The title page of “The Conservation of Moral Leadership,” Sermons [4], Box 3, Lloyd C. Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Copyright University of Michigan.
The date is October 19, 1919. Lloyd C. Douglas is preaching at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, addressing the question, “what elements are really essential to the building of a faith, at once fearless in its appeal to the intellect and satisfying in its answer to the instinctive demands of the emotions”? He’s speaking to a congregation partly made up of university people (students, grad students, professors, and administrators), but also made up of people from the town, including some of the principal businessmen. They have chosen him as their pastor because they agree with what he’s trying to do: preach a gospel that appeals to the mind just as much to the emotions.
The rhetorical question he’s asking today is: What are the basic elements of such a gospel?
“In the first place,” he says, “the Christian religion grounds its life on the conviction that the universe is neither an accident nor the product of a blind necessity…. It rather considers all reality as the continuous activity of one who knows exactly what He is doing, and why.” (The first element is God as Father of us all, in other words.)
Second: ” …this establishes among us a common brotherhood. It declares that the strong and the weak, the civilized and the barbarian, the cultured and the ignorant, are bound together by ties which cannot be broken, and which it is decidedly perilous to ignore.” (So the second element is the brotherhood of man.)
“In the third place: Christian philosophy is considerably more than a system of ethics or metaphysics. It is an historical system of faith, of worship, and of practice which traces its origin to the life and teachings of a man whose character it regards as the highest embodiment of ideal living”: Jesus.
And finally: “The Christian philosophy, which begins with God’s Fatherhood, involving man’s brotherhood, and the Mastership of Jesus, who viewed this life as a training-school for future achievements of a higher order, finds it quite impossible to permit death to assume any other place than that of porter at the gates of another world.” (So the fourth element is belief in life after death.)
If you’re at all familiar with Lloyd C. Douglas the novelist, you may be surprised at how unoriginal this answer is. Douglas had a lot of interesting things to say throughout his career as a minister and especially in his writings, but it doesn’t take more than a glance at this sermon to see that, in the fall of 1919, he had not yet developed his ideas. It would take him most of the 1920s to accomplish that; at this point he was still saying many of the same things that other modernists of the period were saying. Christian religion for him was, in essence, a faith in God as Father, the Brotherhood of Man, the centrality of Jesus, and belief in life after death.
This is the core of Douglas’s sermon, but I have to be honest: on this occasion his remarks are not well organized. He talks about a variety of topics, but he doesn’t clearly tie them all together. In fact, I can’t see how the title, “The Conservation of Moral Leadership,” relates to the any of the things he says in the body of the sermon. On at least one other occasion (1/4/1920) he admitted that he was required to submit the titles of his sermons so far in advance (in order to be announced in the newspapers and printed in the bulletin) that his thoughts sometimes went in a different direction from the one he had in mind when he chose the title. Since his sermon the previous week was about the leadership responsibilities of young people in the years to come, he probably had this sermon in mind as a follow-up to that one, explaining how their leadership could be “conserved” by pursuing the kind of religion he was going to describe. Whatever his intentions were, he didn’t end up making them clear.
Despite all this, there are a few “quotable quotes” scattered throughout the sermon, and some of them are worth talking about. I’ll do that over the next few posts.
(In recent posts, I’ve been telling you about the novel that would become known as Magnificent Obsession. When Lloyd Douglas was writing it in 1928, however, the working title was Salvage. In a future post, I’ll talk about the name change.)
The eighteenth chapter of Douglas’s book, Salvage, was remarkable for at least three reasons.
For one thing, he was poking fun at himself. The spotlight in this chapter is on the Reverend Doctor Bruce McLaren, a feisty minister of Scottish descent, who is modeled after fellow Scotsman Lloyd C. Douglas, D.D. This is remarkable because McLaren, although he is said to be “a good sport,” is also a somewhat comical figure. He is so well-educated, he preaches over the heads of his parishioners (as Douglas himself was doing at his church in Los Angeles, or so his critics claimed). McLaren is a modernist all the way.
