Religion: After Christianity

The Organization Man in the Lonely Crowd that makes up the Affluent Society is also known, among some religion writers, under another capital-lettered phrase: he is Post-Christian Man. In the latest issue of the quarterly Theology Today, two Protestant theologians debate how fairly and accurately the term post-Christianity describes the times.

To Presbyterian Bruce Morgan, professor of religion at Amherst College, the age is truly post-Christian; those who dismiss it as just one among many periods of history dominated by nonbelievers “fail to see the uniqueness of our time.” He doubts the contention of Harvard’s Paul Tillich (TIME cover, March 16, 1959) that ordinary men, beneath their daily concerns, are still haunted by the “ultimate questions” that lead to the Christian answer: God.

He wonders, at least, “how accurately this describes the ‘welladjusted mid-twentieth century man, beautifully trained to a high level of mass consumption. This man is extremely difficult to describe as one who finds his ultimate concern in death, let alone God. Death tends to become a technical matter, representing more the struggle between the physician and the mortician than between life and death. He is anxious, disquieted and often desperate, but his anxieties seem oriented around his professional and social status, his sexual relations, and the dislocations of a revolutionary world.”

The Missing Bedrock. Morgan concedes that there have always been skeptics. But in the past, there always “remained a substratum of theologically integrated assumptions to which reference could be meaningfully made”: monotheism, moral order, afterlife, sin. But modern man has rejected the assumptions, and even when he goes to church, he is deeply infected by doubt. He knows that “for millennia his ancestors lived in an era with other bedrock assumptions than his own, an era which can be called Hebrew-Christian.” but modern man “no longer lives in that era, and what is more, he no longer wants to.”

Christians, says Morgan, must ask themselves what is the meaning of this deeper skepticism in the divine plan, and discover how to speak and act in a time which assumes that God is dead. “But we will surely not learn or be taught if we operate on the assumption that our extremity is less severe than in fact it is.”

The Secular Mood. Presbyterian Charles West, who teaches Christian ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, argues that Morgan has improperly defined the age: it is more post-ideology than post-Christian. “It is not just theologically integrated Christian assumptions which are being questioned by the modern secular mood, but all religions, and even all ideological attempts to give meaning to reality as a whole and man’s destiny In it. Salvation by Psychoanalysis, Communism and Existentialism are all fighting the same battle for survival today alongside the remnants of the corpus christianum against the postreligious world.”

To West, the spread of secularization is not necessarily evil and not necessarily new. God’s Word has always had to struggle for life within the corruptible forms man has devised to honor his divine creator. Thus the “explosive which is crumbling our religious institutions and ideas” may even be the work of the Holy Spirit —the “negative consequence of the work of God himself in history.”

Finally, West argues, Morgan’s reflections on modern man ignore the fact that “secular men are trying to be human, are confronted with all manner of honest questions and problems about what this means in an organized industrial age, questions which tempt them sometimes to set up new religions, even when they know in their heart there is neither truth nor power in them.” Rather than attack this new man, the Christian should be content with the discipline of private prayer and with quiet service to his fellow man until God’s intent becomes clear. This “hidden” Christian existence will be “a source of hope” for a world seeking light and guidance. “Perhaps it would help both us and our secular neighbors to understand what it means to call our world post-Christian were we to spell it out in acts of obedience to the Lord of that world. ‘He that doeth the will of my father shall know of the doctrine.’ “