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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The History of Pietism and Christian Cultural Irrelevance

The History of Pietism and Christian Cultural Irrelevance

Feb 12, 2025 | Culture

Pietism is the most important development in the history of Christianity most Christians have never heard of. It wasn’t high on my radar either until a few years back when I began to learn about its contribution to the rise of secularism in Western culture. Because of the Gnostic and dualistic nature of Pietism, the successful takeover of secularism in Western culture was inevitable. With the church, and Christians in general, focused on otherworldly concerns, culture and governing could be left to the godless. This was never the Pietists’ intention, but it was inevitable given their theological assumptions.

Both Pietism and secularism lead to the same thing: a secular society devoid of Christian influence. This might seem counter intuitive given the former is passionately religious while the latter is completely anti-religion. As we’ll see, Pietism has been a disaster for Christian cultural influence in the West, turning Christianity into a culturally irrelevant force. That was not at all the intention of its founders, or for most who subsequently embraced it, but it was the practical result of their understanding of Christianity, nonetheless.

Before we go back in time, let’s clarify terms since few people are familiar with Pietism. We are not talking about piety, the good and necessary personal reverence or devotion to God, but a German Lutheran movement that developed in the early seventeenth century. Because of the influence of Pietism, secularism triumphed as Christianity became primarily inward and personal, eschewing cultural engagement for personal devotion. It took time, but eventually Christianity completely lost the world transforming power that overthrew the Roman Empire, defeated paganism, and gave the world the blessings of modern society.

Pietism and the Reaction to Scholasticism
Scholasticism was a rigorously logical method of teaching in the schools of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, dominating universities from approximately 1100 to 1600, and into the seventeenth century. All of the early Reformers grew up and were influenced by an educational system steeped in scholasticism, and thus their approach tended to the intellectual. Both Luther and Calvin were educated in the Medieval Scholastic system, and their theological works reflect that. Lutheranism and Calvinism, soon labeled Reformed, would not stray far from their intellectual and scholarly roots, until, that is, the reaction of the first Pietists to Lutheran Scholasticism. The influence of Pietism would go well beyond Lutheranism in the centuries to come because of its focus on experience and not theology or doctrine, allowing it to easily cross denominational boundaries to eventually become the default expression of Christianity in the modern world.

 In his book, Pietism and the Foundations of the Modern World, Justin Davis defines Pietism as such:

Pietism is the generic Protestant expression of experiential Christianity. Notions of mysticism, revivalism, and antipathy towards the world and established religious culture become the standard modes in which this experiential religion is expressed. Individualism is often identified as a central tenet of both Protestantism and modernity, and as such it is also key to understanding Pietism. Pietism is therefore shorthand for the prioritization of experience over rationalism and scholasticism for Protestants. . . . the term is an expression of experiential Protestantism in general.

 I can vouch for this definition in my experience of the Christianity I was born-again into when I was in college. The focus on the “spiritual” meant things of the mind were not so much disparaged, as ignored, although they could be seen as semi-dangerous to our relationship with Jesus. It wasn’t until after I discovered Francis Schaeffer and eventually Reformed theology that I realized this version of Christianity was anti-intellectual, anti-theological, and ahistorical.

Experience and feeling, a feature of Pietism, can turn into a kind of idol like anything else; it was something that haunted John Wesley throughout his life, morbid introspection. Martin Luther taking his que from Augustine, helpfully defined sin as Incurvatus in se, Latin for being turned or curved inward on oneself, so much navel gazing. Thankfully, Christianity offers us the best of both worlds, the heart and the mind, but the mind would prove no match for the rise of Pietism as Western Christianity developed over the next several hundred years. Davis adds that by the nineteenth century, “nearly every influential Protestant theologian . . . was impacted or confronted Pietism or its systems.”

The Founding Fathers of Pietism
Pietism had antecedents in the mysticism of the Middle Ages as Christians were looking for more experiential religious expression. Those Christians seeking an experiential religion by removing themselves from society became monks and nuns. Various models of mystical piety resonated with early Protestants even though the tradition was Catholic. Borrowing their thoughts and practices while putting them in the Protestant context, Pietists would make a kind of mystical experience an essential aspect of Protestant Christianity. Unlike other forms of Reformational Christianity, it wasn’t creeds, confessions, or synods, but experiences that scratched their spiritual itch. This will become abundantly clear in the centuries to come.

The founding of Pietism was a long historical process, but it is generally agreed while not the founder,  Johann Arndt (1555-1621) was foundational to the movement. A pastor, Arndt published a series of books starting in 1605 called True Christianity, in which he developed an experiential Christianity differing from previous mysticism in that it seeks a kind of union or merging with God, but something available to all Christians. Justin Davis writes,

In none of these works does he simply abandon himself to the idea that his experiences are those of a mystic, rather they reflect a newness of life that is far more open and common to every Christian.

