Dr. Angus MenugeGrand Reunion, 2012 – Columbia, IL

Transcript (edited for readability).

Thank you, Bev, and thank you so much for having me here. Tonight's presentation is going to be about naming the beast, the problem of what I'm going to call post-Christian Christianity. Now, there's a paradox for you. And then I hope that tomorrow we will be able to talk about how we can address this problem.

What I mean by post-Christian Christianity is simply that we're seeing increasingly that non-Christian ideas are reshaping the Christian faith from within, because, well, that's what works for me. We've all heard phrases like "cafeteria Christianity." And if you saw the last issue of Lutheran Witness, it was especially devoted to that. I think that's a positive, that basket — believe it your way. Doctrines being dissolved: not the way, the truth, and the life, but my way, my truth, and my life. And even to the point of embracing clear contradictions. All of this unsurprisingly leads to conflict within the soul, and hence in the family, the state, and the church.

So what kind of faith would you like? The Burger King spirituality, you might say. Have it your way. Or your best life now, as our friend Joel Osteen likes to say.

So the way I'm going to look at this is to see it as a kind of pathology. What are the symptoms that show we really have a problem? Is this just an extremist reaction, or is it a real problem? If it is, what's the diagnosis — what should we call this sickness? Then, what are the roots of the malaise? Where does it come from in modern and postmodern ideas? And what are its implications, so that we see this is not just an intellectual matter, but it affects people where they live. Many of you are much better qualified than I when it comes to the counseling and pastoral concern for individuals, and that — especially tomorrow — is where I'm going to very much want your input. How do we address this where we live?

All right, so let's start with the symptoms of the malaise. I'm just going to begin with a couple of anecdotes. This one I saved in my files because it was so outrageous: eclecticism — you pick and choose a bit of what you fancy, and inconsistency and contradictions don't matter. The redoubtable Reverend Ann Holmes Redding — she's Episcopal, an Episcopal priest — said, "I am both a Muslim and a Christian, just like I'm both an American of African descent and a woman. I'm one hundred percent both." Now, people who study things like theology make a few observations: Christian teaching says God is triune; Islam rather strongly and absolutely and totally denies that. Jesus is the Son of God, Christianity claims; Islam says he's only a great prophet. Christ was crucified for us, Christianity claims; Islam says no, that was just the way it was made to seem — it couldn't really happen, because in Islam Allah would not allow his prophet to be dishonored. Christ raised from the dead? Oh well, no — just small things, really, not anything to get excited about.

And so you ask, well, why is it that the contradictions don't matter? She explained in an interview: "It wasn't about intellect. All I know is the calling of my heart to Islam." There were things she liked about Islam and things she liked about Christianity, and she took some of each. And yet, at the same time, you find that it isn't an equal combination — it involves compromise, because she goes on to explain that she doesn't think the Trinity should be taken literally, and specifically she thinks that God is in some sense more than Jesus, some sort of Arian view. In fact, she has many specific unorthodox, Islam-friendly beliefs. So there's anecdote number one: not having a problem combining inconsistent belief systems because you like some things about both of them.

Now, anecdote number two — so that this doesn't seem like I'm just picking on someone who's a woman — Brian McLaren of the emergent church. If you saw this on the cover of his book A Generous Orthodoxy, he says: "I'm a missional, evangelical, post-protestant, liberal, conservative, mystical, poetic, biblical, charismatic, contemplative, fundamentalist, Calvinist, and Baptist, and Methodist, Catholic, green, incarnational, depressed-yet-hopeful, emergent, unfinished Christian." You just don't know what to do with someone like that.

Now, to be fair, you might say these are very extreme people, and — contrary to our journalists — the plural of anecdote is not data. Just because you've got a couple of strange examples doesn't prove anything. The trouble is, all those surveys do. The largest-scale one was probably the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey in 2008: a strong majority of those who are affiliated with religion, including majorities of nearly every religious tradition, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. So if they're Christians, they don't believe John 14:6, or Acts 4:12, or Galatians chapter 1, which say that the gospel is the only way, and there is no other gospel, and Christ is the only way to the Father. And almost the same number believe there's more than one true way — not just one way, because of course anyone would allow that there are multiple interpretations, but more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion, including ones which apparently are both true even though they're contradictory.

And if you look at George Barna's 2011 book, Futurecast, it says many of the same things: people say, "I believe in God, I believe the Bible is a good book, and then I believe whatever I want." So this is very well attested as a general problem. It's trans-denominational; it's not just located in one particular area. So what we're seeing is the personal turn in faith, because faith is viewed as something you own. It's my faith, not the faith, and therefore it can be tailored to my personal preferences.

Isn't it interesting how different Scripture is on this specific topic? Paul says: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received" — the faith was something I received, I didn't make it up, it's not free for me to change it — "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures." And also, "by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you." So it's something external, objective, and we're supposed to guard it, not edit it or modify it or Photoshop it to our preferred image.

