HVP Systems: Post-modernism; James 3:15
Satan utilizes what the Bible
calls the world system. This is from the Greek word KOSMOS [kosmoj], cosmic thinking. In every
generation and in every era cosmic thinking shifts. Some call it the
spirit of the age; others call it the worldview. It has to do with the
mentality of the culture. Every culture has its way of looking at reality and
defining reality, and as we move through history we also see that change from
one generation to another, so that the way we look at reality is much different
from the way our parents looked at reality. What makes that difference is the
influence of culture, cultural thinking, the spirit of
the age on each generation. One thing that is important for us as believers is to
be able to identify what those cultural influences are, because that is a part
of worldliness. There are going to be those things within worldliness that are
going to appeal to the sin nature and provide rationalisations for our sin
nature. There are also going to be those things in the cosmic system, this
worldview, that relate to our production of human good and morality.
James says, “But if you have
bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart, do not be arrogant and {so}
lie against the truth.” Selfish ambition is man putting himself forward as the
final solution to all life’s problems, selfish ambition in the mentality of the
soul. Emotional sins begin to dominate the soul so that they affect the way a
person thinks. Mental attitude sins, then, will affect the way you think. Then
there is the prohibition in the past part of the verse: “do not be arrogant and
{so} lie against the truth.” There is a very interesting juxtaposition of ideas
here. In arrogance there are four components which we identify as arrogance
skills. The more you practice these the more skilled you will be at promoting
yourself in your arrogance. The first is self-absorption. If anybody doubts
that we live in a society that is self-absorbed, just look at the way the
British reacted to the death of Princes Diana, and the way Americans have
reacted to the death of JFK Jr. These are clearly
tragic events and tragic events for the family, but for the news media to camp
out on everybody’s doorstep and gives a blow-by-blow microscopic view of every
detail in people’s lives shows that we have become so self-absorbed in the
whole grief process. And that leads to the second area which is
self-indulgence. When we become self-absorbed we then start indulging
ourselves. We indulge our emotions so that rather than saying, Okay, it’s
grieving, I’m sorry this happened, it hurts, I’m going through a lot of sadness
and sorrow but now I’m going to move on, we just stop and revel in it. This is
all part of what has happened as a result of our psychologised culture. As part
of psychotherapy we are told to get in touch with our emotions and that you
have to know how you are feeling and why you are feeling and just revel in it
for a while so that you are not divorced from that. That is all part of psychology
and it is just self-indulgence because it is going to promote a “positive
self-image.” Notice the emphasis is on self, self, self.
Self-indulgence then leads to
self-justification. Now that we have indulged ourselves we are going to justify
it. We are going to find reasons for why this is good and healthy and
beneficial. We are going to justify all of our activity and then this in turn
is going to cause us to be more and more divorced from reality. Arrogance
distorts reality, and now we are into self-deception where we no longer can see
things. Then this leads to greater self-absorption, increased self-indulgence
and more sophisticated forms of self-justification and then a further
distancing of our mentality from reality in self-deception. And so it goes. It
goes on and on and on, and as there are more and more people operating on the
arrogance skills an entire culture is developed that is divorced from reality.
That brings us to the last
phrase: “They lie against the truth.” When you are self-deceived and you are in
arrogance you are divorced from reality and so you no longer understand what
truth is. When Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate before he went to the cross,
Pilate looked at Him and said, “They have accused you of being the king.” Jesus
said, “You have spoken the truth.” Pilate disdainfully says, “What is truth?”
This is a question that has plagued man throughout the ages. The Greek
philosophers from Aristotle on down to almost modern times in philosophy have
defined truth as that which aligns with reality, that which expresses reality
and that which is consistent with reality. There is an underlying assumption
here, and that is that there is an objective, knowable reality, so that we
could speak about truth. From the 5th century BC down to the 1800s
people believed that truth was knowable and that we could know truth and it was
objective and verifiable. But then there was a major shift, and today we live
in an era when people have lied against the truth and they reject the truth.
Yet as Christians we believe there is an absolute, knowable truth. Jesus said:
“You shall know the truth.”
James 3:15 NASB
“This wisdom [human viewpoint thinking] is not that which comes down from
above, but is earthly, natural, demonic.” The first adjective, “earthly,” is
the Greek word EPIGEIOS [e)pigeioj]. This has its root in the Greek word GAIA which
refers to the earth and has been popularised today by those who are earth
worshippers. The second word, “natural,” is PSUCHIKE [yuxikh].
It doesn’t refer to a believer, it refers to that which is soulish
and related to the person who is dichotomous, just having a human body, a human
soul, but minus the human spirit. Then “demonic” is DAIMONIODE [diamoniwdh]. It is demonic; it has its source in that which is
demonic. So here we see that according to the Bible we have an identification
between human viewpoint thinking, foolishness, worldliness and demonic. So this
is Satanic type of thinking. Why? Because
it has its roots in arrogance.
