(All Rights Reserved-James O. Richards)
The
Shaping of the "Second Europe," 1914
- Present
Theology
and the Revolt Against Europe
Outline of Lecture
I. Introduction
II. Fundamentalism
III. The Social Gospel-Walter
Rauschenbusch (1861-1918)
IV. Neo-Orthodoxy-Karl Barth (1886-1968)
V. "Man's Coming of Age"-Dietrich
Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
VI. Theology and the Second Europe
Introduction
The last time we mentioned religion was in a discussion of the impact of Darwin's theory of
evolution. I pointed out at least two major effects of that theory:
(1) It raised questions about basic Christian beliefs which caused questions
among many believers. By making man just another part of creation, Darwin seemed to be
taking him down from his place at the top of creation. If man evolves like any
other creature, why should it be said that he alone has an immortal soul? And
if he has one, when did he acquire it?
(2) It led to new directions in theology. Scholars, influenced by science,
wanted to treat Scripture as a text to be analyzed, not as sacred revealed
writing, but as any other text. The result was "higher criticism"
which presented a different picture of the Bible than commonly accepted.
Scholars began to show that the books of the Bible were products of their times
and written within the ancient world-view to convey the faith, not objectively
and historically describe it. Comparative religious studies showed the common
elements in all religions, leading to questions about the uniqueness of
Christianity. Also, scholars tended to humanize Jesus and to eliminate the
supernatural from his life.
To these two major influences Roman Catholicism responded more forcefully
than did Protestantism. The Roman Church reacted to the theory of evolution and
the challenge of science by proclaiming the doctrine of papal infallibility in
1870. It officially opposed evolution until the 20th century.
Protestantism was less united in its reaction to science and Darwin's ideas. But the impact was strong
there as well because the Bible was central to Protestantism and Darwin's theory appeared
to undercut the Bible. Some Protestants accepted evolution wholeheartedly;
others could not. This division continued to trouble the Protestant churches
through the end of the 19th century and into our own time.
In the 20th century theologians and
ordinary believers have continued to try to maintain religious belief in the
face of science and the other currents and forces which have challenged faith.
Although we have time to look at only a sample of the theological responses, we
need to do so to round out our picture of the phenomenon I have called the
"Revolt Against Europe". The same forces
working against the common values, convictions, and ideals of Europe
have assaulted religious faith as well. We are going to look at four theologies:
Fundamentalism; the Social Gospel--Walter Rauschenbusch; Neo-Orthodoxy--Karl
Barth; and "Man's Coming of Age" (or "secular"
theology)--Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Fundamentalism
The term "Fundamentalism" was coined by Curtis Lee Laws, a American journalist and Baptist leader, to identify those
who feared the onslaught of Darwinian science and secular trends and wanted, as
he said, "to do battle royal for the Fundamentals." American in
origin, fundamentalism also had, and has, a lesser presence among evangelicals
in European countries as well. The "fundamentals" were basic tenets
defined in a series of pamphlets published between 1910-1915 called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the
Truth. Written by leading evangelical churchmen and theologians, these
booklets were distributed free of charge to clergymen and seminary students.
Since then Fundamentalists have continued to maintain the truth of these
"fundamentals." In 1976 the World Congress of Fundamentalists, which
met in Edinburgh, Scotland reaffirmed the basic tenets of Fundamentalism:
A Fundamentalist is a born-again believer in the Lord Jesus
Christ who--
1. Maintains an immovable allegiance to the inerrant, infallible, and
verbally inspired Bible.
2. Believes that whatever the Bible says is so.
3. Judges all things by the Bible and is judged only by the Bible.
4. Affirms the foundational truths of the historic Christian Faith: The
doctrine of the Trinity; the incarnation, virgin birth, substitutionary
atonement, bodily resurrection and glorious ascension, and Second Coming of the
Lord Jesus Christ; the new birth through regeneration by the Holy Spirit; the
resurrection of the saints to life eternal; the resurrection of the ungodly to
final judgment and eternal death; the fellowship of the saints, who are the
body of Christ.
5. Practices fidelity to that Faith and endeavors to preach it to every
creature.
6. Exposes and separates from all ecclesiastical denial of that Faith,
compromise with error, and apostasy from the Truth.
7. Earnestly contends for the Faith once delivered.
By emphasizing the fundamentals, Fundamentalists for almost
a hundred years have fought against what they believe to be dangerous trends:
(1) the liberalism of higher biblical criticism
which they believe denies the supernatural and miraculous and promotes the
human authorship of the Bible.
