Our confidence was gone. Word started to get out that Stalin had failed to create his utopia but Chairman Mao had already started imposing his vision on China. Every experiment proved a failure. And still few were willing to suggest that the problem may not be the different ways to build utopia but whether it was possible at all.

Instead, many began to suggest that the failure wasn’t finding a non-transcendent source of truth and ethics but asserting that there is any such thing as truth or ethics.

Historically speaking, we struggled through a war pitting fascism and emperor worship against communism and the welfare state. After the World War II ended, the two powers the remained standing squared off against each other, and the long Cold War began.

Everyone thought theirs was the one and only right way to do things. Maybe, the skeptics thought, no one has the answer. Maybe, the relativists answered, what works for the East works for them and what works for the West works for them. Skeptics believed no one was right; relativists argued that everyone was right.

Really, both sides were saying the same thing. If everyone is right, no one is right. Like Norm Geisler says, pointing in all directions at once is the same as pointing in no direction at all.

So, maybe we should just give up the idea of there being “right” or “wrong” altogether. Maybe that’s what got us into trouble in the first place.

More and more, the question in our generation has less and less to do with whether it will be science or religion that offers us the best pathway to truth; the question now is whether or not there is such a thing as truth.

Where do you stand on this? Is there such a thing as truth? If so, how do you come to know it?

One more question: What if Nietzsche was right — what if there is no such thing as truth — what if it’s all just perspective? What would be so bad about that?

I started an email conversation that seems like it might turn into a wider exchange of ideas, so I thought I’d just import it to the blog. It has to do with some ideas that started banging around in my head Sunday night while I was in Cleveland.

Lots of the songs we sing — several I heard Sunday night in fact — say things like, “All I want is You, Lord” or “You’re all I want — You’re all I’ve ever needed.”

But when I say to God, “All I want is you”, he’s likely to respond, “You can’t have just me. You have to have all these other people, too. Love me, love my kids. We’re a package deal.”

I’m concerned that God’s message about how you can’t separate your love for him from your love of others (see 1 John 4:19-21) gets undermined by some of these songs that seem to play to our instincts that want to privatize our faith by saying, “It’s just me and God. I don’t need ‘organized religion’.”

Thoughts?

FDR thought he had figured out a way to get America out of the economic pit it had fallen into. And, with Europe at peace and Germany put firmly in its place, we could focus on domestic issues and get on with the business of building heaven on earth right here in the good ole U.S. of A.

But, as it turned out, Germany wasn’t all the way dead; they had simply been backed into a corner, and now they were angry. And, as we all know, a wounded animal is a dangerous thing indeed! They geared their war machine up again and went in search of new lands to conquer. Hitler managed to marry the mechanical efficiency of the Enlightenment with the ethical vacuum created by Nietzche and talked his countrymen into steamrolling most of the continent.

The Enlightenment gave birth to things no one thought possible. It started with the idea that we could create a perfect world. It morphed into the idea that the exercise of force might be a necessary evil in order to create such a world. It ended with the exercise of brute force for its own sake.

The state had become God.

The world went to war again, and this time it wouldn’t be won by the side that built the largest weapons but by the side that built the smallest weapons. The longer the war went on, the more apparent it became that the winner would be whoever managed to successfully harness the power of the atom.

Victory came but it was empty for the Allied forces. It could be argued that more than the Axis powers fell; the Enlightenment dream itself was crushed when the Enola Gay emptied her cargo hold over Hiroshima. The grand experiment had failed. Two world wars, a global depression and the mushroom clouds hovering over Japan demonstrated the bankruptcy of the whole thing.

Our love affair with progress showed how dangerous it can be when technology outpaces wisdom. It’s difficult to persuade people that utopia is just around the corner when their chilren are huddled underneath desks at school.

