Man At The Crossroads I: The Practical Atheism of the Modern World

Last updated on: July 14, 2008 at 11:11 am by Henry Karlson

Man At The Crossroads I: The Practical Atheism of the Modern World 2008-07-14T11:11:41-05:00 Henry Karlson

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The world is undergoing a radical shift in its economic, political, and social hierarchies, and it is quite important for Christians to realize this and take the opportunity being given to them before it is too late for them to do so. If we wait too long, our next opportunity to help humanity might be in the far future, after a new barbarism has taken over the world. For quite some time, we have lived in a purely secular world, in society which, more or less, exists as a kind of practical atheism. “Since we are more concerned with economic and political questions, religious beliefs no longer mean anything to us.”[1]Recently the pure, positivist rationalism of modernism has found itself overturned, for the good, by the post-moderns. It is time for Christians to take post-modernism’s reaction to modernism to heart. We must join our voices with it. We must overcome modern scientism, positivism, and pure unbridled rationalism. We know, with the post-moderns, that humanity is not the measure of all things. No matter what, we will never be able to comprehend the universe by ourselves. Post-modernism has shown how subjective and imperfect so-called rationalistic approaches to the world have been, and must always be. We must re-establish an open-ended worldview, one which allows for ever-increasing understanding of the world, but also one which realizes we will never comprehend truth by ourselves. It must be one which not only accepts reason, but also the limits of reason. It must allow for positive revelation from those who are outside ourselves, from those greater than ourselves; that is, ultimately, it must be one which no longer sees humanity as the high end of creation, but one which sees humanity for what it is, both great and yet limited, capable of understanding much, but never comprehending the absolute. It must allow for the fact that others can know or comprehend better than us, and if they reveal something, we should listen to them. In this way it will be one, in the end, which has a place for God in the picture, but also one which allows God to be God, to be free to reveal and interact with us as God wishes, at God’s prerogative, not ours.

As Pope Benedict has expressed many times, the current situation we find ourselves in, all that is good and all that is bad within it, can only be understood as the end product of the age of revolutions (American, French, Russian, Chinese, et. al.). Of course, these revolutions were more than mere political revolutions; behind them was the massive paradigm shift of the Enlightenment, creating a new hermeneutical lens in which humanity experienced itself in the world. The philosophies which came out of the Enlightenment were secular in nature; they took the Renaissance’s glorification of humanity to a new end, where humanity was seen as self-sufficient in and of itself. To become the true master of the world, humanity needed to live in and of itself; all that it could understand and comprehend was to be followed, what it could not prove by reason alone was to be questioned or outright rejected. “These philosophies are characterized by their positivist – and therefore anti-metaphysical- character, so that ultimately there is no place for God in them. They are based on a self-limitation of the positive reason that is adequate in the technological sphere but entails a mutilation of man if it is generalized. The result is that man no longer accepts any moral authority apart from his own calculations.”[2] It’s easy to see how this leads to the secular state where God has no place in it. Humanity has rejected God’s place in the world; it tried to create a world in its own image and to become its God, instead of God’s steward. “Hence can be seen the great meaning of the negative [or] the Western development, the great purpose of Western civilization. It represents the complete and logical falling away of the human, natural forces from the divine beginning, their exclusive assertion, the striving to found the edifice of universal culture upon themselves.”[3]Or, as Pope Benedict states it, “In the realm of ideas, this meant that the sacred foundation for history and for the existence of the State was rejected; history was no longer gauged on the basis of an idea of a preexistent God who shaped it; the State was henceforth considered in purely secular terms, founded on reason and on the will of the people.”[4]

Sure, some might say they believe in God, but it becomes apparent that they remove God’s active participation from the world and only give lip-service to God in the hopes that God will reward them in some secondary, non-earthly existence.[5]Religion as a whole is suffering in our world, in part because of how it has been transformed from a communal world view into a search for an individual’s own meaning for their own lives at the expense of others. God enters into the lives of the common folk only to validate their desires, to provide a personal feelingthat “all that I do is fine.” Save for those few moments of praise they give back to this feeling, they live their lives unaffected by God, and indeed, for the most part live contrary to the way God has told them to live. They don’t care. God has no control or authority in the world. And religion in the world is just one of many things in the marketplace of ideas. We can practice religion as we wish, just as we can choose the kind of food we want to eat. And if we grow tired of one spiritual meal, there is always another we can try. Sadly, manly religious thinkers pander to this, disgracing the very name of religion, as Vladimir Solovyov pointed out over a century ago: “Contemporary religion represents a very pitiful thing: properly speaking, religion as the dominating principle, as the centre of spiritual attraction, does not exist today; instead, there is the so-called religiosity as a personal mood, a personal taste: some people have this taste, others do not, just like some people like music and others do not.”

People tend to feel that their lives are good enough as it is, or whatever improvements are needed, they can do on their own. They can lead successful lives without having to bring God into what they do.

How did we get to this situation? It is to this which we must turn next.

Footnotes

[1]Paul Evdokimov. Ages of the Spiritual Life. Trans,. Sister Gertrude. Revised by Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 21.
[2]Joseph Ratzinger. Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. Trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), 40
[3]Vladimir Solovyov. Lectures on Godmanhood. Trans. Peter Zouboff (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd, 1948), 75
[4]Joseph Ratzinger. Europe: Today and Tomorrow. Trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), 20-1
[5] Such gnostic thinking prevails with many Christians today. They do not understand that the incarnation has practical effects upon this world, upon all creation, and that the cosmos, just like us, is being transformed in Christ. They have no problems abusing the world, thinking it is meant to be our plaything. They think we will discard it as we enter the kingdom of God, forgetting that we pray for the kingdom of God to be on earth as it is in heaven. Believing that the world has no lasting significance, they reject their duty to it, and fail to be a good steward over creation. They have become the wicked servant who will find themselves rebuffed for what they have done.
[6]Vladimir Solovyov. Lectures on Godmanhood, 67

Henry Karlson

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