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Niebuhr
Essays in applied Christianity
ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
ESSAYS IN
APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
by REINHOLD NIEBUHR
selected and edited by D. B. Robertson
LIVING AGE BOOKS
published by MERIDIAN BOOKS New fork
REINHOLD NTJEBUHR
Reinhold Niebuhr is vice-president of the faculty and
professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological
Seminary in New York City. He was born in 1892 in
Wright City, Missouri, where his father was an Evangelical
Church pastor. After preparing for the ministry at Eden
Theological Seminary in St. Louis, he studied at Yale
University, taking his B.D. degree in 1914 and his M.A.
degree in the following year. He then became a pastor in
Detroit, where he served until 1928, when he was called
to teach philosophy of religion at Union Theological
Seminary. Among his many books are LEAVES FROM THE
NOTEBOOKS OF A TAMED CYNIC and AN INTERPRETATION
OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS, both of which are available in
Living Age Books editions.
ivi
A Living Age Books Original
Published by Meridian Books, Inc. April 1959
First Printing March 1959
Copyright 1959 by Meridian Books, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-7189
Manufactured in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Introduction by D. B. Robertson 11
I. The Weakness of Common Worship in
American Protestantism
A Christmas Service in Retrospect 29
Sects and Churches 34
Sunday Morning Debate 42
Worship and the Social Conscience 48
A Problem of Evangelical Christianity 52
The Religious Pluralism of America 56
The Weakness of Common Worship in American
Protestantism 57
Religiosity and the Christian Faith 63
II. Can the Church Give a "Moral Leaf?
The Weakness of the Modern Church 69
Moralists and Politics 78
Church and State in America 84
Which Question Comes First for the Church? 87
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 90
The Church and Equal Rights for Women 93
Utilitarian Christianity and the World Crisis 95
Social Christianity 102
The Protestant Clergy and U.S. Politics 106
Prayer and Politics 114
Communism and the Clergy 117
Literalism, Individualism, and Billy Graham 123
The Security and Hazard of the Christian
Ministry 132
III. Barthianism and the Kingdom
Earth Apostle of the Absolute 141
Barthianism and the Kingdom 147
Barthianism and Political Reaction 150
Marx, Barth, and Israel's Prophets 156
Karl Barth and Democracy 163
Karl Barth on Politics 165
We Are Men and Not God 168
An Answer to Karl Barth 175
Why Is Barth Silent on Hungary? 183
Barth on Hungary: An Exchange 190
IV. The Catholic Heresy
Arrogance in the Name of Christ 197
Pius XI and His Successor 201
The Catholic Heresy 207
The Pope's Christmas Message 212
Three Elements in Papal Leadership 215
The Pope on Property 217
Our Relations to Catholicism 220
The Godly and the Godless 226
Catholics and Divorce 229
Catholics and Motives of Action 231
The Rising Catholic-Protestant Tension 233
The Pope's Domesticated God 238
The Increasing Isolation of the Catholic Church 244
Catholics and Politics: Some Misconceptions 247
Protestants, Catholics, and Secularists on the
School Issue 253
The Catholic Hierarchy's Analysis of the Ills of
Our Day 256
V. The Church and the Churches:
The Ecumenical Movement
A. The Ecumenical Issue in the United States
The Ecumenical Issue in the United States 265
The Reunion of the Church through the Re-
newal of the Churches 279
Has the Church Any Authority? 285
The Church Speaks to the Nation 290
The National Council Delegation to the Rus-
sian Church 292
B. The Problems of a World Church
The Oxford Conference on Church and State 295
The World Council of Churches 297
Protestantism in a Disordered World 300
The World Council at Amsterdam 305
The World Council and the Peace Issue 311
The Problems of a World Church 314
Hope Needs Faith and Love 316
Christ the Hope of the World: What Has
History to Say? 323
Our Dependence Is on God 331
Greek Orthodoxy and the Ecumenical Move-
ment 341
Sources and Acknowledgments 345
ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
INTRODUCTION by D. B. Robertson
Since the beginning of the ecumenical movement and the
totalitarian attacks upon the church which have generally
paralleled this movement, a great deal of thought has been
given to the question of the nature of the church and of
its peculiar function in society. More attention has been
given to the ''doctrine of the church" in this period, in fact,
than in any time since the sixteenth century on the con-
tinent and the seventeenth century in England. There are
those who would say that the question has been more
thoroughly examined in our time than at any time before
in the history of the church. While some of the outstanding
Protestant theologians of our generation (including Barth,
Brunner, Tillich, and Niebuhr) could not be said to have
been preoccupied with questions of "faith and order/* they
have all, nevertheless, each in his own way, shared in the
church's new awareness of itself and its place in the world.
It has been said by numerous people, speaking from a
number of positions, that Reinhold Niebuhr has given
little attention to the question of the church. John Bennett
wrote over twenty years ago that Niebuhr gave 'little at-
tention to what an awakened church can do" and that some
emphasis upon the "creative possibilities of a Christian
group which has been brought to repentance" would be
helpful (Religion in Life, Winter, 1937). Recently the
question of the church has been referred to as an "un-
developed area in his thought" and a "critical omission in
Niebuhr's social picture of redemption" (William J. Wolf,
in Kegley & Bretall, Reinhold Niebuhr, His Religious, So-
cial, and Political Thought, p. 249). In this same volume
11
12 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
Paul Scherer notes that the church is not one of the themes
in Niebuhr's preaching, though it may "stand in the wings"
(p. 331). It is significant too that in this symposium, de-
voted to Niebuhr's thought as a whole, no chapter on the
church was included. Niebuhr himself says that he has
"increasingly recognized the value of the Church as a
community of grace" (p. 437). Actually he has given a
rather large amount of attention to the church, as this
collection of articles will show, and he also values the in-
stitution more highly and positively than his reputation
would seem to allow.
The greater part of what Niebuhr has written on the
church is to be found in his fugitive essays, scattered
through a dozen magazines and journals. This volume
brings together most of the writings which deal with the
church and groups them in five major divisions. Part I
contains articles on various aspects of common worship in
America and its relationship to the weaknesses and
strengths of sectarian Christianity. Part II relates the faith
of the church more specifically to the whole range of moral-
political problems. Part III presents Niebuhr's version of
the "Anglo-Saxon" view of the church's social ethic which
he states in opposition to the Barthian or "Continental"
view. Part IV contains Niebuhr's analysis and criticism of
the Catholic conception of the church and of the natural
law ethic of the church. Part V brings together most of
Niebuhr's writings about the ecumenical movement.*
* A statement of his view of the church is to be found in
Faith and History, Chap. XTV. There are some references in
The Nature and Destiny of Man, II, pp. 225-6, relating to the
sacraments. A short definition of the church is given in Beyond
Tragedy, p. 62, and there are many briefer references through-
out his books and many of his articles. A few magazine articles
which did not fit into this present volume are: The Paradox
of Institutions/* The World Tomorrow, August, 1923; "Rever-
end Dr. Silke/' The Christian Century., March 11, 1926;
"Beauty as a Substitute for Righteousness/' The Christian Cen-
tury, September 29, 1927; '"The Minister as an Expert/' Effec-
tive Preaching, Boston University Conference on Preaching
1929; "The Church and Political Action/' The Christian Cen-
tury, August i, 1934; 'The Radical Minister and His Church/'
Introduction 13
First, a brief general statement about Niebuhr 's view of
the church may provide a context for this group of essays.
His thought about the church developed in its first stages
during the thirteen years which he spent as pastor of Bethel
Evangelical Church in Detroit. The pastoral experience, as
he said, tamed his "cynicism," and his published record of
these years (Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic,
1929) shows not only the polemical approach to the
church and the ministry for which he is noted, but also a
deep appreciation of the possibilities of grace and growth
in a congregation. What he said about the ministry in this
book (p. 18, Meridian Books edition) he might equally
well have said about the whole church. "I make no apology
for being critical of what I love." And critical of all the
"fragments of the church" he has consistently been. For,
says he, "When I see how new evil comes into life
through the pretension of the religious community, through
its conventional and graceless legalism and through reli-
gious fanaticism, I am concerned that my growing appreci-
ation of the church should not betray me into . . . com-
placency" (Kegley & Bretall, p. 437).
While Niebuhr would not try to lay down too explicitly
the characteristics of the "true church" in terms of a historic
institution, he nevertheless belongs clearly in the Reforma-
tion, nonconformist tradition. His own church was the
Evangelical (later the Evangelical and Reformed), the
American version of the German Prussian Union, a union
of Lutheran and Reformed groups. As it is made clear in
the following articles, Niebuhr has some very definite ideas
about the nature of the church and its functions about
polity, the ministry, the sacraments, liturgies and worship
services, its theology, its witness to and against the world.
The church is founded upon the faith that "God, the
Creator, is revealed as forgiving love in the drama of
Christ's life, death, and resurrection" (ibid., p. 432). In
spite of the many historical corruptions which the church
Radical Religion, winter, 1936; "Does the Church Pray?"
Christianity and Crisis, June 15, 1942; "Churches and Society,"
New Statesman and Nation, September 18, 1948; "The Heresy
Trials," Christianity and Crisis, December 26, 1955.
14 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
has fallen into, it yet bears the "oracles of God," as Paul
said of Israel The church is variously referred to as "that
place in human society where men are disturbed by the
Word of God," as the place where "the word of mercy,
reconciliation, and consolation is heard," and where "the
kingdom of God impinges upon all human enterprises"
(Beyond Tragedy, p. 62). It is sometimes called a "com-
munity of hopeful believers" or a "community of forgiven
sinners" (Faith and History, p. 238) or a "curiously mixed
body" of those who remain self-righteous and those who
"live by a broken spirit and a contrite heart" (Kegley &
Bretall, p. 7). Something of the Reformation conception of
the invisible church continues to be a meaningful and essen-
tial instrument for keeping all particular churches under
judgment. For, Niebuhr emphasizes, the "church is always
in danger of becoming anti-Christ" because it is tempted to
pray, "Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other institu-
tions." The church, as he sees it, not only shares the ten-
dency of all institutions finally to choke the life out of every
idea or impulse which they are created to foster; the church
is especially vulnerable, for no fragment of the church
"understands as well as the prophets of Israel understood
how severely the judgment of God falls upon the commu-
nity which is the bearer of the judgment" ( Faith and His-
tory, p. 242). In fact, "every vehicle of God's grace, the
preacher of the word, the prince of the Church, the teacher
of theology, the historic institution, the written word, the
sacred canon, all these are in danger of being revered as if
they were themselves divine. The aura of the divine word,
which is transmitted through them, falsely covers their hu-
man frailties" (Christianity and Power Politics, p. 219) . But
to be forever aware of the dangers of institutions, forms,
and vehicles of grace is not, of course, to deny their rela-
tive importance.
The question of polity is not the all-important question to
Niebuhr, but it has its importance. He refers to polity as
"the skeleton of the common lif e of the church" as theol-
ogy is also "the skeleton of the faith of the church," and
"the full stature requires the support of the skeletal struc-
ture" (p. 273, this volume). But it might be said of Nie-
Introduction 15
buhr's view that if the polity is the skeleton of the church's
common life, the skeleton would seem to be worn on the
outside of the body, and it is expendable like the skin of the
snake. That is, polities come and go, are contingent, but
God's church remains. "The 'order' of a church, its rites and
its polity, belong clearly to the realm of the historically
contingent** (The Nature and Destiny of Man, II, p. 225).
The form of the polity of the church is not a part of the
givenness of the church. "God gave the church its gospel
and the Holy Spirit keeps faith alive in it. But human genius
creates and human sin corrupts all the historical and rela-
tive forms of the church" (Beyond Tragedy, p. 122). To
make polity the heart of the matter is to put one's trust in
man, or man-made institutions.
Important values in all the various contingent types of
church polity are recognized, but, of course, the less demo-
cratic churches have certain built-in dangers or tendencies
to pride, vainglory, and the abuse of power. "My demo-
cratic soul rebels at the obsequious verger who bows him
(the bishop) into the pulpit," he wrote after attending a
service. But his democratic soul has not prevented his full
appreciation of the liturgical strength of this church and
even of its type of government, as many references in this
collection of articles will show. He argues against sectarian
"liberty" and independence of the congregation that "the
congregation is not powerful enough and its resources not
great enough to maintain the uniqueness of the Christian
witness against the world," and that the sect in its celebra-
tion of liberty has not recognized the value of the bishop's
authority in "maintaining the witness of the church against
the world" (p. 274, this volume. Numbers hereafter refer
to this volume unless otherwise indicated. ) . He recognized
the strength of the more centrally organized churches in
some social situations, such, for instance, as the Southern
integration struggle. The minister and the local church may
be less subject to the pressures of the local community than
is the case with the sectarian congregation. The Reforma-
tion was not so much an attack on authority in favor of
freedom as an attack upon the tendency to idolatry in the
church.
l6 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
In summary, Niebuhr's view of the church, reflecting his
own denominational heritage, calls for more unity and au-
thority than sectarianism allows and more flexibility and
freedom than the more "catholic" churches have tolerated,
and also for the constant witness of the divine word to bring
judgment to bear upon all fragments of the church. Niebuhr
suggests that the Reformation concept of the invisible
church may be a valid source of judgment of particular
churches (The Nature and Destiny of Man, II, p. 139),
though he does not develop the use of this idea in his own
thought. However, he seems to combine something of the
two concepts in this statement: "The secure church is pre-
cisely that community of saints, known and unknown,
among whom life is constantly transformed because it is
always under the divine word" (Faith and History, p. 242) .
PART I
Niebuhr has had much to say about worship in the
American churches, and Part I reveals the many aspects of
his concern in this area of church life. Twenty years ago he
saw a "crying need for liturgical reform in American Prot-
estantism (p. 48), a need which continues to our own day
(p. 57). Our peculiar weaknesses and corruptions of com-
mon worship in America are traced to the dominance of the
sect in our heritage. Sectarian protests against the church's
preoccupation with liturgy, theology, and polity had a good
measure of validity in their time, and Niebuhr notes how
regrettable it is that the Reformers did not accept the seri-
ousness and legitimacy of their protest. But "spirit without
discipline, form and tradition is also vain. The trouble with
American Protestantism is that its protest against the vari-
ous forms and disciplines led to their destruction" (p. 62).
Worship becomes formless, secularized, vulgarized, and the
church, like the theater, more often presents a spectacle or
a stunt rather than a worship service, from the exhibition-
ist choir director to the banal "chatty conversations with
God" which the minister offers as prayers. The priestly
function of tie minister has an important place in the life
of the church.
Introduction 17
Episcopal liturgies have appealed to Niebuhr personally
("Though a nonconformist myself, I prefer a liturgical
church with as little sermon as possible." p. 29), as a num-
ber of references in these pages suggest. Liturgical churches
have much to teach those of the nonliturgical tradition.
Attending a service in an American cathedral in 1933, he
was prompted to observe that "the adequacy of the liturgy
and the inadequacy of the sermon is roughly symbolic of
the fact that the central message of the Christian religion
still lives in the tradition of the church but that it is not be-
ing made applicable for the problems of our common life.
When we sing our religion all the ages of Christian wisdom
speak to us. But when we preach it the petty illusions of
the nineteenth century . . . obscure the profundities of an-
cient insights" (p. 33) . But for all the recognized adequacy
of the liturgy, American churches are warned against
merely copying liturgies or simply adopting them for aes-
thetic purposes. A better example for American churches,
he points out, is the nonconformist tradition in Europe. It
was during a visit to Europe in 1924 that Niebuhr first de-
veloped a great appreciation for "ritualistic services" of the
type he observed in the nonconformist churches there
(Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, p. 81), and
he used adaptations of them in his church in Detroit. Later
he was particularly attracted to what he observed in the
Scottish Church and thought it to be a better example in
the art of worship than we could secure anywhere else,"
for "the Church of Scotland, since the reunion between the
established and the free church, has blended the liturgical
tradition of the former with the free tradition of the latter"
(Christianity and Crisis, March 3, 1947). Part I contains
numerous specific suggestions on how to improve worship
services. He has been particularly concerned with the im-
portance of adequate prayers (pp. 48ff.; 52fF.) and sung
responses, and it has been noted that in his own prayers
one finds expressed Niebuhr's deepest appreciation of the
Christian community.
Niebuhr's view of the church is interestingly symbolized
in his interpretation of the use of the sacraments (see espe-
cially The Nature and Destiny of Man, II, pp. 225-6; Faith
l8 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
and History, Chap. XIV) . Early in his ministry he recorded
that he was "losing some of the aversion to the sacraments
cultivated in my seminary days" (Leaves . . . , p. 24).
By the time of the Gilford Lectures he believes that the
"eschatological emphasis in the sacrament is a true expres-
sion of the eschatological character of the church." In Faith
and History (p. 240) he says that "a community of grace,
which lives by faith and hope, must be sacramental. It
must have sacraments to symbolize the having and the not
having of the final virtue and truth."
Niebuhr is strictly Protestant in his emphasis on the func-
tion of the preacher. The sermon is necessary for channel-
ing religious emotion "into all the thirsty areas of life" (p.
31). He expressed no shame at "having the Bible rather
than the altar as the center of nonconformist worship" (p.
42). Early in his ministry he determined not to be a
"preacher of pretty sermons" (Leaves . . .p. 27) and
noted that "pulpit eloquence" may cover a failure to make
the Gospel relevant (ibid., p. 85). Prophetic religion
preaches the Word of God to specific time, place, and cir-
cumstance. It is Niebuhr's attacks upon the liberal church
because of what he regarded as its confusions and failures
in the realm of applied Christianity and his attacks upon
the ecclesiastical pretensions of all groups which have left
something of a negative impression of his views of the
church.
PART II
Part II represents the area of interest to which Niebuhr
has given the great portion of his attention in his ministry
and his writings. His thinking about the life of the church
is many-sided, but he never wanders far from his concern
that the Kingdom of God, which is not of this world, be
"made relevant to every problem of the world." These se-
lections from his occasional writings (as well as those in
Part III) should illustrate clearly and in a fairly brief form
the depth and breadth of his thought about the church and
moral-political questions. He never loses sight of what he
calls the "first business of the Christian church," as ortho-
Introduction 19
dox critics suggest that he does. This first business is "to
raise and answer religious questions within the framework
of which these moral issues must be solved" (p. 88) . While
he emphasizes that neutrality between justice and injustice
is "untrue to our gospel" (p. 101), he is equally insistent
that a utilitarian attitude toward the faith debases it to "a
mere instrument of the warring creeds" (p. 95) and that
the introduction of religious absolutes into politics may
easily produce self-righteous fury and intolerance. "If there
is no power and grace in the Christian church *to bring
down every high thing which exalteth itself against the
knowledge of God' (and this includes the church itself),
the church becomes not merely useless but dangerous"
(Christianity and Society, Spring, 1950).
PART III
The group of articles on Earth and Baitnianism has a
place in this collection of writings because of Earth's great
influence in the church, particularly in Europe, and his
conception of the ethical task of the church and the rela-
tionship of theology to culture with which Niebuhr dis-
agrees. It is believed, too, that the points of difference
between Earth and Niebuhr constitute an important and
continuing question for the church. Charles West (in Com-
munism and the Theologians, p. 14) speaks of "the Barthian
he (Niebuhr) truly is." What Niebuhr has in common with
Earth is perhaps well enough known, and their common
ground has been important for the ecumenical church and
will continue to be. Niebuhr's reservations about Barthian
theology were first expressed in print thirty years ago. This
group of articles rather underscores the Barthian which
Niebuhr truly is not. This section includes all the articles
Niebuhr has written about Earth, though there are brief
references in various of his books.
There are broad areas of difference between Earth and
Niebuhr. One area of difference which is particularly rele-
vant to the subject of this volume is the relationship be-
tween the church and the world, Barth seems to Niebuhr
really to insulate the church and theology from the world.
20 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
The way Earth conceives his "political watch," for instance,
does not represent sufficient "care of the world" on the part
of the church. Their differences, too, are expressed in vary-
ing conceptions of eschatology. These articles will indicate
how Niebuhr argued on several occasions that Earth is "too
consistently 'eschatological' for the 'nicely calculated less
and more' which must go into political decisions" (p. 186) .
"The 'end' stands only above history and the Biblical idea
of the *end' is obscured" ( The Nature and Destiny of Man,
II, p. 309). Related to this "defect" in Earth's theological
approach to social ethics is what Niebuhr calls "his extreme
pragmatism, which disavows all moral principles" (p. 186) .
Here he is thinking of the sort of general statement Earth
made in Against the Stream (p. 114): ". . . the Church
never thinks, speaks or acts *on principle.* Rather it judges
spiritually and by individual cases." Niebuhr also taxes
Earth in some of these pages and elsewhere with combin-
ing a "sophisticated knowledge of all the disciplines of mod-
ern culture with a frantic effort to isolate the Christian
faith from the allegedly debilitating effects of philosophical
and scientific speculations" (The Self and the Dramas of
History, pp. 108-9).
The criticisms which Niebuhr has aimed at Barthian
thought have not gone totally unchallenged. E. G. Homrig-
hausen wrote an article ("Barthianism and the Kingdom,"
The Christian Century, July 15, 1931) in answer to Nie-
buhr's criticisms of Barthianism in "Let Liberal Churches
Stop Fooling Themselves" (March 25, 1931, issue). Nie-
buhr 's reply is reprinted here. Earth on one occasion an-
swered Niebuhr's criticisms,* claiming that Niebuhr had
The following exchange occurred in 1948-49: "We Are
Men and Not God," The Christian Century, October 27, 1948,
by Niebuhr, in answer to Earth's Amsterdam address. The
essential parts of Earth's address were published in the Decem-
ber 8, 1948, issue under the title: "No Christian Marshall
Plan." In the February 16, 1949, issue Earth replied to Nie-
buhr's article in "Continental vs. Anglo-Saxon Theology, a
Preliminary Reply to Reinhold Niebuhr/' Niebuhr concluded
this exchange in "An Answer to Karl Earth," published in the
February 23 issue of The Christian Century. The same ex-
change is discussed in Danielou, Jean, "Gesprache nach
Introduction si
"missed the mark" in his understanding and criticism of
"Continental theology," and that he (Barth) did not find
himself "where the 'Continental' theology and I appear to
him to be." Furthermore, he argued, Niebuhr had not found
the heart of the difference between the "Continentals" and
the "Anglo-Saxons." Barth thought the major difference to
be in the "irresponsible attitude toward the Bible" among
the Anglo-Saxons. In the case of the last article and ex-
change in this section, the article on Barth and Hungary,
Barth has remained silent, but a group of his students en-
gaged in an "exchange" with Niebuhr, and Niebuhr's state-
ment is reprinted here.
PART IV
The selections in Part IV are intended to bring together
Niebuhr's typical analyses and criticisms of what he has
called "the Catholic heresy," as well as his estimate of the
Catholic social ethic and its reliance on natural law.*
The "Catholic heresy" is the error of "regarding the historic
church as the unqualified representative of Christ on earth
so that the enemies of the church become the enemies of
God" (p. 296). Basically the error springs from the exalta-
tion of the church as an extension of the Incarnation. A re-
lated error "changed the gospel of forgiveness to contrite
souls into a great scheme for assuring men of their salva-
tion if they would climb a ladder of merit' " (p. 336) .
While particular attention is given in this section to the
Roman church, it should be noted that Niebuhr, here and
elsewhere, points out that this "heresy" is not confined to
Amsterdam," Evangelischer Verlag A. G. Zollikon, Zurich,
1949-
Other articles and chapters not included in this collection
are: "The Pope," Radical Religion, Autumn, 1936; "Catholicism
and Communism," Radical Religion, Winter, 1936; "Catholicism
and Anarchism in Spain," Radical Religion, Spring, 1937; The
Nature and Destiny of Man, II, pp. 134-56; 220-5; Christian
Realism and Political Problems, Chap. 10; "A Protestant Looks
at Catholics," The Commonweal, May 8, 1953; see also Nie-
buhr's reply to Gustave Weigel in Kegley & Bretall, op. ctt.,
pp. 444-6.
22 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
the Roman church alone. Greek Orthodoxy exalts the "un-
broken tradition of the church." Anglo-Catholicism, while
not as consistently pretentious as the others, does present
problems in their relationship to other churches in the de-
liberations of the ecumenical church. But even further,
Niebuhr argues, no church, Protestant or Catholic, escapes
the temptation to make itself a vehicle of sin and yet ex-
empt itself from the necessity of repentance, though some
Christian groups, because of their understanding of the
nature of the church, are more given to the error than
others.
Some of the articles in this group discuss the Catholic
position on specific issues and deal with matters in the
news a couple of decades ago. Some deal with pressing
current issues. The fact that Dr. Niebuhr was wrong in his
predictions about Cardinal Pacellfs chances of becoming
Pope (pp. 20 iff.) does not destroy the interest of his arti-
cle as an analysis of Vatican politics from the outside.
Dr. Niebuhr was perhaps more sharply critical of the
Roman church twenty years ago (largely because of the
Fascist issue), though the basic points of his difference, as
the later articles will indicate, continue essentially the same.
More recently, however, he has been concerned with the
"scandal" of deteriorating relations between Catholics and
Protestants in this country. He emphasizes that while we
should oppose any Catholic political actions which seem to
us unjust and a danger to our democratic life, we should
nevertheless strive to do this without malice. As long as
"we meet each other only vituperatively in the public
prints," he says, "the secularists may plausibly contend that
a society can be saved from the fury of the theologians only
by its secularization" (p. 237).
It is characteristic of Niebuhr's thought about the church, .
Catholic or Protestant, that he often points out that God's
work in the world is many times done not by the church but
by the "enemies" of the church. " 'The wind bloweth where
it listeth' (John 3:8), said Jesus to Nicodemus; and that is
a picturesque description of the freedom of divine grace in
history, working miracles without any *by your leave* of
priest or church" (The Nature and Destiny of Man, II, p.
Introduction 23
208). Secular idealism may speak "the word of God" on
some issues (p. 94). Democracy may be in its own time
God's instrument (p. 162). The church must humbly rec-
ognize that it was a "secular age" which granted women
recognition as persons, and in many ways the church still
lags behind our society in general in its treatment of women
in the household of faith (pp. 93, 179). Sports groups and
labor unions have preached the "gospel" to the church in
the development of decent race relations.
PART V
The last part contains practically everything Dr. Niebuhr
has written on the ecumenical movement, except the items
which were published in connection with the ecumenical
conferences,*
Already in the 1920'$ Niebuhr was active in the inter-
denominational work in the United States. He noted early
in his ministry the desperate necessity for ecumenical re-
lationships because of our religious pluralism, but he has
understood profoundly our peculiar religious history in
America and why so much of the discussion in the world
church seems irrelevant to it (pp. 56, zB^S.).
Niebuhr has been active and influential in the world
church since the period of preparation for the Oxford Con-
ference. He participated in preparing for Oxford (1937),
Amsterdam (1948), and Evanston (1954), and he at-
tended the first two of these conferences. From Oxford to
Amsterdam there came into existence in the world church
an explicit outline of a common ecumenical philosophy of
society, and none was more influential than Niebuhr in the
development and formulation of this common philosophy.
"The Christian Church in a Secular Age," address at Ox-
ford Conference on Church and Community, published as Chap.
16 of Christianity and Power Politics, 1940; "Christian Faith
and the Common Life," Oxford Conf. Series, Vol. 4, 1938; and
"God's Design and the Present Disorder of Civilization," and
"The Situation in the U. S.," in Vol. Ill, Amsterdam Studies,
The Church and the Disorder of Society, 1949; substance of
Amsterdam address published in Christian Realism and Political
Problems, Chap. 8.
24 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
His most active participation in the ecumenical life of the
church has paralleled the high points of the "Life and
Work" aspect of ecumenicity, as the focus of these three
great conferences suggests. His own focus of interest and
emphasis has in fact been in "Life and Work" rather than
in "Faith and Order." He sees the significance of the World
Council of Churches essentially in the work in this area
and notes that "Faith and Order" are consigned to a study
commission "where they belong." And to those who see the
union of the church in any absolute sense as possible and
desirable, he warns that "the divisions can never be abso-
lutely healed, unless all fragments of the church submit to
the fragment which makes the most extravagant preten-
sions" (Faith and History, p. 241).
Like many leaders in the world church, Niebuhr has been
critical of any tendency toward an uncritical centrism. As
many passages in these articles show, his emphasis has con-
tained the common note of emphasis upon renewal more
than reunion, on an operating or working relationship more
than on organization or agreement about a "doctrine of the
church." These words, written by Niebuhr thirty-five years
ago, suggest a persistent element in his thought about the
ecumenical movement:
Eager ecclesiasts think they can make the church the
one agency of world salvation if they can only achieve a
new Catholicism . . . What we need is a supernatural
conscience in the church rather than an international
organization. "The Paradox of Institutions," The World
Tomorrow, August, 1923.
While Niebuhr believes that there might very well be
more unity among the churches than has yet developed
(p. 279), he does not see this as the "genuine ecumenical
task." This task is one of "appropriating each other's treas-
ures for a fuller testimony of the many-faceted truth in
Christ" (p. 280). There are two wrong reasons for promot-
ing more unity in Protestantism. One wrong reason for
promoting unity is to give Protestantism a united front in
competition with Catholicism. Another wrong reason is the
desire to give the Christian message more power, prestige,
Introduction 25
and authority in the world (pp. 280, 284). The authority
of the church does not come from its unity. The authority
of the church comes from Christ and his gospel.
A word of general appreciation is offered to my col-
league, Professor W. Gordon Ross of Berea College and
also to Professor John Bennett of Union Theological Semi-
nary. Both have offered help and encouragement in numer-
ous ways. A special word of thanks is due to Dean Walter
Muelder of the Boston University School of Theology. His
talks with me about the nature and function of the church
and the contemporary discussions of it have enlightened the
whole context of this volume.
I am grateful to the editors and staffs of the following
periodicals for permission to use articles they have pub-
lished: The Christian Century, The Christian Herald, The
Ecumenical Review, The Messenger, The Nation, Religion
in Life, The Reporter, Theology Today, Union Seminary
Quarterly Review; and to Dr. Niebuhr for permitting the
use of material from Radical Religion, Christianity and
Society, and Christianity and Crisis.
PART i: The Weakness of Common Worship
in American Protestantism
A CHRISTMAS SERVICE
IN RETROSPECT
I went to church in the cathedral on Christmas day. It is
one of the few days of the year on which I am able to at-
tend church without preaching myself. On that day, though
a nonconformist myself, I prefer a liturgical church with as
little sermon as possible. It is not that I don't like to hear
anyone but myself preach. I merely dislike most Christmas
and Easter sermons. Only poets can do justice to the Christ-
mas and Easter stories and there are not many poets in the
pulpit. It is better therefore to be satisfied with the symbolic
presentation of the poetry in hymn, anthem, and liturgy.
The sermons which interpret these stories usually make a
rational defense of their historic validity or they qualify
them rationally to make them acceptable to the intellect.
I have preached many of the latter type in my own parish
days, but I now feel sorry for the people who had to listen
to them. I suppose it is necessary and inevitable that the
poetry of religion should be expressed in rational terms but
something is always lost in the rationalization. Dogma is
rationally petrified poetry which destroys part of the truth
"embodied in the tale" in the effort to put it into precise
terms.
Belief in the Christmas Story
I believe the Christmas story. It expresses the idea
that the great God of the universe has purposes which are
relevant to man's purposes. That is very difficult to believe.
30 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
There is, as a matter of fact, a note of rational absurdity in
the belief. Human values must achieve cosmic validity if
any religion is to live. Yet there must be in this belief some
suggestion of the mystery of life and of the majesty of the
divine which transcends human life. True religion must
therefore be conscious of the difficulty and the absurdity of
the human claiming kinship with the divine, of the tem-
poral trafficking with the eternal. If the divine is made rele-
vant to the human it must transvalue our values and enter
the human at the point where man is lowly rather than
proud and where he is weak rather than strong. Therefore
I believe that God came in the form of a little child born
to humble parents in a manger "because there was no room
for them in the inn/*
But if I put all this in rational terms I lose something of
the rich variety of the Christmas story. I prefer, therefore,
to do what I did on Christmas day: I like to sing "Hark
the herald angels sing" and "O come, all ye faithful." I like
to hear the soprano of boys' voices rejoicing, "Glory to God
in the highest." (Why is it that a boy's soprano gives a
suggestion of the supernal not to be found in a woman's
voice? Why should these urchins who have such a difficult
time keeping quiet in their choir stalls suggest the song of
angels to me?)
. . . Until the Sermon!
Even when we come to the Nicene creed I enjoy it. I
should not like to commit myself to the Nicene creed in
cold blood. Here poetry has been transmuted into dogma
"very God of very God, begotten not made." I want to raise
some questions about that. But why bother? The choir is
singing it to an E flat tune by Eyre. The curse has been
taken from the dogma. The alchemy of the service has
changed what was once poetry and has been made into
dogma back into poetry again.
The priest reads the lesson from the altar. He intones,
"The word was made flesh and dwelt among us." That is
Weakness of Common Worship 31
a very philosophical statement of the Christmas story and
I believe it. But I don't like to have a little man in a frock
coat reading it to me from behind a desk. I would rather
hear that imposing and sonorous phrase coming from a
priest who is hidden from me by the choir screen and who
intones it with a suggestion that a mystery is involved in
this simple statement. In short, I am inspired by everything
in the cathedral service until it is time for the sermon.
Of course there must be a sermon. Religious emotion
must be made relevant and applicable to the problems of
everyday life. The church has a teaching function. Let it
inspire religious emotion, but the religious emotion must be
channeled into all of the thirsty areas of life. The bishop is
preaching this morning. I don't like anything about his
sermon. My democratic soul rebels at the obsequious verger
who bows him into the pulpit. I don't like the bishop's kind
of self-consciousness. He talks about the lowly Jesus with
the accompaniment of imperious gestures calculated to sug-
gest that he the bishop is a prince of the church. Per-
haps I am prejudiced against this bishop because I happen
to know many of his attitudes on public and theological
questions and I don't agree with any of them.
Christ Our Judgment
Yet if I had never heard of or seen this bishop before I
would not have liked his sermon. His text was "Jesus Christ,
the same yesterday, today and forever." The bishop said
that the spirit of Christ would solve all problems. If men
only followed Him there would be no more war and the
injustice of poverty and riches in industry would be abol-
ished and all the churches would be united. If men only
followed Him! I have heard all that so often. The bishop
did not suggest that Christ is our judgment as well as our
hope. He did not say that none of us, not even in the
churches, live by the law of Christ, There was nothing in
the sermon to suggest that at the foot of the cross men be-
come conscious of the sin of self-will and the tragedy of
32 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
unrealized ideals. He did not even suggest that the life in
the manger ended upon the cross and that ours might end
there if we really emulated it.
As usual, the mystery of Christ was reduced to the ideal
of mutuality. We must all love one another and the world
will be saved. But what are we to do since we are not good
enough to love one another? What political and what reli-
gious conclusions are we to draw from the fact that we are
selfish? The bishop was certain that the world would really
follow the law of Christ if only all men believed that Christ
was God. Many other preachers have held that the world
would follow the law of Christ just as soon as men ceased
believing that he was divine and regarded him as a human
example. There was nothing in this sermon, as there is not
in most sermons, to suggest that when the word was made
flesh it not only revealed the relevance between the human
and the divine but the distance between the human and
divine.
We can touch the divine by our ideals. We know we
ought to love. But we do not, as a matter of fact, love our
neighbor as ourself . We can love enough to know that the
highest human ideal must be stated in terms of love and
that thus stated it becomes a symbol of the divine. But we
do not love enough to have the word made flesh in us.
Thus I rebelled against the bishop's sermon. There was
no note of humility in it. There was only the suggestion that
the church had a message which the world had not yet
heeded. I knew that the bishop is not celebrated for the
spirit of humility and I may for that reason have been of-
fended by the suggestion of unconscious arrogance in his
message. But he might have been a much more humble
man than he is personally, and his sermon would still have
been inadequate. The world is in moral confusion partly be-
cause religion is not fulfilling its task of helping people to
know themselves. How can we know ourselves if we do not
scrutinize ourselves from the perspective of the absolute?
That is how we learn how selfish we are.
If we estimated our selfishness accurately we would not
be deceived so easily by the efforts to reform the world by
persuading people to be a little less selfish than they are.
Weakness of Common Worship 33
We would know that to the end of history selfishness will
clash with selfishness. Knowing that, we might be more
ready for political programs which place a social restraint
upon human egoism and we might also be more ready for
a religion which plumbed the depths of life, and ceased to
move merely upon its surfaces.
Obscuring Ancient Insights
It would be foolish to suggest that, because the bishop's
sermon failed to help while his cathedral did, we ought to
have fewer sermons and more liturgy. The poetry of reli-
gion must, after all, be interpreted, if it is to become most
effective. It would be truer to say that the adequacy of the
liturgy and the inadequacy of the sermon is roughly sym-
bolic of the fact that the central message of the Christian
religion still lives in the tradition of the church but that it
is not being made applicable for the problems of our com-
mon life. When we sing our religion all the ages of Chris-
tian wisdom speak to us. But when we preach it the petty
illusions of the nineteenth century, the illusions that men
are good and are becoming better, that the kingdom of
God is around the corner, obscure the profundities of
ancient insights.
In the bishop's liturgy the prayer of general confession
acknowledged "that we have done those things which we
ought not to have done and have left undone those things
which we ought to have done and there is no health in us."
But there was no such suggestion of contrition in the bish-
op's sermon. That is, roughly stated, the difference between
the gospel and the gospel as we preach it. I say "we" be-
cause the reader will have discovered by this time that I
hate the arrogance of the bishop so much because it is my
own arrogance slightly accentuated.
34 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
SECTS AND CHURCHES
One of the basic difficulties of American Christianity lies
in the fact that its predominant churches are sects which
have become churches and do not know they have under-
gone such a change. The difference between church and
sect, as understood in Europe, is not known in America.
Sectarianism, among us, merely means the multiplication
of denominations- But there is an important difference be-
tween the church and the sect, The sect is a voluntary and
exclusive religious fellowship with standards of faith and
conduct different from the general community and there-
fore conscious of a tension between the Christian ideal and
the life of the community. The sect is usually either pietistic
or apocalyptic that is, it tries in terms of pietistic individu-
alism to achieve the Christian ideal in personal conduct, or
it is dominated by the hope of the establishment of the
kingdom of God on earth. Thus the Baptist sect was origi-
nally apocalyptic, carrying the faith of the disinherited of
reformation days, that the Kingdom of God would be estab-
lished on earth. It set itself against the pessimism of Lu-
theran orthodoxy, in the creed of which the Kingdom of
God lay beyond the possibilities of any earthly achieve-
ment. The Methodist sect is on the other hand pietistic. It
is the child of the evangelical-pietistic movement and its
spirituality is a fruit of the pietistic protest against the
sacramental piety of the church, in which the doctrine of
justification and forgiveness frequently leads to religious
formalism. Against this formalism pietism emphasized both
personal religious experience and a rigorous ethic.
One of the curious developments of American church
history, for which I know no explanation, is that the Meth-
odist church, with its pietistic, individualistic past, should
Weakness of Common Worship 35
be socially more radical than the Baptist church with its
apocalyptic and therefore socially oriented past.
Baptism as a Symbol
In contrast to the sect, the church is inclusive in its mem-
bership, and expresses a more social concept of religion by
assuming the Christian faith of its members without expect-
ing a special religious decision. In a sense, child baptism is
the symbol of this involuntary membership, while adult
baptism is the most perfect symbol of the voluntary mem-
bership. The church is, at least in its European background,
coextensive with the total community. It does not separate
its membership from the community. It lives on the assump-
tion that the entire community is Christian, It regards it-
self as the expression of the Christian conscience of the
community. Yet at the same time the church knows that the
state is not Christian. It knows in fact that no one lives by
the law of Christ. Its emphasis is therefore upon the grace
of God which redeems sinners. The sect challenges the
world; the church accepts the world, knowing it to be chal-
lenged and standing under the judgment of the law of
Christ. Broadly speaking, one could say therefore that the
church has partially resolved the tension between Christ
and the world, while the sect tries to maintain it.
What has brought confusion into the American religious
scene is that the sects have become churches (without
knowing it) and that the churches have become sects
(without being willing to admit it). A church is fully a
church only if it has an organic relationship to the total
community. No American church has that. They are there-
fore forced into a system of voluntary membership, just as,
on the other hand, the sect churches substitute rather sec-
ularized "decision days'* for the religious experience which
was once a prerequisite of membership. Denominationally,
the most obvious instances of the church type in America
are the Lutherans and Episcopalians. Both the Presbyterian
and Congregational denominations are churches with sect
36 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
features, which do not derive altogether from the American
environment but are inherent in their European history.
Churches Have Learned from Sects
The Congregational church is probably more sectarian in
its characteristics than the Presbyterian, largely because its
congregational polity tends to depreciate the more organic
conception of the church in favor of the more individual-
istic and voluntaristic concept. Denominations with an un-
qualified church tradition become slightly ludicrous when
they make absolute church pretensions in America. The
Episcopal church is probably more given to such preten-
sions than the Lutheran church. A church which has an
organic relation to a total civilization, as the Anglican
church to British life, needs to possess a higher degree of
grace than is vouchsafed most church leaders, in order to
find just the right adjustment between its tradition and the
indubitable fact that, as in America, it is merely a small
denomination side by side with many others.
The churches which have become sects in America have
probably sacrificed less of what is valuable in their tradi-
tion than the sects which have become churches. The
churches have learned more from the sects than the sects
from the churches. They have borrowed from the sects the
principle of lay leadership and the advantage of lay initia-
tive. This is, of course, not a pure advantage, because it
subjects the American parson to lay pressure to a much
greater degree than the European parson. The churches
have also learned to take a more robust attitude toward the
state. The principle of a free church in a free state is really
a principle of the Enlightenment which the real churches in
Europe have never been willing to accept but which sec-
tarian Christianity knew how to make the basis of a new
religious vitality. The churches of America have learned
some of the sect's self-reliance and independence in regard
to the state, though it must be admitted that, since the sects
have become churches, they sometimes capitulate as easily
Weakness of Common Worship 37
to the unofficial state (community opinion) as the European
churches capitulated to the official state.
But since the most powerful American denominations
have sect rather than church traditions, the spiritual prob-
lems of American Christianity are more implicated in the
drift from sect to church than from church to sect. In gen-
eral terms the problem could be put like this: The church
knows that Christianity in an absolute sense cannot defeat
the world. It knows that men will continue to live in a
world of sin and that both as individuals and more particu-
larly as social groups there is a law in their members which
wars against the law that is in their mind. It knows that
human lives can be transformed by the grace of God, but
it also knows that the grace of God must express itself not
only as a power unto righteousness but as forgiveness of
sins. Hence the sacramental emphasis of the church. Fre-
quently the church is betrayed into a premature compro-
mise with the world. In American history, for instance, the
Presbyterian and Episcopal churches were usually either
indifferent toward social-political issues or they allowed
their pessimism to become an instrument of political and
social reaction.
Tension with the World
The sect, on the other hand, tries to defeat the world in
the name of Christ, either in the lives of individuals (pie-
tism) or in the hope of a Kingdom of God to be established
upon earth ( apocalypticism ) . The original sect maintains a
stronger tension against the world than does the church.
The American sect contributed more to the establishment
of egalitarian democracy and to the elimination of slavery
than did the church. The sect churches of the frontier, in
fact, were wholehearted supporters of Jeffersonian and
Jacksonian democracy against the opposition of Hamilton-
ian plutocracy, frequently supported by the churches. So
far the advantage lies with the sects. They labored for the
approximations of the Christian law of love in politics and
38 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
economics, while the church mourned over a lost world.
Nevertheless, the sect churches of America are today
religiously less vital and less capable of survival than the
churches. They are more frequently secularized, and their
religion vulgarized, than the churches. One of the reasons
for this is that the peculiar circumstances of American his-
tory betrayed the sect into a relaxation of its tension with
the world. It began to believe that the world would submit
to the law of Christ. The expanding American frontier, the
expansive nature of American economy, the success of
American republican government, all these factors seemed
to guarantee that the Sermon on the Mount could be ap-
plied to politics and be successful there.
The sentimentalities of American Christianity, its failure
to grasp the tragic character of man's collective life, its easy
confidence that a few more sermons on love would subdue
the sin in the human heart, all these limitations are not sim-
ply borrowed from secular liberalism. They represent rather
the consequence of the ease with which sectarian Christian-
ity was able to put religious passion behind the social goals
of secular liberalism and actually gain a victory over the
enemy. It deluded itself into believing that its victory was
final and that it was living in a Christian world. It had
made the world Christian. Thus the sect lost its tension
with the world and became at home in the world. And all
this happened (tragedy of tragedies!) over the precise
period when the world of Jeffersonian liberalism and agrar-
ian democracy was being gradually transmuted into the
sorry realities of industrial capitalism.
Two Alternatives
Facing the cruelties of this world in its period of expan-
sion and the even greater cruelties of its period of contrac-
tion, liberalized sectarian Christianity could adopt only one
of two alternatives. It could either preserve its faith, some-
times naively and sometimes frantically, that the sins of the
world could be overcome by preaching the ideal of love
(the old social gospel) or it could become politically real-
Weakness of Common Worship 39
istic and seek for a political program which would imple-
ment its ideals of justice. Both of these things have been
done. Stanley Jones's, "The Christian Alternative to Com-
munism," is a belated example of the first method. Most of
the younger social-gospel preachers have become -politically
more realistic. They know that justice in society can be
established only by implementing religious-moral ideals
with political techniques. In either case the approach rep-
resents a secularization of Christianity. Social techniques
are used without religious reservations that is, without
recognition of the fact that political techniques of conflict
and coercion are necessary but also dangerous, and that
they stand under the judgment of the absolute command
of love. In the case of Stanley Jones the old evangelical
piety is vital enough to prevent secularization, and in that
he is typical of many others in the sectarian tradition. But
while this type preserves religious vitality and avoids secu-
larization, it does not avoid sentimentality.
The historical basis of the whole of Protestant liberalism
in America is really this defaulted sect. In genuine Chris-
tianity the law of love is always an impossible possibility.
The world must be challenged by it and also changed by it,
that is, through its approximations. But the world, particu-
larly every political and economic order, must also be
judged by it, judged and found wanting. In thousands of
Christian pulpits the richness and breadth of the Christian
gospel is lost in a moralistic radical-social preaching which
belabors middle-class people for not acting politically like
proletarians. If the preaching is liberal moralism, rather
than radical, it may be even worse, inasmuch as it gives
middle-class comfortable people the illusion that they are
living by the law of Christ because they have never partici-
pated in violence.
Disintegration of Sectarianism
The disintegration of sectarian Christianity leaves our
American Christianity in a sad state. It is theologically in
confusion because in its vital period it lived by spontaneous
4O ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
religious emotion and held theology in contempt. But theol-
ogy is a necessary means of preserving religious conviction.
It is difficult to perpetuate undefined religious beliefs. Be-
cause of its lack of a theological tradition sectarian Chris-
tianity was split into two camps, those who fell into a dry
orthodoxy and those who leaned on secular liberalism and
redefined Christianity in terms which usually add only pious
phrases to the concepts of secular liberalism. This division
is most obvious in the Baptist and Disciples denominations.
In both cases there is practically nothing in common be-
tween the two wings. They can exist together at all only
because they do not live intimately with one another. Their
congregational polity makes it impossible for one group to
bring the other under its discipline.
The Methodist church has been able to escape the rigors
of this theological controversy because it has continued to
remain essentially untheological. The Methodist church
does not, however, escape the general processes of disinte-
gration. When the old evangelical piety is dissipated and
there are not powerful theological and liturgical forces to
preserve the Christian faith and feeling the tendency is to
sink into vulgarity or into a pure morafism. In all sectarian
churches there are today types of vulgarized Christianity
in which both sermon and service seek to intrigue the in-
terest of the religiously indifferent masses by vaudeville
appeals of various sorts. This represents the worst form of
disintegration. The best form is to be found in the cham-
pionship of various moral and social causes.
Vulgarization of Christianity
The Prohibition movement may be regarded as a rather
pathetic effort of sectarian Christianity to preserve its ten-
sion with the world. The degree to which this became a
pure political movement is the measure of the seculariza-
tion of the church. Some of the finer spirits among the sec-
ularized prophets in sectarianism today now pkce all then-
efforts into the cause of world peace and social justice.
Their courage is admirable and their striving not without
Weakness of Common Worship 41
significance or success. But what they say upon these issues
is the same gospel preached in every woman's club and
every open forum. Little is to be discovered in this preach-
ing of the fact that historic Christianity measures the
dimensions of life in much more ultimate terms than secu-
larism and that it distinguishes itself from modern interpre-
tations of life by a much profounder pessimism and more
ultimate optimism.
The vulgarization of sectarian Christianity is partly due
to its difficulty in finding proper forms for the social expres-
sion of its faith. In the period of its vitality the sect may
hold the church in contempt for its formal and stereotyped
prayers and liturgy. Spontaneous prayer is more vital than
stylized prayer. But prayer which has ceased to be spon-
taneous and simulates the appearance of spontaneity, that
is, the pastoral prayer of the sectarian church, with its
formlessness and lack of beauty, the monotony of its reitera-
tions, destroys the religious ethos in the congregation. For-
mal liturgy does not necessarily preserve vital religion. But
it is like well-cultivated garden beds into which seeds may
be dropped and spring to life. The individual worshiper
may find in it the occasion for, and prompting to, religious
aspiration which may be all the more effective because the
form of the liturgy is beautiful enough to carry religious
emotion and not sufficiently specific to interfere with the
particular moods and needs of the worshipers.
This criticism of the sect in America is not meant to im-
ply that the churches in America are making a greater con-
tribution than they to our religious and moral life. Churches
which have become sects have just as difficult problems of
adjustment as sects which have become churches. But the
problems of the sects are more important because they rep-
resent the dominant force in American Protestantism. Per-
haps they are also intrinsically more important. The church
lives in conscious compromise with the world. The vitiated
sect lives in unconscious compromise with the world. The
first attitude may lead to premature defeatism. The second
leads to sentimentality and self-deception. In our present
state of spiritual life the second peril is greater than the
first.
42 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
SUNDAY MORNING DEBATE
My wife and I were on our way to the Sunday morning
service at the cathedral. To compensate her for the number
of times she has to hear me preach I go with her on my
two free Sundays of the year to the cathedral. This bargain
is further weighted to my advantage by the graceful con-
cession from my wife which permits such tardy arrival that
we can miss the sermon and yet hear the litany. "We Angli-
cans," declared my wife, "do not need a sermon if we have
the service. There is more genuine religion in a well-sung
litany than in any sermon." I agreed to that. A good boys*
choir covers a multitude of sermons, particularly if the sex-
less and austere beauty of its song echoes through the ma-
jestic vaults of a cathedral. It is too bad that there are so
few places where you can hear both a vigorous sermon and
a good choir.
My spouse countered this by enumerating the parsons in
her denomination whom I like to hear preach. There are
quite a number, I admit. "You may have more good preach-
ers than we," she said, "but you need them more desper-
ately and do not have them in proportion to your need. We
do not need them."
The Numinous Not Enough
I suggested that every church needs them. The sense of
the numinous is not enough. Let God impress man not only
by the distance between God and man but by specific
words of truth out of that distance. I am not ashamed to
have the Bible rather than the altar as the center of the
nonconformist worship. This is prophetic religion, God
"Weakness of Common Worship 43
speaking to man and not simply man aspiring to the infi-
nite God.
"The Bible is well enough," answered my wife, "'but
there is a little frock-coated man behind the Bible in your
church who sometimes imagines himself God/*
We were off on an old argument. The American Prot-
estant church is too secularized, my wife insists, from the
sermon on current topics to the nineteenth-century Moody
and Sankey lilts. I am inclined to admit that and deplore it.
Religion is the dimension of depth in life and the Protes-
tant church does not suggest depth. "But," I ask, "is it
possible to create the sense of depth merely by building
the high vaults of a cathedral?"
I recalled the words of Solomon: "The Lord hath said
that he would dwell in the thick darkness but I have built
a house of habitation for thee and a place of thy dwelling
forever." Is it really possible, I inquired, to symbolize the
majesty of God and the distance between God and man?
Isn't it better to let His throne be thick darkness than to
build a house? The house will inevitably be for Solomon's
glory as much as for the Lord's. It will be intended to glo-
rify a particular church, or perhaps the bishop. (I have
heard of a bishop who speaks of my cathedral.) It will
symbolize pride rather than humility.
At this particular stage of the argument we approached
the beautiful new and massive doors of the cathedral, re-
cently dedicated. In one of the panels of the doors we saw
engraved, "To the glory of God and in memory of . . ."
The memorial was in honor of one of the great financial
overlords of the past decade, recently deceased. You see,
I observed, these things are never purely for the glory of
God. Human pride is always mixed with them. Perhaps we
ought not try to symbolize the truths of our religion in stone
and steel. The result is usually some unhappy combination
of the sense of divine majesty and human pride.
We entered the great unfinished nave of the cathedral,
Or rather, it is finished but still empty. I could not deny
that its very size and proportions were overawing, prompt-
ing a sense of religious awe. Was the emptiness, I won-
44 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
dered, an advantage, giving everyone the opportunity of
expressing his specific religious ideas in terms of its great
dimension? Or was this perhaps symbolic of the Christian
church in our era? An empty gothic church fane of majestic
proportions! Let the gothic symbolize what is archaic in the
church's message, for surely this gothic does not express
anything relevant to the thoughts and aspirations of our
generation. Let the emptiness of the unfinished cathedral
symbolize that the message of the church is vacuous when
it is not archaic. It has nothing to say to this generation that
would make the Christian gospel relevant to the problems
which we face.
Protestantism's Advantage
I was inclined to insinuate a certain degree of denomina-
tional pride into these reveries, as we passed through the
long nave. For I thought that a quasi-secular Protestant
church with a relevant message might have its advantages
over a more religious Catholic church which either had no
message or only speaks with the voice of the past. Further-
more, a Protestantism that is not secularized has the possi-
bilities of a greater religious tension than Catholicism. It
does not glorify the visible but the invisible church and
occasionally some of its prophets find the message in its
Bible which reveals both the majesty of God and the rele-
vance of his word to the human heart In other words,
Protestantism is either better or worse than Catholicism.
Catholicism symbolizes the eternal in church, edifice, altar,
priest, and liturgy. It expresses too exactly what cannot be
expressed. That is its virtue and its vice.
It was too late to make these reflections the basis of an
argument. We had entered the part of the cathedral where
the service was being held. The bishop was still preaching.
We arrived at the part of the sermon in which the bishop
was telling the congregation how to fight modem paganism
which, he said, abounded in modern civilisation. "First of
aU," he declared, "the church must be sure of its own mes-
Weakness of Common Worship 45
sage. It must not be afraid to state that it is both super-
natural and miraculous."
I failed to understand just how the bold proclamation of
miracles would give modern paganism its coup de grace.
Was the bishop perhaps thinking of the miracle of conver-
sion? But he said nothing about conversion; and one would
hardly expect the miracle of conversion as a natural conse-
quence of a mere faith in miracles. Not being a naturalist,
I didn't mind his emphasis upon supernaturalism, if he had
only said what he meant by it and in what way it was re-
lated to the spiritual life. But the bishop's only hint of a
definition implied that he thought there were two layers
of reality, one spiritual and another material.
The Morality of Jesus
The second point of the sermon was that the church must
develop fervent missionary zeal against modern paganism;
but no hint was given of the method in which the zeal
might express itself. I thought we might come to grips with
reality a little more on the third point, because the right
reverend preacher said that the third point of attack was
to uphold the morality of Jesus against the morality of con-
venience. "We must understand that morality is what God
reveals in Christ and not what we may want or desire," he
said. But he made no suggestion of the content of the mor-
ality which Christ revealed. He couldn't have meant the
injunction of Jesus, "Sell all thou hast and give it to the
poor." Nor could he have been thinking of the words,
"Resist not him that is evil." At least, I doubt whether that
could have been on his mind, considering the number of
sermons he has preached excoriating pacifists and extolling
the splendors of our navy.
I could make nothing of his idea of Christian morality
except that he seemed to make inconvenience a test of
goodness. Anything which conformed to our desires seemed
to be bad. But just what was it that he regarded as good?
At this point my mind wandered and I thought of the ages
46 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
of controversy in moral theology on the validity of the per-
fectionist principles of the sermon on the mount. Is it pos-
sible to make the "morality revealed in Christ" a guide in
specific problems of conduct? And if not, just what kind of
a morality does the church set against the pagan world?
As I summed up the bishop's points I was struck by the
remarkable similarity between the sermon and the cathe-
dral. It was both empty and archaic; or rather it was archaic
when it was not empty. His conception of supernaturalism
was archaic, his idea of missionary zeal was empty and his
exposition of "Christian morality" was both.
Loyalty to the Prayer Book
But I must not forget the final point of the sermon. It
was that the church must resist the pagan world by loyalty
to the prayer book. That evidently limits the hosts of the
Lord to that part of the church which has a prayer book.
In fact the bishop became a little confused at this point
about the relation of his church to the church universal.
He praised the prayer book as "the greatest handbook of
religion of all the ages." As a good Protestant I wanted to
say a word in favor of the Bible, but in the next moment
the bishop became less inclusive and presented the prayer
book as the religious foundation of the Anglican church
and the Anglican church as the universal church of the
"English-speaking world."
But the church which holds such a pre-eminent position
in the English-speaking world, according to the bishop, was
also somehow or other in a special way the apostolic and
universal church. I think the bishop was a little uneasy
about this argument because he tried to bolster it by assert-
ing that there were Anglican churches in every nation of
the world. The argument didn't seem quite fair, consider-
ing that some of these churches are little chapels, the chief
purpose of which is to make Englishmen feel at home in a
foreign land. I remembered the disgust with which that
great soul of the Anglican church, the late Studdert-
Kennedy, once reported after a world tour that some of the
Weakness of Common Worship 47
churches of his communion seemed to serve the purpose of
English clubs among the natives. He might, of course, have
observed that the Lutheran church serves the same purpose
for Germans in the Balkans and elsewhere.
The Bishop Confused
The bishop was clearly confused in the peroration of his
sermon on one of the most fundamental problems of reli-
gion, the relation of the transcendent God to the partial,
contingent, and relative forms of Life and culture with which
the worship of God becomes associated and which falsely
appropriate the majesty of God for themselves. Even the
Catholic church is "Roman" for all of its claims to univer-
sality, claims which are historically and geographically
more plausible than those of the bishop's church. This is
the point where even the best religion becomes evil, trying
to domesticate God in some little world of time and place,
and imagining that the thunder of His voice betrays some
delightfully familiar accents of our particular nation, cul-
ture, time, and place. To make a prayer book the source of
religious pretension, is that not akin to building a cathedral
for the "glory of God" and the incidental aggrandizement
of some bishop, donor, or denomination?
Of course, I must not blame the bishop for not solving
these vexing problems since they have never been solved.
What vexed me was that he didn't seem to be aware of
them.
*1 assume," said my wife as we left the cathedral, "from
the diligent notes you took during the sermon, that you
found it very profitable." I confessed that the notes repre-
sented a violent debate with the preacher rather than a
reverent record of his words. My wife assured me that the
confession was unnecessary. She knew very well that when
I take notes during a sermon or address I am making ready
for debate and not in appreciation.
"If you must debate/* she said, "please don't regard
everything you hear in my church as typical of my church.
What you heard this morning is no more typical of my
48 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
church than a holy roller revival meeting is typical of non-
conformist Protestantism." I conceded die point and gen-
erously remembered that the most saintly Christian I know
is a bishop in her church and that a beautiful service is
really a partial compensation for this kind of sermon. I
even agreed to her contention that some of the frock-
coated, bespatted, and boutonniered ushers in some of our
churches look like floorwalkers in a department store and
are symbols of the secularized church. We finally restored
marital felicity by the mutual agreement to regard what
seemed to be typical in the respective communions as perils
rather than typical realities.
WORSHIP AND THE SOCIAL
CONSCIENCE
What we have to say on the subject of worship and radical
preaching would apply with equal validity to most of the
services of our American Protestant churches. We say it to
radical ministers because they frequently accentuate the
natural weaknesses of the Protestant worship.
There is a crying need for liturgical reform in American
Protestantism. The prayers and the "opening exercises" of
our services are not calculated to arouse and to express reli-
gious thoughts and feelings. The minister is too much in the
center of the worship. The prayers are usually formless and
without beauty. The old spontaneity having departed from
the evangelical churches, die prayers which once expressed
a tumultuous religious passion have degenerated into chatty
conversations with God in which, moreover, the minister is
preaching indirectly to his congregation. The same clich6s
appear again and again in every prayer. "Bless each and
every one of us." "We thank thee for the opportunity of
worshipping thee this morning." "Bless the speaker of the
morning and endow him with a message from on high" and
Weakness of Common Worship 49
countless other stereotyped phrases are repeated ad nau-
seam. Scriptural language and liturgical form are com-
pletely absent from the prayers.
Liturgical language and Scriptural phrases are not valu-
able for their own sake, and we do not ask for more beauty
in the worship service as an end in itself. There are, in fact,
tendencies in the nonliturgical churches to copy the forms
of the liturgical churches which are primarily prompted by
aesthetic considerations, and we do not support them. What
we need is more spiritual reality in the worship service.
This is not possible if the minister does not take his task as
priest seriously. The task of the priest is not to speak to God
in a casual fashion, making a few desultory remarks which
usually combine stereotyped phrases and ideas taken from
the morning sermon. The priest must know how to express
the basic religious aspirations and feelings of a whole con-
gregation. This is a difficult task which requires a high
measure of discipline. The discipline is necessary because
the temptation is to forget and to neglect the basic and
common and perennial religious needs of all men when the
prayer is not carefully prepared.
From the standpoint of radical religion it is particularly
important that concern for our social problems should be
intimately related to the basic forms of our faith and the
whole range of religious attitudes. To illustrate, let us con-
sider the various aspects of prayer in turn.
i. Praise and Thanksgiving
The Christian prayer acknowledges God as the author
and creator of life. Thanksgiving for the supply of life's
necessities can therefore be made an acknowledgement of
our sense of stewardship without a too obvious belaboring
of the point. Our thanksgiving ought moreover to include
gratitude for what we have, not only through the bounties
of nature but by the working of an intricate system of serv-
ice and production in modern society. Thus gratitude to
God becomes also an expression of our awareness of our
mutual dependence and our indebtedness to all who by
their faithfulness in their several callings contribute to our
necessities.
50 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
2. Humility and Contrition
The expression of contrition is a natural consequence of
the soul's self-discovery in the sight of God. In worship we
become conscious of our violation of the law and the will
of God. We confess that we have done the things we ought
not to have done and left undone the things which we
ought to have done. Usually this confession of sin is too
vague and general. It ought to include contrition for the
dishonesties and deceits which we practice in our attitude
toward social issues, in which we always mix idealism with
self-interest. Naturally it will express our sense of responsi-
bility for the collective sins which bring society into con-
stant confusion, the violence of nations, the oppression of
the weak, our indifference toward the needy, the pride of
the powerful, and the envy and jealousy of the frustrated.
Human sin expresses itself in every area of human exist-
ence, in secret thought as well as overt deeds, in family
life and in the relation of the family toward society. The
whole range of human sinfulness cannot be touched in each
prayer. It is important therefore to deal with a particular
area of human wrongdoing from time to time and search
the heart in regard to it. But it is also important to express
the relation of sins to each other, particularly their common
root in the pride of man and the relation of so-called social
sins to individual sins.
3. Intercession
Our prayers of intercession express our sense of unity and
common responsibility in the sight of God. Sometimes we
may limit them to those who are bound to us by the ties of
our common faith. At other times we will think of the unity
of mankind without regard to this particular bond. We will
pray for all "sorts and conditions of men." But to discipline
the imagination the sorts and conditions ought to be named
and their special needs expressed: the unemployed, the vic-
tims of cruelty and oppression, those who live in economic
insecurity, the racial minorities who suffer from the arro-
gance of our race. We might also include in our prayers
men of business who stand under particular temptation
Weakness of Common Worship 51
that they may regard the services they render as some-
thing more than a profit-taking device and the responsible
leaders of government that they may not forget their
sacred trust. At certain times we ought also to include the
various callings and professions, nurses, teachers, doctors,
writers, artisans, housewives, etc., in our intercessions,
remembering their particular duties, temptations, and op-
portunities. Such prayers give specific content to what may
otherwise become a meaningless "Lord bless each and
every one of us."
4. Aspiration
The prayer "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven"
must take many forms in the pastoral prayer. We will pray
for peace and for a just social order, for the elimination of
particular abuses in our common life, but above all we
will make it a rededication of our own wills to an obedient
love toward God. Sometimes it would be well to meditate
upon the will of God, using various classical Scripture
passages in which the character of His will is expressed.
