Truth Really Matters

http://hometownheroesrun.com/lib/somebodys-crying
143. 1/1/20 The Foundations of American Law
144. 2/1/20 Existentialism: Not all bad, not all good
145. 3/1/20 DNA & De-volution
146. 4/1/20 The Good Life in America
147. 5/1/20 Unspeakable
148. 6/1/20 The Doctrine of the Christian Life
149. 7/1/20 The Call
150. 8/1/20 Doubt: A Good Thing?
151. 9/1/20 Sealed Upon Your Heart
152. 10/1/20 The Original Marxist-Leninist
153. 11/1/20 So-Called Scholars
154. 12/1/20 A Time for Truth

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143. The Foundations of American Law
January 1, 2020

For the last hundred years or so, Christians in America have sporadically been disturbed over various trends in society, including flagrant immorality, pornography, abortion, evolution indoctrination in the public schools, the breakdown of families, crime and violence, and political corruption. In Francis A. Schaeffer’s 1981 book, A Christian Manifesto, he argues that Christians have mistakenly viewed such issues as core problems, instead of symptoms of a much bigger problem, that the worldview of the West has shifted away from something at least vaguely Christian, toward an irrationality – that reality is ultimately based on impersonal matter and energy, shaped into its present form by impersonal chance.

America has never had a population whose majority were born again Christians, but Biblical truths guided the principles on which it was founded and Christian values have infused much of the nation’s history, including respect for individual liberties, the importance of stable families, and a common recognition of objective moral virtues. That has changed over the last few generations.

Schaeffer observes that “these two worldviews stand in complete antithesis to each other in content” and in their impact on society and government, including on the laws of the land. The two worldviews cannot be mixed. They cannot be synthesized. Liberal churches have attempted synthesis over the last century by throwing the Gospel under the bus in favor of ‘social justice’ programs, which typically feature cheeseburgers for the homeless and shoes for orphans . . . which may provide some temporal encouragement, but are oh-so-rarely (or never?) combined with a Gospel message that could actually turn someone’s life around and open the door to Heaven. Instead, the cheeseburger just provides a bit of comfort while the lost fellow stays lost, one heartbeat from Hell, with no Holy Spirit to convict his conscience and direct his steps in this life.

Evangelical leader David Platt recently challenged 12,000 pastors at a conference, that the churches are responsible for exacerbating racism, because they haven’t prioritized its solution. What foolishness! The Gospel itself solves racism. The Bible teaches we are one race, all sons and daughters of Adam. Racism is just one form of hatred – based on evolutionary fantasies. Repent from hatred and trust Christ. That’s the solution . . . the only solution.

Schaeffer argues that materialists (matter / energy / chance is everything), whether Marxists or not, not only miss the truth about God, they do not know who Man is. Not knowing Man as made in God’s image, with free will and a moral conscience, and accountable to the moral realities delineated in God’s word, they get society wrong, they get government wrong, and they get law wrong. Their foundation is that man is merely a clump of molecules bumping along; therefore morality and law can only be matters of whim or instruments of power.

Supreme Court jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) wrote, “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” Thus, there is no basis for law except man’s experience, feelings, opinions. Holmes’ final conclusion: Law is “the majority vote of that nation that could lick all others.” Brute force, that’s what counts.

Henry DeBracton, a 13^th century English judge, consistent with a Christian worldview, noted that God could have crushed Satan in his revolt by use of sufficient power, but because of God’s character, justice came first. Christ died to satisfy the demands of justice and, at the same time, to demonstrate His love. That’s who God is, the source of justice and love. The basis of English common law was that the prince has power to rule, but not the right to do so without justice.

Schaeffer, from his 1981 vantage point, observes that the U.S. State Department, after WW2, sought to implant ‘democracy’ all over the world, in cultures whose philosophy and religion would never produce it. In almost every case, this ends in some form of tyranny. It should be obvious today, but is not to our ruling elite, that in Muslim nations it is impossible to establish constitutional republics that respect individual liberty.

Humanists / materialists / atheists will speak of ‘freedom’, but the end will be chaos or slavery under an elite. That’s what we see today in America. The ‘freedom’ the Left espouses is a license to persecute and prosecute their opponents, even to stir up violence and lawlessness, with the goal of an all-powerful state.

True freedom must derive from the understanding that we are, individually, made in God’s image. The Gospel is all about free will. It is impossible to ‘force’ someone to be a Christian. You can force someone to be a Muslim, to submit, to perform the Islamic disciplines. But you can’t force genuine agreement with the true God. You can’t force genuine repentance or love.

America’s founders understood the basis of government. Schaeffer: “Think of this great flaming phrase: ‘certain inalienable rights.’ Who gives the rights? The state? Then they are not inalienable because the state can change them and take them away. Where do the rights come from?”

The issue is . . . Is God there? And is He the God described in the Bible? If He is, then government and law build from that foundation. If God is not there, then anything goes. Let’s not pretend the political debates are merely Left vs. Right, or about who is offended, or who feels strongly. All the current discourse is either fluff or misdirection. The issue is . . . Is God there?

Right after the Revolutionary War was over, the Congress proclaimed the first Thanksgiving Day to thank God. John Witherspoon’s sermon that day included, “He is the best friend of American liberty who is most sincere and active in promoting pure and undefiled religion.” William Penn (1644-1718) said earlier, “If we are not governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants.”

Almost everyone understood these principles, once.

John Adams wrote that our law is rooted in a common moral and religious tradition that stretches back to the time that Moses went up on Mount Sinai. The deep thinkers of Adams’ time had the wisdom to agree that our liberties are God-given, and that there is an obvious distinction between liberty and license.

Schaeffer: “And now it is all gone.” Recall that he wrote this in 1981. We now live by sociological law. The courts decide abitrarily what they think is good for society. It is striking that if you want to buy a copy of America’s Constitution, you are sold a huge tome that includes all the Supreme Court rulings that have reinterpreted the Constitution again and again. Frederick Moore Vinson (1890-1953), former Chief Justice, said, “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes.”

Regarding personal ethics and the social order, Will Durant, a notable atheist / humanist, admitted in a 1977 column in The Humanist magazine, “Moreover, we shall find it no easy task to mold a natural ethic strong enough to maintain moral restraint and social order without the support of supernatural consolations, hopes, and fears.” Indeed. Not just difficult, but impossible, Shaeffer declares . . . correctly.

In Durant’s book with his wife, Ariel, The Lessons of History, they quote the agnostic philosopher / historian Ernest Renan (1866): “If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.” In this context, the Durants comment, “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”

They’re partly right, of course. It’s not just religion, but the Biblical Gospel of Jesus Christ that transforms lives and undergirds a sustainable moral fabric. Atheism is determinedly foundation-less. A worldview based on matter and energy alone, according to Schaeffer, “must be by its nature, silent as to values, principles, or any basis for law.” In fact, there can be no such thing as values or principles, because they are found neither in the Periodic Table nor in the laws of physics.

Furthermore, religion in general, has no hope. False out-of-touch-with-reality religions like Islam, Hinduism, and Roman Catholicism consistently foster societal immorality, despise individual liberty, and subjugate various ‘classes’.

Laws are not foundational. Neither are constitutions. Secular conservatives in America today tragically miss this. You cannot sensibly argue that reality is founded on the American Constitution. And, if not, then why not change it? But if laws are measured by God’s word, because He is there, then laws may correspond to reality, a reality that is reflected in any man’s moral conscience that has not been fully seared.

As with a man-made Constitution (and we should have one, but it must be based on God’s morality), we dare not battle for mere freedom as the ultimate goal. Foundationless freedom becomes licentiousness, which leads to anarchy and then tyranny, which terminates freedom for everyone. Rather, Truth must be our goal. Will Americans ever, in a majority, side with Biblical Truth as a foundation for government, law, and policies? Of course not. But individual Christians must have this perspective. Otherwise, Christian energy is poured into fruitless political adventures and the Gospel is despised. As we’ve seen for several decades.

In my view, and possibly Schaeffer’s, John Wesley (1703 – 1791) may have had the richest understanding in combination with the largest contributions in modern history for application of the Gospel to both individual salvation and societal stability. Wesley’s ministry was in a time when the urban poor (in England, especially) were the overwhelming demographic. An unfettered Industrial Revolution victimized multitudes. Wesley worked tirelessly for the spiritual and material welfare of coal miners, smelters, copper workers, shipyard laborers, farm hands, and women in the factories, among other groups, who responded to his efforts wonderfully.

Wesley opened free dispensaries, started a credit union, and built schools and orphanages. But his priority was always the Gospel, to save souls, to transform lives, to give purpose for this life and an assured hope for eternity. Wesley preached 500 sermons per year for most of his adult life and saw multitudes saved.

Modern evangelical churches would applaud Wesley’s community work, but they despise the forthright preaching of the Gospel.

Furthermore, and so unusually, he understood Biblical discipleship, and therefore established local ‘societies’ – really, house churches – for Christians to learn together, and grow, and encourage and help each other. He worked to the Biblical pattern of organizing Christians at local levels, not trusting a distant and centralized hierarchy. The founders of this nation, including James Madison (not a Christian), learned in part from such examples, both Methodist and Baptist, in fact, in devising a government that distributes power, enabling measures of freedom that we still coast upon.

Schaeffer: “Even secular historians acknowledge that it was the social results coming out of the Wesley revival that saved England from its own form of the French Revolution.”

Materialists / humanists have no reason to obey the state, Schaeffer suggests, “except that the state has the guns and has the patronage (money).” Those are big motivations for them to control the state. Oddly, the humanist is never content to simply live his own life. He is obsessed with controlling the lives of others. That obsession has no foundation in materialism, of course, but is easily identified with Satan’s desire to rule, to be worshipped, and to oppress those who defy him.

The Christian is commanded to obey the state, except in those rare instances where the state outlaws the Gospel itself. A Christian, if consistent with his own worldview, simply wants to live his own life, and serve others voluntarily . . . if they voluntarily wish to engage. The Christian wants to speak truth freely, and allows others to do so, too. The Biblical pattern is filled with principles and examples of reasoned discourse. It is the Adversary who stifles communication.

In God’s reality, and by His decrees, the state is a “delegated authority; it is not autonomous. The state is to be an agent of justice, to restrain evil by punishing the wrongdoer, and to protect the good in society. When it does the reverse, it has no proper authority. It is then a usurped authority and as such it becomes lawless and is tyranny.” Consider Romans 13:1-4, 1 Peter 2:13-17, and Acts 5.

The Romans tortured and executed Christians because the state demanded state worship. Religious beliefs were irrelevant to the empire; in fact, a huge diversity of religious beliefs were practiced. But the state must be above all. That’s what leftists today demand. That’s why they get ‘outraged’ when Christians defy them.

Samuel Rutherford (1600 – 1661) wrote Lex Rex: or The Law and the Prince in 1644. He held that a tyrannical government is always immoral . . . on absolute grounds. And that citizens have a moral obligation to resist unjust government. We must respect the office, but we are not to be subject to the man in the office who oppresses.

The threshold for defiance must not be trivial. Schaeffer argues that when rulers act in ways that attack the fundamental structure of society, then citizens are right to relieve them of authority. The leaders of the American Revolution acted on this understanding. You might argue that the leaders of the French Revolution did, too, but they replaced the tyranny of their monarchy with an oppression far worse and more bloody.

Interestingly, Schaeffer notes echoes of Rutherford in Bob Dylan’s song, “When You Gonna Wake Up”, pleading with people to wake up to the strength that remains, because of adulterers in the churches and pornography in the schools, gangsters in power and lawbreakers making the rules.

I’ll mention a few specific areas where worldview makes all the difference in establishing laws. Abortion is an obvious one. Is the unborn child a human being, created in God’s image, with an eternal soul? If yes, preserve life. If not, who cares?

How about evolution indoctrination in the public schools . . . mandated . . . to the exclusion of any competing ideas? How about marriage? Who invented it? Is marriage God-ordained or just an arbitrary social construct? How about hormone injections and transgender surgery for children, some as young as eight years old? Yes, that is happening today. What about equal justice for corrupt leaders, even if they are part of the establishment? Or even if they are filthy rich? What about lawless borders or self-defense (gun ownership)?

Worldview matters.

Schaeffer observes that the humanistic leftist worldview “is completely intolerant when it presents itself through the political institutions and especially through the schools.” As I’m drafting this, I’ll note a news blurb I just saw. A conservative speaker was invited by a couple of student groups to speak at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His topic was that men are not women. They’re different. That was too much for campus radicals. He never got the chance to speak. Hecklers screamed and threatened, and one activist attacked him physically.

Schaeffer: “The state will not tolerate any gods beside itself. The school is their special target . . . One either confesses that God is the final authority, or one confesses that Caesar is Lord.”

Harvard historian Perry Miller, an atheist, analyzed the genesis of the American Revolution: “Actually, European deism was an exotic plant in America, which never struck roots in the soil. ‘Rationalism’ was never so widespread as liberal historians, or those fascinated by Jefferson, have imagined. The basic fact is that the Revolution had been preached to the masses as a religious revival, and had the astounding fortune to succeed.”

Miller argued, “Circumstances and the nature of the dominant opinion in Europe made it necessary for the official statement [that is, the Declaration of Independence] to be released in primarily ‘political’ terms – the social compact, inalienable rights, the right of revolution. But those terms, in and by themselves, would never have supplied the drive to victory, however mightily they weighed with the literate minority.” Rather, he goes on, the Revolutionary inspiration was grounded on beliefs that God’s laws are inviolate.

Secular conservatives, today, don’t get this. They have no foundation, but simply believe that ‘conservative principles’ will work out better for the economy, for health care, etc. That’s not good enough. They have denied that God is there as much as the leftists have. Additionally, they pander to and take advantage of evangelical sentiments, but then don’t keep promises. And the state rages ever more powerfully.

Schaeffer concludes his work a bit surprisingly, in some uncertainty. He saw the trends in 1981 that have only exponentiated in the forty years since, but he hints of despair in hoping that political action may turn America around.

His thesis is that the worldview must shift – a daunting prospect at the national level. That would necessitate national revival. It seems he doesn’t want to admit the unlikelihood, but there it is anyway.

What about you and me, personally? It is foolish to stew over ‘national’ issues that you can’t do anything about, when you should be motivated over the battle that rages around you. It’s the same spiritual battle! You are called to do your part in this battle.

What part? The strategy for you and me, the solution, is simply the Great Commission, not at a national level, but one-to-one, which is where any revival has always started. If you have any hope for a national revival, it must start at the 1-2-1 level, with prayer, fervor, and holiness energizing individual Christians. Now, I would be totally shocked to see even a large-scale revival, let alone a national movement. But what can any individual Christian do . . . today?

Any of us, every day, can offer the Gospel by conversation and / or by tract to any lost sinner. And do it again tomorrow. And pray that the Holy Spirit work on that heart. Then repeat. Repeat again. If someone trusts Christ, then befriend and teach. And replicate. And again.

It’s not hard to do what you can do!!! So do it.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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144. Existentialism: Not all bad, not all good
February 1, 2020

During the liberation of France in 1945, a couple of blokes founded the Club Maintenant to promote “literary and intellectual discussion.” (I wish that American culture today offered such intellectual entertainment. Sigh.) The invited speaker for Monday, October 29^th, 1945, was Jean-Paul Sartre, who was eager to defend his thesis that “Existentialism is a Humanism.”

Sartre (1905-1980) was probably the most celebrated philosopher of the mid-20^th century. He sold millions of books, fueling liberal fires in the hearts of Western youth in the 1950s and 1960s. That rebellious generation became the liberal establishment that dominates today’s universities, mainstream media, entertainment, and even the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies.

As described in Paul Johnson’s book, Intellectuals, Jean-Paul was raised a spoiled only child. Physically unimposing at 5 foot 2, he parlayed his fame into a lifetime of seduction, bedding as many young and attractive women as possible. He mistreated those around him and was described by Johnson as “the archetype of what in the 1960s became known as a male chauvinist.” Sartre professed a doctrine of openness and total freedom, but gloried in taking advantage of 17- and 18-year old female students. In the 1950s he actively supported the Communist Party, making favorable comments about Stalin, Mao, and Castro, despite overwhelming evidence of Communist atrocities. Followers of Sartre became the mass murderers of Cambodia in the 1970s.

Yet Sartre’s ideas still find fertile soil in the hearts of young and old atheists who yearn for purpose in life, a concept that has no place in a materialist worldview, which knows nothing but particles in random motion.

Sartre was eager to speak at the Club Maintenant to respond to severe criticisms from various quarters. Christians criticized him for his atheism and materialism, that by rejecting God and His commandments, by rejecting eternal values, anything goes. Communists criticized him for not being a materialist, accusing him of subjectivism, that by agreeing with Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” the subjective individualist cannot find solidarity with others. Others saw Sartre as an anti-humanist, demoralizing the French when the nation needed hope above all, a nation in physical ruin after the war.

The lecture was a turning point, a media event, giving rise to “the Sartre phenomenon.” It helped crystallize his status as a popular philosopher, building on his other works that included critical essays, plays, movies, and novels. Annie Cohen-Solal, in writing the introduction to the 2007 book Existentialism is a Humanism, an English translation of the 1945 lecture, asserted that “Sartre became, around 1960, the first global public intellectual.”

Cohen-Solal sees Sartre’s work, overall, as “anything but a closed, satisfying, reassuring system of thought. It is located in a philosophy of lived experience, in an attitude of rebelliousness in complete accord with his theoretical model, in a stubborn irreverence, in a rejection of seriousness, and in a very keen ability to perceive new cultural trends.”

Sartre ‘shocked’ his students at the Sorbonne by declaring, “The only way to learn is to question.” Well, all right then. Let’s look at some nuggets from his notable 1945 lecture and challenge his assertions.

Sartre identifies two kinds of existentialists: Christian and atheist. He includes Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel among the Christians, both professed Catholics . . . and so Sartre does not truly understand Christianity. Among the atheists he includes Heidegger and himself. “What they have in common is simply their belief that existence precedes essence; or if you prefer, that subjectivity must be our point of departure.”

But Christians, he thinks, get it wrong. As an example, a man designs and fabricates a book or a knife, knowing what purpose it will serve. The concept, the purpose – the essence – thereby comes before the existence of the book. In the Christian view, God the Creator has man in mind, his essence, before man’s existence.

In atheistic existentialism, God does not exist, and so the only being whose existence comes before essence is man. What Sartre means is “that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself . . . he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive of it.” Man is what he wills himself to be. “Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of existentialism.”

As opposed to Sartre’s suggestion of what Christians may have in common with him, he starkly defines the difference between belief and unbelief, between reality and unreality. The Bible-believing Christian starts with God and His word, with man made in His image, enabling man to be a rational, moral, purposeful, meaningful, and communicative creature, able to relate to other men and to God himself, a being more than just a collection of molecules in motion. The atheist or the Roman Catholic or anyone not born again by the Spirit of God, sees himself as Judge and Jury over his own life, over his relationships, and over Truth itself. He decides what is right based on his own reasonings and gut feelings. It all starts with man.

But what is reason to a mere collection of molecules? What are thoughts but mere brain chemistry? What are meaning and purpose and hope but mere illusion? When you die, you die. That’s ultimately the core of the philosophy of Albert Camus, Sartre’s philosophical brother, who deemed all of life to be absurd.

To his credit, Sartre asserts that if “existence truly does precede essence, man is responsible for what he is . . . we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.”

But this is cold-blooded robbery from the Biblical worldview. It is Jesus who commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves and the apostles who warned that we will give account individually to God for our actions in life. Responsibility, by its very nature, entails obligation to another. Since Sartre starts without God, leaving us with only matter and the laws of physics, there can be no obligation. In fact, with brain chemistry as the foundation of alleged thoughts, there can be no persons. In the Christian worldview, all of God’s image-bearers are poignantly responsible to God and each other. Yet Sartre’s conscience still survives enough to recognize that mutual responsibility, despite denying the only possible Source of responsibility.

Sartre’s burden of responsibility (which he ignored in his personal life) is extended in his proposal that when men choose, they choose for all men, that individual choices reflect what a man thinks is best for all men. Accordingly, “we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all.” But what is evil in the Periodic Table or in Newtonian mechanics? The atheist has no ground on which to define evil. Also, Sartre’s construct enables a vast array of rationalizations for any manner of evil . . . evil defined Biblically and in man’s conscience.

Sartre asserts that a man’s choice to marry and have children commits “not only himself, but all of humanity, to the practice of monogamy . . . In choosing myself, I choose man.” But this doesn’t follow, does it? Individual choices do not commit groups not under the individual’s power. It’s surprising that such weak stuff is so admired. Yet the seed of truth in Sartre’s point is that individual choices do affect others, with accruent responsibility – but that’s from the Christian perspective!

Consider Jean-Paul’s personal commitment to serial fornication, along with deceiving and betraying those closest to him. If, with a mystical power, he committed his choices as the moral norm for all of humanity . . . how would that work out?

Sartre cites the anguish of existentialism in the decisions of a military leader whose orders may send men to their deaths. Even the lowest subordinate commander must interpret orders from above and execute his own derivative orders, perhaps responsible for ten or twenty lives. Leaders experience the anguish of responsibility here, “but it does not prevent them from acting.” Curiously, Sartre insists that in choosing one particular action, “its only value lies in the fact that it was chosen.”

