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The Modernist Element in Protestantism
By Edward Farley

"It should not be necessary to say that the earthquake, the displacement, and the decline of mainline Protestantism is an occasion of great temptation.... After the earthquake, we begin to envy religious movements that glitter with power and slick success and wonder whether to imitate them. After the earthquake, we look for aspects of our heritage we might blame for our failures: our ecumenism, our commitment to scholarship, our social witness. In the face of these things, I want to try to make a case for another response, a kind of calling we have in the situation of displacement and decline, a calling to recover and more vigorously pursue a certain part of our heritage."

SOME MAINLINE Protestants are tempted nowadays to think that these are, to borrow from Dickens, "the worst of times." Mainline denominations, once used to vitality, growth, and widespread influence, experience torpor and decline. In denomination after denomination, the response to this experience is intensified denominational consciousness and repristination. But the historical past of the Protestant mainline tradition is complex. It includes not only the event of the Reformation and such seminal figures as Calvin, Knox, Wesley, and Campbell, but a century-long series of controversies in which these denominations struggled to come to terms with historical ways of understanding Scripture, science, and ecumenism. The outcome of this struggle was, to use the term that arose in the struggle itself, the modernist element in the Protestant mainline. This element is also part of the vitality and contribution of mainline Protestantism and it risks much when it attempts to repress or forget it.

The thesis of this essay is that the modernist element has so powerfully shaped the mainline past that most of its tenets are still taken for granted, and I shall use the history of the Presbyterians as the primary example. The point, however, holds for other mainline denominations as well.

Edward Farley is Professor of Theology, Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He is the author of Ecciesial Reflection (1982) and Theologia (1983). This essay which develops Dr. Farley's notion of "critical modernism" is adapted from one of the Caldwell Lectures delivered at the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, March 1989. Together with other lectures in the series, Westminster/ John Knox Press has issued a symposium entitled The Presbyterian Predicament: Six Perspectives (1990).

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In Colonial times, American religion meant the Episcopalians, the Congregationalists, and the Presbyterians, the big three.¹ Today, there are more Roman Catholics in America than all three combined, more Muslims than Episcopalians, more people who identify themselves by the Hindu method of transcendental meditation than Presbyterians. American religion now has, as Martin E. Marty says, a new map.² And what is mapped is a massive realignment of American religious demography, a vast earthquake that has shifted the so-called mainline denominations from the center to the margin of American religious life, a marginality not just of numbers but of vitality and influence.³ Occupying the new center are large, rapidly growing, aggressive and politically and religiously conservative Protestant denominations. The story of the shift begins a long time ago and includes the creation of the American melting pot from waves of European migrations that added new populations to English New England and the Spanish West, the arrival of a large population of black slaves and recent new populations of Latins and Asians, and a low birth-rate and low natural growth of the mainline denominations.⁴ The effects of the earthquake seem long-term. No one expects a shift back to the way things used to be.

The marginalization of mainline Protestantism is not a secret, something known only by a few statisticians and historians. We all experience it in some way. We experience it when we see the major communication instrument of our day, television, completely dominated by fundamentalist religious entrepreneurs, when we drive through the small towns and see old mainline churches with 75 members in 100 year-old churches with five new and very large edifices built by Nazarenes, Southern Baptists, and Churches of Christ, when we realize that our national presidents and candidates for presidents can be Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist, black Baptists, and Greek Orthodox, when we are no longer surprised to find huge religiously conservative book stores in our large shopping centers or to learn that conservative seminaries count students by the thousands instead of the hundreds. We could go on. The earthquake, that is, the displacement and decline of mainline Protestantism, is now a fact of life. This fact is not just a realization that there are many religious traditions different from our

¹ See William McKinney and Wade C. Roof, "Liberal Protestantism: A Sociodemographic Perspective," in Robert S. Michaelsen and Wade C. Roof, eds. Liberal Protestantism: Realities and Possibilities (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1986).
² Martin E. Marty, A Nation of Behavers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976).
³ The notion of a shift assumes some sort of previous establishment, in this case, the hegemony of a "Protestant establishment" from Colonial times into the twentieth century. For an account of the forming of this establishment, see Martin E. Marty's Righteous Empire (New York: Dial Press, 1970); H. Richard Niebuhr's The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper, 1937); and Digby Baltzell's The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (New York: Random House, 1964).
⁴ Much of this story is told in Martin E. Marty's The New Shape of American Religion (New York: Harper, 1959), but see also Robert Bellah's Beyond Belief (New York: Harper, 1976) and Richard D. Brown's Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976).

