Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 162 of 216 · 20 per page

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  “YOUR KINGDOM COME, YOUR WILL BE DONE” The second line of the Lord’s Prayer says, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This doesn’t mean that God is not sovereign here on earth. Instead, it is a recognition of the current reality of sin, shame, disease, death, hatred, and a host of other things not found in heaven. And in the midst of that chaos, we are asking God to be just as sovereign, just as powerful, just as triumphant, as if none of those things had any power. Because they don’t. Well, they do and they don’t at the same time. On one hand, the pain and evil of this world have real consequences. We can’t deny that, and prayer should embrace reality, not ignore it. But on the other hand, nothing we face in this life is bigger than God. The “real reality” is that God is more powerful than our circumstances. That’s the point of this line: recognizing the sovereignty of God. Before God, nothing stands. There is no failure, no weakness, no enemy, no problem that lies outside His power and authority. So when we come to God in prayer, it is with a recognition that He has all we need. Notice that up until now, the prayer has not even mentioned our needs, wants, or desires. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The prayer begins by recognizing who God is and surrendering our will to His. Now, your prayers don’t always have to start with this lofty, mature perspective. A lot of mine don’t. They go more like this: “Dear Jesus . . . help!” And I’m in good company with that prayer. As we saw earlier, David sent up SOS prayers all the time. Just read the book of Psalms. If you’re not in a crisis moment, though, praying that God’s will would be done before you pull out your list of needs is a good habit. It’s a way of reminding ourselves that we are not the senior partner in this relationship, we aren’t the experts on life, and our wish is not His command.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  ESCHATOLOGY 225 4. As to the way inwhich the Christian ideal of society is to come, we must shift from catastrophe to development. Since the first century the divine Logos has taught us the universality of Law, and wemust ap- ply it to the development of the Kingdom ofGod.Itis the untaught and pagan mindwhichsees God's presence only in miraculous and thundering action; the more Christianour intellect becomes, the morewe seeGod in growth. By insisting on organic development we shall follow the lead of Jesus when, in his parables ofthe sowerand oftheseed growingsecretly, hetried to edu- cate his disciples away from catastrophes toan under- standing of organic growth. Weshall also be follow- ing the lead of the fourth gospel, which translated the terms of eschatology into the operation of presentspir- itualforces. We shall be following thelead ofthe Church in bringing the future hope down from the cloudsand identifying itwiththe Church; except that we donotconfine itto the single institution ofthe Church, but see the coming ofthe Kingdom ofGod in all ethical and spiritual progress of mankind. To convert the catastrophicterminology of the old eschatology into developmental terms is another way of expressing faith inthe immanenceof God and inthe presence of Christ Itismore religious to believe ina present than inan absent andfuture Christ. Jesus saw the Kingdom as present and future. This change from catastrophe to development is the most essential step toenablemodern mento appreciate the Christian hope. 1 1 Pfleiderer, " Grundriss der christlichen Glaubenslehre /' 177, has this fine summary : " The primitive Christian faith in thereturnof

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  It is open to any minister to emphasize thoughts such as these, connecting the Lord’s Supper with the King- dom of God. All who have the new social conscious- ness would feel their appeal. Any person encountering antagonism or loss for the sake of the Kingdom would find comfort and strength in connecting his troubles with the cross of Christ. The Lord’s Supper was instituted by Jesus in full view of his death. We can fully share his spirit only when we too confront the possibility of suffering in the same cause. The emphasis on such thoughts would be the reaction of the social gospel on the religious and theological con- tent of the Lord’s Supper. They would be a challenge to the Church to realize its mission as the social embodi- ment of the Christ-spirit in humanity. They would constitute a spiritual preparation for the actual experi- ence of the Real Presence — that Presence which re- quires a social group of two or three because love and the sense of solidarity are necessary to enable him to be in the midst of us. CHAPTER XVIII ESCHATOLOGY Eschatology raises two questions of profound in- terest to the human mind. First, What is the future of the individual after his brief span of years on earth is over? Second, What is to be the ultimate destiny of the human race? These questions are important to every thoughtful mind, and they are inseparable from religion. Religion is always eschatological. Its characteristic is faith. It lives in and for the future. In all other parts of our life we deal with imperfect things, fluctuating, condi- tioned, relative, and never complete. In religion we seek for the final realities, the absolute values, the things as God sees them, complete, in organic union. All religions of higher development have some mythology about the future. The Christian religion needs a Christian eschatology. To be satisfying to the Christian consciousness any teaching concerning the future life of the individual must express that high valu- ation of the eternal worth of the soul which we have learned from Christ, and must not contradict or sully the revelation of the justice, love, and forgiving mercy of our heavenly Father contained in his words, his life, and his personality. Any doctrine about the future of the race which is to guide our thought and action, must ’ 208 ESCHATOLOGY 209 view it from distinctively Christian, ethical points of view, and must not contradict what is historically and scientifically certain.