In an article published in the “Washington Times”, March 4, 2005, Uwe Seimon-Netto writes of the demise of secular or “scientific” atheism. As an idea, atheism is no longer taken seriously by large groups of influential people in Europe or the United States. Seimon-Netto states two reasons for its demise. The first reason cited is that modern science has lost a great deal of stock with the emergence of the Intelligent Design movement and other leading edge science. Naturalistic evolutionary dogma holds that a material world with incredible complexity materialized by mere random chance. Evolution simply does not pass any reasonable muster in the light of current scientific investigation. New technology can look more deeply into the macro and microcosms than ever before and is rendering information pointing to something much more than random chance as the origin of all that we observe in the physical universe. The second reason cited in the article mentioned above for material atheism’s diminishing popularity is the inhumane and loony ideas that have resulted from political systems informed and organized around atheistic philosophy. The Soviet Union, North Korea, Communist China, Cuba, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia do not offer examples of desirable societies built on the philosophical foundations of atheism.
So, what is the result of this demise of atheism? For those who are evangelical or orthodox Christians it would be natural to rejoice assuming that once again Biblical truth has emerged victorious after a great protracted struggle. We should pause before we go too far down the road of celebration. Another religion is vying for ascendance in the United States and on virtually every other continent on this planet. The religion is paganism and while it may be “new” to us, its roots are ancient. Paganism has historically been the most formidable enemy of revealed Biblical truth. It offers a comprehensive world-view. It sneers at post modernity and its nihilistic frivolity. It offers a compelling explanation of transcendence and meaning. This contemporary version of pagan spirituality also offers an insidious, toxic mix of truth and lies retrofitted seductively to man’s falleness and separation from He Who is truly God. There is growing fear that many are being deceived and will ultimately be seduced by this global neo-pagan revival. Rev. Gerald McDermott, an Episcopal priest says, “The rise of all sorts of paganism is creating a false spirituality that proves to be a more dangerous rival to the Christian faith than atheism.”
Dr. Peter Jones has spent the last several years speaking and writing about this explosive emergence of contemporary pagan spirituality around the world. During a phone conversation with him, Dr. Jones spoke to me about his concern with the ignorance of evangelical and orthodox Christians. He said, “Unless we come to terms with what is happening and begin to equip our children to avoid the pagan seduction, we will lose them.” While Dr. Jones believes that the truth of God will ultimately triumph, he is concerned that many of this and the next generation will succumb to the allure of pagan spirituality. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, was a wildly popular fictional account of the life of Jesus based on a group of writings called the Gnostic Gospels. These collections were written during the first century following the time of the writing of the New Testament. Dan Brown depicts the Gnostic Jesus as a totally different kind of Messiah than the one we read about in the Gospel accounts. In The Da Vince Code Jesus becomes a fun loving guru who is not particularly moral. Dan Brown’s Jesus brings to humanity a hope for higher spiritual consciousness and fulfillment without the moral absolutes and prohibitions on which human nature easily chafes. Young and old alike read The Da Vinci Code and considered the alternatives presented by Dan Brown to the Logos of God made flesh, revealed in the Gospel of John and other New Testament Gospels, to be a refreshing change for post moderns.
Those who minimize this spiritual threat to biblical faith or merely dismiss the resurgence of pagan spirituality as a passing fad are disregarding one very real historic reality. Paganism is the preferred religion based upon “THE LIE” first told to our parents in the Garden. Fallen humans have and always will be susceptible to its seductive allure.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
Rip Van Winkle Revisited
My mother is ninety years old. She has vision and hearing issues, but her mind is razor sharp. We live in different parts of the country and being her only child I make several airplane trips a year to be with her. We talk almost every day by phone. A consistent topic she raises is, “What has happened to our country?” or, “I feel as though I went to sleep and woke up in a different world”. One doesn’t have to live ninety years to identify with those same sentiments.
I have been a pastor for most of my professional life. For eighteen of those years I wore two hats. The first part of each workday I wore a “pastor hat”. That was my day job. But every weekday afternoon I would jump into a phone booth and just like Superman, I would put on another hat. Well, it wasn’t a hat really. It was a pair of earphones and it wasn’t a phone booth, it was a radio studio. Since the radio station format was “Christian Talk” I was hired to, from a biblical perspective, examine politics, culture, and life style issues.