So then, to summarize the symptoms we're dealing with in American Christianity — and I'm sure it's not confined to America — a blurring of the distinction between Christianity and other faiths: why can't you combine it with some other faith, or say it doesn't matter? A blurring of distinctions between Christian confessions — that seems to be indifferent too. Emotion is put before logic, inclusivity before coherence and orthodoxy, and above all, my faith, not the faith.

All right, so that's the problem. Now, how do we diagnose it? I think one can diagnose it sociologically and theologically. A wonderful work from 2005 diagnosing it sociologically is Christian Smith and Melinda Denton's book, Soul Searching. And an excellent theological analysis was Michael Horton's Christless Christianity. Christless Christianity — what a shocking idea, as is this image, of someone rather important missing from the Last Supper.

The sociological diagnosis is based on the National Study of Youth and Religion. It was the largest study of its kind of American teenage religion and spirituality — over 3,000 teenagers were involved. They also spoke to their parents, and did detailed follow-up interviews with some of the teenagers to find out what they really thought. Some of the specific things they said were most revealing. Their main conclusion — I'm sure some of you've heard this phrase before — was that the de facto dominant religion is moralistic therapeutic deism. Notice it consists of three terms, and of those three, the "therapeutic" one is the most important, because it qualifies the other two — how things feel affects the other two dimensions. So the essence is feeling good about oneself.

So, the first one, moralism: what does being moral mean? Being the kind of person that other people will like, fulfilling one's personal potential, and not being socially disruptive. As one teen said, "It's just whatever makes you feel good about you." So being liked and being happy come before conviction of sin, repentance, and falling on God's mercy.

The second dimension is therapeutic. It's not about repentance from sin, building character through suffering, God's love and grace, but attaining subjective well-being. As one teen put it, "When I became a Christian, it always made me feel better." It seems so odd to set that by the side of a publication like Voice of the Martyrs, which I receive. Does that mean these aren't good Christians — those who are martyred for their faith in the most trying circumstances imaginable? Well, think about what Luther said about being a theologian: of dying, and being damned — those amazingly powerful words about what may happen to the Christian on account of his faith.

And deism — well, we know deism is the idea that there is a God who created the world, but he's largely uninvolved. This is the idea of a god who, as C.S. Lewis once put it, is like a book on a shelf, there if you need it, but otherwise he'll leave you alone. Not particularly involved in one's affairs — especially, oddly enough, affairs in which one would prefer not to have him involved. But deism is revised by the therapeutic idea again, because, of course, sometimes you do want God around, because there's something you need and you can't get it anywhere else. So this distant God is selectively available for taking care of needs — like a combination divine butler and cosmic therapist.

Now, this doesn't mean that moralistic therapeutic deism — which is exhausting to say, for one thing — is another religion. In fact, Smith and Denton concluded that it's really a parasite. Nobody "lives there." They still go to particular churches or synagogues or mosques, if they're not Christian. It doesn't really have any life of its own; it can't sustain itself, but it has to attach itself, like an incubus, to established historical religious traditions. This is a horrifying image — feeding on their doctrines and sensibilities, expanding by mutating their theological substance to resemble its own distinctive image. This is what's insidious about it: it lives inside ordinary religious communities. It's not a problem out there in the world; it's a problem that's in here, in the church, and everywhere.

And this explains why adherents, in fact, have to be Christian-moralistic-therapeutic-deist, or Jewish-moralistic-therapeutic-deist, or absurdly enough, even non-religious-moralistic-therapeutic-deist. And notice the package: you get to enjoy whatever particulars of your heritage appeal to you — if you like stained glass or incense or something like that, you can keep that — while also reaping the benefits of this harmonizing-into-one-faith religion, which makes it a lot easier to get on with other people. That's what's driving it: the desire to have a common religion that allows you to get on with people of, apparently, other faiths.

And they conclude that there is really a tragic cost here — that this idea is colonizing historical religious traditions and converting believers to its alternative religious vision of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness, even though they may retain the vocabulary of that religion. So on the outside, it doesn't seem to be a problem, but this, unfortunately, is what is really believed. And the rather stern conclusion: a significant part of Christianity in the United States is only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.

Now, again, you might want to say, well, perhaps this is just teenagers, and they'll mature and get over it. But they also found that this framework, for most contemporary U.S. teenagers, was also shared by their baby-boomer parents — reflecting the larger adult world into which adolescents are being socialized. In other words, it doesn't look as though this can simply be dismissed as a problem for teens, a temporary phase — it's a large-scale problem within American culture.

