Evangelicals and Their Ambivalence to God’s Law

Evangelicals and Their Ambivalence to God’s Law

Sep 4, 2024 | Theology

I’m currently reading Greg Bahsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics, an extensive study about God’s law (theos-nomos) as it applies to ethics, the study of the principles of right and wrong conduct. We Evangelicals tend to have a love/hate relationship to God’s law. On the one hand it’s God’s, so we know it is a reflection of his character and our obedience is required. On the other, it condemns us because keeping it to the degree we must is impossible for sinful human beings. When Jesus says, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48), I reply, good luck! Calvin calls this use of the law a mirror because when we look into it, it’s not pretty. It condemns us specifically so we can realize our helplessness before our Holy Creator God, and be driven to Christ and his shed blood for us, he who fulfilled the law in our place.

Unfortunately, for most Christians because of the history of revivalistic fundamentalist Christianity, this is about as far as it goes. Our tendency is to be antinomian, against law, because we are saved by grace and not by works of the law, as Paul says for example in Galatians 2:16. We see God’s law as primarily if not solely a hostile force. If we’re honest, though, we’re not quite sure what to think about God’s law, thus the ambivalence. Bahnsen shows this isn’t just lay people who think God’s law isn’t relevant to Christian ethics. He quotes numerous scholars from various Christian traditions, including his and my Reformed tradition, who all discount God’s law to one degree or another. 

My first encounter to the relevance of God’s law to the Christian life came after I’d been a Christian for over five years. It came in the form of my introduction to Reformed theology and the soteriology of John Calvin. I learned to see the purpose of God’s law as relevant to the Christian life, not as something only to drive me to the cross. I’m sure I studied it in seminary and developed some convictions at the time, but that was a long time ago and the study of God’s law never became a priority after that. Then in August 2022 when I embraced postmillennial eschatology, I found people in that camp have no ambivalence toward God’s law whatsoever. I wrote about theonomy and God’s law in my latest book, but I’m really just beginning this journey of developing my own convictions, specifically how God’s law relates to my sanctification and applies to the governing of nations.

The Fulfillment of the Law
Unfortunately, as Bahnsen points out, Christians have effectively become secularists when it comes to law in society. The ethics of Christianity, of what is right and wrong, is only applied to individual Christians, and even there, God’s law is not embraced as relevant to the Christian’s sanctification. Christians have no problem citing the Sermon on the Mount as foundational to Christian ethics, but when it comes to the L word we get cold feet. For some reason we ignore or explain away this passage about Jesus not abolishing the Law right in the middle of that sermon:

17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

I’m not sure how you get from this to God’s law being only a mirror for the Christian to drive him to Christ, but that’s been the dominant view in Evangelicalism since the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century.

First let’s ask what it means when Jesus says he’s come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Bahnsen goes into great detail, quoting numerous scholars and perspectives. Giving away his own, he titles this chapter, “The Abiding Validity of the Law in Exhaustive Detail.” No ambivalence there! After an extensive survey of various scholars and lexical analysis of the text, he comes to this conclusion:

It is hard to imagine how Jesus could have more intensely affirmed that every bit of the law remains binding in the gospel age.

He also quotes Charles Spurgeon commenting on v. 17 which for most Christians lends significant credibility:

The law of God he established and confirmed. . . . our king has not come to abrogate the law but to confirm and reassert it.

What Jesus is saying about abolish and fulfill is related directly to something the Pharisees, the most respected Jewish religious professionals of the day, did to in some way abolish or abrogate it, to somehow make it null and void. We know from a later rebuke of Jesus that they “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel” (Matt. 23:24). The Greek word refers to straining water through a cloth or sieve to remove impurities, which relates back to an obscure part of the law they interpreted as meaning they should purify their water. They were so focused on the details of the law, the smallest minutia that in fact they went beyond the words and intent of the law, and at the same time ignored immense sins (swallowing camels) like pride, greed, and arrogance.

There is a lot of debate, and always will be, as to what exactly all this means. We know from the Apostle Paul that righteousness cannot be obtained by obedience to the law. We also know as Protestant Evangelical Christians, if that is what we are, that Christ lived the perfect obedience to the law that is required by God’s holiness, and his righteousness has been legally granted to us in him, it is forensic. The law could never do this, thus it condemns us, but the law itself is still valid for us, as Jesus says, not one jot or one tittle (KJV v. 18) shall pass away until everything is accomplished or fulfilled. Most agree this means at the end of the age, the consummation of all things in the second coming of Christ. It is necessary then to conclude what Bhansen does, though many won’t, that the law has an abiding validity in exhaustive detail. Of course we all know, pun intended, the devil is in the details.

Misunderstanding God’s Law as Totalitarian
What is it about God’s law that creates such ambivalence in modern Christians, both as relates to us personally as Christians, and its application in society? I recently realized the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of law itself. We tend to think of law as totalitarian, but experience law as liberty. The two concepts, totalitarianism and liberty, are diametrically opposed to one another. The former seeks to control everything, all thought and behavior, while the latter gives wide latitude for people to determine their own thoughts and behavior.

I use the contrast of the French and American Revolutions here frequently to explain the only two choices of existence in a fallen world, totalitarianism and liberty, the former inspired by an anti-Christian secularism, and the latter by a widely accepted Protestant Christianity. Robespierre and his buddies on the left introduced what came to be called the Reign of Terror. Anyone not thinking and acting a certain way was condemned to death by the infamous Madam de Guillotine. In American, by contrast, the people were free to think and act within the confines of the law with a limited government, and we call that liberty.

The modern world has given us numerous revolutions inspired by the French, each one bloodier than the next. We learn from the 20th century varieties the true nature of totalitarianism which by contrast enables us to better understand liberty and its relation to law. A simple definition of totalitarianism is total and comprehensive control of all aspects of life, including all thought and action of the people. This is of course impossible, which is why totalitarian regimes never last. In addition to raw history, there are numerous fictional accounts that give us a window into the totalitarian mind, the presumption that total control is possible. One is the classic novel by George Orwell, 1984. The protagonist, Winston Smith, resists the ubiquitous thought control throughout the story, lying when it is required to escape punishment, but it doesn’t work. The state in the form of Big Brother demands total, sincere fealty, and in the end brain washing accomplishes this in Winston when he genuinely falls in love with Big Brother. He now believes two and two equals five. The total in totalitarianism is complete. The other is much less well known, a 1983 movie called The Lives of Others about life in Soviet East Berlin and their secret police, the Stasi. This is an excellent depiction of the inevitable failure of trying total control human beings, who because they are made in God’s image cannot be totally controlled.

