The Necessity of Commitment
The restoration of the things that are wanting
The strengthening of the things that remain.
— Lancelot Andrewes
What reason is there to suppose that our civilization, in contrast to civilizations which have preceded it, will endure? The person who has not faced this question is hardly alive. That many different ways of life have flourished and have then declined is beyond contradiction. Consequently, there is no high probability that the fate of our civilization will be different — unless. The precise character of this "unless" is of such importance as to attract and to hold our best thinking, both individually and in groups. It is our most urgent question.
As we analyze the record of the experience of the past, we realize that neither technological nor material success is sufficient for endurance or even for survival. Life goes down, whatever the physical conditions may be, unless there is a relevant faith held by a sufficient number of the best minds. And not just any faith will suffice. It must have certain features, and it must be held with both intellectual integrity and dedication by self-conscious groups of people. Herein lies the crucial relevance of what we mean generally when we refer to the Church, since endurance requires both
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a spirit and a fellowship. Little is gained without the spirit, and the spirit cannot be maintained by separated individuals. Therefore the Church or something like it must be cherished, criticized, nourished, and reformed. The Church of Jesus Christ, with all its blemishes, its divisions, and its failures, remains our best hope of spiritual vitality. However poor it is, life without it is worse.
The paragraph above is a brief statement of a philosophy of civilization which has been elaborated elsewhere by many scholars and need not, therefore, be elaborated now. Suffice it to say that it is not absurd, that it can be defended with intellectual cogency, and that to the present author it seems true. Accordingly, in investigating our present predicament, we may proceed from this thesis on the assumption that it is a sound one. Assuming the necessity of the Church — or some similar society with an equally redemptive function — we need to ask fearlessly some penetrating questions about the existent Church. Has the salt lost its savor?
It is not likely that any valuable discussion of the possible alteration of the pattern of the Church's life will result unless we begin with a frank recognition of our relative failure. Strong Christian leaders — of whom Bishop James Pike of the Episcopal Church and Bishop Gerald Kennedy of the Methodist Church are outstanding examples — have had the courage in recent months to use the popular press to make our people realize that in large measure the contemporary Church is in retreat. Bishop Pike's remarkable essay on this subject, published in Look in December 1960, came as a surprise to many readers. They expected such an analysis from outsiders, but millions had failed to realize that the severest critics of the contemporary Church are the insiders who love her.
The seriousness of our plight is largely hidden from us because of certain marks of superficial success to which we
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can always point for comfort if we have any desire to do so. Thus, it is possible to take comfort in the fact that official church membership in the United States is higher than it has ever been in our entire history, whether we count absolutely or relatively. Membership is about three times as great per capita as it was at the time of the Civil War. In the second place, we can point to large budgets. A good many local congregations have budgets of more than one hundred thousand dollars a year, and these budgets are successfully underwritten. Some of our pride in this particular achievement is dimmed when we discover what a large proportion of the normal budget is devoted to the support of the local organization, particularly in the payment of salaries and the upkeep of local buildings— but in any case the budgets are large.
A third occasion for satisfaction is found in attendance records. The great attendance at public worship, long exhibited by Roman Catholics, is now generally matched by Protestants, the best success of this kind occurring in the southern parts of our country. Often the effectiveness of a clergyman is measured primarily by the crowds which he can attract, and by this standard some clergymen are highly successful. Of course there is always a strong possibility that the ease with which large crowds are gathered may not long continue. The United States is markedly different from the countries of northern Europe in this regard, and fashions have a way of moving west, so far as civilizations of European origin are concerned.
A fourth occasion of comfort is to be found in the construction of new ecclesiastical buildings. In some communities the church which has not just completed a building campaign or is not about to start one is relatively rare. For the last few years we have spent in the neighborhood of one billion dollars a year on new physical structures for church purposes. Some of the new buildings are truly impressive and some are even
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beautiful, while nearly all represent genuine sacrifice on the part of numerous donors. It is important to recognize, however, that some of the motives for buildings are far removed from the motives of a redemptive society. In some areas the buildings minister to pride, and nearly all of them play some part in the ecclesiastical power struggle. Idolatry of the church building is one of the real dangers of our contemporary culture. The fact that the Church and the building are identified in popular speech is particularly disquieting. The point is more than semantic; it is indeed something of a revelation.