This idea seems akin to the Calvinist prescription for decision-making: Pray about your options, seek counsel, analyze potential consequences, then choose . . . and whatever you choose, that apparently was God’s sovereign will. Now, Sartre is no Calvinist, but seems to sport a ‘Que sera, sera’ attitude about how life works out.

Again, the Frenchman is right on the mark regarding the commander’s responsibility, which is personal – his troops are persons, made in God’s image. It matters. He’s accountable. But Sartre doesn’t even try to find warrant from his atheistic perspective.

He mentions some French professors who, around 1880, tried to formulate a secular morality, since God was a useless and costly hypothesis to them. Sartre insists that for a civil society, “it is essential that certain values be taken seriously; they must have an a priori existence ascribed to them.” These would include not lying, not beating your wife, raising children properly, etc. Here’s his punch line . . .

“We therefore will need to do a little more thinking on this subject in order to show that such values exist all the same, and that they are inscribed in an intelligible heaven, even though God does not exist.”

Good luck with that. Values are properties of persons, not found in Maxwell’s or Schroedinger’s equations. Sartre admits that many existentialists “find it extremely disturbing that God no longer exists, for along with his disappearance goes the possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There could no longer be any a priori good, since there would be no infinite and perfect consciousness to conceive of it.”

Nor any finite human consciousness, since brain chemistry is all there is. So Sartre agrees with Dostoyevsky, “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” Man is abandoned, and so he finds no excuses. Since existence precedes essence, we can reference neither God nor an immutable human nature. So man is free and “responsible for everything he does.” Man is even responsible for his own passion and cannot use passion for an excuse.

Hey, Jean-Paul, if you are responsible, then who will bring you to account? Responsibility goes hand in hand with accountability, does it not? If accountability is merely to other men, then it’s all about power. Those who control the government and the guns make the choices that hold others accountable. Tyranny is inevitable if atheistic existentialism controls the culture. That’s how it worked out in Cambodia. That’s what the Left strives for in the West today.

One of Sartre’s students asked him for advice. His brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940. His father was a collaborator and abandoned the family. The young man wanted to go to England to join the Free French Forces, to avenge his brother. Mom desperately wanted her son to stay home with her.

He was conflicted between a moral obligation to his mother and a moral obligation to fight for freedom, as uncertain and dangerous as that would be. After much discussion, Sartre gave him the “one answer I could give him.” “You are free, so choose; in other words, invent. No general code of ethics can tell you what you ought to do; there are no signs in this world.” In other words, just do it and move on. It’s all about you, anyway.

The Christian has more resources than simply listing the pros and cons. He has a Spirit-informed conscience and the promise that God will answer prayers for wisdom in difficult circumstances, especially when values compete. God will always give clarity to the sincerely seeking heart . . . of the believer.

Sartre confessed that for any truth to exist, “there must first be an absolute truth.” But since he denied God, he declared that absolute truth is within any man’s reach: “One need only seize it directly.” What you choose to do is as much truth as there is. Weak stuff.

Sartre was an admirer of the Russian revolution, but he was not a Marxist, in that he rejected the inevitability of the proletariat revolution.   A true Marxist sees history unfolding according to laws of history . . . a view also inconsistent with a materialistic worldview. Sartre properly saw individual free will as the instrument making history unpredictable.   “Things will be what men have chosen them to be.” He believed in advocacy, but had no illusions. Passionate for collectivism, he simply determined to do everything he could to support his favorite causes.

A useful summary of Sartre’s existentialism: “Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing more than his life.”

Accordingly, he decried those who would say that they are unlucky, beset by circumstances, or that they ‘deserve’ a better life. He condemns those who claim they would have been great authors, athletes, parents, or anything else, except for circumstances out of their control. Rather, “There is no love other than the deeds of love; no potential for love other than that which is manifested in loving. There is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.” Outside of what a man does, there is nothing to that man.

In that, he’s largely in sync with James . . . faith without works is dead. Show me your faith by your works. But Sartre’s existentialism is all assertion. The New Testament book of James is founded on God’s character and the personhood of each of us.

To an existentialist, a coward is a coward, not because of his physiological makeup, or his supposed psychology, but “because he has made himself a coward through his actions.” There are no cowardly temperaments or bad blood, etc. Cowardice is the act of giving up or giving in. I like Sartre in this regard. I wish I could travel back in time and mention to him that he got some of his conclusions right, but missed the foundations. His actions during WW2 should have defined him as a self-centered coward.   He did nothing to help the Resistance, but rather built his career, writing plays and novels, carefully avoiding any offense to Nazi sensors. In the war’s aftermath, his timing was perfect, finding France disillusioned, its young people lonely, aggressive, ready to be swept up in an anti-establishment cause.

For one who is searching for meaning beyond oneself, Sartre offers no hope. Without God, values only exist if we decide so. “Life has no meaning a priori. Life is nothing until it is lived, it is we who give it meaning, and value is nothing more than the meaning we give it.”

Indeed, God has given us spectacularly free will, and charged us with the opportunity to know Him and to love and encourage others. Sartre would agree that we should strive to make our lives count, but only in Biblical reality can we make our lives count not just for our brief sojourn here, but for eternity. A soul saved by your witness cannot be un-saved. Life eternal is truly a cause to spend one’s life on, to build God’s kingdom and populate it with more brothers and sisters, friends and fellow saints and servants for all the ages to come.

Sartre, too, felt man’s yearnings to “pursue transcendent goals,” to “lose himself beyond himself.” But he erred fatally in defining “himself as the core and focus of this transcendence.” How small. How sad. God designed us to be social, loving, connected, sharing, part of an ultimate cause, part of His family. Jean-Paul admitted that human fulfillment is not found by turning inward, “but by constantly seeking a goal outside of himself,” to liberate himself. Choosing the right goal matters, though.

Jean-Paul Sartre was brilliant and articulate – a really smart guy. But unwise, unkind, and unhelpful. Worldview matters. Reality matters. Truth matters. He tried to create his own niche worldview, but failed to connect with reality. It doesn’t take raw intelligence to embrace a Biblical worldview, to recognize God-breathed moral law, to repent, to trust Christ. We don’t have to and we don’t get to create our own worldview because the ultimate TRUTHS are manifest in God’s own character, and He has revealed them to us. Embrace that foundation and you’ll be far wiser than any secular philosopher who ever lived. Your destiny, also, will be infinitely better.

– drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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145. DNA & De-volution
March 1, 2020

This essay can be found as EN22 in this site’s Short Course on Creation / Evolution.

Click on EN22: DNA & De-volution

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146. The Good Life in America
April 1, 2020

Americans, statistically speaking, “have it all.” At least, that was the prevailing wisdom until the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted our economy along with that of the rest of the world. I’m sure a lot of people are re-thinking their priorities in life, while hoping and praying that life gets back to normal.

A few years ago we lived in the Phoenix valley along with four million other people. There are a LOT of middle-class neighborhoods in the valley which appear to my eyes to be rather “upper class” . . . my eyes are those of a middle-class son of a Chicago public school teacher. I was raised in the 1950s and 1960s. The consumer comfort levels have changed radically since then – upward – although the complaints and whining politics have only gotten worse. America: so blessed and yet so grumpy.

It’s not just that the average square footage of a suburban house has risen dramatically. Everyone’s got central air conditioning; in my youth it was only the occasional neighbor that had a single window unit. (I envied, a little, my buddy next door whose house had one such unit.) In the Phoenix valley a house without A/C is inconceivable. Two-story houses have two big units, one for each level. Yet the area was inhabited for centuries past without electricity. Frankly, you’d have to work hard today to find an A/C-less house in the upper Midwest or Northeastern U.S., even though the summers are short there.

If you just think about it for a moment, you know what else is new in new neighborhoods: vaulted ceilings, cable TV/Internet, computer controlled appliances, cell networks (a phone for each family member), giant screen TVs, at least 2 (nice) cars per household with good gas mileage and lots of electronic perqs, plus audio / visual systems throughout the house and cars. I observe that King Solomon and every other king throughout history did not have most of the luxuries available to any working class family today.

And still, political furor is driven by “have” vs. “have not.” It’s not a race issue. These neighborhoods are thoroughly diverse! Before moving to Phoenix we lived for several years in the Rockford, Illinois, area. My efforts in personal evangelism acquainted me with every part of the city, rich and poor, working class and welfare, Black and White and Hispanic and etc. I also spent considerable time near the courthouse and the central bus station, meeting people in various kinds of trouble and experiencing all of life’s challenges and discouragements.

Later, in Arizona, we expended much effort in door-to-door evangelism in the ‘nice’ neighborhoods, and visited university campuses to talk to college students. Now, in Louisiana, we knock doors in all kinds of neighborhoods, do some campus evangelism, and engage quite often – intentionally – as we do errands and visit stores and restaurants in the area.

So here are some observations and conclusions. You might think I’m oversimplifying and failing to appreciate the complexity of “social injustice” preached by liberal politicians, liberal academics, liberal pundits, and liberal clergy / pulpiteers. You would be wrong.

1. The poorest sections of town have the highest concentrations of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, bars, liquor stores, weed smokers, and cigarette smokers. All of these ‘commercial products’ are incredibly expensive and they hurt you (and others) severely. Crime is also rampant in the poorest sections of the cities. Much of the crime is correlated with illegal drugs. All of these tragedies derive from choices – free will. The issues are moral, not political. Throwing political cash at moral failings simply tempts those already addicted and enables more tragedy.
2. The poorest sections of town are awash in enough discretionary cash to support plenty of bars, liquor stores, and drug dealers. I once calculated that the amount of money spent annually on alcohol in the U.S. could buy a nice new home for every household in Chicago and many of its suburbs . . . yes, every year. All that money – literally – gets flushed down the toilet after damaging body, soul, and spirit . . . and marriages and children.
3. The poorest sections of town have the highest concentrations of broken families and fatherless children. Once again, these are moral issues. What foolishness it is to pretend that government cash is the solution to fornication, adultery, abuse, abandonment, and crime.
4. The wealthiest sections of town (which have become typical 21^st century middle-class neighborhoods) have the highest concentration of stable families and steady jobs. In the Rockford area we lived in a very nice middle-class neighborhood. Here were some of my nearest neighbors: a retired city garbage man (sorry, ‘sanitation worker’!), a mailman, a retired retail businessman, a factory worker, an auto mechanic, another factory worker, and yet another factory worker. Nice houses, long and stable marriages, no apparent crime records . . . It seems that if you keep your job, don’t waste money, don’t bust up your marriage, and keep at it for a few years, then you can live very, very comfortably in America!
5. The court system, including judges, lawyers, extensive support staff, police officers, etc., is funded in part by a transfer of wealth from the poorest sections of town . . . from the people who have the least discretionary money, but persistently sin so egregiously that they run afoul of man’s law. I note that man’s law is far, far more lenient than God’s law. If you break man’s law, sin truly abounds.
6. America is consumed with the worship of two gods. One of them – SPORTS – consumes attention at least seasonally. In Arizona I visited a men’s small group meeting, part of a local megachurch, for a couple of months. The dominant conversation topic at the start of each meeting that Fall? Arizona Cardinal football. The team wasn’t even very good! The facilitator felt constrained to waste the first few minutes of every meeting to allow energetic discussion of the latest exploits. Whatever the spiritual topic that followed, it enjoyed little enthusiasm, in comparison. In Louisiana this last year, LSU football consumed the attention of evangelicals. Woe be to the pastor who doesn’t feature some football application for life in his ‘teaching.’ And it’s hopeless to try to drum up a substantive conversation with any of the men before an adult Sunday School class starts. But now . . . during the shutdown of sports at all levels, perhaps some will find more constructive things to do. Hopefully, some Christians will spend more time in prayer and Bible study . . . and encouraging each other.
7. The other god for Americans is obviously POLITICS. I’ve written several relevant essays over the last few years on this, but I’ll make just one point here. Whether the prayers are for healing from the pandemic or to ‘Make America Great Again,’ or more recently, to ‘Keep America Great,’ how might these prayers be heard by a holy God, when He sees no humility and no repentance? Abortion continues. Sexual confusion and immorality abounds. ‘Conservative Christians’ have no interest in preaching the Gospel to their lost neighbors. It’s so much more fun to talk about a Trump rally or a football game. Perhaps the current crisis will provoke some to reduce their daily addiction to political chaos.
8. During the pandemic the world isn’t partying so much, is it? It’s not so much fun to be invested in the lusts of the flesh these days. Perhaps some, in desperation, will turn to God and be saved, with a life transformed. I know of one who has. I pray there will be more. Perhaps some will discover there are other things to do than go night-clubbing or bar-hopping. Perhaps some will sober up. Yet I hear that liquor stores are doing terrific business – and have been declared essential businesses by government.
9. Most of America’s churches have responded to the crisis by on-line streaming. How pitiful. Just tune in to the weekly lecture, but don’t forget to send in your check. What churches ought to be doing is organizing member-to-member help and encouragement . . . what churches should have been doing all along, rather than passively attending the big show on Sundays. Most pastors don’t have a glimmer of the concept, though. Hopefully, some Christians will come out of this with a determination for substantive fellowship and discipleship, which cannot be found in conventional churches. (See my “church” essays in the Discipleship section of this site.)

If America gets past COVID-19, and life becomes normal again, most everyone will get back on the track to have it all, whether or not they have the character to work hard and steady and stay out of trouble. I’ve previously opined on the determination of modern evangelical churches to reach out with tangible charity to the most destitute 1%. And how they consistently manage to avoid sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ along the way, which addresses the BIGGEST problem of the poor – SIN!!! – and offers the solution of a Holy Spirit-led new man / new woman who can follow God’s will out of sin and poverty into a fruitful life. I’ve also observed how there is no end game for the typical Gospel-less approach: if EVERYONE achieves middle class status, are we done?

Of course not. I’ve spent much evangelistic effort on the “top 99%” and can attest that sin and rebellion are rampant among the comfortable classes. Although the “successful” act enough in their own interest to avoid economic tragedy, they are quite content without God and typically scoff at the idea of a Great White Throne Judgment in their future.

The “haves” – the 99% — are complacent. As long as they’ve got their stuff and are in a stretch of reasonably good health . . . “no worries.” With the pandemic, though, worries exponentiate. We were doing 121 evangelism consistently before and after the 911 attack. The entire nation was shaken then. For about two months afterward, it was easy to get people to open up to consider spiritual truths. After two months, most lives got back to a complacent normality.

We were doing 121 evangelism on the Northern Illinois University campus both before and after the shooting in February, 2008, where 5 were killed and 17 wounded. For about two months after that horror, students were humble and open to talk about the big issues of life, death, Heaven, and Hell. But life got back to normal.

This pandemic is different. It is extended in time. It’s worldwide, which imposes a sense of fragility on us all. As a Christian, I pray for protection for us and for those who are close to us. A lot of people are praying that God simply kills off the virus. I get that, and I hope to see enough normality return so I can get out there on the street again and share the Gospel.  (Although we have been diligent to give tracts out wherever we go, to whomever we cross paths with.)  My specific prayer, now, is that God uses this to save souls, especially souls who would never consider the compelling truth of the Gospel. One soul, Scripture teaches, is more precious than all the world holds, since this world will pass away, to be replaced by a world ruled in peace and righteousness . . . when the Lord Jesus returns.

If and when normal resumes, most “haves” will return to expending energy and worry to acquire more “stuff” and regularly complain about what they don’t have. Their focus is on the physical. They despise the spiritual.

Most “have nots” – and there may well be many more with a damaged economy – will look to political saviors. How foolish. Both the “haves” and “have nots” will eagerly look for a complacent pattern to settle into. Hopefully, some will opt out of the world’s categories and find truth and reality in a Biblical perspective.

It’s not just the lost who are complacent. Professing Christians exude apathy as evidenced by the ones I meet locally who are perfectly content in their ‘seeker sensitive’ megachurches. No burden for souls, little knowledge of Scripture, no urgency to make the days count in the Lord’s service . . . in fact, no concept of what it means to serve God . . . and no notable difference in day-to-day life when compared with their lost next door neighbor.

Hey, look at what’s happening. Israel has been regathered, still in unbelief (Ezekiel chapter 37) and the nations are at each other’s throats over Jerusalem, causing worldwide consternation . . . just as Zechariah prophesied 2500 years ago (Zech 12:3). The time is short. Days are precious.

Please read my tract below, “Can You Name these Famous Fighter Aircraft?” The theme is war and prophecy, transitioning from past history to future history. My attempt in this tract is to shout, “WAKE UP!!” In addition to being a student of history I’ve lived long enough to recognize how much the world has changed over the last few decades. We must be in the ‘last days.’

Click on . . . Tract – Famous Fighter Aircraft

You can check out the rest of our tracts at https://thinktracts.com/

If you’re a Christian, shouldn’t you be obedient to your Lord by reaching out to the lost, to help them to lose their complacency? Just get out there and do some 121 evangelism, once a bit of normality resumes. At least hand some tracts out. Perhaps you can get someone to stop and talk. You don’t have to be brilliant. Just be real . . . and care. Show some compassion. You might not see them respond, but God will stay on their trail. You might just cross their path again on the streets of the New Jerusalem. How great would that be?

And while we’re all on some measure of quarantine, ask God for divine appointments, by phone or by media. Be alert. Someone you know may need some help, perhaps physical, perhaps spiritual.

drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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147. Unspeakable
May 1, 2020

“Let us not forget that violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with lying . . . Nothing screens violence except lies, and the only way lies can hold out is by violence. Whosoever has once announced violence as his method must inevitably choose lies as his principle . . . Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1970 Nobel address

It has long fascinated me that politicians, celebrities, and even minor potentates in media, academia, or ‘woke’ business lie so reflexively. Your typical atheist / abortionist, for example, won’t say what he believes, such as, “Sure, I know I’m murdering human babies. I don’t care. If they inconvenience my life or someone else’s, just kill them.” Instead, they make up vacuous rationalizations about a fetus as a mere mass of tissue, or ‘choice’ as if the very existence of choice is a high moral principle, even if their preferred choice is murder. Ironically, in the atheist’s materialistic worldview there is no such thing as choice – free will. And certainly no moral principles can be found in the laws of physics or in the Periodic Table, which is all there is, supposedly.

Why lie? Why not admit that you’ve chosen your political positions because that’s where the donor money is? Why not admit that you want open borders because you hate America and want to destroy freedom . . . with you in power?

I believe that the motivations behind the lies of the powerful are more than just cover. In John 8:44 the Lord Jesus rebukes His self-righteous critics, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.”

Liars become what they do, and despite their supposed intellectual autonomy, they are simply the Devil’s minions. As Scripture teaches, this world’s rulers see themselves as gods, but are, unknowingly (or sometimes knowingly), subject to the principalities and powers of the air, under the authority of ‘the god of this world.’

It is evident that the worst of our ruling class prefer the lie, even when truth would serve. What is the fate of a nation whose rulers are so determined to serve wickedness? Yes, there are a few apparently ‘truth-conscious’ among the elites, as some would judge, but even secular conservatives care nothing for God’s will for our nation, and clearly despise the Gospel, or else they would be converted themselves and say so publicly.

Solzhenitsyn’s conclusion for the individual, the man or woman with no ‘power,’ is poignant for the Christian life . . . “but not through me.” We will stand individually at the Bema. We walk through life with an Audience of One. Individually, we can do right, speak right, and encourage others – encourage the lost to repent and trust Christ, and encourage other believers to stand up and speak out and share the Gospel with those around them.

The Solzhenitsyn quote is featured in Os Guinness’ 2005 book, Unspeakable: Facing Up to the Challenge of Evil. It’s not an easy book to read, because of the tragedies and atrocities that he cites . . . that’s why he calls the book Unspeakable. But it’s worth the effort, especially because Guinness’ intent is to help to answer the ultimate cry of the human heart – Why?!? – when we face evil.

As always in my essays, I won’t attempt a book review, but I will pull out some nuggets and offer my own thoughts.

Unbelievers / skeptics / secularists are usually prejudiced, Guinness observes, against faith as if it is irrational, “a way of avoiding reality . . . a form of wish fulfillment that plasters its sunny optimism over the grim realities of the human condition.” Rather, it is clear, the true utopians are Leftists / secularists / socialists who believe the world will get better and better if the State controls everything, with them holding the levers of power.

It is unbelief that is out of touch with reality. In anti-God worldviews, there is no foundation for morality, justice, honesty, integrity, love, or hope. The Christian, however, knowing that he is made in the image of God – spiritually, nonmaterially – has the assured hope of a personal resurrection and a righteous kingdom under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The best the anti-theist can hope for is that death ends everything. But it’s worse than that, in reality.

Whether Christian or anti-theist, when we are hit hard by evil, Guinness writes, we demand an explanation. Where is the ultimate responsibility? Who is at fault? Will there be justice? Someone has to make it right! Either God is there, and has wired us with a moral passion for justice, or else “the universe is cold and silent.”

Guinness cites Simone Weil: “One can only excuse men for evil by accusing God of it.” Indeed, those who refuse to believe in God often blame Him for their suffering.

Os Guinness is a professing Christian, by the way, so he invokes a Biblical perspective at times. I wish that he were more clear, more often, though. There is a Biblical simplicity to Why?!? We live in a fallen world. Starting with Adam’s sin, we have filled our world with our sins and their consequences. God has given us free will . . . spectacularly free will. When men do evil, it’s by choice. The men of His time, religious men, evilly lied about Jesus and then crucified Him. He was totally innocent of sin, the only one of us ever. As the Son of God / Son of Man, Jesus used His own spectacularly free will to do right, moment by moment, relentlessly. And so He qualifies to be our Savior. Our choice when evil is done to us, is to respond with forgiveness and a Gospel witness – or not.

