The concept of GOD and the Social Gospel
"The conception of God held by a social group is a social product. Even if it originated in the mind of a solitary thinker or prophet, as soon as it becomes the property of a social group, it takes on the qualities of that group. If, for instance, a high and spiritual idea of God is brought to a people ignorant and accustomed to superstitious methods of winning the favour or help of higher beings, it will soon be coarsened and materialized. The changes in the Hebrew conception of God were the result of the historical experiences of the nation and its leaders. The Christian idea of God has also had its ups and downs in the long and varied history of Christian civilization.
A fine and high conception of God is a social achievement and a social endowment. It becomes part of the spiritual inheritance common to all individuals in that religious group. If every individual had to work out his idea of God on the basis of his own experiences and intuitions only, it would be a groping quest, and most of us would see only the occasional flitting of a distant light. By the end of our life we might have arrived at the stage of voodooism or necromancy. Entering into a high conception of God, such as the Christian faith offers us, is like entering a public park or a public gallery of art and sharing the common wealth. When we learn from the gospels, for instance, that God is on the side of the poor, and that he proposes to view anything done or not done to them as having been done or not done to him, such a revelation of solidarity and humanity comes with a regenerating shock to our selfish minds. Any one studying life as it is on the basis of real estate and bank clearings, would come to the conclusion that God is on the side of the rich. It takes a revelation to see it the other way.
Our imagination has only a short reach. In conceiving a higher world we have to take the familiar properties and figures of our material world, and enlarge and refine them as best we can. As long as kings and governors were the greatest human beings in the public eye, it was inevitable that their image should be superimposed on the idea of God. Court language and obeisances were used in worship and when men reasoned about God, they took their illustrations and analogies from those who were a close second to God." {pp. 169-170}
. . .
. . . We are most familiar with the arbitrary power of God in the doctrine of election. The right of God to select some individuals for eternal life and leave others to eternal punishment, entirely apart from any question of personal merit or demerit, was always based on the ground of the " sovereignty " of God, that is, the divine autocracy. If a city rebelled, all lives were forfeited; if the King had only 50 councillors hung, or every tenth citizen sold into slavery, it was an act of royal clemency worthy of praise. By the fall all men were in a state of damnation; if God elected some to salvation and left the others as they were, it was divine grace; nor was he under obligation to explain his reasons in picking the favoured.
Scholastic arguments reach few people; imaginative pictures of spiritual ideas are subtle and pervasive. God was imagined far above, in an upper part of the universe, remote from humanity but looking down on us, fully aware of all we do, interfering when necessary, but very distinct." {p. 172}
. . .
The sense of fear which has pervaded religion has doubtless been, at least in part, a psychological result of the despotic attitude of parents, of school-masters, of priests, and of officials all the way from the town beadle to the king. To uncounted people God has not been the great Comforter but the great Terror. The main concern in religion was to escape from his hands. Luther longed that he " might at last have a gracious God "einen gnadigen Gott; the word is the same which was applied to princes and nobles when they were goodnatured. Luther sweated with fear when he walked alongside of the body of the Lord in a Corpus Christi procession. To what extent was this due to the fact that he was constantly beaten by his parents and by his schoolmasters, and taught to be afraid of everything? Men enriched the Church enormously with gifts of land as insurance premiums that God would not do anything horrible to them. When farmers are afraid enough to part with land, it must be a deep fear."
"The mediaeval methods of earning religious merit and of securing intercession were the product of fear and a close duplicate of the conditions existing under economic and political despotism. God was a feudal lord, holding his tenants in a grip from which there was no escape, exacting what was due to him, and putting the delinquent in a hot prison which was even worse than the terrible holes underneath the duke's castle. By special self-denial the religious peon could win " merit " to offset his delinquencies. The saints and the blessed Virgin had much merit. The Church had power to assign some of this to those who stood in with the Church. The intercession of the saints counted; every one knew that it was a great thing for a poor man if a nobleman spoke for him to the judge; it would be so in heaven too. Things go by favour; the more aristocracy, the more pull."
. . . "Thus the social relations in which men lived, affected their conceptions about God and his relations to men. Under tyrannous conditions the idea of God was necessarily tainted with the cruel hardness of society. This spiritual influence of despotism made even the face of Christ seem hard and stern. The outlook into the future life was like a glimpse into a chamber of torture.
