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A Byproduct of Greek. The mistakes of modern Christianity have helped to promote the new substitute religions. Anglican Casserley criticizes the Roman Catholic Church for transforming "the whole character and function of dogma" by some of its recent acts, e.g., proclaiming the dogma of the Assumption. Dogma, he holds, should be used only when necessary to fight obvious heresy which threatens the church's existence ("Dogma is not made for dogma's sake"). Proclaiming dogmas in the absence of any such threat plays into the hands of critics who say that the orthodox believer's thought is hopelessly "chained and fettered" by the church's laws.
He is even more severe towards evangelical Protestantism, because the Reformers' emphasis on faith and the Bible took so much of "medieval rationalism" out of
Christianity. It led to "the cult of the 'simple Christian.' " ("No man ever became a good Christian merely by not being an intellectual!") The theologian and the "simple Christian" drifted apart. Theology, instead of being the great unifier of Christian culture, degenerated into pedantic criticism of the Bible—"little more than a byproduct of Greek grammar." If theology abdicates its historic function, modern man, in an age of growing specialization, has no intellectual means of making proper sense out of existence.
Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, was in one of its "feeblest" moments when the Industrial Revolution began: "The foundation stones of modern large-scale urban industrial life were laid with the church absent . . . from the ceremony." The result is an industrialized society in which religion has little traditional place. Says Dr. Casserley: "It would be absurd to pretend that the average cheerful Sabbath-breaker, at the cinema ... or peacefully potting plants in his garden, has just read Darwin, Marx or Freud . . . He cares for none of these things. His conduct must be explained in terms of a pattern of life which he has inherited from his fathers."
Surpassed Indeed!. The theologians now have a good opportunity to reweave Christianity into a new pattern of life, Author Casserley notes, for the substitute religions of the retreat must fail. Morally, they have been unable either to describe or to understand moral failure or sin, and their morals have wavered for lack of a higher goal. Intellectually, "the Christian thinker ... is repeatedly struck by the narrowness of outlook and the intellectual timidity of his time . . . We have ceased, many of us, even to conceive of the reason as the architect of civilization . . . and we have turned it instead into the merely technical instrument of the passions."