3 The Dilemma Of Man
We have considered two areas in which Christianity and the new theology fundamentally disagree—personality and knowledge. There is one more area where disagreement could not be more radical, and that is the question of man and his dilemma. Anyone with sensitivity and concern for the world can see that man is in a great dilemma. Man is able both to rise to great heights and to sink to great depths of cruelty and tragedy. Modern man is desperately struggling with the concept of man in his dilemma. Most of the paintings of the crucifixion today, Salvador Dali’s for example, are not of Christ dying on the cross in history. They are using the Christ-symbol to exhibit man in agony.
Of course it is possible to try not to get involved in man’s dilemma; but the only way not to get involved in the dilemma of man is by being young enough, well enough, having money enough and being egotistic enough to care nothing about other human beings.
As we consider this question of man and his dilemma, only two possible explanations can be given. The first explanation suggests a metaphysical cause. This says, in effect, that man’s problem is that he is too small, too finite to wrestle with the factors that confront him. The second explanation is quite different; it puts man’s dilemma down to a moral cause. If the first explanation is right, then one is bound to conclude that man has always been in the same dilemma. Thus, for example, the new theology says that man has always been fallen man. This also means that there is no moral answer to the problem of evil and cruelty. Because man, whether somehow created by a curious thing called god or kicked up out of the slime by chance, has always been in this dilemma, the dilemma is part of what being “man” is. And if this is what man intrinsically is, and he has always been like this, then the French art historian and poet Baudelaire is right when he says, “If there is a God, he is the Devil.” This statement was simply the logical deduction from the premise that man, with all his cruelty and suffering, is now as he always has been. At this point Baudelaire was consistent and refused to give any kind of romantic alternatives as an explanation. But the Bible says that this is not the situation.
One day I was talking to a group of people in the room of a young South African in Cambridge University. Among others, there was present a young Indian who was of Sikh background but a Hindu by religion. He started to speak strongly against Christianity, but did not really understand the problems of his own beliefs. So I said, “Am I not correct in saying that on the basis of your system, cruelty and noncruelty are ultimately equal, that there is no intrinsic difference between them?” He agreed. The people who listened and knew him as a delightful person, an “English gentleman” of the very best kind, looked up in amazement. But the student in whose room we met, who had clearly understood the implications of what the Sikh had admitted, picked up his kettle of boiling water with which he was about to make tea, and stood with it steaming over the Indian’s head. The man looked up and asked him what he was doing, and he said with a cold yet gentle finality, “There is no difference between cruelty and noncruelty.” Thereupon the Hindu walked out into the night.
If the metaphysical explanation to man’s dilemma is given, it is not an abstraction. In such a case, all that moves man at his best is really meaningless.
THE SCANDAL OF THE CROSS
There is a serious commentary given on man and his dilemma in Albert Camus’s book The Plague. The story is about a plague brought by rats into the city of Oran at the beginning of the Second World War. On the surface it reads like an account of any city that might have been struck by such a tragedy. But Camus intends a deeper understanding. Therefore he confronts the reader with a serious choice: either he must join the doctor and fight the plague, in which case, says Camus, he will then also be fighting God; or he can join with the priest and not fight the plague, and thus be antihumanitarian. This is the choice; and this is the dilemma which Camus faced and which all those face who, like him, do not have the Christian answer.
However, the new theology has no answer to the dilemma either. Its followers are caught equally in Camus’ problem and Baudelaire’s proposition. All that is reasonable in their position, based on observing the world as it is, says God is the Devil. Nevertheless, because they do not want to live with this conclusion, by an act of blind faith they say God is good. This, they say, is what the “scandal of the cross” is—to believe that God is good against all the evidence open to reason. But this is emphatically not the “scandal of the cross.” The true scandal is that however faithfully and clearly one preaches the gospel, at a certain point the world, because it is in rebellion, will turn from it. Men turn away in order not to bow before the God who is there. This is the “scandal of the cross.”
Modern theology may use the term guilt, but because it is not orientated in a true moral framework, it turns out to be no more than guilt-feelings. And as in their system they have no place for true guilt, the death of Jesus on the cross takes on an entirely different meaning. Following from this, the work of Christ and the ministry of the church becomes one of two things: either a basis for sociological motivation, using undefinable religious terms; or a means for psychological integration, again using religious words. In both cases, the connotation words used are open to the control of the manipulators.
There is an opposite danger: that the orthodox Christian will fail to realize that at times guilt-feelings are present when no true guilt exists. Let us remember that the Fall resulted in division not only between God and man, and man and man, but between man and himself. Hence there are psychological guilt-feelings without true guilt. In such cases we must show genuine compassion. But where there is a real moral guilt before the God who is there, this must never be passed off or explained away as psychological, as the new theology does.
