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.

 

We Went from Negative to Positive World in One Day!

We Went from Negative to Positive World in One Day!

Mar 5, 2025 | Culture

For those not familiar with the phrase “negative world,” it comes from Aaron Renn who wrote a piece for First Things in early 2022 titled, “The Three Worlds of Evangelism.” He lays out his assessment of where American culture was at the time:

As I laid out back in 2017 and refined for my recent article in First Things, I divide the period from the 1960s to today into three phases distinguished by the way official American culture viewed Christianity: the positive, neutral, and negative worlds.

In the negative world, which we live in now and in which came into existence around 2014, official culture now views Christianity negatively. To be known as a Christian is a social negative in the elite domains of society, and Christian morality is expressly repudiated and treated as a threat to the new moral order of society.

I would argue it officially goes back to 2008 with Obama’s election, but by 2014 negative world was entrenched in all areas of elite American culture and government. This is true throughout the West because when America sneezes, the world catches a cold, and Western culture and the Anglosphere had it bad.

According to Renn, Americans and American culture saw Christianity as a net positive for society through the 1980s. Christians were generally viewed positively in the culture. He says that began to change in the 90s into what he calls neutral world, where Christianity was seen as neither good nor bad, just one religious choice among many, as long as it stayed personal within the church or the home. Even before Obama was elected he had to pay lip service to whatever Christian faith he possessed, and politically felt the need to leave the church of the Marxist, “God damn America,” pastor Jermiah Wright. Then with his election, and the leftist radicals who filled his administration, Christianity became the enemy of all that was decent and good. That was always the plan of the “Community Organizer” and his Marxist desire to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” as he said near the end of the 2008 election. America was born a Christian nation full of bigotry and hatred and misogyny, and that just wouldn’t do for the Utopia he had in mind. As the “transformation” in government and law started, the media made sure it became entrenched in the culture as well.

I became a Christian in the fall of 1978, as those of you familiar with my writing know because I say it all the time, and after finding Francis Schaeffer a year or two later realized I was a conservative. Being a Christian who is, as they called us at the time, a “social conservative,” I was painfully aware of the media biased against people like me. The idea of objective journalism was a 20th century invention starting with Edward R. Murrow who became famous reporting on World War II from Europe, eventually making the transition to TV in the early 1950s. He was every journalist’s hero, including Walter Cronkite who was on in our house every night during the 60s and 70s. He would famously end his broadcasts with an affirmation of Murrow type objectivity claiming, “That’s the way it is,” and giving the date. Of course the mainstream media was never objective, and when Rush Limbaugh came on the air on August 1, 1988, it was a shock to conservatives all over the country. Someone on national radio who is a conservative? He mocked liberals for over 30 years and unmasked their bias every weekday until the Lord took him too soon.

Until Obama, the media played the game nobody believed, that they were objectively reporting the news. If they were accused of bias, they would call their accusers “right wing extremists.” Funny how there has never been a reference to “left wing extremists” in the media, ever. With Obama, the veneer of objectivity was officially dropped, the mask not just taken off but thrown to the floor and stomped on for good measure. The media now showed its true leftist stripes, but still pretended they were down the middle, until Trump, when they effectively became Pravda, an embodiment of 1984’s Ministry of Truth. This is not anecdotal or just my opinion either; we can measure this empirically.

In the Spring 2020 journal Academic Questions, Dr. David Rozado did a word frequency usage study on New York Times articles written between 1970 and the end of 2018. He was looking for progressive/Marxist buzzwords used by groups with an ideological agenda. He discovered in 2010 and the years following such words and phrases exploded in frequency. There are numerous charts in the article graphically displaying the jump in terms such as climate change, sexism, patriarchy, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy, and so on. Apparently, all these things became such critically important issues around 2010 that America’s “paper of record” found it necessary to endlessly report upon them. In fact, they were doing what the left always does, driving “the narrative,” but in this case it went into overdrive. Joseph Goebbels would have been impressed.

If the media bias in the Obama Era was becoming undeniable, it went full-on steroids when Trump came on the scene. Because of Trump, the term “Fake News” stuck, but fake doesn’t begin to describe the blatant lying which has been the media’s stock in trade ever since. Everything started to be seen through the lens of hurting Trump or not, which was fine for most liberals because, well, Trump. But for many honest liberals who are not leftists, who still believe in and care about truth, this move by their media buddies, normal allies, was raising red flags. Woke culture, long tyrannical on college campuses, was taking over newsrooms and corporate board rooms. Covid and the 2020 election season, with the silencing of free speech and big tech de-platforming, made the globalist totalitarian nature of the threat to Western civilization undeniable to a growing number of liberals, let alone conservative Christians. The narrative now became, Christians bad, Christians immoral, Christians unenlightened, Christians homophobic, Christians anti LGBTQ+, or whatever, Christians racists, Christians narrow minded, Christians tyrannical, Christians bad, bad, bad! Negative world was in full flow.

