“My own mind is my own church.”
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794
The Scientific Revolution of the 1500’s and 1600’s gave birth to the “Age of Enlightenment” in the mid 1600’s to the late 1700’s. During the Enlightenment the masses began using the scientific method, the way of reason and rationality, as tools of cultural formation. The United States was born because of enlightenment thinking. The Declaration of Independence and US Constitution emerged from the minds of people who wholly believed in reason over magic and superstition. Some of the founders even held rationality and logic as superior to religious faith.
The Enlightenment age led to the Romantic Era (Mid/Late 1800’s to Early 1900’s) which gave way to the Modern Era (1900’s to Mid/Late 1900’s) and then post-Modernism (Late 1900’s to Now). Each era contains remnants of the ones that came before. Over time, major ideas of the former eras die-off while some are kept. We find that today’s thinking has become an “ala carte” venture with smatterings of past thought intermixed with current cultural experience.
The above quote by Thomas Paine is a great example. As people in the new millennium dive deeper into their lived experiences for meaning and identity, we see Paine’s point playing out. We see people worshipping at a “church” of their own mind. They fall in love with, or perhaps despise, their own thoughts, seeking to express, and be affirmed for what flows from their mental altars. At the same time, reason and logic are tossed aside as they arrive at “authentic selves” which often do not match up with facts and reason. Paine’s rejection of God is present in today’s minds while magic and superstition remain; all wrapped in a tight cloak of rationalization over rationalism. They might quote “science” while using none of the scientific method. They might mention evolution while ignoring the engines of Darwin’s theory. For a rational person, it looks like madness. But it’s the grim result of lives spent untethered from concrete meaning which has led to our own 21st Century self-determination. Our fellow human beings truly believe they are creating their own worlds.
We know that culture has largely left enlightenment thinking when our publicly elected officials begin not only affirming these created identities but promoting them as moral, legislating in their favor and enforcing the subsequent laws against detractors. The Enlightenment promised eyes opened and awakened minds to the rational truths surrounding all people. Now that the Enlightenment tenets of reason and logic are dying in American culture, we watch as the blind lead the blind from their corrupted minds to ruinous ends for all who follow them.
What’s a Christian to do?
Christianity has survived every emergence of philosophy and debate since Christ ascended. Belief in the Lord God advanced century to century before the birth of Jesus as the Israelites faced kings, kingdoms, war, exile, and devastation. This is due to what each generation of human beings has come to believe as the foundation of real salvation under God. The endurance of the Christian view of the world begins in one place. There is one God. This God is Lord. This God is Savior. What spans human history, age to age, is the knowledge of and belief in the God of the Bible. Following the fault line of faith in the one true God through the years, we find believers in each generation not just a part of philosophy, art, music, science, medicine, and education, but as pioneers in all disciplines.
The culture will sway proclaiming brave new boundaries broken and “new selves” revealed to the rest of the world. We must remember the human struggle is age old and has not changed. It’s always been the opposite of a staring contest between God and people. He’s desperate to catch our gaze, while we repeatedly look away. God has revealed Himself in each generation of recorded history to the creatures He’s made. But these creatures have decided they’d rather be Him than serve and worship Him. We’d rather be the creators of worlds than subject to the one who’s created the world.
The statements of liberation and independence we hear in culture are nothing new, therefore as human thinking allegedly progresses, we find ourselves still limited, still stuck in what we are. We try to define ourselves by what we do or how we are, yet we find that we are nothing more than we’ve always been, God’s wayward children that He’s calling home. And God, He’s still God, He’s still in control and He’s reaching for all in every era through Jesus Christ.