Man in Modern Focus

The assault on the dignity of man sparked by behavioral science today promises to be even more powerful than that provoked a century ago by the Darwinian controversy over evolution. The earlier argument was that since man’s ancestry was animal, he had no need to consider God his Maker. Today’s assumption is that since science can change human nature, God is dispensable as man’s Redeemer.

Another ramification of the debate, one given currency in Communist lands, also implies the irrelevance of Christianity: since Communism alone breeds a new man with a passionate commitment to socio-political revolution, the Christian churches offer mankind nothing to outweigh their obsolescence. In city after city, Mao’s China has therefore eliminated “parasitic” churches.

This dispute over the nature of man may not hold the highest priority on an evangelical agenda, but in the 1970s it surely belongs near the top. Consider the theological predicament of contemporary ecumenism. Since the World Council’s attempt to arrive at a common doctrine of God has collapsed into chaotic frustration, many ecumenists have turned instead to the doctrine of man in hopes it would lead to some intellectual unity. Yet because many churchmen obscure the truth of revelation, their definition of man no less than of God is highly confused.

Technocratic scientism sponsors the view that external reality can be wholly explained in terms of mathematically predictable continuities. The net effect of this theory is to eliminate any role for personal intelligence, will, and activity from the ultimately real world, and from nature and history, and from mankind objectively considered. Not only does the mechanistic explanation of the external world leave no scope for God’s personality, providence, and purpose; man himself is on these premises to be explained wholly in terms of natural processes and events. God may be subjectively significant for some individuals, but his personal agency assertedly has no important role in the external cosmos or history.

Behavioral scientists explain all man’s behavior in terms of inherited or environmental factors. Through genetic changes scientism hopes to eliminate the undesirable features of human nature and to clone or reproduce only the ideal ones.

Since science thus expects to be able to create and change human nature, and since God is presumed to count for nothing in cosmic and historical events, the only remaining role for deity is mythological. Creative human autonomy charts the future of history and of the cosmos, and the destiny of man as well.

The Communist vision of the new man, which in effect calls for a repudiation of the imago Dei and the substitution of the Marxist manifesto, presupposes dialectical materialism, or a special version of the theory that all reality can be reduced to natural processes and events. In “The Soul of China,” an article in the July, 1972, issue of Asian Challenge (journal of the Discipleship Training Centre in Singapore), Y. P. J. So notes that the revolutionary man idealized by Mao is the worker-intellectual with “a socialist consciousness and culture” whose ideological soundness is attested by socio-political engagement. Much the same point is scored by C. R. Hensman, who in his China: Yellow Peril? Red Hope? reports the claim by Maoists that they alone succeed in basically changing men by releasing their energies and enlarging their possibilities to transform “the not-yet-truly-human situation” to meet the requirements of the Cultural Revolution.

Miss So properly raises questions about the propriety of this concept of the “new man” because of the discrimination it breeds in educational policy and in human relations generally, the cruel deeds it approves for the sake of the Party, and its accommodations to supervision by the secret police. Moreover, she questions how realistic the concept is, in view of the recent “failure” of Lin Piao, who had been the hero of the Cultural Revolution.

With scientism and Communism each postulating the new man, it is all the more imperative that Christians declare what the Bible teaches, not only about the new birth but about the ideal man as well. Christians who hand over Genesis 1 and John 1 to the naturalists will soon learn that Genesis 3 and John 3 then have no place to stand. The First Adam is not irrelevant to the Second Adam.

The futuristic theologies that consider the resurrection of Jesus as prefiguring the type of humanity God approves, and that surrender the creation account to the realm of legend and mythology, show little awareness of how this same principle of concession led Bultmann to transform even the resurrection in a more comprehensive extension of scientific naturalism. To correlate the believer’s future conformity to the unique image of Jesus of Nazareth with a universal evolutionary scheme provokes all kinds of questions about the frontier significance of the Man of Galilee.

On the other hand, if the Logos of God is truly the divine agent in creation, redemption, and judgment, then the enfleshed Jesus as God’s obedient Son aptly proclaims what God ideally intended in the creation of man, and the biblical figure of Christ, not an evolutionary projection, reveals the image to which Christ’s brethren will be conformed in the age to come.

It is little wonder that Communism is constrained to rid itself of Jesus and the supernatural. How can it market its own concept of the new man without first eclipsing the biblical prototype? And how gain carte blanche to redefine the content of social justice, or separate it from God’s demand for personal holiness and from man’s need of the forgiveness of sins and new life in Christ, except by repudiating the particularity of revelational truth?

As for Western scientism, how else could it enhance man’s creative autonomy to shape the future and to redefine the ideal image of man, than by forfeiting Adam to the beasts and Jesus Christ to the realm of mythical demi-gods? The Nazi scientists would doubtless have cloned their new breed in the image of a very different Führer. May God preserve us from such “progress” in anthropology!

The contemporary generation is increasingly caught in a pincers movement represented by the technocratic scientism or naturalistic secularism of the West and the special version of naturalism promulgated by Sino-Soviet Communism. The one potent alternative is revelational religion. Little wonder therefore that Marxist lands repress and retard Christianity. The greater wonder of our time is that the so-called free world voluntarily neglects it.

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