The Christian Way has reached a crisis because of the radical shift in human consciousness which has been taking place in the last three hundred years. The Christian response to the new form of human consciousness has so far been uneven and quite diverse. At one extreme, as discussed in the first article, an increasing number of people have been led to disengage themselves from traditional church activities, while still often affirming what they call Christian values. At the other end the ecclesiastical officials, who see themselves as the guardians of the Christian Way, have been slow to adapt to the new consciousness and have stubbornly fought a rear-guard action in defence of traditional beliefs and practices.

At the official level, what was once experienced as a living movement, freely adapting itself to changing circumstances, has become frozen into something permanent and unchanging. But whatever fails to change is already beginning to die, for life means change. To the extent that the Christian Way becomes crystallised into some unchangeable thing called Christianity it is facing its demise. Those who choose not to change are taking a blind road.

All who insist that Christianity consists of certain irreducible concepts, beliefs and practices face this danger. A moderate set of irreducibles was affirmed in 1888 by the Lambeth Episcopal Conference of the Anglican Communion. It contended that there are four permanent pillars on which the Christian Church is founded - the Bible, the Creeds, the two Sacraments and the Episcopacy. These have become known as the Lambeth Quadrilateral.

From early in the 20th century fundamentalist Christians were even more rigid, declaring that, to be a Christian, one must embraced all of the following:

• the literal inerrancy of Holy Scripture
• the belief in a personal God
• the doctrine of the Holy Trinity
• the virginal birth of Jesus
• the divinity of Jesus Christ
• the bodily resurrection of Jesus, as an historical event
• belief in life after death

All who defend traditional Christianity cogently argue that if Christianity is to retain its true and recognisable identity it must preserve certain essential elements. Otherwise, if these are lost by radical changes, however admirable, what results can no longer be regarded as Christian. But perhaps we should not be asking what constitutes the sine qua non of Christian identity. That is to fall into the trap of assuming Christianity to be something fixed and irreducible. Rather we should be asking - "Where does the path of faith lead us to now?". Instead of talking about Christianity, we should be talking about the Christian path of faith, the Christian Way.

As soon as we do this the issue begins to look different. We find that the path trodden by our spiritual forbears, and which has brought us to this point, is a very long one, more than three thousand years old. And through nearly half of that path it was not even known as Christian. All Christians agree that the Bible is basic to the Christian Way, yet four-fifths of the Bible was written before the word Christian had ever been heard of.

In the three thousand and more years of the historical path of the Judeo-Christian tradition there have been any number of significant crises. By crisis is meant a turning-point or crossroads, which calls for a decision or shift of direction in order to restore it. Such turning points in the Judeo-Christian path of faith have usually involved, not only a change of direction but a change of content, change of emphasis and even change of name. Yet it has been one continuous path.

The Babylonian Exile of the Jews, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the impact of Hellenistic culture on the Gentile Church, the Fall of the Roman Empire, were all crises. Crisis involving radical change is therefore by no means novel even though, on each occasion, the people who lived through it feared their religious world was facing its end.

There has been a strong tendency for modern Christians to believe their path of faith originated with Jesus of Nazareth. That is not how the first Christians saw it. They saw Jesus not as the beginning of their path of faith but as the fulfilment of what had gone before and hence a radical turning-point. If the path had a beginning at all, it started with Abraham, a shadowy figure of the very ancient past. Jews see him as the pro-genitor of their race. Christians see him as the model man of faith. Muslims see him as the first Muslim. What started as one path of faith, long ago divided into three paths, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, all with much still in common.

The person of Jesus of Nazareth marks the point where the Jewish and Christian paths diverged. The decision to be made at that crossroads was this. What was to be made of the life, teachings, death and continuing influence of Jesus? Christians were those who decided to call him the Christ, or Messiah, and to follow him as a marker on the path of faith. That decision shaped the Christian Way, in contrast with the Jewish Way.

But that was not the last crisis. The next crisis came very soon after and is clearly documented in the New Testament itself. The first people to walk the Christian Way were all Jews and took it for granted that it implied they should observe the Jewish Law, as Jesus himself had done. But when Paul made Gentile converts he did not require them to observe the Jewish Law. A crisis arose which was never resolved. It was the parting of the ways for the Gentile Church and the original Jewish church. The Gentile-Christian path flourished and spread. It was the more liberal one. The Jewish church accused Paul of abandoning things essential to the Christian Way. It actually lingered on for nearly five centuries but finally died out. It had evidently chosen a blind road even though it could claim the approval of the original Apostles.