In summary, our priestly function must be performed in
terms of greater relevance to all the specific problems, per-
sonal and social, in which our people stand and in terms
of greater contact with the whole Biblical and religious
tradition of our faith, including the liturgical history of all
the Christian churches. We ought, incidentally, not count
only upon our own resources but use material from all
prayer book sources. Even when we do not use prayers of
the past, just as they have been written, it is well to read
them for the sake of acquiring a decent style. If style may
seem an inconsequential matter to passionate prophets
of the gospel it may.be well to remind them that without
it they will merely v parade their own personalities and
prejudices in prayer. A good style is a cloak of anonymity.
That cloak is very much needed in our Protestant churches.
We preachers constantly border on the abyss of exhibi-
tionism.
52 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
A PROBLEM OF EVANGELICAL
CHRISTIANITY
The occasion which prompted these reflections on the state
of Evangelical Christianity was an early morning Easter
Service in a large movie auditorium. Easter is supremely
the climax of the Christian church year. The incredible
Easter story of the empty tomb gains credibility only as a
part of, and against the background of, the whole Chris-
tian story. The Christian faith is, that if we die with
Christ we will also be raised with Him. The idea has a
double significance. St. Paul seems sometimes to be think-
ing primarily of the dying to sin and the rising to righteous-
ness, and at other times primarily of the guarantee in
Christ of the victory over death.
In any event Easter is a day in which men ought humbly
to consider all the false and pretentious ways by which
they have sought to live and to cover up the insecurity,
frailty, and sinfulness of life; and joyfully to realize that
there is forgiveness and resurrection for those who are of
penitent heart. It is a question whether any sermon, even
the best, can convey the Easter message and hope, if the
whole atmosphere of the Gospel is not created and re-
created in prayer and song.
Evangelical Christianity in all of its various varieties
began as a protest against formal religion. It believed that
the formal prayer and the theological subtleties of the
traditional church did not sufficiently emphasize that we
cannot live with Christ if we will not die with Him. It
desires, so to confront the soul with Christ, that as Judge
he would drive the old self to despair and that as Re-
deemer he would transmute despair into repentance; and
repentance into new life. Evangelical Christianity desired,
in other words, a more powerful impact upon the souls of
Weakness of Common Worship 53
men than the traditional offices and services of the church
afforded.
One could not help but be struck by the sorrowful con-
trast between the desire and the reality as one worshipped
on Easter morning in the movie palace. Nothing symbolizes
the tawdriness of our modern culture more obviously than
the moving picture palace. Not that any of the nice com-
binations of sentimentality and eroticism which is the
daily fare of the movie audience obtruded this Sunday
morning. The palace itself was chaste and free of the
usual gimcracks which usually disfigure these places. One
had the feeling that the directors of the palace were doing
their level best to make the place fit for a Christian service.
But such things cannot be done overnight. What was pain-
fully evident was that the most non-Christian form of mod-
ern culture cannot provide the forms for a genuine Chris-
tian service of worship. The arrangements for the service
were obviously left in the hands of the movie people. They
did the best they could to transform a movie palace into
the semblance of a church. There was a backdrop of a
cathedral window. Between the choir and the window was
a curious arrangement which might have been intended for
an altar laden with Easter lilies. Yet it looked more like a
huge coffin, smothered in flowers. Perhaps a cemetery
scene was really intended; for before the altar-catafalque
was a gilded fence with large gates. On each side stood
figures which might have been angels or again they might
have been props left over from some medieval decor.
The service began with the house in darkness and the
gradual lighting of the stage, symbolizing the Easter dawn.
The organist appeared with the spotlight upon him as his
console emerged, trickily and automatically from its cubicle
to full view. The choir was for some obscure reason
gowned in a symphony of colors from deep blue on the
outside to bright red at the center. I do not know what
this symbolized and could not make up my mind whether
it represented something left over from some spectacle or
whether the red at the center was meant to be the rising
sun. There was the usual rather exhibitionist choir director
who spoiled by his antics what would otherwise have been
54 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
quite acceptable Easter music. -This exhibitionist director
is one of the symbols of what the evangelical church has
in common with the theater.
The whole trouble was that the movie people were quite
obviously intent upon producing a "spectacle." This is
what they are adept in. They wanted it to be subdued and
solemn, but nevertheless a spectacle. They quite obviously
wanted to make a real contribution to "religion/* Here was
a church service with so little of its own to go on that
movie technic could dominate the spirit of it completely.
The one adequate note of Christian faith and hope was
expressed in a brief and simple but adequate and helpful
sermon on the text "Thanks be to God who giveth us the
victory through our Lord Jesus Christ/'
Perhaps one ought not to be too critical. I am sure that
the leaders of united Protestantism in our city were grate-
ful that this great movie palace was filled with seven thou-
sand worshippers at 7 A.M. on Easter morning. But the
real trouble lies with the fact that we were not worshippers
and could not be. There was nothing in the symbolism or
in the service which might prompt us to behold the
"beauty of the Lord" or His Majesty or the mystery of His
Mercy. There was of course a "general" prayer which
touched upon the themes of the Christian faith but no great
act of adoration and praise, of penitence and contrition.
Here there was no chance to confess that our life, as
"carnally minded" leads to death, and to praise God for
the grace by which death can be transformed into life,
love, joy, and peace. One must not put too much emphasis
upon a single service or upon a single symbol of the reli-
gious inadequacy of modern Evangelical Protestantism.
The service had significance chiefly because it revealed the
tragic problem of modern Protestantism. The formlessness
of its worship sometimes achieves its own form in the sim-
plicity of a village meeting house. But this formlessness is
inadequate when confronted with the potent forms created
by a modern secular culture. The forms of that culture sug-
gest a content; and it is not the Christian content. The
Evangelical Christianity of the frontier of yesterday can-
not be transported into the highly competitive cultural
Weakness of Common Worship 55
currents of a modern metropolis and maintain itself with-
out more adequate instruments. The old Evangelical spon-
taneity is lost in any event even in the village chapel. The
Christian faith requires conduits of an adequate theology,
an adequate liturgy and an adequate symbolism of wor-
ship. These forms are always in danger of becoming empty
and require periodic protests against "devotion's every
grace except the heart." But religious spontaneity without
adequate forms degenerates into something even more
graceless than a graceless formalism. It degenerates into
a void which is filled by the potent symbols of a cinema
secularism.
I left the "dawn" service and betook myself to a liturgi-
cal church and participated in Holy Communion with my
family. The simple Communion service offered the pos-
sibility for the expression of every genuine Christian im-
pulse of worship, and contained all the sublime affirma-
tions of the Christian faith and hope.
The service held me completely enough so that it was
only after it was over that I speculated ruefully upon the
fact that I could not have received communion in this
church except for the fact that the church was touched by
the slightly heretical broadmindedness which the academic
community had imparted to it. The liturgical churches,
whether Lutheran or Episcopalian, fail to help the main
body of Christianity in America because they set up bar-
riers to fellowship, more formidable than is necessary to
guard their peculiar treasures of faith and tradition. Thus
they retain as a peculiar possession what should be flowing
into the whole body of the church.
Our problem would not of course be solved by merely
imitating their forms. Already that is producing in some
nonliturgical churches theatrical versions of a liturgy and
forms in which a sentimental aestheticism is more obvious
than a Biblically inspired common worship.
The Christian faith in America faces many perplexing
problems in expressing itself adequately amidst the con-
fusions of modern culture and civilization. The problem
which was illumined by this Easter service may not be the
most primary. But it is certainly important. Ought there
56 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
not be in America some real movement for the reconsidera-
tion of the relation of faith to worship and of worship
to forms? Are not the experiences of our chaplains in the
army proof of the same void which this Easter service
revealed?
THE RELIGIOUS PLURALISM
OF AMERICA
The preceding article by Dr. Alec Vidler, editor of The-
ology and librarian at St. Deiniors Library at Hardwarden,
England, was written at our request.* Dr. Vidler is at
present on a visit in this country and we were certain that
his critical view of our religious life would be of great
value to American Christians. We feel compelled to take
issue with him on his criticism of our religious pluralism,
all the more so because we are afraid that what will seem
an unjustified indictment on this point may detract from
the power of his general (and it seems to us justified)
criticism of the "religiousness** of American churches.
The religious pluralism of America has its own special
history, being partly the consequence of transplanting
European "national" churches to a new nation into which
they carry their old national ethos and partly the result
of the protest of the sectarian and exclusive religious com-
munity against "national" and inclusive churches. Dr.
Vidler seems to recognize no validity in this radical protest
against churches which are too closely identified with the
ethos of a nation. He seems to regard a "national" church
as having some kind of special Scriptural warrant. What-
ever the weaknesses of the "sectarian" church, which has
set the pattern for American church life, one should think
the prevailing secularism of modern culture, might give the
"The Appalling Religiousness of America," pp. 4-5, same
issue.
Weakness of Common Worship 57
idea of an exclusive church a new validity. Is there any
value in a "national" church pretending to be the whole
nation at prayer when it is, as a matter of fact, a minority
group within the nation, not only in a culture which is, like
our own, officially secular, but also in European nations
which are officially Christian but not actually so?
It would be wrong to be complacent about the anarchy
of American religious pluralism. We are only slowly over-
coming it, but perhaps not more slowly than European
established churches are able to include dissenting churches
into their fellowship. Dr. Vidler does not want to accept
any present "established" church as the truly national
church. But the higher degree of religious unity in Euro-
pean nations depends altogether upon the supremacy of
such established churches; and their inability to find a
common ground with dissenting bodies is derived precisely
from the pretension that they are in some ultimate sense
"the" national church.
One further question must be asked: If we are to insist
with such emphasis as Dr. Vidler on "national" churches,,
what is to become of "Christ's Church"? Is not the national
ethos which colors the church life of each nation a peril to
the ecumenical movement, and do not all national churches
assume that the contingent historical forces, which molded
their history, have a universal validity?
THE WEAKNESS OF COMMON
WORSHIP IN AMERICAN
PROTESTANTISM
In almost every Christian movement of the world, con-
cerned with the revitalization of the life of the church,
liturgical reform, or at least liturgical concern, is one of
its aspects. This is true everywhere except in America,
where the concern should be greatest because the need is
$8 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
so urgent. Sometimes liturgical reform movements are in-
terested in reclaiming some forgotten treasure of worship
in the life of the church. Sometimes they seek to make
the prayers of the church more relevant to the peculiar
problems of our age; and sometimes, as in the more liturgi-
cal churches, they seek to relate the worship of the church
more closely to its sacramental life.
In America there is no such movement. Perhaps this
proves that it is possible for a church to lose a traditional
treasure of grace so completely that it is not even conscious
of a loss. The nonliturgical churches of America have felt
inadequacy in their worship services at only one point.
They have sensed a certain aesthetic inadequacy and
have sought to overcome this by vested choirs, sung re-
ponses to prayers, and rearrangement of the chancel to
make the altar or communion table, rather than the pulpit,
the focus of attention for the congregation. Sometimes
silent prayers with soft organ music are added. The "free
prayers," or the pastoral prayers of the minister, are not as
formless as they once were. They do not as frequently begin
with the phrase "We thank Thee Our Father that Thou
hast permitted us to come together this morning." But they
very frequently supplant the old banality and crude im-
mediacy with a new sentimentality and rather too-purple
poetry.
Since we rightly pride ourselves in America upon inti-
mate ecumenical relations which permit the churches to
borrow each other's treasures of grace, it is somewhat sur-
prising that this mutual exchange has taken place so
little in the field of common worship. Here nothing has
happened but the appropriation of some of the "trappings"
of liturgical worship.
The deficiencies in a krge number of nonliturgical
churches could be briefly enumerated as follows:
i. The pastoral prayer is both too long and too form-
less. The free worship gives too much freedom to the
minister to speak to God without reference to the spiritual
needs of the congregation. Instead of a long prayer, a
series of short prayers, each devoted to a particular con-
cern of the spiritual life is more likely to carry the con-
Weakness of Common Worship 59
gregration with it. A bidding which announces the subject
of the prayer is also very helpful. A rambling prayer in
which various concerns are expressed without logical
coherence is a kind of "performance" but not an act of
"common worship."
2. Without the discipline of traditional and historic
prayers there is a tendency to neglect some of the neces-
sary and perennial themes of prayer: praise and thanks-
giving, confession, dedication, intercession, etc. Some-
times when these various themes are in the prayer they are
scattered about to such a degree that the thanksgiving
fails to deal adequately with "all the blessings of this life"
and the confession is not a significant expression of contri-
tion for the worshipper's involvement in the evils of the
world.
3. The language of the prayers of common worship is
either too common, too sentimental, or too extravagant.
The effort to make worship more "beautiful" has in recent
decades tended to substitute rather extravagant poetic
phrases for the original banality and commonness. What is
still lacking is chastity. Chastity of phrase does not pre-
clude poetic rhythm. The fact is that prayers should have
something of the quality of good poetry; for worship must
avail itself of the highest arts in the realm of speech as
well as in music and in the graphic arts. The prayers
should, furthermore, contain both Biblical material and
Biblical phraseology. If this is done to excess the relevance
of the Biblical faith to contemporary experience may be
obscured. If it is not done at all the contemporary ex-
perience is not transfigured by the Biblical insight.
4. The use of Biblical ideas in prayer is necessary not
merely to purify the expressions but to correct the thought.
Most free prayers at funerals, for instance, tend to become
heretical in their sentimentality; for they usually assure
the eternal bliss of the dear departed on the basis of his
good works on earth. A closer relation to Biblical truth
would inevitably result in an expression of the Biblical
faith that all of us, even the best, are in the final instance
dependent upon God's mercy and forgiveness.
The lack of influence from either the Bible or the great
6O ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
traditions of common prayer tend to betray the prayer to a
consideration of the immediate situation to the exclusion
of the total human situation. Thus, for instance, when
pastors gather together in their monthly meeting to hear
a visiting speaker, the prayers frequently consist of elabo-
rate thanksgiving for the talents of the visiting speaker,
and equally elaborate prayers for the inspiration of his
message and expressions of the hope that his message may
bear fruit in the hearts of his listeners. As one who is fre-
quently made the subject of such prayers I must confess to
an embarrassment not because I do not greatly need the
inspiration which is the object of the intercession, but be-
cause a puny individual is made the center of concern.
Obviously in such a situation the center of attention should
be the "whole estate of Christ's church," thanksgiving for
its unity, contrition for its divisions, and a meaningful rela-
tion of the church, as a community of grace to the whole
range of problems in the communities of the world.
5. The free worship tends to be too personal in every
respect It centers too frequently in the personality of the
leader of worship. Personalities are exchanged in the
introduction of the preacher which are sometimes humor-
ous, sometimes banal, and almost always quite unneces-
sary. The forms and traditions of the liturgical churches
tend to hide the personal idiosyncrasies of the preacher
and to guard against the temptations of exhibitionism.
These temptations are much more considerable than is
usually recognized.
6. The reading of the Scripture in Protestant worship
leaves much to be desired. First of all, churches have al-
most completely dispensed with the reading of two lessons,
taken either from the Epistles on the one hand and the
Gospels on the other, or from the Old Testament on the
one hand and the New Testament on the other. In conse-
quence, the modern congregation, whose intimacy with
Scripture is precarious in any event, is not instructed in
Biblical thought; and the Old Testament becomes an al-
most completely unknown book. In the reading of the
Scripture there is moreover a curious formality in contrast
to- the informality of the rest of the service. No word of
Weakness of Common Worship 61
explanation of a Biblical phrase or paragraph is ever
offered during the reading, though such a brief word
would frequently make what seems irrelevant, relevant to
the experience and the understanding of the congregation.
7. The participation of the congregation in the worship
service is too minimal. When nonliturgical churches in-
troduce responses to prayers, they usually limit them to
sung responses by the choir but not by the congregation.
There are nonliturgical churches that have books of com-
mon worship; but frequently they are not used. Some
churches do not possess them. Without such forms it is
very difficult to secure adequate participation of the con-
gregation in the service. One of the most important prob-
lems confronting us in this whole realm is to help the
congregation become a worshipping body, knit together as
a community by its worship so that it will not be an audi-
ence, for which a kind of preacher-choir performance is
being staged.
8. Choir music in the nonliturgical churches and in some
liturgical ones is still affected by the sentimentality which
began to corrupt religious music in the latter part of the
last century. The soprano solo is still too frequently the
main offering. Even the most modest church should have a
choir; and the choir would do better to sing one of the
great chorales than to present some insipid modern con-
coction. The paid quartet is usually no more integrated into
the whole economy of worship than is the soprano with her
solo. It is fortunate that choirs have increasingly achieved
robes. A great deal of distraction has thus been avoided.
But this remains a rather external advantage if the music
of the choir is not more genuinely a part of the worship
service than is usually the case.
All these detailed criticisms of banalities, sentimentali-
ties, and lack of beauty, decorum, and religious breadth
and depth in public worship, deal only with symptoms.
Something more fundamental than a deterioration of
aesthetic standards is responsible for the condition of
public worship. The proof that this is so lies in the fact
that a mere lifting of standards aesthetically still leaves
much to be desired. The fact is that American Protestant-
62 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
ism is founded upon sectarian protests against preoccupa-
tion with theology, liturgy, and polity in die more orthodox
churches. These protests had their validity in their day;
for it is manifest again and again in the lif e of the church,
that the various disciplines of the church which are prop-
erly means of grace may also hecome corrupters of grace.
Liturgical worship may possess "devotions every grace
except the heart." Theology may destroy the vitality of
faith. Preoccupation with the polity and organization
of the church may express pride rather than the spirit of
fellowship. The protest against all these disciplines was
supported by the authority of the Pauline word "the letter
kifleth but the spirit maketh alive." The letter does indeed
destroy spirit if it means a preoccupation with minutiae
of forms. But spirit without discipline, form, and tradition
is also vain. The trouble with American Protestantism is
that its protest against the various forms and disciplines led
to their destruction. It may be possible to have a brief
period of religious spontaneity in which the absence of
such disciplines does not matter. The evangelism of the
American frontier may have been such a period. But this
spontaneity does not last forever. When it is gone a church
without adequate conduits of traditional liturgy and the-
ological learning and tradition is without the waters of
life.
In a sense the formless exuberance of American church
architecture in most of the churches built between 1870
and 1930 is a perfect expression of the formlessness inside
the church. Neither Gothic architecture nor the chaste
New England meeting house are the only possible archi-
tecturally-poetic frames to outwardly symbolize the spirit-
ual reality of the church. A vital Christianity will express
itself in new architectural forms or in novel adaptations of
old forms to the new realities of a technical society. But
American church architecture in the period mentioned
revealed no discipline of any kind. It was merely the ex-
pression of free imagination and the fruit of some archi-
tect's conviction that a church should not look like a grain
elevator. Therefore it was distinguished from the latter by
Weakness of Common Worship 63
as many turrets, arches, and other curious gingerbread
as the architect could dream up.
It is neither necessary nor possible for the "free churches"
to return to the traditional forms of the liturgical churches.
There can well be more freedom and spontaneity than these
forms allow. But the more vital liturgical churches have
actually achieved a considerable freedom beyond their
traditional forms, in the use of prayers, for instance, which
are not in the prayer book, but which extend the spirit
of the prayer book to contemporary occasions. It is neces-
sary, however, that the free prayer become thoroughly in-
formed by the whole Biblical faith and by the spirit and
the form of the traditional disciplines. That such an end is
possible is proved by the type of worship which we find in
the Church of Scotland for instance. For there the pastoral
prayers have achieved a Biblical form and comprehensive-
ness which our prayers lack; and the spirit of the service
has a stateliness and dignity which we have not achieved.
It is rather suprising how little this matter of worship
has been made an object of concern in the ecumenical
church. This is a field in which churches of various tradi-
tions ought humbly to seek to learn of one another no less
than in the field of religious thought, in which ecumenical
exchange and mutuality is an established reality.
RELIGIOSITY AND THE
CHRISTIAN FAITH
A visitor to our shores would probably come to the same
conclusion at which St. Paul arrived in regard to the
Athenians, namely, that we are "very religious." But the
judgment might not imply a compliment any more than
Paul wanted to so imply when he called attention to the
worship of many gods in Athens, including the "unknown
64 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
god." Our religiosity seems to have as little to do with the
Christian faith as the religiosity of the Athenians.
The "unknown god" in America seems to be faith itself.
Our politicians are always admonishing the people to have
"faith." Sometimes they seem to imply that faith is itself
redemptive. Sometimes this faith implies faith in some-
thing. That something is usually an idol, rather than the
"God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ," who both judges
and has mercy upon sinful men and nations. Sometimes we
are asked to have faith in ourselves, sometimes to have
faith in humanity, sometimes to have faith in America.
Sometimes, it is hope, rather than faith, which is really
intended. We are to have hope that we will win the cold
war or that the cold war will not break out into an atomic
conflict.
These provisional hopes are no doubt rather better than
despair, for desperate actions and policies are generated in
despair. But the objects of faith are almost always idola-
trous. For whether it is in ourselves, or in mankind, or in
civilization, or in America, that we are asked to have faith,
the admonition always points to an object of faith which
is less than God and which certainly does not deserve un-
reserved commitment or adoration. The question is whether
a generation which has lost its faith in all the gods of the
nineteenth century, that is, in "history," or "progress," or
"enlightenment," or the "perfectibility of .man," is not
expressing its desire to believe in something, to be com-
mitted somehow, even though it is not willing to be com-
mitted to a God who can be known only through repent-
ance, and whose majesty judges all human pretensions. It
is precisely faith in this God which is avoided in all this
religiosity. A nation as powerful and fortunate as ours is
not inclined to worship a God before whom "the nations
are as a drop in the bucket," and "who bringeth princes to
naught." Our modem religiosity, in short, expresses various
forms of self-worship. It is a more specifically religious
ethos than the so-called "secular" faiths which history in
our tragic age has refuted. The strategy seems to be to
bring the discredited pagan gods in Christian disguises,
Weakness of Common Worship 65
hoping that the traditional piety may be merged with the
secular forms of self-confidence.
The cause of this procedure seems to be that we are so
sure of ourselves, or our power and of our virtue, and yet
we are not sure of our destiny at all. We live on the edge
of an abyss, and at any moment our private securities may
be swallowed in the world-wide insecurity. The religiosity
which seems to correspond to this combination of self-
esteem and anxiety would seem to be a secular faith
clothed in traditional terms. The most disquieting aspect
of such religiosity is that it is frequently advanced by
popular leaders of the Christian church, and is not re-
garded as a substitute, but as an interpretation of that
faith. The Gospel admonition, "Repent ye for the kingdom
of heaven is at hand," this challenge to submit all our
achievements and ambitions and hopes to a much higher
judge than those judges who support our self-esteem, this
admonition would seem to have little affinity with the
"power of positive thinking."
It is significant that while this modern religiosity makes
for self-esteem, particularly collective self-esteem, the
nation is helped to find and to hold its rightful place in
the perilous position of leadership in the alliance of free
nations by many shrewd and critical "secular" thinkers
who help us to weigh our responsibilities and judge the
hazards of the task in which we are engaged. One must
come to the conclusion that religion per se and faith per se
are not virtuous, or a cause of virtue. The question is al-
ways what the object of worship is, and whether the
worship tends to break the pride of the self so that a truer
self may arise, either individually or collectively. If worship
and faith do not serve this rebirth of men and of nations
they are the source of confusion. We can, therefore, take
no satisfaction in the pervading religiosity of our nation.
Much of it is a perversion of the Christian gospel. It ag-
gravates, rather than mitigates, the problems of a very
successful people.
It will be remembered that the prophet Jeremiah was
worried about the false prophets who did not speak "the
66 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
word of the Lord" but spoke their own dreams and imagi-
nations. He had a test for detecting false prophecy. The
false prophet was one who accentuated complacency and
promised those who despised God, "you shall have assured
peace in this place." It is as difficult in our day as in the
day of Jeremiah to preach "the word of the Lord," for
that runs counter to the complacency of men and of nations.
It is sharper than a "two-edged sword." It must hurt before
it can heal.
PABT n: Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead 9 ?
THE WEAKNESS OF THE
MODERN CHURCH
Superficially considered the Protestant churches of Amer-
ica are the most vital churches of the Western world.
Their public prestige may not approximate that of the
English churches in quality, but they hold the allegiance
of the masses to a larger degree. In Germany Protestantism
has become a middle-class minority movement to a marked
degree, and it has begun to take the disaffection of the
great working classes for granted. Among us, where class
consciousness is less- marked, the church may be predomi-
nantly middle class, but it has not sacrificed the loyalty of
the working classes completely. Whatever the weakness
of the puritan tradition which informs the moral attitude
of American Protestantism, it has considerable achieve-
ments to its credit. It has made for wholesomeness in
family relations, for diligence and thrift in ecomonic life,
and for rather generous philanthropic attitudes. The wealth
of the nation may now be corroding some of the puritan
virtues; yet there can be no question but that the puritan
tradition made for robust self -discipline, without which the
nation would have succumbed to the vices of sensuality
more quickly than it did.
But in spite of these solid achievements the religious
life of America is not in good health. One must suspect, in
fact, that such vitality as the church evinces is partly
analogous to the contortions of a feverish patient whose
sickness drives him to fretful activity, though his strength
is waning. The basic difficulty of the church is that it is
not facing the central moral problems of our era. It main-
69
70 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
tains ethical attitudes in the interstices of our civilization,
but does not build them into its structure. It embroiders
life with its little amenities, but it does not change the
pattern. The dominant pattern of social activity in our
society is that of profit-seeking. The constitution of our
civilization was written by Adam Smith, who gave himself
to the illusion that each man could be selfish without any
other restraint but that which the selfishness of others
offered, so that a society of selfish individuals would never-
theless create a social harmony. This is the creed by which
America lives, whatever its protestations. In Europe this
individualism has long since been qualified to a large
degree. In America our great wealth obscured the defects
of an individualistic system until a very recent past.
The church has a gospel of love, which ought to have
given it the insight to recognize the basic fallacy of the
assumptions upon which our civilization organized its life.
There is a word in the church's Scripture which it might
have heeded more earnestly: "From whence come wars
and fighting among you? Come they not hence, even from
your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust and have not;
ye kill and can not obtain; ye fight and war, and yet ye
have not because ye ask not." Unrestrained economic sel-
fishness, unchecked by adequate social control and in-
creasingly free of the inner checks of a vital religion has
piled up social injustice until America has become the
enigma of the Western world. Strangers speak with amaze-
ment of a nation as rich as ours which permits millions of
unemployed to beg the bitter bread of charity while
thousands who gambled on the stock market live in luxury
without disgorging their gain.
The gambling fever which possessed the country be*
tween 1925 and 1929 was not effectively checked by reli-
gion. Only a few voices in the church were raised against
it, in spite of the fact that the desire to get something for
nothing, which prompted it, is clearly contrary to any
ethical view of life. Disaster followed upon this carnival
of greed and riotous living, and today millions live in the
misery of poverty and insecurity. The church is laudably
busy in alleviating the sufferings of the unemployed. But
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 71
any church that has gone into a thorough program of un-
employment relief must know how absolutely unsatisfac-
tory private charity is in such a crisis. What is needed is a
sense of responsibility on the part of the whole of society
for the needs of all its members. In regard to the needs of
such a crisis as the present, that sense of responsibility
must express itself in terms of social insurance, which
happily some churches are beginning to advocate.
However, modern society can not be saved by this or
that social reform, and selfish individuals are not brought
to express themselves in Christlike terms by the advocacy
in the pulpit of this or that radical measure. The church
may well leave specific programs to other agencies pro-
vided, however, that it deal rigorously and honestly with
the ethical problems of human nature and human society.
It is at this point that the church fails most grievously.
The orthodox church still convicts people of sin, but the
sins of which it makes people conscious are usually not
those which are most significant in our society; and the
liberal church takes such a romantic view of human nature
that it does not convict its members of sin at all. A religious
institution which does not deal with kind and yet brutal
frankness with human nature, and which does not make an
astute analysis of the motives which drive men to action,
may become very dangerous, because it may easily lead to
hypocrisy.
To profess a gospel of love without letting that gospel
convict each one of us of sinful selfishness means merely
that we will suffer from the illusion that our actions have
been brought into conformity with the ideal we profess,
when in reality our ideal merely obscures the ethically
indifferent character of our motives. The gospel of love
and holiness has been at war with the immediate impulses
of human nature from the very beginning. It is not main-
tained that a new malice has entered the human heart in
our age which would make the preaching of repentance
more needed than in other ages. But it is probably true
that that selfishness expresses itself in greed and in the lust
for power more unrestrainedly in our civilization than in
any other.
72 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
We are living in a world in which the essential power is
economic power. The men who hold this power either
cynically or naively beat back every effort to restrict its
force and to bring it under social control. They may reveal
many amenities in their lives and may, in their intimate re-
lationships, express themselves with charming grace. They
may even be quite honest in their business dealings, though
that may not mean too much, for a civilization which gives
the profit motive rather unrestricted sway has curious
standards of honesty. Now if a religious and ethical insti-
tution is unable to deal realistically and honestly with the
human motives which express themselves in this power
and in the insistence upon its maintenance, all of its claims
to moral leadership must become hollow pretensions.
Let us make this very specific. Here is a good and pious
member of a church who owns a factory. The factory makes
such good profits that the directors decide to capitalize
the income. They sell three million dollars worth of stock,
the proceeds of which they pocket, except for one-third
of it which is put into capital equipment. The workers in
the factory are unorganized. Their wages average $25
per week. They have no protection against unemployment.
They are, as a matter of fact, on a two-day week at the
present time, and have nothing but a meager two-days'
wage for their weekly sustenance. The majority stockholder
has meanwhile made a handsome contribution to his
church, which was received with uncritical and extrava-
gant praise on the part of the leaders of the church, and
there was in their gratitude the broad suggestion that he
had really reached the last and perfect stage of Christian
morality.
Meanwhile he lived in a gorgeous mansion, which must
have cost him more than a quarter of a million dollars,
and his yearly expenses could hardly be less than a hun-
dred thousand dollars. His benevolences really represent
the crumbs which fall from Dives table. He might have
been much more generous than he was without making
anything which could be called a sacrifice according to
Christian standards. Having many friends in the bond
business, it might be added that he took some fliers in
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 73
stocks not connected with his business. Most of his profits
have vanished since the stock-market crash in 1929, but
that does not change his intention. He was perfectly will-
ing to regard American industry as a Christmas tree which
offered rich fruits to those who knew how to pluck them.
He seemed perfectly oblivious to the social and moral im-
plications of stock-market transactions, which loaded in-
dustry with a vast burden of ownership obligations, while
the workers sought in vain for elemental security. In a
recent drive for unemployment relief he gave $25,000, and
honestly imagined himself very generous because he had
counted his paper profits to his wealth, and pitied himself
when he lost it.
The man I describe may be quite sincere within the
limits of his social intelligence. He lives in a world in
which privilege is taken for granted, and he does not think
of himself as living luxuriously. Nor does he fully realize
what the social consequences of his economic greed are.
But if the Christian church to which he belongs does not
help him to realize this, it is hardly true to its own highest
insights. It has a gospel which proclaims that greatness
must be measured in terms of service, and that self-realiza-
tion comes through forgetting oneself.
This man finds greatness in the power he holds and
realizes himself in the expression of his power. His benev-
olences are only incidental to this central passion of his
Me. Has the church ever helped him to analyze himself?
Has it disclosed to him how sweet the lust of power is and
how easily it is rationalized? Has it ever confronted Tiirn
with himself? After all, that is one of the chief functions
of vital religion. An honest religious experience makes the
soul conscious of its own inadequacies and sins as it feels
itself in the presence of God. That is why, when religion
has achieved great vitality it has always produced a few
ascetics who were so conscious of the demoniac power in
the acquisitive instinct that they throttled it altogether.
The modern church turns its back upon this asceticism;
but is it not blind to the moral sensitiveness which is at the
root of asceticism, and does it produce anything com-
mensurate with that kind of moral sensitivity? Our
74 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
churches are filled with people who have never made an
honest analysis of their own motives. They try to deceive
their fellows with moral pretensions largely because they
are themselves self-deceived. And sometimes their piety is
one of the forces which is consciously or unconsciously ap-
propriated for the purpose of maintaining this deception.
It is not only in helping people make an honest self-
analysis that the modern church fails. It fails also to make
a rigorous analysis of society for the benefit of those it
claims to lead. Most men can not see very far. Their in-
justices are partly due to their blindness. They do not know
what kind of a world they live in. They imagine that
America is a thoroughly generous nation while the fact is
that America, like all other nations, expresses itself in
terms of economic greed in its relationship to other na-
tions, the most significant aspect of its foreign policy at
the present time being that it desires to sell other nations
more goods than it is willing to buy from them. This
policy is prompted to a degree by the fact that our work-
ers do not get enough wages to buy the products of our
own machines, and we must get rid of the surplus in foreign
markets. Our present depression is partly caused by the
fact that there is an increasing resentment in the outside
world against this unmutual conduct. Does the church
acquaint its members with the moral implication of this
policy?
Or again the members of the church believe that every
worker, if only he is diligent, will gain sufficient rewards,
and that if workers are poor, that is because they are lazy.
That creed is a part of the individualism which we have
inherited from the past and which is thoroughly irrelevant
to the facts of modern civilization. The fact is that the
modern machine is displacing workers so rapidly that some
two million of them could not find work even before this
depression came upon us.
Does the church help its members to see this fact in
modern life? Many of its members imagine that the workers
have no right to organize because the owners know what
is best for them, and are wise enough to pay them what
they are worth. If the church is adequate to its task of
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 75
moral leadership it will set present problems in the light of
history. The average man does not know history. It would
be well if the church helped him to see that history proves
rather conclusively that benevolent despots have never
been as benevolent as they imagined themselves to be.
Such is the inevitable defect in the human imagination
that we never quite see the interests of others as clearly as
we see our own. The wise man will therefore conclude that
he will never deal ethically with his fellowman, if his
fellowman does not have the opportunity to match power
with power.
A man of really great social intelligence would have to
come to the conclusion that his workers must be organized
so that they may help him to deal ethically with them. He
will not trust himself. Only those who do not know history
can stand in such naive confidence of their own virtue.
They have a right to expect that the church will illumine
their darkness by letting the light of history shine upon it.
Or again the members of the church live luxuriously
and justify themselves to society and their own conscience
with the excuse that their luxuries help to keep people at
work. It is difficult to believe that they are honest in this
conviction, but some of them are. It would be rather easy
to prove to them that no amount of luxury will provide as
much work as could be provided if families which now live
on $1,500 per year could have at least $2,000. Both from
an ethical and an economic standpoint the salvation of our
society depends upon a more equitable distribution of
income, and luxury expenditure as a substitute for this
social end is a travesty. People of ordinary intelligence can
be made to realize this with a little, or perhaps with
constant, social education.
All this may seem to suggest that the church should en-
gage too much in political education. But it need not be-
come political at all if it will only interpret its gospel of
love in terms relevant to the life of our day. Surely it is
obvious enough that a high ethical ideal such as the church
holds and which it can not escape, not only because the
authority of its revered Lord is behind it but because the
experience of history makes the logic of that gospel irrefu-
76 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
table, is a great peril. No institution can hold and proclaim
such a gospel without sinking into hypocrisy if it does not
subject itself to constant self -analysis.
Hypocrisy is so easy because subterfuges and substitutes
for the real gospel are so ready to hand. A little philan-
thropy, a little honesty, a little decency in personal rela-
tions, a little kindliness in intimate contacts seems to put
the mark of a Christian upon a character. But the illusion
is transitory and those who suffer from economic greed cry
with louder and ever more strident voices against the
deception which these little amenities create. Either the
church must take its gospel of love seriously in this world
and apply it to the important relationships of life or it will
die with our dying civilization.
What is needed to make this gospel effective is a com-
bination of two qualities which are not always combined
with ease: spiritual vigor and social intelligence. The
spiritual vigor is needed to create in men the desire to
check their expansive desires and to bring their clamant
self-will under the will of God. So powerful are the forces
of self that only a powerful religious devotion can bring
them in check. But sometimes the religious fervor which
creates the will to live the Christlike life is not accom-
panied with sufficient social intelligence to know what the
Christlike ethic is. Therefore social education must accom-
pany religious regeneration.
Some of the Christians of our day have no honest desire
to live as God wants them to live with their fellows. They
must be literally reborn. But there are others who are too
ignorant to bring their life into a really social and ethical
relationship with their brothers. They must be guided and
instructed. The more intricate and complicated our mod-
ern life becomes the more necessary is education as a part
of the redemptive process. The churches which frown
upon education and continue to create moral sentiment in
vacuum without channeling this moral sentiment into the
areas where its application is needed' are self -deceived. It
is only in rare cases that moral good-will makes itself
effective automatically. It must be directed. In the process
of that direction the church will always be skirting the
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 77
edges of pure politics and pure economics, which does not
belong in its sphere.
There is some danger there; but there is greater danger
in the policy of avoiding contentious issues. That policy
leads inevitably to moral mediocrity. To advocate what
everyone accepts means to advocate less than the best.
To champion only conventional virtue means to play
truant to a great task in a morally confused age. "Except
your righteousness exceed the righteousness of the scribes
and pharisees you can not enter the kingdom of heaven,"
Jesus declared, and that word is a perpetual challenge
to the church in every age. The church of our age has not
J O O
yet met that challenge,
If the church could attack the problems of our era with
vigor and realism it might make greater progress in the
important problem of church unity. Lacking organic rela-
tionship to our society, the churches are forced to preserve
ancient traditions and maintain themselves by the perpet-
uation of loyalties which had significance only for the past.
Denominationalism is becoming constantly less defensible
because the loyalties and credos which divide the churches
have less and less meaning. Our fathers could be denomina-
tionalists with honesty because they sincerely believed that
they were defending righteous and important principles.
We support our separate organizations without any great
confidence that the various policies and principles which
divide us are important, except, perhaps, as matters of
taste.
But unity is not achieved as an end in itself. It is always
the product of companionship in arms in a common cause.
If the church could see the paganism of our civilization
in sufficiently sharp outline and could sense the funda-
mental conflict between its gospel and the dominant moods
of our civilization it would inevitably close its ranks for
common action. In so far as it has actually done this it
has been due to a recognition of this conflict. In so far as
it has not closed ranks it proves that it is living on the
heritage of the past without re-creating spiritual vitality in
terms meaningful to our own generation.
78 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
MORALISTS AND POLITICS
The political discussion and controversy which the depres-
sion has prompted and the numerous pronouncements on
politics made by moralists, lay and clerical, secular and
religious, in the past months even before the political
campaign is well under way, give overwhelming proof of
the unrealistic approach of moralists to political problems.
The metropolitan press has been filled for the last few
weeks with commencement-day addresses made by college
presidents and other savants who tried to justify the wis-
dom of the honorary degrees, just conferred upon them,
by sage advice to the younger generation. The sentimental-
ity and futility of most of these remarks fills the heart with
dismay. The tenor of most of them was to the effect tihat
the world was in a very evil plight, that greed and
stupidity had brought it to its present pass, that the hope
of the future lay in the younger generation whose college
education guaranteed, or promised, at least, a more en-
lightened social attitude than that of their fathers, and
whose youth would offer the dynamic necessary to build
a new world order. Yet most of these same college grad-
uates had voted only two weeks previously, in those inane
elections which most senior classes conduct, that Mussolini
was their favorite world figure and that Hoover was en-
titled to re-election.
Religious Idealism
The clerical words of wisdom have a slightly different
note. The emphasis, in diagnosing the world's ills, is placed
upon greed and "materialism" rather than stupidity, and
the young men and women are advised that only a return
to the religion of Jesus will solve our generation's problems.
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 79
In so far as genuine religious idealism and real social in-
telligence are absolute prerequisites of a social politic
adequate to the needs of our day, all this advice is sound
enough. It fails not in what is said but in what remains
unsaid. Hardly anywhere, from either academic or eccle-
siastical political moralist does one hear a word about the
limits of morality in politics. The impression is imparted
that it is possible to secure sufficient social intelligence
and religious dynamic to change a social order without
any further difficulty. If only more people would attend
church or go to college, the rich who now have too much
of the world's goods would divest themselves of their
privileges and create justice within and between the na-
tions. This easy solution for the world's ills is offered in
spite of the fact that the whole history of the human race
is a testimony to its error. It is not one bit advanced over
the romantic hopes of the eighteenth century which ex-
pected the Kingdom of God just as soon as the printed
word became ubiquitous and universal suffrage general.
There is no political realism in all this moralism. It does
not deal with the fact that human groups, classes, nations,
and races are selfish, whatever may be the moral idealism
of individual members within the groups; that this selfish-
ness has something of the order of nature in it, predatory
man expressing himself in his collective capacity long after
he has been tamed in his individual capacity; that the
selfishness of human groups is not only "natural" but in a
sense diabolical, since human ingenuity arms the primitive
lusts of collective man and sharpens the teeth of the hu-
man beast of prey; that every human group which benefits
from a present order of society will use every ingenuity
and artifice to maintain its privileges and to sanctify them
in the name of public order; that political life is, in short,
a thinly veiled barbarism.
Thinly Veiled Barbarism
Overt violence is not necessary to reveal that fact. The
unwillingness of rich taxpayers to pay enough taxes to keep
SO ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRIS HAJN JL 1 Y
the unemployed from starving is a proof of it. The stupidity
of America and the pitiful combination of fear and hatred
in France which is slowly strangling Germany under the
reparations load and creating thereby the chaos and hatred
which it fears, is proof of it. The willingness of barons oi
industry to use machine guns against striking workers,
rather than permit their organization, is proof of it. The
tendency of all efforts at interracial cooperation to ac-
complish little more than spin a thin veil of moral idealism
under which the white man does not really hide his deter-
mination to maintain the Negro in a subordinate position
in our civilization, is further proof of it. The fact that all
projected solutions of our social problem emanating from
the enlightened members of the privileged group, whether
Gerard Swope, Owen Young, Howard Coffin, or any
other, betray the philosophy of Fascism only thinly dis-
guised, offering to meet the threat of social disorder not
by social reorganization but by a more enlightened and
more vigorous affirmation of the present social order, is
additional proof of it.
Coercion and Persuasion
What the moralists, intellectual and religious, fail to
understand, though it is written on every page of past and
contemporary history, is that politics is an area in which
the rational and the brutal, the moral and the predatory,
the human and the subhuman are compounded in perplex-
ing and infinite variety. That combination is present, in a
measure, in all human activity, But it is particularly ap-
parent in man's collective activity. Even the religious
group is inherently imperialistic and merges its life with
other groups only under the threat of a common foe,
secularism, Catholicism, or what not.
Political strategy, therefore, always involves a combina-
tion of coercive and persuasive factors. Sentimental moral-
ism which underestimates the necessity of coercion, and
cynical realism which is oblivious to the possibilities of
moral suasion are equally dangerous to the welfare of man-
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead'? 81
kind. The former spends Its energies in vain efforts to
achieve a purely voluntary reorganization of society; the
latter resorts to violent conflict and makes confusion worse
confounded. The welfare of society demands that enough
social intelligence and moral idealism be created to pre-
vent social antagonism from issuing in pure conflict and
that enough social pressure be applied to force reluctant
beneficiaries of social privilege to yield their privileges
before injustice prompts to vehemence and violence.
Practically, this means that the Negro will never win his
full rights in society merely by trusting the fairness and
sense of justice of the white man. Whatever increase in
the sense of justice can be achieved will mitigate the strug-
gle between the white man and the Negro, but it will not
abolish it. Neither will the Negro gain justice merely by
turning to violence to gain his rights. To do so means that
he will accentuate the vices of the white man. If he is
well advised he will use such forms of economic and
political pressure as will be least likely to destroy the
moral forces, never completely absent even in intergroup
relations, but which will nevertheless exert coercion upon
the white man's Me. It means, to choose another illustra-
tion, that labor will never come to its full economic rights
by trusting the intelligence and sense of justice of em-
ployers. They are circumscribed in their standards of jus-
tice by the prejudices of their class and the economic in-
terests which bind them. If any of them should achieve a
sense of justice which transcends these prejudices and
interests always a possibility it will be just so much
gain, but it will not abolish the fact of a class struggle.
How Dominant Groups Dominate
The laborer must develop both economic and political
power to meet the combination of political and economic
power which confronts him. His economic power consists
in his capacity to interfere with the economic process con-
trolled by the dominant economic group. His political
power consists in the possibility of influencing or deter-
82 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
mining the policy of the political state, which always yields
to group pressure though it affects to regard itself as the
total society, impartially adjudicating conflicting group
interests. The group which is able to wield the most eco-
nomic and political power really determines its policies.
If democracy were really pure, it alone could guarantee the
resolution of all social conflict to nonviolent social tension
in which a progressively higher and higher degree of jus-
tice would be assured by the increased ability of the under-
privileged to use the weight of their numbers in the state
in the interest of distributing the privileges of society more
evenly.
Unfortunately, the dominant groups which control not
only the state apparatus but the whole system of propa-
ganda and education are able to frustrate a good deal of the
potential political power of the disinherited by prejudicing
the judgment of all but the politically most sophisticated.
That is why proletarian groups tend to lose confidence in
democratic institutions and to put their trust in violence.
Their counsels will prevail, unless enough social intelli-
gence can be created, not to prompt a voluntary equaliza-
tion of privilege (which is a counsel of perfection) but to
allow a measure of fairness in the state's adjudication of
social controversy.
Social Pressure Necessary
If this analysis is correct it means that pure pacifism is
an impossible goal for political life, if by pure pacifism we
mean the use of nothing but moral suasion to resist in-
justice. Gandhi, who began his political efforts in India
with the ideal of using nothing but soul-force against
British imperialism, ended by initiating a vast strategy of
nonviolent coercion. Sentimental pacifists still hail him as
an apostle of pure love while pacifist perfectionists berate
him for having abandoned his moral ideals. What he did
was as inevitable as the tide when religious idealism really
comes to grips with the political problem. He eschewed
violence and disavowed hatred and reduced the social
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 83
struggle to proportions in which the moral factor in inter-
group relations could have the largest possible sway without
trusting it to soften imperialistic minds and hearts alone.
Nothing less realistic than Gandhi's policy can ever hope
to be politically effective. All the fair-minded Britishers
and they are rather more numerous than in nations less
consciously but not less really imperialistic cannot over-
come the force of self-interest and stupidity which deter-
mines the policy of every nation. The best they can do is
to mitigate the severity of the struggle between India and
England.
Religious idealists find it extremely difficult to accept the
conclusions which any realistic analysis of political life
forces upon the unbiased student. The Christian religion
has an ideal of self-sacrifice which demands that men shall
sacrifice themselves for others, thus obviating the necessity
of conflict. This is really the ultimate moral ideal. Any-
thing less than loving self-sacrifice is not really justice.
Justice without love is merely the balance of power. But
this ideal, too logical and inevitable to be disavowed, is
achieved only rarely in individual life and is not achieved
in group life at all. No nation, race, or class sacrifices itself.
Human groups make a virtue of the assertion of self-
interest and will probably do so until the end of history.
The best that can be expected of human groups is a wise
rather than stupid self-interest.
Since most human groups have not yet achieved this
minimum ideal and the world is in danger of sinking into
chaos because every modern nation is pursuing the interest
of the moment in defiance of a more ultimate common
interest with its foe and neighbor, the energies of intel-
lectual and religious idealism must be bent to the purpose
of achieving a sufficient measure of social idealism and
intelligence to guarantee a minimum justice and fairness.
Social pressure of various types will have to do the rest.
The issue in our day is not between voluntary and coerced
justice but between coerced justice and chaos.
Moralists find this lesson in politics an extremely tin-
palatable one and it is not entirely to their discredit that
this is so. A high morality demands trust in human nature
84 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
and a realistic political strategy presupposes a measure of
cynicism. To maintain confidence in human nature and
yet deal realistically with human evil is a task which re-
quires a rather impossible combination of realism and
idealism. If it is not achieved, sentimentalists and cynics
will continue to guide our generation to disaster.
Practically every pronouncement on political issues by
church bodies and by academic liberals and radicals is
futile because it lacks political implementation for the
social goals projected. It is declared that we need a better
distribution of wealth, that we need social planning rather
than anarchic individualism, but it is always assumed that
these laudable social goals will be achieved with the cul-
tivation of a little more social intelligence and idealism. If
the religious and intellectual moralists and social idealists
had the slightest idea of the kind of political and social
conflict which would have to be waged before their ideals
can be realized, their pronouncements would never be
uttered. They want a more ideal social order, but the
comforts of middle-class life and the illusions of detached
intellectuals prevent them from realizing with what stub-
born inertia the old order hangs on and with what poignant
pangs of birth the new order comes into being.
CHURCH AND STATE IN AMERICA
There have been several episodes in recent weeks which
have raised the question of the independence of the church
from state control and give a welcome occasion to re-
examine the character and the value of the historic Ameri-
can conception of the separation of church and state.
The first of these episodes was a letter by Mayor La-
Guardia to the clergymen of the nation, asking them to
observe Civilian Defense Week. His letter enclosed the
outline of a sermon on the relation of religion to democracy
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead*? 85
which, he declared, "exemplifies the kind of message we
are thinking of and which might be used effectively/'
Though no one denies that the sermon outline was a good
one, it was undoubtedly a foolish blunder to send it, and
it is unfortunate that the Office of Civilian Defense did not
consult with responsible church leaders, who could have
informed it of the inevitable reaction of parsons to "canned"
sermons put out under government auspices.
The mistake which LaGuardia made was, of course, not
as great as the absurd hysteria with which his mistake was
greeted by the spokesmen of Christian isolationism. To
declare that "Hitler and Goebbels never went further" in
their control of the religious life of Germany than LaGuar-
dia went in his predigested sermon is a charge so ludicrous
as to require no refutation. Nevertheless, we hope we shall
have no more such sermons.
Another episode which has aroused churchmen is the
alleged action of a commander of an army camp near
Denver in declaring certain churches in Denver * e out of
bounds" for his soldiers because isolationist meetings were
held in these churches. The commander denies that reli-
gious services were affected by his order, but the incident
has aroused apprehensions in the minds of church people.
The third and more serious episode centers about a
young man, the son of a Methodist minister, who has been
sentenced to two years imprisonment for draft evasion,
after his local draft board and appeal board had rejected
his plea that he is a conscientious objector. The Methodist
Conference of Southern California and Arizona felt that
this case represented a serious miscarriage of justice and
the young man has the support of many Methodist clergy-
men who are not pacifists. Nevertheless, the local U. S.
District Attorney threatened the entire conference with an
F.B.I, investigation.
This particular incident calls attention to a serious defect
in our conscription act in that its provisions for making
appeals from the decisions of local draft boards are too
administrative and not sufficiently judicial. The appeal is
made to the President through the administrator of the con-
scription act. In Great Britain civilian tribunals have been
86 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
set up to hear such appeals and they are manned by well-
known leaders in the cultural life of the nation. They are
able to separate the wheat from the chaff and their deci-
sions, arrived at after sober public probing, cany a moral
authority which no purely administrative decision made by
overworked administrators of a draft act can have.
It would be well if nonpacifist Christian leaders could
support pacifists in securing a better appeal system. For
it is important that the part of the church which is not
pacifist should nevertheless impress upon the general
community that it understands the religious source of
conscientious scruples against arms-bearing and that it
appreciates this religious perfectionism, as the general
community cannot, as a valid part of the Christian tradi-
tion.
It might be well to emphasize that the American tradi-
tion of the separation of church and state represents a deli-
cate balance and cannot be maintained merely by the fiat
of law. An absolute separation would require, as Roger
Williams believed it did, that religion be regarded purely
a private matter. This would mean that the church would
not speak on public and social issues in return for the
state's abstention from any control over the purely private
religious convictions of its citizens. We have never had
that kind of separation of church and state in this country
and we certainly do not desire it. Any conception of Chris-
tianity which gives social content to its message makes a
certain overlapping between church and state authority
inevitable. The church does speak upon social and political
issues. But if the state is to appreciate the function of
religion and understand, in a measure, the profound reli-
gious sources of moral convictions, it is also necessary that
religious teachers have a proper sense of responsibility
toward the true function of political society.
It has been common among certain critics of our gov-
ernment in recent years to cry to high heaven at any real
or imagined infringement of their liberty but to betray by
their very criticisms that they are informed by essentially
anarchistic conceptions of society. They have spoken of both
legislative and executive acts of government as "Fascist'*
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 87
and as "tyrannical" when these epithets could have mean-
ing only upon the assumption that the coercive acts of
government are of themselves evil, which is to say that
government is evil. For governments do coerce. The idea
that we could move by progressive steps to a society of
purely voluntary co-operation is an anarchistic and Utopian
illusion.
A religious criticism of policies of governments is im-
portant and necessary. For there is finally no vantage
point, other than the religious one, from which to judge
the self -deification of nations. But such criticisms can be
effective only if the critic recognizes government as a
divine ordinance and has a decent sense of reverence to-
ward the majesty of the law which coordinates the vitali-
ties of a nation.
Some of the hysterical criticisms made of our govern-
ment in recent years have been either completely irrespon-
sible, or they have been informed by implicit or explicit
social philosophies which the historical experience of man
has invalidated. These critics might do well to read Ro-
mans 13. They will not find the whole of the Christian
attitude toward the state expressed in these Pauline words.
But they will find a half of the Christian truth there, which
they have neglected.
WHICH QUESTION COMES FIRST
FOR THE CHURCH?
In both the religious and the secular world the question
"What shall we do?" is raised with an urgency which some-
times rises to the pitch of hysteria. Its immediate forms are
two: What shall we do about our relations with Russia?
and What shall we do about the atomic bomb? These are
important questions and must be answered. The fate of
our civilization depends upon them. If relations with Rus-
88 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
sia continue to deteriorate, the mutual mistrust between
the great centers of power may vitiate the hope for effi-
cacy of the United Nations Charter and make that instru-
ment irrelevant. If a solution for the problem of the atomic
bomb is not found, the war which we will have failed to
avert will most certainly destroy the last remnants of
civilization. The moral-political issues which we face are,
in other words, of unparalleled urgency.
Despite that fact, the first business of the Christian
church is not to find an answer to those questions. Its first
business is to raise and answer religious questions within
the framework of which these moral issues must be solved.
Our generation is in a religious, as well as moral and politi-
cal, confusion because the ultimate religious question:
What does life mean? has been falsely solved. We thought
that life's meaning was guaranteed by the historical
process. We believed in progress. Now we find that an
atomic bomb stands at the end of the technical develop-
ment. And at the end of the hoped for rational-moral
progress we find little statesmen, representing little na-
tions, drawing pretensions of omniscience from their mili-
tary omnipotence, and playing with the powder which
might blow up the world.
If we ask the question about the meaning of our exist-
ence, we must include in it the datum that we are unable
to give a clear and decisive answer to the moral question:
What shall we do? Not even the church, and perhaps least
of all the church, can give a definitive answer to that
question. Already sentiment in the church is divided be-
tween those who think we must first of all defend a
"Christian civilization," and those who think we ought to
make every possible sacrifice, even of Christian values,
for the sake of an accord with Russia. A conference of inter-
national idealists recently met in Dublin, New Hampshire,
and immediately divided into two groups. One group called
for a world government, but did not suggest how we are to
achieve it from the present position of international mis-
trust. The other group called for an alliance of democratic
states, which means, for an anti-Russian alliance. The con-
ference thus presented the nation with the alternative of an
Can the Church Give a "Moral LeocT? 89
impossible solution on the one hand, and an irresponsible
one on the other. We can do better than this conference.
But a part of the tragedy of our situation consists in the
fact that there is no clear way out of the present impasse.
We can also do better on the problem of the atomic bomb
than the present May Bill before Congress. That bill prac-
tically guarantees that we will enter an armament race on
the atomic bomb issue. We had better do what we can to
kill that bill. But there is still no clear and obvious method
of solving the problem of the bomb; and certainly not an
unmistakable "Christian answer" for this issue.
There is meanwhile a very great task for the church to
help people to live sanely in a very insecure world. A reli-
gious faith which trusts no historic securities too much, but
understands the ultimate security of the assurance that
"neither life nor death are able to separate us from the love
of God," can become a resource of sanity in an insecure
world. A religious faith which understands the perpetual
disappointments in human history and knows that no his-
torical achievement can be identified with the Kingdom of
God, can prevent the disillusionment, bordering upon de-
spair, which those feel who had expected the postwar world
to be at least the vestibule of the Kingdom of God.
A religious faith which prompts us to live our life in
obedience to God, and to recognize the self -justifying char-
acter of the sacrifice which such obedience may require,
will not become involved in the hysterical conclusion that
the sacrifices of the men who died upon the fields of battle
have been in vain, if we fail now to achieve a world gov-
ernment. "Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof,"
These men made their sacrifices, facing a horrible evil of
their day. They destroyed that evil. New evils and new
possibilities of world anarchy are arising, which may mean
that, in terms of history, their sacrifices have only negative,
and therefore only tragic, justification. But in God's sight
these sacrifices have a more absolute justification.
It is, in other words, not possible to work sanely upon his-
torical tasks, with a religion which confines the meaning of
human existence to the limits of historic achievements and
frustrations. From such religions spring the alternate evils
gO ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
o "sleep and drunkenness," which is to say, of complacency
and hysteria. "Those that sleep, sleep in the night and they
that are drunken are drunken in die night" declares St.
Paul, but "let us who are of the day watch and be sober."
CAN THE CHURCH GIVE
A "MORAL LEAD"?
If only it were as easy for the Christian church to define
the "moral issues" confronting the world as many of the
correspondents who write to a Christian journal seem to
believe! "I believe," writes one correspondent, "that the
church ought to give a clear moral lead for peace in this
crisis. We ought to demand that we withdraw our troops
from Berlin before it leads to war/' While the editor pe-
rused this letter a telephone call requested that he sign his
name to a petition, calling upon the President to make a
solemn declaration that we will not under any circum-
stances "abandon our democratic allies in Berlin, who have
been so heroically resisting the Communists." The almost
hysterical voice on the phone expressed the conviction that
we ought to treble the transport service into Berlin in order
to serve notice on both the Russians and the Germans that
we will not yield to Russian pressure and chicane. Here are
two "clear" moral leads which cancel each other out. The
Berlin situation represents a delicate strategic problem. If
one were to hazard a guess it would be that the risk of re-
maining in Berlin is worth taking. But no one can deny that
a tremendous risk is involved in the undertaking. We
yielded to Hitler point by point because a decade ago we
refused to take such risks.
Here is another letter. The author wants to know why
the churches do not recognize that our government's aban-
donment of partition in Palestine was a "death-blow to the
United Nations'? The missive rather corresponds to the
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 91
editor's own prejudices or convictions. But another corre-
spondent thinks that "The support of political Zionism by
Christians represents an ignoble indifference toward the in-
terest of Arab peoples, who are asked to pay the price for
the unsolved problem of anti-Semitism in the Western
World." On this particular question, the editor knows that
the editorial board of the journal, which reaches agreement
upon most issues, would find it difficult to arrive at a com-
mon conviction.
While meditating upon these evidences of the fragmen-
tary and contradictory nature of moral convictions, inside,
as well as outside of the church, another letter arrives to
raise the question whether the American delegation to the
Assembly of the World Council of Churches will make it
quite clear to the Christians of Europe that we believe that
democracy and the "free enterprise system" are wedded in
an indissoluble union, and that we regard it as the mission
of American Christianity to dissuade European Christians
from their flirtation with "socialistic schemes which lead
down the slippery slope of Communism." Here is a new
facet of the "clear moral lead." A political ideology is iden-
tified, not with the Christian faith as such, but with an
"American" version of that faith. But obviously the Ameri-
can version is regarded as the true and ultimate one. Other-
wise there would not be so much concern that it be propa-
gated at Amsterdam. One wishes one might take this
correspondent along to Amsterdam so he might be con-
fronted by certain European Christians who look askance at
every American Christian because they believe him to be
guilty of using the Christian faith as a facade for the power
interests of the "only unreconstructed capitalistic nation of
the modern world." When one recalls previous debates
with some of these European Christians, particularly of the
younger generation, one rather hopes that they will never
learn about the story of the Boston clergyman who chal-
lenged the men of his congregation to grow mustaches "in
order to prove our loyalty to the leader of the political party
to which most of us belong."
There are undoubtedly some basic moral convictions,
transcending political and strategic problems, to which all
Q2 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
Christians are committed. There are others to which they
ought to be committed, though they are not. The church
cannot afford to deal merely in vague generalities because
it lacks unanimous convictions on the level of political strat-
egy. It remains a fact, nevertheless, that the church is
divided by every partisan interest of geographic or racial,
economic or political origin. That fact alone is a proof that
the sanctity of the church does not consist in the good-
ness of its members but in the holiness of its Lord.
Perhaps the church ought to be more concerned to bring
the goodness of Christ as a judgment upon every fragmen-
tary form of human goodness than to find the particular
cause which might be identified with Christ. There are
many good causes and just claims which turn into evil at
the precise point where absolute validity is ascribed to
them. Is not religion, including the Christian religion, a
fruitful source of fanaticism and bigotry precisely because
men pretend that their good is the ultimate good in the
name of religion; and because Christians so easily claim
Christ as an ally without ever having experienced his love
as a judgment upon the shoddy character of their so-called
"values" and upon the fragmentary character of even their
best causes?
We must, as Christians, constantly make significant moral
and political decisions amidst and upon perplexing issues
and hazardous ventures. We must even make them "with
might" and not halfheartedly. But the Christian faith gives
us no warrant to lift ourselves above the world's perplexities
and to seek or to claim absolute validity for the stand we
take. It does, however, encourage us to the charity, which
is bom of humility and contrition. This is not a "clear moral
lead" but a clear religious insight into the fragmentary char-
acter of all human morality, including the virtue of the
saints and the political pronouncement of churches. "Our
life is his in Christ with God/' If we claim to possess
overtly what remains hidden, we turn the mercy of Christ
into an inhuman fanaticism.
Can the Church Give a "Moral Leatf'? 93
THE CHURCH AND EQUAL RIGHTS
FOR WOMEN
The refusal of the convention of the Episcopal church to
seat women delegates who had been duly elected by their
dioceses to their position raises some interesting questions
about the reasons for the tardiness of religious communities
in meeting the standards of secular society in the matter of
equal rights for women. The church may sometimes have
higher moral and social standards than the general commu-
nity, and it may sometimes fall below them. But it is most
consistently below the general standards of modern bour-
gois society in its refusal to grant women equal rights as
persons, this refusal involving it in disobedience to the
Apostolic injunction: "In Christ there is neither male nor
female/* This tardiness is rather ironic in view of the fact
that women bear more than their share of the burdens of
the church and exceed their male relatives in devotion
to the religious community. The action of the Episcopal
convention was the more remarkable because it did not in-
volve the question of ordination. The women were not
knocking at the gates of the holy of holies. They were
refused admission to the outer court.
This incident may serve to remind the church that the
emancipation of women from the restraints to which they
were subject in all traditional societies is one of the real
achievements of modern secular idealism to which even the
most advanced Christian thought made only ancillary con-
tributions. It may be that there is some deep undertone in
a religious community, having nothing to do with Christian-
ity but profoundly related to the impulses of "natural reli-
gion," which accounts for the difference in standards be-
tween the religious and the general community. It would
be well for the Christian church to recognize that however
94 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
"Christian" its conscious standards are, every church is
something of a "religious" community as well as a Christian
community. Therefore its life is informed to some degree
by these general impulses of "pagan" or natural religion.
One of the motives of this pagan religion, reaching far back
into primitive life, is the "enmity between the priest and
the woman/' This enmity may have sexual origin or it may
be the contest between the woman as protagonist of the
family and the priest as the exponent of the larger com-
munity, contrived by priest and warrior. In India, for in-
stance, women had comparative equality in the Vedic
period but became completely disinherited when the tri-
umph of the priests was codified in the "Code of Manu."
It is worth noting that even in modern life churches have
difficulty in dealing with the problem of women in propor-
tion to the degree of sacramentalism in their piety. This
does not imply an indictment of sacramentalism in general,
but does suggest that the animus against women does arise
where there is a very explicit area of the sacred. Yet it
must be confessed that women have difficulties of some kind
in almost every religious community. If a priest is not seek-
ing to prove that a woman cannot be the representative of
Christ because Christ was a man, some fundamentalist
theologian will seek to disinherit her by quoting texts.
Perhaps the church could overcome these sub-Christian
standards more readily if it ceased arguing about them on
Christian grounds and recognized more frankly that there
are primitive depths as well as sublime heights in religion,
not known in secular idealism. That need not persuade us
to become secularists. But it might make us willing to let
secular idealism speak the "word of God" on occasion.
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 95
UTILITARIAN CHRISTIANITY
AND THE WORLD CRISIS
An ironic aspect of the present world situation is that the
more Christians seek to commend their faith as the source
of the qualities and disciplines required to save the world
from disaster, the less does that kind of faith prove itself
to have the necessary resources. It is significant that a
purely utilitarian justification of Christianity tends actually
to produce a type of religious idealism which is more likely
to become a source of confusion to the conscience of the
nation than a spiritual resource. Christ admonished us "to
seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness" and
assured us "that all these things would be added/' But if
we place our main interest upon the things that will be
added if we seek to justify Christianity because it pre-
serves democracy, or inspires hatred of dictatorship, or
makes a "free enterprise system" possible, or helps us to
change such a system into something better, or creates a
"third force"- our utilitarian attitude debases the Christian
faith to the status of a mere instrument of the warring
creeds from which the world suffers.
