The death of man and the crisis of our culture

In this insightful piece, Wilberforce Director Dr Joe Boot discusses in depth society's increasing rejection of objective reality and its "absolutisation" of feeling - resulting in challenges such as transgender theory. In denying the existence of our Creator, he says, we lose our souls. He encouragingly states: "God has called groups like Christian Concern to be the leaven of Christ, to serve God and minister life and hope to our fellow man in the public space". 
 

In the 1960s, as the sexual revolution started to take root, various social movements began in earnest to pursue the removal the public influence of Christianity in Britain and a protracted battle to revoke biblically grounded laws has largely been won. The result has been the steady moral neutering of two generations, and the casting adrift of the human personality. It has led to the absolutization of the feeling aspect of human experience so that now, in an increasingly plastic world, ‘I feel, therefore, I am.’ Under the influence of European radicals like Michel Foucault we have been told there is no essential self; the human person and the human family are mere social constructs. We are only what we make and define ourselves to be. In such a cosmos even grammar and pronouns must go since they speak of law and norms – for the progressives man is nothing more than mere artifice.

By contrast, at the beginning of Scripture we discover the most fundamental aspect of God’s word-revelation for granting a coherent and intelligible vision of the human person:

Then God said, "let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Gen 1:26-27)
 

There is no parallel to this starting point anywhere else in human thought. The triune (plural) God of Scripture creates all things out of nothing – all that is distinct from himself – and makes the human person in his image, where the "I" or human ego is established as a transcendent reference point for all the aspects of temporal human experience. As a part of creation, man somehow transcends nature. As Blaise Pascal so well understood, the human person is a mystery that transcends his environment as a living integral being comprehensible only in reference back to the living God as the source and origin of all life, law, truth and meaning. This unique human identity and the critically important distinction between creator and creature implies, of necessity, a limit to both the reach of human thought and the legislative prerogatives of man. For we read in Ecclesiastes, "As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything" (Eccl. 11:5).

The average person today however has lost sight of the true nature of man and fallen prey to spiritual nihilism and a world of negation they were taught to embrace. As the great Dutch philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, put it regarding modern man, "He has lost all his faith and denies any higher ideals than the satisfaction of his desires.… To him, God is dead…, modern mass-man has lost himself and considers himself cast into a world that is meaningless..."[1] In the parlance of popular culture, the singer-songwriter-poet Sting gives expression to the existential rootlessness of an ailing humanity:

You could say I lost my faith in science and progress
You could say I lost my belief in the holy church
You could say I lost my sense of direction
You could say all of this and worse but

If I ever lose my faith in you
There'd be nothing left for me to do

Some would say I was a lost man in a lost world
You could say I lost my faith in the people on TV
You could say I'd lost my belief in our politicians
They all seemed like game show hosts to me

I could be lost inside their lies without a trace
But every time I close my eyes I see your face

I never saw no miracle of science
That didn't go from a blessing to a curse
I never saw no military solution
That didn't always end up as something worse but
Let me say this first

As a result of this modern temper, there has perhaps never been a time in the past fifteen centuries or more when the Western world faced a greater crisis of identity and thereby confronted so dramatically its own social and cultural ruin. Any observant and thinking Christian can see that we are a radically uprooted and dislocated generation adrift in the world. Social and cultural philosophers, commentators and theologians have spilt much ink seeking to trace upstream to the font of the problem following the various tributaries of the crisis toward its common source, but not all have grasped the religious character of its subterranean spring – the decline of the human personality via the apostasy of the heart from God and the consequent emergence of mass-man (i.e. depersonalized, dispensable human beings) in a technocratic society where the individual strives to ‘find themselves’ without God. Not many then perceive that our present situation is so precarious that the elegy of Western culture is on the verge of being composed.

We read daily of people in the grip of a radical relativism unimaginable even twenty-five years ago. As abstracted and generalized people reduced to self-created group identities, we no longer know what a human being is. This condition has advanced to such a degree that we are essentially unsure as a society if there are any human norms that transcend radical autonomous desire and subjectivist self-identification. It is not simply that the last vestiges of pride or rootedness in our historical self-understanding are being eagerly eroded by the contemporary muses, it is that we are no longer confident of the intrinsic value of the human person made in God’s image, whether pre-born, new-born, disabled, aging, sick or despairing. Indeed we are so fundamentally uprooted that we are no longer assured of the scientific and chromosomal reality of the binary gender distinctions of male and female, of normative human sexuality, or of the oldest institution known to the human race – marriage and family.

