It is to speak of all the godlessness in our time and the loss of the truly human as well.
Will durant, formerly chairman of the philosophy department at Columbia University and author of the famous volume, Story of Philosophy, writes, “God who was once the consolation of our brief life, and our refuge in bereavement and suffering has apparently vanished from the scene; no telescope, no microscope discovers him. Life has become in that total perspective which is philosophy, a fitful pullulation of human insects on the earth; nothing is certain in it except defeat and death—a sleep from which, it seems, there is no awakening.… Faith and hope disappear; doubt and despair are the order of the day.… It seems impossible any longer to believe in the permanent greatness of man, or to give life a meaning that cannot be annulled by death.… The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even East vs. West; it is whether man can bear to live without God.”
Two thousand years ago, the apostle Paul expressed the dilemma of humanity in these words: Without Christ … without hope … without God. Modern man has discovered that he who loses God loses not only hope but also his very humanity. In this two-part article, Albert Outler diagnoses the true malaise of modern man and prescribes its cure.
He first probes liberal panaceas for our lingering human frailties but then penetrates man’s mortal illness to its ultimate cause in the almost total loss of the sense of the sacred with its consequent human disorientation from the moral order of God and its sometimes raging, sometimes apathetic, despair of meaning and value for human existence. For Dr. Outler, this deep understanding of our human predicament has led away from liberalism to a growing commitment to a more biblical, more evangelical, and more realistic faith.
Any serious consideration “the loss and recovery of the sacred” plunges straightway into the depths of our epoch’s spiritual crisis. It carries us right down to our spiritual roots.
This by no means forces us to reject the authentic passion of many who identify symptoms of the crisis: assaults on human dignity, the menace of nuclear weapons, technological and economic exploitation of the poor, political repression of dissidents, environmental abuses.
But we must part company with such an approach at two points: First, lists only fashionable symptoms; unfashionable ones are ignored. Second, we need to look well beneath these inhumane barbarities to their basic cause: that is, the Western world’s radical rejection of the sacred. Thus Martin Buber rightly speaks of an “eclipse of God.” More recently Philip Rieff has detected “a world of spent sacred forces …, all grievances sticking out and every sense of limit challenged.”
The bumper crop of doomsayers in our midst (Heilbronner, Toffler, Gross, Wilson, Jonas, Lasch) tempts us to ignore this root cause of our modern malaise. While they grant that the human prospect is bleak, their perspective nevertheless reveals a radical, almost devout secularism. Every proposed alleviation lies wholly within human hands, upheld by the decrepit dogma of “progress.”
And the same radical secularism dominates the minds of the hope hustlers among us. In a Time essay, Lance Morrow could dismiss the current descriptions of human decadence with the lame comment that they reflect nothing worse than “the customary mess of life.”
The best that can be said for this new half-hearted optimism is that it seems to tone down the exuberant utopianism of the sixties—manifestos like Charles Reich’s Greening of America with its fatuous vision of “Consciousness III,” a mind-set where freedom and concord reign together. It also resists some of the extravagance of Theodore Roszak’s alternative, Where the Wasteland Ends, which promised we would be loosed from the shackles of our “linear” (that is, rational) thought and valuations. Amazingly enough, in 1972, Rozak really believed we were on the verge of a whole new mentality!
In taking up the present-day challenges of both doomsayers and hope hustlers, we must probe yet more deeply than have the secular writers into the causes of our crisis. We must explain as carefully as we can the mounting demoralization of our society (and also of our mainline churches, so cozily affiliated with this society). We must recognize the loss of the sacred as an essential element in any study of causes.
Definition
What do we mean by the loss of the sacred? Mystics like Otto, Buber, and Teilhard de Chardin may speak of a sacred milieu (or of the “idea” of the holy). However, we must also consider the biblical revelation of a sacred order—the kingdom of God defining the whole “order” of authentic human life, here and hereafter. We must balance the sacred as the mysterious ground of creation and grace, and the sacred as a matrix of human selfhood and morality. We must give due regard to God’s sovereign rule in Christ.
