A new movement has emerged in contemporary philosophy, paralleling the anti-hero in fiction. It is the vogue of the anti-mind.
Depth psychology in all its forms, including Freudianism, general semantics with its all-out war on Aristotelian logic and kindred language philosophies, the phenomenon known as “hippiedom,” Zen Buddhism, and other like movements all converge at the point of debunking the universal values of reason. The appeal of this anti-mind “philosophy” spreads in an era when multiple-media propagandists seek to produce a crowd-culture that would rob the individual of what makes him human: his freedom and responsibility.
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines the new word “psychedelic” as “of or noting a mental state of great calm, intensely pleasureful perception of the senses, esthetic entrancement, and creative impetus.” It also denotes “any of a group of drugs producing this effect.” Commenting on those who champion this state, Time magazine reported on the difficulty of arguing with people “who, while condemning virtually every aspect of the American scene, from its foreign policy to its moral values, offer no debatable alternatives” (“The Hippies,” July 7, 1967). All they offer, Time implied, is the syndrome of the anti-mind philosophy.
However disturbed reasonable citizens may be by this utter nonchalance over any responsibility toward society or any individual redirection toward new goals, it need not surprise us that the hippies wholly disregard other Americans’ disapproval or approval. In Zen language they are the enlightened; and logic in Zen Buddhism, as in general semantics, is held applicable only to words, never to actual “reality.” Verbal reference, involving the logical relations of words-to-thoughts-to-things, has been explained away as the “noises people make” under specific circumstances. In more than one modern semantic view, definitions in any knowledge-field stand at varïous levels of abstraction from what is being defined. Zen’s main tenet, from Bodhidharma in the sixth century to the late Dr. D. T. Suzuki, has been: “All generalizations are false, including this one!” The so-called Zen enlightenment (the experiencing of “the oneness of it all”) entails the impossibility of telling others what Zen is. Thus the person who fails to attain enlightenment is forever barred from the knowledge of it.
Zen does not hold concepts to be descriptive of the truly real. Christmas Humphreys, a prominent English barrister and Buddhist, wrote: “When thought, infuriated, baffled, and at last aware of its futility, gives up, then suddenly, unmistakably, comes—What? A unique, utterly personal incommunicable experience, in a flash of THAT which is beyond description, because it is beyond the plane on which description, which must use the symbols of duality, can function” (Encounter, Dec., 1960; italics added). Conceptualization is said to destroy the enlightened one’s “unity.” To make the student of Zen wake to the error of his conceptual understanding, said Dr. Suzuki, it may be necessary to strike him and thus to let him realize within himself the meaning of the statement, “One is all and all is one” (Zen and Japanese Culture, 1959). By such means alone, at times, may the learner be awakened from his “logical somnambulism.”
It is true, of course, that two years later Suzuki wrote in his defense of Zen against an attack by Arthur Koestler: “There will be no name-calling, no kicking, but a ‘logical’ presentation of Zen philosophy.” But, he added, the achievement of satori (defined as “entering fully into life here and now”) is helped on by the master’s hitting students over the head with bricks, by kicks, slaps, and so on. When he used the term “logical” he put it in quotes, adding as an apology for using the word at all: “The human situation is full of contradictions: When we wish to say that no words are needed, more words are needed to prove it” (Encounter, Oct., 1961). He stated, too, that all Zen literature is “a pile of waste paper to be consigned to fire” and proceeded to back the statement by quoting from Arvaghosha, of the second century A.D., Confucius, and Lao-Tzu, all of whose writings have been carefully preserved. Buddha himself was invoked as having said, “I have been talking and talking to you for the last forty-nine years, but in truth I have not spoken a word.”
Talking and more talking has gone on over the centuries, of course. And no cult in our era has been so talkative as Zen Buddhism itself. Even in impugning logic, Zen literature is admittedly vast. The highly vocal Dr. Suzuki himself contributed an astronomical number of words to it. In fact, a disciple said admiringly that Suzuki had made English, in which many of his works were written, a second Zen language.
Zen has been praised immoderately as a refreshing nonconceptual philosophy for the rationalism-sodden culture of the West. The late psychiatrist Dr. Carl G. Jung and others have held that it represents a kind of primal simplicity and sanity. But Zen seems, instead, as overly sophisticated as the doctrines of the first sophists, and as unsound. The rational faculty is part of all experience. Hence, whoever distrusts the mind’s ability to report truly on reality was certainly made to do so by a false philosophy. He was not born with any such distrust.
