Progress and Spiritual Angst.

As I was reading J.H. Bavinck's An Introduction to the Science of Missions for Missiology last night, I ran across an interesting quote. Bavinck is in the midst of discussing the perils of missionaries acting as bearers of culture, and more widely the impact that western culture has had on many of the developing nations. Missionaries can be unwitting accomplices to the process of acculturation: the developing world desires to live like and be like the western world, since the standard of life in the western world is better than anything they have experienced before.

Here is what Bavinck wrote that caught my attention:

• "Much of the restlessness and spiritual conflict that is characteristic of our present day world can be traced to the speed with which the process of cultural change is taking place." (p. 105)

What he is saying is that in most of the world, if not all of it, there has been great progress in terms of technology and economics, but this has not been matched by a progress in the religious core of people's lives.

This is probably more evident in the developing world than it is here in the western world, where we make all the progress. In many countries, there is still much of the old life, the old religions, the old beliefs, that play a role in people's lives. There is still, for example, a belief in animism, that everything has a spirit, and that these must be appeased or else bad things will happen. But in terms of economic and technological progress, people are living very differently than even their parents did. They build better houses, manage their fields better, have better medicine, and in many ways live like we in the west do, but they do not have the same 'inner progress' that the west had. They live like the west, but still have their non-western soul, so to speak.

Part of the problem, Bavinck writes, is the west itself. Not even simply that the west pushes or pushed itself onto other cultures in a fit of cultural-egoism, but also the fact that we in the west, we who have made this progress, are ourselves not able to handle the pace at which things progress. We are, in a sense, victims of our own success. Bavinck writes that the west is unprepared to give answers to the questions it raises, since "The West itself felt confused, bewildered, even despondent, anxious and unsure. ... The Western world itself had fallen prey to despair and meaninglessness." (p. 105-106)

Bavinck wrote this book in 1954, and now in 2006, this is all the more true. Everywhere we look, we can see the result of our 'spiritual orphanism'--the West has gotten rid of God, and anything that science cannot explain, and has put nothing in its place. It is hollow, and the speedy progress of technology, science, economies, etc., give people the feeling of being something, of being filled with something, but it is just the trappings, the icing covering the cake. Again, we have becomes victims of our own success.

There are many implications to this thought, especially for believing Christians, and even more especially for ministers and missionaries. But I lack the time to get into them here. I will conclude by mentioning a book that these thoughts reminded me of. When I was in high school, Mr. Smit, in any of his classes, would generally mention E.F. Schumacher's book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. I own the book, but have not yet read it. But the basic principle that Schumacher argues for is sustainable progress. Progress for the sake of progress is destroying people's inner lives, their spiritual lives. What we need to do is to take each step slowly, so that we can realize the impact that it will have on our lives, on our society, and on the world as a whole. As it is now, by the time that we realize how something impacts our life, and what it means, we are a generation behind. We can barely, if at all, keep our heads above the waters of our own progress.

Not that I am advocating rejecting all progress. But I think that we need to do some serious thinking, and some serious soul-searching, to bring our inner lives onto at least the same level as our 'outer lives.'

I also hope to write more on this if I have the time to think it through some more, but time is a rare and precious commodity here at the College, so this might just be the extent of my thoughts on the subject for now.