18 The Congregation as Hermeneutic of the Gospel
The word "myth" has become rather useful to theologians because of its ambiguity. In frequent popular use it is just another word for a falsehood. When it is used in the title of books such as The Myth of Christ Incarnate, or The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, the authors have a convenient shield to protect them from the charge that they are simply denying the truth of these hallowed beliefs and will claim that they are using the word in a technical sense. In respect of these two works, I have to confess that I find it hard to discover what this technical sense might be, and what (in these works) is the difference between "myth" and "mistake." One of the definitions of myth used in its more technical sense is: "An unproved collective belief that is accepted uncritically to justify a social institution" (Random House Dictionary, s.v.). I am proposing to use the word "myth" both in this technical and its popular sense: I am suggesting both that the belief in a secular society is an unproven belief accepted uncritically to justify a social institution, and also that the belief is mistaken.
Put very briefly, the belief is that modern society is on a steady and irreversible course toward increasing secularization, and that this is to be welcomed since it enables us to put the wars of religion behind us and to create a society in which the conflicting truth-claims of the religions do not tear society to pieces. The articulation of this belief is frequently attributed in the first place to Max Weber, who taught that the threefold process of rationalization, industrialization, and bureaucratization was creating a society in which there would necessarily be less and less room for the supernatural, the magical, the transcendent. The modern world, as he saw it, was undergoing a process of disenchant ment. There would be no more room for gods or fairies, for providence or for miracles. Rational planning, forecasting, and organizing would create a world in which there was no place for God. While religious people of a conservative temper might regret this, it could nevertheless be welcomed by those who had the wider interests of humanity at heart. Especially in a country like India, long riven by interreligious tensions and struggling to create a single, strong nation, the vision of a genuinely secular society was and is compelling. Such a society, it was believed, would provide free space for the exercise of religion. It would not be in any sense antireligious. It would safeguard the freedom of each person to follow the religion of his or her choice. But it would not allow any particular religious belief to govern national policy or to have a privileged place in education. This has been and is the hope of many devoutly religious people. But beyond this and especially in the so-called developed world, there has been and is a further expectation-namely that the process of secularization would inevitably lead to the gradual disappearance of religious belief, that secularization is an irreversible process, and that the farther any society moves along the road of rationalization, industrialization, and urbanization, the more certain it is that religion will have a receding role in that society.
The first thing to be said about this belief is that it appears to be a myth in the popular sense of that word. It appears to be-quite simply-untrue. In the face of the statistical evidence of the survival and vigor of religion in the most highly secularized societies, sociologists no longer accept the theory which has had so much currency since the time of Weber's writing. Sociologists have accumulated a great mass of statistical material which demonstrates the continuing and often greatly increased vigor of religious belief in that society which has proceeded farthest along the road of rationalization, industrialization, and urbanization-namely the United States. The main facts are well known. The strongly conservative and evangelical elements in the Protestant Churches have undergone a remarkable renaissance, while the churches which have tried to adjust their beliefs and practices to the temper of modernity are in decline. Religious belief has become a serious factor in public politics-something which sociologists even up to twenty years ago regarded as a feature of the past which would not reappear. And, as is well known, new religious movements have appeared in a bewildering number and variety not only in the United States but all over the "developed" world. Moreover, these movements are not mainly among the marginalized and disadvantaged sections of society. It has been well known by sociologists of religion for a long time that peoples on the margins of society who feel that they have no hope in the present world are prone to welcome religious beliefs, often of an apocalyptic kind, which offer hope for a new order and another world. But the new religious movements which are such a prominent feature of the "developed" world are attracting not these disadvantaged people but-on the contrary-the young people of the most affluent sections of society. In a recent collection of essays by leading sociologists, mainly from the United States, there is an almost unanimous confession that the belief which was accepted uncritically up to ten or twenty years ago, namely that the process of modernization would necessarily lead to the decline of religion, was totally mistaken. To quote only one of these writers, Professor Rodney Stark, Professor of Sociology at Washington University, the evidence "leads to the conclusion that secularization will not usher in a post-religious era. Instead, it will repeatedly lead to a resupply of vigorous otherworldly religious organizations by prompting revival" (The Sacred in a Secular Age, Berkeley 1985, p. 146).
