Christianity and the Social Crisis; A Theology for the Social Gospel

My main purpose in this book has been to show that the social gospel is a vital part of the Christian conception of sin and salvation, and that any teaching on the sinful condition of the race and on its redemption from evil which fails to do justice to the social factors and processes in sin and redemption, must be incomplete, unreal, and misleading. Also, since the social gospel henceforth is to be an important part of our Christian message, its chief convictions must be embodied in these doctrines in some organic form.

Now, the doctrines of sin and salvation are the starting-point and goal of Christian theology. Every essential change or enlargement in them is bound to affect related doctrines also. It will be the object of the remaining chapters of the book to indicate how the social gospel would re-act on the doctrine of God, of the Holy Spirit and inspiration, of the sacraments, of eschatology, and of the atonement.

The conception of God held by a social group is a social product. Even if it originated in the mind of a solitary thinker or prophet, as soon as it becomes the property of a social group, it takes on the qualities of that group. If, for instance, a high and spiritual idea of God is brought to a people ignorant and accustomed to superstitious methods of winning the favour or help of higher beings, it will soon be coarsened and materialized. The changes in the Hebrew conception of God were the result of the historical experiences of the nation and its leaders. The Christian idea of God has also had its ups and downs in the long and varied history of Christian civilization.

A fine and high conception of God is a social achievement and a social endowment. It becomes part of the spiritual inheritance common to all individuals in that religious group. If every individual had to work out his idea of God on the basis of his own experiences and intuitions only, it would be a groping quest, and most of us would see only the occasional flitting of a distant light. By the end of our life we might have arrived at the stage of voodooism or necromancy. Entering into a high conception of God, such as the Christian faith offers us, is like entering a public park or a public gallery of art and sharing the common wealth. When we learn from the gospels, for instance, that God is on the side of the poor, and that he proposes to view anything done or not done to them as having been done or not done to him, such a revelation of solidarity and humanity comes with a regenerating shock to our selfish minds. Any one studying life as it is on the basis of real estate and bank clearings, would come to the conclusion that God is on the side of the rich. It takes a revelation to see it the other way.

Wherever we encounter such a strain of social feeling in our conceptions of God, it is almost sure to run straight back either to Jesus or the prophets. The Hebrew prophets were able to realize God in that way because they were part of a nation which had preserved the traditions of primitive fraternal democracy. The prophets emphasized God's interest in righteousness and solidarity because they were making a fight to save their people from the landlordism and oppression under which other peoples have wilted and degenerated. When, therefore, w^e today feel the moral thrill of Hebrew theism, we are the heirs and beneficiaries of one untamed nation of mountain-dwellers. When such a conception of God is transmitted to other nations or to later times, it is the exportation of the most precious commodity a nation can produce.

On the other hand, if a conception of God originates among the exploiting classes in an age of despotism, it is almost certain to contain germs of positive sinfulness which will infect all to^whom it is transmitted.

Christianity is an old religion. Its youth was lived in the midst of a matured and dying imperial despotism. At first it was an illegal organization, suppressed by the Empire, and in turn the Empire was described in our Apocalypse as " the Beast.'' This hostility was a saving element which made the Church somewhat immune to the despotic influences, as long as it lasted. But in time the Church came under the control and spiritual influence of the upper classes, and finally of the Roman State. We know that the effects of this social environment were wrought into the constitutional structure of the Church. The Roman Catholic Church is still the religious replica of the Roman imperial organization, Harnack thinks this is the characterization which comes closest to its real nature. Did this environment also influence the theological and religious conceptions about God?

Later the Western Church passed through the age of feudalism. Feudalism was a social order in which the military, judicial, and executive powers were under the control of the same class which controlled the one great source of wealth at that time, the agricultural land. What such a combination of private property power and governmental powers of coercion comes to was brought home to us by the revelations about the rubber trade in the Belgian Congo a few years ago. Of this feudal social order the Church was an integral and active part. The temper and attitude of the dominant part of the clergy was deeply affected by this social environment. Did it also shape the conception of God? Did it create habits of mind which came out in the religious appeals, the illustrations and arguments used, and the tacit presuppositions of all argument?

