the enlightenment

I have been helping lead a community group this semester at UBC, in which we have been reading and discussing Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian. This has been a great group, and all of us have learned many things from the book and each other. As part of this book, we have been discussing the problems with doing faith and being Christians with a Modern mindset. As a result, we have critiqued many parts of modernity, but I want to make one thing clear. Modernity is not all bad. We wouldn't be reading computers, turning on lights, and doing a many other myriad of things without modernity.

Today my modern European philosophy professor was giving a side note about the Enlightenment before we started our discussion of Rousseau. One thing he said caught my ear: On September 11, my professor was eating lunch with a friend, who is also a professor at Baylor. They were discussing the tragedy from the morning, and my professor's friend remarked, "You know, the people who crashed the planes into the twin towers missed out on the Enlightenment."

One of the contributions of the Enlightenment was its emphasis on individual rights and autonomy. Sure, individualism developed as a result of these emphases, but something good did come out of them. Freedom of thought. Without this freedom, we would not have easy access to the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad-Gita, etc. We would not have easy access to books like Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian. We would not have the freedom to openly and publicly explore the edges of theology. We all value this freedom of thought, but I do not think we realize where it came from.

Bad things resulted from the Enlightenment and the modern period. However, many good things did as well. Let us not look past those good things. peace