Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia
IT is easy to find in secularism the greatest obstacle to the Christian mission in our time. On the one hand, its triumph in the West has made the mission of the church worldwide in a disastrous sense, for while the missionaries of the Christian West have gone to the ends of the earth, the homelands of the mission have been progressively de-Christianized. On the other hand, secularism as well as the gospel has been spread to the ends of the earth, and there, too, it seems to be the spirit of secularism rather than the reviving ethnic religions that offers the greatest resistance to the gospel.
What in fact is secularism? One author remarks, “To describe it is like describing the air about us. No logical knife can dissect it; it is too pervasive and fluid to be captured in the net of any system of ideas. We are so completely adjusted to it that we do not mark it … .”[1]
However true and discouraging such an observation may be, the demands of the Christian mission require a Christian evaluation of secularism. At the outset a definition does not appear to be difficult. Loemker, who was just quoted as to the evasive and pervasive qualities of secularism does not hesitate to proceed immediately to a definition: “Secularism is practical atheism”.[2] This is the consensus of a number of definitions. Georgia Harkness, for example, says, “Secularism is the organization of life as if God did not exist”.[3] Goodrich C. White declares, “Secularism, as a philosophy of life or as a way of life, leaves God out”.[4] Reinhold Niebuhr has said, “Secularism is a philosophy of life and a way of living which denies the Holy, the Ultimate, the Sacred; in more explicit terms, denies God”.[5]
These definitions agree in using a negative form. Secularism is understandable only in terms of a denial of God, or at least, of the Holy. Gerald O. McCulloh calls attention to this, stating that, “As a philosophy, secularism has historically borrowed its frame of reference from a more inclusive world view”.[6] McCulloh refers to Walter Lippmann’s demonstration of the delimitation of meaning which is characteristic of contemporary secularism.[7]
Most of the definitions of secularism are also agreed on the element of practical atheism. This is not to deny that the secularist may be a doctrinaire atheist. Militant atheism and anticlericalism have been phases of the secularist movement, notably in France and Russia. But the secularist is not necessarily or even usually more than a practical atheist. Indifference to religious truth and norms of conduct rather than overt hostility to them is seen as the prevailing attitude of modern secularism.
Another accepted characteristic of secularism is a positive ethical idealism. As Loemker puts this: “Secularism is irreligion, but it is not synonymous with iniquity; often it is strengthened by the moral protest against the intolerance, the otherworldliness, the inhumanity that have marked much religion. It might be well today if tragic India had more of this critical secular spirit”.[8] Whatever the ultimate pre-suppositions or the final outcome of the secularist position may be, it does not usually appear as an immoral or an amoral position. The morality it professes, however, is always immanentistic. It holds that “morality should be based solely in regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from belief in God or in future life”.[9]
Georgia Harkness sees in this moralism the power and appeal of secularism. “It is the more insidious rival to Christianity because it does not for the most part set before man bad but good ends as the goal of his effort.”10
All the elements in this analysis of secularism were present in the thinking of the man who first gave currency to the word as a party label. In the second half of the nineteenth century, George J. Holyoake was the leader of a flourishing Secularist movement in England. He was a radical reformer who advocated a positivistic approach to social and political problems. He chose the term “secularism as “expressing a certain positive and ethical element, which the terms ‘Infidel’, ‘Sceptic’, ‘Atheist’ do not express”.[11]
Such a formulation of Holyoake’s views as that given in the Oxford English Dictionary serves as a working definition of modern secularism: “The doctrine that morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from belief in God or in a future state”.[12]
So understood, modern secularism is not merely “worldliness” as the etymology of the term has led some to suggest.[13] Its roots are in the Renaissance, and it is dependent on the rise of the scientific method. It implies the rejection of Christian theism as irrelevant and can only be understood as a post-Christian reaction. It seeks to achieve, apart from Christianity, goals which themselves cannot be accounted for apart from the Christian heritage.
On the other hand, modern secularism is but a specific form of that rebellious independence of God which prompted Eve to take the forbidden fruit and built the tower of Babel.
All attempts not only to live apart from God, but to organize life, with ethical standards, apart from God, are essentially secularism.
A secular strain in all human history has come to a manifestation and perhaps a climax in a characteristically modern form. Even so, it is essential to distinguish between the perennial secular spirit as one of revolt from God, and the concrete modern exemplification of it, with its peculiar ambiguities and inconsistencies. It is important to recognize also that such a perennial secularism is not only exemplified but qualified in its current form. Modern secularism is different in its nature, as well as in the circumstances of its occurrence, from pre-Christian attitudes and movements with which it has fundamental religious affinity.
It is with modern secularism that we are primarily concerned. Examining its specific character is necessary in understanding its challenge for the Christian message. The significance of understanding secularism concretely is evident when we are confronted with secularism in the lands of the younger churches. Precisely because the secularism of Europe and America developed against the background of a society that was in a certain sense Christian, it has a new significance in a non-Christian culture. Aspects of this secularism which existed as protest and revolt may be minimized when the Christian views or practices to which they are negatively oriented are present only in a small minority of society. Conversely, revolutionary new importance may be attached to elements in this secularism which were shaped by the Christianized culture in which it arose.
For a concrete understanding of secularism it is also necessary to distinguish secularism from the secular. The confusion that may arise here is the chief concern of Robert T. Handy in an article “The Newest Form of Infidelity”.[14] Through a generalized and uncritical rejection of secularism, Christian thought may be trapped into a contempt for the secular as such. Handy finds P. A. Micklem’s treatment of this question unsatisfactory,[15] not because Micklem does not distinguish between secularism and the secular, but because he so subordinates the secular to the sacred as a distinct and lower sphere that the secular is not given its rightful place in the Christian view.
This problem is basically a problem of Christian theology. Micklem’s acceptance of natural theology and of the nature/grace dualism of Thomistic thought is the crux of his position. Obviously a meaningful definition of secularism depends upon the theological position from which it is made. The connotation of “practical atheism” is fixed by one’s view of theism. If by theism is meant any “otherworldly” philosophy or religion, Christianity and Buddhism have secularism as their common foe. If theism is defined from a more orthodox Christian standpoint, Buddhism itself is “practical atheism”. In short, if sacred /secular is the equivalent of spiritual/material, secularism becomes another term for materialism, and any movement of the spirit is anti-secular. On the other hand, if secularism is seen as the effort of man to exclude God from his life, to assert his autonomy in understanding and shaping himself and his world, it is fundamentally a spiritual attitude, and may be expressed in lofty idealisms. Confucianism and Vedanta Hinduism may appear to be antithetical in basis as world-affirming and world-denying, but from the theistic standpoint, both are secular in motive, that is, both have excluded the transcendent God of creation to whom every creature is responsible.
In the literature on the issue of secularism clarity appears to be attained to the degree that a clear-cut theological position is presented or implied as a frame of reference. Micklem’s position, for example, is plainly stated; so is John Baillie’s.[16] Herman Dooyeweerd presents a profound and brilliant analysis from the Calvinistic position in his address, “La sécularisation de la science”.[17] G. Bromley Oxnam, in discussing “Secularism and the Christian Faith”, while less clear than some others, nevertheless gives a fair indication of the radically different evaluation of secularism from the side of modernistic theology: “Our task is to cooperate with all those who know the worth of the spirit and seek to build a society in which the spirit may live”.[18]
This survey of the problem of defining secularism shows the necessity of both an historical and a theological approach. Secularism as it exists in the modern world must be understood in the light of its development and judged from the perspective of Christian theology. The former task has been much more successfully undertaken in recent literature than the latter.
The scope of a full treatment of the historical origins of modern secularism is well indicated in James H. Nichols’ History of Christianity 1650–1950,[19] which bears the significant sub-title, “Secularization of the West”. So pervasive are the origins of secularism that only such a full-scale and capable study can begin to bring them into focus.
