Second verse,
Same as the first –
A little bit louder,
And a whole lot worse!
For those of you who had girlfriends in high school, you may not be aware of a man named Immanuel Kant. He was a German ethical philosopher in the 18th century, best known for two philosophical theories. One: that metaphysical assertions can be proven through logic – what he called a “synthetic a priori” statement. Which is interesting, and it bears impact on what I want to talk about today, but it’s not his most important contribution to the 20th and 21st Centuries. His other big idea was what he called a “categorical imperative”. In short, this idea means that there can be objective moral values and truths without appealing to a transcendent source. Or, in other words, you can have a moral law without a moral lawgiver. Or, in still other words, you can have objective right and wrong without God.
Now, granted, very few people read Kant. He’s a bit boring, and very tedious, and many people – me included – dismiss his arguments out of hand. But a lot of people really like his ideas, even if they don’t like his presentation of his ideas…’cause it’s boring.
Amongst those thoroughly impressed with Kant was a dude named Freddy Schleiermacher. Now, Freddy, he wanted to be the theologian who saved Christianity from its antique mythologies and Bronze Age superstitions. He wasn’t superstitious…he wasn’t even a little “stitious”. So, Freddy and the boys got together and talked about how much they liked Kant’s ideas and then they invented Liberal Christianity (N.B. it only mostly happened like this). And so they got Liberal Christianity off the ground and it was a big hit in Germany. Other things that became big hits in Germany: Beethoven; Science; Hitler…well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.
As we should all know by now, the fact that Schleiermacher and his buds were all German speaking white men should tell us they were very bad, rotten, no good, racist scum. But that’s besides the point. The point is that they came up with a theology – a now dominant theology – that attempts to have a Christless Christianity. The Messiah was Messianic because he made manifest the map to mankind’s moral-maturity. Or, to put it another way, Jesus didn’t really die and rise again in fulfillment of the Scriptures to pay for sin and impart new and everlasting life to all who put their faith in Him. No, he lived as a good moral teacher.
Now despite the fact that Lewis completely and elegantly dismantled the “good moral teacher” argument, desperate clingers keep clutching onto it in the vain hope that if they repeat the magic words that “there is no such thing as Divine Judgment”, like the cowardly lion rejecting the reality of spooks, that that will negate the coming Parousia and judgment, when God will judge the world for sin.
So, we can draw a more or less straight line from Kant to Schleiermacher to modern mainline Protestantism and a growing body of “Evangelicalism”. The whole idea is to have a Christ who was nothing more than a moral teacher and thus to have morality without God. And this is important because sinful human beings have a couple of pretty important desires. Let’s consider them:
Not feeling evil.
The ability to justify oneself to oneself.
The ability to not incur the disapproval of others.
Well, actually, let’s not consider them – that can be a project for you to do yourself. Because what I really want to end on is this observation: we’re now in the second worse verse. When Christ was removed from Christianity in Europe, it led to 2 world wars. When morality became definable by human notions of good and bad, we got Stalinism. In the 20th Century we saw what happened when man became the measure of morals, even though society broadly still held to a moral and ethical system based upon the Christian faith, and Christian notions of good and evil. Christianity, even its lingering aura acted as a backstop to halt the most horrendous possible excesses and abuses – which is hard to believe, but all you have to do to see that things could have been worse is to look at the world of East Asia and consider some of the atrocities committed there to begin to grasp how much restraining power Christianity has, even when it’s only a formal and not actual.
As America and the rest of the world becomes truly post-Christian and we’re attempting to define morality, as absolute, imperative, and also defined by us, I shudder to think of the atrocities that will happen in our lifetime. We’re already murdering babies by the millions and selling off their corpses. And I predict it’s going to get worse! And as I try to ponder what the world will be like for my children, I Kant even. As Jesus warned, “if this is what men do when the tree is green what will they do when it’s dry?”