A Theology for Today’s Youth

The chasm between Europe and America is fast being bridged. The tired old world and the tireless new one face common problems. The unrest of Berkeley and Columbia is matched by Paris and Berlin. Students have stolen the limelight from the hippies in New York and the provos, a similar movement in Amsterdam.

Police of American and European cities are wrestling with youth delinquency. On both continents youth alcoholism is being replaced by drug-taking. Yet on both continents there are also young people who are eager to help in what has come to be known as the Third World. Suddenly they are found fighting the structures of establishment while being somewhat vague about the structures of the world they want to create. The old and the new world are rapidly becoming one.

Youth on both continents are facing the same problems, asking the same questions, discovering the same challenges. They feel equally estranged from their parents; they are equally afraid of the future. This means also that American and European evangelicals are alike challenged to reach this new and troublesome generation for God. But does it understand our Gospel language?

A British Anglican, John C. King, has just produced a book about evangelicals. He calls them the “people who know they are saved.” We might be proud of such a description. The words “saved” and “salvation” have always been the core of evangelical theology. Do young people understand what we mean by them?

We tend to forget that in past centuries other words have sometimes stamped theology. The characteristic word of the Reformation was not “salvation,” but “justification.” Luther was not so much thrilled by the fact that he was saved as by the fact that God had accepted him, sinner as he was. The word “salvation” did not really take its central place in theology until the revival movement of the last century.

These different accents caused variations in vision. Reformation theology—especially in its Calvinistic form—was rather earthly minded. God was the sovereign Lord of the whole earth. Evangelical theology tends to be more heavenly minded. God awaits saved people, who are not of this world, in his heaven.

But the now generation is exclusively earthly minded. That is why much modern preaching is being shrugged off. This became evident at the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches. The rich young rebels of Club 68 in the Swedish city had no good word for the work of Section II, which dealt with missions. “Patch-work!” they cried. They were much more interested in WCC answers to social and economic problems.

There are Christians who will not hear of changing their preaching. They claim to be setting forth the everlasting Gospel. They have no intentions of adapting that Gospel to the moods of a new generation. Rightly so, but they never consider the possibility that the Gospel they inherited from their fathers perhaps had been adapted to their generation. The time has come to compare our evangelical message with the teachings of the Bible. The Gospel has a message for present-day youth—of this I am sure—but I often wonder whether our theology has. The time has come also to study the state of youth and ascertain what possible answers are offered by the Bible.

The past has little or no relevance to young people. They are not interested in old confessions, nor are they concerned about tradition. Two years ago, three books suddenly became best sellers in the Netherlands. The first gave a selection from pre-war advertisements, sermons, speeches, songs, and radio talks of Protestants; the second of Roman Catholics; and the third of Socialists. These men of the thirties turned out to be far funnier than Fred Flintstone. The past no longer sets us thinking; it makes us laugh.

How did this happen? We are reaping as never before the final fruits of the evolution theory. I am referring not to Darwin’s hypothesis but to the philosophy of his successors. In the struggle of life, it is claimed, the best species survive; thus every new generation must be better than the one before. Tradition loses its value. What is important is not what lies behind, but what is ahead. This outlook has influenced former generations too, of course, but never has it been as influential as now.

The impact of evolutionary optimism is being strengthened by technological optimism. Every new plane is bigger and better than the one before. Every new refrigerator is colder and roomier. Every new invention improves life. And it is only a small step to slip from technological into ideological thinking. Life today must be an improvement on life yesterday.

Naturally some past generations also have been swayed by this technological ideology. But it is now a conquering spirit because of the world the past generation offers the new. Two world wars, an economic crisis, a Korean and a Viet Nam war, plus the fact that no peace treaty has yet been signed to finish World War II—these cannot be regarded as examples to make young people long for the world that was.

