Prophecy, Providence, and Politics
Vree, Dale
It is rightly questionable whether religion is possible in such a society, other than in its reformist-therapeutic variety: it is supposed to improve race relations, housing problems,...
...Delegates are implored to involve themselves in the issues of the day in a truly "prophetic" manner...
...There is a minoritarian, but not heretical, current in Christianity which interprets Old and New Testament prophecy "literally" and believes God is working through the political events of the day in preparation for the apocalyptic Second Coming of Christ...
...22 Today it is an uncontested truth that the German-Christian phenomenon was treacherous and lamentable...
...It is one thing for a priest to say, "In my own humble opinion, such and such is an unwise and/or immoral policy...
...Joseph Hrom6dka, "The Situation in Czechoslovakia," The Religious Situation 1969, ed...
...Furthermore, given the historical standards of orthodox Christianity, our modern prophets are probably not prophets at all, but rather false prophets who dishonor the very cause of God they presume to serve...
...Ibid., pp...
...Philip Berrigan, Prison Journals of aPriest Revolutionary, New York, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, pp...
...Is this degeneracy due to the urban character of society, to its cosmopolitan features...
...According to the Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad: "there is universal agreement, that visions and auditions came to the prophets from outside themselves, and that they came suddenly and completely without premeditation...
...One is forced to conclude that judgments of this kind, whether of the "Right" or the "Left," are probably products of exacerbated political passions and/or naive prejudices...
...They finally accepted it because they could no longer resist God...
...65 and 55...
...For the orthodox Christian, then, the authentic source of revelation is the Bible as understood by the tradition of his church or denomination...
...Who has been his counsellor...
...or in the face of a status quo racist., warmongering so- ciety...
...J. HrOmadka, Impact of History on Theology: Thoughts of a Czech Pastor, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1970, p. 37...
...The game of being more-radicalthan-thou is a big one in left-wing Catholicism...
...It is hardly surprising that out of such a revolution of religion there issued, among other things, a religion of revolution...
...however, Berrigan continued in the prophetic mode: "Yes, man is really coming to a full self-consciousness...
...Albert Berecsky, the Reformed bishop of -Hungary, had fewer reservations about elevating socialism into a medium of salvation: "he asserts a 'positive correlation between the history of salvation and world history.' "31 Barth, who strongly defended the progressive political views of Berecsky (and Hromadka), rose to express his deep suspicion of Berecsky's theological position, which he associated with false prophecy and a second revelation...
...10 It is noteworthy that Garaudy has already described Marxism as the sense of our times...
...In the case before us, it led to the Nazifying of the German churches...
...In this way the hand of God is not only perceived in profane history, but salvation itself is subordinated to certain events in profane history...
...How often have we—that is, those of us who still listen—heard that the Chinese (or some other Third World) revolution was ordained by God as a punishment for the wicked ways of the white man...
...Activity in the field of social reform was taking the place of witness to the Gospel of Redemption...
...15 Sometimes it is not the action of God, but the action of the Holy Spirit, which is perceived, as when the former Catholic priest Philip Berrigan said in 1968: "You see the Spirit is not chained...
...16 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 human goodness out of the Temple...
...3 and 42...
...Usually these utterances are very personal and conventionally orthodox, hence of no immediate concern to the orthodox churches...
...A radical departure from Western tradition was implicit in the tendency...
...it is a waiting for the end...
...Then what objective Christian criterion is there by which to judge when and where God is, and is not, acting in profane history...
...He urged the churches to support "the high patriotic and social ambitions' of the age...
...36 Furthermore, simply to be for "the good" does not make one ipso facto a prophet either...
...My friend George McGovern has declared himself for the Presidency...
...NOTES 1. Louis I. Bredvold, The Brave New World of the Enlightenment, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1961, p. 102...
...Cox, God's Revolution and Man's Responsibility, p. 31...
...175-176...
...Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy, New York, 1937, p. 65...
...Thus, while countless Christians languished in Czechoslovak jails, he was granted the rare privilege of traveling to the West to defend the policies of the Communist powers in front of Western churchmen...
...in the modern mind...
