Contending? Not Culturally Acceptable, Part 2
Jude 1:3 NASB “Beloved, while I
was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity
to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was
once for all handed down to the saints.”
In the last lesson we started on what we
are calling “contending,” because the focal point of verse 3 is that we are to
be contending vigorously. This means that this is to be a high priority. It is
another way of talking about the concept in the Bible of spiritual warfare.
Spiritual warfare is not something that takes place outside of us, it is
something that really takes place between our ears. That is the first and
foremost battlefield, the battlefield for the mind. So we are to contend
earnestly for the faith, and that starts between our ears. We have to make that
a focal point.
But the problem is that this idea of
contending for a set body of objective truth that is universally true and
applies to very human being, regardless of their background, their culture, of
whatever ideas or values that were taught to them, that critiquing that,
evaluating that, saying that there are many elements in those cultural beliefs
that are wrong, is completely unacceptable today. It violates all the
principles of so-called political correctness which was one of the most evil
ideas that has ever been promoted in human history. And yet, we discover that
numerous Christians have bought into these ideas. Not because they necessarily
heard them taught and they bought into them, but because it was just part of
the air they breathed, the food they ate and the water they drank in terms of
their culture. As American culture changed over the last thirty to forty years,
those who were born after about 1980, and maybe as early as 1975, really do
think differently from people who were born before that. The people who were
born before that were generally brought up to think about reality in a way that
is different from the way someone who is, say, twenty or twenty-five years old
today thinks about reality. There has been what people call a worldview shift.
A worldview is really a cultural view in
some ways. It is the way in which a person seeks to organise all of the data,
all of the information, all of the events in his world and to make sense of
them. And a worldview basically includes a foundational element, such as their
view of reality. Are we living in a world that is the product of time plus
chance plus evolution, and are we living in a world that was created by a
personal, infinite God? Those are radically different ways of looking at the
beginning of life. If you believe that everything is the result of time plus
chance plus evolution then what you basically think is that any human being is
just an accident, and accident that is the result of some unexpected accidental
electrical discharge on some blob of protoplasm millions and millions of years
ago, and so there is nothing any different essentially between a rock, a
cockroach, and your next-door neighbour. Because you can’t distinguish that,
and everything therefore must be material because there’s no framework or basis
within that kind of a worldview to believe in the existence of something like
an immaterial soul, there’s no basis for thinking within that framework of any
kind of future accountability or that there is life after death; that would
imply a completely different nature of man.
So if you start with no God and then start
with everything is an accident, then people are just accidents and nothing
really matters. There is no real basis for absolute right and wrong because
everything is just a product of whatever opinion has developed over time. But
if you are operating on the other side as a Christian, a theist, or for
example, if you are Jewish, if you are a Christian, if you are operating on any
kind of a theistic worldview where you have a distinct creation, a distinct
creator that has informed man about ethical absolutes, then you start with a
different starting point. Then you have a different basis for knowledge because
you accept the fact that there is a true, genuine revelation from God and it
affects your view of what is right and wrong, where that comes from, and your
view of man and nature, your view of law and government, your view of
education. All of that is going to be completely different than the view of the
person whose starting point is just pure matter that has accidentally evolved
over time into the present state.
If there are huge numbers of people who
believe one side then that is going to necessarily produce a certain kind of
culture, certain kinds of lifestyles, certain kinds of belief systems, a
certain view of education, politics, law; all of these things flow out of that.
On the other hand, if your starting point is a literal view of the Bible, and
that this is an objective revelation from the creator God of the universe who
is both personal and infinite, who is omniscient and knows everything and
therefore can properly address everything, then you have a completely different
view of all of these things.
These people eventually, as you push these
different ways of looking at the world to their logically consistent positions,
are going to end up with a huge divergence. People on one side are going to
look at something and say, ‘Look, that is a whatever,’ and they will describe
it. But the person on the other side is going to say, ‘You’re absolutely crazy.