It is important to explore the failed attempts at implementing totalitarianism in various countries to contrast it with liberty, but more importantly, to show us what law is not, and specifically God’s law. I am convinced that the ambivalence or hostility to God’s law is in the misunderstanding of it as fundamentally totalitarian, as if the purpose of the law is to control every aspect of people’s lives. In fact, just the opposite is true. James in chapter 1 of his epistle is imploring Christians to be not just hearers but doers of the word, and then he says this:

25 But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does.

The word freedom can be translated as liberty, and means freedom from slavery. James uses the same phrase in chapter 2, “So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty,” the context being the Ten Commandments. We see this as well in the Old Testament in Isaiah 61:1, something Jesus proclaims as he announces his ministry in his hometown of Nazareth (Luke 4)

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
    and recovering of sight to the blind,
    to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

This liberty can be found only within the confines of obedience to God’s law, which can only truly be had by those freed from their bondage to sin by the gospel. God’s law is not a fence to keep us in, but a guardrail to keep us safe so we don’t careen down the cliff and crash into a ball of flames on the rocks of life.

The Law’s Abiding Validity for the Christian and Societal Life
First and briefly, it seems the law’s validity for our Christian lives and sanctification should be obvious. I will quote Paul from 2 Tim. 3 to make the point: 

16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man  of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The Scripture Paul refers to is the Old Testament, the only Bible they had. All includes God’s law, every jot and tittle, lived as best we can in love, which as Jesus told is the fulfillment of the law. Read Psalm 119 if you need a reminder of the importance of God’s law for God’s people.

The abiding validity of God’s law for society is more complicated. There is a reason God starts the revelation of his law with the Ten Commandments. Those are the broad principles under which people should live to have true liberty and human flourishing, both individually and in community (i.e., nations). God didn’t start with details, with the minutia. Those developed over time because of the messiness of life lived in a fallen world among fallen people in fallen bodies. Take the ninth commandment to not lie or bear false witness against your neighbor. The command to not lie is not absolute. Rahab the prostitute lied to protect the Hebrew spies in Jericho, and not only was this prostitute and her family spared from the city’s destruction, but she is in the hall of fame of faith in Hebrews 11. Leave it to God to put a prostitute in the hall of fame of faith! Or take Corrie Ten Boom during WWII in the Netherlands when the Nazis took over. She was part of a group hiding Jews from the Nazis, and when they were asked if they were hiding Jews, of course they said no, they lied, and saved lives.

Over time people being the sinners they are, brought specific issues before Moses so he could judge conflicts and dispense justice. It soon became too much for him. When his father-in-law Jethro saw this, he told Moses to appoint judges among the people so he wouldn’t have to do it all himself. Out of this arose something we call case law which are laws based on precedents from previous cases because of the many varieties, for example, of bearing false witness. In the Christian West Alfred the Great in the 9th century in what is now England established his law based on the Ten Commandments, out of which eventually flowed the liberty developed in England and fulfilled in America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution. The primary principle is one of government of limited means, and laws with broad boundaries in which people can live freely without any coercion of the government.

How we decide what the validity of the law is in exhaustive detail, in Bahnsen’s words, is the challenge. The important thing to remember is that exhaustive detail is not totalitarian. If we do not break the law we are free to do whatever we want within the confines of the law. And the fewer the laws the healthier a society. A representative republic like America should not need a plethora of laws to cover a self-governing people. America as currently constituted is not a healthy society as indicated by its multitudinous laws.

Also, thinking there are simplistic answers like there is a one-to-one correlation between Israel’s laws and America, for instance, is a category error. America isn’t Israel, and every nation is unique in how it is arranged. Finally, we must remember there is no neutrality, thus the issue isn’t theocracy or theonomy; every nation is ruled by a god or a worldview and set of ultimate values. The question is which God. The question in the West is will it be the god of secularism and tyranny, or the God of the Bible and liberty. As Paul says in Romans 13 discussing the Ten Commandments, “Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” The goal of a biblically based theocracy isn’t control, but loving our neighbors so our society can truly flourish. Only God’s law can do that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is the Phrase Christian Nation an Oxymoron?

Is the Phrase Christian Nation an Oxymoron?

Aug 28, 2024 | Politics & Government

Unfortunately, most of the modern conservative movement thinks so, including one of the most respected men in my conservative world, Hillsdale college President Larry Arnn. He said exactly this in a discussion on his podcast. Ironically, the title of the episode is, Bold Christianity in a Secular World. Yet Arnn thinks a Christian nation is a contradiction in terms. That means America should remain a secular nation, right? Here is the question: Are we to have a secular nation or a Christian nation? Those are our only choices. The further question is, what do each of those choices mean. Larry Arnn, as brilliant as he is, like many post-World War II “consensus” conservatives seems to have no idea what either means. He made that very clear in his comments toward the end of the discussion.

Arnn is one of my favorite people in the world. I got to know of him when my daughter started attending Hillsdale College in 2010. I heard many of his talks, read a couple of his books, and was always impressed with his breadth of knowledge and wisdom. I’ve gotten Imprimis, their monthly speech digest, since the early 1980s, so I’ve been a longtime fan of Hillsdale. I had just graduated from Arizona State University in 1982 when I learned about Hillsdale and was bummed out I hadn’t gone there. In my wildest dreams I would never have imagined my own daughter would go there (and she now works for Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative). In 2013, he started joining Hugh Hewitt every Friday for what they called the Hillsdale Dialogues, and I’ve listened to those consistently over the years. Although Arnn is a traditional conservative, it was him taking Trump seriously during those dialogues that opened my mind to Trump when I didn’t think it possible.

His contribution to the conservative movement through Hillsdale has been impressive and important, but secularism is a blind spot for conservatism, and one that needs to be addressed. One of the fronts in the war to re-establishing America as a Christian nation is getting conservative Christians to realize secularism is the enemy, and that pluralism based on secularism is a recipe for totalitarianism. The only basis for real liberty of conscience and true pluralism is Christianity and God’s law. Most secularists, Christian or non-Christian, believe Christianity and God’s law at a societal governing level are a basis for tyranny. Thus to them, like Arnn, a Christian nation is an oxymoron. For someone who knows Aristotle so well, Arnn begs the question like a pro, assuming this conclusion as if it were a self-evident truth. In a Christian nation, he implies, rulers will force Christianity on the ruled. Who in the world believes that!? Not anyone who believes God has called nations to be Christian as a result of the great commission. Yet, this fallacious belief persists for a reason, even in the minds of intelligent people. Why?

The Source of the “Theocracy is Tyranny” Lie
The idea that a Christian nation is an oxymoron, or 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 1.0, as Doug Wilson calls it, 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 that heresy would create societal instability, and it must be stopped. Catholics get the worst press, however.

Bloody Mary’s purge of Protestants in Tudor England from 1553-1558 is a primary example where an estimated 300 Protestants were burned at the stake for not converting to Catholicism. In Germany, Martin Luther’s heresy against Catholic dogma was seen as a threat to the Holy Roman Empire’s political authorities. He was called to stand before the Diet (Assembly) of Worms in 1521 and recant. When he declared his freedom of conscience it changed the direction of Western Civilization, slowly but surely, in the direction of religious liberty. Commanded to repudiate his writings, he stood against an array of powerful clergy and statesmen asserting he could not go against his conscience. The official transcript quotes him as saying:

Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason (I do not accept the authority of popes and councils because they have contradicted each other), my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. So help me God. Amen.

