Episode 1

The Roman Age

Introduction

  • Problem: dilemma of social breakdown and violence leading to authoritarianism which limits freedom
  • We are, however, not helpless. Why?
  • Answer approached through consideration of the past.
  • Any starting point in history would be good; we start with Rome because it is direct ancestor of modern West.

Rome: The Empire Triumphant

  • Size and military strength of Empire.
  • Imperial sway evoked by Aventicum (Avenches), Switzerland.

Rome: Cultural Analysis

  • Greece and Rome: cultural influences and parallels.
    • Society as the absolute, to give meaning to life.
    • Finite gods as ground of accepted values.
  • Problems arising from Roman culture.
    • No infinite reference point as base for values and society.
    • Collapse of civic ideals therefore inevitable.
  • Results of collapse of ideals.
    • Dictatorship of Julius Caesar a response to civil disorder.
    • Firmly established authoritarian rule of Augustus.
  • Characteristics of regime introduced by Augustus
    • Claim to give peace and the fruits of civilization.
    • Care to maintain facade of republican constitution.
    • People ready to accept absolute power in return for peace and prosperity.
    • Religious sanction for emperor-dictators: the emperor as God.
  • Christian Persecution
    • Religious toleration in the Empire.
    • Christians persecuted because they would worship only the infinite-personal God and not Caesar also. They had an absolute whereby to judge the Roman state and its actions.
  • Viability of presuppositions facing social and political tension.
    • Christians had infinite reference point in God and His revelation in the Old Testament, the revelation through Christ, and the growing New Testament
    • Christians could confront Roman culture and be untouched by its inner weakness, including its relativism and syncretism.
    • Roman hump-backed bridge, like Roman culture, could only stand if not subjected to overwhelming pressures.

Rome: Eventual Decline and Fall

  • Growth of taste for cruelty.
  • Decadence seen in rampant sexuality and lust for violence.
  • General apathy, as seen in decline in artistic creativity.
  • Economic decline, more expensive government, and tighter centralization.
  • Successful barbarian invasions because of internal rot.

Conclusion

  • There is no foundation strong enough for society or the individual life within the realm of finiteness and beginning from Man alone as autonomous.

Questions

  • Dr. Schaeffer claims that, through looking at history, we can see how presuppositions determine events. Does his discussion bear this out and, if so, how?
  • How can a survey of Roman history in one-half hour be either useful or responsible? Discuss.
  • “History does not repeat itself.” —The parallels between the history of Rome and the twentieth century West are many and obvious.” How may these statements be reconciled?

Episode 2

The Middle Ages

Introduction: The Post-Roman World

  • Social, political, and intellectual uncertainty.
  • General decline in learning, but monasteries were a depository for classical and Christian documents.
  • The original pristine Christianity of the New Testament gradually became distorted.
  • Decline of vital naturalism in art parallels decline of vital Christianity: positive and negative aspects of Byzantine art.
  • Music at time of Ambrose, later Gregorian chants.

The Church in the World: Economic, Social, Political. How to be in the world but not of it.

  • Generosity of early church.
  • Ambivalence in Middle Ages about material goods; asceticism and luxury.
  • Economic controls to protect the weak.
  • Emphasis on work well done.
  • Care for social needs: e.g. hospitals.
  • Meaning of Christendom; attendant problems. Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government.

Artistic Achievements

  • Close relation between church and society in art and life: e.g. reign of Charlemagne.
  • Basis of unified European culture laid by Charlemagne.
  • Birth and flowering of Romanesque architecture.
  • Birth and flowering of Gothic architecture.
  • Aquinas’ emphasis on Aristotle.
    • Negative aspect: individual things, the particulars, tended to be made independent, autonomous.
    • With this came the loss of adequate meaning for the individual things, including Man, morals, values, and law.
  • Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard to authority and the approach to God.
  • Reaction of Wycliffe and Hus to theological distortions is prophetic of Reformation.

