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Love the Fundamental Idea in Christianity

Love the Fundamental Idea in

Christianity

BY

The Reverend FRANK CRANE

S love or sovereignty the fundamental idea in Christianity?

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This is the question set before us, and it is one whose answer covers the entire history of Christian thought, from Jesus until now. The inner history of theology, indeed, has been but the story of the struggle of the human mind to shake itself loose from the cramping, regulative idea of God as a Sovereign, into the liberty and stimulative development of the idea of God as a Father.

The keynote of the intellectual system of Jesus, as far as He can be said to have had any intellectual system, was that our relations to the Creator are to be set right chiefly by allowing the idea of His fatherhood to swallow up the idea of His kingship. He taught that the souls of men are to come into direct communion with the Supreme Being in all the free affection of sonship. It was the apparent looseness of this notion, the supposedly dangerous freedom it allowed, that shocked the Pharisee and caused Jesus's rejection by the Jewish people. They could not see that sonship meant anything else than license. Puerile themselves, they felt that nothing could control them but law, and they were unable to comprehend how love could regulate. Love, in any degree, is but desire, and the world, until Christ—and alas! for the most part until this day, has failed to grasp the sublime truth that desire, which in the natural human heart is the cause of all sin and seems to be "set on fire of hell," can be cleansed, transformed into a divine guide and made to be the vicegerent of God in the life. The transition from law to love is so immense that, in two thousand years, mankind is still nonplussed, amazed, incredulous at the simple declaration of Jesus.

The apostolic church faced the same foe that confronted the Founder of their faith. St. Paul rapidly assumed the dominancy of the early church because he most clearly apprehended the meaning of Jesus and translated it into the brilliant dialectic of the Greeks. It was his main theme that the law had passed away, being superseded by the personal influence of Jesus manifested through the Holy Spirit, which fulfilled the law. Inspired by this conception, he flung open the doors of the church to the Gentiles, to "all men everywhere." In this he was met and opposed by the same reactionary spirit which had slain Jesus: jealousy for the system which governed by rules and laws lay in wait for the Master at every turn and at last had His blood, and the same jealousy dogged the footsteps of the chief apostle, sought to divide the church behind him by schism, and to stir up the heathen before him into riot. Everywhere the bitterest enemies of the new church were not the sins and passions of the common people, but the narrow zeal and literalism of those who clung to the outgrown legalities of Judaism.

Passing next to the church in the subsequent ages we find another great conflict, that of the East against the West, the Greek against the Latin. Underneath all the smoke and confusion of the theological battles of that day, down below the multitude of non-essentials that seemed at times to be the causes of dispute, lay this same issue which had been the rootcause of trouble in the days of Jesus and of Paul: to wit, Is religion the influence of the loving presence of God among men, or is it a rule given to men by a distant God? The Greek theologians as a rule stood for the immanence, the Latin for the transcendence of God.

The next great epoch in the life of Christian thought was the Reformation, a period which, roughly speaking, covers the time from Luther in the fourteenth century to Wesley in the eighteenth, reaching indeed until now, for our religious thought is still under the cast given it by the great controversies of the four centuries mentioned. Outwardly the Ref

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