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OTHER BOOKS BY
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
THE CHILDREN OF LIGHT AND THE CHILDREN OF DARKNESS
THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN (2 VOLS.J
VOL. I. HUMAN NATURE
VOL. II. HUMAN DESTINY
CHRISTIANITY AND POWER POLITICS
BEYOND TRAGEDY
AN INTERPRETATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS
REFLECTIONS ON THE END OF AN ERA
MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY
THE CONTRIBUTION OF RELIGION TO SOCIAL WORK
LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF A TAMED CYNIC
DOES CIVILIZATION NEED RELIGION ?
DISCERNING THE SIGNS
OF THE TIMES
SERMONS FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW
.*
_C j.1 T" ' ::>; . : V
of me 1 imes
SERMONS
FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW
by
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1945
COPYRIGHT, 1946, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any form without
the permission of Charles Scribner'* Sons
CONTENTS
9
Preface " ix
I. Discerning the Signs of the Times I
II. Anger and Forgiveness 21
III. The Age Between the Ages 39
IV. The Nemesis of Nations 57
!
V. The City Which Hath Foundations 73
VI. Today, Tomorrow and the Eternal 94
VI L Humour and Faith in
VIII. The Power and Weakness of God 132
IX. Mystery and Meaning 152
X. The Peace of God '174
PREFACE
JL HE CHAPTERS of this volume are sermonic essays.
They are based upon sermons actually preached in
American colleges and universities j but they were not
written until after delivery. In the process of putting
them in written form they were made somewhat more
theological than in their original form. Theoretical
points were elaborated in some cases beyond the limits
usually deemed advisable in the traditional sermon.
The sermons are divided into two categories. One
group deals with the perennial themes of the Chris-
tian faith. The other seeks to interpret certain aspects
of the Christian faith in terms of their special rele-
vance to the thought and the life of our age. Being a
tragic age which has suffered two great world con-
flicts and which can not yet be certain that it has the
moral resources or the political instruments to avoid
further world chaos, the primary theme of this cate-
gory of sermons is the relation of the historical to the
trans-historical elements of the Christian faith. The
Christian community prays: "Thy kingdom come, thy
will be done on earth as it is in heaven" and thereby
testifies that it believes in the realization of God's will
in human history. But it also confesses with St. Paul:
"If in this life only, we had hoped in Christ, we are
of all men most miserable," thereby expressing its un-
r the Christian hope tran-
erids tlie ' limits of history as we know it. The
sermons (a*rii r ineant to elaborate these two facets of
the Christian hope, in the belief that an age con-
fronted with so many possibilities of realizing God's
will in new dimensions of historic existence, but also
confronting so many historic frustrations, is in par-
ticular need of the Christian gospel} and requires both
the relative-historical, and the final-and-absolute
facets of the Christian hope to maintain its sanity and
its sense of the meaning of existence.
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
December, 1945
DISCERNING THE SIGNS
OF THE TIMES
SERMONS FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW
I
DISCERNING THE SIGNS OF
THE TIMES
"The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came,
and tempting desired him that he would shew them
& s *g n from heaven. He answered and said unto
them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair
weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning,
It will be foul weather today: for the sky is red
and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the
face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs
of the times?" Mt. 16:1-3.
HEATHER forecasting is one of the oldest forms
of scientific knowledge. Since the most ancient days
fishermen and men of the soil have been wont to look
at the sky, to "cock a weather eye" at the rising or set-
ting sun, at the cloud formations and other indices of
prospective weather, and make their predictions of
sunshine or rain. Every community has had its partic-
ularly shrewd forecasters to whom intuitive knowl-
2 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
edge was frequently ascribed. But the supposed intui-
tions were merely unconsciously collated scientific
data. They had studied various sequences in the
weather, artfully weighed and balanced different vari-
ables, and thus arrived at their conclusions. The
advance of science has increased the range of weather
forecasting; but it is still a good symbol of the reli-
ability of man's objective knowledge when he. ana-
lyzes the processes of nature. A mistake may be made;
but personal interest is not likely to prompt the mis-
take, or tempt the observer to falsify data, or to draw
wrong conclusions from the evidence.
There is thus a reliability in our knowledge of the
"face of the sky" which is practically unattainable in
our discernment of the "signs of the times." "Signs of
the times" include all forms of historical, in contrast
to, natural knowledge. To discern the signs of the
times means to interpret historical events and values.
The interpretation of history includes all judgments
we make of the purpose of our own actions and those
of others; it includes the assessment of the virtue of
our own and other interests, both individual and col-
lective; and finally it includes our interpretation of
the meaning of history itself.
The issue which brought the charge of "hypocrisy"
from Jesus against those who asked for a "sign from
heaven" concerned the ultimate issue about history.
The meaning of Messianic expectations was at stake.
Messianic expectations were expressions of the idea
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 3
that history had a certain character and that it moved
toward the fulfillment of its purpose. The age of the
Messiah was the age in which the obscurities of his-
tory would be clarified j its frustrations would be over-
come and human life would flower in a community of
perfect peace and harmony. There were to be some
special "signs" of this approaching end. The Pharisees
and Sadducees were asking Jesus to produce these
signs in order to validate his Messianic claims.
Jesus 3 answer implied that the "signs" were already
manifest, but that those who desired them could not
discern them because of their hypocrisy. The hypo-
critical element which entered into all Messianic cal-
culations was the egoistic hope that the end of history
would give Israel as the chosen nation, or the
righteous of Israel, victory over their enemies and
final justification in the sight of God and man. This
egoistic form of Messianism leads to mistakes and mis-
calculations not only in regard to the ultimate "end"
or meaning of history but in regard to any proximate
end. Actually no nation or individual, even the most
righteous, is good enough to fulfill God's purposes in
history. Jesus' own conception of history was that all
men and nations were involved in rebellion against
God and that therefore the Messiah would have to
be, not so much a strong and good ruler who would
help the righteous to be victorious over the un-
righteous, but a "suffering servant" who would sym-
bolize and reveal the mercy of God 5 for only the
4 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
divine forgiveness could finally overcome the con-
tradictions of history and the enmity between man
and God. But no self-righteous man or nation would
be able to discern the "signs" (the impending cross,
for instance) which would signify this kind of final
clarification of history. The lack of discernment would
be due., not to a defect of the mind in calculating the
course of history, but to a corruption of the heart,
which introduced the confusion of selfish pride into
the estimate of historical events. This is the basis of
our Lord's charge of hypocrisy against those who
desired a "sign" of the coming Kingdom. They were
morally and spiritually unable to discern the sign of
the Kingdom of God, which would not vindicate any-
one, not even the righteous man against his foe, but
which would rather be a vindication of God against
all elements in human history which stood in defiance
of His power and goodness.
II
It is not our concern, in this study, to analyze the
particular form of hypocrisy which led Jesus' con-
temporaries to the particular error of misinterpreting
the ancient hope of a Messianic reign, but rather to
study the difference in the source of error between all
forms of historical knowledge and those dealing with
the knowledge of nature, i.e., between the "face of the
sky" and the "signs of the times." This difference
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES ,5
has been obscured in the whole of our modern culture,
which fondly assumed that the kind of "objectivity"
of which the natural sciences boast may be easily trans-
ferred to all historical, political and social judgments.
This assumption rests upon a disregard of the partly
conscious and partly unconscious dishonesty involved
in the error of social and historical judgments. All
false judgments of friend or foe, of accepted or re-
jected social movements, or of any aspect of man's
social life and the course of his history, must be
charged, at least partly, to hypocrisy. Therefore the
elimination of error is never purely an intellectual
enterprise but a moral and spiritual one. The highest
degree of objectivity and impartiality in the assess-
ment of historical values is achieved by a quality of
religious humility, which gains awareness of the un-
conscious dishonesty of judgment and seeks to cor-
rect it.
The difference between the knowledge of nature
and the knowledge and estimate of our fellowmen is
this: in the knowledge of nature the mind of man is
at the center of the process of knowing ; and the self
with all its fears, hopes and ambitions is on the cir-
cumference. In the knowledge of historical events the
self, with all its emotions and desires, is at the center
of the enterprise -, and the mind is on the circum-
ference, serving merely as an instrument of the anxious
self. The reason for this difference is obvious. When
we look at a flower or a star, at a geological formation
6 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
or at a problem in chemistry, the prestige and the
security of the knower is not involved. The things we
see are what they are; and no emotion can change the
facts or alter the conclusions. If we try to assess the
meaning of some facts of nature for the human
enterprise, we are already on a different level of
knowledge where the whole weight of human pride
and insecurity may be felt. One school of thought
may seek to prove that natural history invalidates all
human claims to a unique kind of creaturehood among
the other creatures} while another school of thought
may seek to deny obvious facts of natural history, as
for instance the fact of evolution, because these prove
man's relation to other creatures and are therefore
"felt to be an affront to human pride. The whole evo-
lutionary controversy was charged with non-scientific
and non-objective factors on both sides. In the one
case scientific philosophies were too prone to seek an
escape from the unique responsibilities of human free-
dom 5 and in the other case orthodox religionists were
too anxious to prove too much and to assert the
dignity of man by denying his creatureliness.
The conflict over scientific philosophies suggests
that any philosophy, even one which claims to rest
purely on the science of nature, is on the borderline
between the objective knowledge of nature and the
subjective and "existential" knowledge of history.
Wherever judgments are made about the relation of
man to nature, they are a part of a total religious
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 7
interpretation of life, in which detailed facts of nature
and history are brought into a total scheme of mean-
ing. These schemes of meaning are always something
more and something less than mere constructs of
thought. They are always systems of faith. Such sys-
tems must finally deal with man's sense of the mean-
ing of the whole and of his place in that meaning. In
seeking to find his own place in the whole, man is
always subject to two contradictory temptations. He is
tempted on the one hand to claim a too unique and
central place in the whole scheme of things j on the
other hand he is tempted to flee from his responsi-
bilities by denying the unique place which he has in
the created world by virtue of his freedom.
Most philosophies are on the borderline between
the knowledge of nature and the knowledge of his-
tory. On the borderline there is a mixture of the
objective knowledge of nature and the subjectively
colored knowledge of human events and purposes.
This borderline does not alter the essential contrast
between the two types of knowing. When we behold
not a flower or a star, but a friend or foe; when we
estimate not natural sequences, but the course of
human history; when we weigh not the actions and
reactions of the atoms of nature, but the ambitions
and purposes of our competitors and comrades, we
are never disinterested observers. We are always part
of the drama of life which we seek to comprehend 5
and participants in the conflicts and comradeships
8 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
which we seek to arbitrate or enjoy. Our judgments
of others are mixed with emotions prompted by our
strength or our weakness in relation to them. Their
virtues and advantages may excite our jealousy or
prompt our emulation. Their vices may tempt us to
hatred. Their weakness may elicit our pity or their
strength arouse our fear. We are involved as total
personalities in the affairs, of history. Our mind is
never a pure and abstract intelligence when it func-
tions amidst the complexities of human relations.
There is no vantage point, individual or collective, in
human history from which we could judge its move-
ments with complete impartiality. There is not even
a point in time from which we could judge past events
with complete impartiality. It is true of course that
some periods of history are, or appear to be, suffi-
ciently dead to seem irrelevant to the contest of inter-
ests and values which color our judgments in the
present moment. But we can never be sure. Our
judgment of Hamilton or Jefferson is still partly
determined by contemporary party prejudice 5 and
even an analysis of the causes of the decline of ancient
Rome is certain to be mixed with social and political
convictions, derived from contemporary situations.
That is why the writing of history remains a political
weapon. When the Russian communists change their
party line, they also give a new and different estimate
of the significance of Peter the Great, or even of Ivan
the Terrible.
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 9
Just as there are only vantage points of relative im-
partiality in time from which we view the past, so
there are only vantage points of relative impartiality
from which we view the present scene. All human
justice depends upon the organization of relatively
impartial judicial instruments, through which the end-
less conflicts of interest between men are arbitrated.
But if the issues reach deep enough into the very
foundations of the society upon which the court rests,
its judgments become interested judgments. In the
international society, no genuine instruments of im-
partial justice have, as yet, been created. Even a war,
which by the common consent of mankind is judged
a just war against aggression, prompts some social
and political judgments which future generations
will regard as partisan prejudices or as expres-
sions of the power, rather than the justice, of the
victors.
It is of course important for any society to have as
many organs of relative impartiality as possible, both
official and unofficial. There is, for instance, a profes-
sional group in modern society which is not imme-
diately involved in the contests of power which divide
the industrial community. The relative impartiality
of such a group may greatly contribute to the mitiga-
tion of party animosity. Furthermore, a degree of
impartiality may be achieved purely by intellectual
process. For the higher and wider the intellectual
perspective, the better are men able to see, not merely
io THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
the interest of their own nation or group, but those of
competing groups.
But whatever the merits and achievements of these
organs of relative impartiality, there is no place in
human history where the affairs of our f ellowmen can
be viewed in purely intellectual terms. We are always
part of the drama of life which we behold 5 and the
emotions of the drama therefore color our beholding.
There is no novelty in this observation. The com-
mon sense of mankind has always taken cognizance
of these partialities and has shrewdly learned to dis-
count the judgments of interested participants in any
enterprise. But little has been done to estimate the
moral, as distinguished from the intellectual, factors
which are involved in our errors of historical judg-
ment. Marxism, which first developed the theory of
the "ideological taint" in our political judgments,
regards dishonest rationalizations as primarily due to
the finiteness of human perspectives. Engels spe-
cifically denies that any element of conscious dis-
honesty enters into these errors. This is due to the
fact that the Marxist theory of human consciousness
is too naturalistic to appreciate the indeterminate free-
dom of man and the consequent transcendence of the
self over its limited judgments. Yet Marxist polemics
against the "bourgeois" foe always assume the dis-
honesty which is explicitly disavowed in the Marxist
theory of "ideology."
Actually our historical judgments, when carefully
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES n
analyzed, reveal a bewildering compound of uncon-
scious ignorance and conscious rationalization of selfish
interests. If we think that the second world war was
fought for the sake of achieving an "American cen-
tury," that judgment (which is incidentally remark-
ably similar to the Messianic errors castigated by
Christ) is partly derived from the limited perspective
of Americans, who naturally look at the world from
an American vantage point. But it is also partly de-
rived from a conscious American pride and will-to-
power which would bring the world under American
domination.
If a woman underestimates the beauty of a rival
that is an error in judgment which can not be cor-
rected by, let us say, a course in aesthetics. Per-
sonal jealousies weigh more heavily in such judgments
than purely intellectual estimates of beauty. In the
treason trial of Marshal Petain, the Marshal claimed
that he was honestly seeking to preserve France in a
difficult situation, while his enemies maintained that
he used the catastrophe which befell his nation to fur-
ther personal ambitions, conceived long before. Some
witnesses hesitated to charge the defendant with con-
scious treason ; and insisted only that his actions, what-
ever his motives, were detrimental to the interests of
his nation. This restraint was commendable even
though the weight of evidence was on the side of those
who charged a conscious advancement of personal
ambition. The restraint was justified because the mix-
12 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
ture of motives in any person is so complex and
bewildering that none of us can be certain about any
judgments which pretend to search the secret of men's
hearts. We can not even be certain about our judg-
ments of our own motives, perhaps least of all about
our own. Since we usually do not deceive others with-
out also deceiving ourselves, our motives are fre-
quently "honest" after we have dishonestly con-
structed the imposing facade of ideal intentions.
The awful evils which arise from race prejudice
are regarded by some observers as a form of conscious
perversity, and by others as the consequence of mere
ignorance. When race prejudice is fully conceived it
brings forth the most terrible cruelties. These cruel-
ties would seem to justify the theory of a consciously
perverse race pride. Yet the soil out of which they
spring is no different in kind than that which nourishes
the seemingly harmless false judgments about the
virtues and vices of other groups which one meets at
practically every dinner conversation. Race pride is
actually derived from a mixture of ignorance and
anxiety. We judge the other race falsely because we
ignorantly make the partial and particular standards
of our own group into the final criteria of beauty,
virtue or truth. We also judge it falsely because we
fear the competitive threat of the other group and
seek to discount it.
The combination of ignorance and dishonesty,
which determines the composition of our social
prejudices, is occasioned by the fact that all men are
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 13
creatures of limited perspectives and yet are also free
spirits who have some knowledge of the larger frame
of reference in which their judgment and their inter-
est are not the center of the scheme of things. Our
anxieties as weak creatures in competition with other
forms of life prompt us to advance our own interests.
Our strength as rational and spiritual creatures en-
ables us to advance these interests beyond their right-
ful range. Our further capacity to recognize the in-
validity of these claims means that we must, with
some degree of conscious dishonesty, hide our special
interests and claims, and merge them with the more
universal and general interests.
Thus it is that every party claim and every national
judgment, every racial and religious prejudice, and
every private estimate of the interests and virtues of
other men, is something more and something less than
a purely intellectual judgment. From the simplest
judgment of our rival and competitor to the most
ultimate judgment about the character of human his-
tory and the manner of its final fulfillment, we are
tempted to error by our anxieties and our pride; and
we seek to hide the error by pretension. We can not
discern the signs of the times because we are hypo-
crites.
Ill
The achievement of a decent measure of honesty
in our judgment of our fellowmen, and in our esti-
i 4 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
mate of the meaning of the human drama in which we
are involved, is therefore something else than a mere
intellectual achievement. It is a religious achievement
which requires that the human tendency to claim a
final position of judgment, though we are interested
participants of the drama, must be overcome. The
lurking dishonesty of our judgments by which we
hide our own interests in our pretended devotion to
the general welfare must be searched out. The im-
plicit indolatry, by which we usurp a more central
position in the scheme of things, must be judged. The
fact that the real solution of the problem is to tri-
umph over the temptation to idolatry proves that the
issue which confronts us has a religious dimension. It
can not be solved by ordinary moral idealism 3 for that
always degenerates into self-righteousness. It can be
solved only by religious contrition. The prayer of the
Psalmist: "Search me, O God, and know my heart:
try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be
any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way ever-
lasting" measures the dimension in which our self-
judgments must take place. We must recognize that
only a divine judgment, more final than our own,
can complete the whole structure of meaning in which
we are involved; and can discern the hidden dishon-
esties by which we claim a false finality for our various
interested positions in the drama. To ask God to "see
if there be any wicked way in me" is to admit the
partly conscious and partly unconscious character of
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 15
the dishonesty of our judgments. If we were not
partly conscious of them we would not be prompted
to the desire for a searching of the heart from beyond
ourself . If we were fully conscious of them we would
not require that God "see if there be any wicked way
in me." We know and yet we do not know how dis-
honest we are. In the moment of prayer in which we
become more fully conscious of the dishonesty of our
judgments, we also achieve a fuller measure of hon-
esty. Out of the humility of prayer grows the charity
for comrade and foe. The recognition that we all
stand under a more ultimate bar of judgment miti-
gates the fury of our self -righteousness and partly
dissolves the wickedness of our dishonest preten-
sions.
We do not know the God who judges us except by
faith. As Christians we have by faith accepted the
revelation of His will and purpose in the love of
Christ. We therefore know the criterion of His judg-
ments to be that love. We know that all forms of self-
seeking, even the most subtle, fall short of that
standard. But we must not claim too much for our
knowledge of God and of His judgments. When we
do, we merely make God the ally of our interested
position in the scheme of things. Christian faith must
contritely admit that the Christian, as well as every
other religion, has frequently accentuated the fury of
party conflict and increased the measure of human
pretensions. It has done this to such a degree that
i6 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
secular idealists who strive for intellectual disinter-
estedness and impartiality have sometimes shamed
the community of the faithful and have introduced
more charity into the human community than they.
These idealists have been prompted to deny the reli-
gious solution of this problem because they have so
frequently observed religious emotion accentuating,
rather than mitigating, the idolatry of man.
The secularists and the faithful alike usually fail
to see that religion as such is no cure for human pride
and pretension. It is the final battleground between
pride and humility. There is no form of the Christian
faith, no matter how profound its insights about the
finiteness and sinfulness of man and the majesty of
God, which can prevent some devotees of that faith
from using it to claim God too simply as the ally of
this or that human enterprise and as the justification
for this or that partial human judgment. But these
terrible aberrations of faith also can not invalidate the
truth of the final insight of Christian faith in which
the God is recognized who stands above (and in some
sense against) all human judgments 5 who judges us
even while we judge our foe; who completes the
drama of history which we always complete falsely
because we make ourselves, our culture, and our
nation, the premature center of its completion.
St. Paul perfectly expresses this humility of faith
in the words: "With me it is a very small thing that I
should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yea,
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 17
I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing by
myself } yet am I not hereby justified: but he that
judgeth me is the Lord." * The sense of a divine judg-
ment beyond all human judgments is rightly appre-
hended by St. Paul as having a double edge. To find it
"a very small thing" to be judged of men means that
we recognize the provisional and interested character
of judgments which are made against, or for, us by
others. We will therefore not be swollen by pride
because others think well of us. We will remember
that they do not know the secret of our hearts. Per-
haps they have been taken in too easily by our dis-
honest pretensions. Neither will we take their dis-
approval too seriously. The sense of a more ultimate
judgment arms us with the courage to defy the false
judgments of the community. The idea that our con-
science is purely a social and sociological product is
ridiculous in view of the fact that the power of con-
science has always been most perfectly expressed when
men have defied the mediocre or perverse standards
of a given community in the name of a religiously
apprehended higher standard. The most fruitful re-
source for the defiance of tyranny has always been the
faith which could declare, "We must obey God rather
than man."
But the other edge of the faith which discerns a
divine judgment beyond our own is directed against
the estimates which we make of ourselves, rather than
1 l Cor. .4:3.4.
i8 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
against those made of us by others. "I know nothing
by myself," declares St. Paul, a y et am l not hereby
justified." We do of course frequently know some-
thing against ourselves. We judge the action of yester-
day wrong in the contrite contemplation of today.
But if that should give us an uneasy conscience we
may regain our self-respect by the observation that
what we are today must be virtuous; otherwise we
could not have found the action of yesterday contrary
to virtue. Thus we never know anything against our-
selves ultimately. The self is always righteous in its
self -analysis and secure in its self-esteem until it feels
itself under a more ultimate judgment than its own.
Most of us are constitutionally self-righteous as we
' contend with and against our f ellowmen in the great
contests of life. We never know anything against our-
selves. The only moments in which the self -righteous-
ness is broken are moments of genuine prayer. Yet
something of that broken spirit and contrite heart can
be carried into the contests of life. If this is done the
dishonesties and pretensions which color all our social
and historical judgments can be mitigated. We can
moderate the hypocrisy which prevents us from dis-
cerning the "signs of the times." A measure of charity
is insinuated into our judgments of other groups and
nations. The condemnation of even a wicked foe is
made in "fear and trembling" because we know that
even that judgment stands under a more ultimate one.
And by that fear and trembling our righteous wrath
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES 19
is saved from degenerating into self-righteous vin-
dictiveness.
This religious humility is also the final source of a
truer comprehension of the whole human enterprise.
It saves us from expecting a Messiah who will com-
plete history by preferring us to our enemies, or by
helping us to achieve an American or Anglo-Saxon
century, or possibly a Russian one. The errors and
hypocrisies which creep into our various historical
judgments always finally culminate in an erroneous
conception of the meaning of history and of history's
fulfillment. Both the historical conceptions of bour-
geois liberalism and of Marxist utopianism are in-
volved in errors, similar to those which Christ casti-
gated in his day. They assumed that history would
culminate in either the triumph of the bourgeois
classes over their aristocratic foes 5 or in the triumph
of the proletarian classes over their middle-class foes.
Actually both the middle classes and the workers have
been significant bearers of justice in history. They
would have been, and would be, more perfect instru-
ments of justice if they had not been tempted to re-
gard themselves as the final judges and the final
redeemers of history. Because of that lack of humility
and that new form of pretension, they introduced new
forms of injustice into history in the very attempt of
abolishing old ones. Other Messianic classes and na-
tions will make the same mistake. That is why the
mystery of history can not be resolved except in the
20 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
divine mercy. And that mercy can only be compre-
hended and apprehended by those who acknowledge
that all classes and groups, all cultures and nations,
are tainted with hypocrisy in their judgment of the
contestants in and of the whole drama of history.
The wisdom by which we deal with our f ellowmen,
either as comrades or competitors, is not so much an
intellectual achievement as the fruit of a humility
which is gained by prayer. The faith through which
we understand the meaning of our existence and the
fulfillment of that meaning in the divine mercy is,
ultimately, a gift of grace and not the consequence
of a sophisticated analysis of the signs of the times.
We are not merely minds but total personalities. We
can deal with immediate issues as minds. But we deal
with all ultimate issues as personalities. And we deal
with them truly only if not the ignorance of the mind
but the pride of the heart has been vanquished.
II
ANGER AND FORGIVENESS
"Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go
down uj>on your wrath: Neither give place to the
devil" Eph. 4:26-27.
A,
LNGER is the root of both righteousness and sin.
We are aroused to anger when men take advantage o
us or of those for whom we are concerned 5 when they
violate the dignity of man ; or when they commit some
other flagrant wrong. We are angry in the presence of
injustice because we are emotional as well as rational
creatures; and we react in the wholeness of our char-
acter to evil. Only a perversely detached person can
view the commitment of a wrong without anger, and
only a morally callous and indifferent person contem-
plates evil-doing without emotion.
Yet anger is also the root of much evil. Our emo-
tions are more personal and less detached than our
reason. We are inclined to be very unfair when we
are angry. If we repay hurt for hurt in anger, we
21
22 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
usually repay with very heavy interest. One of the
first problems of primitive society was to place some
restraints upon vengeance. These restraints gradually
grew into the juridical procedure of modern society^
in which the community as such assumes responsibility
both for restraining the victim and punishing the
criminal. It has long been recognized that justice is
not served when men are "judges in their own case."
The total community has a more detached perspective
upon the disputes between citizens and upon the
wrong which one may do the other than have the
parties to the dispute. Thus we have found a social
method of eliminating some of the evil which flows
from anger. Yet we continue to face the residual prob-
lem of being angry without sinning.
One source of sin in anger lies in the selfish narrow-
ness of our emotions. We are more angry about the
hurt done us than that done to others; and we are
tempted to repay the hurt twofold, because we over-
estimate its seriousness. Thus anger brings forth ven-
geance, which is the egoistic corruption of the sense
of justice. All communal schemes of justice have
developed through the effort to eliminate the vin-
dictive and egoistic corruption of anger, so that it
might bring forth a purer justice.
The second corrupt fruit of anger is hatred. Hatred
is the consequence of the persistence of anger. In
hatred rational perspectives are falsely mixed with
emotion. Emotions are passing; and their fleeting
character may sometimes occasion a lack of moral
ANGER AND FORGIVENESS 23
resolution. But on the other hand it is salutary when
the emotion of anger is ephemeral. If we begin to
brood about the wrong which has been done us, the
emotion of anger hardens into hatred of the wrong-
doer. That is why St. Paul, in the words of our text,
immediately adds to the admonition "Be ye angry,
and sin not" the words "Let not the sun go down
upon your wrath."
