The Crisis of Secular Faith

"Believers did suffer a serious [crisis of confidence] two or three generations ago . . . . But that crisis was precipitated by the presence of a rival confidence, a massive cultural certainty that united natural science, democratic politics, technology, and colonialism.  Today this civilizational ice-shelf has broken up, and though some of the icebergs floating around are huge-- natural science and technology, especially, drift on as though nothing has happened-- they are not joined together anymore, nor joined to the land.  The four great facts of the twentieth century that broke the certainty in pieces were two world wars, the reversal of European colonization, the threat of the nuclear destruction of the human race, and most recently, the evidence of long-term ecological crisis.  The master-narrative that was to have delivered us the crown of civilization has delivered us insuperable dangers."

Oliver O'Donovan, The Ways of Judgment, p.xii.

Intellectual Innocence

“Totalised criticism is the modern form of intellectual innocence—not a harmless innocence, unhappily, for by elevating suspicion to the dignity of a philosophical principle, it destroys trust and makes it impossible to learn.”

-Oliver O'Donovan, Desire of the Nations, p.11.

Faith

“The weakness of our faith in the truth of Scriptures, and the remnant of our unbelief in it is the principal cause of all the languishings of our love and obedience and every grace, and to strengthen faith is to strengthen all.”

-Richard Baxter, Practical Works, vol. 1, p. 158 (1707)