The writings of Francis Schaeffer and Rousas J. Rushdoony, popularizers and appliers of Cornelius Van Til’s theology, have for a long time made us aware of the opposing world views of Christianity and the world, between believers and unbelievers. In the mid-1970s, Os Guinness (Dust of Death) and James W. Sire (The Universe Next Door) wrote two powerful books that outlined and critiqued the available world views. They offered a Christian world view that answered questions posed by other major world views.
During the past three years these world views have come to focus on two opposing systems of thought: secular humanism and Christianity. Secular humanism represents the totality of Western thought when it refuses to believe in God.
The conservative Christian fight against secularism has grown hot. It is seen as the fence behind most of the evils of the world. The New Christian Right has raised its banners against secularism, fighting with fervor what they describe as the “religion of man.”
The Threat
Evangelicals have produced at least five books on the subject of humanism that deserve attention. One book published in this contemporary movement against the tide of humanism is Tim LaHaye’s The Battle for the Mind (Revell, 1980, 247 pp., $4.95). LaHaye sent it to 75,000 pastors and church leaders throughout the country. It is popularly written, designed to stimulate Christians to political involvement and action against secularism. The author finds the roots of secularism in Greek philosophy. According to him, Christian philosophy laid Greek secularism to rest until the Renaissance when it again began to flourish in all its bright colors. LaHaye stated that France later became the center for secular writings and politics, whereas America was built upon a predominantly Christian philosophy.
LaHaye sees secularism as being in direct opposition to Christianity and all that Christianity stands for. The former is an unscientific, religious force that is actively controlling America despite America’s moral, conservative majority. He blames secular humanism for the increases in immorality, pornography, drug abuse, self-indulgence, lack of responsibility, and disillusionment with America. He urges Christians to pray, evangelize, and especially to get involved politically in order to stop this evil force.
At about the same time, Ernest Gordon came out with his book Me, Myself and Who? (Logos, 1980, 264 pp., $4.95), treating the “false premise” of society’s humanism. Gordon likewise describes secularism as a direct contrast to Christianity. Secularism is bankrupt, however, because as a copy of Christianity it has abandoned the main tenets of the Christian faith. Gordon focuses on this process within the university. He asks Christians to live out their faith in real terms in order to influence and change the university. A mature, living faith will open the eyes of those who attempt to live with an empty, secular humanism.
Harvie Conn, in his Four Trojan Horses of Humanism (Mott Media, 1982, 143 pp.), shows how secular humanism has subverted psychology, sociology, politics, and theology by its philosophical presuppositions. Empiricism destroys morality’s base. Freud’s emphasis on behavioral causations has destroyed belief in man’s individual responsibility. The effect of secularism has been antilife. It advocates legalized abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, state-enforced birth control, and the acceptance of homosexuality and suicide as normal. The effect of secular humanism in politics is atheistic communism. Although Conn’s book lacks solid argumentation, it forcefully sets Christian philosophy in direct contrast to humanistic philosophy.
The Challenge
In contrast to LaHaye, Gordon, and Conn, Robert E. Webber in his book, Secular Humanism: Threat and Challenge (Zondervan, 1982, 137 pp., $7.95), does not say that all forms of humanism are from the pit. Defining the central concern of humanism as man and his welfare, Webber contrasts secular humanism with Christian humanism. He believes that Christian humanism offers a more human view of man and is more concerned with human welfare than secular humanism. The effects of secular humanism are described in terms of a “playboy mentality”: free sex, TV sex, pornography, “a violent society” that produces TV violence, child abuse, the breakdown of the family, and nuclear arms build-up, and a “schoolroom nightmare” that includes relativistic values clarification and sex education programs while it prohibits prayer on school grounds. Webber is more cautious than LaHaye in advocating political action. Instead, Webber challenges the church as an institution to “act as a social critic in its life of prayer, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, preaching, and lifestyle example,” and he urges individual Christians to take their Christian values and world view into the world through their vocational callings.
The Ammunition
Although all of these books have very important and timely things to say about humanism, I have felt the need for a book on this subject that I could give to my non-Christian, college-educated friends. A book that meets this need for me is Norman Geisler’s Is Man the Measure? (Baker, 1983, 201 pp., $7.95). It is a truly academically respectable evaluation of humanism. Geisler shows the diversity within humanism by describing and summarizing eight forms: evolutionary, behavioral, existential, pragmatic, Marxist, egocentric, cultural, and Christian. He compares and contrasts these forms of humanism. Then he draws together the common elements of non-Christian humanism into what he calls “secular humanism.” Although some of the elements of secular humanism have been helpful, secular humanism is comparatively inferior to Christian humanism. Secular humanism is internally inconsistent; scientifically, religiously, and philosophically inadequate; and socially arrogant. In short, while Christianity offers a solid rational justification for being a humanist—that is, concerned about the welfare of humankind—secular humanism does not.
The clashing world views of secular and Christian humanism are at the heart of differences between alternative solutions to the problems that we are presently facing. Secular humanism dehumanizes man, whereas Christian humanism humanizes him. This is a message that can be proclaimed from the rooftops. While many books effectively describe the effects of secularism, Geisler gives us the intellectual arguments that will enable us to understand and conquer its forces. It will enable us to preach a gospel that is truly human, a gospel fashioned after our human needs, longings, and hopes.
