I AM not entirely sure why I am here speaking to you. I am not presumptuous enough to think that it is to instruct you. You are specialists. Your knowledge is much greater than mine. Nor am I here to advise you. I am not in a position to do that.
But now that I am here we can put it this way. The clergyman has a tremendous advantage in his preaching. His hearers cannot answer back. But by the same token he is at a disadvantage. Because there is no reaction the preacher cannot always be sure that he is hitting the mark. He may not be meeting the minds of his audience at all. Let this be then a sort of laboratory experiment. The mind of a layman is here laid open at the touch of your scalpel, or perhaps I should say, sacrificial knife.
Nothing but good can come of it. I do not mind in the least what I tell you. If what I say is wrong, none could be quicker than you to detect it, and you will have the benefit of knowing perhaps more exactly than you do now, what are the current errors which you must combat. If what I say is right you will know that I have the potentiality of comprehending truth and for that reason you may be the more ready to speak forth the faith that is in you. Of course none of us are afraid of our audience,—still, equally of course, there is no use in talking over the heads of our auditors nor in preaching in advance of their spiritual receptivity.
The subject assigned is Religion and the Supernatural. It is tautological because unless it is supernatural there is no religion. We may have a code of ethics or a high philosophy but there is no natural religion. By the supernatural of course I do not mean the abnormal (religion is not magic) but merely that which cannot be apprehended through the five physical senses.
Comprehension, the possibility of comprehending truth, [or] reality, is the crux of the situation. Let us, then, take a little excursion into reality together. I do not mean to discuss the question of the experience of reality — that is not the layman's problem — but how to link up our experiences of reality with the phenomenal world about us. The priest of God, technically, actively and consciously the channel of divine grace, does not have to cope with this problem. Your experience of God is so lively, your communion with him so intimate and continuous, that you never think of allocating it with the shadows of the phenomenal world about you. But with the layman it is far different. Sense impressions at the rate of 10,000 a second, on the one hand, transient visions of God, on the other. May it not be that the phenomenal world is the reality after all and the fugitive glimpses of God merely apparitional?
The problem of the layman, then, is to link up his experiences of reality with the phenomenal world. I cannot blame him. He is merely trying the spirits whether they be of God. For after all the phenomenal world, though it many not be ultimate reality, is not illusory. It is a cross-section of reality; and therefore, to the lay mind, that which claims to be real must have some relation to its cross-section. I think that is a very fair statement of the lay mind. We experience religion. We believe in the reality of those experiences. But the world is very insistent. Which is the real reality? To the specialist the question does not arise. To the novice it does. Let us consider it.
When I argue before the judges, I do so on the basis of some legal maxim which I take as a text. I try to explain its implications and its applicability to the case in hand. Let us take some such fundamental statement now. It appears thus in the Authorized Version:
But as many as received him, to them gave the power to become sons of God.
What does this mean, if anything? As a first step to comprehending we must explain the translation. That word 'sons' is not uios but teknon, born offspring. It is explained by the following phrase, "born not of blood nor of the will of flesh nor of the will of man but of God." Likewise, that word 'power'. It is not dunamis but axousia. Dunamis might mean blind force. Exousia means authority. It is the word used by J[esus] in that closing passage of Matthew:
All exousia hath been given to me in heaven and on earth.
It is in the tenth chapter of John where Jesus says that "no man taketh his life but he has exousia to lay it down and to take it up." Then he adds, "This is a command from my father." So exousia means not only power and authority but responsibility. Therefore our text does not mean that when we receive Jesus we are given a magical power whereby we are reborn sons of God. It means that we are given an authority by which if we care to exercise it we are reborn not of the flesh or of man but above it, of God.
There is a type of Christianity which accepts Jesus but accepts him as a model. It never looks beyond the human. In fact, to claim perfection with the Father is [considered] blasphemous. To expect anything spiritual except in a sort of symbolic way is [considered] fanatical and chimerical. The sacraments are [seen as] symbols; the death of Christ [as] an example, the work of the spirit [as] a metaphor. Verily, as Plato tells us, they used to say in the old mystery plays: the bacchics are many but the thyrsus bearers are few.
