How Shall We Then Live 7, “The Age of Non-Reason”

The Collapse of Humanistic Certainty

The history of the non-Christian philosophers up until the 18th century went like this. Here is a circle which stands for what the unified and true knowledge of the universe is. Then the next man would say, no, and cross out the circle.

But he then would say, here is the circle. And the next man would say, no, and cross out that circle. Then he would make his circle. And the next man would cross it out and make his circle. This continued through the centuries.

They never found the circle, but they optimistically believed someone would, beginning only from man himself and on the basis of man's reasoning alone. Then the endless row of circles through the centuries and the crossing out were broken.

And a drastic shift came because the humanistic ideal had failed. Humanistic man gave up his optimism for pessimism. He gave up the hope of a unified answer. And this makes modern man who he is. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher from Geneva, he lived in the 18th century.

He thought primitive man, the noble savage, to be superior to civilized man. He felt that the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, the arts and the sciences, caused man to lose more than he gained.

Rousseau saw the constraints of civilization as evils. L 'homme est né libre, et cependant, partout il est dans les fers. Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains. He demanded not just freedom from God or the Bible, but freedom from any kind of restraint.

Freedom from culture, freedom from authority, absolute freedom for the individual. With the individual at the center of the universe. When applied to the individual, his concept led to the bohemian ideal, where the hero was the man who fought all standards and all values and all restraints of society.

When Rousseau applied his concept of autonomous freedom to society, his concept would not function. Whosoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. Rousseau wrote this in 1762.

This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. In other words, tyranny, a tyranny that carried his position to its logical conclusion in the reign of terror of the French Revolution. Robespierre, the king of the terror, genuinely saw himself putting Rousseau's ideas into practice.

Paul Gauguin was a follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his hunt for total freedom, he deserted his family. He went to Tahiti, hoping to find there the noble savage. There he found the ideal of the noble savage to be an illusion.

As he worked on this painting, he also wrote about it. He called it a philosophical work comparable to the gospel. But what a gospel.

Gauguin himself said... Close to the death of an old woman, a strange, stupid bird concludes, whence, what, whither? Oh, sorrow, thou art my master. Fate, how cruel thou art. And always vanquished, I revolt.

What he found in Tahiti was death and cruelty. The man is good by nature, as Rousseau claimed, is no more true a primitive man than a civilized man. When Gauguin finished this painting, he tried to commit suicide, but he did not succeed.

There was one man who well understood the logical conclusion of the deification of nature, the Marquis de Sade. If nature is all, then what is, is right. And nothing more can be said. As nature has made us, the men, the strongest we can do with her, the woman, whatever we please.

The inevitable result was his cruelty to women. Thus, there was no basis for either morals or law. Let me dwell for a moment on the Dutch Reformation painters, who so rejoicingly painted the simple things of life.

They knew that nature was created by a personal and a good God. But they also knew because of the fall, man's revolt against God, that nature as it is now is abnormal. That is a very different thing than taking nature as it is now and making it the measure of goodness.

Because when this is done, there is no difference between cruelty and non-cruelty. Even at the time of Rousseau and his followers, the two concepts of total freedom and of everything including man being part of one big machine could no longer be kept together.

Rousseau's position of man's total freedom collides with the position that on the basis of man's reason alone, everything including man is part of one big machine. The two positions just couldn't be kept united.

Existentialism and the Flight from Reason

Later, the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and George Wilhelm Hegel and the Danish Soren Kierkegaard wrestled with the problem of the unity of reason on one hand and on the other hand, meaning and values.

But they did not solve the problem. Humistic man, beginning only from himself, has concluded that he is only a machine. Humanistic man has no place for a personal God, but there is also no place for man's significance as man, no place for love, no place for freedom.

Man is only a machine, but the men who hold this position could not and cannot live like machines. If they could, modern man would not have his tensions, either in his intellectual position or in his life, but he can't.

And so they must leap away from reason to try to find something which gives meaning to their lives, to life itself, even though to do so they deny their reason. Once this is done, any type of thing could be put there because in the area of non-reason, reason gives no basis for a choice.

This is the hallmark of modern man. How did it happen? It happened because proud humanistic man, though he was finite, insisted in beginning only from himself and from what he could learn without other knowledge.

He did not succeed. Perhaps the best known of the existential philosophers was John Paul Sartre. He used to spend much time here in Paris at the Durmago. His position is that in the area of reason, everything is absurd, but that one can defenicate himself, that is, give validity to his existence by an act of the will.

