Читать книгу Modern Religious Cults and Movements - Gaius Glenn Atkins - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Chronologically the point of departure for such a study as this is the decade from 1880 to 1890. This is only an approximation but it will do. It was a particularly decorous decade. There was no fighting save on the outposts of colonial empires, the little wars of Soldiers Three and Barrack Room Ballads—too far away for their guns to be heard in the streets of capital cities, but lending a touch of colour to newspaper head-lines and supplying new material for rising young writers. It was the decade of triumphant Democracy and triumphant Science and triumphant Industrialism and, among the more open-minded, of triumphant Evolution. Western Civilization was sure of its forces, sure of its formulæ, sure of its future; there were here and there clouds no bigger than a man's hand against particularly luminous horizons, but there was everywhere a general agreement that they would be dissolved by the force of benign development. The world seemed particularly well in hand.

The churches generally shared this confidence. Catholicism and Protestantism had reached a tacit working agreement as to their spheres of influence and were even beginning to fraternize a little. The divisive force of Protestantism seemed to have spent itself. Since Alexander Campbell—dead now for a decade and a half—no Protestant sect of any importance had been established. The older denominations had achieved a distinctive finality in organization and doctrine. Evolution and Biblical criticism were generally the storm centers of controversy and though these controversies were severe enough they produced no schisms in the churches themselves. A few religious leaders were urging a more thoroughgoing social interpretation and application of the teachings of Jesus; such as these were really looked upon with more suspicion than the propagandists of a liberal theology.

We see now with almost tragic clearness that, beneath the surface of the whole interrelated order of that tranquil afternoon of the Victorian epoch, there were forces in action working toward such a challenge of the accepted and inherited as cultures and civilizations are asked to meet only in the great crises of history and bound to issue, as they have issued in far-flung battle lines, in the overthrow of ancient orders and new alignments along every front of human interest. It will be the task of the historians of the future who will have the necessary material in hand to follow these immense reactions in their various fields and they will find their real point of departure not in dates but in the human attitudes and outlooks which then made a specious show of being final—and were not final at all.

Just there also is the real point of departure for a study like this. We may date the rise of modern religious cults and movements from the last decades of the nineteenth century, but they are really reactions not against a time but a temper, an understanding of religion and a group of religious validations which had been built up through an immense labour of travailing generations and which toward the end of the last century were in the way of being more seriously challenged than for a thousand years (and if this seems too strong a statement the reader is asked to wait for at least the attempted proof of it). We shall have to begin, then, with a state of mind which for want of a better name I venture to call the representative orthodox religious consciousness of the end of the nineteenth century. That this consciousness is Christian is of course assumed. It is Protestant rather than Catholic, for Protestantism has supplied the larger number of followers to the newer religious movements.

To begin with, this representative religious consciousness was by no means simple. Professor James Harvey Robinson tells us that the modern mind is really a complex, that it contains and continues the whole of our inheritances and can be understood only through the analysis of all the contributive elements which have combined to make it what it is and that the inherited elements in it far outweigh more recent contributions. The religious mind is an equally complex and deep-rooted inheritance and can best be approached by a consideration of the bases of religion.

Certain Qualities Common to All Religions

We are but pilgrims down roads which space and time supply; we cannot account for ourselves in terms of what we know to be less than ourselves, nor can we face the shadow which falls deeply across the end of our way without dreaming, at least, of that which lies beyond. Whence? Whither? and Why? are insurgent questions; they are voices out of the depths. A very great development of intelligence was demanded before such questions really took definite shape, but they are implicit in even the most rudimentary forms of religion, nor do we outgrow them through any achievement of Science or development of Philosophy. They become thereby, if anything, more insistent. Our widening horizons of knowledge are always swept by a vaster circumference of mystery into which faith must write a meaning and beyond which faith must discern a destiny.

