Introduction

that had never been within the competence of logos. As a result, traditional faith was no longer possible for a growing number of Western men and women.
The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) would discover that human beings were as strongly motivated by a death wish as by a desire for eros and procreation. Increasingly, an apparently perverse yearning for (and terror of) extinction would surface in modern culture. People were beginning to recoil from the civilization they had created, at the same time as they enjoyed the undoubted benefits it conferred. Thanks to modern science, most people in the West lived healthier, longer lives; their democratic institutions meant that, for the most part, life was more equitable. Americans and Europeans were rightly proud of their achievements. But the dream of universal brotherhood that had sustained Enlightenment thinkers was proving to be a chimera. The Franco-Prussian War (1870--71) had revealed the hideous effects of modern weaponry, and there was a dawning realization that science might also have a malignant dimension. There was a sense of anticlimax. During the revolutionary period in the early years of the nineteenth century, a new and better world had seemed finally within the grasp of humanity. But this hope was never fulfilled. Instead, the industrial revolution brought new problems and fresh injustice and exploitation. In Hard Times (1854), Charles Dickens presented the industrialized city as an inferno, and showed that modern pragmatic rationalism could be destructive of morality and individuality. The new mega cities inspired immense ambivalence. The Romantic poets who denounced the “dark satanic mills” were in flight from urban life, as much as they were inspired by a positive longing for the unspoiled countryside. The British critic George Steiner notes the curious school of painting that developed during the 183os, which could be seen as a “counter-dream of modernity.” The modern cities-London, Paris, and Berlin--which symbolized the great Western achievement, were depicted in ruins, smashed by some unimaginable catastrophe.
People were beginning to fantasize about the destruction of civilization and to take practical steps to bring this about.
After the Franco-Prussian War, the nations of Europe began a frantic arms race which led them inexorably to the First World War. They appeared to see war as a Darwinian necessity in which only the fittest would survive.
A modern nation must have the biggest army and the most murderous weapons that science could provide, and Europeans dreamed of a war that would purify the nation’s soul in a harrowing apotheosis. The British writer I. F. Clarke has shown that between 1871 and 1914 it was unusual to find a single year in which a novel or short story describing a horrific future war did not appear in some European country. The “Next Great War” was imagined as a terrible but inevitable ordeal: out of the destruction, the nation would arise to a new and enhanced life. At the very end of the nineteenth century, however, British novelist H. G. Wells punctured this Utopian dream in The War of the Worlds (1898) and showed where it was leading. There were terrifying images of London depopulated by biological warfare, and the roads of England crowded with refugees. He could see the dangers of a military technology that had been drawn into the field of the exact sciences.
He was right. The arms race led to the Somme and when the Great War broke out in 1914, the people of Europe, who had been dreaming of the war to end all wars for over forty years, entered with enthusiasm upon this conflict, which could be seen as the collective suicide of Europe.
Despite the achievements of modernity, there was a nihilistic death wish, as the nations of Europe cultivated a perverse fantasy of self-destruction.
In America, some of the more conservative Protestants were in the grip of a similar vision, but their nightmare scenario took a religious form. The United States had also suffered a terrible conflict and an ensuing anticlimax.
Americans had seen the Civil War (1861--65) between the northern and southern states in apocalyptic terms. Northerners believed that the conflict would purge the nation; soldiers sang of the “glory of the coming of the Lord.” Preachers spoke of an approaching Armageddon, of a battle between light and darkness, liberty and slavery. They looked forward to a New Man and a New Dispensation emerging, phoenix-like, from this fiery trial. But there was no brave new world in America either. Instead, by the end of the war, whole cities had been destroyed, families had been torn asunder, and there was a white southern backlash. Instead of Utopia, the northern states experienced the rapid and painful transition from an agrarian to an industrialized society. New cities were built, old cities exploded in size.
