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THE APPROACHING CRISIS

What Is the Function of Religion in Human Living

HENRY NELSON WIEMAN

HE sickness of religion will continue until her method and service are so clarified and established that she can take her rightful place with science among the recognized functions of human living. This does not mean primarily to develop a new set of ideas about God and salvation and heaven and hell. It is not merely a body of accepted doctrines which religion needs, although it does need that. But the deeper and greater need just now is for a clearly defined and generally recognized part to play in the economy of life and a distinctive method for doing it.

Some devotees may deny that there is anything wrong with religion in modern life. But a careful examination would probably show that, while religion has its ebb and flow like all other human interests, it has on the whole been declining in power and place for several centuries. This decline has been largely due to its inadequate adjustment to scientific method and discovery.

But why, some may inquire, should the condition of religion be considered any more serious to-day than it was four hundred years ago? Is the present crisis in religious thought any greater than that of 1500 or 1600 A.D., when Copernicus and Galileo

made their astronomical and physical discoveries, requiring a radical reconstruction of our whole view of the world; or than the crisis that arose from the teaching of Darwin and Huxley in the field of biology; or that which revolutionized our view of the historical background of Christianity under the leadership of such historical critics as Strauss and Renan? At the present time it is research in the field of psychology and sociology which is demanding a transformation in our thinking. This demand will become more radical as these sciences advance. Then, looming up back of them, too vast and complex for most people to discern as yet, but sure to make even greater demands upon the reconstructive powers of religious thought, is the theory of relativity. But why, it may be asked, should we say there is anything critical in the present situation, since these scientific discoveries and these changes have been going on for more than three centuries?

Our answer is that the required reconstruction of the religious point of view has not been going on for these three centuries. That is just the difficulty. If it had been proceeding there would be no crisis at the present time. But instead of reconstructing itself as each succes

sive wave of scientific research struck it, religious thought has merely patched and repaired. It has never thoroughly reconstructed.

Now, a system of thought, like a bridge or machine, can endure for a long time by merely patching and repairing. But if thorough reconstruction is required and is not made, a crisis ultimately arises. The need is cumulative. A condition is finally reached where a little change here and a bit added there are not sufficient. It becomes a question of collapse or reconstruction. Such seems to be the crisis which religious thought is approaching. It is not because the scientific views of to-day are more revolutionary in their effect on religious thought than were those which pronounced the world to be round and not flat, but it is because religious thought did not thoroughly and consistently adapt itself to scientific procedure when that first demand was made. It merely developed a system of apologetics; it merely patched and repaired. And it has been doing that continuously with each successive new scientific advance. Hence the pressure for reconstruction becomes stronger and stronger. It is in this sense that religion is approaching a crisis.

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It may therefore be permissible to suggest something concerning the nature and function of religion. Religion is not merely a belief. It is a vision and a certainty. Belief falls short of certainty. But God, in the sense of that Something, whatever its character may be, which is of supreme value for all human living, is a certainty. This is so because some things have more value for the

highest attainment of human life than others. Hence there must be something of most value. That something which will lift human life to its largest fulfilment, when proper adjustment is made to it, is God. In that sense God is a certainty.

But to have religion we must have more than mere intellectual certainty that God exists. It is possible to have certainty without vision; and religion requires vision. A man must not only be certain that this Object exists; he must have vision of it. That means he must have such appreciation of this Object that it transforms his life, glorifies his world, and fills him with a great enthusiasm for life. He must be not only intellectually persuaded but emotionally stirred; not only cognize the fact but discern its value and catch its significance. He must so realize it that it wins his devotion and shapes his will. To have this appreciation of the divine Object, and thus to feel the stimulus of it, is to have what we call vision of it. Vision involves emotion, imagination, and conversion of the will in devoted self-surrender.

So we say the object of religious interest is not only an object of belief, it is an object of certain knowledge, because God is that Something which is of supreme value for all human living. When apprehension of this Object becomes a vital and reconstructive factor in human living, we have religion. To be religious is to be vividly cognizant and fully responsive to the fact that the universe contains something which is of more value than anything else and to be stirred to joy and enthusiasm by that fact.

But we can scarcely attain to this vision unless some concrete historic

object of surpassing beauty and goodness is brought to our attention, through which the hidden glory can be suggested in concrete form. concrete form. Merely to know there is a light that never was on land or sea is not enough. We must discern some glint or gleam of it if it is to awaken that deep joy which is religion. The universe may be a diamond in the rough, but if we never see anything save the dirt and the scratches and the ugly contortions of the rough outer coat, if there never streams into the eye through this rough outer coat when turned in the light something of the beauty hidden there, it is not likely one will cherish the rough stone as something exceedingly precious. It is not likely one will fall in love with the universe with its ugly shame, its filth and pain, unless in some happy moment of changing conditions what is hidden there gleams forth.

Now there is nothing that can adequately give human beings a hint of the best this universe has to offer save a human life so lived that there shimmers through it a loveliness so different from the grimy facts of daily life as to seem like a dream and yet be not a dream. This brings us to Christianity.

What we have already said about religion and vision applies to Christianity along with other religions. We have said nothing to distinguish the Christian religion from any other. But there is a difference. And yet many professing Christians are less like one another, in this matter of vision and the consequent manner of life, than some Christians are like some Buddhists or Mohammedans or members of other religions. The saints of all religions have

the vision we have described. They differ only in the attaining of it. The Christian attains it through the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Buddhist through the life and teachings of Buddha, the Mohammedan through the Mohammedan tradition.

