An Ancient Problem in a Modern World

There is a phenomenon which C.S. Lewis described as chronological snobbery.

It is the idea that we know stuff but they didn't, they being all the people in the past.

And it's something I think which creeps up on us, that the modern world is the most enlightened, it is the most intelligent, it is the most advanced in all ways that matter and we today are just completely different.

by virtue of how good we are and how much we know and all those sorts of things.

And the past was darker, more ignorant, less advanced, less decent.

I didn't realize I had actually imbibed that idea until about the age of 19 or 20.

I read Saint Augustine's City of God.

Now Saint Augustine wrote City of God in the sort of 400 AD sort of range of time and I didn't know what it was as I read that book but something was going on in my brain.

I was really struggling with it and I realised after about this number of volumes but after a significant portion, I realised what one of my struggles was.

This man was too smart.

This was too incredible.

It was too insightful.

It was too wise.

It was too scientific.

It was too brilliant because it was old, really, really old.

And see, that was a great revelation that I had, namely, that so often what is new is actually very old.

He said things there that would leave for dead people who I hear philosophizing and talking about science today, such incredible insights, even without the technology that we have in this day and age.

It's a biblical statement, you know, that there is nothing new under the sun.

Human nature basically doesn't change.

The way humans organize themselves into societies and the sorts of things they get up to basically doesn't change.

It gets weaponized and progressed through technology and so on, but at its root, at its core, it basically doesn't change.

And that's important for us to realize because the Apostle Paul has written this book called Romans and he's just spent chapter one describing a society.

And you think, yes, a very ancient, a very pagan society, an ignorant society, a society of the past, a society that has nothing to do with us today, of course.

Well, like I said, what is new is so often what is old.

Let me describe some aspects of that society to you and some things that you might be aware of.