The Death of Expertise

One of the by-products of information’s glut and speed is that we are increasingly skeptical about its trustworthiness. There is so much bad information out there, so much that is false and fake and corrupted by bias. It’s no wonder we increasingly cope by seeing ourselves as the most trustworthy source. It’s no wonder “look within,” “follow your heart,” and “you do you” are resonant phrases. External authorities like family, teachers, pastors, politicians, religious traditions, and others have disappointed us or been proven hypocritical. At best we see them as secondary to the self as sources of truth. At worst we dismiss them as oppressive obstacles on the path to self-discovery.
 
But the self is not the reliable authority it is cracked up to be. Our fickle hearts are unreliable guides, deceitful above all things (Jer. 17:9). Our embrace of “being true to ourselves” often leads to a closed loop of self-deception and chronic brokenness, where we erroneously believe we have all the resources for healing within ourselves. We buy into the notion that we exist as isolated, self-contained creatures who needn’t be accountable to anything beyond ourselves. But this is a dangerous and lonely lie.
  
The “look within” tendency to shun authority is as old as Eden. It was refined by Enlightenment thinkers like René Descartes and John Locke, who located truth in the individual’s mental world, not in the world outside our heads. But the last century has seen an acceleration in the erosion of external authority.
 
The Internet’s democratization of information has had a leveling effect that tends to downplay credentials and embolden unqualified participation in every area of discourse. We are now all “experts” on everything and have platforms to publish our thoughts. Actresses can launch lifestyle blogs that proffer all manner of dubious health advice.
 
Experts are usually not out to get us. They want to help us. Guardrails and gatekeepers are not about stifling us. They’re about protecting us. Authority can be abused, yes, but at its best it is for our good.. When we shun the advice of experts, we not only risk being exposed to bad things; we also miss out on good things.
 
We can’t all be experts in everything. God gifts people differently for a reason. The biblical vision of a healthy church, for example, is not one where everyone contributes in the same way, but where variously gifted parts contribute to a healthier whole (see 1 Cor. 12:12–28; Eph. 4:1–16 among others). We need each other because we can’t do everything on our own. We need to be educated and apprenticed by others if we are to become truly knowledgeable or skillful in any area. Rather than resenting the expertise of others, we should respect it and learn from it.

 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Return to the Concept of Truth

Basically, what Wells is calling for is a return to biblical truth-not only to its content, but to the very concept of truth. The Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles had a certainty that contrasts sharply with modernity's outlook. They were convinced that the revelation that they had received from God and proclaimed was true in an absolute sense. It was not just true for them or true in their time alone. It was true "universally, absolutely, and enduringly. "
 
Wells is aware that this conception of truth is regarded by moderns as untenable. He advances three reasons moderns cite in defense of the position that we can no longer hold to absolute truth as those ancients did.
 
(1) The first is often more implicitly assumed than argued per se. It is the idea that we have progressed to the point where we can no longer turn back to that older way of thinking. What is culturally older is considered to be of less value. While this was earlier based on Darwinism and the philosophy that stemmed from it, it has more recently been related to technology.
 
(2) Second, there is the contention that it simply is not possible to slip back into the ancient or biblical worldview, the way one would take off a garment and replace it with another. Worldviews are tied to the psychology and experiences of a given age, and ours is modern. While the argument of New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann along these lines is now considered obsolete, this belief seems to linger.
 
(3) Third, we now face religious pluralism and a bewildering array of claims to truth. It is therefore no longer possible to believe simplistically, as did the biblical writers, in an unqualified view of truth.
 
Wells responds to each of these contentions, arguing that they need not deter us from holding a biblical understanding of truth.
 
(1) First, to hold the view of the progress of the human spirit in view of the atrocities of this century requires a greater credulity than to believe the biblical writers.
 
(2) Second, from the fact of contemporary experience, it does not follow that we must simply acquiesce in this view. Experience is to be interpreted, and it certainly has not been shown that we have lost our freedom to accept or reject beliefs. If beliefs were strictly determined, what would be the point of writing books to persuade someone on any subject, including this one?
 
(3) Third, while religious pluralism in our time has reached a magnitude previously unequaled, it is quite remarkable to hear the claim that this requires giving up the uniqueness of Christianity. Wells says, "Had this been the necessary consequence of encountering a multitude of other religions, Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, and Paul would have given up biblical faith long before it became fashionable in Our Time to do so. "

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Disappearance of Evangelical Theology

Actually, the world in which the apostles lived and preached was more pluralistic than any other age until the present. While their world was small and ours is not, there is another very important difference between them and us, together with an important consequence:
 
Theirs, however, was a cauldron of conflicting religious claims within which the Christian faith would have remained tiny but for one fact: the first Christians knew that their faith was absolutely true, that it could brook no rivals, and so they sought no compromises. That was the kind of integrity that God, the Holy Spirit, blessed and used in the ancient world in spreading the knowledge of Christ. We today are not so commonly persuaded or, I dare say, not so commonly blessed. Even among those who seek to guide the Church in its belief, many are of the mind that Christian faith is only relatively true, or they think, against every precept and example that we have in the New Testament, that Christ can be "encountered" in other religions-religions that they view not as rivals but as "interpretations" with which accommodation should be sought. What would have happened over the ages, one wonders, if more of the Church's leaders had been similarly persuaded?
 
