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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