The New Christianity Part 5

As the determining factor in the social structure of Europe from 800 A.D. to 1500 was feudalism, and from A.D. 1500 to 1900 capitalism, so from 1900 onwards to the dawn, it may be, of still vaster changes as yet undescried, the dominant factor will be organized Labor.

If Labor, then, is to be the dominating factor in the age just opening, it becomes a question of deepest interest to discover the principles of the Labor movement.

A full answer to this question would be lengthy and might have elements of uncertainty, but the essential outstanding principles of the Labor movement are neither doubtful nor difficult to determine. They are three:

1. Every man and every woman a worker.

The Labor movement has no place except for workers. Its essential demand is that every man and woman shall, during the normal working years, make a just contribution to the welfare of the social organism.

It is determined that there shall be no place in society for idlers or exploiters. It is the deadly enemy of parasitism in all its Protean forms.

2. The right of every worker to a living wage.

This is nothing other than the a.s.sertion, in the only form that makes it more than iridescent froth, of the great Christian principle of the worth of the soul. It is a very modest and restricted a.s.sertion of that great principle, but it is a more substantial and significant a.s.sertion than has been made anywhere else. The Christian doctrine of the infinite worth of the human soul becomes claptrap where this principle is not admitted.

3. Union.

The Labor movement is based on the solidarity of the workers. It abhors compet.i.tion. It represents the triumph of the we-consciousness over the I-consciousness. It organizes in unions. There have been few things in history that had more of the morally sublime in them than the way in which the individual has been called upon by the Labor movement to risk, not his comfort merely or his advancement, but his livelihood, in defence of some one whom he would never know but with whom he was linked in the sacred cause of Labor.

And these principles of the Labor movement are at the same time the characteristics of the corresponding Christianity of the new age. For, as we found an aristocratic type of Christianity in the aristocratic medieval period, the social conditions demanding the aristocratic organization in Church and State and permitting no other, and as, in the age which succeeded the feudal, a freedom-loving, compet.i.tive, individualistic cla.s.s imposed its character on the social and the ecclesiastical organization, so inst.i.tutional Christianity will undergo a third transformation and, in a society dominated by Labor organizations, will become democratic and brotherly.

Protestantism must pa.s.s away. It is too rootedly individualistic, too sectarian, to be the prevailing religion of a collectivist age. It is pa.s.sing away before our eyes. Everywhere it reveals the marks of decay or of transformation. It must change or die.

Not to Protestantism, not to Roman Catholicism, belongs the age now dawning, but to a new Christianity which will, indeed, have affinities with them both but still more deeply with the Christianity of Jesus.

This Christianity, indeed, is already here. Like its Master when He came, it is in the world and the world knows it not. It is still immature, undeveloped, unconscious even of its own nature and destiny.

It will receive large and valuable contributions from both the great historic forms of Christianity, not improbably from the Eastern, or Greek Christianity, as well. But in promise and potency the coming Christianity is more fully and truly here in the Labor movement than in any of the great historic organizations. Perhaps a more accurate statement would be, that the Labor movement needs less radical change than the great Church organizations to become the fitting and efficient Christianity for the new age.

It needs, in the main, but two great changes.

1. It must broaden.

It must open its doors, as the British and Canadian Labor Parties are now doing, to include all kinds of productive work, of hand or brain.

It must make room for all who contribute to the feeding, clothing, housing, educating, delighting of the children of men. It must include the inventor, the research scientist, the manager, as well as the manual worker; the men who grow things or who distribute them as well as those who make them; the professional cla.s.s, who, on their part, must cease to regard themselves as other than men and women of labor. Labor must become, in short, the category to which all belong who really earn their living and do not seek to "make" more than they earn.

2. Labor must recognize the Christianness of its own principles.

I do not say Labor must become Christian. It is profoundly and vitally Christian in its insistence on the right of the humblest man or woman to human conditions of life, in its corresponding denial of the right of any human being to live on the labor of others without rendering his own equivalent of service, in its devotion to the fundamental Christian principle of brotherhood.

