CHAPTER I

THE NECESSITY FOR A RESTATEMENT OF THEOLOGY

T

RUTH is essentially the same in all ages.

"The Word of the Lord endureth for

ever. It is also a fact that human viewpoints change, and therefore expression of truth will inevitably change. Every age has its characteristic point of view, its dominant mode of thinking. The truth of the ages is expressed in the language of the age, and is differently approached in various periods of human history. There is an old story of four blind men who were allowed to touch an elephant as they went past. One, who happened to grasp his tail, said the elephant was like a rope. Another, who had touched his leg, said the elephant was like the trunk of a tree. The third, having felt the animal's side, said, "That is all rubbish: an elephant is like a wall." The fourth blind man, who had felt only the great ear of the elephant,

affirmed that he was like none of those things aforesaid, but was like a leather bag. So our view of truth depends largely on the angle from which we approach it, and our description of it will be in the language of our experience. In the age when men thought the earth was the stationary center about which revolved planets, sun, and stars, all thinking was colored more or less by that hypothesis. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton changed the intellectual viewpoint, not only for astronomy, but for all categories of thought.

Theology, no less than physical science or philosophy, is modified by the dominant thoughtform of the age. Theology is either rabbinical, ritualistic, scholastic, mathematical, legal, political, evolutionary, or humanitarian, according to the theologian's characteristic thought-form; and the theologian's thought-form is affected by the dominant spirit of his time no less than the color of the chameleon is affected by environment, or the thermometer by temperature.

The Bible abounds in evidence of this statement. Running throughout the Old Testament

are at least two widely different classes of writings, the priestly and the prophetic, the difference being due to differing viewpoints of identical truth. Priestly writers thought in terms of rite and symbol. To them the ceremonies of the cult were the language in which Jehovah expressed His thought. The priestly religion was formal, sacrificial, ritualistic. Opposed to this was the prophetic attitude. This was less formal. Ritual was minimized. Externalism was often ridiculed and condemned. To the prophetic soul God spoke not so much in the design of tabernacle or temple, in bloody sacrifices, or in any ceremonial observances, as in creation, in historic providence, in the still small voice of the Spirit. The heavens and the earth were full of the glory of Jehovah, and their "words" spoke to the end of the world, telling God's power and wisdom. The rise and fall of nations were the doings of a majestic, moral God. By Him kings reigned and princes decreed justice. The prophet needed no Shekinah to assure him of Jehovah's presence. Sun, moon, and stars, the beauty of the earth, and its provi

dential adjustments, were the testimony-the very Ark and Shekinah of omnipresent Deity. The prophet's own soul, hot with moral enthusiasm, was the sacrificial altar burning with sacred fire. Micah sets these two attitudes in contrast in the sixth chapter:

"Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

These two views of religion still persist, even in Christianity. The Roman Church thinks in terms of symbol and ceremony. Her views of Deity, duty, destiny are more or less formal, mechanical, ritualistic. The Protestant Church represents more or less the prophetic aspect of religion. The Roman Church exalts the altar;

the Protestant, the pulpit. The typical Papist thinks in terms of cult and institution; the normal Protestant of the evangelical type in terms of the individual soul and its relation to the cosmos. Although both hold the same historical facts as the foundation of the Christian religion, their conception and interpretation of those facts vary because of fundamentally different mental attitudes.

This has been the history of religious and philosophical thought as long as men have indulged in speculation. There was a time when Jewish theology ran in the narrow channel of rabbinical hair-splitting. It was so in the time of Christ. His offense was that He filled the channel so full of the water of life that it broke over the banks and levees of rabbinical narrowness and irrigated the desert of the starved spirit. The contemporary thought-form and religious cult could not contain the abundant life and the truth He had to give. He had to put new wine into new wine-skins: the old would have burst. In fact, they did burst. The tremendous vitality of His revelation shattered