John T. McNeill in his “Historical Introduction to Secularism”[20] views secularism as a “disorder endemic in humanity, which, from time to time, passes to an epidemic stage”. His succinct summary of the rise of modern secularism traces a line back to the Christianization of the Roman empire under Constantine. The early church, whatever its defects, was not secularistic. Early Christians had a positive attitude to the secular world, but were sustained by a power with which worldly motives could not compete. “The fact that they prayed for the emperors while they refused to pray to them is an index of their positive but uncompromising attitude to secular affairs in general.”[21] With the growth of the church, however, came wealth, prestige, and power which finally brought imperial recognition. Thereupon “‘there was an unholy rush into holy orders,’ … the secular spirit entered the church, and it has never since been entirely cast out”.[22] What remained of intense devotion tended to be channeled in the monastic movement, leaving the membership of the church largely secularized.
A further complicating factor is emphasized by John Baillie.[23] The Roman Empire was not merely the world of the secular as over against the church. It too had its sacred things, for paganism was its established religion. The assumption that the empire must have its religious affiliation led to the establishment of Christianity in the place of paganism. Baillie has well shown the drastic nature of this change, and considers that the early church had not foreseen this possibility or prepared to meet it. The church which had its own organization as a minority within the hostile empire now was recognized by the empire. After the deluge of the barbarian invasions, Charlemagne took the next step of reconstituting the empire, in effect, as the political organization of the church. The medieval view of society was thus of a corpus Christianum in which Christianity is compulsory. The “remnant” church had become involved in a new theocracy of its own.
It is this situation which is the background of the Renaissance and modern secularism. The situation itself is variously appraised. Micklem regards the attempt on the part of the “sacred” sphere to deny any real independence to the “secular” as a fundamental mistake, but nevertheless is sympathetic with the ideal of a Christian civilization as it was developed in the Middle Ages. It was, he believes, the best solution which could be found under the circumstances. On the one hand the corpus Christianum of the Middle Ages may be seen as the very antithesis of secularism, in which the secular is taken up into the sacred. But on the other hand, the same situation effectively secularized the church, not only through its grasping for feudal rights, but fundamentally, by removing the distinction between the church and the world.
It is not enough, then, to say that modern secularism is post-Christian. It is post-medieval. The secularism of the West has a very different complexion from the secularism that could have grown up had the Christian church refused to be identified with the whole of society. In the motivation and fabric of Western secularism there are elements of protest with which every Protestant, and certainly every Dissenter, is in sympathy.
Significantly, the climactic synthesis by which the medieval mind defended the union of church and state as differing aspects of the one community, prepared the way for Renaissance secularism. This was the scholastic dualism of nature and grace. Aquinas’ development of this theme was in the pattern of the Aristotelian dialectic between matter and form.[24] As the Thomistic effort at synthesis was driven into antithesis by Ockham and the nominalists, the philosophic basis for the rise of secularism was given. Natural reason, although at first it was depreciated as incapable of a natural theology, was nevertheless completely detached from Revelation. It was neutralized and secularized. The scope assigned to reason in Thomistic thought became first independent and then sovereign. In this way there is a progressive development from this detachment of “natural reason” to the use made of it by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz in seventeenth century rationalism and to British empiricism. The new, critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant gives to this movement a form which has shaped the modern thought world.
If the dualism of the sacred and the secular in medieval thought provided a basis for modern secularism through philosophy, the same dualism in institutionalized form contributed to the development of the modern secular state. Here again the medieval attempt at synthesis broke down. The church claimed higher authority as representing the realm of grace, superior to the realm of nature. In the struggle between popes and emperors the whole Christian ideal for political life was discredited. Machiavelli’s cynical work, The Prince, has its setting in an Italy in which “Christian” cities fought each other, and the Papal armies were among the warring factions. The extension of the established church idea in the Reformation period led to the wars of religion, from which the secular state emerged. Again it is profitable to note that the emergent secularism has a “post-Christian” character. Apart from the corpus Christianum ideal no papal army could ever have taken the field nor could wars of religion have been fought. Had the church not sought to use the sword of the state on its behalf, the relation of church and state would have been entirely different. The state would not have been “Christian” in the externalized medieval sense, but neither would it have become secular in the a-religious modern sense.
The Renaissance was not merely the breakdown of the medieval synthesis. It was, in great measure, the product of the enlarged horizons that grew out of expanding trade and travel stimulated by the Crusades. Even in this connection, however, the unsatisfactory relation of the sacred and the secular in the Middle Ages had its effect. The hierarchical structure of nature and grace implied that theology was the queen of the sciences and that any progress of natural reason must be in conformity with the traditions of the ecclesiastical institution. The impossible situation to which this gave rise is dramatized by the scientists who became victims of the Inquisition. The development of the modern scientific method shows the effect of this struggle. Partly because of it the modern philosophy of science quite generally supposes that it is able to proceed without any religious presupposition whatever.
In philosophy, political theory, and science the development of the secularistic viewpoint of the West is thus characterized by reaction to the medieval situation and at the same time is conditioned by it. It would be possible to trace a similar pattern, to some extent, in economics, in the fields of learning represented by the university, and in social life. It is indeed characteristic of the development of the secular pattern that life is no longer seen as a totality but broken down into spheres which are not easily reconcilable. One characteristic of the secular movement is the effort to develop a unifying world view from the perspective of one of these areas. For Leibniz God is the great geometrician—the palpable deification of the infinitesmal calculus which he had developed. Rousseau passionately combatted the deification of mathematical science and created instead a God who corresponded to the sentiment of liberty and personal autonomy. Kant’s God is a postulate of the practical reason created by the philosopher in the image of that moral autonomy which he proclaimed as the ultimate end of human personality.[25] Similarly Comte sought to develop a humanistic religion on a positivistic basis that made sociology the key to a world-view. More recently the same attempt has been made with psychology (and psychology itself has been approached first in mechanistic fashion after the analogy of physical science, and then as a type of emotional chemistry). One of these secularistic attempts to understand the whole of reality in the one-dimensional point of a single aspect is the doctrine of Marxian communism, which has fastened the limited horizon of a dialectical economic materialism upon the thought of half the world. Science, in the broadest sense, gives a much fuller perspective than any of these partial views mentioned but it cannot of itself achieve a unified view.
Science cannot, for example, resolve the dialectic between nature and freedom with which Kant struggled. In pressing mastery of nature, science has developed the “behavioral sciences” in terms of which the control of human behavior is the necessary goal from the secular standpoint. But this conflicts with the goal of freedom for the personality. By what norms is man to remake himself? C. S. Lewis has exposed this dilemma in merciless fashion in The Abolition of Man.[26]
The long succession of provincial secularisms with their pathetic jargons cannot explain man or his destiny. Rather they have produced the great evils of our time. In the secular state has arisen nationalism. The secularizing of society and of economic life has produced materialism, mass-man, and totalitarianism. All these are combined in Russian communism in a manner which makes it a distinctive symbol of modern secularism. The secularizing of learning has produced a humanism now under attack in education and the arts. Secularized science is now called scientism, and secularized Christianity in the form of modernism is widely criticized.
The bursting of the bubble of uninterrupted progress in this century of world wars has called attention to a crisis in secularism. To many it appears that secularism has run its course, and it is upon this assumption that some investigations of it proceed.[27] In any case it is increasingly recognized that secularism reaches a religious stage.[28] Because human nature is religious in its core, indifference to religion cannot be a stable human attitude. Secularism creates a vacuum which is filled by pseudo-religions and idolatries. Secularism itself, in its limited horizons, provides the idol in many cases. The religious fervor of modern nationalism has dramatized this.
Because of the complexity of modern secularism, its justified protest against the assumptions of the medieval synthesis on the one hand, its rebellion against all supernatural authority on the other, Christian attitudes toward secularism have varied widely.
The early sympathy between Luther and Erasmus indicates the close relation between the protest of humanism and the protest of the Reformers. The Roman Catholic attitude has always regarded the Protestant reformation as a particularly deadly aspect of the secular revolt. Certainly Luther’s scholarship, a product of the new learning, provided the instrument by which he dared to stand on the teaching of Scripture against the authority of the church. Without the nominalism of the late Middle Ages, Luther’s thinking with respect to the church could not have developed as it did. Yet Luther’s central experience and teaching concerning justification by faith alone is the reverse of the secularist attitude. It is, in fact, a desecularization of medieval Christianity. Apart from sacramentalist theology the church could not have seized temporal power. The church as a secularized power system required the theology of a treasury of grace to be dispensed. The secularization of the medieval church was thoroughgoing, and its citadel was a secularized theology, in which the hierarchical institute controlled and administered the very grace of God.
