Truth Really Matters

190. 1/1/24 Christianity vs. Wokeness
191. 2/1/24 Love Thy Body
192. 3/1/24 Signals of Transcendence

190. Christianity vs. Wokeness
January 1, 2024

“The Bible is authoritative on everything of which it speaks.  Moreover, it speaks of everything.” – Cornelius Van Til

Van Til was right about that, at least in the sense that the Bible addresses all in life that is important.  I love everything about Van Til except his Calvinism.  In the Evangelism section of this site you’ll find my 3-part essay on Van Til’s presuppositional apologetics.

The quote is from Owen Strachan’s informative (and compact / readable) book, Christianity and Wokeness:  How the Social Justice Movement is Hijacking the Gospel – and the Way to Stop It.  He opens by citing a 2016 ‘anti-racism’ training video, which went viral, featuring a speaker named Ashleigh Shackelford, who told a group of white women that “all white people are racists,” and had no hope of changing.  “No, you’re always going to be racist, actually.  Even when you’re on  a path to be a better human being.”

Strachan explains that this reflects a core element of the “wokeness” system, in which there is no grace, no love, “only grievance, resentment, and condemnation.”  Therefore, it is clear that wokeness is not merely a non-Christian system.  It is an anti-Christian system.  It reveals its true father – Satan – who hates God’s image-bearers and devises means to foster misery and, ultimately, damnation.  Shackelford revealed her own heart when she commented, “I believe all white people are born into not being human.”  Later, she said that white people grow up “to be demons.”

The wokeness movement took off in the 1990s in academia, which should be no surprise.  Its goal was to convince many who had no racial prejudice that they actually did, and that they could not transcend differences in skin color.  Its chief enemy is Christianity, working to infiltrate churches with the idea that Christianity fosters “white privilege” and “white supremacy.”

Strachan summarizes how wokeness attacks a Christian spiritually.

• Wokeness divides us – oppressors versus oppressed.
• Wokeness tempts us to despise others based on some category or label.
• Wokeness tempts us to pride in condemning others.
• Wokeness robs us of peace and joy.
• Wokeness directs our attention away from the Gospel.  We lose sight of the most vital need of every individual – salvation.
• Wokeness tempts to bitterness.
• Wokeness makes forgiveness difficult.
• Wokeness diminishes faith – we lose sight of God’s prophetic vision of history.
• Wokeness makes man big and God small.  Man’s concerns dominate us.

Sadly, tragically, and ridiculously, many current evangelical leaders claim that wokeness is the way forward for the church.  I can only conclude that those who think like this have never been born again.  What else could explain such a disgusting lack of discernment?

Van Til’s comment above is grounded in 2 Peter 1:3, which assures us that God’s word is sufficient for all things that pertain to life and godliness.  With regard to race, there is only one.  Paul, in Acts 17:26, noted that God made us all of “one blood,” affirming our parentage from Genesis, Adam and Eve, in Eden.  What matters a little more or less of melanin in the skin cells?

“Woke,” of course, is derived from “awake,” clued in to the true nature of the world when so many are clueless, asleep.  I’ve observed that the woke mindset / posture works against postmodernism, which denies definite answers and objective truths.  When postmodernism seemed to hit its peak in the 1990s, the gravest sin seemed to be judgmentalism.  But the woke crowd is intensely and viciously judgmental, preaching a definitive, yet anti-biblical morality.

Strachan summarizes Critical Race Theory (CRT), the academic veneer of wokism, as the doctrine that “all of societal life is structured along racial power dynamics.  Race is a ‘social construct’ . . . it’s not biologically based and exists only in our imagination.”  But now they’ve mixed some postmodernism back in and yet . . . how can Shackelford call those women white and racist merely by looking at them?  Shouldn’t she ask them how they identify?

CRT goes on to assert that America is infested with racism, using terms like “structural racism” and “systemic racism.”  This ignores the tremendous progress America has seen, especially since the 1950s.  But history is ignored or revised to fit the political narrative, and to feed the grievance industry.  Martin Luther King’s goal of “color-blindness” has been reversed; no longer do the ‘anti-racists’ desire a society where children are judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.  Rather, defeating “whiteness” is the goal.

The enemy is the ordinary man or woman who leads a quiet, normal American life.  Ibram X. Kendi, a widely published professor at Boston U., says that such people are the “most threatening racist movement” today.  Author Robin DeAngelo said that the “regular American” is worse than the cross-burning Klan member.

Apparently, the mom who posts photos of her kids on Instagram, bakes muffins, helps her neighbors, and volunteers at the homeless shelter is a “white supremacist” who must be defeated because her very existence oppresses others.  In CRT, Strachan notes, life is a zero-sum game.  Some win; most lose.

In the woke worldview, intersectionality is the principle that the victimhood of many groups overlaps, including blacks, the poor, the disabled, anyone not heterosexual, etc.  Also, for each of the oppressed, there must be an oppressor.  The rich oppress the poor, the “cisgender” oppress sexual minorities, and men oppress women because of “toxic masculinity.”  Such lists can be extended indefinitely.

Although wokists reject “binary” thinking in terms of the sexes, they are quintessentially binary in that you are either an oppressor or you are oppressed.  What a miserable way to look at the world and to avoid personal responsibility.  The mindset also avoids the humility required to own your own sins and repent.  Therefore, wokeness opposes the mind and heart conditions required to trust Christ for salvation.  It seems far more satisfying be righteously indignant and blame others; in fact, if you can find ways to cancel or punish the oppressors, that really feels good!

Where does CRT and its ilk come from?  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – for example, in The Communist Manifesto:  “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave . . . lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”

Marx hated everything about God and sought to expunge Christian teaching from the face of the Earth.  In What Every Christian Needs to Know about Social Justice, Jeffrey Johnson notes that the institutions and historic principles of individualism, family, church, and state derive their authority from God; accordingly, Marxists must deconstruct them to eliminate God from society.  Furthermore, “for Marx, deliverance from the evils of capitalism cannot occur until all traces of God are removed from the world.”