How in the world can you think that that is what you said it was; it is
something totally different.’ It is because the glasses that they put on can
help them interpret, understand, organise all of the data in the world are
completely different. The person on the one side who is an evolutionist, a
materialist, has put on rose-colored glasses. Because often what happens is
they want to think things are good when they have no basis for it because
everything is everything is just an accident and therefore you can’t say anything
is right or wrong, good or bad. But they can’t live that way. You often hear
people talk like that: that they believe in evolution, but then they’ll say
something like, ‘Oh well, the holocaust was horrible’ or ‘Hitler was horrible.’
What basis do they have to make those value judgments? They don’t have one.
However a Christian over here is completely different.
Things that were not a part of our culture
and would not have been acceptable are acceptable today. What has changed? What
has changed is this thing called a worldview. We have gone through a complete
cultural transition from one way of thinking to another way of thinking. This
has happened throughout history. This kind of thinking is what was witnessed in
the ancient world. There were different people with slightly different
worldviews, some in the Greco-Roman word who bought into what was called the
mystery religions and were very mystical in their orientation. On the other
hand there were those who were somewhat sceptical, very similar to sceptics
today, who didn’t believe in any gods, any eternal truth, anything of that
nature; and they had their own form which was a more primordial view of
evolution but that’s what they operated on. Then there were others who believed
in a sort of blend of the two. Then there were at that time the Jews. As we have seen in Colossians there was a
distinct blend of these ideas that was a problem in Colosse.
This was what the apostle Paul was addressing as these ideas
from this Colossians mix was influencing those in the church.
People who are Christians are always saved
out of a cultural context. Every Christian comes into the Christian life with a
load of mental and moral baggage. This has to be dealt with, but it can only be
dealt with on the basis of the Word of God.
This is part of the problem that is faced
in this group that Jude is facing. Peter had written in 2 Peter to warn about
this, that this was coming, and that they needed to be aware that this was
coming. Jude is writing that this has now arrived, is a present reality and
that there are these “ungodly people” who are presently within the church,
“crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this
condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness
and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” So there is this group which has infiltrated
the church. This is a group of unbelievers and they are thinking according to
the codes and standards of the world outside the church. But there are also those
who are within the church who have bought into the same ideas they had before
they were saved and they have entered into the world. Jude is writing this at
the prompting, the motivation, and the stimulation of God the Holy Spirit.
We saw that in Jude three, used as an
illustration of how inspiration worked. It is very important to understand why
it was so critical to take the time to go through inspiration and inerrancy at
the very beginning because that establishes the principle for the believer of our
authority. That is so critical. Authority is one of the most fundamental
concepts in the Christian life—authority in terms of what is our ultimate
source of right or wrong. To whom do we go for our authority? Are we submissive
to the authority of Scripture? Are we willing to let the Scripture change us
because it is from God and God is the one who is the authority? The authority
for the believer has to be the Word of God. This is fundamental because this is
what makes the difference between a Christian and the way a Christian should
be, someone who holds to biblical Christianity….
Jude is writing for the purpose of
inciting, challenging, to motivate them to a particular course of action. This
course of action is then defined as “contending earnestly.” He wants us to be
involved in a fight. This is a certain kind of fight that has to be conducted
according to certain rules, but it is developing a warrior’s mentality. We have
to have the mentality of an athlete going into an athletic contest, the
mentality of a warrior, a soldier who is going to engage in combat, and we are
going to win and defeat the enemy. This word agonizomai
[a)gonizomai] is based on
the word which means to struggle with an intense effort. So we are to struggle
thus for the faith.
This fits a particular kind of literature
in the ancient world that involved both read
literature as well as rhetoric as well as oral presentations and sermons. It is
called the paraenesis. It is important to understand
this because this relates to how we are to think. This one is completely
contrary to the prevalent notions that are in our culture around us today. Paranaesus was a style of exhorting someone to a course of
action, and it was accomplished two ways. First of all, the positive of
encouraging: ‘this is what you should believe.’ And then it was also
dissuasion: ‘this is what you should not believe.’ In the dissuasion side it is
being critical and pointing out the flaws in other ways of thinking. In the
younger generation, 40 years old and under, this doesn’t feel good to them. It
doesn’t sit well with them. And the more they have been influenced by the
culture around them the less they like this, because when they hear the Bible
critiquing, or a pastor critiquing a certain way of thinking, there is something
inside of them that starts to vibrate and they are not really sure why. It is
because they have developed a mindset and have absorbed a certain value system
from the culture around them that they have never really taken out into the
light of day and looked at and evaluated and changed. And they are still
thinking like a pagan. They say, ‘You know, that’s not really right to say that
what other people believe is wrong.’