It would seem to be proved beyond doubt that human beings cannot live in the rarified atmosphere of pure rationality as the post-Enlightenment world has understood rationality. There are needs of the human spirit which simply must be met. It seems that those religious bodies which have tried to accommodate as much as possible of the rationalism of the Enlightenment are those which are in decline, and that those which have maintained a strong emphasis on the supernatural dimension of religion have flourished. Here I am not equating religion with Christianity. There is much in the flourishing of new religions and the revival of old ones which is more pagan than Christian. But this flourishing does seem to prove that what is loosely called "modernity" does not provide enough nourishment for the human spirit. Moreover, quite apart from religion properly so-called, one has to look at the enormous growth of belief in astrology, precisely among the most "developed" societies. This is surely evidence of the fact that the human spirit cannot live permanently with a form of rationality which has no answer to the question "Why?" Even if the whole infinitely complex pattern of events could be completely mapped and all the links uncovered so that one could explain the antecedent cause of everything that happened, one would still be left with the question "Why did this happen to me?" and if there is no belief in a divine providence it seems almost inevitable that one will either deify chance under the name of Fortune, or else fall back on something like astrology.
A large amount of statistical material has been gathered and analyzed by sociologists of religion in the effort to discover what correlation exists, if any, between religious belief and achievement in the natural and human sciences. Two conclusions from these studies are of interest in my present discussion. The first is this. To quote Professor Robert Wuthnow, professor of sociology at Princeton, "virtually all surveys and polls, whether of the general public, college students, church members or clergy, show inverse relations between exposure to higher education and adherence to core religious tenets" (The Sacred in a Secular Age, p. 189). In other words, the better educated you are in our modern society, the less time you have for religion. But, and this is the significant point, the surveys show that, to quote Wuthnow again, "it is the irreligious who are selected into academic careers in the first place, not that the process of being socialized into the academic life causes them to become less and less religious" (p. 191). The second finding is this. The correlation between academic life and irreligion is much higher in the social sciences and the humanities than it is among the natural sciences-physics, chemistry, and biology. Atomic physicists are much more likely to believe in God than sociologists. These two facts taken together lead Professor Wuthnow to make an interesting suggestion, based on the work of the sociology of science. Science, like every human activity, is a socially embodied exercise and therefore scientists are under the necessity of demarcating the boundaries of their exercise. The editor of a scientific magazine has to be able to recognize what is science and what is not. This boundary definition is much easier in the case of the natural sciences like physics and chemistry. These sciences have a high degree to clarity and internal consistency. It is more difficult in the case of sciences like sociology, economics, psychology, and even more in the humanities, to say where exactly the boundary is to be drawn. Yet the drawing of the boundary is essential to the corporate sense of identity without which the scientific community cannot flourish. Wuthnow suggests that the two facts which I have referred to can best be explained on the hypothesis that the irreligion of academics is essentially a matter of boundary demarcation. It is clear that it is not the contents of these academic disciplines themselves which cause alienation from religion. The irreligion, insofar as it has been documented, is a factor at the point of entry into the study, not a product of it. And further confirmation of this thesis is obtained, says Wuthnow, from the fact that the enormous expansion of scientific work in the United States since the Second World War has not been accompanied by any decline in religion. In the period of twenty-five years from 1955 expenditure on scientific research in the USA increased by over 1,000 percent, which must mean that a vastly greater number of people were giving their fulltime commitment to science; yet in the same period commitment to religion as measured by church membership remained steady. There seem to be good grounds for taking seriously Professor Wuthnow's conclusion. "While the evidence clearly documents the irreligiosity of scientists themselves, it shows that this irreligiosity is far more pronounced among the least scientific disciplines-the social sciences and humanities-than it is among the natural scientists. And closer inspection of the scientific role itself suggests that scientists in these fields may adopt an irreligious stance chiefly as one of the boundary-posturing mechanisms they use to distance themselves from the general public and thereby maintain the precarious reality of the work they do.... The proverbial conflict between science and religion may be more a function of the precariousness of science than of the precariousness of religion" (The Sacred, p. 199).
