Protestantism in its Full Development. The Wandering of Religious Thought. Rationalism – The Unlimited Arbitrary Will of Preachers and the Degeneration of Preaching. – The Sectarian Insularity of Parish Churches and Their Inaccessibility to the Common People. – Helpless Victims of Religious Demagogues. – Dark Sectarianism With an Admixture of Charlatanism – “Independent Catholic” and “Physiological” Churches. – The Salvation Army

Any force, no matter how beneficial in itself, can bring benefit only when it acts under certain limiting and guiding conditions. Outside such conditions, even the most beneficial force either loses its good quality or assumes a destructive character. Fire is the most beneficial and most necessary element for human life and culture, and yet this very same fire at any moment, in the absence of restraining conditions, can grow into an all-consuming flame and turn entire cities to ashes. The same is true in the realm of religion. Strong faith and living religious feeling can move mountains, but they, in the absence of established regulating conditions, can give birth to phenomena that lie as a heavy burden on the conscience of a people. Such a phenomenon is observed in the religious-moral state of the American people of the United States. This people, as we have seen, is distinguished by strong energy of religious feeling and therefore is extraordinarily sensitive to the interests of religious truth; and yet the principal doctrinal system in which Christianity expresses itself in North America does not provide sufficient assurance to the religious conscience, not only of preserving truth, but against outright deviation from it. This is Protestantism, which appears as the predominant doctrinal beginning in North America and to which the country itself owes its settlement, for it, fleeing oppression in the Old World, sought freedom of development in the New. There, enjoying full freedom, it was able, without obstruction, to express its doctrinal essence in all its fullness, and therefore for evaluating the essence of Protestantism the study of the ecclesiastical-religious state of America provides the best data.

Protestantism as a doctrinal system is founded upon two main principles, from which all its content logically develops. As a negation of the Roman Catholic system, which carried external church organization to the point of suppressing all personal initiative, it began to teach that the church is only a spiritual, invisible society and members can be united in it only in the most general principle, namely only in faith; so that every believer, believing that he is redeemed by Christ, thereby becomes a member of the church, whatever his views may be in all other respects. Then, in contrast to the Roman Catholic system, which denied the individual his own participation in determining true doctrine, it rejected the authority of the church and tradition and determined that every person, with the help of his own reason, on the basis solely of Scripture, can and must determine what his religious doctrine should be, “what his faith” and moral code should be. Underlying this doctrine is evidently the thought that the realm of spirit is a realm of freedom, and therefore if there is anywhere man can be completely free, it is precisely in spiritual life, and especially in its highest sphere—religion. Hence the rejection in Protestantism of all authority and the provision to each individual person of complete freedom of thought. But in this a small thing was overlooked which deprives even truth itself of unconditionality, namely, that complete freedom presupposes the purest spirit; but since man is not a pure spirit but represents a combination of spirit and body, this very combination in itself already limits the spirit and places it in dependence on numerous completely extraneous conditions. As a consequence, limitation is necessarily introduced, whose limits may narrow as man rises on the steps of the ladder of education, or expand to the furthest degree—as he descends into the realm of ignorance and darkness. But there is no degree of education and enlightenment where the spirit completely throws off the chains of limitation and where it could contemplate truth not as in a mirror darkly but face to face, and therefore it always needs a certain authority that could serve as a criterion for its logical work. This truth found its fullest expression in our Orthodox Church, where within certain limits freedom of religious thought is allowed (and these limits are so broad that in them there is room for the greatest genius of speculative thought to unfold), and at the same time a firm, immovable, unchanging, supporting point is constantly provided for theologizing thought in the universal mind of the church, in tradition, constituting the result of centuries of thought and experience of all Christian society. Thanks to this, in the Orthodox Church every person, according to his intellectual makeup, can either experience with his mind the deepest truths of theology, or hold with simple faith to those established rules that serve as the external expression of these great truths, in full confidence that here he has immutable truth in its simplest, tangible for the simplest mind form, and this confidence is guaranteed by the high and immutable authority of the church. The believing Protestant finds himself in quite a different position. If he possesses the faculty of thought, then of course his enlightened mind can embrace and understand the highest truths of theology, and in history can even find some support for verifying his thought, but in view of the fact that for the Protestant mind there is no unchanging, binding authority in the form of the church, he can easily be carried away by the results of logical thought, attach to them greater significance than they actually have, and thus go beyond the bounds of true Christianity and fall into heretical error. He drifts like a ship on a boundless sea, having lost his compass. In the distant blue he seems to see a luxurious shore with a cozy harbor, he sets course there at full sail; but the mirage vanishes and the ship breaks into pieces on a submerged reef. But the position of the simple uneducated mass, which in even the most enlightened countries constitutes an immeasurable majority of the population, is even more helpless. Unable to independently construct a religious worldview and at the same time lacking the immutable authority of the church, which could substitute for insufficient personal reason, this mass under Protestantism must necessarily cling slavishly to the letter of the Bible, rely on the arbitrary interpretation of the pastor in understanding it, and in church life live by that very tradition which is denied theoretically, or become prey to all sorts of charlatans who come forward in the role of self-appointed reformers. All this we have had occasion to see in reality in studying the ecclesiastical-religious life of North America.