The Draft Report on Reconstruction, for example, prepared near the close of 1917 for the Labor party of Britain, is not only the ablest and most comprehensive programme of social reconstruction so far drawn up, but in its aims and methods and spirit it is profoundly Christian, a thousand times more Christian than the ordinary ecclesiastical p.r.o.nouncement, though the name of Christ does not occur in it. The need is not so much that Labor become Christian, as that it become clearly conscious that it is Christian and can realize itself and win its triumph only on Christian lines.

It is not strange, after all, that among working men should arise the Church which is to give the truest interpretation of Christianity. The Lord Jesus was Himself a working man and brought up in a working man's home; His chief friends and chosen apostles were mostly working men.

How can He be fully understood except through a working man's consciousness? The high, the served, the rich, the mere scholars, as such, are not fitted to understand Christianity. Individuals of exceptional character and insight may escape the limitations of their environment and education, but in any large community interpretation the working man's consciousness would seem to be essential. And, on any large scale, Christianity has never found such an expression as the Labor movement promises to give it--so essentially and predominately democratic and brotherly.

Labor and Christianity, then, are bound up together. Together they stand or fall. They come into their kingdom together or not at all. It is the supreme mission of the prophetic spirit at this fateful hour to interpret Labor to itself, that it may not in this hour of consummation miss the path. To turn away from Christianity now would be for Labor to turn away from the throne. But it will not. Mankind is in the grasp of divine currents too strong to be resisted.

CHAPTER II.

AN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY

It will help us, perhaps, to understand still more clearly the religious revolution which is going on to-day concurrently with the social revolution if we survey the evolution of Christianity from another standpoint,--the racial. In the preceding chapter the effort has been to show that Christianity in its organization and even in its spirit has been profoundly affected by its social environment and has changed as that has changed. The most superficial study of the history of Christianity reveals, moreover, that Christianity has been, also, deeply affected by the characteristics of each race among which it has made its home.

1. Jewish Christianity.

The earliest form of Christianity was that which sprang up in Jerusalem immediately after the Resurrection and the ingathering at Pentecost. It was the Christianity of the apostles and of the first disciples.

Perhaps it might be called a Christianized Judaism rather than a Jewish Christianity, for it was the old Judaism unchanged except by the acceptance of Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfilment of the national hope.

The apostles remained good Jews, even stricter than before in their discharge of the duties of the old faith, and commanding through their strictness the respect of the Jews, James the brother of Jesus, in particular, being held in high esteem for his devoutness.

The chief characteristic of Jewish Christianity, it might almost be said, was its lack of almost all the features which have since been counted essential to a Church.

The ancient Jew, as has often been noted, markedly resembled the modern Englishman in many things, notably in an indifference to theological or philosophical speculation and in a strong sense of the value of the ethical and practical. These earliest Jewish Christians, accordingly, did not seek to a.n.a.lyze and systematize their faith. They did not seek to draw out its philosophical implications. They were interested in the construction neither of a creed nor of a theological system. They were content to hold their faith in Jesus as a vital loyalty and a great hope. Jesus was to them the long desired Messiah who would redeem Israel and establish the Kingdom of G.o.d upon the earth. That glorious consummation would take place when He returned, as they confidently expected He would, in the immediate future. Meanwhile, the door into the Kingdom of G.o.d stood open to all Jews who would accept Jesus as the Christ, and to such Gentiles as were willing to receive circ.u.mcision and identify themselves with Israel.

Overshadowed with the imminence of the Parousia, this Jewish Church of the first years had no interest in a reflective interpretation of its faith or in the elaboration of its organization. The apostles preached; alms were distributed to those of the disciples who were in need. No programme was drawn up for the future; no propaganda among the Gentiles was even dreamed of. The whole att.i.tude was one of almost pa.s.sive expectancy that clung to the ancient capital, the holy city, where the long-expected Hope of Israel would shortly, descending from the heavens, establish His throne.

Jewish Christianity had only the rudiments of a creed, only the simplest organization, and the most unelaborated and democratic form of wors.h.i.+p.

It was a seed with the germinating impulse unawakened, a bark launched and rigged but that had no thought of venturing out of the harbour.

This simple, undeveloped, undogmatic, unorganized, and Judaistic character of primitive Jewish Christianity is strikingly displayed in the early chapters of the book of the Acts and in the Epistle of James, which on most, at any rate, of the different hypotheses as to date and authors.h.i.+p is, at least, a witness to early Jewish Christianity.[#]

[#] A later form of Jewish Christianity, the obscure Ebionitism of the second century, does not fall within the limits of this sketch. It was, probably, not so much a development of Christianity as a perversion of it.

