sible." That shows to our group the degree of the rationalistic aberration of Calvinism from the revealed word.21 As we have seen, the application of the majority principle to matters of faith is considered rank rationalism. It is the essence of the hybris between church and state. The result will ultimately be the application of the principle of vox populi, vox dei to religion itself. The Lutheran can do no other than ask: "What will a man's faith be worth to him or to his associates if he is willing to base it on the vote of others like himself?" Of course it will ultimately mean, as the Lutheran sees it, that the Calvinists will capture the state, and then turn upon the churches of the minorities and assimilate them, via vox populi, for the greater glory of God. They have reason to believe that the state will ultimately, if the Calvinists and sectarians continue their nefarious work, force them, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others, to base their faith upon the vote of others quite unlike themselves. 28 23 They are very much afraid of the state. They scan anxiously the signs for a sympathetic response to this attitude from the other American churches. They quote The Gospel Message on "Shall the Government Control Our Religion," and rejoice in what the southern Baptists have to say: "The government has deliberately "See Theolog. Quartalsschrift, Jahrg., XVI, 299–301. Also J. Schaller, Biblical Christology: A Study in Lutheran Dogmatics, 1919, pp. 299–301: "Calvinistic rationalism and English materialism have shorn . . . . the Gospel of its saving power. . . . . The main object of the Protestant churches of this country has become moral, social, and political work, aiming to materialize the Kingdom of God in the perishable institution of the state. . . . ." See the remarkable criticism of American Christianity during the war, ibid., Theolog. Quartalsschrift (1918), pp. 172-73. The "rectoral theory of atonement" is no less heretically rationalistic. See Hodge, III, 100 ff.; for the Lutherans see in Romans 1:16 the ground which definitely arraigns them "against the Calvinistic error, that the spirit does not work in and through the word, but produces all spiritual effects by an influence superadded to the word, and that this is the testimony of the spirit" (Theolog. Quartalsschrift, XVII, 149–50). Theolog. Quartalsschrift (1920), Jahrg., XVII, 89-90; in review of Gilkey, Seth Gorham, "A Plea for Greater Unity," 1919, see p. 92. 23 As early as the fifties, Walther, in the Lutheraner and Lehre und Wehre, expressed his surprise at how guilelessly American sectarian Christians accepted the fellowship in arms of the Rationalists and Forty-eighters against the divine institution of slavery. He seems to have seen the implication of the Revolution of 1848 and of 1860 for property, as well as other “divine institutions." tions. . 24 cracked the military whip over the various Protestant denominaWhen did the American people tear up their Bill of Rights, grind to dust their Constitution, and establish a department of war and religion?" They, of course, know exactly when and how that happened. It is due to the nefarious zeal of the sectarians and the Calvinistic theocratic ideal of the Kingdom of God on earth. They record with disgust how the executive department has given them the "themes" of recommending the buying of war bonds, of explaining the justice of the war, of working toward a smooth reconstruction. It has even suggested sermon texts, and if the sects continue as before, we can get ready for a Kirchenstaat, "as the Roman church would not make it any more ruthless." But what will then become of the church? It will become what it has always been for others and elsewhere in America: a society, a verein. But the last straw is a letter from the Internal Revenue Office appealing to the clergy—their clergy—to give clear, strong, public support for the enforcement of prohibition, and suggesting that "a committee be appointed to receive all complaints of violations of the law and lodge such complaints with the proper authorities." This is the caustic comment of the Lutherans: "In other words, we are to become a sort of American Legion."25 The Methodists are rank rationalists. For do they not open the gates of hell with an eye for results? Is not their whole technique of "drumming up trade," of "putting the church on the map," and of "putting the gospel across" borrowed from "the others"? That is the rationalism of the hybris and the natural man in disguise. The spiritual man professes his faith and trusts God for results. The Methodists may talk more or less rationally on any subject under the sun. It may be good social philosophy at that, but religion it is not. It may be plausible; the method may be good salesmanship, but pastoral theology it is neither. Thus the inherent interest of the church precludes that it tol 24 'Assistant Secretary of War Keppel had written them that "the whole desire of the government is to break down denominational distinctions" (Theolog. Quartalsschrift, XV, XVI, 153). Theolog. Quartalsschrift, XVII (1920), 66. erate rationalism in any form. It must be kept out. But it also raises its brazen face in the group itself. Mere rationalizing about the effectiveness of the organs of the church may cause Ärgernis. Where that rationalizing entails a challenge, a demand for a change not sufficiently documented by group theology, there is a taint of rationalism in the air. Where a