Response Post: Carl Truman and Two Kingdom Pietists

Response Post: Carl Truman and Two Kingdom Pietists

May 28, 2025 | Culture

Sometimes I read something and I just can’t let it go. I have to tell somebody about it and share my reaction. Much of the time it’s my poor long suffering wife, and since I got active on Twitter early last year, that allows me an outlet, but you have to be pithy there, and I’m not really good at pithy. As a Christian in a dominant secular culture, I’m in the minority so there’s plenty to react to. But within Christian circles, I’m in the minority of the minority of the minority, and maybe a few more. I’m Reformed in my theological convictions, a Calvinist. Among these, I’m a Presbyterian, thus believe babies should be baptized as covenant children, while not believing baptism saves babies like Lutherans and Catholics do. That’s pretty solid for minority status, but I’m also postmillennial in my eschatological perspective, and you can’t get much more minority than that! So, there’s a lot I run across that drives me nuts, and I just have to get it off my chest. I came across a piece by Carl Truman I have to respond to, so he is going to be the first response-piece victim, so to speak, and a worthy one at that.

He wrote an article last year for First Things called, “How Pop Nietzscheanism Masquerades as Christianity.” How’s that for a provocative title! If you’re not familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche, he was a late 19th century atheist philosopher who declared God is dead, and prophesied the horror of the 20th century wars because of it. Even as an atheist, he knew the moral structure of Western civilization came from Christianity, and even though he despised it, he knew if you cut off the branch from the tree, it will die. Western intellectuals in fact cut down the entire tree! The term Nihilism, often associated with Nietzsche, means nothing, and those who embrace it believe exactly that, nothing. Nobody can consistently live that way, but without God that’s really all you got, nothing. We’ll have to see how Truman creatively weaves this into condemning certain Christians he disagrees with on politics, but I will make the point that whatever he’s trying to do, he fails miserably at it.

I won’t quote the entire piece, but let’s start here. This is enough to get the old Italian blood boiling.

I wrote the piece when Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option was the talk of the town. At that time, the big threat to the faith was the emerging pressure on religious freedom, focused then on the issue of gay marriage. The threat to religious liberty remains and has indeed expanded, but a new one has also emerged: the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same. For want of a better term, it’s a kind of pop Nietzscheanism that uses the idioms of Christianity. It’s understandable why such a thing has emerged. Many Christians think America has been stolen from them. And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. While the left may pose an obvious threat, there is also a more subtle danger in succumbing to the rules of the political game as currently played by both sides.

His first criticism is that this “pop Nietzscheanism,” is “fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same.” For an otherwise intelligent man to say something so inane is   something to behold, but two kingdoms Pietism will do that to a person.

Evangelical Elites’ Problem with Power
Notice the inherent dualism in Truman’s understanding of the world. Simply, dualism is the idea that there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles of reality, and these are mutually exclusive, something on one side of the wall, another thing on the other. Pietism sees a dualistic world of competing forces, spiritual and material, spiritual and sinful. Truman believes there is something called “worldly power,” and clearly “worldly” means not “spiritual” power, which we presume is good. He assumes we agree with him that there is this kind of inherently bad “worldly” form of power, and that those who engage in it are somehow Nietzschean. If we are to have fruitful discussions with anyone about anything, we must define our terms. Assuming the meaning of the terms, and that others agree with you, is a very bad strategy for fruitful discussions. Regarding the word power, Britannica has an excellent definition to help us parse what Truman might mean:

Power, in political science and sociology, the capacity to influence, lead, dominate, or otherwise have an impact on the life and actions of others in society. The concept of power encompasses, but is not limited to, the notion of authority. Unlike authority, which implies legitimacy, power can be exercised illegitimately.

The reason this is so helpful is because power, like most anything else in God’s created order, can be used legitimately, and so is good, or illegitimately and thus bad. What use a thing is put to, and how it is used, determines its goodness or badness. Two kingdom Pietists believe there is something called “worldly power,” which I guess can be legitimately used for “worldly” ends by “worldly” people, but if Christians do the same thing, it’s bad, wrong, and possibly even sinful. It’s hard to tell exactly what Truman means. Power can also be exercised through coercion to exercise control over others, and I think that’s likely what’s lurking in Truman’s mind about those Christians exercising illegitimate “worldly” power. Coercion can also be good or bad depending on the circumstances and people involved.

What frosts me about what Truman is saying is that Christians are not allowed to exercise political power as Christians for Christian ends. That, to him, is apparently “worldly.” What’s even worse is that he accuses such people of being Nietzschean, which means like Nietzsche, they believe they can mold reality to their own wills by the exercise of their sheer, raw power, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “the will to power.” This is where Truman’s dualistic assumptions are most pernicious. He’s accusing fellow Christians of believing their power, their influence, is being exercised apart from God, that these Christians believe by their own power they can usher in the kingdom. Over the years I’ve heard two-kingdom Pietists hurl such accusations, all the while assuming their assessment of “worldly power” is the truth. That is what in logic we call begging the question.

