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 20th 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
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 20th
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
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
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?
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