Strunk and White: God Revealed in Words

Strunk and White: God Revealed in Words

Dec 14, 2023 | Culture

It’s amazing how easy it is for us to not see God in everything. The reason is because secularization has squeezed the divine out of life. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes our secular age as disenchanted, or the loss of the transcendent, what is over and above and beyond this material world. Life in the secular age becomes entirely horizontal. All that matters to secular man is the immanent, what he can see and hear and taste and touch. Described differently, we tend to see life as atoms and events colliding willy nilly, sometimes benefiting us, most times annoying and often harming us. These purposeless (secular) circumstances mostly get in our way and keep us from getting what we want. This focus on the here and the now, the mundane, the every day, primarily focused on us, strips the wonder we should have in the magical mystery tour that is life. And unlike with the Beatles, we don’t need a reservation. The magic is laid out on a platter for us every day right before our eyes. We merely have to break through the secular and learn how to see the divine. As the Apostle Paul says, it is everywhere (Rom. 1):

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they are without excuse.

The “they” Paul is referring to are those “who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” In other words, they have no incentive to see God’s invisible qualities in the visible because they prefer their sin. They like being their own god, thank you very much.  We are all given to this temptation, but we can learn to see God’s creation in the material world, His “eternal power and divine nature,” thus see God in everything. We can start the process learning from the ancient pagan Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, who said philosophy, or the love of wisdom, begins in wonder. We have to be taught to wonder, to learn how not to be secular, which is a challenge in a secular age. But we can be encouraged knowing it gets easier, that it is matter of obedience. If we want to please God and be blessed by him, we will see his invisible qualities in everything.

How Not to Be Secular
How exactly do we do this? First, we must realize how secularism blinds us to the truth of God, and in all the ways it happens. It’s rarely a brick in the face; the subtle ways we are programmed into secularism are often difficult to spot. As we develop our skills and a wary eye, in due course we will see the secular “agenda” everywhere. I put the quotation marks around agenda because this is not planned by a cabal of nefarious God haters to suck us into their illusions of a God-less universe. Rather, it is simply people’s secular worldview expressed culturally in all they do, be it in their art, or scholarship, or news, or how they see and do law and government, architecture, everything. An obviously not obvious example is TV and movies. Again, this is mostly subtle by treating God as persona non grata, i.e., a person who is unacceptable, unwelcome, or ignored, mostly ignored. God haters don’t sell well to Americans, but an invisible God doesn’t have to be sold.

Any show or movie that isn’t obviously Christian could be given as an example. One we recently watched and enjoyed very much was a documentary series on Netflix about British soccer star David Beckam. The only time the divine makes a showing is when Beckam utters the name and title Jesus Christ in frustration, and the word God makes an appearance or two. Like most art through film, there is no anti-God animas—He’s simply irrelevant. I realized some years ago as I became aware of the insidious nature of secularism that the irrelevant God is probably the most powerful weapon against faith (i.e., trust) in God in the modern world. This secular mindset can easily develop in us if we’re not careful, and a certain kind of God unawareness becomes how we start viewing the world. Almost in a moment, a world of a missing God seems more plausible than one with an omnipresent God.

The Power of Plausibility Structures
I learned about this sociological concept a long time ago, but was reintroduced to its power when I wrote my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent. Put simply, societies develop the mechanisms (i.e., structures like a building we live in) that make certain things seem true and other things not true. Whether they are true or not isn’t the point, only if they seem true, or seem plausible, to us. This concept is why Taylor wrote his book with the title, A Secular Age. In the Western world today, secularism is the dominant, and often oppressive, plausibility structure, and it appears to many people Fort Knox strong. For example, most people who do not think critically or carefully about things, and from a very specifically intentional Christian worldview (i.e., seeing God in everything) will look at a show like the Beckham documentary and never ask, “Where is God?” God is just as irrelevant to their lives as he is to the Beckham’s.

The easiest way to grasp this concept is to think of it in regard to a movie or TV show or a novel. If they are done well, the story will grip you with its realness, its verisimilitude. You won’t be distracted knowing there is a camera following the character, and likely dozens of people in the room doing the work to make the scene seem plausible. If you yourself were in the room watching it being shot, it would appear to you exactly like what it is, one scene being shot in a movie or TV show. If you’re reading a good novel you won’t think about the person who wrote it making this all up; it will have the plausibility structure to move you; it will seem real. This brings me to the reason I wrote this post.

The Elements of Style and The Revelation of God
I recently read a book called, The Elements of Style. For that past eight years I’ve been on a journey to become a “writer.” Like everything else in my life, I was not naturally good at it, and for a while insecure and doubtful I could master the skills necessary to communicate clearly through written words. I have improved considerably, I think, and continue my journey to improve my craft daily. I had read Elements years ago and thought a re-read of this classic was in order. I was pleasantly surprised I’ve adopted many of the rules laid out as necessary for effective writing, but it was the last chapter on the intangible thing called style that made me shout out, God! I’ve always known words are spiritually profound because our Savior is called the Word, or logos-λόγος in Greek. Also, God created the heavens and the earth using words; God said, and it was. That is power! And we are made in God’s image, so our words have power as well, although in our case for good and ill. Words are primarily and ultimately spiritual in nature, and in some sense communicate He who is the Word.

As I read the following passage introducing the concept of style, I could not help thinking of Romans 1, and God’s invisible qualities:

Here we leave solid ground. Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? These are high mysteries, and this chapter is a mystery story, thinly disguised. There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rule by which writers may shape their course. Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.

What the author is trying to describe can only be known when we see or hear it. It is magic, or more accurately, the divine, be it in music or words. What these do to us goes beyond sound waves and ink on a page, and he gives a wonderfully simple example. In the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine penned these immortal words to start a series of essays called, The American Crisis:

These are the times that try men’s souls.

