The Double Search by Rufus Jones

First published: 1906

Edition(s) used:The Double Search: God’s Search for Man and Man’s Search for God, Studies in Atonement and Prayer. Chicago: John C. Winston, 1937

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Meditation and contemplation; spiritual treatise

Core issue(s):Connectedness; God; Jesus Christ; love; mysticism; psychology; soul; union with God

Overview

At the outset of The Double Search, Rufus M. Jones invokes the myth in Plato’s Symposion (c. 399-390 b.c.e.; Symposium, 1701) that man in his original nature was a round being with four legs, four arms, one head, and two faces. Plato defines love between humans as the longing to return to this original state, in which each human was perfectly joined to another. While Plato argues that there is a higher love—namely, the soul’s longing to return to eternal Truth—Jones believes that our love for God is radically similar to our love for other people. Thus Plato’s parable of human love can also be taken as a parable of religious love. God and humanity were originally one, a “divine whole” divided at human birth by the emergence of our individuality. God longs to be reunited with us as much as we long to be reunited with God. Christ represents the fulfillment of this double search; Christ is the round man in whom God and humanity are one.

Jones believes that his view of Christ is not undermined by modern science or biblical criticism. While other views of Christ are called into question by scientific rejections of supernatural claims and by literary critical rejections of the simple unity of biblical texts, Jones believes that his approach avoids these problems. His approach to Christ is an expression of the psychology of New Thought that began to be popular in America in the mid-nineteenth century. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, the father of New Thought, Jones regards the historical Christ primarily as an example of how persons can realize the presence of God in their own lives. He believes that the outward, historical revelation of Christ is an important guide to God, much as Ludwig van Beethoven is an important instructor in music. Christ, however, is fundamentally an inward reality for Jones. The incarnation is an ongoing psychological event.

Like founder of Christian Science Mary Baker Eddy, the most famous proponent of New Thought, Jones understands Christ as the idea of divine love. He further believes that having the idea of divine love enables human beings to represent Christ to others. Also like Eddy, Jones believes that religious idealism amplifies without contradicting modern science. However, while Eddy focused on the health-giving effects of Christian idealism, in The Double Search Jones is primarily interested in reflecting on the role that God and Christ play in the human psyche. He defines God as the spiritual personality that human persons develop through their love of God. He uses the term “Christ” as a means of discussing the evolution of the human personality.

Viewed in relation to the evolution of human society, Christ represents the historical moment when humankind became fully aware of God as the ideal toward which it should rightly strive. Jones believes that the Hebrew prophets were dimly aware of this Christ ideal but that their primitive culture prevented them from fully realizing this ideal. The birth of Christ represents a new era of cultural maturity. Christ is the great divide in the history of human evolution. He embodies humanity’s successful striving for the ideal self that pulls it out of its lower nature.

The spiritual evolution of humankind is the result of cooperating forces. On one side, as we strive for an ideal self, we push ourselves upward. God is this ideal self. On the other, by opening ourselves to the compelling force of our ideal self, we are drawn upward by its embrace. This is the point Jones continually reiterates: the uplifting pull of the ideal self cooperates with our effort to push ourselves upward from below. Human beings’ efforts to improve themselves are met by spiritual cooperation from above; God is always reaching down to draw us upward. Jones pictures God as a universal force permeating human personalities, much as sunlight permeates the natural world, infusing all organisms with the power of life. Just as in the natural world the capacity to absorb sunlight differentiates a giant oak from a daisy, so in the human world, persons who open themselves fully to God and his uplifting love grow spiritually stronger and more loving than persons who absorb less of his love.

Some confusion results from the fact that Jones sometimes speaks of God as the Divine Other and of his love as a force outside the individual, and at other times he speaks of God and his love as aspects of human personality. Although by identifying him as the person’s ideal self Jones implies that God can be understood in terms of human psychology, he ultimately relinquishes this line of thought in favor of mysticism. His experiences of God’s love are so fundamental to his worldview that, like other mystics, he ultimately defines himself and others in terms of God.

In his chapter on Christian atonement, Jones defines sin as our disobedience of our own good intentions. He believes that persons seek deliverance from the selfish drives that prevent them from following their own visions of goodness. He argues furthermore that sin corrupts not only the sinner but also the sinner’s view of God. The idea of an angry God who demands appeasement is the erroneous but inevitable by-product of the guilt persons feel when they fail to obey the higher principles they know to be right.

The correlation between religious faith and childhood experiences of parental authority is essential to Jones’s religious views. In his chapter on the atonement, he compares the disobedient and frightened child’s desire to appease his father with the primitive religious belief that an angry deity requires human sacrifice. In both cases the felt experience of sin colors perceptions of authority, causing it to seem stern and distant rather than warm and loving. Although Jones interprets primitive religious fear in terms of childhood guilt and compares a sinner’s relation to God with a child’s relation to its father, he stops short of discussing the possible relationship between guilt and love.

