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God, Man, and the Millennium
| Article
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17443 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1990 |
4,375 Words |
| Author
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Carl F.H. Henry
Carl F.H. Henry, an evangelical theologian, is the author of
more than thirty books, among them The Uneasy Conscience of
Modern Fundamentalism and the six-volume work God, Revelation,
and Authority. |
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
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