Modernization and the Issues

Modernity has been hard at work reducing evangelical faith to something that is largely private and internal. Belief has shrunk from being a contemporary confession of God's truth in the church and beyond to being simply a part of personal identity and psychological makeup. Many evangelicals quietly assume, perhaps even without much thought, that it would be uncouth and uncivil to push this private dimension too noticeably or noisily on others or into the public square.
 
The right of each individual to his or her own private thoughts and beliefs is held to be both axiomatic and inviolable. So it is that the particularities of evangelical faith - the things that make it different - are dissolved. Modern culture grants me absolute freedom to believe whatever I want to believe - so long as I keep those beliefs from infringing on the consciousness or behavior of anyone else, especially on points of controversy. So it is, as John Cuddihy has suggested, that civil religion is always a religion of civility: the edges of faith are rounded off, the angles softened.
 
Modernity is not simply an issue; it is the issue, because it envelops all our worlds - commerce, entertainment, social organization, government, technology - and because its grasp is lethal. There is no part of culture that can gain any distance from it and hence no part of culture that is neutral or safe. All of culture is touched by the values and appetites, the horizons and hopes that modernity excites.
 
Worldliness is a religious matter. The world, as the New Testament authors speak of it, is an alternative to God. It offers itself as an alternative center of allegiance. It provides counterfeit meaning. It is the means used by Satan in his warfare with God.
 
Worldliness, as we have seen, is that set of practices in a society, its values and ways of looking at life, that make sin look normal and righteousness look strange. It is the view of the world that puts the sinner at its center and relegates God to the periphery.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Costs & Benefits of Modernization

The benefits of a modernized world are obvious and innumerable. Modernization has liberated us from the provincialism of small towns, opened the world to us, linked us to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world. With our technological achievements we have made our world more comfortable, in some ways safer, certainly more productive. In this century alone we have come close to doubling our life expectancy. We have enlarged our knowledge of the world, secured freedoms once only dreamed of, expanded rights, opened the doors of education, lifted hopes, and mightily multiplied our prosperity.
 
But in order to enjoy these manifold benefits, we have had to pay some stiff costs. Modernization has also blighted our lives by cutting our connections to place and community, elevating our level of anxiety, and greatly diminishing our satisfaction with our jobs. It has spawned pervasive fear and discontent. It has contributed to the breakdown of the family, robbed our children of their innocence, diluted our ethical values, and blinded us to the reality of God.)° It has made us shallow. It has made its empty.
 
Those who thought that affluence could be made to compensate for or offset the drain on the human spirit that modernization has exacted were sorely disappointed. While we now bask in relative plenty, the very means of amassing that plenty - the reorganization of our world by the processes of modernization - has diminished our soul.

- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Three Developments in Modernization

Norman Cantor has argued that three developments in particular have given birth to the growing sense of nihilism in art, architecture, literature, dance, theater, and rock music.
 
First, biotechnology, which built on the discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA, has succeeded in driving home the idea that human life is defined by impersonal genetic codes rather than personal choices. This perception has greatly diminished the sense of human significance.
 
Second, astounding advances in computer science and technology have reproduced or surpassed many of the tasks that were once thought to be defining marks of human uniqueness.
 
Third, new communications technology has not only brought news, sports, and entertainment from around the world into American living rooms each day but has also given vast new power to multinational corporations and forced the last pockets of Marxism into desperate disarray. Like computer technology, the new communications technology has expanded human capability and increased human efficiency, but it has diminished human stature. We have been dwarfed by our own inventions and in many ways have become irrelevant to their workings. For these and many other reasons, we have come to feel small, empty, unspecial, meaningless.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

The Process of Modernization

The process of modernization is driven by four main realities: capitalism, technology, urbanization, and telecommunications.
 
1. Capitalism emerged as a defining force in Europe following the collapse of the old medieval synthesis, but it did not effect evident changes until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when industrialization got under way, and it did not reach its full intensity until technology became both ubiquitous in society and indispensable to the functioning of capitalism. At the same time, however, capitalism has developed a profound dependence on the sorts of freedom typically provided by democratic societies. But in societies that have afforded rights of free association, unrestricted travel, and a belief in the propriety of the capitalist economy, capitalism has successfully reorganized the social structure for the purposes of manufacturing, production, and consumption. It has concentrated populations into cities and produced massive systems of finance, banking, law, communications, and transportation. In short, it has changed the shape of our world, how we relate to it, where we live, how we experience our work, and the values and expectations that we bring with us in order to be adaptable to and successful in this public sphere.
 