The Overnight Transition to Positive World, Or Not
The one day I reference in the title was November 5, 2024, with the election of Donald Trump to his second term in office, only the second president in American history to serve two non-consecutive terms in office, the other being Grover Cleveland in that late 19th century. While “the vibe,” as we say nowadays, has certainly shifted in a positive direction toward sanity, vibe shifts in culture don’t happen in one day. The cultural and intellectual influences of wokeness given to us by cultural Marxism have been developing in their current form since the 60s, inspired by a group of intellectual Marxists in the 1920s and 30s called. The woke revolution only seemed to have happened quickly, but this toxic mentality had been brewing for some time even though almost overnight it came to dominate cultural and governmental elites and their media allies. It was never as strong or widespread as it appeared because only a tiny minority of the cultural and political elites are true believers. How did woke become discredited so quickly when it seemed so strong? A move back to positive world for Christianity is part of the reason, which didn’t seem to be a possibility too long ago.

Most of us remember the so called New Atheists who were active in the first decade of the century bringing their old worn out arguments against God and Christianity to a Western culture disconcertingly receptive to it. Seemingly everywhere, they sprouted messages like, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, in the title of Christopher Hitchens’ book. I had just started a blog in 2004, and their spouting’s were often topics of my rants. But something funny happened on the way to their God-less, secular Utopia. They disappeared. Justin Brierly, who was host of the popular long running podcast, Unbelievable? Published a book in 2023 with the provocative title, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers Are Considering Christianity Again. In hindsight it isn’t all that surprising.

I wrote about this in some depth in my book Going Back to Find the Way Forward if you’re interested in a more detailed explanation, but briefly, secularism, a several hundred year experiment in human history, proved to be a colossal failure. It was based on two lies. One called the myth of neutrality presumes a society could be irreligious, which is impossible because human beings are by nature religious beings who live by faith. Vishal Mangalwadi in his wonderful book, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, 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.

What is secularism’s final source of authority? That’s not a hard one to answer: The state! Which has become readily apparent in the last 15 years, especially with a fake pandemic.

The other lie is that religion, specifically Christianity, is what causes division and violence in a society and wars among nations, not sinful self-centered human beings. Developing in the age of the so-called Enlightenment, secularism promised a God-less nirvana, and produced nothing but misery, suffering, and death, including an America where 50,000 people every year successfully kill themselves, and triple that number try. Not to mention the massive number of people on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication. By the time woke came on the scene and was in the process of discrediting everything the left-liberal-progressives ever believed, secularism was sucking air, on its deathbed, and soon to be dead. Of course it isn’t going anywhere soon because culture’s don’t fundamentally change quickly, but Christianity and Christians are now getting the attention culturally once given to atheists, especially as the Internet and social media have become ubiquitous. Even some of those angry “New Atheists” are declaring themselves to be “cultural Christians,” something we could never have imagined 15 years ago.

The change toward “positive world” started happening because of a transformational event, Donald Trump coming down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his run for the presidency. This caused a hysterical reaction from the left, and driven by Trump Derangement Syndrome, wokeness came out of its shell with a vengeance like a rabid dog with rabies, foaming mouths and all. At the same time all of this was happening, secularism as I said was showing its age, and itself being exposed for the fraud it always was. As my book was an exercise of grappling with this event and its stunning aftermath, I started it with this sentence:

When Donald Trump started his descent down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, there was a rip in the space-time continuum.

For me and millions of others, Trump’s trip down that escalator began a dizzying red pill journey. And it wasn’t just the failure of secularism setting the table for this, but also the character of the American people. As we go back to the founding of this country, we see a unique series of historical events. It starts with the Puritans fleeing persecution in England from the 1620s into the 1640s coming to America, and a British people founding a country while developing a civilization on a wild and dangerous continent. Nothing like it had ever been done in the history of the world, and it produced a one-of-a-kind people and nation. Because of their unique character, Americans en mass could never be turned into communists, even through the Great Depression, nor into woke leftist who hate their country in the 21st century. This was the big mistake of the left, thinking average Americans were like them and buying what they were selling. Not a chance.

I realized this after I graduated from Arizona State University in 1982. Even then America-hating leftists were common among the faculty, especially in the social sciences. It was common enough that later in the decade after getting my masters at Westminster Theological Seminary, I decided against getting a Ph. D because I didn’t want to deal with the widespread liberalism in academia. I kept my college experience throughout my life as I got older, and it would bubble up every Fourth of July celebration while I attended fireworks celebrations in the communities in which we lived. I would look around at the multitudes and think to myself amid all the red, white, and blue festivities, “There is no way any of these people hate America like the lefties do.” And my unpleasant experiences with liberal professors would flood back into my mind’s eye.

I had become increasingly positive and optimistic in the run-up to the ’24 election season and finishing the book. The entire book is an argument for God being the author of all of it, which is why the subtitle is, Trump, a Great Awakening, and the Refounding of America. The question I was trying to answer in my argument is, why? Why was all this happening? The answer is God’s providence at our unique time in redemptive history. 

