The Social Mission of the Church

THE most revolutionary idea of modern times is the theory of evolution. Charles Darwin planted intellectual dynamite under every church, university, and library; and it went off, more or less simultaneously, in all places when the new generation touched it. Textbooks, thumb-marked and dog-eared by the fathers, were thrown into the fire by their sons and daughters. The Church rallied its leading minds and ecclesiastical courts for defense against the theory, only to see every champion ignominiously fall before the sling-stone of this modern David. In the short space of one generation every university in Christendom had assumed, as the regulative idea in all departments of science, history, and philosophy, the theory of evolution and development. A revolution had taken place in the intellectual life of the world, the magnitude and farreaching consequences of which we can scarcely yet conjecture.

For two thousand years the Christian Church, Catholic and Protestant alike, had thought of a speedy ending of the world. And it had abundant scriptural authority for so thinking. Had not Christ himself told the High Priest and the Sanhedrin, in one of the solemn moments of his life, that they should ‘see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of the Almighty and coming in the clouds of heaven’? To be sure, they died in their beds without any such vision, but the second coming had only been delayed. Paul taught it to every community of Christians that he established, and every other apostle believed it. The early Church universally accepted it and put into its first formula of faith, ‘We believe that He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.’ From those days until our own, all Christians of every name have believed that it was possible that in their lifetime the heavens might open and that upon the clouds might appear in power and great glory the Christ in judgment. That expectation, like some solemn strain in sacred oratorio, runs through all the liturgies of Christendom. And multitudes of pious souls have prayed either that the great day might come or that it might not come while they were alive. Periodically some man or woman, sincere and ignorant, has arisen to announce the date of the end of the world.

Whether the Founder of the Christian Church believed in any such mistaken notion about the world as this which his Church has believed for nineteen centuries, is a much debated question among New Testament scholars at the present moment. On one side we have authorities who maintain that Jesus went to the cross in the firm belief that God would interfere at the last moment, and that He died in despair because God forsook Him. On the other hand are men of no less learning and insight who hold that the apocalyptic element in the Gospels has been put into the mouth of the Lord by his apostles who did not understand Him. But whether on strictly scholarly grounds or not, the majority of Christian students to-day minimize the apocalyptic element in the Gospels and magnify those elements which the Church has heretofore slightly stressed. No passages of scripture are so frequently preached upon to-day, in all the churches, as those which speak of development, of a leavening process at work in society, of the growth of the followers of Christ into all truth under the enlightening Spirit. The Church is shifting its basis from the Christ of tradition and heaven to the Christ of science and social redemption.

In making this revolutionary change from millenarianism to evolution the church is likely to lose in our generation the spiritual value of apocalyptics, just as for centuries it has failed to appreciate the value of the evolutionary elements in the teaching of Jesus. That there is basis of fact for apocalyptics must be apparent to every student of history. The race has gone forward by means of revolution as well as by evolution; the leavening process results in an uplifting as by volcanic eruption; the silent growth of years bursts into fruition; gestation eventuates in birth. In Church and in State the law, as revealed in European history, is — Renaissance, Reformation, Revolution. Evolution and revolution are complementary; revolution crowns evolution and in turn inaugurates a new evolution.

Now the apocalyptic parables of the Day of the Lord are symbols of revolution, as the parables of the seed and the leaven represent evolution. In the history of our race there have been advents of Christ, times of tribulation, deliverance, and advance. In the experience of the individual there have been sudden conversions and transformations when the Lord has come to men ‘as a thief in the night,’ and robbed them of their pride and self-sufficiency and left them rich before God. Christendom has frequently ‘seen the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Almighty and coming in the clouds of heaven.’

The belief in the near ending of the world, or the apocalyptic faith, as universally held by the Church, Catholic and Protestant alike, has done untold harm. It has also done some good. Were we to believe the end of all things to be at hand, in this year of our Lord 1915, as a neighboring minister firmly holds, would not that belief change our perspective and give us a different sense of proportion? Would not little things be small, and big things large?

The generation which has really believed in the Day of the Lord as imminent, under the preaching of some John the Baptist, has been brought up standing before the things that count. But, from a social point of view, such teaching, whatever revolutions it may have brought to the individual, has destroyed human society. If it had destroyed some system of society and compelled the race to inaugurate a new system of justice and equality, we should have no quarrel with it. As a matter of record, however, it has entrenched the children of this world and rendered foolish the children of light. The spectacle of multitudes of earnest but silly people selling all that they had, clothing themselves in white garments, and waiting on some high hill for the archangel’s trumpet, is one to make demons laugh and angels weep.

It has frequently happened that a ‘revival’ has been preached in a community just at the time when it began to think about community ownership of its water or light plant, with the result that those social problems lost all significance, and ‘salvation’ monopolized the serious thought of all earnest people. What good to society upon this earth can a belief bring which holds that any and every society here, cooperative or competitive, democratic or monopolistic, industrial or military, is as dust in the balance? Supernaturalism, the expectation of something or other which is to come down from the stars, should be consigned by all socially minded men and women to the museum of ecclesiastical and theological antiquities.

The modern world is beginning to take up in dead earnest the splendid task of building upon this earth an ideal society. It is singing unto the Lord a new song — the song of brotherhood; it is seeing a new vision — the vision of a community in which no one is overworked and no one is underpaid and every man has his chance to do and be his best. When men and women whose hearts beat to the new tunes of social aspiration and effort hear their faith derided from the pulpit and their religion called unchristian, what must they think of the Church? Professor Peabody has said that the growth of the religion of socialism is due to the failure of the Church to obey the social teachings of Jesus. Without doubt the repudiation of the Church on the part of multitudes in both Catholic and Protestant countries is the penalty which the Church is paying for its unreal faith. There are those who believe that the Church is even antichrist. The unreality of the religion of the Church is responsible for this situation, and the decay of this unreal faith is one of the hopeful signs of the times.

