The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Of Christmas And Christianity I AM WRITING THIS on the sixth day of December, 19 days before the celebration of Christmas, and its attendant bells, greenery and...
...Bishop Pike is a tremendously effective preacher—and one feature of effective preaching is denunciation of sin...
...I couldn't figure out for the life of me what terrible sins any of them had committed...
...A celebration, he suggests, presumes a victory...
...People may be awkward, ignorant and wasteful—but they are trying...
...It seems to me that we can think more profitably about such matters if we start with a picture of what human beings are like, where they have come from and how they happen to be where they are...
...But he was speaking to those whose ancestors for thousands of years had lived brutish lives...
...But now we are putting up a fight and the end is in sight...
...Yet the Bishop thinks we have nothing to celebrate...
...But after these two thousand years of missionary work the victory of the church is hard to ascertain...
...The great majority of our people is for it...
...No one pretends to know when we humans took on our present form or how long we have had the advantage of our present rather superior faculties...
...The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863...
...They are on their way...
...Our ancestors fought and changed and grew for hundreds of thousands of years, but only in the last few thousands have we had an alphabet or any way of making a record...
...I recall that when I was a boy and our old preacher lit into his parishioners and pointed out their shortcomings...
...The Right Reverend James A. Pike, Bishop of California, has written at some length in Look magazine on the rather gloomy theme, Christianity in Retreat...
...I used to look around at the neighbors sitting on those hard benches...
...In the end it is bound to be recognized, in those sacred words, as "the law of the land...
...The creeds which were fashioned had little to do with the warm and realistic teaching imparted to the fishermen pupils on the shores of the Sea of Galilee...
...The entire argument implies that we had a better sort of Christianity at some earlier, better time—and that this modern, violent, individualistic, un-brotherly way of living is a rather recent invention...
...The truth is that preachers, writers and editors generally seem to make the world out worse than it is...
...Look at the preachers who do not dare to speak frankly to their rich parishioners, at the church-members who fight to preserve race segregation, at the countless competing Protestant sects...
...And it must be confessed, he says, that following the psychologists we have turned our religion into a man-centered, rather than a God-centered, institution...
...In an exceptionally thoughtful mood I just happened to pick up an article by an Episcopal bishop whom I respect much more than I do most clergymen...
...It is true, Pike concedes, that we have more church-members in this country than ever before, but we are still far from being a righteous nation...
...Two thousand years ago Jesus proclaimed the Sermon on the Mount and, in other ways with other words, urged us toward brotherhood...
...For all but the last moment of our existence we have been brutes...
...And the institutions, buildings and pictures which were created then represented human pride far more than Christian love...
...During this last instant of racial time, good and wise men have occasionally appeared...
...There is plenty to Celebrate...
...The moment Jesus was gone the flimsy record borne in men's minds began to fade and be transformed into grotesque figures...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Of Christmas And Christianity I AM WRITING THIS on the sixth day of December, 19 days before the celebration of Christmas, and its attendant bells, greenery and gift-giving...
...Bishop Pike pitches into us lustily because some of us are slow about getting into step with the Supreme Court...
...The same thing applies pretty well to the entire world: Practically every place where trouble exists it has resulted from efforts at improvement...
...If he found 12 who understood and dared to follow him, he was fortunate...
...The decision against school segregation came in 1956...
...Take the race problem, for example...
...At present, of course, this is rather easy to do...
...But we do, at long last, have that Supreme Court decision and the lower courts are standing by it...
...It is the high ecclesiastics thought that there is something inappropriate about all of this hullabaloo set off in honor of Jesus Christ...
...It is clear, however, that the few thousand years of our development about which we have some information are but the last tiny layer of our total existence...
...For nearly a century our Negroes were forced to endure almost every kind of insult and disadvantage...
...when you stop to think what the churches have done with Christianity, it seems wonderful that so much good has come of it...
...And if the eager and earnest Bishop Pike, who turned himself loose on eight million Look readers, thinks the matter over, I feel sure that he will come to the conclusion that he has overplayed his hand...
...Most of what we hear in church has little to do with what Christ had in mind...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 50