One of the blessings of childhood is the shortness
of the child's memory. When their elders do not inter-
fere in the quarrels of their children, the latter usually
follow the Scriptural injunction "Let not the sun go
down upon your wrath." But the memory of older peo-
ple, and particularly the collective memory of nations,
harbors anger over past wrongs to the point where it
poisons all human relations. Consider, for instance,
the Irish memory of the wrongs which England once
committed as a source of hatred, even after England
has done much to atone for past wrongs ; or the mem-
ories in our own south of Sherman's march to the sea;
or the bitter memories of all vanquished people. One
of the tragic aspects of human history is the fact that
the vanquished have longer memories than the victors.
The victors could profitably have longer memories
and the vanquished shorter ones.
II
The biblical viewpoint which inspires the admoni-
tion, "Be ye angry, and sin not" must be distinguished
24 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
from all forms of highly rationalized morality which
regard the emotions aroused in the struggles of
life as in themselves evil. Their approach could
be epitomized in the admonition: "Be not angry
so that you may not sin." They seek for a position of
detachment from the controversies and passions of life.
The Stoic attitude toward all passions and emotions is
the classic example of this kind of morality. The diffi-
culty with this rationalism is that we are constitu-
tionally creatures of passion and will, as well as of
intellect; and we are inevitably and responsibly in-
volved in the disputes and controversies of life as
participants. The depreciation of emotion destroys
our generous, as well as our hateful, passions. A posi-
tion of detachment destroys our responsibilities in life's
controversies for the sake of avoiding sinful corrup-
tions of those responsibilities. We ought to be angry
when wrong is done; but we must learn the difficult
art of being angry without sinning.
"When a person does ill by you," declared the
Stoic saint, Epictetus, "or speaks ill of you, remember
that he acts or speaks from a supposition of doing his
duty. . . . Setting out from these principles, you
will meekly bear a person who reviles you 5 for you
will say upon every occasion, c lt seemed so to him.' " x
One need only suggest such advice to, let us say, a
Pole in a German concentration camp to realize that
there is something wrong with it. It is very good
1 The Enchiridion, XLII.
ANGER AND FORGIVENESS 25
advice in dealing with all sorts of disputes and con-
flicts in which both disputants are equally honest and
well-intentioned. In such cases it is valuable to try to
place oneself in the position of the other in order to
mitigate the tendency of regarding any position, in
conflict with one's own, as wrong. But when real evil
is done such detachment is immoral. The proper atti-
tude toward evil is anger.
The cure of the sin in anger is not an emotional
detachment from the issues of life. It is rather an
attitude of humility which recognizes the constant
temptation to sinful and egoistic corruption in our
anger. We can not disavow our responsibilities in the
struggles of life 5 and every effort to find a vantage
point of pure objectivity and. impartiality in such
struggles tends to a disavowal of responsibilities. But
we must school ourselves to realize that we are par-
ticipants, and not detached observers, so that we will
not regard our judgment of the foe as a purely dis-
interested judgment. The root of forgiveness toward
the foe lies not in the supposition that he did right in
his own sight, as Epictetus suggests; but rather in the
recognition of the mutuality of guilt which finally
produced the explicit evil against which our anger is
aroused.
In the early days of the war with Germany and
Japan there were high-minded people who mistook
the detachment of Epictetus for the Christian idea of
forgiveness. Either they tried to deny that the evil
26 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
which the Nazis committed was as evil as it seemed,
or they insisted that our own position was so tainted
with evil that we had no right to resist the evil of
tyranny. Such passionless forms of idealism obscure
the fact that all decencies in human history have been
won by comparatively just men, though themselves
tainted with some form of the corruption which
aroused their anger, proceeding against flagrant in-
justice. In times when we seek to evade our respon-
sibilities in the name of a high-minded idealism, it is
important to emphasize the righteousness of the anger
which injustice arouses, and the rightfulness of har-
nessing that anger in proceeding against the foe.
But when the foe has been vanquished and the im-
mediate peril of the evil he incarnated has been over-
come, it is necessary to emphasize the other aspect of
the problem. How little victors seem conscious of the
taint of evil in their good, of their share in the evil
against which they have fought; of the temptation to
pride in their victory and the corruption of vindic-
tiveness in their anger! How quickly they forget the
scruples which tempted them to evade their duty in
the hour of danger! See how simply the victorious na-
tions speak of the difference between "peace-loving"
nations and those who break the peace! Notice how
they tend to obscure the fact that the peace of the
future depends upon the moderation of the pride of
each victor so that they may attain a decent accord
with each other. Instead they would make it appear
ANGER AND FORGIVENESS 27
that if only the vanquished foe may remain perma-
nently humbled and maimed, no threat to the world's
peace can arise. The tendency to identify our relative
justice with ultimate justice, and to regard the foe as
congenitally evil, is one of the terrible fruits of the
anger which warfare arouses* There is an awful blind-
ness in such anger.
We can trace the baleful consequences of this blind-
ness in personal feuds between individuals. But both
the blindness and the consequences are even more
marked in the collective life of mankind. There is,
for one thing, no relatively impartial court to arbi-
trate the disputes of nations ; and there may not be
for a long time to come. Nations are always judges in
their own case. The pretension of victors that they
are impartial judges is one of the most fruitful sources
of vindictiveness. For thus the egoistic corruptions of
justice are obscured, except of course to the van-
quished. If the vanquished react with cynicism to
these pretensions, their natural response is immedi-
ately regarded as a further proof of their congenital
wickedness.
Any fairly i astute observer may discern how the
power impulse of this particular victorious nation, and
the pride and anxiety of that one, and the special
vanity or "point of honor 3 ' of another, is the real
cause of this particular boundary line or that special
measure, ostensibly designed merely to exact just
punishment of the vanquished nation and prevent its
28 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
future aggression. The victors and judges are so ob-
viously interested parties in a great historical dispute j
and yet they pretend so transparently to be merely
the executors of a divine judgment. The less they be-
lieve in a divine judgment which "maketh the judges
of the earth as vanity," the more inclined they are to
usurp the position of divinity.
Another cause of special temptation to sin in the
judgment of nations is the difficulty of dealing with
the complexity of guilt and innocency in the nation
which has transgressed against the laws of justice.
No one can deny that when a nation is corrupted, as
for instance Nazi Germany was, the corruption is
partly due to the lack of civic virtue of many citizens
who are otherwise untainted by the explicit form of
the evil which the nation incarnates 5 and that the con-
sequences of the evil affects even the most healthy
parts of the body politic. Yet, on the other hand, there
are always elements in even the most evil nation
which have withstood that evil more heroically, be-
cause they withstood it at closer quarters than the
righteous and self-righteous members of the victori-
ous nations. But these complexities, including in ad-
dition the endless gradations of guilt and innocency
which lie between the overt evil-doers and those who
overtly resisted them, are obscured by the blindness
of vindictiveness. Even at best, collective guilt can not
be punished without involving many innocent. The
self-appointed judges of nations ought to have a de-
ANGER AND FORGIVENESS 29
cent sense of pity for those innocently involved in
collective punishment. Instead there is a general dis-
position to deny the gradations of guilt and to insist
upon the total corruption of the enemy, both quali-
tatively and quantitatively. Such is the blindness of
anger when it brings forth the sin of vindictiveness.
There are those who think it is possible to trace a
neat dividing line between justice and vengeance 5
and to avoid the sin of vengeance by these nice dis-
tinctions. But rational distinctions alone do not have
the power to hold the selfish impulses in check which
corrupt justice and transmute it into vengeance. Un-
less we exact retribution upon the vanquished foe with
"fear and trembling/ 3 that is, with a consciousness of
the precarious and dangerous position of our role as
judges, and unless we have some sense of a more ulti-
mate and divine judgment, under which both the
righteous and the unrighteous are found guilty, our
best attempts at justice will still be tainted by vindic-
tiveness. The avoidance of sin in anger is not achieved
by a position of detachment but by a recognition of
the partisan and partial character of our actions and
of the majesty of the divine judgment above all
our judgments. Since it is difficult to know whether
nations as such ever have any sense of a judgment
beyond their own, it is a question whether victorious
nations can achieve that degree of humility which
would prevent anger from turning into vengeance.
It is apparent, at any rate, that some of the endless
30 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
chain of evil in the history of warfare to the very
present moment is due to the fact that collective man
does not seem to rise above himself to the point where
he senses a judgment beyond himself. Nations are, in
other words, constitutionally self-righteous. Yet there
is always a possibility that a minority within the nation
is able to mediate the divine judgment upon the
nation. This was the function of the "saving remnant"
in the thought of the prophets. Ideally it is the func-
tion of the Church to be the saving remnant of the
nation today. But the Church must recognize that
there are sensitive secular elements within modern
nations, who, though they deny the reality of a divine
judgment, are nevertheless frequently more aware of
the perils of national pride than many members of the
Church. Whatever the source of the moral and reli-
gious insight which sets a final bound to the immense
self-assurance of nations, particularly of victorious
nations, it is important that this insight act as a leaven
within national communities. Otherwise the pride and
vengeance of nations know no bounds ; and vindic-
tive passion dictates terms to the vanquished which
approach the morality of the foe and make his re-
pentance impossible.
Ill
Anger mixed with egotism produces vengeance.
Anger mixed with memory and foresight produces
ANGER AND FORGIVENESS 31
hatred. The injunction, "Let not the sun go down
upon your wrath," arises from very profound con-
siderations, however impractical and impossible it may
be to follow the injunction literally. Confronted with
a positive evil we properly react in anger 5 and there
is no possibility of distinguishing fully between the
evil and the evil-doer. The advice to hate evil and
love the evil-doer is not altogether sound morally;
and is also psychologically difficult. It is based upon
the supposition that the evil-doer has been prompted
merely by ignorance and not by malice. Yet a very
great deal of evil is done in malice; and the proper
reaction of anger must include the doer as well as
the deed.
But the fact that the doer is positively implicated
in the evil which he does gives rise to the temptation
to identify him too absolutely with the evil. Every
war prompts theories of total depravity in the foe. In
the past war such theories reached a higher degree of
plausibility than ever before, because the malice of
the Nazi foe exceeded all previous bounds. Yet these
theories are never just. The admonition not to let the
sun go down upon our wrath means that the evil deed
which has aroused our anger must not be regarded as
the complete revelation of the moral resources of the
foe. Permanent anger hardens into hatred of the foe;
and such hatred assumes that the foe is as evil as his
deed.
There are indeed criminals so far past redemption,
32 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
at least from the perspective of human society, that
we Incarcerate them for life or kill them. Some indi-
viduals, implicated in collective guilt, as for instance
the Nazi leaders in the past war, must be treated as
society has always treated its most hopeless criminals.
But the guilt of a national society is no more absolute
than the guilt of any ordinary transgressor against the
laws of society. There is a labyrinth of motives in
every heart; and every action, both good and evil, is
the consequence of a complicated debate and tension
between various tendencies within the soul. Sometimes
the most evil deed issues from a character less evil
than those who have perpetrated a less overt crime.
It is a well-known fact that the murderers' row in a
prison frequently contains the best class of the prison's
inmates. Their crime was frequently prompted by a
momentary passion or fit of desperation, and pro-
ceeded from less malice than other ostensibly less
serious crimes.
The secret debate of motives in the heart of an
individual becomes, in the case of the actions of a
nation, a public debate in the moral life of a com-
munity. A community must, of course, be corrupt in
many ways to desire a tyrannical government such as
many of the German people desired; and it must be
weak in various ways not to be able to resist the tyrant
successfully. Yet the whole tragic decay of a culture
and civilization which finally issued in the overt evil
of Nazism is not the proof of the total depravity of a
ANGER AND FORGIVENESS 33
people. The hatred which the world has conceived
against Germany is natural and inevitable enough.
Yet it is not -just j and it will sow the seeds of many
future evils in our common life. It is important to
resist evil in the immediate instance j but it is also wise
not to allow the memory of the evil to poison all
future relationships. The admonition, "Let not the
sun go down upon your wrath," may be too rigorous
to be obeyed literally. But the general intention be-
hind the advice is sound. The more the heats and
passions of conflict abate, the more terrible becomes
the calculated hatred which preserves the viewpoints
of the day of battle into the days of peace.
We must finally be reconciled with our foe, lest
we both perish in the vicious circle of hatred. To this
reconciliation belongs a f orgetfulness of the past which
gives the foe a chance to prove the better resources of
his life.
It will, of course, be argued that such f orgetfulness
of past crimes is irresponsible. It fails to consider the
duty of every society to punish crime and to protect
the community from future violations of its laws and
securities. It is true that the admonition, taken liter-
ally, disavows the foresight and care which the com-
munity must exercise. Crimes must be punished both
for the sake of convincing the criminal that the im-
mediate advantages of his crime are outweighed by its
ultimate consequences ; and for the sake of deterring
similar acts in the future.
34 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Yet the efficacy of punishment is constantly over-
estimated. No criminal is ever brought to repentance
by punishment alone. In penology, dealing with indi-
viduals, society has learned by painful experience that
severity of punishment guarantees neither repentance
of the criminal nor the deterrence of others who might
be tempted to a similar crime. Therefore, thoughtful
forms of penology, designed to reconstruct the crim-
inal by discovering the residual moral health in his
character, have gradually replaced the more ruth-
less forms of punishment. All of these are in a sense
applications of the injunction, "Let not the sun go
down upon your wrath," for the realization of the
limited efficacy of punishment implies a recognition
of the short-range power of anger. Anger against evil
is the necessary immediate reaction; but long-range
considerations require that anger be abated in order
that we may, in soberness of spirit, seek the best means
of restoring the evil-doer to moral health.
The injunction, "Let not the sun go down upon
your wrath," achieves a special relevance in a war
in which the immediate consequences of our wrath
against immediate wrong have contrived a more ter-
rible punishment than we could have consciously de-
vised. The cities of Japan and Germany lie in ruins.
Highly industrialized communities have been reduced
to the simplicities and privations of primitive society.
Mighty cities are mere heaps of rubble. If the wicked-
ness of modern aggressor nations has been more ter-
ANGER AND FORGIVENESS 35
rible than previous violations of justice, so also is the
punishment more terrible which total defeat in a total
war entails.
This punishment may not incline the heart of the
foe to repentance 5 but if it does not, no calculated
increase of the punishment will. The conferences of
the victorious great powers, solemnly deciding to hold
the victors completely in the chains of an indefinite
occupation, and seeking by mere punishrftent both to
turn the heart of the foe to repentance and to maim
his power sufficiently to make him incapable of future
wrong-doing, present us with the most pathetic sym-
bols of the vainglory of man. How easily we assume
the position of the Almighty, in both our sense of
power and our sense of justice. How little we realize
that the two objects of punishment to maim the
power of the foe and to turn his heart to repentance
are incompatible. If we accomplish the one, we can not
achieve the other. How completely we fail to recog-
nize that the sword of the victor is a very confusing
symbol of the divine justice under which alone re-
pentance is possible! Our cause was just enough in the
immediate instance. But our effort to draw upon the
prestige of that justice for untold years transmutes
justice into injustice. If only we could understand the
wisdom of not letting the sun go down upon our
wrath.
Efforts to prolong judgment and punishment
indefinitely spring from a failure to recognize our
36 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
limitations as creatures and as interested participants
in the struggles o life. They are informed, by man's
most fruitful source of sin: his pretensions to a power
and a goodness which men do not possess. Thus the
effort to maim a foe, so that he will not hurt us again,
may incite him to a fury of resentment upon which we
did not calculate; and in his fury he may be prompted
to the ingenuity of inventing other weapons for those
we have taken from him. And the effort to become the
permanent judges of the vanquished becomes increas-
ingly subject to the challenge of cynicism. If the com-
munity of nations had genuine instruments of juridi-
cal impartiality, these evils could be mitigated. But
the international instruments we have do not approach
the impartiality of the courts of our long-established
national communities. They are, and will remain for
a long time, the instruments of the power of victors.
They do not have the resources to mitigate the pride
of victors in the name and the power of a higher
justice,
One of the profoundest insights of the Hebraic
prophets was their conception of the various nations
of the world acting as the executors of divine judg-
ment. Yet each of the nations was itself finally brought
under the same divine judgment of which it had been
the executor. The reason for this change was always
the same. The nations assumed that their special mis-
sion under divine providence gave them some special
security, or proved that they possessed some special
ANGER AND FORGIVENESS 37
virtue. They were, in short, tempted to pretension by
the very success o their mission 5 and thus came in
turn under divine judgment.
They failed to recognize the limited character of
all human missions and the short run of all "manifest
destinies." This prophetic interpretation of historical
events springs from the same wisdom which prompts
the injunction, "Let not the sun go down upon your
wrath." The wrath of the righteous man against in-
justice is an engine of virtue in a given moment. But
if it is unduly prolonged and proudly seeks to clothe
itself in the garments of divine justice, its very pre-
tensions become the source of a new injustice. Man
is a creature of the day and hour. Since he also has the
capacity to transcend days and hours and look into the
past for lessons and into the future for promises and
perils, it is neither possible nor right to limit him to
the day and hour. Yet the biblical injunction, "Let
not the sun go down upon your wrath," just as the
warning, "Take therefore no thought for the mor-
row," are essentially right, though not literally ob-
servable. They are warnings to men not to forget the
limited character of their insight into the future, and
the partial character of their justice, and the short-
range virtue of their anger.
We are called upon again and again to be executors
of divine judgment. But in the ultimate sense another
word of St. Paul, springing from the same wisdom of
faith which prompted the words of our text, is true:
38 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
"Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather
give place unto wrath: for it is written. Vengeance is
mine 5 I will repay, saith the Lord." 1
These words are not only ultimately true but espe-
cially relevant at the end of a great conflict in which
the vengeance of God upon evil-doers has been more
terrible than any which human calculation could have
devised.
1 Rom. 12:19.
Ill
THE AGE BETWEEN THE AGES
"Thus saith Hezekiah> This day Is a day of
trouble^ and of rebuke y and blasphemy: for the
children are come to the birth y and there is not
strength to bring forth" II Kings 19:3.
JLHESE pessimistic words were spoken by Hezekiah,
King of Judah, when he faced a crisis in Judah's rela-
tion with Assyria and was threatened with defeat and
enslavement by the great power. The words -are as
applicable to our own day as to his. We are living in
an age between the ages in which children are coming
to birth, but there is not strength to bring forth. We
can see clearly what ought to be done to bring order
and peace into the lives of the nations j but we do not
have the strength to do what we ought. A few hardy
optimists imagine that the end of the second world
war represents the end of our troubles $ and that the
world is now firmly set upon the path of peace. Yet it
does not require a very profound survey of the avail-
able historical resources to realize that our day of
trouble is not overj that in fact this generation of
39
40 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
mankind is destined to live in a tragic era between two
ages. It is an era when "one age is dead and the other
is powerless to be born." The age of absolute national
sovereignty is over j but the age of international order
under political instruments, powerful enough to regu-
late the relations of nations and to compose their com-
peting desires, is not yet born. The age of "free
enterprise/' when the new vitalities of a technical
civilization were expected to. regulate themselves, is
also oven But the age in which justice is to be
achieved, and yet freedom maintained, by a wise regu-
lation of the complex economic interdependence of
modern man, is powerless to be born.
I
The lack of "strength to bring forth" a newly con-
ceived life, ordained to birth, is a significant weakness
of human life not shared by the animals. In animal
existence there are always instinctive and vital re-
sources sufficient for every necessary process, includ-
ing the generative one. Animals bring forth easily,
giving birth with little pain, as they die without fear.
Human beings are born in pain 3 and frequently the
strength to bring forth must be augmented by all
kinds of obstetrical aid. The special difficulties of
human birth were matters of observation at a very
early date in human history and in the story of the
Fall in the book of Genesis the pains of childbirth are
AGE BETWEEN THE AGES 41
interpreted as God's curse upon the sinful Eve: "In
sorrow shalt thou bring forth children." There is a
profound truth in this myth even though we would
not now regard the pains of birth as an explicit punish-
ment of sin. The truth in the myth is that human life
distinguishes itself from animal existence by its greater
freedom and the consequent possibility of the misuse
of freedom. Though the biological processes in man
are prompted by instinct, as in animal life, only a few
of them are purely instinctive. Generally an area of
freedom is left open, where the human will is fused
with the instincts of nature. Thus man's sexual life is
not limited to the procreative process, but can, by
imagination and will, become the source of a wider
spiritual and artistic creativity, and also of a destruc-
tive perversity.
In the same way the process of birth is not com-
pleted by purely instinctive power. It is more painful
than animal birth, partly because of physiological
reasons, which are, however, related to man's unique-
ness in the animal world the size of the human in-
fant's head, for instance. Being more painful, it can
be evaded and avoided, for human freedom has now
contrived methods of arresting the natural process of
procreation. If it is not avoided, the human will, as
well as obstetrical devices, must aid and abet the
instinctive forces of nature to create the strength to
bring forth. A noted gynecologist once observed that
the power to bring forth in the human mother con-
42 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
tained a bewildering mixture of spiritual and natural
elements. Among the spiritual elements, the fear of
death in the mother was marvellously compounded
with the desire to bring forth life.
Yet physical birth in human beings is sufficiently
close to nature to proceed, on the whole, by nature's
laws and forces. It is when men deal with the organ-
isms of their social existence, with their political and
economic and cultural institutions, that the pains of
birth and the lack of strength to bring forth becomes
more fully apparent. All social institutions are partly
subject to nature. In the early stages of human exist-
ence, at least, they are born, they grow, and die with
only slight interventions of the human will. But as
these institutions become more and more the creations
of the mind and will, their birth and death are in-
creasingly subject to the defects of the will. Modern
social institutions are the artifact of the warrior's
prowess, the statesman's skill and the community's
imagination. With this development the hiatus be-
tween the social task, made urgent by historic develop-
ment, and the moral power required to do what ought
to be done, continually widens.
The fact that world-wide economic and technical
interdependence between the nations makes a world-
wide system of justice necessary is so obvious that
even the most casual observers have become convinced
of it. At the beginning of this century, before two
world wars had chastened the mood of our culture, it
AGE BETWEEN THE AGES 43
was assumed that the comprehension of an historic
task would guarantee its achievement. Since then we
have learned that a potential world community may
announce itself in history through world conflicts 5
and that some of the very instruments which were to
guarantee the achievement of world-wide community
could be used to sharpen conflict and give it global
dimensions.
But even now we are not ready to measure the full
depth of the problem of man's lack of strength to
bring forth the historical new-birth required in a new
age. The lack of strength to bring forth is usually
interpreted as the consequence of a natural or cultural
"lag." The common theory is that the mind is more
daring and free in its comprehension of historical tasks
than are the emotional and volitional forces which
furnish the strength to do. Natural passions and cul-
tural institutions supposedly offer a force of inertia
against the more inclusive tasks which the mind en-
visages.
This idea of a cultural lag is plausible enough, and
partly true. But it does not represent the whole truth
about the defect of our will. It obscures the positive
and spiritual element in our resistance to necessary
change. The lower and narrower loyalties which stand
against the newer and wider loyalties are armed not
merely with the force of natural inertia, but with the
guile of spirit and the stubbornness of all forms of
idolatry in human history.
44 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
II
Consider, for instance, the position of the great
powers in the present world arrangements. Three
great powers have achieved a dominant position in the
world j and the charter of the new world organization
gives them an explicit hegemony in world affairs. The
new world charter speaks loftily of this arrangement
as one in which the nations of the world "confer upon
the Security Council [which is the organ of the great
nations] primary responsibility for the maintenance of
international peace and security." Everyone knows
that the smaller nations have not willingly conferred
such broad powers upon the great nations. The great
nations have assumed their rights and powers. They
alone wrote the first draft of the present world char-
ter, which the smaller nations tried vainly to amend
in principle though they succeeded in circumscribing
the authority of the great powers in some details.
It is also obvious that the great nations are not
absolutely single-minded in their desire to maintain
the peace of the world. They undoubtedly desire to
do so 5 but each also desires to preserve or enhance its
own power and influence. This is the law in their
members which wars against the law that is in their
minds. The great nations are "of two minds." This is
a collective and vivid expression of a general human
situation. The "law in our members" is never merely
AGE BETWEEN THE AGES 45
the inertia of "nature" against the more inclusive
duties which the mind envisages. It is a spiritual force,
compounded of strength and weakness. It is the pride
of the. powerful, not wishing to share their power. It
is also the anxiety of weakness; for even powerful
nations are not as secure as they pretend to be. In their
anxiety they seek to make themselves independently
secure even against their partners in a common world
undertaking} and their very effort to do so partly
destroys the common security which they pretend to
(and in a measure actually do) seek.
All birth in the realm of man's historic institutions
is rebirth. The old self must die in order that the
new self may be born. The new self is a truer self,
precisely because it is more intimately and organically
bound to, and involved in, the life of its partners in
the human enterprise. But the new self, whether in
men or in nations, can not be born if the old self
evades the death of repentance, seeking rather to re-
establish itself in its old security and old isolation. The
tragic events of recent history have proved that old
security to be insecure $ and the old isolation to be
death. There is, therefore, a genuine desire for a new
birth and a wider and more mutual security. But it is
not powerful enough to destroy the other and older
desires. Thus we see the old human drama on a col-
lective and a world scale. If "the strength to bring
forth" is lacking in a new period of history, the lack
is therefore something else than a natural or a oil-
46 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
tural "lag." There is a positive spiritual force in the
power which weakens the will to bring forth.
Whatever our hopes for world peace, we must
realize that our prospective security against inter-
national anarchy is not as good as that of the Pax
Romana. This is not because we are worse than the
Romans were, but simply because there are three
sources of power, rather than one, in the scheme of
order. There are too many possibilities of friction
between the three, and too many justified mutual ap-
prehensions, to permit the hope that their combined
power will give the world an island of order from
which to operate against the sea of international
anarchy.
Even if the great powers, which have primary
responsibility for world order, were more perfectly
agreed than they are, we would still face the prob-
lem of transmuting the order, which their authority
achieves, into genuine justice. The first task of gov-
ernment is to create order by preponderant power.
The second task is to create justice. Justice requires
that there be some inner and moral checks upon the
wielders of power 5 and that the community also place
some social checks upon them. Neither the inner
moral checks, nor the outer social and political checks,
are sufficient by themselves. Men are never good
enough to wield power over their fellowmen, what-
ever inner checks of conscience may operate in them,
without also being subject to outer and social checks.