If, then, we may see good ground for thinking that the idea of secularization is an irreversible process which must lead to the inevitable marginalization of religion as a myth in the popular sense, namely something which is untrue, we may turn now to the more technical use of the word "myth." There are good grounds for saying that the secularization theory has been accepted uncritically by Christians to justify a social institution. The idea of a secular society has been attractive to Christians because it seemed to hold out the hope of peaceful coexistence between the religions and worldviews. It promised a society in which public affairs were governed by beliefs which are shared by all "enlightened" people, and in which there would be freedom for individuals and voluntary associations of individuals to profess and practice their particular religious or nonreligious beliefs. It promised deliverance from the tyranny of dogma, and peaceful coexistence in an accepted framework of shared rationality. Just because the idea of a secular society has been such a powerful symbol, offering the hope of peace among the warring religions and ideologies, it is necessary to scrutinize it in order to see whether the failure of the secularization theory is due to accidental circumstances or to weakness inherent in the idea itself.
One of the most influential statements of the idea of a secular society was set forth in a book with that title written by the Oxford economist, Denis Munby. He wrote at the beginning of the 1960s, that decade which saw the secular as something to be welcomed and not shunned by Christians. It was the decade which saw the wide circulation of such books as Harvey Cox's The Secular City and Paul van Buren's The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. It was the decade which celebrated a misunderstood Bonhoeffer and "Man's Coming of Age." Munby's book appeared at the beginning of the decade. Its title was a deliberate rebuttal of the book of T. S. Eliot written twenty-three years earlier, The Idea of a Christian Society. The background for Eliot's book was the miserable period of the 1930s when the nations of Europe were drifting helplessly toward a second world war, when millions were rotting in unemployment, and when the bright hopes kindled after the first war had been extinguished. Democratic governments in most of the European countries appeared to be rudderless and helpless, mere victims of economic forces which were not understood and could not be controlled. Eliot had seen movements, mostly of young people, taking control of these drifting hulks, rejecting the ideology of liberal capitalism, and proclaiming a new ideology which would insure that the life of their nations would not be left to the blind forces of the market but would be directed to deliberately chosen ends. Eliot was one of a number of Christian thinkers in several countries who asked: If small determined minorities can do this in the power of a pagan ideology, is it not possible that a Christian minority could impart to a whole nation a sense of purpose directed by the Christian faith?
Munby, on the other hand, was writing at the beginning of the 1960s, that decade which was supremely confident of the power of technology to solve every human problem, the decade which acclaimed the secular as the truly human. Munby was in tune with his times when he advised Christians to reject Eliot's vision, to shake off the lingering nostalgia for a Christian past and to embrace wholeheartedly the ideal of a secular society. It was Munby and those who thought like him who captured the ear of many Christians in the decade which followed the publication of his book. Reading it now, one is chiefly aware of its failure to grasp the real human problem.
The secular society for which Christians should work will, according to Munby, have the following six essential marks:
1. It is uncommitted to any particular view of the universe and man's place in it.
2. It is therefore a pluralist society, not merely plural in fact but pluralist in principle.
3. It will therefore be a tolerant society, its tolerance limited only by the need to resist activities which are directed against the accepted policies of the society.
4. It must, however, have some common aims for which citizens can work together. But it will deflate the pretensions of judges and magistrates to represent anything more august than these agreed aims of society. A secular society will therefore eliminate the relics of the sacred which still hang around the role of the judge.
5. The secular society will solve its problems by eliminating emotion and irrational impulses; it will work by ascertaining the facts of the situation so that society may be organized to enable the citizens to achieve their actual aims. It does not pretend to pass judgment on these aims.
6. Finally, therefore, a secular society will be without official images, ideal types, or models held up for imitation. It will aim, rather, to provide a framework within which people of different allegiances can work together.
Thus, in his own words, Munby outlined the idea of a secular society and advised the Christians of his day to accept it and to reject Eliot's idea of a Christian society. His advice has been widely followed. And yet its illusions and self-contradictions are obvious. Consider each of the six elements in Munby's secular society.