Our imagination has only a short reach. In conceiving a higher world we have to take the familiar properties and figures of our material world, and enlarge and refine them as best we can. As long as kings and governors were the greatest human beings in the public eye, it was inevitable that their image should be superimposed on the idea of God. Court language and obeisances were used in worship and when men reasoned about God, they took their illustrations and analogies from those who were a close second to God.

Athanasius, for instance, in order to explain how the

incarnation could save the human race from death and give immortal life, says that when a great king takes residence in one house in a city, the whole city enjoys great honour and is not in danger from any enemy or bandit invasion. In the same way the physical presence of the incarnate Logos dispelled the evil of death. This is one of the principal arguments in his mind. But in fact it is no argument at all except on monarchical assumptions.

In his epoch-making book, " Cur Deus Homo," Anselm bases his discussion on the proposition that God's " honour " has been violated by human sin. Man is wholly subject to God, and bound to fulfil all his demands. If he falls short, God is under no obligation to show him favour, and must exact satisfaction for the violation of his honour. He can not simply forgive sin. It is not enough if the sinner henceforth performs his whole duty. " Satisfaction " must be rendered by some adequate work of merit over and above the legal requirements of God. This equivalent man is unable to render. Christ is able. On this basis Anselm builds his theory of the atonement. It has often been pointed out that Anselm derived his idea of " satisfaction " from the Teutonic practice of commuting physical punishment into a financial payment.'^ I think Anselm, an Italian and a churchman, was also influenced by the " satisfactions " in the penitential practice of the Church. But beyond all these contemporary influences of law and custom was the pervasive impres-

1 This was first established by my friend Professor Hermann Cremer in his monograph, " Die Wnrzeln des anselmischen Satisfactionsbegriffes." Studien und Kritiken, 1880.

sion of autocratic power and monarchical self-assertion, which rates an offence against the members of the royal family or against the governing class far more highly than other crimes, and makes the king's " honour " a concern for which nations must go to war.

God's right of arbitrary decision, which has been asserted in many connections, runs back to the same autocratic sources. Duns Scotus and his followers even held that the death of Christ was necessary only because God declared it necessary. If he had been willing to accept the obedience of some good angel, that too would have sufficed. We are most familiar with the arbitrary power of God in the doctrine of election. The right of God to select some individuals for eternal life and leave others to eternal punishment, entirely apart from any question of personal merit or demerit, was always based on the ground of the " sovereignty " of God, that is, the divine autocracy. If a city rebelled, all lives were forfeited; if the King had only 50 councillors hung, or every tenth citizen sold into slavery, it was an act of royal clemency worthy of praise. By the fall all men were in a state of damnation; if God elected some to salvation and left the others as they were, it was divine grace; nor vv^as he under obligation to explain his reasons in picking the favoured.

Scholastic arguments reach few people; imaginative pictures of spiritual ideas are subtle and pervasive. God was imagined far above, in an upper part of the universe, remote from humanity but looking down on us, fully aware of all we do, interfering when necessary, but very distinct. In Greek theology this distinctness was due to

philosophical influences. In popular theology the remoteness of great men perhaps had more to do with shaping this idea than philosophy.

The sense of fear which has pervaded religion has doubtless been, at least in part, a psychological result of the despotic attitude of parents, of school-masters, of priests, and of officials all the way from the town beadle to the king. To uncounted people God has not been the great Comforter but the great Terror. The main concern in religion was to escape from his hands. Luther longed that he " might at last have a gracious God " — einen gnddigen Gott; the word is the same which was applied to princes and nobles when they were goodnatured. Luther sweated with fear when he walked alongside of the body of the Lord in a Corpus Christi procession. To what extent was this due to the fact that he was constantly beaten by his parents and by his schoolmasters, and taught to be afraid of everything? Men enriched the Church enormously with gifts of land as insurance premiums that God would not do anything horrible to them. When farmers are afraid enough to part with land, it must be a deep fear.

