On Strangling Kings

Why does a man become an atheist? “That’s an easy question!” replies the atheist. “I chose atheism objectively, after a careful, dispassionate examination of all the relevant evidence.”

Really? I wonder. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is just a front. I suspect that a lot of “hidden persuaders” gnaw at one’s mind when he is forming a world-view. Frederick Nietzsche suggested that to understand a man’s whole philosophy you look first at his ethics. Find out how he wants to behave and then examine the rest of his thought; you may find a cause-and-effect relation that you didn’t expect.

I agree with Nietzsche. I think that many unbelievers have an ethical prejudice when they choose a life philosophy. As Cornelius van Til was fond of saying, “A sinner has a sinner’s ax to grind.” Aldous Huxley admitted as much. “I had motives,” he confessed, “for not wanting the world to have meaning, consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.” No person is without guilt. Alleviating the sense of guilt is a daily problem for the psychiatrist; everybody does something to get rid of it. The Christian is convinced that both his sin and his guilt are taken away when he believes in Jesus Christ. The unbeliever also, in a sense, holds to a doctrine of “justification by faith.” Or rather, justification by antifaith. The thing he erects as his metaphysical ultimate is the thing in which he places his trust, devotion, and obedience. His life philosophy is what takes away his guilt and neutralizes his sin. Once he has chosen a secular, naturalistic philosophy he can say with the Apostle Paul (Romans 8:1), “There is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in——,” filling in the blank with whatever he has chosen.

The process is really quite simple. In these times when there is a smorgasbord of non-religious world-views to choose from, the sinner can easily select a theory that makes his sin a function of something other than his own will. He consciously or unconsciously passes the buck to something outside himself—to nature, matter, or society. He must never choose Christian theism, for this would require belief in individual choice and personal responsibility, and that belief would dramatize his sin, not remove it. He must choose a theory that allows him to say, “I can’t help it.”

1. For instance, the unbelieving sinner may choose the philosophy of humanism, which neutralizes sin by asserting that moral error is usually a result of mere ignorance. “Knowledge is virtue,” as Socrates and many ancient Greeks were quoted as saying (Plato, Protagoras, #345. Ignorance, furthermore, usually results from lack of opportunity, not basic moral culpability. Give a person the opportunity to get a good education, to increase his knowledge, to train his mind, and he will eventually conquer his bad behavior.

This same optimistic view of man afflicted many thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In his History of Human Progress (1794), the Marquis de Condorcet wrote that “no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties,” and that “the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite.”

The great Immanuel Kant expatiated on the Perpetual Peace (1795) that would come when enlightened statecraft directed the political affairs of men. It seemed as if the Christian doctrine of original sin was going to expire on the altar of human dignity.

“The dignity of man!” Today the words die on our lips. Since Kant and Condorcet we’ve seen the Reign of Terror, two world wars, Fascism, Hitler, the Stalin purges, Auschwitz, the Final Solution, the bomb. Not many people still believe in the essential goodness of man, although this brand of humanism is always an option for escaping the reality of sin. An unbeliever nowadays will more likely neutralize his guilt with some form of behavioral determinism, whether biological, psychological, or social.

2. Biological determinism dodges the issue of personal sin by attributing misconduct to some malfunction of the physiological organism. In other words, the body gets the blame. Sometimes man’s problems are naïvely explained as the unfortunate legacy of his animal background, as in the popular but pseudo-scientific works of Robert Ardrey (African Genesis, Territorial Imperative).

At other times human aggression and associated urges are explained by an evolutionary lag in the growth of the human brain. This theory says that the neo-cortex, the “new brain,” the locus of purely human faculties, grew so quickly as man evolved from the primates that it couldn’t completely establish control over the old brain, the seat of the animal instincts, the sources of irrational or impulsive behavior. Sinful man is merely, by this account, an evolutionary miscarriage, a biological freak. As G. K. Chesterton once quipped, “One of the animals just went off its head.”

3. Psychological determinism focuses on a more specific section of the human organism, the hereditary drives in the Id or the Unconscious. Sigmund Freud branded forever on the modern mind the idea that some mysterious, hidden realm—call it passion, emotion, instinct, unconscious force—is the true “reality,” and that it mightily determines who men are and how they act.

