The Future and Freedom

Al Mohler is one of many Christian thinkers that I greatly respect, and I couldn't help but to quote this paragraph from his blog. It very succinctly sums up a topic I've been pondering for a while and briefly mentions another topic of interest to me:

"Western liberal thought has long been shaped by the myth of inevitable progress. This is inevitably fueled by a legitimate celebration of developments ranging from democracy to air conditioning and antibiotics. There are also legitimate grounds for celebrating moral progress on fronts including slavery, racism, and other issues. The liberal mistake is to assume that this means that all moral change is progress. This mistake is accompanied by an assumption that moral progress always means the expansion of individual autonomy."

I would only adjust this idea to be applied beyond just liberal thought. I think the delusion of the superiority of the future has permeated virtually all areas of thought in the West. Just think of the way that the words yesterday, today, and tomorrow are used in political speeches. It doesn't make much difference whether you're listening to a Democrat or a Republican; yesterday was a time of backward thinking and flawed systems, today is better but needs improvement, and tomorrow promises the perfect harmony of all of our ideals. Or, think of how the word primitive has taken on an exclusively derogatory tone in our age of supposed progress. There was a time when institutions sought eagerly to be primitive in the positive sense of regaining the forms and principles of their founding (e.g. the Primitive Baptists, whom I don't think got everything right but do have a great name). Somewhere in the wake of the industrial revolution we in the West observed that technology was making remarkable progress over time, but we mistakenly concluded that new ideas will always bring similar progress to society over time. It was this sort of "progressive" Western thinking that brought about the two world wars and the holocaust. Shouldn't we have learned something there? The Nazi party doesn't have to be involved for popular new ideas to lead to degradation.

Another topic Mohler mentioned was the similarly blind assumption that individual freedom is always good. Often Christians follow the thinking of the majority in this respect as well, but we of all people should know better. We know that we are completely dependent on God to sustain us, and that our pursuit of autonomy from Him is what led us into the sin and death from which we needed salvation in the first place. Also, God has established the church as the place where we are to grow and improve not as autonomous individuals but as parts of the community that is called the body of Christ. Even God Himself exists as three-in-one, with the Son in perfect submission to the Father, and with the Spirit in perfect submission to the Father and the Son.

Most parents know that small children are better off not exercising autonomous free will. Otherwise they would let them run across busy streets, play with matches, and drink antifreeze. Yet for some reason we think there is a magical age when we are suddenly better off to do whatever we want and to learn from our mistakes. That is foolish and destructive.

And to chase a rabbit, I think our inflated opinion of individual autonomy has led to most Christians to a flawed solution to theological problem of evil. It goes something like this: "God allowed evil to enter the world because He loved us so much that He gave us free will, and we used our free will for evil instead of good." That doesn't make much sense to me because I don't understand how free will could have so much inherent value as to be worth the eternal condemnation of billions of people. There is another solution to the problem of evil that I think works much better than this one, but I will save it for another time.

The point is that there are two faulty assumptions in popular Western thought: that new ideas will always lead to progress over time, and that more individual freedom is always better than less individual freedom. Of course some new ideas are good and some forms of freedom are good, but Christians need to aware and skeptical of the sweeping assumptions of the world around us.