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Is This the Post-Christian Era?
By Bruce Morgan

"THE Post-Christian Era" is abroad in the land today as a description of the times in which we live. It is used by all kinds of people in many walks of life and it is often used carelessly and loosely. In reaction against its use one hears many responses, most of them quite naturally from within the Christian community. The tenor of many of these responses is that this is no more a post-Christian era than any other era. In fact it might be better, the argument goes, to entitle this, as all other periods, a "pre-Christian era"; because this era, like all others in human history, finds man caught up in his idolatries, in his self-worship, in his turning away from God, his Creator and Redeemer. It is the task of the Christian community, as it has always been, so this argument runs, to challenge man to come out of his pre-Christian era, to repent and to come to terms with the activity of God in Christ.

It is the argument of this editorial that such attempts to retitle our time another pre-Christian era fail to see the uniqueness of our time in history, demonstrate a peculiarly circular, tin-linear and thus essentially non-Christian philosophy of history, and miss the essential meaning of the term, "the post-Christian era."

I

Not long ago as I traveled in my car, I heard an advertisement for a very worthy cause, a fund drive for the conquest of the dread disease called multiple sclerosis. It went something like this: "... its mysteries have so far defied hundreds of researches, but there is an answer, and science, with your help, will find it." This is a para-

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digm of the real spirit of our age which can be described as optimistic social, scientific and technical, short-run pragmatism.

Not long afterwards I came upon the following comments by Nathan Glazer in his brilliant little book, American Judaism (1957): "... religion has lost in the modern world the major position it has held throughout history. I do not plan to go into this vast subject, except to point out that the flourishing state of theology, the building of Churches, and high attendance at religious services must not blind us to the fact that religion has suffered crushing blows and plays a completely different role in the world today from that which it played only a hundred years ago.

"The great change is that hardly any significant number of people now interpret life in the terms proposed by the major religions. They no longer live for salvation, no matter how defined, but for life on this earth, in this world, interpreted in purely non-religious terms. There are Jewish thinkers fond of pointing to the fact that Judaism has always emphasized this life rather than the life beyond the grave, as if to suggest that this puts Judaism in a better position than Christianity in the modern world. But in so doing they deceive themselves. Judaism governed all the minutiae of life, not to enhance it in the way in which contemporary men wish to enhance it, but to fulfill the word of God. And insofar as it is inconceivable for modern man to live so as to fulfill the word of God (unless that word is bowdlerized-which many ministers of religion are happy to do), Judaism is as badly off as any other religion."

It seems to me that this description of modern man by Mr. Glazer is very close to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer once called a world that has come of age. Bonhoeffer speaks of the ordinary man "who spends his every-day life at work and with his family and of course with all kinds of hobbles and other interests too." This man has "neither time nor inclination for thinking about his intellectual despair and regarding his modest share of happiness as a trial, a trouble, or a disaster." As Bonhoeffer indicates, there are those-and we see this today in the whole movement which clusters around the work of Paul Tillich-who say that this is not man's real condition and that man underneath all this facade of complacency is still haunted by the "ultimate questions," is still bothered by death, by the threat of non-being, and by a great pulsating question mark, the answer to which the Christian religion has called by the name of God, Tillich's

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ground of being." This seems to impute an idealist kind of continuity to man, abstracted from his cultural situation which is not in fact realistic.

I wonder how accurately this describes the man of whom Bonhoeffer and Glazer speak, the "well-adjusted" mid-twentieth century man, beautifully trained to a high level of mass consumption of the material benefits of science and technology. Though threatened by death this man is extremely difficult to describe with any accuracy as one who finds his ultimate concern in death or in the threat of nonbeing, let alone God. He is by no means without concern about death. But he seems to have managed rather well to postpone concern about death to its "proper" place in the temporal linear sequence. Whether from cancer, cardiac causes, or nuclear attack, death tends to become a technical matter, representing more the issue of a 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 the concerns of the horizontal plane on which he finds himself, his professional and social status, his sexual and other interpersonal relations, and the dislocations and turbulence of a revolutionary world. He is lacking, as Tillich has described him, "the lost dimension" of life, the dimension of religion, but he does not seem to be suffering in his missing of it. His suffering has other foci. And as Glazer so beautifully puts it, even when he seeks economic and political justice, he seeks it not as a rendering of the will of a righteous God but as a movement toward the most widespread possible hedonistic participation in the bounties of the earth.

II

Perhaps we can be assisted in understanding this modern man by the words of the central character in Camus' The Stranger, when he says at the close, as he awaits his execution for a meaningless killing,"... for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe." And he has just said at the close of a bitter encounter, when he leaps upon his would-be comforter, the prison priest, "I was sure of myself, sure about everything, far surer than lie; sure of my present life and of the death that was coming. That, no doubt, was all I had; but at least that certainty was something I could get my teeth into-just as it had got its teeth into me.

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I'd been right, I was still right, I was always right. I'd passed my life in a certain way, and I might have passed it in a different way, if I'd felt like it. I'd acted thus, and I hadn't acted otherwise; I hadn't done x, whereas I had done y or z. And what did that mean? That, all the time, I'd been waiting for this present moment, for that dawn, tomorrow's or another day's, which was to justify me. Nothing, nothing had the least importance, and I knew quite well why. He, too, knew why. From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze, had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come. And on its way that breeze bad leveled out all the ideas that people tried to foist on me in the equally unreal years I then was living through. What difference could they make to me, the deaths of others, or a mother's love, or his [the priest's] God; or the way a man decides to live, the fate he thinks he chooses, since one and the same fate was bound to 'choose' not only me but thousands of millions of privileged people who, like him, called themselves my brothers. Surely, surely lie must see that?"

