The 'New Consciousness'

The ‘New Consciousness’

Although social critics devote considerable attention to the so-called new consciousness, the Zeitgeist is so chaotic that no pulse-readings taken at any one time and place will serve reliably to chart the current situation.

Even the mood on American campuses varies widely. Some universities report that little has changed, while others find life vastly different; student revolt has peaked and is discredited, and job-material needs have become forefront concerns.

For all that, the campus world is haunted by monumental frustrations. The so-called scientific world-view, long the captivating goddess of the oncoming generation, is now a despised ogre of counter-cultural youth. The values long championed by technocratic scientism, with its reduction of the externally real world solely to mathematically predictable sequences of impersonal events, are being cast aside by the alienated young. They repudiate the depersonalization of reality as a kind of addictive mythology of twentieth-century pseudo-intellectuals.

The modern mentality remains bewitched, however, by moral relativism, and simply assumes (without any intelligent understanding of it) that the biblical life-view is out of date. Between a repudiated scientism on one hand and a forfeited supernaturalism on the other, the counter-cultural revolt drifts in muddy, murky waters.

Dr. W. Harry Jellema, one of the brilliant philosophical minds of our day, finds the prime cause of modern frustration not so much in what positively identifies the spirit of the times as in what negatively is lacking in it. In remarks to leaders of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, Jellema recently noted that from the American elementary schoolroom onward most of the present generation of both faculty and students has had no education in the Christian heritage. The contemporary classroom steeps its learners in the modern secular outlook but presents no viable alternative in terms of the history of ideas or of world cultures. Whether students come from Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Jewish homes seems to make little difference; all of them are immersed in secular concerns to the virtual exclusion of eternal and spiritual interests.

Much campus frustration today stems from inner dissatisfactions with an academic milieu that offers no impressive defense of an alternative perspective on life. However unsatisfying, the prevalent outlook is assumed to have no reasonable or valid rival.

To be sure, many hundreds of evangelical scholars serve on influential secular campuses in one post or another. But unfortunately professors who negate biblical theism tend to dominate the religion and philosophy departments; however vocal they may be for academic freedom to promulgate special viewpoints, they themselves seldom sponsor proponents of historic Christian theism. Instead, they seem to issue a special welcome to the purveyors of novelty.

Evangelical scholars are aware that modern science has created much of its own bad press because some of its spokesmen arrogantly equated the scientific outlook with a certain highly partisan way of projecting science. Consequently not science but scientism came to identify reality solely with the extrapolations of empirical scientific methodology. It then dignified this arbitrarily limited reading of reality as the scientific world-view.

Some empirical dogmatists now go so far as to scandalize biblical values as the source of many modern problems. The divine exhortation that man “multiply” and exercise “dominion” over the earth is blamed for the modern reproductive rate and for ecological problems. It matters little to such propagandists that empirical scientism itself offers no basis whatever for establishing or vindicating any permanent norms. All that seems to matter to such spokesmen is that their dogmatisms be trusted as the latest word. What this line of argument shows most of all is that the younger generation is not alone in its ignorance about what the Bible really teaches.

Dr. Martin Buerger, a former director of the School of Advanced Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has said that neglect of the Scriptural heritage through professional concentration on empirical laboratory interests is one of the vocational hazards to which scientific technicians are vulnerable.

Neglect of the Bible is no less a vocational danger of theologians. This is perhaps least excusable in evangelical circles, which place a high estimate on scriptural revelation. One can be substituting evangelical for non-evangelical activism while all the while revelational compass-bearings become increasingly obscure.

The new-breed theology now in vogue sacrifices personal piety to social activism, and through its neglect of the Word of God tends to misunderstand both man and society. Indeed, it transmutes theology itself from reflection upon God’s self-revelation and the reproduction of his Word to man into reflection on social problems and the implementation of secular techniques for coping with them. Because, as the secular theologian declares, modern man is assertedly earth-oriented and uninterested in questions of spirit, the biblical message is held to be no longer intelligible or relevant.

Strange as it may seem to the secular scientist and secular theologian, counter-cultural youth are repudiating this reading both of external reality and of the inner life of modern man. They see that scientific reductionism has mythologized the real world, and that secular theologians have accommodated their prognosis of contemporary man to that myth. The technocratic scientist concentrates his interest on impersonal and mathematically relatable events, and the secular theologian accommodatingly deflects his interests from the self-revelation of a supernatural God.

But if, as Christianity insists, man is made in the image of God for a destiny in the eternal world, then the existence of God and the realm of spirit must inevitably remain an abiding interest of all who do not suppress it. Every statistical poll of the masses confirms such an interest in the invisible spiritual world.

The youth-revolt, in its turn to the mystical-transcendent, has pronounced its own verdict on scientific reductionism (and by extension upon secular theologians who share its prejudices). Disaffiliated youth call such thinking not simply irrelevant but mythological. We need not belabor the irony of an oncoming generation’s imputation of a propensity for fairylike legend to intellectuals who prided themselves on having banished even miracles from the world of modern intelligence. What we must note, rather, in a day when secular theologians have dropped a curtain over the transcendent spiritual claims of the Christian religion, is the striking revival in Western society of interest in astrology, spiritism, and fortune-telling, and a resort even to Oriental mysticism.

The modern consciousness is not, of course, in all respects the consciousness of yesteryear. But the propensity for myths—whether on the part of the young or of their elders—endures. It is not so much a new consciousness as a new mythology that seems to characterize the successive lost generations.

The only deliverance from this sad predicament lies in setting the question of authentic selfhood once again in the context of God’s creation and recreation of man. If any new factor marks our generation, it is the almost total loss of an intelligible rationale for a transcendent alternative to the secular reduction of reality. Never since the age of Augustine has a reasoned evangelical faith been more imperative.

CARL F. H. HENRY

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