The Dilemma of Western Thought

Eph. 4:17-19 provides the following insight and instructions:

“So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.”

“Modern man must be challenged to forsake his sinful and therefore futile effort to find meaning in life in terms of himself as a law unto himself.” [Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge] Since the fall, man has been desperately searching for meaning and knowledge, but he has presupposed that he can discover meaning and knowledge apart from God. In fact, bound up in the fall of man is the idea that truth may be accessed apart from God. Man can determine for himself if truth exists, what truth is, and how truth should be accessed.

The apostle Paul provides a vivid description of the state of the unregenerate. He describes the unregenerate condition as 1) futility of their mind, 2) darkened in their understanding, 3) excluded from the life of God, 4) ignorant, 5) a hardened heart, 6) callous, 7) given over to sensuality.

Knowledge is like the tree we see outside our window. It existed once as a seed. Without the seed, the tree would not be possible. In other words, knowledge from nothing is impossible. What this means is that knowledge depends on knowledge. Apart from some prior knowledge, knowledge in any meaningful sense is impossible. How does one account for “the why” and “the how” where it concerns human knowledge about reality? What is the epistemic seed necessary for knowledge? What are the necessary preconditions for knowledge? As Van Til would put it: what are the necessary preconditions for the intelligibility of human experience?

In his book, Problems of Knowledge, Michael Williams lists five problems confronting the idea of knowledge. The analytic problem concerns how knowledge is to be distinguished from mere belief or opinion. The problem of demarcation is related to what knowledge actually is and whether or not it has boundaries and what those boundaries involve. Another problem concerns that of method. How do we obtain knowledge? There is also the problem of skepticism. Is knowledge even possible? Finally, there is the problem of value. Is knowledge even something worth having? If so, why? Indeed, these are some very important questions and worthy of consideration. Christians must learn to use their minds differently in the 21^st century, especially in Western culture, and especially in America. The absence of deliberation, contemplation, critical analysis has placed us in a very challenging and embarrassing predicament. The good news is that it is never too late to reverse the course. But it is critical that such a course must be reversed and it must be reversed today.

Human beings exist in and are part of, reality. Reality is what God says it is. Therefore, the existence of human beings is what God says it is. All that remains is to examine and understand what God says about human existence in this thing we call reality. This argument represents a way of thinking about human existence that is antithetical to Western culture in general, and American culture in particular.

Insanity is defined as a state of mind that prevents normal perception, behavior, or social interaction. The very definition of insanity then presupposes the existence of God. If insanity is to have a state of mind that prevents normal perception, behavior, or social interaction, then there must be a normal state of mind. And if reality is what God says it is, then God must have already defined what a normal state of mind actually is. The text I referenced above indicates that the Apostle Paul positions Christianity as the only sane worldview in existence today. All other worldviews, being the product of godless, and therefore, abnormal thinking, are the products of insanity, if Christianity is to be taken seriously. It is unfortunate, though not surprising, that all humans have fallen in varying degrees into a pit of insanity. Holding mindlessly to false beliefs, failed hypotheses, and unjustifiable ideas, each individual is left clinging for life to any root, branch, or outcropping that will prevent his plummeting descent into the dark abyss of folly. [Jonah Haddad, Insanity: God and the Theory of Knowledge]

American culture has fallen into such inanity, head to toe. She has marched off the cliff of the rationally coherent, and plunged headfirst into the chasm of madness with the irrational impulsiveness of a teenager on prom night. Driven by blind pleasure alone, she has purged herself of anything remotely resembling healthy, intellectual interchange, preferring only the intense love affair she has with a postmodern hedonism, rapidly moving along, with more speed and power than any locomotive ever engineered in the history of mankind. In short, no mountain on God’s green earth seems big enough to deter the end goal of American society: ˜God (no God).

Recently, there has been a dustup in American culture over the North Carolina “bathroom law.” There are many supposedly smart people, intelligent people, who think that a person can not only self-identify whatever gender they wish, but that such people should be able to use the public rest room of their choice. A man can use a woman’s rest room if he self-identifies as a woman. But isn’t it possible he could be wrong? Isn’t it possible he could be lying? How could we know if he is either? Is there a certification process in place, and an I.D. card issued to people that have been through some sort of scientific assessment, thus, validating and certifying that they are in fact properly identifying themselves as “x” gender? What is to protect women and girls from being subjected to dangerous perverts of all sorts? No one seems to be asking those questions or worse, no one seems to be even slightly interested in that question. I wonder why.