Critical theorists go far beyond arguing that society is corrupted – they insist that reason is corrupted.  Thus, they ignore evidence and logic.  Only the woke can see the relevant structures of reality.  Voddie Baucham argues that this is simply gnosticism.  You can trust only the anointed woke priests and priestesses for enlightenment.

I resonate with Strachan’s take:  “The ultimate source of this ideology does not sound like the voice of God, but like the slithery hiss of a serpent.”

Strachan cites John McWhorter’s critique of what he calls the “Third Wave Antiracism,” particularly the type of traps the woke set for the rest of us.  For example, “You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people.  But you can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.”  Another:  “Support black people in creating their own spaces and stay out of them.  But seek to have black friends.  If you don’t have any, you’re a racist.  And if you claim any, they’d better be good friends.  Just know that you still aren’t allowed in their private spaces.”  What do you think?  Will this approach increase or decrease racism?

Apparently, the most influential book to promote wokeness in evangelicalism is Divided by Faith, by Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, 2000.  They argue that whites, as the creators of our present society, “must repent of their personal, historical, and social sins.”  Otherwise, they are passed on to future generations.  This idea of generational sins is foreign to the New Testament, of course.  Such heresies only divide; they do not unite.  The Christian viewpoint is that the individual is responsible for his own sins, but can be restored through faith in Christ.  Thus, woke heresies distract from the need for 1-2-1 evangelism and the individual’s requirements for salvation.

In 2017 InterVarsity Press published White Awake, by Daniel Hill, a Chicago-area pastor.  He writes that all white people are racist, even if subconsciously.  (Whatever that actually means.)  Also, that racism is the chief sin of the Church today.  “The primary enemy of God’s kingdom in this realm is white supremacy.”

Strachan notes that actual white supremacy is truly hideous and includes segregation, lynchings, abused women slaves, and a societal order that dehumanizes people based on skin color.  Nothing like that exists in America today.  He observes that evangelicals today are demonstrably multi-ethnic.  Where there is a proper Christian unity, it comes from God’s grace, not skin color.  In fact, it is the CRT crowd that yearns to divide everyone by race, arbitrary though that may be.  Wokeness in the churches attacks unity, fostering distrust and resentment.  Of course it does, considering the source.

In short, wokeness is not a helpful paradigm to discover truths within the Christian framework.  Rather, wokeness is a different Gospel; indeed, it is anti-Gospel.  It is an evil, intentionally ‘racist’ doctrine.

In magnifying human diversity, wokeness creates attitudes that prevent any chance at unity.  Unity is only possible in Christ and, unfortunately, will not be universally realized until the Millennium.

In promoting  the CRT narrative, Marxists eagerly ignore or rewrite history.  For example, it wasn’t just ‘whites’ who sinned.  Black African traders facilitated the transatlantic slave trade in the 17^th century.  Black leaders supported 19^th century colonization.  America had numerous black slaveholders.  In the 20^th century black leaders have supported the disproportionately high abortion rate in the black community, and young black men are regularly victims of murder by young black men.

In Art Carden’s 2020 essay, “Slavery Did Not Enrich Americans,” he refutes the woke accusation that America and its prosperity was built on slavery.  Cotton crops would have been profitable without the expense of slavery; in fact, they would likely have been far more profitable.  People are more productive when paid wages that they can then use in freedom to lead their own lives.  Furthermore, cotton was not essential to industrialization.  Thus, slavery hampered the American economy.  This position is consistent with many descriptions of antebellum life, which featured (overall) a poor work ethic, a decadent culture, and immorality – all derived from the conscience-blighting effects of slavery throughout the culture.

Woke Marxists hate free markets.  Economist Walter Williams argues that free markets are naturally color-blind.  “Markets have a notorious lack of respect for privilege, race, and class structures.”  Strachan concludes that if the woke really wanted “fairness” and “equity,” they would be enthusiastic supporters of free markets, not their enemies.  He notes that Robin DeAngelo typically charges $15,000 per speaking event and has earned over $2M from her book White Fragility, all the while deriding capitalism as a racist system.

It is well known that so-called ‘racial’ differences (skin color, eye shape, etc.) account for only 0.012 percent of human biological variation.  Skin color derives from the presence of more or less melanin.  Ken Ham:  “No one really has red, or yellow, or black skin.  We all have the same basic color, just different shades of it.”  Such differences are trivial, but the woke want to deconstruct the entire world over nonsense.

In Ibram X. Kendi’s best-seller, How to Be an Antiracist, he offers a solution to racial prejudice:  “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”  How will that work out for future generations?  Perhaps the real motivation is to provoke race wars and destroy the West.  Strachan suggests that the Satanic goal is not a new order, but an anti-order, opposing everything that God ordained for His image-bearers to find peace with Him and with each other.

Under wokeness the law is divorced from retributive justice – rendering to each what they deserve – and becomes a tool of distributive justice – apportioning privilege to those without it.  Equality of opportunity is supposedly racist.  Equality of outcome is the new principle.  Romans chapter 13 makes clear the heresy.  God designed government to be a terror to evildoers and to reward good conduct, to execute justice with the power of the sword, if necessary, and that the people should be subject to the authorities.

The state promotes civil law and maintains order against evildoers.  The Church preaches the Gospel and disciples believers under the authority of the Bible, and the family raises children to know God, to love others, and to grow up productive members of the community.  The boundaries and responsibilities for these institutions are made clear within Scripture.  There is nothing complicated here.

The goals of Marxist ideology include the destruction of the family and the Church, and the perversion of the role of the State.  Society becomes a contest for power.  Individuals, cut off from family and church bonds, are easily controlled and intimidated by the overreaching State.  Diversity is achieved without unity.  Deconstruction of God’s institutions generates estrangement, fear, and hostility.  The world will be ripe for a powerful charismatic leader.  The antichrist will arrive just in time.

