The Stirrings in America
by RUFUS M. JONES
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EVERY in the midst of the fighting, is deeply concerned over the type of peace that will emerge when the fighting ends. He is concerned, too, about the creation of the right social, economic, and political structure for the reorganization of the post-war world.
Stable world-orders cannot be built while men and women and children are starving, and there surely is no point in talking of nation-planning to persons who have no home, no fire, and no breakfast. There must be first of all a wise and extensive campaign of relief and reconstruction, actuated and maintained in a spirit of unselfishness, genuine sympathy, and understanding, with no ulterior aims. We need to have our imagination captured so that we see vividly the actual suffering human faces, so that we feel pathetically what hunger does to children, and are moved by the agonies and slow crucifixions of human beings like ourselves, living in the occupied areas of Europe and Asia.
But we need to realize also that there are strange stirrings of hope and expectation already moving across the world. There are unmistakable signs of awakening, and dreams of a new epoch are abroad. There is a surge for freedom and enlarged life in almost all the countries we have been accustomed to consider backward, and all these stirrings of the human heart are prophesyings of great significance. We cannot possibly return to the kind of world that existed between the wars. It is one of the evidences of man’s intrinsic greatness that it is just when he seems to be at the end of his human resources that he rises above himself and does what he couldn’t. It is quite possible that we may be at the frontier of a new and marvelous epoch.
If, however, these stirrings are to be realized as something more than a vague hope and yeasty dream, the crisis of our time must bring to our lives a profound spiritual awakening, resurrection of creative faith. The type of religion 1 am eager that men should have in this crisis not only brings a vision of relief and enables a person to live triumphantly, with inward peace and serenity amid the stern conditions of life: what is much more, it gives the spirit of man the fortification which is needed for taking up the task of rebuilding the world on a diviner pattern, with a new skyline.
The supreme epochs in the history of the race have for the most part been marked by a fresh discovery of the springs and sources that supply the soul of man with powers beyond himself, and by the breaking in of an Environment of Life beyond the visible skyline — the emergence of the Unseen. The reason these epochs have been unique is that in them man has not only risen beyond himself but he has discovered the sublimity of the reality of God and the spiritual world where he belongs. When that happens, there comes into active operation a creative faith that carries everything before it, because living has become a joy.
There is a moving story of the early Christian martyrs, who, in an era of imperial persecution, were taken to North Africa and put in the mines there, to toil for the remainder of their lives. With their implements of labor they cut on the walls of the mines the words, vita, vita, vita—“life, life, life.” They did not mean life after death; they had discovered a spring and principle of life which made living a thrilling business even in the confinement of the mines.
“Faith,” as William James once put it, “is the sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the actual.” But it must not be a tour de force faith, a lifting of oneself by the bootstraps, a leap in the dark out beyond the solid ground for feet to feel and stand on. No, the faith I am eager to see revived for our crisis must be dynamic, and therefore it must spring out of the actual discovery of the eternal realities by which men live and move and have their being, and overcome the stubborn conditions of their outside world. If there does come a genuine resurgence of this dynamic faith it will be due, I am convinced, to a profounder appreciation of man’s inherent possibilities as a spiritual being in direct mutual and reciprocal correspondence with a Spiritual Environment akin to us and for which we were made.
Immanuel Kant, who in spite of his blind spots is, next to Plato, my guiding philosopher, always held that man’s reason demands the unconditioned — that is, the infinite and absolute— in every one of its manifold operations: in the realm of knowledge, in the realm of morals, and in the realm of values. There can, he insisted, be no real explanation of anything until the mind transcends the limits of what the understanding can describe. And we can go beyond those limits not by making our descriptions more exact and mathematical, but by living our way into the heart of those realities we need for creative, significant life.
Until we discover the way to expand the skyline of life, we shall have a recurrence of cynicism and a return of the sense of frustration. Even if we should succeed in securing the Four Freedoms, and, mirabile dictu, should have a world “free from want” and “free from fear,” it would not be free from the oppression of frustration. Man cannot be confined in the nutshell of a world of describable basic material elements, and not have bad dreams of futility. We are so made, so endowed, that we yearn beyond the limits, however extended, of a world made up of the earth’s crust, the sun, moon, and stars and innumerable vibratory atoms. One of the major troubles of our time, one which has led to our other troubles, has been the attempt to live in a severely “reduced” world, with insufficient scope for the soul to expand its native wings. Where vision fails and there is no sphere for transcendent faith, the people perish, as ancient prophets declared. Vitamins for the soul are as essential to life as vitamins for the body.