Our profound confusion is such today that some people are not even sure that they occupy the right age group or gender, were born into the right people group, or even gestated by the right species since they ‘feel’ like something else. No one dare challenge these inner fictions since all that is left of the human personality is the notion that autonomous and subjective feeling has the absolute existence of God himself. As such there is no longer a basis for differentiation of any objective kind. And thus, in a world of flux, of irrational fluidity to all things, where the possibility of normative differentiation between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, reality and unreality has collapsed, culture has not simply reached a bump in the road but has been sucked into a kind of vortex of democratic insanity, spiralling downward toward what Cornelius Van Til called "disintegration into the void."

In our disarticulated world, the vain rantings of Nietzsche’s overman, who have gone beyond good and evil, declare the reasonable and sane to be sick, mad or malevolent and demand the voice of plain reason be silenced in the face of the cultural conjurers’ reimagining of the world. The stark reality of our situation is that we are facing the death of man as man in the West. By denying, debunking and defacing of the image of God in man we have lost our very soul and the tragedy is that there are so many who do not yet realise it and will not do so till it is too late.

Jesus Christ said, "for what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul" (Matt. 16:26). When iconoclastic and fractious man declares that what is left of human dignity is now rooted solely in radical autonomy from God, revelation, true human community and all familial and moral obligation, we have realized the most fundamental depersonalization of all life. Such a society, whatever its protest to the contrary, is anti-social to the core, whilst ironically individual responsibility for action and its consequences is passed onto an impersonal scientific society governed by statistics, bureaucracy, fashion, technology, social planning and other impersonal forces. The socio-cultural deficit ensuing from this disaster cannot be fixed with any amount of state welfare or scientific planning – there is no technical solution to this colossal religious problem.

In the state of crisis that results from the illusion of the creative freedom of selfhood, people are, more often than not, deeply inwardly afraid even as they revel in an autonomy that finds endless social indulgence and legal sanction. People on every side are gripped by sadness, guilt and despair that no amount of psychotropic prescriptions can finally ameliorate or truly heal – by such technique the fear of disintegration and death is simply supressed. But as Dooyeweerd rightly noted, "it is uncomprehended revelation of God that fills humankind with fear and trembling".[2]

We may deny God and man as his image bearer; we can try to kill both God and man as man, we may press ahead in a suicidal course, but it always proves to be pure vanity, for we are surrounded inside and out by the reality of God and his order in every sphere of life. This revelation may well be supressed but it is inescapable and still grips the being of every person generating both guilt and deep disquiet. Consequently there is no recovery for our society till we recognise that whatever our gains materially, we have lost our soul and Christ warns us that there is a reckoning, for God is not mocked, what a man sows, he reaps. We cannot bargain with God to get it back – what can we give in exchange? Our only recourse is true repentance, both personal and national.

In the meantime, our culture looks to political and indeed magical solutions to its ills because, as one Christian thinker puts it, "the truth is so intolerable to fallen humanity that even when it does take hold of people, they still seek to escape its total claims in every possible way."[3] Into this increasingly pretentious and arrogantly overreaching world of political life God has called groups like Christian Concern to be the leaven of Christ, to serve God and minister life and hope to our fellow man in the public space – if only at times through a kind of prophetic witness to those in authority.

In this task, Christians must recognise that all political life is shaped, like every other aspect of life, by the beliefs, or more properly the religious worldviews of those who participate – and I have already described some of the fruits of the worldview that increasingly dominates our culture. I say religious worldview because man is a worshipping being. As St. Paul makes clear in chapter 1 of his letter to the Romans, if we refuse to worship the living, creator God, we do not cease to worship. Rather we will worship some aspect of creation itself – some being or thing will be absolutized. This the Christian calls idolatry, which is an apostasy from the true God, finding its root in the human heart and spreading out to touch everything. Before renewal of a Christian view is possible, a self-conscious appreciation of from whence we have fallen is necessary.

Today we are actually in the grip of God’s historical judgements seen in our growing adherence to very ancient beliefs dressed in a new outfit. Anthropologists in the past called them ‘mana beliefs’ which lay at the foundation of the disintegration of the human personality in pagan cultures. These beliefs are characterized by a supposed fluidity of reality between the personal and impersonal (nature religion), for mana is a mysterious life force that underlies everything. Millions of people in our culture (often unwittingly) pay homage to such a life force from the yoga mat and alternative healer, to the science classroom, where nature is deified as an endless stream of life that spontaneously evolved from an original mysterious point of undifferentiated absolute unity. It was such a belief that filled the ancient Greco-Roman world with dread in the face of blind fate, and so promoted the nobility of suicide – a belief re-emergent in our time.