minority sets itself over against the group, there it is a stench in the nostrils of the Gemeinde, who call it Selbstüberhebung. It is the ancient superbia; it is heresy. In the presence of heresy, Lutheran theology remembers Luther's own estimate of reason, other people's reason: Die Vernunft ist eine Bestie, sie muss geschändet werden.26 Rationalism, then, for the group, is dissent from the group consensus sociologically, and theologically from the group creed. It is within the group der Geist der stets verneint; it is the spirit which prevails outside, the spirit of the others. The spiritual man it is not. But thrice damned are the Masons and all fraternal orders. In the roaring forties, when the parochial organization of charity began to be inadequate, they tried to reorganize and rearticulate it. They grafted the principle of fellowship and mutual aid upon an adventitious and somewhat godless "society." They thus borrowed from the fellowship what they gave to the society, and also coaxed godly Germans from their Gemeinschaft into a bad Gesellschaft. That was bad enough; it threatened the Gemeinde in its integrity, its sole stewardship of the trust of caritas. But did they not also, for their nondescript crowd, adopt some continental American God and Supreme Being as their protector, some secret hocus-pocus as their symbol? That supreme being is not Christ, that mystery is not baptism, and their faith is no faith, for "cursed he who puts his faith in man." They have been, as our Lutherans see it, the real enemies of the Christian religion in America, and they have debauched the church. They are responsible for the adultery of American Christianity with the deistic rationalism of the eighteenth Cf. Luther on the "Superbi Hospites, Non Cives," W. A., III, 83, 7; cit. Holl, pp. 250-51; and Theolog. Quartalsschrift, passim; also 1910, pp. 52 ff., 61. John 10, 35 "gilt uns tausend mal mehr als alle Wissenschaft." 26 century; the religion of the brotherhood of man is their nefarious work. Their religion is deism and their church is the state."7 No German Lutheran of the Missouri Synod may call brother a Mason or any member of a fraternal order. He who dies in that brotherhood must go unshriven by his church. The minister has no calling to go with his body, and to speak at his grave is dangerous in the extreme. For is not a non-denominational prayer constructive blasphemy? Thus, from the relative rationalism of the others the Gemeinde and its church protects its members to the very grave. Our Lutheran may not have remained a good German in saeculo; his soul may not go to heaven at that. But neither has he been an Elk or an Odd Fellow, a Shriner or a Mason. He was not a joiner, he has kept himself unspotted from the world, and the gospel of the new Americanism has touched him not. 27 (Masons.) The outlawry of consociation with the Masons was the work of Rev. Walther, and one of the most decisive steps taken to conserve the sectionalism of the Lutheran mind. For the fraternal orders must be considered one of the most potent solvents of creed sectionalism, their group also the integrator of a new American lay religion in the above-characterized sense. For the modern attitude of the group toward lodges, see Theolog. Quartalsschrift, VIII, Fg., 60 ff.; XV-XVI, Jahrg., 43 ff., 121 ff.; XVIII, Fg., 731 ff. Also Paul Pieper, Die Christusfeindschaft der Logen, N. W. Pub. House, 1923. [To be continued] THE CONCEPT "SOCIAL FORCES" IN AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY SECTION V. THE "INTEREST" CONCEPT FLOYD N. HOUSE ABSTRACT With the publication of his General Sociology in 1905, Small advertised a new type of classification of human motives, designated by the term "interest." He gave Ratzenhofer credit for the term and for the general idea, but Small's interests concept seems to be something quite different from anything he found in Ratzenhofer's writings. Ellwood, Blackmar and Gillin, Ross, and Southard and Jarrett have referred with approval and with varying degrees of emphasis to the interests concept as developed by Small; most of these writers treat it as a term designating a class of social forces which subsist alongside of the more elementary social forces. The interest concept is one which is still at the time of writing involved in a process of competition with several others for prestige and utilization. 3 We have embodied in numerous passages in other sections of this paper discussions of Small's attitude on the social forces question, together with quotations displaying his point of view. We have also quoted classifications of social forces by Blackmar and Gillin' and Ellwood2 which make use of the interest concept; it will not be necessary to repeat them here. We have also quoted a passage from Ross' Moot Points in Sociology, which embodies a classification of what he called "interests," but without any particular emphasis upon the term. Ross had published this article in the American Journal of Sociology before Small's General Sociology appeared in print. Small contends, however, that he was not influenced in his use of the interest concept by any other writer except Ratzenhofer, and an examination of Small's summary of Ratzenhofer's presentation of "interests," in General Sociology, will convince anyone that he took the suggestion he received from Ratzenhofer and manufactured something quite different out of 1 A. J. S., November, 1925. 2 Ibid., XXXI (September, 1925), 169. 8 Ibid., p. 166. |