A Different World: Part 3

 

            This begins the third installment of a reflection about change in the Church under the title, “A Different World.” In the first two essays, I have attempted to describe the immediate post WWII  church as I experienced it and  the dramatic changes which occurred in the turbulent 1960’s to offset that settled 1950’s church. For the purpose of discussion, I have asked a question about why the Episcopal Church in particular and the Mainline Protestant Churches in general seemed to be so poorly prepared for the onslaught of secularism which hit them in full force in the 1960’s. The question was asked because there seemed to be advance warning from several highly respected sources.

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             In the aftermath of two unbelievably destructive World Wars in the first half of the 20^th century, some individuals began to take a critical look at the theology and beliefs of Christianity. This in itself was not earthshaking. Throughout the long history of the Church, there have been individuals who have sensed the needs of the age in which they were living and have questioned the ability of the church to meet those needs without making some changes (adjustments) in the theology which it was teaching to its people. For example:

In the first Christian century, the theological contributions of Paul and the Hellenistic author of John’s Gospel, enabling the Church to move out into the wider world, would need to be mentioned.

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354-430), lived his life between the collapsing classical world and the beginning of the Middle Ages. He established orthodox Christian doctrines (sin, grace, the Trinity) which would dominate the Western Church for 500 years. He was deeply influenced by Neo-Platonism (Plotinus).  His work was a stabilizing influence in the gathering chaos of the medieval period.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) achieves the great medieval Scholastic synthesis between Aristotelian philosophy and the faith of the Church. He in effect struck a much needed balance the demands of faith and reason.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) raised his voice in the battle between the needs of the individual conscience and the established authority of the Church and in the process lit the spark which set off the Protestant Reformation, thereby dramatically altering the history of Western culture.

 In the second installment of this essay, I briefly outlined the contributions of  several theologians whose “prophetic voices” heralded the coming advances of secularism and offered suggestions for change which would put the Church in a better position to preach its message in language which would better appeal to modern individuals.

Briefly, I will restate those contributions. The theological fervent in the first half of the 20^th century was led by German theologians: Karl Barth in 1919 attacking Protestant liberal theology with his publication of The Epistle to the Romans, Rudolf Bultmann and his proposal to demythologize the New Testament, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his call from a Nazi prison for a form of Christianity that does not depend on the practice of religion; and Paul Tillich who, using the methodology of depth psychology, reformulated God as the ground of being. Obviously these individuals were all European theologians and their work seems to have had limited initial impact in the United States because of translation issues and the post-war stability and optimism of the 1950’s. The next decade, however, was to be a different story.   

The Spirit of the Times

            The 1960’s began a period in American social history of open rebellion against authority. Campus violence was common. The civil rights movement was gathering momentum. These were the years of the beginning of the sexual revolution. The decade of the 1960’s also began the escalating process of the extreme secularization of American society. A difficult road lay ahead for American Christianity and especially for mainline Protestant churches. The days of a kinder, simpler faith had passed! It would have been surprising if the authority of the church had gone unchallenged! “Modern American culture in the 1960’s,” according to Langdon Gilkey, writing in Naming The Whirlwind, “can only be described as a secular age for which categories and symbols of transcendence, especially those pertaining to God were empty, irrelevant, and unheeded – and thus it was announced that God was dead for our time.”

Those of us who have lived through the past fifty years in American society and in the Episcopal Church know from experience the many changes that this transition has brought. Some of the change has been positive while others such as declining church attendance and membership have been painful. As has been stated several times already in this essay, it would have been helpful if there could have been some advance warning of the approaching difficulty for the church, some strategy for the church to counter the blow of the advancing secularity. Actually there was an abundance of such prophecy! In the nineteen-fifties and sixties there was a great deal written about the challenges that a dominant secularity would pose for the church.  

