In Defence of the Faith
The Ethic of Christianity
[The writer of " The Ethic of Christianity " was recently Professor of New Testament Exegesis at King's College, London. He is a Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford, and Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford.] THIS is a question of paramount importance, but it needs a volume rather than an article. Inherent in the Christian faith is the fact that it claims to redeem every sphere of life and to satisfy the deepest needs of men at all times and in all circumstances. That is the claim which now has to be verified, and it is the supreme task before the Christian Church. Intellectually and experimentally the Christian Gospel has to be reinter- preted as the focus and the consecration of our immeasur- ably vaster Universe and infinitely more complex ways of life. For at present every observer must admit that the religious field has shrunk so narrowly, as one by one the various kinds of knowledge and other activities of the human spirit have become emancipated from its control, that it remains in the midst of the surrounding world like some ancient enclave or protectorate, regarded as a picturesque anachronism: The common attitude of our contemporaries is not so much that Christianity is untrue as that it is irrelevant. In the general specialization of modem life religion has become too specialized—pre- occupied with keeping itself alive ; and the great world of affairs passes it by on the other side of the street.
Because we have acquiesced in this dualism, allowing art, science, economics, and the other activities of spirit to repudiate the sanctions of religion, civilization has become secularized and religion has drawn in upon itself, robbed of the strength and wholesomeness that comes to it through contact with the tasks and claims of life. But Christianity cannot acquiesce in this ; for it is, after all, a way of living. The claim which Christians make for Christ concerns the true nature of reality and the way of life that follows from that belief, and it knows no frontiers or departmentalizing.
The way we try to express that in our time is to say " Religion means the whole of life." Some look wistfully to the Middle Ages at a time when all the interests of life were embraced and consecrated by the Church. But there is another version of the story. If we read, for instance, Huizinga's study, The Waning of the Middle Ages, we see the appalling price that was paid for this over-easy identification in the profanity, the degradation, and the worldliness that beset religion. The religious attitude is not the same as the moral, scientific, or aesthetic, and everything is lost if we confuse them.
Yet Christianity is a way of living ; English people feel and feel quite rightly that unless it verifies itself in act, in the building up of a better social order and the leadership of all worth-while enterprises, it cannot claim to hold our allegiance. Most Englishmen would endorse the view that carrying out our Lord's moral teaching is " real," authentic Christianity. Gallant attempts are made from time to time to find in the language of the New Testament, and especially in the sayings of our Lord, positive guidance for the modem world, stretching them enough to make them applicable. But is this a legitimate procedure ? Is there in fact an " ethic of Jesus ? " " If Christianity," said Blake, " were ethics, then Socrates is the Saviour." A hard saying but, I believe, true. The eternal preciousness of our Lord's teaching is not as telling us what to do but as revealing the quality of His Spirit and mediating to us the God He worshipped. The real centre of our Lord's teaching was not human conduct at all. It was the revelation of the Father. After all that was His vocation. He came into a weal stiff with problems—political, economic, sociological all that complex of changed conditions, social upheaval and new political contacts that Luke suggests wit dramatic economy in the phrase, " In the fifteenth y of Tiberius Caesar." There were half a score of avenn - before Him open to brave and enlightened leadership national, political, economic, etc. With none of th• was Jesus concerned. Keenly sensitive He was to the force of them—that was surely the point of the Temptatio —but He extruded them from His mind as disloyalty t His own mission. His life was emptied, deliberately, o much that for us gives life its value that it might enshrine the ultimate, perfect treasure. His concern was with life itself. " Make the tree good," as He said. " When he had found the one pearl of great price "—that is the keynote of the whole story. His vocation was to show men God at the innermost of all that life can mean. By His teaching, life and death and resurrection He made the vision of God come alive, God in all His richness of reality.