Arndt finds little value in theology or doctrine not specifically in service to the renewed life of faith. Thus, “the true Christian must find the kingdom of God within themselves” rather than in any focus on the outside world or the wider church. This effectively transferred a person’s “salvation to the realm of moral endeavor” rather than the communal life of the church. His followers “focused on personal revivals rather than a revival of the church or the culture at large,” and his work came to dominate discussions not just in Germany but throughout Europe.

Philip Jakob Spener (1635-1705) built on the work of Arndt and is technically the founding father of Pietism. Serving as a pastor in Frankfort, Germany, he introduced something called Collegia Pietatis, or “piety groups,” thus Pietism. From these twice-weekly devotional meetings in his house, Spener published Pia Desideria, “Devout Desires,” in 1675, with six major proposals for reform and revitalization of the church. Spener’s reforms were pastoral and practical, easily adopted by the laity, but not popular with the German Lutheran Church who accused him of doctrinal laxity. Indeed, Spener considered doctrinal conflicts irrelevant and often harmful, which would be a hallmark of modern Evangelicalism in the centuries to come. To Spener, and Evangelicals in the future, religious and moral duties were far more important than doctrinal disputes.

We also see in Spener a kind of asceticism in his opposition to card playing, dancing, the opera, and theater, and his stress upon moderation in dress, food, and drink. This becomes a feature of the fundamentalism of the nineteenth and especially twentieth century, along with an undervaluation of the church’s liturgy’, sacraments, and clergy. We see the legacy of this in modern, stripped down services in many churches which consist of praise music and a sermon. It also wasn’t just his desire to reform the church separating him from Arndt, but his desire to confront the growing secularism of what was quickly becoming the modern world because of the effects of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

Secularism was also given a push by French Philosopher Renes Descartes (1596-1650) and the development of rationalism, a radical, indeed revolutionary departure from the Middle Ages in which man began his pursuit of knowledge with God. Now, man would begin his pursuit of knowledge with man, as Descartes put it, Cogito Ergo Sum, or I think therefore I am. From Descartes sprung the period in Western intellectual history known as the Enlightenment, so called because man was supposedly coming out of what some thought “The Dark Ages,” and into the glorious light of human reason. On this freight train to modernism, secularism hitched a ride, and the Western world would undergo a slow moving irreligious revolution. Spener was determined to fight against that. As governments became more secular, it was the church through the preaching and the laity that would affect legislation for reform to create a more religious society. His embrace of Luther’s notion of a priesthood of all believers can be seen in a work he published in 1677 titled The Spiritual Priesthood, which would take Arndt’s more inner looking spirituality in a more outward, practical direction. Also, because of its lack of focus on a rigid orthodoxy, Pietism as it grew easily adapted to different theological contexts.

Finally, in its development, Pietism would not be limited to Lutheran Germany. Prior to its appearance in Lutheran circles, a Pietism without the name is found in the work of highly influential English Reformed theologian William Perkins (1558–1602), considered the “father of Puritanism.” Coinciding almost exactly with the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), Perkins’ life influenced a whole generation of English churchmen and English piety. The focus of Perkins’ life and ministry was developing piety in others, his students, parishioners, fellow pastors, and readers. From his influential position at Cambridge in his preaching, teaching, and especially writing, he proved a gifted popularizer of Reformed theology.

His books outsold those of Calvin and Beza in England, and he became the first English theologian to enjoy a wide readership throughout Europe with books translated into several languages. He was also the first English Protestant theologian to be published North America. The English Puritans escaping persecution made their way to the New World in the great Puritan migration to New England from 1620 to 1640. “Anyone who reads the writings of early New England learns that Perkins was indeed a towering figure in their eyes,” wrote Perry Miller. Perkins and his followers were “the most quoted, most respected, and most influential of contemporary authors in the writings and sermons of early Massachusetts.” In fact, Jonathan Edwards was fond of reading Perkins more than a century later.

Perkins shows us that piety and intellectual rigor are not mutually exclusive. The problem, however, was that Pietism the movement tended to see them as exactly that, or if not, then at least in tension. Too much intellectual effort and you were in danger of your heart growing cold, but that’s not the way knowledge works, as is the case with any of the good gifts of God. As Tim Keller said, idolatry is turning good things into ultimate things, and that can happen with anything. Even though Perkins wrote extensively on theological topics, his teaching and exhortation on pious Christian living made the biggest impact in America where various forms of Pietism across denominational lines would come to dominate Evangelical faith. Add that to our next “founder,” and in due course Pietism would become the default Evangelical experience for Christians, as it was for me many years after these men lived.