Rational criticism naturally has no weight with those who hold metaphysics passé and who immerse themselves as far as possible in the dream of a No-Mind existence. But there is no real choice between eighteenth-century rationalism and the No-Mind mentality at this point. Although both lay claim to “enlightenment,” each rests on dangerous half-truth.
The existentialist, to be sure, strives to do justice to the whole person, but with equally inadequate results. Kierkegaard, whom certain Zennists would like to claim, was actually a God-centered intellectual who agreed with Socrates that the paramount duty of every person was to tend his soul. Unfortunately, however, his disjunction of eternity and time so exaggerated the transcendence of God that he was a forerunner of both dialectical and existential theology. In anticipating their denial that divine relevation takes the form of concepts and words, he too merits criticism from the standpoint of the errors of the anti-mind philosophy of our era, however commendable his forthright repudiation of Hegelianism.
The case for the actual ability of language to convey human knowledge without deformation and to serve as an adequate vehicle for divine revelation still stands. This, in fact, is what the Bible teaches and the best of Christian thought affirms. Christianity declares that God has come to man in a speaking and an acting person, Jesus Christ, and that he continues to come to man in the written words of Scripture. “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” Far from restricting man to a non-real, chimeric existence, language and the rational faculty to receive it are actually the vehicles by which God reveals the real to man. They are vehicles of revelation. Consequently, they are actually among the greatest of God’s gifts.
Missionaries are the Church’s unsung heroes in the cosmic struggle between God and Satan, good and evil. They are the expendables who make bruising contact with the enemy; they endure hardship as good soldiers of Christ. They suffer the loss of much that this world holds precious in order to establish beachheads on the borders of Beelzebub’s kingdom and to push back the forces of unbelief.
Missionary annals are filled with stories of intrepid men and women who truly counted all things but loss in their service of Christ. Who but a fellow volunteer can fully appreciate the agony felt by William Carey, Adoniram Judson, and J. Hudson Taylor as they laid to lonely rest on foreign soil the bodies of their wives and children? How long is the list of saintly warriors felled by disease or by martyrdom! Longer still is the list of volunteers who had to return to their native lands physically and mentally debilitated by their struggle against disease, environmental hazards, and the onslaughts of Satan.
Ever since William Carey published his Inquiry in 1792, the missionary task force has grown despite the defeats, the setbacks, the obstacles. When one life has been sacrificed, two new volunteers have arisen to replace the fallen. The vision has not faded, the call has not ceased, men and women have not failed to respond.
The outcome is written large for all to see. The nineteenth century became the Great Century of Christian missions. The flag of the Redeemer has been planted in every major nation. Hundreds of languages have been reduced to writing, and the imperishable Word of God has been printed for all to read. Often the response to the Gospel has been amazing. Churches have been established, schools and hospitals founded, men invigorated by a new sense of worth. It is no bold claim to say that the emergence of newly independent nations today has been in part a by-product of the liberating power of the Gospel. The Gospel alone proclaims the true dignity of man. It causes men to realize that they were made in the image of their Creator. It forces them to lift their eyes from earth to heaven, discloses to them their higher destiny, and provides answers to the great questions of life: Who am I? How did I get here? Where am I going? What is life’s meaning?
The Gospel brings not only spiritual advantages but radical environmental changes as well. It dispels ignorance. It delivers men from bondage to superstition. It brings healing to the nations, health to the sick, compassionate help for the poverty-stricken. It calls men from a narrow parochialism to a larger vision and lays down for human beings everywhere the thesis that the Church, in the period between its creation and its consummation, lives as the servant of the world. Now suffering and militant, the Church that finds its life only as it loses it will someday be the Church triumphant.
We have come now to a new and a harder day for missions, a day in which the Church seems to halt between two opinions. Never has it been so rich in this world’s goods, and never has it been more tempted to sacrifice spiritual ideals for material gain. Faced with a world of increasing complexity—a world made wise by the explosion of knowledge, a world made small by the increase of people—the Church is at bay. The pioneer spirit has atrophied. The theological certainty of our spiritual forebears has diminished. The marching orders of the Great Commission seem less compelling. The world’s invitation to secular engagement moves youth more than the Church’s challenge to Christian service.
