The first installment of this essay about change
in the Church was a collection of post-WWII personal memories &
observations. The picture painted was taken
from my experience growing up in a parish church in Bismarck ,
North Dakota
Turmoil in the Church:
Modernity rears its ugly Head
The accelerating changes in American society mentioned
in the first installment directly impacted all institutions. The church was not
immune! One very important example quickly spring to mind. It is a parable of
sorts, about the many problems involving belief or the lack of it which would
soon confront the Episcopal Church. Those issues were embodied in the tragic career
of Bishop James Pike. The church was bitten by one of its own. His statements
and books, critical of the church and its theology, commanded a great deal of popular
interest & media coverage in those days. Bishop Pike was front page news in
the 60’s. I have in my files a copy of
the November 11, 1966
issue of Time with his picture on the
cover. On a slash across one corner is the statement: The Relevance of Faith & Myth in Twentieth Century Life. That
for Jim Pike was the issue, the relevance of the church and its teachings to
modern man! (It’s still the issue today, fifty years later.)
Pike was an
individual whose life and career was “meteoric,” as a 1999 article in The Living Church described him. He was
first of all intelligent and well educated. One has to wonder how much he could
have accomplished in a less volatile, more disciplined life. A brief summary of
his career(s) provides a clue to that volatility. A 1934 graduate of the University
of California Santa Barbara , California September
7, 1969 in the Judean Desert Dead Sea . He and his third wife Dianne were in
the Holy Land on their honeymoon and researching a book
they were writing. In his twenty-five years in the Episcopal Church, James Pike
did it all and burned himself out in the process. James Pike never seemed to
stay with one thing very long. He seemed always ready to embrace something new
as long as it was controversial.
I would be
the first to admit that this short biography in no way gives a complete picture
of Pike’s life and accomplishments. What it does show is the degree to which
his career unsettled the Episcopal Church. As his obituary in Time magazine noted, “For seventeen
years, Pike dominated the Episcopal Church in word and deed.” Much of it was not positive! The church seemed
totally unprepared to discuss the issues he was raising.
The opening salvo in his departure from
theological orthodoxy was fired on December
21, 1960 in an article in The
Christian Century. It was entitled “Three-Pronged Synthesis.” In it, Bishop
Pike denied the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, and described the Doctrine of
the Trinity as “excess baggage. An outcry about his opinions culminated in
cries of heresy. It finally came to a head six years later. A number of conservative
bishops did bring heresy charges against him and (after some negotiation) he
was censured by a majority in the House of Bishops in 1966. One comment made on
that occasion was that “a bishop was supposed to symbolize the unity of the
church.” The censure was part of a deal to avoid what would have been an
embarrassing heresy trial, a spectacle which the Episcopal Church definitely
did not want.
I was at
Grace Cathedral in September of 1968 when he came back to preach a farewell
sermon. He had resigned in 1966. His remarks were a lengthy, incoherent
diatribe by a man who was obviously not well. It was also an example of an
intellect which had run amok. Completely undisciplined! What was he searching
for? Jim Pike loved and perhaps needed the controversy that was gained by
fiercely challenging established positions. He was accomplished at it. After
all, he was a skilled attorney. People today still argue about whether or not
he was “good” for the church. I wonder whether or not he (and they) ever
thought about what he was doing to all those faithful people whose faith he was
aggressively challenging by his statements about their beloved beliefs. I doubt
it!
***********************
James Pike
was not an original thinker, particularly in the field of Christian theology.
Here I reach an important point in my argument. What Pike did was to present
some ideas which he had picked up from his (I am guessing) superficial reading
of the works of three well known German theologians. Their names were Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. Before I give a sampling of
their important ideas, I must talk a bit about a comment which I made earlier,
to the effect that there was an ongoing project by modernists in church and
society to complete what is called, “the Enlightenment Project.”
