Counter-Heresies?

Through its bimonthly magazine Social Action, the Congregational Christian Churches' Council for Social Action has served up some intelligent, if sometimes captious criticism of what is wrong with the church and the nation.* In the current issue, subtitled "Christian Faith and the Protestant Churches," Social Action asks some searching questions about the current philosophy of U.S. Protestantism.

The indignant Protestant reaction to the proposal to send a U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, says Social Action, points up a disturbing fact: "The one emotional loyalty that of a certainty binds us together as Protestants...is the battle against Rome." This tendency goes far deeper than most U.S. Protestants realize, Social Action believes: over the generations, "in protesting against the heresies of Rome, we have created the counter-heresies of Protestantism."

The first "counter-heresy" is "the negative and sterile view of the separation of church and state." Originally, the U.S. Protestant tradition regarded church and state as "not two insulated compartments, but rather interrelated parts of a whole society. Both were bound by a covenant with God which expressed their members' sense of mutual involvement and their discernment of the divine society revealed in the Scriptures." But modern Protestants, in reacting to a widely suspected Roman Catholic tendency to ally church and state, have gone to the opposite extreme: "The most astounding victory for the Roman Catholic Church in modern America...is...the voluntary default of Protestantism in the last 100 years from its historic sense of a Christian vocation for participation in the world."

Vocation or Fellowship? The opposition of many Protestants to religious instruction in public schools is a case in point. "If we choose to ignore the public-school system as an avenue of religious instruction so as to 'keep the Catholics out,' then in effect we allow secular theologies to become the source of meaning and motivation for the public-school system." And, warn the editors of Social Action, "we have very few social principles which can be taught in their full meaning without reference to a religious tradition."

The second counter-heresy is "the denial of corporate discipline and authority." Since the Catholics have a visible church with well-defined authority, U.S. Protestants, says Social Action, have again reacted by going to the other extreme: "Is the church to be conceived simply as an aggregate of individuals who meet for casual fellowship and worship once a week under a professional leader?...Individual persons are saved, but in their real human relations to others and not in isolation...

"A side of the Reformation which modern Protestantism tends to neglect is the overarching sense of vocation, the Calvinist and Lutheran drive to participate in the whole of this actual world and to bring all of it under the judgment of God...What we imagine to be the Protestant tradition, the Puritan would disown as a flight from responsible exercise of power or influence..."

Social Grace & Gimmicks. "Protestantism has no working doctrine of the visible church...The minister, no longer sustained by a priesthood of believers, looks outside his faith for sources of authority. Social grace and charm, ability to present a popular, interesting sermon filled with gimmicks that produce an immediate response become his basis of leadership. The 'good guy'...emerges in the ministry..."

Concludes Social Action: "The church, [as] the captive of the Gospel, is not a hiding place from the facts of the world...[It is] that body of believers who remember the past event of Jesus Christ in the world, who hope for His coming again, and who relate themselves to the present event of His overcoming of the world."

* Early this year, the Council for Social Action was itself criticized by some church members for 1) a left-of-center point of view, and 2) a tendency to make pronouncements on behalf of the entire church membership (TIME, March 17). At the Congregationalists' biennial conference in Claremont, Calif. last week, delegates, by a vote of 689 to 31, approved the council's program "with commendation," but asked the council to speak for itself and not for the church in its Washington lobbying.

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