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  employees. Are you a pet owner? Okay, pray for your pets too. Are you a basketball fan? Unless you root for the Lakers, don’t bother praying. In prayer, you’ll start to see others the way God does. The quirks and petty offenses will matter less, and their innate value as children of God will take center place. You’ll start to see their gifts, their contributions, their potential. As you take on God’s perspective toward people, you’ll find yourself developing empathy. Prayer humanizes people. This world could certainly use more of that. Besides those seven things, you can probably think of other areas where a heavenly perspective would be helpful: health, school, work, family, sex, world affairs, racism, leadership, church, and a million things more. Besides these general areas, maybe there are specific situations in your life where you could ask God to see things with His eyes. Take a few moments to think through the things that are worrying you, draining your energy, or causing pain. Then pray about them. Give them to God. Ask Him what He thinks about them. Allow the mind of Christ to become your mind. Let His heart touch your heart. You won’t change your world until you change your mind. SIX The problem with birthdays Prayer and presence Do you have friends who have more money than you? Like, considerably more? No judgment here, either for them or for you. We all know money doesn’t make us happy. (Although it would be nice to prove that firsthand, right?) A couple of my friends are significantly wealthier than I am. And I sort of dread their birthdays. After all, what do you get the person who has two of three of everything, in different colors? Every year, after giving the question deep thought, I give up. I settle for a text message. “Bro, happy birthday! Love you! Let’s celebrate ASAP!” And then I pray to the God of heaven that they don’t buy me anything for my birthday. My wealthy friends don’t need my gifts. They don’t want me to blow up my budget by trying to impress them either. They want my friendship, not gifts. That’s what matters most to them, and it’s what matters most to me. It’s hard enough to buy gifts for the friends who have everything. But what do you give the God who has everything? The answer, of course, is the same. You give Him your friendship. Your love. Your loyalty. Your presence. God isn’t trying to get something from you—He is trying to get you. You are the gift. You are the goal. You are the object of His love.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  We take up now the doctrine of salvation. All that has been said about sin will have to be kept in mind in discussing salvation, for the conceptions of sin and sal- vation are always closely correlated in every theological or religious system. The new thing in the social gospel is the clearness and insistence with which it sets forth the necessity and the possibility of redeeming the historical life of humanity from the social wrongs which now pervade it and which act as temptations and incitements to evil and as forces of resistance to the powers of redemption. Its chief in- terest is concentrated on those manifestations of sin and redemption which lie beyond the individual soul. If our exposition of the superpersonal agents of sin and of the Kingdom of Evil is true, then evidently a salvation con- fined to the soul and its personal interests is an imper- fect and only partly effective salvation. Yet the salvation of the individual is, of course, an essential part of salvation. Every new being is a new problem of salvation. It is always a great and wonder- ful thing when a young spirit enters into voluntary obedi- ence to God and feels the higher freedom with which Christ makes us free. It is one of the miracles of life. The burden of the individual is as heavy now as ever. 95 96 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL The consciousness of wrong-doing, of imperfection, of a wasted life lies on many and they need forgiveness and strength for a new beginning. Modern pessimism drains the finer minds of their confidence in the world and the value of life itself. At present we gasp for air in a crushing and monstrous world. Any return of faith is an experience of salvation. Therefore our discussion can not pass personal salva- tion by. We might possibly begin where the old gospel leaves off, and ask our readers to take all the familiar experiences and truths of personal evangelism and re- ligious nurture for granted in what follows. But our understanding of personal salvation itself is deeply af- fected by the new solidaristic comprehension furnished by the social gospel. The social gospel furnishes new tests for religious ex- perience. We are not disposed to accept the converted souls whom the individualistic evangelism supplies, with- out looking them over. Some who have been saved and perhaps reconsecrated a number of times are worth no more to the Kingdom of God than they were before. Some become worse through their revival experiences, more self-righteous, more opinionated, more steeped in unrealities and stupid over against the most important things, more devoted to emotions and unresponsive to real duties. We have the highest authority for the fact that men may grow worse by getting religion. Jesus says the Pharisees compassed sea and land to make a proselyte, and after they had him, he was twofold more a child of hell than his converters. To one whose mem-

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  all, it becomes a dead burden. The dogmas and theo- logical ideas of the early Church were those ideas which at that time were needed to hold the Church together, to rally its forces, and to give it victorious energy against antagonistic powers. To-day many of those ideas are’ without present significance. Our reverence for them is a kind of ancestor worship. To hold laboriously to a religious belief which does not hold us, is an attenuated form of asceticism; we chastise and starve our intellect to sanctify it by holy beliefs. The social gospel does not need the aid of church authority to get hold of our hearts. It. gets hold in spite of such authority when necessary. It will do for us what the Nicene theology did in the fourth century, and the Reformation theology in the six- teenth. Without it theology will inevitably become more and more a reminiscence.