17: The Modern Era - An explosion of -isms

INTRODUCTION

The Enlightenment essentially “unmoored” western culture from Christianity. No longer was Christianity the glue that held society together.

However, as this happened, other ways of explaining the world and answering the big questions of life had to be found. The questions philosophers had asked since the beginning and that Christianity answered (Where did everything come from?, Why am I here?, What is good?, etc.) didn’t go away just because the Christian way of answering them was rejected.

I’m convinced that the explosion of “isms” that we see after the Enlightenment is the result of mankind looking for ways to answer these questions – and because, in the end, none of these movements do answer the questions, you have one “ism” replacing another, over and over -things like Romanticism, Modernism, Marxism, Darwinism, Fascism, Feminism, Post-Modernism, etc., etc. All these are attempts to come to grips with the ultimate questions of life by a culture that has rejected the one true way of doing that.

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MODERNISM

Modernism or the Modern era began roughly with the start of the Enlightenment and lasted until mid-way through the twentieth century. The focus of modernism was things like words, reason and the material world. The outlook was primarily optimistic, based, as we’ve discussed, on the perceived ability of man to reason his way to truth and the possession of an innate goodness that would help him use that reason to make a better world. Things are moving onward and upward, getting better and better.

For the most part, the nineteenth century was a time of peace and progress, at least for Europe. The Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 had reorganized Europe at the close of the Napoleonic wars and that reorganization for the most part held throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. With the exception of the Franco-Prussian war that lasted less than a year in 1870-71 the continent had been at peace for nearly 100 years as the twentieth century dawned.

Despite this, there were some who became dissatisfied with the enthroning of reason by the Enlightenment thinkers. One of the first secular movements to challenge the Enlightenment was known as Romanticism.

Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment notion that reality could be known via human reason. In some ways it was a reaction against the notion that reality could be known at all. It was most prevalent amount artists and authors of the late nineteenth century. You’ve probably heard of the “Romantic poets” like William Wordsworth and John Keats. It wasn’t that they wrote great love poems but because they were students of Romanticism.

The Romantics believed that “the human mind cannot comprehend even the finite world, let alone the infinity beyond us.”[i]They tended to favor feelings and emotions and emphasized mystery over certainty.

Schleiermacher, even though a child of the Enlightenment with his emphasis on the unreasonableness of things like miracles is also associated with Romanticism because of his emphasis on feeling. One thing you see as you study the different movements of this era is that lines are often blurry.

What you tend to see once Christianity is jettisoned is a pendulum swing between “we can know everything” and “we can know nothing.”

We’ll see this swing happen again in a bigger way when modernism gives way to post-modernism in the middle of the century.

I include Romanticism to show that even in non-Christian philosophical circles, problems with the Enlightenment emphasis on reason became obvious. That’s the pattern with these isms, one gives way to another because it must because the former didn’t do what it promised to do.

IMPACT ON THE CHURCH

As we saw when we studied the Enlightenment, that movement gave birth to Protestant Liberalism.

The theology of Schleiermacher and the German higher critics basically carried the day in continental Europe and, while not as influential here, made significant inroads in the United States, especially among the mainline denominations in the cities.

One of the pillars on which Protestant liberalism stood was the inherent goodness of man. What mattered most was helping society progress in knowledge and ethics and the pinnacle of this progress was often seen as the European culture of the day.[ii]And while it was true that Christianity was largely responsible for the European culture of that day, that was because of the Grace of God, and the biblical fidelity of their ancestors, not the goodness of man.

On June 28, 1914 while on a state visit to Sarajevo, Bosnia, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and his wife Sophie were assassinated by a young Serbian revolutionary named Gavrilo Princip.

By August that year, the peace forged at the Congress of Vienna nearly 100 years earlier had collapsed and Europe was in the midst of the most destructive war the world had yet seen. All of the progress in science and technology that had been seen as evidence of man’s inherent wisdom and goodness was now being used to slaughter people by the thousands in the trenches of France.

How might that impact the kind of Christianity taught by Protestant liberalism?

Sadly, when people are taught bad theology and that bad theology then cannot handle the difficulties of life, rarely do they say “My teacher was wrong.” Usually what they say is “God or the Bible must be wrong.” I’ve seen that in the lives of individuals over the years, people who apparently had a strong faith but it was a faith that had no explanation for tragedy so when tragedy struck they turned their backs on God.

NEO-ORTHODOXY

One man particularly impacted by this disconnect was a Swiss pastor and theologian name Karl Barth.

After Germany invaded Belgium, Barth saw a statement in support of Germany’s war effort that had been signed by virtually all of his former theology professors in Germany. In true Enlightenment style, they viewed the acts of Germany as those of essentially good people seeking the best for humanity.[iii]German soldiers went into battle wearing belt buckles that said “Gott mit uns.” God with us. That feeling was not limited to Germany, by the way, all of the great powers on both sides believed God was on their side. I’ve heard the First World War described as a civil war in Christendom.

