Seeking the heart amidst revival
“And I shall give you a new heart and establish a new spirit in you and remove the heart made of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I shall establish my spirit in you, and I shall work so that you walk in my duties and keep my judgements and do them. And you will dwell upon the land which I gave to your fathers, and you will be my people, and I will be your God” (Ezekiel 36:26-28).
“It’s impossible for a man to exist without bowing down; such a man couldn’t bear himself, and no man could. If he rejects God, he’ll bow down to an idol–wooden one, or a golden one, or a mental one. They’re called idolaters, not godless… There are such as are truly godless, only they’re much more frightening than these others, because they come with God’s name on their lips” (Dostoevsky, The Adolescent 273-274).
Recently, I’ve learned of a Christian revival taking root in Silicon Valley, strange as it seems for a region entrenched in machine-logic to appear open to the language of the heart. It reminds me of the prophecy of Zacharias, who foresaw his son’s role in salvation, turning the people back to God, that He might remove their hearts of stone and grant them hearts of flesh (cf. Ezekiel 36:26).
That’s the criteria, after all, for a genuine revival: repentance, that is, reorienting the heart toward God.
This is the Gospel: that the Lord became man, sanctifying the flesh and enabling us to become temples of the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn. 1:12; I Cor. 6:19), as the Apostle Barnabas writes, “For, my brethren, the habitation of our hearts is a shrine holy to the Lord” (Epistle of Barnabas 6:15). It is internal: a disposition of the heart.
The prophet Zacharias foretells of his son’s role in leading the people’s hearts back to God, saying that the Forerunner shall “give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, in order to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Lk. 1:79). This peace is the very fruit of the spirit; the peace that surpasseth all understanding (cf. Phil. 4:7).
The peace, like the light it reflects, does not originate in man but in the One to Whom the Forerunner points. The Forerunner, as noted by the Evangelist, is not the light, “but was sent that he might bear witness concerning the Light. That was the true Light, which giveth light to every man coming into the world” (Jn. 1:8-9). Thus, the Forerunner comes to offer hope, pointing men’s hearts to the Coming One, living ascetically and growing in the spirit (cf. Lk. 1:80).
The prophets of old spoke of this coming Light; this Light Who removes the hearts of stone and, in their place, gives hearts of flesh, being established in His spirit; all this, made possible by the Incarnate Word, hypostatizing as the God-man.
Truth, then, is the Light, and the Light is the Life of men (cf. Jn. 1:4). Thus, faith precedes knowledge; taking steps toward Christ—Who deigned to enter time and walk amidst men—is epistemic justification, or the grounding from which a belief is held to be logical.
Beyond that, though, is Life.
The Incarnation reveals that Truth is not a concept but a Person. Christians do not bend the knee to abstractions, but a King. Rationalism, by contrast, abstracts truth from life—enthroning Idea in the place of God; it seeks knowledge without transformation. Whenever Christianity becomes a system to be explained or defended, it is turning away from the what St. Irenaeus called the scandal of the Incarnation. It reduces God to an idea among many. Rationalism and utilitarian religion, thus, share a denial of this Mystery of the Word made Flesh.
Life in Christ is not an idea, it is not an ideal, and it is not a system that needs logical proofs or reason to support it. It’s an ontological transformation of being. That said, it is easy—even for me—to get caught up trying to demonstrate Christianity as a rational system. It’s a mistake to suggest Christianity is a worldview which needs defending—Truth needs no defense.
Yet, it is this very temptation that is the genesis of reducing the Faith to a code of morality and ethics. Flattening it into something lifeless.
Nothing more.
Christian revival is not a problem, but it can be when it is being filtered through materialist assumptions and is used to serve individuals and collectives rather than Christ. That’s not a religious orientation; it’s pragmatism clothed with traditionalist garb. We can see this distortion among Silicon Valley-types like Peter Thiel, baptizing his authoritarian, technological expansion with a Christian eschatological vision. We see leftist collectives using Christianity to bolster their form of social justice as divinely sanctioned. Yet, for both extremes, what is at their core is man. They may be political opponents, but both preach an anthropocentric Christianity: a false gospel.
An immediate issue found here is something I’ve witnessed in my non-Christian friends who’ve developed a poor understanding of the Faith and, seeing the champions of this false gospel bring darkness into the world, turn away from God.
Just recently, I was speaking with a friend who called MAGA-Christians fascists. This is one of the fundamental reasons I’ve been so dedicated to try to illustrate the philosophy behind Christian thought, despite philosophy being downstream from theology. Most people I encounter simply think that being Christian means one is uneducated or clinging to an antiquated, superstitious worldview that reason was—and is—meant to displace. This is the working premise behind the work of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism. Yet, the world of reason does not liberate man from a superstitious past but enslaves him in a disenchanted present.
No author foresaw this enslavement more clearly than Dostoevsky.
The narrator in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground embodies the irrationalism of man, despite his public profession of the opposite. For the Underground Man, there is no advantage to his vile pleasure, and yet he takes pleasure in it all the same; he even looks beyond himself at civilization not advancing man’s intelligence so much as advancing his barbarism. Rationalism and enlightenment ideals may be paid lip service, but man, even the most rational of men, who value reason and truth, still may count the cost of a decision based on that value only to do precisely what they want to do, anyway. Even if that is at variance with his own intent and rationale.