Does it mean anything real to become reborn not of man but of God? If so, what does it mean? Let us consider those questions. Let the clinic begin.
First I shall state the Fund[amentalist] and Mod[ernist] positions, then my own as a layman. I don't expect to state either the f[undamentalist] or m[odernist] position correctly. I merely state them as received and understood by me.
The mod[ernist] says in the first place that of course the words do not mean what they say. Can a man be born again when he is old? The words were written considerably after the life of Christ, by someone unknown but someone very naïve. They represent his attempt to express the profound impression made upon him by the myths already formed about the life of Jesus, and to adapt the teaching to a system of Hellenistic philosophy. They represent a mental framework which is no longer possible to us. They must be reinterpreted in accordance with the categories of modern thought. If they cannot be so interpreted they have no vitality. The words mean that you should be an intelligent and not too credulous gentleman, considerate of all who do not disagree with you.
The fund[amentalist] says that it doesn't make any difference what the words mean; you must believe them. They were written by the apostle John and were taught to him by the Holy Ghost if not by Jesus himself. They refer to conversion and mean that, if you believe, you will have comfort in your sorrows and a pleasant future life. If enough people are converted the world will be a better place to live in. Also, [they mean] that any other than the Christian religion is false.
Now what do I think?
As I sit in my pew below you while you discourse entertainingly on various topics of current interest, the thought of evolution pervades my mind. In spite of the tremendous mechanical developments by which we are surrounded, I cannot get away from the great awakening of the nineteenth century because it has to do with life. Of course the truth of evolution, like every other truth. is two-faced, and one face is error. If evolution means to us, You are what you have become, it is deadly. If it means, Become what you really are or may be, then it is another story.
Let us look at the great drama of evolution. It is set out for us very clearly. First the primeval chaos. Then the formation of stars, the sun, the throwing off of planets, of moons, the hardening of the earth's crust, the appearance of life, of sentiency, of simple consciousness, of self-consciousness, of man. The whole process we discern very clearly. But there are hiatuses. Whence the primordial flux from which all things developed? How [was] the chasm between the inorganic and organic bridged? How [does evolution] account for life, for consciousness, for self-consciousness? Take the later stages of evolution, the ev[olution] of the species. There are three distinct theories, each so well worked out that I believe they are all correct. Yet each school admits that what makes natural selection work, what makes adaptation to the environment, what makes mutations work, is not known and can never be known. So at the various stages in the evolutionary process something unaccountable has stepped in. I call it God. It is a very simple doctrine: He formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
Now take man at the summit, as we proudly say of the evolutionary process. We find him a being with three clearly developed centers. The instinctive center, his automatic physical body. The emotional center, the seat of art and religion. For the average [person] religion is purely emotional. Not faith, hope, and love the graces, but fear, hope, and love. If you talk to the ordinary man, it will not take you long, if you are not a clergyman, to find that while he has hopes there is also a fear that the hopes are but hopes. "With head bloodied but unbowed" is a heroic sentiment, but it is not creative.
After the instinctive and emotional [comes] the intellectual [center], seat of science and philosophy, seat of self-consciousness. [Here resides] the power of forming concepts and labeling them with words. This is what distinguishes man from the brutes.
And so we find each stage marked off by an enlargement of consciousness. First we have recepts only, as in the case of the amoeba, automatic responses to simple stimuli. Then [we have] percepts, composite photographs of recepts, as it were, the stage of simple consciousness, the animal stage with emotional reactions added to the instinctive. Then [we have] recepts and percepts gathered together into concepts, the stage of self-consciousness, in the midst of which we [find ourselves].
When we once perceive this, it is not difficult to appreciate that the next step in evolution is another enlargement of consciousness—to God-consciousness. We are fairly well conscious of the mechanism of the universe about us, of the mechanism of ourselves—but what makes the mechanism work, the spirit behind it—of that we are not conscious at all. We are groping toward it.