But once Gentile Christianity broke with Judaism there were more problems. A charismatic leader called Marcion argued that Christians should drop the Jewish scriptures altogether and declare that what had preceded Jesus was a false and idolatrous path. Such a view could have caused the Christian path to have lost its sense of direction by thus abandoning the markers of where it had come from. By retaining the Jewish Scriptures, and adding the New Testament writings to form the Bible, the Christian path preserved continuity with the past. It is continuity, rather than keeping things unchanged, which provides the path of faith with its distinctive identity.

In the fifth century the ecumenical council of Chalcedon (451 AD) set the final stamp on the developing Creeds. These formulated the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and defined the person of Jesus Christ. But it was far from being unanimous. Although the decision made at that crossroads established what became Christian orthodoxy we can now say, with the gift of hindsight, that it was too restrictive and rigid. That decision meant that two sizable sections of Christians became thereafter separated from the main body. The Coptic Church of Egypt and Ethiopia has lived its own existence, with its own Pope, ever since. The Nestorian Church moved Eastward and flourished in Iran and China.

In 1054 the Eastern (or Orthodox) Church and the Western (or Catholic) Church excommunicated each other. That schism resulted from the long term effects of the Greek and Roman cultures through which the Christian Way had spread. It was Greek culture which gave the Eastern Church its ethos, and Roman culture which finally shaped the Western Church. The Western church, for example, inherited Rome's legal and institutional genius for power and authority, still clearly visible in Catholicism down to the present. Thus these two ancient cultures eventually so constrained the Christian Way that the two churches which were shaped by them became incompatible.

At the Protestant Reformation Western authority was challenged and the Christian Way divided still further. All through the medieval period the Catholic church, partly because of its authority and partly because of its catholicity, was able to contain diversity. It failed to do so at the Protestant Reformation. The fragmentation of Christendom marked the beginning of the modern world. The path of faith, long known as Christian, could no longer be contained within one institution. The ecclesiastical institutions began to lose catholicity and become sectarian. Protestantism fared little better than Catholicism even though it manifested considerable vitality and creativity. It became allied with the emerging spirit of nationalism to form national churches, each embracing the Lutheran or Calvinist forms of Protestantism best suited to their needs. In subsequent centuries, particularly the 19th century, many further divisions and subdivisions have taken place.

So the Christian path of faith has been far from straight, smooth or even unified. However much Christianity may today be regarded as a set of unchangeable beliefs, it is quite false to assert that these have been preserved in their pristine purity from the time of the Apostles. The Christian Way has been a developing process, often facing crossroads and being forced to make decisions. Past decisions have not been made unanimously and have not always been wholly wise and fruitful. There has never been a time when all Christians believed and practised the same things. The Christian Way has diversified into a whole family of paths.

It is in the light of this we now turn to the cross-roads we face today owing to the radical shift in human consciousness already referred to. As Don Cupitt has already pertinently remarked, "When we go to church we re-enter a medieval universe which, so far as the outside world is concerned, finally passed away over three centuries ago".

For nearly two hundred years there have been some Christians trying to take the Christian path forward into the modern world. Many of them unfortunately have been so quickly ostracised and even excommunicated by church authorities that they have been quickly forgotten. One who was accepted in his own day, and who is often called the first modern theologian, is Schleiermacher, though even he has been forgotten through most of this century. Schleiermacher pioneered Protestant liberalism. For nearly a hundred years Protestant theologians were strongly influenced by him even though also critical of him. Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89), like Schleiermacher his mentor, condemned the notion of authoritative ecclesiastical dogma and made religious experience the base of theology. But Ritschl, along with many others, feared that Schleiermacher had made the Christian Way too vulnerable to human subjectivity and looked for something more objective. Ritschl appealed to the historical deposit inherited from the Christian past. He believed that the Bible, the Creeds and the historic Confessions, while no longer to be accepted as absolute and infallible authorities, nevertheless supplied the Christian with the objective and historical material without which faith would cease to be nurtured. Liberal Protestants were thus free to criticise the Creeds and to give fresh verbal expression to their beliefs and experience, in ways which took into account all current knowledge. They were free to examine the biblical material critically, to relate it back to its original cultural context rather than treating it as timeless truths of divine origin.

