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God, Man, and the Millennium
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17443 |
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SPECIAL SECTION
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1 / 1990 |
4,375 Words |
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Carl F.H. Henry
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As space-time compresses into this century's last ten years and trickles into a new succession of ten centuries, the questions of good and evil, truth and right, meaning and worth, are bantered about in ominous confusion.
Conflicting views of the nature of human life itself divide and perplex learned commentators as much as ever: Whether humans are merely complex animals whose destiny is the cemetery or crematory; whether we are still steeped in sporadic evolutionary development that precludes any pancultural human essence and implies that superman will ultimately supersede us all; whether we are moral rebels without historical hope apart from spiritual reconciliation with the creator and giver of life; or whether we are only what we internally and existentially make of ourselves in successive life-or-death decisions. Respected philosophers, moreover, cannot agree on whether human nature--if such there be--is essentially selfish or essentially good, or an elusive and enigmatic mixture of virtue and vice.
Yet on the answers to such questions hang crucial issues, among them whether Jews, as Hitler held, are but dubious instances of humanity and whether unborn fetuses are human at all. (And by aborting a million and a half of them a year, Americans imply the negative.) At no juncture of history has a verdict on whether or not humans find their true selfhood in special relationships to a transcendent God been more important for human destiny. Is Jesus of Nazareth still to be viewed as ideal man? And if not, who is to replace him?
Even anthropologists are in disarray over the supposed evolutionary ancestry of man and a precise chronology for the appearance of humanity as we know it. Elwyn L. Simons, director of Duke University's Center for the Study of Primate Biology and History, tells us what will surprise few biblical scholars--that "many attributes or skills by which we define humanity arose much more recently in time than before believed." Indeed, he adds, "Much of what we hold 'near and dear' about ourselves--our very anatomical proportions, our ability to create art and symbols, sophisticated tool manufacture, and construction and use of house and home--may have appeared only a few tens of thousands of years ago."
To be sure, Simons does not even mention the imago Dei, or created image of God, which the Judeo-Christian account declares most decisive for human beginnings. But he suggests that fully as important as the grave questions raised regarding our species' past development are the "frightening problems of the future arising from our very selves." The matter of human identity is, in fact, no less significant and even more critical than that of human chronology. No cosmic importance whatsoever attaches to humanity's march into a new millennium if, severed from the image of God, the human species can no longer make a persuasive case for its distinctive meaning and worth.
Areas of Contemporary Concern
Space and communications technology have linked earth's four billion inhabitants intimately, while at the same time shaping dread possibilities of human and planetary destruction through nuclear war. The dawning century inherits a colossal fallout in the form of the present century's unresolved tensions.
Among
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