He then gives the same or similar words rearranged to show how it is only these eight simple words arranged exactly this way that exhibit the “high mysteries” of language:

  • Times like these try men’s souls.
  • How trying it is to live in these times!
  • These are trying times for men’s souls.
  • Soulwise, these are trying times.

These are all grammatically correct and the meaning is clear and the same as Paine’s, but they would have been “marked for oblivion” the moment they were written. We can all see the power and superiority of Paine’s version, but none of us could say why exactly it has that quality. We just know that it does, that it moves us, and says something profound we cannot forget.

Music is the same way. I often think of this with my favorite bands and artists of the ‘60s and ‘70s. What was it, for example, about the four young men who made up the Beatles that made their music so magical to so many millions of people all over the world? Listening to their catalog it seemed almost impossible for them to make a bad song. For me, Led Zeppelin was the same. The 1970s version of Stevie Wonder as well. Or take Frank Sinatra. He could sing a song and bring out the magic in the notes and words, while other singers of the same song make me yawn. Nat King Cole had that magic too. Everyone’s taste is different, but this extends beyond taste. I’ll never forget at a function my wife and I attended in the 1990s where I experienced this. I heard a group perform the song Crazy by Patsy Cline, and even though the music wasn’t my “style,” I couldn’t get over how heavy the song was. It had that undefinable magic, and we became Patsy Cline fans instantly. The same happened for me when I learned about singer-songwriter Martin Sexton and his album, The American. In fact, when I first played the CD for my family, my daughter said, “Dad, this is not your kind of music.” I knew there was magic in a bottle in that album, and my family soon agreed with me.

The question is what explains the magic. What is it that gives one combination of notes or words appealing and enduring staying power? That thing we can’t really explain or put our finger on, but everyone knows it when they see or hear it. The other question is does it even require an explanation. The unequivocal answer is that it compels us to ask the question because we know that something like this doesn’t explain itself, any more than does the beauty of a sunset or full moon. Every work of art speaks to the nature of the one who created or performs it, and creation is God’s canvas.

One of my favorite apologetics concepts gets us to the answer. It is worth remembering because it will help you see God in everything: Explanatory power. It simply means what is the best, most plausible, reasonable, rational explanation for something. That which explains something better than any alternative has explanatory power, and we must always consider the alternative. When I read the pages explaining the mystery of style, I got chills because I was clearly seeing “God’s eternal power and divine nature.” I knew the only explanation for it is God, and He became even more real for me in that moment. His fingerprints are powerfully obvious in every square inch of reality for those with eyes to see. The alternative is atheistic materialism, which explains absolutely nothing as I argued in a recent post. We all know matter plus time plus chance cannot explain the “high mysteries” and the magic. We are encountering something deep, something profound, which are “God’s invisible qualities.”

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew Perry: What Does it Profit a Man . . . .

Matthew Perry: What Does it Profit a Man . . . .

Nov 16, 2023 | Culture

The recent death and sad life of megastar Matthew Perry at 54 is a tale many of us can learn from. Unfortunately, most will learn the wrong lessons. Some will conclude that fame and wealth are bad things in and of themselves. They are not. They can be a huge blessing depending on the person. Others will see fame and wealth having destroyed Mr. Perry. There is some truth to that because he obviously couldn’t handle it, but no external circumstances cause anything. Almost four decades ago when I started my theological journey with Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology, I learned something about money I had never considered. After all, I was only 24 at the time. Money, he said, is a reflection of character, it reveals who we really are, and it also allows us to develop better character as we earn more of it. That, of course, depends on our character, who we are (this article about his parent’s divorce is instructive why he was who he was). Those lacking good character, for whatever reasons, will tend to be corrupted by having considerably more money than required to meet their daily needs. Unfortunately, this seems to have been the case with Matthew Perry. I am not at any point addressing his eternal destiny, although the verse in my title always tends to be interpreted that way.

The Christian Understanding of Wealth
God declares that “wealth and honor” comes from Him (I Chron. 29). Fame is a kind of honor, but a distinctly modern phenomenon. Whenever we attain wealth and honor, or fame, we are confronted with a question: What are we going to do with it? Jesus put the rhetorical question this way:

 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

Matthew Perry would have said, none at all. It destroyed him. But wealth (i.e., money and what it can buy) is an unqualified good in Scripture. You can’t get more unqualified than this (Deuteronomy 8):

17 You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” 18 But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.

But like any good, it can be perverted by sinners who don’t acknowledge it comes from Him.

As I argued recently, God wants to bless us. I would encourage you to read Deuteronomy 8 to see how this wealth-creating ability granted by God is in direct correlation to our obedience to Him. In other words, material blessing is baked into the salvific cake of God’s relationship to His people. This is sadly misunderstood by many Christians today, partly because we over spiritualize everything, and also mistakenly judge God’s good creation by those who abuse it.  (This is one reason, lamentably in my opinion, that almost all Evangelical churches serve only grape juice during Communion.)

Think about it. When you encourage and exhort your children to obey you, and punish them when necessary if they don’t, do you expect the outcome in their daily lives to be good? Do you not want them to flourish and thrive in this life? Of course you do. You specifically do those things because you want your children to have a better life, not a worse one. Why would it be any different with God and his people? It isn’t! Jesus confirms the analogy to our heavenly Father in Matthew 7:11:

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

Yes, I know, life is “unfair,” and material blessing is not in the cards for some people. Just think about what appears to us the lottery of where someone is born. Nonetheless, the blessings of obedience to God, even trusting his goodness and love in suffering, always lead to a spiritual flourishing in our relationship to Him that cannot be determined by our circumstances. Not to mention, we are going to live forever with God in a resurrected body on a new heavens and earth!