Towards the end of the 19th century liberal Protestant thinkers had enthusiastically embraced the new approach to the Bible, even accepting the new theory of biological evolution. They were completely confident that historical research would be able to confirm all that was essentially basic to Christianity and that such adjustments as appeared necessary in expressing Christian faith could readily be done. It was a confidence which conservative and traditionally orthodox Christians viewed with great alarm, condemning it as further manifestation of modern humankind's sinful rejection of divine authority.

Yet even in the 19th century the appeal to history was proving to be a two-edged sword. Once one removes from the Bible the protecting covering of sanctity which had previously guaranteed its every word, the material in it was not quite what it had seemed to be. The historian is always looking for first-hand extant evidence from the people and times being studied. That is how the Bible had been traditionally read. The Books of Moses came from Moses and the Gospels from the Apostles, who consequently were eye-witnesses of the events they recorded. All this proved to be a superficial veneer. Historical research showed that in both of these examples the material we now have was written by unknown authors some time after the events they narrate. But the full effects of this were not to be felt until the 20th century.

Exponents of Protestant Liberalism insisted that Christian theology is "Christian religious conviction endeavouring to think itself out, and to relate itself to all other knowledge and opinion"i. Liberal Protestant thought may be said to have reached its peak in 1900, when Adolf Harnack (1851-1930), already internationally celebrated as church historian and theologian, delivered a series of public lectures in the University of Berlin. They were received so enthusiastically (by the exclusively male audience !) that when published under the title What is Christianity? they quickly became a best-seller, being translated into more than a dozen languages. It was exactly a century since Schleiermacher had published his epoch-making "Speeches On Religion". Both books were widely read, being intended to take theology out of academia into the public arena.

During this century, particularly after World War I, strong reaction to liberalism began to surface in the Protestant world, partly because liberal thought had never been satisfactorily transmitted from the academic classroom to the pulpit and the pew. The majority of practising Christians were left in the dark as to how the leading edge of religious thought was responding at the crossroads. This failure to pass on new religious thought led to the rise of fundamentalism, which takes its name from a series of 12 booklets entitled "The Fundamentals", written by conservative scholars and widely in the English-speaking world. These books violently attacked liberalism, Catholicism and the new sects; they affirmed the fundamental doctrines of seventeenth century Protestantism, which they identified as the only genuine form of Christianity.

Another reaction to Protestant liberalism and one very different from the fundamentalism, came from the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886 -1968). He condemned Protestant liberalism for what he regarded as its shallowness and its dependence on human reason: he reaffirmed Christian dependence on divine revelation. In more recent times the originally clear distinction between fundamentalism and Barthianism has greatly lessened. Conservative Christianity today combines the theology of Karl Barth with a view of the Bible somewhat more enlightened than that of the earlier fundamentalists.

Liberalism did not wholly die because of the reactionary forces. The person who best represents its continuation in the post-Barthian era was Paul Tillich (1886-1966). Hardly anyone outside of the church knew much of Karl Barth but Paul Tillich was read much more widely. Some of his phrases came into common usage, such as "ultimate concern", "the courage to be", "the God beyond God". During the middle of this century he was at the leading edge of Christian thought, intent on understanding the radical change taking place in Western culture, and endeavouring to reconnect Christian faith with the mainstream of intellectual thought in the west.

But now we must go back in time to sketch what had been happening in Catholicism. The Catholic response to modernity has to be told separately because at first it was quite different from the Protestant one. This was because Catholicism had retained its highly authoritative character, exercising absolute rule from the top.

From the Reformation onwards Papal authority had endeavoured to protect the faithful under its pastoral care from the dangerous ideas emerging from the birth of Protestantism onwards. To this end it had established in 1557 the Index of Forbidden Books and solemnly warned Catholics that the reading of such books would gravely imperil their eternal destiny. In addition the Catholic Church prevented its own teachers from spreading confusion, by insisting that they obtain the Nihil Obstat and the authoritative Imprimatur from church officials before the results of their study and reflection could be published. All this made it more difficult for any one to step out of line, and ensured that the church always spoke publicly with one voice. But it also meant that fruitful dialogue among the church's own scholars was slowed down at the very time when the emergence of new thought was accelerating outside of the church.

