The Difference Between a Conservative and a Liberal
After walking quite a distance, my wife and I sat to rest in a large tent where someone was serving Turkish coffee. We both sat on little stools and the terminology “classic liberal” came into the conversation. After someone else commented, I was asked by a hippie-looking younger man what I thought liberal was.
I said that I relate conservative and liberal to the U. S. Constitution when it comes to a political definition. The liberal takes what many call a “loose construction” of the constitution. With that approach, the liberal can conform the meaning of the words to what he wants. The constitution is malleable.
You have heard progressive applied to liberals. The Constitution is an evolving document. According to liberals., it can progress in its meaning.
Related to a loose construction of the constitution is a view of government that says man gets his rights from democratic government. Man gives and takes away rights. They can change. Meaning changes, because it is subjective. Taking it to an extreme, a man can self-identify as a woman and vice-versa.
Since power comes through human construct, forms of power are human constructs, using language. This can change using language through deconstruction. Some would say by synthesizing an antitheses with a thesis, forming a new thesis.
On the other hand, a conservative takes a strict construction of the U. S. Constitution. His goal to to find what the authors meant by what they said. This is sometimes called originalism. The conservative looks for author’s intent. The constitution is objective in its meaning. It can’t change in what it means. The goal is to find out what they meant, not read into it something that he wants it to mean.
I continued by saying that this approach to reality and truth affects everything. An engineer building a bridge or an airplane must follow the laws of physics. He can’t read whatever he wants to natural laws. This was a good hopping off point into evangelism.
Our rights are not given by government, but by God. Meaning is objective because it proceeds from God. Natural rights from God are self-evident truths.
Theological conservatism or liberalism are not much different, except that instead of the constitution, someone interprets scripture according to either a strict or loose construction. Someone can look into the text of scripture and see what he wants, everyone having his own take, his own opinion. Or, he interprets the text of scripture according to original intent, what God and His human authors intended, what they meant by what they said.
Men Seek Signs and Wisdom, But God Saves by the Foolishness of Preaching the Gospel
1 Corinthians 1:18-32: The Foolishness of Preaching
In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul said God uses the foolishness of preaching to save. God saves people through the foolishness of preaching. Paul started out this section in verse 18 by saying that “the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness.”
It’s not that the cross is foolishness or that preaching is foolishness. People think it is foolishness and Paul is saying, “That thing they think is foolishness; that’s what God uses to save.” God uses a means that does not make sense. Because people think the gospel is foolishness, they become offended from it.
Of all the offenses of the gospel, Paul gives at least two. (1) The Cross, and (2) Preaching. The cross is offensive. It is this way also in at least two ways. (1) Someone on a cross needs saving. Saving comes by a powerful means. (2) The cross would be to say that Jesus is the Savior or the Messiah. I’m not going to write about that in this post. Instead, preaching.
Rather Signs or Wisdom
Paul in essence asks, “Why use preaching when Jews seek after signs and Greeks after wisdom?” (1 Cor 1:22) He divides all men into these two different methodological categories. Jews and Greeks need signs and wisdom, not preaching. In my thirty-five plus years of ministry, I agree that every audience of ministry breaks down into those two general categories.
When you think of signs and wisdom, that might seem like two items people should like and want. They are two biblical words. In a very technical sense, a sign is a miracle. Almost exclusively, I think someone should view a miracle as a sign gift. I will get back to that.
Wisdom. Isn’t Proverbs about wisdom? We pray for wisdom. How could wisdom be bad? Proverbs 4:7 says, “Wisdom is the principle thing.”
Signs and Wisdom
Signs
Signs are something evident in a way of supernatural intervention. If there is a God, won’t He do obvious supernatural things? “If He doesn’t do those, why should I believe in Him? I want to see some signs. Wouldn’t He give me those if He really wanted me to believe in Him? That would be easy for Him, if He really did exist. If God did give me signs, I would believe. Since He doesn’t, then I won’t believe or I don’t need to believe.”
The absence of signs is not that God is not working. He works in thousands of different ways in every moment. They are all supernatural. We even can see how God is working in numbers of ways.