John Wesley and the Institutionalization of Pietism
The man most responsible for bringing Pietism to dominance in Christianity is the impressive if problematic John Wesley. Prior to learning about Wesley, I would never have connected Pietism with the development of the modern world, leaving the blame, or credit as the case may be, for that on the Enlightenment. But both historical phenomena had a fascinating symbiotic relationship through time to give us the modern world. I’ve argued here previously that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin.

Wesley was born in 1703 into a strict Christian family, attended Oxford University, and eventually became an ordained priest in the Church of England. In 1729 he returned to Oxford for a fellowship, joining his brother Charles in a religious study group derisively called the “Methodists” because of their emphasis on methodical study and devotion. The “Holy Group,” as they were also known by those who mocked them, were active in doing good works in the community and intense in their religious devotion. In November 1735 these concerns would compel Wesley to take a trip to Georgia to oversee the spiritual lives of the colonists and be a missionary to the Native Americans, in addition to seeking his own salvation of which he was still not assured. The trip would be filled with terror and doubt in the middle of which he would encounter a Pietism lived out that challenged his weak faith.

Specifically, Wesley encountered a group of Moravians, also called United Brethren, from what is the modern day Czech Republic. They were initially followers of Jan Hus, who foreshadowed the Reformation to come and was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1417. Wesley’s trip to George was a failure, his dream of what he would accomplish turning into a nightmare. A couple years later he fled back to Britain. Even in his interaction with the Moravians, he still did not have assurance of his salvation, until he met another Moravian, a missionary himself heading to Georgia, Peter Bohler. Wesley was told he had no saving faith, and still hoped to become righteous by virtue of his own deeds, lacking true faith that comes in an instant, bringing rebirth and certainty of salvation. Talking to Bohler he was convinced he didn’t possess saving faith. This realization was Wesley’s real Evangelical conversion.

From this point on, age 35, Wesley would proclaim the good news of salvation by grace through faith, which he did in any pulpit he could find. The Church of England, however, did not like such displays of what was called at the time, “enthusiasm,” and he became persona non grata. This reaction was the opportunity to jump start the Great Awakening in England, something that had already been happening in America with Jonathan Edwards starting back in New England in 1734 with a series of sermons on “Justification by Faith Alone.” Initially Wesley worked with groups of Moravian church societies, but in 1739 when he got pushback there as well, George Whitefield persuaded him to go to the unchurched masses. It is difficult to convey to modern readers how radical Wesley was in the eyes of the religious establishment of his day. Any religious work done outside of the established parish churches was suspect because there could be no control mechanisms against “enthusiasm.”   

Even as Wesley became an itinerate preacher whose endurance was legendary, his mission wasn’t only saving souls, but keeping Christians accountable to live and grow in a life of holiness. To that end he developed rules for the Methodist Societies, and association within these societies had little to do with doctrine outside of the broad contours of a kind of “mere Christianity.” In due course Wesley would send lay preachers to the American colonies, where Methodism grew quickly and over time would become one of America’s largest denominations, though in time dividing over various issues.

How Pietism Came to Dominate the Evangelical Church
This was a complicated several hundred year cultural and sociological process, but in due course American Protestant Christianity would become a thoroughly Pietistic Christianity. The first Great Awakening had a profound impact on the spread of the distinctives of Pietism. George Whitfield (1714-1770), arguably the greatest evangelist ever, would preach the new birth and holiness throughout the American colonies as well as in Great Britain, arriving in America in 1738 after Wesley left. Through the spreading Great Awakening Pietism eventually was institutionalized in various Protestant denominations, The conversion experience would always be the driver, and a commitment to personal holiness would follow. My conversion and early Christian life would fit the Pietist mold to a T.

And speaking of holiness, Wesley’s striving for and obsession with holiness led him to preach something few Christians today have ever heard of, perfectionism. Eventually, holiness movements in various forms would have broad influence in Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Also called the higher life, or victorious Christian living, it often included a “second blessing” which would eventually be integral to the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. Wesley’s teaching on perfectionism would not only inspire holiness teaching, but become an underlying assumption of modern fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. That was the case when I was a young Christian. Nobody I knew or heard overtly taught perfectionism, but it expressed itself in what I came to call moralism. Christianity was defined in practice as morality. I’m all for morality, doing good and right, living in obedience to God’s law, which is fundamental to Christianity, but Christianity is far more than morality.

This conception of Christianity is about jumping through hoops, and if you jump through all the right hoops, you can feel good about your faith and your relationship to God. It basically turns Christianity into a form of legalism, and given I’m a sinner guilt was a constant companion in my young Christian life no matter how hard I willed myself to overcome my sin. Even though perfectionism wasn’t overtly taught, I had imbibed Wesley’s theological assumptions. It wasn’t until my mentor led me to a book by the great Princton theologian B.B. Warfield called, Studies in Perfectionism, that I learned about the history of the holiness movements of the last two hundred plus years.