It was the deliberate intention of the Catholic Church to insulate itself from all new and dangerous ideas which were in conflict with its own unchangeable teaching. This was particularly the case during the long reign of Pope Pius IX from 1846 to 1878. In his very first Encyclical, Qui Pluribus, 1846, he said, "You well know the monstrous errors and artifices which the children of this century make use of in order to wage relentless war against the Catholic faith, the divine authority of the Church, its laws, and to trample the rights of authority, ecclesiastic or civil. Such is the object of the execrable doctrine called communism: it is wholly contrary to natural law itself; nor could it establish itself without turning upside down all rights, all interests, the essence of property, and society itself".ii

Pius IX thundered condemnation of all liberal thought. In 1864 he warned Catholics of the error of thinking that anyone outside of the Catholic Church, or who defied the authority of the Church, could gain eternal life. In the same year he drew up a Syllabus of (80) Errors. This declared it erroneous to believe such things as “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion, which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true”, “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with, progress, liberalism and modern civilisation”.iii The Syllabus was accompanied by an Encyclical in which, along with his predecessor Gregory XVI, he asserted the insanity of believing "that the liberty of conscience and of worship is the peculiar right of every man...and that citizens have the right to all kinds of liberty...by which they may be enabled to manifest publicly and openly their ideas, by word of mouth, through the press, or by any other means".iv

At the very time when Protestant Liberal theologians were trying to help Protestantism keep pace with the changing world and adjust its thinking to rapidly expanding knowledge, the Pope was not only insulating Catholicism from the modern world but actually leading it further back into the medieval world. Protestantism and Catholicism were moving in opposite directions and the rift between the two was growing wider. For example, in 1854 Pius IX proclaimed a new Dogma which thereafter was "to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful". This Dogma of the Immaculate Conception declared that “the most blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception...was preserved free from all stain of original sin”v.

To press this home a second new Dogma followed in 1870, as a result of the Vatican I Council called by Pius IX. After considerable debate, and vigorous opposition by a minority, the Council affirmed the Dogma of Papal Infallibility which states that “The Roman Pontiff when he speaks ex cathedra is possessed of that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to be endowed in defining doctrine concerning faith and morals: and therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are irreformable of themselves”. This proved too much for some Catholics, who seceded from the Church and were known thereafter as the Old Catholics. Lord Acton, a devout Catholic and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge remarked, "The Church cannot now be reformed and become what it ought to be, unless it be destroyed and rebuilt".

In this ecclesiastical climate it may seem surprising that liberal thought surfaced at all within Catholicism. It did, but with disastrous consequences for those who spoke up. Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) was a French priest and a very able biblical scholar. The Catholic hierarchy already held Loisy under some suspicion because he had been attracted to the work of Ernst Renan (1823-92). Renan was a Catholic scholar who had caused a sensation in Europe when he published his Life of Jesus in 1863. This had repudiated all the supernatural elements in the story of Christ, so Renan was removed from his professorial chair at the College de France.

The storm broke when Loisy published his book The Gospel and the Church (1902) even though, quite ironically, its purpose was to defend Catholicism against the influence of Protestant Liberalism, particularly as that had been expounded in Harnack's What is Christianity? (the title of which in German meant “The Essence of Christianity”). In response to Harnack's attempt to reduce Christianity to it very essence, Loisy questioned whether Christianity does possess any unchangeable essence. Rather he saw Christianity as a living and ever changing process. Just as a man of fifty looks very different from the infant he was at birth, so Christianity could not be expected to remain in the Galilean form in which it originated. It was quite legitimate for Christianity to evolve, as it had done, into the fully-fledged form of Catholicism. He believed Harnack to be quite mistaken in thinking that, by stripping away what had developed over many centuries, he would find the unchangeable and primitive kernel of essential Christianity. “It cannot be too often repeated that the Gospel was not an absolute, abstract doctrine, directly applicable at all times and to all men by its essential virtue. It was a living faith, linked everywhere to the time and the circumstances that witnessed its birth. In order to preserve this faith in the world, a work of adaptation has been, and will be, perpetually necessary".

