To adapt a phrase from Nietzsche, the problem in our modern world is that man is dead and we have killed him. The concept of human nature is no longer subject to any kind of consensus, with obvious and catastrophic implications for society. Man has been abolished. So what has led to this abolition? Four causes suggest themselves: Human nature has been dismantled, disenchanted, disembodied, and desecrated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nI\u2019ll sum up what Trueman thinks happened.\n
(1)\u00a0 Human Nature Has Been Dismantled.\u00a0<\/strong> Christianity gave human beings a purpose.\u00a0 Trueman cites the Westminster Catechism: \u201cWhat is the chief end of man? Man\u2019s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.\u201d\u00a0 (Lutherans would say something like \u201cto love and serve God and your neighbor.\u201d)<\/p>\nBut the rise of naturalistic science\u2013Trueman specifically cites the doctrine of evolution\u2013eliminated any sense of final purpose.\u00a0 \u201cWhen man has no God-given end, he has no stable or distinct nature,\u201d says Trueman. \u201cIn killing God, we kill man.\u201d<\/p>\n
The point was made by Nietzsche in his critique of Kant. One could not murder God and then expect human nature to do the late God\u2019s work for him. If God had died, so had the notion that human beings were made in his image.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In this way of thinking, human beings lost their exceptionalism.\u00a0 Today they are seen as merely \u201cthe hapless products of networks of discursive power relations, a view that now rings out from countless university seminar rooms and underpins the rhetoric of identity politics, left and right.\u201d<\/p>\n
(2)\u00a0 Human Nature Has Been Disenchanted.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Human beings have become stripped of their mystery, depth, and dignity.\u00a0 Man became just another object, a thing.\u00a0 The Industrial Revolution turned human beings into commodities.\u00a0 And the sexual revolution went even further in reducing human beings into objects to be used.<\/p>\nThe sexual revolution, that progressive watershed, has arguably done more than anything to turn people into things. And pornography, the most consistent iteration of the logic of the revolution, makes sex into a commodity, turning the actors on the screen into objects for consumers.<\/p>\n
Then there is the transformation of abortion from an evil into a regrettable necessity and then into a right to be celebrated. Society\u2019s moral imagination has been shaped by the logic of the sexual revolution, in which children are deemed accidental to sex; the humanity of the child in the womb has thus been stripped of its mysterious personhood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(3)\u00a0 Human Beings Have Become Disembodied.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>The body has become \u201ca hindrance to liberation of the self.\u201d\u00a0 Feminism \u201chas tended to treat women\u2019s bodies and procreative functions as problems that must be solved if sexual equality is to be achieved.\u201d\u00a0 And transgenderism \u201cinvolves a psychologized view of identity that marginalizes the sexed nature of the body and also the belief that bodies are simply raw material.\u201d<\/p>\nMeanwhile, our technology has diminished the importance of the body.\u00a0 \u201cNever in human history has life required less actual, physical, interpersonal engagement.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cToday social media have universalized disembodied social interaction and perhaps made it normative for interpersonal engagement.\u201d\u00a0 And AI threatens to take this disembodiment even further.<\/p>\n
(4)\u00a0 Human Beings Have Become Desecrated.<\/strong>\u00a0 The world\u2019s religions have always taught that sex is sacred.\u00a0 \u201cTo consider sex sacred makes sense, for in creating new life, it is the act that makes humans most like God. The sexual revolution did not simply make sex into recreation; it stripped it, and therefore the human nature of which it is a central part, of its sacredness.\u201d\u00a0 Pornography desecrates both sex and humanity.\u00a0 Abortion desecrates life itself.\u00a0 \u201cCurrent pro-abortion politics are the politics of transgression, specifically the transgression of what was once considered sacred.\u201d<\/p>\nThe same applies to death. Cultures have \u00adtypically surrounded the end of life, no less than its beginning, with sacred significance. . . . And yet western societies are making great efforts to transform death from a mystery into a medical procedure\u2014a procedure that governs not just late-stage terminal illness but old age in general, depression, indeed any condition that can be presented as burdensome to the individual, the family, or even the state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Trueman laments the eclipse of religion, though the fact that many are returning to the church is evidence for him that a reaction might be brewing against the anti-human quality of so much of contemporary thought.<\/p>\n
He calls for a new humanism that both believers and thoughtful non-believers might agree on.\u00a0 He admits, though, that the possibilities of such an alliance are limited, due to the lack of consensus in our secular society about the reality of God.\u00a0 \u00a0\u201cThe response to the desecration of human nature must be its consecration, and consecration must occur in a religious context.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, he hopes for a new consensus around the problem of the other three (dismantled, disenchanted, disembodied).\u00a0 \u00a0We need a new humanism to dig ourselves out of the ditch we find ourselves in.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t see it myself.\u00a0 Just as \u201cdesecration\u201d can only be resolved by \u201cconsecration\u201d (that is, the loss of sacredness being resolved by recovering the sacred), the loss of purpose (being \u201cdismantled\u201d) requires finding a purpose that only religion can bestow.\u00a0 Being \u201cdisenchanted\u201d requires being \u201cenchanted\u201d; that is, recovering a sense of transcendent mystery that only religion can provide.\u00a0 Recovering from being \u201cdisembodied\u201d requires appreciating being \u201cembodied,\u201d which requires a belief in God\u2019s creation.<\/p>\n
That the loss of God has brought on the loss of humanity only proves the foolishness of jettisoning God.\u00a0 If some secularists are starting to realize that, the better hope is that they will abandon their secularism.\u00a0 And, as Trueman himself notices, this is starting to happen.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Photo:\u00a0 Carl Trueman<\/a> by Blarneytherinosaur, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having repudiated God, our society is now repudiating humanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":85973,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12,15,27,30,33,35,37,39,40,41,44],"tags":[2564,14585,1057,2589,17180,1984],"class_list":["post-85877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics","category-culture","category-ethics","category-life-issues","category-medicine","category-nature","category-philosophy-2","category-psychology","category-religions","category-science","category-sex","category-technology","tag-anti-humanism","tag-decline-of-religion","tag-humanism","tag-humanity","tag-recovery-of-religion","tag-secularism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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