Dostoevsky’s prophetic work envisioned the tension between the mechanical, logical mind and the deep yearning of the heart well before our age of the Machine. The Underground Man sees civilization as the undoing of man, because science divorces man from his will; and a man without a will is nothing more than an organic cog.
Man in this rational civilization will be recorded, computed, and no longer responsible for his actions. He will be an automaton. And so, the Underground Man feels useless in civilization because he is but an organic cog in the machine, and this boredom opens one up to all fantasies of destruction.
What, he asks, will one not think up in this boredom?
Man will become shamed by his own imaginings while the modern world offers a way to actualize these imaginings: man will become consumed by civilization, driven to madness from rationalism and apathy from life becoming easy. The Underground Man serves as a prescient type for our future, living in darkness and the shadow of death.
Dostoevsky saw the fruits, in his own time, of man disenchanted by reason, yet desperately seeking meaning in his rational world. Religion is not a relic of the past, but an eternal dialogue with the present. Enlightenment ideals steal our humanity; rationalism gives way to madness; a ready-made world is boring and leads to increasingly extreme perversions in the multiplicity of sensations.
As Ivan Fyodorovich says in The Brothers Karamazov, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”
Our post-Enlightenment modern world is seen uncritically good by virtue of its being rational and convenient. Progress itself is not necessarily a good thing; progress is not neutral, and the way progress manifests in the world is through the consumption of reality.
“Humanism and secularism,” writes the philosopher Predrag Cicovacki, “appear to [Dostoevsky] as practically opportune but spiritually dishonest: They offer a compromise that makes life more convenient but which leads away from search for the highest values” (Dostoevsky and the Affirmation of Life 145). Civilization’s destruction of God has realized a present where everything is permitted; our every fantasy and whim is catered to, often at the expense of our rationality.
Thus, the atheist, the agnostic, and modernity’s skepticism of God are not products of intelligence but emerge out of mistaking the absence of responsibility for freedom. Modern man surrenders his will to convenience and allows his thoughts to be shaped by the Machine.
While it remains important to me that Christianity be portrayed in its truest depth, it often feels like a fool’s errand to do so, because as we see with our prescient Underground Man, no matter how rational something may appear, it won’t find purchase in man, regardless of how reasonable he conceives himself to be.
Underneath the oppressive rationalism lies this most poisonous temptation: to accept Christian morality without Christ Himself. This is the second element that I find so disagreeable, and this is precisely what Dostoevsky warned against in his own day: Christian utilitarianism’s accepting of Christian morality without accepting its truth limits the scope of mankind’s vision of eternity. When pragmatism asserts itself over real theology, then heaven is sought here on earth, not within one’s heart as we are instructed as Christians, but outside ourselves, constructing an earthly utopia serving the individual and the collective.
When heaven is sought on earth, then man dethrones theology and enthrones ideology.
We see this in its most out-and-out example: communism, but it also manifests as social justice and green politics on the Left, while on the Right, it is realized in technological colonialism and accelerationism. Neither of these, however, captures Christianity because they lack a Christocentric worldview.
If we accept and promote Christian morality without its grounded Truth—He Who gives shape to morals—then we have a legalistic, transactional code of conduct, reflecting the very rational civilization the Underground Man saw as coming to compute, record, and reduce man to a mere cog in the societal machine. This type of morality is beneficial to the Machine because it is easy to predict and, by extension, easier to enforce. It is not moral clarity, but moral pragmatism that drives progress.
It is relatively easy to muster support for amorphous ideals grounded in Christian ethics: human rights, equality, liberty, self-determination, inclusivity, and unity. However, no matter how well-intentioned man is, by decoupling morality from its theological grounding—thus the reason supporting them—and glorifying abstract ideals then one could justify anything to help humanity to establish heaven on earth, for if there is no God, then everything is permitted.
This pattern goes back to Babel: man builds the Tower, not in forgetting heaven, but to draw it down on his terms.
Establishing an earthly kingdom and dismissing heaven ultimately leads to the loss of hope; the people will lose sight of the true Light in their hearts, growing cold in their darkness, eventually abandoning eternity and embracing their role as cogs in the material machine.
As Dostoevsky’s complex characters often wonder, if life on Earth is all there is, then what’s the point in anything?
When the collective seeks to realize an earthly utopia, individual persons are only beneficial if they support this vision, but their personhood will be crushed and suppressed under the stone of Idealism. Christianity, in contrast, begins with the person—the hypostasis—not the collective. It begins with God’s revelation the human heart, not a manifesto. Further, even subscribing to normative claims to make the world a better place can still be egocentric; to make the world a better place for man, thus for ourselves, and even this can only go so far before folding in on itself.
Being good for selfish reasons is pragmatic; it is not Christian.
But Christianity is not a moral system; it is the revelation of Love Himself.