The mediaeval methods of earning religious merit and of securing intercession were the product of fear and a close duplicate of the conditions existing under economic and political despotism. God was a feudal lord, holding his tenants in a grip from which there was no escape, exacting what was due to him, and putting the delinquent in a hot prison which was even worse than the terrible holes underneath the duke's castle. By special self-denial the religious peon could win '' merit " to offset his delinquencies. The saints and the blessed Virgin had much merit. The Church had power to assign some of this to those who stood in with the Church. The intercession of the saints counted; every one knew that it was a great thing for a poor man if a nobleman spoke for him to the judge; it would be so in heaven too. Things go by favour; the more aristocracy, the more pull.

Thus the social relations in which men lived, affected their conceptions about God and his relations to men. Under tyrannous conditions the idea of God was necessarily tainted with the cruel hardness of society. This spiritual influence of despotism made even the face of Christ seem hard and stern. The outlook into the future life was like a glimpse into a chamber of torture.

The conflict of the religion of Jesus with autocratic conceptions of God is therefore part of the struggle of humanity with autocratic economic and political conditions. This carries the social movement into theology. Theologians therewith have their share in redeeming humanity from the reign of tyranny and fear, and if we do not do our share emphatically and with a will, where do we belong, to the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Evil? The worst form of leaving the naked unclothed, the hungry unfed, and the prisoners uncomforted, is to leave men under a despotic conception of God and the universe; and what will the Son of Man do to us theologians when we gather at the Day of Doom?

Here we see one of the highest redemptive services of Jesus to the human race. When he took God by the hand and called him '' our Father," he democratized the conception of God. He disconnected the idea from the coercive and predatory State, and transferred it to the reahn of family life, the chief social embodiment of solidarity and love. He not only saved humanity; he saved God. He gave God his first chance of being loved and of escaping from the worst misunderstandings conceivable. The value of Christ's idea of the Fatherhood of God is realized only by contrast to the despotic ideas which it opposed and was meant to displace. We have classified theology as Greek and Latin, as Catholic and Protestant. It is time to classify it as despotic and democratic. From a Christian point of view that is a more decisive distinction.

Paul has preserved for us the deep impression of liberation and relief which the Christian idea of God made on him and his contemporaries: " For (when you became Christians) you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fill you with fear once more, but you received the spirit of sonship which leads us to cry, * Our Father.' " The Gnostics, some of whom were exceedingly able minds, attracted to Christianity by its spiritual contents, believed that Christ had for the first time in cosmic history brought to mankind a revelation of the real God. All the other God-ideas had been counterfeits and caricatures imposed on humanity by lower and evil spiritual beings to enslave them. This is a striking expression of the feeling that the God mirrored in the teaching and person of Christ was in a wholly different class from all others.

Of course the Christian conception of God was not kept pure. The pall of darkness rising from despotic society constantly obscured and eclipsed it. The imagery of coercion and tyranny always suggested itself anew. The triumph of the Christian idea of God will never be complete as long as economic and political despotism prevail.

The value of the Reformation should be re-assessed from this point of view. Luther tore the idea of " merit '* out of theology. Christ alone had merit. By his blood he had paid the whole debt once for all. Man need not earn merit. He can not earn merit. It would be a sin for him to try. That ended the contract labour system in religion. God was reconciled. He had been angry but he was now kind and ready to forgive. The sinner need only believe and accept the great transaction made on his behalf. That ended the reign of fear for those who understood. The saints and their intercession were dismissed; they never had any merit either; the sinner could deal with God and Christ direct. Purgatory was gone; only hell proper remained. It was a religious Seisachtheia, like that in Athens under Solon's laws, a great unloading, a revolution in the field of the spiritual life, and the condition for the coming of political and economic liberty.

But the restoration of the Christian conception of God was by no means complete. Despotic government was still in full swing when the Reformation theology was written. Luther and Calvin were not personally in sympathy with democracy. The age of absolutism and of Louis XIV was just ahead. The long era of witch-trials had just begun. The spell of fear was broken only for a few. The fundamental assumptions about God remained. The inherited forensic terminology of theology suggested the old lines of thought. As long as religion borrows its terms from the procedure of law-courts, the spirit of coercion and terror leaks in. Legal ideas are not congruous with the Christian consciousness of salvation. The idea of " justification " did not come to us from Jesus and it does not blend well with his way of thinking. For Paul and Luther " justification by faith " was an emancipating idea; it stood for an immense simplification and sweetening of the process of salvation. They used the terminology of legalism to deny its spirit. To us, who are not under the consciousness of Jewish or Roman Catholic legality, " justification " does not convey the same sense of liberation, but the phrase is now a vehicle by which legal and often despotic ideas come back to plague us.

