Our concern here is to explore the moral and religious dimensions of the human personality, a topic in the symposium series on the place of the person in modern societies. Morality and religion, as we well know, are highly complex and dynamic phenomena. The assumptions and concepts preliminary to our explorations could well engage all our time and energy, and the qualification, "in modern society," vastly complicates the endeavor. For the modern achievement invites, perhaps compels, us to ask once more: Is the religious proclivity intrinsic, or merely accidental, in "human nature"?

The present paper, however, takes Christianity in particular, rather than religion in general, as its focus : Christianity viewed primordially as biblical faith. The reasons for this definition will emerge. Secondly, this paper addresses the interface between Christianity and modernity, here understood as "societal modernization"¹ as it emerged in the Western experience. Thus the topic of this symposium, "the moral and religious dimensions of personality," will be treated in the specific instance of Christianity and modernity in the West. In effect, the various ‘churches" of "Christendom" will be questioned by "primordial biblical faith,"² on the one hand, and the pluralizing of human experience by modernity, on the other.

Christianity was a necessary though not a sufficient factor in the development of Western individualism. Thus for historical, as well as for intrinsic reasons, relationships between Christianity and modern individualism are burdened with ambiguities. Modernization, as we shall see, tends to "individualize" personality. Historically, a defining moment in the unfolding of Western individualism was the sixteenth century Protestant Reformation in the West. In the following pages I offer some reflections on the Reformation "prism" of Western individualism, and its bearing on the jeopardy of the self in "postmodern" society.

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

It is useful at the outset to distinguish broadly the three elements comprising religion: its social and cultural forms; its personal, subjective intuitions; and finally the religious object (Deity or the ultimate). Analytically, thus sequenced, these elements might be ranked on a scale extending from the material and empirically observable to the Ineffable. Religious social forms as forms are observable like any other social behavior and subject to the "laws" that govern social life. Personal behavior, overtly expressed, is likewise observable, but intuitive prehensions are not. The Ultimate, the Holy, the Divine is ineffable, beyond empirical observation.

All humans are religious in the sense that as humans we confront Mystery at the boundaries of our existence. Regarding these boundaries we are compelled existentially to make judgments that shape our life and destiny. Whether theistic, agnostic, or atheistic, such assessments, are all "religious:" i.e., they must be made without the benefit of the evidence and proofs that we rely upon in the visible world. To be sure, uncertainty pervades the empirical order as well, while various forms of evidence operate in the domain of belief and unbelief. "O taste and see that the Lord is good," a Psalmist (34:8) recommends.

Analogies, metaphors, symbols and myths are the modes of religious apprehension, of "God talk." With the ineffable lying outside the domain of the empirical observation that informs human experience otherwise, "faith" and "witness" are the basic biblical idioms of religious experience and communication. Nonetheless, biblical writers at times argue that the "invisible" is to be inferred self-evidently from the "visible." Only the "fool" says in his heart, "there is no God" (Psalm 14:1). Yet, surprisingly enough, these writers, at other times accord an honest agnosticism a validity of its own (cf., e.g., Romans 2:14). Thus, a broad, rather than a restrictive, definition of "religion" is implied.

The "subject" or "agent" in religious experience is the individual human being. Strictly speaking, groups are not "subjects" of religious experience. William James, the American psychologist/philosopher, held that religion is "the experiences of individual men in their solitude." The experiences of mystics can be invoked in support of this definition. On the other hand, the human "person" is socially constituted, as are the symbols and language of religious experience. Even the hermit, who withdraws from society, is nonetheless a social being. Accordingly, Emile Durkheim viewed religion as essentially social. Indeed, he proposed that the very object of religion is none other than the human collectivity. There is no effect without a cause, he reasoned. Cult clearly has a strengthening effect on the worshippers. Given the nonexistence of the Deity in Durkheim’s scheme, the object, the "cause," operative in the cult is the force that the collectivity exercises on the consciousness of the worshippers.