As to the speculative side of theology in America, the indicated extremes of Protestant theology were able to occur on American soil all the more easily because the American mind is extraordinarily inclined toward speculative thought. Here we have an entire speculative-theological school at the head of which stand such strong minds as Parker and Emerson. This school of American transcendentalism was formed on the soil of Puritan New England, where it now in the state of Massachusetts has as its representative a well-known school of speculative philosophy in the small town of Concord. It must be noted first of all that this speculative school, with all its deviations from the authority of the universal church and sound theology, is distinguished by profound religious spirit. Religion and philosophy in it are inseparable, and the school itself has as its ultimate goal the establishment of harmony between religion and science, for “science, in Parker’s literal expression, is the natural ally of religion, and to separate them means to separate what God has joined together.” Nevertheless, because here reason does not recognize the authority of the church, rationalism still gains complete dominance, and it leads finally theological thought to monstrous conclusions that destroy true Christianity. This was even observed by representatives of the Unitarian community in Boston.

When Emerson in 1838 in his introductory lecture at Harvard University expressed his confession of faith and directly rejected miracle on the ground that God’s intervention is conceivable only in the normal operation of the laws of nature, that church history had distorted by various exaggerations the personality of Jesus—“this sole spirit in history who fully appreciated human worth,” this lecture produced terrible alarm in the community, and in the well-known “Association of Preachers of Boston” the question was directly posed: does Emerson with his party belong to Christianity, or to a special “religion of Boston?” Parker answered this question with his sermon “on the transient and permanent elements in Christianity,” and there fully articulated what Emerson left unarticulated, namely, that their school sees in Jesus only a perfect type of religious man, who drew great religious and moral truths from his own conscience, animating them with his love for humanity; that among the transient elements in Christianity belongs the belief that the Bible contains a supernatural revelation and that in Christ there was a supernatural essence, and not merely that spiritual-moral perfection which He had in common with other great founders of religious systems. Clearly, this is pure rationalism, as we see it in the theories of Strauss and Renan. But nevertheless it did not lead to that complete denial of the supernatural and complete atheism which, as is known, Strauss ended in, but on the contrary, by the bent of the American mind, it led to the formation of a special church, the so-called “Free Religious Community,” at the head of which stood pastor Hinkley (F. Hinkley). And it is remarkable that this new “church” immediately declared those same legal rights that belong to other churches; namely, the right to solemnize marriages, to have real and tax-exempt church property, and so forth. But it must be said that a commission appointed by the legislative assembly to investigate whether the new community actually represented religion in the full sense of the word had doubts about this and therefore did not immediately grant it the required rights, which are granted only to truly religious communities clearly expressing faith in God. Regarding this matter, an interesting conversation took place between the chairman of the commission and Hinkley, throwing curious light on the murky vagueness of the symbol of faith of the new community. Since in the program of the community submitted for consideration it was stated that it had as its exclusive aim “the practice of virtue, the study of truth, and the cultivation of the feeling of brotherhood among people,” the president of the commission remarked to Hinkley that he did not see from the program to whom exactly they addressed their prayers in their worship. To this Hinkley answered:

“As individuals we represent all shades of free inquiry, but as a community we have a certain element of definite worship. All sound-minded people recognize a certain Power outside us and above us. We think that we recognize the great principle of things when we recognize this Power, although we do not recognize it as other churches do.”

