Is Protestant Christianity Being Sabotaged from Within?

Recently Protestant Christians have been warned by at least three writers that their faith is being sabotaged from within by their own theologians. The most detailed warning was given by Charles M. Nielsen, professor of historical theology at Colgate Rochester Divinity School (American Baptist). In an article entitled “The Loneliness of Protestantism,” he said: “Presumably a medical school would be upset if its students became Christian Scientists and wanted to practice their new beliefs instead of medicine in the operating rooms of the university hospital. And a law school might consider it unbecoming to admit hordes of Anabaptists who refused on principle to have anything to do with law courts. But almost nothing (including atheism but excluding such vital matters as smoking) seems inappropriate in some Protestant settings—nothing that is, except the traditions of Christianity and especially Protestantism. Traditions are regarded as ‘square,’ supposedly because they are not new. The modern theologian spends his time huddled over his teletype machine, like a nun breathless with adoration, in the hope that out of the latest news flash he can be the first to pronounce the few remaining shreds of the Protestant tradition ‘irrelevant’ …” (The Christian Century, Sept. 15, 1965).

In the preface to a new paperback edition of his earlier book, The Spirit of Protestantism, Robert McAfee Brown indicates that he too is alarmed by the current trends in Protestant theology. He says: “Much of what is going on at present on the Protestant scene gives the impression of being willing to jettison whatever is necessary in order to appeal to modern mentality.” He goes on to say—and most Protestants will agree with this heartily—that “it is not the task of Christians to whittle away their heritage until it is finally palatable to all.”

A third warning was given in a brief editorial in CHRISTIANITY TODAY (Nov. 5, 1965): “ ‘Christian atheism’ is the newest twist in a sick theological world. A group now vocal in some theological seminaries is spoken of as the ‘God is dead’ movement.… Men who carry a ‘Christian’ banner and whose salaries come from Christian sources teach and preach a new form of atheism. ‘Tenure’ is being maintained by men who, if operating in the business world, would be dismissed out of hand for disloyalty and treason to the institutions employing them. Academic freedom is being used to destroy the foundation that made such freedom possible.… No one will deny these men the right to be atheists, but (we say it reverently) for God’s sake let them be atheists outside of institutions supposedly training men to spread the Gospel that God is alive and that faith in his Son means life from the dead.”

None of these writers specified any particular seminary. But anyone familiar with what has been going on in Protestant theological education in the last decade or so knows that they were talking about something that is taking place in one form or another in some seminaries of all leading Protestant denominations.

We owe a word of thanks to these men, because they have boldly brought out into the open the major scandal of contemporary Protestantism—namely, the irresponsibility of many of our Christian theologians. Now we can talk about this scandal without fear of being labeled scandal-mongers or heresy-hunters. For these warnings come from men who represent the whole spectrum of theology from left to right. Now we have the opportunity to join in a fruitful discussion of what can and ought to be done about this crucial problem.

These writers are not referring to the denial of one or two tenets of Protestantism, such as the Virgin Birth, or to an untraditional way of interpreting some doctrines, such as the Atonement and the Resurrection. They are saying, in effect, that the Christian faith as a whole, as found in its only authentic source, the New Testament, is in danger of being displaced by another and non-biblical faith. This new, radical faith can conveniently be discussed under four hearings.

1. Christianity without belief in God. Those who proclaim this faith are now a “God is dead” movement. This movement has been widely publicized in both secular and religious publications. Its three most frequently mentioned leaders are Thomas J. J. Altizer, of Emory University (Methodist); Paul van Buren, of Temple University, an Episcopal minister; and William Hamilton, of Colgate Rochester Divinity School. Each is in his late thirties or early forties.

Professor Altizer is the most vocal spokesman for the group. In a magazine article he says, “Ours is a time in which God is dead,” he says. “The ‘new and radical’ movement must begin by attacking the very possibility of ‘God language’ in our situation.… If ours is a history in which God is no longer present, then we are called upon not simply to accept the death of God with stoic fortitude, but rather will the death of God with the passion of faith.” After making these bold assertions, he insists that he and his school of theologians are Christian theologians and that they are saying these things in order to bring a “new meaning of Christianity to our times” (“Creative Negation in Theology,” The Christian Century, July 7, 1965). It is no surprise to learn that his next book will be called The Gospel of Christian Atheism.

