“WHAT is bothering me is the question what Christianity really
is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.” So wrote the young
Lutheran Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his Berlin prison cell in
April 1944, one year before he was executed by the SS for complicity in
the plots against Hitler's life. It is a question that today—for more
complicated reasons—concerns countless thousands of U.S. churchgoers,
who see about them a Christianity in the midst of change, confusion and
disarray.For Roman Catholics, the religious revolution set loose by the Second
Vatican Council has changed many traditional patterns of worship and
thought, and seemingly unleashed a legion of priests, nuns and laymen
who feel free to cast doubt on every article of defined dogma.
Protestants too have been stunned by the spectacle of an Episcopal
bishop openly denying the Trinity and the Virgin Birth, and ordained
ministers teaching in seminaries proclaiming the news that God is dead.
On the theological right, evangelical preachers summon believers back
to a strict Biblical orthodoxy; on the left, angry young activists
insist that to be a Christian is to be a revolutionary, and propose to
substitute picket lines for prayer.It is not really surprising that the churches should be sounding
uncertain trumpets, or that Christians should be insecure as to the
meaning and direction of their spiritual commitment. Undeniably, one of
the most telling events of modern history has been a revolution in the
relationship of religion to Western civilization. The churchgoer could
once take comfort in the fact that he belonged to what was essentially
a Christian society, in which the existence of an omnipotent God was
the focus of ultimate meaning. No such security exists today, in a
secular-minded culture that suggests the eclipse rather than the
presence of God.Science and technology have long since made it unnecessary to posit a
creative Deity as a hypothesis to explain anything in the universe.
From Marxists, existentialists and assorted humanists has come the
persistent message that the idea of God is an intellectual bogy that
prevents man from claiming his mature heritage of freedom. In the U.S.,
which probably has a higher percentage of regular Sunday churchgoers
than any other nation on earth, the impact of organized Christianity
appears to be on the wane. One problem for the future of the churches
is the indifference and even hostility toward them on the part of the
young. Even those drawn to the person of Christ chafe against outmoded
rules, irrelevant sermons, dogmas that apparently have no personal
meaning to a generation struggling to understand themselves, to grapple
with such concrete issues as sex and social injustice.Also a Man