Dualism and the Soul
In our tendency to over spiritualize is a kind of dualism, material/spiritual, earthly/heavenly, temporal/eternal. I want to suggest that we cannot neatly separate those, not in the least. That separating came as a result of the fall and man’s rebellion, and Jesus came to earth to bring them together, not further separate them. Let’s put it this way:

  • The material is the spiritual, and the spiritual is the material.
  • The earthly is heavenly, and the heavenly is the earthly.
  • The temporal is the eternal, and the eternal is the temporal.

There are many reasons we don’t think this way, but I believe ancient Greek dualistic assumptions are a primary cause. We can’t explore that here, but instead of seeing life fully integrated and wholistic in the omnipresent life of God, there are sharp distinctions like this in our minds.

Because we do this we automatically see the reference to losing or gaining souls as Jesus talking about going to heaven or hell. I don’t think he is. That’s an implication, but it’s much bigger than that. This dualism makes us think we are made up of two substances, body and soul, and when we die our soul goes to heaven to wait for our resurrected body. That could be true and I tend to believe that, but we can’t be sure. The New Testament only gives us the barest hints that it is, but ancient Hebrews and Jews of Jesus’ day as well, didn’t think this way.

So, what did Jesus and the first Jewish Christians mean by the word soul? I’m convinced it had a much more earthy, this life meaning, more Hebrew than Greek. The Greek influence in early Christian thinking came in the centuries that followed as the church slowly became increasingly Gentile. Certainly the Greek thought influenced how Jews saw the world given that the process of Hellenization (the influence of Greek culture) started when Alexander the Great conquered Judea over 300 years before Christ, but it would not change the fundamental character of Jewish thought. So instead of seeing what Jesus said dualistically, let’s look at it as a first century Hebrew/Jew might.

What is the Soul Biblically Speaking
The Greek word soul, psuché-ψυχή, is where we get our word psychology. The English automatically brings in the Greek dualistic assumptions by its meaning of mind, that our psyche is about what and how we think and why. That’s helpful to learn and understand, but it’s too narrow. Let’s see what the biblical ancient Greek meaning was according to Strong’s:

Usage: (a) the vital breath, breath of life, (b) the human soul, (c) the soul as the seat of affections and will, (d) the self, (e) a human person, an individual.

Further:

5590 psyxḗ (from psyxō, “to breathe, blow” which is the root of the English words “psyche,” “psychology”) – soul (psyche); a person’s distinct identity (unique personhood), i.e. individual personality.

5590 (psyxē) corresponds exactly to the OT 5315 /phágō (“soul”). The soul is the direct aftermath of God breathing (blowing) His gift of life into a person, making them an ensouled being.

This broad understanding of the word is critically important to understand if we’re to escape from the prison (chains) of dualism. Notice especially that soul is the unique identity of a person, their one of a kind personhood, who they are. That includes their body as much as everything that goes on inside them. It includes this life and the life to come.

I know this is heavy philosophy stuff, but bear with me. Even though I am probably a dualist, meaning I think we are body and soul, two distinct entities, I am also a monist in that I believe the two are inextricably bound to one another. Unfortunately, a very real separation occurred between the two, between us, who we are, our soul and our bodies, when mankind crashed and burned in the fall. It is helpful to understand the Apostle Paul’s theological perspective of the human body. He uses the word in Greek, sarx- σάρξ, over sixty times. It is a foundational part of his anthropology, or his understanding of the nature of man (anthropos in Greek). It is the principle of sin that inheres in us, in who we are. Not being a Greek dualist, Paul isn’t saying the flesh, our bodies are sinful and evil, but a principle of rebellion against God is part of who we are. We could say our souls, who we are, is infected with this sin principle.

I won’t go any deeper into this, but the point is that this sin principle ruins everything it touches in this life. The implications are not only eternal. All Christians know this, but given our Greek dualistic assumptions we’re always thinking eternal consequences are more important. Of course they are because, well, they are forever, and that’s a long time! But God is every bit as concerned with this life, with who we are in terms of who we are becoming, and the material implications for here and now. I encourage you to read Deuteronomy 8 and  Deuteronomy 11 where Moses lays out the blessings for obedience to God, and the opposite if we don’t. Despite what many Christians think, this was not just for Israel. He’s built his law into creation such that our relationship to him has real, substantive, material consequences one way or the other.

Christians sometimes have a hard time with this line of thinking as I used to because I thought of it like a kind of “prosperity gospel” position. I think Britannica defines this well in case you’re not familiar with the phrase:

It is also referred to as the “health and wealth gospel” or “name it and claim it.” Central to this teaching are the beliefs that salvation through Jesus Christ includes liberation from not only death and eternal damnation but also poverty, sickness, and other ills.

Well, it does! But there is nothing magical about this like I used to think. We are saved from sin unto good works. It is only in obedience to God’s law that he can bless us because that’s the way he made things to work! If we live our lives in obedience to the Ten Commandments the best we can, our lives will turn out a whole lot better than if we don’t.

Matthew Perry Loses His Soul
Unfortunately, Matthew Perry didn’t obey the ten commandments. As I said above, I can’t speak to the eternal aspect of his soul, but he clearly lost it in this life. Wanting the entire world, so to speak, apart from God, he got it. He lost his soul in the process, and his life for good at the young age of 54. His mistake was thinking something like the fame he craved could ultimately fulfill him, but he likely responded as many people do when they get it: is that all there is? As I’ve heard it said, idolatry is turning good things into ultimate things. Making an idol of fame, which drives so many in our secular culture, is a recipe for disaster. How that plays out in each individual’s life who achieves it depends on the person. For some who don’t place their ultimate worth in the idol, they can deal with it in a way that brings wisdom. Even at that, it is not easy.

