Modernism

Ever since reading Oden ("The Rebirth of Orthodoxy"), I am intrigued by the events leading up to the age of modernism. Oden places the beginning at 1789 (the Bastille), but clearly, a big influence was Darwin's "The Origin of Species" (1859). Then, there is Charles Lyell's "Principles of Geology" (1830-33) which so greatly impacted Darwin...

While Lyell and Darwin were doing their thing in Great Britain, Albert Mohler has found an interesting occurrence in America around the same time...

In 1838 (one hundred and seventy years ago!) Ralph Waldo Emerson (in "The American Scholar") made many of the statements we hear today from postmoderns.

I think the whole thing is summarized in one block:

"To this holy office you propose to devote yourselves. I wish you may feel your call in throbs of desire and hope. The office is the first in the world. It is of that reality that it cannot suffer the deduction of any falsehood. And it is my duty to say to you that the need was never greater of new revelation than now."

Emerson seems to understand what is at stake. Yet, he falls into the classic blunder.

The assumption that the new is better than the old.