Churches of Christ -- Sermons; Sermons, American -- 20th century
“Meanwhile,” it’s this meanwhile that I am interested in, “Meanwhile,
however, I am fed up with a familiar type of course in some of our
institutions, where religion may not be taught but where, by innuendo
and clever sniping, irreligion is taught. The Jewish prophets, Christ,
and the creative seers of our spiritual tradition might as well never
have existed, while Freud, for example, not simply as the great pioneer
in psychiatry but as an atheistic materialist, is presented at length as
though he were infallible.”
2. If I were to go into some of our public schools and teach the truth
on church unity and the meaning of baptism, I would be considered
intolerant, narrow minded and out of order in using the public schools
to teach religion. But when a man gets up and teaches that the Bible is
not true, he is teaching religion, even though it is a false religion.
He is teaching a religion just the same as the man who says that the
Bible is true.
That reminds me of one college professor who asked his class at the
beginning of the course how many of them believed that God existed.
Several students raised their hands. He said, “I predict that by the
time this course is finished there won’t be any here who believe in
God.” He was teaching religion—false religion. He was opposing the
truth. He was taking advantage of a state school in which to do it.
3. When I was going to high school nearly every chapel speaker who was
not a member of the church of Christ would tell us that one church was
as good as another. The members of the church of Christ who came never
gave us the opposite side of that. They should have told us that one
church was not as good as another—that there is only one church.
However, if they had done so, they would have been accused of being
narrow minded and of preaching their own peculiar doctrine. But the man
who says that one church is just as good as another is preaching what he
believes just as much as I am preaching what I believe when I say that
one is not just as good as another. So you see this matter of tolerance
ought to work both ways in public institutions. If one is not allowed to
say that there is just one church, then someone else who believes
differently ought not to be allowed to say that one is just as good as
another.
But to continue with Mr. Fosdick. “The separation of church and state is
a fundamental principle of American democracy, but we are allowing it to
mean what the fathers of the republic never dreamed it should mean: that
youth, in our public institutions of learning, may be taught the denials
of faiths but not the affirmations of them. Our postwar world cannot be
reconstructed on the basis of any negative futilitarian philosophy. We
desperately need great faiths about life issuing in great ethical
standards for life.”[1]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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