Barth later said of that event: “Nineteenth-century theology no longer held any future for me.” He recognized the bankruptcy of a belief system that depended upon the inherent goodness of mankind.

Karl Barth went on to become one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century and the founder of what would come to be known as Neo-Orthodoxy.

Barth sought to return Christianity to a dependence upon the Word of God that he felt had been lost by Enlightenment theologians. He felt they relied too much on the notion that truth about God was obtained through interaction of human reason with the natural world.

However, as is often the case when movements are reactions to other movements, Barth overcorrected a bit. Barth claimed we could know nothing about God from the natural world putting great emphasis on God’s “otherness.” The Enlightenment thinkers had been on too familiar terms with God. Barth and the Neo-Orthodox thinkers tended to make Him too mysterious and unknowable.

R.C. Sproul describes Neo-Orthodoxy like this:

Neo-orthodoxy was a reaction to the Protestant liberalism of the nineteenth century, which denied biblical supernaturalism and defined faith solely as a “feeling of absolute dependence.” The bankruptcy of such views in light of the horrors of two world wars led Barth and others to try to restore the Bible to prominence in the church.

While neo-orthodox theologians take a step in the right direction, they do not go far enough. While neo-orthodoxy does not deny the supernatural character of the Bible, it does deny that its propositions are objective, inerrant truth. Its proponents redefine truth as an “encounter” or an “event.” For the neo-orthodox, the Bible becomes the Word of God when the Holy Spirit uses the words of Scripture to bring us into an encounter with Christ. They say that the Bible as an objective source of propositions is never in and of itself God’s revelation because God only reveals Himself in the events of redemptive history and in His interactions with us today.[iv]

You see a similar belief today among some who teach that Jesus is the Word of God but the Bible is not. Of course the problem with this is that nowhere in scripture are we ever told to make that distinction.

Sproul goes on:

Barth and Brunner denied that the Bible was the Word of God in an objective sense. They said that the Bible was, at most, a collection of merely human documents. But, they said, God uses these human documents to create an “encounter” with the reader, so that the Bible becomes the Word of God as we read it. Reading the Bible, which is full of factual error, sparks this “encounter.” Orthodox Christianity, however, affirms that the Bible is objectively true in all respects while also insisting that we must have a personal relationship with God. There is no need to pit these two things against each other. The Bible is true whether we accept it or not and whether we encounter Jesus Christ or not. The statements of the Bible are inherently revelatory and inherently true whether or not we respond to them.[v]

Barth’s major work was Church Dogmatics, a thirteen-volume work published between 1932 and 1967 and was still, at 6,000,000 words, unfinished when he died.

THE FUNDAMENTALS

Across the ocean in the United States, theologians were also reacting to Protestant Liberalism but with a different approach than Barth and his colleagues in Europe.

One group represented by famous evangelist Dwight Moody (1837 – 99) looked at Protestant Liberalism and the higher criticism coming out of many of the seminaries and decided modern scholarship and theological learning were the problem. As a result, they adopted an anti-intellectual approach to Christianity. Moody famously said of seminaries:

“Except to go in one door and out the other, I’ve never been to seminary.”[vi]

Evangelist Billy Sunday, also in this group, once quipped, “I don’t know any more about theology than a jackrabbit knows about Ping-Pong!”

Despite the sincerity of Moody and Sunday, this anti-intellectualism did not serve Christianity well in subsequent years in my opinion.

Another group, however, was not so anti-intellectual. They saw the problem not with theological learning itself but with the results of such learning when it is based on the wrong presuppositions or foundations. In other words, the problem is not theology, the problem is BAD theology.

In 1895 a group called the Evangelical Alliance met at Niagara Falls, NY and came up with what they called the five fundamentals, those things which could not be denied and remain within the faith. As we’ve seen throughout this study, it is often in response to heresy or false teaching that orthodox belief is codified and clarified.

Those “fundamentals” were:

1. Jesus was uniquely divine

2. He was born of a virgin

3. He died as a sacrifice for sin

4. He will come again

5. The Scriptures contain no errors; the Bible is “inerrant.”

After the conference was over, a Christian businessman financed a series of pamphlets with defenses of these five beliefs written by prominent Christian scholars. The pamphlets became known as The Fundamentals and those who accepted them as “fundamentalists.”[vii]

For several decades after this, the majority of Protestants in the US, especially in the South, were “fundamentalists.”

Interestingly, though fundamentalism became associated with opposition to the teaching of evolution, three authors in the first volume of “The Fundamentals,” including Princeton scholar B.B. Warfield, believed there was not a conflict between evolutionary theory as then taught and God’s special creation of the world.

This statement by the “fundamentalists” did not go without a reply from liberal Protestants. In 1922 Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of First Presbyterian Church, New York City preached a message called “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” to which his answer was “no” or at least he hoped not.

