RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Religion
The veritableness of volition or desire consists in the unchangeableness of the end or aim assumed by the conscious willing subject out of its own knowledge. A real willing occurs only where the
subject connotes all that he under-
5. Telic takes in time in a supreme voluntary
Conscious- act which possesses an eternal end.
ness; But in no momentary act of self-ex-
Freedom. pression can the individual regard his
existence as eternally warranted; hence in every act of will another element acts in combination with the impulse, namely, the consciousness of its final object. The abstraction from momentary self-existence and concentration upon the eternal purpose reflects the dawn of the consciousness of the human will unchangeable. An inner life of a higher order with an imperishable content is the result. This will grounded upon the eternally valid is the ethical sense. In the true willing of the ethical, positive self-denial becomes self-expression. What is directly willed is not the life of the soul, but the overcoming of mere appearance in obedience to the truth and in the tendency of the telic aim. The first impulses of ethical perception lead the soul toward the consciousness of freedom. This is attained not in a state of individual seclusion but in society amid the stream of historical life. Contact with morally awakened fellow beings stimulates confidence and respect, the experience of which is the dawn of moral perception in every human being. A true power of will is born in him who, in the experience of a love which concerns itself for him, becomes conscious of a state of life in men, imperceptible to sense, and has confidence in them. But in this the capacity of religious experience has come into being. When that is earnestly practised which is given in this conduct of trust, there is a sense of being possessed of a power affording an experience of something otherwise entirely remote. This wonder has oftentimes been conceived and described in its glory. Wherever religion has given itself expression the wonder has at least been touched upon. The incomparable boon given in the impulse of trust is the inner situation in which the human subject may be wholly overwhelmed. Men in whom this is not possible are isolated by their inner exclusiveness. It is a rescue from darkness to approach a power that has open access to the soul. This takes place the moment in which one bows in trust and reverence before the beneficence of a personality, which becomes noticeable by the act of transfixing one in the motive of those impulses. Release from deadly isolation, or unfree selfishness, is possible if in trust in a person one becomes conscious of him so as to impose an unconditional requirement upon himself. Naturally one confides in another only so far as the other inspires the conviction that he is not self-seeking, but acts in obedience to an absolute command given by the singleness of his willing. But there must also arise in the subject the recognition of the unconditionally necessary to which his will adheres, or candid trust becomes impossible. As one trusts another that he is inwardly true, he becomes such himself. As one sets up before himself what shall bind him eter-
nally, there arises in him the sense of freedom, in which he realizes himself as wholly in submission.
The consciousness of freedom emerging from the
elementary ethical transaction is a condition of the
life of religion. For reflection upon religion that is
experienced reveals that therein one
6. Religion knows himself dependent upon a power and God. from which there is no escape. A human being who finds himself in the
movement of history, because by voluntary service to others he is promoted to confidence and therefore to ethical perception, is on the way to religion, if the challenge to unqualified reality embraces also those individual experiences. Only in the complete contemplation of all the real can God be approached. Religion can be a blessed certainty only to one who can uprightly confess that when he found it he confronted naught but reality in all its terrors. Most important of all experiences must be that in which that power by which man is conscious of being wholly vanquished becomes distinct. This becomes possible only where, by voluntary service of others, one arrives at ethical self-determination, or the experience of love. Were there in a man no echo of grateful respect to others, he would be God-forsaken. Only from recollections which awaken in the soul does the irresistible inward-ruling power arise. But this experience vanishes again when much appears in the same person that militates against such confidence. Men themselves afford the means, in the ascent to ethical knowledge, of comparing them with that which reveals their human limitations. Religion becomes real in that moment when the spiritual power already known in experience is abstracted from the individual places of revelation and asserts itself for human consciousness as a self-existent life which answers to pure submission in human experience. How this transpires is unknown, but where it occurs it means, first, the surrender to the power of the good, or morality, and also the revelation of God as the power from which there is no escape and which reveals itself as seeking love. It is the same power that, in individual impulses to confidence, moves man to humility and benevolence, but is now extended as omnipotent goodness over all existence.
To make the power or the certainty of religion more evident one must not only consider its source but also its operation. It was a felicitous step when the Reformers designated faith or obedience to the experienced revelation of God as regeneration. With every closer approximation of
7. Regen- the inner life to God, affording a new eration. and deeper grounding of faith in him,
the certainty of religious assurance advances. The spiritual power which overcomes man in this act of self-surrender ever carries him beyond the previous limits of his strength. Every moment in which man is inwardly possessed, God is to him the one who rules supremely in all the depths of his being; and yet, at the same time, he is brought to the full realization of his inward autonomy. The inner self-existence of the truly vital is possessed only as one breaks through the confines within which he moved before. That which is retained of the past the blind instinct of self-preservation of
Religion