Wells contends that theology is disappearing from evangelicalism. This may seem strange, since surveys indicate a strong continued belief in and commitment to the doctrines of historic Christianity. Yet, Wells contends, theology is disappearing because those beliefs have been pushed to the periphery, where their power to define what evangelical life should be has been lost. This disappearance means two things. On the one hand, the several aspects of theology have been broken apart. They are now engaged in, respectively, by biblical scholars; philosophers, historians, and sociologists; and the theoreticians of practice. Second, the articles of belief are no longer at the center of the life of evangelicals and evangelicalism. Instead, there is a vacuum, into which modernity is pouring. The result is that for the first time there is a faith that is not defining itself theologically.
 
Not only the understanding of the nature of evangelicalism but the understanding of ministry has been corrupted by modernization. Two roles that are highly admired in our society have become the models that ministers now tend to adopt: the psychologist and the manager. Thus, preaching, even in evangelical pulpits, tends to be therapeutic, and the pastor is seen as the CEO of a corporation, responsible for its efficiency and growth. This is in keeping with Wells' contrast between two types of ministry-one theologically based, the other professional in orientation. In the latter, one's occupation has become a career, in which advancing to larger, more financially rewarding, and more prestigious positions is the goal.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Human's Unfulfilled Needs

According to Augustine, our feeling of dissatisfaction is a consequence of the Christian doctrine of creation – that we are made in the image of God. There is thus an inbuilt capacity within human nature to relate to God. Yet, on account of the fallenness of human nature, this potential is frustrated. There is now a natural tendency to try to make other things fulfill this need. Created things thus come to be substituted for God. Yet they do not satisfy. Human beings are thus left with a feeling of longing – longing for something indefinable.
This phenomenon has been recognized since the dawn of human civilization.
 
In his dialogue Gorgias, Plato compares human beings to leaky jars. Somehow, human beings are always unfulfilled. Perhaps the greatest statement of this feeling, and its most famous theological interpretation, may be found in the famous words of Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
 
Throughout Augustine’s reflections, especially in his autobiographical Confessions, the same theme recurs. Humanity is destined to remain incomplete in its present existence. Its hopes and deepest longings will remain nothing but hopes and longings. The themes of creation and redemption are brought together by Augustine, to provide an interpretation of the human experience of “longing.” Because humanity is created in the image of God, it desires to relate to God, even if it cannot recognize that desire for what it is. Yet, on account of human sin, humanity cannot satisfy that desire unaided. And so a real sense of frustration, of dissatisfaction, develops. And that dissatisfaction – though not its theological interpretation– is part of common human experience. Augustine expresses this feeling when he states that he “is groaning with inexpressible groanings on my wanderer’s path, and remembering Jerusalem with my heart lifted up toward it – Jerusalem my home land, Jerusalem my mother.”
 

- Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, p132-133.

 
 

Feeling Replaced Reason

The bridge from Kant into modern theology was made easily. Kant initially argued that reason cannot establish the reality and nature of God, and then, in his Critique of Practical Reason, he went on to propose that it is only in moral experience that such knowledge can be grounded, for the knowledge we have of ourselves as moral beings is inexplicable if God does not exist.
 
Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern theology and the chief formulator of liberal Protestantism, agreed with Kant that the reality and nature of God are neither given by reason nor accessible to it, but he went on to propose that this knowledge is grounded in religious rather than moral experience. The general acceptance of this proposal has had profound implications for the doing of theology and has done much to give the popular culture of the modernized West the shape it now has. Our culture tends either to view experience as suffused with the divine or to confer divinity on the self.
 
The Immanence of God as Feeling
 
First in his Speeches on Religion and then in his much more complex work The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher repudiated objective knowledge of God and then, like the romantics, reached down into his own being to find the grounding for his knowledge of God. This being the case, a rehearsal of the divine attributes will tell us less about God than about ourselves, for each of them is now simply an objectification of what we first find in our religious self. We experience sin in ourselves, and we project an understanding of God
as holy; we find that we are able to resolve internal conflicts, and we attribute the resolution to God in terms of grace and love.
 
Schleiermacher dismissed entirely the vertical dimension of a God outside of experience summoning sinners through biblical revelation to pass beyond themselves into union with God through Christ. He maintained that the knowledge of God was restricted to the self, where the immanence of God was registered in feeling - specifically, awe deriving from radical dependence. Thus God became a kind of psychological deposit, a "something" deep in the self. Somewhere within, the divine signature could be read with enough clarity to secure some meaning in life. Thus it was that in the liberalism that followed Schleiermacher, in Europe as well as in America, poetry gradually edged out exposition, feeling replaced reason as the primary means of knowing God, the heart replaced the head, and intuition supplanted external, revelatory truth.
 