Fosdick felt the conservatives were being too narrow in their beliefs. He basically said who are they to say who is and isn’t a Christian? A classical theological liberal of the era, Fosdick denied the miraculous elements of scripture such as the Virgin Birth:

We may well begin with the vexed and mooted question of the virgin birth of our Lord. I know people in the Christian churches, ministers, missionaries, laymen, devoted lovers of the Lord and servants of the Gospel, who, alike as they are in their personal devotion to the Master, hold quite different points of view about a matter like the virgin birth. Here, for example, is one point of view that the virgin birth is to be accepted as historical fact; it actually happened; there was no other way for a personality like the Master to come into this world except by a special biological miracle. That is one point of view, and many are the gracious and beautiful souls who hold it. But side by side with them in the evangelical churches is a group of equally loyal and reverent people who would say that the virgin birth is not to be accepted as an historic fact. . . . So far from thinking that they have given up anything vital in the New Testament’s attitude toward Jesus, these Christians remember that the two men who contributed most to the Church’s thought of the divine meaning of the Christ were Paul and John, who never even distantly allude to the virgin birth.[viii]

Fosdick was eventually brought up on charges by the Presbyterian Church but before he could be tried resigned his pastorate.

He was not long without a church, however.

John D. Rockefeller who was a big fan of Fosdick and his liberal theology build Riverside Church in Manhattan for him where he pastored for 16 years.

The Scopes Trial

In 1925 with the support of fundamentalist Christians in Tennessee, that state’s legislature passed The Butler Act, which said:

That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) placed advertisements in Tennessee newspapers offering to defend anyone who would defy the Butler Act. John Scopes, a football coach and freshman biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was convinced by some local businessmen (who wanted to make their town famous) to say he’d taught that people and apes came from a common ancestor.[ix]

The resulting “Scopes Monkey Trial” was the event of the year if not the decade. Two of the nations most famous attorneys squared off, Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution. Every day the courtroom was filled with spectators and the proceedings were carried on the radio as well.

In the end, Scopes was convicted – interestingly because his own lawyer asked that he be found guilty, denying William Jennings Bryan the opportunity of delivering a closing statement. After Scopes was found guilty and sentenced to pay a fine, Bryan offered to pay it for him.[x]

Evangelicalism

In the years following the Scopes trial, fundamentalism became an increasingly separatist movement. Fundamentalists retreated from culture and from attempting to influence culture.

However, there were many Christians who agreed with the fundamentalist belief in the authority of scripture but did not believe that one had to reject everything contemporary or to withdraw from culture in order to be a faithful Christian. They taught, in fact, that to do so was not being a faithful Christian.

In October 1941 several Christians in this category met at Moody Bible Institute and formed the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). Their desire was to engage with the culture and with other like-minded Christians while not compromising on the truthfulness of scripture and salvation by grace through faith in Christ.

Two of the most prominent products of this movement were Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry.

Graham, as I’m sure many of us are familiar, tended to focus on an evangelistic message often delivered at large crusades. If you ever went to a Billy Graham crusade or saw one on television, you’ll remember that the message was basically the same every time – a presentation of the gospel and a strong evangelistic call to repent and believe.

Carl Henry on the other hand, while certainly not downplaying the importance of evangelism, was concerned with giving the evangelical movement a sound theological foundation.

That is, of course, not to pit one man against the other. As the Scripture tells us we’re all given different gifts and some water, some plant, some harvest.

In 1947, Henry published a book entitled “The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism” in which he made the case that fundamentalism had retreated from “any meaningful communication with the modern world.” He felt fundamentalists, Bible-believing Christians, had separated dealing with social issues from personal transformation and this had left social issues in the hands of liberal Protestantism – who was all too happy to weigh in on them. In other words, they felt the Christian’s only job was to share the gospel and not to advocate on behalf of things like justice.[xi]

In other words, our transformed lives should lead us to be salt and light in our culture not cause us to remain cloistered in our churches.

In this work Henry said:

“A Christian world- and life-view embracing world questions, societal needs, personal education ought to arise out of Matt. 28:18-21 as much as evangelism does. Culture depends on such a view.”

And:

“You can believe in separation of church and state “without sacrificing world statesmanship to men of godless convictions.”

Carl Henry went on to be instrumental in formulating the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy as well as to become the first Editor-in-Chief of “Christianity Today.”

Carl F.H. Henry died in 2003 and Billy Graham, of course, is still with us still at the ripe old age of 97.

So we’ve now made it from Constantine to Billy Graham, a journey of some 1600 years.

[i]Historical Theology by Alister McGrath, p. 227 [ii]Christian History Made Easy by Timothy Paul Jones, p. 168 [iii] Ibid [iv]http://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/neo-orthodoxy/ [v]http://www.ligonier.org/learn/devotionals/the-neo-orthodox-view/ [vi]Jones, p.162 [vii]ibid [viii]“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” by Henry Emerson Fosdick [ix]Jones, p. 172 [x]ibid, p. 173 [xi]ibid, pp. 178-79