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The Church in the World
By Charles C. West

THE POST-CHRISTIAN EXPLOSION

It would be better perhaps to say nothing about the Editorial with which this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY begins and just sit back and wait for the explosion. For the article is a bomb-intended as such by its writer without a doubt-to tear the roof off our comfortable religious view of the world around us and let in the harsh daylight of the world as it is. Like every bomb it is intended to administer only a roughly just punishment. Much that is good and valuable is bound to be blown up along with the central target. One can picture many quite innocent readers wandering shell-shocked from the scene, their practice of piety badly injured, the house of their faith in rubble, because it stood too close to that misplaced Church at which the explosive charge was aimed. But these casualties they can accept. They are the poor in spirit whom Jesus called blessed, and it would be a privilege to offer the true Gospel to them, amid the angry cries of those whose vested interest in a Christian-worldview and in the peddling of religious medicine for the sicknesses of men, had been destroyed for good. If only one could be sure that this bomb were so fashioned and aimed as really to hit its target!

It is lingering doubt at this point which prompts a few more words of comment in these pages. There are a number of places besides the proper target on which the bomb could fall. There is conservative orthodoxy, for example, whose structure is more like a rock than a building. Bruce Morgan's analysis might dent it a little, and sweep away what little vegetation of social relevance had found a foothold on its crags, but leave it more sure in its other-worldly solidity than ever before. There is the lush jungle of our clubby Church life for which an explosion followed by a patch of sunshine would be a fascinating novelty. The author might well be invited to repeat his bombing act weekly in different places to chastize and entertain the faithful-only to find that in due course the jungle filled in each

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hole again. Or-yet worse-the bomb might land in the swamp of our religious and social anxiety (there are formations of marsh reeds which look deceptively like Churches here-see Freud) and send aloft a geyser of self-pitying mud. All these would at least still be direct hits on something. But the most frustrating consequence of such an explosive as this is the way it seems always to be landing in someone else's back yard. How easily the secularists may observe with satisfaction that at last Christianity is blowing itself up, without noticing that the charge is aimed just as surely at their illusory ideals of harmony, progress, and the goodness of man. How quickly the layman can assume that here at last a theologian has blasted away the minister's irrelevant verbiage without seeing how much of his own unexamined "practical Christianity" is now resting on air. And how easily the minister can accept this analysis as a picture of the lamentable state of mind in his congregation unaware how much of his own theological arsenal has been pulverized!

In view of all this we venture a few remarks concerning the nature of the weapon and its delivery-in the interests of the laudable destructive intentions we believe the writer has in mind.

First, concerning the target. This is "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." Because this no longer is present in the world, it has become "post-Christian." But is not this target at once too narrow and too broad? Too narrow because it is not just theologically integrated Christian assumptions which are being questioned by the modern secular mood, but all religious, and even all ideological, attempts to give meaning to reality as a whole and man's destiny in it. In Christendom this has come about in two stages. First the corpus christianum-the total system of faith, philosophy, science, and social order built on Christian ideas -was destroyed by aggressive humanist faiths and practice. Natural law, without ceasing to be morally and scientifically absolute, became a function of human reason. The state, without ceasing to be honored, became the expression of the people's will. The triple attack of Freud Marx, and Nietzsche introduced the theme of the revolutionary conquest of self-alienation-the secular drama of sin and redemption-which far from overthrowing the religious character of humanist ideology, only deepened it. This is why salvation by Psy-

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choanalysis, Communism, and Existentialism along with a host of other minor ideologies are all fighting the same battle for survival today alongside the remnants of the corpus christianum against the post-religious world which Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the first to describe. Nor is this secularized world a sick one, despite its indifference both to ultimate meaning and to salvation. Morgan has done his argument a disservice by quoting Camus' Stranger. Such sick souls and anti-social characters are epiphenomena, just as were fanatic enthusiasts in a religious age. The surprising thing about secular man is how well he relates to other men, how practically he solves the immediate problems of life, in short how human he can be without any doctrine of man and his destiny.

When one looks into the world outside of Christendom one sees the same process at work. The revival of non-Christian religions is a curiously secular business, just as has been the revival of Christian religion in America. (See John H. Hick, "Is Religion an American Heresy?" THEOLOGY TODAY, April, 1961.) Necessary as a means of national and cultural integration, as a basis for morality and social responsibility, it is being continually undermined by the recognition that after all it is not the truth about the power which controls the life and development of an Asian nation. In this confusion lies the urgency and the opportunity of the Christian mission today.