Strachan argues that wokeness is a new religion, a new worldview, which includes the following pillars:

• Neo-paganism – no Creator; we are our own gods
• Sexual libertinism – anything goes
• Marxist statism
• Postmodern Darwinism – evolution got us here and there is no absolute truth
• Mystic selfism – follow your heart
• Utopian eschatology – Earth-centric; make the Earth right via social justice

The author spends some time describing the Bible’s teaching on the nature of human beings.  Genesis chapter 1, for example:  We see one human race, with male and female, one couple, the foundation of marriage.  Period.

The Bible presents us as made in the image of God, conscious, sentient, knowing good and evil, exercising free will.  Jesus Christ is the ultimate example of what man (and woman) should be at its summit, without sin, loving, in perfect fellowship with God.  In our present state we are all guilty and condemned by our own willful sins, but obtain forgiveness and a new birth into God’s family by repentance and faith in Christ.

In contrast, under wokeness some are good and beautiful just as they are, and others are definitely not – those who are born into or exercise “whiteness.”  Strachan notes that when you miss that sin is always personal, you cannot see the problem.  “It is not that society is flawed and we are innocent.  It is that we are sinful, and so our world is polluted with our sin.”  Christ did not die for society.  We are not victims; we ourselves, individually, are criminals in God’s court, lawbreakers in desperate need of salvation.  The woke need to be saved, too, but they have embraced a philosophy and attitudes that work hard against it.

When we solve our vertical problem with God, we can line up with Him and His word and thereby line up with each other.  “Jesus is the only true hope of those who desire unity of any kind in the world.”  Of course, this will not happen on any significant scale until the 2^nd coming of Christ, when He rules the world from His throne in Jerusalem.  There is no other plan.  In this present age, the mission is the Great Commission – individual souls are at stake.  Ephesians chapter 2 gives a hopeful illustration of what unity can be achieved now (and in Paul’s day) in that the blood of Christ unifies Jew and Gentile, which at that time was quite a startling concept.

The cross is not God’s “best shot” at unification, so that we can improve the odds later with Marxism or psychotherapy or political compromise.  Jesus is the only way, because He is the source of life, He is the source of truth, and reality is wired for no other options.

Wokeness, Strachan observes, has no concept of God as Creator with us as image-bearers.  Rather, it starts with the dull, antagonistic stereotypes of Marxist collectivism and identity fictions.  There is no hope in any secular (Satanic) worldview, no afterlife, no Final Judgment, and . . . what should be incredibly frustrating to the Marxist woke . . . no justice.  Not to mention, no resolutions, no peace, and no happiness.  Have you noticed that the woke crowd is perpetually angry and miserable?

Yet with Jesus and the grace of forgiveness and salvation, people in allegedly antagonistic groups find themselves in the same spiritual family.  The most important things in life, they share in common.  In a group of truly born again Christians, who care about each others’ souls and the souls of the lost around them, there is neither Jew nor Greek, rich nor poor, white nor black nor brown.  A healthy church, even in this age, can show this kind of love if it wants to.

When God’s causes dominate our desires, the trials of this life seem small, petty.  And when life gets tough, Christian brothers and sisters are there to help.  At least, it can be that way if your church is organized around New Testament principles, instead of today’s seeker-sensitive megachurch mindlessness.

If wokeness is creeping into your church, say something.  Do something.  If you get thrown out, thank God and try to find some other Christians who haven’t gone mad.  The truly saved Christians won’t get fooled so easily.  As you share the Gospel with clearly lost woke individuals, recognize that they cannot consistently live their wacky worldview.  Share the distinctives of the Gospel message, that sin and lostness are individual, that humility and repentance are required to seek God, that Jesus paid the ultimate price, and that forgiveness, peace, joy, and the ability to love others who don’t look like you is a gift from God to those image-bearers who want it.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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191. Love Thy Body
February 1, 2024

Is there a dichotomy between you and your body, between body and person?  Or do “the two together form an integrated psycho-physical unity”?  The Christian (biblical) perspective is to honor our own bodies as a revelation of God’s purpose for our lives.

So argues Nancy Pearcey in her wonderful 2018 book, Love Thy Body:  Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality.  She observes that the physical characteristics of our bodies reveal truths about our identities; further, that our bodies enable rational grounds for our personal moral decisions.  Accordingly, ethics depend on biology, especially on the topics of sexuality and abortion.

Pearcey quotes Sam Allberry, a Christian pastor with same-sex attraction who practices celibacy:  “Desires for things God has forbidden are a reflection of how sin has distorted me, not how God has made me.”

With comparable humility and courage to face difficult truths Tim Wilkins, who once lived as a homosexual man, but is now married with children suggests:  If God created some people gay, then “God has played a cruel joke on them.  He has engineered their minds and emotions for attraction to the same sex and yet created their physiology to be in direct opposition to that attraction.”  Pearcey notes that when your emotions war with your physiology, you cannot be a whole person.

We live in a fallen world, but God promises grace to live through brokenness.  When his disciples asked Jesus whose sin caused a man to be born blind, the Lord blamed neither the man nor his parents, but that God could manifest even through such tragedy.

Some Christians with same-sex attraction pray for years for God to change their desires.  Paul endured his “thorn in the flesh” (whatever it was) despite repeated prayers.  Paul ultimately decided to “glory in my infirmites, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”  Similarly, I’ve had a life-long tormenting malady, but have realized that I would rather depend on God’s grace with the affliction, than to be free of it without God’s presence in my life.

The body we are born with and grow up in does indeed limit our freedom, Pearcey notes.  Similarly, our biological (family) ties are not discretionary.  We don’t choose our parents, relatives, or the place of our birth.  But all these realities form our identity.  Gilbert Mailaender reminds us that we are not just “free spirits but embodied creatures.   Lines of kinship and descent locate and identify us.”

