People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, but they do not know how to, because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God. . . . We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soon begins to show in their actions. You see it in our whole culture — in the theater of cruelty, in the violence in the streets, in the death of man in art and life.
~Francis A. Schaeffer, Escape from Reason
Sing to the Lord a new song, His praise from the end of the earth, you who go down to the sea, and all that fills it, the coastlands and their inhabitants. Let the desert and its cities lift up their voice, the villages that Kedar inhabits; let the habitants of Sela sing for joy, let them shout from the top of the mountains. Let them give glory to the Lord, and declare His praise in the coastlands. The Lord goes out like a mighty man, like a man of war He stirs up His zeal; He cries out, He shouts aloud, He shows Himself mighty against His foes. For a long time I have held My peace; I have kept still and restrained Myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor; I will gasp and pant. I will lay waste mountains and hills, and dry up all their vegetation; I will turn the rivers into islands, and dry up the pools. And I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, in paths that they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I do, and I do not forsake them. They are turned back and utterly put to shame, who trust in carved idols, who say to metal images, “You are our gods.”
Oh beloved, it is true. We are watching the end of an age. There was a dream, and it was bright and clear and good in so many ways. It was far from perfect, because its script was written by men who were but men. But they were men who were committed to something that most of us are not.
Words meant things
Honor was worth dying for
Truth was esteemed
A gentleman was that
Warriors were often poets
Art was a reflection of common grace
Freedom was the boundary of choice
Love meant good for others.
Now, again, let no one be confused by this fool of a writer. The founders of the United States and of other institutions of the West were flawed. They saw things through lenses that we now – in retrospect – know were wrong. Much of the dualism and deism that fueled the propelling thought of the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries is what has created the trajectory we are on.
But, in the same way, let none of you be confused about this either. There was a nobility to the dream of The West. There was an enormous hope that the goodness G_d had given us could be put to use, and that humanity could somehow rise above the horrible and putrid bogs we had slogged about in for millennia.
I had the opportunity, some twenty years ago, to walk into the Long Room at Trinity College in Dublin. For those of you who don’t know it. The seeds of the Modern Age are in that room. The books that launched the concepts of scientific research and freedom of thought and modern economics are in that room. Along with the beginnings of the technocracy (Newton, Kepler, Pascal, and lesser knowns like Pacioli) are the writings of Shakespeare, John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and Ben Jonson. Artistic thought of DaVinci and Michelangelo is there. Medical insights by Vesalius and Paracelsus are there. All of this, along with the spiritual insights of Teresa of Avila, Fenelon, Guyon, Molinos, Calvin, Luther and others.
It was beautiful. It was beautiful beyond belief. There was this clear sense that nearly all of the writing in that vast-halled library was pointing towards something. It was not about the elevation of mankind. It was about aligning mankind with something that was already in place. Oh, to be sure there was not agreement on What or Who was the centerpoint of alignment, but there was agreement that Truth was much bigger than us.
Somewhere though, in the midst of the 19th century, we listened to something that has taken civilizations out throughout the history of the world. We began to wonder about the reality that truth is so much bigger than us. We listened to our pride and we asked the question: Couldn’t we just figure all of this out, if we just tried hard enough? And we in the West, bit the bait.
It really started to come unhinged, though, about mid-late 18th century in Germany. Tübingen, to be exact. We started to listen more to the rationalists (read simply: those who held that we could think our way to a solution for our problems, rather than look to the solution from a transcendent place) like as John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and G. W. F. Hegel. And we applied this enormously flawed thinking to our understanding of Scripture. Said more simply, we began to distrust the one set of documents that could be trusted.
And this was the beginning that has gotten us to where we are now.
As we careened through the late 1800s and into the 20th century unhitched from Truth, we have headed out into the horribly turbulent waters where the ideas of the origin of the species went from thoughts above, to the pits and bogs of a primordial soup. We have shown our true abilities apart from G_d. We have found that what is within us, apart from transcendent Truth, is only ever-growing movements of death.
WWI
WWII
Communist Purges
Radical Islam
Neoconservatism/Neoliberalism
Eugenics gone wild in abortion.
We, apart from Truth, have extinguished the lives of over 1,300 million souls in the 20th century due to war and politically induced traumas such as torture, famine and starvation. This number also includes the massacre of over 1 billion children through abortion world in the last 50 years. Even so, we are far from convinced that our experiment has failed.
Flash forward to the current day. America is beginning to unravel. Our love has grown cold. We really care little about our own lives, except to shove as much pleasure in our eyes and veins as possible. We spend dozens of billions on drugs and porn and entertainment. We go on crazy, chemical-driven escapades in our cities, and our economy is looking more and more as though it is about to collapse.
We are blaming all of this on things that are nothing more than symptoms of our disease. We cry racism, and bigotry and corruption. And while all of these things are true, they are not the problem. They are the result of our trying to find truth within ourselves, rather than above.
For example, racism is real. Totally real. Terribly and completely real. I have always said this. It has existed in nearly every people group that has ever existed throughout history. Regardless, the real healing will only come when we all – as a group (we the people) – come back under the banner of transcendent Truth. Without this change of heart, America will degrade into a warzone. Even if 90% of guns in America (270 million of the 300 million) are rounded up (a very high estimate of what could be accomplished by govt), we are still going to have 30 million guns… Cops are twitching because they have reasonable fear of the people they stop, acting out violently against them.
People, especially people of color, have reasonable fear of being mortally wounded if they are stopped, so they are more willing to act in ways that are unpredictable and dangerous. This is due to racism in part. AND, this is due to the reality that we as a people have given ourselves over to drugs and violence. Cops watch this. Cops see gang members shooting each other, and shooting at them. Cops see the millions of cases of domestic violence that comes from our choices. …. Without a newfound respect for transcendent Truth (things like life, truth, goodness, virtue, honor, etc.) – no policy will fix this.
No educational programs will eradicate this. We are bearing the bitter fruit of our choices as a culture and a nation. … And our political situation is merely a reflection of our abandoning truth. Our ‘above the law’ elites, like Hillary Clinton, and our bombastic Drumphs are not the cause of our problems, they are the fruit – again – of our beliefs.
So, hopefully the answer is obvious – even if it doesn’t seem to be to the screaming heads on our television sets. I will leave it with one of the guys who helped set the vision for the West. Read and learn beloved.