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own. It is the experience of a loss of national or local visibility and influence, an experience of being on the fringe, and on the slope of decline in numbers and vitality.⁵

In the case of the Presbyterians, this experience has now evoked a response to existing on the fringe and on the slope.⁶ The Presbyterian response may be typical of other denominations. A number of important statistical, historical, and sociological studies have been instigated with more to come. New programs come forth from central headquarters with catchy titles that sound like ad agency commercials: Celebrate, New Age Dawning. Three new confessional statements have been written in twenty-five years. And there is a new denominational self-preoccupation. Presbyterians are more worried about whether their candidates for the ministry go to their own Seminaries. They talk much more about "the Reformed tradition." But for the most part mainline Protestants do not know what to do. They cannot wave a magic wand and increase their birth rate, turn the clock back so as to cancel the American melting pot. Most of them would not even want to return America back to the big three or to some sort of established, national religion that would stem the tide of secularism.

It should not be necessary to say that the earthquake, the displacement, and decline of mainline Protestantism is an occasion of great temptation. Communities are like individual human beings in the sense that times of decline, uncertainty, insecurity, and threat are times of greatest temptation. When threatened with harm, extinction, or even change, we human beings will latch on to all sorts of ideologies, worldviews, demagogues, authorities, and institutions which we think may save us. Times of peril and insecurity are times of idolatries and absolutisms. After the earthquake, things we thought we had outgrown begin to look attractive again; a new, narrower denominationalism, provincialism, and nostalgia, even schemes of the old dogmatics. After the earthquake, we begin to envy religious movements that glitter with power and slick success and wonder whether to imitate them. After the earthquake, we look for aspects of our heritage we might blame for our

⁵ The last twenty years have seen a number of works that describe the removal of the Protestant mainline to the margins of religious and cultural influence and the rise of a new and conservative religious center. One of the earliest books that called attention to this was Jeffrey K. Hadden's The Gathering Storm in the Churches (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), but see also Dean M. Kelley's Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (New York: Harper, 1972). Since the earlier works, major studies have gotten underway on the changed demography of American Protestantism. See Wade C. Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1987); Carl Dudley, Where Have All Our People Gone? New Choices for Old Churches (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1979); Dean R. Hoge and David A. Roozen, eds. Understanding Church Growth and Decline: 1950-1978 (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1979).
⁶ Some observers have noted mainline responses to their own decline. John R. Fry's controversial little book is largely a description of the response as it was occurring in the 1970s, The Trivialization of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (New York: Harper, 1975). See also John H. Leith, The Reformed Imperative (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1988), p. 21.

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failures: our ecumenism, our commitment to scholarship, our social witness. In the face of these things, I want to try to make a case for another response, a kind of calling we may have in the situation of displacement and decline, a calling to recover and more vigorously pursue a certain part of our heritage.

