Religion: The Liberal Outlook

Two major challenges within Christianity came into focus at major meetings in Tokyo and Chicago last week. The Tokyo gathering was dominated by restless non-white Christians, who reproached their white brethren for racial prejudice (see below). On the surface, the Chicago meeting of the International Association for Liberal Christianity and Religious Freedom* seemed designed to meet just such reproaches, for its watchword was tolerance. Yet, as its delegates spelled out just what they meant by liberalism, their version of an irreproachable Christanity began to look to many a Christian like nothing but a pallid imitation of the real thing.

Demythologization? In the last half-century, said Dr. Wilhelm Pauck, a Congregationalist and professor of church history at Manhattan’s Union Theological Seminary, Christianity has suffered serious blows: 1) in terms of influence, it has become a minority movement in the world, and 2) the faithful have deserted organized churches in droves. In short, “Christianity stands at the fringe of the common life today. It no longer shapes it.” What happened? According to Dr. Pauck, the fault lies with the churches, which “have refused to demythologize the Gospel . . . They have lost the people because they do not speak to them in their own language.”

Dr. Pauck was referring to the theory of German Theologian Rudolf Bultmann (TIME, Sept. 24, 1956) that the forms in which the Gospel is set down had meanings for the people who wrote it which are no longer clear to contemporary men. They must be reinterpreted in order to be understood and communicated. Historian Pauck seems to leave out of consideration, however, the increasing popularity in recent decades of a more demanding, more theological, more supernatural form of religion in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity and in Judaism as well.

Moral Realism? When it came to what to do about the sorry state of the world, the delegates admitted that they had “no simple recipes,” fell back on such familiar churchman’s cliches as “creative adjustment and accommodation,” “painstaking, patient negotiation, preferably through a strengthened and expanded United Nations,” and “a stronger measure of moral realism.”

Noted speakers for non-Christian religions, including Moslem Muhammad Za-frulla Khan, a judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and Buddhist U Chan Htoon, Justice of the Supreme Court of Burma, contributed speeches of great good will. But it was Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof of Pittsburgh’s Rodef Shalom Temple (Reform) who came close to denning much that is wrong with religious liberalism. Said he: There is a “sort of spiritual restlessness, a hunger” in the hearts of modern men, and it is expressed, among other things, by the bestsellers. The type of religion found in popular books about religion, said Rabbi

Freehof, offers a clue to the general religious situation. “People should be concerned with their immortality and the salvation of their souls in eternity, but the books do not show it … They deal with the questions of how to live, how to be happy, how to face the world. The spiritual hunger of our day is almost entirely this-worldly. People want help from religion in the present problems, spiritual and ethical, of their daily life. This tendency to be noncreedal and practical is precisely liberalism. There is an unintended but unmistakable liberalism in the popular religious books of the day. This liberal, nondenominational spirituality is all the more interesting because the authors are chiefly churchmen … All of this urges a new task upon every modern religion.”

The question remained whether this task is “demythologization.”

* The I.A.R.F. was founded in Boston in 1900, mostly by American Unitarians and “other liberal religious thinkers and workers,” underwent several name changes throughout the years as it collected kindred groups in other countries.