There is also a dualism inherent in Pietism that causes Christians influenced by it to tend to reject political or cultural influence as biblical imperatives. It wasn’t that way with the early Lutheran, English, or American Pietists. They very much saw their faith as logically having an impact for the good on the societies in which they lived. Unfortunately, because of their thin theology and focus on experience, any Christian societal impact could not be sustained, and thus secularism eventually came to dethrone Christianity in the West.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Burying Our Dead: Is Cremation Christian?

Burying Our Dead: Is Cremation Christian?

Jan 29, 2025 | Culture

The inspiration for this post is the cremation question I saw on Twitter by a guy who goes by the handle, Smash Baals. It became quite the lively discussion and a lot of people expressed strong opinions one way or the other. The back and forth had an interesting effect on me because the more I interacted and read, the more convinced I became that cremation is in fact not Christian at all. I’ll explain what I mean by that, but I am sure in our day my new conviction would be considered “controversial.” I’ll explain that as well, but after years of waffling and mulling and ambivalence, I’ve come to the conclusion for a variety of reasons that as Christians we should bury our dead and not practice cremation. The primary concern of those who have no strong opinion one way or the other is reflected in this comment:

There’s nothing in the Bible that instructs us, New Testament believers, on how to handle our bodies in death. To claim that cremation is “unchristian,” is unbiblical. There is no ground to stand on.

I am sure in the 21st century post-Christian West this is the default position of most Christians. I frame it this way specifically because we live in a thoroughly secular society that for all intents and purposes is pagan. It’s ironic because Christianity grew to overcome the paganism of the ancient world, and all these centuries later paganism is back on the throne of society. We call it secularism, but it’s pagan in ostensibly non-religious garb, but there is no such thing as a non-religious society or a non-religious person because all people live by faith.

This Christian concern about it being biblical or unbiblical is a typically modern Christian way to frame this. We call this concept biblicism, which is a distinctly Protestant malady. It first shows up in Pietism and some Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then comes to dominate modern Evangelicalism in the 19th and 20th centuries through the Second Great Awakening and fundamentalism. It’s a misunderstanding of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. In stating Scripture alone is our basis for faith and life, we are not saying therefore that if something isn’t expressly stated in Scripture it is illegitimate. In the Reformed world this is called the regulative principle, primarily in regard to worship. It says, if something isn’t expressly allowed or commanded in Scripture regarding worship, it’s wrong and unbiblical to do it. That position itself, however, is wrong and unbiblical.

This becomes obvious when you realize how little Scripture actually addresses in the overall scheme of things. In worship, for example, it’s one thing to say unless something is expressly commanded in Scripture it must not be done, and another that  we should do what Scripture commands. For instance, the Bible says nothing about pianos and organs, maybe because they didn’t exist at the time. But it does say something about other musical instruments used in praising the Lord. The Biblicist who is hard core regulative would say, too bad, it doesn’t command or allow for pianos or organs, so no pianos and organs! That’s just dumb, I say speaking the truth in love. So, regarding burial, yes we don’t find it directly addressed in our Bibles, but we do see how dead bodies are handled in contrast to the pagans, and that tells us a lot. We also see how burial developed in Western Christian history in contrast to paganism, and that also tells us a lot.

The History of Christian Death and Burial
Many early church leaders spoke against cremation, and burial replaced cremation as Christianity spread. It took quite a while for paganism to be vanquished in the West, and thus their burial custom of burning the bodies of the dead as well. With the conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century, paganism began its slow demise. When Rome fell a hundred years later, however, it looked like it would be Christianity that would experience demise, but alas, God’s providential control over all things for His people, His church (Eph. 1:18-23) prevailed. This came through the British Isles starting with St. Patrick becoming a missionary to the Irish in the fifth century, then Charlemagne’s rule in the eighth into the ninth century on the continent, and finally Alfred the Great in the later ninth century. Alfred defeated the pagan Scandinavian hordes by the miraculous intervention of God and helped begin to establish a Christian England that would change the world. 

There are many theological and Scriptural reasons why burial is the preferred and Christian approach to handling our dead, which can be seen in the development of the early church. The church was born into a Hellenistic world where Greek ideas permeated the culture and society, especially those of Plato which developed into the heresy of Gnosticism. Greek thought reflects a radical dualism where matter is tainted and bad, and the soul and the spiritual, non-matter, is good. The goal of life is to eventually escape this tainted mortal body into a non-material realm, so burning dead bodies to ashes was a reflection of this anti-materialist perspective on reality. All pagans shared it to one degree or another because they had no other theological reason for suffering and evil than matter itself being at fault. The concept of a personal, Creator God who made all things good, indeed very good, was unknown among pagans and heathens of every other religion except for Jews and then the Christians.

