One feature of this year’s American Baptist Convention, in Boston’s War Memorial Auditorium, was a spirited panel discussion on “Technology, Modern Man, and the Gospel” that brought together Dr. Harvey G. Cox, associate professor of church and society at Harvard Divinity School, and Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Their exchange was moderated by Dr. George D. Younger, program associate of the Division of Evangelism, American Baptist Home Mission Society.
Younger: Our problem this morning is a very real one, for we live in and are shaped by and must witness in the middle of a technological society. We cannot talk about modern man as if he were someone apart from us, for each of us is a modern man or a modern woman. And when we talk about the Gospel and the Church, we again are talking about ourselves. This morning we are gathered here as American Baptists with two churchmen who are part of our fellowship. On your right is Harvey Cox, on your left Carl Henry. I’m going to ask each of them in his own way to say what he feels is the heart of the problem as we in the Church seek to address the Gospel to modern man in a technological society—perhaps a better way to put it might be: to understand what the Gospel is, as we ourselves are part of a technological society. Now, we haven’t even agreed which one is to go first. Who’d like to start out?
Cox: Well, thank you George. First of all I’d like to welcome all of you to Boston, which is the home of Harvard University, the place where in the middle of the seventeeenth century President Dunster was fired as the president of Harvard for becoming a Baptist. They’re nicer to us now. I want to say also that this is a very auspicious and interesting way for Dr. Henry and me to have a conversation about theology. Very frequently, theological dialogues in the past have been phrased in categories about which people understood beforehand where the differences were. Today we’re going to talk about the problem for which no theological position has finished answers, the problem of modern man and technology, and I for one look forward to a very profitable exchange. Let me say at the very outset that by technology today I will mean the tools and processes by which we reduce the relative costs of the enterprises that man is engaged in—the application of scientific know-how to the reduction of the relative costs of the various enterprises that man engages in. This means that we have to make choices that we have not been called upon to make before. Many of the things which took care of themselves in previous centuries now are on the agenda of choice for human beings. For theology, for the Gospel, I think this means two things.
First of all, we have to ask the question asked by the Psalmist in a new way: What is man that Thou art mindful of him? What is the place of man in history and the cosmos? What is his appropriate task and mission? Here I think the answer has to come for me from Christology, recognizing that in Jesus Christ we have a disclosure not only of who God is for man but, from my point of view, also a disclosure of who man is for man—an image, a metaphor, a normative instance of who man is and who he is called to be.
I think, secondly, the challenge to theology is the translation of the vision of the Kingdom of God into a vision of what we should strive and work and pray for on this earth, in this world. We’re talking about the transformation of the kingdoms of the world into the kingdom of our God and of his Christ, and I take this very literally: the transformation of the earth into the Kingdom of God. But the Kingdom of God as we know it and confess it in the Bible is phrased in metaphors—the lion lying down with the lamb—which have to be given a certain political and social cogency for our time. So I think this is the theological task: asking “who is man?” and dealing once again with the Kingdom of God.
Younger: Dr. Henry, let’s hear your definition of the heart of the problem.
Henry: By technology I mean applied science devoted to the systematic manipulation of the material aspects of civilization. And as such it today holds, of course, not only vast creative potential but also frightening destructive potential. Perhaps it is the secret carrier of a nuclear spasm that will explode all human achievement, or the carrier of the automation of production that will consign mankind to a global breadline, or the carrier of a new mythology of the secular city, with a materialistic determinism of modern life. I agree that we must ask earnestly whether sooner or later it may not encompass all human endeavor and radically alter every man’s way of living.
Modern man I find somewhat more difficult to define, since man is always fundamentally the same and human history shows less change than constancy. Modern man can be projected two ways. First, anybody so fascinated by material techniques and things that he disregards and demeans the supernatural: for example, in Boston, a Harvard graduate who is a disciple of my colleague Harvey Cox rather than Nathan Pusey. Or secondly, and I think this is the preferable definition, anybody who is earnestly involved in the modern conflict of ideas and ideals.
Now by the Gospel I mean God’s message of Christ’s death and resurrection for sinners that offers the secular city forgiveness of sins, spiritual life, and enduring hope. And I would just comment that the very arrangement of our topic is curiously modern: the Gospel stands last, as an appendage of tertiary concern, and technology has the priority as the real issue of the day. Modern man stands between these as the great arbiter of human destiny. Whereas the fact is that the Gospel is the decisive issue, and man—whether he’s pre-modern, modern, or post-modern—will be judged by what he does with God. Technology is simply the latest human colossus, and its moral tone turns ultimately on man’s response to the God of justice and the God of justification.
