The Orthodox Christ in the Modern World, Part 3

An Introduction to the Thought of E. L. Mascall, Part 3 of 3

The Irony of Modern Theology

In Christianity there is the irreformable and the reformable. And these are not equals. Contextualization is always necessary, but a message such as the gospel already has a largest conceivable context: namely God, his creation, our fall, and redemption. These things remain the same. That which may be changed is always the inferior. So the truth of God is always infinitely larger than the media of its communication. Mascall derives from this that there may be twentieth century Christians, but there is no more a twentieth century Church than there is a twentieth century gospel.1

There are two works with which Mascall interacts more than his other contemporaries: John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God and Paul van Buren’s Secular Meaning of the Gospel. In the name of broadening our faith to “modern relevance,” Mascall argues, they have only given us a far narrower “provincialism”2 because they would ignore the wisdom of the centuries and the world.

Here is another angle of the irony of modern theology. Who remembers Robinson and van Buren? Indeed who even puts things in the terms of the more famous Rudolph Bultmann anymore? If one is going to be a radical critic of the New Testament, one goes all the way as Bart Ehrman does. But an existential Christ is now a relic of historical theology. This only goes to show the lack of vitality in such doctrinal renovations.  

Even the modernist theologians, like van Buren, discerned the problem with the more extreme species of their own genus, as he categorized Bultmann, Ogden, and even Bonhoeffer at points. They reduced religion to “God as a means of explaining, justifying, or otherwise ‘filling in the picture’ of the world or human affairs.”3 In other words it was God as a projection of the Godless void. Yet they all limited themselves to their own echo chambers: the existentialists may have been sealed off with their copy of Heidegger, but van Buren was no better in his devotion to the analytical philosophers.

Cutting through all of the intramural debates between the modernists, Mascall unveils a statement of perfect candor from van Buren, which brings us full circle to the true nature of the showdown:

“We reject the cognitive approach to theological language, not primarily because it is logically puzzling, but because of certain theological commitments out of which this study has arisen. That approach builds its case on a natural sense of a divine, on natural religion and on natural revelation.”4

In short, the modernist who has fully secularized sees what the Evangelical (still secularizing) does not: the antithesis of liberal theology is fully classical theology, complete with natural theology and natural law; and short of this classical Christianity, the secular slide inevitably commences. 

Robinson, as was already said about the liberal, prefaces his secularization with the “great need” to restate the “defense of the faith” in ever fresh ways. His reasons? It is that the language of orthodoxy leaves a gulf not merely between Christian and the world, but between the orthodox and the layman. The church and the world are in the same boat. Orthodoxy is, to the new humanity, meaningless.5

And so, according to Mascall, what Robinson does is to redefine Christian faith to “include within it all men of good will,”6 and from there tries to convince such neighbors that they really do believe Christianity in their hearts, though their modern outlook rightly shudders at the thought of it. The Christian will have to give this modern neighbor something wholly different to think about: something that lines up with their hearts. He will begin by defining God so vaguely that none would bother to argue against his existence.7 

Underneath all of this is a very half-hearted way in which modern theologians hail the supernatural outlook at “unscientific,” which becomes the pretext for recasting the essentials of the faith. Ask them what they mean by this and what follows has very little to do with empirical science. The orthodox are charged with “outmoded speech.” For example, Robinson brings in a “three decker”8 universe: God “up there” in heaven, men in the middle on earth, and then the evil spirits below. That modern theologians feel the need to “introduce” this to us: that it is only a figure of speech and so forth, evidences more than a little chronological snobbery. But who among the orthodox theologians holds to such a scheme? 

