The Faith of Modernism

Shailer Mathews

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781839744129
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

THE world is being reconstructed. Can Christians aid?
A religion that cannot meet the creative needs of men and women is a social encumbrance. A faith on the defensive is confessedly senile. Aesthetic appeal, vested wealth, the inertia of organization may serve to hide its decadence, but they cannot renew its youth. True, such a religion may serve as a form of social control, like bread and the circus keeping an uneasy proletariat from revolt. So it was in Home when the rich restored the shrines of the Olympian gods. So it was in France when Napoleon purveyed religion as a hope of heaven to a nation he refused political liberty. So in our world there are those who would make the church only a means of quieting unrest. But such hopes are already vain.
The proletariat like the rest of the world refuses to be quiet. A religion that cannot meet the deepest longings of restless hearts, that fears freedom of speech, that distrusts social reconstruction, that makes respectability its morality, that would muzzle scientific inquiry will be ignored by a world that has outgrown it.

THE FAITH OF MODERNISM

CHAPTER I. — IS CHRISTIANITY OUTGROWN?

THE world is being reconstructed. Can Christians aid?

A religion that cannot meet the creative needs of men and women is a social encumbrance. A faith on the defensive is confessedly senile. Æsthetic appeal, vested wealth, the inertia of organization may serve to hide its decadence, but they cannot renew its youth. True, such a religion may serve as a form of social control, like bread and the circus keeping an uneasy proletariat from revolt. So it was in Home when the rich restored the shrines of the Olympian gods. So it was in France when Napoleon purveyed religion as a hope of heaven to a nation he refused political liberty. So in our world there are those who would make the church only a means of quieting unrest. But such hopes are already vain.

The proletariat like the rest of the world refuses to be quiet. A religion that cannot meet the deepest longings of restless hearts, that fears freedom of speech, that distrusts social reconstruction, that makes respectability its morality, that would muzzle scientific inquiry will be ignored by a world that has outgrown it.

I.

Religions spring from human needs. Each has grown as its teachings and institutions have satisfied creative souls. Each has become an enemy of progress when it has fastened upon society the authority of the past. The ideals of the past have then become the source of injustice for the present; the hopes of the past, the conventions of the present; the spiritual achievements of the past, the inhibitions of the present.

The history of Christianity is one of successive applications of a religious inheritance to new needs. Jewish Christianity fulfilled the hopes of the Jews; patristic Christianity gave metaphysical satisfaction to those who wished for immortality; Roman Christianity gave order and unity to the Western world; Protestantism satisfied the needs of those souls that had been touched by the new spirit of nationalism and economic independence. Each advance broke the mortmain of the past and led to reformation. Adventurous spirits like Origen, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley represented the creative needs of their days. The older forms, it is true, have continued, more or less to the advantage of their own progeny, but Christianity has been a creative rather than a restraining power whenever it has satisfied the needs of those who were making tomorrow. Christians have never had a static system of philosophy or a finished theology. They have been moved by a spiritual loyalty to a succession of institutions and groups. These, like a coral island, have been built up by innumerable lives. According to their best intelligence and in response to actual currents of life men have organized methods for expressing their loyalty to Jesus as Savior, and their faith in a loving God. The demand for theological change has not sprung merely from theologians. New human needs, new phases of civilization have demanded satisfaction. Every age has had its Modernist movement when Christian life, needing new spiritual support, has outgrown some element of ecclesiastical coercion, and incarnated some new freedom of the spirit. Society has grown irreligious where Christians have opposed religious progress. Social inertia has bred religious decline.

Our own age has grown creative. What the rise of the Roman Empire was to the ancient world, the rise of nations to Western Europe, the rise of democracy to Protestant Europe and America, is the rise of our new social mind seeking new knowledge of reality, liberty, and justice in all social relations, to the present. But today, as in the past, creative spirits when asking religious teachers for bread have too often been told to feed on the crusts of yesterday. And there are thousands of men and women who wonder why custodians of the faith should so fear the future that they must elevate the past.

Such questions cannot be quieted by mere pietism or theological dogmatism. The masses are asserting their human worth; economic processes are more complex and are becoming better fitted to personal ends; women are sharing in the privileges of men; education is being democratized; science is reinterpreting and discovering realities; thought is adventurous; religion is being separated from political control; duties are supplementing rights; new nations are gaining self-determination; internationalism is beginning to discover the need of morality; social evils are being converted or destroyed; a new world of freedom is struggling to be born. How shall Christian people maintain their religion as a vital and inspiring force in such new conditions?