(2) the pernicious Darwinian theories about the
origin of the universe. They also bitterly oppose the teaching of Darwinian
evolution in public schools, and scorn educators who teach evolution as
elitists cynically undermining the morals of the youth.
(3) the growing awareness and toleration of the
beliefs of world religions which undermines the ethical basis of society.
(4) (in the early 20th century) the waves of
non-Protestant immigrants coming to the United States from southern and
eastern Europe. Primarily Anglo-Saxon in the
early 20th century, Fundamentalists believed these immigrants and
their Catholicism threatened the spiritual foundation of the United States.
(This does not seem to be a force in fundamentalism now).
(5) the separation of church and state.
Fundamentalists believe that the state should be guided by the same religious
principles they affirm. If the fundamentals are true, and Fundamentalists
believe they are, they should apply to everyone, especially in America which
was founded on traditional Christian beliefs. Religion is not a matter of
private conviction and practice. Freedom to practice one's own faith leads to
moral confusion and social breakdown.
Starting in the 1920's, Fundamentalists fought these trends several ways.
They vigorously defended the fundamentals (as defined) of historic Christian
teachings. They asserted the necessity of conversion by faith in Jesus Christ
alone. They proclaimed the Bible to be as accurate on questions of science and
history as well as theology. They preached an imminent Second Coming in which
Christ would physically return to the earth and inaugurate a millennium of
peace and righteousness.
Also, Fundamentalists mounted campaigns in the legislatures, courts, and
denominational structures to get their views adopted. In the 1920's they got a
number of state legislatures to adopt anti-evolution laws (mainly in the
South). In a celebrated case in 1925 one of their spokesmen, William Jennings
Bryan, prosecuted a Tennessee
teacher for teaching evolution. They won the case--Scopes was convicted of
breaking the law--even though they lost the press battle. They also fought
against what they called Modernism in the denominational meetings of mainline
Protestant churches with mixed results. They established their own schools,
colleges, seminaries, and missionary organizations. They founded their own
publishing houses and, eventually, their own telecommunication organizations.
They directed their appeal to a broad spectrum of society. While not
anti-intellectual, Fundamentalism regarded thinking as a dangerous activity
unless guided by the fundamentals. After the Second World War
Fundamentalists led in the evangelical, pentecostal, and charismatic movements
which swept the country. Starting in the 1970's and continuing up to the
present, they took national political action as the Christian Right to advance
their views in organizations such as the Christian Coalition, the Rutherford
Institute, and the Liberty Foundation (which succeeded the Moral Majority).
?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the fundamentalist outlook?
The
Social Gospel-Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918)
The American preacher and writer Walter Rauschenbusch developed a theology
based on the conviction that the Gospel of Christ had to be expressed in social
and economic justice. The two were inextricable: the Gospel without any social
expression was empty platitudes; social and economic activism without the
Gospel guiding it might do some good, but was ultimately going to fail. The
Social Gospel was a distinctive American theology with a considerable impact
because it coincided with the American Progressive reforming movement, and
because it grew out of Rauschenbusch's own life and the force of his own
beliefs.
Rauschenbusch, an American, studied both in America and Germany, and
after graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary in 1886 became a Baptist
pastor in one of the worst sections of New
York's West Side,
near an area known as "Hell's Kitchen". There he ministered to
parishioners suffering from misery, poverty, and diseases. Their plight made
him decide that preaching alone was not enough. He had to get involved in
improving the conditions of their lives. He explained why in a speech in 1913:
It came through personal contact with poverty, and when I
saw how men toiled all their life long, hard, toilsome lives, and at the end
had almost nothing to show for it; how strong men begged for work and could not
get it in hard times; how little children died--oh, the children's funerals! they gripped my heart--that was one of the things I always
went away thinking about--why did the children have to die?
Reading widely both in Christian theology and social and economic theory, he
decided that he had to minister to men's bodies as well as their souls, in fact
had to do so before he could save their souls.
In 1897 Rauschenbusch returned to Rochester Seminary to teach church
history. His first book was not church history, however, but the first writing
on what came to be called the Social Gospel, Christianity and the Social
Crisis (1907). It catapulted him to instant fame and led to a number of
other works all on the same themes. The argument of Christianity
and the Social Crisis was twofold: (1) that "the essential purpose
of Christianity was to transform human society into the kingdom of God
by regenerating all human relations and reconstituting them in accordance with
the will of God." (2) that this sense of mission
had been lost over the ages, but needed to be recaptured. Religion must be
accompanied by social reform. In a later book, A Theology for the Social
Gospel (1917) he worked out in greater detail what he meant by the Social
Gospel:
This is a religious book from beginning to end. Its sole
concern is for the kingdom
of God and the salvation
of men. But the kingdom
of God includes the
economic life; for it means the progressive transformation of all human affairs
by the thought and spirit of Christ.
