WORLD OF RELIGION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23097, 23 July 1938, Page 7 (Supplement)

WORLD OF RELIGION

By PHILEMON

NO chapters in Principal D. S. Cairns' "Riddle of the Universe" are more timely than those in which, under the title of "The Hebrew Solution," ho considers the contribution which the Jewish people have made to the religion of the world. Their most formative thinkers, living in a day of violence and oppression, were faced with facts which seemed utterly to belie their faith. Every moral question that sprang to men's lips during the Great War, and the very problems that harass our thought today, confronted them. Their problem, says Dr. Cairns, was this: Since God is such as we believe liini to be and the world and men are such as we see in power around lis, how can we maintain our faith in a wise and prevailing Providence? Where is (Joel that Force should he given right-ol'-way and His people suffer the evils of invasion and captivity? These were the questions over which the Hebrew seers and prophets brooded. And they came out of their perplexities with ail amazing faith. On the one hand, nothing could move them from their basal trust in the character of God as they had seen it in their clearest hours. Whatever clouds and darkness might encompass Him, still righteousness and judgment \w 10 tho foundation of His throne. To lose this surpassing confidence would be to sink in fathomless waters. God Over All And still more astonishing, they rose to the almost incredible assurance that their very foes were instruments in God's hands serving an unseen end, and that the disasters that smote them were working out some larger good. Nebuchadnezzar was a "battle-axe" in tho service of Another, hated Babylon was "a golden cup in the Lord's hands," Cyrus was His "shepherd" and tho executant of His purposes. And. savs Dr. Cairns, alter some pages of convincing argument, the supreme achievement o! the Hebrews was to fuse these two conceptions into one tremendous faith and give it to the world. God was over all, they believed, and God would prevail. But. he adds, there still remained a more daring leap of faith. The seers of Judaism forecast a day when, with the Jew as leader and his Holy City as its centre-point, a new humanity should arise, holding one God in reverence and living together in peace and brotherly accord. Tho brave vision springs out of the very heart of tempest and dismay, and almost takes one's breath away. Xo wonder that, as Lotze said, the Jews seemed to the surrounding nations like a race of madmen; tint he immediately adds, "They seem to us the one sober people in <1 world of drunkards." Coming of the Kingdom It is this great faith of Israel in its most spiritual form that boats in tho heart of our Christianity to-day—the hope of tho coming of the Kingdom of God. There come hours, maybe, when the high ideals of both Jew and Christian seem shattcied and irretrievably destroyed bv the hard facts of history. But such a faith is all that lies between us and a savage chaos of which wo dare not think., and the human heart will never let it perish. It is this ancient people, to whom we all are bankrupt and whose faith we so deeply share, around whom an inhospitable sea of misery is rising in many parts. Over a ljtrge area of Europe, as the Manchester Guardian points out, "neither the text of treaties, nor jus-

"ONE TREMENDOUS FAITH"

ticc, nor compassion saves a Jew." Everywhere they (lee, yet cniinot escape from the meanness and brutality ot men to whom the world owes nothing but a vast unrest and a haunting fear of tho future. JJut onco it was said of tho enemies of Judnh, "The Lord shall have them in derision." Professor .J. A. Findlay, who recently visited Auckland, is recognised as an outstanding New Testament scholar, and in the Correspondence Column which lie conducts in the British Weekly a wide range of questions is taken up and discussed with refreshing frankness. There .is with him no timid teaching by implication, no opening of one finger at a time, as Bacon counselled, when the hand is full of truth. The After-Life Some little time ago the significance of the word "everlasting" as used in Scripture to describe duration in the after-life Mas dealt with, Dr. findlay arguing that it did not in that connection menu "lasting for ever." In his view it is a fluid word having various differing meanings. From tlie Bible itself he cites instances where it is used of the gates of a city, of the mountains, of Jonah's incarceration, and even as a description of "past history." But, he says, the upo of the language of time m a discussion of the after-life is futile. Our conceptions of time and space are incidental to our present space-time consciousness which, as we are beginning to see, can give but the dimmest picture of reality. It is a vast assumption to argue that they hold good in a realm where, Scripture itself being our witness, time is 110 more. Thus the mental picture of eternity as a straight line going 011 for ever is "an utterly misleading idea of what the Bible means." The discarding of the word "everlasting'' in the Revised New Testament, and the substitution of "eternal" approaches more nearly to tho truth, for, says I)r. Findlay, it gets rid of the idea of duration altogether. And he adds. "Internal life is life of a certain quality, it means belonging to eternity, not to time." Important Trend We do not quote Dr. Findlay in these matters as an end to all controversy, but rather as indicating an important trend in religious thought. The crude conceptions of future punishment which were freely advanced by the pulpit less than a century ago have almost completely disappeared. Thoughtful men have freed themselves from bondage to metaphor. The fact of punishment remains as a teaching of the New Testament, but whether it is a punishment of loss or of infliction, how far it is remedial in character, and how its nature and duration (if we may continue to use the term) are to be related to a belief in the Divine Fatherhood, are questions upon which few are inclined to dogmntiso. The Bishop of London, who regrets that the Report on Doctrine in tho Church of England, issued a few months «sio, has unsettled the minds of many people, lias published a book entitled "What a Layman Should Believe." His aim is to remove misunderstanding and to stcaclv the minds of those who are saying, to quote a criticism which ho himself heard, ''You can believe what you like in the Church of England today." Tho bishop makes an interesting personal confession: "ft so happens that ] had to fight my way to my present faith through many doubts and difficulties," and, adds a reviewer, "I believe his own ordination was delayed for that very reason." There are important matters involved in all this to which we may return.