Religion begins, therefore, in our need so to interpret the power manifest in the universe[1] as to come into some satisfying relationship therewith. It goes on to supply an answer to the dominant questions—Whence? Whither? Why? It fulfills itself in worship and communion with what is worshipped. Such worship has addressed itself to vast ranges of objects, fulfilled itself in an almost unbelievable variety of rites. And yet in every kind of worship there has been some aspiration toward an ideal excellence and some endeavour, moreover, of those who worship to come into a real relation with what is worshipped. It would need a detailed treatment, here impossible, to back up so general a statement with the facts which prove it, but the facts are beyond dispute. It would be equally difficult to analyze the elements in human nature which lead us to seek such communion. The essential loneliness of the soul, our sense of divided and warring powers and the general emotional instability of personality without fitting objects of faith and devotion, all contribute to the incurable religiosity of human nature.

[1] I have taken as a working definition of Religion a phrase quoted by Ward Fowler in the introduction to his Gifford Lectures on "The Religious Experience of the Roman People." "Religion is the effective desire to be in right relationship to the power manifesting itself in the Universe." This is only a formula but it lends itself to vital interpretations and is a better approach to modern cults, many of which are just that endeavour, than those definitions of religion just now current which define it as a system of values or a process of evaluation.

The value which religion has for those who hold it is perhaps as largely tested by its power to give them a real sense of communion with God as by any other single thing, but this by no means exhausts the value of religion for life. All religions must, in one way or another, meet the need of the will for guidance and the need of the ethical sense for right standards. Religion has always had an ethical content, simple enough to begin with as religion itself was simple. Certain things were permitted, certain things prohibited as part of a cult. These permissions and prohibitions are often strangely capricious, but we may trace behind taboo and caste and the ceremonially clean and unclean an always emerging standard of right and wrong and a fundamental relationship between religion and ethics. Religion from the very first felt itself to be the more august force and through its superior authority gave direction and quality to the conduct of its devotees. It was long enough before all this grew into Decalogues and the Sermon on the Mount and the latter chapters of Paul's great letters to his churches and our present system of Christian ethics, but we discover the beginning of the lordship of religion over conduct even in the most primitive cults.

We shall find as we go on that this particular aspect of religion is less marked in modern religious cults and movements than either the quest for a new understanding of God or new answers to the three great questions, or the longing for a more satisfying communion with God. They accept, for the most part, the generally held standards of Christian conduct, but even so, they are beginning to develop their own ethical standards and to react upon the conduct of those who hold them.

As has been intimated, however, the appeal of religion goes far deeper than all this. If it did no more than seek to define for us the "power not ourselves" everywhere made manifest, if it did no more than answer the haunting questions: Whence? and Whither? and Why?, if it did no more than offer the emotional life a satisfying object of worship and communion with the Divine, supplying at the same time ethical standards and guiding and strengthening the will in its endeavour after goodness, it would have done us an immense service. But one may well wonder whether if religion did no more than this it would have maintained itself as it has and renew through the changing generations its compelling appeal. More strong than any purely intellectual curiosity as to a first cause or controlling power, more haunting than any wonder as to the source and destiny of life, more persistent than any loneliness of the questing soul is our dissatisfaction with ourselves, our consciousness of tragic moral fault, our need of forgiveness and deliverance. This longing for deliverance has taken many forms.

Henry Osborn Taylor in a fine passage has shown us how manifold are the roads men have travelled in their quest for salvation.[2] "For one man shall find his peace in action, another in the rejection of action, even in the seeming destruction of desire; another shall have peace and freedom through intellectual inquiry, while another must obey his God or love his God and may stand in very conscious need of divine salvation. The adjustment sought by Confucius was very different from that which drew the mind of Plato or led Augustine to the City of God. Often quite different motives may inspire the reasonings which incidentally bring men to like conclusions. … The life adjustment of the early Greek philosophers had to do with scientific curiosity. … They were not like Gotama seeking relief from the tedious impermanence of personal experience any more than they were seeking to insure their own eternal welfare in and through the love of God, the motive around which surged the Christian yearning for salvation. Evidently every religion is a means of adjustment or deliverance."

[2] "Deliverance," pp. 4 and 5.

