THEOLOGY “IN PIECES.”

Waikato Times, Volume 105, Issue 17750, 29 June 1929, Page 14 (Supplement)

THEOLOGY “IN PIECES.”

“ SAFETY FIRST ” MINISTERS.

CREEDS IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE A striking address on “Christian belief in the modern world” was delivered by the Rev. T. Rhondda Williams, chairman of the Congregational Union, at the annual assembly in London.

“We have got to realise," he Bald, “ that our traditional doctrines concerning Jesus, hammered out as they were in the early councils of the Church, cannot be made current coin in the intellectual world of to-day. “It should be a truism that if the Christian Churches are to serve the needs of the modern world they must know the world—lts prevailing modes of thought and'methods of life. And they must learn its language. “Official religion is practically using the dogmatic system of the presoientiflc world. It is using modes of thought and language that belong to the time when the human race was considered to have originated in Adam and Eve 6000 years ago and the earth was the centre of the universe and only recently oreated. “This makes it impossible for a large number of good and thoughtful people to attend the services of a Church that continues to talk as if nothing had happened.

Adam and Eve "Legend.” “If we take the Genesis account of Adam and Eve to be a legend, are we still to go on talking about the Fall of Man without explaining that we mean something different from what used to be meant by that phrase? “I have maintained for at least 35 years that the framework of the old theology has gone to pieces, and I feel sure that whatever the religion of the future will be it will not be traditional Christianity. Indeed, traditional Christianity has already ceased to be the religion of a good many of our churches and of a still larger number of our ministers.

“It is the misfortune of the Churoh that the creeds which still hold a formal place in most of them are for the greater part impossible of belief to educated and intellectual men and women.

“Tho pulpit is suspected of trimming and prevarication and of something very near to, if not quite, intellectual dishonesty.

“The Church has a great deal to learn from scientists in regard to revoronco for truth. In Church thinking and speaking there is far too much prudence, tactical care, and worldly wisdom, too much playing for safety—theso ‘things have too often strangled tho witness of the Church to truth.

“ ‘Safoty first’, is a good motto for motorists, but It is the damnation of tho Christian ministry."