Last night I casually listened to the above video before my sleep. What caught my attention was the idea of superman in relation to the “son of perdition” or the embodiment of the Antichrist spirit in human thinking and personalities.
The core belief, which is pure secularism or “humanism”, is actually one of the core tenets of most of modern philosophies and occults like Satanisms or New Age ideas.
Most possibly, Oswald Chambers was reflecting on the time that he was witnessing.
The idea of superman was first propagated by the rather demonized philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed “God is dead”, and Karl Max, a disenchanted Jewish philosopher and writer. Later on it was more or less practiced as few brands of nationalisms or socialisms (national and political thinkings and practices) by wicked rulers like Adolf Hitler, Mossolini, the Japanese militant ruling class on one side and even perverted Communism regimes like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong on the other. Its rise is really the inevitable reaction of these peoples to the aggressive policies by major powers of the day, esp. the arrogant British Empire and France, who populated the policy of colonizing other peoples and thus dominated the whole world for their wanton gain.
Disenchantment of life can become the very reason for man-made hopes and and self-made righteousness or justice. All the above personalities are wounded soul who turned not to God or inner self-peace, but chose, under the influence of the Devil, to rise up to produce their own righteousnesses and pursue their own version of a better society. Each had caused great havoc to their own people, and brought the world to suffer thru their follies. Many close to their personal life were tormented and in turn disenchanted by them. These mostly were sensible family members or otherwise loyal devotees, for just trying to be a decent human being, who had not given up the last hope to keep a “good conscience”.
At the time in America, this trend of evil found a different expression in the person of Teddy Roosevelt and his brand of stout nationalism and heroism, brooded up with the American Pragmatism advocated by secular philosophers like Peirce and Dewey. TR was a bit a war-monger: he was the main player in the Mexican War and the colonization of Filipino people.
These trends of evil eventually led the world into two major wars and the Great Depression in between: man is proved totally incapable to govern himself without the restraint and counsel of God.
No wonder, Oswald Chambers has much to say, as indicated by his above reflection.
Carrol Quigley
After watched the video, the Lord nudged me to continue to read a book I picked up some time ago, Tragedy and Hope by Carrol Quigley. And this morning, I feel led to continue and was surprised with what I came across, which prompted me to send a trove of messages with few from our fellowship.
The author touched a few topics the Lord had dropped into my reflections in recent few months. Whereas I made few broad “claims”. I talked a bit about cultural clashes (man’s v.s. the Kingdom of God specially), the alienation of its traditional self in progressive liberalism and fundamental republicanism, and the inevitable collapse of modern capitalism. I felt a bit uncomfortable to expound because I did not read extensively nor reflected carefully on any of them. In fact, I have not read on any of such topics for about 15 years. Before the Lord began to speak to me, I was totally disillusioned from the ideals of man, and was wearied with what the philosophers and foolish rulers of the world have to say.
At the time, I concluded that these “wise” man, so admirable in the eyes of man, are mere liars, either deceived or/and evil, and that nothing is true in this life and life itself have no meaning: everything is NOTHINGNESS. Man is no happier than a senseless pig stalks about into a life of slaughter.
Uncannily in the book, Quigley expressed many of the observations and conclusions I came to at the time. To quote what I just read today:
“The belief in the innate goodness of man had its roots in the eighteenth century when it appeared to many that man was born good and free but was everywhere distorted, corrupted, and enslaved by bad institutions and conventions. As Rousseau said, “Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains.” Thus arose the belief in the “noble savage,” the romantic nostalgia for nature and for the simple nobility and honesty of the inhabitants of a faraway land. If only man could be freed, they felt, freed from the corruption of society and its artificial conventions, freed from the burden of property, of the state, of the clergy, and of the rules of matrimony, then man, it seemed clear, could rise to heights undreamed of before—could, indeed, become a kind of superman, practically a god. It was this spirit which set loose the French Revolution. It was this spirit which prompted the outburst of self-reliance and optimism so characteristic of the whole period from 1770 to 1914.”
