Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

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eliminating poverty, hunger and suffering. Instead, modern progress has produced a
world where technological advancements have in some ways benefited mankind, but have
also threatened our very existence (pollution, etc.). Mankind benefits from
mechanization, but has also become its slave, as in humanity’s growing need for energy
sources (e.g., coal, oil). Production and progress simply have not delivered as promised,
yet in many parts of the world the “gospel of modernity” continues to be preached and
practiced.
The church has been deeply influenced by the Enlightenment project. “Even where it
resisted the Enlightenment mentality it [the church] was profoundly influenced by it”
(Bosch, 2000:269). Reason became profoundly important in theology, even as it still is in
our day. Theology eventually became a science, and the queen of the sciences. The
accommodation to rationalism has thoroughly shaped and re-shaped the church and
theological studies ever since. The preoccupation with proper interpretation, precision
hermeneutics, and ‘pure doctrine’ continues to dominate Christian thinking in the West
and now beyond. Not a few, especially in our postmodern day, argue that the absolutes
sought by modernist theologians go beyond the scope and purposes of God, who demands
that His own live by faith, not by sight (2Co. 5:7).
Why is modernity so broadly embraced, even among [committed] Christians
Because modernity is rooted in a man-exalting, man-pleasing ideology that accords with
humanity’s sin-corrupted [base] nature, about which the Bible clearly informs us (cf.,
Gen. 6:4-7; Jer. 16:12; Mat. 15:19; Rom. 8:19f). In this fallen condition (cf., Gen. 3),
man’s inclination is always toward corruption and rebellion against God (cf., Luther,
Martin. The Bondage of the Will). Passages such as Genesis 11:1-9 and Isaiah 14, esp.
vs.13-14, among so many others -- reveal man’s penchant for exalting himself and
rebelling against God. Thus, an innate and direct product of man’s inherent sincorruption
is the desire to deny and rebel against God and to exalt self. “Yet they did not
obey or incline their ear, but followed the counsels and the dictates of their evil hearts,
and went backward and not forward” (Jer. 7:24). Modernity has produced a cultural
climate in which, “the Christian faith is severely questioned, contemptuously repudiated,
or studiously ignored. Revelation, which used to be the matrix and fountainhead of
University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa