Calculated Despair

The modern era, jaded by two world wars, battles of extermination, totalitarian regimes, nihilistic philosophy, and Death of God theologies, is an era of despair. Robert Herrera, in a treatment of the despairing views of Kafka, Unamuno, and Rosenzweig, observes: 

Contemporary man is only aware of a vague malaise, an unsettledness he attempts to silence by means of trivial pursuits and the gravity of everyday life. Politics becomes social activism; religion, maudlin senti-ment; philosophy, deconstructionism.1

Herrera traces the course of the abolition of God:

[I]f, in fact, God is dead, both names and agonic life shatter on the rocks of the absurd. If God lives, he is surely absent—absent in the tradition of the Psalms and the Psalms of Solomon. He has withdrawn, and the vacuum produced by his withdrawal is a sounding silence. The world has returned to Gadara. Legions of devils swarm into new and loathsome habitats.2

Secular, autonomous man invites devils because the only alternative to serving God is serving himself or Satan, and in serving himself he serves Satan (Gen. 3; Rom. 6:15-18). Because man is created to serve God only, any worship of Satan creates a naturally irreconcilable conflict in the core of man’s being—ungodly man is necessarily fragmented man, and fragmented man is necessarily despairing man.

Despair as an infallible mark of this age is instanced indelibly in its art, especially its music. Handel’s and Bach’s bars of joy yield to the Rolling Stones’ and Ozzie Ozborne’s odes of despair. No less do painting, movies, and theater—when sincere and fully self-conscious—highlight the lowlight of the age, the despair of the drowning man not merely without hope, but without hope of hope.

The despair is the effect of a calculated decision—those rebelling against God and his inscripturated revelation can expect nothing more nor less than this despair. As the bird not designed to swim and the fish not designed to fly expire when shorn from their divine design, so man, designed to love and obey God, can do no other successfully. The suicide of Judas is the microcosm of the suicide of a rebellious world—to betray Christ is to betray man and his calling.

The message of the Bible is the message of hope for both time and eternity—not merely eternity, where evil will be obliterated, but in time also, where it will be vanquished. Since man’s sin and its effects occurred on the plane of human history, so Christ’s righteousness and its effects must occur on the plane of history. God has not postponed visible victory until eternity, the day of judgment, or even the Second Advent. The sin of the First Adam which plunged the race into iniquity will be vanquished by the righteousness of the Second Adam which restores the elect to obedience (Rom. 5:12-21). The Second Adam, not the First Adam, will prevail.

Godly man is restored to his legitimate calling as God’s vicegerent in the earth (Gen. 1:27-28). It is a task fueled by the joy of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22, 23) and the knowledge of the eternal significance of the task (1 Cor. 15:58). Dominion Man practices godly charity, godly childrearing, godly politics, godly evangelism, godly art, godly education, godly business—godliness in all he does (1 Cor. 10:31)- His life is one of total meaning.

Will there not be conflicts? There will be. There are no victories without battles. Our brethren today in the Sudan fighting for their very existence, combating the murder, rape, plundering, slavery, and torture of their covenant community (while most of the Western world sits idly by troubled by fluctuations in the leading economic indicators) are not comforted by the glib American maxim, “Trust Jesus and he’ll take care of all your troubles.” When one’s children are sold into slavery, wife is raped, and friends are peeled alive, he is not exactly interested in Church Growth methodology, laughing revivals, and Promise Keepers. He knows that victory requires battles, and that the stakes are high.

But Christians are no masochists. We do not glory in suffering. We work for triumph. As Chilton notes of the great sixteenth-century Scotch reformer,” [John] Knox did not want martyrdom; he wanted victory.”3

We press forward with no despair, only assurance—assurance that the Triune God speaking infallibly in Holy Scripture will bring all his enemies to their knees in time and history.

We are privileged to participate in his triumph.

1. Robert Herrera, “They Are Legion: The Tragedy of Twentieth- Century Man? Modern Age, Vol. 38, No. 3 [Summer, 1996], 220.

2. ibid., 323.

3. David Chilton, “John Knox,” Journal of Christian Reconstruction, Vol. V, No. 2 [Winter, 1978-79], 197, quoting Jasper Ridley, John Knox (New York, 1968), 83.