The great powers in the present world situation
AGE BETWEEN THE AGES 47
have seen to it that these social and political checks
are minimal. Neither the smaller powers nor the sub-
ject peoples have been given constitutional instru-
ments adequate for the achievement of genuine jus-
tice. The great powers pretend that these checks are
not necessary because they, the great powers, are
"peace-loving" and just. This is somewhat analogous
to the pretensions of absolute monarchs of another age
who claimed that they were responsible only to God,
and not to their fellowmen. Then, as now, it was
argued that a wider sharing of responsibility would
encourage anarchy. In both cases there was an element
of truth in the contention. There is indeed a period
in the growth of both national and international com-
munities in which the constitutional instruments, and
the organic sources of social harmony, are not ade-
quate for the achievement of harmony, except upon
an absolutistic basis. But in both cases the wielders of
power tend to obscure the egoistic corruptions of their
sense of responsibility. Ages of international consti-
tutional struggles must intervene before the centers
of power in the international community are brought
under the same adequate checks which now exist in
democratic communities. This struggle will be a long
and tortuous one, partly because the self-righteous-
ness of the great powers will resist the efforts at
greater justice. This self-righteousness is no natural
force of inertia. It is a spiritual force. Self-righteous-
ness is one of the oldest and most persistent forms of
human sin. In it the human spirit seeks to obscure the
48 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
partly conscious sense of being involved in universal
human sin; just as the lust for power seeks to over-
come the partly acknowledged social and historic in-
security.
Our recent experience with a very explicit and
demonic form of national egotism and imperialism,
in the Nazi state, tends to aggravate these various
forms of national self-righteousness. For the nations
which now bear responsibility for world peace and
justice are obviously more just than were the Nazis.
They are tempted to regard that moral superiority as
adequate for the achievement of justice. Yet there
have been many wielders of power, in both the na-
tional and international community, who have been
better than the Nazi tyrants and yet have not been
just enough to grant real justice to the weak/ The
destruction of the most tyrannical centers of power in
the community, national or international, does not
guarantee justice. It merely creates the minimal con-
ditions under which the struggle for justice may take
place with some hope of success.
The will-to-power of the great nations, which in-
volves them in vicious circles of mutual fears, is a
manifestation of an age-old force in human history.
It accentuates the insecurity which it is intended to
destroy. It is never completely overcome in man's
history 3 but every new communal advance requires
that it be overcome upon a new level of man's com-
mon enterprise. Mutual fears lead so inevitably into
overt conflict that one would suppose that the nations
AGE BETWEEN THE AGES 49
would recognize this danger more clearly, and would
take more explicit steps for a complete international
partnership. The fact that they do not can not be
attributed merely to ignorance or the cultural lag.
There is an element of perversity in this failure to see
the obvious 5 and in the unwillingness to act upon the
facts and implications which are seen. The stupidity
of sin is in this darkness. "They became vain in their
imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened,"
is the way St. Paul describes this fact in human life.
That description fits the international situation exactly.
The self-righteousness of the great powers, in their
pretension that they are safe custodians and protectors
of the rights of small nations and dependent peoples,
is also a "vain imagination. 35 Just as the will-to-power
is intended to overcome the natural insecurity of men
and nations, but actually increases what it would over-
come 5 so also the moral pride of peoples seeks to
obscure their common involvement in the sins of
nations, but actually accentuates what it intends to
hide. Both of these forms of vain imagination con-
tribute to the spiritual impotence which prevents the
necessary next step in the development of the human
community.
There are, of course, special and peculiar forms of
these sins, and special and unique reasons for them,
in the case of particular nations, which exhibit the
general tendency in variable terms. Thus Russia may
have a special form of insecurity, derived from the
dogma in its religion of an inexorable conflict between
50 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
capitalist and communist nations. And its special form
of pride may be rooted in the idea that it is the only
nation which stands on the other side of a revolution,
which, according to its faith, proves that it is purged
of the common sins of other peoples. The simplicity
with which Russia brands any opponents of its policies
as fascists reveals this special form of spiritual pride.
Britain may possess a special form of insecurity be-
cause she is not quite as strong as the two other part-
ners in the hegemony of nations 3 and she may possess
a special form of pride derived from the superior
political astuteness achieved through longer experi-
ence in world relations. The phenomenal economic
power of the American nation is the source of a special
temptation to pride ; and the political immaturity of
the nation tempts it to a peculiar form of insecurity
as it moves into the uncharted waters of world poli-
tics. Each one of these special sources of either inse-
curity or compensating pride is a special hazard to the
creation of a world community. Yet they all are
merely unique manifestations of the general character
of the defect of the human will.
The great powers offer vivid examples of the
spiritual impotence of our day. But equally valid
illustrations could be drawn from the life of the less
potent nations. The smaller as well as the larger
nations cling desperately to a form of national sover-
eignty which is incompatible with the requirements of
a new age. Each of them, moreover, has its own
characteristic weaknesses. The hurt pride of France
AGE BETWEEN THE AGES 51
and her difficulty in acknowledging to herself that her
internal decay contributed to the ignominy of her
defeat makes her particularly truculent in her rela-
tions with other peoples. Resentment and fear deter-
mine her relations to a vanquished, but still poten-
tially more powerful, foe; and the dream of re-
establishing her military might seems more important
to her than becoming the creative center of a conti-
nental reconstruction.
China, whose manifest destiny is to become the
center of order in Asia, shows little capacity for ful-
filling her appointed task. Lacking sufficient resources
for her own unity, she may well be divided by the
greater powers into their own spheres of influence.
Her impotence will tempt the great powers to venture
further into Asia than they ought. The peace of the
world is not served by the dominance of western
powers in the affairs of Asia. Wherever we turn we
find not only general, but specific, forms of spiritual
and political impotence. The nations are not prepared
to create the kind of moral and political order which
a technical civilization requires.
Ill
The failure of this age to achieve adequate instru-
ments of international order is matched by, and re-
lated to, the concomitant failure to solve the problem
of economic justice within each nation. Modern tech-
nics have centralized economic power and aggravated
52 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
the problem of achieving justice between the various
groups of a national community. While a liberal cul-
ture sought for an easy solution of the problem of
justice, the growing disproportions of economic power
transmuted the static injustices of a feudal-agrarian
order into the dynamic injustices of technical civiliza-
tion.
Russia has presumably solved the problem of jus-
tice and security in the realm of economic life; but
she has paid a high price for the solution in the loss
of political liberties. The totalitarian aspects of the
Russian regime obscure the genuine achievements
of Russian equalitarianism; and give the privileged
classes of the western community the occasion to
identify falsely political liberty in general with the
anachronistic liberty of the economic oligarchy in
capitalistic society. If economic power is not brought
under more effective social and political restraint, it
may well destroy the securities of the common people
to the point of undermining the very fabric of western
civilization. Of the great powers, Britain is most likely
to solve this problem without the loss of democratic
liberties $ and America is most likely to make abortive
efforts to return to a "free enterprise 37 system, which
is incompatible with the requirements of justice in a
highly interdependent world.
The rise of modern fascism was partly occasioned
by the inability of western civilization to solve the
problem of economic justice. Fascism grew in the soil
of social chaos and insecurity - y and its coerced unity
AGE BETWEEN THE AGES 53
was an effort of modern nations, rent by class conflict,
to avoid the disintegration of their national life. The
cure proved worse than the disease. The terrible price
which nations paid for neglecting to solve their prob-
lem of domestic justice might well have been a warn-
ing to the privileged classes of the western world.
They have chosen rather to identify any effort at a
real cure with this false cure 5 and to lay the charge
of fascism against all efforts of the community to
bring economic power under control.
There is something more than mere ignorance in
this stupidity. It is also a form of the "vain imagina-
tion" which distinguishes sin from ignorance. The
pride and power of position insinuates itself into the
political judgments of the privileged. It insinuates
itself into all judgments; but those who have great
treasure are obviously more tempted than those who
have less: "Where your treasure is, there will your
heart be also." The strength to bring forth a more
just social order depends partly upon the ability of
the poor to transmute their resentments into genuine
instruments of justice; and partly upon the ability of
the rich to moderate the stupidity of sinful pride and
arrogant defiance of the inevitable.
IV
Since the moral and spiritual resources to achieve a
just and stable society in global terms are not yet
available, we must be prepared to live for decades,
54 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
and possibly for centuries, in heart-breaking frustra-
tions, somewhat eased by small advances toward the
desired goal.
It will not be easy to live in this age between the
ages without being tempted to despair. Richer re-
sources of faith will be required than those which the
liberal culture of the past two centuries has lived by.
Its faith grew out of an age of easy achievements and
few frustrations; and has little conception of the
tragic character of history.
These resources can not be enlarged upon here,
but two facets of an adequate faith for our age be-
tween the ages must be mentioned. The one is a form
of hope which gives meaning to life not only by what
is accomplished in history. We can not live by historic
achievement alone, though we can not live meaning-
fully without historic achievement. The Christian
faith has been at a discount in recent centuries because
its confidence that "neither life nor death can separate
us from the love of God" seemed a desperate kind of
hope which was irrelevant to the needs of men who
found all their hopes easily fulfilled in history. There
are periods of historic achievement in the life of man-
kind, just as there are periods of fulfillment in the
lives of individuals, when the problem of frustration
does not arise as a serious issue. But there are also
periods when our hopes so far exceed our grasp that
we can not count on historic fulfillments to give com-
pletion to our life.
AGE BETWEEN THE AGES 55
There must be a new appreciation of the meaning
of the words of St. Paul that "if in this life only we
have hope in Christ, we are of all men most misera-
ble." Without the understanding of this depth of
human existence it will be difficult to traverse the age
between the ages.
The other resource required for our day is a sense
of humility which recognizes the lack of strength to
bring forth as a common form of human weakness in
which all share. We must avoid the peril of attribut-
ing our historic frustration to this or that nation to
Russian intransigeance, or "British imperialism," or
American pride, or any one of the specific forms which
the spiritual inadequacies of our day will take. The
temptation to do this will be great because there will
be many explicit and unique forms of spiritual failure
in our day in this class and that nation. It will be
necessary to define and isolate these special forms of
social and political failure and to deal with their spe-
cific causes. But it is equally important to recognize
the common root of the failure of all the nations, lest
a combination of our pride and our frustration lead
to intolerable resentments toward each other.
Human beings in general are more tragic in their
stupidities than we have generally believed; and their
stupidities are derived from vain imaginations which
only great suffering can eradicate. All our new births
are brought about in pain 5 and the pain and sorrow
of re-birth are greater than the pain of natural birth.
56 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
The periods of gestation for the births of history are,
moreover, very long; so long that they try our pa-
tience and tempt us to believe that history is sterile,,
This is not the case. Mankind will finally find politi-
cal instruments and moral resources adequate for a
wholesome communal life on a world-wide scale. But
generations and centuries may be required to complete
the task.
IV
THE NEMESIS OF NATIONS
"And it came to 'pass In the eleventh year, in
the third month, in the first day of the month ,
that the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,
Son of man, say unto Pharaoh king of Egypt, and
to his multitude; Whom art thou like in thy
greatness? Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in
Lebanon with fair branches, and with a shadow-
ing shroud, and of high stature; and his tof was
among the thick boughs. The waters made him
greaty the dee'p set him wj> on high with her rivers
running round about his plants; and sent out her
little rivers unto all the trees of the field. There"
fore his height was exalted above all the trees of
the field) and his boughs were multiplied, and his
branches became long because of the multitude of
waters, when he shot forth. All the fowls of
heaven made their nests in his boughs, and under
his branches did all the beasts of the field bring
forth their young; and under his shadow dwelt
all great nations. Thus was he fair in his great-
ness , in the length of his branches: for his root
was by great waters. The cedars in the garden of
God could not hide him: the fir trees were not
57
58 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
like his boughs, and the chestnut trees were like
his branches; nor any tree in the garden of God
was like unto him in his beauty* 1 have made him
fair by the multitude of his branches: so that all
the trees of Eden, that were in the garden of
God, envied him.
"Therefore thus said the Lord God; Because
thou hast lifted up thyself in height, and he hath
shot up his top among the thick boughs , and his
heart is lifted up in his height: I have therefore
delivered him into the hand of the mighty one of
the heathen ; he shall surely deal with him; I have
driven him out for his wickedness. And strangers^
the terrible of the nations, have cut him off y and
have left him: upon the mountains and in all the
valleys his branches are broken, and his boughs
are broken by all the rivers of the land; and all
the people of the earth are gone down from his
shadow, and have left him. Upon his ruin shall
all the fowls of the heaven remain, and all the
beasts of the field shall be upon his branches: To
the end that none of all the trees by the waters
exalt themselves for their height, neither shoot up
their top among the thick boughs, neither their
trees stand up in their height, all that drink water:
for they are all delivered unto death, to the
nether parts of the earth, in the midst of the chil-
dren of men, with them that go down to the pit"
EzeL 31:1-14.
THE NEMESIS OF NATIONS 59
LHIS parable of the trees is one of a series of judg-
ments upon the nations which the prophet Ezekiel
proclaimed in the name of God. It was one of the
distinctive aspects of Hebraic prophecy that it did not
think of the judgment of God as resting primarily
upon the enemies and competitors of Israel. For the
prophets the divine judgment fell first of all upon
Israel, the chosen nation. "You only have I known
of all the families of the earth," declares the prophet
Amos in the name of the Lord, "therefore I will
punish you for all your iniquities." But the prophetic
idea of judgment became more and more universal
and the whole of history was regarded as moving
under God's providence. Under this providence each
of the nations could, upon occasion, become the instru-
ment of God's designs in history, even if, as in the
case of Persia under Cyrus, it was not consciously
seeking to perform God's will.
However, each of the nations would also, in turn,
fall under the divine condemnation. The cause of this
condemnation was always the same. They exalted
themselves above measure, and engaged in preten-
sions which exceeded the bounds of human mortality.
Thus Ezekiel proclaims the judgment of God upon
Tyre, "Because thine heart is lifted up, and thou hast
said, I am a God, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst
of the seas 5 yet thou art a man, and not God 5 thine
heart is lifted up because of thy riches, behold,
So THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
therefore, I will bring straijgers upon thee, the terrible
of the nations: and they shall draw their swords
against the beauty of thy wisdom, and they shall de-
file thy brightness. They shall bring thee down to the
pit. . . . Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth
thee, I am God? but thou shalt be a man, and no God,
in the hand of him that slayeth thee." *
The prophetic judgments against the nations are
always prompted by their pride, which seeks to hide
the common human frailty of all achievements and
constructions of men, or which denies the divine source
of their power and pretends that their position among
the nations is due altogether to their own achieve-
ments. Thus in the parable of our text, Assyria is
compared to a tree which grows by the waters and
"the waters made him great, the deep set him up on
high" j but the nation forgot that it was the provi-
dence of God which made him "fair in his greatness,
in the length of his branches." The nation will there-
fore be delivered to judgment "To the end that none
of all the trees by the waters exalt themselves for
their height" nor that the mighty ones "stand up in
their height for they are all delivered unto death."
In the case of Egypt, a civilization which rested
upon the fecundity produced by the Nile's periodic
overflow, the pride takes the form of assuming that
what has been given it as a special gift of grace is
really its own achievement, and therefore belongs
2 Ezek. 28:2, 5, 7, 8, 9.
THE NEMESIS OF NATIONS 61
completely to itself. The divine judgment runs: "Be-
hold, I am against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the
great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers,
which hath said. My river is mine own, and I have
made it for myself. But I will put hooks in thy jaws
. . . And I will leave thee thrown into the wilder-
ness." 2
The theme which underlies the prophetic judgment
upon the nations is thus the idea that "nemesis" over-
takes the nations because mortal men contend against
God. They seek to make themselves stronger than
mortal men have a right to be; and they pretend to
be wiser than mortal men are. They come thus in
conflict with the divine prerogatives. It may take a
long while, but in the end the Divine Avenger hum-
bles these human pretensions and brings all false
majesties of history "into the pit" "to the end that
none of -all the trees by the waters exalt themselves
for their height."
This theme is not confined to the prophets. It is
one of the basic themes of the Bible. In the Genesis
myth of the Fall it is suggested that false pride lies
at the foundation of human sin. Man sought to pene-
trate to the final mystery of the "tree of the knowl-
edge of good and evil," which, alone among the trees
of the garden, was forbidden to him. That was the
cause of his Fall. In the profound parable of the
Tower of Babel, we are told that men sought to build
2 Ezek. 29 :s-5.
62 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
a structure "whose top may reach unto heaven," and
"make us a name." God is pictured as jealous of this
human effort, declaring "now nothing will be re-
strained from them, which they have imagined to do."
Therefore he confounded their language and "scat-
tered them abroad from thence upon the face of all
the earth." 3
Nor does the New Testament lack the same inter-
pretation of the ultimate issue between man and God.
St. Paul defines sin as man's effort to change "the
glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made
like to corruptible man" 4 and in his second letter to
the Corinthians he defines the warfare of Christians as
"casting down imaginations, and every high thing
that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and
bringing into captivity every thought to the obedi-
ence of Christ." 5 There is thus in biblical thought in
general a perpetual theme of warning to men and na-
tions "not to think of themselves more highly than
they ought to think." These warnings express the un-
easiness of the human soul, when informed by a pro-
found faith, over the tendency of man to hide his
weakness with a false show of strength; or to forget
his limitations in the knowledge of his real, yet always
limited, strength. This uneasiness is accomplished by
a sense of judgment and doom. It is felt that ulti-
mately any man or nation who seeks to usurp the place
of God will be brought low. The ultimate majesty
3 Gen. 11:4, 6, 8. 4 Rom. 1:23. 5 II Cor. 10:5.
THE NEMESIS OF NATIONS 63
which rules the world will be able to subdue all false
majesties. God, who is the Creator and Judge of the
whole of life, has the power to put down any rebellion
of the various parts of life which make themselves
into the whole. In the judgments of the prophet
Ezekiel, of which our text is one, the justification for
the various judgments upon the various proud nations
is always that in "that day" of judgment "they may
know that I am the Lord."
II
This theme of the contest between a jealous God
and the pride and pretension of men is not limited to
biblical thought. It is a recurring motif in Greek
tragedy. The very word NEMESIS, which is generally
used to describe the fate of arrogance, is derived from
Greek thought. Nemesis is the consequence of pride
(HYBRIS). The theme is most explicitly presented in
the Promethean myth, though not confined to it.
Prometheus was, it will be remembered, the demi-god
who aroused the jealousy of Zeus by teaching men
the use of fire. In Greek tragedy the heroes are
warned again and again (frequently by words spoken
by the chorus) not to arouse the anger of Zeus by
attempting feats which are beyond the limit of mortal
men, or by making pretensions which are in conflict
with the pride of Zeus.
There is one significant difference between the
64 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
manner in which this theme is handled in Greek trag-
edy and its development in biblical thought. In Greek
drama we are never quite certain whether Zeus's
jealousy is an unwarranted divine egotism, seeking to
prevent men from developing their full capacities for
the sake of preserving the unchallenged character of
the divine power, or whether it is the justified anger
of the guardian of the whole against the anarchic pre-
tensions of the various parts of life. Sophocles seems
to come nearest to the perception of the biblical idea
that the jealousy of Zeus is not some unwarranted
divine caprice, but the expression of the power of
ultimate order against those vitalities of life which
seek to make themselves the false center of that order.
This ambivalence of Greek tragedy would seem at
first blush to take the complexity of the human situa-
tion into account more adequately than the biblical
account. It would seem particularly to do justice to
the fact that all human powers and all extensions of
these powers are creative, as well as destructive. The
taming of fire was a necessary step in human civiliza-
tion j and Zeus's anger against Prometheus would
therefore seem to be unjustified. The "knowledge of
good and evil" is a necessary expression of the final
"freedom of the human spirit" and the building of
towers "whose top may reach into heaven" is a neces-
sary expression of the human skill which has raised
man from complete dependence upon nature to a rela-
tive mastery of nature.
THE NEMESIS OF NATIONS 65
The extension of human powers is the basis of the
progressive character of human history. Every new
conquest of nature and every new elaboration of
human skills means that human actions and responsi-
bilities are set in the context of a wider field. This is
the creative side of human history. Yet every new
mastery of nature and every enlargement of human
powers is also the new occasion for pride and a fresh
temptation to human arrogance. If biblical thought
seems to neglect the creative aspect of the extension
of human powers in its prophecies of doom upon
proud nations, this 'is due only to the fact that it is
more certain than is Greek thought that, whatever
the creative nature of human achievements, there is
always a destructive element in human power. The
Bible is so certain of this because it is more certain of
the majesty of God and more sure of the justice of
His jealousy. It is certain that there is one God, and
that "it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves,"
and that His majesty transcends all human majesties.
It is also certain that all human majesties and powers
claim a more central position in the scheme of things
than is their rightful due. It understands, in other
words, the tragedy of sin without denying the creative
character of human achievements. It knows that
jealousy of God is not the caprice of one life in com-
petition with other life. It is rather the justice of the
Lord of life against the pretentious attempts of little
forms of life "To the end that none of all the trees
66 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
by the waters exalt themselves for their height,"
nor that the mighty ones "stand up in their height
for they are all delivered unto death."
Ill
Living in an age of atomic energy and of total wars,
it seems almost fantastic to think that men of any
other age should have considered the perils of human
pride and the temptations of human power. There
were, to be sure, great empires in those days , and their
rulers claimed divine majesty. But these ancient civ-
ilizations, resting upon a simple agrarian economy,
were infantile in their strength compared to the power
which modern men and nations have achieved through
the technics of modern civilization. If the human situ-
ation warranted the warnings of the prophets in those
days, how much more are those warnings justified in
our day! There is in fact no greater proof of the per-
ennial relevance of the biblical analysis of the mean-
ing of life than that the course of history seems to
make it ever more true. While our modern culture
rested upon the assumption that the elaboration of
human powers would be almost exclusively creative
and would guarantee the achievement of ever wider
and more inclusive human communities, our modern
civilization produced an atomic bomb the first effect
of which can only be to sharpen the conflict of nations
and to tempt nations to new forms of pride and arro-
THE NEMESIS OF NATIONS 67
gance. The atomic bomb is the most telling proof of
the perpetual relevance of the biblical warnings 5 and
even of their ever-increasing relevance as human
powers increase, while the essential finiteness of the
agents who wield these powers does not change.
The most immediate relevance of the prophetic
promise of doom upon the trees that "exalt themselves
for their height" is, of course, the ignominious end of
proud dictators and "master" races, who sought only
yesterday to enthrall the world and who are today
completely humiliated and defeated. In one fateful
week of the year 1945, one dictator died an obscene
death in expiation for an obscenely ambitious life$
and another died in the violence which his life had
breathed. Whatever the sins of other nations, those
nations were still good enough to be executors of
divine judgment upon the impossible pretensions of
power of these dictators and of the nations who had
followed their beguilements. We are not wrong if we
sense, beyond and above the purely political dimen-
sions of the drama of these years, a deeper and more
divine dimension. One can almost hear God speaking
through Ezekiel to these nations: "Wilt thou yet say
before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but thou
shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that
slayeth thee."
The most obvious relevance of the biblical concep-
tion of the contest between God and man is thus the
explicit doom which has descended upon nations which
68 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
have most explicitly defied the proper limits of all
human agencies which "are all delivered unto death,"
and which have tried most idolatrously to usurp the
place of the divine. Yet it would be very superficial to
apply this prophecy of judgment only to our enemies.
We do well to remember how great the power of the
victorious nations is, and what temptations lurk in the
possession of this power.
We did not contrive, as the Nazis did, to bring
other nations completely in our power j but we do
well to consider that the defeated nations are, in fact,
in our power j and that the possession of absolute
power is a peril to justice.
No man or nation is wise or good enough to hold
the power which the great nations in the victorious
alliance hold without being tempted to both pride
and injustice. Pride is the religious dimension of the
sin which flows from absolute power j and injustice is
its social dimension. The great nations speak so glibly
of their passion for justice and peace; and so obviously
betray interests which contradict justice and peace.
This is precisely the kind of spiritual pride which the
prophets had in mind when they pronounced divine
judgment upon the nations which said, "I am god, I
sit in the seat of God." Consider how blandly the
victorious nations draw plans for destroying the eco-
nomic and political life of defeated nations in the hope
of rebuilding them as democracies "from the ground
up." This lack of consideration for the organic aspects
THE NEMESIS OF NATIONS 69
of the social existence of other nations, this confidence
in our ability to create something better by our fiat, is
a perfect illustration of the pride of power. It is not
made any more sufferable by the idea that we are
doing all this for the sake of "purging" the defeated
nations of their evil and bestowing our "democracy"
upon them. The very absurdity of bestowing democ-
racy by the will of the conqueror contains the preten-
sion against which the prophets inveighed.
IV
But neither the doom which has already fallen
upon the pride of dictators, nor the impending doom
which must fall upon the pride of the victors, is the
most obvious point of relevance between the biblical
theme of the contest between God and man and the
experience of our own day. The most obvious point
of relevance lies in the fact that several centuries of
technical achievement have been crowned with the
discovery of methods for releasing atomic energy.
This new discovery crowns the creative achievements
of a technical society which has increased man's mas-
tery of nature immeasurably and which has enhanced
the power of all human vitalities. But the new dis-
covery also crowns the pretensions of modern civiliza-
tion ; it gives man a power which obscures his weak-
ness. And it is a dangerous new power precisely be-
cause it is given to some men and some nations who
70 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
are actually in competition with other nations; but
who will seek by this power to place themselves above
this competition.
The contradiction between the greatness of the
power in the hands of modern men and nations, and
the weakness and mortality of the agencies which
wield the power, is commonly interpreted as a con-
tradiction between the perfection of the natural sci-
ences and the imperfection of the social sciences 5 or as
a contrast between the scientific and the moral achieve-
ments of men. But these contrasts are due to some-
thing more than a cultural lag. They reach down to
the very paradox of human existence: the greatness
and the weakness of man. This paradox becomes pro-
gressively more dangerous because man's powers are
continually increasing and yet man's essential weak-
ness remains the same.
A nation which has the power to annihilate other
nations does not achieve, as a concomitant of that
power, the transcendent wisdom which would make it
the safe custodian of such power. The possession of
this power by a group of nations has the immediate
prospects of peace because it will make other nations
reluctant to challenge the possessors. Yet there are no
ultimate promises of peace in the possession of such
power by a nation or a group of nations; because other
nations will resent this exclusive possession; will
rightly or wrongly question the justice of the policies
which are dictated by it; and will seek to come into
THE NEMESIS OF NATIONS 71
the possession of the same power or of some other
secret equally potent and dangerous.
Ultimately, of course*, the increase in the power of
human destructiveness must make for the organization
of the world community. The destructive power has
become so great that it threatens the nations with
mutual annihilation. It may be, therefore, that the
fear of such annihilation will persuade them to
moderate their pride and their inclination to cling to
the momentary advantages of the possession of dis-
proportionate power. Whether this will be accom-
plished before men taste, even more than they have
done, the terror of modern warfare 5 whether they
must be brought to the very brink of disaster before
they will seek to bring great power under the agency
of the most impartial instruments of government
which human ingenuity can devise, depends upon the
degree to which they sense and anticipate the NEMESIS
which threatens all human pretensions.
The point of the prophetic anticipations of doom
was always partly to avoid the doom by inducing a
humble and contrite anticipation of it. There are al-
ways possibilities of "fleeing the wrath which is to
come." Our generation has been given such a possi-
bility even as it is confronted with a kind of wrath
more terrible than that faced by previous genera-
tions.
