Chapter Thirteen The Alternatives
Overwhelming pressures are being brought to bear on people who have no absolutes, but only have the impoverished values of personal peace and prosperity. The pressures are progressively preparing modern people to accept a manipulative, authoritarian government. Unhappily, many of these pressures are upon us now.
Economic breakdown. Modern society’s inability to find a solution to the problem of inflation without causing economic recession opens the door wide for economic breakdown. Each cycle of inflation, attempted control, the threat of economic recession, and finally, released control has increased inflation; yet politically, with most people dominated by the concept of an ever-expanding affluence, it is difficult or impossible to face the danger of economic recession. Thus, each threat of economic recession opens the door for the next higher state of inflation. At a certain point economic breakdown seems all too possible.
I cannot get out of my mind the uncomfortable parallel to the Germans’ loss of confidence in the Weimar Republic just before Hitler, which was caused by unacceptable inflation. History indicates that at a certain point of economic breakdown people cease being concerned with individual liberties and are ready to accept regimentation. The danger is obviously even greater when the two main values so many people have are personal peace and affluence.
War or the serious threat of war—between the expansionist, imperialistic, communistic countries and the West. Alistair Cooke (1908–2004) in America (1973) has said it well: “What is fiercely in dispute between the Communist and non-Communist nations today is the quality and staying power of American civilization.” I would only add that not only America but the West in general is involved. Will the West be able to stand against the totalitarian nations now that the Christian base of the Western freedoms is largely gone? Obviously this could be related to point one—the possibility of economic breakdown in the West.
Pressure from the communistic countries could come in any of several ways or a combination of them: militarily by a strong East acting against a less militarily strong West over a crisis arising somewhere in the world; economically in the event of breakdown in the West; or politically through the takeover of some European countries by the old-line Communist parties in those countries. The latter could come suddenly with open collusion with Russia and its military power, or it could come subtly and slowly with apparent reasonableness, until a time of crisis and showdown. There is a surge by the old-line Communist parties in southern Europe, and it is important to note that these are the countries which never had the biblical base which the northern countries had after the Reformation. The freedoms in these countries were imported, not homegrown.
In this mix the threat of war, especially atomic war, would cause those who have only the values of personal peace and prosperity to be ready for almost any kind of authoritarian government which would be able to remove the threat of war, particularly if (as Augustus did in ancient Rome) it was brought in while seemingly keeping the outward forms of constitutionality. The atomic bomb is a special threat to a generation that has so largely turned away from the existence of an objective God and which therefore believes that only man exists to watch with intelligence the sun set or the birds fly.
Nevil Shute’s (1899–1960) novel On the Beach (1952) still speaks with relevance. In it he envisions a time after the atom bombs have fallen, when no person is left alive. Lights will be left burning for a time in the cities, but no person will be there to see them. Not long ago, men thought there might be conscious life on Mars. It has been said that when Charlie Chaplin, speaking not as a clown but as a philosopher, heard that there is no conscious life there he said, “I’m lonely.” And to the many thinkers for whom the only final value is the biological survival of the human race, the atom bomb brings a special pressure to give up almost anything in order for the threat of war to be even slightly minimized.
The chaos of violence—especially random or political violence and indiscriminate terrorism, in an individual nation or in the world. Both in individual nations and in the overall world the widespread use of political terrorism has become one of the phenomena of the age. Random and indiscriminate terrorism is even more frightening. Similarly alarming are the indications that terrorist organizations from all over the world have in some way coordinated their efforts. We have already seen indications of how people give up liberties when they are faced with the threat of terrorism.
The radical redistribution of the wealth of the world. Redistributing the world’s wealth would be accompanied by at least two things. First, there would be a lowering of prosperity and affluence among those individuals and countries which have come to take an ever-increasing level of prosperity for granted. Recent history has shown us how quickly nations and individuals change their principles toward other nations and other individuals when this becomes a threat. Second would come a redistribution of power in the world. In a descending spiral of prosperity and world power, a manipulating authoritarian government might be easily welcomed, in the hope that such a government would somehow soften the unpleasant results caused by a lessening of prosperity and world power.
A growing shortage of food and other natural resources in the world. This last point is apt to become increasingly important. As the Christian consensus dies in countries where it has previously existed, we must expect that it will make a difference not only within the nations themselves but also in their compassion for others. What will be left will be not compassion but only utilitarianism. Not that the record has ever been perfect, but we can expect open pragmatism increasingly to take the place of the partial compassion which has existed. A growing food shortage is apt to constitute an increasing pressure to cause people to drift along with a growing authoritarianism which promises solutions. As insecurity grows, greed—with the goals of personal peace and affluence at any price—grows.
If these pressures do continue to mount, which seems probable, do you think people, young or old, will at great cost to themselves, at the cost of their present personal peace and affluence, stand up for liberty and for the individual? Countries that have never had a Christian Reformation base will be the first to bow to authoritarianism. Already a growing number in Asia and Africa have gone this way. Men in the Western governments, who were themselves often modern men, did not understand that freedom without chaos is not a magic formula which can be implanted anywhere. Rather, being modern men, it was their view that because the human race had evolved to a certain level by some such year as 1950, democracy could be planted anywhere from outside. They had carefully closed their eyes to the fact that freedom without chaos had come forth from a Christian base. They did not understand that freedom without chaos could not be separated from its roots.
And when these outward forms are imposed on a worldview that would have never produced freedom without chaos in the first place, people will not stand when the pressures increase. Reports in the newspapers remind us that in many countries where democracy has been imposed from outside or from the top downward authoritarianism has increasingly become the rule of the day. One could make a long list of such countries.
