The Growth of Pietism and Secularism’s Inevitable Dominance

The Growth of Pietism and Secularism’s Inevitable Dominance

Apr 9, 2025 | Western Civilization

Pietism and secularism lead to the same thing: a secular society devoid of Christian influence. As I’ve argued here previously, Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin; one requires the other, and each contributes to the other. This is an odd notion for many because Pietists are extremely religious and secularists are not. In fact, there is a species of human in the modern world called Christian secularist. This Pietistic-secular dynamic is critically important for us to understand because if we’re to bring heaven to earth in obedience to Jesus, we need to understand the lay of the land, and the challenges a secular society presents to us. Because secularism is the air we breathe, like the water fish swim in, few give any thought about why it exists or where it came from. To most people, including Christians, it’s just the way things are, and the way things are supposed to be, but it’s a relatively new phenomenon in the history of the world.

Secularism is primarily a perspective on society, and how it is arranged. It developed out of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century as a reaction to the protracted wars of religion in Europe, and the idea that a Christian state led to those wars. Religion and politics when combined created misery and strife, so secularism’s proponents had the benign intention of creating civil peace by getting religion, meaning the church, out of the governing business. And we agree, representatives of the institutional church, be they elders, deacons, priests, bishops, pastors, etc., should not as official representatives of the church dictate government policy. But in due course secularism became like a societal Pac Man gobbling up anything smacking of religious belief, insisting it belongs only in someone’s personal life, not in the public square. This slowly developed in the 20th century, and eventually Pac Man gobbled up the last vestiges of a Christian America in the 1960s.

By this point you may already see where Pietists and secularists hold hands. For the Pietist, Christianity is primarily a personal faith without direct societal implications. Whatever cultural impact the Christian faith has on a society is not planned or sought, but a spillover from Christians faithfully living out obedience to God in their lives. There is a continuum of such beliefs on the pietistic Christian side, but as American Christianity became increasingly pietistic, it became increasingly personalized and culturally irrelevant.

We’ll talk about the myth of neutrality below, the bridge that brings the Pietist and the secularist together, but as became apparent over time, Christianity as a societal and cultural force never had a chance. As the 20TH century progressed, and culturally Christianity waned, secularism became more aggressive and we discovered it was a jealous God; it would have no other Gods before it. This was likely inevitable given the historical forces we see play out in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the changing nature of Americanized Christianity made secularism’s triumphant march all the easier.

How Pietism Took Over American Christianity
The first Great Awakening, while looked on positively by most Christians in our day, had within it the seeds of the two story Christianity I wrote about previously. The terms Old Lights and New Lights were initially used during that time, and we can guess which were for this awakening and which weren’t. New Lights generally referred to Congregationalists and Baptists in New England who embraced the revivals spreading throughout the colonies, while the traditional branches of their denominations, or the Old Lights, did not, seeing them as a threat to their authority, and their emotional appeals as a recipe for social chaos. Jonathan Edwards described his congregants’ vivid experiences with grace as causing a “new light” in their perspective on sin and atonement, and thus the terms were born. Old Light ministers such as Bostonian Charles Chauncy (1592-1672), a Congregational clergyman and second president of Harvard College, decried the awakening as delusionary enthusiasm. Even without delusional before it, enthusiasm was not a compliment in the 17th century. It connoted not merely overly emotional, but implied a claim to have received divine communications or private revelations. That was positively dangerous.

In God’s providence, we largely have George Whitfield to thank for the Great Awakening. Whitfield’s first of his seven tours of the colonies was in 1738. America was a thoroughly Christian culture steeped in Protestant Christianity and biblical knowledge, and because of Pietism’s growing influence in America the emotional appeal of an itinerate preacher like Whitfield found fertile soil for the gospel message. As the saying goes, timing is everything, and Whitfield became America’s first celebrity. He preached upwards of a thousand sermons a year, at times to as many as 25 or 30 thousand people. He also set the foundation of a particularly American church reflected in a dogmatic yet broad ecumenical mentality, with iconoclastic and populist impulses, thanks in large part to Pietism. These would also set the tenor of what would become the American Revolution. The twentieth century focus on Christians being “born again” started in this time. New Lights even began challenging established church pastors as nominal Christians because they hadn’t experienced the “new birth.” They exhorted the true believers to leave the lukewarm established congregations and join new, “pure” churches. The establishment of the day didn’t like that one bit.

We can see in the New Light ministers a rejection of the rationalism of the Enlightenment with their appeal to the emotions of the crowds or congregants, often resulting in immediate conversions. Old Light sermons tended toward the intellectual and sober religious practice, and preached the dangers of “enthusiasm.” From this point American Christianity began the embrace of the anti-intellectual, anti-doctrinal approach to Christianity of German Pietism which would come to dominate Evangelicalism in the 20th century. By the 19th century and the Second Great Awakening, the newness of the emotional appeal was no longer an issue, but became common in revivalist preaching. Nineteenth century revivalism largely replaced Scripture with experience and emotion, divine sovereignty with human free will, a high church ecclesiology and sacramental focus with the parachurch, liturgy with revivalistic techniques, psalms and hymns with more of what we call today praise music, and a properly ordered hierarchy with egalitarianism. This Great Awakening was also driven by the influence of Methodist revivalist preachers, thanks to John Wesley’s indefatigable efforts in Britian and sending ministers to the Colonies.

At the same time developing in Dublin, Ireland, in the 1820s and 30s, were the Plymouth Brethren, and something that almost a hundred years later would come to be called dispensationalism. These men came out of the larger Brethren movement, the most famous and massively influential would prove to be John Nelson Darby. It was this small group that developed the eschatology of what was then known as “the new premillennialism.” As it developed and spread through fundamentalism in the 20th century, dispensationalism become the dominant understanding of “end times,” exploding in cultural awareness with the popularity of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s, which by the end of the century had sold an estimated 35 million copies. It inspired another “end times” cultural phenomenon in the 90’s, The Left Behind series written by written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, which was turned into a hit movie film series of five movies in the early 2000s staring Kirk Cameron.

It is helpful to study the development of American Christianity through the nineteenth century into the twentieth and how it prepares the way for dispensationalism to completely dominate the Evangelical mind in the latter part of the century. Secularism was developing at the same time playing off the dominant fundamentalism of the early part of the century to set the table for secularism’s domination. It was a kind of dysfunctional symbiotic relationship. Fundamentalism put up a good fight but because of its Pietistic assumptions and theology, it didn’t have a chance.

Fundamentalism’s Losing Battle with Secularism
The nineteenth century set up everything that came after in the twentieth. While revivalism and a growing dispensationalism was sweeping the country in the 1800s, at the same time in Germany biblical higher criticism was itself sweeping Christendom. German intellectuals completely embraced Enlightenment rationalism, including its anti-supernatural bias. This meant the Bible was merely a book written by men and could not be God’s revelation to man. The Bible’s critics, however, did not want to abandon Christianity just yet, so Christianity was thereby transformed into moralism, little more than the golden rule, and the world was given liberal Christianity. The “Father of modern liberal theology” was a Christian from Prussia, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), himself no doubt influenced by German Lutheran Pietism.

The great Princeton Theologian J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) was kicked out of the Presbyterian Church and founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia in 1929. He spent much of his professional life battling liberal Christianity in the Presbyterian Church and Princeton Seminary. A bastion of Christian theological orthodoxy in the 19th century, Princton produced scholars who were titans of American Protestantism, including Charles Hodge, his son A.A. Hodge, and B.B. Warfield. By 1929 liberalism had won. In his 1923 book Christianity & Liberalism, Machen argues that “The liberal preacher is really rejecting the whole basis of Christianity, which is a religion founded not on aspirations but on facts.” I would add historical facts, which if they did not happen, there is no Christianity. The liberals would not see it that way; the facts didn’t much matter to them. Machen concludes that liberal Christianity is a different religion all together, and the rejection of supernaturalism is at the heart of that difference.

Liberal Christianity in the early 20th century, unfortunately, had all the cultural and intellectual momentum, not least because of German higher criticism. However, it ran into a movement which grew out of revivalism and the Second Great Awakening, fundamentalism, which would not bow the knee to this scholarship taking the intellectual world by storm. It is difficult for most Christians today to grasp just how powerful an attack German high criticism, and its liberal offshoot, was on Christianity. It had developed over a century which produced secular superstars like Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, and going into the 20th had developed a seemingly unstoppable momentum in the form of liberal Christianity. From a cultural perspective, it appeared conservative Christianity’s days might be numbered, but fundamentalism stood in the way.