The loss of the past could have been overcome were the present more challenging. Social security in the broad sense can be a curse as well as a blessing. The aim of modern welfare states is to take care of people from the cradle to the grave, but they deprive men of opportunities to fight for something. Young people are confronted by the utter drudgery of the welfare state.

Moreover, man has become a social security number. Mankind is being depersonalized. We are rapidly creating a “masskind” to take the place of mankind. Our kids feel lost in mammoth schools, our students in campuses that are bigger than the towns they were born in. Mass clothing and modern cosmetics turn out young people as out of one mold. If they escape the “bourgeois life” and turn into hippies, they are just being transformed by another mold. A former generation had its “great characters,” but we are turning out uni-men and uni-women.

But the Bible says that God has created men and women without a mold. Every one of us is unique. In every culture that tried to kill the personality of men, people started to rebel. If we continue on this road, we should fear not so much a new war as a clash between generations. Son against father. Is that not an apocalyptic image?

The main philosophy of the early fifties maintained that our only hope was that we have no hope. The early sixties saw a rebellion against that view. Slowly philosophers showed a new glimmering hope. Jürgen Moltmann even wrote about the theology of hope. But during the past two years it is as though the curtain has gone down again. We have suddenly been confronted by the spirit of technology which we ourselves have let out of the box but which we can no longer control.

We are being threatened by our own inventions. We can split atoms and destroy the world. We are trying to grow human beings in test tubes. Soon we will be able to reach any nook of the earth with satellite television. Either East and West will bombard each other with slogans, or we will get programs carefully screened by a world agency like the United Nations. In either case our mass-culture will cover the earth like a weed. This will only increase the “mold-iness” of life.

We must face the fact that the new generation lives between the void of the past and the fear of the future in the emptiness of the present. No wonder many of them want to escape in either drugs, good works, or a violent defiance of present structures.

The first form of escapism among the young was the hippie world, which suddenly sprang into existence. They step out of the struggle for life of the capitalistic society. They badly want to be different, but they become so differently alike. Already we seem to have passed the peak of this movement. The Amsterdam provo movement ended in the clutches of drugs. The same thing is true of many American hippies. This is an escape into a dream world which completely depersonalizes men.

Evangelical theology had a message for men confronted by personal sin, but the new generation is far more obsessed by corporate sin. We are being taught new consequences of original sin. Sin is that unique men are being turned into numbers, creative beings lowered to consumers, God’s beautiful creation turned into a gas chamber of polluted air, God’s pure rivers into streams of poison. Mankind is busy playing suicide. Is it so incredible that many want to step out of this Western way of life? What was once our pride, our technical power, has become the torture of the teens.

It seems to me that the young generation is more conscious of corporate sin than the old. This technological world is too much of the old generation’s making for them to see the weak spots. But youth, inheriting this world, realize deeply its deficiencies. Some become dropouts from society in order to redeem themselves from this sense of corporate sin.

This is the point where the evangelical theology in its traditional form fails. By concentrating on salvation from this world now, it gives the impression that faith is a religious sort of dropout. Such a Gospel has no appeal to the modern dropouts of society. But the biblical message has. The first thing the Bible stresses is that God is not frightened off by sin. God came into this world. When Adam and Eve sinned, God did not withdraw but came and called them. God comes into this technological world. We can be “with him” because he has come to be with us.

But there is another form of escapism. The sixties are marked by a new willingness to serve developing nations. The world looks favorably upon the scores of young people who give up the possibility of a career to bury themselves in some faraway spot. As a way to redeem the sins of the colonial past, this is a form of escapism. Personal guilt is not erased by good works; neither is corporate sin.

Paul Verghese of India once warned European church leaders: “It is painful for the West to look into its own soul and discover the emptiness and the guilt [because of expansion in the direction of the Third World]. Because it is so human it is not able to walk the road of contrition and repentance. Contrition is completely the opposite of activism and that is why the West thinks it best to redeem its guilt by good works. But good works are different from seeking forgiveness. Good works must follow repentance, but can never take its place.”