Personal and Societal Flourishing in Positive World
Unlike secularism which had a nice several hundred year run but is now bankrupt, Christianity is only 2,000 years in and just getting started. It doesn’t hurt that it is the truth about the ultimate nature of reality, and the only answer to the conundrum of life daily delivering on its promises of meaning, hope, and purpose for a humanity desperately needing it. Not to mention its massive explanatory power, meaning Christianity enables us to take the puzzle pieces of life and fit them together in a way that makes sense of the bigger picture of existence. But it’s far more than merely psychological and emotional power to make sense of life for us; it is transformational at the very heart of our being. In other words, the changes aren’t just on the surface, some rudimentary outward changes in our habits, mere morality. The change is ontological, the transformation of our inner being, who we are. This is most powerfully illustrated by God’s revelation through the prophet Ezekial, specifically chapters 36 and 37.

God is proclaiming Judgment on Israel for its evil deeds, and in the middle he promises to save them from their own sin in this powerful image pointing to their ultimate redemption in Christ:

24 For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Although there is historical referent in these chapters for God bringing Israel back to the land, the image is about far more than a people in a plot of land. Rather, it’s about the transformation of God’s people Jesus came to save (Matt. 1:21). Jesus is at the right hand of God reigning “above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that can be named” (Eph. 1:18-23), and by his authoritative power transforms spiritually dead hearts of stone to spiritual living hearts of flesh living to the Glory of our great God. He sent his Holy Spirit to make sure of it. Put starkly, secularism can’t compete, nor can any other religion. And the Lord makes the point even more strongly by giving Ezekiel a vision of a valley of dry bones, very dry bones. Before his eyes these bones are slowly clothed in flesh, then God breathes life into them, and they come back to life as a vast army. That, brothers and sisters is us!

This third decade of the 21st century is a time of revealing contrasts. One side is God-less, be it in its virulent woke version, or just your average agnostic American going about their daily lives. This we call secularism. To see how pathetic this is, watch any TV show or movie dealing with the deep, existential issues of life where God is persona non grata, unwelcome and invisible. Without God in Christ, all you get is the blind leading the blind, life as a Woody Allen movie leading to despair or resignation. On the other side is Almighty God revealed to us in creation, Scripture, and Christ. This option brings ultimate and eternal meaning, hope, and purpose to life through a Savior who in the prophetic words of Isaiah tells us over 700 years before it happened what Jesus of Nazareth did for us, his people:

4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

This story, this narrative, the miracle of the incarnation in Christmas, to the inconceivable suffering of the cross, to the hope of the resurrection in Easter, is again grabbing people in a powerful way exactly because of the death of secularism. It offers but failed promises, while Christianity is the only option available to humanity for true personal and societal flourishing. It delivers. As America’s Founders knew, obedience to God’s law is the means of blessing, and the American republic could only succeed with a religious, i.e., Christian people. It is positive world again, and that gives us a chance to Make America Christian Again!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Show notes:

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/the-three-worlds-of-evangelicalism-7fc

 

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Negative-World-Confronting-Anti-Christian/dp/0310155150

 

https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/what-caused-the-negative-world

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/a_window_on_the_orwellian_dystopia_of_america_.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Trust in Man or the Lord, that is the Question

To Trust in Man or the Lord, that is the Question

Feb 26, 2025 | Epistemology - Trust

As a young pup Christian in college in the Jesus Revolution days, I was born-again into a Scripture memory focused campus Christian organization. I memorized a very lot of verses, chapters of epistles and even entire letters, like Philippians, and chunks of other letters. I still have a box of those cards on which those verses are printed or written. Given life is life, I fell out of the habit of memorization and only slowly started memorizing Scripture again decades later when we moved from Chicago to Tampa. Not sure why, other than I realized anew what a “living and active” (Heb. 4:12) thing God’s word is. The first passage I was compelled to memorize was in the church bulletin in one of the services we attended when we got down here, King David’s doxology on the greatness of our God, I Chronicles 29:10-13. This passage has been a constant companion through the vicissitudes of life ever since. God’s word is indeed living and active.

My older self doesn’t seem as adept at memorization as my younger self, and I’m only memorizing verses or passages that mean something to me in the moment. The latest has to do with a theme I’ve come to realize is what the Christian life is all about, trusting in God, or not. I’ll get to the passage in a moment, but first I want to briefly explore why trust is the very essence of the Christian life. We have to go all the way back to the temptation Satan threw at Eve in the Garden (Genesis 3). The first thing Satan does, in the form of a very crafty serpent, is question what God had commanded Adam and Eve:

 “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

Well, in fact he did, Satan, so buzz off! Unfortunately, Eve didn’t do that and thought she could reason with the father of lies. When I read this passage I wonder why she was so easily seduced by the serpent. The blame must go to Adam. In Genesis 2, the Lord creates man, and Moses tells us about him:

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

The Hebrew word for “keep” tells us why Eve’s encounter with the serpent was Adam’s fault. According to Strong’s:

The Hebrew verb “shamar” primarily means to keep, guard, or observe. It conveys the idea of careful attention and protection. . . . It implies a sense of diligence and responsibility in maintaining what is valuable or sacred.

Adam obviously did a terrible job of guarding and protecting the garden and the woman God gave him, the fall happened, and all its terrible consequences followed because the man didn’t do his job. All men are called to “shamar” their garden, whatever that is.

So, Eve’s on her own to deal with a crafty liar whose job is to get her to not only not trust in the character of God, but to rebel against his express command of not eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And not only does Satan impugn the character of God, but he also calls God himself a liar! 4 “’You will not certainly die,’ the serpent said to the woman.’” Oh yes you will. So the woman uses her own judgment about the tree, thinks it looks kind of appealing, and takes some and eats it. Adam having failed at Job 1, goes along for the ride, and sin, misery, death, and suffering are introduced into God’s perfectly good and ordered world.

In a nutshell, this is our same battle today, trust in the character of God or not, call him a liar or not, and experience the consequences one way or the other. It’s that stark, as are the consequences. Which brings me to Jeremiah 17:5-8. I will quote it in full, and then comment on the incredible contrast and what it means for our lives.

5 This is what the Lord says:

“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who depends on flesh for his strength
and whose heart turns away from the Lord.
6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands;
he will not see prosperity when it comes;
he will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.

7 “But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
8 He will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.”

Cursed verses blessed; the choice is ours. Let’s see what that looks like in practice according to the word of God.

The Cursed and Blessed Contrast
First, let’s look at the contrasting words cursed and blessed. In Hebrew they connote divine favor or not. What they do not necessarily refer to, and this is absolutely critical, is circumstances. God’s favor, or disfavor, can’t be divined merely from circumstances, and we mistake God’s intentions if that’s what we use to judge them. Are they irrelevant? Of course not, given the obvious fact some circumstances are pleasant and others are not. Nobody wants to suffer, but suffering and terrible circumstances are not necessarily an indication of God’s disfavor, any more than pleasant circumstances, wealth and honor, are necessarily indication of God’s favor. The qualifier means they may or may not be, and wisdom understands the difference.

In fact as we see from the blessed man, unwelcome circumstances are perfectly consistent with God’s blessing, as are pleasant circumstances to the cursed man. This is counterintuitive to us because we’re human and we prefer pleasure over pain. Christianity frees us from the tyranny of circumstances because God enables us in some manner to overcome or transcend them so they do not determine us. In other words, circumstances are a superficial and often deceptive way to try to divine God’s intentions toward us. Can God use them to send messages to us one way or the other? Obviously He can because as Scripture plainly teaches, He is in control of all things, and He does that all the time. It’s called life.

The point is a simple one, if difficult to attain in practice: we are to place our ultimate trust in God alone, not anything or anyone outside of Him.

One of the great curses of the modern age, in the words of our Declaration of Independence, is “the pursuit of happiness.” The founding generation, steeped in a thoroughly Christian culture, read those words differently than we tend to today in our prosperous thoroughly secular culture. For them it was about purpose and goodness and independence, character, but for us it’s perfect circumstances. If we have pleasant circumstances we’ll be happy, if not, we’ll be miserable. If you want to be miserable, make happiness the purpose of your life. On the other hand, even if our circumstances are perfect, we’re not to put our trust in those circumstances for our fulfillment. It’s subtle, but daily prayer and thanksgiving for all the blessings God bestows upon us keeps us grounded. It gives us the proper perspective, that He not things or other people, is our ultimate reward, the ultimate joy that allows us to take joy, and enjoyment, in everything else. If we allow anything outside of Him to be our source of joy and fulfillment, we’ll be squeezing the joy and fulfillment out of them like water out of a wet rag.

Having said that, and at the risk of contradicting myself, God wants to bless us with good and pleasant things, as all parents want to bless their children with good and pleasant things. That wasn’t always easy for me to believe, or any of us really, but Jesus himself makes this perfectly clear (Matt 7):

11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

This can also be clearly seen from the beginning when God commanded the man and the woman to be fruitful and multiply; barren or dead trees don’t bear fruit. Women who couldn’t bear children were considered cursed because children were seen as the ultimate blessing in life, as indeed they are. (As an aside, we should want more little blessings in our lives.) The Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses, overflow with words of blessing and prosperity for obedience to God, and curses for disobedience. God’s law is not merely a means to drive us to Christ, but a means to blessing and true personal and societal flourishing. To live in alignment with God’s good, created order is the means to blessing.

Part of the reason for God’s curses and His judgment is to drive us back to Him to find true blessing and fulfillment, no matter what the circumstances are. When the boundary lines do fall for us in pleasant places our contentment is still in Him, not the circumstances. David teaches us this in Psalm 16:

5 Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;
you make my lot secure.
6 The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.

That’s why Jesus tells is to seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness, and not to worry about all the other stuff. Do that, and everything follows regardless of the circumstances.