^ The great religious thinkers who created theology were always leaders who were shaping ideas to meet actual situations. The new theology of Paul was a product of fresh religious experience and of practical necessities. His idea that the Jewish law had been abrogated by Christ’s death was worked out in order to set his mission to the Gentiles free from the crippling grip of the past and to make an international religion of Christianity. Luther worked out the doctrine of ‘‘justification by faith ” because he had found by experience that it gave 1 President H. C King’s “ Reconstruction in Theology ” gives an admirable summary of the causes for dissatisfaction with the old doctrinal statements, and of the fundamental moral and spiritual convictions which demand embodiment in theology. See also Prof. Gerald B. Smith’s lucid analysis in his " Social Idealism and the Changing Theology.” 14 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL him a surer and happier way to God than the effort to win merit by his own works. But that doctrine became the foundation of a new theology for whole nations be- cause it proved to be the battle-cry of a great social and religious upheaval and the effective means of breaking down the semi-political power of the clergy, of shutting up monasteries, of secularizing church property, and of increasing the economic and political power of city coun- cils and princes. There is nothing else in sight to-day which has power to rejuvenate theology except the con- sciousness of vast sins and sufferings, and the longing for righteousness and a new life, which are expressed in the social gospel.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  about growth. Trials will change you, if you let them. They’ll make you a better, more perfect version of yourself. It might take some blood, sweat, and tears, but the results are worth it. 2. Growth takes time. It takes your whole life, to be precise. I don’t mean that to sound discouraging— what I’m saying is that you will continue to grow for as long as you’re walking this planet. Growth is natural. It’s healthy. And it never stops. Many of us have the false assumption about growth that someday, if we try really hard, we will reach the pinnacle of perfection and never have to change again. That is not going to happen this side of heaven. This is why prayer is such a vital tool. It keeps the lines of communication permanently open with God. Not just during a one-time emergency, but all the time. Sometimes we treat prayer like a tech support request. Have you ever submitted one of those? Maybe you can’t figure out why a program or service you paid for isn’t working, so you contact their support team. They open a case for you, help you solve the problem (if you’re lucky), then close the case. You get a nice email at the end summarizing how helpful they’ve been. And you never speak again. The entire thing is cold, faceless, voiceless. That’s not the point of prayer, though. Prayer is so much more than formally requesting help for a problem you can’t figure out. The Bible is not a list of FAQs that your particular problem has to fit within. And the “case” is never closed. Why? Because God doesn’t treat us like consumers, clients, or customers. We are His children. We are His friends. Prayer is more like an ongoing text thread with a close friend. You text when you feel like it. You answer when you want to. You randomly send each other messages, memes, and inside jokes. You talk about what you’re planning to do that day and how you’re feeling about it. You tell each other what is making you happy, sad, or angry.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  That’s a very different understanding of the word perfect than you or I might have. We tend to associate perfection with achieving some ideal state of excellence, performance, or morality. Something that is perfect, in our minds, does not need to change because it doesn’t have any flaws. Perfectionists are people who strive for perfection in every area. The Bible concept of being perfect, though, is less about striving toward some impossible ideal and more about maturity. It’s the idea of becoming more complete, more congruent with the design and purpose God has for us. It’s about becoming more you. Perfection, therefore, is less about the goal and more about the process. It is about growth. Think of how your physical body grew when you were a kid. You couldn’t see the growth, you couldn’t predict the growth, and you couldn’t really control the growth. It just happened. And it was unstoppable. Spiritual growth is similar: slow, natural, inevitable, unstoppable. Remember, our spiritual growth (including sinning less) isn’t connected to our salvation. Salvation is a gift from God by grace. We don’t go to church, pray, worship, fast, avoid sin, love our neighbor, or help the poor in order to be forgiven by God. Rather, we do these things because we are forgiven. It’s the whole “from-not- for” dynamic we talked about earlier. We are free to do good things; and as we do them, we grow in our walk with God. We begin to think, speak, and act more like Jesus. That’s true perfection. We see the word teleion multiple times in the book of James. For example, he writes: Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. 1:2–4 NASB, emphasis added

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  They are an expression of faith. They are heartfelt requests that He delights to fulfill. Jesus is saying that when you pray, don’t assume God won’t answer—assume He will. So ask away! Pray boldly for as long as it takes. God might be on the verge of answering the prayer right now. You never know when it could happen or what it will look like. It would be a tragedy to give up too soon. You might be thinking, You said God wouldn’t hear us just because we use a lot of words. Now you ’re saying we should keep on praying as long as it takes. That’s inconsistent! There is a big difference between trying to be heard because of our “many words,” as Jesus said, and praying without giving up. The first treats God like a vending machine: If you put in enough prayer coins, an answer drops out of some heavenly chute. It’s a transactional approach that treats prayer like a price or a debt that we have to fulfill before we can get what we want. But as we saw earlier, prayer is relational, not transactional. We don’t pray until we’ve paid a debt or earned our answer. We pray because we know God loves us and is listening. Notice how Jesus connected answered prayer to God’s goodness, not our efforts, in Matthew 7:7–11: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! The difference between incessant babbling and persevering prayer is—as in almost every area of prayer—our heart attitude. The former tries to manipulate God into doing what we want by piling fancy phrases higher and higher like a game of spiritual Jenga. The latter patiently trusts God to do what is right and best, confident in His character and unworried by delay. Most of us know the name of Apple’s founder and iconic CEO, Steve Jobs. His partner, Steve Wozniak, is nearly as well known. Both made billions of dollars from the success of Apple. There was a third founder, though, who is nearly always forgotten. When Apple was incorporated on April 2, 1976, an engineer named Ron Wayne owned a 10 percent stake in the company. A mere twelve days later, partly because he felt out of his league next to the two Steves, Ron sold his shares back for eight hundred dollars. Today, those shares would be worth billions.