Christianity
Subtitle: its nature and its truth
By: by Arthur S. Peake
Series: The Jackson collection
Publisher: Crowell
Published: 1908
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 298
Subjects: Christianity; Essence, genius, nature
Table of contents: title: I. What is religion?; title: Religion is neither cults, creed, nor conduct, but fellowship with the Unseen; title: It is the inevitable creation of man's spiritual nature; title: While other elements enter into it, emotion is its central constituent; title: The preacher ought, therefore, to appeal to emotion, but to worthy emotion in a worthy way; title: Religion and morality; title: The definition of religion as "morality touched by emotion" is quite wide of the mark; title: For religion may be immorality touched by emotion, or it may transcend the sphere of conduct, while morality may be saturated with emotion without becoming religion; title: Morality and religion are radically distinct and often mutually antagonistic; title: Yet each must have its full rights maintained; title: The religion of Israel and Christianity secured the complete fusion of the two; title: The low level of morality in Christendom due partly to survival of paganism, partly to combination of rudimentary moral standard with deep religious feeling; title: The performance of religion guaranteed by its universal diffusion; title: The vital thing is not the form in which the religious instinct has expressed itself, but the fact that the instinct exists; title: The existence and survival of the spiritual instinct guarantees the existence of a spiritual environment which responds to it; title: Hence the non-religious man is incompletely human; title: II. Has theology had its day?; title: The present impatience with theology not wholly unjustified though greatly exaggerated, and largely due to the mental demoralization of our time and failure to appreciate the gravity of the issues involved; title: Since the universe is mysterious no adequate explanation can be simple; title: Since we cannot be content without a theory of our experience, the permanence of religion involves the permanence of theology; title: Belief without thought is superstition; title: Constructive theology has still a vast task before it; title: While we reverence the past we must avoid its defects, and respond to the demand our own age makes upon us; title: Christian morality cannot permanently survive Christian theology; title: III. Why I cannot be a materialist; title: The material universe forces itself on our unremitting attention; title: The triumphs of physical science have also made materialism very attractive; title: Yet it does not prove permanently satisfactory; title: The seven riddles of the universe; title: What are matter and force?; title: Materialism cannot account for consciousness or personal identity; title: We know matter only through mind; title: If the universe is a dream there must be a mind to dream it; title: Materialism leaves no room for religion or morality; title: IV. Is there a God?; title: The universality of religion implies a spiritual universe with which man is in relation; title: If man is rational his history cannot rest on the irrational; title: The proofs of the existence of God; title: The argument from design; title: Darwinism and design; title: The veto of agnosticism; title: We cannot infer from our own experience that personality necessarily implies limitation; title: The power which makes for righteousness; title: the witness of conscience; title: The existence of sin, death, and pain no disproof of Theism; title: V. Which is the best religion?; title: Man must have a religion, but which?; title: Tests which a religion must satisfy; title: Failure of non-Christian religions, including Islam and Buddhism; title: Christianity secures fellowship with God; title: It has an adequate conception of sin, but fights with the assurance of victory; title: Its moral ideal is incarnate in a Person; title: It works for progress and the elevation of mankind; title: This is not disproved by the frequent antagonism to progress often exhibited by Christians; title: The Christian estimate of man's worth; title: V. Which is the best religion?; title: Man must have a religion, but which?; title: Tests which a religion must satisfy; title: Failure of non-Christian religions, including Islam and Buddhism; title: Christianity secures fellowship with God; title: It has an adequate conception of sin, but fights with the assurance of victory; title: Its moral ideal is incarnate in a Person; title: It works for progress and the elevation of mankind; title: This is not disproved by the frequent antagonism to progress often exhibited by Christians; title: The Christian estimate of man's worth; title: VI. The trinity in unity; title: Fundamental character of the doctrine; title: It was formulated less in a speculative interest than to guard the great facts of redemption; title: The danger of polytheism accounts for its absence from the Old Testament, which nevertheless exhibits movement towards it; title: The Christian facts created the doctrine; title: The problem: how to reconcile the divinity of Christ with the unity of God; title: Sabellianism, ancient and modern; title: The Arian controversy; title: The trinity not merely a trinity of revelation; title: The relative simplicity of human nature is no measure for the complexity of the divine; title: All human language is inadequate to express the truth about God; title: The doctrine helps to secure the personality of God; title: Moral relations have existed eternally in God; title: Love implies the lover and the loved; title: God is not the lonely God; title: VII. Sin; title: The surprise of evil in a universe created by God; title: No full solution possible, but only helpful suggestions; title: The sense of sin is the creation of religion, and pre-eminently of Christianity; title: Sin in itself is radically evil, but we must not exaggerate the range of its dominion; title: The pantheistic denial that sin really exists; title: No freedom, no sin; title: We are conscious of our freedom, and remorse is inexplicable if we have no freedom of choice; title: Does sin contribute to the aesthetic completeness of the universe?; title: Sin is not merely negative nor disguised good; title: Limitation of being is not moral imperfection; title: The seat of sin is not in the body; title: Paul does not mean the body when he speaks of the sinful flesh; title: Sin emerges when self-love clashes with God's will; title: Theologians have traced man's universal sinfulness to a catastrophe; title: Popular doctrine of the fall is not to be found in the story of Eden; title: Has modern knowledge destroyed the foundations of the Pauline theology?; title: Paul's doctrine of Adam essentially independent of the historicity of Genesis; title: Adam and Christ; title: a parallel and a contrast; title: The view that the death of the individual is due to personal sin does not harmonize with experience, with the terms of the passage, with the parallel between Adam and Christ, with Paul's language elsewhere and in the immediate context, or with the passage as a whole; title: The death of all due to Adam's sin, because the sin of Adam is the sin of all