In the end Mascall shows that the orthodox speak the language of the human—the philosopher and the true scientist—refusing to recast the objects of faith into the imaginative projections of material particulars. The belief in a realm beyond (the ultimate object of reason) is the defining difference between man and beast. Thus modernism is not a progress, but a great intellectual regress, back behind even the savage to the lower beasts.9

Now it is one thing to say that “Christianity is better for the world than secularism.” It is another thing to say that this must be the classical form of Christianity and not the modern variety. But that is the whole point of the Secularization of Christianity. As Machen had said before and Schaeffer would say afterwards, a Christianity that is “modernized,” in the sense of morphing or dispensing with its essential, supernatural elements just is secularism and not Christianity. Thus we cannot put a halt to the secularizing process by a Christianity of the lowest common denominator. Catholicity was wide, but it was also deep. If it was not, then it could not have withstood as anything but a passing fad. 

Classical Theology is Better for the World

Mascall begins his book The Christian Universe by examining what Kant regarded as the big three foundations: commitments to freedom, God, and immortality. These are all denied in the new secular landscape; they are further eroded in the secularizing tendency. He draws out the cultural ramifications of these. One of the most obvious features of our present world is hushing up any real talk of eternity. For the individual in denial, the culture accommodates with a deathless facade, to put it off and increasingly to sanitize the sight of death in others. The more sophisticated approach “is provided by those scientific humanists who make the continuance of the human race as a substitute for the survival of the individual.”10 With objective morals and meaning debunked, modern man feels the need to invent his own. 

However the secularist is limited in both time and space. In the transition between old and new realities, his art can only revel in the loss of morals and meaning. So he examines the so-called “meaninglessness” genre. The existentialist authors could not quite succeed at creating characters who invented their own entire morality in the midst of a Godless world. They borrowed. And their deductions to the absurd were forced. For Sartre, as for Russell, traditional religion was chief among “easy solutions.” So we were informed that what is harder is the heroic, yet pessimistic, acceptance of a cold, careless universe. 

What is needed for meaning is something even prior to Wittgenstein’s Transcendent Speaker. There must be a Transcendent Seer: One who sees the whole world for what it really is.11 More than that, Mascall concludes, the sense of the world must lie outside of the world. “The modern absurdists are fully right in maintaining that the world does not make sense of itself. Where I think they are wrong is in assuming that nothing can make sense of it.”12

Envisioning Christianity as better for the world is not to reduce the argument for Christianity to pragmatism.

“This does not mean that we ought to encourage a revival of religion in order to get people to behave as we would wish; that would be to put the cart before the horse, as well as to degrade religion. For if people will not behave themselves because they love God, they are not likely to take up loving God as a help to behaving themselves.”13

How exactly does orthodox Christology hold this center? In answering this question he has three misconceptions to dispel: 1. that Christ benefits people from the outside, but that these same do not share in his life now; 2. that those who are in Christ are distinct from the rest either by an arbitrary choice of God or by an act of faith by the believer; 3. that Jesus Christ is all important to human beings, but not to the cosmos as a whole.

These three falsities are all the more pernicious because of how much truth they contain. We may notice that all three have a common thread: union with Christ. In other words, the three “unities” of orthodox Christology, already covered, imply that a significant portion of humanity shares in the divine life now, that this union is neither merely the choice of God or man, but is a choice in Christ, and that the union of humanity to God in Christ extends to the perfection of all things.

In light of his contemporary C. S. Lewis’ criticisms of scientism, we may ask how Mascall viewed scientism as a species of modern thought? For one, he notes that popularizers of evolution (not usually trained scientists) cast evolution as the mechanism by which mortality will be conquered.14 In The Christian Universe, the question is taken up only in light of applied science, and specifically how it can improve the emerging global consciousness, citing some interesting, if outdated, models like that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.15

Elsewhere he takes on the scientific enterprise itself, steering between the extremes. At one end there is a wall of separation, where both the scientist and the theologian are permitted their safe spaces and all can come away with the sense of harmony on the cheap. At the other end there is an amalgamation of the spiritual and empirical, where conflict is bound to arise again and a hierarchy emerges: Scripture over nature, or Nature over scripture.

