THE STEWARDSHIP OF FAITH.*
ME. KIECOPP LAKE has published under the title of The Stewardship of Faith some lectures delivered two years ago in America. They have all the clearness of thought and exactness of definition which distinguished his book on the earlier Epistles of St. Paul ; and the subjects with which he here deals, being nearer the centre, require these qualities in an expositor even more urgently. His first problem is to ascertain what the Christian faith meant for its earliest preachers, and his second is to show how their first message was translated from the terms of Jewish thought into those of the Graeco-Roman world. Bat the purpose of this study of ancient history is the intensely practical one of urging that
• The Stewardship of Faith: Our Horitago from Early Christianity. By Kizeopy Lake. London: Chrtztophers. [is. net.] a similar task of retranslation lies upon the Christian Church to-day. We think Mr. Lake has performed a most valuable service to his brethren by the clearness and candour with which he has expressed his opinions. It is possible to agree or disagree, but not to misunderstand.
The first two lectures sketch the teaching of Jesus in relation to its historical background in the apocalyptic beliefs of the time. The recognition of this background is one of the more recent achievements of New Testament scholarship, and happily it has not been allowed to trouble the public mind until its significance has been reduced from the scale in which Schweitzer first presented it to something nearer its true proportions. Acknowledging that Jesus may hav been under an illusion as to the length of time the world would last, for He Himself disclaimed any knowledge of times and seasons, Mr. Kirsopp Lake here insists that such an illusion was an advantage in fixing attention on certain spiritual values. He illustrates from photo- graphy " Usually [photographers] are dealing with plates which are too sensitive to blue and insufficiently sensitive to yellow light, so that difficulties arise if they want to photograph something which contains a great deal of yellow. They therefore use a screen of yellow glass, which cuts out the other rays of light, so that they obtain artificially a world in which there is little except yellow light, and so overcome the limitations of their plates. From the point of view of this illustration our minds are photographic plates which are too sensitive to certain social values, and not sensitive enough to certain spiritual values and I believe that the eschatological view of the Jews and of Jesus has served as the yellow screen which has enabled us to overcome this lack of proportion."
The deposit of faith, therefore, which the Christian Church exists to carry down the ages is just an appreciation of the "eternal verities," the ultimate values of life; the power to recognize the Spirit of God in the world and in man, and to co-operate with it. In the sketch which he gives of the history of the Christian Church in the first age Mr. Lake emphasizes again and again how frequently Christianity found itself "at the cross-roads," having to make up its mind between adherence to tradition in what seemed a matter of principle and a recognition of some new witness of the Spirit. The baptism of Cornelius was an early and critical instance. The ministry of St. Paul, who stood between the Jew and the Greek, was one long process of rejecting logical deductions pressed upon him by one side and the other and following the " demonstration of the Spirit." And the theology and worship that emerged at the end of the first century, while as different as possible from those of the first Disciples at Pentecost, was nearer, as it seems to us, than theirs to the " eternal verities."
Mr. Lake's lectures are full of fresh and interesting judgments on incidents and problems of Church history. With those we cannot here deal. We are concerned with the conclusion of the whole matter, which is the appli. cation of these lessons of history to our own time. In short it is this, that "progressive movement, and not the retention of a fixed position, has throughout been the condition of vigorous life. Christianity has always been a movement: the stewardship of faith is to carry on the move- ment." Mr. Lake takes the three chief forms in which the Christian tradition expresses itself, theology, ethics, and the ministry, and states in regard to each where he considers that "movement" is necessary. In all of them what is urgently required is observation of fact and not development of theory. As examples of theological doctrines which need restatement in the light of observed truth, he mentions the doctrine of the Atonement and that of the two natures of Christ; in both cases the heart of the mystery needs separation from particular and antiquated modes of expression. Turning to the ministry of reconciliation, he contrasts the Roman Catholic and Protestant types, and shows that each has something to lean from the other, and urges that the vexed question of the validity of Orders must be settled, not by theory or tradition, but the witness of the Spirit. The chief modern problems in the field of ethics he considers to be the raising of the standard in social life; and providing the nations with a "common superior " to whom they could submit their disputes without dishonour. The whole subject is handled with great candour and freshness, and in the right spirit of reverence, and we commend Mr. Lake's pages to the careful study of both clergy and laity.
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