The New Situation

A Study Paper for the Curriculum Consultation Committee

Prepared by the Department of Religious Education
January, 1968

“Change is the biggest story in the world today, and we are not covering it adequately; change in the size and movement of our people; change in the nature, location, and availability of jobs; violent change in the cities and on the land; change in the relations between village and town, town and city, city and state, state and nation, and, of course, change in the relations between empires that are falling and the empires that are rising, the old states that are going down and the new ones that are coming up.”
James Reston, “The Biggest Story Ever Told,”
The New Republic, May 4, 1963.

God does not change, but the human situation does. Religious education must proceed with this awareness if it is going to be meaningful to those whose lives are cast in this world.

I. The Christian Attitude Towards Change

It is the conviction of this paper that religious education must proceed in dialogue with what the human situation is if it shall justify its claim upon man’s time and thought. The rapidity and universality of change are the hallmarks of the contemporary period. The changes we are witnessing are not occurring at the peripheries of life. Rather they are erupting in the center of existence where men struggles with the questions of identity, worth, and purpose. Moreover, the events of our hastened time suggest a transition into what some have called the “post civilized age,” suggesting not simply a settling process by which we become more fully adjusted to an old situation, but rather a revolution buy which we are being transported into a new situation.

The Christian understanding of God as a dynamic participant in history commits the believer to a positive attitude toward change. To affirm that God works in the world, and that such action occurs in historical events is to live in the expectancy of social change. Moreover, to hope for the kingdom of God is to project on’s confidence beyond what “is” to what “will be.” Thus the vision of the just society with God as its author and guarantor equips the Christian with a fundamental congeniality to change.

Openness to the future is also based on the Christian’s understanding of creation. While nature is seen as God’s handiwork, it is not sacralized. It is not thought of as a direct extension of God or as the embodiment of the divine, thus precluding scientific inquiry and technical adoptions. Rather is the created order a field in which man has a creative responsibility, particularly to subdue it and exercise dominion over it. While guided by concern for the divine purpose, he is not immobilized by a sacral view of creation, and thus is open for new developments in the stewardship of the created order.

A similar openness exists in the Christian’s view of politics and political structures. He does not hold to the view that governments rule by divine right or that certain political structures constitute a “given” element in life. Rather is the political realm one in which he holds stewardship responsibilities, charged to see that basic human values are facilitated by whatever political structures are adopted.

Even in the area of values, the Christian is open. While he acknowledges the existence of absolutes, he does not claim to possess them. He realizes the historical conditioning of his own values. Moreover, he recognizes his own moral finitude. Both remind him of the tentative nature of his ethical insights and values. Such an admission is not an invitation to nihilism, however, for the Christ is guided by the faith while his perception of values is quite subjective, nonetheless object of that perception is real.

Thus, the Christian lives in an attitude of openness. He affirms the dynamic character of life and history. He sees his responsibilities to be creative and innovative. The phenomenon of change is not immediately suspect, but rather seen as the expression of the dynamic character of the life to which his is called.

This does not mean that all change is intrinsically good or constructive. Nothing is quite so absurd as to assume that all the revolutions and changes now occurring in life are pointing toward the kingdom of God. It does suggest, however, that the disciple has a responsibility in change, both to initiate to where the interests of the kingdom are to be served and to judge it in light of his Christian commitments.

Thus Christian responsibility includes an affirmative attitude toward and an acceptance of responsibility for change.

II. Areas of Change

A. Secularization

An omnibus term that catches up the essence of many of the changes occurring arround us is secularization. A society in the process of secularization in liberating itself from dogmatic religious authority, perhaps from ontological authority in general in favor of a more functional concept of authority. such a society is decidedly pragmatic. Authority ceases to be a given reality. Rather it is an emergent entity born out of relationships. Authority is established for an individual and for a community as a result of a long process of interaction, reflection and discussion. Authoritative conclusions remain tentative. Reflection and evaluation go on in the awareness that new data may shed light on previous conclusions. Dogmatism is suspect.

With this energizing force behind it, secularization expresses itself in at least five distinct ways:

1. Secularization expresses itself in a revolt against Platonic dualism. The two-story universe has disappeared for many. In its place has come a greater emphasis upon this world, its problems, its possibilities, its hopes. Secularization is not particularly materialistic, but it does see the secular order as the place where life is lived and man’s destiny is worked out.
2. Secularization expresses itself in the liberation of men from theological or metaphysical ideas which keep them focused on the life to come. It invites men to appreciate and celebrate the joys and pleasures of this life, and to take it seriously.
3. Secularization means the erosion and in some cases the outright destruction of systems of authority by which men were given the answers to life without having to think. Questions increasingly are settled not by reference to what is in the Sutras, the Koran, or the Bible, but by calculations based on scientific research. Moral questions are seen to be increasingly released from a supernatural control. Definite, absolute, in-advance type answers are viewed with skepticism.
4. Secularization means the increasing tendency to understand life within the context of cause and effect relationships. There is less resort to the supernatural as explanation for phenomena. This does not necessarily imply a mechanistic view of life. It does imply increasing confidence in man’s ability to grasp and understand life in rational categories. He sees himself as “come of age.” Consequently, he sees his life with other men differently. He perceives the world as a neighborhood and understands himself as being responsible for its present and future. Many things traditionally assigned to God as his responsibility are now seen as man’s responsibility.
5. Secularization is witnessed in the determination to examine all things, leaving no vestige of human life exempt from critical analysis and understanding. A society in the process of secularization is characterized by perpetual creative doubt though which all supposedly “given” elements are constantly received and appropriated. As a consequence, while a man’s faith may remain undaunted, his intellectual understanding of it may have taken some severe blows.

These then are the general outlines of secularization, a phenomenon spreading throughout the world. Religious education must proceed in the awareness that it is occurring. It views it with neither fear nor hostility, nor with uncritical enthusiasm. The disciple responds to it with the sober understanding that God desires men to be free to the end that they can obey the truth.

At least three positive reactions to the process of secularization can be made:

1. The very mind set which enabled modern science and technology to come forth and from them a secularized view of life to emerge, was indigenous to the Biblical faith. The faith that the world was orderly, amenable to investigation, and subject to man’s dominion is intrinsically Biblical.
2. Secularization has been accelerated by the Christian view that the condition of human life in this world can be radically bettered.
3. Secularization can be seen to be breaking down autocratic patterns of society in places where Christian churches themselves have been a negligible influence. India is a case in point. The dictatorship of religious sanctions particularly in the caste systems is being broken down as science and other secular forces are reshaping the society. Men are discovering what it means to have real options for themselves.

In the same vein, three questions can be posed with regard to secularization which help point up its risks.

1. While man turns his attention to this world and seeks to gain mastery over his physical environment, what is happening to him as a person? Gaining the capacity to have anything he wants, will he know what he wants? Will life’s meaning drain away?
2. While man is being delivered from many idols by secularization, will he be brought around full circle to a new idolatry—secularism? Being liberated from magic, superstition and religious tyrannies, will he find himself imprisoned in a new absolutism, namely, that reality lies in the material world and nowhere else, that all causes are natural or human causes, that all events therefore begin and end here, and that all interests lie solely in this world?
3. Will man employ the new freedom secularization is granting him to choose the God who is?

It is in this context that religious education must proceed demonstrating its sensitivity to these issues and concerns.

B. The Scientific Revolution

The fact that human knowledge has doubled in the last 25 years is largely traceable to the scientific revolution. Whatever else science is, it is essentially a rigorous method of acquiring knowledge, of testing and evaluating that knowledge, and finally of organizing and relating it. Its methodology has been applied to all fields of endeavor and apparently shall increasingly be so applied.

Such a revolution in the way knowledge is acquired, evaluated, and organized has resulted in technical applications which are virtually revolutionizing the contours of human life, to which further attention will be given in a moment. But apart from the technology which has emerged from the scientific revolution, science itself has vitally changed human life, particularly  in how men think about themselves and their world. Men have traditionally thought of themselves and their world on the basis of folk wisdom or folk image which have been built up out of the ordinary experience of men. From this ordinary experience men have generalized to the whole world. With the advent of science, a more rigorous approach to knowledge has been utilized producing a continuing series of images which have been in conflict with traditional folk wisdom. As science further organized the expansion of knowledge the pressure on folk images has become so great that society has been compelled to shift its understanding in light of the new revelations.

Such a shift from folk images of man and society to scientific images has involved man in two large, irreversible and related changes. First, man has experienced a dramatic increase in self-consciousness. This is not only true of the individual but also of the society in which he is placed. Prior to the scientific revolution everything in man and in society was perfectly natural and man never questioned it. But the scientific view has destroyed such a homocentric view or attitude. Whether in astronomy or the social sciences, the development of the scientific view has demolished parochialism. Just as man now sees himself as an inhabitant of a rather obscure planet no longer at the center of the universe, so also he sees his own society (including his church) as a cultural (or religious) planet in a world of planets, rather than as a sun, and as one among may possible ways of ordering human life and relations.

Second, the shift from folk understanding to scientific understanding has produced a “systems point of view” radically in conflict with traditional wisdom. Traditional man has seen the world from an illusory perspective. Things nearby not only seem large but are thought to be large and things that are far away are thought to be small. Moreover the drive for organization moves traditional man to systematize the world. But in systematizing the world he not only errs by generalizing out of nothing more than his own experience, but he relates random things together which have no demonstrable relationship. Such an inclination to find connections between events which have no demonstrable relationship has left a residue of superstition against  which the scientific view continues in conflict. Scientific knowledge concerned as it is with necessary connections between phenomena results in a much different “systems point of view” than does folk knowledge.