Paul tells us that the unregenerate walk in the futility of their mind. This Greek word mataios means that the unregenerate mind is useless, and lacking in content. He tells us in Romans 1:21 that they became futile in their speculations. How much more futile can you get when you think that a man ought to be able to use a woman’s restroom, and anyone who dares to disagrees with that concept is, well, not engaged or debated, but dismissed as a hateful bigot who doesn’t even deserve the right to gainful employment. Curt Schilling was fired for posting his view regarding the homosexual issue on his own Facebook page. Apparently, employers now have the right to discriminate against people with religious beliefs that are contrary to their own. The message is simple: either reject your Christian worldview and adopt our worldview, or you are a bigot with no rights to support your family. That is basically what it comes down to. Dr. Eric Walsh, a medical doctor and lay minister in Georgia was fired from his position in the Department of Public Health recently after the state demanded he turn over his sermon which took contrary positions on issues related to marriage, creation, and sexuality. Did you read that? In America, a man was fired because of a sermon he preached in his own church. This is indeed, insane! But it is exactly what the rest of our brothers and sisters have faced throughout the world for centuries. Hey Christians in America; welcome to the party! The Christian persecution party.

Peter tells us that we were redeemed from a “futile way of life.” We have been redeemed from a way of life that is useless, without fruit, pointless. Western thought, being thoroughly autonomous, refusing to acknowledge dependence on God is doomed from the start. We see this argument expressed in Scripture without ambiguity. The unredeemed mind is hopelessly futile. We cannot, in any way, allow the unbeliever to establish his own criterion for what passes as knowledge. Having rejected God from the start, he has rejected knowledge from the start. Attempting to build his house of knowledge on a foundation of autonomy, he only builds upon quicksand. The Christian message is indeed good news. It is a message of grace, of peace, of hope, of forgiveness, and of redemption and restoration. But that message comes to us as a message of divine demand, informing us, reminding us, of an obligation to our Creator that we would rather ignore. Apart from God, knowledge cannot even get started. The skeptic carries the day so long as we ignore God or even if, for some reason, we pretend there is no God when we interact with the unbelieving pagans. The gospel demands that men acknowledge the Creator. We know, being contemporary eyewitnesses, that Western thought degenerates into insanity because it attempts to do what no one, in the history of the world, has yet been able to do: provide the necessary preconditions for the intelligibility of human experience apart from God.

The gaze of God is both what we fear and what we can’t do without. Scripture makes it clear that apart from God’s coming to us and opening our eyes, we cannot know him truly. Talk about epistemic difficulties! For us to know him, he must know us first. Our knowing is warped, especially when it comes to knowing God, because of human rebellion against God. There is something inside us that doesn’t want to know him, even as another part of us does. Our blindness thus requires the terror of his meeting us. [Meek, Esther Lightcap, Longing to Know]

College Kids Say the Darndest Things: On Identity

Welcome to the future of humanity. Man, seeking to be a law unto himself, has finally arrived at the very heartbeat of the unintelligible. What is bizarre is that these kids represent that upper echelon of American culture.

This is an excellent example of answering the fool according to his folly.

God Said…

 אַף כִּי־אָמַר אֱלֹהִים Did God really say? ʾap kî-ʾāmar ʾĕlōhîm? So goes the hiss of the serpent as the first seeds of doubt are planted in the mind of the first woman.

On the mountain bearing the name, Jabal an-Nour, in a cave called Hira, from what eventually became a book called the Qurán, an angel named Gabriel, brought a word for God to a man named Mohammad. Eventually, this event was the beginning of a series of events that resulted in what is today one of the largest religions in the world; Islam. Islam exists because a man claimed that God spoke to him on a mountain, in a cave, through an angel named Gabriel. Did God speak to Mohammad?

On Easter morning in 1935, in the Korean mountains, a young man was praying, when suddenly, Jesus appeared to him in a vision. In that vision, Jesus supposed informs the young lad, Sun Myung Moon that he is to finish the work that Jesus started 2,000 years earlier. From this experience was born the Unification Church, a.k.a. the Moonies.

One spring day, in 1820, a 14-year old boy went into a grove of trees to pray. This lad petitioned God for an understanding of which church was the true church. The young man reported that God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him. The Father and Jesus Christ informed the lad that all of the religious denominations were preaching false doctrine. He was told to wait for further instructions. According to the Church of the Latter Day Saints, Joseph Smith’s revelation was the greatest revelation in the history of the Church since the Christ event. This experience produced the Mormon Church.

One man, on a very popular Christian network, tells his audience that God spoke to him and told him that Fidel Castro would die in the 90s. The same man said that God told him that Homosexuals in America would be destroyed by fire in 1995. This man also claimed that Jesus would appear physically in churches to show His people how close we are to the second coming. This man is none other than Benny Hinn.

I very recently heard someone claim that the Holy Spirit will oftentimes tell us the exact amount we should give, and to which causes. No so long ago, I had a dispute with Darrell Bock over at DTS regarding his position that God still speaks to us today by way of dreams and visions. Indeed, it is frightening that the idea that God is continuing to reveal things to us by way of personal, mystical encounters, has invaded even our most conservative evangelical and reformed churches, and it has done so with great haste and sensation. I can hear claims in our own conservative, Baptist church that parallel those of Mohammad, Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Sun Myung Moon, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Hagin and many, many others.