Loisy did not confine himself to a criticism of Harnack but paved the way for an essential reform in the interpretation of the Bible, in the whole of theology and even in Catholicism itself. Loisy later confessed that, as a result of his earlier biblical study, he had ceased to accept such traditional beliefs as the divinity of Christ and the conception of God as a personal being. Yet he remained a priest for a further twenty years in the hope that Catholicism would undergo radical change.

But though his book was welcomed by other liberally minded Catholics, Loisy soon found himself facing the full wrath of the Catholic hierarchy, who charged him with “denying the inspiration of Scripture, denying Jesus was the revealer of infallible truths, denying the bodily resurrection of Jesus by regarding it as myth, and undermining the authority of the Papacy and the Church's teaching office”. Loisy and other liberal Catholic thinkers had been tolerated and even encouraged during the reign of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), who had real respect for academic scholarship. But his successor Pius X (1903-1914) distrusted this liberal movement from the beginning.

In 1907 the radical reform led by Loisy became officially termed Modernism and was condemned by Pope Pius X as “the synthesis of all heresies”. In an encyclical (Lamentabili) and a decree (Pascendi) he set out the 65 errors of Modernism, one of which was that "Scientific progress demands that the concepts of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word and Redemption be readjusted".vi Loisy was excommunicated in 1908 but in 1909 was appointed to the Chair of the History of Religions at the College de France, the very position from which Renan had been dismissed. From this position he continued to write about Christian origins for the next twenty years.

The leading Catholic Modernist in England was George Tyrrell (1861-1909). Reared as an evangelical Protestant in Dublin, Tyrrell was attracted to High Church Anglicanism. By 1879 he had become a Roman Catholic and in 1880 he entered the Jesuit novitiate. Remaining strongly attracted to the devotional aspects of Catholicism he became increasingly hostile to the orthodox Scholasticism, and began to publish his views with some vigour, contrasting living faith with dead theology. Refusing to repudiate his more provocative statements he was dismissed from the Jesuit Order in 1907. When the Pope issued his encyclical condemning Modernism, Tyrrell wrote letters to the London Times accusing the Pope of heresy. He was immediately excommunicated. He died in 1909 and was refused Catholic burial.

Tyrrell's views were set forth in The Church at the Crossroads, published posthumously in 1909. There he defined a Modernist as “a churchman of any sort who believes in the possibility of a synthesis between the essential truth of his religion and the essential truth of modernity”. Like Loisy, he also was critical of the Protestant Liberals, remarking that “The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through 19 centuries of Catholic darkness is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face seen at the bottom of a deep well”. In his view Catholic Modernism differed strongly from Protestant Liberalism in several important respects. The Protestants put the emphasis on historical records, and on the moral teaching of Jesus. Tyrrell believed that the changes being called for in the current age were of such a radical nature that it might be necessary for Catholicism to die, in order that it might rise again in a greater and grander form.

Pope Pius X was determined to root out all elements of Modernism from Catholicism and to this end in 1910 he required all priests to swear an anti-modernist oath in which they were to offer complete submission to his earlier condemnations of Modernism. Only forty priests refused. All ordinands were thereafter required to make a vow renouncing all Modernist tendencies. This marked the end of Catholic Modernism for the time being, driving underground all liberalising tendencies in the Catholic Church. They did not surface again until the 1940's and were to lead to the Vatican II Council called by Pope John XXIII.

In the meantime Modernism had taken root in Anglicanism and eventually came to be called the Modern Churchmen's Union. Its aim was to advance liberal religious thought and to acknowledge the legitimacy of reformulating Christian doctrine and revising forms of worship. Although many well-known priests, scholars and even bishops were members of the Union over the years, the one who became the chief leader and organiser of Anglican Modernism was Henry D. A. Major (1871-1961). After joining the Modern Churchmen's Union, he founded their journal The Modern Churchman. In 1912 he set forth the principles of Modernism in a book The Gospel of Freedom, and in 1915 privately circulated a pamphlet entitled “A Modern View of the Incarnation”. This presented a non-miraculous view of Jesus, consistent with the modern non-miraculous view of the universe and the evolution of planetary life.

