Making God Real to The Present Generation

Waiapu Church Gazette, Volume 36, Issue 7, 1 October 1945, Page 19

Making God Real to The Present Generation

An extract from a recent book by the Rev. Dr. James Parkes (John Hodham) : One of the things from which we are suffering to-day is that all the conventional descriptions of. God were written by men who held totally different views of the world, of human society and of the nature of the individual from that which we now hold. Their descriptions were real at the time they were written just because, they were set m the language and. the thought of the ages which created them; but they have no permanent validity just from the fact that they were once universally accepted and are incorporated m books of the Bible, m creeds or m public prayers. The natural world, as it was seen' by the mean who wrote descriptions of God the Creator was static world brought suddenly into existence by a mere act of power; m their minds man was created all of a sudden directly out of dust; they considered that the world was only a few thousand years old, but was already near its end; and m such a world it was perfectly natural to speak of God working by arbitrary miracles, possessing designs which He had no , intention of revealing to His creation, inscrutable and incomprehensible m His activities, or directly controlling thunder and lightning, storm and : earthquake, rain and drought, according as He was pleased or angry with His creatures. ' The political world m which they lived was one of autocratic sovereigns, living m magnificent courts, surrounded by luxury and flattery, ; and bound by nothing but their own , arbitrary wills. It was natural for : them to describe God as a still more \ powerful and arbitrary monarch, !• permanently surrounded by still j more worship and flattery, dwelling , m acity with streets of gold, palaces ; of pearls and jewels, and so on. And I it was natural that such a sovereign ; should only be approached "with the most complete humiliation and adula- ; tion or through a mediator who ■ would soften His wrath and turn i aside His anger. : The human nature which they '■■ described was equally remote from i our ideas. They believed that a ] world, perfect when it was made, I had fallen through a single sin. The i wrath df God was declared against ' it. Individuals could be rescued > from the penalties of sin only by the ceremony of baptism and: by acts of i faith; their ultimate destination, was;, more or less . arbitrarily fixedi with

little reference to their acts; and the short span of their lives on this planet determined their eternal destiny. Now there are, of course, manyother descriptions than these of God, man and the world which the one made and the other lives m; and to pretend that what has been set out above is the whole content of the Christian faith on these subjects would be to caricature it. But these ideas are still allowed to be part of that faith and are used indiscriminately m prayers and psalms, m readings from the Bible* m hymns and sermons, without comment, without qualification and apparently without surprise that they have extremely little influence on the conduct of people living m a worldin which all these ideas, so far from giving . an exalted conception of, religion, make it appear not only meaningless, but unimportant. To make God — the same God— real to the present generation our descriptions should be consistent with themselves and based on the language and thought of the present generation. They will be no more permanently true than were previous descriptions. They will sound . just, as "oldfashioned" a thousand years from now as do to-day the descriptions of a thousand years ago. But only such terms are real to us, terms which relate God to our knowledge of evolution, our conception of the meaning and responsibility of government and leadership, our conception of human nature; all based on the stage we have reached m science, m political and social thought, m medicine and psychology.