In historical practice, tension between the mystical and the social elements in religion have been endemic. The sociocultural manifestations are acutely vulnerable: to idolatry, on the one hand, and to political abuse, on the other. In the former instance, the symbol tends to replace the Ineffable as the object of devotion. In the latter, political rule invokes the legitimation of the Ineffable. Invoking the divine or cosmic order inspires awe, thus reinforcing the claims of the ruler. Arend T. van Leeuwen describes this proclivity of rulers to invoke the divine order as the "ontocratic temptation," the notion of the state as ‘‘ the embodiment of the cosmic totality.’’ He describes the four earliest "centres of Eurasian civilization" as ontocratic. Historically he traces "the irresistible power of the ontocratic ideology." Even the West, where this conception was challenged by the modern democratic movements, "has only with great difficulty contrived to escape its blinding spell." Religiously reinforced ethnic and nationality conflicts around the world today illustrate the "radio-active" power of autocratic deformations.

Here we focus on the turbulent interplay of the personal, the social and the ineffable in the saga of biblical religion. "Man shall not see me and live," Yahweh declares at a critical revelatory moment (Exodus 33:20). The battle against idolatry, that yearning to materialize the Deity, the effort, in effect, to circumvent the uncertainties of faith, became a central feature of the Hebrew experience. Yet, on the other hand, Yahweh’s rule creates and is somehow embodied in the life of, the Exodus community. The vision materializes in temple and monarchy. Land, people, sovereignty become the ideal, the goal--to be a sovereign people among the nations, secure in its own polity.

But as Walter Brueggemann, a noted Old Testament scholar recently pointed out, "The temple-royal-prophetic model of the people of God is not the only model evident in the Old Testament, nor is it self-evidently normative. The Davidic monarchy lasted only 400 years (until 587 B.C.E), never to be replicated thereafter. There had been the prior period, from Moses to David (1250-1000 B.C.E.), when a different model obtained. Indeed, Brueggeman might be asked, why not reach back to Abraham for the beginning of the first period?

But then, after 587 B.C.E., a third model emerged in the Exile and the Dispersion (diaspora), with the latter condition continuing down to our own time. The "collapse and failure" of the royal model "generated in ancient Israel enormous pluralism and vitality, as the community searched for new and viable models of life and faith" (131) . But as Brueggeman notes further, "Christians know very little about this period, pay little attention to it, and care little for it" (133). And as we shall see presently, this is due to factors that are significant, though hardly flattering. Nevertheless, the diaspora experience contributed importantly to the experience of the Christian movement (cf. 1 Peter)

Exilic and post-exilic Judaism, reduced to marginality and cultural pluralism, had to forge a new, and spiritually more profound, identity. This meant a "recovery of memory and rootage and connectedness," as well as "the intense practice of hope." The post-exilic community became "an intensely textual community, ... busy formulating the text; so it is widely believed that the period around the exile is precisely the period of canonization, the making of normative literature". Hence a "textless Jew is no Jew at all, sure to be co-opted and sure to disappear into the woodwork, and my sense is that a textless church is increasingly no church" (135). Thus Bruegqeman and the church of which he speaks is the church in America.

As John Bright points out, there is a further corollary, important to us here. The collapse of the Jewish state, followed by exile, "cleared the way for the possibility that faith, divorced from state and state cult, might live on in the hearts of individual men. "The notion of the elect people thus becomes far more individualized a matter than it ever had been before. Individual men of the humiliated residue of the nation who at all costs hear the Word of God and obey his will--these are the people of God" (123). Bright here echoes the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, recalling especially the latter’s espousal of individual responsibility. Ezekiel in effect, announces a new era, versus earlier traditions of corporate guilt. Hereafter "the soul that sins shall die" (18:14). Nonetheless Bright, at the same time, cautions against an understanding of individualism that ignores the corporate nature of Israel’s faith.

The Hebrew experience unfolds in three stages: pre-political, political, and post-political. Suggestive parallels appear in the histories of Greece and Rome. Monarchies and empires arose out of more primitive tribal fragments. These flourish for a time, and with their decline, cosmopolitan outlooks emerge (Stoicism) that look with apathy at royal particularism. Historians have traced the rise, prosperity, and decline of nations and empires. The decline of imperial rule may result in the collapse of order, and historical examples can be cited accordingly. But it is also the case that imperial pacification generalizes experiences, symbols, and values that in turn foster the growth of the personal autonomy that tends to undermine coercive order.

In a footnote, Brueggeman observes that "an analogue exists between the royal temple establishment in ancient Israel and the Constantinian establishment of the church." George Mendenhall, another Old Testament scholar, in a slightly earlier work, effectively elaborates Brueggeman’s footnote. Mendenhall sees King David as the "Old Testament Constantine." Where Brueggeman elaborates on the post-monarchic developments, Mendenhall, echoing the discomfort of the Prophet Samuel when Israel demanded a king, sees in the rise of the monarchy "the dissolution of religion into politics." Deity, he argues, is manifest, not in the exhibitions of power, as in the ancient monarchies surrounding Israel, but "in the qualities of personality."

