Chapter XV: The Church as an Institution--Protestantism

The rise of Protestantism was the consequence of many factors which temporarily combined and worked in the same direction. There are those who maintain that it was an unhappy accident, which threw back the wheels of progress some hundreds of years. But those who bewail the division of the Christian Church forget that division is a sign of incompatible tendencies within a body not flexible enough to contain them. Strife is irrational only when we cease to be realists. The appearance of Protestantism in the sixteenth century is only one instance among many of the inadequacy of any one institution to comprehend the life of its time. Were we to call the roll of the heresies of the past, the names which would appear upon the list would be far more numerous than popular history records. Just because Christians believed that they possessed a final truth they were intolerant and persecuting. The natural desire of an institution to maintain itself and its interests intact added its force to this unfortunate characteristic. But the tragedy of the situation was, that this final truth could not prove itself by an appeal to experience and reason. It had, therefore, to resort to violence. The logic of revelation is the logic of the _auto da fe_. The logic of science is the logic of tested {199} fact. Science can have hope of agreement; theological religion has no right to such a hope.

Protestantism had its ethical, political, economic and doctrinal sides. It was not merely a religious movement. Had it been so, it might more readily have run its course as a reform movement within the institutional life of the time. Had the Northern nations possessed greater power in the councils of the Church, it is just possible that the change would have been brought about without the occurrence of an open rupture. But the Church was too centralized and too rich to escape conflict with the growing nationalism. For our present purpose, however, this larger social setting of Protestantism is not important. What we wish to study is the religious tendencies covered by this term. What advance did they contain? What was the weakness of the movement?

The setting of Protestantism was entirely supernaturalistic. So far as the fundamental doctrinal assumptions are concerned, there is practically no difference between Catholic and Protestant. Protestantism represented a reform, and not a revolution. Or, to put it more deeply, human nature is such that the real revolutions take centuries of growth and come like the thief in the night. The modern scientific view of the world is revolutionary in the philosophical and true sense of the term; while the sharp sectarian conflict is only a battle over secondary things. Since it has so commonly been assumed that the Protestant reformation represented a decisive break with the outlook of the Middle Ages and somehow marked a milestone in man's intellectual progress, it may be worth while to consider whether such really was the case. A disinterested study {200} of the reformation must, I feel sure, convince the student that the crisis in the Church was concerned more with matters of theological doctrine and church polity than with the ideas underlying Christianity. It brought no essential change in the inherited and firmly entrenched tale of the past. The puritan poet, Milton, sings of "man's first disobedience" in much the way that St. Augustine would have done. The weapons of the great advance had not yet been forged. We are the ones who will be called upon to face the vision of the New Spiritual World and to be faithful to its demands upon our loyalty and integrity. "The defection of the Protestants from the Roman Catholic Church," writes Professor Robinson, "is not connected with any decisive intellectual revision. Such ardent emphasis has been constantly placed upon the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism by representatives of both parties that the close intellectual resemblance of the two systems, indeed their identity in nine parts out of ten, has tended to escape us. The early Protestants, of course, accepted, as did the Catholics, the whole patristic outlook on the world; their historical perspective was similar, their notions of the origin of man, of the Bible, with its types, prophecies and miracles, of heaven and hell, of demons and angels, are all identical.... Early Protestantism is, from an intellectual standpoint, essentially a phase of mediaeval history."

But when we look at Protestantism as a social and religious movement rather than an intellectual movement, we see that it stood for certain relatively new emphases which did indicate a breaking loose from mediaevalism. Many sincere men felt the need for a deeper, more personal assurance of salvation than that {201} offered by the traditional, substantial sacraments of the Church. Religion seemed to them a more personal affair than it had overtly come to be. By means of an act of faith, the individual hoped to secure a new relation to God in which his sins were forgiven and salvation attained. Salvation thus became a more internal act than it had been, and particularly one in which the ecclesiastical institution played a far less important part. The new tendency emphasized the individual and personal as against the institutional and formal. Catholicism had inherited too much ritualistic and magical trapping to harmonize completely with the keen ethical sense of the younger and simpler people who were growing to adulthood.

A new movement is on the defensive and, when too completely estranged from the institutions of which it is a reform, almost inevitably tends to be narrow and intense. Now Protestantism was essentially an emphasis on the soul's salvation by meeting certain requirements of a doctrinal and ethical type, and so it tended to drop those functions and relations which the Mediaeval Church included within its scope. It is this clear-cut intensification of one factor and the exclusion of others which we must bear in mind when we compare the early Protestant sects with the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.

Deep religious fervor easily leads to narrowness, especially when the spiritual values regarded as essential are subjective and rather formal. Because confessional Protestantism was as other-worldly as the Mediaeval Church, it cut itself loose from aspects of life which might otherwise have mellowed it and saved it from formalism and hardness. We may laugh with {202} Swift at the freaks of Jack, at his dourness and savagery, his strained interpretation of the scriptures and his lack of social tact, but we must, if we would be just, always bear in mind the outlook which Jack had inherited.

