USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Religious Education Association : proceedings of the first annual convention, Chicago, February 10-12, 1903 > Part 8
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3. The modern spirit has perceived that the Bible is a growth. It not only includes documents of different periods and by different men, but expresses the religious spirit as exemplified in widely different types of char- acter and at various periods of the process of develop- ment. It becomes a matter of very great interest to investigate these different periods, and the literature which emanates from them. This becomes possible in a fuller measure as our information regarding the life of the biblical people increases. It is also possible to fix with a certain degree of confidence the dates of utter- ances which have hitherto been unsatisfactorily assigned upon the mere dictum of tradition. Indeed, it is a char- acteristic of the modern spirit that it takes nothing for granted. It seeks by investigation and painstaking research to test every tradition which is found connected with any part of the Holy Scriptures. It aims to be entirely impartial, and accomplishes this aim in so far as it is true to the historical and the scientific spirit. It ignores no phenomena ; it trusts no theory, but searches simply for the facts, confident that these will yield an explanation which may be absolutely trusted and which will prove far more satisfactory than any tradition based · upon supposed dogmatic necessity.
4. The historical spirit has discovered as well the fact that the different books of the Holy Scriptures are not in all cases the product of a single impulse, nor necessarily produced in any instance wholly by one hand. It discovers that the material for the composition of a book may be documentary in character and of a period prior to the writer's life, or in the form of oral tradition may have existed in practically the same form for gen- erations ; or that different works may have been com- bined by a writer living at a subsequent period. It dis- covers as well that material tends to group itself about distinguished names, so that the fact that writings have
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attached themselves to some larger body of work, pro- duced by a prophet or teacher of an earlier time, presents no great difficulty, and is likely to explain a number of the phenomena perceived in the Bible.
5. It is clear also that different books of Holy Scrip- ture have a varying value, as over against the a priori idea that all parts of the Bible are in a mechanical sense infallible and on the same level. It is clearly perceived that some parts of the Bible have a greater significance than others. Their finding power is superior; they have ministered to faith in a much larger degree. One who takes an unhistorical view of the Old Testament would exalt the utterances of Moses and Isaiah to the same level as those of Christ, would find in every portion of the Bible equally important truth, and would attach the same importance to a verse in Chronicles as to one in the gospels. Such a view cannot meet the test of facts. It is perfectly clear that all parts of the Scriptures are not of equal value. Whatever one's theory may be, in daily experience books like Isaiah and Deuteronomy have a surviving value that never attaches to Lamenta- tions and Ecclesiastes. The Psalms are loved and read by those who never read Ezra and Nehemiah; the epistle to the Romans or the gospel of John ministers to the Christian life as the epistles of James and Peter never do.
6. Biblical literature presents many variations and even contradictions which the unhistorical view was accustomed to overlook, explain away, or deny. Closer study of the Bible has shown the impossibility of regard- ing such treatment as satisfactory. It is easily per- ceived that historical development may account for most, if not all, of these variations or contradictions. The laws emerging in one period of a nation's life are not likely to prove equally suitable to other periods, and the legislation formed in different ages may be contra-
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dictory without in cach case lacking the essential value of adjustment to its age. Different periods may have different explanations for historical events or traditions of the distant past. The historical spirit aims to find the date, not only of a particular event, but of the docu- ment or book in which that event is chronicled, and to place that narrative in the environment of the ideas that prevailed in that age. Viewed from this standpoint, dis- crepancies and contradictions find explanation, and are seen to be the results of varying view-points ; and by that means they become the landmarks for the tracing of the growth of the religious spirit.
7. The historical spirit distinguishes between the form and the substance. All literary forms have value, but the degree of value which they possess is dependent upon the substance they contain. Parable, fable, alle- gory, custom, rite, legislation, are all valuable, not as ends in themselves, or as the final form in which religious teaching is conveyed, but as the protecting shell for the mediation and preservation of an inner truth, wherein the value lies. To be able to disengage the essential truth contained in a historical narrative or a parable from the peculiar form in which it is given, is to render that reli- gious truth everywhere usable and vital. The danger of insisting upon the form rather than upon the substance, upon the shell rather than upon the kernel within, upon the story rather than upon the truth which it contains, is apparent to everyone who considers the problem of teaching.
8. The historical spirit studies as well the influence of other national life upon the history of which the Bible speaks. It is not only the archæological interest which here emerges, but the desire to understand what truth was held in common by the carliest interpreters of our holy faith and those who represent other great reli- gions. Christianity has everything to gain and nothing
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to lose from the frank recognition of all the elements of truth contained in the ethnic faiths. The teachers of Israel and our Lord himself are commanding, and in the latter instance supreme, when viewed in comparison with others who spoke in behalf of righteousness.
