Ours is a task of witness in educated society. The first task of the educated Christian is moral leadership. Isaiah describes a man of God as “the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” The word “rock,” no doubt, prefigures Christ, in whose shadow we find salvation, but it is descriptive of any man who fronts the storm and stands firm against the tide. Sir George Adam Smith has written one of his purple passages on this very theme. Where the desert touches an oasis, he writes, life is continually under attack from the wind-driven infiltrating sand. The rains come, and a carpet of green struggles to life on the desert’s edge, and there is a promise of fertility. But it is doomed, for the thrusting sand creeps in, and stunts and chokes the feeble aspirations of the green. But set a rock on the sand. After the brief rains, life springs up on its leeward side, and in time there comes a garden. The boulder has stayed the drift.
The shadow of a rock is life in those arid lands. Hence Isaiah’s image. A man can be a “hiding place from the wind and a covert from the tempest.” He fronts the deadly storm and stays the drift. In the shadow, weaker life can live, and pant through the harsh hours. Protected from the arid drift, useful life and faithfulness can grow. So stood Isaiah himself in the days of the great Assyrian invasion. Hezekiah was a weak man and unwise. The prophet was his rock. In the shelter, the king could strike roots of sustenance; courage could grow to fullness, and faith find place to spring.
And Hezekiah, thus nourished and protected, saved Jerusalem. There are those who fall and die in the struggle for faith and righteousness because they never see these values potent and uplifted against the storm in another and stronger personality.
Here, then, is a noble function for the educated Christian, especially for the teacher in school or university. Many a young man and girl have been preserved from devastating doubt and moral ruin by the mere spectacle of some Christian teacher standing firm. The prerequisites are exacting. Second-rate scholarship, shoddy work in the classroom, dour aloofness, and lack of social grace, can destroy such usefulness. The rock, in the critical eyes of youth, must be truly based, without flaw or fundament of clay. It is easy to fail those who seek such shelter; but occasionally to pass the test, to be conscious that some feebler life has taken root in the beneficent shadow, to see that life grow and learn to face the storm alone, is the fairest privilege of the Christian teacher’s, or, let me add, the Christian parent’s life.
Let us covet the best gifts, of which this is one: to stand fast by God’s grace, unwearied, uncompromising, unafraid, and proclaim Christ among the intellectuals.
It is no easy place of witness where agnosticism is a cult, and the search for truth a fetish rather than an adventure of discovery—where a live Christian faith is often snobbishly dismissed as bad form, or written down cruelly and falsely as bad scholarship. But such artificial attitudes are commonly those of lesser academic lights, who find their foothold precarious among the educated. True thinkers do not dismiss thus the Christian’s claim to have apprehended vital truth, and discussion with fine and unprejudiced minds on the bases and essentials of his faith can be the Christian’s most stimulating and searching experience. In Luke’s fine narrative we can watch one of the most superbly educated men of the ancient world, Paul of Tarsus, meet thus the intellectuals of two worlds. He debates, single-handed, against the combined learning of the Jerusalem Jews. He meets the Jews of the Hellenistic synagogues, heirs, like himself, to the cultures both of Greece and of Palestine. He passes to Athens, and makes the tremendous intellectual adjustment thus demanded, arguing like Socrates in the Agora or facing the philosophers of the Areopagus with Greek reasoning, quotation from Greek literature, and local illustration. “Prove, correct, encourage,” Paul urged the young Timothy, “using the utmost patience in your teaching.” Paul put that precept into practice with superb tact, relevant learning, and precise argument. It was no doubt with such an example before him that Peter, no intellectual, but an incisive and vigorous preacher, wrote near the end of his life, “Be ready at any time to give a quiet and reverent answer to any man who wants a reason for the hope that you have within you.”