1. It is obvious from Munby's own outline that his secular society is committed to a very particular view of society. It is a view which excludes the belief, shared by Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, that all human society, like all creation, is under the sovereign rule of God, and that the word "God" is not a meaningless cipher but refers to one whose purpose for human society has been made known. The secular society is effectively committed to a worldview which excludes this belief. But here at the outset we meet the power of the myth in the technical sense of that word-the power of an uncritically accepted belief to justify a social institution. It is widely believed in our society that to introduce the name of God into the discussion of a public issue, or into an academic study, is to intrude a private opinion into a sphere which is governed by other criteria. These other criteria are not normally brought into the open for scrutiny. The "modern worldview" is simply "how things actually are." Munby himself is plainly a victim of this very familiar illusion. His whole hook, The Idea of a Secular Society, is itself a comprehensive refutation of his opening statement that the secular society is not committed to any particular view of the world or man's place in it.
2. The second mark of Munby's secular society is that it is pluralist in principle. It is not necessary to repeat here what I have said earlier about the limits of this pluralism. Clearly Munby, like other advocates of the pluralist society, understands pluralism to apply to the aims of people (what are more often now called their "values") but not to the facts. In regard to what are called "facts" the secular society is not pluralist. Its distinctive feature, as I have argued earlier, is its sharp dichotomy between "facts" and "values," its implied belief that "values" or "aims" are purely a matter for personal choice and are not under the control of the world of "facts." This is made clear in iMunby's third mark of a secular society, namely that it will draw a strict boundary between public and private morality.
3. This boundary, one of the distinctive features of a secular society, is drawn in order to insure tolerance for a wide variety of private lifestyles. In Munby's secular society tolerance will not be extended to activities which are directed against the accepted policies of society. Thus the secular society, while it does not have an accepted public view of the world and man's place in it, does have accepted policies. Presumably these are the policies approved by the majority, or by whoever is able to gain power. But it would draw a clear boundary separating public and private behavior. Here, plainly, we have one of the key elements in the picture-a concept of the human person which separates morals from public life. This separation is surely impossible in the long term. The way societies behave, and the policies they accept, will be a function of the commitments the members of the society have, the values they cherish, and-ultimately-the beliefs they hold about the world and their place in it.
4. In his fourth point Munby proposes to deflate the pretensions of judges to represent anything more than the agreed aims of society. This is, of course, what Marxists have always insisted on. The courts are "people's courts" where the will of the people is carried out. In this situation language about justice becomes meaningless. If courts exist to carry out the will of society, then it would be quite absurd to complain that a particular judgment was unjust. The claim that a judgment is unjust is-whether or not the claimant is aware of it-an implicit appeal to a tribunal higher than the courts of the state. What Munby wishes to remove, as the last vestiges of sacredness still clinging to the role of judges in our society, are those elements which are the reminder to judges, if not to plaintiffs, that there is such a higher tribunal and that judges will in the end have to plead before it.
5. Munby's fifth point calls for the elimination of "emotion and irrational impulse" so that society may ascertain the facts and act on them. Here we have again the familiar dichotomy of fact and value which has been discussed in previous chapters. The concept of facts as simply raw data presented to us apart from any conceptual framework within which they are understood, is-as we have seen-one of the characteristic illusions of a secular culture. All facts are interpreted facts and the interpretation depends upon a whole range of social and personal factors rooted in the tradition of the society in question. The decision as to what are the significant facts in relation to a given problem is one which, plainly, cannot be decided on the basis of "facts" which are prior to any decision about importance. And the decision about importance will be related to the world of beliefs, aims, purposes, values-all that world which Munby would dismiss as emotion and irrationality. But the secular society, as acclaimed by Munby, will simply establish the facts so that individual citizens may achieve their aims; it will not pass judgment on these aims. But can a human society thus divest itself of all responsibility to distinguish between good and bad, right and wrong? If societyand here presumably we must be talking about the institutional structures of society such as the state, business, universities, and professional associations-if society is not to pass judgment on the aim of citizens, this must also mean that citizens have no right to pass judgment on the performance of these institutions of society. We are driven inevitably to the tyranny of institutions: the state is no longer a moral subject which can be held responsible for doing right or wrong. There is a final divorce between politics and ethics.