In the Jewish experience, the dominant tendency has been to treat stage two, the political, as normative. This is evident not only in the Hebrew canonical texts, but also in the assimilation of the royal imagery by the figure of the Messiah who is to come. But both the prophetic vision and history move definitively beyond the national to the universal, and by the same token, from the corporate to the personal. At best, then, spiritual confusion surrounds the creation of the modern state of Israel. Whatever that state’s claims to political legitimacy, within the tradition itself theological appeal appears anachronistic.

The parallels between Judaism and Christianity as historical phenomena are striking indeed, and presumably instructive as well. Both began as scattered, marginal movements and eventually achieved sovereign nationhood. The most dramatic example in the latter instance was the fourth century establishment (Constantine/Theodosius) of Christianity as the imperial religion. Of greater consequence, however, may well have been the royal adoption of Christianity by one European chieftan after another, from Armenia and Georgia in the East to Britain in the West. From the fourth through the eleventh century, C.E., the peoples of Europe developed into nations under the aegis of Christianity.

In some instances, where the church became the symbol of the nation in the face of alien political rule, this amalgamation has remained politically potent to this very day. In other instances, however, notably in Western Europe, where politics have come of age, so to speak, Christianity has become largely a spent force. In the United States, described by Seymour Lipset as the "the first new nation," Christianity still displays greater vitality. But there, too, it is becoming increasingly privatized, and correspondingly displays public uncertainty.

Thus the three stages through which Judaism passed appear paralleled, perhaps indeed recapitulated, by Christian history: pre-political, political, and post-political. Analysts increasingly note the similarities, but also the differences, between stages one and three in Western Christianity. In important respects, Christians in modern, pluralistic societies, have more in common with the pre-Constantinian era than with the many centuries of medieval Christendom. Among Western churches, however, the tendency has been strong to cling to the trappings of establishment, consciously, and, even more, unconsciously. But if ancient Israel, nurtured by the hope of a "Promised Land," understandably clamored for monarchy, there is nothing in the Gospel that anticipates, or warrants, a politically corporate Christendom.

Reality-construction and institution-building are fundamental processes in human experience. As populations grow, activity scales extend, and interdependencies multiply, how is the pool of the common pictures and expectations that we carry in our heads, and that alone make common action possible, to be reconstituted accordingly? Between the tribalism characteristic of the childhood of our race and the democracy and personalism we cherish in the modern world lie centuries of coercive pacification and institution-building. Hence the question: must societies, like children, pass through a coercive stage of reality construction, to prepare them for autonomous action in adulthood? Were the Hebrew monarchy and the royal/imperial establishment of Christianity in that sense inevitable as stages of growth and development.

Exploration of these fascinating hints lie outside the scope of this brief paper. It is enough here to note the parallels between the three-stage unfolding of Jewish and Christian history, despite the differences in historical detail. Thus, whereas captivity, exile and the destruction of temple and monarchy mark the end of stage two in the Jewish experience, the break between the second and third stages in the Christian instance is more difficult to tie to a single decisive event. Nonetheless in both instances the transitions between stages and "models" entailed periods of historical development. The sixteenth century Protestant Reformation in Europe signaled the (beginning of the) end of medieval Christendom, the period here seen as the Christian equivalent of the "royal-temple establishment" of ancient Israel. And so I turn now to the stirrings of personal faith and agency in that epoch.

THE REFORMATION

Generations of Western historians have thought in terms of ancient, medieval, and modern historical eras. Renaissance and Reformation were the transformations that marked the transition from medieval to modern times. More recently, empirically-minded scholars have taken the revolutions of the eighteenth century as the initiation of the modern era--the political, industrial, scientific, and technological revolutions and their interactions. On the other hand, one can extend the perspective in the other direction, to explore the origins of both Renaissance and Reformation in the developments that led to them.

Whatever the perspective, societal differentiation and personal individuation are the correlative processes that increasingly dissolve and supplant the ancient solidarities of blood and soil. Neither process advances far without the other. And both arise in the continuous and complex interplay of ideas and events, likewise neither without the other. And by any reckoning, the Protestant Reformation was indeed a defining moment in the rise of Western individualism, and if we were to evaluate, we would have to add, for better and for worse. Here we are interested in the light that the Reformation sheds on our exploration of the moral and religious dimensions of personality in the modern era.