...30 Providence as Manifest It is even possible to go one step further by imbuing secular events with such sacred significance that they become organically related to the drama of salvation itself...
...Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches: 1933-4.5, New York, 1968, p. 11...
...And there were those who were willing to fill the void created by their own disbelief by political enthusiasms—enthusiasm for Socialism, or, in the situation of 1933, for National Socialism...
...Perhaps the reason why this kind of prophetic activity comes so effortlessly is that the point of reference is not some inscrutable God of history, but the Spirit of the Age—the content of which is open to anyone who cares to inquire...
...Said Reinhold Niebuhr: "The prophet is an iconoclast who throws all symbols of German-Christians saw the finger of the divine in the rise of Nazism, Lord Rosebery saw it in the British Empire, and Harvey Cox sees it in the integration of professional baseball...
...It is more than the sum of its parts...
...He has said that evidence of the breaking in of God's Kingdom could be found in the Freedom Schools set up in the heyday of the civil rights movement and in Saul Alinsky's Woodlawn experiment, 13 -as well as in the integration of professional baseball...
...24 And, it must be added, National Socialism where National Socialism prevailed...
...To be sure, modern prophets attack unjust social institutions and habits, and champion the poor...
...There are growing numbers of "pentecostal" Christians who make prophetic utterances on behalf of God...
...it is more than a collection of ideas, it is the Idea...
...The condemnation of Montanism is endorsed by orthodox Protestantism as well as by the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican branches of Christendom which adhere to the Apostolic Succession and the Catholic Tradition...
...As a faith it seems remarkably impervious to repeated evidence of crisis and disaster...
...Karl Loewith, Meaning in History, Chicago, 1949, p. 196...
...by Johannes B. Metz, New York, 1966, p. 27...
...217-218...
...Quoted in Francine du Plessix Gray, Divine Disobedience: Profiles in Catholic Radicalism, New York, 1969, p. 145...
...I am not interested in discussing the merits of the Chinese revolution, Martin Luther King, or the ACLU...
...21 It was also this kind of logic which led the Deutsche Christen, the pro-Hitler "German Christians," to support the ambitions of National Socialism, to the point of regarding Hitler's assumption of power as an act of divine redemption and a new source of divine revelation...
...The world, its character, its hopes, its meaning, its destiny, becomes the content as well as the context of our speaking...
...This error, which was known as Montanism in the early Church, was officially condemned by the Church when Montanus was excommunicated in 177 A.D...
...16 McCarthy did not take the scene...
...Only transcendental history, including the earthly pilgrimage of the church, has direction toward its eschatological fulfillment...
...cit., p. 67...
...in the millenarian and chiliastic groups...
...Italics added...
...The result is an idolatrous second source of revelation which rivals or supersedes the teachings of the Bible and the church...
...Resolutions are dutifully passed and submitted to the press...
...When the Communists took over his native Czechoslovakia in 1948, Hromadka offered them his support...
...Today, however, orientation to the future is not a minority preoccupation but the mood of a whole culture...
...Their concerns are primarily those of the secular progressive intellectuals...
...Here, Providence is manifest: however, these Christians do not set themselves up as new prophets with a new word from God on how to usher in the Kingdom...
...What should be of concern to these churches, however, are those politicized Christians who mimic the prophetic mode, announce new and unprecedented revelations about the will of God, and try The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 13 to press the churches into conformity with their private political illuminations...
...by Carl J. Friedrich, New York, 1954, pp...
...231, 235, and 255...
...The latter has curbed its mission to the exclusive service of the former, not because it is compelled to do so as in the good old days of conflict between spiritual and temporal, but because the Church now actually believes in society as the ultimate verity...
...Charles C. West, Communism and the Theologians, New York, 1958, pp...
...They have taken the dimension of earthly futurity as their theological point of departure and their point of contact with Marxism...
...Any alleged prophecies, miracles, or actions of the Holy Spirit which occur in contemporary times must be tested for authenticity in terms of their conformity with authentic revelation...
...Advance Men of the Zeitgeist Modern self-styled prophets are primarily intellectuals (usually affluent seminary professors, ecclesiastical officials, and religious journalists) who, unlike ordinary parish clergy, are free from pressures exerted by rank-and-file church members...