Another result of the position of the new theology is that there is no personal antithesis at the point of justification. For the new theologians there can never be a qualitative difference in man’s relationship to God. The Christian view is that when a person casts himself on Jesus Christ as Savior, at that moment he has passed from death to life, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God’s dear Son. Justification means to be acquitted from true guilt and no longer to be condemned. This is an absolute personal antithesis. If on the other hand, there is no absolute antithesis between moral and immoral, cruel and noncruel, then the only difference is a quantitative one.
We may not play with the new theology even if we may think we can turn it to our advantage. This means, for example, we must beware of cooperation in evangelistic enterprises which force us into a position of accepting the new theology as Christian. If we do this, we have cut the ground from under the biblical concept of the personal antithesis of justification.
Because the new theology has no place for antithesis, and because for its proponents sin and guilt are, in the last analysis, a metaphysical and not a moral problem, they have either an implicit or explicit universalism regarding man’s ultimate salvation. It is naive for evangelicals to regard this universalism as merely an unrelated corner of the neo-orthodox system. It may not always be explicit in the teaching of the new theologians, but we must see that the logic of their view concerning man’s dilemma irresistibly drives them to this position. At this point their beliefs hang together very well. They have no final antithesis between right and wrong; therefore there can be no such thing as true moral guilt; therefore justification as a radically changed relationship with God can have no meaning; therefore no one is finally condemned. On the basis of their system, this is a perfectly consistent and necessary position to hold. Universalism is naturally related to what their system is.
HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY AND MAN’S DILEMMA
The historic Christian position is that man’s dilemma has a moral cause. God, being nondetermined, created man as a nondetermined person. This is a difficult idea for anyone thinking in twentieth-century terms because most twentieth-century thinking sees man as determined. He is determined either by chemical factors, as the Marquis de Sade held and Francis Crick is trying to prove, or by psychological factors, as Freud and others have suggested, or by sociological factors, such as B. F. Skinner holds. In these cases, or as a result of a fusion of them, man is considered to be programmed. If this is the case, then man is not the tremendous thing the Bible says he is, made in the image of God as a personality who can make a free first choice. Because God created a true universe outside of himself (not as an extension of his essence), there is a true history which exists. Man as created in God’s image is therefore a significant man in a significant history, who can choose to obey the commandment of God and love him, or revolt against him.
This is the wonder of man and the wonder of history. It is the very opposite of the Zen Buddhist statement which says, “The mind of man is like the wind in a pine tree in a Chinese ink drawing.” In this, man is killed twice. He is only the wind in the pine tree, and even then only in a drawing. Christianity teaches the very reverse of what the Eastern thinker says. Man can understand and respond to the One who, having made him and communicated with him, called upon him to show that he loved God by simple command: “Don’t do this.” The test could have been something else. No act of primitive magic is involved here. This is the infinite-personal God calling on personal man to act by choice. And it was a motivated command, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die,” which would make no sense if man is only a machine. He could so act by choice because he was created to be different from the animal, the plant and the machine.
To ask that man should have been made so that he was not able to revolt is to ask that God’s creation should have ceased after he created plants and animals. It is to ask that man should be reduced to machine programming. It is to ask that man as man should not exist.
If one begins to consider the Christian system as a total system, one must begin with the infinite-personal triune God who is there, and who was communicating and loving before anything else was. If one begins to consider how sinful man can return to fellowship with God, one must begin with Christ, his person and work. But if one begins to consider the differences between Christianity and rationalistic philosophy’s answers, one must begin by understanding that man and history are now abnormal. It is not that philosophy and Christianity deal with completely different questions, but that historic Christianity and rationalistic philosophy differ in their answers—including the important point as to whether man and history are now normal or abnormal. They also differ in that rationalistic thinking starts with only the knowledge finite man can glean for himself.
Christianity says man is now abnormal—he is separated from his Creator, who is his only sufficient reference point—not by a metaphysical limitation but by true moral guilt. As a result he is now also separated from his fellowmen, and from himself. Therefore, when he is involved in cruelty, he is not being true to what he was initially created to be. Cruelty is a symptom of abnormality and a result of a moral, historic space-time Fall.
What does a historic space-time Fall involve? It means that there was a period before man fell; that if you had been there, you could have seen Adam before he fell; that at the point when he revolted against God by making a free choice to disobey God’s commandment, there was a tick of the clock. Take away the first three chapters of Genesis, and you cannot maintain a true Christian position nor give Christianity’s answers.