We are in the middle of fascinating documentaries about two men, and one woman, who achieved massive wealth and fame and came out the other side better people through the pain and struggle that comes along with such success. One is about soccer superstar David Beckham (and his Spice Girl wife), and the other is Rocky, Sylvester Stallone, both on Netflix. Like Perry, they had their dreams come true beyond their wildest imaginations, and struggled to come to terms with it. It’s interesting to see the young Beckham with no tattoos, and the now 48 year-old with a bunch of them. To me those are a reflection of the struggle. He seems, though, to be a genuinely good bloke, as the Brits would say. Stallone too seems to have come out the other side a better human being.

What this means for their eternal soul we don’t know, but ultimately that’s the only thing that counts.

Let Me Guess. The Lewiston Shooter was Not a Churchgoing Follower of Jesus?

Let Me Guess. The Lewiston Shooter was Not a Churchgoing Follower of Jesus?

Oct 30, 2023 | Culture

On Thursday morning, October 26, when I went to my first stop to get a brief overview of the news, Gateway Pundit, I saw that some wicked man had shot and killed 18 people, and injured at least another 50 or 60 more. My first thought was, why in the world didn’t anybody shoot back! Leftists hate truth, and one they especially hate is that what it takes to stop a bad man with a gun (and it’s always a man) is a good man (or woman) with a gun. We aren’t surprised that the bowling alley where the killing occurred is a “gun-free zone.” My second thought was this is the deadly fruit of secularism. My third was, secularism is dead; it has been weighed on the scales and found wanting. I can promise you with 100% certainty that this man was not a Bible-believing Christian who read his Bible and prayed every morning, and worshipped God on Sundays at church. Anyone want to bet me? I heard Doug Wilson say it’s Christ or chaos.

Even though it started earlier, what we call the 1960s gave us the secular monster that eventually gobbled up the Christian influence in American culture, and gave us the chaos we now enjoy. The tragedy in Lewiston, Maine, and the grieving families and communities left in its wake, is just one of the more egregious examples. Of course there are multiple reasons and causes for the many disasters we’re now witnessing, but secularism write large and the church’s retreat are what’s driving all of it. We can blame secularism and the secularists who push it, and we should, but the church’s retreat from the culture over the last century bears its share of the blame. The Bible and God’s law, along with the Christians who embrace them, are demonized as positively harmful to the body politic. If Christians get out of line, like the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, warnings of theocracy fill the airwaves of the elite media. Scary stuff, that “theocracy.” But let’s get back to guns.

Gun Control Kills
Everything leftists (i.e., liberals, progressives, Democrats, corporate media) promote leads to misery and death, everything. I wish I was exaggerating, but it’s not possible when talking about these people. They are so enamored of their own moral superiority (Karl Marx would be proud), so condescending in their preening self-righteousness, they are incapable of thinking beyond their own ideological blindness. It’s infuriating because so many innocent people have to suffer for their moral idiocy. Gun control, so called, is just one of the almost innumerable examples. The phrase, “gun violence” is used as if it meant anything. Leftists, and I’m not joking, actually think guns cause violence. Remember, for these Rousseau inspired Marxists, human nature isn’t the problem, society is. Most rational people, however, realize it is people who do violence, guns just being one of many ways to inflict harm on other human beings. Israel is a perfect case study in the consequences of morally inverted gun control laws, the 1400 dead at the hands of terrorists a sad example.

Since the nation’s founding in 1948, Israel has had extremely strict gun control laws. It is practically impossible for a civilian to get permission to own a gun. When the Hamas terrorists broke through the supposedly impenetrable wall separating Gaza from Israel, those civilians had no way to defend themselves. For seventy-five years Israeli citizens depended on the government to keep them safe, and they failed, miserably. The same thing happens in America when mass shooters appear and law enforcement can’t get there in time to save lives. Tragedy happens, lives are shattered, and leftists call for more gun laws. It’s as predictable as the sunrise. Guns, however, save lives when good people have them. Inbar Lieberman shows us how:

A brave 25-year-old Israeli woman proved to be a formidable opponent against Hamas after she successfully protected an entire kibbutz from imminent danger by mobilizing a large group of residents and neutralizing over two dozen advancing terrorists, including five Hamas terrorists she slaughtered herself. 

When she realized something was wrong, she accessed the armory at the kibbutz, armed the 12-member security team, and strategically positioned them to fight the invaders. The team killed a total of twenty. The good people had guns, and nobody died. Why this didn’t happen at more Kibbutz’s I don’t know, but everyone else were sitting ducks, just like the people in Lewiston, Maine.

In response to the invasion, the Israeli government is changing their gun laws, too little too late for the dead and their grieving families. Better late than never, I suppose. It makes us appreciate the second amendment and the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers. From a news report:

Following the recent Hamas terror attacks on Israel, Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir indicated Sunday the country will ease its gun laws in hopes of arming “as many citizens as possible.”

In a post on X, Ben-Gvir noted how the laws, effective Monday, would be eased:

Applicants without a criminal or medical record would need only undergo a telephone interview instead of a physical interview and would receive permission to carry a gun within a week; Anyone who received a conditional permit to buy a gun but has not yet done so this year can now buy a gun, even if that permit has expired; Citizens who deposited their weapons having previously failed to undergo refresher training will be given their guns back; and Citizens can now purchase and possess up to 100 bullets as opposed to 50. 

Just think how many people would be alive and families not grieving today if Israel’s founders had had the wisdom and foresight of America’s.