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"Honest To God" Revisited

            Systematic criticism from an English speaking insider appeared in the Anglican Communion in 1962 with the publication of Honest To God by the Bishop of Woolwich, England, John A.T. Robinson. In his book, Bishop Robinson began by asking a simple question: what is the true defense of Christian truth? Is it a “firm reiteration in fresh and intelligent contemporary language of the faith once delivered to the saints?” Or is it instead a much more radical recasting of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself? He would opt for the latter.

In 1962 there was a growing gulf between, on the one hand, the traditional orthodox supernaturalism in which traditional faith was framed and, on the other hand, the categories which the world found meaningful. Bishop Robinson wrote Honest To God as an argument for the need of a radical reinterpretation of the Christian message in modern times. It was also a personal confession of his feelings about Christian beliefs and doctrine, feelings which he had suppressed for some time. His concerns would span the whole spectrum of Christian theological loci: the authority of scripture, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and, perhaps most importantly, the question of the reality of God.

Robinson felt that the use of the word “God” had become so impregnated with a outmoded way of thinking that it needed to be discarded if, in his words, “the gospel was going to signify anything.” In Bishop Robinson’s mind, the idea of a God who is a separate, distinct supernatural being and who is personal had become a stumbling block for moderns. What John Robinson was really getting at in his argument to discard primitive constructs and mythologies was an attempt to replace them with contemporary language and concepts. He believed that people who live in a post-supernatural world were not going to be drawn to a religion based upon supernatural stories, doctrine and revelation. If Christianity was going to survive and have any chance of recapturing the imagination of secular human beings, Robinson felt that there was no time to lose in detaching it [Christianity] from this “theistic mode of thought.”  The urgent task in his mind was to somehow frame a conception of God and the Christian gospel which does not depend on the projection of God as a person who dwells in a specific place, i.e. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” . . .

            These were startling words to be addressed to the church in 1962 by one of its Bishops. Robinson was certainly not alone in the direction of his thinking. He had been deeply influenced by the work of the popular German systematic theologian Paul Tillich, particularly several of his sermons published in a collection titled The Shaking of the Foundations. It was published in English in 1948. The choice of this title conveyed Tillich’s conviction that the foundations of traditional Christian theology had been shaken and they must now be reconstructed. Paul Tillich instructed his listeners: “Forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even the word itself.” This is precisely the message which Bishop Robinson was attempting to convey in Honest To God. 

            John Robinson went on to say that the story of the Incarnation is mythical. He saw the encounter with Jesus as purely transformative, a complete reorientation of human being, mirroring the example of Jesus, “whose only concern is for others, who maintains the freedom from self to the end.”

            Bishop Robinson considered it to be a “religious perversion” when worship becomes a realm into which to withdraw from the world to be with God. Traditionally, “holy” has meant that which is not common. The purpose of worship, according to Bishop Robinson, was not to retire from the secular into the department of religion (the sacred), let alone to escape from this world into the other world, but to open oneself to a meeting with Christ “in the common, to open oneself to that which has the power to penetrate superficiality and to redeem one from alienation.”

            What John Robinson was attempting to do – relying heavily on the theological insights of Paul Tillich and also, surprisingly, the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer – was to ground Christian faith and belief in reality (the ground of all being) instead of supernaturalism. Robinson saw clearly that in the post-scientific world, the natural world is all that there is (reality) and God, faith, and belief must be grounded there to be believable. This was a movement towards liberal humanism, an attraction which he acknowledges in the book. It is a humanism firmly grounded in a confidence in humanity’s ability to work in community to make positive progress towards the good, i.e. “judging, forgiving, supporting in time of need, providing ethical ideals, etc.”  

Unless the church could accomplish the necessary reconstruction of its theology and worship using his model, Bishop Robinson believed that it was set for decline and fall. He wrote in 1962 that we, Christians, need to prepare for a revolution, a change of the pattern of Christianity, and unless that preparation is made, it – Christianity – will be abandoned. The church must identify itself fully with the things and people of the world just as the incarnate Lord did. There should be no “otherworldliness” about the church.

