Article November 14, 1908 Issue

The Church to-day is exceedingly unfortunate in the...

Duluth (Minn.) Tribune

The Church to-day is exceedingly unfortunate in the interpretations of the ages of theological expressions from which they cannot free themselves, and the definition of words of necessary use, making it almost impossible to read into them now their real meaning as used from the modern pulpit. Among the stumbling-blocks placed between the Church and the man of to-day is that of a "personal God." God made man "after his own image," and through all the centuries this has come to mean more and more — to mankind in general — physical image. So we all have been taught, and the instant the term is used from pulpit or pew there comes to mind that picture in all the old Bibles and still found in many Biblical illustrations, of a benevolent-looking, flesh-tinted, wholesome old gentleman with an abundant white beard and surrounded by quite palpable clouds.

That is what the "personal God" of the Church means in the mind of the average adult. It is no longer what the term means to the modern theologian. There are many other terms still covered with the barnacles of the ages, or as one clergyman phrased it, "infected with the microbes of the years and sadly needing to be sterilized before being used as instruments by the Church." They are the barriers between the Church and the hearts and lives of the people who are coming to find a sufficient satisfaction in merely being of enough use in this world and of sufficient value to the immediate or remote environment to justify their being here. These are substituting this life-motive for the Christian religion, and their spiritual ideals for the Christian's personal God. The Church has need to move rapidly to surround and capture to itself this movement toward a possibly new but not a godless religion.

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