Some Men Weep: The Tragic Loss of Our Era

Much is being spoken and written about the present bourgeois, “one class” character of the Church, and biblical Christianity’s problem of reaching intellectuals and workers. To understand the relevant issues, I think, we must constantly be aware of four events in the 1930s, and their continuing results.

THE EVANGELICAL DRIFT

In the 1930s liberalism in the United States reached a point where it led to a division among the evangelicals. One group followed a historic emphasis, especially in Reformed churches, and separated when the liberals came into control in most of the major denominations. The other group did not separate. This event of the 1930s is still with us, and it seems to me one can find reason for sadness in what has happened to both groups.

In surveying the first group, one must distinguish between a strong acceptance of the principle of the commanded purity of the visible church and what has happened in the intervening 30 years among those who have separated. There is cause for sadness in the results of the separated movement. While the criticism does not apply to everyone who took this position, yet the organized leadership of “the separated movement” largely developed an expertness in preparing a kind of lawyer’s brief which has the end of “winning one’s case at any cost” by choosing that portion of the facts which is convenient to this end, and in using this lawyer-brief mentality against liberals and true Christians equally.

In surveying the second group, one must distinguish between staying in an ecclesiastical unit at any one specific point of history, and the surrender of church purity as a principle. There is cause for sadness in the historical results of the action of this second group of evangelicals. For their ecclesiastical contacts have tended to “bridge-building” in wider areas of co-operation, and then tended to theological contacts of a “bridge-building” nature.

THE LIBERAL SHIFT

In the 1930s a change in liberalism itself became clearly observable. From that point to this liberalism became Kierkegaardian. Prior to the 1930s Kierkegaard was still generally considered the “mad Dane”; in the past 30 years, however, Kierkegaardian thinking has increasingly dominated liberal thinking. It is to be noted that this change is neither theological nor exegetical in the historic sense of these words. It is a change which simply followed the general intellectual and cultural climate. The old liberalism was born by accepting the deterministic, optimistic philosophy of that moment as it had flowed up into Germany from the Italian Renaissance, and liberalism has constantly followed the cultural humanistic curve through the 200 years and more that have passed. Kierkegaard was considered the mad Dane because he was ahead of his time in regard to humanistic thought. He is now accepted because the cultural climate has caught up with him; it has found its old optimism intellectually and in practice untenable, and has passed into a relativism and general pessimism. Kierkegaard’s concept of faith, the stepping out on 50,000 fathoms, can be considered the avant-garde of this trend (though Hegel took the first steps) and he is owned by his children such as Sartre and Heidegger as their precursor.

Curiously enough, the art critics and literary critics seem to understand these implications better than the conservative theologians. The whole cultural curve shows the movement from a certain, deterministic, optimistic humanism, which broke down in both theory and practice, to a relativistic and generally pessimistic humanism. In twentieth century terms one could say that quantum in philosophy preceded quantum in the arts, preceded quantum in science, preceded quantum in morals and the general cultural pattern. As the old theological liberalism simply followed the old curve, so the new liberalism, neo-orthodoxy, simply follows the new curve. The new liberalism’s only original contribution is the use of theological terms to express the same concepts, thus giving an illusion of purpose, when logically this quantum thinking offers no base for purpose nor for justification of moral-rational, that is, significant life.

WAR AND RELATIVISM

The Second World War is event three of the 1930s. This did not cause the new relativism. The intellectuals had already taken this step, even before the First World War, because the old deterministic humanism had failed to answer intellectual problems. For example, in the field of art Van Gogh had clearly expressed this change by the time of his increasingly de-humanizing self-portraits beginning in Paris in 1886; Gauguin by the time of his painting “Whither What Whence” by 1898; and even Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” was painted before 1910. And thus the Second War did not cause the new relativism. All it did was to speak loudly enough so that even the intellectual stragglers heard.

Since liberal religious thought had been following the general cultural curve since its birth in Germany, it too had to listen. And so the old theological liberalism became the new theological liberalism. One would have difficulty being sure who spoke more scathing words against the old optimistic thought—the new artists in terms of Dada, collé or abstraction, or the new liberal theologians in terms of Barth, Brunner, and Niebuhr. But in neither case was there any change of base. In both cases the base remained the same, the line unbroken; it was simply the old, confident optimism having to become the new nonconfident, relativistic expression. Thus World War II was the earthquake which brought down the house that the intellectuals had already condemned as unsafe for habitation.