Questions

  • Summarize the negative and positive aspects of church influence in the Middle Ages.
  • “To speak of distortions of belief in the Middle Ages is to pretend that the church should have stood still when the apostles died. But we have to adapt to new circumstances and ideas. The medieval church did.” Comment.
  • Apply the particulars-universals discussion to modern circumstances. How do people repeat the same mistakes nowadays? Be specific.

Episode 3

The Renaissance

The Art of the Renaissance Is One of Mankind’s Glories

  • The artists reflect their culture.
  • The artists often provide the way for the next step in culture.
    • Positive emphasis on nature in Giotto’s art.
    • Significance of work of Masaccio.
    • Perspective as a form of humanism.
    • Parallel and supportive developments in Low Countries. Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb, the substitutionary work of the crucified and risen Christ. Also an example of landscape naturalism.
    • Dante’s life and work.
      • Following Aquinas, he mixed Christian and classical elements.
      • Dichotomy in Dante and other writers between sensual and idealized, spiritual love.
    • Brunelleschi’s architecture and the conquest of space.
    • Trend to autobiography and self-portraiture a mark of emphasis on Man.
  • Italian Renaissance music.
    • Invention of orchestration.
    • Invention of movable type for music.

Increased Drift Toward a Total Humanism

  • Could have gone either way—with emphasis on real people living in a real world which God had made, or humanism could take over with its emphasis on the individual things being autonomous.
  • The die was cast: Man tried to make himself independent, autonomous.
  • A growing humanism sees what preceded the Renaissance as the “Dark Ages.”
  • Idea of a “Dark Age” and a “rebirth” in Renaissance.
  • Aquinas had opened the door for that which is the problem of humanism.
    • Illustrated by Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican: The School of Athens.
    • Humanism’s problem: What is themeaning of individual things, including Man, if there is no final thing to relate them to? And how do we know what is right or wrong if there is no absolute to give us certainty? Humanism ends with only statistical averages.
  • Fouquet’s Red Virgin as an example.
    • At first, only religious values seemed threatened.
    • But gradually the threat spread to all of knowledge and all of life.
  • Man as hero: Michelangelo’s Prisoners and David. Change in his later work, however.
  • Leonardo da Vinci and the dilemma of humanism.
    • Logical conclusion of humanism as perceived by Leonardo.
    • Final pessimism of Leonardo an expression of inevitable progression of humanism towards pessimism.

Christianity’s Answer to Humanism’s Problem

Questions

  • In what ways is this treatment of the Renaissance different from other treatments with which you are familiar?
  • What were the positive and the negative aspects of the Renaissance?
  • Attitudes toward nature and Man seem to be crucial to understanding the Renaissance. How far were these attitudes Christian and how far non-Christian?
  • What happens when particulars are made autonomous? Do we see this at all today?
  • Can you see any parallels between the evolution of humanism in the Renaissance—from hopeful dawn to ominous sunset–and the changing outlook on human and world problems during your own lifetime?

Episode 4

The Reformation

The Reformation as a Reaction Against Medieval Religious Distortions of the Biblical and Early Christian Church’s Teaching

  • Illustration from Luther.
  • Luther—German; Zwingli—Zürich; Thomas Cromwell—England; Calvin—Geneva.
  • Biblical view of salvation (grace only) and its effect on certain aspects of church construction.
  • Real meaning of destruction of artwork in Reformation.
  • The Reformation rejected.
    • Medieval distortion of Church’s having made its authority equal to the authority of the Bible.
    • Medieval distortion of Church’s having added human works to the finished work of Christ for salvation.
    • Medieval distortion introduced by Aquinas: mixture of biblical thinking and pagan thought.
  • Summary of humanistic influence in church.
    • Illustrated by Raphael’s School of Athens and Disputà.
    • Illustrated by Michelangelo’s making pagan prophetesses equal to Old Testament prophets in Sistine Chapel.
  • For William Farel and the other Reformers it was the Scriptures only.
    • Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel.
    • Bible gives needed answers not only as to how to be right with God, but concerning the meaning of life and what is right and what is wrong, and concerning mankind and nature.
    • The people of the Reformation did not have humanism’s problem, because the Bible gives a unity between God—as the ultimate universal—and the individual things.
    • The Reformation was no golden age, but it did aspire to depend on the Bible in all of life.