In Luther’s collected works his closing words come down to us most famously as, “Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.” Nothing like this, a declaration of freedom of conscience, had ever been said before.

You can’t leave a discussion of Christianity and tyranny in the Middle Ages without addressing the case of Michael Servetus. He was burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553. Supposedly this was John Calvin’s doing, but it was the Geneva city council that condemned him for heresy and called for his execution. Calvin agreed, but tried to have him executed by sword rather than burning at the stake, a more merciful death. The council refused and Servetus was executed. He was a wanted man all over Europe, so this would have happened no matter where he went. Denying the Trinity and the incarnation of Christ were capital offenses throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. To make Calvin the bad guy is disingenuous because he couldn’t have saved his life even if he wanted to.

Moving forward to the 17th century we see progress for religious liberty. Puritans like Oliver Cromwell proclaimed freedom of conscience, although not quite up to modern standards. After his reign ended in 1660, Catholic King Charles II did the same, again not as we would understand it, but this was unique in the world of that time. Especially important for religious liberty is the development of the rule of law in England, starting with Alfred the Great in the 9th century. In 1215 Magna Carta was passed which started the process of taking absolute power away from kings. It was the Glorious Revolution in 1688 that cemented the idea in Western civilization. The 17th century also saw Puritans, called dissenters, flee England for the New World which was instrumental in starting what eventually would become America. Speaking of the rule of law and America, I will mention the Salem Witch trials (June 1692–May 1693) in passing because skeptic and Christian both use it as a cudgel to try to discredit theocracy. In fact, in due course the rule of law in this Puritan community worked to finally discredit the injustice and hysteria just as it was supposed to, the fruit of almost 800 years of English history.

Theocracy is Inescapable Because Neutrality Is Impossible
Skeptics mock the “dark ages” of religious persecution and blame it on Christianity, specifically “theocracy.” Handmaiden’s Tale is only the most ridiculous expression of something even most Christians believe, that the rule of Christianity and God’s law is inherently tyrannical. Self-righteous censorious Christians can unfortunately give some credibility to that slander, but standing for God’s law will never be easy in a fallen world. Unfortunately, the answer for skeptic and Christian secularists alike is the rule of secularism, a truly 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.”

That this is now denied across the ideological and religious spectrum, and secularism unquestioned dogma, goes back 300 years to the developing Enlightenment, so called, in Western culture. Initially it was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutrality assumes that 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.

Fortunately, in Western history we have two experiments in government by which we can see the religious/secular contrast, the American and French Revolutions. The former was drenched in Protestant biblical Christianity, and the latter in hostile anti-religious secularism. The results speak for themselves. However, the proponents of secularism will tell us the radical nature of the French experiment isn’t typical but extreme, and secularism is able to give us a kinder and gentler non-religious public square. The problem with such an understanding of secularism is that in practice it can never hold up. The West is a perfect example. As long as Christianity as a cultural force endured, the religious tendencies of secularism were held at bay, but as soon as Christianity was completely dethroned, we see the true nature of secularism. What do I mean by this?

R.J. Rushdoony wrote a book in 1959 called, By What Standard? The title says it all: there must be a standard, whether for personal or societal morality. The foundation of a nation’s laws, and what is considered right or wrong, good or evil, legal or not, must be based on some kind of standard. For the Christian nation, that standard is God’s law in biblical revelation, for the secular nation that standard is human reason. The history of philosophy tells us that developing a moral standard, personally or societally, without the revelation of God is a slippery thing. Ultimately the question must always be asked, says who? Somebody must have the last say, and the two revolutions tell us unequivocally that will be either God in Scripture or man and his reason. Secularism will always end in tyranny, and as such is a perversion of true theocracy. We must educate fellow Christians that this is biblical truth.

America’s Secular Founding?
Secularists will argue that this is a false choice. Christians and conservatives in the mold of Larry Arnn believe natural law is sufficient to bring Christians and heathens together in agreeable harmony about what is right or wrong in a society. I ask a simple question: natural law based on what? Post WWII conservatives like Arnn seem to miss this point thinking that America’s Declaration of Independence is an example of a kind of secular founding of a country. It most certainly is not! Even those who argue that America’s founding was Christian believe because of the modern changed religious demographics of America, a neutral secular pluralism is required, but secular pluralism has failed, and we can’t tweak it to success. Natural Law must come from somewhere, be based on something.

For most of my adult Christian and conservative life, north of 40 years, I had no biblical categories for a Christian nation. Like all Christians I longed for more Christian influence in culture and politics but had no idea how that would happen. I had never thought through my own Christian political philosophy, but my latest book was an opportunity to do that. As I discuss there, we have an argument today over the interpretation of America’s founding. Was it Christian, was it secular, or was it something in between. The Marxists tell us it was fundamentally evil, while all normal Americans believe it was fundamentally good. Unfortunately, much scholarship in the 20th century bought into the secular founding myth, including Christian scholars. Mark David Hall in Did America Have a Christian Founding? dismantles that contention, but shows even respected Christian historians like Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden claim America’s Founders were primarily Deists and Unitarians and “not in any traditional sense Christian.” As I argued, none of America’s most famous founders were doctrinaire Deists, and the rest were in fact orthodox Christians. Hall contends only one, Ethan Allen, could be considered such a Deist.

The conservative movement since its inception in the 1950s with William F. Buckley’s National Review, has had an inter-conservative squabble between those who believe America’s founding was secular, and those who believe it was Christian. A good example is an article in American Greatness by

Edward J. Erler. He writes about Harry Jaffa and Willmoore Kendall, and this paragraph makes clear Erler falls into the secular trap. Speaking of the Mayflower Compact, he says

What was its attraction for Kendall? It was pre-Locke—although that didn’t preclude it having “Lockean” elements—it didn’t mention equality, and it did, albeit in passing, make a bow to Christianity, whereas the Declaration’s “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” seemed to make a secular reference to Divine Providence.

Except it doesn’t. Whatever Jefferson’s personal religious beliefs, he lived in an America that was 98 percent Protestant. He believed when he wrote this, and everyone who read it did as well, that this God of nature was the God of the Old and New Testaments. It wasn’t some far off clockmaker God who made and let nature take its course, but the providentially intervening God who ordains history. Read any founding documents or public proclamations and that becomes abundantly clear. At the Constitutional convention, supposed Diest Benjamin Franklin 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.