So that gives us some sense of the sociological diagnosis. Now, you can also look at it theologically. On one level, of course, it's simply the very nature of sin being manifested in our age — sin, of course, being curved in on oneself. And Pastor Swirler's articles capture this so beautifully. St. Augustine once confessed that every infant believes he or she is the center of the universe: each of us is the judge of our own truth, the master of our own destiny, the god of our own religion. And we follow this idolatry of self to our ruin and destruction. So in some ways there's nothing new here — this is just our particular cultural manifestation of this age-old problem.

And yet, notice, at the same time there is denial of sin, because where is the solution to all the problems sought? Within the self — within that which is infected with sin — and yet that's where one looks for therapeutic affirmation. Authority is being shifted from the outside — it's not about God's saving actions — to the inside, to what we think or experience in our feelings. And this is what Michael Horton means by Christless Christianity, because it doesn't include Christ's saving work. As he says, the self is made the measure of truth, and redemption is something we find within ourselves, in that flourishing life. And that's why he is so critical of the work of Joel Osteen, which he shows, over and over again, promotes this idea.

Here's a famous statement made in the mid-twentieth century about liberal Protestantism: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." In other words, it's a really emasculated version of the faith — everything that really matters is removed. Anyone can see this. In a way, it's an example of what Martin Luther called the theology of glory in the Heidelberg Disputation. The theology of glory calls evil good, and good evil. Why? Because it makes its judgment on the basis of what the sinful self affirms. So self-reliance and pride: called good, right? If you're having that successful, thriving life, and everybody is accepting you, and you're doing well — well, that's called good, denying the sin that's involved. And at the same time, suffering and humility are called evil. "That's the last thing I want, and the last thing that appeals to me is the idea of a suffering Savior." So it reverses the truth, whereas the theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.

That's really what we're seeing, I think, theologically. And I found this stunningly humorous — this may be hard to see — but I was last summer at a conference in Germany, and I went to Heidelberg, where you can see, on the town square, this wonderful inscription that marks where the Heidelberg Disputation took place. But there, what do you see? A glorious Mercedes-Benz — the ultimate German driving machine — parked on top of it. That, I thought, really encapsulates the problem.

So I think it's fair to say that something has gone wrong here. Just look at some obvious passages that stand in direct opposition to this: the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. It wasn't all about him — that's the model, and that same model is then passed on to us. Also the cross: "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Whoever would save his life" — what does that mean? Seek their salvation in their own self-fulfillment, on their own terms — "that person," Jesus said, "will lose it. But whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." And so our culture is really in denial of the fact that renunciation and death are what lead to new life. As Pastor Weible said in his book on sanctification, dying to live — that's what is not accepted.

Well, what, though, are the sources? I think that the sources, at an intellectual level, really run quite deep. It's not just general individualism in the culture, and I don't think it can all be blamed on postmodernism. I think that modernist ideas laid the foundation for this moralistic therapeutic deism, and the way they did this was with their skepticism about objective value — the idea that there can be objective moral and religious values. And in my view, postmodernism didn't really do anything radically new; it simply continued that trend. Postmodernists are always trying to say that they utterly reject modernism and are coming up with something very new. I see many postmodern themes as really continuing what modernism began.

So, of the modernist sources of this problem, what's fascinating is that there are a couple of main ones, and they had the same result. Those who were very much impressed with science became devotees of scientism — the idea that science is the only place you can find knowledge. Those who recoiled at that image and said, "No, I don't want nature to be a machine, I don't want to just be part of this meaningless machine," went toward a romanticist view of things. And yet, interestingly, they ended up in the same place: namely, emotivism — that values are really just a matter of emotion.

So, briefly, how did this happen? With scientism, although Newton himself was a religious believer, the success of his science made people believe that the world was the so-called "world machine" — everything worked in a clock-like fashion — and soon people denigrated other ways of knowing besides science. And scientism today — you see this all over the place with a new atheist like Richard Dawkins, or the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss — they all say the same thing: science is the only way to gain knowledge about reality. Literature, history, philosophy, theology — obsolete. You may like them, but you can't gain knowledge through those kinds of disciplines. And it's very materialistic: you reduce everything to the physical. You can only talk about physical realities and undirected causes, so no goals, no purposes — nothing like that is allowed to survive.

Now, this is a little bit technical, but where this really had its major impact — and you see this, by the way, in the writings of C.S. Lewis — was in a doctrine called logical positivism. This began with Auguste Comte, and it was continued with the Vienna Circle. This was a group of scientists and philosophers, including Moritz Schlick, and Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Carnap. They basically believed that science had the world whipped, and the only way you could know anything about reality was by using the methods of the natural sciences. In the Anglo-American philosophical world, this became popularized by A.J. Ayer, in his famous work, Language, Truth, and Logic. And it led to a startling principle about what you could say was truly meaningful — in other words, the kind of stuff you could know.

