I have taken the title for this website from the first sentence of the book An Emerging Christian Faith by Justin Wroe Nixon (1886-1958) published in 1930. Reverend Nixon was a distinguished Baptist minister and theology school professor. His resumé—as student, pastor, and educator—included numerous prestigious institutions of his day and ours.
The book came into my possession through a pastor friend who was disposing of books as he prepared to retire. He must have acquired it second-hand, as I found the name of another, older pastor from the area on the front page. It sat on my shelf for about two decades until I too decided to weed my library. I almost tossed it, but the title caught my attention. Reconciling Christianity and modernity has been nearly a lifelong interest for me, and I was curious to see how the issue was viewed from several generations back. Reading the book in 2021, more than 90 years after it was written, I was surprised by how keenly aware Mr. Nixon was of the depth and seriousness of the challenges facing Christianity and by his perception that the institutional church of his day was failing to meet the problem head-on.
The first line of the book reads as follows:
The Christian religion needs a new house of faith. The scheme of thought which constituted the framework of Christian preaching for centuries has been rendered obsolete by the advance of the modern world.
Justin Wroe Nixon. An Emerging Christian Faith (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930), 1.
Rev. Nixon was saying here rather bluntly that the worldview of the traditional Christianity of his day did not work anymore. Time has proven him right. The popular theology of the institutional Christianity of today, by which I mean the theology that is preached in most churches on Sunday morning, is not much changed from what it was a century ago, and those churches are today experiencing a definite and, in many cases, precipitous decline in participation.
Rev. Nixon states the following in the second paragraph:
The Christian Church must essay the task of developing once more a “high philosophy” of religion and life—a philosophy which in both its intellectual strength and spiritual dignity will be comparable to that of the Alexandrian thinkers in the third century, of Augustine in the fifth, of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth, and of Calvin in the sixteenth. Since Calvin’s day the issues of religion have changed profoundly, but the Church as a whole has shrunk from accepting the challenge to a radical reconstruction of its system of thought.
Justin Wroe Nixon. An Emerging Christian Faith (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930), 1-2.
A radical reconstruction of its system of thought! That means deep changes in our understanding of what Christianity is really about. Rev. Nixon was careful to point out that this is not the first time Christianity has needed such change.
Rev. Nixon was not an outlier in his day. If you go back and read the prominent progressive religious leaders of the first half of the twentieth century and even before, many of them expressed similar concerns. These were not theological radicals on the fringe of American religion; they were prominent leaders and thinkers in America’s dominant religious traditions. They simply could not avoid seeing that the emergence of science and technology had changed our understanding of reality and of ourselves and that, in important ways, traditional religion was not compatible with that new understanding.
These many years later, the situation has deteriorated. In Rev. Nixon’s day, the mainline denominations were robust with numerous forthright liberal leaders and theologians trying to address the challenge he so eloquently stated. Unfortunately, the necessary reconstruction proved elusive and liberal-minded congregants lost patience. They left the churches in droves during the last half of the last century. This outflow has left the mainline denominations somewhat more conservative and far more concerned with mere survival than with bold theological reconstruction.
What Rev. Nixon meant by a new house of faith is not a new building or denomination but a substantially new theology, a theology that fits our current understanding of reality. I am convinced that the radical reconstruction for which Rev. Nixon hoped is possible, but, like him, I am not at all sure that the Church that exists today is capable of stretching itself to embrace and proclaim a radically new religious philosophy.
On this website I intend to explore how I think the Christian system of thought might be reconstructed.
John Speers
© Copyright 2022 John Speers