I

Since a religious community is as corruptible as any other human community, its past and its heritage may be as much a burden and shame as a glory to be celebrated. We Presbyterians do not escape the truth of Jesus' parable: our historical existence is a mixture of wheat and tares. There are things to be celebrated in our liturgical, moral, and theological tradition, a tradition founded by Calvin and Zwingli, honed by seventeenth century European school theologies, narrowed by the Swiss school, and broadened and modified by the French of Saumur, the federal theologies of Holland, and by English Puritanism. In a time of uncertainty and peril and of the ascendancy of conservative Protestantism, we are prone to see that tradition as a kind of preserve which needs maintaining, a deposit of doctrines that need recollecting. But deposits of doctrines are not the genius of this tradition. Most of the doctrines of the Presbyterian heritage are shared with Lutherans and Christendom at large, and most Presbyterians do not even know the specific controversies that set the rather subtle doctrinal differences between the Reformed churches and their opponents. If we did know them, we would probably regard them as obsolete. If we have a genius or "way," as John A. Mackay called it, it is not so much some distinctive deposit of doctrine as a way of transcending our deposited traditions under the constant nagging pressure of the question of truth. Mackay argued that the Presbyterian way was a passion for truth and objectivity that opposed all equating of human expressions of "the truth as it is in Jesus with the truth itself."⁷ John Leith speaks of the historical genius of Presbyterianism (which he thinks is seriously endangered) to be a concern with the content and the life of the mind. And Brian Gerrish describes those in the Reformed tradition who "claimed the right to a critical use of tradition," as "in principle claiming nothing more than did Luther and Calvin." In other words, the genius of the Presbyterian heritage is its critical modernism.⁸

Two reasons make the term modernism an unrecoverable term. First, many decades separate us from the time when it functioned to describe the alternative to fundamentalism. Second, the new mood of conservativism and repristination gives the term a pejorative connotation. Furthermore, some philosophers and theologians are drumming for something they call postmodernism. Like modernism, this term too is ambiguous,

⁷ John A. Mackay, The Presbyterian Way of Life (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1960).
⁸ Brian Gerrish, Tradition and the Modern World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 7.

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and now functions to describe both conservative and liberal agendas. But I know of no "postmoderns" who reject the major tenets of what used to be called modernism. I use this term modernism, however, because it was the term used in the past for a modernizing movement that mainline Protestantism has never rejected. I use it, thus, to show the continuing historical connection between what we now take for granted and "modernism." Even as a historical term, modernism is not without its ambiguities. First, it is ambiguous because it describes quite different movements of recent religious history. Initially, it named a turn of the century Roman Catholic movement condemned by Pius X. In Protestant history, it is used in two ways, first, as a label for the extremely liberal wing of Protestantism, in which case a distinction is posited between evangelical liberals like Charles A. Briggs and William Adams Brown and modernists like Shailer Matthews and G. B. Smith. Second, it is also the 1920s term for the theological alternative to fundamentalism.⁹

As a theological category, modernism contains a deeper ambiguity. On the one hand, it describes the tendency to displace the distinctive witness of the gospel with secular or cultural contents. In this sense, the translation of Christian faith into categories of pop psychology or of theological symbols into the categories of a philosophical system are modernisms. Let us call this usage "secular" or "cultural" modernism.¹⁰ On the other hand, modernism names an openness to the various discoveries, sciences, and criteria that have arisen with modernity and to the task of making positive use of these in the interpretation and understanding of the Christian gospel. This is the modernism that evoked the theological battles of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and that posed the issues of the modernist-fundamentalist controversies over biblical criticism, certain doctrines, and evolution. Let us call this "critical" modernism.

Christianity as a type of religious faith is especially open to both cultural and critical modernism, because its conviction that no specific cultural form, nation, ethnicity, or gender is necessary to salvation prompts it to appropriate a great variety of cultural forms and worldviews. The history of the Christian church and its theology is a history of continual new appropriations of culture, such as Roman auctoritas and law into church structures, the ancient goddess tradition into Mariology, Platonism into theology, Victorian manners and customs into piety. And the appropriations of culture continue. Virtually all contemporary American religions from the Protestant mainline to the nouveau riche conservative churches have elements of secular modernism. The therapeutic mindset seems to dominate the mainline churches,

⁹ One of the best histories of modernism as a strand of North American Protestant Christianity is William R. Hutchison's The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976).
¹⁰ Kenneth Cauthen uses the term "modernistic liberalism" to describe this form of modernism. See The Impact of American Religious Liberalism (New York: Harper, 1962), chap. 2.