The verification principle says that a statement is only meaningful if it's either the kind of thing that's true by definition — a bachelor is an unmarried man, or 2+3 is 5 — or it's verifiable by observation: salt dissolves in water, something you could do a scientific experiment to show was either true or false. As a result, you get logical truth and you get scientific truth, but everything else is literally meaningless. If it doesn't have any meaning, it must be metaphorical — otherwise it's simply nonsense and doesn't mean anything.

Now, if you think about what this does — it's an absolute bombshell. This view implies that many statements people thought were meaningful are not. Theological statements, metaphysical statements — metaphysics deals with the fundamental claims of what truly exists — so the statement that God exists now becomes meaningless, because it's not a scientific question you can determine by some sort of observation or experiment. Likewise, that the soul exists has the same fate. And ethical statements as well, because there's no scientific instrument that can detect rightness or wrongness — no gauge that will show that when some horrendous action takes place — even that torturing people for fun is wrong, which seems about the most self-evidently true statement of ethics — is not something you can show scientifically.

Well, then they had to explain: well, then why do we say these things? And their conclusion was, well, since they have no factual meaning, they must in fact be just reports of our own feelings. So "murder is wrong" means "boo, murder — I disapprove of murder." And "kindness is good" means "hooray for kindness" — it's just a way of expressing one's own strong feeling for or against it. That, then, is the doctrine of emotivism. Emotivism, in philosophy, is the idea that evaluative judgments — good or bad, right or wrong, better or worse — are nothing but expressions of preference, of your attitude or your feeling. This is what Alasdair MacIntyre said in his After Virtue, where he said that the Enlightenment was a catastrophe for ethics, because, using a scientific model, you could never come up with a justification for moral statements — so they end up just being subjective emotions. So theology and ethics end up being viewed as non-cognitive — simple terms — stuff you can't know. It's not really factual, just matters of emotion.

Now, interestingly, romanticism was a reaction against all of this Enlightenment thinking. People thought, no, that's a horrible view — there must be some meaning. The poets have meaning, the religious have meaning, we're not just machines, there's got to be purpose. But where did they seek purpose in life? Within — the mind of the visionary. You're projecting meaning, or finding it, in your internal response, in literature or art. And so, in fact, that also supports emotivism, because it's still the inner life, the subjective, that grounds meaning. And in fact, it cedes control to science over the realm of objective fact.

And you'll notice that, parallel with that philosophical movement, you had theological manifestations that emphasized feeling as being more important than what God objectively did — pietism and enthusiasm, that C.F.W. Walther had dealt with, revivalism with its great emphasis on the authenticity of your personal response, "Bible-onlyism" as it's sometimes called, meaning that it's your response to the Bible that matters. And, controversially, are there some approaches to church growth and contemporary worship that feed into that, to the extent that perhaps they're very interested in people's emotional responses? Any idea that we are — just as we consume various products — we now think of ourselves, sometimes, as consumers of beliefs: these are the beliefs I like, and if I'm not getting them, I should go somewhere else, and I can design my own creed.

This was probably first noticed in the '80s in a very famous essay by Robert Bellah, which I'm sure some of you have heard of — Habits of the Heart — where, in doing his research that preceded the work of Christian Smith, he came to the staggering conclusion — he said maybe there are as many faiths as there are people, because there are so many people like Sheila. Sheila was this nurse he interviewed who said, "Well, I believe in God, I am not a religious fanatic, can't remember the last time I went to church, my faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism — just my own little voice. It's just trying to love yourself and be gentle with yourself." Notice that's where you start to see how an intellectual idea — regular lay people are not generally talking about things like logical positivism or other long words like that — and yet the conclusion of people on the street is that faith is a matter of emotion and preference. That's what they believe. So philosophies that people have never heard of nonetheless end up affecting how they think.

Nancy Pearcey, in her book Total Truth, appropriated Francis Schaeffer's two-story model — this is the tragic outfall on the Christian mind, according to Schaeffer and Pearcey — that we divide the world in two. At the bottom, where we're talking about objective fact — the so-called lower story — we say, well, science deals with that world, that's where you can know stuff, true or false. At the top, where do our values go? And notice, by the way, the phrase "our values" is very telling. The Greeks talked about virtues as something objective, because virtue was what enabled you to flourish in the community — it didn't belong to you, justice didn't belong to you, it was that property that enabled you to live well in your community. But today we talk about "my values" — that's very telling, and we psychologize them and assume that they're things that we own. That all tells us that emotivism is a very dominant idea. That's where ethics and religion go.

Now, in my view, postmodernism, therefore, is not the source of this malaise, which has very deep roots — it just extended it to some degree. And there are lots of things one could talk about here. I'll mention four. This attack on objective truth — this idea of being suspicious. Hermeneutics, of course, is doing an interpretation, but this is the idea that whenever somebody tries to make a truth claim, you think, "Huh, I know why you're saying that — there's got to be some advantage you will reap." In other words, it always assumes that an attempt to state truth is really a power play that can be unmasked in some way or other. And what Harry Blamires calls the "imperious self," where the self takes charge and becomes the authority for judging all things, and has no problem, therefore, rewriting and recreating its own faith. And Harry Blamires also talks about the well-known "Age of Aquarius," which he uses to name a kind of intellectual and cultural trend.

