Excerpts from the Introduction.
THAT which is designated as the New Theology is, on the constructive side, the most general and conspicuous religious fact of our time, and by far the most significant one. What I have to say aims at a better understanding of this fact, in itself, in the forces which give rise to it, and in its practical results.
The New Theology is after all not a theology. There is no creed that we can call the new creed; there is no conclusion or series of conclusions that occupies, in this movement, anymore a final position than do other allied convictions. The New Theology is not a creed but a tendency; is not a result but a movement. All men may feel it and share it, — most cultivated men do share it, — no man can make it his own or sufficiently voice it. Indeed it consists largely in breaking old bonds and in refusing to accept new ones. It is a ferment in the religious mind, an excitement in the religious camp, of which many marches are already the result, from which many more are to come. Some of these marches have carried those who have taken part in them quite beyond the lines of safety, and, as we think at least, over the uncertain borders which separate belief and unbelief. Such marching, because it is bold, even to recklessness, and is yet the result of the new inspiration, is not, therefore, its most complete or most just expression. Some have hardly left the camp, and only slightly shifted their quarters in it, yet this restlessness has the same cause and the same significance as the rashness of their fellows. The New Theology is to be judged by that which is sound, safe, and moderate in it, and not by its excesses or its insufficiencies.
The New Theology stands for an awakening in religious thought which leads it to seek for more flexible, less rigid; more productive, less barren; more living, less dead forms of expression and action, and by means of them to come fully under the progressive movement which belongs to our time as one of enlarged knowledge and renewed social life. One of the most conservative forms of thought is the religious form. But that conservatism has been sensibly reduced in many directions, and that fact is the fact of the New Theology, — the greatest fact in the history of the period because it expresses the utmost power and stretch of the tendencies that are securing change, that are pushing men onward, and bringing forward the Kingdom of Heaven.
The point of greatest interest in this movement is not what leading minds now think, but what directions, what degrees, what rapidity, of progress, are to be occasioned by the pulsation of faith in the religious mind as a whole. Our only test of these later results is what we ourselves regard as the most guarded conclusions of the soundest thinkers of today, but we may be well assured that humanity, in traversing more slowly the same wilderness of thought, will not pitch its tents in exactly the same positions we have chosen, nor tarry in them merely because we have found it convenient to rest there....
The present volume proposes five topics of consideration, which closely concern the New Theology: Naturalism, Supernaturalism, Dogmatism, Pietism, and Spiritualism. The discussion will involve a partial reconsideration of topics before discussed by me, but the importance of the topics, their modified presentation and new relations, will justify this demand for fresh attention to them. While these topics of thought in their final statement are the most difficult that come before us, they return to us as no other topics do, and affect the inner flow of thought and outward form of action with a vigor all their own. As long as life is more than meat, will men consider, and be wise in considering, these themes which bring rest to the mind within itself, and lay down lines of thought and laws of conduct that stretch to the spiritual horizon. The mind raises questions for the very end of answering them, and though the answers may be long in coming, the inquiries themselves imply the movements of thought which are finally to bring them.