As Christians we are called to honor our parents and love our children, seeing them as gifts from God.  Learning to love and honor builds the character we need to live a fruitful life.

Marriage, differently, begins with consent but continues as a covenant as opposed to a contract.  In a contract there is quid-pro-quo consideration, but in marriage we pledge our very own selves, “for better or worse, until death do us part.”  Love is to be unconditional; after all, it may not always be reciprocated as we like, but God’s typology for marriage is an eternal relationship, not breakable.

Pearcey (dis)credits the loss of the positive view of the body to Charles Darwin.  Darwin, like Richard Dawkins today, could not deny the apparent design of life, but determinedly embraced a philosophy of materialism – matter is everything – the apparent purpose of life and its structures must be the result of blind, undirected forces.

Historian Jacques Barzun:  “This denial of purpose is Darwin’s distinctive contention.”  Dawkins:  “Natural selection, the blind, unconscious automatic process which Darwin discovered . . . has no purpose in mind.”

With no purpose there is no basis for moral truths.  We are merely machines, driven by physics, chemistry, and genetic predestination.  Obviously, without God humans may impose their own will.  Yet I would point out, as I have many times before, that in materialism you and I have no personhood.  If matter and physical laws are all there is, then what is love, hope, meaning, purpose, beauty, integrity, logic, and even rationality?  These are fundamental to human experience, foundational to what it means to be a person.  If our existence is just about physics, then where does your next thought originate?  How small a materialistic worldview is!

(Regarding whether Darwin and his modern acolytes have any clue at all, see my free ebook on the subject of creation vs. evolution.)

This conflict of worldviews is critical to the issues of identity and the body.  If an unborn child is just a ‘blob of tissue,’ then abortion seems plausible.  But then there are no immoral acts of any kind, anywhere and anywhen.

What about casual sex?  It’s “no big deal” according to Western culture.  Yet I’ve noticed that secular fiction (TV, movies, novels) often gets it right when they portray the tragic consequences of sexual sin:  jealousy, violence, divorce, STDs, addiction, etc.

Pearcey reports that a Washington Post book review opined that it is healthy when teenage girls “refuse to conflate” love and sex, reinforcing the “no big deal” mantra.  The Nation asked, “Why should sex have an everlasting warranty of love attached to it?”  Yep, if the body is just a lump of matter, why not just play with it?  A video by Children’s Television Workshop, used in sex education classes, defines sexual relations as merely “something done by two adults to give each other pleasure.”  There is no mention of marriage or family.

It is ironic, Pearcey notes, that some see sexual hedonism as too much emphasis on the purely physical.  Rather, she concludes, it places too low a value on the body, diminishing moral and personal significance.

Extolling the idea of “friends with benefits,” the New York Times explains, “You just keep it purely sexual, and that way people don’t have mixed expectations, and no one gets hurt.”  In other words, avoid actual friendship to avoid emotional connections.  Pearcey relates the story of a teenager who was depressed because her hookup partner had just broken up with her.  Despite the euphemisms (“friends with benefits,” “hookup culture”), God has wired our human body & soul systems to take sex seriously, within the boundaries of marriage.  Troubles multiply outside the boundaries.

Researcher Donna Freitas interviewed hundreds of students and concluded that hookup culture “creates a drastic divide between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy,” teaching young people not to “reckon with someone’s personhood.”  The hookup culture inhibits dissent.  If you want more than sex, like friendship, relationship, or commitment, you will be labeled needy, clingy, and dependent.  One student said, “It’s a contest to see who cares less.”  This is a denial of the reality of our human nature designed by God.  We were designed for marriage, not hookups.

Miriam Grossman, a UCLA psychiatrist, wrote the book Unprotected:  A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student, after experiencing the consequences of university policies that prevented her from using concepts of “right” and “wrong” when counseling students.

Christian teachings shocked the 1^st century world by commanding husbands to love their wives, to be sexually exclusive and faithful within the marriage, and not to seek sexual pleasure with slaves or prostitutes.  At the time it was not considered possible that a man could commit adultery, because women were property.  Adultery was not a property crime.  The Christian view was radical.

Pearcey:  “Biblical morality is teleological:  The purpose of sex is to express the one-flesh covenant bond of marriage.”

When a mother nurses her baby, her body releases oxytocin, called “the attachment hormone,” because it promotes the desire to care and nurture.  Surprisingly to scientists who discovered this, oxytocin is also generated during sex, especially in women, but also in men.  There is a biochemical / emotional bond built between a man and a woman . . . intended for marriage.  In hookup culture, you build and break such bonds continually and trouble is inevitable.  There is biochemistry connected to Paul’s admonition is 1 Cor 6:18 to avoid fornication because you sin against your own body.  Grossman notes, “You might say we are designed to bond.”  Studies consistently report that the people who are happiest sexually are married, middle-aged, conservative Christians.  Shocking.

The biblical view of the body is wholistic, Pearcey observes.  When you eat, you don’t say, “My mouth is eating;” rather, “I am eating.”  You know that you don’t just own your body – your body is part of you.  Someday the body of the Christian will be redeemed, transformed, resurrected, made immortal, because we are “embodied beings.”

In the 1^st century these ideas were counter-cultural.  The philosophies of the day, like Gnosticism, typically disparaged the material world as corrupt, inferior to the spiritual.  Salvation was about escaping the corrupt physical and ascending to a higher realm.  (Note the reinvention of this idea in sci-fi, Stargate SG-1, for example.)

Now, biblically, we live in a presently fallen world, but God created it originally as “very good.”  After the 2^nd Coming of Christ, all the “good” will be restored.  God created a lot of stuff.  Stuff is not inherently evil.  What we do with the stuff can be righteous or sinful.  And God will ultimately redeem all the consequences of the Fall.