The social gospel is God's predestined agent to continue what the Reformation began. It arouses intelligent hatred of oppression and the reign of fear, and teaches us to prize liberty and to love love. Therefore those whose religious life has been influenced by the social gospel are instinctively out of sympathy with autocratic conceptions of God. They sense the spiritual taint which goes out from such ideas. They know that these religious conceptions are used to make autocratic social conditions look tolerable, necessary, and desirable. Like Paul, the social gospel has not " received the spirit of bondage again unto fear." It is wholly in sympathy with the conception of the Father which Jesus revealed to us by his words, by his personality, and by his own relations to the Father.

This reformatory and democratizing influence of the social gospel is not against religion but for it. The worst thing that could happen to God would be to remain an autocrat while the world is moving toward democracy. He would be dethroned with the rest. For one man who has forsaken religion through scientific doubt, ten have forsaken it in our time because it seemed the spiritual opponent of liberty and the working people. This feeling will deepen as democracy takes hold and becomes more than a theory of government. We have heard only the political overture of democracy, played by fifes; the economic numbers of the program are yet to come, and they will be performed with trumpets and trombones.

The Kingdom of God is the necessary background for the Christian idea of God. The social movement is one of the chief ways in which God is revealing that he lives and rules as a God that loves righteousness and hates iniquity. A theological God who has no interest in the conquest of justice and fraternity is not a Christian. It is not enough for theology to eliminate this or that autocratic trait. Its God must join the social movement. The real God has been in it long ago. The development of a Christian social order would be the highest proof of God's saving power. The failure of the social movement would impugn his existence.

The old conception that God dwells on high and is distinct from our human life was the natural basis for autocratic and arbitrary ideas about him. On the other hand the reHgious belief that he is immanent in humanity is the natural basis for democratic ideas about him. When he was far above, he needed vice-gerents to rule for him, popes by divine institution and kings by divine right. If he lives and moves in the life of mankind, he can act directly on the masses of men. A God who strives within our striving, who kindles his flame in our intellect, sends the impact of his energy to make our will restless for righteousness, floods our sub-conscious mind with dreams and longings, and always urges the race on toward a higher combination of freedom and solidarity, — that would be a God with whom democratic and religious men could hold converse as their chief fellowworker, the source of their energies, the ground of their hopes.

Platonic philosophy in the first century made God so transcendent that it had to devise the Logos-idea to bridge the abyss between the silent depths of God and this world, and to enable God to create and to reveal himself. Theology shrank from imputing suffering to God. Patripassianism seemed a self-evident heresy. To-day men want to think of God as close to them, and spiritually kin to them, the Father of all spirits. Eminent theologians insist that God has always suffered with and for mankind and that the cross is a permanent law of God's nature: " The lamb has been slain from the beginning of the world." Through the conception of evolution and through the social movement we have come to see human life in its totality, and our consciousness of God is the spiritual counterpart of our social consciousness. Some,

apparently, would be willing to think of God as less than omnipotent and omniscient if only he were working hard with us for that Kingdom which is the only true Democracy.

Two points still demand discussion. The first is the problem of suffering.

The existence of innocent suffering impugns the justice and benevolence of God, both of which are essential in a Christian conception of God.

The simplest solution is to deny the existence of unjust suffering; to trust that good and ill are allotted according to desert; and if the righteous Job suffers great disaster, to search for his secret sin. This explanation broke down before the facts. How about the man born blind? What personal sin had merited his calamity?

Dualism took the other extreme. It acknowledged that the good suffer, and stressed the fact. But it exculpated the good God by making the evil God the author of this world, or at least its present lord.