The Reformation and the Arts

  • German Reformation music tradition peaks in Bach.
  • Significance of Cranach’s and Luther’s friendship.
  • Dürer’s identification with Luther evidenced in his diary; significance of his work.
  • Rembrandt’s paintings show that he understood that his sins had sent Christ to the cross, and that Christ is the Lord of all of life.
Forgiven
  • Point is not to romanticize Reformation art but refute view that reformation was either hostile to art and culture, or did not produce art and culture.
  • Wittenberg Gesangbuch, Geneva Psalter, and revival of congregational singing.

Comparison of Renaissance and Reformation

Both sought freedom. In the South license resulted from lack of absolutes; in the North freedom lasted through absolutes.

Questions

  • How did the Reformers understand the relationship between the universals and the particulars?
  • How did Rembrandt’s art compare with Michelangelo’s?
  • Contrast the concept of freedom as understood by the Reformers with the attitude of this influenced by the Renaissance with regard to freedom.
  • Can you clearly differentiate between the key ideas of the Renaissance and the Reformation, respectively?
  • “The Reformation is simply the last gasp of medieval Christianity. Once exhausted, the truly modern and humane force of the Renaissance dominated the West.” Comment.
  • “As a man thinketh, so is he”—the renewed emphasis upon the Bible’s teaching in the Reformation had practical results. If some of these results are no longer common among us, how far may this be attributed to a de-emphasis upon biblical teaching today?

Episode 5

The Revolutionary Age

Bible as Absolute Base for Law

  • Paul Robert’s mural in Lausanne.
  • Rutherford’s Lex Rex (Law Is King): Freedom without chaos; government by law rather than arbitrary government by men.
  • Impact of biblical political principles in America.
    • Rutherford’s influence on U.S. Constitution: directly through Witherspoon; indirectly through Locke’s secularized version of biblical politics.
    • Locke’s ideas inconsistent when divorced from Christianity.
    • One can be personally non-Christian, yet benefit from Christian foundations: e.g. Jefferson and other founders.

The Reformation and Checks and Balances

  • Humanist and Reformation views of politics contrasted.
  • Sin is reason for checks and balances in Reformed view: Calvin’s position at Geneva examined.
  • Checks and balances in Protestant lands prevented bloody resolution of tensions.
  • Elsewhere, without this biblically rooted principle, tensions had to be resolved violently.

Contrast Between English and French Political Experience

  • Voltaire’s admiration of English conditions.
  • Peaceful nature of the Bloodless Revolution of 1688 in England related to Reformation base.
  • Attempt to achieve political change in France on English lines, but on Enlightenment base, produced a bloodbath and a dictatorship.
    • Constructive change impossible on finite human base.
    • Declaration of Rights of Man, the rush to extremes, and the Goddess of Reason.
    • Anarchyorrepression:massacres,Robespierre,theTerror.
    • Idea of perfectibility of Man maintained even during the Terror.

Anglo-American Experience Versus Franco-Russian

  • Reformation experience of freedom without chaos contrasts with that of Marxist-Leninist Russia.
  • Logic of Marxist-Leninism.
    • Marxism not a source of freedom.
    • 1917 Revolution taken over, not begun, by Bolsheviks.
    • Logic of communism: elite dictatorship, suppression of freedoms, coercion of allies.

Reformation Christianity and Humanism: Fruits Compared

  • Reformation gave absolutes to counter injustices; where Christians failed they were untrue to their principles.
  • Humanism has no absolute way of determining values consistently.
  • Differences practical, not just theoretical: Christian absolutes give limited government; denial of absolutes gives arbitrary rule.