Freud was rather pessimistic, on the whole, about man’s chances for happiness. In Civilization and Its Discontents he painted a dismal picture of neurotic man, struggling desperately to live in a world where social order demands renunciation of the strongest drives in human nature. Human beings are a good deal less rational and innately virtuous than the optimists of the Enlightenment felt, but I doubt if they are as morally blind and as hopelessly unreasonable as Freudian pessimists of the twentieth century think. The main point to remember is that Freud’s system has no way to make man responsible for his blindness.

4. Sociological determinism takes the searchlight off individual man and blames all human problems on the structure of society. Thinkers like Karl Marx and J. J. Rousseau felt that man is born free, innocent, and without the profit motive but that by some mysterious process society and civilization always develop greed.

Classical Marxism teaches that all immorality arises from the multi-class organization of society that has dominated history: slave and master, serf and lord, proletariat and bourgeois, have-not and have. Hence, when the classless society arrives and all become members of the same class (proletariat), sin will die out, exploitation will cease, and the state will wither away.

Rousseau and other Enlightenment philosophers insisted that a “cultural lag” or an inertia in social and political institutions caused man’s moral problems. Kings, priests, nobles, capitalists, czars, police, bureaucrats—someone is always fouling up the works. One articulate radical before the French Revolution claimed that society would never be right until “every king is strangled with the guts of every priest.”

Sinful man thus shows great ingenuity in his efforts to fabricate secular alternatives to explain sin. When one surveys all these salvation surrogates, certain general features of all non-Christian secular explanations of sin stand out.

1. First, all alternatives destroy the essential paradox of human nature, the balance between dignity and wretchedness. Humanism upholds the dignity of man but without the balancing ingredient of fallenness. Most determinisms admit the wretchedness of man but lose sight of his potential dignity. Only in Christian theology is there an appreciation of both the heights and the depths of human nature. Man is, in Pascal’s words, “judge of all things, a ridiculous earthworm, who is the repository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the glory and the scum of the world” (Pensées, #246).

2. All secular alternatives make sin a natural fact rather than a moral fact. They make sin a function of something other than the ego. Humanism makes sin a function of the intellect; determinism makes it a function of either body, or Id, or society. In all cases, the guilty will is exonerated and sin is thrown into the material, scientific world of the is, rather than into the spiritual, transcendent realm of the ought.

3. By thus making sin merely a concrete datum, all four alternatives lend themselves to human self-therapy, to social engineering. And when sinful man tries to heal himself, his attempt leads to all sorts of ethical quackery. Man, says the unbeliever, can save himself, but only if he will turn over his life to the teacher, or to B. F. Skinner, or to the psychiatrist, or to Chairman Mao.

4. Finally, all forms of determinism dehumanize man. They take away his sin, true, but only at the price of reducing him to the status of a natural fact, a chunk of matter, a machine, a mere animal—in short, an object, not a subject. B. F. Skinner told the truth when he entitled his manifesto of behaviorism Beyond Freedom and Dignity; he might just as well have added: Beyond Humanity, Selfhood, and Personality.

Christianity says that man’s problem is not really a brain-lag or a culture-lag but a will-lag, an ego-lag. The problem of sin is in man himself, in the deepest part of his being, at the very core of personality, in his will. This will, as Luther argued, is in bondage and refuses to live according to the divinely ordained law of its being, the law of love, no matter how favorable the physical or social conditions may be.

If this is true, then no amount of body engineering, education, psychiatry, or social engineering really attacks the problem of sin at its roots. Man’s help will have to come from someone who can renew his mind and transform his will. “The good man out of the good treasure of his heart produces good,” said Jesus, “and the evil man out of his evil treasure produces evil; for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks,” (Luke 6:45).

By now, the advantages of the Christian world-view ought to be obvious: if a person can face the truth that he is to blame for his own sin, then Jesus Christ can remove both sin and guilt without dehumanizing him! To me, that’s Good News, very good news indeed. As Francis Schaeffer emphasizes in all his books, no matter how sinful a man becomes he can never cease to be a creature made in the image of God, with the capacity to respond to the divine initiative. We need to tell modern man in the clearest possible terms that all his secular alternatives to Christ leave him both unsaved and dehumanized. We need to tell him that only in Jesus Christ can he both remain human and be justified from sin and freed from guilt.

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