2
WITH all our planning, therefore, for a peace that will last, and for a world-order that will guarantee to all races and colors an essential political and economic freedom, we must not forget to strive and plan and work for a fresh revival of religious life and faith. It is, I believe, even now in process of gestation. I am impressed, everywhere I go, with the large number of eager “seekers” I find, particularly in college and university groups during these last unsettled years.
But they are not easily satisfied. They do not take kindly to traditional and formal types of religion. The historic churches will need to be very patient with this new crop of “seekers.” More than that, they will need to undergo a profound transformation themselves before they can harvest this growing crop. But it is a vastly important opportunity. The educational institutions of all the grades could at this stage do much more than they are at present doing to foster this “seeking” aspiration among their students. Where there are teachers, or professors, who are interested in this aspect of life and who know how to speak to earnest “seekers” dissatisfied with substitutes for life itself, the movement is accelerated by a natural process. Where there are a wise and understanding chaplain and a warm, creative chapel service, the process is still more accelerated, and the spiritual growth of the students is as natural and normal as intellectual growth.
What is needed more than anything else now in educational circles is a sound philosophical basis for the conviction of a spiritual constitution in man’s being as a person and equally in the total structure of the universe; and a sound philosophical basis for a genuinely moral order in man and in the world to which man belongs. There is no genuine scope for life in a world reduced to a “block universe” and a “puppet man” pushed and pulled into action by invisible springs.
The missionary colleges and universities in the Near East and in the Orient have given a remarkable demonstration of the transforming power that a truly creative and spiritually guided educational institution can bring to bear on the lives of its students. Robert College in Constantinople and the American University of Cairo, to mention only two, have been working miracles in the Moslem world of the Near East. The twelve Christian colleges and universities of China explain in very large degree the new atmosphere and awakened spirit of Chinese youth today.
These institutions have not been imparting formal or sectarian religion. They have been interpreting the deeper springs and the higher liberating realities by which men live a rich and significant life. And one result of this immensely important work, and of the heroic spirit of the modern missionaries, is the fact that they will be welcomed back with glowing enthusiasm in all the countries from which the fortunes of war have driven them out. I have visited these institutions, more times and for much longer periods than was possible for Wendell Willkie in one short visit, and I have been stirred with the same enthusiasm as his for their constructive work.
But there can hardly be the great religious awakening and spiritual resurrection I am calling for without the coming of a new stage of insight, sacrificial devotion, and enlargement of vision and aims in the Church, which is composed of the churches across the world. This is the hour for greatness of spiritual power and magnanimous aims in the Church, which ought to be on earth the organ of the Kingdom of God, and the Body of men and women here and now expressing in the world the mind and spirit and will of Jesus Christ.
Whatever happens to our world, we must keep the Church at its distinctive spiritual mission; and if we are ever to rebuild our broken world on right lines for a great future, we Christians must get closer together and we must work together, not as the guardians of a sect, but as vital followers of Christ. The darker the world and the deeper the virus of hate, the more glowing must be our Christianity and the more triumphant the note of our faith.
Martin Nicmoller, one of the most valiant Christians in the world, and perhaps the one who has suffered most for his faith, has nobly said: “ I have a consciousness that we all belong together as one great congregation of the Body of Christ and we should like to enter the spaciousness of a real Christian brotherhood, which will unite us one with the other and make us free to serve one another.” And Kagawa, one of the greatest followers of Christ now on the earth, also like Niemoller in the enemy’s country, has been for years working for a united Christianity and for a religion of life and power.
These two men, if they live until the war is over, will be among the foremost religious leaders of the world, working for the unity of Christianity and for a new era of spiritual religion. But we cannot wait for the war to be over. We must have Christian coöperation now. We want the unity of the Church now. We want the resurgence of a new and creative faith for our supreme tasks now. If the churches are not struck awake by the present crisis and the momentous tasks which confront us now, they will certainly not be ready for the new and unpredictable situations that will emerge when the fighting ends.
What we need most is a more vital church service, which reaches the deeps in the attenders and refreshes them with a powerful sense of reality. It ought to have the effect that the rising of the water has on a ship in a lock, which goes out for its voyage on a higher level. There ought to come, more often than usually does come, a return to the freshness of life, the joy and radiance which were a striking feature of Christ’s life, even though He was consciously moving toward tragic issues. We need to recover that spell of eternity, under which His early followers lived and wrought and suffered. It brought to them, as it always does bring, a new dimension of life, a notable expansion and inner amplitude of being. Here, not in outworn formulations, is the pattern for our new time, and in breathings of the ever living Spirit is the inspiration for the birth of a dynamic faith that will bring a new epoch for religion.