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “I’ve nothing against you personally,” Joel explained, while John was out of the room, “but you have no experience. Nobody knows you—you are not even—” He broke off, gesturing hopelessly at me but saying nothing. “Pretty” was clearly the word that, with a restraint that I would later realize to be quite uncharacteristic, he had managed to bite back. The only thing that gave him any hope at all was that I had once been a nun. “Perhaps we can make some scandal out of that,” he sighed, blowing the blue cigarette smoke out from his nostrils like a disconsolate dragon. In fact, the only person who had any faith in the project was John. “It’s going to be wonderful, darling!” he told me repeatedly. “You’re going to be a big hit. I’m going to make you a star!” I took all that with a pinch of salt. But for some reason, I wanted to make this film. I sensed instinctively that this was what I had been waiting for. It was odd that I should feel this. For years I had wanted nothing to do with religion; the thought of reading anything remotely theological had filled me with visceral disgust. But this was different. The reading I was doing now in preparation for the series was not devotional. It would have no bearing on my life, after all, but would be a purely academic exercise. The slight quickening of spiritual interest that I had experienced while writing Through the Narrow Gate had been submerged. In the robustly secularist atmosphere of Channel 4, any form of faith seemed absurd, and my early life an aberration. Where Nick found religion faintly upsetting, John hated it with the passion of a zealot. This, I was told, was one of the reasons why Jeremy Isaacs, the controller of Channel 4, had put him in charge of religion. This new channel had a remit to be different from the other three. There was to be no “God slot,” no Songs of Praise, no edifying discussions for the devout. “I want to open up religion and discuss it as critically as any other subject,” John was fond of saying. And he did, conducting his mandate as an antireligious crusade. “They’re all bonkers, darling!” he would exclaim incredulously when yet another pious broadcaster came to talk to him about the possibility of a commission. He had also decided to put on a highly provocative series called Jesus: The Evidence, designed to explode the Christian myth once and for all. Indeed, as he gleefully explained, the director actually intended to blow up a statue of Jesus at the very beginning of the first program. “Blast it to smithereens!” John predicted exultantly. “That’ll show the bastards!”

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  The social gospel has an inherent interest in history. Individualistic theology sees everywhere countless sin- ful individuals who must all go through the same process of repentance, faith, justification, and regeneration, and who in due time die and go to heaven or helL The his- torical age in which a person lived, or the social class or race to which he belonged, matters little. This religious point of view is above time and history. On the other hand the social gospel tries to see the progress of the Kingdom of God in the flow of history; not only in the doings of the Church, but in the clash of economic forces and social classes, in the rise and fall of despotisms and forms of enslavement, in the rise of new value- judgments and fresh canons of moral taste and senti- ment, or the elevation or decline of moral standards. Its chief interest is the Kingdom of God ; and the Kingdom of God is history seen in a religious and teleological way. Therefore the social gospel is always historically minded. Its spread goes hand in hand with the spread of the his- torical spirit and method. This dominant interest in the creation and progress of social redemption influences the approach to the theolog- ical problems of the person and work of Christ. We 146 INITIATOR OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD 1 47 want to see the Christ who initiated the Kingdom of God. Theologians have always tried to make their christology match with their conception of salvation. If they believed salvation to consist chiefly in the knowl- edge of God, they emphasized the personality and the doctrine of Christ as the complete revelation of God. If they made salvation to consist chiefly in the mystic impartation of divine life and immortality, their christ- ology laid chief stress on the union of the divine and human in the incarnation and in the sacraments. If sal- vation consists above all in the expiation of guilt, the forgiveness of sins, the justification of the sinner, and the remission of his penalties, then we need a Christ who made atonement for our sins, rendered satisfaction to God for our delinquencies, and offset our guilty defects by his infinite merit and divine virtue. Each concep- tion of salvation made a pragmatic selection and con- struction of the facts. Each was fragmentary, but with- out necessarily excluding other series of ideas. So now the social gospel, without excluding other theological con- victions, demands to understand that Christ who set in motion the historical forces of redemption which are to overthrow the Kingdom of Evil. This is surely not an illegitimate interest. It is a re- turn to the earliest messianic theology: whereas some of the other christological interests and ideas are alien importations, part of that wave of Hellenization which nearly swamped the original gospel.