Liberty Depends on Christianity
This is the fundamental fact of human political existence that secular conservatives and Christians miss, and the founders understood. It seems obvious to me, but it is not obvious to many brilliant people who should know better. The Puritans gave us the Great awakening which had a profound influence on America’s founding. America’s thirteen colonies were a geographical amalgam of Congregational (democratic), Presbyterian (oligarchical), and Anglican (monarchical) peoples who came to America to run their own lives with limited oversite from government. The Atlantic Ocean made that necessity into a compelling reason to break the bonds with their mother country, but it was Christianity alone that provided the necessary and sufficient conditions for liberty, while the Enlightenment without Christianity led to the French Revolution and disaster.

We’ve also seen over time that as Christianity’s influence in the West declined, secularism become increasingly dogmatic and tyrannical. In the 21st century West we have the theocracy of woke. R.C. Sproul said that “the inevitable omega point of secularism” is statism. And the state, every state, has some ultimate moral standard upon which to base its laws. Either that will be Christianity which gives us the limited state of America’s founding, or without Christianity the unlimited tyrannical state. Here is my claim, and one which every Christian should agree with but unfortunately won’t: secularism can never give us liberty and a limited state. The state (i.e., nation), any state and every state, must be under God, the God of the Old and New Testaments, under King Jesus, if they are to recognize their boundaries.

Because of the Great Commission (Matt. 28), and Christ bringing God’s kingdom to push back sin and the fall, every discipled nation will be a Christian nation. All Christians, it seems, want Christianity to influence government and laws, but they won’t go all the way and declare that the nation should officially be proclaimed a Christian nation. If we want liberty and justice for all, that is our only option.

 

The Therapeutic Nation: It’s All About Parents

The Therapeutic Nation: It’s All About Parents

Aug 21, 2024 | Parents and Family

I promote my books as much as I can because I’m a nobody with no platform to speak of, so if I don’t do it, no one else will. Yes, I know, ontologically before God I am not a “nobody,” but you know what I mean.  Getting attention without “a name” isn’t easy. I feel like the bum in front of the luxury hotel rattling a tin cup for pennies, while the Big Shot who everyone looks at pulls up in a Rolls Royce. And people are bombarded by a zillion things today that vie for their attention, and sadly fewer people read books than ever before. That alone makes me despair for civilization, but I also pray for a revival of book reading to add to a revival of the Holy Spirit transforming lives. If vinyl albums can make a comeback, so can books.

I say all that to plug my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent. It wasn’t a terrible rookie contribution to the Christian book market, and the message is more relevant than ever. The subtitle makes the point of this post: How to build an enduring faith in you and your children. Christian parents think this is more difficult than ever given the state of our world and culture, but I disagree. The reason is because of Parents, both for good and bad. The first section of the book, the first two chapters, is the title of this post, it’s all about parents.

 

I was thinking of my book as I recently listened to this conversation of Al Mohler with Abigail Shrier about her new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. What Philip Reiff called The Triumph of the Therapeutic in 1966 has become a contagion in 2024. Navel gazing has turned into an art form, encouraging a search for the authentic self that destroys the self. We’ve reached the critical mass of this triumph because we’re living with the generational consequences of what Reiff wrote about almost 60 years ago. Parents who grew up in the 60s and 70s (boomers) raised therapeutic children, who in turn raised their children (generation X) the same way, who did the same with their children (Millennials), who have given us the basket case generation Z. As God said through Moses, God punishes “the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate” him. This isn’t God being a big meany; it’s just a generational sociological fact.

As I was listening to Mohler and Shrier, I couldn’t help thinking, how stupid are those parents! But as I said, this is the result of generations of children raised primarily by parents who swim in a secular irreligious therapeutic culture where self is God. Of course such parents will raise basket cases who find life inscrutable and impossible to deal with. With such raw material, the left has an easy job of brainwashing today’s college students; stupid parents raise stupid children. In biblical terms, fools raise fools.

Often when I encounter children or teenagers, or even adults, however they act, good or bad, I automatically think it is likely a reflection of their parents and how they were raised. Which always reminds me of something my mother told me when I was young. The simple folk wisdom of my Italian from‑the‑ old‑country grandfather. He used to tell my mother if she misbehaved when she went into town, people wouldn’t think she was a bad little girl; rather, they would think what rotten parents she has! This problem of raising therapeutic children is certainly a secular issue, prevalent in families in which God is invisible, but Christian parents are not immune. Culture’s influence, any culture, is impossible to escape, and unfortunately Christians are as susceptible to the therapeutic mindset as their irreligious neighbors. As my grandfather knew, it’s all about parents.

Having said that, not all children raised by fools will not end up living their entire life like fools. God is doing a great work in our time, and many of these will be saved and brought into their right mind. However this fundamental fact about the nature of reality, that parents have the greatest influence on their children’s development, means the most important cultural battle is in the home. Not only in how we raise the children God gives us, but in having more children. Secular people have fewer children than religious people, and Christian families should have more than they currently do. God’s command to be fruitful and multiply was never abrogated. We need to outbreed the enemy!

Do Parents Bear Ultimate Responsibility for their Children?
Given the insecurity many Christian parents feel about their own children and raising them successfully in the faith, this is a question that needs to be addressed. I found as I began promoting my book the contention, it’s “all about parents,” was for some “controversial.” Normally the knee jerk reaction was, “So you think you can guarantee how your children turn out?” The question reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of God’s created reality, fallen though it is, and our place in it.

First, the most obvious thing that needs to be said that shouldn’t need to be said: We can’t guarantee anything and are in control of nothing. And these facts of existence apply not only to raising children, but in all of life. That human beings have ever thought guarantees and control are possibilities is a reflection of sin and the distorted hubris that comes from it. Life, however, is not endless uncertainty because God decided we needed some semblance of predictability for healthy, flourishing lives. Raising children is like anything else in life

We live in a cause and effect universe; God made it that way. We can have a reasonable expectation that if we do X, then Y should result. This expectation can be in raising children in the faith, tending a garden, building a house, practice honing an art or craft, building a business, getting a degree, anything human beings do. Can we be absolutely certain of or guarantee results, or that we are in control of the results? Of course not! But to say that because of this it follows that we can’t then have a reasonable expectation of the results, or be confident that we can produce results is, well, unreasonable. And unbiblical.

In philosophical terms, God is the primary cause of all things, while human beings are the secondary cause. Both causes are required because that’s the way reality works. Man gets this backward when he thinks that secondary causes, us, don’t require a primary cause, God. It’s the same in the “natural” world, where people think trees, for example, grow because of dirt and air and water and sun. They do, of course, but without God as the primary cause of trees, there would be no trees! Yet the trees must be watered, and human decision and agency to make sure the watering gets done.

