Illusion and sin

In today’s Breakpoint commentary, Mark Earley talks of a new book by Joe Loconte, William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at The Heritage Foundation. Loconte’s book, The End of Illusions, compares the liberal anti-war rhetoric of the WWII era with the liberal anti-war rhetoric of today.

Sadly, I am not the student of history that I should be, so I cannot evaluate Loconte's claims. However, they are fascinating, and, if true, extremely significant.

Writes Loconte,

... "the latest fads in theology, psychology, and economics had flattened the Bible's hard-nosed teaching about evil and its deep link to human personality. . . . Indeed, the fatal flaw of liberal intellectuals was what the realists called 'the dogma of the natural goodness of man.'"

This heresy, Loconte writes, assumed that "sin resides mostly in social and political institutions"; once man is freed from them through reform or revolution, he will "rise to new humanistic heights."

Says Earley,

Well, in all the work we have done in prisons and with prisoners over the last thirty years at Prison Fellowship, we know that is not the case.

Indeed, theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr attacked this heresy and revived the scriptural definition of sin: rebellion against God and His laws. Hitler's rage and maniacal fury against the Jews, Niebuhr asserted, must be stopped through confrontation.