Sunday Sermon 10/2/11

One characteristic of the modern world is the development of group thinking. Historically there was little more than national identity, if anything. Joan of Arc, travelling to meet the king for the first time, could not speak easily to neighbors in towns twenty miles away because their french was so different. Indeed, Manchester says that war was a unifying factor in nations not because it created a common enemy but because it organized a national language.

With better unification, identities formed and sometimes ethnicity trumped nationality. (See Balkans, see Black America.) But these reasonable identities could not prepare us for the new identities that were discovered/invented/smoked up in the last two hundred years. We, as a species, became thralls to economics, power and sexual urges among many others. Captivated by the surmising of bright and creative men we became slaves to the plausible.

And some of these ideas were quite captivating. Some made sense. But all of these generalities were as unproven and unprovable as string theory. Nonetheless we were ready to kill and die for them.

This modern tendency is in great conflict with two groups, religion and the English (really Scot) Enlightenment. Both emphasize the nature of man as an individual rather than a part of some group movement or evolution. Before any discussion occurs between the two philosophies of groups and individuals, that impossible bridge must be built.

And before any thought of man's relationship with man can be entertained, that personal and individual relationship between him and his soul must be encountered.