Back to children. When we hear statistics about children who abandon their faith, we tend to see parents as bystanders and victims of social forces beyond their control. That’s simply not true. Sociologist Christian Smith in his books Soul Searching and Souls in Transition found that the most important factor in a young person keeping their faith into adulthood was their parents. Peter Berger, writing 40 years before Smith, states that, “In the sphere of the family and of social relationships closely linked to it, religion continues to have considerable ‘reality potential,’ that is, continues to be relevant in terms of the motives and self‑interpretations of people in this sphere of everyday social activity.” Berger, a sociologist, knows what 19th century Princeton theologian Charles Hodge knew about the centrality of the family: “The character of the Church and of the state depends on the character of the family. If religion dies out in the family, it cannot elsewhere be maintained.” As important as extended family and the Church are to the faith of young people, nothing comes close to the influence of parents, for good or ill.

Parental influence is not only a sociological fact but a biblical reality. It is the way God made things. In the Old Testament we see that God’s calling is generational. In other words, when God called Abram, he promised that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him. We live in a hyper‑individualized culture that sees people as autonomous, independent organisms with barely a connection to that which gave them life, as if tree branches have no connection to the tree. In Scripture, by contrast, the family is the central medium for the transmission of the Faith. Children are never treated as aliens to the covenant, but rather were bound up in it. Moses gets at the centrality of the family to Faith, and Faith to the family, in Deuteronomy. 29:29:

The secret things belong to the Lord our God; but the things revealed belong to us and our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

We read of the familial nature of Faith in the New Testament as well. In Acts 16, Paul and Silas found themselves severely flogged and in prison for bringing the Kingdom of God to Philippi. At about midnight, they were praying and singing hymns to God (what else would you do if you were beaten, bleeding, in pain, feet in stocks, and in prison). When a violent earthquake shook the ground, all the prison doors flew open, and everybody’s chains came loose. The guard was ready to kill himself when Paul stopped him because no one had escaped. The man, trembling and in great fear, pleaded with Paul and Silas, “What must I do to be saved?” Notice:

31 They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” 32 Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. 33 At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized. 34 The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household.

Children are assumed just by their birth to be part of God’s plan, and that did not change after the resurrection of Christ.

Lastly, Solomon in Psalm 127 famously says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.” This is absolutely true. But, if we build a crappy house that is blown over at the mildest spring zephyr is that the Lord’s fault? Nobody would say it is. If our children turn out to be apostate heathens, do we as parents not bear some of the responsibility? Of course we do. The issue isn’t to rub it in and make those parents feel guilty, but we all in life have to take responsibility. And knowing what to do and not do helps Christian parents build solid houses that endure for generations.

Raising Children Differently in a Secular Age
This was the reason I wrote the book. Many Christian parents don’t understand that living in a secular age means we have to raise our children in the faith in light of that fact. Just taking our children to church and Sunday school, reading the Bible and praying with them is not enough. That is the reason the second section of the book is, It’s All About Truth. Because of where we were in our lives at the time when our kids were younger, I rarely did family devotions and Bible reading with them. I would pray with them before bed sometimes, but my wife did that more often than I did. I was just not very good at that, and looking back, it bums me out. I told that to my daughter one day, how bad I was at being spiritual leader dad, and her reply was, “Well, daddy, at least you taught us Christianity is the truth.” I guess there is that!

This relates to one of the great moments of my life, and in saying that I do not exaggerate. One Sunday on our way home from church, I was doing my typical lecturing on various and sundry topics. Our youngest, a son, maybe seven or eight at the time, said something with not a little annoyance like, “Why do you always have to lecture us, Dad?” I was taken aback a little when our daughter came to the rescue, “Because, Dominic, daddy is always teaching.” My heart melted—truly one of the great compliments of my life. After all, this is one of the primary reasons I exist: the profound responsibility to raise our children before God. And I would like to suggest this can be done well or done poorly. Who would disagree? The question is, what does raising our children well or poorly in our current historical and cultural context mean.

It starts with truth. I was motivated to write the book because of a young lady who grew up in a Christian home, very involved in her church, went away to college and promptly became an agnostic. It angered me because I thought that would never happen to my children. As I said, some people think that’s arrogant or naïve, but it is neither. As I also said, we live in a cause and effect universe, and we can have a reasonable expectation of results in light of our current cultural challenges. I taught my children from their earliest days that Christianity is the truth, and that is the only reason we believe it. The truth of Christianity, and the lies of every other view non-Christian view of reality did not seem to be part of this young woman’s upbringing because in her story of leaving the faith the truth of Christianity, or not, never seemed to be a consideration. That, I believe, is a parental dereliction of duty in the 21st century post-Christian secular West.

The reason this is so important should be self-evident. If our children believe, have been persuaded and taught, Christianity is the truth, and nothing else is, they are far less likely to abandon it. If they do, if they go through a period of rebellion, chances are they will know it’s rebellion and not believe Christianity has been discredited as a lie. This is simple logic. They must be taught and understand the law of non-contradiction, that A cannot be non-A, so only one faith, religion, worldview is true, and every other one is a lie. If we’ve taught them this, that Christianity is true, what we believe and why we believe it, doggedly, persistently, annoyingly if necessary, I am confident they will never abandon their faith. Who is going to reject what they believe in their hearts and minds is the truth? Nobody!

You can read my book to find out some of the ways I did that with our children.

 

 

A Christian Prince: Nayib Bukele

A Christian Prince: Nayib Bukele

Aug 14, 2024 | Politics & Government

That name is likely not familiar to you, as it wasn’t to me until recently. He is the President of El Salvador. I knew something of El Salvador’s turnaround over the last five years, but knew few details, or how drastic it has been. I also knew nothing about the man who led the effort. He came to my full attention recently when I listened to his interview with Tucker Carlson. He was initially elected president in June of 2019 when El Salvador was one of the most violent countries on earth with nearly 110 homicides per 100,000 people. Compare that to today when the country has just 2.3, making it safer than the United States and Canada. This piece at IM—1776.com called, “Bukele’s War for Peace” gets into the details of how they accomplished it.

This transformation reminded me of Trump’s victory over ISIS. Remember during the Obama years when beheadings and torture were commonplace, sickening videos popping up all the time. During the campaign Trump said beating ISIS would be easy, and it would happen very quickly. Obama, by contrast, had said the war against ISIS and terrorism would be a long slog, a generational battle, and implied it would go on for the foreseeable future and there was nothing we could do to change that. This is typical of liberals and leftists, their weakness and compromise with evil always leads to more evil, which always means not punishing evildoers. We see this in American blue cities, and especially since the current radical leftist regime took power in 2021. As a Christian, Bukele took seriously Paul’s charge in Romans 13, that as a ruler he is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on those who do evil. His first priority was peace, and wrath is how he would make it happen.

