The Madman on Your Nightly News

We find ourselves as Christians living in a modern secular age. Just as Judah, in the Old Testament, was forced to live as exiles in Babylon, so are we as Christians in the West forced to live in a society vastly at odds with our core Christian doctrine and ethics. This reality, that we are once again exiled, ought not surprise Christians. No matter how optimistic one’s vision of the future is (and mine is quite optimistic), we cannot utterly detach ourselves from the New Testament vision that until Christ returns we will be “exiles” (1 Peter 1:1, 1 Peter 2:11, 2 Corinthians 5:8, Romans 12:2).

While, this exilic understanding of life has been central to the Christian faith since its inception, there is a new dynamic to it that requires discussion. A titanic shift has been made between Christian and nonChristian thought that has drastic implications for how we live faithfully as exiles and witnesses to Christ. Most Christians are unaware of this shift and the impact it has on how we live faithfully unto God, communicate truth to a hurting world, and serve our neighbor.

In his book The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer describes the dilemma of modern man. According to Schaeffer, a shift in philosophy took place in the early 1800’s, particularly underneath the teachings of Hegel, that has slowly, over a few centuries, worked its way from the philosopher’s armchair into the every day life and mind of modern man. This shift in thinking has infused our education, our politics, our economics, our art, and our everyday simple decisions. This shift has to do with our understanding of truth.

If you were to go back into the the times of Christ, or the Middle Ages, or the mid 1900’s for that matter, how humanity understood truth was quite uniform. Both Christian and nonChristian alike understood the world to operate with certain absolutes. Everyday folks didn’t necessarily use the word “absolute” to describe their vision of reality, but they lived this way nonetheless. Everybody agreed that if one thing was true, its opposite was false. As students of logic might say it, A cannot be non-A. This binary vision of the world was quite simple. For the Christian, it was a simple outworking of the Scriptures. God is a god of order and beauty, and designed the world with order and beauty. Even non-Christians who had removed God as the ultimate reality behind “truth” and “logic” and “beauty,” accepted that the world was structured that way, even if they couldn’t explain. In other words, the secularist was willing to grant that black is black, and therefore that black is not white, not because they had a basis to make that claim, but because they knew they must make that claim.

Because of this mutual shared agreement on the necessity of truth, christian and nonChristian alike were able to speak intelligently with one another. We might discover evidences that led us to different conclusions, but we all still accepted the fact that there was such a thing as evidence, and such a thing as a conclusion.

But the tides have changed. Modern man, with its infusion of secular sentimentality, has developed an entire worldview detached from this fundamental presupposition of absolutes. We see this everywhere in our society. The secular mind has dropped below what Schaeffer calls the line of despair. In its simplest sense, this means that the secular mind no longer has any legitimate basis, no anchor, or warrant for absolutes. Having removed God from their worldview, the secular mind is forced to place something else at that center, something else as the standard by which all “truth” can be measured. The problem of course is that any other option besides God as the basis of utter reality, is…nothing. Humanists have attempted to placed humanity at the center, but what even a surface level reading of the history of Humanism reveals is that they have changed and adjusted their basic premises and core truths many times over the last century. Why? Because humanism, no matter how much it wants to, can never arrive at absolutes. It can only ever provide “hopefuls”, “maybes,” and “potentials.”

Though here and there, you may find a secular minded individual romantically standing on absolutes, they do so not according to their own values and presuppositions, but only because some inward part of their heart still knows that life must contain certain absolutes to have any meaning whatsoever. “Good” must ultimately mean more than what one group of individuals over here in this corner of the world supposes “good” to mean, otherwise as soon as a more powerful group wins the culture war with a different understanding what “good” is, suddenly what once was “bad” is now defined as “good.”

With God removed (or so the secularist believes), the modern man sought for some absolute somewhere. Aldous Huxley sought the “first order experience” through psychodelic drugs, and today Huxley’s efforts to find a replacement basis for truth is wreaking havoc upon an entire generation in the West. Van Gogh sought a basis of truth in having artists lead the way to a new and great community and society. He died in despair. Gaugin, sought the deepest level of truth in the beauty of the natives of Tahiti. But his last painting titled What? Whence? Whither? reveals a strange and dark twisted ending to his quest. Gaugin, like Van Gogh, also attempted to take his own life in despair. I do not say these words lightly, as if Van Gogh and Gaugin’s despair is something to be mocked. Rather, Schaeffer poses these men as leading examples of modern man’s efforts to write a new gospel, to establish a new absolute. Time and time again, every effort has failed.
Today, we have gone beyond Schaeffer’s line of despair. I would argue that culture has now accepted and celebrated the madness of Neitzche’s Madman, who supposing himself to realize “God was dead,” suddenly understood that every aspect of society, if there was no God, was unbounded and free to be rewritten at will. The madman cries,

"But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning?"

In Neitzche’s time, this was a madman who had arrived to early. The people of his day were not ready to accept the truth he had felt he discovered, that without God there was no truth, no up, no down, no logic, no certainty, no cohesion, no self, no existence, no order. The Madman cries out later, “I come too early… I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling, it has not yet reached men’s ears.” Well the time has arrived. This man was mad in the days of Neitzche, today he is the epitome of sanity.

I’m writing this post not necessarily to critique secularism, though there is plenty of critique in what I’ve shared. Rather, I write this post to equip Christians to understand what is taking place around us. Here is the lesson: As soon as modern man removed God as the source of utter reality, they set themselves on the mad path leading towards where we have arrived today, a society where “truth” is nothing more than a spectrum, and the great evil is to declare otherwise. A society that cherishes “your truth” and “my truth,” but cannot stand “the truth.”

What can a simple Christian do about it? We can stand unapologetically on the truth of Scripture, God’s Word. Don’t budge, not an inch. Do not cater to madness. Force the one who believes there is no truth to say to you, “You’re wrong,” and see if he can spot the irony. Do not pretend like the madman is not mad, lest you yourself go mad in the process. When someone suggests that truth is a spectrum, reveal the absurdity of the claim and go on with your life. And when they say, “You’re wrong,”remind them that “wrong” and “right” are categories that belong to a Christian, not to a madman. Live boldly in the binary of truth. State unequivocally that all that God says is good is in fact good, and all that God says is bad is in fact bad. Celebrate marriage as God has defined it, it works! Celebrate the differences between men and women, and mothers and fathers. When confronted with the absurdity of the madman on your nightly news, feel free to chuckle at his antics, then open your Bible and pray to the God of all truth.