Cultural glasses

We all look at life through cultural glasses. The next question (from the Grove City College students' list) deals with European people's cultural glasses, how they "see" or perceive Christianity: "What are the atheistic philosophical assumptions or presuppositions that many Europeans carry?"

After centuries of buildup of the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the French people had finally had enough of the Roman Church + Monarchy alliance = Christendom. A series of revolutions that swept Europe began with the emblematic (there were only 7 prisoners left) storming of the Bastille.

The historian Latourette (p.1008) comments:

It is highly significant that this series of revolutions had its beginning and its early course in Christendom and that the ideas which inspired and shaped them had their birth and initial formulations in lands and among peoples which for centuries had been under the influence of Christianity. Many of the revolutionary programmes repudiated that faith, but most and perhaps all of them embodied ideals and conceptions which had come through it. They took only part of what had been given by Christianity and to a lesser or greater extent distorted what they took....

The revolutionaries freed the French people from the power of Christendom and set up a government to protect people from that religion.

Paving the way for revolution, the prolific Voltaire, a defender of the persecuted Huguenots, vilified the Catholic Church. Candide and other writings led the way for deism — a thoroughly transcendent god established the universe as well as laws to govern it, then left Man to fend for Himself. Voltaire said, "The universe embarrasses me, and I cannot conceive that this Clock exists without there being a Clockmaker."

Voltaire's contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, already in the late 18th century spoke of the "ardent missionaries of atheism." Latourette says (p.1063) that 19^th century Europe saw “movements which seemed to threaten the very existence of the faith."

Near the end of the 19th century, the founder of sociology, August Comte, birthed Positivism, “which for many intellectuals… became a substitute for Christianity” (Latourette, 1072). Positivism was the belief in “an invincible law of the progress of the human mind, to replace theological beliefs or metaphysical explanation.” It hoped in politics that were “founded on a rational organization of society, as well as on a new religion without God: the religion of Humanity" (Philosophie de A à Z, 78).

Nietzsche's Superman declared, "God is dead."

Dostoevsky foresaw that “if God does not exist, everything is permitted." And the reign of 20th century superMan proved the truth of that with a bloodbath that left over 100 million dead.

Solzhenitsyn summed up the 20^th century saying, “the most optimistic century ended as the most cannibalistic.”

Nobel laureate, Albert Camus, opined, "God's only excuse is that he does not exist."

Sartre stated, “if I have done away with God the father, it is quite necessary for someone to invent values." He wrote, "Existentialism thinks that it is very bothersome that God does not exist, because with him disappears all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven; there can no longer be a “good” a priori, because there is not an infinite conscience to think it up. Nowhere is it written that the good exists…there are only men" (Sartre, 38-39).

So the philosophical glasses through which many French / Europeans see/perceive/understand Christianity are:

God blew it (Voltaire);

"God is dead" (Nietzsche);

"God's only excuse is that he does not exist" (Camus);

"Even if God did exist it would make no difference" (Sartre).

And then, to make matters more difficult, the postmodern philosophers took things farther.

Michel Foucault

So these are some of the ideas that most Europeans must work through before intelligibly considering the claims of Christ. Please pray for believers in Europe, that they might have wisdom to help people remove glasses that obscure the gospel. And pray for them to have the fortitude to be and proclaim the Good News to Europeans who do not know what they are missing in the alluring person of Jesus.