Christian Philosophy 

 

 

THE DECLINE OF   THE TWUENTYETH-CENTURY   MAN[1]       By Francis Schaeffer[2]

 

 

The natural consequences of secular humanism

 

 

Gradually, that which had become the basic though of modern people (humanism) became the almost  totally accepted viewpoint, an almost monolithic consensus. And as it came to the majority of people through  art, music, drama, theology, and the mass media, values died. 

 

Ø      As the more Christian-dominated consensus weakened, the majority of people adopted two impoverished values:

-        personal peace and

-        affluence.      

 

Personal peace means just to be let alone, not to he troubled by the troubles of other people, whether across the world or across the city - to live one's life with minimal possibilities of being personally dis­turbed.

Personal peace means wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime, regardless of what the result will be in the lifetimes of my children and grandchildren.

 

Affluence means an overwhelming and ever-increasing prosperity – a life made up of things, things, and more things – a success judged by an ever-higher level of material abundance.

Ø      For several generations the fragmented concept of knowledge and life which had become dominant was taught to the young by many of the professors in universities around the world. All too often when the students of the early sixties asked their parents and others,

-        "Why be educated?" they were told, in words if not by implication,

-        “Because statistically an educated man makes so much more money a year." And when they asked, "Why make more money?" they were told, "So that you can send your children to the university."

According to this kind of spoken or implied answer, there was no meaning for man,  and no meaning for education.

 

Much of the mass media popularized these concepts, pouring out in an endless stream so that a whole generation from its birth has been injected with the teaching that reason leads to pessimism in regard to a meaning of life and with reference to any fixed values.

Ø      This had been that generation's atmosphere. It had no personal memory of the days when Christianity had more influence on the consensus.

Ø      Those in the universities saw themselves as little computers controlled by the larger computer of the university, which in turn was controlled by the still-larger computer of the state.

 

The work ethic, which had meaning within the Christian framework, now became ugly as the Christian base was removed. Work became an end in itself - with no reason to work and no values to determine what to do with the products of one's work.

Ø      And suddenly, in 1964 at the University of California at Berkeley, the students carried these ideas about the meaninglessness of man out into the streets. Why should anybody have been surprised?

Ø      Many of the teachers taught the ultimate meaning­lessness of man and the absence of absolutes, but they themselves lived inconsistently by depending on the memory of the past. Was it not natural that one generation would begin to live on the basis of what they had been taught? And at Berkeley in 1964 the results were visible, full blast.

 

Because the only hope of meaning had been placed in the area of non-reason, drugs were brought into the picture.

Ø      Drugs had been around a long time, but following Aldous Huxley's ideas, many students now approached drug taking as an ideology,  and some as a religion.

Ø      They hoped that drugs would provide meaning "inside one's head," in contrast to objective truth, concerning which they had given up hope.

Ø      Psychologist Timothy Leary, for example, said that drugs were the sacraments for the new religion.

But drug taking was really only one more leap, an attempt to find meaning in the area of non-reason.

 

At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs.

Ø      At first it was politically neither left nor right, but rather a call for freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza.

Ø      Then soon the Free Speech Movement became the Dirty Speech Movement in which freedom was seen as shouting four-letter words into a mike.

Soon after, it became the platform for the political New Left which followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse, a University of California professor of philosophy who ascribed to Neo-Marxism.

 

For some time young people were fighting against their parents' impoverished values of personal peace and affluence - whether their way of fighting was through Marcuse's New Left or through taking drugs as an ideology.

Ø      The young people wanted more to life than personal peace and affluence They were right in their analysis of the problem, but they were mistaken in their solutions.

Ø      As the sixties drew to a close and the seventies began, probably more people were taking some form of drug, and at an ever-younger age.

But taking drugs was no longer an ideology. That was finished. Drugs simply became the escape which they had been traditionally in many places in the past.

 

Humanism, man beginning only from himself, had destroyed the old basis of values, and could find no way to generate with certainty any new values.

Ø    In the resulting vacuum the impoverished values of personal peace and affluence had come to stand supreme.

Ø    And now, for the majority of the young people, after the passing of the false hopes of drugs as an ideology and the fading of the New Left, what remained? Only apathy was left.

In the United States by the beginning of the seventies, apathy was almost complete. In contrast to the political activists of the sixties, not many of the young even went to the polls to vote, even though the national voting age was lowered to eighteen. Hope was gone.

 

After the turmoil of the sixties, many people thought that it was so much better when the univer­sities quieted down in the early seventies. I could have wept.

Ø      The young people had been right in their analysis, though wrong in their solutions.

-        How much worse when many gave up hope and simply accepted the same values as their parents - personal peace and affluence.

-        New drugs remain, but only in parallel to the older generation's alcohol, and an excessive use of alcohol has become a problem among the young people as well.

-        Promiscuous sex and bi-sexuality remain, but only in parallel to the older generation's adultery.