Younger: Now, Dr. Henry, I think you’ve already joined one issue that we had better get out of the way immediately, since Dr. Cox is the author of a book, The Secular City, and you mentioned the mythology of the secular city. I wish you’d explain that a little bit further.
Henry: Well, as I see it, the secular city (at least as Dr. Cox espoused it in his earlier volume) seeks to detach modern man and all of his responsibilities from any answerability to the supernatural, and from the idea that there are created orders, structures in society by which society is permanently bound; it tends to prefer a wholly open and fluid society, open to the future in the sense that the past is in no way binding and decisive for us. I regard this as a secular alternative to the biblical conception of the Kingdom of God. I share the vision, certainly, of the transformation of the earth into the Kingdom of God. What I dispute is the idea that modern socio-political ideals are to be assimilated directly to the New Covenant, and that we are, like the theocracy of the Old Testament, to have a priestly class that somehow makes direct political inroads and determines the structures of society for the generation in which we live.
Younger: It sounds to me right now as if you’re going on from where you tried to draw the issue to add a couple more. Let’s stick with where you drew it. And that was on the detaching of man from answerability to the supernatural and this fluid situation it assumes. Would you like to speak to that?
Cox: I think it’s very good that we have joined the issue early, because I would like to point out where I do differ quite basically from my colleague at this point. I do not think that man is bound to the past. And I think that the Christian announcement that God forgives us of our sins, that he promises a new kingdom of love and justice, is the power which releases us from the grip of the past, both individually and socially. I think the past is there for us to learn from, to celebrate, to remember; but we are not prisoners of the past, and this is exactly the way I understand St. Paul’s interpretation of our forgiveness that God makes possible. He does open the future for us. This is the meaning of the resurrection. We do not have to live bound with patterns that have been established in the past. We do have the responsibility to make changes if we feel these are more appropriate to our response to what God requires. I’m not nearly as suspicious of the material, I think, as Dr. Henry is. And I start here from the incarnation—that God shares and becomes a part of the material universe. William Temple once said that Christianity is of all the religions the one that is most materialistic. And I give thanks for such materialistic things as penicillin and X-ray and other gifts of modern technology.
Finally, on this business of the supernatural, I don’t see how anyone could read The Secular City without recognizing that I am suggesting that man is answerable in a colossal way to the God who created the world and places man in that world and makes him responsible. I even have a book called God’s Revolution and Man’s Responsibility. Now, as far as the supernatural is concerned, I’d simply like to say that I think that a division between the natural and the supernatural is not something we have to get hung up on. I think our problem as Christians is that we have accepted a scientific, rationalist description of what is natural, and therefore we’ve had to say God is supernatural. I would say that God is preeminently and ultimately natural, that he works in, with, and under the natural processes of history, of nature, and that we don’t have to dichotomize his world into natural and supernatural anymore. That’s a nineteenth-century debate that I don’t even want to enter into.
Younger: Would you like to say something more from the nineteenth-century before we move on?
Henry: I’d like to go back, sir, to the first century. Just a passing comment on natural-supernatural. I share the protest against the modern, restricted, arbitrary definition of the natural. The natural is what God wills habitually, and I want to insist on that. But the only alternative to supernaturalism that I know is naturalism, and I don’t want to be stuck with it.
Now, the real issue that I want to get back to is this one about not being tied to the past and the resurrection having opened a path to the future, because I think that this is strategically important for us in the panel. It is true, of course, that the resurrection opens for man trapped in sin a wholly new option for the future. But it is wholly new only in the sense that it is possible for him in terms of redemption to recover God’s purpose for man on the basis of creation. It’s a cheap victory, I think, to debunk the emphasis on orders of creation and orders of preservation that are divinely willed in history as sort of a deification of the status quo, because the orders of creation are only as static as the Creator and Preserver of the universe wills them to be. I grant that these orders are often violated by secular forces in power, but there is no merit in an anarchic reaction to injustice.
Younger: Excuse me, could you give those who are here a little more specific example of what you mean by orders? I’m not sure we know what you mean.