Professor James in his chapter on The Sick Souls deals most suggestively with these driving longings and all the later analyses of the psychology of conversion begin with the stress of the divided self. The deeper teaching of the New Testament roots itself in this soil. The literature of confession is rich in classic illustrations of all this, told as only St. Augustine more than a thousand years ago or Tolstoy yesterday can tell it. No need to quote them here; they are easily accessible for those who would find for their own longings immortal voices and be taught with what searching self-analysis those who have come out of darkness into light have dealt with their own sick souls.

Every religion has in some fashion or other offered deliverance to its devotees through sacrifice or spiritual discipline, or the assurance that their sins were atoned for and their deliverance assured through the sufferings of others. All this, needless to say, involves not only the sense of sin but the whole reach of life's shadowed experiences. We have great need to be delivered not only from our divided selves but from the burdens and perplexities of life. Religion must offer some explanation of the general problem of sorrow and evil; it must, above all, justify the ways of God with men.

Generally speaking, religion is very greatly dependent upon its power so to interpret the hard things of life to those who bear them that they may still believe in the Divine love and justice. The generality of doubt is not philosophical but practical. We break with God more often than for any other reason because we believe that He has not kept faith with us. Some of the more strongly held modern cults have found their opportunity in the evident deficiency of the traditional explanation of pain and sorrow. Religion has really a strong hold on the average life only as it meets the more shadowed side of experience with the affirmation of an all-conquering love and justice in which we may rest.

Broadly considered, then, the elements common to all religions are such as these: a satisfying interpretation of the power manifest in the universe, the need of the mind for an answer to the questions Whence? and Whither? and Why?, the need of the emotional life for such peace as may come from the consciousness of being in right relationship and satisfying communion with God, the need of the will and ethical sense for guidance, and a need including all this and something beside for spiritual deliverance. The representative religious consciousness of the end of the nineteenth century in which we find our point of departure for the religious reactions of the last generation naturally included all this, but implicitly rather than explicitly. The intellectually curious were more concerned with science and political economies than the nature or genesis of religion, while the truly devout, who are not generally given to the critical analysis of their faith, accepted it as a Divine revelation needing no accounting for outside their Bible. Moreover such things as these were not then and never can be held abstractly. They were articulate in creeds and organized in churches and invested with the august sanction of authority, and mediated through old, old processes of religious development.

Christianity Historically Organized Around the Conception of a Transcendent God and a Fallen Humanity

For in its historic development religion has naturally taken distinctly divergent forms, conditioned by race, environment, the action and reaction of massed experience and by the temper and insight of a few supremely great religious leaders. But centrally, the whole development of any religion has been controlled by its conception of God and, in the main, three different conceptions of God give colour and character to the outstanding historic religions. Pantheistic religions have thought of God as just the whole of all that is; they widen the universe to the measure of the Divine, or narrow the Divine to the operations of the universe. Pantheism saturates its whole vague content with a mystical quality of thought, and colours what it sees with its own emotions. The religions of the Divine Immanence conceive God as pervading and sustaining all that is and revealing Himself thereby, though not necessarily confined therein. The religions of the Divine Transcendence have believed in a God who is apart from all that is, who neither begins nor ends in His universe, and from whom we are profoundly separated not only by our littlenesses but by our sin.

All this is a bare statement of what is almost infinitely richer as it has been felt and proclaimed by the devout and we shall see as we go on how the newer religious movements take also their colour and character from a new emphasis upon the nature of God, or else a return to understandings of Him and feelings about Him which have been lost out in the development of Christianity.

Historically Christian theology, particularly in the West, has centered around the conception of a Transcendent God. As far as doctrine goes Christianity took over a great inheritance from the Jew, for arrestingly enough the Jew, though he belongs to the East, had never anything in common with Eastern Pantheism. On the contrary we find his prophets and lawgivers battling with all their force against such aspects of Pantheism as they found about them. The God of the Old Testament is always immeasurably above those who worshipped Him in righteousness and power; He is their God and they are His chosen people, but there is never any identification of their will with His except in the rare moments of their perfect obedience.