This utilitarian attitude destroys the real power of the
Christian faith because it creates a type of piety in which
there are no longer any genuine engagements between the
soul and God, or between the nation and God, but merely a
religious accentuation of various forms of ethical and politi-
cal idealism. Even now many contradictory testimonies of
various types of Christians in our nation tend to be either
so irrelevant or so dangerous that a wise statesman will do
well to ignore most of them; and he may well thank God
96 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
that they cancel each other out sufficiently to make this
indifference politically expedient.
Consider our situation: We are involved in a "cold war"
with a great power which is more than a mere political
power. It is the "fatherland" of a political religion which
has transmuted the prophets of a Utopian faith into tyran-
nical priest-kings of a vast system of exploitation. The fact
that the original Marxist Utopian dream has turned into a
nightmare has not, however, disillusioned millions of im-
poverished people in Europe or in Asia, who look to Russia
as a kind of messianic nation. Most recently China has
capitulated to this illusion.
Opposed to this great power, which is able to add to its
military might, the weapons of political chicane and moral
illusions, stands a vast alliance of "free nations." These free
nations have an imperfect unity, compared to the mono-
lythic unity which tyranny can create. They are also filled
with various forms of injustice, economic and racial. The
former are responsible for inciting the rebellion of the so-
called "industrial" classes against bourgeois democracy, out
of which the Russian power grew. The racial injustices in
the free world have done much to incline the peoples of
Asia and Africa to Communism. At the "head" of this vast
alliance stands our own nation. We are in this position of
leadership not because of our superior wisdom or virtue.
We hold this position because of our great economic power.
Yet the stability and moral health of the free world will de-
pend to a large degree upon the wisdom with which our
very wealthy nation can relate itself to an impoverished
world.
We believe that our free society is worth preserving,
whatever its moral and political weaknesses. It is locked in
mortal combat with a tyrannically organized world. It is not
certain either whether we can prevent further encroach-
ments of Communism in our world or whether we can
avert a world conflict between the two centers of power.
Such a conflict would mean the end of civilization even if
we had the strength to gain a victory for "our" civilization.
It is fairly obvious that in the event of such a conflict atomic
weapons would be used, including the new type of hydro-
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 97
gen bomb. Mankind has never faced moral dilemmas of
such staggering proportions.
How are the Christian churches guiding the conscience
of the nation in this situation? It is not quite fair, yet it is
not unfair, to suggest that they are all too frequently in-
volved either in adding religious fury to the hysteria or the
self -righteousness to which an embattled nation is naturally
prone; or in finding religious grounds for evading our duties
in a hard situation. Catholicism is more prone to the former
error and Protestantism to the latter.
One form which hysteria takes in a tense situation is the
curious desire to invite the catastrophe which we ought to
avoid. The political form of this hysteria is the doctrine
of an inevitable war; from which the proposition of a pre-
ventive war is quickly derived. The Catholic church does
not believe in an inevitable war or a preventive one. But
there are too many Catholic voices which hint at it; and
there have been no official disavowals of the idea. The hints
arise understandably enough from the teriffic conflict be-
tween Catholicism and Communism in the nations behind
the Iron Curtain and the fear that Communism will do
mortal damage to the church in those countries. The con-
cept of a "just war" in defense of "Christian civilization"
can easily lead to a moral justification of a final conflict
with Communism. If such a conflict is inevitable there is
no good reason for not choosing the moment most propi-
tious to our cause for initiating it.
No one can guarantee that this conflict will not eventu-
ate. But since Communism is not primarily a military but
a moral-political force, one should have thought that the
primary Christian emphasis ought to lie upon the moral
resources by which alone we can overcome Communism,
without of course relaxing our military defenses against the
military threats of the Communist world.
Catholicism tends to accentuate the self -righteousness of
the advocates of our cause, thus contributing to the moral
complacency which may be our undoing. When it wars
against "secularism" the Catholic church makes some
pointed criticisms of the moral illusions of our bourgeois
world. But when it wars against Communism it forgets
9& ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
these criticisms and speaks of our world, as a noted Cath-
olic radio preacher did recently, as "the fellowship of
Christ" at war with the "fellowship of anti-Christ." Mean-
while Communism still spreads among the agrarian, rather
than the industrial, poor of Italy, because there has been no
genuine land reform in this Catholic nation.
Finally, Catholicism has failed to check the hysteria in
this country which expressed itself in the fantastic search
for traitors in high places, when it is obvious to sober-
minded people that this nation is freer of an internal Com-
munist threat than any other democratic country. It would
be wrong to hold the church responsible for the antics of
an irresponsible Catholic senator any more than Protestant-
ism should be held responsible for the demagogues who
have corrupted our heritage. But the seriousness with
which Holy Name societies treat the hysterical warnings
of an ex-Communist Catholic is not reassuring. Wrote a
wise American from France recently: "The antics of Sen-
ator McCarthy have done us great damage in France. The
more astute French people feel that it proves that we do
not take Communism seriously enough, that we do not
understand its threat as a world-wide force. They find in
these investigations a frivolous effort to reduce a tragic
drama to the proportions of a cheap melodrama." The
church has not spoken a single unequivocal word to quiet
the hysteria expressed in recent senatorial investigations.
II
The weaknesses of the Protestant testimony in the pres-
ent situation are on the whole of a different order. The
only Protestant words which are similar to the Catholic
failings are those which aggravate the tendency toward self-
righteousness on the part of a fortunate and powerful na-
tion, by making it appear that the libertarian form of
democracy which we enjoy is the final norm for a free
world. This form of self-righteousness complicates our mu-
tual relations with the impoverished nations of a free world,
all of which have had to place greater checks upon the
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"P 99
economic life than we, though many have given greater
proof of their devotion to liberty and justice than we have
been able to give.
Most of the Protestant mistakes arise from the tendency
of the modern Protestant church to equate Christianity with
a system of rigorous moral idealism, without regard for the
endless moral ambiguities in the political realm. Thus we
confront the awful possibilities of a new level of atomic
destructiveness and a nation in anguish of conscience asks:
What shall we do? Many Protestant idealists simply answer:
"Let us be Christians and not make the bomb at all." Very
simple, except that a good Christian in Europe writes: "We
hope that America's qualms of conscience will not prompt
policies of defencelessness which will expose us to a Rus-
sian occupation."
We are involved in a "cold war" with Russia. What shall
we do about that? The Protestant answer frequently is: We
must come to terms with the Russians. As if that were a
simple thing. We are asked to reach an agreement with
Russia on German unity in the name of Christian idealism.
But suppose the Russians will accept no agreement which
does not permit them to dominate a united Germany? We
are asked to reach an agreement upon atomic weapons. But
suppose the Russians ask as the price of such an agreement
a total disarmament which will leave them free to do in
Europe what they will? Or we are asked to achieve the
even more impossible goal of a world government in the
name of Christian idealism? But we are not told how a
world constitutional system would be able to beguile either
side from the fear and mistrust which would wreck any
constitutional system.
The simple fact is that Christianity as merely a system of
rigorous idealism can be discounted by any statesman, even
if he is only moderately shrewd. For his responsibilities
teach him that there may be tragic conflicts in history
which are not easily resolved either by moral suasion or
by constitutional devices. (Do we remember our Civil
War?) They also teach him that a statesman can never fol-
low merely one set of moral values but must usually seek
to realize partially incompatible goals. In the present in-
1OO ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
stance this means both the preservation of a free world and
the prevention of war.
If Catholicism were not so sure of the virtue of its
"Christian civilization" and Protestantism not so certain of
the efficacy of its moral idealism, if in fact both were less
concerned to validate their faith as relevant to the present
situation, that faith might be more relevant.
A less relevant faith would, as did the prophets of Israel,
give our nation a sense that its primary engagement is with
God and not with its foes. That kind of religious engage-
ment, in which the distinction between the righteous and
unrighteous nations (or in the words of the prophet Jere-
miah, the distinction between the "circumcised and the
uncircumcised") is obscured, is the only source of humility
for a nation so tempted as our own to regard its fortune as
proof of its virtue. We could have less friction with our
allies and be a better moral match for our foes if our en-
gagement with a divine judge helped us to recognize the
fragmentary character of all human virtues and the ambigu-
ous nature of all human achievements. We might also be
helped to see that what we regard as great generosity
toward our poorer allies (as embodied in the European
Recovery Program) is prompted not so much by Christian
charity as prudent consideration of national interest.
A less relevant faith would have less to say about over-
coming race prejudice in order to commend our cause to
the peoples of Asia and Africa. It would be more concerned
to bring race pride, as every other form of human pride,
under divine scrutiny. Racial bigots will not be converted
by the warning that lynching may hurt our cause in Africa.
They face a more serious problem in their own souls. They
must literally be **born again." There are intellectual as
well as religious resources against racial bigotry. But the
church is primarily concerned with the religious encounter
between an ethnic group and the divine justice and mercy.
The encounter between nations and the divine justice
always wipes out a part of the distinction between good and
evil men, and between just and unjust nations. But the
Christian faith also helps us to understand the necessity of
preserving whatever standards of justice or virtue we have
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead'? 101
achieved against tyrannical power. It does not persuade us
that we must not stand resolutely against tyranny, because
we happen ourselves not to be just in God's sight. It helps
us to appreciate the responsibilities which even sinful men
and nations have to preserve what is relatively good against
explicit evil. Neutrality between justice and injustice,
whether derived from a too-simple moral idealism or a too-
sophisticated Barthian theology, is untrue to our gospel.
The most important relevance of a Christian faith, which
is not too immediately relevant to the political situation, is
a sense of serenity and a freedom from hysteria in an in-
secure world full of moral frustrations. We have to do our
duty for a long time in a world in which there will be no
guarantees of security and in which no duty can be assured
the reward of success. The hysteria of our day is partly
derived from the disillusion of a humanistic idealism which
thought that every virtue could be historically rewarded
and encouraged men to sow by the promise of a certain
harvest. Now we must sow without promising whether we
can reap. We must come to terms with the fragmentary
character of all human achievements and the uncertain
character of historic destinies.
There is nothing new in all this. Our present vicissitudes
merely remind us of the words of Scripture: "If in this life
only we had hoped in Christ we are of all men most
miserable." That is an expression of what a humanistic age
calls "Christian otherworldliness." It is the Biblical illumi-
nation of a dimension of existence which makes sense out
of life, when it ceases to make sense as simply upon the
plane of history as it was once believed. We are, as Chris-
tians, rightly concerned about the probabilities of disaster
to our civilization and about our various immediate duties
to avert it. But we will perform our duties with the greater
steadiness if we have something of the faith expressed by
St. Paul in the words : "Whether we live, we live unto the
Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether
we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's." In this final
nonchalance about life and death, which includes some
sense of serenity about the life and death of civilizations,
there is a resource for doing what we ought to do, though
102 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
we know not what the day or the hour may bring forth.
The best statesmen of the world may, or may not, have
such a faith. But a statesmanlike common sense is a closer
approach to it than many forms of religious hysteria or
religious idealism.
SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY
A serious development is taking place in American Prot-
estantism. The alliance between Protestant pietism and
political reaction which characterized Protestant thought
in America through most of the nineteenth century, and
which the Social Gospel effectively challenged, has
achieved a new triumph. The old alliance was based upon
three propositions: (i) The physiocratic theory which as-
sured men that a "pre-established harmony of nature" guar-
anteed justice in economic affairs if only governments did
not interfere with the automatic processes of a market econ-
omy was given a Christian baptism. The pre-established
harmony of nature became the providence of God. (2) Pov-
erty was attributed to sin; and the economic rewards of an
expanding economy were interpreted as just deserts of vir-
tue, particularly the virtues of diligence and thrift. Thus
the Christian conscience was absolved of any concern for
establishing justice in the intricacies of an ever-growing
technical society. (3) Pietistic individualism was identified
with bourgeois individualism, and the Christian emphasis
upon individual responsibility to God was transformed into
an assertion of the "rights" of the individual as against the
claims of the community. Henry May's Protestant Churches
and Industrial America is a fairly accurate description of
this amalgam of Christian thought and the presuppositions
of what is now known as the "American way of life."
The rise of the Social Gospel offered a welcome release
from this moral and spiritual complacency. The Social Gos-
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 103
pel insisted on the Christian's responsibility for justice in
the community and challenged the doctrine that laissez-
faire would make for justice, citing the unjust consequences
of the ever-growing concentration of power in industry. Un-
fortunately the Social Gospel was not a fully sophisticated
approach to social issues. On the right wing it was subject
to the general moralistic illusions of Christian liberalism*
It seemed to believe that the only reason men had not fol-
lowed the love commandment in the vast collective rela-
tions of mankind was because no one had called their
attention to the necessity. This it proceeded to do. But it
had little understanding of the relation of love to justice
and no understanding of the contest of power and the bal-
ance of interests which were required for the achievement
of justice. On the left wing the Social Gospel degenerated
into Marxism. Christian phrases and ideas were diluted
with basically Marxist concepts in various degrees of
consistency.
Right-wing Social-Gospel thought has suffered the fate
which has befallen Christian liberalism generally. Its social
convictions as well as its theological presuppositions were
tender plants, unable to survive the wintry blasts of twen-
tieth-century history. The left-wing Social Gospel, in its
few remnants, is caught in the tawdry politics of Stalinism.
But whatever the defects of the Social Gospel, one must
be grateful for its insights compared to the new menace
of a degenerated pietism which is seeking to enslave the
conscience of the Christian church and force it to speak
in the accents of the National Association of Manufacturers,
Thus Daniel Poling, once the international leader of the
Christian Endeavour (perhaps still so if there is still a
Christian Endeavour), challenges the World Council of
Churches because it is too "confused" to understand the
merits of American capitalism. James Fifield has long con-
ducted his "Spiritual Mobilization" campaign in which the
hosts of Christ are summoned to do battle against "statism"
and the liberty of the gospel is identified with "free
enterprise."
More recently a weekly newspaper entitled Christian
Economics, with some very respectable names on its mast-
1O4 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
head, has developed the same theme, adding a venomous
reactionary note on foreign policy which seems to come out
of the mouths of George Sokolsky and Fulton Lewis, Jr.
Norman Vincent Peale, who long ago reduced the Christian
gospel to the dimension of a soporific for tired businessmen
and a promise of success for aspiring ones, recently chal-
lenged the Christian church to "come out for capitalism/*
His Readers Digest article, in the hands of many members
of the business world, has been used as an instrument of
pressure upon ministers in local communities. Why, minis-
ters have been asked by local leaders, do they not follow
Dr. Peale's example and assure their flocks that capitalism
is the truly Christian answer to the world's problems?
In this situation it has become important to gather, or-
ganize, and inform that portion of the Christian church in
America which has a real concern for the integrity of the
church and for the truth of the gospel and is anxious to pre-
vent the always dangerous mixture of religious sanctity with
the moral complacency of a culture. The peril of this com-
placency has grown immeasurably in America in recent
years. For a nation as powerful and as fortunate as Amer-
ica, is tempted to believe that the peculiar conditions of
American life are the final standards of justice for the King-
dom of God. It is ironically tempted to this form of pride
at the precise moment in history in which libertarian eco-
nomic theory exists nowhere else but in America, and in
which American practice is in sharp contrast to the theory.
For we do have the beginnings of a "welfare state" which
our religious and economic reactionaries describe as the first
slip on the treacherous slope which ends in Communism,
and which is in reality our bridge between the conscience
of the free world and the American conscience.
The Frontier Fellowship, which issues this journal, rec-
ognized some years ago that the issue of socialism versus
capitalism was not the real issue on which the conscience
of the church and of America is to be challenged. Social-
ism in its pure form is not a live issue in America. For that
matter, orthodox socialist doctrine is almost as irrelevant in.
European political life as in America, even though socialist
parties have a power in Europe which they never achieved
Can the Church Give a "Moral LeacF*? 105
in America. The issue in America is the right and the duty
of democratic society to achieve economic justice under the
conditions of a technical society. That task cannot be per-
formed if the conscience of a nation is confused by either
of the contrasting dogmas which have brought a civil war
into Western civilization. The one dogma is that the free
play of economic forces will automatically make for justice.
The other is that the socialization of property inevitably will
lay the foundations for both justice and freedom.
In Europe Christian thought must resist both dogmas in
the interest of a Christian realism which understands the
perils to justice in all forms of power, whether economic or
political, and which knows of the corruption of self-interest
in all dreams of justice whether bourgeois or proletarian.
But in America our business is to challenge the bourgeois
rather than the proletarian illusions. The latter do not exist.
America is a bourgeois paradise which has been spared a
class conflict of European proportions, not by its wisdom
but by the fortunate circumstances of a constantly expand-
ing economy on a vast and virgin continent. But there is
danger that the bourgeois illusions about life and justice,
which have long since been punctured by hard realities in
European history, should reach monstrous proportions in
our own land. There is danger too that religious piety
should give these illusions a final dimension of absurdity.
That is why it has become necessary to build and organ-
ize a movement of resistance of much wider and stronger
proportions than the present Fellowship. This movement
must not deal merely with the social and political prob-
lems of our day. It must be deeply grounded in the Chris-
tian faith and deal as rigorously with the religious and theo-
logical presuppositions of social policy as with the details
of political and economic theory. The problem of achieving
a more adequate organization of the forces within the
church which believe in bringing the force of the gospel
to bear upon the idolatries and injustices of our civilization
and of finding a better expression of our common beliefs is
so urgent that we invite any reader of these lines to write
the editor, if he has suggestions of what may be done.
Either the Frontier Fellowship should be enlarged and its
106 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
instruments for reaching its members with significant ma-
terial should be perfected, or a larger and better organiza-
tion should be formed.
THE PROTESTANT CLERGY
AND U. S. POLITICS
There are indications that a long period of "creative ten-
sion" between the clerical leaders of American Protestant-
ism and the American business community is coming to a
close with the triumph of the business community over the
churches. The creative tension (for it was creative on the
whole) was due to the fact that the American business
cornmunity is rather uncritically devoted to the principles
of a laissez-faire economics, regarding "free enterprise" as
a final and absolute norm of social organization, whereas
the clerical leadership of the Protestant churches has been
deeply influenced by the traditions of the "Social Gospel."
The Social Gospel movement was in fact a revulsion of
the religious conscience against an alliance between Prot-
estant individualism and pietism and classical economic
liberalism. This alliance was very potent from the middle
to the end of the nineteenth century. The social theories of
Protestantism were little more than religious versions of the
economic principles of Adam Smith. A Protestant journal in
1874 declared: "Labor is a commodity [that] ... is gov-
erned by the imperishable laws of demand and supply."
It was characteristic of this Protestant individualism that
it insisted upon purely individual explanations of social in-
justice. Thus even Henry Ward Beecher, the famous anti-
slavery preacher, could insist: "Looking comprehensively
at the matter . . . the general truth will stand, that no
man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than
his fault unless it be his sin."
One of the inevitable marks of this kind of individualism
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead 9 '? 107
was the fear that economic justice might eliminate the
necessity of Christian charity. **The poor we have with us
always," declared a Protestant journal in the 1870*5, "and
this is not the greatest o our hardships, but choicest of our
blessings. If there is anything a Christian may feel thankful
for, it is the privilege of lifting a little of the load of some
of his heavily-burdened neighbors." The thoughtful reader
may remember that in the early days of the depression Pres-
ident Herbert Hoover opposed unemployment insurance on
the ground that it would leave no room for Christian char-
ity. The echoes of this early creed can be detected in Mr.
Hoover's economic theories.
Protestant Individualism
Before presenting the evidence for the recrudescence of
this type of pious individualism in recent years, it is neces-
sary to give a brief account of the effect of the Social Gos-
pel upon American Protestantism. This movement was a
revolt against the Protestant individualism, which refused
to accept any Christian responsibility for the justice of so-
cial and political structures and which pretended to believe
that personal virtue, plus the beneficent effects of a self-
regulating economy, was all that was needed.
The Social Gospel movement had its rise at the end of the
nineteenth century and extended to the first decades of this
century. Its greatest exponents were Washington Gladden,
a Congregational preacher in Columbus, Ohio, and Walter
Rauschenbusch, a Baptist theologian. But there were many
other influential figures in the movement, such as Francis
Peabody of Harvard, the Wisconsin economist Richard Ely,
George Herron of the Rand School, and Shailer Mathews
of the University of Chicago. The most important docu-
ment of the movement is undoubtedly Rauschenbusch's
Christianity and the Social Crisis, first published in 1907.
The concern for social justice expressed in this movement
was the product of the confluence of several different
streams of thought. It was partly the fruit of a Christian
radicalism that had developed on the American frontier,
1O8 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
where the old sectarian pietism had lost its pure individual-
ism and had become related to Jacksonian radicalism. It
was partly the consequence of "theocratic" impulses in the
heart o Calvinism impulses intent on bringing "the whole
of life under the dominion of Christ." Some of the thought
of the Social Gospel movement was derived from the
radical ideas of the sectarians in Cromwell's army.
All of these streams of thought united to define Christian-
ity's purpose, in the words of Rauschenbusch, "to transform
human society into the Kingdom of God by regenerating all
human relations and reconstituting them in accordance
with the will of God/'
It may be pertinent to observe that while a certain
amount of Marxist thought entered into this amalgam of
religious forces, the movement was, from beginning to end,
highly moralistic and liberal, almost pathetically anxious to
disassociate itself from every idea of a class struggle. A left
wing did indeed espouse pure Marxism. This left wing,
which was active primarily in the Methodist and ( strangely
enough) in the Episcopal churches, also became enmeshed
in the toils of Stalinism. It has served the purpose of giving
American conservatives the pretext for insisting that the
churches are becoming "socialistic."
The Federal Council
Actually the Social Gospel movement, despite its great
virtue of insisting that social justice is a proper and neces-
sary concern of the Christian faith, was always rather too
moralistic to understand fully the operations of economic
and political life with their inevitable contests of power and
interest. But these defects now appear to be minor when its
achievement is recognized: It delivered American Prot-
estantism from meeting complex ethical problems of a tech-
nical civilization with an almost completely irrelevant
individualistic pietism and moralism.
Perhaps the most significant organizational achievement
of the Social Gospel movement was that, combined with
the growing church-unity movement, it created the Federal
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead?'? 109
Council of the Churches of Christ in America. This Coun-
cil, which brought all major U. S. Protestant churches into
a single co-operative organization, was born in 1908. In its
very first meeting it adopted a "social creed" which, though
subsequently amended and enlarged, has remained a guide
to its social thought. In that creed it insisted upon "the
right of workers to protection from the hardships often re-
sulting from crises and industrial change; for the protection
of workers from dangerous machinery and occupational dis-
ease; for the regulation of the conditions of toil for women;
for the gradual and reasonable reduction of hours of labor;
for a living wage as a minimum in every industry; for suit-
able provision for the old age of workers;" and so on. The
right of collective bargaining was not asserted in this origi-
nal creed, though it was implied. That right was added in
a later revision; and it may be regarded as significant that
the Protestant churches insisted upon this right long before
the American business community was ready to grant it.
The social theories of the Federal Council, while origi-
nally inspired by the Social Gospel movement, achieved a
maturity beyond the earlier sentimentality. The council was
as active in the field of international relations as in the field
of social theory. In international relations it consistently
stood for the principle of America's responsibility to the
world community against the isolationist tendences of part
of the American business community. Its educational pro-
gram in international affairs reached its climax after the
Second World War, when John Foster Dulles directed the
work of its Commission of a Just and Durable Peace.
World Protestantism
The activity of laymen like Dulles in the affairs of the
council refutes the charge of radicalism so frequently
brought against it by men like John T. Flynn. The co-opera-
tion of leading laymen in its economic and social program
also disproves the idea that the council represented merely
clerical, as distinguished from lay, opinion. In recent years
its National Study Committee on the Church and Economic
110 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
Life held a series of conferences in which some of the most
enlightened leaders in business, government, and labor
participated.
The last conference of the old Federal Council on eco-
nomic problems was held in Detroit in February, 1950. It
was attended by a genuinely representative group of lay-
men and clerical leaders and issued a report entitled "The
Responsibilities of Christians in an Interdependent Eco-
nomic World." This report contained no dogmas or isms of
the right or the left; but it proved that decades of social
idealism wedded to organizational responsibility had pro-
duced a high degree of ethical and political maturity.
The success of the Federal Council undoubtedly con-
tributed in a very considerable degree to the formation of
similar international organizations in which world Protes-
tantism has become united. In turn, the contacts of Ameri-
can Protestant leaders with the leaders of Europe served to
modify what Europeans always felt to be an undue opti-
mism and sentimentality in American social thought. The
world movement on Christian Life and Work began in
Stockholm in 1925, developed through a conference at
Oxford in 1937, and culminated in the organization of the
World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948. The
Amsterdam conference, incidentally, gave the American
business community a great deal of concern. For though it
condemned Communism unequivocally, it also faithfully
reflected Europe's and Asia's rejection of the American
free-enterprise doctrine. It declared that the promise of
laissez-faire capitalism, that justice would flow inevitably
from economic freedom, had no more been fulfilled than
the Communist promise that freedom would flow inevitably
from equality.
Thus the old Federal Council of Churches was an instru-
ment for achieving not only a viable pragmatic creed of
justice for America but for relating American Protestantism
to a world movement of Protestant churches. If in that
world union American Protestantism lost some of its senti-
mentality in the field of political affairs, it also helped some
of the churches of Continental Europe to overcome their
undue social and political defeatism.
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 111
End of an Era?
The question now is whether this whole period of crea-
tive tension between the Protestant churches of America
and our dominant culture has come to an end. Recently a
whole spate of "organizations" has arisen to re-establish
the old alliance between Protestant pietism and economic
individualism. The word "organizations" is put in quotation
marks because these movements, though heavily financed
and able to send their literature gratis to practically every
Protestant parson, are not membership organizations.
One of them, called Spiritual Mobilization, is directed
by the Reverend James Fifield, Jr., of the First Congrega-
tional Church of Los Angeles. Its theory is that any gov-
ernment control of economic Me is a form of "statism" and
that statism is a horrible form of idolatry that gives govern-
ment the authority and reverence that are due only to God.
Even the mildest deviations from laissez-faire doctrine are
defined as the first step down the slippery slope that leads
to Communism. This organization, like similar ones, has a
political program identical with that of the National Associ-
ation of Manufacturers, to which it adds merely a prayer
and religious unction.
More recently a biweekly journal entitled Christian Eco-
nomics has made its appearance. It is also so well sub-
sidized that it can be sent free to practically every clergy-
man in America. This journal is convinced that a sharp
distinction must be made between "man-made laws" and
"God's laws." "God's laws" are nothing else but "the laws
of nature" as the eighteenth-century physiocrats conceived
them. They are presumably unalterable norms of social
life, which prohibit every contrivance of statesmanship for
the regulation of human affairs.
According to this remarkable exposition of Christian
doctrine, even the Federal postal system is a mistake. We
would be much better off if the government made postal
service subject to competitive bidding. The combination of
economic and religious naivete exhibited in this journal is
112 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
a reminder of the fact that uncritical religion is frequently
a plausible, and therefore dangerous, ally of uncritical
ideological positions in the political debate. It is difficult
to assess the influence of these movements. They are un-
doubtedly intended to make American Protestantism the
devoted ally of the most uncritical and nostalgic form of
American liberal-conservatism. For it is clear that American
conservatism in its most unviable form is a kind of decadent
liberalism that thinks a return to pure classical economic
liberalism is a live option for America.
Financial Support
The financial support of Spiritual Mobilization and Chris-
tian Economics is something of a mystery. Both display
boards of directors composed of clerical leaders. The busi-
nessmen behind them do not show their hands. Fifield's
journal, Faith and Freedom, has a distribution of over
100,000. In an appeal letter some years ago, Fifield ac-
knowledged a budget of $270,000, and referred his pro-
spective donors to E. T. Weir (National Steel) and J.
Howard Pew (Sun Oil and Sun Shipbuilding) as refer-
ences. The same J. Howard Pew gave Christian Economics
a check for $50,000 to start it on its way. But nothing is
known of the subsequent financing. While these movements
are religious versions of such organizations as Merwin K.
Hart's National Economic Council and Leonard Reed's
Foundation of Economic Education, they usually avoid the
virulence that characterizes the polemics of Hart.
Many Protestant leaders who have labored for decades
in the social and ethical program of the old Federal Coun-
cil of Churches have naturally become apprehensive upon
the discovery that the chairman of the finance committee
of the new National Council of Churches is the same J.
Howard Pew who has been one of the angels of the sub-
sidized movements designed to bring American Protestant-
ism back to the uncritical individualism from which it
extricated itself over a period of half a century. They won-
der how it is possible for a man who has insisted upon
Can the Church Give a "Moral L,eacT? 113
social theories which stand in absolute contradiction to the
work of the Federal Council so suddenly to occupy a seat
of power in an organization that is supposed to continue
the traditions of the council. If Mr. Pew agrees with Chris-
tian Economics that unemployment insurance is wrong be-
cause "individuals with sensitive Christian consciences will
organize private charity to take care of the needy/ 7 he cer-
tainly cannot agree with the social creed of the council.
The National Council
It must be explained that the new National Council of
Churches has brought the old Federal Council, the Inter-
national Council of Religious Education, The Home and
Foreign Mission Councils, and other Protestant interde-
nominational agencies into one great superorganization.
Two problems arise in such a new movement. The one is
whether the sheer weight of organizational mechanism will
not stifle some of the freedom that the several movements-
once had. This question is, to use the words of Santayana,
whether "the harmony of the whole may not destroy the
vitality of the parts." There has been some frustration on
this score, which may, however, be overcome as the new
council learns how to decentralize as well as to centralize
authority.
The other problem is that of providing fuel for this vast
machinery. The council has a budget of $4.5 million. That
is considerably larger than the combined budgets of all the
agencies that entered it. Mr. Pew, as chairman of the fi-
nance committee, is making valiant efforts to balance the
budget. Recently he made an appeal to corporations for
support of the council, in which he declared that over a
thousand of them had placed the council on their contribu-
tion lists. He appealed for corporation gifts on two counts:
the nondenominational character of the work, and the argu-
ment "that enterprises such as ours exist as long as there
is a measure of freedom in the market place and freedom
in the market place is only one of freedom's many parts."
The logic is not altogether clear. But if anything is meant,
11-4 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
it must be the idea that there must be an alliance between
business and religion to overcome the threat of "statism."
It is not suggested that Mr. Few and his business friends
can annul in a single stroke the history of fifty years. The
clerical leadership of the National Council is highly re-
spected in all circles. The Presiding Bishop of the Episco-
pal Church, Henry Knox Sherrill, is president of the coun-
cil Dr. Samuel M. Cavert, who, as it were, grew up with
the Federal Council, is now general secretary of the
National Council. Such men as Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam
are in positions of leadership in it. It is impossible to be-
lieve that they would easily yield to any effort to turn the
National Council into a kind of big brother of Spiritual Mo-
bilization. Behind them are thousands of Christian leaders
in the churches who fervently believe that the churches
must have their own voice on questions of social justice and
cannot simply sponsor the moral complacency of a segment
of our business world.
But it is also difficult to believe that Mr. Pew has moved
into this great organization without intending a basic alter-
ation of its social orientation. It is therefore likely that some
interesting history will be made during the coming months
in American Protestantism's central sources of authority.
PRAYER AND POLITICS
Why is it that our prayers and devotions, which we fondly
believe to be the source of spiritual strength and humility
for our people should, when they are transferred from the
walls of our several houses of prayer to a big public gath-
ering, be an offense alike to the devout and tie scornful?
In a memorable editorial this summer the Christian Century
protested against the "exploitation" of religion by the po-
litical conventions. It spoke for many of us; but the word
"exploitation" defines only a part but not the whole of the
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 115
offense. Religion is exploited when it is used for ulterior
purposes; there is a strong suspicion that it is so used at
large political meetings. It is interesting that there would
be a temptation to exploit it; for prayer is a discipline of
humility and consecration which naturally creates the
temptation to be used not for its original purpose but for
pretending a humility and consecration which we do not
have. One is reminded of Jesus' warning against praying
in the market place "to be seen of men," and His admoni-
tion to pray in secret "that the Father who seeth you in
secret will reward you openly/' There is, incidentally, a
strong inclination to use religious observances at conven-
tions in order to seek the favor of the three denominational
groups Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic who are invari-
ably represented in the official prayers. Europeans find
these religious observances at our political occasions quite
as baffling as they find the political convention itself. Per-
haps they illustrate an intimate and uncritical relationship
between religion and public life in our nation which marks
us at one and the same time as one of the most religious
and the most secular of nations.
But the offense is given not only by conscious or uncon-
scious "exploitation" of religion. It is also given by an
accommodation of religion to the political purposes of the
gathering. In detecting accommodation we make no criti-
cism of the eminent clergymen who led the prayers at the
conventions. Most of them did as well as any of the rest of
us would do. Nevertheless the total effect of their labors
was accommodation. The Century thought the prayers were
"too long and too eloquent." The criticism is correct, but
one must observe that they were only a little longer and
a little more eloquent than the ordinary long prayer of our
churches. (This may point to a distinctive Protestant fail-
ing, but it is worth observing that when Catholic priests
or prektes conduct prayers outside their church and free
from their liturgical disciplines, their prayers sound more
like political harangue than the prayers of most Protestant
ministers.) A prayer which is too long and too eloquent
betrays that it is delivered for the ears of man and not
God. Prayers must be eloquent only with the eloquence of
Il6 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
brevity and chastity. Length and eloquence do not of them-
selves accommodate the prayer to ulterior purpose but they
contribute to the effect. One remembers Jesus' warning
against long prayers being coupled with His warning
against prayers in public, In any event, how quickly the
prayer loses its virtue in the new surroundings! Thus pray-
ers of gratitude for God's blessings upon this nation easily
turn into exercises in self-congratulation about the virtues
of our national history. Prayers of contrition are easily bent
to partisan purposes. Contrition for national corruption
sounds like a political document in a Republican conven-
tion and repentance for national irresponsibility has the
same effect in a Democratic convention.
We were most impressed by the quick degeneration of
prayers of aspiration in which the ideal goals of the nation
were held up as ends of consecration. How quickly these
aspirations degenerate into sentimentality when the ideal
goal is not held in proper balance with the forces of inertia
and sin in life which prevent an easy realization of the goal.
Some of these corruptions are not so much in the defects
of the priest's prayer as in the pressures of the public
gathering.
It would be defeatist to suggest that the way to keep
religion pure is to preserve it from contact with these pub-
lic occasions. Yet the public reaction to the prayers was a
wholesome one. We know that public men who ostenta-
tiously display their religious faith are treated with cyni-
cism by the public, which expresses by its reaction its
understanding of the fact that religion, which is usually
a source of humility, may also be a "source of pride to
those who are proud," and may on occasion be the instru-
ment of insincerity, precisely because it is ideally a dis-
cipline of sincerity.
We religious people will have to accustom ourselves to
the thought that religion may be a source of corruption as
well as of wisdom and light; and that the corruption may
come not from some flagrant distortion of malice, but from
weakness in the heart of the devout. The same prayer
which lifts the heart of men to God could also be used by
Can the Church Give a "Moral LeacF? 117
the Pharisee to thank God that he was not as other men.
And the same devotion which has a usual fruit of love "joy
and peace" may also produce the fruits of fanaticism and
cruelty. This is the fruit if men arise from their devotions
with the conviction that their purposes are identical with
the will of God.
The radical nature of human freedom makes it inevitable
that in the final encounter between man and God the
proper response of contrite recognition of the vanity of hu-
man pretensions should become among some the final vehi-
cle of pretension. That is why it is difficult to isolate the
true church of genuine believers for any one who does not
look into the heart. Only God can look into the heart. That
is also why we are taught that "by their fruits ye shall
know them/' The contrasting fruits of humble and vain
prayer are obvious to us all.
COMMUNISM AND THE CLERGY
Many of us rejoiced over Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam's vig-
orous defense before the House committee on un-American
activities and over his insistence that the committee clean
up its files and eliminate the lies and slander contained in
them. These files are evidently none other than those of the
F.B.I., and they contain every kind of unsupported charge
which malicious gossip could devise. There is some evi-
dence that Mrs. Billing's notorious Red 'Network of a few
decades ago, filled with fantastic charges of alleged mem-
bership not only in Communist but in every type of left-
wing organization, is still in the files. These charges are
indiscriminate, and they are designed to hit every 'liberal"
even if he has valiantly fought Communism, as is the case
with Bishop Oxnam. No one who knows the bishop and has
knowledge of his activities would accuse him of Commu-
Il8 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
nist sympathies. But he is undoubtedly a social "liberal"
and has been active in many social causes, some of which
had Communists enlisted in them.
The bishop called attention to the fact that membership
in the American-Soviet friendship organization, which was
held against him, was recommended by General Dwight
D. Eisenhower. This illustrates how many of the charges
of the vigilantes gain plausibility by obscuring chronology
and superimposing the temper of an age which finds itself
in fateful conflict with Communism upon the realities of a
period in which all men of good will tried desperately to
build bridges between ourselves and Russia. The files of
many of us who are targets of the vigilantes, although we
have resisted the Communist illusion for two decades, con-
tain evidence that we were once members of organizations
which were subsequently dominated by the Communists.
But they contain no record of our struggle to prevent this
development, or of our withdrawal when it took place.
In many cases, honored and definitely not subversive
organizations are listed as Communist. Membership in paci-
fist organizations is consistently recorded as evidence of
communist sympathies. J. B. Matthews makes the ridicu-
lous charge that 7,000 clergymen are members of Commu-
nist-front organizations. He does not bother to document
as many as 700. Of these hundreds most are pacifists,
many of whom (foolishly in my opinion) signed the "Stock-
holm Peace Appeal." Many were convicted of Communist
sympathies because of their opposition to the McCarran
immigration act, which shows how far the current hysteria
has gone. Bishop Oxnam cited, as evidence of the kind of
malice which prompts the gathering of evidence, the inclu-
sion of sentences, taken out of context, from a sermon he
preached years ago at the Indiana state prison. The ser-
mon was a completely respectable exposition of the Chris-
tian idea of patriotism. It naturally did not satisfy the
modern chauvinism.
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead?? 119
There are thus good reasons for rejoicing in Bishop
Oxnam's courageous challenge of modern vigilantism and
for hoping that others will follow his example. Yet despite
my admiration for the bishop and my general approval of
his stand, I was left uneasy by his exposition of the rela-
tion of Christianity to Communism in his introductory
statement. This was partly due to the fact that the state-
ment was designed to prove that Christianity and Com-
munism were so antithetical that no Christian could possi-
bly be a Communist sympathizer. Such a statement causes
difficulties because there are in fact Communist sympathiz-
ers and fellow travelers in the church. I wonder whether
Bishop Oxnam ought not to have admitted this more freely,
even before a committee not anxious to get at the truth.
Life never follows logic consistently, and the fellow trav-
elers could presumably defy the antithesis which he stated.
But I have a suspicion that they were able to defy it pre-
cisely because the antithesis is not as simple as the bishop
made it appear. He stated the contradiction between Com-
munism and Christianity as follows: "When I affirm: I be-
lieve in God the Father Almighty, I strike at the funda-
mental error of Communism, which is atheism." He went
on to say that the Christian idea of the dignity and the
responsibility of the individual prompts him to "reject
the materialism which assumes that institutions and even
morality are determined by modes of production." The
difficulty with this statement is that the idolatry of Com-
munism is more dangerous than its atheism; and the vol-
untarism by which it claims the right of a small group of
elite to "master history," and incidentally their fellow men,
is more dangerous than its materialism and determinism.
Furthermore, it is precisely these emphases of Communism
which make it so attractive to the fellow travelers who have
been taken in by it.
n
It must be affirmed that there have never been many
explicit Stalinists in the churches, and today their number
12O ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
is so insignificant that the hysterical labors of the vigilantes
are completely irrelevant. Nevertheless there are a few and
we ought to admit it. The fellow travelers range all the
way from those who have no sympathy with Communism
as a creed but (at least in Europe) prefer Russia to
America, to those who were betrayed by an original Chris-
tian Marxist conviction to give their allegiance to the
Stalinist cause. As the Stalinist policy followed its tortuous
path through history and across the moral sensibilities of
mankind, most of the sensitive spirits, in the church and out
of it, who were originally attracted to the Communist Uto-
pia, saw the errors of their way. But a few maintained their
allegiance and became ever more pathetic in trying to make
the worse appear the better reason.
Strangely enough Mr. Matthews, despite the farrago of
nonsense in his article "Reds and Our Churches," has
named all the real Stalinists in the church. They are a hand-
ful The only significant thing to be said about them is
that they were long protected by anti-Stalinist "liberals" in
the church who foolishly thought that the "prophetic"
spirits in the church were bound to be accused of dis-
loyalty and therefore that the charge of Communist sympa-
thy was a validation of the "prophetic spirit." They did not
stop to examine the curious logic which failed to make a
distinction between the false charge of disloyalty and actual
disloyalty, not to the nation but to the principles of demo-
cratic civilization and to the tenets of the Christian faith.
Ill
The European fellow travelers are of a different stripe.
Ironically, some of the most eminent were heroic opponents
of Hitlerism. Few are touched with Marxist ideology. Karl
Earth indeed, despite an explicit disavowal of all secular
ideologies, is influenced by a Marxist estimate of America
as a "capitalist" country and a confidence in the ''socialist"
economy of Russia which obscures the nature of her totali-
tarian political regime. Niemoller, who is no ordinary fel-
low traveler, is influenced by Earth. He perversely inter-
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 121
prets every phenomenon of Russian tyranny as evidence of
"Russian primitivism." Hromadka, the eminent Czech fel-
low traveler, is influenced by Barth. He was originally
motivated by a romantic idealization of Russia as the "big
brother" of the Slav nations and by a hatred of "bourgeois"
culture, acquired incidentally in his wartime residence
among us. The Hungarian Bishop Bereczky is influenced
by Barth and by an uneasy conscience about the conniv-
ance of the church of the past with Hungarian feudalism.
He is not the only one who cannot conceive that a "progres-
sive" movement may turn out to be worse than the civili-
zation which it has destroyed. The notorious "Red Dean"
of Canterbury has no obvious ideological ties -with Marx-
ism. He has a soft heart, a softer head, and an invincible
vanity which only the big crowds, delivered by the Com-
munists, can satisfy.
There is an interesting letter extant in which Barth lec-
tures the Hungarian bishop on the error of taking the Red
Dean seriously. On the whole, European fellow-traveling
theologians adopt the slogan of the neutralist intellectuals:
"A plague on both their houses!" Their traditional contempt
for capitalism allows them to equate the errors of American
pride with the cruelties of the most vexatious tyranny in
history.
IV
While the matter is beyond the competence or interest
of a congressional investigation committee it is proper,
while we deal with these issues among ourselves, to admit
that the pathetic clerical Stalinism could not have devel-
oped except against the background of a very considerable
Marxist dogmatism in the "liberal" wing of the Protestant
churches. On the whole the sympathy was for democratic
socialism. It is scandalous that our conservatives try to ob-
scure the difference between Communism and Socialism
and to deny the rigorous anti-Communism of European
Socialism as well as its great contributions to the extension
of justice. But it would be idle to deny that these contribu-
122 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
tions depend partly upon the ability of democracy to draw
the fangs from the Marxist error.
Those of us who used Marxist collectivism to counter
liberal individualism, Marxist catastrophism to counter lib-
eral optimism, and Marxist determinism to challenge
liberalism, moralism, and idealism, must admit that the
"truths" which we used to challenge "error" turned out to
be no more true (though also no less true) than the liberal
ones. But they were much more dangerous precisely be-
cause Marxism, in its orthodox variety, makes for a monop-
oly of political and economic power which is dangerous to
justice; while a liberal society preserves a balance of power
in the community, which makes for justice, though there
are and were some flagrant injustices as the result of a
monopoly of economic power. Those of us who were criti-
cal of capitalism were in short too uncritical of the Marxist
alternative, even when we rejected the Communist version
of Marxism and espoused the democratic Marxism.
The present writer is ready to confess to his complicity
in these errors, though he is quick to affirm that the Marxist
errors do not make more true the ridiculous dogma of
laissez-faire, which our conservatives have used to prevent
the political and moral criticism of the workings of power
monopolies in the economic sphere. I must, however, ex-
empt from this confession one illusion, generally held by
the Christian left. I never spoke of socialism as bringing
in a society in which "motives of service" would supplant
the "profit motive." This was a complete confusion be-
tween systems and motives, unfortunately popular in
Christian circles. It invested a collectivist system with
a moral sanction it did not deserve. It furthermore obscured
the fact that the so-called "profit motive" can hardly be
eliminated under any system, particularly since it is usually
none other than concern for the family, as contrasted with
the total community. This concern may be excessive; but it
is in any event "natural." Every parson who speaks grandly
about supplanting the profit motive exemplifies it when he
moves to a new charge because the old one did not give
him a big enough parsonage or a salary adequate for his
growing family.
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 123
Such confessions do not belong, as has been said, to in-
vestigating committees. But they are proper among our-
selves, not for the purpose of reaching a greater conform-
ity with our already too complacent nation and culture but
for the purpose of making our "prophetic witness" against
its complacencies more telling by eliminating political
errors from its essentially religious judgments.
LITERALISM, INDIVIDUALISM,
AND BILLY GRAHAM
Mankind, in its intellectual, including its theological, his-
tory, must frequently rethink itself and ask whether it has
not discarded some truth with the error which it was intent
on discarding. The development of theological thought
from "liberalism" to "neo-orthodoxy" is a case in point.
The end of the First World War represented the effec-
tive end of the "liberal" world view, particularly the
conceptions of human nature and human history, which
were directly or indirectly inherited from the Enlighten-
ment's view of the perfectibility of man and of histori-
cal progress. Christian theology had accommodated itself
too much to this secular world view and tried to fit the
Christian truth into the modes of thought generated by the
Enlightenment.
This theological dependence upon the Enlightenment
produced a "Christian liberalism" which seriously misin-
terpreted the human situation. It substituted the idea of
historical inertia for the concept of original sin, and there-
fore obscured the fact that the sin of man was a corruption
of his freedom and would be the constant concomitant of
man's growing historical freedom. It tended to place the
seat of virtue in the mind of man, and therefore could not
come to terms with the integral human self in both its
majesty and its misery that is, in both its indeterminate
124 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
freedom and its perennial corruption of that freedom for
egoistic ends. Having made reason and history the means
of redemption, it had no real place for the Biblical doc-
trine of redemption. And having interpreted history in
Hegelian terms, it had no real place for revelation that is,
for the invasion of the historical by an absolute word of
God.
Biblical Christ Not Needed
Consequently, the Christology of liberal Christianity de-
parted from the classical and Biblical Christology, The
Christ of the Bible was not needed in the modern schemes
of redemption. It was the more convenient to rid the-
ology of this Christology, since the "preaching of the cross"
had been a perpetual scandal long before the modern day.
It had challenged classical rationalism as much as modern
historical rationalism. It had insisted that a character,
event, and drama in history were more than an event in
history, were the revelation of the divine judgment and
forgiveness toward man and mankind. It had demanded
faith and commitment of the whole person, beyond the
necessary deductions of pure reason. It had also de-
manded the recognition of sin, repentance being the pre-
condition and concomitant of faith. It was, in short, of-
fensive to every type of "immanenta!" thought and moral
consciousness.
Unfortunately, the elimination of this scandal from
Christian preaching sacrificed the very heart of the gospel
and led to misinterpretations of both human nature and
human history in fact, to misinterpretations of everything
which had to do with human freedom, its responsibilities,
its decisions and commitments, its corruptions and the
concomitant guilt. It must not be obscured, of course,
that there were many forms of "evangelical liberalism,"
which preserved much of the essential gospel. But on the
whole "liberal Christianity" was a capitulation to the
spirit of the Enlightenment, whether that spirit expressed
itself in Hegelian or in Kantian rationalism.
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 125
The "neo-orthodox" revolution against this theological
capitulation was undoubtedly initiated by Kierkegaard's
polemic against Hegel and his justification of the Christian
revelation as a necessary source of man's self -understand-
ing. Man could not understand himself as a person without
knowing himself to be a sinner in need of forgiveness.
There were, of course, many types of "neo-orthodoxy."
The most forceful and creative influence in theology was
that of Karl Earth.
Earth's Attitude toward Scripture
Earth influenced all of us who stood in the neo-orthodox
tradition, though many of us were embarrassed by the
tendency toward literaKstic orthodoxy which he did not so
much promulgate as encourage among his disciples by a
kind of irresponsibility toward the problems of interpret-
ing the Scriptures honestly in terms of the knowledge
which historical sciences had brought to the analysis of
the books of the Old and New Testaments. Karl Earth was
essentially irresponsible toward this problem, for he in-
sisted that it was necessary to accept the Scripture en bloc,
even though he allowed himself the freedom of suggesting
that the story of the empty tomb was in the category of
"saga" and that the Genesis stories were Urgeschichte.
His disciples were usually not so sophisticated or so disin-
genuous.
This brings us to the first point of our complaint: that we
are in danger of sacrificing one of the great achievements
of 'liberal" theology namely, the absolute honesty with
which it encouraged the church to examine the Scriptural
foundations of its faith. This honesty involved not only
loyalty to the truth but also fidelity to the standards of the
whole modern world of culture, which rightly insisted that
no facts of history could be exempted from historical
scrutiny in the name of faith. Christianity was a historical
religion. It rested upon the facts of history as interpreted
by faith. But the faith would have to be profound enough
to remain secure, even though peripheral myths with which
126 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
former ages surrounded the truth of faith in the hope of
validating it were disproved. In short, this honesty toward
the Scriptural foundations of the faith was not only an act
of loyalty to the whole enterprise of modern culture; it was
also a method of purifying the Christian faith. For this
honesty made it imperative for the believer to accept Jesus
as the Christ because the revelation of God in Christ
validated itself to him existentially and did not require the
confirmation of "signs and wonders."
It is this distinct gain of liberal Christianity which is now
imperiled, with the general loss of the prestige of liberalism
and the general enhancement of orthodoxy. Perhaps the
gradual ascendancy of "ecumenical" concern has con-
tributed to this development.
Religious Purity and Honesty
The ecumenical movement is not explicitly orthodox;
but the general presuppositions of the world-wide church
certainly give stronger support to a traditional orthodoxy
than to any formulation of the Christian faith which is
partially determined by the disciplines of modern culture
which therefore takes Bultmann's questions about the
nature of the kerygma seriously, even though it may not
agree with his answers. At any rate, the general influence
of ecumenical relations is to subordinate those questions
about history and the history of "God's mighty acts" in
Christian revelation which embarrass the more uncritical
believers.
The net result of this tendency must be to widen the
chasm between the Christian faith and the modern mind
at the precise moment when the modern man is shaken
in the alternatives to the Christian faith which he once
took for granted. But he presumably remains a modern
cultured man, who has scruples about believing incredible
"facts"; and he probably finds those very facts, which
some desire as validation of the gospel, hazards to true
belief. But he is not deaf to the essential kerygma, which
is that "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto him-
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lea<T? 127
self." Religious purity is, in short, related to historical
honesty. Surely this is a treasure of "liberalism" which we
cannot discard and which, if discarded, we must restore.
Social Concern in Peril
But another treasure of "Christian liberalism" deserves
the same consideration and prompts the same questions
about a too hasty rejection. That is the social concern of
liberalism, which in America usually was called the "Social
Gospel." The Social Gospel made the mistake of assuming
that the Christian could express his social responsibility
merely by applying the love-commandment to the larger,
rather than to the more personal and intimate, relations of
life. Its defective analysis of human nature made it oblivi-
ous to the relation of love to justice and to the factors of
interest and power which must be reckoned with in any
system of justice. In modern parlance, it lacked "realism."
But it was infinitely more realistic than the pietistic in-
dividualism which it replaced. This pietism was completely
irrelevant in the social life of Europe except, of course,
that it was superb in prompting attitudes and acts of
personal charity. In America pietistic individualism grew
to great strength through frontier evangelism and was am-
bitious to become socially relevant. In so far as it gen-
erated disciplined and responsible individuals it did be-
come indirectly relevant. But it was a source of illusion
wherever it interpreted the problems of justice in Amer-
ica's growing industrialism as merely the fruits of a lack
of individual discipline. It became particularly dangerous
when it interpreted the differences between wealth and
poverty as due to diligence on the one hand and sloth on
the other hand.
Many of us, in our strictures against the Social Gospel,
have forgotten the religious irrelevancies from which it
saved us. This pietism, invariably coupled with perfectionist
illusions, knowing nothing about the Reformation's restora-
tion of that part of the gospel which revealed the moral
ambiguity in the life of the redeemed, is still powerful in
128 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
the evangelistic traditions of the American churches. It
has come to our notice in our own day because it has a
personable and honorable exponent in the person of Billy
Graham. Graham has proved himself an able ambassador
of American good will in the Orient and a good ambassador
of Christ to Europeans, who are not inclined to accept any-
one from America with sympathy. He has incorporated
many of the Social Gospel's concerns for social justice into
his pietism. And, though a Southerner, he has been rigor-
ous on the race issue.
Graham's Pietistic Moralism
Nevertheless, Graham still thinks within the framework
of pietistic moralism. He thinks the problem of the atom
bomb could be solved by converting the people to Christ,
which means that he does not recognize the serious perplex-
ities of guilt and responsibility, and of guilt associated
with responsibility, which Christians must face. No human
goodness can heal the predicament of man, for which the
gospel of divine forgiveness is the only final answer.
There are no perfectionist solutions for the problems of an
atomic age or indeed of any age in which men have
accepted responsibility for the justice and stability of their
communities and civilizations, and yet have had the grace
to measure the distance between the divine holiness and
all fragmentary human righteousness.
Something of the same individualism associated with
social awareness is revealed in Graham's discussion of the
"seven deadly sins/' He comes to the last sin, "avarice,"
and points out truly that this is the particular sin of
Americans, living in their "economy of abundance" and
tending to forget that "life consisteth not in the abundance
of things a man possesses." But having dealt with this
sin of a whole culture he irrelevantly presents Christian
salvation as a kind of magic panacea, with the assurance
that the <c blood of Jesus Christ" can save us from this sin
too. There is nothing here about the temptations to which
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead?'? 129
even the most devoted Christians are subject in a very
wealthy nation.
Something of the same weakness of individualism and
pietism is revealed in Graham's attitude toward our large
cities. He is inclined to castigate them for their sins, as if
the evils of inevitable sexual vice were their only defects;
and he does not give due regard to the achievements of
community, despite technical mass culture. Certainly our
cities, as well as our whole technical civilization, can be
"redeemed" by no simple perfectionist devotion of a few
or many saints. They and it are redeemed by the devoted
services to the community of many people of different and
indifferent religious persuasion.
The common services which the pious and the secular
make and must make toward a tolerable community and
for the preservation of a civilization must be recognized.
There is a danger of obscuring this fact in all evangelistic
efforts. The ultimate religious commitment is a personal
and individual one, and it can therefore be most effectively
made by a pietist who narrows the vision of religious aware-
ness to highly personal dilemmas and needs. Hence the
pietistic evangelist is probably most effective among in-
dividuals who have pressing personal, moral, and religious
perplexities*
"Other Sheep" Must Be Respected
Meanwhile, however, there are many Christians and non-
Christians who are committed to tasks and responsibilities
and are involved in common human dilemmas which are
not to be comprehended in any neat formulas of salvation.
We assert as Christians that the message of Christ is a
source of grace and truth to all men either in their individ-
ual dimension or in the social dimension of their existence.
But we must also have a decent modesty and humility
about the righteousness of those whose common decencies
contribute to our security, whether or not they have solved
the ultimate mystery through faith or have made an ulti-
130 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
mate commitment to Christ. The mystery of the human and
the divine is greater than is surmised in our philosophies.
It cannot be measured by the neat formulas to which
Christian orthodoxy is frequently reduced, any more than
it can be exhausted in even the most elaborate theological
systems. If the evangelistic effort tempts us to draw
pharisaic lines between the righteous and the unrighteous,
that is perhaps not so much the fault of the evangelist
particularly if he be as modest as Graham as it is the
dilemma of the Christian faith itself, which is bound ulti-
mately to ask for a personal commitment but must always
be aware that the grace of God is not bound by any of our
formulas of salvation, that the Lord has "other sheep which
are not of this fold/*
The personal achievements of Graham as a Christian and
as evangelist should be duly appreciated. But they do not
materially alter the fact that an individualistic approach to
faith and commitment, inevitable as it may be, is in danger
both of obscuring the highly complex tasks of justice in the
community and of making too sharp distinctions between
the "saved" and the "unsaved." The latter may not have
signed a decision card but may have accepted racial equal-
ity with greater grace than the saved. We must, in short,
bring Christian evangelism into correspondence with the
breadth and complexity of our social obligations as ap-
prehended by any form of classical Christian faith, and at
the same time into conformity with the Reformation in-
sights, or better still the Biblical truths about the pre-
cariousness of the virtues of the redeemed. That will make
us fit fellow workers with decent secularists in the com-
mon tasks of our civilization.
No Simplifying of the Gospel
All this can be done without detracting from the im-
perious claims of the gospel upon the conscience of the
individual, who transcends every social situation and com-
munal destiny to face the mystery of the divine judgment
and mercy. The humble parson who tries to be a mediator
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 131
of the divine grace and the ordinary services of the church
may have a better chance of doing this and presenting the
gospel in its full dimension than the professional evangelist,
however gifted.
But whatever the church may do to spread the gospel, it
must resist the temptation of simplifying it in either liter-
alistic or individualistic terms, thus playing truant to posi-
tions hard-won in the course of Christian history. We can-
not afford to retrogress in regard to the truth for the sake
of a seeming advance or in order to catch the public eye.
The problem we are considering really transcends the
question of the validity of highly individualistic evangelism,
which the frontier tradition in America has made partic-
ularly popular among us. The problem is whether, in the
course of our history, the church can absorb what is valid
in the modern "liberal" attitude toward history and yet
preserve what is valid in the Reformation's rediscovery of
the Biblical message of redemption. That message did not
make the sharp distinction between the virtues of the
redeemed and unredeemed which modern pietism makes.
The Reformation knew of the equal need of all men for
divine forgiveness. Its interpretation of the Christian faith
did not encourage simple answers to the complex questions
of social order and justice. It recognized the fragmentary
character of all human virtue and the finiteness of all hu-
man knowledge. Such a message of Christ is relevant to
the perplexities of an atomic age without presuming to
offer Christians a simple way out of common human dilem-
mas. It knows that the ultimate dilemmas are universal
and that the judgment of Christ is always relevant to both
the righteous and the unrighteous.
132 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
THE SECURITY AND HAZARD OF
THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY
Lesson: I Corinthians 3, 11-15.
I want to speak to you in this climactic hour, in which
long and arduous years of preparation for the Christian
ministry come to a close for you, on the theme "The Se-
curity and Hazard of the Christian Ministry," upon the
basis of the Scripture lesson of the evening.
The security is quite obvious. It exists in the foundation
or in the words of the text "Other foundation can no one
lay than that which has been laid in Christ Jesus." We
might spend some time in comparing the gospel of Christ
with the religions of the world. But it may suffice to prove
the security of this foundation by calling attention to the
fact that the answer to the human predicament is more
adequately given in the Christ revelation, because in that
revelation the freedom of man is given its final norm and
the guilt of man is given the final salve and healing.
The gospel of Christ is succinctly expressed in the Cross
of Christ. That Cross always represents two dimensions to
the eyes of faith. It means on the one hand the perfect
love, which is the final norm for this strange creature with
such a radical freedom, distinguishing him from other crea-
tures, that no norm can be placed for that freedom but the
realization of himself in the love of God and his fellows,
even at the expense of his physical existence. The Cross
of Christ stands on the very limit of human history and
defines the perfect good which is not beyond our possibil-
ities, as the history of martyrdom proves, but which is
certainly not within conventional possibilities of our exist-
ence. We have thus in Christ as our norm and law, a
Address delivered at the One Hundred and Twenty-first
Commencement at Union Theological Seminary, May 28, 1957.
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 133
standard which challenges every achievement and prevents
us from taking premature satisfaction in any of the virtues
by which men count themselves righteous. But the gospel
of Christ is not primarily a norm for our freedom but a
balm for the wound of our guilt. The central message of
the gospel is that "God was in Christ reconciling the world
unto himself" and overcoming the hiatus between his
divine holiness and our sinful nature. Morally the gospel
of Christ presents us with such indeterminate possibilities
that the Christian faith is always threatened with the heresy
of other- worldliness. But to capitulate to the search for
perfection at the price of responsibility would be to build
falsely on the foundation of Christ.
It would be equally false to invest some proximate good,
some easily attainable virtue, with absolute sanctity. The
long history of Christian legalism and fanaticism proves
that many have hazarded to build wrongly on the founda-
tion of Christ and to escape the tension and the relaxation
of the tension through the assurance of divine mercy, by
the strenuous effort to establish human virtue, in either
ordinary or extraordinary terms, as the way of salvation.
But if we build truly on the foundation of Christ we escape
the evils of both fanaticism and irresponsibility.
To build on the foundation of Christ truly means that
we cannot engage in the world flight of Buddhism or the
fanaticism of Islam. The world flight of the one is due to
a disregard of the whole historical order. The fanaticism of
Islam is due to the introduction of false absolutes into
history. Historical responsibility and fanaticism are fre-
quently closely related. The one is the by-product of the
other. To call attention to these dangers is to introduce the
second word of our topic into our thought. The security is
in the foundation. The hazard is in the building upon the
foundation. For as Paul insists in our lesson, no one can
guarantee the way we build on the foundation; it may be
"hay, wood and stubble" or "silver, gold and precious
stones."
134 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
The Yogi and the Commissar
Years ago Arthur Koestler wrote an interesting little book
entitled The Yogi and the Commissar. The Yogi was the
symbol of world flight and the Commissar was the symbol
of the fanaticism which is the inevitable fruit of the illu-
sion that we can, from our standpoint, define and achieve
history's ultimate good. Koestler did not even consider that
the gospel of Christ provides us with an alternative to both
Yogi and Commissar because it sets the final good, not in
eternity, but in history, though at the very rim of history,
and it prevents us from regarding any human virtue or
achievement as anything but fragmentary. But we must
humbly acknowledge that the long history of Christian
fanaticism on the one hand, and of Christian otherworldli-
ness on the other hand, clearly prove that it is possible and
perhaps inevitable that man should build falsely on the
foundation.
The hazard of the Christian ministry is obviously to
build wrongly on the true foundation, to build "wood, hay
and stubble," in the words of the Apostle. I should like to
analyze these hazards in terms of the two tasks which
always confront us. The one is to minister to the perennial
needs of men in the light of the gospel and the other is to
minister to the peculiar needs of the people of this genera-
tion.
As pastors, we must minister to people who go through
the natural cycles of life. They grow up, and then they
wither and die. And whether in youth or in age, they fall
into sin because they have a unique freedom which enables
them to make many false starts and false ends. It is one
of the blessed forms of the ministry that one is entitled to
be a guide and helper to young people as they grow up.
The process of growing up is not quite as easy for young
people as Karen Homey seems to assume (in her Neurosis
and Human Growth), for she thinks if neuroses do not
interfere, there is a natural development of the potentialities
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"? 135
of human nature. Actually the process of growth demands
a combination of discipline and freedom, of law and of
grace. We build wrongly on the foundations if we interpret
the gospel merely in terms of discipline, and particularly if
we identify law and discipline with the conventions of
society, which partly express and partly corrupt the neces-
sary disciplines of life. One of the besetting errors of
Protestant Christianity is excessive conventionality. All
laws, and particularly those which are expressed in tradi-
tions and conventions, must be subject to the law of love
if we are to mediate the discipline of life to growing youth.
Excessive legalism and conventionality is wrong, but so is
the romanticism which extols freedom as the final good;
for the problem for youth and for all men is not how free
we can be, but how free we can be, being bound by our
responsibilities. Both conventionality and romanticism
are false elaborations of a religion of truth and grace, of
love and law.
In the course of life young people grow old, and all men
go the path of withering and finally dying. It is certainly as
difficult to grow old gracefully and to face death with faith
and peace, as to grow up. If I have any regret about my
early ministry, it is that I was so busy being what I thought
to be a prophet of righteousness, that I was not sufficiently
aware of the importance of the pastoral ministry to the
maimed, the halt, and the blind, in short to all people who
had to resign themselves to the infirmities of the flesh and
who must finally face the threat of extinction. The "sting of
death is sin" declares the Scripture, which is to say, if we
center our life within ourself and not in God, if we do not
learn the nonchalance which is able to confess "Whether
we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die
unto the Lord, and whether we live therefore or die we are
the Lord's/' our death and the death of our dear ones will
strike us as stark tragedy, though it is the common lot of all
men. We build falsely on true foundations if we try to
mediate the grace of the Christian faith through slogans
and cliches or if we try to quiet anxious hearts through
spurious appeals to special providence which is supposed
136 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
to protect the faithful. For the gospel gives us no special
securities or exemptions from the frailties of men and the
tragedies of life. We are expected to live life fully but also
to be detached from life so that we have everything as if
we had it not.
