1. A Humanist Movement
1. A Humanist Movement
I am a humanist. In truth, I believe it is only a thoroughgoing Christian who can ever have a right to that name. I am not the only one who believes this. In 1938 the Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote a book calling for a reconstructed Christendom as our social target for tomorrow, and he boldly entitled his work True Humanism. More recently, we have seen the appearance in English of Hans Kung's 700-page treatise On Being a Christian, which is wholly devoted to spelling out and making good the claim that "Christianity cannot properly be understood except as radical humanism."1 It would be well if Protestants took up this thesis more robustly, for it is true. It is part of the glory of the gospel to be the one genuine humanism that the world has seen.
What is humanism? Essentially, it is a quest: a quest for full realization of the possibilities of our humanity. We see ourselves as less satisfied, less fulfilled, less developed, less fully expressed, than we might be; - we have not yet tasted all that could enrich us, nor yet developed all our creative potential, nor yet made the most of relationships with others, nor yet enjoyed all that is there to be enjoyed, nor yet fully harnessed the powers of the physical world as instruments of our freedom; and we long to enter further into what we see as our human heritage. In this basic sense we are all humanists; our natural self-love, which God implanted in us, makes us so. You would have to say of anyone who had ceased to look for personal enrichment in any of these ways (as alas, broken folk sometimes do) that he or she was hereby lapsing from one dimension of humanness, as if to contract out of the human race.
But some who claim to be humanists deny that Christians have any right to the title. I am thinking of those who call themselves secular, scientific, Marxist, or existentialist humanists. For the moment I shall not challenge their view of Christians; no doubt there are black spots in our record, and in our zeal for God's righteousness we have sometimes lost sight of basic human values, and the secular humanists are judging us as they find us. But I must tell you how their own claim to be humanists looks to me.
Please do not take offense at what I shall say now. I am not making a debating point, but spelling out in the fittest words I can find a conviction about humanness which for Christians is quite fundamental. What I have to say is this: they call themselves humanists; I think they are using the wrong word. The more exact name for their views would be brutism or animalism. Why? Because they tell us that the way to live is to turn our backs on God as Christians know him, to give up that ideal of the good life which the Bible and the Christian past bequeath to us, and to start “doing our own thing" without regard for any authority save the imperious promptings of our own hearts. Notwithstanding my deep respect for the integrity of those who take this line, I conceive that anyone who turns his back on God and God's revealed will for us forfeits a dimension of human dignity and settles for a way of life which in this respect befits the lower animals, but does not match the nature and potential of man at all.
Christian humanism of the evangelical type stands in the tradition of two other movements of the past, for both of which I heartily thank God—the Puritan movement of the seventeenth century, and the Methodist movement of the eighteenth. They too were humanist movements in the sense I have defined, and both had to face the same kind of flak from the uncomprehending and ill-disposed that comes the way of evangelical humanists today.
What sort of movements were Puritanism and Methodism? To describe either as a protest movement would be inadequate, though many gestures of protest issued from both. But whereas protest movements try to clear the ground of evil without taking responsibility for designing anything better to put in its place, Puritanism and Methodism were positive evangelical movements, attacking evils only in order to make room for the better things of the Christian gospel so that all life might become "holiness to the Lord." Similarly, to think of Puritanism or Methodism as Pharisaic would be a mistake. I would not blame anyone who had it in for Pharisaism, which is at motivational level an unlovely ego-trip compounded of pride and envy. But though Puritans and Methodists were accused of spiritual pride in their own day and later, the accusation will not stick, save perhaps to substandard specimens of each kind. The zeal for God's praise which animated Puritans and Methodists was a different thing from Pharisaic self-righteousness.
Nor, finally, was either Puritanism or Methodism a kill-joy movement. I know they are often thought of in those terms, Puritanism in particular, but this is lampooning them. Thus, for example, Shakespeare in Twelfth Night had Sir Toby Belch describe the odious kill-joy Malvolio ("ill-wisher" is what his name means) as "a kind of Puritan"; Lord Macaulay said that the Puritans hated bear-baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators; H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the fear that somewhere, somehow, someone is enjoying himself; and John Mortimer, Q.C., who so often appears for the defense these days in obscenity trials, has recently gone on record as saying, "I think there is a tremendously strong streak of Puritanism in the English national make-up that we must guard against."2
The stereotype of Puritanism which these remarks reflect is of a negative, morose repressiveness, culturally impoverishing, but this is historically a complete mistake. What the Puritans opposed was not fun and games as such, but fun and games of a demoralizing and dehumanizing type. Thus, they opposed, not alcohol or sex, but drunkenness and debauchery. Thus, they closed theaters, not because they were against drama as such (some were, but only a minority), but because theaters were centers of prostitution.
Similarly, John Wesley taught the Methodists to have nothing to do with brutalizing amusements like cockfighting and bearbaiting, which were still going on in England. Wesley has been criticized for this, as if he too belonged to the genus kill-joy. But Wesley, the man who once said that there is no Christianity but social Christianity and no holiness but social holiness, was trying to clear a place in men's lives for the joy of the Lord. It was noticed that under the teaching of this supposed kill-joy folk learned to sing at their work, just as Wesley himself loved to sing as he rode from place to place to preach the gospel. To sing! Yes, for something had happened to them. They had found God through Jesus Christ, and joy had come pouring in.
What about evangelical Christian humanism today? Surely it is no more a protest movement, or a Pharisaic movement, or a kill-joy movement, than were Puritanism and Methodism. Nor is it a mere outburst of social conservatism, a flight by the middle-aged of the middle class back from the present into the womb of the past, to the manners and customs of the days we would refer to by the phrase, "when I was young. . ." What is it, then? The answer seems to be: it is a movement raised up by God for cleaning up moral messes in our society. Ways and styles of life which tend to coarsen, brutalize and dehumanize, undermining human dignity by encouraging us irresponsibly to follow instinct, like animals ("if it feels good, do it"), are widely adopted and promoted today. Evangelical Christian humanism challenges these because they keep folk from the true fullness and joy of human life under God. The purpose of the challenge is not simply to get rid of things which hurt man and dishonor God, but primarily to create space for the gospel. As an involved observer of this movement, it seems clear to me that this is essentially what it is about.