• From Bold Move

  She had me read it because I was struggling with the usual career choices—what to do with my life, what I could become—and as I struggled with these questions, I often worried a lot about resources, both current and future. I never saw myself as “resource restricted” per se, but the reality was, I knew we had financial limitations, and it worried me to the point that I could only dream within that narrow lane and never outside of it. Over coffee one afternoon, my grandmother forcefully insisted that I could become anything that I wanted to be, do whatever I wanted to do, and dream as large as life. The only catch was that if I could dream up something big and bold, it would then be my job to make it happen. This magical reality seemed like nonsense to me. At first, I attributed this “crazy talk” to her strong belief in things like crystals and energy fields. Don’t get me wrong: I cherish the crystals that she gifted me throughout the years and I still have them, although the scientist in me is not sure how much power they actually have. Though I must say, the crystals do make me feel powerful because they remind me of her. Anyway, when she painted this rosy Disney picture for me, that I could do anything I could dream of, I was not having it and still remember arguing with her about the limitations that would always shape my life. And now we can bring our focus back to The Alchemist . She gave the book to me and said, “Read this, and when you finish it, let me know if you still feel the same way.” As I write this chapter, I still have my old Portuguese copy right next to me. If you haven’t read the book, it is a wonderful story about pursuing your personal legend in the world by listening to your heart and following your dreams. It sounds cheesy when I just blurt it out like that, but believe me when I say that as a Harvard scientist, I am still puzzled about how this fictional novel came to change my life. After reading and discussing the book with my grandmother, I experienced the first Shift in my life. As you have learned throughout this book, our views of the world are based on our context, our history, and the lessons we have learned in life, and other experiences.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I started to eat normally again, quite spontaneously and without any real difficulty, which suggests to me that I was never truly anorexic. The pounds came back on and I barely noticed them. That phase was over. I had given up crying for help, because I had given up expecting any. Of course, I was grateful to the Harts and to Jane for their generosity to me during the crisis, but they could not touch the essential problem, nor could they ease my passage back to the world. Only I could do that, and toward the end of my third year of graduate study, I gave up psychiatry. Maybe this therapy could help others, but it had had no effect upon me at all. And besides, I told myself, I had submitted to other people’s programs and agendas for far too long. That, perhaps, was part of my trouble. It was now time to take my life into my own hands, instead of handing it over to other people, no matter how well intentioned. From now on, I was on my own. Thus, during the third year of my doctoral studies and some four and a half years after leaving my order, I turned a corner. I may have imbibed some of the spirit of the time, because during the late sixties and early seventies, laws that had hitherto seemed to be part of the very nature of things were being severely challenged. It was starting to be impossible now to assume that men were superior to women, that homosexuality was a crime, that whites should rule blacks. Women were taking command of their own lives, were campaigning for equal rights—and beginning to get them. In November 1970, the Gay Liberation Front had held its first public demonstration in Britain. In the United States, South Africa, and Europe, an unprecedented racial equality was beginning—slowly and painfully—to overturn centuries of enslavement and oppression. Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King were heroes to students all over the world. People were beginning to think in new ways, to cast aside a discredited past, and were gradually transforming the world. In my own small way, when I left the religious life, I too had faced the unthinkable, broken a taboo, and crossed a frontier that had once seemed impassable. I too was beginning to think differently, and to realize that assumptions that had hitherto held me in thrall were by no means cast in stone. It was even possible that one day I would be able to sing “We Shall Overcome” with the rest of my generation.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But that was his privilege; it was not for me. This moment of grace was precious for its own sake, because it was an earnest of recovery. Of course, I realized that there was still a long way to go, but I now knew that I could feel things, that I was not emotionally dead, as I had feared, and that my mind was beginning to come to life again. I was also aware that my full recovery depended upon my obeying certain rules. I was especially struck by Eliot’s line “I rejoice that things are as they are.” For years I had told myself that black was white and white black; that the so-called proofs of God’s existence had truly convinced me; that I might not be feeling happy, but that I really was happy because I was doing God’s will; that sewing for hours at a machine without a needle was the most profitable way of spending time. I had deliberately told myself lies and stamped hard on my mind whenever it had reached out toward the truth. As a result I had warped and incapacitated my mental powers. From now on I must be scrupulous about telling the truth, especially to myself. I realized that this would not be a popular