Review of Current Religious Thought: March 12, 1965

About eight years ago we had William Albright lecturing in the East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh on the subject of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The excitement about the scrolls was evident by the fact that East Liberty was almost filled. It is something to contemplate that the accidental find of a shepherd boy in far-off Palestine could fill a church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Albright, as you know, is worth listening to at any time on any subject. He is a very learned and very interesting man, and to hear him makes you feel that you are caught in the happy flow of genuine scholarship. Among other things that night he said this: “Regardless of whatever else the Dead Sea Scrolls tell us, one thing is certain. We know now that none of the New Testament could have been written after A.D. 80.” This was a shocking statement to multitudes of people, especially ministers who had been sharing the debates in the thirties and forties about dating John’s Gospel all the way into the late second century. And there were professors there who had been telling classes that the Great Commission was a late third- and fourth-century interpolation.

When we were walking out after the service, one of the outstanding pulpiteers in Pittsburgh, a Baptist, said to me in passing, “Well, after that I guess I’ll have to go home and throw away all my seminary notes.” Whether he did or not I do not know. But this is a parable of our day. So much information has been showered on us that it is pretty hard to find and hold a position in almost any area of theology or biblical study. Men who had gone to seminary in the twenties taught me in the thirties, and I taught on the basis of my notes in the forties and fifties. Beneath that overhang of solidified scholarship there was always the fast footwork of adjusting to the latest book or journal. It was easy to end up with a mishmash; and it was very difficult to end up with a position that would give any assurance or stability to students, especially in a course for which parallel readings were being required.

What was happening in biblical studies it à la Albright is even more prevalent in theology. We live in the time of Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Niebuhr. This is a new theology constantly being faced with the response of a new movement in theology reviving the classic position of the Church. The counter-thrust of conservative theology, with such names as Hodge, Warfield, Carnell, Ramm, Henry, and Gerstner, is very much alive and kicking; and if it is called, as it sometimes is, “neo-fundamentalism,” the reason is that people are conscious of the “neo” in this movement. The word “neo-evangelicalism” refers to the same sort of thing.

And what shall we do with John A. T. Robinson, Southwark Cathedral, and the new scholars of the Cambridge theology? In addition to being familiar with Honest to God we simply must keep up on John Wren-Lewis and others of similar ilk. Read Jenkins’s Bold Religion; Gregor Smith’s The New Man; the volumes of the Cambridge theologians, Soundings and Objections to Christian Beliefs. Pelz has one entitled God Is No More; Van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel; and Sir Richard Acland, We Teach Them Wrong: Religion and the Young.

These books in turn have their own answers. For good coverage you will want to dip into Leon Morris’s The Abolition of Religion, in which he says that, though Bonhoeffer may be correct in eliminating “religion” if it is merely a matter of forms and rites, he is dead wrong, as are some of the others, if he is eliminating religion as such. Meanwhile in any bookstore you can pick up complete listings on the “new morality,” pro and con, and a list of titles in which a wide variety of men defend the faith—little handbooks that might be called “What a Christian Ought to Believe,” or maybe, “How Goes It with the Presbyterians?”

You are not much better off if you try your strength on some of the side issues. I didn’t say this—the science editor of a metropolitan daily newspaper did: “We still know so little about man that there is no need to accept materialism as a philosophy of life. I believe—and this is only a belief—that we know less about the nature of the mind than primitive tribesmen knew about astronomy. Most psychologists think otherwise—and their view, too, is only a belief based perhaps on their eagerness to achieve physics-chemistry status as a science.” This kind of surprising talk from a science editor can send an experimental psychologist into orbit and can bring crashing down about our heads all kinds of easy acceptances concerning our college psychology courses or even the objectives of our counseling programs.

I get it on pretty straight authority that a great many of our university psychology departments have shifted around in the direction of behaviorism; so what shall we do now with the whole mind-body problem, our definitions of consciousness, or even our happy solutions by way of Gestalt? In spite of what you may think about your last psychology course, the fat is still in the fire. A psychiatrist of the measure of Tournier (The Meaning of Persons) gives one the very encouraging belief that we can still talk about the soul or the heart, but I can warn you that there are a lot of universities where that kind of language will get you laughed out of court.

Pretty soon now someone ought to write a book to explain how it has happened in our day that we can’t be sure of anything or at least must be nervous when the talk gets around to definitions or conclusions. Creeds are one thing in this battle; and what shall we say about the canons of art, the principles of music, the beautiful in aesthetics, the freedom from absolutes in Dewey education, the balance of equity in law, and existentialism in ethical decisions?

In a day when everyone is trying to increase lay participation in the thinking of the Church, the enormous confusion in all intellectual disciplines looms increasingly as the fundamental problem. With all the eagerness in the world, a layman lacking three years’ study in a seminary has an inescapable problem that “popular” treatments cannot answer. A variation on the same problem is the difference of ministers now being graduated from those who were graduated fifteen years ago. Just for fun, and it won’t be much fun, listen to a forty-five-year-old pastor and his twenty-five-year-old assistant as they try to work out the content of a weekend retreat for laity.

Good luck. We are living in a grand and awful time.

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