Had Luther’s revolt been limited to a protest against Roman control of the German church, it would have had perhaps an even greater appeal to German nationalism, but it would not have attacked medieval secularism at its heart. For Luther salvation was of the Lord, and therefore the papal pretension to sell grace was intolerable. The same deep commitment to the doctrine of grace made Luther’s break with the humanism of Erasmus inevitable. While Luther found elements of support in the new humanism and nationalism, the core of his position, in opposition to these, was anti-secular.
Luther was not successful, however, in establishing the complete rejection of secularism which his central position demanded. Limited by the very intensity of his conviction as to personal justification by faith, he failed to see the vital importance of establishing a spiritual form of church government in the biblical pattern. Because he regarded this matter as indifferent, he permitted the German princes to take the government of the church into their hands under the consistorial system. The result in the Landeskirchen was that temporal and spiritual power continued to be united. The outcome was a “political Quietism” on the part of the Lutheran church which prepared the way for the omnicompetent absolutist state.[29] Through Melanchthon’s influence Lutheran thought was contained in the old scholastic pattern which continued the sacred/secular dualism.
In the Reformed branch of Protestantism, largely as a result of the work of John Calvin, the dualism between the sacred and the secular was more fully overcome. Calvin’s emphasis on the glory of God was Luther’s basic principle more consistently applied to the whole range of theology. The Calvinist doctrine of the sovereignty of God in salvation is the expression of the antithesis to secularism. But Calvinism was not narrowly soteriological. The sovereignty of God extended over all of life. Upon every thought and activity soli Deo gloria! must be inscribed.
Again the use which the Protestant reformation made of the new learning of the Renaissance is apparent. Calvin was a scholar in the classics, and applied his learning to the study of the Scriptures and the church fathers. Calvin did not share Luther’s indifference to the form of the organized church. Rather he developed a doctrine of church government from Scripture and labored to make the city of Geneva a model Christian community. As Baillie says, “The holy community which Calvin sought to set up in Geneva represents in some ways a completer integration of Christianity with civilization than anything Europe had yet seen”.[30]
Certainly Calvin sought to make the life of Geneva genuinely Christian. The grandeur of his vision must be contrasted with the divided society of the Middle Ages, where anyone who proposed to take Christianity seriously was expected to take up the monastic life.[31] As Baillie has shown, “conversion” in the middle ages meant conversion to the life of a monk.[32] Calvin was not content to leave the mass of Christians thus secularized. Further, the liberty of the church from the state must be preserved. The struggle to achieve this at Geneva shows Calvin’s grasp of its importance. Above all the church must have the right to discipline its members. The elders who formed a characteristic part of Reformed church government must be free to work on the immense task of “reforming the manners” of a secularized people.
Attention has been called[33] to the relationship of Calvinism to the great change in the economic life which ushered in the modern period. “So far from rejecting the rising forces of nascent capitalism, and clinging to the feudal agrarian framework of society, it identified itself wholeheartedly with the former, and constituted activity and successful activity in this new field of economic enterprise the very sphere within which religion could find its most appropriate expression.”[34] Calvinism thus provided the needed spiritual basis and background for modern capitalistic society. This relationship can be exaggerated, for the secular spirit could and did mouth Calvinistic terms to justify its own acquisitiveness. For the full impact of the Reformed Faith in the field of economics one may not neglect the profound influence of what has been called the “nonconformist conscience” as the legacy of Puritanism in England.
In Calvinism the Christianization of the secular was the goal. Yet even in Geneva the corpus Christianum ideal remained. Christianity was compulsory. The alternative was exile or the fate of Servetus.
In the period of the Reformation, then, the secularism of the medieval church rather than that of Renaissance humanism was regarded as the threat to Protestantism.
In the seventeenth century growing national power increased the subjection of the church to the state in all of Europe. This was apparent in the Roman Catholic countries (for example, in Gallicanism), as well as in those which had become Protestant. This growth of state control increasingly secularized the church. While vigorous and creative doctrinal work continued the building of Protestant theology, scholastic methods were employed and a strenuous intellectualism revealed a confidence in reason akin to the rationalistic philosophers of the century (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz). The prevalence of a formal and sterile orthodoxy led to a reaction of pietism. In its manifestations early in the century in English Puritanism this movement was not one of withdrawal from secular responsibility. Rather it was true to the Calvinist ideal. However, when the English Puritans and Dutch “precisianists” realized the impossibility of shaping the national community after their pattern a characteristic introversion began concentrating on personal piety in the personal, spiritual life.[35] This was much more evident in the German Pietism of P. J. Spener and A. H. Francke at Halle. This introversion resulted in greater inroads of secularism for it largely abandoned the secular. It provided no Christian view of reality which could correct the coming “Enlightenment”.
The development of natural science by Galileo and Newton brought an attempt to create a new natural theology on the basis of the new cosmology. By the end of the century deism and rationalism were already in evidence. Bayle’s Dictionary (1695–1697) has been called the “arsenal of all Enlightenment philosophy”.[36] It popularized a rationalistic approach to Scripture and was the model for Diderot’s Encyclopédie. The closing years of the century in England were marked by publications by Locke and Toland, the former being close to deism and the latter fully deistic. Natural theology now superseded revealed theology in a fashion which marked a triumph for the secularist approach.
The “rising tide” of secularism in the seventeenth century met with little effective Christian opposition because the Christian reaction of pietism withdrew to a subjective spirituality which ceded the world to the secularists.
In the eighteenth century the wave crested and broke in the Enlightenment. English deism reached its peak but was carried into a more profound skepticism by David Hume. It became clear that the mediating position of deism was not tenable. The resistance to the secularizing of English Christianity came through the Evangelical movement primarily under Wesley. Wesley was heir both to English Puritanism and German Pietism. Again, as in the preceding century, the pattern of resistance to secularism was that of a retreat from the disputed areas into more strongly affirmed subjective spirituality. Because Methodism was in contact with the masses, however, it did develop awareness of social need, and many movements for social reform, opposition to slavery among them, grew out of the evangelical revival.
Deism and skepticism in France, unchecked by an evangelical movement, developed far more violently. Rousseau made the state the supreme moral order, a spiritual refuge which replaces the church. Rousseau held to the goodness of an individual uncorrupted by society: but only the state can protect him. The power of the state assures liberty to its members. For the development of the individual, there must be an absolute surrender, with all his rights and powers, to the community as a whole. The will of the community as a whole, the volonté général, is freedom. This must be the religion of the citizen. Christianity will not serve, for it dampens national ardor with an other-worldly perspective. It preaches servitude and dependence. The state must proclaim its own creed, and teach all children from the cradle, suffering no organizations, no parties, not even the family to intervene in its absolute power over each citizen.
Before the end of the century, Rousseau’s totalitarian speculations had become the blueprints of the French Revolution. The Revolution came to its maturity in Napoleon’s dictatorship.
In Germany the Aufklärung triumphed over Pietism, though, especially in its later forms, it was influenced by it. The most significant figure was Immanuel Kant. His thought did not provide a program for social action like Rousseau’s, but it did establish a new frame of reference and climate of opinion which issued in German idealism and was the underlying basis for a reconstruction of Christian philosophy and theology to meet the challenge of secularism. The solution was not a penetration of the secular problems with Christian thought. On the contrary it provided in theoretical form a reenforced dualism. Kant was concerned to secure the liberty of the individual (an Enlightenment ideal), and at the same time a free field for natural science, which he understood in terms of the determinism of Newtonian physics. As a true son of the Enlightenment Kant’s assumption was that the solution must be found rationally, and on immanentistic grounds. The autonomy of the reason was his major presupposition. This provided him with his key. By proceeding epistemologically in analyzing reason, rather than metaphysically in making assertions about reality, Kant found the two dimensions in which ethical freedom and physical necessity could have a peaceful coexistence. The “pure” reason yielded science, the “practical” reason deistic religion, with projected concepts of God, freedom, and immortality. The autonomous man was squarely in the center, deterministic science was at liberty to remake the world, and God was sealed off from metaphysical reality as a reference point for the conscience in ethical culture.
