from there devising a drama of salvation to be enacted at a definite spot in history before the eyes of men and carried down the ages with power through their testimony of what they had seen and heard.

It is here that modernism pauses. It cannot think in this imagery. It cannot conceive such a God. It finds no monarchical deity in the universe, nor can it postulate one by faith. A new feeling about monarchs and potentates has seized modern mankind, a new moral insight has been vouchsafed which penetrates the unreality of the whole idea of kingship. The majesty of kings and potentates has toppled amid men's widespread disillusionment. This insight has been signalized by the birth of democracy, whose coming has broken the ancient spell which the glamour of kings and their courts threw over the thoughts of men. The disillusionment reflects itself in the way men think about God. No more can men who think critically allow the imagery of a heavenly monarch to determine their thoughts of spiritual reality. There is no such God, men are now calmly bold to say. And this they say not only without fear of incurring the divine wrath but with the vivid sense that in denying existence to him they are doing honor to the God who really is. If monarchy in human relationships is inferior and unethical, a monarchical God is also inferior and unethical. And those doctrines concerning God's will, his covenants, his modes of operation, his plans which grow out of the monarchical conception of the divine being are, so far forth, fictitious, irrelevant and unethical.

So the modern mind is turning to democracy for imagery with which to conceive God. Just as democracy has stripped from the monarch not only the insignia and glamour but the realities of sovereignty and lodged them in the people's will, so this same movement of the human spirit is turning from the pseudo-majesty of a monarch-God to seek for the divine presence and pur

pose in the living world of men. We stand only on the threshold of this great quest. Whither it leads no one yet clearly sees. With what ideas we shall arrive at the end of the day none may guess. But the conviction that our feet are in the right path is profound and inspiring. To let go the imagery of monarchy and to seek for God under the imagery of democracy stirs the blood with high expectation. Gone are all arbitrary decrees, all the lonely, self-contained glory, all the arm's length reach of God across a vast chasm to set up a plan of salvation. Gone, too, is all dramatized grace. For modernism, God's life is eternally self-identified with man's. Christ's real humanity is beyond dispute. The gulf of spatial dualism and of caste dualism between God and man is obliterated. In terms of immanent justice, of inherent truth, of gracious purpose, of creative beauty, of love sharing all our sorrow and hope and sin-yea, sharing our sin!-in thoughts like these men are striving to draw a picture of God as the eternal Democrat whose majesty is symbolized by no courtly throne but by a basin and towel.

This God toward whom the modern spirit is feeling its way is not far off, not up there, but within our life. It is as if we were on the front line of His purposes, and as if He were making progress through our loyalty and our valor. He sees through our eyes, hears through our ears, works through our hands. He has a vast task to do and needs us to help Him. He fails when we fail. He wins when we win. We can disappoint Him. We can thwart Him. We can make His achievements possible. He feeds every faint impulse toward good; indeed our good impulses are His prompting. It is not just our impulses but His will that urges us to holiness. Everything that is good in the world, the forest and flowers, the hills and the sea, the devices of industry, the discoveries of science and the beneficent institutions of society are the work of His hands. And all evil represents the incompleteness or the failure of His work. He has pain and

grief in every impure act of every man, in every immoral, ugly, unsocial, lustful, brutal deed. It grieves Him because it involves Him. He is not outside of the sin regarding it vicariously, but inside it, deflected for the time by it, stained by it Himself, standing partner with the sinner in his sin. He does not flee the sinner, or send some one else to suffer with the sinner, but He remains and shares the sinner's sin until thereby together they cast out the sin and heal its wound.

No such truth has ever come to man equal in importance to that of a God who abides eternally in our human life as Jesus tarried with us in his short span of years. God is doing eternally what Jesus did in the narrow limits of time. He is no remote God, wrapping His regal garments about Him in inaccessible isolation while His son acts out a drama of grace. But all the while God is among us and Christ is the first fruit of what he would do for all.

Great and deep are the problems that arise here. The problem of transcendence and immanence, of the omnipotence and the limitation of God, of the responsibility of an immanent God for evils that spring out of the heart of nature, like earthquakes and storms, as well as for those which inhere in the human scene in which he shares these problems are beside our present purpose to discuss. Our teachers are themselves working upon them with the diligence of a great passion. We are hardly past the stage of insight. The gathering of the data and the construction and the proof remain for the future. But that mankind is definitely turning its thoughts away from the kind of God whose dealings with men may be stated in the imagery of monarchy is the belief of modernism. Here, definitely, is the source of the difference between modernism and fundamentalism. The two systems begin with two Gods. What one God may logically be expected to do the other God may not do. Therefore the systems clash. Therefore

the debate over this detail or that doctrine is unavailing and sterile until the issue leads back to this basic divergence in the two points of view.

And as for anthropomorphism, no one imagines that we shall be able in our finiteness to outgrow it. The soul's need of symbols as carriers of feeling and purpose is ineradicable, but whereas fundamentalism consents to utilize the symbols of monarchy which the social ethics of our time has discredited, modernism insists that our symbolism, for moral reasons as well as in the interest of truth, must be kept up to the level of our highest ethical thinking. And the imagery of the Father, which Jesus filled with immortal radiance, remains still the richest and purest medium of faith and devotion. This conception modernism insists upon taking seriously, building its theology upon it and testing all other theologies by it.

FUNDAMENTALISM, MODERNISM AND

CHRIST 1

The key to the essential difference between the fundamentalist view of Jesus and the modernist view is found in the dissimilar attitudes with which the two types of mind approach Him. Fundamentalism comes to the figure of Jesus by the dogmatic route. Modernism approaches him as a fact of history. To the Fundamentalist the significance of Jesus' personality is interpreted by a certain doctrinal framework into which the historic figure is made to fit. This framework consists of the conception of an infallible Bible, a "plan of salvation" which engaged the divine mind from the beginning of time and was revealed by various stages prior to the appearance of Jesus, a series of predictions pointing to certain events in the career of Jesus by fulfilling which at His appearance He could be identified as the promised 1 From Christian Century. 41: 495-7. April 17, 1924.

one and His place in the divine scheme attested, His miraculous birth of a virgin, the miracles which He Himself wrought, His death on the cross, His resurrection, His ascension and His promised return to earth to consummate His mission. Here is an a priori framework into which the figure of Jesus is fitted and by which He is to be explained. The system has as its background the messianic concepts with which the Jewish mind of Jesus' day was occupied, plus certain other concepts derived from the writings of Paul.

If one reads the life story of Jesus with this group of ideas in the foreground of his thinking he is able to comprehend the view of Jesus held by fundamentalism. It is necessary, according to fundamentalism, to hold the framework fixed and indisputable in all its details, as much so as is the historic outline of the figure within the frame. This conception of Christ is based upon the assumption that those to whom He originally came, those who therefore were His first interpreters, perceived and interpreted Him with final and unchangeable categories, and that it is necessary, if we are to take Jesus at all, that we shall take their framework of interpretation also. Thus their framework has become a system of control by which a certain way of thinking about Jesus has been invested with the same vitality and authority as that which is imputed to Jesus Himself.

Modernism, from its side, approaching Jesus with utter reverence for His personality, looks with skepticism upon the finality of the system of concepts with which His first interpreters sought to understand Him. It asks questions about these concepts. It wonders whether the category of messiahship as held by later Judaism is either universally valid or universally necessary in order to understand Jesus. It asks whether the a priori conception of a scheme of salvation, a drama enacted upon a divinely ordered stage transcending the levels of our common human action, is either necessary or usable for