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