Out of these two opposing forces came the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. While I’ve critiqued the awakenings and their tendency to an overly emotional Christianity, the fundamentalists, the inheritors of the revivalist tradition, were solidly conservative and refused to give up on the historical, supernatural foundations of Christianity. Fundamentalism today carries pejorative connotations and few Christians embrace the term, but when coined in 1920s it simply meant conservatives who stood up against the liberals. It originated with a book called The Fundamentals, a project conceived by a Southern California oil millionaire and edited by Bible teachers and evangelists, and published in twelve paperback volumes from 1910 to 1915. This served to coalesce those unwilling to lay down on the tracks in front of the intellectual and cultural freight train of modernism—not that fundamentalists had a chance, culturally speaking. Around this time conservative Christianity began its rather quick decline into cultural irrelevance and caricature.

Conservative revivalist Christianity in some ways allowed liberals to pass themselves off as orthodox Christians. In Fundamentalism and American Culture, George Marsden points out the similarity between these two diametrically opposed views of Christianity:

The evangelical tradition had long been strong on the condemnation of the appetites of the flesh—with alcohol and sex seen as the chief temptations. In the pulpit, liberals could not easily be distinguished from conservatives on such practical points, and practical morality was often for American Protestants what mattered most.

Both stood on moralism, and liberal preachers were good at sounding orthodox when in fact they were not. Eventually, however, an anti-supernatural Christianity that appeared unstoppable in the 1920s withered and what proved unstoppable was the supernatural religion of the Bible and conservative Christianity. Unfortunately, on the cultural front the latter was not only stoppable, but proved no match for the freight train of secularism.

The freight train as a metaphor for secularism is apropos. Starting with Renes Descartes and rationalism in the 17th century birthing the Enlightenment, the forces of societal secularism in the West were likely never to be stopped no matter how intellectually robust the Christianity was standing in its way. Unfortunately, a personalized, pietized Christianity made it all the easier, fundamentalism especially so. Nineteenth century conservative Protestant Christianity is exemplified by evangelist D.L. Moody (1837-1899). All things, including doctrine, took a backseat to winning souls. By the early 20th century, according to Marsden, for Christians “evangelism overshadowed everything else,” including battling for the integrity of the Bible against higher criticism. That would be left to the Reformed intellectual types at Princeton like Warfield and Machen, but they were a tiny part of the conservative Protestant world. Machen, however, would prove prophetic, not only in his assessment of Christianity and liberalism, but Christianity and Pietism in the current form of fundamentalism.

According to Marsden, Machen lived his entire professional career in an atmosphere “in which the leading intellectuals, and even many theologians, ridiculed traditionalist Christianity.” Machen believed the hostility to the gospel was “due to the intellectual atmosphere in which men are living,” and the evangelism of the conservatives and the social work of the liberals must be “founded on a solid intellectual base.” For him, the key to the battle to win men to Christ was in the universities. He believed the cultural crisis was rooted in an intellectual crisis, and “an attempt to bypass culture and the intellect, the arts and the sciences, would simply make the situation worse.” The Pietism dominating Christianity at the time ensured that would be the case. Culturally, the final nail in the coffin would be the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” in 1925. The cultural irrelevance and caricature of conservative Christianity as full of backward unsophisticated rubes started here, thanks to the journalist with the acerbic wit who covered the trial, H.L. Mencken. It wasn’t evolution on trial, but the caricature in the popular imagination of fundamentalism. Some fundamentalists certainly tried to fight back, but intellectually and culturally they were no match, so much of conservative Christianity became culturally invisible; fundamentalists separated themselves to maintain their purity in the midst of a hostile culture.

Pietism and the Secular Myth of Neutrality
As with any movement among peoples and cultures there are a variety of complex factors that cannot be neatly packaged as a cause. The same is true with these two isms, and we can see how they grew symbiotically together as a poisonous weed in Christian Western culture. But as much as I denounce secularism, it wouldn’t be nearly the obstacle it is if most Christians weren’t pietists, effectively Christian secularists.

In addition to this faulty, dichotomized version of Christianity, another reason most Christians believe in secularism is because of a misunderstanding of Christianity and the state. Many Christians see the phrase “Christian nation” as an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. I’ll give examples from two well respected scholars, Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College, and Carl Trueman, an author and professor at Grove City College. Arnn had a discussion on his podcast with an Episcopal Bishop on the topic, ironically, of Bold Christianity in a Secular World. When he said, “A Christian nation is an oxymoron,” I started yelling at my little MP3 player I was listening to. “No, Larry, it’s not!” Why would he say such a thing? I’ll get to that with my second example. I saw the following on Twitter from a forward Trueman wrote to James Bannerman’s book, Church of Christ:

If the church’s power is spiritual, then the notion that the civil magistrate should be used to coerce belief is shown to involve a terrible confusion of categories. To put it bluntly, the sword cannot be used to impose Christianity. . . . Churches are Christian; it is hard to see how a nation may qualify as such.

Carl, who said anything about those in government compelling others to believe anything? Larry Arnn basically said the exact same thing. In logic this is called a straw man fallacy. By exaggerating, misrepresenting, or just completely fabricating someone’s argument, it’s much easier to present one’s own position as being reasonable. Of all those who are convinced the Bible and the Great Commission calls for nations to become Christian, not one believes this includes forcing people to believe anything. So, because they believe this is what being a Christian nation is, and it most certainly is not, they believe a nation should be secular. This, however, assumes a secular nation can be morally or religiously neutral, which is a metaphysical impossibility.

The idea that God’s rule (theocracy) based on Christ in a society is inherently tyrannical exists for a reason. It came primarily from a certain slice of Christendom in the Middle Ages where tyrannical force was indeed used to coerce belief in certain things. We know this as the Inquisition, a judicial procedure and later an institution that was established in the 12th century by the Catholic Church to identify heresy. Before we Protestants get on our high horses, our forebearers thought they too could compel belief. This is a complicated situation of the Middle Ages that historical ignorance and bias only makes worse. Religion and state were not separated, and to think people at the time should have thought otherwise is, as C.S. Lewis put it, chronological snobbery. Protestant Christian princes, and everyone else, thought heresy would create societal instability, and it must be stopped.

Because Christian and non-Christian secularists alike believe the rule of Christianity and God’s law in the state is inherently tyrannical, their answer is the rule of secularism, a neutral public square where justice and not religion rule. Such a thing, however, has never existed because it cannot exist. A nation’s culture and laws are a reflection of its worldview, its faith commitments. Its culture and laws are the externalization of its religion. Doug Wilson calls this “inescapable theonomy” because “all societies are theocratic.” Vishal Mangalwadi states an unalterable fact of existence:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption, the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutrality assumes religion is fundamentally a private, personal thing that only messes up the tranquility of society if it is brought into how a society is governed. It’s easy to see how Pietism feeds into this.

While the early Pietists were certainly not secularists, they had something in common with modern Pietists. Both believed personal piety would spill over and affect the morals of society, therefore, the more Christians in a society the more Christian it is. There is obviously truth to this, but societies must be governed according to some “final source of authority,” and if Christians aren’t governing and insisting that it is the Bible and God’s law ultimately in King Jesus, that authority will be the state. In the year of our Lord 2025 that has become obvious, and unless Christians reject Pietism for a more engaged Christianity, secular statist tyranny will never be far away.

 

This is Us, Alzheimer’s and the Programming of Modern Medicine

This is Us, Alzheimer’s and the Programming of Modern Medicine

Apr 2, 2025 | Culture, Uncategorized

My wife and I recently watched a TV series called This is Us, and one of the main characters came down with Alzheimer’s. Given I’ve had a health epiphany because of Covid, I now see portrayals of disease like this differently than I used to. This Is Us was a series that aired on NBC from 2016-2022. I caught the pilot on Netflix, and it brought tears to my eyes several times, as did most episodes, and we were hooked. Even though it’s typically 21st century secular and left, the story lines do a great job capturing the glory and wreckage of fallen people living in fallen bodies in a fallen world, but without God. It’s wonderful and pathetic on so many levels, not least what it reveals about how indoctrinated most people are by modern medicine.

As a baby boomer I was born smack dab in the middle of the age of “experts,” and nowhere were experts more revered and trusted than in medicine. We turned over our health to doctors and the medical profession because certainly they would not steer us the wrong way. In This is Us doctors are never questioned, nor is what caused the disease. For the most part, modern medicine treats disease as a mystery because doctors are primarily trained to treat symptoms with medication or surgery.

