“We Are Beggars, This is True”

In a society marked by more personal wealth, more personal power and more options for self-expression then any other in human history we have almost forgotten that the possession of all three of these things does not solve the basic human dilemma. In the 21st Century West the mantra of our entire culture is “if you can dream it, you can do it”. We have collectively bought into the lie that we are somehow largely masters of our own destiny. The guru’s of self-esteem and self-actualization have deified “human potential”. We have made idols of the prerogatives we have as members of a materially rich, socially mobile and personally “empowered” society. In doing so most of us in North America and Europe have collectively forgotten what so many previous generations deeply understood, that human life is precarious, short and anything but inherently independent. We have forgotten our mortality, our inborn limitations and our status as a fallen race alienated from the only One who can save us from ourselves. We have also forgotten that our very lives, both physical and spiritual depend on the moment to moment mercy of a transcendent and holy God.

The general exceptions to this thoroughly human-centered worldview amongst the denizens of the First World are those who have either acquired everything this world has to offer and then lost it or those who have acquired everything this world has to offer and found it meaningless. These are the people who have hit rock bottom and come to realize that we are not the masters of the universe. Rather they are what Martin Luther told us we all are six hundred years ago when he commented that, when it comes to fallen humanity, “We are beggars, this is true”.

The problem today is the illusion of self-empowerment. We’ve gotten so used to our age’s technical mastery of much of nature that we have begun to think that mastery extends to ourselves and our individual destinies in some kind of personally omnipotent way. Apparently the reality that the grave awaits us all has become something to deny rather than reckon with (one of the few places that I see an exception to this are those bumper stickers that remind us that no matter how much we exercise we still die.) We also deny that our very power to keep ourselves alive, much less “self-actualize” ourselves, comes not from us, or our will, or our ability, or anything else intrinsic to us. We are entirely without personal power that is not borrowed, through common grace, from the Lord of the Universe and we do not deserve even that. When it comes to facing the Provider of all good things, a Provider that we are all born in collective rebellion against, we truly are the beggars Luther speaks of.

It is just that most of us don’t know it and don’t care to know it. That is why all the goal-oriented, self-possessed, positive thinking achievers in this culture are, apart from eventual surrender to God’s program of redemption, on their way to the utter loss and futility of a Christ-less eternity.

I suspect the only way this would reverse itself on a societal scale would be some kind of economic and political catastrophe, the kind of catastrophe that would remove from us all the things in life that we for some reason believe are our birthrights as rich Westerners. Take away all the structures of wealth and political stability that give us the illusion of personal power and we’ll see how long the “if we can dream it, we can do it” philosophy of life continues. Not for long, I’d wager.

The chimera of the self-made man or woman is just that, a chimera, a fantasy, a self-delusion. Yet this idea permeates the Post-Modern culture of our day and is constantly being pounded home to us by the popular media. It is in a sense the majority religion of our age but it is a bad religion and one that will not survive the ongoing moral decline (to be followed, quite likely, by the economic and political decline) of the Western world. If the Lord’s return isn’t immanent, and civilization of any kind endures, future historians will look back on our contemporary idea of “personal empowerment” and “human potential” as one of the greater follies of history.