Weaknesses Which Developed Later in Reformation Countries

  • Slavery and race prejudice.
    • Failure to live up to biblical belief produces cruelty.
    • Hypocritical exploitation of other races.
    • Church’s failure to speak out sufficiently against this hypocrisy.
  • Noncompassionate use of accumulated wealth.
    • Industrialism not evil in itself, but only through greed and lack of compassion.
    • Labor exploitation and gap in living standards.
    • Church’s failure to testify enough against abuses.
  • Positive face of Reformation Christianity toward social evil.
    • Christianity not the only influence on consensus.
      • Church’s silence betrayed; did not reflect what it said it believed.
      • Non-Christian influences also important at that time; and many so-called Christians were “social” Christians only.
    • Contributions of Christians to social reform.
      • Varied efforts in slave trade, prisons, factories.
        • Wesley, Newton, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and abolition of slavery.
        • Howard, Elizabeth Fry, and prison reforms.
        • Lord Shaftesbury and reform in the factories.
      • Impact of Whitefield-Wesley revivals on society.

Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection

  • But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there was a unique improvement.
  • With Bible the ordinary citizen could say that majority was wrong.
  • Tremendous freedom without chaos because Bible gives a base for law.

Questions

  • What has been the role of biblical principles in the legal and political history of the countries studied?
  • Is it true that lands influenced by the Reformation escaped political violence because biblical concepts were acted upon?
  • What are the core distinctions, in terms of ideology and results, between English and American Revolutions on the one hand, and the French and Russian on the other hand?
  • What were the weaknesses which developed at a later date in countries which had a Reformation history?
  • Dr. Schaeffer believes that basic to action is an idea, and that the history of the West in the last two or three centuries has been marked by a humanism pressed to its tragic conclusions and by a Christianity insufficiently applied to the totality of life. How should Christians then approach participation in social and political affairs?

Episode 6

The Scientific Age

Church Attacks on Copernican Science Were Philosophical

Galileo’s and Copernicus’ works did not contradict the Bible but the elements of Aristotle’s teaching which had entered the Church.

Examples of Biblical Influence

  • Pascal’s work.
    • First successful barometer; great writing of French prose.
    • Understood Man’s uniqueness: Man could contemplate, and Man had value to God.
  • Newton
    • Speed of sound and gravity.
    • For Newton and the other early scientists, no problem concerning the why, because they began with the existence of a personal God who had created the universe.
  • Francis Bacon
    • Stressed careful observation and systematic collection of information.
    • Bacon and the other early scientists took the Bible seriously, including its teaching concerning history and the cosmos.
  • Faraday
    • Crowning discovery was the induction of the electric current.
    • As a Christian, believed God’s Creation is for all men to understand and enjoy, not just for a scientific elite.

Scientific Aspects of Biblical Influence

  • Oppenheimer and Whitehead: biblical foundations of scientific revolution.
  • Not all early scientists individually Christian, but all lived within Christian thought forms. This gave a base for science to continue and develop.
  • The contrast between Christian-based science and Chinese and Arab science.
  • Christian emphasis on an ordered Creation reflects nature of reality and is therefore acted upon in all cultures, regardless of what they say their world view is.
    • Einstein’s theory of relativity does not imply relative universe.
  • Man acts on assumption of order, whether he likes it or not.
  • Master idea of biblical science.
    • Uniformity of natural causes in an open system: cause and effect works, but God and Man not trapped in a process.
    • All that exists is not a total cosmic machine.
    • Human choices therefore have meaning and effect.
    • The cosmic machine and the machines people make therefore not a threat.

