JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

21
MODERNITY
German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg in his book, Jesus-God and Man, explains the
modernistic trend in our educational institutions which has devastatingly undermined any
semblance of biblical authority:
". . . there is now an insurmountable coalition between the Enlightenment idea
that it is the subject who defines reality and the universities that are now
structured not only to make this idea normative but also to make its orthodox
alternative unacceptable.
In twentieth-century universities, especially in America, the fact that confession
is unwanted is communicated in a number of ways. There has been a trend
(which peaked in the 1960s) toward replacing departments of theology with
departments of religious studies. The new script for study is human experience,
not the teaching of the Bible or, for that matter, of the Church. This script
encompasses all human experience in all of its religious shades; it is no longer
tolerable to restrict academic considerations to what is Christian or Western. The
method of study is now scientific, objective, and comparative; the starting point
is the assumption that all religions are works of human interpretation and that no
one religion has 'the truth.' And, because the study is conducted under the aegis
of the social scientists rather than that of the clergy or theologians, the credibility
of the whole undertaking requires that it take place not in the context of the old
spirit of belief but rather in the context of the most audacious, irreverent, and
skeptical questions, even if the result is to create a maze through which
befuddled students will not easily find a way. Unhappily, the demand for
pluralistic values, to which unstinting support is given in these departments,
itself invariably becomes an unyielding orthodoxy. Faculty in many of these
departments will not tolerate those whose views are not pluralistic."11
Robert Hutchins, former President of the University of Chicago, has cynically defined
our modern university as a series of separate schools and departments held together by a central
heating system. There is no longer a coherent philosophy.
In his book, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom points out that the
Enlightenment substituted nature for the divine authority of God as its supreme reality. Modern
man has abandoned both God and nature and thus ended up with himself as the reference
point. Thus our highest value is openness—to anything and everything. This has led to what
professor Bloom calls the "democratic personality," which is receptive to "whoever" or
"whatever."12