Religious World Trends

Protestantism Warned by Observer

The church and the priests of all its denominations have fallen into the habit of warning one another, of warning the world. It is time that somebody should warn both the priests and the church.

Declaring there is "throughout the church a general drift," he avers:

The church has arrived at the stage of crisis in the sequence through which any organization founded to perpetuate an idea inevitably passes.

Asserting that the church has taken on "the empty organization's pretentiousness," he elaborates the thought in this trenchant ex­cerpt:

In order that their idea may overwhelm all oppo­sition, they organize it. They must make the organ­ization strong, so that the idea may never be in dan­ger. Developing such an organization requires end­less attention. So they—or their followers, in turn—become so much occupied with organizing that they forget the idea the organization was intended to per­petuate. The idea is gradually covered over with a smothering incrustation of all kinds of heavyweight machinery. Until some new life-giving individual comes along from within or without and shatters this incrustation and restores to the idea its early state of free mobility, the organization is an enemy of the idea, instead of a guaranty of its life. This is where the church has arrived today. It is an empty, top-heavy organization that hinders the direct application of the philosophy [the teaching] of Jesus.

Observing that "Great conferences take on the spectacular character of a national political convention,—and do not leave out the politics,"—Mr. Brown then utters this warning:

In a hundred important ways the church has sub­stituted the cowardly, cruel, and self-destructive meth­ods of organization and mass action for the quietly penetrating spirit of Jesus.

And in the end, too, the church logically has been seized by the empty organization': fear. All over the country I hear clergy and official laity express to their adherents one great fear after another. In the pleas­ant mutual incognito of travel, I listen while priests of every sort express even more desperate fears. The church is afraid. It fears for its organized self. It sees reason for fear in everything from its own component parts to the remotest nonchurch groups in the country.

The author declares that while "the hills and plains are full of people whose hungering for the religious is so great that it is pathetic," "unfriendliness has arisen, and is growing steadily, because men feel that the church has abandoned what it set out to do. They believe it has allowed itself to become merely partisan —for the sake of short-lived expediency."

Stressing this hunger of people for vital religion, the article continues:

They will join any cult or club that promises them the least crumb. They are not any special grade of 'subnorma,ls, but only high-pitched mortals who famish for that which the church is supposed to give, but which they do not easily detect in an organ­ization busy with mass campaigns.

Then the candid observer closes with this warning:

If the church uses up its energy in the business of making itself solid, if it occupies itself with wars of one kind or another, if nobody rises up to give the philosophy of Jesus a fair chance in the church and through its representatives, the church may well face a more tragic eclipse than any that it has imagined for itself at the hands of external enemies.

Misconceptions Regarding Antichrist

Two articles in the Religious Digest for January reveal the fallacious view cur­rent in many quarters relative to antichrist. First, Albertus Pieters, Professor of English Bible, Western Seminary, tabulates the four schools of prophetic exposition—(1) "futur­ist," (2) "continuous historical," (3) "preter­ist," contending that the book of Revelation reveals only the struggles of the early Chris­tian church with the pagan Roman Empire, and (4) those who hold that the beast repre­sents any violent persecuting, opposing power, wherever and whenever found. In the fu­turist view the antichrist is a single individual yet to come; in the historical, it is recognized as the Roman Catholic Church_; and in the preterist view, it is confined to pagan Rome. Professor Pieters contends for the preterist view, declaring that "the pictures of the book of Revelation are no more to be taken literally than the cartoons in a modern newspaper."

The second article, by Samuel M. Shoe­maker, rector of Calvary Episcopal Church, New York City, begins with this penetrating analysis of present world conditions:

Man stands aghast at the forces which have been released through him into this world. The family disintegrates, democracy disintegrates, religion dis­integrates, and man's belief in marriage, government, and in faith itself disappears. This is a moral and spiritual crisis in which the essence of humanity is threatened with destruction.

Then, asking a "compelling" question, he gives this fallacious answer as pertains to the identity of antichrist:

What paralyzing influence has estopped the ordi­nary power of men and of nations to lift, correct, and stabilize themselves? I believe it to be the force of antichrist on a titanic scale, as it makes a su­preme bid for the human soul. . . . Antichrist per­sists today and opposes in all fields of human enter­prise the authority and control of God. Selfishness, pharisaism, immoral compromise, atheism, material­ism, moral defeat of all kinds—such is antichrist.

Setting forth the "true holy catholic [universal] church,"—Roman Catholic, and Prot­estant "also," or secondary,—as the organized spiritual force in "the spiritual warfare for Christ and against antichrist," he pleads for compromising unity thus:

The same kind of inclusive, strategic action is needed in this spiritual warfare as when nations march to the field of battle. Today is the day to build bridges by means of which all possible forces may join in united devotion to the cause of the restoration of Christianity. Antichrist makes use of divisions in the Christians' ranks; if we close the ranks, our offensive will be strengthened. Churches have been closed and burned in other countries; our answer to a burning church must be a church aflame with consecration to its task.

Such a concept and scheme leads him to put the Catholic and Protestant churches, and the Jewish as well, in this light and relation­ship:

The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the most powerful organization on earth; it is the second of the great spiritual resources. Strong in its declara­tion of loyalty to Jesus Christ, this church upholds private and public morality, and is the common enemy with Protestants everywhere of the forces of antichrist.

There are also the more conservative Protestant communions which have resisted the dilutions of false liberalism. They are zealous for Jesus Christ and His Word. They are a powerful ally in the spiritual war for the soul of humanity. Equal to these communions in conviction and morality are the real Jews, who, if they respond to their spiritual heritage, will work against antichrist in faithfulness to that Hebraic imperative, "Thus saith the Lord!"

Literal Advent Scouted

The creeds which have to be recited in church services contain statements which, taken literally, contradict the commonplaces of daily life. We no longer picture hell as a place beneath the world's surface or heaven as above the bright blue sky. Fewer and fewer people look forward to a resuscita­tion of the bodily elements which after death have been laid in the grave. Many who regard the Chris­tian ideal as the only ideal of life reiect without hesitation the hope of a visible second coming of our Lord and the story of the virgin birth. Such things do not fit coherently into the mental picture which they have of the universe, as conceived in accordance with knowledge of the way in which things happen. Two assumptions are widely, if tacitly, held side by side: first, that Christ provides the one possible standard of religious belief and conduct; and secondly, that the miraculous setting of His life, as set forth in the creeds, cannot be taken literally and must be translated into current equivalents of thought.

Here Modernism is revealed in its boldest form, and incidentally, the strife within the ranks of the Anglican Church as well. Concentrating attention on the virgin birth, the writer observes:

It would be interesting to learn whether any one of the bishops is prepared to maintain the literal truth of the story upon which the idea of the virgin birth is based, in view of the verdict of scholarly research upon the subject.

Then follows this unequivocal denial of its historicity:

St. Paul preached his gospel and founded his churches without reference to a virgin birth, but, on the contrary, with passage after passage in his letters which invites such a reference yet consistently ig­nores it. The more detailed and the more compre­hensive becomes knowledge of Biblical literature, the more impossible is it to accept the literal story of a virgin birth. . . If, admittedly, scholarship proves such a doctrine as that of a virgin birth to have no historical basis in the New Testament, but to have been an apologetic or a poetical attempt to present the doctrine of divine sonship in terms of narrative.