Christian Individualist

One of the world's top authorities on the New Testament is a plain-speaking pipe-smoking Presbyterian minister named Ernest Findlay Scott. For most of his 78 years, English-born Dr. Scott has been writing about Christianity and teaching it. For 19 years he was at Union Theological Seminary, where former colleagues still recall his shyness, forceful lectures and dry wit.

No admirer of left-wing ideology, Dr. Scott once defined the difference between Socialism and Communism as "the difference between an ordinary dog bite and hydrophobia." Nor did he have any more use for other brands of collectivism. Returning from Europe on a German ship soon after Hitler came to power, he was summoned to a ceremony at which the new swastika emblem was raised in place of the republican flag. When an officer asked him to salute, he replied: "I would as soon salute that diagram as the first proposition of Euclid."

After retirement from Union in 1938, Dr. Scott went right on teaching (last year at Amherst) and writing. Latest of his 20-odd books, Man & Society in the New Testament (Scribner; $2.75), just published, is the July selection of the Religious Book Club. In it he vigorously hammers home the text that Christ's teaching is no blueprint for the Good Society, but a religion for individuals.

No Pure Ethic. The New Testament, says Dr. Scott, seems to "waver" between two basic ideas--that each man is an individual soul who must know and obey the will of God, and that each man must submerge his individuality in the great human brotherhood of which he forms a part. The Roman Catholic Church emphasized the social concept of Christianity; the Protestant Reformation reasserted the right of the individual to justify himself, in Paul's words, by faith alone. The truth, says Presbyterian Dr. Scott, is that Christ was never concerned with man-in-the-mass, but with showing individuals their proper relation to God.

"For Jesus," says Dr. Scott, ". . . religion was no mere shell, enclosing an ethic, which was the kernel. He thought of morality as growing out of religion, and existing for the sake of it. The idea that you may discard the religion of Jesus and still retain his pure morality is utterly mistaken, for without the religion you have nothing at all. ...

"Nothing, indeed, was further from the purpose of Jesus than to organize society on some new plan. ... He was not concerned with poverty as a social problem, for which some drastic solution must be found. He was seeking to create a new disposition in men. . . . Our modern ideal of a society so organized that all would be obliged to aid each other would perhaps have had little attraction for Jesus. He might have doubted whether the world would be any better when no place was left for charity. . . .

"[Jesus] saw clearly that if all kindness were embodied in some legal system, and nothing were left to individual pity and self-denial, it would be a miserable world. Men might secure more comfort but they would miss the true end of life, which is to conform your own will to the will of God."

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