When Christ—the mooring rope between heaven and earth—is at the center, then God’s self-sacrificial love shapes morality and ethics. Sacrifice of self, for and out of love, is not moralistic, nor is it practical. Love is not rational; it’s suprarational. Love is an act that can only be expressed by those willing to take responsibility for their lives and the world around them, contrasting the rational civilization that crushes the Underground Man underneath the refusal to take responsibility for himself.
Against the fruits of civilization stands real, salvific Love. Salvation is to “make yourself responsible for all the sins of men… and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see that it really is so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all” (Brothers Karamazov 320). This is the most radical act, profoundly Christian, transcending pragmatism and political discourse, soaring beyond philosophy and theory, to the heights of Truth itself. This is Love and it is Beautiful; no machine can compute this love, nor can generative models mimic it; syllogisms cannot deduce it, nor can it be reasoned out. Only through experiencing it can we understand Love, only by becoming Love can we know what it is.
Through this experience reason is ordered, correctly; no longer holding primacy, it becomes doxological. Philosophy is the handmaiden of theology. Epistemology is redeemed in the Logos. Hegel himself demonstrated that knowledge is interconnected with faith; they are unified and mutually dependent. Therefore, Love and Faith are our epistemic justification.
As Makar Dolgoruky states in The Adolescent, where God is absent something always rises to takes its place.
Yet, what passes for revival in our age resembles something else entirely. In Silicon Valley, we have the prophets of the Machine preaching progress and cold, computational redemption. They baptize their words, anointing them with Christian ethics and morality all while unmaking humanity. They promise transcendence through algorithms, beaming their message into our minds through the black mirrors they swear will be our salvation.
Likewise, the secular moralists on the other side of the aisle weaponize Christian virtues and teachings to enforce ideological compliance. Their rhetoric drips with antichrist axioms like tolerance is a virtue meant to compel others into submission. They wield the Cross like a sword and demand we bend the knee to them and their Christianity rather than the true King: Christ.
These are not movements toward Christ: they do not preach repentance or the transformation of the heart. Both preach redemption without suffering—salvation without a Cross. They do not serve the God-man; they serve the man-god. Man remade into his own image and Christianity subsumed into materialism, exploiting others under the shadow of the Machine. Man cannot escape worship, yet by dethroning God in his heart, man offers his worship to the things of this world, constructing utopia from dust.
We must discern what is truly leading man to God and what can only imitate or: “Become therefore wise as the serpents and guileless as the doves” (Matt 10:16).
The Christian revival is a good thing, ultimately, if it leads people to Christ and His Church; otherwise, we need to be leery of political philosophies adorned in theological garments, because a Christianity that serves technological accelerationism and ephemeral social justice is not Christianity, but is a tool. This is not a new temptation, however, and the pharisaical class of Christ’s day embodied this very seduction: flattening eternal mandates into traditions of man, wielded to remain in power, emboldening the ego, and hardening the heart to God.
Christianity does not serve both God and Mammon, for we cannot set out on the way of life and the way of death simultaneously. Yet, Christian utilitarianism seeks to do just that: “This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:8-9).
Christianity is about encounter. An encounter with Christ Who transforms us. It’s not about transforming the world; it’s not about converting others. Christianity is about changing one’s heart, being shaped by God’s love for man, and being granted a heart of flesh that beats for God, for our neighbors, and for our enemies.
Christians, then, need not be worried about trying to convince others we’re educated, that we’re not simply clinging to a Freudian projection, or a relic of antiquity. This is the time we need more fools-for-Christ! I’ll admit that, in hindsight, it is likely that I’ve fallen for this temptation, too: trying to portray Christianity as philosophically and spiritually rigorous has become an idol. Moreover, the Christian and materialist paradigms are, essentially, incommensurable, so the former trying to portray itself in a light that the latter understands naturally leads to Christians reducing the Faith to be understood.
This is a losing battle. And when we try making our Faith intelligible to modernity, we risk being catechized by it instead.
Modernity’s secular humanism has captured the masses. Christianity offers something completely different—it’s a unique worldview, and it’s an embodied life—but this Christian revival appears to have been captured by the same secular philosophy and discourse. Thus, it cannot offer anything besides tailored Christian rhetoric that doesn’t upset people who don’t believe.
Christian utilitarianism will not bring utopia in the same way that socialism will not bring utopia. Following Christ won’t be found in technological expansion; it isn’t found in critical theory, or the compelled redistribution of resources; following Christ isn’t a rational thing to do by modern standards, because what’s rational leads to death. The narrow path that leads to Life, is Christ Himself: He is Truth and His Light is transrational. It’s beyond reason; it’s beyond man-made conceptions.
And so, while the revival of something emerges around us, let us not forget to place the Incarnate Word at the center of our lives and straight ahead: for God giveth light to every man coming into the world and His Light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overtake it.
We are called by God, not to persuade those who will not listen, nor to flatten Christ into a form they will accept. We are called to be shaped by Him—to become Christlike—to embody Him in the world and reflect His Love in it. This world needs more men like the Forerunner, who give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, in order to guide our feet into the way of peace. “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Phil. 4:7).
Witness, NM 