The development of religion has kept pace with the development of human culture. To trace here the course of religion's historical development, and to observe it in connection with the whole process of social life, is a very effective and fitting way to understand the essential concept of religion. To observe religion by joining the parts of the religious facts into a meaningful, systematic relation would call for predetermined norms of value and a fixed logical form. But religion, which has vital experience at its center, has the essential character of something that must always be alive and moving, and so it can p. 65 easily be seen that it has in substance advanced and developed through history. Of course, taken part by part, one cannot say that the religion of primitive peoples is wholly undeveloped and the religion of modern people wholly developed. Just as civilization is often superficial, and savagery lies hidden beneath its skin, so there will also be cases in which a rationalized modern religion falls, in its fundamental spirit,¹ into blasphemy and betrayal. But even if we do not blindly follow a cheap historical optimism, we can point out that religion too, as the social experience of humankind has accumulated, has in substance passed through many historical stages and has advanced and developed.

In classifying the historical development of religion, we are faced at the outset with confused material and a multitude of opinions, and we feel no small perplexity. Siebeck,² on the basis of theological preconceptions, divided religion into three kinds, primitive religion, ethical religion and religion of redemption (Siebeck H., Lehrbuch dei[sic] Religiousphilosophie[sic]). Tiele,³ on the basis of philosophical theory, divided religion into two kinds, nature religion and ethical religion (Tiele, C. P., Elements of the Science of Religion). But Galloway,⁴ noting that the forms in which religion appears, and its content, are conditioned by the level of culture and by social conditions, said that religion can be summed up in three types: tribal⁵ religion, national religion and cosmic religion (Galloway, G., The Philosphy[sic] of Religion). Below, since religion and its stages of development are closely related to the conditions of life and to social circumstances, we intend to follow Galloway's scheme of classification just as it is.

Tribal Religion

p. 66 (1) The tribe is a small social group of primitive form, and may be called, broadly, an extension of the family system. People who belong to one tribe think of themselves as related by blood. Moreover, in primitive society the individual consciousness of each member had not developed, so that almost the whole of the individual's personality was absorbed by society; people held an idea of shared responsibility and lived under a common consciousness. They do not recognize any value in the personality of the individual self, or in an individual's own original standing or activity. They live more in others than in themselves; they lived in the community more than in the self. Their religion, therefore, belongs to the common consciousness, the common action and the common experience of society. Here primitive people's ideas of spirits, such as animism, spiritism⁶ and fetishism, became the basis on which religious practices for the peace and welfare of the tribe, such as totemism and ancestor worship, developed. The "totem" is the representative of the tribe's social spirit, and the clan god⁷ they believe in shares the tribe's rise and fall and its destiny. Ancestor worship deifies the tribe's forebears,⁸ and believes the chief of the tribe to be the tribe's guardian spirit.

(2) Tribal religion offered no higher ideal beyond satisfying desires for the immediate needs of daily life. On the banks of rivers in muddy flood, people had no choice but to live in ceaseless struggle with an unfavorable nature; in regions of harsh cold and heat, they had no thought but to resist the forces that threatened⁹ their lives at every moment. Their life, therefore, was realistic and practical through and through. They could not taste a life of leisure, such as the search for profound truth or rapture in selfless contemplation. Their religious rites were for the most part forms concerned with the food supply, such as offerings of crops or livestock, top. 67tem dances, animal disguises, tribal feasts and harvest festivals; rites for the onset of puberty;¹⁰ customs for marriage, birth and death; and acts imitating war.

(3) Tribal religion's idea of the nature of the objects it worshiped was imprecise. Their gods are shadowy, image-like¹¹ fictions that exercise powers above the human. According to their natures, some gods are friendly to human beings and some are malevolent. Though the gods were not clearly distinguished from one another as individual representations, for the most part a god dwells in some unusual object or place and responds to human prayers. But primitive people's religious rites consisted more in magical acts, meant to use the gods to fill human wants, than in a spirit of reverence for the gods. Each person could choose a suitable god as need arose and offer it sacrifice, but the clan god that represented the tribe belonged to that tribe alone, and so, for its time,¹² carried an exclusive limitation.

The Religion of Peoples¹³

(1) The tribal units of primitive times gradually disappeared through conquest or alliance, and were consolidated into unions as states. In this process of fusion great sacrifices of human culture were demanded; but on the other hand it is a fact that customs of other kinds flowed together, the experience of a wider range of humanity combined, and the limits of knowledge were enlarged.

