The Modern Drift: Is Nobody Home in This World?

Sometime between 1000 and 2000 B.C. (depending on who does the dating) the intellectuals of India concluded that “we live in an impersonal world.” They adjusted this concept of an impersonal world, however, to meet man’s practical needs. The myths and myth-cycles of Hinduism (and later Buddhism) were launched with intellectual sophistication because something in man, whether philosophically sophisticated or ignorant, makes living in an impersonal world intolerable. The word “god” has in itself a certain sense of the personal, and so the word “god” was used by the thinkers of the East in order to cushion the concept of an impersonal universe. But since the “wisdom” of the East is centered in the final loss of personality, it was natural to minimize personality in ourselves, and to have little care for it in others. To the religion of the Orient, sin is simply “lack of understanding,” and sin passes as man accepts “the fact” that he and dung are brothers.

THE PLIGHT OF THE WEST

Many have come to such a position in the twentieth century post-Christian Western world. Lawrence of Arabia, in fact, said that the highest purpose of man’s body is to become manure on the fields. Dominated by this concept, he later committed intellectual suicide, having turned off his mind long before he brought his death to pass on his motorcycle. Historian Toynbee says that while northern European culture is based on Christianity, it no longer believes it, but is trying to keep the moral-cultural concepts built on it; therefore there is now no real relationship between what the Western world is trying to keep and what it believes. Toynbee then seems to say that communism is, by contrast, in the position of resting its culture on what it believes, and that thus communism will win since it is unified in itself as opposed to the divided present culture of the West.

I doubt that communism will win, for it seems to me that it contains even greater divisions in itself. But that is a secondary point. Communism does not have to win for us to lose. We are losing to ourselves.

Many intellectuals of the West have come to the conclusion that we live in an impersonal world, so that we have arrived back at the more than 3000-year-old world view of the East.

In the race of fission versus fission, fusion versus fusion, missile versus missile, what reason is there to think that those conceiving and engineering these things on “our side” believe anything basically different concerning the personal versus the impersonal view of the universe from those on the “other side,” the Communists?

THROUGH THE CURTAIN

We here in Switzerland have been in touch with certain young intellectuals who have escaped from behind the Iron Curtain. Some have come out at great cost. One, for example, spent several years in a concentration camp for a previously attempted break. When he did get out, he left his shoes behind in a swamp, and some of his family were in the camps for two years or more because of his successful escape. But he says, “I’m glad for the freedom, but I have not found what I thought I would—I have not found in the West any base for the freedom.” I can hear the shouts, “ingrate, haven’t you freedom, haven’t you shoes?” But he is only saying out of the rough and tumble of a personally displaced life what Toynbee has said.

Or think of it another way. In the Brussels Exposition last year, a modern art exhibit was titled “Ensor to the Present.” There was an unusually representative cross section of Western paintings of the past 50 years; and more unusual still was a certain scattering of Russian canvases since the revolution. In every room the Russian canvases stood out immediately, for they pictured the world as a world of order. True, each was in some way a political tract saying that the individual only has his meaning in relationship to the State; but it was a world of order. In contrast, the Western canvases of the past 50 years, almost without exception, spoke of a universe of disorder, of purposelessness, of disintegration, of “no one home,” an impersonal universe. And if we were facing the decision of which of these two worlds to accept, and we knew of no third alternative, would we automatically accept the freedom plus shoes plus chrome on the automobiles, plus chaos and reject the meaningful order of the individual, if only in the nauseating context of his relationship to the total State? Freedom is like bread—it needs a base to replenish it, or it rots. And when freedom rots, the only choices left are chaos or dictatorship.

ATOMS WITHOUT A SOUL

So twentieth century man visualizes himself as living in an impersonal world—a universe with no one home—a nightmarish De Chirico painting, where there are chugging machines, endless rows of houses, but the lone figures in the midst of it all only point up the lesson—“There is no one home,” personality has no real meaning. It is worse than a painting, for it is four dimensional—it stretches away to the light years which measure the cosmos; it reaches back to an origin by chance on one end and forward not only to a personal oblivion but the oblivion of all conscious life on the other end, and it embraces the view that man is only the atom contemplating itself, and the atom is finally only energy. It is nobody home—nowhere in the wide universe is there anything which can be rightly termed personality.

Twentieth century man is learning the lesson of the Hindus of 1000–2000 B.C. that man cannot take the naked concept of an impersonal world. With Camus it is a moral sense which damns; with others it is the aesthetic, the sense of beauty, which will not fit into a world of chance; with still others it is the love they feel toward their beloved which cannot be equated with the mere sexual urge, which will not fit into this impersonal universe which the Eastern mind and the twentieth century Western man say is the universe that exists. Consequently, some smash schools as the Teddy Boys of England and the juvenile delinquents of the United States; some paint a universe of chaos; some write Music Concrete and some write equally relative novels and drama; some become alcoholics; some sleep under the bridges of Paris; some just endlessly read the newspapers so they will not have to think; and some mouth religious slogans, not to think but to keep from thinking.