2. Technology is, of course, essential to modern capitalism. Its importance lies not simply in the fact that it facilitates the production of knowledge, makes possible medical and engineering breakthroughs, and is now indispensable to all modes of production. Equally important is the fact that it also rationalizes all of life. People who live in technologically logically dominated societies are prone to think naturalistically and to subject all of life to a calculus of benefits - to assume that whatever is most efficient is most ethical.
 
3. Modernization has also been driven by the stunning growth of urbanization, which has now spread beyond the West to become a worldwide phenomenon.  During the twentieth century, this trend has been amplified in America by mass migrations of peoples from Asia and Central and South America. They have brought with them their own ethnic identities, cultural habits, languages, religions, and values - all of which have been brought into close proximity to one another in our cities. The new multicultural environment has produced a secular ecumenism and a powerful demand for pluralism, for mutual tolerance, for private space in which to hold one's beliefs, live one's own lifestyle, do what one wants to do. Thus far, the Constitution seems to be securing this much for each person, within the boundaries of the law, but it seems to be producing an encompassing relativism as well.
 
4. Finally, modern telecommunications has made us all citizens of the whole world. Television is perhaps less a window on the world than a surrogate eye that preselects what images of the world we will be exposed to. Still, we have become witnesses of an extraordinary range of events that daily shape and shake the world. Television gives to us a psychological transcendence of space, both physical and cultural, linking us to other people around the world. The bonds that television creates, unlike those that once prevailed in the small towns of America, are entirely synthetic - even if it doesn't seem that way. The communion that television provides - the communion of common voyeurs - can seem as real as that of a local neighborhood. And television also produces mass communal reactions to material that is bound to any specific context, to wholly homogenized information, to the fads and fashions and disconnected sound bites of mass culture. It spins out information in such abundance as to rob most of it of any value.
 

- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 

The Description of Modernity

…depicted in the first two chapters of No Place for Truth.
 

somewhere between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century lies a great historical divide. The period before that could be called the Age of the West; the new period he calls simply Our Time. On the other side of that line, Europe was the center of the world, politically and economically; now America is. In the earlier period, there was a sense in which Judeo-Christian values were at the center of culture, even if they were not believed in personally. Now, however, there is no such set of values. Rather, they have been displaced and replaced by a loose set of psychological attitudes, which are now referred to as modernity.' This new period, Our Time, is not restricted by geography. It is not the civilization of any one group of people, in any one place. It is not political in nature. The soil from which it springs is that which capitalism and democracy produce, and it especially depends on technology and urbanization. But it may be found virtually anywhere that the requisite conditions are present.

The Enlightenment world that has characterized much of modernity was an optimistic one. It was based on a strong confidence in human reason and its ability to solve humanity's problems unaided. This confidence, in turn, was based on an illusion, however, according to Wells-an illusion that an impersonal force was at work in the world promoting only the ends that the Enlightenment envisioned. This has not proven to be the case, however. For the fruits of this Enlightenment have been far from positive in many cases. Violence is present in our society in many forms. The powerful run roughshod over the weak. Many of the unborn never have an opportunity to live. Industry pollutes the earth. The elderly are encouraged to die and make room for those coming after them.
 
What shapes the modern world is not powerful minds but powerful forces, not philosophy but urbanization, capitalism, and technology. As the older quest for truth has collapsed, intellectual life has increasingly become little more than a gloss on the processes of modernization. Intellectuals merely serve as mirrors, reflecting what is taking place within society. They are post-modern in the sense that they are often disillusioned with the emptiness of the old Enlightenment ideals, but they are entirely modern in that they reflect the values of the impersonal processes of modernization. 

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Ten Features of Modernism

Modernism can actually be clustered into two general types, a more moderate form and a more extreme form, which I term soft modernism and hard modernism, respectively.
 
Soft modernism shares with its forerunner, premodernism, belief in the rationality of the universe and in human ability to know and understand the truth. Both believe that inclusive explanations of reality, or in other words, integrative metaphysical schemes or worldviews, can be constructed.
 
Hard modernism goes beyond its soft counterpart, however, by excluding anything other than this. On the terms of hard modernism, reality is limited to what can be experienced, thus excluding supernaturalism of any kind. Knowledge is restricted to what can be known through reason and experience, excluding any sort of intuition. What is not logical is not considered real.
 
Several salient features of modernism should be noted.
 