Kant’s defence of religion proved as disastrous as Napoleon’s attack in the name of the revolution. As the Protestant missionary enterprise was launched anew at the end of this critical century, it is evident that the unanswered challenges of secularism must from the beginning create serious ambiguities.
The nineteenth century can be assessed only with extreme brevity. The fundamental factors in the relation of Christianity and secularism remained constant, although the problems appeared in new and aggravated forms. The triumphant march of science through the century developed a self-confident scientism which regarded Christianity as the persisting remains of a dead superstition. With a sure instinct, Napoleon had patronized the science of his day, and the stamp of the French Revolution is apparent in the Positivism of Auguste Comte. It is only necessary to name Strauss and Darwin to be aware of what new problems for Christianity were posed as self-confident science proceeded to the biblical documents and the question of human origins.
In another sense science created problems, for applied science had produced the industrial revolution, and the deplorable social conditions in industrial England provide the background for the “scientific” solution of Karl Marx. Even this extreme of secularism—as dialectical materialism is intended to be—is not so unambiguous as might be supposed. The elements of Christian idealism in Marx’s concern for social reform have often been pointed out in the observation that communism is in a sense a “Christian heresy”.
Hegel’s dialectic, to which Marx was oriented, if often negatively, was productive of many more movements, and especially of renewed interest in historical studies.
In the ecclesiastical and political fields, the century was filled with struggles between church and state, as the churches sought to free themselves from state domination. In a sense it was a century of individualism rather than statism, but Nisbet has pointed out that these are really complementary, since the freedom of the individual is from the intermediate associations of society rather than from the state.36a The freedom which the churches gained, however, marked an advance which was possible partly because of the reaction to the totalitarian aspects of the French Revolution.
Free churches also broke away from the established churches, and there were secessions by conservatives as churches were dominated by liberals. These movements were significant in the struggle against secularism since they represented vigorous protest against secularized theology and practice within the church. The movement under Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands was remarkable in this respect. The establishment of the Free University in Amsterdam indicated a Calvinistic concern for all of culture. The political program of the “Anti-revolutionary” party which Kuyper led is an unusual example of an effort by capable leadership to develop a program of Christian action on the basis of historic Christianity.
In America and Great Britain the contributions of Christian scholarship to evaluating and meeting the challenge of secularism were impressive, but it must be admitted that Christianity’s chief recourse was to revivalism in continuation of the pietistic-evangelical stream. This was particularly the case in America, where the continuing frontier was evangelized by the revival preacher. It was from this evangelical ardor that the mighty missionary effort of the century was made, and in the lands of the younger churches its strength and weakness has been manifested.
The optimism with which the twentieth century was greeted by secularists and Christians alike is ironical and, for our purpose, revealing. It is a fair indication of the superficial estimate on both sides of the real significance of modern secularism. Even the shattering experience of the first world war was accommodated to the presupposition of uninterrupted progress. It was viewed as a final Armageddon, a necessary prelude to a Utopia, if not the millennium. It would “make the world safe for democracy”. It was a war to end war.
The relentless outworking of the secularist presuppositions in the history of this century forced a reappraisal of this optimism. Spengler’s Decline of the West seemed prophetic. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia embodied Karl Marx’s thought in history in a manner which surpassed even the actualization of Rousseau’s thought in the French revolution. World communism and fascism showed the threatening potential of the modern omnicompetent state. Mass man was revealed, freed from all restrictions of class status and responsibility in family, church, guild, and community, responsible only to the state. His freedom was slavery.
In the chaos of collapsing values, crude new paganisms appeared. Secularism came to its idolatrous stage in the “blood and soil” religion of Nazi Germany and the Stalin cult in Russia. Most disquieting of all was the realization that in these demonic perversions of society and religion there was nothing totally alien or strange to the secularized ideals of the West.
In the fear that has spread among thoughtful men there is a realization that the human evil which seemed a little worm when the socialist Utopia was just around the corner has become a roaring dragon. The secular Renaissance faith in human capability and goodness shared by communists, democrats, and liberal churchmen has proved to be what D. R. Davies has called “The Great Illusion”.[37] War is the normal condition of human society, just as conflict is the normal condition of the human personality. The heart, like the world, is a battlefield, and its history is measured in cycles of frustration. Disorder, the irrational, the demonic have fascinated the students of psychology as well as the observers of history. At the same time even physical science appears to rest upon an abyss of irrationalism. The mechanistic simplicity of Newtonian physics has its applicability to wide aspects of the macrocosm, but the universe of subatomic particles appears to be of a different order.
The literature cited in this essay illustrates the seriousness with which current Christian thought is facing the issue of secularism. Increasingly it is viewed as a world-wide problem. The rapid development of communication and commerce has far outstripped the development of community, and the overshadowing menace of weapons of total destruction promises only a common annihilation.
The world-wide nature of the problem was realized long ago in the church. Missionaries throughout the last century became increasingly aware that the cultures in Asia, Africa, or Oceania to which they brought the gospel were not stable, but in rapid and accelerating change under the impact of Western secularism. Leaders in the younger churches sought to assess the new situation in which their work was to be done. The Jerusalem meeting of the International Missionary Conference in 1928 discussed secularism along with the leading non-Christian religions as at least of equal significance for the Christian approach. In his preliminary paper, Rufus M. Jones views secularism not so much as another faith as the enemy of all faith, Christian and non-Christian alike. It is clear that the secularism he opposes is materialism. “I am using ‘secular’ here to mean a way of life and an interpretation of life that include only the natural order of things and that do not find God, or a realm of spiritual reality, essential for life or thought” (italics added).[38] With the “deeper spiritual values” of the secularistic scientist he has no quarrel. The church should seek to incorporate these in a new synthesis adequate to the new age. As Augustine welcomed neo-Platonism and Aquinas welcomed Aristotelianism, to the great enrichment of Christianity, so should the church receive the modern scientific world view. Only then can it gain a hearing among the university youth of the East, already captivated by the scientific method. This synthesis offers no great problems to Jones, for that which the church must insist upon is no creed, but a way of life. There is no fact which is not open to investigation, no truth which is of a special order. Further, the Christian way of life is naturally attractive to everyone as “the most beautiful ideal that has yet been proposed”.[39] Christ as overlaid with theological interpretations repels, but “men natively, naturally love Christ and want to follow Him when they really see Him in His true beauty and loveliness”.[40] Men’s spirit of adventure only needs some guidance to come to Christ.
Many of the speakers at the conference gave a proper recognition of elements of value in secular civilization. William Temple, in a brief paper on “Christianity and Secular Civilization” makes an important contribution by analyzing certain of these secular values to demonstrate an origin in Christianity for them. He holds that secularism poses a greater threat to the non-Christian religions than to Christianity, not only because of the attitudes which it has borrowed from Christianity, but because Christianity is unique in the place which it provides for the secular life. In a suggestive statement he calls Christianity “the most materialistic of all higher religions, for while they attain to spirituality by turning away from matter, it expresses its spirituality by dominating matter”.[41]
The Council’s statement on this question appears to reflect the general conception of secularism as materialism. The Council declares, “We call on the followers of non-Christian religions to … hold fast to faith in the unseen and eternal in face of the growing materialism of the world; to cooperate with us against all the evils of secularism…”.[42] A further section expresses a call to “all who inherit the benefits of secular civilization and contribute to its advancement…”. Here the labors of scientists and artists are recognized as service to Christ’s cause in dispersing the “darkness of ignorance, superstition, and vulgarity”. “Noble elements” in nationalism are acknowledged. The warning is expressed that “when patriotism and science are not consecrated, they are often debased…”.[43]
The Jerusalem report, then, expresses a viewpoint which seeks a synthesis of the spiritual contributions of secular civilization with a Christianity that must be rethought. This is similar to the attitude adopted at Jerusalem with respect to the non-Christian religions. Yet the Jerusalem report actually calls for an alliance of all religions against secularism as materialism.