My health journey is an ongoing affair, with the learning curve seemingly always going up. Given the complexity of the human body that doesn’t surprise me. I’ll share more of what I’ve learned below, but last year God graciously gave me a bad case of Dermatitis so I could see in full relief the MO of modern medicine. Early in 2024 I started developing dandruff. Soon there was itching on my scalp, and then red itchy spots on my arms and legs which in due course spread to different parts of my body. How fun! Given I’m still clawing my way up the learning curve, I decided I should go to a Dermatologist, a modern medical professional. She said I had some kind of yeast infection, a fungal issue, and proscribed medication for my scalp and a steroid, anti-inflammatory, for my skin. Then she gave me a piece of paper that said the following, and I kid you not:

Dermatitis is an inflammatory response of the body with no known cause.

As I’m reading this in her office maintaining self-control was difficult, but inside I’m thinking, what? Are you kidding me? No known cause? Seriously? I’d learned enough by this point to know everything has a cause, but modern medicine isn’t interested in causes. Lest you think my experience is unique, it isn’t. Casey Means is a doctor who at 31 after five years of surgical residency quit because my experience is all too common. In her book, Good Energy, she relates this stunning fact:

Despite surgically treating inflamed tissues of the head and neck day in and day out, not once—ever—was I taught what causes the inflammation in the human body or about its connection to the inflammatory chronic diseases so many Americans are facing today. Not once was I prompted to ask, Huh, why all the inflammation?

A tragic example of this in practice was a family member of ours in her 70s who went into the hospital in September 2023 with pancreatitis. Any word with “itis” on the end means inflammation. Did the doctors try to discover what caused the inflammation? No. Instead, they treated the symptoms with twelve plus surgeries, and she died horribly spending the final months of her life in a hospital. As we’ll see, these doctors could not see this any other way because that is how they were trained, and how the whole system sees disease. They tried to do the best they could, thought they were helping her, and ended up killing her.

Dermatitis caused me to finally start seriously looking for a wholistic, integrative medical professional. I did my research and eventually decided on a nutritionist because this had to be something diet and lifestyle related, and it was. After a couple tests, she said the problem was gut related, as is so much disease. I had extremely bad fungal overgrowth, which was the main problem, and bacterial overgrowth as well. This caused something called leaky gut which eventually leads to inflammation. This had obviously been developing for a long time, and it finally caught up with me. She put me on a protocol of herbs and probiotics, and tweaked my diet which had gotten pretty good over the last several years as it was. It instantly started getting better, and completely went away. No known cause indeed!

So now when I see a typical portrayal of something like Alzheimer’s on a TV show it ticks me off. For most people, and modern medicine in general, disease is a crap shoot, a matter of luck, or not, of throwing the dice and hoping you don’t get snake eyes. Are there exceptions to the rule, where someone may do absolutely everything right and some disease strikes them? Of course, but that is not the rule. God gave us a creation that can sustain the creatures He created, and that means we live in a cause and effect universe. With certain inputs we can reasonably expect certain results. He’s given us that reasonable confidence as a gift, but we never presume upon his grace. He may have plans for us much bigger than we can imagine. The Westminster Shorter Catechism # 66 says it in its succinct best:

Quest. 66. What is the reason annexed to the fifth commandment?

The reason annexed to the fifth commandment, is a promise of long life and prosperity (as far as it shall serve for God’s glory and their own good) to all such as keep this commandment.

If our good and God’s glory includes our suffering, so be it. We will trust him as best we can. Otherwise we trust the gracious gifts of his creation to do what He intended them to do.

Modern Medicine, How We Got Here: Pasteur, Béchamp and Germ Theory
To understand where we are we have to go back to the nineteenth century and the foundation of modern medicine, germ theory, and the work of two men, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), who everybody has heard of, and Antoine Béchamp (1816-1908), who few people have. Their titanic battle over germ theory is a microcosm of the same battle in the twenty first century over health and modern medicine. Once germ theory became the only accepted theory of disease, the template for modern medicine set.

If you do an internet search for, “Pasteur, Béchamp, and Germ Theory,” one of the top results you’ll get is a Wikipedia article entitled, “Germ theory denialism.” That’s almost funny. The word denialism will always tell you the accepted cultural elite position on a topic; and it shall not be questioned! During the Covid era it was used a lot. I believe it originated with those questioning the Holocaust, so Holocaust denialism became a thing, and after that anyone questioning the accepted narrative, whatever it might be, was labeled a denier. This, of course, is meant to shut off any debate on an issue. Thankfully because of the Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, the Internet, that is increasingly impossible. Everyone is indoctrinated to believe in germ theory as the unquestioned explanation for disease, and it is extremely difficult to see it any other way.

For 60 years I had been indoctrinated like everyone else to believe disease as something primarily coming from outside of us, that some little invisible thing invades us causes disease. That disease already lived inside me was hard to wrap my mind around, and more difficult to grasp was that I was the one who determined whether that happened or not. Would the little invisible thing invading me have an inviting space to do its dirty work, or not. That was up to me, not the little invisible thing.

Contrary to Germ Theory, Béchamp developed something called terrain theory. In the former germs are what we need to worry about, finding ways to kill them off with some kind of medicine once they get inside us. Terrain theory, by contrast, argues if the body is well and balanced then germs being a natural part of life and the environment will be dealt with by the body without causing disease. In other words, a germ can cause sickness in one person and not another based on the “terrain,” meaning the inner workings of the body’s immune system. A compromised “terrain” means the body’s inner environment makes it susceptible to viruses and parasites, etc. Therefore, it is far more important to work on the terrain of the body than worry about the latest germ or virus.

Pasteur’s victory for germ theory meant modern medicine’s focus on, well, medicine, was a foregone conclusion. There is a reason we call it medicine given we ingest or consume something as a treatment or cure. You’ll see as we talk about medical education, terrain is well down on the list of the modern medical professional’s priorities, as in pretty much invisible.

The Flexner Report and Modern Medical Education
Few people in or out of the medical profession have ever heard of Abraham Flexner and his report, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. The Flexner Report, published in 1910, transformed the nature and process of medical education in America. In 1908 the Carnegie Foundation authorized a study of medical schools in the country, which were visited and assessed based on how medical education was then currently practiced. Flexner then developed criteria on how doctors would be educated and trained and thus made acceptable to the American Medical Association. Both the AMA, which was founded in 1847, and Flexner accepted germ theory without question. By then cultural elites in the West could see the practice of healthcare in no other way. This can be seen in many places in the report, but one quote will be sufficient to understand the fundamental assumptions of modern medicine. Speaking of pathology and bacteriology, he says the goal is “to master the abnormal,” and in the that context says,

Now the agents and forces which invade the body to its disadvantage play their game, too, according to law.

Something outside of the body invades it and causes “the abnormal,” so the entire medical system became focused not on the patient’s health and enabling the body’s immune system to successfully handle the invaders, but on medicine used to defeat it. On the very next page, however, Flexner seems to contradict himself. He writes, the doctor “through measures essentially educational to enforce, the conditions that present disease and make positively for physical and moral well-being.” This and only one other minor reference to a more holistic approach is about it because by that time the assumptions of germ theory were dominant in the medical profession. Science was seen as all powerful, while God’s creation, the human body and the immune system, were victims of forces beyond their control. Man would save the day and defeat disease though his ingenuity.

Henry S. Prichett, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, said the report was basically agnostic regarding which kind of healthcare the medical professional practiced, as he claims in the introduction:

In making this study the schools of all medical sects have been included. It is clear that so long as a man is to practice medicine, the public is equally concerned in his right preparation for the profession, whatever he calls himself—allopath, homeopath, eclectic, osteopath, or whatnot. It is equally clear that he should be grounded in the fundamental science upon which medicine rests, whether he practices under one name or under another.

In practice, however, once the “scientific standards” were set by the “experts,” anyone straying from them would be considered a quack not to be entrusted with the license of an educated medical practitioner. To that end, Flexner succeeded in aligning medical schools along the university model as the standard for all medical schools. This orientation had its origins in German medical education as American educators and physicians became enamored with university medical schools in Europe. Thus schools ignored what they considered “outdated and unscientific methods,” so doctors received minimal nutritional education and defaulted to treatments primarily with pharmaceuticals. Flexner writes:

The only authoritative competent to pass on such values are trained experts. The entire matter would be in their hands if the state boards should in every state delegate the function of evaluating entrance credentials to competently organized institution of learning.