A more generalized feature of our society which obscures the relative failure of the Church is its public acceptance. We cannot normally have a public occasion, however secular, without religious representation. Thus, at President Kennedy's inauguration the committee in charge felt that it was wise or necessary to give public recognition, through vocal prayer, to four communions: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Jewish. Furthermore, all four prayers were printed in The New York Times. This national recognition is only a consummation of what occurs at countless lower levels. In most communities leading clergymen are automatically invited to membership in the best luncheon clubs; ministers of all faiths are given reduced rates on the majority of railroads; and every church has the immense advantage of nontaxation of its physical property.
Before we take too much satisfaction from popular acceptance it may help our sense of historical balance to remember that the popular religion of ancient Greece succeeded in maintaining its shrines after the real vitality had departed. Representatives of Greek religion provided "services" long after what went on at the shrines had ceased to have any relevance in the life of business or education or government. It was to existent yet really obsolete shrines that the Apostle Paul
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referred when he began his famous address at Athens by saying, "Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious" (Acts 17:22).1 They were religious; and their religion had some good features, as scholars like Gilbert Murray and Edith Hamilton have shown; but their religion died in spite of its assets. It died because it could not meet the tests of intellectual validity and social relevance; it could not match the new vitality of the fellowship which stemmed from the life and teaching and death and resurrection of Christ.
Many astute observers in our day are suggesting seriously that our Christian faith is now in essentially the same condition as that of the popular religion of Greece four centuries after Plato. Few have stated the danger more vividly than has Karl Heim, who compares the Church to a sinking ship:
The Church is like a ship on whose deck festivities are still kept up and glorious music is heard, while deep below the water-line a leak has been sprung and masses of water are pouring in, so that the vessel is settling hourly lower though the pumps are manned day and night.2
When we speak of the present sorrowful condition of the Church, we must be careful not to suggest that we are comparing our own day with that of a generation ago. In the last fifty years there have been some gains, particularly theological ones. No sensitive Christian can read Harry Emerson Fosdick's autobiography3 without gratitude for the liberation from some debilitating forms of intellectual bondage which the majority of our ancestors experienced. What we must say is not that the condition of the Church is worse than
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it was—which may or may not be true — but rather that the Church is far weaker right now than it might be. Areas could be occupied which are now neglected; resources could be employed which are now wasted. The real problem before us is not whether our faith has declined, but how it can be made more truly relevant to contemporary life and its urgent needs. However good the contemporary Church is, it is not good enough; it is not so good as it might be, in view of its glorious founding and in view of its current unexploited resources. And its adversaries are strong.
The purpose of assessment is not to indulge in unproductive pathos or to boast of our undoubted successes. It is instead, to give us such a clear understanding of where we are that we may be able to go forward, using powers which may otherwise be wasted. Realism and idealism are both needed and needed together. The defense of engagement in sober realism is always that without it there is no real possibility of idealistic advance in the future. Although there have been in the modern Church great gains as well as great losses, it is more profitable to stress the losses. For when we know what we face, we may see better how change can be produced. At least, by so doing, we avoid complacency. Our enduring faith is that of Ezekiel, that no matter how dry the bones may be, breath can come into them and they can live. This has been demonstrated many times in both Jewish and Christian history. When the great Timothy Dwight took over the presidency of Yale College not one student would admit publicly to faith in Christ. When Dwight ended the presidency twenty-two years later, in 1817, the entire intellectual climate of the college had changed: it changed because Dwight did something about it.