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but it is also very much present in the conservative churches.¹¹ The functionalist rationality of technological and media religion and of professionalism is especially manifest in the conservative churches, but it is also present in tamed form in the mainline churches. Contemporary Presbyterianism is modernist in both senses. Its secular modernism shows up in therapeutic, managerial, and professionalist shapings of its congregations, bureaucracies, and seminaries, but in an arrested form. Compared to Robert Schuller, Presbyterian therapeutic and professionalism is very much tamed. And "critical" modernism has so deeply shaped Presbyterianism that the matters which modernists fought for in the 1920s are now simply taken for granted. I want to focus now on the critical modernism of the Presbyterian heritage, arguing that if Presbyterians want to have a guilty conscience, it should be about the tacit, hidden secular modernism eating away at their vitals; and that if Presbyterians have a call, it should be to continue and sharpen their critical modernism.

II

A quick study of the history of Presbyterianism in America shows what seems to be the opposite of a community inclined to modernism. From Colonial times to well into the twentieth century, the Presbyterian church appears to be a very conservative, tradition-oriented community, successfully resisting all attempts at confessional change, hunting down heretics whenever they appear, and even introducing subscriptionist vows for ordination to protect its doctrinal deposit.¹² But let us see how Presbyterians today react to the following issues. Do they subscribe to the five points of Calvinism as articulated by the Synod of Dort or to all the affirmations of the Westminster Confession? Do they see the Westminster Confession as such an absolutely adequate expression of the gospel for all places, peoples, contexts, and future times that it should never be revised, amended, or added to? Do they think that historical methods are appropriate and useful in studying the Bible, determining who wrote its texts, its layers of traditions, the situations these layers reflect? Do they approach the Bible on the assumption of literal inerrancy of every specific text so that the geology, dates, historical descriptions, and biology of those texts are guaranteed to be accurate and true for all time? Do they reject the discoveries, methods, advances of modern geology, biology, genetics, astronomy, and the evolutionary account of the biological history of species? Do they reject the social character of the Christian gospel, the sense in which it has to do with the transformation of corporate evil, systems of oppression,

¹¹ Phillip Rieff has described the pervasiveness of the therapeutic worldview and of "psychological man" in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper, 1966).
¹² The most detailed history of the pre-World War I Presbyterian response to modernizing influences at work in the nineteenth century remains Lefferts A. Loetscher's The Broadening Church (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1954), especially the first nine chapters. See also Maurice W. Armstrong, Lefferts A. Loetscher, and Charles A. Anderson, eds. The Presbyterian Enterprise (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956).

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because they see its terminating point in the creation of individual virtues and the salvation of the individual soul? Do they reject other branches of Christendom and denominations as simply false or highly suspect versions of the gospel under the conviction that there is one true version of Christianity, the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition? My guess is that most Presbyterians answer "No" to these questions. I further suspect that they answer the "No" with an accompanying yawn, because these are not the issues they find themselves agonizing over, worried lest they be tried for heresy before a church judicatory. At one time, most Presbyterians would have answered "Yes" to these questions.

What happened? Did an angel of the Lord appear to a denomination mired in its own traditionalism and effect an overnight miracle, so that Presbyterians all woke up the next day with a different set of convictions? Here we need more than a quick study of Presbyterian history. Six issues stand out in two centuries of struggle in the Presbyterian church between critical modernism and its opponents. I state them in the form of questions.

(1) Is the Calvinist theology and system modifiable?

(2) Are the confessions and creeds which express the corporate faith relative, fallible, and revisable?

(3) Is a thorough-going historical approach to the Bible proper, useful, even necessary for its interpretation?

(4) Is the gospel and theological truth part of and consistent with the larger truth of the world which the sciences, philosophy, and the humanities attempt to discern?

(5) Is the Christian church a pluralism of communities called to cooperate with and respect each other and even celebrate each other's differences?

(6) Is the Christian gospel social in character?

Is Reformed theology modifiable? The question is, of course, rhetorical. Reformed theology was never simply a single fixed system. However, by the eighteenth century, a very conservative form of that theology had taken root in Colonial America that was subjected to criticism and change by the New England theologians in the line of Jonathan Edwards. This movement that liberalized the Scotch-Irish side of the Presbyterian tradition found expression in the nineteenth century in what was called the New School, and an actual separation of Presbyterians took place for the thirty-two years following 1837. The issue? The truth, coherence, and adequacy of the conservative form of Calvinism. The modifications continued in the form of the New Theology, and, while Karl Barth and neo-orthodoxy may seem conservative to some theologians, that movement is a radical modification of Calvinism in its seventeenth century scholastic and puritan expressions. We take the modifications of the old Calvinism for granted.

