Leithart
“Modern civilization, aghast at the results of a conflict between societies which had acknowledged no higher ideal than the pride of an ignorant nationalism, looks forward fearfully and almost helplessly to a yet mightier conflagration of the hates and passions it has nurtured. Remembering the holocaust which ethical stupidity has ignited and science fed with fuel, it fears to face its foreboding of a yet more fateful application of the destructive knowledge which its warriors are feverishly seeking. . . . It recalls and foresees the murder of its millions of young men, the destruction of its treasures, the enslavement of debt-ridden population.”
Thus H. Richard Niebuhr in 1929 (Social Sources of Denominationalism, 265) – before World War II, before Hitler and Holocaust and Hiroshima, before the full revelation of Stalin, before Mao and Pol Pot, and all the other horrors of the last two-thirds of the twentieth century. With only one World War behind him, Niebuhr already saw the world disintegrating around him.
And he also discerned that the denominational church was unequal to the challenge: “Christianity as represented by denominations, which in turn are representative of the divided culture and its divisive interests, is no more able to stem the tide of disintegration in the world than it is able to set bounds to the process of disintegration within itself. Following the leadership of nationalism and capitalism, it cannot but continue the process of schism which has marked its entire past history” (269-70). State churches were passing away, but not nationalist churches, which often gave the sanction of Christianity to already intense national passions. Denominational Christianity lacks “an integrating ethics” and “a universal appeal” and so “continues to follow the fortunes of the world, gaining petty victories in a war it has long lost” (275).
To be equal to the mission, what’s needed is “some other type of Christianity than the religion which merely adjusts itself to social conditions whether these make for union or for schism.” That fresh vision of the faith cannot be an “other-worldly faith which regards the message of the gospel as applying to the individual’s relation to a transcendental sphere alone and condemns every aspect of the present world . . . and every attempt at amelioration of social ills as the expression of a depraved and lost world” (275). It’s heresy to “anticipate attainment too easily,” attainment of a semblance of justice and peace, and this impatience for the eschaton “has ever been a weakness of religion. At the same time, Niebuhr quite rightly condemns the under-realized eschatology that condemns every effort to work out human salvation in reliance on God’s mercy (277-8).
Niebuhr thinks that the only Christianity that meets the challenge of the modern world is one rooted in the gospels, one that aims to achieve the unity to which Jesus calls us, one that proclaims the gospel as a saving message for human society. The only effective gospel has to be a gospel that radically subordinates national allegiances to “the unity of an international fellowship” (280), a church that proclaims and lives out God’s kingdom of love.
Niebuhr writes, “Only such a church can transcend the divisions of men and by transcending heal them; only such a church can substitute for the self-interest and the machinery of denominationalism the dominant desire for the kingdom and its righteousness and the free activity of familiar fellowship. It requires from its members the sacrifice of privilege and pride and bids each count the other better than himself. It can plant within the nations a fellowship of reconciliation which will resist the animosities nurtured by strife for political and economic values – a fellowship which, doubtless, may often be required to carry crosses of shame and pain when the passions of men have been aroused for conflict” (281).
It is probably always true, but it is certainly true now: Only a catholic church can be a missional church.
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