Remembering the Fall

Although he was never ordained, Congregationalist Stanley High, graduate of Boston University's School of Theology, served as a pastor for three years, later edited the monthly Christian Herald. Now a roving editor of the Reader's Digest, 51-year-old Layman High still takes time out to be a preacher and critic of Protestantism. Last winter he told U.S. Protestants that they were "preacher-ridden" (TIME, Feb. 17). Last week at East Northfield, Mass., he told an interdenominational audience at the 63rd Northfield General Conference that the church was failing its members. Said High:

"I could speak . . . about how I've failed the church. I could talk about how laymen, generally, fail the church. That's a popular subject--it's an easy one. Instead, I'm going to talk about how the church has failed me. . . . And the way it is failing me is, I think, a key to the way it is failing and due to continue to fail society.

"I don't make any apology for putting the failure of the church on this personal level ... I think that the first business of the church is to redeem me. And I don't mean to redeem me in the merely social sense which convinces me that the Golden Rule ought to be my Confession of Faith. By redeeming me, I mean personal redemption--the process by which I'm spiritually shaken apart and spiritually put together again, and from which I--the personal I--emerge a totally different person. . . ."

A Kick in the Pants. "The first reason for this failure is that the church--the modern, modernist Protestant church--rates me altogether too highly. It has been one of the glories of Protestantism that it has put its emphasis on the Individual, on Free Will and Free Choice. But the net result may prove to be disastrous. . . . I'm simply not as good as modern Protestantism assumes me to be. I haven't got the spiritual stuff to do, on my own, what modern Protestantism expects me to do. The church has failed me because it has given me too much freedom and too little discipline. ... It has assumed that all I needed was the right hand of fellowship, when . . . what I am in greater need of is a kick in the pants. . . .

"Ever since my Sunday School days I've had it dinned into my ears that I'm a Child of God, that I'm made in His Image. It seems to me that those who lay so much emphasis on my bearing such a resemblance to the Almighty are not only mistaken about me, they're also mistaken about history.

"Man was made in the image of God in the first chapter of Genesis. He didn't stay that way very long. In fact, he only stayed that way until the third chapter of Genesis. Then he had what the theologians call a Fall. He's never been the same since--not on his own. . . . The whole of the Bible and the whole of the ministry of Jesus, as I understand it, were designed not to persuade man how good he is on his own, but how evil he is on his own. And how good, by the process of redemption ... he can become. . . ."

A Live Devil. "There is, unmistakably, a great uneasiness abroad in American Protestantism--a widespread concern about the Protestant future in this country. Much of that concern seems to be focused on the Catholic Church. . . .

"As a Protestant ... I do not think our chief concern about Catholicism should be in terms of school buses or political influence or the separation of church and state. . . . The really vital matter . . . is that for the modern man--and for the likes of me, if you please--the Roman Catholic Church has something to offer which Protestantism too generally isn't offering. . . .

"The ground the Catholic Church stands on is--for Catholics--high and lifted up. It preaches the love of God, but it also preaches the fear of the Devil. . . . The Catholic doctrine of Heaven has meaning because there is meaning and reality in the Catholic doctrine of Hell. . . . As Protestants I wish we'd stop worrying and clamoring against the secular competition with Roman Catholicism and begin to worry a little bit about the spiritual competition.

"I, personally, need the church as I never needed it before. I happen to know that my fellow laymen need it as never before and are ready, at the slightest suggestion, to acknowledge that need. But the church we need will have more of Dante and Dostoevsky in its message and less of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Eddie Guest; more of the Last Judgment and less of the Golden Rule. It will not only have a Living God, but a Live Devil. Its Heaven will have a Hell for its alternative. Its objective--so far as I'm concerned--will not be my cultivation, but my rebirth. I might fail that kind of church. But that kind of church could not fail me."

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