The conflict of the religion of Jesus with autocratic conceptions of God is therefore part of the struggle of humanity with autocratic economic and political conditions. This carries the social movement into theology. Theologians therewith have their share in redeeming humanity from the reign of tyranny and fear, and if we do not do our share emphatically and with a will, where do we belong, to the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Evil? The worst form of leaving the naked unclothed, the hungry unfed, and the prisoners uncomforted, is to leave men under a despotic conception of God and the universe; and what will the Son of Man do to us theologians when we gather at the Day of Doom?
Here we see one of the highest redemptive services of Jesus to the human race. When he took God by the hand and called him " our Father," he democratized the
conception of God. He disconnected the idea from the coercive and predatory State, and transferred it to the realm of family life, the chief social embodiment of solidarity and love. He (Jesus) not only saved humanity; he saved God. He gave God his first chance of being loved and of escaping from the worst misunderstandings conceivable. The value of Christ's idea of the Fatherhood of God is realized only by contrast to the despotic ideas which it opposed and was meant to displace. We have classified theology as Greek and Latin, as Catholic and Protestant. It is time to classify it as despotic and democratic. From a Christian point of view that is a more decisive distinction.
Paul has preserved for us the deep impression of liberation and relief which the Christian idea of God made on him and his contemporaries : " For (when you became Christians) you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fill you with fear once more, but you received the spirit of sonship which leads us to cry, `Our Father.' " { p. 173 - 174}
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. . .
Of course the Christian conception of God was not kept pure. The pall of darkness rising from despotic society constantly obscured and eclipsed it. The imagery of coercion and tyranny always suggested itself anew. The triumph of the Christian idea of God will never be complete as long as economic and political despotism prevail."
{p. 175-176}
. . . "The social gospel is God's predestined agent to continue what the Reformation began. It arouses intelligent hatred of oppression and the reign of fear, and teaches us to prize liberty and to love love. Therefore those whose religious life has been influenced by the social gospel are instinctively out of sympathy with autocratic conceptions of God. They sense the spiritual taint which goes out from such ideas. They know that these religious conceptions are used to make autocratic social conditions look tolerable, necessary, and desirable. Like Paul, the social gospel has not " received the spirit of bondage again unto fear." It is wholly in sympathy with the conception of the Father which Jesus revealed to us by his words, by his personality, and by his own relations to the Father".
" The idea of "justification" did not come to us from Jesus and it does not blend well with his way of thinking."
{p. 177}
" This reformatory and democratizing influence of the social gospel is not against religion but for it. The worst thing that could happen to God would be to remain an autocrat while the world is moving toward democracy. He would be dethroned with the rest. For one man who has forsaken religion through scientific doubt, ten have forsaken it in our time because it seemed the spiritual opponent of liberty and the working people. This feeling will deepen as democracy takes hold and becomes more than a theory of government. We have heard only the political overture of democracy, played by fifes; the economic numbers of the program are yet to come, and they will be performed with trumpets and trombones.
The Kingdom of God is the necessary background for the Christian idea of God. The social movement is one of the chief ways in which God is revealing that he lives and rules as a God that loves righteousness and hates iniquity. A theological God who has no interest in the conquest of justice and fraternity is not a Christian. It is not enough for theology to eliminate this or that autocratic trait. Its God must join the social movement. The real God has been in it long ago. The development of a Christian social order would be the highest proof of God's saving power. The failure of the social movement would impugn his existence.
The old conception that God dwells on high and is distinct from our human life was the natural basis for autocratic and arbitrary ideas about him. On the other hand the religious belief that he is immanent in humanity is the natural basis for democratic ideas about him. When he was far above, he needed vicegerents to rule for him, popes by divine institution and kings by divine right. If he lives and moves in the life of mankind, he can act directly on the masses of men. A God who strives within our striving, who kindles his flame in our intellect, sends the impact of his energy to make our will restless for righteousness, floods our sub-conscious mind with dreams and longings, and always urges the race on toward a higher combination of freedom and solidarity, - that would be a God with whom democratic and religious men could hold converse (conversations) as their chief fellow worker, the source of their energies, the ground of their hopes."
{pp. 178 - 179}
The moral and religious problem of suffering has entered on a new stage with the awakening of the social consciousness and the spread of social knowledge.