Shift in Modern Science

  • Change in conviction from earlier modern scientists.
  • From an open to a closed natural system: elimination of belief in a Creator.
    • Closed system derives not from the findings of science but from philosophy.
    • Now there is no place for the significance of Man, for morals, or for love.
  • Darwin taught that all life evolved through the survival of the fittest.
    • Serious problems inherent in Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism.
    • Extension of natural selection to society, politics and ethnics.
  • Natural selection and Nazi ideology.
  • The new authoritarianism: not the crudely dictatorial regimes of Hitler and Stalin. New regimes will be subtly manipulative, based on sophisticated arsenal of new techniques now available.
    • To obtain organs for transplants forces acceptance of new definition of death. Possible abuses.
    • Without the absolute line which Christianity gives of the total uniqueness of Man, people have no boundary line between what they can do and what they should do.
    • Moral and legal implications of Artificial Insemination by Donor (A.I.D.)
  • (cont’d)
    • Skinner’s social psychology and the abolition of Man.
    • Tell people they are machines and they will tend to act accordingly.
    • Each theory of conditioning leads to social application.
      • Koestler: tranquilizer to cure human aggression.
      • Clark and Lee: controlling aggressions of politicians.
      • Kranty: control reproduction through the water supply.
  • (cont’d)
    • Who controls the controllers? —The unasked question.
      • The basic question begged: the psycho-civilizer as King?
      • If people are machines, why should biological continuation have value?

Need to Reaffirm That Which Was the Original Base for Modern Science

Questions

  • Explain the important contributions to science made by biblical principles.
  • How should our knowledge of the biblical view of work and nature affect our own attitudes to research, study of the Bible, and the use of our minds?
  • Does this segment help you to understand how and why men of great intellectual refinement in Nazi Germany could accept what was going on?
  • “Without the absolute line which Christianity gives of the total uniqueness of Man, people have no boundary line between what they can do and what they should do.” Discuss.

Episode 7

The Age of Non-Reason

Optimism Of Older Humanist Philosophers:

  • The unity and true knowledge of reality defined as starting from Man alone.

Shift in Modern Philosophy

  • Eighteenth century as the vital watershed.
  • Rousseau: ideas and influence.
    • Rousseau and autonomous freedom.
    • Personal freedom and social necessity clash in Rousseau.
    • Rousseau’s influence.
      • Robespierre and the ideology of the Terror.
      • Gauguin, natural freedom, and disillusionment.
  • DeSade: If nature is the absolute, cruelty equals non-cruelty.
  • Impossible tension between autonomous freedom and autonomous reasons conclusion that the universe and people are a part of the total cosmic machine.
  • Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard and their followers sought for a unity but they did not solve the problem.
    • After these men and their followers, there came an absolute break between the area of meaning and values, and the area of reason.
    • Now humanistic philosophy sees reason as always leading to pessimism; any hope of optimism lies in non-reason.

Existentialism and Non-Reason

  • French existentialism.
    • Total separation of reason and will: Sartre.
    • Not possible to live consistently with this position.
  • German existentialism.
    • Jaspers and the “final experience.”
    • Heidegger and angst.
  • Influence of existentialism.
    • As a formal philosophy it is declining.
    • As a generalized attitude it dominates modern thought.

Forms of Popularization of Nonrational Experience

  • Drug experience.
    • Aldous Huxley and “truth inside one’s head.”
    • Influence of rock groups in spreading the drug culture; psychedelic rock.
  • Eastern religious experience: from the drug trip to the Eastern religious trip.
  • The occult as a basis for “hope” in the area of non-reason.

Theological Liberalism and Existentialism

  • Preparation for theological existentialism.
    • Renaissance’s attempt to “synthesize” Greek philosophers and Christianity; religious liberals’ attempt to “synthesize” Enlightenment and Christianity.
    • Religious liberals denied supernatural but accepted reason.
    • Schweitzer’s demolition of liberal aim to separate the natural from the supernatural in the New Testament.
  • Theological existentialism.
    • Intellectual failure of rationalist theology opened door to theological existentialism.
    • Barth brought the existential methodology into theology.
      • Barth’s teaching led to theologians who said that the Bible is not true in the areas of science and history, but they nevertheless look for a religious experience from it.
      • For many adherents of this theology, the Bible does not give absolutes in regard to what is right or wrong in human behavior.
  • Theological existentialism as a cul-de-sac.
    • If Bible is divorced from its teaching concerning the cosmos and history, its values can’t be applied to a historic situation in either morals or law; theological pronouncements about morals or law are arbitrary.
    • No way to explain evil or distinguish good from evil. Therefore, these theologians are in same position as Hindu philosophers (as illustrated by Kali).
    • Tillich, prayer as reflection, and the deadness of “god.”
    • Religious words used for manipulation of society.

