Theology and the Social Consciousness A Study of the Relations of the Social Consciousness to Theology (2nd ed.) — Edition Insights

shaped in the atmosphere of the social consciousness. They got at things in a way we should not now think of using. The method of approach was too merely metaphysical and individualistic and mystical, and the result seems to us to have but slight ethical or religious significance. The arguments that now move us most, in this entire realm of spiritual inquiry, are moral and social rather than metaphysical and mystical. It is interesting to see, for example, how such arguments for immortality as that of the simplicity of the soul's being--and most of those used by Plato--and how such arguments even for the existence of God as those of Samuel Clarke from time and space, have become for us merely matters of curious inquiry. We can hardly imagine men having given them real weight. A similar change seems to be creeping over the laborious attempts metaphysically to conceive the divinity of Christ. The question is shifting its position for both radical and conservative to a new ground--from the metaphysical and mystical to the moral and social; though some radicals who regard themselves as in the van of progress have not yet found it out, and so find fault with one for not continually defining himself in terms of the older metaphysical formulas and shibboleths. The considerations, in all these questions and in many others, which really weigh most with us now, are considerations which belong to the sphere of the personal spiritual life. Ultimately, no doubt, a metaphysics is involved here too; but it is a metaphysics whose final reality is spirit, not an unknown substance--Locke's "something, I know not what."

The unsatisfactoriness of even so honored a symbol as the Apostles' Creed, as a permanently adequate statement of Christian faith, must for similar reasons become increasingly clear in the atmosphere of the social consciousness. One wonders, as he goes carefully over it, that so many concrete statements could be made concerning the Christian religion, which yet are so little ethical. The creed seems almost to exclude the ethical. It has nothing to say, except by rather distant implication, of the character of God, of the character of Christ, or of the character of men. The life of Christ between his birth and his death are untouched. The considerations that really weigh most with us--as they did with the apostles--in making us Christians, certainly do not come here to prominent expression. This whole difference of atmosphere is the striking fact; and were it not that we instinctively interpret its phrases in accordance with our modern consciousness, we should feel the difference much more than we do.

What the previous discussion has called the truly mystical--the recognition of the whole man, of the entire personality--is coming in increasingly to correct both the falsely mystical and the falsely metaphysical. We are arguing now, in harmony with the social consciousness, from the standpoint of the broadly rational, not from that of the narrowly intellectual.

II. THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD, AS THE DETERMINING PRINCIPLE IN THEOLOGY

One might reach essentially the same general results from the influence of the social consciousness, by seeing that, so far as it deepens for us the meaning of the personal, it will deepen immediately our conception of the Fatherhood of God--the central and dominating doctrine in all theology--and so affect all theology. For, with a change in the conception of God, no doctrine can go wholly untouched. Every step into a deeper feeling for the personal--and the growth of the modern social consciousness is undoubtedly a long step in that direction--deepens necessarily religion and theology. Perhaps the possible results here can be illustrated in no way better than by recalling Patterson DuBois' putting of the needed change in the conception of the proper attitude of a father toward his child. We are not to say, he writes: "I will conquer that child, no matter what it may cost him," but we are to say, "I will help that child to conquer himself, no matter what it may cost me." Now that change in point of view is a well-nigh perfect illustration of the social consciousness in a given relation, and it cannot be doubted that it is a true expression of Christ's thought of the Fatherhood of God; but has it really dominated through and through our theological statements? Manifestly, what it means to us that God is Father depends on what we have come to see in fatherhood. And Principal Fairbairn, in the second part of his _The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, has given us a good illustration of how much it means for theology to be in earnest in making the Fatherhood of God the determining doctrine in theology.

III. CHRIST'S OWN SOCIAL EMPHASES