stratagem. I had noticed how frequently people rushed to put an optimistic gloss on a disaster or a difficulty, even when their interpretation seemed at obvious variance with the facts. As Eliot had said in another poem: “Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” It was probably natural for us to deny pain or at least to try to push it out of sight. I could see that this could be a useful survival technique. While you were marveling at your silver lining, you could be making all kinds of unconscious adjustments so that when the storm finally broke you were in fact prepared. But I could not afford to do this. I was like a recovering alcoholic, who could not allow herself even a sip of this positive elixir, because it could awaken old destructive habits. That was why I could not go along with Dr. Piet and his theories any longer. For me, they did not reflect the way things really were. By making a habit of gazing unflinchingly at reality, however unpleasant, I too might learn to rejoice in it. So now I had a new project: to construct my own recovery by correcting the bias of my mind toward delusion, thus helping it to regain its former integrity. But I was only on the very first steps of Eliot’s winding stair; I had no idea how far I still had to go. For one thing, I was not nearly as resigned to my fate as I pretended.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  The modern conception of inspiration not only recog- nizes the free operation and the contributions of the dis- tinctive psychical equipment of the inspired person, but seeks in every way to get beyond the individual to the social group which produced him, to the spiritual prede- cessors who inspired him, and to the audience which moved him because he hoped to move it We might characterize the progress of the historical study of re- ligion in the last fifty years as a progressive effort to in- terpret religious individuals by their social contacts. The great work of biblical criticism has been to place every biblical book in its exact historical environment as a pre- liminary to understanding its religious message. The religionsgeschichtliche Methode’’ takes up the work where the critical method drops it, and reaches out still further, beyond the ideas and purposes of the literary per- son to the religious drifts and desires and beliefs of his age, to which he more or less consciously reacted. Every one who has shared in the results of this work will* appreciate how helpful and fruitful this process at its THE HOLY SPIRIT, REVELATION I9I best has been. It has opened up the inspiration of the past and released social values which had been completely locked away under the individualistic method of inter- pretation. The historical method has already done what the social gospel might wish it to do. Here we have a completed laboratory experiment proving the value and efficiency of a social understanding of religion. The only question is whether we can win just as strong a sense of the presence of God from this complicated social process of inspiration, as when God was believed to have dic- tated the books by a psychological miracle. It can be done, but the interpreter needs personal acquaintance with inspiration to do it. In another direction, however, we have not yet over- come the narrowing influence of the old, mechanical views of inspiration. Those who have had first-hand experience of inspira- tion either in their own souls or in the life of others, have always combined reverence for the authority of the word of the Lord and a realization of the human frailty and liability to error in the prophet. Paul and his churches had a rich experience of inspiration. Writing to the Thessalonians he asserts the right of prophesying, but takes the duty of critical scrutiny by the hearers as a matter of course: ‘‘Quench not the spirit (in your- selves) ; despise not prophesying (in others) ; scrutinize all utterances; appropriate what is good.’’ Inspiration did not involve infallibility when men knew it by ex- perience. When the inspirationalism of the primitive Church died 192 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Don’t be surprised if your prayer times morph into brainstorming sessions. That might be God gently nudging you into action. If prayer rarely leads to action, you’re doing it wrong. Some of my most creative moments have come from prayer. They didn’t start in creativity, of course. They started with whining. With me telling God how much a particular situation sucked and how He clearly needed to intervene. But they ended with me pacing the room, excitedly dreaming about how we could solve a problem that fifteen minutes earlier seemed overwhelming. If peace is the first benefit we receive from prayer, as we saw in the last chapter, purpose is a close second. The two go hand in hand. Peace refers to the assurance that God has a plan. Purpose refers to the part you and I play in that plan. Both are beautiful. God is committed to awakening our purpose and prodding us toward it. He knows what we can do, even if we don’t think we can do it. God cares about our present and our future. He sees the purpose, the plans, the potential written all over our lives. He placed those things within us, after all, and He calls them into existence day by day. When you go to God in prayer, you walk away with purpose. He gives you direction, guidance, instructions, challenges. He shows you dreams to chase and giants to conquer. Don’t ask God to guide your steps if you’re not ready to get off the couch. LET’S DO IT TOGETHER This principle that God involves us in the answers to our own prayers helps resolve a common misconception about prayer: that we either ask God to do something or we do it ourselves, but not both. Usually, when we face a problem, we try to solve it ourselves. When that doesn’t work, we call out to God in prayer for help. But if He doesn’t answer right away, we get frustrated and decide we’re going to handle it on our own. And so on and so forth, swinging like a pendulum between the “God will do it” and “I will do it” extremes. But those two options—God does it or I do it—are a false dichotomy. That is, they are not the only two options. They are also not mutually exclusive. When it comes to fixing problems, does God do it, or do I do it? Yes. It’s almost always both/and. We work and pray, and pray and work, and work and pray because life is a partnership with God . The beauty and mystery of prayer are found in that partnership of purpose. We can’t separate God’s work from ours, which is why we can’t separate prayer from action.