Huxley, in the Brave New World, knew that his “new world” would face this problem, and so he suggested soma, a nontoxic drug, to provide a controlled, needed escape.

But now the leaders of our culture are rethinking their attitude toward religion, as the Eastern thinkers did long ago. We who are Bible-believing Christians should of all people not be surprised at this trend. If biblical prophecy is read in the historical grammatical sense of the words, the antichrist will himself be the object of worship in a world-wide religion, a world-wide “Brave New World,” with a total religion in the place of soma.

Recently a professor in one of the European universities expressed himself this way: “As a natural scientist I find myself in a dual position—I see man from a naturalistic viewpoint; but I find that this materialistic phenomenon of man, as he has been produced by chance, has functional needs. It is necessary for him to fill these functional needs; this is a kind of truth. Thus, we see now that man needs religion.”

Shall we who are biblical Christians shout that a victory is won? Not a bit of it. Instead, we ought to weep, for all he means is that man is the atom contemplating itself by chance, and in the chance relationship of the atoms we are, we find that we have unexplained functional needs and these needs are best met by religion, so, they say, let’s have religion, the tranquilizer supreme. Any religion which meets this functional need is “truth.”

I am convinced that the Eastern type of religious thinking is winning the Western religious world today. Of those I meet from many Western lands who have some interest in religion as opposed to the “pure” materialists, existentialists, and so forth, many more have their basic religious thoughts rooted in Eastern thinking than in Christianity.

Anthroposophy (Rudolf Steiner), Theosophy, Unity, Christian Science, Bahai, and many sects like them are Eastern and use varying degrees of Christian terminology to express that which is contrary to Christian thought. The rush to Yogi everywhere, the growth of an almost untouched-up Buddhism in Britain, have had an influence beyond the numbers of those who would call themselves their followers. Wagner’s operas and Goethe’s poems were born in Eastern thought, and have had great, if only partially understood, influence in our twentieth century world.

LIBERALISM AND IMPERSONALITY

Protestant liberalism is in its own way a strongly contributing factor: it has been depersonalizing Christianity for varying lengths of time, from 250 years ago until the present, depending on which country is inundated. The new current shaped by Barth, Brunner, Niebuhr, and the Scandinavian Lund Theology twists and turns, but it has not changed the direction of the flow. For example, a Hindu or Buddhist well understands the myth-cycle treatment which much of the new liberalism imposes on the first three chapters of Genesis: it is in method what the Hindu-Buddhist myth-cycles are. Yogi Yogananda in his autobiography deals extensively with Genesis 1–3, and using the myth-cycle method he turns this passage into a Hindu-Buddhist tract for Western consumption. By the myth-cycle method, one can come with equal efficiency to the conclusions of the new liberals or to Yogi Yogananda’s conclusions.

The new liberal attitude toward apologetics is a part of the pattern. All we can do, we are told, is “witness.” Religious truth is pushed back out of the test of time, space, and history. When both the modern liberal Protestant and Hindu witness to their religious “truth,” no one can be sure whether they witness to someone, or even something there, or whether they witness only to an abstract idea. On this basis Yogi Yogananda’s interpretation of Genisis 1–3 is as good as anyone’s. Take the first steps in removing the Bible out of space, time, and history, and soon it can be lodged as one more myth-cycle in a Hindu temple, to be circumambulated and meditated upon while one waits for “the lightning to fall.” Who then is to say which is “more right,” the Hindu or the modern liberal Protestant witness? Perhaps lightning strikes deeper in the Himalayas, or Rome, than in Basel, Zürich, or New York.

THE BATTLE FOR TRUTH

In our shrinking, close-knit world we are now facing the most basic of all questions: “Do we live in a personal or impersonal universe?” and the related question of whether religion is merely functional or whether it deals with truth. What is the framework of reality? What is the universe really; what is it objectively?

As one meets Protestants from many lands, one finds them troubled because Protestantism is, in country after country, now an almost entirely middleclass phenomenon. Neither the intellectuals nor the workers are being touched. To reach them we must deal in a gentle yet rough and tumble way with the ideas involved in Christian truth. We must be able to defend the historic creeds of the Christian Church without embarrassment or reservation.