In the report of the advisory commission on the main theme of the second assembly of the World Council of Churches at Evanston, 1954, “Christ, the Hope of the World”, there is a statement concerning secularism as one of the “hopes of our time”. In this report secularism in general is not discussed hut the component movements are analyzed: democratic humanism, scientific humanism, Marxism and the renaissance of nationalism.[44]
This section is of considerable significance. It reflects the learning of its authors with respect to the historical developments of these movements and provides a valuable summary of their features. It manifests a different theological climate from that of Jerusalem. One feels that it is the product of sadder and wiser minds. It recognizes the anti-Christian character of these movements. After tracing the historical relation of Christian faith to democratic humanism, it mentions the multiple origins of this movement and declares: “To a variety of sources other than Christian—among them classical humanism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and modern scientific and cultural humanism—it owes other ingredients that vitiate its understanding of man”.[45] With this report in view we must turn to a Christian evaluation of secularism.
As William Temple, John Baillie, the Evanston report, and many others have shown, a Christian evaluation of secularism demands first of all, an understanding of the extent to which it is molded by Christian assumptions. The principal assumptions may be noted briefly.
The first is the idea of history and progress so characteristic of modern secularist faith. This is most sharply evident in contrast with the Eastern tendency to regard history as an illusion signifying nothing. It stands also in marked contrast with the cyclical view of history characteristic of Greek thought. The static hierarchical structure of the Middle Ages was a perversion of the basic Christian philosophy of history. By its institutionalization of the means of grace it set up a hierarchical “chain of being” which was characteristically explicated in the terms of Aristotelian philosophy rather than those of biblical thought.
The significance of history is profoundly asserted in the Christian gospel. It is rooted fundamentally in the Christian doctrine of creation which asserts both a beginning and a purpose for created reality. It is underscored by the unfolding actions of God’s redemption climaxing in the Incarnation, the historical ministry of the Son of God, his death, resurrection, ascension, and enthronement as the Lord of history, until history shall have been brought to its climax in the consummation. This very exaltation of Christ and the spiritual nature of his church makes Christianity a dynamic force in every culture which it enters and prevents it from being identified with any fixed order reflecting one particular set of circumstances.
A second Christian assumption of modern secularism is the ideal of freedom. In Christian doctrine this also is a result of the sovereign lordship of Christ. Those who have been made free by the Son are free indeed. No outward circumstances nor social status can in any way limit the prerogatives of the heavenly citizenship. It is Christian brotherhood in the church which has provided the ideal of brotherhood as a human relationship which is a leaven in modern secularism. Again this doctrine which finds its most pointed expression in the realm of redemption is founded upon the doctrine of creation. The declaration that all men are of one blood is a revolutionary statement in those areas of the world where tribalism or its consequences prevail.
This assumption is closely related to another—the respect for the individual personality so characteristic of democratic humanism. Man as bearing God’s image, even as a sinner, may not be despised. The law of capital punishment in Genesis is explicitly founded upon the value of human life because of this fact. Man as redeemed is renewed in the image of Christ and therefore both the individual and the new community must be treated with the greatest respect. It is the flock of God which he purchased with his own blood. The humblest Christian is called to judge angels. This principle was never lost sight of in the Christian church and was powerfully reasserted in connection with the Reformation. It is this basically Christian assumption as it has been taken up by modern secularism which has so profound an effect upon the East. As the Evanston report has pointed out, this is an essential ingredient in the democratic ideal.
An element in democratic humanism which is not characteristic of secularism generally is the recognition of the potential for evil of the human heart. This again is a Christian assumption deriving from the doctrine of original sin. As the Evanston report declares: “To the same source (Christian teaching) it owes its understanding of men’s lust for and misuse of power, of the peril of placing unchecked power in the hands of a few, and of the obligation of governments to safeguard each man against injustice, tyranny, and exploitation, and to seek the welfare not of a privileged few, but of all”.[46]
The utopian ideals of secularism are also basically Christian in origin. The eschatological perspective of Christianity, the Christian hope for the restoration of all things, the Christian concept of the consummation, all these have powerfully influenced the secular ideal. Further, the ministry of mercy of the Christian church has opened the way for an attitude toward human suffering that has molded the program for the social reform of secularism. The ideal of the welfare state is in large measure a secularization of the Christian concern for the well-being of every individual. Even the place of education in the utopian programs of secularism, in large measure, derives from Christianity, and particularly from the place that the printed Bible occupies in Protestantism. The transition from the Christian to the secular is abundantly illustrated in the lands of the younger churches where Christian institutions erected for the education, health, and economic improvement of the people have been taken over by the rising nationalism. Nationalism does not regard itself as becoming in any way Christianized by such action because the Christian ideals in the secular movement of which nationalism is a part have provided the transition.
Another Christian assumption is involved in the scientific humanism which is so prominent a part of secularism generally. This is the Christian attitude toward nature and the natural. Again the Christian doctrine of creation provides the basis for the Christian outlook. The world is not the embodiment of mysterious mana to be worshipped, nor is it maya, an illusion. It is the product of God’s creative work. Further, man has a vocation with respect to the natural world. Man is to fill and subdue the earth. When Adam was placed in the garden, he was given the task of dressing and keeping it. William Temple is justified in declaring that only in the atmosphere of such an attitude toward nature could the modern scientific attitude develop. It is not accidental that natural science once had a close affinity with natural theology. The motivation to understand the world rose naturally out of a desire to glorify the God who made it. The Calvinistic support for the development of the economic life is rooted in this conviction that the world is given to man for his own benefit and thereby for God’s glory.
These factors of the Christian assumptions inherent in secularism must never be lost sight of in evaluating the Christian attitude toward the modern mind. It is foolish to assume that Christianity and Western culture are unrelated or merely opposed to one another. The admonition to missionaries to preach Christ and not Western culture is an over-simplified ignoring of the leavening of Western culture by the gospel.
It is also evident, however, that in this brief summary of the Christian assumptions in secularism, the other side of the picture has been omitted. An evaluation of secularism must also take into account its post-Christian orientation. It is true, as the Evanston report suggests, that streams from both Christian and non-Christian sources are mingled in these secular movements. But such phrasing does not give the full picture, for these other elements are antithetical to Christianity. There cannot be a mechanical mingling; secularism, in its fundamental dynamic, is anti-Christian. Every attitude which has been borrowed from the Christian world-view has been transformed or vitiated in the new setting. The basic theme of modern secularism is the autonomy of man. If secularism is influenced by the Christian doctrine of history and progress, it perverts this assumption to something quite different, the doctrine of inevitable progress. While the Christian view of history derives its structure from the sovereign purpose of God, the secular ideal seeks only the self-glorification of man. The goal of freedom in secularism is not freedom under God but freedom from God. Man desires a freedom which is proper only to God. He desires to be unconditioned and autonomous. The anti-authoritarianism of secularism has plunged it into a relativism which acknowledges no norm. Secular science in its attitude to the natural denies the supernatural. As has been noted, the two themes of the exploitation of nature and the assertion of freedom thus secularized present a contradiction which can never be harmonized on the assumption of human autonomy. The naturalistic assumptions of science demand that man himself be part of the nature which he seeks to control. Science which engages in “human engineering” and “human conditioning” destroys human freedom for all but the conditioners. Indeed, as C. S. Lewis has caustically shown, the conditioners themselves can acknowledge no norm, but on that fateful morning when they make the decision which unalterably conditions the whole human race from that hour forward, they themselves are conditioned, perhaps by what they had for breakfast!
The perversion of the Christian assumption runs through all the others that we have noted. In the relation of mass man to the totalitarian state, the curbing of power characteristic of the Christian conviction of sin has been removed. The utopianism of secular ideals is deliberately affirmed as a substitute for the kingdom of God.
In this perversion of the Christian assumptions secularism has involved itself in inherent contradiction. The outworking of these contradictions in the disasters of our time has brought some to declare that we stand at the end of the secular era. We do well to be reminded, however, that few men are without some form of hope, absurd though the hope may be. The Evanston report calls attention to this fact. The secularism which may have appeared to have run its course in Western society stands, in a sense, at the threshold of a new epoch in the East. As was noted earlier, the significance of secularism is altered when it is introduced into a non-Christian society. The Christian assumptions, perverted though they may be, tend to emerge in more emphatic form.
Nor should the vitality of secularism in the West be underestimated. In fact, secularism appears to be entering a new phase rather than disappearing. The unchecked growth of the omnicompetent state demands increasingly one center of loyalty for all citizens. There is a corollary demand for one man in whom this loyalty shall be focused.
