Written by Jeffrey A. Tucker |
Friday, September 16, 2022
Today we live amidst new creations that we know from experience turned very different from how they are envisioned: lockdowns, closures, masks, distancing, capacity limits, vaccines, vaccine mandates, and a host of other preposterous things and practices (plexiglass anyone?) that came to mark our time, all promoted as the approved science by major media. 

Two years before lockdowns, the world celebrated the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, about which a wonderful movie was released on the author’s life and thought. At the same time, there was a book and an exhibit at the Morgan Library, and growing controversies about the personal and political ethos that a generation of radicals meant to their times and bequeathed to ours.
This is the book that never stops giving, but there is more going on. The anniversary two years ago seems now like a foreshadowing of what happens when science goes wrong. She knew it back then: the grave dangers of intellectual pretense (thus anticipating F.A. Hayek) and the unanticipated social consequences of what Thomas Sowell would later call the unconstrained vision.
The monster created in the fictional laboratory — readers are always surprised that he is a sympathetic character, only lacking in all moral sense, like perhaps many we know too well now — anticipates the unfolding of politico-technological history as it developed from the late 19th century through the 20th. This came to be perfected in 2020 when the innovations we rely on – social media, Big Data, personal tracking, wide availability of medical services, even vaccines – came back to destroy other features of life we value, like liberty, privacy, property, and even faith.
The long fascination with Shelley’s work is related to her intellectual pedigree. She was, after all, the daughter of one of two of the mightiest minds of the 18th century, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, thinkers who took the Enlightenment project into new frontiers of human liberation. Mary herself ran off with and eventually married the troubled but erudite Percy Shelley, found herself embroiled in an awkward relationship with Lord Byron, and experienced the terrible tragedy of losing three children while experiencing both cruel shunning and great acclaim.
Her thinking and her life were the product of late Enlightenment thought, infused by both its best (Humean) aspects and its worst (Rousseauian) excesses. Her lasting contribution was as a corrective, affirming the freedom to create as the driving force of progress, while warning against the wrong means and the wrong motivations that could turn that freedom to despotism. Indeed, some scholars observe that her politics late in life were more Burkean than Godwinian.
Her enduring contribution is her 1818 book, which created two enduring archetypes, the mad scientist and the monster he creates, and still taps into cultural anxiety concerning the intentions vs. the reality of scientific creation. There is a good reason for this anxiety, as our times show us.
She wrote during a period — it was a glorious one — when the intellectual class had a justified expectation that dramatic changes were coming to civilization. Medical science was improving. Disease would be controlled. Populations were on the move from the country to the city. The steamship was vastly increasing the pace of travel and making international trade more resource-efficient.
She was surrounded by the early evidence of invention. The beautiful movie about her life recreates the ethos, the confidence in the future of freedom, the sense that something marvelous was coming. She attends a kind of magic show with Percy at which a showman and scientist uses electricity to cause a dead frog to move its legs, which suggests to her the possibility of giving life to the dead.
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One reason Christians today are losing the cultural battle is that they are fighting on yesterday’s front. Athanasius was fighting for Christology. Luther fought for soteriology. The fight today is over anthropology. Yes, all truth everywhere matters, but the battle today rages over what is a human. This issue has implications for sexuality, natural law, education, medicine, and more. The world does not know what a woman is, because it does not know what a human is or what a human is for.

The need of the day for American Evangelicals is spiritual maturity.
Much like teenagers, American Evangelicals adopt a new identity every year – quick to jump on board each new fad conjured up by the cool kid elites. Trendy worship styles, innovative theological claims, hipster preachers, and gimmicky programs all feature prominently in Evangelical church life. From the olden days of WWJD bracelets to the recent “He Gets Us” Super Bowl ads, the marks of immaturity are legion.
In his foreword to Leland Ryken’s book Worldly Saint: The Puritans As They Really Were, J.I. Packer addresses why one would even bother with the Puritans. His answer is timely. “[T]he suggestion that we need the Puritans…may prompt some lifting of the eyebrows… What could these zealots give us that we need? it is asked. The answer, in one word, is maturity. Maturity is a compound of wisdom, goodwill, resilience, and creativity. The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don’t.” Packer touches the problem with a needle.
Mike Sabo highlights this dynamic well in his recent piece about the cage-stage phenomenon. “Theological cage-stagers can become puffed up with an assortment of facts but have little wisdom… They spend their days in fruitless ‘debates’ in Facebook groups, hammering away on their phones as dust gathers on their Bibles.” With an abundance of knowledge at our fingertips, many are able to parrot and mimic the newfound argument. What they lack, in most cases, is what they need most – maturity borne from experience.
This was true of me. Unlike many, I never had the cage-stage Calvinist experience, but I did come down with this malady regarding presuppositional apologetics. From my earliest days in the faith, apologetics was a passion. It was not long before stumbling upon John Frame, and from there Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen. After a few Bahnsen debates and a few hours of Jeff Durbin on the streets, there was no stopping me. I will spare you the details, but prideful immaturity was abundant.
Over time, my outlook changed. Chewing through work by Augustine, Ambrose, Calvin, Luther, Edwards, etc. revealed the undeniable gap between my approach and theirs. Then came the beginning of lay ministry.
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Nobody likes to wait.
Not for food, not for service, not at the DMV, not for a lull in the video streaming—not for anything. One of the reasons we hate to wait comes from our culture. We live in a culture in which everything is measured against time. Everything must be better—faster—at virtually any cost. We want what we want, and we want it now. And if we can’t have it now, we demand to know exactly how long it will take in order for us to get it. Hence the rise of the “time guarantee”—whether it’s the delivery of pizza, shipping on a product, or a repair on a kitchen appliance, if we have to wait we want to at least wait with a timetable. It is, after all, our sovereign right as a consumer.
This is problematic for the Christian, though, because we worship a God that doesn’t give timetables.
God is perfectly content to operate in His way, and in His time, and is not obligated to tell us what—much less when—He is going to act. There are, then, many times when we find ourselves believing God will make good on His word, and yet we do not know when.
This is not a new phenomenon, though—because God is the Rock who does not change, He has always operated in this way with His people.
Think of the children of Israel, enslaved for 400 years, trying to hold onto the promise given to their father Abraham that they would have a land of their own, and yet having no timetable on when God would make good on that promise. Or consider Abraham himself who was promised a son that would be the beginning of an entire nation, and yet the decades came and went without God scheduling a baby on Abraham’s calendar. And then there are the promises of the Messiah who would come and deliver the people of God, and yet these promises did not contain a specific date or time in which God must perform this service or the service would be free.
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