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Storm Clouds of Religious Defiance: The Crisis of Authority
| Article
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15326 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1989 |
5,186 Words |
| Author
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Carl F.H. Henry
Carl F.H. Henry, an evangelical theologian, is the author of
more than thirty books, among them The Uneasy Conscience of
Modern Fundamentalism and the six-volume work God, Revelation,
and Authority. |
The defiant head winds of human autonomy are sweeping over much of contemporary life with a despite for authority unmatched by that of earlier generations in scope and intensity. On virtually every front, authority now faces scornful challenges, not least of all in the arena of religion.
The rejection of religious authority is especially significant because, as Thomas Molnar remarks, "Religious [devine] authority is the prototype of all authority." Not all world religions acknowledge a personal God, but all nonetheless claim divine origin and authority.
Conventionally, the West has considered the God of the Bible as the ultimate authority over human life and has at the same time viewed him as the source and guarantor of human freedom. Today's reining naturalism, however, rejects both these assumptions. The contemporary humanist Paul Kurtz urges us to "weed out permanently the idea of God." Uncompromisingly hostile to the supernatural, secular humanism--now often depicted as the "covert metaphysics" of modern liberal learning--disavows a transcendent deity as promotive of an arbitrary or despotic authority and as an intolerable barrier to human freedom.
Upon the outcome of this conflict over deity, authority, and autonomy hinges the future of Western civilization. John Locke (1632-1704) and Freidrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) perceived better than many recent philosophers that a distinctive connection prevails between the reality of God and the nature of Western society. Western culture, Locke emphasized, rests on theistic belief, and atheism threatens its very survival. Nietzsche contended that "God is dead" and that this divine expiration renders inevitable a comprehensive transformation of the whole of Western culture. When Alexandr Solzhenitsyn more recently blamed the current disintegration of Western civilization on the fact that "men have forgotten God," he disclosed himself--though a Russian--to be a more discerning critic than many contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophers.
Rationalism, mysticism, and the Enlightenment all opposed the doctrine of religious authority that derived from Christian orthodoxy. They initially affirmed that, as the structure of reality, the universal law of reason is immanent in man. Hence man was no longer thought of as dependent on a transcendent God and on His objective revelation or as being in need of divine grace. This detachment from the God of the Bible led to an emphasis on autonomy (the self is law) and then to more radical heteronomy
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