Today that phrase has come to mean, “raise the question,” but it’s critical to be aware of its meaning in logic when we’re assessing people’s assertions. Truman begs the question when he says, “the temptation to combat this by fusing Christianity with worldly forms of power and worldly ways of achieving the same,” because he’s assuming all kinds of things he doesn’t feel the need to prove. That’s what makes it a logical fallacy. If something is a temptation it’s clearly bad. It assumes there is something called “worldly power,” the bad kind, and we guess a good kind of power which he doesn’t define, but we presume it’s spiritual power, the kind that depends on God. Who knows; he never bothers to explain himself.

He gives us a hint as to what he thinks this “worldly power” is:

And the path to political power today is littered with crudity, verbal thuggery, and, whatever the policies at stake, the destruction of any given opponent’s character. While the left may pose an obvious threat, there is also a more subtle danger in succumbing to the rules of the political game as currently played by both sides.

Given he wrote this in the middle of last year’s presidential campaign you know he’s got Donald Trump on the mind, and he is a card carrying member of the NeverTrump cabal. This again begs the question. Are we to believe all Christians do these things? And let’s stipulate that “crudity, verbal thuggery, the destruction of any given opponent’s character” can be in the eye of the beholder. Also in his mind I’m sure anyone associated with Trump is lumped in and likely guilty by association.

The Delusions of Third Wayism and Moral Equivalence
Commenting on these two sentences it is difficult for me not to be verbally incontinent, it’s that bad. Unfortunately, America’s Evangelical establishment, its elite, buy into a moral equivalence between left and right that is so morally obtuse you wonder if these people can think at all. Yet they are intelligent, often brilliant, but intellect has never equaled wisdom.

They also fail to understand in the old phrase, politics ain’t beanbag, and one might say something in the heat of political battle that is less than charitable toward the opponent. Andrew T. Walker captures this mentality well:

Third-wayism in politics is a form of political Gnosticism as it assumes that there is a platonic ideal to politics that does not require engaging the kingdoms of the world as what they fundamentally are: worldly, temporal, & creational ordinances designed for proximate justice.

Christians in the modern world have proved terrible at politics because they live in this idealized platonic world where they believe in some kind of third way that doesn’t exist, and never has.

As for Democrats, I’m not sure exactly when it started, but at some point they became the party of perpetual liars, and their media lackies tagged along. There can be no compromise, no in between, no third way, when you’re dealing with liars. What Jesus said of the Pharisees could be said of Democrats (John 8:44):

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

I will say it bluntly: the Democrats are Satanic. Lying is effectively the language indicating where someone comes from, to which country or nation they belong. As someone who speaks Japanese is likely from Japan, so someone who speaks lies is from hell. I’m not talking about someone who tells a little white lie, or someone who gets caught doing something and lies under pressure, but someone who lies as his “native language.” Lies are the native language of the secular progressive left, a case that is not hard to make, and all Democrats, save possibly a few, are of the secular progressive left.

While all politicians may lie to one degree or another, this didn’t become a political strategy for the Democrats until Barack Obama came on the scene. What happened wasn’t so much about not telling the truth, but crafting a narrative. Whatever was required to drive “the narrative” was fair game, thus truth became optional. How do I know this? The media has always been biased, as I learned when I embraced conservatism as a young Christian in 1980. While the media always feigned objectivity, when Obama came on the scene, “the narrative” became priority number one.

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 had 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. Then when Trump came on the scene, they went from narrative driving to blatant lying. In fact, their hypocrisy was so blatant and in your face, that it was almost impressive. There can be no third way in response to such mendacity.

Do Church Things, The Rest Will Take Care of Itself
This is the basic message from Pietist two kingdom folks like Truman. Since the church is the kingdom of God where His redemptive work happens, everything else is a bit less than important. All Pietists of whatever stripe live in such a bifurcated reality, one branch being the spiritual, the eternal, which is the truly important stuff, and down the other branch everything else. I’ll quote one more paragraph where Truman embodies this mentality, and all Pietistic two kingdom thinkers do so as well:

And yet the sun also rises, to quote Ecclesiastes. Regardless of the political stakes, at ground level the births, marriages, illnesses, and deaths continue. Pastoral ministry goes on, day to day, year to year, whatever the political officer class, right and left, are debating. And so in this context, the Church must continue to do that to which she has been called: proclaim Christ in Word and sacrament. The big problems of life—sin and death—remain, whoever wins the election in November 2024. And so the Church needs to remain faithful to her appointed task and not become simply an arm of those vying for political power.

This doesn’t infuriate me like the previous paragraph, as much as sadden me. To take God’s kingdom redemptive work and truncate it to such a degree that it’s only narrowly applied to the ministry of word and sacrament, as they often say, is tragic. I’ve written in the past that the kingdom of God is not identical to the church, yet most Christians limit God’s kingdom work to the church. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, they think that means the spiritual stuff, things pertaining to salvation and personal holiness. Grubby stuff like politics, that’s most certainly not “spiritual” nor kingdom work. In fact it is both.