Among the perennial needs of people, whether young or
old, is their need as sinners. We have all fallen short and
we are all engaged in more or less pathetic efforts to hide
that fact. All sentimentality which hides our sin and helps
people escape the seriousness of man's predicament, all
frantic legalism intended to obscure the fragmentary
character of human virtue and to prevent the confession of
man's sins and therefore the possibility of real grace is a
part of the hazardous, erroneous building on the true
foundation. It changes the gospel from a gospel of grace
and forgiveness to a sentimental morality which gives sim-
ple answers to difficult problems.
Not much evil is done by evil people. Most of the evil
is done by good people, who do not know that they are not
good. It is one of the true functions of the minister of
Christ to puncture the self-deceptions, including his own,
by which people try to perpetuate the open secret that we
all think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think.
The Problems of the Age
We must help people to face not only the perennial
problems of human existence, the problems of growth, of
death and sin, but to face the unique problems of our age.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were wrong in
hoping that history would essentially change the perennial
human situation. But within that situation history certainly
presents us with some novel responsibilities and predica-
ments in every new age.
One of these new responsibilities is to preserve the
dignity of man and the healing power of true community
amid the impersonal and merely technically contrived to-
getherness of an industrial age. The Christian church in
Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead?? 137
America has done tolerably well in comparison with other
churches in building integral religious communities in our
cities. That is the achievement partly of American sec-
tarianism and partly of the immigrant church. But there
is something in this achievement which is not in accord
with the foundation of Christ. Our churches are friendly,
even to the point of being chummy. That is just the point;
they are too chummy. They have mixed the natural com-
munity of race and class too much with the community of
grace. Hence the grievous entanglement of our churches
with racial pride in a day when the state leads the church
in establishing racial brotherhood. If we want to build truly
on the foundation we must mediate the Gospel judgment:
"If ye love them which love ye what thanks have ye?"
Community, particularly in an industrial society, requires
justice; and justice requires a delicate equilibrium of
social forces. To be ministers in our land of society means
to distill the norm of love into norms of justice. If we do
not understand the relation between love and justice, our
preaching of the gospel of love is bound to degenerate
into sentimentality.
But So as "by Fire . . .
Finally, we cannot escape the problem as Christian min-
isters in America, the wealthiest and most powerful of
modern nations, of mediating the gospel to the conscience
of the nation, involved in all of its responsibilities. A pure
individualism and pietism is certainly hay and straw in
our day. So is a simple moralism which cannot understand
the responsibilities of a nation in a nuclear age, which can
not make war without risking the physical fabric and the
moral substance of our civilization and which cannot sim-
ply disavow the terrible new instruments of war without
risking capitulation to tyranny. To speak the word of truth
and of faith in a nation and generation involved in such
deep predicaments in which the perennial problems of
mankind have reached new dimensions, is certainly a
138 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
hazardous undertaking. Let us change Paul's metaphor a
little. He declares that it is hazardous to build on the
foundation of Christ and that if you build wrongly you may
be saved "But so as by fire." Let us merely say, you are
not in peril of your life. You are only in peril of your soul,
but you can be saved "by the skin of your teeth."
PART m: Barthianism and the Kingdom
EARTH APOSTLE OF THE ABSOLUTE
For months, even years, we have been hearing of Barth
and the Barthian movement in Germany. But the reports
have been fragmentary. None of Barth's books was avail-
able to us in translation. It seems the fate of American
theology, at least so far as it is developed in the pulpit
rather than the theological school, that it must orient itself
without any sense of cooperation with German theology.
Perhaps that is not so much its fate as its punishment for
the superficiality which creates a market for every casual
book of sermons while translations of significant theological
treatises from other languages are left on the shelves. Let
us hope that Douglas Morton's service to the American
church, rendered through his translation of Barth's Das
Wort Gottes und die Theologie, will earn the deserved
gratitude of sales so large that other translators may be
encouraged. At any rate, we finally have direct contact
with this man Barth.
Barth's theology has been described as a kind of funda-
mentalism. If one means by fundamentalism a theology
which rests upon a defiance of the generally accepted re-
sults of the historical and physical sciences the description
is quite erroneous and misleading. The Barthian school
accepts the results of the Biblical criticism and has no
magical conceptions of revelation. Neither has it any quar-
rel with the physical sciences and evolution. But in the
sense that it is an effort to escape relativism through dog-
matism it is a new land of fundamentalism or an old
kind of orthodoxy. It is, in fact, a revival of the theology
of the Reformation, Calvinistic in its conception of God
141
142 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
and Lutheran in its emphasis upon the experience of jus-
tification by faith.
The Place of Jesus
The simplest explanation of Barthian theology is that it
is a reaction to the subjectivism and the relativism of lib-
eral theology. It reacts not only to the theological but to
the inevitable ethical relativism of modem thought. The
Bible is not, according to Earth, an inerrant revelation
but neither is it the history of man's progressive thoughts
and experiences of God. It contains the word of God, an
absolute in spite of all relativities. The absolute character
of this revelation is finally guaranteed by the position of
Christ. With Paul, Earth, if he knew Christ after the flesh,
wants to know him so no more.
Jesus Christ is not the keystone in the arch of our think-
ing. Jesus Christ is not a supernatural miracle that we
may or may not consider untrue. Jesus Christ is not the
goal which we may hope to reach after conversion.
... He is God who becomes man, the creator of all
things who lies as a babe in the manger.
Just what is the significance of Christ and how does he
become the center and basis of our religion? Simply that
he resolves the conflict between God and man, between
man's finitude and his infinite hopes. What damns man
is not his sins in specific situations but his sin. The good
and evil, the virtues and vices which emerge in historical
incident and are determined by the condition of time and
place are not man's real problem. What drives man to
despair is not the satanic nature of his life when governed
by its evil moods but the inadequate nature of his highest
morality.
God stands in contrast to man as the impossible in
contrast to the possible, as death in contrast to life, as
eternity in contrast to time. The solution to the riddle,
the answer to the question, the satisfaction of our need
Barthianism and the Kingdom 143
is the absolutely new event whereby the impossible be-
comes of itself possible, death becomes life, eternity
time and God man.
A Sense of Guilt
If this does not make sense to a liberal theologian, it
might be observed that it does state a problem which
liberal religion has sadly neglected. It is the highest func-
tion of religion to create a sense of guilt, to make man
conscious of the fact that his inadequacies are more than
excusable limitations that they are treason against his
better self. It accomplishes this task by revealing sin as a
treason against God. "Against thee and thee only have I
sinned/* cries the psalmist. Earth puts it this way: "To
suffer in the Bible means to suffer because of God; to sin,
to sin against God; to doubt, to doubt of God; to perish,
to perish at the hand of God."
It is quite possible that such a religious consciousness of
sin has the moral limitation that it preoccupies the soul
with an ultimate problem of life to such a degree that it
loses interest in specific moral problems and struggles which
must be faced day by day. But the merit of this note of
tragedy in religion is that it saves us from the easy op-
timisms into which we have been betrayed by our moral
evolutionism. After all, there is something just as unreal in
most modern dogmas of salvation through moral evolution
as in the older doctrines of salvation.
Is Progress Real?
Is not the doctrine of progress little more than dogma?
Is it not true that history is the sorry tale of new imperi-
alisms supplanting old ones; of man's inhumanity to man,
checked in one area or relationship expressing itself in new
and more terrible forms in other areas and relationships? Is
it not a monstrous egotism and foolish blindness which we
betray when we imagine that this civilization in which com-
144 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
mercialism has corrupted every ideal value is in any sense
superior to the Middle Ages, or that the status of the
industrial worker differs greatly from that of the feudal
slave? Religion ought to condemn the achievements of
history by bringing them into juxtaposition to the "holiness
of God."' Even if we cannot define the holiness of God
without making it relative to our own experiences and
hopes, that religious experience will at least help us to see
that moral limitation involves perversity, that it is in a
sense treason against the highest we have conceived.
In so far as Barthian theology reintroduces the note of
tragedy in religion, it is a wholesome antidote to the super-
ficial optimism of most current theology. But we may well
question whether it gives us the sense of certainty and the
experience of "deliverance from the body of this death"
which it imagines, and we may also question whether it
does not pay too high a moral price for whatever religious
advantage it arrives at.
As to the sense of certainty, having sacrificed the iner-
rancy of the Bible and even the miraculous in Christ's life,
it tries to escape the subjectivism and relativism in which
religious knowledge, together with all other knowledge, is
involved, by finding one absolute, the Christ-life or the
Christ-idea. It is really the Christ-idea that is absolute
rather than the Christ-life, for this theology cares nothing
for the peculiar circumstances of Christ's life or the his-
torical background of his teachings. It is not even above
describing the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount as the
definition of the ultimate ethical idea which men can never
reach.
How do we know that this Christ-idea is absolute and
not subjective: we do not know. That is simply dogmatically
stated. The proof that is offered is the proof of human
need. Only this kind of an absolute can save man from the
cursed paradox of his existence, from an existence which
conceives ideals beyond attainments and lives at once in
eternity and in time. To accept this absolute is the ex-
perience of justification by faith and presumably it gives
support in actual life to the dogma. That is, we know this
Barthianism and the Kingdom 145
doctrine to be true because it is a doctrine which meets a
human need.
The Pathos of Theological Thought
Here we have the whole pathos of this kind of abstruse
theological thought. In order to escape the relativism of a
theology which is based upon and corrected by biology,
psychology, social science, philosophy, and every other field
of knowledge, we accept a theology which has no way of
authenticating itself except by the fact that it meets a
human need. This is a sorry victory. Relativism may be
defeated but at the price of a new and more terrifying
subjectivism. How do we know that the human need which
this kind of religion satisfies is not really a too-morbid con-
science? May it not be that the very emergence of Barthian
theology at this time comes from the sense of tragedy which
the war created, particularly in Germany?
Earth considers that possibility and denies it, dogmati-
cally. There is, as a matter of fact, no way of escaping
relativity except through dogmatism or magic. There is
always a danger that a religion which makes or has made
its adjustments to society, to culture, to science, and to
thought in general will degenerate into nothing more than
a sentimental glow upon thought and life. In contrast to
that land of insipid religion, Barthian religion has the note
of reality in it. But ultimately there is no more peace in
dogmatism than in magic. We can escape relativity and
uncertainty only by piling experience upon experience,
checking hypothesis against hypothesis, correcting errors
by considering new perspectives, and finally by letting the
experience of the race qualify the individual's experience
of God.
The other question to be considered is whether Earth
does not pay too high a moral price for the religious ad-
vantages of his theology, even rf these are real. There is,
to be sure, a note of moral realism in Barthian thought
which is not found in quietistic theology. The peace which
146 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHKISTIANITY
comes to the soul through assurance of pardon, the inner
harmony which is realized by overcoming the sense of
moral frustration, does not absolve the sinner of his sins.
We are sinners still even after we have been saved.
The Moral Price
Let us acknowledge with gratitude that we have here
no new escape from the world of reality. The true Christian
according to Earth continues to look upon the brutalities
of history with wholesome contrition. He knows that he is
a part of a world and that his sins have helped create it.
Nevertheless, it is inevitable that he should be more con-
cerned with the problem of his inner life than with the
effort to protect and advance moral values in society. Even
if there is no social progress in the sense that modern liber-
alism assumes, each generation has the task of defeating
its own lusts or of bringing them under some kind of
discipline. In our own generation, in which man's expansive
desires may be gratified more easily and in which his lusts
are expressed with more deadly force than in any previous
age, it is particularly important that the humility expressed
in the cry, "God be merciful to me a sinner," should result
in creative social activity as well as in a religious assurance
of pardon.
If religion can help men see that the root of imperialism
is the imperialism of the individual and that social misery
is in some sense due to the perversity of the individual
soul, it has remarkable social and moral function. But if
the realization of the tragedy of sin merely busies the sensi-
tive soul with efforts to find theological, metaphysical, and
mystical solutions for the problems of our mortality, the
poor devils who bear in their bodies the agony of social in-
justice may be pardoned if they will regard religion with
indifference and contempt.
Barthianism and the Kingdom 147
Individual Responsibility
Bartihian pessimism is, as all pessimism, the fruit of moral
sensitiveness. It is the business of religion to create a sen-
sitive conscience. And there is certainly more religious
vitality in such pessimism than in the easy optimism of
evolutionary moralism. Yet it is one of the tragedies of
the religious life that it is almost impossible to create
this kind of moral sensitivity without tempting the soul
to despair of history and take a flight into the absolute
which can neither be established upon historical grounds
nor justified by any strictly rational process, but can only
be assumed and dogmatically asserted because it seems
morally necessary. What seems impossible must become
possible, else the world will have to worry its way out of
bloodshed, slavery, and social misery without the aid of
the sensitive souls whose very acuteness of feeling incapaci-
tates them for the world's work. It will then have to depend
for emancipation upon the morally sensitive souls who have
no assurance of God to save them from despair but who
develop what moral energy they can while walking always
on the narrow ledge at the side of the abyss of despair.
BARTHIANISM AND THE KINGDOM
It is quite obvious that Mr. Homrighausen and I are in
agreement at many points in our estimate of Barthianism
and liberalism. I think he is quite right in resenting the
suggestions that the Barthians are not interested in the
social question and in pointing out their social radicalism.
He thinks I do not fully appreciate this background of
social radicalism. It is at this point that I would part com-
pany with him and make a distinction between their social
148 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
sensitivity and their social vigor. I would say that the
Barthian theologians are very sensitive to the iniquities of
the present social system and that in this critical attitude
they are measurably superior to the liberal theologians who
frequently indulge the illusion that the League of Nations,
or the latest bank merger, or the last humanitarian cam-
paign are proofs of the imminent realization of the new
heaven and the new earth.
The Barthians are very critical of present society but
they are also very critical of every effort to improve society.
They regard it as necessary but dangerous; dangerous be-
cause moral and social activity might tempt men to moral
pride and conceit and thus rob them of salvation. If the
Barthians are socialists, I think it is not unfair to them to
say that they don't work very hard at it. It might as well
be pointed out, too, that men like Gogarten manage to
combine a social ethic which smells of feudalism with their
theology of crisis. That proves that a radical social philoso-
phy does not flow inevitably from Barthian theology. The
real fact is that the theology originally emerged from a
radical social philosophy which found no possibility of
realizing itself in history. I still insist that if the Barthians
gave themselves more vigorously to the social task they
would not be quite so pessimistic about history, because
vigorous moral activity creates its own eschatology.
It ought to be said that the moral sensitivity and the
lack of social vigor in Barthian thought flow from the same
source, and that source is religious perfectionism. God, the
will of God, and the Kingdom of God are conceived in
such transcendent terms that nothing in history can even
approximate the divine; and the distinctions between good
and evil on the historical level are in danger of being
reduced to irrelevancies. Mr. Homrighausen himself offers
an interesting example of just how this kind of moral
logic works. "Should Christians ever fight for their rights?"
he asks. "If they do is it not an evil? At least it is not an
absolute good. Is a compromise ever good; does the end
ever justify the means?"
I am not sure just what he means by fighting for rights.
If violence is implied, of course it would be rather easy to
Barthianism and the Kingdom 149
rule it out on ethical grounds. But since Mr. Homrighausen
is a pretty consistent Barthian I suspect he means more than
that. He means that to contend for one's rights is not con-
sistent with a perfect ethic of love which, if followed
consistently, leads to complete nonresistance. In terms of
this perfectionism he is therefore forced to rule out all
types of political, social, and economic pressure by which
the weak must oppose the pretensions and exactions of the
strong. To be very specific, he would undoubtedly have to
frown upon the innumerable strikes which will probably
occur this coming winter in order that wage scales may
not sink to new minimum levels. From the standpoint of
ethical and religious perfectionism such strikes are un-
doubtedly unethical. Yet I am persuaded that they may
help to keep society from reaching new depths of inhu-
manity.
Of course they represent compromise. All history is com-
promise. But the "nicely calculated less and more" with
which we must deal when we deal with the ethical prob-
lems of history is really important. Any religious idealism
which absolves us of responsibility for finding the best
possible means to the highest possible social end is dan-
gerous to the moral struggle. That does not mean that it
is not also helpful. There is always a touch of the sense of
the absolute in vital religion, and in so far as the Barthians
have this sense they are religiously superior to the liber-
als who have been so completely lost in the relativities of
history that every slight eminence in the landscape of time
seems to them to be a final mountain peak of the Kingdom
of God.
True religion does save man from moral conceit in the
attainment of his relative goals. But if the sense of the
absolute and transcendent becomes so complete an obses-
sion as it is in Barthian theology all moral striving on the
level of history is reduced to insignificance. It is good to
survey history occasionally sub specie aeternitatis, but it is
not wholesome to the moral vigor of a people to make the
eternal perspective the perpetual vantage point. It is be-
cause the Barthians do this that they cannot give them-
selves with great fervor to any social program, however
150 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
certain tibey may be that society is in need of reorganiza-
tion, and however clearly they perceive what steps must be
taken for its redemption. In Barthianism, religious vigor
first creates and then devours ethical passion.
BARTHIANISM AND POLITICAL
REACTION
The' Barthian theologians began as frustrated and disap-
pointed socialists. Brunner and Barth both acknowledge
their indebtedness to Ragaz, Kutter, and the Christian
socialists who were believed in the prewar period to have
established an effective relationship between Christianity
and socialism. The First World War convinced Barth and
his followers that the hope of the establishment of a King-
dom of God on earth was an idle dream, and they re-
turned, therefore, to the emphasis of orthodox Christianity
rthe perennial sinfulness of the world and the need
salvation which transcended the whole sphere of
socio-ethical relationships. Neither human nature nor so-
ciety could be redeemed in ethical terms. All that was
possible was to accept the grace of God and to know
oneself "justified" in a world of sin.
Logically this emphasis need not preclude rigorous so-
cial, ethical, and political activity looking toward the alle-
viation of the world s injustices and inequalities. Barth and
Brunner remain socialists who insist that capitalism must
be destroyed even though a good Christian does not give
himself to the Utopian illusion that the socialism which is
substituted for capitalism represents either the Kingdom
of God or even a proxirnately just society. As a rational
and ethically sensitive person, declare both Barth and
Brunner, the Christian is bound to seek a social order
which will throw the most effective restraints about the
sinfulness of man and establish the most tolerable com-
Barthianism and the Kingdom 151
munal life. But all this is fairly inconsequential in the light
of the real problem which faces the Christian, that is the
distance between the human and the divine, between time
and eternity, and the necessity of appropriating the grace
y of God by which that chasm is bridged.
Serving Social Reaction
Though a modified social radicalism is thus compatible
with the neo-orthodoxy which Earth has created, it is be-
coming increasingly apparent that the emphases of the
new theological conservatism are being exploited in the
interest of political reaction to a greater degree than
in the interest of social liberalism and radicalism.
Various elements in Barthian orthodoxy lend themselves
to this use by political reactionaries, even though, in the
case of Barth, the conception of the transcendence of God
is so absolute that it is impossible to use either religious
dogma or religious emotion for the purpose of supporting
or sanctifying any particular political program, either con-
servative or radical Among his followers this is less true.
Gogarten in particular has developed a political ethic from
the Barthian theology which finally ends in the bog of a
reactionary feudalism.
The first element in the Barthian orthodoxy which can
easily become grist for reaction is its revival of the Lu-
theran theory of the Schoepjungsordnung the "order of
creation." By this, the natural relations of life, family, state,
vocation, and race are designated. It is maintained that
both the rationalistic individualism of the nineteenth and
the rationalistic collectivism of the twentieth century do
violence to these relations which God has ordained. There
is probably some truth in this charge. The Russian attitude
toward the family and the generally critical attitude of
socialism toward the sentiment of nationality may be re-
garded as a too consistently rationalistic attitude toward
natural sentiments and relationships.
1 5 2, ESSAYS IX APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
Finding Social Institutions "God-Given"
Perhaps it is true that the imagination of religion can
deal more adequately with the organic character of life
than a rationalism which reduces organism to mechanism
and reacts against a mechanistic individualism with an
equally insupportable mechanistic collectivism. However,
there is only one step from the religious sanctification of
the order of creation to the religious support of particular
rvpes of social organization which the theologian regards
as "God-given/' Thus Gogarten sets a feudalistic concep-
tion of a social order, which smacks of serfdom, against
rationalistic equalitarianism in the name of a religious con-
ception of vocation (Beruf). The world of nature, it is
argued, is full of inequality and the rationalist is trying to
coerce this world into equality.
The same theory of the order of creation gives a new
support to the idea of statehood, and many a Barthian
epigone is using it to justify the state absolutism which is
setting itself up in Germany. In the same way the anti-
Semitism of the Hitler movement is justified because it is
supposed that the reality of race belongs to aa order of
creation to which rationalists are trying to do violence. It
is interesting to note that the new dualism of Barthian
theology works in paradoxical fashion here. In one mo-
ment the world is a world of sin which cannot be re-
deemed. In the next moment it represents a "God-given"
order which must not be violated.
An Orthodoxy that Breeds Indifference
Thus some of the modern theological reactionaries man-
age to combine all the weaknesses of both religious dualism
and monism, of a too rigorous separation between God and
the world and a too consistent identification of the two.
The National Socialist Lutheran preacher who argued at a
meeting of the German Christians that when the Apostle
Barthianism and the Kingdom 153
Paul declared "in Christianity there is neither Jew nor
Greek" he did not mean that this ideal was to be realized
in a world of sin but that he meant it for a world of the
resurrection, was thus drawing a possible though not a
necessary deduction from the new orthodox emphasis.
Another emphasis in the neo-orthodoxy of Barthianism
which may be appropriated by the reactionaries is its good
Lutheran emphasis upon "justification by faith." Brunner,
in his recent book, Das Gebot und die Ordnungen, derives
some valuable insights from this doctrine. He recognizes,
for instance, that political action cannot be "Christian" in
any exact sense and that the effort to have a Christian so-
cialism or a peculiarly Christian approach to any cultural
or political problem will destroy that unity between Chris-
tian and non-Christian action which is necessary for the
success of any secular enterprise. The idea that the Chris-
tian is "justified" in doing the things which must be done
in an imperfect world enables him to deal realistically with
all current problems and to regard various ascetic and semi-
ascetic withdrawals from the world as "parasitic" efforts to
establish purity at the expense of other people's sins.
But the same doctrine of justification also persuades
Brunner that a judge who administers a bad law should not
worry too much about it since God will justify him in en-
forcing a bad law in an imperfect world. The judge must
not be too anxious about the imperfection of the law,
particularly since it is worth remembering that "any given
law" is better than no law at all. In all this Brunner forgets
completely that no law is a fixed quantity and that judges
are making law constantly by their interpretation of previ-
ous laws. One can be thankful, therefore, that Oliver
Wendell Holmes and Justices Brandeis and Cardozo have
never heard of Brunner's theory of justification by faith.
Complacency to Social Injustice
Perhaps this tendency of Barthianism to sharpen the con-
trast between the human and divine in one minute so that
all the world lies in hopeless sin and in the next -minute
154 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
to "justify" the hopeless world in its imperfections has no
greater dangers than the liberal tendency to find the divine
in every little human virtue. But its dangers seem equally
great. What can be done with this kind of doctrine was
clearly revealed in Germany recently when a group of
Lutheran clergymen suggested that it was impious to hope
for a social order in which wages would be commensurate
with human needs since human sin made such justice im-
possible and since the expectation of it denied "the neces-
sity of Christ's salvation."
Here religious absolutism which begins by making the
conscience sensitive to all human weakness ends in com-
placency toward social injustice. The selfishness of privi-
leged groups who are trying desperately to prevent the
organization of a social order in which all men will have
basic security is confusedly identified with human selfish-
ness in general, and the workers are told that they must
suffer from injustice as punishment for the sins of man-
kind. The harassed unemployed may well express their
scorn for these theological subtleties and insist that they
are at least entitled to a world in which all men suffer
equally from the consequences of human sin.
The new emphasis upon the natural law in Barthianism
as a method of holding the sinful world in check is a
revival of the doctrine of the natural law which has char-
acterized Christian orthodoxy until the rise of modern
liberalism. Liberalism erroneously imagined that the law
of love could be made authoritative for the world of politics
and economics and it thereby merely substituted uncon-
scious compromise for conscious compromise. Perhaps there
is nothing more important in the ethical reorientation of
modern Christianity than a new study of the doctrine of
natural law. Love perfectionism is clearly no specific guide
for the detailed problems which arise in human society.
No society has ever existed without some degree of coer-
cion and it is better to recognize that fact than to obscure
the realities with idealistic phrases which permit privileged
people to benefit from covert coercion while they stand
in abhorrence of the overt resistance of the underprivileged.
Barthianism and the Kingdom 155
Aids of Reaction
On the necessity of coercion, men like B runner and
Gogarten speak with clarity and persuasiveness. But on
the whole the doctrine works out completely to the advan-
tage of political and economic reaction. In Gogarten this
is obviously true. In Brunner the reactionary tendency is
less marked but nevertheless real. First of all, the state
is given a new emphasis. It is the instrument which God
uses to hold a sinful world in check. All the epigones of
Barthianism are using that doctrine to justify the efforts
to establish a state absolutism in Germany under Hitler.
Brunner is more circumspect. But his pessimism about
human society finally drives him into the camp of reaction
in spite of his avowed socialism. He thinks capitalism
ought to be destroyed. But since any political order is bet-
ter than no order at all, and since the state is a "dyke"
against the final consequences of sin, and since any effort
to remodel the dyke might possibly result in an inundation
of the world in sin, it follows that the Christian can coun-
tenance change only if it can be achieved without interrup-
tion (Pausenlos}. Brunner presses that point so strongly
that one does not see how a Christian can possibly coun-
tenance adequate measures of social change, since no
conceivable method can be guaranteed to achieve its goal
without some social dislocations and convulsions.
Conscious or Unconscious Conservatism
Without being unfair to Brunner one must come to the
conclusion that a genuine religious absolutism is uncon-
sciously compounded in his social theory with the fears
which a bourgeois world harbors of the consequences of a
revolution. If we are to have a new theory of natural law
we ought at least to have one which will justify necessary
coercion in favor of a new social order as much as in favor
of the status quo. With the possible exception of Barth
156 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHBISTIANITY
himself, who refuses to permit the premature application
of his theology to any political problems, the other Barthian
thinkers are ' either consciously adjusting themselves to
political reaction (as in the case of Gogarten) or they are
being appropriated for that purpose by their lesser disci-
P As one who bears a few wounds from doing battle
ao-ainst complacent liberalism, I must confess that this ap-
propriation of Barthian thought by reaction almost per-
suades me to return to the liberal camp as a repentant
prodigal. Fortunately there are alternatives which malce it
unnecessary to embrace liberal illusions for the sake of
avoiding orthodox confusions. One must not make the
mistake of ascribing Hitlerisrn to Barthian theology. Earth
himself is one of its most determined foes. But Hilter's
type of reactionary politics, including his anti-Semitism,
finds altogether too much abettance in this new theology
to justify the confident prediction of some European the-
ologians'" that they have found a way of extricating the
Christian church from its too intimate relationship with
capitalistic civilization into which liberal Christianity sup-
posedly enmeshed it. Rather than escaping from this slav-
ery, too many of the alleged emancipators have turned
out to be minions of the oppressor.
MARX, EARTH, AND ISRAELIS
PROPHETS
We hear much today about two types of dialectic think-
ing, dialectic materialism and dialectic theology; about the
secularized religion of which Karl Marx is the author and
the extreme reaction to it associated with the name of
Karl Barth. Both of them are derivatives of a much older
dialectic that of the Hebrew prophets. Marxism is a
secularized version of the prophetic interpretation of his-
Barthianism and the Kingdom 157
tory, and Barthianism is a highly sophisticated version of
the religious thought which insists upon the absolute tran-
scendence of God. In the one case, the prophetic idea of
God as working in history and giving it meaning is reduced
to the idea of a logic in history which works toward the
final establishment of an ideal society not totally dissimilar
from the messianic kingdom of prophetic dreams. In the
other case, it is denied that God works in history; the
world of human history is a chaotic and meaningless thing
until it is illumined by the incarnation; since all human
actions fall short of the perfection of God it is denied that
human actions can in any sense be instruments of God; the
hope of a better world in prophetic eschatology is trans-
muted into a consistent otherworldliness which simply
promises doom for man and all his works, as far as man is
a creature of nature.
In both of these types of dialectic thinking, the true
dialectic of Hebrew prophecy and the Gospels is destroyed.
The significant fact about Hebrew thought is that it neither
lifts God completely above history nor identifies Him with
historical processes. It is, in short, neither pantheistic nor
dualistic, as all Greek thought inclines to be. The God of
Jewish prophecy is a transcendent God. Before Him "the
nations are as a drop of the bucket, as small dust in the
balances it is he that sitteth on the circles of the earth
and the inhabitants are as grasshoppers before him." The
idea of the transcendence of God is perhaps most beauti-
fully and adequately expressed in Isaiah 40.
The Prophet's God
The idea of God's transcendence seems to have been
arrived at in Hebrew thought through ethical insights.
The prophets denied that God was limited to his chosen
people or that he depended upon their pride and success
for his glory. Faith in a completely transcendent God was,
in other words, their victory over polytheism and tribalism.
Since everything in history is partial relative, and imper-
fect, it follows that any God worthy of genuine adoration
158 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
must transcend history. The God of the Hehrew prophets
was transcendent as both the creator and the judge of the
world, as both the ground of all existence and as its goal
and end. Jewish prophecy thus rested upon the idea of
creation (in which God is both distinguished from and
related to the world) and it made religion dynamic by
seeing the will of God not only as the ground of existence
but as its ultimate fulfillment.
For the Hebrew prophets this transcendence of God
never meant that the world of historic existence was mean-
ingless or sinful as such, and that the realm of meaning
and goodness was above the world. The transcendent God
worked in history, and the prophets pointed out how He
worked. Evil and injustice would be destroyed and good
would be established. History was a constant revelation
of both the judgment and the mercy of God. The insistence
of modern ethical naturalism that history is meaningful,
and the whole liberal idea of progress, is an essentially
Hebrew concept revived to counteract the dualism of
Christian orthodoxy.
The Religious Realism of Marx
But at one significant point it failed to achieve the
depths of Hebrew prophecy. Its logic of history was a
simple logic and not a dialectic. It saw history as a realm
of creativity, but not of judgment. In its appreciation of
the fact of judgment and catastrophe in history, Marxism
is undoubtedly closer to the genius of Hebrew prophecy
than liberalism, either secular or religious. The idea of
Marxism that unjust civilizations will destroy themselves
is, in fact, a secularized version of the prophecies of doom
in which the Old Testament abounds.
The Marxians pride themselves upon their scientific
realism by which they claim to have arrived at this knowl-
edge. But such knowledge is the product of religious
rather than scientific realism. It is only because life is
moral and men feel that an unjust civilization ought not to
survive that the scientific evidence can be finally adduced
Barthianism and the Kingdom 159
that it will not survive. But on the other hand, the prophets
were too realistic to share the illusion of modern rational-
ism that men would desist from evil once they had dis-
covered it. They know that evil must sometimes destroy
itself in a terrible catastrophe before men will cease from
their rebellion against God and His laws of justice. This
pessimism is obvious in the words of Isaiah: "Make the
heart of this people fat and their ears heavy and I said,
O Lord how long and He answered until their cities are
wasted and without an inhabitant/* In this pessimistic
analysis of the stubbornness of human egoism and sin
modern radicalism is, again, much closer to the prophets
than most of our modern religion.
The mercies of God, for both the prophets and Jesus,
were also revealed in nature and history and were not, as
in later Christian orthodoxy, revealed purely in super-
natural acts. Jesus pointed to the impartiality of nature,
"which visits with equalest apportionment of ill, both
good and bad alike," as a revelation of God's mercy; and
the prophets pointed to the slowness of historical processes
as an evidence of the longsuffering of God. He destroys
evil but he "is slow to anger and plenteous in mercy."
There is always chance for repentance, though the prophets
realized that men do not usually avail themselves of the
chance.
The prophetic insistence upon the meaningfulness of
human history is a natural consequence of the Jewish
conception of the unity of body and soul. There is no sug-
gestion in Hebrew thought of a good mind and an evil
body, an idea which is the bane of all Greek ethics. Greek
thought may begin with the naturalism of Aristotle but
even in it the highest ethical attitude is the rational con-
templation of pure being, which is a form of rational exist-
ence, transcending the historical world. The dualism of
Plotinus and neo-Platonism is thus implicit in the natural-
ism of Aristotle and invariably works itself out. In this
connection the difference between the love doctrines of the
Stoics and of Jesus is significant. For the Stoics, the per-
fection of love is a rational achievement from which all
emotions of pity have been subtracted. In Jesus, love is
160 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
the achievement of the total psyche. There is in genuine
prophetic ethics no moral distinction between emotion and
reason or between body and mind. For this reason the
Jews never had a doctrine of the immortality of the soul,
but only a hope of resurrection.
Prophetic Rejection of Dualism
It is clear, therefore, that where modern naturalism
protests against the dualism and idealism of Greek thought
and Christian orthodoxy, it is in line with prophetic
thought. It seems to be equally clear that the unqualified
distinction in Barthian thought between the finite and the
infinite is a heresy from the standpoint of prophetic religion
and that, in spite of important distinctions, it really falls
into the errors of neo-Platonic dualism.
On the other hand, the strong insistence in prophetic
thought on the transcendence of God distinguishes it from
all forms of modern naturalism, whether liberal or radical
For it, historic reality is never self-explanatory or self-
sufficient. Both the ground and the goal of historic exist-
ence lie beyond itself. The weightiest ethical consequences
flow from this emphasis. It is never able to make an
unqualified affirmation of the ultimate moral significance
of any movement in history. It cannot, as democratic
idealism did, identify the democratic movement with the
Kingdom of God. Neither can it, as modern radical Chris-
tianity does, identify the Kingdom of God with Socialism.
The Kingdom of God, the final ideal, is always beyond
history. What is in history is always partial to specific
interests and tainted by sin.
A stronger hold on prophetic essentials would have
saved liberal Christianity from committing the error of
identifying bourgeois democracy with the ethics of the
Sermon on the Mount. Religious knowledge often an-
ticipates the knowledge gained by painful experience.
Through many disappointments and disillusionments we
are now discovering to what degree the democratic move-
ment was the instrument of the middle class interests and
Barthianism and the Kingdom 161
perspectives. A genuine prophetic religion would know
that a priori. In the same way modern radical Christians
incline to an identification of the Kingdom of God with
Socialism. Some of them persist in regarding Russia as a
paradise long after it is apparent that, no matter what the
genuine achievements of Russian Communism, the ideal
society is being relativized there by the inertia of history
and the necessities of politics.
The Relativity of History
It is this relative and imperfect character of every his-
torical movement and achievement which persuades the
dialectic theologians to counsel Christians to abstain from
politics as Christians, though of course they recognize the
necessity of acting in an imperfect world. The dialectic
materialist thinks it is possible to affirm the proletarian
movement as an absolute in history. The dialectic theolo-
gian is unable to affirm anything in history as really good.
But the moral defeatism of his perfectionism is as foreign
to prophetic religion as is the utopianism of orthodox
Marxism. In prophetic religion there is a more genuine
dialectic in which the movements of history are in one
moment the instruments of God and in the next come
under His condemnation. Thus Babylon and the king of
the Medes are regarded by the prophets as the instruments
of vengeance in God's hands. But that does not mean that
they are better than others and that they will not be cut
down in time. They pronounce doom upon Babylon as
well as upon Israel. Their attitude toward Israel is perhaps
the perfect illustration of this dialectic. They do^not deny
that Israel has a special mission from God ("You only
have I chosen"). But this same Israel stands under the
judgment of God and must not make pretensions. God's
hands are in the destiny of the Ethiopians, the Syrians, and
the Egyptians as well as in the history of Israel John the
Baptist warns his contemporaries, when he finds them com-
placent in their sense of destiny, that God is able to raise
up children of Abraham from the stones.
l62 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
This interpretation of ancient history has a very direct
relevance to modern social problems. The Dutch and other
Calvinists were not wrong in affirming the democratic
movement as against monarchical reaction. Democracy
was in its day an instrument of God. It was modern liberal
Christianity which was wrong (having lost faith in the
transcendent God) in making an easy moralistic identifica-
tion of democracy and the Kingdom of God, without a reli-
gious reservation. Modern radical Christians are not wrong
in affirming the fateful mission of the victims of injustice in
our present civilization. The prophets and Jesus blessed the
poor, not because they were morally superior as individuals
to the privileged, but because they are by virtue of their
position in society the forces of progress and creativity in it.
Change Comes from Below
The privileged classes of society form an "upper crust/'
This phrase is literally accurate. It is a crust they form. No
matter how good privileged people may be, they will be
inclined to defend their interests and with it the old society
which guarantees and preserves them. The destructive and
constructive force must come from below. Any religion
which, in its perfectionism, wipes out this insight and de-
stroys all criteria for the religious evaluation of political
movements will become, for all of its talk of perfection, an
instrument of the classes which are afraid of social change.
If we live in a society which is unable to establish justice
(as I think we do), it becomes a Christian duty to seek a
just society and to appreciate the fateful mission of those
whose hunger will create that society more than it will be
created by our ideals. That is our duty, even if we know
as Christians that human egoism and collective will-to-
power will reduce the justice actually achieved by every
new society to something less than perfect justice.
A Christian socialism in our day could find an adequate
theology and an adequate political strategy by a return to
the dialectic of prophetic religion. If it fails in that, the
Christian religion will on the one hand become a little con-
Barthianism and the Kingdom 163
venticle of dualists who find human history meaningless
and historic crises irrelevant to the real meaning of human
Life; on the other it will capitulate to a secularized radical-
ism and to naturalistic substitutes for religion. These will
have vigor and social energy and they will undoubtedly
succeed in the long run in establishing a new society. It
will probably be a better society than the one in which we
now live. But it will not be just as it might be if it is estab-
lished by fanatics who have no idea how relative all human
ideals are. Utopianism is the perennial disease of all natu-
ralism. In one moment naturalism protests against God and
in the next it exalts some movement in history into its God.
It is thus not only subject to perpetual disillusionment but
tempted to perennial self -righteousness and to the cruelty
which flows from all self -righteousness.
It is idle to hope that, even at best, a prophetic religion
could completely stem the tides of dualistic otherworldli-
ness on the one hand, and of naturalistic utopianism on the
other. But it is still possible to create and, above all, to
reclaim a prophetic religion which will influence the destiny
of our era and fall into neither defeatism nor into the illu-
sions which ultimately beget despair.
KARL EARTH AND DEMOCRACY
In writing to a theological professor in Prague just before
the European crisis reached its climax, Karl Barth said:
"Has the whole world come under the bewitching power
of this huge serpent? Must the postwar pacifism really end
in such a terrible paralysis of the courage needed for deci-
sions? I still dare to hope that the sons of the old Hussites
will show sloppy Europe that some real men still exist in
this world. Every Czech soldier who will then fight and
suffer will fight and suffer for all of us and I say this
without reserve also for the church of Jesus Christ which
164 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
in the midst of such Hitlers and Mussolinis will either de-
cline into ridicule or will be wiped out."
We find these judgments astonishing, though we agree
with them politically. They are astonishing because they
come from a man who has spent all his energies to prove
that it is impossible to mix relative political judgments with
the unconditioned demands of the gospel. Nothing dis-
credits Earth's major theological emphasis more than his
complete abandonment of his primary thesis in the hour of
crisis. Just as Einstein's two per cent pacifism was discred-
ited when he called for a war against Nazi Germany. We
agree neither with Earth's previous separation of the gospel
from fateful political and historical decisions which we as
men must make, nor yet with his present identification of
the Czech soldier with the liberty of the church of Christ.
Surely Earth ought to be the last man to believe that the
church "will be wiped out" if the Hitlers and Mussolinis
are not defeated. It may be forced into the catacombs, but
the more the ridiculous Caesar-gods rage the more apparent
it will become that Christianity is true and that it is the
ultimate truth. The majesty of God is most perfectly re-
vealed in the moment when the Christ is crucified. The
gates of hell cannot prevail against this church.
But the church against which the gates of hell cannot
prevail is not any particular historical institution. Nor is its
future determined by whether men will save democracy
against Fascism. On the other hand, it is quite true that the
fate of a Christian civilization may well be decided or could
have been decided by Czech soldiers. There is a difference
between a civilization which seeks to build itself on the gos-
pel foundations and one which explicitly defies the gospel.
This difference is tremendous and it is worth fighting for.
Those who believe that Greek culture would have survived
if the Greeks had not defeated the Persians at Salamis have
never been able to present very plausible arguments for
their convictions. A culture lives in a civilization, and a
civilization is a physical thing which can be destroyed and
can be saved. But a culture is nothing more than a rationali-
zation of a civilization if it is not also the fruit of a religion
Barthianism and the Kingdom 165
which is not primarily concerned about the future of
cultures and civilizations.
Here again Barth, the exponent of dialectical theology,
has proved himself to be not sufficiently dialectical. In all
the years before this crisis his "no" to the problem of culture
and civilization was too unreserved, and in the hour of
crisis his "yes" is too unreserved.
KARL BARTH ON POLITICS
We called attention earlier to the fact that Karl Barth
had written a letter to a Czech professor of theology
in which he declared that Czech soldiers would be fighting
for the church of Jesus Christ if they fought against Hitler.
The letter has had interesting repercussions. The Nazi press
has published it widely to prove that Earth's opposition to
it was informed by political animus rather than religious
scruples from the very beginning. More interesting still,
Barth has published a pamphlet on "The Church and the
Political Question of Today" in which he elaborates sys-
tematic conclusions from the position he took in the Czech
crisis.
The pamphlet is important because it really brings to an
end what has been known as Barthianism; for Barthianism
in its pure form declared political questions to be irrele-
vant to the gospel. Barth conceded that Christians must
indeed make choices between political alternatives, and that
his own common sense judgments were on the whole social-
istic, but he did not relate these decisions with the content
of the gospel, which is solely a declaration of the mercy of
God to men who are and remain sinners, whatever side of a
political controversy they may choose.
In this pamphlet Barth declares that Nazi politics must
be opposed from the standpoint of Christian faith for two
reasons. The first reason given by him is not revolutionary
l66 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
from the standpoint of his own thought. The reason is that
Nazi politics is not merely a political program but a reli-
gion and that it promises a salvation which is diametrically
opposed to what Christians believe about man, God, and
the relation between man and God, and to the need which
all sinful men have of the mercy of God in Christ. He com-
pares this Nazi religion with the Mohammedanism against
which Luther admonished the faithful to pray and act. He
declares that he sees no reason why Nazi religion should
be placed in any other category than that of a political
religion like Islam.
The second reason is more revolutionary from the stand-
point of orthodox Protestantism. He declares that Christians
must oppose National Socialism because it is not a "Recht-
staat," that is, a state based upon justice, but that it is
"tyranny qualified by anarchy and anarchy qualified by
tyranny." He thinks it important from the Christian stand-
point to know that this government came into being through
a "gigantic fraud, the fraud of the Reichstag fire," and that
it is not supported by the German people as a whole but
by a "small clique" who conduct "fraudulent elections" to
maintain the semblance of popular support. The tyranny is
attested by the fact that "no one is safe against arbitrary
arrest, arbitrary court procedure, conviction, imprisonment,
cruel mistreatment, death ending by being returned to one's
family as content of a funeral urn." This land of tyranny,
he holds, absolves the Christian of the obligation of obeoli-
ence to the state as enjoined in Romans 13, the fateful
Romans 13 which has had such a decisive influence upon
Continental Christianity and has so frequently given
the state a sacrosanct character beyond any possible justi-
fication. **It is impossible to pray for the preservation of the
government of National Socialism/' he declares, "without
outraging one's Christian confession and making one's
prayer meaningless."
Perhaps the most interesting section of his pamphlet is
devoted to the proposition that this conviction is not merely
a personal opinion of his but that it follows inevitably from
his Christian faith. He holds that he has both the right and
the duty to present this conviction in the community of the
Barthianism and the Kingdom 167
faithful as "not merely a political opinion" but as a "com-
pulsion of his faith in Christ." What then shall those do
who do not agree with him? Since we are not Catholics,
but Protestants, he asserts, we have no business to wait
upon some official utterance of the church. It is our busi-
ness to testify to our moral convictions in the light of our
faith. Let those who disagree with us also bear testimony
in the light of their Christian faith. Let them prove in the
light of the Scriptures that they have a right to say "yes"
to National Socialism and "no" against our unequivocal
"no." We will leave the ultimate issue to the work of the
Holy Spirit in the church.
These are exactly the principles for which we as Chris-
tian Socialists have stood, though of course we would ex-
tend the range of political judgments beyond those envis-
aged by Earth. We have insisted that we have no right to
declare that only socialistic political convictions are com-
patible with Christian faith but that we have both the right
and the duty to insist that they are binding upon us and
that they are organically related to our Christian faith; and
that we have the right and the duty to challenge those who
do not agree with us to validate their political convictions
in the light of their faith. The church must not be a mere
forum of diverse political opinions. It is important that
those who speak from within the church should speak in
terms of their faith. It is also important that our convic-
tions should not be bound by any official position of the
church, but that they should be bound by a common faith.
If Barth had arrived at his present convictions ten years
earlier the history of central Europe might be different,
considering how powerful his influence was in accentuating
those tendencies of Lutheranism which make it politically
neutral. The one weakness of his pamphlet is that he does
not admit that he has changed his basic position. He ad-
mits only that the pressure of the years has changed his
emphasis. This is a little too much like the Communist
strategy which never admits obvious changes in the party
line. In spite of this weakness, however, Earth's new stand-
point may have far-reaching significance in the religious
life of Europe, assuming that he still retains the degree of
l68 ESSAYS IN APPJLIE0 CHRISTIANITY
influence on the continent which once was his. It may for
instance have immediate political significance in Switzer-
land, where the problem of Fascism is a very pressing one.
It is significant that the ministry of education in Berlin
immediately answered Barth's broadside against Nazism by
a decree, stipulating that no German student shall be al-
lowed credit for any work done at the University of Basle,
as long as the university continues to retain Barth as
professor.
WE ARE MEN AND NOT GOD
Beyond the traditional differences between confessions at
Amsterdam the most marked theological contrast, apparent
at the first Assembly of the World Council, was between
what was frequently described as the "Continental theol-
ogy" and what was with equal inaccuracy known as the
"Anglo-Saxon approach to theology." Both designations
were inaccurate because many Continentals did not share
the first approach, and the second was "Anglo-Saxon" only
in the sense that beyond all denominational distinctions in
the Anglo-Saxon world, delegates from that world seemed
united in their rejection of the Continental position.
Issues Raised by Barth
This position might best be defined as strongly eschato-
logical. This does not mean that it placed its emphasis
primarily upon the hope of the culmination of world his-
tory in the second coming of Christ, the final judgment,
and the general resurrection. If the position is termed
eschatological it must be regarded as a form of "realized
eschatology." Let Karl Barth's words explain the emphasis,
since he was the most persuasive spokesman of the position.
Barthianism and the Kingdom 169
The assurance, declared Earth, that "Jesus Christ has al-
ready robbed sin, death, the devil and hell of their power
and has already vindicated divine and human justice in his
person" ought to persuade us "even on this first day of our
deliberations that the care of the church and the' care of
the world is not our care. Burdened with this thought we
could straighten nothing out/* For the final root of human
disorder is precisely "this dreadful, godless, ridiculous opin-
ion that man is the Atlas who is destined to bear the dome
of heaven upon his shoulders."
No Christian would quarrel with the affirmation that the
church finds the true and the new beginning of life and
history in the revelatory and redemptive power of our
Lord's life, death, and resurrection. The questions which
arose at Amsterdam were about the conclusions which were
drawn from this article of faith. Did not these conclusions
tend to rob the Christian life of its sense of responsibility?
Did they not promise a victory for the Christian without
a proper emphasis upon repentance? And did they not
deal in an irresponsible manner with all the trials and
perplexities, the judgments and discriminations, the tasks
and duties which Christians face in the daily round of their
individual and collective life?
The Testimony of St. Paul
The first conclusion which Earth drew from the Chris-
tian certainty that Christ has already gained the victory
over sin and death was that "the care of the church is not
our care." We must rather commit the church unto the
Lord "who will bring it to pass." He has called us to be
his witnesses but not to be "his lawyers, engineers, statis-
ticians, and administrative directors."
One is a little puzzled about this complete rejection of
differentiated functions, since the precise point of St. Paul's
classical chapter on the church as the body of Christ in I
Cor. 12 is that there are not only "diversities of gifts" but
also "differences of administration" and "diversities of oper-
ation" within the church. And St. Paul does have a "care"
1/0 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
about the church, which is very relevant to our present
ecumenical task. His care is lest diversities of gifts and dif-
ferences of administration ternpt "the eye to say to the ear,
I have no need of thee." In other words, he is afraid that
special gifts and functions within the church may become
the occasion of the isolation of one member from another,
rather than the basis for their mutual growth in grace. It
is in this way that sin enters the church and divides it. If
these divisions are to be overcome, must there not be a
contrite recognition of the sinful pride in our special gift
or function by which we have become divided?
What is that but "care" about the church? It is the basis
of the "dying with Christ" without which, according to the
Scripture, there can be no new and triumphant life with
him. The real weakness of this unvarying emphasis upon
what we cannot do and upon what Christ has already done
is that it tempts the Christian to share the victory and the
glow of the risen Lord without participating in the cruci-
fixion of the self, which is the Scriptural presupposition
of a new life, for the individual, the church and the nation.
Decrying the Prophetic Function
We are warned with equal emphasis that the "care of
the world is not our care." We are to beware lest we seem
to present a kind of "Christian Marshall plan" to the na-
tions. This is a wholesome warning against the pat schemes
of Christian moralists. But does it not annul the church's
prophetic function to the nations? Must not the church be
busy in "the pulling down of strongholds, casting down
imaginations and every thing that exalteth itself against
the knowledge of God and bringing into captivity every
thought to the obedience of Christ"?
In such a day as this we are particularly confronted with
the fact that nations and empires, proud oligarchies and
vainglorious races have been "wounded" by the divine
wrath in the vicissitudes of history and "have not received
correction." It is a sobering fact that judgment so fre-
quently leads to despair rather than to repentance. It is
Barthianism and the Kingdom 171
not within the competence of the Christian church to change
despair into repentance. That possibility is a mystery of
divine grace. But it does belong to the "care" of the church
for the world that it so interpret the judgments under which
nations stand, and so disclose their divine origin, that there
is a possibility of repentance.
If the gospel is made to mean merely the assurance of
God's final triumph over all human rebellion, it may indeed
save men from anxious worries. But does it not also save
them prematurely from their own perplexities? It prevents
them from indulging in the vainglorious belief that they
can create the Kingdom of God by their own virtue. But
does it remind them that they are "workers together with
Him"? Is this not, in short, a very "undialectical" gospel in
which the "Yes" of the divine mercy has completely can-
celed out the "No" of the divine judgment against all
human pride and pretension?
What Help for Christians?
The second question one is forced to raise about this
emphasis is whether it has any guidance or inspiration for
Christians in the day-to-day decisions which are the very
woof and warp of our existence. Barth insists that we have
no "systems of economic and political principles to offer the
world." We can present it only "with a revolutionary hope."
This emphasis has its limited validity. Christianity is too
simply equated by many with some simple system of
"Christian economics" or "Christian sociology." But Barth's
teachings seem to mean that we can, as Christians, dispense
with the principles of justice which, however faulty, repre-
sent the cumulative experience of the race in dealing with
the vexing problems of man's relations to his fellows.
We ought indeed to have a greater degree of freedom
from all traditions, even the most hallowed, as we seek to
establish and re-establish community in our torn world.
But freedom over law cannot mean emancipation from the
tortuous and difficult task of achieving a tolerable justice.
It is certainly not right for Christians to leave it to the
1/2 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
"pagans" of our day to walk the tightrope of our age, which
is strung over the abyss of war and tyranny, seeking by
patience and courage to prevent war on the one hand and
the spread of tyranny on the other, while the Christians
rejoice in a "revolutionary hope" in which all these anxi-
eties of human existence, and the particular anxieties of our
age, are overcome proleptically. It is particularly wrong if
we suggest to these pagans that we have no immediate
counsel in the present perplexity but that we will furnish
a "sign" of the "coming Kingdom" by some heroic defiance
of malignant power, if the situation becomes desperate
enough. We will not counsel any community that this or
that course might lead to tyranny. We will merely prepare
ourselves to defy tyranny when it is full blown.
"Crisis" Theology Gone to Seed
Here there are suggestions of a "crisis" theology, but not
in the connotation originally intended. It is only fair to
Earth and to those for whom he speaks to acknowledge
gratefully the great contributions which this theology made
to the struggle against tyranny in recent decades. Its inter-
pretation of the Christian faith helped to create a heroic
heedlessness, a disposition to follow the Scriptural injunc-
tion, "Be careful in nothing." This resulted in a very power-
ful witness to Christ in the hour of crisis. But perhaps this
theology is constructed too much for the great crises of
history. It seems to have no guidance for a Christian states-
man for our day. It can fight the devil if he shows both
horns and both cloven feet. But it refuses to make dis-
criminating judgments about good and evil if the evil shows
only one horn or the half of a cloven foot.
There is a special pathos in the fact that so many of the
Christian leaders of Germany are inclined to follow this
form of flight from daily responsibilities and decisions, be-
cause they are trying to extend the virtue of yesterday to
cover the problems of today. Yesterday they discovered
that the church may be an ark in which to survive a flood.
Today they seem so enamored of this special function of
Barthianism and the Kingdom 173
the church that they have decided to turn the ark into a
home on Mount Ararat and live in it perpetually.
Earth is as anxious to disavow any special responsibilities
in our debate with a secular culture on the edge of despair
as in our engagement with a civilization on the edge of
disaster. We are not to worry about this "godless" age.
It is no more godless than any other age, just as the evil in
our day is neither more nor less than that of any previous
period. We seem always to be God rather than men in this
theology, viewing the world not from the standpoint of the
special perplexities and problems of given periods but sub
specie aeternitatis*
Have We Nothing to Bay?
In any event, says Earth, we are not to enter into debate
with the secularism of our age. With a special dig at his
old opponent Erunner, who had analyzed the "axioms'* of
secularism to prove that they were filled with idolatry,
Earth warned that we had nothing special to say to the god-
less people of our age which we would not have said in
any age. What we have to say to them is that "Jesus Christ
died and rose again for them and has become their divine
brother and redeemer."
Does this mean that St. Paul had no right to analyze the
meaning of the yearning of his day for the "unknown God"*
and prove its relevance for the gospel? -When Julian Hux-
ley, for instance, writes a book, Man in the Modern World,
in which he manages to distil every error of modern man
about himself and his destiny, his virtue and his wisdom,
is the Christian apologist to refrain from every apologetic
assault upon some of the absurdities of these modern be-
liefs? Is he merely to assure Mr. Huxley that Christ died
for him, even though Mr. Huxley could not, in his present
state of belief possibly understand why anyone should need
to die for us?
One sees that the church is as rigorously prohibited from
turning a furrow in the field of culture as in the field of
social relations. Let the church remain an ark, ready to
174 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
receive those who are fleeing the next flood. If meanwhile
weeds should grow in the garden of either culture or civi-
lization that is not surprising, since the church knows
a priori that weeds grow in every human garden.
With the fullest appreciation of what this theology did
to puncture the illusions of churchmen, theologians, and
moralists, one must insist that this is not the whole gospel.
It warned the church rightly that it must bear witness, not
to its own power but to the power of God, not to its capac-
ity to build the Kingdom but to the Kingdom which has
been established by divine grace.
But the Christian faith, which can easily degenerate into
a too simple moralism, may also degenerate into a too sim-
ple determinism and irresponsibility when the divine grace
is regarded as a way of escape from, rather than a source
of engagement with, the anxieties, perplexities, sins, and
pretensions of human existence. The certainty of the final
inadequacy of the "wisdom of the world" must not be al-
lowed to become the source of cultural obscurantism. The
Christian must explore every promise and every limit of the
cultural enterprise. The certainty of the final inadequacy
of everv form of human justice must not lead to defeatism
in our approach to the perplexing problems of social justice
in our day. The possibilities as well as the limits of every
scheme of justice must be explored. The certainty that
every form of human virtue is inadequate in the sight of
God must not tempt us to hide our talent in the ground.
One of the tasks of an ecumenical movement is to pre-
vent a one-sided statement o the many-sided truth of the
gospel. "Narrow is the way which leadeth unto life." There
is an abyss on each side of that narrow way. Anyone who
is too fearful of the abyss on the one side will fall into the
abyss on the other side. We "Anglo-Saxons" who object to
this one-sided emphasis may be corrupted by many Pela-
gian and semi-Pelagian heresies. We stand in need of
correction. But we also have the duty to correct.
We are embarrassed about our correction because we
cannot deny that this "Continental" theology outlines the
final pinnacle of the Christian faith and hope with fidelity
to the Scriptures. Yet it requires correction, because it has
Barthianism and the Kingdom 175
obscured the foothills where human life must be lived. It
started its theological assault decades ago with the re-
minder that we are men and not God, and that God is in
the heavens and that we are on earth. The wheel is come
full circle. It is now in danger of offering a crown without
a cross, a triumph without a battle, a scheme of justice
without the necessity of discrimination, a faith which has
annulled rather than transmuted perplexity in short, a too
simple and premature escape from the trials and perplexi-
ties, the duties and tragic choices, which are the condition
of our common humanity. The Christian faith knows of a
way through these sorrows, but not of a way around them.
AN ANSWER TO KARL EARTH
Karl Earth's Lrenic reply to rny criticisms of his Amsterdam
address must naturally elicit an answer in land. He rightly
suspects that it is difficult to avoid presenting the opponent
in caricature. I hasten to confess that at one point my argu-
ment was subject to a misinterpretation. I suggested that
the emphasis of his Amsterdam address might encourage
certain tendencies in the German church to regard the
church as a perpetual ark and make a home in it on 'Mount
Ararat. I certainly did not tax Barth himself with such a
tendency, for as he rightly insists he bore eloquent testi-
mony against religious irresponsibility, particularly during
the war years. He may be sure that the so-called Anglo-
Saxon world is not unconscious or unappreciative of his
creative relationship to the resistance movements of Europe,
176 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHBJSTIANITY
Not Always in Crisis
In the light of this relationship it may seem completely
unjustified to suggest that the temper of Earth's address at
Amsterdam tends to support an attitude of irresponsibility
toward the immediate and pressing decisions which Chris-
tians must make from day to day. It could be proved,
nevertheless, that a theology which illumines the pinnacles
of the Christian faith and nerves men to heroic action in
a day of obvious crisis may yet be less than adequate in
guiding their conscience in the prosaic tasks of every day.
After all, Earth's disciples were inclined, before Nazism
was revealed in its full demonic dimensions, to see little
difference between it and other forms of political evil. In
like manner Barth seems inclined today to regard the dif-
ferences between Communism and the so-called democratic
world as insignificant when viewed from the ultimate Chris-
tian standpoint. But we are men and not God, and the
destiny of civilizations depends upon our decisions in the
"nicely calculated less and more" of good and evil in
political institutions.
Attitude toward Bible
Barth thinks that the real difference between the thought
which he represents and the Anglo-Saxon world lies not at
the point where I placed the main emphasis but at a point
of minor emphasis in my criticism, namely, in our contrast-
ing attitudes toward the Bible. He thinks that the Anglo-
Saxon world does not take the authority of the Bible seri-
ously enough, spinning its theologies and theories without
reference to Biblical texts and their context. We, on the
other hand, charge the Continent with Biblical literalism.
Perhaps it would be profitable therefore to waive debate on
the first issue and survey this second one.
In doing so we must begin by admitting that it would
be foolish to speak of a single "Anglo-Saxon" or a single
Barthianism and the Kingdom 177
"Continental" attitude toward the Bible. Both regions are
naturally filled with various contrasting and contradictory
tendencies. It is nevertheless true that, very broadly con-
sidered, there is a difference between them in attitude to-
ward the Bible. Continental thought, particularly as influ-
enced by Barth, seeks to establish Biblical authority over
the mind and conscience of the Christian with as little
recourse as possible to any norms of truth or right which
may come to us out of the broad sweep of a classical,
European, or modern cultural history. In Anglo-Saxon
thought there is a greater degree of commerce between
culture in general and Biblical faith.
It might be well to begin by admitting the errors to
which we are led by this procedure on the Anglo-Saxon
side. For these errors are obvious not only in what Europe
knows as American liberalism; they are obvious, though
expressed in a different way, in the characteristic Anglican
thought of Britain. There is no doubt a great deal of preach-
ing in the Anglo-Saxon world in which Biblical faith is
corrupted and supplanted by the current credos of our cul-
ture. Sometimes Biblical faith is identified with bourgeois
individualism, and the message of the Bible is reduced to
the concept of the "infinite worth of the individual" or to
confidence in the value of a "free society/' Recently an ap-
preciative layman sent me a sermon by his pastor which
was in his opinion better than the pronouncements of the
World Council at Amsterdam. The pastor declared that
the struggle of our age was between Christianity, which
believed that "the state must serve the individual," and
Communism, which believed that "the individual must
serve the state."
How Protect Purity of Gospel?
There is obviously no engagement between the Holy
God and sinful men in such expositions of Scripture. There
is neither need nor knowledge of a divine judgment or
mercy. One is reminded of Thoreau upon his deathbed
who, when asked whether he had "made his peace with
1/8 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
God," declared that there had never been any alienation
between himself and God. One cannot deny that much of
what passes for Christianity in the Western world is no
more than a simple confidence that God is our ally in our
fight with Communism even as he was our ally in our fight
with Nazism. And isn't it nice that God is always on our
side! Let us not forget to pay tribute to Earth's influence
in the Anglo-Saxon world in extricating the Christian faith
from the idolatries of our day.
In performing this work of reformation Earth believes,
however, that it is necessary to protect the purity of the
gospel by destroying every possible commerce or debate
between the Christian faith and the philosophical and ethi-
cal disciplines. One must not enter into a debate with mod-
ern culture to prove that its analysis of the plight of man is
mistaken and that its proffered redemptions are illusory;
one must preach the gospel and wait for the Holy Spirit
to validate it. Neither must one relate the ethical demands
of the gospel to any ethical insights which may have come
to mankind in classical or modern currents of thought. One
may champion justice in the political order provided one
does not appeal to "natural law" and is careful to find war-
rant for one's conception of justice in the Scripture. One
may even have to torture Biblical texts in order to arrive
at a preference for a democratic society without making
any appeal to non-Biblical sources of insight.
If this procedure meant that one regarded, as Luther
did, the mind of Christ as the final criterion of Scripture
as well as the final norm of law one would have a creative
freedom over all kw, including the positive law of states,
the "natural law" so dear to Catholic thought, and even
Scriptural laws as concocted by Protestant literalism from
various ethical injunctions embodied in the canon and rep-
resenting various levels in relation to the law of love. But
it does not seem to mean this.
Barthianism and the Kingdom 179
What is "Time-Bound"?
Earth accuses us for instance of regarding the Pauline
word, "In Christ there is neither male nor female" (Gal.
3:28), as more authoritative than such texts as: "For the
man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.
Neither was the man created for the woman; but the
woman for the man" (I Cor. 11:8-9); or "Wives, submit
yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For
the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the
head of the church" (Eph. 5:22-23).
I am informed that Earth dismissed the authority of the
Pauline injunction that women must not pray in church
with their head uncovered. He regarded that injunction as
"time-bound." But as far as I know he did not give a cri-
terion for determining what is time-bound and what is time-
less in these Scriptural injunctions. I should certainly re-
gard St. Paul's absolute subordination of woman to man as
more obviously time-bound than the word, "In Christ there
is neither male nor female." It may have been influenced
by the second creation story, according to which God fash-
ioned Eve from Adam's rib. It is certainly colored also by
the traditional standards regulating the relation between
men and women in every pretechnical culture.
Or does the modern Continental conception of Biblical
authority exclude the possibility that echoes and accents
of the culture of an age appear in the Scripture? If this is
excluded, Biblical authority may indeed emancipate us
from the prejudices of our own age, but at the price of bind-
ing us to the prejudices of bygone ages. Furthermore, the
Bible may thus become the instnnnent of, rather than the
source of judgment upon, the sinful pretensions of men
in this case of the sinful pretensions of the male toward the
female. Some of us remember very well how the very texts
which we are asked to take as seriously as the word, "In
Christ there is neither male nor female," were used by
Biblical literalists to prove that women did not have the
right of suffrage in the state.
l8o ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
The Jewish Question
Earth uses one other example of Anglo-Saxon indifference
toward the Scripture. He thinks we try to solve the Jewish
question without having recourse to the wisdom of Romans
9-11, where St. Paul yearns over his own people and hopes
"that they might be saved." He does not say just what light
these chapters shed on some of the vexatious issues of our
day. Among Biblical literalists I know there is a division of
opinion between those who support Zionism on the ground
that the Jewish state will hasten the culrnination of the
whole of human history and those who oppose it as a
nationalistic corruption of the messianic hope.
