Churchianity

Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell, Canon of Christian Education in the Protestant Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, serves his God with a tough mind and a sharp tongue. Last week, in the unofficial Episcopal weekly, the Witness, High Churchman Bell was in top form at his favorite sport--mussing up ecclesiastical stuffed shirts.

Christians, says Canon Bell, have a tendency not only to exalt the Church as the end rather than the means of their religion, but "to make of it a covert in which to hide from Christ." All too many, he says, use the Church to cushion the impact of Christianity, as a small boy about to be spanked stuffs napkins in the seat of his pants. "Or, to change the comparison, we may seek to be inoculated against Christianity with a churchly solution of one part Christianity to 99 parts respectability and good-fellowship. Good-fellowship and respectability are not poison; but they can, and frequently do, so dilute the grace of God as to render it almost powerless."

A Social Club. Such "churchianity," says Bell, has been an especially besetting sin of Episcopalians: "The Episcopal Church, by and large, has tended too much to exalt itself and minimize God." The disease, as Canon Bell describes it, was partly inherited from the nation's founders, who, in Virginia and other colonies, treated the Church as "a conventional meeting place of the better-off landowners." The 19th Century waves of non-English immigrants, he feels, only made matters a little worse, because in the mixed society that resulted the Episcopalians soon came to regard themselves as patricians.

Bell quotes a letter received recently from a friend who had moved to a new parish: "The church here has everything, from an exquisite chapel to a gymnasium and a manual-training shop for young Episcopalians to enjoy themselves in. There is money all over the place . . . It's impressive all right; but ... it seems more like a social club." There are many such rich parishes, writes Bell, in which Christ is genteelly revered and His upsetting utterances muffled. "The vulgarity of the Gospels is concealed by the quaintness of the King James version; the dynamite of the Eucharist is replaced by the easier formalities of morning prayer; the sermons are not disturbing of complacency--the vestries see to that--and few are the clergy who even wish to rebel; the benevolences are set to remedial rather than reformative good works."

A Warning. In the Episcopal Church, Canon Bell finds some encouraging signs that there is less churchianity. But it seems to him that another branch of Christianity, the ecumenical movement, "is plainly being tempted to go in for it in a large way."

He sees a tendency in ecumenical circles "to assume that it does not matter overmuch what people think of Christ, whether He is God redeeming the world or only a superfine moral leader, or even perhaps a neurotic with messianic illusions of grandeur who nevertheless said some right good things. The thing to do is to get everybody into 'one big united Church' . . . One is driven to the conclusion that the 'ecumenical movement' is in considerable danger of substituting the Church for Christianity . . ."

Bell warns "ecumenicals" to be on their guard, "even if to be Christ-centered slows up 'reunion' for a while, maybe for a long while . . . The world, now hurtling on toward political, economic, moral catastrophe, is going to be saved, if it is to be saved at all, not by the multitude of an uncommitted host nor by the charm of Episcopalians nor by any human device. In that salvation, or maybe in a rebuilding after debacle, the Church can play a mighty part, but only if it stops admiring itself and starts to adore and to obey the most high God."

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