Pearcey comments that what really set Christianity apart in the 1^st century was the incarnation – that almighty God took on a physical body!  Scripture teaches that the Lord Jesus will remain incarnate throughout the rest of eternity.  The apostle John offered a test for genuine faith and legitimate preachers in his Gnostic world:  “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God:  Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.” (1 John 4:2 and surrounding context)

The resurrection of Jesus is a declaration that God will fix this broken world and regenerate our broken bodies.  We won’t float on clouds in some ghostly state, but will have physical feet planted on physical streets and buildings and parks and tennis courts in a physical New Earth and New Heaven, headquartered in a physical New Jerusalem.

One horrific consequence of the view that the body is mere biology, sub-personal, is abortion.  Virtually everyone believes that “life” begins at conception, but in the Roe v. Wade ruling, Justice Harry Blackmun bluntly declared that an unborn baby is not a person.  He admitted that if the baby were a person, then abortion would necessarily be illegal.  Judge Blackmun will be judged himself for that wicked judgment.

A famous source for mind/body dualism is Rene Descartes:  “I think, therefore I am.”  Descartes saw only the mind as the authentic self.  Pearcey evaluates this perspective as illogical.  “How can a free mind influence a body that functions as automatically as a machine or a robot?  How can a mind control a body whose behavior is determined by mindless mechanical laws?”

The issue is intertwined with materialism.  How can a non-material mind / soul even exist within a matter-only universe?  If there is no spiritual, no soul, then Blackmun is no more a person than the unborn baby he is content to discard.

Bioethicist Joseph Fletcher proposes fifteen qualities to define when human life is worthy of respect and protection, including intelligence, self-awareness, self-control, concern for others, and communication.  A problem is that such qualities are not binary (you have it or you don’t).  They emerge gradually as you grow, in a continuum from conception until death.  Differences between persons are quantitative.  Pearcey:  “What we do not find is a clear qualitative transition point for the momentous transformation from a non-person to a person.”

So equal rights under the law for all persons critically depends on your worldview.  Does God exist and, therefore, do you as a person exist?  What about the unborn baby?  What about the old woman in a years-long coma?  Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the dedicated atheist, admitted that the “Christian concept . . . of the ‘equality of souls before God’ . . . furnishes the prototype of all theories of equal rights.”

Ultimately, it’s not within our moral rights to decide that someone else has no right to life or liberty.  As a being made in the image of God, my rights and your rights are unalienable, bestowed by our Creator, who loves us and provided for our salvation, if we humble ourselves, repent, and trust in Him.  Our world’s cultural and legal and moral disasters arise from those who reject such obvious truths.

Ernst Haeckel was Darwin’s foremost apologist in the late 19^th century.  Perfectly consistent with his evolutionary dogma, Haeckel saw caring for the disabled as interfering with the survival of the fittest.  He urged society to follow “the example of the Spartans and Redskins” who killed disabled infants immediately after birth.  Haeckel also advocated euthanasia for disabled adults, Pearcey notes.

Today there is still a strong correlation between those who embrace evolution and advocacy for euthanasia, abortion, and even the murder of newborn infants who survive an abortion procedure.  Worldview matters.

Pearcey explains how “the Harvard criteria” proposed in 1968 at the medical school switched the debate on euthanasia from biology to philosophy.  No longer would death be defined as when the heart cannot be restarted or a certain number of cells die, but rather when you suffer a ‘loss of personhood.’  It is so ironic that materialists depart from scientific (measurable) criteria to a standard – personhood – that has no meaning whatsoever in an atheistic worldview!  And so death becomes a “social construct.”  Pull the plug when it is convenient to whomever has the power or the money.  Pearcey observes, “Essentially a patient is no longer a person when the attending physician says so.”

One of Nancy’s students works for a suicide hotline.  She said, “I spend hours every week persuading people not to end their lives, telling them that their lives still have value.  It breaks my heart that people think they must be able to function in a certain way to be considered significant.”

The answer to the suicide crisis is, of course, the Gospel.  I wonder how many suicide hotlines offer the assured hope that the Lord Jesus offers, not just for eternal life, but to live with meaning, purpose, and the promise that Jesus will walk with you through the travails of this life.

Right-do-die advocates portray euthanasia as compassionate.  Yet compassion means to “suffer with” (com = with, passion = suffer).  True compassion obligates you to help the suffering bear their burdens, to sacrifice your time and effort and resources – love in action.

When the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” that includes a disabled person.  The body is part of the person, “the place where we come to know a person.”  Thinking biblically makes it easy to evaluate the morality not only of abortion and euthanasia, but also organ harvesting, surrogacy, and the sale of tissue from abortion products or frozen embryos.

Let’s try thinking biblically about same-sex desire.  Geneticist Francis Collins writes that “sexual orientation is genetically influenced but not hardwired by DNA, and that whatever genes are involved represent predispositions, not predeterminations.”  Not disagreeing, gay advocate John Corvino writes, “It doesn’t matter whether we’re born this way.  The fact is that there are plenty of genetically influenced traits that are nevertheless undesirable.”

There is plenty of evidence that both maladies and temptations to sin may be genetic (run in families), including depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and heart disease.  In fact, most people find themselves predisposed toward anger, lust, greed, worry, impatience, etc.  The underlying factors go far beyond the genetic, of course.  The mix of genetic, environmental, experiential, and even free will factors are incredibly complex, beyond quantitative analysis.  God actually knows this, yet commands us to choose righteousness and calls sin out for what it is.  When we sin it’s because we want to and don’t care what God says and, frankly, usually don’t care whether we hurt someone else.  Even when tempted, we can choose to resist, and build patterns into our lives that are constructive.  God helps, if we seek Him.  Christians can help by offering sincere friendships.  We don’t have to follow Freud who saw every relationship as sexual.

We live in a fallen world, and we can do right even if it’s not easy.