In other words, as the young people revolted against their parents, they came around in a big circle - and often ended an inch lower - with only  the same two impoverished values, their own kind of personal peace and their own kind of affluence.

 

SOCIOLOGICAL LAW

 

In the United States many other practical problems developed as man's desire to be autonomous from God's revelation - in the Bible and through Christ - increasingly reached its natural conclusions.

-        Sociologically, law is king (Samuel Rutherford's Lex Rex)

-        was no longer the base whereby one could be ruled by law rather than the arbitrary judgments of men and whereby there could be wide freedoms without chaos.

Any ways in which the system is still working is largely due to the sheer inertia of the continuation of past principles. But this borrowing cannot go on forever.

 

Civil law has moved toward being sociological law. Distinguished jurist and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. took a long step in this direction. In The Common Law Holmes said that law is based on experience.

Ø      Frederick Moore Vinson, former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, spelled out this problem by saying,

"Nothing is more certain in modem society than the principle that there are no absolutes."

All is relative; all is experience. In passing we should note this curious mark of our age:

 

The only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

Ø      Left today with Oliver Wendell Holmes' "experi­ence" and Frederick Moore Vinson's statement that nothing is more certain in society than that there are no absolutes, law has only a variable content.

Ø      Much modem law is not even based on precedent; that is, it does not necessarily hold fast to a continuity with the legal decisions of the past.

 

Thus, within a wide range, the Constitution of the United States can be made to say what the courts of the present want it to say - based on a court's decision as to what the court feels is sociologically helpful at the moment.

Ø      At times this brings forth happy results, at least temporarily; but once the door is opened. anything can become law and the arbitrary judgments of men are king.

 

Law is now freewheeling, and the courts not only interpret the laws which legislators have made, but make law.

Ø      Lex Rex has become Rex Lex. Arbitrary judgment concerning current sociological good is king.

Ø      As arbitrary absolutes characterize communistic rule, so there is a drift in this direction on our side of the Iron Curtain as well.

Ø      This means that tremendous changes of direction can be made and the majority of people tend to accept them without question - no  matter how arbitrary the changes are or how big a break they make with past law or past consensus. 

". . . for so long a large section of the church  has only been teaching a relativistic humanism  using religious terminology. "

 

As the Christian consensus dies, there are not many sociological alternative.

One possibility is hedonism, in which every man does his own thing.

Ø      Trying to build a society on hedonism leads to chaos.

Ø      One man can live on a desert island and do as he wishes within the limits of the form of the universe, but as soon as two men live on the island, if they are to live in peace, they cannot both do simply as they please.

Consider two hedonists meeting on a narrow bridge crossing a rushing stream: Each cannot do his own thing.

 

A second possibility is the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote.

Ø      In the days of a more Christian culture, a lone individual with the Bible could judge and warn society, regardless of the majority vote, because there was an absolute by which to judge.

Ø      There was an absolute for both morals and law. But to the extent that the Christian consensus is gone, this absolute is gone as a social force.

 

Let us remember that on the basis of the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote, Hitler was perfectly entitled to do as he wished if he had the popular support.

Ø      On this basis law and morals become a matter of averages.

Ø      And on this basis, if the majority vote supported it, it would become "right" to kill the old, the incurably ill, the insane - and other groups could be declared non persons. No voice could be raised against it.

If there are no absolutes, and if we do not like either the chaos of hedonism or the absoluteness of the 51-percent vote, only one other alternative is left: one man or an elite, giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes.

 

Here is a simple but profound rule:

Ø      If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

Ø      Society is left with one man or an elite filling the vacuum left by the loss of the Christian consensus which originally give us form and freedom in northern Europe and in the West.

In communism, the elite had won its way, and rule was based upon arbitrary absolutes handed down by that elite.

Ø      Absolutes can be this today and that tomorrow.

 

HUMANISM - ITS NATURAL CONCLUSION

 

Humanism has led to its natural conclusion. It has ground down to the point Leonardo da Vinci visual­ized so long ago when he realized that starting only from man, mathematics leads us only to particu­lars - and particulars lead only to mechanics.

Ø      Humanism had no way to find the universal in the areas of meaning, and values. As my son, Franky, put it, "Humanism has changed the Twenty-third Psalm:

They began - I am my shepherd

Then - Sheep are my shepherd

Then - Everything is my shepherd

Finally - Nothing is my shepherd."

 

There is a death wish inherent in humanism – the impulsive drive to beat to death the base which made our freedoms and our culture possible.

Ø      In ancient Israel, when the nation had turned from God and from his truth and commands as given in Scripture, the prophet Jeremiah cried out that there was death in the city. He was speaking not only of physical death in Jerusalem but also a wider death.

Because Jewish society of that day had turned away from what God had given them in the Scripture, there was death in the polis, that is, death in the total culture and the total society.

 

In our era, sociologically, man destroyed the base which gave him the possibility of freedoms without chaos.

