Twentieth Century To Present
The carnage of World War 1 shattered liberal optimism. Boundless idealism was eclipsed by the dark side of humanity and this prompted a realist backlash amongst Christian scholars and theologians. Known as ‘neo-orthodoxy’, its leading protagonists were Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth. Both were erstwhile political liberals but they now insisted on getting back to ‘basics’. The curse of original sin seemed born out by the horrors of the war and any humanist aspirations would now have to be rooted in a theology of redemption and acceptance of complete human dependence on God. It was not until the 1970s that a strident social Christianity re-emerged. Taking root in the fertile soil of rampant injustice in Latin America and the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa, ‘Liberation Theology’ aimed at harnessing Christianity to the cause of social justice and even revolutionary socialism. However the title itself was misleading as it was never really a ‘theology’ and when Marxism lost credibility with the collapse of communism, its Christian offshoot tended to follow suit.
Over the past century the legacy of social gospel humanism has been carried forward by notables such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, G. K. Chesterton, Flannery O'Connor, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. However since the advent of postmodernism, many radical, ‘progressive’ Christians have tended to see the Christ of faith as irreconcilable with the Jesus of history, regarding the latter as a mere mortal and a distinctly fallible one at that. One such website, for instance, states that it is possible to be a Christian without a belief in God: The Christian Humanist: Religion, Politics, and Ethics for the 21st Century. As progressives, they generally take a deconstructionist view that dogmatic theology is suspect and spiritual truth is a personalized and subjective pursuit. They tend to align with liberal secular humanism, one of whose outspoken advocates is retired US Bishop John Shelby Spong.
There have been various attempts to reclaim a more traditional Christian humanism. One of these represented by the Centre of Religious Humanism and its director Gregory Wolfe, embraces its rich cultural heritage. This Christian humanism goes back to the source, repositioning Jesus as the incarnate fusing of humanity with the divine- humanity in the image of God-especially as manifested in the sublime, creative achievements of Western civilization. These reached their peak in the Renaissance and Wolfe particularly draws inspiration from the Renaissance humanists that supported the Catholic Church, such as Erasmus, Thomas More, Johann Reuchlin and John Colet.
Recently a new strand of Christian humanism has been developed by Tom Drake-Brockman in his book Christian Humanism: the compassionate theology of a Jew called Jesus. This position draws on recent biblical scholarship that identifies Jesus as a prophet steeped in the Judaic social justice tradition. Unlike previous Christian humanist conceptions, Drake-Brockman attempts to build a new Christian theology around the proposition that Jesus predicated any salvation on good works- especially the need to express compassion- and not on faith, either in Old Covenant Judaism or in Christ as the Lord and Redeemer. By framing the compassionate relief of suffering as the purpose of our existence, Christ becomes the ultimate humanist and humanity the master of its own destiny, heavily focused on this world in seeking to make it more worthy of its creator.
Read more about this topic: Christian Humanism
Famous quotes containing the words twentieth century, twentieth and/or present:
“If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley’s footsteps....To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their means; to all eternity, falsehoods and injustice will be the weaker because they have lived.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They’re admired and hero-worshipped but there is always present underlying desire to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)