Individualism in the Reformation is associated most dramatically with Martin Luther, the pioneer reformer. As the late Roland Bainton, a leading Reformation historian, pointed out, Luther’s individualism consisted simply in the insistence "that every man must answer for himself to God." Contrary to the widespread view that the sacraments of the church were intrinsically effective, Luther declared that "the sacrament depends for its efficacy upon the faith of the recipient."

Thus Luther’s individualism is not "the individualism of the Renaissance, seeking the fulfillment of the individual’s capacities; it is not the individualism of the late scholastics, who on metaphysical grounds declared that reality consists only of individuals, and that aggregates like Church and state are not entities by simply the sum of their components" (Bainton, 141). Indeed, when the German peasants translated Luther’s message of Christian liberty into actions of overt rebellion, Luther took a conservative position, calling on the princes to suppress them. Rather Luther’s individualism was essentially religious.

A dramatic moment in Luther’s emerging individualism was his famous appearance before the Reichstag in Worms in April, 1521, the assembly of the Emperor and prince electors of the Holy Roman Empire. Summoned to recant his ostensibly heretical writings, he replied, "Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other--my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen" (Bainton, 185).

Like other reformers, Luther set out to renew, not to divide the Church. But once the originally unintended break with Rome occurred (his papal excommunication came in 1520), he confronted a new situation. Where in the church is authority now to be vested? Indeed, what and where is the church? Those questions had political connotations as well. Political order in medieval times presumed religious uniformity as its foundation. But while Luther’s theology pointed toward religious disestablishment, to Luther, and his contemporaries, disestablishment was not an option. In a sense, then, Luther was a tragic figure. His appeal to conscience at Worms was a leap, as it were, into the twentieth century. In his "ontocratic" view of society and polity, on the other hand, he remained thoroughly medieval. It is hardly an overstatement to suggest that his subsequent career was shaped by his efforts, in the end inevitably unsuccessful, to harmonize his individualism with his ontocracy.

The problem came into even sharper focus in the early Swiss Reformation, led by Luther’s contemporary, Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich. Though the capital of the canton by that name, Zurich belonged to the diocese of Constance, some thirty miles to the northeast, in German territory. Zwingli was installed as the pastor of the Great Muenster, the central church in Zurich, on New Year, 1519. Less grounded in medieval theology and more of a Renaissance humanist than Luther, in his preaching, teaching, and writing he emerged as an advocate of reform. Public controversy over the new Reformation preaching in Zurich broke out in the early 1520s. At the urging of Zwingli, the mayor and city council convened a public colloquy in late January, 1523, to determine whether the new preaching could be tolerated.

Normally, of course, the convening of such a gathering was an episcopal prerogative. And while churches and regions found themselves at various positions and stages in relation to the growing unrest, in some places to the north the break with Rome had already occurred. The Bishop of Constance, who not surprisingly declined the invitation to attend this canonically irregular assembly, did send his vicar. Early in the proceedings, the latter intervened to challenge the legitimacy of the event. Only a duly convened universal Christian council, he argued, could authorize changes in church order.

Zwingli was ready with his answer: "Here in these rooms," he argued (there were six hundred people present} "is a Christian assembly. For I hope that most among us, moved by the will and love of God, wish to hear, to promote and to know the truth, which God Almighty will not deny us, insofar as we desire to honor him in genuine faith and heart. For the Lord says, ‘Where two or there are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20.)" (495; tr. mine).

Never mind the fact that Zwingli’s appeal to this text is exegetically dubious! This was a political, not a religious gathering. Ecclesiologically, however, in citing this text, Zwingli was somehow appealing to the neglected primordial conception that the church in its fullness, the "whole church," is fully present where people gather with Christ in the midst. In that sense, the church is realized existentially from below or within rather than sacramentally from above.

Zwingli, like Luther, was a tragic figure, and for the same reason. Confronted with political instability after the break with Rome, he, like Luther, yielded the church’s public order to government control. Zwingli died in the Battle of Cappel in 1531, a battle between the Catholic and Protestant forces in the Swiss Confederacy. However, it is analytically useful to compare these two scenes, Worms and Zurich. In the former instance, the focus is on the autonomy of the individual; in the latter, on the "autonomy" of the "autonomous" assembly of individuals, under Christ. Both perspectives, however, appear in the projects of both reformers.

