This past few days I have been undergoing a strange immersion in Protestant theology.
The subject here is Martin Gardner. I have been a fan of Martin’s since the days when I was a pretty regular reader of Scientific American, approx. 1960-1980. We have had some friendly exchanges: I have reviewed a couple of his books (here, and here) and Martin has blurbed one of mine.
Well, October 21 was Martin’s 95th birthday. I posted a notice on National Review Online. Among the subsequent reader emails was one asking me if I had ever read Martin’s autobiographical 1973 novel The Flight of Peter Fromm. I hadn’t, so I ordered a copy from Abebooks.
Hence the immersion. The novel has nothing at all to do with math. It is the story of a young man’s religious development from 1938 to 1948, the subject (Gardner, but removed to third person) being aged early-20s to early-30s. The fictional narrator, a very liberal-Protestant teacher at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is a generation older than the subject. He watches the subject’s religious development, from fundamentalist Bible-Belt Protestant to “New Mysterian.”
Imbedded in the narrative are explications — quite lengthy and thoughtful ones — of some of the great mid-20th-century schools of Protestant theology: Bultmann, Barth, Tillich, Brunner, Niebuhr, Bonhöffer … It is surprising now to recall how well-known these guys were even to middlebrow Americans. It was all taken terribly seriously. Gardner:
Consider the writer John Updike. Who would guess that he had a Barthian past? Yet I was surprised to read, in Updike’s introduction to a collection of his essays, the casual remark that there had been a period in his youth when the only thing that sustained him was the Barthian theology. These young men to whom Barth spoke were searching desperately for a way to save the foundation doctrines of their faith. They saw the church rolling down the grassy slope to humanism and, like a dropped ball of yarn, the farther it rolled the smaller it became. [What an apt metaphor! Martin is really a very good writer. — JD] It seemed a clearcut either/or. Either a turn in the direction proposed by Barth or an honest abandonment of traditional Christianity.
Some of the controversies about Christology were positively 4th-century. Did Christ exist? Was he divine? Was he nuts? He doesn’t sound nuts in the New Testament. Hence the famous “trilemma,” popularized by C.S. Lewis but in fact going back to the gospels (John 10.xix ff.): if Jesus wasn’t nuts, he must have been what he said he was. The usual reply of the unbeliever is: Why couldn’t he just have been mistaken? To which the Christian answers: That’s a heck of a thing to be mistaken about, if you’re not nuts. And he doesn’t sound nuts … Gardner:
In Jesus’ time the expectation of a Messiah was so strong in the Jewish community that it is not difficult to comprehend how a wise and good man of lowly birth and descended from David (two criteria by which the Messiah was to be identified), who found himself drawing enormous crowds by his preaching and seemingly miraculous healing, would come to regard himself as the Messiah without being driven to that belief by neurotic compulsions.
In an age when everyone believed in the divine right of kings (I now bolster [Albert] Schweitzer’s arguments [in his The Psychiatric Study of Jesus] with some of my own), a king need not have been paranoid to believe that he possessed divine right. Today, when traditional Catholics still believe in the infallibility of the Pope (when he speaks ex cathedra), a Pope need not be paranoid to believe that (when he speaks ex cathedra) he speaks with the true voice of God …
The thing that struck me, reading this quite fascinating novel, was how dead this all is now. Go on: name a Protestant theologian born later than 1914. (The dates for Bultmann, Barth, Tillich, Brunner, Niebuhr, and Bonhöffer are 1884, 1886, 1886, 1889, 1892, and 1906 respectively.) All right, Harvey Cox**, but he’s not exactly a household name, as some of those earlier dudes were. Barth had his picture on the cover of Time magazine (April 20, 1962).
Let’s face it: so far as the great mass of American Protestants are concerned, theology is a dead letter. They are either “tribal Protestants,” going to church because their parents did, or because their neighbors do, or else they are Left Behind fundamentalists of the Huckabee persuasion, fundamentally anti-intellectual and indifferent to theology, or to any kind of intellectual inquiry. (Please note: There are no mentions of glossolalia or snake-handling in this blog.) Intellectual Protestantism probably survives in a few seminaries somewhere, but nobody cares. If I say “intellectual theologian,” to you, you will probably assume I am referring to some RC. Even then, the guy has probably, with very few exceptions, been dead at least 500 years.
Question for discussion: How is the death of intellectual Protestantism related to the fall of Anglo-America?
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** I know one you don’t know: John Robinson, author of Honest to God, much discussed among Anglicans in my student days.