In using the words "progressive transformation" he
meant that Christ's cause on earth would eventually triumph through divine
action, not human. Man helped but God did it.
A progressive Kingdom of Righteousness happens all the time
in installment, like our own sanctification. Our race will come to an end in
due time; the astronomical clock is already ticking which will ring in the end.
Meanwhile we are on the march toward the kingdom of God,
and getting our reward by every fractional realization of it which makes us
hungry for more.
Later in the work, he continued:
Every human life is so placed that it can share with God in
the creation of the Kingdom, or can resist and retard its progress. The Kingdom
is for each of us the supreme task and the supreme gift of God. By accepting it
as a task, we experience it as a gift. By laboring for it we enter into the joy
and peace of the Kingdom as our divine fatherland and habitation.
The Social Gospel did not long survive Rauschenbusch's death in 1918. It
became discredited because later adherents lost the passion and intensity of
his conviction that social activism has to be grounded in commitment to the
Christian life. They forgot, in other words, that the Gospel is the
Gospel, and the Social Gospel is not, and will do no good unless it is based
firmly on personal religious faith.
?
Fundamentalism and the Social Gospel come at the problem very differently. Or
do they?
Neo-Orthodoxy-Karl
Barth (1886-1968)
Karl Barth, German theologian and teacher, rejected all forms of liberal
theology, including the Social Gospel, to enunciate a new orthodox theology
which stressed the transcendence of God and man's utter inability to understand
him except through his revelation in Christ. Religion, he said, was man's
attempt to grasp and fix God into some formulation or scheme. But God was - is
- revelation. Any theology which did not start there, he said, would wind up in
a failed accommodation to man and his selfish, sinful interests. Barth's
theology began a new orthodoxy which is still one of the strongest forces in
religious thought today.
Barth, born in Switzerland in
1886, studied theology in Swiss and German universities just before the
outbreak of World War I. He held pastorates in Switzerland during the war years.
That period drove home to him the failure of liberal theology and its message
of the progressive realization of God in society. Liberal theologians and all
believers in progress were unprepared for the devastating effects of World War
I; such a war should never have happened because God was transforming the world
for the better, slowly but surely. Barth felt empty and hypocritical preaching
the liberal theology he had studied at university. He immersed himself in the
Bible, starting with the Book of Romans. (Luther started there too in his own
spiritual quest). In 1918 he published a commentary on Romans which broke
decisively with liberal theology and in the coming years produced a truly
massive corpus of works.
From 1921 to 1933 Barth held positions in several German universities. When
the Nazis came to power in 1933 he refused to take the oath of allegiance to
Hitler. Most churchmen did, calling themselves "German Christians":
some Nazis, some sympathizers, but most just cautious church leaders who were
afraid to stand up to Hitler. In 1934 Barth and like-minded German theologians
and pastors formed what was called the "German Confessing
Church" and
condemned the takeover of the German state church in the famous Barmen Declaration (1934)
which proclaimed Christ as the Word of God and head of the church. In the
following year Barth was forced to leave Germany and return to his native Switzerland
where he lived, taught, and wrote until his death in 1968.
Barth's theology can be summarized under three headings:
(1) Jesus Christ is central to the mystery and otherness of God. In
him, true God and true man, God is revealed in a way man cannot comprehend or
definitively apply to life. God is God. Man is man. Apart from Christ there is
no bridge. Man cannot be like God or tie God to any human endeavor,
institution, movement, or any area of culture. To this God man must become
captive. (This sounds like the existentialist notion of being seized by truth,
doesn't it?) He must obey God, abase himself, conform himself to God. His
model, as he does this, is Christ who in his humanity conformed himself to
God's will.
(2) The Church is the body of Christ and subject to his leadership as the
head of the body. This meant to Barth the necessity of hearing the voice of
Christ in preaching and participating in his life, death, and resurrection by
receiving his Spirit through the sacraments. The Church was central to man's
obedience to God.
