Religion: A Crown Without a Cross?

At Amsterdam last summer, when Protestantism foregathered at the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches (TIME, Sept. 13), a notable divergence in point of view between the U.S. and Europe was quickly apparent.

The two points of view might be stated like this:

¶European Protestants spend too much time thinking about God and Scripture, not enough in helping their neighbor. ¶U.S. Protestants are inclined to be simple-minded do-gooders with a busy-bee, “social-worker” concept of religion that comes perilously close to the Pelagian heresy.*

Last week, in the pages of the Christian Century, U.S. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr attacked “continental” theology for having its head in the clouds. His target was the continental theologians’ chief spokesman, Karl Barth.

In the Way. Big, bearlike Karl Barth of Basel, Switzerland, had jolted the Amsterdam delegates with a speech on the text: Take counsel together and it shall come to naught . . . for God is with us! (Isaiah 8:10). Perhaps, he said, the much-regretted absence of either Roman Catholic or Russian Orthodox delegates was God’s doing: “I propose that we should now praise and thank God, that it pleases Him to stand so clearly in the way of our plans.” Barth warned the churchmen that their job was to bear witness to the Gospel —not to presume to the world-saving functions reserved for God Himself. Said he: “We ought to give up … every thought that the care of the Church, the care of the world, is our care . . . For just this is the final root and ground of all human disorder; the dreadful, godless, ridiculous opinion that man is the Atlas who is destined to bear the dome of heaven upon his shoulders.”

Says Theologian Niebuhr: Barth is preaching a dangerous doctrine. The care of the Church is most certainly our care, and to prove it, he cites Saint Paul (I Corinthians 12). Earth’s emphasis on “what we cannot do” is really a temptation to Christians “to share the victory and the glory of the risen Lord” without undergoing the trials, perplexities and decisions —the “crucifixion of the self which is the scriptural presupposition of a new life …”

Through, Not Around. Earth’s theology, writes Niebuhr, delineates “the final pinnacle of the Christian faith and hope with fidelity to the Scriptures. Yet it requires correction, because it has obscured the foothills where human life must be lived. It started its theological assault decades ago with the reminder that we are men and not God, that God is in the heavens and that we are on the earth. The wheel is come full circle. It is now in danger of offering a crown without a cross, a triumph without a battle, a scheme of justice without the necessity of discrimination, a faith which has annulled rather than transmuted perplexity—in short, a too simple and premature escape from the trials . . . duties and tragic choices which are the condition of our common humanity. The Christian faith knows of a way through these sorrows, but not of a way around them.”

*Pelagius, excommunicated for heresy in the 5th Century, has been identified with the belief that man could be saved by good works alone.