The old proverb, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” is only half true. Imitation of an adult by a child, of an older writer by a younger writer, of one nation by another, grows out of something deeper than the desire to flatter. Imitation takes place when one person or institution accepts the philosophy, style, aims, or attitudes of another. That one imitates another reveals that the two have some deeper common basis that may not be readily apparent even to a critical observer.

Imitation is also the basis of art. Twenty-three centuries ago Aristotle defined poetry (by which he meant also drama and music) as “the imitation of an action.…” No matter how “original” or “creative” the author or composer may be, he must work with the materials given in life—that is, he can do nothing but imitate reality. He may emphasize, he may distort, he may offer a fantastically “new” point of view; he may utilize the contents of the subconscious or even the hallucinations of the alcoholic or drug addict; but like everyone else, he must work with reality. Therefore, no matter how far he may extend the situations of life by his imagination, the author-composer imitates life. And thus, historically, the creative person (the writer, composer, painter) has affirmed reality.

Nations have always recognized that the affirmation and continuance of their national life resides in their thinkers, and that they owe their freedom and dominance to their creative thinkers and leaders in all fields. The enemies of the human spirit have always recognized this, too. The Assyrians and Babylonians took into exile the thinkers and leaders of ancient Israel and other conquered states. Hitler systematically murdered Jewish intellectuals, while the Jewish underground leaders tried to save (and fortunately did save) many of their intellectuals; both sides knew that the fate of the Jews was bound up with the fate of that wonderfully fertile group of writers, artists, and scientists produced by European Jewry.

The Communists also, according to documented evidence, eliminated the intellectuals of those Eastern European countries they subverted or overran. Dr. Arthur Vööbus of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago has written extensively of the murder of the intellectual class in his native Estonia. Indeed, tyrants have always recognized what the modern Christian Church is only slowly remembering: that the future of any people—and of any institution, such as the Church—lies in the performance of its intellectual class. Moreover, the productions of writers, researchers, artists, and composers may ultimately be of more significance than the acts of military, governmental, and religious leaders. That other proverb, “The pen is mightier than the sword,” has been proved true, pre-eminently by the Bible, but also by the Dialogues of Plato, the Communist Manifesto, and Mein Kampf. “I care not who writes the nation’s laws, if I may write its songs” is an insight that the Church that produced “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and the hymns of Wesley should never forget.

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A Lost Source Of Sustenance

By now the reader may be saying, “Very well, I agree. But what is the significance of these things?” The answer is plain. That modern literature, drama, music, and art have stopped “imitating” the Christian faith in any positive sense shows that Christianity has become irrelevant for many modern intellectuals. There is no longer a common religious root beneath the surface of society from which the artist, writer, and composer draw sustenance.

The obverse of the failure of modern writers and artists to imitate the Christian faith in any significant way is the more disturbing tendency of the Church increasingly to imitate the world. So key questions arise, such as these: “How is the Church imitating the world?” and “How is this kind of imitation undermining the communication of the Christian faith?”

The Church is imitating the world, first of all, in the standards, means, and goals its ministers adopt for their task. Consider the overriding concern with budgets, size of congregations and denominations, and building projects—a concern that reflects the statistic-sickness of the contemporary Protestant church. That this condition is an aping of the “success-philosophy” of secular culture needs no documentation. The church on the corner too often pursues the same goals by the same means as the company down the street. The literature the two distribute seems to be mass-produced by the same advertising agency. But it is carrying this success-philosophy into the pulpit that becomes a false Gospel. To equate the Kingdom of God with Sunday school attendance is to trample on pearls. Why should secular thinkers imitate the teaching of an institution whose parroted philosophy of “busyness” leaves even the most secular men empty within? Books like The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, stories like “Cash McCall,” and studies like The Lonely Crowd and The Status Seekers reveal the emptiness of the Horatio Alger myth. The secular writer has discovered what too many ministers have failed to see: “To be first,” to succeed materially, to make $1,000 a week, is not the fulfillment of life.

