1 Personality Or A Devilish Din
Our forefathers used the term systematic theology to express their view that Christianity is not a series of isolated religious statements, but that it has a beginning and flows on to an end. Each part relates to each other part and to the whole, and to what stands first in the system. It is perfectly possible that such a systematic understanding of Christianity can become a dead thing, but let us not despise the word systematic as if it were automatically a corpse.
Rightly understood, Christianity as a system has the answers to the basic needs of modern man. In this it differs from the new theology, which has no adequate basis upon which to give answers which will stand up to the test of rationality and the whole of life as we must live it.
The first basic need is caused by the lack of certainty regarding the reality of individual personality. Every man is in tension until he finds a satisfactory answer to the problem of who he himself is.
The biblical Christian answer takes us back first to the very beginning of everything and states that personality is intrinsic in what is—not in the pantheistic sense of the universe being the extension of the essence of God (or what is), but that a God who is personal on the high order of Trinity created all else. Within the Trinity, before the creation of anything, there was real love and real communication. Following on from this statement the Bible states that this God who is personal created man in his own image. A personal God created all things freely in a nondeterminate fashion, and man is created in a special situation—what I would call a special circle of creation. He is the image of this kind of God, and so personality is intrinsic to his makeup. God is personal, and man is also personal.
It might be helpful to illustrate the situation in this way. Imagine you are in the Alps, and from a high vantage point you can see three parallel ranges of mountains with two valleys in between. In one valley there is a lake, but the other is dry. Suddenly you begin to witness what sometimes happens in the Alps—a lake forming in the second valley where there was none before. As you see the water rising, you may wonder what its source is. If it stops at the same level as the lake in the neighboring valley, you may, after careful measurements, conclude that there is a possibility that the water has come from the first valley. But if your measurement shows that the level of the second lake is twenty feet higher than the first, then you can no longer consider that its source may be from the neighboring valley, and you would have to seek another explanation. Personality is like that; no one has ever thought of a way of deriving personality from nonpersonal sources.
Therefore, biblical Christianity has an adequate and reasonable explanation for the source and meaning of human personality. Its source is sufficient—the personal God on the high order of Trinity. Without such a source men are left with personality coming from the impersonal (plus time, plus chance).
The two alternatives are very clear-cut. Either there is a personal beginning to everything, or one has what the impersonal throws up by chance out of the time sequence. The fact that the second alternative may be veiled by connotation words makes no difference. The words used by Eastern pantheism; the theological words such as Tillich’s “Ground of Being”; the secular shift from mass to energy or motion—all eventually come back to the impersonal, plus time, plus chance. If this is really the only answer to man’s personality, then personality is no more than an illusion, a kind of sick joke which no amount of semantic juggling will alter. Only some form of mystical jump will allow us to accept that personality comes from impersonality. This was the position into which Teilhard de Chardin was forced. His answer is only a mystical answer of words.
Because these men will not accept the only explanation which can fit the facts of their own experience, they have become metaphysical magicians. No one has presented an idea, let alone demonstrated it to be feasible, to explain how the impersonal beginning, plus time, plus chance, can give personality. We are distracted by a flourish of endless words, and lo, personality has appeared out of the hat! This is the water rising above its source. No one in all the history of humanistic, rationalistic thought has found a solution. As a result, either the thinker must say man is dead, because personality is a mirage; or else he must hang his reason on a hook outside the door and cross the threshold into the leap of faith which is the new level of despair.
A man like Sir Julian Huxley has clarified the dilemma by acknowledging, though he is an atheist, that somehow or other, against all that one might expect, man functions better if he acts as though God is there. This sounds like a feasible solution for a moment, the kind of answer a computer might give if you fed the sociological data into it. God is dead, but act as if he were alive. However, a moment’s reflection will show what a terrible solution this is. Ibsen, the Norwegian, put it like this: if you take away a man’s lie, you take away his hope. These thinkers are saying in effect that man can function as man for an extended period of time only if he acts on the assumption that a lie (that the personal God of Christianity is there) is true. You cannot find any deeper despair than this for a sensitive person. This is not an optimistic, happy, reasonable or brilliant answer. It is darkness and death.