This is not time to dream of yesterday’s triumphs or to flee from today’s challenges. The banner of the Cross must be lifted high. The time to sound the call to service and to voice the note of victory is now.
India with its half billion people faces catastrophe and seems impotent in its struggle for survival. Will the modern Church respond to its needs? China’s millions have become almost a billion, still waiting for the liberating power of the Gospel to rescue them from chaos and despair. Egypt’s hordes of unfed and illiterate Muslims still heed the call to prayer from a thousand minarets three times a day in woeful ignorance of him who is the Prince of Peace and the Saviour of the world. Israel has raised the six-pronged star of David over the Old City of Jerusalem, but it denigrates David’s Jahweh and spurns its own Messiah, who sprang from David’s loins. These are but examples of the challenge to the Church.
We salute the Protestant missionary task force of more than forty thousand faithful warriors who risk all to make Jesus Christ known. And we challenge young Christians everywhere to consider whether God wants them in missionary service. To those who cannot go we say: Pray till you can pray no more and give till the giving hurts. That is the spirit of missionary self-giving. Nothing else is worthy of Jesus Christ, or of the fellowship of those who own his name.
The sinful neglect of our fathers comes now to haunt us. Half of our adult brothers can neither read nor write. The generation of our fathers and the generations before them have disinherited our brothers. Because they cannot read, hundreds of millions of them are hungry. Because they are hungry they are angry. Because they are angry, they are beginning to rebel. What can Christians do about one billion illiterates—the disinherited?
Communism has taken advantage of their desperate plight. It has turned their need into an opportunity to propagate the Communist cause. Russia, Cuba, and China are examples. One of the most successful mass adult literacy efforts in history took place in Russia shortly after World War I. Immediately after the Castro take-over in Cuba, school teachers were sent across the country to teach illiterate adults how to read. Chinese Communists have simplified Chinese, and the reading public has now been taught the new form almost completely.
Floods of simply written books, pamphlets, and periodicals inundate the new readers in Communist and potentially Communist lands, each paragraph an apostle of the Communist conspiracy. In a recent year Russia produced 4.5 per cent more book titles than the United States. The new Chinese in which present Communist propaganda is written makes the old literature obsolete. Citizens of Communist China find it difficult to read the Chinese from Taiwan and Hong Kong—including Bibles and other Christian reading matter.
The Communists may be offering a stone instead of bread, but they are responding to the cry of the illiterate and semi-literate world.
History will condemn Bible-believing Christians if they allow Communists to win this race for souls. What will God say in judgment if we, like our fathers, minister to our “own” yet refuse an open Bible to a billion of our brothers! Refuse an open Bible? Yes, for well-printed Bibles translated into every tongue of man are just so much paper to those who cannot read. But teach them to read and give them the Word of God, and the largest congregation on the earth will sing a glorious doxology.
They will take our hand and be lifted up, if we reach down to help and to save. No one can seriously object to literacy missions. It is a potent opportunity for evangelists, for among the illiterate billion it is the best vehicle for communicating the Gospel and pointing the way to life eternal. It satisfies the proponents of the social gospel because it lifts people up to a new way of living.
It is a mere matter of time before the disinherited come into their own. The masses are coming up, either the way of the pagan materialist or the way of the compassionate Christian. What an advantage the Christians have! It was Christ himself who so loved the common people that he put profound and eternal truths in simple, everyday words. Christian missions were in the front ranks of the attack on slavery, injustice, superstition, disease, and the suppression of women. And, it was Christians like Jimmy Yen and Frank Laubach who pioneered in mass adult literacy education. Shall we drop out of the race for the minds and souls of the inhabitants of the silent world of illiteracy? Never! It is the opportunity of our age.
How can the opportunity be grasped? The ladder toward literacy already exists. There are 36,000 Bible-teaching Christian missionaries and millions of national Christians in the nations where illiteracy plagues man the most. They are leaven for the task. The burden must be placed on the hearts of those at home who can provide the support.
First, missionaries must be trained in the techniques of literacy-missions. The techniques of teaching and writing and administrating literacy evangelism campaigns are not difficult. But they must be learned.
One way of learning is through courses in Bible colleges, universities, and seminaries. There should be more courses like those sponsored by Seventh-Day Adventists at Andrews University, Wycliffe Bible Translators at the University of Oklahoma, and New Tribes Mission at Waukesha, Wisconsin, and more programs like the master’s degree program sponsored by Laubach Literacy at Syracuse University. A literacy-missions course is in the making at the new Oral Roberts University.