9. The historical spirit, by its discovery of the high character of the Old and New Testaments and the reli- gious life which they reveal, removes absolutely the means of attack from which the Holy Scriptures suffered in an uncritical age. The partial character of the truth as perceived even by prophets and teachers of the Old Testament may easily be recognized, and its 'recognition shows at once the shallowness of any attack upon the character of God based upon the imperfections of reli- gious ideals disclosed at any particular period of the advancing process of revelation. The apologetic signifi- cance of this fact is recognized by most Bible teachers in our time, and it may be confidently asserted that, with the diffusion of the knowledge of the Scriptures now accessible as a result of the application of historical and scientific methods to the study of the Bible, most of the popular arguments against the Word of God fall to the ground.
10. The historical spirit emphasizes the embodiment of divine ideals in personality, as revealed in the pages of the Holy Scriptures. Only as it is perceived that the Word was made flesh in the lives of the prophets, the apostles, and supremely in the life of Christ, is it pos- sible to understand the duty and possibility of the incar- nation of the life of God in our own characters. Isaiah is the ideal and the inspirer of the Hebrew race in a great historic moment. Paul expresses, not only the doctrines, but as well the practical outworking of the Christian life. Supremely in Christ are disclosed those forces which make possible the redeemed and redemptive life. It is not strange therefore that His is the one
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imperial figure in history, the revelation of God in terms of humanity, the life whose words are the hinges of history, and whose influence has produced a new world.
Such are some of the considerations which are involved in the modern conception of religious educa- tion, which in so large a degree is dependent upon materials furnished by the Holy Scriptures, whose increasing use in the educational process and equip- · ment of the future is so greatly desired by the most thoughtful and far-sighted of modern educators.
The teacher who possesses the historical spirit, and perceives the significance of the Word of God, as studied with this attitude of mind, will be able to bring from the Bible things new and old for the development of the religious life. Nor will this depend wholly upon method. Method is always subordinate to substance. The teacher using the most faulty system of lessons, or with the least scientifically approved method, may, with the proper appreciation of the character and value of the Bible, accomplish results impossible to one using a greatly superior method, but unprovided with the sub- stance of properly apprehended biblical truth. The duty of the hour is the larger recognition of the his- torical spirit as essential in any competent program of religious education, and as destined to disclose still more fully in the future those elements of divine truth abun- dantly evidenced through the centuries as characteristic of the Word of God.
DISCUSSION
REV. PHILIP STAFFORD MOXOM, D.D.,
PASTOR SOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS
We have been listening to a very illuminating and instructive series of addresses. If any brother has been asleep for twenty years, let him wake up, and he will have more surprises than Rip Van Winkle. The light is breaking ; the many who have worked in perplexity for years, feeling their way in the dim twilight, are hailing the dawn and are recognizing in it the effulgence of the holy cause.
Of course, in a discussion where one is limited under the Draconian and Procrustean methods of the commit- tee-necessarily-he can do nothing more than take a single thought or a single fact and lay his main emphasis upon that.
Underlying the modern conception of education as a whole, and certainly of religious education, is the idea of the integrity of life. Man is an integer ; he is related to the physical system of things, through the physical organism which he inhabits and which is his plastic and mobile instrument. He is not a being with impenetrable partitions separating different sets of faculties; not a being who has a soul to save ; he is an integral personal- ity, and he must be saved as an integer or be lost as an integer. He cannot have a depraved reason and a regen- erate heart ; he cannot be partly a child of the devil and partly a child of God; he is one thing, and that one thing is mainly a thing of great possibilities.
Underlying the modern conception of education is the idea also of the integrity of society; humanity is one, and the age-long distinctions between sacred and secular are factitious and unreal.
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There is a moral integrity of human life. That which is right, that which is in accordance with the nature of things, that which belongs radically to man as the creature and child of God, is always sacred. It is just as sacred to send a wagon-load of coal to a poor family as it is to make a prayer, and it is just as secular to go to church to be entertained as it is to go to the opera.
The idea of the integrity of life involves the integrity of nature. It also is one thing, and not two, partitioned off by an impenetrable wall into something that is called "the natural" and something else called "the super- natural." It is not true that God is there, but excluded from here; he is in his world and he is part and parcel of all that we see and all that we do. At once immanent and transcendent, he is the life, the origin, the law, and the goal of the world.
The dying infidel, who had been brought up under the theory that the supernatural was an occasional and spas- modic irruption of the divine into the human, of the supernatural into the natural, wrote upon the wall of his room : "God is nowhere." His little girl, coming into the room shortly afterward, read : "God is now here." The mouth of the babe and suckling spoke the truth that we are just beginning to learn.
