What is Christian Faith?

by Charles Sanders Peirce

WHAT IS CHRISTIAN FAITH?

BY CHARLES S. PEIRCE.

It is easy to chop logic about matters of which you have no experience whatever. Men color-blind have more than once learnedly discussed the laws of color-sensation, and have made interesting deductions from those laws. But when it comes to positive knowledge, such knowledge as a lawyer has of the practice of the courts, that can only rest on long experience, direct or indirect. So, a man may be an accomplished theologian without ever having felt the stirring of the spirit; but he cannot answer the simple question at the head of this article except out of his own religious experience.

There is in the dictionary a word, solipsism, meaning the belief that the believer is the only existing person. Were anybody to adopt such a belief, it might be difficult to argue him out of it. But when a person finds himself in the society of others, he is just as sure of their existence as of his own, though he may entertain a metaphysical theory that they are all hypostatically the same ego. In like manner, when a man has that experience with which religion sets out, he has as good reason,—putting aside metaphysical subtilties,—to believe in the living personality of God, as he has to believe in his own. Indeed, belief is a word inappropriate to such direct perception.

Seldom do we pass a single hour of our waking lives away from the companionship of men (including books); and even the thoughts of that solitary hour are filled with ideas which have grown in society. Prayer, on the other hand, occupies but little of our time; and, of course, if solemnity and ceremony are to be made indispensable to it (though why observe manners toward the Heavenly Father, that an earthly father would resent as priggish?) nothing more is practicable. Consequently, religious ideas never come to form the warp and woof of our mental constitution, as do social ideas. They are easily doubted, and are open to various reasons for doubt, which reasons may all be comprehended under one, namely, that the religious phenomenon is sporadic, not incessant.

This causes a degeneration in religion from a perception to a trust, from a trust to a belief, and a belief continually becoming more and more abstract. Then, after a religion has become a public affair, quarrels arise, to settle which watchwords are drawn up. This business gets into the hands of theologians; and the ideas of theologians always appreciably differ from those of the universal church. They swamp religion in fallacious logical disputations. Thus, the natural tendency is to the continual drawing tighter and tighter of the narrowing bounds of doctrine, with less and less attention to the living essence of religion, until after some symbolum quicumque has declared that the salvation of each individual absolutely and almost exclusively depends upon his entertaining a correct metaphysics of the godhead, the vital spark of inspiration becomes finally quite extinct.

Yet it is absurd to say that religion is a mere belief. You might as well call society a belief, or politics belief, or civilisation a belief. Religion is a life, and can be identified with a belief only provided that belief be a living belief,—a thing to be lived rather than said or thought.

The Christian religion, if it has anything distinctive,—and must not aspire to be the necessary ultimate outcome of every path of religious progress,—is distinguished from other religions by its precept about the Way of Life. I appeal to the typical Christian to answer out of the abundance of his spirit, without dictation from priests, whether this be not so. In the recently discovered book, "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,"^[1] which dates from about A. D. 100, we see that long before the Apostles' or any other creed was insisted upon, or at all used, the teaching of the Lord was considered to consist in the doctrine of the Two Ways,—the Way of Life and the Way of Death. This it was that at that date was regarded as the saving faith,—not a lot of metaphysical propositions. This is what Jesus Christ taught; and to believe in Christ is to believe what he taught.

Now what is this way of life? Again I appeal to the universal Christian conscience to testify that it is simply love. As far as it is contracted to a rule of ethics, it is: Love God, and love your neighbor; "on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." It may be regarded in a higher point of view with St. John as the universal evolutionary formula. But in whatever light it be regarded or in whatever direction developed, the belief in the law of love is the Christian faith.

"Oh," but it may be said, "that is not distinctive of Christianity! That very idea was anticipated by the early Egyptians, by the Stoics, by the Buddhists, and by Confucius." So it was; nor can the not insignificant difference between the negative and the positive precept be properly estimated as sufficient for a discrimination between religions. Christians may, indeed, claim that Christianity possesses that earmark of divine truth,—namely that it was anticipated from primitive ages. The higher a religion the more catholic.

