OUT-OF-DATE BELIEF

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 621, 25 March 1929, Page 14

OUT-OF-DATE BELIEF

OUTSPOKEN CHAPLAIN WHY GOD ALLOWS SIN Two thousand young men and women listened recently to a remarkable address by Canon Raven. a chaplain to the King. A DDRESSIN'G the Student Christian *** Movement at Liverpool, the Canon said that in the last two generations the Church’s interpretations of the universe had entirely changed. “Those who hanker after traditional orthodoxy,” he said, “should remember that it is not primarily the scientists who have revolted against that ancient traditional scheme. “It is those of us who feel that that, scheme does outrage to the conception of God w’hicli we see in Jesus Christ. “Biology, psychology, textual criticism and the scientific study of history have made havoc of it. That is the secret of the bewilderment of our time.” It was easy to construct a philosophy, modelled upon Jesus, in the small and friendly universe of pre-Darwinian days. “It is amazingly hard for us to feel that the revelation in Jesus can be applied to a universe in whose development cruelty, pain and lust have taken so obvious a place by men whose animal ancestry and instincts are only too evident.” Good Out of Evil The great task of the. present generation was to grasp “this sorry scheme of the things entire and make sense of it.” In that task, the life and words of Christ supplied the clue. “A philosophy which tries to explain the universe in terms of a dualism of God and the devil is not only unchristian. but unsatisfactory. “We have got to recognise that evil falls within a universe for which God is responsible. “We cannot absolve God from permitting the existence of sin and pain. “I believe that those who have suffered most will feel that God achieves by means of suffering—yes, and of sin—that which Tie could not effect at any lesser cost, that as a result of evil we get a revelation of love which would otherwise he impossible. “It is on that line that we must work.”