Stephen chose to speak truth in Acts 7. He died young. The apostle John spoke truth and lived to an old age. Both trusted the Lord more than caring for their very lives.

When trouble overwhelms we ask, “How can I stand it?” The atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, suggests, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Also, “It is not so much the suffering as the senselessness of it that is unendurable.” Of course, the atheist has no answers to why questions. If we’re all just clods of molecules in collision, there is no why, no purpose, no hope, and the concept of senselessness makes no sense because there is no you or I in a clod of molecules that can decide what truly makes sense.

But the Christian is immersed in purpose and in hope for a better country, a New Earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Os observes that soldiers will pay the supreme sacrifice for their countries, or even their platoon-mates. In materialism, though, why should a soldier give his life for a so-called country. In dying he goes out of existence, he believes. As will all of his buddies, whether in combat or in old age. Only a Christian has a rational basis for risking his life for others. What is amazing is that God has wired into us a level of compassion that will risk everything even when our worldview denies the sanity of sacrifice.

The Christian’s assured hope undergirds the potential for ultimate sacrifice. Yes, a Christian’s courage may fail, while an atheist’s courage prevails. Yet only the Christian’s worldview provides a rational motivation for such courage. Multitudes of Christian martyrs throughout history have found dying faith, which combines a rational, Biblical, assured hope with palpable spiritual strength provided by the Holy Spirit.

Guinness cites an English survivor of Dachau who was asked how he endured the camp’s brutality. He replied, “They wanted to make us into beasts. Behaving like men, not letting them destroy the human being in us, was how we won.”

Although, apparently, not a Christian, he clung to the Biblical principle that we are more than clods of molecules, more than beasts, but made in the image of God.  G.K. Chesterton has some insight here: “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” We dare not sell our souls to save our lives, while at the same time counting life precious.

Jean Amery, sadly, took his own life after surviving Auschwitz. In his study of the intellectuals (atheists) in the camp, he wrote: “Once the intellectual’s first resistance had flagged, with all his knowledge and analyses he had less with which to oppose his destroyers than the unintellectual.”

In this book, as in some of his other works, Os considers the issues of modernity, which entail “the entire spirit and system of the modern world and is simply shorthand for the world created by the rise of modern science . . . and is now continued by what we call globalization.”

First, modernity has produced a culture that minimizes pain, starting with the discovery of anesthesia in 1846 and the commercial production of aspirin in 1893. To live with an absence of pain has been taken so for granted that our nation is consumed with an opioid epidemic.  Also observe how easy it has been for leaders to use fear (coronavirus) to shut down the economy — for political gain — rather than “allow” us to take risks to preserve our livelihoods.

Second, modernity has magnified our destructive powers, with weapons of mass destruction, along with industrial scale pollution and eradication of habitats. But Os sees something deeper here, that our modern bureaucracies and management systems in government and industry enable monstrous evil while individuals have little or no apparent responsibility. Evil assumes a certain ‘banality.’ The Holocaust was a notable example. The ongoing abortion holocaust, with over a billion babies ripped apart and thrown on the trash heap – or with their organs harvested – still thrives as a major industry.

Third, modernity enables evil to be ‘cool.’ Movies and videogames glorify violence. Sexual immorality is so commonplace it has become irrelevant, unless you’re talking about rape, and then it’s only relevant to those in the opposing political party.

When people suffer in our modern world, the accepted wisdom is to promote governmental ‘solutions,’ or referral to professional secular psychologists, or to the medical establishment for an opioid prescription, or to fund another suicide hotline. The Christian’s responsibility, when finding someone in pain, is to befriend and offer counsel, especially the assured hope of the Gospel . . . and continued friendship, for life, if he’s interested.

In the New Mexico desert as the mushroom cloud ascended above the world’s first nuclear weapon test, Robert Oppenheimer recalled a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.” He became an activist against nuclear weapons after the war while struggling to fit his personal responsibility into his New Age worldview.

Raised Jewish, Robert embraced his father’s secular humanitarianism, which aspired to replace Judaism and Christianity. Yet he used Christian metaphors to rail against American nuclear weapon development, that the bomb represented “the inhumanity and evil of modern war . . . the devil’s work . . . the physicists have known sin.”

Oppenheimer insisted that his dedication to duty overrode any consideration of the consequences. Os writes that “Oppenheimer’s understanding of Hinduism allowed him to achieve a personal freedom that transcended the morality and moral scruples of others.” The Gita is in sync with Nietsche here, that if you have achieved a pure heart, in your own opinion, then you are beyond good and evil and can act in ways that others may see as wicked. How convenient. Jean-Paul Sartre seduced and abused young women throughout his life under the same philosophy.

The Bible has much to say on this subject. At the end of the book of Judges, as lawlessness, civil war, and moral evil consumed the nation, we read, “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

What about monsters, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Manson, Dahmer? Os suggests that the ‘monster’ view of evil is dangerous because it distances us from what seem to be special cases; it immunizes us to the low intensity evil around us because we’re not like them. Historically famous evil, however, derives from the same sins that we see around us . . . lying, greed, selfishness, self-righteousness, hatred. Mao and the Kims of North Korea, along with every other despot in history, could not have perpetrated mass-scale evil without the support of henchmen and minions and a complicit population that failed to stand against evil.

After WW2, two visiting American psychiatrists wrote, “By conventional criteria, no more than 10 percent of the SS could be considered abnormal.” The overwhelming majority “would have easily passed all the psychiatric tests ordinarily given to American army recruits or Kansas City policemen.” Primo Levi wrote concerning Auschwitz, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

And so today’s Left works hard to establish group-think, to manufacture multitudes of drones who will obey the elites who know best.

Guinness cites Zygmunt Bauman, a Jewish Pole whose wife was an Auschwitz survivor. The Holocaust, he argues, was not an aberration; rather, it grew from the processes at the heart of the modern world. Men have the same temptations of the heart today. The Holocaust, after all, was carried out by millions of ordinary people. The challenges are the same today. Today’s rising anti-Semitism threatens the future, not just of Jews, but anyone who doesn’t go with the flow of evil. Witness the efforts in America today to repress free speech, especially on college campuses. Witness the efforts of the Left to foster racism and sexism and genderism and all kinds of tribal conflict by hammering identity politics day after day.

The power of technology to surveil, monitor, and shape communication and culture magnifies the potential for evil to rise and control. Richard Rubenstein wrote in 1966, “It is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelty are an antithesis . . . In our times, the cruelties, like most other aspects of our world, have become far more effectively administered than ever before.”

Robert Kaplan wrote in 2002, “For that is another lesson of the twentieth century; the link – when we are not vigilant – between technological acceleration and barbarism.” Industrial strength oppression and killing are more possible and more likely than ever before in history. One historian wrote that Auschwitz was “a mundane extension of the modern factory system . . . the end product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager’s production charts.”

Today, America’s tech companies are considering use of China’s social credit system, which the Chicom government uses to reward or punish politically correct or incorrect behavior inside their own borders. This is clear foreshadowing of the Antichrist’s coming rule.

Guinness sees three areas where Americans have eroded traditional barriers to evil. First, the idea of “under God” has been neutered, rendered a cliché at best. In colonial New England John Cotton’s understanding of a nation under God led him to declare, “It is necessary, therefore, that all power that is on earth be limited.” Thomas Jefferson, when contemplating slavery, wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.” (Would that he had trembled enough to repent, trust Christ, and put his life on the line to end slavery in his own lifetime.)

Today’s activists work hard to erase every mention of God from the public square and from the education of children. Guinness cries out, “Are they ignoramuses or fools? . . . History alone will show what happens to American freedom when this bulwark is removed and the ultimate appeal against human power and its abuse is taken away from public discourse.”

The second erosion concerns what George Washington called the “great experiment” – the hardest problem to solve is the transience of freedom. It’s not just hard to attain freedom; it’s much harder to keep it. Part of the framers’ solution was the Constitution’s separation of powers. “The forgotten part (is) . . . the enduring triangle of freedom: freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith, and faith requires freedom. Only so can a free republic remain free.”

Ben Franklin noted that, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” But America has flushed its morals down the sewer. As the apostle Paul details in the first chapter of Romans, immorality leads to idolatry and a vicious downward spiral. Morals disintegrate and people will fall for anything. True faith, a worldview grounded in Biblical reality, goes out of existence. The Christian remnant needs freedom to exist and to preach the Gospel. That freedom disappears and the most carnal, the most ruthless come to rule the nation.

The third erosion is startling. The culture begins to glorify immorality, rebellion, the destruction of traditions and conventions. Chaucer wrote, “Forbid us a thing, and that desire we,” identifying a perverse trait of human nature. Guinness views the heart of the modern world as a refusal to accept any limits, in fact a lust “to celebrate a culture of transgression.” Just watch the news to see this in all kinds of demonstrations, parades, and protests, with content that was unthinkable just a few decades ago.

Social media exponentiates the effect. Say anything you want with no consequences . . . unless you’re a Christian or even a secular conservative. You’ll see consequences if you dare to speak up. So be it.

Guinness asks, “How long will we continue to confuse evil with freedom? . . . Any tilt toward evil is an act of hostility toward civilization and a vote for barbarism.” I marvel at times, more at Christians than unbelievers. Some Christians criticize my tracts for being too bold, too blunt, for actually naming specific sins. Most Christians despise what they call “confrontational evangelism,” which is simply walking up to someone or . . . God forbid! . . . knocking on their door to engage in conversation and share the Gospel. Wake up, Christians! This world is headed toward the cliff of the Great Tribulation while multitudes of individuals are headed for Hell, but you’re too timid to hand out a Gospel tract, or open your mouth to contend for truth?

Eastern religions offer no hope. In Hinduism and Buddhism, evil and suffering are thought to be integral to human life. Many Hindus offer sacrifices to a myriad of small deities, but other Hindus and Buddhists simply work at detachment, Nirvana, kill all your desires and hope that you get absorbed, extinguished into “the great deathless lake of Nirvana.”

Philosopher Ninian Smart concludes, “There is Nirvana, but no person who enters it.” Extinguishing your self, your personhood – Buddhists yearn for what atheists / materialists already claim, the non-existence of persons. Thus there is no remedy for suffering and evil. And no hope, no you, no me. The Biblical view – which syncs with the way everyone lives this life – is founded on the person of God, who made us as His image-bearers, persons with choice, hope, a moral conscience, and abilities to love, to create, to help.

The Zen teacher, D. T. Suzuki, said, “The goal of Zen is not incarnation, but ‘excarnation’” . . . freedom from self, freedom from individuality. What we see as reality is maya, illusion, to the New Ager. Such philosophy is the enemy of solutions, and certainly the enemy of the Gospel.

What about the religion of secular humanism, undergirded by atheism and evolution, the increasingly dominant worldview over the last 50 years, especially in academia, the educational establishment, big media, and government? How does the anti-God establishment deal with evil? Some quotes on their perspective of man’s position in the cosmos:

Geneticist H. J. Muller: “We see the future of man as one of his own making.”

Archaeologist Gordon Childe: “Man makes himself.”

Algernon Swinburne (in his Hymn of Man): “Glory to Man in the highest! For Man is the Master of Things.”

John F. Kennedy (inaugural address): “All man’s problems were created by man and can be solved by man.”

I’ve met high self-esteem humanists on the street who assure me that they are the Captain of their fate. I’ll ask them whether they can control their heartbeat, skip sleep for a week, do without food or water, or disdain the bathroom for a few days. In fact, they are Captain of nothing. The richest, most brilliant humanists get sick, age, and die. Then what?

Bertrand Russell admitted that “extinction” is the destiny of “all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius.” Furthermore, that we share the “tie of a common doom,” that life is “a long march through the night,” that death is omnipotent, and yet . . . we must still shed “over every daily task the light of love.”

That last bit is merely an irrational leap, disconnected from everything else Russell professed to believe. Why must we do anything since we are just molecules in motion. What is love anyway? Love is found neither in the Periodic Table nor in the laws of physics.

In short, humanism has no answers whatsoever for the problem of evil. Ordinary people get this. You have to immerse yourself in the irrationality of academia to embrace materialism as a way of life.  But no one can actually live that way.

In vicious and hypocritical irony, though, atheists often use the problem of evil to argue against the existence of God. They try to make a moral argument about how God should behave, while their worldview denies any basis for morals, for justice, for fairness, for any immaterial value or concept.

Guinness offers the Biblical view of man’s Fall – in Genesis – as the historical source of trouble, of evil. Most importantly, he identifies the solution as individual transformation.

I would simply identify transformation as the new birth . . . repentance from sin, faith in Jesus Christ, and regeneration by the Spirit of God. This solution is the only solution, and cannot be found politically, societally, psychologically, or in any other mass-marketed way. Salvation is one at a time.

Your job, Christian, is to preach the Gospel 1-2-1. It’s up to those who hear to say yea or nay. That’s it. That’s the only game in town (Earth).

What about content, in addition to the basic facts of the Gospel and the plea to repent and trust Christ? So, preach the whole counsel of God. Preach against evil and for righteousness. Preach the 2^nd Coming. Preach the coming judgments of the Tribulation and the Great White Throne. Preach Hell, Heaven, and the New Heaven and New Earth. Preach to the mind, to the conscience, to the heart, and to the will. Preach compassionately. Preach boldly.

We have an assured hope grounded tightly into reality. Only the Biblical worldview makes sense of life. Victory is ours; we just have to wait a bit to experience it fully. Even in the midst of trouble and evil, victory is certain.

Look at our nation spiraling into hatred and chaos. The enemy’s mouthpieces are bold and in your face. Are you afraid of offending people that despise God? Are you afraid that someone might respond and become a child of God? What are you waiting for? Is there not a cause?

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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148. The Doctrine of the Christian Life
June 1, 2020

Lord is a proper name, the name of a person. Yes, God is personal, “not an impersonal force like gravity or electromagnetism, or even a set of superstrings, but a person: one who thinks, speaks, feels, loves, and acts with purpose.”

So writes John M. Frame in his 2008 book, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, a serious thousand-page work that covers a lot of ground from a Biblical perspective . . . albeit, at times, a Reformed perspective, which I’ll comment on later.

The Christian life is often characterized as a relationship between the believer and the Lord Jesus. Indeed it is. The person of the Spirit of Christ indwells you when you’re born again. But I often cringe at the common evangelical use of the ‘relationship’ mantra, as if it’s primarily about fuzzy feelings while singing contemporary ‘worship’ ditties.

No, there must be content, rich doctrinal content, truths your soul can grip tightly when the storms of life crash around you, when despair crushes with no respite in sight. Soul-bracing truths must be rooted in the Bible’s documented history, in the laws of God that reflect His very character, and in prophetic promises that deliver assured hope that victory is coming, and we are co-inheritors with Christ.

Ethics is one of the topics Frame explores, in his usual tri-perspectival manner. In his books he likes to consider a subject from the normative, situational, and existential perspectives. In ethics, then, we have command ethics as normative, emphasizing the authority of God’s moral law. The 10 Commandments are exemplary, and Frame devotes almost half of his book to unpacking the 10 Commandments for relevance to the Christian life.

Narrative ethics, the situational perspective, teaches ethics by telling the story of salvation, especially through the Old and New Testament histories. Virtue ethics, the existential perspective, probes the inner character of the believer, a topic developed at length in the New Testament epistles.

Frame observes that Scripture uses all of these methods to teach and provoke righteous behavior. As a teacher myself, in science, engineering, and in Biblical studies, I’ve seen the value of offering multiple perspectives to explain ideas, especially difficult ideas, since we all learn in different ways. In classical physics, for example, mechanical problems can be analyzed from a Newtonian (F = ma) perspective, but also using a Lagrangian or a Hamiltonian approach. Wisdom determines which is more effective – rarely the Hamiltonian. But when you consider quantum problems, the Hamiltonian perspective dominates. In the 19^th century, Sir William Rowan Hamilton had no idea how useful his work would be. Now, back to our task . . .

At a very practical level, I can analyze an ethical choice situationally by asking which choice best gives glory to God. Which choice furthers the Great Commission? Which choice encourages and strengthens my Christian brothers and sisters?

Normatively, if Scripture is clear in guiding an action, then the choice is simple. I can trust God’s explicit commands in Scripture, that flow from God’s very character. Just do it because God says so. I trust God because He’s always right even if I don’t understand it. No problem. Maturity, of course, provokes increased understanding and guess what . . . I can see better why God’s commandments work. It’s His reality, after all.

Existentially, Frame suggests, “the ethical question becomes, ‘How must I change if I am to do God’s will?’” I focus inward to align my own heart with God’s will. I want to ‘be’ in sync with what I ‘do’.

The three perspectives are intertwined. I can’t wisely choose how to give God glory without knowing His word and knowing – honestly – whether my attitudes are in sync. Also, I can’t understand myself without knowing Scripture and I don’t understand Scripture unless I have practiced applying its principles to my own situations.

A thought occurs . . . I’ve marveled at ‘mature’ Christians who have attended Bible studies for decades, yet have no interest in the Great Commission. What do they think the Bible is about? It is particularly ironic and tragic to watch an adult class do a Sunday-School Bible study on the Book of Acts and never bother to share the Gospel with a single lost soul from Monday to Saturday.

Sigh.

Our ethics are driven by our theology. God, as revealed in the Bible, is both transcendent and immanent. He is exalted, above all, on high, but He is also with us, down here. In contrast, Islam views Allah as transcendent, but not immanent. Hindus and New Agers identify lots of Ascended Masters, roughly coequal and akin to the Greek and Roman pantheons, and thereby not transcendent. They also look to the ‘god within’ but that idea defies the separate personal-ness of God who relates to us quite personally. Indeed, the person of the Holy Spirit indwells the Christian believer.

Immanence is vital in Christ’s promise to be with us in the Great Commission, Matthew 28:18-20. We are co-workers with Him, as in 2 Corinthians 6:1. Yet His transcendence assures us that all Biblical promises will surely come to pass.

A distant or non-existent God provokes the secularist to create fluid moral principles that are comfortable, convenient. Love, justice, and tolerance can mean anything at all to the autonomous man. It’s interesting that today’s leftists are moralizing more than ever before, about sexuality, genderism, racism, climate change, etc. Yet there is neither content nor foundation to their moral pronouncements. You’re simply evil if you disagree and must be crushed. No debate. Dogmatism on steroids.

Frame points out that “God’s transcendence shows us how small we are and promotes humility.” The incarnation and the Gospel of redemption, though, give us hope, purpose, and a loving connection to the ultimate Personality. The man who rejects the Gospel doesn’t want a world like that, where he is small and dependent on a transcendent and immanent God. How foolish to defy reality! I challenged such an autonomous fellow once to prove that he is the captain of his fate by defying sleep for a week, or to defy the bathroom for a day. He’s not even the captain of his bowels.

Secular philosophers and determined atheists have long viewed human reason as self-sufficient in that, as Frame writes, “it requires no justification from anything more ultimate than itself.” Frame suggests that secular philosophers who appear to deny autonomous reason (existentialists and postmodernists), typically exalt autonomous will or feelings. This is not progress.

Frame asserts that nobody can be a serious atheist, because when they turn from the true God, they don’t reject absolutes. Rather, they worship idols and will usually preach more dogmatically and with less substance, than any fundamentalist would dare to do.

In ancient times, impersonal fate was held to be ultimate, as found in Egyptian, Babylonian, and Confucian texts. Don’t fight fate! The Egyptian pharaoh was heaven’s link to earth, “the absolute arbiter of right and wrong.” Tyrannical government is natural for such a worldview. Classical Marxists believed the overthrow of capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat was absolutely inevitable, and those who would defy such future history are justly disposed of. Calvinists, of course, are natural fatalists: “Oh, I guess I made that wrong turn because it was God’s sovereign will.”

Frame criticizes Islam for teaching fatalism, in which human choices have no effect on events. To Frame, a Calvinist, Islamic fatalism is mechanical, and thereby flawed. Calvinist sovereignty is somehow personal, though, and OK.

Yet fatalists cannot live that way. Like a-moralists, they don’t want others stealing from them and they want their own wives to be faithful. The open-borders zealot doesn’t want illegals living in his own house.

Frame observes that under such systems it is impossible to learn right from wrong. Life becomes the old Seinfeld show. For every situation that arises, you create a new moral rule to justify yourself, but chaos and conflict grow.

Only Scripture accounts for reality. Morality is about personal obligations, which start with the person of God, who wired absolute moral standards into our God-given conscience, standards that correlate perfectly with internal peace and peaceful relationships, with successful marriages and businesses, and with sensible governance. Depart from Scriptural principles and there are no limits on trouble.

Frame notes that Buddhism emphasizes right living, but the goal is to achieve Nirvana, a nothingness, a non-existence that ends suffering. That supposedly beats the Hindu’s perpetual reincarnation based on karma. But if Nirvana is the goal, there is no basis for any specific moral principle, including altruism. The Buddha delayed his entrance to Nirvana in order to assist others. But why? The quicker everyone achieves nothingness, the better, one would think. Helping someone out materially to make him more comfortable delays both parties from reaching Nirvana.

