THE CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION--PROTESTANTISM
The rise of Protestantism was the consequence of many factors which
temporarily combined and worked in the same direction. There are those
who maintain that it was an unhappy accident, which threw back the
wheels of progress some hundreds of years. But those who bewail the
division of the Christian Church forget that division is a sign of
incompatible tendencies within a body not flexible enough to contain
them. Strife is irrational only when we cease to be realists. The
appearance of Protestantism in the sixteenth century is only one
instance among many of the inadequacy of any one institution to
comprehend the life of its time. Were we to call the roll of the
heresies of the past, the names which would appear upon the list would
be far more numerous than popular history records. Just because
Christians believed that they possessed a final truth they were
intolerant and persecuting. The natural desire of an institution to
maintain itself and its interests intact added its force to this
unfortunate characteristic. But the tragedy of the situation was, that
this final truth could not prove itself by an appeal to experience and
reason. It had, therefore, to resort to violence. The logic of
revelation is the logic of the _auto da fe_. The logic of science is
the logic of tested {199} fact. Science can have hope of agreement;
theological religion has no right to such a hope.
Protestantism had its ethical, political, economic and doctrinal sides.
It was not merely a religious movement. Had it been so, it might more
readily have run its course as a reform movement within the
institutional life of the time. Had the Northern nations possessed
greater power in the councils of the Church, it is just possible that
the change would have been brought about without the occurrence of an
open rupture. But the Church was too centralized and too rich to
escape conflict with the growing nationalism. For our present purpose,
however, this larger social setting of Protestantism is not important.
What we wish to study is the religious tendencies covered by this term.
What advance did they contain? What was the weakness of the movement?
The setting of Protestantism was entirely supernaturalistic. So far as
the fundamental doctrinal assumptions are concerned, there is
practically no difference between Catholic and Protestant.
Protestantism represented a reform, and not a revolution. Or, to put
it more deeply, human nature is such that the real revolutions take
centuries of growth and come like the thief in the night. The modern
scientific view of the world is revolutionary in the philosophical and
true sense of the term; while the sharp sectarian conflict is only a
battle over secondary things. Since it has so commonly been assumed
that the Protestant reformation represented a decisive break with the
outlook of the Middle Ages and somehow marked a milestone in man's
intellectual progress, it may be worth while to consider whether such
really was the case. A disinterested study {200} of the reformation
must, I feel sure, convince the student that the crisis in the Church
was concerned more with matters of theological doctrine and church
polity than with the ideas underlying Christianity. It brought no
essential change in the inherited and firmly entrenched tale of the
past. The puritan poet, Milton, sings of "man's first disobedience" in
much the way that St. Augustine would have done. The weapons of the
great advance had not yet been forged. We are the ones who will be
called upon to face the vision of the New Spiritual World and to be
faithful to its demands upon our loyalty and integrity. "The defection
of the Protestants from the Roman Catholic Church," writes Professor
Robinson, "is not connected with any decisive intellectual revision.
Such ardent emphasis has been constantly placed upon the differences
between Protestantism and Catholicism by representatives of both
parties that the close intellectual resemblance of the two systems,
indeed their identity in nine parts out of ten, has tended to escape
us. The early Protestants, of course, accepted, as did the Catholics,
the whole patristic outlook on the world; their historical perspective
was similar, their notions of the origin of man, of the Bible, with its
types, prophecies and miracles, of heaven and hell, of demons and
angels, are all identical.... Early Protestantism is, from an
intellectual standpoint, essentially a phase of mediaeval history."
But when we look at Protestantism as a social and religious movement
rather than an intellectual movement, we see that it stood for certain
relatively new emphases which did indicate a breaking loose from
mediaevalism. Many sincere men felt the need for a deeper, more
personal assurance of salvation than that {201} offered by the
traditional, substantial sacraments of the Church. Religion seemed to
them a more personal affair than it had overtly come to be. By means
of an act of faith, the individual hoped to secure a new relation to
God in which his sins were forgiven and salvation attained. Salvation
thus became a more internal act than it had been, and particularly one
in which the ecclesiastical institution played a far less important
part. The new tendency emphasized the individual and personal as
against the institutional and formal. Catholicism had inherited too
much ritualistic and magical trapping to harmonize completely with the
keen ethical sense of the younger and simpler people who were growing
to adulthood.
