It does not take much wisdom to deduce that our world is in deep trouble. Our country, our society, our culture—all are under attack, with the very real prospect in view that they will not survive.
Our moral and spiritual foundations have been corroded to such an extent that public order and tranquility can no longer be taken for granted. A woman is quite literally safer at night alone on the streets of Saigon, or Tokyo. than she is on the streets of Chicago, or even Grand Rapids. She is safe neither day nor night in our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.
In the midst of all the depressing news that we hear, the tidings from the Church seem especially depressing. Instead of standing as a bastion for righteousness and truth and justice, too often the Church seems to be in the very forefront of the forces attacking our institutions.
Churchmen have led the fight against prayer in the public schools, against the censorship of films, against the struggle to do something about pornography, against efforts to control drugs, against law and order, against the proper punishment of criminals, even against the Sunday services that the President has been conducting in the White House.
In the area of United States government policy, churchmen have been leaders in the successful movement to boycott Rhodesia, in favor of recognizing Red China, opposed to a strongly armed nation, in favor of unilateral disarmament. Church leaders have supported left-wing revolution in Latin America, they have been loud in their praise of Communist Cuba, they have denounced America’s commitments in Asia.
It is churchmen who have promoted draft evasion more than any other professional group in America and churchmen who have sent committees to Sweden and Canada to be sure our deserters are well cared for. It is churchmen, including seminary professors, who picket draft boards and induction centers, and churchmen who lie down in front of troop trains and National Guard convoys.
It was in church that the so-called new morality was born and it was from churchmen that America first began to hear in public meetings that sex outside marriage can be beautiful and good.
It was church-supported colleges who were among the first to construct coeducational dormitories and a church.supported college was the first to hire a publicly registered official of the Communist party to teach on its faculty (Bryn Mawr-Herbert Aphtheker).
Presbyterian Church U.S. – I cannot speak for the Reformed Church, hut I know something of Presbyterians. In our communion too many of our schools do not teach the Christian faith and too many of our pulpits do not proclaim it.
Within the past 18 months I have personally experienced the following:
– I have been in a denominational youth meeting in which the leader ridiculed a youngster because he thought a three-day convention should have prayer in it somewhere.
– I have sat in a discussion group in a missionary conference where a missionary of the Church laughed at the idea that there was some invisible Person who actually heard the words spoken when we pray.
– I have heard a black militant, speaking from a Presbyterian pulpit, call for the overthrow of the United States government.
– I have seen the platform of the denomination’s conference center turned over to a man who publicly declared he professed no religion.
– I have defended the Presbyterian faith before a seminary student body against a seminary professor who attacked that faith.
– I was present in the meeting of our General Assembly when that body voted to give top priority in the mission of the Church to the alleviation of hunger.
– Not long ago I saw a letter from the president of a Presbyterian college, explaining to his constituency why the faculty thought it was a good idea to invite Madalyn Murray O’Hair to address the student body.
– Within the past twelve months, to my knowledge, three student centers operated by Presbyterians, including a coffee house in my own community, were raided by federal narcotics officers and from one of these centers a conviction was obtained for selling illegal drugs on the premises. Three student centers, including one of the other three just mentioned, were closed down during the past twelve months because they had come under public fire as constituting a community nuisance.
All of Us – While these illustrations are from the life of the Presbyterian Church US, I rather imagine that they are not too far removed from the life of the Reformed Church in America as well. All of us, even those from the more conservative denominations, are feeling the hot breath of winds of unhealthy change.
Many are asking, How have we come to this point? What brought us to such a pass?
It is a fact of history that most, if not all, perversions of religion have begun as movements fo,reform. Someone with a well-intentioned interest in clarification, or improvement, or renewal, but with a poor sense of propriety or a weak grasp of the Word of God, tries to take a short cut, perhaps with greater reverence for sociology than Revelation. The result is a deviation from the straight and narrow and a defeat of the very objective desired.
Four stages – Looking at the life of the Church (and I rather imagine that the picture fits your own as well as mine) it is possible to detect four stages in the process which has brought us to the present state of confusion.
1. At the beginning, the Church was content to be the custodian of the keys to another world. But there came to be a time when the Church seemed to have less and less effect on a rapidly developing social order.