The kind of humility which is required of the na-
tions to meet the possession of the new powers in their
72 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
possession may be partly achieved by a shrewd politi-
cal intelligence, which is able to measure the probable
effect of certain policies upon attitudes of other na-
tions. It is possible, for instance, for a shrewd political
observer to know in advance that the display of power
by a single nation or group of nations can not perma-
nently secure the acquiescence of other nations. But
ultimately this humility is a religious achievement.
Rather it is not so much an achievement as it is a gift
of grace, a by-product of the faith which discerns life
in its total dimension and senses the divine judgment
which stands above and against all human judgments ;
and of the divine majesty which is justifiably jealous
of human pretensions. The more men and nations fear
the wrath of God, the more can they be brought under
the sway of the divine mercy. The more they antici-
pate doom, the more can they avoid it.
V
THE CITT WHICH HATH
FOUNDATIONS
By faith Abraham^ when he was called to go
out into a 'place which he should after receive for
an inheritance y obeyed; and he went out y not
knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned
f in the land of 'promise, as in a strange country y
dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob y the
heirs with him of the same 'promise: For he looked
for a city which hath foundations^ whose builder
and 'maker is God" Heb. 11:8-10.
J? ROM the perspective of modern culture the Chris-
tian faith is "other-worldly/' entertaining hopes of
human fulfillment beyond all historic possibilities.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries assumed that
if only these other-worldly hopes, which seemed to
beguile man from his mundane tasks, could be dis-
avowed it would be possible to center human attention
so completely upon the achievement of the "land of
promise" in this world that all of man's frustrations
73
74 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
could be overcome. Actually the faith of the Bible,
as compared with the other-worldliness of either the
classical western age or the Orient, is stubbornly "this-
worldly" from the day of the Messianic expectations
of the prophets to the prayer of Christ: "thy King-
dom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in
heaven."
Yet the faith of the Bible is never purely this-
worldly. The Messianic hope of the prophets was an
interesting mixture of historic and trans-historic ex-
pectations. In one sense the Messianic kingdom would
be the completion and fulfillment of history 5 and in
another sense it would be the end of history. The ful-
fillments which the prophets expected could not be
contained within the limits of the historic enterprise,
as it is rooted in time-nature and as it is circumscribed
by the conditions of finite existence. This combination
of this-worldly and other-worldly hopes is the only
adequate religious expression of the human situation.
For man's freedom over nature and his capacity to
make history mean that there are indeterminate possi-
bilities of historic fulfillment of human hopes 5 but
this freedom also means that man finally transcends
the whole historic process in the ultimate reaches of
his spirit. There are no historic possibilities which meet
the final definitions of realized goodness which are
implicit in the life of spirit. Biblical faith is thus both
this-worldly and other-worldly 5 but in Christian his-
tory the two emphases tend always to become sepa-
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 75
rated, so that various ages are tempted to center
their attention too much upon either the one or the
other.
There is no nicer expression of the delicate biblical
balance between the two facets of hope than in the
words of our text in the eleventh chapter of the
Epistle to the Hebrews. The whole chapter deals
with the power of religious hope and faith, the two
being equated in the introductory words: "Now faith
is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen." The various achievements of the
prophets and martyrs of the ages are recounted, who
lived and moved in the power of faith, and by that
power "subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness,
obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,
quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the
sword, . . . waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight
the armies of aliens. 55 On the whole the attention
seems to be directed toward the possibility of "obtain-
ing promises" in this world by the courage which faith
induces. Yet there is a subtle interweaving of the other
hope which is directed toward a redemption beyond
history. The relation of the two hopes is beautifully
expressed in the symbolism of our text.
The story of Abraham's special call from God and
his finding the "promised land" was the very founda-
tion of the historical self -consciousness of the Hebrew
people. It was by that call to Abraham that they
became an elect people j and the attainment of the
;6 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
land of promise was the legendary expression of their
sense of national origin, just as the hope of the recla-
mation of the same promised land remained, and still
is, the expression of their sense of final national salva-
tion. It is^ therefore a perfect symbol of the kind of
historical hope which all nations have in varying de-
grees, though not always in as overt religious terms
as the Israelites.
But the author of the epistle introduces another
note in the account of Abraham's venture which
makes explicit what lies implicit in the whole
prophetic interpretation of the "land of promise."
Abraham, he declares, when he had attained the land
of promise, lived there with his heirs in "tents" or
"tabernacles," thereby signifying that he was a "stran-
ger" in it, that he had no abiding place there, and
that he looked for something more secure than any
earthly land of promise, for a "city which hath foun-
dations, whose builder and maker is God."
This poetic reinterpretation of what was to begin
with a legendary account is done with a poetic touch.
Abraham symbolized the pastoral period of history ;
and the movement toward Canaan signifies the devel-
opment from pastoral to agrarian life. If Abraham
did indeed continue to live in tents, that would mean
that pastoral modes of life had not yet yielded to the
more stable forms of abode characteristic of an
agrarian society. Pastoral peoples were always
"strangers" and wanderers, moving from pasture to
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 77
pasture. This insecurity of a pre-agrarian period is
thus re-interpreted by the writer as signifying a more
ultimate insecurity. Abraham lived in tents, he de-
clared, because he regarded himself a "stranger" in
the very land which was promised him. He was
strange in it because he looked beyond the earthly
land of promise to a more ultimate security in a city
"which hath foundations whose builder and maker is
God."
This is a poetic expression of the human situation.
The faith of all men and nations drives them toward
the "land of promise" toward the hope of an historic
fulfillment in which the "slavery" of Egypt is over-
come, independence is established and preserved
against the threats of the more powerful adjacent na-
tions. Men seek both freedom and brotherhood in
human history. The earthly hope of Israel included
both the establishment and preservation of national
independence and the achievement of a real brother-
hood of nations, with "Zion" as the center of this
Messianic reign of peace and goodwill.
There are elements of hope and faith analogous to
this expectation in the life of modern nations. The
recently occupied and enslaved nations of Europe all
hope for a renaissance of their national existence; and
most of them are dimly aware of the necessity of a
higher form of brotherhood between them if their
independence is to have any stability and their life
any fulfillment. Not the nations only which have
78 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
suffered something analogous to the Egyptian slavery
look forward to a new fulfillment of their life in the
future. Even the strong and great nations have their
special expectations. Some idea of national aggrandize-
ment is mixed with these hopes. No nation is so strong
and great that it does not think of some way of round-
ing out its power and security. But on the whole the
hopes of the nations of the world, in the present his-
toric situation, emphasize the ideal of peace and
brotherhood. Whatever may be the special hope of
each nation for the achievement of this security or that
prestige, for emancipation from this usurpation or for
surmounting of that weakness, all have been prompted
by the ravages of two world wars to look forward to
the possibility of a more stable security and the crea-
tion of a peaceful world order.
Just as nationalistic and universalistic elements
were present in the Messianic expectations of even
the greatest of the prophets, so also now each nation
mixes a certain degree of egotistic corruption with its
more generous hopes. Thus Americans hope not only
for a reign of peace but also for an "American cen-
tury," while Russians hope for the realization of a
communist world society and also for a world-political
situation in which Russian power and pride will be
established , and Britain combines its desire for world
brotherhood with the hope that its imperial system
may not be too much at a disadvantage in comparison
with the power of its partners. These nationalistic
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 79
overtones and undertones are never absent 5 yet they
do not obscure the more generous hope for the estab-
lishment of a world community in which all nations
may share. This is the "promised land" of the na-
tions, whatever the private and peculiar "promised
land" of each may be.
II
This international expectation is obviously one di-
mension of the meaning of our life in this era. It
defines our moral and social responsibilities in the
most inclusive terms. It points to the obvious line
which historic development must take. It rightly as-
sumes that there are possibilities in history of making
actual, what is potential $ for the world community
has been made potential by the development of a
technical civilization in which all the nations have
been brought into intimate contact with each other.
It must be made actual by the development of politi-
cal institutions in which the partnership of nations
and their peaceful accord with each other will become
real.
The proponents of eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury this-worldliness may plausibly argue that our
present situation, with all its urgencies and possibili-
ties, is ample proof of the necessity and possibility of
disavowing all expectations of a more eternal city,
and of centering our hopes in the earthly city, or
8o THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
more particularly in the generous universal transfig-
uration of the hope of the earthly city into a city
"which lies four-square,". into which the peoples of
the world may enter from east and west, from north
and south.
Yet it is precisely in our present historic situation,
when more profoundly considered, that the justifica-
tion for, and the validity of, the more supernal hope
is found. While the meaning of bur existence lies
partly in the hope of fulfilling the promises of a
universal community which are implicit in the whole
human adventure, we must also be prepared for the
frustration of these hopes to a very considerable de-
gree. The difficulty of religions which limit their
hopes to historic possibilities is that they tempt men
to despair when the possibilities are not fulfilled.
The coming decades, and indeed the coming cen-
turies, will be characterized by frustrations as well as
by fulfillments. The resources for the establishment
of a universal community are not adequate. Every
previous larger community of mankind has been held
together partly by forces of nature and destiny, by
consanguinity and a common language, by geographic
boundaries, common traditions, and the memories of
common experiences. The universal community has
only two minimal forces making for its unity. The one
is the force of fear that failure to achieve unity will
involve us in universal chaos. The other is the reli-
gious and moral sense of an obligation more universal
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 81
than the partial loyalties which bind our national and
imperial communities together. Between the force of
fear and the sense of universal brotherhood, the uni-
versal community lacks the intermediate forces of
togetherness which national communities possess in
their common language, culture and tradition.
These inadequacies are so important that we can
not be altogether certain whether a universal com-
munity of real stability can be established. It may be
that the invention^ of the atomic bomb will so increase
the fear of future wars that what now seems impos-
sible will become possible. Yet the fear of war is never
as strong a unifying force in history as the fear of a
common foe, which has played a part in the unifica-
tion of all larger communities. The fear of war as
such may well prompt all nations to desire a system
of universal justice 5 but it will hardly prevent the
greater powers from each seeking for themselves spe-
cial advantages in such a system incompatible with
the security of the whole.
If one considers the power impulses of the great
nations and empires and remembers that the pride of
these nations has been enhanced, rather than miti-
gated, by recent history, one may well wonder how a
moral and political force at the center of a world
community can be constructed, powerful enough to
coerce, and with sufficient moral and political prestige
to gain, the willing obedience of the great nations.
Undoubtedly many of these difficulties will be over-
82 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
come in the course of time. But it is not likely that
they will be overcome so completely that a perfectly
stable and harmonious universal state will be created.
We have probably reached a level of historic develop-
ment where even indeterminate historical possibilities
can not hide certain ultimatrfrustrations. Mr. Morti-
mer Adler 1 predicts that a universal state will pos-
sibly be achieved after five hundred years of trial and
error when it will finally become apparent that the
kind of alliances into which the nations are now enter-
ing after this war are not adequate for the preserva-
tion of permanent peace. But he takes upon himself
to guarantee that the ultimate creation of such a state
will furnish the final certainty of perpetual peace.
Since no lesser human community, national or im-
perial, has an absolutely stable harmony, and since
all historic achievements of coordination and coopera-
tion must partially suppress, rather than resolve, com-
peting interests, this is a rather bold guarantee, and
one which history will probably not justify.
Our era of historic development is therefore des-
tined to experience both important realizations of
hopes and equally significant frustrations. Some of the
frustrations will be overcome in due time, though we
are not the generation which will experience the sig-
nificant fulfillment. We are therefore a generation
which must have the spiritual resources to deal with
the problem of frustration.
1 How to Think About War and Peace.
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 83
III
We must consider, however, that an epoch which is
confronted with the ultimate task of the human com-
munity may also, if it views its situation profoundly,
recognize not merely the immediate frustrations to
which it is subject but also the final disappointments
to which all ages must adjust themselves. If we re-
gard the difficulties of achieving a universal com-
munity as merely momentary, it will be possible of
course to live by a hope which is prepared patiently
to wait for deferred fulfillments. Moses was not the
first or the last leader, seeking a land of promise,
who perished outside its borders. There are indeed so
many possibilities of achieving tomorrow what lies
beyond the range of possibility today that a secular
religion, such as prevails in our culture, can and
will keep its strength for some time to come by
imagining that every tomorrow will finally solve, not
only the unsolved problems of today, but also the
insoluble problems of history.
But no profound analysis of the human situation
can justify such an interpretation of man's historic
tasks and possibilities. A deeper probing of our prob-
lem must inevitably lead to the conclusion that frus-
tration is as permanent an aspect of human existence
as realization. Man's search for a "city which hath
foundations, whose builder and maker is God" is
84 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
occasioned by the fact that the freedom of the human
spirit finally transcends all limits of nature. The good
which man must claim as his final goal rises above all
historic possibilities. Historic achievements are not
merely limited by the conditions which nature-history
sets, but are also corrupted by the pride which man
in his freedom may introduce into the achievements
of history.
The particular task of creating a universal com-
munity which faces our age is the most vivid por-
trayal of the limits, as well as the possibilities, of
history. We face the task of creating a world-wide
community precisely because man is too free to recog-
nize any boundaries of nature as the final limits of his
obligation to his fellowmen. Moreover his technical
skills constantly enlarge or defy those boundaries.
That freedom is the basis of the whole historical de-
velopment which finally culminates in the task of
creating community in world-wide terms. On the
other hand this same man is bound to this or that
place, speaks a particular language, and has organic
ties with a portion of his fellowmen but not with all
of them. In the words of Kipling:
"God gave all men all earth to love,
But, since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all."
The tension between what is particular and what is
universal in man is not confined to any one age, though
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 85
it may be more clearly revealed in some epochs than
in others. It is a permanent tension in human history.
The a city of God" is consistently conceived by all
great prophets as a universal community in which no
distinctions of race or geography are known. Yet every
city of man, no matter how great its achievements,
makes such distinctions.
These distinctions are the marks of natural finite-
ness. They are transmuted into more stubborn and
positive handicaps to the achievement of the uni-
versal by the false visions of the universal which arise
in them. This false element is the factor of "sin" in
the human situation. Our racial tensions, for instance,
are not merely the frictions of ignorance. They are
made particularly tragic because each race and group,
with partly conscious and partly unconscious perver-
sity, pretends to embody the final form of human
virtue or beauty or manliness; and condemns the
other groups for their failure to conform to this abso-
lute standard. Mixed with every effort toward unity,
including the unity of religious denominations, is the
belief that the enlarged common life must conform to
our particular pattern of life on the supposition that
our pattern conforms most nearly to the absolute one.
The reunion of Christian denominations is, in some
respects, more difficult than the unification of secular
and political communities, precisely because the ex-
plicit religious element, at the center of the religious
community, also lends itself to the most explicit forms
of the pretensions of finality. That is why the Chris-
86 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
tian Church must be more humble and not suggest
so complacently that it has achieved, in its own life,
a form of universal love which it would bestow upon
the nations.
One need only analyze the two facets of the hope
of the promised land as it exists in every nation, and
has from the days of Abraham, to know that the most
perfect form of that hope is subject to historical frus-
tration. The most perfect form is the hope of a uni-
versal community. But mixed with this hope is the
idea that our nation may have some place, particularly
close to the center of it, or gain some special prestige,
or be in a special way the seat of authority in it. Even
the greatest prophets were certain that the law of the
universal community would come from "Zion." The
inevitable friction between the three great centers of
international power in the modern world, British,
Russian and American, will be caused not simply by
the naked will-to-power of each of them, but by the
partly honest conviction of each that it has a better
method of world organization than the others, or
that its skills, experience, ideals or political virtues
are superior. No promised land can be conceived by
man, or at least not in the collective consciousness of
a nation, without being partially corrupted by egoistic
reservations. There is thus a spiritual source of cor-
ruption in the very historic projections of the ultimate
goal of history which prevents history from fulfilling
itself.
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 87
IV
There are modern dissenters from the Christian
faith who are perfectly willing to admit that a hiatus
always remains between any achieved promised land
of human history and the ultimate vision of the King-
dom of God a vision which is incidentally so im-
plicit in the human situation that even the most secu-
larized religions have some version of it. The great
majority of dissenters do not of course acknowledge
the permanency of this contradiction. They believe
that the future will resolve it. But even those who do
recognize this aspect of human history are not thereby
persuaded that there is a "city which hath founda-
tions, whose builder and maker is God." They accept
the tragic aspects of ultimate frustration in history
but they find no relief from it. They regard the
pinnacles of Christian hope as either harmless, or
possibly as harmful, illusions which the weak and the
credulous may require but which are not necessary
for the sanity of robust spirits.
Actually this vision of the Kingdom of God, offer-
ing a security and fulfillment beyond all securities
and insecurities, beyond all fulfillments and frustra-
tions in history, is not some primitive illusion or
harmless vagary of the human spirit. It is the crown
of faith which completes the meaning of human exist-
ence. Man, who lives both in time and beyond time,
88 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
both within and beyond the limits of nature, can not
complete his life within time or nature, except as he
completes it falsely by projecting the peculiar and
conditioned circumstances of his life into the ultimate.
Man lives beyond time in the sense that time is in
him, as well as he in time. His consciousness and
memory hold the moments of time which he traverses
in a meaningful whole j yet the meaning is constantly
broken by the fact that he is immersed in the process
which he thus holds within his consciousness. This
paradox of human existence can not be resolved by
speculation. It can be resolved only by faith. The
faith which resolves it is not some simple credulity. It
is the expression of the final power of the human
spirit in the recognition of its final weakness. "Not
that we are sufficient of ourselves, 75 declares St. Paul,
"to think any thing as of ourselves 5 but our sufficiency
is of God." x This is an acknowledgement of the limits
of human powers and at the same time an expression
of the belief that the limits of human powers are not
the limits of the meaning of existence. We are too
limited either to comprehend the whole world of
meaning or to complete and fulfill the meaning which
we comprehend. This human situation either tempts
us to despair, if it should persuade us that our inability
to complete the world of meaning destroys such par-
tial meaning as we do discern; or it prompts us to
faith, if we should find the power and wisdom beyond
1 II Cor. 3:5.
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 89
our own, in the very realization of our limited power
and wisdom.
The religious community, including the Christian
Church, has frequently given a certain validity to the
scepticism of the dissenters from religion by filling the
sense of an ultimate fulfillment of life with too specific
content and by claiming to know too much about the
dimensions, the geography, and the whole structure
of the city of God. All visions in time of the comple-
tion of the time process, all previsions of the fulfill-
ment of life, must remain decently humble and mod-
est. "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." Every
too specific definition becomes a bearer of some human
pretension. On the whole the primary error in Chris-
tian other-worldliness has been its too consistent in-
dividualism. There is usually no suggestion of a "city
of God" in them. The vision of life's fulfillment has
been primarily a vision of individual completion be-
yond the frustrations of human communities. It has
not been a vision of the fulfillment of the communal
process. Thus the sceptics have frequently been the
primary bearers of the social meaning of existence.
Actually there are aspects of both individual and col-
lective existence and meaning which transcend the
possibilities of history. If there is a fulfillment, it must
be both social and individual. This twofold aspect of
human existence is well understood in Hebraic
prophecy. The vision of the Messianic kingdom al-
ways implies both individual and social fulfillment.
9 o THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
But orthodox Christianity, both Catholic and Protes-
tant, has frequently destroyed the idea of social and
communal fulfillment 5 and Protestant Christianity,
at least, has frequently derived this error in its final
hope from a too consistent individualism in interpret-
ing the meaning of man's present existence.
A faith which claims to know too much is not
merely the bearer of the pretensions of wisdom, but
also the instrument of human will-to-power. Invari-
ably it suggests that the ultimate fulfillment of life
also involves a specially advantageous completion of
the projector of the vision. For this reason the scepti-
cism of the secular world is actually a wholesome
source of faith's purification. Yet such a scepticism,
developed consistently, must finally arrive at the con-
clusion that the partial meanings of human history
are too incomplete and corrupted to be meanings at
all. Faith in the ultimate fulfillment of the meaning
implicit in human existence is therefore primarily an
assertion of the reality of that meaning.
The structure of man, for instance, is such that
he can not complete himself within himself. Love
and brotherhood are the law of his existence. Further-
more there are no natural limits of brotherhood. The
law of love is universal. There are indeterminate pos-
sibilities of realizing a wider brotherhood in history.
But the natural limits are never completely tran-
scended. Man is never quite universal man in history;
but black man and white man, European and Asiatic,
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 91
American and Russian. Furthermore each kind of man
introduces the corruption of sin into this finiteness by
claiming for his partial and peculiar manhood more
ultimate significance than it possesses. If the transcen-
dent reality of brotherhood is not emphasized the
partial and corrupted definitions of man, as we have
them in history, can become perversely normative as
they did in Nazism. The liberal democratic world
saved itself from this perversity by the hope of a com-
plete historical realization of universal man. Future
ages are bound to invalidate this hope. It is at that
point that the issue between the Christian faith in the
"city which hath foundations" and moral cynicism will
become fully joined.
V
We must consider in conclusion the not unjustified
feeling of modern proponents of "this-worldliness"
that the vision of the "city which hath foundations'*
beguiles men from seeking the promised lands of
human history. No one can deny that Christian other-
worldliness has frequently beguiled men from achiev-
ing higher possibilities in history. There is a form of
Christian moral cynicism which believes, for instance,
that Christian universalism is not to be fulfilled in his-
tory because it will be ultimately fulfilled; that the
dictum of St. Paul that in "Christ there is neither
Jew nor Greek" applies to "the resurrection" and
> 9 2 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
therefore not to this earth. There was a form of Nazi-
fied German Christianity which sought this way of
escape from the moral obligations of Christian uni-
versalism. There are also types of Christian pessimism
which will not take the task of building a peaceful
world community seriously, on the ground that the
Scripture prophesies a war and rumours of wars" to
the end of history.
These corruptions of the Christian faith must be
humbly acknowledged by the Christian community.
It must be recognized that this impulse toward the
achievement of justice and brotherhood in the past
two centuries has frequently been borne primarily by
secularists who emphasized the petition which Chris-
tians had neglected: "Thy Kingdom come, thy will
be done on earth as it is in heaven."
On the other hand the secular world has not recog-
nized to what degree its obligations to realize the
historically possible have been confused by alternating
illusions and disillusionments, by too facile hopes and
consequent moods of despair.
Ideally there is a tremendous resource for the ac-
complishment of immediate possibilities in an ulti-
mate hope. Such a hope frees us from preoccupation
with the prospects of immediate success or fears of
immanent failure. It helps us to do our duty without
allowing it to be defined by either our hopes or our
fears. This is a resource which will be particularly
required in the coming decades and centuries. We do
CITY WHICH HATH FOUNDATIONS 93
not know how soon and to what degree mankind will
succeed in establishing a tolerable world order. Very
possibly we will hover for some centuries between
success and failure, in such a way that optimists and
pessimists will be able to assess our achievements, or
lack of them, with an equal degree of plausibility. In
such a situation it is important to be more concerned
with our duties than with the prospect of success in
fulfilling them. It is not recorded that Abraham was
less assiduous in seeking the promised land because of
his feeling that he would be a stranger in it, once he
reached it.
A sense of ultimate security and ultimate fulfill-
ment may beguile a few from their immediate tasks.
But the heroic soul will be the freer to seek for pos-
sible securities in history if he possesses a resource
against immediate insecurities. The city of God is no
enemy of the land of promise. The hope of it makes
the inevitable disappointments in every land of prom-
ise tolerable.
VI
TOD AT, TOMORROW AND THE
ETERNAL
"Take therefore no thought for the morrow:
for the morrow shall take thought for the things
of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil there-
of." Mt. 6:34.
"Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened
unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went
forth to meet the bridegroom* And five of them
were wise and five were foolish. They that were
foolish took their lamfs, and took no oil with
them: But the wise took oil in their vessels with
their lamps. While the bridegroom tarried, they
all slumbered and slept. And at midnight there
was a cry made, Behold the bridegroom cometh;
go ye out to meet him. Then all those virgins
arose, and trimmed their lamfs. And the foolish
said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our
lamj>s are gone out. But the wise answered, say~
ing, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and
you; but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy
for yourselves. And while they 'went to buy, the
bridegroom came; and they that were ready went
in with him to the marriage: and the door was
94
TODAY, TOMORROW 95
shut. Afterward came also the other virgins; say"
ing, Lor^ Lord o^en to us. But he answered and
said. Verily I say unto you, I know you not*
Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day
nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh?*
Mt. 25:1-13.
.HE foolish virgins were chided because they were
not prepared for the promise and opportunity of to-
morrow. Yet the same Christ who uttered this parable
included the admonition, "Be not anxious for tomor-
row/ 5 in the Sermon on the Mount.
The parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins is one
of the Messianic or "eschatological" parables, which
deals with the promised coming of the Messianic
reign. Jesus consistently maintained that we must
always be ready for this final fulfillment of the whole
promise and meaning of life, "for ye know neither
the day not the hour wherein the Son of man
cometh." It is to be noted that the foolish virgins were
completely shut out from the marriage feast (this
feast being a traditional symbol of the final culmina-
tion of history in the reign of the Messiah). Their
lack of preparedness for the critical hour seemed to
have doomed them completely. There is thus a strong
emphasis in the parable upon constant preparedness
for the critical hour of opportunity.
This hour of opportunity has a very ultimate sig-
nificance in the text; for it is identical with the
96 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
culmination of all history in the reign of the Messiah.
As most biblical symbols dealing with the eternal
fulfillment of the course of history, the "end of his-
tory" in the Messianic reign must not be taken liter-
ally. It must nevertheless be taken seriously because
it indicates the eternal dimension in which history
moves. There are moments in history which are more
than mere historic moments ; for in them a whole
course of history is fulfilled. In them the seeming
chaos of the past achieves its meaning; and the partial
and particular aspects of life are illumined to become
parts of a complete whole.
These moments of illumination and fulfillment
have, however, no meaning at all to those who are
not prepared for them. Christ does not come to those
who do not expect him. The great crises of both our
individual and our collective lives do not round out
and complete the fragmentary character of our pre-
vious history, if that previous history is not under-
stood as containing within itself partial meanings
which are moving toward the completer revelation of
their essential character. The foolish virgins are shut
out of the marriage feast, and the "unlit lamp and the
ungirt loin" always result in unfulfilled promises.
Yet on the other hand we have the explicit prohibi-
tion of anxiety for the morrow; and the reason given
is that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
There seems thus to be a contradiction between the
advice to regard each day as complete in itself and the
TODAY, TOMORROW 97
warning to be prepared for the unexpected fulfillment
and completion of the tasks and events of today in an
unknown tomorrow.
This seeming contradiction is occasioned by meas-
uring two different dimensions of the acts, responsi-
bilities, and events, which constitute the stuff of our
experience. Every such act and event has an intrinsic
quality which makes it complete in itself, or rather
which makes it complete if it is related to the final
meaning of life as we have it in our relation to God.
If we used spatial symbols we could describe this
dimension as a vertical one, being constituted by the
direct relation of every moment of time to the eternal,
or the transection of every moment by the eternal. 1
If we speak of this quality without the presupposition
of faith, we define it as the "intrinsic" quality. But
there can be nothing purely intrinsic in life, since all
things are related to each other. What seems intrinsic
is that aspect of existence which does not wait upon
some future development for its meaning, but has
that meaning, not within itself, but within itself in
relation to what is felt to be the ultimate source of
the meaning of our life.