The loss of the sacred, then, is a code phrase for the nearly total disappearance, in the collective consciousness of “modern” man, of not only any vivid sensibility of that sacred presence in which we “live and move and have our being,” but also of that sacred order by which we ought to live. It speaks of a generalized insensitivity to the Holy Spirit as God’s personal presence in human life and history, and it points to a fading of the vision of the kingdom of God as the rule of his righteousness, in persons and among nations.
Clarification
We may be accused, however, of suggesting that the recovery of the sacred means an innocent return to the sacralized societies of the past. Not at all. We have only to look at the dismal track record of the Egypt of Tutankhamen, the Byzantium of Justinian, the Rome of Innocent III, the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the resurgent Islamic theocracies in our own times. All of them ignored the cause of human freedom, equality, and self-realization. All of them displayed an unholy alliance between throne and altar, theocrats and sadists, bigotry and persecution, orthodoxy and affluence.
We can therefore sympathize with the outrage of the Voltaires and Diderots, whose humanitarian instincts told them that precisely the sacralization of those old regimes made them uniquely inhumane. Diderot summed it up in his famous jibe: “Mankind will find its happiness only when the last prince has been throttled with a noose woven from the entrails of the last priest.” From Francis Hutcheson to Friedrich Gogarten (with a hundred eager choristers in-between—Feuerbach, Marx, and others), we have heard the many-stanzaed ballad, always with the same chorus: “If we are to achieve the professed humanitarian goals of Christianity, we must secularize.”
In analyzing our theme, this means we have a considerable task of sorting on our hands. We must be careful to avoid simplistic overestimations of any of the sacralized regimes of the past. We must face the paradoxical linkage between sacralization and tyranny. As I shall be arguing, desacralization has issued in a shattering demoralization in postmodern society, with the worst still ahead, unless …
But we must also oppose any kind of resacralization that restores a theocratic tyranny. I have yet to see this dilemma explored with adequate candor, and with an equal passion for the human constituency of the kingdom of God. How does one speak of the sacred order with due reverence while safeguarding the cause of full humanity with due concern?
A Radical Shift
To speak, then, of the loss of the sacred is to speak of all those signs of godlessness in our time—false doctrine, flagrant immorality, militant amorality. Moreover, paradoxically, in speaking of the loss of the sacred it is necessary also to speak concurrently of the loss of the truly human as well. For it really was the eclipse of the sacred order and the deifying of human autonomy that have been the twin causes of our current dehumanization. The whole of the secular city has turned into a stage on which the players strut and fret their hours, playing Jack Horner, or Muhammad Ali, or spiking their touchdowns, or reading their new magazine, Self, and still signifying—much ado about nothing.
At the outset, then, let us trace the course of this loss of the sacred; we can then consider how to reverse the trend.
The general loss of any proper sense of the sacred amounts to a radical shift in human sensibility from its immemorial reverence for a sacred order (the kingdom of God) to the rejection of all sacred orders (Nietzsche), to the repudiation of all moral orders (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Wilde), and the overthrow of all “superego” tyrannies (Freud) to a man-centered secular supernaturalism, replete with pundits and gurus (Maslow, Houston, Peris, Castañeda, Leary, et al.).