Earth himself has rendered a great service to the Lu-
theran world in recent decades by extricating the Lutheran
conscience from the grip of another Pauline text Romans
13: i : "Let every soul be subject to the higher powers . . .
the powers that be are ordained of God." No one can deny
that this single text without reference to the "consensus"
of Scripture, and therefore without the reservation of the
many Scriptural judgments upon the pretensions and cor-
ruptions of political authority, induces an uncritical rever-
ence toward political authority. Fortunately later Calvinism
softened the authority of this single text, a service which
was not performed in German Lutheranism early enough
to prevent the misuse of the text for generations.
There are in short very good reasons for preferring some
texts of Scripture to others and for judging them all from
the standpoint of "the mind of Christ." We do that at our
hazard of course; but the hazards of Biblical literalism are
certainly greater.
Cultural Facts Affect Insights
Sometimes the rigorous distinction between Scriptural
and other moral insights leads to a roundabout discovery of
certain moral insights in Scripture, without due acknowl-
Earthianism and the Kingdom 181
edgment of what the culture of the age has contributed to
the insight. Thus Earth in the volume of his Dogmatik
devoted to the Biblical concept of creation writes pages
upon pages of very excellent exegetical commentary on the
simple word of Genesis, "Male and female created he
them/' This commentary has made Earth the champion of
women's rights within the church on the Continent, though
he seemed at Amsterdam at times to deny the women in
the name of St. Paul what he granted them in the name
of Moses. But the simple word from Genesis was the
weapon with which he triumped over the priestly minds
who insisted that only a man could be a priest in the church
for the reason that only a man could represent a male
Christ.
I would not wish to deny that all that Earth has found
in this simple word of Genesis is actually implied there.
I think it is implied. But it is also true that the Christian
ages did not find it there for centuries. Why not? Perhaps
there is a kind of enmity "between the priest and the
woman/' vividly displayed in the "Code of Manu" but
operative in all religion, though overcome in the Christian
faith whenever the "love of Christ" operates to challenge
every social convention and tradition which encourages
pride rather than mutual respect between persons.
But the Christian church is a religious community, sub-
ject to certain characteristically religious aberrations which
stand in contradiction to the mind of Christ. The enmity
of the priest toward the woman is one of them. If this
theory seems speculative, the fact is certainly not specula-
tive that it was a secular age which granted women fuller
recognition as persons, and that even now the religious
communities lag behind the civil communities on this
standard of ethics.
When, therefore, we expound the word of Genesis, ""Male
and female created he them/' it behooves us not to take
a prestidigitator's delight in pulling rabbits out of a hat
which every previous exegete regarded as merely a hat. We
ought rather to admit contritely that we understand the
full implication of the Scriptural word that God created
both man and woman in his design of the human person
ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
because we are the heirs of a spiritual history which in-
cludes a secular revolt against religion. We shall continue
to reject the exaggerated forms of feminism which a highly
rationalistic culture breeds, even as we shall continue to
bear witness against all illusions and idolatries of a secular
age. Yet we will admit that God "is able of these very stones
to raise up children unto Abraham." It is not the first nor
the last time that a facet of the full truth in Christ has been
clarified and restored by heresy after being obscured by
orthodoxy. There are certain insights about the political
order which come to us in the same way from modern sec-
ularism, despite its libertarian or equalitarian illusions.
The illustration of the attitude of the church toward
women has been chosen as an example of contrasting atti-
tudes toward Biblical authority in the Anglo-Saxon and in
the Continental world, not only because Earth chose some
of his examples from this realm but also because his dis-
cussions on the subject at Amsterdam illustrated so nicely
both the power and limitations of his method.
No one has the right to speak for the "Anglo-Saxon" or
any other portion of the Protestant world. Yet it is, I hope,
not too presumptuous to say that there are many in the
Anglo-Saxon world whose gratitude for Earth's profound
interpretations of our Biblical faith will yet not beguile
them into accepting his method of preserving the purity of
that faith from corruption. They believe that it easily leads
to two errors. One is the introduction of irrelevant detailed
standards of the good, when the Christian life requires a
great deal of freedom from every kind of law and tradition,
including the kind which is woven together from proof-
texts. The other is that it fails to provide sufficient criteria
of judgment and impulses to decisive action in moments of
life when a historic evil, not yet full-blown and not yet
requiring some heroic witness, sneaks into the world upon
the back of some unobtrusive error which when fully
conceived may produce a monstrous evil.
Barthianism and the Kingdom 183
WHY IS EARTH SILENT
ON HUNGARY?
The whole world has been thrilled by the spontaneity and
the stubbornness of the Hungarian rebellion against Rus-
sian despotism. As George Kennan and Bedell Smith pre-
dicted, the monolithic structure of Communist tyranny
cracked first in the satellite nations, where patriotism united
with love of freedom to offer resistance; and Poland and
Hungary were the first to offer resistance. We need not now
go into the details of the difference between the Poles, who
were able to contain their revolution within peaceful Tito-
ist limits, and the Hungarians, who were so outraged by
the Russian guns turned on peaceful demonstrators that
their hatred of the oppressor knew no bounds. They sought
absolute freedom from Russia; and their revolution was
suppressed in a bloodbath which has destroyed perma-
nently whatever prestige still adhered to the Communist
ideology in Eastern Europe and among the intellectuals and
neutralist theologians of the Continent. It is enough to re-
cord that the regime in Hungary, which seemed to have
the uneasy acceptance of the people, was proved by recent
events to have been so oppressive that it piled up resent-
ments, resulting in a heroic defiance which astonished and
thrilled, as well as saddened, the whole world.
Our purpose is to analyze the record of Europe's most
famous and imaginative theologian, Karl Earth, in relation
to recent Hungarian history. Nothing in that record can
dim the theological achievements of this man, who was the
184 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
chief instigator of the neoReformation theology, which
challenged the liberalism in religious and secular society
that had reigned in Western culture in the nineteenth cen-
tury and was finally destroyed by the historical realities
culminating in the First World War,
Nor can Earth's record on Hungary change the glory of
his relation to the resistance movements in the Nazi period,
though it is now obvious that that resistance was dictated
by personal experiences with tyranny and not by the frame
of his theology, which was, before Hitler as now, too
"eschatological" and too transcendent to offer any guidance
for the discriminating choices that political responsibility
challenges us to. Barth was the theologian of the anti-Nazi
resistance in the whole of Europe. In his famous letter to
Hromadka (who is ironically involved with him now in the
toils of neutralism), he went so far as to say that a Czech
soldier fighting the Germans would be serving Christ. His
partisanship was probably too extreme, as his neutralism
now is too undiscriminating. But let past history stand.
Karl Barth will of course be properly scornful of any at-
tempt to judge his theology by its political fruits; he would
have it judged by its adequacy in interpreting "the Word
of God." But let us be Scriptural and follow the axiom,
"By their fruits shall ye know them/* remembering that
political justice and wisdom must be one of the fruits by
which any system of thought is to be judged.
What has all this to do with Hungary and its revolution?
The link is established by Bartr/s intimate connection with
the Reformed Church of Hungary and by the confusing
advice he offered it. Barth was, in fact, a kind of unofficial
pope of the Hungarian Reformed Church. When the church
adopted a new constitution it submitted the articles to
Barth for approval. When the Communist government dis-
missed Bishop Ravasz and suggested the election of Bishop
Bereczky, the church leaders asked Barth whether it was
correct to elect a bishop favored by the government. Barth
answered that the favor or disfavor of the government
should be irrelevant to the church if the opinions of the
bishop were theologically correct. Bereczky was in fact a
Barthianism and the Kingdom 185
devout, theologically correct, and timid man. So he was
acceptable to both Earth and the Communist government,
and so he was elected. That government, it should be re-
called, was headed by the notorious Rakosi, who had con-
trived the execution of the other leader, Rajk. Both men
were implicated in "Titoism" a crime in Stalin's eyes
and Rakosi saved himself by sacrificing his partner. Rakosi
was dismissed just before the revolution in the vain effort
to appease the wrath of the Hungarian people.
Another bishop was appointed John Peter, who was
certainly not "theologically correct" because he has since
confessed that he was a Party member; but it is not re-
corded that Earth gave him the imprimatur. Peter did
represent the church at Evanston, though the state depart-
ment kept him under surveillance, knowing his now con-
fessed record, as the church leaders did not. Needless to
say, Bishop Peter gave Evanston some very pious accounts
of the church in Hungary; and, also needless to say, he
confused some church leaders outside Hungary. But he did
not confuse the faithful pastors and people of the Hun-
garian churches. Many of these have since perished in the
revolution and thousands of them have fled their fatherland.
Earth had a rather triumphant tour in Hungary, and all
his thoughts about the issues of church and state in a
tyranny are faithfully recorded in his collection of occa-
sional writings entitled Against the Stream ( 1954) . A Hun-
garian Christian asked him, for instance, whether it was
right for a Christian to co-operate with a Communist gov-
ernment. Earth answered: "We shall never see a state
either in its pure form as an ordinance of God or in its
complete diabolical perversion. These are the two frontiers
between which history moves/* Thus the possibility of a
diabolical government's appearing in history was excluded
in principle. This did not change the fact that the Hungar-
ians had direct experience of the demonic in their own
government.
If one inquires why a man of so wise and robust a mind
as Karl Earth should have come to such false conclusions
in a specific historical case, and why he should have been
l86 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
so sure of himself that he did not inquire of the Hungarian
Christians instead of lecturing to them, one must look for
the answer in the confidently held theological frame of
reference, and also in the lower political frame of reference.
One must inquire about the latter as well as the former,
for even a theologian who thinks he can solve everything
by drawing on the wisdom of the "Word of God" is a man
who makes his decisions about proximate ends according
to his political presuppositions.
II
Karl Barth's theological framework is defective for wise
political decisions for two reasons. The first is that he is
too consistently "eschatological" for the "nicely calculated
less and more" which must go into political decisions. In
his essay "The Christian Community and Political Change"
he declares: "The goal toward which we are moving is the
second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The message of
the church is a message of hope for everyone. Alternations
in political systems must stand in the light of this great
change, which is called Jesus Christ. It would be curious if
the church, which knows of this one great change, could
not accept with a certain calm certain smaller changes."
The "certain smaller changes" which are to be accepted
with calm are, for instance, the change from comparative
political freedom to despotism. Not being a theologian, I
can only observe that if one reaches a very high altitude,
in either an eschatological or a real airplane, all the dis-
tinctions which seem momentous on the "earthly" level are
dwarfed into insignificance. Since Barth had much to do
with the eschatological theme of the World Council of
Churches* Evanston assembly, one wonders whether his
presence at Evanston would have changed the atmosphere
and made the eschatology more relevant to the unimagina-
tive and common-sense "Anglo-Saxon" mind.
The second defect in Earth's theological approach to po-
litical and moral problems is his extreme pragmatism, which
disavows all moral principles. In answering Emil Brunner's
Barthianism and the Kingdom 187
question, "Why do you not oppose totalitarianism now, as
you did then (in the Nazi period)?" Earth declared: "The
church must concern itself with political systems, not in
terms of principles but as seen in the light of the Word of
God. ... It must reject every effort to systematize political
history and must look at every event afresh." Without the
guidance of principles and looking at every event afresh in
the light of the Word of God, Earth comes to the capricious
conclusion that Communism is not as bad as Nazism be-
cause it is not anti-Semitic. "It is a question," declared
Earth, "whether it was the totalitarianism, or the barbarism,
nihilism, and anti-Semitism, which was the chief sin of
Nazism." A little concern for "principles" would have in-
structed Earth that some of the barbarism of Nazism was
derived from the same monopoly of irresponsible power
from which the barbarism of Communism is derived. Look-
ing at every event afresh means that one is ignorant about
the instructive, though inexact, analogies of history which
the "godless" scientists point out for our benefit.
A Catholic theologian has defined the Barthian approach
to the political order as "designed for the church of the
catacombs." The description is accurate: Earth's view
makes no provision for discriminating judgments, both be-
cause of its strong eschatological emphasis and because of
the absence of principles and structures of value.
"The Christian church/* Earth writes, "is independent
of all political changes, inasmuch as it is grounded in the
Word of God and committed solely to his word. It can
therefore see ancient and modern political systems as noth-
ing but halting and restricted human efforts, the furthering
or opposing of which it must not confuse with its proper
mission/* This advice would be more palatable if Earth
were not so interested in passing political judgments while
he constructs a theology which disavows political responsi-
bility in principle. He has a framwork for these political
judgments, which can be discerned below the level of his
theological framework.
An unkind critic might suggest that the framework of an
arrested nineteenth century Marxism, by which he judges
between "capitalistic" and "socialistic" nations; a kind of
l8S ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
Marxism that, despite Earth's theological avoidance of
"systems," is not sufficiently alert to the fresh constellations
of history to realize that the capitalism of the West may
have corrupted, but did not destroy, democracy, while the
"socialism" of Communism did produce absolute despotism.
But this criticism would not be fair, because Barth is no
Christian Marxist. He disavows the Marxist creed reso-
lutely, as does his fellow-traveling Czech disciple, Hrom-
adka. The Marxist creed is in his subconscious but not in
his conscious approach to things.
Thus in reporting on his trip to Hungary Barth wrote:
I did not find a single outright believer in the new sys-
tem in Hungary. . . . Enthusiasm for the Red Dean
(Hewlett Johnson of Canterbury), who visited Hungary
before my visit, aroused astonishment among the Re-
formed Christians. . . .But the Reformed church also
resisted the opposite temptation of Rome that of enter-
ing opposition as a matter of principle. I met no responsi-
ble Reformed Christian who thought that one ought to
talce the line of political resistance as a matter of political
principle.
In fairness to Barth it must be said that, while he obvi-
ously did not meet in Hungary the kind of Reformed
Christians who not only resisted as a matter of principle
but suffered heroically in doing so, his approach to things
has been more creative in East Germany, where political
resistance is absolutely impossible because of the weight
of Russian military upon that Soviet outpost. There Barth's
eschatological emphasis has inspired a land of religious
resistance which has permitted the East German Christians
to bear witness to their faith and to assert their dignity as
men, without raising false hopes and fears in the political
realm.
Barthianism and the Kingdom 189
III
Some of the political framework of Earth's judgments
is furnished by his ill-disguised anti-Americanism and by
what he regards as our "worship of the dollar." Some of it
is given by his belief that the struggle is not between
Communism and democracy but between Slav and Ger-
man. In his lecture on the "Church between East and
West" he declared: "Russia signifies not only Communism
but the resurgence of the Slavonic races, which thrust back
the German thrust toward the east." But the political strug-
gle between the East and West, according to Barth, is com-
plicated by another factor: the struggle between America
and Russia. "Russia and America," he declares, "are both
in different ways children of Europe. . . . They have both
suddenly grown into giants, who each in his own way would
like to be patron, benefactor and protector of Europe. Both
are afraid of encirclement by the other." Then Barth adds
a final word which certainly does not follow from the "Word
of God," for he declares: "One must concede that the anxi-
ety of the Eastern giant is better founded than that of the
Western giant, when one considers the total ring of Western
bastions."
One is amazed by the number of technical, strategic,
and political presuppositions which entered into these haz-
ardous judgments. We are men and not God, and all our
political judgments are bound to be hazardous. If we are
also theologians we ought to have the grace to repeat the
Pauline warning from time to time: "Thus say I, and not
the Lord," so that our hearers will not regard a stray
political opinion as a deliverance ex cathedra.
One could forgive Barth many things because he is a
creative and imaginative theologian, who is also interested
in politics. One could even forgive him his many capricious
judgments in politics, though one might well wish that he
would study the realities of the political order a little more
if he is going to speak about them so much. But the one
ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
failing that is difficult to forgive is that he has not mod-
estly confessed himself in error about Hungary. He seemed
to know so much about Hungary, and history has refuted
his judgments so absolutely.
The godless existentialist Jean Paul Sartre has broken
with Communism and denounced its actions in Hungary.
Even the lowly party hacks in the Communist parties of
Britain and France have been shocked. But Earth's Czech
disciple Hromadka has issued a pathetic defense of the
Hungarian government, and Barth himself has remained
silent. Surely one could have expected as much of the
world's most eminent Protestant theologian as of the as-
sistant editor of the London Daily Worker, who publicly
disavowed all his former illusions.
BARTH ON HUNGARY: AN EXCHANGE
If the ardent young English-speaking disciples of Karl
Barth are really interested in "mutually helpful criticism"
they might begin by refraining from flagrant misinterpreta-
tion of my criticisms of the master. Let me enumerate some
of them.
i. I did not insinuate that Barth was a "Communist
sympathizer." On the contrary, I quoted his biting criticism
of the "Red Dean" of Canterbury to refute this charge.
52. I did not criticize Barth for not advising a revolution
in Hungary either eight years ago or now. I criticized him
for adopting a complacent attitude toward Communist
tyranny, particularly in Hungary, by many devices, includ-
ing the observation that no government in history is abso-
lutely good or absolutely evil. I did not challenge the
theological correctness of the Christian truth that no gov-
ernment is absolutely evil, but merely observed that the
young Hungarians must have found it morally and politi-
Barthiamsm and the Kingdom 191
cally irrelevant when they found a despotism, particularly
a foreign one, absolutely insufferable,
3. I did not criticize the most eminent theologian of our
day for remaining silent, out of indifference for the impor-
tant theological pursuits in which he is engaged. I was
speaking of a man who enjoys an unparalleled theological
eminence in our generation but who has not dwelt in an
ivory tower. He has spoken rather consistently on political
issues; and during the Nazi terror he was the religious
inspiration of the anti-Nazi movement. In our engagement
with the Communist tyranny he has taken the opposite
position and has been the inspiration of European neutral-
ism. He has not remained quiet on these new issues but has
spoken as consistently in defense of neutralism as in his
anti-Nazi days. All my quotations were taken from the col-
lection of his political and theological essays entitled
Against the Stream. My criticisms of Earth were particu-
larly relevant in regard to Hungary because so much of
that volume is devoted to his dialogue with the church in
Hungary.
4. I did not expect him to admit to the same errors to
which Sartre admitted. I only observed that this atheistic
existentialist admitted his error and that Earth might have
admitted the error of judgment in which he refused to
equate or compare Nazi and Communist tyranny on the
ground that it was still an open question whether the Nazis
were so bad because they were totalitarian or pagan or
anti-Semitic. Events in Hungary were ample proof that we
must have enough regard for "systems" and "principles"
to recognize that an absolute monopoly of irresponsible
power creates grievous injustices under any system. My
point was that 'looking at every event afresh in the light
of the Word of God" defrauds us of the lessons from the
analogies and experiences of history. Not theology but
common sense and historical experience ought to persuade
us that Cromwell's protectorate was a despotic form of
government resulting in many grievous injustices, even
though Cromwell was not a pagan but a very devout
Christian. I think this criticism is particularly relevant in
1Q2 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
the lidit of Barth's observation that none of the Hungarian
Reformed Christians were tempted to the "Catholic error
of opposing the regime out of principle."
In addition to these misrepresentations of my position I
must call attention to some very ludicrous misinterpreta-
tions of the historic situation. Earth, these young gentlemen
declare, did not speak during the Hungarian crisis because
of his "reluctance to encourage Switzerland and the rest
of the righteous 'free world' to undertake a holy war against
Russia at the time when the West had effectively dirtied its
own record at Suez." One can only be astounded at this
interpretation of recent history. Who in addition to neutral
Switzerland was spoiling for a "holy war'? Our own coun-
try united with Russia in disciplining the three invading
nations in Egypt, and so rigorously refrained from support-
ing the Hungarian revolution that we have earned the dis-
respect of many Europeans.
The young gentlemen report that Barth's position was
less anti-American than that of most of his Swiss country-
men. That is a comfort, though not surprising, since we
were not engaged in a holy war. I am intrigued by the anti-
Americanism of the Swiss as reported by the young men.
Did they criticize us because we slapped the British and
French down in Egypt or because we failed to support the
Hungarians? At any rate, nothing that could have been
said could possibly have aggravated the danger of a holy
war, since there was not the slightest inclination to such
a war either among the Swiss or in America. There was
only revulsion against the Russian cruelty in Hungary.
The young men's final excuse for Barth's silence (and
they do offer an excuse despite their insistence that a theo-
logian, as contrasted to an "anthropologian," is not required
to speak on the issues of the day) is that the "dubious role
played by Cardinal Mindszenty in the revolution" has
validated Barth's reserve. I know that the Communists'
boss, Khrushchev, has used Mindszenty's alleged role to
prove that they were dealing with a Fascist uprising. But
have the young men not heard that this was the most
spontaneous uprising of a resentful people in recent history?
And that the Cardinal had no more to do with it than that
Barthianism and the Kingdom 193
the Nagy government, in the brief moment of his freedom,
unwisely allowed him to hold a press conference which he
unwisely exploited?
Perhaps I might offer a parting word of advice for the
young and ardent disciples, and that is that there is no
substitute for common sense, even for theologians, whether
budding or eminent.
PART iv: The Catholic Heresy
ARROGANCE IN THE NAME
OF CHRIST
Writing about the excesses against the church during the
civil war in Spain, the Archbishop of Westminster, primate
of the Roman Catholic church in England, recently inter-
preted the sufferings of the church as follows:
Christ foretold that his followers should suffer and be
known by the mark of the cross. He pronounced them
blessed when reviled and ill-treated for His Name's
Sake. St. Peter writes, "Think it not strange the burning
heat which is to try you as if some new thing happened
to you/* The church of God is no stranger to the violence
and hatred of the "gates of hell/* but the patience of
Christians under persecution does not justify indifference
to the fate of our country and our Christian civilization.
We have ordered the following prayer from the Missal
to be said daily in the diocese till further notice, ~A1-
mighty and everlasting Lord in whose hands are all
the might and the lordship of the kingdoms of the earth;
look upon and help Christendom and with the power of
thy right arm crush the heathen peoples whose trust is
in their ferocity. Through Christ our Lord."
The Archbishop closes his appeal in behalf of the Span-
ish church by quoting an English priest in Spain who ob-
jects to the use of the phrases "government forces" and
"the rebels" in the foreign press. "They should say," de-
clares the priest, ** 'the rabble' and 'the forces of Christian
law and order."* Evidently the strong condemnation of
rebellion in orthodox Christianity can be easily overcome
197
ig8 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
if the church happens to be on the side of the rebels. It
need only insist that the government forces are "rabble"
and that the revolutionists are "forces of Christian law and
order."
This comment and exhortation of a Catholic hierarch
upon the tragic events in Spain is an interesting commen-
tary upon the perils in which the church always stands in
its 'relation to the world. It is in the world and always, to
some degree, of the world; but in the moment of crisis it
claims an absolute identity with the Christ, whose purity
is above the world. Thus the Archbishop identifies the
sufferings of Spanish priests with "the cross" and suggests
that the vicissitudes, which the revolution has brought
upon them, conform to the promise and prediction of
Christ, "Blessed are ye if men revile you and speak all
manner of evil against you falsely."
The Height of Spiritual Arrogance
This is spiritual arrogance of the worst type. This is the
very arrogance which proves that the most grievous sin of
pride is always committed by religion and in the name of
Christ, the sin of identifying sinful human purposes with
the perfection of Christ. The Archbishop does not utter a
word of penitence over the grievous relationship between
Spanish Catholicism and the decrepit feudalism, now in
its last stages of decay in Spain. He does not admit that the
Spanish peasants, now in revolt in Spain, have suffered for
ages from the most corrupt form of landlordism in Europe
and that the injustices from which they have suffered
have piled up a terrible increment of vengeance in their
souls. Nor does he evince contrition for the fact that the
hierarchy and the priests of the church have been in inti-
mate league with landlordism, monarchism, and reaction
in Spain not only before but after the revolution. The
church in Spain is, in other words, a political instrument,
and one which is committed to reactionary politics without
reservation.
Considering these facts the revolutionary and radical
The Catholic Heresy 199
forces have been fairly generous toward the church until
the moment of this present reactionary rebellion against
the democratically chosen left government. The effort to
overthrow this government and to return to the oppressions
of the past has naturally aroused the fury of the new Spain
and of all of the forces fighting for its preservation. It is
regrettable that the passions of conflict never know dis-
crimination and that radical defenders of the government
should vent their vindictive passions upon pious and self-
sacrificing nuns. Some innocent priests are undoubtedly
also victims of the furies unleashed by civil conflict. la po-
litical conflicts individuals are unfortunately treated as
symbols rather than as persons. Thus innocent individuals
are made to suffer for the sins of the institutions.
One might wish that revolutions were otherwise and that
the passions of conflict were more restrained. But it ought
to be the first task of a profound religion to deal realisti-
cally with the causes of these terrible passions. Perhaps it
is even more important to deal contritely with them and
to recognize what action or attitude of the self has been
responsible for such destructive hatred in the soul of the
other. We find instead the Catholic church, wrapped in the
cloak of self-righteousness, calling God's curse upon the
'^heathen peoples whose trust is in their ferocity" and
speaking of rebels against constitutional authority as "the
forces of Christian law and order." The force of religion
is used, in other words, exclusively to increase rather than
to mitigate the natural self-deception and pretension of the
human heart.
Perhaps there is no more crucial test of the genuine-
ness of a religion than its effect upon human pride and
pretension. It is because religion may issue in either a con-
trite subjection of all human ideals to the holiness of God
or in a false identification of those ideals with the divine
perfection that it is impossible to regard any religion as
good per se. The final and most sinful pretension of the
human spirit is always expressed religiously. Just as the final
effort to overcome the pretension is religious. It need
hardly be said that both within and outside of Christianity
the former consequence is a more frequent fruit of religion
200 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
than the latter. That is why social radicals are, broadly
speaking, right in regarding religion as a bulwark of social
reaction" but are nevertheless wrong in their total appraisal
of the place of religion in life.
The Church Clings to a Dying Feudalism
In the case of the Spanish church we see again an almost
unqualified identification of Christ with a particular set of
social values, in this case those of a dying feudalism. Spain
is the last modern nation to go through the process of de-
caying feudalism. Her church has evidently learned noth-
ing from the history of Europe during the last three hun-
dred years. As in France of the eighteenth century and in
Russia two decades ago, the church is once again defend-
ing a "Christian civilization" against the "rabble." It is too
blind to see that it is defending a corrupt and unjust civili-
zation against a rising passion for justice. The pathos of all
human sinfulness is revealed in this self-deception of the
church. To claim the moral prestige of Christ's "blessed
are ye if men revile you** for sufferings incurred in a sordid
political struggle is a consistent expression of religious pride
and sinfulness.
This is, of course, no reason why Protestants should re-
gard the error committed by the Spanish church as uniquely
Catholic in its defects. To assume that would be to close
our eyes to the universal character of the temptation to
sinful pride and arrogance. Protestantism is sometimes as
intimately enmeshed in the evils of capitalism as Catholi-
cism is with feudalism. It must be admitted however, that
the Catholic theory of the church as divine institution
lends itself particularly to the temptation of confusing rela-
tive with eternal values. Since the church is the incarna-
tion of Christ it is supposed to incarnate the spirit of Christ
in every historical situation. This theory lacks the proper
reservations such as are found in the more consistent Prot-
estant views o the church. It does not do justice to the
fact that though the church may delight in the law of Cod
after the inward man, there is a law in its members which
The Catholic Heresy 201
wars against the law that is in its mind. That war is an
eternal one in the life of the church. Whenever the church
imagines that the battle has been won, its very confidence
will prove it to have been lost.
PIUS XI AND HIS SUCCESSOR
What will be the effect of the Pope's probably imminent
death on Vatican policy? Catholics may regard the ques-
tion as slightly premature, not to say impious, but they
will hardly question its importance, particularly since the
Vatican has taken such an intransigent line in the disturbed
affairs of the contemporary world. Will its present policy,
in which Catholicism is becoming more and more an un-
qualified ally of Fascism, be changed? Does the selection
of a new pope offer at least the possibility of some devia-
tion from this line?
To judge from the casual conversation of non-Catholics,
two presuppositions, both of which are very dubious, usu-
ally underlie speculations about the future. One is that the
present Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli, is the probable
successor of Pius XI. The other is that Vatican policy at the
present moment is the personal policy of either the Pope
or his Secretary of State and might therefore be appreci-
ably altered in a new reign. The first supposition is almost
certainly false and the second requires many qualifications.
Cardinal Pacelli is not likely to be the new pope. If prece-
dent should be violated and he should be raised to the
papal throne, the present policy would certainly be con-
tinued; for it is his policy. There is, however, a long tradi-
tion against elevating the secretary of state to the highest
eminence, in spite of the prestige which he acquires during
his secretaryship. The simple reason for this is that he
makes too many enemies during his period of authority to
be able to command a majority in the electoral college.
202 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
The hierarch with the greatest chance of success is al-
ways the one who is not too definitely committed to any
particular policy and not too closely identified with the
various divergent and sometimes conflicting influences,
particularly monastic influences, within the church. Our
own presidential conventions offer interesting parallels to
this tendency.
A brief survey of the reigns of recent popes clearly
proves the point. The secretary of state for the "angelic"
Pope Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878, was the
reactionary Cardinal Antonelli; but Pius's successor was
not Antonelli. His successor was the diplomatic and slightly
liberal Leo XIII. Leo had several secretaries, the last of
whom, Cardinal Rampolla, gained a great reputation in
Europe. His election to the papacy was vetoed by the Em-
peror of Austria. Whereupon a very simple and pious man,
who prided himself upon his simplicity and whose gifts
were in marked contrast to those of Rampolla, was elected
and reigned as Pius X. Pius chose a man much shrewder
than himself as secretary, the Spanish cardinal, Merry del
Val. When Pius died in 1914 many assumed that his
secretarv would succeed him. But Rampolla finally came
into his own, for a disciple of his was chosen. The new
pope reigned as Benedict XV. He chose Cardinal Gasparri
as his secretary. Gasparri gained wide fame and potent
influence during the days of the First World War. But he
did not succeed his master, though he probably determined
the choice of the successor. The election fell upon Cardinal
Ratti, who had come into prominence through his negotia-
tion of the concordat with Poland after the war. He had
been a cardinal for only a short time when he was elected
to the papacy in 1922.
Unlike Pius X, the present Pius is a man of diplomatic
training and may therefore be presumed to be the author
of his own diplomatic policy to a larger degree than was
the previous Pius. Nevertheless, there are evidences that
his Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli, has been the real
driving force behind the present papal diplomacy, particu-
larly in the recent years of the Pope's declining strength.
Any speculation about a possible change in this policy may
The Catholic Heresy 203
well be prefaced by a short description of it. A description
of this kind cannot be entirely accurate, however, because
Catholic discipline prevents the serious tensions within the
church from being aired in public. Some very honest Cath-
olics even deny that they exist. Yet the evidences of these
tensions, not to say conflicts, are clear enough to the out-
side observer.
The present policy of the papacy, a policy for which
Cardinal Pacelli is probably more responsible than the
Pope, is first of all to favor the hierarchy against lay
Catholicism. By "lay Catholicism" the present writer is
designating something which Catholics have probably
never named but which nevertheless exists. At times it
has expressed itself in Catholic political parties, for exam-
ple, in the German Center, in which such lay leaders as
Chancellors Marx and Bruning achieved a greater author-
ity over their followers, at least in the realm of politics,
than was held by the bishops. The term "lay" Catholicism
is not entirely accurate, however, for it ought to include
certain liberal political movements, such as that led by the
Italian priest, Don Sturzo. Many village priests, as distinct
from the hierarchy, have been active in similar movements.
It would be difficult to give an exact description of the
political tendencies of these movements, but it is quite
clear that they were economically more liberal and politi-
cally more daring than anything ventured by the hierarchy.
They expressed the common man's discontent with the
status quo. In Germany the policies of the Center party
managed to be a bridge between socialism and bourgeois
conservatism, a not inconsiderable achievement consider-
ing that Catholicism is traditionally rooted in feudalism.
In every case the policy of the papacy in the now closing
pontificate was to the disadvantage of these movements.
The concordat with Mussolini completely destroyed Don
Sturzo's movement. The concordat with Hitler was con-
cluded in defiance of the advice of the effective leaders for
the German Center party. It was an agreement between
the Catholic hierarchy and the German Nazis in which the
hierarchy sacrificed the lay forces of the church for the
sake of preserving the freedom of the religious institution
204 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
within a totalitarian state. Many who were leaders in the
now defunct Center party must find it difficult to suppress
an "I told you so" when they realize how little the bishops
gained in their bargain with Hitler, and how little they
have been able to improve the terms of the bargain by
pleading with Hitler to accept them as equal allies in the
fight against Communism.
The tremendous emphasis upon "Catholic Action" so-
cieties in the present pontificate belongs to the same policy.
Catholic Action places the lay forces of the church directly
under the bishops and thereby establishes a more perfect
hierarchical control over all Catholics. The final effect of
this process is the establishment of greater papal control
over national units. This, despite the accusations of rabid
anti-Catholics, has not been the unvarying policy of the
papacy. Certainly the tendencies toward centralization of
authority have increased in recent years. Among other
things they led to an understanding between the church
and Hitler in regard to the Saar plebiscite which violated
the convictions of 90 per cent of the Catholic population
in the Saar.
The other side of present papal policy is more difficult to
deal with justly because of the universal reticence of all
parties affected by it. Broadly speaking, it could be desig-
nated as the continued ascendancy of Jesuit influence at
the Vatican over the milder and more spiritual tendencies
of other monastic groups. The Benedictines and Francis-
cans are less anxious to play the political game than the
Jesuits and are less deeply involved in political activities.
Particularly since the Spanish crisis the Jesuit influence
has been accentuated. For Spain is the classic nation of
the Catholic counter-Reformation, and Jesuitism is the driv-
ing force of that movement.
Any speculation about a possible new policy in regard to
Fascism and radicalism after the present Pope's death
therefore revolves around the question: Is the intimate
alliance between Catholicism and Fascism a consequence
of Jesuit influence or is it the product of tendencies within
Catholicism deeper and more far-reaching than any partic-
The Catholic Heresy 205
ular influence? The answer to that question would seem
to be that Jesuit influence has merely accentuated a tend-
ency which Catholicism is bound to express. If, therefore,
a new pope stood less directly under Jesuit influence, one
might hope for a less unqualified alliance between Catholi-
cism and Fascism; but one could hardly hope for a reversal
of the policy. The change is bound to be slight, but even
a slight qualification of the policy might have important
consequences in world affairs.
Catholic political policy is determined by fateful forces
in modern history. The most important is the intimate his-
torical connection between Catholicism as a civilization and
feudalism. This bond sometimes gives Catholicism a cer-
tain degree of impartial perspective with regard to capital-
ism, such as was revealed, for instance, in the politics of
the German Center party. But it puts it at a complete
moral and spiritual disadvantage where there is a dying
feudalism, whether in Spain or in Latin America. In such
a situation the feudal relation between church and state, or
more particularly between the church and the army and
the feudal landowning caste, is so strong that the instincts
of Catholicism to preserve itself as a social system over-
power any possible moral scruples which may inhere in
Catholicism as a religion and to which the more spiritual
monastics may give occasional voice. Fascism, except in
Spain, is of course not feudalism but the effort to press the
forms of feudalism upon a technical civilization, a proce-
dure which results in consequences even worse than those
of feudalism.
Catholic policy is determined by the irreligion of radi-
calism as .much as by the feudalism of Catholicism. The
avowed intention of radicalism to destroy institutional
religion naturally drives religion into the camp of reaction,
particularly if the religion is rooted in a historic institution.
The radical will be unable to see anything in this opposition
to his cause but proof of his thesis that all religion is coun-
terrevolutionary. He will never know how many purer
religious souls in a historic religious movement are really
defending their faith and not a civilization. Nor do the
206 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
purer religious souls realize to what degree the irreligion
confronting them is not the decadence which they imagine
it to be but a protest against the religious sanctification of
social injustice.
There is a peculiar pathos in the present Catholic anti-
Communist campaign, with its admissions that the church
does not like Fascism but prefers it to Communism be-
cause Communism tries to destroy it while Fascism merely
embarrasses it. Since German Fascism is as anti-Christian
as Communism, the Catholic choice is reduced to a prefer-
ence for a lower-middle-class type of modern religion over
the proletarian variety. The total situation is determined by
forces on both sides too deeply rooted in history and too
inexorable in their logic to permit the hope that a change
in reigning popes will greatly affect the issue. All historic
religions have tended to become so intimately related to
the civilizations of which they were part that they have
been driven to defend them against just as well as unjust
judgments and to die xvith them if the judgment of history
was a death sentence. Catholicism is particularly tempted
to this identification and confusion because it was the
architect of medieval and feudal civilization. There is good
reason to estimate the achievement of medieval civiliza-
tion more generously than the modern liberal or radical
rationalist is inclined to do, but such a generous estimate
increases the pathos of the present situation. This pathos
is accentuated even more by the recognition that religion
is never so simple a rationalization of a given social order
as the radical believes, and that within the pale of Catholi-
cism today there are many pure spirits who long for a bet-
ter world and seek higher justice.
The radical will not learn to estimate the perennial and
basic character of this tragedy of modern Catholicism in
particular and of organized religion in general for centuries.
He will learn it only when, three hundred or five hundred
or a thousand years from now, some group of creative
spirits challenges a decadent Russian society in the name
of a higher conception of society. It will be seen then that
this decadent society can offer stubborn resistance because
its official spokesmen derive moral self-respect from the
The Catholic Heresy 207
memories of Russian sovietism in its creative period and
have appropriated the moral prestige of Lenin's disinter-
estedness.
THE CATHOLIC HERESY
It is becoming daily more apparent that the Catholic
church has cast its lot with Fascistic politics. In Germany
the church is reduced to the pathetic role of begging the
Nazis kindly to let it co-operate in their anti-Communist
campaign, since the Pope hates Communism as much as
Hitler does. Many a liberal Catholic, particularly in Amer-
ica, does not like Fascism. Politically liberal Catholics do
not deny that their choice of Fascism is a hard alternative.
They justify it by the assertion that Fascism does not in-
tend to destroy the church while Communism does. One
might answer that Fascism intends to destroy Christianity
i it should not succeed in corrupting it and making it
serve its purely national purposes. But that does not make
an immediate contribution to the problem. The Catholic
might answer that sufficient unto the day are the evils
thereof. For the moment only German Fascism is avowedly
anti-Christian. In Austria Fascism is completely clerical
and in Italy it has made a cynical bargain with the church.
Grounds Not Purely Political
The real problem is whether the Catholic position is
justified from the Christian standpoint. In order to under-
stand the problem correctly it must be appreciated that
Catholicism takes its stand for other than purely political
reasons. It is not simply a rationalization of economic
interests. It would be foolish to deny, of course, that some
aspects of Catholic policy can be understood only in terms
208 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
of the intimate historic alliance between the church and
the feudal order. The position of the church in Spain is
partially determined by the historic affinity of interest
between the clerics and the feudal aristocracy. This same
relationship is making the church the primary source of
Fascistic politics in French Canada. It also explains the role
of the church in South America. Nevertheless, there are
democratic and progressive Catholics in nonfeudal nations,
who are forced into political support of Fascism in defiance
of all their political convictions and instincts. Their plight
is pitiful. What is the basis of their position?
The cynic might explain their position by attributing it
to the necessity of obedience in an authoritarian church,
the heart and center of which is involved in feudalism,
though some of its members are not. The iron authority of
the church prevents them from extricating themselves
from political policies which they personally disavow. But
even this explanation is too simple. The real basis of the
Catholic position in modern politics lies in the most
characteristic of all dogmas of the church, its identification
of the church with the Kingdom of God. For the Catholic
the church is an unqualifiedly divine institution. It is
Christ on earth and in history, as the pope is the vicar of
Christ. Any attack upon the church is therefore unquali-
fiedly evil because it is an attack upon Christ. In the recent
letter of the Spanish bishops they speak of the blasphemies
of loyalist troops, their profaning of sacred mysteries and
finally of the act of a trooper in pointing his revolver at the
"sacred host/' This is regarded as a final revelation of the
hatred of Christ'* which animates "our poor Communists"
and can be explained only by the ascription of it to "dia-
bolical" influences. It seems never to have occurred to
these bishops that a radical soldier might profane a church
not because he hates Christ but because he hates a his-
toric institution with all of its dubious involvements in the
political struggle on one particular side. The Spanish
bishops incidentally do not see or confess a single mistake
of the church in its relation to the social struggle, though
American Catholics, like Father Ryan, have said some very
critical words about the Spanish church.
The Catholic Heresy 209
This perfect complacency of the Spanish hierarchy, its
confidence that its enemies are the enemies of Christ and
its pathetic belief that hatred toward it can be explained
only in terms of diabolical inspiration, is the natural fruit
of a dogma which identifies a human, relative, and historic
institution with the divine. The consequences of this
dogma are so baneful in all human history that we have
new reason to emphasize the Protestant doctrine that the
church is not unqualifiedly the Kingdom of God but rather
that place in human society where the Kingdom of God is
known and where the judgments of God are felt to be
pointed at all human actions and institutions, including
the church itself.
Not that the Roman church is alone guilty of this heresy.
In the Greek Orthodox church divinity is ascribed not so
much to the hierarchical institution as to a body of sacred
tradition. But the general effect is the same. At the Oxford
Conference last summer, one of the most brilliant exponents
of Greek Orthodoxy, Father Bulgakoff, insisted again and
again that modern history must be interpreted as a conflict
between Christ and anti-Christ, and he attributed the
antireligion of radicals to the mysterious working of anti-
Christ as prophesied in Scriptures. There is a peculiarly
pathetic aspect in this charge of anti-Christ. It fails to
recognize that a great deal of protest against historic reli-
gion is prompted not by the devil but by a wholesome
reaction to the divine pretensions of very human institu-
tions and very imperfect priests. That is, the alleged anti-
Christ is actually objecting to what is really anti-Christ in
the religious institution. The Scriptural definition of anti-
Christ is one who blasphemes against God by lifting him-
self above measure. Anti-Christ, in other words, is one
who pretends to be Christ. This is what led Luther to give
the pope that name. In this connection it is instructive to
note that in many Catholic nations it is a legal offense,
defined as blasphemy, to speak contemptuously of the
church. The true Protestant would say that blasphemy is
precisely the pretension of the church to be so divine that
it cannot repent and ought not to be criticized.
21O ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
Catholic Heresy Not Confined to Rome
The Catholic heresy is not confined to Rome, nor yet to
Rome and Orthodoxy. Anglo -Catholicism is also seriously
infected with it. At the Oxford Conference a not too im-
pressive Anglo-Catholic archdeacon protested that the
continued call of the conference for the repentance of the
churches was absurd. The church could not repent because
the church was Christ. This particular archdeacon was not
the most intelligent representative of his group. It is in-
structive therefore to turn to one of the finest spirits of
Anglo-Catholicism, V. A. Demant Writing in the English
journal, Christendom, the organ of the Anglo-Catholic
social movement, Demant, who has a very profound under-
standing of current social issues, declares that on the whole
he is forced to choose "left" rather than "right" in most
of the political issues which confront him "because in that
(leftist) tradition I find some link with my prejudices
which have their roots in the civilization of Christian
Europe." With this general orientation Demant proceeds
to discuss what he ought to do if faced with an antireli-
gious movement, and declares:
Where formal atheism and anti-Christian paganism is
at issue, however much in line with Christian justice the
aims of the secular movement may be, and however op-
pressive, corrupt, superstitious and servile the church
mav De i win no t allow the sins of the Christian bodies
to prevent my siding with those who uphold the church
against those who would destroy it. It would be a tragic
and unholy choice, but it would have to be made, be-
cause the essential content of the Body of Christ is a
more ultimate thing than the most perfect system of
social justice.
In my own soul this confession of Demant has had a
most shattering effect, all the more so because I hold him
in such high esteem. It revealed to me the tremendous
importance of the Protestant principle. It is the "essential
The Catholic Heresy 2,11
content of the Body of Christ" which is to be preferred
to the "most perfect system of social justice"! The power
of God is thus restricted to the "Body of Christ." Does the
church not know that if it is the Body of Christ, it is collec-
tively under the fate which St. Paul confesses as an in-
dividual, namely that "there is a law in my members
which wars against the law that is in my mind"?
The Protestant Inheritance
Is this complacent assumption of the church that God
can work only through it any different from the com-
placency of preprophetic Israel and does it not stand under
the prophetic condemnation, "Are ye not as the children
of the Ethiopians unto me?" Is it not this sin which John
the Baptist castigated when he insisted that God would be
able "out of the stones" to raise up "children unto Abra-
ham"? Is it not this sin which has made the vice-regent of
Christ, at his worst, a kind of priestly and ghostly Caesar
who has claimed for Caesar's dubious imperial ambitions
the ultimate sanctities of the spirit of Christ?
We do not want a new crusade of anti-Catholicism. But
the relevance of this theological issue to contemporary
political problems might well prompt us to a new under-
standing of what is involved in the genius of Protestantism.
It must be admitted of course that our Protestant inherit-
ance disintegrates into secularism much more easily than
Catholicism does. It must also be admitted that many of
our Protestant radical minorities allow themselves to be
used as catspaws and allies of antireligious radicals without
any sense of responsibility toward their religious inherit-
ance and with no sure hold upon the truth which divides
them from secularists. They stand against Roman Catholi-
cism but are in danger of becoming enmeshed in Stalin's
Catholicism. For Stalin is but a secularized version of the
pope. He also believes that anyone who opposes him is an
incarnation of the very principle of evil. (In Communist
mythology that means that he is a Fascist.) He also be-
lieves this because he claims ultimate sanctity for the
ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
dubious, though probably necessary, compromises of Rus-
sian statecraft. He, like all priests of an established religion,
is unable to distinguish between a heretic who would un-
dermine the faith and the one who seeks to purify it of its
corruption. He, like all priests who have become kings,
claims a more ultimate sanctity for his power than ordinary
kings who have only a borrowed divine aura.
The danger that radical Protestantism may become a
too servile ally of secular radicals can be avoided only if
our criticism of the Catholic heresy is made, not from the
standpoint of secular cynics but from the standpoint of
Protestant Christian faith. We will resist all temporal
divinities, whether they call themselves popes, kings by
divine right, or commissars. We will not be under the illu-
sion that we can get rid of this tendency toward self-deifica-
tion by getting rid of the Catholic faith or the Christian
religion. We recognize in it the very quintessence of sin,
the tendency of man to make himself God. That we should
discover the Christian church itself as a potential vehicle of
this sin will make us the more circumspect in our claims
and the more certain that the majesty of God may reveal
itself in the destruction of historic Christian churches as
well as in their preservation.
THE POPE'S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE
The annual message of the Pope at Christmas time is sig-
nificant for the fact that it has become increasingly a state-
ment of the relevance of the Christian faith to the various
social and political problems which vex our world. The
statement last month was more unequivocal than any
previously made. The Pope rightly condemned theories
which "claim for particular nations or races or classes the
juridical instinct as the final imperative from which there
is no appeal" and also the philosophies of state absolutism
The Catholic Heresy 213
which regard the state as "an absolute and supreme en-
tity" which is "exempt from criticism and control." The
condemnation of Marxism is remarkably restrained in the
latest papal message. The Pope is content to declare: "Al-
ways moved by religious motives the church has con-
demned the various forms of Marxist socialism and she
condemns them today." But this condemnation is merely
a prelude to the statement that "the church cannot over-
look the fact that the worker ... is opposed by a ma-
chinery which not only is not in accordance with nature
but is at variance with God's plan and with the purpose
he had in creating the goods of the earth/* Here he restores
the ancient teaching of the church, once very influential,
according to which all the treasures of the earth should be
made available to all men. The Pope draws distributist,
rather than communist conclusions from the religious idea
of a divine ownership of all property. He thinks that private
property should be a privilege of all men and that a
propertyless worker is condemned to "economic depend-
ence and slavery." He wisely observes that this kind of
slavery is possible either ''through the exploitation of pri-
vate property or through the power of the state/*
It is not possible to do justice to the full program of
social justice for individuals and nations which the Pope
elaborated in his Christmas message. It must certainly be
regarded as superior to many secular and Protestant anal-
yses of social problems, which ignore one or another aspect
of the complexities of social justice. There is a remarkable
balance in this Catholic statement.
Its primary defect is derived from a general defect in all
Catholic social theory. It is based upon the assumption that
there are in two sources, the natural law of justice and in
the Scriptural law of love, exact and precise definitions of
every problem of justice. It assumes that universal prin-
ciples of justice have been challenged primarily by posi-
tivists and relativists who "give a deceptive majesty to
purely human law" and who "leave the way open to a
fateful divorce between law and morality."
This is a Catholic thesis which every Catholic teacher
has been expounding in recent years. According to it the
214 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
explicit egotism of Nazi politics is but the final product of
a pragmatism which rejects the standards of universal
law for the sake of laws of expediency. According to this
thesis the secular world has undermined law and order by
its moral cynicism. On the whole this is a false polemic
of Christianity against secularism, in which many Protes-
tants have also participated.
There is indeed a decadent cynical, relativist, and nihilis-
tic fringe of secular culture. But on the whole modern
culture is Utopian, universalist, and moralistic. It believes
in the possibility of establishing universal justice, and
universal culture. It has rejected Christianity because it
thinlcs it knows of simpler methods of saving both men
and nations than Christianity proposes. The real fact is
that both Catholicism and modern culture have one tiling
in common. They know much too exactly just what justice
is. Modern rationalism and Catholic rationalism both have
too great a confidence in the ability of reason to state the
laws of justice. Both fail to understand the full interplay
between reason and interest and passion in man's social
Me. The most sophisticated moderns draw cynical conclu-
sions from this taint of interest in all historic justice and
declare that there is no justice. But the more naive moderns
are agreed with Catholicism in estimating the ability of
man to define the eternal laws which govern society. Only
the moderns would allow the scientists, rather than the
church, to define the laws. And they believe that the knowl-
edge of the law is sufficient to guarantee its fulfillment;
while Catholicism takes human sin more seriously than
that. It believes that only an infusion of grace will enable
man to fulfill the law which transcends his own interests.
Simple moralism, rather than moral cynicism, has
brought us so close to disaster in the modern world. Not
many moderns are Nazis who believe that there is no good
but "my" good. But there are many moderns, both Chris-
tian and secular, who believe it easy to define the good
without corrupting the definition by "my" interest; and to
realize it without compounding it with self-interest. We
dare not disavow general standards of justice. But neither
must we give ourselves to the illusion that they are either
The Catholic Heresy 215
easily defined or simply realized. Some of our worst social
evils are derived, not from the cynics, who acknowledge
no standard but their own, but from the fanatics who
acknowledge an absolute standard but fail to detect the
corruption of self-interest in their definition of the absolute.
THREE ELEMENTS IN PAPAL
LEADERSHIP
The Pope's address to the College of Cardinals on June 2,
is a remarkable document and also a very typical one; for
it combines three elements which are characteristic of
Roman Christianity. It pleads for the city of Rome; it
makes the traditional claims for the primacy of the Bishop
of Rome over all of Christendom; and it makes some thor-
oughly Christian observations on the conduct of the war.
Thus it combines the Roman, the Papal, and the Christian
elements which constitute Catholicism as we know it.
In regard to Rome the Pope declares: "If at the moment
our anxiety is especially for Rome it is because such senti-
ments are evoked by the pitiable conditions in which a
large part of the population of the city, which is also our
diocese, finds itself." This special anxiety is natural enough,
though the conditions in Rome are probably no more piti-
able than those under which the Pope's children, let us
say, in Poland, suffer. This may be put down as local
pa'triotism which qualifies the Pope's universal loyalties.
The genuinely Christian observations on war policies are
expressed as follows:
In many is born the impression or the fear that there
may not be, even for the peoples and nations as such,
any alternative but this: A complete victory or complete
destruction. When once this sharp dilemma has entered
men's minds, its baneful influence is a stimulant for the
ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
prolongation of the war. Even among those who by nat-
ural impulse or for realistic considerations would be
disposed to a reasonable peace, the spectre of the alter-
native and the conviction of the real or supposed will of
the enemy to destroy national life to the very roots,
smothers all other reflections and instills in many the
courage of desperation.
This is the Pope's wise criticism of the Allied policy of
"unconditional surrender." It is a pertinent criticism and
is informed by genuine Christian presuppositions.
It is rather strange and interesting how the papal ad-
dress combines with these immediate concerns the presenta-
tion of the ancient claim of the primacy of the Holy See.
The argument is, as usual, that the Pope has inherited from
Peter the promise of Christ that he would build his church
upon this rock. "Between Christ and Peter," deckres the
Pope, "there reigns from the days of the promise near
Caesarea Philippi a mysterious but eminently real bond
which was affected once in time but draws its roots from
the eternal counsels of the Almighty." The entire papal
argument is a proof of the fact that in all debates, the
important point is the presuppositions upon which the
conflicting arguments proceed. Granted that the words of
Christ were meant personally for Peter, and granted that
Peter was the first bishop of Rome (a particularly ques-
tionable presupposition) and granted that there is a mys-
tical and magical bond between the first and last Bishop
of Rome, the argument may seem irrefutable. It is of course
implausible to all who are unable to accept the presupposi-
tions.
For the Pope no unity of Christendom is possible, if all
those who "profess themselves Christians" do not accept
this papal claim. There is something rather pathetic about
the papal hope that he may persuade errant Protestants to
accept this claim; for it proves how little he understands
the irrevocable character of certain historical events, which
have made these ancient papal claims implausible.
"How much more potent," declares the Pope, "would be
the influence of Christian thought and life on the moral
The Catholic Heresy 217
substructure of the future plans for peace and reconstruc-
tion if there were not this vast dispersal and division of
religious confessions, that in the course of time have de-
tached themselves from the Mother Churchl" We are not
so sure. The Christian gospel validates itself finally not so
much by the unanimity of its contemporary witness as by
the profundity of its appeal. An authoritarian unity is
always a peril to this profundity, for it achieves harmony
by sacrificing facets of the gospel testimony which do not
fit into the prevailing scheme. Suppose all of Christendom
were now united under the Pope! Would then not the
whole of Christendom be committed to the proposition that
the integrity of the church must be the first consideration
of statecraft; and would we then not support any govern-
ment which allows the church to live and attack every
government which is inimical to the church, no matter how
important its coDaboration for a peace system might be?
THE POPE ON PROPERTY
In his radio address, commemorating the anniversary of the
beginning of the Second World War, the Pope made many
very commendable observations on the method of recon-
structing the world, on the necessity and the limit of force
in building a world organization and on the obligation of
the wealthy nations to come to the aid of those whose lands
have been ravaged by "war.
In dealing with the property issue the Pope was obvi-
ously prompted by the fear that Europe would be subject
to radical political movements with collectivist property
concepts. He reiterated the general Catholic distributist
idea of property. Property should not be abolished but as
widely distributed as possible, because it is a form of
security which all men desire and deserve. "The church,"
he declared "does not intend in principle to protect the
2l8 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
rich and plutocrats against the poor. On the contrary ever
since its beginning the church has protected the poor and
the weak against the tyranny of the powerful." One might
say in passing that such a statement betrays the usual
inability of Catholic thought to distinguish between the
principles of an institution and what it does in fact. In
principle the church desires to protect the poor; but in fact
it has often been the ally of the landlords against the
peasants, of the aristocrats against the rising middle classes
and of the monarchs against the rebellious democrats.
But to return to the Pope's ideas of property, the primary
weakness of Catholic property ideas from Aquinas to the
present Pope is that it does not preserve the original
Christian idea that property may be necessary in a sinful
world, in order to give men security against the ambition
of others, but that it must be regarded as a necessary evil
which must not be given an absolute sanction. The justifi-
cation of property in Catholic thought has become as ab-
solute as in eighteenth century thought.
Catholicism does, of course, teach that property should
be morally and politically controlled. The Pope declares,
"When the distribution of property is an obstacle (to
justice) the state should in common interest intervene,
regulate its activities or issue a decree of expropriation
with suitable indemnities. Small holdings in agriculture,
the arts, trade and industry must be guaranteed and sup-
ported."
The general philosophy behind the papal pronounce-
ment is that which informs our own antitrust laws. The
Pope refuses to admit that technical advances make the
socialization of large-scale industry necessary. He declares,
"The suggestion should not be put forward that technical
progress is toward the establishment of gigantic concerns
which must inevitably cause the collapse of a social system,
based on private property." But he does not explain how
large-scale concentrations of wealth are to be brought into
the scheme of his philosophy of distribution. He merely
observes that "technical progress must not prevail over the
common good but must be governed by it and subordi-
nated to it."
The Catholic Heresy 219
The papal philosophy of property is half right and half
wrong. It is right in seeking to maintain a distribution of
property as one method of preserving an equilibrium of
social power in opposition to an omnipotent state. He calls
attention to the fact that the ideal of the socialization of
property may in actual history produce "a dictatorship of
a political group, that as a ruling class will control the
means of production." He understands in other words that
the complete socialization of property may compound
economic and political power and thus destroy liberty.
But the papal policy has no program, but moral exhorta-
tion for one aspect of the modern property issue. A tech-
nical civilization creates centralized forms of economic
power which must be socially owned because they can
neither be perfectly controlled, nor can the wealth and
property in them be divided in such a manner as to give
every one an individual share in the power and security of
the property.
The papal pronouncements on property are on the whole
superior to those of the Protestant churches who have
usually not thought out a consistent attitude toward the
issue; so that the conservative part of the church usually
accepts the liberal ideas of property uncritically while the
radical minority of the church subscribes to Marxist ideas
without qualification. Catholic property philosophy is con-
sistent but nevertheless inadequate for the problems of our
day. It recognizes that property is a legitimate form of
security in one of its aspects; but it has no answer for the
problem when property becomes inherently so powerful
that it becomes a threat to security and justice.
220 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
OUR RELATIONS TO CATHOLICISM
The acrimonious relations between Catholics and Protes-
tants in this country are scandalous. If two forms of the
Christian faith, though they recognize a common Lord,
cannot achieve a little more charity in their relations to
each other, they have no right to speak to the world or
claim to have any balm for the world's hatreds and mis-
trusts. The mistrust between Catholics and Protestants has
become almost as profound as that between the West and
Communism. A little editorial note in this journal, raising
questions about the advisability of the Protestant position
on the school bus question produced more correspondence
than any other recent editorial comment. Catholic journals,
some of which are wont to label every liberal Protestant
utterance as "Communist" suddenly hailed us as a font of
wisdom. The Knights of Columbus who had condemned
our articles on the Catholic position in South America,
gave us an embarrassing embrace. Most of the Protestant
clergy were highly critical of our position. A surprising
number of Protestant laymen on the other hand wrote in
commendation and expressed their embarrassment over the
degree of animosity which exists between Protestant and
Catholic clergy. We know of Catholic laymen who have
the same sense of embarrassment and who long for a better
understanding between Protestantism and Catholicism.
There is incidentally an untapped resource of democratic
common sense among laymen in all churches, which cleri-
cal leaders might draw upon to their advantage.
What is written in these pages is by no means an official
utterance of Christianity and Crisis. The editorial board of
this journal has never threshed out this issue and we have
no way of knowing whether any degree of unanimity on
the issue could be achieved. This word is a purely personal
The Catholic Heresy 221
venture, which has the hopeful but probably futile purpose
of putting the debate between Catholics and Protestants on
a different level.
We should like to present three propositions, the first
of which applies to both Protestants and Catholics, the
second to Catholics, and the third to Protestants. The first
proposition is that there is an unfortunate inclination in
the human heart, which Christians should, but have not,
mastered, to be more concerned with the sins of others
than with our own sins. Thus democrats frequently in-
crease the peril in which a democratic civilization stands
by heedlessness toward the internal corruptions of this
civilization and preoccupation with either the Nazi or the
Communist external danger. Communists, on the other
hand, are even more self-righteous, being informed by a
secular religion which knows nothing o the sinful corrup-
tion, which appears in every human endeavor and which
foolishly equates all historic evil with capitalist corruption.
In the same way a good deal of Protestantism is little more
than anti-Catholicism; and Catholicism is very fond of his-
toric theories which ascribe all the ills of our generation to
the destruction of a Catholic civilization by the force of
the Protestant Reformation and modern secularism. This
inclination to find the root of all evil in the sins of the
other and not in those of the self is as wrong as it is natural.
There ought however, to be some resource in the Christian
church to counteract it; for the Christian faith insists that
the primary encounter in human life is not between good
and evil men, nations, or institutions, but between all men
and God. "Whosoever thou art that judges," declares
St. Paul, "thou thyself doest the same thing." The mistrust
and hatred of others which affronts us, always has greater
similarities with our own mistrust and hatred than we
would like to believe. The root of all Christian charity lies
in the contrite recognition of the common need of all men
for the divine mercy. Charity, particularly the charity of
forgiveness is not something which can be demanded or
learned. It springs from the heart of those who know them-
selves to stand under a more ultimate judgment than any
of the judgments by which they judge their foes and their
222 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
foes judge them. If there is not something of this ultimate
insight informed by faith, in the Christian life, it is a salt
which has lost its savor. Catholics may boast of the supe-
riority of their discipline and unity; and Protestants may
boast of their superior liberty. But without charity the
virtues of each become corrupted by an intolerable self-
rio-hteousness. The virtues of each have, indeed, become
o
thus corrupted.
Since we are men and not angels we do, of course, have
our various loyalties and causes to which we have a re-
sponsible relationship, which we seek to protect against
various perils and which we judge favorably in camparison
with other causes and values. Catholics thus feel under the
compulsion of protecting their kind of Christian civiliza-
tion against what seems to them the anarchy, and some-
times the secularism of Protestantism. Protestants on the
other hand do have a certain common interest with secular
democratic idealism in protecting the values of liberty
against what seems to them to be the encroachment of an
authoritarian and an officially intolerant creed. This brings
us to the second proposition which refers particularly to
Catholics.
The Catholic bishops have the practice of rushing to
the public and to print, every time Protestants call atten-
tion to some form of official Catholic intolerance, with the
assertion that it is Christ himself who is under attack and
that only disloyalty to Christ could have prompted the
criticism. There is a curious pathos in this performance;
for the bishops could hardly understand that from the
Protestant standpoint it is precisely this unqualified iden-
tification of Christ with the historic church which is the
root of all Catholic heresies and the cause of Catholic
intolerance. We should like to report, for the benefit of
our Catholic friends, that our Protestant army chaplains,
returned from their army service, have become to a large
degree anti-Catholic.
Only a few were able to report the achievement of any-
thing like a sense of spiritual comradeship with Catholic
chaplains. Where such comradeship was established it was
accepted with such gratitude that we may assume a much
The Catholic Heresy 22,3
wider desire for it than gratification of it. Mostly the Prot-
estant chaplains resented "being pushed around." This
"pushing around" consisted in various Catholic efforts to
establish special privileges in the army which frequently
succeeded because officers tended to yield to the persistent
and consistent pressure of Catholic authorities while they
had nothing to fear from divided Protestantism. We could
give chapter and verse on these charges of Protestant chap-
lains and it may yet be necessary to do so.
In the same way Protestants are inclined to be unyield-
ing on problems of the public school because they suspect
the hierarchy, at least, of being inimical to the whole idea
of the public school system, which Protestants, as well as
our secular democrats, regard as one of the foundation
stones of our democracy. Protestants are, furthermore, not
at all certain that the Catholic hierarchy really accepts the
fundamental separation of church and state, to which
American democracy is committed. The position of the
late Archbishop Ireland, affirming the Catholic acceptance
of this principle and insisting that the Catholic church had
prospered under it, has been frequently disavowed in
recent years.
We have been told again and again that Catholicism
must insist on the obligation of the state not only to teach
religion but to teach the "true religion." This means that
Catholicism accepts our constitutional principle "that Con-
gress shall pass no laws respecting the establishment of
religion" only provisionally, that is so long as it is powerless
to alter it. We have been assured of course that a mere
majority would not give the church the right to alter this
principle. It would seek its alteration only if the Catholic
population achieved an overwhelming majority.
The remoteness of this prospect is, according to the kte
Monsignor Ryan, supposed to allay our fears. But it can
hardly change our convictions that Catholicism would, if
it could, seek the establishment of a particular religion.
We Protestants oppose this not only because the condition
of religious pluralism in America makes it quite unfeasible
but also because we believe that monopoly in anything,
including monopoly in religion, is a source of corruption.
224 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
It is a particular source of corruption in religion. Institu-
tions of religion should be politically powerless, if the true
principles of our religion are to achieve political influence.
We could multiply these charges of official intolerance.
Catholic bishops have sought to eliminate Protestant insti-
tutions from community funds, if they sanctioned birth
control clinics. The bishops probably honestly believe that
the prohibition of birth control, according to the "natural
law/' is so absolute that violation of the prohibition is the
proof of un-Christian conduct. But thoughtful Protestants
have some basic questions about these supposed absolute
requirements of the "natural law." It is the very character
of Catholicism to be unable to recognize the honesty of
such scruples.
