The 'New' Theology

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 21, 23 May 1907, Page 9

The 'New' Theology

The re-hash of (mostly) old errors miscalled the 'new' theology is still in the journalistic >air. "Some of the secular papers have, for the moment, donned the whit© ' choker ' and begun to echo like so many gramophones the ' Doctrines fashioned to the varying hour ' .by a well advertised Independent clergyman who never studied in a theological sohool and never mastered the • queen of this sciences ' about which he dogmatises so

frecily. It has been ap>tly said of the ' new ' theology that what is new in it is not true, and what is true is not new. Private judgment, left to itself, is pretty sure to box the compass of variable opinion. In •the eajrly ages of the Church, for instance, the tendency of heresy was utterly to exclude from the hope of pardon those who committed certain sins. Some modern creeds have gone to the other extreme and more or less lost the sense of personal sin and. of the need of reconciliation to ' God. From the first, the Church of God followed the safe and true middle course —the one that lies between the old rigorism and the new laxity. ' She excludes none from pardon ', says a theological writer, ' whatever his guilt, provided that he is penitent ; she insists on penitence as well as upon a humble acknowledgment of personal guilt '. And now one of the rare new things in the ' new ' theology declares, in effect, that sin is really a striving after perfection ! One of the old heresies cf * the ' new ' theology' meets with a strong rebuke from so unexpected a lay quarter as ' Dagonet ' in the London ' Referee '. ' The new theology ', writes he, ' with its denials, its confusions, and its explanations, will. pass. But Easter, in all its glorious significance of the I>awn that follows the Darkness, of the risen Sun that bids the shadows flee, of Joy after Tears, of Hope after Despair, of Life after Death, will soothe the troubled souls of men for ages yet to come.' It is a sad jumble, this ' new ' theology, of diluted biblical lore, vapory indefiniteness, and odd notes from the ddscordant tin gods of the sort of destructive theorising that is ' made in Germany.' But it is not Christianity that is placed before the tar by the ' new ' theology—it is the principle of private judgment, as opposed to tre principle of authority, in religion. In the sixteenth century, ' reformers ' employed the principle of private judgment to ma'e a fetish of the Bible. Some lesser ' reforming ' lights of the twentieth century employ the same principle of private judgment to make a football of the Bible. On that principle, the right to deny is as great as the right to affirm even the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. Moreover : once the principle is accepted, the denial must be considered as sound doctrine as the assertion — the negation and the affirmation of the same thing may both be doetrinally true. Which is absurd. The ' new ' theologian (who has now throiwn in his political lot with agnostic socialism) is merely pushing the l right ' of private judgment towards its natural and obvious conclusion.- Sic transit the Reformation. Meantime (as we said a few months ago) Catholics— like Uhland's Knab' vom Bergc— sit serenely in the blessed sunlight of God's faith, on the hilltop on which the Holy City (the Cfairch) is built ; and with sympathetic interest, but without fear, they view the clouds and storm's and mists that befog and dismay the less fortunate dwellers in the valleys far below.