So if we look at these — here's something an intellectual postmodernist argued, Richard Rorty: there's no Truth with a capital T, that's to say, no truth out there. He says, well, that would somehow imply that there's this Logos written into the fabric of reality, and he can't believe that. So now, he says, what we'll agree to call truth is only truth with a small t, which is the result of our unstable consensus when we all get together. I call it, rather rudely, the "donuts and coffee" theory of truth, because what counts as true is what nice people with the right supply of donuts and coffee say is true. And of course tomorrow, perhaps with better donuts and better coffee, they'll say something else is true. No worries, because notice truth doesn't have to stay — it's just a matter of what we're willing to live with for a certain amount of time. Hence it's called the pragmatic theory of truth: what works for a given group of people.

Now, a very good book by Gene Edward Veith — no, by D.A. Carson — deals with the emergent church, called Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church. He points out that these postmodern thinkers — and there are many of them, you know, Brian McLaren, I mentioned before, but many others, Doug Pagitt and so forth — argue intellectually that we can't know reality as it truly is, only as we talk about it in our communities. Now, why is this? They take the idea that we're all somehow imprisoned, either in our culture — so we can't think our way out of the particular area of culture we live in, like southern Illinois culture — or in our language, so we never really meet reality, we only meet things as mediated by the way we talk about them.

Side by side with this is the hermeneutics of suspicion — that's a very ponderous phrase, as many things postmodernists say are. And yet we sure see it at a very popular level as well, right? If you try to say that anything is true, you are, of course, imposing your view — "you're only saying that because you are [fill in the blank]" — and then the assumption is that you have some power motive. So it sees every text as a political creation, propaganda for the status quo. Now, "text" here could literally mean a written creed — amazingly enough, even the Word of God — but it can also mean an institution. So this view is also taken to apply to social relationships: marriage is apparently oppressive, being a parent is oppressive, being a child is oppressive. All sorts of structural relationships — the orders of creation that God himself put into this world to govern and preserve it — are now viewed as something oppressive, to be rebelled against.

Now, many people have read Harry Blamires's classic book The Christian Mind. Well, he also wrote a book about this issue, The Post-Christian Mind, where he analyzes this trend. Because of emotivism, no meaning can be found in the objective scheme of things — so where is it going to be sought? In the experiencing subject. And he says it's really, fundamentally, a denial of the supernatural — that there is an order that God himself has written into things. "Having turned its back on all notions of the supernatural, it can look for authentication of its judgments only in the individual self, only within." Just like we saw with moralistic therapeutic deism. This is a very sad place to look, if you think about it even for a few minutes, because of the amazing constant changes in our emotions and our thinking and our opinions and all the rest of it. Talk about building a house on sand, shifting sands.

And this is what Blamires says: "Where intellect and feeling were in conflict, where wisdom and whim collided, it became the smart thing to reject the intellect and wisdom." And he recounts how he had often found that he could give arguments in his tutorials as a teacher, and people would listen, and either they would accept the argument, or, if they didn't, they would provide a reason — "well, that was an error in logic," or "I think your premise is false." But after a while, he found more students who would simply say, "Well, yes, that's a good argument, I guess, but—" and then proceed to simply think otherwise, or do otherwise, because they didn't see any reason not to simply follow their own feelings. It doesn't matter if you have a good argument or not. So it became smart to reject intellect and wisdom, because they belong to a sphere of rules that constrain the self — the imperious self — right? You want to do things: you feel that way, and fixed edges and demarcations, while feelings and whim inhabited the ever-changing environment of the fluid. And he calls out the environment of the age of Aquarius.

Now, notice how seductive this is. Isn't that — when it's, whatever it is, a hundred degrees, and there you are feeling scorched by all things, and somebody just shows you this wonderful, fluid, refreshing water. Let's see — Lewis observed in his youth where the matron got him interested in all kinds of spirituality, changing, the stern crystal to — one does feel it's so refreshing, right? They have no particular limits, just as there's that water flying around there — it has no real boundaries. How freeing, how nice.

And if you go to one of these sites that supports Aquarianism, notice exactly what it says — this is just amazing stuff: "What is your truth? Truth itself is something that you own. What opportunities are available to you right now? Do you have faith and trust to follow your own intuition and instincts? What would you dare to dream and do if you knew you could not fail?" Aquarians hardly dislike any restraint. It's like — well, you know, if you really do this, maybe you'll do some things like what James Holmes did in Colorado. Maybe you would end up harming yourself terribly and harming other people terribly. It's in denial of the fact that we can follow our emotions down incredibly destructive paths. Any restraint is viewed as the enemy — just set me free.

