Religion and Theology. Religion is one thing and theology another, but religion is never found apart from a theology of some kind, for theology is the intellectual articulation of religious experience. Every man who has anything worthy to be called a religious experience has also a theology; he cannot help it. No sooner does he attempt to understand or express his experience of the relations of God and the soul than he finds himself in possession of a theology. The religious experience may be a very good one and the theology a very bad one, but still religion and theology are necessary to each other, and it is a man’s duty to try to make his theology as nearly as possible an adequate and worthy expression of his religion. He will never succeed in doing this in a permanent fashion, for the content of religious experience is, or should be, greater than any form of statement. But theology is everyone’s business. We cannot afford to leave it to experts or refrain from forming our own judgment upon the pronouncements of experts. To speak of theology as though it had an esoteric and an exoteric side, one for the man in the study and the other for the man in the world, is a practical heresy of a most dangerous kind. Neither should theology be confounded with ecclesiasticism. It is my conviction that the battle with ecclesiasticism has long since been decided, and civilisation has nothing to fear from the official priest. Those who spend their time in protesting against sacerdotal pretensions are only beating the air “We shall never go to Canossa,” as Bismarck said. No, the real danger to spiritual religion, and therefore to the immediate future of mankind in every department of thought and action, arises from practical materialism on the one hand and an antiquated dogmatic theology on the other. I hope it will be understood by readers of these pages that in any references I may make to dogmatic theology I am passing no reflection upon the scientific theologian whose work is being done in the field of historical criticism or archaeology or any of the departments of scientific research into the subject-matter of religion. Most of my readers will understand quite well what I mean. Everyone knows that, broadly speaking, certain ways of stating Christian truth are taken for granted both in pulpit and pew; the popular or generally accepted theology of all the churches of Christendom, Catholic and Protestant alike, is fundamentally the same, and somehow the modern mind has come to distrust it. There is a curious want of harmony between our ordinary views of life and our conventional religious beliefs. We live our lives upon one set of assumptions during six days of the week and a quite different set on Sunday and in church. The average man feels this without perhaps quite realising what is the matter. All he knows is that the propositions he has been taught to regard as a full and perfect statement of Christianity have little or nothing to do with his everyday experience; they seem to belong to a different world. He does not know how comparatively modern this popular presentation of Christianity is. What is wanted therefore is a restatement of the essential truth of the Christian religion in terms of the modern mind.

The New Theology and the Immanence of God. Where or when the name New Theology arose I do not know, but it has been in existence for at least one generation. It is neither of my invention nor of my choice. It has long been in use both in this country and in America to indicate the attitude of those who believe that the fundamentals of the Christian faith need to be rearticulated in terms of the immanence of God. Those who take this view do not hold that there is any need for a new religion, but that the forms in which the religion of Jesus is commonly presented are inadequate and misleading. What is wanted is freshness and simplicity of statement. The New Theology is not new except in the sense that it seeks to substitute simplicity for complexity and to get down to moral values in its use of religious terms. Our objection is not so much to the venerable creeds of Christendom as to the ordinary interpretations of those creeds. And, creeds or no creeds, we hold that the religious experience which came to the world in Jesus of Nazareth is enough for all our needs, and only requires to be freed from limiting statements in order to lay firm hold once more upon the civilised world.

The New Theology is an untrammelled return to the Christian sources in the light of modern thought. Its starting point is a re-emphasis of the Christian belief in the divine immanence in the universe and in mankind. This doctrine is certainly not new, but it requires to be placed effectively in the foreground of Christian preaching. In the immediate past the doctrine of the divine transcendence that is, the obvious truth that the infinite being of God must transcend the infinite universe has been presented in such a way as to amount to a practical dualism, and to lead men to think of God as above and apart from His world instead of expressing Himself through His world. I repeat that this dualism is practical, not theoretical, but that it exists is plain enough from such statements as that of the present-day theologian who speaks of God’s “eternal eminence, and His descent on a created world.” This kind of theologising leads straight to the conclusion that God is to all intents and purposes quite distinct from His creation, although He possesses a full and accurate knowledge of all that goes on in it and reserves to Himself the right to interfere. In what sense language like this leaves room for the divine immanence it is difficult to see. The New Theology holds that we know nothing and can know nothing of the Infinite Cause whence all things proceed except as we read Him in His universe and in our own souls. It is the immanent God with whom we have to do, and if this obvious fact is once firmly grasped it will simplify all our religious conceptions and give us a working faith.

