This post was written by Patrick Rist on November 29, 2007
Marxism was supposed to produce the “New Man.” He’s a little late, but the New Man may be emerging in communist China.
A recent Reuters story (found here) describes the younger generation of twenty-somethings found in the wealthier districts of China. Almost all of them were raised as an “only child,” and evidently display many of the narcissistic, self-centered personality traits long associated with children without siblings – at least in popular lore. (I should probably add here that some of my best friends are only children.)
The article specifically focuses on the widespread (and quite casual) failure of marriages among this group. With the Chinese economy booming, and personal options and choices expanding exponentially, many Chinese simply can’t be bothered by the necessary give-and-take involved in sustaining a marriage. Considering the needs of another person is, after all, something with which they have had no previous experience. Divorce has become completely un-stigmatized in this echelon of society and marriages sometimes last only a few weeks.
Cohabitation is on the rise, and even extra-marital sex (quaintly called “cheating” by some in American society) is becoming accepted. All of these changes are an enormous departure from the Confucian ideals that have guided Chinese society for centuries.
To give the Marxists their due, I don’t think this is what they had in mind when they predicted the New Man. But is it possible that what is happening in China represents something actually new? A non-Western, and hence, non-Christian society passing from traditional mores to a post-modern, self-centered ethic – essentially within the span of one lifetime; other examples of this would be hard to find.
This cultural change presents something of a challenge to those of us who maintain that the way of living described here is contrary to human flourishing, and damages our souls. While perhaps true, convincing the young affluent Chinese would be a hard sell. They have no residual common moral ground in which such claims would make sense, even less than young affluent Americans.
Most of us Christians want to believe in natural law. We all take great comfort from Lewis’ arguments for a universal moral code in Mere Christianity. Yet a new generation of essentially amoral Chinese, living intently focused on material and sexual desire, would seem to present a great challenge to these notions. Perhaps we need less theory and more real life, hard case examples of seeing natural law apologetics in action.
Almost all of us know Chinese here in the US, either graduate students visiting, or professors. Perhaps this Reuters article could be a way to start a discussion of mores and morals. Of course, one should avoid an opener like, “What a selfish, immoral lot you Chinese are!”
Rather, one could ask:
– Have you seen examples of what the article describes? Do you think it is accurate?
– What are the implications of these trends for China’s future?
– Does it matter? Are some ways of living better than others? How does one decide that?
This post was written by Mark Hansard on November 26, 2007
AI staff member Mark Hansard sat down with J.P. Moreland recently to interview him about his new book, Kingdom Triangle (Zondervan, 2007). Moreland is distinguished professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology. He is the author and co-editor of numerous works including Scaling The Secular City (Baker, 1987), Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (IVP, 2003), Does God Exist? (Promethius, 1993), Body and Soul (IVP, 2000), and Christianity and the Nature of Science (Baker, 1989), among others. Excerpts:
In Kingdom Triangle, you talk about a thin worldview. What is a thin worldview, and how is it promulgated in the academy?
A thin worldview is a worldview that doesn’t have the resources to make sense out of meaning to life and objective value. It is a world without purpose to life. Naturalism is exactly a thin worldview. It says the material world is all there is. Postmodernism says whatever values your culture invents are true for you. On this view, the difference between abortion and choosing life is no more meaningful than choosing McDonalds over Burger king.
How does a thin worldview multiply “empty selves?” What is an empty self?
An empty self is someone who is a self-absorbed narcissist for whom everything is about him. If there is no ultimate purpose in life, some big picture, the only thing to live for is me.
If you were a professor in the secular academy today, what would you be doing to foster a “thick worldview?”
Just as Marxist professors and feminist professors teach their discipline from their point of view, Christians ought to do the same thing. They ought to integrate their worldview into their teaching. You don’t have to explicitly appeal to the Bible to do this. You could show that there are objective moral values without appealing to the Bible, for example.
Practically speaking, how can a Christian professor in a secular setting do this, without ‘relativising’ their position? If they say, “I’m coming from a Christian perspective” in the classroom, are they merely saying theirs is one more perspective among many?
Well, such a professor could say, “I’m coming from a Christian perspective here that I believe is actually true.” Or you could find reasons in your discipline that don’t presuppose Christianity to teach something. In history, for example, you could show that there are objective facts that can be known, without appealing to Christianity.
How, in your view, can the recovery of non-empirical knowledge be brought about? Why must non-empirical knowledge be brought back, and how can it be done?