Christianity, as we know it in the West, appears in three major forms. The first of these is standard Protestantism, the dominant religious pattern in American civilization for
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three hundred years, though the dominance may already have ceased. The contemporary danger in this sector is dull conformity — neither hot nor cold but alarmingly tepid in the level of concern. Much of the effort goes into paying for buildings and keeping up the mechanics of the organizations. Because many of the most successful pastors are able promoters, the organization can go on for some time after the life has departed. Standard Protestantism is characteristically urbane and well-mannered, but it is sadly deficient in driving power and in the ability to imagine new and fresh ways of permeating the world. Alfred North Whitehead described, with characteristic frankness, the decline of Protestant effectiveness in words which all who care should ponder. "Its institutions," he said of Protestantism, "no longer direct the patterns of life."4
The second major strand in American religious life is Roman Catholicism. It has gained such great power, by virtue of both its numbers and its interior discipline, that membership in the Roman Catholic Church, far from being a political liability, is now an obvious asset and will probably continue to be so for a long time to come. The Roman Catholic Church has such a hold on a variety of minorities that it may easily become in our lifetime an effective majority. It has enough prestige and glitter to hold the loyalty of the impoverished and enough intellectual appeal to hold some educated persons. At the same time, however, it involves a terrible ultimate weakness in its totalitarian claims. It claims, officially to be the only true Church, with the logical corollary that all other Christians are heretics. This is why the rule against worshiping with other Christians is enforced with such severity. Sharing in worship would be a tacit recognition of validity. In its claim to monopoly, and
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in its parallel emphasis on its own spiritual prestige, the Roman Catholic Church runs exactly counter to the teachings of its supposed Founder who undermined all arrogance by washing the disciples' feet and countered all monopolistic claims by saying "other sheep have I which are not of this fold." The basis for the temporary strength in the Roman Catholic Church in the modern world will also be the basis for its ultimate failure to speak to the minds of more thoughtful men and women.
The third major strand in contemporary Christianity is that represented by the plethora of sects and fringe movements. These, known by many names, combine a truly impressive evangelical zeal with a theological fixation on a kind of Fundamentalism which cannot bear examination by critical minds. They are, on the whole, more nearly equal to the Communists in driving power than are either Roman Catholics or standard Protestants, and this one feature makes them impressive. Though their chief success is, for the most part, among people of relatively low income and of inferior educational opportunity, the commitment they secure is so great that the work done and the money contributed by their adherents are often greater than the corresponding work and giving of more privileged people. The outside observer, if he tries to be fair, is bound to be impressed with the level of dedication among these groups, though at the same time he is bound to be aware that this religion cannot win. What it lacks, fundamentally, is the full commitment of mental powers, without which a faith cannot be enduringly effective.
Much of our present tragedy lies in the fact that many who want to be part of Christ's cause cannot feel at home in any of the three major forms which the contemporary Church takes. They are looking for a bold fellowship, and what they find is a complacent society concerned to an absurd degree with its own internal politics or so unimaginative as to
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suggest that the world can be saved by three hymns and a sermon or a Mass. The needle seems to be stuck in a groove. Many contemporary seekers cannot abide the Church as they see it, their dissatisfaction arising not from the fact that membership demands too much, but rather from the fact that the demands are too small. It helps our humility to admit that some of the critics may be on the right track.
Though the three types just mentioned are the major choices now open to Christian men and women in the West, there are naturally many variations of the types and some which defy such classification. In addition to the three weaknesses of the three types, there is a general weakness which may be termed segregation, especially segregation from common life. Whether our religion is segregated from common life by being limited geographically (i.e., to a religious building), or temporally (by undue emphasis on one hour a week, which is usually on Sunday morning), or limited in personnel (by the assumption that religion is the responsibility of a special professional class called clergy), the damaging effect is the same.
When we think that religion is what goes on in a building of recognizable ecclesiastical architecture, the damage comes in the perfectly natural human tendency to minimize religion in other places. When we think of religion as what transpires on Sunday morning, the harm lies in the tendency to suppose that what goes on at other times, in factories and offices, is not equally religious. When we think of religion as the professional responsibility of priests, clergymen, and rabbis, the major harm lies in the consequent minimizing of the religious responsibility of other men and women. The harm of too much localizing of religious responsibility in a few — however dedicated they may be — is that it gives the rank and file a freedom from responsibility which they ought not to be able to enjoy.