Americans brought back two distinct images from World War II — two images that perhaps best reveal the dangerous dark side of the Enlightenment thought process. First, there were the huge, empty cathedrals dotting the landscape of Europe — monuments to an older and better age. Second, and most devastating, were the images of Jews in the concentration camps. Here was a people committed to living in light of a transcedent vision, a standard of right and wrong that did not originate with popular opinion but with a supernatural revelation.

It was this people, more than any other, who bore the brunt of German rage.

Everyone knew it was wrong. But no one could say why anymore.

In Atlanta we dabble in winter. We experiment with it periodically. Every so often, we’ll go right to the edge and dip our toes in freezing temperatures. We play at winter.

In Cleveland they don’t play.

It’s not “ooh — it’s chilly out there — better wear a sweater” kind of cold here. It’s “I can’t feel my face” cold here. Winter means business here. It’s a season. If you live in Cleveland, one quarter of your life is going to be cold; you’re just going to have to deal with that.

I’m heading to the airport in a few minutes — doing a parenting seminar this weekend in Cleveland, OH.

I haven’t traveled since the second weekend in December! It’s been great sitting around the house, but I’m ready to get back to work! And, boy, am I going to hit the ground running. I’m in Cleveland this weekend. Then I go to Amarillo, TX. Then I go to Santa Rosa, CA. I have President’s Day Weekend off. Then, I speak at a church here in the Atlanta area two Sundays in a row. Then back out to California. I’m going to Milwaukee (land of beer and cheese) and Hanover, PA (land of potato chips).

I sure would appreciate your prayers for me and my family. I think we’re all a little out of practice with my travel schedule having been dormant for nearly seven weeks. Pray for my wife, especially, if you would. She gets to stay home with the girls after what’s been a really emotionally draining week.

I’m a little anxious about this weekend. I’m presenting some new material in this seminar, and that always wigs me out a little. Oh, and it’s supposed to snow the entire time I’m there.

Okay…without further interruption…your Friday Sports Question is: Who will win the Super Bowl?

(I know we did this one a couple of weeks ago, but I think Dusty Rush and Lisa Lee are the only ones with a dog still in the fight.)

Who is going to win: Colts or Bears?

When you’re writing about history like I have been lately, there are two approaches possible. On the one hand, I could attempt a narrow and in-depth analysis of all the historical details, or, on the other hand, I could attempt a broad survey of major themes. In other words, I could choose to go an inch wide and a mile deep or a mile wide and an inch deep.

Both approaches have pros and cons attached to them.

Obviously, I’ve chosen to be a mile wide and an inch deep here, and that has made me easy prey for people to offer critiques of what is not said or is insufficiently discussed. I am a novice historian at best. My approach has not been big into nuance because, for one reason, I don’t know enough about the details to speak intelligently about them. Some have rightly interjected thoughts and opinions. I have no problem with that, but I would ask everyone to consider my intentions.

With a focused and sufficiently detailed study we are sometimes prone to miss the forest for the trees. It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae and precise details and miss the bigger picture of history.

Also, it’s difficult to write something like that for mass consumption. Most people don’t read textbooks for fun.

I thought about trying to synthesize both approaches but realized that attempting to do so would result in such long posts that many people would be tempted to give up altogether.

So, let me state my parameters here. Hopefully, we can all agree to live with the consequences.

I am attempting to provide a broad overview of Western history and cultural development for popular consumption. I am an educated, Christian, heterosexual, white male living with my wife and three young daughters in the suburbs of a major American city. As such, I necessarily write from a limited perspective.

In spite of this, I believe that what we discuss here can tell us some things about the world in which we find ourselves, a little about how we got here and, finally, how we might live in such a way as to bequeath a better world to our children, who will undoubtedly live in even more serious times than these.

That last part — the bit about living appropriately — is the main objective here. I do not believe we can do that without at least a cursory understanding of how our world got into the mess it’s in, but, hopefully, we’re learning our history to help us with our present attempts at forging a brighter tomorrow.