So, in summation, because of Bishop Robinson’s major overriding concern about how the church would fare in the face of the inevitable dominance of the secular spirit in Western culture, his solution was to offer the outline of what we could call “a radical theology” to counter secularity. In some sense, it became a matter of, if you can’t beat them (secularists), join them.

The principles of this “radical theology” according to Landon Gilkey, a theologian teaching at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in the 1970’s,  were that there was to be an acknowledgment that humanity had come of age (Bonhoeffer’s words) and was now autonomous (the secular spirit) and not theonomous (dependent of the guidance & authority of God.) The idea of a sacred deposit of faith or “religious mode of knowing” was to be discarded. Theological statements needed be restricted to what one actually believes and accepts and, importantly, what makes sense in one’s cultural context. The “new” Christianity should focus only on the historical Jesus as a source of ethical guidance. Categories such as divine, suprahistorical, eschatological, and supernatural should be regarded as meaningless. And finally, the new Christianity should be an action centered view of human existence, i.e. theology should follow and not precede experience. The autonomy of humanity would change all the categories!

Postscript

            The final comment needs to be a question. To what extent has the Protestant mainline church in general and the Episcopal Church in particular moved deliberately [emphasis mine] to incorporate the several aspects of Bishop Robinson’s model for a new Christianity in order to be equipped to exist and compete for loyalty in the post-modern culture of the early 21st century?

 

 

A Different World: Part Two

 

            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. I talked about the 1950’s as being an expansive time for the Episcopal Church. There was a drive across the country to found new churches in the suburbs and to replace old buildings with new, more modern facilities. It was a time of growth and prosperity in the country and in the church! The defining forces of the 1950’s, according to the essayist John Lahr, were velocity, mobility, and confidence. The increasing number of automobiles on the road was a visible witness to the mobility. I can still remember the day in 1956 when our family got a second car. It was the Eisenhower years; we liked Ike! American society had put the war securely in the past and was focused on building the economy, i.e. living the good life. The age of the transformation of American citizens to consumers was in full swing. Credit cards were in the not too distant future. Television had made its appearance. Elvis Presley had started a music revolution. Times were good but ominous signs (of change) were on the horizon and the church would not escape. The turbulent 1960’s and its challenges to authority of all kinds were just around the corner.

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, he received his law degree (JD) from Yale in 1938. After employment with the Securities and Exchange Commission and service in the Navy during WWII, he was attracted to the liturgy of the Episcopal Church and decided to pursue ordained ministry. He had been born a Roman Catholic. He studied at both Union Theological Seminary and the General Theological Seminary. He was ordained to the Diaconate in 1944 and to the Priesthood in 1946. In rather quick succession, he was the Rector of a parish in Poughkeepsie, New York and Chaplain at Vassar College (1947-49); Chaplain at Columbia University and chair of the Religion Department (1949-52); Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City (1952-58); and the 5^th Bishop of California (1958- 66). He resigned in 1966 and became the theologian in residence at the Institute for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. He left the Episcopal Church in April of 1969 and announced his intention to do so in an article in Look magazine titled, “Why I Am Leaving the Church.” By then he was dabbling in the occult and Spiritualism. He was found dead on September 7, 1969 in the Judean Desert near the 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!

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            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 17^th 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 19^th & 20^th century - beginning with Schleiermacher - was most impressive! In Protestant theology & biblical studies, their work was head and shoulders above everyone else.

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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 13^th 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, the most advanced nation in the world, descended into the madness of National Socialism (the Nazis). Where was God?

            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 in the 1930’s and came to the United States to teach at Union Theological Seminary in New York where his thought impressed and influenced a great number of people. Among them was James Pike, who recruited him to teach at Columbia University.  Tillich wrote numerous books on a variety of cultural subjects and among them was a large three volume Systematic Theology which was used in the introductory systematics course when I was a student at CDSP in the late 1960’s. Tillich was very “in” then!

            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.