The decline of organised Christianity. For a generation or more in every part of Christendom there has been a steady drift away from organised religion as represented by the churches, and the question is being seriously asked whether Christianity can much longer hold its own. Protestant controversialists frequently draw attention to the decline of church-going in Latin countries as evidence of the decay of sacerdotalism, particularly in the church of Rome. But outside Latin countries it is not one whit more noticeable in the church of Rome than in any other church. The masses of the people on the one hand and the cultured classes on the other are becoming increasingly alienated from the religion of the churches. A London daily paper made a religious census some years ago and demonstrated that about one-fifth of the population of the metropolis attended public worship, and this was a generous estimate. Women, who are more emotional, more reverent, and more amenable to external authority than men, usually form the majority of the worshippers at an ordinary service. Mr. Charles Booth in his great work on the “Life and Labour of the People in London” asserts that the churches are practically without influence of any kind on the communal life. This I believe to be an exaggeration, but it will hardly be denied that the average working, business, or professional man looks upon the churches almost with indifference. In many cases this indifference passes into hostility or contempt. Intelligent men take little notice of preachers and sermons, and the theologically-minded layman is such a rarity as to be noteworthy. Most significant of all, perhaps, is the fact that much of the moral earnestness of the nation and of social redemptive effort exists outside the churches altogether. I am well aware that there is a great deal of snarling criticism of the churches which springs from selfish materialism, and I gladly recognise that in almost any ordinary church to-day brave and self-denying work is being done for the common good, but this does not invalidate my general statement. The plain, bald fact remains that the churches as such are counting for less and less in civilisation in general and our own nation in particular. One of the ablest of our rising young members of Parliament, a man of strong religious convictions and social sympathies, recently declared that we were witnessing the melancholy spectacle of a whole civilisation breaking away from the faith out of which it grew. To be sure, the same thing has been said before and has proved to be wrong. It was said in the eighteenth century when men with something of the prophet’s fire in them preached the gospel of the Rights of Man, declaring at the same time that institutional religion was at an end, utterly discredited, and impossible of acceptance by any intelligent being. In France during the Revolution the populace turned frantically upon the established faith, tore it to shreds, burlesqued it, and set up the worship of the Goddess of Reason, as they called it, typified by a Parisian harlot. In England a devitalised Deism laid its chilly hand not only upon the world of scholars and men of letters, but even upon the church. An English king is reported to have said that half his bishops were atheists. And yet, somehow, religion reasserted itself all over the civilised world. Napoleon with shrewd insight realised that the people could not do without it, and so effected the Concordat with Rome which has now been dissolved; Wesley began the movement in England which has since created the largest Protestant denomination in the world; Germany produced a succession of great preachers and scholars the like of whom had hardly ever been known in Europe before.

Will religious faith regain its power? Will this happen again? For assuredly Christianity has for the moment lost its hold. Can it recover it? I am sure it can, if only because the moral movements of the age, such as the great labour movement, are in reality the expression of the Christian spirit, and only need to recognise themselves as such in order to become irresistible. The waggon of socialism needs to be hitched to the star of religious faith. But have the churches spiritual energy enough to recover their lost position? That depends upon themselves. If they consent to be bound by dogmatic statements inherited from the past, they are doomed. The world is not listening to theologians to-day. They have no message for it. They are on the periphery, not at the centre of things. The great rolling river of thought and action is passing them by. Scientific scholarship applied to the study of Christian origins is extremely valuable, but the defender of systems of belief couched in the language of a by-gone age is an anachronism and the sooner we shake ourselves free of him the better. The greatest of all the causes of the drift from the churches is the fact that Christian truth has become associated in the popular mind with certain forms of statement which thoughtful men find it impossible to accept not only on intellectual but even on moral grounds. Certain dogmatic beliefs, for example, about the Fall, the scriptural basis of revelation, the blood-atonement, the meaning of salvation, the punishment of sin, heaven and hell, are not only misleading but unethical. What sensible man really believes in these notions as popularly assumed and presented, and what have they to do with Christianity? They do not square with the facts of life, much less do they interpret life. They go straight in the teeth of the scientific method, which, even where the Christian facts are concerned, is the only method which carries weight with the modern mind. The consequence is that religion has come to be thought of as something apart from ordinary everyday life, a matter of churches, creeds, and Bible readings, instead of what it really is, the coordinating principle of all our activities. To put the matter in a nutshell, popular Christianity (or rather pulpit and theological college Christianity) does not interpret life. Consequently the great world of thought and action is ceasing to trouble about it.

Theologians and preachers rarely realise the situation. One would think that the men whose business it is to teach religious truth would see this and ask themselves the reason why. To an extent they do see it, but they never seem to think of blaming themselves for it except in a perfunctory kind of way. They talk about religious indifference, the need for better and more effective methods, and so on. The professional theologian rarely does even as much as this. He takes himself very seriously; sniffs and sneers at any suggestion of deviation from the accepted standards; mounts some denominational chair or other and thunders forth his view of the urgent necessity for rehabilitating truth in the grave-clothes of long-buried formulas. I mean that the language he habitually uses implies some kind of belief in formulas he no longer holds. He hardly dares to disinter the formulas themselves, that would not be convenient even for him, but he goes on flapping the shroud as energetically as ever, and the world does not even take the trouble to laugh. Wherever and whenever religious agencies succeed it is rarely because of the driving power of what is preached, but because the preacher’s gospel is glossed over or put in the background. We have popular services by the million in which devices are used to attract the public which ought not to be necessary if their framers had any real message to declare. But they have not. Popular pulpit addresses rarely or never deal with the fundamental problems of life. The last thing one ever expects to hear in such addresses is a real living representation of the beliefs the preacher professes to hold. He makes passing allusions to them, of course, such as appeals to come to the cross, and such like, but they generally sound unreal, and the pill has to be sweetly sugared. The ordinary way of preaching the gospel is to avoid saying much about what the preacher believes the gospel to be.

