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the context of God's redemption and making it the primary under–
taking of the Jewish religion.
The concern for man's temporal estate is certainly not unbe–
coming to religion or theology. What is clear, however, was that in
the '30s religion was on the run, scoffed at, derided, and ignored.
The quality of the ministry was not the highest; the attendance of
the laity was at its lowest. Bright people were either on the left or
entrenching themselves on the right. Religion was neither popular
nor unpopular in the late '20s, '30s, or early '40s. It was merely
passed by as a great waste of time, irrelevant to the issues of the day.
Serious theologians did not ignore, however, the criticism of the
age implicit in the general public indifference to religion. Paul Tillich,
in his now reissued
The R eligious Situation,
took note of the im–
mense relevance of the criticism of Christianity being leveled by the
newer movements in European politics, art, and literature. Reinhold
Niebuhr moved from a position of extraordinary, but justified, am–
bivalence about the relevance of the Christian position to the social
order, to something like a clear doctrine of the relation of love and
justice to human events. Mordecai Kaplan, though not a systematic
thinker, trained a whole generation of rabbis to make some peace
between their religious tradition and the needs of the twentieth–
century American Jew.
If
anything, the indifference to religion caused
serious religious people to think. Thus religion was compelled, both
by conviction and vested interest, to become reflective.
There is no question but that the great and profound moments
of religious expression come out of periods of most intense anguish,
whether the anguish be response to the active opposition of the world
or the inner conviction of the world's indifference to God. The
martyrologies of those who were slain during the Hadrianic persecu–
tions of the Jews; the Acts of the Martyrs that precede the accession
of Constantine to the Church; the reports of Christian missionaries
and sundry pilgrims-these together with the inner anguish of St.
Francis, St. John of the Cross, Pascal, the Baal Shem and others wit–
ness, not only to the security and pride of the faithful, but to their
essential distress, their fundamental
deracinement.
The religious
spirit is most profound when it is thrown into the state of uprootedness
and estrangement. This is not to say that such estrangement is without
joy or love; nor need such estrangement be pathological to be au-