...As Robert C. Tucker wrote: "The movement of thoughtfrom Kant to Hegel revolved in a fundamental sense around the idea of man's self-realization as a godlike being or, alternately, as God...
...35 One reason why the orthodox Christian is so anxious to disavow, rather than assume, the prophetic mantle, is that he knows that true prophecy is an extraordinary event and Providence is essentially mysterious...
...Just as the German-Christians believed that God had revealed his will through the Nazi revolution, so Hromadka believed that God had spoken through the Communist revolution in Czechoslovakia...
...That is, it is the prophet who enjoys the special gift of discerning God's ways and pronouncing his judgment...
...obstructs the attempt to 'work out' the working of God...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 15 sense more "Christian" than Christians themselves...
...For example, Cox says that in the past there were "movements of intense fascination with the future, such as...
...Christianity in Rome first conquered the slaves, the households of high officials, and many intellectuals...
...Said West: "it is just one step, which Hromadka hints at but does not take, to the endowment of 'socialist reconstruction' in a Communist society, already possessed of a historical necessity of its own, with a positive relation to the Christian hope...
...For example, cf...
...Stone), The Christian Century, LXXXVII (November 4, 1970), p. 1315...
...It was from these people that the so-called 'German Christians' emerged...
...Franklin H. Littell described the problem well: "The Liberal Theology had done much to disintegrate the theological integrity of the Protestant Churches...
...4 The modern belief in Progress, whatever its original rationalistic underpinnings, does indeed manifest religious qualities...
...While religion has become implausible in our urbanized, leveled landscape, it has not become impossible: the message is not, never will be, the medium...
...He did battle with the religious liberals who sought to immanentize God, cast doubt on the reliability of the Scriptures, and enlist religion in the service of what were thought to be man's noble endeavors...
...2 Since modern culture could no longer swallow the notion of a transcendental history, it imputed the values, symbols, and prophecies of transcendental history to profane history...
...55:8 NEB), and in the words of St...
...Cox identifies the Spirit of the world with God: "Only when we have learned the world's language can we speak of God...
...V]ery frequently at least, such reception of revelation was something which caused the prophet a severe bodily shock...
...rather, he speaks for God...
...The world's secular, optimistic, and messianic self-understanding, its Spirit, is God...
...Like Rome, which became with the empire religiously pluralistic, our pluralistic society too faces great difficulties in its religious restoration...
...3:15).38 The prophet does not speak for himself, he does not announce what he thinks is just or good...
...19 In fact, wherever the Zeitgeist is working itself out, there is God...
...8. Harvey Cox, op...
...at present, we are just trailing along behind, happy to provide it our theological blessing...
...2. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago, 1952, p. 118...
...1 The Monumental Hubris It is instructive to contrast the secular messianism of the modern spirit with the traditional Christian philosophy of history...
...the Holy Spirit is working through today's communication media and technology, making people aware of their wretched plight, and revolting against it...
...I only hope that this move will help McCarthy take the scene...
...46-47...
...Adherents of a manifest Providence are oblivious to the mysterious ways of God, as expressed in the words of the prophet: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways...
...Not so...
...339 and 336...
...11 One of Cox's persistent claims, and one of the major themes of our modern prophets, is that God is a "politician-God" who works through the progressive political events of the day: "Theology today must be that reflection-in-action by which the church finds out what this politician-God is up to and moves in to work along with him...
...But it is extraordinarily hard to be prophetic to hippies, New Leftists, and those who are already with-it to an extraordinary degree...
...cit., p. 15...
...The Church tackled this problem of authority early...
...Hromadka believed it was possible to discern God's hand in secular political events...
...This is the very word of the Lord" (Isa...
...How often have we heard that Martin Luther King was sent by God to save his people...
...Such a secular-minded and man-centered theology refuses to set itself up against the ascendant presuppositions of the day...
...This is one of the most awesome fates that could befall a human being, and it is usually accompanied by great suffering...
...Matthew Spinka, "Church in a Communist Society: A Study in J.L...
...Harvey Cox, God's Revolution and Man's Responsibility, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1965, p. 27...
