By Seven Oxford Men—B. H. Streeter, R. Brook, W. H. Moberly, R. G. Parsons, A. E. J. Rawlinson, H. S. Talbot, W. Temple. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited. 1913.1
The character of this book is fairly intimated by its title. The “Seven Oxford Men” who have written it describe themselves as young men; and, as young men, they conceive their place to be in the advance-line of progress. They feel their responsibility to the church to which they belong; they are loyal in heart to that church; but they consider that the nature of their responsibility is of a different kind from that of older men. It may be the part of older men to conserve what has been attained; to the younger men belongs the task of leading on to what is yet to be acquired; their responsibility is “the responsibility of making experiments.” And the times in which we find ourselves living call loudly for experiments. They are times of transition. The Victorian age is gone; and the assumptions on which Victorian religion was built up have been dissipated. What was thought to be the bed-rock has become shifting sand. A new world has come into being, a new world which is asking questions. The repetition of old answers can serve no purpose. New answers must be framed, and these answers must be couched in the “terms of modern thought.” Young men, children of the new age, cannot breathe “the atmosphere of pre-‘critical’ and pre-Darwinian religion.” They think in other terms; they must at least attempt to express what they think in the terms of the thought-world in which they live. And, indeed, to be perfectly frank, if Christianity cannot be expressed in terms of this new thought-world, Christianity is doomed. Men of the time are under the stress of a great obligation, therefore, at least to attempt to pour the old wine of Christianity into the new bottles of modern thought.
Adventuring upon this necessary task of transfusion, our “Seven Oxford Men” present us with nine trial essays. They “do not profess to have covered the whole field.” They have confined themselves to the problems which seemed to them the most fundamental, or on which they felt they had something to offer. And they speak modestly of what they offer: it is not put forward as the solution, but only as a contribution towards the solution of the problems they have approached. The nine essays which are given, after a general exposition of the modern situation calling for restatement of fundamental principles, treat in turn of “the Bible,” “the Historic Christ,” “the Interpretation of the Christ in the New Testament,” “the Divinity of Christ,” “the Atonement,” “the Church,” “the Principle of Authority,” “God and the Absolute.” Probably only a coterie of Anglican writers—among Protestants at least—would have hit upon just this series of topics, when dealing with Christian fundamentals; could have chosen to write of the Church, for example, instead of the Holy Spirit, or could have separated “the Principle of Authority” so far from “the Bible” and attached it so closely to “the Church.” Certainly the “Critical” preoccupation is very prominent. And one will naturally wonder how, in this age of Psychological investigation, even so short a series of fundamental problems could be outlined without including a single topic belonging to the subjective life—not Sin, for example, or any of the great stages or steps of the recovery of the soul from sin to holiness. The disclaimer of all pretension to have covered the whole field must no doubt be borne in mind here; as must also the fact that the book is not altogether silent on these great subjects. If they are not made the subjects of separate essays, they come up for discussion incidentally, sometimes for rather full discussion. Sin for instance is discussed as fully as its own proper subject in the essay on “the Atonement,” and the essay entitled “the Interpretation of the Christ in the New Testament” is almost a brief sketch of New Testament Theology. Meanwhile the precise series of topics selected for professed discussion is worthy of remark, as is also the order in which they are discussed. Some explanation is given in the brief Introduction of the rather odd postponement of the discussion of the existence of God to the end. This amounts to saying that it was thought best to examine in the light of modern knowledge the actual sources from which Christians have derived their conception of God before the validity of the belief in God itself was brought to the question. This would seem a natural ordering of the material if a negative conclusion all along the line were aimed at; it seems to us an unnatural order since it is a positive conclusion that is aimed at.
No one will doubt that Christians of to-day must state their Christian belief in terms of modern thought. Every age has a language of its own and can speak no other. Mischief comes only when, instead of stating Christian belief in terms of modern thought, an effort is made, rather, to state modern thought in terms of Christian belief. The writers of this volume seem not to have escaped this danger. They are preoccupied with modern thought and appear to suppose that Christianity must be assimilated to it. They open their Introduction by telling us that “Christianity” as well as “its traditional theology” originated in a past of outworn conditions; and they apparently intimate as the condition of the survival of “Christianity” that “its theology” shall not be “out of harmony with science, philosophy, and scholarship.” This is, of course, to lay down an impossible condition, if “Christianity” is to be supposed to have any determinate content. For “science, philosophy, and scholarship” are not stable but varying entities, and nothing but a most habile chameleon could manage to keep in harmony with them from age to age. Of course what is meant is our own “science, philosophy, and scholarship”—which seems to be only a naive way of transferring the claim of infallibility from “Christianity” and “its theology” to ourselves. Nothing is more certain, however, than that a “Christianity” and a “theology” which are closely in harmony with the “science, philosophy, and scholarship” of to-day will be out of harmony with the “science, philosophy, and scholarship” of to-morrow. After all, is it not enough to ask that “Christianity” and “its theology” shall be in harmony with truth? And if it is to be in harmony with truth, must it not be out of harmony with all the half-truths, and quarter-truths, and no-truths, which pass from time to time for truth, while truth is only in the making? A “Christianity” which is to be kept in harmony with a growing “science, philosophy, and scholarship,” beating their way onward by a process of trial and correction, must be a veritable nose of wax, which may be twisted in every direction as it may serve our purpose.