“The whole business of institutionalized religion,” he says, “demands reappraisal! It appalls me to contemplate what must be the future of the Church when all the people who are now fifty and up are in their graves! This oncoming generation, now in its adolescence, is not in the least way concerned about organized religion. Religious enough, instinctively, I dare say; but out of sorts with the sects; weary of their bad-mannered yammering at one another over matters in which one man’s guess is as good as another’s, and no outcome promised either in faith or conduct, no matter whose guess is right!”
A little later, McLaren says, “A Christ who can help us to a clearer perception of God needs to be a personality confronted with problems similar to our ours, and solving them with knowledge and power to which we also have access – else he offers us no example at all. But here we have a majority of the churches trying to elicit interest in him because he was supernaturally born, which I wasn’t; because he turned water into wine, which I can’t; because he paid his taxes with money found in a fish’s mouth, which – for all my Scotch ingenuity – I can’t do; because he silenced the storm with a word and a gesture, whereas I must bail the boat; because he called back from the grave his friend who had been dead four days, while I must content myself with planting a rosebush and calling it a closed incident! What we want is a Christ whose service to us, in leading us toward God, is not predicated upon our dissimilarities, but upon our likenesses!”
Now… these are the very same things Douglas had been saying for a long time, almost word-for-word, in sermons, speeches, and articles. But when McLaren says them, we’re supposed to grin. For he’s right, up to a point; but he’s also missing the most important thing – the thesis of the whole book – and we know that Bobby Merrick is about to set him straight.
This reflects an important change in Douglas’s thinking, either just before or during his writing of the non-fiction book, Exploring Your Soul.
“I wonder if we modernists,” McLaren says later, “are not somewhat in the predicament of Moses, who had enough audacity to lead the slaves out of their bondage, but lacked the ingenuity to take them on into a country that would support them. We’ve emancipated them; but – they’re still wandering about in the jungle, dissatisfied, hungry, making occasional excursions into paganism and experimenting with all manner of eccentric cults, longing for the spiritual equivalent of their repudiated superstitions – sometimes wishing they were back in the old harness!”
“It’s worthwhile to have fetched them out of that,” says Bobby. “It ought to be equally interesting to lead them on. They mustn’t go back! But they will – if they’re not pointed to something more attractive than the jungle you say they’re in.”
How, exactly, can McLaren lead his people forward? By practicing what Bobby Merrick has just taught him: a message that goes beyond modernism.
In May of that same year (1928), Douglas published an article in the Christian Century entitled, “The Seeming Impotence of Christianity.” In it he asked:
May not the chief difficulty of the churches lie in the fact that we have all been interpreting Christianity in terms of metaphysics to a generation that does its thinking in terms of kinetic energies? Even modernism, for all its twentieth-centuryness, has made no more of a contribution at this point…. The modernist refutes the metaphysics of the fundamentalist by proposing another metaphysics. Both schools are equally absorbed in speculative thought, one hoping to show the public that the other is an infidel, the other hoping to show the public that the one is an ignoramus, but neither of them interested in showing the public that Christianity is a dynamic energy….
In the field of physical energies, it is common knowledge with our boys and girls that an ampere is the current produced by one volt acting through the resistance of one ohm; that a horsepower equals 746 volts-ampere; that a calorie is the heat required to raise a gram of water one degree centigrade. But what the soul can do, under given conditions, by reliance upon and utilization of divine power in fortifying against disappointments, encountering grief, and resisting the demands of appetite, is not only unknown but undiscussed. What manner of vital connection an aspiring soul may practically establish with its Source; under what circumstances spiritual power may be definitely guaranteed; whether prayer may be made a workable pursuit, and, if so, for whom, how, where, and when—these matters are spoken of with vagueness, albeit sung about with pious fervor. This generation has not been trained to think of power as something that should be set to music but set to work.
This is not to mean, however, that the present public is utterly without a spiritual aspiration. An increasing number of yearning people are possessed of the belief that there are certain spiritual energies in existence which, if practically utilized, could extend the reach of a man’s soul exactly as physical dynamics have multiplied the capacities of his eye, ear, and hand. That there is an unseen power, accessible to mankind, is not considered a mere chimera…
Lloyd C Douglas, “The Seeming Impotence of Christianity,” Christian Century, 5/24/1928, pp. 664-667.
This is the second thing that’s remarkable about the eighteenth chapter of Douglas’s novel: in it, Bobby Merrick claims that God can be approached in a manner that mimics applied science.