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Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman poignantly portrays the agony of a man who accepted what the recruiting posters of modern industrial society proclaim: WORK HARD, THINK BIG, GET RICH! Poor Willy Loman ventured forth into the jungle of business with a smile and a shoestring; he didn’t make it, but he never stopped believing in the myth. This was his tragedy, that he died still believing in the sanctity of numbers written beside a dollar sign. His son Biff tried to help him, saying, “I’m a dollar an hour”; but Willy refused to believe that Biff couldn’t become “a leader of men” if only he would try. It is “not that they died, but that they die like sheep” that is the awful truth about so many in our society. We may fail as persons, but we never question the ethics of success. And if we succeed financially, we too often look down on those who do not succeeed, considering them worthless, shiftless, sinful people.

To our shame, we preachers of the Gospel have perpetuated this myth; earning for ourselves the curse invoked by Paul in Galatians, we have preached numbers, budgets, buildings, and “hard work for personal success” as another gospel. But the Bible rather discordantly says, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord …” and, “Not by works of the law will a man be justified but by grace through faith.”

The only positive means of combating the increasing irrelevance of the modern Church to contemporary writing, drama, art, and music, and thus to contemporary life (for they are one), is the old solution to the futility of life expressed in justification by faith. The pulpit must proclaim Jesus Christ, the strong Son of God, who is able to save us from the meaninglessness of a life devoted to material success, unrestrained sexual pleasure, alcohol-induced joviality, and leisure stupified by the nerve-jarring cacophony of television—all of which men grasp desperately to stave off the anxiety that nibbles away in the back of the brain like a maddened mouse. For, as any secular writer will tell us, there is no salvation in any of these things. Rather, as Eugene O’Neill never stopped saying, we have only our illusions to sustain us.

All Are Guilty

It may be that many who were commissioned to proclaim Christ have consciously or unconsciously decided that he, too, is an illusion, and therefore have sought substitutes from the world. This has been the historic weakness of liberalism. The rejection of revelation for reason, the rejection of redemption for ethical improvement, the rejection of the Bible for philosophic and psychological insights—these describe the history of liberal Protestantism from the seventeenth century to our own. The emphasis on theological, homiletical, liturgical, and church-administrational “methodology” since 1900 in all Protestant circles is a clear indicator of the abandonment of eternal truth for means to success determined by secular criteria. And we all—fundamentalists, conservative evangelicals, liberals, and modernists—have shared in this. All are guilty, for we all have stressed method (be it the use of radio, campaigns, committees and reports, membership drives, demythologizing, or the new hermeneutics) more than the Spirit and have generally relied upon the methods of the world instead of placing the Gospel of Jesus Christ first.

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One of Camus’s characters in The Fall remarks, “Now that I have lost my character I must devise a method.” Unfortunately that is all too applicable to us, who were called to proclaim “foolishness to Greeks, a stumbling block to Jews.”

Many may take offense at these remarks. Yet I have stated what I believe to be true. And I could also say something of the techniques of preaching adopted from secular pursuits—chiefly from the semi-scientific critical approach used by university professors—that detract from so much modern sermonizing. Let me simply say that every lash I have laid on my brethren’s back I feel on my own. I sat where they sit and stood where they stand. As Plutarch said: “It is a thing of no great difficulty, to raise objections against another man’s oration—nay, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome.”

To pretend to have produced a better work is folly. I can only point, as John the Baptizer did and as every preacher should, to him who imitates no one and nothing, but who is the Express Image of God, the Judge of every work of man, the Saviour of everyone who trusts in him.

John C. Cooper is assistant professor of philosophy at Newberry College, Newberry, South Carolina. He has the A.B. (cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) from the University of South Carolina; B.D. from Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, Columbia, South Carolina; and S.T.M. from Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago.

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