A Palid Christian Humanism
Phillips Brooks was everyone's pastor! The shy, towering 19th century Episcopal rector of Boston's Trinity Church and briefly the Bishop of Massachusetts wrote the widely acclaimed book on preaching (Lectures on Preaching - Lyman Beecher Lectures, 1877) that is still used in some seminaries today. He is probably best known for writing the sentimental and theologically shallow hymn, "O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Historian Gillis Harp, in his outstanding biography (Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism), shows how Brooks helped guide the Episcopal Church into the liberal Protestant way of all mainline denominations. His Broad Church convictions were based on a "sunnier determination of human nature" that refused to identify with either Reformation Anglicanism (based on the historic Anglican formularies) nor the Catholic revival of the 1830’s. R. R. Reno describes Brook’s theology as "a pallid Christian humanism.” Brooks died in 1893, but the Broad Church influence continues to this day, making the way for all novel, non-creedal, theological speculations.
Oh, how absolutely critical it is to begin theology, the study of God, with an accurate picture of human nature, a biblical anthropology! Depending on how we view ourselves quite literally determines our view of God. Either we think we are basically pretty good with a few smudges that can be addressed with regular church attendance and try-harder religion, or we are sure that we are spiritually dead in our trespasses and sins and by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2). One leads us to a grandfatherly distant God who occasionally shows up to clean our face with the dinner napkin tied around his neck. The other leads us to a Savior who has the power and the righteousness to bring spiritually dead people to life. If moralism - a pallid Christian humanism - fills the pews and pulpits of Episcopal and Anglican Churches today, the popular rector of Trinity Church Boston is at least partly to blame.
What was lost in Broad churchmanship was perhaps the biggest contribution of the English Reformation: the bondage of the human will. This biblical understanding obviously challenges the sunnier picture of human nature, and is the foundation on which all the other doctrines of our Protestant faith depend. Without an understanding of the un-free we lack a proper understanding of ourselves and we cannot appreciate the character of God or the cost to him for our salvation. The Bible in its rightful place of authority and salvation by a righteousness that is not our own are gigantic markers of the Reformation, but understanding who we are “by nature” (Eph 2:3), may be the Reformation’s most important rediscovery.
When we speak about an un-free will we are obviously not saying that we are puppets or that some kind of determinism is at play. It should be obvious that we have free wills to raise our right hands and wiggle our fingers, and to select an ice cream flavor. Whether the human will is free or un-free goes to the question of salvation and how we enter the Kingdom of God. Either we are saved because we willfully choose him (men and women in search of God, with all eyes closed and heads bowed), or our “wills” are so in bondage to sin that our only hope for help is outside of ourselves (God in search of us). Is the story of salvation about men and women climbing a ladder to reach God, or about God coming down to us on our level (or, heaven forbid!, some half way meeting: God helps those who help themselves)? It is absolutely true what the old hymn says best: "I sought the Lord and afterward I knew; he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me.”
The Bible teaches human helplessness in sin and the glory and sovereignty of God in grace. “Almighty God, we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves…” states the collect for the Third Sunday in Lent. But we are not left there in the desert sun to shrivel and die. In his unfathonable mercy, he came to our rescue. Biblical Christianity leads us to have complete and utter confidence in God for salvation from beginning to end. Our efforts at self-justification and the treadmill of moralism only leads to further despair because we simply can never do enough.
Men and women, apart from grace, are incapable of doing anything but continue to sin, either by doing wrong things, or by doing right things for the wrong, selfish reasons. “The fall of Adam was not simply a paradigm for the way all men fall. It was the determining factor that controlled what it has meant to be a human being ever since. . . We who are born into the race are born into a community of rebellion against God. The fault and corruption of our nature precede and determine our individual existences” (On the Thirty-nine Articles, Oliver O’Donovan). This is the subject of the second Anglican Homily: “Let us learn to know ourselves, our frailty and weakness, without any ostentation or boasting of our own good deeds and merits. Let us acknowledge the exceeding mercy of God towards us, and confess that just as from ourselves comes all evil and damnation, so likewise of him comes all goodness and salvation” (Lee Gatiss, Homilies). It is only by grace that our wills and affections will be set right by the power of the Holy Spirit. Article 9 (the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion) speaks of “the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation. And this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regenerated.” Article 10 says this even more clearly: “the condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, the he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith.” The Christian life takes its first breath in us with the words, “God! Please help me!” People in 12-Step programs seem to know this better than others, and so do Christians who have been humbled on moralistic treadmills of self-righteousness - who have learned to pray from the heart: “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy…”
Phillips Brooks was a kindly man who never taught wildly outside the perimeters of orthodox Christianity as some of his Broad Church successors did, but his optimistic view of human capacity apart from God opened wider the door that the 19th century Tractarians before him opened to leave the foundations of the supreme authority of Holy Scripture as preserved in the formularies of historic Anglicanism.