“Isn’t the modern school just substituting a new metaphysic for the old one?” Merrick asks McLaren. “Our generation is doing all its thinking in terms of power, energy, dynamics – the kind you read about, not in a book, but on a meter! Why not concede the reality of supernormal assistance, to be had under fixed conditions, and encourage people to go after it?”
Douglas’s emphasis here is on the “fixed conditions” – on doing what Jesus taught. To state the matter in religious terms, Merrick shares his testimony with the McLarens. But it’s not the typical tale of sorrowing over one’s sins and asking forgiveness; it’s a story about how he did what Jesus said… and received the promised results.
After the book’s publication, some conservative Christians would balk at the “pseudo-scientific” overtones of the story, but Douglas was really just putting his faith in Christ on the line. He was saying (although not in these exact words), “Do you believe in Jesus’ promises? If so, why be upset if someone follows his teachings and gets the promised results? Why be angry just because they didn’t come to him by following your four-step process? If they come to Jesus by doing what he himself said, how can that be wrong?”
The third thing that’s remarkable about the eighteenth chapter is that Douglas addresses an issue that every college freshman faces in Philosophy 101: the so-called “proofs for the existence of God.”
I’m a philosophy professor. I teach the “proofs.” And I see firsthand how irrelevant they are to people’s day-to-day lives. Students don’t resolve their doubts about the existence of God by having the matter “proven” or “disproven.” In fact, most people in this world never find intellectual resolution, one way or the other. They either believe, or they don’t. “We’ll find out when we die,” they say.
In the eighteenth chapter of the novel Salvage, however, Douglas claimed that resolution was possible.
When McLaren says that God is only “an hypothesis,” Merrick says, rather shyly, “I’m afraid I don’t accept that.”
“Oh – Doctor Merrick!” says Mrs. McLaren. “You don’t mean to say that you do not believe in God at all!”
“I mean that I do not think of God as an hypothesis.”
“But – my dear fellow,” says McLaren, “we really have no hard and fast proofs, you know!”
“Haven’t you?” asks Bobby. “I have.”
The text says: “The two forks in use by the McLaren family were simultaneously put down upon their plates. ‘Er – how do you mean – proofs?’ queried his guest.”
Of the three, this is perhaps the most remarkable feature of this chapter: that Lloyd Douglas claims we can go beyond just believing in God, then finding out if we were right only after we die. Douglas claims that, if we do what Jesus says, we’ll find out now. The things he promises will happen. We’ll come into daily contact with the Living God… and we’ll know.
I can’t speak for anybody else, but I can tell you about my own case: when I read this chapter just before starting my junior year of college, I was thunderstruck – not because I wanted to have that experience for myself, but because I already had; I just didn’t realize that it was intellectually permissible to say so. For me, the reading of this chapter was life-changing.
Lloyd Douglas circa 1926. From Akron 1926 Scrapbook, Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
On Sunday, January 20, 1928, Douglas preached the third sermon in his series entitled, “Exploring Your Soul.” His topic was “Your Soul: How to Develop Its Peculiar Capacities.”
We don’t have a copy of the sermon. It wasn’t included along with the previous two weeks in The Living Faith, a compilation of his sermons that his daughters published after his death. It’s also not filed with the many sermons that his daughters boxed up and donated to the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library. All that we know about the sermon comes from his daughter Virginia’s narration of the events of that day, in the book she cowrote with her sister Betty, The Shape of Sunday: An Intimate Biography of Lloyd C Douglas by His Daughters. So I’ll let Virginia tell the story. About the sermon series, she writes:
“He had long been trying to convince people of the very real power of religion as a working energy in their lives if they would only experiment with it. He wanted them to think of it as a positive force – the ‘dynamics of Christian faith,’ he called it. The clues to this energy lay in the New Testament. Taking for example the words of Jesus – ‘Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them’ – he explained what power could be stored in the personality of anyone who heeded that advice, the power of secret altruism known only to one’s God” (p. 211).
She continues:
The sermons were particularly vivid and clearly illustrated. I remember during the third and last Sunday of the series [I think this is an error; a fourth sermon was scheduled for the following week] the huge crowd strained in their attention as though they were hearing some wonderful secret of living and feared to miss a word of it. Even I was impressed, and moving out with the thoughtfully departing throng said to myself, ‘I shall try that,’ and wondered how to begin.