We also notice another pernicious distortion in such sloppy thinking. He’s speaking about “the church,” but we’re not quite sure if he means the institution of the church, like a denomination, or individual Christians. He just assumes we know what he means. Clearly he has to mean the latter because no church denomination makes authoritative proclamations as a church body about public policy, and I doubt seriously any denomination has hired lobbyists in DC to push policy. So his target is individual Christians. For Truman, Christians who engage in politics are basically pawns of those greedy for political power, which he seems to infer is a bad thing, or at the last not a “spiritual” thing, as we’ve already discussed.

I wrote here recently about the history of Pietism and how this kind of dualistic thinking came to dominate the Evangelical church over the last several hundred years. Before Pietism, Christians saw God’s kingdom coming in Christ as applying to every square inch of life because declaring Jesus as Lord is an all-encompassing statement, including politics. King Jesus is just that, King of kings and Lord of Lords. I recently learned that when the Messiah was composed by Handel and Charles Jennens, they put The Hallelujah Chorus in the middle, and not the end where I always thought it was. We are so programmed to believe Jesus only really takes charge at his second coming and not his first, that of course Handel would have put the chorus at the end, where it belongs. But until Pietism took over, Christians didn’t think that way. They believed like the Bible teaches, that Christ was coronated as King of kings and Lord of Lords at his ascension to the right hand of God where he now reigns over all things, including all earthly power, and that Christians are his representatives on earth. That makes everything we do spiritual, not just the “spiritual” stuff.

So, contrary to Truman and all two kingdom Pietists, redemption accomplished by Christ in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension is meant to reverse the effects of the fall in every nook and cranny of life. As the great Dutch statesman and theologian Abraham Kuyper famously said,

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!

This is not a theoretical authority, but a real, concrete, authority realized in the nitty gritty of life, be it in politics or anything else. And Christ exercises this authority, like it or not, through his body, the church as his people, not the church as an official institution that ministers word and sacrament. So Carl, you could not be more off base or wrong. Christians should be involved in “vying for political power,” and in our day that would be as part of the Republican Party. Learn it, live it, love it!

 

What and Why Boomers: The Generation Everyone Loves to Hate

What and Why Boomers: The Generation Everyone Loves to Hate

May 21, 2025 | Culture

I was listening to Tucker Carlson interview Tim Dillon, a comedian I’d never heard of. He’s a funny guy, not surprising, but when he and Tucker went on a twelve-and-a-half-minute rant completely trashing boomers it was hilarious. I shared it on Twitter, and someone replied with this:

This is so true (broadly speaking). It’s been a bizarre observation to me how much wisdom people in their 80s and 50s have compared to those in their 60s and 70s. I don’t understand what happened with that generation, but the stereotype is so real. So many are like old children.

Given my handle on Twitter is The Based Boomer and I have a podcast of the same name, I suppose I’m the ideal person to speak to the phenomenon of the horribleness of the baby boomer generation. And from what I can gather, my woeful generation is responsible for every horrible thing that’s happened in the modern world, even, it seems, the stuff that happened before we were born!

There’s the rub at which I have a bit of a problem with the boomer blamers. No generation is born in a vacuum, and each generation is in some sense determined by what came before; they are the recipients of all the historical forces coming before and into which they were born. In fact, I would contend that boomers could no more help who they’ve become than any other generation. This process, a kind of historical determinism, is just baked into the generational cake.

The significance of the baby boom generation is not only their timing in history, but their size. They are a huge generation. Millions of men fought in the war and came home ready to procreate, and they did, thus the boom. As this generation, this demographic wave moved through society and years, they affected everything. It’s the law of big numbers. As consumers what they were interested in, the world became interested in, like it or not. Think of the Beatles and the popular music of the 60s and 70s (the best there has ever been, says this boomer), to fashion, to sex and changing moral standards, the boomers led the way. In the 80s and 90s as they were growing up, careers, raising the perfect children, and real estate became the thing, and as they neared retirement and health challenges increased, the medical industrial complex took over the world. Why do you think Big Pharma is the biggest advertiser on television? Boomers!

Culturally, we boomers have been bad enough, but politically we’ve been an unmitigated disaster. I’ll talk more about that below, but I think the worst part of this disaster has been the Civil Rights revolution that started in 1964. If you haven’t read Christopher Caldwell’s book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, I highly recommend it, especially if you want to know why America is in the sorry state she is in. I wrote about it last year, and called it “the most important book of the 21st century,” no hyperbole. When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, Caldwell called it a new Constitution, something that fundamentally changed the nature of the American experiment. It wasn’t intended as that, and wasn’t at the beginning, but it became that. The power of the demographic boomer wave made sure of it. Civil rights soon came to mean not just race, but as Caldwell says, “Racial integration turned into the all-embracing ideology of diversity.” And that, literally, changed everything. But let’s do a brief look back and see where boomers came from.

