Christians in Revolt

"These that have turned the world upside down," is what the Apostles Paul and Silas were called at Thessalonica. In Christianity's early days, the gospel of Jesus Christ was a revolutionary religion indeed.

It still is. Though Christianity has taken on age, respectability and power--and though some Christians seem to assume that God is always on the side of the status quo--the basic teachings of Jesus still challenge the accepted ways of the world. Published last week was a book about five religious thinkers called Modern Christian Revolutionaries (Devin-Adair; $4), edited by British Catholic Donald Attwater. First published piecemeal in England, this collection of studies by different authors is what Editor Attwater calls "a very mixed bag." Two of its subjects are Protestants, two Catholics and one is Russian Orthodox. Three are especially notable for general readers:

Soeren Kierkegaard, a lonely, God-hungry Dane, waged his revolution against the excessive rationalism of the mechanistic 19th Century in which he lived. Thus his Christianity did not try to be "objective," but dealt with the universe in terms of man's own suffering, fearing, loving and hating--much as does present-day psychology.* For contemporary Denmark's official church Christianity, Protestant Kierkegaard had nothing but contempt, though he himself had been trained for the Danish ministry. His anger boiled over in such pronouncements as "Parsons canonize bourgeois mediocrity" and "Official Christianity is both aesthetically and intellectually ludicrous and indecent, a scandal in the Christian sense." On his deathbed in 1855 at the age of 42, Kierkegaard refused all churchly ministrations, saying that "the parsons are royal functionaires, and royal functionaires are not related to Christianity."

Author Gilbert Keith Chesterton passionately accepted the orthodoxy that Kierkegaard scorned. A devout member of the Church of England from his youth, at the age of 48 he became a Roman Catholic. But though he accepted and stoutly defended every word of Roman Catholic dogma, he denounced the economic orthodoxy of modern capitalism.

Though he adopted some of the analyses of Marxism, Chesterton's ideal pattern for society lay not in the future (with the dictatorship of the proletariat) but in the past. In the Middle Ages, said he, men inhabited "a world more wonderful than the eyes of men have looked on before or after . . . and saw St. Francis walking with his halo a cloud of birds."

Chesterton advocated communal ownership of large-scale industry and decentralized agriculture. But as a revolutionary he was very much of an Englishman. The threat of World War I forced him to choose armaments produced by capitalists rather than socialist-pacifist unpreparedness.

Arthur Eric Rowton Gill said: "I am an ordinary man who refuses to be bamboozled." But Eric Gill, born in 1882 as the second of a poor nonconformist minister's 13 children, was far from ordinary. One of England's top sculptors and wood carvers, he was also a Christian whose religious simplicity led him to beat a hasty and disgusted retreat from the great names of the art world.

For Gill, the Gospels made "political" faith superfluous. "All our politics," he wrote, "are based on a denial of the Gospels. Our capitalist society is founded solely upon the notion that those who have money have the duty to get more, and that those who have none must be enslaved or exploited or 'employed'--until machines make their existence unnecessary. The fascist societies want to ... become as rich and great as the others. The communist societies want to make the rich poor in order that the poor may become rich. But the Church of God wants to make the rich poor and the poor holy.

"This is the circle of human politics: When we have accepted poverty there will be peace among men. Only when we make peace shall we become the children of God. Only when we love God shall we love our fellow men. Only when we love our fellow men shall we have peace. When we have peace we shall have poverty, and when we have poverty we shall have the kingdom of Heaven."

*And much of present-day Protestant theology, which Kierkegaard profoundly influenced.

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