Intellectual Leadership
I have already trespassed on my second point. The educated Christian’s role is not only moral leadership. He has also a duty of intellectual leadership. “A liberal Protestant,” runs a paragraph in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, seeks “an anti-dogmatic and humanitarian reconstruction of the Christian faith,” an attitude which, according to the same authority, “until recently appeared to be gaining ground in nearly all the Protestant churches.” The words we emphasize are the dictionary’s tribute to the conservatives. Perhaps we should pause a moment to stress that which we have sought with such toil to conserve.
The principle object of our jealous conservation has been an authoritative Bible. We cannot see how without the loftiest doctrine of inspiration, the teachings of Scripture can be preached or taught with cogency or confidence. Granted a Bible which is the Word of God, a man can preach without misgiving the traditional message of Christianity—a divine Christ, an atoning death, a unified Bible telling the story of a great historical process culminating in God’s inruption into history, a coherent New Testament with no division between Christ and Paul, between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Once shake substantially the authority of Scripture, and the haphazard collection of documents into which the Bible forthwith dissolves becomes of little more than antiquarian use in preaching or devotion. Interpretation becomes rationalist and subjective. The Bible ceases to speak. Authority must be objective, not dependent on a reader’s whim or choice. Such is the conservative’s quite logical belief. This position is finding wider acceptance because conservatism has learned to speak in the language and thought-forms of the day, and to meet undoubted problems coolly and face to face.
But if we are to fulfill our function, conservatism must be informed conservatism. Orthodoxy should be something more than a mere emotional attitude. It should be the stand of an educated Christian, free from credulity, shibboleth, and superstition, above the noisy controversy which so often passes for loyalty, and careful to avoid hot polemical attitudes.
Informed conservatism recognizes the indefensible positions which ill-informed orthodoxy has sometimes sought nervously to hold; it admits those legitimate areas of difference where opinion is free, and where dogmatic attitudes cause unnecessary division. Informed conservatism welcomes all the light which learned research can throw on Scripture. It is no devotee of literalism, nor is it committed to Ussher’s dates, Elizabethan English, or the views, in their sacrosanct entirety, of the Reformation theologians. Informed conservatism believes that no truth can be alien to the Word of Truth, and that no honest scholarship can harm the faith. It does believe that, as Goethe once put it, each generation must win over again its spiritual heritage and experience truth in its own person, that the need is ever with us to rephrase old doctrine, to relate it afresh to the changing patterns of life, to think boldly and apply our faith to the problems of our generation. Our task is to keep the cause alive, modern, active, adaptive; to meet the need of the world we live in; and to demonstrate the eternal relevance of what we believe.
Devotion To Scholarship
Hence the need for thought, and a task of intellectual leadership, a role which conservatism was too late in recognizing. Over significant and lamentable years in the latter half of the last century, conservatives neglected scholarship. The reasons were three. The pulpit was the goal in a great age of preaching, and the pulpit is an exacting master. Spurgeon, Parker, Moody, Talmadge—these were not great scholars. There was also current a widely proclaimed and accepted eschatology which, Thessalonian fashion, further encouraged men of ability to seek the pulpit rather than the lecture-room. It proclaimed a Second Advent so imminently near that plans of preparation involving years of study seemed a confession of unbelief. Thirdly, thanks to the blessed and forgotten British Peace, the world was opening with incomparable opportunities for missionary enterprise, and ability was drained off into these open and useful channels in a manner which had the unfortunate result of stripping the church at home of leadership in thought.
Meanwhile liberals, not so keen on missionary activity, skeptical of orthodox eschatology, and lacking the strong evangelical urge to preach, gave energy and enterprise to church politics and theological teaching. In a word they practically monopolized the schools. Such a triumph involves a time-lag of half a century even when promptly countered by an alert opposition, for the teacher has pupils who bear the mark of their classroom through another generation. And the liberals’ capture of the classrooms was not promptly countered. One must not forget such men as Orr and Denney, and later Machen and others like them, but the fact remains that liberal theology dug its defenses deep in strategic places—a most lamentable victory, won by conservatism’s default. “Until recently” the position was unchallenged. The conservatives, newly aware of a great neglected responsibility, are at last on the march, and a mass of modem, useful publications and enlightened teaching are beginning to reverse the situation.
