Part 10 (2/2)

In these respects Royce shows his sympathy with traditional Christianity as over against the standpoint of modern liberalism. He protests in effect, in the first place, against a ”reduced” Christianity based upon the Synoptic teaching of Jesus alone, and upon this teaching only after alleged Johannine and Pauline elements have been cut out. Secondly, he finds that Christianity includes doctrine as well as ethics. And, third, he finds in Paul's teaching not a perversion of the gospel, but a developed statement of the central ideas of Christianity.

Unlike many philosophers, Royce takes an austere view of the misery and tragedy of sin, as ”grave with the gravity of life, and stern only as the call of life, to any awakened mind, ought to be stern.”[201] The sinner cannot save himself. By his own deed he has banished himself to the h.e.l.l of the irrevocable. If there is to be atonement which shall reconcile the traitor to his own deed and the community to the act of treachery against it, an atonement stated in purely human terms, it must be an ”objective” atonement, not merely one of moral influence upon the traitor. It must be by some creative deed of loving ingenuity by which the world is made better than it would have been had the treason never been done. Thus the family of Jacob was reunited in peculiarly tender ties after the reconciliation. ”Through Joseph's work all is made better than it would have been had there been no treason at all.”[202]

201: ”The Problem of Christianity,” I, p. 120.

202: _Ibid._, I, p. 370.

In his purely human and untheological treatment of sin and grace, Royce's thought has professedly moved within the limits of social relations.h.i.+ps. Sin is an act of broken faith or disloyalty to the community. The sinner is restored from his estate of misery by the saving grace of the community.[203] ”'Atonement' and 'Divine Grace' may be considered as if they were expressions of the purely human process whereby the community seeks and saves, through its suffering servants and its Spirit, that which is lost.”[204]

203: ”The Problem of Christianity,” I, p. 390.

204: _Ibid._, I, p. x.x.xviii.

While Royce's exposition of sin and grace is full of suggestion and insight, it is more philosophical than Biblical. Thus at important points the contrast between Paul and Royce's interpretation of Paul is very striking. Royce hints at the divinity of the community, while Paul a.s.serts the divinity of Christ. Royce says, Be loyal to the community, while Paul would say primarily, Believe in Christ and be loyal to Him.

”Loyalty to the personal Christ,” says a reviewer of Royce's work, ”has been (and surely is) even a more vital element in Christianity than loyalty to the community.”[205] Royce would say that by the grace of the community we are saved; while with Paul the Saviour is personal and it was the vision of Christ, not of the community, that transformed his life.

205: H. Rashdall in _Mind_, N. S. 91 (July, 1914), p. 411.

Again it is not easy to read the doctrine of the beloved community and of the community as the source of grace into the words or the spirit of the teaching of Jesus. The attempt, however, is made. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the voice of the father, who is ”for the moment simply the incarnation of the spirit of this community,”[206] is said to be the voice of the family, welcoming the wanderer; and the joy of the father is the joy of the family in his return. If this be so the father should have said, ”The family fellows.h.i.+p is restored,” instead of saying, ”This my son was dead and is alive again.”

206: ”The Problem of Christianity,” I, p. 353.

Even Royce's Old Testament ill.u.s.tration from the story of Joseph, where we find a grievous betrayal and then a deed which leaves the community, in this case the family, richer in love and more united in heart than if the deed of betrayal had not been done, does not support Royce's principle that the ideal community is the saviour and the source of atoning grace. The story to be ill.u.s.trative should have been reversed; Joseph should have been the betrayer and destroyer of the family life, and then the brethren unitedly by their love and ingenuity should have won him back.

How then does the loyal community which is to be the source of grace originate? Royce admits that it can only be by ”some miracle of grace,”[207] and the problem becomes acute when we consider the origin of the historical community of the Christian Church. The usual view is that here a miracle of grace has happened in the person of Jesus, the author and finisher of loyalty, but in that case there could be no such ”simplification of the problems of Christology,”[208] as Royce desires.

Who, then, was the founder of the Christian Community? It was not Paul, for he found a community already in existence. It was not the human Jesus, though He gave the signal, for we cannot say that, speaking of Jesus as an individual man, we know that He explicitly intended to found the Christian Church.[209] It was not the divine Christ, for ”the human source of all later Christologies must be found in the early Christian community itself.”[210] We must in fact renounce our quest for the origin of the Christian Church, for its foundation depended ”upon motives which we cannot fathom by means of any soundings that our historical materials or our knowledge of social psychology permit us to make.”[211] Such recourse to a convenient agnosticism, however rhetorically it may be expressed, does not bring us out of the circle, that the church founded itself, and in that case, as a source of grace, saves itself. The modern man, under Royce's guidance, is relieved from the problems of Christology only to find that those of ecclesiology are equally pressing.

207: ”The Problem of Christianity,” I, p. 185.

208: _Ibid._, I, p. xxiii.

209: _Ibid._, I, p. 418.

210: _Ibid._, I, p. 415.

211: _Ibid._, I, p. 419.

The conception of the community is obviously fruitful alike in its ethical and its theological implications, and Royce's discussion of it, so elevated in its tone, will doubtless be for the ”strengthening of hearts” as he desires. But inferences foreign to Christian thought are drawn when it is suggested that ”Man the community may prove to be G.o.d,”[212] and that in ”this essentially social universe” the community is ”the Absolute.”[213] This is the voice of Hegel rather than that of Paul.

212: ”The Problem of Christianity,” I, p. 409.

213: _Ibid._, II, p. 296.

In an essay on Browning's theism Royce has remarked: ”To say G.o.d is Love is, then, the same as to say that G.o.d is, or has been, or will be incarnate, perhaps once, perhaps--for so Browning's always monistic intuitions about the relation of G.o.d and the world always suggest to him--perhaps always, perhaps in all our life, perhaps in all men.”[214]

The doctrine of the incarnation is thus acknowledged to be vital not only for Christianity but for theism as well. ”The fact of the Incarnation,” as Westcott has said, ”gives reality to that moral conception of G.o.d as active Love without which Theism becomes a formula.”[215] But the meaning of incarnation and its support of theistic belief is weakened in proportion as it is interpreted not in an historical sense but as an incarnation ”perhaps always, perhaps in all men.”

214: _The New World_, Vol. V, 1896, p. 416.

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