A new movement is on the defensive and, when too completely estranged
from the institutions of which it is a reform, almost inevitably tends
to be narrow and intense. Now Protestantism was essentially an
emphasis on the soul's salvation by meeting certain requirements of a
doctrinal and ethical type, and so it tended to drop those functions
and relations which the Mediaeval Church included within its scope. It
is this clear-cut intensification of one factor and the exclusion of
others which we must bear in mind when we compare the early Protestant
sects with the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.
Deep religious fervor easily leads to narrowness, especially when the
spiritual values regarded as essential are subjective and rather
formal. Because confessional Protestantism was as other-worldly as the
Mediaeval Church, it cut itself loose from aspects of life which might
otherwise have mellowed it and saved it from formalism and hardness.
We may laugh with {202} Swift at the freaks of Jack, at his dourness
and savagery, his strained interpretation of the scriptures and his
lack of social tact, but we must, if we would be just, always bear in
mind the outlook which Jack had inherited.
The Protestant of to-day does not usually realize how different the
Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was from that
which he sees around him. Protestantism has mellowed and absorbed
values and interests which it would once have repudiated as irrelevant
to the tremendous drama of salvation. Take mediaeval Catholicism, with
its ideal of a Church-directed society, its doctrines of sin and
redemption, its belief in another world overshadowing this one, its
strain of asceticism, and remove the sacramental power of the Church,
and you have early Protestantism before you. Instead of fleeing the
world and its temptations, the Christian was ordered to live in it like
a sentinel on his guard. He was not to set his heart on creaturely
comforts nor love the things and interests of this life overmuch, but
rather to trample them underfoot while gazing upwards. No wonder that
the early Protestants were a stern people; they were a community of
secular monks. They had the joy of union with God and assured
redemption from sin, but this world was not their true home. Whereas
the Mediaeval Church had tempered the asceticism of historical
Christianity by the distinction between what was imposed upon clergy
and what was demanded of the laity, Protestantism was unable to
continue this distinction because all believers were priests. All had
to come up to the same high standard or risk damnation. This
exaltation has in large measure departed from Protestantism, and we who
{203} have grown into a mellower idea of salvation are inclined to
judge this set of ideals as narrow and even morbid. We forget that
puritanism was the expression of an ascetic religious view of the world.
It was in the sphere of church government that Protestantism made its
great changes by attempting to return to the polity of the early
associational form of Christianity. The more radical forms of
Protestantism, especially, inaugurated a movement in the direction of
what we now call democracy. There can be little doubt, in fact, that
these waves of religious individualism assisted the growth of
democratic and republican forms of government. This influence was
unplanned and relatively accidental because religious individualism was
more concerned with the right to worship according to the dictates of
conscience than with political rights. But man is a psychological
whole, and so a reform along one line is bound to affect other phases
of life.
As we have already pointed out, the alterations introduced on the
theological side were by no means revolutionary from an intellectual
standpoint. And yet the spirit and mood of religion was deeply
altered. The process of salvation was differently conceived, and this
led to the thought of a more direct relation between man and God than
had been admitted in the older Church. God was believed to have
guaranteed redemption to those who had faith in Jesus Christ as the
redeemer. This tenet led to an emphasis on the bible and on personal
experience. It was through a study of the bible that men were led to
this personal faith, and the bible was accordingly conceived as the
representative of God upon earth. What wonder that it was {204}
substituted for the Church and tradition as an infallible and
unchanging authority! The logic of the movement is clear. It has been
pointed out by one scholar that Protestantism introduced the doctrine
of infallibility before the Roman Catholic Church did. Calvinism
selected the Augustinian dogmas of election and original sin as its
foundation, and used them in such a way as to become a fighting church,
a congregation of the elect, fearless and self-reliant.
