Pantheism's destruction of boundaries - pagina 30

PantheisvCs Destruction of 'Jouadai'les.

who

protests against the idea of evolution

it is

lie wlio

came

clown from the Father of lights in order to reveal himself as God in the flesh. Christ is the miracle. It is Bethlehem that

opens a branch

in the line of

lunnan genealogy.

"Imnianuel's

And when Church of Christ starts out upon her mission in the woi'ld lier deeply marked characteristic is not to be of the world. Hence the Church of Christ stands ipso facto opposed to the unity dream of the paTitheistic process, and denies that salvation can ever come by evolution to a world lost in sin. This Abandonment of this antithis her character and her nature. She must hold up this esis is the sacrifice of her character. resurrection" breaks through the order of nature. the

dualism in the face of the unregenerated world. And as soon as the boundary is blurred which sepai'atcs her from the natural life

she ceases to be the Church of Christ.

This, of course,

is

the very thing ojiposed by the pantheistic tendency of our age,

and no

less

sharply by the principle of evolution.

cannot triumph unless taken out of the

way

Pantheism

the 6tuml)ling block of the cross be ;

the evolution

theory cannot exist

that notion of Golgotha be not removed,

if

flence the a^^sertion

by a German philosopher, that "where culture breaks through

Hence Hegel's statement that there can be no more Church." the State, as " the divine will in the present," must make the Church subservient to its end, uniil finally she be dissolved Hence Rothe, m'Iio was himself a theologian, threw away his honor and committed treason to the Church,

in the State.

by prophesying her rapid declension and disapjiearanee in the State; and from this, no less, comes the cool determination of the leading jurists in Germany to forge the shackles by By a circle of almost thirty which to chain the Church. professors of law, among whom Ihering was one, the ductrine has been published that the Protestant Church "is a ])urely worldly organization," and, stronger sidered in the sense of

modern

still,

" that, rightly con-

ecclesiastical law, the

Church

is

shows whither this erasure of boundaries lends us; and we are no longer surjirised at the boldness of Pi-ofessor Lorn in writing that the Church of Christ is nothing more than a Relnjions-Yereln^ and that the present relation between State and Church "rests on the principle of the sovereignty of the State, to which even the Church onh'' a part

of the world."

Tliis

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