69 “Will the Christian Church survive?”

This the title of a 1942 article in the Atlantic Monthly. You could lift entire paragraphs and insert them in any news story or commentary about the Christian church today in war time and people might not notice the date. For instance:

“There was no country in the whole world, in the year before the war broke, in which the Christian Church had for years been expected or permitted to exert a controlling or even a largely critical influence on education, politics, industry, the arts, marriage and divorce. These are life's chief activities. In respect to every one of them, modern man had become used to ignore what might be the will of God for him, to substitute a desired self-expression for an attempt to do that will; and in respect to them all, he assumed his own entire competence. This same self-centeredness and self-confidence are also characteristic of the programs now variously offered for the shaping of things to come. Without a complete rediscovery of its own function, the Church is hardly likely to matter any more tomorrow than it mattered yesterday or than it matters at the moment, which is just about not at all.”

However, a complete reading of the article reveals a misunderstanding of Christ’s purpose. The author, Bernard Iddings Bell, considered a “prophet” in the 1930s, worked the Chautauqua circuit and was the author of 18 books (then). There is a faculty chair named for him in a religion program at Bard College. He wrote and lectured extensively on American culture and in the 1950s he wrote about the failure of progressive education, so you can find him quoted everywhere on many topics.

Bell’s Atlantic article offers seven moral and ethical teachings of Jesus, then says that “these ethical convictions are clear in the New Testament, recognized by reputable Christian theologians. . . In accordance with these teachings, Jesus lived. It was because He proclaimed them that He was crucified.”

1) Life’s chief end is to know God; 2) all people regardless of race or ethnicity were meant to live together in harmony; 3) we have an obligation to take care of the less fortunate--servanthood is more pleasing to God than positions of power; 4) love your enemies; 5) live each day as though it is the last and do what is right; 6) it is more important for children to be loved than mothers and fathers; 7) riches are immoral if that is your final security.

The church, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish, (he was a popular lecturer for all faiths in many countries) had lost its mission to renounce and denounce he said. He saw small glimmers of hope on the horizon--Catholic Social Action, efforts by the Anglicans and Episcopalians [alludes to a 1940 conference], and . . .“The Federal Council of Churches and its emerging child, the World Council of Churches, show signs of understanding the revolutionary character of the Christian morality.”

He had the root of the problem correct--“For years that world has been hearing and heeding the assured and strident cries of the hawkers of pottage, while the trumpets of God have sounded faint, obscure, confused,” but his faith in ecumenism and social action certainly falls flat today as we look back over the bloody, tired 20th century, and the new culture wars of terrorism and religious conflict of the 21st century.

Tim Bednar of Moxy Turtle thinks this is a wonderful article with a message for today (Jan. 3, 2004). I disagree. Bednar misses the crux (no pun intended) of Bell’s article--that Jesus died because his moral and ethical teachings offended the powerful, and that is what the church isn’t proclaiming.

After WWII the church was further weakened by the very things Bell recommended--more social action, more ecumenism, and more emphasis on moral teachings. Today we have dead and dying main line Protestant churches, not only NOT heeding the message of the cross about personal repentence and faith in Christ, but charging full steam ahead with the cultural agenda of the day, and a Catholic church embroiled in scandals of leadership. All the things wrong with our culture and the church in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s when Bell’s message was so popular and energized so many Christian leaders, are still true today.

Yet, I doubt that a single person ever came to saving faith listening to him.