With Sartre's position, one can equally help an old woman across the street. Or run her down. Reason was not involved, and there was nothing to show the direction that this authentication by an act of the will should take.

But Sartre himself could not live consistently with his own position.

...addressed to the President of the International Court of War Crimes by President O 'Keemene.

At a certain point, he signed the Algerian Manifesto. Which declared that the Algerian war was a dirty war. This action meant man could use his reason to decide some things were right and some things were wrong.

And so he destroyed his own system. Karl Jaspers, a German existentialist, tended to have the greatest impact on the thought and life form which followed existential thought. According to him, we may have some huge experience, which gives us the hope that perhaps there is a meaning to life, even though our reason tells us that life is absurd.

He calls this a final experience. Martin Heidinger was another existential philosopher who said that the answer was in the area of non-reason. The German philosopher said there is something he called angst.

A general feeling of anxiety one feels in the universe. This feeling, this mood of anxiety, revealed existence. And this imposes on us a call for decision. Out of this mood comes meaning to life and to choice.

Even against one's reason. Meaning which rests on nothing more than this vague feeling of anxiety. So nebulous it doesn't even have a specific object. As Martin Heidinger grew older, this view became too weak for him, so he changed his position.

Existentialism as a form of philosophy has all but disappeared. But more and more people are thinking this way, even if they do not know the name existentialism. To them, reason leads to pessimism. And so they try to find an answer in something totally separated from reason.

Drugs, Eastern Religion, and the Occult as Alternatives to Reason

Aldous Huxley, the English philosopher and writer, proposed drugs as a solution. According to him, we should give drugs to healthy people. By means of the drug experience, they could then find truth inside their own heads anytime they wished.

What was left for Huxley and his followers was truth inside man's own head. To them, objective truth was gone. The drug culture and the mentality that went with it, had its own vehicle which crossed the frontiers of the world, which were otherwise almost impassable by other means of communication.

This record became the rallying cry of many of the young people throughout the whole world. It expressed the essence of their lives, their thoughts, and their feelings. Later came psychedelic rock, an attempt to find this experience without drugs.

The younger people, and the older ones, tried drug taking, but then turned to the Eastern religions. Both drugs and the Eastern religions seek truth inside one's own head, in negation of reason. The central reason for the popularity of Eastern religions in the West is a hope for non-rational meaning to life and values.

The reason young people turn to the Eastern religions and so on is simply the fact, as we have said, and that is that man, having moved into the area of non-reason, you can put anything up there. And the heart of the Eastern religion is a denial of reason, just exactly as the idealistic drug taking was.

And so the turning to the Eastern religions today fits exactly into the modern existential methodology, the existential thinking of modern man, of trying to find some optimistic hope in the area of non-reason, when he's given up hope on a humanistic basis, of finding any kind of unifying answer to life, any meaning to life in the answer of reason.

Though demons do not fit into modern man's conclusions, on the basis of his reason, many modern people feel that even demons are better than everything in the universe, being only one big machine. People put the occult in the area of non-reason, in the hope of some kind of meaning, even if it is a horrendous kind of meaning.

One must feel as a Christian a real sorrow for these people. But as far as the blame is concerned, we must understand these people who have turned to this are not to blame. They must bear their own kind of blame of individual choices.

But basically they're not to blame. The Church is to blame, because the Church, with its liberal theology, has left a vacuum. Man, beginning from himself alone, was now expressed and taught in theology and in theological language.

Liberal Theology, Historical Jesus, and the Bible as Truth

In the Renaissance, men had attempted to mix Aristotle and Plato with Christianity. This new theology was an attempt to combine the rationalism of the Enlightenment with Christianity. It is often called religious liberalism.

It was embarrassed by the supernatural and often denied it entirely. For example, the resurrection of Christ from the dead. But it tried to hold on to a historical Jesus by sifting out from the New Testament all those supernatural elements which the New Testament taught about Jesus.

This attempt came to a climax with Albert Schweitzer's famous book, Quest of the Historical Jesus. It failed. It failed to rid the New Testament account of the supernatural and still keep an historic Christ.

The historic Jesus could not be separated from the supernatural events connected with him in the New Testament. History and the supernatural are too interwoven in the New Testament. If one kept any of the historical Jesus, one had to keep some of the supernatural.

If one got rid of all the supernatural, one had no historical Jesus. We should remember Schweitzer's humanitarianism in Africa. His genius as an organist and his expertise concerning Bach. But unhappily, we must remember his place in the theological stream as well.