Doug Mainwaring ended his marriage to engage in multiple sexual relationships with men, and became an advocate for same-sex marriage.  After ten years he became a Christian, remarried his wife, and they finished raising their children together.  He writes, “Along the way, I learned that marriage is more than just a tradition or a religious or social construct.  Monogamous, complementary, conjugal marriage is a pearl of great price worth investing one’s entire life in.”

Pearcey:  “Our feelings do not define us.  Our moral commitments do.”

Pearcey cites a New York Times article that reports that the part of the brain associated with navigation is enlarged in London taxi drivers, as is the region that controls the fingers of the left hand in right-handed violinists.  So brains can be ‘rewired’ by diligent practice.  Other brain studies show MRI patterns that shift after trauma or significant events.  Biblically, we understand that the brain is a physical tool subject to the immaterial mind / soul.  Scripture teaches that we can grow in knowledge, wisdom, and even righteousness.

Pearcey discusses how Queer Theory produces a very low view of the body, presuming that one’s psychological state, one’s feelings, define the authentic self, disregarding the biological sex you are born with.  But why should mere desires and feelings define identity?  How much of reality are you willing to deny or reimagine because you have strong feelings today, which may change tomorrow?

Pearcey notes that Christianity is often accused of being anti-sex and anti-body.  Clearly, it is the secular post-modern ethic that is anti-body by denying biological reality (given by God’s design) and anti-sex, by relegating sex to mere transient pleasure while despising the God-given institution of marriage.

Pearcey:  “It is Christianity that honors the body as male and female, instead of subordinating biological sex to psychological feelings.”

Pearcey has a lot to say in her chapter, “Transgender, Transreality,” which I won’t summarize here.  Please do buy her book.  It’s a wonderful reference.  One interesting factoid is that the 80 to 90 percent of children who experience some gender confusion, lose those feelings before adulthood.  Yet all the power centers of our culture are pressuring children into mutilating and sterilizing treatments and surgeries . . . God’s judgment will be fearsome upon those who destroy children.

There is a nice historical review of social contract theory toward the end of the book.  The notable proponents were Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.  They imagined what human nature would be like if we could strip away all accumulated marks of civilization:  morals, laws, customs, traditions, institutions, and religions.  Especially religions.  Rejecting biblical history and the Christian worldview, humans were once, supposedly, in a primeval, pre-social state, the “state of nature.”  Individuals were disconnected and autonomous with no natural obligations.  Therefore all social relations are constructed by choice.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s most famous work, The Social Contract, opens famously with, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”  Accordingly, we have liberty to throw off whatever chains of cultural or social duties we dislike, and invent our own morality, our own rules . . . or none at all.

Social contract theory was primarily applied, at first, to politics and economics.  But now, it intrudes everywhere.  Rejecting the Bible, we reject Scriptural principles for the God-given institutions of the family, the church, and government.  Let’s create our own visions for alternative forms of marriage and the family, for example.

Pearcey points out that, contrary to Hobbes, “we do not pop up overnight like mushrooms after a rain.”  Starting as a helpless baby, we are born into a pre-existing family, clan, church, town, and nation.  We mature into adulthood only if others, especially parents, commit to us sacrificially.  God designed this pattern; God designed the family, including the strong natural bonds that inspire and ground us.

She cites the Charles Bronson character in the (terrific) movie The Magnificent Seven, who tells a group of boys in a poor village, “You think I’m brave because I carry a gun.  Well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility:  for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers.  . . . They do it because they love you, and they want to.  I have never had this kind of courage.”

I’ve noticed that God’s system works, even when practiced by non-believers.  Years ago I got to know the families that lived in my cul-de-sac, none of which were Christians.  They were all middle-aged or older, had avoided divorce, had raised their children to be productive adults, and were ‘responsible citizens.’  Only one had enjoyed a ‘professional / executive’ level job.  Another had been a ‘garbageman,’ one had been a postal worker, one worked in an auto factory, and another had a modest job in construction.  But they all prospered – nice houses, nice cars, and apparently happy in their lives, as far as I could tell.  Namely, they all worked largely within God’s framework for family, work, and civic life, and enjoyed the benefits.

My neighbors lived reasonably in sync with reality.  Unfortunately, much of America does not, anymore.  Trouble results and disaster looms.  The way to optimally live in sync with reality is to repent, trust Christ, become a born-again Christian, and live in accordance with God’s Scriptural principles for life.  Anyone can do that, but it first requires humility – that we are not autonomous, independent creatures, that we are not little gods who can shape our own version of reality.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

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192. Signals of Transcendence
March 1, 2024

Why am I here?  What is life all about?  What’s the point of it all, anyway?  Many ask these questions.  Many dismiss them quickly, repeatedly.  Some begin a quest to find THE answers, but end up in the wrong place.  Some find TRUTH and it changes everything.

Os Guinness has written an intriguing book, Signals of Transcendence (2023), each chapter a case study of some notable figure who, at a key point in his or her life, cried out, “There must be something more.”  Guinness credits his mentor, Peter Berger, for coining the term ‘signals of transcendence’ to describe the experiences that provoke the soul to yearn for more than can be seen.

Is life merely “a tale told by an idiot,” as Shakespeare says in Macbeth, or is it just a “trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind,” as Joseph Heller wrote?  Guinness asks, “Will it be chance, necessity, determinism, karma, or our stars?”  Or is there something . . . someone . . . ultimate, God as revealed in the Bible, who draws all to him, as in John 12:32 and John 6:44, 55?

I can think of three especially poignant ‘signal’ experiences in my life.  The first I’ve written on elsewhere on this site, regarding the crisis of pointlessness I had as a teenage atheist that led to my conversion.  Guinness advises us that “signals only signal.”  They don’t come with the full story.  It’s up to us to take the steps that lead to answers.  In my case I had no idea where to look, since I had rejected all religion when I rejected my Roman Catholic heritage, and since it was the evolutionary worldview, that suffused all of my formal education, that had provoked the ‘life-has-no-purpose’ crisis in the first place.

