The Un-Enlightenment

Growing Daily

The Un-Enlightenment

The so-called “Enlightenment” was a period in the 1700s that marked a shift in the way people thought. They increasingly looked to human observation and reason, rather than divine revelation, as the ultimate path to knowledge.

How ironic is the name “Enlightenment” for a period that elevated what humans could discover over the light God had already revealed?

It occurs to me that this is a perfect mini-commentary on Jesus’ words in Matthew 6:23: “But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!” 

Jesus warned about a danger worse than simply being in darkness: being convinced that what we think is light is actually darkness. When the very thing we trust to illuminate the way—human wisdom, reason, autonomy—turns out to be a lens which obscures the truth.

The answer, of course, isn't to stop thinking. Our ability to reason is a gift from God. But we must let God illuminate our thinking—using His revelation as the standard against which we measure our reasoning. It’s not that we don’t want to know truth; it’s that we already know the One who is Truth.

“So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish.”  (1 Corinthians 1:20)


- Catherine Reid