Conclusion

  • With what Christ and the Bible teach, Man can have life instead of death—in having knowledge that is more than finite Man can have from himself.

Questions

  • What is the difference between theologians and philosophers of the rationalist tradition and those of the existentialist tradition?
  • “If the early church had embraced an existentialist theology, it would have been absorbed into the Roman pantheon.” It didn’t. Why not?
  • “It is true that existentialist theology is foreign to biblical religion. But biblical religion was the product of a particular culture and, though useful for societies in the same cultural stream, it is no longer suitable for an age in which an entire range of world cultures requires a common religious denominator. Religious existentialism provides that, without losing the universal instinct for the holy.” Study this statement carefully. What assumptions are betrayed by it?
  • Can you isolate attitudes and tendencies in yourself, your church, and your community which reflect the “existentialist methodology” described by Dr. Schaeffer?

Episode 8

The Age Of Fragmentation

Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought

  • Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas) and Post-Impressionism (Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat): appearance and reality.
    • Problem of reality in Impressionism: no universal.
    • Post-Impression seeks the universal behind appearances.
    • Painting expresses an idea in its own terms as a work of art; to discuss the idea in a painting is not to intellectualize art.
    • Parallel search for universal in art and philosophy; Cézanne.
  • Fragmentation
    • Extremes of ultra-naturalism or abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky.
    • Picasso leads choice for abstraction: relevance of this choice.
    • Failure of Picasso (like Sartre, and for similar reasons) to be fully consistent with his choice.
  • Retreat to absurdity
    • Dada, and Marcel Duchamp: art as absurd.
    • Artfollowedphilosophybutcamesoonertologicalend.
    • Chance in his art technique as an art theory impossible to practice: Pollock.

Music As a Vehicle of Modern Thought

  • Non-resolution and fragmentation: German and French streams.
    • Influence of Beethoven’s last Quartets.
    • Direction and influence of Debussy.
    • Schoenberg’s non-resolution; contrast with Bach.
    • Stockhausen: electronic music and concern with the element of change.
  • Cage: a case study in confusion.
    • Deliberate chance and confusion in Cage’s music.
    • Cage’s inability to live the philosophy of his music.
  • Contrast of music-by-chance and the world around us.
    • Inconsistency of indulging in expression of chaos when we acknowledge order for practical matters like airplane design.
    • Art as anti-art when it is mere intellectual statement, divorced from reality of who people are and the fullness of what the universe is.

General Culture As the Vehicle of Modern Thought

  • Propagation of idea of fragmentation in literature.
    • Effect of Eliot’s Wasteland and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’ Avignon compared; the drift of general culture.
    • Eliot’s change in his form of writing when he became a Christian.
    • Philosophic popularization by novel: Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir.
  • Cinema as advanced medium of philosophy.
    • Cinema in the 1960s used to express Man’s destruction: e.g. Blow-up.
    • Cinema and the leap into fantasy: The Hour of the Wolf, Belle de Jour, Juliet of the Spirits, The Last Year at Marienbad.
    • Bergman’s inability to live out his philosophy (see Cage): Silence and The Hour of the Wolf.

Only on Christian Base Can Reality Be Faced Squarely

Questions

  • Explain what “fragmentation” means, as discussed by Dr. Schaeffer. What does it result from? Give examples of it.
  • Apart from the fact that modern printing and recording processes made the art and music of the past more accessible than ever before, do you think that the preference of many people for the art and music of the past is related to the matters discussed by Dr. Schaeffer? If so, how?
  • “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds… With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.” Emerson wrote this over a century ago. Debate.
  • How far do you think that the opinion of some Christians that one should have nothing to do with philosophy, art and novels is a manifestation of the very fragmentation which is characteristic of modern secular thought? Discuss.