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  Here again new social elements sprang up. The prac- tical necessities of the case created a social backing for the young candidate. Since his owix responses were still inarticulate, grown-up sponsors recited the creed and other formulas for him, and this service established a social relationship which often lasted for life. Since the faith of the child was still undeveloped, theology taught that the sponsors and the Church were to supply it. In modern time much finer ideas have been attached to infant baptism. The act is based on the organic unity of the family ; the parents thereby dedicate the child to God and pledge themselves to give it Christian nurture; the child is by baptism incorporated into the organism of the Church and made to share in its saving power ; the act ex- 200 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL presses the consciousness of the Church that the child is a child of God and has a right to claim the divine pater- nity. These are much more Christian ideas than those which first called infant baptism into existence. Scarcely any Christian institution has experienced such changes and deteriorations as baptism, but of them all the loss of outlook toward the Kingdom of God was one of the most regrettable. Could the social gospel — at least in some instances — fill baptism with its original meaning? We could imagine a minister and a group of candidates who unite in feeling the evil of the present world-order and the promise and claims of the impend- ing Christian world-order, together using baptism to ex- press their solemn dedication to the tasks of the Kingdom of God, and accepting their rights as children of God within that Kingdom. In those churches in which bap- tism is administered in infancy, confirmation would of- fer the next best opportunity to impress and express such convictions. In the catechumenate the ancient Church put the candidate through long processes of exorcization to expel the demon powers which had infected him in his pagan life. Those churches which practise confirmation have shifted the instruction of the catechumenate to pre- cede confirmation; those churches which practise adult baptism are much in need of a period of systematic instruction before baptism. It would be a really rational and Christian form of exorcization to break the infection of the sinful and illusive world-order and to explain the nature of a distinctively Christian order of life. Siich a restoration of its earliest meaning might save BAPTISM AND THE LORD’s SUPPER 201

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  THE HOLY SPIRIT, REVELATION 189 revelation was to be a message. Their religious experi- ences were moments of intense social consciousness. The Christian Church began its history as a commun- ity of inspiration. The new thing in the story of Pente- cost is not only the number of those who received the tongue of fire but the fact that the Holy Spirit had be- come the common property of a group. What had seemed to some extent the privilege of aristocratic souls was now democratized. The spirit was poured on all flesh ; the young saw visions, the old dreamed dreams ; even on the slave class the spirit was poured. The char- ismatic life of the primitive Church was highly impor- tant for its coherence and loyalty in the crucial days of its beginning. It was a chief feeder of its strong affections, its power of testimony, and its sacrificial spirit. Re- ligion has been defined as the life of God in the soul of man.’’ In Christianity it became also the life of God in the fellowship of man. The mystic experience was socialized. The doctrine of the inspiration of the Bible, as we all know, has passed through profound changes in recent years. The change has all been away from religious in- dividualism and toward a social comprehension of the religious facts. The process of inspiration was formerly conceived as a transaction between God and the individual. The higher the doctrine of inspiration, the more .solitary was the in- spired individual. It would have defeated the purpose of the doctrine to admit the presence of outside influences. Even the intellect and personality of the recipient were ipo A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL sometimes represented as passive and quiescent. Philo, whose ideas the early Church followed, said : A prophet gives forth nothing at all of his own, but acts as interpreter at the prompting of another in all his utter- ances, and as long as he is under inspiration he is in ig- norance, his reason departing from its place, and yielding up the citadel of the soul, when the divine Spirit enters into it and strikes at the mechanism of the voice.'' In extreme orthodoxy it was a liberal concession to grant that the divine power utilized and respected the literary style and individual outlook of the writer.