In neither secular nor religious expression is the new thought anything more than the changed expression of the old. In all its expressions the humanism of the Renaissance could find no infinite reference point in the finite area of man or corporate mankind, and so had to shift to the relative and begin functioning on fragments of the circle. By Picasso and other artists, for example, the acceptance of the damnation of the permanent paradoxes of what man is in the humanistic concept was expressed in the tension of form versus freedom. Many of Picasso’s paintings of his mistresses simply say on canvas that man (to Picasso it is woman, for woman is his point of contact with the human race) is half angel, half devil. This is not a departure from what preceded, it is an innovation of the same theme, brought about, logically, by the nature of what humanism intrinsically is. To interpret the hard words between the old and the new as an expression of a real difference is to misunderstand the twentieth century; and to accept the new relativistic theology as intrinsically different from the old liberalism is naïve in total cultural understanding.

From Kierkegaard on, the thinking of the Western world has moved towards the thinking of the East. The activistic step of faith into the deep has become the justification of life, in much the same way that meditation is the justification of life in the East. And the language of theology in both East and West gives a connotation of significance of personality couched in terms of ideas, ideals, and myth.

The twentieth century relativism of the West discloses a constant tension between the logic of this position and the practical necessities of living in the world as it is. This is equally true both in its secular and theological expressions. Thus in art, when freedom is carried out logically, contact with the world is lost, and quite illogically, but for practical reasons, form must be re-entered. Thus Sartre is more logical than Camus on their common base, but for practical reasons Camus is nearer to the world of reality. We note in passing that Sartre is not living logically on his base either when he signs the Algerian Manifesto. Even Sartre must live in God’s world, the only world there is. But the main point is that Sartre is more logical than Camus on their common base, and equally Bultmann is more logical than Barth on their common base. It is not the other way round; on their common base, logic is with Bultmann as with Sartre.

Thus the problem returns to the old one of Romanticism, the functioning without a base. The new theological liberalism is merely one more form of Romanticism. And it is to be understood, in the total cultural content, not basically as theology but as a Romantic expression of “bottomless truth” in theological terms. Thus, out of inherent necessity, it must and does function outside the hard stuff of space-time history.

THE LOSS OF DIVINE LAW

Changes in the state since the 1930s mark the fourth significant sign. Not the interpretations of Jesuit theologians like John Courtney Murray (who assert the Thomistic view of natural law for an understanding of the American proposition) but the fact that Northern European culture was produced by the Reformation supplies the background of this transition. In the 1930s it became evident that the United States no longer had a consensus upon which to base its actions, internal or external. From Justice Holmes on, law moved from Lex Rex to a sociological and psychological base; this is part of man’s twentieth century relativism. Rutherford’s Lex Rex was a product of the Reformation; and when the Reformation was given up, no base existed for such a concept. In the old Swiss Supreme Court building in Lausanne the Christian Swiss artist Paul Robert has a mural. It is called “Justice Instructing the Judges.” The mural, in the foreground, pictures many types of human litigation; and behind this, Justice is pointing with her sword to a book, and on the book is lettered “The Law of God.” The Judges look on and learn. This is in painting what Rutherford gave in Lex Rex, and it is the base of Northern European law, including United States law. Originally the United States was based upon the framework of the Reformation consensus, even though certain of the founding fathers were not themselves Christians.

Beginning with the 1930s the results of the loss of the Reformation consensus began to be evident both internally in the United States and in its external dealings. And just as Van Gogh’s views of necessity led him increasingly to paint his self-portraits as less than human, so our giving up the Reformation view has led the United States to deal with men as sacks-of-potatoes. Since the 1930s the United States has had to bear a large share of responsibility for millions of human beings being placed under communistic rule. The logic of what we have given up does its work.

And where will we find our consensus to act in the future, when all forms of humanism have failed to find even a theoretical base? What is left to us as a nation is to live in practice before the time of Lex Rex, and find a relativistic consensus either in Roman Catholic humanistic thought, or some Marxian or non-Marxian materialistic thought, or some combination of these, any of which means some form of arbitrary rule.

Will Christians live in this moment of history and not speak of the judgment of God, when Northern Europe and the United States have given up the Reformation light, as the men of the Reformation spoke of the judgment of God with such clarity and at such great personal cost?

And is it not true that in giving the millions to communism, we have had a part in shaping a “razor” fit to shave us, if God does deal with us in justice using this instrument of judgment?

Our culture has forgotten that it is not possible to keep the cultural and social results of Christianity after Christianity is gone; and we evangelicals must not make the same mistake. It is not possible to keep the theological and ecclesiastical results of Christianity either, after biblical Christianity is gone.

Thus, it is worth considering that Christianity is not reaching the intellectuals and the workers simply because it is not saying anything distinct enough from the total twentieth century cultural flow, nor consistent enough to the concept of a totally personal, supernatural, moral universe, to be worth listening to.

In conclusion, it betrays a lack of understanding in regard to ecclesiastical and theological matters to speak of the “extreme right and the extreme left,” with the extreme “right” being the bitter ones and the extreme “left” being the old liberals. For the new form of liberalism is indeed also very much on the “left.” And there are some on the “right” who do love but weep both for their brothers in Christ and for the loss of our moment of history.

Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.

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