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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
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7. The Twentieth Century. In the twentieth century
two World Wars, centered at the heart of European
Christendom, shook the earth and made history more
dynamic. Christianity was faced by organized systems
such as Communism and Nazism, which constituted
a more powerful threat to it, and cleared away more
of the traditional fabric of society, than anything hith-
erto known. The acceleration of scientific progress, the
resulting change in one's notions of the physical uni-
verse, the great power that man had acquired over
nature, the enormous advances of educational systems
that were essentially secular, and the influence of the
popular press, radio, and television in the dissemination
of a new world view—all these produced a greater
intellectual challenge than religion of any sort had ever
had to meet before. Now, also, the ethical ideas of
society, though so many of them still carried the marks
of Christian influence, came to conflict in an unprece-
dented way with some of the longest and most consist-
ent traditions of the churches. The fact that the
churches had so often been engaged in a rearguard
action—sometimes against liberty, sometimes against
science itself—became a disadvantage, since it left (as
an additional obstruction to the hearing of the Gospel)
a resentment in intelligent people, even a fear lest the
Church should ever recover its power. In other conti-
nents, the great missionary endeavor (in which man
may sometimes have tried unthinkingly to tie Christi-


408

anity to the values and the manners of Western civili-
zation) came to be charged understandably, but un-
justly, with having sought to provide cover for
imperialist purposes.

The resulting issues are as momentous as in the days
when the faith of the first disciples had to confront
the culture of the Greco-Roman world, and it is not
easy to say what will be the long-term effects of the
new situation on the intellectualization of the faith and
the attempt to run it into a new world view. The actual
experiences of the human race, as it develops the
implications of its current systems, may affect the story;
and it is not clear that Christianity may not have to
confront a world somewhat similar to the one which
the early Church had to face in the Roman Empire—a
hostile world, but suffering strange nostalgias and
harassed by competing forms of faith.

In some respects the churches may have drawn in
upon themselves as though determined not to lose
anything essential in their ancient heritage. A liberal-
ism which, before and after the First World War, may
have been too directly rationalistic, soon came to ap-
pear “dated,” and even Protestants—even noncon-
formists—became somewhat more interested in their
tradition. The situation of the world may help to ex-
plain why Karl Barth in 1918 began to present the
“theology of Crisis,” directly attacking liberalism and
reviving some of the profounder aspects of early
Lutheranism. But historiography raised radical prob-
lems, especially when from 1919 the teachers of
Formgeschichte examined the shape which the early
Church had given to the packets of oral tradition that
lay behind the Gospels. History emerged again as a
crucial issue for an “historical religion” in the much
controverted work of Rudolf Bultmann. He called for
“de-mythologizing” and presented existentialist ideas
which threw light on some aspects of Christianity if
not also on history itself.

The Bible retained its influence even amongst people
(including Roman Catholics) who had accepted the
kind of criticism that could be described as central.
In the United States the churches retained their high
membership and remarkable vigor for further decades,
the country acquiring a recognized leadership in the
Protestant world. But, even amid technological
progress and booming prosperity, influential teachers
issued their moral challenges, took their stand on the
Bible, and reasserted the pessimistic view of human
nature. The spectacular scandals and crimes in certain
sections of society did not nullify that compassion and
that American idealism which owed so much to an
ultimate Christian influence.

It was natural that, in the new situation, the various
sects and denominations should lose much of their
former fanaticism and hostility, and should come to
feel one another as allies against a world of hostile
forces. To a considerable degree it was coming to be
the case that, within Protestantism, the differences
between the liberals and the conservatives in the vari-
ous churches were deeper than the differences between
one denomination and another. Even in the decades
after 1914, it became an important consideration that
the work of foreign missions was being hampered by
the divisions within Christianity. Unions between de-
nominations and cooperation for special objects,
though not unknown before, now became much more
frequent and significant. The Ecumenical movement
was a natural development of this and a typical feature
of it was the preparation in 1938, and the official
constitution at Amsterdam in 1940, of the plan for a
World Council of Churches. The work of Pope John
XXIII and the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65
stand as one of the most remarkable features of the
twentieth-century story—a significant change in the
relations between Catholic and Protestant, who (in
spite of rivalries and hostilities) had never, throughout
the centuries, quite ceased to exert a beneficent influ-
ence on one another.

Lord Acton once remarked that he saw Providence
in general history (saw it in the march of “progress,”
as he explicitly stated on a number of occasions); but
he added that he did not detect it in the history of
the Church. His attitude is understandable, for ecclesi-
astical systems have not been exempted from scandals
and crimes; and (at least in those tangible things which
the secular historian has chiefly in mind) they would
seem to have been subject to the laws which govern
other religions, including that of the Old Testament.
Acton may have been misled because he tended to be
interested in the kind of history that deals with “public
affairs” and perhaps saw the historical Church too
much as a politico-religious institution. All the same,
he must have known in his heart that its essence lay
in the spiritual life which presumed the immediacy of
divine activity, though it might be unrelated to
“progress”—a spiritual life which might be at least as
profound in the fifth or the fifteenth century as in the
twentieth. He was prepared also to see all history as
the development of the scope and the quality of the
human conscience, this conscience being a key to
progress itself and the effective dynamic behind even
modern revolution, in his view. The enlarged scope
for the individual conscience had been achieved by the
influence of Christianity, making the great contrast
with classical antiquity where, he said, man's duty had
been prescribed to him by the state.

Mazzini regarded the French Revolution as the cli-
max and fulfilment of Christianity which, by making


409

every human being a value incommensurate with any-
thing else in the created universe, could be regarded
as working throughout the centuries for the principle
of “individualism,” working for it at times even when
ecclesiastical systems were resisting it. On this view
a Christian civilization operates (as Acton believed) to
produce a regime of freedom, and the effect of its
advance is to bring about a greater differentiation in
personalities, a world in which each man decides the
object he will work for and the God whom he will
serve. Mazzini was not content with this, however, and
insisted that a new stage had been reached—a stage
at which the individual ought to give way to the “or-
ganic People.” And this is perhaps the great issue;
whether men shall be organized, and even herded like
cattle, to carry out a single all-consuming purpose that
is imposed on everybody.

There are elements or patterns of Christian thought
that appear in a more or less secularized form in a
Voltaire, a Rousseau, a Hegel, a Mazzini, a Ranke, and
a Marx; and perhaps they come to an end there. From
the middle of the twentieth century, the world moves
on its own momentum to new patterns of thought, new
notions of the enterprise of living, new realms of
human experience. Behind the technological age and
the attempt to explore the outer universe, and behind
the permissive society are elements which were part
of the Christian outlook, but which, having become
autonomous, have moved far forward on their own
account. Perhaps the great compassionateness now
visible in contemporary society will stand as the most
palpable result of fifteen hundred years of Christian
predominance in Europe. And now, perhaps, for the
first time during those fifteen hundred years, Christi-
anity returns to something like its original state—a
world in which it cannot be objected that, for the great
majority of people, things are unfairly disposed in favor
of conventional or habitual or hereditary belief.