(3) Jesus Christ is the new man, God incarnate, crucified, risen, and
returning to make a new heaven and new earth. He is the new model for man,
what he was created to be but failed to be because of sin, but now is
because of Christ. Christ is not just risen in spirit,
but in body as well. He is risen humanity as well as risen God. Thus he has
triumphed over death and corruption and rules over all the
world and its demonic powers. Hence the "German
Confessing Church" and Barth's rejection of Hitler and Fascism. The
Church, the body of Christ, is, as one theologian put it, new wine in old
wineskins. It bursts all the old forms and structures. It will always be
breaking old containers and be working out what it means to be the body of
Christ.
Barth's neo-orthodoxy is another kind of fundamentalism, but different in
its focus from the movement discussed above.
?
Have you made any choice so far among the views discussed?
"Man's
Coming of Age" - Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer is important for two reasons. First, he died a martyr's
death which gave his theological views a unique intensity and poignancy.
Second, he was working toward what many have thought was a theology especially
appropriate to the 20th century, a theology for man who had come of
age and no longer considered God as essential. Unfortunately, that theology was
in fragmentary form when Bonhoeffer died at the hands of the German S.S. so we
will never know exactly what he meant by a "religion-less
Christianity".
Born in 1906 to a family which was only nominally religious, Bonhoeffer
nevertheless decided on the study of theology as a career. After getting his
doctorate at the young age of 21, Bonhoeffer took a position as pastor of a
German church in Spain.
In 1930 he took a year's fellowship at Union Theological Seminary in New York, returning to Berlin in 1931 to a
teaching position at the University
of Berlin. He returned
just as the Nazis were coming to power and threw himself into attacking the
liberal theology which was supinely yielding the church to Hitler's claim to be
God's chosen leader of state and church.
In 1933 Bonhoeffer along with Karl Barth and others refused to take the oath
of allegiance to Hitler and formed the "Confessing Church".
Bonhoeffer went abroad again briefly but soon returned to teach pastors and
students of the Confessing
Church. He said at the
time "I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. . . I
shall have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after
the war unless I share the trials of this time with my
people." He also began active resistance to the Nazis along with his
brother-in-law who worked for the government and got Bonhoeffer clearance to
travel abroad. Using this cover Bonhoeffer became involved in activities to
smuggle Jews out of Germany,
to conspire against the regime and to try to convince foreign governments that
there was an opposition to Hitler. After war broke out in 1939, the contacts
with foreign representatives became more urgent, the goal being to seek
assistance for the assassination of Hitler and a peaceful end to the war.
Bonhoeffer's views were so well known to the Nazis that he was banned from
preaching and teaching. In 1943 he was arrested, along with his brother-in-law,
on the charge that he had misused his position to get Jews out of the country.
When he was tied to the plot to kill Hitler in 1944, his doom was assured. As
the war neared its end, Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law were specifically
listed by Hitler as those who must "under no circumstances be allowed to
live." On April 9, 1945
he was hanged in Flossenburg
Prison just days before Hitler killed himself. His last known words,
relayed through a fellow prisoner: "This is the end--for me the beginning
of life."
?
Should a theologian be plotting to assassinate someone, even a Hitler? Why? Why
not?
Two of Bonhoeffer's works came out of the years of his imprisonment, Ethics
and Letters and Papers from Prison (See excerpts from the latter at this site).
It is from these works especially that his theology for man come of age is
expressed, even if in tentative form. In 1944 he wrote in one of his letters from prison:
We are proceeding toward a time of no religion at all. . . .How
do we speak of God without religion. . .? How do we speak in a secular fashion
of God? . . . The movement beginning about the thirteenth century. . .towards
the autonomy of man (under which head I place the discovery of laws by which
the world lives and manages in science, social and political affairs, art,
ethics and religion). . .has in our time reached a certain completion. Man has
learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a
working hypothesis. . .[Traditional "Christian"] efforts are made to
prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of
"God." Even though there has been surrender on all secular problems,
there still remain the so-called ultimate questions--death, guilt--on which
only "God" can furnish an answer, and which are the reason why God
and the Church and the pastor are needed. . . . But what if one day they no
longer exist as such, if they too can be answered without "God"?
What did Bonhoeffer mean by "man come of age" and speaking of
"God without religion"? He seems to have concluded that the modern
world had abandoned "religion" which he termed "no more than the
garment of Christianity." "Religion" in this sense was an
obsolete historical phenomenon, a relic from the past. It had been an innate
God-given capacity before the modern age. Now the religious sensibility of the
past was dead. God in that sense was dead. Man had ceased even to call on God
to be a "stop-gap" to plug holes in his understanding of life. This
God shrank as man's knowledge grew and took over the gaps God formerly filled.