The reformers’ conceptions did not emerge at once, and in advance, as a detailed blueprint of the future. Rather, as is typically the case, insights and events advanced dialectically. The Renaissance preceded, and in important respects prepared the way for, the Reformation. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century facilitated lay participation in the public discourse. Pamphleteering became a powerful medium. Bible reading and discussion groups met among urban craftsmen. Debates once confined to clerics and academics spread more widely among the populace. Peasants were in motion, and the stirrings of early nationalism had begun.

While historians stress the urban nature of the Reformation, and Luther was born into what we today call an "upwardly mobile" family (Erikson), the north and central German lands were still largely feudal. By contrast, the Reformation milieu in Zurich was rather more urban. Zwingli’s collaborators included lay humanist scholars, who in turn were in dialogue with Bible reading circles among the city’s artisans. Zwingli’s appeal to the self-authenticating character of the disputation assembly in February, 1523, was thus more than empty rhetoric. As doubts concerning papal claims grew, other possible modes of church polity had obviously been considered. Much like developments in eastern Europe today, after the first steps were taken in the 1520s, events rushed forward in unanticipated ways. Religious and political institutions, as we noted, had been closely intertwined. A challenge to the authority structure in the former domain threatened social and political order as well. Accordingly by late 1523, Zwingli submitted the manner and rate of church order reform to the city government. And while the city-state of Zurich, the Mayor and bicameral City Council, was eager to defend its independence from Pope and Emperor alike, church autonomy appeared clearly to jeopardize the political order. In effect, Zwingli, like Luther, remained medieval in his view of society and church. Accordingly, by 1525 he came to defend and perpetuate practices (briefly even the Catholic Mass) which in his earlier preaching he had challenged.

At that point, as so often in revolutionary movements, disagreement broke out in Zwingli’s own camp. As we saw, Zwingli himself for a time entertained the possibility that the church consists of believers, ready to commit their lives accordingly, and thus does not automatically embrace a whole populace. Thus the faith community must be self-governing, independent from the political community. When it became clear that Zwingli opted to retain the medieval model of compulsory membership in a universal, state-maintained "church," a circle of his collaborators concluded that the time had come to act. On a January night, in 1527, fourteen persons met in a dwelling behind the Great Muenster in Zurich to decide what to do. A chronicle of the time describes the scene:

This scene, to people reared in the great churches of Christendom, whether Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic, must appear scandalous if not sacrilegious even today. In medieval perspective the above action meant not mere sacrilege but social and political subversion as well. Thus Steven Ozment, a contemporary Reformation historian, observes: "To the people of Reformation Europe no specter was more fearsome than a society in which the desires of individuals eclipsed their sense of social duty" (Ozment, 177). Indeed the response of the ruling authorities to this initiative resembled the response of totalitarian regimes of the present century to autonomous action in what we now call civil society.

This scene in Zurich in 1525 was rapidly reenacted elsewhere, from the Alps to the North Sea and from Vienna and Moravia to the Atlantic, sometimes by contagion, at other times spontaneously. Nor was the fear of insurrection an idle one. The peasants were in revolt, and in one instance, in Muenster (Westphalia) a rebaptizing urban commune seized power militarily. Europe was in ferment. Regimes felt threatened. Conflict was breaking out between regimes that accepted and regimes that opposed the Protestant cause. Regimes that accepted the Reformation felt threatened by the radicals, not only because these challenged their authority, but also because the appearance of these movements on their terrain put the reformers on the defensive vis-a-vis their Catholic challengers.

In Zurich, the municipal government quickly outlawed the new movement described above, and banned its leaders. When this did not suffice, harsher measures, namely executions, followed. Indeed, though with differing arguments and measures, both Protestant and Catholic authorities moved against the radicals--"Anabaptists," they were called--and in the following decades many hundreds were executed throughout northwestern and central Europe--drowned, beheaded, burned at the stake, often following brutal torture.

