0 An American Looks at His World Comment on the Times by Glenn Frank LIBERALIZING THE FUNDAMENTALIST MOVEMENT NY ONE interested in a study of the significant groups in contemporary American life is forced to the regrettable observation that in the church Bourbon reaction and blind credulity furnish most of the effective evangelism and father virtually all of the widely popular movements, as witness the current fundamentalist movement, which is compelling the church to squander in guerilla warfare between its own members precious energies that should be employed in the prosecution of its basic mission. It is nothing less than tragic that liberalism invariably allows itself to be manoeuvered by reaction into a defensive position. I have often wondered why Bourbons seem to have so much better sense of generalship than liberals. Perhaps it is because they waste so little time on ideas that they have all their energy left for strategy. However gray-minded they may be in other ways, the standpatters have an uncanny facility for capturing the effective catchword. It would be difficult to imagine a more nearly irresistible rallying-cry than the word "fundamentalism." The man in the street has a veritable passion for "going back to the fundamentals of the thing." He likes to feel that he is "getting down to bed-rock." Whether consciously or unconsciously, the fun damentalist movement, from the point of view of popular psychology, has been admirably staged. The high art of sloganeering is here seen at its best. The fundamentalists have succeeded in giving the liberal and intelligent leaders of the church the appearance of renegades who are sniping the church from the ramparts. The liberal movement in the church is weakest in its sense of strategy. The right is on its side, but the right is being badly stage-managed. The success of the fundamentalist movement would mean the conversion of the church into a Hall of Dead Doctrines presided over by Pious Ignorance. The success of the liberal movement would mean the conversion of the church into an inspiring and energizing force of contemporary civilization. But the liberal movement will not succeed as long as the liberals wage a merely defensive warfare against the detailed contentions of the fundamentalist program. The liberal movement will succeed only when the liberals spend their energies in the organization of a liberal fundamentalist movement that will put the reactionaries on the defensive-a movement that will beat the fundamentalists at their own game of catchwords and mob psychology. All the necessary raw materials for a liberal fundamen talist movement lie ready at hand. I should like to suggest fourteen points that I think should be included in the program of any such liberal fundamentalist movement. I think that liberal leadership should challenge the church to do the following things: I.-Substitute the religion of Jesus for Christianity. I am not merely playing with words here. Most intelligent folk realize, I think, that three fourths of our traditional theological doctrine bear little, if any, direct relation to the religion of Jesus. If Jesus were to return to earth, I doubt that he would be able to recognize either his purpose or his program in the average theological treatise. Hounded free-lance that he was, berated, betrayed, and beaten by the fundamentalists of his own time, Jesus would be ill at ease in reading the theological pronouncements of that over-doctrinized and over-formalized Christianity which has for centuries usurped the place, misinterpreted the principles, and maladministered the influence of his essentially simple religion, which was and is not only personally regenerative, but socially revolutionary. II.-Make faith a matter of adventure rather than a matter of assent. Too often faith has been made a synonym for credulity. When some one says that John Smith is a man of great faith, we are accustomed to think that this means that John Smith is a man marked chiefly by the fact that he is willing to believe any widely accepted doctrine provided it was formulated enough centuries ago and its authors look antique enough in the steel engravings. In such a case, it would be more accurate to say that John Smith is a man of great cowardice. The man of great faith is the man who has such confidence in the essential rightness of the universe that he is willing to adventure outside the little circle of the white light of the known that falls about his feet. Throughout history the men of greatest faith have not been conformists, but pioneers. III.-Preach the gospel of Jesus rather than the gospel about Jesus. The distinction here is too obvious to require explanation. I want only to record this personal impression: in at least eight times out of ten that I listen to an orthodox sermon I leave the church with the feeling that I have listened to a man discuss a historical something that happened some nineteen hundred years ago. The gospel about Jesus may be intellectually interesting, but it lacks power to motivate the contemporary world. The gospel about Jesus makes a minister the calm expositor of a doctrinal form; the gospel of Jesus makes a minister the impassioned advocate of a dynamic force. IV. Apply as well as announce the principles of the religion of Jesus. The mere personal recommendation of the sermon on the mount and the golden rule does not constitute an adequate message to the modern man. The church must add to the preaching of abstract virtues and personal spiritual experience an intimate, continuous, and specific moral analysis of all the political, social, industrial, and professional processes of modern society. To-day a business or professional man can lie, steal, take life, and despoil virtue in a thousand indirect, impersonal, and long-distance ways that never occurred to Moses when he announced the ten commandmentsways the moral implications of which it is not alway easy for a man to recognize. Now the minister, if he is any thing, must be an expert in the moral meaning of modern life. The religion of Jesus must function to-day in a changed world, and it is the business of the church to show men what the religion of Jesus means in terms of life in modern America rather than in ancient Palestine. V.