Hordes of new immigrants poured into the country from southern and eastern Europe. Capitalists made vast fortunes from the iron, oil, and steel industries, while workers lived below subsistence level. Women and children were exploited in the factories: by 1890, one out of every five children had a job. Conditions were poor, the hours long, and the machinery unsafe. There was also a new gulf between town and countryside, as large parts of the United States, especially the South, remained agrarian. If a void lay beneath the prosperity of Europe, America was becoming a country without a core.
The secular genre of the “future war” which so entranced the people of Europe, did not attract the more religious Americans. Instead, some developed a more consuming interest than ever before in eschatology, dreaming of a Final War between God and Satan, which would bring this evil society to a richly deserved end. The new apocalyptic vision that took root in America during the late nineteenth century is called ypremillennialism, because it envisaged Christ returning to earth before he established his thousand-year reign. (The older and more optimistic (postmillennialism of the Enlightenment, which was still cultivated by liberal Protestants, imagined human beings inaugurating God’s Kingdom by their own efforts: Christ would only return to earth after the millennium was established.) The new premillennialism was preached in America by the Englishman John Nelson Darby (1800--82), who found few followers in Britain but toured the United States to great acclaim six times between 1859 and 1877. His vision could see nothing good in the modern world, which was hurtling toward destruction.
Instead of becoming more virtuous, as the Enlightenment thinkers had hoped, humanity was becoming so depraved that God would soon be forced to intervene and smash their society, inflicting untold misery upon the human race. But out of this fiery ordeal, the faithful Christians would emerge triumphant and enjoy Christ’s final victory and glorious Kingdom.
Darby did not search for mystical meaning in the Bible, which he saw as a document that told the literal truth. The prophets and the author of the Book of Revelation were not speaking symbolically but making precise predictions which would shortly come to pass exactly as they had foretold. The old myths were now seen as factual logoi, the only form of truth that many modern Western people could recognize. Darby divided the whole of salvation history into seven epochs or “dispensations,” a scheme derived from a careful reading of scripture.
Each dispensation, he explained, had been brought to an end when human beings became so wicked that God was forced to punish them. The previous dispensations had ended with such catastrophes as the Fall, the Flood, and the crucifixion of Christ. Human beings were currently living in the sixth, or penultimate, dispensation, which God would shortly bring to an end in an unprecedentedly terrible disaster.
Antichrist, the false redeemer whose coming before the End had been predicted by St. Paul, would deceive the world with his false allure, take everybody in, and then inflict a period of Tribulation upon humanity. For seven years, Antichrist would wage war, massacre untold numbers of people, and persecute all opposition, but eventually Christ would descend to earth, defeat Antichrist, engage in a final battle with Satan and the forces of evil on the plain of Armageddon outside Jerusalem, and inaugurate the Seventh Dispensation. He would rule for a thousand years, before the Last Judgment brought history to a close.
This was a religious version of the future-war fantasy of Europe. It saw true progress as inseparable from conflict and near-total destruction. Despite its dream of divine redemption and millennial bliss, it was a nihilistic vision expressive of the modern death wish.
Christians imagined the final extinction of modern society in obsessive detail, yearning morbidly toward it. There was one important difference, however. Where the Europeans imagined everybody enduring the ordeal of the next great war, Darby provided the elect with a way out. On the basis of a chance remark of St. Paul’s, who believed that Christians alive at the time of Christ’s Second Coming would be “taken up in the clouds ... to meet the Lord in the air,” Darby maintained that just before the beginning of the Tribulation, there would be a “Rapture,” a snatching-up of born-again Christians, who would be taken up to heaven and so would escape the terrible sufferings of the Last Days.
Rapture has been imagined in concrete, literal detail by premillennialists.