It would appear that the religious cult centering upon a dictator remains the inevitable trend of the modern secular world. In the countries of the non-Christian religions the effort for a rapid transformation of society into the secularized pattern, however much it may be motivated by attractive ideals in that pattern, appears to accentuate the tendency toward a dictatorial regime.
Modern secularism, then, shows a strange ambivalence. Its orientation is anti-Christian, but it has only perverted and not replaced the Christian ideals which are embedded in its structure. For the clarification of the Christian position as over against this baffling challenge, theological reflection is essential. Dooyeweerd has convincingly shown how the nature/grace dualism, as a theological misconstruction of medieval thought, opened the way to a secularist attitude by undermining a properly Christian view of the secular.[47] Only as the biblical doctrines of creation, the fall, and the restoration of all things in Christ are taken in full seriousness can such dualism be overcome.
Biblical theology can render great service in this area. Much of the confusion which led to the medieval secularization can be traced to a failure to grasp the profound distinction between the Old Testament theocracy and the New Testament church. To the extent that the organized church seeks to dominate society and culture it invites the evils of a secularist revolt and courts the dangers of becoming itself secularized.
At the same time, a correct understanding of the Old Testament form of the covenant greatly aids our understanding of the secular. The land of Palestine is given by the Lord to his covenant people. In the covenant, therefore, the garden of Eden is in a sense restored and the creation mandate to develop the world reissued to the community of God’s people. The world of creation becomes, in a special sense, a gift of the covenant, and its fruit is to be brought to God in worship. So also the artisans who labored on the tabernacle were filled with wisdom for the work by the Holy Spirit. It is only by the grace of God that the world of nature continues to yield its fruit to man. His right to possess it as God’s original gift has been forfeited by sin. Here is the antithesis of the secularist attitude. Both by God’s creation and by his redemptive grace man is made a steward of the manifold gifts of God. This concept of stewardship is a fundamental presupposition of the ceremonial law of the Old Testament. The legislation with respect to the year of jubilee, however little it may have been observed in the history of Israel, makes the stewardship concept perfectly clear. The land was the Lord’s, not Israel’s, and no man had absolute rights in it. The cancelling of debts and restitution of property in the year of jubilee form a powerful check to the secularist spirit.
The balance here is theological. On the one hand the Old Testament has a profound respect for material things as the gift of God and the mark of his blessing. On the other hand the concept of stewardship made Israel a nation of free men in a world of great slave states. The balance of the concept is in the fact that the covenant is God’s. A humanized concept of stewardship that does not take into account man’s responsiblity before God can never preserve these Old Testament ideals.
The root evil of secularism as autonomy, independence from God, is emphasized in the Old Testament. It is worthy of note that the earliest evil after the fall, as presented in the book of Genesis, is not idolatry but primeval secularism. The civilization of the line of Cain is described as one of technical progress but one which is away from the face of the Lord and knows not the fear of the Lord. Lamech’s song of the sword is a secular hymn that our century too has learned to sing. The tower of Babel is the great Old Testament symbol of the secular spirit as manifested in urban life. Only a divine interposition which broke the monolithic secular civilization of that period could preserve humanity from another divine judgment more complete than the flood.
In this section of Genesis the antithesis between secularistic autonomy and worshiping dependence on God is expressed in terms of the “name” of man as over against the Name of God. Cain builds the first great city and gives it the name of his son Enoch (Gen. 4:17). This City of Man’s Name appears again in the plain of Shinar: “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make us a name …” (Gen. 11:4). In contrast is the line of Seth, where men “call on the name of the Lord” (Gen. 4:26). To Abraham, the pilgrim of faith, God promises “I will make thy name great” (Gen. 12:2). Abraham does not build his own city to establish his own name, but looks for “the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10).
Modern Babel builders have no comprehension of the evil of ignoring God’s Name and the exaltation of man’s name. Zeal for the Name of the Lord must be evident in a Christian estimate of secularism. The enormous wickedness of the blasphemy of the secularist mind must be rebuked.
Because Israel did not sanctify God’s Name in the land, the nation was condemned through the prophets to the judgment of the exile. The blessings of God in the land has been profaned, not only by idolatry, but also in the sin of Babel. The people of God sought the glory of their own name rather than the glory of God’s Name. Israel had chosen to serve other gods, and therefore was judged by being made servants of those who worshipped their gods. Israel had also trusted in its own wisdom, strength and wealth, and must be taught the vanity of such worldliness (Jer. 9:23). The futility of life under the sun apart from the law of God was a lesson of the Preacher which had to be learned in the exile by a faithful remnant of the nation, while the profaned land enjoyed its Sabbath rest.
It was learned by very few. After the judgment of the exile the secularistic temptation prevailed in a new form. The Jews of the dispersion, while living as communities in the fellowship of the synagogue, did not have a theocratic manner of life. The temptation to divorce daily life from religion was heightened by the economic success of the diaspora in the Roman Empire and the East. Yet, in God’s providence, the synagogue community was a transition toward the new form of organization of the people of God that was to be established through the work of Christ.
Misconceptions regarding the relation of the New Testament proclamation of the Kingdom to that which went before always have a damaging effect on the evaluation of secularism. It is usual to hear the Old and the New contrasted in terms of nationalism and universalism, materialism and spirituality. Such a dualism is unjustified. The particularism of the Old Testament has a universalistic end. Abraham is called so that in him all the nations of the earth may be blessed. Israel’s calling is before the nations and for the sake of the nations. The failure of Israel leads to the work of the individual Servant of the Lord who comes to bring that blessing to the nations that the sinful people could never provide. God’s covenant with his people is both realized and fulfilled in Christ in whom all the promises are yea and amen.
The change in the form of the manifestation of the Kingdom is that which flows from this realization of all things in Christ. The Kingdom appears in its fullness as the rule and realm of God’s redemptive action in Christ. In him God tabernacles among his people, with his death the veil of the temple is rent, for its symbolism is fulfilled. The atonement is made, and the High Priest goes to the true and heavenly sanctuary to sprinkle the mercy seat with his blood. He goes also to sit at the right hand of God; the real and heavenly throne transcends and abolishes the earthly throne of David. The abiding city of God is the heavenly Jerusalem where the risen Christ is, and to which all his people come in faith. There is therefore no longer a holy place on earth. Worship is not localized in Jerusalem or Gerizim but in heaven. The nations are drawn to the true mount of the Lord, the Lord of the whole earth, whose rule is universal, and who sends his heralds to the ends of the earth. The Kingdom is taken from an unbelieving nation and given to the true seed of Abraham, the New Israel in Christ.
The ascended King, however, is also the coming King. His servants await that coming and occupy until he comes. In the interim the heirs of the earth are pilgrims and strangers. They do not yet reign on the earth. They must use the world for the ends of the Kingdom.
Yet Jesus’ lordship over the temporal world is clearly asserted. Jesus’ call to the disciples was issued after the miraculous catch of fish. Jesus not only commanded his disciples to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, but also assured them that all these things—their temporal needs—would be provided. Early Christians sometimes misunderstand the relation of the world of things to the program of the kingdom. It was necessary that they should be enjoined to labor with their own hands that they might provide for their own and have to give to those who were in need.
The basic principle of the Christian’s vocation according to the New Testament is nevertheless clear. He is called as a disciple to seek the things of the kingdom of God and he prays in faith that his bread should be supplied day by day. There is no distinction between a spiritual and a secular calling, whether as dividing between men or dividing a man’s life. His calling is to be the steward of all God’s gifts, whether they be material things or spiritual graces. But his stewardship is not to be discharged foolishly. Wisdom is required as well as diligence. The steward must not only occupy till his Lord comes, but proceed wisely, making spiritual gains by his use of earthly mammon. His treasure must be in heaven. He does not labor as a mere servant, who is uninformed as to his Lord’s purpose and program, but as one who has been called a friend. Knowing that his Lord will return, knowing that the gospel must be preached in all the earth, knowing that the church is a pilgrim church, hastening on, as Newbigin has put it, “to the ends of the earth and the end of time”, the Christian steward must be prudent in the direction of his labors. The command to subdue the earth is still, by God’s grace, applicable, but in the eschatological situation and with the missionary task of the New Testament, the direction of this task must conform to the greatly altered situation.