After the failure of the older theological liberalism, Karl Barth stepped into the vacuum. He held the higher critical views concerning the Bible. That is, that the Bible has many mistakes. But he taught that a religious word could break through from it.

This was the theological form of existentialism after existentialism had been accepted in its secular form. Thus, one more thing was added to the area of non-reason along with all the other things that had been put there.

In another way, we must have admiration for the Swiss Karl Barth. Because while he was teaching in Germany, he spoke out clearly against Nazism in his Barman Declaration of 1934. The teaching of Barth led to those theologians who said that the Bible isn't true in the areas of science and history.

But they nevertheless looked for a religious experience from it. And for many adherents of this theology, the Bible does not give absolutes in regard to what is right or wrong either. Before you even come to the Bible and begin to read it, one must realize there are two ways to read the Bible.

One is just one more religious thing among thousands of other religious things, which really are nothing more than another form of trick, not very, very different, actually, from a drug trick. The other way is to understand that the Bible is truth.

And as such, what we're listening to is something that is completely contrary to what we hear about us on every side, namely merely statistical averages, relativistic things. Now, having said this, then I'd have to guard myself for the simple reason that it doesn't mean a person has to believe all this before he can begin to read the Bible and find truth in the Bible.

I would just say in passing, I was not raised in a Christian family, and I was reading much philosophy when I was a young man, and I didn't read the Bible because I believed it was true. I read it to simply have an intellectual honesty.

But I did do one thing. I read it exactly the way it was written, beginning with Genesis 1 -1 and going right on. I read it the same way I would read another book, expecting that what was being given was a straightforward statement of what was meant, and that it wasn't to be read in a different level than I would read in the area of another kind of book.

And as I read it, it answered the questions which already by that time I realized the humanistic philosophy couldn't answer, and over a six-month period, I came to conclude that it was truth. But nevertheless, we must keep in the back of our mind, how are we reading the Bible?

Just as another religious trip? Or am I really wrestling with the question of what is given in all the areas of which it speaks? Is this truth compared to merely relativism? The new liberal theologian has no answer for the existence of evil, and thus they're left with the same problem as the Hindu philosophers.

Everything that is, is a part of God. This is Kali, the Eastern Hindu feminine representation of God. Why the fangs and the skulls? In Eastern religious thought, cruelty is ultimately the same as non-cruelty, because everything that now is, is part of that which has always been, a part of what they call God.

Modern humanistic man has come to the same awful place, a place in which it is not possible to know what is right and what is wrong, nor why we should choose non-cruelty rather than cruelty. Professor Paul Tillich of Harvard was one of the outstanding neo-orthodox liberal theologians.

A student who was present told me that when Professor Tillich was lecturing in Santa Barbara just before his death, someone said to him, Sir, do you pray? And he said, No, but I meditate. He was left only with the word God.

With no certainty that there was anything more than just a word, the God is dead theologians, which followed Tillich, concluded logically that if they are only left with the word God, they might as well cross out the word.

But for these theologians, even if they do not say God is dead, for them certain things are dead. All content about God is dead, and all assurance of knowledge about a personal God is dead. Because for them, God has not given to people truth about himself in the Bible and in the revelation in Christ.

That is, truth about himself which may be expressed in propositions in normal language. All they're left with is religious words without content, but with that emotion that certain religious words still brings with them, and that is all.

And here is what comes next. These highly motivational religious words out of our religious past, but separated from the content which the Bible originally gave them, are now used for manipulation. Manipulation in such areas as a change in sexual ethic, but also legal and political manipulation.

If God is dead, if content about God is dead, if the knowledge of a personal God who has not been silent, but has given us truth is dead, then everything for which God gives an answer and meaning is dead as well.

And yet, people, no matter who they say they are, cry out for meaning and values. And this place of tension is where modern man has come, upon his humanist base, and this is where he is. When we think of Christ, of course we think of his substitutionary death upon the cross, when he who claimed to be God died in a substitutionary way.

And as such, his death had infinite value. And as we accept that gift, raising the empty hands of faith and accepting it with no humanistic elements, we have that which is real life, and that is in being in relationship to the infinite personal God who is there, and being in a personal relationship to him.

But Christ brings life in another way that often is not as clearly thought about, perhaps, and that is that he connects himself with what the Bible teaches in his teaching. And as such, he is a prophet as well as a saviour, and it's upon the basis of what he taught and the Bible teaches, because he himself wraps these together, that we have life instead of death, in the sense of having some knowledge that is more than man can have from himself, beginning from himself alone.

Both of these elements are the place where Christ gives us life.