Furloughed missionaries can learn the techniques by going back to school or by attending special summer institutes or workshops. Many short courses should be offered. Organizations like the Committee on World Literacy and Christian Literature, and Laubach Literacy, Inc., should be encouraged to offer full-scale summer programs for furloughed missionaries.
In-service training on the field is another answer. Centers like those sponsored by ALFALIT in Puerto Rico, by the National Council of Churches in Zambia, and by the Laubach organization in Kenya, in Colombia, and at the University of Nigeria should be multiplied.
Denominations and mission boards should emulate the Methodists and Southern Baptists by employing full-time literacy-mission specialists to coordinate their programs.
Second, churches at home can look to their own ripe fields. Not all illiterates live in the developing nations. From eight to ten million Americans cannot read a newspaper. New York State has over 700,000 illiterates! Twenty-one per cent of Louisiana’s adults cannot read! The need of these citizens can be an opportunity for reaching them for Christ.
Local literacy-missions is a challenge that can pull laymen off the spectator’s bench and onto the field of action. Already many housewives and a few of their husbands are working in literacy-mission programs in the inner-city areas of the East, among Negroes in the South, and among the foreign-born in the West and Southwest. Sitting beside the learner, the Christian shares both his knowledge of reading and his knowledge of the Saviour. He sees the smile of discovery as his pupil learns the words on the page. He sees the smile of gratitude as his pupil learns the Word of Life.
Third, pastors, journalists, and educators can put the plight of the disinherited on the hearts of the people. When God loved—he loved the world. Can his people afford to neglect half of the world’s adults?
The people who pray, who contribute, and who may possibly go themselves need to hear the knock of opportunity. They need to know that literacy is already being used by almost 1,000 missionaries to satisfy at least five Christian ends. It is a tool for the evangelist—providing an ideal climate for conversion. It opens the pages of the Bible and other Christian literature to both pagan and growing convert. It is a door into nations and parts of nations where other types of missions are unwelcome. It provides a satisfying activity for national Christians who are eager to help lift their own people up to a better life. Literacy-missions is a significant expression of compassion, demonstrating that Christians are still in the Samaritan business.
L.S.D. And Social Conscience
Most warnings about LSD—the “mind-expanding” drug embraced even by some churchmen—have described psychological harm. Now the Saturday Evening Post and Time report that a parent’s use of LSD may cause abnormalities in his babies and those of future generations. Initial studies of mice that were given tiny doses and of human beings who had taken the drug show repeated damage to chromosomes, the carriers of heredity. Broken chromosomes can produce mongolism and other forms of retardation, distorted bone structure, and brain damage.
Thus Christians more than ever must oppose indiscriminate use of such dangerous chemicals. Beyond that, this situation highlights a peculiar ethical disease of our age: emphasis on social morality (the decisions of others) to the neglect of personal morality. Doubtless most of the LSD hippies and their elder intellectual sympathizers favored the nuclear test-ban treaty, because of the harmful genetic effects that continued radiation could have in the future. It was possible to stir consciences about this social sin. The LSD case is a reminder that personal ethical choices can have social consequences—in this case the identical social consequence of the random appearance of genetic mutations two or three generations hence.
LSD was welcomed for its spiritual significance and as a means of moral protest against materialism. This new evidence will test the authenticity of moral commitment within the LSD cult.
Episcopalians And Pike’S Progress
One widely publicized achievement of the World Council of Churches is the New Delhi espousal of trinitarian doctrine. Now a theological committee of the Episcopal Church has cast weight against a heresy trial of Bishop James Pike, who is barely able to affirm a personal God, let alone the Trinity (see News, page 36).
Protection of Pike, on the ground that the Church must “encourage free and vigorous theological debate,” is unworthy; unless the Church is answerable to New Testament doctrines, it forfeits a right to respect and survival. Episcopal leaders have no difficulty in affirming detailed politico-economic positions as a divine imperative and welcoming doctrinal ambiguity. How much faithfulness can be absent before churches cease to be truly church?
Meanwhile, in Crete, the Rev. Philip Potter of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism pleaded with the WCC Central Committee for evangelistic engagement, but affirmed that evangelism is not “the purveying of particular confessional doctrine.” Apparently the Church has become an ism without an evangel!
