Evangelical Pathbreaking

When it comes to bold social criticism alongside courageous evangelical evangelism, one must not overlook the “evangelical hippies.” They, more than any other phenomenon of our times, bear the clear marks of an underground movement. Questioning evangelical institutions as well as organized ecumenism, they set their sights on both the New Testament and the modern social crisis. If, on the one hand, they charge modern radicals and revolutionaries with a lack of valid solutions and point them to Jesus Christ, they also call the churches to uncompromising fulfillment of their responsibilities.

Looking much like other hippies, these evangelical troupers infiltrate the secular colonies and identify themselves with the people and their discontents. Impatient with acceptance of the social status quo by evangelicals, and especially the evangelical jet set, they want social re-examination and activism. Ashamed and outraged by the race prejudices of many of their elders, they eagerly engage in interracial evangelical witness. Without apology, hippie evangelicals not only point out the inadequacy of the secular solutions being bandied about but also point to Jesus Christ as the only adequate resolution of life’s problems. Trademark of the usual hippies is the V-for-victory sign; that of the evangelical band, one raised finger rather than two, to signify: “One way! One way!” At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, evangelical hippies made a significant impact on the radical youth movement; urging personal commitment to Christ as the only alternative to ultimate disillusionment, they succeeded in redirecting the revolutionary enthusiasm of not a few converts into recreative channels and toward durable Christian goals.

In Hollywood the hippies publish underground religious newspapers that are psychedelic in mood yet evangelistic in thrust; these tabloids depict not sexual license or drug trips as life’s supreme bliss but rather conversion to Christ. The courage these hippies have for the Gospel puts to shame the reticence and trivial preoccupations of many of their kooky evangelical contemporaries. They seem to sense more deeply than does the so-called evangelical establishment the awful chasm and clash between Christianity and contemporary values, and to feel more existentially the sting of the revolutionary protest against accepted patterns of social morality.

This first-century-like boldness for Christ lends enviable substance and vitality to the commitment and convictions of these young people. Impatient with the wary, even wavering application of many independent fundamental churches to racial and other proper social changes, they are no less indignant when evangelical clergy in ecumenically oriented churches exalt socio-political concerns above the Gospel. They have been known to contemplate attending one such church and, in the middle of the “sermon,” calling for “Gospel! Gospel!” while pointing to “One way!” Whatever may be said of such strategies, it is unlikely that an evangelical minister would summon the police to quell hundreds of young people calling for a preaching of the biblical “good news.”

The evangelical hippies gain from the Bible a certain historical perspective that offsets their lack of experience and that infuses them with a higher, more disciplined sense of personal morality than that which characterizes their secular counterparts. Nonetheless, their solutions can easily be simplistic and not deeply reasoned, and in this sense the hurried strategy of the evangelical hippies may be not unlike that of the radical secularists. Like the extreme groups, some of the evangelical hippies—often as a reflex of their discontents concerning Viet Nam—refuse to salute the flag. Without consigning all elders to intellectual moribundity, they nonetheless know themselves to be better informed than their parents in many things (and suspect that they are therefore wiser). Their sense of social concern can easily approach the borders of self-righteousness.

Never should their readiness to open the Bible be overlooked, however, especially when their secular fellows confess ignorance both of the real answers to the real questions and of where to find them. Obviously the phenomenon of social concern, among evangelical hippies at least, reflects far more than just a current flash of dress, hair style, and pop music.

The various “unofficial” Christian movements, as we have said, are unmistakably significant. No less significant is another trend, one that is explicitly concerned with the logicality of the Christian faith and champions return to the truth of revelation as the only cure for the irrationalism of our times.

Aggressive atheism in our universities and classroom indifference toward classic Christian theism are almost hallmarks of contemporary American education. Much of modern society, in fact, lolls in a peculiar kind of anti-intellectualism. The backwash of modern philosophy, modern theology, and modern scientism has left Western man in a muddy puddle of irrationality. To arrest this stagnation demands a convincing recovery of the significance of logos, of universal truth, of rational faith, concerns crucial to historic Christianity but obscured, unfortunately, by neo-Protestant religious trends.

The truth of revelation has inescapable ultimate consequences. That fact is miserably belied, however, by the vogue ideas that stuff the academic world today and bear not even a semblance of the convictions familiar to Moses or Paul, or Jesus.

Many young people, it should be said, express lively interest in a vital Christianity—not in the institutional church, to be sure, but in the person and claims of Jesus of Nazareth. The great masses of mankind as well, longing for a super-scientific world, grope for transcendent realities. Yet the academic hierarchy, in contrast to society as a whole, busies itself for the most part with the scientific quantification of modern life, and poses little challenge to the secularization of modern culture.

When inflation canceled the practicality of a great Christian university, a number of evangelical scholars on various campuses proposed as feasible and urgent the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. Organized to develop an agenda for research, to subsidize scholars working on target-projects, and in time to establish a functional headquarters under proper administration, the institute envisions periodic conferences where scholars discuss in depth the relevance of Christian faith to the whole field of learning, and especially to new frontiers. Such an enterprise might very well inject into the American university world an exposition of the validity and relevance of the Christian world-life view.

CARL F. H. HENRY

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