On the other hand all life is in a moving process,
and every event and act is related to future events
and possibilities in which they are rounded out and
fulfilled. In the Epistle to the Hebrews the author,
after recounting the heroic deeds of martyrs and
1 Cf. T. S. Eliot, The Rock.
9 8 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
prophets, observes that all of them "having obtained
a good report, received not the promise, God having
provided some better thing for us, that they without
us should not be made perfect." This is to say that
every generation requires its successors to complete
its work. Even the most heroic and perfect action does
not "receive the promise," since the fulfillment of
"their" task requires "our" contribution. One thinks
immediately how the dead of this war are dependent
upon future generations to determine whether their
sacrifice was futile or historically fruitful.
II
There is no possibility of equating these two dimen-
sions of our existence or reducing the one to the other.
Throughout our life, there is a sense in which each
act and responsibility must be weighed without regard
to its consequences j while from another aspect it waits
for fulfillment on some tomorrow.
Consider for instance the responsibility of parents
in the upbringing of children. All of these responsi-
bilities have a vista toward the future. Each child is
not what it is but what it will be 5 and the fond parents
consider the future in the child's discipline. It is for
tomorrow that this training and that preparation are
undertaken. It is in the maturity of tomorrow that
the care of the child finds its justification. Albert
Schweitzer confesses that a strict aunt who kept him
TODAY, TOMORROW 99
at his music lessons, when play beckoned outside, was
responsible for the muscular coordination which was
the basis of his skill as an organist and which could
only have been acquired at an early age because the
foresight of an elder counteracted childish disinclina-
tion. There is a certain pathos and yet beauty in the
anxious solicitude with which parents look toward
tomorrow. In a spirit of hope, mixed with apprehen-
sion, they wonder how their children will "turn out?'
Too much anxiety is undoubtedly harmful to the
child, at least too much acknowledged anxiety. Yet it
is the care of early discipline which provides the oil
for the lamps for the wedding feasts of tomorrow.
But this is only one facet of the situation. Children
are what they will become j but they also are what they
are. A parent who did not see the perfection of child-
hood in each age and period which it traverses in its
immaturity, and who did not recognize the meaning
of his responsibility without regard to the future,
would destroy one dimension of parental responsi-
bility. There are children who do not survive to
maturity. In such a situation some parents feel them-
selves completely defrauded. No one can deny the
tragic character of a life cut off before its fruition 5 yet
there are parents who are able to thank God in the
hour of sorrow for the joy they have had in their
child while they had him. Such a peace within sorrow
is the fruit of faith which understands the com-
pleteness of life within each moment.
ioo THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
If we consider the educational preparation for life
from the standpoint of the child himself, we discern
the same two dimensions. The whole educational en-
terprise is preparation for tomorrow. Yet no young
man or woman who is driven merely by ambition or
the hope of being able to "make use of" the educa-
tion of today can possibly enjoy study and discipline.
There is an aspect of the learning adventure which
makes it enjoyable and meaningful without' regard to
tomorrow. There is joy in trying out the wings of
intellect and imagination. It is enjoyable to test grow-
ing skills of mind and to penetrate into the mysteries
of life. From childhood to old age one part of the
learning process is not preparation for tomorrow but
an expression of the momentary spiritual capacities
without regard for any tomorrow.
The cultivation of the soil is even more an obvious
illustration of the two facets of experience. Every
husbandman sows his seed in expectation of the fruits
which it will bring forth. The justification of the
sowing is in the harvest. But there are so many haz-
ards between the sowing and the reaping that the
sower might easily be tempted by his anxieties over
them to shirk his task of sowing. It is well not to be
too anxious about tomorrow's possible storms. "Suffi-
cient unto the day is the evil thereof." Furthermore
there are satisfactions in tilling the soil which are not
drawn from the expectation of the harvest. There is
satisfaction in performing one's appointed function
TODAY, TOMORROW 101
without reference to the outcome of the task. There is
joy, moreover, in the husbandman's communion with
nature, in turning the fragrant earth and sensing the
quiet yielding of nature's forces to the mastery of
man. No one would sow, of course, if there were no
reaping j if no fruits of tomorrow justify the tasks of
today, these finally become meaningless. Yet the
meaning of the task is not merely in tomorrow's frui-
tion. A part of the impetus for the performing of it
is derived from more immediate and yet more ulti-
mate considerations. One does one's duty and per-
forms one's characteristic function without too much
regard for the consequences. If work were not in
some sense its own reward, men would become so
preoccupied with the anticipation of rewards, and
with apprehensions about their possible failure, that
the strength for the task would be dissipated.
Ill
The great experiences of the world crisis, through
which we have been and are still passing, reveal the
two facets of human experience. The nations of the
world were faced with the threat of tyranny. Their
immediate responsibility was to overcome that peril.
None of the nations were too willing to accept the
responsibilities which were implicit in the peril. One
method of escape from the responsibility was to en-
large upon the perilous consequences of involvement
102 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
in war. We were told, for instance, that we would all
become fascists in our effort to destroy fascism. There
was a degree of plausibility in this argument; for
military discipline tends toward authoritarianism, and
the high cost of war may weaken economic systems to
such an extent that they may be threatened with the
social chaos out of which tyrannies arise. Actually the
democratic world survived, with its liberties fairly
well preserved. If our anxieties for tomorrow had
been our sole counsellors we should have capitulated
to tyranny.
Another counsel of anxiety was the suggestion that
action even against a great evil is not justified, if it
has little prospect of successful conclusion. In the
Catholic definition of a "just" war one of the criteria
of justice enumerated is a good prospect of success.
This criterion has a provisional legitimacy. Both Aris-
totle and Aquinas were right in suggesting that the
wise man will consider whether an abortive effort to
overcome an evil may not aggravate the evil. But the
idea must not be pressed too consistently. One may
be grateful, for instance, that Mr. Churchill did not
give it any consideration in the grave hours of 1940.
He would in that case have followed the course of
Marshal Petain. Mr. Churchill's greatest claim to
fame, and to the respect of both his contemporaries
and posterity, arises precisely from the fact that he
articulated the inarticulate and yet powerful sense of
a great number of his countrymen and of the civilized
TODAY, TOMORROW 103
world, who felt that there are perils so great and
responsibilities so urgent that they reduce the calcula-
tion of consequences to an irrelevance. This is an exact
application of the words: "Sufficient unto the day is
the evil thereof."
We have thus far dealt with the "vertical" dimen-
sion of our experience as both an obligation and an
achieved task. Yet it is necessary to discriminate be-
tween the two, for the one is more absolute than the
other. We may have a momentary obligation which
is absolute. We perform it "in God's sight," which is
to say that the responsibility is unqualified no matter
how uncertain the consequences may be. In such ex-
periences we truly measure the eternal dimension of
life within its flux. On the other hand what we achieve
is very imperfect, partly because the act itself is not
perfect and partly because the actions of other genera-
tions are required to complete it. For this reason the
sense of consummation within the relativities of life
is always the part of faith. This is precisely what is
meant by the biblical doctrine of "justification by
faith." If we live and act in faith, the imperfections
of our momentary achievements are transmuted and
become a part of God's perfection. There must be
forgiveness in the attitude of God toward us, for our
acts are not merely imperfect, in the sense that they
only approximate their ideal possibility; but there is
always a positive element of evil in them. One thinks,
for instance, of the degree to which national egotism
104 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
and self-interest were the driving motives of the
nations, prompting them to do their duty. Thus we
have absolute responsibilities which represent the
challenge of the eternal to our finite situation 5 but
our achievements are only absolute by faith.
IV
But even the most superficial estimate of this "ver-
tical" dimension of experience suggests that the more
"horizontal" or historical dimension is implicit in
every moment of experience. Every action is bound
both to its origins and to its consequences. History is
a moving stream. The completion of an act and a
responsibility always lies in an historical tomorrow
and not merely in the eternal.
In the present world situation it is apparent that
no matter how justified we were in meeting a present
peril without regard to all the historical consequences,
a view of those consequences obtruded as soon as the
immediate peril was less pressing. We fought to
throttle tyranny in the immediate moment. But in the
next moment we recognized that the tyranny grew in
a soil of an international anarchy for which all na-
tions were responsible. Thus we face the question
whether we can overcome that anarchy. Can we miti-
gate the power of national egotism sufficiently to
establish an international order?
Looked at from one aspect, the sacrifices of this
TODAY, TOMORROW 105
war are self- justifying, or at least they are justified
by the preservation of our liberties. From another
aspect they wait upon other generations for their
perfecting, "God having provided some better thing
for us, that they without us should not be made per-
fect." If this war does not issue in a more stable world
order, the sacrifices which it required will have only
a negative, and therefore a tragic, justification.
Whether we are able to complete the meaning of
today in the achievements of tomorrow depends
partly upon the degree to which we measure the
meaning to today's task in depth. That is represented
by the oil carried in the lamps of the wise virgins. If,
for instance, an immediate peril is recognized only in
its immediate dimensions, and if the deeper issues out
of which it arose are not understood, we do not pre-
pare ourselves for the more ultimate task and the
more ultimate realization of our obligations. There
are military minds, for instance, who insist upon view-
ing the present world situation in purely military and
technical terms. We defeated a terrible foe, they
argue, by establishing a technical supremacy over his
might on land, on the sea and in the air. Our job is to
maintain that supremacy under all circumstances.
They regard this as an adequate preparation for the
perils of the morrow. In reality this attitude repre-
sents the foolishness of the virgins, who did not
realize how unexpectedly the "bridegroom" may ap-
pear tomorrow* For the Kingdom of God appears in
106 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
history in every great judgment and in every new
level of community. The Kingdom is always both
judgment and fulfillment. In judgment the contra-
diction between our history and the law of God is
more fully apprehended. Without this apprehension
we are tempted to regard our present achievements
as adequate. In the fulfillment some creative step is
taken to bring our human communities into con-
formity with the law of brotherhood.
Different ages and periods of history emphasize the
one or the other dimension of experience, according
to their distinctive faith. Since the eighteenth century,
modern culture, having lost its faith in the God who
is known in Scripture, was forced to place an undue
emphasis upon the fulfillments of the future as the
only source of the meaning of the present As Garl
Becker has shown in his Heavenly City of the
Eighteenth Century Philosophers, the wise men of
the Enlightenment made "posterity" into the image
of God. It was posterity which would judge them
and find them righteous or unrighteous. It was pos-
terity which would justify their acts by fulfilling
them. The inadequacy of this faith may be discerned
by the simple observation that we are the posterity
to which the eighteenth century appealed and which
it worshipped. Our broken and fragmentary life is
TODAY, TOMORROW 107
hardly an adequate fulfillment of the dreams of that
century 5 and we are much too preoccupied with our
own sorrows and responsibilities to heed the out-
stretched hands of the eighteenth-century worshippers.
We are not God. We are not even good idols. It
might be observed furthermore that the eighteenth
century was a very inadequate fulfillment of the faith
of the seventeenth century. The conception of the
meaning of life expressed in the religious controversies
of the seventeenth century was profounder than was
the sense of meaning in the eighteenth century. For
the Enlightenment reduced everything to shallow-
ness. We should be poor indeed if we were dependent
only upon posterity to fulfill our lives. Yet there is a
dimension of our existence which is fulfilled only in
the future.
If the secularism of the eighteenth century gave
undue emphasis to the horizontal dimension of his-
tory, orthodox Protestantism very frequently saw no
significance in historical fulfillment. It believed with
the great historian, Ranke, that all moments of time
are equi-distant from eternity- Karl Earth, for in-
stance, standing in the radical Reformation tradition,
counselled the British Christians, in his well-known
letter to them, 1 not to avail themselves of the "per-
mission" their government had given them to discuss
post-war prospects. He placed no confidence in these
1 Karl Earth, "A Letter to Great Britain from Switzerland, April
i94i, 5) in This Christian Cause.
io8 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
plans for the future. He placed sole emphasis upon
the dimension of experience which is measured in the
words, "Be not anxious for the morrow." This advice
might well be contrasted with the observation of
Harold Laski that if this war did not lead to a world-
wide fellowship of socialist republics it would have
been fought in vain. Both estimates of the present
crisis are wrong because both are one-sided. Each
measures only one dimension of our experience.
The two dimensions of our experience must lead
to an attitude in which serenity and alertness are
combined. We may be serene in the present moment,
both because its obligations may have a finality which
transcends the relativity of the moment, and its
achievements, though imperfect, may by faith give
us a sense of consummation. We must not be anxious
about tomorrow, partly because we do not know
tomorrow and partly because tomorrow, when known,
will be less than a perfect fulfillment of our hopes.
All pure instrumentalism, which judges every act and
event in terms of its consequences, contains an ele-
ment of pretension. It assumes that we have a more
certain knowledge of future consequences than is
possible for finite man, standing within the flux of
time. He knows a great deal about the past, though
not as much as he thinks he knows. But if his knowl-
edge of the past is a symbol of his greatness, let him
be reminded that his ignorance of the future is a sign
of his weakness. If, by faith, we understand and lay
TODAY, TOMORROW 109
hold of the divine power which completes our in-
completeness, we can accept the finiteness of our life
without fretfulness and anticipate every unknown to-
morrow without anxiety.
And yet we shall be anxious as we look into the
future. We shall survey the future with hope and
apprehension. We shall survey it with apprehension
because we know that there are evils in the present
which must bear fruit in some terrible judgment of
tomorrow. Our present apprehension must be the
seed of our future repentance. We shall not know the
judgment of the Kingdom of God, if apprehension
does not prepare us for it. Also our present hope is the
seed of our future sense of obligation. We recognize a
more universal obligation emerging out of the frag-
mentary loyalties of today. Living in racial and na-
tional strife, and yet sensing the universal character of
our obligation, we prepare ourselves to meet those
obligations more full tomorrow. For the Kingdom
comes in fulfillment as well as in judgment. This
hope of fulfillment and this apprehension of judg-
ment is the oil in our lamp, which helps us to enter
the wedding feasts.
Only a combination of repose and anxiety, of se-
renity and preparedness, can do justice to the whole
of our life and the whole of our world. For our life
is a brief existence, moving within a great stream of
finiteness. Yet the stream moves within its bed; and
the flux of existence is held together by the eternal
no THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
purposes of God. We ourselves stand beyond the flux
in memory and hope. But we do not stand beyond it
so completely that we can touch the eternal in the
present moment by our own strength. We touch it by
faith. That faith is the source of our serenity, even as
alertness for the promises and perils of tomorrow is
a reminder of our continued finiteness and sin. Both
posterity and God are required to complete our life.
But posterity without God would give us a very sorry
completion. Wherefore even the future would become
a source of intolerable anxiety if we could not believe
that both tomorrow and today are in the hands of a
God whose power is great enough to complete our
incompleteness and whose mercy and forgiveness are
adequate for the evils which we introduce into both
the present and the future*
VII
HUMOUR AND FAITH
fC He that sitteth In the heavens shall laugh: the
Lord, shall have them in derision" Ps. 2 14.
JLHIS word of the Second Psalm is the only instance
in the Bible in which laughter is attributed to God.
God is not frequently thought o as possessing a sense
o humour, though that quality would have to be
attributed to perfect personality. There are critics of
religion who regard it as deficient in the sense of
humour, and they can point to the fact that there is
little laughter in the Bible. Why is it that Scrip-
tural literature, though filled with rejoicings and
songs of praise, is not particularly distinguished for
the expression of laughter? There are many sayings,
of Jesus which betray a touch of ironic humour; but
on the whole one must agree with the critics who do
not find much humour or laughter in the Bible.
This supposed defect will, however, appear less
remarkable if the relation of humour to faith is under-
stood. Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and
laughter is the beginning of prayer/Laughter must
in
THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
be heard in the outer courts of religion} and the
echoes of it should resound in the sanctuary } but
there is no laughter in the holy of holies. There
laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is
fulfilled by faith.
The intimate relation between humour and faith is
derived from the fact that both deal with the incon-
gruities of our existence. Humour is concerned with
the immediate incongruities of life and faith with the
ultimate ones. Both humour and faith are expressions
of the freedom of the human spirit, of its capacity to
stand outside of life, and itself, and view the whole
scene. But any view of the whole immediately creates
the problem of how the incongruities of life are to be
dealt with; for the effort to understand the life, and
our place in it, confronts us with inconsistencies and
incongruities which do not fit into any neat picture of
the whole. Laughter is our reaction to immediate
incongruities and those which do not affect us essen-
tially. Faith is the only possible response to the ulti-
mate incongruities of existence which threaten the
very meaning of our life.
We laugh at what? At the sight of a fool upon the
throne of the king; or the proud man suffering from
some indignity} or the child introducing its irrele-
vancies into the conversation of the mature. We laugh
at the juxtaposition of things which do not fit to-
gether. A boy slipping on the ice is not funny. Slip-
ping on the ice is funny only if it happens to one
HUMOUR AND FAITH 113
whose dignity is upset. A favorite device of dramatists,
who have no other resources of humour, is to intro-
duce some irrelevant interest into the central theme
of the drama by way of the conversation of maid or
butler. If this irrelevance is to be really funny, how-
ever, it must have some more profound relation to the
theme than the conversor intended. This is to say that
humour manages to resolve incongruities by the dis-
covery of another level of congruity. We laugh at the
proud man slipping on the ice, not merely because the
contrast between his dignity and his undignified plight
strikes us as funny j but because we feel that his dis-
comfiture is a poetically just rebuke of his dignity.
Thus we deal with immediate incongruities, in which
we are not too seriously involved and which open no
gap in the coherence of life in such a way as to
threaten us essentially. But there are profound in-
congruities which contain such a threat. Man's very
position in the universe is incongruous. That is the
problem of faith, and not of humour. Man is so great
and yet so small, so significant and yet so insignificant.
"On the one hand," says Edward Bellamy, 1 "is the
personal life of man, an atom, a grain of sand on a
boundless shore, a bubble of a foam flecked ocean, a
life bearing a proportion to the mass of past, present
and future, so infinitesimal as to defy the imagination.
On the other hand is a certain other life, as it were a
spark of the universal life, insatiable in aspiration,
1 In The Religion of Solidarity.
ii 4 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
greedy of infinity, asserting solidarity with all things
and all existence, even while subject to the limitations
of space and time." That is the contrast.
When man surveys the world he seems to be the
very center of it 5 and his mind appears to be the
unifying power which makes sense out of the whole.
But this same man, reduced to the limits of his animal
existence, is a little animalcule, preserving a precari-
ous moment of existence within the vastness of space
and time. There is a profound incongruity between
the "inner" and the "outer" world, or between the
world as viewed from man's perspective, and the
man in the world as viewed from a more ultimate per-
spective. The incongruity becomes even more pro-
found when it is considered that it is the same man
who assumes the ultimate perspective from which he
finds himself so insignificant.
Philosophers seek to overcome this basic incon-
gruity by reducing one world to the dimension of the
other j or raising one perspective to the height of the
other. But neither a purely naturalistic nor a consist-
ently idealistic system of philosophy is ever com-
pletely plausible. There are ultimate incongruities o
life which can be resolved by faith but not by reason.
Reason can look at them only from one standpoint or
another, thereby denying the incongruities which it
seeks to solve. They are also too profound to be re-
solved or dealt with by laughter. If laughter seeks
to deal with the ultimate issues of life it turns into a
HUMOUR AND FAITH 115
bitter humour. This means that it has been over-
whelmed by the incongruity. Laughter is thus not
merely a vestibule to faith but also a "no-man's land"
between faith and despair. We laugh cheerfully at the
incongruities on the surface of life; but if we have no
other resource but humour to deal with those which
reach below the surface, our laughter becomes an ex-
pression of our sense of the meaninglessness of life.
II
Laughter is a sane and healthful response to the
innocent foibles of men; and even to some which are
not innocent. All men betray moods and affectations,
conceits and idiosyncrasies, which could become the
source of great annoyance to us if we took them too
seriously. It is better to laugh at them. A sense of
humour is indispensable to men of affairs who have
the duty of organizing their fellowmen in common
endeavors. It reduces the frictions of life and makes
the foibles of men tolerable. There is, in the laughter
with which we observe and greet the foibles of others,
a nice mixture of mercy and judgment, of censure and
forbearance. We would not laugh if we regarded
these foibles as altogether fitting and proper. There is
judgment, therefore, in our laughter. But we also
prove by the laughter that we do not take the annoy-
ance too seriously. However, if our fellows commit a
serious offense against the common good, laughter no
ii 6 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
longer avails. If we continue to indulge in it, the ele-
ment of forebearance is completely eliminated from
it. Laughter against real evil is bitter. Such bitter
laughter of derision has its uses as an instrument of
condemnation. But there is no power in it to deter the
evil against which it is directed.
There were those who thought that we could laugh
Mussolini and Hitler out of court. Laughter has
sometimes contributed to the loss of prestige of dying
oligarchies and social systems. Thus Cervantes 5 Don
Quixote contributed to the decline of feudalism, and
Boccaccio's Decameron helped to signal the decay of
medieval asceticism. But laughter alone never de-
stroys a great seat of power and authority in history.
Its efficacy is limited to preserving the self-respect of
the slave against the master. It does not extend to the
destruction of slavery. Thus all the victims of tyranny
availed themselves of the weapon of wit to preserve
their sense of personal self-respect. Laughter pro-
vided them with a little private world in which they
could transvalue the values of the tyrant, and reduce
his pompous power to the level of the ridiculous. Yet
there is evidence that the most insufferable forms of
tyranny (as in the concentration camps, for instance)
could not be ameliorated by laughter.
Laughter may turn to bitterness when it faces seri-
ous evil, partly because it senses its impotence. But,
in any case, serious evil must be seriously dealt with.
The bitterness of derision is serious enough 5 but
HUMOUR AND FAITH 117
where is the resource of forgiveness to come from? It
was present in the original forbearance of laughter 3
but it can not be brought back into the bitterness of
derision. The contradiction between judgment and
mercy can not be resolved by humour but only by
vicarious pain.
Thus we laugh at our children when they betray
the jealous conceits of childhood. These are the first
buds of sin which grow in the soil of the original sin
of our common humanity. But when sin has conceived
and brought forth its full fruit, our laughter is too
ambiguous to deal with the child's offense; or if it is
not ambiguous it becomes too bitter. If we retain the
original forbearance of laughter in our judgment it
turns into harmful indulgence. Parental judgment is
always confronted with the necessity of relating rigor-
ous judgment creatively to the goodness of mercy.
That relation can be achieved only as the parent him-
self suffers under the judgments which are exacted.
Not humour but the cross is the meeting point of jus-
tice and mercy, once both judgment and mercy have
become explicit. Laughter can express both together,
when neither is fully defined. But, when it becomes
necessary to define each explicitly, laughter can no
longer contain them both. Mercy is expelled and only
bitterness remains.
What is true of our judgments of each other is true
of the judgment of God. In the word of our text God
is pictured laughing at man and having him in derision
u8 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
because of the vanity of man's imagination and pre-
tensions* There is no suggestion of a provisional
geniality in this divine laughter. Derisiveness is pure
judgment. It is not possible to resolve the contradic-
tion between mercy and judgment, on the level of
the divine, through humour 5 because the divine judg-
ment is ultimate judgment. That contradiction, which
remains an unsolved mystery in the Old Testament,
is resolved only as God is revealed in Christ. There is
no humour but suffering in that revelation. There is,
as we have observed, a good deal of ironic humour in
the sayings of Christ. But there is no humour in the
scene of Christ upon the Cross. The only humour on
Calvary is the derisive laughter of those who cried,
"He saved others j himself he can not save. ... If
he be the son of God let him come down from the
cross" 5 and the ironic inscription on the cross, ordered
by Pilate: "The King of the Jews." These ironic and
derisive observations were the natural reactions of
common sense to dimensions of revelation which
transcend common sense. Since they could not be com-
prehended by faith, they prompted ironic laughter.
There is no humour in the cross because the justice
and the mercy of God are fully revealed in it. In that
revelation God's justice is made the more terrible
because the sin of man is disclosed in its full dimen-
sion. It is a rebellion against God from which God
himself suffers. God can not remit the consequences
of sin; yet He does show mercy by taking the conse-
HUMOUR AND FAITH 119
quences upon and into Himself. This is the main
burden of the disclosure of God in Christ. This is the
final clue to the mystery of the divine character.
Mercy and justice are provisionally contained in
laughter; and the contradiction between them is ten-
tatively resolved in the sense of humour. But the final
resolution of justice, fully developed, and of mercy,
fully matured, is possible only when the sharp edge of
justice is turned upon the executor of judgment with-
out being blunted. This painful experience of vicari-
ous suffering is far removed from laughter. Only an
echp of the sense of humour remains in it. The echo
is the recognition in the sense of humour that judg-
ment and mercy belong together, even though they
seem to be contradictory. But there is no knowledge
in the sense of humour of how the two are related to
each other and how the contradiction between them
is to be resolved.
Ill
The sense of humour is even more important pro-
visionally in dealing with our own sins than in deal-
ing with the sins of others. Humour is a proof of the
capacity of the self to gain a vantage point from which
it is able to look at itself. The sense of humour is thus
a by-product of self-transcendence. People with a
sense of humour do not take themselves too seriously.
They are able to "stand off" from themselves, see
120 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
themselves in perspective, and recognize the ludicrous
and absurd aspects of their pretensions. All of us
ought to be ready to laugh at ourselves because all of
us are a little funny in our foibles, conceits and pre-
tensions. What is funny about us is precisely that we
take ourselves too seriously. We are rather insignifi-
cant little bundles of energy and vitality in a vast
organization of life. But we pretend that we are the
very center of this organization. This pretension is
ludicrous ; and its absurdity increases with our lack of
awareness of it. The less we are able to laugh at our-
selves the more it becomes necessary and inevitable
that others laugh at us.
It is significant that little children are really very
sober though they freely indulge in a laughter which
expresses a pure animal joy of existence. But they do
not develop the capacity of real humour until the fifth
or sixth year, at which time they may be able to laugh
at themselves and at others. At about this age their
intense preoccupation with self and with an immediate
task at hand is partly mitigated. The sense of humour
grows, in other words, with the capacity of self-tran-
scendence. If we can gain some perspective upon our
own self we are bound to find the self's pretensions a
little funny.
This means that the ability to laugh at oneself is
the prelude to the sense of contrition. Laughter is a
vestibule to the temple of confession. But laughter is
not able to deal with the problem of the sins of the
HUMOUR AND FAITH 121
self in any ultimate way. If we become fully conscious
of the tragedy of sin we recognize that our preoccu-
pation with self, our exorbitant demands upon life,
our insistence that we receive more attention than our
needs deserve, effect our neighbors harmfully and
defraud them of their rightful due. If we recognize
the real evil of sin, laughter can not deal with the
problem. If we continue to laugh after having recog-
nized the depth of evil, our laughter becomes the
instrument of irresponsibility. Laughter is thus not
only the vestibule of the temple of confession but
the no-man's land between cynicism and contrition.