Christianity took direct aim at Greek and pagan thought with the incarnation of the personal Creator God, something inconceivable to an ancient Roman or Greek. Jews couldn’t conceive of it either, but for very different reasons. The Apostle John speaking of the word or logos in the beginning, the one who was with God and was in fact God, affirms in the incarnation the fundamental goodness of the material world and the human body:

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Clearly, it wasn’t matter that makes the world fallen and miserable, but man’s rebellion against his Creator; big difference! And because God united himself with a human body, so Christians saw the body as sacred, part of the full human person. Our bodies are us, and we are our bodies. There is a kind of dualism in Christianity as well, but not playing the material off of the spiritual as the Greeks did. Who we are is more than just our bodies. Some would call that essence, our unique personalities, what makes us, us, our soul (psuché- ψυχή in Greek). Our souls, who we are in our essence, may be separated for a time from our bodies in death, but that is temporary. Our hope, and this is critical, is not an immaterial, i.e. bodyless, existence in an ethereal place called heaven where we go when we die, but a material resurrected body united with our souls in the resurrection on a renewed and redeemed earth, the same earth we exist on now.

Which brings us to one of the pictures of death in the Bible being a kind of sleep from which we will all awaken, and burial is clearly more consistent with this image than cremation. In the great resurrection chapter, I Corinthians 15, Paul speaks of the eternal and spiritual nature of our physical bodies:

42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

Given what is a uniquely biblical anthropology, how Christians understand the nature of man, it is a person who is buried, not just their remains. I came up with a powerful phrase for our kids as they were growing up to communicate God’s hand in the creation of our bodies and who we are: lucky dirt. It was a sarcastic mocking of the idea that we’re simply material beings and a product of mere chance. No, what David says about us in Psalm 139 is that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” This is because we are not merely matter in motion, as I said above, we are persons made, as revealed in Genesis 1, in God’s image, male and female. That we bury persons not merely remains is seen in Mark 1 when the women go to the tomb where Jesus is buried:

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so they could go and anoint him. 

The NIV says “body,” but the Greek says him, and not his remains. As I said, Christianity teaches us that we are our bodies and our bodies are us, even though we are more than just bodies. As Paul also says in I Corinthians 15, our bodies have one kind of splendor while our heavenly bodies will have another kind, but both bodies are us! As Paul says, our earthly body must die because what is sown does not come to life unless it dies. Buriel reminds us of this, cremation does not.

So we must ask ourselves a question. Does cremation communicate the same meaning attached to the body as burial? Of course not. People will often ask that their remains be spread in various places that means something to them and their family, which says nothing about the Christian hope of our final destination in a resurrected body on a renewed and redeemed earth. Even if Christians choose cremation, I would hope they would bury the remains of the person as an affirmation of the dignity of the human body and the hope of the resurrection.

Burial and Cremation in a Secular Society
The concern of many of the Christians who commented on Twitter was that this issue would have some bearing on one’s salvation, but that misses the point entirely. Something can be Christian without having any impact on one’s salvation, or not. There are wider societal issues at stake as Christians throughout history understood because a culture is a people’s religion externalized. The ultimate faith commitments of a people would then have implications for how people in that society lived. This was intuitively accepted by all peoples in all societies for all of time until secularism slowly grew out of the 17th century Enlightenment. The great lie of secularism is the myth of neutrality, that a society can be irreligious. This was supposedly the answer to the Wars of Religion, but as we’ve seen over the last several hundred years, wars keep on happening.

It took until the middle of the 20th century for secularism to become the default worldview in the Western world. We can see clearly now that it wasn’t that the West merely grew increasingly irreligious, but that God himself became persona non grata, an unwelcome presence in cultural life. God with all his unpleasant side effects must not be seen in public, but must remain part of people’s private lives. As long as God was kept in private, people could be as religious as they wanted. The lie in all this is that people can somehow be irreligious, but in fact all people live by faith, and thus all people are ultimately religious. Further, a people’s religion, or ultimate faith commitments, have profound implications for culture.

An example of this related to cremation comes from India. Not too long ago, a Hindu tradition probably going back two thousand years known as Sati was practiced by certain Hindu castes. When the man died his body would be cremated and the ashes thrown into the river, and so deliver his spirit to heaven. The other part of this tradition was that if he had a living wife she would be taken and burned her as well, by force if necessary, and burn her on the same funeral pyre as her husband. When the Christian British colonized India, they finally put a stop to this barbaric practice. Hindus obviously didn’t see it that way, so it was culturally accepted even for the many who did not practice it. Culture always cultivates and will have inevitable moral implications.