Bibliolatry soon flourished, and sects sprang up on every hand, ready
to suffer persecution for their particular interpretation of passages.
Theology became a series of fanatically held dogmas supported by
copious quotations. And the intellectual atmosphere within which these
dogmatic theories arose was of the most conventional and limited sort.
Broadness of outlook upon life was the exception rather than the rule.
The general assumption of the Christian scheme of the world remained
unchallenged, while the bitterest disputes broke out in regard to
points which seem to the educated man of to-day quite unimportant.
Such a course of events was to be expected, and could not have been
prevented. Perhaps it did more good than harm, because it encouraged
independence on the part of the masses. Its only cure was not
authority but education. And the world was not yet ready for universal
education. At certain periods, a tremendous waste of mental and moral
energy is simply inevitable: men cannot help going around and around in
the same circle of ideas in the most pathetically earnest fashion. The
conditions of progress are not always ready. Take the knowledge of the
clergy. It was confined to the classics, the patristics, to massive
tomes of theology, to {205} the bible in its Hebrew and Greek original.
It was not from these fields that enlightenment was to come. The truth
is, that Protestantism was slowly modified and mellowed, almost in
spite of itself, by the pervasive influence of the great world
civilization that grew up around it and to which it was more
susceptible than was the reorganized Catholic Church. Let us look at
this point more closely.
The reformation was an effect as much as a cause. The nations were
coming to their own in the midst of a more complex social life full of
human interests and values. The Confessional Churches which sprang up
were unable to establish themselves securely enough to dominate the
civil powers. The consequence was, that secular civilization was
released from the sway of religion and its supernaturalism.
Government, science, art, industry, and literature flourished in a
freedom they had seldom before experienced. The disorganization of
religious institutions enabled many tendencies, hitherto kept in the
background of men's consciousness, to push to the front and reveal
their power over the human soul. Do we not know that many great
mediaeval doctors had to fight against their love of literature and art?
Protestantism may be said to have been an unintentional cause of the
modern world.
Protestantism broke up into an array of sects and tendencies as it fell
upon the prism of human temperament. Radical sects appeared, like the
Independents, the Quakers, the Baptists, the Pietists, and the
Congregationalists. These were radical in a social way rather than in
an intellectual way. They were subjective variations of the inherited
motives. Largely, they represented a revolt against authoritism, and
{206} emphasized the inner light or a very mild appeal to reason. Yet
we must call them sects, just because they had much the same spirit and
assumptions, and exaggerated what must be regarded as slight
differences. Still their very number gave a milder direction to
religion and made the idea of toleration more natural. There was
safety in numbers. On the intellectual side, the Unitarian movement
deserves attention for its aid in the dethronement of the old dogmatic
structure. Alongside of these more subjective and emotional offshoots
of Protestantism arose philosophical idealism to add a touch of vague
pantheism and a flavor of kindly mysticism. In short, the confessional
type of Protestantism mellowed under the influence of a more rational
social organization with its gentler life. Reason was gaining in
concreteness and power, and human values were gaining in
attractiveness. The Old Testament gradually gave way to the synoptic
gospels of the New, while asceticism dropped away like a mantle. I,
myself, well remember when religion was largely a matter of taboos on
the moral side. "Thou shalt not" outbalanced by far the suggestion of
concrete lines of positive endeavor. Such spiritualism was passive and
suspicious rather than active and creative. During the last thirty
years, Protestantism has passed insensibly into a gentle religion of
the spirit, sentimentally inclined toward life and permeated with
popular notions of science and philosophy. The sermon of the Puritan
concerned itself with the two dispensations; the sermon of the modern
minister is full of quotations from the poets and reveals the growing
influence of the social sciences. The negative note is hardly audible.
This {207} world and its spiritual problems occupies the focus of
attention.