So this idea of paraenesis
had the idea of stating positively what we would believe but contrasting it
negatively with what the opposite was. A lot of times when we learn ideas, we
learn positive things, we don’t connect the dots to some of the things that
they believed that are off-base a little bit or not quite right.
So we are to contend earnestly for the
faith. This is another problem that we face in our culture today. This
whole idea of the faith is the assertion of something that is very
positive, something that is an absolute. It is the Greek word pistis [pistij]
and it refers to the content of what we believe. Sometimes it refers to the act
of believing. As a noun it still refers to an action, but here it refers to the
content of what we believe. It is stated in such a way that it is emphasising
that there is a set defined body of beliefs that are correct and anything else
is incorrect, and we are to be in the process of striving, contending, fighting
for, maintaining the integrity of, that belief system. That means a couple of
different things.
First of all, if we are going to contend
for something—be involved in a fight or a competition, a war, an athletic
event—we have to know two things: a) we have to understand the enemy; b) we
need to know ourselves. We need to be able to identify what the enemy strategy
is, what the enemy strengths and weaknesses are, but we need to understand what
we are, what our strategies, strengths and weaknesses are. That means we have
to be able to think in an objective, honest manner about ourselves and about
the other person. This part of what it means to contend for the faith. We are
fighting for this and we have to be able to identify in the spiritual realm
that there are certain ideas that are wrong and there are certain ideas that a
right. There are certain ways of doing things that are wrong and there are
other ways of doing things that are right. Methodology is how you do something,
and methodology can be right or wrong.
We live in a world today where those who
are younger have really caught this whole idea of what is called postmodernism.
This is a way of thinking about the world that is very different from the
previous generations who held to a view called modernism.
What we need to do as we contend for the
faith is recognise three spheres of combat here. The first is in the area of
our own thinking, i.e. what is going on between our ears. The second has to do
with our family. If we are a parent or a grandparent then we have children and
grandchildren that we are responsible for in terms of training them up in the
faith. So we have to contend for the faith between our own ears and also in the
family. Then a third sphere would be within the church, and ultimately the
fourth sphere would be outside in whatever other area where we may operate.
This idea of being engaged in a spiritual
combat over ideas is also emphasised by the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians
chapter ten. 2 Corinthians 10:2 NASB “I ask that when I am present I
{need} not be bold with the confidence with which I propose to be courageous
against some, who regard us as if we walked according to the flesh.” He had
opposition from people who still wanted to think like they did before they were
saved, and because they brought that pagan, worldly view into the church and
were not changing their ideas according to the revelation of God it was causing
division and problems within the congregation at
Walking in the Scripture is
the metaphor for the way we conduct our life. 2 Corinthians 10:3 NASB
“For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh…” Here
Paul is talking about the fact that we have a material life and existence, we
have a physical life that is in the flesh (material), but we do not war
according to the flesh. Again, he is talking about the way we do things, the
way we conduct the war. There is a right way and a wrong way to be engaged in
this warfare, in contending for the faith. We are not going to contend for the
faith on the basis of the value system of the world, on the basis of the
negative passions of the sin nature. We are not going to be hostile; we are not
going to be vindictive; we are not going to operate on the basis of jealousy,
envy, mean-spiritedness and anger. We are going to operate on a different
standard and a different way of doing things. So that: 2 Corinthians 10:4
NASB “for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but
divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.” In other words, how we
conduct the warfare is not carnal. How a church is
going to do things, how a Christian is going to do things, is going to be
different from the way things are done in the world.
