The Prophet, Jeremiah famously wrote the following: “’The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it? (Jer. 17:9)” Modern Christians will read things like this, give it a head-nod, and not think much about it in concrete personal ways. The Apostle Paul wrote the following:

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. (Eph. 4:17-19)

Both Jeremiah and Paul are affirming what the cross of Jesus Christ reveals in depth; that is, that humanity’s fallen incurved heart is depraved beyond all imagination; depraved so deeply that it took the eternal God to become human in Jesus Christ to put it to death, for each person, personally. And yet, for some reason most modern [even “conservative”] Christians don’t really believe this, not in practice. In the main, modern Christians operate like what Jesus did only has purchase for their place in heaven, something like ‘fire-insurance.’ In other words, we have this pervasive ‘moralistic-therapeutic-deism’ run-amok among most of the evangelical churches, operating as if the massa of humanity is mostly good. They operate as if world-leaders, entertainers, and most people in general have good intentions at heart. But this fatly contradicts the reality of the cruciformed Gospel. The cross says that people aren’t inherently good, but instead, inherently evil. Not just in theory, but concretely. And yet Christians, in the main, have so-called ‘social-imaginaries’ that ‘buffer’ them from actually believing what the Gospel presupposes: ie that human beings in their unchecked fallen hearts are deleteriously evil all the way down. People in general, and Christians in particular, don’t want to imagine that people really are all that bad, and so along with the world, they attribute evil actions of people to psychiatric problems; or maybe they’ll allow for the idea that someone’s ‘family-of-origin’ (again more psych categorization), ie nurture not nature, has led a person to do evil things.

Why do so many modern Christians act as if the reality of the Gospel, and its full attestation in the total canon of Scripture, really is just an artifact of history? Why do they operate as if the world of demons, monsters, and dark souls is a primitive relic of a past superstition that has now been transcended by the turn-to-the-modern? Why do Christians, even if they intellectually know about the impact of Enlightenment categories on the Christian imagination, still operate as if the “primitive” datum of Holy Scripture has been transcended by human reason, and the dawn of the scientific revolution? Charles Taylor provides insight into how the Christian mind has come to function in the 21st century, as if in opposition to the Gospel it claims to be submissive to:

What made Christianity particularly repulsive to the Enlightenment mind was the whole juridical-penal way in which the doctrine of original sin and the atonement were cast during the high middle ages and the Reformation. Our distance from perfection was glossed as just punishment for earlier sin; and our salvation through Christ as his offering satisfaction for this fault, paying the fine, as it were.

There were some repugnant aspects of this just in itself. But it became connected to two doctrines which were potentially deeply offensive. The first was the belief that only a few are saved. The second was the doctrine of predestination, which seemed to be generated inevitably from a belief in divine omnipotence in the context of the juridical-penal model.

Now in fact, opinion begins to move against these doctrines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the “decline of hell”, and the rise of universalism; on the other, there is growing revulsion at predestined damnation, even within Calvinistic societies. Of course, these developments were surely not independent of the one I was tracing above, viz., the growth of confidence in the human power to do good. But they add an extra level of motivation, a revulsion at the orthodox formulations, which must either lead to a revised faith, or in certain cases, to a sharp break with it.

Again, as confidence in human powers grows, and in particular, in the powers of reason, the claims of Churches to authority on behalf of a faith which partly consists of mysteries, becomes harder and harder to accept. This is another way in which a modern rationalism based on science can argue that the rise of science refutes religion.

But this still doesn’t capture fully the negative movement, the hostility to Christianity which spread among elites at this time. It wasn’t just the particular doctrines of the juridical-penal model, nor the rationalist rejection of mystery.

We saw that much of the historical practice of Christianity ran afoul of the new ethic of purely immanent human good: . . .1

For those who have studied the history of ideas this isn’t new information. But then I scratch my head: because even many people who know the history of ideas still operate as if modern humans have ‘come of age’ and transcended our primitive pre-critical past. We’re more comfortable with attributing what used to be considered demon-possession to psychiatric problems. Once the world of actual sin, evil, and the devil are smudged away as if a footnote of intellectual history, the modern Christian, along with their pagan counterparts, give way to the seduction of the materialistic and thus therapeutic world. As modern Christians we feel free to reduce everything to a physicalist explanation, leaving the ‘world’ of the Bible in the dustbin of history.

As a result, many modern Christians, cannot, will not imagine that our dear leaders just might have evil intentions inspiring what they do. After all, post-Enlightenment, any respectable person knows that humanity has the generative power within itself to be either good or bad; and given Romantic categories, clearly most people are inherently good, or so the imagination goes. This is the belief that seems to pervade our species currently. It surely has realized universalistic premises behind it; ie the idea that Christ has so objectively turned humanity back to God, that humanity indeed, and in general, operates with God-like attributes. This seems to be the ethos that currently dominates the mainstream evangelical-mind. It is an ethos that looks nothing like the biblical revelation as that comes in the Theanthropos, the Godman, Jesus Christ.

People, by definition, are drunk on their own self-driven-wanderlust. That’s what the kerygmatic reality demonstrates; that’s what the stauro-logic (cross-logic) demands. And yet modern Christians carry-on on their merry way as if most people really are good when it comes right down to it. But that thinking doesn’t come from the Gospel, it comes from the elevation of human reason to the point that it comes to think itself smarter and wiser than God. The Enlightenment only took humanity full circle, with some technological and scientific advancement, such that humanity believes itself to be beyond the mythos of Holy Writ. I’m left wondering if when Jesus comes again, and He surely will, if He really will find faith on earth; He wondered the same. I’m rather skeptical about that at this point.

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2007), 262-63 kindle.