And some of you may know that landmark work by Paul Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, where he talks about a particular school of existential psychology that encouraged people to develop according to their self-chosen path — and it's amazingly destructive.

Well, what are the implications of this? And this, the implications, in a way, offer some kind of refutation of this view, I would say, because they're so terrible — they show this talk about "not working as advertised." This idea that promises everything actually leads to so many destructive consequences at an individual level. And then, of course, as you harm the soul there, you harm the family, the state, and the church. And I think that primarily — and this is why I'm so delighted that Dr. Bartelt is going to be speaking about vocation — what this view does is it undermines the whole idea of vocation, because that's an external call, not an internal choice or feeling. And so this idea is completely, radically at odds with vocation and the orders of creation — that there's an institution of marriage, for the sake of the family, and so forth. And what it does is: at least the people who don't know who they're supposed to be as an individual are lost, but also they don't know what their role is in the family, state, and church.

So if you can imagine, it's a very strange play — it's not like What's My Line, it's a large play with a lot of actors, but each one is doing improvisational theater. Trouble is, there's no coordination whatever — so while one person thinks he's doing Dracula, another person thinks he's doing Stuart Little. And you can see that with this combination — I remember that movie about Bambi meets Godzilla — of any character imaginable pursuing their own preferred life script. This probably won't go very well.

So at the individual level, being a free spirit sounds appealing, free and all that — but if you don't have a sense of objective moral and religious value, what the classical philosophers called magnanimity — to be magnanimous literally means to have a large soul — you get what Lewis called, in The Abolition of Man, "men without chests." Now, the idea of magnanimity is what enables you to make a sacrifice for something larger than yourself — dying for your country, making sacrifices for your family, sacrificing something in your life because you know that's what God wants — all those higher things you sacrifice for: the chest, or magnanimity. And he's borrowing here from a classic tripartite picture in Plato's Republic, which also comes up in other places, but the idea is that an individual has three dimensions: there's the head, the reason or the intellect, and then, of course, there's the belly, desires and all of that — but in the middle, to moderate, is supposed to be the chest, where you identify with those higher causes for which you will sacrifice and perhaps lay down your life. If you take that away, you get men without chests, and so, of course, all that can happen now is that reason simply exists to serve your desire, to get you what you want. You don't have to moderate your desires anymore for the sake of something more than you, such as your family, or your country, or even God himself.

And so you see — now Plato attacks this view, pointing out something that's probably rather obvious to psychologists: you can't just go around telling people to do what they want, because people want contradictory things. Our desires are at war with each other. So — let's see, I want to do the best thing for my family, but I really kind of like to try drugs. All right? Ignoring family duties to experience alternate states of mind, and you end up, in fact, not being freer, but a slave of addiction. That desire is running you, not the other way around. Well, people who say you can have it all — no, nobody can have it all, because some of the things you have exclude other things you could have. I want to be successful in my career, popular with others, and also to experience every pleasure — doesn't work. That dissipation is going to undermine the other goals. And at times we see that with people who become addicted to gambling, and then there's divorce, they may lose their house, lose their job, and so on. Turns out you really couldn't have it all.

And so Plato, in the Republic, describes this as a multifarious beast — a beast with many heads. If you think of Cerberus, in Greek mythology, the three-headed dog, that's the problem. You don't just want one thing — then it'd be simple — you want contradictory and conflicting things. And he argues against the tyrant: the tyrant thinks, "If I can just do what I want, I will be powerful and successful and happy." Plato says, no, you won't — and the reason is that if you can do anything you want, you will unleash inconsistent desires that will drag you around from one place to the next, and you'll find, pretty soon, that it's not you who's in charge, but those desires that are in charge. Hence, how apt it is when pastors say that sin is an addiction — it's something that takes control of you. So really, it's a picture of the natural man in rebellion against God's law. Now, Plato didn't realize that's what he was describing, but he was — it's denying God's law, and hence, of course, the need for an external Savior. So you end up in a rather nasty place.

Now, one is fiction — the picture of Dorian Gray. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a masterpiece book, and there was a wonderful movie made in 1945, and there's a rather disgusting recent one which I don't recommend, but it shows what happens. He gets this bargain — what if I can just do whatever I want, and it won't show on my face? It'll only affect my portrait. And the portrait, though, is his soul, and the marring of the soul that really occurs. And he finally gets to the point where he doesn't want to do this anymore, but can't stop, because those desires have taken over him.