Henry: I’ll give you a good example, in that monogamous marriage is divinely willed for man on the basis of creation. This is fixed and given. It is not something wholly fluid, and the resurrection of Christ doesn’t open a new way for man in history on the basis of it. Man is born into a life that’s already structured, not simply by a moral consensus in society, but by God’s plotting of nature and man and history—his purpose.
Younger: But does the resurrection have anything to say to monogamous marriage? You’ve said it recovers God’s intention for the orders. Now, in what way does it recover it in marriage, the example you’ve used?
Henry: It publishes the fact that injustice and immorality cannot prevail and that human nature as it is lived in obedience to Christ, and in obedience to his word, is the only type of human nature that can look hopefully into an eternal future.
Younger: Harvey, using the same example—monogamous marriage—how would you see the future being opened by the resurrection?
Cox: Well, I’m not against monogamous marriage. I think it’s a fine institution. It’s not perhaps the one that is most directly relevant to the question of technology and technological change as others might be. I do think that one would be hard put to show that there is a clear certification of monogamous marriage for all people in the New Testament. As I recall my New Testament, it’s for bishops but not for everyone. However, I happen to be in favor of it for everyone. I think the real question here.…
Henry: Sir, Jesus was talking to the Pharisees when he reiterated what was so from the beginning, not to bishops.
Cox: Well, I really don’t think I want to talk about monogamous marriage. I would like to talk, however, about the restoration of the purpose of God in creating man. And I think that’s a phrase that I would latch on to, this phrase that Dr. Henry just used, and then ask the question, What is God’s purpose in creating man? To what are we restored and called in God’s act of redemption? Here I would say that clearly, for me, it’s to have dominion over the earth, to tend the garden, to be the one who has dominion over the creatures, to give them their names—in other words, to exercise the kind of stewardship and power which man frequently refuses to exercise over the creation for God as an agent who is responsible to God. I just wonder whether we agree on that.
Henry: Yes. I would say that Christianity alone makes technology possible, in the long run, in terms of its view of an ordered universe and all that is implied in this, and that only Christianity can protect technology from arbitrary exploitation of man and the universe. But having said that, and agreeing with your emphasis here, Professor Cox, I am still troubled about this revolutionary approach, which, if it looks upon the action, the breakthrough wherever it occurs, as a manifestation of the will of God, seems to me to sacrifice necessarily the ability to judge adversely even the relatively better, from the standpoint of something superior to it. That is, if the divine orders of creation and preservation need to be replaced, then we’re in worse difficulty with the problem of evil than we think. Actually, instead of narrowing the problem of evil, we’ve widened the problem of evil, as I see it, and I don’t think even the most aggressive and dedicated representatives of the new theology can possibly rescue us from our predicament.
Cox: Well, can I just say that I’ve never been very happy with theologies based on the orders of creation. I don’t think that one necessarily … I think you can have a biblical theology—and I’m sure you’d agree, Dr. Henry—without building it on orders of creation. This is a datable, locatable Lutheran understanding of theology. I would much rather start with the fact of redemption and look at creation from the point of view of redemption and from the point of view of God. That is, my theology, in this sense, is radically Christological; I start with the action of God which then indicates to us the purpose of creation, both as we look back to the original creation of man and as we look forward to the kingdom that breaks in here on our present and to which we are responsible. I suppose my emphasis here would be that as Christians we are more responsible to look forward to the kingdom which God is making possible for man, which began with Jesus Christ, than we are to look back to try to preserve orders of creation. Insofar as man always lives in a political order, always lives in an economic order, in a familial order—to that extent and to that extent only I would accept an orders-of-creation approach. I would say, however, that these are institutions which are malleable and changeable; they have been changed and they will change in the future.
Younger: How do you respond to this business of looking back to orders and looking forward?
Henry: I, of course, consider my theology a theology of redemption, and not onesidedly a theology of creation. It is the redefinition of redemption as mere “demption” that bothers me. Because the biblical view is redemption, regeneration, and God’s recovery of his purpose for man on the basis of the original creation. I would hold the two together. But I think we’ve exploited these differences, and explored them as fully as possible. Let’s get on.
Younger: I’ve got one that I’m afraid, at least the way I’ve heard it, would strike both of your positions. There are those who are pointing out: quite true, Harvey, that Christianity is materialistic, and quite true, Carl, it alone has made technology possible. Historically it’s made technology possible. There are those who are now saying back to us that some of the worst things that we see in technology—the going ahead and raping nature for the use of man—are precisely an outgrowth of a Christian outlook that sees only man as important and doesn’t honor the creation. Now, I wonder how to respond to this line of criticism that’s being made by a great many people today, that Christians are people who only worry about man and what they can get out of the universe.