If God stands for the present social order, how can we defend him? We can stand the pain of travail, of physical dissolution, of earthquakes and accidents. These are the price we pay for the use of a fine planet with lovely appurtenances and for a wonderful body. We can also accept with reasonable resignation the mental anguish of unrequited love, of foiled ambition, or of the emptiness of life. These are the risks we run as possessors of a highly organized personality amid a world of men. But we can not stand for poor and laborious people being deprived of physical stature, youth, education, human equality, and justice, in order to enable others to live luxurious lives. It revolts us to see these conditions perpetuated by law and organized force, and palliated or justified by the makers of public opinion. None of the keys offered by individualistic Christianity fit this padlock. The social gospel supplies an explanation of this class of human suffering. Society is so integral that when one man sins, other men suffer, and when one social class sins, the other classes are involved in the suffering which follows on that sin. The more powerful an individual is, the more will he involve others; the more powerful a class is, the more will it be able to unload its own just suffering on the weaker classes. These sufferings are not " vicarious "; they are solidaristic. Our solidarity is a beneficent part of human life. It is the basis for our greatest good. If our community life is righteous and fraternal, we are enriched and enlarged by being bound up with it. But, by the same law, if our community is organized in a way that permits, encourages, or defends predatory practices, then the larger part of its members are through solidarity caged to be eaten by the rest, and to suffer what is both unjust and useless. It follows that ethically it is of the highest importance to prevent our beneficent solidarity from being twisted into a means of torture. Physical pain serves a beneficent purpose by warning us of the existence of abnormal conditions. It fulfils its purpose when it compels the individual to search out the cause of pain and to keep his body in health. If he takes " dope " to quiet the consciousness of pain without healing the causes, the beneficent purpose of pain is frustrated. Social suffering serves social healing. If the sense of common humanity is strong enough to set the entire social body in motion on behalf of those who suffer without just cause, then their troubles are eased and the whole body is preserved just and fraternal. If the predatory forces are strong enough to suppress the reactions against injustice and inhumanity, the suffering goes on and the whole community is kept in suicidal evil. To interpret the sufferings imposed by social injustice in individualistic terms as the divine chastening and sanctification of all the individuals concerned, is not only false but profoundly mischievous. It is the equivalent of " dope," for it silences the warning which the suffering of an innocent group ought to convey to all society without abolishing the causes. It frustrates the only chance of redemptive usefulness which the sufferers had." {pp. 182-183}
. . . Both the Old Testament and the New Testament characterizations of God's righteousness assure us that he hates with steadfast hatred just such practices as modern communities tolerate and promote. If we can trust the Bible, God is against capitalism, its methods, spirit, and results. The bourgeois theologians have misrepresented our revolutionary God. God is for the Kingdom of God, and his Kingdom does not mean injustice and the perpetuation of innocent suffering. The best theodicy for modern needs is to make this very clear.
Finally, the social gospel emphasizes the fact that God is the bond of racial unity. Speaking historically, it is one of the most universal and important characteristics of religion that it constitutes the spiritual bond of social groups. A national god was always the exponent of national solidarity. A common religion created common sympathies. Full moral obligation stopped at the religious boundary line. The unusual thing about the Good Samaritan was that he disregarded the religious cleavage and followed the call of humanity pure and simple.
. . . [ a footnote : I have seen Southern pamphlets undertaking to prove that the negroes are not descended from Adam, but have evolved from African jungle beasts. The very orthodox authors were willing
to accept the heretical philosophy of evolution for the black people, though of course they claimed biblical creation for the white. The purpose of this religious manoeuvre is to cut the bond of human obligation and solidarity established by religion, and put the negroes
outside the protection of the moral law." {pp. 184 - 186 ]
. . . But it is essential to our spiritual honesty that no imperialism shall masquerade under the cover of our religion. Those who adopt the white man's religion come under the white man's influence. Christianity is the religion of the dominant race. The native religions are a spiritual bulwark of defence, independence, and loyalty. If we invite men to come under the same spiritual roof of monotheism with us and to abandon their ancient shelters, let us make sure that this will not be exploited as a trick of subjugation by the Empires. As long as there are great colonizing imperialisms in the world, the propaganda of Christianity has a political significance. God is the common basis of all our life: Our human personalities may seem distinct, but their roots run down into the eternal life of God. In a large way both philosophy and science are tending toward a recognition of the truth which religion has felt and practised. The all pervading life of God is the ground of the spiritual oneness of the race and of our hope for its closer fellowship in the future. The consciousness of solidarity, therefore, is of the essence of religion. But the circumference and spaciousness of the fellowship within it differ widely. Every discovery of a larger fellowship by the individual brings a glow of religious satisfaction. The origin of the Christian religion was bound up with a great transition from a nationalistic to an international religious consciousness. Paul was the hero of that conquest. The Christian God has been a breaker of barriers from the first. All who have a distinctively Christian experience of God are committed to the expansion of human fellowship and to the overthrow of barriers. To emphasize this and bring it home to the Christian consciousness is part of the mission of the social gospel, and it looks to theology for the intellectual formulation of what it needs.