True enough, through the insight of the prophets and particularly the experience of psalmists, this conception of the Apart-God became increasingly rich in the persuasion of His unfailing care for His children. None the less, the Hebrew God is a Transcendent God and Christianity inherits from that. Christianity took over what Judaism refused—Jesus Christ and His Gospel. But out of the immeasurable wealth of His teaching apostolic thinking naturally appropriated and made most of what was nearest in line with the prophets and the lawgivers of their race. Judaism refused Christ but the Twelve Apostles were Jews and the greatest of the group—St. Paul—was a Jewish Rabbi before he became a Christian teacher. He had been nurtured and matured in the schools of his people and though he was reborn, in renunciations and obediences distinctly Christian, there were in his very soul inherited rigidities of form in conformity to which he recast his faith.

More distinctly than he himself could ever have known, he particularized the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Doubtless his own experience was the deeper directing force in all this. Theologies always, to begin with, are the molten outpouring of some transforming experience and they are always, to begin with, fluid and glowing.

Such glowing experiences as these are hard to communicate; they, too, soon harden down and we inherit, as cold and rigid form, what was to begin with the flaming outcome of experience. St. Paul's own struggle and the bitterness of a divided self which issued in his conversion naturally gave content to all his after teaching. He worked out his system strangely apart from the other group of disciples; he had probably never heard a word of Christ's teaching directly from Christ's lips; he naturally fell back, therefore, upon his Jewish inheritance and widened that system of sacrifices and atonements until he found therein not only a place for the Cross but the necessity for it. He made much, therefore, of the sense of alienation from God, of sin and human helplessness, of the need and possibility of redemption.

The Incarnation as the Bridge Between God and Man; the Cross as the Instrument of Man's Redemption. The Cross the Supreme Symbol of Western Theology

Here, then, are the two speculative backgrounds of historic Christianity—God's apartness from man in an inconceivable immensity of lonely goodness, man's alienation from God in a helpless fallen estate. For the bridging of the gulf between God and His world Christianity offers the incarnation; for the saving of man from his lost estate Christianity offers the Cross. The incarnation is the reëntry of God into a world from which, indeed, according to the Christian way of thinking, He has never been entirely separate, but from which He has, none the less, been so remote that if ever it were to be rescued from its ruined condition there was needed a new revelation of God in humanity; and the Atonement is just the saving operation of God thus incarnated.

Eastern Christianity has made most of the incarnation. The great Greek theologies were built around that. They exhausted the resources of a language particularly fitted for subtle definition in their endeavour to explain the mystery of it, and, after more than a century of bitter debate about the nature and person of Christ, contented themselves with affirming the reality both of the human and divine in His nature, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance, nor indeed making clear in any truly comprehensible way the truth which they so sought to define, or the faith to which they so passionately held. But though their keen dialectic broke down under the burden they laid upon it, they did, nevertheless, keep alive just that confidence in God as one come into human life and sharing it and using it, without which there would have been in all the faith and thinking of the West for more than a thousand years an unbridged and unbridgeable gulf between God and man.

Indeed, when we turn back again to the great Greek symbols with that conception of the immanence of God which the truer insights of our own time have done so much to supply, we find these old forms and phrases unexpectedly hospitable to our own interpretations. If the Western Church had been more strongly influenced by the philosophical insight of the early Eastern Church, Western Christendom might have been saved from a good deal of that theological hardness from which great numbers are just now reacting.

But Western Christendom took the Cross for the central symbol of its faith. What would have happened to Western Christendom without Augustine we do not know, and it is idle to try to guess, but Europe in its religious thinking followed for a thousand years the direction he gave it. His theology is only the travail of his soul, glowing and molten. His Confessions reveal to us more clearly than any other record we have Paganism becoming Christian. In the travail of his spirit we see something vaster than his own conversion, we see the formulation of new spiritual experiences, the birth of new spiritual relationships, the growth of new moral orders and consecrations. He bridges for us the passages between Paganism and Christianity. He reveals what rebirth meant for men to whom it was no convention but an agonizing recasting of both the inner and outer life. He shows us what it meant to put aside the inheritances and relationships of an immemorial order and to stand as a little child untaught, undisciplined and unperfect in the presence of the new. The spiritual attitude which Augustine attained was to be for long the dominant spiritual attitude of Europe, was to govern medieval conceptions, inspire medieval actions, colour with its flame the mystic brooding of the medieval mind.

