The Roots of Modernism

Introduction

How many of you have heard of post-modernism?

How many of you have heard of modernism?

We have our work cut out for us.

Our goal this week will be for you to understand this meme by Friday.

But seriously, our goal will be to discover how we got to the place of a supreme court justice being unable to give even the most rudimentary definition of a woman. How we got to the point of have serious conversations about whether or not drag queen story hour at the local library is a good thing or not.

What we will find is that the threads are long and twisting and lead back to some unexpected places. But we are going to try and keep tugging at the those threads and find sources for thought processes that have brought us to this current place.

Our goal then, in the end, is to find those sources, see where and how we are affected by those sources, and get to pulling weeds.

Definitions & History

Where do we begin (Gen. 3:1-5)?

We have to start somewhere but every thread we pull connects to another.

I was talking to Wes Brown about this and asking him how far back to go. He said, “I reckon to the garden”

I am going to make the case that at some point, once we accepted certain premises, we were always going to end up with drag queen story hour and the social chaos we see more broadly.

I am going to make the case that all of this started in the 80s. The 80s were a wild time of social unrest and upheaval. A time of throwing off old structures of authority and a time of optimism about what could be accomplished by human ingenuity which soon led to drastic leaps in technology that changed the way people lived and how they viewed the world.

I am, of course, referring to the 1680s.

We will actually go back a little bit from there even, but the 1680s is when modernism really began to take form.

What is modernism?

Modernism was a movement beginning around the 1680s that emphasized reason, science, and human progress, challenging traditional authorities like religion and human tradition.

As we look at the tenets of modernism all along we will find

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD) took the philosophy of Aristotle and combined it with knowledge of scripture and divided knowledge into two categories: grace (revelation) and nature (what can be learn from rational observation).

Aquinas noted that you don’t need biblical revelation to know the truths that nature reveals.

And you can’t use nature to know the truths that the Bible reveals.

All of this was ultimately to show that faith and reason were compatible.

But it also, in many ways, disconnected those two ways of knowing. Two types of truths.

This was not a man who was trying to challenge the authority or lower the authority of God. In fact, the opposite is true. But there was a seed planted here about truth that will have consequences down the road.

This led to scholasticism.

Scholasticism very much resembled rabbinical teachings of antiquity.

The goal was to bring reason to bear on God’s word to answer more and more questions.

From this movement, we get questions like, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”

This is not just a silly question, it is a question about metaphysics. Do angels actually take up physical space in this world. If you think that isn’t an important idea, let me ask you about the resurrection. In the resurrection, will physical realities cease to exist or will they be changed into a more glorious reality. C. S. Lewis paints heaven as the most tangible thing you will ever come in contact with. That is, it will be more real than anything you have ever touched. But many believe it will have no tangible substance at all. Does it matter?

But they also got so lost in these questions that they ended us with layers of commentary that would allow on some technical grounds the grave abuses of the Catholic Church.

The reformers pushed for an appeal to go back to the simplicity of the scriptures.

They were willing to follow that appeal to varying degrees of extremity.

Some were willing to burn it all down and start over while most wanted to ultimately modify the current state of things.

This led to an overthrow of the iron grip authority of the Catholic Church but also led to violent disagreements among the reformers.

It did not lead to a single unified understanding of the truth of God’s word.

This led to the Enlightenment which proclaimed that human reason was the universal foundation of all knowledge.

Key philosophers leading up to and in the beginning stages of the movement include:

Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton.

Descartes said, “I think therefore I am” and so set human reason as the foundation of all knowledge.

Hobbes viewed humans a mere outcomes of material processes and that they would always act in self-interest (solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short) and therefore needed a strong government to practice restraint on those tendencies.

Locke claimed empiricism is how to discover all truth. This is the philosophy of “just the facts.” He believed that anything outside of what could be empirically shown, should be considered personal liberty and that government should be limited to what concerned the empirically provable things.

Newton began to explain in mathematical terms what he observed in nature. He based this on a belief that God had created order and so we should expect to find order.

The American Revolution was built on a combination of the ideas of these philosophers.

Some modernist thinkers began to push back on some of the beliefs of these early thinkers:

Rousseau contrasted Hobbes by saying man was best when he was most primitive and that society was the cause of the evil in man. This led him to believe in the innate goodness of man and therefore believe that the best thing we could do was be led by total democracy. He believe it was centralized authority, private property, and “rule of law” were what corrupted man and led to inequality. Man needed to find his “true” and natural self (secret sacred self) in order to truly be fulfilled.

Robespierre took Rousseau’s ideas and radicalized them into a combination of hatred for inequality and believe in absolute rule of “the people.” Individual rights are consumed by the “will” of the people.

Kant believed that we are always limited in our ability to perceive reality. We view everything through a lens of our own experience. Therefore, when we say “truth” we are only referring to our perception of reality. But he posited that we could, nevertheless, develop a universal ethic through reason.

Karl Marx comes a little bit later and believes that society has arbitrarily instituted structures of power and class and that the ultimate goal of society was to progress to a point where there are no classes and no inequality. This remained a modernist view because it was a belief in a narrative of human progress moving to a point of the perfectibility of man.

Core Tenets

Modernist America

Support for Modernism

Conclusion