§ 5. THE Justification and Reconciliation of sinners with God, considered as an operation of God effected through the instrumentality of Christ, are strictly religious conceptions. By religious conceptions, we mean such as are comprised within the scheme of His operation on men—taking the word “operation” in its widest sense. The conception of sin committed by men is also, it is true, a religious one, as distinct from injustice and crime. But it expresses merely a judgment upon the unworthiness of such actions when contrasted with God’s precepts and honour. Sin, therefore, is a religious conception of an indirect kind, as it does not lend itself to interpretation as an operation of God upon men. Those, therefore, who have supposed that this idea of sin should be assimilated in form to those that are directly religious, in order to produce a system formally homogeneous, have been in error. But the ideas which represent what Christianity puts forward as the fundamental operations directed by God against sin, necessarily take the form of directly religious conceptions. Moreover, two characteristics are perceptible in religious conceptions which must be stated at the very outset. They are always the possession of a community, and they express not merely a relation between God and man, but always at the same time a relation toward the world on the part of God, and those who believe in Him. All religions are social. And if in particular cases we may observe that the founder of a religion is for a time the sole supporter of his convictions, this circumstance is, for one thing, counterbalanced by the other, that he intends to share his possession with others, that is, to form a community. But then, before that has taken place, he appears rather as the bearer of a revelation, and only in a subordinate way as the subject of his particular religion. To come under our scientific observation, consequently, every religion must take shape as the religion of a community whose members agree in recognising certain Divine operations on them, and show that they are thus conscious of a common salvation. If, therefore, we attach our more exact knowledge of a religion to a single individual, whom we isolate from the rest of his fellows, in that case we shall have to take care not to leave out of account the given fact of fellowship in religion. For fellowship includes, among its preconditions, more than the similarity of all its members. It will not do, therefore, after we have previously analysed the individual subject as a type of all the rest, to bring in, in a merely supplementary way, the social character of religion. On the contrary, when examining the typical individual subject, the complete conditions of fellowship must be taken into consideration from the outset. When this is neglected in the scientific investigation and explanation of the phenomena of religion, mistakes are made which tell on the subsequent discussion of the social character of a religion. If, therefore, justification and reconciliation of sinners are the leading features of the Christian religion, they can be correctly examined and explained in the case of the individual only when at the same time we take note of his place in the Christian community.
From the social character of religion we can gather that, in a complete view of it, its relation to the world must necessarily be included. For the majority of those who exhibit attachment to a common religion employ, in the commerce and outward expression of it in worship, such means as are characteristic of mankind’s situation in the world. But for a religion this circumstance cannot be without importance. On the contrary, since even the thought of God or of gods includes some kind of relation to the world, every religious society, as such, must take up an attitude, either positive or negative, towards the world in which it exists. Every religion, on closer examination, is found to consist in the striving after “goods,” or a summum bonum, which either belong to the world, or can only be understood by contrast with it. And this striving rests upon belief in some Divine Being who professes to possess a more comprehensive authority over the world than is within the reach of man. For these reasons no religion can be properly understood unless it be interpreted on some other principle than the most usual one, that religion consists in a relation between man and God. Three points are necessary to determine the circle by which a religion is completely represented—God, man, and the world. For the central point is always this, that the religious community, as situated in the world, endeavours to obtain certain goods in the world, or above the world, through the Divine Being, because of His authority over it. And even when, as in Brahmanism (or, for that matter, Neoplatonism), it is sought to negate the world for the sake of God; yet the framework of this religion embraces the world, which exists by God, and for the sake of man, in order to be negated by man’s religious activity. Christianity has a right to ask to be interpreted on the same principle. Theology, it is true, is not as a rule prepared for this. It states the problem of the content of religion, as Melanchthon stated it, in terms of the position of the mystic, in which the soul which sees God sees Him as though it alone were seen by God, and as though apart from Him and it naught else existed.1 Schleiermacher, too, so far from abandoning this method, rather confirmed it. His interpretation of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence on God, involves in its intention the complete neutrality of both factors towards the world, the latter being held in reserve as the object of discrete cognition and volition. Only in a secondary way is the world brought into relation to the religious faculty, inasmuch as feeling must combine with knowing or willing if it occupies a moment of time, or, in other words, enters into experience. But this is an assumption quite as obscure as the conception of religious feeling itself, and it has not succeeded in preventing this conception from being erroneously confounded with the principle of mysticism. These conditions lead us to conclude that the religious conceptions of justification and reconciliation, to be explained, must not be applied in isolation to the individual subject, but to the subject as a member of the community of believers. Nor do they express a change of standing relatively to God, without at the same time implying a change of attitude to the world on the part of those who aforetime were sinners. Theological tradition recognises. this fact, for it makes justification equivalent to the forgiveness of sins, but explains the latter as the abrogation of the Divine penalties. And these penalties, as regards their substance, invariably consist in some relation on man’s part to the world. It is objected to the principle we have just considered, that religion is a relation between man and God, while to refer it to the world is part of its application. This is an untenable distinction. The reference of religion to the world cannot be regarded as an accident which may be present or absent without altering its substance, for in Christianity, e.g., we must conceive God as the Creator and Ruler of the world, and ourselves as parts of the same. Whoever overlooks this fact makes an imperfect commencement in the subject he wishes to understand, and so falls into error.