What stood out to me, though, wasn’t his strategy to punish violent criminals, the gangs that controlled the country. Rather, one of his primary strategies for success was to pray to God for Wisdom. When Tucker asks him how they did it, how they accomplished something nobody thought they could, including against the leftists ruling the country at the time that tried to stop him, he gave two reasons. One was the “official” reason, the strategies and tactics to defeat criminal gangs and restore peace. When Tucker asked him about the other reason, he said, “It was a miracle.” Then he explains as the gangs fought back and things started looking bad, his government had meetings, and they prayed. Not just once, but several times, and God gave them the victory. He says El Salvador is a secular country, but in fact he accomplished job one of a Christian prince and government, one ruled by God’s law: peace. In the article I linked to above we learn that El Salvador, contrary to Bukele, is de facto a Christian Country:

It is the most religious population on earth, dominated by evangelicals, mostly Pentecostals, and they responded strongly to his message of carrying out a holy war against the satanic gangs. Even if we had a Bukele, it is questionable whether our weak, watered-down, secular first-world societies would stick with him and back him the way Salvadorans have consistently done with Bukele, returning him to office this Sunday with nearly 90% of the vote.

Can you imagine, almost 90% of the country voted for success and peace, not failure. America, on the other hand, has probably 40% of the voting public who continue to vote for failure. If you look at blue states and cities, what do you see? A populace that continues to vote for Democrats who continue to bring misery and suffering to the population. It makes no sense, but when does evil ever make sense.

This is why every morning I pray the Four R’s for America: revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation. The re-founding of America as the Christian nation it was founded to be is a gospel, Holy Spirit led project. The founders of America believed it was God’s providence alone that would give them the victory over the British. I look at the print of Washington on his knees at Valley Forge in my office as I pray. All of the founders understood and believed what  the supposed Deist Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention:

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.

He couldn’t say it any better for all those today who war against the ever present threat of Babel in our time. Bukele understood this, and so must we.

The Case Against Secularism
The reason I’m writing about this isn’t because of the man who engineered a victory over evil in his country, but because as Christians we need to understand it is specifically Christianity that made it possible, not secularism. This is a difficult thing for most Christians to understand and embrace, let alone those who don’t proclaim the name of Jesus. Secularism is the enemy, full stop. The entire history of secularism, the fruit of its Enlightenment inspiration is a lie. It may not seem like it, but secularism is dead. It has been weighed on the scales and found wanting, only most Westerners and Americans haven’t realized it yet. Secularism promised everything but delivered nothing but misery and despair. The disaster of secularism was inevitable because it is based on faulty premises and an inaccurate understanding of reality. In other words, it’s all a lie, and in the end lies will be revealed for what they are, lies. Truth will always win, sooner or later, because of the One who is the Truth.

Initially Secularism was a response to the Wars of Religion in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religion, specifically Christianity, was seen to have dangerous tendencies to promote violence, so in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers began the slow process of pushing Christianity to the periphery of Western culture. In this telling, Christianity is non-rational, mythological, and prone to violence. Secularism came to the rescue. Embedded in this view of secularism is an assumption we’ll call the myth of neutrality, a metaphorically naked public square. Neutral comes from the Latin “neuter” meaning “neither one nor the other,” so it’s come to mean unbiased which it most certainly is not. In this illusory “neutral” place, secularism is the unbiased referee calling balls and strikes without that pesky Christianity getting involved and inevitably leading to theocracy and intolerance, and thus violence.

Imagine this public square as a big banquet table, the place where citizens get together to discuss how we as a people and nation should be governed. Every place setting has one of those little cards you see at weddings with names on it to indicate who is to sit where, except at this table the cards read religions. So at one setting is Buddhism, at another Hinduism, at another atheism, and so on, and there are many chairs. Out of the dozens of settings is a place for Christianity, and for many Christians they are grateful to even have a seat at the table at all. It feels like, rather, that we’ve been relegated to the kids’ table. This setting is seen by Christians, as well as the dominant secular culture, as a healthy pluralism where everyone has an equal chance to make their case. This all assumes the myth is truth, secular neutrality, and that Christianity is happy to at least have a seat at the table.

If this myth had been accepted in the 18th century, there would never have been an America. Most Christians, let alone, most Americans, have no idea how critically important Christianity was to the founding of America. In fact, if there was no Christianity there would have been no America. Read the primary sources if you don’t believe me. The secular “scholars” have for decades claimed America was solely an Enlightenment project. It was not. This claim is pure bias or ignorance, or a combination of the two. My claim, by contrast, is that if America is to be re-founded, it will be because of Christianity and Christians taking responsibility to make that happen. What stands in our way is the enemy, secularism.

It is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After almost 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point. Their description of secularism is helpful:

Western culture is not pagan, nor is it Christian. It has been secularized. Western man has “come of age,” passing through the stages of mythology, theology, and metaphysics, reaching the maturity of science. The totem pole has yielded to the temple which in turn has given way to the acme of human progress, the laboratory. . . . Resistance to Christianity comes not from the deposed priests of Isis but from the guns of secularism. The Christian task (more specifically, the rational apologetics task) in the modern epoch is not so much to produce a new Summa Contra Gentiles (An apologetics work of Thomas Aquinas to non-Christians) as it is to produce a Summa Contra Secularisma.

The authors further state the obvious:

The impact of secularism . . . has been pervasive and cataclysmic, shaking the foundations of the value structures of Western civilization. The Judeo-Christian consensus is no more; it has lost its place as the dominant shaping force of cultural ethics. . . . Sooner or later the vacuum (the rejection of theology in the West) will be filled, and if it cannot be filled by the transcendent, then it will be filled by the immanent. The force that floods into such vacuums is statism, the inevitable omega point of secularism.

I could not agree with this more, the consequences becoming clearer with every passing year.

The Necessity of Christian Rulers and a Christian Nation
I can’t make this case fully in this short space, but I made it more fully in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. First I will have to assert that nations are a biblical concept, and that God deals with nations as ethical entities who can be judged or rewarded based on their obedience to His law and their faithfulness, or not, to Christ. Next I will assert and try to prove, briefly, that God’s law is as applicable today for the nations as it was to Israel. The mode of application is different post Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, because no nation is ancient Israel. And as I lay out in the book, we live with over a thousand years of the concept of common law and case law that started with King Alfred the Great in England in the 9th century. Alfred based his law on the Ten Commandments, and the freedom and liberty assumed in God’s law was painstakingly worked out in England until fulfilled most fully in the American experiment.

As Doug Wilson says in his latest book, Mere Christendom, “Limited government is the theopolitical genius of Christianity.” The point of God’s law, and the American experience in self-government, is that selves should be able to govern themselves! Government exists for very limited means, as the Founders argued, and one of those limited means is to punish evildoers. This responsibility as given to us by revelation in God’s word is why Nayib Bukele is a Christian prince, a ruler who takes his God-given responsibilities seriously. If you listen to the interview with Tucker, listen to him share what the transformation has done for his country. People who fled for their lives are now returning home to live among their own people and culture in peace. It is now, as he says, the safest country in the Western hemisphere. I don’t know his political philosophy beyond this, but creating a safe environment for his people is job one of the Christian ruler.