This is a great problem in Christianity
today because we have a lot of churches who don’t understand this and, in fact,
what they are doing is conducting church and have
bought into a philosophy of church where the idea is we don’t want unbelievers
(seekers) to come into the church and feel uncomfortable. They should feel like
they are in an environment that is culturally similar to what they are used to;
we should hear music that is familiar to them. When they come into the church
and hear some of the great hymns of the faith they sound foreign to them. So
this modern church growth movement say that is wrong. But they are completely
wrong because they are letting the world’s philosophical system set the agenda
for how they do what they do. It is a right thing (often they are involved in
evangelism) done in a wrong way. They are using the weapons of the flesh in
order to carry out the work of God. Paul says: “the weapons of our warfare are
not of the flesh,” they are not based on the sin nature, they are not based on
the carnal world philosophies or systems and methodologies, and using basic
salesmanship techniques in order to grow the church—which is what people have
done.
As part of this modern mental baggage that
we have today one of the primary values in that inclusiveness is good. This is
one of the upper tier ethical values—we need to include everybody. It doesn’t
matter what the differences may be, we are not going to evaluate them (that
would be judging!), we want to include everybody; any form of exclusion is bad.
If we look at that, even using the word “man” is exclusive; you’ve just
excluded all the women. If you use the word “American,” that is being
exclusive; you’ve just excluded everybody else in the world, and that is evil.
That is their value system. This is the way they think and how they have been
taught to think, and this is what is in their text books. This is why parents
need to be reading the text books that their children have, especially the
history books and of the other books that have anything to do with society,
social structures, the environment. These text books are written from a
specific agenda and parents need to address these things with their kids as
they read them so that they don’t pick up these fraudulent ideas.
One of the values we see in postmodernism
is inclusiveness is good and any form of exclusion is bad. Therefore terms like
“biblical” and “Christian” are necessarily exclusive terms, so by definition,
according to postmodern values, that is evil,
dangerous, exclusionary. When we talk about something
being biblical that means that everything else is non-biblical.
If we go back a couple of hundred years to
the 1700s, the time when America’s founding fathers were establishing the
country, as soon as we say “founding fathers” some people are going to vibrate
because, well, women weren’t involved also. As soon as you say founding fathers
you have committed an egregious, horrible sin because you have excluded the
women. The concept of founding fathers has been completely expunged from text
books used in schools for about twenty years. Now they are referred to as “the
founders”—politically correct language. As soon as you say founding fathers you
are evil, a danger to society, and you are wicked because you are anti-woman,
and you hate women because you only refer to the founding fathers and are by
nature a sexist misogynist. This is how it works.
We have to be very careful about these
ideas coming into the church, and there are some people under forty who were
brought up to think that way and they will come into a church and hear
something like that and they will just vibrate and not even know why. They
think there’s something about that that is wrong. They can’t really identify it
because this way in which we are taught to think culturally is so foundational,
it is not necessarily at the forefront of our thinking. It is the foundation
that shapes out thinking, our knee-jerk reaction, our emotions and things of
that nature.
Contemporary society and postmodernism
embraces the ultimate value of diversity, and we have to accept everybody as
being on an equal footing. This is a view called multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism started off as being something with perhaps some value to it.
Definition of multiculturalism from The Death of Truth by Dennis
McCallum:
An educational movement designed to facilitate awareness and
appreciation of diverse cultures. In postmodern
ideology, it teaches that all cultures should be empowered to preserve,
unchanged, their unique cultural
There is nothing wrong with
the statement, “An educational movement designed to facilitate awareness and
appreciation of diverse cultures.” We should learn how a people who come out of
a Roman Catholic Hispanic culture think, and how Aborigines in
When we don’t have an
absolute and we are like the people over here who believe there is no God, no ultimate
reality, everything is just material and a product of time plus chance and all
you have is accidents, that this culture over here in Viet Nam isn’t any better
or worse than the culture over here, the Indian culture, and that is not any
better or worse than the culture of the United States. But those cultures such
as
We have a mandate from
Scripture that we are to evaluate these things. We have certain weapons of
warfare that are going to be different from the weapons of the pagan worldview
systems, and they are designed for the purpose of pulling down strongholds.
Pulling down strongholds is a Greek word kathairesis
[kaqairesij], which means destruction, to tear down, to demolish,
and it is used in 2 Corinthians 13:10 as the opposite of edification.