Reviewed by Bradley P. Hayton, adjunct assistant professor of psychology, Azusa Pacific University, and a member of the Orange County Christian Psychiatric Institute, California.
Sobran: A Common Bond?
In an increasingly confused, hostile, and secularized world, evangelicals need all the friends they can get. More than a friend, indeed an ally, is Joseph Sobran, a Catholic, a CBS radio commentator, a senior editor of National Review, and a contributor to the Center Journal of the Center for Christian Studies at Notre Dame University. He addresses abortion, fatherhood and the family, homosexuality, sex education, and other topics.
That the material in his book Single Issues originally appeared in The Human Life Review should discourage no one from reading it. Few writers can be “trans-prosed” from the glossy page to between hard covers and pull it off; Sobran is one. He is a master of a lost art form, the essay, and none of them is the kind of thing one reads over donuts and coffee. He is not trading on celebrity status, just saying what he feels needs to be said.
And he says it well. There is no humbug in this book, no wasted space. Indeed, Sobran, who has been compared to Chesterton, so lucidly and incisively exposes modern bufooneries and barbarities that one must sometimes set the book aside—only to pick it up again. The salient feature of Sobran’s writing is its fearlessness; behind it is a high, biblical view of human life.
Abortion and human life are recurring themes, and this is without apology: “Abortion might be called the single issue about which you mustn’t be a single-issue voter. Civil rights, Israel, farm policy, nuclear energy, entitlement programs, whales—you can be downright obsessive about any of these, and nobody will say boo.… What single issue [abortion] lies nearer the heart of civilization?”
Of particular value are his judgments on modern media and its linguistic gymnastics. The Christian who would engage in polemics with secularists and their media allies would do well to master his lexicon. The careful reader will be outfitted with a new nose for euphemistic jargon and weasel words, and insight into what they betoken in the speaker.
The bonus in this collection is “Happy at Home,” which deals with C. S. Lewis and his views on politics, education, culture, and mass media. Sobran sees Lewis as a conservative, “But Lewis’s conservatism was not of the Right that mirrors the Left. There is a world of difference between the man who wants to be left alone in his cottage and the man who wants to hold a mass-rally in the city. Lewis was a cottage dweller.” It is not easy to give a fresh perspective on C. S. Lewis, but Sobran has done it.
Single Issues will not only challenge and enrich the reader, but it confirms that Catholics and evangelicals have much more in common than has previously been imagined.
Single Issues: Essays on the Crucial Social Questions, by Joseph Sobran (Human Life Press, 1983, $12.95, 189 pp.). Reviewed by Lloyd Billingsley, a writer living in Southern California.
Campolo’S Theology
Anthony campolo, one of the most popular lecturers on the contemporary Christian scene, discusses in depth in A Reasonable Faith the theology he has developed as the result of his reflections upon modern secular thought. Rather than simplistically rejecting all modern philosophies as variants of “secular humanism,” he uses a number of secular thinkers to construct a theology for the modern age. Campolo argues that many of the discoveries of science and insights of contemporary philosophy are in actuality signposts that point to God, although that may not have been the secular scientist’s or philosopher’s original intention.
The author has a breadth of knowledge that includes the natural and social sciences as well as theology. Being a trained sociologist, he is particularly effective at demonstrating the relevance to Christian thought of such figures as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. For example, Campolo discusses the value of George Herbert Mead’s social psychology in understanding the genuine possibility of Christian conversion (pp. 84–5). From Soren Kierkegaard, Campolo concludes that every Christian believer is a kind of existentialist because of the total faith commitment that God requires (p. 12). In his reliance on the philosophy of Martin Buber, Campolo presents us with a way to escape the narcissistic trap that many contemporary Christian psychologists have fallen prey to. The author views self-actualization as the highest goal of the Christian lifestyle, but this process should take place within the context of an “I-Thou” relationship in which each Christian brother or sister is fundamentally concerned with helping the other to reach his or her full humanity rather than placing primary concern upon the self.
An example of Campolo’s understanding of modern science appears in his examinations of the implications of Einstein’s theory, showing the Calvinistic belief in predestination and the Arminian tradition of free will to be compatible and not contradictory theologies (pp. 130–1).
In a postscript, Campolo admits that some may see the results of his theology as a form of heresy, but he argues that such attempts to contextualize the biblical message are a necessity. “I believe the Bible to be an infallible message from God,” he says, “but I also believe that it remains a task for men and women in each new culture to express that biblical message in ways they think might be relevant to their contemporaries” (p. 191).
Despite the fact that many of the thinkers discussed in the book present complex ideas, Campolo writes about their theories in a style that most will find comprehensible. The book will prove to be particularly valuable to Christians who are struggling with modern thought and seeking to find its relevance to their lives.
A Reasonable Faith: Responding to Secularism, by Anthony Campolo (Word, 1983, $8.95). Reviewed by Cecil E. Greek, New School for Social Research, New York, N. Y.