1. Naturalism. Reality is believed to be restricted to the observable system of nature. Its immanent laws are the cause of all that occurs.
 
2. Humanism. The human is the highest reality and value, the end for which all of reality exists rather than the means to the service of some higher being.
 
3. The scientific method. Knowledge is good and can be attained by humans. The method best suited for this enterprise is the scientific method, which came to fruition during this period. Observation and experimentation are the sources from which our knowledge of truth is built up.
 
4. Reductionism. From being considered the best means for gaining knowledge, the scientific method came increasingly to be considered the only method, so that various disciplines sought to attain the objectivity and precision of the natural sciences. Humans in some cases were regarded as nothing but highly developed animals.
 
5. Progress. Because knowledge is good, humanly attainable, and growing, we are progressively overcoming the problems that have beset the human race.
 
6. Nature. Rather than being fixed and static, nature came to be thought of as dynamic, growing, and developing. Thus it was able to produce the changes in life forms through immanent processes of evolution, rather than requiring explanation in terms of a creator and designer.
 
7. Certainty. Because knowledge was seen as objective, it could attain certainty. This required foundationalism, the belief that it is possible to base knowledge on some sort of absolute first principles. One early model of this was found in the rationalism of Rene Descartes, who found one indubitable belief, namely, that he was doubting, and then proceeded to draw deductions from that. An alternative was empiricism, the belief that there are purely objective sensory data from which knowledge can be formulated.
 
8. Determinism. There was a belief that what happened in the universe followed from fixed causes. Thus, the scientific method could discover these laws of regularity that controlled the universe. Not only physical occurrences but human behavior were believed to be under this etiological control.
 
9. Individualism. The ideal of the knower was the solitary individual, carefully protecting his or her objectivity by weighing all options. Truth being objective, individuals can discover it by their own efforts. They can free themselves from the conditioning particularities of their own time and place and know reality as it is in itself.
 
10. Anti-authoritarianism. The human was considered the final and most complete measure of truth. Any externally imposed authority, whether that of the group or of a supernatural being, must be subjected to scrutiny and criticism by human reason.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Tenets of Postmodernism

This modern period has, in turn, given way to the postmodern, and its ideology to postmodernism. This represents the convergence of several movements in different intellectual disciplines.
 
In many ways, the beginning inspiration was from the French school of literary criticism known as deconstruction. In history, there is the new historicism, in which history is not merely the objective discovery of the past, but actually creates it. In philosophy, neo-pragmatism holds that words refer not to objective, extralinguistic entities, but to other words. Certain basic motifs have emerged, countering the modern view. Although these will be described at greater length by several of the thinkers we will examine, they can be briefly summarized here.
 
1. The objectivity of knowledge is denied. Whether the knower is conditioned by the particularities of his or her situation or theories are used oppressively, knowledge is not a neutral means of discovery. 
 
2. Knowledge is uncertain. Foundationalism, the idea that knowledge can be erected on some sort of bedrock of indubitable first principles, has had to be abandoned.
 
3. All-inclusive systems of explanation, whether metaphysical or historical, are impossible, and the attempt to construct them should be abandoned.
 
4. The inherent goodness of knowledge is also questioned. The belief that by means of discovering the truths of nature it could be controlled and evil and ills overcome has been disproved by the destructive ends to which knowledge has been put (in warfare, for instance).
 
5. Thus, progress is rejected. The history of the twentieth century should make this clear.
 
6. The model of the isolated individual knower as the ideal has been replaced by community-based knowledge. Truth is defined by and for the community, and all knowledge occurs within some community.
 
7. The scientific method as the epitomization of the objective method of inquiry is called into question. Truth is not known simply through reason, but through other channels, such as intuition.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Rise of Postmodernism

The current dissatisfaction with modernity, intellectually, has appeared in a wide variety of disciplines. One of the first was architecture, where modernism had attempted to develop a homogenized style that broke with the past and its indigenized designs by attempting to universalize, to belong everywhere because it did not belong anywhere in particular. Postmodern architecture broke with this by having many styles, reflecting interests of both the past and the present. It is one expression of our multiculturalism. But because it is not driven by any hard ideology, as was modernism, in its eclecticism it really does not have any definite purpose at all.
 