It simply regards skepticism in regard to any of its "self-
evident truths" as the mark of the moral nihilist. It is in
short not easy to deal charitably with an officially intolerant
religion. It is usually certain, not only that it is right but
also that those who are wrong are so for unchristian mo-
tives. It cannot understand what Oliver Cromwell meant
by the robust warning: "Remember, by the bowels of
Christ, that you may be mistaken." Upon the understand-
ing of that warning depends the appreciation of the moral
legitimacy of a democratic civilization.
Despite the genuine difficulties which we face as Protes-
tants in dealing with a form of the Christian faith which is
officially intolerant we have lacked charity as much as have
Catholics, partly because we fail to appreciate the genuine
grace of personal religion within this system of official
intolerance. Furthermore, we fail to appreciate the real
concern for religious values which underlies the Catholic
insistence on religious instruction. Protestantism is errone-
ously branded by Catholicism as merely another version
of secularism. But on the other hand Protestant faith lacks
sufficient robustness to understand that an absolutely rigor-
ous separation of church and state does mean the seculari-
zation of the community; for the state is the organ of the
community in regulating its common concerns.
Our constitutional fathers quite obviously and quite
rightly wanted to prevent the establishment of religious
The Catholic Heresy 225
monopoly. That is the clear meaning of the First Amend-
ment. It is not at all clear that they sought to prevent the
state's support of religion absolutely, provided such sup-
port could be given equitably to all religious groups.
Whether this should be done is a question of policy upon
which we may have different opinions. It may well be that
the religious heterogeneity of America is such that the
state support of religion is not advisable.
But we ought not to prejudge that issue in the name of
a principle of "separation of church and state" which in
exact constitutional terms goes no further than the prohibi-
tion of the establishment of one religion and the suppres-
sion of others. It is not at all irreverent to suggest that our
oo
highest court, in interpreting this simple prohibition of the
constitution, inclines to "follow election returns" as Mr.
Dooley once suggested, in the sense that it inevitably not
only interprets what our constitutional fathers intended
but also mirrors what we now intend. That is the existen-
tial character of the judicial process.
We will, as good Americans, abide by the decision of
the court, but we must also recognize that its decisions
over a period of decades and centuries, accurately reflect
what the American people believe their democracy to be.
The present tendency to make the separation of church
and state as absolute as possible is a reflection not only of
the prevailing secularism of our culture but of the Protes-
tant fear of Catholicism.
This fear may seem in one sense justified. But in another
sense it is an effort to cover up by political action, the
weakness of Protestantism in the field of religion itself.
The anarchy of Protestantism, its lack of spiritual disci-
pline, its ridiculous tensions between obscurantist versions
of Protestantism on the one hand and of liberal versions on
the other, its half-secular sentimentalities, all these weak-
nesses are more responsible for its sense of insecurity than
anything that Catholicism may do politically.
Let us defend ourselves against any political actions of
Catholicism which tend to encroach upon our liberties; but
let us achieve a greater consciousness of our own weak-
nesses and our tendency to cover our weaknesses by our
226 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
apprehensions about a religious foe or competitor. It is not
a very nice fact about human nature that religious com-
munities should be in conflict with one another, partly for
the same reasons that there is hatred between racial com-
munities. In each case inner insecurities and a guilty con-
science are transmuted into social hatreds. But in the case
of religious hatreds these fears of the other are doubly
reprehensible because the faith which should cure us of
our fears is made into a bearer of them.
THE GODLY AND THE GODLESS
The National Catholic Welfare Council has made a state-
ment entitled "The Christian in Action," which has the
primary purpose of challenging the Supreme Court deci-
sion which outlawed the "released time" religious program
in the public schools of Illinois. The bishops centered their
criticism on the reliance of the Court upon Jefferson's meta-
phor "the absolute wall of separation between church
and state." This metaphor, according to the Catholic
bishops, cannot clarify the First Amendment which enjoins
that "Congress shall pass no laws respecting the establish-
ment of religion or the suppression thereof," since the
meaning of the amendment is perfectly clear. It means that
there shall be no "established church" no "state religion"
and, therefore, that no religion shall be given preferential
status by the state. It does not, therefore, prohibit coopera-
tion between church and state so long as this is done in
terms of complete equality.
This journal has previously outlined a similar criticism
of the Supreme Court decision and expressed the convic-
tion, stated in the dissenting opinion, that "a rule of law
cannot be drawn from a metaphor." We are perhaps a little
more sensitive than the Catholic bishops to the fact that
it is very difficult to achieve a policy which will be re-
The Catholic Heresy 227
garded as fair by all religious sects and by those who have
no religious loyalty. It is clear, for instance, that Catholics
would hope ultimately to secure the public support of
parochial schools under their interpretation of the First
Amendment. This would be regarded as unfair by most of
the Protestant sects which have no parochial schools. If
complete fairness were to be achieved it would mean the
establishment of parochial schools by various Protestant
sects, a policy which would wreck the unity of our public
school system. It would, granted the religious pluralism
of the American culture, also endanger the unity of the
people. We do not believe that the increased secularization
of our culture ought to be the price of that unity; but we
do have some understanding of the viewpoint of those who
fear religious divisiveness in our community. Despite these
apprehensions it is important that Protestant agreement
with the Catholic position should be expressed, as far as
that agreement runs.
It is equally important that we should, from the stand-
point of the Protestant faith, express our disagreement
with a basic presupposition of the Catholic position. The
bishops express that presupposition in these words: "The
failure to center life in God is secularism, which ... is
the most deadly menace to our Christian and American
way of living/' There is a great truth but also a consider-
able error in this simple condemnation of secularism. The
truth is that secularism, in both its liberal and its Marxist
variety, promised the world a utopia of perfect justice, if
only the irrational prejudices of religion could be elimi-
nated. This Utopia was not realized, not only because the
Western world is involved in a deadly conflict between the
two versions of secular idealism, but also because each
misinterpreted the human situation. Each believed that
the evils of human nature and the injustices of society
were due either to a simple remedial ignorance which
more education would eliminate; or to the institution of
property, which the abolition of that institution would
overcome. Neither recognized the profoundly idolatrous
tendency in the heart of man, the tendency to set himself
up as God and to defy the common good. Catholicism
228 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
usually makes the mistake of regarding secularism as
morally cynical, that is, as acknowledging no law except
the good of each individual or nation. Actually only a very
subordinate strain of secular thought is morally cynical.
Nazism was the final fruit of that strain of thought. Most
secular thought is morally sentimental. It believes in gen-
erally valid principles of justice; but it underestimates the
recalcitrance of the human heart. It does not know that
though men may "delight in the law of God after the
inward man," there is yet a "law in their members which
wars against the law that is in their mind."
In our Christian apologetic against secularism it is, there-
fore, not enough to teach men that there is a God; but
rather that the true God with whom all men are ultimately
engaged, is our enemy before he is our redeemer. We can-
not know His mercy if we do not acknowledge His judg-
ments upon the inclination of all men and nations to set
themselves up as God. But this God, who is revealed to
the Christian through Christ, is not simply an ally of the
Christians against the secularists. His judgments fall as
severely upon Christians as upon secularists, precisely be-
cause the Christian faith in God is no guarantee against
the corruption of using God as an instrument of our in-
terests and of claiming the "law of God" or the "natural
law" as a rationalization of our claims against the claims
of others. That is why Jeremiah insists that the judgments
of God fall upon both the "circumcised and the uncircum-
cised" and why John the Baptist warns against the com-
placency of those who think they are virtuous because they
are "the children of Abraham" and suggests that "God is
able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham."
Translated this means, that the "elect" must have some con-
trite recognition of the fact that the truth of God is fre-
quently stated by those who do not know God against
those who claim they do.
No Christian polemic against secularism can be truly
Christian if it does not recognize that liberal secularism
was partly informed by a sense of justice which found
the religiously sanctified social forms of the feudal order
intolerable and that Marxist secularism is partly informed
The Catholic Heresy 229
by a sense of justice which found the religious and secular
justifications of middle-class justice intolerable. If these
facts seem to belong to another age one need only mention
Spain and possibly Italy and some Latin American coun-
tries to prove their relevance to contemporary scenes. One
might also mention the simple identification of bourgeois
interests and Christianity in the Calvinist political parties
of Holland.
A Christian apologetic must not simply be a defense of
God against the godless but a disclosure of the Majesty of
God against the pretensions of the godly and the godless
and a promise of mercy to those who truly repent, whether
godly or godless. The godless must know God before they
can repent. Sometimes the "godly" have greater difficulty
in repenting. For they have to unlearn their prayer: <e l
thank Thee God that I am not as other men."
CATHOLICS AND DIVORCE
A debate, which has developed in New York state with
reference to its divorce laws, illustrates one of the difficul-
ties in the relations between Protestants and Catholics. The
state of New York has not changed its divorce laws since
the eighteenth century. According to these laws adultery
is the only ground for divorce. Meanwhile a culture has
developed in a modern urban secular community in which
divorce for many other causes is publicly approved or con-
doned. The inevitable consequence is that the law is cir-
cumvented. The form of circumvention, discovered by the
district attorney of New York, is "faked" testimony proving
adultery, even though neither party has been guilty of it.
This 'situation prompted a demand for a liberalization of
the divorce laws. Catholic authorities, however, declared
that this development proved the necessity of making
divorce laws more stringent and eliminating even adultery
23O ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
as ground for divorce. One Catholic dignitary, preaching
in the Cathedral, declared that divorce was the evil fruit
of "apostates from the Catholic faith who call themselves
reformers." The belief of Catholics that a rigorous insistence
on the indissolubility of marriage can be preserved merely
by legal sanction in a community which lacks every pre-
supposition for such a standard, reveals a shocking reliance
upon law as the basis of morals. Protestants were guilty of
this same error during the Prohibition movement. Both
Catholics and Protestants ought to know that no moral
standard can be enforced by the police power of the state
if the overwhelming portion of the population does not
abide by it voluntarily. Police power can deal only with
the recalcitrance of a minority.
We may well question Catholic legalism even when it
is exercised within the church itself. We may ask whether
the sacramental character of the marriage relation can be
preserved by law when the disloyalty of one or both
partners has in fact violated the sacrament. From the
Protestant standpoint, Catholicism places too great a reli-
ance upon law, even within the Christian community.
There are certain ideal standards of personal conduct and
of human relations which may be preserved by grace but
not by law. If grace is lacking no legal sanction can make
such standards either possible or sufferable. But so long
as Catholic legalism is limited to its own religious com-
munity we do not have the same concern about it as when
it seeks to enforce impossible standards upon a whole civil
community.
This problem represents one of the many instances
where Protestant Christianity must develop its own middle
ground, distinguished from both the Catholic and the secu-
lar position. Such a ground requires that we seek to pre-
serve the sacramental conception of marriage in opposi-
tion to the secular community's concept of marriage as a
mere social contract, in which only the two contracting
parties are engaged. But it also involves opposition to the
Catholic effort to preserve by legal sanction what can only
be maintained by every resource of grace. The decay of
American family Me is a shocking aspect of a general moral
The Catholic Heresy 231
decay. A thoughtful judge recently expressed the opinion
that half of all cases of child delinquency are caused by
broken homes. Stringent laws may be necessary to protect
the rights of children in the home as much as possible.
But law does not have the power to prompt incompatabil-
ity to be transmuted into compatibility by forgiveness, or
to induce the kind of patience and mutual forbearance
which makes intimate relations suffer able. There is a cer-
tain Catholic nation permitting no divorces on any ground,
in which, according to report, half of all homicides are
committed by irate husbands and wives upon their spouses.
There is a lesson worth pondering in those statistics.
CATHOLICS AND MOTIVES
OF ACTION
"Everyone knows," declared the Pope in his allocution,
"that the Catholic Church never acts from worldly mo-
tives." "The diplomacy of the Soviet state," declared
Foreign Minister Molotov, "bases itself firmly on the scien-
tific analysis of objective reality. . . . Soviet diplomacy
always adheres strictly to principles. It is alien to com-
binations promoted by the situation at a given moment, to
unscrupulous transactions, intrigues, intimidations or to
disguising real tendencies by false formulae."
We know how distasteful it will be to many readers to
place these two pretentious claims in the same paragraph
and thereby suggest that they have any similarity. The
Catholic church claims never to act from worldly motives,
because any policy by which it defends, protects, and ex-
tends the influence of the church in the rough struggles
of history is for the sake of an institution which is more
than an historical institution. It can, therefore, not grant
that the difference in its attitude toward a Fascist regime,
which is merely perverting justice, and a Communist
232 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
regime, which seeks to destroy the church, is determined
bv the anxious survival impulse of an historic institution.
Whatever treasures of grace are born in the earthen vessels
of this historic institution cannot, however, completely
hide from the critical, or even from the sympathetic, ob-
server that very human and sinful human motives express
themselves in this struggle for survival. One might men-
tion the rather hysterical sermon of Cardinal Spellman on
the Mindszenty trial, to which Professor Bennett refers in
the leading editorial, as a case in point.
It will be remembered that the eighteenth century
thought with Condorcet that all fanaticism could be abol-
ished from human civilization if we could only get rid of
"priests and their hypocritical tools." The rationalists of the
eighteenth century rightly discerned that the root of fanat-
icism lies in the unwillingness of finite men to admit the
conditioned character of their perspectives and the inter-
ested character of their judgments. It correctly saw a fruit-
ful source of the illusion of the absolute in religion, but it
erroneously regarded traditional religion as the only source
of it.
It did not foresee to what degree "the scientific analysis
of objective reality" would take the place of priestly ab-
solutism as the source of fanaticism. It did not foresee
that a Stalinism would arise, which would justify the most
intolerable injustices, the most ruthless diplomacy, and the
most cynical subversion of juridical procedures on the
ground that all Communist tactics spring from devotion to
the laws of "objective reality" discovered by a Marxist-
Leninist science. Evidently it is possible to pretend to
stand above the ambiguities of human existence without
the benefit of clergy. The resulting pretensions are even
more monstrous. In so far as they are more monstrous we
must more rigorously resist them. While doing so, we will
shed a tear, however, over the plight of a civilization
caught in a controversy between a Caesar who knows
nothing about Christ and a vicar of Christ who is a little
too sure of the complete identity between his own and
Christ's puiposes.
The Catholic Heresy 233
THE RISING CATHOLIC-PROTESTANT
TENSION
Both Catholics and Protestants must admit the deep pathos
of the fears and prejudices which exist between the two
communities of Christendom, making a mockery of the
common elements in their faith, more particularly of their
common profession that "love vaunteth not itself, is not
puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not
her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil." The
fact is that we do think evil of each other and are easily
provoked.
The political struggle over the Federal Education Bill
has become so acrimonious that it threatens the social
peace of our nation. We have had some fairly serious waves
of anti-Catholic hysteria in this country, the repetition of
which we must seek to avoid at all costs. But that requires
moderation and forbearance on both sides. If a Roman
Catholic cardinal regards an honest difference of conviction
between himself and Mrs. Roosevelt on provisions of the
education bill as proof of "anti-Catholic prejudice" on
Mrs. Roosevelt's part, it would appear that there is no
possibility of proving oneself free of "prejudice" except by
agreeing with him. Such a simple solution of the problem
of "prejudice" aggravates every issue in a religiously plural-
istic nation such as our own. Not only on matters of reli-
gious controversy but on almost every other issue of life,
the preservation of community in a free society requires
that we have some degree of respect for the motives of
people who differ with us seriously, who **k>ve what we
hate" and desire that which we abhor. We must take for
granted that on all social issues we are not discamate
minds, arriving at our positions without presuppositions,
that is, without prejudices. But if we have any measure of
234 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
charity we will remember that we are in the same position
as our competitor or foe. In the words of a Puritan divine
of the seventeenth century, "my reasons are as dark to
thee as thine are dark to me until the Lord enlighten all
our seeing."
On the particular issue of tax support for parochial
schools the Protestant or the secularist is usually unable to
comprehend the sense of injustice which the Catholic tax-
payer feels, when contributing to the support of public
schools to which he does not send his children and then
paying an additional amount for the support of his own
schools. This seems like rank injustice to him. His sense of
injustice is not assuaged by the argument that our national
solution of the problem of religion and education is the
only possible democratic one. He knows that there are
democratic nations in which public funds are used for the
support of religious schools or for religious education in
public schools. The Protestant, as distinguished from the
secularist, might also bring some measure of sympathy and
understanding to the Catholic for his efforts to give a
religious content to education and for his recognition of
thefact that the public school, which is at best religiously
and culturally neutral, is at its worst, a religious school in
which a secular-religious scheme of redemption is taught.
But there are certain aspects of this problem which our
Catholic fellow-citizens have not considered sufficiently.
The complete secularization of the public school and the
prohibition of state support for parochial schools may not
be the only possible democratic solution of the problem of
the religious pluralism of America; but, it has become an
established solution. Established solutions, which work
tolerably well, are not easily challenged by abstract con-
cepts. Some of us agree with Catholic critics that there is
not much evidence that the constitutional phrase "Congress
shall pass no laws respecting the establishment of religion
or the suppression thereof" does not mean, in terms of either
logic or historic intent, the same as the "absolute wall of
separation." But surely our Catholic friends must know that
history makes and interprets laws even in nations in which
there is a written constitution, and that in this case the
The Catholic Heresy 235
Supreme Court has been the voice of history or more
exactly the voice of the American people. The jealousy for
the inviolability of the public school in its present form
may be wrong in some absolute court of judgment; but
there are no such courts in history. Catholics may believe
that it is an expression of the secularism of our age, but
they hardly do justice to the instinct for community and
social peace which is expressed in it. Should we allow the
public support of private schools in this country, ethnically
and culturally less homogeneous than any country of the
world, we would ultimately duplicate in our schools what
we already have in our churches namely, the institu-
tionalization of ethnic and cultural divisions in the com-
munity. Can a nation such as ours afford this? Such
problems are not settled by abstract concepts of "natural
law" but by a wise and statesmanlike weighing of a dozen
imponderables, all of which differ from nation to nation
and from age to age.
It is necessary furthermore to assure our Catholic friends
that the doctrine which has gained prevalence in Catholic
circles in recent decades on the question of toleration (and
which is, indeed, the traditional position of the church)
has hardened the hearts of non-Catholics in this country.
More precisely it has filled them with fear. We refer to
the position expounded by various Catholic teachers that
ultimately the church must hold the state responsible for
the support of "true" religion, meaning the Catholic reli-
gion, even though it is ready to accommodate itself to some-
thing less than this provisionally. Even Catholic reassur-
ances that only a nation, ovenvhelmingly Catholic, would
fulfill the necessary conditions for such a venture has not
quieted non-Catholic fears. We know that the orthodoxy
of this position is being challenged by able Catholic the-
ologians today. They maintain that it is not, according to
Catholic doctrine, the business of the state to be concerned
with the salvation of souls but only with the common wel-
fare; and that it is therefore not its business to give special
support to "true" religion. We do not know to what degree
this second doctrine has found acceptance in Catholic
circles. We hope it will find wide acceptance. We do know
236 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
that Ryan and Boland's exposition of Catholic doctrines,
according to which Catholic toleration of minorities would
seem to be only provisional and tentative, has had much to
do with the "camel's nose" theory held by non-Cath-
olics. This theory is that we must not yield to Catholic
demands at any point since any demand is merely the nose
which is threatening us with the whole camel of authori-
tarian religion in our tent.
One further point must be considered in weighing the
charge of "bigotry" made against those who disagree with
the Catholic position on any question. Have our Catholic
friends ever thought how much patience is required when
our own convictions are constantly challenged as obvious
violations of the natural law, and as, therefore, in conflict
with the expressed will of God?
We do not agree with Catholics in their effort to vali-
date the sacramental character of marriage by seeking to
compel the state to render marriage indissoluble by legal
enactment. Nor do we agree that there is a "natural law"
which proves contraception to be a sin against God and
nature. In many a community we are challenged by Cath-
olic prelates with threats of nonco-operation if institutions
in which birth-control information is available, are included
in a community chest. We are, furthermore, given public
reprimands for being involved in the "moral nihilism" or
the moral "relativism" of our age, if we fail to accept the
Catholic theory of an inflexible natural law, which regulates
even historically contingent moral norms.
If Protestants have any degree of charity, they will know
that these positions are matters of faith for Catholics and
that they cannot yield them. But it takes a considerable
degree of charity to remember that and not to interpret
these attitudes as merely the fruit of a graceless attitude
toward those who differ from us. A pluralistic world like
our own, indeed any democratic world, requires a certain
degree of relativity on some points of moral practice if not
on points of moral doctrine. "Remember, by the bowels of
Christ, that you may be mistaken," declared Cromwell to
the sectarian absolutists of his day who threatened the
unity of his army by their religiously inspired convictions.
The Catholic Heresy 237
It requires a great deal of forbearance, to be consistently
confronted by men and institutions who are never mis-
taken but always have the law of God on their side.
We have presented as honestly and with as little malice
as possible some of the reasons which make non-Catholics
apprehensive about Catholic theories and practices. Resent-
ments thus bred, may easily be fanned into flames by such
ill-considered charges of bigotry as Cardinal Spellman
makes with greater and greater frequency.
Having said all this, we \vould like to suggest that the
school aid question might be settled if non-Catholics would
allow federal scholarship or other educational aid, to go
to scholars in any school, provided it is to the scholar and
not the school. We have already accepted this policy in the
G.I. Bill of Rights and there is no reason why it could not
be extended. On the other hand Catholics ought not to
regard such a policy as merely one step toward the direct
tax support of parochial schools. They mistake the temper
of this country if they imagine that such a policy could be
given legal sanction without decades of the most acrimoni-
ous controversy. Furthermore, the fear of this ultimate
demand now endangers every viable compromise.
It might be added in conclusion that there is not now in
this country a meeting ground where representative leaders
of various faiths can sit down together and exchange con-
victions upon these weighty matters with some degree of
mutual trust. We will not apportion the blame for this
situation. But it is a scandal. W T e meet each other only
vituperatively in the public prints. As long as this is so,
the secularists may plausibly contend that a society can
be saved from the fury of the theologians only by its
secularization.
238 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
THE POPE'S DOMESTICATED GOD
Every Protestant who seeks to mitigate the hatreds and
fears of Rome, which so easily disfigure the heart and coun-
tenance of Protestantism, is periodically either implored
by his Catholic friends to join the true church or assured
that he is not far from being worthy of being included in
its membership. The wide advances of Catholicism since
the war have made Catholics even more confident than
hitherto that Protestantism is a heresy or defection which
mus ultimately disappear, since its dismal anarchy com-
pares unfavorably with the impressive inclusiveness and
unity of the Roman church. Even so wise a Catholic the-
ologian as Father J. Courtney Murray, in a recent debate
with W. Russell Bowie, expressed the opinion that Protes-
tants had a sense of inferiority, not because they were
afraid of becoming second-class citizens in America but
because they had a secret fear that they might be second-
class Christians.
Intolerable Pretension
All these hopes and illusions come to mind as one reads
the Pope's Christmas message. Nothing that has recently
emanated from Rome has revealed so clearly the great gulf
which lies between Rome and those of us who are not
bound to the Holy See. We often define the difference be-
tween us in terms of our varying attitude toward freedom.
We persuade ourselves that we Protestants would rather
run the risks of anarchy for the sake of spiritual freedom
than gain the boon of unity and order at the price of spirit-
ual tyranny. But that was only one issue in the Reformation.
A more important issue was derived from the Reformation
The Catholic Heresy 239
conviction that Catholicism was involved in idolatry be-
cause it allowed the church to usurp the majesty of God.
It pretended that the church could mediate the divine
mercy and judgment without itself standing under that
judgment or requiring that mercy. It was, in short, involved
in an intolerable pretension.
This pretension is expressed or implied in almost every
paragraph of the Pope's Christmas message. Pius XII be-
gins by expressing the feeling that millions of faithful are
imploring him as they once implored the Redeemer, "Give
us a sign from heaven." "Well then/* answers the Pope,
" 'today you will know that the Lord will come and at dawn
you shall see his glory/ The sign you are waiting for shall
be announced to you today . . . when by our hands the
mystic door is to be removed once again, thus opening the
entrance to the greatest temple of Christendom." In short,
the Pope will furnish the "sign from heaven" by initiating
the holy year.
The Pontiff expresses the hope that "divine providence
may deign to work in (this year) and through it the marvels
of his mercy." But this is more than a hope. It is guaranteed
by his own assurance. "We ourselves/' the Pope continues,
"to whom divine providence has reserved the privilege of
proclaiming it and granting it to the whole world, already
foresee its importance for the coming halfcentury."
After reading these words one turns to Matthew 24
where Christ warns against those who try to point too defi-
nitely to the signs of redemption: "Then if any man shall
say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.
For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and
shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it
were possible, they shall deceive the very elect/' Thus one
almost instinctively repeats the polemic of the Reformation
against Rome. At the risk of the charge of "intolerance"
one must confess that the words of the Pope strike a non-
Roman as blasphemous.
Pope Pius proceeds to analyze the political, spiritual, and
moral miseries of our day and ascribes them to the "rebel-
lion" of the modern world. "Just as the modern world has
tried to shake off the sweet yoke of God," he says, "so it
240 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
has rejected with it the order he established, and with the
selfsame pride that moved the rebel angel at the beginning
of creation, has pretended to set up another of its own
choice." This is the familiar doctrine of Catholicism that
Reformation, Renaissance, nationalism, and industrial revo-
lution are all caused by man's rebellion against the order of
God, as established in the heyday of medieval culture. It
does not take into account to what degree the new vitali-
ties which were expressed in these various movements
could not be fitted into "God's order" as the church con-
ceived it, precisely because the order was too narrowly
conceived. Nor is there any understanding here for the fact
that the irreligion of some of these movements was derived
from resentment against a too simple identification of the
will of God with the contingent circumstances of a feudal
civilization. There was undoubtedly some of the pride of
the "rebel angel" in these movements. But the same pride
was in the culture and the church against which they
rebelled.
Papal Pride
Some of the same pride is in fact betrayed in the words
in which the Pope generously welcomes back the erring
"children." Among these he includes not only the secular-
ists, whom he rightly accuses of espousing either too indi-
vidualistic or too coUectivistic forms of social life, but also,
the adherents of "schism," namely ourselves. "Why," he
asks, "are there still separations? Why are there still
schisms? When will all the forces of the spirit and of love
be united?" One answer is that this will certainly not be
possible if the voice which invites us to union speaks with
no more humility than the Pope's voice. In several para-
graphs one must read twice before being certain whether
the Pope is speaking of God or of himself. His invitation
reads: "We extend a welcome from the heart of a father
whose fatherhood in the inscrutable design of God has
come to us from Jesus the Redeemer." Here the Pope is
obviously speaking of his own paternal heart.
The Catholic Heresy 241
In another passage the meaning is not quite so clear but
in the end it becomes apparent that he is still speaking of
himself. "We expect then," he writes,
a great homecoming during this year of extraordinary
grace; great because of the number of children for whom
we reserve a most affectionate welcome; great because
of the distance some of them will come . . . May all
our sons and all men of good will lovingly undertake not
to disappoint the hopes of the common Father [yes,
capital F] who holds up his hand to heaven in prayer
that the new outpouring of divine mercy upon the world
may surpass all expectations.
The Pope fondly regards himself as the successor of St.
Peter. It will be remembered that St. Peter, after a heal-
ing miracle, asked, "Why look ye so earnestly on us, as
though by our own power or holiness we had made this
man walk?" One looks in vain for any such modesty in this
papal pronouncement.
Authentic Christian Teaching
Not only is the grace of God thus bound to the Holy See
but the mysteries of divine mercy are related to the holy
year. Not absolutely, of course. "Let the holy year then be
chiefly a year of repentance and expiation. Interior and
voluntary repentance together with expiation are the indis-
pensable prerequisites of every human renovation," the
Pope writes. There are some moving Christian exhortations
in the statement, not only on the necessities of repentance
but upon the need of forgiveness of our foes. On that par-
ticular issue the Pope has spoken consistently in words of
gospel truth and power. "W T hoever would be a sincere
Christian," he declares, "must know how to forgive. "Thou
wicked servant/ is the rebuke of the Gospel parable, \vas
it not thy duty to have mercy upon thy fellow servant, as
I had on thee?'"
One mentions these words of Christian truth gratefully
because they prove that there is Christian content in the
242 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
Roman Catholic church, as there are no doubt many mani-
festations of grace in its life. Some time ago at an ecumeni-
cal discussion with Catholic theologians in France they
advanced the theory that we might be able to ^approach
each other with greater charity if we recognized "remnants
of the true church" in each other rather than "branches of
the one church," They felt that they would be able to see
some "remnant" of the true church in any church in which
Biblical truth led to a life of grace. We ought to be able to
say as much when we look upon the Roman church. Cath-
olics will, of course, find it offensive if we are able to find
only remnants of the true church in this papal statement.
But we will not be driven by our resentments to withhold
this recognition. By the same token, we cannot be forced
by premature hopes of unity to desist from registering a
profound disquiet over the temper of the statement as
a whole.
Exaltation of Rome
There is an ironic quality in the conclusion of the papal
statement. It would almost seem as if the Pope felt that he
had not sufficiently bound the grace of God to a particular
institution and thought he had to underscore the place
which the city of Rome, as seat of the Holy See, has in the
divine plan. "Every Christian," he writes, "can and should
say, 'Rome is my fatherland.* Here God's supernatural
providence over souls is more particularly in evidence; here
the saints acquired the norm and inspiration of their hero-
ism . . . Here is the immovable rock to which your hopes
are anchored." A more persuasive voice constantly inter-
venes to challenge these cadences: "If any man shall say,
Lo, here is Christ, or there, believe it not/*
We are living in tragic times and have no certainty that
a suicidal conflict can be avoided. We are not even certain
that the health of Western civilization can be preserved.
We cannot even be sure that the Catholic party in Italy
will grant land reform quickly and thoroughly enough to
prevent a further spread of Communism in that country.
The Catholic Heresy 243
Our anxieties are aggravated by the fear that nations, peo-
ples, and institutions may not be adequate for this time of
testing, that they have not been sufficiently shaken in their
pride and self-esteem to do what is necessary for their sal-
vation. We would be more secure if the Roman Catholic
church were anxious with us under the divine judgment
and not so anxious about us. We would be willing to dis-
pense with the assurance of its fatherly forgiveness toward
us if we were certain that it sought divine forgiveness with
us for the evils in which \ve have been jointly involved.
The Elder Brother of the Parable
"The venerable father of the Gospel story," declares the
Pope, "is waiting anxiously on the threshold of the holy
door for the contrite return of the prodigal son." But when
the Roman church is not usurping the place of the Divine
Father it seems to assume the place of the elder brother
who does not need repentance. If the mercy of the Father
were not so great, the elder brother could drive every
prodigal back into the wilderness.
The Roman church has a favorite explanation of all the
ills of modern life. They are due to mankind's departure
from "God's plan" as incorporated in the church. We have
an equally plausible explanation, not for all the ills of the
modern world but for a serious aggravation of all our dif-
ficulties. The animosities of modern men are exacerbated
on the one hand by the priest-kings of a secular religion
who make ridiculous pretensions of omniscience and om-
nipotence from the Kremlin; and on the other hand by
priests of a true religion who give the final glory to God
but meanwhile are too certain that they are privy to his
counsels and the sole dispensers of his grace.
"Those who are whole have no need of a physician, but
those that are sick," declares Christ in a deeply ironic
word. Could it be that this word is meant for the church
as well as the world? Might it not mediate the healing
power of the true physician more surely if the church
acknowledged its complicity in the world's ills?
244 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
THE INCREASING ISOLATION
OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Recent developments in the Catholic church must be dis-
turbing to all non-Roman Christians, even if we have not,
as some Anglo-Catholics, cherished the hope of a possible
ultimate reunion with Rome. For these developments in-
crease the isolation of the Roman church from the rest of
Christendom. They widen the moat of pretension and
heighten the wall of contradictory dogma which separates
Rome from other Christians.
The first shock came with the Vatican announcement
that the Pope would, on November ist, declare the assump-
tion of the Virgin Mary to be a dogma of the church, which
all members of the church are bound to believe. Thus the
Pope invokes for the first time the doctrine of papal infal-
libility which was established in 1870; and at the same
time he incorporates a legend of the Middle Ages into the
official teachings of the church, thereby placing the final
capstone on the Mariolatry of the Roman church.
In some respects the papal encyclical of August 2ist is
even more disturbing. This is a very carefully worded
document which will have as fateful an influence upon the
thought of the church as the encyclical on modernism in
the last century. In fact, it brings theological tendencies,
first expressed in that encyclical, to their logical conclusion.
But it is not modernism which is proscribed in the encycli-
cal. The theological tendencies against which the Pope
warns are thoroughly orthodox from the Biblical stand-
point. They are questionable only from a strict Thomistic
standpoint. The Pope's warnings are obviously intended
against theological movements in England, France, and
Germany which have won the respect of Christian thought
beyond the confines of the Roman church.
The Catholic Heresy 245
The strict Thomism of the encyclical is directed against
both Protestant thought and against tendencies in modem
philosophy. The Pope warns against the "eirenism" in some
sections of the church which seeks to "reconcile differences
in dogma" between Roman and non-Roman churches.
More specifically this means that Augustinian, as distin-
guished from Thomistic forms of thought, frequently lead
to conceptions of the relation of faith to reason, in which
Protestants and Catholics are able to agree. In refutation
of this position the encyclical frequently reasserts the
Thomistic position which makes faith not so much the
presupposition of reason as the correction of reason which
has "been hampered both by the activity of the senses and
the imagination and by evil passions arising from original
sin." "Absolutely speaking," die encyclical asserts, "reason
can, by its own natural force and light, arrive at the true
and certain knowledge of the one personal God."
The Thomistic position is also asserted against tendencies
in modern Catholic thought to regard various philosophies
as compatible with the Christian faith, a thesis eloquently
defended recently in the current issue of an English Cath-
olic journal. The Pope criticizes those who think "that our
perennial philosophy is only a philosophy of immutable
essences while the contemporary mind must look to the
existence of things and life which is ever in flux." This
section of the encyclical seems almost specifically directed
at the thought of Christian existentialists such as Gabriel
Marcel.
For reasons which are not quite clear in the encyclical,
the Pope also warns against the preoccupation of some
Catholic theologians with early Christian thought. "What
is expounded in the encyclical letters of the Roman Pontiffs
is habitually neglected by some with the idea of giving
force to some notions (sic} which they profess to have
found in the ancient fathers, especially the Greeks." This
portion of the encyclical would seem to have serious conse-
quences on some very significant patristic studies, particu-
larly in France.
In addition fruitful Biblical studies are restricted because
some of the Catholic Biblical scholars have evidently
346 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
traced (as all good Biblical scholars do) the relation of
Biblical to non-Biblical historical material. The Pope as-
serts that the Genesis chapters on creation, etc., must be
accepted as simple history and nothing must be taught
which might imply that our "ancient sacred writers" are
not superior to "the ancient profane writers."
In every section of the encyclical the kind of freedom
which true scholarship requires, is restricted in the interest
of a strict Thomism. One has no right to speculate from the
outside just what sort of forces inside the church move
toward the production of such a document. But one rather
suspects that the practical hierarchs who want everything
in neat and exact form, have expressed themselves in this
encyclical against some of the most creative theologians in
the Roman church.
Perhaps the most serious aspect of the encyclical is not
so much in the particular restrictions which it places upon
thought, as its insistence that all encyclical utterances are
generally binding.
"If the Supreme Pontiffs," declares the Pope,
in their official documents purposely pass judgment upon
a matter up to that time in dispute, it is obvious that
the matter, according to the mind and the will of the
same Pontiffs, can no longer be considered a question
open to discussion among theologians.
The papal absolutism takes one further step and the
ossification of dogma is furthered to one more degree. Non-
Roman Christians cannot but view these developments
with profound regret, particularly in an age in which so
many lights of freedom are snuffed out.
The Catholic Heresy 247
CATHOLICS AND POLITICS:
SOME MISCONCEPTIONS
Most American non-Catholics have a very inaccurate con-
cept of Roman Catholic political thought and life. In this
concept, it is assumed that if Catholics anywhere had their
way, they would at once build a political structure as much
like Spain's as possible.
This land of reasoning is highly damaging to the mutual
understanding upon which a democratic society must rest.
Democracy requires more careful and discriminate judg-
ments about friend and foe, particularly since a political
foe upon one issue in the vast welter of issues may be a
friend on another. Some forms of deduction proceed from
the assumption that on every and any question a religious
group's political attitude is dictated by its basic creed.
Others do not even bother to start with the group's actual
basic tenets but with tenets the group is imagined to hold.
Thus it is argued: Catholicism is an authoritarian reli-
gion. All forms of authoritarianism are (a) hostile to de-
mocracy and (b) are brothers under the skin to totalitari-
anism. It follows that Catholicism is antidemocratic and
totalitarian. A simple syllogism then leads with seeming
logic to an extravagant question: Is Catholicism any better
than Communism? Even that is frequently answered with-
out allowing common-sense evidence to muddy the clear
stream of our deductive process.
Religion and Democracy
There is a story about Garibaldi during his campaign for
the political unification of Italy. He was told that he must
expect the opposition of every village priest. He declared
248 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
that he would not assume this to be true until it had been
proven. He had the reward that comes to every good
empiricist: It proved untrue.
I write upon this subject as a Protestant theologian who
has his own misgivings about Catholic politics. They can
be stated in three propositions:
In the first place, I don't like religious political parties
as they exist on the Continent of Europe. I believe that one
great achievement of Anglo-Saxon democracy is that it has
no religious parties. Religious parties are dangerous be-
cause they tend to identify the moral ambiguities of politics
(and every political position contains some moral ambigu-
ity) with eternal sanctities. The result is that almost any
kind of struggle can be interpreted as a contest between
Christ and anti-Christ.
Second, I think that the Catholic church tends to iden-
tify the historic church with the Kingdom of God, and too
often its final criterion is what a political movement prom-
ises or does not promise to the historic church. It is there-
fore forced at times to give preference to movements which
deserve plainly to be condemned on grounds of justice. The
relation of the Catholic hierarchy to Peron in Argentina is
a case in point.
Finally, the reasoning of Catholic political moralists is
too dependent upon deductive and intuitive "rational prop-
ositions" for my taste. I do not believe that the only escape
from moral mhilism is to be found in the inflexible proposi-
tions of "natural law"; particularly not when these propo-
sitions become very detailed and commend some principle
(such as prohibition of birth control or the absolute prohi-
bition of divorce) as a moral standard fixed by God's eter-
nal law. No one could convince me that birth control would
not be advantageous, in Italy, India, and some other
overpopulated nations.
Catholicism in Industrial Society
After this confession of prejudices, I can proceed to chal-
lenge too simple judgments about Catholic politics.
The Catholic Heresy 249
The worst defect is that Catholicism is often judged
solely as it shows itself in old (and decaying) feudal struc-
tures, whether in Spain or South America or even in French
Canada. People who argue this way usually ignore the re-
lationship of Catholicism to the political life of modern
industrial society. Catholicism is at its least impressive in
feudal-agrarian societies, where it frequently seeks desper-
ately to hold onto special powers and privileges which
were essential in the Middle Ages but are so no longer.
Catholicism is most creative in highly developed industrial
communities.
It seems completely unknown to American critics of
Catholicism that the "middle ground" of European democ-
racy is now being held, and has long been held, primarily
by a combination of Catholic and socialist parties. For
obvious reasons, the alliance has never been easy. Yet for
two reasons cooperation has been possible. Catholicism has
always believed that "the state has the moral authority' to
control economic life." In a sense, therefore, Catholicism,
which may have been too tender with the weaknesses of
feudalism, has never capitulated to pure capitalism. It has
never believed that justice would be an inevitable by-
product of the free play of economic forces.
In the second place, Catholicism's relation to European
labor has differed from that of Protestantism. Protestantism
lost the laboring masses almost completely. Catholicism lost
them too tragically, as Pius XI admitted. But Catholicism
has recently regained an organic relationship with labor;
its labor organizations have become genuine trade unions
and have influenced the policies of the Catholic parties. In
effect, unions have formed the bridge which has made the
Catholic-socialist alliances possible.
The Protestant Default
In the Germany of the Weimar Republic, the Prussian
state government was controlled for over a decade by a
Catholic-socialist alliance. In contrast to the Republic itself,
the Prussian regime preserved a remarkable stability. What
50 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
little stability the Weimar Republic had also depended
upon this overt and sometimes covert alliance.
It must be observed that the old German Center party
did not include the Bavarian Catholics. They had then-
own Bavarian People's party for the simple reason that
their kind of agrarian conservatism did not fit into the poli-
cies Catholics had developed in the highly industrialized
German Rhineland. Unfortunately, these two parties have
since the war become one. The result is that the Adenauer
government is considerably more conservative than the old
Center. A few years ago some left-wing Catholics in the
British Zone tried to reorganize the Center, but it was no
more than a splinter group.
The differences betwen Catholicism in Bavaria and in
the Rhineland are roughly typical of the differences be-
tween the expression of the Catholic ethos in agrarian and
in industrial situations. In industrial Europe, Catholicism
has had a more creative approach to politics than Protes-
tantism because the latter (particularly in Lutheran coun-
tries) tends to be too individualistic and too eschatological
(that is to say, preoccupied with ultimate religious issues)
to be capable of discriminate judgments in the endless
complexities of politics.
Situation in France
Since the Second World War, Catholic influence upon
politics in western Europe has grown perceptibly, and only
the bigoted or unrealistic could ascribe this to Vatican
machinations. In France, the Popular Republicans, the
M.R.P., emerged as the first strong Catholic political party
in the history of the French Republic. It was heir to, and
formed by, a long and distinguished line of Catholic
"social" thinkers. In the first elections it won 30 per cent
of the vote, but this strength proved to be ephemeral. What
happened was that everyone who would have liked to back
the old parlies of the right, which had been discredited by
Vichyism, went along with the new party. It has steadily
lost both to the older 'liberal" parties and to the Gaul-
The Catholic Heresy 251
lists, until now it commands only twelve per cent of the
electorate. But it still is a very important political force. Its
greatest individual contribution to French politics is per-
haps the perpetual French Foreign Minister, Robert Schu-
man. Its left wing is eager to remove the purely religious
cleavage in European politics and to work for a just social
order under modern industrial conditions. It is indicative
of the temper of French Catholicism that two years ago,
when the Pope said it was impossible to be both Catholic
and Communist, the French bishops interpreted the papal
word sa that it would be clear that the church did not
imply a Catholic preference for capitalism. The bishops
cafled attention to previous papal encyclicals to show that
the church did not accept the doctrine of an unregulated
economic life. (Perhaps some Americans will remember
that Franklin Roosevelt, in his first campaign, justified his
New Deal by appealing to Catholic political theories based
on Pope Leo XIII's teachings and expounded in this coun-
try by the late Father John Ryan. Roosevelt pointed out
that the "Social Creed" of the Federal Council of Churches
was in substantial agreement with these teachings.)
At Home
It is hardly necessary to expound the realities of the
American scene. Fortunately we do not have religious
parties. But it would be well for Protestants who talk about
the "reactionary" tendencies of Catholicism to remember
that, in religious terms, the main political struggles in
America would appear to be between Jews and Catholics
who are left of the Center and Protestants who are right
of it.
The alliance between Republicanism and Protestantism
is, as in Europe, prompted by the affinity between religious
individualism and the political individualism of the farmer
on the one hand and the businessman on the other. Cath-
olics do not have their own trade unions in America, but no
one can question that they have a sounder relation to the
unions than Protestants, as such, do. This is partly due to
252 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
the fact that our farmers and business people have been
largely Protestant, while industrial workers, at least in the
North, are predominantly Catholic and, in certain sections
and trades, Jewish. The imbalance is no doubt related to
the historic pattern of migration to our shores. A good deal
of Catholic politics in America is strictly "lay Catholicism."
The fact is that the best Catholic politics in Europe is also
"lay," or so it seems at least to an observer who has anti-
clerical prejudices.
This does not mean that sharp distinction can be drawn
between clerical conservatism and lay progressrvism. Some
of the more radical tendencies in European Catholic poli-
tics emanate from neither lay nor clerical sources but from
various Catholic orders. There are individual bishops in
every Catholic country even in Spain who cannot be
branded conservative. Take as an example the recent un-
explained tension in Quebec between an archbishop, who
had ordered collections in the churches for some strikers,
and the very conservative Quebec government under Pre-
mier Duplessis. The archbishop resigned no one knows
just why. It would seem unlikely that a politician could
defeat an archbishop in the counsels of the Vatican. But,
in the absence of any authoritative explanation, many
Canadian observers draw the conclusion that, in this case,
this did happen.
Freedom in Catholicism
In international politics, there is the same need for cir-
cumspection. A favorite theory of anti-Catholics is that the
Pope is scheming for another world war because of Cath-
olic losses in lands behind the Iron Curtain, particularly in
Poland and Hungaiy. Catholic prelates have indeed made
statements which seem to support a "preventive" war.
When a pious Catholic secretary of the navy voiced such
sentiments over a year ago (sentiments which were subse-
quently repudiated by the administration), the case seemed
to be complete for the theory that American Catholic
leaders want a preventive war.
The Catholic Heresy 253
Yet there is strong evidence that the Vatican is strongly
opposed to the idea. There is certainly no question that the
Catholic statesmen and clerical leaders of Western Europe
are opposed to it. They are also very critical of what one of
them has called the "sterile anti-Communism" of some
American Catholics. The Pope's Christmas message with its
"plague o* both your houses" note should help refute the
usual concept of Vatican foreign policy.
Incidentally, there is no evidence of simple unanimity
among clerical leaders of America on problems of inter-
national politics. We tend to assume that the position of
the most vocal cardinals is generally accepted. This assump-
tion may be false, but those of us who accept it are not
altogether to blame. For Catholic leaders do not criticize
each other in public. Nor do they publicly disassociate
themselves, although they may privately, from Catholic
positions in other nations Spain, for instance. Thus they
are partly responsible for the myth of a monolithic Catholic
part} 7 , speaking with the same voice throughout the world.
Still it is dangerous for all of us to give the myth cre-
dence. Catholicism naturally has a greater unity of disci-
pline than other religious communities. But it has the free-
dom to relate itself to various national situations. It also
has many moral and spiritual resources which can act
creatively in a free and responsible society.
PROTESTANTS, CATHOLICS,
AND SECULARISTS ON
THE SCHOOL ISSUE
Elsewhere in this issue we are publishing an article by
Will Herberg on the Protestant-Catholic tension in educa-
tion, which originally appeared in the monthly Commen-
tary. Mr. Herberg, an influential leader among the reli-
giously minded Jews, who has a great influence among
254 ESSAYS IX APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
Christian and Jewish college youth, is concerned that the
Protestant opposition to Catholicism on the school question
plays into the hands of the secularists, who want to elimi-
nate religion from education altogether. We agree with
Mr. Herberg, but it is important to call attention to the
fact that the Protestant church can not easily choose sides
in this controversy because both Catholics and secularists
advance claims in the name of democracy which are incom-
patible with democratic pluralism. The Catholic position is
democratic in two senses of that term. It resists the claim
of the state to enforce uniform education in the name of
the right of parents to give their children an education ac-
cording to their convictions. It is also democratic in the
sense that a Christian viewpoint emphasizes the true di-
mension of the individual, as having his ultimate authority
and fulfillment above the political community and the social
process in which he is involved. Without this emphasis
man is easily debased into a mere instrument of a social
or political process and is left powerless to defy the majes-
ties of the world with a rigorous: "We must obey God
rather than man."
But it is only fair to note that our schools are secular
not only because of the pluralism of Protestants and the in-
roads of secularism, but also because the Catholic church
objects to religious instruction in the schools under any but
Catholic auspices; furthermore the impulse to do justice to
Catholics, by permitting them to gain the fringe benefits
of buses, luncheons, and textbooks, is lamed consistently by
the refusal of Catholics to promise that the granting of
those benefits will not be the entering wedge for larger
demands, ending in the state support of Catholic schools.
But such a disposition of the vexing school question would
lead to the endless elaboration of parochial schools by every
sect; and this would no doubt seriously impair the unity in
a nation which is religiously as pluralistic as we are. The
absolute claims of Catholicism are, in short, not easily
fitted into a democratic framework.
On the other hand, the secularists make even more abso-
lute claims in the name of democracy. Instead of valuing
The Catholic Heresy 255
the various religious traditions they would annul them all
in the name of the unity of the democratic community and
their secular viewpoint, which is, in effect, another religion
with a total and consistent outlook upon life; this violates
what Christians and Jews feel to be the truth about man
and his destiny. In the one case, the resource of democratic
individualism is impaired by an ecclesiastical institution.
In the other case, a so-called democratic community is made
into an idolatrous center of meaning which violates the
rights of the individual which it must be the business of
democracy to guard. In this situation there is obviously
no consistent line of policy out of the difficulty; the suppo-
sition that a mere emphasis upon the separation of church
and state will solve all difficulties contributes to the total
secularization of our national culture, as Mr. Herberg
observes.
Catholics and Protestants ought to realize that the mutual
fear and mistrust in which they live is an offense to Chris-
tian charity and a scandal in the sight of scoffers and un-
believers. They ought to take steps to make contact between
the two communities, at least as intimate as those which
exist in the German Rhineland, for instance. They must,
furthermore, take practical steps to liquidate the specific
controversy in regard to education, more particularly the
federal education bill. The most obvious solution of this
problem is for Protestants to give up their opposition to
federal aid to Catholic children and for Catholics to dis-
avow public aid for the maintenance of parochial schools.
To accomplish this result both sides will have to be more
flexible in defining tibe standards to which they appeal.
The Catholics ought to realize that no abstract standards of
justice can overcome the historic prestige of an established
institution, such as the public school. The Protestants must
learn that no principle, such as the separation of church
and state, is not subject to amendment in the light of new
developments. The particular developments which chal-
lenge this principle are two. On the one hand the realiza-
tion that absolute separation leads to the secularization of
our culture, and that on the other hand the modern state
256 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
with its wide taxing powers can not so easily be separated
from any vital aspect of community concern as the fathers
assumed.
THE CATHOLIC HIERARCHY'S
ANALYSIS OF THE ILLS
OF OUR DAY
In a rather startling statement published November 20,
the American cardinals, archbishops, and bishops, through
their organization of the administrative board of the Cath-
olic Welfare Conference, addressed themselves to a diagno-
sis of the ills of our day. They found the enemy to be
"atheistic materialism or godless humanism." They did not
merely point to the incorporated tyranny which is our
political enemy. But they warned that if we are to "escape
the fate of China, Yugoslavia and so many others, if we
are to survive as a free nation, we must be strong and
clear-eyed. It is the blind who fall into the pit." They were
insistent that they were not merely talking about the obvi-
ous political enemy. "Some see the enemy only as a state
or a group of states or as an economic system," they de-
clared. "Spiritual vision gives better intelligence of the fact.
The enemy is entrenched in the organs of a foreign state
or in one of our own domestic institutions; it is atheistic
materialism which threatens to destroy us. This is the
enemy."
In order that there be no misunderstanding they repeat,
"Materialism is the real enemy whether at home or abroad.
In its varieties there is little difference in land. The differ-
ence is largely one of degree. Both are deadly to America/'
The hierarchy then proceeds to define this deadly "ma-
terialism." It turns out to be the whole gamut of what the
rest of us Christians would define as sin. It can be given
the connotation of "materialism" so plausibly because the
The Catholic Heresy 257
good is identified with "spirit" and the evil with "matter."
"The way of the flesh and of matter is the way of death,"
they declare and, "The way of God and the spirit is the
way of life."
Many critics thought they discerned echoes of Platonic
dualism in St. Paul's phrases of "carnally minded" and
"spiritually minded." But we doubt whether even St. Paul's
thought would lend itself to the interpretation which iden-
tifies all evil with "matter."
The bishops proceed to identify the various manifesta-
tions of evil in our day with this "materialism." They say,
"It is not that God is expressly or generally denied. It is
rather that so many ignore hirn and his kw in their ab-
sorption in the material world which he created. There
is not yet a deliberate turning away from God but there is
excessive preoccupation with creatures/'
This analysis reveals the Augustinian thought which dis-
tinguishes between the love of God and the love of the
world, and the love of self. But it falls short of the Augus-
tinian definition of sin as the proud self-love or superbia.
in short, Plato has evidently completely triumphed over the
Scriptures in the definition of good and evil. The triumph
is so complete that it makes it possible to identify any one
who believes in God with virtue, and everyone who does
not with evil. Naturally the idea that all men are at vari-
ance with God, not excluding Christians, is erased. This
makes it possible to divide tlie world simply between the
good Christians and the vile "atheists" who are naturally
"materialists."
It is perhaps significant that the Atonement as the con-
tent of the Incarnation is reduced to proportions which
seem positively heretical from the Scriptural standpoint. It
is declared that Christ "set men's feet on the highroad of
faith, hope and love; the highroad of happiness through
harmony with God, with feHowrnen, and with himself.
Jesus Christ restored the meaning and purpose of love in
human life. He warmed and illumined our life where be-
fore it had been cold and dark. He rescued man from the
wild wandering and dark despair of the atheistic material-
ism of that day. In this day of the new paganism we Chris-
ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
tians can again triumph in the name of the same cross of
Christ." This is really a novel doctrine of the Atonement
of the Cross. It is certainly novel to picture the Lord as tri-
umphing over the "atheistic materialism" of his day. We
had always believed that he triumphed over the hard-
heartedness of the fanatically righteous people of his day.
But above all he triumphed over the sins of the whole
world, including the sins of the people who most certainly
believed in God.
Jn the framework of this conception of good and evil,
the sins of our day are excoriated. We are told that "There
is no need to instance the growing evils in family life, the
growing self-indulgence which leads from birth prevention
to divorce, from broken homes to the broken lives of youth-
ful delinquents." The materialism, which is the root of all
our difficulties, is said to "reveal itself as secularism in poli-
tics, as avarice in business and the professions and as
paganism in personal lives and relations of all to many
men and women."
The bishops then warn, "unless we push back the domes-
tic invasion of materialism, we shall not be able, as history
clearly attests, to withstand the enemy from without."
The most obvious criticism of such sweeping statements
is that the bishops have availed themselves of a well-known
political technique of identifying every tendency that they
do not like with a hated enemy. Jacob Burckhardt, the
great historian, once spoke of "the terrible simplifies." In
our opinion this statement is in the category of a terrible
simplification.
Ultimately we must object, as Christians, to the state-
ment of the Catholic bishops because it distinguishes be-
tween the godly righteous and the godless sinners and
obscures the fact that Christ convicts, before he saves, both
the godly and the godless for being at variance with God.
This, in short, is the old debate between the Reformation
and Catholicism. We believe that the Reformation was
more true both to Scripture and to the facts of life than
this type of Catholic spirituality. It was also right in seeing
the whole of the self under judgment rather than the body
or even "matter*"
The Catholic Heresy 259
But it is also relevant to observe that this kind of division
confuses us in "knowing the enemy" in the pluralistic
conditions of a quasi-Christian and quasi-secular society.
Whether we consider the moral, the cultural, or the politi-
cal facts, we cannot define the enemy so simply as the
bishops propose to do.
Morally it is certainly dubious to identify the sin of
"preoccupation with the creature" and the idolatrous devo-
tion to the comforts of the "American way of life" with
philosophical materialism. It is particularly ironic because
of the fact that the godly have been rather more successful
in achieving wealth through technical efficiency than the
godless Communists. According to Max Weber, Protestant-
ism is probably more responsible for the development of a
commercial and then a technical civilization than Catholi-
cism, which, when left unaided, has preferred an agrarian
culture. But there is no evidence that either Puritans or
Catholics have been immune to the temptations of riches
and comforts in our culture (that is, to lures of practical
materialism as distinguished from philosophical material-
ism) because they believed in God.
We doubt incidentally whether either the godly or the
godless can be held -responsible for the predicament of a
civilization with such high productive standards that it is
forced to use tremendous advertising pressure to persuade
the consumers to higher and more luxurious consumption.
Let the first person who allows himself to be persuaded to
turn in a perfectly good used car for a new and shinier
one, search his soul and solve this problem.
On another sector of the moral front, it is certainly too
simple to derive the frequency of divorce and consequent
child delinquency from the practice of birth control We
deplore the gradual decay of family life in an urban society
but reflect that the family does tolerably well under the
strain of urban conditions, as contrasted with the stabilities
of an agrarian world. As for child delinquency, one would
guess that too many children in a poverty-stricken home
may contribute to the problem.
Culturally the distinction between a "godless humanism
and atheistic materialism" and a godly culture is also too
Z60 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
simple. Certainly our culture has a strong strain of natural-
istic thought which could be defined as "materialistic/'
Wliether the naturalism is Freudian or Marxist, it has little
sense of the unique dignity and responsibility of the human
self. But there is also a strong strain of '^humanism," usu-
ally drawn from classical, rather than Christian sources.
This humanism can hardly be called "godless" though some-
times it is explicitly so. It does not lack a sense of the dig-
nity of the person. Unfortunately it usually lacks what the
bishops' statement also lacked, namely, a sense of the mis-
ery of man having the same root as his dignity in the
person's radical freedom. Neither the bishops nor our
humanists have studied Pascal. Both are probably too busy
proving that either faith in God, or disbelief in him, is a
prerequisite of true virtue, that they failed to note the
common human predicament of theists and atheists. This
predicament is that, "There is a law in their members
\vhich wars against the law that is in their mind." When
that fact is discovered the difference between faith and lack
of it may become apparent. For true self-knowledge in the
light of the revelation of the divine justice and mercy may
be "the sorrow that leadeth to repentance." On the other
hand, "The sorrow of the world leads to death." That is to
say, to despair. On this issue the Christian faith can chal-
lenge modern culture without embarrassment. But nothing
but embarrassment can result from the policy of commend-
ing Christ by pointing to the righteousness of the believers
and the sins of the ungodly. The goodness of the former
always proves itself to be fragmentary and ambiguous
and the sins of the ungodly are not as consistently black
as the godly debaters would have us believe.
In the realm of politics it is particularly embarrassing to
attribute the freedom of an open society to the Christian
faith and to insinuate that a "godless humanism and ma-
terialism" must inevitably lead to tyranny. This is true even
though the Christian is on firm ground when he insists that
without a Biblical faith it is impossible to assert the dignity
of the individual against the encroaching community or to
find the authority upon the basis of which it is possible
to defy the tyrannical community with a resolute: "We
The Catholic Heresy 261
must obey God rather than man." We are also on firm
ground when we call attention to the fact that the tyranny
of Stalinism was not a fortuitous corruption of Marxist
idealism, but a natural consequence of the illusions about
human nature in Marxist thought. We might even go fur-
ther and assert that the thought of the French Enlighten-
ment, revered by many liberals who abhor Communism,
was basically totalitarian, as Talman in his Totalitarian
Democracy has so well established. Its totalitarianism did
not stem so much from its materialism as from its naive
rationalism and its consequent determination to "redeem"
society by forcing men to accept rationally approved stand-
ards of justice. In that sense Comte was certainly totali-
tarian, and so are many contemporary psychologists who
dream of a Utopia in which men will be "conditioned" to
be virtuous. (See Skinner, "Wai den Two.")
But these tendencies to totalitarianism in a consistent
rationalism which does not appreciate either the dignity of
the individual or the peril of his egotism to the community,
still does not change the fact that a free society had to
establish itself against pious forms of authoritarianism
which believed it legitimate to annul freedom so long as
such annulment protected God and "God's laws" against
the rebellion of men. Perhaps the only Christians who truly
believed in freedom were the Levellers and Independents
of the England of the seventeenth century. Incidentally
Santayana may be right in suggesting that political democ-
racy was originally a unique Anglo-Saxon achievement.
That judgment, however, does not do justice to the growth
of liberty in the various parts of Western Europe.
In any event, the story of religious authoritarianism and
fanaticism is such a sorry chapter in the history of the West
that Christians must observe a proper humility and lack of
polemical bias when they discuss the various ways in which
liberty has been established and imperiled by both the
godly and the godless.
We might sum up this critical discussion of the bishops'
pronouncement with the observation that any Christian
challenge to our culture which does not call both the
godly and the godless to repentance must be suspect. For
2,62, ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
the Christian faith deals basically with the perpetual vari-
ance between all men and God. It therefore senses, with
the prophet Jeremiah, the judgments of God upon "the cir-
cumcised and uncircumcised." But this is one of those
instances in which the prophets of the Old Testament saw
the issue rather more clearly than many conventional forms
of Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant.
PART v: The Church and the Churches:
The Ecumenical Movement
A. The Ecumenical Issue in the United States
B. The Problems of a World Church
A. THE ECUMENICAL ISSUE IN THE
UNITED STATES
THE ECUMENICAL ISSUE IN
THE UNITED STATES
Many of the debates of the great world conferences,
dealing with the problem of the reunion of the churches
on a world scale, seem quite irrelevant to the American
scene. The American denominations faithfully send their
delegates to these conferences and the delegates listen at-
tentively to the debates on the right order of the church,
and are not moved. They do not take the problem of order
too seriously, except in so far as many of them are afraid of
any order which might imperil the freedom of the
congregation.
The cause of this irrelevance of ecumenical debates in
America is the fact that American churches are historically
and predominantly under the influence o the "sect" idea
of the church or the "sect" protest against the order, the
liturgy, and the theology of the church.* Ecumenical de-
The distinction of "church" and "sect" used in these pages
has been familiar since Ernst Troeltsch first defined the distinc-
tion. The very fact that churches become sects in America, and
sects churches, because the former are less inclusive in America
than in Europe and the latter less exclusive, partly obscures and
seems to invalidate the distinction. It is, nevertheless, a useful
265
266 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
bates presuppose the church in the orthodox sense. They
take its order, its theology, and, to a considerable degree,
its liturgy, seriously. They seek to arrive at the definition
of a common order and theology upon which the entire
church can unite. But the sect of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth century came into being in protest against the
church and against its liturgy, theology, and order.
The sect protested against the inclusiveness of the
church, believing that in it believers were yoked with un-
believers. It believed in a voluntary and exclusive fellow-
ship, entrance into which was not by inheritance but by
a clear experience of repentance and conversion. The sect
protested against the hierarchical order of the church both
because it found the distinctions involved in it a peril to
the Christian ideal of equality and because it regarded
the authority of the hierarchs as dangerous to Christian
liberty. Various sects did not emphasize this equalitarian
and libertarian principle equally. Some were more equali-
tarian and some were more libertarian. But the critical
attitude toward the order of the church was general.
The sect tended also to be untheological or antitheologi-
cal. It emphasized the immediacy of religious experience
and regarded rational-theological elaborations and defini-
tions of the Christian faith as a threat to the vitality of that
faith. Frequently it preferred lay preachers to a profes-
sional ministry or priesthood. For the same reason it was
critical of both sacraments and liturgy, fearing that in the
one sacramental grace might be claimed by "graceless"
men, and that in the other "devotion's every grace except
the heart" might be cultivated. It preferred spontaneous
prayer, sometimes delivered in the forms of crude
immediacy.
These generalizations about sects are somewhat mislead-
ing because there were many kinds of sects. Some were
socially radical and sought to sharpen the contrast between
the world, to which the church had accommodated itself,
and the Kingdom of God, which they desired to realize
upon the earth. Some were individualistic and pietistic and
distinction for purposes of defining the historical traditions in
which two different types of American churches were formed.
The Church and the Churches 2,67
emphasized the experience of the saving power of Christ
in the individual heart, in contrast to all social and com-
munal, historical and theological expressions of the Chris-
tian faith. Nevertheless, generalizations about sectarian pro-
tests against the church are justified because there is some-
thing common in them despite all diversities. Sectarian
Christianity is a form of the Christian faith which is more
conscious of the corruptions of the order of the church, of
its theology and its liturgy than it is appreciative of them
as means of grace. The church on the other hand tends too
uncritically to celebrate all these instruments of faith as
means of grace without understanding the perils of corrup-
tion in all of them.
The problem of ecumenical Christianity in America is
the problem of resolving what is true and false in both the
church and the sect idea of Christianity, rather than the
problem of finding the right order of the church. The rea-
son that this is so is because churches developed from a
sect foundation have had the dominant influence in Ameri-
can church history. Of the powerful American denomina-
tions the Baptists belong most clearly to the sect tradition,
though it must be observed that some of the socially radi-
cal implications of the continental Anabaptist movement
of the sixteenth century were not transmitted to either the
English or the American Baptist heritage. Yet Roger
Williams' radical individualism and Hbertarianism, coupled
with his radical "seeker" suspicion of all historical institu-
tional forms of Christianity, have had a potent influence
upon American Baptist life.
Congregationalism is not purely "sect/' nor was the
English Independency from which it is derived. Yet it be-
trays the typical sect suspicion of bishops and hierarchs,
conceives of the local congregation as the significant unit
of the Christian fellowship, and historically lays little
emphasis upon the inclusive church as a sacramental
community.
The Methodist church in Britain was for a long time not
quite certain whether it should count itself among the
"nonconformists." It thought of itself rather as a leaven
within the Anglican communion. It was, nevertheless,
268 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
brought more and more into the nonconformist camp in
Britain. In America it conquered the frontier primarily
through typical sectarian instruments, the lay ministry, the
prayer meeting with its emphasis upon lay participation,
the emphasis upon individual repentance and conversion,
the protest against all compromises and the impulse toward
"sanctification" and perfection. Coupled with this was a
considerable indifference toward theology and sufficient
lack of conviction about the right order of the church to
enable the Wesleyans to be nonepiscopal in England and
episcopal in America.