18^th century philosopher Immanuel Kant allowed for the existence of God, but only in a vague, detached sense. Frame reports that Kant believed that we should live as if God existed, as if there is an afterlife in which good is rewarded and evil is punished. I recall that, when I was a boy, my dad mentioned this about Kant, and I recall my impression that my dad thought Kant wise in this view. It was only many years later that I came to realize my dad was an atheist, or at least a flaming agnostic, a distinction without much difference.

To Kant then, morality is not sourced in God, yet we should do good for duty’s sake. Duty on what grounds, he is not clear, but he is hopeful that happiness follows from dutiful morality. Thus Kant borrows some ‘oughts’ from a Biblical worldview while despising the core . . . the very person of God.

Frame has much more to say about the non-Christian view of morality. But let’s move onto Biblical ground.

“In general, a Christian ethical decision is the application of God’s revelation (normative) to a problem (situational) by a person (existential). Existential revelation is defined as God’s word expressed through human beings, whether prophets or Christian witnesses. Christians are revelation. Image-bearers, we’ve been marred by the Fall, but redeemed and led by the Spirit we can speak God’s word truly and faithfully in our own situations.”

God’s word is vital, of paramount importance in our witness. We speak truly if we speak in accord with the Bible. (Aside: Inerrancy / preservation is a big deal.) Our attitude matters. If our hearts see Scripture as absolutely authoritative, our mouths will speak authoritatively.

Frame observes that the Bible is not explicit on every subject (tax policy, nuclear proliferation). Yet the Bible touches all of life implicitly: “So to say that Scripture is comprehensive is to say that the whole Word applies to the whole world.” For example: “Scripture doesn’t mention abortion, but it forbids murder and treats unborn children as human persons. So pro-life Christians rightly argue that the Bible prohibits abortion.” We never escape the need to apply general principles to specific situations. Living the Christian life isn’t easy, but it’s not complicated. God gifted us each with a high performance conscience, and equips us with His word to handle everything that applies to life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3).

In science (much discussed on this web site), a Biblical foundation leads to wisdom. Given the Genesis flood what would we expect to find? As Ken Ham loves to say, “Billions of dead things buried in rock layers laid down by water all over the Earth.” Flood geology makes sense of Earth’s landscape. Evolutionary mythology fosters nothing but mysteries. Similarly, created kinds of creatures lead us to expect huge distinctions in genomes and morphology. We see that, too. And designed DNA provokes us to expect close to 100% functionality in the DNA, as opposed to evolutionary fantasies suggesting that most of our DNA is junk . . . such fantasies thereby holding back microbiology for many years.

Frame makes the point that Scripture is unique in that it was written not only for its own generation, but also – and expressly – for people many centuries in the future. (See Romans 15:4) Also, the Lord Jesus was clear that if you don’t know how to apply Scripture properly, you don’t know Scripture. In Matthew 22:31-32 the Lord cited Exodus 3:6 to instruct the Sadducees on the reality of a resurrection to come. In denying that application, the Sadducees showed they were ignorant of Scripture . . . willfully.

Let’s pull a few nuggets from Frame’s exposition of the Ten Commandments. In the 2^nd, for example, Exodus 20:5, God warns idolaters that He will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the fourth generation. We can take this as temporal consequences. Consider how King David’s sins impacted his children and his nation for generations to come.

Frame insists there is nothing deterministic about this. Citing Ezekiel 18:14-18 and Acts 2:40, we see that individual “repentance is always possible, by God’s grace.” Odd, for a Calvinist to use the word possible, but the author is right.

On the fifth commandment, which Jesus endorses (Mark 7:10-13), the Lord also places loyalty to Himself above loyalty to parents (Matt 10:35-37, Luke 9:59-60). This is not only a serious claim to deity, but also a strong connection to the first commandment.

In the context of the fifth, within a chapter on racial and national equalities, Frame observes that “the Great Commission reverses the centripetal movement of the Old Testament (the nations coming to Jerusalem) to a centrifugal movement (God’s people bringing the gospel to the nations), and it removes those Old Testament laws that aimed at isolating God’s people from other nations.”

I’ll observe that modern churches work, as in the Old Testament model, to increase their gravity, building facilities and programs as attractors, exalting the megachurch above the New Testament plan of a citywide house church network. Christians are generally content to be isolated spiritually, with only modest charitable efforts extended to the community. The lost community endorses this, as long as the Christians don’t try to cram religion down their throats. Cheeseburgers for the homeless – that’s cool. Door-to-door evangelism – not.

Frame notes that modern folks seem not to take adultery too seriously. The seventh commandment forbidding adultery is tied to many Scriptures that draw a parallel to idolatry, spiritual adultery. The deep connection is that adultery is covenant treason between husband and wife. In the Old Testament idolatry broke many of Israel’s covenants with God, committing national treason. Marriage and family are more fundamental to human existence than the nation state. So yes, adultery is serious.

The New Testament teaches that marriage is a type of the relationship Christ establishes with His born again believers throughout eternity. Adultery violates this typology in an especially drastic way because those who are born again cannot lose eternal life. The Lord Jesus expects His people to hold marriage in purity as a witness to unbelievers.

Frame has much to say about the Christian’s interaction with culture, but I’ve touched on this issue many times in previous essays, so I’ll leave it to you whether to pick up his book. It seems to me that the author has greatly underemphasized the responsibility of Christians to be bold witnesses for the Gospel. I suspect that is driven by his Calvinist theology. But then, most non-Calvinist evangelicals today are also disinterested in personal evangelism; rather, they seem to be focused on designing ever-more-vibrant ‘worship’ experiences to attract people to their megachurches, or megachurch wannabes.

The principal takeaway is that every aspect of our Christian life must be informed by doctrine, by Biblical truth. Feelings, emotions . . . they can’t be foundational to life. Yet love, joy, compassion, zeal, and yes – even worship – flow naturally from a heart filled with God’s truth and energized by the Holy Spirit when He is welcomed diligently, thoughtfully, and rationally.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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149. The Call
July 1, 2020

Arguably the most essential individual during World War 2 – for liberty to prevail – was Winston Churchill. Certainly, the war was ultimately won due to American industry, the American military, and the resolve of American families. But America could not have engaged the Nazis in Europe if Britain had fallen. And Britain’s freedom hung by a gossamer thread that surely would have broken quickly without Churchill’s leadership.

In short, Winston Churchill was called to his role in history. I believe it was God’s providence that prepared him and placed him where he could use his God-given gifts. Yes, even though Churchill was not a born again believer. How much more could God have used him if he had trusted Christ? Perhaps he could have led post-war Britain into prosperity, rather than the dreary socialist penury it experienced over the next few decades.

How about you? What is your purpose in life? It’s not likely to be on the world stage, but it is certain that most of the stars in God’s hall of fame were never known outside their local community. See Daniel 12:2-3. The first qualification to find and fulfill your calling is to find forgiveness and righteousness, to escape justice for the countless sins in your life. Secondly, in Daniel’s revelation, your calling must involve turning others to righteousness. In the New Testament, this is the Great Commission: Share the Gospel with unbelievers and encourage / teach / disciple / befriend believers around you.

That two-sided coin succinctly summarizes the life of the Lord Jesus as He walked this Earth, and the life of the apostle Paul as he traveled the Mediterranean world. It’s a good plan for life . . . no, it’s the only plan worthy of a child of God.

In his 1998 book, The Call, Os Guinness asks if you have found, or are even looking for “a purpose big enough to absorb every ounce of your attention, deep enough to plumb every mystery of your passions, and lasting enough to inspire you to your last breath.”

Guinness explores the options offered by assorted worldviews. The first is the Eastern answer, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. What is the purpose of life if the final reality is undifferentiated and impersonal? Briefly, “Forget it and forget yourself.” Eastern mysticism is about freedom from individuality. “Humanity must be cut from ‘the dark forest of delusion,” says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. So, no purpose to your life, no point at all.

The second is the secularist / atheist / materialist answer. Since there is no God, it’s up to us to decide. That was the core of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism. Nietsche described life’s challenge as “Thus I willed it.” Frank Sinatra sung that he did it “my way.” But in atheism, there is nothing but particles and the forces of physics. There are no such things as love, justice, hope, beauty, meaning . . . in short there are no persons.

The third is the Biblical answer. Ultimate reality is grounded in the person of God, who made us in His image. Spirit and soul are real, along with love, justice, hope, etc. Life is much bigger than particles and forces. God wants you to find Him and He has a calling for you.

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that the vital thing is to see what God wants you to do, “to find the idea for which I can live and die.”

Guinness observes that for us moderns the trouble is that “we have too much to live with and too little to live for . . . in the midst of material plenty, we have spiritual poverty.” Guinness pleads that politics, science, psychology, management, self-help techniques, and a host of other activities fall desperately short as sources of meaning, or even as techniques to find meaning. Tolstoy wrote of science what applies to them all: “Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important to us, ‘what shall we do and how shall we live.’”

Love is a worthy cause, right? The Biblical view entails choosing how to love and whom to love. Love of pleasure is no love at all, in God’s reality. Loving the homeless enough to give him a new pair of shoes and a cheeseburger, but without giving him the Gospel is no love at all, either. Yet thousands of American churches miss this point.

God is the true Source of love, enabling us to love Him because He first loved us, to love Him and His image-bearers, trusting that God’s priorities and instructions – in His word – are the necessary and sufficient elements of real love.

Guinness notes that we need God’s grace to love God’s way. We cannot bridge the chasm over sin’s gulf ourselves, and so God built a Cross across that chasm. “We start out searching, but we end up being discovered. We think we are looking for something; we realize we are found by Someone.”

C.S. Lewis correctly observed, “The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.” Lewis hits the Biblical bullseye on this, in that the believer can be led by the indwelling Holy Spirit whenever he chooses to ‘get out of the way.’ (I rarely quote Lewis – he was a strong apologist for theism, but there is much evidence that he was never actually a born again Christian.)

Guinness connects the point to doubters: “Professing to be unsure of God, they pretend to be sure of themselves.” Christians, though, may well and appropriately doubt themselves, but can be sure of God if, for example, the heart’s inclination is at variance with Scriptural truth.

We love the idea of others seeing us as ‘original.’ Guinness: “But genuine ‘originality’ is God’s prerogative, not ours. At our most ‘creative,’ we are only imitative.” Yet the lives of others, especially that modeled by Jesus when He walked the earth, can stir, challenge, rebuke, and inspire. Even our imagination is God-given, a subset of His personality.   When we imitate Christ we grow . . . up. When we strive for worldly esteem we shrink . . . down.

In sync with much that I have written on this site, Guinness sees the call to full-time Christian service as fallacious. The New Testament position is found in Romans 12:1-2, which calls for every believer to present their bodies a living sacrifice, to be wholly transformed so we can find God’s will and do it. In practice, full-time Christian service means salaried positions, paid professional Christian workers. I’ve written before about paid evangelical clergy who are too busy to go door-to-door or get out on the street to share the Gospel with actual lost people.

Guinness comments on Roman Catholic history, the establishment of monasticism, which began with a reforming effort to provoke an increasingly secularized church toward spirituality. The result was a double standard that elevated the specialists, “the aristocrats of the soul,” leaving everyone else to live the worldly life. So monasticism reinforced secularization.

In medieval times, the term calling was reserved for the priestly class (including nuns). Tragically, the same mindset persists today. In evangelicalism and fundamentalism, the clergy class claims its own privileges. Most ‘real ministry’ is defined and directed by the salaried clergy and woe be to anyone who questions the ‘man of God.’

Jesus’ call to His disciples was, “Follow me.” And, “I will make you to become fishers of men.” (Mark 1:17) God’s call is not meant to elicit mere profession. We’re called to obedience. If you must go through a process to figure it out, then do so quickly, apologize for the delay, and get to work.

Young Christians are often tempted – and encouraged – to focus on minor issues. Which school? Which major? Which part of the country? You can find those answers, if you’re obedient where you are right now. Whether you’re in Baton Rouge or Boston, you can find lost folks to share the gospel with and Christians to befriend and encourage. Once obedient, God may lead you to your destiny in Topeka, for example. Whether you’re an engineering major or a business major, you have classmates whose eternal destiny is, in part, in your hands. Reach out to them and God may lead you to med school or the welding trade, depending on where He can use you best. Don’t worry. He’ll wire the proper passion into you. But you’ve got to obey before you get access to deeper wisdom. See John 7:17.

Your audience in all your endeavors is the Audience of One. It’s the ‘opinion’ of the Lord Jesus that matters, all that matters.

The ‘elite’ of our society get this upside down. Movie superstar Marlene Dietrich made vinyl recordings of the applause she received in different cities so she could impress her friends. Mozart wrote that he was never in a good mood in a place where people didn’t recognize him. So, are you content to do good when no one but Jesus will notice?

Margaret Thatcher, in dismantling much of Britain’s welfare system in the 1980s, annoyed liberals with the comment, “There is no society, only individuals and their families.” I’ve noticed during my lifetime, as Guinness does too, that community has deteriorated in the modern world. With travel, mobility, careers yanking us to one region after another, and especially with modern lifestyles, including social media, cable TV, and life on the internet, neighborhoods aren’t like they used to be. So-called ‘virtual communities’ are pitiful substitutes. Add in that churches are in decline, those that exist are centered on the show, not on mutual discipleship . . . and the continually stoked political hatreds threatening to consume our nation . . . you have to be proactive, diligently proactive, to make a difference in the eyes of the Audience of One.

For your calling to be resonant Biblically, you have to go against the flow, against the church’s flow, a highly structured clergy-centric program; against the culture’s flow where immorality is celebrated; against the nation’s flow wherein politics is god over all; and against the flow of individuals and families to conform to everything that is either against God’s will or trivial in significance.

Arthur Burns, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, attended an informal White House evangelical prayer and fellowship group in the 1970s. Deferential to him and respectful, the others in the group took turns closing the meeting in prayer each week, but passed Burns by, knowing that he was Jewish. Eventually, a newcomer one day guilelessly asked him if he would close the meeting in prayer.

Promptly, Burns reached out to hold hands with the others and prayed, “Lord, I pray that you would bring Jews to know Jesus Christ. I pray that you would bring Muslims to know Jesus Christ. Finally, Lord, I pray that you would bring Christians to know Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Guinness opines that for the last two thousand years, the one unanswerable objection to the Christian faith is . . . Christians. He cites a T-shirt that states, “Jesus, save me from your followers.”

Clearly, the vast majority of “Christians” are not born again. It is remarkable that most people who attend “Christian churches,” when asked why they think they will be in Heaven some day is that they are ‘good enough.’ That is the antithesis of the Christian faith. Many others who profess faith in the shed blood of Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins show negligible evidence of repentance in their lives . . . namely, they seem to enjoy the forgiveness without any intent to change their lifestyle. Yet many of the truly born again Christians in the West have lives enmeshed with worldly – anti-Christian – values.

George Bernard Shaw quipped, “Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.”

Jesus asked, “And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46) Guinness reminds us that “the Way” is for traveling. Traveling and following are not about what you say you believe, but rather what you do. Jesus: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” (John 14:15) The new birth is about transformation, empowering and indwelling by the Holy Spirit, so that we are changed. We approach life differently. It’s not just about trying, but about doing and being.

Yoda: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

Modern evangelicalism has little of calling, and much of conceit. The message of seeker-sensitive churches is, “You are chosen; you are gifted; you are special.” That’s the message of the god of this world, the Deceiver, the ‘angel of light.’ Guinness writes that “the call of God is enlisted to camouflage ego, stifle disagreement, excuse failure, decry opposition, and gild the commemorative plaques of success.” He’s thinking mostly of evangelical ‘leaders’ here, which speaks to the dangers of exalting leaders to power and celebrity within Christendom. Consider the New Testament record – after the Lord and the apostles, how many exalted ‘leaders’ are there? There are lots of new converts and new churches. In all of Paul’s writings, though, you will find no mention of superstar senior pastors in his letters to the churches.

Exalting man, of course, magnifies pride in the exalted and envy in the ‘laity.’ Exalting ‘super-pastors’ and para-church leaders and ‘Christian’ musicians destroys the sense of calling that many Christians should find in business, law, engineering, police work, etc. There are lots of ways to make a living, such that your career’s environment opens up doors for the Great Commission – which is the explicitly expressed calling of the Lord Jesus to every follower.

If you get the career choice wrong at first, God will give you a Plan B. In many ways it doesn’t matter how you make a living. Anywhere on Earth your calling to share the Gospel and encourage believers is right there in front of you.

And it never makes sense to envy your brothers and sisters in Christ. You don’t envy your teammates! You pray for them and encourage them and help them to do even better!

Might a believer envy a lost person? That’s crazy. I’ve been a tennis player throughout much of my life, and still a tennis watcher (on TV) since I aged out of serious competition. But envy the top-ranked players in the world? Would I trade my life for that of ___________ (fill in the blank)? Ridiculous! Not only is ___________ headed for Hell, but as a Christ-rejecter, he has done nothing of value in God’s eyes. I may not have done much, but I am confident, through God’s patience and grace, that I have sent on ahead a few nuggets of treasure.

Money, Guinness insists, is a spiritual issue. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., was asked how much money it takes to make a man happy. His famous reply, “Just a little bit more.” Early on, Sam Walton’s wife, Helen, asked him why he wanted to keep expanding; they already had plenty. She said, “After the seventeenth store, though, I realized there wasn’t going to be any stopping it.”

It’s easy to mock the super-rich, but the same lust afflicts all of the economic classes. I see Christians in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, working oh-so-hard to get a little more, get a nicer car, build a bigger house, in addition to filling their lives and the lives of their children with oh-so-many activities. When are they going to start following Jesus? I mean, in what they do today, what they schedule this week. “But we’re oh-so-busy!” Sure, by choice. They serve Mammon and pleasure and distraction. Their heavenly bank account is destitute.

Those that have too much money to spend scratch the charitable itch, whether they are Christians or not. I’ve know many churches who contribute fairly well to overseas mission programs, but won’t knock on their neighbors’ doors. The missions giving may salve their mostly seared conscience, but their hearts are revealed by what they spend time on.

Jesus preached, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Luke 6:21)   The Lord is stating a spiritual law here. Wallow in treasures here and your heart may be mired for life. Prosperity and entertainment and distractions, like sports, make evangelism and discipleship extraordinarily difficult in America today.

Have you thought about your calling? Vaclav Havel, the Czech who stood against communist tyranny in his country, said, “The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.” That’s my experience in going door-to-door and in street evangelism. Many will affirm the facts of the Gospel and even their own sad spiritual state. But the attitude is, “Whatever!” Apathy kills . . . eternally. American life is just too safe, too easy, too air-conditioned, with a wealth of consumeristic trivia and distractions available by quick click.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote in the mid-19^th century, “Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is wretched, for it lacks passion . . . Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy.”

Is there not a cause for the Christian, with multitudes in the valley of decision, multitudes who have had no clear Gospel witness, even in America?

Guinness revisits a theme from his other books, how modernity tempts us to be addicted to choice – a plethora of choices leads to lack of commitment to any given path, to “a sense of fragmentation, saturation, and overload.” I’ve examined the ‘ministries’ of a number of megachurches, some listing as many as 100 different groups, activities, initiatives, etc., for members to choose from. Inevitably, there is one thing missing . . . 1-2-1 evangelism. Anything but that!

Have we not been bought with a price? We are not our own and the one job that the Lord Jesus gave us is to share the Gospel with the lost. The Bible teaches many things about how to live – to love our wives, to raise godly children, to be honest in business, to speak kindly, to discern between good and evil, (and a thousand more). But the one job Jesus gave us is to do what He did, to work to save lost souls. Are you in a “church” that doesn’t care about that? And it claims to be a Christian church?

The modern world, Guinness writes, makes it harder to focus. Focus is a prime virtue of successful people, though. Harvard philosopher George Santayana wrote, “In accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else.” ‘Everything’ may be extreme, but the point is clear.

The Lord Jesus’ accomplishments in 3 ½ years were world changing. Yet he never wrote a book, founded a college, or started a political revolution. “Or heal everyone, or teach everyone.” He came “to seek and to save that which was lost.” He came to die for our sins, and to rise again to give us the assured hope of resurrection. What’s your focus this week? Yes, there is lots to do in life, but what is the preeminent focus?

Guinness relates that Justin Martyr grew up near Galilee and wrote that the plows made by Joseph and Jesus were still being used widely in his day. How much care was taken in their fabrication, in the details, that enabled those plows to plod on through the decades?

You and I might not be able to do much. I know I don’t do much. But I can plod. Just another step forward, just another tract given out, just another word of encouragement. Plod through today, make the day count, then thank God if you wake up tomorrow, to plod yet another day. It’s not always easy, but it’s not at all complicated.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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150. Doubt: A Good Thing?
August 1, 2020

You can’t live without trust. You can’t live without doubt. When you drive city streets you necessarily trust that others will stop at red lights and try to avoid collisions. But you don’t trust them entirely. A measure of doubt is rational. Businesses and personal relationships exist on trust – marriage, most of all. To work together, to accomplish more than you can on your own, necessitates trust.

Trust cannot be replaced by laws and law enforcement. How sad the world would be if we depended solely on legal consequences to protect ourselves from harm. Government over-reach and over-regulation occur, in part, from doubt and mistrust, which derive in turn from the degradation of ethics and morality in our culture, wherein everyone does whatever he likes, despising the very possibility of their accountability to the God who is there. Plus, despising the righteousness wired into the Golden Rule.