“Obviously, if man is innately good and needs but to be freed from social restrictions, he is capable of tremendous achievements in this world of time, and does not need to postpone his hopes of personal salvation into eternity. Obviously, if man is a god-like creature whose ungod-like actions are due only to the frustrations of social conventions, there is no need to worry about service to God or devotion to any other worldly end. Man can accomplish most by service to himself and devotion to the goals of this world. Thus came the triumph of secularism.”
“To the nineteenth century mind evil, or sin, was a negative conception. It merely indicated a lack or, at most, a distortion of good. Any idea of sin or evil as a malignant positive force opposed to good, and capable of existing by its own nature, was completely lacking in the typical nineteenth-century mind. To such a mind the only evil was frustration and the only sin, repression.
Just as the negative idea of the nature of evil flowed from the belief that human nature was good, so the idea of liberalism flowed from the belief that society was bad. For, if society was bad, the state, which was the organized coercive power of society, was doubly bad, and if man was good, he should be freed, above all, from the coercive power of the state. Liberalism was the crop which emerged from this soil. In its broadest aspect liberalism believed that men should be freed from coercive power as completely as possible. In its narrowest aspect liberalism believed that the economic activities of man should be freed completely from “state interference.” This latter belief, summed up in the battle-cry “No government in business,” was commonly called[…]”
“From either aspect liberalism was based on an almost universally accepted nineteenth-century superstition known as the “community of interests.” This strange, and unexamined, belief held that there really existed, in the long run, a community of interests between the members of a society. It maintained that, in the long run, what was good for one member of society was good for all and that what was bad for one w as had for all. But it went much further than this. The theory of the “community of interests” believed that there did exist a possible social pattern in which each member of society would be secure, free, and prosperous, and that this pattern could be achieved by a process of adjustment so that each person could fall into that place in the pattern to which his innate abilities entitled him. This implied two corollaries which the nineteenth century was prepared to accept: (1). that human abilities are innate and can only be distorted or suppressed by social discipline and (2). that each individual is the best judge of his own self-interest.
All these together form the doctrine of the “community of interests,” a doctrine which maintained that if each individual does what seems best for himself the result, in the long run, will be best for society as a whole..
Closely related to the idea of the “community of interests” were two other beliefs of the nineteenth century: the belief in progress and in democracy. The average man of 1880 was convinced that he was the culmination of a long process of inevitable progress which had been going on for untold millennia and which would continue indefinitely into the future. This belief in progress was so fixed that it tended to regard progress as both inevitable and automatic. Out of the struggles and conflicts of the universe better things were constantly emerging, and the wishes or plans of the objects themselves had little to do with the process.
The idea of democracy was also accepted as inevitable, although not always as desirable, for the nineteenth century could not completely submerge a lingering feeling that rule by the best or rule by the strong would be better than rule by the majority. But the facts of political development made rule by the majority unavoidable, and it came to he accepted, at least in western Europe, especially since it was compatible with liberalism and with the community of interests.
Liberalism, community of interests, and the belief in progress led almost inevitably to the practice and theory of capitalism. Capitalism was an economic system in which the motivating force was the desire for private profit as determined in a price system. Such a system, it was felt, by seeking the aggrandization of profits for each individual, would give unprecedented economic progress under liberalism and in accord with the community of interests. In the nineteenth century this system, in association with the unprecedented advance of natural science, had given rise to industrialism (that is, power production) and urbanism (that is, city life), both of which were regarded as inevitable concomitants of progress by most people, but with the greatest suspicion by a persistent and vocal minority.”
Excerpt From: Quigley, Carroll. “Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time.” iBooks:
It is relevant for our day
It is worthy to review these things in today’s western world, esp a world so amnesiac with its sins and follies, who had come back its vomit again and again in the past. It is a world claimed the benefit of the Gospel and the name of God so hypicritically often that it makes non-believers sickened by just mentioning God to them. Christianity many time is branded as western supermacy and cultural infiltration, if not a means of political oppression and cultural invasion. How history repeated itself:
“Now you, if you call yourself a Jew; if you rely on the law and boast in God; if you know his will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by the law; if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of little children, because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth— you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law?
As it is written: “God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.””
Romans 2:17-24https://www.bible.com/111/ROM.2.17-24
