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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 o 