I quote this Indian Christian (now bishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church) because evangelicals have the wrong image. They too often have been condemned, because of their tendency to give most of their attention to preaching and none or too little to handing out the cup of cold water to the thirsty. Proclaiming the Gospel surely means both speaking and acting it.

Our younger generation rebels against the preaching of the past and replaces it by good works. But improved living standards do not necessarily improve spiritual conditions. Evangelicals have often too easily said that converted people will change the world. Church history should have taught them better. Young people now too easily think that a changed world will convert people. The crime rate of America and the neurotic state of Sweden should have warned them.

What is needed more than ever is the biblical message that God comes into this world to change it by redeeming it unto himself. Christians should take their rightful place in this world, because they are called to be fellow-workers with God. Guilt should not force us into good works; redemption should prompt us to accept our part in the work God is doing. We should not go to the Third World seeking redemption, but as representatives of God. Then we will no longer work ourselves to death improving living standards, which is no more than teaching people the Western way of life, but we will live to reveal God’s way of Life.

Already some young people sense that “a raving group of world improvers” will never be able to improve the living standards of the Third World merely by good works. During the last two years a new answer has been offered. Young people all over the world are discussing changes in the structures of society. With revolutionary zeal they are attacking them. Where peaceful means do not succeed, often young people try to bulldoze themselves through the present structures. Their call to revolution often ends in acts of violence which reveal the frustration of modern-day youth. The new slogan is “participation.” Young people want to take the world into their own hands.

An opinion poll in Amsterdam showed that students of sociology and political science tend more to the political left than any other group of students. Students who studied engineering or agriculture have a chance to escape into activism. The young nations need them. Sociology students have far fewer opportunities to serve in the Third World. Therefore they had to find another way of escape. Through their studies they are preoccupied with structures of society. The result is that they see them as the causes of failure.

They have discovered a biblical truth which we tend to forget. The Church has often given the impression of considering traditional structures as God-given. In WCC circles one always hears people talk about “conservative evangelicals.” But are evangelicals of necessity conservative?

Sometimes we have sanctified existing orders in spite of the teachings of the Bible. We have too often forgotten that the devil is the prince of this world. We have forgotten that when God enters this world he comes to turn it upside down. God has to change the structures of this world. They are unacceptable in his eyes. Our democratic Western society is not the best world, but the least evil one. We too easily have equated our own country with God’s revelation. In the Netherlands we put God, the Netherlands, and the House of Orange on one line as inseparable entities. America is often referred to as “God’s own country.” Is the Kingdom of God revealed in our earthly nations? We should be more careful when equating our order with God’s.

The new storm-troops against the structures of establishment are only very vague about the world they want to create. They want something new. Here the influence of evolutionary and technological thinking is being felt. It is enough to call for something new, for everything that is new is better than anything that is old. That is why they do not have to spell out what they mean by “new.”

These people teach us that the structures of this world are not the structures of God’s world. That is a biblical truth. But they do not solve anything. The positive message is that God’s Kingdom comes. No human structure can ever stand before the criticism of the Bible. But we cannot improve this world by destroying it. Anarchy succeeds only in doing in a short time what takes the world itself a long time to do.

If we want to reach these young people, we will have to stress the promise of God that he recreates a new world. He promises a new heaven and a new earth. That is a message for us evangelicals and for all would-be reformers. It warns us that this heaven is not even good enough to receive us. It warns the reformers of our day that this earth will never be good enough to receive God.

And in the meantime, he wants us not to destroy this world but to live in it for him. We do not have to be frustrated, for the past is not void. God created heaven and earth, and they are his. The present is not dull, for we as his children can reveal him in work for him. And we do not have to fear the future, for his Kingdom comes.

Jan J. Van Capelleveen was ordained a minister of the Evangelical Free Church in the United States. Formerly a Youth for Christ evangelist, he is now religion editor of “De Rotterdammer,” a newspaper in the Netherlands.

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