In short, whether we are commissars, gurus, bonzes, mullahs, priests, ministers, psychoanalysts, existentialists, or humanist philosophers, the bomb has landed in all of our back yards.

But on the other hand "post-Christian" is too broad a term for this world. This has to do with the second remark-about the nature of the explosive. Whence comes this secularizing dynamite? Our thesis is that, far from being something which arises for the first time in this century, it is the negative consequence of the work of God himself in history through his Covenants, old and new. The substratum against which it works is not so much theologically integrated assumptions (these can be quite non-religious, as indeed, for the first Christians, they were) but the tendency to invest nature, or culture, a philosophy, or a man with ultimate significance and divine power. The first secularizing act described in the Bible was the Creation. Secular history began when God refused to name his name to Moses-"I will be who I will be." The Biblical history is one long struggle of God's living Word with the religious ideas and

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institutions invented to do him honor and secure his favor. It was not for nothing that the early Christians were called atheists-because there was so little of that religio in them which Cicero described as an attitude of reverence and piety toward the gods.

To be sure Christianity became a religio. Augustine first applied the word to it-in the sense that it is simply the outward expression of what it means to be tied (religare) to God. The corpus christianum was endowed with divine significance despite the careful distinction in medieval theology of a secular realm of thought and life. It is not surprising, therefore, that the modern secular attitude can make very little of our theology and our Churches. But this is our fault, not the Gospel's. The explosive which is crumbling our religious institutions and ideas is first of all in the Bible, and only as a reflection of the same Holy Spirit at work, also in the world outside.

Our third remark concerns the means of delivery of this explosive. Do we really want a bomb? Should we not recognize that secular men trying to be human (or in Barth's illuminating phrase "cohuman") 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 hearts there is neither truth nor power in them? Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of a "hidden discipline," a discipline of prayer (including hard Biblical and theological work) and service to the neighbor until the day when the right, the liberating word, the word which would judge and redeem, would be given to the Christian. In other words, is not Christian existence, the existence of living without religion in the world as a calling to share in the presence of Christ there, itself a continual explosive and at the same time a source of hope for a world which finds it so hard to be genuinely relative, human, and secular over a long period of time? 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, however uncertainly, in acts of obedience to the Lord of that world. "He that doeth the will of my Father shall know of the doctrine."

THE NUCLEAR BOMB

No more poignant example of Christian perplexity in a post-religious world can be taken than the effort to think our way, with-

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out utterly losing our moral integrity, out of the thermonuclear arms dilemma, which John C. Bennett presents elsewhere in this issue. By common consent the dilemma is intolerable. No intelligent American can any longer be unaware of the danger we are in on a quarter hour's notice of practical annihilation by missiles with thermonucelar warheads. Herman Kahn, in trying to make the world after a nuclear attack a rational credible place while looking the danger straight in the eye, has only succeeded in shocking us into clearer awareness of how irrational and incredible it would be, and how little would be left, even assuming "victory" in the exchange, of what we now value as freedom, democracy, prosperity, and health. But this in itself would not produce the dilemma. Nations have looked their own destruction in the eye before, yet lived and fought -with conviction. What is new in this situation is that the circumstances of the conflict make us potentially an active party to the destruction of the civilized world.

One cannot help but share the apprehension of many a watchful neutral about the two giants wrestling on a flimsy bridge over an abyss-a bridge they also are standing on. What consolation if it were the friendly, the protective giant whose false move broke the girders? Suppose it were our nation whose technical miscalculation, whose maladjustment of means to ends, whose misjudgments of the enemy's aims, should initiate the nuclear exchange. Suppose our pursuit of relative ends, a raw material source here, the stability of an unavoidable dictator there, should involve us in this total war. Fundamentally it is our uncertainty about ourselves which makes the nuclear dilemma intolerable.

In one sense this plight has proved a boon for religion. Even the most redoubtable secular analysts have been forced to project their bit of ideology, their little pattern of hope, on which to build their proposals for action. Salvation by technology, the retaliation system so automatic and invulnerable that the enemy knows in advance exactly what will happen to him, or the anti-missile missile so perfect as to cancel out nuclear aggression, is one of them. The old hope of a Communist world crumbling from within under the pressure of containment still sparks many an article, though it is burning dim. The exposure of such ideologies' blind spots, however, only deepens the problem.

