A WITNESS TO THE WESTERN WORLD
Continued From the March/April Issue
Review of Part I.
The thesis of this continued article is that modern Western culture lives and operates
within a mind-set that makes it very difficult to bear an effective witness to the Gospel
of Jesus Christ. Empirically verifiable facts, i.e. scientifically proven facts, have
become the staple goods of modern intellectual store. Nothing can be accepted as true
except what can be proven by the scientific method. There is no place for meaning or
significance in facts; that cannot be scientifically demonstrated. The natural world of
things, events and people must be explained only in terms of physical, provable causes.
The Bible, of course, categorically denies this viewpoint. Like the angel with flaming
swords, it stands guard to deny this perspective any entrance into the Garden of God. It
insists that all created things are meaning-laden. They all point beyond themselves to the
living God. To see them in any other way is to be blind to their real significance.
Part I provided a brief historical explanation of how the modern perspective developed,
particularly in the period of Enlightenment. It also described events within the Christian
church which saddled the church with a dualistic way of thinking about the world and
rendered it incapable of resisting the tidal wave of secular humanism which has swept
through the Western world in recent centuries. Part I broke off with the assertion that
the Enlightenment insisted that to explain a thing we need only specify its physical and
chemical causes; any thought of meaning or purpose in ordinary reality must be excluded.
God is no longer needed; we can get power over the world by dealing directly and solely
with the "natural laws" which operate in it.
PART II
"Fact," then, in the modern sense has a totally different meaning than it
had in the Middle Ages. Luther or Calvin, were they to return to earth today with the mind
set they had when they died, would be totally unable to comprehend our modern way of
looking at facts. Jacques Ellul already saw this clearly almost forty years ago. He
pointed out that
"It is well known that in other civilizations men did not respect facts to the
same extent, nor did they conceive facts in the same way. At the present time the fact,
whatever it is, the established fact, is the final reason, the criterion of truth . . .
People think that they have no right to judge a fact - all they have to do is accept it .
. . Everyone takes it for granted that fact and truth are one; and if God is no longer
regarded as true in our day it is because He does not seem to be a fact." The
Presence of the Kingdom, p. 37
Ellul speaks of "the Moloch of fact," the great modern idol which all Western
men worship and serve. So on this side of the watershed we have a totally new worldview, a
view which says that only facts can be known surely and that there is no divine purpose or
meaning in then facts of ordinary human life. This is what C.S. Lewis calls "the
great modern myth." Whereas earlier peoples (and the third world people even today)
saw the world within a religious framework that gave meaning to every part of life, modern
man doesn’t believe in any gods at all. He lives in what Peter Berger calls "a
world without windows." And he has forgotten that he could not hold this view without
having made the original concession that it was all right to disregard purpose in life.
Since that concession cannot be proved, it remains a belief, indeed an idolatrous
religious belief. The modern worship of "fact" is as fierce, cruel, and
destructive an idol as ever the Baalim of the Old Testament were. It is all the more so
for not being recognized as an idol.
There are two features of the modern worldview that deserve special attention. They are,
as Newbiggin points out, the split between fact and value and that between public and
private. It is well known that a scientist insists it is impossible to determine a value
scientifically. A value is an "ought" and it cannot be derived form an
"is" (a fact). The only things we can be sure of are scientific facts (until
science finds it necessary to alter them, as in the great paradigm shift from Newtonian to
Einsteinium physics). So facts are public and every reasonable person must be expected to
accept them. The person who will not accept them as final in themselves is the modern
"heretic." Values, on the other hand, are extremely relative. One person’s
values are as good as anyone else’s. The one thing that a person is not supposed to
do is to deny the validity of another’s value system. Facts are public, and
demonstrated through empirical evidence and reason; values are private. There is no way of
proving that one set of values is better than another. Facts are cognitive; values,
affective. Facts are rational; values, emotional. And like Kipling’s East and West,
"never the twain shall meet."
The Church’s Problem
The church’s problem in the modern Western world is many sided. One side is that
the modern Christian is forced to wear at least two hats. He is one person in the privacy
of his own home and church, and as long as he is willing to restrict his Christianity to
the private area, he is tolerated, often even admired. But in the public world of
business, labor, government, research, the media, and education, he must operate as that
world operates - on the basis of the finality and meaninglessness of facts. He is not
allowed, in the public area, to introduce the concept of the lordship of Christ and hence
the meaningfulness of all human action. He may hold to his own morals or his ethical
standard, and many Christians see that as the sum total of their witness to the world, but
he must not introduce value or meaning into the world of facts. He is left with what Peter
Berger calls a "homeless mind." He cannot fully be himself in his life, but must
be one person in private and another in public. Note that this is not to say that he
cannot hold to a Christian value system in his public activities. That is permissible, if
it does not become too inconvenient, because values are personal and private. But he may
not attach meaning to "facts". So he is condemned to live a divide life.
A second side of the Christian problem is that such a divided life is Biblically
impermissible. If Christ is indeed the Truth, then there is no such thing as meaningless
fact. Facts are created things, and the Bible is clear that creation bears witness to who
God is. (Romans 1:20; Psalm 19; Job 42:5-6; etc.) It is one of God’s ways of bearing
witness to Himself in our hearts. The Bible is another way in which He comes to us, and
the incarnation of Christ is the third and most important way. But the primary purpose of
creation is to be a medium through which God makes Himself known to us. All the facts
point toward Christ for their ultimate significance. They are held in being by His
powerful Word (Hebrews 1:3). He speaks to us in and through them and calls upon us for a
response. No Christian can properly admit that there are facts that call for no commitment
on his part. Life, in Biblical terms, is whole. We may not fragment it by making one part
responsible to Christ and the other neutral and void of commitment. " . . .
Whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31) is still in the Bible.
So Colossians 3:17 which calls on us to do everything, in word and deed, in the name (i.e.
consistently with the character) of the Lord Jesus with thankfulness. Furthermore, the
Christian is aware that only people have "facts"; horses and cows and dandelions
and daises don’t have them. People are made in the image of God and always have faith
roots to their worldviews. Facts are always "people facts" and consequently
reflect the faith presuppositions of the person who holds them.
A third side to the problem is that of the church’s own making. If we had not, since
very early in the Middle Ages, given in to the Greek philosophical approach of dividing
the world into two levels and then baptized that perspective through the work of St.
Thomas Aquinas, we would not have been so weak when secularism began its triumphant march
to take over the modern world. If we did not live, today, in practical agreement with the
fact/value, public/private split, it would not be so hard for us to see that it is utterly
inconsistent with what the Bible teaches and that it is impossible to proclaim fully the
Gospel without confronting such a mind set.
That leads directly to the final, and perhaps the saddest, side of the church’s
problem. Our acquiescence in the modern worldview makes it almost impossible for us to
challenge that worldview. Newbiggin puts it in these words:
"The Church has lived so long as a permitted and even privileged minority,
accepting relegation to the private sphere in a culture whose public life is controlled by
a totally different vision of reality, that it has almost lost the power to address a
radical challenge to that vision and therefore to ‘modern western civilization’
as a whole."
The Other Side of 1984, p. 23
The Church is the body of Christ, called to bear witness to the whole world. But how
shall we bear witness to the vast area that is now known as public life when we have
already agreed that spiritual truth does not have any bearing on the "natural"
world? Perhaps this has something to do with the declining church membership in Europe and
with the fact that Christians, while numerous in the Untied States, seem impotent to make
any real difference in the social, economic, and political life here.
A Solution to the Problem
What, then, is the answer to the church’s dilemma? One part of the answer is that
the Christian must seek an altered consciousness. It is ironic that the great emphasis of
the New Age movement in America is a call for altered consciousness. The New Age is a
return to Eastern pantheism. It bids us to see all things, including ourselves, as god,
and god as all things. There is, of course, no room for any concept of sin or salvation in
such a consciousness. Furthermore, pantheistic Eastern religion is thoroughly akin to it,
for, as Newbiggin also points out, there is no teleology in eastern religions. Only the
Bible and the Judeo-Christian perspective see creation as going somewhere in the end.
Given this quality in eastern religion, it is not surprising that some of today’s
most advanced physicists, perplexed by the mysteriousness of "matter" which does
not seem to be made of "stuff" at all, have turned toward Eastern religion.
(Think, for example, of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, or of Gary
Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Master: An Overview of the New Physics.) But an
altered consciousness is an old Biblical command for Christians. " . . . be not
conformed to this world, but be ye transformed, by the renewing of your mind . . ."
(Romans 12:1-2)
There must be, then, an outright rejection of the fact/value split. This does not mean,
first of all, a renewed argument with the scientific world and the modern mind. That will
come in its own time, but the first problem is to repent of our own divided minds and seek
by God’s grace to cultivate a renewed Christian mind. When the Biblical declaration
that God reveals Himself in creation, Scripture, and the Person of Christ begins to grip
our hearts, we will not be able to keep quiet about it, even in public. But until our own
minds have been renewed, it will be of no more use to engage the modern world in a verbal
contest than it was for the Israelites at Kadesh Barnea to attack the Amorites (Deut.
1:41-46). Having only the day before refused to obey God and attempt to conquer the land,
they now decided that they had been wrong and went up on their own. The result was a
wholesale debacle for Israel. So it will be for us until God’s Word gets deep hold of
our hearts in these areas we are discussing. There is nothing in the universe so powerful
as God’s Word. If we are once in touch with it, God will find a way to use us.
Then, as our minds are renewed in their understanding of the holiness of ordinary things,
we must find ways of bearing an effective witness to the modern world and its
Enlightenment worldview. We must find ways to publicly confront the idolatry of the
twentieth century as the first century church did in its time. That church could have gone
on, protected and tolerated in its curious beliefs and practices, if only it had been
willing to acknowledge the one commitment which the empire demanded of all its citizens -
acknowledgement of the divinity of the Emperor. But, in a day when the inseparability of
politics and faith were better understood than they are today, that was the one thing that
the church would not do. She paid with ten dreadful rounds of persecution, but in the end
she emerged victorious. The church today faces a similar challenge. If we are willing to
continue to agree that "facts" are neutral and to acknowledge the rule of the
Enlightenment mentality in the public area, we can continue as a protected and even
privileged minority. But that is one thing we cannot do without compromising the Gospel
and denying the lordship of Christ.
The possibility of a clear and powerful witness to the 20th century world
lies before us. It will require a renewed mind, and, if we are blessed with that, it will
guarantee the presence and power of Holy Spirit in developments we cannot even, at this
point, imagine.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
Alta
Vista
1719 NE 50th Street
Seattle, Washington 98105
Phone: (206) 524-2262
Fax: (206) 524-1837