Henry: I would say that this perversion of the Christian ideal actually has its possibility in the Christian interpretation which made technology possible, but that it is a perversion and that it comes under the judgment of the same God of creation and redemption. But I’d emphasize that, while I stress the incarnation, certainly, it was the incarnate Christ who warned us most against materialism and cautioned us to seek first the kingdom of God and not things. Man’s basic problem, it seems to me, is not his environment nor the tools of technology, but man himself. Peter Drucker of New York University, who was onetime president of the Society for the History of Technology, and who writes in the two-volume work on Technology in Western Civilization that was published last year by Oxford University Press, has this to say: “It was naive of the nineteenth-century optimist to expect paradise from tools. And it is equally naïve of the twentieth-century pessimist to make the new tools the scapegoat for such old shortcomings as man’s blindness, cruelty, immaturity, greed, and sinful pride.” I would say that it’s the human mind and will that needs spiritual and moral correction, and that apart from this man’s creative genius and his human dignity and his human worth are going to degenerate. The basic human problem will not be met by adding to or subtracting from technology.
Younger: What’s your opinion on that?
Cox: I couldn’t agree with that more. It’s entirely my position. I don’t think tools are either the answer or the problem. The problem is man himself. I think we might disagree on exactly what that problem is. I think it’s the problem that man is encapsulated in sin and death, what the Bible calls sin and death, and that the Gospel liberates him, announces his liberation from sin and death, so that he can take responsibility for tools, for his ideas, for his society, for himself, that he doesn’t have to be the victim of the way things have gone in the past. But with reference to your early question, George, which I think is a very good one—that is, the accusation that Christianity in its historical development has laid the groundwork for an overly technologized society—I think there’s truth in that. And I think we gain nothing from denying that the historical development of Christianity has resulted in certain unfortunate phenomena. Here especially as Protestant Christians, I think we can learn from, let’s say, the spirit of the Franciscan, St. Francis, whose first impulse with relation to nature was not how to dominate it, necessarily, but loving nature, celebrating it. He talked about his friends the birds and his brother the fire and his brother the sun. I think we can learn something from that as Protestants. And as Christians I think there are even things we can learn from the non-Christian religious traditions of the world. One doesn’t have to stop being a Christian and a dedicated Christian to recognize that there are insights in these great Oriental traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism from which we can profit immensely. One of them is a kind of respect for nature, a capacity to contemplate nature and not simply always to be manipulating it. I think that in the next century we can learn a good deal from these people which we can integrate with our own Christian starting point.
Younger: Is this respect for and contemplation of nature a part of your outlook, Dr. Henry?
Henry: Oh, yes, by all means. Of course, it’s in the Psalms. The modern scientific approach tends to be largely a technique for mastery and manipulation rather than for contemplation. And the scientist, qua scientist. in his professional capacity, doesn’t know what it is to see the glory of God in nature anymore; as a man, he is of course confronted, as every man is, by the revelation of God in nature. But I want to pick up this other point that Professor Cox has suggested. I think it’s a good one in its own way. This point is that the Oriental religions are saying something to the West at this stage and will be saying something increasingly. And I suspect from what Professor Cox has said that he considers this perhaps to be a larger threat to the Western outlook than that posed by technology. Would you say that?
Cox: I wouldn’t say just a threat. Not just a threat. I think it also has elements of real promise.
Henry: But do you think its significance might overshadow that of …
Cox: Yes, its significance could well overshadow the technological development.
Henry: I think this is so. And I’d like to comment on it for just a moment but from another point of view. It seems to me that all the values of the last 2,000 years—indeed, of the past 4,000 years—now hang in the balances. Almost all problems of modern civilization have now reached the supremely critical stage of a final choice, a final decision. And modern science and modern philosophy and modern theology in the West all seem to be failing to kindle authentic hope. They evade the great issues, they evade the ultimate concerns that have engaged human life and thought in its loftiest creative hours, the realm of spirit, the realm of mind, the realm of conscience, the eternal world, particularly the reality of God and the will of God for man. I think that this attempt to make a basically materialistic response or a merely materialistic response to the real and massive problems that are posed by modern life is inadequate and self-defeating, and that the Oriental religions are speaking to us today. The United States has been involved in military commitments abroad (and I tend to take a positive view of that vis-à-vis Communism, in contrast to some of my colleagues), but despite this commitment, and despite extensive foreign aid, nonetheless we are being criticized today even by the pagan nations of the Orient—so called traditionally—because of our materialistic aspirations and our disinterest in the spiritual and eternal world. I think that this materialistic response in Western society is inadequate and self-defeating. It adds illusion to the misery of the masses and it compounds that illusion.