Edification means to build something up, to construct something of value, but kathairesis means to destroy it, to tear
it down, to demolish it. That is what we are supposed to be doing. We are on a
search and destroy mission in our own soul to remove ideas that are not
biblical. Not to remove ideas that are not comfortable because there are a lot
of pagan ideas that are comfortable we have picked up from our parents or
teachers or whomever, but we have to get rid of ideas that are not biblical. So
we are on a mission and we are pulling down strongholds. The word for
“strongholds” is the Greek word ochuroma
[o)xurwma], which
means a fortress or a fortification, or a bulwark of error or vice; so that is
referring to a mental attitude that is so entrenched in our thinking that what
we have to do is go in and send in our divine viewpoint doctrinal sapper units
to plant charges under the walls of this stronghold and completely blow it up.
This is going to be spoken
of in the next couple of verses in terms of taking a thought captive or casting
down an argument. That is what we are to do—pull down strongholds, take a
thought captive, and cast down arguments. In order to do that
we have to be able to identify the stronghold. We have to know what that
stronghold is. If you are an engineer in the military and are involved in
blowing up a wall, you have to know how the wall is made, understand where all
of the support elements are, understand the dynamics—whether it is concrete,
brick, hollow, wood. All of these elements come into play as to what kind of an
explosive you need in order to take out that wall. So as the metaphor goes we
have to understand the intricacies of the thinking that goes into this mental
stronghold. That means we have to understand all these inner workings of the
thought system.
That immediately scares
half the people who hear this and it bores the 90 per cent of those that
remain, because they really don’t want to do this. They don’t want to put forth
the amount of effort because they are just mentally lazy. They just want to be
saved and glad they are going to heaven, and they don’t care if they live in a
ghetto in heaven as long as they are in heaven. But we have to be engaged in this
kind of a battle because this is what the Scripture tells us to do.
Paul goes on to say that we
have to cast down arguments. To do this we have to understand the arguments
that we are casting down. You can’t defeat a football team if you don’t
understand how they play. What we should get from this passage is that in order
to fulfil this mandate to contend for the faith a few things are necessary. We
have to know the faith, what we are contending for. We really have to
understand truth: not just basic doctrine but the entire realm of what the Word
of God teaches from Genesis to Revelation, and every detail related to every
branch of systematic theology. We have to understand all of it and we have to
probe the depths of Scripture, not just hop along the surface of the Word of
God. We have to know the faith inside and out.
But we also have to
understand the thought systems that we are going against. So we have to
understand two things. This is a never-ending learning process, and if we are
really serious about the Scripture and about the Christian life then we are in
for a lifetime of learning. If we don’t like to read, don’t like to learn,
don’t like to study, then we are just going to fall apart in the Christian life
because we won’t go anywhere. We have to do these two things, and the more we
do them the more successful we are going to be in our own spiritual life. We
are going to be able to identify the strongholds of human viewpoint thinking or
worldliness that has invaded our souls from the time that we began to grow
up—partly from our own sin nature and partly from the world around us—and we
have to understand how to take those things out biblically. We have to know the
truth, and that is why Jesus said we have to know the truth, because the truth
will set us free. From what? From
the bondage of these sin nature-based and world system-based errors and
strongholds of thought.
We are to be casting down
arguments, so we have to be able to define and identify the argument. “…and
every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of
God.” And then we are what? We are “taking every thought captive to the
obedience of Christ.” We are out there taking captive these enemy ideas that
are shaping our thinking. We are on a search and destroy mission, so we have to
make a decision. Are we going to function like a drafted private who just does
barely enough to get along, or is our ultimate goal to be a spiritual [Navy]
seal so that we are going to work to the maximum to increase and develop every
possible skill that is known to Christianity in order to be successful.
Are we going to be a special opps. Warrior? Are we going to be a special forces airborne ranger in the spiritual life? Or are
we going to be just some sort of draftee who spends most of his Christian life
napping away. Unfortunately that is what ninety-nine point nine per cent of
Christians are. We have to decide what kind of Christian we are going to be.