In recent decades these martyrs for the faith have been exhumed (symbolically) as the archival records of the sixteenth century in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and the Czech lands have been systematically published for the first time. Thus, likewise for the first time, historians are "listening" to the radicals in their own words and terms. Since World War II literally hundreds of dissertations and other monographs have mined these materials. As a result the history of the sixteenth century Reformation era is being rewritten.³

What did the Zurich radicals seek? To begin with the above account, two important affirmations, common among Protestants, are readily evident in their actions: first, is the disavowal of papal and sacramental authority, enunciated by Luther; and second, the (correlative) highly personal nature of religious reality. Here the radicals stood on common Reformation ground. But with the baptisms that January night in Zurich, the ways of the "magisterial" (Luther, Zwingli, et al.) and the "radical" Reformation (Williams) parted. Having made the above two affirmations, they proposed, in effect, that the church is experientially, existentially rather than primarily sacramentally mediated; that the gathering in Christ is therefore self-authenticating; that membership is voluntary, limited to believers; that correspondingly the church is free from civil control; that baptism follows confession of faith, and hence is not administered to infants; that accepting Christ means commitment to radical discipleship, including renunciation of the sword.

This is merely a listing of some salient features of this scene in Zurich, not a creedal inventory. Clearly the movement that grew from this event was a fragmentary endeavor, organized around issues of dissent, hence truncated; moreover, because quickly driven underground, soon isolated, impoverished, ingrown. Even so, for decades, the radicals repeatedly sought to be heard, and indeed dozens of colloquies between establishment clergy and the dissenters were held from the Alps to the North Sea. Though many of these movements were suppressed or died out, an unbroken historical line survives in our own era, in three versions--Mennonites, Amish, and the communal branch known as the Hutterites.

Historically the Zurich event signaled the emergence of what has come to be known as the "free church" movement in the modern world, movements such as the Pilgrims, in part, the Puritans, the Baptists and Congregationalists, indeed the principles of religious voluntaryism and the separation of church and state, the "free church" in a "free society," increasingly enshrined in modernizing state constitutions around the world. And beyond this, as historians like A. D. Lindsay and Franklin Littell have shown, the dialoqical form of free church life was of seminal importance in the rise of Anglo—Saxon democracy. The dialogue that characterized the life of free churches blazed the trail, as it were, for dialogue in local political assemblies.³

In medieval times monarchs or rulers had "subjects." Without political voice, people were simply the objects of political rule. When the "subjects" of autocratic rule become citizens in a democratic order, the term is inverted to take on an active meaning. The following anecdote illustrates the point. On June 4, 1989, the day of the first-stage election on Poland’s contemporary road to independence, I happened to arrive in Poland, along with colleagues from my university, to participate in a conference. Solidarnosc candidates, as we know, won handily in that election. Days of exuberance in Poland followed. The people were arising from decades of political subjection, of being voiceless objects of alien political rule. "We’ve become political subjects!" our hosts exulted, as we gathered around the TV nightly for the evening news--subjects in the modern active, participatory sense.

Something analogous occurred in the religious domain in that little conventicle in Zurich in January, 1525. Medieval society was not without its virtues. But in neither the political nor the religious spheres were people conceived as active subjects, as autonomous agents, sustaining the common life. Indeed, as the Roman Catholic Vatican II Council implicitly and belatedly recognized (see esp. the Council Documents, "Dignitatis Humanae" and "Gaudium et Spes," Abbott) the church had lagged behind the political process in recognizing their members as fully participating "subjects." Repeatedly the Council documents note and affirm the growth of individual personal dignity and the claims of conscience in the modern world. The church is the whole believing community, not primarily the hierarchy.

Meanwhile, however, the "free church" itself has been flawed in the opposite direction, in its sometimes unrestrained subjectivity. This is evident in the loss of authoritative, salvific "substance" in the churches; in schismatic sectarian excess; in vulnerability to social fads. We already met Walter Brueggeman’s cri de coeur--"a textless church is increasingly no church."

Persons familiar with our western sociology of religion will readily recognize, in this contrast between the "high churches" and the "free churches" of Christendom, Ernst Toeltsch’s seminal distinction between Kirche and Sekte. In the former instance "the "Church is an institution which has been endowed with grace and salvation as a result of the work of Redemption, it can afford to ignore the need for subjective holiness for the sake of the objective treasures of grace and redemption." The sect, on the other hand, "is a voluntary society, composed of strict and definite Christian believers bound to each other by the fact that all have experienced ‘the new birth.’"