It was that which re-endowed civilization. As soon as the Gospel went out into the world it began at once to verify itself in the vivid life of a new social order. Yet it was not a programme for society. It was in its essence other-worldly. It was all concerned with sin and forgive. ness and the redemptive love of God the Father. The startling thing is the seeming meagreness of the Intel. lectual and moral content in the Gospel to which they sought to convert mankind. The pagan world said there was nothing in it—its whole outlook was " uncivilized "- it poured contempt on all their pride. Yet this queer other-worldly faith proved to be the creative nucleus of a new cultural and social life. The leaven was cast into a new lump and at once began its magic of transformation. For what it was, was the guarantee that the innermost sanctities of life are safe. To a world in which the precious things of life were proving bitter and unsatisfying all its best values getting tarnished, through sheer lack of a God to trust and worship, it brought the knowledge of a God who cared for them, a God whom they could trust because they knew His will--the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It restored to men their sense of direction and enabled them to trust life again. For that is just what paganism cannot do. All history shows that Naturalism, or the Humanism which is another form of it, is the way of destruction for the human spirit. You cannot " trust Nature " as it stands. All religious history makes that clear. Nature worship and natural ethics mean not only Artemis and Apollo ; they mean Pan. Moloch and Priapus. Life is not safe till we can find its roots in a Reality not of the natural order. The Hebrew mythology is right. There is always a snake which gets into the garden. The natural always tends to become unnatural unless redeemed by the supernatural. But because of the God Who meets us in Jesus and the Holy Spirit Who comes to us through Him, we can dare to say that the creative impulse pouring forth this prodigal stream of life is a manifestation of the Divine Spirit. What we know of God in redemption enables us to trust Him in creation, and to give ourselves in confident consecration to the manifold interests and opportunities which the gifts and tasks of life offer men. And always in the material thus entrusted- to us this transfiguring, redemptive influence will be at work making water wine, For if God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is enthroned at the heart of life, if Love is indeed the Reality, then that, if we take it seriously, means the rebirth of all our attitudes ; it involves the redemption of our loyalties and the transfiguration of our values. And in fact it is in its moral effectiveness that, ever since the first Christian century, the Gospel has vindicated its claim. It is so still as it was in the age of Julian. It alone has the con- structive power to transform the societies which accept it. It is not " religion " merely, but Christianity which can confidently appeal to this judgment. The romance of the renaissance in Uganda under the influence of Christian missions is as striking as any instance in history. We may take one more from British experience. " Confronted in India with a civilization that demands religious sanction for all its customs, regardless of their moral value, British rulers have been less inclined to ignore a religion which essentially can be identified only with what is highest in man's nature. To the Hindu philosopher all religions may be equally true ; the administrator comparing a Christian settlement with the pariah village at its gates has good reason to know that they are not all equally effective. And he will rote, as more than a coincidence, the readiness of the religion which has been socially and morally most effective to submit its doctrines to the test of history and psychological experience."* Fellowship with the love at the heart of the Universe involves new conceptions of good, more exacting standards of ethical obligation. It involves new attitudes to Nature —creative, scientific attitudes such as can never flourish in an atmosphere laden with a theology of fatalism. It involves new powers of artistic creation, a changed hierarchy of values. For it is inherent in the Christian faith that even the humblest personal relationships are more preciouS than anything • else on earth—beyond knowledge, even beyond beauty: This is the-fundamental moral difference between the Christian scheme of life and paganism ; and it carries with it a social revolution that we have -hardly yet begun to contemplate. 'Christianity stands for the vision of God in Christ; the redemptive influence of His Spirit. This is the power, transfiguring character, giving a real ground for belief in progress and a genuine hope and faith in human nature and in the highest qualities of spirit, which expresses itself in renewal and redirection over the whole area of life. It implies a new respect for Personality and all of which Personality is capable, because it is rooted in the Divine Being and born for inexhaustible perfections. Hence its real intolerance of privilege, its hunger for justice, its passion for beauty and freedom, above all its sanctification of the home.
It is in this sense that we can rightly claim that the
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*141.9yhew : Christianity and the Government of India, p. 14. Christian religion covers the whole of life, infusing its redemptive influence into all the activities of spirit. " Having Christ," we say " we possess all things." Pre- sumably no Christian can say otherwise. But on the surface it seems to be untrue. It is not true that if we believe in Christ that gives us all that is good in life— such as those aesthetic and scientific values with which our contemporary world is so much and so rightly occupied. He does not " embody all the values," as we who preach are apt to say too glibly. But He gives us that supreme thing of worth which invests all other goods with their preciousness. In this way, once secure at the centre, we can move bravely out to the circumference and embrace all life in our faith and worship. We may claim as a vivid concern of Christianity all the values of our brilliant world, all the open ways of opportunity, all its art, its knowledge, its effectiveness, all the natural joys and tasks of life—whatever things are true and pure and lovely—we can live to the full, and life will not betray us because it is redeemed at the centre. Creator and Redeemer are one God ; and the interests and claims of civilization are not the rivals of the Christian life, they are its God-given opportunity.
In this way, and only in this way, can the Christian Church achieve emancipation from that narrow range of aim and interest, that unconcern' with the world about us and preoccupation with merely religious things which tends to make its life anaemic, and feel its -way to• a new Christian Hellenism and more imaginative ways . of worship. It is in this way that secular civilization— adrift at present from its Christian hearings—can. be reclaimed for the Christian faith ; not by pretending that the Christian Gospel has a direct answer to all, its problems, not by equating Christ's revelation of Cod and the devotional response involved in it with God's revelation in nature, art or science. That is to make shipwreck of the Gospel. But rather guarding faithfully, insistently, the true uniqueness of our Saviour Christ, we must win through Him to a nobler Theism, commensurate with the vaster world we live in—this ceaselessly emergent Universe with all its undisclosed possibilities. The ultimate quality of Divine Spirit is for ever focussed in our Lord. But the sources of religious belief, as Professor Whitehead -says, are always growing. F. It BARRY.
[Miss Evelyn Underhill will contribute newt week's aslick on
The Witness of the Saints." Previous articles in this series have been : Philosophy and Religion," by the Archbishop of York, " The Elements of Religion," by Professor Albert A. Cock, of University College, Southampton, " Evolution and Revealed Religion," by Dr. Charles E. Raven, " The Nature. of Christ," by. Dr. Alfred Cervix, Principal of New College, Hampstead, and Hackney College, " The Gospels as Historical Documents," by Professor C. H. Turner, and " The Miraculous Elements in the Gospels," by Dr. Gordon Selwyn.]
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