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The major danger of our contemporary religion, then, is that it makes small what ought to be large. By segregating religion in place or time or personnel, we make religion relatively trivial, concerned with only a part of experience when it ought to be concerned with the whole of life. Whenever the Church means merely a building on the corner, or a special kind of service, or a man with a round collar, the salt has already lost much of its savor. But there can be no serious doubt that for millions the Church does mean precisely that. It seems successful, but it is fundamentally unimportant because it is deemed to be marginal in its relevance. In so far as this is true, it is not only Church members but the Church itself which requires a radical conversion. Few phrases deserve currency in our time more than the phrase "The Conversion of the Church."
This phrase provides the real justification of the labor of writing books such as this. We have reason to believe that civilization cannot be redeemed without the Church as a redemptive society, but the disturbing thought, which must always be matched with this one, is that the Church as we know it is not now good enough to fulfill its redemptive function. The basic trouble is that the proposed cure has such a striking similarity to the disease. No one denomination has the perfect pattern and, furthermore, no church has the right to be proud. I do not know precisely what the true Church is but I am certain that it is different from and better than mine. We do not seek a victory for any of the existing groups, as though Christianity were engaged in an internal power struggle. Indeed, it is important for us to realize that words like "Catholic," "Protestant," and "Evangelical" have become so ambiguous as to be virtually meaningless. Nor is mere union of the denominations our primary need if we are to have renewal. The movement we need is a movement in depth, and if it is deep enough the problem of unity
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will take care of itself. As lines go down vertically from the surface of the earth they necessarily come nearer to one another. In any case, the divided condition of the modern Church is by no means its greatest evil or weakness. We could stand division if we had genuine commitment to Christ and His cause.
Superficially, the Church appears to be riding high, but closer examination of the situation is disconcerting. Our position is not unlike that of the Roman Empire when it appeared to be at the height of its prestige, with great show of power at the center, but actually was losing province after province on the edges. Things looked very good in Rome, for example, after Britain could no longer be held. The contemporary lost provinces are indeed numerous, so far as the living Church is concerned, but three are especially disturbing. The first such province, requiring immediate attention, is that of higher education. Though originally, in our culture, most colleges and universities were instituted and supported and dominated by Christian conviction, this is far from true today. A few colleges have made bold steps to become consciously Christian in their total effort, seeking to build again on their earlier foundations before it is too late, but these are still a conspicuous minority. Even those institutions which still recognize their Christian origins are, in many ways, as secularized as are any others.
There is no way of knowing accurately how many students have any real commitment to the Christian cause — and it is certainly uncritical to pay much attention to the answers to questionnaires, in this or any other important field of experience — but it is not hard to see that Christian conviction has been eroded among students and professors. This is shown in many ways. An extreme example of the evidence is that a service of dedication on the World Day of Prayer, set up in a university of six thousand persons, and well
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advertised, brought an attendance of five students and no professors. Obviously, the whole thing seemed irrelevant to the students and their teachers. It did not have the urgency of a basketball game or a dance or even of a scientific discussion.
The denominational foundations which surround the chief campus areas do their best, but they touch, in most institutions, only a tiny minority. One knowledgeable observer who has visited many colleges has told us that perhaps two per cent of the more than three million students in the colleges and universities of the United States are deeply concerned and dedicated Christians of any variety. Many students, as well as great numbers of professors, are openly contemptuous. If professors think they will not be quoted, many will say quite simply that the Christian faith seems to them something which was perhaps useful long ago but is no longer relevant to modern society with its manifold issues, intellectual and otherwise.
The primary problem, it must be noted, is not usually one of explicit atheism. In some institutions of learning it is probable that the majority of students and a fair proportion of professors would admit rather reluctantly to some kind of belief in some kind of God, but this is not the point at issue. Since Christianity has never survived on the basis of mild and uncommitted theism, it is certainly not likely to survive on that basis today. Something more is required for victory, and it is the precise character of this additional element which we must make an effort to understand. In any case, when the Church is looking for a mission field it need not look beyond the nearest campus.