Jiro Tokuyama (1919–2000), managing director of the Nomuro Research Institute, the largest interdisciplinary research organization in Japan, wrote in Newsweek: “Whereas Western religions are based on beliefs in an everlasting, absolute God, the Japanese . . . did not perceive the presence of such a permanent being. Instead they believed that what is right changes with the times and changing situations.” Tokuyama well understood that the worldview of a people will determine its private morals and its form of society.
Furthermore, when these nations which have no base for democratic procedures in their own countries gather in international organizations and form a majority in them, we are foolish to think that they will not function in the way they do in their own countries, even if this means functioning illegally against the constitutions or the charters of those organizations. This is true not only of the United Nations but of the whole range of such bodies. We can expect the tyranny of the majority in the midst of the winds of political change.
Let us hasten to say that freedom of the individual is not magic in the countries with a Reformation background either. As the memory of the Christian base grows ever dimmer, freedom will disintegrate in these countries as well. The system will not simply go on, divorced from its founding roots. And the drift will tend to be the same, no matter what political party is voted in. When the principles are gone, there remains only expediency at any price.
Most of the leaders of the countries which used to have a Christian base are now “modern” men. Happily there are notable exceptions, but they are exceptions. The attempt to be autonomous—to be independent from God and from what He has taught in the Bible and from the revelation of God in Christ—affects the political leaders as well as the university professors and the common people. Most of these leaders, too, think in terms of synthesis instead of fixed standards and absolutes, and this shows in political actions both at home and in foreign affairs.
Synthesis has won on both sides of the Iron Curtain: people see no fixed, final right or wrong, but only a mixture in public dealing as well as in private morals, in foreign affairs as well as in internal matters. This is especially so in the intellectuals who have understandingly carried the abandonment of the Christian base toward its logical conclusion. But it is also true of those who have been influenced by this thought without analyzing it. Pragmatism, doing what seems to work without regard for fixed principles of right or wrong, is largely in control. In both international and home affairs, expediency—at any price to maintain personal peace and affluence at the moment—is the accepted procedure. Absolute principles have little or no meaning in the place to which the decline of Western thought has come.
But we must have a disquieting memory—the memory of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signing the Munich Pact with Hitler on September 30, 1938, at the cost of Czechoslovakia and at the cost of all that followed, in the illusion of attaining “peace in our time.” Winston Churchill’s (1874–1965) words in the House of Commons after the Munich Pact was signed now sound prophetic:
[The people] should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war . . . they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history . . . and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.” And do not suppose this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden times.
It is unfortunate that no leader of vision was available after the crisis of war to warn the West that the moral battle was being lost in a new way. After the war thousands of Cossacks were forcibly thrust back into Russia against their wishes, to be killed and imprisoned by Stalin. Solzhenitsyn asked in Gulag Archipelago, “What military or political reason can there have been for the delivery to death at Stalin’s hands of these hundreds of thousands?” In Communism: A Legacy of Terror Solzhenitsyn said that one and a half million Soviet citizens who did not want to return to Communist Russia were turned over by force to Stalin to be exterminated. And in The Last Secret (1974) by Nicholas Bethell (1938–2007), a British senior staff officer who supervised the handover of the Cossacks is said to have told Bethell, “There is nothing we can do to help these poor wretches now, but we can at least learn something from their fate.”
But the years that have passed show no sign that such a lesson has been learned. Without the base for right and wrong, but only a concept of synthesis, pragmatism, and utilitarianism, what will not be given up, both inside of nations or in foreign affairs, for the sake of immediate peace and affluence? The weak humanistic ideals are not and will not be enough in our own generation or for the future. Remember from the first chapter the little Roman bridge that would stand when people walked over it, but would break under the weight of a truck? If further economic recessions come, if fear of the loss of personal peace and prosperity increases, if wars and threats of wars intensify, if violence and terrorism spread, if food and other resources in the world become ever scarcer—and all of these are more than possible—then the trend is speeded up. As these things come upon people who have only the values of personal peace and affluence, they will crush them as a six-wheeled truck will crush the little bridge.
In such circumstances, it seems that there are only two alternatives in the natural flow of events: first, imposed order or, 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 in the previous chapters many of the implications of an imposed order. 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. The biblical message is truth, and it demands a commitment to truth. 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. It means the acceptance of Christ as Savior and Lord, and it means living under God’s revelation. Here there are morals, values, and meaning, including meaning for people, which are not just a result of statistical averages. 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 then they influence the consensus. Such Christians do not need to be a majority in order for this influence on society to occur.
In about AD 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. Previously, he had said the same things to Greek thinkers while speaking on Mars Hill in Athens. He had spoken with the Acropolis above him and the ancient marketplace below him, in the place where the thinkers of Athens met for discussion. A plaque marks that spot today and gives his talk in the common Greek spoken in his day. He was interrupted in his talk in Athens, but his letter to the Romans gives us without interruption what he had to say to the thinking people of that period.
He said that the integration points of the Greek and Roman worldview 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 wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them [that is, the uniqueness of man in contrast to nonman], for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made [that is, the existence of the universe and its form], even his eternal power and divinity; so that they are without excuse. (Romans 1:18–20)
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. 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. 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. It is either this or an imposed order.
As I have said in the first chapter, people function on the basis of their worldview more consistently than even they themselves may realize. The problem is not outward things. The problem is having, and then acting upon, the right worldview—the worldview which gives men and women the truth of what is.