The result can only be a splintering off between scientism and fundamentalism, where either the scientific method or the Bible becomes the undifferentiated arbiter of all data. What Mascall suggests is rather a singular reality with two forms of divine revelation, and thus two corresponding methods under one Reason.16

He can have this view of exploring nature because, on the classical view, there is a philosophical basis for finding unity in the diversity of things we see. Moreover, because of the Incarnation, the Christian hears God declaring that all of nature is still good as to its intrinsic design. It is not Modernity that opposes Gnostic denouncement of nature. Where the Gnostic said nature is evil the Modernist shrugs his shoulders and says that is all we have. The orthodox Christian can do far better. So even in the realm of the sciences, Mascall finds a way to make the orthodox creed foundational. 

The Christian sees all of the best of what modern people see, and better; and yet sees it all against the infinite backdrop of the world of spirits. In Christ’s work, even all the best of the body and nature are redeemed and perfected forever: “undreamed-of glory and dignity.”17 Christ is better for nature, through the human nature; but also for human diversity.

“Again, if Christ is the savior and perfecter of the whole human race, the full manifestation of the riches of Christ will require for its expression all the outlooks, aptitudes and capacities of mankind, and not only those of that one culture to which we belong.”18

Mascall offers a metaphysical picture that shouldn’t be reduced to what Lewis called “picture thinking.” With several qualifications, he envisions the whole material universal at the outside, man inside, then the church inside that, and finally Christ the Man; but then, at a point, we see One who is uncreated. Yet the Son of God is present at the historical point in his humanity as well as present in his divine creative power, upholding all. And “although the circles mark out definite realms, they must not be thought of as impenetrable membranes.”19

Concluding Thoughts

There is always lurking in the background a demonstration to the Reformed that the “middle way” is a better way. To a great degree he succeeds at showing a better way, but it seems as though he failed to ever pay attention to the best Reformed voices on nature and grace. He sees “traditional Protestant theology” as relying wholly on special revelation against “man’s natural apprehension of the world.”20 So Mascall’s view of the Reformed doctrine of nature is one that rejects both the good of the world of revelation and the good of the human faculties. 

It is interesting that what critics of Chalcedon have always said about its Christology, Tillich went all the way and lamented about the orthodox God: he was “a perfect person who resides above the world and mankind.”21 In order to be personal, sympathize, and act on our behalf, modern theology says that God must no longer be transcendent in any sense. In opposition to this, the orthodox Christ is good for the world in being the clearest leans of God both transcendent and immanent. What else is union between God and man but a reunion of that which is presently divorced? Every other alienation is really a species of the hostilities between God and man.

While the Reformed may naturally wish, at this point, that more specific gospel solutions to those hostilities be addressed (Mascall is weak on the judicial dimension) nevertheless Mascall has something to offer as to the wider union that encompasses both atonement and resurrection, which the Reformed have very often less to say than we ought. Short of our human nature’s union with Christ, we find the death of man and destruction of nature.

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1. The Secularization of Christianity (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 4.

2. The Secularization of Christianity, 36.

3. The Secularization of Christianity, 61.

4. The Secularization of Christianity, 63.

5. The Secularization of Christianity, 108.

6. The Secularization of Christianity, 110.

7. The Secularization of Christianity, 121-22.

8. The Secularization of Christianity, 112.

9. The Christian Universe (New York: Morehouse-Barlow Co. 1966), 49.

10. The Christian Universe, 20.

11. The Christian Universe, 39.

12. The Christian Universe, 42.

13. The Christian Universe, 35.

14. The Secularization of Christianity, 203.

15. The Christian Universe, 91-95; The Secularization of Christianity, 202.

16. Christian Theology and Natural Science (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1966), 2-3.

17. The Christian Universe, 25.

18. The Christian Universe, 71.

19. The Christian Universe, 137.

20. The Secularization of Christianity, 64, 65.

21. The Secularization of Christianity, 125.