Our lunch was late that Sunday because so many people had crowded up to the front of the church after the service, waiting to shake Daddy’s hand and thank him. He came home tired but exhilarated.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘no matter what the old guard think of me, there seem to be many people who are grateful and yearning for that kind of talk.’
We were having cold ham that day. I remember all the details of the table, for it was a meal which registered a milestone in our lives. Mother sat down at her place and said, ‘I was helped by your sermon today, Lloyd. I think for the first time I understand exactly what was meant by the idea of secret altruism.’
Betty and I murmured that we too had felt a personal tug and had been inspired by the sermon. It was unusual for us to make such intimate revelations and Daddy was touched.
He took up the carving things and started to serve the ham. ‘The idea has been there in the Bible a long time,’ he said, ‘but its simplicity disguises its power. Once you try it, you realize you have laid hold of something. I wish I could get the meaning across to more people. If I have a message, it’s probably that.’
‘Why don’t you put it into your novel,’ said Betty, calmly buttering a piece of bread.
Daddy seemed transfixed with the carving knife and fork in his hands. Seconds passed and we three looked at him, waiting. Then Mother said excitedly, ‘Is that it, Lloyd?’
He nodded but his face forbade us to say more. It occurs to me now that perhaps he was gratefully acknowledging the power of some of his own secret altruisms. We ate our meal almost in silence. Daddy was far away (pp. 211-212).
The novel Betty was referring to was Salvage, about the rich young playboy whose life was saved at the expense of a great surgeon. For several months, Douglas had been stuck at the beginning of Chapter Three, unsure how to proceed. Betty was suggesting that he incorporate the thesis of his sermon into that novel.
It is unclear whether Betty or Virginia realized that their father had also been working on a non-fiction book, Exploring Your Soul, and that his sermon series was based on that book. In fact, he had been writing it as “a three-cornered dialogue.” As he held the carving implements in his hand, his imagination must have been working on a way to take the dialogue he had already written and insert it into the novel, Salvage. Who would present the thesis? And who would play the other two roles of the dialogue?
Before long, he had at least part of the answer: Dr. Hudson would be the one presenting the thesis. After his death, it would be revealed that he had spent his life doing altruistic deeds in secret. Bobby Merrick would learn about this and follow in his footsteps.
Virginia remembers the days that followed:
We asked Daddy questions about his story and often he was not able to answer them. ‘If the doctor’s philanthropies were all secret how is the young man [Bobby Merrick] ever to learn about them?’
‘Perhaps he kept a diary,’ Daddy suggested. ‘In code,’ he added, seeing our doubtful faces (p. 213).
One indication of a skilled novelist is his ability to take an idea that seems doubtful on the face of it and get his readers to believe it. Over the next several months, Douglas would rewrite his “three-cornered dialogue” as the story of Bobby Merrick and the head nurse, Nancy Ashford, decoding the secret diary of Doctor Hudson and debating its contents.
From the Lloyd C Douglas Papers, Box 4, “Miscellanea [1],” Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. (There is a typographical error. The series took place in 1928 and the announcement was made in December 1927. The typo must have occurred when this information was retyped in 1951 from a December 1927 church bulletin.)
During the first four Sundays of 1928, Lloyd Douglas preached a series of sermons based on the book he had been writing entitled, Exploring Your Soul. The series followed the topical outline indicated in the announcement imaged above. The first two sermons in the series can be found in The Living Faith: From His Selected Sermons. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), pp. 230-257.
On Sunday, January 6, 1928, he spoke on the subject, “Your Soul: What It Is and How It Operates.” His treatment of the theme was neither systematic nor definitive. Although he avoided giving a definition of the soul, he said, “a man may arise in the morning and wash his face for the same reason that a cat washes hers; and eat his breakfast for the same reason that a dog eats his; and work all day to earn his victuals for the same reason that the horse works all day to earn his…. But when he sits down, quietly, to contemplate the everlastingness of himself, and comfort his mind with his firm belief that he is of eternal stuff; that he proposes to outlive all the material things he sees about him because his essential self was existent long before any of these material things came to be, he immediately puts himself in quite another category than that of the animals. It is his soul that he is dealing with now” (p. 233).
