13AR18-33

( - previous page - )

Apologia Report 18:33 (1,169)

September 5, 2013

Subject: A personal ethic of authenticity, a liturgy of inwardness

In this issue:

ATHEISM - survey reveals that something greater than the "New Atheists" has long been at work to turn young people from the gospel

ISLAM - a book about how dreams draw Muslims to faith in Christ

MORALITY - "passive nihilism" and "the power of now"

------

ATHEISM

"Listening to Young Atheists" by Larry Alex Taunton -- "The non-profit I direct, Fixed Point Foundation <www.fixed-point.org> ... launched a nationwide campaign to interview college students who are members of Secular Student Alliances (SSA) or Freethought Societies (FS). These college groups are the atheist equivalents to Campus Crusade: They meet regularly for fellowship, encourage one another in their (un)belief, and even proselytize. They are people who are not merely irreligious; they are actively, determinedly irreligious.

"To our surprise, we received a flood of enquiries. Students ranging from Stanford University to the University of Alabama-Birmingham, from Northwestern to Portland State volunteered to talk to us. The rules were simple: Tell us your journey to unbelief. It was not our purpose to dispute their stories or to debate the merits of their views. Not then, anyway. We just wanted to listen to what they had to say. And what they had to say startled us. ...

"Here is what we learned:

"They had attended church

"The mission and message of their churches was vague

"Most of our participants had not chosen their worldview from

ideologically neutral positions at all, but in reaction to Christianity. Not Islam. Not Buddhism. Christianity.

"These students heard plenty of messages encouraging 'social justice,' community involvement, and 'being good,' but they seldom saw the relationship between that message, Jesus Christ, and the Bible.

...

"They felt their churches offered superficial answers to life's difficult questions

"They expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously

"Ages 14-17 were decisive

"When our participants were asked to cite key influences in their conversion to atheism - people, books, seminars, etc. - we expected to hear frequent references to the names of [anti-supernaturalist celebrities known as] the 'New Atheists.' We did not. Not once."

What Taunton and company received amounts to an unintended rebuke for the entire Body of Christ: "[T]hese students were, above all else, idealists who longed for authenticity, and having failed to find it in their churches, they settled for a non-belief that, while less grand in its promises, felt more genuine and attainable. I again quote [one

respondent]: 'Christianity is something that if you really believed it, it would change your life and you would want to change [the lives] of others. I haven't seen too much of that.'" The Atlantic, Jun 6 '13, <www.ow.ly/omxT3>

Will not these final lines echo the cries of the condemned as they accuse the lukewarm at the climax of history?

---

ISLAM

Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World?, by Tom Doyle [1] -- in his review, Scott Hedley, "a research associate working with a Muslim language group in Asia," begins by explaining that "I was very interested in the subject of this book since I have personally met Muslims who have become more interested in Jesus as a result of dreams. ...

"I made an observation about dreams ... and Tom Doyle's book supports this observation: God doesn't lead Muslims to a saving knowledge of him through dreams alone; God uses dreams to make Muslims more curious about Jesus. Then, God leads each Muslim to a believer in Christ who will then help him or her come to the point of following Jesus as Lord and Savior. ...

"Doyle's book is broken down into twenty-three short chapters. Almost every chapter contains one or more dreams from countries in the Middle East and North Africa and beyond.

"I was especially encouraged by Doyle's second chapter, 'The Imam and the Gun,' in which he reveals that there are several imams (Muslim religious leaders) who have become followers of Christ in a certain Middle Eastern country." Evangelical Missions Quarterly, 49:2 - 2013, pp369-371.

A widely circulated, multi-language video series vividly portrays this phenomenon - see <www.morethandreams.org>.

---

MORALITY

Contrast perspectives of "authenticity" in our first item (above) with the following. In this essay on the New York Times' "Opinionator" page, its authors - using simple secular common sense - become fed-up with the self-serving nonsense lauded by popular culture. "The Gospel According to 'Me'" by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster begins: "The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! ... The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be connected! Achieve well-being!

"Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another - abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. ...

"[A] postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and 'becoming who you are' fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith - and certainly not feelings of guilt. ...

"This is the phenomenon that one might call, with an appreciative nod to Nietzsche, passive nihilism. Authenticity is its dominant contemporary expression. ... Authenticity, needing no reference to anything outside itself, is an evacuation of history. The power of now.

"This ideology functions prominently in the contemporary workplace, where the classical distinction between work and nonwork has broken down. ...

"Work is no longer a series of obligations to be fulfilled for the sake of sustenance: it is the expression of one's authentic self. ...

"But here's the rub: if one believes that there is an intimate connection between one's authentic self and glittering success at work, then the experience of failure and forced unemployment is accepted as one's own fault. I feel shame for losing my job. I am morally culpable for the corporation's decision that I am excess to requirements.

"To take this one step further: the failure of others is explained by their merely partial enlightenment for which they, and they alone, are to be held responsible. At the heart of the ethic of authenticity is a profound selfishness and callous disregard of others. As the ever-wise Buddha says, 'You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.'

"A naïve belief in authenticity eventually gives way to a deep cynicism. A conviction in personal success that must always hold failure at bay becomes a corrupt stubbornness that insists on success at any cost. ...

"This search is an obsession that is futile at best and destructive at worst. ... When the values of Judeo-Christian morality have been given a monetary and psychological incarnation - as in credit, debt, trust, faith and fidelity - can they exist as values? Is the prosperous self the only God in which we believe in a radically inauthentic world?"

The authors conclude with evidence showing how our culture has turned moral history on its head. "In 'Hamlet,' Shakespeare puts the mantra of authenticity into the mouth of the ever-idiotic windbag Polonius in his advice to his son, Laertes: 'To thine own self be true.' This is just before Polonius sends a spy to follow Laertes to Paris and tell any number of lies in order to catch him out. ...

"We dare say that we love 'Hamlet' not for its representation of our purportedly sublime authenticity, but as a depiction of the drama of our radical inauthenticity that, in the best of words and worlds, shatters our moral complacency." New York Times, Jun 29 '13, <www.ow.ly/oqKWc>

-------

SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World?, by Tom Doyle (Thomas Nelson, 2012, paperback: 288 pages) <www.ow.ly/orKAQ>

--------

( - next issue - )