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?
——————–
** I know one you don’t know: John Robinson, author of Honest to God, much discussed among Anglicans in my student days.
Pingback: Secular Right » The rise of McChurch, but not Old Time Theology
Derbyshire challenges:
Well, Stanley Hauerwas didn’t get his picture on the cover (or did he?), but Time did name him America’s Best Theologian. He’s gotten lots of publicity, but you’re right that Protestant theologians don’t get the middlebrow attention that they used to.
Another well-known Protestant theologian born after 1914: Alvin Plantinga, who seems fairly well-known in middlebrow circles, though not a superstar like Barth or Niebuhr, or as big a start as Hauerwas.
Last time I checked Barack Obama’s Facebook page, his list of favorite books (there were about eight) included of course the Bible, but also the heavily Protestant-theological novels Moby Dick and Gilead. Gilead, for those who haven’t read it, is an outstanding, beautifully constructed, broad and deep novel, a masterpiece. More to Derbyshire’s point, it got a huge amount of attention (albeit partly because it was Marilynne Robinson’s long-awaited second novel), and it got uniformly rave reviews, though I think even the rave reviews seriously under-appreciated the quality of this great book. This is a deeply Calvinist novel which includes discussions of George Herbert, Feuerbach, and Calvin’s Institutes, though really the theology is inseparable from the novel as a whole. Robinson may not be exactly what you call a theologian, but she’s undeniably a literary superstar, and the publishing of her most explicitly theological novel was a real “event” in the literary world.
I could name many. But then you could play the oh not him, he doesn’t count, nobody takes him seriously card.
Nevertheless an obvious example is N. T. Wright. He is the intellectual force behind the so-called “New Perspective on Paul” school.
Did Christ exist? Was he divine? Was he nuts? He doesn’t sound nuts in the New Testament.
He sounds nuts to me, a mad fanatic with delusions of apocalyptic grandeur, one in a very, very long line of self-righteous, Middle Eastern megalomaniacs. The only thing that softens his image is his Sermon on the Mount, where he counsels non-violent acquiescence to secular authority, but he advised that only because he (personally) anticipated wreaking serious spiritual revenge come Judgment Day.
I thought all the non-fundie Protestants have turned into religious pluralism-preaching “God is a metaphor” types. Even though I’m an atheist and those types probably have a more pleasant attitudes towards my ilk I find them so incoherent and weak sauce that I actually find them more repulsive than hardcore evangelicals. At least those guys believe in something, modern liberal Christians sound like guys who don’t believe in anything but keep up Christian appearance because they enjoy the whole church experience or they get a warm fuzzy feeling from the whole “Jesus was a hippie” notion.
Somebody beat me to N.T. Wright.
As for the Time cover thing, nobody is putting Steven Pinker, Greg Cochran, Robert Trivers, Jonathan Haidt, David Sloan Wilson or whoever on the cover either, yet evolutionary theory isn’t exactly doing badly these days. (To be fair, Charles Murray and Richard Dawkins have made the cover, IIRC.)
Supporting evidence for this is that the Conservative majority on the Supreme Court is composed solely of Catholics. We can speculate that it is mostly Evangelical Christians & Catholics are drawn to Conservative Politics. Except that to be on the Supreme Court judges must be of a very high intellectual caliber, and here the Evangelicals are lacking. Bush wanted to appoint one to the post (Miers), but she was found lacking. He eventually appointed a Catholic.
I think the idea that theology is dead just makes no sense. Consider Process Theology. Admittedly Hartshorne is now dead (as is Whitehead obviously) but I don’t think you can ignore Griffin. I don’t care for that movement (and most Evangelicals hate it) Liberation Theology is arguably one of the more important movements of the 20th century. And you can’t discuss that without talking about the major figures in Brazil and elsewhere such as Trujillo and then the major texts such as those by Gutiérrez. While that’s more Catholic it has had a profound influence on other religions as well. I’m not as familiar with the figures in the movement but Black Theology is a form of Liberation Theology and a major movement on its own. Obviously there are a lot of African American Protestants. You then completely neglect the phenomenological theologians such as Levinas, Ricouer, Hart or others who are very significant.
I’m not well versed on Prostestant theological movements and I was able to name quite a few major names of the late 20th century!
John, there is very little that I know (‘nothing’ is a word that comes to mind) about past or present American theological grandees, Protestant or otherwise, but I always thought that one of the advantages of the Church of England of my early years was that it was a church that didn’t put too much (or in many cases, any) emphasis on theology. That’s one of the numerous merits of a national (but subordinate, and appropriately mild) church. I do, however, remember hearing about Honest to God at some time in the late 60s or early 70s. Naturally I never read it – it smacked too much of ‘enthusiasm’. That same fault , I suspect, could have been laid at the door of C.S. Lewis half a generation earlier. Then again, I never looked at any of his books either – other than the Narnia stories, which I read as a child and rather enjoyed.
Right in the midst of a fifty year (and counting) revival of Reformed Theology you pronounce the death of intellectual Protestantism. (I think Time Magazine even listed Calvinism recently in some way, most important or influential ideas today, or something like that.)
Also, Protestants who tend to be involved in the more rigorous level of biblical doctrine (Bible-based, sola Scriptura) tend not to be too enamored of the liberal theologians and academic fads that you list in your post. We’re more likely to be reading Geerhardus Vos or Meredith G. Kline (to name to 20th century theologians that stand with the greats of the past). When we’re not learning from the wealth of Reformed theology going back to the early 16th century.
Andrew: Know wotcha mean. We English are the empiricists of the world, probably the only nationality among whom “intellectual” is a dirty word. (Remember Harold Macmillan’s axe-blow to Iain Macleod’s political hopes: “Too clever by half.” Nobody would vote for the guy after that!) I think the real reason the Reformation was successful in England is that no English person could follow those great plodding arguments about metaphysics the RCs swoon over — Aristotle, Aquinas, essence, existence, zzzzz. We’d rather do a bit of gardening.
At the urging of one reader of my book (buy it!) I have been trying to read Camus. My sad report is here.
When, in the late 1960s, the facts about Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution came out — schools shut down, teachers persecuted, students sent to do farm work — my first instinctive reaction was: “What a great idea!” The old despot took things much too far, of course. Still, I can’t shake off the feeling that he had a point in there somewhere. I especially can’t shake it off when in a roomful of intellectuals.
Danny, the idea that evangelical Protestants just don’t have any smart people strikes me as a prima facie implausible theory, though I grant that it might be true. Here’s a more plausible theory. Very intelligent committed evangelical Protestants are more likely to become preachers than to become lawyers. The reason why Catholics become lawyers instead is because lawyers can marry in their religion.
Miers was found lacking, but the primary reason she had to be withdrawn was that she was found lacking in sufficient conservative credentials.
“Please note: There are no mentions of glossolalia or snake-handling in this blog.”
A self-refuting sentence!
Pingback: This Generation - Question for Youth Only =) - Elections - Page 2 - City-Data Forum
Pingback: Why the hysteria over the '' loss '' of Christianity ? From both sides ? - Politics and Other Controversies - Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Conservatives, Liberals, Third Parties, Left-Wing, Right-Wing, Congress, President - City-Data Forum
Pingback: Why the hysteria over the '' loss '' of Christianity ? From both sides ? - Politics and Other Controversies - Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Conservatives, Liberals, Third Parties, Left-Wing, Right-Wing, Congress, President - Page 3 - City-Data For