Book excerpts
I. Light in the Darkness of Postmodernism: An American Christian Surveys His Life and Times
II. Where is the American Church? Three Essays on Salvation, Sin and Judgment
III. Questions and Observations on the Conflict Between Faith-Based and Secular Rationalities
I. From Light in the Darkness of Postmodernism
On white male privilege, from chapter 6 (“An aimless life”)
Do all of those people who are so resolutely condemning white male privilege have the faintest idea of how many white males in America today are living on the street, homeless, ravaged by alcohol, drugs, mental illness or all of them combined? Do they know how many white males are in prison, or have experienced long term unemployment due to the loss of jobs overseas, or are physically and psychologically scarred and crippled for life because of experiences in foreign wars? Do they know how many white males are eking out a living at mediocre jobs they have no real interest in, or are divorced and unwillingly separated from their children?
I well understand that those who enjoy portraying themselves as victims of white male privilege because of their own self-pity, self-justification, or political advantage, can no more consider this subject rationally than a Soviet Communist could rationally consider his hostility to rich kulaks who were guilty of owning a small piece of land and a couple of cows, or than an Aryan supremacist could objectively consider evidence that his ideas of racial superiority were wrong. Nevertheless, for others who are capable of thinking logically about this subject, I would like to make what should be the obvious observation that merely being a white male is no guarantee of wealth, status, or success, nor is it a grant of immunity from life’s problems. In fact, many of the people who make the most noise about white male privilege are themselves the possessors of a privileged and sheltered status with levels of prestige and standards of living that many white males will never attain to.
The African American writer Richard Wright made some compelling statements that relate to this. In his autobiographical work American Hunger, Wright described some white girls who worked in a restaurant where he washed dishes in Chicago in the 1930s. As he considered the shallowness and complacent triviality of their conversations, he felt that they too had been warped by the superficiality of American commercialism and materialism, and prevented from reaching their full potential as human beings. As he saw it, “None of them possessed the insight or the emotional equipment to understand themselves or others . . . the words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.”
On the problem of evil, from chapter 15 (“The oppositions of radical secularism”)
First of all, it must be said that atheism contributes exactly nothing to the solution of this age-old problem. If human life is merely an accident, the result of random interactions and combinations of impersonal forces, then there are no answers to this question. All of human suffering, from the perishing of millions in a plague to the unhappiness of a little girl whose parents do not love her, is all pointless.
Some atheists like to console themselves with dreams of making the world a better place, but these dreams do nothing to account for or give value to all of the accumulated thousands of years of death, famine, pain, sorrow, loneliness and cruelty that have already passed. Nor will any clever atheistical scheme for reorganizing society and redesigning humanity accomplish anything significant in the future, except to make problems worse. This is because of the conceit and incompetence of those who have little or no understanding of human nature, yet who imagine that they are the ones who will save humanity. There are ample recent historical examples of this.
Christianity, on the other hand, while not claiming in its essential doctrines to give us a complete answer to the problem of evil, does have some profound advantages over atheism. First of all, it sheds some light on the subject – great light, in fact. For one thing, the concept of a final day of judgment promises that the guilty will in the end be punished. Theoretically they might find forgiveness in Christ, but a concern for repentance and forgiveness is not noticeably evident among the vast majority of evildoers. All but a small percentage die in their sins, and hence are beyond forgiveness. As Jesus said, “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (Matthew 7:13–14). So, the administration of divine justice in the end means that the universe is not entirely void of justice. At least a part of the problem of evil is thus solved.
On preaching divine anger, from chapter 18 (“The wrath of God?”)
It is possible to give a biblically sound sermon—or perhaps I should say lecture—on the wrath of God without troubling anyone. First, after a suitable introduction (maybe even one with a little humor), one needs to cite various Bible verses showing that God’s anger exists; that it is not cruel and arbitrary, but just; and that it is not inconsistent with other biblical teachings. After all, we read in Scripture that “God is love” (I John 4:8), but also that “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). And, of course, true goodness must include opposition to evil. Some biblical examples of God’s anger need to be presented as well.