It is important for an understanding of what has happened to realize that the time came in the development of this complex civilization, when the public influence of the Church did not keep pace with the social changes taking place. Social progress began to outstrip spiritual development.
During this time religion was personified in the preacher with the Gospel, the rabbi with his prayer shawl, the priest with the sacraments. Then some people began to say these symbols were pretty irrelevant.
I’ll not pause to debate the relevance of spiri tuality at this point, but I would point out that modern civilization was built on the formula that man is a citizen of two worlds and that to he the best possible citizen of the heavenly world is the only way to be the best possible citizen of the human world.
No man who ever has studied the history of missions would say that the time when the Church was other-worldly was a time of no social progress. In fact, even the secularists have agreed that the teachings of religion were responsible for setting in motion genuine social progress.
In any case, the first state was one in which it still was said, The Church is spiritual.
2. In the second stage, some began to insist that while the Church may be spiritual, it must exist for social action. The pace of change seemed too slow. Perhaps a bit less emphasis on preaching and a bit more emphasis on good works would be a better formula.
Churches began to speak less often of saving people and more often of giving people “wholeness,” meaning not only affecting their spiritual welfare but also affecting their material and social welfare.
The Church was still the Church and it still considered itself in touch with heavenly reality. It still distinguished itself from a world which was not interested in heavenly reality.
This was not the older liberalism of the social gospel. The social gospel had denied the supernatural dimension and had preached that the evolution of man brought him each day closer to perfection, and brought society each day closer to Utopia.
This second stage on the road to modern secularization continued to feature Jesus Christ as the hope of the world. But that word “hope” began to take on a more materialistic aspect than it had before. Now it was said that God wanted his people to work for human welfare and social progress—not merely to make men better citizens of two worlds.
The new social activist did not reject the traditional doctrines and worship of the Church. He simply placed a new emphasis on the effect of a profession of faith as though that effect had not really been in evidence before. He even began to stress effect as though in some fashion it was central and primary.
During this time the Roman Catholic Church saw the rise of the “worker priest” movement. Priests left their chancels to don working clothes and live and work with the people they wanted to help.
It was towards the end of this phase in the development of the secularization of the Church that the so-called civil rights movement began to take shape. And a new thing was seen in the land: churchmen, identified as churchmen, and in the name of the Church, participating in demonstrations of one kind and another.
3. Almost abruptly a brand new idea appeared in the world of religion. With it the Church passed to the third stage in the process of its secularization. The idea: It is wrong to separate the community of professing religious people from the rest of society. People who profess religion may have certain insights that others have not been given; they may live on a different level from the rest of the world (as the adult lives on a different level from the child). But the sphere of God’s activity is the whole world, not just the religious community. And as in human families, religious people belong to the same cosmic “family” as non-religious people.
Notice that this is not to surrender religion, as the older humanist would have done. This is to suggest a wider sphere for religion. It is to try to make the influence of religion cover a wider field for greater effect. It is to say that all people live fundamentally under this umbrella, but some are better aware of the faith dimension of life than others.
More significant, at this stage the Church offered God, not to bring men out of their secular preoccupation into a spiritual life-perspective, and not to help men resist the pressures of secular existence. The Church offered God as the One actually responsible for the pressures of secular existence, the One producing the secular trends in which society is caught up, the One making men restless under social inequities, the One inducing the social revolution.
It now was said that to be the servant of God is to be a partner with God in his work in the social revolution.
Dr. Joseph Sittler, of the University of Chicago, electrified the 1961 meeting of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, India, by saying that there could be no distinction drawn between the Church and the world. Then, before the 1963 General Assembly of the National Council of Churches Dr. Sittler said, “Faith raises the flag of the holy over all things…Theology has been faulty in that it has not taken into account man’s creativity as God working in the world.”
Dr. Jitsuo Morikawa, of the American Baptist Convention, said to a 1964 meeting of a National Council of Churches unit: “The redemption of the world is not ultimately dependent upon…the souls we win to Jesus Christ.” In other words, to see how the world is being “redeemed,” look outside the institutional Church at what is happening in the world.
