I have been cleaning out my files and recently ran into a sermon I delivered to the Adrian College chapel service over 40 years ago. For some reason they never invited me to do another one! Here it is, for whatever it might be worth.
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Welcome to the Dark
Ages
(A chapel address delivered at Adrian College by Paul F.
deLespinasse on October 25, 1972.)
Did you ever wonder what life was like in the Dark Ages? Our
ability to imagine Eighth and Ninth Century conditions is probably rather
limited. But according to William G.
Pollard we need not therefore resign ourselves to ignorance; like the Michigander seeking a pleasant
peninsula, we need merely look around
us. Professor Pollard, who is a physicist, persuasively argues that we ourselves are
living in a Dark Age, a Second
Dark Age.
Pollard defines a dark age as any “period in which the West
has lost the capacity to respond to either one of its two cultural roots.” These two roots are known as the Greek-Roman
tradition and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The First Dark Age was a result of losing hold of the Greek-Roman
tradition. The Second Dark Age, in which
we presently live, resulted from our collective loss of feeling for the
Judeo-Christian way of thinking. The
First Dark Age was dominated by the Church,
the institutional embodiment of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and ended when the Renaissance brought a
renewed feeling for Greek and Roman ideas,
restoring the balance.
The present Dark Age, conversely, is dominated by the Greek-Roman outlook and
characterized by a general religious feebleness. Harvey Cox, of the Harvard
Divinity School
Having,
with the aid of Deweyan naturalism,
“demythologization.” and
existentialism,
disposed of their deity or at least placed him in a weak
position, Protestant clergymen in the United
States
from the
intellectual equivalent of technological unemployment.
But it is not just—or even mainly—the clergymen. It is the
whole climate of the times. As Pollard
points out:
A college
student of today who is introduced for the first time to
Thucydides
or Plato, to Cicero or Virgil, finds himself rather much at
home in the
ideas and outlooks which he encounters. He recognizes
important
differences, to be sure, but there is in them, nevertheless, very
little
which seems so alien that he cannot respond sympathetically from his
own
experience to the outlooks on life and history which he discovers there.
The same
student, on the other hand, even though
formally associated with
Christianity
or Judaism and regarded himself as a committed and practicing
member of a
church or synagogue, nevertheless finds
himself in alien
territory
when he comes to Biblical literature.
For Harvey Cox, in
spite of the secular city, there is no
present Dark Age; he believes that the
secular city is unequivocally good, and indeed that it is the fulfillment of
the law and the prophets. If Cox is
right, even if we want to define a Dark
Age so that the present era qualifies as one,
the description implies no negative connotation. “The name is not the thing,” and if the thing is good it is not rendered
otherwise by having a frightening label stuck on it. It is difficult, however, for me not to agree with Pollard when he says
that:
underneath
all our material prosperity and accomplishments there is a deep-
seated
malaise, a sense of meaninglessness and frustration, and a background
of dark and
foreboding suspicions about the feasibility of modern man’s
whole
enterprise which have been widely noted in much recent commentary.
Pollard,
incidentally, was writing in
1964—during the pre-Vietnam era of relatively good feelings and liberal
euphoria—and not just reflecting the more recent fashionable secular
gloominess. If the malaise he notes has
really been lurking under the surface all along, then Cox’s complacency is not called for.
Pollard’s prescription calls for a second renaissance in
which people would redevelop their feeing for the Biblical style of thought so
that balance between the two roots of our culture would once more be
restored. But how feasible is such a
renaissance? What would it require?
The very minimum condition
for a religious renaissance---it seems to me---would be a renewal of our
ability to take seriously the Biblical thesis that God creates men in his own
image and is interested in each individual human being. This thesis has come into apparent conflict
in our time with the sociological idea that men have created God in their own image, and with the common
sense feeling---grounded in our own hectic lives--that God could not possibly
have time to be personally concerned with each of the four billion individuals
presently on earth. For those who
realize that there may well be sentient beings on millions of other planets in
this universe, the problem only seems to
be compounded.
The trouble with the sociological theory that men create God
in their own imagine is not that it is completely false. As Rupert Brooke suggests in his poem about
how a fish might conceive of heaven, it is natural for us to extrapolate qualities
we see in ourselves to God:
…somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is
wetter water, slimier slime.
And
there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who
swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous,
omnipotent and kind;
And
under that Almighty Fin,
The
littlest fish may enter in.
The trouble when we say men create God is that we are
referring to creating a concept of
God, whereas when we say God creates men
we mean He creates the objects themselves and not just the concept. Two different things, which have little
bearing on the validity of each other,
are thus being talked about. In
the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant,
the fact that the Blind Men were creating various partial and hence
inevitably erroneous concepts of the
elephant around which they were groping had no implications for the existence
or nature of the elephant itself. I do
not see how the situation would have been appreciably changed if it had been
blind but intelligent baby elephants groping around their mother.
A more serious obstacle to a religious renaissance is the
difficulty in believing that God has enough time to be personally concerned
with each individual person. Modern
social conditions have made it increasingly hard to take the Biblical thesis on
this question seriously and literally.
It has become commonplace to observe that ours is the age of large-scale
organization, impersonality, and
facelessness. The inhabitants of the
secular city, as Cox correctly
says, cannot know everybody and cannot
have deep personal dealings with everybody.
Just for one person to shake hands with every person in the United
States
The theological danger in all this is that we may be tempted
to take our new appreciation or even obsession with a facelessness,
impersonality, and anonymity which are direct and logical results of the finite
amount of time each individual human being has,
and extrapolate this human
characteristic to God. Cox, I think,
falls into this trap when he says “we need to develop a viable theology
of anonymity.”
Fortunately, men are
more imaginative and more able to transcend themselves in their thinking than
the Blind Baby Elephants or Brooke’s Fish were.
Not only can we project essential human characteristics into our concept
of God, but we can also extrapolate obvious differences. One such obvious difference has to do with time: the relationship between men and
time, on the one hand, and on the other
hand the relation between God and time.
The basic point that I would like to make today is that in a created
universe time is a part of the created
order, and therefore must be
transcended by God. It seems to me that
there is no escaping this conclusion if any sense at all is to be made of
Judeo-Christian theology and the Bible is not to be dismissed as a fabrication
with no basis in reality whatsoever.
The point that time is part of the created order is not
new; St. Augustine St. Augustine 10:29 ),
a claim which sounds absurd to the busy modern ear---I might almost say
to the Greek-Roman ear!--- there is
therefore no reason why we cannot take the statement literally. Indeed,
until many more people can take this statement literally, I believe we must wait in vain for the
religious renaissance.
Is time a key to the intellectual and emotional logjam of
our age? Perhaps time will tell.
Meanwhile, let me welcome you to the
Dark Ages with a concluding observation:
we must remember that a Dark Age is only a collective phenomenon which
can be surmounted by individuals, and that it is better to light a candle than
to curse the darkness.
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William G.
Pollard, “Dark Age and
Renaissance in the Twentieth Century,” in Edmund Fuller (Ed), The Christian Idea of Education (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1964).
Edward Shils,
“Intellectuals and the Center
of Society University
of Chicago
Brooke’s poem was quoted in Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (New York: Scribners, 1949), p. 118.
Harvey Cox, The Secular
City
Dewey B. Larson, New
Light on Space and Time (Portland: North Pacific Publishers, 1965).
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Paul F. deLespinasse is professor emeritus of political
science at Adrian College Corvallis , Oregon
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