Dear Sisters and Brothers,

In our world today “Education” is touted as the answer to everything. We take it for granted as a presupposition of fact that more research, discovery, and information will soon give us all the answers we seek and make all our lives and the whole world the utopia we long for. Like the earth in the 2300’s that the Star Trek TV series presents, we will finally achieve universal peace and prosperity through knowledge, reason, and logic. Leaving now only the “continuing mission to explore strange new worlds” to add to our knowledge for our own corporate and individual perfection. This visionary image is an accurate representation of the utopian expectation of our times. We will be “SAVED” by our knowledge…. whenever we get enough of it, …which by the way is always just around the corner. Then “human reason” and that “knowledge” will be enthroned as the emancipators and sources of the enlightenment of the human race.

Though in some ways we may not be totally incorrect if we think highly of our thinking and knowledge. Our Father tells us that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds Rom.12:1. This places our minds and the knowledge we receive through them in a key role of high importance to us just as a small rudder that steers a whole ship. Our minds are a vehicle for growth, accomplishment, and a hope for betterment in all areas of our lives, so they have a high place. But our minds are not omnipotent in their capabilities as sometimes inferred to in various ways by our culture, and they can never be omniscient.

We are finite and our knowledge, even as a whole, is very limited. The presupposition held by most of our culture is the assertion of the sovereign independence of humanity, that humankind is the apex of “evolution” and hence “lords” of the earth. This narrows and focuses our attention on our own knowledge and accomplishments, exalting them and misdirecting us from the truth of our finitude. So, though our historic collection of human knowledge, not being measured by God’s yardstick, may appear very high with reference to own finite standard of measure, in truth it is not according to God’s absolute standard.

 We are finite beings with finite means, we can only gather a few small pieces at a time of an infinite puzzle and then seek to assemble the puzzle in as comprehensible a way as possible, adding to the collection over time and adjusting the perceived outcome of the picture as we go. Yet all along the way many of our “experts”, the priests of our secular religion, make dogmatic declarations and authoritarian assertions of great certainty regarding the meaning of these partially assemble pieces, seeking to maintain their cloak of legitimacy as those who are in touch with “Heaven”, just as the wizard in the Wizard of OZ and priests and shamans of pagan religions. But we and they are finite and very limited beings and all the knowledge that any human could gather in a lifetime, or even all the collective knowledge gathered from all the humans that have ever lived, seems clearly to be but as an ant hill when one only just considers the vastness of space around us. We have seen now that surrounding us are myriads of stars, with myriads of light years between them, in myriad of galaxies, myriads of light years across, with myriads of stars themselves, and then the question arises … does the universe end somewhere …or not? Or concerning life on our planet, can we create life, or prohibit death, do we even really know what it is? And what about matter, what is our world is made of, where did it come from? If there was a Big Bang, how did that happen? Who lit the fuse? Was there anything before it? And if not, then what exactly is nothing?

These are questions like those that God asked Job and reproved him with to help him see his smallness and Gods greatness, for God can answer all the questions. Yet such questions should not cause us to feel our smallness and impotence but be filled with joy and wonder at the glory of our Father Creator.

It is when we forget to keep our place in God’s order that temptation gives us opportunity to exalt our capabilities and forget our weaknesses. And this is especially true for those who do not have the restraining Grace of God in their lives. For as J.C. Ryle noted, “We know nothing of humility by nature, for we are all born proud. And as Paul testified, “Knowledge puffs up” I Cor. 8:1. And soon we begin to imagine ourselves as creators as Yuval Noah Harari author of Homo Deus (Man God) 2015 said, “If we succeed (with trans-humanism), and there’s a very good chance we will, then very soon, we will be beyond the god of the bible”.

But there is also another foundational influence we may be less aware of because we were born into a culture that is still riding the wave of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Those of us in the West were born into the influence of Enlightenment and Industrial thinking as a presuppositionary or foundational cultural influence. It serves as an axiomatic foundation for the thinking and way of life of the culture we assume to be standard or normal and it surrounds us in every conceivable way.

 Beginning only 3-400 years ago and truly advancing only in the last 150 years, “The Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in history. Comparable only to humanity's adoption of agriculture with respect to material advancement”. “Economic historians agree that the onset of the Industrial Revolution is the most important event in human history since the domestication of animals and plants.” But this has not been true for all of history, for everywhere on earth, or even for Biblical history.

And our culture coming out of the “Enlightenment” has been often “enlightened” with false lights. “If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” Matt.6:23b:”

Enlightenment philosophers from a similar time period as the Industrial Revolution generally made “graven images’ out of God’s “secondary causes”, such as man’s reason and knowledge, science in general, and the worldly mechanisms of physics, chemistry, etc.., fueling the birth and amoral progress of the Industrial revolution. “The main ideas that dominated Enlightenment thinking included: Deism – the belief in the existence of a creator who does not intervene in the universe.” So, “Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of “reason”, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition.” They substituted and assigned God’s “secondary causes” of governing the world, for the Prime or “First Cause” of all things, (God Himself) eliminating a moral God, the true first cause for the amoral mechanizations we use in the world. They replaced the “Personal”, God, and left only the mechanics as “god” (as in Darwinism) of which we then become like. As A.W. Tozer once said, “We tend by a secret law of the soul, to move toward our mental image of God”. And this error of a “mechanical god” has continued and metastasized into many different avenues up until today creating the “mechanism” of man’s reason and knowledge as our cultures tool for all our answers to the issues we face in the world and our ultimate “salvation”.  So that the exercise of “Faith” in a Personal God, which is the polar opposite of this mechanism, then is naturally viewed as superstitious or irrational, a useless tool. And this is because of Enlightenment presuppositions about reality, a poisonous set of presuppositions which Christians in the West contend with consciously and unconsciously on a daily basis. 

But Faith is what is exactly required here, it completes us because our finitude as creatures depends on an infinite Creator. A transcendent Creator that can counsel us with complete knowledge. We were made for Him. As we can understand the concepts and possibility of eternity and infinity, complete knowledge and wisdom, we cannot attain to them, and we are in-complete. As King Solomon wrote: “He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.” Ecc 3:11 And as Jesus said to us, "apart from me you can do nothing" Jn. 15:51 of any eternal value. And it is to this foundational "presupposition" of our continuing dependence upon revelation and salvation from an all- knowing Personal God that we must return our individual minds, our educational establishment, our culture, and the way we build our civilizations in the world henceforth. We must reject the visionary claims of an independent human sovereignty and the abusive experiment of the "Enlightenment" and Industrial utopia, and now answer the question anew...."How shall we then live?" Francis Schaeffer .

May God Bless,

Jonny