If the campus is largely a lost territory, so far as an unapologetic Christian faith is concerned, the same can be said of youth in general. The average church today has the loyalty of the small children and the support of the old people, but there is a conspicuous gap between these age groups. So far
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as attendance at public worship is significant, and it is partly though not wholly so, the absence of youth is obvious to any interested observer. Often in congregations of, say, two hundred persons it is impossible to find ten who are under twenty-five. The great loss begins in high school and continues, usually, until people are in their thirties. This partly accounts for the fact that so many genuine conversions come in middle life. People who have left the Church in youth sometimes come back to it with conviction when they are old enough to be deeply serious, both about themselves and their children, but others never return at all. They are lost to the life of the Church as young people and they remain lost.
A number of churches claim to have highly successful youth programs, but not all of these will bear close examination. What we discover is that the youth program in many local churches is almost entirely one of entertainment, not really different in kind from the secular entertainment which is provided in such abundance by those modern parents who strive pathetically to keep their children happy. The inequality of the sexes in Christian youth programs is also something to note with a sense of shock. It is not uncommon to listen to a youth choir in which the girls outnumber the boys five to one. Insofar as we care about the Christian cause we are bound to ask why this is so. Incidentally, it is not true of the Communist youth groups, which stress preparation for occupation of capitalist cultures rather than being temporarily happy.
A third lost territory is that of organized labor. Many committed Christians work with hand or brain, whether in offices or homes or on farms, but relatively few of the ranks of organized labor are to be found among those who are serious about the Christian cause. This is partly because labor union members often think that they have found a cause of their own which makes the Christian cause unnecessary.
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They note, of course, that the majority of church workers appear to be of the owning and managerial class. Accordingly, the Church takes on more and more of a class structure. The historic American Protestant denominations suffer most severely in this way, the Roman Catholics and the Fundamentalists suffering a little less, but no group is doing really well in holding the imagination of organized labor.
What a paradox it is that the Church of Jesus Christ, the Worker, should seem alien to those who work with their hands! After all, He was called the Carpenter (Mark 6:3), and there is reason to suppose that He made both ox-yokes and plows in the carpenter shop of Nazareth. Historically, Christianity has glorified work and has given to the modern world the marvelous idea of vocation. The faith certainly has a potential contact with labor if only we are able to see how to employ it. In any case, however, we have lost ground, and this ground must somehow be recovered if the kingdom of Christ is to prevail. Some Christians are working at it with great dedication, but most of the lost territory is still to be occupied.
There is no doubt that the tide of secularism is rising. In Russia and in mainland China it is regnant or at least unchallenged. We have seen in these countries the fulfillment of the dire prediction of Dostoyevsky that the time would come when the greatest change was not that of a church becoming a state, as with the Vatican, but rather that of the state becoming a church.5 That the latter danger has materialized is an insight which modern man will neglect at his peril. How else can we account for the entire tone of Prime Minister Khrushchev's speech of January 6, 1961? In that speech he was acting both as official philosopher and as high priest in showing the path which his conquering "church" must take.
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What worries us rightly in the West is not that the two major parts of the world are so different, but that they are coming to be so much alike. What is now emerging , it would seem, is not two radically different systems, but two variants of the same materialism. If we are inclined to dispute the existence of the materialism of the West, all that is required to convince us of its reality is a careful study of advertisements, particularly at Christmas time. In preparation for the birthday of Him who had not where to lay His head, we are urged to buy for the wife a forty-thousand-dollar necklace or, for a couple, matching airplanes marked His and Hers. Thousands of students celebrate Easter by an orgy of self-indulgence at Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Succeeding generations, as they try to evaluate our culture, will not have much evidence that is conclusive about our religious life, but they will have abundant evidence by which to judge our manner of living. What will surely strike researchers as odd if they still have access to the words of the Gospels is that these words will seem to have had no effect at all upon the manifest cult of self-indulgence. The remaining pages of slick and expensive advertising will appear more of a revelation than will the seemingly obsolete words of Christ about losing one's life and identification with the poor and humble.
