Letter to the Editor

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The Nov. 17 CRIMSON report of the first Noble Lecture has so thoroughly misrepresented a profound and perceptive message as to make the lecture appear ludicrous. Your reporter's utter lack of comprehension would indicate that the article's absurdity is unintentional. Had he merely taken the thirty seconds necessary to read the printed outline of the lecture provided for everyone in the audience, he could scarcely have produced the disjointed, self-contradictory article that we find on this morning's front page.

Bishop Newbigin, who has spent twenty-two years in India as a missionary, and has thought deeply about the meaning of his experiences, dealt with massive tidal movements of society in our time, only one of which is the repudiation, implicit or explicit, of the Christian faith by most members of western society. This declaration, on which you have based your headline and lead sentence, can be understood only in the context of the entire lecture. Further, that a Harvard reporter can state in one paragraph, "He called for a return to a cyclical religion," and two paragraphs later report that Bishop Newbigin "further observed that modern western society cannot have the cyclical, chronological view point found in the East," is almost beyond belief. The article's final sentence, while like most of the others it is highly distorted, indicates that your staff member did remain in the church to the end of the lecture and serves further to point up his complete failure to grasp any of the lecturer's meaning.

Contrary to the impression given by your article, Bishop Newbigin's lecture was carefully outlined and followed a logical progression. He began by considering the ending of the centuries-old movement of western culture into the rest of the world, referring most of his remarks to India, the country he knows so well. The eastern cultures have now asumed the western, and are facing the world with a new serenity and sureness of their own position. Nehru, for instance, is now saying that all things are ours, whether ancient or modern, eastern or western.

At the same time, the white races have largely discredited themselves in the eyes of the rest of the world. The assumption of western ethical superiority has been shattered in the Asian mind by two world wars and the experience of western motion pictures. To the eastern peoples, we stand for war, sex, and technics; they want none of the first two, but they do want our technics; and not solely for the raising of living standards, but more significantly, because western technical culture is considered to be the world civilization of our time. They see this technical culture as a detachable product of western society. In their thinking, to assume our technics is not to re-submit to western domination, but rather to keep abreast of world civilization.

Meanwhile, the Christian faith, which in the West has given birth to this scientific culture, is now denied or tacitly ignored by most western men. At the moment when our western culture has penetrated all the world, that culture has disintegrated. The absolutes on which people base their lives are no longer those provided by Christian faith; this at the same time that our scientific culture has become the property of all nations. Thus emerges the general question with which the lectures are to deal: what is the relation of Christianity to this world civilization? The remainder of this first lecture had as its stated purpose an analysis of the new world civilization itself.

At first sight there is nothing particularly Christian about a physics formula. But the scientific world civilization is more than abstract thought. It consists of a body of knowledge, its systematization, the multiplication of tools and implements for using the knowledge, and an implicit belief that human life can and ought to be changed. This last aspect requires that human history be seen as a linear, irrversible movement, and is therefore opposed to the deeply-rooted belief of eastern religions in a cyclical theory of change in human experience. Further, can science, which has grown up in the Christian notion of love for the whole material world as God's Creation, co-exist with the eastern religious view that the visible world is an illusion?

Portions of India have traditionally used a calendar figured in 60-year cycles. But now India is undertaking 5-year plans, and this project is based on the belief that after twelve such plans the country will not have returned circle to her present condition. Thus the cyclical calendar is being replaced, of necessity, by a chronological (which is not synonymous with cyclical, as your article so erroneously implies), dated Anno Domini, as the scientific world civilization overtakes India. Perhaps this fact is symbolic; the lectures will attempt to show that it is.

Thus two facts present themselves: 1) the idea of purposive change must eventually destroy the eastern religions or be strangled by them; and 2) this idea of linear, purposive movement is based in the Christian faith, in which western culture has been grounded.

Both Russia and Japan started programs of technical advancement by rejecting Christianity; and in the process they had to set up new absolutes. In Russia the idea of the Kingdom of God was transformed into the vision of the classless society; Japan instituted emperor-worship and the messianic mission of the Japanese people. Bishop Newbigin believes that technical culture is not religiously neutral. If it does not keep its roots in the Christian faith, it will have to find a new absolute, and will become demonic.

The very idea of a secular realm is a Christian notion; saecula, or age, rests on the Biblical doctrine of the Creation as having a provisional independence over against the God Who created it. In the Christian revelation, a new saecula has dawned, which shows us what this world it.

If the idea of a new order lying in the future assumes the Marxist or Nazi forms, for example, the power of the true new age is confused with elements of the old, and we witness the demonic power of all idolatrous thought. The New Testament conception of the Antichrist--a false messiah of this world pretending to power of the world to come--is here relevant. In the lectures we are attempting to understand our age in terms of New Testament faith. The idea of purposive change, basic to science, derives its moving force from the Christian doctrine of the Kingdom of God. In our days we have a secularization of the Christian eschatology.

There has never before been such a reality of world history as there is today. Areas which heretofore have had no real history as such, and tribal-centered areas, are being drawn irreversibly into the mainstream of world history.

The world civilization will inevitably raise in eastern lands the question: What is the destiny of man?--and therefore, What are the absolutes on which life is to be based? The coming of Christ was the coming of an absolute, which men must accept, or find another. The new world civilization must eventually center itself around Christ or Antichrist. And interpreting from the New Testament, there is hope that Christ will be the center.  Pat Henry '6