Having done that, it is next necessary to show how Christ experienced the wrath of God for us so that we can be forgiven and thus escape condemnation on judgment day; assure the congregation that they are forgiven and going to heaven, or at least leave them with that assumption; and then the great majority of the listeners, or maybe all of them, will leave the service no different than they were before the sermon was preached.
On sin and belief in childhood, from chapter 2 (“My early life”)
Be that as it may, my childhood was outwardly a conventional one for a middle-class boy of the period. I had a bicycle, a starter stamp collection, comic books and kids’ magazines. I collected butterflies and displayed them in a nice, cork-lined wooden case with a glass door made by my grandfather - but all was not well. The problem of sin, that has afflicted all of humanity since the fall of Adam and Eve, and will continue to afflict humanity until the end of the world and the return of Christ, was already at work beneath my placid exterior, and the little seeds of much greater future problems had been sown and taken root.
For one thing, I had no thought of or regard for God. Even a child is capable of taking interest in the fact that God created the world, and us within it, if the subject is properly introduced. Even children wonder about a death in the family, or why some things are right and allowed and other things are wrong and forbidden. They are capable of understanding that the soul lives after death and goes to another place, a place of blessing or a place of punishment – and some introduction to these and other truths of God do not warp or stunt a child’s development as the atheists mistakenly and blindly assert. If they are lovingly and sensibly presented in a way suitable to a child’s interest and capacities, they can stimulate thought, build character, and direct the child’s attention to those higher truths and realities which alone make for a meaningful life.
Of course, there are religious parents who can deal with these things in a wrong way and alienate their children. If their words about religion are not accompanied by real love and sympathetic interest that show themselves convincingly to the child over time, and in the many circumstances of everyday life, they may and probably will have negative effects. Yet, there are non-religious and unbelieving parents who also have negative influences on their children and fail to give them loving and sympathetic guidance. Those who say that parents are abusing their children by gently introducing them to eternal truths are more likely than not supportive of a mother’s right to kill her unborn child if she decides she can’t be bothered with it. They really have no real concern for children at all, but are I believe motivated by hatred and fear of God. And, the fact that some (not all) of these people would like, if possible, to control how the children of others are raised only reveals their fascistic tendencies, and their all-too-often cold, unnatural and inhuman contempt for the divinely ordained institution of the family.
II. From Where is the American Church?
On the current state of the church, from the Introduction
Numerous Christian authors recognize that contemporary American versions of Christianity are in difficulty. Such concerns as “A crisis of Christianity . . . division and weakness . . . loss of spiritual power . . . fear, anxiety, and uncertainty . . . we have lost our way forward” show a general awareness that all is not well with too many of the churches in America. Moreover, looking at the situation around us, we do not see any great nationwide regard for the laws of God, or for the opinions of church leaders. What the Bible might say is not a part of our national dialogue, and however religious America might have been in the past is no longer relevant. The godliness of David and Solomon did not serve as a talisman to grant the nation of Israel eternal security.
Theory vs. reality, from chapter 1 (“The Gospel Of Christ And The Christian Life”)
“The mind of Christ”—is this only a theory? Is it just a Bible verse, or is it a vital reality? Much of our Christianity today is only theories, verses, letters on a page. Where is the power? Paul says in 1 Corinthians that “the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power,” and that “your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God” (4:20, 2:5). Of how many Christians today is this true? Isn’t there a conspicuous lack of power in many books, sermons, speeches, and religious activities today, even when they are outwardly orthodox?
I believe that there is such a lack, and that there are specific reasons for it. Those reasons are clearly set forth in Scripture, and hence may be recognized and discussed. There are problems in doctrine and there are problems in practice. There are subtle but highly significant alterations of such biblical terms as “faith,” “sin,” and “repentance.” There is conformity to the world, and there is serious, even blatant, iniquity. Some sins are hidden, but some are accepted and widely practiced in the churches, where they ought not to be.
Judgment and discernment, from chapter 1
At this point I would like to reflect on the obvious difference between judgment and discernment. These are two significantly different activities, and while Jesus forbade the one, he did not forbid the other. In fact, he commanded discernment when he told us to be wise as serpents. The judgment we are to avoid is that proud and haughty condemnation which we feel when we forget that we also are sinners. We read in 1 Corinthians that spiritual discernment, on the other hand, is something granted by the Holy Spirit of God, along with wisdom, knowledge, faith, and other spiritual gifts (12:10).