In every church to-day there is a growing number of men and women who have drunk anew at the spring of their religion and have found there water of life. With minds trained in scientific method and with hearts open to their own day, they have once again searched the scriptures if haply they might find God. And they believe that they have found Him, and with Him, have found his will and purpose for the world.

Further back than Protestantism, and before the world had ever heard of Catholicism, there existed in the cities of Asia and Southern Europe communities of Christian men and women. Little societies they were, each complete in itself, yet united with one another by ties of mutual service and sympathy. Composed of working people almost entirely, they were primarily engaged in meeting the needs of the workers, when oppressed, hungry, sick, imprisoned, enslaved. Harnack is right in calling them the first labor unions. They were also the first charity organization society, children’s aid society, employment bureau, social settlement, socialist local. Those little communities were formed around the faith that God had spoken to men in Jesus the crucified carpenter, and that Christ was about to come again. In that faith and hope those men and women lived such lives of service and courage as the world had never seen before.

When two or three generations of such communities had lived and died, with the growth of numbers and power, they developed — as all societies do — organization, rituals, and traditions. This huge accumulation of several centuries is known as Catholicism, and, when it is reformed in certain particulars, is called Protestantism. Both the Catholic and Protestant churches resemble the Primitive Church about as the Steel Trust resembles a college fraternity.

The modern parish more closely resembles the Christian Church which braved the Roman Empire and conquered the world, than any form of religion which the world has seen for many centuries. At its heart is a great faith in a living and present Christ. Unlike the early church it is unable to confine the expressions of that faith to its immediate community, but finds outlet and effectiveness in innumerable organizations distinct from its own. Among its members are many types of mind, radical and conservative, and they express their faith in different ways. In the socialist local some find an outlet as others find it in boys’ clubs. There are those for whom Socialism is too conservative and who are found dreaming the Syndicalist dream and pleading for liberty of speech for the I.W.W. The constructive policy of the Women’s Trade Union movement appeals to one, while the ameliorative work of the Girls’ Friendly Society commands the loyalty of another.

There are those who believe in woman suffrage and those who oppose the giving of votes to women. Playgrounds and politics, business and family, charity and social justice, individual relief and social revolution, parish-house activities and community effort are ‘outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual grace’ of a manysided modern Church. What it calls ‘social service’ is a new expression of religious life, an attempt to relate many different types of minds to the larger community of city, nation, and world. It believes in a better world and sets out, inspired by its faith in a present Christ, efficient though unseen, to produce it, by evolution or by revolution.

Professor Harnack says that historical Protestantism was the restoration of the Gospel which Catholicism had lost among alien accretions, such as holy water, the Pope on his throne, St. Anne. The Church of the Reformation under the leading of the Spirit restored as much of the Gospel as it could appreciate in the light of the needs and the knowledge which it had. In the light of our needs and new knowledge of the gospels, Protestants and Modernist Catholics are restoring a part of the Gospel which was hidden from our fathers. A little phrase, long overlooked in scripture, stands forth with new meaning like a window on which the setting sun shines. It is ‘ The Gospel of the Kingdom.' What is the good news? The end of the world, in the first century; the creatorhood of God, in the Nicene age; the Church, in mediæval times; salvation by faith only, in the sixteenth century; forgiveness of sins, in recent times. Each of these in its time and place has been the Gospel.

Our modern age is about to give a new answer. The Kingdom of God is that social order which it is the will of God to have prevail upon the earth. It is a society of individual wills, knit into one corporate will, which resembles more and more the Will of the Father. It is an organization of humanity which is according to the plan of the Creator. The scene of its triumph is not the clouds but this earth. ‘Thy Kingdom come on earth.’ As the ideal social order, it is always here in part and yet is always coming. In so far as the ideal has been partially realized, in the family and in the political democracy, the kingdom is here; in so far as it has yet to be worked out, in industrial life and elsewhere, it is still to come. John the Baptist announced that the Kingdom of God was imminent. Jesus declared that it was here among men, growing up as a seed, at work in society like leaven, destined in time to fill the whole earth.

When the church universal awakes from its mediæval and sixteenth-century dreams to the realization of the Gospel of the Kingdom, and consecrates itself to preaching it, there will be such a Day of the Lord as supernaturalists never expected nor hath it entered into the heads of Catholics and Protestants to conceive. Men and women are groping for it, hungry and thirsty for something, they know not just what; expecting the Church to give it and cursing the Church because it disappoints them; turning to panaceas which promise more abundant life and yet leave them unfed. Verily Christ is again moved to compassion because of the multitude who are as sheep without a shepherd; and because those who in his name claim to be pastors are unable to discern the signs of the times.

What the Church needs to-day is a restoration of the Gospel of the King-dom, with the same revolutionary vigor and life with which the Protestant Reformation witnessed the rediscovery of the Gospel of the individual soul. It is in the will and purpose of God, as manifested in the teaching and the life of Jesus, that humanity is to find the abundant life. In the midst of life, speaking like thunder in the discontent of the age, illuminating like the sun in the science and scholarship of to-day, going before and behind, as a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day, is God. To make his voice articulate and his way plain for every man and woman, is the high calling and the supreme mission of the Church.