If I may paraphrase Mark Twain—in a way he certainly would not approve—the rumors of God’s death have been grossly exaggerated.
As you all know, we have been inundated during the past few years with books … and articles, and speeches, and even, heaven help us, sermons … proclaiming the demise of biblical theism.
We have been told—so often and so emphatically that few dared question the bald assertion—that man, having “come of age,” finds it “impossible” any longer to believe in a transcendent God or an order of reality beyond nature.
Bishops, theologians, and other oracles have warned us that, if we want to obtain a hearing from “modern man,” we must abandon the very word “supernatural.”
If we want anyone to take the Bible seriously, we must “demythologize” it by “reinterpreting” or simply excising all of those embarrassing stories about miracles.
If we feel compelled to speak of the resurrection, we may do so provided we make clear that we’re not really making the preposterous claim that it was an actual, historical event.
That’s what we’ve been told by the radical theologians who’ve dominated the idea market—and the religious book lists—in recent years.
However, we have not been told … at least, no one has managed to make clear to me … why we must jettison about 90 per cent of the historic Christian faith. We have simply been told, in a more dogmatic tone than any Roman pope has dared to employ for some time, that this is the way it has to be if we want to communicate with “modern man.”
Now I cannot speak with the same assurance as the radical theologians do about the mind-set of “modern man.” To be perfectly honest, I must confess that in twenty-seven years as a newspaper reporter, I’ve never met the fellow. He seems to be as elusive in real life as that “common man” Henry Wallace used to talk about.
In my quest for the prototype “modern man” I have met and talked to a good many individual modern men. I’ve even listened to some of them. And my impression of their attitudes and desires is totally different from that of Bishop Robinson and Harvey Cox.
What I hear these modern men saying is that they’re sick and tired of being told what they can’t believe. They want to know what, if anything, they can believe.
They feel they’ve been cast long enough in the role of captive audience for theologians engaged in a reckless competition to see who can administer the rudest shock to the faithful.
Most of them aren’t particularly interested in the denatured Christianity which is being offered to them as a concession to their supposed modernity of mind. They figure that if the Church is just a human institution for social service, if the Bible is so unreliable that you can’t take any part of it very seriously, if the Christian faith is based on a gigantic lie about a man rising from the dead … then there’s no use trying to “modernize” all this mess. Just throw it all out and be done with it.
This growing disenchantment among the laity is, I believe, the main reason why we are witnessing a decline in church attendance and a relative decline in giving. Some religious leaders like to attribute these trends to lay disapproval of church social action. This explanation strikes me as rather self-righteous. It says, in effect, “we are suffering because we, like Christ, have stood up for the right.”
My own observation is otherwise. For every layman I know who has quit coming to church because he disapproves of social action, I know at least three who are hanging on and supporting the church only because it is a channel for community service.
The real lesson to be drawn from the current slump in religious interest seems to me quite clear. If you persist in handing out stones when people ask for bread, they’ll finally quit coming to the bakery.
The most hopeful fact I know today is that there are signs that we are approaching the end of the fad for reckless negation in theology.
The first heralds of a new day are to be found where important new intellectual currents nearly always make their first appearance—on the book lists.
Within the past year or so, authors of impressive scholarly standing have come forward to assure bewildered laymen—and, I might add, equally bewildered parish ministers—that “modern man” can believe in God … even in a personal, loving, purposeful God … without the slightest sacrifice of intellectual integrity.
Indeed, some have gone so far as to argue—quite cogently, it seems to me—that “modern man” really can’t make sense of all the phenomena of his own existence without the hypothesis of God.
Over in Europe, whence we belatedly imported demythologizing, a new generation of theologians has arisen who know not Bultmann. Actually, they know him quite well—they just don’t think he’s infallible. Men like Gunther Bornkamm and Wolfhart Pannenberg are saying quite boldly that, yes, we can know quite a bit about Jesus. And—would you believe it—they are even treating the resurrection as an actual, historical event.
And now comes that handsomely-credentialed liberal, Peter Berger, to rehabilitate the term “supernatural.” Miracles, obviously, have not ceased.
Dr. Berger—who is, you remember, a sociologist—offers in his new book A Rumor of Angels some badly needed perspective on this whole business of making dogmatic pronouncements about what “modern man” will or won’t, can or can’t, believe.
“It may be conceded,” he writes, “that there is in the modern world a certain type of consciousness that has difficulties with the supernatural. This statement remains, however, on the level of socio-historical diagnosis. The diagnosed condition is not thereupon elevated to the status of absolute criterion.… We may agree that contemporary consciousness is incapable of conceiving of either angels or demons. We are still left with the question of whether, possibly, both angels and demons go on existing despite this incapacity of our contemporaries to conceive of them.”
I am not greatly exercised, personally, about the existence of angels and demons. But I must confess that I am heartened to find myself in a changing theological climate which makes it possible to admit—even in a gathering of church leaders—that I say the Apostles’ Creed without crossing my fingers.
As publishers of religious books, it is your responsibility both to anticipate—and to help share—the future trends of religious thought. Some of you, I am happy to note, already are making a large and creative contribution to the recovery of the positive in theology. I hope all of you will push forward in this endeavor.
As Professor Paul Lehmann of Union Seminary observed recently, we are moving into “an encounter between an emerging age of doubt and an emerging age of faith.” It is an age of doubt because vast numbers of men and women—and particularly young people—are unwilling to believe anything simply on authority. It is not enough any more to pound people over the head with didactic pronouncements preceded by the words, “The Church teaches” or “The Bible says.”
But it also can be an age of faith, because millions upon millions of people are searching hungrily for a meaningful concept of God. Most of them already are powerfully attracted to the person of Jesus Christ. They don’t know quite what to make of the Bible, and they don’t think much of the Church. But their faces light up with interest when you talk to them about the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
There has never been a time, in my opinion, when the fields were whiter to the harvest. I believe that Chad Walsh accurately described the condition of a vast portion of humanity in our time in his book of poetry entitled The Psalm of Christ:
I have called to God and heard no answer,
I have seen the thick curtain drop, and sunlight die;
My voice has echoed back, a foolish voice,
The prayer restored intact to its silly source.
I have walked in darkness, he hung in it.
In all my mines of night, he was there first;
In whatever dead tunnel I am lost, he finds me.
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
From his perfect darkness a voice says, I have not.1From The Psalm of Christ by Chad Walsh. The Westminster Press. Copyright © 1963 by W. L. Jenkins. Used by permission.
the courage of Christ
It took courage for the son of the carpenter to leave his village and launch out upon his ministry without the help of family or friends. It took courage to accept baptism from John and thus run the risk of being thought of as a needy sinner. It took courage to face the rigors of the temptation alone in the wilderness. It took courage to oppose the traditions of men that obscured or even contradicted the word of God. It took courage to tell men that they were evil, and to expose their sins so relentlessly that they were left without a cloak for those sins. It took courage to refuse the demand of the people that he consent to be made their king. It took courage to set his face steadfastly to go up to Jerusalem. It took courage to cleanse the temple. It took courage to accept the cup from the Father’s hand. It took courage to face the venom of his accusers and the brutality of his crucifiers. It was one long trail of courage from beginning to end—the courage of conviction and consecration. It has the church and all of Christian history as its abiding monument.—From A Short Life of Christ, by Everett F. Harrison, 263, 264. Copyright © 1969 by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
