INTELLECTUALISM

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4016, 23 February 1938, Page 9

INTELLECTUALISM

THE CHURCH AND MODERNISM. “In the first place,” says Dr H. E. Fosdick, “modernism has been excessively preoccupied with intellectualism. Its chosen problem has been somehow to adjust Christian faith to modern intellect so that a man could be a Christian without throwing his reason away. Modernism’s message to the church has* been after this fashion : “When, long ago, the new music came, far from clinging to old sackbuts and psalteries, you welcomed the full orchestra and such composers as Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, to the glory of God; when the new art came you did not refuse it but welcomed Cimabue, Giotto, Raphael, and Michelangelo to the enrichment of your faith; when the new architecture came, far from clinging to primitive catacombs or the old Romanesque, you greeted the Gothic with its expanded spaces and aspiring altitudes; so now, when the new science comes, take that in too, and, however painful the adaptations, adjust your faith to it and assimilate its truths into your Christian thinking. “Surely, that has been a necessary appeal, but it centres attention on one problem only—intellectual adjustment to modern science. It approaches the vast field of man’s experience and need head first, whereas the deepest experiences of man’s soul, whether in religion or out of it, cannot be approached head first. “List as you will the soul’s deepest experiences and needs friendship, the love that makes a home, the enjoyment of music, delight in nature, devotion to moral causes, the practice of the presence of God—it is obvious that, whereas, if we are wise, we use our heads on them, nevertheless we do not approach them mainly head first, but heart first, conscience first, imagination first. A man is vastly greater than his logic, and the sweep and ambit of his spiritual experience and need are incalculably wider than his rational processes. So modernism, as such, covers only a segment of the spiritual field and docs not nearly coni pass the range of religion’s meaning. “Indeed, the critical need of overpassing modernism is evident in the fact that our personal spiritual problems do not lie there any more. When I was a student in the seminary, the classrooms where atmosphere grew tense with excitement concerned the higher criticism of the Bib|c and the harmonisation of science and religion. That, however, is no longer the case. The classrooms in the seminary where the atmosphere grows tense today concern Christian ethics and the towering question whether Christ has a moral challenge that can shake this contemporary culture to its foundations and save us from our dead y personal and social sins. “Therefore, let all modernists lift a new battle cry: “We must go beyond modernism! And in that new enterprise the watchword will be not, Accommodate yourself to the prevailing culture! but, Stand out from it and challenge it! For this unescapable fact, which again and again in Chns - ian history has called modernism to its senses, we face: we cannot harmonise Christ Himself with modern culture. What Christ does to modern culture is to challenge it.”