II.

But he is a near-sighted optimist who regards social change as always social progress. Its threat of injury is as loud as its promise of happiness. We have not yet learned how to use our new power, our new wealth, our new knowledge, our new ideals, our new freedom. The dangers of progress are as real as the dangers of reaction. The new world is not yet a brotherhood.

Everywhere we find the survival of the psychology of war. For a generation men were taught to suspect and hate nations other than their own. They applied their beat intelligence to the organization of armies and navies with which they sought to conquer and control not only backward nations, but their rivals in the struggle for the coal and iron and oil and gold and alluvial land and trade and treasures of weaker folk. When war came upon a world filled with distrust and hatred, treating generosity as hypocrisy or sentimentality, cynical as to human nature, it left men as it found them, still distrustful of each other, still endeavoring to maintain peace by diplomatic intrigue, secret treaties, and military force. A generation trained to hate has continued to trust hatred. It is little wonder we look upon the future with apprehension. Where there should be mutual faith there is suspicion, where there should be confidence there is fear, where there should be hope there is cynicism, where there should be cooperation there are rivalry and intrigue.

Distrusting the future, men seek to enjoy the present. Nations with millions of their children starving abound in those who are feasting. Distrust of spiritual values has given rise to pagan enjoyment of animal life. Contempt of old inheritances has thrown too many men and women back upon primitive instincts. Morality is flaunted by thousands in the name of freedom, and in many a community the family has become a temporary mating—if indeed men and women in revolt against the pact and its ideals trouble themselves with marriage. Love is too often but a synonym for animal passion. Men would rather be pagans than Puritans.

Economic development which has proceeded with ever accelerating rapidity for a hundred years has intensified that class struggle which is as old as humanity. Here too is hatred. Those who own machines and those who work machines are grouping themselves in sinister opposing camps, each waiting for some sign of weakness in the other, in order to coerce the other. The increase of wealth has brought increase in discontent. The individual is threatened with submersion in social groups. The Battle Hymn of the Republic is repeatedly silenced by the Marseillaise of the masses.

And because men are desperate, they have grown cynical. They distrust human nature and its worth. The deep motives of life are diseased. The war to end war has bred wars. The treaty that promised peace has given coercion. The idealism of social prophets has been scorned and caricatured by men who distrust and hate their fellows. The cry for justice has too often been silenced by suspicion and abuse. The naturalism of some men of science only makes for deeper distrust of mankind.

Let us be thankful that such dangers are only the darker side of social change; that throughout the world there are voices calling men to repentance and to God; that as never before, there are men denouncing war as criminal, brotherly souls who are seeking to give justice rather than fight for their rights, scientists who are showing God’s ways of action, citizens who believe that a better social order comes by self-control rather than by surrender to sensuous enjoyment. But the new world in the making is not at peace.

III.

What have we to meet these needs, born not of intellectual doubt but of social change and human passion?

Some look to democracy. But as we better understand the democracy of the past and observe its operations in the present, this faith is tempered by apprehension. Will democracy unfold anew the moral quality of human nature? Will it grade up or grade down human life? A social order without authorities, subject to the will of the people must rely upon good will and expert knowledge or terror. Not a few observers of society say that the worst enemies of democracy are democrats themselves.

There are those who tell us that material and social forces will adjust themselves as men come to be more intelligent. Science, they say, is a new religion and as men come to see the facts of nature they will also come to wisdom. There is hope in this conviction.

Science is making over social life. Its going forth is like that of the sun and there is no hiding from the heat thereof. Not only in laboratory and study, but in counting house and factories, we find the conviction that it is possible to organize creative forces so as to increase their effectiveness. There is a way of conducting all affairs in accordance with the facts. Men analyze business as they practice chemistry. To think of science as a merely academic matter is to forget advertising and meat-packing, oil-finding and automobile-building, radio concerts and a million other things in which the human mind has grown accustomed to think in terms of facts and inferences rather than of authority. The scientific mind is not infallible, for it is human, but it is suspicious of whatever fears investigation. For it there can be no God behind a veil too sacred to be touched.