Which brings me to God’s law proper. It’s amazing to me that whenever God’s law is brought up as a requirement for a Christian nation, heathens and Christians alike run to the charge of . . . . theocracy! It’s a stupendously stupid charge because what they are saying is that God’s law is inherently tyrannical. If what Bukele did in El Salvadore is tyrannical, then yes, it is tyrannical. But in fact, what God’s law is, is the ground of liberty and freedom in a society. The point of law, it’s purpose, is not to force people to do or think anything (something progressives and leftists believe), but to keep people from doing evil, or things that will destroy the peace of a society. God’s law is the foundation for true human flourishing because God only blesses righteousness, doing right, not doing wrong or evil. So James tells us, twice (1:25 and 2:12), that God’s perfect law gives freedom. It is the guiderail within which people can live fully human lives. I say this a lot, but since secularism gained all the cultural power in America and shoved Christianity into the closet, people have become generally more miserable. That suicide rates, anxiety and depression, alcohol and drug abuse are all rampant proves the point; without Christ and God’s law, this is what you get.

Most importantly, and what allows peace, or in Hebrew, Shalom, is love, because love is the fulfillment of the law. In fact we can say that theonomy is love in practice on a societal level. Paul confirms this in Romans 13 when he says that “love is the fulfillment of the law.” I didn’t make this up. Paul got his teaching on love from Jesus who when asked which is the greatest commandment in the law summed it up as loving God, your neighbor, and yourself, the latter commandment he took from Leviticus 19:18. This kind of love, as with all love, can be hard, but it is necessary, tough love, without which a society will devolve into chaos and anarchy. Real love, biblical love, Godly love has nothing to do with feelings, least of all with Romance, but with action, righteousness, and justice.

A last point. A Christian nation isn’t a totalitarian nation, by definition it can’t be because in a Christian nation ruled by God’s law liberty is maximized for its in habitants. Self-government, and self-rule, requires a people not enslaved to their own lusts, wants, and desires, but a righteous people able to, well, govern themselves. Thus a Christian nation is a gospel centered nation, and the great need of the hour is what I call the Four Rs, and which I pray for every day: revival, renewal, restoration, and reformation.

 

Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Plausibility Structures and the Importance of Jordan Peterson

Aug 7, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

Since I became active on Twitter earlier this year, mainly to promote my new book and work, I’ve noticed that Christians can be narrow minded and dogmatic. And lest you think I’m bagging on my fellow Christians, these less than appealing traits come naturally to sinners regardless of what they believe. Such myopia, the inability to see beyond their own certitude, is why I often see people saying that Peterson is not an orthodox Bible-believing Christian, therefore he’s either dangerous or not worth listening to. I could not disagree more. I believe God is using him as an important piece of the puzzle to re-Christianize America and the West. I believe this, strongly, because of a concept most Christians have never heard of; plausibility structures. This post will be a short primer on the importance of this concept for our specific time in history, living in what Aaron Renn calls “negative world,” and the importance of Jordan Peterson.

In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I explore plausibility structures in some detail, which is the idea of the reality generating mechanism of a culture. The term was coined by sociologist Peter Berger in his books, The Social Construction of Realty (with Thomas Luckman) and The Sacred Canopy. As a sociological construct (i.e., what it means to live with and among human beings and the culture and meanings they create), it simply means what seems true to us, and the social structures that contribute to that seeming.

A simple example is that for secular people God seems no more real than Santa Clause. Whether God is real, is not the point; what seems real is. Society creates the plausibility structures that contribute to God being plausible to us, or not. These structures are built into our educational systems, media, entertainment, etc. They are the secular air we breathe, and they affect us in ways big and small without our being aware of it. Christians are not immune to it either. In the West, God is persona non‑grata; if he exists at all he is merely a personal preference. I am convinced most people reject Christianity or never entertain it, because it just doesn’t seem real to them. For most, whether it is true or not is beside the point.

The sociology of knowledge is the study of how a life lived among persons in society affects their perception of reality, the “seemingness” of it. Reality isn’t just there; in some sense it is socially constructed, and the plausibility of our faith to us is directly related to the idea of a socially constructed reality. Christians affirm objective reality, that meaning inheres in things apart from our perceptions or experiences of them. Reality, however, is mediated to us in a variety of ways, through our senses, our psychology, our upbringing, interactions with other people, and society itself. This mediation means that although we affirm that objective reality exists, it must be interpreted by us, to us, and for us. Pure human objectivity does not, and cannot exist. Yet most human beings take reality for granted, as if their view of it was perfectly objective, no interpretation needed. All the while they are ignorant that interpretation is not an option; it is going on all the time whether they acknowledge it or not.

Secularism: There is No Such Thing as an Unbeliever
Western post-Christian secular culture no longer shares our Christian presuppositions. God, it is asserted and assumed, is not part of reality in any objective sense. He is wholly subjective, likely a projection of our wishful thinking, a purely personal phenomenon, and as such His existence has no bearing on society.  This perspective, however, starts with the secular world’s understanding of faith.

Secular cultural messaging denies that irreligious people need faith because faith is defined as something required only by religious people. Secular, non‑religious people, however, don’t embrace something called unbelief, but rather some other faith. All people live by faith, but we live in a culture that defines objectivity in a way that prejudices it against religious belief. Scientists and those who live by its light, we are told, can be purely objective, while religious folks by definition can’t be. This “objectivity double standard” allows the culture to define objective reality against us because in this view religious people can’t be objective. Secular people technically may not be “religious” in that they don’t go to church, but they still have a worldview based on faith commitments, which is why there is no such thing as an unbeliever. Finite creatures of limited knowledge can only exist by faith, by trusting the knowledge or expertise or insights or authority of others.

Secular irreligious people don’t know this, and many Christians unfortunately don’t know it either. To the secular, the Christian faith is less believable, less credible, than the secular faith they embrace which seems more credible, more plausible. This faith takes many forms, be it agnosticism, atheism, or an indifference to the claims of Christ, but it is faith, a trust in something, nonetheless. It seems more plausible to such people that God is either not worth pursuing, or even if He’s there it doesn’t much matter, or that any meaning to be had is in this life alone. None of this is merely rational or logical, and I would argue it rarely is. What they believe has more to do with what seems real to them than what is actually real. Society and culture in many ways determine this.

The Social Construction of Reality
In order to work under the rubric of “science,” sociologists have to bracket questions of truth or ultimate meaning. So when they say that reality is a social construction, they are not saying that it is only a social construction. What they are saying is that human beings interpret reality, give meaning to it, in social settings, and that social settings in turn affect that meaning. In the words of Berger and Luckmann:

Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. As sociologists we take this reality as the object of our analysis.

The key phrase here is “reality interpreted.” Reality isn’t self‑interpreting. Looking at the world through our eyes is not unlike how we experience a movie or TV show. The director constructs a reality, i.e., meaning, for us through various mechanisms at his or her disposal, and they are all deliberately, painstakingly used. After laying out an extensive list of what goes into making these virtual fictional worlds meaningful for us, Ted Turnau in his book Poplogetics says:

Each of these techniques adds meaning and texture for the imaginative landscape projected by the film, a world that the filmmaker constructs for our imagination.