The Disciples as the only indigenously American group
among the larger of our religious denominations, was born
with a strong ecumenical impulse, but it gave that impulse
a typically sectarian expression. It believed it to be easy to
define the "New Testament" character of the church; and
thought it possible and desirable to recreate that character.
It also exhibited the typically sectarian Congregationalism
and fear of hierarchical control. The disapproval of some
sections of the Disciples church of musical instruments in
the services is a typical symbol of the sectarian fear of
aesthetic elaborations of worship not specifically authorized
in Scripture.
Thus only the Presbyterian, the Lutheran, and the Epis-
copal churches are left among American church bodies
who trace their ancestry indubitably to traditional "church"
sources. Among these the Presbyterians have, in common
with all Calvinism, certain "sect" tendencies most clearly
revealed in American history in the controversy between
the "Old Lights" and the "New Lights." Presbyterians have
taken theological issues more seriously, however, than the
sectarian churches; and their passion for an order of the
church which avoided both too much license and too much
hierarchical distinction places them predominantly in the
category of the church.
Such a cursory and inadequate survey leaves many im-
portant issues untouched; but it seeks to establish the fact
that numerically and otherwise the church of America
stands primarily under the influence of the sectarian pro-
test against the church.
The Church and the Churches 269
II
The predominance of sectarian conceptions of the
church makes most of the ecumenical debates irrelevant,
for they deal with the right order, theology, and other
instruments of the life of the church but do not deal with
the basic issue between the sect and the church. If, for
instance, the union of the Presbyterian and Episcopal
churches should succeed, it will not, as some hope, estab-
lish a pattern for a general reunion of American Protestant-
ism. It will be a union of two denominations which share,
whatever their differences, a common conception of the
historic church as a community of grace, and the terms of
reunion will not deal with the legitimacy of the sectarian
protest against the church.
This does not imply that the primary ecumenical task in
America is to do justice to the element of truth and validity
in the sectarian protest. The primary task is rather to vali-
date the church, against the sect and the sect against the
church. The task is to find an institutional form broad
enough, and a comprehension of the Christian faith rich
enough, to give a solid basis for the instruments of grace
which the historic church has rightly developed and at the
same time to appreciate the validity of the sectarian pro-
test against the corruptions which periodically appear in
these means of grace.
Since the sectarian influence is dominant in America it
may be well to begin by a more thorough appreciation of
the church. The institutional religious situation in America
is that the sectarian protest against the church has been so
powerful that it has well nigh annihilated the church as a
unique institution of grace, resting upon the foundation of
the revelation of God in Christ. This tendency is slightly
mitigated by the fact that the sect, when it does not have
a powerful established or inclusive church to protest
against, is inclined to become a church without fully un-
derstanding the genius of the church. Thus in America
sects tend to become churches because they are more
270 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
inclusive than the typical historic sect of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries; and the churches tend to become
sects because they are, in the American environment, less
inclusive than the traditional churches in their European
setting.
This qualification does not, however, obscure the gen-
eral pattern of American church life, which is, that the
sectarian protest again the church is so powerful as to
destroy some of the unique virtues of the church. This
charge must be elaborated in detail.
In terms of the church as a worshipping fellowship, the
sectarian protest against liturgy, which was originally made
because liturgical worship may easily degenerate into
empty forms, has tended to destroy the liturgical channels
and instruments of common worship. The sectarian church
believes in free and spontaneous prayer. There is a place
for this emphasis because it is not possible to do full justice
to all the needs of worship by traditional prayers. But if
the emphasis upon spontaneous and free prayer destroys
all liturgy, as it has done in the American sectarian church,
the free prayer, originally a means of grace, degenerates
into banal, sentimental, and chatty conversations with God.
The forms of worship (or lack of them) of most of the
American churches, including some with an old but for-
gotten liturgical tradition, are frequently a scandal. The
Biblical thought and phrase by which the "worship life"
of a congregation is held close to the source of its Biblical
faith tends to disappear completely from the pastoral pray-
ers. A very great religious vitality and spontaneity may
compensate for the lack of aesthetic form in the original
period of sectarian passion. But as the vitality is dissipated
the vulgarity of the haphazard phrase becomes more obvi-
ous and intrudes itself as an offense to the worshipping
congregation. Furthermore, purely free prayers place an
intolerable burden upon the minister. No minister, no mat-
ter how gifted or filled with grace, is able unaided to do
full justice to all the dimensions of the Christian faith in
its contact with life. Most ministers of the "free churches"
are not even fully conscious of their priestly function in the
worship of the congregation, and fail to understand that it
The Church and the Churches 271
is dubious to express personal whimsies and merely spon-
taneous religious emotions in public prayer. The business
of the priest is to lead the congregation in praise and
thanksgiving, in contrition and petition, and so to express
the great religious aspirations, as informed by the Christian
faith, that the congregation will be established and nur-
tured in its communion with God.
The experience of chaplains in the army in the present
war has fully revealed how inadequately most ministers
are equipped to conduct the worship of a congregation.
Many of the army services have been so inadequate that
even religiously untrained soldiers have felt the inadequacy.
The Episcopal church, with its liturgical traditions, has a
standard of common worship which is the envy of all who
have some feeling for the dimension of this problem. Thus
we have the paradoxical situation that a sectarian protest
against empty forms has tended to destroy all forms, and
to destroy with it the real content which the historic form
contains/The churches with liturgical forms have preserved
certain valuable content with their forms. The Episcopal
church may for instance be almost as secular in its preach-
ing as the sectarian church has become. But it can never
become, and has not become, as secular in its common life.
The historic forms preserve the deeper content, despite the
vagaries of the individual preacher. The same may be said
for the Lutheran church.
The sectarian protest against the sacraments has never
gone the full length of the protest against liturgy. All
churches, with the exception of the Quakers, preserve the
two traditional Christian sacraments of Baptism and the
Lord's Supper. Yet the full Christian witness in them is
frequently seriously impaired. Baptism, even in the evan-
gelical churches, is frequently reduced to a ceremony of
dedication in which the uniqueness of the Christian com-
munity of grace into which the person is admitted in bap-
tism is obscured. The rightful sectarian protest against
grace by magic is mingled in the modern sectarian church
with a secular indifference toward the life of grace. The
sacrament of the Lord's Supper likewise frequently loses its
full Scriptural dimensions and, becoming merely a rite of
2/2 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
remembrance, ceases to be a means of grace through which
the believer is renewed in his faith by repentance and by
fellowship with Christ. It is one of the paradoxical aspects
of sectarian Christianity that it ultimately makes more shal-
low what it first intended to deepen. Secularism develops
in the maturity of sectarianism. This is one reason why the
distinction between the church and the world is less marked
in America than in other Christian countries, though the
original intention of the sect was to sharpen the contrast
between the church and the world. AH historic Christian
means of grace may become either empty or the tools of
magical and nonmoral conceptions of religion. This fact
justifies the sectarian critical attitude toward them. But
they all are genuine means of grace; that is proved by the
loss of grace when the means are vitiated or destroyed.
Ill
The typical sectarian attitude toward theology is analo-
gous to its other criticism against the church. All sects have
not been equally hostile to theology. Some have had a sim-
ple Scriptural theology, which they usually assumed to be
the only possible interpretation of the Scripture. Others
have emphasized religious experience in contrast to the
rational formulation of faith as developed in theology. In
general, the emphasis upon theology has been minimal or
file attitude has been hostile. The sect realizes that theol-
ogy, as wefl as liturgy and the sacraments, may become
empty and vitiated. It usually does not understand how
necessary it is to give a reason for the faith that is in us
and how the total life of the church depends upon a com-
prehensive and coherent view of all the implications of the
Christian faith. Sectarian theology is particularly inclined
to be critical of the theological traditions of the ages and to
imagine that an ecumenical theology could be developed if
only everyone understood the Scripture as simply as it does.
The consequence of this atttitude in the American sect
is that no great theology has developed in this country. All
of us have been more or less dependent upon theological
The Church and the Churches 273
developments in Europe. American liberal theology of the
past decades was derived more or less from Schleiermacher
and Ritschl, and the reaction to it is influenced primarily
by the dialectical school of thought. America's greatest
theologian, Jonathan Edwards, developed a new and crea-
tive relationship between Calvinism and philosophical
idealism. In it the evangelicalism which belongs to the sects
was vitally related to the solid theological tradition of
Calvinism. But Jonathan Edwards has been a long time
dead. He labored among us before America was a nation.
Thus the emphasis upon religious immediacy has tended
to destroy theology among us. The revival of theological
interest in our own day is as necessary a part of a genuine
ecumenical movement as any discussions on church polity.
Sectarian protests against theology are a necessary part of
the life of the church. But a church can not exist without
theology. Theology is the skeleton of the faith of the church
even as polity is the skeleton of the common life of the
church. The flesh on the bones, whether in faith or in Me,
is nourished by a more immediate transmission of religious
vitality. But the full stature requires the support of the
skeletal structure.
The question of church polity has a completely different
orientation between the sect and the church from that
which most debates on church order presuppose. The sect
is quasi-anarchistic in its conception of the common life
of the church. It is afraid of hierarchical authority and in-
equality. It emphasizes Christian fellowship and is critical
of all instruments of the common lif e of the church which
integrate that fellowship beyond the local congregation.
Congregationalism is one of the most natural expressions
of sectarian ethos. From the standpoint of sectarianism the
detailed issues of the right order of the church are irrele-
vant because it is not fully aware that the question of order
has any great importance. The solemn conclusion of the
Anglican communion that the ministry of the non-episcopal
churches is "irregular" even though "owned by the Holy
Spirit" (to quote the conviction of the late Archbishop of
Canterbury, Dr. Temple) has no persuasive power at all.
It merely suggests to them that the Anglican communion
274 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
is engaged in trying to achieve church union upon the basis
of its polity and that such spiritual imperialism cannot suc-
ceed. Sectarian Christians dutifully attend the ^ecumenical
conferences because they believe that such "fellowship"
will gradually produce an ecumenical union or even that it
is the very reality of ecumenical union. The Stockholm and
Oxford ecumenical conferences, rather than the Lausanne
and Edinburgh gatherings, are the real expressions of sec-
tarian ecumenical feeling. Sectarianism would achieve a
world-wide union of Christianity on the basis of "life and
work" rather than "faith and order."
The real question which must be solved between the
church and the sect on the problem of polity is the ques-
tion of order itself. The sect must come to realize that the
congregation is not powerful enough and its resources not
great enough to maintain the uniqueness of the Christian
witness against the world. It must understand that its very
ambition to remain unspotted from the world is negated by
the dissipation of the wider integrity of the church. The
sect is more afraid of the authority of the bishop than of
the influence of the village bigwig upon the faith and mor-
als of the church. It celebrates the ideal of liberty from
ecclesiastical authority and does not recognize the value of
that authority in maintaining the witness of the church
against the world. Thus the sectarian church easily be-
comes a "community church" which may unite all the reli-
gious forces of a community but which has little power to
witness to the Christian faith against the sinful forces in a
community. One has the uneasy feeling that if the commu-
nity ever degenerated into the demonic, as the German
community did, American sectarian Christianity would
hardly possess the spiritual resources to witness against the
community. The sect must learn not so much a "right order"
as the relation between the instruments of order and the
integrity of the church as a supernational, superracial com-
munity of grace. The sect may be pardoned for regarding
all insistence on "right order" as somewhat pretentious.
The church can hardly bring the sect its own unique con-
tribution if the primary emphasis lies upon right order. Its
primary emphasis must be upon the necessity of order as
The Church and the Churches 275
such, as an instrument of grace and as a means of the
integrity of the church.
On the other hand, the traditional churches have a too
patronizing attitude toward the witness of the sect against
the order of the church. Some churches believe that right
order is the only guarantee of the preservation of the full
substance of the church. Actually there are no such guar-
antees. If order were the guarantee of the substance of the
church, Roman Catholicism would have a better claim to
having preserved the full substance of the church than any
other communion. The full substance of the Christian faith
and of the church as a community of grace is maintained
by the continual renewal of the faith through the Scrip-
tures. Yet every interpretation of Scripture may become the
vehicle of divisive and fanatic movements which destroy
the unity of the church. The full substance of the church
is preserved in the sacramental and liturgical observances
of the church; but these also may become vitiated. The
substance of the church is maintained by religious vitality;
but there are forms of religious vitality which defy the
Scriptural content of the Christian faith. The substance of
the church is maintained by an ecclesiastical order which
preserves the fellowship of the church in widest possible
terms, which maintains the historic continuity of the Chris-
tian witness and which prevents the dissipation of the
power of the sacraments through the vagaries of this or that
priest or the moods of this or that age. Yet the authority
which is necessary for the maintenance of this order can
become the vehicle of an unchristian pride, and even the
instrument of irreligion and skepticism. (There have been
bishops in the very church which regard the episcopacy as
the guarantee of the full substance of the church who have
preached a type of rationalistic liberalism in which almost
every characteristic accent of Biblical religion was absent.)
IV
The real ecumenical problem for American Christianity
is how to arrive at a better common denominator between
276 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
the sectarian and the more traditional and orthodox Prot-
estant conception of the church. In a sense this problem is
being solved by progressive stages on the American scene.
The fractional character of die various denominations
prompts them to a certain degree of humility in assessing
their own virtues and in appreciating the excellencies in
the traditions of others. The general tendency of churches
to become less inclusive and of sects to become less exclu-
sive, makes for a gradual rapprochement between the
denominations. It is safe to say that American churches
will achieve a broad working unity long before the vexing
problem of the Established and the Free Churches of
Britain is solved.
Yet there is a danger that this unity will be achieved too
much in merely practical and administrative policies, and
that no sufficient attention will be given to the theological
and religious issues which divide sect from church. If those
issues are to be solved the church must recognize the
necessity of a perpetual criticism of the institutional means
of grace, and the sects must recognize that a criticism
which destroys these institutions also destroys what the sect
desires most fervently: tension with the world and a sense
of contrast between the community of grace and all other
human communities,
A mere emphasis upon fellowship and upon administra-
tive comity is not enough. On the other hand, the tendency
of the Anglican church, at least in its Catholic wing, to
introduce the question of right order as a theological issue,
intrudes a Catholic conception of the church into this whole
problem. The problem of unity between church and sect
is capable of solution upon the basis of a Reformation con-
ception of the church. The blindness of the Reformation
church in rejecting the witness of its contemporary sec-
taries must be disavowed. But if that grace of humility is
achieved, the high conception of the church and of its
liturgy, theology, and sacraments, which characterized the
Reformation church, can be maintained.
If, however, the question of church polity, of "right
order/* is introduced into the whole equation from the
standpoint of a Catholic or quasi-Catholic theology, real
The Church and the Churches 277
unity becomes a hopeless quest. In this respect there is a
certain conflict between the ecumenical task in the na-
tional and in the international sphere. Internationally there
can be no ecumenical movement of great significance
which does not seek to solve the tension between Protes-
tant and quasi-Catholic views of the church. But on the
American scene the primary problem is to bridge the
gulf between Protestantism and what might be called
"ultra-Protestantism."
It may be observed, however, that even on the interna-
tional scene we may have to make a choice. Already there
are Anglo-Catholics in Britain who assert that they will
withdraw from the ecumenical movement if Greek Ortho-
doxy is not fully brought into the fold. But the problem
of Greek Orthodoxy's relation to the ecumenical move-
ment has been complicated by political factors, such as the
debate within Orthodoxy itself about the integrity and
political independence of the reconstituted Russian Church.
If the rest of us should become too afraid of the charge of
"Pan-Protestantism" which Anglo-Catholics are beginning
to hurl at the ecumenical movement, we might well lose
the possibility of a genuine union of the churches within
the realm of Protestantism for the sake of following the
chimera of a Catholic-Protestant ecumenical movement,
On these issues a special responsibility rests upon the
evangelical section of the Episcopal communion in this
country and upon Anglicanism in general. No one can
doubt the genuine interest of Anglican evangelicalism in
the ecumenical task, and of the contribution of Anglicanism
in general to the ecumenical program. Nor can it be denied
that this church has much to offer to the ecumenical church
in both its liturgical traditions and its sacramental piety.
But it also introduces a degree of confusion into the whole
ecumenical task by the division in its own ranks between
those who have an impulse toward closer fellowship with
Protestant churches and those who fear that such fellow-
ship may endanger some kind of ultimate (and probably
chimerical) reunion with Rome. It may be that the Angli-
can communion will ultimately be forced to make a deci-
sion on the meaning of the Reformation. It must decide
2/8 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
whether It regards the Reformation, on the whole, as an
aberration or as a creative event in the history of the
Christian faith, an event which delivered the church from
the heresy of identifying itself with the Kingdom of God
and of making a particular and highly authoritarian organi-
zation of the church the only possible basis for a world-
wide Christian fellowship.
The rest of us must leave that issue with our Anglican
brethren. Perhaps even such words of advice as are offered
in these pages will seem ungracious. We have meanwhile
our own problems, particularly in America. In America a
more organic and intimate ecumenical fellowship depends
upon a fuller and more conscious exploration of the the-
ological, liturgical, and ecclesiastical issues between the
Reformation tradition and the sectarian tradition, as well
as the emphasis upon practical, ethical, and immediate
forms of fellowship which we have developed. We must,
in other words, find a theology, liturgy, and church polity,
creative enough to embody both the value of the church's
institutions of grace and the perennial, and perennially
justified, insistence of sectarian Christianity that the spirit
"bloweth where it listeth" and that the grace of God is
bound to no institution. Churches have become sects, and
sects churches in America without either one or the other
fully understanding what they lost in the procedure. They
have drawn together in this manner but have not made the
peculiar treasure of each sufficiently available to the in-
clusive church of Christ. We must find a more positive
approach which will seek by conscious effort to save the
power of all of the institutions of grace; but also to pre-
serve them from corruption by understanding the legiti-
macy of the perennial criticism to which they must be
subjected.
Underneath our present comity there is still too much
good-natured (or even ill-natured) contempt for either the
"forms" of one type of church or the lack of forms of
another type. We ought to face the issue which underlies
these judgments more openly and resolve it by a fuller
understanding of the needs of the church.
The Church and the Churches 279
THE REUNION OF THE CHURCH
THROUGH THE RENEWAL
OF THE CHURCHES
I
A very discerning critic in Germany recently called atten-
tion to the fact that the now well-known "Stuttgart Dec-
laration," in which the Confessional church of Germany
confessed the complicity of the whole German people in
the crimes of Nazism, was defective at one point. It con-
fessed the guilt of the nation but did not confess the special
guilt of the church in contributing to the moral and politi-
cal confusion out of which Nazism emerged.
We have had many prayers of "Father forgive us" rising
from the congregations of American Protestantism. But
one must raise questions about the adequacy of this con-
trition and ask whether it has really penetrated to the
heart of the weakness of American Protestantism. Our
contrition is usually centered either upon the sins of the
nations or upon the most obvious vice or weakness of
Protestantism: our divisiveness. In seeking the "fruits mete
for repentance," one may rightly point to the growing
ecumenical movement as the proof of the sincerity of our
confession of fault. But the ecumenical movement is pri-
marily a movement for the increasing unity of Protes-
tantism across national barriers. It has not greatly changed
the relation between the various denominations in this
religiously heterogeneous nation. We do, of course, have
forms of comity on a somewhat higher order than some
other nations, partly because we are driven to them by the
very degree of our religious pluralism and partly because
the absence of any religious establishment puts all denomi-
280 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
nations upon an equal basis, eliminating the vainglory of
an established church in its relation to other churches.
We do have certain standards of decency and tolerance
in the relation of the denominations to each other. But the
genuine ecumenical task of appropriating each other's
treasures for a fuller testimony of the many-faceted truth
in Christ has hardly begun. We confess our disunity while
we proudly hold on to our particular treasure or tradition
as containing the truth more fully than the traditions of
other churches. The pride of nations, which we condemn,
hardly approaches the pride of denominations in intensity
because it lacks the specific religious pretension which
gives human pride its final dimension. Even when we seek
a wider unity than we now possess, we frequently betray
our lack of understanding for the basic issues by giving the
wrong reasons for desiring such unity. We desire it either
because we want to be less impotent and futile in our
competition with the more highly integrated Catholic
faith, or because we imagine that a united church will
give our message more power and prestige. Actually the
authority of the gospel is not derived from the power,
prestige, or authority of the church. On the contrary the
authority of the church is derived from the gospel. The
gospel must be validated by proving itself "sharper than
a two-edged sword** in speaking to the condition of man,
in moving him to repentance and in revealing the glory
and the redemptive mercy of God to him in the experience
of repentance and faith. The disunity of the church is of
course a serious handicap to the triumph of the gospel;
because it proves that die church, which mediates the
gospel, has, itself, not been fully moved to repentance and
faith by its own message. But in a sense that is always true.
It is not the goodness of the historic vehicle: the church,
nor yet the virtue of the preacher, which moves men to
repentance and faith. It is> in fact, one of the serious weak-
nesses of our proclamation of the gospel in a moralistic age
that we so frequently call attention to the virtues of our
saints and martyrs, our missionaries and heroes, the far-
flung empire of our missionary hospitals and schools to
prove the validity of our message. The cynics can easily
The Church and the Churches 281
puncture these pretensions; for they can match every
ecclesiastical achievement with some vice of the church,
some flagrant involvement in social evil, some cowardly
evasion of obvious duty. When the gospel is heard at
all, it is heard by those who have discerned the voice of
Christ beyond and above the confused counsels of us poor
preachers and recognized a majesty of power and love
considerably more glorious than any ecclesiastical majesty
or power.
II
The unity of the churches does not as such renew the
church. Yet a renewal of the church may lead to wider
unity of the churches because it will rigorously separate
the "traditions of men** from the truth of the gospel. We
lack an ecumenical movement in this depth in our Ameri-
can church life. Consider, for example, either the the-
ological or the liturgical issues and the questions of order
which divide the Protestant churches. On every one of
these issues a deeper unity waits upon a more thorough-
going recognition of the problematic character of the truth
or the value which each of us cherishes. Theologically the
point of division among us is still between "fundamen-
talism" and "modernism," between orthodoxy and liber-
alism. In this debate, which is no less a source of division
because it transcends the ordinary denominational lines,
the orthodox pose as defenders of the true faith against
modernistic betrayals of the truth of the gospel. The liber-
als on the other hand are the defenders of enlightenment
against obscurantism. We are so busy, as St. Paul observes,
in establishing our own righteousness that we are not
brought under the judgment of the righteousness of God.
Orthodoxy "requires a sign" and liberalism "seeks after
wisdom." Thus they miss "the wisdom of God and the
power of God" between them. To preach the gospel as a
series of "signs'* means to assure men of salvation through
belief in a history of miraculous events. Such "belief"
does not touch the human heart at its center. It does not
2,82, ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
move proud men to repentance or help powerful nations to
stand in the fear of God. That is why so much orthodoxy is
so graceless, so full of hatred, so easily compounded with
reactionary social positions and is such a ready tool of our
political animus against foreign "isms." The end result of
such orthodoxy is magic. It offers salvation to men whose
hearts remain graceless.
The liberal or "modernistic" opposition to this orthodoxy,
on the other hand, has been seeking wisdom with the
Greeks. It has tried to validate the gospel by proving that
it is nothing more than a pious rendering of the creeds
which all modern men believe. Usually it shares with mod-
ern men the belief that evil comes primarily from igno-
rance and that there is a final redemption in "enlighten-
ment." It does not know what to do with the Pauline ob-
servation that "the world by its wisdom knew not God,"
or with the prophetic warning, "Let not the wise man glory-
in his wisdom." Sometimes it believes with modern man in
the redemption of man through historical progress. There-
fore, it is just as confused as our secular age when it seeks
to interpret the facts of our contemporary history. For
these facts prove that the progress of man toward increas-
ing freedom and power over nature may mean global and
total wars and the peril of atomic destruction. These facts
prove, in other words, that there is no salvation in history,
but rather that history accentuates every basic predica-
ment of sinful man.
Or perhaps our modernism believes simply in human
goodness and in the necessity of exhorting men to be good
or of proving to them that the highest good is the love
of one's neighbor. It has not heard the cry of despair from
the human heart about its impotence to do the good which
it knows. The liberal church offers salvation through end-
less cascades of moral exhortation. Men, on the whole,
know that they ought to do good rather than evil; and they
have a shrewd suspicion that usually the good may be
defined in terms of generosity toward the brother rather
than concern for the self. But they are not fully conscious
(though they may be darkly conscious) of the fact that
they violate moral commandment by their own impulses of
The Church and the Churches 283
pride and lust for power, and that their anxieties about
self make it impossible for them to consider the neighbor.
Furthermore, the liberal church, preaching in a cata-
strophic age in which the communal life of man is torn by
a thousand hatreds, in which the newly won freedom of
India is almost drowned in the blood of fratricidal strife, in
which conflicting rights of Jews and Arabs reveal how
terribly complex problems of justice are, and in which the
vicious circle of mutual fear between two great centers of
power in the community of nations threatens to tear the
world apart, blandly advises men and nations to love one
another, if they would escape disaster. There is in this
preaching no understanding either of the complex prob-
lems of the justice which is required to preserve a tolerable
peace among nations, races, and groups which do not love
each other, nor yet of the agony of rebirth required if the
individual would turn from self-love to love.
Thus in a recent sermon of this type all men were simply
divided into three groups: the "peace makers," the "war-
makers," and the "peace fakers." The first class included a
few pacifists; the second class a few generals, diplomats,
and men of power; and all the rest of us, caught in a
tragic situation in which one world is dying and another
is powerless to be born, were simply catalogued as "peace
fakers." That is an indication of the futility of the liberal
moralism which turns a gospel of repentance and faith
into an intolerable moral commandment, which no one
can keep.
Thus the real ecumenical task between orthodoxy and
modernism has hardly been touched. Schemes of church
organization do not touch it nor do confessions from both
sides about the sins of society touch it, when they merely
assume that nations do evil because they have failed to
follow the creed of the part of the church which makes the
confession.
The divisions between the churches on liturgy and
church polity may be as serious as these theological issues,
but they are nevertheless important. The liturgical
churches know that the religious community must be
nourished, not merely by sermon and exhortation, but by
284 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
a life of common prayer, in which the full breadth and
extent of the Christian life and thought is expressed. The
nonliturgical churches represent an age-old sectarian revolt
against the gracelessness of formalism in religion. The
liturgical churches refuse to believe that, though liturgy
and order are means of grace, they may also become ene-
mies of grace when made ends in themselves. The non-
liturgical churches on the other hand are only dimly con-
scious of the fact that one does not acquire more grace
by destroying these corruptible means of grace. In as far as
they are conscious of liturgical deficiencies they may seek
to add a little "aesthetic" color to otherwise uninspiring
"opening exercises." The liturgical problem is one of the
most serious issues for us because American Protestantism
stems primarily from sectarian protests against all the
established forms of the church, theological, liturgical, and
governmental. We are only beginning to realize that a
protest against the corruption of a form of faith, which
destroys the form, tends to expose religion to formlessness.
It easily degenerates into a pious feeling without well-
articulated theological convictions, to habits of prayer in
which banality and sentimentality run rampant and into
organizational anarchy which robs the church of the power
to maintain any standards, whether of faith or morals. The
churches which have preserved traditions of order are of
little ecumenical help in this situation because they are
usually touched by idolatrous conceptions of both the
church and its order, regarding them not as means of grace
but as necessities of salvation. They think they can beguile
those who are children of the Reformation and who have
a proper fear of the church's self -worship with a patience
not unmixed with a condescending patronage. We think,
on the other hand, that among the many idolatries against
which the Christian must bear witness is the idolatry
which places the church in the position of Christ, and
makes the right order of the church a sine qua non of
salvation.
We do not gain the authority to speak to the nations by
achieving the prestige of organizational unity. The author-
ity to speak to the nations is in a gospel which discloses a
The Church and the Churches 285
majesty and a mercy beyond all historic majesties and all
human justice. Where that gospel is preached with power
it will heal both the nations and the church. But it will
first wound the pride and the self-esteem of the churches as
much as the vainglory of the nations.
HAS THE CHURCH ANY AUTHORITY?
The Readers Digest recently stirred the apprehensions and
fears of many timid Christians by giving wide publicity to
a chapter of John T. Flynn's book The Road Ahead, in
which every organization and personality, not devoted to
the pure principles of laissez-faire is castigated as either in
league with Communism or as the innocent dupes of totali-
tarianism. Naturally the Federal Council of Churches and
many of its leaders were subjected to Flynn's lash. His
previous claims to fame consisted primarily of books about
the Roosevelt era, in which the venom of the author against
the wartime President colored every judgment.
The book itself has no particular significance, except as
an expression of a rather hysterical creed, prevalent in some
parts of America. According to this creed any use of the
sovereign power of a state for human welfare is the first
step down the slippery slope which leads to Communism.
What is rather disturbing is that so many Christians, pastors
and laymen, should take it seriously. The Federal Council
refuted its misstatements in a special pamphlet for which
it secured the support of some of the leading Christian
laymen of America. It might be mentioned, in passing, that
in a recent Federal Council conference on the church and
econornic life, 400 outstanding business and labor leaders
gave thoughtful consideration to the problems of "freedom
and order" in our economic life and freely, and almost
unanimously reached conclusions in complete harmony with
the general social philosophy which underlies the political
286 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
attitudes, not only of the Federal Council of Churches but
of the World Council of Churches.
This general position might be defined as governed by a
concern for both freedom and justice, and as allowing for
a great variety of pragmatic approaches to the vexing prob-
lems of modern economic life. But it does not assume,
either that the free play of all economic forces will make
justice automatically, or that the solution of every prob-
lem of justice lies in bringing economic life more and more
tightly under political control. The Detroit Conference ex-
pressed this general framework of principles as follows:
We seek a dynamic free society in which there is oppor-
tunity to agree and disagree on many important goals for
society and the means of achieving them; and a society
in which people find their highest freedom in the use of
their liberties to increase the freedom of others. We
seek an ordered society in which individuals and groups
will use their liberties to increase the freedom of others.
We seek an ordered society in which individuals and
groups will use those social controls which will stabilize
the economy at levels of employment providing work
opportunities for all.
This statement was not made by the conference in terms
of any slavish conformity to previous ecumenical documents.
It is, nevertheless, significant that the conference, in which
many more laymen participated than in ordinary ecumeni-
cal gatherings, freely arrived at the conclusions within
the framework of a general consensus in the Christian
church which modern Protestantism has formulated in the
three great conferences of Stockholm, Oxford, and Amster-
dam in 1925, 1937, and 1948. This consensus of Protes-
tant thought is the more remarkable in that it closely ap-
proaches the main emphases in the social teachings of the
Catholic encyclicals since the Rerum Novarum. Whatever
may be the differences in Catholic and Protestant social
policy, and however much the theories may vary because
of the stricter interpretation of natural law in Catholic
thought, the similarities are more striking than the dif-
ferences. Both reject Communism. Catholic theory once
The Church and the Churches 2,87
rejected socialism unequivocally while Protestantism tended
to do so in practice but not in theory. But now the encycli-
cal of Pope Pius XII has declared: "It may well come
about that the tenets of a mitigated socialism will no
longer differ from those who seek to reform society accord-
ing to Christian principles. For it is rightly contended that
certain forms of property carry within them an oppor-
tunity for domination too great to be left in private individ-
uals."
This does not mean that either Catholic or Protestant
theory is committed to socialism. It certainly does mean
that it rejects the theory that every form of socialism is
but a half-way house to Communism, and that every form
of social control upon economic process is inherently wrong.
The consensus in Christian thought is not merely the
consequence of the presence in the Christian churches of
people of varying political and economic convictions,
whose thought must somehow or other be harmonized.
There are specifically Biblical viewpoints about man and
history which help to establish this consensus. It is, for
instance, not possible to justify the pure laissez-faire doc-
trine from the Christian standpoint, because Christianity
knows that any "pre-established harmony of nature" is not
applicable to human history. It knows human history to be
filled with boundless possibilities of good and evil not
known in the bounded harmonies and discords of nature.
Christian thought, except for a few sectarian anarchists,
has always taken the function of government seriously
because it is convinced that, because of the sinfulness of
man, the order of the human community is never purely
"natural" but partly contrived. It is bound to refute any
socialist theory with equal force which assumes that the
root of human evil lies primarily in the institutions of prop-
erty, and expects the abolition of property to usher in a
Utopia of perfect good-will.
Christian thought is equally rigorous with both the
ideologues who persuade men to fear economic power but
not political power, and those who teach that political
power is dangerous but not economic power. It knows that
any form of power is dangerous, and that any form of
288 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
power can be both the occasion of sin and an instrument
for organizing the affairs of the community. If both
Catholic and Protestant theory tend to justify a subordina-
tion of economic to political power, that is because political
power can, at its best, express the will of a total com-
munity while economic power is by its nature private and
partial.
American Protestant political and econouoic theory has
gone through immature phases in which "free enterprise"
was too uncritically accepted, and in which subsequently
the "social gospel" introduced some Utopian illusions into
the thought of the church. The remarkable fact about de-
velopments in recent decades is that these contradictory
errors have been overcome, and that lay opinion has par-
ticipated in these revisions.
When, therefore, Mr. Flynn attacks the Federal Council
of Churches for its social positions, he is not attacking the
individual vagaries of individual religious leaders. He is
attacking a well-established consensus of Christian social
thought, extending far beyond America. He is doing so
from presuppositions which are thoroughly heretical from
the Christian standpoint. This Christian consensus cannot
accept either of the warring secular philosophies of redemp-
tion.
According to this consensus there is no simple harmony
of all social and economic forces on either this side> or on
the other side of a social revolution. It is, therefore, bound
to be critical of the social complacency which assumes
that problems of justice in a technical society can best be
solved by interfering as little as possible with the free
play of economic forces. It is naturally even more critical
of the Communist creed of world redemption because there
are demonic forces in that creed which threaten to engulf
the world in disaster,
On the whole, Christian laymen and pastors have a
proper regard for the moral and spiritual authority of the
church, though the church cannot bind the conscience of
individuals in economic arid political decisions. But the
Flynn book has revealed one of the great weaknesses of
Protestantism. There are members of Protestant churches,
The Church and the Churches 5289
both lay and clerical, who treat the consensus in the
church with complete disrespect upon the prompting of a
second-rate and hysterical critic. They seem to have no
understanding that when the church regards all social and
political institutions as standing under divine judgment
this conviction is no vagary, but a consequence o having
its mind renewed by the mind of Christ. If Christians find
fault with consequent social opinions because these opin-
ions do not justify a given social creed of a given social
class of America, this merely means that there are Chris-
tians who do not take either the gospel or the church
seriously at all. It means that there are men in the church
who resent having their "idealism" challenged, particularly
if the light of the gospel should reveal that all human
ideals are curious compounds of self-interest and ideals.
It means that the religion which is being preached and
practiced in some of our churches is not the Christian reli-
gion at all, but merely a religious sanctification of our
own ideals and interests. On all such idealism St. Paul has
spoken a definite word: "For I bear them record that they
have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For
they, being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going
about to establish their own righteousness, have not sub-
mitted themselves unto the righteousness of God." This
ought to be clear: Wherever the Divine word does not
illumine the ambiguity of our human virtues, including our
social ideals, wherever men are sure of themselves, of
their virtues and their good intentions, wherever they
simply identify their will with God's will there is no church
at all, however pious the practices.
Protestantism is inclined to vaunt itself because of its
liberty as distinguished from Rome's authoritarianism. We
fear that Roman Catholicism deifies the church. But, as a
friendly critic in the Roman church recently suggested,
does not Protestantism deify the individual conscience to
an extent which gives men a sense of security about the
"dictates" of their conscience and no sense of repentance
about the mixture of interest and self-seeking in lie ideals
of conscience? The Roman church defines the community
of grace rather sharply against the world and may give
290 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
some sinners in the church a spurious sense of ease. But
at least they know themselves to be forgiven sinners; and
they have some respect for the church as bearing the
"oracles of God." The Protestant church has no well-
defined community for grace, its members shading off in
indeterminate shades of heresy until we reach a type of
church member who rages and rants if any word of the
church is sufficiently penetrating to disturb his ease. Some
of the reactions to the Flynn criticisms of the church might
well prompt us as Protestants to be less concerned with
the characteristic weaknesses of Rome, and a little more
anxious about the vast morasses of sentimentality and
human pride in which parts of the Protestant church are
sinking.
THE CHURCH SPEAKS
TO THE NATION
At the beginning of November the Commission on Interna-
tional Justice and Goodwill of the National Council of
Churches held a conference in Cleveland. The delibera-
tions of that conference resulted in a message to the
churches and to the nation which reveals how much the
Christian gospel is the source of wisdom for the collective
life of man as well as a source of grace for the individual.
This has not always been apparent in American Chris-
tianity. The individualistic traditions of early American
evangelicalism and the excessive moralism in the liberal
Christian tradition made the Christian witness on interna-
tional problems frequently irrelevant. Evidently these
weaknesses have been overcome, to judge by the Cleveland
message.
The primary virtue of the Cleveland message is that it
shows clearly that our responsibility as a nation to the
The Church and the Churches 291
international community derives from the sense of respon-
sibility which Christians feel they owe to God. "As a na-
tion and as individuals," it declares, "our responsibilities
to God rise above all other claims and responsibilities."
But this ultimate responsibility clarifies rather than annuls
the responsibilities which we have as citizens of a very
powerful nation. The message declares: "As American
Christians, citizens of a nation of great wealth and power,
we feel the need to affirm our common bond with Chris-
tians of other nations. Yet at the same time we must speak
as Christians who are also citizens of the United States.
It would be presumptuous and irresponsible if we tried to
speak as if we were not bound by our particular respon-
sibilities as Americans." Here is Christian universalism
which does not cancel out particular responsibilities.
The second mark of maturity in the message is its dis-
avowal of previous interpretations which have equated the
Christian faith with a kind of moral panacea, which would
solve all the world's problems if it were only accepted. The
message declares:
The Christian faith does not provide us with a blue-
print or easy answers for the tragic problems of the
world's disorder. We must guard ourselves and others
against the illusion that there is any simple or perma-
nent solution to the problems of the world's order.
The third virtue of the message is that it speaks soberly
against both the disciples of "appeasement" and the pro-
ponents of the idea of an inevitable war. "Since it is our
Christian faith," the message declares, "that God can
bring about changes which are beyond human powers, we
refuse to believe that a reconciliation (with Russia) is
finally impossible." But the message makes it plain that
there is no possibility of such a reconciliation now. Instead,
it insists with soberness that "the minimal condition for
coexistence is the recognition by both sides that peace is
better than armed conflict, especially when war means
mutual annihilation."
One has the feeling, when reading the document, that if
2Q2 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
America is maturing under the weight of its responsibilities,
one factor in its increased wisdom is the counsel of a
maturing church.
THE NATIONAL COUNCIL
DELEGATION TO THE
RUSSIAN CHURCH
Nothing but good can be said about the visit of the Na-
tional Council of Churches delegation to Russia. It is true
that some of the leaders of the churches in exile, partic-
ularly from the Baltic states, protested against the visit and
warned that it might lead to illusions in the West. But
the statesmanlike procedure of the delegation and partic-
ularly of its chairman, Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, dispelled
these fears. The delegation met with the Russian religious
leaders but they were not taken in by any of their political
naivete. The Russian leaders proved themselves rather
simple followers of the Communist "peace line/* They had
no views of their own about international relations, and
Dr. Blake made it clear that we could not expect an in-
dependent line from them. The traditions of the Russian
Orthodox church, declares the report of the delegation,
persuade the church to think of the function of the church
as "that of saving souls and preparing them for heaven and
therefore it shows little concern for the intellectual and
social life of the people. . . . Educational, economic and
political life are die functions of the state. Worship from
birth to death is the task of the church."
Naturally, with such a circumscribed function, the
church has little influence on the total life of the nation or
indeed upon individuals. The delegation gave it as its
opinion that, even though freedom of worship is now fully
accorded, the materialistic education of the youth is bound
The Church and the Churches 393
to further limit the authority of the church. In short, the
Russian church is not a full-bodied church and certainly
not in any obvious way the "body of Christ." It is the
product of long ages of otherworldly interpretations of the
Christian faith.
Dr. Blake was therefore quite right in emphasizing that
we could not expect the church to influence the state
or to exert an independent moral influence on international
problems upon the people. Incidentally, it might be pos-
sible to say without cynicism that probably one reason
for the increased freedom of the church is the complacency
of the state with regard to the influence of the church or
its will to exert it.
Why then was it valuable to make the visit? There are
several reasons. One is to give the Christians of Russia
some contact with Christians in democratic lands and im-
press upon them both the freedom with which they deal
with international issues and to contribute a little to the
emancipation of the Russian mind from the preconceptions
in which all citizens of totalitarian states are imprisoned.
But beyond these immediate objectives, it is important to
explore every avenue of contact by which Russia might
gradually be brought into the community of nations after
long isolation. The Kremlin leaders have encouraged these
contacts for the purpose of increasing the technical effi-
ciency of the Russian production, particularly in agricul-
ture. But there is no reason why the West should not try
to open any gate which has not been absolutely locked.
Certainly the gate of common Christian conviction is one
of these, even though one cannot speak of too much "com-
mon" conviction; for long before the Communist revolu-
tion, "Eastern Christendom** became divided from the West,
and some of the spiritual realities which the delegation
found were due not to the Communist, but to the previous
schism, long centuries ago.
We cannot afford any illusions in regard to the intransi-
geance of the Communist political foe. But we also must
not leave any avenue unexplored by which bridges might
be built across the deep chasm which divides us. If we
294 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
think not in terms of years but of decades, we may hope
that ultimately the Russian isolation will be dispelled or
overcome.
Certainly the Christian church has a bounden duty to
be one of -die bridge builders, even if it must compete with
agricultural technicians in the task of bridge building.
While the chasm between the Russian church and the
churches of the West is very wide, it is not quite as wide
as the political chasm between Communism and democ-
racy. The delegation was therefore quite right in regarding
this visit as but the first in a series of many contacts to
express the hope that "the Churches of Jesus Christ may
be used for the reconciling and salvation of the nations."
B. THE PROBLEMS OF A WORLD CHURCH
THE OXFORD CONFERENCE
ON CHURCH AND STATE
One does not expect too much of an ecumenical confer-
ence. Too many viewpoints must be harmonized in the
official reports to permit the church to speak unambig-
uously on the great problems of the day. Yet the five
reports of the Oxford conference, dealing with the five
problems of church and state, church and community,
church and the social order, church and the community of
nations, and church and education achieved a remarkably
high level of genuine Christian testimony.
The report on church and community was so unequiv-
ocal in its insistence that "in Christ there is neither Jew
nor Greek, neither bond nor free" that one of the South
African delegates expressed the apprehension that it
"would prove very embarrassing to the church in South
Africa," a fear shared by some of the southern delegates
of our own nation. The report rigorously opposed racial
bigotry and pride and insisted on the transracial character
of the church as a community of grace.
The report on the church and the social order made a
vigorous and clear analysis of the destructive forces at
work in the present economic order and insisted that the
irreligion of modern radicalism was in a large measure
due to the failure of the church to understand the problem
of social justice in the modern age and to bear clear tes-
296 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
timony in favor of the cause of justice in the various crises
of our era. This interpretation of the modern situation was
opposed by those sections of the conference which regard
the irreligion of Communism as a manifestation of "anti-
Christ" in conflict with the Christ of the church. This
"Catholic heresy" of regarding the historic church as the
unqualified representative of Christ on earth so that the
enemies of the church become the enemies of God was
resisted by the conference in various ways, though it was
held by some of its members. In that emphasis the con-
ference was "Protestant" in principle though non-Roman
Catholic in its total membership.
The report on the church and the world of nations was
rather unsatisfactory in that it listed three possible positions
which Christians might take toward the problem of war
with little discrimination. They might regard obedience to
the state under all circumstances as the duty of the Chris-
tian (the extreme Lutheran position); they might feel
obligated to support the state only in "just" wars, that is
wars of defense or wars in support of the principle of col-
lective security; or they might refuse participation in all
wars. The first position was only mildly condemned as
embodying the danger of giving the state an authority
which belongs only to God. The report called upon Chris-
tians to respect each other's conscientious scruples, what-
ever position in regard to war they might severally take.
It was quite correct in calling attention to the fact that it
is impossible to arrive at a single position on war (the
pacifistic one for instance) and to declare all other positions
unchristian. But the demand for mutual respect for each
other's conscientious convictions hardly does justice to the
real situation in war time. At such a time the Christians
who support a war are tempted to succumb to the hysteria
of war and to become corrupted by the immense spiritual
pride and self -righteousness of the nations. This peril was
not sufficiently considered. On the other hand the danger
that the church disown its pacifists in time of war was not
warded off with sufficient charity.
Though, as is generally known, this journal does not
accept pacifism as the only possible attitude of Christians
The Church and the Churches 297
toward the problem of war, it is nevertheless obvious that
pacifism in the modern church has something of the same
functions as asceticism in the medieval church; and this in
spite of the fact that pacifists are not usually as clear-
headed about the implications of their abstention from so-
cial responsibilities as were the ascetics. Nevertheless, the
church would be the poorer and its counsels in greater
danger of corruption by popular hysteria if it lacked the
pacifist testimony. War is such a terrible catastrophe in
modern life that anyone who participates in it ought to do
so only with a very uneasy conscience; and his conscience
ought to be kept uneasy by the influence of those who find
it impossible to reconcile war with Christ. In that sense
pacifists are not fools to be tolerated by the church but
witnesses which must be heard.
The Oxford reports are on the whole carefully thought
out documents in which the issues are defined with fine
precision, even though everyone will not agree with the
conclusions. They ought to contribute greatly to the clari-
fication of the Christian mind on modern social issues.
THE WORLD COUNCIL
OF CHURCHES
Other journals will deal with the religious significance of
the first assembly of the World Council of Churches. We
must confine ourselves to the statement of the assembly
which diagnosed the "disorder" of modern society and the
relation of the churches to it. The portion of the statement
which received the greatest amount of publicity declared:
"The Christian Church rejects the ideologies of both Com-
munism and laissez-faire Capitalism, and should seek to
draw men away from the false assumption that these ex-
tremes are the only alternatives. . . . It is the responsibil-
ity of Christians to seek new creative solutions (for the
208 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
organization of modern society) which never allow either
justice or freedom to destroy the other."
This statement gives an accurate picture of the social
convictions of the first assembly of the free churches of
the world. Those convictions were sufficiently radical to
refute all the critics of the church who regard religious
institutions as naturally conservative, and to baffle con-
servative members of the church, particularly in America.
The idea of making an equilateral condemnation of capital-
ism and Communism is enough to fell quite a few con-
servatives in America with a stroke of apoplexy. Yet it
represented the considered convictions of most of the dele-
gates who worked upon this particular report. Some of the
delegates, particularly from Asia, would probably have
preferred a stronger condemnation of capitalism than of
Communism. The Christians of Europe have certainly
moved toward the left in politics during the past century;
but they are on the whole very antagonistic to Communism
and are baffled by the romantic attitude of Asiatics toward
the Communist cause. But even the Europeans would not
have accepted a criticism of Communism which did not
bring capitalism under equal condemnation.
This equilateral indictment is unfair at one point. The
"ideology" of capitalism is the belief that justice will be
achieved automatically from the free play of all competi-
tive economic forces. This is a mistaken belief which has
resulted in much injustice in modern society. But it could
hardly be said that it generates the demonic fury which
characterizes modern Communism. If one were to be
absolutely fair, one would have to point out that the mis-
taken ideology of capitalism is not wholly incompatible
with the preservation of a free society, while the Com-
munist dogma results inevitably in the destruction of free-
dom. But the delegates at Amsterdam were in no mood for
such niceties of discrimination. Many would, in any event,
be concerned to say an appreciative word for Communism
as springing from a passion for justice, however mistaken,
and a critical word against capitalism, as responsible for
the social maladjustments of the modern world.
The sympathy for Communism among modern Asiatic
The Church and the Churches 299
and African Christians, manifest at Amsterdam and at
many previous ecumenical gatherings is one of the out-
standing social facts of our time. There are few Christian
Communists even in Asia. But evidently thousands of
Christians in Asia are sympathetic to Communism. There
are many reasons for this. The Asiatics know little and care
less about what Communism does in Europe. In Asia they
think of it in terms of Russia's championship of the cause
of the colonial peoples against the "imperialist" powers;
of the practice of interracial fellowship in Communist
youth groups; of Communism's challenge to China's cor-
rupt government; and in general of the hope which it holds
out to the miserable and poverty-stricken people of the
Orient. Asia has not, in other words, awakened to the
deepest tragedy of our age, which is that the alternative to
capitalism turned out to be worse than the disease which
it was meant to cure. Even Christian Asiatics are not too
inclined to heed the warnings about Communism from
Europeans, and more particularly not from Americans.
Whatever the virtues of America may be, it is much too
rich and powerful to make much of a moral appeal to
people in Africa and Asia. Moreover, resentment against
racial discrimination is such a large part of the propulsive
power of the Communist creed in Asia, that America, with
its segregated churches, is not in a good moral position
to give the warnings which Asiatics need.
One has the uneasy feeling, therefore, that Communism
will spread in Asia long after it is checked in Europe. In
Europe it is certainly checked ideologically, though there
is still the possibility of its victory over that continent by
political and military pressure. One added factor for the
growth of Communist sentiment in Asia is the absence of
those middle parties of democratic socialism which play
so large a role in the politics of Europe.
In India, for instance, there is increasing danger that
the Congress party will become more and more a tool of
the reactionary mill owners, despite the socialistic convic-
tions of Nehru. The protest against this rising reaction is
being expressed primarily by the growing Communist
movement in India. The Socialist party is small and in-
3OO ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
effectual. Nehru is too preoccupied with the total prob-
lems of India to give it leadership. In Europe the middle
ground is always in danger of being immersed by the
floods of passion from the right and left. In Asia there is
a danger that the middle ground, which the World Coun-
cil of Churches so strongly prefers, may not even establish
a foothold. It exists neither in China nor in India.
We have dealt with only one aspect of the report of the
World Council on the disorder of the modern world. The
general tenor of the total report is such that one might
imagine that the churches of the world had adopted the
basic creed of our Fellowship (of Socialist Christians).
The cynics may suggest that this is not exactly a coin-
cidence, since the secretary of the section which wrote
the report, Professor Bennett, is a member of the Fellow-
ship. But however great his contribution to the report, the
inference would be wrong. Dozens of people contributed
to the report; and it undoubtedly crystallized the social
and political convictions of the free churches of the world.
Those churches have "moved left" particularly in Europe
and Asia. They have done so not merely because (as a
Socialist member of the Assembly at Amsterdam declared)
the whole world has become as insecure as once only
proletarians were. It has moved left also because religious
convictions have increasingly made the church aware of
the social and ethical problems of our modern world.
PROTESTANTISM IN A DISORDERED
WORLD
The readers of this journal would not be particularly inter-
ested in a discussion of the religious significance of the
first assembly of the World Council of Churches, recently
held in Amsterdam. I will, therefore, confine my report to
an analysis of the assembly's social and political attitudes
The Church and the Churches 301
and merely record my conviction that it is too early to
estimate its importance in religious history. Subsequent
developments will have to prove whether or not it really
marked a turriing-point in the life of non-Roman Chris-
tianity, the point where the free churches consciously
turned their back upon the divisiveness and anarchy of
freedom and sought a wider unity and greater order within
the framework of a non-authoritarian Christianity. Mean-
while it must be observed that democratic religion is always
in greater peril of anarchy and disorder than democratic
politics. The road toward religious order and unity is there-
fore a hard one.
Socially and politically the assembly was significant be-
cause it recorded convictions which confute those critics of
the churches who identify religion with reaction. It is true
that the assembly as a whole did not have to subscribe to
the diagnoses of the various commissions which examined
the "disorder of the world" and the relation of the churches
to that disorder. It merely "received" and "commended"
the reports. It could however, have rejected any of them,
and it frequently exercised the right of amendment. The
reports, as accepted, therefore represented roughly the
common mind of the most representative group of church-
men ever gathered together from all parts of the world.
The statement which aroused the greatest degree of in-
terest was the equal condemnation of both capitalism and
Communism. '"The church/* declared the committee,
"should reject the ideologies which underly both kissez
faire capitalism and Communism . . . Each has made
promises which it could not redeem. Communism . . .
promises that freedom will follow automatically upon the
completion of the revolution. Capitalism . . . promises
that justice will follow as a by-product of free enterprise.
That too is an ideology which has been proved false."
Positively, the report called upon Christian churches to
help explore the middle ground and "to seek for creative
solutions which do not allow either justice or freedom to
destroy the other." This middle ground will be generally
recognized as the realm of democratic socialism. But it
would be wrong to make the identification too complete,
3O2 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
for many Christian conservatives or at least Christian non-
Socialists at the assembly accepted the report because
they rightly felt that the church did not and could not
commit its members to the doctrine of a particular party,
and that in any event there were many "creative" ap-
proaches to politics which were not strictly Socialist,
though they would hardly be creative if they did not, in
the words of the report, "subordinate economic activities to
social ends."
On the question of the socialization of property the
report declared: "The church cannot resolve the debate
between those who believe that the primary solution is to
socialize the means of production and those who fear that
such a course will merely lead to new and inordinate
combinations of economic and political power, culminating
finally in the omnicompetent state." But it can remind the
advocates of socialization that the institution of property
"is not the root of the corruption of human nature" and
that its abolition cannot therefore achieve the Utopian
ends usually expected. And it can remind "the defenders
of existing property relations that ownership is not an
unconditioned right, and it must therefore be preserved,
curtailed, and distributed in accordance with the require-
ments of justice." The requirements of justice are that we,
on the one hand, "vindicate the supremacy of persons over
purely technical considerations and subordinate all eco-
nomic process and cherished rights to the community as a
whole," and that "on the other hand we seek to preserve
the possibility of a satisfying life for Tittle men in a big
society/ "
The secular reader probably will note that the whole
approach to political justice is informed by the Christian
conviction that human nature is "corrupted," and that
there is therefore no guaranty that the elimination of
specific social evils through new social institutions may not
create fresh evils. "Men are often disillusioned," the
report declares, "by finding that changes of particular sys-
tems do not bring unqualified good but fresh evils. New
temptations to greed and power arise even in systems
more just than those which they have replaced, because
The Church and the Churches 303
sin is ever present in the human heart." This Christian
conviction will probably not be as quickly rejected as it
once was, since our generation has had opportunity to see
the Utopian illusions of both liberals and Marxists refuted
by actual history. But at any rate there it is, as an in-
evitable part of a characteristically Christian analysis of
social evils. The present writer regards it as a source of
wisdom.
Communism was condemned because of ( i ) its "prom-
ise of what amounts to the complete redemption of man
in history"; (2) "its belief that a particular class is free
. . . from the sins and ambiguities which Christians be-
lieve to be characteristic of all human existence"; (3) "its
materialistic and deterministic teachings . . . (which)
are incompatible with the Christian belief in man as a
person, made in the image of God and responsible to him";
and (4) the policies of a Communist dictatorship in "con-
trolling every aspect of life."
But Christians were asked to "recognize with contrition
that many churches are involved in forms of economic in-
justice and racial discrimination which have created condi-
tions favorable to the growth of communism, and that the
atheism and antireligious teaching of communism are in
part a reaction to the checkered record of a professedly
Christian society." However the secular reader may view
the relationship of Christianity to modern society, he must
admit that this kind of analysis is free of the notes of self-
righteous judgment upon "atheism" which have charac-
terized the pronouncements of many churches, and partic-
ularly those of the Roman church.
The question is, where did these strong convictions come
from? There will be conservative churchmen in America
who will ascribe them to a cabal of "leftists" in the inner
circle of the assembly. As one who might possibly be in-
cluded in such a category I should like to testify that most
of the judgments in the reports were made much more
rigorous than they were originally by the pressure of Eu-
ropean and Asiatic delegates. I would not myself, for
instance, attempt an equilateral condemnation of capital-
ism and Communism, partly because I believe that the
304 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
latter has a demonic fury which capitalism as a creed lacks
and partly because I believe that the "ideology" of capital-
ism in its original form no longer exists except in the minds
of a few or perhaps many American Republicans. It is
not a live creed in the rest of the world. The resolution's
equal condemnation sprang from the feeling of a radical
Continent and an even more radical Asia.
Protestant Christianity in continental Europe was once
quietistic and either indifferent to politics or frankly a sup-
porter of the old order. The Amsterdam conference proved
how seriously the events of the past decades and the experi-
ence of the churches in resisting Nazism have altered the
social outlook of the churches and increased their sense
of social responsibility. As one delegate, the Christian
mayor of a German city and a Socialist, put it,
Recent history has reduced all bourgeois existence in
Europe to the insecurity which once characterized prole-
tarian life alone. Whatever spiritual insights are derived
from that social insecurity are therefore no longer ex-
clusively proletarian. If Christianity insists that the social
environment does not finally determine the meaning of
our existence, it can make that point only if it recognizes
the immediate and pressing importance of all questions
relating to the organization of a tolerable justice.
The radicalism of Europe at the conference was strongly
anti-Communist. The lone voice in favor of Russia was that
of the Prague theological professor, Hromadka. It might
be mentioned in passing that the most powerful theologi-
cal influence on the Continent, that of Karl Barth, is
obliquely pro-Communist but not actively so. The radi-
calism of Africa and Asia on the other hand is friendly to
Communism. The poverty of the Orient, the resentment of
the colored peoples of the world at the white man's ar-
rogance, the aspirations of colonial peoples, rightly or
wrongly imagining that Russia is their champion against
the "imperialistic" powers all these factors contribute to
the formation of something new in the history of Christi-
anity. This something new is not exactly Christian com-
munism but a form of Christianity tremendously sym-
The Church and the Churches 305
pathetic to Communism. I should add, from the standpoint
of Western prejudices, that it is also tremendously naive
about the actual workings of the Communist political
machine and rather ignorant about recent political history
in Europe. The general hatred of Britain as an imperial
power and the envy and moral loathing aroused in the
East by America's technical power and economic wealth
contribute to this whole orientation. After attending three
ecumenical Christian conferences in the past year I have
come to the conclusion that even if there were no other
evidence available the attitude of Christians in Africa
and Asia would prove that the greatest triumphs of Com-
munism will be achieved in the non-European world.
THE WORLD COUNCIL
AT AMSTERDAM
An ecumenical conference is at once a thrilling and a
disheartening experience. It is thrilling because there are
so many evidences of a genuine unity of faith and lif e be-
yond the national and denominational differences which
divide Christendom. One has the feeling that the church
does really worship one Lord who rules its mind beyond
differences of administrations and diversities of gifts. One
realizes too that there is not only a given unity but
also a growing unity. Misunderstandings are actually be-
ing overcome in days of fruitful discussion and common
prayer. New definitions resolve old perplexities. New
insights make for a genuine exchange of the various gifts
of grace in the various traditions of Christendom.
The conference just ended at Amsterdam was partic-
ularly heartening because it brought a long history of
growing understanding to both a culmination and a new
beginning. Here the churches committed themselves to
each other officially in such a way that it marks a real
306 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
milestone to their history. They have done something ir-
revocably. They cannot be quite the same again. They
have decided that they will maintain this permanent in-
strument of unity in which they may encounter each other
in the spirit of charity rather than competition, through
which they will engage in many common tasks and in
mutual support of each other; and by the aid of which
they will seek to appropriate each other's treasures of
faith and of grace. The conference was heartening too be-
cause of the strong note on the renewal of the church as
the real objective. It was recognized how frequently the
causes of disunity are also the roots of the church's irrele-
vance to the problems of men today. The emphasis was
not upon unity merely that a united church might gain the
authority which a divided church lacked. It was fortunately
recognized again and again that the truth of the gospel had
its own authority which was not derived from the church
but which was frequently prevented from reaching the
hearts of needy people because of the various sins of the
church, its flight from the world into irrelevance, its alli-
ance with powerful classes and groups in society, its mix-
ing the notes of national self-esteem with the truth of the
gospel, its failure to preach a prophetic word of judgment
to the proud and the complacent, and its neglect of the
poor and needy. The emphasis was upon a renewed
church, more instant to show forth the love and mercy of
Christ to those whom the tumults of modern history have
reduced to despair; more courageous in exalting the maj-
esty of a crucified and risen Savior against all principalities
and powers; and more ready to make the church a true
community of grace in which racial, national, and class
distinctions are overcome. It was felt that the reunion of
the churches must be a part of a total process of its
renewal.
One heard the witness of the so-called younger churches,
the representatives of Asia and Africa and one realized
that the great missionary movement, begun over a century
ago, was beginning to bear fruit in the universalization of
the church in history as well as in idea. The younger
churches brought new insights into the discussion which
The Church and the Churches 307
prevented many a possible one-sided emphasis. Further-
more the discussions between the older churches on polity
and order, on theology, and the life of the church, revealed
how much of what divides the church represents facets of
truth which belong in a total unity. When, for instance,
the communion service was held according to the rite
of the Dutch Reformed church on Sunday morning with
most of the delegates participating, many representatives
of the liturgical churches felt that the special form of the
service, involving the seating of the communicants around
a common table and the passing of the communion cup
from one communicant to another, was a more vivid re-
minder of the historic last supper and a more telling sac-
ramental exposition of the words "this do in remembrance
of me" than any alternative service. These notes of appreci-
ation were generally associated with criticisms of the
words of introduction to the communion which expressed a
rather hard legalism, a strict separation of the goats who
could not participate in the communion from the sheep
who could. If the definition of the sinners had not been so
archaic and had described the relevant sins of our own day
one would have had the feeling that no one really had the
right to participate, since no one is worthy to do so. One
was tempted to forget that the sacrament is for repentant
sinners and that there must be a note of gratitude and
rejoicing in it for the mercy of God.
This is merely one illustration of the real ecumenical
problem and promise; the endless possibilities offered to
the churches to learn of one another rather than to hold
jealously to their own particular emphasis, practices, or
traditions.
The assembly was distressing as well as heartening be-
cause it is so apparent that most churches actually do as-
sume that they have the only right order, theology, or
way of life. Statements of agreement were sometimes so
general and vague that they said practically nothing at
all. In these vague statements neither significant agree-
ment nor significant disagreement is clarified. The amount
of sheer empty verbiage which flows in an ecumenical
gathering is so great that it seems like a mighty stream of
308 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
murky water which threatens to engulf the necessarily tiny
streams of grace and truth.
The Anglo-Saxon world, unwilling to sacrifice the free-
dom of historical criticism of the Bible as a real and lasting
achievement of the liberal movement, was baffled by the
growing literalism of the Continent. Thus Karl Earth fought
for the rights of women in the church against ecclesiastical
traditionalists who were certain that a priest must be a man
because Jesus was a man or even because God is mascu-
line. But the thoughtful women in the church were not so
well pleased when Barth took back in the name of Biblical
literalism what he had won against tradition. He warned
the women to be more careful not to violate any of the
Biblical, mainly Pauline, injunctions about the place of
women in the church. He granted that some of these were
"time-bound" and were therefore not the word of the
Lord. But he never made clear just by what measure you
determine what is time-bound in Scripture and what is
not.
Perhaps the most discouraging aspect of an ecumenical
gathering is the complacency with which pious representa-
tives of the churches approach the problems of the rela-
tivity of historic viewpoints. Considering that the Chris-
tian faith has in its essence a profound understanding of
the fact that man is man and not God and that he does
not easily achieve a timeless truth, being himself involved
in all the conditions and contingencies of time, one should
imagine that Christians would have a little more apprecia-
tion of the contingent and conditioned character of partic-
ular theological, liturgical, and ecclesiastical traditions.
The fact that Christ himself transcends these historical con-
tingencies is recognized because it is realized that it is
the power of His mercy which draws Christians together
above and beyond their differences. But almost every
theological or ecclesiastical tradition insists upon adding
something which belongs to the historically contingent to
this final truth and regarding it as absolute. It does this
with a curious air of complacency which makes one under-
stand the belief of the secular age that the one way to get
rid of fanaticism is to get rid of religion. There were touch-
The Church and the Churches 309
ing and gracious examples at Amsterdam of the mood of
humility and charity, of the readiness to learn as well as
to teach. But there were also many examples of the op-
posite mood, which were obvious enough even though they
were expressed with the greatest urbanity and never in
terms of a shrill polemic. One realized from all this that
the ecumenical process had only begun and that it had a
long and hard road ahead; and that indeed the church
would have to be shaken and disturbed by the hand of
God much more than it has been before there could be a
more genuine disposition of each not to look at his own
things but also at the things of the other.
In contrast to the sharp differences of conviction on al-
most every question of theology and polity there was a
remarkable consensus on social issues. The churches can-
not agree in defining what the true church is, but they
have a fairly common mind on what it should do in the
present world. The old contrast between American activism
and Continental quietism has disappeared completely. The
European churches awakened to their social responsibil-
ities in the last tragic decade. In doing so they have become
considerably more radical than most American churches.