...In the words of Karl Barth (generally regarded as the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century): "the Church must not allow itself to be swept away by the movements of the age...
...Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit, New York, 1973, pp...
...Protestants of course reject Tradition and the Apostolic Succession as practiced by the early Church...
...This is an imposing, perhaps dreadful, event...
...liberal religion, almost by definition, is a defensive attempt to seek an accommodation with the outlook of the secular world...
...The Zeitgeist is a Hegelian notion...
...Given the standards of orthodoxy, it would seem that there is no standard whatsoever by which judgments of this nature can be rendered...
...7. Roger Garaudy, Karl Marx: The Evolution of His Thought, New York, 1967, p. 205...
...Italics added...
...Its vocation is to fill society by occupying its spiritual center and spreading to the peripheries...
...34 This kind of prophecy comes fast and furious...
...Garry Wills, Politics and Catholic Freedom, Chicago, 1964, p. 126...
...The coincidence between this radicalism and upper-level main-line secular American intellectual values isworthy of continual suspicion...
...Herberg, op...
...Italics added...
...Profane history, on the other hand, has no such direction...
...test the spirits, to see whether they are from God, for among those who have gone out into the world there are many prophets falsely inspired" (1 John 4:1, New English Bible...
...the medium can always be compelled to carry the message...
...we have not had the courage to listen to each other [fellow Christians] and to make decisions freely through real dialogue...
...5 The Spirit of the Age is so potent and durable that, despite its anti-Christian thrust, it even works its way into the Household of Faith...
...8 Juergen Moltmann, the German "theologian of hope," says that one of the common bases for dialogue with Marxism is the "eschatological interpretation of modern times as the dawning of the 'new age' and the 'new world.' " 9 Both Cox and Moltmann are socialists who would agree with Garaudy when he says that the churches must accept socialism, and when he asks Christians to "give a Christian answer to the problems of our times and to give it in the spirit of our times...
...127 and 124...
...After the Soviet invasion of his country in 1968 (which he bitterly opposed) he came to admit his prostration: "We have often come to meetings and conferences [that is, international gatherings of Christians] with certain views and tasks which were given to us from outside [namely, the Party], directly or indirectly...
...He sought to have Christians develop a positive attitude toward Communism, even during the Stalinist era...
...At present, we are in the phase of disguised attacks and of mockery, as musicals like Candide and films like The Exorcist show...
...Although the logic of Hromadka's position propelled him in this direction, he actually stopped short of it...
...by Donald R. Cutler, Boston, 1969, p. 59...
...It is not the city as such but the exclusively horizontal dimension of our civilization that has conquered us...
...For example: "When Jeremiah went around Jerusalem telling the people to surrender to the Babylonians, he wasn't saying something that comforted the poor, or the rich either...
...18 A Second Source of Revelation In general, our modern prophets tend to see the hand of God in the rise of Communism (frequently deemed a "judgment of God" upon the sins of the capitalist West), the violent revolutions of oppressed Third World peoples, the peace movement, the student movement, the women's movement, and the black movement...
...Hrom6dka's Theological Politics," The Hartford Seminary Foundation Bulletin, No...
...But I am convinced that our men of the cloth who stylethemselves modern prophets have no greater insight into the politics of God than I do, or you do...
...Ezekiel relates how he sat on the ground awe-struck and unable to speak a word for seven days after his call" (Ezek...
...5. Douglas J. Hall, "The Theology of Hope in an Officially Optimistic Society," Religion in Life, XL (Autumn, 1971), p. 380...
...seem convinced that the Spirit of the Age and the Holy Spirit have somehow intermingled flames...
...He was also allowed to host Western church people in Prague with an eye to enlisting them in the support of Communist causes...
...Italics added...
...Indeed, Karl Loewith has observed that "the Hebrew-Christian tradition...
...Since the causes endorsed are so various and contradictory it is unlikely, on the face of it, that all of them would represent God's will...
...Gerhard von Rad, The Message of the Prophets, London, 1968, p. 39...
...In the [present] epoch of the secular city, politics replaces metaphysics as the language of theology...
...Italics added...
...33 Cheap Prophecy Notions of a manifest Providence are closely tied in with prophecy...
