It was to the credit of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, which for four years has had the character of a mobile academic community, that it sponsored a recent conference providing Christian perspective on the contemporary search for reality. Christian scholars from forty-two campuses discussed what is evangelically authentic and inauthentic in the present counter-cultural revolt. Their deliberations will issue in cassette recordings from Word and in a book from Harper and Row setting the culture crisis in Christian perspective.
Interest is mounting in such a balanced assessment of the social tumult today. Not only are campus intellectuals seeking a discriminating critique of contemporary culture, but also multitudes of parents are reaching for help in discriminating between radical commitments that are neither Christian nor intelligible, commendable departures from inherited moral compromises, and mere culture-badges such as mod dress.
The so-called new consciousness is mainly a Western phenomenon; it is not pervading Communist-sphere nations or Eastern culture, although there are surface indications that youth discontent is an almost universal leaven and some signs of youth revolt even in India. As technology inevitably overtakes other cultures (how prevent it?), their presently dominant religions will face new stresses. As scientific concentration invades all realms of life, and confronts the easy notion that religion and science can survive on wholly different levels of reflection, scientism will tighten its grip, and men will reach for distinctively human survival.
Dr. David Carley, head of Inland Steel Development Corporation, thinks the modern turn toward world-reality requires responsible involvement at the frontiers of change and need, and especially so in the struggle for human rights, if one aims to be spiritually authentic. A dominant feature of the new consciousness is keen awareness of problems of race prejudice, population growth, environmental pollution, and poverty; conservation of natural resources is likely to follow on this list of temporal concerns.
But the call of alienated youth especially includes a dimension of love that modern Christianity could and should have had all along. Moreover, the distressing gap between social concern and personal morality now concerns not a few of the countercultural young; they realize that in a new outlook on life the whole person must somehow be involved. This is one level of commitment to which the young Jesus-followers address a Christian witness and invitation. The young seem more receptive today to the call of Christ than we have ever known them to be, and in the decisions they make they are being most influenced not by their elders but by their peers.
Although its present energies are devoted to an unknown God, the youth rebellion, observes Dr. George Mavrodes of the University of Michigan, involves a demand for collision with a higher reality. One feature of the modern search for reality surely lies in this insistence on confrontation—including confrontation of or by reality. This has been one factor, no doubt, in the violent propulsion of many into a new sphere of consciousness through hallucinatory drugs, and in the resort of others to bizarre sexual perversion in quest of “interpersonal truth.” But Dr. Armand Nicholi II of Harvard Medical School now notes a widespread disenchantment with the drug scene and a turning to more promising alternatives. Dr. Douglas Feaver of Lehigh University reports that unrestricted freedom in the world of sex has brought increasing complaints about waning pleasure and intensity of sex, and a feeling of emptiness about love.
Christian claims, too, are approached with the expectation that the God who assertedly revealed himself in Christ must be active now as well in some dramatic way. When misdirected, this expectation leads readily to the demand for charismatic miracles and apostolic powers. But we cannot effectively counter such excesses by treating the Living God as a semi-retired star of past generations. Kierkegaard made the point that the disciples contemporary with Jesus had no advantage over those who acknowledge Christ’s lordship today, since the truth of revelation is revealed not to sight but to faith.
To be sure, modern encounter-theology espoused its dramatic leaps of faith at the insufferable expense of intelligible revelation. Sound evangelical faith will preserve not only the rationality of God’s nature and ways, but also the ongoing drama of redemptive renewal and of the Risen Christ’s own living presence in the midst of his people. Surely the divine integration of fragmented personalities must involve something more astonishing morally and spiritually than many laggard evangelical congregations now realize.
In an anti-intellective mood, today’s youth counterculture deliberately correlates consciousness and personal values with the mystical. In doing so, it forfeits any ultimately intelligible anchorage for the very countercultural values it champions.
Stipulating the proper role of reason is one of the most demanding requirements of a Christian critique of the countercultural mood, and evangelicals are not themselves wholly agreed on this issue.
The fact is that modern philosophical rationalism, in its speculative revolt against transcendent cognitive revelation, promised from human reasoning more than it could deliver, and thereby encouraged the recent modern disenchantment with reason. For the human mind was considered an imminent rational apriori that had an inherent potent for answering all questions, either because man’s mind was considered secretly divine or because human reason was held to supply reality with its intelligible connections. The notion that man’s mind is the source of all truth is about as far as one can get from the Judeo-Christian view that human reason is an instrument for recognizing and receiving truth, and that God himself is truth.
What the modern approach forfeited was the biblical truth of a transcendent rational Creator, of the supernatural Logos as the source of the substance and structures of creation, and of the reality of transcendent cognitive revelation. The counterculture needs to be recalled to a proper regard for reason, instead of an easy tolerance of the present shrinkage of reason and external reality to mere technocratic mathematics and predictable cosmic continuities.
Ronald Nash of Western Kentucky University has warned, and properly, against the epidemic of bad epistemology among alienated youth and among those who speak for them on the public scene. Any outlook so prone to overemphasize the subjective and to disregard rational claims can neither invalidate a false revelation nor validate a true one—its own peregrinations included. Nash’s comment is to the point: “The message that all in the counterculture should heed is this: If you are sincere in your search for the Real, you must not repudiate the Rational.”
CARL F. H. HENRY