But when has knowledge meant virtue? After we have learned how to control nature and have fully gained social equality and freedom shall we have learned how to live happily and justly? Knowledge is certainly not always identical with good will, however much good will must be directed by knowledge. At bottom every crisis is a matter of folks.

Nor is our need any less individual than in former days. Our age of freedom and of power is in danger of becoming an age of revolt. The eighteenth century saw revolutions turn special privileges into popular rights. In our day still other rights have been gained by the masses, but the question of authority is still unanswered. If men and women are to be equals, where is control to lie? Is there to be any control? How can free persons live together? For the first time in history there are being formed a morality and a social order where no man is recognized as having inherited right to claim superiority. Is this to mean moral license and political anarchy? Is any sort of authority compatible with equality and freedom?

Our new knowledge of natural forces has given men new power to produce wealth. Economic efficiency is advancing almost geometrically, new methods of communication are all but abolishing space and time. Our new chemistry and physics promise still greater control of material forces in the future. It is a fearful thing for a civilization to be possessed of such power. Who can assure us that it will be wisely used? What hope is there of any protection against its being used for purposes of destruction? Is humanity good enough to have such power?

The answer is tragic: humanity is not good enough. It must be transformed, regenerated. But if democracy and science alone are not sufficient where is the power for such a change? We confidently reply, in Christianity. But can Christianity meet these needs and change human life? That is the supreme question of the hour.

IV.

There are Christians who declare it cannot. They affirm the world can grow only worse instead of better. Progress is denied and evils alone are affirmed. Men and women must be rescued from the world by accepting theological beliefs.

And what are these beliefs? And how are they to be applied?

The world needs new control of nature and society and is told that the Bible is verbally inerrant.

It needs a means of composing class strife, and is told to believe in the substitutionary atonement.

It needs a spirit of love and justice and is told that love without orthodoxy will not save from hell.

It needs international peace and sees the champions of peace incapable of fellowship even at the table of their Lord.

It needs to find God in the processes of nature and is told that he who believes in evolution cannot believe in God.

It needs faith in the divine presence in human affairs and is told it must accept the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.

It needs hope for a better world order and is told to await the speedy return of Jesus Christ from heaven to destroy sinners, cleanse the world by fire, and establish an ideal society composed of those whose bodies have been raised from the sea and earth.

Will such answers today bring in the reign of justice and love? Their proponents tell us they do not expect it. Social pessimism is preached as the background of individual hope. The truths that will save men will not save the world.

It is not strange, therefore, that theological orthodoxy no longer appeals to thousands of men and women. It is not heralded as a regenerating power in the modern world. Even granting it true, it will not work such a result. The doctrines alleged to be its fundamentals have been earnestly and even fanatically enforced by the church for hundreds of years, and never more so than in Russia, the Balkan States, Austria, Italy, Spain and France. The results speak for themselves. The appalling fact is that dogmatic Christianity has succeeded in demonstrating its own contention that it has no message for the world’s new needs.

V.

Has Christianity then no promise of hope for a suffering world? Can Christianity do no more than its dogmatists?

The history of the Christian centuries, let us be thankful, permits of no such doubt. The Christian movement is far more extensive than its orthodoxies. It has always been a leaven of social righteousness. Theology is autocratic, but Christian loyalty is creative. One has only to read the sermons of the church or watch its social influence to feel the Christian dynamic within and above the creeds. It is no accident that theological change is the work of pastors. For Christianity even when most relying on the civil power has always been more than its theologies. The Christian community has supplied a spiritual influence lifting men gradually from their sins and giving them new ideals. Orthodox Christians are now working for the world’s transformation. But the strikin...

Table of contents

• Title page
• CHAPTER I. - IS CHRISTIANITY OUTGROWN?
• CHAPTER II. - WHAT IS MODERNISM?
• CHAPTER III. - MODERNISM AND THE BIBLE.
• CHAPTER IV. - CHRISTIAN CONVICTIONS AND DOCTRINAL PATTERNS.
• CHAPTER V. - CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGION OF SALVATION.
• CHAPTER VI. - THE GROWING FAITH IN GOD.
• CHAPTER VII. - JESUS CHRIST THE REVEALER OF A SAVING GOD.
• CHAPTER VIII - JESUS AND HUMAN NEEDS
• CHAPTER IX. - THE AFFIRMATIONS OF FAITH.