Younger: I think we’re beginning to get to paydirt here. I’m personally very much aware of the many ways in which that which the Christian vision seems to speak of is already happening. The time when all the nations will flow unto Jerusalem—nowadays they flow to whoever controls the communications satellites, or we remember they all flowed unto Washington at the time of Kennedy’s funeral. In our time we are extremely aware that within every one of our metropolitan areas in this country and within the nation as a whole we are bound up together with each other—everyone, every man. We are bound up in such a way by our past choices that we have every possibility of destroying each other rather than of realizing that sort of fruitful life that we also can see. I’m glad you moved us into this area, Carl, and I’d like to ask Harvey about this final decision. It’s certainly final for our generation, although the thing we’re aware of is that it may be final for the human race.
Cox: I think Dr. Henry’s right about that. We’ve come to a certain crucial crossroads in two ways. One, that we now have in our hands the capacity for self-destruction, not only nuclear self-destruction but psychological self-destruction, and that we therefore have to make choices and enter into a plane of responsibility that is higher and more demanding than our forefathers had. I think that is being made possible for us—and from my own theological point of view, it is God that makes this kind of human responsibility possible. I would want to say in that regard that there are a lot of false hopes in the world, based on science, based on politics, and this is why I emphasized in my opening remarks the job we have to do as Christians in stating the hope of the Kingdom of God in a way that will engage the imagination of modern man. Now the reason why people are hoping in science or in politics is that we have not so persuasively stated and demonstrated the hope of the Kingdom of God that they’re hoping in the Gospel. This is part of our responsibility, and that is why I emphasize it so strongly. It’s a judgment on us as Christians that people do not entertain that hope as seriously as they entertain some of their false hopes. I do think that I would put a slightly different emphasis on the materialism in science—this has come up a couple of times before—than Dr. Henry does. I’m impressed with the spiritual aspects of science. This is not simply a materialistic quest. When one thinks of the mystery of the atom, the mystery of the human body, and the mind, the mystery that reveals itself to advanced scientific investigation and exploration, one finds some of the most spiritually sensitive people in the world now working in scientific laboratories, because they’ve touched the inner mysteries. And I believe that there is something happening there that can’t simply be put down as materialism at all. Because it’s the material universe that God has given us and within which he allows himself to be known, at least in part. The hope that we have to state for the men of our time is one that articulates that promise of the Kingdom of God in a way which engages the imagination of man with all its scientific and political configurations.
Henry: I think that technology can and ought to be used to confront the vacuums that technology itself creates—that is, to confront modern man with the divinely published standards by which men and nations will ultimately be judged, and with the good news of the offer of forgiveness of sins and of new life in Christ and of God’s claim upon life. The crucial issue for modern man, I think, is whether he will recognize that his creatureliness and his sinfulness place limits on the fulfillment of human aspirations, and that the abundant life simply can’t be found in an abundance of material things and in an abundance of sex, or in an abundance of status, or in an abundance of leisure, if we come to the leisure era. Christ’s word is, I think, still the most relevant counsel to the current age: “Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all desirable things will come as by-products.” Improved material conditions don’t overcome man’s softness or his moral delusion or corruption. I think there are more wonderful possibilities that can be held out for modern man even than creating parts for wornout bodies, magnificent as that is, or regulating human fertility, or communicating by satellite, or living on artificial food. God can turn sinners into new creatures. And he will raise the dead. And we can enter into our closet and talk to the eternal Spirit. And we can enjoy meat to eat that others cannot see. There’s a city more durable than the secular city—the New Jerusalem—and in it death will be abolished. I think that if modern man devoted half as much interest to the spiritual and moral world as he does to technological efficiency, there would be a staggering religious awakening and a regaining of eternal truth that would make contemporary technology rather than theology seem to rest on a plateau.