The test of the vitality of a religion is to be seen it its effect upon culture. The more we recognize the deep similarity between our own culture and that of imperial Rome, the more we see the significance of a great passage in the late Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, a passage which helps to explain why Pasternak's book has not yet been published in his own language in his own country. Our shame is that the new Rome is not equally challenged.
Rome was a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples, a bargain basement on two floors, earth and heaven, a
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mass of filth convoluted in a triple knot as in an intestinal obstruction, Dacians, Herulians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Hyperboreans, heavy wheels without spokes, eyes sunk in fat, sodomy, double chins, illiterate emperors, fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves . . . all crammed into the passages of the Coliseum, and all wretched.
And then, into this tasteless heap of gold and marble He came, light and clothed in an aura, emphatically human, deliberately provincial, Galilean, and at that moment gods and nations ceased to be and man came into being — man the carpenter, man the plowman, man the shepherd with his flock of sheep at sunset, man who does not sound in the least proud, man thankfully celebrated in all the cradle songs of mothers and in all the picture galleries the world over.6
The outstanding success of the recent motion picture version of Ben-Hur was more revealing of our own culture than of the culture which was supposedly depicted on the screen. Both the battle at sea and the chariot race succeeded in exciting the viewers tremendously, but the religious scenes fell flat. Though Ben-Hur is subtitled "A Tale of the Christ," the representations of Christ's work were largely unconvincing. Almost all that the producers could think of to depict Christ's work was an assemblage on a hillside. This accurately indicates our own preoccupation with public meetings as the chief form which contemporary religious experience can take, but it was certainly not the chief form it took during the formation of the original Christian community. Then it was far more a matter of almost secret instruction of the small cell and the sending out of ordinary men two by two. But these operations would hardly be recognized as authentically Christian by modern movie audiences. Words like "take up your cross daily" seem quaint to a generation which is only mildly shocked by the advertisement of the solid gold putter.
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It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the modern Church seems irrelevant to modern man. The Church is looked upon as something to be neither seriously fought nor seriously defended. A church building is welcomed, partly because it provides such a nice place for a family wedding; and, after all, most families expect weddings, sooner or later. A church is also a good place to send the children on Sunday morning — they might learn something helpful, and certainly the experience of being sent will do them no harm. The point is that such conceptions are wholly consistent with the idea that the Church has only marginal relevance. We do not expect, for the most part, to find the gospel centered in a burning conviction which will make men and women change occupations, go to the end of the earth, alter the practices of governments, redirect culture, and remake civilization.
Some indication of the mildness of our religious conviction is illustrated by the fact that we spend more on dog food than we spend on foreign missions. Another indication is the fact that we expect the inaugural address to be more inspiring than the prayers which precede and follow it. In short, we welcome religion, but we expect it to be innocuous and, above all, unfanatical. We are willing to accept it, provided that it involves no zeal. It is at this point that the contrast between the mildness of our faith and the burning devotion of the Communist faith is so disturbing. If only we possessed another object of devotion as an alternative to that involved in Christianity the situation might be less disturbing, but there is no such devotion in sight. Certainly democracy as an article of faith does not elicit any transforming power, while only a minority is able to understand the connection between democracy and a transforming faith which makes democracy reasonable.
Most of the defection from the Church in contemporary life is not that of outright antagonism. Bitter denunciation
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may be found among some college students and in some parts of the labor movement, but most of the rejection of the Church is far less vocal or self-conscious. What we face in most areas of experience is merely the unexpressed assumption of men and women that the Church of Jesus Christ is not in the least connected with what means most to them. It they have a cause it is likely to be comparable to the cause of the class-conscious laborer who believes with all his heart that he is working for economic justice, but who never connects his own deep concern with the Biblical message of the Prophets of Israel or with the Church as he knows it. The message of the Church, as he understands it, is not so much untrue as irrelevant. In like manner, thousands of contemporary scientists and technologists see no connection, logical or otherwise, between the central faith which inspires the Church and the intellectual urge which drives them to their work.