Are Presbyterian confessional statements revisable? Since the Presbyterian tradition was born amidst a protest against a church absolutizing its own creedal and theological tradition, one would expect Presbyteri

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ans to have a high sense of the fallibility and revisability of their confessions. But something tends to happen to prophetic movements of protest and to vital religious movements. Because they experience the new power of grace through the work of their founders and since this work is expressed in their confession, they tend to give the same absolute status to these human works as they do to the God who saves. Thus, the Presbyterian heritage introduced what had not been there in the beginning, the attempt to assure the gospel's truth by subscriptional vows to specific doctrines; hence, five doctrines, for many, were regarded as the essence of Calvinism. And with this came a resistance to altering the Westminister Confession in any respect.

But a counter-current had been at work since the early nineteenth century. The Presbyterian participation in the revivals in the Great Awakening resulted in what was called the New Side, which was both a more moderate Calvinism and a re-affirmation of experiential religion in the face of an over-emphasis on religion's doctrinal and legalistic aspects. After the Civil War, this counter-current found a clear and decisive voice in a Chicago pastor, David Swing, who said plainly that church confessions were not deposits of absolute truth but statements having a useful function for a specific time and situation in the church's life.¹³ Pressed by the charges brought by Francis Landey Patton, Swing was tried but vindicated by the Chicago Presbytery. We all know the outcome of the counter-current: the decision to let a cluster of confessional statements express the church's beliefs, thereby undercutting the absolute authority of any one confession or statement within. And one of those confessions says explicitly, "No one type of confession is exclusively valid, no one statement is irreformable." (The Confession of 1967, Preface) The implication is that the expression of the church's faith should occur in continuing restatements that reflect new knowledge, new situations, new imageries, and new perspectives. Confessions are not absolute and timeless; they are experiential, fallible, utilitarian, and situational.

Is a historical approach to Scripture proper and useful? The formal principle of the Reformation was sola Scriptura. Scripture alone is the measure of the church's witness. But what is Scriptura? According to a very ancient and even pre-Christian paradigm, Scripture means a collection of texts whose originating inspiration guarantees the truth and accuracy of each specific asserted content. The unit of Scripture's truth is, accordingly, the sentence, the exegeted verse. Elements in Renaissance textual scholarship and even in some of the Reformers are at odds with this paradigm. Nevertheless, the paradigm was elaborated into a technical hermeneutic in seventeenth century Protestant school theology, a heritage transmitted to American Presbyterianism. There was no single refutation of this paradigm, rather a deluge of historical evidences for the human, churchly, and theological character of Scriptura.

¹³ For the story of the controversy surrounding David Swing, see Hutchison, op. cit., chap. 2.

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Originating in Europe long before, the historical approach to Scripture was slow in coming to American Presbyterianism, and when it came, its exponents were put on trial with the result of the church losing both its most gifted biblical scholar of the day, Charles Briggs, and its main New School seminary, Union Theological Seminary.¹⁴ But these victories of Old Side Presbyterianism could not hold back the massive tides of linguistic, archaeological, literary, redactional, and other scholarships that simply swept the old paradigm away. Thus, the historical approach to Scripture has now been taken for granted in the seminaries for forty years or more.