Such statements as these serve only to confuse the average Christian, because as he reads the New Testament he finds Christianity set forth as a religion and as a theistic faith. And he finds that, according to the dictionaries, “theism” means “belief in the existence of a god or gods,” “atheism” means “a disbelief in the existence of God or the doctrine that there is no God,” and “religion” means “the worship of a God or the supernatural.” Thus the definition of Christianity as an “atheistic religion” is a contradiction in terms.

The question, then, must be raised: Can this new form of atheism be called “Christian”? Christianity as it is set forth in the Christian Scriptures is unmistakably theistic. The Hebrew predecessors and ancestors of early Christians, Jesus and his followers, and all the early leaders in the original Christian Church believed fervently in the existence and the reality of God.

Furthermore, a theologian who calls himself an atheist ceases to be a theologian and becomes a philosopher or something else, because the dictionary says that a theologian is “a specialist in theology,” and that “theology deals specifically with God and his relation to the world.” The being or the existence of God and his action in the world are assumed when “theologians” discuss “theology”—or at least they used to be. Such expressions as “atheistic theology” and “atheistic Christianity” show a careless, irresponsible attitude toward the English language and misrepresent the nature of Christianity.

2. Christianity without religious experience. In his book Honest to God, published in 1963, Bishop John A. T. Robinson declared that our Christian concept of God as a “personal Being” who is “up there” or “out there” somewhere beyond our world is no longer tenable and should be discarded. It was amazing how quickly his book became accepted by liberal theologians and how enthusiastically they publicized it by promoting study conferences of theologians, theological students, laymen, and ministers. Its appearance seemed to be the very thing needed to make theologians bold to bring out into the open the doubts and disbeliefs they had long been secretly harboring. As a result, Protestants began to discover the extent to which their faith had already been undermined by some theologians. Shortly after the publication of this book, all sorts of articles and books began to appear calling attention to supposedly outworn doctrines of Christianity that ought to be superseded by a new theology similar to that of Bishop Robinson. And in time the “God is dead” movement began to attract public attention.

Among the novel doctrines put forth by the bishop, none became popular more quickly than the idea that God can no longer be thought of as a Person. Typical of those who hold this belief is William Ferm, dean of the chapel at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, who set forth his ideas in “The Time Has Come” (The Christian Century, July 15, 1965). Among the major doctrines of the Christian faith that to him now “seem false, meaningless and irrelevant,” and that therefore should be abandoned or radically reinterpreted, he mentions first “the traditional notion that God is a personal being ‘out there’ beyond nature and history.”

Soon it became evident that the rejection of the idea of a personal God carried with it the rejection of a number of other beliefs that have been central and precious to Christians from the very beginning. If God is non-existent, or if he is impersonal, then all talk about human persons having fellowship with him is foolish. All those things that together constitute what is known as religious experience—communicating with God in prayer and in meditation, “hearing” an inner voice from God, being guided within one’s mind or judgment by God’s Spirit, indeed, any meeting of the human spirit with the divine Spirit in a mystical experience—are meaningless unless God is a person.

Soon we began to hear that in some seminaries, such things as daily chapel services, private devotions by individuals or by small, intimate groups, and prayers at the beginning of classes and at assemblies and lectures were being discouraged or discontinued. However, early this year Dr. Walter Houston Clark, professor of psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological School, raised the question whether a theological seminary curriculum is complete without an effort to prepare the students to be as competent in religious experience as in conceptual and rational theology.

It must be remembered that the professors who are teaching the idea of an impersonal God call themselves and are regarded by others as Christian theologians teaching the Christian faith. Again the question must be asked: Can a faith that considers God to be impersonal and by implication rules out the validity of religious experience rightly be called the faith of the early Christians?