To these two forms of Christian association, Troeltsch added a third modality, namely mysticism. In this mode, "the world of ideas which had hardened into formal worship and doctrine is transformed into a purely personal and inward experience..." But he then maintains that from the beginning "these three forms were foreshadowed, and all down through the centuries to the present day, wherever religion is dominant, they still appear alongside of one another, while among themselves they are strangely and variously interwoven and interconnected" (Troeltsch, 993) Or as he says earlier in the same work (733) the "germ" of each of these forms is to be found in the New Testament itself. The "future task," Troeltsch concludes, specifically for Protestants, but surely for all three expressions, lies in "the mutual interpenetration of the three chief sociological categories, which must be united with a structure that will reconcile them all."

Published originally in 1911, this work has been importantly surpassed by events and scholarship. Yet it retains its seminal significance. Troeltsch rightly perceived the emergent importance of individualism in the modern world, and in the end directly addressed the problem confronting us here. "The Christian Ethos alone possesses, in virtue of its personalistic Theism, a conviction of personality and individuality, based on metaphysics, which no Naturalism and no Pessimism can disturb. That personality which, arising above the natural order of life, is only achieved through a union of the will and the depths of being with God, alone transcends the finite, and alone can defy. Without this support, however, every kind of individualism evaporates into thin air" (p. l004f, emphasis added).

The "evaporation" of the individual self is precisely the "postmodern"⁴ experience and concept that we now confront. The story is told vividly by Kenneth Gergen, a social psychologist, in a book entitled The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, published this year. Gergen proposes that the older "romantic" (passionate) and more recent "modern" (rational) conceptions of the self-being supplanted by the "postmodern" (relational). Gergen addresses the fragmentation of modern life, the multiplicity of roles and relationships in which we find ourselves. These overtax our ability to order and to integrate. This "fragmenting and populating of self-experience" results in what he calls "multiphrenia," that is, "the splitting of the individual into a multiplicity of self-investments" (Gergen, 73f).

Suggestions of this sort, of course, have been appearing for some years. Students of the modern industrial and political revolutions long since described "the rise of a new type of society, one in which moral egoism and social atomism were the dominant qualities" (Nisbet, 43). In the mid-1970s, Ralph Turner reported on a shift from institution to impulse as the focus in self-definition. "The articulation of real selves with social structure," Turner still held, however, "should be a major link in the functioning and change of societies." Nearly a decade earlier, near the end of the turbulent sixties, Bertram Brown, then Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, observed:

What distinguishes Gergen’ s "postmodern" view, however, is the claim that our conventional conception of "a self independent of the relations in which he or she is imbedded" is passé. Instead this "social saturation brings with it a general loss in our assumption of true and knowable selves.. .We come to be aware that each truth about ourselves is a construction of the moment, true only for a given time and within certain relationships. One ceases to believe in a self independent of the relations in which he or she is embedded" (l6f). Individuals, he writes later "themselves cannot ‘mean’ anything; their actions are nonsensical until coordinated with the actions of others" (242). Most consequential of all, for "the postmodern there is no transcendent reality, rationalilty or value system with which to rule between competitors" (253).

As the justification for belief in the notion of "voluntary decision-making" deteriorates, "the concept of the individual who chooses ‘wrong’ loses tenability. To be sure, individuals break the law, but from the postmodern perspective, such actions should not be attributed to the individual alone but to the array of relationships of which he or she is a part. The crime is but a manifestation of these relationships--the ordinary complicities of daily life" (244).

Without the support of "a union of the will and the depths of being with God," Troeltsch concluded, as we saw, "Every kind of individualism evaporates into thin air." Did Troeltsch thus implicitly anticipate and preempt Gergen’s phantasmagoria, or was he obsoletely mired in a "modern" or "romantic" (pre-modern) world view? Obviously his language and idioms are no longer fully current. But what of his basic postulate?

Descriptively, even analytically, Gergen’s diagnosis is hardly to be gainsaid. Great numbers of Americans (and others in advanced societies) doubtless struggle with the identity diffusion that he poignantly describes. And the dissolution of traditional communal solidarities is in many respects irreversible. Thus the integrative functions formerly provided by solidary groups fall increasingly on the individual "ego" or "self." And for this our culture is poorly prepared. Moreover the very transformations that permit and facilitate the emergence of this personal autonomy tend to weaken the communal matrices that nurture such autonomy.