Secularism Also Kills
I’ve written numerous pieces here on secularism having proved to be a disaster of an experiment in Western history. It is impossible to point to the exact historical antecedents of secularism (I explore the details of his in my book The Persuasive Christian Parent). Of the many factors, some point to Aquinas and too much Aristotle, the nominalism of Occam, or the empiricism of Bacon and rationalism of Descartes. All of these and more led to an awakening of autonomous man in the 18th century in what has come to be called the Enlightenment. What actually happened is that it slowly snuffed out the light of God’s word in what was once Christian Western civilization. As scientific knowledge exploded throughout the 19th century the hubris of Western intellectuals knew no bounds. As the 20th century bloomed, science promised endless progress overcoming all human limitations. Then Titanic slammed into an iceberg in 1912 and everything changed. It was followed quickly by a world war of unimaginable horror by supposedly Christian nations, the rise of Soviet communism, another world war, and over a hundred million deaths. The Enlightenment wasn’t working out so well.

Secularism, however, was just getting started. To Western elites, God and the Bible were still far too influential in the Western world. Sadly, as the 20th century progressed many Christians cooperated with the secularists by withdrawing from cultural engagement in a type of fundamentalist faith. Many believe the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in 1925 was the final straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back of Christian influence in America. The secular freight train, however, was just picking up steam. After World War II it was all over but the shouting. By the 1960s the inevitable harmful consequences exploded into the culture.

As Christians we  know the war we wage is spiritual, not against flesh and blood (Eph. 6:12), and in any war it is critical to have a thorough understanding of the enemy. That means we must have a thorough grasp of the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After almost 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point. Their description of secularism is helpful:

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

I could not agree more. The so called “secularization thesis,” that as science and knowledge progress religion will eventually disappear, has been completely discredited. The world is arguably more religious than ever, even if the West is less so. The authors further state the obvious:

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

I could not agree with this more as well, the consequences becoming clearer with every passing year. As the authors state, at a political level the inevitable result is Babel, the concentration of power in the state. At the cultural level, the results are dysfunction on a massive scale. Both cause death and misery. 

Nobody has to be convinced we live in miserable times, and on many levels. Some may respond that there have been miserable times before, as indeed there has, but there has been no time in recorded history where mass numbers of people in a society have killed themselves. In America last year, a record of almost 50,000 people killed themselves, and probably three times as many tried. Surprisingly, the countries with the lowest suicide rates are the most troubled nations in the world. If you look at the suicide rates in Africa they are significantly lower than more developed nations. The worst suicide rate in Africa? South Africa, by far, the most secular Western influenced nation in Africa. There is no need to belabor the point with endless statistics. Anyone’s news feed makes it abundantly clear America is messed up.

What is the Answer?
Jesus, of course! God’s revelation in creation, Scripture, and Christ is the foundation for a flourishing society. I used to see this primarily on a cultural and personal level, thinking that if enough people became Christians everything would magically get better. We do need more Christians; thus we pray for revival and Jesus pouring out the Holy Spirit everywhere, but everything turns on what kind of Christians we are. A personalized, pietistic, over spiritualized faith isn’t going to cut it. Jesus is Lord over all. Every square inch of existence is his, and we his people are his body, sent into the world to bring his reign and rule into material, fallen reality. In other words, with this mindset we are being obedient to Jesus when he taught his disciples to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That, my brothers and sisters, is our job! If we really want our country to flourish (and this applies to every country on earth), it will be because we bring God’s word and law into everything we do.

At a political and government level, there is no secular sphere of neutrality where Jesus gets just one seat at the table. Living in a pluralistic society with many different religious beliefs represented doesn’t mean Christianity is co-equal with the others. There is only one religion founded on a resurrected Savior who ascended to the right hand of God to rule and reign “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1:21). The founders of America, even the supposed Deists among them, knew the success of their experiment in republican self-government was dependent on the God of the Bible in Christ. If the experiment is not to completely fail in our day, leaders at every level of government must acknowledge Christ’s rule and authority. That is a “controversial” statement, but it is a true one, nonetheless.

Back to culture for a moment. It wasn’t until the reign of secularism that mass shootings became a thing in America. Getting rid of so-called “gun control laws” and arming more good people is necessary, but it is not sufficient to fundamentally change anything. The goal is for guns never needing to be fired. Only in a society where Jesus and God’s law and word are honored is that possible. Let us pray and work toward that end.

 

Russell Moore’s American Evangelical Church Crisis and the Myth of Neutrality

Russell Moore’s American Evangelical Church Crisis and the Myth of Neutrality

Oct 2, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

If you don’t know who Russell Moore is, you’re not missing much. He used to be a big shot in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), and last year became the Editor-in-Chief of Christianity Today. He left the SBC amid some controversy in 2020 and eventually took over at Christianity Today. He’s a Christian, along with people like David French, leftist elite society loves. He writes for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, among other establishment organs of the approved secular cultural and political narratives. To say the least, he is not a fan of the MAGA movement thinking it’s infected the Evangelical church and as he argues has created a crisis for the church. He writes of this “crisis” in a July article in The Atlantic, and since my last two pieces were about “gospel losers,” I figured it would be important to continue the theme of the biblical contrast to such anti-cultural engagement Christianity.