Ø      Humanists have been determined to beat to death the knowledge of God and the knowledge that God has not been silent, but has spoken in the Bible and through Christ - and they have been determined to do this even though the death of values has come with the death of that knowledge.       

 

We see two effects of our loss of meaning and values.

 

1.     The first is degeneracy - Think of New York City's Time Square - Forty-second and Broadway.

Ø      If one goes to what used to be the lovely Kalverstraat in Amsterdam, one finds that it too has become equally squalid. The same is true of lovely old streets in Copenhagen.

Ø      Pompeii has returned! The marks of ancient Rome scar us: degeneracy, decadence, depravity, a love of violence for violence's sake. The situation is plain. If we look, we see it. If we see it, we are concerned.

 

2. The Elite will exist - But we must notice that there is a second result of modem man's loss of meaning and values which is more ominous, and which many people do not see.

Ø  This second result is that elite will exist. Society cannot stand chaos. Some group or some persons will fill the vacuum. An elite will offer us arbitrary absolutes, and who will stand in its way?

Ø      Will the silent majority help? The so-called silent majority was and is divided into a minority and a majority.

Ø      The minority are either Christians who have a real basis for values or those who at least have a memory of the days when  the values were real.

The majority are left with only their two poor values of personal peace and affluence.

       

With such values, will men stand for their liberties?

Ø      Will they not give up their liberties step by step, inch by inch, as long as their own personal peace and prosperity is sustained and not challenged, and as long as the goods are delivered?

Ø      The life-styles of the young and the old generations are different. There are tensions between long hair and short, drugs and non-drugs, whatever are the outward distinctions of the moment. But they support each other sociologically, for both embrace the values of personal peace and affluence.

 

Much of the church is no help here either, because for so long a large section of the church has only been teaching a relativistic humanism using religious  terminology.

Ø    I believe the majority of the silent majority, young and old, will sustain the loss of liberties without raising their voices as long as their own life-styles are not threatened.

Ø    And since personal peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority, politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things.

 

Ø      POLITICS has largely become not a matter of ideals - increasingly men and women are not stirred by the values of liberty and truth - but of supplying a constituency with a frosting of personal peace and affluence.

They know that voices will not be raised as long as people have these things, or at least an illusion of them.

 

Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire said that the following five attributes marked Rome at its end:

1.     first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence);

2.     second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation);

3.     third, an obsession with sex;

4.     fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity;

5.     fifth, an increased desire to live off the state.

It all sounds so familiar. We have come a long road, and we are back in Rome.

 

WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES?

 

In such circumstances, it seems that there are only two  alternatives in the natural flow of events:

1. first, imposed order or,
2. second, our society once again affirming that base which gave freedom without chaos in the first place –

-        God’s revelation in the Bible and his revelation through Christ.

We have seen many of the implications of an imposed order.

Ø      But rather than throwing up our hands and giving in, we should take seriously the second alternative.     

 

Christian values, however, cannot be accepted as a superior utilitarianism, just as a means to an end.

Ø      The biblical message is truth and it demands a commit­ment to truth.

Ø      It means that everything is not the result of the impersonal plus time plus chance, but that there is an infinite - personal God who is the Creator of the universe, the space-time continuum.

 

We should not forget that this was what the founders of modern science built upon.

Ø      It means the acceptance of Christ as Savior and Lord, and it means living under God's revelation.

Ø      Here there are morals, values, and meaning, including meaning for people, which are not just a result of statistical averages.

Ø      This is neither a utilitarianism, nor a leap away from reason; it is the truth that gives a unity to all of knowledge and all of life.

 

This second alternative means that individuals come to the place where they have this base, and they influence the consensus. Such Christians do not need to be a majority in order for this influence on society to occur.

Ø      In about A.D. 60, a Jew who was a Christian and who also knew the Greek and Roman thinking of his day wrote a letter to those who lived in Rome.

Ø      He said that the integration points of the Greek and Roman world view were not enough to answer the questions posed either by the existence of the universe and its form, or by the uniqueness of man.

 

He said that they deserved judgment because they knew that they did not have an adequate answer to the questions raised by the universe or by the existence of man, and yet they refused, they suppressed, that which is the answer.

 

To quote his letter:

"The retribution of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness Because that which is known of God is evident within them [that is, the uniqueness of man in contrast to non-man], for God made it evident to them. For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived by the things that are made [that is, the existence of the universe and its form] ,even his eternal power and divinity; so that they are without excuse."

 

Here he is saying that the universe and its form and the mannishness of man speak the same truth that the Bible gives in greater detail.

Ø      That this God exists and that he has not been silent but has spoken to people in the Bible and through Christ was the basis for the return to a more fully biblical Christianity in the days of the Reformers.

It was a message of the possibility that people could return to God on the basis of the death of Christ alone.

But with it came many other realities, including form and freedom in the culture and society built on that more biblical Christianity.

Ø      The freedom brought forth was titanic, and yet, with the forms given in the Scripture, the freedoms did not lead to chaos.

And it is this which can give us hope for the future.