Our world, however, is inundated with far more meaning than any film; it’s a veritable Niagara Falls of significance. And it doesn’t take a director to manipulate sound, light, or camera angles; we just have to wake up in the morning. The meaning exists out there, and we hunger for it as we hunger for stories told to entertain us.

Reality, however, isn’t merely something socially determined for us. The idea of the realness of reality, if you will, its objective nature, is both biblical and classical. In the Bible this is assumed from beginning to end, and Plato and Aristotle believed and argued that things have meaning in and of themselves apart from our subjective experience of them. The only other view of meaning, the default of most in the West, is that we are sovereign meaning creators because reality is what we make of it. Ernst Becker, a cultural anthropologist writing in the 60s and 70s, in his book the Structure of Evil writes that there was a “problem of creating meaning,” and that man is “the meaning creating animal.” His fundamental assumption about the nature of reality was that “man maximizes his Being by creating rich, deep, and original human meanings.” Even though in some sense we do create meaning, the difference for the Christian is that meaning is primarily there to be discovered. Our attempt to interpret it is to get as close as we can to the thing that is actually there, but as finite limited creatures we will always be one step away.

Whose Interpretation?
Even though as Christians we affirm objective reality, our everyday existence in the world is a constant encounter with a plethora of circumstances and experiences that must be, in one way or another, interpreted and attached with meaning. Berger and Luckman use the term, “Subjectively meaningful.” This reality is meaningful to us, and as such it must form some kind of “coherent world”; it must be comprehensible, it must make sense to us.

Everything, however, turns on the interpretation, which is “the action of explaining the meaning of something.” Interpretation, then, is where the true battle for the soul of Western civilization lies. Who gets to interpret reality? It is either God in Christ in Scripture, or secularism by default. The biggest challenge for the rise of a new Christendom is secular culture. As Berger points out in The Sacred Canopy:

One of the most obvious ways in which secularization has affected the man in the street is as a “crisis of credibility” in religion. Put differently, secularization has resulted in a widespread collapse of the plausibility of traditional religious definitions of reality.

And he wrote that in 1967! It wasn’t too many years prior that a universe without God would have been inconceivable for average Americans. Among Western society’s cultural elites after the Enlightenment it was totally conceivable, and it only broke out into the wider culture with a bang in the 1960s. Sociology helps us to understand how wider social currents, like secularization, get internalized into individuals.

The interpretation process and how human beings derive meaning from the world is interactive. Berger and Luckman:

It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity.

They call it a paradox that human beings construct a world that they “then experience as something other than a human product.” At first blush, concepts like “humanly produced, constructed objectivity” may appear arcane, but it is important for this discussion and Christianity’s influence in our secular world. This “seeming” process happens because all of us interact socially. In producing a world in our perceptions we externalize it, then interacting with it we objectify it, and finally we internalize it as “reality.” In effect our perceptions become reality for us, whether they reflect objective reality or not. You might want to read that sentence again, and think about it a bit. As Christians it is a good idea in our knowing and what we think we know to exercise some epistemological humility (I Cor. 8:2). I have written about that in detail previously.

Christians Should Not Take “Reality” for Granted: Says Who?
What does all of this have to do with Jordan Peterson? Everything! Reality and how people perceive it is in some way always socially defined. The dialectic process of a world becoming “real” to us is never ending. Christians can never take “reality” for granted because the question is always, “Says who?” That is, who serves as the definers of reality, secular culture or God. In The Sacred Canopy, Berger puts it this way: “The fundamental coerciveness of society lies not in its machineries of social control, but in its power to constitute and impose itself as reality.” The power of this imposition occurs when reality becomes taken for granted. We should never let reality be “taken for granted,” never assume reality is there to be seen for just the way people instinctively think it is. This is where Peterson comes in as a powerful question mark on this secular-taken-for-granted reality people inhabit in the 21st century.

Our Job as Christians battling secularism is to be consistently defining reality biblically. If we don’t, the hostile secular culture will always do the defining, and Christianity will lack a compelling plausibility to most people. The cultural air breathed throughout the West is plausibly secular. It is much easier for most people to believe in an irrelevant God (few are philosophical atheists) than the providential God of Scripture who ordains and defines all things. The challenge for Christians and Christianity at this moment in history, in “negative world,” is that we don’t have any cultural credibility. In fact, as Renn’s phrase implies, the dominant secular culture sees Christianity as positively harmful and dangerous. In this environment it is, practically speaking, extremely difficult to gain cultural traction. Most of us have little culture defining power, except in the very narrow pocket of our personal lives. Then, in God’s providence steps Jordan Peterson, himself a secular, Canadian liberal academic psychologist, and a most unlikely driver of a new Christian cultural consensus.

Too many myopic Christians focus on Peterson’s lack of historical Christian orthodoxy, as if that really matters for the cultural job God has called him to. It doesn’t. It’s almost a sport now, parsing Peterson’s words to see when he’ll finally take the plunge and declare with his mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in his “heart that God raised him from the dead,” so that he will finally be saved (Rom. 10:9). And being a man of many words, it’s a robust sport! It seems The Hound of Heaven is after him, though, given his wife is a convert to Catholicism, and his daughter an outspoken born-again Christian. Not to mention how many people challenge him on his conception of Christianity. But at this point, whatever the form and nature of this conception, his job is much bigger than his own salvation. I know that’s not a very Evangelical thing to say, but it’s true.

 

 

The reason Peterson is so important is because the “conceptual machinery” that elites in a society impose on the masses must be unmasked so that the underlying assumptions are always questioned. The secular culture like a machine grinds its notions, or concepts, into our plausibility field, so to speak, to make reality seem a certain way. This seeming must be questioned. As the popular bumper sticker in the olden days demanded, we must “Question Authority.” We as Christians in a culture hostile to our Faith must always question the authority of the definers: “Says who?” That is Jordan Peterson, and God has given him a huge platform to do that. This short video is a good example of how effectively he does that.

He also has credibility among cultural elites who are not leftists. Not being a run of the mill conservative Evangelical has helped him gain an impressive traction among people who would otherwise not find Christianity plausible at all. I’ve heard quite a few stories of people who have come to Christ because of him, so his lack of orthodoxy hasn’t kept people from being influenced by him to embraced Christ as Lord and Savior. The battlefield in our secular age is immense, and much of it happens, as Burger and Luckman say, on a “pretheoretical level,” that is prior to people even thinking. What Peterson is doing so well is again making the Christian worldview a player on the secular world’s stage, making it plausible for an increasing number of people. That means they will take it more seriously as a possible answer for the crying needs of our time. Secularism is not working, an experiment birthed in the Enlightenment that has proved wanting at every level. Let’s pray for Jordan that he makes it all the way to the only one who can save him from sin and death.