Such institutions accepted the pharmaceutical paradigm which was the inevitable result of germ theory and the rise of science. The “trained experts” believed it was primarily medicine that healed disease. The profit motive, as well, cannot be ruled out given the financial backers of the report were two of the richest men in the world, Carnagie and John D. Rockefeller. While not downplaying their philanthropic motives, they also likely believed they could bring the production model to the medical profession.

The rise of Big Pharma was built into this new university model of medical education. After the report, funding was only given to schools following its recommendations. Without the money, alternative schools of medicine couldn’t compete and disappeared. The challenge with nutritional or holistic healthcare is that there’s no money in it. You can’t patent something readily available from nature like you can something from a lab, which is why I was almost 61 years old before I first heard the saying, “food is medicine.” In addition to the challenge of the profit motive, insurance companies believe they have no incentive to cover anything other than medicine, and they often won’t work with holistic doctors. Keeping people healthy so they don’t need medicine or medical care in the first place is a terrible business model!

Of course, Flexner and those who supported him had the best of intentions, as do those in the modern medical profession, but they were terribly naïve about the monster they were creating. When I read this sentence I had to laugh, sadly, especially in light of the Covid debacle:

Scientific medicine, therefore, has its eyes open; it takes its risks consciously; it does not cure defects of knowledge by partisan heat; it is free of dogmatism and open-armed to demonstration from whatever quarter.

This was written in 1910 when science was the unquestioned, benevolent, and all powerful god of the age who would never disappoint but only bring untold blessings to all the peoples of the earth. Unfortunately, Flexner and the entire Western cultural elite missed the little fact that science is practiced, and its results applied and implemented, by sinful human beings. Thus it can never be free of “partisan heat” or “free of dogmatism,” and as we saw with Covid, it most definitely is not “open-armed to demonstration from whatever quarter.” In fact as currently practiced, modern medicine is the exact opposite of all these. If, for example, you question the efficacy of vaccines, you are automatically discounted as a “denier.”  Let’s see what this mentality has turned into as medicine is practiced today.

Disease Care and Silo Medicine
Looking at modern medicine, keep in mind this quotation from muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), the author of the well-known book about the Chicago meat packing plants, The Jungle (1906):

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Human nature is predictable, and money makes human beings as predictable as the sunrise. Reality, however, is a stubborn thing, and in due course reality always wins. Another word for reality is truth, and truth eventually exposes lies because of he who is The Truth. Jesus told his disciples (John 14:6) he is “the way and the truth and the life,” so truth isn’t merely the nature of things but a person who defines existence because he created it all. This is why no matter how messed up things are, no matter how stubborn human nature and human beings can be, we can have confidence our good and God’s glory will always win out in the end. The Covid neutron bomb of truth, as I’ve come to call it, makes this abundantly clear. We saw the modern medical industrial complex in all its malevolent ugliness on full display during that debacle, and it revealed to millions of people all over the world its ruinous business model. And yes, it most definitely is a business.

The fundamental problem with modern medicine is that, according to Casey Means, “every institution that impacts health—from medical schools to insurance companies to hospitals to pharma companies—makes money on ‘managing’ disease, not curing patients.” The evidence to prove this point? “Patients aren’t getting better.” What Casey calls silo medicine is built into the entire medical paradigm. If someone chooses not to be a general practitioner, your basic family doctor, they will become a specialist in a narrow subset of medicine, and doctors are encouraged throughout their education to “stay in their lane.” Doctors thus are not taught to see the body as a system but as isolated parts. If there is a problem with a part, they treat that part. Just like my Dermatologist, doctors primarily treat symptoms within their silo.

Inflammation caused by the body’s immune system appears to be the cause of most disease, yet as Casey points out, the cause of inflammation is never addressed by medical professionals. That is shocking, but as I was told, my Dermatitis “was an immune response of the body with no known cause.” If God had not graciously opened my eyes I would have spent the rest of my life managing my disease as another victim of modern silo medicine. Yes, the medical profession can do incredible things, as when dealing with acute issues like injury or infection, but the entire system is broken and millions of Americans suffer for it. I trust in due course more doctors will wake up and transform the profession so it treats the body and health wholistically. In the meantime, God has provided us everything we need to manage our own health, with knowledge readily available so we no longer have to play the dice game of modern medicine.

 

 

 

 

 

Trump, A Great Awakening, and the Refounding of America

Trump, A Great Awakening, and the Refounding of America

Mar 26, 2025 | America

If you’re not one of my multitude of fans, all three of them, you won’t know this is the subtitle of the book I published last year, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. As we see things unfolding in Trump’s second term, I’m thinking I might be some sort of prophet. Since most of you reading or listening to this haven’t read the book, you may want to check it out to see the bigger, grand historical context in which our momentous times are taking place.

If we look back through redemptive history we see God working out his plans to redeem His people and His earth even up to this very day. None of what’s happening now should be seen outside of its historical, ultimately redemptive context, even in the grimy world of politics and governing. Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven applies as much there as it does in our personal lives and in our churches. If you don’t believe this, or if that statement rubs you the wrong way, I encourage you to read or listen to three of my previous posts:

Because I now see the Christian faith, mine included, as something grounded and rooted in history, nothing that happens is outside of God’s ultimate redemptive purposes. History is the outworking of those purposes, of which are the subject of my book. Let’s see why I believe everything that is happening is of God.

God, Red Pills, and History’s Dividing Line
As 2024 progressed and Democrats continued to double down on stupid, I became increasingly optimistic, an optimism developing since I first came across Steve Bannon’s War Room after the 2020 election. As a long-time card carrying member of Con Inc., officially from when Reagan was first elected, I had gotten used to conservative losing. Our side talked a good game, but never did anything to actually challenge the progressive status quote, let alone push back. Then Trump.

Democrats will rue the day they did everything in their power to not let Trump win the 2020 election. If he had, his second term would have been mired in controversy and “resistance,” but most importantly the Democrats would not have been able to inflict wokestan upon the American people to the degree they did, which opened the eyes of tens of millions of Americans to their stupidity and lies. They actually believed what they were doing was morally good and the American people were behind them. Lies will tend to make people delusional. As important as the left’s blindness and stupidity, Trump and the people around him would not have had those four years to learn what they did wrong in the first term, and apply it in his second. He’s accomplishing things literally nobody thought possible. Even Democrat analysts are amazed, saying in effect this is truly something new under the sun. Even worse for the Democrats? They pissed Trump off, pardon the French, but trying to kill and put him in prison for 500 years will do that to a guy. The determined, angry, focused Trump is the Democrat’s and left’s worst nightmare.

What explains all this? If God isn’t at the top of your list, you’re not paying attention. As the book developed over ’22 and ’23, I would look at the print on my office wall Washington praying next to his great white steed at Valley Forge. Painted by Arnold Friberg to celebrate America’s bicentennial in 1976, its symbolic meaning would grow in importance to me by the day. I began to realize the odds against the newborn American republic were far worse than ours against the leftist woke Uniparty deep state. America should have been still born against the mighty British Empire, so God explains our founding as He does our potential refounding.

The founders fervently believed their success ultimately depended on the Almighty God revealed to us in Scripture. The supposed Diest, Benjamin Franklin, may have said it best. At the convention where the details of America’s experiment in self-government were being hashed out, he said these words to the august attendees which could come out of the mouth of any fervent Evangelical of that time or now:

I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that “except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.

In our case the question is, can an empire endure. Only God knows, but more importantly it is only God who determines whether it will or not. As I was writing I believed and hoped that was true, but now I’m suspecting in fact it is. God appears not to be done with the United States of America!

 

Everyone in the world knew, even the hardcore atheists were tempted to admit it, that Trump turning his head at that exact moment wasn’t chance. And then the raised fist and Fight! Fight! Fight! Are you kidding me? I get chills envisioning it again as I write this. If we didn’t know any better we would think this was scripted by mega reality TV Star Trump, but we do know better, and it was most certainly scripted by Almighty God. Both Reagan and John Paul II believed God saved them from the assassin’s bullet for a reason, and that was so together they could defeat the Godless Soviet Union. Trump too is a man on a mission to defeat the progeny of those same Soviets embodied in our Democrat Party and everything they stand for in American government and culture. Trump is on a mission from God, having said as much, that God spared him to do exactly what he’s been doing since January 20 at noon Eastern Standard Time.