The only important exception to the general lack of connection between the Church and dominant concern is provided by the Negro population of the South. Those who have worked so intelligently and so bravely for equality of opportunity have tended to find the Church their rallying point. This was conspicuously true in Montgomery, Alabama, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, and the gracious example of Christ-likeness in Rosa Parks which eliminated racial discrimination in buses. If the drive had had some other center, the resulting violence might have been really frightful. It ought also to be recorded that, cowardly as many congregations are, the major help given to those in New Orleans who were persecuted for taking their children to integrated schools came from the churches. Other congregations paid the rent of the pastor whose original home was attacked by mobs.
The paradox of the apparent victory, yet real defeat, of the contemporary Church is nowhere more vividly demonstrated
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than in the present concentration upon attendance. Great billboard advertisements appear by the hundreds with a single message, "Worship Together This Week." The fact that the donors of the advertisements are undoubtedly motivated by goodwill toward the life of religion, as they understand it, does not obscure the fundamental ineptitude of their effort. Obviously, the sponsors of the advertisements look upon attendance at a religious assembly as the major religious act or the major evidence of church membership. It is no wonder that they think this, if they observe the frantic and sometimes ingenious efforts of pastors, week by week, to surpass all previous records of attendance. The promotional purpose of local church newsletters is transparent.
The tragedy of the billboards lies less in what they say than in their revelation of a suppressed premise concerning the central nature of Christ's cause. Many betray the same unargued assumption when they describe themselves by announcing which church they go to. The trouble with this response is that a church, in its very nature, is not really something to which men and women can go. Rather, it is something which they may be in. The difference is fundamental and far-reaching. We can go to a railroad station or to a motion picture theater or to a ball game; but a church is something which demands a wholly different human relationship, the relationship of belonging. If a man is really in — really belongs to — a church, he is just as much a member of it when he sits at his desk in his business or house as when he sits in a pew at his meetinghouse. The point is that the relationship, if real, is continuous, regardless of time and place and performance. Christians made a great step forward in human history when they took from Stoicism the germ of the membership idea and developed it.
The radical difference between the Church and most human
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organizations is so important that unless it is truly understood our chance for renewal of vitality is slight indeed. Though it is sad that people fail to respond to public worship with the enthusiasm and devotion which they evince at basketball games, the greater sadness lies in the fact that supposed Church members do not even understand the difference between the two kinds of relationship. If Christianity is primarily a matter of attendance at a performance, it is not different in kind from a host of other experiences. Though membership may include attendance at performances of a certain character, such attendance is not the primary meaning of the Christian effort at all. The fact that this is not generally understood is one of the chief evidences of the spiritual erosion which distresses us.
There are always some people who, in times of discouragement or perplexity, cry out that what we need is religion. The evidence of our time makes clear to us, if it was not clear before, the essential ineptitude of such remarks. We have religion; the problem is always the precise character of the religion. We can apply now the lesson which Whitehead taught so vividly in his Lowell Lectures — that religion, far from being necessarily good, may be terribly evil. It may produce bitterness; it may become a tool of the power struggle; it may be purely instrumental, so far as the individual is concerned; it may descend into gross superstition. "In considering religion," wrote Whitehead, "we should not be obsessed by the idea of its necessary goodness. This is a dangerous delusion. The point to notice is its transcendent importance; and the fact of its importance is abundantly made evident by the appeal to history."7 The widespread belief in the necessary goodness of any and all religion, far from being one of our assets, is one of our contemporary liabilities. It is
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part of the reason that we are not so disturbed as we ought to be. Only if we have a beneficent disturbance will we put real effort into trying to learn what the nature of the sorely needed faith is. Where, then, do we start if we mean to rebuild?