We have discussed three points in this chapter: how the conception of God can be cleansed from the historic accretions of despotism and be democratized; how it can be saved from the indictment contained in the unjust suffering of great social groups; and how we can realize God as the ground of social unity. Freedom, justice, solidarity are among the aims of the social gospel. It needs a theology which will clearly express these in its conception of God." {pp. 186 & 187}
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"Those who have had first-hand experience of inspiration either in their own souls or in the life of others, have always combined reverence for the authority of the word of the Lord and a realization of the human frailty and liability to error in the prophet. Paul and his churches had a rich experience of inspiration. Writing to the Thessalonians he asserts the right of prophesying, but takes the duty of critical scrutiny by the hearers as a matter of course : " Quench not the spirit (in yourselves); despise not prophesying (in others); scrutinize all utterances; appropriate what is good." {p. 191}
Religions of authority have no real use for prophets except to furnish a supernatural basis for doctrine. Hence prophecy used to be put on a level with miracles as " evidences of the Christian religion." Where the main interest is to keep doctrine undisturbed, living prophecy seems a dangerous and unsettling force.
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This was the combination which produced the Hebrew prophets. We have the same combination in those manifold radical bodies which preceded and accompanied the Reformation. They all tended toward the same type, the type of primitive Christianity. Strong fraternal feeling, simplicity and democracy of organization, more or less communistic ideas about property, an attitude of passive obedience or conscientious objection toward the coercive and militaristic governments of the time, opposition to the selfish and oppressive Church, a genuine faith in the practicability of the ethics of Jesus, and, as the secret power in it all, belief in an inner experience of regeneration and an inner light which interprets the outer word of God. (sic ) These radical bodies did not produce as many great individuals as we might have expected because their intellectuals and leaders were always killed off or silenced. But their communities were prophetic. They have been the forerunners of the modern world. They stood against war, against capital punishment, against slavery, and against coercion in matters of religion before others thought of it. . . Great church bodies now stand as a matter of course on those principles of freedom and toleration which only the boldest once dared to assert. {p. 195}
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Those who have trained their religious thinking on the Hebrew prophets and the genuine teachings of Jesus are for the social gospel; those who have trained it on apocalyptic ideas are against it. This is
all the more pathetic because the pre-millennial scheme is really an outline of the social salvation of the race. Those who hold it exhibit real interest in social and political events. But they are best pleased when they see humanity defeated and collapsing, for then salvation is nigh. Active work for the salvation of the social order before the coming of Christ is not only vain but against the will of God. Thus eschatology defeats the Christian imperative of righteousness and salvation.
{pp. 210-211}
. . . "The eschatological schemes of primitive Christianity were all based on the supposition that the end would come soon. If Paul expected a longer interval in his later life, it was a matter of years, not of centuries. The actual duration of the present world for nineteen hundred years has disrupted the whole outline. The judgment and the general resurrection of the dead were necessary parts of the Jewish eschatology because the judgment was needed to decide who was to share in the Messianic happiness, and the resurrection enabled the dead to have their part in it. But what is the use of the judgment if the fate of every man is decided at his death and he goes directly to heaven or hell? And why should a Christian of the first century receive his body again at the general resurrection when he has lived in heaven without it for eighteen hundred years?
History is a revelation of God's will. God thinks in action, and speaks in events. His historical realities are a surer word of God than any prophecy. The least of us today knows things which would have revolutionized the eschatology of the apostles. Are we obedient to the revelation of God if we think more of the sprouting grain than of the full ear, and artificially put ourselves back where we do not belong?
{p. 221}
. . .
To convert the catastrophic terminology of the old eschatology into developmental terms is another way of expressing faith in the immanence of God and in the presence of Christ. It is more religious to believe in a present than in an absent and future Christ. Jesus saw the Kingdom as present and future. This change from catastrophe to development is the most essential step to enable modern men to appreciate the Christian hope.'
{p. 225}
The coming of the Kingdom of God will not be by peaceful development only, but by conflict with the Kingdom of Evil. We should estimate the power of sin too lightly if we forecast a smooth road. Nor does the insistence on continuous development eliminate the possibility and value of catastrophes. Political and social revolutions may shake down the fortifications of the Kingdom of Evil in a day. The Great War is a catastrophic stage in the coming of the Kingdom of God. Its direct effects will operate for generations. Our descendants will have a better perspective than we to see how all the sins of modern civilization have brought forth death after their own kind, and how the social repentance of nations may lay the foundation for a new beginning.
{p. 226}
The following {pp. 244 - 248} need to be pared down.