In the old Enlightenment belief, there was confidence in the possibility of rational, objective scholarship. This has been rejected by postmodernism, intellectually. In the absence of any assent to a body of universal truth, even those conclusions that are presumably objectively discovered by scholars are seen to be only results of these scholars' interests and dispositions. Given the belief in relativism, there is great difficulty in insisting on the universal validity of one's findings. Even science, thought of as the paragon of objectivity and rationality by the modernists, is seen not to be exempt from this relativizing influence. Thomas Kuhn has shown that what scientists observe is very much affected by their anticipation of what they are looking for and what they consider possible. In literature, deconstruction holds that words do not have any meaning in themselves. They mean only what we want them to mean. These same phenomena can also be seen in postmodern theology.
 
Wells asserts, however, that the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is more complex than we sometimes recognize and acknowledge. The very fact that we insist on being postmodern, rather than merely antimodern, indicates a desire to transcend the recent past, which in turn reflects belief in progress. And this in itself is a clearly modern conception. Thus, even postmodernism has not fully freed itself from modernism.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

三钟经（Angelus）的消失

用餐时间是很重要，但不敌工厂、办公室、商业和服务业、学校等等⋯⋯统一规划的工作时间，所有强制性的时间规划都是为了让群体和个人的生產效益能交乘成长，进而提升生產力。

欧洲人在十四世纪发明了机械式座鐘之后，日出而作、日落而息的人类生活史随之告终。第一个鐘摆式座鐘出现在1657年，之后1675年发明的螺旋弹簧更催生了个人携带式鐘表──两大技术革新的关键工匠非惠更斯家族（Huygens）莫属──一个完全社会化，不必然与大自然的时间推移自动產生连结的作息表，强势登场。到了十八世纪，拥有一座在当时象徵着创新技术的座鐘，与其说是财富的表徵，不如说是生活上的必需。进入工业化社会后，一切全都变了：慢慢的，人与人之间的活动变得必须同步进行，一个人要想融入群体，就得知道现在几点鐘。

人类的日常生活作息逐渐与日升日落脱鉤（今日脱鉤的速度更形剧烈），同时也与宗教的作息背道而驰。以往，鐘楼的鐘声是在召唤上帝的子民祈祷，所谓的三钟经（Angelus），早、午、晚各一次，由是标示出了用餐的时刻，分别是第一次颂祷之前，和最后一次颂祷之后，确切的时间当然也因日出日落的时辰而有所变动。十九世纪，先是在欧洲的城市地区，然后慢慢普及各地，上班的起迄时间，和用餐的休息时间开始建立在一个比较属於人为制定，且近乎俗世的时间表上。套用历史学家杰克‧勒高夫（Jacques le Goff）着名文章的篇名，商贾时间大胜教堂时间。

- Christian Grataloup，《百年早餐史：现代人最重要的晨间革命，

可可、咖啡与糖霜编织而成的芬芳记忆》，2018.

The West Is in the Midst of Huge Cultural Shifts?

 What are these cultural changes that have contributed to the marginalization of the church? 

First, we are in the midst of a shift from modernity to postmodernity, postmodernity. This shift represents a challenge to the main assertions of modernity, with its pursuit of order, the loss of tradition, and the separation of the different spheres of reality, expressed, for example, in the separation of the sacred and the profane at every level. More often than not, the church has found itself taking the side of modernity, defending its project against all viewpoints.

Second, we are embroiled in a shift from Westernization to globalization.

Third, we are engaged in a communication revolution, as we shift from a print culture to an electronic-based culture. 

Fourth, we are in the midst of a dramatic shift in our economic mode of production, as we transition from national and industrial-based economies to economies that are international, information based, and consumer driven. 

Fifth, we are on the verge of significant breakthroughs in understanding the human at a biological level. Sixth, we are seeing a convergence of science and religion that has not been seen in centuries.

- Gibbs, Eddie; Bolger, Ryan K. Emerging Churches. 2005.

20世纪的自由主义神学

受到自由主义神学的影响，一些大学、神学院和教会开始偏离他们原来的信仰。基督教基要派人士则成立了自己的机构，并采取了与现代文化划清界限的方式抵制自由主义神学的侵蚀。当自由主义神学开始侵占神学院和讲台的时候，基要派人士的回应是以激进的、分裂主义的观点看待整个生活——尤其是思想领域。他们消极避世的态度使得“反智主义”在他们当中一度盛行。他们把人们（甚至包括基督徒）接受教育并拥有知识看做危险之事，并把人的情感和经历高举到比思想更重要的地位上。
 
公众对基督教的看法一直很消极，基要派信徒也仍然持守着自己自杀式的、反对一切的分裂主义立场。终于，20世纪40年代，卡尔亨利（Carl Henry）和葛培理出现了。他们向人们展示出保守派基督教的一种更成熟的形式，它并没有在基督教的核心真理上妥协，这标志着现代福音派的诞生。
 