2. Greek Christianity.

But the expansive forces residing in this undeveloped Christianity could not long remain inactive.

An important element in the population of Jerusalem in the time of our Lord was the h.e.l.lenist. This name was applied to the Jews who for various reasons, mainly for trade, had made their home in the commercial cities of the Levant. Here they had learned to speak the prevailing language of the countries around the Eastern Mediterranean, Greek, and had been, to a varying extent, intellectually broadened and quickened by contact with the Greek world. Large numbers of them returned to Jerusalem for educational purposes or to gratify their devout feelings, but they were regarded by the Palestinean Jews with something approaching contempt for their willingness to live away from the sacred soil of Palestine.

It was in the h.e.l.lenist mind, thus stimulated and developed by the Greek spirit, that the first development of Christianity occurred. To the h.e.l.lenist Stephen, the first thinker, the first controversialist, and the first martyr of Christianity, belongs the honor of first discovering the universal principle of Christianity, and his interpretation of Christianity brought about his own death and kindled a persecution which scattered the Christians of Jerusalem up and down the Syrian coast of the Mediterranean.

To some of these fugitive h.e.l.lenist Christians, partakers of the thought of the martyred Stephen, belongs the not less lofty honor of being the first to overleap the jealously guarded barriers of Judaism and to open the door of Christianity to the Gentiles. "They therefore that were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and Antioch, speaking the word to none save only to Jews. But there were some of them, men of Cyprus and Cyrene [and therefore h.e.l.lenists] who, when they were come to Antioch, spake unto the Greeks also, preaching the Lord Jesus." Acts 11:19-20.

It is to be noted that it was, probably, this influx of Greeks into the Church hitherto composed only of Jews which made necessary a new name applicable to the composite body, and so it came about that "the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch."

A Church, in part Jewish but, probably, in still larger part Gentile, thus sprang up in Antioch, which became the mother city of Gentile, or world-wide, Christianity. From this centre the greatest of all h.e.l.lenist Jews, Saul of Tarsus, fired by that very universalism which had at first aroused the hatred of his bitter Jewish particularism, carried Christianity westward through Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and, possibly, even to Spain.

Thus transplanted from the deeply and exclusively religious and ethical Hebrew mind to the predominantly speculative mind of the Greek, Christianity began to undergo an immediate transformation. The Greek mind, probably never equalled for its curiosity, its acuteness, its subtlety, could never be content to ask, what? It must also ask, why, and how? To it we owe science, philosophy, all our ordered thinking.

Christianity, as a mere affection felt for Jesus Christ or purely as a code of conduct, could not satisfy the Greek mind. The Greek mind, at first contemptuous of it as a mere vulgar superst.i.tion, fascinated at length by its rational monotheism, its lofty ethics, and, above all by the charm of its central figure, flung itself with ardor on the task of adapting this naive and untutored but fascinating religion to its own tastes and habits of thought.

A place was found for the Jewish Messiah in the philosophical world of the Greeks as the Logos, or Reason, of G.o.d, a familiar philosophical conception. Plato and Zeno were made His forerunners. The principles of His teaching were dissected out of the traditions of His ministry and organized into a coherent body of doctrine. The acutest minds of Greek Christianity disengaged the great problems which were involved in the wors.h.i.+p paid to Christ and, after centuries of speculation and of strife (not always intellectual only), achieved those great solutions which, whether in every respect permanently satisfactory or not, must forever be recognized as among the sublimest constructions of the philosophic intellect,--the creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon.

For good and for ill the simple, almost creedless Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount and of the Epistle of James had become through Paul, the author of the Fourth Gospel, the still more mysterious author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and countless Greek dialecticians and theologians, the elaborately and authoritatively dogmatic system which has, almost till to-day, treated unorthodox opinion as the deadliest of sins.

The undue emphasis on the intellectual element in Christianity, the tyrannical control of human thought we to-day must deplore, but he who repudiates Greek Christianity must also deny that Christianity had any mission to the Greek mind, and that men have any right to think out their religious beliefs and adjust them to the rest of their thinking.