As Os Guinness writes in his 1996 book, God in the Dark: The Assurance of Faith Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, “God is not only a person, He is the supreme person on whom all personhood depends . . . That is why to know Him is to trust Him, and to trust Him is to begin to know ourselves.”

If God is not there and we are all just clods of molecules in collision, then there is no truth, no basis for trust, no ethics, no morality, and doubt is just some random misfiring of neurons . . . indeed no persons exist.

In this essay, let’s pull some nuggets from Guinness and apply them to some specific cases beyond the scope of his book. Guinness challenges us to embrace an examined faith, in which we are unafraid to doubt.

Doubts are as inevitable as thinking and wondering. If our doubts turn out to be justified, then we were believing something not worth believing. If a doubt is answered clearly, our faith grows stronger. Doubt is an opportunity to grow, to learn . . . if we explore it.

My doubts as a young Roman Catholic, as I learned something of the history that Rome tried to cover up, led me to atheism. My doubts about the pointlessness and hopelessness of a materialistic worldview led me to doubt that blind faith, knowing that there must be purpose in life. So I became open to arguments that led me to the Gospel. The Bible, the Gospel, and the presence of the Spirit of Christ in my newly converted life, provoked me to explore doubts about inerrancy, creation vs. evolution, and other issues, knowing that there must be answers. Finding those answers strengthened me. Seeking God’s truths all these years continues to strengthen the foundations of my faith, and enables me to trust God about those matters that lie beyond human experience and wisdom.

I have written much on this site about specific answers on many topics. If you are new to this site, please do explore . . . and let me know if you find something that annoys, confounds . . . or encourages or intrigues you.

Guinness observes that the Christian foundations of Western culture have been torn up and discarded, replaced “by a bewildering variety of alternative faiths, facing us with a jostling and anxiety-creating pluralism.” I see this as the Adversary’s explicit strategy, to so confound young people today with a haystack of choices that they will never find the jeweled needle in the midst.

Many people raised in church, but in a church that neglects serious discipleship and worldview training, confront doubts as they grow up, certainly by the time they are of college age, and ‘depart the faith.’ Their faith was never grounded. They had no idea what to do when faced with doubt. Many embrace doubt as an excuse to jump into the immoral cesspool of Western culture . . . which usually amounts to a combination of drunkenness and fornication. They don’t want answers.

Guinness: “The loss of faith has not been stanched, and this has suggested that the Christian faith is a fragile, vulnerable belief with little intellectual integrity. This suggestion, in turn, lends support to the common rejection of the Christian faith among thinking people.” I should put quotes around “thinking people.” The anti-Christians of this age are full of slogans, insults, and are eager to scoff, but it’s rare to find someone who offers an argument, and rarer still to find a ‘skeptic’ who is able to respond to an argument.

The Lord Jesus challenged the intelligentsia of His day, “How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only?” (John 5:44) Today’s anti-Christians are typically also today’s leftists, wallowing in the group think of the campus and the media – you won’t detect any thinking in that crowd. Lots of anger, yelling, and whining, to be sure, but a reasoned argument? These are today’s intellectuals?

Guinness suggests that our God-rejecting culture is a judgment from God on the West, to shake out who the real Christians are and prepare them for the testing ahead. How will you shake out? Are you contending or going with the flow? Griping about politics within your small church group doesn’t count.

Guinness informs us that the English word doubt derives from the Latin dubitare, which comes from an Aryan word meaning “two.” So, to believe or to trust someone is to be “in one mind,” as is to disbelieve firmly. To doubt, however, is to waver between the two, to be “in two minds.”

Other phrases come to mind, like “having a foot in both camps.” The Chinese speak of “having a foot in two boats.” The Navajo say, “that which is two within him.”

In Mark 9 we see the father of the demon-possessed child cry out to Jesus, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” This is doubt. Jesus never responded kindly to outright unbelief, but answered this father’s prayer which was infused with doubt.

I would call your attention to John 20: 24-31, the account of ‘doubting Thomas.’ This label is wrong. In verse 25 Thomas says, “I will not believe.” This isn’t doubt. Thomas is of one, certain mind. When Jesus confronts him in verse 27, the Lord accuses him, “Be not faithless, but believing.” Namely, convert from willful unbelief to determined faith. The passage concludes powerfully in verse 31 that in believing, “ye might have life through His name.” The powerful promise of verse 31, that the Gospel of John was written so that we might believe, indicates that God designed the human heart so that we will recognize truth when we hear it, if we want to.

America is filled with unbelief today. As I knock doors or visit campuses or walk city streets to reach out with the Gospel, I yearn to meet doubters. Doubters have a chance. All they have to do is walk down Doubting Road to see where truth lies. Few are interested. What once was doubt has hardened into concrete unbelief. Accordingly, I’ll cross a busy street to engage a young person. Yes, I do engage the middle-aged and above, but the concrete is hard to chip.

The “market value of doubting,” as Guinness says, is determined more by whom or what we doubt, more than how. “If the object of our faith were as elusive as the Loch Ness monster or as inconsequential as whether to have a third cup of tea, then doubt makes little difference.” But if the question is trust in the Creator, the God to whom you’re accountable, the value of a definite answer is life vs. death . . . eternal life vs. eternal death. This issue dwarfs all others.

Guinness advises that the best way for faith to grow and flourish is to feed it and exercise it. Don’t resist doubt by fighting against it. Immerse yourself in truth, in truth-finding activities, and in acting out on the truth you believe. From my own experience, I can testify that the most effective way – by far – to ‘feel’ close to the Lord and to experience the solid foundation of Biblical truth, is to get out on the sidewalk or the street corner, or the grocery store parking lot, and engage people 1-2-1 with the Gospel. It’s experiential, not just intellectual. And it’s a promise . . . Jesus promised to be with us in the work of the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20.

The Holy Spirit indwells the believer, empowers him in the Great Commission, and affirms the truth of God’s word. The Holy Spirit is no skeptic.

Guinness argues that the beginning of faith – saving faith – is an awareness of the danger or emptiness of our life without God. The unbelieving worldview ‘doesn’t work.’ Specifically, I would assert on Biblical grounds, that the unbeliever must recognize his lostness, his deserved judgment for his sins, and have a desire for forgiveness and for practical righteousness in his life. Guinness often fails in the specifics that a lost reader would need to understand just what one must do to be saved.

But the author is right about a necessary discontent with the unbelieving worldview, whether atheist or Muslim or Roman Catholic . . . or anything other than the Biblical Gospel.

If there is a deficiency in this awareness, Guinness writes, doubts may arise downstream, after one professes Christ. I would argue that the typical case here is false conversion. If one doesn’t fully understand he is lost in his sins and one heartbeat from Hell, he doesn’t get saved. Much modern evangelism produces such false converts by focusing on the ‘good news’ and failing to camp on sin, judment, and – especially – repentance.

The genuinely born again Christian is necessarily grateful to God for life, and eager to serve Him. Guinness quotes Dostoyevski, who writes about mankind: “If he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.”

The lost man, especially the atheist, insists on autonomy. Christians, too, must beware of sliding into a life pattern of autonomy, neglecting God. The true convert can forget, to some degree, where he came from. His Spirit-indwelt conscience will make him miserable, though.

Guinness labels one form, “the Christendom doubt.” Students in Christian colleges, he writes, “are so sheltered that they have no idea of the difference that God makes that is more than verbal.” It’s all theory. Faith must be tested and refined ‘out there’ in the world.

Much of the culture of fundamentalism and evangelicalism seems built on the premise that to fix doubt merely requires another sermon. Many pastors take pride that their primary ministry is their ‘pulpit ministry.’ Find that in the Bible! How can a careerist ‘pastor’ apply God’s words for those who work for a living – in the world, no less? (How can a Roman Catholic priest offer counsel to a troubled marriage?)

When young people do transition to careers and lives ‘in the world,’ many falter. The theory fails. They never lived it. Shame on the churches and the parents who never taught their children to contend.

Another category of doubt comes from a wrong view of God – in short, idolatry. You’ve got to know your Bible. The new Christian must build new presuppositions and continually examine them Scripturally as he applies them in life. We always carry presuppositions. The old ones have to go. The new ones had better be Biblical. Guinness suggests that hanging onto old, worldly presuppositions is akin to an army advancing “into enemy territory and carelessly leaving behind it pockets of resistance.” Whatever gains it makes will be hindered and losses will ensue. As Israel entered the promised land, it failed to drive out all the pagan tribes, resulting in trouble and misery for centuries to follow.

Specifically, I’ve observed countless American Christians who embrace cultural relativism, fearful to be labeled judgmental. So they don’t call out error and they don’t worry about the lost condition of the people around them. They certainly don’t imagine that other churchgoers might actually not be born again! They become practical universalists. I’ve heard many evangelical sermons delivered with a self-satisfied mindset that everyone in the auditorium is already a Christian, already Heaven-bound. No worries.

Guinness suggests that “the combat against relativism is not a clean, hand-to-hand fight but a wearing war of nerves against an enemy who is everywhere and nowhere, friendly-seeming but deadly at the same time.” I had a conversation with an elder when we visited a megachurch some years ago, who admitted that the church membership included several hundred Roman Catholics who were attracted to the ministries and the ‘worship experience.’ I asked him what approach the church had taken to explain the Gospel to these Catholics, to insure that they were truly born again, that they understood now that sacraments and religious works don’t save. He was dumbstruck. The thought had never occurred. Yet he and his wife are ‘old-fashioned’ evangelicals, saved for fifty years, with considerable evidence that they understood the Gospel.

In our personal lives, when trouble comes, and God doesn’t respond like a magic genie, it’s not God that has the problem. Most of our problems are self-made, not God’s fault. And we must keep in mind that we live in a fallen, sin-cursed world . . . including countless sins of our own. Everyone gets sick. Everyone dies. Everyone suffers the troubles that other sinners sling our way. God promises to be with us and sustain us in tribulation, particularly when we serve Him in reaching out to the lost and in loving, encouraging, and discipling fellow believers. Those that preach a ‘prosperity gospel’ are especially worthy of condemnation.

Once given eternal life, our perspective locks in. Mere circumstances don’t have the power to deter us, if we continually seek God’s comfort and strength. If trouble comes from the Adversary, double down on serving the Lord. God loved Job throughout his ordeal. Job got more depressed than he should have, but he did hang in there, and was humble at the end. God rewarded Job during his temporal life. If our reward waits until the next age, that’s OK.

For people you know who are locked into a lost worldview, it would be better for them to doubt than to remain devout, Guinness concludes. “The more devout they are, the uglier their faith will become since it is based on a lie.”

How did I come to saving faith? By God’s grace I came to doubt my Roman Catholic worldview, which led me to atheism. The vacuousness and hopelessness of atheism, in turn, generated doubts that led me to be open to Biblical truth and the Gospel. Uncertainties – doubts – about how to make my new Biblical faith work in light of what I “knew” about science / evolution, led me to explore biochemistry, paleontology, geology, and astronomy, which led me to the sure foundation of Biblical creation, which explains the information-rich complexity of life, flood geology, the fossil record, and many other areas . . . whereas evolutionary fantasies produce nothing but contradictions and mysteries. Yep, doubt is good if it launches a sincere exploration.

Guinness notes the “sorry mixture of Christian and non-Christian ideas” in evangelicalism. The error of theistic evolution that I doubtfully embraced as a young Christian was not helpful to me, nor to anyone else I might witness to. I thank God that He kept annoying my conscience about it until I figured out what was right, not just for my sake, but so I might represent a coherent Christian worldview to others.

Guinness opines that the double-minded Christian is half-hearted, that he wants the best of both worlds, but finds the best of neither. More Biblically, I would say, truth is binary. You can’t mix light with darkness, or Christ with Belial. The instability is good, if the conscience is sensitive. Elijah used the principle on Mt. Carmel, with lethal consequences to God’s adversaries.

Elijah’s presuppositional argument was classic. “If the Lord be God, follow Him: but if Ba’al, then follow him.” If Ba’al is the god, then he should be able to call fire down from Heaven. Call the false worldview out. Demonstrate how useless it is.

In other areas, for example, look at the fossil record. Does it show a myriad of separate kinds, with limited variation within the kinds, or does it show a continual evolutionary morphing of ever-plastic species? Does the ‘tree diagram’ look like an orchard or a single, ever-branching tree? Once you look at all the ‘tree diagrams’ in the textbooks or in the natural history museums, you’ll see the creationist ‘orchard’ every time. (See my ‘Fossil Record’ tract at ThinkTracts.com.) The evolutionist imagines a single tree, but has to invent dashed lines at the base to fantasize evolution and imaginary ‘missing links’ that never show up in the fossil record.

How about the Biblical view of sex – for marriage only? The world’s do-what-thou-wilt philosophy produces plagues of STDs, broken marriages, pornography and sexual addiction, and violence . . . the continual hook-up / break-up culture generates strong emotions that often lead to violence.

Another area of doubt among professing Christians, Guinness suggests, is because many know what they believe, but not why they believe. Discipleship matters, and the proof of dereliction in the churches is the overwhelming loss of young people as they come of age. If a little cultural challenge or some snarky comments made by a university professor can destroy the ‘faith’ of a 19-year old, immersed in Sunday School and church services for 18 years, just how pitiful were the efforts of family and church? A good starting point to help in this area, at the 15-minute level of investment, is my essay, How do I know the Bible is true? I expand on that essay in the books and other essays throughout this site.

Guinness: “The Christian faith is not true because it works. It works because it is true.” The truths found in the Bible are wired into the reality of the physical creation and the human heart, mind, and conscience. Nothing else is even in the ballpark. He goes on to assert that if you are a true lover of the Lord Jesus, you must be a passionate lover of truth. I marvel at the apathy in Christendom. It can only be explained as a fruit of false conversion, for multitudes of professing Christians.

A grounded faith enables sound interpretation of experiences based on that faith. The more I read, the more I share the Gospel and interpret the responses of the hearers, the more clear it is to me that Biblical truth explains everything that’s important. (See 2 Peter 1:3, “all things.”) Faith grows. Experience grows. Knowledge grows. The true worldview grows richer, with explanatory power that is ever increasing. Guinness comments on the “well-thumbed, much handled appearance” of the books in his library. “Like the faith for which they argue, the best books are not there to collect dust, but to stretch minds and to shed light.”

Embracing truth generates commitment. “No conviction is truly our own unless we are prepared to hold it even if the rest of the world is against it.” In Daniel chapter 3 we see the commitment of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to worship God rather than Nebuchadnezzar, even though it meant their lives. God miraculously saved their lives, although history records the martyrdom of multitudes whose commitment opened the door to Heaven the day it was tested.

Joshua stood with his family to challenge the entire nation of Israel, “Choose you this day whom ye will serve . . . but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Hey, dad, you need to stand up for your family, too. Don’t do opinion polls, surveying wife, children, and relatives. Stand. Lead. Without commitment faith is dead. This is the message of James chapter 2.

The new birth – salvation – is the first step of a Christian’s journey through the rest of his life, indeed, through eternity. Eternal life isn’t what the Christian hopes for; it’s what he has – present possession. Nevertheless, a Christian may not grow much. It may be difficult, as Guinness observes, to tell whether there is life there or not. Growth is an unmistakeable sign of life. Growth is a natural consequence of gratitude . . . we want to know our Lord and to serve Him. Gratitude derives from a repentant heart that trusts the Lord, a heart that desires to follow the Lord Jesus, as He instructed all His disciples to do.

If growth is stunted, or the spiritual birth is stillborn, doubt grows. Charles Darwin wrote, “I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation . . . Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete . . . I have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.”

It’s clear that Darwin never knew the Lord. His background was a mix of Unitarianism and Anglicanism, and so he would never likely have been challenged on his lost condition, and his need to repent and trust the Lord Jesus. Darwin’s doubts led him to explore, but he settled down in the City of Destruction. His heart was comfortable there. So it is with anyone who determinedly goes his own way, defying reality.

Doubt doesn’t need comfort. Doubt needs challenge. Guinness: “The problem is not that faith is untrue, but that it is untried.” Occasionally, I’ve met someone who believes the facts of the Gospel, but is unsure how to repent, how to believe, or how fervently to believe. Jesus said, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” (Matthew 7:7) Also, in verses 13 and 14 of that chapter, “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.”

I’ll advise the ‘seeker’ to start walking on the road to life, demonstrating repentance and trust, and living the Christian life, all the while asking God for forgiveness and faith. God will meet him very shortly on that road and regenerate him, indwell him, encourage him, and teach him. Step out on the way to eternal life. You won’t miss it. Darwin and many others don’t want the narrow way. The broad way, going with the flow – that’s so much easier . . . in the short term.

Unruly emotions are another launching pad for doubt. Elijah was part of spectacular victories and miracles, but got exhausted and fears overwhelmed him. If you attempt to serve God with all your heart, you will be tempted to depression at times. You may succumb to it. Many have. In the last half of the 19^th century, there was no greater evangelist / pastor / teacher / author than Charles Spurgeon. Yet he fought depression regularly. Even if you or I, little though we may be, attempt a modest work for God, watch out. Recognize that the spirit of fear is not from God, but rather the Adversary. See 2 Timothy 1:7. Recall John Bunyan’s characters, Christian and Hopeful, as they languished in the dungeon of Doubting Castle. They were delivered by remembering God’s promises, by once again trusting God’s word.

Watch out for what Guinness calls an American heresy – faith-in-faith. You’ll hear the phrase “people of faith,” and other expressions that exalt the “person of faith” rather than the object of faith. Guinness cites Oswald Chambers: “Be ruthless with yourself if you are given to talking about the experiences you have had. Faith that is sure of itself is not faith. Faith that is sure of God is the only faith there is.”

Faith in the wrong object will crash and burn, whether it’s faith in self, or faith in a false religion, or faith in experts or pundits or preachers . . . or anyone or anything other than faith in the Lord Jesus. Accordingly, for evangelicals and fundamentalists, beware scheduled pseudo-revivals, beware emotional altar calls, and beware fleshly, emotional ‘worship’ services. I’ve often marveled at Pentecostals who persist within their culture for years despite hundreds or thousands of disappointments from false promises of prosperity, healings, raising the dead, and supposed prophecies made by their preachers week after week.

Martin Lloyd-Jones warns that most unhappiness in life derives from listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself. Don’t whine. Don’t wallow in doubt. Embrace God’s truths and tell yourself to act on them.

Nevertheless, doubts arise because of circumstances and suffering. We know from the Bible what future history entails. There are victories and rest and reward and joy ahead. But we don’t usually know what God is doing right now, today, in and around us. Yet we know what to do with our energy, time, and God-given talent. So trust . . . and do. There is much Scripture that relates. Consider many of David’s psalms. We see the end of his story, but he lived moment by moment, wondering why King Saul wanted to kill him, or despairing over his son Absalom who wanted to both kill and depose him.

“When we see Jesus on the cross,” Guinness writes, “we can come to trust God with an unutterable trust that never for a moment considers He will not stand by us in our sufferings.” His resurrection gives us an assured hope of a real, physical, eternal life of purpose, fellowhip, and joy.

What’s Plan B? Is there any competing plan worthy of our consideration? Guinness: “Faith’s calling is to live in between times. Faith is in transit.” We see a better country ahead, but only when the Lord Jesus returns. “Behind faith is the great ‘no longer.’ Ahead of it lies the great ‘not yet.’” We stand on the past’s foundation and look forward to the New Jerusalem, a New Heaven and a New Earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. But today, we do God’s will.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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151. Sealed Upon Your Heart
September 1, 2020

As the new bride concludes her dialogue with her beloved, she intreats him to “Set me as a seal upon thine heart.” (Song of Solomon 8:6) Does she already know that their marriage is established? Yes. Does she believe in her beloved’s commitment, declared publicly for all to hear? Yes. So what does she want?

In James 2:19 the professing Christian is challenged, “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.” The demons believe, but do not have faith. “What more is there to faith than belief?” asks Alvin Plantinga in his book, Knowledge and Christian Belief, a shorter and simpler rendering of his famous work, Warranted Christian Belief. (In this essay I’ll unpack some of the ideas in Chapter 6, “Sealed Upon Our Hearts.”)

Clearly, the devils are missing something vital. They don’t rejoice in what they know about God. They tremble. They hate God for who He is. Have they deceived themselves, hoping they can win in the end? Or, knowing that defeat is certain, do they want to do as much damage as possible, taking as many of His image-bearers into their own destiny, the Lake of Fire?

Many professing Christians would never admit hating God, but they certainly don’t want God telling them what to do. But given who God is, despising what God desires . . . how far is dismissal or scorn from hatred? Consider Proverbs 1:7. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” How far is foolishness from insanity – persistent denial of reality?

Plantinga suggests that “the devils also know of God’s wonderful scheme for the salvation of human beings, but they find this scheme – with its mercy and its suffering love – offensive and unworthy.” Perhaps, like the atheist philosopher Nietsche, they consider the foundations of Christian love and forgiveness suitable only for those who are weak, cowardly, and duplicitous.

The Christian, though, not only believes the doctrines of redemption, he finds the entire plan of salvation ”enormously attractive, delightful, moving, a source of amazed wonderment.” He is grateful to God for His lovingkindess and is inspired to show love to his Saviour by obeying Him, trusting Him that He knows best how life should be lived, and showing love to others in many ways.

So “the difference between devil and believer lies, in part, in the area of affections: of love and hate, attraction and revulsion, desire and detestation.” The differences manifest in the will, a conscious orientation of attitudes and resultant actions.