The interim service of Christ must never ignore the purpose of his present rule. It is the day of grace. The longsuffering of God withholds judgment until Christ gathers in his people through the power of his Word and Spirit. Therefore the servants of Christ must not use the sword in his name. Those who are ordained as his officers are given spiritual authority exclusively; the outward organization of his people is the church, not a state using armed force.
However, just because the judgment has not come, the sword must be exercised for the punishment of evil doers. But this function is not to be carried out either by or for the people of God as such. The organized church is not made the ruler of the nations. The church must recognize the legitimacy of political power, and its independence of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. There is a loyalty due to Caesar, for Christ has not erected on earth a competing Kingdom. To be sure, there is an apparent ambiguity in obeying for God’s sake a rule that knows not God, but this situation is the consequence of God’s longsuffering grace. When the rule of Christ becomes openly manifest, the interim of grace will be over. His servants will thrust in the sickle in his name one day, but that day is the last day, the day of judgment. Until then, God has ordained government for all men with authority that does not require piety for its validation. This authority may be so perverted by those who exercise it that it demands that obedience which is due to God alone, or contravenes his revealed will by its decrees. Christians must then obey God rather than men; such government has ceased to fulfil its ordained function to the degree that it opposes the Word of God. However, the people of God may not organize a Christian revolution to make Christ King by force, even if the earthly Kingdom is that of the Beast and the Antichrist. Christ is the King of glory; at the day of his appearing his Kingdom will be manifest.
Throughout the Bible, therefore, we are furnished with the basis for a theological critique of secularism. The dualistic motif of nature/freedom is not supported by any biblical dialectic of nature/grace. Rather, the Bible teaches God’s blessing on his creation and man’s position as steward, implying both man’s lordship over creation and his service of God. The grace of God is manifested in his creative goodness, and requires the response of worship. After the sin of man, the redemptive purposes of God include the fulfilment of the original blessing on creation. The vocation of the people of God, both before and after the coming of Christ, is to do all to the glory of God, using temporal means to eternal ends.
In this unity of service, however, there is a programmatic structure. The servant may not usurp the authority of his Lord, and Christ has forbidden our use of temporal power to enforce the requirements of his Kingdom. The pilgrim people, who share Christ’s reproach as strangers in their own inheritance, must nonetheless exercise dominion over created things, but their dominion is partial and preliminary. Signs of the coming fullness have been granted through Christ and in the church of the apostolic age, but the realization of this promise is yet to come.
In the interim, Christians share with non-Christians the development of this world, and recognize the right of the non-Christians as founded, not in their fallacious assumption of human autonomy, but in the long-suffering goodness of God, who has not withdrawn from the sinner the world his wickedness has forfeited, but has given him its fruit in toil and suffering.
This attempt to formulate a Christian understanding of secularism should make quite clear the importance of the first step for the Christian mission as it is confronted with this challenge. It is plainly the development of a more vigorously theological appraisal of this modern movement. Informed conversation with the secularist mind is an essential part of the approach of the gospel to our age. This is true both in the lands of the younger churches and in those areas from which the gospel was spread in the last century. Dooyeweerd has pointed out that while the Protestant Reformation was vigorous in re-evaluating theology, it failed in the challenge offered by the great universities which came into Protestant hands. Melanchthon led Lutheranism into the old scholastic patterns and the Reformed branch of Protestantism followed suit. The progress of secularism was not understood by Christian thinkers largely because they had become progressively secularized. Even when secularism was vigorously rejected by revival movements it was neither understood nor countered. Indeed secularism was enforced by the very flight from the world to which revivalism often gave rise. Modern theology is heir to the old dualism. For all of its concern with social problems, it requires a wall of separation between science and religion. It is never less helpful than when this dimensionalism is carried to the point of declaring all human deeds alike under judgment and under grace.
Only as the modern world is examined upon Christian presuppositions can truth and error be distinguished. There must be active Christian leadership in the areas of learning and research as well as in public affairs. For conversation with the secularist, the Christian must know what he is talking about.
After Western missions became aware of naive ethnocentrism that characterized the early period there was a reaction of equally naive encouragement of “indigenous culture”. Sometimes this still continues in efforts to spare the younger churches the complexity of Western theology. Such paternalism is ill-advised in a day when nationalist leaders the world around are thoroughly familiar with the complexities of Marxist dialectic and other manifestations of Western secularism. Leadership in the younger churches must be prepared to act on the basis of a profound theological appraisal of secularism. Whatever the specific problems may be in relation to the cultural heritage of the area, they will not exceed those created by the secularist motif of the emerging world culture. Even in areas where a “primitive” culture has prevailed, the dominant problem is not the revival of a snake cult or the proliferation of pseudo-Christian sects, but the rising tide of secularistic nationalism. Theological education for leaders of the younger churches may not be simplified or second rate. The society to which they must carry the gospel is incredibly complex, a maelstrom of ancient tradition, persistent superstition, and new technology; a vortex where whirlwinds from two worlds converge. These leaders must themselves discern which truths of the Christian heritage are most needed in their particular circumstances, but they, perhaps more than we, need the fullest resources of theological scholarship.
Further, Christian education must not be limited to Christian religious education. Such a limitation is in itself a secularist triumph. In lands of the older and younger churches alike there must be Christian private schools from the primary level to the university. The secularist mind will never be challenged if Christians themselves receive their total education from a secularist state. The Christian home cannot hope by supplementive or corrective teaching to overcome the secularist propaganda in which a public educational institution in a modern secular state is steeped. Further, only in such a Christian system of education is there developed the necessary professional leadership in Christian learning and research. The impact of the Free University in Amsterdam upon the life of the Netherlands indicates this. Of course the secularist will lament the development of a Christian approach to the problems of modern life as divisive of the unity of the state. Yet unless this approach is developed and heard, the secular community will be disintegrated by its own contradictions, and bear the judgment of God.
In this century the importance of Christian schools has been more fully recognized in the missionary outreach of the church than in the situation at home. Many thousands of Americans have supported mission schools abroad who would consider Christian schools in America absurd. This underestimation of the secularizing force of public education in America has had inevitable consequences here, and it is being repeated abroad as mission schools seek state aid at the price of a “neutral” curriculum. Some have even come to regard Christian schools as an emergency measure to develop literacy until state schools are established.
If Christian schools are established only as an aid to evangelism, or as a charitable enterprise, a vital element in the Christian response to secularism is missing. Christian parents, charged with the whole training of their children, have the responsibility of educating them not in a secularist atmosphere, but in the nurture of the Lord. This is needful not only in countries where a false religion dominates the schools, as in the Islamic states, but also where the propaganda is secularistic. The freedom of parents to sponsor such schools is a keystone of true religious liberty. The spirit of secularism threatens to destroy that liberty in the name of national unity. Such a tendency is quite clear in the United States, and reaches violent proportions in the feverish nationalisms that are rife in former colonial areas.
It has been noted that Christian schools should be sponsored by Christian parents. This leads to a second objective of the greatest importance as the Christian mission confronts secularism: the activity of the layman is crucial. If conversation, cooperation, and condemnation are directed toward secularism from ecclesiastical channels exclusively, the old dualism between sacred and secular is being perpetuated and misunderstanding guaranteed. There must be a new appreciation of the calling of each Christian as a witness in every phase of his life. Only in the midst of our urban, industrial, cosmopolitan world can the Christian engagement with secularism be effectively carried on. Only the layman who knows the gospel concretely and the problems of his calling concretely can supply the informed action and criticism which is decisive.
The “lay” response need not be, in fact must not be, merely an individual response. The problems are too complicated and deep-rooted in our culture for solution by isolated Christians. It has been observed that only through Christian educational institutions can there be an adequate analysis of secularism. The same applies to the concrete Christian answer to secularism. Christian organizations, apart from the church, must become active in economics, politics, science, and the spheres of social life. Such concerted action on the part of Christians always runs the risk of developing into a communalism that withdraws from the world. The lack of such action however will result either in an institutionalized and secularized church or the abandonment of all effective Christian witness in the most pressing issues of modern life.