Now, how Charlie Sheen could have gone on is the slightest bit mysterious to me — but there's no real disconnect there. All right, this shows that it's not just bad, it's tragic. On the left here we have, of course, Gollum, Sméagol. Sméagol really becomes "happy" by pursuing what he wants — it's very clear, and it's beautifully brought out in the film editions — but in the end it becomes like an addiction, or a craving, for the ring. It's running him. There's no question that he is anymore doing what is really best for himself. And it was also tragic on the right here, of course, is Bernie Madoff, who, after a while — it's interesting when you read what he said in his testimony — offered why he really did regret getting into this, where he was basically defrauding many charities, including — he was Jewish — many Jewish charities, and all the rest of it, and wished that he could stop, but he got to a place where he didn't know how to stop anymore. So is this really happiness, doing what I want on my own terms? That's the tragedy of this.

And here is probably one of the sternest passages in Scripture about what self-realization on those terms means, from 2 Timothy chapter 3: "But people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God." And notice the last part: despite all those terrible things, "having the appearance of godliness, while denying its power." In other words, still retaining some of that Christian vocabulary but denying its power — why? Because they're really in denial of the fact that they need Christ as Savior. So that's a rather shocking picture of things.

Well, the common feature, then, is clearly denial of original sin, because you're basically attempting to set yourself free from the law on your own steam. What actually happens, though, is the self becomes enslaved to the warring desires, and, in fact, loses its identity — for whoever would save his life will lose it, because, of course, our true identity is found in Christ. It's not found by just pursuing what's within us.

And here's a shocking example of this, which — this is an older book, but I went back to it a couple of times — by Gene Edward Veith, from Postmodern Times. This really got to me when I read it — just staggering. This postmodern punk rocker said: "I belong to the blank generation. I have no beliefs. I belong to no community, tradition, or anything like that — nothing with which this person is really willing to identify because it's just me. I am lost." This is insightful on this person's part, and hopefully this will be a way for them to be brought to Christ. "I'm lost in this vast, vast world. I have absolutely no identity." So isn't it interesting — where you look for yourself within yourself, actually it just falls through your hands, like water would fall through your hands. Lewis said the same thing in Mere Christianity: "Look for yourself, and you'll find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay."

So this is why this matters so much, I think, at a cultural and a personal level, and this is where I'm going to need your help tomorrow in the session — how do we address this, so that we really show people their need for Christ?

The family — again, the imperious self doesn't want to accept the orders of creation, being a parent, right? Where have we got this idea — we've all heard it — that somehow it's a burden to have children, or "I feel stuck in this marriage," or "why do I have to stay in because my parents say so," et cetera, et cetera? Those really are — there it is — the imperious self wanting to deny those limits that were put in place by God himself. And of course the sad thing is, rather than face up to this, we prefer to use euphemism. Euphemism is where you make something that's bad sound good. So when Stalin was sending people off to the gulags, he said, no, no — "relocation of antisocial elements." That doesn't sound bad, it sounds good, doesn't it? I mean, they're antisocial, and you're just giving them a chance to move on — to Siberia.

And so now, notice what's happened to the word "family" — it's "two-parent family," as if there are endless varieties. And Blamires, in his books, points out that this is a way of destroying standards, of evading the issue, and he gives the example: why shouldn't we call shoplifting "uncompounded purchase"? There are two ways you can buy something. Compounded purchase is when you take the goods and you pay. But you can also have uncompounded purchase — you take the goods and don't pay. And so now theft becomes a kind of purchase — there's a traditional kind where you're paying, but now there's a new kind where you don't. And he goes on further and says this is absurd, but in his writing this, there was a move within the UK to have divorce ceremonies — so the divorce itself becomes a kind of marriage, and they would come up with farcical ways of distancing themselves from each other, or placing their rings on little trees, and all the rest of it.

But, in other words, we don't want to accept these limits. Parenthood as well obviously involves duties, but people don't want those. We've all seen where people basically cede their own parental duties to their children, so the children have to self-parent. And it's worrying — the family ends up just becoming a loose association of individuals. There are all sorts of issues there with same-sex marriage, because once you start down that road, it seems like almost any grouping of people who happen to like each other can call themselves married, and they can have children in any way imaginable — it's just a matter of what science allows right now. That's the only apparent limit.

You see this in Shakespeare — King Lear abdicates his role as king and father at the same time. Isn't that interesting? Just walks away from both. And Luther is so insightful in the Large Catechism when he talks about the Fourth Commandment, "honor your father and mother" — he sees that it's a foundation for civil authority as well, right, he extends it. So when we reject these primary orders in the family, is it surprising that then we see people who can't respect civil authorities, don't respect pastors? That same approach is found elsewhere. So in a state — here's what Blamires says, King Lear again being a great example. Here you've got a king who has proper authority, but he abdicates and hands it over to those whose only claim is their greed for power. And famously, one of the characters, Edmund, says, "Stand up for bastards" — in other words, stand up for the illegitimate claimants on authority.

