RECOVERING A LOST WORLD - II

The modern Western world is dying amidst a glut of material possessions, a mad orgy of consumerism, and a preoccupation with techniques that have blinded it to the loss of its soul and the relationships through which alone the soul can be nourished. Mesmerized by the siren song of modern psychology that the only way to happiness is to look out for Number One, Its life is being rapidly squeezed out by the cancerous pressure of modernity. Older cultures that were built on more solid relationships are looked down on by eyes blinded by the glitter of modern progress. It isn’t that science, technology, or modern economics are evil in themselves; they are remarkable evidences of the creativity of the human spirit and, if accepted with thanksgiving, can be great blessings in seeking first God’s kingdom and His righteousness. But when they become ends instead of means, as they have for the modern West, they turn into cruel idols that crush their servants. This is nowhere more evident than in their effect on human relationships.
In the last issue we discussed the recovery of the physical world which has been lost to us because it has been turned into an objective grab-bag of material resources to be conquered by humans for their own enjoyment and aggrandizement. We have effectively lost the world of ordinary things and daily events as channels through which God speaks to us and expects a response from us. It is a severe impoverishment. But it is not the only one we are experiencing. Parallel to and overlapping it is the loss of the arena of human relationships. To that topic we turn in this issue.

THE FOUNDATIONAL QUALITY OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

To be human is to be in relationships. We are obviously dependent on the physical world - its air, water, and soil, its flora and fauna. Without these life would be impossible. But they are not enough, as Adam discovered in the process of naming the animals. There was no match there for him. We are in deep need of human relationships. So God put Adam to sleep and created Eve. Our relationship with ourselves is rich in symbolism and profoundly important in life. We have a self-concept. We can talk to ourselves, criticize ourselves, approve and love, or disapprove and hate ourselves. C.S. Lewis suggests somewhere that the best model for the Trinity is to be found here. That we can talk to ourselves means that we are at least a duality; in this we reflect the Father and the Son. That there is a bridge over which we thus communicate and fellowship with ourselves suggests the Holy Spirit, third member of the Trinity. And this leads into the thought that the most important relationship of all is our relationship to God. So to be human is to be in relationship.
The importance of these relationships can hardly be exaggerated. While the created world of things and experiences will pass away (1 Corinthians 7:31; 2 Corinthians 4:18), our relationships with that world will follow us to the Day of Judgement. If we have let created things usurp the place in our lives which God alone can properly hold, then things have become idols and we shall have to explain our service of them. If we have seen our fellow humans as image bearers in dealing with whom we have dealt with God himself (Matthew 25:34-46), we shall receive a reward. If we have "thingified" them and manipulated them for our own pleasure and imagined benefit, we shall have that to explain also. If we have entertained a concept of ourselves as autonomous beings and loved or hated ourselves - with inescapable consequences in our relationships to others - that again will prove to have been written in the Book of Records. And all of these will prove to have been offshoots of the most basic relationship of all, our relationship to God Himself, in whom we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). Relationships are foundational to human life and living.

THE MODERN PROBLEM WITHOUT RELATIONSHIPS

Relationships are in trouble in the modern Western world. We talked in the last issue about faulty relationships with the created world of things, people, and experiences. We will consider later or relations to ourselves and to God. But here, for a moment, let us look at what is happening to human relationships in the fast-paced "rat-race" that is modernity.
Robert Bellah et al in their recent bestseller, Habits of the Heart, recalls the warning of Tocqueville, the perceptive 19th century evaluator of the American experiment, that individualism, which he saw as an important aspect of the American character, "might eventually isolate Americans from one another and thereby undermine the conditions of freedom." (p. vii) Bellah and his co-authors discovered in their investigations that personal preference has become the primary criterion for Americans in making ethical as well as practical judgements. Our earlier concern has drained away in favor of a devastating lack of commitment to anything except one’s self-fulfillment. The community, of whatever kind, has lost its power to motivate our lives.
William Barrett in his latest book, Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer, provides a brilliant, but chilling study of modern philosophy that corroborates what Bellah says. He traces the path by which philosophers have abandoned the soul or the self as the center of true being. We are not souls anymore; we are merely a "stream of consciousness." That, of course, is totally destructive of relationships to other humans. We are simply advanced forms of the computer, and the computer is supposedly well on the way to equaling if not surpassing us in its development of artificial intelligence. Barrett closes his powerful exposition with the following poignant plea:

" . . . And in justification of our subject, we may be permitted to borrow our last word from a solemn source: Scripture warns us, ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ What shall it profit a whole civilization, or culture, if it gains knowledge and power over the material world, but loses any adequate idea of the conscious mind, the human self, at the center of all that power?" (page 166)

Another powerful witness to the problem moderns have with relationships to be found in Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: the Cult of Self-Worship. From an avowedly Christian perspective, Vitz describes the teaching of four of the major self-psychologists of this century: Fromm, Rogers, Maslow and May. The book is short but strong. Its particular relevance to our immediate topic can be seen in the fifth thesis for which Vitz argues:

"Psychology as religion for years has been destroying individuals, families, and communities. But for the first time the destructive logic of this secular religion is beginning to be understood, and as more and more people discover the emptiness of self-worship Christianity is presented with a major historical opportunity to provide meaning and life." (p. 10)

Clearly, relationships among humans are in trouble in our day.

THE TRINITY AS A PATTERN FOR HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

The Biblical doctrine of the Holy Trinity has fallen on hard times. It is included in all orthodox Christian creeds, and would be acknowledged as true and important by all Christians who take seriously the authority of the Bible. But it is neither frequently preached about nor well understood by the average Christian, and certainly is not perceived as particularly relevant to the topic of human relationships. To the Cappadocian Fathers who in the fourth and fifth centuries did the best and most enduring work on the doctrine, it was a vital source of vibrant Christian life and experience. Today it is acknowledged doctrine and little more.
The tragedy here is that the most effective medicine for illness in the area of human relationships is the Biblical teaching on the Trinity. The Trinity provides the pattern for all human families and so for all relationships (Genesis 1:27; Ephesians 3:14-15). The Father is never without the Son, and the Father and Son are never without the Holy Spirit. They compromise one God, yet they are distinct from each other. We borrow the word "person" here, for lack of anything clearer, and call them Three Persons in one Godhead. The problem is that we cannot conceive of three persons who are at the same time one. We have never experienced that. Perhaps the closest we can come is the suggestion of C.S. Lewis mentioned above. But among these three Persons there is no holding back whatever. There is a fullness of self-giving mutual love that simply boggles our imagination. The infinite fullness of this amazing love is the wellspring and source of all love in human relationships. And self-giving love is the basic quality of all truly good human relationships. That is evident when we remember that the two great commandments are to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves. The Trinity is not only the pattern, it provides the power, meditated through our redemption in Jesus Christ, for only truly wholesome human relationships available to us. So the doctrine of the Trinity ceases to be academic and becomes intimate, personal, and life-giving.
This is what God is like in whose image we have been created. It follows, then, that since there is a plurality in His unity, our reflection of His likeness cannot be fully worked out in us as isolated individuals. God is love, but love is antiphonal. It needs another as a recipient. Hence community is essential to the expression of the image, and the Trinity is the model for all human inter-relationships.

SOME PRACTICAL ILLUSTRATIONS

Marriage. Marriage, as the wedding formulae often state, was instituted by God and was blessed by the attendance of Jesus at the marriage feast in Cana, It is not merely an arrangement to provide companionship for otherwise lonely people, nor to prevent the expression of unbridled lust, nor to perpetrate the race. It is all these, but first and foremost it is meant to be an illustration of the relation between Christ and His Bride, the Church. As Christ called Himself the true vine, so he is the true bridegroom. Human marriage is meant to be the shadow or the reflection of the inexpressibly wonderful relation between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that now flows between Christ and Christians as a community, the heavenly Bride, the New Jerusalem. The standard to which every marriage is called is the exchange of unrestricted love between members of the Trinity.
This is why Ephesians calls on husbands and wives to subject themselves to one another in the fear of Christ. This doesn’t mean there are no differences of function between wife and husband. Wives can bear children; husbands can’t. One wise old doctor said that if husbands could, and were required to alternate with their wives, there would probably never be more than two children in a family. Husbands do have a special responsibility to lead in the sense of holding the marriage up to the norm God has for it. The norm is a norm of love, my life laid down for yours. In our feeble and broken way, we are to work out our salvation in our marriages so that they do indeed reflect something of the firestorm of love that burns incessantly in the Holy Trinity.