People would say they want more than God’s providential working. That isn’t enough. They want God to make it easy for them to believe by doing something amazing and astounding like what they read that Moses, Elijah, Elisha, Jesus, and the Apostles did. People desire direct supernatural divine intervention.
Churches feel the pressure to fake signs, because people want them. They aren’t signs, because they’re faking them, which redefines even what a sign is. Churches also conjure up experiences that give an impression that something supernatural is occurring. People can claim a sign from a lowered expectation of what a sign is. Even if it isn’t something supernatural, people want to feel something at church that might have them think the Holy Spirit is there. This is their evidence for God.
Wisdom
Wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1 isn’t God’s wisdom, but human or man’s wisdom. This could be what people call “science” today. It is scientific proof or evidence. They need data or empirical evidence. This is very brainy arguments.
God is working in the world. It is good to talk about that. This is known as the providence of God. He upholds this world and all that is in it in many various ways. I love that.
A lot of evidence exists out there for everything that is in the Bible: archaeological, scientific, psychological, logical, and historical. People will say that’s what they need and that’s what makes sense to them. Even if they’re not saying that, it makes sense to believers that they need intellectual arguments.
Jews and Greeks in 1 Corinthians 1 represent all apparent seekers in God. If churches and their leaders are seeker sensitive, they would provide signs and wisdom. In a categorical way, that’s what they do. They use the preferred ways of their audience, rather than what God says to do. Apparent seekers are not the source for a method of salvation. God is.
You could give analysis as to the place of signs and wisdom as categorical approaches for ministry philosophy. Churches are rampant with both. Paul is saying, eliminate those as methods. Use the God-ordained method only.
God wants preaching as the method of accomplishing salvation. People are not saved any other way than preaching. Many reasons exist for this, some given in 1 Corinthians 1 and others in other biblical texts.
Local Only Ecclesiology and Historical Theology
My graduate school required a large amount of theology, which included the branch of historical theology. Before I took the class, I must admit, I had not thought much about the category. I know men introduced historical theology to me at different times and varied manners in other classes, but it became important to me at that time between the ages of 22 and 25 years. Now when I listen to a presentation of a position, I want to hear its history for good and biblical reasons.
I know I’m writing on this subject because of an article I read today (as I first write this), called, “Five Reasons Historical Theology Is Necessary for the Local Church.” The man who wrote it is not local church. I would point out to you, if someone uses “local church” language, he may believe in two churches, universal and local, rather than the biblical one church, which is local only. However, churches need historical theology. They need to know that churches always believed what they believed, because it is the truth. Caleb Lenard in the article gives good reasons.
Examples for Historical Theology
A strong argument for perfect preservation of scripture in the original languages comes from historical theology. Christians believed this doctrine, as read in historical confessions of faith. In a theological way, no one has yet upended that position on preservation. Since this is what Christians have believed, you could call a change, heresy. A new position on the preservation of scripture diverges off the already established belief.
Sometimes I hear the language, “the reformed doctrine of justification.” Did the doctrine of justification originate with the Protestant Reformation? I don’t believe that. Maybe they dusted it off or took it out of the trash bin, but men kept believing it or else no one was saved not long after the advent of the Roman Catholic Church.
Is local only ecclesiology also historical theology? Christians do not have to prove that a majority of believers received and propagated local only ecclesiology. If it is true, scriptural doctrine, then believers should reveal its history, tell the historical story of local only ecclesiology. It is also helpful to show how that other ecclesiology diverged from the path of truth, if local only ecclesiology is true.
Historical Ecclesiology
I would like those with a different ecclesiology to consider the historical problem of a catholic ecclesiology and the bad consequences too. Roman Catholicism affected corrupt thinking on the doctrine of justification and many other doctrines. That did not disconnect with Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Correcting justification and not rectifying the other corrupted doctrines still leaves churches with much bad doctrine. This dishonors God and hurts many people.
