Why bother?

A Friday op-ed by Jay Akasie in The Wall Street Journal and a Sunday op-ed by Ross Douthat in The New York Times both addressed the same topic:  the current state of the Episcopal Church in the United States.  According to both men, the current state is distressing.  What is said of the Episcopal Church could be said of any of the mainline Protestant denominations.

Mr. Douthat's main point is that the less distinctively Christian in teaching mainline, or liberal, Christian churches in this country become, the more they hasten their demise.  Their member ranks and financial giving dwindle.  This is a trend that has been continuing for decades and threatens the very future existence of these bodies.

When, as Mr. Akasie reports of the Episcopal General Convention, "During the day, legislators in the lower chamber, the House of Deputies, and the upper chamber, the House of Bishops, discussed such weighty topics as whether to develop funeral rites for dogs and cats, and whether to ratify resolutions condemning genetically modified foods. Both were approved by a vote...," then it is the case, as Mr. Douthat observes, "Today, by contrast [to a previous era], the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism."

This observation might be new to the regular readers of the Times.  It is not, however, a subject that is new at all.  In 1923 a Presbyterian minister named J. Gresham Machen published a book the title of which crystallizes his concern:  Christianity and Liberalism.  The conjunction and in the title signifies the difference between the nouns on either side of it.  His concern then was that Protestant churches were being overrun by the Social Gospel movement, which under his examination turned out to be mostly social and little to no gospel:

But one thing is perfectly plain -- whether or no liberals are Christians, it is at any rate perfectly clear that liberalism is not Christianity.  And that being the case, it is highly undesirable that liberalism and Christianity should continue to be propagated within the bounds of the same organization.  A separation between the two parties in the Church is the crying need of the hour. (160)

Dr. Machen's point was essentially that which Mr. Douthat articulates, something that might be colloquially put this way:  "Why bother?"  Why would the world bother with the church if it is little more than an imperfect version of the world?

History has proven in the time since Dr. Machen's publication that the liberals in the world do, on the whole, in fact become less inclined to attend liberal churches.  That is something characteristic of the way that liberalism and its exponents interact with the Christian church.  The world of secular liberalism does a much better job of offering liberalism than the clumsy ways of liberal ecclesiastical bodies trying to resolve a religious identity crisis.

Despite the similarities between Sunday's op-ed in the Times and Christianity and Liberalism, there is a point at which Dr. Machen would disagree with something noted in Mr. Douthat's column.  It is when Mr. Douthat quotes Gary Dorrien, who argues that the exponents of the original Social Gospel movement were much more dogmatic (read: orthodox) than current Protestant liberals.  The impression given is that as a class the first Protestant liberals were both orthodox and sufficiently socially minded.  Professor Dorrien, himself a Protestant liberal, might view the past with a little more nostalgia than all of the evidence warrants.  Mr. Douthat quotes him as saying of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Protestant progressivism:

Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

That is debatable, and in fact it was debated.  To be sure, Mr. Dorrien's description is true of some Social Gospelers, but it is not necessarily true of them all.  Reading a person's heart is a tricky business.  Interpreting one's doctrinal statement of faith, what is affirmed and denied, is a bit easier.  And it was precisely on this front that Dr. Machen was prompted to pen his book.

It was, in other words, precisely because things like the transcendence of God, the divinity of Christ, and the sole effectiveness of redemption through Jesus' substitutionary atonement were denied that Dr. Machen felt compelled by conviction to, in today's term, "call out" these very denials.  See, for instance, chapter 3, "God and Man," chapter 5, "Christ," and chapter 6, "Salvation." 

About these things, one can disagree, and Dr. Machen was the first to admit as much.  What he desired most was honesty.  He wished for the churches in his day to be clear that the message that it advanced about these subjects was not the historic Christian teaching:

In my little book, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923, I tried to show that the issue in the Church of the present day is not between two varieties of the same religion, but, at bottom, between two essentially different types of thought and life. There is much interlocking of the branches, but the two tendencies, Modernism and supernaturalism, or (otherwise designated) non-doctrinal religion and historic Christianity, spring from different roots. In particular, I tried to show that Christianity is not a "life," as distinguished from a doctrine, and not a life that has doctrine as its changing symbolic expression, but that -- exactly the other way around -- it is a life founded on a doctrine. (Machen, "Christianity in Conflict")

This brings up another point both in Dr. Machen's own writings and in Mr. Douthat's article:  the life that is connected to Christians and their institutions.