现代福音派重视人的思想，他们相信上帝呼召基督徒更多地参与到社会文化生活中，而不是消极地逃避它。因此，现代福音派在社会上得到了比基督教基要派更广泛的认同，但同时它也面临着挑战，那就是，在维持社会认知度的同时，它是否需要在基督教的核心信仰上有所妥协，或者是在文化无力改变社会现状的情况下，放弃基督徒警戒世人的责任？基督徒必须不断提醒自己，传递真理、影响社会是自己的责任。
 
新正统运动
 
20世纪初，自由主义神学的浪潮席卷了整个欧洲，然而，巴特坚持抵挡住了这股潮流的侵袭，开始了一场神学革命，后来被人们称为“新正统运动”。在面对纳粹党的疯狂举动时，他也表达了自己的反对立场。
 
巴特的思想无异于一枚炸弹，投向了自由主义神学阵营，于是他们开始向他咆哮，基督教保守派人士则开始向他鼓掌。不过，后者很快发现，他对圣经启示及其在基督徒生活中的作用的理解是有问题的。他说，圣经并不完全都是神的话，而是有一部分是神的话；圣经并不是来自神的直接启示，它记载的只是人类对上帝启示的回应。
 
结果，巴特遭到了来自两方面的批评。尽管如此，几乎所有生活在他那个时代和我们这个时代的人都承认，20世纪最伟大的神学家非巴特莫属。虽然他最初也来自自由主义神学的阵营，但后来他一直在尝试将自由主义神学拉回到正统基督教的根基上。即使他自己可能也没有完全归回，但正是他亲手埋葬了自由主义神学发展成为经典神学的希望。

——理查德 W. 科尼什，《简明教会历史》,2010.

20世纪对教会的冲击

除了科技的发展，另一个挑战便是共产主义的兴起与蔓延。自从主后一九一七年俄国革命以来，短短的几十年，共产政权统摄了世界三分之一的人口。共产主义是一套完整的宇宙人生观和历史观，对很多人有莫大的吸引力。共产主义之中不少人文理想根本是来自基督教，当然也有一些是与基督教对人的瞭解及理想有所冲突的。这些理想成为很多革命者的生命动力，推动革命。然而，共产主义的唯物思想否定了神的存在，也否定了宗教的价值，因此，当共产主义蔓延时，基督教便受到很大的压力。
 
马克思主义、存在主义、语言分析哲学等不断冲击基督教的思想，神学家面对这些思想的冲击不得不重新瞭解传统的信仰。从积极的角度来说，这是很好的，但偶一不慎，很容易让这些思想取代了教会信仰的实质。例如马克思主义在南美对神学思想影响极深，因而产生解放神学。解放神学固然不一定是错误，但问题是，当神学家完全用马克思主义去分析历史及社会状态，他们很容易失去了圣经的透视。不单如此，从马克思主义的角度看历史、社会的转变，革命是主要的动力。如此，神学家往往将圣经的信息解释成革命的信息，这是非常危险的。
 
语言分析哲学对神学也有相当的影响，语言分析哲学家认为神学语言是没有意义的，因此神学所讲的东西有很多都是在人的经验以外，是不能摸、不能见的事物，例如三位一体的理论等。因着这种挑战，在五十年代及六十年代纪中很多神学家便致力研究神学语言到底在20世纪是否还有它的地位。一些神学家研究的结论是，传统的神学语言在20世纪是完全无用的，就算是"神"这个字也没有什么意义；于是他们开始谈到将"神"这个名词从字典中抽出来。而"神死了"的神学思潮便是这样开始的。

20世纪是神学思潮汹涌，也是相当纷乱的时代。一个思潮兴起，流行一时，不到十年便又衰落。这种情况，使信徒感到很迷惘，甚至怀疑神学家在玩一些思想游戏，因此神学教导在很多信徒的心中也失去了过往崇高的地位。
 

——余达心，《基督教发展史新释》

20世纪教会的情况

在20世纪，科技发展急速，经济的发展更惊人，物质主义与消费主义更明显地成为文化的主流。而除此以外，共产主义的扩展更是前所未有的，也构成了20世纪很重要的特色。20世纪虽然在各方面都急速发展，但很奇怪的，欧洲人的自我形象却不断下降。原因很简单，两次的大战将他们过往极高的自信都打碎了。他们突然惊觉自己黑暗的一面；也很深的体会到罪的真实。同时，科技与物质文明的发展却带来了很多其他的问题，例如污染便是很好的例子。还有人与人之间的疏离已经到了不能忍受的程度，西方现代人在20世纪中叶开始不断地探索新的方向。
 