Dr. Colin Williams, then head of the Department of Evangelism of the National Council of Churches, said in Nashville, Tennessee: “The task of the Church is to be with God in what He is doing in the world. There is no Biblical foundation for separation of the secular world and the Church. The theological revolution and the technological revolution are one.”
Dr. Robert Spike, of the NCC’s Commission on Religion and Race, declared, of the struggle over one of the “civil rights” bills before the Congress: “Each person who wrote a letter, sent a message or interviewed a Senator or a Congressman, truly is the Church.” This sort of thing, in other words, is religion.
Dr. G. S. Wilmore Jr., of the United Presbyterian Church, said of an activist minister who lay down behind a bulldozer and was crushed to death: “That is what it really means to be a Christian.”
About this time a book appeared which had a profound effect on theological development. The Secular City catapulted its author, Dr. Harvey Cox, into international fame.
In his book Dr. Cox argued that St. Augustine’s distinction between the city of God and the city of man was a false distinction. The city of God is the city of man, argued Dr. Cox. Man is not a citizen of two worlds, he is a citizen of only one world. The world he knows and lives in is precisely the world which has the potential of becoming the kingdom of God.
These churchmen argued that the religious person should not look to the future for meaning, he should look to the present. The man who wants to he in touch with the divine dimension in reality does not look to another world, or go into a sanctuary, he looks at this world and goes into the streets. God is not in some New Jerusalem. He is in Resurrection City, Washington, D.C.
Now it is important to keep in mind that this new way of thinking about God did not merely relocate him by moving him from heaven to earth, it also secularized him. It did not eliminate him, it made him the human spirit rather than the divine Spirit.
If this seems a difficult concept to grasp, that is because it is a difficult concept to grasp.. But it is the concept that lies at the heart of the “God is Dead” movement, which in some of its aspects profoundly influences the thinking of all modern secularists.
The “God is Dead” churchmen seemed to be making the point that a divine, other-worldly dimension no longer is tenable in religion. Our “reach into the unknown” can extend as far as the “rationality” in the universe revealed by the death of Jesus (hence, “God is dead”).
So the secular churchman speaks of a “joyous feeling for things human” and commits himself to the “humanization of society.”
Because “to be fully human” is the only ultimate he knows, he has a reverence for everything belonging to “authentic humanity,” from “human dignity” to uninhibited “sexuality.”
He gets his religious lessons from the daily newspapers, the Hollywood films, the Broadway plays, rather than the Bible. If he uses the Holy Scripture it is with the view that these are “man’s religious beginnings”—of some value as precedents but not necessarily relevant to every modern need.
For the secularist, to be “human” is the measure of all things. Latest effect of this view we have seen is the March, 1970 issue of Colloquy, a magazine published for use by Presbyterians UPUSA and US, and the United Church of Christ. An editorial in this issue rejoices in the liberation that a sixteen-year-old girl discovered in full sexual experience and in being “turned on” with marijuana. Why not? If the greatest good is that which satisfies human desires most fully, why not?
4. There’s one more stage in complete secularization and that is just now dawning. In it, the circle comes full round.
Beginning with the view that the Church is spiritual, then turning from spiritual preoccupations and reducing the Church to the level of the world, now the secular religionist is beginning to affirm that secularity is spiritual.
A recent hook entitled Christian Spirituality East and West speaks of a “new spirituality of involvement…a ‘secular’ spirituality.” This new “spirituality” is social and communal, says the author, as Christians seek “to develop themselves as persons within the context of society.”
So there are the four stages in the secularization of the Church. Identified by slogans, they are, 1) The Church is spiritual; 2) The Church is in the world; 3) The Church is the world; 4) The world is spiritual.
The last has just begun to develop and has not yet found sufficient expression to offer much documentation.
What of the future? – Where does all this leave us here and now? What is our expectation for the time ahead?
The Biblical and Reformed Christian must realize that he is dealing with a concept of religion that is as pagan as that of the Canaanites, or of Aphrodite. He cannot make his peace with this religion, he may find that he cannot long live with it.
Against its influence he must recover the roots of the faith, the authority of the Word, the distinctives of the Gospel, the imperatives of the Great Commission. These he must proclaim from the housetops.
