Friends, Modern culture isn’t only working itself away from Christ, it’s erasing reality. Time to wake up.  See the column below ... Blessings! Bob

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Spirituality Column #897

January 23, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Reality? Really.

By Bob Walters

“…the reality, however, is found in Christ.” – Colossians 2:17

I’m somewhat encouraged, from much recent reading, that the heavyweight philosophers and opiners of our time are beginning to catch on to the “Woke” fallacy.

Wokeness is a cultural cesspool, whose name is of recent vintage but with intellectual and academic roots tracing back not years or decades, but centuries.  As “natural theology” broke into the mainstream of divinity studies – some like Francis Schaeffer track its beginnings back to Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century – man slowly began to redefine God, Christ, and Spirit into a product of man’s own determination.

Never mind that God created us and that the goal of each of our particular lives is to ascertain God’s goals for us, to enjoy restored human relationship with the divine through Jesus Christ, and to seek through prayer and service the Spirit’s wisdom and comfort.  The gift of God’s freedom to us – Jesus – is our freedom to be with Him.

We’ve spent roughly 800 years putting the wrong-sized shoe on a wrongly-measured foot.  Wokeness is about redefining freedom in God to freedom from God.

And when one takes God out of the freedom dynamic, things like responsibility, common sense, and reality itself eventually will go with it.  Enter “Wokeness” and the human spirit-killing chaos of a secular world endowing spurious authority to “My Truth.”

As we have seen public figures and intellectual chatterers of the recent years assert deepening idiocies on society’s proper conduct and attitudes – traditional marriage is oppression, abortion is “women’s health,” gender fluidity is freedom, critique of any non-white person is racism, American wealth is a construct of colonial chattel slavery, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are settled as moral goals for their own irrational sakes, looting is proper recompense for social injustice … you get the idea – “freedom,” in elite halls, has been defined away from all vestiges of responsibility.

“Responsibility to what?” one may ask. Responsibility to the capital T Truth, which is synonymous with capital R Reality, i.e., the Word of God, and the fact of God’s Creation, will never be subservient to the rantings of worldly, philosophical man trying to replace the will, purpose, and plan of God with an empty freedom absent God’s wisdom.

The “Woke” eruption of recent years is the logical, spiritual result of “theology” that went off the rails long ago.  Through the Reformation, Enlightenment, and the ascendant human freedom defined by American independence, what was at first considered the gift of God – our freedom – is now thought to be a restriction by God.

Tom Sowell’s recent book, Social Justice Fallacies, Schaeffer’s classic Escape from Reason, and numerous think-piece articles have put divinely rational lyrics to clear-thinking anthems rebelling against the sanity-breaking zeitgeist of Woke ideology.

The disingenuous modern academy has redefined “Freedom” to exclude truth, attempting to capture truth’s Godly purity for its own impure purposes. It won’t work, because truth’s purity resides first in Christ, and then in our human comprehension of responsibility, common sense, and reality.  That which is not real – My Truth – is a lie.

Regarding the inescapable anger of the reality-flouting Woke, First Things editor R.R. Reno’s recently penned, Idealistic Nihilism. It’s a heavy lift, but illuminating.

The aim of Wokeness is the freedom to destroy the “wicked oppression” that binds us to reality, without, of course, the responsibility, plan, or love, to replace it. 

Jesus is our true and only link with God’s reality. The Woke are dead asleep to it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays for those who lie to themselves. Really.