What we do with our dead communicates something profound about our Christian worldview, and what Christians value and hold to be true not only about the human person but about the ultimate nature of reality. Because of the Enlightenment and rationalism, eventually giving us Darwin and materialism, the secular worldview defaults to matter is all that exists. Cremation regardless of the context in which it is practiced, will always tend to confirm materialism and thus secularism. As I said above if all we are is lucky dirt, matter in motion, and we live in a culture that confirms this, then cremation will communicate exactly that. It is important to understand, which should be clear by now, that I am not making a theological argument but a cultural one because culture not only cultivates but communicates as well, it tells us something about who we are and what this world is.

Many of us are familiar with the phrase heard at funerals, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” a phrase found in the Book of Common prayer, not in the Bible. However, seeing our perishable bodies as dust is clearly biblical, as a few examples make clear. After the fall we read, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen, 3:19). Or this statement from Abraham: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes” (Gen. 18:27). Or when Joab laments, “He throws me into the mud, and I am reduced to dust and ashes” (Job 30:19). And when the cynical Solomon declares, “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return” (Eccl. 3:20).

Yet knowing this, Christians for over 1800 years specifically refused to practice the pagan custom of cremating their dead (people weren’t cremated in America before 1876). In the beginning this was specifically because of their Jewish understanding how to treat their dead who were promised resurrection at some point in God’s redeemed world. This article in the Jewish Virtual Library, “Death & Bereavement in Judaism: Ancient Burial Practices,” is a good one to read to see how important it was for the Jewish people to treat their dead with respect. Although they did not think of cremation as an abomination, nonetheless, their burial customers communicated a profound truth about the biblical nature of the created world, including the people in it.

Lastly, I will point out the value of cemeteries, which can be used for cremation but not created for that. They were created as a place of rest for the dead until the resurrection. They are also a visual reminder that we are mortal and death is our destiny, so we ought to, as the Psalmist says, ask God to “number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).  All of my adult life since I became a Christin at the age of 18, when I drove by cemeteries I was reminded that death is a stark reality I will have to face some day, and that I should live appropriately. Because death is so remote from most people in our secular modern age, our mortality is news to most people. They live with the illusion that maybe the Grim Reaper won’t come for them after all, that death happens to other people, but surely not them. Of course they know that’s not true, but they live like it. As Freud said, none of us can imagine our own deaths, so we’d rather not think about it at all. Cemeteries remind us it is coming, and sooner than we think.

Given I’m somewhat morbid and think about death all the time, any time we would pass a cemetery with the kids in the car, I would remind them they are not immortal and death will come for them one day too. That would often lead to lectures about the veracity of Christianity and how in life only one thing ultimately matters, our relationship to God through Christ. With the much overused phraseology in the Trump era, for this and all the reasons above, I implore my fellow Christians that we must Make Burial Great Again.

 

Culture and Making America Christian Again

Culture and Making America Christian Again

Dec 11, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

When I started writing my latest book in early 2022, I knew it would be about the Great Awakening happening all around us, and along the way it also became about the re-founding of America. I didn’t realize until a little later into the journey, specifically after I embrace postmillennialism in August of 2022, that Making America Christian Again was the only way America could truly be RE-founded. The book is an historical analysis of how we got our post-Christian 21st century secular America from our founding as a deeply Christian enterprise with a ubiquitous Protestant Christian culture. Without Christianity again becoming the dominant ethos and plausibility structure of the nation, a re-founding will not happen. Which means without America rejecting secularism and embracing its Christian roots, it cannot be the constitutional republic conceived in liberty it once was.

I first heard Joshua Haymes of the Reformation Red Pill Podcast use the phrase, Make America Christian Again, and it perfectly encapsulated in a Trumpian way what I’d been hearing among my new post-mill compatriots. This gets into discussions of the divisive phrase, Christian nationalism, and the even more divisive concept of theonomy, or God’s law over the nation. But those are meaningless concepts and useless discussions without a Christian culture undergirding them. We must work on parallel tracks as we seek to rebuild a Christian America, studying and debating and thinking through exactly what this will look like, but developing a Christian culture is a prerequisite if a Christian America is to even be a possibility.

It’s All About Culture
Culture is a people’s religion externalized. However a people answer ultimate questions of life and death, purpose and meaning, will affect not only how they live, but how they perceive everything in the lives they live. American culture, and the West in general, is secular, God is persona non grata, unwelcome at the societal table. He may or may not exist, but either way He is an invisible, unimportant God, irrelevant to everyday life. This is the driving assumption underlying the secular worldview, and it’s doleful consequences are everywhere. In The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi puts this succinctly:

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

The final source of authority in a secular culture is man and his reason, the poisonous fruit of Enlightenment rationalism. Unfortunately, Christianity played along with the rise of secularism in Western culture through the influence of Pietism, a German Lutheran movement in the 17th century, which was a not unreasonable response to a dry, scholastic theology coming out of the Reformation. It was also a perfect example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What made Pietism the ultimate disaster in the demise of Christendom was an over spiritualized Gnostic dualism it created in practice. All this means is that most Christians today effectively live in a two story reality (dualism). Upstairs is the important, spiritual stuff, like prayer, church, evangelism, Bible reading etc., while downstairs is every day mundane life, which is not as important, and above all, not “spiritual.”

