Misplaced Trust

Reacting against rationalistic arrogance, our age is drifting into irrational skepticism disguising as humility.  Chesterton spoke of the "dislocation of humility" in modern thought and it works as well as a description of what many people are calling postmodern:

"By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise.  Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small. ... But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place.  Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled on the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be.  A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.  Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert- himself."

(Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 157-158)

Today what we doubt is not ourselves but God's Word.  

Michael Horton, The Gospel-Driven Life.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Chesterton was writing over 100 years ago about the fruit of modernism as captured by Nietzsche and his followers.  I have often argued that today's postmodern culture is nothing new.  It is just a maturing fruit of modernism.  

I say maturing because my guess is that the end of modernism still has not appeared.  In the end, with a trust in self and a denial of all truth, (post) modernism will end in anarchy against all transcendent truth.  In the end, we humans cannot live without some notion of transcendency.  Thus, someone or some group will come to power who provide us with a version of transcendent truth focusing on the individual.  Ironically, in their system the individual will be absorbed by the collective, but they will promote their agenda in the name of "fairness" "justice" and "equality."  In the end, we will have war on all who disagree.

In other words, such a misplacement of modesty will lead to a new tower of Babel, where humanity rejects God and sets itself up as God.  The first one did not end up well, so I doubt God will be mocked in such a manner!

My question is why the Church that knows the truth rejects and dismisses this truth so as to match a culture marching to its own destruction?  This is utter foolishness.

Yet, time and time again, particularly for the past three hundred years, the Church first drifts and then runs away from God's Word to trust changing cultural values.  This tendency must be resisted. 

Why?

When we follow this path, we lose our message, we lose our power by the Holy Spirit, and we lose our soul.  All that is left are empty church buildings, a nostalgia of past glory, and lost individuals.