Crisis Theologies

Century ago the most notable thing about Protestant Christianity was that most of its practitioners throughout the world were optimists who believed in progress, creature comforts, civilization. Such Protestants looked down their noses when Pope Pius IX, speaking for the Roman Catholic Church, denied that it was the duty of Catholicism to come to terms with political or religious liberalism. Today, progress is not so popular a notion, and liberalism has few friends among European religious thinkers.

Europe's theologies today are predominantly those of "crisis." designed not only for catastrophes which may over take the world but for crises arising be tween men of faith and their God. Published this week was a valuable guidebook to crisis theologies -- Contemporary Continental Theology-- by Walter Marshall Horton, professor of theology at Oberlin College.

Despite political disorder, widespread paganism and actual persecution, the at titude of European churchmen is not one of defeatism but, according to Professor Horton, "of courage, hope and active service of God and man -- service which necessarily refuses to define its objectives very far in advance, since the whole surface of European life is cracking and sinking under foot like a thawing ice floe, but which receives its orders day by day from God, who alone knows what will be required of his servants by tomorrow!" Since the Russian Orthodox Church, before the War, was deepest bogged in reaction, its recent recovery has been the most spectacular, under the leadership of Nicholas Berdyaev and Dean Sergius Bulgakov of the Russian Orthodox Seminary (for exiles) in Paris. Protestant thought, to Professor Horton. is most stimulating in the Lutheran nations of Scandinavia, in Czechoslovakia, whose Philosopher-President Dr. Thomas Garrigue Masaryk was "the last great liberal humanitarian," and in Germany, where Karl Barth, most famed if not most influential of European theologians, stirred up the most provocative religious discussions of modern times, before exile to his native Switzerland.

Plain, pious U. S. Roman Catholics hear little of the tremendous widening of modern Catholic theology in Europe. There the most influential lay Catholic thinker is a mild-mannered little Frenchman, Jacques Maritain, convert to the faith and professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Maritain is a follower of the great medieval doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. In Neo-Thomism, based upon the monumental Summae of St. Thomas, Maritain sees the unique cure for modern ills. Seeking, like Karl Barth, to rescue civilization from humanism and revive pure Christianity, Neo-Thomism does not "annihilate man before God" (as Barthianism does) but aims with an "integral" attitude to preserve man's dignity, incorporate the valuable elements of humanistic culture in a new Christian order. So far as the Church is concerned (and Maritain is at present in bad odor with some members of it because he favors "positive impartiality" in the Spanish war), he says: "Catholics are not Catholicism. The errors, apathies, shortcomings and slumbers of Catholics do not involve Catholicism. . . . Catholicism is not a religious party; it is religion, the only true religion, and it rejoices, without envy, in every good, even though it be achieved outside its boundaries."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.