When nature itself is, in various ways, absolutized, culture becomes increasingly decrepit because with all of nature being somehow an aspect of the divine, emerging from an original unity, how can real and meaningful differentiation take place at the familial, biological, ethical, artistic, juridical, moral or even ontological level? In such a view man and his culture is merely impermanent artifice in a mysterious fluidity. And, in the post-Darwinian world that we occupy, we can no longer speak cogently or persuasively of even ‘natural law’ as a moral referent in the way that the pseudo-Christian secularists of past generations did. A mysterious world of chaotic forces can give no objective or transcendent law, and so all that is left to the ‘mana’ world of jurisprudence is positive law which ‘emerges’ as a development of the reflective experience of the people, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., former chief justice of the US Supreme Court and leading legal thinker, argued.[4] The obvious question is, who will interpret the reflective experience of the people and transform experience into law? Increasingly the answer is a new elite in our courts, cut loose from accountability to God and Scripture’s definition of man as his image-bearer.

This new elite or humanist priesthood (Plato’s philosopher kings) are necessary of course, because social chaos is not a workable political philosophy, and in a lawless world of radical autonomy, humanity needs salvation from all those fatalistic forces threatening to crush him. Increasingly our society looks to absolutize the cultural sphere of the state as the agency that should be able to control the threat that man, as an aspect of nature, is to himself. It is to the state that idolatrous man largely delegates his freedom.

It naturally follows that modern political doctrine rests typically on a set of beliefs that flatly contradict what God says about humanity. It is not that in political life we deny that there is evil in the world that needs to be addressed, but we locate that evil not in the heart of man (who is thought of as inherently good and perfectible by the average pagan neighbour today), but in the environment and spheres of social order like the family, the church, private property and other structures of alleged inequality that supposedly war against an original unity.

Fairly recently I was a fly on the wall in a Labour party committee meeting in the Parliament buildings in which they were analyzing their serious defeat in the recent elections. One MP and key speaker began his presentation by saying that the core problem is that the Labour party needs a robust return to the conviction of the essential goodness of man. This illustrated the recurrent theological-political illusion concerning the human person, that we are born without sin and so can change people by transforming the evil in society by getting back to an unspoiled condition that humanity supposedly lived in in his primitive past – a past supposedly without social inequality. So, if we abolish marriage and the family, no one will be subject to hierarchy anymore and women and children will not feel subjugated. If we eliminate binary gender norms no one will feel oppressed by distinctions anymore. If we eliminate income inequality, no one will be greedy anymore. If we open our borders and embrace Islamists returning from fighting with ISIS and find them work and housing, they won’t want to crucify and behead Christians anymore or plot against our country. In this view human beings are perfectible by political technique – a repackaged world of magic.

Our unfallen nature in this erroneous view is not fixed but plastic. We are not beings made in God’s image who have fallen into sin and idolatry who need to be restrained from evil by revealed moral law and renewed by Jesus Christ and God’s Holy Spirit. In fact we are so malleable we may become trans-human or post-human by not only redefining ourselves but evolving to merge with our own technology. This is a world of political and technocratic magic, resting on mana beliefs that hold we can abolish sin, guilt, poverty, disease, indolence, ignorance, hunger and even death itself, so long as God and man as his image bearer can be removed as a roadblock. The key obstacle is all hierarchy (except the privilege of belonging to a new cultural elite) because the principle of hierarchy is a reminder of the distinction between man and God.

If all hierarchies are leveled, it is thought, God is brought down to the level of man, and man is raised to the level of God. If the authority of families, parents, the church, pastors, private businesses, guilds, and associations are eroded, if we can abolish all true authority outside of the state and its legislative apparatus that authoritatively interprets the experience of the people, perhaps we can abolish God who stands behind and over all legitimate authority. Critically, centralization and massive political power must be accrued to the state do this. This path, it is held, is true liberation for the human personality. As the cultural theologian Andrew Sandlin has summarised it:

Liberals (progressives) since the French Revolution have engaged in one massive liberation project, what has been called ‘the oppression-liberation nexus.’ The liberal religion has become one of never-ending clawing for the liberation of humanity from every tyranny – real or imagined: the secularists must be liberated from the religionists, the parishioners from the clergy, the enlightened from the unenlightened, the citizens from royalty, the poor from the rich, the workers from the capitalists, blacks from whites, women from men, wives from husbands, children from parents, debtors from creditors, employees from employers, homosexuals from heterosexuals, convicts from law abiding citizens – and soon, if the trajectory persists, polygamists from monogamists and pedophiles from prison guards. The Great Liberation now extends even to non-human nature: the liberation of ‘the environment’ from rapacious humanity.[5]
 

The social cost and destructiveness of this autonomous liberation project is beyond full comprehension and the welfare states of Europe and increasingly North America are now buckling under the financial reality of such a counterfeit Exodus.

