compound of some of the best and some of the worst elements of Paganism and Judaism, moulded in practice by the innate character of certain peoples of the Western world,” * as Huxley puts it—or else to go back behind the early Church, behind even the New Testament, to the original purity of the gospel of Jesus.
This second alternative is the Liberal Protestant solution, and it is the logical conclusion of the appeal of the Reformers from the Church to the Bible and of their attempt to set up an abstract ideal of primitive Christianity against the historic reality of the Catholic Church. In the moral teaching of the Gospel and in the personality of ” the historical Jesus ” the Liberal Protestants believed that they had at last found a firm basis for a faith that should be purely ethical and religious without any contamination of metaphysics or theological speculation. This is what Harnack means when he says that the work of the Reformation is only completed when faith cancels dogma, and that the Reformation is the end of dogma as the Gospel was the end of the Law. The divorce of dogma from intelligence that was inaugurated by the Reformers consummates itself in the dissolution of dogma itself in the interests of that moral pragmatism which is the essence of modern Pro-
* T. H. Huxley, Essays, v., p. 142.
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T H E CLAIM OF CHRISTIANITY
testantism. Christianity, it is said, is not a creed but a life ; its sole criterion is the moral and social activity that it generates. And thus religion loses all contact with absolute truth and becomes merely an emotional justification for a certain standard of behaviour.
But this intensely subjective attitude to religion is no less inconsistent with a genuinely historical understanding of the Gospels than it is with theology or metaphysics. Liberal Protestantism selects those elements in the Gospel which appeal to the modern liberal mind, and disregards or rejects the uncompromising supernaturalism on which the ethical teaching of Jesus rests. It condemned the Catholic tradition for replacing the historical Jesus by a metaphysical abstraction—the incarnation of a Divine hypostasis—while its own interpretation was nothing but an ethical abstraction—the incarnation of the ideals of liberal humani¬
tarianism.*
* The following passage from Mr. C. E. M. Joad’s Present and Future of Religion (p. 34) is a typical if somewhat extreme example of this attitude. ” For many men of advanced ideas, to-day, Christ is primarily a great preacher and teacher of conduct, expounding doctrines of compelling force and originality. As such he despises ritual and ceremony, and lays stress upon what men do.
He is a communist and an internationalist, advocating the widening of the private family to include the whole family of mankind. He is a humanitarian, denouncing