As societies of tribal units came to form the society of a state, the naturalistic view of God of primitive times developed into a personal view of God. At times people believed the ruler of the state to be a spokesman who had received a commission from God, and at times they thought the hero of the age divine p. 68 in character, or a representation of authority.

Of course, the "humanizing" of God does not mean that the idea of believing natural objects to be gods had disappeared. For example, the Agni of the Veda was a fire god, the Persian Ahura Mazda a god of light, the Babylonian Marduk and the Egyptian Ra sun gods, the Greek Zeus and the Latin Jupiter sky gods, and Odin and Indra wind gods.¹⁴ But these same peoples also personified natural objects and worshiped them, and later many of their gods took the form of a wholly personal real being,¹⁵ like Osiris in Egypt, "Pallona" in Greece¹⁶ or Vishnu in India.

(2) The development of social forms and of social consciousness is accompanied by the development of moral ideas. Moreover, only when the idea of God leaves the stage of natural objects or material forces and advances to the stage of personality, or of the personally real, do morality and moral meaning come to attend the attributes and actions of God. God is then believed to be a real being possessing an ideal personality, who governs the moral law that rewards good and punishes evil.

If we consider the history of the development of Old Testament thought as well, as the consciousness and organization of the state developed around the eighth and ninth centuries B.C., the ethical claim became the center of the religious ideal. "You must hate evil and love good, and do righteous judgment in the gate; then perhaps Jehovah, the God of all things, will show mercy to the remnant of Joseph" (Amos 5:15, 21, 24).¹⁷ The demands of human moral life are grounded in the nature of God, the Lord of human existence and value. It is said that God is "merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in compassion and truth" (Exod. 34:3–7).¹⁸

p. 69 But the ethics of national religion is mechanical, partial and customary. "Mechanical" means that people obey a fixed social code unconditionally, under social constraint, and that moral ideals and conduct are not the free, personal expression of the individual. "Partial" means that people do not act on the universal principles of ethics, but either confine the standard to one region or, even where the standard is general, apply it in practice with distinctions of class and circumstance. "Customary" means that moral ideals have been formed as rules, and handed down, by social experience.

(3) As the form and consciousness of the state develop, the institutions and rites of religion also are gradually unified and develop. Historically, the unification of the state and the unification of religious institutions have for the most part gone together. When David and Solomon became kings of Judah, the first thing they undertook was to build the temple in the holy city of Jerusalem and to seek the unification of religious institutions. When there was no unified state, the many religious rites for farming and for war were scattered region by region. David's plan was to unify these complex institutions, to build a temple in the capital, to bring the local priests under control, and so, once a year, to gather the whole people in a joint religious and political movement to keep the great feasts.¹⁹

At a developed stage like the modern state, it is hard to embrace a single religion of a people, and a fixed religious rite cannot be forced on a nation's people.²⁰ Not only do culture and culture flow together and people and people merge; p. 70 within one state, too, various religions are freely believed and spread abroad. So long as that is so, there may be a religion that belongs to one state, but no religion or religious rite that the state may impose uniformly on its people is permissible. Yet whatever the religion, in its forms of expression it must reflect on the particular character of the people and on its traditional culture, and, so long as these do not run against the principles of religion, take a form it has digested as its own.²¹

Cosmic Religion

Cosmic religion is religion that claims to be the ultimate truth that every human being ought to believe. Historically, the religions that now regard themselves as cosmic religions and carry on mission throughout the world are only three, Islam,²² Buddhism and Christianity; all the rest are either tribal or else religions of a people. Cosmic religion transcends differences of race, the boundaries of lands and the ages of past and present, and is not bound by them. But this does not mean that a religion is cosmic only when everyone in the world believes it, or only when it has a long history. Nor can a religion necessarily be called cosmic because its ideal lies not only in the salvation of human beings but takes in even birds and beasts, grass and trees.