Is the gospel consistent with the larger world of knowledge and the sciences? Another wave, virtually a tidal wave, was approaching the shores of Protestant America, the wave of the new sciences of earth, cosmos, and life. Like the Roman Catholic churches of Galileo's time, the Protestant churches of nineteenth century America offered initial resistance. The scientific challenge to biblical cosmology and biology had begun in the sixteenth century, so that in the seventeenth century, the Rev. Thomas Burnet wrote a work, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, trying to reconcile biblical geology and the new science. In post-civil war America, evolution was the test case, dividing such neighbors as Charles Hodge (against) and James McCosh (for). This, too, turned into a deluge, not because of scientific consensus about the mechanism of evolutionary process, the Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection, or its alternatives, but because of the massive data concerning the antiquity and the continuity of all life-forms on our planet. The evolutionists lost the Scopes trial but won the war. With evolutionary biology and other sciences, the church was presented a choice: reject the sciences and their piling up of new evidences, thus placing faith, religion, God, gospel, and church on what appears to be the side of falsehood, reality-denial, and even dishonesty, or remain open to the truth wherever it appears and of whatever kind it is. The Presbyterian church rejected the way of scientific obscurantism and opted for the second alternative.¹⁵

Is the Christian church a pluralism of communities whose differences call for cooperation and mutual respect? The experience of different and competing forms, of religion, and even of Christianity, has been in the Christian movement since the days of the Apostle Paul. But the issue of pluralism is not the same as the issue of diversity. A pluralist posture grants legitimacy to the other form of faith and even celebrates its difference. In earlier times, the branches and denominations of Christendom were related to each other through controversy, polemics, and competition, a relation which assumes that one's own version of the gospel is the one true version, the one and only authentic instance of

¹⁴ See Loetscher, chaps. 3, 4, and 6.
¹⁵ Brian Gerrish's Tradition and the Modern World is not specifically on the response of the Reformed tradition to the sciences. It does, however, offer detailed studies of a group of Reformed theologians, Schleiermacher, Nevin, Schaff, etc., whose theologies constituted a response to the changing world of the sciences and philosophy.

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obedience and faithfulness. To the degree that a denomination had this posture, it simply competed with other denominations and regarded cooperation and union as disobedient compromises. In the earlier epoch, virtually all forms of Christendom retained this posture and Presbyterians were no exception. Guided by this posture, Presbyterians spawned new denominations and underwent splits in their ranks: old side and new side, Old School and New School, north and south. On the other hand, this history, too, has a counter-current, an uneasy conscience about denominationalism, which prompted the desire to reconcile divided Christendom. One Plan of Union was directed even to the Congregationalists, and while that was voted down, the church has successfully accomplished a number of reunions. From the 1920s on, self-absolutizing and narrow denominationalism was replaced in the Presbyterian church with an ecumenical spirit that resulted in participation and even leadership in the national and world ecumenical movement and in a mood to reconcile the branches of Presbyterianism and explore union with other denominations.¹⁶

Is the Christian gospel social in character? Centuries of Christendom have been dominated by the assumption that the deep structures of political, economic, racial, and gender oppressions are not changeable. The gospel gives human beings resources to bear up under those structures and prepares them for the after-life; it is not addressed to the fallen and unchangeable structures themselves. This posture of an earlier time has also been displaced. Well known is the role the Presbyterian clergy played in Colonial times in changing one deep political-structure, the shift from colonial monarchy to a democracy, expressing thereby a vision of a certain kind of society and its attainability. But it was especially the Social Gospel of the early twentieth century that pressed the issue of the social character of the gospel. And while its framework was an optimism and progressivism, which few people now share, its legacy is at work when the church takes its stand against dehumanizing movements of modern culture, when it confronts racism and sexism within itself and the larger society, when it debates issues of militarism and the pollution of the planet. Rare now is the view that the gospel is simply a message about a trans-earthly destiny of individual souls. Few doubt that the Christian gospel has something to do with systemic evil and our social well-being.

These six spheres are now part of the deep convictions of the Presbyterian church as of other mainline denominations. They are also what modernism was all about. These were the very issues debated and fought over in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The outcome was what Lefferts A. Loetscher called "the broadening church," and the content of this broadening resides in these six convictions. None of these

¹⁶ The major history of Presbyterian ecumenism is Stanley Rycroft's The Ecumenical Witness of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Philadelphia: Board of Christian Education, 1968). See also John A. Mackay, op. cit., for a strong emphasis on ecumenism in the Presbyterian heritage.

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issues is really up for current debate. No judicatory is going to refuse ordination to a candidate who thinks the Westminster Confession is fallible, contextual, and revisable, who thinks the gospel has something to do with racism, sexism, and ecology, or who uses Von Rad or Bultmann in the study of the Bible.

