More from James Ungureanu, on and from president Charles W. Eliot (1834–1926) of Harvard Divinity School on the ‘new [Christian] religion’:

The dramatic advances in the natural and historical sciences convinced Eliot that the new religion of the future will not be based on any external authority, nor on the personifications of the primitive forces of nature, nor on the worship of dead ancestors, teachers, or rulers; it will not be propitiatory, sacrificial, or expiatory, not gloomy, ascetic, or maledictory; it will not perpetuate Hebrew anthropomorphic conceptions of God. Rather, the religion of the future will combine elements of the “Jewish Jehovah, the Christian Universal Father, the modern physicist’s omnipresent and exhaustless Energy, and the biological conception of a Vital Force.” The God of this “new religion” will be called the “Infinite Spirit” in which “we live, and move, and have our being.” God will be conceived as “absolutely immanent in all things.” Concomitantly, the new religion of the future will reject “the entire conception of man as a fallen being, hopelessly wicked, and tending downward by nature.” Future generations will rather find knowledge of God through knowledge itself. Moreover, the new religion will recognize in every great and lovely human person an individual willpower that is the essence of the personality of God. “In this simple and natural faith,” Eliot asserted, “there will be no place for metaphysical complexities or magic rites, much less for obscure dogmas.” For his part, Eliot welcomed the coming new Christian brotherhood.[1]

Do you recognize your Christian religion in all or at least part of this? I see this strewn all over the mass of social media, and concrete life all around. What I often refer to as the American Folk Religion, what many simply take to be Christianity, is what Ungureanu alerts us to by paying attention to Eliot’s thinking in years past. Do you ever wonder if what you’ve been “saved to” is actually the biblical orthodox Christian faith? No. You should maybe wonder that sometimes. If you affirm any of the above in a self-conscious intentional way you are not a Christian in any meaningful sense. Indeed, Eliot’s thought is simply a total negation of what the orthodox and Dogmatically oriented Christian faith has always already maintained and articulated. The Christian faith isn’t a private faith between you and your God, it is a public faith wherein God put Himself on display for the whole world to see on the cross of Jesus Christ. Here he made a public spectacle of the principalities and powers, the powers we are born under as we come into this world. He came to set us free from this through unioning with us that we by grace might union with Him, and become participants in the triune life of the eternal God through adoption and thus co-heirs with Christ. This is the most ‘public’ occurrence that has ever or will ever happen.

If you affirm the new religion, or any part of it: repent.

[1] James Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 168.