Primal Vision And Modernization

Anthropological Approach To Globalisation

Chapter 6: Primal Vision And Modernization

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The Church’s Mission and Post- Modern Humanism by M. M. Thomas

Dr. M.M. Thomas was one of the formost Christian leaders of the nineteenth century. He was Moderator of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches and Governor of Nagaland. An ecumenical theologian of repute, he wrote more than sixty books on Theology and Mission, including 24 theological

commentaries on the books of the bible in Malayalam (the official language of the Indian state of Kerela). This book was jointly published by Christava Sahhya Samhhi (OSS), Tiruvalla, Kerela, and The Indian Society for Promoting Christian

Knowledge (ISPOK), Post Box 1585, Kashmere Gate, Delhi - 110 006, in 1996.

Price Rs. 60. Used by permission of the publisher. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

Chapter 6: Primal Vision And

to critique both the primal and modern visions of human being and society in the light of each other and in the light of the theological vision of God’s purpose for the future of humankind. I do not think that we can get away from the fact that modernity has come to stay and that the task is to humanize it. Any idea of going back to the pattern or world-view of

traditional societies either primal or medieval or even early modern is doing violence to the

historical nature and social becoming of human

beings. Human future both historical and

eschatological is a valid theological category and so is the idea of historical development. Therefore any society we envisage for the human family should be post-modern in nature and form.

The theologies of Creation

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and Redemption point to the newness of the future of humanity. Human

creativity building culture out of nature is inherent in Creation according to

Genesis and this creativity remains an essential

expression of the image of God in human beings

bestowed in creation even when all human creativity has become perverse and come under divine

judgment. And St. Paul interprets the new Adam Jesus Christ as belonging to a higher spiritual order than the original Adam of Paradise. It is therefore not wrong to interpret cosmos itself as a movement from

mechanical matter through organic life to the spiritual human selfhood, and to interpret human history itself as the evolutionary or revolutionary

enlargement of the human selfhood and its spiritual self-determination and its social and cosmic

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responsibility. I should add that such a historical approach is not wrong provided it is clearly understood that self- determination and

responsibility whether in the early or later historical stages, has a tendency to get perverted by the false position of self-

centredness in relation to God and others. So cosmic history does not

experience fall till human beings appear, since

matter, vegetable and animal do not have the spiritual freedom to fall.

And every new stage of growth in creative

selfhood is accompanied by a new fall; and even at the end of history, the New Testament speaks of a Last Judgment before the Kingdom is

established. So in the course of history every growth in spiritual

freedom and responsibility is not a growth from bad to good but from a lower

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capacity for good and evil to a higher capacity for them. And Divine

Redemption is to be

understood as necessary at every stage of the spiritual expansion of the human self-consciousness, more so at the higher stages of self-consciousness.

In this approach, there is a distinction between two theological criteria to evaluate societies. One is in terms of goodness and other in terms of the

intensity of self-

consciousness. Some societies may not have high sense of selfhood and the right of self-

determination, but may show a great measure of social virtues; and others may have high sense of self and its freedom but may show greater

perversity in human

relations. The question is whether we can have some kind of a balance between goodness and self-

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determination in social ordering. It is here that I see the necessity of a synthesis between

tradition and modernity in the development of

peoples in our sinful world. Any society in history will need

structures which balance enhancement of freedom and self-determination with checks on it by long- established legal and moral traditions of keeping power in the service of order and mutual responsibility, as well as creation of new structures of public morality.

Nevertheless it is

important to recognize that God’s vision of the future of humanity is the Community of Persons in which persons have the highest sense of selfhood but are redeemed of self- centredness and therefore are also good and

responsible; and the

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foretaste of it is the

church, the community of people who know

themselves to be forgiven by God through Christ and therefore forgiving one another and growing

towards love which is the mark of perfection, as Col.

3 puts it. The pressure of the church in a society should help reduce the tension between spiritual freedom and social

morality and therefore the influence of the church in society should produce a larger community which also may be spoken as a first fruits of the Future, God intends for human beings.

II

I have given this rather long theological-

sociological introduction because it provides a framework for us to consider the relation between primal and

modern visions of reality

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and society and to see what kind of a spiritual framework will help develop a post-modern society.

The forces of

modernization need not detain us. But I would just mention them, namely the science-based technology which gives power to humans to control and engineer with material, social and even psychic forces to achieve purposes and goals for the future chosen by humans; the revolutionary social

changes produced by the revolts of the poor and the oppressed in all societies;

and the break-up of the traditional religious integration of societies and their reintegration by the State. They have no doubt produced a global society and revolutionized all traditional societies one way or the other Since however modernization has brought with it a good

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deal of dehumanization betraying the promises it held forth, the spiritual vision behind it is now under challenge. The criticisms come from all the traditional visions of society including the primal tradition. Our concern in this study is with the spiritual vision behind modernity and the nature of the critique

which primal vision brings to it and to evaluate the same from a Christian theological view-point and to see how the spiritual vision of post-modern society may incorporate what is valid in it.

The spiritual vision of modernity as we know it in ideology and practice has emphasized three aspects of realty, namely progress through

differentiation and

autonomy of individuality;

the concept of the world as history moving towards the Future through the

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creativity of human

rationality; and the ethos of secularism as the basis of social ordering. At all three levels modern vision challenged and even broke the primal vision.

The primal vision is that of what may be called Undifferentiated Unity.

John Taylor’s Primal Vision, a study of African culture speaks of “a total unbroken unity” of the cosmos as characteristic of African spirituality. In it there is the vision of a spiritual continuum within which the dead and the living, natural objects, spirits and gods, the individual, clan and the tribe, animals, plants,

minerals and humans form an unbroken hierarchical unity of spiritual forces;

and the human self is not an individual self but an extended universal self present and actively

participating in all parts of the totality. This is

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generally descriptive of

the primal vision