When we look closely at these convictions, we realize that they are not just six separate issues, but are part of a single woven fabric. For instance, if we think Scripture should be studied historically because its texts have a history and are rooted in historical settings reflecting the historical responses of the authors, we surely are also going to think about John Calvin, the Westminster Assembly, the Reformed tradition, and the Presbyterian denomination in the same way. And if we are open to the evidences of historical method, that is going to be part of a larger openness to any and all evidences from any and all sciences. These convictions then are part of one over-all conviction. Expressed negatively, it is the refusal to make anything human and historical a timeless absolute, dwelling above the flow of contexts and situations. One refuses to give this status of the timeless and the unconditional to one's denomination, to one's confessions, to one's heritage, even to one's Scripture. In this negative sense and as a theological position, modernism is a radical prophetism refusing to identify any human entity with God. Expressed positively, it is the conviction that God's presence and truth come through human, but historical and fallible vessels. Positively, modernism is the conviction that God redeems, transforms, and empowers in and through the earthen vessels of the creaturely, the cultural, the historical. If we need certainty about salvation, modernism would direct that to God and God alone, not to the vessels that deliver it.

III

Let us conclude with three affirmations. First, critical modernism is not only part of recent history but is an expression of a very old and deep heritage. Second, critical modernism is present in an arrested form today, and there is ambivalence and even resistance to it. Third, the heritage of critical modernism sets before us what might be the calling of the Presbyterian church, and perhaps others, in a time of decline.

What does critical modernism have to do with the older and deeper heritage of Reformed faith? It can be said that it has nothing to do with it simply because it is a "modernism." Thus, it can be seen to be an accretion, something that was not always there and which can be easily dispensed with, a coat we can shed whenever we want, especially when other denominations turn the heat up. But there is something that is a deep part of our heritage-a certain persistent and trouble-causing concern for truth. Reformed churches fought with Lutherans over the ubiquity of Christ's ascended body because of a philosophical concern. They argued that the idea of an all-present body was philosophically implausible. Something about this heritage cannot settle for a version of the gospel that is mere nonsense, that requires the sacrifice of the

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intellect, that is anti-intellectual, that assigns faith to the sphere of emotion only, that reduces truth to functions and to pragmatics.

I am not sure where this came from. Calvin's debates with his Roman Catholic opponents show a sharp and ruthless intellectuality which argues what is the case about Christian history and the meaning of texts. Perhaps that set the tone. Perhaps it is the sense that all of creation is the sphere of God and God's working and no manifest truth about that world can be simply dismissed. Whatever the rootage, when this posture enters the modern world, it cannot turn its back on what is happening. And if evidence accumulates as to the historical character of the church's earthen vessels of redemption, it cannot turn its back on that. This is why I think that critical modernism is not a superficial addition but an expected response in; at least, the Presbyterian heritage.

How is critical modernism a part of the present church? I have argued that it is part of our taken- for-granted convictions. I now want to argue that it is present in an arrested form. What does this mean? It means we have not pressed the Calvinist theology and its themes and dominant metaphors hard enough. We are too quick to think that Karl Barth's restatement handles all the problems and is utterly sufficient. A new chorus of voices has raised issues of the nature of revelation, the effect of situations on theology, the hegemony of Western male modes of thought, and many other themes we dare not ignore. And listening to those voices will mean a continuing reinterpretation of our theological tradition. In the writing of new situationally-based confessional statements, we have acknowledged the historical and revisable nature of confessions. But the confessions we write tend to stay away from hard theological questions, and few state with full conviction and in an unambiguous way the modernist themes we all accept.

