LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2023, Page 101

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the last few centuries. The fundamental aspects are the
following:
1.
2.

Human beings are sinful and indeed enslaved to sin.
We reach our true end or goal in the next life, not the
current one.
The purpose of this life is to love God and serve neighbor.

3.

The broad societal rejection of these three truths of Christ the
wisdom of God has developed in fits and starts, easily here and
against great resistance there, gradually and seemingly
inexorably. As we unpack the ideas that have been adopted in
place of these truths, it will become obvious how we have
arrived in our current state of decay.
Our journey away from wisdom begins in seventeenth-century
Europe. The Thirty Years’ War wracked Europe through most
of the first half of the 1600s. The war was quite worldly, but
because it dealt in great part with a confluence of religious
affiliation with the quest for geopolitical domination, it will
forever be thought of as a war of religion. This combination of
truth claims with widespread destruction left behind a mood in
Europe that was decidedly doubtful about whether religion
was the right place to look for real understanding about the
nature of humanity and the world. The mood among many was
to look elsewhere, and that mood corresponded in time with
the beginning of an age of great scientific discovery and
technological innovation. Hence, the great merger of technical
advancement with spiritual reversal that we now know as the
Enlightenment.
An idea that began to take hold during this era was that
humanity is not fallen or enslaved to sin, but rather is basically
good. As the eighteenth-century Genevan philosopher JeanJacques Rousseau described, 8 man in his primitive state of
nature is good, loving self only in the sense of meeting his own
needs, having natural impulses of justice and of compassion for
others, and possessing perfectibility. It is only through the
corrupting influence of civilized society, and especially of
private property, that man has become duplicitous and
ruthless. Reformed author Carl Trueman, whose work The Rise
and Triumph of the Modern Self I highly recommend,
summarizes Rousseau’s view this way: Man is “at his best—he
is most truly himself as he should be—when he acts in
accordance with his nature.” 9 It is difficult to overstate how
broadly and deeply this idea of basic human goodness has
penetrated the modern consciousness. 10
This denial of bondage to sin is really denial of Christ the
wisdom of God. And while the denial of bondage to sin poses a
grave danger to one’s soul, at the societal level it can also have
devastating effects in the here and now. We see those effects all
around us, as Dr. Trueman aptly describes. 11 Because our nature
is widely seen as good, self-restraint is seen as unhealthy or
hypocritical, while self-indulgence and embracing one’s
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (On the) Equality Among Mankind
(Hoboken, N.J.: Generic NL Freebook Publisher, 2000).
9
Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
(Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2020), 123.
10
For more on the ideas and influence of Rousseau, see Trueman,
116–28, and Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. VI
(London: Search Press Limited, 1960), 65–69.
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Convention Essays

impulses are celebrated as authentic. Because society breeds
falsity, societal constraints on morality are distrusted, while
defining oneself according to one’s feelings is the highest good
and must be respected at all costs. The resulting disorder, and
ultimately the persecution of those who would seek to bring
order under God’s Law, is unsurprising to anyone who knows
the depravity of the human soul.
If, as asserted by Rousseau and so many other thinkers since the
eighteenth century, humanity is good but societal influences
are evil, then it would make sense that earthly life could become
paradisical if only we could correct the societal forces. There
would be nothing about humanity itself that would prevent an
earthly paradise. And so, the last three centuries have
witnessed one urgent quest after another to engineer society
into a perfection that allows humanity to enter into bliss. This
is not the heavenly bliss of eternity with Christ, of course; it is
earthly bliss. And this is the second rejection of a fundamental
aspect of Christ the wisdom of God—the rejection of the notion
that our ultimate destination, our ultimate joy, is to be found
not in this life, but the next.
Perhaps the most famous and societally destructive philosophy
that aims toward earthly bliss belongs to Karl Marx. He saw
private property as the fundamental evil plaguing humanity
and preventing the realization of universal bliss. If there were
no private property, there would be no want. Neither would we
have need of any exclusivity (such as marriage) that leads to
jealousy, nor would we need religion to help us to feel better
because we would already feel better, since there would be no
material or social alienation. The solution, then, is for the
working class to overthrow the owners of property and
factories and such. Eventually the government will wither
away from lack of use, and all people will live in the harmony of
communism. 12
Tens of millions of people have died around the globe because
of the pursuit of this unattainable chimera of universal peace,
of earthly bliss. They have died because people have exchanged
their eternal inheritance in Christ the wisdom of God for the
bowl of pottage that is communist bliss. And we should not
imagine that Marx’s ideas have no purchase here, for whereas
he focused on dismantling the economic system, others in the
last 100 years have applied his ideas instead to dismantling
sexual ethics, dismantling the family and even dismantling
language. Essentially, any distinction that could be perceived
as placing one group above another is subject to destruction—
or as the sanitized vocabulary has it, deconstruction. 13 We must
not delude ourselves: American society has embraced the quest
for earthly bliss, and much of the aggressiveness of the
movement toward moral disorder is explicable in this way.
Those of us who are in Christ the wisdom of God, living out our
baptismal pilgrimages toward our ultimate home in the next
Trueman, The Rise and Triumph, 124–28.
For an incisive and brief treatment of Marx’s philosophy, see
Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. VII (London: Search
Press Limited, 1963), 305–34.
13
Trueman, The Rise and Triumph, 232–36. See also Helen
Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories (Durham, N.C.:
Pitchstone Publishing, 2020).
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PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2023 (68TH) LCMS CONVENTION | 101