Man could even foresee that the elusive questions of the past, the source of
guilt, the matter of death itself, were susceptible to scientific answers.
Hence, for him, God, the God of the past, was dead.
So what was God for a man come of age? Bonhoeffer had no clear answers, but
he speculated that new ways would have to be found to interpret God to make him
and the Gospel real to an indifferent modern man. Perhaps it would be necessary
for a while not to even use the word "God" or the traditional
language of religion and allow a new term and a new language to emerge as
needed. But God would no longer be described as a tribal god, or as an
imperious potentate of majesty and splendor. No, he would have to be seen, as
one commentator on Bonhoeffer said, as
one who is inescapably met
everywhere, in every problem and delight and activity, met and served here and
now, a presence and a charge in the thick of immediacy. . . .His majesty is not
in the flash of omnipotence, but in the sovereignty of his suffering. His
weakness, his sacrifice, is his greatness.
Exactly what Bonhoeffer meant by a "religion-less Christianity" has
captured the imagination of all kinds of interpreters.
Radicals who want to imitate Bonhoeffer in striking at evil institutions and
persons have justification for their cause in his ideas. After all, Hitler
needed killing. One has to strike sometimes at evil forces and persons, even if
one tries to follow Christ's command to love and forgive. (Bonhoeffer himself
was quoted as having said "If I see a madman driving a car into a group of
innocent bystanders, then I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the
catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to
wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.") And then
there was Bonhoeffer's lying and deception as a conspirator. Some have seen
that as vindicated by the cause. Isn't it better to do evil than be
evil? Lying and deceiving for the right reason is all right, isn't it? In the
last half of the century Bonhoeffer has been cited to defend "situational
ethics": doing the right thing in the circumstances, even if the action is
wrong by absolute standards. His ideas continue to resonate. Probably they
always will, borne along by the mythic quality of his martyrdom at so young an
age.
?
1. This last paragraph: is Bonhoeffer being cited and followed out of context?
2. As a way of probing what Bonhoeffer meant by a theology for "secular
man," consider the arguments of Robert Ettinger in his book Prospect of Immortality (1964).
Ettinger explores the possibility of humans living as long as they choose,
using the work of cryobiology or cryogenics ("deep freezing"). In
chapter 1 he states:
Most of us now living have a chance for personal, physical
immortality.
This remarkable proposition-which may soon become a pivot of personal and
national life-is easily understood by joining one established fact to one
reasonable assumption.
The fact: At very low temperatures it is possible, right now, to preserve
dead people with essentially no deterioration, indefinitely. (Details and
references will be supplied.)
The assumption: If civilization endures, medical science should eventually
be able to repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing
damage and senile debility or other cause of death. (Definite reasons for such
optimism will be given.)
Hence we need only arrange to have our bodies, after we die, stored in
suitable freezers against the time when science may be able to help us. No
matter what kills us, whether old age or disease, and even if freezing
techniques are still crude when we die, sooner or later our friends of the
future should be equal to the task of reviving and curing us. This is the
essence of the main argument.
The arrangements will no doubt be handled at first by individuals, then by
private companies, and perhaps later by the Social Security system.
What does this "prospect" make you think about Bonhoeffer's
theology for "man come of age?" Any thoughts about
the prospect of immortality?
Theology
and the Second Europe
The theologians we have considered take, as a group, two broad attitudes to
the ideas and beliefs of the Enlightenment. First, they all attack the secular
tone of the Enlightenment, affirming the older transcendent explanation of life
found in the First Europe and deriving from Judaism and Christianity. They all
view God as inextricably involved in human affairs, rather than as the God of
Deism, the clockmaker who built it all, set it going and then left it for man
to understand through reason. They do not reject Europe
as a culture; just the Second Europe's emphasis on this life as the focus for
man.
Second, it should also be apparent that theologians represent a defense of
the idea of Europe as a core of common spiritual aims and values. They may
question the over-reliance on reason and the over-confidence in human nature,
but they still affirm the importance of man as a being of worth and dignity.
They believe in the older version of the Idea of Progress, the
pre-Enlightenment version which held that God's actions in human history were
leading finally to God's triumph and man's salvation. And, thus they stand
almost alone against the "Revolt Against
Europe" we have seen as so characteristic of the last century.
Now we turn to the final topic of the course, a question.