In the end the sovereignty of God became for Augustine supreme and over against this he set with strong finality man's hopeless fallen state. He was doubtless in debt to St. Paul for these governing conceptions but they took new character as they passed through the alembic of his own experience. "The one pervading thought of the Greek fathers concerning the redemptive work of Christ is that men are thereby brought into unity with God. They do not hesitate to designate this unity to be as a deification … they dwell on the idea that we become partakers of the Divine nature."[3] The emphasis here is not so much upon sin to be atoned for or punishment to be avoided, as reconciliation to be achieved.

[3] Fisher, "History of Christian Doctrine," p. 162.

After Augustine the interpretations of the Cross take a new direction. Now men are thereby not so much to be made partakers of the divine nature as to be saved from hell. The explanations of the way in which this salvation is really achieved change with the changing centuries but through shifting theologies there is one constant. All men are lost and foredoomed to an eternal punishment from which they are saved only in that Christ suffered for them and they, through their faith and obedience, have availed themselves of His vicarious death. The varying theological interpretations are themselves greatly significant as if here were something whose meanings no single explanation could exalt, something to be felt rather than understood. The Cross so seen is the symbol at once of love and need, of moral defeat and moral discipline, of suffering helplessness and overcoming goodness. We cannot overstate the influence of this faith upon the better part of Western civilization.

It has kept us greatly humble, purged us of our pride and thrown us back in a helplessness which is, after all, the true secret of our strength, upon the saving mercy of God. The story of it, simply told, has moved the hard or bitter or the careless as nothing else can do. Its assurances of deliverance have given new hope to the hopeless and a power not their own to the powerless. It has exalted as the very message of God the patient enduring of unmerited suffering; it has taught us how there is no deliverance save as the good suffer for the bad and the strong put their strength at the service of the weak; it has taught us that the greatest sin is the sin against love and the really enduring victories for any better cause are won only as through the appeal of a much enduring unselfishness new tempers are created and new forces are released. Nor is there any sign yet that its empire has begun to come to an end.

The Catholic Church Offered Deliverance in Obedience to the Authority of an Inerrant Church

Nevertheless the preaching of the Cross has not commonly taken such forms as these; it has been rather the appeal of the Church to the individual to escape his sinful and hopeless estate either through an obedient self-identification with the Church's discipline and an unquestioning acceptance of the Church's authority, or else through an intellectual acceptance of the scheme of redemption and a moral surrender to it. Here are really the two lines of approach through the one or the other of which Christianity has been made real to the individual from the time of St. Paul till our own time. During the early formative period of the Church it was a matter between the individual and his God. So much we read in and between the lines of the Pauline Epistles. As far as any later time can accurately recast the thought and method of a far earlier time evangelical Protestant theology fairly interprets St. Paul. Faith—a big enough word, standing for both intellectual acceptance and a kind of mystic receptivity to the love and goodness and justice of God revealed in the Cross of Christ—is the key to salvation and the condition of Christian character. It is also that through which religion becomes real to the individual. But since all this lays upon the individual a burden hard enough to be borne (as we shall see when we come back to Protestantism itself) the Church, as her organization became more definite and her authority more strongly established, took the responsibility of the whole matter upon herself. She herself would become responsible for the outcome if only they were teachable and obedient.