Like the young pastor Poythress in my previous posts, Moore believes in a personal pietistic kind of Christianity, and thinks cultural and political engagement is poison to the true mission of the church. As with other people who think like him, he is good at setting up straw men (a logical fallacy) so he can mow them down. The Christians he criticizes are caricatures in his imagination. He condemns people like me, but what he says I believe is inaccurate and untrue. The straw man strategy is an effective way to get people who already agree with you to agree with you, which is why he writes for leftist publications, and Christianity Today has lamentably become one of those. He doesn’t know any populist-nationalist (MAGA) conservative Christians like me because if he did he couldn’t write pieces like this in good faith. I’m not going to go through the paragraphs like I did in my previous posts, but give a couple examples of his straw men and false choice assertions, and argue for the biblical position. Which, by the way, can be proved without doubt by the history of the church. Here is the very first paragraph:

The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the Church’s future. Almost none of them even call themselves “evangelical” anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories.

I will assume he’s being honest here and not using this to simply make a rhetorical point. If it is true, he needs to talk to more young Evangelicals. And beware of anyone who uses the phrase “internet conspiracy theories” to discredit others. We’ve seen the last several years how the globalist deep state elites used this to try to stifle dissent and anything against the accepted “narratives.” You can see in the last sentence he embraces a personalized pietistic faith that shouldn’t get too involved in politics. He asserts a false choice typical of such thinking: it’s either “culture-war politics” or prayer and the Bible. It is not. Here is the most egregious straw many setup:

Some evangelical Christians have confused “revival” with a return to a mythical golden age.

Really? Can you give me some proof of this, Russell? He can’t because they don’t exist except in his imagination. He uses the word nostalgia four times in the piece to make his point, which only makes it weaker. As he says, “The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous.” I wonder how dangerous it really is when nobody actually believes it! I’ll quote two more sentences that show how committed his is to a personalized pietistic Christianity.

Nostalgia—especially of the sort wielded by demagogues and authoritarians—cannot protect religious faith, because it uses religion as a tool for worldly ends, leaving a spiritual void. The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace.

It doesn’t surprise me that Moore accuses those Christians he disagrees with as being “authoritarians.” Since the New Left arose in the 1960s they’ve used the “authoritarian” card to discredit and try to silence Christians who dare bring their faith into the public square. Unlike the leftists, Christians are supposed to leave their faith at home, and apparently Moore agrees with them. This is especially targeted at Christians who want their Christian faith and worldview reflected in how our nation is governed. That he is using leftwing rhetoric to discredit fellow Christians is reprehensible.

Lastly, he says the answer is “a commitment to personal faith and to the authority of the Bible.” He won’t get any argument from me there, but we mean something completely different by “personal faith.” The distinction of what “personal faith” is gets to the nature of the Christian faith and the heart of the issue. Pietism has been a disaster for the church and its influence in Western culture. This movement of 17th century German Lutheranism in due course influenced Evangelical Christianity in a way that divorced faith from life beyond the Christian’s personal piety. In other words, personal holiness and devotion, prayer, Bible study, church, etc. are such a priority that everything else pales in comparison. As you can see from Moore, even being concerned, or engaged in things like politics or “culture wars” distorts Christianity from what he thinks is its true purpose, personal transformation. The problem with this view is that it is not only not biblical, but an extreme distortion of the gospel. Cultural influence at every level, including politics, is baked into the gospel cake.

Christians in the first centuries of the church declaring “Jesus is Lord” was a loaded political statement. Unlike modern pietistic Christians, the ancient church knew there was no such thing as a “neutral” society. Someone had to be Lord, and it would be either Caesar or Christ. Many of these early Christians gave their lives because they understood the Christian faith was not at all just personal, but had ramifications for all of life. It wouldn’t be until the rise of the Enlightenment in the 17th century that secularism began its attack on Christian Western civilization which by the 20th century introduced the concept of neutrality, or as it is rightly called, the myth of neutrality. That Christians bought into, and still do, this myth has been a disaster for Christian cultural influence in the West over that last sixty plus years. Secularism reigns in our day, and because it does Christians who venture into the public square declaring God’s law and word as applicable to everything are attacked as “authoritarians,” among other epithets. As long as we accept our place at the pluralistic table and keep our faith respectfully private, we can occasionally scrape up some cultural crumbs to keep us happy. Russell Moore obviously agrees with the secularists.    

Jesus clearly said (Matt. 28:16-20) because he was given all authority that we are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching them to obey everything he commanded. This is also the same Jesus who said we are to live on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Matt. 4), and who declared that the entire Old Testament was about him (Luke 24). From the moment God called Abram out of Ur to make for himself a people (Gen. 12), the faith of His people had radical implications for all of life, both personal and societal. How could it not! Human beings live in communities, live as peoples, as nations, and some worldview, some ultimate source will be authoritative. In the West, which includes most of the world today, that source is either God in Christ revealed in His Word, or man. There is no in between, as badly as Russell Moore wants to think there is.

 

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose, Part 2

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose, Part 2

Sep 28, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

In my last post I vented about the badness of this piece by a young pastor, Justin N. Poythress: “How Evangelicals Lose Will Make All the Difference.” There was too much badness for just one post, so I continue here. His last section is titled, “Better Way,” so let’s see exactly what this way entails. He starts with a doozy:

Jesus tells his followers to take up their crosses, not their crowns (Matt. 16:24–26).