Christianity has combined several explanations of suffering. It grounds it in general on the prevalence of sin since the fall. It has ascribed a malignant power of afflicting the righteous to Satan and his servants. It has taken satisfaction when justice was vindicated in some striking case of goodness or wickedness. It has held out a hope of a public vindication of the righteous in the great judgment, and of an equalization of their lot by their bliss in heaven and the suffering of the wicked. (This element, however, was weakened in Protestantism by the disappearance of purgatory and the tacit assump- tion that all who are saved at all will enjoy an equal bliss. Purgatory was a great balancer and equalizer.) Finally, Christianity has taught that God allots suffering with wise ♦ and loving intent, tempering it according to our strength, relieving it in response to our prayer, and using it to chasten our pride, to win us from earthliness to himself, and to prepare us for heaven. This interpretation does not assert the justice of every suffering, taken by itself, but does maintain its loving intention.

All these are powerful and comforting considerations. But they are shaken by the bulk of the unjust suffering in sight of the modern mind. These Christian ideas are largely true as long as we look at a normal village community and its individuals and families. But they are jarred by mass disasters. The optimism of the age of rationalism was shaken by the Lisbon earthquake in I755» when '^0,000 people were killed together, just and unjust. The War has deeply affected the religious assurance of our own time, and will lessen it still more when the excitement is over and the aftermath of innocent suffering becomes clear. But that impression of undeserved mass misery which the war has brought home to the thoughtless, has long been weighing on all who understood the social conditions of our civilization. The sufferings of a single righteous man could deeply move the psalmists or the poet of Job. To-day entire social classes sit in the ashes and challenge the justice of the God who has afflicted them by fathering the present social system. The moral and religious problem of suffering has entered on a new stage with the awakening of the social consciousness and the spread of social knowledge.

If God stands for the present social order, how can we defend him? We can stand the pain of travail, of physical dissolution, of earthquakes and accidents. These are i the price we pay for the use of a fine planet with lovely appurtenances and for a wonderful body. We can also accept with reasonable resignation the mental anguish of unrequited love, of foiled ambition, or of the emptiness of life. These are the risks we run as possessors of a highly organized personality amid a world of men. But we can not stand for poor and laborious people being deprived of physical stature, youth, education, human equality, and justice, in order to enable others to live luxurious lives. It revolts us to see these conditions perpetuated by law and organized force, and palliated or justified by the makers of public opinion. None of the keys offered by individualistic Christianity fit this padlock.

The social gospel supplies an explanation of this class of human suffering. Society is so integral that when one man sins, other men suffer, and when one social class sins, the other classes are involved in the suffering which follows on that sin. The more powerful an individual is, the more will he involve others; the more powerful a class is, the more will it be able to unload its own just suffering on the weaker classes. These sufferings are | not '' vicarious "; they are solidaristic.

Our solidarity is a beneficent part of human life. It is the basis for our greatest good. If our community life is righteous and fraternal, we are enriched and enlarged by being bound up with it. But, by the same law, if our community is organized in a way that permits, encourages, or defends predatory practices, then the larger part of its members are through solidarity caged to be eaten by the rest, and to suffer what is both unjust and useless.

It follows that ethically it is of the highest importance to prevent our beneficent solidarity from being twisted into a means of torture.

Physical pain serves a beneficent purpose by warning us of the existence of abnormal conditions. It fulfils its purpose when it compels the individual to search out the cause of pain and to keep his body in health. If he takes " dope " to quiet the consciousness of pain without healing the causes, the beneficent purpose of pain is frustrated.

Social suffering serves social healing. If the sense of:ommon humanity is strong enough to set the entire social body in motion on behalf of those who suffer without just cause, then their troubles are eased and the whole oody is preserved just and fraternal. If the predatory forces are strong enough to suppress the reactions against injustice and inhumanity, the suffering goes on and the whole community is kept in suicidal evil. To interpret the sufferings imposed by social injustice in individualistic terms as the divine chastening and sanctification of all the individuals concerned, is not only false but profoundly mischievous. It is the equivalent of *' dope," for it silences the warning which the suffering of an innocent group ought to convey to all society without abolishing the causes. It frustrates the only chance of redemptive usefulness which the sufferers had.

