MODERNISM

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22337, 26 February 1938, Page 13

MODERNISM

TO THB EDITOR or 188 PaKSS. Sir, —Modernism implies the rejection of a good deal of orthodox theology. It is a breakaway, rationalistic and without revelation. It is religious, in so far as it endeavours to reconcile religion and science. Certainly the clergy should cease railing at rationalism. If they would attempt a more sympathetic outlook towards the splendour of the universe, the complexities of matter, evolution, natural causation, justice, belief, their censure would turn, one would hope, to the crudities in the popular conceptions of I divinity and theology. They complain of indifferentism, but are they students and do they inform their people of theological progress? They think thai n good life, devotion, and aloofness | should refill the churches. Orthodoxy should see the dilemma of modernism or death. Consider two important events in j the Biblical world-qrama. in the light of modernism. First. Adam's preference for the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the extreme penalty attached to the eating of its fruit. Nowadays we would acclaim and eagerly seek such a tree, and as to the forbidding and the penalty, we would look on them as blameworthy in the highest degree. And throughout, the story of the Fall, splendid in drama, is equally obsolete. Granted, it is legendary, yet it cannot be lightly dismissed, as it is irrevocably tied to the scheme of redemption, which stands or falls with it. Take this scheme, the main act of the drama, as ;t second example of orthodoxy. In the modernist view, our whole rational being is offended by the orthodox assertion that if a man hears the message of the Gospel and does not bcjicve. he is damned for ever. Centuries ago the critics showed that belief or unbelief cannot be forced, that it is involuntary, so that neither is belief rewardable by Heaven nor unbelief punishable by Hell. The offensiveness is increased to the starkest limit when we note that orthodoxy, from false premises, has been relentlessly forced to the doctrine that the elect only are saved, even then not of themselves, but by grace alone. Are these ecclesiastical terrors discreetly dropped and if so are candidates for the Church required to swear to and sign them? The last act of the great drama, the binding of Satin and the Millennium seems already foredoomed by the disappearance of Satan, even from popular theology, disquietening, however, to the doctrine of the goodness of God. -Yours, etc., jAs r WILKmsON . Rangiora, February 25, 1938. TO 'I'UE KDITOK OF THE PRESS. Sir, —The earnest inquiry of "Twentieth Century" constrains me to reply. The modernist holds that relig-l ion and creed, -though so long associated, are quite distinct. The essence of aIZ religion is self-sacrifice, love, charily, and the function of religion is to determine the conduct of the individual towards his fellows and thus make society possible. Reason may destroy a man s creed, but it need not touch his religion, which may gain in purity and strength bv being freed from the fear of hell and deprived of the hope of heaven, though beliefs sincerely held, may stimulate the religious instinct. If your correspondent will look about him,'he will see plenty of modernists, though not avowed. The man in the street is generally a modernist; he cares nothing for doctrine but always appreciates true religion and the Church is surely marching in the same direction. —Yours, etc., A MODERNIST. February 21, 1038.