Tag: 1950s

Theology of the Cross or Glory?

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Where do you put a guide to domestic duties?

A few years ago, 2013, a gift was received from Mrs. Robert (Renata) Voeltz — a 1951 “Your Household Guide” sponsored by the Ladies Aid Society of Our Saviors Lutheran Church. This book contained 1,001 helpful household hints selected from several hundred home recipe books of Walsworth Bros., located in Marceline, Missouri, distributed throughout the nation…. It was a wealth of information. For instance, baking, birthstones and flowers, canning, children’s section, cooking, business laws, federal old age benefits. Then, freezing, gardening, health and accident, holidays, insects and kitchen measures. Going on…laundry, paints, picnics, postal rates, presidents of the U.S., sewing, state capitals, time savers and wedding anniversaries.

These were only “hints:” For even consistency when making a pie crust, add water with a clothes sprinkler.” (Clothes sprinkler?? Perhaps a thing of the past.) To see whether old yeast was still good, put it in warm water with a teaspoon of sugar, stir. If it foams in 10 minutes, use it right away. Place an egg in a pan of water — if fresh, it will turn on its side; a few days old, it will tilt upwards; if stale it will stand on end; if very old it will float! Rub scissors with butter to cut up marshmallows. Sprinkle talcum powder into new shoes, they will seem much more comfortable when new. Onions will not make your eyes water if scalding water is poured over them before they are peeled. Boil potato or carrot peelings in the teakettle to remove lime. When scalding a chicken, add one cup soda to the boiling water — the feathers will come off easier and the flesh will be clean and white.

Postal rates? First Class – 3 cents for each ounce. Postal cards – 1 cent each. Second Class – newspapers – 1 cent per two ounces. Third Class – 2 cents for each two ounces; Fourth Class – Parcel Post – must weigh eight ounces.

Sponsors of the book? Full pages: Home Federal Savings & Loan, three offices, savings accounts insured up to $10,000, home loans, convenient monthly payments. Distel & Co.: Furniture, funeral services, ambulance; service within the reach of all, day and night phones. Rendahl & Highum: Feed, seed, grain. Burgess & Sons, Inc.: Lumber, building materials, Clech quality coal, paint and hardware, big enough to accommodate, small enough to appreciate.

Half pages: Kvale’s IGA Store; Kehrberg’s Our Own Hardware, Sears Roebuck & Co. “Shop at Sears & Save.” Biel Implement Co. – Oliver and Minnesota machinery and repairs. One third page: Nash Cafe, Valley Dry Cleaners, Stickan’s Ben Franklin, Webster & Kohn N.J.C. Pure Foods; McConnell Electric; Sward-Kemp Drug; Sande’s Implement – Allis Chalmers and New Idea farm equipment and Studebaker cars; Root River Oil Station – Shell gas and oil; Art’s Husky Station – Goodyear tires; Clifford Walker’s D-X Station – home and auto supplies; Denny’s Cafe – home baked pastries.

As cultural Christianity goes, this seems harmless, even appealing. I’m still not seeing much gospel or cross.

The Death of Christian America

Published on by D. G. Hart27 Comments

Peter Leithart gives a clue. It has to do with ways of relating churches to the culture, coming along side it to use the vernacular of the Vatican, that would wind up devastating the Protestant mainline:

The growth that swelled the mainline during the 1950s was fueled by people looking for “a more relaxed, less legalistic, less dogmatic version of the faith.” Despite numerical growth, the mainline churches didn’t grow “stronger” during the 1950s; their grown “concealed an ongoing weakness that a few years later produced an unprecedently steep decline in membership” (194).

The authors see the drift in the mainline as an accommodation to cultural trends: “The American cultural climate has shifted during the twentieth century in the direction of greater relativism and skepticism in matters of religion, and toward greater degrees of individualism. Acceptance of diversity in belief, lifestyle, and ethnic and racial background has broadened markedly.” Initially promoted by elites, the shift became popular, and “the leadership of the mainline Protestant churches accommodated the shift within their own ranks.” When the Sixties hit, the mainline Protestant churches were already sailing with the same wind that carried the sexual revolution and the challenge to settled authority: “The mainline Protestant churches did not initiate the new shift, but they were unable and unwilling to resist it” (198).

Not surprisingly, Presbyterians lost the next generation: “The children have asked over and over what is distinctive about Presbyterianism – or even about Protestantism – and why they should believe it or cherish it. The answers have apparently not been very clear. Today Presbyterians should not bemoan the lack of faith and church commitment exhibited by their youth, since they have no one to blame but themselves. No outside power forcibly pulled their children away from the faith”

And what happened to the mainline in the 1960s, happened to Roman Catholics in the 1970s once the bishops at Vatican II opened the windows to modern society and hoped for a more relaxed church. (By the way, it could happen to all the folks inspired by TKNY. Some think it already has.)

Once again, it’s the progressives who pave the way for “progress” among Roman Catholics.

Why is it that the more you try to make Christianity relevant, the less Christianity you have left?