2 Corinthians 10:6 NASB “and we
are ready to punish all disobedience, whenever your obedience is complete.” In
other words, we are going to start within our own head. We have to deal with
this. We have to take that out, this is part of warfare. Paul says this to
Timothy in 1 Timothy 1:18 NASB “This command I entrust to you,
Timothy, {my} son, in accordance with the prophecies previously made concerning
you, that by them [i.e. on the basis of the Word] you fight the good fight.”
People talk about fighting the good fight but they have no idea of what they
are talking about. This is what this passage is talking about. We are engaged
in a warfare. So are we going to be some draft dodger
and fritter away our spiritual life, or are we going to accept the challenge to
excellence and pursue excellence in our Christian life, and commit ourselves to
a lifetime of study of the Word of God and learning about the culture around
us?
We can’t do that by showing up at church
once a week or going to some church that sings praise songs for forty-five
minutes and then hearing a little homily for fifteen minutes; all that is going
to produce is what it has always produced: baby, cry-baby, self-absorbed,
infantile Christians who don’t have a thimble full of knowledge about the
Bible, are just absolute spiritual failures, and a disgrace to the character of
God and the plan of God.
We have to learn how to think. Thinking is
hard. Thinking about our thinking is much harder. To begin with we have to
understand this. This is a foundational structure for being able to evaluate
any kind of thinking:
There are basically four ways in which we
come to know truth. Three of them are based in our thinking, what goes on
between our ears, and the fourth way is based on someone coming and telling you
(because of their authority, because of their knowledge) what is true, what is
right, what is wrong. So the first three ways are in contrast to the fourth way
which is the divine viewpoint: God being omniscient, He knows everything; He
alone can tell us how to think about everything.
Three categories: the name of the system
or the way of thinking; the intellectual starting point from which they try to
reason for all of their different beliefs; and the method that is used. The
first two were dominant in western civilisation from about the early 1600s to
about the early 1960s. That would be either rationalism or empiricism or a
combination of both.
Rationalism is basically the idea that we
can come to an understanding of everything simply from the use of our own
reason. Or in combination with empiricism, i.e. studying and analysing what we
see or feel or experience through our senses. Then we use logic and reason to
come to a conclusion. These two systems, rationalism and empiricism, became
completely independent from any influence from religion or the
Bible—specifically the Bible in western civilisation—starting in the 1600s. In
the 1600s it began to slip its anchor from any influence of the Word of God.
The hope was that man (humanism) in his best efforts of intellectual activity
can find the answers to all of life’s problems—we don’t need some sort of belief
in religion. In many ways it was a reaction to a bad form of Christianity that
dominated through the Middle Ages, what they called
the Dark Ages, because of the blend of superstition and the Bible, and certain
elements of pagan rationalism and empiricism through the influence of Aristotilianism and Platonism. It really wasn’t biblical Christianity, it was a distorted, perverted, paganised form
of Christianity. But that became identified as Christianity and there was a
reaction to it that wanted to get rid of anything related to God, the Bible and
anything else. That became known as the Enlightenment, and their starting point
was not going to be revelation from God but the ideas of man. But it didn’t
work.
Typically the cycle in human history is
that when rationalism and empiricism and logic don’t work we throw out logic
and reason and in its place we accept mysticism, the idea that somehow I just
internally know what is true. I have an impression; I have a feeling; I have a
sense of what is right and wrong. This is based on inner, private experience.
But in rationalism, where are those innate
ideas? They are between your ears. Where is the inner private experience under
mysticism? It is between your ears. So mysticism is really rationalism and
empiricism just gone to seed. It rejects the method though. It rejects logic
and reason and replaces it with a non-logical, non-rational, non-verifiable
method.
These three are all completely in contrast
to divine revelation. In divine revelation God has revealed truth to man so
that man can know right or wrong, because he can’t get to those eternal
absolutes just on his own. So in revelation we have objective knowledge, i.e.
knowledge that is true—true completely apart from my experience of it. Whether
I believe it or not, it is still true; whether I like it or not, it is still
true; whether I understand it or not, it is still true. It is true for
everybody. Biblical Christianity doesn’t reject logic and reason but it submits
logic and reason to the authority of the Word of God.