在十九世纪，教会可谓处处失利。在神学思想方面，新派神学攻占了很多神学院的阵地，尤其是在大学里面的神学系。在科学与信仰的争论中，科学似乎永远占上风，例如生物学家赫胥黎与牛津的主教在一次公开的学术辩论中，为达尔文的进化论辩论，结果牛津的主教惨败。进化论便毫无疑问的为人所接纳，并以此否定创造论。然而到了20世纪，形势却有所转变，神学家巴特首先举起反新派神学的旗帜，再次肯定圣经的启示及神的主动性，他强调，要瞭解神，我们必须放下我们为自己建立的宇宙人生观，放下我们的假设，安静地去聆听神的话。巴特在欧洲的影响至为深远。在他的领导下，一群忠于传统信仰的神学家开始在各神学院发挥他们的作用，收回部分已失的阵地。同时，在主后一九三Ｏ年开始，特别在美国，福音派渐渐兴起。

过往，忠于传统信徒的神学家或信仰在外面的各种压力下，退缩在自己小小的圈子内，称自己为基要派，将神学院、大学的阵地放弃掉，任由新派神学人士占据。但从三Ｏ年代开始，一些有见识有才学的基要信仰的人觉得要在知识界内重新建立基督教信仰的地位，并且要重新收复在大学及神学院失去的阵地。于是，福音派的神学院便一间接一间的开办，并且在学术水平上，直追大学内的神学系，而新一代的福音信仰的神学家便在四Ｏ年代出现，为福音信仰神学建立稳固的基础。
 
20世纪也是宣教运动退潮的时候。欧洲以外的地方，民族主义兴起，在西方文化影响下的各民族都寻求确立自己的身份，因而对于宣教士有很大的抗拒。同时，各地区的教会也寻求自立。一时间，宣教士失去了过往扮演的角色，以至有很大的失落感。十九世纪的宣教运动到了20世纪便渐渐失去了过去的活力。然而，这却刺激了地区教会的自立性及自主性，地区信徒的恩赐与活力便更深得发挥，这一种祝福是很多人所料不到的。各地区的教会，不单著意训练自己的领袖，更著意建立自己的神学，将神的启示更具体地在自己的文化传统内表达出来。所谓本色神学或本土神学便是20世纪才出现的现象。

 

——余达心，《基督教发展史新释》

How the Digital Age Stupefies Young People

Teenagers and young adults mingle in a society of abundance, intellectual as well as material. American youth in the twenty-first century have benefited from a shower of money and goods, a bath of liberties and pleasing self-images, vibrant civic debates, political blogs, old books and masterpieces available online, traveling exhibitions, the History Channel, news feeds . . . and on and on. Never have opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater. All the ingredients for making an informed and intelligent citizen are in place. 

But it hasn’t happened. Yes, young Americans are energetic, ambitious, enterprising, and good, but their talents and interests and money thrust them not into books and ideas and history and civics, but into a whole other realm and other consciousness. A different social life and a different mental life have formed among them. Technology has bred it, but the result doesn’t tally with the fulsome descriptions of digital empowerment, global awareness, and virtual communities. Instead of opening young American minds to the stores of civilization and science and politics, technology has contracted their horizon to themselves, to the social scene around them.

Young people have never been so intensely mindful of and present to one another, so enabled in adolescent contact. Teen images and songs, hot gossip and games, and youth-to-youth communications no longer limited by time or space wrap them up in a generational cocoon reaching all the way into their bedrooms. The autonomy has a cost: the more they attend to themselves, the less they remember the past and envision a future. 

They have all the advantages of modernity and democracy, but when the gifts of life lead to social joys, not intellectual labor, the minds of the young plateau at age 18. This is happening all around us. The fonts of knowledge are everywhere, but the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, and texts back and forth, living off the thrill of peer attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic

- Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, 2009.

The Failure of Reason and Knowledge

Postmodern culture generally — and postmodern Christian culture in particular — is profoundly disillusioned with the capacity of the mind’s reasoning ability as a force for the good. The Enlightenment (against which postmodernism is a reaction) was a period in history characterized by an unbridled optimism concerning human reason. Caught up in the enthusiasm over the new philosophy spawned by the work of René Descartes and the explosive progress in the sciences, Enlightenment thinkers were tempted to conclude that if only the world would think and reason properly, we would find our way into a utopian kind of existence.
 