The pattern of development for such organizations will vary, not only from country to country but between cosmopolitan urban centers and rural or village life. In any case, such action is as necessary in America as in Japan or West Africa. It is not evangelism, but it is part of the Christian calling in the modern situation. It calls for fellowship not only within a particular area, but in a sphere that is world-wide. Christian organizations in the Netherlands that have grown out of the pioneering of Abraham Kuyper indicate the feasibility of such action when its urgency is grasped.
In all the lands of the younger churches the influence of Christian leadership on national life has far outstripped that which might be inferred from the proportion of Christians in the population. Yet it remains minimal, and seems to be felt at times almost in spite of the casual and unreflective fashion in which the Christian witness is brought to bear on modern problems. The need of concerted Christian action is now increasingly recognized and it is not surprising to find the sense of urgency more compelling in countries where the clash of secularism with ancient culture is most acute. In Japan, for example, the religious implications of the cultural crisis are clear indeed. The nationalism of the past found religious sanction in the Shinto cult. It is now confronted by a secularistic nationalism which seems to require the same intense devotion without the supporting theology. To be sure, State Shinto itself marked a partial secularization, and Shinto at best is formalistic; but the shock of defeat and the Emperor’s renunciation of his divinity was profound for the Japanese. The void created by this collapse has not been filled. There is no replacement for the Imperial Rescript on Education which was once read regularly with the most solemn formality in every school. In this situation, Christians are forced to consider what answers may be given. Here is a great opportunity for Christian associations to come to grips with these issues not at a distance or from the sidelines but in direct participation in the affairs of society and nation.
Another field for Christian action is that of labor and its problems. Evangelicals may have been moved to jealousy by the influence of the social gospel in this area in time past, but if so their reaction seems to have been a rigorous avoidance of such questions. It is true that the “social gospel” was secularized beyond Christian recognition, altering the Kingdom of heaven into a Utopia to be secured by socialist reform. The evangelical reaction was also secularized, however. To exclude from Christian concern acute social problems is to yield to secularist assumptions. The remedy is not to remake the church into a social service agency nor to dilute the gospel to schemes of social welfare. It is to give expression to the universal significance of the gospel in specificially Christian action. The Christian labor movement in Michigan is an example of the kind of Christian association that meets this problem squarely. The severity of the difficulties it faces is a measure of the degree of secularization that prevails in American life, and indicates the critical value of such action.
It would be unfortunate to conclude that Christian lay action in the various spheres of daily life is effectively expressed only through distinct Christian organizations. These have an important place, for, as has been seen, the value of concerted action is great. Because such associations are sometimes misunderstood or opposed as a communalism which withdraws from the world their legitimacy and importance must be emphasized. They do not mean withdrawal from the world, and therefore they do not conflict with further participation, individually or jointly under auspices that are not hostile to Christianity. For example, a supporter of Christian schools may without inconsistency serve on the board or staff of a public school. Public education is essential for public welfare in a democratic state, and the Christian citizen has a responsibility for it.
An outcome of this is that the Christian, working with non-Christians for the development of this world, will often be cooperating with aspects of the program of secularism while opposing its principle.
This is quite clear in the area of political life. We have seen that the New Testament teaches loyalty to the state as a responsibility before God in so far as the state performs its proper functions. The Christian, therefore, will work with secularists of many kinds in building and maintaining such a state. Since the Christian understands that Christ’s Kingdom is not established by force, he will wish to avoid any constitutional or legislative enactments which would give preferential treatment to Christians or require church membership for civil rights. On the other hand, the Christian is compelled to oppose vigorously the effort to prohibit Christian witnessing as “proselytizing” or in other ways to contravene the commands of God whom he must obey rather than man. In this sense, the Christian supports a secular state in preference to one with an established religion. However, the Christian cannot seek a secularistic neutrality for the state. He must work for a recognition on the part of the state of the limitations of its own power before God. He must seek justice in the state’s control of society and his standard of justice is Christian.
Cooperation of this kind with the program of secularism will develop because secularism is frequently inconsistent with its own deepest principles. Further, as we have seen secularism is amazingly diversified both in the areas it enters and the stages through which it passes. Democratic liberalism is basically a secular movement, as the Evanston report points out, but the Christian must greatly prefer it to the monolithic state totalitarianism of communist Russia or China. All cooperation with the program of secularism must be coupled with a Christian witness as to the goals which the Christian seeks. The Christian must always maintain a basic criticism of the ideal of human autonomy which is the core of secularism.
But the criticism must be brought to bear in active engagement with this world and men’s problems. The secularist cannot ask for an easier triumph than to have uncontested possession of the field!
Notes
- Leroy E. Loemker, “The Nature of Secularism,” in ed. J. R. Spann, The Christian Faith and Secularism, (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1948), p. 11.
- Idem.
- The Modern Rival of Christian Faith (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1952), p. 11.
- “Secularism and Christian Higher Education,” in J. R. Spann, op. cit., p. 45.
- For a Christian World (New York: Home Missions Council of North America, 1950), p. 15. Quoted by Robert T. Handy, “The Newest Form of Infidelity”, Theology Today, XI, 1 (April, 1954), p. 22.
- “How Christianity Challenges Secularism,” in J. R. Spann, op. cit., p. 232.
- Cf. Walter Lippmann, Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929).
- Op. cit., p. 12.
- G. J. Holyoake, Secularism, the Practical Philosophy of the People (1845). Quoted by Loemker, op. cit., p. 12.
- Op. cit., p. 13.
- G. J. Holyoake, op. cit., p. 5. Cf. E. S. Waterhouse, “Secularism” in ed. James Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (New York: Scribner’s, 1928), XI, pp. 347–350.
- IX (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), p. 366.
- Op. cit., p. 12.
- Theology Today, XI, 1 (April, 1954), pp. 22–33.
- P. A. Micklem, The Secular and the Sacred (London: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 1948).
- What Is Christian Civilization? (London: Oxford University Press, 1945).
- In Sécularisation du Monde Moderne, a report of the International Congress for Reformed Faith and Action, meeting in Montpellier, France, 1953, comprising a double issue of La Revue Réformée, V, 17, 18 (St-Germain-en-Laye, 1954), pp. 138–157.
- Spann, op. cit., p. 284. Cf. also the definition of “spiritual community” which satisfies Bishop Oxnam, p. 288.
- New York: Ronald Press, 1956.
- Spann, op. cit., pp. 24–42.
- Ibid., p. 26.
- Ibid., p. 27.
- Op. cit., pp. 10, 11.
- Dooyeweerd traces this fundamental Greek dualism to religious roots: the effort to unite the Olympian gods of the Apollonian type with the earlier Dionysian, vitalistic deities of early Greek religion. Op. cit., pp. 144–146.
- Cf. Dooyeweerd, op. cit., pp. 149 f.
- New York, Macmillan, 1947.
- Micklem, Casserley and others.
- Casserley particularly.
- Cf. Micklem, op. cit., pp. 140, 141.
- Op. cit., p. 22.
- Baillie, op. cit., p. 20.
- In his Auburn Lectures at Union Theological Seminary, 1956.
- Notably by Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, Olive Wyon, tr. (New York: Macmillan, 1931, 1949). Micklem, Baillie and others refer to this point.
- Micklem, op. cit., pp. 143 f.
- Cf. Nichols, op. cit., p. 82.
- Ibid., pp. 98 f. (36a) The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). This is a most stimulating book, to which this article is much indebted.
- Secular Illusion or Christian Realism? (New York: Macmillan, 1949).
- Rufus M. Jones, “Secular Civilization and the Christian Task” in The Christian Life and Message in Relation to Non-Christian Systems of Thought and Life, Vol. I of the Jerusalem Meeting of the International Missionary Council, 1928 (New York: International Missionary Council, 1928), p. 230.
- Ibid., p. 251.
- Ibid., p. 250.
- Ibid., p. 380.
- Ibid., p. 411.
- Ibid., p. 412.
- The Christian Hope and the Task of the Church (New York: Harper, 1954), pp. 29–38.
- Ibid., p. 30.
- Ibid., pp. 29 f.
- Op. cit. Cf. also A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, D. H. Freeman & W. S. Young, trs. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1953), especially vol. I, pp. 169–188.
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