If we are just ‘naked apes,’ or selfish genes, or as Plato put it, “featherless bipeds,” there would be no hope, no point.  (Diogenes responded to Plato by plucking a chicken, throwing it into the assembly, and declaring, “Here is your Platonic man.”)

God was gracious to me.  With perfect timing he crossed my path with a Christian family, offering me the chance to respond when I heard some truths I’d never considered before.  It took several months for me to work through this new landscape, but when I realized that Jesus is exactly who He claims to be in Scripture, I believed.  Life changed completely, forever.

Guinness’ first chapter describes the signal event in the life of Malcolm Muggeridge, the prolific and famous writer and journalist.  In WW2 Muggeridge was an intelligence officer monitoring German shipping in Mozambique, what seemed to him to be an utterly pointless role in a life altogether too pointless thus far.  He was drunk, alone, depressed, and decided to commit suicide.  He swam out into the ocean, planning to go too far to possibly return.  But he glanced back at one point, saw the lights along the coast and thought of his wife, Kitty, back in England.

“They were the lights of the world; they were the lights of my home, my habitat, where I belonged.  I must reach them.  There followed an overwhelming joy such as I had never experienced before; an ecstasy.”  He swam back.  He had hope again.  Was he converted?  No, not at all.  But he began a quest for meaning.

Guinness reports that Muggeridge eventually became a Christian, which is the consensus view.  His ‘Christianity’ however, was at first Anglican, then later Roman Catholic.  Muggeridge brought Mother Theresa to the attention of the world in his TV documentary, Something Beautiful for God.  In short, Malcolm properly started the quest, but landed in the wrong destination in the end.  It is significant, I believe, that Guinness provides no details of an actual born again conversion experience or testimony on the part of Muggeridge.

I love Os Guinness, but he has a serious lack of discernment about what is wheat and what is tare within Christendom.  Not that it’s easy!  And there is no way to validate any specific case of true vs. false conversion while we reside under this blue sky.  But in this case there are definite clues that, while Malcolm Muggeridge became a theist, and even embraced Christendom, he never understood the Gospel.  If he had, he would not have fallen into the grasp of Rome.

W. H. Auden was one of the 20^th century’s foremost poets, according to Guinness and many others. WW2 was underway, but the U.S. had not yet entered the war. He visited a local cinema in Manhattan in a largely German-speaking community.  The film was a documentary of the Nazi conquest of Poland; it was graphic and violent.  Auden, an Englishman, was horrified to hear the audience cry out in support of the Germans – “Kill the Poles!  Kill them!”

Auden’s convictions until this point had included a belief in the natural goodness of mankind, and that the solutions to the world’s problems could be found in politics, education, and psychology.  The cinema experience convinced him he was wrong.  The Nazis’ actions were absolute evil and must be judged and condemned.  Auden had been in sync with the late 19^th century book by Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, which asserted “evil perpetually tends to disappear. . . . Progress, therefore, is not an accident but a necessity.  Evil and immorality must surely disappear; man must surely become perfect.”

Spencer was simply expressing the optimism of the 18^th century Enlightenment but, as Guinness states, “after the Great War it was ludicrous and after World War II and the Nazi death camps, it was unthinkable.”

Auden’s elite education had assured him that there were no absolutes in his universe.  Judging anything absolutely was done only by “the great unwashed.”  God was dead (Nietzsche) and truth was dead and all that was left was relativism (your truth / my truth) and emotivism (what I feel is good is good, etc.).  How could anyone judge the Nazis if there were no absolute standards?  Yet they must be judged!

Berger wrote, “Deeds that cry out to heaven also cry out for hell.”  Many proclaimed that “hanging is not enough” for Eichmann.  The soul demands damnation in the full biblical sense.  Only God can deliver that.

Winston Churchill once growled that a powerful argument for God “was the existence of Lenin and Trotsky, for whom a hell was needed.”

Auden entered the theatre an atheist and left it a seeker after an unconditional absolute.  Eventually, he began attending church and became a Christian.  Once again, Guinness reports no clarity – no testimony from Auden and no distinctive change of life in accord with New Testament principles.  Wikipedia mentions that Auden was an Anglican and that he had a serious homosexual relationship in the 1940s.  So, was W. H. Auden a ‘born again’ type of Christian?  Guinness offers nothing.  Did Auden have a ‘signal’ experience that changed his perspective?  I don’t doubt Guinness on this.  But that’s a long way from repentance and saving faith.

G. K. Chesterton, author of 80 books, 200 short stories, hundreds of poems, and thousands of essays, is a favorite of Guinness. Chesterton’s ‘signal’ arose from wrestling with the dichotomies of beauty and brokenness, optimism and pessimism. In his book Orthodoxy he writes that Christianity was accused of being too optimistic about the universe, and of being too pessimistic about the world.  He realized that this made sense, however, in the Bible’s account of creation and the Fall.

What Guinness (and Chesterton) should have realized is that prophecy’s end, the 2^nd Coming, and the New Heaven / New Earth as restoration of the creation, completes the arc and is the foundation for the ultimate hope of every believer, whether healthy and prosperous, or tortured and dying in a dungeon for his faith.

But Chesterton landed on potentially fruitful ground, realizing that the Christian worldview allowed him to be both optimistic and pessimistic simultaneously.  It explained “why I could feel homesick at home.”

Chesterton finished his autobiography just weeks before he died, ending with a chapter entitled “The God with the Golden Key,” describing his faith as “the overwhelming conviction that there is one key which can unlock all doors.”

He famously argued, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he is genuinely thankful, but has nobody to thank.”  And, “If my children wake up on Christmas morning and have somebody to thank for putting candy in their stocking, have I no one to thank for putting two feet into mine?”