This theory (of atonement) has furnished the ground-work for orthodox theology ever since Anselm. Yet it raises unanswerable questions and in some respects offends our Christian convictions. How can it satisfy justice to have an innocent one die in place of the guilty? How can God pay an equivalent to himself? If the debt due to God has been paid by the death of Christ, why is it any longer an act of grace on the part of God to remit sin? The debt we owe to God is not a financial but a moral debt; another man may discharge a debt of $100 for me, but no man can discharge my obligations as a son or as a father for me; how then can the debt we owe to God be paid by another?
These traditional theological explanations of the death of Christ have less biblical authority than we are accustomed to suppose. The fundamental terms and ideas - " satisfaction," "substitution," "imputation," "merit"-are post-biblical ideas, and are alien from the spirit of the gospel.
It is important to note that every theory of the atonement necessarily used terms and analogies taken from the social life of that age, and that the spirit and problems of
contemporary life are always silent factors in the construction of theory. The early Church set the model of formulating the doctrine in the terminology of sacrifice. To us sacrificing is a matter of antiquarian knowledge, kept alive mainly by the Bible. To Christians of the first three centuries it was a social institution which they saw in operation all about them. {pp. 241-43}
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These social realities which lay back of the theories gave them their influence and convincing power at the time they originated and for a long time thereafter, but when these social realities disappear, the theories of the atonement based on them become artificial and unconvincing, and sometimes repulsive. Analogies and illustrations taken from the priestly slaughtering of animals or the ritual functions of the Jewish high-priest are remote from our imagination, and instead of clarifying the facts, they themselves need elaborate explanation. . .
(In OUR time) Our dominant ideas are personality and social solidarity. The problems which burden us are the social problems. Has the death of Christ any relation to these? Have we not just as much right to connect this supreme religious event with our problems as Paul and Anselm and Calvin, and to use the terminology and methods of our day?
As Christian men we believe that the death of our Lord concerns us all. Our sins caused it. He bore the sin of the world. In turn his death was somehow for our good. Our spiritual situation is fundamentally changed in consequence of it. But how? How did he bear our sins? How did his death affect God? How did it affect us? These three questions we shall discuss.
How did Jesus bear sins which he did not commit?
The old theology replied, by imputation. But guilt and merit are personal. They can not be transferred from one person to another. We tamper with moral truth when we shuffle them about. Imputation is a legal device to enable the law to hold one man responsible for the crime committed by another. Imputation sees mankind as a mass of individuals, and the debts of every individual are transferred to Christ. The solution does not lie in that way.
Neither is it enough to say that Jesus bore our sins by sympathy. His contact with sin was a matter of experience as well as sympathy, and experience cuts deeper. Child-birth and travail reveal the realities of life to a woman more than sympathetic observation.
How did Jesus bear our sins? The bar to a true understanding of the atonement has been our individualism. The solution of the problem lies in the recognition of solidarity.
By his human life Jesus was bound up backward and forward and sideward with the life of humanity. He received the influences of the historical life of the Jewish people through the channels of social tradition, and he transmitted the effects of his own life and personality to the future through the same channels. Palestine was only a little corner of the Roman Empire, but the full life of humanity was there, just as a man's little finger is filled with the flow of life which nourishes his whole body. Even the feeblest mind has some consciousness of the tide of life playing about him. The stronger and more universal a human personality is, the more will he consciously absorb the general life, and identify himself with it. To a genius, or to one whose social feeling is made vivid and sensitive by love, even small experiences unlock life, and from a small circle one may prolong great sectors into the wider concentric circles. Jesus had an unparalleled sense of solidarity. Thereby he had the capacity to generalize his personal experiences and make them significant of the common life.
Now, this race life of ours is pervaded by sin; not only by sporadic acts of folly, waywardness, vice .or crime which spring spontaneously from human life, but by organized forces and institutions of evil which have stabilized the power of sin and made it effective. Our analysis of race sin culminated in the recognition of a Kingdom of Evil (Chapter IX). Jesus lived in the midst of that Kingdom, and it was this which killed him.
Every personal act of sin, however isolated it may seem, is connected with racial sin. Evil social customs and ideas stimulate or facilitate it; in turn it strengthens the social suggestion to evil for others.