With this radical (generally socialist) political conviction
they combine an eschatological note, an insistence on the
final triumph of Christ over sin, evil, and death, no matter
what may happen in the next year or decade or century.
This note of New Testament faith was found very baffling
by many Americans who thought it connoted irresponsibil-
ity toward the pressing problems of the world. Indeed, it
was expressed in words which seemed to suggest the pos-
sibility of human beings achieving a kind of timeless seren-
ity, which had no concerns with this world. Yet the same
man who baffled us with such words insisted that the
church was much too sentimental in dealing with problems
of political justice. It found some of the Anglo-Saxon devo-
tion to such matters as the Human Rights Declaration of
the United Nations quite irrelevant in the light of the more
pressing decisions confronting the world. Despite the
presence of many church leaders from behind the Iron
Curtain, only one, the well-known Professor Hromadka of
310 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
Prague, espoused the Russian cause. Every one else was
apprehensive about a possible war but every one also
seemed quite certain that the best way to avoid it was
not to yield to Russian pressure.
There is no sympathy for Communism among Christians
in Europe. But there is a great deal of hope in it in Asia.
It was interesting to hear bishops from India and China
argue that Communism must not be too rigorously con-
demned since the millions of Asia were attracted to it by
genuine needs arising out of their poverty, their resent-
ment against Western imperialism, and the white man's
arrogance. One has the uneasy feeling that, as certain as
the march of Communism is stopped in Europe, it is on
the march in Asia.
This note from Asia served to divide the conference on
Communism but to increase the consensus on a generally
radical approach to social and economic issues. More con-
servative Americans did not challenge this general con-
sensus on political issues partly, it seemed, because they
were convinced as Christians, rather than as political
partisans, that the indictment of the old order in the West
was necessary and justified from a Christian standpoint.
Beyond these particular political convictions the discus-
sions at Amsterdam did give the impression that the
churches were more certainly in a process of renewal than
in a process of reunion. Few saw the irrelevance of many
churches to the immediate and the ultimate issues of life
very clearly and they constantly insisted that the church
must help men to solve the immediate issues of social
justice and community and to preach the gospel of the
Crucified and Risen Lord more boldly and faithfully that
men may not despair in a day of social anxiety, insecurity,
and frustration.
The Church and the Churches 311
THE WORLD COUNCIL AND
THE PEACE ISSUE
The statement on the Korean crisis by the World Council
of Churches is significant primarily because of its unequiv-
ocal position. The body which passed it has a world-wide
membership; and there was naturally a great deal of
searching of heart about its possible effect upon the mem-
bers of the Council in lands behind the Iron Curtain.
These churches were, for the first time, not represented at
all; but they were present in spirit and everyone was anx-
ious that nothing be done to make their lot more difficult.
Yet these scruples did not prevent the Council from
speaking without equivocation on the world situation. The
two most important emphases in the document are: (i)
the commendation of the action of the United Nations, as
an instrument of world order in resisting the aggression in
Korea; and (2) the insistence that this conflict need not be
the beginning of another world war if both the military
pressures of totalitarianism are resisted and the injustices
and disorders, which Communism exploits, are corrected.
There were only two pacifist abstentions from the state-
ment, one from a representative of an historic "peace
church." It is significant how Christians from all over the
world had the common conviction that the way to avoid a
general conflict was to resist totalitarianism in its various
"thrusts/* whether by military power as in the case of
Korea, or by political intrigue, as in other instances. There
was a general feeling that military circles, and perhaps all
the rest of us, have been too concerned with the possibility
of a world war and had not considered sufficiently the pos-
sibility which is now unfolding, namely engagements in
many parts of the world, both military and political. It
must be admitted that many European and Asiatic dele-
312 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
gates, while grateful for the prompt action of the United
States and the United Nations in the case of Korea, were
not at all sanguine about the ability of our country to deal
as adequately with the endless political and moral issues
which this kind of conflict implies as with the technical
problems of a world military conflict.
While the pacifist position is one of three possible Chris-
tian attitudes, defined by the Amsterdam assembly of the
World Council, it is significant that this position had little
support in the World Council, certainly far less than it has
in American church life. The Council did include a strong
condemnation of atomic and bacteriological weapons at
a time when some of our hysterical congressmen were call-
ing for the use of atom bombs in Korea. It is clear that
both the United Nations and the United States high com-
mand understand the awful loss of moral prestige which
would result from the use of these weapons. It is now
fairly certain that they will not be used.
The realism of the World Council statement stands in
significant contrast with the efforts now being made by
American pacifists in the name of a newly organized com-
mittee, entitled, "Committee for Mediation Now/' This
committee asks that the churches shall place all their sup-
port behind Nehru's efforts at mediation. We are told
that he
in a large measure inherits the leadership of Gandhi and
is therefore probably best qualified to ... inaugurate
and conduct the delicate negotiations . . . He would
be much heartened in his efforts if there were indica-
tions of support from the United States and other parts
of the world.
The statement of the committee declares:
We must strive to bring the bloodshed to an end and
find a peaceful alternative. It would be tragic if a few
weeks or months from now, in the midst of a full-fledged
world conflagration, we were burdened with the suspi-
cion that there was something we might have done but
failed to do.
The Church and the Churches 313
Yet Nehru's greatness as a statesman, cannot change the
purposes of the Kremlin. They are willing to negotiate on
terms which would practically deliver Asia into the hands
of Communism. Here is the old dilemma. Pacifism as a
measure of practical statesmanship means appeasement of
a resolute foe, who hopes to expand his power without
a general conflict. Pacifism in the realm of practical politics
assumes that a little conflict is necessarily the beginning of
a big one. The chances are that the best way of avoiding
the big one is not to yield on the little one. Nothing, in a
sense, has changed in the past ten years. Peace, as a reli-
gious absolute, can be held by sensitive spirits, who can-
not abide the horrible ambiguities and risks of so tragic an
age. Peace as a political absolute is confusing. If we strive
for political peace too desperately we deliver the world into
the hands of those who have no scruples.
It is rather unfortunate that the debate in Christian cir-
cles must always be upon this issue. It prevents us from
engaging the conscience of the nation upon a more impor-
tant point. That point is our inadequacy as a nation to help
establish what the World Council statement calls "an ex-
panding justice," particularly in the vast complexities of
Asia, with its desperate poverty and its unfulfilled ambi-
tions of national independence and unity. We ought to be
grateful that the prospect of a world-wide conflict is less,
rather than more, ominous through recent developments.
But the change of emphasis has brought up issues which
tax our conscience less, but engage it more, than our pre-
vious fears. The question is not how to appease Commu-
nism but, in the words of the World Council, to achieve
enough justice to "render the world morally impregnable
to totalitarian infiltration/*
314 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
THE PROBLEMS OF A
WORLD CHURCH
These lines are being written in the midst of a ten-day dis-
cussion of a World Council of Churches committee which
has been given the task of preparing material for the next
assembly of the World Council. The experiences of our
committee are a revelation in microcosm of the problems
of the world church in macrocosm. The basic problem is to
state the full truth of the Christian gospel in such a way
that it will be relevant to all historic situations. Consider
some of the divergencies of viewpoint and experience at
such a meeting as ours, as symbolic of the world situation.
There is one group of Christians, living close to the Iron
Curtain, which wants the Christian message stated in such
a way that it will bring comfort and hope to Christians
behind the Iron Curtain, some of whom are undergoing
great suffering and few of whom could possibly exercise
any significant political choices. On the other hand a mes-
sage to Christians in America deals with people who suffer
little but who bear great responsibility, America having be-
come the center of a world-wide system of democratic
order. Americans are not tempted to despair, as are people
in those parts of the world in which there is little prospect
of freedom or justice. But Americans may well be tempted
to pride on the one hand or to complacency on the other.
But these two extremes do not exhaust the divergencies
in the world-wide church. The peoples of Asia do not have
the securities which we enjoy; but they do have the new
possibilities and perils of their various new freedoms. They
want to know how the Christian faith may be related to
the creation of a viable economic and political order and
what the Christian resources are for preventing the spread
of Communism. This does not mean that they take a merely
The Church and the Churches 315
utilitarian attitude toward the Christian faith. But naturally
they are bound to relate their ultimate confidence to their
immediate confidence and anxieties.
There is another type of situation, different from Amer-
ica, Asia, or the prisoners behind the Iron Curtain. Many
people of Europe, perhaps particularly in France, are in a
condition of hopelessness. They think that all alternatives
offered today are not necessarily equally bad but that none
of them are good enough to give any real hope to modern
man. France is, as far as it is not Communist, deeply af-
fected by the mood of "existentialists," who find no signi-
ficant meaning in life.
There is a part of the Gospel which is meaningful
particularly to those who have no earthly hope but need to
be assured of the love of God from which "neither death
nor life will be able to separate us." There is a part of the
gospel which is meaningful particularly to nations, classes,
and peoples who are secure and successful. It could be
expressed in the text, "Be not therefore high-minded but
fear." There is a part of the gospel which is directed to
those who are not in an impossible situation, but think they
are, such as some of the people of Europe. They need to be
reminded of their responsibilities. The parable of the tal-
ents is meant for them, particularly the warning to the
servant who hid his talent in the ground.
The peoples of Asia, who need so much to establish basic
security and to escape from the grinding poverty of an in-
efficient economy, must learn how to relate their justified
striving for more justice and plenty to the more ultimate
judgment and mercies of the Kingdom of God. One would
like to quote the text to them, "Seek first His kingdom and
His righteousness/* except that this text cannot be pressed
upon people who desperately need "all the things that will
be added" by comfortable people who have these things.
In these many situations there are not different gospels.
But different facets of the gospel are variously relevant.
The task of the church is to define the different facets but
also to insist on the unity of the one message in Christ.
Finally that message is of course found in his Cross and
Resurrection from which those who are comfortable and
316 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
secure must learn that "if ye will not die with him, neither
will ye live with him"; while all the weak and despised and
lowly and oppressed must learn the meaning of Paul's
assurance in his second letter to the Corinthians: "We are
treated ... as dying, and behold we live."
HOPE NEEDS FAITH AND LOVE
As one who participated in formulating the first, but not
the second, report of the Advisory Committee on the theme
of the General Assembly > I am glad to participate in gen-
eral approval of the second report and to associate myself
with the equally general opinion that it is very superior
to the first report. One might draw some interesting conclu-
sions about the methods of arriving at an ecumenical con-
sensus in accounting for this superiority. A noted European
theologian is reported to have accounted for the superiority
partly by asserting that the American delegation to the
second meeting was superior. A more plausible reason for
the excellence of the second report was that it profited by
the wide discussion and criticism to which the first report
was subjected, thus proving the value of ecumenical discus-
sions in the most comprehensive possible terms. But I have
drawn an additional conclusion from the indubitable facts.
The first report was inferior because some of us were so
anxious to reach an ecumenical accord that we did not
represent those viewpoints which were bound to express
themselves in the church and to influence the second re-
port rigorously enough. If this be true, it proves that if it
is important to avoid the notorious rabies theologorum in
theological discussion, it is also important to avoid what
the general secretary of the World Council, Dr. Visser'T
Hooft once defined as "theological pacifism." The point is
that the first report affirmed what is undoubtedly the Scrip-
tural faith in regard to the Christian hope. But every part
The Church and the Churches 317
of Scriptural faith has a long history of interpretation, and
also of possible misinterpretation. The first report stated
the convictions of that part of the church which has made
the eschatological emphasis of the New Testament its spir-
itual possession; it may have guarded it against misinter-
pretation and related it to other parts of Scriptural truth in
so thorough a manner as to find further explanations and
reservations unnecessary. But those of us who represented
portions of the church which had to deal with sectarian
distortions of Biblical eschatology or who wanted to be
sure of guarding the truth embodied in the Biblical affirma-
tion of the ever-present Christ as distinguished from the
hope of his second coming did not present the concern of
our churches vigorously enough. The second report is more
comprehensive because it embodies the viewpoints, reser-
vations, and interpretations of that part of the church
which has not lived with the eschatological emphasis so
long and is not persuaded that the whole Gospel can be
expressed in the New Testament eschatology.
The excellence of the second report in my opinion is due
to the following reasons:
1 ) The second report gives a comprehensive account of
the Biblical eschatology and shows that the whole New
Testament thought is involved in the balance of the two
affirmations that Christ has come and that He will return.
It may be observed in passing that the criticisms which
have been leveled even at the second report are due to
fears that the emphasis on the coming Christ is in danger
of upsetting this balance.
2) The second report guards against the apocalyptic
misinterpretations of New Testament eschatology and
warns against fruitless miBenarian speculation on "the day
and the hour."
3) The second report tries to prove the relevance of the
Christian hope by appreciating on the one hand, and criti-
cizing on the other, the various hopes and forms of crea-
tivity in which our secular culture is involved and in which
Christians too must be involved in so far as they recognize
their responsibility for the peace and justice of the world.
This section of the report has been criticized on the ground
318 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
that it did not make sufficient distinction between "demo-
cratic utopianism" and "Stalinist utopianism/' I noted that
the Hungarians criticized it because it did not sufficiently
criticize "chauvinism" along with Stalinism. As one who
believes it to be very important for Christians to make dis-
criminate judgments about political movements and who
would believe it to be inexcusable to find Communist tyr-
anny and modern democracy, however imperfect, as equally
under judgment from the standpoint of the Kingdom of
God, I nevertheless believe that the report is right in find-
ing fault with all these movements from the standpoint of
New Testament eschatology. For whatever their merits
they, like all human efforts, are in danger of claiming a final
and ultimate sanctity for their values and of obscuring the
creaturely limitations of the men who are engaged in these
various forms of creativity. On this point Christian eschatol-
ogy reveals itself as very important. It must remind men,
including Christians, constantly how great the difference is
between the Lord of history and the little creatures who
are called to be co-workers together with him. This is the
more important because we have many modern reminders
of the fact that the worst evils are brought into history by
those "idealists" who think they can bring history to some
final conclusion. Whether it is Hegel or Marx or the late
N. Berdyaev, speculating about the validity of Russian
Messianism, these pretentions are either pathetic or
dangerous.
While the second report stands up very well under the
various criticisms leveled against it, and while I do not be-
lieve that it can be significantly improved short of giving
up the original idea of the theme for the General Assembly,
the criticisms which have been made of the report in the
Central Committee at Lucknow and by various study
groups are nevertheless significant.
Let us review them. Mr, M. M. Thomas said that it was
not enough to destroy Utopian hopes but that the church
must give guidance for present Christian action and respon-
sibility. Dr. Fry thought the document was deficient in
emphasis on the Holy Spirit, and Dr. Mackay thought em-
phasis on the vocation of Christ should be added to the
^riurcn ana irte
hope of Christ. Some critics found the report too pessimis-
tic, for any emphasis on Christ as our "only hope" would
seem by implication at least to dismiss all other forms of
hope for at least partial realizations of Christ's will in his-
tory. Finally there was the criticism by one of the commit-
tees at Lucknow, that all of the report's antimillenarian
emphasis would not in fact save it from being interpreted
in millenarian terms. I would draw a single conclusion from
these evidences of continued uneasiness in the church about
what is actually an excellent report, and that conclusion is
fairly well expressed by one of the study groups, which
criticized the report. It declared that any isolated discus-
sion of hope would run the peril of violating the Pauline
dictum, "Now there abideth faith, hope and love. But the
greatest of these is love." The question is whether the gen-
erally-accepted principle of theological exposition is true
that a wise exposition of any facet of the Christian truth
will finally do justice to every other facet, or whether this
trinity of "faith, hope and love" is one that cannot safely
be dissolved or looked at merely from one of its three facets,
if only for a moment.
In answering these questions we must observe that the
emphasis of all the critics upon Christ as a revelation in a
present dimension of the God whom we encounter, upon
the Holy Spirit, upon present obedience as contrasted with
future hopes, all include what might be defined as faith as
distinguished from hope. The recognition of our encounter
with God in Christ challenges every form of the interpreta-
tion of Me which imparts meaning to human existence by
finding some coherence of nature or of reason or of history
as the final clue to the meaning. These alternatives prove
themselves wrong in the end because they do not reveal
the true God ("the world by its wisdom knew not God*')
and because they fail to do justice to the heights of both
good and evil which men are capable of in history. The
encounter between the soul and God in which the despair
caused by sin and death is overcome by the mercy, medi-
ated in Christ, is first of all a personal experience, and no
questions are raised about the whole drama of history and
what kind of outcome it will have. It is an encounter in
The Church and the Churches 321
rejoice with a young man or woman in their budding ma-
turity but also remind them that the final end of maturity
is death? Or encourage a wise statesmanship to build a
precarious peace in a catastrophic age while reminding it
that every peace of the world must be precarious?
In the first meeting of the Advisory Committee we heard
a great deal about the fact that those who lived in islands
of security in an insecure world were less interested in
Christian eschatology than the Christians behind the "Iron
Curtain." I have therefore studied with special interest the
various descriptions of Christian life under totalitarian re-
gimes and I have not found a single instance of the eschato-
logical hope as an element in the Christian witness. The
emphasis lies upon integrity and courage which reflects
the Scriptural injunction, "We must obey God rather than
men/* and upon love of the neighbor which surmounts the
fears and resulting cowardice in a world created by tyranny
in order to bear witness to the love which casteth out fear.
No doubt the total faith of the Christians who have this
capacity to witness would include the New Testament
hope that the whole confused drama of human history
will come to a close by the victory of Christ over all princi-
palities and powers. There is no doubt also that without
this hope the Christian faith is in danger of pietistic distor-
tions in which the faith and hope of the individual for
forgiveness and fulfillment is isolated from the destiny of
the whole of mankind. That is why the Christian hope as
affirmed in the New Testament is so integral a part of the
whole Gospel. But it seems to me that nothing can change
the fact that the love of Christ is a more effective witness
of the faith and the hope which is in us than the hope
which is the fruit of the faith which love declares. While it
is necessary to insist on the hope as a part of the Gospel
news, one may expect a good deal of uneasiness in the
church about any implication that the affirmation of our
hope is an effective way of witnessing to the reality and
relevance of our faith before a generation composed largely
of skeptics and unbelievers.
Perhaps the question about the suitability of an eschato-
logical theme for an ecumenical meeting is reduced to the
322 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
question about the primary end and purpose of such a
meeting. Is it to "establish the brethren" and create the
broadest and most satisfactory Biblical basis for an ecumen-
ical consensus? In that case the eschatological emphasis is
necessary, for it represents a neglected portion of the Bib-
lical inheritance; it corrects two errors which are prevalent
in the church, an individualism which does not take prob-
lems of the whole drama of man's total history seriously
but seeks to find fulfillment for each soul independently,
and an optimism which usually infiltrates into the church
from the secular movements of a bourgeois era and which
expects the course of history itself to be redemptive. It is
important to refute both of the errors.
Or is it the purpose of an ecumenical meeting to bear
witness of our faith to the world? This can hardly be its
primary purpose, but no one will deny that what is said
at the Assembly will be overheard in the world and will
be meant to be overheard. In so far as it will be overheard
one must admit that the eschatological theme is not the
most effective theme from an apologetic standpoint, what-
ever may be its theological importance. To admit this is to
admit that a wide chasm yawns between the Biblical truth
and the ethos of the modern man. Perhaps it is mistaken to
look for bridges across that chasm, but such bridges are
actually suggested in the Bible. The best witness to the
Lordship of the crucified Savior is to live under the reign
of his love and to show forth his Agape. A General Assem-
bly is not, of course, the most adequate vehicle for this
kind of witness, but there seems to be some uneasiness in
the church lest the Assembly should fail to bear testimony
to the importance of this witness.
The Church and the Churches 323
CHRIST THE HOPE OF THE WORLD:
WHAT HAS HISTORY TO SAY?
I
It is significant for the chasm which separates America
from the Continent that so eminent a Christian historian
as Professor Latourette should interpret the theme of
the Second General Assembly of the World Council of
Churches, to be held in Evanston this summer, as implying
that Jesus Christ is the "hope of the world'* in the sense
that the Christian faith offers the world some hope of a
gradual triumph, in actual human history, of the "values"
embodied in Christ.
For the Continental theologians, who were chiefly re-
sponsible for formulating the theme, chose it, I am per-
suaded, because they thought it most strategic to challenge
precisely the form of historical optimism which Professor
Latourette elaborates in his article. They regard such a
hope as a form of secularism, and they replace it with
a Biblical account of Christ's second coming which in
America will be regarded as a purely illusory projection of
hope to the "end of history/* which cultured Christians had
left to literalistic sects to claim as their article of faith. The
average intelligent Protestant Christian will interpret the
phrase "Jesus Christ the only hope of the world" in exactly
the same way as Professor Latourette has interpreted it.
I tliink this whole misunderstanding proves that the defi-
nition of Christian hope is not the best way of consolidating
an ecumenical consensus or of challenging the remnants of
"secularism" which the Continent suspects in the Christian
thought of the "Anglo-Saxon" world. The "secular" element
in Christian thought, particularly in America, is of course
324 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
the identification of Christian hope with the idea of
progress.
Professor Latourette assumes it to be his function to in-
terpret Christian hope in this way. But he is also an honest
historian and he therefore has great difficulty in fulfilling
his assignment. Thus he calls attention to tie spread of
Christianity from the Western world to the entire globe;
but he is forced to concede that this phenomenon is bal-
anced by the secularization of Western Christendom and
that a part of this secularization includes the emergence of
the demonic secular religion of Communism. He also faith-
fully records that the dynamic of Western civilization is
the fruit of Christianity's affirmation of man's historic ex-
istence, but that this dynamic has both evil and good fruits.
This latter admission contains the refutation of any simple
identification of Christian hope with the idea of historical
progress. It is very plain that human history is open to end-
less possibilities of both good and evil, because human
freedom is radical and real. There is therefore the possibil-
ity that any historic development of human freedom will
result in both destructiveness and increased creativity.
In the report of the World Council Advisory Commis-
sion on the central theme, this character of human history
is described in the following words:
The long history of the world which He created and sus-
tains from day to day and for the sake of which He sent
His Son, is not rendered meaningless by the coming of
His Kingdom. Nor on the other hand is His Kingdom
simply the final outcome of the world's history. There is
no straight line from the labors of men to His Kingdom.
He rejects that history of which man fancies himself to
be the center, creator and lord. He accepts that history
of which the beginning, middle and end He Himself
fixes.
In short, the theme of the General Assembly elaborates
a New Testament hope according to which the culmination
of history is not within history itself but at its end. History
is recognized as being problematic to the end. It solves no
The Church and the Churches 325
human problems but rather accentuates every human
problem.
Therefore from the standpoint from which the Christian
hope has been defined by the Advisory Commission, some
of the evidence adduced by Professor Latourette is rather
irrelevant: that Christian influence entered the formation of
the League of Nations, that it was powerful in the organiza-
tion of the Red Cross, that the Salvation Army responded
to the needs of the poor who were driven to revolt by Marx-
ist dogmas, that it was responsible for the abolition of
slavery and for the organization of the Y.M.C.A.'s. Some
of these assertions are highly problematic, incidentally.
Wilson may have been a Christian, but the dream of a
world community which brought forth the League of Na-
tions is a Renaissance, rather than a specifically Christian,
achievement. However great may be achievements of the
Salvation Army, they do not seriously challenge or abate
the evils of world-wide Communism. In most of the
achievements which the historian enumerates, secular ideal-
ism cooperated with more distinctively Christian idealism
in bringing them about. This is true of the abolition move-
ment and of the growth of political democracy. One there-
fore feels it a little pretentious to assert that "it is through
lives made radiant through Christ that these movements
begin."
One must be even more hesitant to affirm with Professor
Latourette that "judged from the scope of the entire human
scene and the course of history to our day, Christ and his
Church are making themselves more and more felt and
have never been more potent than in our time." Perhaps it
is the phrase "Christ and his Church" which makes the
assertion so dubious. We are convinced that the Sovereign
Lord of history has been supremely revealed in Christ. We
can detect proofs of this Lord's sovereignty in the whole
course of history, particularly when we see Him making
the wrath of man to praise Him; and when we see move-
ments not specifically Christian and far beyond the con-
fines of the church, serving providentially to do God's wiH.
But this vision of a divine Lord is obscured when we say
326 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
"Christ and his Church" and particularly when we make
the claim that the two, "Christ and his Church," are be-
coming increasingly potent in our day. The claim that the
church is becoming increasingly potent in our day is cer-
tainly open to doubt. But it is even more dubious to link
"Christ and his Church" in this way. For thus we make
the glory of Christ dependent upon the weak human
instrument of the church.
Let us take just one example from current history: the
struggle with Communism, and previously with Fascism.
In each of these struggles some Protestant and Catholic
Christians bore heroic witness to their faith, but the total
Christian witness was ambiguous. The Catholic church,
which resisted Nazism in the end, first made compromises
with it because it saw it as a foe of Communism. It re-
sisted Communism more unequivocally. But it was also
involved in the decadent feudalism, of Eastern Europe for
instance, the injustices of which furnished the resentments
upon which Communism fed. Protestant Christianity had
its own heroes of resistance to both Fascism and Commu-
nism. But it contributed by its indifference to political and
economic justice to the rise of both; and it was, and is,
tainted by Communist sympathies.
The self-destruction of these two demonic movements is,
therefore, a manifestation of the sovereignty of God over
history which is greater than anything suggested by the
phrase "Christ and his Church." For the church is deeply
involved in the sins of the world; and never more so than
when it pretends to divine sanctity, as in the case of
Catholicism. One suspects, in fact, that the phrase "Christ
and his Church" hides the heresy which the Advisory Com-
mission wanted to warn against by distinguishing between
the divine sovereignty and the history conceived in terms
of human virtues and human powers. The point is that the
divine sovereignty expresses itself not chiefly by the aid of
human virtues and powers but despite human weaknesses;
and it uses all kinds of instruments for its purpose, includ-
ing the virtues of non-Christians and the self -defeat of the
sins of men.
The Church and the Churches 327
II
This does not mean that the conscious effort to do God's
will is irrelevant or that the church, as that community
where the mystery of the divine sovereignty is disclosed,
does not play a significant part in God's designs. Most of
the illustrations which Latourette uses are in fact excellent
examples of the working of Christ's spirit in the affairs of
men. They only become absurd when it is implied that the
triumph of Christ depends upon them. For not only are the
historical fruits of Christian men and the church continu-
ally ambiguous, but the effects in history of those who do
not consciously follow God's will are very important* The
design which the Bible discerns in God's sovereignty over
history is in every case more majestic than can be seen if
we try to isolate Christian virtues and attribute certain
types of moral progress to them.
Most of the examples which Professor Latourette gives
of men and women who incarnated the spirit of Christ; and
particularly his emphasis upon humble men and women
whose lives cannot be obviously fitted into some grand
pattern of history but who are nevertheless significant in
the eyes of faith, call attention to the fact that the witness
of faith, and of love as a fruit of faith, is more important
than the witness of hope.
The situation seems to be that the Christian faith affirms
that the drama of each individual life and of the whole
human enterprise is pkyed on. a larger stage than the one-
dimensional nature-history which the historians chart. It is
declared to be under a higher sovereignty than the system
of nature and of reason which scientists and philosophers
discern. The only real but important proof of such an
affirmation is that the human self transcends all the sover-
eignties which are known, and that Me does not make any
sense if it is measured in the dimension of the "wisdom of
the world." We are either driven to despair by its mean-
inglessness or to various types of madness by trying to
make sense out of it from our own standpoint. The mad-
328 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
ness is the consequence of our grasping for power or pres-
tige or wisdom beyond the obvious limits of creatures. The
alternative is to discern by faith the higher dimension and
to be assured that "neither life nor death nor any other
creature is able to separate us from the love of God which
is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
A concomitant of the faith that Christ is a clue to the
mystery of the divine sovereign of human life and history
is that human life transcends our earthly existence. There
is no witness for such a faith and such a hope except the
nonchalance of perfect faith and love, which is able to say
"whether we live we live unto the Lord, whether we die
we die unto the Lord, whether we live therefore or die we
are the Lord's." This nonchalance is a perfect witness
to the faith only if it results in an actual mitigation of the
lust for power and prestige by which the faithless people
try to make sense out of life.
But such a faith leaves the question unanswered how the
whole human enterprise will come to a conclusion. The
New Testament eschatology assumes that human history
will be fragmentary and contradictory to the end, that the
worst form of evil, the "anti-Christ/' will appear at the end
of history; and that the final victory of Christ will there-
fore come not in history but at the end of history. This
assumes that the moral ambiguities of history and its con-
tradictions will not be mitigated. They may even be height-
ened. The New Testament eschatology assumes that they
will be heightened. "In the last days" many evils will ap-
pear. Men will be "proud, boasters, lovers of themselves."
This eschatology seemed highly speculative; and since the
Renaissance it has also seemed irrelevant because another
way was found to give history meaning. The meaning was
furnished by the development of all good things in history.
The Christian faith did not relinquish its faith in personal
inrmortality, but it substituted the modern idea of progress
for this eschatology of the New Testament.
The choice of the World Council theme is an effort to
recall the church to the hope as expressed in the New
Testament. In a sense this is an appropriate era in which
to make the attempt For the substitute faith which seemed
The Church and the Churches 329
so plausible in the nineteenth century is rather fantastic
now in an age of probable atomic wars and of global con-
flicts instead of the hoped-for global peace. Professor
Latourette, as a good historian, allows the evidence for
this nature of history to appear in his analysis, though he
clings to the old faith by his insistence that "Christ and his
Church" are becoming progressively more influential. We
are living in an age in which the modern substitute for
Christian eschatology, which was once so plausible, has
become more fantastic than the Christian hope of the
parousia of Christ.
Ill
I would maintain nevertheless that the selection of
eschatology was faulty statesmanship, if it was the concern
of the church to bear witness to its faith before the world.
The New Testament eschatology is at once too naive for a
sophisticated world and too sophisticated for the simple-
minded modern man, who has become so accustomed to
try to make sense out of life by measuring history in terms
of some scheme of rational intelligibility. It is just as foolish
to bear witness to our faith by insisting on what will seem
to the world a fantastic hope as to bear witness to our
faith by our personal hope of "the resurrection.' 7 These
two hopes are indeed an integral part of the faith. But we
might not in the hour of death be perfectly certain of our
destiny after death and we might, despite these doubts,
have given a genuine witness to our faith, if we had borne
pain and sorrow with patience and had been released from
self -concern so that our hearts went out to our brethren.
While the present seems a very strategic era in which
to restore a part of the New Testament faith which had
become discredited and obscured, we need only to analyze
the needs of our generation to recognize that it is not par-
ticularly redemptive to approach a disillusioned generation
with a proud "I told you so" and a fanciful picture of the
end of history, or at least a picture which will seem fanciful
to our generation, whether Christian or secular. What
330 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
would be more to the point is to bear witness to our faith
in terms of attitudes of watchfulness and soberness rather
than alternate moods of "sleep and drunkenness" which
St. Paul describes as the moods of "the night," that is, as
the consequences of the lack of faith in the Lord of history
who has been revealed to us in Christ,
Our generation has these moods of sleep and drunken-
ness, of complacency and hysteria, not only alternately hut
simultaneously; for we are curiously hysterical about Com-
munism but complacent about the possibilities of an atomic
war. The poor Civil Defense Administrator has difficulty
in getting any one to man the civil defense, and he rightly
surmises that the dangers of atomic destruction are so mon-
strous that the imagination either refuses to comprehend
them or is incapable of doing so. Yet these dangers are no
more than the most vivid expressions of the peril of death
which we have always faced, and which our generation
by some legerdemain has sought to banish from the
imagination.
To "watch and be sober" means that, armed by our
faith, we will not be surprised by any evil which appears
in history; and in our surprise we will not seek escape into
either complacency or hysteria. Such a genuine Christian
nonchalance might actually help our civilization to survive;
since its dangers are actually increased by complacency on
the one hand and by hysteria on the other.
But the final paradox of faith is that the Christian faith
and hope will be most creative if we are not too preoccu-
pied with its current relevance and pragmatic efficiency.
In that sense the contemporary preoccupation of our cul-
ture with history has made it less effective in historical
action than it ought to be. This is an ironic refutation of
the secular humanism which believed that if only it dis-
avowed the transhistorical interests of the Christian faith
and centered the attention of man upon historical goals, it
could establish a heaven upon earth. This heaven on earth
turned out in the case of orthodox Marxism to be a Com-
munist hell. In the case of liberal utopianism it has degen-
erated into the far less dangerous but equally pathetic
hopes for a "scientific" management of human affairs,
The Church and the Churches 331
which would in time eliminate human "aggressiveness" and
establish some kind of human consensus through the "com-
mon faith" of all right-minded and "enlightened" people.
These modern faiths were fantastic enough and they
have suffered tragic refutation. But they must be answered
by a faith which does not place its main emphasis upon a
hope which will seem equally fantastic, but upon a Hfe of
soberness and watchfulness, of faith and of love which
will appeal to a world in the night of despair as having
some gleams of light in it, derived from the "Light that
shineth in darkness."
OUR DEPENDENCE IS ON GOD
We represent fragmented portions of a universal church,
a covenant community, gathered out of the many races
and climes, to bear witness to the faith that we have seen
the "glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." We declare
this faith against the wisdom of die world, which does not
acknowledge the mystery of the Creator and the Judge
whom we meet at the final limits of our conscience and
consciousness, and which therefore thinks our faith foolish;
that the mystery has been clarified, and the loving purposes
of God have been revealed to us in the life, death, and
resurrection of our Lord; that we have, through him, a
sure knowledge of the truth, and a mediator of the divine
grace, entering our Hfe as pardon and as power.
We acknowledge this God who has been revealed in
Christ, both as the Lord of our life, whose goodness and
severity are equally necessary for OUT redemption; and as
the Lord and sovereign of this strange drama of our human
history, of all our collective destinies. The scoffers find our
faith strange. But we live in a day in which every effort to
An address written for delivery at the Evanston Assembly
of the World Council of Churches.
332 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
give this drama a simpler meaning and a simpler ending
than the Biblical faith gives it, proves itself to be the
source of both confusion and evil. That is why it is so
necessary to emphasize that in the final instance our de-
pendence is on God and not man, not on human virtue,
not on human power to bring this fragmentary human life
to a conclusion, to purge it of its evils and to complete its
incompleteness.
Our insistence that it is God's power and grace, and not
any human virtue or power, which can give meaning to our
existence and redemption from our sins, must not be mis-
understood (as it is frequently misunderstood) as encourag-
ing irresponsibility. The same Lord who is the pledge of
God's grace to us is also our example. He bids us "to work
while it is day, for the night cometh when no one can
work/* He assures us that we are co-workers together with
him. And the Scripture warns us that we have not resisted
unto blood fighting against sin. Man in the Christian view
is undoubtedly a creator, and he undoubtedly participates
in the strange drama, in which he is also a creature, the
mystery of which he cannot fully discern and the destinies
of which he cannot fully bring under his control.
We must be responsible to the limits of the power with
which God has endowed us. If we affirm, nevertheless, that
our dependence is on God rather than men, we merely
look at the whole drama of life in the wisdom borrowed
from the cross. There we see that the divine goodness was
in conflict, not chiefly with obvious human evil but with
human goodness. It was Roman justice, the best justice of
its day, and Hebraic religion, the highest religion of its day,
which were implicated in the crucifixion. Arid all through
the Christian ages we have additional testimony of this
truth revealed in the cross. The tragedies in human history,
the cruelties, the fanaticisms have not been caused by the
criminals, who were incidentally crucified with Christ; but
by the good people who crucified him, by idealists who did
The Church and the Churches 333
not understand the strange mixture of self-interest and
ideals winch is compounded in all human motives, by re-
formers who fail to understand the necessity of personal
reformation, by priests, who do not know that "judgment
begins in the house of God," by prophets who do not know
the word of the Lord but speak "out of the imagination of
their own hearts," by the wise who do not know the limits
of their wisdom, and by the righteous who do not know
that in "God's sight no man living is justified."
It is in the light of this overwhelming testimony in his-
tory to this truth, first discerned by the prophets and then
conclusively proved in Christ's revelation, that we insist
that the church's duty is to point to God, our creator,
judge, and redeemer, as the source of our peace, rather
than to any human virtue or power.
Recently I had a visit from a distinguished abbot of a
Japanese Buddhist monastery. He was an amiable man,
free of all malice. But he revealed a most natural confu-
sion about the very meaning of the Christian faith. The
Christian West, he declared, unlike the mystic East, be-
lieved in God and trusted in God to right all wrongs, thus
absolving men of responsibility. The result was a quietistic
complacency and injustice, which prompted the Commu-
nist rebellion against our civilization. I spent some time
trying to set him straight on the virtues and vices of the
historical dynamism of the Christian world; how the prayer
"Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven," taught us
by the Lord himself, expressed the life- and history-affirm-
ing faith of Christianity; how the injustices which had pro-
duced rebellion against our civilization were not due to
inactivity but to another type of complacency, the com-
placency which identified the status quo of a feudal or
capitalistic civilization with God's Kingdom; how sectarian
Christianity created a ferment of revolt against these in-
justices, but mixed with its justified sense of injustice an
unjustified reliance on the virtues of the righteous, in most
instances of the poor; how the original symbol of the fall
of Adam, as the cause of a universal corruption of sin, was
subtly changed by i7th century sectarians into the subse-
quent story of Cain and Abel, so that a sharp too sharp
334 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
distinction could be made between the righteous and the
unrighteous; and how modern Communism, which he er-
roneously regarded as a justified protest against Christian
faith, was in effect but the last fruit of a Christian heresy,
which was intent on taking the Kingdom of God by vio-
lence and remained unaware that its Utopian prophets,
turned priest-kings of an atheistic theocracy, changed the
righteousness of the poor into the cruelty of the powerful
because it did not understand the ambiguity of afi human
virtue and the foolishness of all human wisdom,
I did not tell the Buddhist abbot for I could not expect
him to understand these curious ironies of Western his-
tory, that we did have to contend with a tyranny, Nazism,
which was based on law-defiance or moral cynicism. It
gave many righteous people the illusion that the chief
problem of human history came from law-defiance. But
just as we had vanquished this tyranny another one arose,
derived not from moral cynicism, but from a fierce idealism,
which knew nothing of the ambiguity of human virtues. It
resulted in cruelties as grievous as those of the cynics. We
have not yet learned the lesson which the similarity of the
fruits from such contradictory causes should have taught us.
II
It is tempting for us as Christians to regard the evils of
Communism as but the final fruits of modern secular ideal-
ism and as a final refutation of the hopes of a secular age
that, if modern men could only be beguiled from their faith
in God and in the consummations of another world and
could give their undivided attention to the betterment of
their lot in this world, all ancient evils would be rectified.
The refutation of this faith and these hopes, not only by
the undoubted evils of Communism but by the very pre-
dicament of possible global atomic wars, is very instructive
for the understanding of the whole character of the drama
of human history and for the peril of human pretensions
of power and virtue. Surely the most dangerous actors in
this drama are the men who do not acknowledge the limits
The Church and the Churches 335
of man's power, wisdom, and virtue, who usurp the divine
majesty and feel themselves unneedful of the divine pardon.
But we must not make too much of this part of the mod-
ern refutations of secular pretensions. If we do we will
falsify the gospel and make the Christian cause appear
to be a contest between God-fearing believers and unright-
eous unbelievers. That interpretation would be contrary to
both Scripture and experience. It would not heed the word
of the prophets that God's judgment is upon the "circum-
cised as well as upon the uncircumcised" and the word of
the New Testament: "There is none righteous, no not one
... for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of
God." Nor would such an interpretation do justice to the
facts of our history, to the fact of the religiously sanctified
forms of injustice at which modern secularism revolted,
and the various forms of religious fanaticism and persecu-
tion of which we have been guilty. All these evidences
prove that it is not only those who deny God but those
who profess him but claim him too simply as an ally of
their purposes and as an aid for their ambitions, who bring
evil into the world.
These facts of history and these Scriptural injunctions
must warn us that it is the business of the Christian church
to bear witness not to the righteousness of Christians but
to the righteousness of God, which judges all men, and to
the grace of Christ which saves all who truly repent of their
sins. It is true, of course, that an unrighteous Christian
may be a scandal to the cause of Christ. There must be
"fruits meet for repentance" in our lives individually and
collectively as testimony of the grace and truth in Christ.
But all of us must have noticed the very revealing embar-
rassment which occurs when we point to our individual or
collective virtue as a witness to the gospel. Augustine, a
long while since, pointed to this embarrassment. If we
call attention to the saints in the church, he declared, the
world will remind us of the hypocrites in it.
336 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
III
If we apply the lesson of the reliability of God and the
unreliability of men, even in their wisest and most virtuous
moments, to the problem which brings us together as a
divided church, seeking to purge ourselves of the human
pretensions which have divided us and obscured the truth
in our gospel, we shall appreciate how much the movement
which has purged us of our divisions and has restored the
full substance of the gospel against our cherished heresies
and parochialisms has been the movement of God's grace
against our sins.
We must begin by the rehearsal of the historic move-
ments which destroyed the unity of the church for the sake
of restoring the purity of the gospel, so that we do not
make the mistake of assuming that the majesty and unity
of the church as the body of Christ is necessary to his
glory. The unity of the Roman church is indeed impres-
sive, and in some respects enviable, in comparison with
our unhappy divisions. But the Roman church maintained
this unity and a part of the substance of the gospel truth
at the price of building two great heresies into the Chris-
tian message. The one heresy was to exalt the church as
the "extension of the Incarnation/' as essentially divine, as
the mediator of God's judgment, rather than as the locus
in human history where the judgments of God can be
heard, whether on the righteous or the unrighteous. This
heresy was to obscure the chasm between the human and
the divine, which the prophets of Israel understood so well;
to pretend that there were priests who were privy to God's
counsels, were in control of God's redemptive powers and
purposes and in possession of the "keys to heaven."
The other heresy was either consequent or ancillary. It
changed the gospel of forgiveness to contrite souls into a
great scheme for assuring men of their salvation if they
would climb a 'ladder of merit," chiefly by castigating the
passions of the body. This ladder of merit, these ascetic
disciplines, did not however guarantee that the self in the
The Church and the Churches 337
pretensions of its self-esteem would be shattered by the
"severity" of the divine judgment, that a new self would
arise from the crucifixion of the old self.
It is not necessary to recount how these heresies not only
changed the message of redemption in Christ but also con-
structed a very imposing institution and a very vexatious
and pretentious priesthood, pretending to have dominion
over all the nations in the name of Christ. Justice and free-
dom could not be established on earth, even as the gospel
could not be truly preached, until these pretensions were
challenged.
But the fact that it has not been possible to purge the
gospel of these Roman heresies without exposing it to the
corruption of new heresies and of dragging the church
behind the chariot wheels of every nation is as instructive
to the Christian as the first chapter of this contest between
the righteousness of God and the righteousness of men.
The Roman church has a right to interpret our condition,
divided by the intrusion of every historically relative in-
sight and condition into the Christian message, as analo-
gous to the Biblical parable of the "house swept and gar-
nished/' of the man exorcised of one devil of heresy who
was visited by "seven devils more evil than the first/* It is
not only that every national and parochial viewpoint col-
ored the Christian message among us, but that our neces-
sary commerce with the culture of the world produced,
particularly in the nineteenth century, every form of quasi-
heresy in which Kantian or Hegelian, Freudian or Marxist
forms of thought usurped the wisdom of Christ and the
foolishness of the cross with some form of worldly wisdom.
The most thrilling part of the ecumenical enterprise has
been not so much the increasing unity which we have ex-
perienced, but the increasing purity of the gospel message
by the elimination not only of nationalistic and other paro-
chial heresies, but of all those forms of worldly wisdom
which colored and obscured the plain truth of the gospel,
with its exaltation of the righteousness of God against all
human righteousness. The ecumenical movement does not
try to establish one unified church with the power to con-
vict this or that church of heresy. Rather it establishes a
338 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
place of encounter in which we can instruct each other by
bringing our cherished treasures of grace and where, by
allowing the criticism of our fellow Christians to aid us in
separating the "precious from the vile/* we may all draw
closer together by all coming closer to the truth in Christ.
Thus it is God's judgment and grace and not any virtue of
our own which works mightily among us to heal the
broken body of Christ and make us one.
IV
We face two temptations as we try to profit from the
experience of extricating the Christian gospel from its vari-
ous heresies, so that we might have unity in the acceptance
of the substance of the gospel. The one temptation is to
renounce all commerce with the wisdom of the world, with
the various disciplines of culture, all of which contain the
danger of deflecting us from the truth of the gospel. If we
succumb to this temptation we will be like the man who
hid his treasure in the ground. We will not learn to appre-
ciate the truth of these disciplines which are valid on their
own level, and we will not be able to validate the truth of
the gospel on the level where its truth is apparent and the
truth of the wisdom of the world turns into error. That is
the level of the self's freedom and responsibility, the self's
sin and need of redemption: of God's freedom as creator
and redeemer; of the self's encounter with God and of its
redemption through divine grace and the self's response of
repentance and trust.
Nor will we be able to exploit common experience in
our generation to extricate ourselves from the heresies in
which we have become involved. Let us take as an exam-
ple the experience of that section of the ecumenical move-
ment which has studied the problem of "The Church and
a Responsible Society." It has made as great progress in
reaching a Christian consensus as any part of the ecumeni-
cal movement. It has, in effect, overcome the chasm be-
tween a Christian conservatism on the one hand, based on
The Church and the Churches 339
an undue pessimism, and on the other hand a Christian
perfectionism which approached perilously close to the
Utopian illusions of a secular culture. This creative conse-
quence has brought us all closer to a viable Christian social
and political ethic, free of illusions about human nature
but also with a strong sense of responsibility for establish-
ing a maximum of freedom and justice within the limits set
by human sinfulness. This whole development has brought
us closer to the Biblical analysis of the human situation,
which we should never have forgotten. But it was achieved
partly by analyzing and profiting from the errors in which
partial Christian political theories and secular schemes of
salvation were involved.
The whole of middle-class culture rested on the erro-
neous conviction that history was like nature, and that
natural harmonies would prevail in human society if only
"left alone." The rebellion against the injustices of an in-
dustrial society was also based on the erroneous conviction
that society was like nature and could easily be "man-
aged" and "planned" for the ends of social justice. Both
errors could have been refuted out of hand by a Christian
interpretation of history and of man's ambiguous status
of creator and creature in it. But meanwhile both errors
left a free and flexible economy. The other error, robbed
of its virulence, became the basis of all programs of justice
in a free society. Thus we have arrived at a viable Christian
political ethic, both by reclaiming the Christian insights
into the character of the person and his history, of his
dignity and his misery, which is to say, of his creative
freedom and of the corruption of that freedom in his self-
ishness; and also by profiting from the tension between the
Christian faith and a secular culture.
We have also learned the modesty of not pretending that
the Christian faith can offer a perplexed and fearful gener-
ation a simple way out of the predicament of a prospective
or possible, though not probable, atomic conflict, except
the counsel that powerful nations should be patient and
wise in the use of their power, should refrain from vain
threats of the use of these destructive weapons, and should
34O ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
not rely on a military power too exclusively, but know that
their final security must depend on their unity, their moral
and political health and the increase of justice in their
alliance.
The other temptation for us is to make too much of, or
to make too uncritical application of, the rediscovered
Biblical fact that all men are sinners and that every historic
struggle is therefore a struggle between sinful men. The
temptation is to imagine that the cry of "a plague on both
their houses" is a Christian solution of every problem; that
neutralism is an answer to every political perplexity. This
error consists in an effort to rise above the responsibilities
which we have as men for the order, the justice, and the
preservation of our civilizations and painfully nourished
systems of justice, seeking to play the part of God, in whose
sight no one indeed is justified. But we are men and not
God; and we must distinguish between the moral level of
our decisions, where we must carefully weigh whether the
ostensible foe may not be a friend with whom we must
come to terms and whether the ostensible friend and ally
may not be a foe who must be resisted resolutely if our
prized liberties are to be preserved; and the religious level,
on which we have some knowledge of the fact that both we
and the most dangerous foe are equally sinners in God's
sight and are equally in need of his forgiveness.
National heroes are, on the whole, not as interesting to
other nations as to the patriots. I will therefore apologize
for mentioning the example of the greatest hero of America,
who solved this problem more satisfactorily than any
statesman or any theologian of my knowledge. Lincoln was
opposed to slavery. "It may seem strange, that men should
ask the assistance of a just God in wringing their bread
from the sweat of other men's brows," he declared. But
this moral judgment did not prevent him in the heat of a
terrible conflict from rising to the religious level from
The Church and the Churches 341
which he could survey the pathetic spectacle of each side
claiming God as its ally against the other. "Both sides
read the same Bible," he declared, "and pray to the same
God. The prayers of both cannot be answered. The prayers
of neither will be answered just as they intended."
This sense of an overarching providence and grace can
rob our conflicts of their virulence because it purges us of
our arrogance. Thus we decide and discriminate and even
fight for our causes in history. We cannot escape these re-
sponsibilities. But every effort to end history, to bring it to
a conclusion by a victory over our foe or by the triumph
of our scheme of wisdom, only brings the final evil into
history by the claim of a final righteousness. Therefore we
are saved, not by what we can do, but by the hope that
the Lord of history will bring this mysterious drama to a
conclusion, that the suffering Christ will in the end be the
triumphant Lord.
To this hope we have dedicated the labors of this con-
ference. It is, like all hopes, strictly derivative from our
faith. As a hope it may seem highly speculative. But the
faith on which it is based is not speculative. That faith is
grounded in the daily experience of the forgiven sinner, in
the experiences of redemptive grace which shine as a light
into our darkness.
GREEK ORTHODOXY AND THE
ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT
The opposition of the Greek Orthodox leaders to the pro-
jected merger of the World Council and the International
Missionary Council, voiced in the session of the World
Council's Central Committee this summer, is a reminder to
all devotees of the World Council that it is not a pan-
Protestant movement. The Council contains both Protestant
342 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
and non-Roman Catholic churches. The Catholic churches
comprise both the Anglicans of Catholic persuasion and the
Greek Orthodox churches.
The Greek Orthodox churches object to the Missionary
Council because it conducts missions on Greek Orthodox
soil. Many of us would not like the Missionary Council to
abandon its efforts in these fields, even if the price is the
failure to achieve complete amalgamation with the World
Council. This position will, of course, be questioned by
those who think Protestants should not do mission work
in any Christian nation. But few of us would be prepared
to disavow all missionary activity in the Latin American
nations, for instance, in many of which Roman Catholicism
is not a vital spiritual force and is sometimes a very reac-
tionary social force, in league with an anachronistic
feudalism.
But quite apart from the question whether any version
of the Christian faith should, in the name of ecumenicity,
refrain from doing mission work in any traditionally Chris-
tian field, the objections of the Orthodox brethren remind
us that the World Council has not solved, and cannot solve,
the problem of the contradictory conceptions of the church
held by the Protestants and the Catholic portions of its
membership.
Broadly speaking, the difference is that Protestantism re-
gards the church itself as standing under the judgment of
God and of being holy only as it mediates the judgment
and mercy of God. Roman Catholicism regards the church
as "the extension of the Incarnation," as sharing the sanc-
tity of Christ; and Greek Orthodoxy, although claiming no
sanctity for the hierarchy, does claim sanctity for the
unbroken tradition of the church.
This difference is wide and deep. Many theological issues
today run through the different churches rather than be-
tween them. Many of the issues will yield to friendly
debate; but this issue will not yield, for each side would
yield something of what it regards as its essence if it
yielded on this issue. For that reason the World Council
will never become, as some hope and others fear, a super-
church. It will have commissions on "Life and Work" and
The Church and the Churches 343
on "Faith and Order/' but the Commission on Faith and
Order will never achieve a perfect consensus.
This need not trouble us too much. It is enough that the
World Council should be a ground on which the churches
meet each other in friendly encounter, and an instrument
for doing common work of the type which differences in
theology do not make impossible and which common con-
victions about our Christian witness in the world make
imperative.
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I. The Weakness of Common Worship in American
Protestantism
"A Christmas Service in Retrospect/* The Christian Cen-
tury, January 4, 1933.
"Sects and Churches," The Christian Century, July 3, 1935.
"Sunday Morning Debate," The Christian Century, April
22, 1936.
"Worship and the Social Conscience," Radical Religion,
Winter 1937.
"A Problem of Evangelical Christianity/* Christianity and
Crisis, May 13, 1946.
"The Religious Pluralism of America," Christianity and
Crisis, December 22, 1947.
"The Weakness of Common Worship in American Protes-
tantism," Christianity and Crisis, May 28, 1951.
"Religiosity and the Christian Faith," Christianity and
Crisis, January 24, 1955.
EL Can the Church Give a "Moral Lead"?
Weakness of the Modern Church," Christian Herald,
May 1931.
"Moralists and Politics/' The Christian Century, July 6,
193*.
"Church and State in America/* Christianity and Crisis,
December 15, 1941.
"Which Question Comes First for the Church?" Christianity
and Crisis, November 12, 1945.
345
34$ ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
"Can the Church Give a 'Moral Lead?" Christianity and
Crisis, August 2, 1948.
"The Church and Equal Rights for Women," Christianity
and Crisis, October 31, 1949.
"Utilitarian Christianity and the World Crisis," Christianity
and Crisis, May 29, 1950.
"Social Christianity," Christianity and Society, Winter
19501-
"The Protestant Clergy and U.S. Politics," The Reporter,
February 19, 1952.
"Prayer and Politics," Christianity and Crisis, October 27,
1952.
"Communism and the Clergy," The Christian Century,
August 19, 1953.
"Literalism, Individualism, and Billy Graham," The Chris-
tian Century, May 23, 1956.
"The Security and Hazard of the Christian Ministry,"
Union Seminary Quarterly Review, November 1957.
III. Barthianism and the Kingdom
"Barth Apostle of the Absolute," The Christian Century,
December 13, 1928*
"Barthianism and the Kingdom," The Christian Century,
J ul 7 IS 1931-
"Barthianism and Political Reaction," The Christian Cen-
tury, June 6, 1934.
"Marx, Barth, and Israel's Prophets," The Christian Cen-
tury, January 30, 1935.
"Karl Barth and Democracy," Radical Religion, Winter
1938 '
"Karl Barth on Politics," Radical Religion, Spring 1939.
"We Are Men and Not God," The Christian Century,
October 27, 1948.
"An Answer to Karl Barth," The Christian Century, Feb-
ruary 23, 1949.
"Why Is Barth Silent on Hungary?" The Christian Century,
January 23, 1957-
"Barth on Hungary: An Exchange," The Christian Century,
April 10, 1957.
Sources and Acknowledgments 347
IV. The Catholic Heresy
"Arrogance in the Name of Christ," The Christian Century,
September 2, 1936.
"Pius XI and His Successor," The Nation, January 30,
1937-
"The Catholic Heresy," The Christian Century, December
8, 1937.
"The Pope's Christmas Message," Christianity and Society.
Winter 1942.
"Three Elements in Papal Leadership," Christianity and
Society, Summer 1944.
"The Pope on Property," Christianity and Society, Fall
1944-
"Our Relations to Catholicism," Christianity and Crisis,
September 15, 1947.
"The Godly and the Godless," Christianity and Crisis,
December 13, 1948.
"Catholics and Divorce," Christianity and Crisis, January
10, 1949.
"Catholics and Motives of Action/' Christianity and Crisis,
March 7, 1949.
"The Rising Catholic-Protestant Tension," Christianity and
Crisis, August 8, 1949.
"The Pope's Domesticated God," The Christian Century,
January 18, 1950.
"The Increasing Isolation of the Catholic Church," Chris-
tianity and Crisis, September 18, 1950.
"Catholics and Politics: Some Misconceptions," The Re-
porter, January 22, 1952.
"Protestants, Catholics, and Secularists on the School Issue,"
Christianity and Crisis, February 2 r 1953.
"The Catholic Hierarchy's Analysis of the Ills of Our Day,"
Christianity and Crisis, December 27, 1954.
348 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY
V. The Church and the Churches: The Ecumenical
Movement
A. The Ecumenical Issue in the United States
"The Ecumenical Issue in the United States," Theology
Today, January 1946.
"The Reunion of the Church through the Renewal of the
Churches," Christianity and Crisis, November 24, 1947.
"Has the Church Any Authority?" Christianity and Crisis,
April 3, 1950.
"The Church Speaks to the Nation," The Messenger,
December 15, 1953.
"The National Council Delegation to the Russian Church,"
Christianity and Crisis, April 30, 1956.
B. The Problems of a World Church
< The Oxford Conference on Church and State," Radical
Religion, Autumn 1937.
"The World Council of Churches," Christianity and Soci-
ety, Autumn 1948.
"Protestantism in a Disordered World," The Nation, Sep-
tember 18, 1948.
"The World Council at Amsterdam," Christianity and
Crisis, September 20, 1948.
"The World Council and the Peace Issue," Christianity and
Crisis, August 7, 1950.
"The Problems of a World Church," The Messenger,
August 21, 1951.
"Hope Needs Faith and Love," The Ecumenical Review,
July 1953.
"Christ the Hope of the World: What Has History to Say?"
Religion in Life, Summer 1954.
"Our Dependence Is on God," The Christian Century,
September i, 1954.
"Greek Orthodoxy and the Ecumenical Movement," The
Messenger, October 8, 1957.
LIVING AGE BOOKS
published by MERIDIAN BOOKS, INC.
12 East 22 Street, New York 10, New York
LAI AN INTERPRETATION OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS by Reinhold
Niebuhr
LA2 THE MIND OF THE MAKER by Dorothy L. Sayers
LAS CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM by W. R. Inge
LA4 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY IN ITS CONTEMPORARY SETTING
by Rudolf Bultmann
LAS THE DESCENT OF THE DOVE by Charles Williams
LA6 THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION by Paul Tillich
LA7 WHAT MEAN THESE STONES? by Millar Burrows
LAS THE MEANING OF PAUL FOR TODAY by C. H. Dodd
LA9 MARTIN LUTHER: ROAD TO REFORMATION by Heinrich
Boehmer
LA 10 RELIGIOUS DRAMA 1: FIVE PLAYS selected and introduced
by Marvin Halverson
LA 11 THE SOCIAL SOURCES OF DENOMINATIONALISM by H. RicH-
ard Niebuhr
LA 12 CHRISTIAN THOUGHT by Ernst Troeltsch
LA 13 LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF A TAMED CYNIC by
Reinhold Niebuhr
LA 14 MYSTICISM EAST AND WEST by Rudolf Otto
LA 15 DOSTOEVSKY by Nicholas Berdyaev
LA 16 THE UNITY OF THE BIBLE by H. H. Rowley
LA 17 THE SERMONS OF JOHN DONNE selected and introduced by
Theodore Gill
LA 18 A HANDBOOK OF CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
LA 19 ETHICS AND UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY by Ernest
Lefever; introduced by Hans Morgenthau
LA20 RELIGIOUS DRAMA 2 1 MYSTERY AND MORALITY PLAYS Se-
lected and introduced by E. Martin Browne
LA21 PETER: DISCIPLE, APOSTLE, MARTYR by Oscar Cullman
LA22 THE FAITH OF THE CHURCH by Karl Barth
LA23 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
by W. O. E. Oesterley and Theodore H. Robinson
LA24 A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY by Martin E. Marty
LA25 THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE REFORMATION by
Karl Holl
LA26 ESSAYS IN APPLIED CHRISTIANITY by Reinhold Niebuhr
Titles listed here are not necessarily available in the British Empire
MERIDIAN BOOKS
22 East 22 Street, New York 10, New York
Ml ABINGER HARVEST by E. M. Forster
M3 ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM by Irving Babbitt
M4 IMPERIALISM AND SOCIAL CLASSES by Joseph Schumpeter
M5 WAYWARD YOUTH by August Aichhorn
M6 THE PLAYWRIGHT AS THINKER by Eric Bentley
M7 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MODERN ART by Herbert Read
M8 CREATIVE INTUITION IN ART AND POETRY by Jacques Mari-
tain
M9 OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY by Edu-
ard Zeller
M10 LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT OF THE CHILD by Jean Piaget
Mil SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY by William Empson
M12 ESSAYS ON FREEDOM AND POWER by Lord Acton
Ml 3 THE MAN OF LETTERS IN THE MODERN WORLD by Allen
Tate
M14 THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN by Van Wyck Brooks
M15 SEX AND REPRESSION IN SAVAGE SOCIETY by BronislaW Mali-
nowski
M16 PRAGMATISM by William James
M17 HISTORY AS THE STORY OF LIBERTY by Benedetto Croce
M18 NEW DIRECTIONS 15: INTERNATIONAL ISSUE
M19 MATTHEW ARNOLD by Lionel Trilling
M20 SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY by A. C. Bradley
M21 THE DEVIL'S SHARE by Denis de Rougemont
M22 THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES by Joseph Campbell
M23 BYZANTINE CIVILIZATION by Steven Runciman
M24 ESSAYS AND SKETCHES IN BIOGRAPHY by John Maynard
Keynes
M25 NIETZSCHE by Walter Kaufmann
M26 THE MIND AND HEART OF LOVE by M. C. D'Arcy
M27 CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT by Woodrow Wilson
M28 TWO ESSAYS ON ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY by C. G. Jung
M29 THE WRITINGS OF MARTIN BUBER edited by Will Her berg
M30 BERLIOZ AND HIS CENTURY by Jacques Bar tun
M3 1 FREEDOM, EDUCATION, AND THE FUND by Robert M. Hutch-
ins
M32 A PREFACE TO LOGIC by Morris R. Cohen
M33 VISION AND DESIGN by Roger Fry
M34 FREUD OR JUNG? by Edward Glover
M35 THE MAKING OF EUROPE by Christopher Dawson
M36 THE FORMS OF MUSIC by Donald Francis Tovey
M37 THE VARIETIES OF HISTORY edited by Fritz Stern
M38 THE ESSENCE OF LAUGHTER by Charles Baudelaire
M39 EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOEVSKY TO SARTRE edited by
Walter Kaufmann
M40 ITALIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE by Bernard Beren-
son
M41 SIGHTS AND SPECTACLES by Mary McCarthy
M42 MOHAMMED AND CHARLEMAGNE by Henri Pirenne
M43 THE WHEEL OF FIRE by G. Wilson Knight
M44 GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE AND SCHOLASTICISM by Erwin Pan-
ofsky
M45 FREUD AND THE 20TH CENTURY edited by Benjamin Nelson
M46 POLITICS AND THE NOVEL by Irving Howe
M47 A SHORTER HISTORY OF SCIENCE by William Cecil Dampier
M48 A GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE by Wal-
lace Fowlie
M49 THE RENAISSANCE OF THE 12TH CENTURY by C. H, HaS-
kins
M50 NEW POETS OF ENGLAND AND AMERICA selected by Hall,
Pack, and Simpson
M51 ST. AUGUSTINE: HIS AGE, LIFE, AND THOUGHT
M52 CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL and THE WORLD AND THE WEST by
Arnold Toynbee
M53 RELIGION AND CULTURE by Christopher Dawson
M54 PROUST: A BIOGRAPHY by Andre Maurois
M55 ST. THOMAS AQUINAS by Jacques Maritain
M56 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST by D wight Macdonald
M57 DEBATES WITH HISTORIANS by Pieter Geyl
M58 POLITICS: WHO GETS WHAT, WHEN, HOW by Harold Lass-
well
M59 GODS AND HEROES OF THE GREEKS by H. J. Rose
M60 RELIGION IN AMERICA edited by John Cogley
M61 MEN AND IDEAS by Johan Huizinga
M62 WITCHCRAFT by Charles Williams
M63 SCENES FROM THE DRAMA OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE by
Erich Auerbach
M64 THE HUMAN MEANING OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES edited by
Daniel Lerner
M65 ARISTOTLE by W. D. Ross
M66 THE DISINHERITED MIND by Erich Heller
M67 THE BOOK OF JAZZ by Leonard Feather
M68 THE WORLD OF ODYSSEUS by M. L Finley
M69 THE SCROLLS FROM THE x>EAD SEA by Edmund Wilson
Titles listed here are not necessarily available in the British Empirfc
RELIGIOUS DRAMA 1
Selected and introduced by Marvin Halverson
This volume contains five complete plays: For the Time
Being, by W. H. Auden; The Firstborn, by Christopher
Fry; David, by D. H. Lawrence; The Zeal of Thy
House, by Dorothy Sayers; and The Bloody Tenet, by
James Schevill. LA 10 410 pages
"Religious Drama I is a credit to the church and the
paperback book industry." The Christian Century
RELIGIOUS DRAMA 2
Selected and introduced by E. Martin Browne
E. Martin Browne, long distinguished for his revival
of public interest in the medieval English dramatic
cycles, here selects and edits twenty-one plays from the
famous Cornish, Chester, York, Wakefield, Coventry,
and Hegge medieval English dramatic cycles. The plays
are organized in such a fashion as to trace the normal
medieval dramatic cycle from the creation of the world
and the narratives of the Old Testament through the
life and death of Jesus Christ. LA20 317 pages
Ill II III II
126
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