Man's highest developments are social; and religion, though it begins in a seminal individual inspiration, only comes to full flower in a great church coëxtensive with a civilisation. This is true of every religion, but supereminently so of the religion of love. Its ideal is that the whole world shall be united in the bond of a common love of God accomplished by each man's loving his neighbor. Without a church, the religion of love can have but a rudimentary existence; and a narrow, little, exclusive church is almost worse than none. A great catholic church is wanted.

The invisible church does now embrace all Christendom. Every man who has been brought up in the bosom of Christian civilisation does really believe in some form of the principle of love, whether he is aware of doing so, or not.

Let us, at any rate, get all the good from the vital element in which we are all at one that it can yield: and the good that it can yield is simply all that is anyway possible, and richer than is easily conceivable. Let us endeavor, then, with all our might to draw together the whole body of believers in the law of love into sympathetic unity of consciousness. Discountenance as immoral all movements that exaggerate differences, or that go to make fellowship depend on formulas invented to exclude some Christians from communion with others.

A sapient critic has recently blamed me for defective cocksureness in my metaphysical views. That is no less than an indictment for practising just as I have always preached. Absurd was the epithet ever coming to my tongue for persons very confident in opinions which other minds, as good as they, denied. Can you induce the philosophic world to agree upon any assignable creed, or in condemning any specified item in the current creeds of Christendom? I believe not; though doubtless you can gather a sequacious little flock, quite disposed to follow their bell-bearer into every vagary,—if you will be satisfied so. For my part, I should think it more lovely to patch up such peace as might be with the great religious world. This happens to be easy to an individual whose unbiased study of scientific logic has led him to conclusions not discordant with traditional dogmas. Unfortunately, such a case is exceptional; and guilt rests on you who insist on so tautening the lines of churches as to close them against the great body of educated and thinking men, pure and undefiled though the religion of many of them (you are obliged to acknowledge it) be. Surely another generation will witness a sweeping reform in this respect. You will not be permitted to make of those churches a permanent laughing-stock for coming ages. Many things are essential to religion which yet ought not to be insisted on: the law of love is not the rule of angry and bullying insistence. Thus, it seems plain to me, I confess, that miracles are intrinsic elements of a genuine religion. But it is not half so important to emphasise this as it is to draw into our loving communion, almost the entire collection of men who unite clear thought with intellectual integrity. And who are you, any way, who are so zealous to keep the churches small and exclusive? Do you number among your party the great scholars and the great saints? Are you not, on the other hand, egged on by all the notorious humbugs,—votaries of Mammon or of Ward McAllister,—who deem the attitude of a church-caryatid to be a respectable or a genteel thing? Your voting-power, too, is repleted with many who, as soon as they are a little better informed and educated, will drop away from you; and in these days that education will come speedily.

To those who for the present are excluded from the churches, and who, in the passionate intensity of their religious desire, are talking of setting up a church for the scientifically educated, a man of my stripe must say, Wait, if you can; it will be but a few years longer; but if you cannot wait, why then Godspeed! Only, do not, in your turn, go and draw lines so as to exclude such as believe a little less,—or, still worse, to exclude such as believe a little more,—than yourselves. Doubtless, a lot of superstition clings to the historical churches; but superstition is the grime upon the venerable pavement of the sacred edifice, and he who would wash that pavement clean should be willing to get down on his knees to his work, inside the church.

A religious organisation is a somewhat idle affair unless it be sworn in as a regiment of that great army that takes life in hand, with all its delights, in grimmest fight to put down the principle of self-seeking, and to make the principle of love triumphant. It has something more serious to think about than the phraseology of the articles of war. Fall into the ranks then; follow your colonel. Keep your one purpose steadily and alone in view, and you may promise yourself the attainment of your sole desire, which is to hasten the chariot wheels of redeeming love!

1. Edited with translation and notes by Roswell D. Hitchcock and Francis Brown. New York: Scribners. 1884. Also, by Philip Schaff. 3d Edition. New York: Funk and Wagnals. 1890.