Humanism

The humanist tells me that man is a cosmic mistake.

He comes out of nothing, he goes to nothing, but in between he's the creature of supreme dignity. Humanism is intellectually untenable, but it is emotionally very, very attractive. But to the thinking person, humanism gives no reason, ultimately, for ascribing virtues and values.

They become, in a word, preferences rather than principles. Do you know what your neighbors believe? You might have Christian neighbors, but if you don't, their worldview is likely a form of humanism, and humanism today tends to be best described as militant humanism. Welcome to the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, a daily outreach of Ligonier Ministries. When you understand the faulty foundation of a worldview, it can help you engage in thoughtful conversations with those around you. Most people have not questioned their worldview and the influences on their thinking. So what you learn today and the rest of this week can aid you as you seek to contend for the faith and be a faithful ambassador for Christ in this fallen world.

Perhaps like you, R.C. Sproul has helped me in so many areas, and his lessons on philosophy and worldviews have shaped me greatly, filling in gaps from my early education. So let's hear today's succinct overview of humanism.

Here's Dr. Sproul. In this segment of our study of contemporary culture, we're going to turn our attention now to humanism. We've already looked at secularism, and now we're going to turn our attention to humanism. Now, humanism is a very ancient philosophy and one that has gone through all different kinds of stages and transitions and changes, and it's very difficult to define humanism because it's such a broad philosophy and has so many different elements to it, and we must be fair when we're trying to define any kind of philosophical system lest we come at it in a simplistic way and distort it. But one of the big problems we have with humanism in understanding it is that it's often confused in people's minds with another word and another concept in our culture.

Do you have any idea what it is? Humanitarianism. Many people use the term humanism as if it were a synonym for humanitarianism. Now, humanitarianism just simply refers to a concern that people have to care for the welfare of human beings.

Anybody who cares about people and who does things to help the cause of people could be called a humanitarian. But humanism seeks to be humanitarian as well. But humanism as an ism deals with a philosophy that is much more defined than just simply having a care or concern for the welfare of mankind. Judaism cares for human beings.

Christianity cares for the welfare of mankind. Even communism as an ism has at the heart of its philosophy a concern for the welfare of mankind. But humanism is a philosophical system, not just a concern or attitude toward the well-being of mankind.

It has, as I mentioned a moment ago, a very long history. And we usually trace the beginnings of humanism back to ancient Greece, to the pre-Socratic philosopher whose name was Protagoras. Protagoras developed a concept of humanism which he set forth under the motto homo mensura, homo mensura.

And the reason why I bring this in is not just for the sake of ancient history, but because this motto that Protagoras introduced has become kind of a rallying cry for later generations of humanists. And what the motto homo mensura means is man the measure, man the measure. And the idea behind Protagoras' development of humanism is simply that man is the measure of all things. Man in himself is the ultimate norm by which values are to be determined so that man becomes ultimate for all intents and purposes and autonomous. That is, man is the ultimate being, and man is the ultimate authority. Now, this may get a little bit complicated, but historically as humanism developed, older, more ancient varieties of humanism did not deny the existence of God. So that we have seen in history forms of what may be called theistic humanism, where there was a belief in a God, but God's activity for the most part is restricted to being the creator of the natural realm and the natural forces, and that religion that came into older varieties of humanism came in through the door of what we would call naturalism. There is a God, yes, but it's not a supernatural God who is involved supernaturally with this world.

Again, I want to be fair, and in such a brief period of time, we can just skate lightly over this. But as I said, there are all different kinds of humanists. There have been optimistic humanists, pessimistic humanists, benevolent humanists with respect to the church and religion, militant humanists, which have vigorously opposed any kind of even the existence of Christianity. And I want you to note just in passing that the rallying cry of contemporary humanism tends to be much more militantly opposed to the church and to Christianity than earlier varieties. For example, we go back to the 16th century, and if I can use as an image or as a symbol to indicate the struggle that was going on for men's minds in Western civilization in the 16th century, I think of the great debate that went on in that period between two titans, two intellectual giants who represented on the one hand humanism and on the other Christianity, biblical Christianity. Who were those two figures that really carried on the debate so lively in the 16th century?

Does anybody know? Erasmus of Rotterdam, okay? And who was his antagonist? Martin Luther.

I knew if there were a Lutheran in this room, we would be able to get this. But Erasmus was considered the prince of Renaissance humanism. And he, as a great scholar, as a great humanistic thinker, also had a motto, and his motto was ad fontes. You can't take this course without having a refresher course in Latin, can you?

Ad fontes. Does anybody know what that means? Two something.

We got the first word, two. All right? Fontes.

Come thou font of every blessing. All right? What English words? All right, fountain, spring, koala. Okay?

Got to get the German in. It means simply to the source, or to the sources. And what happened in the Renaissance was, why is it called the Renaissance? What does Renaissance mean? Renew or rebirth? It was the rebirth of what? Of learning.