What Created the Modern World, And Boomers?
One of my passions is studying intellectual and cultural currents in history to see how they’ve flowed down to us in the present, and then how they’ve influenced who we are and what we think as a people and as individuals. Nothing happens in a vacuum, nor does anyone exist in one. We are the product, the result, of innumerable forces coming before we existed, and encompassing us at every level of our existence. This does not mean, in case you’re wondering, that I’m saying we are determined and have no choice about who we are or who we become. A fundamental Christian assumption is that we have agency, that we can change things, and that our choices matter and have consequences; we are accountable beings. Thus, as creatures made in God’s image we are not slaves to these forces, which is why we study them, so we don’t have to be.

We can go all the way back to the fall. Man, male and female God created them, rebelled against God, and introduced sin into the world. You might think it silly to even mention, but in the 18th century a French philosopher came up with the brilliant idea that man is born pure, and it is civilization that corrupts him. His name was Jean Jaques Rousseau, and he introduced the concept of the “noble savage” into the bloodstream of Western intellectual culture. If man is indeed born noble and corrupted by his environment, then all you have to do is change his environment and you will change the man. On the other hand, if man is born a sinner, corrupt from birth, you have to change the man before you can change the circumstances.

Historically, side by side God in his providence gave us these two views of man in juxtaposition so we can compare how they work in practice. Rousseau’s influence gave us the French Revolution, the triumph of reason, which gave the world a Reign of Terror. From September 5, 1793, to July 27, 1794, upwards of 1,400 people were summarily executed, having their heads mercifully lopped off by Madame Guillotine, and tens of thousands were executed over the course of the Revolution.  By contrast the American Revolution, steeped in Protestant, specifically Calvinistic, Christianity, gave us the American Revolution. Two diametrically opposite views of man, two diametrically opposite results.

What, you ask, has this to do with baby boomers? My fellow boomers are children of Rousseau, but coming through Kant and Hegel, Marx and Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud, and innumerable influences in between and since. Starting with French Philosopher Renes Descartes in the 17th century, and through all of these influences, as Marx said, the object of life became for man “so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun.” This had implications, as you can imagine, for both individuals and the societies they developed. Marx was just parroting Satan in the garden, that man could “be like God, knowing good and evil.” The boomers exploded onto the world scene in the dreaded “60s” at the apex of the hubris of man thinking he could “be like God.” On a personal level, this coincided with the triumph of the therapeutic, in the title of an important 1966 book by Philip Rieff. Even as a secular Jew, Rieff lamented the loss of religion by modern man. His religion had now become the therapeutic, his highest good a manipulatable sense of his own well-being. He explains it in the introduction:

In compensation, and in place of where faith once was, men are offered Art and/or Science. It is true that new religions are constantly being born. But modern culture is unique in having given birth to such elaborately argued anti-religions, all aiming to confirm us in our devastating illusions of individuality and freedom.

I’m not sure anything could better explain boomers, except as Rieff fills out the picture a few pages later:

Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when “I believe,” the cry of the ascetic lost precedence to “one feels,” the caveat of the therapeutic. And if the therapeutic is to win out, then surely the psychotherapist will be his secular spiritual guide.

And while boomers didn’t create psychotherapy, as with many other things they popularized, therapy became the religious replacement of our age. And when Rieff uses the word religion in his book, he’s speaking primarily of Christianity because his concern is the Western Christianized world. It was the development and dominance of Christianity that gave us the blessings of the modern world, and Rieff is lamenting its demise with the rise of secularism.

Being a boomer, albeit on the younger side, I grew up witnessing this societal convulsion in real time. Having been born in 1960, I could only experience the wild 1960s as a child, but as teenager in the 70s, I could participate in some of the more enjoyable aspects of the era, not having to think too much about the politics, or be worried about being drafted into the Vietnam War. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll were our past time, but thankfully I wasn’t too successful on the sex part, and I was too much of a scaredy cat to do more than a few brief experiments with the heavier drugs. I mostly indulged in beer and the weak pot of the time, and loved it!. Rock n’ roll was my passion. Say what you will about boomers, but we gave the world the greatest era in popular music ever. I was going to be a rock star, but thankfully God had different plans.

It wasn’t until I became a born-again Christian in 1978 and then embraced conservative politics in 1980 that I began to look back critically at this era. I started learning about these forces that would create possibly the most consequential generation of the modern world, and it wasn’t just the implications for the personal and relational, but how my generation saw America and the world.

Boomers and the Progressive American Dream
As a generation, the boomers would be well-prepared to build a modern tower of Babel, and inherit the hubris to try. We are fortunate the Lord revealed any Babel like aspirations are not good (Gen. 11):

6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

Nothing will be impossible for them was pretty much the vibe of the post-World War II period. People in the 1950s and early 1960s pre-Vietnam believed anything was possible, and they prepared the way for the boomer generation. Kennedy’s administration was staffed with the “best and the brightest,” young guns who never doubted their ability to do great things with their power. Unlike the generations before them who went through a global conflagration that developed in them a certain kind of modesty, there was nothing modest about the boomers who believed they could use technology to create anything. This wouldn’t last.

