Shuffling the Deck Chairs on the Titanic. It is Time to Retire a Discredited Proverb

The secular worldview has morals, but it cannot rationally justify them or keep from them becoming relative at some point. Secularism, because of its rejection of God’s revelation in both nature and Word, has only humanity to guide it. There are no moral absolutes, and so what is morally right or wrong will eventually be modified.

This is very clear in the eagerness of the secularist to embrace medical dictatorship without critical complaint: the confinement without trial (nursing home residents), tearing families apart for months, destruction of personal incomes and the subsequent enrichment of the rule-makers and their colleagues, the banning of normal social behaviour, forcible wearing of face-coverings, and now a demand to surrender bodily autonomy are all what a few years ago would be called immoral.

Now these have become moral, and that shift came with almost no argument. People complain about the details, but went along anyway. The Christian faith provides the critical tools to examine, critique, and offer alternatives to each of these in a time of a worldwide pandemic, but cannot get a hearing. The response to the pandemic is demonstrably far worse than the disease, but the opinion that we are on the wrong track is limited only to outliers, certainly not the mainstream governmental officials, medical/scientific communities, media, and large business.

But the reason that Christians are largely ignored is because they are not there to be heard. Few are the committed Christians in any of the fields that control society: government, science, education, media, business, etc. They exist, but we have been absent for almost two centuries. It is now very difficult, but necessary, for large number of Christians who have a real Christian worldview, to enter all fields of human knowledge. I do not mean a Christian who goes to church on Sunday and operates in his/her profession on Monday as a pagan.

The reason for our long absence is the hold that dispensationalism and pietism has had and has now I the church. These views concede this world to Satan, even though the Bible does not. It relegates God to the heart, church, and in an increasing limited sense, to the family. A Christian would have to be totally asleep to fail to see that a secular mindset (which is in all-out war against the Christian worldview) is encroaching in every place humans inhabit. The willingness for the church to concede its worship, fellowship, and education to the state in these past few months is indicative of the degree to which the church has withdrawn.

It is the church that needs a Christian worldview most of all. I believe the near-death experience of Biblical Christianity in the West, which reached its peak in 2020-2021 has been long in coming. The church already had one foot out of the door and abandoned its commission to disciple the nations. And it is abandonment to reduce “disciple the nations” to “make church-goers of the nations.”

Here’s a test: if a medical doctor, a lawyer, a judge, or a parliamentarian is converted to Christ, what counsel do you give them for their profession? Do you tell them they must operate with honesty and integrity? Good. Do you tell them they must treat all cases that come to them with the same supposed objectivity and neutrality they exercised prior to their conversion? That is very bad. You are teaching them to live a lie, and are siding with secularism. You are teaching your disciple that their faith has no bearing in the “real world.” Secularists are not neutral nor objective, but their presuppositions and prejudices are expressed as though they are. There is no neutrality. Secularists pretend neutrality, and pietistic Christianity goes along with the charade.

This is how the church loses its belief in moral absolutes. When the secular world shifts, the church keeps up instead of critiquing the shift, offering alternatives, or resisting.

If your view is that to be involved in this world is just “shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic,” you need to repent of your non-Christian worldview. The world needs a Christian worldview, because no other approach will fulfill the desires God has for humanity and avoid His judgement. Of course, a secularist denies both judgement and God Himself, but that is irrelevant to the facts.

24 March, 2016

Paganism, or Not Paganism

From Peter Jones book, The Other Worldview: Exposing Christianity’s Greatest Threat. Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2015:

Our Worldview Alternatives: Oneism and Twoism

I claim, with the Bible, that there are only two worldviews—one based on the ultimacy of the creation, and the other based on the ultimate, prior, and all-determining existence of the Creator. Creation and Creator are the only alternatives as divine objects of worship—the only possible explanations of the world we know. The conflict is between two mutually exclusive, antithetical belief systems. Our choice will affect the answers we give to those two important questions: Is there something rather than nothing? And if there is something, what is that something like?
For the sake of simplicity, I call these two alternatives Oneism and Twoism.1 They are not mere variations on a general spiritual theme, but the only two timeless, mutually contradictory ways to think about the world. In these two terms (Oneism and Twoism), there is a universe of difference. These are the only two destinations on the tracks we can travel; let’s map them out in more detail now.