Men often will not say, perhaps because they don’t know, that their doctrine is Roman Catholic. They don’t teach the false gospel of Roman Catholicism, but they teach other false doctrines. Those false doctrines lead back to a false gospel. One Roman Catholic doctrine accepted is the Roman Catholic doctrine of the church. Catholic church is universal church. That ecclesiology, a false one, spread in a widespread way to Christians.
Some of you reading right now are nodding your head, “no.” Back and forth, maybe smirking, rolling the eyes. Maybe. Just think about it though. Did you get your ecclesiology from Roman Catholicism? What kind of effect does that have for your life, others’ lives, and for all the other doctrines?
On the other hand, did I get my ecclesiology from mid 19th century landmarkists (see this series, and this one)? Everyone had believed in catholic ecclesiology (just like they denied justification before) up to that point. Local only ecclesiology then arose as a knee jerk reaction from J. R. Graves and Baptists in America. They didn’t like the ecumenism spreading among Southern Baptists, so they invented the local only position to combat it. Is that what happened instead? What is it about Baptists that made them in particular prey in a widespread way to a teaching that the church was only local, never universal?
Catholic Ecclesiology
I wouldn’t believe the local only position if I thought it originated among 19th century Baptists in America. Instead, I believe that looking in the Bible and also tracing history of doctrine supports something different. The universal church view grew from seeds of neo-platonism previous to Constantine and took hold as the predominant ecclesiology only with the state church in the 4th century. The Catholic Church persecuted churches separate from the state church. Those churches existed and they believed the church was local, not universal.
A platonic system of theology, Origen’s allegorical or spiritualizing system, affected everything in the Roman Catholic Church. Sprinkling of infants proceeded from this. A corrupt human priesthood arose. Amillennialism, the view that the kingdom was the Roman Catholic Church, took hold. Hierarchical church government became the norm. Tradition took prominence. The Pope. Transubstantiation.
Roman Catholicism and universal ecclesiology led to the dark ages. It caused regression or glacially slow progress in measurements of living standards. Most people stayed stupid for a long time because of Roman Catholic ecclesiology now embraced by many professing Christians. Satan used it greatly. The Protestant Reformation did not correct all that Roman Catholicism ruined. It embraced or absorbed Roman Catholic ecclesiology and eschatology with few exceptions.
Consequential Regression
Byproduct of Roman Catholic Ecclesiology
Even if there is notable minute progress to which someone might point in correct thinking about issues of life, it is an exception. It is usually a few bright spots mixed into still astounding darkness. Useful scientific discovery overall, subduing and having dominion, came to a stop for over a thousand years because of Roman Catholicism. Wherever it spread, such as Central and South America, left its destructive nature.
Everywhere the Roman Catholic Church took hold still continues a worse place to live because of its influence. It is a byproduct of Roman Catholic ecclesiology, that can’t be separated from its system of interpretation. As I say that, anticipating this argument, I understand that forms of paganism like animism also left the culture in ruins. It wasn’t much worse than Roman Catholicism, and I compare the consequences to biblical Christianity in contrast.
Still today people think “Christian” means Roman Catholic. Evangelicalism is a branch off a Catholic root in the mind of the general population. Every Christian then becomes responsible for the crusades, the inquisition, the conquistadores, feudalism, a flat earth, religious wars, and widespread poverty.
Once the hold of Roman Catholicism was broken, including Catholic state church ideology, the freedom brought astounding progress. People don’t trace that to ecclesiology or even talk about it in history classes, but it is true. When Warren Buffet says that John Rockefeller did not live as well as Buffet’s middle class neighbors, this relates to progress arising from the downfall of a state church.
Wreaking Havoc
The ecclesiology of Roman Catholicism, however, still continues, reeking its havoc everywhere. Globalism itself and its damage comes from Roman Catholic ecclesiology. It is a utopian, universalist concept, that first existed in Roman Catholicism. It stems from the mystical, spiritualistic, and allegorical system of Roman Catholicism.
A religious grounding from the system of Roman Catholicism continues in leftist thinking, which spreads utopian thinking, exerting power over individuals. It has the capacity to return the world to neo-feudalism and another dark age. None of this is true. The trajectory of the American colonies and the first one hundred fifty years of American history changed the world by overturning the influence of universal church doctrine. A nation begins to suffer as it welcomes it back.
