The Spirit of the Age
(And Why We Do NOT Follow It)

 "If anyone among you seems to be wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise.  For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God."  (1 Cor. 1:18-19)

 

The Coming of the Age

In 1923, Christian author J. Gresham Machen, troubled by the church's increasing desire to be esteemed by the world, acknowledged that the modern scientific age has brought particular challenges to Bible-believing Christians: "Modern inventions...have given us in many respects a new world to live in... In such an age, it is obvious that every inheritance from the past must be subject to searching criticism; and as a matter of fact some convictions of the human race have crumbled to pieces in the test.... If such an attitude be justifiable, then no institution is faced by a stronger hostile presumption than the institution of the Christian religion, for no institution has based itself more squarely upon the authority of a by-gone age.... It is no wonder that that appeal [to an older authority] is being criticized today; for the writers of the [Bible]... were no doubt men of their own age, whose outlook upon the material world, judged by modern standards, must have been of the crudest and most elementary kind. Inevitably the question arises whether the opinions of such men can ever be normative for men of the present day; in other words, whether first-century religion can ever stand in company with twentieth-century science." 

Machen then asks what many in our generation are asking:  "What is the relation between Christianity and modern culture, and may Christianity be maintained in a scientific age?"  We shall respond to this question by challenging the modern age's narcissistic evaluation of itself, and by asserting that a bold, uncompromising and unapologetic Christian faith has never lost its power.

The Arrogance of the Age

Machen, who wrote his remarks over 80 years ago, was correct when he pointed out that modern science has increased skepticism towards the authenticity of the Christian faith, to the extent that many demand a full explanation of every question before they will even consider whether the Bible is true or not.  What about Adam & Eve – do you really believe in that?  Where did Cain get his wife? How could Methuselah live to be 969 years old?  Do you believe such "unscientific" stories as the creation of the heavens and the earth in six days, a literal Noah’s ark, the confusion of languages at the tower of Babel, or the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea on dry land?  To those of us who believe, it defies common sense that most who ask these questions demand a full explanation from God, but not from their scientists who, when the doors are closed and their devoted public fans aren't listening, often admit that their theories are little more than fantasies. 

Machen's observation that many long-held convictions have crumbled in the dust with the coming of the modern scientific age is indeed true, but it must be qualified.  The fact is that modern science, with its continual theorizing, challenges not merely traditional moral convictions but the findings of science itself, for nearly every previous scientific belief has crumbled as well, not always because they are factually disproven but because they are replaced with new theories.  Renowned scientist Stephen Jay Gould was being brutally honest when he observed, "Facts do not ‘speak for themselves’; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robot-like accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation." What this means is that modern science does not constitute absolute truth.  The over-politicized moral priorities of this age, many allegedly based on pure science, will change; the modern appeal of marxism, radical environmentalism, tolerance of "diversity" taken to the extreme, cannot stand and will pass away like the social mores of every age.

A perfect example of this lack of absolutes in scientific inquiry is the attack on the authenticity of the Bible, called the "Higher Criticism," which began in the 18th century in the universities of Europe.  Theories were put forth as to why the Bible should not be considered the infallible Word of God.  Cynics of all types eagerly signed on to those theories and disseminated them all over the world.  Yet as a branch of science, Higher Criticism was a complete failure.  In time, not only were their findings recognized to be merely a disguised attack on Christianity, but these scholars disputed one another's findings, and their objective of a unified, scientific consensus against the divine origins of the Bible came to nothing.  Their movement was doomed to fail, for as C.S. Lewis said of reading the Scriptures before his conversion to the Faith, “I, rather than it, was the source of the criticism.  The Bible was criticizing me more than I was able to criticize it.” 