It was a dream assignment. Every weekday I could preach, pontificate, posture, and even get paid for my time. The medium allowed a slightly more irreverent tone than pulpit decorum demanded. In short, it was fun! About ten years into the talk show era I became much more sober about the assignment. My diagnosis of “what ails America” had been the domination of liberal politics for four decades. The solution to that problem seemed obvious. I believed that Christians, biblically informed and politically engaged, could resolve much of the cultural degradation we were witnessing. We could turn secular humanism on its head with the ballot!
For most of my life the “Silent Majority” could afford it’s silence. Our society maintained a distinctly traditional consensus about morality and truth. My notion was that now if the “Silent” ones would cease their silence the slide toward decadence in our country would be halted. However, after a decade of reading, interviewing, talking to listeners, and seeing biblically informed public policy consistently defeated, I came to realize that there was no substantive foundation for a political solution in our present situation. It was obvious that the portion of the Christian church engaged politically was wedded to partisan passions rather than a biblical vision. Political engagement, while important, was not the sole remedy. Evangelicals who were social conservatives believed Jesus, at His second Advent, would surely be riding an elephant. Evangelicals persuaded by social liberalism envisioned Jesus ushering in the consummation of history aboard a donkey. My belief of there being this sleeping mass of Evangelicals out there somewhere who, with some education and encouragement, would turn back the massive momentum of our culture toward a post-Christian era was simply unfounded. Rather than being a “Silent Majority” we had actually become a “Silent Minority”.
What most of the rest of my talk show colleagues and political ilk did not realize is that underneath our radar screen something very radical had occurred. “Christian America” existed in memory alone, if it ever existed at all in reality.
Enlightenment values had unquestionably succeeded in deconstructing much of the common cultural ethos informed by traditional biblical beliefs about law, the role of the state, traditional marriage, morality, etc. Most Christians were aware of that dynamic. Secular Humanism was viewed, since the 1970’s as the single greatest of all enemies to biblically informed faith. Other than a political answer for the drift toward our cultural decadence there was not much vigorous analysis going any further than political solutions. The insistence of the Christian Right that the ballot box could be used to retake America for God was simplistic.
When I encountered Dr. Peter Jones and his work regarding the resurgence of pagan spirituality it was as though I had been smacked by lightening in the head. While Enlightenment notions had deconstructed traditional ones, it could not do one very important thing. It could not absolve, even stark atheists, from the guilt of behaving in ways defying traditional structures and morality. Secularism, atheism, and anti-supernaturalism had prevailed in the West for many years among the “gate keepers” of society. Now this is very telling in my view: not many years before our present time, most atheists even, for much of the modern era, subscribed personally to traditional morality and structures and ordered their lives accordingly. The authoritative basis of morality and truth had shifted in a whole new direction and most Evangelicals and cultural conservatives were oblivious to the new trajectory. While Modernism deconstructed the notion of a traditional God, as an ideology, it was not powerful enough to give wholesale permission to exchange the Truth for a Lie. What Naturalistic Atheism did not know was that man is unalterably hardwired as a spiritual being. Man is bound to worship.
Culture wields great influence at a suppositional level. It conditions us; it desensitizes us, but is not strong enough to give permission to openly behave in ways contrary to our consciences. Cultural influences might tolerate someone else declaring “evil to be good and good to be evil”. (Is. 5:20) Nevertheless, our own consciences will not permit us to make public pronouncements or act out in ways deeply believed to be aberrant. We might do things in secret we believe to be wrong, but we would not want those deeds “shouted from the house tops”. In order for behavior traditionally deemed evil to be perceived as good, one needs a higher authority than external ideology. Something deep within our beings was created to give us permission from a spiritual Authority to reorder our moral sensibilities. Pagan spirituality, retrofitted to fallen human sensibilities, does just that. That is the new normal of our times. I am convinced that until the body of Christ repositions itself as the pillar and ground of truth and boldly engages the culture with Gospel truth, the pagan lie will maintain its ascendancy among the gatekeepers and will remain the prevailing culture and spirituality of postmodern society.
