The New Man for Our Time - Continued
The totality of Christian witness is fractured today because of the emergence of opposing parties, one of which may be called activist and the other pietist. There is no way of knowing what percentages these parties represent, and it would not be helpful to try to assemble figures, but the fact of separation is both undeniable and tragic. In one local church the division has been so sharp, and the consequent bad feeling so great, that seven hundred members have resigned.
By an activist is meant a person who holds that an attack on entrenched social evils is the only part of Christian life that is worth considering. The characteristic activist pickets, organizes marches, signs petitions, and engages in protests. By a pietist, on the other hand, is meant a person who emphasizes the life of prayer, of worship, of devotion, and of personal evangelism. Sometimes he is concerned primarily with the salvation of his own soul, valuing supremely his own peace of mind.
While there have always been both of these emphases in the Christian community, they have, in our generation, become alarmingly sharpened. So sharpened are they, indeed, that many communions have two rival groups looking at each other with mutual suspicion and condescension, each feeling superior to the other. Because some of the most vocal activists are clergymen, the current division appears sometimes to involve clergy on the one side and laymen on the other. The antagonism is increased by the often suppressed, but always incipient, anticlericalism. Many laymen believe, and even say openly, that the clergy whom they know have departed from the faith. Thus the divisions that were known and often deplored in an earlier generation, the divisions between rival sects and denominations, now seem mild by comparison. The tragedy is that two attitudes, both of which are valuable, have been harmed by mutual isolation. The problem, therefore, is that of a new isolationism.
We understand the Christian crisis better if we realize that the division within the general Christian community is in part a reflection of a division that occurs in the total population. Dag Hammarskjöld was speaking more accurately than he could have known, when in an address at Cambridge University in June, 1960, he said, "The human world is today as never before split into two camps, each of which understands the other as the embodiment of falsehood and itself as the embodiment of truth."