Yet all too often orthodox creeds are used not as keys to understanding, but rather as slogans to escape from the tough business of facing ideas and truth. It is so comforting in the circle of our applauding friends to slay Hinduism, the old and new liberalism, and all else, without an honest effort to understand the problems and the statable Christian ideas in answer to those problems. Slogans will not do. Nor will it do to say that the intellectual questions are unanswered, but as “a blind act of faith” we accept the Bible. Such an assertion tends to confuse the question as to whether Christianity deals with objective truth or only with the functional needs of man.

The writers of the Bible held that truth is to be intellectually considered in the broad daylight of history, or it is nothing. To Paul the resurrection of Christ was physical, testable in history and coherently statable, or the Christian faith was to be declared vain, not true. We must hold this firmly, or we feed the rushing river of the functional and relative concept of religion. We should worship the living God because the Bible has statable answers to man’s bone-crushing, ruthless, intellectual questions.

GOD AND THE INDIVIDUAL

As we seek to understand the problems of our age, we shall see that something is needed in addition to the intellectual answer. There needs to be a demonstration that God is and that he is personal. Christianity is not just “the best intellectual system” the world has ever known; it is truth. It will not do simply to pay lip service to Scripture as to some mechanical truth, and assume that cold logic and common sense are all that is needed. The Bible does not say that such an attitude is enough, and the writers of the creeds did not say it was enough. We ought to note again how carefully the writers of the Westminster Confession balanced the truth of the objectively inspired Word of God with the work which the Holy Spirit does in relationship to the individual.

Again we are back to the central problem, “Is anyone home?” in the universe. The Bible says that someone is very much at home. The Bible teaches that there is a Triune God, and that this personal God deals individually with the finite creatures he has made. Thus, individuals have significance when they fulfill the purpose of their existence in fellowship with him. When man by sin revolted against God, this infinite God loved man enough to send the Saviour who really saves, so that finite creatures might return individually to the purpose of their creation, and, in fellowship with this personal God through the finished work of Jesus Christ, find their significance as finite personalities restored.

SUBJECTIVITY AND OBJECTIVITY

The Christian answer includes the biblical exposition of the universe, the full supernatural system of the Bible, stated without compromise and without embarrassment; and it includes the work of the Holy Spirit in history today. That answer is not the subjective without the objective Bible, as the new liberalism teaches; neither is it simply the objective Bible, if that is taken to imply that only mental assent to the best intellectual system is necessary. It is the objective Bible and the Holy Spirit, the latter dealing not only in an abstract world of religious concepts but in history, and not only history from 1500 B.C. till 100 A.D. but history in every generation.

If there is going to be a convincing statement that God exists and is personal, there must be a demonstration that the Bible’s statements and promises concerning God’s acting in history in relationship to the individual are more than mere words. It will not do to shut up the Holy Spirit’s work merely to regeneration, which cannot as such be seen; nor will it do to carry on Christian work with the means or techniques of the world (which so admirably sell cornflakes, cars, and strange sects), and then expect men to be convinced that God exists and that He is personal. The need involves first the objectively inspired Word, the Bible, from which comes a statable system based in history, set forth in history, not completely comprehended but truly comprehended, and proclaimed without compromise; and second, some demonstration that God does deal with the individual Christian in our generation.

The dangers of subjectivism are always present, but the Bible’s explicit teaching of the “power” of the Holy Spirit, its teaching of the individual leading of the Holy Spirit to individual Christians, and the relation of the individual Christian to other Christians without chaos or machine rule, on the basis of the blood of Christ and the gifts of the Spirit—these things must mean something in A.D. 1960. If they do not mean something real and tangible in our moment of history, not only will the world ask us but we must have the courage to ask ourselves, “Is there a personal God who does exist?” And we must face the question both from the world and from ourselves on the honest background of the only alternate universe which could exist, an impersonal universe of chance and consequent meaninglessness of both the individual and the human race.

The promise and emphasis of God’s acting in history are a part of the Christian system. The objective Word makes these statements and these promises. We did not originate them; they are there, as much a part of the Bible as anything else. Remove the statements and promises, and the biblical system no longer remains.

We have to leap-frog over the trivial half-systems to the basic problems of life and the universe. Because the universe is personal; because the living God exists; because after we have come to him on the basis of the finished work of Jesus Christ we are in fellowship with him; and because his promises to us as Christians have meaning in our moment of history, it is not vain to say before the world:

To eat, to breathe

to beget

Is this all there is

Chance configuration of atom against atom

of god against god

I cannot believe it.

Come, Christian Triune God who lives,

Here am I

Shake the world again.

Jacob J. Vellenga served on the National Board of Administration of the United Presbyterian Church from 1948–54. Since 1958 he has served the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. as Associate Executive. He holds the A.B. degree from Monmouth College, the B.D. from Pittsburgh-Xenia Seminary, Th.D. from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and D.D. from Monmouth College, Illinois.

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