I started not to post today, as I usually do, and let yesterday’s post/4 minute podcast on Senator Kaine, Charlie Kirk, and Rights serve in its place. Thursday is the day I write and, honestly, I needed “time off” to process the assassination of Charlie Kirk before continuing on the topic I proposed at the conclusion of last week’s commentary: Is reason the way forward in law.
This morning, though, as I processed Kirk’s assassination and remembrances of 9-11 and prayed, something came to my mind that I read a few weeks ago. I pray it helps make sense of why some folks just don’t seem “to get it,” no matter how logical our reasoning is or how illogical and inconsistent the other person’s thinking is.
I think it is important because many, across a wide spectrum, are asking, “What have we forgotten about ourselves as a people that these things are happening? What is the way forward?”
What Has Been on My Mind
What I’ve been thinking for a few weeks is why logical reasoning seems to bounce off people. Clips of Charlie Kirk’s exchanges with people show that to be true.
That is not to say say that logical reasoning is unimportant, that such should not be offered, or that it has no place in public discourse. But if we apply mere reason as a way forward, I believe we must keep in mind that nihilistic assumptions are pervasive in most people’s thinking, even if they don’t realize it.
As influential atheist historian Carl Becker has written, science showed that we live “in a world ruled by an indifferent force,” not “a beneficent mind.” (The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, p. 74.)
So, the post-moderns with whom we must deal believe humanity has progressed out of what was only an older experience of the cosmos, which they believe was subjectively-oriented and organized into meaning by us. As Becker said, “facts are primary” in today’s nihilistic and, therefore, subjective-oriented climate of opinion. Logic is no longer primary because “whirl is king.”
Interestingly, this subjective, experiential orientation coincides nicely with much of today’s evangelical theology and preaching. And that led me to what follows.
The following is my paraphrase of a quote from John Owen's Christologia:
Mankind, by Adam’s transgression, has fallen into a condition or state in which the principles of his moral operations are at enmity against God. Consequently, whatever befalls him, he chooses to continue in his state of apostasy, because he is wholly “alienated from the life of God.” He doesn’t like the life of God, because, for him, it does not suit his dispositions, inclinations, and desires; rather, the life of God is inconsistent with everything in which he has an interest.
In our fallen condition, and apart from the life of God, we will reject logical reasoning when it impinges on what we want to believe or want to do.
I increasingly think that is why the Apostle Paul, when in the sin-saturated city of Corinth, said he "determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2). But, apart from reading a number of John Owen's works, I don’t think I would really appreciate the profound importance of the words “Jesus Christ” preceding the "and."
In the preaching I can recall, it seems there was little development of and exposition given to the person of "Jesus Christ," the words that precede the “and.” Rather, it was focused mostly on His crucifixion and only when necessary because of the text or it being Easter.
It seems to me that much of evangelicalism wants to focus on the saved-from-hell implication of "Him Crucified.” But without an explanation of his person, the cross loses its power and is "made of none effect" (1 Corinthians 1:17). What is left is a morality play and a code of ethics we think logical because of the residuals in our mind of the now-jettisoned cosmological framing brought about by a beneficent mind.
Why Preaching the Cross is “Foolishness” or Unreasonable
I suspect inattention to the person of Jesus Christ adds to why "the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness" (1 Corinthians 1:18). Owen helped me realize that the preaching of the latter—the cross—without the former, is foolishness. Why?
First, because what could a mere man do to save me even if he were wholly righteous. That righteousness is what he would have owed God anyway? His righteousness could not extend to me. We might say he would have no righteousness “left over” for me to use.
Second, if Jesus were only the Son of God, the human righteousness we need could not be found because of the infinite distance between God and creation.
Without understanding the person of Christ as God and man in one nature, including his offices and his ongoing exercise of those offices, the cross is foolishness.
This is what I was left asking
Who will preach that message in our churches until the love of the person of Jesus Christ on the cross is, by the Holy Spirit, so "spread abroad in our hearts" as to reform and redirect every other inclination, disposition, and desire we have—our loves? See Romans 5:5.
Will we make it our focus, too, even if our preachers or priests don’t?
The person of Jesus Christ, in the mediation of his offices as God’s prophet, priest, and king, conquered all "principalities and powers" (Colossians 2:15; Ephesians 3:10, 6:12.). And, by faith in who He is and the eternal covenant promises between the Father and the Son extended in time through those of the faith of Abraham for the reconciliation of the world (cosmos), He will extend his conquest.
Lord have mercy! Give us courage.