But personal transgression does not develop moral force and resentment enough to slay the prophets of God. It takes public and organized evil to do that. When a travelling pedlar cheats a farmer's wife, he is part and parcel of an ancient system of business which overreaches the customer if it can. But if the pedlar learns that a socialist editor is advocating a system of production which would abolish him and his cunning, he does not waylay and kill the editor to stop his pen. On the other hand if trade and finance have developed a lucrative system of evil income, such as the American slave trade, or the English opium trade, or the universal liquor traffic, or Five Power Loans to China, or a monopoly of colonial trade, then it will resist interference. The gigantic collective pedlar will blast reputations by the press he controls, break men financially by the bank credit he controls, or ruin men politically by the party machinery or official power he controls. When Evil is organized, the prophets suffer. There is probably not a single State of our Union which has not seen the reputation and financial or political standing of good men killed in cold blood because they sincerely opposed high class graft.
These public evils so pervade the social life of humanity in all times and all places that no one can share the common life of our race without coming under the effect of these collective sins. He will either sin by consenting in them, or he will suffer by resisting them. Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins.
As one looks across human history with a mind enlightened by the thought of the Kingdom of God, he sees a few great permanent evils which have blighted the life of the race and of every individual in it. They always change their form and yet remain the same in substance. Seize and fight the power of evil at any point, as you will, and soon one of these ruling evils will lift its head and strike back at you. The stronger and more influential a man's life is, and the broader his moral interests, the deeper will be his experience of these chief evils. I have been impressed with the fact that so many of them plainly converged on Jesus and had a part in doing him to death.
These evils were not as gigantic and fully developed in Palestine as they have been in the great Empires, including our own. But the fact that even in this remote corner of the ancient world they were present and virulent, proves their universal power in the life of the race. There are few communities, a cross-section of which would not reveal their presence. Jesus experienced his full collision with them when he came to the capital of his nation in the last week. There is a reason why prophets are most likely to die at Jerusalem.
{pp. 244 - 248}
Religious Persecutors. . .
Secular governors are but poor persecutors compared with men of religion. The persecutions of the Roman Empire against Christians were feeble and occasional as compared with the zeal of the Inquisition. It takes religion to put a steel edge on social intolerance. Just because it is so high and its command of social loyalty so great, it is pitiless when it goes wrong.
Religious bigotry has been one of the permanent evils of mankind, the cause of untold social division, bitterness, persecution, and religious wars. It is always a social sin. Estimate the harm which the exponents of religion have done simply by suppressing the prophetic minds who had received from God fresh thought on spiritual and intellectual problems, and by cowing those who might have followed the prophets.
Jesus was killed by ecclesiastical religion. He might have appeared in almost any highly developed nation and suffered the same fate. Certainly after religion bore his name, there were a thousand situations in which he would have been put to death by those who offered salvation in his name.
A second social evil which contributed to kill him was the combination of graft and political power. Those who are in control of the machinery of organized society are able to use it for selfish and predatory ends, turning into private profit what ought to serve the common good.
We are on sure ground when we realize that the prophetic leadership of Jesus endangered the power of the ruling class. There is always an oligarchy, wherever you look; monarchial and republican forms of government are both protective devices for the-group-that-controls things. This group is the universal government. For every oligarchy political power is convertible into financial income and social influence, thus satisfying the powerful double instinct for money and for power." {pp. 249 - 251}
In the case of the Jewish people, the Romans held the chief power and collected the main taxes through the concessionaires called the publicani or publicans. But considerable powers were left to the native oligarchy, especially the control of the institutions of religion, and from the loyalty of the Jews to their ancestral and centralized faith a modest income in cash and considerable social prestige could be harvested. Even distant colonies in the pagan cities remitted the annual temple tax, and a poor widow dropped her two farthings. Also it was pleasant to be called Rabbi, and to get the best seats in the synagogue. Their sincere concern for their religion was reinforced by concern for their special privileges as the custodians of the religious institutions and jurisdictions.
Jesus was a prophet of religion; they were exploiters of religion. This added durable fuel to their bigotry. They assumed that Jesus planned to stir up the revolutionary elements, and they feared that a messianic revolt would lose them the remnants of their power. " Whatever is to be done? " the fourth gospel reports them as saying; " if we let him alone like this, everybody will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and suppress our holy Place and our nation." Caiaphas formulated the situation with Machiavellian frankness : " You know nothing about it. You do not understand it is in your interest that one man should die for the People instead of the whole nation being destroyed.".
A third historic evil is the corruption of justice. We remember how often the Hebrew prophets denounced the judges who took bribes against the poor. Bearing false witness was so constant an evil that it got a place in the decalogue. Jesus took an illustration of the power of prayer from the case of a widow and a hard judge; though the judge cared neither for religion nor public opinion, she got the better of him by sheer feminine persistence. But it was hard for widows who had no pull.
