ALONE WITH GOD     

Attempted Solution
The Modern Way

One would not wish to appear captious in passing adverse judgment upon the opinion of so many devout and thoughtful men. In extenuation of my unpopular opinion I may say that it is quite evident that Protestant Christianity—including many godly and intelligent men—has been in somewhat of error on the question of unity for three hundred years; and it is not inconceivable but that it might again be in error as to the way out of division. In any case sober and thoughtful men will patiently hear the other side before rendering an opinion.

There are several reasons why ecclesiastical mergers do not seem to show the way out. I shall say though that I do believe they are a favorable omen as showing that Christians are beginning to see the evils of interminable division and are becoming more willing to make the necessary mental adjustments to live with their Christian brethren of a different spiritual education and religious traditions. They seem to be a real, if crude and incomplete, gesture of obedience to the divine imperative toward Christian unity.

But that they are not the real road to unity seems indicated by the following considerations:

They involve needless and unscriptural compromise of doctrine. It may seem a strange thing for an advocate of Christian unity to oppose doctrinal compromises, as it is usually assumed that there is no other way to unity. Nevertheless I believe that each man's doctrinal convictions are sacred, and cannot be lightly surrendered. Especially can one not subscribe to statements of doctrine contrary to his established beliefs and convictions. Not always— especially later in life, can one change these successfully.

Given a Calvinist, who has all along been trained to believe in predestination and the final perseverance of the saints, and such a man cannot conscientiously subscribe to an Arminian creed. And a straddling, non-committal creed disgusts him. On the other hand, an Arminian cannot without sin set his hand to the following articles from the Westminster Confession of Faith:

"God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established."

"By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting death.

" These angels and men, thus predestinated and foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably designed; and their number is so certain and definite that it cannot be either increased or diminished. "

Undoubtedly, if one is a strong enough Calvinist, he can sign the foregoing creed with a good conscience. If so what is the harm of his holding such a creed for himself ? The objectionable feature is that by holding a creed that his Christian brother cannot conscientiously sign he interposes a barrier between them which makes church fellowship impossible, in any organic sense.

For example, there are certain churches which refuse admission to the Lord's Supper to all who are not members of their denomination. Now, a certain Christian might say to himself that he personally objects to that part of the creed of the church, but since he believes in the major part of its doctrine and desires Christian fellowship he will join this church. But the moment he does so he gives his assent and his voice to the unchristian practice of barring his fellow Christians from the table of his Lord.

Perhaps a minister joins such a denomination under the same circumstances. He has submitted to what he considers an unchristian requirement in order to purchase the fellowship of a group of good spiritual Christians; but he must also do more. He must, in his own turn, impose this unscriptural restriction upon all other Christians. This is an example of the harm one does in imposing a human creed upon his fellow-Christians. He makes fellowship—at least normal Christian fellowship—impossible.

In a certain congregation it was sought to merge together men of various beliefs. One of the leaders was a believer in the doctrine of eternal security, sometimes called the "final perseverance of the saints. " He wrote this doctrine into the constitution of the church. Several of the members were strongly Arminian in theology and radically opposed this Calivinistic plank. Nevertheless they were obliged to submit to it; and for the sake of peace they did give their adherence to this plank, which violated their deepest Christian convictions.

This is an illustration of the evils of ecclesiastical mergers. It reminds one of the saying of St. Paul: "When ye sin so against the brethren and wound their weak consciences ye sin against Christ." In the present age of freedom of thought it is morally certain that there are literally millions of persons who are attached to churches who have given their formal assent to creeds in which they do not believe. Hundreds of preachers are committed to creeds and confessions of faith which their very soul revolts against.

In another age this would have been labeled hypocrisy; but the development of human thought has put so many intelligent and good men in that position in recent times that there has grown up a sort of new moral code to the effect that what one says in signing a creed is not to be judged by the same standards of sincerity and frankness as what he says of his own independent motion.

Here is a problem in moral casuistry which we can leave to those whose consciences upbraid them for their inconsistency. I only say that doubtless every sincere Christian will admit that there would be a real gain in sincerity and truthfulness if no one is ever forced to sign a creed which he does not thoroughly and sincerely believe in full.

Is Christian unity impossible then as long as there are such grave problems in Christian theology as the freedom of the will and the decrees of God—questions which have vexed theology ever since it became a subject of rational inquiry.

The answer is, no; but these questions should be relegated to the schoolroom instead of made a fellowship issue in the church. And Christians should only be asked to signify their assent to the doctrines of the New Testament. Eventually calm, unbiased study of the New Testament, free from the trammels of creed and dogma, may be expected to produce a unanimity of belief which today seems beyond possibility.

As a matter of fact this is one of the practical difficulties of such fusions. Rarely, if ever, are the old denominations wiped out. Usually one or both bodies have enough dissidents to set up as a fully organized denomination.

Something like this is what happened to the Cumberland Presbyterian Church at the time it was sought to merge it with the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., in 1906. Quite a few members refused to enter the merger. Lawsuits followed. In the end the dissidents persisted in maintaining a separate organization. As a result the United States Census Bureau report of 1926 gave the number of Cumberland Presbyterians at that time as 67,938—a pretty fair showing for a body that had been wiped out of existence by a merger! If denominationalism is only to be done away with in this manner the visible unity of the church will have a long time to wait.

