The French Revolution Lives On!

The anti-clericalism of the French Revolution forced Catholic thinkers to recognize the distinction between state and society. The very existence of society as a complex entity of various social groups independent of the state and its government was called in question by the radical revolutions beginning with the French and continuing through the Bolshevik and subsequent revolutions including the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cuban and the Cambodian. The revolutionary regimes claimed the right to suppress or control all of the groups that make up a flourishing society including church, family, labor unions, academic faculties, athletic organizations, charitable organizations, simply everything.

In response to this, according to Russell Hittinger, Catholic thinkers saw from Genesis that God had created different kinds of entities. The purely physical powers and objects, animals with a kind of organic unity of each individual and then, marriage, a society of more than one person with a unity and structure of relationships suitable for its membership of husband, wife and children. Other groups within society had their chosen goals but constituted something similar in that they were a unity of persons seeking common goals and were natural to human societies.

As Hittinger puts it, the Catholics looked with favor on all such groups with legitimate purposes and saw them in a hierarchy in which the church was the highest in that its goal of relating to God was the highest purpose, followed by the state, whose goals are temporal but important and then society with its pluriform associations of family and other groups. These thinkers defended the legitimacy of society as against the state, which had no basis for suppressing or controlling its entities in pursuit of their legitimate goals.

Because of the anti-clericalism of the revolutions that swept Europe after 1789 and on into the 20th Century, Catholic thinkers opposed the revolution, often in the name of monarchy, the main political force available to oppose it. Because the American Revolution did not overturn church and society on the model of the French, Americans were slow to recognize the problem of utopian revolutions bent on perfecting human society and human beings, whatever the human cost. But Catholic thinkers did see that they were defending society in its multiform variety when they opposed these revolutions.

Abraham Kuyper's concept of sphere sovereignty, it seems to me, recognizes the same reality that society consists of many legitimate human institutions besides the government that are directly ordained by God and thus have a sphere of action independent of control by the state. I think that sphere sovereignty clarifies the reality without imposing a hierarchy. What the Catholics have seen best is that the revolutionary spirit abroad in the world is bent on totalitarian control of society in order to accomplish its goal of perfecting humanity and creating the earthly paradise. The state must be sovereign over all. Rousseau's idea of a General Will determined by a majority vote has been used to promote totalitarian democracy, but this bears no relationship to the popular sovereignty of the American Republic of our Founders.

Marxism-Leninism was explicit about its goals. But I believe that the spirit of the revolution animates the secular intelligentsia throughout Europe and America. Although Soviet Communism was turned back, the revolutionary spirit has triumphed in Europe and that is why the European Union is unwilling even to acknowledge its Chrsitian heritage. This is what the Culture War is about in America: the revolution. I believe that Del Tackett and the Truth Project get it. But it's not obvious to most Americans and so Christians are bound to differ about issues ranging from gun control to early childhood education.

Education, secularization and gun control are key areas where state control must be advanced in order to bring about the revolution by peaceful means. Christians should be wise in advancing Christian initiatives in education and in resisting secularization and gun control. Hate crimes laws are the leading edge of suppression of religious speech at the moment. But education is the key to long-term success. And well over 90% of American children are in government schools. That is the biggest practical problem.

Of course, the underlying problem is our failure to be the church. That is why I believe--contrary to current appearances perhaps--that our focus groups are the most important thing we are doing. This is where the church will come alive when God visits us.

The Paradox of God's Sovereignty, Man's Freedom

I thought Ravi Zacharias's response at a university forum to a questioner who posed God's sovereignty as a direct contradiction of man's "free will" was brilliant. His brief response was that neither God's sovereignty nor man's freedom is absolute in this relationship.

Since Ravi didn't have time to make a complete response, I'll try to duplicate it in part and fill in the blanks in the argument from my perspective. To begin with, human beings are limited by their creaturely natures: genetics, parents, the laws of nature and many other things. Therefore, human choices are not entirely free, but are limited by God who has ordained all these things. Nevertheless, Adam at least was free to make the most significant choice of whether or not to obey God, to choose good or evil.

God, by contrast, is inherently completely free, but he freely chose to limit himself by making Adam a moral being with freedom to choose obedience and life or disobedience and death. Thus, God did not choose to impose his prescriptive will of obedience but chose to permit Adam's forseen disobedience.

At this point it should be clear that the contradiction is only apparent, a paradox, not a true contradiction. God freely limits his prescriptive will and man exercises his freedom to choose good or to choose evil. Adam, in fact, chose evil and thereby died spiritually, thus losing the ability to choose the good. Right here is where the real controversy begins. I'm not sure where Ravi goes with it, but I'll take this up again soon, D.V.

Doubting Darwinism Dangerous

NPR's February 15 feature on Evangelical biology students in Kansas being taught to reconcile Darwinism with their Christian faith glossed over the depth of the difficulty. For these students believe—with some reason—that to get a Phd. in biology they must accept humanity’s not being a special creation of God as a fact as well established as Copernicus’s realization that earth is not the center of the solar system. And, indeed, as your intro indicated, this is what is believed by most academics in biology.

But the revolution of the earth about the sun can be confirmed by direct observations in the present and macroevolution, by contrast, cannot (because of its long time frame). Perhaps the science friendly way to deal with the continuing controversy over evolution is to acknowledge that now, as always since 1859, significant numbers of competent biologists hold that natural selection is a mechanism inadequate to explain the diversity of life.

Instead of allowing further debate and observations, however, those in control of the biological sciences establishment prefer to suppress dissent in defense of the reigning neo-Darwinian paradigm. And I think this intolerance has been well documented in Ben Stein’s documentary on the ID controversy, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Darwin’s Legacy of Purposelessness

If Darwinism is true, we should be honest and face up to its implications that life has no overarching purpose and no rational basis for moral obligation.

If the rich diversity of organic life on earth came about by an undirected, impersonal process ruled by random mutation and survival of the fittest, then, indeed, human life has no purpose beyond survival and reproduction. Moreover, morality, while it may be beneficial for the group, has no basis for obligation binding on the individual.

As evolutionary philosopher and Tufts University Professor Daniel Dennett eloquently explains, "Darwin's idea--bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid . . . eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view.” So purposelessness replaces the glory of God and amorality replaces the morality of the Ten Commandments of Christian faith.

Our government schools have taught this corrosive idea, the evolutionary creation myth, to generations of American children. This myth makes the implausible claim that unintelligent causes are enough to explain all the astounding complexity of organic life from the single cell to the human brain. When youth taught this myth realize its implications, we should not be surprised that some despair of life and commit suicide. Others have even murdered their tormentors (and others) at school before they turned their weapons on themselves—confident from the myth that no Creator existed to hold them responsible.

But macroevolution can never be directly observed because it requires so much time. And where are the endlessly intergrading fossils recording the gradual process of transformation of species that Darwin expected would be found? And how explain the production of the massive amounts of encoded information in each cell’s DNA by a random process? Finally, how did life ever get started when the mathematicians say that attaining the minimal level of chemical complexity necessary for life by accident would take far more time than the 14-billion-year age of the universe?

For good reasons, then, many Americans remain skeptical of Darwinism.