...Dale Wee Prophecy, Providence, and Politics • • Undoubtedly many of you reading this essay have had your cherished political beliefs condemned as violations of the very will of God by some zealous priest, minister, or college chaplain...
...unless they are tribal, thus voluntarily limited in their appeal, religions are capable of stirring up large masses of people and of carrying their message to all categories...
...According to H. Richard Niebuhr, religious liberals sought to prove religion's usefulness to man "in promoting the dominant purposes of the age or group in which they lived, the purposes of nationalism where nationalism was in power, of capitalism where capitalism reigned, of radicalism where radicalism took the initiative...
...Letter to The Christian Century, LXXX (May 15, 1963), p. 649...
...9. Juergen Moltmann, "Hope without Faith: An Eschatological Humanism without God," Is God Dead...
...Franklin H. Littell, "The Protestant Churches and Totalitarianism (Germany 19331945)," Totalitarianism, ed...
...But it is quite another thing when he mounts his pulpit and announces that he is a successor to the Old Testament prophets and possesses privileged insight into God's providential will for the political arrangements of mankind...
...In the words of Barth: "beside the Holy Scriptures as the unique source of revelation, the German-Christians affirm the German nationhood, its history and its contemporary political situation as a second source of revelation, and thereby betray themselves to be believers in 'another God.' "23 Barth was the leader of the neoorthodox movement in Continental Protestant theology...
...Roger Garaudy, A Christian-Communist Dialogue, Garden City, New York, 1968, p. 69...
...The enemies of the modern prophet, like those of the intellectual, are the unradicalized masses, the self-centered "silent majority," the unenlightened "hard hats," in other words, those supposedly messianic classes who refuse their destiny, who are always dragging their feet on the road to the millenium, who are just not "with-it...
...Paul Ramsey, Who Speaks for the Church?, New York, 1967, p. 167...
...Although he did not immanentize God and he clearly distinguished the Kingdom of God from any man-made utopia, in seeking harmonious dialogue with Marxism, he too fell into the Montanist second-source-of-revelation heresy...
...The mark of a true prophet, Paul Ramsey said sarcastically, is to prophesy against the government and/or the Right Wing...
...From the viewpoint of orthodoxy, the problem here is that there is a mistaken view whereby Providence is regarded as manifest rather than mysterious...
...I suspect that many of us left-wing Catholics are being had these days, and I worry about that...
...That which is so widely hailed as a "dialogue" between Marxists (like Garaudy) and Christians (like Cox and Moltmann) subtly becomes a monologue whereby Marxism assimilates Christianity into the dominant chorus of the times...
...Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men's hands...
...With all these presuppositions, it is not surprising that Hromadka prostrated himself in penitential fashion before the Communist idol...
...Karl Barth, Against the Stream, London, 1954, p. 223...
...There is no doubt that, at the moment when the prophets received a revelation, they believed that they heard themselves addressed in words...
...It has sometimes been called "cheap" prophecy because it is often made so easily and with so few risks.This urge for instant prophecy is frequently indulged in when councils of churches meet and denominations hold their conventions...
...3. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, Cambridge, 1961, p. 31...
...I am writing this at a very nice desk, in a very nice house, and most of the money for these amenities has come from the unsought but profitable business of being known as a left-wing OK Catholic, one who can be counted on to knock the same things in the Church that most enlightened secular minds have always knocked...
...39 In sum, an orthodox Christian is one who is extremely skeptical of those Zeitgeist mitlaeufer, those "OK" Christians, those "prophets," who are able to spot the "finger of the Divine" in political events, who sacralize human Progress, and who speak a word, not from God, but from the Spirit of the Age...
...When Providence is equated with one's own understanding of man's noblest designs and achieve ments, then the temptation is overwhelming to see God supporting one's own favorite political projects...
...Barth warned: "you are on the way to making your affirmation of communism a part of the Christian message, an article of faith which...
...Most of them are apolitical and tend not to confuse Providence with their favorite political projects...
...Will Herberg, "Introduction—The Social Philosophy of Karl Barth," Community, State and Church, by Karl Barth, Garden City, New York, 1960, p. 38...