We all understand, when we give our minds carefully to the question, that to be an effective Christian it is not enough to be an individual believer. Inadequate as the fellowship of the Church may be, in many generations, including our own, there is not the slightest chance of Christian vitality without it. Apart from the poor and all too human fellowship called the Church we should not have had even the New Testament. Men are often brave and good alone, but they are never really effective unless they share in some kind of group reality. Voices crying in the wilderness are not permanently recorded. Furthermore, the indispensability of the Church is demonstrated by the fact that the new life normally arises from the inside. The ultimate evidence of the divine ordering of the Church is the way in which it is always the members of the Church itself who are the most intelligent critics of her life and witness.
The crucial question today is not whether we must have a fellowship, for on that point we are reasonably clear; the crucial question concerns the character of the fellowship. The more we think about it the more we realize that it must be a fellowship of the committed. This is because mere belief is never enough. Some writers and speakers give the impression that the main adversary we face is atheism, with the consequence that they try to convince other men that "there is a God." Although the philosophy of religion, including the case for theistic realism, is an important intellectual discipline and one which a true scholar will never neglect or even minimize, the chief barrier to a renewed vitality in the Christian society is not lack of belief. Millions who feel no sense of urgency
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about the Christian endeavor will list themselves, when inquiry is made, as believers of some sort.
There is no better way, in contemporary thought, of approaching the meaning of commitment than by reference to Marcel's distinction between "believing that," and "believing in."8 To be committed is to believe in. Commitment, which includes belief but far transcends it, is determination of the total self to act upon conviction. Always and everywhere, as Blaise Pascal and many other thinkers have taught us,9 it includes an element of wager. This is why in great religious literature, including the New Testament, the best light that can be thrown upon commitment is that provided by marriage. For everyone recognizes the degree to which marriage is a bold venture, undertaken without benefit of escape clauses. The essence of all religious marriage vows is their unconditional quality. A man takes a woman not, as in a contract, under certain specified conditions, but "for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health." Always, the commitment is unconditional and for life. The fact that some persons fail in this regard does not change the meaning of the glorious undertaking.
One way of stating the crucial difference between belief and commitment is to say that when commitment occurs there is attached to belief an "existential index" which changes its entire character. Belief in differs from belief that, in the way in which the entire self is involved. "If I believe in something," says Marcel, "it means that I place myself at the disposal of something, or again that I pledge myself fundamentally, and this pledge affects not only what I have but also what I am."10
We shall not be saved by anything less than commitment,
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and the commitment will not be effective unless it finds expression in a committed fellowship. If we have any knowledge of human nature, we begin by rejecting the arrogance of self-sufficiency. Committed men need the fellowship not because they are strong, but because they are — and know that they are — fundamentally sinful and weak.
It is generally recognized that though commitment is of the first importance, men may have more than one object of their commitment. The full commitment of millions of Germans, prior to and during the Great War, was to Adolf Hitler and his cause. Other millions are today committed to Marxism. This is why it is now recognized that Marxian communism is fundamentally a religion rather than a mere economic or political system. The fact that it denies God does not keep it from being religious. Christians have no monopoly on commitment; they simply have a different object. A Christian is a person who confesses that, amidst the manifold and confusing voices heard in the world, there is one Voice which supremely wins his full assent, uniting all his powers, intellectual and emotional, into a single pattern of self-giving. That Voice is Jesus Christ. A Christian not only believes that He was; he believes in Him with all his heart and strength and mind. Christ appears to the Christian as the one stable point or fulcrum in all the relativities of history. Once the Christian has made this primary commitment he still has perplexities, but he begins to know the joy of being used for a mighty purpose, by which his little life is dignified.
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1. Unless otherwise stated, all Biblical references are from the Revised Standard Version.
2. Karl Heim, Christian Faith and Natural Science (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957,), p. 24.
3. The Living of These Days (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956).
4. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), p. 205.
5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Bk. II, Chap. V.
6. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (New York: Pantheon Books Inc., 1958), p. 43.
7. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), p. 18.
8. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Pt. II (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1960), p. 77.
9. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, p. 151.
10. Op. cit., p. 77.