Meanwhile, he should make no mistake about the nature of his antagonist as he wrestles, “not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers…against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
The nature of the enemy appears in many things he says. 1 recall a recent news release from an office of the National Council of Churches: “Turbulence,” said the release, “belongs at the growing edge of what is human.” And, “We recognize that change is horn of turmoil.”
Here is the dynamic of the secularized Church nakedly revealed, namely the notion that social progress (the end goal) is achieved through turmoil, turbulence. It comes about as a result of pressures generated by tensions which, in turn, are generated by the inequities in society.
This, quite frankly, is the philosophy of dialectic. Dialectic is a description of imagined forces which work for human improvement, namely the forces associated with mass coercion or of revolution.
As Karl Marx saw it (and as Communism practices it), social inequities lead to tension and tension leads to pressure and pressure leads to disruption and disruption inevitably leads to revolution—as a result of which society is lifted another notch. Then the process repeats itself.
In the Church, the dialectical philosophy appears in the enthusiasm for Project Equality (economic pressure exerted upon business by the Church) in actions taken to support boycotts (as of Rhodesia, South Africa and grape growers in California) and in the behavior of clergymen taking to the streets in demonstrations.
Here is the idea that social progress is the result of vast impersonal forces acting through people engaged in movements.
The Christian believes in coercion. The coercion he believes in is the coercive power of the Holy Spirit, not that of street demonstrations. For the Christian the power of the Spirit works through the Word and through transformed persons. The business of the Christian is the Gospel, which he recognizes as “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
For the rest of mankind, the Christian believes in the fair, prompt and impartial application of law, to bring about and maintain a just society.
These two, law and Gospel, are the ingredients in Christian activism.
But the modern religionist depends on social activism. What a great number of them do not realize is that when they take to the streets carrying a sign, as the best possible way to make their “witness,” they are not acting as Christians, no matter how worthy the cause. They are acting as Marxists.
Dr. G. Aiken Taylor, editor of THE PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL, delivered the following address at a recent meeting of the League of Christian Laymen (Reformed Church in America) Inc. It is reprinted here from THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMED RECORD.
Our moral and spiritual foundations have been corroded to such an extent that public order and tranquility can no longer be taken for granted. A woman is quite literally safer at night alone on the streets of Saigon, or Tokyo. than she is on the streets of Chicago, or even Grand Rapids. She is safe neither day nor night in our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.
In the midst of all the depressing news that we hear, the tidings from the Church seem especially depressing. Instead of standing as a bastion for righteousness and truth and justice, too often the Church seems to be in the very forefront of the forces attacking our institutions.
Churchmen have led the fight against prayer in the public schools, against the censorship of films, against the struggle to do something about pornography, against efforts to control drugs, against law and order, against the proper punishment of criminals, even against the Sunday services that the President has been conducting in the White House.
In the area of United States government policy, churchmen have been leaders in the successful movement to boycott Rhodesia, in favor of recognizing Red China, opposed to a strongly armed nation, in favor of unilateral disarmament. Church leaders have supported left-wing revolution in Latin America, they have been loud in their praise of Communist Cuba, they have denounced America’s commitments in Asia.
It is churchmen who have promoted draft evasion more than any other professional group in America and churchmen who have sent committees to Sweden and Canada to be sure our deserters are well cared for. It is churchmen, including seminary professors, who picket draft boards and induction centers, and churchmen who lie down in front of troop trains and National Guard convoys.
It was in church that the so-called new morality was born and it was from churchmen that America first began to hear in public meetings that sex outside marriage can be beautiful and good.
It was church-supported colleges who were among the first to construct coeducational dormitories and a church.supported college was the first to hire a publicly registered official of the Communist party to teach on its faculty (Bryn Mawr-Herbert Aphtheker).
Presbyterian Church U.S. – I cannot speak for the Reformed Church, hut I know something of Presbyterians. In our communion too many of our schools do not teach the Christian faith and too many of our pulpits do not proclaim it.
Within the past 18 months I have personally experienced the following:
– I have been in a denominational youth meeting in which the leader ridiculed a youngster because he thought a three-day convention should have prayer in it somewhere.