Since the "postmodern" situation is unprecedented, rational conceptions of personal autonomy, inherited from pre-modern social stages, provide only limited guidance. Ironically, on the other hand, as the human "spirit" has triumphed over the determinisms of nature, our concept of human being has become increasingly deterministic. And the more deterministic our views, the less we resonate to the metaphysics of a Troeltsch. Thus we become fair game for Gergen’s nihilism. Gergen’s scenario of the "post-modern saturated self" is reminiscent of Jesus’s parable of the swept room. An evil spirit leaves its victim, journeying forth in search of a new abode. Finding none, it returns, and finds its former room empty and swept. The spirit reenters, invites seven other spirits more wicked than itself, to join. "The final condition of that man," Jesus concludes, "is worse than the first."

As academics and intellectuals we doubtless are fated to expect more of intellect and reason in human affairs than they can deliver. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the great social and political transformations--and dislocations--of our era have been "spiritual" in origin. For this we must accept responsibility and make amends. Even a bare outline of the tasks ahead will require a treatise in its own right. But to add a bit of closing specificity to this already too lengthy and rambling account, I note the following.

Until recent centuries, in Western thought, some version or semblance of Platonic idealism prevailed: appearances were judged to be imperfect renditions of reality. Reasoning, speculative thought, contemplation--these modes of inquiry therefore were thought to be superior to sense observations in the quest for truth or for insight into the nature of things. On the surface this comported well, with both the "ontocratic" conception of sociopolitical reality (see above) and the "sedimentation" of Biblical faith in priestcraft and sacrament.

As we all know, in recent centuries, the above order has been reversed. We are now instructed to take as "real" only objects or events that can be observed, measured, and counted. The emancipation that we call modernity (and post-modernity?) is the result. The "common people," to use a colloquial idiom, intuitively sense "on which side of their bread is buttered." Metaphysicians and believers increasingly appear to be anachronistic. Taking "this world" seriously has done far more to improve "the human condition" than millennia of dreaming about an "other world."

End of history? Hardly. To the contrary, both the grandeur and misery of the human being has become more acute. Much is drastically redefined when we come to terms with the distinction between husk and kernel in Biblical faith. The inner thrust, the "kernel," in fact precedes and illumines, but also transcends and judges, the modern experience. We desperately need a creative dialogue between the explosive vision of Biblical Faith and the empirical disciplines regarding both human being and the cosmos planes.⁵ The confusion of the historical, cultural husks for the living kernel of both Bible and "church," a confusion to which both protagonists and antagonists of "religion" have contributed profusely, must be penetrated.

The parable of the swept room, to which I referred above lays bare the modern (and postmodern) experience. The "scandal" of faith (I Corinthians 1,23) will not, cannot, disappear, nor the need for believers and unbelievers to collaborate respectfully in the human enterprise. But the ground on which they now meet is needlessly encumbered, and in the era before us, we must clear the field. We can then address the paradigm choice, Troeltsch or Gergen, in its real saliency.

* Symposium on The moral and religious dimensions of human personality, Institute of Philosophy, Tbilisi, October, 1991.

1 "Societal modernization," as employed here, is a nominal category, referring to the transformations of traditional kin- and locality-based social systems since the eighteenth century into the highly differentiated, Large scale societies of the twentieth century. Efforts to define modern and modernization in realist terms, though informative, have been unsuccessful. The literature is vast. For a recent informative survey see Turner.

2 I am uncertain as to the provenance of this expression, "primordial biblical faith." The concept is to be distinguished from the notion of "primitivism" that has haunted Christian renewal endeavors. Primitivism, in those contexts, implies that the early church was somehow pure, and that that purity can and must be somehow recovered. Primordial refers to" something original or fundamental.. .a first principle" (Webster’s Third International Dictionary), hence to the primal energy of the faith, experienced directly by the believer.

3 The literature is too vast cite here. A seminal essay, by a leading promulgator of this research enterprise, was "The Anabaptist Vision," a presidential address to the American Society of Church History in 1943 by H. S. Bender. A classic survey of the early yield of Anabaptist studies was Williams’ The Radical Reformation. Durnbaugh’s The Believers’ Church links the early history to the broader variety of free church manifestations. My own acquaintance with the radical reformation stems from my sociological study of radical reformation origins in sixteenth century Switzerland, a doctoral dissertation submitted at the University of Zurich in 1953 (Peachey).

4 Whether the distinction between "modern" and "postmodern" is useful in terms other than nominal remains to be seen. Admittedly the differences between social corollaries of the early industrial revolution and today’s technology are enormous. Here, too, the literature is vast. The Gergen study is sufficient for the purpose of this paper.

5 For a beginning, see Moulyn; but cf. Konner.