And from the standpoint of the advocates of unity, the worst feature of it all is that the dissidents have a good case in reason and in Scripture,—if the denominational system is right. Then there is no satisfactory reason why a big denomination is any [128] better than a little one. The chances are always in favor of the little one in such a case. Besides, if the larger denomination required adhesion to a creed or practice of customs which violated their conscience, then the Cumberlands were supported by Scripture in refusing to join the larger denomination; for no man can be forced to violate his conscience as a Christian man. Neither dare he subscribe to a creed of which he disapproves.

Impossible it is that Christian unity shall ever come by a method which cannot place a Scriptural imperative upon the conscience of every Christian in the district where this unity is in operation. Simple adherence to the New Testament, and avoidance of every human attempt to organize the church of Jesus as a human corporation, develops a church which is capable of placing this demand upon the consciences of all Christians.

A church is not a mere conglomerate assemblage of individuals. A church is a homogeneous group, a social organism. Thus it happens that even where Christians do give their verbal assent to the compromise creed of an amalgamated church it is in the nature of things that they should be unable to give their warmest loyalty to a hybrid structure which bears the marks of compromise and official carpentry all over it.

Whatever may be the faultiness of denominationalism as a system, the fact remains that the great denominations were born in the strain and heat of mighty historic moments in history. Frequently they were annealed in the fires of persecution and cemented with the blood of martyrs. Their glorious traditions have passed down from father to son throughout generations of time. They command the allegiance and loyalty of their members in a most effective way.

But what claim have these coldblooded ecclesiastical mergers upon the love and loyalty of Christians? They have not the unity of the ancient church nor the allegiance and loyalty of modern denominations.

If the denominational system is right it is a matter of indifference whether we have large or small denominations; and also how many we have.

But if we are merging together denominations because the system itself is at fault and we are trying to get away from it, then how absurd to manufacture one large denomination out of two or three small ones; for we are only perpetuating the thing which we confess by our actions is a sin against the holy unity of the church of Christ.

Although such an outcome is entirely improbable, in the light of all presentday conditions, if it were possible to merge all denominations into one, yet would we not have the holy unity of the apostolic church. We should only have a large denomination which in the very nature of the case could not command the allegiance and loyalty of all the Christian brotherhood, because it would be a human corporation and not the holy bride of Christ.

But that there would be real dangers in a vast ecclesiastical machine organized along the lines of a modern corporation may be shown, I think, by the example of the Mediaeval Church, which dominated kings and emperors and for ages laid a heavy hand upon all the forces of democracy and progress throughout Europe.

I have seen a book upon Christian unity written by a devout and spiritual scholar, a man who is so keenly alive to the evils of division and so eagerly anxious for the answer to the prayer of our Lord for unity— qualities which do him great credit—that he is willing to see the whole Christian body of the world brought under the sway of the diocesan episcopacy of the ancient churches. Not that he is himself a believer, but for the sake of unity he is willing to accept the apostolic succession of the great ritualistic churches and the rule of the monarchistic bishops.

So good a scholar as he is must be keenly aware that the development of the monarchial bishop of the ancient churches is a result of copying the imperial government of pagan Rome and not the outgrowth of the simple, pure teachings of the apostolic church.

Since the possibility of a united church is a pure act of faith anyhow, because we cannot at present see much evidence of it, why not exercise our faith in a way commensurate with the dignity of Jesus Christ, its end and object, and believe that the church in unity will be worthy of its Lord who must bring it into being by a creative act of power ?

At any rate it is easy to see that a great world church ruled by imperious and aristocratic bishops would be an unfriendly soil for democratic ideals. Nor could one expect such a church to encourage and stimulate the creative qualities of free and untrammeled thought. It is almost certain that civilization would go backward under such a church.

It could even be expected to develop the imperial air of the Mediaeval Church and invoke the strong arm of the civil government against heretics and dissenters.

What a terrible disappointment it would bring to workers for Christian unity if they should find that they had created a F r a n k e n s t e i n monster which should martyr the saints of God in fire, and lie like a nightmare upon the progressive spirit of modern democracy.

We have lived so long in the religious liberty of a great free government that we have come to take such liberty for granted. We assume that as long as the guarantee of liberty stands printed in the Constitution that so long must our religious freedom rest unhindered. We do not stop to think that the Constitution is not self operative. It is administered by human beings. And there is an ever increasing number of men in the country who do not believe in the Constitution in general, nor in religious liberty in particular. Men can make the Constitution what they will. Dominated by a great state church they would be able, and probably willing, to change it.

Russia ought to give us a lesson of what one determined group of citizens is capable of doing to the unorganized masses outside their fraternity.

Not one person in three hundred in Russia is a Communist. Yet that one person rules the other three hundred with a rod of iron, even to the point of insulting religious faith and destroying churches and killing their ministers of religion before their eyes.

When men set out to oppress you there must be some limit set to their rapacity; but when they set [133] out to do you good and reform you for your own good, there is no outrage too terrible for them to inflict under the assumption that the end justifies the means.

A spiritual church in unity represents the goal of humanity's dreams, and the fulfillment of the yearnings of the heart of Jesus Christ. But a great ecclesiastical machine dominated by despotic bishops and dispensing a religion of magic—the logical development of such a machine—leaves a lover of Christian unity cold.

It is only a step back to the simplicity and unity of the New Testament church; and if people are going to break up their religious housekeeping and pass through the mental distress of tearing down an old, beloved denomination and building again a new one which they must take time to learn to love, why not do a thorough job of it at once and move into the blessed land and the gentle city of Christian unity ?