(1) First, cosmic religion longs for and pursues abiding value. It distinguishes, in our experience, what is short-lived from what is eternal. It divides the sacred from the "secular." And so religion senses directly, in our daily life, the highest and most eternal value, and interprets all experience in the light of this standard of abiding value. Religion seeks p. 71 absolute truth and absolute value, and continues in a conscious effort to possess them. For a human being cannot be satisfied with truth that is fragmentary, temporary and merely expedient. In many cases we move swiftly in the world of the senses and never cease to pursue new²³ stimuli of sensation day by day. But once this reaches a state of surfeit,²⁴ we soon feel weariness or even disgust toward it, realize how shallow the world of the senses is that once held such power to tempt us, and come to ask for a new turn in life. One does not live by bread alone, but by the word of God.²⁵ That the true purpose of human life lies not in matter but in spirit is a very commonplace thought, and a one-sided one;²⁶ yet it cannot be denied that it is a precious ideal, which now and then, by self-reflection, comes home to human beings who belong to the dust. But at times, too, people feel deeply a human transience that neither abundant goods nor earnest spiritual effort can overcome. They come to think that everything human is a delusion like a spring dream, and that humanity's claims to truth are no more than an inner connection²⁷ contained within the fact of its own existence. Here humanity and everything human are wholly denied, and people take refuge in the self-giving act²⁸ of the absolute, which is pure object. To cast away matter and insist on spirit alone, or to deny human experience and follow an absolute God, is not without difficulties, in theory or in practice. But unless we believe that the highest values learned in human experience make up the essential structure of the real in the universe, and that the will of God, in spite of human folly, weakness and defilement, is revealed in human experience and in the norms that experience points to, religious knowledge in any sense cannot be established. Therefore p. 72 religion may also be called, as Professor Hocking says, "the pursuit of objectivity."²⁹

(2) Second, cosmic religion is moral. Religion supplies the cosmic ground of morality, and morality is a requisite that makes up the essence of religion. Religion, therefore, is bounded by the moral. Unless, as religion, it points to goodness and righteousness, shows how noble and rich such a life is, and is a ceaseless spur and guide that makes us strive to live a moral life, it does not fulfill the function of religion. Buddhism's regard for the arhat's cultivation of mind, the monk's keeping of the precepts and the bodhisattva's advance in virtue; Muhammad's taking himself for a prophet of righteousness, purging the corrupt society of Arabia and requiring six moral vows of believers;³⁰ Christianity's taking over the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament just as they are, making them the concrete guide of conduct, and imposing³¹ strict moral discipline and duties; Confucianism's making the concrete ideal of cultivating oneself, ordering the family, governing the state and bringing peace to all under heaven its chief concern in practice,³² though it takes the ideas of heaven and of nature as the ground of the Way and of teaching, and requiring silent compliance with inherited social custom: all these show that any religion whatever must be thorough in its moral claims and in its moral practice. The religion that modern people ask for is a religion that believes in the grace of redemption and at the same time, with this grace become power, believes in the possibility of the completion of personality and the improvement of society, and shows moral practice.

(3) Third, cosmic religion does not cling to any particular institution or environmental element, but centers on vital, lived experience and the spiritual life, and lays weight on an earnest attitude of spirit that loves righteousness and would follow the truth, more than on any fixed doctrine or creed. John Wesley too once said, "Dost thou love God? That is enough for religion."³³ p. 73 This is, of course, a saying easily misunderstood. It goes without saying that it does not mean that outward forms are unnecessary in religion. We did not have spiritual experience just as we pleased, anyhow; in fact we come to have it on the basis of, or grounded in, a certain historical form of faith, that is to say, as the experience of the church, and this experience is then expressed again in the thought-patterns of the age. But at no time must faith be fixed in a set form. For faith is of such a nature that it must not be a mere husk, with creeds only and dead to life, or form only with its content empty. It is a living thing, to be lived through in the present. We should remember that in the past the many sectarian prejudices and bloody disasters arose, not from questions about vital experience, but for the most part from differences of form. What is asked of us is, first, a faith that has come to a deep, living realization in the soul and goes out into its age with a sense of mission.

But such attempts at a spiritual religion sometimes fall into syncretism. Examining the various forms of the historical religions, they set aside the differences of form and fix their eyes on some universal point of unity at the root of all these forms,³⁴ and so come to the broad, abstract conclusion that the religions of the whole world can be combined to rebuild a single "cosmic religion."³⁵ But this comes from ignoring the historical nature of religion and failing to see that faith is not an imitation of a general ideal, but must keep its absolute uniqueness as concrete, personal experience. A cosmic religion is not necessarily formed by mixing various religions. It is a religion that holds that the experience of redemption, lived through within³⁶ the historical, individual existence of religion, is for all human beings the command of the ought p. 74 and a glorious privilege.³⁷