Douglas identified a few different types of souls and invited his listeners to think about what type of soul they might be. There are others, no doubt, and the ones he listed are not mutually exclusive – we might recognize ourselves in more than one category. He said:
One man had the soul of a mystic. As a mere child, the consciousness of God’s living presence in his life was at times quite overpowering. He could sit quietly, in rapt contemplation, and sense a kind of inner illumination, a warmth that was other than thermal, an awareness of the Divine affection. It was a very fine, high-grade potential soul – and needed expert handling. His parents were zealous about his physical welfare and saw to it that he knew his hygiene; were careful that he should have balanced rations and his full quota of sleep and the right amount of exercise and recreation. Equally mindful for the training of his intellect, which was quick and precocious, they were inquisitive about his school, his teachers, his outside reading. But it never occurred to them that his soul demanded direction. He learned about souls at the Sunday School.
There was no discipline in that Sunday School, for the reason that not only was the instruction voluntarily offered but as voluntarily accepted, and a good deal of the teacher’s efforts and ingenuity were spent in the sheer task of keeping her wriggling charges quiet enough to avoid disturbing the class adjacent.
To capture their attention and command interest, [the Sunday School teacher emphasized the fantastic stories of sensational events from the Old Testament]. Religion was something that used to be. It used to perform queer tricks. And certain men used to hear celestial voices; but apparently it had gone out of such business long since, for the teacher made no effort to connect this antique lore with present possibilities.
Obviously, what this lad needed, to develop the type of soul he owned, was the direction and influence of some mature person who, like himself, was of sensitive, mystical quality. As he grew up and went to the services of the church, he learned that the main business of the institution was to raise its annual budget (which is not often accomplished, probably for that reason) and around the family table he heard discussions of the main issues which commanded the attention of his parents’ church, and no one of them even remotely impinged upon the problem of his own soul hunger.
In later adolescence, he became absorbed in the affairs of his physical world – his vocational problems, college, love, the new home, his business – and forgot he had a soul. Now and again it throbbed and stretched and sighed, but he ignored it and it went to sleep again. He had the makings of an important spiritual leader but lost his chance to be that through mishandling – mishandling largely charged to the church, and the church’s misguidance (pp. 241-242).
“Another man,” Douglas said,
had a definitely aesthetic soul, but was so unfortunate as to be taught what passed for spiritual culture at the hands of people to whom the love of natural and moral beauty, for its own sake, had never been evoked. Religion was a sheer matter of conduct – their conduct. They had their own little table of mores, and the business of religion was to make everybody behave just like that. As for the loveliness of life, the livableness of life, the profoundly stirring majesty and wonder of the divinely coordinated beauty of life, they couldn’t teach it because they had never suspected it.
Religion was a gospel of don’t. It began and ended with Thou Shalt Not. It had no sunrises and sunsets; it knew nothing of great music, great literature, great drama. In short, it had nothing to offer to an aesthetic soul, and this particular aesthetic soul hungered awhile and dropped off, through sheer undernourishment and anemia, into a rather fitful slumber – occasionally haunted by longings and dreams, but colorless.
Then there are the inquisitive souls – eager to learn as much as they may of God’s will as apparently deducible from Nature, scientific discovery, and the ripest thinking of other inquisitive souls – people who, falling into the hands of confirmed Traditionalists, have been warned that inquiry is infidelity.
Highly socialized souls, who believe only in a gospel of work, should get themselves into some connection where there will be lots of committees to attend and speeches to make and hats to pass and cards to sign and resolutions to enact – a perpetual procession of things accomplished. For them to find themselves in a mystical atmosphere of quiet contemplation might not benefit their souls at all (pp. 242-243).
“One might suppose, from a survey of the churches of the day,” he said, “that there is abundant room for them to do some constructive work on this subject, in assisting men and women to a discovery of the paths to their own souls.
Too many of our churches are so busy regulating or – to speak more accurately – too busy attempting and failing to regulate the public conduct that they have about left off dealing with spiritual matters. All that Religion is about is souls, and their culture. Most of our modern religion concerns itself with practically everything else but souls and soul culture.