Nowhere is this more evident than in Baruch Spinoza’s vision for philosophy and science done well. In his treatise On the Improvement of the Understanding, he explains that philosophy and science done well would enable him “to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.” Not a bad goal.
 
But the increasing knowledge characteristic of the rise of the “new science” and Cartesian philosophy did not culminate in continuous, supreme, and unending happiness. Instead, as postmodernists never tire of reminding us, it gave us Hiroshima. Of course, it gave us much that is good too. But to the postmodern mind, the rise of science and the accumulation of knowledge is now recognizable as being subject to the whims of human management and mismanagement. Increased knowledge is no guarantee of a better world. To live in a postmodern culture is to be alive to the failure of reason and knowledge to live up to their Enlightenment expectations.

-  Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, 2009.

Self-deceptive Strategies

1. Attention management 
Attention management has two sides. On the one hand, we manage to deceive ourselves by systematically avoiding attention to evidence against those beliefs upon which our felt well-being depends. On the other hand, we direct inordinate critical attention to evidence that opposes our cherished belief if that evidence can’t be avoided or if we think we’ll have to answer for it in public. We give it our attention, it seems, not so much to learn from it as to creatively discount it. Either way, through careful management of attention, we enable ourselves to be deceived over the long haul. Attention management, then, is the first of our self-deceptive strategies.
 
2. Procrastination
Many have agreed to take on the heart of Jesus, but they’re planning to do it later . . . much later. They’ll have the character of Jesus — just not now. For now, they’ll be, as the bumper sticker says, “not perfect . . . just forgiven.” Having received forgiveness because of the work of Jesus on the cross, they’ll live with the expectation that perfection will come to them all at once in the blink of an eye at the moment of passing from this life to the next. As a result, they procrastinate acting upon the clear biblical imperative to put on perfection. And the longer they procrastinate, the less clear it is to them that this is really what they ought to be doing anyway.
 
At this point, procrastination joins forces with attention management. It’s extremely difficult to reconcile with the witness of Scripture the belief that noticeable progress toward Christ-likeness awaits my bodily death. So I’ll need to direct my attention to those passages that emphasize themes like grace, forgiveness, and passivity. I’ll need either to avoid attention to, or explain away, those passages suggesting that I’m expected to work hard now to make progress toward Christ-likeness in this life.
 
 
3. Perspective Switching
Most of us monitor with some care the perspective others have of us. Often a decision to see the world from their perspective gives us relief from painful truths that haunt us. But we’re not happy to settle permanently into the perspective of the other. Our own perspective gives us special insight into our own circumstances and often yields the more attractive picture. So, as Sartre suggested, we switch back and forth depending on the demands of the moment.
 
4. Rationalization
Perspective switching is but one variation on what is perhaps the most recognizable of our strategies for self-deception: rationalization. To rationalize is to construct a rational justification for a behavior, decision, or belief arrived at in some other way. When we rationalize a behavior, for example, we locate reasons that would justify the behavior were they operational. We then present these reasons to ourselves and others as explaining our actual behavior. But the reasons are mere fictions. They play no causal role in the production of the behavior. One strategy for rationalizing, as we have seen, is to capitalize on the perspective of another. We find or create in those around us a perspective from which our actions and decisions are reasonable and right and we adopt that perspective.
Sometimes, though, there is nobody with the perspective our rationalizing requires. In this case, we are left to the devices of our imagination. We must construct — out of thin air, as it were — a story that satisfies the constraints of rationality and justifies our behavior or decision.
 
Instead, the mind is taken hostage by the will, and a more palatable explanation is invented.
 
 
5. Ressentiment
Crying sour grapes is one form of what Friedrich Nietzsche (and later Max Scheler) called “Ressentiment” — a re-ordering of the sentiments. We adjust our affections, sentiments, and value judgments in order to avoid severe disappointment or self-censure. When we cry sour grapes, we avoid the severe disappointment of not having what we want by convincing ourselves that we don’t really want it after all. Often the ploy for discrediting the desired object is to place inordinate value on something else instead…… Nietzsche famously attributes the Christian praise of humility and prizing of suffering to the ressentiment of the persecuted church. Since they could expect no better than humiliation and suffering, he said, the Christians re-ordered their sentiments in such a way as to praise humility and prize afflictio
 
Three forms of ressentiment:
(a) First, a generally recognized good is made an object of outright scorn for its unavailability.
(b) Second, a seemingly unavailable good is pushed to the edges of consciousness by super-valuing something else. We see both kinds of ressentiment in the various forms of Christian anti-intellectualism.
(c) In this final form, it’s not so much that there is an unavailable good creating a demand for the re-ordering of sentiments. It is rather that particular sentiments are deemed unacceptable, inappropriate, inconvenient, or otherwise undesirable. They are then recast as something other than what they are. They go undercover. They continue to operate, but they are renamed in such a way as to make them acceptable to the person who has them.
 