A similar story could be told of Darwin's theory of evolution, which took the world by storm in the late 1800's and still lives on in scientific theory, in textbooks and in the popular imagination.  But little more than a hundred years later, evolution is a theory in crisis, and has been described as such even by many within its ranks.  Consider the following statements made little more than a decade or two ago by respected thinkers: 

• "Evolution [has become] in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to ‘bend’ their observations to fit in with it,” (H. S. Lipson, Professor of Physics, University of Manchester, UK.)
• "Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless." (Prof. Louis Bounoure, former President of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, later Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research.)
• "I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” (Malcolm Muggeridge, world famous journalist and philosopher, Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.)

Thousands of similar statements have been made by honest scientists saying among themselves what they may fear to admit publicly.  The bottom line is that while those who consider themselves "moderns" have always had an inflated view of themselves and their opinions, science and modern culture have no answers for the deeper issues of human life.  While scientists have made great gains in understanding and making use of the present, physical world, they have generally done a very poor job of reconstructing the ancient past, of predicting the future, or of comprehending the spiritual world. Furthermore, their opinions are constantly changing; thus, someone has wisely said, "He who wishes to be a child of the age soon becomes an orphan."  Astrology, a flat earth, alchemy, bloodletting, spontaneous generation, Dr. Spock's parenting theories (by his own admission), many of Darwin's original theories, and Freudian psychoanalysis were once majority opinions among elitists who mocked those who refused to get on board with them, but they have all been discredited.

Yet the "moderns" simply move on, without a trace of embarrassment, to their new theories. For example, the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, signed by many intellectual elites and academics of that day, audaciously announced that traditional religion must move over for the new science:  "Today, man's larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion."  Yet just over 30 years later, in Humanist Manifesto II, they were forced to admit, "Events since then make that earlier statement seem far too optimistic. Nazism has shown the depths of brutality of which humanity is capable. Other totalitarian regimes have suppressed human rights without ending poverty. Science has sometimes brought evil as well as good."  They then proceeded to call for more of the same godless solutions they had demanded in 1933. 

The Deficiencies of the Age

Writing of the post-Christian age in which the only absolute value seems to be "the systematic hunting down of all settled conviction," David Wells, in his book No Place For Truth, offers the following unflattering commentary:  "What is most remarkable about modern people is that they are not in scale with the world they inhabit informationally and psychologically.  They are dwarfed.  And they have been emptied of their metaphysical substance:  more perfectly, it has been sucked out of them.  There is nothing to give height or depth or perspective to anything they experience.  They know more, but they are not necessarily wiser.  They believe less, but they are not more substantial.  They are attuned to experience and to appearances, not to thought and character."  How well that describes our modern times!

Considering all these things, those of us who love Scripture and the God of Scripture must assert that we will not and cannot follow the spirit of the age.  We see our world much as Machen did in the 1920's when he observed, "The modern world represents in some respects an enormous improvement over the world in which our ancestors lived; but in other respects it exhibits a lamentable decline. The improvement appears in the physical conditions of life, but in the spiritual realm there is a corresponding loss." 

Furthermore, we have lost any sense of stability.  What has accelerated since Machen's day is the rapidity with which new ideas are tried and discarded, resulting in the new cry for tolerance for the diversity of opinions – tolerance, that is, for everything except for biblical Christianity.  Moreover, this so-called tolerance, also carried into the spiritual realm, is viewed as the only absolute truth, which we must accept in order to be in with the times.  This we also reject, and rather than give in to the charge that the diversity of religious beliefs in our day somehow makes the Bible as absolute truth less credible, we would point out that our day has merely become more like the age in which the Bible was written, in which thousands of local gods, cults, religions and philosophies all jostled to be heard and believed. In other words, the Bible was written in and for a climate much like the day in which we live, and so in a sense is more relevant than ever.

The Foolishness of the Cross

In conclusion, though we will undoubtedly be mocked and rejected by many in high places, we accept this as a badge of our faith, and point the reader to the words of Paul the Apostle, who told us from the beginning that this is how it will and must always be for the true Christian:

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent."  Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.  For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.  For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.  But God has chosen the foolish things ob the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence. (1 Corinthians 1:18-29)