The Protestant of to-day does not usually realize how different the Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was from that which he sees around him. Protestantism has mellowed and absorbed values and interests which it would once have repudiated as irrelevant to the tremendous drama of salvation. Take mediaeval Catholicism, with its ideal of a Church-directed society, its doctrines of sin and redemption, its belief in another world overshadowing this one, its strain of asceticism, and remove the sacramental power of the Church, and you have early Protestantism before you. Instead of fleeing the world and its temptations, the Christian was ordered to live in it like a sentinel on his guard. He was not to set his heart on creaturely comforts nor love the things and interests of this life overmuch, but rather to trample them underfoot while gazing upwards. No wonder that the early Protestants were a stern people; they were a community of secular monks. They had the joy of union with God and assured redemption from sin, but this world was not their true home. Whereas the Mediaeval Church had tempered the asceticism of historical Christianity by the distinction between what was imposed upon clergy and what was demanded of the laity, Protestantism was unable to continue this distinction because all believers were priests. All had to come up to the same high standard or risk damnation. This exaltation has in large measure departed from Protestantism, and we who {203} have grown into a mellower idea of salvation are inclined to judge this set of ideals as narrow and even morbid. We forget that puritanism was the expression of an ascetic religious view of the world.

It was in the sphere of church government that Protestantism made its great changes by attempting to return to the polity of the early associational form of Christianity. The more radical forms of Protestantism, especially, inaugurated a movement in the direction of what we now call democracy. There can be little doubt, in fact, that these waves of religious individualism assisted the growth of democratic and republican forms of government. This influence was unplanned and relatively accidental because religious individualism was more concerned with the right to worship according to the dictates of conscience than with political rights. But man is a psychological whole, and so a reform along one line is bound to affect other phases of life.

As we have already pointed out, the alterations introduced on the theological side were by no means revolutionary from an intellectual standpoint. And yet the spirit and mood of religion was deeply altered. The process of salvation was differently conceived, and this led to the thought of a more direct relation between man and God than had been admitted in the older Church. God was believed to have guaranteed redemption to those who had faith in Jesus Christ as the redeemer. This tenet led to an emphasis on the bible and on personal experience. It was through a study of the bible that men were led to this personal faith, and the bible was accordingly conceived as the representative of God upon earth. What wonder that it was {204} substituted for the Church and tradition as an infallible and unchanging authority! The logic of the movement is clear. It has been pointed out by one scholar that Protestantism introduced the doctrine of infallibility before the Roman Catholic Church did. Calvinism selected the Augustinian dogmas of election and original sin as its foundation, and used them in such a way as to become a fighting church, a congregation of the elect, fearless and self-reliant.

Bibliolatry soon flourished, and sects sprang up on every hand, ready to suffer persecution for their particular interpretation of passages. Theology became a series of fanatically held dogmas supported by copious quotations. And the intellectual atmosphere within which these dogmatic theories arose was of the most conventional and limited sort. Broadness of outlook upon life was the exception rather than the rule. The general assumption of the Christian scheme of the world remained unchallenged, while the bitterest disputes broke out in regard to points which seem to the educated man of to-day quite unimportant. Such a course of events was to be expected, and could not have been prevented. Perhaps it did more good than harm, because it encouraged independence on the part of the masses. Its only cure was not authority but education. And the world was not yet ready for universal education. At certain periods, a tremendous waste of mental and moral energy is simply inevitable: men cannot help going around and around in the same circle of ideas in the most pathetically earnest fashion. The conditions of progress are not always ready. Take the knowledge of the clergy. It was confined to the classics, the patristics, to massive tomes of theology, to {205} the bible in its Hebrew and Greek original. It was not from these fields that enlightenment was to come. The truth is, that Protestantism was slowly modified and mellowed, almost in spite of itself, by the pervasive influence of the great world civilization that grew up around it and to which it was more susceptible than was the reorganized Catholic Church. Let us look at this point more closely.

The reformation was an effect as much as a cause. The nations were coming to their own in the midst of a more complex social life full of human interests and values. The Confessional Churches which sprang up were unable to establish themselves securely enough to dominate the civil powers. The consequence was, that secular civilization was released from the sway of religion and its supernaturalism. Government, science, art, industry, and literature flourished in a freedom they had seldom before experienced. The disorganization of religious institutions enabled many tendencies, hitherto kept in the background of men's consciousness, to push to the front and reveal their power over the human soul. Do we not know that many great mediaeval doctors had to fight against their love of literature and art? Protestantism may be said to have been an unintentional cause of the modern world.