Laughter may express a mood which takes neither the
self nor life seriously. If we take life seriously but
ourselves not too seriously, we cease to laugh. The
contradiction in man between "the good that he would
and does not do, and the evil that he would not do,
and does" is no laughing matter.
There is furthermore another dimension in genuine
contrition which laughter does not contain. It is the
awareness of being judged from beyond ourselves.
There is something more than self -judgment in genu-
ine contrition. "For me it is a small thing to be judged
of men," declares St. Paul, "neither judge I myself;
for I know nothing against myself 5 he who judges me
is the Lord." In an ultimate sense the self never
knows anything against itself. The self of today may
judge the selPs action of yesterday as evil. But that
means that the self of today is the good self. We are
122 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
to judge our actions through self-judgment. But we
do not become aware of the deep root of evil actions
in such judgments. We may judge our sins but we
do not judge ourselves as sinners. The knowledge
that we are sinners, and that inordinate desires spring
from a heart inordinately devoted to itself, is a reli-
gious knowledge which, in a sense, is never achieved
except in prayer. Then we experience with St. Paul
that "he who judges us is the Lord." There is no
laughter in that experience. There is only pain. The
genuine joy of reconciliation with God, which is pos-
sible only as the fruit of genuine repentance, is a joy
which stands beyond laughter though it need not
completely exclude laughter.
To suggest that the sense of humour is the begin-
ning, but not the end, of a proper humility does not
mean that the final fruit of true contrition destroys all
vestiges of the seed from which it sprang. The saint-
liest men frequently have a humourous glint in their
eyes. They retain the capacity to laugh at both them-
selves and at others. They do not laugh in their
prayers because it is a solemn experience to be judged
of God and to stand under the scrutiny of Him from
whom no secrets are hid. But the absence of laughter
in the most ultimate experience of life does not pre-
clude the presence of laughter as a suffused element
in all experience. There is indeed proper laughter on
the other side of the experience of repentance. It is
the laughter of those who have been released both
HUMOUR AND FAITH 123
from the tyranny of the law and from the slavery of
pretending to be better than they are. To know one-
self a sinner, to have no illusions about the self, and
no inclination to appear better than we* are, either in
the sight of man or of God, and to know oneself for-
given and released from sin, is the occasion for a new
joy. This joy expresses itself in an exuberance of
which laughter is not the only, but is certainly one,
expression.
IV
We have dealt thus far with humour as a reaction
to the incongruities in the character of self and its
neighbors. We have discovered it to be a healthy, but
an ultimately unavailing, method of dealing with the
evils of human nature. But men face other incongrui-
ties than those which human foibles and weaknesses
present. Human existence itself is filled with incon-
gruities. Life does not make sense as easily as those
philosophers, who think they have charted and com-
prehended everything in a nice system of rationality,
would have us believe. Man's life is really based upon
a vast incongruity.
Man is a creature who shares all the weaknesses of
the other creatures of the world. Yet he is a sublime
creature who holds the ages within his memory and
touches the fringes of the eternal in his imagination.
When he looks into the world within, he finds depths
124 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
within depths of mystery which are never completely
fathomed. Man is a spirit 5 and among the qualities
of his spirit are the capacity to regard himself and the
world; and to speculate on the meaning of the whole.
This man is, when he is the observer, the very center
of the universe. Yet the same man "brings his years
to an end like a tale that is told." This man groweth
up like grass in the morning which in the evening is
cut down and withereth. The brevity of human exist-
ence is the most vivid expression and climax of human
weakness.
The incongruity of man's greatness and weakness,
of his mortality and immortality, is the source of his
temptation to evil. Some men seek to escape from
their greatness to their weakness; they try to deny the
freedom of their spirit in order to achieve the serenity
of nature. Some men seek to escape from their weak-
ness to their greatness. But these simple methods oB
escape are unavailing. The effort to escape into the
weakness of nature leads not to the desired serenity
but to sensuality. The effort to escape from weakness
to greatness leads not to the security but to the evils
of greed and lust for power, or to the opposite evils
of a spirituality which denies the creaturely limita-
tions of human existence.
The philosophies of the ages have sought to bridge
the chasm between the inner and the outer world,
between the world of thought in which man is so
great and the world of physical extension in which
HUMOUR AND FAITH 125
man is so small and impotent. But philosophy can not
bridge the chasm. It can only pretend to do so by
reducing one world to the dimensions of the other.
Thus naturalists, materialists, mechanists, and all phi-
losophers, who view the world as primarily a system of
physical relationships, construct a universe of mean-
ing from which man in the full dimension of spirit
can find no home. The idealistic philosophers, on the
other hand, construct a world of rational coherence in
which mind is the very stuff of order, the very foun-
dation of existence. But their systems do not do justice
to the large areas of chaos in the world; and they fail
to give an adequate account of man himself, who is
something less, as well as something more, than mind.
The sense of humour is, in many respects, a more
adequate resource for the incongruities of life than
the spirit of philosophy. If we are able to laugh at
the curious quirks of fortune in which the system of
order and meaning which each life constructs within
and around itself is invaded, we at least do not make
the mistake of prematurely reducing the irrational to
a nice system. Things "happen" to us. We make our
plans for a career, and sickness frustrates us. We plan
our life, and war reduces all plans to chaos. The
storms and furies of the world of nature, which can
so easily reduce our private schemes to confusion, do
of course have their own laws. They "happen" accord-
ing to a discernible system of causality. There is no
question about the fact that there are systems of order
126 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
in the world. But it is not so easy to discern a total
system of order and meaning which will comprehend
the various levels of existence in an orderly whole.
To meet the disappointments and frustrations of
life, the irrationalities and contingencies with laugh-
ter, is a high form of wisdom, Such laughter does not
obscure or defy the dark irrationality. It merely yields
to it without too much emotion and friction. A hu-
morous acceptance of fate is really the expression of
a high form of self-detachment. If men do not take
themselves too seriously, if they have some sense of
the precarious nature of the human enterprise, they
prove that they are looking at the whole drama of life
not merely from the circumscribed point of their own
interests but from some further and higher vantage
point. One thinks for instance of the profound wis-
dom which underlies the capacity of laughter in the
Negro people. Confronted with the cruelties of slav-
ery, and socially too impotent to throw off the yoke,
they learned to make their unpalatable situation more
sufferable by laughter. There was of course a deep
pathos mixed with the humour, a proof of the fact
that laughter had reached its very limit.
There is indeed a limit to laughter in dealing with
life's frustrations. We can laugh at all of life's sur-
face irrationalities. We preserve our sanity the more
surely if we do not try to reduce the whole crazy-
quilt of events in which we move to a premature
and illusory order. But the ultimate incongruities o
HUMOUR AND FAITH 127
human existence can not be "laughed off." We can
not laugh at death. We do try of course.
A war era is particularly fruitful of Galgenhumor
(gallows humour). Soldiers are known on occasion
to engage in hysterical laughter when nerves are tense
before the battle. They speak facetiously of the pos-
sible dire fate which might befall this or that man of
the company. "Sergeant/' a soldier is reported to have
said before a recent battle, "don't let this little fellow
go into battle before me. He isn't big enough to stop
the bullet meant for me." The joke was received with
uproarious good humour by the assembled comrades.
But when the "little fellow" died in battle the next
day, everyone felt a little ashamed of the joke. At any
rate it was quite inadequate to deal with the depth
and breadth of the problem of death.
If we persist in laughter when dealing with the
final problem of human existence, when we turn life
into a comedy we also reduce it to meaninglessness.
That is why laughter, when pressed to solve the ulti-
mate issue, turns into a vehicle of bitterness rather
than joy. To laugh at life in the ultimate sense means
to scorn it. There is a note of derision in that laughter
and an element of despair in that derision.
Just as laughter is the "no-man's land" between
cynicism and contrition when we deal with the incon-
gruous element of evil in our own soul, so is it also
the area between despair and faith when dealing with
evil and incongruity in the world about us. Our pro-
ia8 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
visional amusement with the irrational and unpre-
dictable fortunes which invade the order and purpose
of our life must move either toward bitterness or
faith, when we consider not this or that frustration
and this or that contingent event, but when we are
forced to face the issue of the basic incongruity of
death.
Either we have a faith from the standpoint of
which we are able to say, "I am persuaded, that
neither death, nor life . . . shall be able to separate
us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord," * or we are overwhelmed by the incon-
gruity of death and are forced to say with Ecclesiastes:
"I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the
sons of men . . . that they might see that they them-
selves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of
men befalleth beasts 5 ... as the one dieth, so dieth
the other 5 yea they all have one breath; so that a
man hath no preeminence above a beast; for all is
vanity." 2
The final problem of human existence is derived
from the fact that in one context and from one per-
spective man has no preeminence above the beast; and
yet from another perspective his preeminence is very
great. No beast comes to the melancholy conclusion
that "all is vanity"; for the purposes of its life do not
outrun its power, and death does not therefore invade
its life as an irrelevance. Furthermore it has no pre-
8:38-39. 2 Ecdes. 3:18-19.
HUMOUR AND FAITH 129
vision of its own end and is therefore not tempted to
melancholy. Man's melancholy over the prospect of
death is the proof of his partial transcendence over
the natural process which ends in death. But this is
only a partial transcendence and man's power is not
great enough to secure his own immortality.
This problem of man, so perfectly and finally sym-
bolized in the fact of death, can be solved neither by
proving that he has no preeminence above the beast,
vtior yet proving that his preeminence is a guarantee
that death has no final dominion over him. Man is
both great and small, both strong and weak, both in-
volved in and free of the limits of nature ; and he is a
unity of strength and weakness of spirit and creature-
liness. There is therefore no possibility of man extri-
cating himself by his own power from the predicament
of his amphibious state.
The Christian faith declares that the ultimate order
and meaning of the world lies in the power and wis-
dom of God who is both Lord of the whole world of
creation and the Father of human spirits. It believes
that the incongruities of human existence are finally
overcome by the power and the love of God, and that
the love which Christ revealed is finally sufficient to
overcome the contradiction of death.
This faith is not some vestigial remnant of a credu-
lous and pre-scientific age with which "scientific" gen-
erations may dispense. There is no power in any sci-
ence or philosophy, whether in a pre- or post-scientific
130 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
age, to leap the chasm of incongruity by pure thought.
Thought which begins on one side of the chasm can
do no more than deny the reality on the other side.
It seeks either to prove that death is no reality because
spirit is eternal, or that spirit is not eternal because
death is a reality. But the real situation is that man,
as a part of the natural world, brings his years to an
end like a tale that is told} and that man as a f free
spirit finds the brevity of his years incongruous and
death an irrationality; and that man as a unity of
body and spirit can neither by taking thought reduce
the dimension of his life to the limit of nature, nor
yet raise it to the dimension of pure spirit. Either his
incomplete and frustrated life is completed by a power
greater than his own, or it is not completed.
Faith is therefore the final triumph over incon-
gruity, the final assertion of the meaningfulness of
existence. There is no other triumph and will be none,
no matter how much human knowledge is enlarged.
Faith is the final assertion of the freedom of the
human spirit, but also the final acceptance of the
weakness of man and the final solution for the prob-
lem of life through the disavowal of any final solu-
tions in the power of man.
Insofar as the sense of humour is a recognition of
incongruity, it is more profound than any philosophy
which seeks to devour incongruity in reason. But the
sense of humour remains healthy only when it deals
with immediate issues and faces the obvious and sur~
HUMOUR AND FAITH 131
face irrationalities. It must move toward faith or sink
into despair when the ultimate issues are raised.
That is why there is laughter in the vestibule of
the temple, the echo of laughter in the temple itself,
but only faith and prayer, and no laughter, in the
holy of holies.
VIII
THE POWER AND WEAKNESS.
OF GOD
"And when they had flatted a crown of thorns %
they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right
hand: and they bowed the knee before him y and
mocked him > say ing y Hail, King of the Jews!
And they spit upon him > and took the reed y and
smote him on the head. And after that they had
mocked him, they took the robe of him y and put
his own raiment on him y and led him away to
crucify him. . . . And they that passed by reviled
him y wagging their heads, And say ing y Thou that
destroy est the temple > and buildest it in three
days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God,
come down from the cross. Likewise also the
chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and
elder s y said, He saved others^ himself he cannot
save. If he be King of Israel, let him come down
from the cross. . . . The thieves also, which were
crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth"
Mt. 27:29-31,39-42,44.
AHEY mocked and derided him. The chief priest and
scribes, the soldiers and passersby, and even the
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 133
thieves, were all agreed in regarding the royal and
divine pretensions of this Messiah as ridiculous. He
was dying upon the cross. Could anything disprove
and invalidate the Messianic claim more irrefutably
than this ignominious death? He was weak and
powerless. He had saved others but could not save
himself. If he were any kind of king he ought to
have the power to get down from the cross.
All this mockery and derision is the natural and
inevitable response to the absurdity of weakness and
suffering in a royal and divine figure. Common sense
assumes that the most significant and necessary attri-
bute of both royalty and divinity is power. The judg-
ments of priests and soldiers, of passersby, and thieves
may vary on other matters. But they are naturally
unanimous in their derision of the royal and divine
claims of a Messiah upon the cross.
The Christian faith has made this absurdity of a
suffering Messiah into the very keystone of its arch
of faith. It therefore allows the records to report the
derision of the onlookers at Calvary. It feels that the
mockery helps to measure the profundity of the reve-
lation upon the cross. If common sense could com-
prehend this absurdity, that would be proof that there
was no depth of revelation in it. A faith which under-
stands the scandal of the cross also has some appre-
ciation of the negative support which mockery gives
to the sublimity of the truth apprehended by faith.
In the words of a modern literary critic: "The image
i 3 4 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
of Christ crucified is, of all Christian images, the oae
that in itself contains the full paradox of human
doubt and human faith, the focal point of the tem-
poral and the eternal, at which the eternal is at once
most essentially challenged and most essentially
triumphant." *
What is involved in the apprehension of Christian
faith that a crucified Christ is the "focal point be-
tween the temporal and the eternal," the most lumi-
nous symbol of the divine in the historical, the best
"handle" by which to grasp the meaning of the divine
mystery, is its understanding of the paradox of the
power and the weakness of God. The crux of the
cross is its revelation of the fact that the final power
of God over man is derived from the self-imposed
weakness of his love. This self-imposed weakness does
not derogate from the Majesty of God. His mercy is
the final dimension of His majesty. This is the Chris-
tian answer to the final problem of human existence.
The worship of God is reverence toward the mys-
terious source and end of all of life's vitalities; and
toward the mysterious source and end of all goodness.
A truly "holy" God must be both powerful and good.
Impotent or limited goodness is not divine. It can not
be worshipped. Its weakness arouses pity rather than
worship $ and faith is distracted by thought of the
power against which this goodness must contend.
1 Kathleen Raine, "John Donne and Baroque Doubt," Horizon,
June 1945.
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 135
But power without goodness can not be worshipped
either. It may be feared, or possibly defied - y but rever-
ence must be withheld. Bertrand Russell suggested
in his Free Marfs Worship that the highest reli-
gion is for man to "sustain for a moment the world
which his own ideals have builded against the tram-
pling march of unconscious power." But such defiance
is only one step from despair. If the ultimate source
of all of life's vitalities is the evil of "unconscious
power," the sense of futility must finally overcome
the attitude of noble defiance.
Faith has never been willing to be embarrassed on
this issue by the consistencies of the philosophers.
Even before the revelation of the cross, the "Holi-
ness" of God has always been conceived as implying
both majesty and goodness, both power and love. Yet
the two attributes of God stand, at least partly, in
contradiction to each other. If God is all-powerful
He must be the Creator of evil as well as of good. All
the suffering of the world would seem to be finally
attributed to Him. If the suffering is due to dishar-
monies in the order of the world, which God has not
mastered, and to recalcitrant forces which He has not
subdued, the goodness of God becomes more sharply
defined 5 but His power is called into question/This
rational contradiction lies at the heart of faith's ap-
prehension of the Holiness of God. It is never com-
pletely resolved. The significance of the revelation in
Christ is that the intellectual embarrassment is over-
136 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
come. The mockery of the absurdity o the weakness
of God is cheerfully accepted as a tribute to the truth
of the revelation. And all the ages of faith have found
in the crucified Lord a luminous point which "makes
sense" of the eternal mystery by defying the conclu-
sions of common sense.
II
One reason why the Christian faith is able to re-
solve the seeming conflict between the idea of the
divine power and the divine goodness is that it does
not allow that conflict to be absolute. It does not
accept the idea that power is of itself evil 5 and that
the source of all power must therefore be lacking in
holiness. One of the attributes of holiness is undoubt-
edly majesty. The Apostles' Creed begins with the
credo: "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker
of heaven and earth." The closing ascription in our
Lord's prayer is: "For thine is the power and the
glory forever." In a majestic passage in Deutero-
Isaiah, God is made to utter the most sweeping claims
of power: "I form the light, and create darkness 5 I
make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these
things." *
The power of God is conceived in biblical faith,
primarily in twofold terms: It is the power of the
Creator of the world and the power of judgment
*Isa. 45:7.
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 137
which sets a final bound to the evil in the world. The
divine power brings forth all the myriad forms of life
on the one hand and maintains order and harmony
among them on the other. Human history by reason
of human freedom had the capacity to defy the order
which God has set for His creation 5 but there are
limits to this defiance. He "bringeth the princes to
nothing} he maketh the judges of the earth as
vanity." 2
The acceptance of the goodness of power in the
Christian faith is intimately related to its whole "non-
spiritual" interpretation of life. It never abstracts the
spiritual and ideal form from the dynamic stuff of
life, to call the one good and the other evil. The
created world as such is good} and all forms of crea-
tion represent various strategies of power. Life is
power} but all created power points beyond itself to
an ultimate source. The fact that life is power is not
the cause of the evil in it} and the power of the Crea-
tor is not a contradiction, but an aspect of His Holi-
ness.
Furthermore, the power of God as judge is holy.
God is the ultimate source of that indestructible order
in the world against which man's pride and self-will
beats in vain. Here the Christian faith, drawing its
conceptions of divine justice from the teachings of the
Old Testament prophets, reveals similarities with the
interpretations of the Greek tragedies, in which the
2 Isa. 40:23.
138 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
power of Zeus is conceived of as the final order and
power which ultimately defeats all lesser majesties
and forces which are arrayed against it. All lesser
sources of power, which seek proudly to usurp the po-
sition of Zeus, are finally brought low. Greek tragedy
is not quite sure whether the a jealousy' 5 of Zeus is
really a source of justice 5 because it is not certain
whether the vitalities and ambitions of the heroes of
history, who defy Zeus, may not be noble and heroic
and whether the jealousy of Zeus is not an unjustified
egotism* There is, in other words, no consistency in
dealing with the world as a unity and harmony. Some-
times Zeus is the divine protector of the ultimate
harmony and order of the world. And sometimes those
who defy him are the necessary heroic protagonists of
the various powers and values of the world.
In the Bible, particularly in Hebraic prophetism,
there is no question about this point. The nations,
judges, and princes of the world are all in partial
defiance of the divine creator and judge of the. world j
and the terrible character of His wrath is a justified
judgment upon the various idolatries of history. For
all lesser gods are false gods. Only the real God,
who is the final source and end of all existence, de-
serves the unqualified worship which the lesser gods
claim for themselves.
We have had ample proof in our own day of the
efficacy of power in setting the outer limits of order
in the world. We have lived through a great war in
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 139
which the idolatrous pretensions of a "master race"
have been defeated by power. These pretensions
clothed themselves in the majesties of power and had
to be defeated by power. The human instruments by
which the defeat of tyranny was encompassed were
of course themselves tainted with some of the evil
against which they fought. There are no perfect hu-
man instruments of either the divine power or the
divine mercy. But we can not escape the responsi-
bilities of power by preoccupation with these corrup-
tions. Life is power. Power is not evil of itself j but
evil incarnates itself in power and can not finally be
defeated without the use of power. There are always
highly "spiritualized" forms of faith which assume
that the only hope of virtue among us is to disavow
power j and that a virtue which is as impotent as it is
good will, by that impotence, achieve the spiritual
power to defeat evil. There is an ultimate truth in
this contention at which we must look presently. Im-
mediately it is not true. In any immediate situation
neither man nor God can defeat a powerful defiance
of the order of the world without using power to set
the limits of that defiance.. There is no purely spiritual
method of preserving minimal justice and order in a
world; for the world is not purely spiritual. Power is
the basis of justice in history as it is of order in the
entire natural world. To declare the omnipotence of
God is to insist that the ultimate power which main-
tains the order of the world is superior to all sub-
140 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
ordinate powers and majesties which tend to create
anarchy by making themselves the premature and
inadequate centers of order in the world.
Ill
Yet, despite the certainty of biblical faith that God
is all-powerful, it looks upon the crucified Messiah as
the final revelation of the divine character and the
divine purpose. This divine representative was so
powerless that he could not save himself, and he died
an ignominious death. One reason why his claims to
Messianic authority were rejected by the leaders of
the Jews was because they expected a Messiah who
would combine perfect power and perfect goodness.
That was the meaning of the hope of a "shepherd
king" which informed the Messianic expectations not
only of Hebraic prophets but of Egyptian and Baby-
lonian prophets before them. Always in human his-
tory the same power which maintained order in the
world also introduced injustice into the order by
reason of the selfish use which the king made of his
power. How could history finally culminate in a reign
of perfect righteousness except by a divine king who
would combine justice with absolute power? This was
the expectation. The expectation was doomed to disap-
pointment. Perfect power and goodness can be united
only in God, where the contest of life with life is
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 141
transcended and where the possession of power does
not lead to its misuse in the struggle for existence.
In human history disinterested power is never as dis-
interested as it claims to be. It always insinuates some-
thing of the special interests of a participant in the
struggle of life into the pretended position of dis-
interested preservation of justice. Thus the so-called
democratic nations were good enough to preserve a
measure of justice against tyranny in recent conflicts.
But the idea, which they have written into the Char-
ter of the United Nations, that there are "peace-
loving" nations who can be absolutely distinguished
from the peace-breaking ones, obviously does not bear
close inspection. The peace of the coming centuries
will be less than a perfect or stable peace because
Russia, Britain, and America will compound their
concern for justice with a concern for their own pres-
tige and power. Every "shepherd king" of history is
more king and less shepherd than he pretends. That
is as true, in an ultimate sense, of democratic centers
of power as of tyrannical ones, though the former are
prevented by wisely constructed social checks upon
their power from following the logic of selfish power
to its final conclusion.
For this reason the revelation of the divine good-
ness in history must be powerless. The Christ is led
as a lamb to the slaughter. He can not save himself
from the cross. No human cause or interest gains a
triumph through him 5 all human interests and causes
142 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
are revealed as practically in contradiction to the
divine goodness because "all seek their own." The
best law of his day (Roman law) and the best religion
of his day (Hebraic monotheism) are implicated in
the crucifixion, though the latter expected to be the
righteous victor who would gain a triumph over its
unrighteous foes in the coming of the Messiah. Christ
is thus doubly an offense to the common sense of
mankind. He possesses no royal trappings of power
and no divine symbols of omnipotence. He is an
offense also because he convicts the righteous as well
as the unrighteous by his impotent goodness. There-
fore the Christian faith regards this scene at the cross
as an ultimate point of illumination on the character
of man and of God. It was inevitable that this ultimate
illumination should be mistaken again and again in
human history for proximate forms of moral illumina-
tion and thus lead to pacifist illusions. According to
such interpretations, the goodness of Christ is a form
of powerless goodness which can be emulated by the
mere disavowal of power. In such interpretations the
tragic culmination of the cross is obscured. It is as-
sumed that powerless goodness achieves the spiritual
influence to overcome all forms of evil clothed with
other than spiritual forms of power. It is made an
instrument of one historical cause in conflict with
other historical causes. It becomes the tool of an inter-
ested position in society; and a bogus promise of his-
torical success is given to it. Powerless goodness ends
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 143
upon the cross. It gives no certainty o victory to
comparatively righteous causes in conflict with com-
paratively unrighteous ones. It can only throw a divine
illumination upon the whole meaning of history and
convict both the righteous and the unrighteous in their
struggles. Men may indeed emulate the powerless
goodness of Christ; and some of his followers ought
indeed to do so. But they ought to know what they
are doing. They are not able by this strategy to guar-
antee a victory for any historical cause, however com-
paratively virtuous. They can only set up a sign and
symbol of the Kingdom of God, of a Kingdom of
perfect righteousness and peace which transcends all
the struggles of history.
This aspect of the revelatory mission of Christ is
expressed in the Christian creeds by the distinction
between God the Father and God the Son, between
the "Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,"
and His "only begotten Son" who "was crucified dead
and buried." The distinction is between the divine
power which underlies all creation and the divine as
it appears powerless in history. Most of the efforts to
reduce this distinction to nice metaphysical points of
discrimination and to indicate just how much of the
divine omnipotence or omniscience the historical re-
vealer of God carried with him into history are mean-
ingless or even confusing. The truth which is revealed
in Christ must be apprehended in faith. Faith, as far
as it uses our natural endowments, draws on poetic
144 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
and imaginative capacities rather than rational ones.
The point of the Christian story is that we see a clue
to the character of God in the character and the drama
of Christ 5 and we have some understanding of the
fact that the -similarity of love between God and
Christ is partly revealed by the dissimilarity of power
in the historical and trans-historical. The divine good-
ness is a part of the divine majesty and power j but it
can appear in history only in powerless, rather than
powerful, terms.
IV
Yet this is not the whole meaning of the powerless
Christ, comprehended by faith even while it is re-
jected by the derision and mockery of priests and
soldiers. The Christian faith makes a distinction on
the one hand between the Father and the Son, be-
tween the God above history and the God in history,
and on the other hand declares that the two are one.
To declare that the two are one is to insist that the
distinction between the historical and the trans-his-
torical, between the facet of the divine which appears
in history and the plenitude of the divine which bears
all history and creation, must not be made too un-
qualifiedly.
It must not be made absolutely because the weak-
ness of Christ is not merely the weakness which God's
revelation in history makes necessary. It is in part the
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 145
weakness of God, as He is in His nature. It is the
weakness of His love.
The weakness of God's love is not the weakness of
goodness striving against the recalcitrance of some
"given" stuff of creation. It is the self-imposed weak-
ness of His love. If God has created free spirits who
have the capacity to defy Him in their freedom. He
has created forms of life so independent that even the
power of God, acting merely as power, can not reach
the final source of their defiance. The divine power,
the very structure of the world, the requirements for
mutual living which are made part of the very char-
acter of human existence, all these are able to set an
ultimate limit to man's defiance of the order of crea-
tion. The justice and the "wrath" of God can prevent
any human rebellion from developing its defiance to
the point of ultimate triumph. The devil, according
to Christian myth, is able to defy God but not abso-
lutely. The divine order is supported by the divine
power.