Imagine that a universe existed which was made up only of liquids and solids, and no free gases. A fish was swimming in this universe. This fish, quite naturally, was conformed to its environment, so that it was able to go on living. But let us suppose that by blind chance, as the evolutionists would have us believe, this fish developed lungs as it continued swimming in this universe without any gases. Now this fish would no longer be able to function and fulfill its position as a fish. Would it then be higher or lower in its new state with lungs? It would be lower, for it would drown. In the same way, if man has been kicked up by chance out of what is only impersonal, then those things that make him man—hope of purpose and significance, love, motions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication—are ultimately unfulfillable and are thus meaningless. In such a situation, is man higher or lower? He would then be the lowest creature on the scale. The green moss on the rock is higher than he, for it can be fulfilled in the universe which exists. But if the world is what these men say it is, then man (not only individually but as a race), being unfulfillable, is dead. In this situation man should not walk on the grass, but respect it—for it is higher than he!
THE LOGICAL END OF DENYING PERSONALITY
In the 1960s while I was giving a series of lectures at an American college, I received an anonymous note from one of the students. This note read: “A question I would like you to answer on one of your broadcast talks if you could: with reference to what you have said about some artists destroying man, what should I do? I want to destroy too.” Many of the students of the 1960s sought to destroy (as the Punks do in the 1980s). And if the smashing of things stops, and people come to the conclusion that there are no better answers than they have been given, the general apathy of the later 1970s and the early 1980s dominates.
In face of this modern nihilism, smashing or the apathy, Christians are often lacking in courage. We tend to give the impression that we will hold on to the outward forms whatever happens, even if God really is not there. But the opposite ought to be true of us, so that people can see that we demand the truth of what is there and that we are not dealing merely with platitudes. In other words, it should be understood that we take this question of truth and personality so seriously that if God were not there, we would be among the first to have the courage to step out of the queue. Insofar as we show this to be our attitude, maybe the far-out ones will begin to take us seriously and listen to what we have to say. If they do not see that in our integrity we would join with them in destruction, “dropping out” or apathy, except that we know we have an adequate basis for personality and the reality of morals, then they will not and should not listen to us.
According to the tape recording of my lecture that night in the 1960s, my answer to the student who said that he or she wanted to destroy was: “I would say to you tonight that if we live in this intrinsically impersonal world, dress it up if you will with the word pantheism, either in the Eastern thought or in the new theology, or if I speak of it in secular terms, if this is what I am, and all men are, with their aspirations, if this is all they are, unfulfillable products of chance, a sterile sport, then come beside me, because I wish to destroy too. If indeed these ideas are your ideas, you should stand beside such a man to destroy. If I am an artist, I should wish to destroy. I should say with the Dutch artist Karel Appel, ‘I do not paint, I hit.’ I should say with John Cage, ‘It is only chance,’ with a resultant noise and a devilish din. But further, let us understand, in such a case, what love will mean. Love will mean facing the problem of pushing the button that destroys the human race. This is the distinction between there being a real meaning of personality that makes it reasonable to love and have compassion, a real reason to keep humanity alive; and no real meaning, and therefore a love resulting in that which should destroy. This then would be nearer to the truth of what is, and what will eventually happen, not only to the individual, but to the human race.
“This person who wrote this note understands something. In such a case I would ask him to come to my side and destroy, but I would ask him also to be honest in considering the other possibility, that all this is not so, but rather that we started with a personal beginning and therefore there is intrinsic meaning to personality, my personality, and other men’s personality in this universe. This is the distinction between the two positions. The things we have considered are not only theoretical things—they are things that cut down into the warp and woof of the understanding of life. We would say indeed to the man who would destroy a romantic concept which has no base, destroy it indeed. Demand a realistic answer. Here we stand face to face with the real issue of the new theology and the whole new thought.”
This is the crux of the matter; either an intrinsically personal “what is,” in the sense of a creation by the personal God, or John Cage’s devilish din!