A key point: “Conversion and regeneration alters affection as well as belief.”

In Knowledge and Christian Belief, Plantinga explores whether the Christian faith is warranted, rational, sensible, trustworthy. Some of what he writes may not serve as powerful apologetic arguments for unbelievers. I prefer a strong presuppositional approach for that, as I’ve detailed in several essays on this site (in the Evangelism section). His Chapter 6, however, is especially encouraging, I believe, for the non-skeptic, the Christian looking for assurance. Implicitly, this area of assurance for the Christian is also a challenge to the merely professing Christian . . . Where are your affections? In what direction is your will determinedly pointed?

Plantinga insists, quite Biblically, that the Holy Spirit is able and responsible to renew our affections in regeneration, part of God’s part in salvation. God draws the unbeliever (John 12:32), we are responsible to repent and believe on Jesus (Acts 26:20, Acts 16:30-31), and the Holy Spirit seals us (Eph 1:14).

(I’ll note briefly that Plantinga often frames his arguments from ideas in the writings of Aquinas and Calvin, but I find no need to emulate him, since I’m neither Catholic nor Calvinist, and I would never look to those two for guidance. Biblical truth is completely sufficient to make the relevant arguments.)

A major aspect, therefore, of our warranted, foundationally secure Christian belief is that the Holy Spirit produces true knowledge in the believer. He seals it in our hearts. We desire a close, deep relationship with our Savior, we desire to know Him, to relate to Him. (You know, the relationship thing.) The more we know Him, the more we love Him and want to please Him. Scripture makes more and more sense and our assured hope for our ultimate salvation encourages us, along with solid expectations for the 2nd Coming of the Lord Jesus, and the prophesied future history of His kingdom on this Earth, plus the final Judgments, etc.

What about all those other areas of apologetics, like evidences of creation that slam-dunk evolutionary fairy tales, and evidences for the Resurrection and the historicity of the New Testament? Yes, yes, I love all that and have studied and written much that you’ll find on this site. But today we’re camping on the experiential, the existential.

A huge part of what makes us human, persons in the full image-of-God sense, is the affections, the desires, the yearning for meaning, the longing for hope, the recognition that life is more than drudging work and money and chores, more than superficial entertainments and pleasures, more than plodding along until you die and then . . . what’s next? Is that all there is? What about love and hope, meaning and purpose, satisfaction and justice, beauty and integrity? Where do we find foundations for what makes life human? What about our yearning to live, to find eternal life?

Plantinga observes that our understanding is not largely due to cold-blooded logic, but rather entwined in our hearts, in our affections. “True religion primarily involves the affections.” When we love God we love the truths in His word. We love His thoughts. We want to find out more about Him. As we learn more, we love Him more and want others to find Him, too.

The ensemble of all believers is termed the bride of Christ. That’s a collective and it’s affectionate. God’s love is not limited. The bride can comprise uncounted millions, even billions, and each one of us will feel no less personal love. Indeed, the more of us in the family, the more love to go around, the more stories of God’s love to share with each other, and the more to appreciate the depth and breadth of God’s passion.

Furthermore, Plantinga sees that when we acquire healthy affections we see the true heinousness of sin and can more readily despise sin in ourselves and plead with others to see the joy of freedom, too. “Conversion, therefore, is fundamentally a turning of the will, a healing of the disorder of affection that afflicts us. It is a turning away from love of self, from thinking of oneself as the chief being of the universe, to love of God.”

Extending the analysis of affections, Plantinga gets into a discussion that is not easy to think about, where a natural squeamishness tempts us to miss something deep. So bear with me for a moment and we’ll come out the other end of the idea just fine.

He argues that there is a strong connection between eros and spirituality. Don’t think of eros as merely romantic or sexual love. Eros can be likened to a genus in which romantic love is a species, a special case. “The essence of eros, as I’m thinking of it, is longing, desire, a desire for some kind of union.”

The Bible is full of such expressions. Consider Psalm 84:2 . . . “My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord: my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.” Also, look up Ps 63:1, Ps 42:1, Ps 27:4, and Ps 119:31.

Proper love for God isn’t like the inclination to spend time with your stamp collection, or anticipating a round of golf. “Although eros is broader than sexual love, it is analogous to the latter. There is a powerful desire for union with God, the oneness Christ refers to in John 17.” Other analogues would include the love between a parent and small child, the homesick yearning of an 8-year-old for her mother when they are separated for a season.

Plantinga suggests additional transcendent experiences, like the sight of a prairie on an early June morning, or a majestic mountain range, or the power of a crashing surf, or the sweetness of beautifully performed music, or the culmination of an epic tale wherein good triumphs over evil.

Is there not a yearning, a searching nostalgia, “a longing for one knows not what”? Such longings are different from eros, but still akin to a desire for union, even if it is hard to express it. We want to be there and revel with the victors in the celebration scenes at the end of The Return of the King, or the first Star Wars movie. We long for victory, for rejoicing, for shared joy, for . . . Heaven.

But the movie or the novel ends. And we know it’s just fiction. The spectacular mountain view must be left behind. We can’t quite find the satisfaction we yearn for in this life, even as Christians. Our salvation is not complete. Yet we have an assured hope . . . how do the lost, the hopeless, manage to cope with no hope?!?

“Man is an unfulfilled passion.” There is always more that cannot be reached in this life or, when we do find ourselves filled up, it’s only for a moment. The Christian understands that true relational fulfillment can be found only in and with the Lord Jesus. Through Him we also will have truly satisfying relationships with other inheritors of His kingdom. But now we see through a glass darkly. We read of a better country, but our vision is dim, albeit hopeful. What we truly long for we have only hints, glimmerings, for now.

Plantinga reminds us that we also have little appreciation in this broken world of how and how much God loves us. I would suggest that the most fervent and knowledgeable Christian on the face of the Earth has only the dimmest understanding of the Cross and the Resurrection. The most basic elements of Biblical faith have much to reveal to us in the ages to come.

An interesting Plantinga observation is that in Greek philosophy, passions were thought of as passive – they are experiences that happen to you, rather than what you choose to do. We fall in love, for example. “God, however, doesn’t ‘undergo’ anything at all; he acts, and is never merely passive.” I love what the prophet Zephaniah reveals about God in 3:17 – “The Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.” God is passionate. That particular prophecy will be fulfilled some day.

This and many other Scriptures indicate that although God is complete in Himself and fellowship within the Trinity is full, yet God yearns for us, although He doesn’t need us. Traditional views of God would see His love as exclusively agape, a benevolent other-regarding love with no element of desire, that there is nothing we can do for Him. Not true. The Lord Jesus is the bridegroom. He’s not aloof. In 1 John 3:22 we see that we can do things that are pleasing in His sight, that please Him.

On the cross Jesus suffered in both manner and degree, a sorrowful passion beyond human comprehension. At the other extreme, the Lord joys over His children. In Luke 15:10 the “joy in the presence of the angels of God” certainly includes our Savior’s joy. Consider Isaiah 62:5: “. . . as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.” This is more than agape.

Plantinga: “The church is the bride of Christ, not his little sister.” God desires passion from us. He demonstrates passion toward us. Similarly, “The infinite happiness of the Father consists in the enjoyment of His Son.” John 17:23 explicitly extends this principle to the disciples of Jesus: “. . . and that the world may know that thou has sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.” And verse 26, “. . . that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

What an unfathomable blessing that God has extended the eros of His trinitarian fellowship to us. We even see it to some degree in the animal kingdom, when we see a mother with her litter or a duck with her offspring waddling along behind her.

We are designed to find full satisfaction only when we find union with our Creator, our Savior. We never have equality with Him, of course. But the advantage of our creature-ness is that we have eternity to explore the heights and depths and breadths of His love. In this present flesh we can tap into mere glimmerings of this relationship, and yet the glimmerings are rich and . . . available. We have to want it, though.

Plantinga concludes his thoughts in this area with the insight that love between human beings, between husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend, is a type and an earnest of something far deeper, the love that God designed to grow between Himself and His children.

Consider these truths when you read your Bible, when you pray, and when you cross the path of someone who may not know the Savior, that you might just offer a tract or a verbal witness, a plea to join the family, so they don’t miss what they have been created to enjoy.

drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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152. The Original Marxist-Leninist
October 1, 2020

Mao, Stalin, Hitler – Who was the most dangerous, wicked, ruthless, murderous tyrant in history? It would be easy to cite those three, in that order, as the worst of all. The shape of this present world order derives in large part from the practical and philosophical legacies of their regimes.

Mao’s evils were enabled, in large part, by the military and economic aid he received from Stalin. Mao couldn’t have conquered and dominated China without Stalin’s help. And the North Korean Kim dynasty wouldn’t exist without Mao. Yet Stalin learned much of his ruthlessness and organizational skills at the feet of his mentor and master, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanonv . . . better known by his pseudonym, Lenin. If Lenin (1870 – 1924) had not died in middle age, he likely would have topped the list in evil’s Hall of Shame.

By the way, it’s interesting to me that in popular discourse, Adolf Hitler is invariably the ultimate bogeyman. His evil “accomplishments” are, quantitatively, much smaller than those of Mao and Stalin. I believe the Communists get a pass, though, because they have so much in common, ideologically, with the Left in America and Europe. Also, it’s a scam to portray Hitler as “right wing” and Mao and Stalin as “left wing.” No, it’s about tyranny vs. freedom. The differences among the governmental / industrial policies of Hitler, Mao, and Stalin, are mere nuances. The real issues are individual freedom vs. the overwhelming power of the state. You might consider, as an example, the similarities of the crony capitalism of Hitler’s Germany with that of present-day China . . . and the collaboration of America’s leftists with our nation’s largest corporations, particularly in the tech sector.

I recently read Victor Sebestyen’s (VS) biography (2017), Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror. That’s the subject of this month’s essay. Let’s pull some nuggets from Sebestyen’s fascinating work and try to interpret what we learn from a Biblical perspective.

Lenin seized power in Russia in a coup in 1917. Other socialist groups did the heavy lifting to overthrow the tyranny of the Czar that year, but Lenin and his Bolsheviks, although a minority party, were the most ruthless group. What tactics did he employ as he grabbed and consolidated power? Consider the parallels with American politics today, and with the fundamental strategy of the Adversary, the “Father of lies,” as the Lord Jesus described Satan in John chapter 8.

Lenin “promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex problems.”   He called those who disagreed with him “enemies of the people.” The ends justified the means, no matter how brutal. Sebestyen: “Lenin was the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call ‘post-truth politics.’” He enjoyed the talent of explaining profound ideas in simple, if deceitful terms. He was shrewd and bold.

Lenin saw himself as an idealist, not a monster, but rather sophisticated, a gentleman, an intellectual. Marxist ideology was useful to him, but discarded when tactics required it. He did not sadistically enjoy the torture of his enemies, unlike the three tyrants above. Deaths were mere numbers. Stalin perfected political terror against opponents, but the ideas were Lenin’s. Perhaps his biggest crime was leaving Stalin in charge when he died.

A formative event in young Vladimir’s life occurred at the age of 17, when his older brother, Sasha, was executed for his part in an assassination attempt on the Czar. The family was devastated. Lenin’s deceased father had been a highly respected civil servant, but now the family was shunned by long-standing friends. Lenin’s mantra quickly became, “The bourgeois will always be traitors and cowards.” His rage and loathing became uncontrollable at times in the years to follow. Politics was personal to him. He was radicalized overnight.

The author cites Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) in an assessment of the Russian people’s historic mindset: “We Russians are slaves because we are unable to free ourselves and become citizens rather than subjects.” I recall my own impressions of studying the Soviet Union in 1986 when I was an Air Force major attending Air Command & Staff College. I objected to the classroom characterization of the Soviet Union, especially the Russians, as a nation of decent people dominated by a wicked Communist Party. I contended that a decent people would revolt against their slave masters and establish a nation that cherished liberty, as did America’s founders against an 18^th Century British monarchy . . . under much less severe oppression. But the Russians tolerate their dictators.   It is troubling that Americans today are more and more obsequious in the face of government overreach.

In Lenin’s youth, 85% of Russia’s people were peasants, with no civil rights at all. The middle class barely existed. VS notes that in the West the middle class undergirds social order. In Czarist Russia the state’s police and the army enforced social order, top down. One of America’s present perils is the diminishing middle class, as illegal immigration exponentiates, the welfare state grows, corporate oligarchs collude with corrupt politicians, and manufacturing is outsourced abroad.

The last two Czars, of the Romanov line, believed that increased repression would make the monarchy safer. They were wrong. From 1890 to 1917, 20,000 ministers, governors, civil servants, and army officers were assassinated by various revolutionary groups. The government worked to insert police presence and influence into everything, including schools, churches, and even family life. The modern Left lusts for the same. The Biblical principle is to minimize government so that people are free to serve God, raise their families, make a living, help the needy voluntarily, and encourage one another. Satan’s team despises every aspect of freedom.

The Okhrana, the Czar’s secret police, had powers to detain without trial and exile people via administrative decisions to Siberia, even for ‘political crimes.’ No other nation in Europe came close to oppression like this. As much as Lenin and other revolutionaries despised the Okhrana, it became the Communists’ model for the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, and even the FSB of the current era. Thousands of bureaucrats opened mail and collected intelligence from spies and informants. Virtually any public activity required a permit from the police, and censorship was pervasive. You could be sent to Siberia for reading ‘illegal’ books. Note how the modern Left works to suppress free speech and the ‘tech’ companies routinely censor or suppress conservative thought.

After Sasha’s death, Vladimir’s mother wanted him to try farming, but he had no interest, no skills, and no luck. He studied Marxism, translating The Communist Manifesto into Russian. He was refused admittance to a university because of his brother’s disgrace, but crammed four years of study into one, on his own, and passed the law exams, obtaining the highest marks of his year group. All the while he was under police surveillance because his radical views were well known.

Lenin hated lawyers – ‘advocates.’ His advice to a comrade awaiting trial on how to deal with his advocate: “One must rule the advocate with an iron hand and keep him in a state of siege, for this intellectual scum often plays dirty.”

Russia suffered a famine in 1891-2, where 400,000 peasants died. The central government did nothing to help. Private efforts by such as Lev Tolstoy helped but little. Lenin, although raised in the worst-hit areas, would have nothing to do with charitable work to save the dying peasants. His priority was to use the crisis to further the Revolution.

Trotsky reported, much later, that Lenin “conducted systematic and outspoken propaganda against the relief committees.” His behavior puts the lie to his alleged devotion to the ‘proletariat,’ the working classes. The playbook for today’s Left hasn’t changed. The ‘me-too’ movement doesn’t actually care about women, but only uses harassment and abuse allegations against political enemies. Urban politicians profess to care about the poor, the homeless, but make policies that multiply the problems. Lenin: “In politics there is only one principle and one truth: what profits my opponent hurts me, and vice versa.” You’re either all in, or you’re the enemy.

Lenin put his energy into publishing anti-Czarist articles and news stories for any oddball publication he could find. He began speaking at clandestine meetings, building a reputation as an intellectual leader for Revolution. As a speaker / debater, Lenin was “domineering, abusive, combative, and often downright vicious.” His goal was not to convince his adversary but, in his words, “to destroy Him, to wipe him and his organization off the face of the earth.” Inevitably, when Lenin’s gang acquired power, violent language turned into physical violence.

Lenin established the Left’s pattern for the following century, to insult, to deride, to ‘play the man,’ not the ball. Have you noticed that there is very little political debate in America today? There are accusations, insults, and name-calling, but despite many Christians and conservatives who would like to ‘play the ball,’ namely discuss the issues peacefully, the other team, inspired by the success of Lenin and his successors, won’t allow debate. Try, for example, to debate the scientific merits of evolution in the public schools. If you’re a student, you’ll fail your course. If you’re a teacher, you’ll be fired. From the 1960s through the 1980s there were hundreds of public debates between creationists and evolutionists. Creationists invariably won, even in the eyes of the opposition. But why debate when you can censor, intimidate, or exclude? It’s hard to find an evolutionist who would condescend to debate today. Why bother?

The name ‘Lenin’ was one of Vladimir’s pseudonymns, meant to fool the Okhrana. It didn’t work, but Lenin developed strong cloak-and-dagger skills as he plotted revolution. VS: “Secrecy was a way of life.” He was advised by older Marxists to “tone down” his rhetoric, but Lenin’s response was, “The Party isn’t a ladies’ finishing school. Revolution is a messy business.” In his writings he exhorted the working class, not just to volunteer or organize committees, but to devote and commit the whole of their lives.

Lenin insisted that his compatriots, which became the Bolshevik party, speak with but one voice, with no internal dissent. Groupthink was vital to his success. Lenin had “no talent for friendship,” reported Martov, a fellow socialist. “He uses people too much.” Martov saw Lenin’s intolerant arrogance as dangerous. Potresov, an editor at Iskra, an early publication, put it: “Louis XIV could say, ‘I am the State’ . . . so Lenin felt that he was the Party, the will of the movement concentrated into one person.”   Lenin and many of his cohorts lived for the Revolution. Their cause was their god. Elena Stasova wrote from prison, years before the Revolution, “No other work can give me the strength to live. This is the flesh of my flesh.”

Marxism is supposed to be a ‘scientific philosophy,’ but “any true Communist zealot . . . felt it emotionally, religiously, spiritually.” Although they would never use such terms. VS makes the point, correctly, that Lenin’s re-interpretation of Marxist ideology is the root cause of the disasters of Communism over the last century. See my two essays on Popper’s book, The Open Society & Its Enemies. Karl Marx’s idea was that universal socialism was historically inevitable. He didn’t call for activism and revolution. In the mid-19^th century, Marx believed that there had to be a widespread industrial revolution first, and a lengthy middle-class phase before any transition to socialism. And Marx believed that the inevitable transition would happen in the West. But Lenin forced it in agrarian, serf-heavy Russia. Marx, a German, didn’t like the Russians. He wrote, “I do not trust any Russian. As soon as a Russian worms his way in, all hell breaks loose.”

As VS points out, though, there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about the gulag, the concentration camps, oppression, misery, and the 100 million plus deaths caused by Communist tyranny in the last century. In Lenin’s day, no one knew what was to come, under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, the Kims, the Castros, and Chavez / Maduro. Lenin’s appeal was optimistic. But today – everyone should know better.

In the battle between the Bolsheviks and competing parties, especially the Mensheviks, Lenin was ruthless, using any dirty trick he could get away with. He tried to recruit one notable, “by offering to show him a secret dossier said to contain salacious rumors about the private lives of prominent Mensheviks. The ruse failed.” The same dirty trick caused untold havoc for three years after the Trump election, however.

Lenin was not personally courageous. He disappointed comrades by being the first to run when the Czar’s cavalry arrived to break up a peaceful demonstration. In his own eyes, he was too valuable to risk his own person.

Stalin was Lenin’s chief thug, who robbed banks and ticket offices to raise funds. Markov and the Mensheviks were appalled. Lenin was contemptuous. “You don’t make revolution wearing kid gloves.”

In 1912 censorship was relaxed so Lenin and the Bolsheviks published a new daily propaganda paper, entitled Pravda – meaning ‘Truth’ in horrible irony. Pravda became perhaps the most notorious newspaper of all time. Lenin at this time was in exile in Paris, with an arrest warrant daring him to show his face in Russia. Pravda was banned nine times, but reappeared each time the next day with a slightly different title: Workers’ Truth, Daily Truth, The Way of Truth, etc. Pravda’s local editors were arrested and jailed regularly.

When World War I broke out, Lenin went against the flow of other revolutionaries by opposing the war. This was unpopular, since his competitors despised German and Austrian imperialism. But strategically, Lenin made the right choice for his cause. When Russia grew war-weary, Lenin continually argued that he had always called for peace, and so support for the Bolsheviks grew. His big promise to the people in 1917 was to end the war if he took control.

In early 1917 Lenin and his ever-loyal wife, Nadya, were low on funds. Lenin mostly lived on funds gifted from others, especially his doting mother. Nadya occasionally found private students to tutor in the Russian language while they moved around Europe in exile. She also had a small inheritance. Lenin’s life was about the Revolution. He disdained working for a living. He spent most days reading newspapers, studying in a local library, writing for Pravda, and walking.

Lenin’s writings criticized giant corporations for freezing out competition, hindering innovation. He warned that a handful of banking conglomerates would exercise financial control, a ‘banking oligarchy.’ Some of what he writes resonates today, even among conservatives. Of course, once he acquired power, all control was vested in the Communist Party with him as its tyrant. Promise freedom but centralize power and extend it over every aspect of the people’s life that you can get away with. Consider the overreach of power-mad government officials at the federal, state, and even local levels during the Coronavirus outbreak who used fear and science-unconstrained policies to shut down small businesses, churches, and personal travel. One startling example was the Illinois governor who mandated that if you went out on the lake with your boat, there could only be two in the boat. A family of four would have to take turns. What was the science behind that edict? And it was an edict with the force of law behind it.

In January 1917, just weeks before the Revolution, Lenin spoke to Swiss students and suggested that they were still a few years away, perhaps as much as ten. He was just as surprised as others when events spiralled.

Morale in the army had cratered, with five million casualties to date, killed, wounded, or captured. Desertions multiplied. The economy crashed, inflation exploded, food became scarce. Riots broke out in the capital, Petrograd (now St. Petersburg).