...True and False Prophecy The distinction between prophecy and false prophecy presupposes a conception of religious authority...
...Quoted in George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays, New York, 1967, p. 108...
...rather they simply interpret established prophecy...
...Religion is a corporate, not a private, enterprise, not even a group-affair...
...It is the epitome of the sins of pride and idolatry, namely, the rejection of human finitude, and the divinization or worship of self...
...Providence was the architect of transcendental history and what the Enlightenment did was to transform Providence into historical Progress, the architect of which is man—all of which is a radical break from traditional Christianity...
...These politicos who pose as prophets are actually heretics—just as the Montanists were heretics—because they prophesy, not on behalf of God, but on behalf of an alien god, in this case, the Zeitgeist (or Spirit of the Age...
...blasphemous...
...But this is only a derivative aspect of the authentic prophetic function...
...Frankly, I do not know what God and/or the Holy Spirit think of these things, and I have no idea whether your attitudes on these issues are godly or ungodly...
...It decided that a false prophet was one whose illuminations either contradicted or were not warranted by the Scriptures as interpreted by the Tradition of the Apostolic Church, and who proceeded to regard his illuminations as normative for the whole Church...
...In regard to churches in America today, the Anglican bishop John Robinson's little book, Honest to God, published a dozen years ago, comes to mind...
...That is more or less where we are: society has become a church and the Church is absorbed by society...
...In any case, religion is either dynamic and proselytizing or it is dead...
...12 Cox has changed his mind about various matters during his career, but he has never had difficulty in spotting the hand of God...
...25 What Barth had done was to direct the fire against "the dominant liberalism, which saw the divine in immanent continuity with the 'best' and the 'highest' in man's spirit and culture, so that talking about God did indeed become, as Barth was later to comment so caustically, 'talking about man in a loud voice.' "26 Joseph Hromadka was one of the leaders, along with Barth, of the resistance to the German-Christians...
...In other words, you are falling into that ideological-Christian way of thinking which once, under different auspices, was adopted by the 'German Christians.' " 32 The German-Christians saw the "finger of the Divine" in the Nazi revolution, Lord Rosebery saw it in the British Em-pire, Hromadka and Berecsky saw it in the rise of Communism, and Cox, carrying on this tradition, sees it in the integration of professional baseball et al...
...In its broadest sense our Zeitgeist is the messianic Idea of Progress, the yearning for an earthly New Jerusalem which—beginning with the Enlightenment, as Louis I. Bredvold has indicated—has become "deeply engrained...
...Transcendence was collapsed and converted from a heavenly dimension (the "Above") into a dimension of this world, the dimension of the future (the "Ahead...
...37 In short, the mark of a true prophet is to speak the authoritative and binding word of God, even to the point of pain and suffering...
...Human and yet not wholly human, for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine...
...28 According to West, he treated the tenets of Communist ideology as "God-given 'scientific' axioms...
...It should be remembered that Nazism appeared for a long time to many Germans (and non-Germans) as a noble cause...
...Wherever men, responding to the imperatives of the age, are involved in allegedly noble and uplifting human pursuits, God is with them almost by definition...
...Any other seemingly prophetic trait (other than, in the Christian context, conformity with the original source of revelation) is incidental...
...It is not my purpose here to determine what "orthodox Christianity" is in its every detail, but only to indicate one example of what orthodox Christianity cannot be...
...Modernity endowed profane history with a purpose, a direction, and a destination...
...It is not hard at all to be prophetic in the face of conservative Christianity...
...Harvey Cox, The Secular City, revised ed., New York, 1966, p. 223...
...H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America, New York, 1937, p. 197...
...He had no choice but to allow himself to be used...
...Increasingly also, people begin celebrating their own cults, imported or homemade...
...Who knows the mind of the Lord...
...hence, a "Christian" answer to the problems of our times reduces itself to something not too different from a Marxist answer...
...110-111...
...These are the words of Peter L. Berger, disclaiming the honorific title of "angry young prophet" which had been affixed to him and his work...
...Remarks in Spectrum of Catholic Attitudes, ed...
...For him to regard his own activity as prophetic, he said, would be...