If we had adequately learned anything by now in our historical experience, it should have been that our rejection of God and the image of God in man leads to the endless defacing and destruction of that image and the steady decay of diverse cultural life as the sphere of the state overreaches itself to try and play a messianic role in people’s lives. As man kills himself as God’s image-bearer he languishes in the ruins of a social order that cannot find a solution to its malady from within nature itself.  Simply put, human beings cannot be remade or renewed by technique and will never be perfected until Christ establishes his kingdom in all its fullness.

The contemporary religious illusion that the human ego has the same absolute existence as God himself is a direct succumbing to the original lie proffered to our first parents, "you will be as gods." In both seeking ‘himself’ and his ‘god’ in the temporal world of experience, modern man has lost himself in the abyss, by absolutizing that which is in fact relative –and thereby comprehensible only in reference back to our creator revealed to us in the person of Christ. This incalculable loss and radical spiritual uprooting is the foundation of our current crisis that presently shows no sign of abating.

In clear contrast to contemporary political illusions, Scripture tells us that the human ‘I’ (person) is nothing in and of itself but truly lives only in reference to the creative power and defining word of God. Indeed true knowledge of ourselves is dependent, as John Calvin made clear, on true knowledge of God. The foundation of all true knowledge of God is right relationship with God – in short, the love of God! The first commandment is to love the Lord our God with heart, mind, soul and strength, and since in this way God is loved, his image bearer will be loved of necessity also; which is the second commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves. Nowhere in the Christian view can such love lead to the destruction of that image in gender fluid confusion, the re-definition of God’s creational institution of marriage or the murder of our neighbor in the womb or in age, sickness or despair, in the name of autonomy and dignity.

The simple truth is that without love to God and a recognition of his Word-revelation to us in Christ and in Scripture, we are not only unable to truly love our neighbor, we cannot even identify them truly. We find, in fact, that we cannot answer the most elementary question ‘what is a human person?’

Again it is Dooyeweerd who comes to the heart of the matter:

The question: "What is man? Who is he?" cannot be answered by man himself. However, it has been answered by God’s word-revelation, which uncovers the religious root and centre of human nature in its creation, fall into sin and redemption by Jesus Christ. Man lost true self-knowledge when he lost the true knowledge of God. But all idols of the human selfhood, which man in his apostasy has devised, break down when they are confronted with the Word of God which unmasks their vanity and nothingness. It is this word alone which, by its radical grip, can bring about a real reformation of our view of man and of our view of the temporal world.[6]
 

In possession of this Word and a true knowledge of God and the human person, we are then able to pursue and build true culture, and true community. With a transcendent referent for life and thought, political reality can proceed faithfully in its’ sphere on the basis of a true understanding of the life of humankind. That true word reveals that human beings are not merged with divinity, a primitive life force, where law and social order are merely an emergent property of nature manifest through man and where history must be ‘captured by the man-gods’ to create a world community, and the parliament of man. That idolatrous vision requires coerced collectivization in an attempt to realize community, but in the process only undermines both true community and the individual. As one cultural theologian notes, "The more social distinctions are denied the more force is required in society to bring men together, and the more force prevails in a society, the less communion."[7] In the Christian view, true community and communion rests on an inner bound, the grace of God, and then loyalty to God, and his life and freedom-bringing Word.

In this pursuit of a true political life, Christian Concern is in the vanguard.  As Christians we are dependent upon God’s grace and the working of His Spirit as we seek to oppose and defeat an apostate and destructive religious worldview that is ruining countless lives. We are called in this task to love and thoughtful obedience. And we can be confident of victory in the long run in this battle because an apostate culture of death has no future.

We must continue to pray for those in authority, and serve the cause of Christ which encompasses the good of our fellow men, to the best of our ability; prophetically witnessing against idolatry in its varied forms and serving the cause of righteousness and justice. We will not always be loved for this stand, indeed we may be hated by some, but this is the victory that overcomes the world – even our faith. With an apostate heart, for almost a century, our culture has been progressively pursuing the death of man as man (as God’s image-bearer), and so we are in that respect surrounded by dead men – dead in trespasses and sins. But the Lord Jesus Christ said:

I assure you: An hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. (John 5:25)
 

Jesus Christ is life. This is our confidence.