Two remarkable articles appeared in the Christian Advocate a year and a half ago. Recent events, together with the perspective of time, give to them now a significance scarcely discernible at the time. Under the arresting title, "Modernism's Self-announced Collapse," this journal declared editorially (Aug. 6, 1936):
We are now turning away from this naturalism which has blighted Western thinking for more than a quarter of a century. It is unquestionably both false and shallow. But let Christian theology be fully cut loose from it, and both thought and life will straighten themselves out.
Strong words these, from such a source! Other expressions are as follows:
It is interesting, indeed, to notice how many of the former proponents of Modernism now are joining in the chorus which announces its collapse!
Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, though he has not come back to anything very nearly approaching evangelical Christianity, yet does firmly announce the ineffectiveness, and even superficiality of several of the former Modernist positions. . . . Far more thoroughgoing though than Doctor Fosdick's criticism is the one set forth in Dr. Edwin E. Aubray's recent volume, "Present Theological Tendencies." Doctor Aubray holds the chair of Christian Theology at Chicago University.
In the succeeding issue (August 13), Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, a Modernist professor of Union Theological Seminary, made this remarkable disclosure, under the title, "The Reaction From Liberalism:"
Recoil from liberalism is the most important feature of the present situation in theology. If the reaction in America has been neither so extreme nor so complete as on the continent of Europe, it has touched the thinking of every contemporary theologian, and is forcing fundamental reexamination of the premises and tenets of Christion theology in the last half century. We who stand within the shadow of this criticism lack perspective fairly to appraise the justice of its indictment or the validity of the position from which it is recoiling. Theology in the past fifty years has been deeply enmeshed in the dominant secular outlook, sharing its presuppositions, partnering its enterprises, glorying in its utopian anticipations. That outlook is now definitely discredited. Criticism has proven its premises invalid. The passage of events has branded its expectations absurd. It must be discarded. Liberal theology, its child, must likewise suffer drastic reconstruction, if not abandonment.
Only a few weeks before, the Baptist Watchman-Examiner (June IS, 1936) had asked editorially, "Is Liberalism Playing Out?" and had said in reply:
A hard-beaded man said to us the other day "Is it not a fact that many of the leaders of liberalism are giving it up as a bad job?" We are quite sure, if we are to judge by their utterances, that this is the case. They at least have found that their liberalism is not a panacea.
Then follows, in the Advocate, this approaching "consequence," as it is called, of the predicted readjustment, with civilization's anticipated "leap forward." Such is the new utopia of disappointed churchmen.
A new authority will emerge. It will not be either the absolute authority of an institution or of an office, as in Rome; nor yet the absolute authority of a Divine Revelation stood quite apart from life, as in the new-Calvinism, which requires special grace, given only to the elect, for its acceptance. Instead, it will be a practical authority arising in the interaction of .a complex of forces, namely, Divine Revelation, human experience, including man's religious and moral intuitions which make Revelation comprehensible, and the pressure of a social consensus through the church. It will be the interaction of these three forces which will produce the new effective authority.
Thus inspired and led, this throbbing, groping age will find itself reenergized, and civilization will leap forward in new social progress as inevitably as mountain torrents seek the sea.
And Doctor Van Dusen, before quoted, declares that "by such pendulum swings, theology lurches forward," and further states:
The new movement seeks to be more realistic—both in its certainty of God and in its understanding of man and his society. It acknowledges the indubitable reality, majesty, and priority of the living God. And it confesses the inherent willfullness of man, and the necessity for drastic dealing with the results both in individual lives and in the body politic.
On the other hand, it reaches out for a "catholic Christianity." That is to say, it feels impelled to seek firm grounding, not in the thought forms of modern culture or even of traditional Protestantism, but in the rich, deep stream of tested certainty which has come down through the life of the church through all the Christian centuries. It wishes to find a place within that catholic tradition and to drink deep of its wisdom and its faith.