...West, op...
...How often have we heard that the Holy Spirit is our liberator and that therefore the Bill of Rights as interpreted by the American Civil Liberties Union constitutes a new gift of the Spirit...
...However, Christianity's historical understanding of itself forbids a capitulation to the times...
...Hence, the urge to realize the Kingdom of God on earth came to be the hallmark of the modern sensibility...
...Paul: "0 depth of wealth, wisdom, and knowledge in God...
...In fact, he wasn't even comforting himself...
...4. Kenneth Hamilton, What's New in Religion?, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1968, p. 72...
...27 According to Matthew Spinka, he was convinced that "communism is the divinely-ordained 'wave of the future,' " which "is destined, inevitably and irresistibly, to conquer the world...
...It is rightly questionable whether religion is possible in such a society, other than in its reformist-therapeutic variety: it is supposed to improve race relations, housing problems, wage-adjustments...
...Cox, who denies a supernatural God, contends that God reveals himself, not primarily in the Bible or church, but in the progressive historical and political events of the secular world...
...A single established church may become petrified...
...6. Harvey Cox, On Not Leaving It to the Snake, New York, 1967, p. 98...
...6 In Cox's view, however the world understands itself, that is God...
...Marxism is the most vigorous and durable expression of modernity and its secular messianism, and our modern prophets have been anxious to make peace with it...
...Slowly America ceases to be the earthly paradise, a substitute for heaven, and, like Rome, the goal of all efforts...
...How unsearchable his judgements, how untraceable his ways...
...The guiding principle of this way of thinking was expressed half a century ago by the leading light in the American Social Gospel movement, Walter Rauschenbusch, when he said: "The gospel, to have full power over an age, must be the highest expression of the moral and religious truths held by that age...
...7—and our modern prophets have been anxious to make peace with it...
...3 This desire to reclaim the attributes of divinity for mankind—a desire best articulated by Ludwig Feuerbach—and to impute the characteristics of transcendental history to profane history is a monumental act of hubris from the viewpoint of traditional Christianity...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 17...
...To champion the poor does not make one ipso facto a prophet...
...Marxist-Christian Monologue Marxism is the most vigorous and durable expression of modernity and its secular messianism—as Roger Garaudy, the French neo-Marxist has said, "Marxism is not only a philosophy of our time...
...The centuries-old ruling conception of an unbridgeable chasm of kind between the human and the divine gave way to the conception of a surmountable difference of degree...
...Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, New York, 1964, pp...
...Because it aided Hitler, yes, but also because it perverted and polluted the Gospel by injecting an alien element, namely, "Germanism...
...Notions of a manifest Providence are probably always self-serving...
...Christians are in a state of confusion, Judaic loyalties are addressed less to Yahweh than to Israel, the minorities celebrate their search for political identity, and the intelligentsia worships the Absolute Absurd...
...He stood for the sovereignty of a transcendent God and the authority of the Scriptures...
...The fact that modern prophecy is such a widespread activity is circumstantial evidence that it is not lodged on behalf of God...
...Inasmuch as it is this intellectual elite which nourishes, promotes, and defines the Zeitgeist, it should not be surprising to see these prophets act as advance men of the Zeitgeist, as agents of mankind's Promethean aspirations...
...Because Progress is really the religion of modernity "it could not die with the guns of August [1914], nor with the Depression of the 30s, nor even with Auschwitz...
...It is more Real than real...
...One of our leading modern prophets is Harvey Cox, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School, a McGovern booster, and the celebrant of The Secular City and The Feast of Fools...
...We have assumed that we were obliged to push through these views and tasks under all circumstances...
...In Hegelian fashion, history is theautobiography of the Zeitgeist as it moves toward self-realization in the march of humanity toward the Kingdom of God on earth...
...But, as said before, we no longer have balanced societies, only a kind of public continuum...
...17 (June 1954), pp...
...29 He thought Communism was succeeding where Christianity had failed: indeed, he felt that Communists were in a The spirit of our age is anti-Christian and modern prophets worship it by treating it as a new source of revelation, mistaking it for the Holy Spirit or Providence...
...Soon the centurions and the senators followed...
