The Old ‘New Worldliness’

Much is being said these days about the need for a radical reappraisal of the attitude of the Christian and of the Church toward the world. The thrust of a great deal of this discussion is that the antithesis between Church and world should be resolved by an identification of the sacred and the secular, so that the Christian unreservedly accepts the world as the bearer of all that is significant in the “sacred.”

Those who have set themselves to the task of articulating the “New Worldliness” feel they must give their religio-cultural projections a sociological setting. They show indebtedness to the sociological theory of Émile Durkheim and to such schemes of cultural history as that of Auguste Comte. And they tend to regard the emerging megacity as the best milieu for elaboration of the desacralized culture.

The secularizing process, admittedly not new, is said to culminate in a world of “man come of age,” in which, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “men as they now are simply cannot be religious any more.” It is supposed that as mankind reaches its cultural and spiritual “majority,” God must systematically decrease. Redemption, in the Christian sense, simply becomes irrelevant, since it points to a supposedly absurd otherworldliness.

Man’s alleged attainment of adulthood coincides with the fantastic increase in human population. Thus the urbanization of the world seems a correlate of the coming-of-age of man. The megacity is accepted as the normative sociological and cultural form for the world of tomorrow. Much of the reading public today is aware of the essential theses of Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, in which the major structures of urban life are regarded as “very good” things for which the Christian is to be grateful.

Some of us are persuaded that the city is neither as evil as the incurable romantics contend nor as good as some of its protagonists believe. It is true that the megacity is determining the shape of many of the future structures of human life; yet one may question whether its normative and controlling role should be accepted so easily as a basis for the future thrust of Christianity.

The city is indisputably shaping man, even while man shapes it. What is important is the degree to which the Christian Church accepts the is of urban life and the degree to which it reserves the right, not only to sit in judgment upon it, but also to challenge the city and its mores in the name of the Lord. Theologies of “identification” that minimize the critical role of the Church in relation to urban life and maximize the Church’s conformity to this life are mushrooming today. Authors must, it seems, include such adjectives as “radical” or “worldly” in theological titles if their works are to sell. Evangelicals must come to grips with the trend toward world-acceptance as a category for the determining of theology.

To speak more specifically, theologies of acceptance seek to come to terms with the fragmented sense of morality that marks our society (perhaps more typically, urban society). Their advocates tend to depreciate standards of personal, especially sexual, morality. Approval seems to be placed upon the weakness of the stunted person who is incapable of establishing any meaningful relation to a person of the opposite sex. Hugh Hefner has moved one step further, making a multi-million-dollar business of cultifying masculine immaturity—and he finds little or no problem in engaging in genial dialogue with theologians, some of whom, at least, seem to find little here with which to disagree.

The avid endorsement some spokesmen in the National Council of Churches are giving to the findings of the government-sponsored Cooperative Commission on the Study of Alcoholism suggests the same spirit of world-acceptance. This commission’s report proposes widespread drinking of alcoholic beverages in the home and lowering the age at which liquor may be purchased. Progressive clergymen seem prepared to accept at face value the romantic theory that Europeans who learn to drink alcoholic beverages at the pre-teen level seldom become alcoholics. Those who have met the situation on the Continent with open eyes know that lands like France conduct vigorous campaigns against the drinking of intoxicants. They know, further, that where the tempo of European life is accelerated by industrialization, alcoholism is a serious problem.

Theologians who espouse the New Worldliness seem to want to revise our nation’s drinking standards to conform to what is done and what is wanted. This reflects, of course, a sentimental view of human nature, in which the distinction between the regenerate and the unregenerate is blurred to the vanishing point.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hailed by some as the messiah of a “religionless Christianity,” suggests in his Letters and Papers from Prison that “God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way in which he can be with us and help us.” What this seems to mean is that today’s worldly man demands a new symbol-system, since the categories offered by biblical revelation can no longer be controlling for him.

The newer secular ecumenist seems to have little doubt that belief in God, as this was understood by historic theism, is wholly irrelevant to the world of the megacity and its problems. He revives the time-worn claim of the religious humanists that to free man from concern with theological matters is to release him for more important sociological and humanitarian activities. Thus the worldly society, as typified by the city, is said to witness man’s responsibility to assume mastery over the world in order to praise God and to serve his fellow men.” This will occur, it is said, if we no longer speak of “man’s limitations, his guilt, his sin, and his pride.”

Seemingly overlooked in this line of thought is the fact that evangelical Christianity has something to say that the natural man does not especially wish to hear—a call to repentance and to vital faith in the Redeemer. The urban man needs to hear of the Living God with whom men have to do, not of God as “ground of being”; he needs to learn of Jesus Christ, who is not merely the “Man for others” but the crucified and risen Lord of life.

The inner city may need, not so much new research, new techniques, or new ministerial forms, but a new look at the Gospel. The times do not call for secularizing the Church; they demand a new affirmation of Christian supernaturalism.

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