Shailer Mathews

“ Thus from whatever point of view we examine the Christian conception of man, we find it including a capacity for union. And this union is not thought of by Jesus as one of mere collocation. It is essential to the truest life. To avoid it is to become abnormal and sinful. Out from the picture of a possible human life presented by his own living we gain a corroboration of his words to his followers. A man is a social being. On the one side he is joined with physical forces, but on the other lie the needed friendship with God and fellowship with men. ”

“ The degeneration of the social nature that arises from the neglect of social duties, unfits a man for, or participation in, the enjoyments of the ideal life. Selfishness—that is, an over-developed individualism—must according to the laws of nature result in abnormality and consequent suffering. As long as a kingdom and a brotherhood are the goal of human effort, so long must man be capable of social life, and sociability a characteristic element of a normal man. ”

“ Therefore he must live not only by himself, but for parents, brothers, wife, children, relatives and friends, for the members of his deme and of his tribe, for his country, for his race, for all mankind. Nay, he must live for the parts of the whole, and also for the entire world, and much more for the Father and the Creator. If he is, indeed, possessed of reason, he must be sociable, he must love the world and God, that of God he may be beloved. ”

“ In each of these cases we have a very early formulation of the philosophy of the incarnation, and one that may very well be taken as representative of the teachings of Jesus himself.
It certainly, therefore, is not too much to say that in the thought of Jesus, the individual man is a unity, which is the outcome of the organic combination of two complementary elements, body and soul. Humanity in its unit is thus a union. ”

“ Among religious teachers, at least, social life has not generally been held to be the normal life for the man who seeks an ideal development. Withdrawal from society, monachism, the literal flight from a corrupt world—these have been the characteristics of the great mass of the religions of the past. Modern evangelicism is often guilty of the same mistake in its attempts to distinguish and withdraw from "worldly" influences. But with Jesus the entrance into the kingdom [31] is the goal and the reward of the individual's endeavor. ”

“ Just as the complete life of the individual depends upon the union of the soul and body, does the normal life of the personality demand a similar union with other personalities. The failure of theology to emphasize this fact is the outcome of a psychology that has been so much concerned with the deliverances of a single consciousness as to slight evidences of social psychical forces.
In the time of Jesus men recognized more or less distinctly the need of establishing a social unity if right living was to be attained—even when their knowledge had little effect upon social institutions. ”

“ Sociability does not mean the extinction of individuality. It simply means that in the conception of Jesus the self is altruistic as well as selfish—social as well as individualistic. [20] There are attracting and correlating powers of the personality that reach out to others and form, much like chemical atoms, a new substance that is essentially a unity derived through union. To disregard the promptings and needs of this social part of the personality is to invite intellectual and moral death, whose earliest symptoms are sin and abnormality of all sorts. ”

“ The gospels nowhere give foundations for the popular notion that the soul is a lower, more physical life-principle, and the spirit a higher, more divine substance. Indeed, it would be quite as reasonable to quote the development of Jewish thought for a precisely opposite view. Still less is there to be found in the words of Jesus the remoter conception of the soul as a sort of connecting link between the body and the spirit. ”

“ It is these fundamental conceptions that one must seek if he would get the logical point of departure for not merely the social but the religious teachings of Jesus. It is not impossible that in the search for them modern ideas may be read into ancient words, but none the less is the search to be made. ”

“ The corresponding position of Jesus, though not expressed so minutely, is quite as distinct, and is far more fundamental to his philosophy. Men's capacity for union renders attainable the purpose of his teaching and his life. It is deep in the ideal which he sets before mankind.
IV.
Nowhere does this conception of the necessity of union more predominate than in those teachings that are the most characteristic of the mind of Jesus and which are the most valuable and resultful of all times—the ideal relations that may exist between the human soul and God. ”

“ With Jesus, as with all thinkers, the possibilities of the component parts of a social whole must limit the possibilities of that whole. With him, to use the words of Ward, "Sociology as a whole rests primarily upon psychology." [1] If in the thought of Jesus man is not a social being but rather is a repellant whole, his conception of society must be radically different from that of an organism. If, on the other hand, Jesus regards man as living not merely within the insulated limits of his own individuality, but as essentially a social being, reaching normality only in social life ”

“ Destined for companionship with high spiritual beings, he necessarily turns in upon himself, grows less and less capable of opening his nature to him who seeks his love. He loses those powers by which he might become a member of God's family and of the brotherhood of man. Exclusion from the kingdom is his natural punishment—he is not fit to be one of its members. [34] In one case at least, [35] Jesus states this cause explicitly. At the day of judgment the ground on which exclusion from the kingdom will be based is a failure to fulfil the social duties of the present age. ”

“ All unions that are the promptings of normal human instincts are therefore natural and helpful. All separations that are approved by such instincts are equally natural and necessary. And what is of especial significance, a Christian sociology becomes possible and necessary as the complement of a Christian theology. ”

“ One essential characteristic of this physico-psychical being is its capacity to merge its life with that of similar beings — that is, its capacity for social life. The ideal human life, as Jesus conceives of it, consists in transcending the limits of an egoistic individuality. By this it is not meant to maintain that Jesus taught a pantheism or a generic humanity that is a sort of scholastic mélange. ”

“ In general Jesus distinguished between only physical and spiritual phenomena, and his language, though never technical, is yet sufficiently definite to make it certain that he never held to the trichotomy that possibly characterized the cruder psychology of the early Hebrew scriptures. At all events, the one class of phenomena did not spring from the other. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. Only that born of the spirit is spirit. ”

“ Jesus, recognizes the sociability of men not merely as a condition of the new and divine age, but as the capacity that underlies the development of sinful men into a sanctified and normal brotherhood. In other words, man's capacity for union with other beings is the hope of his regeneration. ”

“ If we waive all doctrinal formulas it is nevertheless clear that in this teaching and its exemplification by Jesus, we have a presentation of humanity that must condition all theological and sociological statements that claim to be Christian. ”

“ Hell is thus at once the opposite and the horrible caricature of heaven. It is not merely an accommodation of his thought to Jewish terminology when Jesus describes the selfish rich man as suffering alone in Gehenna, and the poor man as in the companionship of Abraham. ”

“ So far was Jesus from being a trichotomist as sometimes to seem to approach a sort of psychological monism, in which the unity of body and soul constitutes a single life. [17] However this may be, the significance of Paul's treatment of the resurrection of Jesus the type of the race, lies not least in the support it gives to the belief that a man can never become a disembodied spirit. ”

“ To exclude a man from the companionship of such was to reduce him to the lowest social grade the Jewish vocabulary could describe. [40] To enter into brotherhood and sonship was the first step toward a future perfection. ”

“ With him it would appear as if sin were the reverse of sociability, and a sinful race, as distinct from sinful individuals, a contradiction of terms. In failing to follow the fundamental instincts and capacities of his nature, a man becomes at once selfish, sinful, and unsocial. ”

“ Even in Plato a physiological psychologist finds little worthy of serious consideration, and the psychologist proper is often obliged to content himself with pregnant analogies when he seeks definitions. ”

“ It would lead too far afield to develop this conception as it deserves. It will properly receive attention in the discussion of the dynamic forces of society. The main thing at present to emphasize is the recognition by Jesus of this characteristic in the but imperfectly righteous man. He as well as the ideal man is a social personality. It is not merely in the glorious age to come that men are to be brethren, it is in the present evil age as well. ”

“ Paul, the best educated of them all, gives little evidence of any training beyond the severely scholastic methods of the professional schools at Jerusalem. It is true he has the schoolman's accuracy in the use of terms, but he suffers also from the schoolman's lack of scientific experiment. ”