-Ask men to believe only what they can use, only what is true for them. The religion of Jesus is not a philosophy to be intellectually believed; it is a way of life. To borrow a phrase from educational theory, in the matter of religion we live our way into our thinking more than we think our way into our living. Intellectual assent to a doctrine means exactly nothing to me unless that "belief" actually does something to my character or my conduct. No truth is mine until I have lived it. In a very real sense I cannot accept the religion of another. That I am intellectually convinced that it is true does not make it true; it becomes true for me only after it saturates me so that waking or sleeping it colors my life. And I am reminded that it was only after his little personal cabinet of twelve associates had been his disciples for many months that Jesus catechized them to find out who they thought he was. He let them come to their conclusion about his character by living and working with him; he did not demand that they hold a certain opinion as a sort of entrance requirement to discipleship. VI.-Modernize the religious vocabulary. The men who wrote the books of the Bible used the language-forms of their own time. Religious leadership is not, in the main, following their lead. The church to-day needs to scrap its ancient vocabulary and begin to talk to the men of this generation in language-forms and thought-forms that the men of this generation can readily understand without having to leap backward over nineteen centuries and convert themselves into ancient Orientals in order to decode the similes and metaphors that fall strangely on Occidental ears and insulate the religion of Jesus from vital contact with the modern mind. VII.-Emphasize the use of science by religion rather than the reconciliation of science to religion. The fundamentalist seems to regard science and religion as two distinct entities, like two prize-fighters who had been striking below the belt and were being asked to apologize and shake hands. Science is not an entity that we can personalize as either devil or deity; it is a compound of a thousand and one specific results. The problem of religious leadership is not that of passing judgment on science as an entity, but the problem of making intelligent use of the new truths unearthed by psychology, biology, and kindred sciences. VIII.-Dramatize rationalism with ritual and beauty. It is regrettable that when ministers become rational and liberal in their understanding of the religion of Jesus they tend to denude their church service of that ritual and richness which the human sense of festival and hunger for beauty demand. The average liberal church service does not stimulate the imagination and satisfy the legitimate emotions of the masses. Protestantism unwisely threw away much of its cultural and artistic birthright in its revolt from Catholicism. That there is a basic difference in certain doctrines between the Catholic and the Protestant church is no reason why Protes tantism should renounce ritual and separation, but de facto union of church exile beauty from its life. IX.-Know God as the mind and the heart of the universe rather than as its judge. To think of God as immanent in His creation, alive and breathing in every atom of His universe, is not a reversion to primitive pantheism that peopled the world with a medley of gods, turning tree and stone and waterfall into a divinity; it is not an atheistic attempt to materialize the spiritual, but rather the spiritualization of the material. It does not even preclude the personality of God. I do not know where I am in my body. I am in my hand when I want to lift something. I am in my tongue when I want to speak. My mind and imagination travel through the lead and wood of my pencil, flow in the ink of my pen, or crawl along the metallic bars of my type-writer as I write. And yet I am a personality. I can approach a God Who is in like manner the mind and heart of the universe as I could never approach a God Who was patterned after an Oriental despot and functioned primarily as a police judge. X.-Make the church the voice of the living as well as of the dead prophets. The Hebrew race holds no monopoly on inspiration, and prophecy did not die with Isaiah and Micah. Mr. Wells was no impious iconoclast when he suggested that we should bring together a new "Bible of Civilization." We need such a synthesis of the modern mind's reachings after ultimate meanings not to supplant, but to supplement the Bible. XI.-Break the chains that now bind the church to the state. We have been under the delusion that we have effected a separation of church and state. We have not. We have de jure and state. In times of crisis, when the state barks, the church barks, and straightway begins to hunt with the pack. Let war be declared, and the church makes its God the ally alike of Pershing and Hindenburg. XII.-Define sin as anything that hurts life rather than something that offends God. Only so can sin become, in the mind of the average man, a moral rather than a legalistic issue. A God worthy of the worship of intelligent men does not spend His time nursing His dignity and watching for infractions of a set of rules. He is pained only when something poisons or prostitutes his handiwork. XIII. Make the "scheme of redemption" take into account institutions as well as individuals. The religion of Jesus has something to say to society as well as to the soul. It is as much concerned with the reconstruction of the social order as it is with the redemption of the individual. In the mind of Jesus there was no contradiction between personal and social religion. There is no such thing as the "spiritual" gospel and the "social" gospel being offered to mankind as alternatives. XIV.-Merge the sacred and the secular. Traditional theology has blighted life with a dangerous dualism that has made religion consist in the doing of special things. The religion of Jesus is not the doing of special things, but the doing of all things in a special way. Spirituality is not "a something" that life uses; it is the tone and quality of life as a whole. I offer these as suggestions only, not as a complete program. I have left out left out many really fundamental things. I have been interested only in suggesting a method of approach. THE RUMFORD PRESS CONCORD |