I have written about the founding of catholic ecclesiology, the universal church doctrine, many times here (here, here, here, here, and here among other places). I have also written about the history and biblical doctrine of local only ecclesiology, offering that position (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and see these two on English separatism–here and here).
Because of the dominance of a universal church through history through the Roman Catholic Church, in comparison not much local only material exists. The winners told the story. They could destroy anything that countered their viewpoint. You hopefully know the same practice occurs today in almost every institution. Some call the falsehoods, fake news. It is revisionist history based on a system of interpretation similar to what hatched Roman Catholicism.
More to Come
The Trinitarian Bible Society and Its Position on Scripture
Four days ago the Trinitarian Bible Society launched this video, called, “Upholding the Word of God.”
I appreciate their stand on scripture. What they present is what, I believe, many Christians across the world say they believe. What the above video explains is also why they believe it.
Scriptural Presuppositions
The Trinitarian Bible Society starts with scriptural presuppositions. Their practice of Bible publication arises from their biblical beliefs about the Bible. This is how it should be. It’s also what we do not see with those on the critical text side. They do not emphasize or most often even teach at all what is the scriptural basis of their position. Their position does not have a biblical mooring.
Someone who appears and speaks often in the above video is Jonathan Arnold, who is also pastor of the Westminster Baptist Church in London. My wife and I visited that church twice on trips to England. I appreciate this younger man’s stand on the Word of God in a time of much attack on the doctrine of scripture. He is now the General Director of the Trinitarian Bible Society.
Many pastors across the world use the Greek New Testament, textus receptus, printed by the Trinitarian Bible Society. They also print an entire original language Bible in the received text of the Old (Hebrew) and New (Greek) Testaments.
Separatist Heritage
The Trinitarian Bible Society is by history and, therefore, by definition a separatist organization. It started from a split from the British and Foreign Bible Society over spreading Unitarianism, hence, Trinitarian, and over scripture, therefore, Bible. As an indication of how significant people thought that was, two thousand gathered for the first meeting at Exeter Hall in London in 1831. Could they get that many to gather for that separatist purpose today?
The British and Foreign Bible Society allowed a Unitarian as an officer. Unitarian at the time became the doctrinal position du jour. It’s a familiar theological term now, unitarian, but it really does encapsulate almost every major theology error in the history of heresy. It was essentially Socinianism, which taught works salvation and anti-Trinitarianism. Unitarians denied not only the deity of Christ but also the miracles of the Bible. They did away of the authority of scripture.
For a long period of time, we would call Socinianism or Unitarianism theological liberalism. Most liberal churches in whatever denomination are Socinians or Unitarians. In many ways, we would say they don’t believe anything. They are drawn together by their denial of scriptural and historical doctrine, which is to say, they deny the truth.
Overall
I have attended many churches affiliated with the Trinitarian Bible Society (TBS) in England. Some strong churches exist who would not fellowship with the Trinitarian Bible Society, but very few. A majority of the strongest churches in England, where the best representation of New Testament Christianity exists, associate themselves with the TBS. This says much about the outcome or consequences of the received text of the original languages of scripture and the King James Version, which these churches support and propagate.
I differ from most of these Trinitarian Bible Society affiliated institutions in ecclesiology, eschatology, and dispensationalism versus covenant theology. That saddens me, but it does not take away the joy I have for what they do believe. I rejoice in that. I have more in common with these churches than I do most other Baptist churches today.
The churches affiliated with the Trinitarian Bible Society believe an orthodox, true position on the Trinity and about the Lord Jesus Christ. They preach a true gospel, including repentance and Lordship. TBS type churches utilize reverent worship. They are active in their evangelism of the lost. Their churches are not worldly churches. Their preaching of scripture is dense and thorough. They rely on scripture for their success. I am not saying these doctrines and practices are all that matter, but they do distinguish the Trinitarian Bible Society affiliated churches.