Thus science has revolutionized not only what man knows, but how he knows it. Moreover it opens up the possibility of testing propositions about man and society which previously were thought to be open only for argument, persuasion or coercion. The significance of this for intellectual conflicts is obvious. Having made inroads in areas previously impervious to systematic exploration, the range of things open to dogmatic assertion indeed is shrinking. It is in such an atmosphere and with such an awareness that religious education must proceed. It must appreciate what has happened and is happening to man by virtue of his immersion in a scientific world view.

C. The Technological Revolution

Technology is the child of science. Out of the resources of scientific knowledge, applications are made to human problems resulting in staggering possibilities in communication, war, agriculture, disease, and the elimination of the same, and every other facet of human experience. Important to us here is not so much the cataloging of technical triumphs, as the pointing up of the new atmosphere and environments in which human life is lived out.

Of basic importance is man’s awareness that the “permanent realm of impossibility” which confronted him for the previous 10,000 years of human experience has now diminished such that few will dare to suggest a thing which man will never be able to do, including the synthesis of life. Technology has produced the mentality of infinite possibility. A new optimism about what is possible in the world has allowed man to take with renewed seriousness the Biblical injunction to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. In taking this world more seriously because of the possibilities opened up through technology, he has proportionately diminished his interest in the hereafter as the locale of the ideal life. A dramatic shift away from the otherworldliness which had its roots in the recalcitrant nature of this life and its seemingly unyielding environment is readily detected. While few are clear on the kind of life we want on this earth, most are agreed that the possibility of having whatever we decide is real.

Thrust in the face of this new optimism is a countervailing pessimism about the world due to the awareness that technology not only can turn deserts into gardens and diseases into memories of the past, but it can also turn cities into incinerators and water into a purveyor of universal, bacteria-initiated death. These polar extremes are the context in which modern man lives his life.

Moreover, technology has confronted man with the possibility of being thoroughly depersonalized. He lives in the awareness that human values may be steadily sacrificed before the relentless and undisciplined structuring of society around gadgetry and efficiency.

We are also aware that technology has led to the weakening of moral systems and presented new ethical issues for which history and experience provide no precedents. Birth control devices, for example, have necessitated a rethinking of the grounds upon which chastity is to be defended. The prospects of cybernation and the possibility that all our necessary goods and services can be produced by a small percent of the available laborers poses questions about the traditional relations between income and productive work and the efficacy of the traditional work ethic so characteristic of Christian thought.

Then, too, technology has confronted us with new images of what it means to be a man. Issues which traditional man has assigned to God are being discovered to be human responsibility. Technology has produced the nuclear warhead and with its advent has come the  possibility of the universal extermination of human life. The end of history was once assumed to be fully God’s concern, but technology has advised man that he shares a massive responsibility for it. A more subtle but equally sobering revelation of what man’s responsibility involves is seen in the population explosion. It has always been assumed that who has children and how many persons live on the earth is God’s province. But the prospect of literally overrunning the globe with people has suddenly made it apparent that men may have to decide who have children, and how many will be allowed to live on the earth.

Thus radical new dimension of human responsibility loom before man in the 20th century. The technological revolution has created an unprecedented context in which life must be lived. religious education must proceed in the awareness of this new context and speak meaningfully to men who live it and breathe it every day of their life.

D. Urbanization

Urbanization not only has to do with the fact that men are congregating in ever increasing numbers in cities, it also has to do with the fact that men think in new patterns, organize their life in new patterns, and experience new problems. Moreover, the urbanization of life reaches far beyond the boundaries of big cities. It is a conditioning factor in towns and villages throughout the countryside.

As a geographic phenomenon urbanization has produced the overcrowded inner city, the insulated suburb, the opportunity to rub elbows with huge varieties of people and at the same time to shut off oneself from the diversity which is the true human community. It has created the necessity for profound inter-dependence, yet it has contributed to a kind of anonymity which threatens the possibilities of true human life. It has triumphed over impossibly complex problems of transportation, communication, education, etc. by organizational genius, but at the same time confronted men with depersonalizing forces which make them ask if the city is a human place to live.

The varieties of people which congregate in a city have had a relativizing effect upon the city dweller. He sees many styles of life, hears many viewpoints, and witnesses many value systems in operation. He becomes less absolutistic in his own outlook. He is more tolerant of other approaches to live. Pluralism becomes accepted as a fact of life.