Indeed he does, but what has that to do with crowns, you ask? The young Pastor Poythress creates a false choice. If Jesus calls his followers to suffer in some way, then crowns, or winning, is somehow at odds with the suffering we are called to in Christ. But as I said in the previous post, suffering can take many different forms for the Christian. In fact, we suffer in a myriad of ways every day, psychologically, emotionally, at times physically. This is what I call the pain of sanctification. Sadly there are some Christians called to physical suffering for proclaiming their faith, as is the case in many places around the world today. That doesn’t mean, however, that such suffering is inevitable or the only calling of the Christian. Far from it. Here is the perspective of our Lord and Savior who sits at the right hand of the Father when he gave his followers what we call the Great Commission:

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

Notice what comes before “Therefore.” We only go and make disciples of “all nations” because Jesus has been given “all authority in heaven and on earth.” What’s the point of Jesus saying he’s been given this authority if he’s sending out his disciples to lose? Did he intend when he said this that his disciples, those trained and instructed as his followers, could not win?  And as I often proclaim, Jesus didn’t say to make disciples of all people, of all individuals, but all nations, in the Greek ethnos-ἔθνος. Does the Christian influence coming from “teaching them to obey everything” he commanded them not apply to politics and issues of culture? To issues of the so called “culture war”? This was a war, by the way, we did not start. Do these questions not answer themselves? Is it not obvious? (Read Psalm 2 and Eph. 1:15-23 in case you’re not sure.)

Then following his crosses, not crowns declaration he states:

Though our faith may be increasingly marginalized and devalued in the West, losing cultural battles with grace, dignity, and love can persuasively display Christ’s cruciform beauty. Conversely, there’s nothing persuasive about chasing the perks of power.

What exactly is “cruciform beauty”? The word simply means in the shape of a cross. The problem with this statement is that it’s absurd. I know what he means, the Isaiah 53 sacrifice of the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, for our sin and reconciliation to our Creator. That is indeed beautiful. However, there is nothing beautiful about a cross. It was the most ugly, horrific, means of torture and death ever devised by sinful man. The cross is only part of the story. The other parts are Jesus’ life lived in perfect obedience to God making him able to grant us his very own righteousness (Rom. 3), his resurrection, victory over death itself, and most importantly, his ascension to be seated at the right hand of the Lord God Almighty. He earned the right to sit there and reign over all of creation, visible and invisible, to advance his kingdom on earth, to reverse the fall if you will, and build his church, conquering all his enemies until the final one is defeated, death (I Cor. 15:25).

Notice also there is supposedly something dirty about “power,” and the “perks” it conveys. It reminds me of certain legalistic Christians who think sex is “dirty.” Power like sex is a natural part of life, and everything depends on what we do with it. He seems to think if we’re seeking “power” we’re doing something inherently wrong, as he says:

Suffering because you’re harmful or obnoxious isn’t Christian faithfulness. Worse, desperately clutching for the instruments of power or elbowing to get a seat at the table sacrifices Christ’s cause to chaos.

Who exactly are these “harmful or obnoxious” people? Jerks on the Internet? And clearly this power he’s obsessed with is a dirty business and in no way has anything to do with Christ’s cause. I would say this is naïve, but it’s worse than that. He completely lacks wisdom about the nature of reality and sinful man, and life lived in societies full of fallen people.

Aristotle in his Politics said that man is a political animal because we live in communities and seek certain ends of our own good, and this can’t happen without power; the process of deciding what is allowed or not, and the means to enforce it. Simply, politics is the distribution of power, and Christians throughout all of history were intimately involved in it and didn’t think of it as beneath them.

Poythress gets to the heart of what makes his understanding so problematic.

This doesn’t mean Christian political savvy is thrown aside while we lie down and float away with the cultural tide. It does mean American evangelicals have a golden opportunity, even in years when it seems the sun is setting on our influence, to prove our hope is vested beyond the material and visible. We can chart for the next generation a trail of faithfulness that avoids bitter and reclusive cultural withdrawal on the one hand and vengeful scorched-earth behavior on the other.

This is typical of third wayism as if our choices are extreme withdrawal or behavior, or some middle way. To Poythress here is the “Better Way”:

As faithful evangelicals, we advocate for God’s ways and encourage our neighbors to follow them while leaving the results to God.

He assumes fighting for Christianity and truth in the public square means we’re not leaving the results to God. This is the typically condescending perspective of Christians who think they’re above it all. He seems to forget God uses people to accomplish things in this world even though ultimate results are always up to Him.

This mentality is an example of a typical artificial duality in overly spiritualized Christians. Joe Boot explains the problem in his little pamphlet For Mission:

[This] is an implicit and destructive duality that slices up reality into matter and spirit, nature and grace, secular and sacred, naturel and supernatural, time and eternity, higher and lower, with one area perceived as lesser or evil and the other as higher or good. This tendency has resulted in a radical separation of creation and redemption (where redemption is essentially for the higher story of existence), spiritual life and historical-cultural development and mutually reinforcing pattern of subservience to non-Christian culture/nature/secular on the one hand, and the abandonment of Christian culture-building (grace/sacred) on the other.

Boot calls this Churchianity, or those Christians who are “at best disinterested in Christ’s manifest Lordship over any other sphere of life or institution, and at worse are hostile to it.” Francis Schaeffer was warning Christians about this faulty understanding of Christianity back in the 1960s and 70s before the West had become completely secularized. He spoke out against such a dangerous duality that would completely impoverish Christianity’s influence in culture. Too many Christians ignored his warnings  and secularism, along with all its horrors, has won the day. It doesn’t have to be this way.

 

 

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose

Gospel Losers: Teaching Christians How to Lose

Sep 25, 2023 | Culture, Politics & Government

When I read the title of this peace I knew reading it would not be good for my blood pressure: “How Evangelicals Lose Will Make All the Difference.” And it was worse than I thought. That it was on the Gospel Coalition website surprised me not at all. There are so many logical fallacies and theological misunderstandings in it that it’s almost impressive. Let me take them one by one and see how far I get. The sheer badness of it may require more than one post.