Major himself, in 1927, defined Modernism as “the claim of the modern mind to determine what is true, right and beautiful in the light of its own experience, even though its conclusions be in contradiction to those of tradition”. He saw this as a mode of human consciousness which would assume enormous proportions in the coming decades and was already making its presence felt in Jewry, Islam, Hindu and Chinese society.

The substance of Anglican Modernism as understood by Major may be summarised thus:

• Divine revelation and religious evolution are one and the same but viewed from different sides.
• Belief in miracles is a survival from the pre-scientific way of viewing the universe.
• The question of what God is like replaces in importance the question of whether God exists. Modernists acknowledge that their conception of God differs from the one traditionally held.
• The doctrine of original sin is denied.
• Modernists retain belief in some form of immortality, but reject the doctrine of everlasting punishment.
• Jesus was just as completely human as every other human being.
• The doctrine of the Virgin Birth is unnecessary and its historicity is not securely based.
• The Christian ethic will become increasingly important in enabling humanity to realise a true and beneficial democracy.
• ristianity is not a demonstrable certainty but a venture of faith.

Anglican Modernism, it seems, managed to go so far in reform and then ran out of steam. Major died in 1961 and did not live to see the more radical thought which began to emerge later. Shortly after his death a group of essays by Anglican Modernists, grouped with some others, was published under the title of Soundings. It was intended to mark the centenary of Essays and Reviews of 1861 but was too academic to make any impact. When more radical thought did break out publicly many of the Modernists were strangely critical.

This is what happened with John Robinson's Honest to God, 1963. The Editorial in the Modern Churchman said it was raising questions which the Modern Churchmen's Union has been discussing or advocating for fifty years. But other Modernists expressed their regret that Robinson “had fallen so completely under the influence of such extremists as Tillich, Bonhoeffer and Bultmann” and found his doctrine of God very suspect. Alan Richardson and Robert Leaney, both of them Modernists contributed to the little book Four Anchors from the Stern, which sharply rejected much of what was in Honest to God.

This led Don Cupitt to remark, “For two centuries liberal theologians have been proposing a revision and modernization of Christianity but there has been no real change. The lay person going to church finds the old world-view presupposed by almost everything that is said or sung”.

Admittedly there has been at least some positive Christian acknowledgement of the times in which we live. There is much less reference in sermons and hymns to a world beyond and much more reference to life in the here and now. Sermons on current social issues and everyday personal problems have replaced sermons threatening hell and brimstone. There has been a certain amount of change in the hymns sung.

Denominational rivalry has been replaced by co-operation. Catholic-Protestant relations have thawed after the four hundred year old freeze. Churches have become somewhat more democratic and less authoritarian. Women have been admitted to the ministry in most churches outside of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Since Vatican II, Catholicism has been changing quite rapidly at the grassroots even if the Papacy has remained stubbornly conservative.

But for an increasing number of people the changes have been too little, too late. As it was observed in the last article, many people have concluded that the Christian Way has nothing to offer them. Their choice to abandon the Christian Way is also a decision at the crossroads. It can be as dangerous as the one by which Christian orthodoxy chooses to come to a dead halt in a blind road. The great value of continuing to be guided by the markers on the path from which we have come is that it prevents us from going round in circles or even worse, perishing in the roadless sands of the desert.

Honest to God was one of the most widely read religious books of this century and it introduced to a wider public some appreciation of Bultmann, Tillich and Bonhoeffer, who were then at the growing edge of religious thought. But what is there to show for it today? The BBC marked the thirtieth anniversary of Honest to God with a series of radio talks. Ruth Robinson, John's widow, observed that the world is lost without a vision and the churches did once supply a vision to live by. She deplored the fact that the churches are failing to provide that vision by insisting on obscuring the original vision within an outmoded belief system. John Bowden, editor of the SCM Press which originally published Honest to God, believes the church missed out on a marvellous opportunity in 1963 and it did so because it suffered from a loss of nerve.

Today's crisis calls for moves more radical than any yet made, if the Christian Way, continuous with the past, is to go forward into the future. There appear to be objects anchoring it to the past, or alternatively they may be seen as roadblocks barring the way forward. We must turn to those in the next article.