Just as the sinking of Titanic was a blow to the spirit of optimism of the early 20th century, so too was Kennedy’s assassination a blow to the optimism of the early 1960s. This “we can do anything” dynamic combined with shattered dreams of greatness, would create a generation of schizophrenics, delusions of grandeur on the one hand, psychosis on the other. Looking back on the 60s and 70s, Christopher Lasch wrote a surprising best-selling book whose title explains this dynamic well: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. Because of sin all human beings are self-centered, curved in on themselves, but the boomers especially so. The generation giving them birth were determined to give them a better life than they had, which when I was growing up was a common refrain. Of course you try to give your kids a better life than you had, but that created a rather self-absorbed generation, one of the common criticisms of my generation.

It turns out all of these many forces made the boomers the perfect generation to inherit the progressive American dream. I blame the Enlightenment for pretty much everything wrong with the modern world, but once reason was exalted as the ultimate means to knowledge, called rationalism, Babel builders were inevitable. Secularism was the unavoidable result of rationalism, which meant God was persona non grata, unwelcome at the societal table, and eventually unwelcome at the personal one as well. The boomers became the generation living out fully agnostic lives, God only an occasional player if at all. God, however, would not be completely ignored. So, he had to be taken out.

As secularism spread its tentacles throughout the Western world in the 19th century, German biblical scholars declared war on the credibility of the Bible with higher criticism. There are two forms of biblical criticism. Lower is an attempt to find the original wording of the text since we no longer have the original writings, and higher studies of the historic origins, dates, and authorship of the various books of the Bible. Biased German scholars approached the Bible with the anti-supernatural assumptions of the Enlightenment, so were looking for ways to explain away any such references with natural or scientific explanations. Because secularism had not completely engulfed Europe yet, the Germans wanted to keep their non-supernatural Christianity, out of which flowed what came to be called liberal Christianity.  Americans were enamored of all things European, especially all things German, and higher criticism made its way to America and blew up the mainline denominations.

The progressive movement of the late 19th century was also in many ways inspired by the Germans. Prussia, a state in northern Germany, was known for their commitment to efficient bureaucracy, and American progressives loved it. It is from the Prussians we get the idea of the rule by “experts.” For progressives, government was instrumental in creating the just society of America’s founding promise. Without government intervention the problems of the modern world would remain insoluble, and anarchy and suffering would reign. The government of America’s founding built for an agrarian society of primarily farmers and ranchers with a relatively small homogeneous population was no match for a modern industrial society. Holding the firm conviction that with science and technology no problem seemed too big to overcome, progressives were determined to apply this mindset to government. “Scientific” management or planning by “experts” would become the rallying cry of the 20th century.

Woodrow Wilson is the founding father of the American administrative state. As an academic, Wilson wrote a paper in 1887 arguing for “the science of administration,” which speaks to the rule by “experts.” This started with Wilson’s administration, and with Roosevelt’s New Deal, government became dominant in American society. But it wasn’t until the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in the 60s, and his Great Society and “War on Poverty,” that the progressive vision was fully realized. The greatest generation fought in World War II and saved the world from tyranny, but they also gave us the dreaded “post war consensus” of the modern liberal welfare state. You can’t blame that on the boomers. It was something they inherited, and they ran with it, liberals and conservatives alike. Government in some way was always their answer. Since the 1980s Con Inc. has been filled with boomer conservatives who I eventually came to see as just liberals in skirts. The conservative movement was adept at losing, going along with progressive gains all the while pretending they were against them. Then Trump, himself a boomer of a very different kind, came along and messed everything up.

Looking back, we can see the Covid disaster was the beginning of the end for the Babel building boomers. The “experts” didn’t come out looking so good, and it so happens people the world over prefer being governed more locally than by an unaccountable globalist elite. We’re just beginning to see what comes after the post World War II “consensus.”

The Boomers and the end of Secular History
The Greatest Generation grew up in the Depression and fought a world war, and as I said, they were determined to give their children a better life; they did, materially. The changes and economic growth in post war America meant boomers were the first generation to live with the illusion they could “have it all,” and it seems many parents didn’t disabuse them of this notion. With the explosion of feminism and the invention of the pill in the early 60s, the sexual revolution was off and running. Unfortunately, the boomers’ parents didn’t prepare them for the radical moral changes, and we got “the 60s.” Francis Schaeffer’s ministry was to these boomer kids whose parents in the 50s had a faith that was a mile wide and an inch deep. In the 1950s Christianity was dominant in America, but lacked substance. Schaeffer published The God Who is There in 1968 as a result of his ministry to these disaffected boomer children. He starts the book with his assessment of the problem:

The present chasm between the generations has been brought about almost entirely by a change in the concept of Truth. . . . Young people from Christian homes are brought up in the old framework of truth. Then they are subjected to the modern framework. In time they become confused because they do not understand the alternatives which they are being presented. Confusion becomes bewilderment, and before long they are overwhelmed.

