When I talk about how the elements of the Garden Temptation and the Fall are so clearly manifested in Western intellectual culture, I’m not giving you a complete analysis of the Fall, nor of Western Civilization. Rather, I am characterizing Western Civ as accursed of God, as is typical with the parable language of the Bible. This makes it sound like Western insistence on the primacy of reason (secularism), and how humanity is the measure of all things (humanism), is the pinnacle of the Fall.
Thus, I’m trying to address the context of where we live today in the West, but by no means have I tried to give you all you could know about the Fall. If you were raised in a non-Western culture, you might come up with a rather different picture of the Fall. You could emphasize something else about the Fall and make it sound like certain characteristic sins of your non-Western society are the ultimate evil.
This is as it should be. Don’t let my prophetic denunciation of the West blind you to what the Fall says about human nature. The underlying issue is not whether we should trust in Aristotelian logic, but trusting in human capabilities of any sort.
You’ll notice that the Tower of Babel wasn’t really much about reason and logic. It was about developing a religion based on human perception. Think about the sequence of major events in the Genesis narrative. The whole concept behind the Tower of Babel was basically a ziggurat, an observatory for something rather like astrology. This was very shortly after the Flood. In order to get that much rainfall from the sky (“forty days and nights”), there had to have been some truly epic cloud cover above the earth. And once it was precipitated from the sky, that cloud cover didn’t ever go back to what it was before the Flood.
This is why the rainbow as the symbol of the Covenant of Noah was such a big deal; there were no rainbows before that moment, yet there is a rainbow at the final revelation at the White Throne Judgment. That’s because the direct sunlight shining in our sky had been permanently occluded by clouds before the Flood. So suddenly that permanent cloud cover was removed and now we have these lights that show in the night sky. Today we call them stars, but they had been invisible until after the Flood.
So when humans undertake to reject divine revelation, it’s not unreasonable for them to assume these new lights in the skies are somehow deities who knocked the clouds out of the sky so they could reveal themselves. And the ones that travel around (planets) are telling us things. So Nimrod developed this plan for a giant ziggurat so they could figure out how to interpret these messages from heaven. This is not all that logical by Western standards, but not too surprising, given the sequence of events.
Secular humanism is just a blip on the timeline of human existence on the earth. It’s just a passing fad, and we can condemn it using Scripture, which reaches back to the very beginning in the Garden of Eden. Secular humanism is a Western artifact, and when the West is gone, secular humanism will go with it. Have you noticed how it’s brother, atheism, is fading so fast? Granted, some portions of atheism and secular humanism will probably stick around for the next civilization, but there’s a really good chance that future lies from Satan will meet the culture where it is. Instead of idolizing Aristotle and human reason, fools will worship other things. Mysticism will make a comeback, however deeply flawed.
Whatever it is you make of John’s Apocalypse and other passages about the Return of Christ and things at The End of this world, you don’t see much sign of secular humanism and the idolatry of human logical reasoning. Rather, you see more of human idolatry of just about anything except the Lord. We also see signs of demonic powers unleashed, and that is not a feature of secular humanism. Rather, it’s a sign of people consciously seeking out Satan.
The current Satanism — the real thing here in the US — is really just secular humanism with fancy robes. They call it “Satanism” simply to mark it as anti-Christian in a cultural sense. And the so-called Church of Satan, not actually a part of Satanism, is just a parody of Catholicism for the most part. Whatever we see in eschatology is something much more consciously seeking to touch the Spirit Realm but outside the guidance of Scripture and revelation. It seeks to get back to the Tree of Life without passing through the Flaming Sword or the Cross.
This is a major consideration why the current tribulation is not the Final Apocalypse. The secular humanism inherent in Western Civilization is not the very soul of the Fall. It’s just the current manifestation of it. Something will have to replace our Western epistemology before Jesus comes back.
The racial and cultural makeup of the West might have something to do with how enshrined reason. We have put it in the place of God in this particular instance because that’s the general direction of our Western European heritage. You don’t see it nearly as much in other cultures: East or Central Asian, Island cultures, Indian, all of Africa, etc. It may be that Western Euro selects for a certain type of people that, through the generations, ended up with high-reasoning, high-trust, low-aggression, preference for formal/ritual lawmaking, etc., which is how the fall is expressed so easily through enshrining human reason. Other cultures would express the fall differently based on their genetic makeup and tendencies, perhaps.
No doubt that’s a factor, at the least, Jay.
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