Jesus prayed, and taught his disciples to pray, as a son talks to his father. He talked constantly in terms that show a firm belief that the human spirit can have a personal relation with God. The writings of the early Christians reveal the same belief. The New Testament doctrine of the Holy Spirit clearly means that man and God can communicate with each other, that God speaks to human beings, makes his will known to them, manifests his love to them, guides them, cleanses them, transforms them into new creatures in Christ.

Dr. Frederick C. Grant once wrote that “religion is life controlled by the consciousness of God, life controlled, guided, held firmly to a fixed purpose and aim which is determined by this faith or ‘awareness of God’ ” (The Practice of Religion, pp. 22 ff.). Without belief in a personal God there can be no worship, no prayer, no real religion. The very heart of the Christian faith would be torn out if God were to be “depersonalized.” (For a thoughtful appraisal of this notion see “The Depersonalization of God,” by Calvin D. Linton, in the April 10, 1964, issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.)

3. Christianity without changed individuals. The new “doctrine” of Christian evangelism being preached by some recent graduates of Protestant seminaries is bewildering to church members who think they understand what the New Testament teaches about being a Christian.

This “doctrine” is frequently labeled “reconciliation theology,” because the few verses of the New Testament in which the word “reconciliation” occurs are often made the foundation for the whole Christian theological system. An example of this is the proposed “Confession of 1967” of the United Presbyterian Church. The drafters of this confession state in the preface that it is built upon the theme of “God’s reconciliation in Christ.” Accordingly, the words “reconciliation,” “reconciled,” and “reconciling” are used twenty-seven times in this brief document.

Two passages in the epistles of Paul are the main basis of this theology. One is Second Corinthians 5:18–20 (RSV): “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” The second passage is Romans 5:10, 11: “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received our reconciliation.”

These passages are interpreted in the new theology to mean that the mission of the Church is to announce to all men that their sins have already been forgiven, that their salvation has been accomplished by Christ’s death, and that all they need to do is to accept forgiveness and salvation as the free gift of God. This makes it sound as if salvation could be had almost automatically. Evangelism, then, consists of informing people that they have already been saved and of trying to persuade them to accept that notion. It has now become common practice for Protestant ministers who subscribe to this explanation of evangelism to stand before their congregations and, after the prayer of confession, say something like this: “God loves you anyway. He accepts you just as you are. In the name of Jesus Christ I pronounce your sins forgiven. Go forth as saved men and women to live in peace.”

Dr. Jitsuo Morikawa, secretary of evangelism of the American Baptist Convention, has said: “God has already won a mighty redemption … for the entire world”; therefore “the task of the Church is to tell all men … that they already belong to Christ” and that “men are no longer lost” (quoted in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, March 13, 1964, p. 26).

This concept of evangelism implies that the task of the Church is to try to “save,” not individual men, but the social structure in which men live together. According to Dr. Morikawa, “The redemption of the world is not dependent upon the souls we win for Jesus Christ.… There cannot be individual salvation.… Salvation has more to do with the whole society than with the individual soul.… We must not be satisfied to win people one by one.… Contemporary evangelism is moving away from winning souls one by one, to the evangelization of the structures of the society” (ibid.). The news media often report that Christian leaders are carrying on “evangelistic campaigns” by working diligently for various kinds of social legislation. The organized church is using its power and influence to persuade legislative bodies to pass laws compelling citizens to treat their fellow men justly.

The trouble with this new evangelism is that it embodies only part of the truth found in the New Testament. It proclaims that God’s part in the redemption of man has been accomplished, and that redemption is free. The New Testament does make it clear that we are saved by the grace of God in Christ and not by our own efforts. The Apostle Paul wrote, “By grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God—not because of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph. 2:8, 9). But there is another half to the evangelism of the New Testament: the responsibilities laid upon the individual. First, the initiative to accept God’s grace is an individual one. Once a person accepts God’s gracious, forgiving love, he has certain obligations to fulfill. In the New Testament salvation is not represented as automatic. Hence, immediately after Paul told the Ephesians that grace is a gift, he wrote, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor. 5:20b). Each person must choose to be reconciled. He must ask for and seek forgiveness, and be willing to repent of his sins and “bear fruits that befit repentance” (Luke 3:8); he must accept God’s proffered grace and desire to be changed by that grace, to live a new life in Christ, to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18a), to “live by the Spirit,” “walk by the Spirit,” and bring forth the “fruit of the Spirit” (cf. Gal. 5:16–26). Those who accepted God’s proffered love in Christ are exhorted to consider themselves “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus,” to yield themselves “to God as men who have been brought from death to life” and their “members to God as instruments of righteousness” (see Rom. 6:1–14). They are urged to “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph. 4:15), to “put off your old nature … and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:22–24; see also Col. 3:1–25 and 4:1–6).