Now, religious education grasps the integrity of life, and seeks the development of the integer, man, in accord- ance with his highest end. It does this by laying clear and persistent emphasis upon the reality of spiritual things-the reality of God, the reality of the soul, and the reality of revelation, historical and contemporaneous. God is as near to man today as ever in the history of the world; and if we have ears to hear and hearts to feel, his communications will be as real and direct as ever they were. It is only when we shall grasp the full signifi- cance of this truth that we shall see that at last religion
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coalesces with education, and we have no longer two kinds of education, but one, and the one education is the entire upbuilding of a man.
PROFESSOR WM. DOUGLAS MACKENZIE, D.D., CHICAGO THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
The dangers of religion are on all hands. Not only does religion find its very life in danger when it con- fronts the man who denies religion completely, but reli- gion as we know and understand it, as we have received it, is in danger also in other directions; and religious education has for its purpose the deliverance of the church of Christ from some of those dangers. One of these is sentimentalism-the religion that lives in and for feeling only, and which issues in all kinds of superficial follies. The religion of superstition, on the other hand, binds itself so completely to abstract statements called dogmas that it sells its soul to them, and to the prac- tices which those who impose the dogmas will also impose upon their practical life.
What we here seek is a religion that is deeply founded in feeling, a religion that is clearly illumined with intelli- gence, and therefore is neither superstitious nor frittered away in sentimentality. This can be secured in the only way in which we can be delivered from sentimentalism, whether in politics or in religion, and from superstition, whether in science or in religion, namely, by education. And the main end of religious education is to direct the feeling that arises out of our relations with God through knowing the truth about him and through clearly defining his relations to the soul. Religious education should show us how God has revealed his relations to us, and what those relations are.
I have been interested to find that some of my prede- cessors on this platform are sedulous lest we should be wringing the child's heart with that which is beyond and
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above its reason. There were times, we are told, when the terrors of darkness descended upon the souls of children through the proclamation of the light. But that which I think we must recognize as educationists is that you cannot educate unless you are giving that which is not only adapted to the child, but is also in advance of the child. It is leading that the child wants, and we must, therefore, recognize that when we speak of educa- ting the child in the knowledge of the Bible, we are con- cerned not only with history, but with a revelation of present relations; and that we are not to be content with defining those relations only in the childish way for the child's mind, but that we must so define and describe them in their historical revelation, in their present signifi- cance, that the child's mind shall grow up to them, and the child-nature be evolved by them.
This, I think, leads to a great deal more than some of us, perhaps, imagine. It will, however, suffice to say that religious education must be comprehended by us as dealing not only with the mere child, but with the adolescent. I was rather disappointed that some of the speakers referred so continuously to the child, and did not bring very clearly to us the conception, which I think is present to all our minds, that the agony of the situation is not with the little children-they are learn- ing through the kindergarten methods now in use in the churches; the agony of the situation for the church today is with the young men and young women, and with the methods and means by which we are to fascin- ate their minds in order that we may quicken their souls.
REV. WILLIAM P. MERRILL, PASTOR SIXTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
In the short time which I may take I can only emphasize one of the points already made. Naturally, I take what seems to me the point of chief importance.
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It is also the thought which has held the chief place in the discussion this morning. It is the personal element in religious education.
A prime characteristic of the modern conception of religious education is the increased emphasis on person- ality, both as object and as means. We are increasingly emphasizing this as our object in religious training; the thing we seek is not chiefly learning on the recipient's part, nor the acceptance of a certain creed, but charac- ter; and not character made to fit a certain mold, but character freely developed. We are emphasizing this also as the means ; the strongest power in religious train- ing is a religious personality ; character comes not by driil, but by contagion.
This increased emphasis on personality is a prime characteristic of the modern conception of all educa- tion, religious or otherwise. Professor James says : "So long as we deal with the objects of sense, we are dealing with the symbols of reality ; when we come to personal relations, we are dealing with reality itself."
Especially is this true of religious training. We are reacting from our dependence on organizations and sys- tems to the individual method of Jesus. To him the supreme power in religious training was not a speaker arousing emotion in a crowd, nor a teacher imparting knowledge to a pupil, but a spirit wakening life in another spirit. There must be preaching and teaching ; but in each, and in all religious work, there must be character calling out character, personal religion awaken- ing personal religion by the personal touch.
Is not our chief concern, then, how to make more efficient the force of personality ; how to keep what we have of it, and get what we lack of it? It is important that our training be as scientific, as exact, as other parts of education ; it is important that it be in harmony with principles of modern psychology and pedagogy; it is
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important that it be true and strong in its view of the Bible. But it is absolutely vital that it be the influence of personality upon personality.
As a pastor I am more deeply interested in the Sunday school than in other branches of work before this Convention. And it is especially in the Sunday school that we should give most earnest care to retain what it now has of personal influence, and to develop it.
