An Excerpt From Wilhelm Pauck's "The Heritage of the Reformation"

Wikipedia:

Wilhelm Pauck (January 31, 1901 – September 3, 1981) was a German-American church historian and historical theologian in the field of Reformation studies whose fifty-year teaching career reached from the University of Chicago and Union Theological Seminary, to Vanderbilt and Stanford universities. His impact was extended through frequent lectures and visiting appointments in the U.S. and Europe. Pauck served as a bridge between the historical-critical study of Protestant theology at the University of Berlin and U.S. universities, seminaries, and divinity schools. Combining high critical acumen with a keen sense of the drama of human history, in his prime Pauck was considered the Dean of historical theology in the United States. In the course of his career he became associated with Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich as friend, colleague, and confidant.

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Pauck had confidence in the significance of the past for the present, and came to regret elements of American culture that downplay the need for a sense of what modern believers owe to their predecessors. From Goethe’s Faust he took over the idea that “we must acquire knowledge of the past in order to possess it,” while the abiding lesson he took from Harnack was that of “overcoming history with history.” For him the latter phrase meant that one cannot get around the fact that all human culture, including religion, is anchored in history and thus subject to new interpretations. As a result, only further study of history, not a flight from history, can be used to correct mistaken views of the past. He took something like the same idea from his sole intellectual hero, Ernst Troeltsch, who taught that religion and theology are thoroughly historical, even when they purport to transmit eternal verities.

Like Adolf von Harnack, who knew that “one St. Francis has been more powerful than many of the princes of the church,” Pauck stressed the power of the individual in world history, for which Martin Luther was a constant reminder. Pauck maintained that, for the foreseeable future, Protestant Christianity would necessarily continue to define itself over against Roman Catholicism, and vice versa. Although he sometimes seemed to be closer to Harnack than to Luther, his original respect for the Reformation remained intact. He criticized laissez-faire economic liberalism for its view of human autonomy, while viewing the task and challenge of theological liberalism (understood as non-fundamentalist Protestantism) to be that of preserving basic tenets of the faith while adapting to new historical conditions.

An excerpt from, “The Heritage of the Reformation” by Wilhelm Pauck, Oxford University Press, 1968, Pg. 303-306:

We have become so accustomed to refer generally to “religion” that we are apt to forget that religion is believed and lived by men who find themselves in concrete cultural situations. Religion is always historical. This observation leads directly to the discovery of the first factor by which the outlook for religion must be determined. It depends upon the cultural conditions in which we find ourselves. The future of Protestant Christianity is closely linked to the fate and destiny of that phase of Western civilization of which it is an inherent part.

The recognition of this interrelation at once brings to mind what lately has been the subject of a good deal of public discussion, namely, the outlook for capitalist or bourgeois, middle-class civilization. No one will deny that Protestantism is closely connected with this civilization and that its own future will be shaped by what is to happen to bourgeois culture.  If we were to characterize the spirit of this culture by a single word, we should not go wrong in choosing the word “autonomy.” The modern world is what it is because it has cultivated and practised the doctrine of the self-determination of man. It is the autonomous mind which has called “modern” philosophy into being, has produced “modern” science, has given the drive to “modern” economics and constantly nourished the spirit of capitalism, has caused the “modern” inventions to be made, and has created and sustained the political democracies. The “Age of Reason” and the “Age of the Machine” are closely connected with each other. The discussion of the problem whether this  modern civilization is the outgrowth of the Protestant Reformation has not yet come to an end, but one fact is certain, that Protestantism as an ecclesiastical movement is, today, closely allied to this modern culture. And it is equally certain that, if modern Protestantism has entered into an alliance with the “modern spirit,” the Reformation belongs to a totally different world from ours. To be sure, attempts have been made to find the source of modern individualism in the teachings of the Reformers, but such attempts have been insufficient to explain the origin of the spirit of autonomy. There is nothing of this spirit discoverable in the Reformation. For the spirit of the modern world is surely not qualified by that disturbing God-consciousness which inspired the Protestant Revolution. As a matter of fact, capitalist or bourgeois or middle-class society represents a growing lack of religious consciousness, if by this we mean a consciousness of the eternal, or an awareness, as Kierkegaard called it, of the qualitative difference between time and eternity. The spirit of modern society is the spirit of temporal self-sufficiency. It rests in itself. It has no faith in a transcendental meaning of existence. It does not hope for the eternal life. Its eschatology is wrapped up in the values of freedom, happiness, immortality, perfectibility, progress.

Today, this civilization finds itself in a crisis—a crisis which has been advancing since the end of the last century, which became fully evident in the wake of the First World War, which disclosed its perils in the socio-political convulsions that preceded and accompanied the Second World War, and which is now engulfing all parts of the earth touched by the Western mind. The fundamental character of our civilization is evident in the bewildering absence of unifying purpose; and its tragedy is revealed by the apparent futility of all efforts, through organization, to achieve the desired unity. 

. . .Western mankind is slowly becoming aware of the forces of disintegration that beset a society which has submitted too readily to the attractive lures of the spirit of liberation inherent in the autonomy of man. And we are now coming to recognize that we must bear the burdens of our times as true and honest contemporaries of our own era. It is not therefore in a spirit of defeat and pessimism that we observe our civilization in a state of crisis and dissolution, but in a spirit of courage, and even with a will to hasten the process; for out of the old we see a new order rising.

With this conclusion we are led to the insight that the crisis of modern civilization is religious in nature. To be sure, many do not admit such a diagnosis. Joseph Wood Krutch, and before him Bertrand Russell, profoundly impressed as they were by the power of the modern spirit and its break with old traditions, and yet deeply disturbed by its emptiness, could only express their reactions in agnosticism and stoic pessimism. Their analyses, I believe, are, if they are met on their own ground, almost irrefutable. But their attitude towards the facts which they so keenly analyze does not rise to the highest level. Their arguments can be met only on the basis of a religious devotion which is perpetually concerned with the search for the meaningful life and which solves the perennial problem, “How Live?” with a practical and positive answer to the deepest of all questions, “Why Live?”

Now, once more, the time is fulfilled and the Church is challenged to live up to its destiny. Is it capable of fulfilling its task? The answer to this question will definitely determine the outlook for religion.