Spiritually hungry people come on Sundays to our churches, wishing they might learn something that would improve their celestial contacts and help them find out their peculiar soul-powers; and they go away pretty sure that they’ll have to muddle along without help…. Let organized religion begin talking about these things, and see what will happen to the churches. And to the people who compose the churches (pp. 243-244).
The following Sunday, January 13, 1928, Douglas addressed the topic, “Your Soul: What It Lives On.”
What does the soul live on? What manner of nourishment makes it conscious of its strength and eager to quest adventure with its powers?
First of all, it must be definitely assured of its own importance!
Out! on all these pale and sickly ballads that timidly chirp of ‘You in Your Little Corner and I in Mine’ and ‘Oh to Be Nothing’ and ‘For Such a Worm as I.’
Quite off pitch is the timbre of a feeble voice like that, when it tries to attune itself to the Galilean: ‘Ask What Ye Will, and It Shall Be Done! Seek, and Ye Shall Find! Knock, and It Shall Be Opened!’ (p. 252).
The first thing that nourishes the soul is its awareness that “I am a child of God.” The second thing is to realize that “all men everywhere are children of God. For if all other men are not the spiritual children of God, there is no sense or significance to my claim that I am” (p. 253). The third thing is “to help other men to… an awareness of their Divine Sonship” (p. 254). But the best way to do this, Douglas said, was not by talking about it; it was to demonstrate it (pp. 254-255). He was a little unclear on how to do this through actions rather than words, but in his next sermon he would take this one step further. And it was a very important step.
This is an article entitled, “Thy Will Be Done,” by Lloyd C Douglas, published while Douglas was pastor of the Zion Lutheran Church in North Manchester, Indiana (USA), sometime between 1903 and 1905. The date and name of the periodical are not given, but he is identified as being in North Manchester, which was his first pastorate. The essay is on p. 23 of Scrapbook 1 in Box 5 of Douglas’s private papers at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.
Even in his day, people questioned why bad things happen to good people. Douglas doesn’t answer that question, but he challenges the belief that such tragedies are God’s will. The last paragraph is especially noteworthy:
A steamer burns just off the New York coast and brings destruction to hundreds of our own faith, and before we recover from the shock the newspapers tell the story, in broad type, of a wreck on the railroad near Chicago, that sends more than a score of Sunday-school workers to instant death, and twice that number to the hospitals, from which they will be taken later, maimed and invalided.
And we are all praying, ‘Thy will, O God, be done!’ I am wondering what we mean when we offer that petition. Can it be that we conceive these tragedies, which bring suffering and sorrow into hundreds of homes, to be the will of our Heavenly Father, who proclaims himself the Strong Tower of Defense and Preserver of his children? Has not the Great Ruler a right to better treatment at the hands of his friends, who have taken a vow of fealty to him?
When Christ came to earth his supreme mission was to do the Father’s will. Being of one purpose, the Second Person of the Trinity manifestly dare not overthrow or thwart the designs of the First Person; yet, with this fact facing us, we find the Master-Man healing all manner of diseases, proving that diseases were not in accord with God’s will: opening sightless eyes and soundless ears; causing the lame to walk and the dead to return to life. It is not to be thought of that the Savior would defeat his Father’s plans; so the conclusion is inevitable: God did not and does not approve of the affliction of humanity.
Christ did not come heralded as the Great Tormentor, but as the Great Physician.
To lay these afflictions at the charge of God, therefore, is to do him grievous wrong and dishonor the attributes of divine goodness. It is no more God’s will that men and women should suffer pain, illness, or bereavement than that sin should have entered into the world and victimized the human race.
The statement, ‘Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth,’ is inspired and true; but does he send his chastisements in the form of wholesale slaughter? God imposes tests of faith upon his children, but does he ordain general massacres as such tests? The hero of the greatest faith-test in Old-World story was asked to conclude his operations while the knife was still upraised.
The Christian world does not want to believe in a God who manifests no mercy—nor need it, if his Word is properly interpreted.