Liberalism Is Bankrupt
Liberalism is proven bankrupt. At first, thanks to conservatism’s timid retreat, its Cross-less and modernized Christianity had seemed to some the answer to the century’s need. Its optimism, based on the current evolutionary philosophy, fitted the bright Victorian notions of progress and the curiously hectic hopefulness which survived the First World War. It turned Christ into a young Apollo suited to an age of youth; it expended its energy on social problems, and substituted a personal mysticism for the lost authority of an inspired Bible.
Then came disillusionment. The Thirties and the Second World War marked the end of easy optimism and secular millennarianism. A Christianity which failed to deal with sin and to meet man’s need with a true Saviour, failed to hold ordinary men. The Bible diagnosis of man seemed so obviously correct. Scientific progress, with the growing menace of nuclear disaster, seemed somehow to be discredited, and visible human helplessness and depravity began to daunt the remaining agnostics who believed that
These things shall be, a nobler race,
Than e’er the world hath known shall rise,
With flame of freedom in their souls,
And light of knowledge in their eyes.
It became clear that liberalism had no message. Preaching based on a “Christian ethic” without dynamism, personal challenge, or divine authority to back it, has failed to hold the crowds. The empty pews of the well-remembered shot in Noel Coward’s Cavalcade were convincing enough argument for many honest men who had seen in liberalism the synthesis of religion and scholarship, and who, thanks to the conservatives’ pre-occupations, had seen in the liberal leaders the intellectual wing of the Church.
But the pew was decisive before the menacing Thirties came to daunt the vision of a man-made millennium. Able men, of whom Harry Emerson Fosdick was a striking example, held full churches by their personal strength of character and eloquence. The rank and file were disillusioned. Men in the liberal ministry in greater and greater numbers became conscious that they had nothing cogent to preach. Some sought less compromising ways of life. Many sought outlet in social work. Lloyd Douglas, whose biography is a document of liberalism’s bankruptcy, passed through such a phase before his spirit found an outlet, and the clear beginnings of a pathway back, in religious-novel writing. There were others, worldwide, who genuinely returned to a conservative faith and found it satisfactory. Others invented neoorthodoxy. On that theme I cannot, in the compass of my present task, embark. At its extreme left, neoorthodoxy is a species of double-talk in which the man in the pulpit preaches ancient doctrine with a reserved, symbolic, and private meaning, unshared by the simpler folk in the pew. At the extreme right, if I may use political terms in a theological situation, the neoorthodox preacher expounds ancient doctrine as any conservative does, but he lies under the strain of holding such doctrines without a clear faith in an authoritative Bible to justify the tenure, and only because he discovers empirically their potency to save, to upbuild, and to feed the soul.
Amid all this scattering and bewilderment of liberal churchmen, the theological schools remained for a long time unrepentant. For young men called to the ministry after a vital religious experience, the seminaries often presented an ordeal, a sort of Mithraic initiation by heat, through which the would-be preacher passed, stopping his ears. Like something prehistoric, a dated liberalism still lies entrenched in many theological schools, and the ardent youth still has, in some quarters, a gauntlet of the mind to run on his way to the pulpit steps.
Why all this excursion into theological history? Because I blame the conservatives, who abandoned or neglected their task of intellectual leadership. That fault is now recognized and purged. It was a hard fight in the days when we were few, and perhaps in the heat of conflict blows were dealt which might have been withheld. It was a time of hard testing for those who stood firm a generation and more ago, when the battle was hottest, especially for educated men who found their scholarship labeled and called into question because they refused to accept a devastating criticism, yet had not, at the moment, a more crushing reply than that of faith to make to it. It was a stern battle, and it was fought too clumsily for its survivors to cherish self-esteem. The worst conflict is over. We are called now to a confident forward march. Let us move on with firm steps, all of us—and we are many.