Family. Family today is a busy place. Mother and Dad are often both working. Time is short, and so are tempers. As Tom Howard puts it, " . . . all this daily clutter of potty chairs and toys and rubbers and earaches and one thing and another . . . keeps us on the chase and never allows us time to breathe and think and live with our children. They inhabit the same house as we do, but we end up being mere laundresses and chauffeurs and umpires for them." (Hallowed Be This House, p. 11) If the family is meant to be a picture of Trinity, it is difficult to trace the correspondence.
But it is! Ephesians 3:14 says that every family in heaven and on earth is named from the Father. In the Bible a name means an expression of what God meant a created thing or relationship to be. A family is meant to be a finite expression of what the Trinity is. There is a sense in which a married couple is not really complete until a child is born. The child acts as a bridge between the parents, binding them to each other by binding them to each other by binding them to itself. Here is probably a faint reflection of what the Holy Spirit does between the Father and the Son. Family, the basic community relationship in the human race, is meant to be the showcase of the love of God expressed most fully in the personal relations within the Trinity.
But the family is in trouble today. Almost half the marriages in America today end in divorce, usually leaving a single parent with the onerous burden of raising the family. As Christians we need to give special consideration and help to those decapitated families. We need also to keep before us that our task as a parents is not merely to feed, clothe, and educate our young, but far more importantly, to seek to have our family relationships radiate the love which flows unhindered among the Persons in the Trinity. In this way it is possible for us to recover, in measure at least, the true meaning of family.

Church. Here is another of the basic community relations within the race. The path to heaven is narrow and steep Jesus said. While each must travel that path for herself or himself, the fact remains that we are not meant to travel it alone. We need one another if we are to make it to the top. The shared experience of the sacraments, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, and the regular hearing together of the exposition of the Word of God are the means of grace which God has provided to help us along the way. Small groups where, in honesty but in love, members can share with each other their successes and failures, their fears and hopes in the effort to walk with God - these are an important part of growth in the Lord. They are a part that has fallen into sad neglect, with the result that the church in the West has frequently lost its first love and became lukewarm.

Work. So far, so good, but the relationship which is most common in today’s culture is that of employer-employee. Most people have to work for a living. Does the Gospel promise recovery in this area as well? Indeed it does!
In the first century this relation was most commonly one between slaves and masters. Accustomed as we in America are to personal freedom, it is almost impossible to imagine what it would have been like to be reduced, by the fortunes of war or the devastation of debt, to the status of a slave. Yet Paul told Christian slaves that they were to serve their masters as if they were serving Christ, even if the master was unkind. And masters were warned to treat their slaves with respect, knowing that there is no favoritism with God. Today that means that the workplace is not a secular wasteland but a place of service to God through service to the boss. The quality of love and of relations is to have its expression here too. Labor is not a mere necessity. It is an opportunity for priestly offering to God through conscientious service to an employer.
This is an aspect of life that has been cheapened and deadened by out idolatrous service to an economic system ultimately founded on greed. It is in need of recovery. God blessed work and He intends that we should do it. Sin has wounded it severely, but Christ has redeemed it. One of our tasks as His servants is to recover work as an area of divine service.

Culture Formation. In all these areas, and many others that contribute to the formation of human culture, Christians are to give expression to a Biblical worldview. But this is something that cannot be done alone. If we are to present to the world a distinctively Christian culture, we must do so in the strength which our mutual dependence and cooperation makes possible. In political activity, in the media, in research, in education, and in philanthropy, the key word for Christians is community. This doesn’t mean they cannot be "co-belligerents," as Schaeffer put it, with non-Christians in important social controversies and activities. But it does mean that they must be working together in a certain gracious exclusiveness if they are to recover the various areas of human relationships under the lordship of Christ. If we do not attempt to recover this lost world, how shall we be able to hold our heads up when the Lord comes back again?

Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College

Alta Vista
1719 NE 50th Street
Seattle, Washington 98105
Phone: (206) 524-2262
Fax: (206) 524-1837

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