This past few days I have been undergoing a strange immersion in Protestant theology.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0American<\/em>, approx. 1960-1980. We have had some friendly exchanges: I have reviewed a couple of his books\u00a0(here<\/a>, and\u00a0here<\/a>) and Martin has blurbed one of mine.<\/p>\n Well, October 21 was Martin’s 95th birthday. I posted\u00a0a notice on National Review Online<\/a>. Among the\u00a0subsequent reader emails was one asking\u00a0me if I had ever read Martin’s autobiographical 1973 novel The Flight of Peter Fromm<\/em>. I hadn’t, so I ordered a copy from Abebooks.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0subject (Gardner, but removed to third person) being aged early-20s to early-30s. The fictional narrator, a very liberal-Protestant teacher at the\u00a0University\u00a0of Chicago Divinity School, is a generation older than the subject. He watches the subject’s religious development, from fundamentalist Bible-Belt\u00a0Protestant to\u00a0“New Mysterian<\/a>.”<\/p>\n Imbedded in the narrative are explications\u00a0\u2014 quite lengthy and thoughtful ones\u00a0\u2014 of some of the great mid-20th-century\u00a0schools of Protestant theology: Bultmann, Barth, Tillich, Brunner, Niebuhr, Bonh\u00f6ffer\u00a0\u2026\u00a0 It is surprising now to recall how\u00a0well-known these guys were even to middlebrow Americans. It was all taken terribly seriously. Gardner:<\/p>\n Consider the writer John Updike. Who would guess that he<\/em> had a Barthian past? Yet I was surprised to read, in Updike’s\u00a0introduction 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\u00a0Barthian theology. These young men to whom Barth spoke were searching desperately for a way to save the foundation doctrines of their faith. They\u00a0saw 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\u00a0metaphor! Martin is really a very good writer.\u00a0\u2014\u00a0JD] It seemed a clearcut either\/or. Either a turn in the direction proposed by\u00a0Barth or an honest abandonment of traditional Christianity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Some of the controversies about Christology were positively\u00a04th-century<\/a>. Did Christ exist? Was he divine? Was he nuts? He\u00a0doesn’t sound<\/em> nuts in the New Testament. Hence the famous “trilemma,” popularized by C.S. Lewis but in fact going back to the gospels\u00a0(John 10.xix<\/a> ff<\/em>.): if\u00a0Jesus 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<\/em>? To\u00a0which the Christian answers: That’s a heck of a thing to be mistaken about, if you’re not nuts. And he doesn’t sound<\/em> nuts\u00a0\u2026\u00a0Gardner:<\/p>\n 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\u00a0good man of lowly birth and descended from David (two criteria by which the Messiah was to be identified), who found himself drawing enormous crowds\u00a0by his preaching and seemingly miraculous healing, would come to regard himself as the Messiah without being driven to that belief by neurotic\u00a0compulsions.<\/p>\n In an age when everyone believed in the divine right of kings (I now bolster [Albert] Schweitzer’s arguments [in his The Psychiatric Study\u00a0of Jesus<\/em>] with some of my own), a king need not\u00a0have been paranoid to believe that he possessed divine right. Today, when traditional Catholics still believe in the infallibility of the Pope (when\u00a0he speaks ex cathedra<\/em>), a Pope need not be paranoid to believe that (when he speaks ex cathedra<\/em>) he speaks with the true voice of\u00a0God\u00a0\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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\u00a01914. (The dates for Bultmann, Barth, Tillich, Brunner, Niebuhr, and Bonh\u00f6ffer are 1884, 1886, 1886, 1889, 1892, and 1906 respectively.) All\u00a0right, Harvey Cox**,\u00a0but he’s not exactly a household name, as some of those earlier dudes were. Barth had his picture on the cover of Time<\/em> magazine (April 20,\u00a01962).<\/p>\n Let’s face it: so far as the great mass of American Protestants are concerned, theology is a dead letter. They are either “tribal\u00a0Protestants,” going to church because their parents did, or because their neighbors do, or else they are\u00a0Left Behind<\/a> fundamentalists of the Huckabee persuasion, fundamentally anti-intellectual and indifferent to theology, or to any kind of intellectual inquiry.\u00a0(Please note: There are\u00a0no<\/em> mentions of glossolalia or snake-handling in this blog.)\u00a0 Intellectual Protestantism probably survives in a few seminaries\u00a0somewhere, but nobody cares. If I say “intellectual theologian,” to you, you will probably assume I am referring to some RC. Even then, the\u00a0guy has probably, with very few exceptions<\/a>, been dead at least 500 years.<\/p>\n Question for discussion: \u00a0How is the death of intellectual Protestantism related to the fall of Anglo-America<\/a>?<\/p>\n ——————– 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\u00a0American, approx. … Continue reading
\n**\u00a0I know one you don’t know: John Robinson, author of Honest to<\/a> God<\/em><\/a>, much discussed among Anglicans in my student days.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"