Younger: I’d like to put to both of you a situation …
Cox: I’d like to respond, if I could, before you go on. I never quite know whether Dr. Henry is saying something that he has thought about beforehand or responding to the discussion as it’s gone along, because so much of what he says I agree with. I think there’s one point, however, in his last statement which I again would want to at least put a different emphasis on. If I understood him correctly, he said the crucial issue today in the preaching of the Gospel is that man shall recognize his sin and creatureliness. I do not think that is the crucial issue. I think the crucial issue is that man should recognize that he is a forgiven and restored child of God whose powers and responsibilities given to him in the creation are now available to him. That he is also a sinful creature, but that the first thing to say about him is that he is forgiven. The first news of the Gospel is not that you’re a sinner but that God has acted and forgiven you. The Gospel is good news, not bad news. And I want that good news to be the emphasis, and the business about sin and creatureliness which is there to remain as a kind of minor motif, not as the major motif of Christian preaching. I think we’ve emphasized that long enough.
Henry: I would simply say, on this, that I think the first thing to be said to modern man is that his destiny in eternity is unsure and that he is locked up to decision for or against Jesus Christ.
Younger: That could be taken out of context [applause] … his destiny is unsure.
Henry: Perhaps Professor Cox would like to clarify what he said, and I give him opportunity.
Cox: I agree with that. His destiny is unsure.
Henry: That’s quite different from telling him his sins are forgiven and everything is all right.
Cox: I didn’t say everything is all right. His sins have been forgiven. Isn’t that the Gospel, that in Jesus Christ our sins have been forgiven? Believe the Gospel and receive? [Applause.] … I didn’t say everything is all right.
Henry: The New Testament, it seems to me, proclaims, number one, the forgiveness of sins …
Cox: Number one, that’s all we have to … We agree.
Henry: No. Secondly, that he who does not believe is condemned already. [Applause.]
Younger: If we’re going to start clapping up on the basis of who’s for condemnation and who’s for forgiveness, we’re going to be in a terrible state here. [Laughter.] We’ve got to start coming to a close, but I was going to put a problem to both of you. I think it would be one of the best ways to sum up. If you were sitting next to an R & D man from Route 128 who is a member of an American Baptist Church (I was in this situation a day or so ago), and you had to tell him what is the nature of the good news for him, and he is a scientist, how would you say it? I’d like you to use this as your summation; if you want to repeat what you’ve said, do that. But if when you were talking to him personally there’s another way you’d say it, please say it that way.
Henry: I’d say that what God expects of us is that we should love him with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves. And we are all miserable sinners. And if we face the future trusting in ourselves, the God of the universe is more righteous than that, and we will simply inherit condemnation that we have brought upon ourselves. And Christ died for our sins and rose again the third day. And he is the author of hope, in the forgiveness of sins that he provides. And we can know him. And what God has in view for me on the basis of redemption is my restoration to fellowship with the living God, and to holiness, and to the exhibition, in relation to my neighbor, of what it means to be in the service of my holy Father.
Younger: Harvey, what would you point to?
Cox: I think I would try to say very much the same thing but try to explain what I mean by the language that Dr. Henry has just used. What does it really mean today to say that we are miserable sinners? That we’re headed for condemnation? That we’re trapped in sin? That we have hope again? Just repeating these phrases to an R & D man or to anyone else today doesn’t fulfill our responsibilities. I think that as a Christian I have to know him personally. First of all, I don’t like these kinds of theoretical situations, desert island or otherwise. I’d like to know who he is, what’s worrying him, where his hang-ups and fears are. In telling him that he is a miserable sinner (which he is and which I am) or that we’re all headed for condemnation (which we are if we don’t change), how do you put content in these words for a person for whom this kind of language has a hollow ring? That’s my problem. And I don’t think you can simply repeat the phrases. I think you’ve got to know him and to know what you mean and to put it in a kind of language that will cause something to happen in this man so that he really does have hope, so that he really is dedicated to working for a future and a hope which God has made possible, instead of a kind of phraseological solution.
Henry: I would share that.
Younger: I want to point out to all of you that although we have had differences and you’ve noted them, there has been in the discussion also some very important agreement. One, that man is the one who controls technology for good or for ill. Another is agreement on the vision of the Kingdom of God, although described differently. And finally, an agreement that the Gospel, the good news which is announced, must make contact with the man now, but that it relates to his situation and our whole situation—to eternity.