Understanding history is so important. A
lot of people today don’t understand history. Part of it is because they are
taught such a distorted, fragmented view of history that has become so
politicised that they have just resisted it. And it has nothing to tie it
together. What they have is a bunch of beads on the table but there is no
string to tie them together. What we are talking about in terms of a worldview
is really a string that ties everything together, but in the postmodern way of looking at life they have rejected the
string. So people have all kinds of ideas and they never think that they ought
to connect together. In fact, trying to connect them together is viewed as
something that is wrong.
The reason we are going into this is
because we not only have to understand what the Scripture teaches is true, we
have to be able to identify the strongholds, the arguments and the high places,
these things that are lifted up against God. We have to understand them in
order to take them down. Where they exist is first of all in our own soul,
secondly in our family, third in the culture around us. So we really have to
deal with this in terms of our own thinking. But we have to understand it
historically.
We have these four ways of looking at
knowledge and now we want to see how the trend has been in recent history.
First of all, throughout the Middle Ages and before
that there was the dominance of Christianity in western civilisation. But it
wasn’t a pure biblical Christianity, it was first a
Christianity that had been sort of reshaped by Greek philosophy: first
Platonism and then Aristotilianism, so it wasn’t a
true biblical Christianity. This is why when there was the conflict between
Galileo and the church it really wasn’t a conflict between science and
Christianity, which is what we have been told and lied to about all of these
years, because modern man can only put it in those terms. What it was, was a church that had sold its soul to Aristotilian philosophy. Aristotilian
science was geocentric; it believed that the earth was the center
of the universe. And when Galileo came along and said that on the basis of
observation the sun is the center of the solar
system, not the earth, that was rejected by the
church. Not because of the Bible, but because of their commitment to a false
science based on Aristotilianism. So it was really a
fight between an Aristotilian view of science and
view of the solar system and an empirical view of the solar system, based on
modern knowledge. It really didn’t have anything to do with Christianity, but
you won’t get that in any science class or philosophy class or history class
because they are committed to a different agenda other than the truth.
In reaction to this
religious foundation there was the rise of philosophers who were trying to slip
the anchor from the Bible. But in many of these cases they are Roman Catholic. Descart was a Jesuit priest and mathematician and he
developed a modern form of rationalism that is an improvement upon the ancient
world’s rationalism under Plato.
Then there was the rise of empiricism
under John Locke. Rationalism says that if man starts with what is between his
ears he can eventually explain everything in the universe. Locke’s basic view
is that if you start not with the Bible but with what he sees with his senses,
he can eventually answer every question in the universe.
Both of these men still have hidden away
in their thinking Christian ideas, biblical ideas, theistic ideas, because that
has informed their culture. In the case of others, even thought they weren’t
truly Christian, they thought more like a Christian than most Christians do
today because most Christians today are influenced by postmodernism, and even
though they are regenerate they think like a pagan postmodernist. This is
because they grew up in a more theistic culture that was influenced by biblical
ideas, even though they rejected the details of Christianity, but they thought
more like a Christian than most Christians do today.
By the time we get to
Immanuel Kant, because of the influence of David Hume, empiricism and
rationalism basically had been debunked. They couldn’t give any answers, it
just falls apart. Immanuel Kant came along and said you don’t really know truth
as it is, you only know truth as you perceive it. So this is called the
Copernican revolution in thought. This led eventually to the increase in
scepticism and existentialism, and in the 19th and 20th
centuries all of this is what is called modernism. It is out of modernism that
there was the rise of Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Marx and Engles and communism; all of these have their roots in a
modernist worldview. This modernism reigned supreme until about 1900 and then
it was thrown out by the intellectuals. This eventually filtered down to the
populace until they began to think in a postmodernist way. There is a lot of
difference between the two and we really need to understand that. Because when
we read the newspaper and watch the news on television and you ask how in the
world the Supreme Court can make the kind of decisions that they make, or how
can the president do the kinds of things he does, how can these things be
accepted? It is because we live in a world now where the people have not only
thrown out biblical ideas, they have thrown out the
rationalism and the value of logic that was part of modernism. Now they are
operating on irrationalism and illogic, and this is coming into the church.
What are we supposed to do?
We are to cast down these strongholds. We have to identify them and understand
them because this is what it means to contend for the faith.