A Lack of Objectivity
 
Barth said, "Theology suffers from a chronic lack of objectivity" in our age; "we do not know what we are talking about when we talk about God but we still want to talk about him," so theologians have repeatedly returned to Schleiermacher to see if perhaps he might show us how to do it.
 
As David Ray Griffin has noted, post-modern theologians "registered their conviction that that noble and flawed enterprise called modern theology had run its course." They have abandoned their belief in the old Enlightenment project and its optimism, its expectation that reason would be able to pacify and comprehend the world. They have walked away from the old preoccupations with truth and meaning and the intellectual categories in which theology had been conceived, such as natural and supernatural, truth and error, transcendent and immanent.

 

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 

A Generation Lost

I am a member of a lost generation. We have lost our values. We have lost our faith. And we have lost ourselves.
 
As societal standards and traditional values have declined, and the crassest elements of sexual deviancy and pornography have taken over the public square, it is the youngest Americans who have paid the price. Never in our country’s history has a generation been so empowered, so wealthy, so privileged—and yet so empty.
 
This book is not written from the perspective of a parent, a sociologist, or a teacher—but of a peer. This is my generation: the porn generation. And for good or ill, we are America’s future.
 
Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the forces of moral relativism, radical feminism, and generational nihilism have gradually destroyed the foundation of our own greatness. Instead of adopting stronger moral standards, our society has embraced the lure of personal fulfillment.
 
In a world where all values are equal, where everything is simply a matter of choice, narcissism rules the day. Our culture has bred hollow young men, obsessed with self-gratification. Young women are told to act like sex objects—and enjoy it. The revisionist historians have effectively labeled obscenity as a right that the Founding Fathers sought to protect. Society told the porn generation that final moral authority rests inside each of us—and in our vanity, we listened.
 
The mainstream acceptance of pornography has become a social fact. Order a movie. Walk past your local news shop. Log on to the Internet. It’s everywhere—in your Blockbuster, your newspaper, your inbox. We’ve replaced faith and family with a warped image of sex and self-satisfaction that ridicules the concept of purity and mangles the most sacred ideals of matrimony.

Traditional authority figures—parents, community leaders, even God—have been discarded. The new authority figures of the porn generation are many, and nearly all are members of a coarsened pop culture—one fed by the destructive malaise of the relativist world. Sex ed instructors, university professors, advertisers, Hollywood actors, MTV artists and assorted celebrities (A-, B-, and C-list) act as the new elders of a church of corrupt, shallow, and materialistic humanism.
 
The porn generation now inhabits a world where “empowerment” means sex with no strings attached. The old faith and traditional morality was too bourgeois, archaic, sexist, and close-minded for this brave new world. Our new god is Tolerance of all behavior, our new credo “live and let live.”
 

- Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation:

How Social Liberalism is Corrupting Our Future, 2005.

 

Age of Jadedness

If millions of people accept the deviant as normal, that reshapes society in vastly destructive ways. Moral self-destruction may seem to have no consequences for an individual, but the destruction of societal standards always has consequences. 

When the stigma left single motherhood, society felt the sting in rising rates of single motherhood and juvenile crime. When the stigma left sexual licentiousness, society felt the sting in rising rates of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, emotional emptiness, and nihilism. Your immoral personal behavior may not affect me, but exempting your immoral behavior from societal scrutiny certainly does. A society without standards is an unhappy, unhealthy society—a society with no future. And all of us have to live in that society.

Nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism are natural results of the chaotic existential subjectivism popularized by the Left. If the hallmark of the baby boomers was rebellion, the hallmark of my generation is jadedness. Nothing really matters—we’re cosmically alone.
 
No generation has ever had the benefits of convenience that my generation does, but instead of using our extra time to live, we seek to kill it. People eight to eighteen years old now spend an average of six hours and twenty-one minutes each day watching television, listening to the radio or to CDs, using the computer for non-school purposes, and playing video games. That’s as opposed to just over two hours per day spent hanging out with parents, only an hour and a half doing physical activity, and under an hour doing homework.
 
Drug use is another form of escapism. Finally, there’s sex. Existentialism and subjectivism are lonely because narcissism is lonely. If you build the world to your own specifications, and everyone else does as well, social contact becomes nearly impossible. Love—the attempt to reach out to another person, to bring that person into your world—requires a faith to which the jaded can never aspire. It is becoming rarer and rarer to find true romantics. In an age of jadedness, the only human contact becomes solely physical, an outward expression of the nihilism that consumes the soul. As society accepts solely physical relationships as an inevitable outgrowth of the destruction of traditional morality, solely physical sex becomes more common.

- Ben Shapiro, Porn Generation: 

How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future, 2005.