How to Be Christian without Really Believing

Abstract

porary religious faith written by young men belonging to four major traditions (one being atheism). The one entitled "I Call Myself a Protestant," was written by William Bartley III,' a former editor of the Harvard Crimson, who had achieved considerable notoriety by tangling editorially with Paul Tillich shortly after the latter's arrival in Cambridge. Bartley complained that leading contemporary Protestant theologians-particularly Tillich, Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr -were culpably disingenuous in their relations with their students and their ecclesiastical constituency. He accused them of reading a radically new content into traditional Christian symbols, concepts, and terminology without clearly announcing, or even admitting, what they were up to. The implication was that these influential thinkers (and thousands of their followers in pulpits and classrooms throughout the world) were guilty of perpetrating a pious fraud in using emotionally freighted religious language to get across their own ideas to a community of believers whose faith they only pretended to share. Bartley's attack upon the great triumvirate is being echoed in various ways and with even greater feeling by scores of churchmen today, for the new "theology of secularity" and the "death of God theology" represent one of the most audacious attempts ever made to pour "new wine" into the old wineskins of a historical religion." On the one hand, there is a more radical honesty about the extent of reinterpretation being carried out. In eath of God thought, there is frank abandonment not only of the language but also of the substance of the traditional