To be sure, the New Testament makes it plain that Christianity is a “way” of life, a distinctive quality of living together in society, and that Christians are expected to uphold Christian principles in all their social relations and, by implication, in all their handling of social forces. But the basic duty of Christian evangelism was and still is to persuade individuals to commit their lives to Christ. Unless those who operate our social machinery do that, we can never hope merely by social legislation to build the Great Society on earth. Inasmuch as the new liberal theology leaves out the saving of individual souls, in the full New Testament meaning of that expression, and omits the part every Christian plays in his own growing Christian life, it cannot be regarded as fully biblical or fully Christian.

4. Christianity without the use of biblical language. There is widespread complaint among members of Protestant churches, including intelligent young people in colleges and universities and many who are well versed in the Scriptures, that their preachers are “talking over their heads.” In place of the language of the Bible, they use new philosophical and theological terms that mean little to their hearers. Such terms have to be analyzed and defined at such length that the speakers might as well use words from a foreign language.

In an article entitled “The Jargon that Jars,” one of the editors of Time expressed the exasperation felt by many Christians who have to listen to the language of the new theologians. Theology is “slicing its concepts so fine,” he says, that it seems to need a new lingo. “Plain words, knighted with a capital letter, take on reverent meanings; Greek and German syllables, in numbers from two to six are joined and set out to intimidate the outsider.… It takes fast footwork to keep up with the latest in theological fashions. Jargon changes as theologians change …” (Time, Nov. 8, 1963).

Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, retired president of Union Theological Seminary, New York, states that the central intellectual motive in liberal theology is “to make the Christian faith intelligible and credible, comprehensible and convincing to intelligent, informed and honest minds of each successive era” (The Vindication of Liberal Theology, p. 27). I would say that this is—or should be—the central motive in all theology in every age. But it is the Christian faith, as it is found in the Christian Scriptures, that Christian theologians are supposed to make credible and comprehensible, not some other faith. A theology with which Christian theologians are to concern themselves must be biblical.

Protestant Christians generally assume, I think, that a professor of Christian theology in a Protestant theological school believes in the Christian faith, is personally committed to it, and is trained and equipped to understand, defend, and teach it and to prepare his students to do likewise. In my judgment, Protestant Christians of all schools also take it for granted that in performing his appointed task, a Christian theologian will spend considerable time in reinterpreting the Gospel, as it is found in the ancient book we call the Bible, and “translating” it into the actual language and thought-forms of the people so that they can better comprehend and practice it. Surely the average Protestant would be astonished to discover that a person responsible for teaching the Christian faith was denying or abandoning it. That would be universally thought to be unethical conduct and, no doubt, the betrayal of a sacred trust. This rejecting of the Christian faith is precisely what is being done by many Christian theologians in strategic positions. The time has come for this sad fact to be faced by our Protestant theologians, by the official bodies who employ them, and by the ministers and the members of Protestant churches.

This situation confronts Protestants with a number of questions for which answers must be diligently sought. What have we a right to expect of our theologians who are supposedly teaching the Christian faith and training others to communicate it? What is the duty of Christian theologians who accept positions in which they are expected to be Christians and to teach Christianity and to train Christian teachers and preachers? What is the ethics of our present situation, as I have described it? How do we begin to do something about it? Where is Protestantism going? What will it become if this trend is allowed to go on unchecked? I offer no answers. But of this I am certain: it is the responsibility of all Protestants to seek these answers now. The present predicament of Protestantism is too serious, the times too ominous, for any of us to try to wash his hands of the matter.

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