 -  Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, 2009

 
 

Deceiving Ourselves About Self-Deception

Philosophers, social scientists, and psychologists have long been aware of the pervasive reality of self-deception. For centuries, it has been called upon to explain various forms of irrationality and dysfunction. Interestingly, it has also been called upon to explain survival and success in a variety of contexts. Historically, few masters of Christian spirituality have failed to notice the significance of self-deception. Christian thinkers through the ages have had a special interest in the bearing of self-deception on the Christian life and the pursuit of — or flight from — God, and it has long served as a key element in the explanation of sin, moral failure, and the avoidance of God.
 
The prophet Jeremiah reminds us that the heart is deceitful above all things and asks, rhetorically, “who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). The prophet Obadiah identifies a primary motive for self-deception: “Your proud heart has deceived you . . .” (Obadiah 3). The apostle Paul explains in his letter to the Galatians how self-deception enables those who are nothing to think that they are something (Galatians 6:3)…
 
An interesting thing happened, though, with the rise in prominence of the philosophical movement called existentialism. Beginning with Kierkegaard, the existentialists (including Sartre, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others) elevated authenticity to a place of primary importance in their understanding of the virtues. Due to the writings of the existentialists and other cultural trends, the “Good Person” was increasingly understood to be the “Authentic Person.” Being true to oneself became a — or, in some cases, the — chief good. Self-deception, then, was given a promotion in the ranking of vices. What was once a derivative vice — one whose primary importance was found in its ability to facilitate other, more serious, vices — became itself the most egregious of all sins.
 
But my point is that the elevation of “authenticity” as a virtue carries with it a promotion for self-deception among the vices. So, to the degree that we value authenticity, we will be averse to the suggestion that we are self-deceived. Believing myself to be authentic — to be true to myself and to others — will be a source of significant satisfaction and felt well-being for me. But, as it turns out, being genuinely honest with oneself is often hard work. And it is at this point that life cuts us a deal. If we can convince ourselves that we’re authentic people — that we’re not self-deceived — we can have all the benefit of theft over honest toil. We can experience the satisfaction associated with saying, “Whatever else is true of me, I’m honest with myself and with others. I know myself. I’m real.”
 

- Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, 2009.

 

Acting Out Our Beliefs

Sometimes I offer my students a thousand dollars if they’ll simply believe that there is a pink elephant standing next to me at the lectern. I even give them a few minutes with eyes closed and heads bowed to work up the relevant belief. I have yet to have anyone take the deal. They know that nobody will believe them if they claim to have taken on the belief, so they chuckle at the ridiculous invitation. We all know that belief just doesn’t work that way.
 
Interestingly, though, we seem to forget that belief doesn’t work that way when we go out evangelizing. We present our friends with the rewards and punishments associated with believing, or failing to believe, that Jesus died for their sins and conquered death in his resurrection. We then invite them to bow their heads and take on the belief. When they open their eyes, we invite them to think of themselves as believers — as having crossed over from non-belief to belief.
 
It won’t be long before they’ll be aware of a certain tension between their lived experience and what they think of themselves as believing. “Why,” one might ask, “do I not naturally act as though Jesus gave his life for me? Why don’t I find myself behaving toward him the way I would toward any other living human being who suffered what he suffered to set me free?” So long as we take it for granted that we believe — after all, isn’t that what happened at conversion? — we’ll assume that the problem is behavioral. “I’m just having the hardest time acting out my beliefs,” we’ll say.
 
But with very few exceptions, no one has any trouble acting out their beliefs. You do act in accordance with your beliefs. More likely, you just don’t believe what you’ve thought of yourself as believing. Rather than trying to work up behavior consistent with what we think we believe, we should be begging with the man who wanted desperately for Jesus to free his son from the demon that possessed him, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).
 

-  Gregg A. Ten Elshof, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, 2009