The is a profoundly unbiblical and destructive take on Christianity, one that has allowed secularism to grow and dominate the culture, which is why I’ve argued that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin. Most Christians see the purpose of Christianity as being saved so when we die we go to heaven, and while on earth practice and grow in personal holiness. This is a terribly truncated, narrow, and distorted view of Christianity. Before we see why, let’s take a look at culture, what it is, and why it’s so important. As Christians, we must think about culture biblically, as opposed to sociologically or anthropologically. In other words, how do we as Christians define culture differently than non‑Christians. 

A Biblical Take on Culture
Christians start with the Bible, God’s story about his relationship with the human race, and not with something called culture somehow existing independently of His story. The Bible has no word for culture, thus, no definition of it, but we can say culture is the imprint human beings put on God’s creation. In the Genesis 1 and 2 creation account, we find something we now called the “cultural mandate.” Human beings are commanded to govern God’s creation:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

But it is the prior two verses that gives the cultural mandate its true power:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

The significance of the Imago Dei (the image of God in man) for the Christian worldview cannot be overstated. We are God’s visible representatives on earth! We reflect his likeness and attributes in every aspect of our human faculties, be it moral, intellectual, relational, practical, etc. All of these attributes contribute to creating culture. God commands Adam and Eve to act (be fruitful, fill, subdue, rule), and these commands define the essential purposes of human existence. Reformed theologian and philosopher John Frame had this to say in a lecture on Christianity and Culture:

Why did God give this command to Adam and Eve? Well, for the same reason, ultimately, he does everything else: for his own glory. God’s glory is that beautiful, intense light that shines out from him when he makes himself visible to human beings. [He] wanted Adam’s family to spread that glory through the whole world. Adam was not to rule merely for himself, but for God, glorifying God in all he did. So culture is based on a divine command. Adam must develop culture because that is God’s desire. Culture is for God’s sake. So it is subject to God’s commands, God’s desires, God’s norms, God’s values. 

I will add that this God orientation is the only way culture and the people in it can truly flourish.

I may create a beautiful piece of art or music, or build a magnificent building, or tell a moving story in words or film, or plant a garden, or do any number of mundane things, but all of these reflect the glory, greatness, power, and knowledge of the living God! All human creations ultimately point back to him. Obviously the efficient cause, i.e., me, deserves recognition, but the point is that every created thing, whether in the natural world or culture, reflects God himself. Nothing is trivial. It doesn’t matter if the person or people doing a thing are Christians or not, for they too are made in God’s image. Just because they are blind to his glory, try to suppress His knowledge and take the glory for themselves, doesn’t mean God is silenced.

There are significant apologetics implications (i.e., evidence for the veracity of Christianity being true) for a proper biblical understanding of culture which play a critical role in re-Christianizing the culture. The importance of cultural apologetics (culture is the evidence) cannot be overstated in its implications for re-Christianizing and refounding America on its foundational principles. There isn’t space to get into this in detail, but contrary to the doomers who bemoan the debauchery of the hostile secular culture, the culture is our best friend. In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I have a section with exactly that title, and show how I used our non-Christian secular culture to ground our children’s faith. The reason has to do with culture being a reflection of man made in God’s image, and the topic we turn to next. 

Culture and The Fall
Six times in Genesis 1 God says his work was good, and caps it off with a “very good.” When we engage culture, we aren’t simply making meaning, but responding to meaning woven into creation. We are taking that meaning‑filled creation and reshaping it in our hands, or responding to others who have, thus culture is fundamentally a religious pursuit. This means there is no neutral position relative to ultimate meaning as we interact with the culture. As I said above, culture is a people’s religion externalized. Because of the fall, man mars culture even as his distorted products of culture glorify God. This reflection of the disease of the human heart, i.e., sin, suffering, and death must be explained. As I’ve often said, if all we are is matter, merely lucky dirt, then life is basically a Woody Allen movie. His is always in a futile pursuit of meaning, hope, purpose, and fulfillment outside of Christ, and he expects the vacuum in his soul to be filled by created things rather than the Creator. All his movies end in resignation, and you can see this futile pursuit etched in his sad face.