An exception is the statement in the Confession of 1967 that "the Scriptures ... are nevertheless the words of men, conditioned by the language, thought forms, and literary fashions of the places and times at which they were written."¹⁷ But this modernist notion of the historical character of the Bible seems to be present in the church more as a whisper than in a loud voice. The result is that the clergy take it for granted and the laity and their church-school materials still know little about it. Another result is the way we tend to use the Bible in preaching; that is, by making direct leaps from specific literary units called texts to the sermon. As to the sciences, we may be amused by the creationist issue of the fundamentalists. But for the most part, there is among us a moratorium on the whole issue of what the gospel is in the setting of a world like ours, where human beings and the planet earth cannot be assumed to be the center and telos of creation, where biologists and physicists both argue for an ultimate randomness in the microevents that constitute reality, where virtually everything about individual and social human existence has some evolutionary and genetic background. We

¹⁷ The Confession of 1967, Part I, Sec. C, #2.

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have rejected fundamentalist obscurantism only to be content with two utterly separated worlds, the world of actual events studied by the sciences and the world of faith. As to postures of ecumenism and pluralism, we have acknowledged that other Christian communities than ours can be vessels of God's salvific working, that there is a place for this variety of traditions. But we are only on the threshold of acknowledging that God might be salvifically working through the communities of other religious faiths, that Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Native American religions are genuine faiths, and that because they are, we can learn from them even as they might learn from us. As to the social character of the gospel, we seem to be caught in a division between the denominational bureaucracy as the voice of this conviction and congregations whose programs are more oriented toward privatized religion than to public issues.

All of these cases of arrested development coalesce in the way our present life is structured, a kind of clericalism in which the clergy are the bearers of the modernist legacy and the laity are on the outside. Promoting this structure is the way we conceive of clergy education and church education. The former educates in a rigorous and disciplined way; the latter nurtures, shapes, and forms but does not educate. And because it does not, the heritage of critical modernism is largely invisible and its themes are puzzling and unclear to the laity.

The final question concerns our calling in a situation of decline. Given the anxiety a time of decline invokes, we can anticipate one response to the heritage of modernism. This, it says, is what has gotten us in trouble. To persist in this heritage will do us in. It is true that the top three so-called liberal denominations have declined the most. But we must be cautious in our explanations of this.¹⁸ They are also the denominations with the lowest birth rates and with the largest numbers of young adults abandoning the church for something else. This is not a loss of members to conservative churches but a loss of the young to culture and secularity. What is it about the mainline churches that accounts for this? It could be argued that it is their critical modernism, and a mood that prevents them from pressing religion on their young in authoritarian ways. But it is almost inconceivable that the young of these churches would be more attracted if the churches became narrowly denominational, unecumenical, indifferent to systemic social evils, pushing creation science and inerrant Scriptures. What seems to be more likely is that critical modernism, as a set of deep convictions, is not communicated in the course of the education of the church. Rather, it is experienced only ambiguously, as a sort of general mood. The result is that the mainline churches present to the young a set of confusions. There is no position held strongly enough to attract them-or repel them-so they simply wander away. In the face of this, part of the calling then as a modernist

¹⁸ Dean Hoge (Hoge and Roozen, op. cit., chap. 4) warns that a decade of studies do not support the thesis that specific policies within liberal denominations are responsible for their decline.

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church in hard times is the creation of a serious, rigorous program of education for the young in which the convictions of critical modernism and the interpretation of the gospel that attends them is clearly set forth.

We must acknowledge the success, growth, and vitality of churches that do not hesitate to make absolute claims about themselves and their interpretations, who offer certainties, who make unabashed and even manipulative use of media technology. Religions that develop specific pieties and casuistries and claim these are the very will of God and that make absolute claims for their traditions and institutions tend to do well. But the question is, are we in the business of religion? Our calling is not to religion but to faithfulness. It is not to growth and success but to a witness to the gospel. More specifically, our calling in a time of decline is to renew our deeper heritage as it as been carried into the themes of critical modernism. Perhaps not every Christian group has this calling. But some Christian communities must attest to the modern world that the Christian faith does not require rendering confessions, ancient authorities, or the denominational bearers of witness into absolutes. And some Christian communities must attest to the modern world that the Christian faith can exist in positive relation with the best knowledge of the time. Is this a strategic risk? Of course, since measured by quantity and success, all faithfulness is a risk. The Protestant mainline must take the risk, reaffirming not only its classical Reformation past but that element in its past that marked its attestation of the gospel in the modern world.