Don't miss a new essay entitled 'Mere Christians' by William Wildblood at the Albion Awakening blog.
This has depth and breadth; it is inspiring and en-couraging... just superb!
Over the past few years I have come to regard William as a Christian writer unsurpassed, in my experience, by anyone today.
And he keeps getting better...
'VIsionary Christianity' would be a good title for it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the heads up Bruce. It is a very good post.
ReplyDeleteI think that the problem has to be engaged at a lower level.
ReplyDeleteChristianity doesn't really begin to make sense until you understand what it says at the beginning of Genesis. "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."
Marxism has spread and metastasized into post-modernism, and so there is a historically unprecedented population which does not have the mental framework to understand what this passage means (or rather, what would be fundamentally true regardless of what is meant by a description of it).
I think that too many of us start by taking life as something granted, something which does not need to be explained. Part of this is attributable to the uncritical (and now dogmatic) insistence on the truth value of the theory of evolution through random mutation and natural selection popularized by Darwin. We now have scientific (and even mathematical proof) that the evolutionary utility of random mutation, the only novel element in this theory, is untenable. Evolution requires directed and teleologically oriented change, not random mutation. But by and large this is not popularly understood.
Because people start from the assumption that human life would exist even without God, it is impossible to present the salvation offered by Christ as anything more than "nice if you're into that sort of thing." Which it is...but the contemporary mind follows that with "But I'm sure I can do better by my own lights."
The enormity of this ignorance is impossible to comprehend, especially for those who display it.
@CCL - "We now have scientific (and even mathematical proof) that the evolutionary utility of random mutation, the only novel element in this theory, is untenable. "
ReplyDeleteWhat proof do you mean?
My understanding (from someone who thought that way for several decades) is that proof is irrelevant, because the belief that life *can* arise and differentiate fully *without* direction is a primary metaphysical assumption in modernity; and therefore undisproveable.
I had thought you were aware of it, but what we currently understand about the nature and complexity of the genome allows us to mathematically calculate what experiments (like Mouse Utopia, among others) suggest, that mutation tends so overwhelmingly to devolution that intense natural selection is necessary merely to hold it at bay, it simply cannot produce the successive developments of improved fitness we call evolution.
ReplyDeleteHowever, you are correct that "proof" no longer has any meaning to the post-modernist mindset. On the other hand, it can and should have clear pragmatic meaning to those who are not prone to even modernist thought. We now use the word "practically" to denote what does not meet the false ideal of perfection habitual to the modernist mind, it used to be much less necessary in common usage outside of discussing abstractions.