I won’t detail the events of 1917, which VS does in a superb narrative. I’ll focus, rather, on the character issues we see in Lenin’s life. Lenin re-entered Russia after the Czar was overthrown and a provisional government tentatively established. He returned from exile with secret help from the Germans, secret because they were still at war with Russia. As Winston Churchill wrote, in 1929, “The Germans turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.” The Germans then heavily bankrolled Pravda to encourage the Russian army to capitulate and end the war on terms favorable to Germany. Lenin’s treason was hushed up by the Communist Party for many decades.

As he traveled he wrote a pamphlet recasting Marxist ideology in his own image, declaring that backward, agrarian Russia could leap right past capitalism and spark a socialist revolution that would catch fire throughout Europe. He outlined how the Bolsheviks would seize power in Russia, discarding any provisional government or competing revolutionary groups and institute a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ History would show that, at best, he created a dictatorship over the proletariat.

In his first meeting with sixty of the leading Bolsheviks in Petrograd, he insisted that there would be neither compromise nor negotiation with any other groups. Most soldiers should go home, rob the landowners and live freely without paying taxes. (Today the Fed just prints money so taxes become more a way of controlling certain groups rather than raising funds.)

Lenin called out to stir up the peasants to seize land in the countryside; in the cities armed groups would be organized to mete out ‘revolutionary justice’ on the exploiting class.   The country would be ruled by ‘soviets’ – committees of workers and soldiers, under Party control. He didn’t actually believe in workers or soldiers running their factories and battalions. The Party would always have to have the preeminence.

Anarchy ensued, exactly what Lenin needed to make promises and seize control. Anarchy is but a short step to tyranny. Fortunately for Lenin, but sadly for Russia and the rest of the world, his opponents were less than competent and far from ruthless.

During 1917 Lenin wrote a serious work, The State and Revolution. The enduring quote is, “When there’s the State there’s no freedom; when there’s freedom there will be no State.” All or nothing. The Marxist phony promise, as Engels wrote, is that when the working class rules itself the State will ‘wither away.’ But the Soviet state grew ever stronger and more centralized. Leftists love power. Give them a little and they will take far more.

Lenin was the crucial driving force behind the Bolsheviks in 1917. VS: “He dragged his reluctant and frightened comrades with him towards an uprising most of them did not want. He used a mixture of guile, logic, bluster, threats, and calm persuasion to impose his will on them.” Nikolai Bukharin, a comrade, later wrote: “Lenin didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought.” Colonel Alfred Knox, the British military attache to Petrograd in 1917 said, “I’ll tell you what to do with people such as Lenin. We shoot them.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in 1862 wrote, “Tyranny is a habit. It has its own organic life; it develops finally into a disease . . . blood and power intoxicate.”

On October 24, 1917, Lenin told Trotsky, “First we must seize power. Then we decide what to do with it.” The next day Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized the reins of government. Immediately he began to censor the press and close down dissenting newspapers. Within weeks his Cheka, the secret police, were established as, in Lenin’s words, “the Party’s sword and shield.” Current Russian President Vladimir Putin, a long-serving KGB officer in the Soviet Union, used to say that he had been a Chekist, identifying himself with all that Lenin stood for. The Cheka operated in secret, without accountability, answering only to Lenin. In the next six months there were recorded at least 884 executions of people who opposed the Bolsheviks. (The actual count was probably far higher.)

Lenin proudly proclaimed a ‘new morality,’ a system of justice that justified any action because it operated in the interests of the ‘exploited classes.’ Lenin’s ‘justice’ acted “in the name of freeing all from bondage. Blood? Let there be blood . . . for only the complete and final death of that old world will save us from the return of the old jackals.”

When crops failed and transportation broke down, Lenin looked for scapegoats. The ‘kulaks,’ rich peasants, served his purpose. Most Bolsheviks were from the urban intelligentsia. The kulaks were mostly village elders and leaders of agrarian communes. In America we see the blue state / red state dichotomy, and the East and West coasts in opposition to ‘fly-over country.’

Lenin’s famine policies focused on compulsion and terror. ‘Requisition brigades’ surrounded villages and seized grain at gunpoint. Brutality was encouraged. (Mao did this and worse in China a few decades later.) In 1921-1922 at least 700,000 starved, with millions more suffering severely. Dozens of rebellions broke out, but Lenin’s Red Army crushed them. Poison gas was used in one case. Entire villages were burned. When they faced opposition, they often took no prisoners. Religions across the board were persecuted. There is an extensive literature about the underground churches in the Soviet Union during the 20^th century.

An assassination attempt in 1918 against Lenin failed, but provided an excuse to round up ‘enemies of the Revolution’ and execute thousands. Stalin got a taste for mass killings as he organized the war against the kulaks and helped sweep up political enemies. Lenin’s principle was that it is better to kill 100 innocents then let one person go free who is a danger to the Revolution.

The ‘Lenin cult’ began at that point, “the exaggerated praise and semi-religious worship that characterized leadership in the Communist world for the following decades – perfected later by Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il-Sung.”

After taking control, Lenin lived modestly, but his compatriots lived in luxury, even while multitudes starved. Special shops, huge domestic staffs, spas, upscale restaurants – the leading Party members lived like the Czar and the former nobility. This is the pattern in Communist states that we continue to see a century later. It’s the same pattern that Leftists in America would love to establish. Destroying small businesses, as executed by lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, and exacerbated by encouraging riots while refusing to enforce the law, is a significant step toward a two-tier Leftist utopia – a ruling class overseeing a population of serfs, all on the government dole.

Lenin and the Communist Party had to survive a civil war over the next few years. Winston Churchill, the British War Secretary at the time said that Bolshevism “should be strangled in its cradle,” and urged for strong military intervention. But the West, including America, did little to help the opposition. Churchill saw it clearly: Communism “was not a creed, it is a pestilence. Bolsheviks are the enemies of the human race and must be put down at any cost.” Consider how the last century may have unfolded differently if the Bolsheviks had been defeated and Russia had embraced freedom and economic partnership with the West.

Lenin initiated, and Stalin continued, huge efforts to interfere with freedom in the West, hoping to establish strong socialist ruling parties all over the world. (At this point in history, he has largely succeeded.) Lenin sent money overseas to support these efforts. Mao, in the 1950s, spent billions to buy arms from the Soviets and the East Europeans while his people starved.

Lenin died on January, 21, 1924, after a long illness, brought on by a stroke. He had made no provisions for succession, but Stalin gradually took over the reins while Lenin was invalided. Stalin’s rival was Trotsky, about whom I’ve said nothing in this essay. Trotsky was ‘brilliant,’ but Stalin was clever, practical, and ruthless.

Against Nadya’s wishes, Stalin had Lenin’s body embalmed and displayed in Red Square. Millions have viewed the body of Communism’s chief saint. In the last century hundreds of scientists have worked to preserve the body, the centerpiece of Moscow’s principal shrine / tourist trap.

I’ll end here. Stefan Zweig, in 1927, wrote, “How could this obstinate little man . . . Lenin, ever have become so important?” In my view, as a Bible-believing Christian, no one achieves such power and perpetrates such evil without the assistance and guidance of the Principalities and Powers of the air. Satan saw the potential in Lenin. Satan always has someone ready to step into the role of the Antichrist.

I recommend the book. The life of Lenin is important history with a legacy that continues strongly to the present, a legacy still growing, with no signs of abating.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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153. So-Called Scholars
November 1, 2020

Historical Biblical Criticism (HBC), sometimes called ‘higher criticism’ (I know not why; the word ‘higher’ reflects neither moral nor logical loftiness), “doesn’t serve as a defeater for Christian belief.” So says Alvin Plantinga in Chapter 9 of his book, Knowledge and Christian Belief. In that chapter, on HBC, and in two other chapters, on pluralism and the problem of evil, Plantinga dismantles what he considers to be some of the principal attacks on Biblical Christianity. This essay extends my review of his book. In my September 2020 essay I examined other aspects of how the Christian can be assured that his faith is rational, warranted, rooted in reality . . . true.

Plantinga sees two basic kinds of scholarship regarding Scripture. The most popular and traditional kind treats the Bible and its doctrines – creation, sin, incarnation, atonement, resurrection, the final judgments – as understandable and reasonable to people of ordinary intelligence and schooling. He cites Jonathan Edwards who insisted that (in AP’s words), “the Housatonic Indians can easily grasp and properly appropriate this message; a PhD in theology or Biblical history is not necessary.”

People become Christians, and can grow in their faith, in a wide variety of ways that are quite independent of historical studies, knowledge of ancient languages, and esoteric training in textual criticism. We have available to us the resonance of Scriptural truth in our hearts (see John 17, for example), the internal and logical consistency of the Bible, the brilliant application of Biblical truth for life, for how to relate to God and how to relate to others, plus a multitude of apologetical arguments, many of which I’ve discussed on this site.

In brief, we are not at the mercy of so-called experts! We can know truth directly, by our own experience and our own God-given common sense and God-given conscience.

Now, HBC comes along, over the last couple of centuries, and proudly sets aside what can be known by faith, claiming to establish a scientific method for interpreting the Bible, allegedly on the basis of reason alone. Science? Hah! Science is about counting, weighing, and measuring, and using mathematics to organize and make predictions about physical phenomena . . . calculating orbits and the trajectories of baseballs, determining the mass and size of protons or the quantity of flour to put into your cupcakes, estimating the size of the galaxy or the limited volume of a scholar’s skull.

What does science say about rationality, about logic or math or justice or truth? Nothing. Science does not exist except as built atop a foundation of reason, but reason sits atop rationality, which sits atop both logic and personhood. We can only seek truth as persons who believe that truth matters, that true is distinguishable from false, that lying is wrong, and that – therefore – morality is objective, not arbitrary. Start with God and His word, the Bible, and man made in His image, as a moral and rational person, and then you can do science . . . and history, and analysis (criticism, if you will).

But you cannot start with a materialistic worldview – that the universe and man are just molecules in motion – and get anywhere near reason! What comes out of the materialist’s mouth, in his view (!) is just the result of brain chemistry.

 Now, Plantinga does not discuss all that, a shortcoming (I believe) on his part. He yields ground that he does not need to yield – the foundation of reason – and yet he proceeds to clobber HBC. He points out that those who pursue HBC are in conflict with the historic and principal lines of Christian thought for two millennia.

Specifically, the ‘scholarly’ critic is unlikely to conclude that, for example, Jesus was (and is) the 2^nd person of the Trinity who was crucified, died, and rose from the grave after three days, literally. AP quotes Van Harvey: “So far as the biblical historian is concerned . . . there is scarcely a popularly held traditional belief about Jesus that is not regarded with considerable skepticism.”

Plantinga spends some time discussing Traditional Biblical Commentary. Those who accept the Bible as the actual word of God understand that many specific truths are taught in its pages, yet it also teaches us “how to praise, how to pray, how to see the depth of our own sin, how marvelous the gift of salvation is, and a thousand other things.” Indeed. But because the Bible contains so many different literary forms, such as poetry, parables, songs, history, genealogies, prophecy, etc., it’s not always easy to grasp the point of a particular passage. For example, there are portions in Daniel and the book of Revelation that are quite controversial, even mysterious.

AP cites as a specific example, Matthew 5:17-20, wherein Jesus declares that not a jot or a tittle of the law shall pass away and that “except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Yet in Galatians, Paul seems to discount the importance of the law in order to emphasize faith. Similarly, James 2:14 seems to be in conflict with Ephesians 2:8-10.

Also, 1 John 3 seems to indicate that Christians don’t sin, but Romans 7 sounds like we can’t help but sin.

Now, it’s not that hard to figure out how to reconcile such passages, but it does take a good bit of work, especially if someone new to the Bible must start from scratch. Study is essential. And the resolution of such conundrums enables deeper understanding of God’s truths and a greater facility in their application. Now, knowledge of the whole Bible is often required to make sense of specific passages. The Bible contains much that a child can solidly grasp, yet it’s a truly adult book. A lifetime of study will not exhaust its riches.

Plantinga: “Given that the Bible is a communication from God to humankind, a divine revelation, there is much about it that requires deep and perceptive reflection, much that taxes our best scholarly and spiritual resources to the utmost.” The aim of Traditional Biblical Commentary is “to determine as accurately as possible just what the Lord proposes to teach us in the Bible.” Believing commentary, AP suggests, has at least three significant features . . .

First . . . Scripture is viewed as authoritative and trustworthy, a sure guide for faith and morals. After all, it is God speaking to us.

Second . . . It is foundational that the principal author of the entire Bible is God himself, using the instrumentality of individuals as scribes; indeed, using their own personalities and experiences in their scribal authorship. Accordingly, although the Bible contains the writings of perhaps 50 different people over a 4,000-year period, “it is possible to interpret Scripture with Scripture.” If we need a passage in a Pauline epistle to illuminate something that Peter or John wrote, no problem. If we need Luke to illuminate Isaiah, well, that is no surprise at all, given the specific future-history prophecies in the Old Testament that are fulfilled in the New Testament.

The Bible is therefore not a library of books. AP properly sees it as a unified whole, “a book with many subdivisions with a central theme: the message of the Gospel.”

Third . . . Since the principal author is God, and Scriptural revelation develops across millennia, you “can’t always determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind.” Certainly, many of the prophecies of the Old Testament were not fully understood by the writers, but because of the New Testament they are often crystal clear to us. Similarly, much prophecy concerning the days yet ahead of us will only become clearer as time rolls on.

I’ll note that prophecies concerning the return of the Jews to their homeland were often allegorized in 18^th and 19^th century commentaries, when it was inconceivable that a literal fulfillment would take place. But we can see the literal reality of it now, especially since 1948.

Plantinga, here, mocks postmodern hermeneuticists who “amuse us that . . . the author’s intentions have nothing whatever to do with the meaning of a passage, that the reader herself confers on the passage whatever meaning it has.” Or worse, that anyone (like me) who attempts a particular interpretation is “ineradicably sullied” by “homophobic, sexist, racist, oppressive, and other unappetizing modes of thought. This is, indeed, amusing.”

Traditional commentary affirms that what counts is what the Lord intends to teach in a given passage. And that takes some work to dig out at times. For example, it is clear in light of the New Testament that Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 are about the suffering Messiah. Also, Jesus declared (Luke 4:18-21) that He personally fulfilled Isaiah 61:1-2. Hebrews Chapter 10 takes passages from Psalms, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk as references to Christ. And so on.

Throughout my Christian life I, like so many, have benefited personally from good commentaries. Good teachers, good authors, serious Bible students through the ages have much we can learn from. But I must have my own Bible knowledge through which to sift the commentator’s opinions. In my own library I enjoy and appreciate a number of commentaries, yet in each one I can find errors of interpretation that I believe I can prove and rectify through my own Bible study.

Just fyi, here are some of the commentaries on my own shelves:

• The Pulpit Commentary, a 23-volume work originally published a century ago featuring, for every passage from Genesis to Revelation, a variety of authors who sometimes agree and sometimes don’t.
• Understanding the Bible, an 11-volume modern work by David Sorenson, a solid treatment from a historic Baptist perspective.
• Studies in the Four Gospels, by G. Campbell Morgan, an early 20^th century Presbyterian preacher.
• A large number of commentaries on individual books of the Bible by authors such as John R. Rice, H. A. Ironside, D. A. Waite, Harold B. Sightler, and David Cloud. Some of these fellows have written commentaries on several books of the Bible, but not all of Scripture.
• Oh yeah, I also have Matthew Henry’s commentary in one fat volume.
• Study Bibles with commentary notes are also precious. My favorite is Henry Morris’ Defender’s Study Bible, with useful notes regarding creation apologetics, although Morris is far broader than that in his coverage. John R. Rice’s study Bible is encouraging for his evangelistic emphasis.

I could go on, but that’s enough to make the point. Find good commentaries and make use of the research and thinking of those who have been there already. Stand on their shoulders! But sift their comments through your own independent study.

While Traditional Biblical Commentary has been with us from the beginning of history, Historical Biblical Criticism (HBC) developed over the last two centuries. The idea of HBC, Plantinga observes, is to use reason alone to determine what the scriptural teachings are and whether they are true. A mite arrogant, don’t you think?

For example, Spinoza (1632 – 1677), looking ahead toward more modern skepticism, wrote, “The rule for (Biblical) interpretation should be nothing but the natural light of reason which is common to all – not any supernatural light nor any external authority.” Sure. Therefore, every man can do what is right in his own eyes (Judges 21:25), every man is autonomous with no god or, indeed, God above. That’s the same bilge that Satan sold to Eve in the garden.

HBCers pull a con job on the laity, the non-scholars, by “wrapping themselves in the mantle of modern science.” One of them, Raymond Brown, calls his discipline “scientific biblical criticism,” since it yields “factual results.” His own contributions are therefore “scientifically respectable,” because he and is ilk conduct their investigations with “scientific exactitude.”

So just what is it that his team is counting, weighing, and measuring? Where are the math models? Where are the predictions, the hypotheses, that can be tested and validated?

Plantinga thereby asks, “What is it, exactly, to study the Bible scientifically?” That is not at all clear, but what is certain is that the foundation of HBC is to deny all theological assumptions or presuppositions. The Bible is not to be associated with any ‘God’ and you dare not assume that Jesus had anything other than ordinary, sordid humanity about His nature. In short, when they say “scientifically,” they really mean “atheistically.”

AP’s assessment of HBC is that it is a project rather than a method. The analysis may look superficially akin to that of a Christian scholar (sometimes), but the presuppositions make all the difference. If your starting point is a determination that God, if He exists at all, had nothing to do with creation, not to mention an incarnation in the little town of Bethlehem, then reason will not allow that Jesus performed any miracles, or that His death on the cross was anything other than a tragic end to the life of a controversial Jewish rabbi.

Never forget – HBC is founded on atheism and the purpose of its project is to discredit the Bible.

Plantinga sees two overarching forms within HBC. The first he labels Troeltschian HBC. Ernst Troeltsch proposed a “principle of analogy”: “historical knowledge is possible because all events are similar in principle.” So we must assume that the laws of nature (I prefer ‘laws of creation’) in Biblical times were just the same as now. Accordingly, since we don’t see such miracles now, they could not have occurred then. Therefore there is no such thing as divine action in the world. If God even exists, He never interferes . . . with anything or anyone. He certainly didn’t inspire human authors to write a book on His behalf.

This is, of course, just atheism, or deism at ‘best.’ Rudolf Bultmann wrote that the HBC method has the unyielding presupposition that history is bound by a continuum of events connected by cause and effect. That’s a reasonable definition of materialism . . . atheism, wherein no person can interfere with the laws of physics. But then Bultmann is not a person, him . . . I mean, itself. You see, if Bultmann and his cohorts are right, that principle applies to their brain chemistry. Why should we trust that what their brain chemistry spews forth has any connection to logic or truth?

The second variety of HBC is a tad more moderate; AP calls it Duhemian HBC. Pierre Duhem was a serious scientist – I recognize the name. It comes up in courses on classical thermodynamics. The Gibbs-Duhem relation shows how the chemical potential relates to temperature, pressure, and entropy.

As a Roman Catholic, and a scientist, Pierre was accused of allowing his Christian worldview to interfere with his physics. Duhem denied this, insisting that the proper way to pursue physical theory is to keep it completely independent of religious views or commitments.

As I’ve explained in other essays, such a perspective is naïve, foolish, and impossible in many areas.   For example, an atheist physicist and a Christian physicist can each measure the acceleration of gravity at the earth’s surface and the techniques and conclusions will be identical. But if the question is the origin of the Earth or the solar system or the universe, or the observed law of gravity, then metaphysical assumptions are pervasive. The so-called Big Bang theory did not develop and is not desperately believed because ‘the data’ demand it. It’s based on naturalism, atheism.

Similarly, both teams may analyze DNA replication in a cell with precisely the same methods. But the origin of DNA? Materialism produces desperate and probabilistically impossible fantasies on the origin of biological information. The Christian biochemist starts with the simple and obvious presupposition that information derives from an intelligent mind. This proper starting point will lead more quickly to discoveries about cellular functions and operations. Indeed, the idea of ‘junk DNA’ was derived from materialistic / evolutionistic presuppositions. Only in the last decade has this false paradigm been discarded, but oh so gradually, as the ‘junk’ has displayed function and purpose.

Back to ‘scholarship’ – Duhemian scholarship does not “involve any theological, religious, or metaphysical assumptions that aren’t accepted by everyone in the relevant community.” So Duhem’s variation is just a tad more light-hearted in anti-Christian dogmatism. The Duhemian scholar would not assume that God is the Bible’s author because other scholars in the community wouldn’t agree. On the other hand, the Duhemian won’t assume that Christ did not rise from the dead or that He did not perform miracles, because some scholars would insist that He did.

AP cites a fellow named Sanders who suggests, “what is needed is more secure evidence, evidence on which everyone can agree.” John Meier fantasizes about a conclave of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and agnostic scholars, “locked in the basement of the Harvard Divinity School library until they come to consensus on what historical methods can show about the life and mission of Jesus.”

The benefit of such an approach is allegedly the ecumenical brotherhood that must burst forth with joy.

But imagine yourself as a Bible-believing scholar locked in the basement with the rest of that crowd. Will you be happy with consensus? In brief, what the Duhemian approach offers is a veto for everyone in the room. Well, at the least the Christian scholar will get to use his veto, right? Oops. The others just happened to lose his invitation before it got mailed.