“What then do you worship?” asks the president, bewildered by this impenetrable speculative fog.

“I am fully disposed to explain to you,” answered Hinkley, “but I do not think it is the duty of the government to define what people should or can worship.”

“I have heard,” the president continued, “you say earlier that you recognize neither God, nor Christ, nor the Bible.”

“All that I said,” answered the preacher of nebulous religion, “is that we cannot recognize them as other churches do. We generally recognize only a certain Power influencing people.”

“But is what you call Power precisely what others call God?”

“Yes, you are beginning to grasp it. From this point you will encounter irreconcilable disagreements, both within churches and outside them.”

Despite this nebulous church being granted legal rights as a religious community, one can be certain that the president of the government commission never did clarify to himself what exactly would be worshipped in this strange church, whose name would be invoked in oaths and who would be called as witness to marriages solemnized by the ministers of this church.

But it is clear that such nebulous thought is accessible only to a small circle of philosophically educated people, from whom the new church was constituted. Nevertheless there is no absurdity that would not find special popularizers with the aim of carrying a certain nebulous idea into simple popular consciousness. On the general principle of free religion, a new community was formed in New York under the name “Society for Moral Culture.” The Boston community had already reduced almost all its thought to the practical aims of moral improvement, but still recognized over all an unexplained and unclear for the founders of the new church Power. In the New York community a further step was taken along the path of eliminating metaphysics from theology, and the exclusive goal of this community was directly set as moral improvement without any reference to a supreme Power. Moreover, the moral element was so emphasized that it completely subordinated the religious, and, according to the explanation of the founder of the “Society for Moral Culture,” Felix Adler, religion itself is merely an auxiliary phantom, needed only for the external unification of moral doctrines. He preaches every Sunday in New York about the height and holiness of moral perfection; but constantly makes known to his listeners that he recognizes neither God nor the immortality of the soul. “I do not accept theism,” he said in one of his sermons. “But the foundations can outlast the building and serve for some new building. And with all my strength I hold to the foundations of theism: it provides the possibility first for denying chance, that is for the conviction that order reigns in the world, and then also for the conviction that this order is good, that is, that there is progress in the world.” It must be noted that Adler is of Jewish origin, and his community at first consisted almost exclusively of representatives of that reformed Judaism which on the free soil of America strives to cast off the yoke of Talmudic law. But subsequently gentiles too, that is, members of other faiths, joined, and from these diverse elements the community in question was constituted, and in it began to seek a hereditary refuge all those restless minds who ultimately felt under them the disappearance of all solid ground. That this is truly a desperate situation is proven by the remarkable fact that into this and similar new communities entered people, many of whom had passed through almost all communities and sects, vainly seeking satisfaction of the living religious need of their spirit. A typical example can be served by the well-known American thinker and writer Orestes Brownson. Born in a Presbyterian community, from early childhood he began to seek the true church, experienced all religious communities and sects up to the extreme sect of Unitarians, finally entered a rationalist community and became a zealous propagandist of Boston transcendentalism as preached by Parker and Emerson, and nevertheless in the end passed into Roman Catholicism, where he died in 1876. This restless wandering through the thickets of sectarianism and this desperate leap from nebulous transcendentalism into the arms of the medieval system—what is this but the despair of a strong religious mind at finding rest in the system of Protestantism? And such examples are not isolated. On the contrary they are vivid types of the wavering and wandering of theological thought which appears as necessary and inevitable in this system, which deprives the person of reliable support in the teaching authority of the church.