Of what learning? Cultural, the great golden age of ancient Greek culture. And so there was a rediscovery and a renewed interest in studying Plato and Aristotle and the great minds of antiquity. So here, Renaissance humanism went back in history and tried to discover the highest expression of human culture.

And give its rebirth to civilization. Now Erasmus was its leading spokesman in the 16th century, and what people often overlook is that even though Erasmus was a satirist and wrote very satirical essays criticizing the Roman Catholic Church, he still was a member of the Roman Catholic Church, of the Roman Catholic Church, and included in his philosophical system the importance of religion. His call ad fonte to the sources was not just a call to renew the study of Greek and Roman theory, but also to go back to what other sources? The Judeo-Christian sources. He was the one who was tearing on the movement to recover the ancient languages of the Bible. In fact, Erasmus, the humanist, was the single most important individual for the reconstruction of the Greek New Testament in the 16th century, which came to be known as the Textus Receptus, which was the Greek text. This is why I'm bringing this in here. It was the Greek text upon which what version of the Bible was based?

Does anybody know? The King James. The King James Version of the Bible was built upon the Textus Receptus, which reflected largely the brilliant work of Erasmus. But you see, for the humanist, religion is just basically one input into the general growth and development of the human race. Religion is part of your experience, and part of what it means to be human is to be involved in some kind of religious aspiration.

And certain values come to the race through religion, but there's no commitment there in terms of the absolute authority, for example, of the Word of God in the life of people. So 16th century humanism sort of embraced to a degree features and values from the Christian community. But a titanic struggle emerged, as I say, in the 16th century between humanists and Christians, and the symbolic spokesmen for that were Erasmus and Luther.

And I think we can say that in the 16th century the battle was won by Luther and the Reformation. By the 17th century, the tide began to turn, and as we go into the Enlightenment, into the 18th century, we see that humanism begins to prevail over the Christian faith and the Christian church as a dominant cultural influence in the shaping of men's ideas, in the shaping of what we call the modern mind. It's important for you to understand that because you are living in a culture that in a certain sense reflects the Renaissance of humanism. You are living in a culture where you are bombarded every day by values and ideals and concepts that come out of humanistic philosophy. And you need to be aware of that as Christians because keep in mind, as I mentioned, this fundamental point of antithesis that exists between classical humanism and Christianity, between that which is anthropocentric and that which is theocentric. The 19th century manifested a movement of another kind of link-up or cooperation between religion and ancient humanism, and we see it particularly in the school of thought in theology that is called liberalism.

Now, I always hesitate to use that word for this reason. The word liberal is a perfectly good word, you know. It means one who is free-thinking, one who is open, one who is scientific and responsible, a person who is tolerant, and all of those things which we would regard from a Christian perspective as being virtues. But again, liberalism of the 19th century refers to a specific concrete movement within theology, and I hesitate to use the word because everybody in this room has a different idea of what it means to be a liberal. There are all different kinds of liberals, and there's all different kinds of liberalism, but when we're talking about liberalism in theology, we're talking about a distinctive movement where we saw an attempt to reconstruct Christianity on a basis of naturalism, to extract from the New Testament anything that was of a supernatural flavor, miracles, the resurrection, the atonement of Jesus, the transfiguration, the virgin age. For some reason, everything seemed to focus on the debate over the virgin birth. But the debate in the 19th century was far bigger than the question over the mode of Jesus' birth.

It had to do with the clash between thoroughgoing supernatural Christianity and those that wanted to reduce Christianity to its social and ethical consideration. Emil Bruner, the 20th century neo-orthodox theologian, the Swiss theologian, one of the most important theologians of the 20th century, in writing his massive work on the person of Christ called The Mediator, he makes the statement in there that 19th century liberalism was, in Bruner's opinion, nothing more and nothing less than unbelief. It's important that it's Bruner that says that and not Sproul because Sproul's a conservative, and he embraces classical orthodoxy.

Bruner didn't. Bruner wasn't carrying a brief for classical orthodox Christianity, but he said this kind of Christianity, 19th century liberalism, is basically unbelief. But here was the crisis. All of a sudden, people came to the conclusion that the Bible, for example, did not come by way of divine revelation but simply reflects primitive man's self-understanding of their religious experience and of their values. Now you have a group of theologians in the 19th century who no longer believe in the resurrection.

What do you do? We have an institution that is part of human culture. It's established, the church. We have literally thousands, tens of thousands of churches across the Western world.

We have billions and billions of dollars invested in these institutions. Not only that, but we have a remarkable platform from which to bring about social change. And what kind of social change? What kind of ethical problems? The very things that Jesus of Nazareth was concerned about. So in the 19th century liberalism, we saw a shift of concern from personal supernatural redemption, you know, redemption from your sin and alienation from God and all of that, to what was called the social gospel, to extrapolate the teaching of Jesus ethically from the supernatural background of the biblical documents.

