Still Adolescent?

Much that has been said in the recent past about man’s “coming of age” has been inspired by the prison statements of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, popularized by Bishop Robinson in Honest to God. The most frequently quoted passages from Bonhoeffer’s writings are excerpts from the series of Briefen an einen Freund (Letters to a Friend), especially those written between June 8 and July 16, 1944.

It is not surprising that Bonhoeffer’s theological statements are woolly and contradictory, since he wrote from prison, with the Gestapo waiting to close in upon him; he realistically expected at any moment to hear the knock at his cell door from the seedy characters who would bid him accompany them—to the gallows. Yet these writings need to be studied for what they are and what they say, so that their truth or non-truth is judged from their intrinsic meaning, and not by the aura of the heroic that surrounds their author.

Like a refrain comes Bonhoeffer’s reiteration of the theme of the Mündigkeit der Welt und des Menschen (the of-age-ness of the world and of man). He sees this as the end-result of a process that had its roots in the scientific movements of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and has continued steadily to the point at which man no longer needs God as a constitutive factor for his thinking, whether moral, political, or scientific (see letter for July 16, 1944, in Richard Grunow, ed., Bonhoeffer Auswahl, p. 589).

Bonhoeffer notes that man has, step by step, conquered his environment, until there is allegedly no room for God, as historically understood, in the framing or articulation of the culture modern man has created. Bonhoeffer assures us (ibid., p. 577) that man has learned to manage or at least to cope with all the important factors and elements that confront him without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. Man simply must learn to get along without God.

Perhaps this will suffice for the present as a statement of Bonhoeffer’s thesis, if we add that at the end of his letter of July 16, 1944, he speaks of God as powerlessly permitting himself to be crowded out of the world and onto the cross. This view has quite evident affinity with the “radical theology” of Thomas Altizer.

The theme of man’s coming of age is a tempting one that derives a degree of plausibility from the immense strides science has made in conquering nature. Man stands at the threshold of the conquest of space: lunar exploration today, interplanetary travel tomorrow, and perhaps interstellar travel later. The question remains, however: Does this capability imply as much as modern man thinks it does?

As one considers man’s coming of age, one troublesome facet of experience presents itself. Perhaps never again does a person feel so grown-up and so capable of managing his own affairs as he felt at the onset of adolescence. This period in life, so easily forgotten by adults, has as one of its signs a false and foolish sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency. Thus, to understand the present status of the race, as it imagines itself to be “of age,” he may well recall some of the traits of mind that accompany the puberty crisis.

The adolescent has a ludicrous inability to distinguish between major and minor issues. Usually his major considerations include rejection of the guideposts of the elders and acceptance of a servile bondage to the ways and taboos of his peer group. Or the achievement of independence looms large, while a realistic assessment of his capacity for self-direction seems unimportant. The immediate nearly always takes precedence over the higher and the lasting. The adolescent is impatient: he wants what he wants when he wants it.

Again, the adolescent tends to misunderstand the nature and role of freedom. He maximizes the absence of restraint and minimizes the significance of the creative boundaries that are essential to the creative life. To him, freedom is something to be gained by quiet rebellion or by noisy revolt—and he is almost compulsive at the point of demonstrating his grown-upness by behaving in a juvenile way.

He tends to take the basic necessities of his life for granted. Any “good” for him must be something beyond these. And any appeal concerning the duty of gratitude to parents is likely to be met with a surly, “Well, I didn’t ask to be born!”

The adolescent often has a distorted sense of danger. While he feels anxious and in personal jeopardy if he is unable to gain the approval of his peers, he tends (in the absence of strong training otherwise) to feel very little the perils involved in excessive speed, the intake of alcohol, or the use of drugs or chemical substances that “turn him on.” He feels strongest at the points at which he is really weakest, and estimates as weakness the cultivation of the areas in which true strength is found.

Much more could be said. The clear implication of it all is that an emphatic and flamboyant proclamation of autonomy and self-sufficiency may well be an eloquent testimony to adolescence and immaturity of outlook. The question repeatedly arises: What are the real criteria for maturity?

One need not seem unappreciative of the greatness of scientific endeavor, particularly in the West, if he acknowledges that there are major areas in which man has not yet begun to master some of the essentials for living. That man’s achievements in power and energy are now too tightly harnessed to destructive purposes does not cheer the thoughtful person. That man has not succeeded in bringing his reproductive energy into some rational relationship with his ability to produce and/or transport basic nutritive elements hangs like a pall over the human enterprise. That the spread of technology now serves mainly to widen the gulf between the affluent nations and the poor ones is hardly a univocal witness to man’s maturity. Nor does the boldness with which some assert man’s independence of a Creator tend to signify maturity, particularly when one reflects that the greatest nations are those that have inherited the greatest natural resources. Whence came these resources? Are they really “natural” and to be taken for granted?

Two conclusions compel our attention. First, the compulsive and shrill proclamation of man’s attainment of his majority may, like similar protestations during the human puberty crisis, be a testimony to great immaturity.

Second, maturity is a relative thing, so that a person (or a society) may be relatively mature in one aspect and pitiably adolescent in many others. The wide time-gap between the teen-ager’s relative physical maturity and his emotional, social, and economic maturity may be profoundly revealing for the predicament of mankind. Can the one who walks be expected to assess his steps and his progress correctly, or to serve as his own locator?

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