Cursed is The One Who Trusts in Man
Cursed is a strong, but accurate, word, reflecting the judgment of God against sin, and not trusting God is sin. God is not obligated to reward bad behavior, any more than we are obligated to reward our Children’s bad behavior. Parents who do not discipline their children do them no favors. When God’s first children, Adam and Eve, rebelled God pronounced curses, first on the serpent and the woman, then on the man. Everything in life became harder than God initially created it to be, thorns and thistles. Like me, you may have asked the question: but why can’t God just overlook the rebellion, why does His judgment have to be so harsh?

Let me answer this with some other questions. In a court of law if a judge let someone off who committed murder would you like that? Be comfortable with that? Think that was the right thing for the judge to do? Of course not because we all intuitively understand justice must be done, that wrongs must be righted, which means we live in a moral universe where right and wrong, justice and injustice are a fact of the reality we inhabit. We can no more escape the moral laws of the universe than we can escape its physical laws. Break the moral law, and we suffer the consequences. Let’s look the one who trust in man.

6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands;
he will not see prosperity when it comes;
he will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.

The image is one devoid of life, devoid of thriving and blooming and fruit. Ironically, this cursed person could have all the most wonderful circumstances he could ever want, prosperity, but even then without God he can’t even see it. It’s like dreaming and working and longing for something for years, and then when you get it, it’s just a thing. It no more fulfills you than one meal fills you. The things of life, be they people or money or comfort or achievements or entertainment or possession or hobbies, or anything else, were never meant to be our fulfillment and joy, or ultimate purpose. All of these things are good, just not ultimate goods. Two of the great saints of Christian history put this truth in wonderfully poetic form. Blaise Pascal, 17th century Christian genius, says it this way:

There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.

And Augustine, the 5th century Christian genius and Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, put it this way:

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

People can stuff all kinds of things in their hearts, stuff them to overflowing, and still they will never be filled, never satiated, never satisfied because they are under God’s curse.

Blessed Is the Man Who Trusts in the Lord
The metaphors Isaiah uses are perfectly descriptive of the contrast, of the blessing, the thriving, the flourishing of this one who chooses, who is determined to trust in the Lord. We all know what trust means, but let’s look at a definition to dial in on its implications for us as we navigate the difficulties and challenges of everyday life in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body:

Reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence. confident expectation of something; hope.

How in the world can we have such confidence in God apart from the circumstances even as we pray and long for the circumstances we think we want? Because God isn’t looking to make His people happy, to give them circumstances that are pleasant and unproblematic, but to make them like Christ. In life I call this the pain of sanctification, and very often it isn’t pleasant, thus the reference to pain. Trusting God in such environments is difficult, to say the least, which is why we have to doggedly determine to believe in the goodness of God’s character and intentions toward us. How do we do that? Especially when things are darkest, and the struggles seem unendurable? We have to know this fact of existence of our life in Christ: Everything God does in our lives is for our good and his glory. Paul tells us in Romans 8:28 it isn’t 98% of things that “work together for our good,” but all things, one hundred percent of things. Is this easy? Of course not. Why should it be? Life isn’t easy for heathens either, so why should it be for God’s people? Assuming it should be has led a lot of Christians to become the cursed one who turns in trust to man because God isn’t measuring up to their expectations, which means the circumstances in their life are not to their liking. It’s a terribly shallow and short sighted way to look at existence, but an understandable one.

By contrast, if we look at the vivid picture presented to us in the tree planted by the water, it gets its sustenance, its life giving force from a source, from living water, that is ongoing and cannot be altered by whatever is outside of the stream. Strong living trees withstand storms or heat or drought because they are always being fed the water of life. No wonder my Christian life changed back in 2012 when I determined that every single morning I would get on my knees and pray and read the Bible. I have done that and it made all the difference. The realness of God has become more real than I can describe. My perspective on everything, literally, is always God. I can’t see anything in life apart from the connection to Him. When I hear great music, a melody that grabs me, I think God! When I look at creation, the most humble little flower, I think God! When I make a living daily working through the thorns and thistles, I think God! When I see other people and make them smile, I think God! When I walk alongside those who suffer I think God! When I see a professional golfer or baseball or football player do something we mere mortals can’t fathom, I think God! I could go on like this for hours, but I trust you get the point.

What Happens When We Get to Our Red Sea Moment
Most of the trust challenges we have in our lives are not dramatic, thankfully, but the choice in every moment dramatic or not, is do we trust the Lord, or not. Those times that do get intense present us with a seemingly intractable dilemma. We are all familiar with the story of the Exodus. Moses leads the people of Israel out of Egypt to worship God, and initially the Pharaoh allows them to go with his blessing. In fact, on the way out God inclined the Egyptian people toward the Israelites, “so they plundered the Egyptians.” Everything was looking fine, smooth sailing all the way to the promised land, then it wasn’t. Pharaoh changed his mind, sends his army out after the people to bring them back, and probably slaughter quite a few in the process.

You can read the narrative in Exodus 13 and 14. The Lord leads the people to the shores of the Red Sea, and in the opposite direction comes the army of the Egyptians. Uh oh! What now? If a situation ever looked impossible this was it. The question for the people of Israel was this: would they trust in the Lord or not. Moses implores them to the former:

13 Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. 14 The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

Be still? What are you nuts? We learn previously that the Israelites were armed for war, and it would have been easy for the warriors to take matters into their own hands, but be still? Yep, that’s the plan. And you know the rest of the story. They decided to trust Moses and thus the Lord.

Chances are, our Red Sea moments are never so dramatic, but they sometimes feel that way. I’ve written here before about building the trust muscle, as I call it. We all know what it takes to make muscles stronger, breaking them down, injuring them if you will, so they come back stronger. It’s not a pleasant process most of the time, but the results are worth it. I’ll end this with something I pray and strive for on a daily basis, and which I’ve yet to attain, from Isaiah 26:3 :

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

Perfect peace . . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pietistic Gnostic Dualism’s Influence on Modern Christianity

Pietistic Gnostic Dualism’s Influence on Modern Christianity

Feb 19, 2025 | Culture, Theology

In a couple previous posts I wrote about what it means that the Christian’s citizenship in is heaven, and what it does not mean, and how the understanding of our spiritual home developed in the history of Pietism. This happened, along with the predictable consequences of waning cultural influence and the growth of secularism because of the Pietistic Gnostic and dualistic assumptions and teachings that came to dominate Evangelical Christianity. Most Christians are not aware they hold these assumptions, let alone how they affect the experience of their faith, or their views of the Christian mission in the world. Further, and the driver of the problem, is pastors who themselves hold these assumption and basically teach a Pietistic Christianity which truncates or narrows the Christian’s mission in the world in various ways. Most Christians see the world as a sinking ship, and our job is to rescue people because the ship is going down, likely soon.

A properly eternal this-worldly vision and understanding of the mission of God, in the title of Joe Boot’s book, is something I myself didn’t understand even as a “worldview Christian.” I came across Francis Schaeffer’s The God Who is There in college, and became passionate about applying a Christian perspective to all of life. This, however, did not include the reign of Christ in this fallen world to take back territory, so to speak, from the devil, specifically for Christ advancing his kingdom on this earth as it is in heaven outside of the church. Inside the church is where kingdom stuff happened, or so I thought; outside was a wasteland. I basically assumed a Pietistic worldview, and believed those words in that old hymn, that heaven is my home, and I’m just a passin’ through. We went to a Christian worldview oriented church for a number of years, and in a sermon the pastor said any Christian engaged in “the culture wars” is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That did not make me a happy camper, but I knew the Pietism that inspired it.

For those of us who believe God’s kingdom on earth most definitely means “culture wars,” we need to understand we are in the education business. In his book, Schaeffer speaking in the 1960s of the radical shift that had taken place in the world up to that time said, “If we do not understand it then we are largely talking to ourselves.” This is a temptation in the Reformed postmillennial circles in which I run. We’re a small pond compared to the ocean of Evangelicalism dominated by going-to-heaven-when-you-die Christianity, and we need to get this message out to our brothers and sisters in Christ who don’t know anything about it. I’m excited about the possibilities of success because of the Great Awakening happening all around us I wrote about in my previous book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. America and the West in general, has reached the end of the Enlightenment and its logical offshoot, secularism. It promised everything and delivered nothing but misery and despair. People are looking for meaning, hope, and purpose, and only Jesus can ultimately give them that. A God-less, basically agnostic society seeks fleeting fulfillment based on circumstances, but even the best circumstances, every dream coming true, leaves people empty if Jesus isn’t the center of their lives.

I am convinced because of all this, we live in a time where Christians are open to a much more expansive vision of Christianity than the overly spiritual, personalized, other worldly Christianity they get at most churches. The gospel is so much bigger than me. I can get plenty of tips for Christian living, for growing in holiness and service to others from Pietistic Christianity, but nothing about transforming the world by bringing God’s kingdom and extending Christ’s reign in every area of life. And it’s not just a Christian worldview, but Christ’s reign; big difference. It’s about King Jesus, not just bringing Christian assumptions and perspective to things, as important as that is. In 21st century Pietistic Christianity consequences for this world are pretty much beside the point. The world will go on its merry way to destruction, and we’ll get as many out as we can in the meantime. What a horribly depressing conception of the purpose of God’s people on earth, about as inspiring as running into battle against an enemy with superior force, numbers, and weapons. Why even fight?

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to change the Christian orientation toward this world, bringing heaven to earth instead of primarily toward the next and going to heaven. In order to do this, we need to understand the other two of the three words informing the Pietistic mindset, Gnosticism and dualism. These are deep and expansive topics, so this will be a brief exploration. Even though Gnosticism is dualistic, we will treat them separately because I see the Gnostic influence in the experiential and emotional side of Pietism, and the dualist influence more as a state of mind, a worldview, a way of looking at existence.

Gnosticism and the Search for “Secret” Knowledge
The early Pietists were influenced by Gnostic dualistic ideas of the ancient Greeks. All Greek thought was essentially dualistic, but Gnosticism was radically Platonic and became a thorn in the side of the church in its early centuries. Its influence continued in one way or another in Western thought through the Middle Ages eventually affecting the worldview of those who became Pietists.

The Greek philosopher Plato envisioned a world of transcendent, immaterial, eternal, and unchanging forms, the ideals of which could be found in the material world that are always changing and uncertain. The material world was created by what he called a Demiurge, a god-like figure who takes the preexisting materials of chaos, arranges them according to the models of eternal forms, and produces all the physical things of the world, including human bodies. The Gnostics adapted this term into their radical dualistic worldview, seeing the Demiurge as one of the forces of evil responsible for the creation of the despised material world and was wholly alien to the supreme God of goodness. In the Platonic understanding of reality, put simplistically, the material world is bad because it is material, and the immaterial world of ideal forms is good because it is immaterial. There is nothing at all like this in the Jewish or early Christian worldview which declared God’s material creation very good, even if distorted and marred by the fall and sin. Gnosticism took this anti-materialist mentality to the nth degree, where escaping it was the essence of salvation.

Gnosticism developed into a Christian heresy primarily active in the second century. The word comes from the Greek gnostikoi, meaning “those who have gnosis,” or knowledge. Gnosticism was a movement focused on a religious experience of gaining knowledge without the intellectual efforts of theology or philosophy, but through a revelation that reawakens knowledge (gnosis) of humanity’s divine identity. The concepts of sin, guilt, and redemption are irrelevant to this awakening because it is not something dependent on the work of God for man, but man’s inner being finding God. This radical dualism teaches that the key to salvation lies in a secret knowledge revealed only to the initiated few, and what separates man from God, the human from the divine, is an illusion that fades away with the enlightenment gnosis brings. Genuine self-knowledge is essentially an awareness of one’s own divinity.

As Gnosticism faded away in due course, it’s specific form of anti-materialist dualism remained an influence within Christianity down through the centuries. While certainly no Gnostic, Augustine, the great Bishop of Hippo (North Africa), was heavily influence by Plato’s philosophy, embracing a form of Neoplatonism, a knockoff of Platonism developed by third century philosopher Plotinus. Augustine believed in the soul’s superiority to and independence of the body, with the soul being superior in the hierarchy of reality. So, for example, sex was problematic because it was part of our material existence, and a necessary evil to propagate the human race. Gnosticism influenced monasticism in the desire for monks and nuns to isolate themselves away from the world and its material temptations that war against the spiritual. Initiates could spend all their time in prayer and the contemplation of the divine gaining a kind of secret knowledge (gnosis) that only comes from isolation and immersion. The mysticism of the Middle Ages naturally flowed from this mentality, inspiring early Pietists and their Gnostic tendencies.

Gnosticism is one of the innumerable answers in history to the most common question in human existence: Why? What Winston Churchill said of the Soviet Union applies perfectly to the conundrum that is life: It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Thus we see man throughout all of recorded history trying to unwrap the mystery, but never quite figuring it out. The reason is the benighted nature of human finitude; we are limited creatures. This is illustrated by the history of philosophy and religion, speculation upon conjecture going nowhere, educated guesses and arguments going in circles. C.S. Lewis spent his early years as an atheist, but found the answers he sought to why and other questions elusive, and the ones he got wanting. After he finally made his way to Christianity, he tells us why he embraced it in my favorite quote of his:

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

Which brings us to the problem of evil, and Gnosticism.

Throughout all human history mankind has been driven by theodicy, better known as “the problem of evil,” trying to answer the why question by founding religions and philosophies of various kinds. None of these outside of Judaism and Christianity have been able to give a satisfying answer as to why evil, suffering, and death exist. Religion and philosophy are the means to deal with this horrible fact of existence.

The phrase “problem of evil” developed in Western thought primarily because of Voltaire and his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, or An Examination of the Axiom: All is Well” written in 1756. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed an estimated 60,000 people, and in the age of the so called Enlightenment, people were trying to wrap their minds around the horror. How could God allow such suffering and death? Voltaire put God in the dock and found him guilty of grave injustice. The problem developed as such: If God is good he would never allow such suffering, and if he was all powerful he would prevent it, but since such suffering exists he can’t be good, and since he can’t prevent it, he is not all powerful. So down through Western history this became primarily a problem for Christians trying to defend the God of the Bible, and even His very existence. Contrary to what many people think, this is not just a problem for Christians. Reject the existence of God completely and you are still left with the question, why?

Gnosticism gave the world a convoluted and complicated answer as I briefly referenced above, but it all comes down to matter is evil therefore there is evil and suffering in the world. Matter and the world must be escaped, and that is through this secret kind of mystical knowledge for the lucky few. The Gnostic tendencies for the Pietist come from this kind of experiential seeking for a knowledge that will confer on the Christian a means of escape from this messy, fallen sinful world. As a young Christian that knowledge came in the form of a little wire I imagined coming down from God into my brain and then zap! when I needed to understand something of spiritual significance. In a way, I completely envisioned it as bypassing my intellect and mental faculties which of course made it all more “spiritual” and thus valid. Few if any Christians given to Pietistic tendencies actually think through any of this. It’s just how they see their relationship to God mediated through the Bible.

