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March 3 - March 18, 2019
In the diagram, freedom and nature are both now autonomous. The individual’s freedom is seen not only as freedom without the need of redemption, but as absolute freedom.
The fight to retain freedom is carried on by Rousseau to a high degree. He and those who follow him, in their literature and art, express a casting aside of civilization as that which is restraining man’s freedom. It is the birth of the Bohemian ideal. They feel the pressure “downstairs” of man as the machine. Naturalistic science becomes a very heavy weight—an enemy. Freedom is beginning to be lost. So men, who are not really modern men as yet and so have not accepted the fact that they are only machines, begin to hate science. They long for freedom even if the freedom makes no sense, and
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It is freedom that no longer fits into the rational world. It merely hopes and tries to will that the finite individual man will be free—and all that is left is individual self-expression.
they all believed in the rational. This word has no relationship to the word rationalism. They acted upon the basis that man’s aspiration for the validity of reason was well founded. They thought in terms of antithesis. If a certain thing was true, the opposite was not true. In morals, if a thing was right, the opposite was wrong.
The sobering fact is that the only way one can reject thinking in terms of an antithesis and the rational is on the basis of the rational and the antithesis. When a man says that thinking in terms of an antithesis is wrong, what he is really doing is using the concept of antithesis to deny antithesis. That is the way God has made us and there is no other way to think.
In science the significant change came about therefore as a result of a shift in emphasis from the uniformity of natural causes to the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.
When nature is made autonomous it soon ends up by devouring God, grace, freedom and eventually man.
The long-term effect of this new approach of Hegel’s has been that Christians today do not understand their children. It may sound strange, but it is true. What Hegel changed was something more profound than merely one philosophic answer for another. He changed the rules of the game in two areas: epistemology, the theory of knowledge and the limits and validity of knowledge; and methodology, the method by which we approach the question of truth and knowing.
A choice was made, and the choice consisted in holding on to rationalism at the expense of rationality.
Truth as truth is gone, and synthesis (the both-and), with its relativism, reigns.
the mass of people have received the new way of thinking through the mass media without analyzing it. It is worse for them because they have been smashed in the face by it, because the cinema, television, the books they read, the press, magazines, have been infiltrated by the new thought-forms in an unanalyzed way.
Modern man continues to hang on to his rationalism and his autonomous revolt even though to do so he has had to abandon any rational hope of a unified answer. Previously, educated men would not give up rationality and the hope of the unified field of knowledge. Modern man has given up his hope of unity and lives in despair—the despair of no longer thinking that what has always been the aspiration of men is at all possible.
In other words, in the lower story, on the basis of all reason, man as man is dead. You have simply mathematics, particulars, mechanics. Man has no meaning, no purpose, no significance. There is only pessimism concerning man as man. But up above, on the basis of a non-rational, non-reasonable leap, there is a non-reasonable faith which gives optimism. This is modern man’s total dichotomy.
A machine, closed system, meaningless
Today there are almost no philosophies in the classical sense of philosophy—there are anti-philosophies. Men no longer think they can get rational answers to the big questions.
No matter what expression he places there, secular or religious, it still amounts to the same thing if it is rooted in this dichotomy. It is this that separates modern man from, on the one hand, Renaissance man, who had hope of a humanistic unity; and, on the other hand, from Reformation man, who actually possessed a rational unity above and below the line on the basis of the content of the biblical revelation.
Man, in neo-orthodox theology, is less than biblical fallen man. The Reformation and the Scriptures say that man cannot do anything to save himself, but he can, with his reason, search the Scriptures which touch not only “religious truth” but also history and the cosmos. He not only is able to search the Scriptures as the whole man, including his reason, but he has the responsibility to do so.
What is particularly important to notice in this system is the constant appearance in one form or another of the Kierkegaardian emphasis on the necessity of the leap.
Faith, whether expressed in secular or religious terms, becomes a leap without any verification because it is totally separated from the logical and the reasonable.
It does not matter what terms we adopt. The leap is common to every sphere of modern man’s thought. Man is forced to the despair of such a leap because he cannot live merely as a machine. This, then, is modern man. It is modern man, whether expressed in his painting, his music, his novel, his drama or his religion.
The defined words in the area of science and history are below the line; up above, there are only connotation words. Their value to him lies precisely in the fact that they are undefined.
The importance of these words to the new theologians lies in the illusion of communication, plus the highly motivated reaction men have on the basis of the connotation of the words. That is the advantage of the New Theology over secular existentialism and the modern secular mysticisms. One hears the word “Jesus,” one acts upon it, but it is never defined. The use of such words is always in the area of the irrational, the non-logical. Being separated from history and the cosmos, they are divorced from possible verification by reason downstairs, and there is no certainty that there is anything
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The old mystics always said that there was somebody there, but the new mystic says that that does not matter, because faith is the important thing. It is faith in faith, whether expressed in secular or religious terms. The leap is the thing and not the terms in which the leap is expressed.
Nature had come to represent determinism, the machine, with man in the hopeless situation of being caught in the machine. Then, in the upper story, we find man struggling for freedom. The freedom that was being sought was an absolute freedom with no limitations. There is no God, nor even a universal, to limit him, so the individual seeks to express himself with total freedom, and yet, at the same time, he feels the damnation of being in the machine. This is the tension of modern man.
The field of art offers a variety of illustrations of this tension. Such tension affords a partial explanation of the intriguing fact that much of contemporary art, as a self-expression of what man is, is ugly. He does not know it, but he is expressing the nature of fallen man, which as created in the image of God is wonderful, yet now is fallen.
science as such is not autonomously free but must follow what is there. Even if the scientist or philosopher says that all is random and meaningless, once he moves out into the universe he is limited, no matter what his philosophic system is, for he must follow what he finds there. If science does not do this, it is not science but science fiction.
Because poetry is with us one hopes that there is more to life than merely what you know rationally and logically to be the case. Here then is another example of an irrational upstairs without any content.
On the basis of rationality man has no hope, yet you look to art as art to provide it. It affords an integration point, a leap, a hope for freedom in the midst of what your mind knows is false. You are damned and you know it, and yet you look to art and try to find a hope that reasonably you know is not there.
But at the moment when he painted a universal and not a particular, he ran head on into one of the dilemmas of modern man—the loss of communication. The person standing in front of the painting has lost communication with the painting—he does not know what the subject matter is. What is the use of being god on a two-by-four surface when nobody knows what you are talking about!