– I have sat in a discussion group in a missionary conference where a missionary of the Church laughed at the idea that there was some invisible Person who actually heard the words spoken when we pray.
– I have heard a black militant, speaking from a Presbyterian pulpit, call for the overthrow of the United States government.
– I have seen the platform of the denomination’s conference center turned over to a man who publicly declared he professed no religion.
– I have defended the Presbyterian faith before a seminary student body against a seminary professor who attacked that faith.
– I was present in the meeting of our General Assembly when that body voted to give top priority in the mission of the Church to the alleviation of hunger.
– Not long ago I saw a letter from the president of a Presbyterian college, explaining to his constituency why the faculty thought it was a good idea to invite Madalyn Murray O’Hair to address the student body.
– Within the past twelve months, to my knowledge, three student centers operated by Presbyterians, including a coffee house in my own community, were raided by federal narcotics officers and from one of these centers a conviction was obtained for selling illegal drugs on the premises. Three student centers, including one of the other three just mentioned, were closed down during the past twelve months because they had come under public fire as constituting a community nuisance.
All of Us – While these illustrations are from the life of the Presbyterian Church US, I rather imagine that they are not too far removed from the life of the Reformed Church in America as well. All of us, even those from the more conservative denominations, are feeling the hot breath of winds of unhealthy change.
Many are asking, How have we come to this point? What brought us to such a pass?
It is a fact of history that most, if not all, perversions of religion have begun as movements fo,reform. Someone with a well-intentioned interest in clarification, or improvement, or renewal, but with a poor sense of propriety or a weak grasp of the Word of God, tries to take a short cut, perhaps with greater reverence for sociology than Revelation. The result is a deviation from the straight and narrow and a defeat of the very objective desired.
Four stages – Looking at the life of the Church (and I rather imagine that the picture fits your own as well as mine) it is possible to detect four stages in the process which has brought us to the present state of confusion.
1. At the beginning, the Church was content to be the custodian of the keys to another world. But there came to be a time when the Church seemed to have less and less effect on a rapidly developing social order.
It is important for an understanding of what has happened to realize that the time came in the development of this complex civilization, when the public influence of the Church did not keep pace with the social changes taking place. Social progress began to outstrip spiritual development.
During this time religion was personified in the preacher with the Gospel, the rabbi with his prayer shawl, the priest with the sacraments. Then some people began to say these symbols were pretty irrelevant.
I’ll not pause to debate the relevance of spiri tuality at this point, but I would point out that modern civilization was built on the formula that man is a citizen of two worlds and that to he the best possible citizen of the heavenly world is the only way to be the best possible citizen of the human world.
No man who ever has studied the history of missions would say that the time when the Church was other-worldly was a time of no social progress. In fact, even the secularists have agreed that the teachings of religion were responsible for setting in motion genuine social progress.
In any case, the first state was one in which it still was said, The Church is spiritual.
2. In the second stage, some began to insist that while the Church may be spiritual, it must exist for social action. The pace of change seemed too slow. Perhaps a bit less emphasis on preaching and a bit more emphasis on good works would be a better formula.
Churches began to speak less often of saving people and more often of giving people “wholeness,” meaning not only affecting their spiritual welfare but also affecting their material and social welfare.
The Church was still the Church and it still considered itself in touch with heavenly reality. It still distinguished itself from a world which was not interested in heavenly reality.
This was not the older liberalism of the social gospel. The social gospel had denied the supernatural dimension and had preached that the evolution of man brought him each day closer to perfection, and brought society each day closer to Utopia.
This second stage on the road to modern secularization continued to feature Jesus Christ as the hope of the world. But that word “hope” began to take on a more materialistic aspect than it had before. Now it was said that God wanted his people to work for human welfare and social progress—not merely to make men better citizens of two worlds.
The new social activist did not reject the traditional doctrines and worship of the Church. He simply placed a new emphasis on the effect of a profession of faith as though that effect had not really been in evidence before. He even began to stress effect as though in some fashion it was central and primary.
During this time the Roman Catholic Church saw the rise of the “worker priest” movement. Priests left their chancels to don working clothes and live and work with the people they wanted to help.