It is said, by Mr. Douthat for one, that "[t]he defining idea of liberal Christianity -- that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion -- has been an immensely positive force in our national life."  This is not something that people should wish to sacrifice.  That it would be sacrificed if non-liberal versions of Christianity were to be ascendant is a false inference.  It was leveled at confessional Christian churches in the 1920s, just as it is the working assumption today.

One can see from Dr. Machen's own reflection on Christianity and Liberalism that thought and life, or we might say teaching and social outworkings, go together; they are inseparable.  The point that he never ceased to emphasize was just the logical priority of the one to the other.  As he put it, it is "a life founded on a doctrine."

And it is not just the individual life that is in view.  Human institutions, as well, may be positively affected, the very institutions that some fear that a so-called conservative approach to Christianity would ignore.  Once again, Dr. Machen:

It is upon this brotherhood of twice-born sinners, this brotherhood of the redeemed, that the Christian founds the hope of society.  He finds no solid hope in the improvement of earthly conditions, or the molding of institutions under the influence of the Golden Rule.  These things indeed are to be welcomed.  But in themselves their value, to the Christian, is certainly small. ... Human institutions are really to be molded, not by Christian principles of the unsaved, but by Christian men; the true transformation of society will come by the influence of those who have themselves been redeemed.  (158)

Now, what it means to be redeemed and to what end society should be transformed are open to debate, and it is just these two things that were debated as modernism swept through American churches at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s.

Dr. Machen meant redemption in the historic Christian sense of someone's deserving punishing condemnation by God for rejecting God as God in thought and life, but that person receives, instead, demerited favor because God condemned as a substitute Jesus to whom the sinner is united:  the human is united with Jesus in his death (condemned really but not physically with Jesus on the cross) and in his resurrection (vindicated really now and in the future physically with Jesus in his glorified life in the Spirit).

And Dr. Machen envisioned a societal transformation organically flowing from the charity that became increasingly manifest in the words and actions of those who both were already and were in the process of being transformed by the power of the life-giving Spirit -- the same life-giving Spirit by which Jesus was raised, even redeemed, from the dead.  This is not the redemption that, treasured though it rightly is, an alcoholic experiences by becoming and staying sober.

To note these things does, however, raise a question about terms.  It is not just questions about terms like "redemption" and "transformation" but also about terms like "liberal" and "conservative."  We should admit that these are slippery terms.  They can obscure and hinder conversation perhaps more than they can advance it.  Such terms advance conversation and thinking when they summarize in a word a more involved nexus of ideas and when the defined or connoted summaries are agreed upon by all parties.  That does not always happen today.  These words are often used instead as pejoratives imbued with animosity and unfair attributions.  This is a danger to recognize and to avoid, but I am less sure than perhaps others that the term liberal as Mr. Douthat and even Dr. Machen used it fall into that trap.

The Protestant liberals that Mr. Douthat has in view self-identify as liberals.  They wear their liberalism on their sleeve as a badge, and they don it, often, in their culture wars as a coat of mail.  Typically the self-conception of Protestant liberalism will nod to historic Christian doctrines such as sin and salvation so far as they do not get in the way of the perceived to be more important matter of "social justice" -- the contemporary term for the societal reform and progressivism that Mr. Dorrien identifies.

Or, to put it differently, in view are the denominations as such, not necessarily every member within them.  When Mr. Douthat refers to liberal Protestants and displays the Episcopal Church and its leaders as the poster child, most people generally know what liberal Protestantism is through such an example.  My point is that clarifying terms is important, but the terms in this conversation are filled with sufficient meaning for the conversation to take place without embarking upon a Socratic dialogue to define them.

What is worth embarking upon in dialogue is the relationship between Christian doctrine and its (social) outworkings.  What Dr. Machen predicted was that taken to its conclusion Protestant liberalism ceases to be Christian.  What Mr. Douthat describes is a denomination, the Episcopal Church, whose very identity and life seem troubled by the loss of historic Christian markers and the addition of politically and religiously liberal ones.  How the institutions that persist in promoting distinctively Christian teachings should manifest those professed realities in their lives is another question for another time.

What I wish to emphasize is that the topic of Mr. Douthat's column is not new.  We would do well to heed lessons from a fuller history.

