myths, many of them pre-Christian, were distressingly similar to the
supposedly factual bases of one’s inherited creed. Then the Protestant
exposure of Catholic miracles, the deistic exposure of Biblical miracles, the
general exposure of frauds, inquisitions, and massacres in the history of
religion. Then the replacement of agriculture–which had stirred men to
faith by the annual rebirth of life and the mystery of growth–with industry,
humming daily a litany of machines, and suggesting a world machine. Add
meanwhile the bold advance of skeptical scholarship, as in Bayle [Bayle,
Pierre (1647-1706)], and of pantheistic philosophy, as in Spinoza; the
massive attack of the French Enlightenment upon Christianity; the revolt of
Paris against the Church during the French Revolution. Add, in our own
time, the indiscriminate slaughter of civilian populations in modern war.
Finally, the awesome triumphs of scientific technology, promising man
omnipotence and destruction, and challenging the divine command of the
skies.
In one way Christianity lent a hand against itself by developing in many
Christians a moral sense that could no longer stomach the vengeful God of
the traditional theology. The idea of hell disappeared from educated
thought, even from pulpit homilies. Presbyterians became ashamed of the
Westminster Confession, which had pledged them to belief in a God who
had created billions of men and women despite his foreknowledge that,
regardless of their virtues and crimes, they were predestined to everlasting
hell. Educated Christians visiting the Sistine Chapel were shocked by
Michelangelo’s [Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)] picture of Christ
hurling offenders pell-mell into an inferno whose fires were never to be
extinguished; was this the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” who had inspired
our youth? Just as the moral development of the Hellenes had weakened
their belief in the quarrelsome and adulterous deities of Olympus (“A
certain proportion of mankind,” wrote Plato, “do not believe at all in the
existence of the gods.”
), so the development of the Christian ethic
slowly eroded Christian theology. Christ destroyed Jehovah.