That pretty much describes an entire generation who turned into relativists—what’s true for you is true for you and not for me. We’ve seen where that leads. Boomer kids saw hypocrisy in their parents and a faith that had no substance, so they rejected the faith of their fathers, and embraced a new faith of self-fulfillment.

Having said all this, I make the point I started with. Boomers are easy to hate, but they are a products of societal forces into which they were born and were in some sense determined by them. I see the boomer generation as the fulcrum generation. They were the final generation in Western history putting the finishing touches on the secular Berlin Wall. Like the physical one in Germany, it appeared impenetrable, but all along was made out of paper mâché. The cracks started appearing a while ago, but Covid revealed just how weak it was as people started pushing on it, and lo and behold, it fell! Younger generations are more conservative than older generations, which has never happened before in the modern world. This is because secularism has proved as hollow as the old East Germany and the Soviet Union that propped it up. As Dylan, not a boomer but of that generation, sang, the times they are achangin’.

If you’ve made it this far listening, I want you to listen to these lyrics by the late great Kevin Gilbert in his song Goodness Gracious from his album Thud. The album was released in 1995, so the boomer lament, as you’ll hear, is nothing new.

Goodness Gracious my generation’s lost
They’ve burned down all our bridges before we had a chance to cross
Is it the winter of our discontent or just an early frost?
Just an early frost

 

Goodness Gracious of apathy I sing
The baby boomers had it all and wasted everything
Now recess is almost over and they won’t get off the swing
Won’t get off the swing

 

Goodness Gracious we came in at the end
No sex that isn’t dangerous, no money left to spend
We’re the cleanup crew for parties we were too young to attend
Goodness Gracious me

 

 

 

The Secular Eschatology of Doom

The Secular Eschatology of Doom

May 14, 2025 | Culture

For much of my Christian life I didn’t think eschatology mattered. That word comes from the Greek eschatos, which means last or farthest, so it means the study (ology) of last things. Since the Late Great Planet Earth 1970s, Christians have come to think of it as the study of “end times,” given the popularity of dispensational theology that believes the world is going to the proverbial hell in a handbasket; the ship is sinkin’ fast, so we have to save as many as we can, and prepare for the end. That view of eschatology isn’t as popular as it once was given the end is always around a corner never seeming to come, but it still informs much Christian understanding of “end times.” That, as the title implies, is not the subject of this post. Here I’m going to take on the secularists because in the title of the YouTube channel I contribute to, eschatology matters. In other words, how we see the end of things has an impact on how we live in the present, and everyone alive has some kind of vision in their mind of the end of things, even if most secularists suppress it with games and distractions. They want to enjoy their Nihilism until the bitter end.

What inspired this post is a TV series my wife and I recently watched on AppleTV+ called Silo (season 1 and 2). As with most of what we watch on streaming TV, it reveals the glories of secularism, or not. We enjoyed it, and I decided to read the book, the first of three in a trilogy. The story is a perfect example of something inevitable in a worldview where God is persona non grata: THE SECULAR ESCHATOLOGY OF DOOM. I don’t normally do all caps, but I want to emphasize the poverty of secularism as an exhausted vision for life. This is extremely important to understand as we do spiritual battle at the end of this secular age (see Eph. 6:12, but only in the context of Eph. 1:18-23). I write about this a lot in my work because we’re at a profound turning point in history, which is a culmination of almost 400 years of thinking and cultural change in the West (which is most of the world today). Intellectuals thought we could build societies and lives where God was a bit player, at best, and we could conquer reality to our indomitable will. It looks like reality isn’t so malleable after all; reality is winning. The liberal progressive secularists, the Western elites who ran things, the “experts,” thought they could mold reality to their wishes, but instead they have encountered the unmovable structure of God’s created order. Let’s take a look at how we got here.

A Brief History Secular Disappointment
From the beginning of the Enlightenment, and its development into secularism in the 17th century, until the early 20th century, everything was Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Sing it with me, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood . . .” Uh, maybe not. Even as difficult as life could be in the 19th century, an infectious optimism gripped the imaginations of all but the most downtrodden. Industrialization brought a new kind of misery to cities exploding in growth, but the blessings of technology and knowledge were undeniable. To cite only one of those blessings, clean water was brought to the masses and saved untold lives from disease because of indoor plumbing and public sanitation.

A good example of the understandable hubris of the time was the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Held around the world annually, fairs showcased some of the world’s most revolutionary inventions and concepts known at the time, and the period between 1880 and World War I was the golden age of fairs. At the Chicago fair, known as the World’s Columbian Exposition celebrating Columbus’ arrival in the New World in 1492, the world-changing technology of electric light made its debut. It really seemed humanity could accomplish anything, and conquer the limits imposed by nature. Without God, however, as Nietzsche prophesied, disaster loomed.