6. One could say that everything in Munby's picture of the secular society comes to a point in the statement that a secular society is without official images or models held up for emulation. If that is so, then there has never been a secular society and there never can be. For, as Calvin said, the mind of man is an image-factory. No society exists without models held up for emulation. In contemporary Western society it is very easy to identify these models. They are presented hour after hour on the television screens in almost every home in the land. They are the images of the good life as our society conceives it, and the presentation is fueled by the most powerful commercial interests in society.
In twenty-five years since Munby wrote his book, we have learned something about the secular society. We have learned, I think, that what has come into being is not a secular society but a pagan society, not a society devoid of public images but a society which worships gods which are not God. But the myth of the secular society remains powerful. Let me remind you again of the definition of myth which I quoted at the outset: "an unproved collective belief that is accepted uncritically to justify a social institution." The idea of the secular society has been accepted by many Christians uncritically because it seemed to offer the Church the possibility of a peaceful coexistence with false gods, a comfortable concordat between Yahweh and the Baalim. But the promise is illusory. It is not surprising that there are violent countermovements which threaten to destroy the good with the had, to throw away the gains of the Enlightenment along with its illusions. It is not surprising that the age which called itself secular has produced an unprecedented crop of new religions. The secular society is a myth, and it has the power of a myth to blind people to realities. A powerful myth, such as this, has in it the power about which I was speaking in the chapter on "principalities and powers." Christian affirmation in this context requires the unmasking of the powers. It calls for a new kind of enlightenment, namely the opening up of the underlying assumptions of a secular society, the asking of the unasked questions, the probing of unrecognized presuppositions.
Christian affirmation in this context cannot mean simply the affirmation of a way of personal salvation for the individual. It must mean this, and no less than this. To call men and women into discipleship of Jesus Christ is and must always be central in the life of the Church. But we must be clear about what discipleship will mean. It cannot mean that one accepts the lordship of Christ as governing personal and domestic life, and the life of the Church, while another sovereignty is acknowledged for the public life of society. It cannot mean that the Church is seen as a voluntary society of individuals who have decided to follow Jesus in their personal lives, a society which does not challenge the assumptions which govern the worlds of politics, economics, education, and culture. The model for all Christian discipleship is given once and for all in the ministry of Jesus. His ministry entailed the calling of individual men and women to personal and costly discipleship, but at the same time it challenged the principalities and powers, the ruler of this world, and the cross was the price paid for that challenge. Christian discipleship today cannot mean less than that. I do not think that any of us yet knows what this will involve. We have accepted for too long the position of a voluntary society among other such societies, conceived as alternative options within a religiously and ideologically neutral society. It was the rise of the totalitarian ideologies of the 1930s which prompted T. S. Eliot and others to ask about the possibility of a society which would not be neutral but would be a Christian society. That question has not been seriously followed up. We have settled for what seemed the easier option-a secular society within which Christianity would be a permitted option. We have tended to suppose that the kind of open democratic societies which have grown out of the European experience in the past five hundred years can be reproduced and can continue without the rooting in the Christian worldview within which they developed. Contemporary political events do not encourage that optimism.
The Church is an entity which has outlasted many states, nations, and empires, and it will outlast those that exist today. The Church is nothing other than that movement launched into the public life of the world by its sovereign Lord to continue that which he came to do until it is finished in his return in glory. It has his promise that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. In spite of the crimes, blunders, compromises, and errors by which its story has been stained and is stained to this day, the Church is the great reality in comparison with which nations and empires and civilizations are passing phenomena. The Church can never settle down to being a voluntary society concerned merely with private and domestic affairs. It is bound to challenge in the name of the one Lord all the powers, ideologies, myths, assumptions, and worldviews which do not acknowledge him as Lord. If that involves conflict, trouble, and rejection, then we have the example of Jesus before us and his reminder that a servant is not greater than his master.