Oneism

Oneism sees the world as self-creating (or perpetually existing) and self-explanatory. Everything is made up of the same stuff, whether matter, spirit, or a mixture. There’s one kind of existence, which, in one way or another, we worship as divine (or of ultimate importance), even if that means worshiping ourselves. Though there is apparent differentiation and even hierarchy, all distinctions are, in principle, eliminated, and everything has the same worth. This is a “homocosmology,” a worldview based on sameness. The classic term for this is “paganism,” worship of nature.

Twoism

The only other option is a world that is the free work of a personal, transcendent God, who creates ex nihilo (from nothing). In creating, God was not constrained by or dependent on any preexisting conditions. There is nothing exactly like this in our human experience of creating; our creative acts are analogous to God’s. There is God, and there is everything that is not-God—everything created and sustained by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This worldview celebrates otherness, distinctiveness. We only worship as divine the distinct, personal, triune Creator, who placed essential distinctions within the creation. This is a “heterocosmology,” a worldview based on otherness and difference. This is often called “theism.”2
Both of these worldviews, whether implicitly assumed or explicitly embraced, require the same fundamental certainty. In other words, if one is ultimately true, the other must be false. In the moral universe of the Bible, knowledge is never neutral. That’s why Paul calls these worldviews “the truth” and “the lie” (Rom 1:25).

Endnotes:

1 I am not inventing anything other than a simplified terminology. Other descriptions of the two options include biblical faith or paganism, monism or theism, or the Creator/creature distinction.

2 If this is the biblical worldview, how does one relate it to Rabbinic Judaism and Islam, whose followers also claim to respect the Bible (though in very different ways)? There is only one pure Oneist—Satan—and one pure Twoist—Jesus Christ. Judaism and Islam have a defective view of biblical Twoism. Their denial of the Trinity leaves them with a transcendent yet impersonal God (an attempt at Twoism), who ultimately depends upon his relationship with human beings in order to constitute his personhood (which ends up in Oneism by a circuitous route). Rabbinic scholar Abraham Heschel (1907–1972) rightly critiqued Islam for seeing God as “unqualified Omnipotence,” who can never be “the Father of mankind,” and thus is radically impersonal. See Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper, 1962), 292, 311. Yet postbiblical Judaism cannot escape Heschel’s critique entirely. The medieval rabbi Maimonides, for example, also confessed an “absolutely transcendent God who is independent of humanity.” See Reuven Kimelman, “The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel,” First Things (Dec 2009). On the other hand, Kimelman notes that Heschel commits the opposite error to that of Maimonides (and Islam), namely that of making God dependent on man in a covenantal relationship that both God and man need in order to be who they are. Heschel adopts the rabbinical concept that it is human witness that in some sense makes God real (Kimelman, “The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel”). Once more, God is dependent upon humanity. This is the classic dilemma of a monotheism without the Trinity. Because Heschel does not believe God to be triune, God depends on man to be personal and therefore cannot be “Wholly Other” in relation to creation.
Peter Jones, The Other Worldview: Exposing Christianity’s Greatest Threat (Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2015), 12–13.

2 February, 2016

When the Church Loses Its Saltiness

“Ecclesiastical structures that depart from the faith do so by the loss of distinctiveness, the gradual conformation of their thought and life to that of the larger community. Sociological observations confirm that, by and large, the religious institutions of the United States do not teach values that are distinctive to their own traditions but rather use religious terminology that ratifies the values of the broader society. There is little to distinguish what the churches say from what other institutions teach, and we are left therefore with only an indistinctive religion-in-general.

. . .

Thus, the master of the American church is likely to be whatever cultural or intellectual fad has gained the ascendancy. Christology displays this tendency when the Gospels are used selectively to show that the ‘real Jesus’ was an exemplar of the American middle class, or perhaps a guerrilla fighter, a social democrat, or a model of psychological fitness. That is a recipe for intellectual and spiritual sterility, for by accepting the dead end of the reigning assumption, the church absorbs whatever conclusions ‘enlightened’ people consider current. In sociological terms, the church functions as just another means used by the political and social establishment to integrate society’s values into the next generation. The support it receives depends on the extent to which it uncritically transmits values. Its passivity makes it acceptable and ensures its irrelevance. C. E. M. Joad saw the Church of England being transformed by this process into a ‘mere purveyor of vague ethico-religious uplift.’”

Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1983. Pp. 235-37