Some people confuse the Enlightenment for the New Creation. To the point that the human spirit has come to a crossroads in its development, and become civilized, or good. But this is not what the Gospel says. The Gospel says that we are constantly being given over to the death of Jesus that His life might be made manifest through the mortal members of our bodies. This presupposes that as Martin Luther rightly emphasized, as Christians, we are simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously justified and sinner) while we continue to inhabit this in-between time within our bodies of death. The New Creation is not an abstract human achievement; that is to say, there is no turn or development to the good without the Godman (Theanthropos), the mediator between God and humanity, becoming sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in His vicarious humanity for us. It is the lie of the desperately wicked and above all evil hearts, that fallen humanity is born with, that asserts that humanity has a spark of good (or divinity) built into them. Indeed, the ultimate lie is that humanity, on its own, has the capacity to achieve a holiness deigned by its own whims and desires; that it can simply call something good, and it is so. All that the Enlightenment did was push the Edenic lie further into the hearts of men and women; that is, that they could be God in and of themselves. It said that the indomitable human spirit in fact is God, and that humanity stands the best chance of flourishing by finally accepting the notion that all of the traditional attributes of God are in fact really just projections of the collective humanity of all times. As such, the conclusion (to the Enlightenment) is that humanity, in fact has really been God all along; that humanity has the capacity to be good on its own self-possessed and self-designed terms. Look at where this type of thinking has gotten us in the world. The world is literally collapsing under the pressure of its own “enlightened” thinking. Kyrie eleison (Lord have mercy!)