Episode 9

The Age Of Personal Peace & Affluence

By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought

Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads to Pessimism Regarding a Meaning for Life and for Fixed Values

  • General acceptance of selfish values (personal peace and affluence) accompanied rejection of Christian consensus.
    • Personal peace means: I want to be left alone, and I don’t care what happens to the man across the street or across the world. I want my own life-style to be undisturbed regardless of what it will mean — even to my own children and grandchildren.
  • Affluence means things, things, things, always more things — and success is seen as an abundance of things.
  • Students wish to escape meaninglessness of much of adult society.
    • Watershed was Berkeley in 1964.
    • Drug Taking as an ideology: “turning on” the world.
    • Free Speech Movement on Sproul Plaza.
      • At first neither Left nor Right. b) Soon became the New Left.
      • Followed Marcuse.
      • Paris riots.
  • (cont’d)
    • Student analysis of problem was right, but solution wrong.
    • Woodstock, Altamont, and the end of innocence.
    • Drug taking survives the death of ideology but as an escape.
    • Demise of New Left: radical bombings.
    • Apathy supreme. The young accept values of the older generation: their.own.idea.o.fpersonal peace and affluence, even though adopting a different life-style.
  • Marxism and Maoism as pseudo-ideals.
    • Vogue for idealistic communism which is another form of leap into the area of non-reason.
    • Solzhenitsyn: violence and expediency as norms of communism.
    • Communist repression in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
    • Communism has neither philosophic nor historic base for freedom. There is no base for “Communism with a human face.”
    • Utopian Marxism steals its talk of human dignity from Christianity.
  • (cont’d)
    • But when it comes to power, the desire of majority has no meaning.
    • Two streams of communism.
      • Those who hold it as an idealistic leap.
      • Old-line communists who hold orthodox communist ideology and bureaucratic structure as it exists in Russia.
    • Many in West might accept communism if it seemed to give peace and affluence.
  • Relativistic law.
    • Base for nonarbitrary law gone; only inertia allows a few principles to survive.
    • Holmes and sociological (variable) law.
    • Sociological law comes from failure of natural law (see evolution of existential from rationalistic theology).
    • Courts are now generating law.
    • Medical, legal, and historical arbitrariness of Supreme Court ruling on abortion and current abortion practice.
  • Sociological law opens door to racism, abrogation of freedoms, euthanasia, and so on.

Social Alternatives After Death of Christian Consensus

  • Hedonism? But might is right when pleasures conflict.
  • Without external absolute, majority vote is absolute. But this justifies a Hitler.

Conclusion

  • If there is no absolute by which to judge society, then society is absolute.
  • Humanist thinking—making the individual and mankind the center of all things (autonomous) — has led to death in our culture and in our political life.

Note: Social alternatives after the death of Christian consensus are continued in Episode Ten.

Questions

  • What was the basic cause of campus unrest in the sixties? What has happened to the campus scene since, and why?
  • What elements — in the life and thought of the communist and noncommunist world alike — suggest a possible base for world agreement?
  • “To prophesy doom about Western society is premature. We are, like all others who have lived in times of great change, too close to the details to see the broader picture. One thing we do know: Society has always gone on, and the most wonderful epochs have followed the greatest depressions. To suggest that our day is the exception says more about our headache than it does about our head.” Debate.
  • As Dr. Schaeffer shows, many apparently isolated events and options gain new meaning when seen in the context of the whole. How far does your own involvement in business, law, financing, and so on reveal an acquiescence to current values?

Episode 10

Final Choices

Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option

One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes.

  • Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes.
  • But society has to be led by an elite: John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Theobald.
  • Daniel Bell’s prophecy of technocratic elite.
  • Bell’s warning of cultural contradiction: no absolute ethic to accompany absolute power.

Nature of the New Authoritarianism

  • Do not think of the model of Hitler and Stalin.
  • Probably a manipulative, authoritarian elite.