Before I get there, that something like this can be written and believed by a large contingent of Evangelical Christians is depressing. I’m convinced part of the reason people think this way, and think it’s the biblical way to think, is because of faulty eschatology, but that’s not all of it. There are many dispensational premillennialist Pentecostal Christians I have more in common with in this regard than my Reformed brethren, and to say the least I do not agree with their eschatology. Most Christians believe losing “down here” is baked into the gospel cake. They are convinced suffering and loss of cultural influence are the only and inevitable hallmarks of the Christian life. They are not! Taking up our cross and following Jesus doesn’t mean Christians are called to being thrown to the lions or burned at the stake. We know that suffering and dying to ourselves takes many forms, and none of it is pleasant. Let’s see what our young pastor, Justin N. Poythress, thinks.

He is addressing something called “The Seven Mountain Mandate.” Some Christians believe a passage in Revelation is a call “to retake seven spheres (or mountains) of cultural influence: religion, family, government, education, media, arts/entertainment, and business.” Well, yeah, the Christian worldview addresses everything in life, including these broad areas, and more. Jesus in the Great Commission said his followers were to disciple nations. That has implications for all these things, and more. I’ll start with this: 

The perspective is ultimately built on a dual misunderstanding of Scripture and of Christ’s purposes in the world. 

Those are some pretty big things to misunderstand! Here is what he believes the Seven Mountain Mandate misses in the passage in Revelation:

The passage was intended as a picture of the spiritual battle waged through all history until Christ returns. It was intended to give Christians hope amid their suffering and cultural loss.

Well yes, it was. The Christians to whom the Apostle John was writing were often being perThe passage was intended as a picture of the spiritual battle waged through all history until Christ returns. It was intended to give Christians hope amid their suffering and cultural loss. secuted violently, some giving their lives for the gospel. But are all Christians in all geopolitical and cultural situations throughout history facing the same kind of persecutions? Is Poythress saying that’s just the inevitable lot for Christians and there is nothing we can do about it but learn to “lose gracefully”? And notice he does something typical of such thinking, he spiritualizes it. Christianity supposedly applies primarily to “spiritual” things, not the mundane issues of life lived in culture.

He then commits a colossal non sequitur (the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise), among many in this short piece. However one interprets the passage in Revelation he asserts:

the conquering warrior is always the crucified Christ, not a sword-swinging church. 

It does not follow that just because the crucified Christ is indeed the conquering warrior, that the church can’t be swinging swords. We’re just supposed to sit back and take it? I guess, be nice and loving and not fight for truth or justice or righteousness or the honor of God? What does this even mean? He says after this:

Even if you’ve never heard of the 7M mandate (and its strange reading of Revelation), it can still be tempting to think Christ’s kingdom grows by “winning” cultural power and influence. If this is where we place our hope, it’ll be hard to stomach the losses.

This is a perfect example of his sloppy thinking. To his mind “winning” cultural power and influence is antithetical to Christ’s kingdom. Somehow Christians living out Kingdom values found throughout the gospels are not supposed to have “cultural power and influence.” Really? How was it that the Roman Empire eventually fell to the “cultural power and influence” of Christianity? Was that a mistake? Unbiblical? Something God never intended when he came to earth in the person of Christ? Why then did Jesus teach us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? Maybe because God wanted us to bring the influence of heaven into the cultures in which we live? Just maybe? In fact, the very nature of God’s kingdom, the kingdom of heaven is to bring it “down” to earth, and when it grows it will always gain “cultural power and influence.” How can it not! You wonder how he and those who think like him interpret the parables of the mustard seed and leaven in Matthew 13. It sure seems that Jesus is saying that the influence of the kingdom of heaven grows inevitably and inexorably, and it cannot help but have influence in cultures.

The next sentence is even worse. Because we desire the gospel to influence the culture and have “cultural power” therefore we’re placing our hope in that and not Christ? Really? We can’t want Christ to be glorified and obeyed in the societies in which we live? That’s not Christian? Frankly, that’s insulting. Then he asserts we need to be concerned with how we are seen by the culture:

Evangelicals increasingly run the risk of being seen as sore losers in the culture war. Our inability to let go, to relinquish positions of public prominence and power, reveals a misplaced faith. Too often, we’ve entangled Jesus’s name with a political agenda, as mainline Christians did when they made the church into little more than a social club for liberal activism.

Oh my. I could do an entire post just about this! So it follows that if we want “cultural power and influence” and we have a tough time of it we’ll be sore losers? We’re supposed to glory in our losing? Really? He must think we aren’t aware that we live in a fallen world among fallen people in a fallen body. Losing and overcoming, and losing again, and overcoming, and losing again, and overcoming is called life! Personally or culturally. 

I wonder if the Apostles and the first generation of disciples cared about how they were “seen” by the Jews and Pagans of Rome. And the gospel calls us to “relinquish positions of public prominence and power”? Really? What kind of doormat theology is this! And he has the gall to compare those Christians, like me, who think our Christianity compels us to a certain political agenda to the liberal Christians of the early 20th century? Really? As you can tell, the old Italian blood gets boiling when I read such calumnies. For you youngsters, that word means insults. And everything about that paragraphs reeks of self-righteousness. He and his ilk think they are above such mundane matters as “the culture war.” I guess as I said above, fighting for truth or justice or righteousness or the honor of God is “misplaced faith.”

I’ve written here about Tim Keller’s unfortunate creating of a moral equivalence between left and right. I’ve heard this called “third wayism,” as if there is some middle way, a more gospel way, between the radical left and the radical right, as Keller said. In our day, there is no “radical right.” And everyone on the left, including most Democrat politicians, and the entire legacy media, are Marxists, thus by definition “radical.” The “culture wars” were started by the left against the right (conservatives) in the 1960s, and we decided to fight back. Now Christians like the young pastor Poythress want us to roll over and play dead because fighting back is “misplaced faith”? Apparently. 

There is much more fodder in the rest of the piece, so I’ll have to do that in another post.