At the time of the fall, man received the threatened curse. Not only was this divine judgment levied upon man, but applied quite as forcibly to nature. Nature has been made for man, and, in a sense, her destiny was coupled with the destiny of man; so when he fell, nature fell too. ‘Thorns and thistles’ were to grow unhindered. The winds, that had gently stirred the foliage in the Garden of Eden were now to blow unbridled. Storms would rage; conflagrations destroy; floods devastate. What sin was to man’s soul, nature’s ravages would be to his body. And nature inflicts her depravity upon the just and the unjust, because her redemption, while provided in the atonement, has not yet been accepted.
Redemption, to be efficacious, must be embraced by its object. The oak tree cannot say: ‘I accept the redemption provided for me in the atonement.’ Man can say that, and secure for himself the personal application of such salvation, but not until this redemption of individuals shall have been perfect—in a word, not until all men have been judged in the light of this redemption will nature be restored; which restoration is foreseen in the ‘new heaven and new earth.’
Until that time the ‘rain falls on the just and the unjust,’ and the floods come, and the wind blows and beats upon the house on the rock, and the house upon the sand. And he, who told the story of the two foundations, would prefer his friends to think of him rather as the rock than as the devastating flood.
North Manchester, Ind.
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From a farewell sermon entitled, “Five Years of Akron,” delivered at the First Congregational Church of Akron on October 31, 1926. (He was on his way to a pastorate in Los Angeles.) This is reprinted in Living Faith, pp. 77-92:
I have attempted to present an idea of Deity which portrays Him as a conscious kinetic energy, speaking to the world through all the media of His creation; not a parochial Jehovah, or Zeus, or Apollo, especially concerned with the welfare of any particular class of people at any particular time in history – but a Universal Father of all mankind.
And, because I have so believed, I have made no effort to disguise my opinion that every alleged quotation of God’s voice, reported in holy books (ours or any other’s) which reveals Him as a parochial God, or engaged in any thought or action not consonant with the thoughts and acts of a cosmic and universal God – is no more to be believed or credited, because written several thousand years ago by some pious shepherd, than if it were to have been written yesterday afternoon on some preacher’s typewriter.
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One of the things I find so interesting about Lloyd Douglas is the insight he had early in his ministry (only eight years after graduating from seminary) that Christians in modern times were being forced to choose between two very different approaches to the world: the mindset and intellectual habits of “everyday life” in twentieth century society vs. the mindset and intellectual habits of the ancient Greek world. He got this idea from Shailer Mathews, Chair of the Religion Department at the University of Chicago, when Douglas and his wife attended a lecture series by Mathews on the east coast sometime between 1909 and 1911.
Douglas believed that faith in Christ should not require people to abandon the mindset and intellectual habits that served them well in their jobs Monday through Friday. He was thinking here of professionals especially. The state universities were increasingly producing waves of graduates who were taught to question assumptions, consider alternatives, and put ideas to the test. These habits were not only making the workforce more productive; they were also changing the way people lived their personal lives. On Douglas’s view, there was nothing either irreligious or antireligious about this way of approaching things; what made this new approach a threat to Christian religion was the fact that the church’s leadership was still largely committed to the mindset and intellectual habits that were common during the days of Christ: that is, the ancient Greek and Hebrew worldviews.
Douglas saw it as his personal and professional mission to divest Christian faith of the old secular philosophies and worldviews that had wrapped themselves around it and were threatening to choke the life out of it. There was nothing in the teachings of Jesus, he thought, that required people to believe in Aristotelian cosmology or biology or any other kind of -ology. Yet he saw leaders of the faith railing against the latest scientific discoveries because those leaders were still stuck in the old ways of viewing the universe and its history. Christ’s message, he felt, was for all time, and must not have its future tied so closely to ancient ways of thinking.
He therefore chose to spend ten years (1911-1921) ministering at two universities (the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan), where, he says, “I daily faced the new problem of a readjustment in religious thought, to make it consonant with the more recent disclosures of the philosophical and religious world.” (This is from a sermon, “Five Years of Akron,” preached at the First Congregational Church of Akron on October 31, 1926, and printed in The Living Faith, p. 80.) His objective was not to force the gospel to fit the culture, but to clear away the old cultural vestiges that were still clinging so tightly to Christian faith.
I believe that we Christians in America are still largely unaware of the problem that he saw so clearly one hundred years ago. That is one of the reasons why I feel it is so worthwhile – and even vitally important – for us to hear his voice again.
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