In other words here is modern man radically prepared to act on the assumption that there is no God. When there is no God, and no belief in life after death, as Dostoievski foresaw, death takes oil quite another meaning, and so, it seems, does ultimate concern. It is obvious from the Old Testament that vital faith in God did not always entail belief in life after death. But today's rejection of belief in life after death does not result from a rediscovery of the vitality of ancient Hebrew faith. Rather it arises from the same sources which result in the rejection of belief in God.

Now one can argue that there have always been times when men said there was no God, there have always been times when men turned their back on that reality, there have been whole periods of widespread unbelief and idolatry and that this is no different from any crisis which Christianity has faced in the past. It seems to me that this is quite inaccurate and unfaithful to the situation. In such periods in the past, there remained a substratum of theologically integrated assumptions to which reference could be meaningfully made and to which men could be recalled from their apathy, their defiance, their atheism, and their idolatry. In fact it was this very substratum of theologically integrated assumptions against which "defiance," atheism" and "Idolatry" could be meaningful terms. Even the pa-

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gan distortions and corruptions of which St. Paul speaks in Romans, Chap. 1, bespoke a framework of assumptions which to Paul testified to the God made manifest in Jesus Christ, and known somehow among all men.

The vast difference between ours and any previous age is that man, who widely accepts the assumptions of Camus' hero, or Bonhoeffer's world come of age, or Glazer's modern man, retains within his cultural memory the knowledge that there was a time when this was not the case and that consequently his age has abandoned and repudiated assumptions which have been held for centuries and millennia. If one lumps together the Hebrew-Christian era one might see it running about three millennia. Or one may prefer to date the beginning with Augustine and Gregory the Great. The era was always more or less but never wholly Christian in terms of obedience to God, but always Christian (or Hebrew) in its bedrock assumptions. As Gabriel Vahanian has put it in his book, The Death of God (1961), all ages have been theologically post-Christian; ours, however, is both theologically and culturally post-Christian.

III

At what point one chooses to date the close of the Christian era is a matter of considerable latitude, whether one dates it in the late seventeenth century when the great Puritan divines were desperately seeking to hang on to the runaway economy and commercial morality of their times, or with the Enlightenment, or with the Industrial Revolution, or at the breakdown of the "Victorian synthesis" in Europe at the beginning of the First World War, or the breakdown of something like that same synthesis in America during the Great Depression or at the beginning of the Second World War.

The fact remains that modern man has surrendered those bedrock assumptions of the Christian era. When he practices religion he practices it quite instrumentally for purposes which he knows deeply within him are those of autosuggestion. There is a bedrock skepticism under the facade, all too easily probed, among many even of the most pious. This is not Christian doubt, the other side of the struggle of faith. This is a skepticism which knows it is correct. And within modern man's cultural memory he retains the knowledge that for millennia his ancestors lived in an era with other bedrock assumptions than his own, an era which can be called Hebrew-

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Christian, and that he no longer lives in that era and, what is more, that he no longer wants to.

IV

Other critics of the notion of a post-Christian era say, well perhaps it's post-Christian in Europe and America but it's still pre-Christian in those parts of the world which have not yet been confronted with the fullness of the Christian Gospel, Asia and Africa, for example, the so-called underdeveloped nations and cultures, or the areas of the great "ethnic" religions. All together they make up a great pre-Christian section of the globe which is still waiting for the coming of a Christian era.

This seems patently false because the post-Christian culture of Europe and America, this optimistic social, scientific and technical, short-run pragmatism of which we spoke, is sweeping the world. The notable leaders of the emerging nations of Asia and Africa are almost universally committed to the cultural assumptions of the West whether they be in the rather extreme form of Marxist-Leninist Communism or in the milder form of Franco-British-American pragmatism. There seems little hope today that the spiritual heritage of their cultures can continue to make itself felt in the face of the power and impressiveness of the industrial technological might of the West which they so desperately need if they are to survive and develop. Thus it seems that they too arc living in an era and in a set of cultural assumptions which are post-Christian in character and they, too, can be described as entering a post-Christian era.

We are not suggesting a counsel of despair, least of all are we suggesting that God is dead; but we arc saying that the Churches and Christians must face up quite honestly to the nature of our time and even to the way in which it invades our own lives, our own way of thinking, our own posture and stance, our own fundamental assumptions. Then it seems to me two fundamental questions must be asked. First, if we take theology seriously, what is the theological meaning-there must be one-of a post-Christian era? What is the meaning for the Church, what is the meaning for the world, of an era which is essentially post-Christian? What is the meaning of this era in the purpose of God? The second question is programmatic. What does such an era suggest to the Church for a programmatic shaping of its life and its service in such a world?

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How are Christians going to speak, or more relevantly, to act in terms of a God with a purpose? If we really do not accept the assumption that God is dead, how do we speak for and serve a living God in a world which acts on the basis that he is dead? Must Christians abandon all possibilities of cultural communication and relevance and retire within a kerygmatic enclave? I think Christian faith to be itself cannot live long under such conditions. If not, what are the alternatives? I think we do not yet know what they are. We do not know what language must be spoken, what style of life is required of us. 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.