What Is This Neo-Orthodoxy?

Time Magazine May. 06, 1946 Religion: Mental Fight Eleven Unitarian Preachers slug it out with Niebuhr, Barth, and Fulton Sheen,

Betrayal & Defeat? "This (neo-orthodoxy] is a sad betrayal that can lead only to confusion. The forces of free religion must oppose this movement and check it. ... As we repudiate totalitarian politics we must also repudiate totalitarian religion."

'Futilitarian Christian gadflies like Professor Reinhold Niebuhr among the Protestants and Dr. Fulton J. Sheen among the Catholics are filling the air with their veiled terrestrial defeatism. No hope for mankind on earth but in heaven if you believe. . . . No, the leap into supernaturalism, which hungry hearts took two thousand years ago to compensate for their frustrations, is hardly proof to intelligent minds today of the existence of such a world."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,887015-2,00.html#ixzz0h4mKZ4B7

Tough-stuff optimism after a brutal World War. Time may have gotten it right when they concluded,

But none of these modern Unitarian strong-talkers thought of quoting the words of their own Servetus in his cogent challenge to Calvin:

"All that men do you say is done in sin and merits nothing but eternal death. But therein you blaspheme. Stripping us of all possible goodness, you do violence to the teaching of Christ, who ascribes the power of being perfect to us: 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.' In the works of the saintly, there is nothing of the corruption you feign."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,887015-2,00.html#ixzz0h4mnxGea

I wonder how many of today's religion editors could quote back Servetus to American Preachers Unitarian or otherwise?