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Christian Humanism
Spiritual Life, Fall 2004 by Merton, Thomas
A Critique of Religion
In reality, the criticism levelled against Christianity by Feuerbach and Marx can be seen as having occultly Christian elements which need to be taken seriously. Religion is for Marx essentially a process of mystification and alienation, in which man accepts estrangement from himself, projects his own reality outside himself, impoverishes himself and dehumanizes himself, in order to lead what is essentially a fantasy life centered on the abstract idea of God. God is in a remote heaven where he will one day reward man. This fantasy life of religion, with its complex of beliefs and observances, is then substituted for the real, productive, creative life in which man ought to take his own world in hand and, instead of merely thinking about it and dreaming about it, actually sets about changing it, and thereby changing himself. It is not in constructing a religious system of ideology and worship that intervenes between himself and his real world, that man can find truth and happiness. No, says Marx, he must enter into a direct and concrete relationship with his world of matter, with his brother and with himself. Man humanizes both himself and his world by working to better the conditions of all men in the world. Hence, according to Marx, religious ideologies and formalities of worship prevent man from being himself, prevent him from being human, and consequently there can be no such thing as a religious humanism. The first step to any authentic humanism is the rejection of religion.
This is a very telling historic criticism, and unless the Christian is willing to face it, there is no further point in talking about Christian humanism today. But actually it is not a difficult criticism to face. To begin with, it rests on a deep but perfectly understandable misconception about the true essence of Christianity. Marx was not only following Feuerbach's critique of Hegel's essentially unChristian theology but also accepting as "Christian" the superficial and decadent manifestations of Christianity which he saw around him in early nineteenth-century Germany and which he did not bother to examine in any depth. There is no question that if pseudo-Christianity is taken to be "Christian," one can with the greatest of ease destroy all its claims to being humanistic.
On the other hand, one has only to open the New Testament at random and one will discover the clearest evidence that the preaching of Jesus and the teaching of the Apostles were directed precisely against what we have come to know as religious alienation. Useless to multiply quotations here; a typical one, "the sabbath was made for man not man for the sabbath" (Mk 2:27), evokes the whole struggle of Jesus with the Pharisees about the question of sabbath observance. In each case what is of utmost importance is the fact that Jesus, for instance in working miracles on the sabbath, is emphasizing the priority of human values over conventionally "religious" ones. In each case, where there is a choice between the good of a suffering human person and the claims of formal and established legalism, Jesus decides for the person and against the claims of legalist religion.
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