What Is Wrong With Us?

I was drawn to this passage in Gustaf Wingren's "Creation and Law":

"Even in this world of men the purity of nature from time to time thrusts itself through and compels man to do good in spite of his evil."

What an interesting concept! In a world that has completely abandoned a concept of sin, in spite of this, how is anybody still capable of not realizing how absolutely and completely mankind is messed up. Living in Ann Arbor, I hear the naturalistic ethic everywhere. It looks at nature, and sees how it functions without war, discrimination, and violence (besides to eat), and wonders why mankind cannot follow in their foot steps. Being merely creatures themselves, and having nothing of a Christian anthropology, they honestly believe that they can achieve this state of utopia, as they see in nature.

What a missed opportunity for the Church! While we have been hammering on the concepts of sin, with the common response: "because the Bible says it is...", we have missed the opportunity of approaching this problem from a different angle. Secular society is already looking at nature and trying to emulate it, how much farther would it be to convince them that its all a pipedream? I mean, who can possibly look at history, seeing how the same evils evident in every era can still be evidenced today. WWI and WWII took us a great way in this vein. Following the hopefulness of modernism and the belief in human accomplishment, this spirit was almost completely shattered. What a failed opportunity that the Church did not capitalize on. The postmodern world was born, replete with the same questions of modernism ("Why can't we be like nature"), and yet the Church gave no response.

Luckily these questions are still being asked. The blindness just waiting to be shattered, I mean, who can honestly believe that mankind is just like nature? We are a disgusting, disgusting race. We need to be answering secular society's question: "What is wrong with us?"