I have been a pastor for most of my professional life. For eighteen of those years I wore two hats. The first part of each workday I wore a “pastor hat”. That was my day job. But every weekday afternoon I would jump into a phone booth and just like Superman, I would put on another hat. Well, it wasn’t a hat really. It was a pair of earphones and it wasn’t a phone booth, it was a radio studio. Since the radio station format was “Christian Talk” I was hired to, from a biblical perspective, examine politics, culture, and life style issues.
It was a dream assignment. Every weekday I could preach, pontificate, posture, and even get paid for my time. The medium allowed a slightly more irreverent tone than pulpit decorum demanded. In short, it was fun! About ten years into the talk show era I became much more sober about the assignment. My diagnosis of “what ails America” had been the domination of liberal politics for four decades. The solution to that problem seemed obvious. I believed that Christians, biblically informed and politically engaged, could resolve much of the cultural degradation we were witnessing. We could turn secular humanism on its head with the ballot!
For most of my life the “Silent Majority” could afford it’s silence. Our society maintained a distinctly traditional consensus about morality and truth. My notion was that now if the “Silent” ones would cease their silence the slide toward decadence in our country would be halted. However, after a decade of reading, interviewing, talking to listeners, and seeing biblically informed public policy consistently defeated, I came to realize that there was no substantive foundation for a political solution in our present situation. It was obvious that the portion of the Christian church engaged politically was wedded to partisan passions rather than a biblical vision. Political engagement, while important, was not the sole remedy. Evangelicals who were social conservatives believed Jesus, at His second Advent, would surely be riding an elephant. Evangelicals persuaded by social liberalism envisioned Jesus ushering in the consummation of history aboard a donkey. My belief of there being this sleeping mass of Evangelicals out there somewhere who, with some education and encouragement, would turn back the massive momentum of our culture toward a post-Christian era was simply unfounded. Rather than being a “Silent Majority” we had actually become a “Silent Minority”.
What most of the rest of my talk show colleagues and political ilk did not realize is that underneath our radar screen something very radical had occurred. “Christian America” existed in memory alone, if it ever existed at all in reality.
Enlightenment values had unquestionably succeeded in deconstructing much of the common cultural ethos informed by traditional biblical beliefs about law, the role of the state, traditional marriage, morality, etc. Most Christians were aware of that dynamic. Secular Humanism was viewed, since the 1970’s as the single greatest of all enemies to biblically informed faith. Other than a political answer for the drift toward our cultural decadence there was not much vigorous analysis going any further than political solutions. The insistence of the Christian Right that the ballot box could be used to retake America for God was simplistic.
When I encountered Dr. Peter Jones and his work regarding the resurgence of pagan spirituality it was as though I had been smacked by lightening in the head. While Enlightenment notions had deconstructed traditional ones, it could not do one very important thing. It could not absolve, even stark atheists, from the guilt of behaving in ways defying traditional structures and morality. Secularism, atheism, and anti-supernaturalism had prevailed in the West for many years among the “gate keepers” of society. Now this is very telling in my view: not many years before our present time, most atheists even, for much of the modern era, subscribed personally to traditional morality and structures and ordered their lives accordingly. The authoritative basis of morality and truth had shifted in a whole new direction and most Evangelicals and cultural conservatives were oblivious to the new trajectory. While Modernism deconstructed the notion of a traditional God, as an ideology, it was not powerful enough to give wholesale permission to exchange the Truth for a Lie. What Naturalistic Atheism did not know was that man is unalterably hardwired as a spiritual being. Man is bound to worship.
Culture wields great influence at a suppositional level. It conditions us; it desensitizes us, but is not strong enough to give permission to openly behave in ways contrary to our consciences. Cultural influences might tolerate someone else declaring “evil to be good and good to be evil”. (Is. 5:20) Nevertheless, our own consciences will not permit us to make public pronouncements or act out in ways deeply believed to be aberrant. We might do things in secret we believe to be wrong, but we would not want those deeds “shouted from the house tops”. In order for behavior traditionally deemed evil to be perceived as good, one needs a higher authority than external ideology. Something deep within our beings was created to give us permission from a spiritual Authority to reorder our moral sensibilities. Pagan spirituality, retrofitted to fallen human sensibilities, does just that. That is the new normal of our times. I am convinced that until the body of Christ repositions itself as the pillar and ground of truth and boldly engages the culture with Gospel truth, the pagan lie will maintain its ascendancy among the gatekeepers and will remain the prevailing culture and spirituality of postmodern society.
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