As I’ve often said, this Great Awakening, the one I write about in the book, is not at all like the previous Great Awakenings. Those were primarily spiritual, taking place in thoroughly Christian cultures among Christian peoples steeped in Christians assumptions and a Christian worldview. This Great Awakening is happening in a thoroughly secular culture whose assumptions and worldview are agnostic. Like the ancient Epicureans, everybody believes in God, save the very atheist few, but lives as if God is completely irrelevant to their lives and the world, persona non grata. We call this religion moralistic therapeutic deism, the faith of secularism, a failed several hundred year experiment in Western culture out of whose ashes will come a new Christendom. It so happens that Trump came along right at the time secularism was showing its age, its impoverished worldview leaving an increasing number of people looking for more.

Because this awakening is not only spiritual but broadly culture, red pill experiences are touching people just at the point of what I call in the book, “the dividing line in Western culture: truth.” Whether this is related to politics, or the administrative state, or endless wars and the military industrial complex, or the Uniparty and Con In., or money and economics, or justice and injustice, or health and the medical-industrial complex, Big Pharma and Big Food, or the woke insanity, those whose eyes are opened are those who care most passionately about truth. And I argue that even if these people are not yet Christians, they just haven’t realized their allegiance to truth points them inevitably to the one who is The Truth. As such, truth itself has metaphysical and spiritual implications. I believe this is why Jesus and Christianity in our cultural moment is no longer uncool and “controversial.” I recently wrote a piece about how We Went from Negative to Positive World in One Day! Even the non-Christians know Christianity captures something deeply at the heart of the nature of reality, and it’s now welcome in the public square like it hasn’t been in a long time. They know something about Christianity leads to societal flourishing. We need to build on that.

The Founding of America
Covid was a blessing in disguise. So many things came to light for so many people during those few years it’s impossible to see any chance of refounding America without it. God’s providential sovereign control of all things could not have been displayed any more clearly if an airplane was writing it in the sky. Of course, in the midst of a storm it’s difficult to see anything but the storm, but since life is 20/20 hindsight, we can see His hand all over the place. As for many things in life, the easiest way to see it is in contrast. Holding two things side by side allows us to compare them and see what we’re really dealing with, in this case two contrasting views of human government, views as different as night and day. The founding is our north star contrast.

Which brings us to the story of Babel in Genesis 11. Man in his hubris was building “a tower that reaches to the heavens,” and God understood if he let them continue, “then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” The moral of the story is a simple one sinful human beings seem adept at forgetting; concentrations of power are bad. We can see throughout history how common aggrandizing power is, and how jealous man is of his power once he has it. Man not only wants to be God, he wants to be God over others. In previous ages this could be limited geographically. For example, the Roman Empire and its tyrannical rule could only extend as far as Roman physical power allowed it. In the 21st century, the aggrandizing is global, something we’ve come to call globalism, run by globalists. In the early 1990s George H.W. Bush called this a “new world order,” and many of us thought it was a good thing. We obviously hadn’t learned our lesson from Babel well enough. Then Trump. So much of the red pill times we live in come down to, then Trump. I still marvel, incredulously, that God would use a man I once so despised and thought so little of to do such remarkably good things.

I didn’t know he’d always been an America first populist-nationalist. His timing to run for office in 2015 was perfect because the spirit of Brexit, the nationalist referendum in Britain to leave the EU, was in the air. Globalists by definition hate the nation-state because it gets in the way of their plans to remake the world in their globalist image. They see themselves as an omnicompetent elite who know better than the people they seek to rule what is good for them, but a “rule by experts” always leads to Babel. The progressive movement in the early 1900s started this, and the Trump induced Covid hysteria ended it. With his reelection, for the first time in almost a hundred years, we’re seeing the potential dismantling of the administrative state. In other words, the pulling down of Babel brick by brick, and the left is powerless, both politically and culturally, to stop it. For a conservative like me since 1980 who’s been conned by Con Inc. ever since, this is stunning to behold.

Which brings me to the founding of America. America had been in historical development since Alfred the Great, specifically in the development in England of the rule of law, and the concept of political liberty. It was Christianity alone that allowed this to develop, not some fictional secular so-called Enlightenment. But it wasn’t only a development in Western intellectual history, but simultaneous boots on the ground governance. It developed through Magna Carta in 1215 and over time into the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Virginia had been settled in 1607, becoming the first enduring English colony in North America, and the English Puritans started fleeing religious persecution to the New World starting in the 1620s. Over the next hundred and fifty years waves of immigrants from all over the British Isles would come to America to establish a Christian country with the rights of Englishmen. In due course the unique character of this Christian people would slowly develop. Far from home they began carving out a living in a harsh land, and learned how to govern themselves which would eventually lead to a Declaration of Independence from the mother country, and the founding of the United States of America. As I was writing the book I read A Patriot’s History of the United States, and I highly suggest it. (Put up image) It was the cultural dynamics of this specific people in a specific geography at a specific time in history that God used to create the historically unique American character, and it is that character at our moment in history that gives us the possibility of a refounding.

The question confronting us in 2025 as we fight this war without bullets and bombs, is what exactly we are refounding. In the book I outline three broad perspectives on how the founding is defined:  Christian, secular, and cultural Marxism leftism. The latter has for the most part been defeated and discredited, so the debate is whether America was founded as a Christian or a secular nation. All of Americas founding generation believed Christianity was at the heart of liberty. Without it, they believed a self-governing republic was unsustainable. The quote on the Liberty Bell from Leviticus 25:10 reflects this, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” The Founders clearly didn’t see a contradiction between liberty and the Bible or Christianity. There wasn’t a secularist in the lot of them! They quoted the Bible, especially Deuteronomy, more than any other book or thinkers as they argued for this new country, believing it was specifically a Protestant Christian people that would enable it to succeed.

Unfortunately, in the increasingly secular 20th century, scholars began to claim most of America’s founders were Deists and the founding primarily secular. The reason they believed this is the same reason most conservatives and Christians today believe America is a secular nation: a Christian nation is not conducive to liberty. Or put the other way round, a Christian nation would be coercive and tyrannical. Only a pluralistic secular society, or so the thinking goes, can avoid the inevitable religious squabbles. I wrote a post last year with a title many conservatives and Christians would answer in the affirmative: Is a Christian Nation an Oxymoron?, a contradiction in terms. They believe this for two reasons. One is misunderstanding the nature of Christianity as the public religion of a nation, and the other is the secular myth of neutrality.

The Refounding of America
The question before us is this: Can America flourish as a secular nation, or was John Adams right when he declared:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The reason this is such a critical question is because America was the first government in the history of the world to be one of limited powers, or enumerated in a Constitutional word, over a self-governing people. The spirit of Babel in the heart of sinful human beings made this a rare thing indeed.

For our side of the political and culture football, i.e., we’re not Marxists, it seems all agree we want to get back to an America with a federal government of limited powers per the Constitution. We may be allies and agree on almost everything, or cobelligerents and only agree on some, but we can all agree the Constitution is our north star. At the turn of the 20th century the clouds of progressivism began to obscure the light of that star until the America of our founding became unrecognizable to us. To the progressive mind, the state ruled by “experts” is the essence of “democracy,” and submitting to their guidance like good little sheep for our own good is what America is all about. Then Trump.

In his first term Trump was naive and had no idea what he was up against. For decades Republicans have been the controlled opposition, part of the Uniparty, effectively no different than Democrats. Everyone, it seemed, was on the progressive statist bandwagon. For me, and I’m not alone, many became aware of what we came to call the deep state, but which we know now as the administrative state, the vast sweeping unelected bureaucracy that really runs Washington, DC, and how insidious it really is. The builders of Babel would have been jealous. Then God in his merciful providence and judgment gave the most radical progressives, leftists, Marxists, statists, their every heart’s desire: four years of almost absolute political and cultural power under puppet Joe Biden. They could not control themselves, and average Americans realized the contrast I mentioned previously, and Trump started looking mighty appealing to millions who previously wouldn’t be caught dead voting for the man.

Given almost 250 years have passed since that Declaration amid the massive changes of modernity, we understand America as re-founded will not look exactly like the 1776 or 1787 version, but it will have basic similarities. Instead of Babel and the concentration of power in globalist minded elites, state and local power, or federalism a la Jefferson, will gain the upper hand. It’s a simple matter of governmental tyranny in the hands of the few, or liberty in the hands of the many, what we call self-government. The latter is built into the American DNA, and the newly MAGA infused Republican Party may actually be able to lead Americans in that direction. Culturally, secularism will no longer be imposed by God hating elites, and Christianity will once again be respected as America’s founding religion. Babel will never sleep, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, and in the year of our Lord 2025, we have taken it.

