Jesus Said, "Truth Shall Set You Free"

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 250, 21 October 1944, Page 4

Jesus Said, "Truth Shall Set You Free"

Bv REV. CANON C. W. CHANDLER

rvR. J. K. MOZLEY'S review of **' "The Unrest in Religion," by Erasmian, is not by any means favourable. He credits this Anglican layman with zeal, but not with zeal according to knowledge. Undaunted, however, by this learned theologian's drastic survey of his book, Erasmian writes in a subsequent issue of The Spectator in defence of his basic premise, which is "that the Church can scarcely hope to solve the perplexities or to retain the allegiance of the younger generation unless its leaders will face frankly the revolution in opinion which the far-reaching Modernist studies of the last half-century have brought about. Can we feel sure," he says, "that the venerable traditions affirmed daily in our churches are still litei*ally accepted as living particles of faith, either by the congregations we belong to or by the ecclesiastical leaders to whose authority we look?"

That is a question that we must as individuals answer for ourselves. The book submits that the cure for our perplexities lies not so much in theology as in recovering the teaching of Jesus unclouded by the difficult Christology which has developed in its place. Van Paassen in his "Forgotten Ally" expresses the same idea with greater force when he says "if the Church does not speak the prophetic word in our day, but instead stands powerless, fearful and silent in the presence of truly apocalyptic events, or at best mumbles inane and innocuous commonplaces and generalities in that jargon of traditional piety which has become unintelligible men of our generation, it is because she thinks too much of her inner organisation, of the abstract eternal verities of wjuch she is the depositary, of her temporal power, of the good repute she enjoys among the well-to-do whose chief concern is their own tranquillity of mind and the undisturbed enjoyment of their comfortable position in society. It is with the authority of this ' good enough' armour of respectability, smugness, unction and sentimentality that the Church thinks to confront a world in turmoil."

Yeast, Not Dough Unless religion can be solely authoritative, that is, unless it can be embodied in set creeds and handed to unquestioning "believers" as something which must be accepted in toto if salvation here and hereafter is sought for, the way must be open for something in the nature of progressive thought and we must be prepared again and . again to submit our most cherished beliefs to the scrutiny of inspired intelligences in our own day. Besides which, every man must do a little thinking for himself. Truth is like the yeast which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal. Its living' particles must permeate the three measures of man, body, mind and spirit. This a solid lump of dough can never do—it is too indigestible.

Is it altogether logical to suppose that what was intelligible to fourth century minds is of necessity intelligible to us in this generation? This is not to cast doubts upon what are the accepted tenets or articles of our belief, but it is to plead for liberty, of inquiry as well as the liberty to interpret those beliefs in language "understood of the people." Would it not be possible for a "Council of the Whole Church" to deliberate upon, say, the Nicene Creed and reduce it to terms suited to our common intelligence, and most of all to the intelligence of those in whom "our matchless Elizabethan prose" finds little or no response? Was it in terms such as these that the Carpenter of Nazareth iwent about teaching the people? Save for what we call the Lord's Prayer, which He taught His disciples, is there any evidence that He required His immediate followers to embody Truth in unchangeable phrases? ' He gave Peter and the rest of the apostles the power to "bind and loose," but did He supply them with a formulary? The answer is "No."

It was inevitable that in the course of time such formularies should develop. It was inevitable, too, that set forms of worship should gradually take shape and that His own words, "this do in remembrance of Me," should become enshrined in the language of succeeding generations'; All this is readily understood. Our various liturgies are among our costliest treasures, and their preservation links us with the dawn of Christianity. But are they sacrosanct?

" Vain Repetitions " Does continual repetition tend to rob the thing repeated of much of its meaning? And does the constant repetition provide any guarantee of genuine acceptance on the part of the repeater of the thing repeated? "The truest reverence is search for truth," says Erasmian, and I am of the opinion that this layman has dis-' played courage in appealing to the leaders of the Church of England, in particular, to heed a timely warning, and follow up the findings of the Doctrinal Commission in an effort to wrest a Living Faith from the cold grasp of the dead hand of Formalism.

Dr. Talbot, Bishop of Pretoria, says "there is a great danger to-day in the exaltation of religious devotion and activity over the love of truth." It is this danger that Erasmian sees, and "Unrest in Religion" is the sort of book that should be written, if only to arouse us from that sense of religious satisfaction that can creep like an opiate over our minds, lulling them to sleep in a twilight hush, while the world at large is writhing in an agony of pain that only a little more Christianity and a little less religion can relieve. Religion, from "religio," means "to bind." Christ came to set men free.