Homo Religiosus and Historical Faith

Abstract

HE distinction between Christian faith and religion, which was urged so strongly by Karl Barth in the second edition of his Epistle to the Romans,' has become almost a commonplace. From the 1930's through to the 1950's, the distinction was made the subject of formal theological investigation, and notably by Hendrik Kraemer.' And now in the 1960's it has found more popular expression through such books as John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God3 and William Stringfellow's A Private and Public Faith.4 Undoubtedly, though, the form in which this distinction is presently stated owes most to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose last jottings on the possibility of a religionless Christianity have aroused the widest interest and debate.5 Bonhoeffer leaves us no more than a few hints and roughly worked suggestions about his positive program, yet he sets out his fundamental starting-point with complete clarity. He argues that twentieth-century man has outgrown religion. Whereas in former ages religion supplied the cosmological frame of reference within which mankind viewed the universe around him, science has since become the purveyor of the facts of life and guide to the secrets of nature. So homo religiosus has died, or else lives on as an anachronism. But Christians, says Bonhoeffer, should not regret this development. Rather, accepting the situation as God-given, they ought to re-state their faith for a nonreligious generation. The disappearance of the gods desired by the human mind for its own purposes has opened the way for faith in the one true God. Only the fearful and the faithless, then, can wish to return to the conditions of past ages or to resurrect homo religiosus from the dead. Against the Barth-Bonhoeffer argument, which welcomes in the name of Christianity the withering-away of religion, there stands a counter-argument. It begins from the thesis that the decay of religion in the modern world is the sign of a failure in the human consciousness, a failure caused by the one-sided development of culture in the West. Consequently, the human spirit is now suffering from religious malnutrition. A return from the artificial values of contemporary civilization to the deeper satisfactions experienced by earlier generations is thus quite imperative. For those satisfactions arose out of the unquestioned sway of religion over men's lives, and the passing of religious meaning from everyday experience has brought into existence a sick world. According to this argument,