Hendrik Kraemer wrote The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World back in 1938 at the request of the International Missionary Council. It is a classic. What Kraemer has to say about the Western crisis facing the church still applies.
Kraemer maintains, “The outstanding characteristic of our time is the complete disappearance of all absolutes, and the victorious but dreadful dominion of the spirit and attitude of relativism” (6). But people starve and degenerate without ideals, so the world “bristles with idealisms, noble and ridiculous, pure and demonic” (8) - idolatrous pseudo-absolutes (race, nation, classless society, a ‘holy’ or ‘eternal’ country) showing people cannot live on relativism alone. But when all is relative, “nothing is really worth-while, because it has no foundation in Eternity” (10).
Human autonomy inevitably leads to immanentist thinking, ending necessarily in anarchy and lawlessness, since “the only valid and indestructible law can be the Law from above and not from within” (10), e.g. 19th century idealistic immanentism, assuming the identity of thinking and being, replaces God with human consciousness as the only starting-point for human thought, e.g. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum.
Existential philosophy treats the identity of Thinking and Being or of Idea and Ultimate Reality as a fiction, since this always remains an object of our thinking. By exposing the intricacies of the human mind, modern psychology fosters greater skepticism about the objectivity of people’s thought-constructions. So the human quest for truth and certitude concludes “that all systems are somehow projections of the mind”. Kramer recognizes that: “Relativism is… the decisive and dominant reality of modern life, although to a great extent subconscious and subterraneous” (12).
Gilbert Murray accurately diagnosed: “Religion essentially deals with the uncharted region of human experience” (13). So primitive societies resort to magic when knowledge and skill can’t cope with danger and uncertainty. This also occurs in “popular” religion, “which forms the broad understream of all great religions, Christianity included.” Therefore, many feel justified in “affirming that religion has been begotten by ignorance and fear.” Modern science, in the domains of nature, society and psychology, “has enabled man to find solutions and master life by his own wits where formerly the authoritative wisdom or consolation of religion fulfilled his needs” (14). Therefore, it has heightened human autonomy, resulting in further evaporation of religion” (13-14).
Kraemer contends that evidence shows that even de-religionized man is really a religious and metaphysical animal. Communism, Fascism and National-Socialism all exemplify this, for “all the paraphernalia of a full-fledged religion” is present. Also, this “frantic fanaticism is only to be explained by the background of fundamental relativism and secularism… It is a desperate endeavour to overcome relativism by self-made absolutism” (16). Since “[the] absolute is a life-necessity for man” it follows that, having rejected God he is forced to develop pseudo-absolutes (16).
From all this Kraemer concludes that the Church in the West “is standing in a pagan, non-Christian world, and has again to consider the whole world its mission field, not in the rhetorical but in the literal sense of the world” (16-17).
Posted February 7, 2009
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