Who's demanding? Faith in ourselves has superseded faith in God
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Early in the 19th century, disputing the religious dogmatism of the Puritans, Ralph Waldo Emerson preached that "it is by yourself without ambassador that God speaks to you. ...It is God in you that responds to God without." With notable exceptions, this is the faith of most Americans at the millennium. It is a private faith-incommunicable, and sentimental, unanchored by Scripture, creed or doctrine, and buttressed only by the latest personal revelation. God is not dead, as naysayers claimed in the 1960's. Rather he has been absorbed and domesticated by individual believers. How did this come to pass? With the notable exception of the Evangelical and Catholic churches, traditional Christianity has become accustomes since the Enlightenment to accommodating the prevailing secular culture. Also known as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment
began in the 18th century to interpret human existance in terms contrary to religion. In the words of Harvard historian Crane Brinton, the basic idea of the Enlightenment was the "belief that all human beings can attain here on earth a state of perfection hitherto in the West thought to be possible only for Christians in a state of grace, and for them only after death." The Rationalists aimed at more than simply releasing mankind from superstition. They meant to free him from belief in, and responsibility to a demanding God. University of Wisconsin historian Thomas C. Reeves identifies the Enlightenment as a secular religion in which pride(for Christians the worst of the seven deadly sins)has been transformed into the principal virtue. Centuries earlier, the reformer Marin Luther reviled reason as the devil's harlot. For Christians the self has always been the problem. It must be denied and mastered by repentance, humility, and reliance on God. Happily, our nation profited from founding fathers who balanced both Christian and Enlightenment thinking. In retrospect, they may have been too optimistic about human nature, but optimism suited the New World and motivated our forebears. At the same time, the founders believed in an ordered universe, and they inherited from the Pilgrims a sense of divine destiny for this land. That was all to the good. Unfortunately, the Enlightenment planted a seed that would grow into secular humanism, requiring the churches to choose whether to accommodate pride as a virtue or to resist it as a vice. Apparently, pride has conquered humility. In the mainline churches at the millennium there is more talk of self-esteem than of human frailty, and practically no mention of sin. Not long ago, when Harold Kushner, a rabbi, wrote a best-selling book
whose tile asked the question "How Good Do We Have to Be," he answered that guilt feelings and inadequacy, not pride, are our downfall. Faith in ourselves has become the alternative to faith in God.-David Yount,Scripps Howard News Service
Edited by - sevenofnine on 14 October 2000 22:4:25
Edited by - sevenofnine on 15 October 2000 11:34:7