“For 500 years, faith has been in retreat, abandoning the battlefield of the physical world yard by yard, until not it sits within its last defense, it’s final redoubt in the place of revelation, under the cloud of unknowing. Meanwhile, science in ascendance has swarmed across the landscape, capturing everything from quark to quasar: Yet now, even as the victory seems at hand, the armies of empiricism appear confused by causality, crippled by uncertainty. Suddenly, the banner under which it fought looks indistinguishable from the torn one waving weakly above the enemies’ trenches. The simple truths over which the war began now seem neither simple nor true.”

 What is True- Forbes ASAP

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog! If you are new, I would encourage you to read the first part of this article before you continue. Some of it may not make sense! Until then, carry on wayward son.

The tug of war between revelation and reason, nature and grace, and the upper and lower stories became even more profound in the years that followed the Renaissance. If you remember your history correctly, the Reformation was an effort to bring the superior upper lower story and the in-logical lower stories together in harmony.  But by the 1700s, the hearts and minds of men were once again seized by “reason” and truth was once again referenced to science and man himself, rather than God and the church.

Francis Schaeffer phrased it this way-“The humanistic elements which had risen during the Renaissance came to flood tide in the Enlightenment. Here was man starting from himself absolutely.”

As a result questions such as “What can we know?” were no answered by reason and not revelation. With Revelation not being considered, man’s thinking shifted in three major ways:

1. The Upper Story was closed by the public and man was now left to answer every question he faced from a cognitive or empirical lower story point of view.

2. When reason was elevated and revelation was eliminated and the deist worldview was allowed to enter.

3. The door opened for the works of Immanuel Kant and George Wilhelm Frederich Hegel.

Allow me to explain these two men briefly. Immanuel Kant was the one who drove the wedge between reason and faith. Kant, invented a theory which revolved around the notion that one could know knowledge without knowing God. To Kant, “Faith is a matter of individual experience, a personal intuition, not an acceptance of theological propositions.”

Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804)

In his book he also said: “True religion is to consist of not knowing or considering what God has done for our salvation but what we must do to be worthy of it…and of whose necessity every man can become wholly certain without any Scriptural learning whatsoever…Man himself must make or have made himself into whatever, in a moral sense, whether good or evil, he is or is to become.”

Hegel who had a much impact on modern thought, he is famous for introducing Hegel’s Dialectical. Prior to this theory the understanding of the world was based a thesis/antithesis principle. This states that there are certain things which are true and certain things which are not true.  In logical form it would say A is A, but A is not non-A. Hegel rejected this premise. According to him, a thesis is a starting point-not and end. For with every thesis comes an antithesis or opposite. If we assume the thesis to be true, then we will also encounter its opposite or it’s contradiction.

This was one of the founding theories which can be seen in the world of people like Karl Marx. I won’t go into depth about the complexity of his works, only because of length. I would love it if you would read his works and form your own opinion.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831)

Hegel’s thoughts have dominated the modern man’s thought and have been great influenced by contemporary culture through the 20^th century. The Universities widely adopted his beliefs across western civilization and ultimately, his thoughts were adapted by the general population from the 20^th century and forward, thus he impacted everybody’s thinking even yours, even if you did not know it.

Francis Schaeffer summed this up flawlessly. He said “One cannot understand modern man in philosophy, in other disciplines, in other morals, in political thought, without understanding that Hegel has won.”

The reason he is ultimately important to understand, is because he, along with Søren Aabye Kierkegaard helped lay the foundations for the birth of Existentialism. This is the belief that purports meaning can only be applied to what already is within an individual’s experience. Therefore, meaning is found in the experience or the moment you live, rather than in objective truth. (See the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, they all contributed to the development of this philosophy.)

As a result of these men’s works, three worldviews on the bible were formed.

1. The Thesis/antithesis principle which says that the Bible is accepted as the Word of God.

2. As a result of the Enlightenment, the liberal view was established which said that the Bible is not the word of God.

3. Neo-Orthodoxy fuses existential thought with theology and says the Bibles become the world of God. Or it may become the word of God, or it may not.

Do you see how these men developed your view of thinking? Which belief do you fall into? Thanks for reading my post about some inspirational dead guys!