We live in a time today which
is characterized by some of the strangest things going on. Therefore we need to
learn to read things critically. We learn doctrine so that we can put on our
doctrinal glasses of wisdom and when we see things in the newspaper, when we go
to movies, when we watch television, hear the news, we can evaluate all of this
stuff. It doesn’t just come into our souls but we can evaluate it critically
and think about it.
Intuition is the epistemology
of mysticism. In today’s world there is a completely new approach to the
written word. The approach is that we can’t really understand what we read. We
see a big shift away from looking at words and understanding words. We see this
in education theory and the focus in more and more on visual things, and this
is enhanced by television and computers. In the new approach to the written
word what we are told is that we can’t really understand what we read, at least
not by attempting to discern what an author attempts to communicate! In other
words, the author’s intended meaning cannot be discerned or understood by you,
the reader. Therefore texts no longer have a particular meaning. They become
nothing but the images projected by an author and mean whatever we create them
to say. In our culture we have lost the concept of truth as absolute. We are
operating on arrogance skills of self-absorption, which means that we are
viewing all reality very subjectively and we ate lying, we are distorting, we
are deceiving ourselves and reshaping truth so that there is no such thing as truth.
In a recent survey college
students were asked if there was such a thing as absolute truth. That is, is
there something that is true at all times in all cultures for all people?
Various responses were given to the question: Truth is what you believe; there
is no absolute truth; if there were such a thing, how would we even know it?; people who believe in absolutes are dangerous.
We have redefined the term
“tolerance.” Tolerance for most of us when we were growing up meant that you
held to your convictions and beliefs, you knew what was right and what was
wrong, and though there may have been someone who disagreed with us you
respected their right to disagree, but they were still wrong. But they had the
right to have their opinions and their views and you tolerated that. Tolerance
no longer means that. In another survey people were asked two questions: Which
of these two statements would you agree with? The first is, people should hold
strong beliefs but respect the rights of others to hold opposing beliefs. Or
second, people should hold no strong beliefs. Eighty-five per cent of those who
responded agreed with the second one. There is no longer universal belief that
there are absolute truths or absolute values. Therefore tolerance is now
redefined to mean not that you believe in absolute truth but respect those who
hold different views, but that unless you believe that all views are equally
valid and equally true and that no belief system can claim absolute truth, you
are intolerant. Intolerance is quickly becoming as great a social evil in the
late 20th, early 21st century as slavery was in the 19th
century.
We as believers need to wake
up and realize that we are becoming further and further distant from our
culture. Most people in our culture, and perhaps even some of our children,
have picked up on that. That is what is seeping in through the woodwork.
Postmodernism, which is what we have been talking about here,
has the view that all truth is purely relative. Once we start buying
into that and that is in the cultural realm then what happens is it seeps into
the church. Whether we realize it or not it is eating its ways through the
walls. In our current cultural context religious belief, especially Christian faith, becomes just another valid option. They no longer
believe that religions are based on truth claims which are founded on
historical fact, for the very notion of historical fact is no longer valid.
Faith has become something that is purely subjective and reduces
interpretation, language and meaning to nothing more than personal preferences
or opinions. Religion is nothing more than expression of your personal taste
rather than a statement reflecting facts and realities because there is no
knowable objective reality.
Historically, truth has
always been defined as that which corresponds to reality, so that reality was
viewed as having an objective existence that was knowable. Yet today truth is
viewed as something that is just based on a collective consciousness. It is on
the group. What does the group come up with? That is the collective
consciousness… truth isn’t something that is fixed by an external reality but
it is decided socially by a group or perhaps by an individual. Truth,
therefore, is something that is manufactured or constructed; it is the result
of being socially constructed. So everything is the result of a social
construct, whether it is the Bible, the Constitution, the Koran, Homer, or
whether it is some tribal tale in Africa that has been handed down from
generation to generation. All of these are social constructs. In order to
understand anything what we have to do is to deconstruct the text.
Postmodernism is the
worldview and its application in law and interpretation is called deconstructionism. Then it also goes hand-in-hand with an
emphasis on multiculturalism, and this flows from its emphasis on everybody as
the source of their own truth. Because if your culture over here is African,
and your culture over here is homosexual, and your culture over here is Asian,
and your culture over here is “just a bunch of white male Europeans—you’re the
worst of the bunch but we’ll let you in because you’ve been here a long
time—then your culture has produced its value system. You can’t tell them they
are right or wrong and they can’t tell you they are right and you are wrong.
And of you are a Christian over here you can’t tell anybody else they are right
or wrong. So every culture has the same value and same significance and same
importance as any other culture. If you come along and say your culture is
better or try to make any kind of a value or judgment decision based on an
absolute about another culture then you are the worst of all because you are
“intolerant,” and this is the great social sin of the day.
How did all of this come about?