So, an example like Woody Allen shows how all human works can be distorted by man’s disobedience to God. This is the tension that exists in all culture, but God doesn’t leave man in his sin. Immediately after the Fall, God promises redemption (Gen. 3:15). Adam and Eve realize they are naked, and they are ashamed. So taking things into their own hands, they try to sew fig leaves together to cover themselves. And when God comes calling “in the cool of the day,” what do they do? They hide. Their covering didn’t do the job. After they get through with all the excuse making, and God shares with them the promise that the woman’s offspring “will crush” the serpent’s head, we have what is possibly the first sacrifice in history. “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” From that moment on, all history is one long story of human beings furiously sewing fig leaves to try to cover themselves from God’s wrath and judgment, and earn his favor; it doesn’t work. Instead the Lord sacrifices himself because no other sacrifice will do the job! Human beings reflect this salvific drama in everything they do, including in the stories they tell, and in whatever they make.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal work Christ and Culture is a good overview of the ambivalence Christians have had with culture since Pentecost. He looks at certain Christians through the ages, and how they thought Christians should interact with culture. He divides them into five broad types or approaches:

  • Christ against Culture
  • Christ of Culture
  • Christ above Culture
  • Christ and Culture in Paradox
  • Christ Transforming Culture

Christians have negotiated their interaction with a fallen world in a variety of ways, and maybe all these approaches in some way at the same time. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, conservative Protestant Christianity in America, however, slowly came to embrace a version of the Christ against culture approach. With the rise of a truly biblical postmillennialism in the 21st century, in contrast to a secular progressive postmillennialism of the 19th and early 20th century, Christ transforming culture is again becoming the dominant view among Protestant, especially Reformed, Christians. If we are to make America Christian again, we must recapture the Reformation and Puritan vision of Christ the transformer of culture.   

Professions of Cultural Influence, Plausibility Structures, and MACA
If America is to become Christian again, that will be fundamentally a cultural change. As conservatives were finally starting to understand the primacy of culture, as the late great Andrew Breitbart famously said, politics is downstream from culture. Politics and the laws of a country in its own way creates culture, but the politics and laws of a country will never fundamentally contradict the dominant cultural ethos of the people. In 21st century America, that cultural ethos is thoroughly secular. Too many Christians either ignore this or don’t understand the power of it. Whatever that cultural ethos is, is that culture’s plausibility structure, and understanding this concept is critically important.

What is plausible is what seems true and real to us, and the societal structures we inhabit determine for us what is plausible or not. For those who uncritically navigate the culture, their perspective is assumed to be just the way things are. It is the fundamental plausibility structures of culture that must eventually be changed if we’re to ever redirect the massive ship of American culture to true north, i.e., Jesus, God’s word and Law. I will address two issues related to this, abortion and homosexuality. Both of these issues are accepted as normal in a secular culture, and rejected as sinful in a Christian one.

If we are ever to get there, we must understand professions of cultural influence. When I first became aware of the power and dominance of culture in 2007, conservatives were still obsessed with politics thinking somehow if we got the right people elected, the culture would become more conservative as well. It doesn’t work that way. It is a two way street, but fundamentally, culture drives a nation’s laws and how it is governed. So the question is, how do we change the culture? It will not come primarily from changing the laws, even as we attempt to change laws. This is why John Adams, no raging Evangelical, famously said,

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

The Founders believed it was the Christian religion and Christian morality of a providentially ordaining God that made the American experiment possible. To them, a secular America would have been a contradiction in terms.

This brings us to professions of cultural influence, something conservatives have basically been clueless about. James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, argues that,

[T]he deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occur from the “top down.” In other words, the work of the world‑making and world‑changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well‑developed networks and powerful institutions.

These networks and institutions include, but are not limited to, education, Hollywood and entertainment, and the media. These three broad areas are the most powerful worldview and plausibility structure generators. As Hunter states further, cultural change, or influence for our purposes, “is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality.” Shaping reality happens primarily from the top down, not the bottom up, and as long as a secular worldview dominates the profession of cultural influence, Christians are spitting into the wind if the think the moral framework of our laws will change.

Too many Christians, unfortunately, seem to think spitting into the wind is a strategy. On Twitter I come across Christians often who declare that abortion is murder and women should be prosecuted as any other murderer would be. Or they declare sodomy should be illegal, some going further say homosexuals should be executed. Such sentiments in the real world are meaningless, not to mention unpersuasive to most people, because we live in a representative republic. That means we have to persuade our fellow citizens that Christianity and God’s law is the only source of true human flourishing, and then elect legislators who will pass laws that will be signed by the state’s or country’s chief executive.

If we truly want to make America Christian again, we need to understand it is a complex, multifaceted, difficult, and generational enterprise. It will only happen if we play the long game. As Christians we have something to learn from the history of cultural Marxism and the rise of woke in our day. Their “long march through the institutions” started in the early 1920s, and it took almost a hundred years for their perverted vision to dominate the culture. As we contemplate the future I say to my fellow Christians, we need to be as patient, persistent, diligent, and determined as the Marxists. We are building cathedrals we will never worship in, and planting trees the fruit of which we shall never eat. Thus we work as if it depends on us, and pray because it depends on God.