One lesson is the necessary step of identifying the relationship between Christianity and liberalism.  Yes; what is in fact, as I have called it, distinctively Christian is open to debate.  But that debate itself should signal by its very fact that some perceived shift is occurring.  Is an implication of Mr. Douthat's column that the Episcopal Church is showing itself increasingly, because of its self-understood liberalism, to be concerned with matters that are not clearly Christian and are not clear implicates of historic Christianity?  If so, was not this the institution-threatening tendency that Dr. Machen identified in 1920s Presbyterianism?

Another lesson is that the supposed dichotomy between liberalism as leading to admirable social outworkings of Christianity, on the one side, and historic, or "conservative," Christianity as leading to no admirable social outworkings, on the other, is fallacious.  What has always existed is a difference between the two groups on how the beneficial effects of the change of thought and life, change that takes place in individual Christians and that is supposed to be apparent in their institutions, would and should manifest themselves in the body politic and society at large.

It may be that liberalism of an earlier era was more self-consciously focused on doctrine than it is now, but liberalism may not have been thereby more distinctively Christian than it is now.  Both versions, in their own ways, may have been more political, social, and cultural than Christian, as Dr. Machen understood it.  Even many of his contemporaries, although of course not all, agreed that he had reliably represented the liberal viewpoint.

H. L. Mencken, for instance, believed that Doctor Fundamentalis, as he called the Princetonian, was accurate in his depictions of modernist versions of Christianity.  In the Baltimore Evening Sun, the ardent atheist Mr. Mencken noted that liberals within Dr. Machen's denomination had "been trying, in late years to convert the Presbyterian Church into a kind of literary and social club, devoted vaguely to good works" (quoted in D. G. Hart, "J. Gresham Machen and the Problem of Christian Civilization in America," 2; see also Mencken's full obituary).  Who knows?  They might have even debated whether to develop funeral rites for dogs and cats or to condemn certain mass-produced foods.

Because it gets at the matter of individual and corporate refreshment provided by the church and of organic transformation of society that flows from that ministry, it is worth rereading the closing words of Dr. Machen's book:

At the present time, there is one longing of the human heart which is often forgotten -- it is the deep, pathetic longing of the Christian for fellowship with his brethren. ... There are congregations, even in the present age of conflict, that are really gathered around the table of the crucified Lord ... But such congregations, in many cities, are difficult to find.  Weary with the conflicts of the world, one goes into the Church to seek refreshment for the soul.  And what does one find?  Alas, too often, one finds only the turmoil of the world.  The preacher comes forward, not out of a secret place of meditation and power, not with the authority of God's Word permeating his message, not with human wisdom pushed far into the background by the glory of the Cross, but with human opinions about the social problems of the hour or easy solutions to the vast problems of sin. ... Thus the warfare of the world has entered even into the house of God.  And indeed sad is the heart of the man who has come seeking peace.

      Is there no refuge from strife?  Is there no place of refreshing where a man can prepare for the battle of life?  Is there no place where two or three can gather in Jesus' name, to forget for the moment all those things that divide nation from nation, race from race, to forget human pride, to forget the passion of war, to forget the puzzling problems of industrial strife, and to unite in overflowing gratitude at the foot of the Cross?  If there is to be such a place, then that is the house of God and that the gate of heaven.  And from under the threshold of that house will go forth a river that will revive a weary world.  (179-80)

More could be said.  This is a thorny subject.  I have attempted to introduce a perspective from an earlier time descriptively, because it seems to me to relate rather closely to the debates raging and the distressing church situations in our own time.  It is perhaps sufficient to observe here that the import of the columns by Mr. Akasie and by Mr. Douthat is that as the Episcopal Church, and perhaps mainline Protestantism generally, becomes more of an institution advocating for principles similar to a political and social segment of society, it becomes to that extent less relevant to society as a Christian institution.

This seems to these observers to be the case today, but it may not always be so.  There are times when, for instance, the moral vision of Christian institutions like the Episcopal Church has been mirrored in society in general.  Then the church was, although perhaps troubled and always imperfect, not in the state of dangerous demise that it is today.  The church may thrive even as its advocated ways are adopted in the culture.

The problem may not be with alignment of church and culture but, as Dr. Machen clearly argued and Mr. Douthat implies, with liberalism -- with liberalism itself within the church.  If the church increasingly reflects the liberal political and cultural order, but does it more poorly than the political punditry and cultural structures, then the question that every institution must ask itself relative to its members is, Why bother?