Do we not have great need of such discernment in these troubled times, especially in matters pertaining to the Christian faith? Are there not today many cunning and subtle mixtures of truth and falsehood in our churches, in our lives, and even in our own understandings of biblical teaching? Are there not those who take sound biblical teachings and present them selectively, while omitting, distorting, and evading others? This is not a matter of scientific certainty either, since we are dealing with questions far beyond the scope of lesser and inferior worldly knowledge.
The sacrifice of Isaac, from chapter 2 (“The Decline of Christianity”)
This is commonly alluded to as an instance of the cruelty and barbarism of a primitive religion, but one fundamental point is commonly missed. While the test was a severe one—perhaps the severest imaginable, both for Abraham and his son—the fact remains that, in the end, no one was killed. It says a lot about the false claims to objectivity of the secularists that they will become so perturbed by an incident of approximately 4,000 years ago in which there was not one single fatality, while they have so little to say about the dozens upon dozens of millions of deaths, inflicted within the lifetimes of many still on earth today, by crazed and fanatical atheists pursuing with ruthless and inhuman dogmatism their corrupt hallucinations of an earthly paradise without God.
The failures of secularism, from chapter 2
Since the preachers of atheism take so much pleasure in referring to the failures of Christianity (using the term in its broadest cultural sense), it will not do any harm to discuss the failures of secularism for a change. One clear example of the complete and utter failure of “enlightened” human reason once liberated from God is the French Revolution. All of the French revolutionaries were secularists, offspring and devotees of the so-called Enlightenment. Some were atheists, some were Deists with a vague and unbiblical concept of God, a few may have been renegade Catholics, but all of them had complete and childlike confidence in the power of human reason to build a rational and just new society on the ruins of the old. Their failure was colossal and catastrophic, and all of their noble rhetoric about the “Rights of Man” was quickly proven to be nothing but the delusions of vain and conceited people.
Mobs parading through the streets with severed human heads on pikes; vicious persecutions and massacres of those who failed to share or even to support the right ideas with sufficient enthusiasm; lethal infighting among different secularist factions, each dogmatically convinced of the rightness of their aims and of the fundamental treachery and evil of those who differed from them in matters of policy; farcical trials that were merely brief formalities preceding the guillotine—it was not until the revolutionaries had been swept aside and crushed by war and counter-revolution that society was able to regain some sort of equilibrium. The blind conceit of those who had confidence in the power of their intuition to guide humanity forward to a bright new day led to the opposite.
Also, today’s secularists and activists who like to fantasize about creating a better world should not forget about Napoleon. When the simple-minded children of the “Enlightenment” were struggling to erect the flimsy cardboard structure of their theories and dreams, along came a military genius who just kicked it all down and set up a new and different system. This regime was founded on naked force and was dedicated solely to one man’s power and glory. Not surprisingly, Napoleon had no shortage of enthusiastic followers eager to do his will.
Eternal punishment, from chapter 3 (“The Wrath Of God?”)
When Christ shall return, all of mankind will be judged. To the righteous it will be said, “Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” To the wicked it will be said, “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” In the last sentence, Christ says, “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:34, 41, 46).
Since the same adjective—αἰώνιος —is used in this verse to describe the end of both the righteous and the wicked as “eternal” and “everlasting,” it is not reasonable to try and find some way out of the terrible nature of the final end of the wicked. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men” (5:11). The Liddell-Scott Lexicon gives both “fear” and “terror” as possible meanings of the word ϕόβος, but since the word “fear” is used in a positive sense elsewhere—“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10)—the stronger and more negative form is appropriate here.
There is biblical confirmation for such a strong rendering. We read in Hebrews that it says of God’s appearance on Mount Sinai, “And so terrible was the sight, that Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake” (12:21). We read in Isaiah that the proud and the haughty—which means all those who set themselves in defiance against God—“shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth” (2:19). This is confirmed in the New Testament, where we read in the book of Revelation,
And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains;
And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb:
For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?