But such power does not reach the heart of the
rebel. We can, as instruments of the divine justice, set
a limit to the defiance of tyranny against the justice
of our civilized institutions. The nations which en-
gaged in such defiance have been brought low, and
their cities lie in dust and ashes. The imagination of
faith is right in discerning this doom as part of the
divine justice, however much human instruments of
this justice may have obscured and brought confusion
146 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
into the terrible drama. But this punishment does not
reach the heart of Germany or Japan. No punishment
can. Justice and wrath have a negatively redemptive
effect. They prove to men and nations that there are
limits beyond which their rebellion can not go. But
punishment may prompt men and nations to despair
as well as to repentance. There can indeed be no re-
pentance if love does not shine through the justice. It
shines through whenever it becomes apparent that the
executor of judgment suffers willingly, as guiltless
sufferer, with the guilty victim of punishment. Thus
the love of parents shines through the punishment
which they may have to mete out to childish recal-
citrance. If it does not shine through, childish recal-
citrance may harden into adolescent rebellion and ma-
ture despair. Because such love seldom shines through
the punishment which "righteous" victors exact of the
"unrighteous" vanquished, the repentance of van-
quished nations is extremely difficult.
The Christian story is that, whatever the inade-
quacies of forgiveness and love may be in the opera-
tions of human justice, men ultimately face divine
forgiveness as well as divine wrath. The Christ upon
the cross is the point of illumination where the ulti-
mate mercy is apprehended. It is not a mercy which
cancels out the divine justice 5 nor does it prove the
divine justice to be merely love. There is a hard and
terrible facet to justice which stands in contradiction
to love. It is not for that reason evil. Justice is good
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 147
and punishment is necessary. Yet justice alone does
not move men to repentance. The inner core of their
rebellion is not touched until they behold the executor
of judgment suffering with and for the victim of
punishment. This is the meaning of "atonement" as
apprehended by faith. It is the final meaning and the
final mystery of the relation of God to man. Since it
is meaning and not pure mystery, faith must explicate
what it means even as we seek to do so in these words.
Since it is mystery it can not be fully explicated 5
which is why all theories of the atonement are less
illuminating (and sometimes positively confusing)
thar. the apprehension of the mystery and the mean-
ing by faith. Faith rises above all philosophies and
theologies in sensing that the weakness of God is His
final power. It is the weakness of love which touches
the heart of the offender. The mystery lies in the fact
that this mercy is partly the fulfillment and partly
the contradiction to the justice which punishes. The
fact that justice and mercy are one is symbolically
expressed in the idea of the unity of Father and Son.
The fact that justice and mercy stand in contradiction
is symbolically expressed in the distinction between
Father and Son and in the idea that the Son bears the
wrath of the Father. In less metaphysical and more
historic-symbolic terms the unity of mercy and justice
are expressed in the biblical idea that "God so loved
the world that he gave his only begotten son." The
distinction between justice and mercy is expressed by
148 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
the idea that the Son bears the sufferings which the
wrath of the Father exacts.
The moralists of every age and faith, including the
Christian faith, regard these insights as meaningless
subleties of theologians or as incredible biblical myths
which can impress only the ignorant and credulous.
They make these disparaging judgments because they
have never plumbed the problem of justice and mercy
through to its final depth. Even now they divide into
two schools, the hard and the soft school. The hard
school would seek to persuade a fallen foe to repent-
ance by the rigor of the punishment of the victors.
And the soft school would remit punishment and sub-
stitute mercy for judgment. The power which main-
tains the order of the world is good and not evil} but
its virtue does not reach into the secret of the human
heart. The justice which checks and punishes evil is
also good and not evil 5 but its force is negative and
the persuasive power of repentance and redemption
is not in it. Thus the final majesty of God is the
majesty of His mercy. It is both the completion and
the contradiction of His power. This is the truth ap-
prehended in the cross, which resolves the mystery of
the relation of justice to mercy, and gives it meaning.
Naturally the final paradoxes of faith are always
in peril of disintegration, inside the Christian com-
munity as well as outside. Thus there have been
Christian heresies (particularly in the extreme form
of Marcionism) which make an absolute distinction
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 149
between the God of power who is not good and the
God of mercy who is good but not powerful. Some
very persuasive forms of the Christian faith drift to
the very edge of this heresy. In the first world war
the most famous of English chaplains, Studdert-
Kennedy, allowed his tragic sense of life to be elabo-
rated into a homiletical theology which resolved the
Christian paradox and denied every form of the
divine majesty and power except the power of love.
One of his best known poems stated his theology
as follows:
"God, the God I love and worship, reigns in sor-
row on the Tree,
Broken, bleeding, but unconquered, very God of
God to me.
All that showy pomp of splendour, all that sheen
of angel wings,
Was not borrowed from the baubles that sur-
round our earthly kings. . . .
. . . For Thy glory is the glory of Love's loss,
And Thou hast no other splendour but the splen-
dour of the Cross.
For in Christ I see the martyrs and the beauty
of their pain,
And in Him I hear the promise that my dead
shall rise again.
High and lifted up, I see Him on the eternal
Calvary,
And two pierced hands are stretching east and
west o'er land and sea.
ISO THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
On my knees I fall and worship that great Cross
that shines above.
For the very God of Heaven is not Power, but
Power of Love." I
A non-Christian interpretation of the problem of
suffering, also presented during the first world war,
in H. G. Wells' Go d, the Invisible Kmg y arrived at
somewhat the same picture of a kind but not very
powerful divine ruler who suffered with man in fight-
ing against the recalcitrance of something in the uni-
verse more powerful than himself. Recently some
Christian philosophers have sought to present the
same doctrine in Christian form.
But all these efforts, however small or great their
ingredients of Scriptural content, manage to obscure
the sublimity of the paradox which the revelation of
God in Christ contains. They are provisionally plausi-
ble because they are philosophically more consistent
than the Christian doctrine. But they are not true to
all of the facts of existence and they fail to illumine
the final mystery of justice and mercy, of power and
goodness, which is revealed from the cross. Faith, by
a wisdom which touches sublimities beyond the ken of
philosophies, will thus continue to cherish the scandal
of the cross and accept the mockery and derision of
the various crowd at Calvary as a kind of tribute to
the truth which transcends and fulfills the highest
1 From "High and Lifted Up" in The Sorrows of God, Anil
Other PoemSj by G. A. Studdert-Kennedy.
POWER AND WEAKNESS OF GOD 151
insights of reason. The words of derision: "He saved
others, himself he cannot save," gives us a clue to the
innermost character of a man in history who perished
upon the cross. It also gives us a clue to the mystery
of the very character of God.
IX
MTSTERT AND MEANING
"For now we see through a glass darkly ; but
then face to face: now I know In fart; but then
shall I know even as also I am known" I Cor.
13:12.
JiHE testimonies of religious faith are confused more
greatly by those who claim to know too much about
the mystery of life than by those who claim to know
too little. Those who disavow all knowledge of the
final mystery of life are so impressed by the fact that
we see through a glass darkly that they would make
no claim of seeing at all. In the history of culture
such a position is known as agnosticism. "Agnosticism
sees no practical value in seeking to solve the mystery
of life. But there are not really many agnostics in any
age or culture. A much larger number of people for-
get that they see through a glass darkly. They claim
to know too much.
Those who claim to know too much may be divided
into two groups, one ostensibly religious and the other
irreligious. The irreligious resolve the problem of
152
MYSTERY AND MEANING 153
human existence and the mystery of the created world
into systems of easily ascertained meaning. They deny
that there is any mystery in life or the world. If they
can find a previous cause for any subsequent effect in
nature, they are certain that they have arrived at a
full understanding of why such and such a thing
exists. The natural cause is, for them, an adequate
explanation of anything they may perceive.
The religious group on the other hand recognizes
that the whole of the created world is not self-
explanatory. They see that it points beyond itself to a
mysterious ground of existence, to an enigmatic power
beyond all discernible vitalities, and to a "first cause"
beyond all known causes. But they usually claim to
know too much about this eternal mystery. Sometimes
they sharply define the limits of reason, and the fur-
ther limits of faith beyond reason, and claim to know
exactly how far reason penetrates into the eternal
mystery, and how much further faith reaches. Yet
though they make a distinction between faith and
reason, they straightway so mix and confuse reason
and faith that they pretend to be able to give a rational
and sharply defined account of the character of God
and of the eternal ground of existence. They define
the power and knowledge of God precisely, and ex-
plain the exact extent of His control and foreknowl-
edge of the course of events. They dissect the mys-
terious relation between man's intellectual faculties
and his vital capacities, and claim to know the exact
154 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
limits of physiS) psyche and nous y of body, soul and
spirit. They know that man is immortal and why 5 and
just what portion and part of him is mortal and what
part immortal. Thus they banish the mystery of the
unity of man's spiritual and physical existence. They
have no sense of mystery about the problem of im-
mortality. They know the geography of heaven and
of hell, and the furniture of the one and the tempera-
ture of the other.
A genuine Christian faith must move between those
who claim to know so much about the natural world
that it ceases to point to any mystery beyond itself
and those who claim to know so much about the mys-
tery of the "unseen" world that all reverence for its
secret and hidden character is dissipated. A genuine
faith must recognize the fact that it is through a dark
glass that we see 5 though by faith we do penetrate
sufficiently to the heart of the mystery not to be over-
whelmed by it. A genuine faith resolves the mystery
of life by the mystery of God. It recognizes that no
aspect of life or existence explains itself, even after
all known causes and consequences have been traced.
All known existence points beyond itself. To realize
that it points beyond itself to God is to assert that the
mystery of life does not dissolve life into meaning-
lessness. Faith in God is faith in some ultimate unity
of life, in some final comprehensive purpose which
holds all the various, and frequently contradictory,
realms of coherence and meaning together. A genuine
MYSTERY AND MEANING 155
faith does not mark this mysterious source and end of
existence as merely an X, or as an unknown quantity.
The Christian faith, at least, is a faith in revelation.
It believes that God has made Himself known. It
believes that He has spoken through the prophets and
finally in His Son. It accepts the revelation in Christ
as the ultimate clue to the mystery of God's nature
and purpose in the world, particularly the mystery of
the relation of His justice to His mercy. But these
clues to the mystery do not eliminate the periphery
of mystery. God remains deus absconditus.
Of the prophets of the Old Testament, the Second
Isaiah is particularly conscious of the penumbra of
mystery which surrounds the eternal and the divine.
He insists upon the distance between the divine wis-
dom and human counsels: "Who hath directed the
spirit of the Lord, or being his counsellor hath taught
him?" 1 He emphasizes the transcendence of God's
power: "It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the
earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers
. . . that bringeth the princes to nothing j he maketh
the judges of the earth as vanity." 2 The question of
the meaning of life must not be pressed too far, ac-
cording to the prophet: "Woe unto him that striveth
with his Maker. . . . Shall the clay say to him that
fashioneth it, What makest thou? Woe unto him
that saith unto his father, What begettest thou? or
to the woman, What hast thou brought forth?"*
1 Isa. 4.0:13. a lsa. 40:22-23. a lsa. 4.5:9-10.
I 5 6 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Faith, as the prophet conceives it, discerns the mean-
ing of existence but must not seek to define it too care-
fully. The divine wisdom and purpose must always
be partly hid from human understanding "For my
thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways
my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are
higher than the earth, so are my ways higher
than your ways, and my thoughts than your
thoughts." 4
The sense of both mystery and meaning is perhaps
most succinctly expressed in the forty-fifth chapter of
Isaiah, where, practically in the same breath, the
prophet declares on the one hand, "Verily thou art
a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the
Saviour," 5 and on the other, insists that God has made
Himself known: "I have not spoken in secret, in a
dark place of the earth: I said not unto the seed of
Jacob, Seek ye me in vain: I the Lord speak righteous-
ness, I declare things that are right." e This double
emphasis is a perfect symbolic expression both of the
meaning which faith discerns and of the penumbra
of mystery which it recognizes around the core of
meaning. The essential character of God, in His rela-
tions to the world, is known. He is the Creator, Judge
and Saviour of men. Yet He does not fully disclose
Himself, and His thoughts are too high to be com-
prehended by human thought.
* Isa. 55:8-9. 5 Isa. 45:15. *Isa. 45:19.
MYSTERY AND MEANING 157
II
For some centuries the intellectual life of modern
man has been dominated by rebellion against medie-
val faith. The main outlines of modern culture are
defined by modern man's faith in science and his
defiance of the authority of religion. This conflict be-
tween the faith which flowered in the thirteenth cen-
tury and that which flowered in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries is a conflict between two forms
of faith which in their different ways obscured the
penumbra of the mystery of life and made the core
of meaning too large. Medieval Catholicism was not
completely lacking in a reverent sense of mystery.
The rites of the Church frequently excel the more
rationalized forms of the Protestant faith by their
poetic expression of mystery. There is, for instance,
an advantage in chanting rather than saying a creed.
The musical and poetical forms of a creed emphasize
the salient affirmation of faith which the creed con-
tains, and slightly derogate the exact details? of
symbolism through which the basic affirmation is ex-
pressed. That is a virtue of the liturgical and sac-
ramental Church, which is hardened into a pitiless
fundamentalism when every "i" is dotted and every
"t" crossed in the soberly recited credo.
On the other hand the same Catholic faith com-
bined a pretentious rationalism with its sense of
158 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
poetry. Any careful reading of the works of Thomas
Aquinas must impress the thoughtful student with the
element of pretension which informs the flowering of
the Catholic faith in the "golden" thirteenth century.
There seems to be no mystery which is not carefully
dissected, and no dark depth of evil which is not fully
explained, and no height of existence which is not
scaled. The various attributes of God are all carefully
defined and related to each other. The mysteries of
the human soul and spirit are mastered and rationally
defined in the most meticulous terms. The exact line
which marks justice from injustice is known. Faith
and reason are so intermingled that the characteristic
certainty of each is compounded with the other. Thus
a very imposing structure is created. Yet it ought to
have been possible to anticipate the doubts which it
would ultimately arouse. Granted its foundation of
presuppositions, every beam and joist in the intellec-
tual structure is reared with perfect logical consis-
tency. But the foundation is insecure. It is a founda-
tion of faith in which the timeless affirmations of the
Christian belief are compounded with detailed knowl-
edge characteristic of a pre-scientific age. An age of
science challenged this whole foundation of presuppo-
sition and seemed to invalidate the whole structure.
The new age of science attempted an even more
rigorous denial of mystery. The age of science traced
the relations of the world of nature, studied the vari-
ous causes which seemed to be at the root of various
MYSTERY AND MEANING 159
effects in every realm of natural coherence 5 and came
to the conclusion that knowledge dissolved mystery.
Mystery was simply the darkness of ignorance which
the light of knowledge dispelled. Religious faith was,
in its opinion, merely the fear of the unknown which
could be dissipated by further knowledge. In the one
case the "spiritual," the "eternal" and the "super-
natural," conceived as a separate and distinct realm
of existence (instead of as the final ground and ulti-
mate dimension of the unity of existence), is so exactly
defined that the penumbra of mystery is destroyed.
In the other case the "natural," the "temporal" and
the "material" are supposedly comprehended so fully
that they cease to point beyond themselves to a more
ultimate mystery. There are significant differences
between these two ways of apprehending the world
about us and the depth of existence within us; but the
differences are no greater than the similarity between
them. Both ways contain an element of human pre-
tension. Both fail to recognize that we see through a
glass darkly.
HI
We see through a glass darkly when we seek to
understand the world about us; because no natural
cause is ever a complete and adequate explanation of
the subsequent event. The subsequent event is un-
doubtedly causally related to preceding events; but it
160 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
is only one of many untold possibilities which might
have been actualized. The biblical idea o a divine
creator moves on a different level than scientific con-
cepts of causation. The two become mutually exclu-
sive, as they have done in the controversies of recent
ages, only if, on the one hand, we deny the mysteri-
ous element in creation and regard it as an exact
explanation of why things are as they are and become
what they become 5 and if, on the other hand, we deny
the mystery which overarches the process of causation
in nature. Thus two dimensions of meaning, each too
exactly defined, come in conflict with each other.
More truly and justly conceived, the realm of co-
herence, which we call nature, points to a realm of
power beyond itself. This realm is discerned by faith,
but not fully known. It is a mystery which resolves
the mystery of nature. But if mystery is denied in
each realm, the meaning which men pretend to ap-
prehend in each becomes too pat and calculated. The
depth of meaning is destroyed in the process of chart-
ing it exactly. Thus the sense of meaning is deepened,
and not annulled, by the sense of mystery.
The understanding of ourselves is even more sub-
ject to seeing through a glass darkly than the under-
standing of the world about us. We "are fearfully and
wonderfully made." Man is a creature of nature, sub-
ject to its necessities and bound by its limits. Yet he
surveys the ages and touches the fringes of the eter-
nal. Despite the limited character of his life, he is con-
MYSTERY AND MEANING 1 6 1
stantly under compulsions and responsibilities which
reach to the very heart of the eternal.
"Thou hast beset me behind and before,
And laid thine hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me ;
It is high, I cannot attain unto it."
confesses the Psalmist in recording the universal
human experience of feeling related to a divine law-
giver and judge.
"Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend into heaven, thou art there :
If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me." 1
Thus the Psalmist continues in describing the bound-
less character of the human spirit., which rises above
and beyond all finite limitations to confront and feel
itself confronted by the divine.
The finiteness of human life, contrasted with the
limitless quality of the human spirit, presents us with
a profound mystery. We are an enigma to our-
selves.
There are many forms of modern thought which
deny the mystery of our life by reducing the dimen-
1 Psalm 139.
1 62 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
sion of human existence to the level of nature. We
are animals, we are told, with a slightly greater reach
of reason and a slightly "more complex central nerv-
ous system" than the other brute creatures. But this
is a palpable denial of the real stature of man's spirit.
We may be only slightly more inventive than the
most astute monkey. But there is, as far as we know,
no Weltschmer'z in the soul of any monkey, no anxiety
about what he is and ought to be, and no visitation
from a divine accuser who "besets him behind and
before" and from whose spirit he can not flee. There
is among animals no uneasy conscience and no ambi-
tion which tends to transgress all natural bounds and
become the source of the highest nobility of spirit and
of the most demonic madness.
We are a mystery to ourselves in our weakness
and our greatness 5 and this mystery can be resolved
in part only as we reach into the height of the mys-
terious dimension of the eternal into which the pin-
nacle of our spiritual freedom seems to rise. The
mystery of God resolves the mystery of the self into
meaning. By faith we find the source of our life: "It
is he that hath made us and not we ourselves." Here
too we find the author of our moral duties: "He that
judgeth me is the Lord." And here is the certitude
of our fulfillment: "But then shall I know even as
also I am known," declares St. Paul. This is to say
that despite the height of our vision no man can com-
plete the structure of meaning in which he is involved
MYSTERY AND MEANING 163
except as by faith he discerns that he "is known/'
though he himself only "knows in part." The human
spirit reaches beyond the limit of nature and does not
fully comprehend the level of reality into which it
reaches. Any interpretation of life which denies this
height of reality because it ends in mystery gives a
false picture of the stature of man. On the other hand
any interpretation which seeks to comprehend the
ultimate dimension by the knowledge and the sym-
bols of the known world also gives a false picture of
man. Such theologies obscure the finiteness of human
knowledge. We see through a glass darkly when we
seek to discern the divine ground and end of human
experience 5 we see only by faith. But by faith we
do see.
IV
The source of the evil in us is almost as mysterious
as the divine source and the end of our spiritual life,
"O Lord," cried the prophet, "why hast thou made
us to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from
thy fear?" 1 We desire the good and yet do evil. In
the words of St. Paul, "I delight in the law of God
after the inward man: but I see another law in my
members, warring against the law of my mind." 2 The
inclination to evil, which is primarily the inclination
to inordinate self-love, runs counter to our conscious
1 Isa. 63:17. a Rom. 7:22-23.
j 64 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
desires. We seem to be betrayed into it. "Now if I
do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but
sin that dwelleth in me," 3 declares St. Paul, in trying
to explain the powerful drift toward evil in us against
our conscious purposes. There is a deep mystery here
which has been simply resolved in modern culture. It
has interpreted man as an essentially virtuous crea-
ture who is betrayed into evil by ignorance, or by evil
economic, political, or religious institutions. These
simple theories of historical evil do not explain how
virtuous men of another generation created the evil
in these inherited institutions, or how mere ignorance
could give the evil in man the positive thrust and
demonic energy in which it frequently expresses itself.
Modern culture's understanding of the evil in man
fails to do justice to the tragic and perplexing aspect
of the problem.
Orthodox Christianity on the other hand has fre-
quently given a dogmatic answer to the problem^
which suggests mystery, but which immediately ob-
scures the mystery by a dogmatic formula. Men are
evil, Christian orthodoxy declared, because of the "sin
of Adam" which has been transmitted to all men.
Sometimes the mode of transmission is allowed to
remain mysterious 5 but sometimes it is identified with
the concupiscence in the act of procreation. This dog-
matic explanation has prompted the justified protest
and incredulity of modern man, particularly since it
3 Rom. 7:20.
MYSTERY , AND MEANING 165
is generally couched in language and symbols taken
from a pre-scientific age.
Actually there is a great mystery in the fact that
man, who is so created that he can not fulfill his life
except in his fellowmen, and who has some conscious-
ness of this law of love in his very nature, should
nevertheless seek so persistently to make his fellow-
men the tools of his desires and the objects of his
ambitions. If we try to explain this tendency toward
self-love, we can find various plausible explanations.
We can say it is due to the fact that man exists at the
juncture of nature and spirit, of freedom and neces-
sity. Being a weak creature, he is anxious for his life;
and being a resourceful creature, armed with the guile
of spirit, he seeks to overcome his insecurity by the
various instruments which are placed at his disposal
by the resources of his freedom. But inevitably the
security which he seeks for himself is bought at the
price of other men's security. Being an. insignificant
creature with suggestions of great significance in the
stature of his freedom, man uses his strength to hide
his weakness and thus falls into the evil of the lust
for power and self-idolatry.
These explanations of man's self-love are plausible
enough as far as they go. But they are wrong if they
assume that the peculiar amphibious situation of man,
being partly immersed in the time process and partly
transcending it, must inevitably and necessarily tempt
him to an inordinate self-love. The situation does
1 66 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
not create evil if it is not falsely interpreted. From
whence comes the false interpretation? There is thus
great profundity in the biblical myth of the serpent
who "tempted" Eve by suggesting that God was
jealous of man's strength and sought to limit it.
Man's situation tempts to evil, provided man is un-
willing to accept the peculiar weakness of his crea-
turely life, and is unable to find the ultimate source
and end of his existence beyond himself. It is man's
unbelief and pride which tempt to sin. And every such
temptation presupposes a previous "tempter" (of
which the serpent is the symbol). Thus before man
fell into sin there was, according to Biblical myth, a
fall of the devil in heaven. The devil is a fallen angel
who refused to accept his rightful place in the scheme
of things and sought a position equal to God.
This then is the real mystery of evil; that it pre-
supposes itself. No matter how far back it is traced in
the individual or the race, or even preceding the his-
tory of the race, a profound scrutiny of the nature of
evil reveals that there is an element of sin in the
temptation which leads to sin; and that, without this
presupposed evil, the consequent sin would not neces-
sarily arise from the situation in which man finds him-
self. This is what Kierkegaard means by saying that
"sin posits itself." This is the mystery of "original
sin" about which Pascal truly observes that "without
this mystery man remains a mystery to himself."
Purely sociological and historical explanations of
MYSTERY AND MEANING 167
the rise of evil do not touch the depth of the mystery
at all. Christian dogmatic explanations have some
sense of it ; but they obscure it as soon as they have
revealed it by their pat dogmatic formulae. In deal-
ing with the problem of sin the sense of meaning is
inextricably interwoven with the sense of mystery.
We see through a glass darkly when we seek to under-
stand the cause and the nature of evil in our own
souls. But we see more profoundly when we know
it is through a dark glass that we see than if we
pretend to have clear light upon this profound prob-
lem.
The final mystery about human life concerns its
incompleteness and the method of its completion.
Here again modern culture has resolved all mystery
into simple meaning. It believes that the historical
process is such that it guarantees the ultimate fulfill-
ment of all legitimate human desires. It believes that
history, as such, is redemptive. Men may be frus-
trated today, may live in poverty and in conflict, and
may feel that they "bring their years to an end like a
tale that is told." But the modern man is certain that
there will be a tomorrow in which poverty and war
and all injustice will be abolished. Utopia is the sim-
ple answer which modern culture offers in various
guises to the problem of man's ultimate frustration.
1 68 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
History is, according to the most characteristic thought
of modern life, a process which gradually closes the
hiatus between what man is and what he would be.
The difficulty with this answer is that there is no evi-
dence that history has any such effect. In the collective
enterprises of man, the progress of history arms the
evil, as well as the good, with greater potency $ and
the mystery of how history is to be brought to comple-
tion, therefore, remains on every level of human
achievement. It may in fact express itself more poi-
gnantly in the future than in the past.
Furthermore, there is no resolution of the problem
of the individual in any collective achievement of
mankind. The individual must continue to find the
collective life of man his ultimate moral frustration,
as well as his fulfillment. For there is no human
society, and there can be none, the moral mediocrity
of which must not be shocking to the individual's
highest moral scruples. Furthermore, the individual
dies before any of the promised collective comple-
tions of history.
But -this is not all. The problem of death is deeply
involved with the problem of sin. Men die with an
uneasy conscience and must confess with the Psalmist,
"for we are consumed by thine anger and by thy
wrath are we troubled." Any honest self -analysis must
persuade us that we end our life in frustration not
only because "our reach is beyond our grasp," i.e.,
because we are finite creatures with more than finite
MYSTERY AND MEANING 169
conceptions of an ultimate consummation of life, but
also because we are sinners who constantly introduce
positive evil into the operations of divine providence.
The answer of Christian faith to this problem is
belief in "the forgiveness of sin and life everlasting."
We believe that only a power greater than our own
can complete our incomplete life, and only a divine
mercy can heal us of our evil. Significantly St. Paul
adds this expression of Christian hope immediately to
his confession that we see through a glass darkly. We
see through a glass darkly now, "but then" we shall
"see face to face." Now we "know in part" but "then"
we shall know even as we are known. This Christian
hope makes it possible to look at all the perplexities
and mysteries of life without too much fear.
In another context St. Paul declares: "We are per-
plexed, but not unto despair." One might well divide
the world into those who are not perplexed, those
who are perplexed unto despair, and those who are
perplexed but not unto despair. Those who are not
perplexed have dissolved all the mysteries and per-
plexities of life by some simple scheme of meaning.
The scheme is always too simple to do justice to the
depth of man's problem. When life reveals itself in
its full terror, as well as its full beauty, these little
schemes break down. Optimism gives way to despair.
The Christian faith does not pretend to resolve all
perplexities. It confesses the darkness of human sight
and the perplexities of faith. It escapes despair never-
1 7 o THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
theless because it holds fast to the essential goodness
of God as revealed in Christ, and is therefore "per-
suaded that neither life nor death are able to sepa-
rate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord."
It can not be denied, however, that this same Chris-
tian faith is frequently vulgarized and cheapened to
the point where all mystery is banished. The Chris-
tian faith in heaven is sometimes as cheap as, and
sometimes even more vulgar than, the modern faith in
Utopia. It may be even less capable of expressing the
final perplexity and the final certainty of faith. On
this issue, as on the others we have considered, a faith
which measures the final dimension of existence, but
dissipates all mystery in that dimension, may be only
a little better or worse than a shallow creed which
reduces human existence to the level of nature.