Injustice between man and man is inevitable and bad enough. But it is far worse when the social institution set up in the name of justice gives its support to injustice. What nation can claim to be free from this? We have thought of the political prisons of autocratic Russia as a remnant of the dark ages, but the War has shown that even in free countries the judicial process can swiftly break conscientious convictions and the most cherished rights of democracy. In our own country the delays and appeals permitted by our legal procedure set up a terrible inequality between the rich and poor. Years of public agitation have produced no adequate change. Even if the judge is wholly free from bias, the law itself in all countries, presumably, is on the side of property. The British Parliament, "the mother of free institutions," has always been an assembly of propertied men; only in recent years has it contained an efficient minority of representatives of the working class. Our own legislatures rarely contain any spokesman of the class which needs a voice most of all As soon as Jesus was arrested, he became a victim of the courts. In the ecclesiastical court, we are told, distorted and bribed testimony was used. His followers were not present and we have no report of eye-witnesses. It may be that he never made the claim that he would come as the apocalyptic Messiah, and that it was concocted in order to have a political charge to present in the Roman court. The priestly court condemned him on a priestly charge; he was a heretic and blasphemer.
In the Roman court the pull of the upper classes and the pressure of mob clamour were allowed to influence judicial procedure. It was Pilate's high privilege to protect a man whom he felt to be innocent; he had the military power of Rome to back his verdict. He yielded to pressure because his own career, as we know from secular history, was corrupt; the Jews threatened to " get him," and he knew they could. So he took some water and demonstratively washed his hands of what he yet consented to do. Pilate's wash-bowl deserves to be a mystic symbol, the counter-part of the Holy Grail.
So Jesus made experience of one of the permanent sins of organized society, bearing in his own body and soul what so many thousands of the poor and weak have borne before and after, the corruption of justice.
A fourth permanent social sin which participated in the death of Jesus was the mob spirit and mob action. The mob spirit is the social spirit gone mad. The social group then escapes from the control of its wiser and fairer habits, and is lashed into action by primitive passions. The social spirit reacts so powerfully on individuals, that when once the restraints of self-criticism and self-control are shot back, the crowd gets drunk on the mere effluvia of its own emotions. We know only too well that a city of respectable and religious people will do fiendish acts of cruelty and obscenity.
There are radical mobs and conservative mobs. Well dressed mobs are more dangerous than ragged mobs because they are far more efficient. Entire nations may come under the mob spirit, and abdicate their judgment.
Rarely are mobs wholly spontaneous; usually there is leadership to fanaticize the masses. At this point this sin connects with the sins of selfish leadership which we have analysed before. Sometimes the crowd turns against the oligarchy; usually the oligarchy manipulates the crowd.
So it was in the case of Jesus. The mob shouted for the physical force man and against the man who embodied the better spirit of the Jewish nation. There was "patriotism " in this choice. Pilate realized that, and tried to play on it by calling Jesus the king of the Jews, but the native politicians outplayed him. The choice was prophetic. It was the Barabbas type which led the nation to its doom in the Jewish War and the later risings of the Jewish patriots.
So this pervasive sin of community life, the intoxication of the social spirit, before which so many prophets and semi-prophets have had to quail, contributed to the death of Jesus. He bore it, not by sympathy or imputation, but by experience.
The fifth universal sin of organized society which cooperated in the death of Christ was militarism. So far as we know, Jesus never passed through an actual war. He probably never saw his home burned, his father killed, his sisters ravished, nor was he ever forced to bear arms. But that he had convictions on war is plain from his sayings. " He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword," shows clear comprehension of the fact that in war neither side gains, and that the reactions of war are as dangerous as the direct effects; of which fact ample demonstrations are before us.
If the words spoken in his lament over Jerusalem are authentic, he not only foresaw that the present drift would carry his nation to war and destruction, but he regarded the acceptance of his leadership as the one means by which his people might have escaped their doom : " If thou hadst known in this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from thine eyes." To his mind, then, the Kingdom of God must have had a conscious and definite relation to war and force revolution.
With his arrest Jesus fell into the hands of the war system. When the soldiers stripped him, beat his back with the leaded whip, pressed the wreath of thorns into his scalp, draped a purple mantle around him and saluted this amusing king of the Jews, and when they blindfolded and struck him, asking him to prophesy who it was and spitting in his face, - this was the humour of the barrack room. This was fun as the professional soldiers of the Roman Empire saw it. The men who drove the spikes through his hands and feet were the equivalent of a firing-squad told off for duty at an execution, and when they gambled for his clothes, they were taking their soldiers' perquisites.
