Prolific Prophet

An importunate new breed is knocking at the church's door: the prophets of post-Christianity. They are usually young, steeped in the Bible and hip to the latest twists of German hermeneutics, at home both in academe and in the churches of the slum-ridden "inner city." Their theme is the need of the churches to answer the new challenges of secular times; their prose is a never-never blend of Pauline exorcism and plummy sociological jargon. The prophets are sometimes a bit of a nuisance, partly because they are as predictable as the tiny hammers in Anacin ads, and partly because they provide a stream of criticism from within that the churches often need but do not necessarily welcome.

Perhaps the most consistently effective of these Daniels with doctorates is a rapid-fire minister of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod who in light-hearted moments used to sign himself "Marty Marty." A hard-traveling (20,-000 miles so far this year) graduate of Missouri's Concordia Seminary, the Rev. Dr. Martin Emil Marty, 35, is an associate editor of the Christian Century and founding pastor of the big Church of the Holy Spirit in Elk Grove Village, 111., a Chicago suburb.-His own literary productivity is positively staggering: in the past five years he has written more than 300 articles, and in 1963 alone he will have overseen the publication of six books bearing his name as sole or joint author.

"Consensus Religion." One newly published Marty effort is a lively introduction to his prickly, pithy style and his new Frontiersy eagerness to get U.S. Protestants moving again. In Second Chance for American Protestants (Harper & Row; $3.50), he argues that the churches are being "displaced" from their comfortable positions of influence in the U.S.; in an increasingly religionless world Christians are becoming once again, in the Biblical phrase, "strangers and exiles." This can be well and good, says Marty. The beliefs of Protestant churches have, in the U.S., formed the basis for a "consensus religion," which now has lost its impact: it is like faded wallpaper, visible everywhere but hardly noticed. Change is needed for the church to become once more a vital spiritual force.

But responding to the new conditions of life will not be easy. Christianity "will have to 'travel light.' Christian institutions, ministries, images, effects must be studied: Which are very important? Which are accidental and can be left behind?" In Marty's view, the accidentals include many of the most apparent artifacts of American religion: the expensive Gothic church built for community prestige, the comfortable words of moralistic sermons, the check to a charity that substitutes for personal engagement with modern problems.

The Limits of Class. Marty has no programmatic answers for those who hear his prophecy and ask what they must do. In fact, he argues that point-by-point planning for spiritual progress is secondary to the problem of changing basic attitudes. Ministers must not be scout leaders or psychologists in clericals but theologians "relating the Word of God to the world of man." Laymen must shift their angle of vision, and see that their task of translating theology into the life of the marketplace has global as well as parochial implications. "I tell my congregation," Marty says, "that their sin is not in being middle class; their sin is not seeing through the limits of their class."

* A position that he resigned in May in order to become an associate professor of church history at the University of Chicago Divinity School starting in July.

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