There are many passages in Scripture that might give one inclined this way to read them in a Gnostic fashion. I’ll just reference an obvious one in Colossians 3:

1 Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3 For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

This has a Gnostic feel to it, but if you continue to read, “earthly things” isn’t referring to this material world at all, but to whatever belongs to our “earthly nature,” then he lists things like sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, greed, anger, rage, etc. He then tells them to put on virtues that are all encapsulated in love. Things above doesn’t refer to a place somewhere far off like heaven where we can escape through a quasi-mystical experience while we’re stuck on earth, but living this Christ-like life here and now.

Dualism and Two Reality Christianity
As I said, unlike Gnosticism, which I look at as the experiential aspect of Pietism, dualism isn’t about salvation, but a way of looking at the nature of things, a mindset, a worldview. I’m not saying Christianity doesn’t have its dualisms, it does. We can see these in good and evil, heaven and hell, body and soul, righteousness and sin, just and unjust, material and spiritual, etc. But these dualisms are firmly found in an understanding of the cosmos rooted in Scripture, that God is the all-powerful creator of the material world which he declares very good. Yet Greek language, and therefore thought, would have a profound influence on Christianity just as God planned it.

Since God doesn’t do coincidence, Christians inherited some of this dualistic mentality from the Greeks given the faith was born in a thoroughly Hellenistic, i.e., broadly Greek, culture. In the providence of God, three great cultures come together at a point in history before Christ was born. Paul tells us why in Galatians 4:

 4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

The Jews, the most ancient of these peoples, gave us God’s people and the covenant promises fulfilled throughout their history in Christ. The Romans brought the Pax Romana (Latin for ‘Roman peace’), the roughly 200 year-long period of relative peace and prosperity allowing Christianity to flourish. This included Roman military power, law, and technological prowess seen most importantly in the vast network of Romans roads allowing relatively safe travel throughout the empire which contributed to the swift spread of the gospel to the “ends of the earth.” And finally the Greeks because of the Hellenizing process starting with Alexander the Great several centuries before Christ. Greek culture, including a universal language and worldview coming from Greek philosophy, influenced Christianity in profound ways. We can see this clearly in John’s gospel as he comes right out of the gate taking a Greek philosophical concept and transforming a Jewish understanding of God into a Christian one:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There is a lot going on in this paragraph from a Greek philosophical perspective, most importantly is John’s teaching on who this Word, or logos, is. According to biblehub.com:

In ancient Greek philosophy, “logos” referred to the principle of order and knowledge. Philosophers like Heraclitus used it to describe the rational principle governing the cosmos. In the Hellenistic Jewish context, “logos” was associated with divine wisdom and the intermediary between God and the world.

John then takes this Greek idea and applies it to the divine preexistent Christ who is the ultimate revelation of God who not only governs the cosmos but created it.

Christianity also inherited and developed a dualistic worldview influenced by Greek thought. Some Christian thinkers have seen this as unfortunate, and something that distorts Christian faith and thinking, while others embrace it with proper qualifications. I would lean more in the latter camp, but it’s clear dualism taken too far gives us a bifurcated two story reality. There are various ways to describe this two-story version of the faith, but it breaks life into two competing realities. Picture a house where upstairs is all the important stuff, the truly meaningful and important things, real stuff, and downstairs is for the servants, the mundane reality we deal with every day. Even though it’s the same house it appears like two completely different houses, say upstairs is 19th century Victorian, and downstairs 1960s hip modernism. In Schaeffer’s words, upstairs “is above the line of despair.” Everyone without access to the stairs is stuck downstairs trying to find meaning, hope, and purpose. If you do have a pass, you can go upstairs when you want to access the things that really matter in life. You can see how a type of Gnosticism might be appealing to people who see reality as mutually exclusive forces, and places.

In a biblical view of things, however, there is only one reality, or as N.T. Wright in Surprised by Hope puts it speaking of heaven and earth, “They are twin interlocking spheres of God’s single created reality.” Most Evangelicals today, unfortunately, are so steeped in the Greek philosophical mindset, even never having read any of it, that saying heaven and earth are one reality almost boarders on the heretical to them. As Wright further puts it:

We think of heaven by definition as nonmaterial and earth by definition as nonspiritual or nonheavenly. But what won’t do. Part of the central achievement of the incarnation, which is then celebrated in the resurrection and ascension, is that heaven and earth are now joined together with an unbreakable bond and that we too are by right citizens of both together.

As I’ve said previously, the first generations of Pietists didn’t see material and spiritual reality as mutually exclusive, but this dualistic perspective was bound to grow over time, and the experiential and personal push of Pietism made sure it did. In my next post I will explore why this mentality, this version of Christianity came to dominate Evangelical Christianity in America.