The Impertinence of Being Earnest
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

Perhaps no slogan better captures the folly of our age than this one: "Been there, done that." There are postures or moods that tend to dominate given cultures at given times. When you think of the Victorian age you think, rightly or wrongly, of stuffed shirts, stiff upper lips and haughty manners. When you think of the sixties what comes to mind is a bedraggled, patchwork doll with a hazy and placid grin. We live now in the age of a sneer too slack to frighten. The post-modern age, however, is an age of cynicism, the younger and far more sinister brother of modernism's skepticism. It is one thing to doubt the truth claim of another, to withhold judgment until all necessary tests and cross-checks have been performed. It is another thing altogether to merely sneer and scoff at the truth claim merely because it is a truth claim.

The anti-epistemology that is at the heart of postmodernism is at once sophisticated and ludicrously idiotic. There are well paid men and women sitting in endowed chairs of philosophy who write learned articles about relativism, this idea that there is no objective truth. They throw around big words like phenomenology, textual narrative contexts, and meta-cognition, all in a vain attempt to hide the fact that they are really just saying, "It is an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth." They are desperately at work trying to hide the fact that they have cut out their eyes to spite their sight. And they bid us to see this as wisdom. Such nonsense makes its way into our everyday lives in a host of ways. We embrace it, when convenient, when we are tired of arguing, "Well, the snow may be wet to you, but it's not to me, so there." We defend it when we are tired of defending ourselves or our friends from moral attacks, "Who is to say that it is wrong to engage in sexual conduct with a 21 year old with stars in her eyes who works for you, but is not your wife, and to lie to a grand jury about it? I mean, who is to say?"

But it reaches us as well in more existential ways. Relativism not only decimates truth and banishes morality, but it makes useless teleology, or our understanding of purpose. That is we cannot know what is true, what is right, nor can we know what we, or anything else is for. We become adrift, with no direction. In short, in a relativistic world, nothing matters. Nothing is worth getting worked up over, because nothing is ultimately worth anything at all. That makes us cynics, sitting about in our jaded, plastic garden, without a care in the world, and with nothing to care about. We live not in peace, but in a catatonic state.

And such is our mood. We are too filled with ennui to even be disturbed by our ennui. Any report of anything exciting, anything moving, anything even worth reporting is met with the moment's mantra, "Been there, done that", or, more cynical still, "Been there, done that, got the t-shirt." We cannot, in this age, express any sort of passion. The truly hip would rather be caught with a Spice Girls record than be caught up in any sort of emotion. Emotions are just mental constructs that we know, through our constant absorption in entertainment media, can be manipulated. In fact, that is the only way to trigger them, through manipulation. To feel an emotion, at least without a sense of irony and detachment, is to deny that nothing matters. And to deny that, you are faced with the Arbiter of what matters, a value (and law) giving God. And He might just want something from us, like obeisance.

To be earnest in any way is to expose oneself not merely to an argument against that which one is earnest about, but raw ridicule for the crime of being earnest. It's all been done before, and nothing really came out of it anyway, so why make a fuss? The latest news then is that there is no news. But not to worry, it doesn't matter anyway.

This is the cynicism to which the Preacher fell in his journey through Ecclesiastes. There is nothing new under the sun. And everything old under the sun is going the way of all flesh. And this is where our culture's long journey under the sun has brought it. Our culture has reached the end of its rope, and is too bored to even tie a noose and put an end to it all. And so it will go out not with a bang, but with a whimper.

We, however, are not citizens of this world. Our address lies over the rainbow and beyond the sun. Our response needs to be contra mundum, against the world. We need a deadly earnestness that is antithetical to the deadly apathy of the world. We need to be a people who care, who care deeply. And that means jettisoning our own cynicism. The irony is this: our ironic age had taught us the cynicism we need, in order to be cynical about cynicism. But we must not stay there, spending all our time being against being indifferent, but rather must spend our time being for the Kingdom of God. We must rejoice without self-consciousness over the birth over a new covenant child. We must weep with a sincerity that hurts. We must love with vigor, and hate with equal passion. We must accept the slings and arrows of those who would call us simple and innocent.

In the biblical culture things do matter. Battles are fought, and soldiers are wounded. And all the battles end with the triumph of the King. Then we face our ineffable future of beholding His ineffable glory for eternity. If we can't be earnest about that, we have been born only once, and born dead.