 

 

 

A Christian Worldview Is Not Enough

A Christian Worldview Is Not Enough

Mar 19, 2025 | Theology

Since I was twenty years old when I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There, I’ve been a worldview guy. I went from a fundamentalist type of Christianity focused on the personal, on my relationship with Jesus, the Bible and me, to seeing how Christianity applied not just to me but to all of life and everything in it. I went from wearing the default set of secular glasses to Christian glasses, and everything looked different. As a Christian, although it may seem counterintuitive, it is possible to see the world through secular lenses. This means we see our Christian lives in primarily personal spiritual terms, and everything else as part of this fallen world, and thus not spiritual. The implication is that spiritual, personal stuff is important, and the other stuff not so much. I never thought through any of this before my worldview epiphany, but I didn’t see Christianity applying to the fallen world outside of the church. Thankfully, I found Schaeffer only two years into my born-again Christian life, and in addition to being so young and busy with college, thinking through any of this wasn’t a priority. But finding Schaeffer, and that a Christian view of the world and everything in it was possible, was exciting, not to mention being introduced to apologetics, and knowing I could credibly defend the veracity of the Christian faith I had embraced.

I’ve realized only recently, however, that having a worldview is not enough to fully capture the profound world transforming power of the Christian faith. Worldview assumes the intellect and how we think about things is primary, and applying those thoughts to what we do is what is transformational about the Christian faith. It is that, but it’s so much more. A Christian worldview is necessary for this new creation transformation (2 Cor. 5:17), but not sufficient. What is, what takes a Christian worldview to the next level, so to speak, is something almost completely neglected in Evangelical Christianity: the ascension. In all the years I’ve been a Christian, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a sermon on it. I didn’t realize this until I heard a talk by someone back in 2018 or 19. He said Evangelicals pretty much completely ignore the ascension, stopping at the resurrection, and I immediately realized he was right.

The Book of Acts makes it clear the church was built and grew on the declaration of the resurrection, but Luke starts with the Ascension. After Jesus promises his disciples to send them the Holy spirit, and gives them a charge to be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth,” Luke writes:

9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

Although the disciples were no doubt befuddled, this raises two important questions. Where did Jesus go, and what does it mean? We learn by the time of the Apostles Creed the ascension had become foundational to the Christian understanding of the faith. It addresses the second person of the Trinity thus:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

We learn explicitly from several passages in Scripture not only where Jesus went, as the creed affirms, but why he went there.

What Exactly is a Worldview and Why It Matters
Before we get to the implications of the ascension we need to address what a worldview is because not everyone is familiar with it, and for some who are they don’t believe it’s a valid concept. What I said previously assumes familiarity and validity, but I need to make that case and not just assume it.

Discussing worldview requires us to address the meaning and significance of presuppositions, and how they determine our view of the world. Having presuppositions means we assume certain things, we pre‑suppose them. Most people know what assumptions are, but have no idea the role they play in how they view the world, how they understand, process, and perceive reality. In fact, most people don’t believe they assume anything at all! But finite creatures like us have to assume all the time because what we can actually know with any certainty is limited in a multitude of ways. James Sire in The Universe Next Door was one of the first to address worldview from a Christian perspective, and he defines it this way:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) that we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.

I used glasses above as a simple metaphor for worldview because everyone understands without having to explain it that glasses change how you see everything. If it’s sunglasses, it brings a certain hue, or if corrective, they turn blurry to clear. You can’t not see what the lenses determine you will see. That is how the set of presuppositions we hold, knowingly or not, become the framework by which we see, or interpret, all things. In Sire’s words, worldview is a “fundamental orientation of the heart” which is the “foundation on which we live and move and have our being.” How people view reality, how they see things, what has meaning to them, what they value, what seems true to them or not, their “fundamental orientation,” is bound up in their worldview. Hence, their existence, how they “live and move and have their being,” is determined by it. We are fundamentally interpretive beings.

Everyone has a view of the world, but few understand how worldview is the lens through which they interpret reality. As such, it colors everything they see, hear, read, and do. In other words, there are no ultimately objective, neutral observers. Yet, this doesn’t leave us without the ability to actually know things, which is epistemology, or the study of how and what we know. It only says everyone has some type of interpretive grid through which they make sense of reality. In his book Popologetics, Ted Turnau has an excellent explanation of how worldview and presuppositions interact:

Worldviews, then, are not simply rooted in “the facts,” as if we could gather the relevant facts to build a picture of the Truth with complete, presupposition‑free objectivity. Rather, the way in which we process the facts is always already involved in a specific set of presuppositions. We are, in a sense, always “captured” by our worldview, our presuppositions. Worldviews are ultimately based on fundamental faith commitments from which we understand evidence, truths, facts, and all of reality. Your set of presuppositions is the most basic place you know from. At this level, worldviews are fundamentally religious. That is, they are types of faith. Worldviews are religiously rooted in these basic, nonnegotiable beliefs called presuppositions.

Therefore, all human beings are fundamentally religious because all people live by faith which become the glasses through which they try to make sense of an uncertain, chaotic, and often confusing world. What we’ll be doing in the next section is discuss how we can in effect fortify our Christian worldview because of the ascension.

As I mentioned, not everybody is on board with the concept or value of a worldview understanding of human psychology. As best I can tell, the critics think what we’re saying is that worldview is some kind of static grid through which people become robots, or something. I haven’t engaged in any depth with the arguments against it, but they don’t seem well thought out or thought through. Worldview isn’t some infallible measure of human nature, but simply a tool to help us understand how and why, in the words of Sire, we “live and move and have our being.” If we look at people from various cultures as a group, say Muslims from the Middle East, or Asians from China or Japan, or secular Europeans or Americans, we can better understand them because of their basic presuppositions, their worldviews. For me it’s an invaluable tool to help me better understand people and cultures and how the gospel message and Great Commission can advance in Christ’s worldwide mission, to which we now turn.

King Jesus and the Great Commission
Before I began to better understand the ascension, I saw Christ’s reign limited to my personal life and battle for holiness, along with other Christians and thus only for the church. Christ’s authoritative power was not meant for those people or institutions outside of the church; the fallen world I assumed would always remain in its rebellious fallen state until he returned. So when Jesus spoke these words to the disciples I assume it primarily meant saving people so when they die they go to heaven, and being made more holy while they are on earth (Matt. 28):

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Making disciples of all nations meant the people within the nations, not the nations themselves. Jesus doesn’t say that, but that’s what I took him to mean because of my assumptions about Jesus’ ascension and its implications for the world. It didn’t, or so I thought, apply to the world, just Christians, just the church. Then what does Jesus say? He says to baptize all ethnos-ἔθνος in Greek which primarily refers to a group of people or a nation, not merely the individuals within a nation. It is all the people in a nation and whatever they do to develop a society, along with the institutions, mores, and customs to create a unique cultural identity. Christ is Lord and King with authoritative power over all of it, and what that society becomes flows out of the people in it. The gospel and what flows out of it in Christians’ lives affect all of it, every square inch. Jesus’ authority is not in any way limited just to us!

Thus, a broadly Christian people can make a Christian nation, just as a broadly secular people can make a secular nation. Does that mean every person in those nations is Christian or secular? Of course not. Even those who reject the notion that a nation can be Christian, have no problem calling our nation, for example, a secular nation. That’s because the idea is not that every person is secular, but rather that the general makeup of the nation as a whole is secular in outlook. God recognizes nations as a whole, as one entity, and it is nations and everything in it that Christ calls us to disciple. Who people are affects everything they do; it’s as simple as that. As we disciple an increasing number of people, the influence through them of Christ and his kingdom will spread to all aspects of that society. This is what happened in the Roman Empire. It took almost 300 years, but eventually a pagan empire became a Christian one, and that had profound implications for how that empire was run. However, a merely personal faith, something Christianity was never intended to be, won’t do that. It will stay merely personal.