In the Bible, we hear about a group of men — known as the men of Issachar. It was said of them that they understood the times in which they lived and how to best live in light of those times (see 1 Chronicles 12). That is my aim here: understanding the seriousness of this age and discerning how to live with intentionality.

Hopefully, we’re coming to understand some things about the flow of history to this point and the turning point moment our age potentially represents.

Last night, in his State of the Union Address, President Bush said, “Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are commitments of conscience — and so it is our duty to keep them permanently sound.

I’m all for keeping our commitments and being true to our conscience — both individually and collectively. Of course, we only have to cast our eyes to places like New Mexico and Arizona to ask ourselves how well we have fared in the past at keeping our commitments, but that’s another story for another day. For now I want us to think through the whole idea of government provided welfare and how it came about as a result of Enlightenment thinking.

One of the things we’re also learning here (hopefully) is that there is such a thing as a Christian view of history. If you’ve read either of the two books I’ve written or heard me speak very much, you know how keenly interested I am in a Christian worldview. A worldview is a set of lenses through which we interpret the big questions of life — questions dealing with where we came from, where we’re headed and how we’re supposed to live in the meantime (origin, destiny and morality).

I am so frustrated by schools that claim to be Christian but do not equip their students to see various subjects from a Christian perspective. Hopefully, what we’re doing here will help people see that your worldview really does impact the way you think through things like history, economics and politics. Oh, and by the way, the Christian lens through which we view history is not tinted at all (rose-colored or otherwise). It must be as clear as possible so that we can live in reality and not some dream world.

Hey, who left that soapbox right there where I could get up on it?

Okay, when we left off yesterday Europe had gone to war. It was big. It was bad. It was ugly. It was difficult for many people to reconcile the idea that humanity was making great strides towards buildling a utopian society, when people took the best and brightest ideas and harnessed them for destruction.

But optimists are not easily dissuaded. Clearly, war was terrible, but it has proven to be nearly unavoidable. You can’t really outlaw war, because who would enforce it? How would you enforce it without going to war yourself? This was a dilemma. Maybe what we need is a governmental body so powerful it could levy terrible sanctions against anyone who creates a war.

That’s the ticket!

Following World War I, there were two things introduced to global politics that were designed to eliminate war in a civilized manner: The League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles. With these two hammers, Germany’s remaining arsenal was pounded to dust, and the once proud nation was ordered to pay reparations that ensured their economic enslavement for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, eastern Europe ceded power to Karl Marx’s vision. The Bolsheviks grabbed power with all the gentility of their French Revolutionary predecessors. Science alone would rule the day, and the idea of a transcendent deity would be educated out of people…or else!

If only other Enlightenment visionaries would rise up and take the wheel of control over education and economy…then we could get on with building heaven here on earth.

At least that’s how it was supposed to work. What actually happened was that the government’s manipulation of the economy gave the impression of post-war prosperity. The Roaring 20s had everyone smiling, laughing, dancing (well, all the white people at least — we still hadn’t settled that pesky thing called Civil Rights). Things looked great on paper until one Friday afternoon.

Suddenly the pseudo-wealth that the Federal Reserve had papered the world with fell down a well and the stock market collapsed. The forces of economic gravity sucked all the real wealth down as well, with a ripple effect plunging us all (including much of Europe) into a deep depression.

By this time, discernment was low and desperation was high, so with each new failure, people cried out for more of the new and less of the old. Ever the populist, FDR gave everyone a new deal and a new concept of governance.

To this point, the federal government in America was primarily limited to protecting life and property. President Roosevelt offered a vision of government that provided freedom from fear and freedom from want. No one needed to lack education or a job or a savings account upon which to retire; the federal government could now ensure all of this and more. This new, larger government wouldn’t be a threat to, but the source of, our new freedoms.

And thus was born the welfare state.

Anyone have a problem with this logic? Anyone see any potential problems?