Chesterton’s most famous fictional character was Father Brown, the small town priest who solved crimes the police always seemed to get wrong.  The moral themes in the story were right in Chesterton’s wheelhouse because, yes, G. K. was a staunch Roman Catholic.  He was even considered for RCC sainthood.  Accordingly, I can find no clear testimony from Chesterton to indicate he knew he was lost in his sins, humbled himself, repented, and was born again.  If he had been truly born again, understanding the Gospel and his own accountability and responsibility, surely he would not have dwelt contentedly within Roman Catholicism, with its sacramental grace, priestly intercessions, and works-based uncertainties regarding eternal life.

C. S. Lewis decided that he was an atheist at the age of 14. For me, it was at 13. His parents were religious, but nominal, members of the Church of Ireland.  My family was Roman Catholic – my mother and her relatives were fairly serious RCs, while my dad turned out to be an agnostic.  Lewis’ atheism was triggered by his mother’s death when he was nine, his father’s coldness, and his own horrific experiences in the trenches of WW1.  He was also rebellious, despising authority, and loved the autonomy of atheism.  For me it was both the moral autonomy and the constant drumbeat of evolution that I experienced in my public Junior High, the Chicago Museum of Natural History, the subscription to Scientific American my parents were so generous to provide me, and a host of books on my dad’s shelves that supported an evolutionary worldview.

In Lewis’ autobiography, Surprised by Joy, he admitted to “an inconsolable longing” for something beyond human experience.  He longed for Joy – with a capital “J” – as distinguished from both pleasure and happiness, which depend on transitory experiences . . . a beautiful landscape, the smell of perfume, etc.  Yet Joy could be triggered by beauty, music, poetry, and human love.

On a summer day he had a memory of his brother, Warnie, with a toy garden, the memory overwhelming him with a sensation of blissful joy.  But then it was gone; the world was ordinary again.  Eventually, he realized that these ‘whiffs’ of something transcendental, these ‘signals’ pointed to something beyond all human objects.  The ‘whiff’ simply was triggered by something terrestrial.  He knew that it was foolish to make idols out of objects or experiences associated with them.  So he began his search.

A fellow don at Oxford – a skeptic – remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was “surprisingly good.”   This shook up Lewis:   “If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not ‘safe,’ where could I turn?  Was there then no escape?”  Lewis began to study the Gospel accounts and became convinced of their truth.

He described his crisis point as feeling “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him who I desired so earnestly not to meet.  That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.  In the Trinity Term of 1930 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed:  perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Now, I’ve written about C. S. Lewis before, and presented evidence that he never understood the Gospel at a personal level, that he knew he was a sinner under just condemnation, needing forgiveness, and expressing a sincere repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus.  Consider the testimony above.  As far as I know, he never recanted that miserable profession, never explained that he was ‘kidding,’ that he was in fact extraordinarily grateful that he found forgiveness and embraced a desire to follow Jesus.  In his book God in the Dock, a collection of writings, he recounts many events where circumstances cried out for him to challenge or plead with lost sinners to repent and believe the Gospel, but failed to do so without any hint of conscience.  In his most famous book, Mere Christianity, he shows zero discernment regarding the heresies that abound within Christendom.  Doctrine seems to matter not at all, even the vital doctrines tied to the salvation of souls.

Indeed, Lewis turned from atheism to become a strong advocate for theism, and even Christendom.  But a born again Christian?  I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t expect to see him in Heaven.  And I am fully aware that I am in a tiny minority on this.

In discussing his grandfather, Whitfield Guinness, Os argues that human love is a poignant signal that God provides to help sinners find Him.  He quotes a line from a Michael Martin Murphy song: “If love never lasts forever, tell me what’s forever for?”

Love is a loud signal “because it is a rare moment when we are simultaneously most ourselves and least ourselves.”  “Love reaches out, love risks, love offers, love affirms, love gives.”  (See also 1 Corinthians chapter 13.)  Love fuses two people into one, culminating in marriage, at least what marriage should be.

Yet human love crashes against mortality.  The cherry blossom is gorgeous in full bloom, but then it dies so soon.  The grip of love on the human soul cries out for eternity.  Shouldn’t love last forever?  Only God’s love satifies this yearning, because God is love, God is the author of love, God is the source of love and offers His love for eternity . . . purchased by His blood on a cruel cross.  We must come via the cross.

Whatever the signal, whether love or joy or beauty or an epiphany of understanding, Os Guinness challenges the reader to pay attention.  “Be ready, then, for the call that will come to you in your life.  Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”  What Guinness fails to make clear, throughout his book, is the destination, the Gospel, what everyone must understand about salvation, and what to do about it.  How do you write a book like this and leave that out?

He’s right in his concluding remarks that “the perspiration that follows the signal is as important to the search as the inspiration.”  He’s right in describing the materialist / secularist worldview as “poor, narrow, and constricting.”  He’s right in that for anyone and everyone, “the time is ripe for a great escape, a grand spiritual awakening.”  He agrees with Tolstoy that someone needs to “tear asunder the enchanted circle in which people are now shackled.”

Well, that’s the job of the evangelist, the Christian – any Christian who cares about souls.  Based on many other writings and interviews, I’m confident that Os Guinness is a born again Christian.  If this were the only book of his I had available, though, I would really wonder.  Is this a sign of the times, a delusion of Satan that beclouds the minds of God’s people so they don’t make clear the pressing need for the salvation of souls all around them?  I don’t know, but it is distressing.

The theme of Signals of Transcendence is vital.  The execution of the theme within this book is lacking.  But it is still worth reading.  It will provoke the Christian who cares about souls to be sensitive to the signals – the drawing of the Holy Spirit – in the lives of lost sinners all around us.  And even if you aren’t aware of the signals touching those around you, just take a shot anyway.  Hand out some tracts this week.  Start a conversation with someone who lingers and explain the Gospel.  Make it personal.  Don’t let someone go to Hell without a clear warning.  Love them enough to give them a chance!

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com

 

 

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