A New Direction

The upcoming 2006 Desiring God National Conference: Above All Earthly Pow'rs hosted by John Piper has me waiting and ready to be taught, to be refined, to be rebuked, and to worship Christ.  I've been reading the book by David F. Wells that the conference was based on and titled after.  I am so completely humbled by the amount of insight, vision, history, and understanding that Wells brings in this book.  In fact, I want to share some of his thoughts...

"Clearly the Enlightenment promised far more than it was ever able to deliver; one way of understanding this is to think of it as a Christian heresy.  What Christian faith had offered was retained while the Source from which that offer had been made was rejected.  The prerogatives that had belonged to God did not simply disappear; now they reappeared in human beings.  The revelation he had given now appeared in the form of natural reason, which would do what revelation had done but without the discomfort of requiring humanity to submit to the God from whom the revelation had come; the idea of salvation was retained but transformed into the drive for human perfectibility, at first achieved by moral striving, and then, as we know it today, by psychological technique; grace became effort; the life of faith became the hope of personal growth; and eschatology became progress (what Lord Acton called the religion of those who have none).  Thus was the Christian Trinity replaced by a substitute trinity of reason, nature, and progress.  The place God had occupied was now occupied by human being.  Meaning and morality, which only God could give, were taken to be purely human accomplishments; but in promising what only God could do, the Enlightenment sowed the seeds of its own downfall.  It promised too much.  It promised, in fact, that all human problems could be solved by purely natural means - and that, plainly, rested on false assumptions.  It both underestimated the magnitude of the problems and overestimated the capacity of human nature to remedy them."

-David F. Wells in Above All Earthly Pow'rs, pages 30-31

Sadly, in some way or another we are all bound by these false assumptions that have been the basis for our thinking.  The loss of the importance of God's revelation, the supernatural, and the coming Kingdom leave us to our own demise, literally.  Thank God in Christ that His truth shall stand forever and that victory is won.

He has spoken,
Lane