Haunted by the power they have released, atomic scientists have

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begun talking to theologians and philosophers with an urgency unknown since the Middle Ages. The whole tradition of natural science has come in for reinterpretation in the light of its spiritual origins and implications. (See especially: H. Butterfield, The Origns of Modern Science; C. von Weizsäcker, The World View of Physics; M. Hesse, Science and the Human Imagination) Churchmen aye invited to sit with engineers, politicians, and military men when questions of policy are subject to reflection. Theologians lecture at the Army War College. Religious leaders, furthermore, have not been slow to offer what is sought: a clear, polishcd doctrine of natural law as the basis of a tough inimical power vs. power approach to the Communist world by Father John Courtney Murray; a reassertion of the conditions of just war-one whose means arc appropriate to limited ends-by Professor Paul Ramsey. But countless preachers have tried the same with less scholarship-to provide for a people uncertain of itself, a moral and spiritual explanation of the ground on which they stand-a religious philosophy of the Good and the True, which is linked to and justifies certain policies they may pursue if not toward success, at least toward salvation.

This will doubtless continue in times to come. But does this not reflect, rather than conquer, the frustration both of the churchman and the layman? For the churchman quickly discovers that his religious principles either work as a sedative for the conscience of the statesman, scientist, and soldier, confirming them in the very policies which made them uneasy, or they arc dismissed as "divorced from political realities." And the layman whose concern these realities are goes away, even if he feels justified, basically disappointed with his religious adviser. He had hoped to learn about a new reality at work in the midst. of politics and military strategy, and all he has heard is what he knew already but cannot apply to the reality for which lie is responsible. The break comes at that point where religious principles are applied to political practice. So a Christian layman, James Reston, takes Paul Tillich. to task for refusing to justify the use of nuclear weapons to defend Europe, even if necessary. "Ministers may accept defeat on ethical grounds, but political presidents may be impeached for following their advice." So Paul Ramsey, after arguing that the very moral nature of warfare itself precludes the use of thermonuclear weapons or even their possession, since the), can be used only against the enemy's people,

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not against his forces, avoids the problem by turning the whole relating of this moral reality to military practice over to the statesman. So even John Bennett's gentle suggestion that perhaps the nuclar arms race has gone so far that Protestant churchmen should raise moral protest anew, is parried by the realist Kenneth Thompson: "I would prefer the moralist to master a strategy of restraint, silence where policy dictates, and self-discipline (which) would support limited goals, conventional military strategy, limited accommodation, probing for possible agreement. I see this as far more constructive than a strategy of moral protest" (Christianity and Crisis, Nov. 13, 1961, p. 203). Restraint, silence, and self-discipline are not the characteristics of crusaders. But perhaps just for this reason they point us the way forward in this impasse.

"Our traditional language," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1944, himself a clergyman without the support of his Church for his involvement with the statesmen conspiring against Hitler, "must perforce become powerless and remain silent, and our Christianity today will be confined to praying for and doing right by our fellow men. Christian thinking, speaking, and organization must be reborn out of this praying and this action" (Prisoner for God, p. 140). Not the religious answer nor the moral principle, but the "hidden discipline" of relation to God and the open discipline of sharing the problemsand the perplexity-of other men is the basis of Christian existence also in the area of nuclear policy.

DISCIPLESHIP IN THE ATOMIC AGE

What Bonhoeffer's "hidden discipline" mentioned above would look like today has been carefully spelled out in the Report of a commission of the World Council of Churches, entitled, "Christians and the Prevention of War in an Atomic Age." Though strangely ignored by many theologians and misunderstood by others, this document is a helpful guide for us, not so much in the conclusions it reaches as in the spirit and method of its work. (Available from the Publications Office, World Council of Churches, 17 Route de Malagnou, Geneva, Switzerland. The quotations are from page 23.)

The Report calls for: "a discipline of wisdom which would discriminate amidst the clash of propaganda and the pressure of our

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technological society and which keeps man as person in view as the object of God's love." For the commission members this meant de-ideologizing technology and controlling its fruits for the common good. Does it not an for us a ruthless facing of the facts of the nuclear dilemma we are in? Are we not called to be suspiciously analytical of all armament programs which present themselves in terms of technological necessity, or which wear the mask, religious or not, of righteousness, or the promise of success? But are we not called, on the other hand, to demand of nuclear pacifists an equally rigorous analysis of the human consequences of their stand, including the violence which would result from other forms of resistance than military? "Every proposal," writes Tom F. Driver, "is a gamble-with the odds against us. No proposal rests on a moral position that is not an affront to righteousness. Our destiny is out of our hands, and our leaders' hands. To recognize this is the only chance one has of bringing things under even partial control" (Christianity and Crisis, Nov. 27, 1961, p. 213). The discipline of wisdom in the midst of nuclear technology with a steady eye on God's love for the human person is to tear the mask from every effort to avoid this fact, most of all the effort of theologians to speak of intrinsically moral or immoral acts.