From the perspective of Jones’s mysticism, the Gospel dissolves the pagan fear of God and reveals him to be an inherently loving and tender Father. This does not mean that the Christian God either blinks at disobedience or does not require repentance for sin. The divine Father no more overlooks sin than any responsible parent overlooks errancy in a child. However, like the remonstrances of every loving parent, God’s corrections and rebukes are expressions of his love for his children. God actually suffers with his children just as other parents suffer with their children when they fail.

The idea that our sin draws down God’s suffering is essential to Jones’s whole view of the relationship between God and humankind. Jones believes that sin is not confined to the sinner; every act of sin affects every other part of the organic whole that God and humanity comprise. When a person sins, God reacts; he feels the sin himself and suffers on behalf of the sinner. Thus Jones identifies God’s love with vicarious suffering. Furthermore, he believes that this suffering defines holiness. Holiness always involves sacrificial acts in behalf of others. Holiness is the vicarious suffering that is spiritual love.

In the final analysis, holiness is a means of compelling holiness in others. While Jones rejects the idea that God demands human sacrifice as appeasement, he argues that God willingly sacrifices himself for humanity and that everyone who realizes this is compelled by that sacrifice. He also argues that we represent God to each other by acts of holiness that embody vicarious suffering. This process of being compelled by the vicarious sufferings of another is not a matter of involuntary assent but compels our active and total responsivity. The realization that God sacrifices himself for us prompts a radical transformation in our will and stimulates a lifelong faith in the goodness of God. Although Jones does not discuss it fully, guilt plays an essential role in the internal logic of this religious psychology and is not limited to its primitive phases. Just as a child’s love for its father can be stimulated by the guilt it feels when the father suffers on its behalf, so guilt is essential to the underlying process by which human beings feel compelled to return the love of their divine Father.

In the final chapter of The Double Search, Jones turns to the subject of prayer. He defines prayer as the opening of the soul to God and argues that the effort to communicate with God elicits his response and actually establishes fellowship with him. Jones objects to the idea that prayer is an effort to interrupt the chain of physical causation, and he welcomes scientific critiques of such primitive conceptions. In Jones’s view, prayer is not a means to some utilitarian end but an end in itself. Prayer is the spontaneous outreach of the soul toward the circle of life beyond itself. Although opening the soul to larger forces of energy may have utilitarian benefits, such as increased health or perspicacity, the real meaning of prayer is in the act of praying itself. The process by which one opens oneself to God is its own reward.

In Jones’s view, there can be no subjective need without “an objective stimulus which has stimulated the need.” Extended theologically, this view translates into the theory that longing for communication with God is proof of the existence of his personhood and of his capacity to communicate with us. The soul’s outreach toward God inevitably leads to enjoyment of immediate fellowship with him. Prayer in its highest form is “actual social fellowship.” God is not a lonely sovereign but a person who, like all other persons, exists in relation to other persons.

Interwoven throughout Jones’s testimony to the organic social relationship between God and human beings are statements about the organic spiritual relationships among human beings. The theory that social relationships are central to the spiritual life is the theme of Jones’s influential Social Law in the Spiritual World (1904), to which he refers the reader of The Double Search for philosophic groundwork. In Jones’s mysticism, the ties between God and humanity are often manifest in relationships among persons. He believes that we find God in our relationships with other human beings. Thus social life is essential to the mystic’s apprehension of God.

Christian Themes

Jones teaches that one does not seek God alone; God is equally fervent in his search for each human being. This double search is represented in the person of Jesus Christ, who is both God reaching down toward humankind and humankind reaching up toward God. The “double search” is characterized by atonement and prayer: Atonement is the process by which God loves and suffers with us and, in so doing, compels our devotion; prayer is the process by which we open ourselves to God and, in so doing, establish fellowship with him.

Sources for Further Study

Fuller, Robert C. Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. An excellent study of the close relationship between psychological theory and American religious thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hedstrom, Matthew S. “Rufus Jones and Mysticism for the Masses.” Cross Currents 54, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 31-44. A fourteen-page essay that addresses Jones’s efforts to bring spirituality to everyday people and their problems.

Jones, Rufus M. The Later Periods of Quakerism. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. An important study of the history of Quaker spirituality.

Jones, Rufus M. Rufus Jones Speaks to Our Time: An Anthology. Edited by Harry Emerson Fosdick. New York: Macmillan, 1951. A good collection of excerpts from Jones’s writings organized by religious themes.

Jones, Rufus M. Social Law in the Spiritual World: Studies in Human and Divine Inter-Relationship. New York: George H. Doran, 1923. A pioneer study in New Thought exploring the relationship between mysticism and social life.

Meyer, Donald. The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan. 1965. Rev. ed., with a new introduction. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. A good overview of the history and issues involved in the New Thought tradition from Emerson to Norman Vincent Peale.