They are convinced that suddenly airplanes, cars, and trains will crash, as born-again pilots and drivers are caught up into the air while their vehicles careen out of control. The stock market will plummet, and governments will fall. Those left behind will realize that they are doomed and that the true believers have been right all along. Not only will these unhappy people have to endure the Tribulation, they will know that they are destined for eternal damnation. Premillennialism was a fantasy of revenge: the elect imagined themselves gazing down upon the sufferings of those who had jeered at their beliefs, ignored, ridiculed, and marginalized their faith, and now, too late, realized their error. A popular picture found in the homes of many Protestant fundamentalists today shows a man cutting the grass outside his house, gazing in astonishment as his born-again wife is raptu red out of an upstairs window. Like many concrete depictions of mythical events, the scene looks a little absurd, but the reality it purports to present is cruel, divisive, and tragic.
Ironically, premillennialism had more in common with the secular philosophies it despised than with true religious mythology. Hegel, Marx, and Darwin had all believed that development was the result of conflict.
Marx had also divided history into different eras, culminating in a Utopia. Geologists had found the successive epochs of the earth’s development in the strata of fossilized fauna and flora in rocks and cliffs, and some thought that each had ended in catastrophe. Bizarre as the premillennial program sounds, it was in tune with nineteenth-century scientific thought. It was modern also in its literalism and democracy. There were no hidden or symbolic meanings, accessible only to a mystical elite. All Christians, however rudimentary their education, could discover the truth, which was plainly revealed for all to see in the Bible. Scripture meant exactly what it said: a millennium meant ten centuries; 485 years meant precisely that; if the prophets spoke of “Israel,” they were not referring to the Church but to the Jews; when the author of Revelation predicted a battle between Jesus and Satan on the plain of Armageddon outside Jerusalem, that was exactly what would happen. A premillennial reading of the Bible would become even easier for the average Christian after the publication of The Scofield Reference Bible.
(1909), which became an instant best-seller. C. I. Scofield explained this dispensation al vision of salvation history in detailed notes accompanying the biblical text, notes that for many fundamentalists have become almost as authoritative as the text itself.
Premillennialism manifests that lust for certainty which is a reaction to a modernity that deliberately leaves questions open and denies the possibility of absolute truth. American Protestants had long been hostile to the expert who alone was deemed capable of understanding the way a modern society worked. By the late nineteenth century, apparently, nothing was as it seemed. The American economy suffered wild fluctuations during this period which were bewildering to people used to the routines of agrarian life. Booms were followed by depressions, which consumed huge fortunes overnight; society seemed controlled by mysterious, unseen “market forces.” Sociologists also argued that human life was controlled by an economic dynamic that could not be discerned by the unskilled observer. Darwinists told people that existence was dominated by a biological struggle, unseen by the naked eye. Psychologists talked about the power of the hidden, unconscious mind. The Higher Critics insisted that even the Bible itself was not all that it claimed to be, and that the apparently simple text was actually composed of a bewildering number of different sources and written by authors of whom nobody had ever heard. Many Protestants, who expected their faith to bring them security, felt mental vertigo in this complicated world. They wanted a plain-speaking faith that everybody could understand.
But because by the end of the nineteenth century science and rationalism were the watchwords of the day, religion had to be rational too if it was to be taken seriously. Some Protestants were determined to make their faith logical and scientifically sound. It must be as clear, demonstrable, and objective as any other logos. Yet much modern science was too slippery for those in need of total certainty. The discoveries of Darwin and Freud came from unproven hypotheses, which seemed “unscientific” to the more traditional Protestants. Instead, they looked back to the early scientific vision of Francis Bacon, who had had no time for such guesswork. Bacon had believed that we could trust our senses absolutely, because they alone could provide us with sound information. He had been convinced that the world was organized on rational principles by an all-knowing God, and that the task of science was not to make wild conjectures but to catalog phenomena and to organize its findings into theories based on facts that were obvious to everyone. Protestants were also drawn to the philosophy of the eighteenthcentury Scottish Enlightenment, which had opposed the subjectivist epistemology of Kant, and claimed that truth was objective and available to any sincere human being of sound “common sense.”