(6:15–17)
III. From Questions and Observations on the Conflict Between Faith-Based and Secular Rationalities
On the limitations of science, from “73 Questions and Observations”
5. Scientists do not automatically have special insight or wisdom in areas that fall outside of the precise confines of the scientific method. This includes such topics as:
~ the reality of life after death
~ the first emergence of the world and of the cosmos
~ the origin of human and animal life
~ the nature and origin of human ethics
~ the existence or the non-existence of God
~ the reality of biblical miracles
~ the virgin birth of Christ
~ the sacrificial death and resurrection of Christ
~ the resurrection of the dead
~ art, music, philosophy, economics, politics, literature, sports and entertainment
~ ordinary and basic human emotions such as love, hate, happiness, or unhappiness
6. The scientific method is limited to the material world, to matter and to objects subject to human control, manipulation and study. Questions outside of naturalistic boundaries are permanently beyond the reach of meaningful scientific theorizing, hypothesizing, analyzing and predicting . . .
11. Scientists, many of them diligently toiling in obedience to the state, have provided us with many lesser weapons such as napalm, military airplanes, machine guns, rockets, biological weapons, poison gas, and innumerable explosives. Science has helped to make warfare far more destructive than it ever was in the past.
12. Current experiments that consist of creating new and dangerous viruses solely for the sake of some hypothetical knowledge reveal some medical scientists as great sources of danger to the well-being of us all. But, our well-being and flourishing is not their concern.
13. What if there should be a terrorist attack, or an earthquake, fire, or structural defect that should release deadly new viruses on an unsuspecting world? This is much more of a real and present danger than any presented by biblical Christianity – which in fact poses no dangers at all.
On the failure of the Enlightenment, from “The Consequences of Opposing Worldviews”
It was the belief of the so-called Enlightenment that we would be able to make a better world by rejecting religion and tradition and relying on reason alone. This dazzling vision of self-reform and self-improvement by a humanity emancipated from God has proven to be a mirage, a delusion, a failure. The twentieth century, which – according to the dreams of secularists – should have been the most enlightened, progressive, and civilized period in history, turned out to be vicious, brutal, and bloody. Even in societies that escaped the devastations of war and totalitarianism, the humanist dreams of peace and material prosperity have proven to be deeply dissatisfying.
Not only have the advances of science failed to bring peace, but the blessings of modern technology have given us more power than we know how to handle wisely. They have exponentially increased the destructiveness of the forces of evil without providing any compensatory moral safeguards. Indeed, what traditional moral safeguards did exist were systematically and proudly dismantled – and the result is what we are seeing today. We can reasonably expect that things will only get worse as those who deny God follow their own appetites and dreams into the modern and postmodern darkness and confusion.
On Luther and the Reformation, from “The Consequences of Opposing World Views”
Historian Robert Wistrich, while severely criticizing Luther, also recognized the importance of Luther’s “devastating assault on the corruption, falsehoods, and superstitions abounding in the papal Rome of his day.”[7] It has been said that the Reformation sundered Europe’s spiritual unity, but who needs a false and artificially imposed unity of so-called faith that has to be enforced by Inquisitions, torture, and murder? We are told that the Reformation led to many religious wars – but what do people think Europe was before the Reformation? Have they read any history at all? Why does it need to be explained that there were countless wars in Europe for two thousand years and more before the Reformation. The Thirty Years War – constantly presented as an example of religious strife – was indeed sparked by religion, but quickly became an old-fashioned dynastic power struggle with Catholics aiding Protestants against their Catholic rivals.
One historian wrote of the violence that afflicted Europe before religious conflicts were mitigated by secularism. Is that why the twentieth century was the most peaceful century the world has ever known, because of the blessings of secularism? Consideration of these subjects is vastly complicated by those whose devotion to their materialist ideology makes it difficult for them to discuss religion objectively. Is it rational to blame Christianity for poison gas, napalm, and all of the other weapons of modern destruction? It was not Christian teaching that transformed war from a limited affair of the battlefield to something vastly greater, more vicious and destructive. Is it not in fact ridiculous for people who flatter themselves on their objectivity to give science credit for all of the advances of modern technology, yet exempt science from any blame for its abuses?