It was towards the end of this phase in the development of the secularization of the Church that the so-called civil rights movement began to take shape. And a new thing was seen in the land: churchmen, identified as churchmen, and in the name of the Church, participating in demonstrations of one kind and another.
3. Almost abruptly a brand new idea appeared in the world of religion. With it the Church passed to the third stage in the process of its secularization. The idea: It is wrong to separate the community of professing religious people from the rest of society. People who profess religion may have certain insights that others have not been given; they may live on a different level from the rest of the world (as the adult lives on a different level from the child). But the sphere of God’s activity is the whole world, not just the religious community. And as in human families, religious people belong to the same cosmic “family” as non-religious people.
Notice that this is not to surrender religion, as the older humanist would have done. This is to suggest a wider sphere for religion. It is to try to make the influence of religion cover a wider field for greater effect. It is to say that all people live fundamentally under this umbrella, but some are better aware of the faith dimension of life than others.
More significant, at this stage the Church offered God, not to bring men out of their secular preoccupation into a spiritual life-perspective, and not to help men resist the pressures of secular existence. The Church offered God as the One actually responsible for the pressures of secular existence, the One producing the secular trends in which society is caught up, the One making men restless under social inequities, the One inducing the social revolution.
It now was said that to be the servant of God is to be a partner with God in his work in the social revolution.
Dr. Joseph Sittler, of the University of Chicago, electrified the 1961 meeting of the World Council of Churches in New Delhi, India, by saying that there could be no distinction drawn between the Church and the world. Then, before the 1963 General Assembly of the National Council of Churches Dr. Sittler said, “Faith raises the flag of the holy over all things…Theology has been faulty in that it has not taken into account man’s creativity as God working in the world.”
Dr. Jitsuo Morikawa, of the American Baptist Convention, said to a 1964 meeting of a National Council of Churches unit: “The redemption of the world is not ultimately dependent upon…the souls we win to Jesus Christ.” In other words, to see how the world is being “redeemed,” look outside the institutional Church at what is happening in the world.
Dr. Colin Williams, then head of the Department of Evangelism of the National Council of Churches, said in Nashville, Tennessee: “The task of the Church is to be with God in what He is doing in the world. There is no Biblical foundation for separation of the secular world and the Church. The theological revolution and the technological revolution are one.”
Dr. Robert Spike, of the NCC’s Commission on Religion and Race, declared, of the struggle over one of the “civil rights” bills before the Congress: “Each person who wrote a letter, sent a message or interviewed a Senator or a Congressman, truly is the Church.” This sort of thing, in other words, is religion.
Dr. G. S. Wilmore Jr., of the United Presbyterian Church, said of an activist minister who lay down behind a bulldozer and was crushed to death: “That is what it really means to be a Christian.”
About this time a book appeared which had a profound effect on theological development. The Secular City catapulted its author, Dr. Harvey Cox, into international fame.
In his book Dr. Cox argued that St. Augustine’s distinction between the city of God and the city of man was a false distinction. The city of God is the city of man, argued Dr. Cox. Man is not a citizen of two worlds, he is a citizen of only one world. The world he knows and lives in is precisely the world which has the potential of becoming the kingdom of God.
These churchmen argued that the religious person should not look to the future for meaning, he should look to the present. The man who wants to he in touch with the divine dimension in reality does not look to another world, or go into a sanctuary, he looks at this world and goes into the streets. God is not in some New Jerusalem. He is in Resurrection City, Washington, D.C.
Now it is important to keep in mind that this new way of thinking about God did not merely relocate him by moving him from heaven to earth, it also secularized him. It did not eliminate him, it made him the human spirit rather than the divine Spirit.
If this seems a difficult concept to grasp, that is because it is a difficult concept to grasp.. But it is the concept that lies at the heart of the “God is Dead” movement, which in some of its aspects profoundly influences the thinking of all modern secularists.
The “God is Dead” churchmen seemed to be making the point that a divine, other-worldly dimension no longer is tenable in religion. Our “reach into the unknown” can extend as far as the “rationality” in the universe revealed by the death of Jesus (hence, “God is dead”).
So the secular churchman speaks of a “joyous feeling for things human” and commits himself to the “humanization of society.”
