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Restricted Circulation the CONCERNS of the BELIEVERS « Q^ V*fe) Restricted Circulation THE CONCERNS OF THE BELIEVERS' CHURCH* Most of the American churches claim to stand in the Free Church line, but the case is curious. One senses unease, and disjarment. To be sure, no­ where in the world is there such universal respect for religion as found in America today. At no time in history have so many people been voluntarily associated with religious programs, supporting them with their prayers, their presence, and their gifts. Nowhere else has there ever emerged such mutual respect between communities of the most varied teaching and style, often leading to joint meetings and cooperative work. Not only are we reap­ ing our share of the harvest of Catholic-Protestant amity planted by good Pope John, but to a degree never known in two thousand years of family quar­ reling, Christians and Jews are living and working side by side as brethren. From every outward evidence, this should be reckoned one of the golden ages of religion. Yet there is a profound uneasiness in our churches and synagogues. Perhaps our Calvinist racial memory will not let us be joyous in the face of such manifest ecclesiastical prosperity. Or perhaps the suspicion grows that we have wandered far from the highroad on which our feet were once set. There is, after all, as much danger in social establishment as in legal establish­ ment. The "Young Turks" among theologians and religious philosophers warn us of impending judgment. Even authors in popular magazines write of "the crisis in American religion" and "the breakdown of Protestant clergy". Wherein lies the crisis, and to what shall we attribute the mood of pros­ perous melancholy? Is it perhaps true that belief and church are sepa­ rating - like cream from skim milk? We hear much of "religionless Christi­ anity", especially among the students.... Are we coming to the end of an age, with no sure guidelines for the future? Are student demonstrations, for example, so often associated with religious groups and leadership, a. kind of "dance of death" signalizing anew the end of a universal discourse? Are our religious movements, like so many which shared the decline of past civilizations, building their greatest institu­ tions and buildings precisely at the moment when they have peaked and begun to decline In authority and worth? When the President of the United States proposed to build a. monument to God in the national capital, to stand in honor beside the stone tributes to other dead heroes, was he perhaps speak­ ing more significantly than he knew? The thesis of this writing runs to the contrary. With all due tribute to the watchman on our walls, it is the writer's belief that the foot-faulting so evident in church and synagogue in America reveals dislocation rather than disaster. Or religious movements, with their great numbers of un­ formed and untrained volunteers, have a potential for good and a basic *An address by Dr. Franklin H. Littell, President of Iowa Wesleyan College, at the Conference on The Concept of The Believers7 Church: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, June 26, 1967. (2. soundness which are hidden behind the outward unease and uncertainty of di­ rection. They are like eager choruses which, compelled by rapidly changing circumstance to sing from new scores, have not yet found the pitch. They often appear confused and disoriented, and the tuning forks and pitchpipes and drums all too often give contrary notes. But once we have passed through this time of confusion, there is in the massed voices a fundamental trueness and soundness of performance which puts to shame the jarring con­ flicts of the directors and sometimes even now confounds the sceptical with the glory of their singing. "Between the Times" We are living "between the times". The basic assumptions which governed the 19th century culture-religion are no longer sound. The tidy continuum of Christiand culture which dominated Victorian England, tsarist Russia, impe­ rial Austria-Hungary, and the Wilhelminischen Zeitalter has been shattered. The integration of political and religious purposes which marked the Anglican, Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran establishments of another age has finally been destroyed. Only the bare skeletons of the edifices of a former "Christian civilization" still stand against the skyline of Europe, disconcerting the casual viewer and diverting the attention of the serious from the real action. The keenest observers, both Catholic and Protestant, speak of the present sit­ uation in Europe as a "post-Constantinian era" or even a "post-Christian age". After two terrible World Wars, two depressions, two monstrously anti- Christian ideologies and systems (communism and fascism), only politicians still speak in Europe the language of the Holy Alliance. Among the spiritu­ ally sensitive, a new language fit for a. world come of age is sought - and, when found on occasion, proclaimed. Only in America, the last great civilization still largely "Christian" and unshattered by recent history, can virginal minds still speak of "Christian politics", "Christian higher education", "Christian social values", in the tone of voice once used by all of Christendom. In the southeast of the United States can today be found the largest intact bloc of Protestant culture left in the world. (The whole heartland of the Reformation is now occupied by communist power, and Christian minorities find themselves in the Diaspora.) In America's major cities and in the upper Middle West there are still solid blocs of Catholic culture where the church enjoys an influence still claimed for it at law in Spain and Italy - but not enjoyed there. But whereas the power of the church is still real among her children in the land of liberty, all of the pretenses of anachronisms like Franco cannot hide the fact that "Catholic Europe" and "Protestant Europe" have gone over to the adversary. Both are missionary territory, in the most precise sense of the word - whether we speak of the collapse of Christian credibility in the West or the public triumph of anti-Christian ideology in the East. Christianity is facing a. credibility crisis in the United States, too. But so far, in spite of inroads in our society (and occasionally in our churches) by the communist and fascist belief and style, the problems of American (3 = church life are the problems of new Christians rather than the problems of tired baptized who have gone over to another and later dispensation. For the self-understanding of American Protestants, the view of history is of vital importance. Is the present era "post-Christian" in America as well as in Europe? Or, is it "post-Constantinian"? When does the church address internal membership, and when does it speak to society at large - and is it aware of the difference? In all of this, the key question is how the first period of Church History in America - the period of the colonial state-churches - is to be understood. For in that place and time the decisions fell which determined, for subse­ quent generations, whether state-churches or believers' church should domi­ nate the American scene. Was it the high tide of our religious life, when American Christianity was a peninsula of British Christendom? Since the collapse of New England's Standing Order has all else been anti-climax? Whither are we tending in American religious life, now that the principle of pluralism gains increasing acceptance? Is religious belief alone a secure principle on which to base religious association? Are there social or political reasons for vigorous churches so compelling that their support and standing cannot well be left to "mere chance"? Puritanism in America Of Nathaneal Emmons, New England Puritan divine (1745-1840), Professor Williston Walker wrote - "In his incisive style he declared that a. Congregational Church is Ta. pure democracy, which places every member of the church upon a. level, and gives him perfect liberty with order.7 In a. Congregational Church, in all matters of business, the pastor Tis but a. mere moderator. "rJ- Today, such radical egalitarian principles ring rather well. But how shocked the founders of Massachusetts would have been by Emmons7 opinions! And as for Professor Walker's, they would have been virtually unintelligible to the men who, to defend order and established authority, drove Roger Williams Into the winter wilderness and Sir Henry Vane the Younger back to the comparative freedom of the Protectorate. Nevertheless, the kernel of the matter was there from the beginning, even though the consequences of the concept of a believers' church were not drawn until the generation when Lyman Beecher returned to praise the benefits of the passing of the state church in Connecticut, a passing which in 1818 and 1819 he had striven mightily to prevent. Religious liberty was not utterly strange to conservative Puritanism, and neither was the principle of church membership based on belief rather than accident of birth. John Cotton (1584-1652), the friend of Anne Hutchinson who abandoned her in the midst of her controversy with the establishment, remained verbally committed to the concept of a voluntary covenant of believing persons. This principle, affirmed also in the Mayflower Compact, was finally to blow the New England Standing Order apart - at the time of the split between Trinitarian and Unitarian Congregationalists. According to an early record - "Mr. Cotton, preaching out of the Book of Kings, 8, taught, that when magistrates are forced to provide for the mainte­
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