The
Enlightenment was an intellectual movement which began in the 17th
century. It was directed towards placing human knowledge on the secure footing
of the authority of human experience. The thinker who many acknowledge as the
initiator of Enlightenment thought was Rene Descartes (1596-1650). A
mathematician, he is rightly called the father of modern philosophy. Descartes
began his journey by questioning what he could know with certainty – the kind
of certainty that did not rely upon anything unobserved (a priori) for the explanation of natural events, but by the
submission of everything to reason. His doubting finally led him to the one
thing he could not doubt, i.e. the fact that he was thinking. He found his
beginning point in his now famous statement: “I think therefore I am.”
Descartes intellectual achievement marks the genesis of modern Western culture.
Its two most important elements are the ever diminishing authority of the
church and the increasing authority of science (scientific method). It was an
enormous shift of authority! Descartes through his investigations set down this
principle: “Nothing is to be recognized as religiously valid but that which can
be found in the reality present to us and produced again out of our direct
experience” [emphasis mine]. What we know as “The Modern World” was born
out of the Enlightenment viewpoint.
It has been
almost four centuries since Descartes began this intellectual revolution and it
has been a long epistemological history of tension between church and society.
The church has struggled to maintain its “sacred” foothold in the world.
Obviously Descartes’ insights spelled trouble for the church. The authority of
the church is based upon a supernatural category of “revealed” knowledge. The church
has always revered the Bible as divine revelation not based upon human
experience. What we talk about today as secularization is the movement of
society away from any dependence upon supernatural agency, any semblance of
revealed knowledge. Since World War II, this movement has accelerated. Because
of this fact, many liberal theologians in the twentieth century began
advocating for change in the Church in order for it to survive in the modern
world. Enter among others: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich.
I have to
say that I have for a long time been extremely impressed with the achievements
of the German theologians beginning with Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834),
the father of liberal theology. One of his teachings was that religion,
philosophy, and science do not contradict each other. Theology was on its way
to becoming anthropology! The contribution of German theologians in the 19th
& 20th century - beginning with Schleiermacher - was most
impressive! In Protestant theology & biblical studies, their work was head
and shoulders above everyone else.
*****************************
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer was a well known German theologian and churchman who became involved
in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was imprisoned and finally executed
in April, 1945 just before the end of the war in Europe .
While in prison, Bonhoeffer did some writing which after the war was collected
and published in 1952 in a book titled: “Letters and Papers from Prison.” In a
letter to a close friend, Eberhard Bethke, Bonhoeffer introduced several
theological conclusions which have made a deep impression on readers ever
since. He asked a question which had been bothering him: “What is Christianity
and what is Christ for us today?” One of
his main ideas was that he felt that there was a movement toward a religionless
Christianity. He wrote: “We are proceeding toward a time of no religions at
all. Men as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore.” What did he mean
by that? He went on -
“The movement beginning about the 13th century .
. . towards the autonomy of man in our time has reached a certain completion.
Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to
God as a working hypothesis. . . It is becoming evident that everything gets
along without God, and just as well as before. . .what we call God is being
more and more edged out of life, losing more and more ground.” Bonhoeffer wrote
about a world which in his mind had “come of age.” He described it as “the
adulthood of the world.” [It no longer needed a dependence on God.] He
described a world which has attained to such a realization of itself and the
laws which govern its existence that it is frightening.
The subject
of the autonomy (independence) of the world was a key theme for Bonhoeffer. He saw reason as the sufficient
instrument of religious knowledge and talked about the substitution of moral
principles for the Ten Commandments. He quoted Descartes: “The world is a
mechanism which runs on its own without the intervention of God.”
He returned
again and again to the theme of the growing tendency of asserting the autonomy
of Man and the world: There is no longer any need for God as a working
hypothesis, whether in morals, politics, or science. Nor is there any need for
such a God in religion and philosophy. In the name of intellectual honesty,
these working hypotheses must be dropped. God is teaching us that we must live
as men who can get along without him.”
