The Death of "Relevance"

Delegates to the Consultation on Church Union in Denver last week were concerned with their lagging campaign to try to merge nine Protestant denominations.* Their keynote speaker, Peter L. Berger, however, had something more basic on his mind.

Berger, 42, perhaps America's leading religious sociologist, first won attention with The Noise of Solemn Assemblies, a trenchant attack on the smug, conventional Protestant churches of the 1950s. Back then, Berger reminded the ecumenical leaders last week, he and other critics seemed to be "banging against the locked gates of majestically self-confident institutional edifices." The situation could not be more different today. In the years since, said Berger, Protestants have suffered a failure of nerve and are wallowing in "masochistic self-laceration" or "hysterical defensiveness." He bluntly told the ecumenists that their efforts to regroup as one big church are a waste of time unless Protestantism regains its self-confidence.

The churches, he said, seem to be frantically searching outside themselves for cultural and ideological refuges. The liaison with Middle America having gone sour, they are seeking out the youth culture, the black culture and romanticized versions of Third World cultures. "If there is any stance that has marked the Christian community in recent years, it is that of listening," Berger maintained. Listening in order to understand others is fine, but too many Christians are "listening to an entity known as 'modern man' in the expectation that thence will come the redemptive word." This kind of listening is demoralizing.

Two Hunches. It is time to stop asking what modern man has to say to the church and to turn, said Berger, to a more significant question: "What does the church have to say to modern man?" The answer is easy: it is "the old story of God's dealing with man, the story that spans the Exodus and Easter morning." There are very different ways in which this message can be delivered, and what is now needed is "the stance of authority," the authority of "those who have come to terms with their own experience and who are convinced that in however imperfect a measure, they have grasped some important truths about our human condition."

About the religious resurgence that is beginning to take place, which may or may not develop within the church, Berger has two "hunches." First, that the currently fashionable Oriental cults will not hold a prominent place in the movement, because they are "too much in contradiction to fundamental themes of American culture, not least to the central theme of a national covenant with history" which links U.S. culture with the Jewish and Christian tradition. Second, the leaders of any renaissance of religion will not be "the people who have been falling all over each other to be 'relevant to modern man.' Ages of faith are not marked by dialogue, but by proclamation," proclaimed Berger.

* The United Methodist Church, three smaller Black Methodist churches, the United and Southern Presbyterian churches, the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

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