This lust for certainty was an attempt to fill the void that lurked at the heart of the modern experience, the God-shaped hole in the consciousness of wholly rational human beings. The American Protestant Arthur Pierson wanted the Bible explained in “a truly impartial and scientific spirit.” The very title of his book, Many Infallible Proofs (1895), shows the type of certainty that he required from religion:
I like Biblical theology that... does not begin with an hypothesis and then wraps the facts and the philosophy to fit the crook of our dogma, but a Baconian system, which first gathers the teachings of the word of God, and then seeks to deduce some general law upon which the facts can be arranged.
It was an understandable desire, but the mythoi of the Bible had never pretended to be factual in the way that Pierson expected. Mythical language could not satisfactorily be translated into rational language without losing its raison d’etre. Like poetry, it contained meanings that were too elusive to be expressed in any other way. Once theology tried to turn itself into science, it could only produce a caricature of rational discourse, because these truths are not amenable to scientific demonstration. This spurious religious logos would inevitably bring religion into further disrepute.
The New Light Presbyterian seminary at Princeton, New Jersey, became the bastion of this scientific Protestantism.” The term “bastion” is appropriate, because the campaign for rational Christianity often used militant imagery, and seemed chronically on the defensive. In 1873, Charles Hodge, who held the chair of theology at Princeton, published the first volume of his two-volume work Systematic Theology. Again, the title reveals its scientific bias. The theologian’s task was not to look for a meaning beyond the words, Hodge insisted, but simply to arrange the clear teachings of scripture into a system of general truths. Every word of the Bible was divinely inspired and must be taken seriously; it should not be distorted by allegorical or symbolic exegesis. Charles’s son, Archibald A. Hodge, who took his father’s chair in 1878, published a defense of the literal truth of the Bible in The Princeton Review, with a young colleague, Benjamin Warfield. The article became a classic. All the stories and statements of the Bible were “absolutely errorless and binding for faith and obedience.”
Everything the Bible said was absolute “truth to the facts.” If the Bible said it was inspired, it was inspired, a circular argument that was anything but scientific. Such a view had no rational objectivity, was closed to any alternative, and coherent only within its own terms.
The Princeton reliance upon reason alone put it in line with modernity, but its claims were at variance with the facts.
“Christianity makes its appeal by right reason,” Warfield contended in a later article.
“It is solely by reasoning that it has come thus far on its way to its kingship. And it is solely by reasoning that it will put all its enemies under its feet. A cursory glance at Christian history shows that, as in all premodern religion, reason had been exercised only in a mythical context. Christianity had relied on mysticism, intuition, and liturgy rather than “right reason,” which had never been the “sole” appeal of Christian faith. Warfield’s militant imagery, which looks forward to confounding the “enemies” of the faith by reason, probably reflects a buried insecurity. If Christian truth was really so clear and self-evident, why did so many people refuse to accept it?
There was desperation in Princeton theology.
“Religion has to fight for its life against a large class of scientific men,” Charles Hodge declared in 1874. It was clearly worrying to Christians who took their stand on scientific reason when the theories of natural scientists seemed to contradict the literal meaning of the Bible. That was why Hodge wrote What Is Darwinism? (1874), the first sustained religious attack on the evolutionary hypothesis.
For Hodge, the Baconian, Darwinism was simply bad science. He had studied the Origin carefully and could not take seriously Darwin’s suggestion that the intricate design of nature had come into being by chance, independently of God. He revealed thereby the closed mind-set of the emergent Protestant fundamentalism: Hodge simply could not imagine that any belief that differed from his own was viable.
“To any ordinarily constituted mind,” he insisted, “it is absolutely impossible to believe that the eye is not the work of design.” Human beings had the duty to oppose “all spectacular hypotheses and theories”--such as Darwin’s--”which come into conflict with well-established truths.” It was a plea for “common sense”; God had given to the human mind “intuitions which are infallible,” and if Darwin contradicted these, his hypothesis was untenable and had to be rejected. The scientific Christianity that was being developed at Princeton fell between two stools. Hodge was trying to put a brake on reason in the old conservative way, and refused to allow it the free play that was characteristic of modernity.