Plantinga summarizes the extent of ‘consensus’ available among such a crowd with the following quote from A. E. Harvey: “That Jesus was known in both Galilee and Jerusalem, that he was a teacher, that he carried out cures of various illnesses, particularly demon-possession and that these were widely regarded as miraculous; that he was involved in controversy with fellow Jews over questions of the law of Moses; and that he was crucified in the governorship of Pontius Pilate.” That’s all, folks. So why even bother with the exercise at all?

AP suggests that to invest your life in Duhemian HBC would be “like trying to mow your lawn with a nail scissors or paint your house with a toothbrush . . . why limit yourself in this way?”

Not surprising, there has been considerable tension between Bible believers and the HBC crowd over the last two centuries. In 1835 David Strauss wrote, “Nay, if we would be candid with ourselves, that which was once sacred history for the Christian believer is, for the enlightened portion of our contemporaries, only fable.”

Enlightened? Hah! In 1845 William Pringle complained, “In Germany, Biblical criticism is almost a national pursuit . . . Unhappily, [the critics] were but too frequently employed in maintaining the most dangerous errors, in opposing every inspired statement which the mind of man is unable fully to comprehend, in divesting religion of its spiritual and heavenly character, and in undermining the whole fabric of revealed truth.”

Brevard Childs: “For many decades the usual way of initiating entering students in the Bible was slowly to dismantle the church’s traditional teachings regarding Scripture by applying the acids of criticism.”

It’s an ancient con. Take over the seminaries, the Bible colleges, and inject atheistic and humanistic philosophies to destroy the Christian faith, all the while taking cash from moms and dads who thought they were sending their children off to strengthen their faith.

And what is the objective of the HBC crowd, not to mention the objectives of the evolutionists and the Marxists and the postmodernists? It can only be a desperate attempt to convince everyone that there is no purpose to life, we are all just clods of molecules bumping around, that no persons with free will actually exist, that such concepts as truth, hope, meaning, virtue, love, logic, and integrity don’t exist, since you can’t find them in the Periodic Table . . . eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die. ‘Misery loves company’ must be at least part of the underlying motive.

Plantinga observes that the ‘faithful’, the Bible-believers, are generally aware and yet unconcerned about the critics. Van Harvey: “Despite decades of research, the average person tends to think of the life of Jesus in much the same terms as Christians did three centuries ago.”

The reason for this happy lack of concern, despite the whole-sale takeover of academia and the dominance of atheistic criticism among mainstream religious institutions is “that there is no compelling or even reasonably decent argument for supposing that the procedures and assumptions of HBC are to be preferred.”

I would say this stronger than AP does . . . the atheistic worldview and its degenerate offspring, like HBC, are totally without merit, without foundation. They’ve got nothing. Only a Biblical worldview makes sense of man, morality, and the universe around us – as I’ve discussed at length in many articles on this site. The other team can’t even get started in a debate because their own worldview precludes reason and even personhood. Bah! Why should anyone listen to such idiots?

In summary, Plantinga affirms that all HBC is either Troeltschian or Duhemian. If Troeltschian, it comes directly from an atheistic view of the Bible. You can happily discard anything that comes out of that camp. If Duhemian, your Bible becomes an ultra-condensed ‘Readers-Digest-like’ version, with less than 1% remaining . . . the least important 1%. What can those guys teach you? Zip.

The next time you hear about a prestigious conclave of Bible scholars who have concluded that creation or the Resurrection or the Flood of Noah are myths, you’ll know better.

And if you meet any of these characters personally, give them Gospel tracts and warn them about their certain judgment . . . citing Revelation 22:18-19.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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154. A Time for Truth
December 1, 2020

November 1989 witnessed the climax of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Prague.  Vaclav Havel, later to be President, mesmerized crowds of over a quarter of a million in Wenceslas Square, calling out the lies and oppression of the Marxist regime, provoking chants . . . “We-are-not-like-them!  We-are-not-like-them!”

The chant proclaimed the dissidents’ refusal to respond to violence with violence.  Havel and other speakers openly accused the Soviet-backed regime, “They are people of lies and propaganda.  We are people of truth.”  Havel, the Czech philosopher, had always found truth inspiring.  His hero, philosopher Thomas Masaryk, founder of the Czechoslovakian Republic and President from 1918 – 1935, put the motto “Truth prevails” on the national banner above Prague’s castle.

The one-man Soviet dissident movement, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his Nobel speech declared, “One word of truth outweighs the entire world.”  In 1966 the little known Solzhenitsyn gave a public talk, decrying censorship and the oppressive KGB, electrifying the audience with his boldness in putting truth on the table.  A writer who was present reported, “How those people must have yearned for truth!  Oh God, how badly they wanted to hear the truth!”

The rebels against Soviet tyranny had no hope to find freedom through use of force.  Their tactic – not even a tactic but rather simple outcries of the soul – was “to counter physical force with moral, staking their stand on the conviction that truth would outweigh lies and the whole machinery of propaganda, deception, and terror.  They chose (to speak truth) and the unthinkable happened.  They won.”

So writes Os Guinness in his book, Time for Truth:  Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype, & Spin, published in 2000, but relevant today and for any time in history.

Guinness, writing just 11 years after the Czech revolution, warns that citizens of the West who rightly applauded the dissidents’ stand on truth now reside in a culture that despises truth.  He asks, “A public hungry to hear truth?”  And answers, “Hardly.”  He observes that in many universities you will find the motto, “The truth shall set you free.”  Yet the universities lead the way in rejecting truth, never understanding the Source of that promise, namely the words of the Lord Jesus in John 8:32, and especially rejecting the condition on that promise:

“Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”  (John 8:31-32)  Indeed, the Lord Jesus called Himself “the Truth” in John 14:6, the Source of all Truth.  In any university’s beloved materialistic worldview, wherein all that exists are atoms, particles, and the forces among them, there can be no such thing as truth, not to mention meaning, hope, justice, beauty, logic, or even rational thought.

Guinness properly contends that when you dismantle truth, “you come face-to-face with the power-driven agendas of race, class, gender, and generation.”  People become “morally blind to the dark impulses that poison the traditional distinctions between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and character and image.”  Guinness writes his book to contend that contending in and for truth is more vital today than ever.  I agree, yet things have changed in the last 20 years.

As a Christian under obligation to the Great Commission (whether I ‘feel’ comfortable about it or not), my mission is to speak Gospel truth – by 1-2-1 conversations, by passing out tracts, by writing via this web site – to anyone I can provoke to listen for a moment.  Even as the culture disintegrates, the ultimate truth, by far, exceeding all other truths, is that Jesus saves sinners who will repent and follow Him.  No other truth is a close second.  No other truth is in its class.  All other debates, dialogues, and decisions are trivial in comparison.  The Gospel lifeboat can save any one even if multitudes reject it and perish.

Guinness quotes ethicist Christina Sommers who notes that a typical college course on ethics has degenerated into indoctrinating politically correct positions on social policies, whether abortion, criminal justice, euthanasia, etc.  Certainly any issue that is hot will have a right answer, including racism, sexism, transgenderism, open borders, etc.

But post-modern ethics is anti-Biblical, and therefore somewhere between shallow and wrong.  You won’t see analysis of hypocrisy, self-deception, selfishness, or cruelty.  Of course not; these are hallmarks of the Left, of the mob.

Guinness:  “The fruit of Western universities in the last two hundred years has been to destroy the possibility of any moral knowledge on which to pursue moral formation.”  Certainly!  Morality is derived from God’s character and expressed in His laws, which are wired into reality, especially the reality of man’s responsibilities to God, to others, and to himself in preserving a clean and healthy conscience.  Sin violates reality.  It always hurts.

Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell (early 20^th century) opined:  “Where ethics is concerned, I hold that, so far as fundamentals are concerned, it is impossible to produce conclusive intellectual arguments . . . In a fundamental question of ethics I do not think a theoretical argument is possible.”  Sigh.  The simple Bible believer is so much wiser than the brilliant philosopher.  In Professor Russell’s worldview, all that he thinks, says, and writes are mere products of brain chemistry.  The laws of physics know nothing of ethics and if that’s all that exists . . .

Guinness cites Karl Menninger’s 1973 book, Whatever Became of Sin?  The idea of evil slid down from ‘sin’ defined theologically, to ‘crime’ defined legally, to ‘sickness’ defined psychologically.  Americans have “defined deviancy down,” as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed.  Today it’s far worse.  Evil is glorified and righteousness is vilified.  ‘Evils’ today include equal justice under the law, a stable family where a father leads and supports the household and the mother raises the children, simple statements about men and women being different, and anyone who dares to disagree with the wacko ideology of the day.

Battling pundits argue superficially about social policies but the real issue is worldview – reality.  If God is dead, “nothing would be immoral any longer, everything would be permitted,” as Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov.  But if God is there, and He is, then His character defines reality and His word is our rule for life, for success, for happiness, for peace, and certainly for salvation and eternal life on a real New Earth some day.

Those who hate God, who hate reality, may discover sin’s limits.  Shock-rocker Marilyn Manson once complained, “We can’t go any further without starting over . . . What other violence can you show?  What other drug can you do?  What other thing can you get pierced?  It’s all been done.”  And at some point death intrudes.

You can try to fool others that you have beaten reality.  Mark Twain famously said, “The secret of success is sincerity.  If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”  Groucho Marx offered the strategic prescription for modern politicians:  “These are my principles, and if you don’t like them . . . well, I have others.”

Modern media, especially social media, have replaced the primacy of words with the primacy of images, and replaced long-term relationships with the mobile, the fleeting, the superficial.  The emphasis is thereby on the external, away from the issue of character and onward to the virtues of image and (apparent) personality.

Guinness:  “Today character would be viewed as the slow road to achievement, if not a handicap.”

Guinness describes character as “the deep selfhood, the essential self a person is made of, the core reality in which thoughts, words, decisions, behavior, and relationships are rooted . . . Character is who we are when no one sees us – but God.”

Character is not static, of course.  It can and should improve over time, and that takes hard work, necessarily in sync with God’s word, the ‘manual’ for “all things that pertain unto life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3).

Personality, Guinness suggests, may be what wins friends, and gets jobs, lovers, and fame.  We can craft our personality with skills and styles and tactics.  But character determines eternal destiny.  Peter Berger observed that “if God does not exist any self is possible – and the question as to which of the many selves is ‘true’ becomes meaningless.”  Certainly meaningless in eternity.

I recall that around twenty years ago there was much talk about postmodernism, but I don’t hear the term much anymore.  I think that’s because we live in a culture now that’s been taken over by it.  It’s become the way people live. (I might have said the way people ‘think’ but there’s little thinking about it.)

Guinness saw the consequences of cultural immersion in postmodernism clearly, including “the rejection of truth and objective standards of right and wrong, the leveling of authorities, the elevation of the autonomous self as the sole arbiter of life and reality . . . the glorifying of power, the resort to victim-playing and identity politics, the licensing of victims’ right to lie,” etc.

The additional shift I’ve seen in the last few years one might call post-postmodernism.  Political correctness is about dogmatizing evil as good.  Guinness sees PC as “a blend of bullying, conformity, and hypocrisy.”  Morality is entirely turned upside down now and wickedness is proclaimed baldly, dogmatically, and vindictively.  Isaiah saw this as the final stage leading to the destruction of the nation of Judah in Isaiah 5:20-23.

In today’s culture and politics, whites, Christians, and cops are evil, abortion is virtuous, transgender surgeries on children cannot be questioned, and the first one to say anything outrageous can accuse someone who disagrees as a racist.  The result is that whoever has power can make rules arbitrarily and punish his enemies.  And the pace continues to accelerate.

The year 2000, when Guinness wrote the book, was the last year of the Bill Clinton presidency.  Senator Bob Kerrey said, “Clinton’s an unusually good liar.”  Monica Lewinsky claimed that Bill admitted to her that he had been a serial liar since childhood.  But then Monica confessed separately, “I have lied my entire life.”  Some scholars have described Clinton as “the most skillful liar in American presidential history.”  Jesse Jackson, in 1992, said of Clinton, “There’s nothing he won’t do.  He’s immune to shame.  Move past all the nice posturing and get really down in there in him, you find absolutely nothing . . . nothing but an appetite.”

Why do people continue to fall for lies?  I think it’s natural that we want to believe someone who seems sincere.  Certainly, Lucifer seemed sincere when he suggested to Eve that she could attain godhood.  Recall that the Lord Jesus called Satan the father of lies.  And so anyone who follows the master of lies can develop the skill powerfully.    Governments and media companies and academic institutions are overflowing with these skills today.

What’s in your core is what’s vital.  Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish scientist and atheist who survived Auschwitz, spoke and wrote much about the Holocaust, yet committed suicide in 1987.  Guinness is convinced that it was Levi’s lack of faith in a transcendent God, and therefore a lack of meaning with which to interpret his awful experiences.

In 1946 Levi described his anger at an old Jew who thanked God for having escaped selection to the gas chamber:  “If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.”  In Levi’s book, If This Is a Man, he wrote, “If there is an Auschwitz, then there cannot be a God.”  But forty years later, just months before his suicide, he scribbled a note in pencil:  “I find no solution to the riddle.  I seek, but I do not find it.”

The hopelessness was, for him, worse than Auschwitz.  The task of repeating the stories was harder as he got older.  And what was his hope for the future?  The atheist / materialist has no hope.  There is no hope or meaning if we are nothing more than clods of dirt and water bumbling about.

The intangibles, the transcendent, must exist and indeed, must be the center of man’s life for there to be hope.  Freedom is a major theme for Guinness.  He has written much about freedom from (constraints) in contrast with freedom for (doing good).  Ben Franklin wrote, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”  The Roman poet Tacitus wrote, “The more corrupt the state, the more laws.”  What country in Earth’s history, do you suppose, has more laws and lawyers?

The Lord Jesus summarized all of God’s laws into two . . . love God and love your neighbor.  Do that, and if your neighbors join in, what other laws do you need?

Lord Acton, writing on liberty, wrote that freedom “is not the power of doing what we like but the right of being able to do what we ought.”  That’s the difference between freedom from and freedom for.  What we ought to do – that’s transcendent.  You won’t find it in the laws of physics.  If the vital aspects of reality are transcendent, more than particles and forces, then we’d better figure out Who is in charge of the transcendent rules.

Guinness notes that Americans have found out that camping on freedom from is unsatisfying.  “Those who set out to do what they like usually end up not liking what they’ve done.”  Sure, Americans are engaged in more substance abuse, sexual immorality, and self-focus than any people group in world history.  But is America happy today?  Even secular polls indicate that America is unhappier than at any time in history, although richer and with freedom from any moral restrictions.

God designed reality, however, so that we are free-est, most just, most excellent, and happiest when we line up with Him and, therefore, lined up with each other.  To aspire to truth, justice, love, and peace, we must find the Source of all virtues, and then do it.

Guinness recounts a story from G. K. Chesterton wherein a Cambridge student fully embraced his professor’s lectures on the death of God, the pointlessness of life, and the virtues of ending it all.  The student confronts the prof in his office and pulls a gun on him, to do the old philosopher the kind favor of ending his pain before doing himself in.  The professor, chased out onto the ledge, begs for his life, willing to do anything to save himself.  The student demands a song and the professor complies, willing to humiliate himself.

The student lets him live, explaining that he had to prove the old man wrong or die.  “I had to prove you didn’t really mean it.  Or else drown myself in the canal.”  So they both found at least a temporary joy in a desire to live.

Guinness cites Peter Berger in taking a dig at ‘relativizers’ (There are absolutely no absolutes!) or skeptics, especially academics, who love to relativize others, but not themselves.  “They pour the acid of their relativism over all sorts of issues but jealously guard their own favorite ones.”  He cites a study of university education which concluded that the American academic is “a well-fed, elite, institutionalized thinker . . . who crafts ideas for his peers, with the assurance that the consequences of those solutions should not and will not necessarily apply to himelf.”

Berger advises that when confronted by the skeptic, reflect the same analysis back on him.  I interpret that as turning defense to offense.  Challenge the evolutionist, for example, by asking what his best evidence is for his position.  Ask him how long it would take for an ocean of amino acids to randomly produce one useful protein.  Ask him why there are nothing but gaps in the fossil record.  How is it statistically possible to continually find fossils of separate kinds and never any in between?  Ask him how he dares to even use such concepts as evidence and logic when, in his worldview, what comes out of his mouth is merely the result of random brain chemistry.

Demand of the skeptic the consequences of his position.  Regarding good trees that bring forth good fruit and corrupt trees that can’t, Jesus said, “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.”  Francis Schaeffer would push them to “the logic of their presuppositions.”  C. S. Lewis suggested to force the skeptic to follow his ideas to “the absolute ruddy end.”

The approach works across a broad spectrum of issues, including abortion, open borders, whether ‘all lives matter,’ free vs. hate speech, whether you can reduce racism by declaring all ‘white’ people systemically racist . . . any public policy issue you can think of.

The challenge today is to find an opportunity for a civil conversation.  Insults, accusations, and violence are pandemic.  The Christian, and even the secular conservative, would be happy to engage in honest debate.  Why should the anti-Christian, the anti-American, the anti-godly bother to come up with reasons, though, when censorship and violence serve so well?

High school students who decry objective truth and therefore object to their grades would be offended if the teacher failed their term paper because she didn’t like it – she read it on Tuesday.   Postmodern professors insist that authors have no privilege in how their writings are interpreted, but object when others interpret their own writings.

Guinness:  “The relativists’ problem is not their clash with us but their contradiction with reality and therefore the cost to themselves.”

Although one’s beliefs may contradict reality, they still drive behavior.  Guinness  says that if someone consistently denies reality, denies truth, then “count on him to lie.”  Examples he offers . . .  Someone who embraces evolution as propagation of selfish genes will be extremely selfish about his own survival and prosperity.  Someone who despises the value of a newborn baby will also support involuntary euthanasia – murder.  Nations that defy reality will suffer large scale consequences.

Guinness encourages us “to be prophetic, not pedantic,” to help the skeptic by focusing on the issues that matter.  For the atheist, on the surface, it might be evolution, but always deeper than that is the issue of autonomy – the atheist loves his sins and doesn’t want there to be a God who tells him what to do.  For the Roman Catholic it might be papal authority, or tradition, or the sacraments she puts her trust in.  Always, we should share Gospel truth.  Sometimes, to get a better hearing, we must try to ‘put a pebble in their shoe,’ to get the unbeliever to question the basis of her worldview.  We can always depend, via prayer, on the Holy Spirit to ‘stay on her trail.’

Guinness discusses Paul Johnson’s book, Intellectuals, which I also recommend.  Each chapter is an analysis of the life of famous (alleged) intellectuals (Rousseau, Marx, Russell, Sartre, Hemingway, etc.) from the last two centuries, especially the disconnects between their philosophy and their personal lives . . . namely, their hypocrisy.

Johnson:  “The belief seems to be spreading that intellectuals are no wiser as mentors, or worthier as exemplars, than the witch doctors or priests of old.  I share that skepticism.  A dozen people picked at random on the street are at heart as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia.”

Guinness:  “The cleverer the mind, the slipperier the heart . . . the more sophisticated the education the subtler the rationalization.  Erudition lends conviction to self-deception.”

Indeed.  But we already knew this since at least 3,000 years ago, when Solomon wrote, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom:  and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.”  (Prov 9:10)

Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, took it for granted that the world had no meaning.  He admitted that he wanted the world to have no meaning, so that “there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way they find most advantageous to themselves.”

‘Do what thou wilt’ – that’s the Satan worshiper’s slogan.

David Horowitz, a former socialist, argues that “Leftism is a crypto-religion.”  They live in a “community of faith,” making it unthinkable to desert their friends and join their ‘evil’ opponents.  “The Left has deep blinders” that keep it from facing reality.

Guinness notes correctly that transformation, returning to reality, is hard in the short term but easier in the long.  Truth is freedom and life makes more sense when you’re honest about reality.  He uses the term repentance, which is just right.  But he doesn’t go far enough.  Repentance from sins and faith in the Lord Jesus allows God to regenerate you, so you can be born again and indwelt and led by the Holy Spirit.  We need the new birth to be in touch with God’s reality.  Nothing else is real.  Jesus is the Truth and only the Truth makes us free.  But the Christian must work at this every day.  The temptation is always there.

The Greek statesman Demosthenes noted, long ago, “Nothing is easier than self-deceit.  For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.”

T.S. Eliot: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

The apostle Paul wrote that unbelievers worship the creature rather than the Creator and love lies rather than truth.

G.K. Chesterton: “When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.”

Accordingly, our witness must be bold and clear, while compassionate.  Avoid the caveat, avoid the weasel words, avoid equivocation.  Speak Gospel truth as if it is the most vital and pressing issue on earth, as if the hearer is about to fall off a cliff, unseeing, and only your words can save him.  Speak so that your words might just be remembered.  Speak with tears in your eyes, if possible, but don’t hold back!

Guinness:  “It is impossible to experience love without being truthful and it is impossible to discover truth without loving it.”

Os Guinness wrote this book twenty years ago, convinced that the West was at a crossroads.  In the year 2020 we see that the West, including America, has given itself up to lies and hatred, and has turned morality upside down.  My belief is that it’s over for our nation.  The ship is gutted and is going down.  What is still available for followers of Jesus Christ is to man the Gospel lifeboat and to offer salvation to individuals.  Also, to find a few Christians of like mind to encourage each other and exhort one another to be faithful witnesses.

It’s not going to be easy.  But it’s not complicated.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

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