The Catholic Church offered to its communicants an assured security, the proof of which was not in the fluctuating states of their own souls but in the august authority of the Church to which they belonged. As long, therefore, as they remained in obedient communion with their Church their souls were secure. The Church offered them its confessional for their unburdening and its absolutions for their assurance, its sacraments for their strengthening and its penances for their discipline and restoration. It took from them in spiritual regions and maybe in other regions too, the responsibility for the conduct of their own lives and asked of the faithful only that they believe and obey. The Church, as it were, "stepped down" religion to humanity. It did all this with a marvellous understanding of human nature and in answer to necessities which were, to begin with, essential to the discipline of childlike peoples who would otherwise have been brought face to face with truths too great for them, or dismissed to a freedom for which they were not ready.

It was and is a marvellous system; there has never been anything like it and if it should wholly fail from amongst us there will never be anything like it again. And yet we see that all this vast spiritual edifice, like the arches of its own great cathedrals, locks up upon a single keystone. The keystone of the arch of Catholic certainty is the acceptance of the authority of the Church conditioned by belief in the divine character of that authority. If anything should shake the Catholic's belief in the authority of his Church and the efficacy of her sacraments then he is left strangely unsheltered. Strongly articulated as this system is, it has not been untouched by time and change. To continue our figure, one great wing of the medieval structure fell away in the Protestant Reformation and what was left, though extensive and solid enough, is still like its great cathedrals—yielding to time and change. The impressive force and unity of contemporaneous Catholicism may lead us perhaps to underestimate the number of those in the Catholic line who, having for one reason or another lost faith in their Church, are now open to the appeal of the newer movements. For example, the largest non-Catholic religious group of Poles in Detroit are Russellites. There are on good authority between three and four thousand of them.

The Protestant Church Made Faith the Key to Salvation with Conversion the Test for the Individual of the Reality of His Religious Experience

If religion has been made real to the Catholic through the mediation of his Church, Protestantism, seeking to recreate the apostolic Church, has made the reality of religion a matter between the individual and his God. And yet Protestantism has never dared commit itself to so simple a phrasing of religion as this, nor to go on without authorities of its own. Protestantism generally has substituted for the inclusive authority of the Catholic Church the authority of its own creeds and fundamentally the authority of the Bible. As far as creeds go Protestantism carried over the content of Latin Christianity more largely than we have generally recognized. Luther was in direct line with Augustine as Augustine was in direct line with St. Paul, and Luther's fundamental doctrine—justification by faith—was not so much a rewriting of ancient creeds as a new way of validating their meaning for the individual. Faith, in our common use of the term, has hardened down into an intellectual acceptance of Protestant theologies, but certainly for St. Paul and probably for Luther it was far more vital than this and far more simple. It was rather a resting upon a delivering power, the assurance of whose desire and willingness to deliver was found in the New Testament. It was an end to struggle, a spiritual victory won through surrender.

The Latin Catholic system had come to impose upon such tempers as Luther's an unendurable amount of strain; it was too complex, too demanding, and it failed to carry with it necessary elements of mental and spiritual consent. (St. Paul had the same experience with his own Judaism.) What Luther sought was a peace-bringing rightness with God. He was typically and creatively one of William James' "divided souls" and he found the solution for his fears, his struggles and his doubts in simply taking for granted that a fight which he was not able to win for himself had been won for him in the transaction on the Cross. He had nothing, therefore, to do but to accept the peace thus made possible and thereafter to be spiritually at rest.

Now since the whole of the meaning of the Cross for Christianity from St. Paul until our own time is involved in this bare statement and since our theologies have never been able to explain this whole great matter in any doctrinal form which has secured universal consent, we must simply fall back upon the statement of the fact and recognize that here is something to be defined in terms of experience and not of doctrine. The validating experience has come generally to be known as conversion, and conversion has played a great part in evangelical Protestantism ever since the Reformation. It has become, indeed, the one way in which religion has been made real to most members of evangelical churches. So sweeping a statement must be somewhat qualified, for conversion is far older than Luther;[4] it is not confined to Protestantism and the Protestant churches themselves have not agreed in their emphasis upon it. Yet we are probably on safe ground in saying that religion has become real to the average member of the average Protestant Church more distinctly through conversion than anything else.