The difference between purely personal King Jesus and King Jesus who has “all authority in heaven and on earth,” is that non-Christians and their worldviews, who they are and how they act, are under the same authority as Christians. Jesus is as much in control of their lives as he is ours, and for the same reasons, to disciple the nations. A personal King Jesus, by contrast, does not include his reign over this fallen world to take back territory, so to speak, from the devil, specifically for advancing his kingdom on this earth as it is in heaven outside of the church. The fallen world in this telling will inevitably get worse until Jesus comes to rescue us out of it at the end of time. It is a pessimistic view of things, which is logical if Christ’s rule has little or nothing to do with anything outside of the church. When I believed in personal King Jesus I effectively equated the kingdom with the church.

As I began to understand the ascension more and its implications for all of life in this fallen world, I had a kind of cognitive dissonance, a discomfort from my contradictory understanding of the ascension. On the one hand Christ had all power over all thigs, on the other it really only applied to the church. This seemed to be what Paul was saying in Ephesians 1:

22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church.

True enough, but the church lives in a fallen world, and Christ’s authority in that world is ultimately to benefit the church in this world, on this earth, to take back territory from the Devil so we can experience God’s blessings in all of life. While many Christians on earth suffer for their faith, as I read very month in the Voice of the Martyrs magazine, that isn’t the goal. Which is why I pray that God would raise up a multitude of Christians in those nations to disciple and turn them into Christian nations where the gospel is proclaimed, and peace and justice reign. That isn’t just for the next life, on this redeemed and renewed earth, but here and now in this fallen world, bringing heaven to earth as Jesus taught us to pray. If Jesus didn’t mean this, he wouldn’t have given the command to his disciples and to us, in just that way; all authority has been given to him, therefore go.

Postmillennialism and the Ascension
Everything about my understanding of the ascension changed when I embrace postmillennialism in August 2022. In addition to my broadened understanding of the Great Commission, I now looked at Daniel’s vision in chapter 7:13,14 differently as well. Daniel sees “one like a son of man” at his coronation being ushered into the presence of “the Ancient of Days” being given “authority, glory and sovereign power” which all “nations and peoples” acknowledge. Prior to postmillennialism I automatically assumed this referred to Christ’s second coming, not a reference to his first. But Jesus clearly tells us it does apply to his first coming. How could I have missed that, and for decades? Paul confirms this all-encompassing authority Jesus received at the ascension was indeed for his first coming in Ephesians 1:18-23. When Jesus was placed by the Father at His right hand, he was now in a position “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is named.” He adds as if, oh by the way,  this rule of Jesus is “not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” In other words, it’s so obvious it’s for life on this fallen world, this the present age, that his readers needed to be reminded it’s also for the age to come. That never stood out to me until I embraced postmillennialism.

Without understanding the true all-encompassing implications of the ascension, a Christian worldview will not positively affirm Christ’s authority over everything, literally every single thing, every single person, including every institution, every government, and every spiritual being beyond earth. If it’s just a Christian worldview, seeing things and applying a Christian view to it all, Christianity will not have the kind of world conquering spirit Christians had for much of the church’s history. In the gospel we declare King Jesus to whom all earthly power must submit, which gives us confidence that bringing heaven to earth is not a product of merely our own efforts or power, but of the rule and reign of Christ over all things. This is why I now pray something I learned from Joe Boot, that Christ would extend his reign on earth, advance God’s kingdom, and build his church. I add this to my four R prayer, for revival, renewal, restoration, and Reformation. That about covers it all!

This brings me to the final point we must discuss: how does this all work? The critics of postmillennialism think our confidence in victory, and our optimism, is in our efforts, and they don’t like that one bit! This straw man is trotted out a lot, but it isn’t true. What is true is that God can’t bring heaven to earth without us, we wretched sinners who always seem to get so many things wrong and messing things up. He’s stuck with us! Read the Bible. Working with imperfect sinners to accomplish his purposes on earth didn’t change when Christ rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. Our confidence then as now is in Christ, in what he accomplished in his first coming, which was to destroy the works of the devil and push back the effects of the fall as far as the curse is found. Now, instead of hell on earth having the upper hand, heaven does.

This is a biblical fact, and if you have faith, and eyes to see, you can see it everywhere. Don’t take my word for it, but do take it from Jesus.  As he told his disciples, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” It never occurred to me until I read it in a book about postmillennialism, that gates in the ancient world were a defensive mechanism. How could I have missed that! And why didn’t preachers at all the churches we attended not tell us this! It is we Christians, Christ’s church, who are on the offensive; the devil and his minions don’t stand a chance!

Add this to your Christians worldview, and you will be a world changer. As I often say, work like it depends on you, but pray because it depends on God. I finish with these world conquering words from Joab, the commander of David’s armies (I Chron. 19:13):

Be strong, and let us fight bravely for our people and the cities of our God. The Lord will do what is good in his sight.

 

The Problem with Biblicism

The Problem with Biblicism

Mar 12, 2025 | Theology

If you’ve never heard the word biblicism, you would never know how prevalent it is in Evangelical Christianity, as in practically ubiquitous. Before I define it in detail and explain why it’s a problem, briefly it means in order to justify doing something or not, there must be a chapter and verse justification for it. If the Bible says it, that settles it. This mentality is the well-intended fruit of the Reformation proclamation of Sola Scriptura, or Scripture alone. The Westminster Confession of Faith lays out the canonical listing of the books of the Bible, and then affirms:

All which are given by inspiration of God, to be the rule of faith and life.

Christians will tend to read this as the only rule, and anything else that purports to provide guidance and direction for life is illegitimate. The famous passage of Paul about the inspiration of Scripture might seem to justify that take:

 16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

One might think this, and the Westminster affirmation, means Scripture is exhaustive and that is what makes it profitable, but Scripture itself is clearly not exhaustive. The Bible does not address every single thing we do or that confronts us in our daily lives, or that human beings do to make life possible. Thank God for that, or the Bible would be a very different and less compelling book (or compendium of books).

I was born again into a faith that taught a kind of biblicism. My relationship with God was mediated through the Bible alone. When I embraced Reformed theology I came across an image that describes how I saw my relationship with God through the Bible. I imagined a wire coming down from heaven, and as I read Scripture when God wanted to communicate something to me he’d buzz the wire and I would have instant insight directly from Him about the meaning for me. It was always about me, and meaning that was given to me by God himself, or so I thought. That is not the most stable epistemology (how we know) or hermeneutics (the science of interpreting a text which I’ll address below). In fact, it’s a recipe for distortion, and one example of biblicism.

Another example of how this works out in practice for some people is seeking guidance for life decisions, where to live, who to marry, taking a job, etc. How do we “know” something is God’s will? Well, God has to zap the wire and show us through some text in the Bible, then we’ll “know”! Most Christians know intuitively the Bible isn’t that kind of book. As my dad always used to tell me when I did something stupid, God gave us a brain, and we’re meant to use it. The key point in this regard and to biblicism in general, is that God’s nature is not totalitarian. In other words, he’s not a “control freak,” who wants to dictate everything we do. He’s far too secure for that, and His creatures were not created to function with that kind of control. Many non-Christians, especially in our secular age, see God as some kind of dictator who is set on determining everything we do, but that’s not how this world, or us in it, works.

God gave us agency, meaning we are beings who can alter the stuff, the raw material of existence; we can change things. This freedom is not an illusion, but very real, and it means there are consequences to the choices we make. That’s thrilling on the upside, and terrifying on the downside, but we’re not in this alone because God is somehow sovereign and in control over all of it, without destroying the reality of our agency. Only a being, God, who created everything out of nothing and sustains it moment by moment could pull that off. It makes my brain hurt whenever I think about it too much. It’s easier to trust the Bible’s declaration and our lived experience of it as true. Let’s take a further look at how biblicism plays out in practice, and then what I believe the role the Bible plays in our lives.

The Basic Assumptions of Biblicism
The Reformation gave the Christian world the five Solas, of which Sola Scripture is foundational because out of it flow all the others by which we live out our faith: Christus, Fide, Gratia, Deo Gloria, or Christ alone, faith alone, grace alone, to the glory of God alone. What “Scripture alone” has come to mean in the Protestant tradition is embracing God’s inspired Word as the inerrant, sufficient, and final authority for the church and the Christian’s life. None of the early Reformers, however, believed or taught this meant the Bible is sufficient all by itself for the church or the Christian’s life. This becomes abundantly clear when we see how they wrote copiously about what they believed God’s word meant, many times disagreeing with one another over the same text or passage, often vehemently. Out of this developed the various traditions of Protestantism, and the confessions defining exactly what they believed and why they believed it, even those who don’t embrace classic Reformation confessions. Not being Biblicists, we see how the Reformers naturally would defend or argue for their theology looking back at early church fathers, for example.