Although a staunch atheist, Nietzsche realized Christianity had created the moral framework that made Christian Western civilization possible, and without something in its place, bad things were bound to happen. Branches can’t be cut from the tree and live. According to Walter Kauffmann, Nietzsche’s writings abound in prophecies of doom.

“If the doctrines . . . of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal . . . are hurled into the people for another generation,” if mankind realizes the unique worth of the human being has evaporated, and that no up and down remains, and if the tremendous event that we have killed God reaches the ears of man—then night will close in,” an age of barbarism begins,” and “there will be wars such as have never happened on earth.”

Next to this paragraph in the book I wrote, “The 20th Century!!!” And remember, this comes from a convinced atheist, but one who realized the West wasn’t just cutting off branches, but cutting down the entire tree! It’s safe to say, no other thinker at the time would have said anything like this, and his prescient prophecies proved disastrously true.

I place the beginning of the end of modernism and its inevitable secularism with the sinking of RMS Titanic in April 1912. While the builders and White Star Line, the technological marvel’s operator, never actually declared it unsinkable, that was the impression in popular imagination. The sinking was a huge cultural blow to the dominant hubris of the time. A little more than two years later a war of unimaginable horror and carnage swept up the most educated and civilized nations in the world. This “war to end all wars” had many horrific unintended consequences, as all wars do, and two decades later led to an even more deadly and horrendous war. One of those consequences was the Russian Revolution, leading to Soviet communism and tens of millions more dead. The communists seemed to want to outdo each other in the mass murder sweepstakes, and Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and others gave the world by most estimates north of 100 million corpses. An “age of barbarism” only begins to describe it.

Ironically, despite all the carnage and destruction, Western cultural and political leaders were more confident than ever “progress” would continue. Technocratic man and “scientific management” would solve all problems sooner or later. The post-World War II period was an especially heady time. People in the 1950s and early 1960s pre-Vietnam believed anything was possible. Kennedy’s administration was staffed with the “best and the brightest,” young guns who never doubted their ability to do great things with their power. Kennedy’s promise of landing a man on the moon in 1961 was indicative of the can-do spirit. Under the surface, however, cracks were beginning to appear.

Technology, like anything sinful human beings create, can be used for good or evil. As Blaise Pascal put it so memorably:

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

The cracks leading to the eschatological doom I speak of started with the 1962 book by Rachal Carson called Silent Spring, which set the stage for the environmental movement. She exposed the hazards of the pesticide DDT, and questioned humanity’s faith in unlimited technological progress. In due course, environmental doom and gloom became a staple of the left’s worldview. Global warming transmogrified into “climate change,” and is only the latest catastrophe awaiting mankind if radical revolutionary changes are not enacted. The changes just happen to conveniently require globalist, leftist, tyrannical, anti-free enterprise solutions, always top down, never bottom up.

The Influence of Christian Eschatology
It’s important to remember the concept of eschatology, of history going somewhere with an inherent telos, or purpose, is a solely Jewish/Christian concept. Prior to God calling Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans (Gen 12), history was literally going nowhere. Humanity’s conception of time and life itself changed that day.

Thomas Cahill in his The Gift of the Jews tells the story of that change. The subtitle isn’t hyperbole: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. He explores the many ways Jewish belief and practice was completely unique in the ancient world. Here are just a few of these gifts:

  • Fate: Before the Hebrew people came along, life was viewed as something determined by inscrutable forces beyond any person’s control. There was nothing to be done about it but submit. That changed forever when God revealed through Scripture that He created man, male and female He created them, in His own image.
  • Time: Prior to the idea of “In the beginning God,” all peoples of the world viewed time cyclically, one season moving into another, a wheel turning forever going nowhere. The people of Israel, by contrast, introduced the concept of past, present, and future; that history was going somewhere, something inconceivable to all other ancient peoples.
  • A transcendent, personal Creator God: All other ancient peoples believed in gods who were visible (idols), and in fear of the forces of nature, believed they could manipulate the gods who presumably controlled those forces. The Hebrews introduced a concept no other peoples could conceive: a personal God, in some way like them, and the only true God. I can imagine an ancient person encountering these strange people saying, One God… who created everything? That’s crazy! Cahill writes that the God of Abraham, “no longer your typical ancient divinity, no longer the archetypal gesturer—is a real personality who has intervened in real history, changing its course and robbing it of predictability.”

Secularism hijacked the Jewish and Christian worldview, threw God out the door, and thought it could fly the plane of reality anywhere it wanted. Man was finally in control of his own existence without all the pesky divine interference. As Karl Marx said in his Communist Manifesto, man could now “move around himself as his own true Sun.” That was the plan anyway, but it hasn’t quite worked out as planned. Providence, however bastardized it becomes, is an inescapable influence of Christianity. Every worldview influenced by Christianity has an eschatology, a vision of the end of things, including secularism, and given the obvious dysfunction of the world, they inevitably tend towards the negative.