Our situation is that, by reason of the freedom of
our spirit, we have purposes and ends beyond the
limits of the finiteness of our physical existence. Faith
may discern the certainty of a final completion of life
beyond our power, and a final purging of the evil
which we introduce into life by our false efforts to
complete it in our own strength. But faith can not
resolve the mystery of how this will be done. When
we look into the future we see through a glass darkly.
The important issue is whether we will be tempted
by the incompleteness and frustration of life to de-
spair; or whether we can, by faith, lay hold on the
MYSTERY AND MEANING 171
divine power and wisdom which completes what re-
mains otherwise incomplete. A faith which resolves
mystery too much denies the finiteness of all human
knowledge, including the knowledge of faith. A faith
which is overwhelmed by mystery denies the clues of
divine meaning which shine through the perplexities
of life. The proper combination of humility and trust
is precisely defined when we affirm that we see, but
admit that we see through a glass darkly.
VI
Our primary concern in this exposition of the
Pauline text has been to understand the fact that the
Christian faith is conscious of the penumbra of mys-
tery which surrounds its conception of meaning. Yet
in conclusion it must be emphasized that our faith can
not be identified with poetic forms of religion which
worship mystery without any conception of meaning.
All such poetic forms of faith might well be placed
in the category of the worship of the unknown God,
typified in the religion which Paul found in Athens.
In contrast to this religion Paul set the faith which is
rooted in the certainty that the mysterious God has
made Himself known, and that the revelation of His
nature and purpose, apprehended by faith, must be
declared: "Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship
him declare I unto you." This declaration of faith
rests upon the belief that the divine is not mere mys-
172 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
tery, the heart of it having been disclosed to those
who are able to apprehend the divine disclosure in
Christ. It is by the certainty of that faith that St. Paul
can confidently look toward a future completion of
our imperfect knowledge: "Now I know in part, but
then shall I know." The indication that faith regards
the meaning, which has been disclosed, as victorious
over the mystery of existence is the expression of a
certain hope that "then shall I know." Faith expects
that ultimately all mystery will be resolved in the
perfect knowledge of God.
Faith in a religion of revelation is thus distin-
guished on the one side from merely poetic apprecia-
tions of mystery, just as on the other side it is distin-
guished from philosophies of religion which find the
idea of revelation meaningless. Revelation is mean-
ingless to all forms of rational religion which ap-
proach the mystery of life with the certainty that
human reason can at length entirely resolve the mys-
tery. The Christian faith is the right expression of
the greatness and the weakness of man in relation to
the mystery and the meaning of life. It is an acknowl-
edgment of human weakness, for, unlike "natural
religion" and "natural theology," it does not regard
the human mind as capable of resolving the enigma
of existence because it knows that human reason is
itself involved in the enigma which it tries to com-
prehend. It is an acknowledgment of the greatness of
the human spirit because it assumes that man is capa-
MYSTERY AND MEANING 173
ble of apprehending clues to the divine mystery and
accepting the disclosure of the purposes of God which
He has made to us. It is a confession at once of both
weakness and strength, because it recognizes that the
disclosures of the divine are given to man, who is
capable of apprehending them, when made, but is not
capable of anticipating them.
According to the Christian faith there is a light
which shineth in darkness j and the darkness is not able
to comprehend it. Reason does not light that light}
but faith is able to pierce the darkness and appre-
hend it.
X
THE PEACE OF GOD
"The -peace of God, which fasseth all under"
standing, shall keep your hearts and- minds through
Christ Jesus." Phil. 4:7.
M,
LAN lives in tumult and anxiety, seeking for peace*
The greatness and freedom of the human spirit places
his life beyond the dimension of nature and makes her
peace an impossible security for him. The creatures of
nature have an internal peace because they are what
they are. They do not have to worry about becoming
their true selves. Since all desires and hungers of
brute creatures have a natural limit, the frictions and
conflicts of the world of nature also move within defi-
nite bounds. Nature may be red in tooth and clawj
and life may feed on life. But the conflicts of nature
do not exceed the bounds which are set in nature's
economy.
Man, on the other hand, has no natural peace either
within or without. "Within are tumults and without
are fears." The tumults within spring from human
freedom. None of the impulses which regulate the
174.
THE PEACE OF GOD 175
functions of animal existence operate in man without
the intervention of his thought. They can be extended
or repressed. They can not be organized into a living
unity without the introduction of a unifying principle
and center. What is that center to be? If man makes
his life its own center, he destroys himself $ for his
imagination reaches too far and his capacities are too
great for self-sufficiency. But if the center of his life
is to be beyond himself, where is that center to be?
Man's anxieties and inner fears are prompted both
by the abortive effort to center his life within himself
and by the uneasiness of trying to find the true center
beyond himself.
The fact that there are no natural limits to human
desires and ambitions makes man's relation to his
fellowmen uneasy and full of discord. Man can not
live without the support of his fellowmen 5 and he
can not live truly without offering them his support.
But this mutual relation is constantly disturbed by the
inordinate claims which the self makes on the com-
munity. The social peace of the community is thus an
achievement of only the wisest statecraft which knows
how to place social checks upon inordinate desires, and
which is able to find the best available instruments
for encouraging mutual tasks and discouraging preda-
tory and inordinate desires. But even the wisest state-
craft can not achieve the harmony within the human
community which ants and bees possess by virtue of
the instinctive direction of their mutual tasks.
176 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Man's unquiet and restless life is thus the fruit of
his special freedom 5 and of the inevitable corruptions
of that freedom by inordinate desire. But he can not
accept this anxiety and friction as normal. All crea-
tures, including man, must have peace. Harmony is
the normal condition of all existence. All vitalities and
centers of life in the whole creation were meant to
exist in conformity with their own proper nature and
in accord with all other creatures. For this reason
man seeks after peace just as certainly as he also seeks
after many ends incompatible with it. But what kind
of peace is possible for man? How is he to find a
peace which will not destroy his essential freedom?
Which will not rob him of the unique dignity that
distinguishes him from the brute creation?
When we survey this fundamental human problem
and explore its full dimension we come upon a per-
plexing fact. We discover that every form of peace
which is easily understood is not adequate for man.
Only a peace "which passeth all understanding" is
adequate.
There are two forms of peace within the limits of
understanding. The one is the peace of nature which
leaves human freedom out of consideration; the
other is the peace of human reason which is achieved
by denying or obscuring the hopes, fears and ambi-
tions, transcending reason, and the impulses and de-
sires, lying below it. Both are simple forms of peace.
Both are too simple. The peace of God, on the other
THE PEACE OF GOD 177
hand, is not simple. There is pain and sorrow in it.
That at least is the peace of God which has been
revealed in the cross of Christ. It passeth understand-
ing to such a degree that the very revelation of it has
been an offense to the wise. The wise men of the
world have always pictured God as dwelling in a
supernal serenity, in an Olympian equanimity, un-
touched by the sorrows of the world and undisturbed
by its tumults. The God who is revealed in Christ is
not so easily understood. There is indeed peace in
Him and with Him. He is the calm source from
which all life springs and the serene end in which all
life finds its fulfillment. But strangely and paradoxi-
cally there is also sorrow and suffering in His heart,
and it is by that sorrow and suffering that He finally
overcomes the world's disquiet.
This kind of peace is both difficult to understand
and impossible to acquire by striving. That is why
men would rather seek for the peace which is within
the limits of understanding. Only, unfortunately, they
are destroyed by that kind of peace.
II
Though the peace of nature is obviously a Paradise
from which man has been expelled and which an
angel with a flaming sword guards against his re-
entry, history is filled with abortive efforts to return
to that peace. In classical antiquity Democritus and
i 7 8 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Epicurus, Lucretius and Diogenes and many other
wise men-, sought to beguile men from their inordi-
nate ambitions by seeking to persuade them to return
to nature and live within the limits of desire set by
it. In the modern day the same abortive effort has
been made, by the German romantics and the French
naturalists, by Thoreau and Walt Whitman. The
accents of the philosophy of romanticism have varied;
but the general strategy is identical. The idea is that
there is a peace of nature which man can claim as his
own and be redeemed by it.
These philosophies have a certain plausibility be-
cause there is a provisionally therapeutic power in the
peace of nature. Close communion with nature does
quiet many a fear and tumult and exorcise many a
devil of care. The poets of every age have discerned
this power of nature:
"The little cares that fretted me,
I lost them yesterday,
Among the fields above the sea,
Among the winds at play,
Among the lowing of the herds,
The rustling of the trees,
Among the singing of the birds,
The humming of the bees." 1
The peace of nature is provisionally therapeutic
because the majesties and immensities of nature serve
1 Anonymous,
THE PEACE OF GOD 179
to make the hopes and fears of the human heart
slightly ridiculous, thus prompting man to shame for
his pretensions. Furthermore the symphony of na-
ture's various quiet melodies the swish of the grass,
the singing of the birds, the lap of the water on the
shore, the rustle of the leaves has a quieting effect
upon the human spirit. They are sacramental re-
minders of the ultimate peace which life must achieve.
Within limits, they are even the means of grace for
achieving such peace.
But these ministries of nature are only tentative
and provisional. Walt Whitman may glory in the
animals who are so "peaceful and self-contained" and
who "do not lie awake at nights fretting about their
sins." But only a little reflection must make it appar-
ent that bovine serenity would annihilate man, were
he able to achieve it. The animal may be peaceful be-
cause it is self-contained j but man is man precisely
because he is not self-contained. His imagination
sweeps the heavens and the ages 5 and all his capacities
and needs are so intimately related to those of his
fellows that self-sufficiency is an impossible source of
equanimity for him. The peace of nature is the fruit
of blindness which does not see beyond its little orbit;
and of deafness that does not hear a cry of joy or
pain beyond its little circle; and of satisfied hungers
because they have definite limits. What is man to do
with that kind of peace, since his eyes look beyond all
horizons and fill him with forebodings of the meaning
i8o THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
of the reality beyondj and since his ears are sensitive
to all the noises of battle and all the pagans of victory
all over the world j and since his spirit gives every
hunger of the body an infinite dimension and every
craving of the spirit a limitless scope?
The peace of nature may persuade man of the
desirability of serenity ; and it may even give him a
foretaste of it. But it can not really quiet the human
heart without destroying man's essential being. How
can nature, which does not know what god it serves,
help man, who is searching for God and is disquiet
because he does not know whether he has found the
real God, the true source and end of his existence }. or
is anxious because he is darkly conscious of the fact
that his preoccupation with self is an idolatrous form
of worship, placing him under the judgment of the
true God?
Ill
Another form of peace also within the limits of
human understanding is supposed to be superior to
the peace of nature. It is the peace of a quiet mind.
The human mind is of course intimately and organ-
ically related to the whole realm of human vitality.
Human reason gives our animal purposes a wider, and
sometimes a nobler, scope. Our rational faculties may
also, as Aristotle observed, bring a certain order into
the whole field of our vital impulses and organize
THE PEACE OF GOD 181
and restrain them according to the principle "in noth-
ing too much." A certain degree of both inner and
social peace can be achieved by the law of moderation.
A prudent restraint upon every ambition and a cau-
tious check upon every desire can serve to create a
modicum of harmony within the self 5 and the check
upon inordinate desire can serve to maintain peace
with our fellowmen.
But reason itself has no sure criterion of harmony
beyond the canon of moderation. It can not determine
the supreme loyalty of life. It can not organize life
in the proper hierarchy of values. Even if it possessed
the criteria to do so, it would not have the final power
to moderate the passions. It might produce some cool
and calculating discipline of life 5 but such a life would
be as devoid of great heroic passion as of destructive
mania.
Whenever philosophers become aware of the im-
potence of reason in its relation to power, desire and
ambition, they tend to translate the ideal of a rational
peace to a peace of detachment. Thus the Stoics re-
garded the final and supreme good a form of
equanimity (Atarama) in which the self is completely
detached from all of its responsibilities, loyalties and
affections, as well as from its hopes, fears and ambi-
tions. This peace of mind is, in other words, not the
peace of a real self, but of a mind detached from the
self. Insofar as it is achieved the real self is destroyed.
It is significant that both Stoicism and Platonism
1 82 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
tended to develop this logic of detachment to a con-
sistent mysticism in their latter forms. The final cul-
mination of the process of detachment is a mysticism,
in which the self seeks for the peace of an undiffer-
entiated eternity and unity of being. This kind of
peace is sometimes defined as "spiritual." If spirit is
equated with reason this may be a correct definition.
But if man's spirit is the synthesis of his vitality and
his reason, the peace of detachment is not spiritual
but ends in the destruction of the self as spirit.
A purely rational peace is, in short, as destructive
of the whole of man as the pure peace of nature. The
peace of nature destroys the whole superstructure of
human freedom. The peace of mind destroys man as
a unity of body and mind, of vitality and freedom, of
instinct and reason.
IV
There are religions which interpret the peace of
God as the detached calm and passionless equanimity
after which the Stoics and the mystics strive. There
are indeed forms of the Christian faith which fail to
understand that the peace of God which is revealed in
the cross of Christ can not be equated with the peace
of detachment. The God of the Bible is both" Creator
and Redeemer. As Creator He is power as well as
wisdom 5 as Redeemer He is merciful as well as holy.
God does not therefore have a simple peace which
THE PEACE OF GOD 183
the mind can easily comprehend. Creativity involves
disturbance and upheaval. To take the "things that
are not and put to naught the things that are" means
revolutionary activity. To suffer with sinners means
pain.
Christian orthodoxy has been rightly afraid o a
too consistent emphasis upon the suffering of God.
It has declared the doctrine, that God the Father
suffers, to be a heresy (the heresy of "patripassion-
ism"). Yet it has affirmed that God the Son suffers
and that the Son and the Father are One. To insist on
the distinction between the Majesty of the Father and
the suffering of the Son, and yet to declare that the
Father and the Son are one, is an effort to state, within
the limits of human understanding, our comprehen-
sion and our lack of comprehension of a form of peace
which passeth understanding. If the suffering of God
is emphasized too completely we arrive at the hereti-
cal conception of a finite God who is frustrated by
the inertia of some "given" stuff of reality. If the
peace of God is defined too rationally, on the other
hand, we arrive at a conception of a peace which is
purchased at the price of detachment. To say that
there is a final peace in the divine majesty and yet that
the pinnacle of that majesty is a mercy which is in-
volved in the sins and sorrows of the world is to speak
beyond understanding 5 but not beyond the apprehen-
sion of faith " y for faith rightly discerns the Father of
the suffering Christ as the real source and end of all
!8 4 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
human striving, and knows His peace to be the one
form of serenity which does not destroy but which
fulfills man in the completeness and the unity of his
being.
The peace of God is a peace of love. There is no
simple peace in love. One need only to compare the
ideals of Epictetus with the temper of the New Testa-
ment to recognize that perfect detachment and perfect
love are incompatible. The peace of love is the most
perfect peace, because in it spirit is related to all of
life. Yet it is a very imperfect peace because attach-
ment to the pains and sorrows of others subject us,
and even God, to those sorrows. That so imperfect a
peace should also be the most perfect peace passes
understanding. Yet it is the peace of God; and it is
also the only possible peace for man.
St. Paul, in the words of our text, expresses the hope
that this kind of peace may guard the hearts and
minds of Christian people. What does such a benedic-
tion imply? How would our hearts be "kept" or
"guarded" by such a peace?
The "peace of God" for man is partly achieved by
the emulation of God's love. Man is not so created
that he can live his life in either calm detachment or
cautious self-possession and moderation. He lives most
truly according to his nature if his imagination, his
sympathies, and his responsibilities draw him out of
himself into the life of the community, into the
needs, the hopes and aspirations of his fellows. But
THE PEACE OF GOD 185
this self-realization through love is not something
which can be achieved by taking thought. It is not
possible if we regard love as a law which must be
obeyed* Love is indeed the law of life; but it is most
surely obeyed when we are not conscious of obedience
to any law. It is obeyed when the sorrows of others
arouse our sympathies, when their needs prompt us to
forget our own needs and meet those of opr friends
and neighbors. We become most truly ourselves when
we forget ourselves , for it is preoccupation with self
which prematurely arrests the growth of the self and
confines it to too narrow limits. The peace of love is
thus the ultimate peace of being or becoming what
we truly are: creatures who do not live in and for
themselves, but find themselves in the life of the
community, and finally in God. Obviously, however,
this ultimate peace of love is filled with pain and sor-
row. It is aware not only of its own pains but also of
those of others. The anxious mother keeping a night-
watch over the bed of a sick child has no peace within
the limits of understanding. That kind of peace be-
longs to those who sleep soundly because they have no
responsibility for any ailing creature. Yet there can
be in the heart of that mother a peace which passeth
understanding. Above, beyond, and yet within her
anxieties and apprehensions there can be a peace which
is the fruit of her complete devotion to the child and
the consequence of her fulfillment of the nature and
the responsibilities of motherhood.
1 86 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
The servants of the needy who embody the various
ministries of mercy, doctors and visiting nurses, social
workers and champions of social justice, pastors and
all other ministers of need can not have the peace
which Epictetus sought after. They become too deeply
involved in the suffering to which they minister. Yet
the most sensitive spirits of every age have rightly
sought after such vocations and found happiness in
them. They have experienced the joys which are
"three parts pain"} and have touched the fringes of
the mystery of the peace of God.
It is, however, idle to assume that human society
could ever be completely knit together by the perfec-
tion of love in which each carries the burdens of all,
and the anxieties of each are quieted by the solicitude
of all. That is the vision of the Kingdom of God, of
the Kingdom of perfect love, which hovers as a possi-
bility and yet impossibility over all human life. Ac-
tually the perfect accord between life and life is
constantly spoiled by the inordinate concern of each
life for its own weal. So pervasive is this self-love
that it is sometimes most dangerously expressed when
we think we are serving the needs of others 5 but when
really we desire to keep the affairs of others in our
power. Human society is full of the friction of cross
purposes. The conflict of interest and passion between
THE PEACE OF GOD 187
races, classes, nations, and individuals can be arbi-
trated into a tolerable harmony by wise statesmanship
and astute methods of adjudication and arbitration 5
but the peace of the world is always, as St. Augustine
observed, something of an armistice between opposing
factions. There is no perfect social harmony in human
history, no peace within the limits of understanding.
The only possible peace within and between human
communities is the peace of forgiveness. It is not a
peace of perfect accord of life with life, but a peace
which is established beyond the frictions of life. And
this is a peace beyond understanding. Moralists are
always outraged by the idea of forgiveness. They
think that it condones evil and is indulgent toward the
evil doer. But moralists never fully recognize how
much the judgment of the righteous upon the evil
doer is below the ultimate and divine judgment. It
is the judgment of an unrighteous self upon his fel-
lows. There are of course legitimate judgments of the
relatively righteous upon the unrighteous. But even
when the unrighteous are as obviously so, as were the
recent barbarian rebels against civilization, there is no
vantage point in history from which a simple judg-
ment against them can be pronounced. Reconciliation
with even the most evil foe requires forgiveness ^ and
forgiveness is possible only to those who have some
recognition of common guilt. The pain of contrition is
the root of the peace of forgiveness. The forgiveness
of God is the readiness of guiltlessness to bear the
i88 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
sin of the guilty. There is an element of this vicari-
ousness in human forgiveness also. Yet a too con-
scious righteousness never achieves real forgiveness
toward an enemy. It is. too anxious to censure the evil
in the foe 5 and too oblivious of its own sins. The
capacity for forgiveness in man is therefore drawn
both from the highest forms of loving righteousness
and from the consciousness of common guilt. Forgive-
ness can not be achieved out of a sense of duty; for it
is a form of love which transcends all law and is an
offense to the makers and keepers of the law.
Yet it is the only ultimate answer to the complexi-
ties of human relations. We will face foes, as well as
friends, to the end of history. There are men and
nations, groups and classes who prize what we abhor,
whose interests run counter to our own, and whose
conception of the good contradicts our sense of values.
If there were no canons of righteousness by which
conflicting ideas and values could be judged, human
society would be a sea of relativity, a complete anarchy
of values and interests* There are indeed proximate
standards of justice and virtue by which society judges
the most explicit forms of vice and rebellion against
order. But there are no perfectly disinterested judges:
all of them are partially involved in the contest of life
with life which their judgments seek to arbitrate.
They are interested participants in the conflict which
they seek to compose. Insofar as they are righteous
and just but without mercy, they may repress evil but
THE PEACE OF GOD 189
they can not induce true repentance in the evil doer.
Insofar as they are righteous, but unconscious of their
own unrighteousness that is, insofar as they pretend
to a divine and impartial justice, when in fact they
are men who are engaged in an interested conflict
with the enemy their pretension of virtue is a temp-
tation to cynicism rather than repentance in the foe.
One of the tragic aspects of our contemporary situa-
tion is the fact that the self-righteousness of victorious
nations, who pose as the executors of a divine and
ultimate judgment, and who consciously and uncon-
sciously obscure their interests in using punishment
as a way of maiming the foe's power of competition
with them in the struggle of life, prevents the re-
pentance of the foe.
The peace of forgiveness is thus doubly beyond
understanding. The roots of it lie in combination of
vicarious love and consciousness of sin, which is be-
yond the understanding of all righteous, and inevi-
tably self-righteous, men and nations. It is possible
only to those who by faith know themselves under a
judgment which* in its final dimension can make no
distinction between the self and the enemy, or be-
tween the righteous and the unrighteous man. The
power and source of this peace is beyond understand-
ing, but is understood by faith. The effect of it is also
beyond understanding, in the sense that it is a peace
within strife, reconciliation within friction. Its highest
perfection is achieved at precisely the point where
190 THE SIGNS OF THE^TIMES
#
no one imagines that there is a possibility within the
sinful conditions of history to find a perfect accord of
life with life, or to achieve a vantage point of disinter-
ested love from which others, but not the self, could
be accused of breaking the peace.
VI
If the peace of God which passeth understanding
keeps our hearts it will infuse them not only with
the peace of forgiving but with the peace of being for-
given. All efforts to arrive at internal peace by moder-
ating passions and desires, or by developing a rational
detachment from passion and desire, are only provi-
sionally efficacious. Man is a creature of infinite de-
sires y and the longing for the impossible is the root of
both man's greatness and his misery. In Herman
Melville's classic, Moby Dick, the instinct for caution,
moderation and the prudential virtues Is symbolically
identified with the land 5 and the impulse toward the
infinite is typified by man's longing for the shoreless
expanses of the sea. "In this landlessness," declares
Melville, "alone resides the highest truth, shoreless,
indefinite as God" and he thinks it is better to "perish
in the howling infinite" than "craven crawl to land,"
But he is also conscious that the yearning for the
infinite is the source of the greatest evil as well as of
the highest in man. Ahab, the seafaring hero of Moby
y achieves an integrity and greatness which is
THE PEACE OF GOD 191
beyond the limits of landlocked prudence. But his
boundless ambitions also result in a megalomaniac at-
tempt to destroy the mutual dependence between
men, a^d to achieve a solitary and independent glory.
Melville's modern exposition of the Promethean
theme was not appreciated in his day because it
was addressed to a generation and a culture which
had given itself to the illusion that it had confined
all the vitalities of human existence within the canons
of prudence and common sense. The real situation
is that the miseries as well as the glories of man's life
are the fruit of his boundlessness. The desire of man
to be related to the whole of life, to give himself to
the widest and greatest cause, to sacrifice himself for
the highest good, to search after and to know the
eternity in which God dwells, is the creative force
which breaks the little conventionalities and respect-
able conformities of life. But the same boundlessness
also tempts man to bring the whole of life under his
own dominion and to make himself the idolatrous
center of the whole scheme of things. If it were pos-
sible to separate the two desires absolutely, one might
have a guarantee of peace. Peace would be the ful-
fillment of man's infinite purposes: though such a
peace would not be too simple, for how are boundless
possibilities to be realized?
But actually the human situation is more compli-
cated. The love of God and the love of self are curi-
ously intermingled in life. The worship of God and
1 92 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
the worship of self confronts us in a multitude o
different compounds. There is a taint of sin in our
highest endeavors. How shall we judge the great
statesman who gives a nation its victorious courage
by articulating its only partly conscious and implicit
resources of fortitude 5 and who mixes the most ob-
vious forms of personal and collective pride and arro-
gance with this heroic fortitude? If he had been a
more timid man, a more cautious soul, he would not
have sinned so greatly, but neither would he have
wrought so nobly.
The perplexing mixture of good and evil in human
history can not be solved by a complacent attitude
toward the evil which is mixed with the good. In
that case the evil would grow to intolerable propor-
tions. Nor can the evil be eliminated even by the
most precise distinctions of the moralists. Every effort
to do so creates a form of Christian perfectionism in
which the meaningful responsibilities of life are
finally disavowed. The kinship between Christian
asceticism and oriental forms of life-detachment is
-significant*
The only possible peace for man, thus involved in
the contradictions of existence, is the peace of being
forgiven. This is no complacent peace which condones
the taint of evil in us. It knows that the evil costs God
dearly. But neither is it a peace which prematurely
arrests the creative urges of life for the sake of a
tranquillity, or which denies the responsibilities of the
THE PEACE OF GOD 193
self toward others for fear of becoming soiled in ful-
filling our duty. It is a peace in which an uneasy con-
science is curiously compounded with an easy con-
science. This peace rests upon the faith that God is
great enough and good enough to resolve the contra-
diction in which human life stands j and that His
mercy is the final resource of His power, by which
He overcomes the rebellion of man against his
creator.
The moralists always discount this peace because
it passes understanding. They want the peace of an
easy conscience, which has known and has done its
duty. But such a peace always degenerates into a com-
placent peace, which rests prematurely on its achieve-
ments, while some duty remains undone and some
responsibility unacknowledged. If on the other hand
the boundless and unlimited character of our respon-
sibilities should become apparent to the moralist, and
if he should become fully conscious of the taint of
self-love which corrupts even our highest moral
achievements, he is driven to despair by the disclo-
sure. All forms of simple moralism, whether Chris-
tian or pagan, move between the poles of compla-
cency and despair. They pretend to a peace which
does not acknowledge the residual chaos in the human
soul 5 or they are overcome by that chaos.
The peace of Christian faith passes understanding
because it is God's peace, transferred to us. It is the
peace of having and yet not having the perfection of
i 9 4 THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Christ j of having it only by grace and yet having it
the more surely for not pretending that we have it
as a right. This peace will offend both rationalists and
moralists till the end of history, because it does not
conform to the simple canons of either rationality or
morality. But it alone does justice to the infinite com-
plexities and contradictions of human existence.
Within this peace all of life's creative urges may be
expressed and enlarged. There is therefore no simple
calm in it. It is as tumultuous as the ocean, and yet
as serene as the ocean's depths, which bear the tu-
mults and storms of the surface.
It is the only peace which does not destroy but
fulfills all human powers. In that peace we under-
stand that man's life in history is fragmentary and
frustrated precisely because it is boundless and un-
limited.
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