Because “to be fully human” is the only ultimate he knows, he has a reverence for everything belonging to “authentic humanity,” from “human dignity” to uninhibited “sexuality.”
He gets his religious lessons from the daily newspapers, the Hollywood films, the Broadway plays, rather than the Bible. If he uses the Holy Scripture it is with the view that these are “man’s religious beginnings”—of some value as precedents but not necessarily relevant to every modern need.
For the secularist, to be “human” is the measure of all things. Latest effect of this view we have seen is the March, 1970 issue of Colloquy, a magazine published for use by Presbyterians UPUSA and US, and the United Church of Christ. An editorial in this issue rejoices in the liberation that a sixteen-year-old girl discovered in full sexual experience and in being “turned on” with marijuana. Why not? If the greatest good is that which satisfies human desires most fully, why not?
4. There’s one more stage in complete secularization and that is just now dawning. In it, the circle comes full round.
Beginning with the view that the Church is spiritual, then turning from spiritual preoccupations and reducing the Church to the level of the world, now the secular religionist is beginning to affirm that secularity is spiritual.
A recent hook entitled Christian Spirituality East and West speaks of a “new spirituality of involvement…a ‘secular’ spirituality.” This new “spirituality” is social and communal, says the author, as Christians seek “to develop themselves as persons within the context of society.”
So there are the four stages in the secularization of the Church. Identified by slogans, they are, 1) The Church is spiritual; 2) The Church is in the world; 3) The Church is the world; 4) The world is spiritual.
The last has just begun to develop and has not yet found sufficient expression to offer much documentation.
What of the future? – Where does all this leave us here and now? What is our expectation for the time ahead?
The Biblical and Reformed Christian must realize that he is dealing with a concept of religion that is as pagan as that of the Canaanites, or of Aphrodite. He cannot make his peace with this religion, he may find that he cannot long live with it.
Against its influence he must recover the roots of the faith, the authority of the Word, the distinctives of the Gospel, the imperatives of the Great Commission. These he must proclaim from the housetops.
Meanwhile, he should make no mistake about the nature of his antagonist as he wrestles, “not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers…against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
The nature of the enemy appears in many things he says. 1 recall a recent news release from an office of the National Council of Churches: “Turbulence,” said the release, “belongs at the growing edge of what is human.” And, “We recognize that change is horn of turmoil.”
Here is the dynamic of the secularized Church nakedly revealed, namely the notion that social progress (the end goal) is achieved through turmoil, turbulence. It comes about as a result of pressures generated by tensions which, in turn, are generated by the inequities in society.
This, quite frankly, is the philosophy of dialectic. Dialectic is a description of imagined forces which work for human improvement, namely the forces associated with mass coercion or of revolution.
As Karl Marx saw it (and as Communism practices it), social inequities lead to tension and tension leads to pressure and pressure leads to disruption and disruption inevitably leads to revolution—as a result of which society is lifted another notch. Then the process repeats itself.
In the Church, the dialectical philosophy appears in the enthusiasm for Project Equality (economic pressure exerted upon business by the Church) in actions taken to support boycotts (as of Rhodesia, South Africa and grape growers in California) and in the behavior of clergymen taking to the streets in demonstrations.
Here is the idea that social progress is the result of vast impersonal forces acting through people engaged in movements.
The Christian believes in coercion. The coercion he believes in is the coercive power of the Holy Spirit, not that of street demonstrations. For the Christian the power of the Spirit works through the Word and through transformed persons. The business of the Christian is the Gospel, which he recognizes as “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
For the rest of mankind, the Christian believes in the fair, prompt and impartial application of law, to bring about and maintain a just society.
These two, law and Gospel, are the ingredients in Christian activism.
But the modern religionist depends on social activism. What a great number of them do not realize is that when they take to the streets carrying a sign, as the best possible way to make their “witness,” they are not acting as Christians, no matter how worthy the cause. They are acting as Marxists.
Dr. G. Aiken Taylor, editor of THE PRESBYTERIAN JOURNAL, delivered the following address at a recent meeting of the League of Christian Laymen (Reformed Church in America) Inc. It is reprinted here from THE CONSERVATIVE REFORMED RECORD.