It is here that the power of the Sunday school, in the past and at present, resides ; not in the lessons, not in the organization, but in the personal influence of teacher over pupil. I suppose there is not a pastor here who has not counted among the best workers in the Sunday school -I mean best in their power to call out true religious life in their pupils-some man or woman, ignorant, with fanciful views of the Bible, yet in whose contact with the class was revealed a genuine religious nature able to awaken the dormant religious natures of the pupils. I am not pleading that we leave ignorance, even pious ignorance, uncorrected. But I am pleading that we remember that skilled teaching, and modern methods, and graded lessons-highly desirable things, things I want to see in my own school -are yet not the main thing in religious training through the Sunday school; that far more important is the personal element ; and that more important than questions of form or method is the development of personal influence.
It is this-the personal element-that will abso- lutely condition all this Convention may propose or attempt. The success of any effort we may make to better religious education will depend, not chiefly on the wisdom of the thing attempted, or the skill of the method devised, but on the presence of men and women willing and truly ready to carry it into effect in the individual schools. In all attempts in my own school to adopt better methods, here is the difficulty which
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daunts me: Could I count on teachers willing to take their work seriously enough to make more thorough lessons a success ?
Here, then is, to my mind, the greatest practical question we can discuss : How shall we get all these good things into the life and work of the average Sunday-school teacher? How can we get the men and women who volunteer to help in religious education to take their work seriously; and, remembering ever that the great force is the power of personality, to seek for themselves, at the cost of patience and sacrifice if neces- sary, a richer and wiser personal life, that they may bring to bear on those under their influence a person- ality well informed and well equipped with true knowl- edge of the Bible, of wise methods of teaching, of right principles of conduct, and of the workings of the human spirit? In short, what can we do to conserve, intensify, and enlighten the personal influence of character upon character, which is the chief force in religious training?
THIRD SESSION
PRAYER
REV. WILLIAM B. FORBUSH, PH.D., L.H.D.,
PASTOR WINTHROP CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Our Father who art in heaven, hear us as we pray this day for the fathers and mothers who are upon earth ; hear us as we pray for our homes and the dear children whom thou hast given us. Hear us as we pray for our pub- lic schools, and for the fathers and mothers whom thou hast given to our children, to train them in learning and righteousness. Hear us as we pray for our young people joined together in social relationships of every kind, in those pleasant and joyous loyalties which are the seed of the final social relationship of society. Hear us as we pray for our country, we who are all joined here together in the larger fellowship of the dear land we love. May this Convention be a blessing to us and to our children, to our homes and to our schools and to our native land. In the name of Christ we pray. Amen.
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RELIGIOUS AND MORAL EDUCATION THROUGH THE HOME
PRESIDENT GEORGE B. STEWART, D.D., LL.D., AUBURN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, AUBURN, NEW YORK
A minister of my acquaintance, who by his opportunity for observation and by his judicial temper is well qualified to speak with authority, in a recent letter said : "You and I know that the homes cannot be depended upon for giving children the instruction in the Bible which they need." It is safe to assume that this is the prevailing opinion on the subject, and that there is in this audience but slight, if any, dissent from the notion that there is sore lack of moral and religious instruction in the homes of our land, even in the religious homes. That we may make some contribution to the improvement of the condition of things we believe to exist, we come to the discussion of this subject upon our program.
Before making some suggestions for the promotion of religious and moral instruction in the home, I should like to bring the principal elements of the problem to our attention.
I. The family altar is to be found in but a small per- centage of Christian homes. It has been my privilege to know the inner life of hundreds of Christian homes, and from my own personal observation, confirmed by the unvarying testimony of other observers, I make this statement. Whatever view we may take of the value of the family altar, and the formal religious life for which it stands, we must recognize that in the present condition we cannot count upon it for the advancement of home religion, unless we can rebuild it. It is not now an appre- ciable religious force.
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2. There is a new Sunday coming in with new condi- tions to govern home training. The old sabbath, with its strict observance of the rites of the sanctuary, and of the proprieties of personal, domestic, and communal con- duct, has gone, and an entirely new day has taken its place. We may say that the old is better, or we may like the new as on the whole more sane, more whole- some, more Christian. But at all events we must reckon with the facts, and in our efforts to advance the religious influence of the home these facts have their value. For example, in making plans for religious instruction in the home we may not assume that there is the same oppor- tunity and incentive on Sunday for home training that there was under the old day. The old day had in it a distinct and recognized place for this instruction in the home, while the new has no such distinct place. On the other hand, the atmosphere of the present Sunday may be more conducive to the cultivation of a more joyous, more real, more truly personal type of piety. Undoubt- edly there are both gain and loss in the changed condi- tion of our home life on Sunday. Opinions may differ as to the relative proportion of each, but with this pro- portion we are not now concerned. The important thing for us is to note the change and to adjust our solution of the problem before us to the existing conditions.
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