Protestantism broke up into an array of sects and tendencies as it fell upon the prism of human temperament. Radical sects appeared, like the Independents, the Quakers, the Baptists, the Pietists, and the Congregationalists. These were radical in a social way rather than in an intellectual way. They were subjective variations of the inherited motives. Largely, they represented a revolt against authoritism, and {206} emphasized the inner light or a very mild appeal to reason. Yet we must call them sects, just because they had much the same spirit and assumptions, and exaggerated what must be regarded as slight differences. Still their very number gave a milder direction to religion and made the idea of toleration more natural. There was safety in numbers. On the intellectual side, the Unitarian movement deserves attention for its aid in the dethronement of the old dogmatic structure. Alongside of these more subjective and emotional offshoots of Protestantism arose philosophical idealism to add a touch of vague pantheism and a flavor of kindly mysticism. In short, the confessional type of Protestantism mellowed under the influence of a more rational social organization with its gentler life. Reason was gaining in concreteness and power, and human values were gaining in attractiveness. The Old Testament gradually gave way to the synoptic gospels of the New, while asceticism dropped away like a mantle. I, myself, well remember when religion was largely a matter of taboos on the moral side. "Thou shalt not" outbalanced by far the suggestion of concrete lines of positive endeavor. Such spiritualism was passive and suspicious rather than active and creative. During the last thirty years, Protestantism has passed insensibly into a gentle religion of the spirit, sentimentally inclined toward life and permeated with popular notions of science and philosophy. The sermon of the Puritan concerned itself with the two dispensations; the sermon of the modern minister is full of quotations from the poets and reveals the growing influence of the social sciences. The negative note is hardly audible. This {207} world and its spiritual problems occupies the focus of attention.

Modern Protestantism is not over certain of its creed. In fact, so uncertain is it of the doctrines it wishes to champion that it much prefers to discuss human problems, and to expend its enthusiasm in the advance of a gentle code of ethics attached to the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. In a very real sense, this attitude is to its credit, for it is positive and genuinely spiritual. Moreover, it bears witness to a consciousness of the decay of the supernaturalistic perspective which dominated and misled the world for so many centuries. The spirit and knowledge of the present age has undermined the traditional beliefs, and the average protestant is too well educated and too much in touch with current movements to be unaware of this situation. He is not certain whither he is being led nor does he so very much care; he is content to drift with the tide of human development, assured that the world is becoming better and broader in its purposes and possibilities. Creed and dogma are dropping into the background and will soon be discarded, while the spiritual values which grow out of, and express, human nature and life are steadily forging to the front.

The church as an institution is only one among many. And it must further be remembered that the life of society reaches beyond institutions, much as the life of an organism is greater than the habits and structure which it uses. Religious institutions did not create the modern world with its gigantic advances in commerce, its acute applications of science, its subtle art, its daring adventures in living, its bold philosophies, its high {208} level of education, its experiments in new social forms. They have had their share in the work, no doubt; but they have been acted upon even more than they have acted. Because of its lack of internal unity and its antagonism to authority, Protestantism could offer no effective barrier to the growth of the new outlook. Often suspicious, it yet fought in the open. The trial of strength went against it ultimately because its foundation was inadequate. Myth cannot fight against science and hope to win. The verdict of the hard-fought contest is becoming evident to both winner and loser. Let us hope that the loser will take his defeat manfully and gradually adapt himself to the New World that is dawning. The Protestant Churches may then become groups of voluntary associations filled with high spiritual purpose and ministering to the growth of a finer social and economic life. The main necessity is to find a function that is real and vital in the judgment and conscience of the time.

It is undeniable that the various churches will long play a beneficent role in the social economy, but the question may well be asked whether this role would not be more significant and sanely creative if the hampering traditions and beliefs of the past were shaken off. For these traditions are the shelter of interpretations and social habits which are ill-adapted to the needs of the present. They slow down the energy of institutions and cloud their vision. They lead the sincerest of people to use tools which have lost edge. For instance, is not civic and moral education far more effective than melodramatic revivals which stir people's emotions and leave them without chart and compass before the problems of their every-day life? The church must {209} learn prevention; it must go to school to the social and mental sciences. Only so will it conquer that dilettantism which accompanies the absence of methodical intelligence.

But the churches have the right to respond that they are not the only sinners in this regard. Institutions of all kinds display the same tendency to retardation, to conservatism, to waste of energy, the beliefs and habits of the past clinging heavily about them as impedimenta. It is seldom that a new life wells up quickly enough within them to break this inertia. Perhaps all that the younger generation has the right to ask is a spirit of tolerance and even respect for all loyalties which attach themselves to things of good repute, and a more catholic admission of all human values into the class of spiritual things. The scientist is working for things of the spirit, and so is the artist, and so is the social reformer, and so is the educator, and so is the day-laborer who does his work for the sake of some dear one.

The sea of faith of which Matthew Arnold sang is indeed at its ebb; but a new sea of faith is welling up in the human soul, faith in humanity, in this life here and now, a faith in common things and common people, a faith in noble things and their gifted creators, a faith founded in sympathy and in mental integrity and rooted in the actualities of life. It is a faith grounded on the high will to assimilate and carry further the spiritual values which the human race has slowly achieved in its travail of the centuries. Not to relinquish but to surpass, not to deny but to transform: thus will the new day be won. Let the spiritual forces which have grown up around religion, industry, science, philosophy, {210} citizenship and art fall to with a will, to bring some fuller measure of the long-dreamed-of Kingdom upon this earth, which has been and forever will be man's sole home.

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