In Romans 1 Paul describes a time when man, having forsaken the true God in
the misguided belief that he (man) is maintaining the intellectual high ground,
actually starts to descend into the arena of 'foolishness'.
Paul describes it like this, "Thinking themselves wise, they became
fools" (Romans 1:22).
Ever since the Enlightenment 300 years ago and the scientific revolution,
humanists have drifted further and further from God, purporting Christianity to
be for fools.
What Paul, perhaps the most brilliant man of the first century AD,
perceives, however, is that the more you drift from God, the more you drift
into the area of the pseudo-intellectual, the pseudo-academic, and end up
making outrageously foolish statements and proclaiming laughable beliefs.
Paul implies here a contrast – and conflict – between the true wisdom of
God and the false wisdom of the serpent. It is a complex theological theme that
begins in the early days of man, where the ‘wise’ serpent offered man
‘knowledge’ (so Genesis 3). Man foolishly took the bait, and ended up in shame
and humiliation, in contrast with the higher heights of false godhood to which
he wished to attain. As Adam bought into the idea he could become ‘like God’
with such false ‘knowledge’, so there is a high level of hubris and presumption
that so often accompanies those academics who proclaim eccentric humanist
ideologies as intellectually superior.
The ‘false wisdom’ idea continues into the Christian era, with a group
called the Gnostics, who had a great deal of success deceiving Christians of
the second century by appealing to the same supposed ‘higher wisdom’. We have a
similar thing today with New Age and eastern mystic thought (and a similar felt
superiority on the part of many New Age practitioners that the Christian age is
moribund and passe, and that we need to move into a higher level of
revelation).
I find it interesting that the term to describe the ‘awakening’ of
philosophical ideas in the eighteenth century is termed ‘Enlightenment’. I
wonder as to a hidden (unconscious) spiritual root or motivation behind it.
After all, the original temptation of the serpent of wisdom in Genesis was to
‘open the eyes’ with the special ‘knowledge’ that would elevate the recipient
to a level of being ‘like God’, and the hubris and arrogance that no doubt
accompanies this.
John Gay in his monumental trilogy on the Enlightenment (regarded by many
as the premiere work on the subject), sub-titled his first volume ‘The Rise of
Modern Paganism’. He does stress that he does not mean ‘paganism’ in a literal
sense, but that there was a sense in which the Enlightenment ethos moved one
away from the established church.
I wonder if he is closer to the truth than he realises, in that – on a
spiritual level – that period began the drift away from God to a
quasi-religion, a ‘humanism’ which, as many have underscored, becomes a sort of
substitute religion in its various forms.
Thus philosopher (and one-time classmate of Jean-Paul Sartre) Raymond Aron accuses Communism of being the ‘Opiate of the
Intellectual’ in his book of the same title; thus too Michael Burleigh’s
similar critiques of the French philosophes of the 1789 Revolution and the
Nazism of the 1930s, both of which contained powerful quasi-religious elements
(‘Sacred Causes’; ‘Earthly Powers’). See also the unpublished thesis Nazi Influence on
Christian life in Germany, which can be accessed at
https://archive.org/details/naziinfluenceonc00wilk
This is, indeed, a phenomenon that is becoming more and more prevalent in
our own day as we tick into the twenty-first century. So-called intellectuals
and academic leaders proclaiming with a straight face the merits of forcing
children into transgender roles, is apt proof of this, among various other
examples.
So too in the 1970s the politically correct argued that global warming
could be averted by scattering the entirety of the antarctic region with soot.
Feminists have long complained that the word 'woman' is sexist because it
contains the word 'man'.
Thus too, males arbitrarily deciding that they ‘elect to identify as’
females, and vice versa, and television programmes celebrating such persons as
hosts and celebrities.
To put it another way, political correctness has made fools of those who
often have the most academic degrees and the highest academic standing.
In all this, the present generation seriously runs the risk of making
itself a laughing stock in the face of history: not to mention the risk of the
public losing all faith in the academia that is supposed to be guiding it and
developing the principles and foundations on which it stands.
As to “Proclaiming themselves wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22), I
suspect Paul's theology is derived in part from Proverbs 1, “The fear of God is
the beginning of wisdom.” That is, every scientist and academic needs first to
bow the knee to God and build his belief and academic platform on God and this
spiritual foundation. Otherwise, and though it may take time, he will drift
ultimately into the arena of the laughable.
It is precisely this phenomenon that is taking place in greater and greater
degrees in our day.
Thus many of our academics, indeed, in "proclaiming themselves
wise" in departing from God and embracing strange humanist ideas, have
"become fools".
Indeed, the End Times will see a fulfilment of Paul's principle that the
intelligent proclaim themselves wise, but believe and state the foolish,
bringing the world crashing down around them.
Indeed, we might be said to have entered the age of the intelligent fool.
It may sound like a paradox, but for those who understand biblical theology
and how the spiritual impacts upon the mental and material, it makes sense.
A further proof of this emerges in the following recent piece, where a
feminist is aptly put in place and her pseudo-intellectualism exposed, and this
by an astute linguist:
https://www.boredpanda.com/create-patriarchal-language-linguistic/