The last of this group of racial sins is class contempt. Class pride and its obverse passion, class contempt, are the necessary spiritual product of class divisions. They are the direct negation of solidarity and love. They substitute a semi-human, semi-ethical relation for full human fraternity. The class system, therefore, is a sinful denial of the Kingdom of God, and one of the characteristic marks and forces of the Kingdom of Evil.
It is almost universal. Our capitalistic semi-democracy has alleviated it but not overcome it. Indeed, while some other nations are slowly breaking up the class systems erected in the past, the present economic tendencies in our country, if allowed to go on, will inevitably build up a durable class system. Economic facts mock at political theory. Sixty-five per cent of the national property before the war was held by two per cent of the population. The war has contributed enormously to the aggregation of great fortunes.
[The Minority Report of the Senate Committee on Finance, August 13, 1917, contains tables of 95 industrial corporations and 5o railways in which the average income of 1911 - 13 is deducted from the net income of 1916, leaving special war profits of 10o%, 400%, 1400%, 4500% in some cases. Thus the Bethlehem Steel Corporation made over 1300% or $40,518,860, and the Du Pont Powder Co. over 1400% or $76,581,729.]
. . . Parasitic incomes produce class differences; class differences create class pride and class contempt.
This sin has always rested heavily on the great mass of mankind. It expresses itself in social customs and in the laws of a nation. Where an aristocracy exists, either its members are formally exempt from the degrading forms of punishment, as in Russia, or they are ostensibly liable to them but practically exempt by the inability to put them in prison or keep them there.
In Roman law crucifixion was a punishment reserved for offenders of the lowest classes. No Roman citizen could be crucified. Cicero flung it at Verres as a culminating accusation in the counts of his misrule that he had crucified a Roman. When Jesus was nailed to the tree, therefore, he bore not only the lightning shoots of physical pain imposed by the cruelties of criminal law, but also that contempt for the lower classes which has always dehumanized the upper classes, numbed and crippled the spiritual self-respect of the lower classes, and set up insuperable barriers to the spirit of the Kingdom of God.
Religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit, militarism, and class contempt, - every student of history will recognize that these sum up constitutional forces in the Kingdom of Evil. Jesus bore these sins in no legal or artificial sense, but in their impact on his own body and soul. He had not contributed to them, as we have, and yet they were laid on him. They were not only the sins of Caiaphas, Pilate, or Judas, but the social sin of all mankind, to which all who ever lived have contributed, and under which all who ever lived have suffered.'.
The spiritual insight of Jesus himself has added a further step to this solidaristic interpretation of his death. In the parable of the Vineyard he described the religious history of his nation as a continuous struggle, with God and his prophets on one side, and the selfish exploiters of religion on the other, and set his own impending death at the end of the prophetic succession as its culmination. This was an historical, social, and solidaristic interpretation of his death.
At the close of the invective against the religious leaders (Matthew 23) he again outlined this historical process, in which the ruling classes of the past had always silenced the living voices of God, but managed to utilize them
[ ' I have not seen this analysis attempted before. My attention has been called to a sermon by President William DeWitt Hyde, on "The Sins which Crucified Jesus," in the collection of
" Modern Sermons by World Scholars," Vol. IV, in which he follows a similar line of inquiry. He specifies the envy of the hierarchy, the money-love of Judas, slander, and the servility of Pilate. But, except in the first part, dealing with the hierarchy, he does not place the discussion under the category of solidarity, and that is the decisive point of my argument. See also Henry Sloane Coffin, " Social Aspects of the Cross." posthumously among the decorative elements and authorities of religion. He warned his own generation that they were on the point of repeating this sin by persecuting the new prophets whom he would send. Thereby they would prove that they were " the sons of them that slew the prophets "; they would "fill up the measure of their fathers"; and would bring upon themselves "all the
righteous blood shed on the earth."]
His thought is that by repeating the sins of the past we are involved in the guilt of the past. We are linked in a solidarity of evil and guilt with all who have done the same before us, and all who will do the same after us. In so far then as we, by our conscious actions or our passive consent, have repeated the sins which killed Jesus, we have made ourselves guilty of his death. If those who actually killed him stood before us, we could not wholly condemn them, but would have to range ourselves with them as men of their own kind.
This is Christ's own theology. It is not a legal theory of imputation, but a conception of spiritual solidarity, by which our own free and personal acts constitute us partakers of the guilt of others.
Along two lines we have replied to the question how the sins of the world were borne by Jesus : First, the realistic forces which killed Jesus were not accidental and personal causes of his death, but were the reaction of the totality of
racial sin against him; and second, the guilt of those who did it spreads to all who re-affirm the acts which killed him. The key to the problem is contained in the realization of solidarity." {pp. 243 - 259 }
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