Perverting Beauty Perverting Truth and Perverting Truth Perverting Beauty
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
God and Beauty
God is one. All truth, goodness, and beauty proceed from God. Since God is one, His truth, goodness, and beauty are one. You can’t take away from one of these three without taking away from the other two. Each of those relate to God, so their perversion perverts an understanding of God, creates a false god or false gods, and/or takes glory from the one and true God.
God is beautiful and beauty itself also issues from Him. He defines beauty both in His essence, in His acts, and in His creation. Man made in God’s image, functioning according to His likeness, produces or generates beauty and beautiful works. Of course, sinful man operating in his flesh does not do that; only his performing according to the image of God. This requires regeneration. After conversion, he can, and should generate only beauty and beautiful works, but still must submit to God to do so.
The production of beauty and beautiful works means the skillful formation or formulation of what reflects God’s nature and achievement. One judges the formation or formulation according to standards aligned with revealed truth about God and what He does. A believer can know beauty. He can know he forms or formulates it. He can know when someone else does. How does he know? He knows based on the testimony and application of God’s Word.
How Do You Know Beauty?
Scripture states in a sufficient manner truth, goodness, and beauty. A believer then applies these to the world. God enables believers to do that. I call this truth, goodness, and beauty in the real world. Believers don’t just know these three in the Bible. They know them also in the real world.
God’s Word says a truth such as “flee idolatry,” “flee fornication,” or “let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth.” It assumes that you will understand the application of that truth in the real world. You can’t say that you didn’t know that. You can also understand and apply, “think on whatsoever things are lovely” or “worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness.”
When Proverbs 7:10 says that a young man met a woman “with the attire of a harlot,” the passage doesn’t explain the attire of a harlot. It assumes you know already. People are still responsible for things that God does not explain. Lack of explanation does not permit dressing like a harlot.
Like many other applications of the Bible, music and art require honesty and setting aside lust or self-will. God gives the necessary capacity for judgment. As is so often the case, the problem isn’t with intelligence, but volition.
Departure from Beauty
The Standard for Beauty
Does someone leave the truth when he departs from beauty? Or does a departure from beauty stand alone, totally isolated, disconnected from the truth? Does leaving beauty start with a flight from the truth?
The view that beauty was neither true nor false, that it made no pronouncements about the world, that it just reflected the mind or feelings of an artist was a completely novel view when it appeared with the origins of modernism in the late 18th to the early to mid 19th century. Truth was true in itself, goodness, good in itself, and beauty, beautiful in itself, separate from the judgment of any man. All of this came from God. If someone can criticize beauty, it could only be because there is some objective standard outside of the object by which to judge it.
Absolute beauty requires principles by which to judge them. If not, then beauty is meaningless. Beauty must be beautiful in itself, not from a mind or feelings, Its judgment comes from external criteria. The standard of beauty transcends the beautiful thing. For something beautiful to exist, something not beautiful also must exist.
Kant and Mill and Beauty
Immanuel Kant in his 1790, Critique of Judgment, introduced the concept of subjective beauty, beauty in the eye of the beholder. He said concerning beauty, that it was
a judgment of taste . . . not a cognitive judgment and so it is not a logical judgment but an aesthetic one, by which we mean a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective.
John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, later in the 19th century popularized the notion that art was nothing more than the intrinsic personal feelings of an artist. Beauty was just an expression of subjective emotion. An assertion of a thing as beautiful described the state of mind of the one asserting. Beauty did reflect reality, but now only a person’s perception of reality.
You can see how that man dethrones God when he decides what is beautiful. Man becomes final arbiter of beauty. Value becomes subjective based on his thinking or feelings.
Beauty Doesn’t Care About Your Feelings
God and Science
Some might say subjective beauty is a matter of freedom. You can say what you like or don’t like. You’ve heard the phraseology, especially made popular by Ben Shapiro, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” How does that relate to beauty?
Isaac Newton, believer in God, and others like him stand as the foundation of scientific progress of the last three hundred years, which started with God as the standard. God’s Word inspired science. It did not disregard man’s senses. In accordance with God’s Word, Newton and his colleagues recognized the place scripture gave to man’s reason, his senses, and evidence. This was different than elevating man’s thinking and his feelings to the only source of truth. They must function in subjection to God within His world.
