The Free Church Record has had a refresh! Angus Mackay has taken over as the Editor and done a great job with the first issue on the theme of 'Life'. I asked Angus if I could share his first editorial as I thought it was so good. If you want to read the whole magazine you can read it here.
As we wind our way through the third decade of the 21st century, the church in the west finds herself in what Dr Carl Trueman has aptly called a Strange New World. We have long been used to a society that rejects aspects of our faith like the incarnation and resurrection, but now we increasingly see around us a rejection of (and sometimes even revulsion for) the wider Christian worldview.
That term worldview is useful, because it reminds us that Christianity is more than the gospel of saving grace: it is God’s perfectly ordered system for our whole lives and society.We are privileged to have been born into a country that has been largely defined by that Christian worldview. Our laws, practices, governance and education are historically rooted in Scripture and we have reaped great benefits from that.
More than that, for over 500 years the Christianity that has largely defined how we live has been the Reformed Christianity first codified by John Calvin in Geneva almost 500 years ago.
But while the Reformation and the culture it created have dominated Europe for the past half millennium, it hasn’t had the floor entirely to itself. Shortly after the Reformation a philosophical movement emerged that would become known as the Enlightenment and ever since, it has existed beside Christianity and vied with it for influence.
So what is the broad purpose of the Enlightenment?
Like all philosophical movements, The Enlightenment is difficult to define, but the historian Tom Holland has neatly summarised that while the Reformation overthrew the corruption of the medieval church, the Enlightenment went much further and aimed to overthrow the Christian faith altogether.
Enlightened ideas were initially confined to the salons and artistic circles of Europe’s intellectual elite, but in time they began to find wider acceptance. Over the centuries that followed, Enlightenment men like Hegel, Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche gradually gained greater influence in forming the thought of Europe’s ruling classes.
Their ideas helped steer Europe towards the early 20th century and the unfolding of its catastrophe - two wars that would kill tens of millions, and destroy both the continent’s wealth and its place in the world.
Rather than perishing with those lost in the World Wars though, the Enlightenment and its ideas have subsequently prospered in the West. In fact they wield more influence than ever in our society today.
In their most aggressive forms, they are seen openly combatting against Christian values in government, law, education arts and media. But they can be more pernicious too; sometimes these ideas are found in our society - and even in ourselves - in much more subtle forms.
Certainly our duty is to try and understand what is happening and why. That matters so that we know how defend what we know to be true, but it also matters so that we can properly witness to the society around us and the many lives that need the gospel.
But our duty is not only external.
The church doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it breathes the air around it in every generation. That has probably never been more true than it is right now. Media, and especially social media, has huge influence on how people think. That influence is often insidious, so we need to asked if these ideas are influencing ourselves in how we live our lives too.
So our aim for The Record in the coming months and years, as we are spared, is to look in more detail at what’s happening to our society and why. How will we do that?
First of all, we need to consider what’s being attacked - things like family, church, community and nationhood. We’ll look at what God’s word says about these things and why He has purposed them.
Secondly, we must examine the ideas that are being used to undermine the the Christian worldview and look at how those ideas measure up to Scripture - the ultimate arbiter of every thought and idea.
Finally we’ll consider how the righteous way of God will surely triumph, which is the comfort and joy of the church in every age.
So where do we start with it all? Well, for this first edition it seems to make sense to start with the most profound of all the current strifes - what is man? How do we understand what it is to be human?
As some of the other writers allude to elsewhere, that current controversy can be traced to the work of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Like John Calvin, Rousseau was a Frenchman who made his name in 16th century Geneva. His legacy, however, is very different.
His philosophical writings became hugely influential in the development of European political thought, but it’s his later work focusing on man’s internal feelings that matters to us right now.
Rousseau came to increasingly define what it was to be human by the inner feelings. To his mind, what you believe you are in your heart is the authentic you. Others would build on his thinking over the centuries, but the work of the man labelled by Dr Trueman as “the other Genevan” can be pointed to as the original wrong turn. He was not alone in writing such things, but his influence was undoubtedly huge.
So the articles in this edition of The Record compare Rousseau’s inward looking view of what it is to be human to the incomparably fuller picture that Scripture paints for us.
God offers us no insular and lonely world that focuses on our own hearts and desires; instead he presents us with a wonderful and multi faceted life rooted in relationships with Himself and others. It’s a life modeled on His own blessed existence and, wonderfully, we are invited into the experience of that. What could be more exciting than that?