Such were
the views of Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose life was cruelly taken from him by the
Nazis. Unfortunately, he did not live to see whether his predictions and observations
about the world would come about in the years following WWII. We can say in honesty that his comments about
the “coming of age” and the advancing autonomy of human beings were remarkably
prescient. This fact alone would certainly greatly impact the church.
Certainly,
Bonhoeffer’s views about the eroding need for the church are disturbing. But we
need to remember that this was a man who had watched as his beloved Germany
Much has
been written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his theology since the war. I would
guess that his most popular book is “The Cost of Discipleship,” which begins
with the statement: “When Jesus calls a man, he bids him come and die.” What I
have quoted in the above few paragraphs are opinions of his which bore
directly, in my mind, on the future situation of the church. Read them and then
look around at the world and society in which we are living. Weren’t Bonhoeffer’s
observations about humanity “coming of age” accurate? I wonder why the church
was not more concerned about the possibilities inherent in Bonhoeffer’s
writings?
Paul Tillich
Paul
Tillich is a German theologian who left Germany United States New York Columbia
University
He wrote at
the beginning of the first volume: “Theology as a function of the Christian
Church must serve the needs of the Church. A theological system is supposed to
serve two needs: the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the
interpretation of this truth for every new generation. Theology moves back and
forth between these two poles: the eternal truth of its foundation and the
temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.” That is an
excellent definition of the persistent, recurrent problem which faces the
church in every age, the imperative to preach the unchanging Gospel in
contemporary, understandable language and symbolism.
Tillich is
best known for his renaming of God as “the ground of all being.” This concept
was presented initially in a famous sermon which he preached titled “The Depth
of Existence.” It was later published in a collection of sermons titled “The
Shaking of the Foundation.” This was an apt title, for the foundations of the
church and faith were being violently shaken by the modern world which
according to Bonhoeffer had “come of age.” God - Tillich was saying - was not a
personal other who was “out there” or “up there in heaven” of whose existence
we have to convince ourselves, but the ground of our very being. He wrote:
The name of
this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all
being is God.
That depth is what the word God means.
And if that
word has not much
meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the
depths of your life, of the source
of your being, of your ultimate
concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation.
John A.T.
Robinson,
Honest To God (p. 22)
We see what Tillich has done. He
has redefined God from a person who exists up there somewhere (a supranatural
image), and replaced that with something much nearer to us, something we all
share in, the depth of being itself. The power of being! Brilliant!
Tillich wrote: “Forget everything
traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself.” He
said: “Our period of time has decided for the secular world. That was a great
and much needed decision.”
I think that those reading this
essay can easily understand from where both Bonhoeffer and Tillich were coming.
A new secular world had dawned following WWII and if the church was going to
remain relevant, it must speak to human beings in a new situation. It must
speak a new language! It must find new methodologies to preach the gospel. That
is one of the keys to Tillich’s thought. He used the vocabulary of depth
psychology and Existentialism to set forth his explanation of who or what God
is.
Rudolf Bultmann
Bultmann’s name is easily
recognizable as the German theologian who said that we must demythologize the
Bible if modern people are going to engage with it. He really put it quite
simply. He said something to the effect that people who are driving automobiles
and listening to radios are going to find it very difficult if not impossible to identify with the biblical world of demons
and miracles. He meant that “the conception of a supernatural order which
invades and perforates this world must be abandoned.” Rudolf Bultmann outlines
his thesis in 1941 in an essay entitled, “The New Testament and Mythology.” A
more popular form of his work appeared in English under the title, “Jesus Christ
and Mythology.”
Obviously
all three of the theologians whose work I have cited were German and
it is understandable that their books would have limited influence in the
English speaking world. I have been pushing the idea in this essay (with the
assistance of hindsight) that it would have been nice if the church had
received some advance warning of the secular onslaught to come.
This second
installment has become long enough. In the next installment, I will talk about
the contribution of an Anglican Bishop named John A. T. Robinson who wrote a
controversial book entitled Honest To
God. It was published in 1963.
No comments:
Post a Comment