Humble Pie
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

I was having dinner with a few local pastors. Someone raised one of those inevitable conundrums that tend to confront ministers of the cloth. We all took our turn trying to untie the Gordian knot, until the final pastor gave the most wisdom saying, "That's one of those questions that I respond to with, 'Sin complicates things.'" Indeed it does. Perhaps the only thing worse than the complications that come to our lives through sin is the further complications that come when we forget about sin. It's bad enough walking through a pasture full of landmines without doing so in ignorance.

Such is true not only in terms of our individual lives, but corporately as well. The whole western world began its long descent into death when it first asserted that it was reborn, during the Renaissance and its extension, the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is a complex of ideas taken from nearly all branches of inquiry. As an epistemology it held that man could know all that he needs to know without the crutch of revelation from God. As a theology it was deistic, affirming that God had created a mechanistic world, wound it up, and went out for a walk, never to return. As an anthropology it held that man is fundamentally good. Add them all together and you get Enlightenment optimism, the idea that with the right application of brains and brawn, we'll make our way back to the garden. We have the technology; we can rebuild us. And so they tried.

They tried in France, crowning the goddess Reason, and uncrowning untold thousands through the ministrations of Madame Guillotine. They tried as revolution continued to spread across Europe, and colonialism spread across the Southern Hemisphere in the nineteenth century. And all along the way, as sin continued to complicate things, we were told to practice patience, to try harder, to keep the faith. If the neighbors don't cooperate with your utopian vision, just annex them. Along came the twentieth century. We began with the world's First World War. The visionaries, while still refusing to recognize sin, did recognize that war tended to delay the arrival of paradise. So they decided to outlaw war, creating the League of Nations, and giving the Germans a positively overpowering dose of negative reinforcement with the Treaty of Versailles.

Meanwhile, the financial Frankensteins were being attacked by the monster of their own creation, as the Federal Reserve System sucked the whole world into a depression. Then there was the second Great War, the holocaust, Stalin's gulags and the crowning achievement of man's unaided reason, the destruction of Dresden, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima. The Enlightenment optimism went up in the smoke of mushroom clouds. Paradise remains lost.

There are, of course, still some old enlightenment-modernist dinosaurs out roaming the land. They keep promising the garden is just around the corner. But nobody is paying them any attention. We have learned from our hubris. We will not build another Babel, nor don the wings of Icarus again. Instead we'll remain earthbound, and babble to ourselves.

The reaction to this failure was the embracing of failure, to create not a paradise, but a safe place to stay by confessing our utter ignorance, and denying that we are good. This is the post-modern way, where we know that we can know nothing, and that good and bad aren't even meaningful concepts. We cannot communicate with ourselves, because we assign our own meanings to words. We cannot love our brother because, being unable to walk a mile in his moccasins, we cannot know him.

Where is the church in all this? During the glory days of the Enlightenment, the church was there cheering them on, doing its part to impart the ethic of Jesus the moral teacher. In the aftermath we are with the dinosaurs, still believing that if we could but get enough Republicans in office, or enough men into football stadiums, or enough true believers barking in the aisles in Toronto, then we'd have what we need for paradise.

It is the same pride. Equipped with Freud and the Bible, then we can make people whole. Equipped with the Bible and the right marketing strategy, then we can win the lost and save America. Equipped with enough delegates we can get prayer back in our schools, and then we've won. Equipped with a big enough coalition, the gates of Disney will not prevail against us. We have maintained the fundamental idea, that we can create a paradise, but have chosen slightly different tools. Like the Enlightenment gurus, we have forgotten about sin.

Well, not completely. It's out there alright, but it is out there. As long as it is at arm's length, we can fight it. Sin, however, is not out there, but in here. Were we able to recreate paradise, all we'd accomplish is another fall. The second we step into the garden, then it contains weeds. We carry it around with us, wherever we go.

Nevertheless, we do have a grand utopian scheme. The problem with Enlightenment optimism is not the optimism, but that it was a blind and foolish optimism that looked for perfection in all the wrong places. We will not create paradise on earth because we are basically good, because we can discover all that we need to know on our own. Instead we will create paradise on earth because Jesus has revealed all that we need to know, and because He is not only basically good, but only and altogether good. Because of Jesus we reject the prideful utopianism of the modernists. Because of Jesus we reject the humiliated despair of the post-modernists.