The Enlightenment gave us the idea that utopia was within our grasp, but it rejected any transcendent source of ethics or morality. So, while most folks agreed upon the destination, few could agree upon the proper route.

Some suggested more power and less education for the masses. Some suggested less power and more education for the masses. Perhaps we needed greater division among the classes. Perhaps we needed to eliminate the class system altogether.

Maybe the problem was rationalism itself. The idea that we’re all part of one big machine can be stifling. That’s what the romantics said. All this stuff about cause and effect, maybe the universe is less like a machine and more like a living organism.

Both the romantics and the rationalists agreed that there’s nothing “out there” — no truth to be found that isn’t already contained in our universe — in ourselves, really. There is no external source of knowledge, purpose or ethics. They just disagreed over whether those things were to be found in our heads (rationalists) or in our hearts (romantics).

These two sides kept pointing fingers at each other throughout most of the 19th Century. Rationalists cheered at every new invention (and there were lots of them — the cotton gin, the steamboat, the telegraph — this was, after all, the age of the Industrial Revolution), saying we were getting closer to the perfect world. Romantics would take people by the hand and walk them through a slum in New York City or London and point to the polution and poverty, the squalor and lack of education (carefully avoiding to point at the opium den where they may have slept the night before). Then, the romantics might produce a new book of poetry or show you some new form of painting as evidence that their path was THE PATH to true enlightenment and heaven on earth.

As the philosophical battles raged, utopian communities began to pop up here and there. And, no sooner had they drawn up charters and covenants than they would be torn apart by some internal strife. Someone failed to work as hard as the rest. Or someone stole something. Or someone thought we were going to share everything — including spouses.

Many of the romantics gave up and joined the rationalists. They found out that you can actually write decent poetry about factories and the nobility of man as an inventor.

And then a bomb was dropped. More literally, lots of bombs were dropped all over the incubator of the Enlightenment. All of Europe was at war, and it was a war like had never been seen before, fought with all the sophistication of modern inventions. It was a war that didn’t just wipe out battlefields but left cities themselves in ruins.

Turns out humans aren’t very good at creating a brave new world after all, but we’re really good at wrecking the one we’ve got.

Don’t you think that at some point in time someone’s got to pick their head up and realize, the problem’s not with the route but with the destination?

I believe the position of Quarterback is the most important position in all of sports. You might disagree with that, but I can’t imagine another single position that has as much impact on a team.

Once again, the AFC Championship game comes down to the New England Patriots vs. the Indianapolis Colts. That, of course, means Tom Brady vs. Peyton Manning — arguably two of the top 10 QBs of all time, and that brings us to today’s question:

If you could take one QB to build your franchise (and I’m talking of all-time), who would it be?

What might happen if a people believed (a) it is possible to build a utopian society; and (b) there is no transcendent source of ethical behavior?

Well, then, I guess anything goes, right? Whatever works. Pragmatism.

People really did believe that it was possible to build this grand utopian society. In fact, I do not think it was simply blind rage that fueled the reign of terror in France. Nor do I think it was just political, economic and social factors (although they certainly contributed). Underneath it all was the idea that wrong-thinking people were gumming up the works and should be eliminated.

After all, we’re talking about building a perfect world here. Can’t make an omelete without breaking a few eggs. There’s going to be a certain amount of collateral damage in anything like this.

Of course, the French Revolution was a disaster, and that took the wind out of the sails of Enlightenment optimism…for a while.

But, with the scientific method as their guide, many realized that this was simply one failure. Trial and error would eventually show us the right way. Let’s just tinker with the factors and try the experiment again.

But what should the next experiment look like? Should we take a more gradual approach? Or should we use more brute force? Should we use long and slow education or quick and blunt power?

See, without some transcendent guide, even if you can get everyone to agree on where we should go, there will always be serious disagreement about how we should get there.

As you think through the history of the last few centuries, what are some of the ways people have tried to bring about heaven on earth?