The other side of the coin is being in denial of vocation — people then constantly usurp the vocational roles that haven't been given to them. We've all seen that with overreaching politicians — fill in your favorite one — who seem to think they're above the law and can do things their office doesn't entitle them to do. Shakespeare — I won't go through this whole quote — "Take but degree away," this is from Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses' famous speech: "Take but degree away," in other words, the proper boundaries, the way things are supposed to work, "untune that string, and hark, what discord follows" — because nobody knows what tune they're supposed to play anymore. Each string can play its own tune, which means, of course, you don't get a tune. "Each thing meets in mere oppugnancy," and it goes on, "the rude son should strike his father dead, force should be right, or rather, right and wrong, between whose endless jar justice resides, should lose their names, and so should justice too." In other words, those primary distinctions between right and wrong and just and unjust start to collapse, because all of them are hedges, they're all limits, and the imperious self doesn't like those limits.

So unsurprisingly, we also see more social conflict. Now why? Because if fulfillment is found by realizing the goals of yourself or a group you identify with, why compromise? I see that as a real problem in society today — people don't ever want to come to a reasonable compromise, because "it's not what I want, you're just trying to limit what I want to do, get out of the way." And in that famous poem, "The Second Coming," by W.B. Yeats — it's almost the opposite of the Colossians passage, right, where it talks about "in him all things hold together." This mentality is: "things fall apart, the center cannot hold." Judges at the bit — we see the same thing: "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes." The king there being symbolic of any of those authorities which God placed in this world.

To see a higher authority again requires the chest, right — to see something that's more important to you, which you have to humble yourself to, like a creed, like a pastor, like God himself. And in the church, of course, we see sometimes this terrible thing — 2 Timothy: "The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching," because again, it limits my ability to design my own faith — "having itching ears" — in other words, "what would I like to hear, what I like to believe" — "will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions," the things you really want to hear. So of course we have endless cause for the church to accommodate people's wayward desires and to sanctify them as marriage or whatever else. "And will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths" — myths here being, in effect, Christless Christianity — any kind of belief which you're substituting for one which depends on Christ's work. They're all myths, because they're not based on the facts of what God did — they're based on what you would rather the world was like.

Well, this has been a pretty — you know, to talk about this problem, I realized there was a serious risk that this would be a horrible downer. And, in a way, it is. But it seems like sometimes you have to look it face-on — you have to look face-on at some real difficulties, because if you don't identify them, if we keep looking away from them, how can we really address them? That's why it's "naming the beast."

Now, of course, where we look for hope, we know: the answers are outside, not inside. I very much look forward to hearing Dr. Bartelt's comments on this — it isn't found within the old self, but in its death and rebirth in Christ. That's where identity is found, so that wonderful passage in Romans 6: being baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ, we know our old self was crucified with him, in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin — that emotivist beast, in Plato's terms. "For one who has died is set free from sin. Now, if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him." So it's got to start, I think, with individuals, and then, in that new life, acquaint them, through the doctrine of vocation and many other resources, with all the roles that God has put in place for them — those good works that Christ prepared in advance for us to do, in Ephesians 2:10.

So where do things hold together — what is the glue? Well, of course, as Lutherans, the answer is always Christ, and the Colossians 1 passage is a wonderful passage: "He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." That includes the church, of which he is the head — "he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead." So that's kind of the pattern, because we are united in his crucifixion and resurrection. "For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross." So there are these things that people want out there — peace. And there's even glory, but glory is always on the other side of a cross — you can't bypass the cross and have it. That really is the opposing view. Notice that it really comes down to a theological point of view — the absolute difference between the theology of glory, approaching God in our own terms, and a theology of the cross.

So, obviously, in naming this beast, sin isn't anything new. What I've tried to do, though, is suggest that we need to look at and recognize some of the worldviews that solidify its foothold. That's something that will give us some weapons. We always have the weapon of the Word of God, but I think it's helpful as well to have some philosophical weapons, because it's hard to fight an enemy if you don't know its name and where it comes from.

So what we did was the symptoms, the diagnosis, and the source of what I've called post-Christian Christianity, and showed its destructive implications. This has all been very negative — it's basically been a philosophical pathology, like a CSI episode. But that's to get you thinking, because tomorrow we want to get constructive and discuss remedies. And I am not in any way qualified in counseling, in those pastoral roles — I'll say a few things about some philosophical responses, but I realize that philosophical responses to questions don't always help a lot of people in real life. Sorry, you know — I'm perfectly willing to admit this. I found it's amazing: when I go to Walmart and point out, "No, no, there's a much better version of the ontological argument than that one," people are just really not interested in that.

So I don't want you to go to sleep feeling depressed, because — and I brought up a problem here — this is not my problem, it's a problem that's been identified by many eminent sociologists and cultural commentators, but I want it to sit as a challenge, and then hopefully we can together start to work on it. And I have no illusions that we could fix it this weekend or anything like that, but to see it as something worth engaging, and worth proposing realistic solutions for, that you could use in your many vocations — I think that is worth doing.