Religion: Heretic or Prophet?

• Share

THEOLOGY (See Cover)

It seems oddly paradoxical that 1966 — intellectually a most permissive year — should almost have produced a certifiable religious heretic.

But that situation is no more startling than its parallel paradox: the casting of doubt on such formidable Christian doctrines as Original Sin and the Virgin Birth, on the Trinity and the Resurrection, has made many men consider — or reconsider — them not with scorn but with respect, not with contempt but with intellectual curiosity.

For the doctrines now being questioned are embed ded in Western man's heritage and, in the manner in which they help interpret sin and guilt, goodness and redemption, they have be come part of his psychic life. They have meaning, often unconscious, for a great majority of humanity — and profound relevance even in 20th century life.

Questioning the doctrines, the man of faith has had his faith strengthened. Examining the doctrines, the skep tic has been apt to find myths far stronger than reality.

Easily the most visible of the doubters — and the near heretic — is James Albert Pike, 53, the recently resigned Episcopal Bishop of California. There is hardly a dogma in the creed that Pike has not at one time or another denied. In doing so he has stirred up something new on the American scene.

A generation ago, a church goer who admitted to doubts about the Virgin Birth, say, would be clearly stamped among his fellows as a disciple of some such flaming modernist as Harry Elmer Barnes at best, or of Agnostic Robert Ingersoll at worst. In the fidelistic mood of the postwar religious revival, questioning was largely out of place — not because people had no doubts, but be cause they were willing to take the church and its teachings as a whole.

Now laymen feel that they can calmly decide and discuss among themselves what they are and are not prepared to accept. "It's been a long time since the doctrine of the Trinity was cocktail-party conversation," says the Rev. John M. Krumm, rector of Manhattan's Episcopal Ascension Church, "but now it is."

Instant Theology. Bishop Pike, who unlocked the discussion, is far from being a man talking his way toward atheism, and his reductionist theologizing is seriously intended to help put Christian faith on a surer, sounder footing. What Christianity needs, Pike proposes, is "more belief, fewer beliefs." In the name of this jaunty slogan, Pike seems quite willing to jettison 20 centuries of Christian doctrinal development, if necessary, to preserve and emphasize what he considers the central, essential and irreducible message of the church: God as the loving personal ground of existence, Jesus as the suffering servant in whom God is seen as "breaking through," and whose self-giving life is the exemplar for

Christians who would follow him to gain eternal life.

In sophisticated U.S. Protestant seminaries, such ideas are neither new nor, when properly elucidated, all that unnerving. Yet to many—perhaps most—Christians, they still have the ring of a betrayal of the Gospel. And besides the fact that it comes from a bishop, this doctrinal iconoclasm offends these people because Pike sets it forth in a sloganeering, Batmannerly, instant-theology style that seems almost calculated to scandalize them. Trinity,