[I should like to make] two points about this diff[erent] plane of consciousness:
The sum of the whole matter is that, for the next stage [of consciousness], Jesus was the individ[ual] selected. In him dwelt the fulness of the Godhead. That is what the V[irgin] B[irth] means. Something new [has] entered. From the standpoint of his human body, this was not God-consciousness. Before that man had always tried to enclose God within concepts. It can't be done. So becoming [the] born offspring of God is reaching the next stage of consc[iousness]. It is achieved by receiving/entering into the secret. (r. Bowie Inesc. Chr.)4
The point of particular importance for us is the responsibility. The really terrible thing is that it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference that God once took on human flesh if it stops there. Jesus was fully conscious of this. Hence his zealous eagerness in training his disciples, his strenuous efforts to make them understand his inner message. Of course, that [message] could not be expressed in words. It is extra-conceptual, for it is from another plane of consciousness.
This is what Jesus meant when he said Salt and added Therefore let your light shine.5 I hate the ord[inary] use of that. I am convinced that the only hope for mankind is the message of Jesus, God-consciousness. We can still achieve tremendous devel[opment] on our own plane. But without God-consciousness, without comprehending the meaning of our furor,6 we shall ultimately destroy ourselves by war or otherwise. Therefore let your light so shine. Don't be afraid of the darkness. Religion is not a thing which can be fitted into the categories of modern thought. It is above and beyond the will of man.
In closing I want to [view] this matter of responsibility from an entirely diff[erent] standpoint: comprehension.
To comprehend the truth. Katalambano.
I comprehend.
I conquer.
Assimilation and destruction. No wonder the word has given so much trouble in translation. But it need not have, for we have the exact equivalent in English: 'master'.
I master a lesson.
I master my foe.
It is very significant to my mind that in both languages the two meanings, assimilation and destruction, are united in the same word. To comprehend the truth is to destroy it as it existed at the moment of assimilation. It is changed for all time. It can never be the same. If nothing else, from being abstract it has become concrete. It has been transformed from potential energy to kinetic power.
You won't believe me when I tell you that a man is not only the sum of his past but also [of] what he might have been. But you think truth does exist in its potentialities. As a matter of fact the change is much greater than this. For better or for worse, you by your act of comprehension of faith have impregnated truth with your individuality, have written a sentence in the timeless archives of truth which can never be erased, though it may be overwritten. You will remember that Emerson said, "Perception makes. Perception has a destiny."7 It is no wonder that we can stand still in awe. I look upon truth not as a graven formula, but as the living heart of reality, expanding with the comprehension of believers and contracting with their lack of faith.
We are all members of one body. If all the members are dead, Christ has no body. That is the crucifixion from which there is no resurrection.
* The first edition of this talk indicates that it was published from a rough draft, not a fair copy of a finished manuscript. The proprietor of this site has taken the liberty of lightly editing the text, providing punctuation and spelling out a few abbreviated words.
1 The story is told in Numbers 22:22–35.
2 An apparent reference to Mark 10:43: "If your hand causes your downfall, cut it off; it is better for you to enter into life maimed than to keep both hands and go to hell..." 'C O H' then abbreviates "cut off hand."
3 Possibly from Orage. But also a simple play on a common rhetorical trope: "Not all brutes think the same way." "Not all Brutes are the same." "Not all brutes are stupid." "Not all brutes were actually thick enough to believe..."
4 Reference Walter Russell Bowie, The Inescapable Christ. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. Bowie, like Allan Brown in 1925, was an Episcopalian.
5 Matthew 5 13–14 (part of the Sermon on the Mount): "You are salt to the world. And if salt becomes tasteless, how is its saltness to be restored? It is good for nothing but to be thrown away and trodden underfoot. You are light for all the world..." [Revised English Version]
6 Thus the first edition. Possibly Mr. Brown intended 'future'.
7 "Poet sees the stars, because he makes them. Perception makes. We can only see what we make, all our desires are procreant. Perception has a destiny." Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks 13 (1852-1855). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977; p. 51, item 178.
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