Which brings us to the Book of Revelation. Any providential discussion of history, as well as the present and that to come, can’t escape the most influential biblical book in Western history, eschatology or not. It’s instructive to consider the Greek word John uses for revelation as he begins his letter to “the seven churches in the province of Asia.” His first words are, “The revelation of Jesus Christ . . .” Revelation in Greek is apokálypsis and simply means unveiling, uncovering, revealing, revelation, and has no inherent positive or negative connotation. The word in English as it has come down to us, apocalypse, has only negative meaning when we see, hear, or use it ourselves. That is the influence of a certain interpretation of Revelation, but left or right, secular or religious, what often unites them all is the conviction the worst is yet to come.

The Inevitable Hopelessness of a God-Less World
One of the things Silo reminded me of is how important our fundamental assumptions are about the ultimate nature of reality, and in the Western mind there are only two mutually exclusive assumptions. Either God revealed to us in the first chapters of Genesis is real, or it’s all a cosmic accident, a product of chance. Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution is the creation myth for the secular eschatology of doom. If there is no God who sovereignly ordains all things for the good of is creation, then there is nothing upon which humanity can base their hope for a bright and positive future. Without God, there is nothing to counter human sin and its attendant evil. Dysfunction will always win in the end, inevitably leading to despair, and logically that leads to dystopia.

Speaking of dystopia, such a concept didn’t exist until Western culture fully embraced secularism. The idea is the flipside of “utopia,” which literally means no place, and was coined by Thomas More in his book Utopia in 1516. In it he describes a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean that is a satire on the state of England. We think of it as an impossibly idealized place that cannot exist, and those who think they can achieve it on this earth generally end up in a very bad place. Inspired by More’s writings, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill coined the word dystopia, meaning ‘bad place’ in 1868 as he was denouncing the government’s Irish land use policy. As the 20th century developed, any kind of Utopia looked increasingly unlikely, and fiction started to embrace this concept of history inevitably going to this bad place, this dystopia. In a God-less universe man was ill equipped to overcome himself. The story behind the Silo series is a perfect example of this. I could probably write an entire post just listing the dystopian novels and movies of the last hundred years. Anyone reading or listening to this could pull numerous of them to mind. And this is only just the fiction. We’re almost daily reminded by the leftists in politics and culture that dystopia is inevitable if we don’t listen to them and give up all our freedoms and wealth so they can save us.

Why is it that God-less secular man is so given to a penchant to doom? I previously talked about the importance of ultimate assumptions for how people view the world, their worldview. Human beings are question raising animals specifically because we are not cosmic accidents, and fundamental questions about the nature of reality will be asked and answered. Nobody can remain a functional agnostic in their actual lives, and what they choose for entertainment will reflect that. I will briefly mention four that all people go through their lives asking and answering. This will of necessity be brief, but each could be developed in a post of its own, not to mention the tomes that have been written on them for thousands of years. Human beings can’t stand unanswered questions, but without God that’s all we got. Christianity is infinitely superior to secularism in the answers it provides to these questions.

  • Origin – Where do we come from? How did we get here? These questions are asked a lot in Silo because 10,000 people live in a hole in the ground and have no idea why. As mentioned above it’s either Darwin or God, either we’re merely animals, clever apes who fell out of the void, or creatures lovingly created and determined to exist by an Almighty Creator God who designed the world and everything in it specifically for us. The former is inherently hope-less; we are hurdling toward death in this mist of a life, and then it’s into the void, nothingness, it’s over. How inspiring! Or God and eternal life in paradise with no more sin, suffering, or death. Let me think about it.
  • Meaning – If all we are is matter in motion, so much lucky dirt, where does one get meaning? People try to squeeze it out of all kinds of things in life, but those things can’t give us ultimate meaning. Those are merely individual puzzle pieces that have no puzzle within which to fit, no big picture to give them meaning, and thus they never ultimately satisfy.
  • Morality – All human beings long for justice, for wrongs to be righted. They know intuitively, deeply, that right and wrong are not merely like preferences in ice cream. There has to be some kind of transcendent moral standard beyond matter, some kind of ultimate straight line that tells us when all the other lines are crooked and by how much.
  • Destiny – And finally, our destiny is either Utopia or Dystopia. It can be nothing in between. People read the book of Revelation and come to the wrong conclusion because they’re stuck on not only the wrong definition of the word apocalypse, but also on the wrong interpretation of the story. It doesn’t end in a bleak and dreary lifeless landscape, but a glorious place of God living with his people. We’re told what it will be like in Revelation 21:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

Only God in Christ offers us answers to all our questions and satisfies all our deepest longings. As Augustine put in most memorably, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”

 

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

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

Apr 2, 2025 | Culture, Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.