Hegel said that we learn from history that we learn nothing from history. The
problem is that we don’t see the trends of history very well. In 425 AD was the
Council of Nicea. It was called by the Roman emperor
Constantine. This was the beginning of the Middle Ages
which we will say ends 1517 on October 31st when Martin Luther
nailed the 95 Theses on the door of the church in
From 1517 through to 1600 was
the period of the Reformation. The battle cry of the Reformation was the Latin
phrase Sola Scriptura, the Scriptures
alone. The Reformation set another trend in motion. It had kicked off the
authority of mother church but there was another group of people that are so
glad to get rid of the authority of mother church because now they were free
from theology and could just go out and construct their systems of knowledge on
the basis of human reason alone. So they went to the other extreme and there
was the beginning of what is called the Enlightenment. The reason it is called
the Enlightenment is because “we are free from the darkness of theology and now
we have the light of human reason to get us into truth.” At the end of the 16th
century there was the birth of Rene Descartes. He changed things phenomenally
through the whole Enlightenment period because he argued that from reason alone
man can arrive at ultimate truth. They still believed that man could achieve
truth with a capital T and that there was a universal truth around which man
could organize all meaning in life. So he came up with the phrase, “I think,
therefore I am.” What that means is that he asked, How
do I know that God is not deceiving me? How do I know that pain is not just a
figment of my imagination? He used the principle of scepticism and he started
doubting everything. From that phrase, I think, therefore I am, he tries to argue to all arenas of knowledge through the
use of logic, on the basis of this one principle. He is the first of the great
rationalists. Rationalists put the ultimate authority in human reason, but it
is an expression of faith, isn’t it? I believe that my reasoning is capable of
constructing a perfect understanding reality. I can come up with truth on the
basis of unaided human reason. Then in reaction to that there were some other
philosophers such as John Locke and others who came up with what is called
empiricism. They didn’t believe that you could start with reason alone but that
knowledge started with sense data, what you see, feel, taste, smell. And that in the mind we are born with an empty slate
and all this sense information comes in and our mind categorizes it and
classifies it. And that becomes the basis for knowledge. So we say, to simplify
it, it is based on experience. Man on the basis of experience alone can
construct his whole view of reality. But of course as we have seen many times
both reason and empiricism are limited. Ultimately you have to make some
assumptions in reason that you can’t prove, so you just have to assume those by
faith. It is the same with empiricism. Scripture says that God has spoken into
the human realm revelation and we are going to trust that. It is not that it is
opposed to reason and experience but the Christian view is that man is going starts
from revelation and then through the use of reason and logic and empiricism man
is going to construct reality.
Locke grew up in a Puritan
home, Descartes was a Jesuit priest, and all through that period there was the
heavy influence of theism. As a result of that influence of theism they still
believed there was an external reality, that there were absolutes, and that man
could come to a knowledge of absolute truth.
Then there was the Copernican.
Copernicus said, like Galileo that the centre of the universe wasn’t the earth,
it was the sun. Emanuel Kant, when he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason in the
late 1700s, said that the centre for knowledge is not “out there,” it is in
here. From then everything changes, because man can no longer know the
ultimate. He devised reality into two areas. One was the realm of God, absolute
truth, and values. The other area was all the sense data, thoughts,
information. Think of it in terms of upstairs and downstairs. Downstairs are
all the details in life; upstairs is that which gives meaning. Up until this
point all philosophers thought there was a staircase that got you up there so
you could know what was upstairs. Kant came long and said that there is no staircase:
the only way you know what is upstairs is if you guess. It has to be there
otherwise there is no meaning, but there is no meaning. In other words, with
Kant you destroy all objective knowledge: I can’t know things in themselves, I can only know things as I perceive them.
If we were to diagram this we
would start back with Descartes and there was the shift in the Enlightenment.
Then Kant came along and lays the seeds for what we now call postmodernism.
With Descartes it became known as modernism. It gave rise to modern science, to
the idea that all truth is knowable through the use of the scientific method
but you still can’t really know God, and it ends up in producing what is known
as secular humanism. But in reaction to that Kant comes along and destroys the
possibility of all objective knowledge and lays the seeds that are later developed.
There is always a ping-pong
effect in history. You start off with rationalism, and rationalism always
produces scepticism. That is what we had in the late 19th century—scepticism
about meaning and value and God and Christianity. There was the rise of 19th
century liberalism which infected all the major denominations. It is
characterized by scepticism: you can’t know truth, you can’t know God, and that
always leads to mysticism. Mysticism says: If I can’t prove it logically then I’ll
just jump to it irrationally. So it is a rejection of logic and reason as the means
to get to know truth and the emphasis becomes on emotion and intuition. But you
don’t have any more truth! Somewhere in all of this the concept that there are
absolutes has been lost, and that you can even know absolutes. So anybody who comes
along and says you can know absolutes is now the enemy.