Possible Forms of Manipulation

  • Review from Episode Six: Koestler — chemical agents; Krantz — birth control in world’s drinking supply; Clark — political leaders should take anti-aggression pills; Lee — psychological tests for public officials; Skinner — reinforcers to modify behavior.
  • Genetic condition: Francis Crick.
    • He advocates:
      • That some group of people is to decide who should be the parents of the next generation and who should be born.
      • That some group of people should determine what kind of people they want in the future and will set out genetically to make them.
    • Once Man is no longer seen as made in God’s image, there is no reason not to “tinker” with Man genetically.
  • The mass media.
    • TV conditions by selective editing. Illustration: simulated riot filmed in San Jose.
    • No collusion needed if views of elite and newsmakers coincide. Media not monolithic, but total control not needed to achieve manipulation.

Authoritarianism in Government. Illustration: United States

  • The dilemma of people who speak out for civil liberties but are also committed to the government’s having a responsibility to solve every problem.
  • Christian freedoms without Christian base produce chaos.
  • In the United States an authoritarian, manipulating government could come from the administrative (executive) side, the legislature, or from the courts functioning on variable, sociological law.

Threat of Authoritarianism

  • Leftist or Rightist authoritarianism are only two roads to the same end.
  • With the loss of Christian consensus, no reason for young or old committed to apathy not to give in if promised personal peace and affluence.
  • Roman bridge simile: humanist values collapse under pressure.
  • Some overwhelming pressures which progressively tend to prepare modern people to accept a manipulative, authoritarian government:
    • Economic breakdown.
      • Spiral of inflation leads to economic recession.
      • Fear of economic breakdown swamps concern for liberty.
    • Random violence and political terrorism. Fear can be so great than any compromise is worth security.
    • Threat of War between the West and expansionist Communist Block. Fear of war opens the way for many to accept authoritarianism as lesser evil.
  • (cont’d)
    • World food shortage and change in world distribution of wealth and goods.
      • Threat of lower living standards alters basic attitudes.
      • Authoritarianism more likely to be accepted in a descending spiral of prosperity and a country’s place of power.
  • As in the days of Caesar Augustus (Episode One), authoritarianism is most easily accepted if it is brought in while seeming to keep the outward forms of constitutionality.

Two Alternatives to Chaos:

Either authoritarianism — or society’s affirming once again the original source of freedom, God’s revelation in the Bible, and His revelation through Christ.

  • Reconsidering the second alternative.
    • Nonpragmatic nature of biblical Christianity.
      • Christianity not a superior utilitarianism to mend society; Christianity is truth that gives a unity to all of knowledge and all of life.
      • Stems from the infinite-personal God who exists and who was the Maker of the heavens and the earth.
    • (cont’d)
      • The acceptance of Christ as Savior and Lord, living under the absolutes which the Bible gives.
      • Christians have a responsibility to influence society across its whole spectrum and the entire spectrum of life.
      • Christians can influence consensus without being a majority.
  • (cont’d)
    • The message of Paul to the Greek and Roman world applied.
      • Classical-humanist answers insufficient.
      • World is guilty of suppressing God’s truth and living accordingly. The universe and its form and the mannishness of Man speak the same truth that the Bible gives in greater detail.
    • (cont’d)
      • Biblical Christianity is a message that people can return to God on the basis of Christ’s work alone, but it also gives the base for form and freedom in society.
      • It is this which can give us a hope for the future.
      • It is either this or an imposed order.
  • A reminder about presuppositions.
    • People act out their thoughts, whether they know it or not.
    • All depends on the world view one accepts and lives upon.

Questions

  • The theory of human biological manipulation, granted its premises, is entirely consistent. Outline these premises and the way in which various programs of manipulation are derived from them.
  • In a world moving steadily towards authoritarian regimes, does the relative slowness of Western democracies to lose their freedoms increase or decrease the likelihood of the West’s political survival? Give reasons.
  • Can you think of ways in which you and your church’s attitudes to society betray the utilitarian approach to the world? Does this approach reflect ignorance about the Truth and guilt about our failure to live it? What is the alternative approach and what does it reflect?