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  6. The coming of the Kingdom of God will not be by peaceful development only, but by conflict with the Kingdom of Evil. We should estimate the powxr of sin too lightly if we forecast a smooth road. Nor does the insistence on continuous development eliminate the possibility and value of catastrophes. Political and social revolutions may shake down the fortifications of the Kingdom of Evil in a day. The Great War is a catastrophic stage in the coming of the Kingdom of God. Its direct effects will operate for generations. Our de- scendants will have a better perspective than we to see how all the sins of modern civilization have brought forth death after their own kind, and how the social repentance of nations may lay the foundation for a new beginning. Christ and the establishment of his Kingdom on earth embodied the ideal of an earthly realization of the Kingdom of God. It set up the extensive and intensive penetration of humanity by the Christian spirit as the aim and task of history. The victorious coming and kingly rule of Christ on earth is achieved by the organization of all mankind in a fellowship of children of God, and by the continuous ethical transformation of all society through the power of the Christian spirit. But since this takes place within the historic life of nations, the process is bound to human conditions and limits.” ESCHATOLOGY 227 7. An eschatology which is expressed in terms of historic development has no final consummation. Its consummations are always the basis for further develop- ment. The Kingdom of God is always coming, but we can never say “ Lo here.” Theologians often assert that this would be unsatisfactory. ‘‘ A kingdom of social righteousness can never be perfect; man remains flesh; new generations would have to be trained anew; only by a world-catastrophe can the Kingdom of glory be realized.” Apparently we have to postulate a static condition in order to give our minds a rest; an endless perspective of development is too taxing. Fortunately God is not tired as easily as we. If he called humanity to a halt in a “ kingdom of glory,” he would have on his hands some millions of eager spirits whom he has himself trained to ceaseless aspiration and achievement, and they would be dying of ennui. Besides, what is the use of a perfect ideal which never happens? A progres- sive Kingdom of righteousness happens all the time in instalments, like our own sanctification. Our race will come to an end in due time; the astronomical clock is already ticking which will ring in the end. Meanwhile we are on the march toward the Kingdom of God, and getting our reward by every fractional realization of it which makes us hungry for more. A stationary hu- manity would be a dead humanity. The life of the race is in its growth.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch rose highest among the ancient philosophers in their views of the future life, but they reached only to belief in its probability—not in its certainty. Socrates, after be was condemned to death, said to his judges: "Death is either an eternal sleep, or the transition to a new life; but in neither case is it an evil;"1104 and he drank with playful irony the fatal hemlock. Plato, viewing the human soul as a portion of the eternal, infinite, all-pervading deity, believed in its pre-existence before this present life, and thus had a strong ground of hope for its continuance after death. All the souls (according to his Phaedon and Gorgias, pass into the spirit-world, the righteous into the abodes of bliss, where they live forever in a disembodied state, the wicked into Tartarus for punishment and purification (which notion prepared the way for purgatory). Plutarch, the purest and noblest among the Platonists, thought that immortality was inseparably connected with belief in an all-ruling Providence, and looked with Plato to the life beyond as promising a higher knowledge of, and closer conformity to God, but only for those few who are here purified by virtue and piety. In such rare cases, departure might be called an ascent to the stars, to heaven, to the gods, rather than a descent to Hades. He also, at the death of his daughter, expresses his faith in the blissful state of infants who die in infancy. Cicero, in his Tusculan Questions and treatise De Senectute, reflects in classical language "the ignorance, the errors, and the uncertainty of the ancient philosophers with regard to the immortality of the soul." Though strongly leaning to a positive view, he yet found it no superfluous task to quiet the fear of death in case the soul should perish with the body. The Stoics believed only in a limited immortality, or denied it altogether, and justified suicide when life became unendurable. The great men of Greece and Rome were not influenced by the idea of a future world as a motive of action. During the debate on the punishment of Catiline and his fellow-conspirators, Julius Caesar openly declared in the Roman Senate that death dissolves all the ills of mortality, and is the boundary of existence beyond which there is no more care nor joy, no more punishment for sin, nor any reward for virtue. The younger Cato, the model Stoic, agreed with Caesar; yet before he made an end to his life at Utica, he read Plato’s Phaedon. Seneca once dreamed of immortality, and almost approached the Christian hope of the birth-day of eternity, if we are to trust his rhetoric, but afterwards he awoke from the beautiful dream and committed suicide. The elder Pliny, who found a tragic death under the lava of Vesuvius, speaks of the future life as an invention of man’s vanity and selfishness, and thinks that body and soul have no more sensation after death than before birth; death becomes doubly painful if it is only the beginning of another indefinite existence. Tacitus speaks but once of immortality, and then conditionally; and he believed only in the immortality of fame. Marcus Aurelius, in sad resignation, bids nature, "Give what thou wilt, and take back again what and when thou wilt."