The first step is to try to get clear on what knowledge is. I do that in the book. Secondly, gaining knowledge about what knowledge is, is not empirical. You can’t solve that issue by any empirical test. Third, when you come to understand what knowledge is, you learn two things: you can learn something without knowing how you know it, and you can know something without being 100% sure that you’re right. So that opens up the fact that people do know that kindness is a virtue without knowing how they know that. And I suggest other things in the book.
How is spiritual formation related to solving the problem of a thin worldview?
One of the three causes of depression and anxiety is moral relativism, according to secular psychological studies. The other two causes are a breakdown in community, and the rapid pace of life in modern culture. Why moral relativism? There is a right and wrong way to function. If you think everything is relative, you can justify any behavior and you will harm the way you were actually made to function. There must be knowledge of wise functioning to give people guidance out of their fears. If everything’s relative, there is no such knowledge. Robust spiritual formation is a way of producing flourishing human beings that know how to live life according to truth and knowledge. The proof’s in the pudding.
What, in your opinion, do evangelicals not know, that they ought to know, about restoring the Spirit’s power?
They ought to know that God is performing miracles with healing and demonic deliverance, and He is speaking to people through dreams, visions and impressions all over the world. We tend to think that happened in biblical times and it’s not for today. We’re way behind other parts of the world. To put it differently, Christianity is a lot more supernatural than people realize.
This post was written by Mark Hansard on August 30, 2007
In a recent op-ed piece for Discover magazine called Peace Through God, computer scientist Jaron Lanier reflects on religion, pluralism, mysteries beyond scientific adjudication, and the meaning of it all. While he does not appear particularly religious himself, he proffers a number of recommendations about how people ought to be religious in our violence-strewn world. Since his thinking has much in common with the secular academy at large, I would like to comment on two points in his essay.
His first point is that we should celebrate and encourage a diversity of complex religious beliefs because this would constitute a “violence-avoiding arrangement,” healthy in a pluralistic democracy in which we would prefer to avoid violence. He thinks that often, traditional religions are “clannish” in the sense that there is concern about who is “in” and who is “outside” the group, and this can cause violence (although to his credit, he does not claim that all religions are this way, and he chastises Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett for claiming that all religious belief is harmful). As expected, Lanier mentions the Hebrew God as an example of a “clannish” one.
He then goes on to say that we should encourage religious belief, even when it appears silly, if it breaks up the “clannishness” of traditional religion(s), because this would be the best way to avoid violence. His example is an apparently new religion in which the worshippers pray by chanting in binary language (zeroes and ones, the language of computers). Why should we be against such belief, he says, as long as it makes God complex enough not to interfere in the real world, and not to interfere with scientific discovery? (Only a small-minded person would believe that God actually interferes in the space-time universe, or that believing in him might have scientific implications).
Note again that we run up against the question of what knowledge is, whether it is possible to have religious knowledge. By recommending that we create our own religious beliefs in order to avoid violence, Lanier assumes there is no such thing as religious knowledge; we only have beliefs which we can create and follow for ourselves. But why should we assume that? Like many scientists, he believes science can step in and tell a religious person where she has erred, but he does not give such a person equal opportunity to critique scientific beliefs. Lanier’s view is an insult to the informed Christian who knows that Christian theology makes claims about knowledge—that it at least claims to describe reality in some way.
Curiously, Lanier goes on to recommend religious beliefs that “are concerned only with things too big to be framed by science.” He explains that mystery in the universe provokes “wonder,” and that certain questions may never be answered by science(!) His examples: consciousness, the source of mathematical truth, and what happened before the Big Bang. His admission here is significant in that it limits science to answering only the questions that science is designed to answer.
But Lanier goes on to define spirituality as “one’s emotional relationship with unanswerable questions.” How can one have an emotional relationship with a question? His attitude reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos musings about the “wonder” and “awe” which the universe inspires because it is vast and mysterious. The problem with this view is that once we revel and glory in “unanswerable questions,” we are delving into a relationship, not with the questions themselves, but with the fact that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s not the questions, it’s the implications of the questions which are intriguing. After all, what did happen before the Big Bang? Why is the universe so huge and we are so small? We don’t have emotional relationships with such questions, but with their implications which lead us—dare I say?—to worship (if not God, then the universe itself). The problem with Lanier is he embraces such questions while studiously avoiding their implications.
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