Closely related to this is "a discipline of penitence which in the conflicts of our day concerns itself more with the sins of our own nations than with the faults of others." For the commissioners this meant a healthy sense of the relativity of each nation's interest and of international politics as an area of give and take where no country's policy or moral analysis is absolute. It meant that at each stage in nuclear armament, or of nuclear war should it break out, we must guard as never before against special interests (e.g., one of the armed services), false motives (e.g., anger at Khrushchev's threats), or even frustration in defeat (e.g., in the case that after nuclear destruction, retaliation, though possible, would accomplish nothing for us).

Is not all this as true for us? If so there is a corollary to it, for the Church itself. Nations do sin in all these and other ways, even with the connivance of Church members. Is it not at times the calling of the Church to bear witness to particular feasible lines of action in nuclear policy which are not taken for reasons of' pride, fear, interest group pressure, or some other, and to spell out the judgement which results from our failure? This I take to be the real contribution of

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Paul Ramsey's book, obscured by the "just conduct of war" argument. It is possible to shift from a thermonuclear deterrent which can only he used against populations to a nuclear one which can be pinpointed on military objectives, and to conventional armaments for limited wars, not subject to escalation. Not to do so when we can undermines our national existence in the providence of God.

The Report affirms further: "a discipline of love that acknowledges an unlimited responsibility to all men, both friends and enemies, the oppressor and oppressed, however bitter the conflict may be." The commissioners spelled this out in terms of the responsible use of power to discover creative ways of mitigating and settling international conflict, at the cost if necessary of national prestige or the adjustment of national economics to help those less favored. They spoke of the pragmatic development of international law around the United Nations. Should we not add that act of Christian empathy which enables us to see things from the perspective of others and to accept them as they are? Despite the growing army of Sovietologists in this country our understanding of Russian motives and points of view remains appallingly wooden and oversimplified. What actually does "deter" the Russians? Is it only the thermonuclear warhead aimed at their cities, or are there other desires and fears which influence them? Are there not some of these latter which we could respect and accommodate? The same questions apply yet more to the collection of neutral nations each with its complex of ambitions and problems to which the whole nuclear arms race means only a total threat, no matter whence it comes.

Finally, the Report speaks of: "a discipline of hope that refuses to give up the struggle for a more just and ordered life for mankind, and a discipline of faith which when men are afraid empowers them and guides their Judgment in the knowledge that God is victorious." It might not be amiss to recognize that most of the fears which ride us when we face the prospect of nuclear war are misplaced. We are afraid of our national destruction and all that goes with it. We are afraid of the opinion of the world of nations and seek to be respectable before its bar. We are sometimes afraid of ourselves and of our national reactions in extreme emergency. The grisly debate about shooting one's neighbor at the shelter door only brought it up out of our subconscious. But it is God, the final determinant of our situation, whom we should be fearing. The situation is out of

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our hands but not out of his, and if destruction comes, it will be his judgment. But this means that those days which are still left to us are pure gifts of his patient grace, sources of hope in a situation which offers no hope of its own. This is why we and our secular neighbors together can maintain our discipline in the face of guilt-laden choices on every side. It is why we can look the consequences of our acts full in the face without running from our responsibilities. It is also why we Christians, both clerical and lay, should not be afraid to speak with hesitant tones or even to be silent on nuclear strategy, until we know that our word is a witness and not another moral idea.

As Bonhoeffer put it: "It is not for us to prophesy the day, but the day will come when men will be called again to utter the Word of God with such power as will change and renew the world. It will be a new language, perhaps quite unreligious, but liberating and saving like the language of Jesus, which will horrify men, and yet overwhelm them with its power. It will be the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language which proclaims the peace of God with men and the advent of his kingdom. 'And they shall fear and tremble for all the good and all the peace I will procure unto it'-Jer. 33: 9" (D. Bonlioeffer, Prisoner for God, pp. 140-141).