more on philosophy

and as i mentioned to you last time, i'll just reiterate this, in the philosophies that pervaded in the ancient world and do even today, there is a serious missing connection. philosophy has basically no attachment to morality, never has. in fact, in my study of philosophy which began when i was an upper-division college student and determined for my own interest that i would take upper-division or western philosophy, all the advance courses i could get in the final two years of my college, i had the privilege of being the only student who signed up with the exception of one other student who had a learning disability. and so between the two of us we exhausted the same professor two years in a row to tell us everything there was to know about european philosophy. and it was a marvellously enlightening experience, particularly beneficial when there are only two people in the class. you're forced to perform and the professor is forced to answer all your questions. it was a rich experience.

but what i learned even in those days long ago was that all of these mental gymnastics, all of these machinations of the human brain, all of these meanderings through processes of thought and explanations for life and meaning had virtually no connection to how people lived. and i found, to my amazement, that philosophers while trying to be the most adept at explaining the realities of life were virtually living in the gutter morally. that has been verified time and time and time again. i've mentioned on some occasion the book by paul johnson called the intellectuals, probably the most riveting book on history i've ever met. it's the story of the pinnacle philosophers of western thought, those who are the architects of our modern world. and it reads like... well it reads like a novel and it reads like a sorted novel as it plunges into the depth of immorality and incest and homosexuality that pervaded in the lives of these familiar names. people like rousseau and kant and hegel and all of those kinds of philosophers.

so, there never has been a connection between philosophy and life and there wasn't in john's day. there were varying kinds of philosophies around but none of them was really connected to life. and so they could literally believe what they wanted and live the way they wanted. and john approaches things very differently. he says, "look, if you're a christian, it's not like a philosophy, you can't believe this and live any way you want to live. that's not how christians are." if you've really been changed and regenerated, two things are going to be true about your life. one is you're going to obey God, and two is you're going to love other christians, you're going to love your brothers.

- john macarthur, live by a new love