Through Jesus, so we Christians believe, there shines more of the unexplored and mysterious goodness of this universe, and in him there is more promise of that unimaginable blessedness that may sometime flood the world, than in any other. Through him we make better contacts with that which lifts the values of human life to the highest level. Therefore we are Christians.

Jesus has been dawning on the world of man for two thousand years. Scarcely yet is he well above the horizon. Far indeed is he from the zenith. We do not yet receive from him all the light he has to give. Yet, thanks to two millenniums of thought and aspiration and research, there may be some to-day who know him better than ever he was known before, certainly better than he has been known since the first century A.D., and probably better than any of his immediate disciples knew him. Jesus still has much to give us that we have not yet been able to receive.

But it would be a very narrowminded Christian indeed who would say that the life of Jesus is the only quarter in which the most precious object in this universe is to be found. That something which gives the deepest and most abiding joy human life can know is to be found in many times and places-in landscapes and sunsets, in many human situations and individual lives, in works of art such as song and drama, painting and

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When this religious vision comes to two or more individuals they are inclined to seek one another out for the sake of sharing their joy and developing the vision of each through interchange of thought and sentiment. They hold a secret joy in common which is a secret only be cause others cannot understand it. They cannot talk to others about the precious and exceeding wonderful mystery they have discovered in the universe because others have not made the discovery and the talk will sound to them like foolishness. Their talk will sound to these others as the talk of a mother about her new-born baby would sound to the ears of an old bachelor.

Those who have new-born babies are likely to drift together because of their common joy and the wonder that has befallen each of them. It is for the same reason that religious folk forgather into churches. It is true that the church with its ceremonies, regulations, dogma, officials, and cumbersome machinery does not serve this purpose very well. Once an institution becomes established and acquires social machinery adapted to do many things, it enters into divers activities, some of which may be diametrically opposed to the original good it was designed to serve. Such is the case with the church.

But underneath all the machinery and all the superimposed activities of the church, its true reason for being is to provide opportunity for this mutual cultivation of religious vision through sharing the joy and the thought of this precious thing which they have found. Wherever two or three are gathered together to converse about this matter, we have a genuine church.

Such was the church, and the only sort of church, that Jesus established. The twelve disciples gathered about him were not controlled by any machinery. They had no officials, no secretary, no president; and their treasurer was the one failure in the enterprise. They were bound together only because of a common vision and a common joy. During the first years after the death of Jesus, when Christianity spread so amazingly, the disciples went about in a sort of daze, so filled were they with the exuberance and the wonder of what they had discovered this universe might contain.

What then is the function of religion in human living? Is it not to provide enthusiasm for the greatest good that may ever enter human life from out of the mysteries of all time and space? Thus it should give a drive to life, a receptivity to all good, and a groping after the best. It should enable men to mount up with wings as eagles, to run and not be weary, to walk and not faint. The method for achieving the best, in so far as its achievement depends upon human ingenuity, must be provided by science. But the vision, without which aspiration must perish, is the work of religion.

FROM REDSKINS TO RAILROADS

Only Broken Bits Remain of the Life of Old New Mexico ERNA FERGUSSON

LBUQUERQUE. Everybody knows

A Albuquerque. In what State

it stands is of the slightest importance. It has a name—a name to misspell and mispronounce in a variety of ways, a name never to forget. Even the most casual transcontinental traveler remembers Albuquerque as the town where he first saw real Indians, where there was a remarkable collection of Indian and Spanish curios, where he bought a bow and arrow. Few, however, realize what lies back of the modern Albuquerque. Its background of natural beauty is plain for all to see -clear electric air, skies of brilliant blue, and a range of mountains changing in the light through every shade of purple, mauve, and rose. Of its human background few have a suspicion. Yet Albuquerque is the microcosm of the Southwest. Sitting at the cross-roads of the centuries, Albuquerque has seen every phase of Southwestern life, has participated in most of it, still has walking up and down its streets people who represent every period of its long history-Indians, Mexicans, cattle- and sheep-men, modern boosters, and Easterners in what they consider Western garb.

Long before the first Pilgrim felt a faint stirring of the wanderlust,

long even before the first Protestant protested, Albuquerque was a recognized point on the desert trails of man and beast. Peaceful Indians from their lovely terraced villages to north and south and east and west passed each other there as they visited from pueblo to pueblo. On that particular muddy stretch of the Rio Grande camped also the nomads of the desert, wild men who harried the peaceful pueblos, stole their garnered food, and made life a terror for them. for them. To-day these very people are to be seen in the streets of Albuquerque. Pueblo people bring grapes to sell in the fall, turquoise in the winter, baskets when the willow withes are most supple in the spring. Their brilliant-shawled women, fatlegged with many yards of buckskin, offer pottery at the station. The nomads are there too, no longer wild but with a savage dignity; tall stately Navajos in blankets and wide hats. Their women wear the sweeping calico skirts forced on them by the missionaries and carry brighteyed babies on their backs in blankets. There too are to be seen the descendants of the first white conquerors of New Mexico, and their speech, the Spanish of Cervantes, is still spoken on the streets, and even in the courts and political gatherings.

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