Modern Protestantism is not over certain of its creed. In fact, so
uncertain is it of the doctrines it wishes to champion that it much
prefers to discuss human problems, and to expend its enthusiasm in the
advance of a gentle code of ethics attached to the teaching of Jesus of
Nazareth. In a very real sense, this attitude is to its credit, for it
is positive and genuinely spiritual. Moreover, it bears witness to a
consciousness of the decay of the supernaturalistic perspective which
dominated and misled the world for so many centuries. The spirit and
knowledge of the present age has undermined the traditional beliefs,
and the average protestant is too well educated and too much in touch
with current movements to be unaware of this situation. He is not
certain whither he is being led nor does he so very much care; he is
content to drift with the tide of human development, assured that the
world is becoming better and broader in its purposes and possibilities.
Creed and dogma are dropping into the background and will soon be
discarded, while the spiritual values which grow out of, and express,
human nature and life are steadily forging to the front.
The church as an institution is only one among many. And it must
further be remembered that the life of society reaches beyond
institutions, much as the life of an organism is greater than the
habits and structure which it uses. Religious institutions did not
create the modern world with its gigantic advances in commerce, its
acute applications of science, its subtle art, its daring adventures in
living, its bold philosophies, its high {208} level of education, its
experiments in new social forms. They have had their share in the
work, no doubt; but they have been acted upon even more than they have
acted. Because of its lack of internal unity and its antagonism to
authority, Protestantism could offer no effective barrier to the growth
of the new outlook. Often suspicious, it yet fought in the open. The
trial of strength went against it ultimately because its foundation was
inadequate. Myth cannot fight against science and hope to win. The
verdict of the hard-fought contest is becoming evident to both winner
and loser. Let us hope that the loser will take his defeat manfully
and gradually adapt himself to the New World that is dawning. The
Protestant Churches may then become groups of voluntary associations
filled with high spiritual purpose and ministering to the growth of a
finer social and economic life. The main necessity is to find a
function that is real and vital in the judgment and conscience of the
time.
It is undeniable that the various churches will long play a beneficent
role in the social economy, but the question may well be asked whether
this role would not be more significant and sanely creative if the
hampering traditions and beliefs of the past were shaken off. For
these traditions are the shelter of interpretations and social habits
which are ill-adapted to the needs of the present. They slow down the
energy of institutions and cloud their vision. They lead the sincerest
of people to use tools which have lost edge. For instance, is not
civic and moral education far more effective than melodramatic revivals
which stir people's emotions and leave them without chart and compass
before the problems of their every-day life? The church must {209}
learn prevention; it must go to school to the social and mental
sciences. Only so will it conquer that dilettantism which accompanies
the absence of methodical intelligence.
But the churches have the right to respond that they are not the only
sinners in this regard. Institutions of all kinds display the same
tendency to retardation, to conservatism, to waste of energy, the
beliefs and habits of the past clinging heavily about them as
impedimenta. It is seldom that a new life wells up quickly enough
within them to break this inertia. Perhaps all that the younger
generation has the right to ask is a spirit of tolerance and even
respect for all loyalties which attach themselves to things of good
repute, and a more catholic admission of all human values into the
class of spiritual things. The scientist is working for things of the
spirit, and so is the artist, and so is the social reformer, and so is
the educator, and so is the day-laborer who does his work for the sake
of some dear one.
The sea of faith of which Matthew Arnold sang is indeed at its ebb; but
a new sea of faith is welling up in the human soul, faith in humanity,
in this life here and now, a faith in common things and common people,
a faith in noble things and their gifted creators, a faith founded in
sympathy and in mental integrity and rooted in the actualities of life.
It is a faith grounded on the high will to assimilate and carry further
the spiritual values which the human race has slowly achieved in its
travail of the centuries. Not to relinquish but to surpass, not to
deny but to transform: thus will the new day be won. Let the spiritual
forces which have grown up around religion, industry, science,
philosophy, {210} citizenship and art fall to with a will, to bring
some fuller measure of the long-dreamed-of Kingdom upon this earth,
which has been and forever will be man's sole home.
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