Since God didn’t gives us a textbook or a how-to manual, it is helpful to see exactly what kind of book He gave us, or like I said books, 66 to be exact, written by 40 or so authors over approximately 1500 years. The Bible is the history of redemption, specifically of the Jewish people in what we call the Old Testament, developing over time into the history of the redemption of the world, including Gentiles, those who are not Jews. Because the Old Testament is more history than statements of belief, we see develop in Judaism differing parties of interpretation. This happened in what we call the Intertestamental period between the cessation of prophecy with Malachi in the mid to early 400s BC to the coming of Christ and the writing of the New Testament. The focus was primarily on the law or the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, and three contending parties, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes developed rival interpretations of the law, though they differed in other areas as well. Biblical faith was always messy, as God obviously planned it.

All of the first followers of Christ were Jews and believed authoritative teaching was part of this faith they’d been given by Christ. As Paul says, the church was “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20). In the first century the writings of the Apostles came to be seen with the authority of Scripture, and by the mid to late second century we see a well-defined canon, or list, of New Testament books. However, the Christians found like the Jews, there was often disagreement as to the meaning of a text or passages. Because of heretical movements in those early centuries, Church fathers realized Scripture itself wasn’t sufficient to give Christians full definition of their beliefs. There’s a wonderful saying I first heard applied to economics and liberty, that liberty is necessary but not sufficient to develop a capitalist economy. In a way, this “necessary but not sufficient” concept can apply to Scripture as well. What I mean is that the Bible doesn’t say something about everything, and biblicism gives us that impression. However, it is sufficient in a big picture way that is crucial for living the Christian life and advancing God’s kingdom on earth. As the Apostle Paul says,

15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 “For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

What biblicism does is limit Christians to words on a page, and keeps them from developing a transformational worldview lens enabling them to “judge all things,” or forming the universal categories to see all things as Christ the Creator sees them. As my favorite and overused quote from ex-atheist C.S. Lewis says,

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Words on a page isolated from their immediate and ultimate context can’t give us this kind of perspective and understanding, nor the wisdom that comes from seeing the bigger picture. It didn’t take long for me to realize what the implications were for my own form of biblicism, and I used three words to describe it.

  • Ahistorical – In Greek an a in front of a word negates it, so for example, theos means God, and atheos means no God, from which we get our English atheist. Taking from Greek, ahistorical means no or without history. Since I believed as a young Christian the Bible was written to me, not so much for me, the history from its writing to me was irrelevant. For me, the Bible existed in an historical vacuum.
  • Anti-theological – Given the church’s history of theological engagement with the text, it isn’t surprising theology was non-existent in my Biblicist days. Doctrine, another word for theology, was disparaged as divisive. When I discovered Reformed theology I found it helped me to understand what I believed and why I believed it.
  • Anti-intellectual – While this is not true for all Biblicists, especially in my Reformed tradition, the me-and-the-Bible mindset made being overly intellectual suspect. Taking Paul in I Corinthians 8 out of context, I was taught, mostly implicitly, that “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” as if love and knowledge are mutually exclusive. There are plenty of ignorant people who are plenty puffed up.

We can see from the early church none of these things were true of them. This becomes apparent as the church delt with heretical movements arising in the first several hundred years of Christianity. Directed by the providence of the Almighty God, the author of Scripture, this complicated and messy process gave us what we call the historic, orthodox Christian faith. This came down to us in the creeds, specifically the Apostles, Athanasian, and Nicene Creeds, also adding a later creed which came out of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, thus the Chalcedonian Creed.

The Bible in the Christian’s Life
You might think from all this that I don’t believe the Bible has an inherent spiritual power within the text itself, that all its power comes from our human intellect and ability to reason and understand it. Certainly, the human ability to think is instrumental in bringing Scripture to life which God must use, but spiritually, the power of the Bible goes well beyond the human intellect, or imagination, to conceive. We can’t chalk up the change in the human heart and transformation of lives merely to our reason. It’s much more mysterious and profound than that. That’s because we’re dealing with the literal Word of God who is God himself in Christ. As John says, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.” How that all works I have no idea, but God moves in powerful ways in the heart of His people as they faithfully read and pray through His word, and through the words of His word, preferably every day. Keep in mind how blessed we are to have access to cheap Bibles, and free online, so have God’s word always at our fingertips. This wasn’t true for most of Christian history as books were incredibly expensive, and thus rare. Most Christians were likely only able to hear the word read at church.

For me, daily Bible reading was a habit in my early Christian life, but then I allowed life to get in the way for a couple decades and it wasn’t as consistent as it should have been. In 2012 that changed when I made a commitment to read the Bible every morning and get on my knees and pray. I’ve pretty much done that ever since, although not always on my knees, and it was transformational. God, and everything about my daily life with him became more real. That’s a difficult thing to quantify, realness, but it’s powerful. We’re staking our lives, deaths, and eternity, on something, someone, who is invisible, who we can’t physically touch or feel, so it can easily come to feel un-real, which is why daily time in the word and prayer, and weekly worship and fellowship with God’s people is critical to experiencing God’s realness. That awareness is mediated through God’s word found in the text of Scripture in our Bibles. There are numerous verses I can cite before I get to the principles of how we understand it, but Hebrews 4:12 says it well:

For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

The words on the page are the tools the Holy Spirit uses to kindle the parched timber and brush of our souls dried out by sin and life in a fallen world, and alight our hearts afire for the Living God. The results in God’s people are captured perfectly by Isaiah (26):

8 Yes, Lord, walking in the way of your laws
we wait for you;
your name and renown
are the desire of our hearts.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism first question asks what the chief end of man is, and accurately expresses it in elegant simplicity:

Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him ever.

Everything we are looking for to fulfill us, to give our lives meaning, hope, and purpose, is found in God Himself, and in glorifying and enjoying him we can truly appreciate everything He gives us in life, including the challenges and suffering He may call us to. The question is, how do we get an accurate understanding of what God is communicating through the words on the page. That brings us to hermeneutics, simply, the study of interpretation. Words on a page have meaning, they need to be interpreted, and all human beings are interpretive creatures, whether it’s interpreting text on a page or scenes in a play or movie, or news items, or other human beings. The word interpret simply means to give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate.

So, as we come to the text of Scripture, we need to keep these four hermeneutical principles in mind if we are to interpret it rightly:

  1. Authorial intent: what we can assess the author intended when he wrote the words.
  2. Audience understanding: what the intended audience would have been expected to believe the words meant. This means context counts, specifically the moment in history and culture in which it was written.
  3. Scripture interprets Scripture: never read a text in isolation from the rest of Scripture.
  4. Scripture is all about Christ (Luke 24): the overarching theme of God’s revelation to us is Jesus.

To fully benefit from the scope of redemptive history revealed to us in Scripture, we must understand how the puzzle pieces fit into the overall big picture. The pieces can only give us a limited picture, and an easily distorted one. Fortunately, we’re not in this alone, which is why we must read more than just the Bible. We have easy access to books, and the Internet, to help us grow in our understanding of the big picture, and all the little pictures that make it up. If we are to obey the imperative of Scripture itself to grow in our knowledge, then we will want to take advantage of the great minds who have come before us, as well as those of our contemporaries. The treasures are endless.

Lastly, we’re aware how much disagreement there has been in the history of the church over interpretation. We might reasonably ask, if these principles are so helpful, why is there so much disagreement, and so many arguments about the meaning of the text. You might not expect the answer I will give, but I believe because God wants it that way. God is sovereign, so if he wanted everyone to agree on everything it would have been that way, but it’s not so he didn’t. Why might that be? First, we are finite and so limited in our understanding. Two, we are sinners, which messes everything up. I often see Christians appeal to Jesus’s command that his disciples should love one another, or this passage of Paul in I Corinthians that they should always agree with one another:

10 I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.

There you go, that’s what we should do, but Paul’s appeal is just that, and not a command, mainly because it’s impossible. It might be an aspiration, but even then, aspiring to agree can only get us so far. Like the great creeds of the church. I believe all the disagreement gives us the opportunity to obey the actual command of Jesus to love one another. If the entire law and the prophets, in effect, the entire Old Testament is summed up in loving God, ourselves, and our neighbor, then it’s pretty important. All we need to do is do it, and watch the word of God come alive in us and in those around us; it’s glorious to behold.