There is a cruel irony here. The liberal society is proving less and less capable of coping with its problems of logistics and morale. Its special version of pie in the sky (embedded in the doctrine of “progress,” namely, “If not in our time, then in the next generation, or eventually …”) is increasingly incredible. John Donne’s prescience in An Anatomy of the World (1619) is all too self-evident. His complaint: “The new philosophy calls all in doubt.” And the result for the world? “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.…”
Three centuries later, Donne’s forebodings were reechoed by William Butler Yeats in “The Second Coming.” He was sensitive to the loss of the sacred order in his time, 1919, though agnostic in his own beliefs: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” He then speculates that “Somewhere in sands of the desert / A shape with lion body and the head of a man. / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow thighs.… / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
All of us can see that things have fallen apart; the center did not hold. The nightmare drags on—and even Yeats’s profane apocalypse appears uncomfortably imminent in today’s “desert sands.” Remarkably, hope still clings stubbornly in the human breast. We have not yet been blessed (unless you count survival a blessing), but still, maybe, if only …
Most of us remember being promised, by good and sincere and intelligent men, whose motives were not ignoble, that if only humanity could be liberated from the involuntary tutelage of the churches and the sacred order, the result would be a rich and joyous liberation from political, social, and economic oppression. They honestly believed that the only truly sacred order was the human order.
That was the promise. What is the fact? We have “progressed” from heteronomy to autonomy to antinomianism to moral chaos. However, the one diagnosis our pundits refuse even to consider is the ancient biblical equation of self-centeredness and “godlessness” on one side, and human demoralization on the other. Nothing is clearer in the biblical account of the human tragedy than the self-defeating consequences of self-assertion and self-salvation.
Paul’S Diagnosis
Most of the commentators on the Epistle to the Romans move too quickly from its two opening chapters to the section on salvation in chapters 3–8. They seldom linger with the analysis of sin in 1:18–2:29, or with that pivotal declaration in 3:31 that justifying faith does not supercede God’s sacred order (Torah) but grounds it ever more securely in the texture of Christian freedom.
It would be useful to work through 1:18–2:29 word by word—best done with an open daily newspaper or several weekly news magazines. The Pauline catalogue of the immoralities of his age can be matched one by one in ours, with another added: the new drug culture, marked by its plague proportions and its devastating effects. But what is distinctive is Saint Paul’s diagnosis: the demoralization of the human is the bitter fruit of a loss of the sacred. We will content ourselves merely to recall the main stages of the Pauline argument:
Man’s primal sin stems not from ignorance, but from reckless pride. It is the refusal to acknowledge God as God; it is unthankfulness and godlessness.
God’s response to this is spoken of as his wrath, and also as his abandonment of the rebels. The unexpected result of their godlessness is unrighteousness; these two features characterize the shadow side of the eclipse of God consciousness within the human consciousness. This in turn is followed by the loosing of the floodgates of immorality. The consequence is a giving of men and women over to their own devices. This is the Deus absconditus—not some game of hide-and-seek, but the human harvest of our abuses of our God-given freedom. So the rejection of the sacred order is followed by the disruption of the moral order, and this by human self-deception as to what the human potential really is.
Notice, though, how God’s wrath is overmatched by his goodness. This “goodness of God” is not actually contrary to his severity. It leads men to radical changes of heart—never mere remorse, but real change. And this allows the apostle to recognize the redemption even of Gentiles. The gospel cure for the human sin of pride is thereafter propounded in the epistle as a whole; its doctrine of “faith alone” is aimed preeminently at the sin of pride (merit) and perfectionism. But such a gospel cure presupposes the diagnosis of 1:18 and following verses: the loss of the sense of the sacred presence and the repudiation of his sacred order.
Editor’s Note: In his second article in the next issue, Dr. Outler studies secularism’s failure in the realms of law and marriage, and in its self-centered substitutes for the sacred.
Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.
Our digital archives are a work in progress. Let us know if corrections need to be made.
Annual & Monthly subscriptions available.
- Print & Digital Issues of CT magazine
- Complete access to every article on ChristianityToday.com
- Unlimited access to 65+ years of CT’s online archives
- Member-only special issues
- Learn more
More from this Issue
Read These Next
- From the MagazineA Theological Monument to Unity amid DiversityFifty years ago, the Lausanne Covenant’s solution to rampant division in evangelical ranks wasn’t uniformity.españolPortuguês
- Editor's PickWanted: No Visa Issues, Fast Wi-Fi, and a Ballroom that Inspires Intimacy with GodGlobal Christian organizations scour the world in search of the best conference sites.