All this applies to our conception of God. The idea of solidarity, when once understood, acts as a theodicy. None of us would want a world without organic community of life, any more than we would want a world without gravitation. The fact that a careless boy falls down stairs does not condemn gravitation, nor does the existence of evil community life condemn God who constituted us social beings. The innocent suffering of great groups through social solidarity simply brings home to us that the tolerance of social injustice is an intolerable evil. The great sin of men is to resist the reformation of predatory society. We do not want God to be charged with that attitude. A conception of God which describes him as sanctioning the present social order and utilizing it in order to sanctify its victims through their suffering, without striving for its overthrow, is repugnant to our moral sense. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament characterizations of God's righteousness assure us that he hates with steadfast hatred just such practices as modern communities tolerate and promote. If we can trust the Bible, God is against capitalism, its methods, spirit, and results. The bourgeois theologians have misrepresented our revolutionary God. God is for the Kingdom of God, and his Kingdom does not mean injustice and the perpetuation of innocent suffering. The best theodicy for modern needs is to make this very clear.

Finally, the social gospel emphasizes the fact that God is the bond of racial unity.

Speaking historically, it is one of the most universal and important characteristics of religion that it constitutes the spiritual bond of social groups. A national god was always the exponent of national solidarity. A com- men religion created common sympathies. Full moral obligation stopped at the religious boundary line. The unusual thing about the Good Samaritan was that he disregarded the religious cleavage and followed the call of humanity pure and simple.

The mingling of populations and religions in modern life makes the influence of religion less noticeable, but it still works as a bond of sympathy. It is easiest to trace it where the religious cleavage coincides with the racial or political cleavages. The French Catholics in Quebec and the English Protestants in Ontario; the Irish and the Ulstermen; the Catholic Belgians and the Protestant Dutch; the Latin nations of America and the United States; — the mention of the names brings up the problem. The Balkans are a nest of antagonisms partly because of religious differences. It has been fortunate for the American negro that the antagonism of race and social standing has not been intensified in his case by any difference of religion.^

The spread of a monotheistic faith and the recognition of a single God of all mankind is a condition of an ethical union of mankind in the future. This is one of the longrange social effects of Christian missions. The effects of Christianity will go far beyond its immediate converts. Every competing religion will be compelled to emphasize its monotheistic elements and to allow its polytheistic ingredients to drop to a secondary stage.

1 1 have seen Southern pamphlets undertaking to prove that the negroes are not descended from Adam, but have evolved from African jungle beasts. The very orthodox authors were willing to accept the heretical philosophy of evolution for the black people,

But it is essential to our spiritual honesty that no imperialism shall masquerade under the cover of our religion. Those who adopt the white man's religion come under the white man's influence. Christianity is the religion of the dominant race. The native religions are a spiritual bulwark of defence, independence, and loyalty. If we invite men to come under the same spiritual roof of monotheism with us and to abandon their ancient shelters, let us make sure that this will not be exploited as a trick of subjugation by the Empires. As long as there are great colonizing imperialisms in the world, the propaganda of Christianity has a political significance.

God is the common basis of all our life. Our human personalities may seem distinct, but their roots run down into the eternal life of God. In a large way both philosophy and science are tending toward a recognition of the truth which religion has felt and practised. The all- * pervading life of God is the ground of the spiritual oneness of the race and of our hope for its closer fellowship in the future.

The consciousness of solidarity, therefore, is of the essence of religion. But the circumference and spaciousness of the fellowship within it differ widely. Every discovery of a larger fellowship by the individual brings a glow of religious satisfaction. The origin of the Christian religion was bound up with a great transition from a nationalistic to an international religious consciousness. Paul was the hero of that conquest. The Christian God though of course they claimed biblical creation for the white. The purpose of this reHgious manoeuvre is to cut the bond of human obligation and solidarity established by religion, and put the negroes outside the protection of the moral law.

has been a breaker of barriers from the first. All who have a distinctively Christian experience of God are committed to the expansion of human fellowship and to the overthrow of barriers. To emphasize this and bring it home to the Christian consciousness is part of the mission of the social gospel, and it looks to theology for the intellectual formulation of what it needs.

We have discussed three points in this chapter: how the conception of God can be cleansed from the historic accretions of despotism and be democratized; how it can be saved from the indictment contained in the unjust suffering of great social groups; and how we can realize God as the ground of social unity. Freedom, justice, solidarity are among the aims of the social gospel. It needs a theology which will clearly express these in its conception of God.