But in reducing all mythical truth to the level of logos, he was flying in the face of the spirituality of the old world. His theology was bad science and inadequate religion.
But Princeton was not typical. Where the Hodges and Warfield were beginning to define faith as correct belief and putting great emphasis upon doctrinal orthodoxy, other Protestants, such as the veteran abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher (1813--87), were taking a more liberal line. Dogma, in Beecher’s view, was of secondary importance, and it was unchristian to penalize others for holding different theological opinions. Liberals were open to such modern scientific enterprises as Darwinism or the Higher Criticism of the Bible. For Beecher, God was not a distant, separate reality but was present in natural processes here below, so evolution could be seen as evidence of God’s ceaseless concern for his creation. More important than doctrinal correctness was the practice of Christian love. Liberal Protestants continued to emphasize the importance of social work in the slums and cities, convinced that they could, by their dedicated philanthropy, establish God’s Kingdom of justice in this world. It was an optimistic theology that appealed to the prosperous middle classes who were in a position to enjoy the fruits of modernity. By the 188os, this New Theology was taught in many of the main Protestant schools in the northern states.
Theologians such as John Bescon in Evolution and Religion (1897) and John Fiske in Through Nature to God (1899) were convinced that there could be no enmity between science and faith. Both spoke of the divine as immanent in the world; every throb in the pulsing life of the universe revealed God’s presence.
Throughout history, the spiritual perceptions of human beings had been evolving, and now humanity was on the brink of a new world, in which men and women would finally realize that there was no distinction between the so-called “supernatural” and the mundane. They would realize their profound affinity with God and live in peace with one another.
Like all millennial visions, this liberal theology was doomed to disappoint.
Instead of achieving greater harmony, American Protestants were discovering that they were profoundly at odds. Their differences threatened to tear the denominations apart. The chief bone of contention at the end of the nineteenth century was not evolution but the Higher Criticism. Liberals believed that even though the new theories about the Bible might undermine some of the old beliefs, in the long term they would lead to a deeper understanding of scripture.
But for the traditionalists, “Higher Criticism” was a scare term. It seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong with the modern industrialized society that was sweeping the old certainties away. By this time, popularizers had brought the new ideas to the general public, and Christians discovered to their considerable confusion that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, nor the Psalms by King David;
the Virgin Birth of Christ was a mere figure of speech, and the Ten Plagues of Egypt were probably natural disasters which had been interpreted later as miracles. In 1888, the British novelist Mrs.
Humphry Ward published Robert Elsmere, which told the story of a young clergyman whose faith was so undermined by the Higher Criticism that he resigned his orders and devoted his life to social work in the East End of London. The novel became a bestseller, which indicated that many could identify with the hero’s doubts. As Robert’s wife said, “If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.”
The rational bias of the modern world now made it impossible for many Western Christians to understand the role and value of myth. Faith had to be rational, mythos had to be logos. It was now very difficult to see truth as anything other than factual or scientific. There was a deep fear that these new biblical theories would undermine the basic structure of Christianity and leave nothing at all. Yet again, the void loomed.
“If we have no infallible standard,” argued the American Methodist clergyman Alexander McAlister, “we may as well have no standard at all.” Discount one miracle, and consistency demanded that you reject the lot. If Jonah did not really spend three days in the belly of a whale, did Christ really rise from the tomb? asked the Lutheran pastor James Remensnyder. Once biblical truth had been unraveled in this way, all decent values would disappear. For the Methodist preacher Leander W. Mitchell, the Higher Criticism was to blame for widespread drunkenness, infidelity, and agnosticism. The Presbyterian M. B. Lambdin saw it as the cause of the rising divorce rate, graft, corruption, crime, and murder.