Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 56:221 (Jan 1899)
Article: Christianity And Idealism
Author: James Lindsay

BSac 56:221 (Jan 1899) p. 61

Christianity And Idealism

Rev. James Lindsay

It has always been to us one of the crowning glories of Christianity that it not merely has close affinities with, but is itself such a living spring, of true idealism. It is itself, however, never mere idealism. It sees too much reality at the core of the universe for that. But such reality is spiritual, and provides the real-ideal, which is the true ideal. Any other idealism is simply inane. We believe a true Idealism to be the true philosophy: we hold the Ideal to be the Real, and Reality to be the test of the Ideal; but we do not take every Ideal to be the true and full Real. It may very well be doubted whether more subtle and subversive influences for Christianity have ever gone forth from any philosophy than have issued from some modern forms of Idealism. The adjective “Absolute” prefixed to an “Idealism” nowise perfects its view of the Real, which it makes equivalent to the Ideal, while the Ideal has been neither seen nor summed by it. Both Jowett and Caird have told us that the Christ whom we know is “necessarily ideal” so he is—our conscious and Highest Ideal; but it is another thing to imply that this Ideal which we have of the Christ is something wrenched from the actual, attained indeed by our own improvings upon the Christ historic and actual. If Christ be not the Ideal because he, as actual, is always more than our own highest Ideal of him, then he should soon cease to inspire us with strenuous effort to realize the ideal that he brings.

BSac 56:221 (Jan 1899) p. 62

But he is the Ideal realized. He is God manifest in the flesh, in whom the Ideal is made everlastingly real. He is the Ideal for mankind to-day, just because these things are so, and because he is Actuality, not mere offspring of our idealizings. It is thus evident that the Ideal is for us the basal reality just because the Ideal is for us more than something merely subjective. The fundamentally real of the Universe is for us just that archetypal ideal which had its home in the mind of God. The physically real is but the manifestation of the spiritually ideal. The eternal principles and laws of reason whereby the ideal so passes into the real are all grounded in God, so that it is in his “light we see light.” The Ideal is seen to be as rational as its realization is seen to be progressive. Just because the realization is progressive, the ideal is realized in the real, imperfect though the realization be. Incompleteness may be part of the case, but the incompleteness is itself an inspiration, calling forth our free agency and effort towards fuller approximation of the ideal.

Still, rational as our conceptions of the Ideal may be, they may yet be no more than subjective and illusive, if so be they are ...