The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

CHAPTER XV

THE CHURCH AS AN INSTITUTION—PROTESTANTISM

The rise of Protestantism was the consequence of many factors which temporarily combined and worked in the same direction. There are those who maintain that it was an unhappy accident, which threw back the wheels of progress some hundreds of years. But those who bewail the division of the Christian Church forget that division is a sign of incompatible tendencies within a body not flexible enough to contain them. Strife is irrational only when we cease to be realists. The appearance of Protestantism in the sixteenth century is only one instance among many of the inadequacy of any one institution to comprehend the life of its time. Were we to call the roll of the heresies of the past, the names which would appear upon the list would be far more numerous than popular history records. Just because Christians believed that they possessed a final truth they were intolerant and persecuting. The natural desire of an institution to maintain itself and its interests intact added its force to this unfortunate characteristic. But the tragedy of the situation was, that this final truth could not prove itself by an appeal to experience and reason. It had, therefore, to resort to violence. The logic of revelation is the logic of the auto da fe. The logic of science is the logic of tested fact. Science can have hope of agreement; theological religion has no right to such a hope.

Protestantism had its ethical, political, economic and doctrinal sides. It was not merely a religious movement. Had it been so, it might more readily have run its course as a reform movement within the institutional life of the time. Had the Northern nations possessed greater power in the councils of the Church, it is just possible that the change would have been brought about without the occurrence of an open rupture. But the Church was too centralized and too rich to escape conflict with the growing nationalism. For our present purpose, however, this larger social setting of Protestantism is not important. What we wish to study is the religious tendencies covered by this term. What advance did they contain? What was the weakness of the movement?

The setting of Protestantism was entirely supernaturalistic. So far as the fundamental doctrinal assumptions are concerned, there is practically no difference between Catholic and Protestant. Protestantism represented a reform, and not a revolution. Or, to put it more deeply, human nature is such that the real revolutions take centuries of growth and come like the thief in the night. The modern scientific view of the world is revolutionary in the philosophical and true sense of the term; while the sharp sectarian conflict is only a battle over secondary things. Since it has so commonly been assumed that the Protestant reformation represented a decisive break with the outlook of the Middle Ages and somehow marked a milestone in man's intellectual progress, it may be worth while to consider whether such really was the case. A disinterested study of the reformation must, I feel sure, convince the student that the crisis in the Church was concerned more with matters of theological doctrine and church polity than with the ideas underlying Christianity. It brought no essential change in the inherited and firmly entrenched tale of the past. The puritan poet, Milton, sings of "man's first disobedience" in much the way that St. Augustine would have done. The weapons of the great advance had not yet been forged. We are the ones who will be called upon to face the vision of the New Spiritual World and to be faithful to its demands upon our loyalty and integrity. "The defection of the Protestants from the Roman Catholic Church," writes Professor Robinson, "is not connected with any decisive intellectual revision. Such ardent emphasis has been constantly placed upon the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism by representatives of both parties that the close intellectual resemblance of the two systems, indeed their identity in nine parts out of ten, has tended to escape us. The early Protestants, of course, accepted, as did the Catholics, the whole patristic outlook on the world; their historical perspective was similar, their notions of the origin of man, of the Bible, with its types, prophecies and miracles, of heaven and hell, of demons and angels, are all identical.... Early Protestantism is, from an intellectual standpoint, essentially a phase of mediæval history."

But when we look at Protestantism as a social and religious movement rather than an intellectual movement, we see that it stood for certain relatively new emphases which did indicate a breaking loose from mediævalism. Many sincere men felt the need for a deeper, more personal assurance of salvation than that offered by the traditional, substantial sacraments of the Church. Religion seemed to them a more personal affair than it had overtly come to be. By means of an act of faith, the individual hoped to secure a new relation to God in which his sins were forgiven and salvation attained. Salvation thus became a more internal act than it had been, and particularly one in which the ecclesiastical institution played a far less important part. The new tendency emphasized the individual and personal as against the institutional and formal. Catholicism had inherited too much ritualistic and magical trapping to harmonize completely with the keen ethical sense of the younger and simpler people who were growing to adulthood.

A new movement is on the defensive and, when too completely estranged from the institutions of which it is a reform, almost inevitably tends to be narrow and intense. Now Protestantism was essentially an emphasis on the soul's salvation by meeting certain requirements of a doctrinal and ethical type, and so it tended to drop those functions and relations which the Mediæval Church included within its scope. It is this clear-cut intensification of one factor and the exclusion of others which we must bear in mind when we compare the early Protestant sects with the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.

Deep religious fervor easily leads to narrowness, especially when the spiritual values regarded as essential are subjective and rather formal. Because confessional Protestantism was as other-worldly as the Mediæval Church, it cut itself loose from aspects of life which might otherwise have mellowed it and saved it from formalism and hardness. We may laugh with Swift at the freaks of Jack, at his dourness and savagery, his strained interpretation of the scriptures and his lack of social tact, but we must, if we would be just, always bear in mind the outlook which Jack had inherited.

The Protestant of to-day does not usually realize how different the Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was from that which he sees around him. Protestantism has mellowed and absorbed values and interests which it would once have repudiated as irrelevant to the tremendous drama of salvation. Take mediæval Catholicism, with its ideal of a Church-directed society, its doctrines of sin and redemption, its belief in another world overshadowing this one, its strain of asceticism, and remove the sacramental power of the Church, and you have early Protestantism before you. Instead of fleeing the world and its temptations, the Christian was ordered to live in it like a sentinel on his guard. He was not to set his heart on creaturely comforts nor love the things and interests of this life overmuch, but rather to trample them underfoot while gazing upwards. No wonder that the early Protestants were a stern people; they were a community of secular monks. They had the joy of union with God and assured redemption from sin, but this world was not their true home. Whereas the Mediæval Church had tempered the asceticism of historical Christianity by the distinction between what was imposed upon clergy and what was demanded of the laity, Protestantism was unable to continue this distinction because all believers were priests. All had to come up to the same high standard or risk damnation. This exaltation has in large measure departed from Protestantism, and we who have grown into a mellower idea of salvation are inclined to judge this set of ideals as narrow and even morbid. We forget that puritanism was the expression of an ascetic religious view of the world.

It was in the sphere of church government that Protestantism made its great changes by attempting to return to the polity of the early associational form of Christianity. The more radical forms of Protestantism, especially, inaugurated a movement in the direction of what we now call democracy. There can be little doubt, in fact, that these waves of religious individualism assisted the growth of democratic and republican forms of government. This influence was unplanned and relatively accidental because religious individualism was more concerned with the right to worship according to the dictates of conscience than with political rights. But man is a psychological whole, and so a reform along one line is bound to affect other phases of life.