It seems to me that there can be no doubt that the foundation of Christianity for many, if not most professing evangelicals has eroded to the point that it no longer exists. The foundation of God stands firm. “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.” (Eph. 2:19-22)

Recently it has been reported that John Piper publicly engaged in the Catholic practice of Lectio Divina. And if you visit Redeemer Presbyterian in NYC, Tim Keller’s church, you will find Lectio Divina is being taught there. Click here for Redeemer's teaching on lectio divina. It is no secret that Ronnie Floyd, president of the SBC has gone off the deep end a long time ago. He recently spoke at the heretic, Mike Bickle’s IHOP. Click here to read more I have been saying for years now that if Christianity is to be preserved in one’s life and in the local church, it will only be preserved insofar as Scripture is preserved. A proper understanding of the phenomenon of Scripture is essential for a healthy, vibrant Christian experience.

What is happening in the modern, American, evangelical churches? In order to get to the root-cause of this problem, we must return to the garden and our original parents. After God created Adam, he spoke to Him, saying, The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” (Gen. 2:16-17) God spoke to Adam. God’s speaking was clear. God’s speaking was authoritative. Adam knew without question that God had spoken. Adam trusted God’s Word. However, when the time was right, Satan entered the garden disguised as a serpent. While Satan would have obviously been out of place appearing in the garden, the serpent was not. It was an appropriate and clever disguise.

Eve willingly entertained a word from the serpent that contradicted God’s word. Eve was willing to consider the possibility that God’s word could be evaluated, tested, and scrutinized. Rather than accept God’s word for what it is, Eve listened to the tantalizing seduction of the serpent, Satan in the flesh so to speak, and ventured out into the realm of autonomous human reason. And when Eve reasoned using the serpent’s method, a method that cut God out of the process, she concluded that God’s word was not the final say in the matter. There were other possibilities. When man reasons apart from God, he will always, to varying degrees, conclude that God is wrong. So it was in the garden, and so it is today.

ὁ θεὸς…..ἐλάλησεν ἡμῖν ἐν υἱῷ. Ho Theos...elalensen humin en huioi. "God has spoken to us in the Son." Semantically, the aorist is consummative. The writer is emphasizng the the fact that God has spoken one final time through the person of Jesus Christ. The revelation of Scripture is the final event of God speaking until we are united with Christ in eternity at his return. What this means is that all claims that God has spoken to someone else apart from Scripture are false. If we dare venture down any other path, we are left with the seriously flawed argument that we can test personal revelation by an appeal to biblical revelation. The fact is such an endeavor is impossible. Take Benny Hinn’s claim that Fidel Castro would die in the 90s. How would it be possible for anyone to have evaluated Hinn’s claim at the time? Suppose I claim that God spoke to me in a dream and told me to give $15,000 to a particular ministry. How could I or anyone else know for sure that God had spoken to me?

If a claim of God speaking can actually be tested by Scripture, then the event itself can be ruled superfluous. That is to say, a person claiming that God spoke to them in a dream not to cheat on their spouse is redundant and unnecessary. These modern claims then are untestable. Not only are they untestable, they are ambiguous. The way God spoke in the biblical revelation compared with how God supposed speaks to people today is radically different. When Mary was visited by the angel, it was beyond doubt. When Jonah was instructed to preach to Ninevah, there was no question that God had spoken. When Adam was forbidden to eat from the tree, it was crystal clear. There was no chance that these people could have mistaken God’s word for some internal impression. Today, people have things pop into their minds and claim that it is God telling them to do something. It is just that ridiculous. How do you know God told you anything when all it is is a thought that popped into your mind? The claim that God spoke is a very serious claim indeed. But modern, American evangelicals think God is the all-tolerant sweet grandpa who will let you get away with anything because he is such a loving God. This picture of God is the product of a sinful, hedonistic, nihilist society that suffers from the accute condition of self-fascination. No one wants to offend or be offended. Everyone is interested in being politically correct, even most of those who say they don’t. And as a result, we let everything slide. We tolerate any and every claim that walks onto the field. If we didn’t, the charismatic movement would have died long ago. If we didn’t tolerate everything, Ronnie Floyd would have been publicly rebuked and maybe even replaced by now.

When we abandon the actual revelation of the self-attesting Word of God, we open the door to an "anything goes atmosphere." It is only when we can point to a final, actual, knowable revelation that we can distinguish false claims of revelation from true revelation. Only then can we know what is true and avoid what is false. In reality, the contemporary refusal to regard any truth as sure and certain is the word kind of infidelity. [John MacArthur, The Truth War] When we see the Bible as uncertain and perhaps even wrong or highly questionable in some places, it makes other claims that God has spoken, much easier to posit. It is only when we hold to the doctrines of the sufficiency, necessity, perspicuity, and authority of Scripture that such claims melt away under the heat and light of divine truth.