I recently re-read an article written by one of the greatest theologians of modernity. The article is entitled Our Secularized Civilization and the author is Reinhold Niebuhr.
Its a little thick. And it is dated 1926. And since he never had a reality television show, Neibuhr is probably unknown to most of the people about which he writes.
Nonetheless, the article remains one of the greatest assessments of the Church’s secular nature, and well before the time of secular, post-modern thinking.
Secular humanism is a way thinking that returns human beings to the central position of existence and pushes God off to one side. Because of the inherent need to test beliefs, God must prove Himself over and over to each seeking individual. Secular humanism also points out that fulfillment, growth, creativity are among the most important priorities in the life of any individual. Moreover, the definition of fulfillment and growth are created by the individual, and not by God or any religious institution or group.
Neibuhr saw this coming. In fact, he saw it aborning.
Our obsession with the physical sciences and with the physical world has enthroned the brute and blind forces of nature, and we follow the God of the earthquake and the fire rather than the God of the still small voice. The morals of the man in the street, who may not be able to catch the full implications of pure science, are corrupted by the ethical consequences of the civilization which applied science has built.
In other words, human beings tend to give God credit for the wonders of creation such as the sunset and the blooming rose. But the experieces of God revealed in the writings of unenlightened human beings become outdated and fail the measure of scientific measure.
Adam Hamilton, pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, has written a book entitled Confronting the Controversies. In the book, Hamilton points out that this is a false seperation of the world into things of God’s domain and the domain of science, especially in the area of Creationism vs. Evolution.
But Hamilton calls for a middle ground, and he does so by calling for a return to thinking about God as an superhuman answer to a merely-human question. Instead, we put God in a cart pulled by the horses of modern science, and that simply doesn’t work.
Neibuhr appears to have agreed with Hamilton, or vice versa. He points out that
[Protestantism] It helps men to master those sins which are easily discovered because they represent divergence from accepted moral customs: the sins of dishonesty, sexual incontinence and intemperance.
Most Christians would claim that the elimination of these crimes/sins from ones life are the major purpose of Christian living and participation in the life of the church. The result, according to Neibuhr, is that humanity is left to determine its own morality based on human capability, including the capability of capitalistic success.
No religion is more effective than Protestantism against the major social sins of our day, economic greed and race hatred. […] No real progress can be made against the secularization of modern life until Protestantism overcomes its pride and complacency and realizes that it has itself connived with the secularists. By giving men a sense of moral victory because they have mastered one or two lusts, while their lust for power and their lust for gain remain undisciplined, it is simply aggravating those lusts which are the primary perils of modern civilization.
In other words, human beings are left to make thieir own subjective opinions regarding how we treat each other socially, politically, and economically. The religious people can confine their focus on the “spiritual” laws to within the walls of the church.
The frightening thought that Neibuhr provokes is that we are living in the midst of a time that is more like the post World War I 1920’s and pre-World War II 1930’s than we would care to admit. It was a time of growing Nationalism and declining morality.
Vaguely conscious of the moral inadequacy of such an existence, men try to sublimate it by restraining their individual lusts in favor of the community in which they live. Thus nationalism becomes the dominant religion of the day and individual lusts are restrained only to issue in group lusts more grievous and more destructive than those of individuals. Nationalism is simply one of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems. Delegating his vices to larger and larger groups, he imagines himself virtuous; the larger the group the more difficult it is to fix moral responsibility for unethical action.
America was a powerful economic force, wealthy in comparison to every other nation in the world. It was also considered itself to be the successor to European Christianity as the moral leader in an immoral world. Neibuhr wrote this almost 90 years ago:
Recent events in Europe reveal what unrepentant tribalists Western people are and how little they have learned from the great tragedy. They seem to lack both the imagination to realize the folly of their ways and the humility to conceive of their folly as sin. While we in America affect to pity Europe, the sense of moral superiority, which is always the root of pity, is based on illusion. We are no more moral than Europe, but our tremendous wealth and our comparative geographic isolation save us from suffering any immediate consequences of our moral follies. However active the institutions of religion may be in our national life, there is no trace of ethical motive in our national conduct. To the world we appear, what we really are, a fabulously wealthy nation, intent upon producing more wealth and seemingly oblivious to the consequences which unrestrained lust of power and lust of gain must inevitably have on both personal morality and international harmony.
Neibuhr could have been writing this for a blog last week, last month, or last year.
So what does this have to do with Church?
I’m glad you asked. 🙂
Rather than dividing the world in which we live into secular and spiritual categories, we should return to the notion that the world in which we live was created by God, and God is the authority in each and every category. Rather than leaving ourselves open to the whims of dogma or the fascism of a cult-prophet, the church must return to the shared responsibility of discerning God’s will. One of the first things we must recapture is Christ’s focus on a social gospel in addition to our slightly obsessive/compulsive focus on puritanical ethics in the area of sex and temperance. Again, Neibuhr: “How a fretful anxiety about a number of lustful temptations can develop a perfect complacency in regard to other temptations may be seen by the fact that the church is not now so conscious of some of the sins of modern civilization as some of our most thoroughgoing realists.”
Perhaps we can couple our newfound need to be more active in changing the rotten systems of the world in which we’re living with a new way of perceiving worship. Worship is a clear reflection of our self-congratulatory opinions of what we are doing as a nation, as an economic system, and as individuals living for the moment.
Perhaps it might not be irrelevant to add that its failure to understand the relation between the physical and the spiritual not only tempts Protestantism to create righteousness in a vacuum but to develop piety without adequate symbol. That is why the church services of extreme Protestant sects tend to become secularized once the first naive spontaneity departs from their religious life. In Europe nonconformist Protestants tend more and more to embrace the once despised beauty of symbol and dignity of form in order to save worship from dullness and futility. In America nonconformist Protestantism, with less cultural background, tries to avert dullness by vulgar theatricality. […] If worship is to serve man’s ethical as well as religious needs, it must give him a sense of humble submission to the absolute.
I would extend Neibuhr’s thinking by reminding myself, and every reader, that worship is not limited to one hour a week. Worship is similar to prayer in that we should pray without ceasing. We should also worship without ceasing. In these terms, every moment is an opportunity to seek humility. As disciples, we must put ourselves in our place: subservient to God’s will and willing to lay aside our own desires in order to further the notion of Christ’s Kingdom.
And here I thought that I’d never get a chance to use any of that Seminary Book Learnin’.
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