The need is imperative for a restatement of the Christian doctrine of man and his historical destiny. It is that form of Christian faith in which a prophetic-progressive philosophy of history culminates in the. expectation of the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. It is in this union of the sacred and the secular that the real prophetic power of liberal Christianity is to be found.
But free and finite creatures become anxious in the face of the perplexities and insecurities of life. But on the question of the relation of the love of God to the possibilities of history.
God’s Grace and Man’s Hope by Daniel Day Williams
God: The Creator and Redeemer
But what it can mean to say that God is immanent in the world without an intolerable spatializing of the concept was never made clear. The important implication for our interpretation of the Christian experience of God can now be summarily stated. There is the human counterpart of the mercy in the love of God, belief in which constitutes the heart of evangelical Christian faith.
The liberal interpretation of the Gospel rarely did justice to the place of. the divine forgiveness in human life. The personal discovery of the transforming mercy of God is the supreme source of power for the life. of moral responsibility and creativity.
Man’s Real Good
Thirdly, we must show the implications of the doctrine that love is the real good for the. It is the will to the good of the other, but a. good in which the self participates.16 Mutual love is not, therefore, the love which we know in God. The clue to our answer as to the nature of the good has already been suggested.
How far the realization of the will to the Kingdom of God is possible for us is the question to which we must turn in the next chapter. It is therefore not a denial of Christian love to intend my own good in the service of the Kingdom.
The Kingdom of God and the Kingdoms of This World
In the last century Jacob Burckhardt said, "Power is in itself evil."5 Today Professor Hans Morgenthau says that the "ubiquity of the desire for power. It is true that the ultimate problem of the relation of the ethic of love to the relativities of the political orders cannot be simply solved. It is by this that the action of the State is a contradiction of the law of love; it is this which makes it a moral problem.
There is the vastness of the economic and political powers which toss individuals about as chips. What has become of the Christian doctrine that man is created in the image of God. The discovery of ethical principle is the first step in the achievement of the full dignity and meaning of personal existence.
That God is both love and law is the doctrine of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition. It is therefore too simple a judgment that the law of the state, enforced by power, always contradicts the ethic of love. This is the problem of the Christian attitude toward the positive law of the state.
But what is not to be forgotten is that while law "reflects" the community, law also becomes a creative element in the mind and will of the. What is really naïve is to fail to see that law operates dynamically in the consciousness of the community. This has been abundantly proved in the history of the law of race relations in America.
Time, Progress, and the Kingdom of God
Hope in the human spirit means its relation to the future before it, the eternity above it, and the saving of the precious values of its past. Even on Case’s terms the question of the meaning of the whole process remains unsolved. It is the inevitable destiny of fascism to create what it intends to prevent -- the socialist commonwealth of the world.
There’s a great Camp Meeting in the Promised Land.20 It is noteworthy that the humanist turns to the language of the religious tradition to express this conclusion. It is the result of the creative activity of God in a stream of conditions and events far beyond the range of my knowledge. 34;In the Moment man also becomes conscious of the new birth, for his antecedent state was one of non-being."32.
Professor Hartshorne’s statement of the relation of God to time saves what is intellectually and religiously meaningful in the Biblical conception. We can use the conception of the embattled reign of Christ as a guide to a reformulation of the Christian view of history. This conception of the reign of Christ includes the universality of his meaning for human existence.
Our third assertion is that we know nothing of the working of God in the world except in relation to real opposition. But the conception of the reign of Christ contains a hope which looks beyond all the particular victories which God. The question of the ultimate outcome of history involves the meaning of the Kingdom of God.
The Divine Call and Man’s Response
This is the assertion of the freedom of the Gospel over against the bondage of the law. It is an example, of especial difficulty to be sure, of the universal moral problem of man. Protestantism the final court of appeal is the conscience of the individual as he responds to the Word of God.
Thus Catholicism rejects one of the cardinal truths which is given in the revelation of God out of which the Bible came. It was this doctrine with which the Reformers pried Christian ethics loose from the dominion of the Church. For him the notion of the calling is the solution of the problem of the Christian service of God in a sinful world.
These two contributions have opened the way for a rediscovery of the meaning of the Christian life as a life of moral integrity in devotion to the will of God. It means that the Christian wherever he is has been called out by God to become a member of the new community, the Body of Christ in the world. To do here and now what needs to be done for the sake of the real good, is the substance of the Christian acknowledgment of our moral.
One of the burdens which love assumes Is that of reckoning with the grim necessities. It is the static character of the doctrines of the orders and of natural law theories which is their limitation. The Christian conception of the moral life as service in the world of the order of good which is never wholly realized in the world opens the way to moral integrity.
The Good Earth and the Good Society
It is one of the functions of theology to be a critic of utopias and utopianism. Yet amidst the travail of creation there is the fact of the tender nurture of life. But death as a natural fact is one of the conditions under which God’s work gets done.
Yet the burden of grinding poverty destroys the possibility of the full life for the masses of men. Christian faith accepts the challenge of the natural environment to make it serve human fulfillment. They determine to govern the whole of life toward the full realization of the ideal.
Some forms of the Christian attack on the social problem have expressed just such a taut idealism. One of the truly bright strands in the dark fabric of human history is the slow but real progress of the humanitarian ideal. The ultimate condition of the Good Society is that men shall freely will the justice and the love which are necessary to it.
In the good earth, and in such glimpses of the Good Society as we have we discern a deeper reality upon which these depend. His Kingdom is present in the goodness of the earth and in the promise of the better society. On this point structural alterations must be made in the interpretation of the social gospel.
Growth in Grace: The Final Assurance
A second confusion which attends the discussion of the possibility of love is related to the problem of perfectionism. There are three reasons why it is difficult to support any interpretation of the Christian life. We are not looking, then, for an indisputable judgment on what may be possible in the response of the spirit to God’s demand.
The beginning of the new life of the Christian is the birth of faith in the whole man. It is the breaking of the shell of self-centeredness and the free commitment of the self to the power and the goodness of God. Edwards’ treatment is a masterly blend of psychological insight and the cautious reserve appropriate in the Christian sense of the mystery of grace.
All involve growth in the depth, the wisdom, and the completeness of the life of faith. The third principle is that there is new temptation at every stage of the Christian experience. In the second place, there is abundant evidence that growth in the life of the spirit brings new temptations with it.
It is part of the strategy of the Christian life to recognize the saints’ capacity for self-deception. Bunyan’s description of the Christian journey through life is one of the most realistic ever produced. There is the last question of the Christian’s relation to the things loved in this life, and the nature of his hope in the face of death.
