Mortal Follies. William Murchison
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From the straight course the churches were making toward Scylla they tacked suddenly, pennants flying and canvas fully stretched, toward Charybdis. The 1960s began with thoughtful churchmen asking how the church might more fittingly identify itself with the culture’s genuine needs. The decade ended in religious warfare of a new kind. It seemed the churches of Jesus Christ were more than disappointed with the old culture; they were angry at it, and at its continuing manifestations—angry and ready to see in the old culture’s place a new cultural style altogether. As course corrections go, that of the American churches, in the 1960s, was something to behold, not least for velocity and noise.
Just what was it the churches felt, increasingly, called on to do? This took some working out. Methodists, Presbyterians, and the like, closely tied to the hard-working middle classes, took their time when it came to stirring. An Episcopal tradition of social commitment, observed irregularly but generally with heart and spirit, did begin to assert itself in the 1950s.
In a generalized sense, one Episcopal theologian, Norman Pittenger, had in 1950 called for “an awareness of the privilege of Christian discipleship . . . a consciousness of the fact that one is a Christian, called to a peculiar kind of life and a unique loyalty to the divine imperative.” Yes, but what then? The sociologist Peter Berger, in The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, published in 1961, identified the “what” as “Christian outreach to the distressed.” Indeed, said he, it was more than that. The call, a loud one, was to “modify the social structure itself,” and to erect “Christian signs in the world.” Not billboards—rather, plain evidences of Christ’s presence in the world. There had to be “complete identification,” Berger argued, with the conditions of daily life.
So also argued the Rev. Gibson Winter, Episcopal priest and professor at the University of Chicago Theological School, whose influential and much-quoted book, The Suburban Captivity of the Church, published the same year as Berger’s, called for repudiation of the model of the church as refuge and resting place. No! cried Winter. The church was a place for exertion. The manifest duty of America’s churches, he said, was to create “a human environment in the metropolis.” “The churches,” he affirmed, “must now become publicly accountable institutions with a vision of the metropolis and their mission to it.” Service to purely middle-class interests could no longer suffice, if ever it had. By such a model the church was “an island of conformity in the metropolis—a treadmill where men and women grind out their salvation.” Such an “introverted church” was a contradiction in terms. The church had to turn outward, in love and reconciliation. The church of Jesus Christ had, in short, to take itself, and its purposes, with utmost seriousness.
This was no extravagant claim. Most Americans understood, vaguely at least, the extent to which the Christian churches had influenced the course of their history, from the theological empires of New England where the anti-slavery crusade germinated, then on through the push for Prohibition. Particular ministers and laymen had attached themselves fervently to the cause of laboring Americans—preaching, urging a Social Gospel, a message of justice.
First had come the Congregationalist minister Washington Gladden (1836-1918), with his ringing appeals on behalf of the rights of labor. There followed the outspoken, and even more influential, American Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch (1861- 1918), who read the Scriptures as a condemnation of “socialized, institutionalized, and militant” evil that “the Kingdom of God and its higher laws” could displace “only by conflict.” To which end he foresaw “prophet minds” fighting “for the freedom of the people in political government and for the substitution of cooperation for predatory methods in industry.”
In the years following World War II, the call to engage the world often fell upon willing ears, of which one set belonged to a young Episcopal priest with extraordinary credentials—a wealthy family, a Yale degree, and a Silver Star and Navy Cross awarded for gallantry on Guadalcanal. The Rev. Paul Moore, as he would write later, was “drawn to the cause of the poor and the persecuted.” With solemn intentions, this scion of a prominent New York banking family sought ministry, his young family alongside him, in slums, and downtrodden places. The world needed the church—that was Moore’s idea, and the idea of other Episcopalians like him, including a young Harvard-educated lawyer, William Stringfellow, who moved to East Harlem in order to provide the poor with legal services otherwise unavailable to them.
There was, at least in Anglican—hence Episcopal—thought, strong theological grounding for commitments of this kind. It lay in the “incarnational” understanding of Jesus as the enduring, undying savior, positioned at the center of human affairs, suffering for the sake of all, not merely for the well-born and comfortable who lived in climate-controlled homes, sent their children to good schools, and on Sunday mornings turned up, freshly scrubbed and accoutered, at the nearest Episcopal church. The nineteenth-century English theologian Frederick D. Maurice had embodied this understanding, with concern (as the twentieth-century American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr epitomized it) for “[t]he conversion of mankind from self-centeredness to Christ-centeredness.” Maurice stood against mere “religion”—heartless formalism scarcely cognizant of Christ’s kingship. By the 1940s, another English theologian, Alec Vidler, saw theology coming around to Maurice’s “emphasis on the solidarity of the human race, on the doctrine of the mystical body of Christ, on Christ’s Lordship over all men and his relationship to the whole created order.”
Incarnational theology was earthy, material—incarnational. That was what was meant by “incarnation”: Word made flesh; God here among us, as one of us. The here-ness, the now-ness of Jesus drew reinforcement and splendor from his “real presence” in the Eucharist, the elements of bread and wine rendered flesh and blood in the spiritual sense, the crucified Son of God taken on the tongue of the faithful worshipper. Not that all Episcopalians, or Anglicans, by any means shared this somewhat rarefied understanding. (The low-church style of worship put far greater emphasis on Scripture and sermon than on regular celebration of the Holy Communion, as the Eucharist was then styled in the Book of Common Prayer.) Yet the wonder and power of Christ here among us under the aspects of bread and wine made a powerful appeal to worshippers with hearts turned in the indicated direction. Paul Moore called the Eucharist “the pattern and the power”—“an exchange of our bodies for his body, of the Cross for Resurrection, of captivity for freedom, of death for life, of all else for joy.” On this intuition he built a consequential ministry.
As did, to somewhat different ends and purposes, the kinetic, not to say frenzied, bishop who until his death in 1969 would symbolize Episcopal wrestlings and fidgets. James Albert Pike founded no school of thought within Anglicanism, nor did he leave much trace of his compulsive activities, apart from a number of short, glib books that still turn up regularly in secondhand sales. Episcopalians scarcely knew whether to acknowledge him as prophet or provocateur. He was likely, in indeterminable portions, a mixture of both. As charismatic dean, in the early 1950s, of New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and subsequently as bishop of California, Pike won for himself a large and attentive audience, outside as well as inside Episcopalianism. (For a few seasons he was host of his own local television show.) The man with the large black-framed spectacles and unstoppable mouth, wearing proudly the garments of church office, was given to judgments and observations not generally associated with men of the cloth. It was a major part of his reckless charm.
Surveying the Christian faith at large, Pike, like growing numbers of non-Episcopal kidney, glimpsed mold, encrustation, and piles of rubbish. Old ideas in a new time simply weren’t the ticket, not in the eyes of James A. Pike. At the 1964 General Convention, he attacked “outdated, incomprehensible, and nonessential doctrinal statements, traditions, and codes”—a considerable statement from a bishop, sworn like his brothers to drive from the church “all strange and erroneous doctrine.”
“The fact is,” said Pike, “we are in the midst of a theological revolution. Many of us feel that it is urgent that we rethink and restate the unchanging gospel in terms which are relevant to our day and to the people we would have hear it; not hesitating to abandon or reinterpret concepts, words, images, and myths developed in past centuries when men were operating under different world views and different philosophical structures.”