Urbanization has set before men a new set of problems. The disruptions, dislocations, stresses and strains brought on by the rapid social changes in urban, technological society have accelerated family disorganization, alcoholism, delinquency, racism, mental illness, narcotic addiction, labor-management rifts, graft and corruption in government. Acute problems in human relations are endemic to urban society.

Scholars have been quick to point out the “unwillingness of substantial groups within the populace to accept the reality of the secular city. They still want to cling to town and even tribal styles of living. Within the city, clan feuds between Irish, Italian, and Yankee political war parties rage on while in the suburbs harried escapees from the issues of the inner city deck out their modern homes with wagon wheels and fake colonial furniture. They keep the spotlight shining on the old white church on the green in an effort to convince themselves that they really do live in the simple, self-sufficient village founded on the green 300 years ago.” (The Secular City, p. 90)

Closely related to the urban revolution is the demise of the individual and the emergence of the group as the locus of decision making and power. While the 19th century and early 20th century demonstrated the viability of rugged individualism, individual power seems less important in today’s world. Interest groups, power blocs and alliances of various kinds have become increasingly important in social change. Impersonal forces are often the source of suffering and inequity. Thus strategies of change characterizing our time include boycotts, community organization, and similar manipulations of group power.

Religious education must proceed in the awareness of this emerging urban culture with its new contours of life being sensitive to its possibilities as well as its problems. Moreover, educational materials must help foster understanding of the complex issues involved in bearing a viable witness in the urban setting.

E. Rising Expectations

With the advent of the modern city and the subsequent improvement and enrichment of life, a crisis in human relations has emerged centering both in racial and economic differences. The unequal distribution of the benefits of modern life as well as the unequal distribution of the intrinsic human right to dignity has created racial tensions not only in America but throughout the world. Universally dispossessed people are demanding their share of the prosperity modern life has produced, as well as the respect their human existence infers. Civil rights and poverty are among the most crucial moral questions facing us in the immediate future. Religious education must proceed in the awareness of this crisis. It must provide theological insights into this new reality and equip men and women to relate in a Christian way to the tensions and change occurring around them.

F. Affluence

American society is overwhelmingly affluent. This, too, is part of the new situation. It affects the style of our life, the amount and use of leisure time, the expansion of education, and the possibility of giving significant tangible expression to Christian love. It has profound influence upon human values and the grounds upon which identity is achieved. Ironically, this affluence, while said to characterize the society, is hardly characteristic of all its people. At least one-fifth of the citizenry do not share in its benefits, living rather in abject poverty in the ghettos of large cities, in small towns, and on marginal farms. Most of these people are invisible to the larger segments of society, but their existence, as well as that of their affluent brothers, is a fact of our time. The fact that they can be invisible in such numbers is itself a prime concern.

From the larger perspective of the world as a whole, our culture exists as an island of wealth in a veritable sea of poverty. These facts constitute moral issues of prime importance for Christian men and women. Religious education must address these concerns in light of the gospel.

G. The Sexual Revolution

The revolution in sexual ethics is not particularly new, but it is a vital fact of our time. Puritanical and Victorian attitudes toward sexual morality have collapsed throughout much of society. Increasing experimentation and rejection of traditional inhibitions characterize the change. The vocal desire of homosexual for recognition and acceptance is also an earmark of the change.

Technology has helped facilitate the change. The automobile has created new dating and courtship patterns. A variety of contraceptive devices have changed the attitude toward premarital sex. The advertising industry has employed sex as a symbol. Pornographic literature, illegitimacy, abortion, venereal disease mark the progress of the revolution.

Religious education must proceed in the awareness of the collapse of traditional morality and accept responsibility to guide society into a viable sexual ethic.

Closely related to the foregoing is the awareness that the double standard is being abolished and a new conception of femininity is emerging. Women are increasingly demonstrating self-reliance and independence and successfully compete with men for jobs and status.

III.  General Implications for the Curriculum

While not exhausting the areas of change which are apparent, this paper has pointed to the fact of change and has suggested that Christian education must proceed in dialogue with life as it is emerging. In affirming this, it affirms the need for Christian thought to hold up and speak to the issues which are associated with the new age into which the world is moving.

In general, the new situation calls for a more informed and earnest ethical concern. It confronts the church with the crucial task of developing a deepened moral competence among its members so they may respond to the issues of their time in a way that communicates a authentic Christian witness. The new situation sets the meaning of human life in a new perspective in view of the dehumanizing forces at work. It calls upon the church to develop its understanding of the nature of man, his purpose and potentials, and provide guidance to those who would make the world a humane place to live.

The new situation illustrates dramatically the solidarity of human life. The secular-sacred, spiritual-temporal dichotomies no longer provide a meaningful model by which to understand how life is shaped and lived. The curriculum is called upon to focus on the wholeness of life, acknowledging all the created order as existing under the sovereignty and judgement of God.