To put it another way, we are humble about ourselves, yet we boast in Christ. Humility was a virtue badly needed during the Enlightenment. And in another sense we need it now as well. The despair of knowledge that drives post-modernism is rooted in a claim of omniscience. The despair of power to change things is rooted in a claim of omnipotence. In modernism we thought that we could be like God, and order the universe to our own whims. In post-modernism we thought that we could be like God, and create reality in the unreachable recesses of our own minds. First we thought we could bend reality. When it wouldn't cooperate, we decided we'd better create our own reality, with its own set of rules.

In both systems, sin corrupts. We seek to restructure or create reality for our own pleasure and our own glory. God, however, has no such limitations. He created for His own pleasure, and for His own glory, which is the appropriate thing for God to do. And now His Son is recreating, restructuring reality to overcome sin, and again, rightly doing it for His own glory. And He starts with us. He remakes us into His image. We are the first of His utopian projects, one that He completes one by one at our deaths. But it does not end until all things are in subjection to Him, until everything but Gehenna is paradise.

Humility teaches us that we will fail, and that He will not. Humility teaches us that paradise is not here because of our sin. Humility teaches us not only that we are not perfect, but that we are wretched. Even in the church we at times forget the depth of our sin, both individually and corporately. We get impatient for the end, and so fail to see how far away we are. We're pretty good, and we live in a pretty good place. That's why we think that all it takes is more rallies, or more Republicans. Evangelical utopianism affirms with its lips that we are sinners, but its actions suggest that we're not that bad, that we're almost there.

We have rightly rejected Enlightenment epistemology. We have rightly, though not sufficiently rejected Enlightenment anthropology. We have rightly held onto Enlightenment optimism. But we have wrongly held onto Enlightenment strategy for building paradise. We maintain essential self-sufficiency, though we concede it's a good thing to pray. And we maintain a lack of humility over how far we have to go, and still think in terms of grand schemes. We need to seize power, and then we'll be able to get something done. We need flash and visibility. We need to seize the controls of pop-culture. We'll take over Harvard, NBC, MGM, CNN and ESPN, and then it's all over but the crying for the bad guys.

And what happens when we succeed? Because we forget our sin, we fail. When our pop-singers cross over into the rest of the world, surprise, they become just like them. When our favored political sons win office, they find they want to keep it, and so sell their souls. Heck, we built Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and look where they are now.

We need humility, to have a better understanding of our own sin, and how far we have to go. We need to straighten our own garden before we go out into the jungle. In short, our goal should not be to seize the power centers, but our goal should be to be faithful in the real, biblical power centers, in our homes and in our churches. When Jesus gets our house in order, then He will move on into the world. We are getting way ahead of ourselves.

What we need to do is to get back to the garden. The garden we are called to now is not Eden, but our own homes, our own families, our own communities. We need to think small before we get big thoughts. That's why we do things the way we do them. You will never receive a come-on from the Highlands Study Center arguing that our work is the linchpin of the kingdom, that if you get behind us, we'll do so much for the kingdom that we'll live on in church history. We're not going like David to fight the Goliath of Washington, or New York, or Hollywood. Instead we're going like David out into the pasture, to tend a few sheep. We're not going to save the American family from the forces of evil. We're going to try, by the grace of our King, to save our own families from the forces of evil, and encourage you to do the same. We're doing more for the kingdom when we take it upon ourselves to teach our children than anything we could do to lobby some school board to allow creationism to be taught at the government school. We need to begin our work in the building of the kingdom by humbly taking on the first task Jesus has given us, to obey Him. If He wants to give us political power, and to make us culture brokers, He'll do it in His time, in His way. And He won't do it by building assorted coalitions with idolaters who, like us, don't like a lot of cuss words in our movies.

That's what it means to live simple, separate, and deliberate lives. We are simple in part because we don't come with a grand scheme. Instead we quietly encourage others to think and act simply, separately, and deliberately. We are teaching whoever wants to listen who God is, what man is, and how they relate. We are teaching people the Word of God, face to face, a few people at a time. We are separate because we want to get the world out of our lives before we start bringing our lives to the world. We are deliberate because we question the assumptions, including the assumption that you have to think big to have a big impact, and because we have thought of our limitations. We are humble about ourselves, but bold about the crown rights of King Jesus. We do it not as retreatists, but for the glory of God and for the building of His kingdom. We tend our garden not out of indifference to the jungle, but so that we might be something set apart, so that the jungle might long for the peace, the beauty, the simplicity that is ours in Christ, the Lord of the Garden.