...20 Curiously, it was this kind of logic which allowed Lord Rosebery to sing the praises of the British Empire in such effusive terms as these: "How marvelous it all is...
...This can be a shocking and bewildering experience for those who count themselves as reasonably good Christians...
...Barth to Bereczky: A Letter," The Christian Century, LXIX (July 30, 1952), p. 876...
...Modeling themselves on the Old Testament prophets, our modern prophets often announce God's purposes in history and bring his judgment upon the excesses of capitalism, the oppressors of Third World peoples, warmongers, university bureaucrats, male chauvinists, polluters, and white racists...
...Rom...
...it is an auxiliary to other horizontally concerned social mechanisms and agencies...
...threatens to overshadow all other articles of faith, and on the basis of which you would now interpret the whole creed and the whole Bible...
...Italics added...
...Robinson argued the irrelevance of transcendence, and recommended a reorientation of churches to social concerns: conditions in prisons, the problem of divorce, sewage systems in poor neighborhoods, etc...
...cemented with men's honest blood and with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of the centuries past...
...It is a reification...
...14 Most recently, 14 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1975 he has pointed to the Kingdom in the liberation of "nature from its thralldom to man's greed," in the children's liberation movement, in Margaret Mead's idea of cluster families and modified monogamy, and in the transcendence of the nation-state system...
...by Robert Campbell, O.P., Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1969, pp...
...Once a supernatural God is denied and transcendence is made into a human dimension, the religious relationship to God is turned inside out and reappears as a "quasi-religious relationship to the spirit of a secular age...
...This is the contemporary form of caesaropapism, Caesar's implicit rule over the spiritual power...
...not without the taint andreproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose...
...Ironically, this desire to emulate the Old Testament prophets usually misses the authentic spirit of prophecy: "A prophet is a man through whom God speaks...
...cit., p. 37...
...According to one of Hromadka's admirers, Charles C. West, Hromadka held that natural reason gave man knowledge of God's works and activities...
...however, they came toan analogous principle, namely, that whatever contradicts or is not warranted by the Scriptures as interpreted by the Lutheran and/or Calvinist traditions (which appropriated much of the basis of the Apostolic Tradition) is falsely inspired...
...Perhaps the time is near when all of us, together, start singing the De Profundis...
...With the progressive conquests of science and human reason, it seemed possible to translate heavenly promises into earthly realities...
...The need for such an authority was expressed in the New Testament itself: "But do not trust any and every spirit...
...11:33-34 NEB...
...Assuming that there is such a phenomenon as the Spirit of the Age, my thesis is that the Spirit of this Modern Age is anti-Christian, and that our modern prophets worship it by treating it as a new source of revelation, mistaking it for the Holy Spirit or Providence, and investing it with eschatological significance...
...Charles Fager (from an interview with I.F...
...Not surprisingly, most of the prophets appearing in the Bible strenuously resisted this vocation...
...17 Garry Wills elegantly diagnosed this mentality when he said that "some proponents of modernity...
...It is characteristically through the prophet that God reveals his will...
...West, op...
...The hope for perfection after death was transformed by modernity into the assertion of man's divinity in an earthly future...
...Lest this sound like a caricature, allow me to cite at length the words of Daniel Callahan, himself one of the most prestigious left-wing Catholics in America: "...I think there is a very real danger in the way left-wing Catholicism has become so respectable among secular intellectuals...
...According to Eric Voegelin, the Christian view distinguishes between "a profane sphere of history in which empires rise and fall and a sacred history which culminates in the appearance of Christ and the establishment of the church...
...or in the face of bureaucratic bishops...
...Karl Barth, The German Church Conflict, Richmond, Virginia, 1965, p. 16...
...On the whole, I don't think I will be happy with left-wing Catholicism until it has learned how to be prophetic to the upper-strata of American secular liberalism...
...It is our time's sense...
...but pluralism too has its dangers: it blocks religious dynamism, it fragments the spiritual aspiration, it erodes what is most universal in the religious message...
...cit., p. 74...
...The Zeitgeist is an ontological imperative which possesses its own power and authority, and guides the direction of history...
Vol. 8 • August 1975 • No. 10