And so we don't believe the supernatural, but we still believe in the values of the New Testament, the ethics of the New Testament. So the church still has a raison d'etre. The church still has a viable ministry to carry on.

So all we've got to do is just change the message and change the structure. Now, not everybody in the church accepted that. There was a fierce battle, you know, the so-called modernist controversy that grew up in the church with liberalism. But the point of this discussion is not on liberal theology, but to point out that at this point, humanists and liberals became allies. All of these ideals of the humanists were also ideals of the Christian.

And so there was a point of contact, a point of cooperation. Remember I said a little while ago that modern versions of humanism tend to be more militant. There is a virtually vitriolic spirit of hostility and antipathy directed against the Christian church, a growing militancy against Christianity.

Why? Why the change from a cooperative spirit agreeing to disagree about the supernatural, but at least working side by side for human dignity, for hospitals, for orphanages, and all of that sort of thing? Well, thinkers along the way, men like John Dewey, okay, came along and said, what religion does is that religion tends to hinder the evolutionary progress of man. The humanist's dream is to rid the world of pain and suffering by the efforts of man through education, through technology, through industry, but principally through education.

Through higher education. And religion tends to keep people in a conservative frame of mind, holding on to outmoded and antiquated values. It tends to make people conservative rather than progressive. And at the heart of humanism is the commitment to progress. And religion is said to hinder that. Now, in the moments I have left, let me just try to draw a little graphic here to understand what the struggle is with humanism in our culture from a Christian perspective. In terms of Western humanism as we know it today, we can say that in many respects, the ethics or the values of Christianity were borrowed by the humanists and ripped off the Christian foundation, which was the character of God and the person of Jesus Christ. See, I believe that it is important for me to be compassionate to the sick and to the poor and that I have a duty, a moral obligation to minister to those people because, first of all, God commands it.

And second of all, Christ has redeemed me and has repeated that commandment to be involved. But what happened was the foundation was negated by the humanists, and the humanists tried to retain the ethics. And so we say the humanist lives on borrowed capital. He rejects the foundation upon which his very values are established. As Francis Safer says, the humanist has both feet firmly planted in midair. And my biggest complaint about humanism, I've voiced it again and again, and I'll voice it one more time, is that the humanist, being anthropocentric, has noble ideals, but he has not an ounce of rational foundation for them. He tells me that man is a cosmic mistake, as we mentioned the last time. He comes out of nothing, he goes to nothing, but in between he's the creature of supreme dignity. Humanism is intellectually untenable, but it is emotionally very, very attractive.

Why? Because we are anthropoi, we are men, we are women, and we want to believe that life has some virtue to us. But to the thinking person, humanism gives no reason ultimately for ascribing virtues and values. They become, in a word, preferences rather than principles. And dear friends, that's exactly where we are with modern sophisticated versions of humanists who come right out and say, that's what we have.

We don't have any principles. We have preferences. My fear of humanism is that when preferences become ultimate, then the question is, whose preferences become ultimate? And historically, that has in every case ended in some form of statism. And the focal point of my concern as a Christian is at this level.

I'm going to say it, and I know it will be controversial. The principal vehicle for the dissemination of humanist philosophy is the public school system. That has always been the strategy of the humanist. He says that the only way we can progress is by education, and if the humanistic philosophy is going to shape the values of modern man, it must capture the institutions of education, and it has done a masterful job of it. And I say to the Christian, who's finally, after decades, finally beginning to wake up and see that what your children are being taught in your homes and in your churches is one set of values, one philosophical value. One philosophical system, and what they get by public education is another.

It's becoming crystal clear now with the debates that are raging in the country, but it took a long, long time for the Christian community to begin to understand that. Now, we'll talk about education and the culture as a separate item later on in this course, but I just mention it in passing now that here is where the battle lies in the battle for the modern mind. In our next session, we're going to consider that philosophical movement that is original to the United States, which is called pragmatism, and we'll take that up the next time. Are you prepared for the battle for the modern mind? We're featuring this week's messages on Renewing Your Mind to help you and your family in that battle.

In fact, that's one of the reasons R.C. Sproul recorded this 12-message series, providing an overview of the many isms seen in the world today and how that came to be. You can take your study further when you request lifetime digital access to all the messages and the study guide by making a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800-435-4343. To further thank you for your generous support of Renewing Your Mind and the global outreach of Ligonier Ministries, we'll send you Dr. Sproul's companion book, Making a Difference, impacting culture and society as a Christian.

Learn to be a Christian witness at work, school, home, or wherever you are. Request both resources today by visiting renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes. Thank you. Join us tomorrow as R.C. Sproul explores a worldview that was born and bred in the USA. So join us then here on Renewing Your Mind. you