To be sure there are many social activities in connection with Christian churches. If it were not for these the churches would have to be shut up. They are quite admirable in their way, and often produce excellent results, but they imply another gospel than the one supposed to be preached from the pulpits. They ignore dogmatic beliefs, and assume the salvability of the whole race and the possibility of realising the kingdom of God on earth. Wherever the churches are alive to-day, and not merely struggling to keep their heads above water, it is not their doctrine but their non-theological human sympathy that is doing it.

This, then, is the situation. The main stream of modern life is passing organised religion by. Where is the remedy to be found?

We seek to save religion rather than the Churches. Let me say plainly that I do not think our object should be to find a remedy which will save the churches. That would be putting the cart before the horse. What is wanted is a driving force which will enable the churches to fulfil their true mission of saving the world, or, to put it better still, will serve to bring mankind back to real living faith in God and the spiritual meaning of life. Hardly anyone would seriously deny that the world is waiting for this. Men are not irreligious. On the contrary there is no subject of such general interest as religion; it takes precedence of all other subjects just because all other subjects are implied in it. Religion is man’s response to the call of the universe; it is the soul turning towards its source and goal. How could it fail to be of absorbing interest? What is wanted is a message charged with spiritual power, “Where there is no vision the people perish.” Mere dogmatic assertions will not do. The word of God is to be known from the fact that it illuminates life and appeals to the deepest and truest in the soul of man. That message is here now. It is being preached, not by one man only, but the wide world over. God has spoken, and woe betide the churches if they will not hear. Religion is necessary to mankind, but churches are not. From every quarter of Christendom a new spirit of hope and confidence is rising, born of a conviction that all that is human is the evidence of God, and that Jesus held the key to the riddle of existence. Although this comes to us as with the freshness of a new revelation, it is not really new. It is the spirit which has been the inspiration of every great religious awakening since the world began. In this country and in other parts of the English-speaking world that spirit is becoming associated with the name the New Theology. To associate it with any one personality is to belittle the subject and to obscure its real significance. There are many brave and good men in the churches and outside the churches to-day, men of true prophetic spirit, who would reject utterly the name New Theology, but who are thoroughly imbued with this new-old spirit and are leading mankind toward the light. In the church of Rome the movement is typified by men like Father Tyrrell, whose teaching has led to his expulsion from the Jesuit order, but not, so far, from the priesthood. The present condition of the church of Rome is not unhopeful to those who believe as I do that that venerable church has been used of God to great ends in the past and that her spiritual vitality is by no means exhausted. Father Tyrrell and such as he are nearer in spirit to the New Theology men than are the latter to those Protestants who pin their faith to external standards of belief. It is a curious but indisputable fact that the most extreme anti-Romanist Protestants are themselves in the same boat with Rome: they insist on the absolute necessity for external authority in matters of belief and are unwilling to trust the individual soul to recognise truth as it comes. In all the churches those who believe in the religion of the Spirit should recognise one another as brothers. In the church of England a large and increasing band of men are looking in this direction and are making their influence felt. Of these perhaps the most outstanding is Archdeacon Wilberforce, but he is by no means alone. A movement has begun in the Lutheran church. It has existed for a long time in French Protestantism as represented by the late Auguste Sabatier and his friend Reville. In the congregational and other evangelical churches of England and America the same attitude is being taken by many who are not even aware that the name New Theology is being applied to it. In this country the movement in the free churches is typified by men like the Rev. T. Rhondda Williams of Bradford. There are many Unitarians who are preaching it; indeed, there are some who would assert that the New Theology is only Unitarianism under another name. But, as I shall hope to show, this is very far from being the case. It may or may not be professed by exponents of Unitarianism, but it is not a surrender to Unitarianism.

The New Theology is spiritual socialism. The great social movement which is now taking place in every country of the civilised world toward universal peace and brotherhood and a better and fairer distribution of wealth is really the same movement as that which in the more distinctively religious sphere is coming to be called the New Theology. This fact needs to be realised and brought out. The New Theology is the gospel of the kingdom of God. Neither socialism nor any other economic system will permanently save and lift mankind without definitely recognised spiritual sanctions, that is, it must be a religion. The New Theology is but the religious articulation of the social movement. The word “theology” is almost a misnomer; it is essentially a moral and spiritual movement, the recognition that we are at the beginning of a great religious and ethical awakening, the ultimate results of which no man can completely foresee.

And also the religion of science. Again, the New Theology is the religion of science. It is the denial that there is, or ever has been, or ever can be, any dissonance between science and religion; it is the recognition that upon the foundations laid by modern science a vaster and nobler fabric of faith is rising than that world has ever before known. Science is supplying the facts which the New Theology is weaving into the texture of religious experience.