Empiricism: Senses as the Source for Beauty First and then Science Second
Kant and Mill established a secular approach to beauty. They elevated man’s senses as the sole source for beauty. Empirical beauty. Not long after, empirical methods became the sole source for truth, a philosophy called empiricism. A secular approach to knowledge and truth followed a secular approach to beauty. Sensory experience formed the basis for both and it started with beauty.
Very often today, Christians say that truth is objective with the Bible as final authority, but they judge beauty with their feelings as the standard. They might confuse the feelings with a mystical experience from God or the moving of the Holy Spirit. Long ago many churches ejected to various degrees from objective beauty. Today we see many of those churches capitulating in objective truth and goodness. This follows along the pattern of the first effect of empiricism on the arts with Kant and Mills and the second with science.
View of Beauty Shapes View of God
When someone starts with God on beauty, he will have the right view of beauty. He will produce, support, and endorse only the beautiful. However, the opposite is also true. Someone’s view of beauty shapes his view of God. He might have God in his doctrinal statement, but his imagination of God will accord with his depiction of beauty. The view of beauty and the view of God will both match.
Easily the world deceives on beauty to pervert the imagination of God. The non-beautiful or what is ugly will draw someone away from the true God. At the same time, he thinks he has or sees God. The two views cannot coexist.
Two people might say they are Christians. They should be similar, shaped by the transcendent view of truth, goodness, and beauty. Their standard is the same.
If two professing Christians’ thinking on beauty is different, their Christianity will seem like two different religions. They are. One has the true God. Very often, depending on the extent, the other does not. He has God on his doctrinal statement, but he imagines a different God, not in fitting with the God of the Bible. What I’m explaining occurs today by far more than it ever has in my lifetime.
So Which Is It, Truth or Beauty? Authenticity
One can say that truth is beautiful and beauty is truthful. When you look at beauty, actual beauty, it is true. It is real. If it is not beauty, it is not true or is in error.
If it is beauty, it is not just someone’s imagination or feelings. Very often today, when it is feelings, people call that authentic. They say it’s authentic, because from the perspective of the performer, it is how he feels. However, it may not and probably does not represent the truth, which mean it is not authentic.
I think I can say the following is ironic. Authenticity isn’t authentic anymore. Authenticity is now a lie.
In the past, authenticity meant true. It wasn’t leather. Instead, it was naugahyde. It wasn’t a diamond, but it was cubic zirconia. If it is not beautiful according to the nature of God, then it is not authentic. In this way, it is not true.
If the lie starts with beauty, treating the non-beautiful as beautiful, that spreads to the judgement of truth. This is where our world is today. You can’t say something is true, but that started with eliminating objective beauty. Today your truth can be your truth, but for a longer time, your beauty is your beauty.
Force Multiplication
In recent days, as I read various material, I saw for the first time that I remember, the use of the terminology, “force multiplier.” I really don’t think I heard it before and on the same day I saw it twice. Military officers or strategists might be rolling their eyes, because of those words’ common usage.
The Concept of Force Multiplication
In definition, a smaller factor when added to a larger one multiplies the larger one in its effectiveness and outcomes. Colin Powell said, “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” On a football team, the addition of what some might call, “one key player,” results in many players better than they were before his inclusion. If you are a baseball fan, you’ve seen a whole line-up add multiple runs per game with the addition of one good power hitter in the middle of the batting order. I see force multiplication explicated by Solomon in Ecclesiastes 4:9-12:
9 Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. 10 For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. 11 Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? 12 And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
The addition of one to one doesn’t equal two in Solomon’s explanation. One can hardly measure how much greater the achievement and results with the addition of one to one. Something exists, a force multiplier, that brings more than the addition of one.
The efforts of a single person in a church can take the church to far greater affects than the addition of one. It multiplies the effort of the entire church in an exponential way. Even the addition of one skill or one surrendered talent to one person could take the whole church to a new level. A utilized tool could make one person so much more effective that it multiplies the accomplishment of the whole church.
Kinds of Force Multiplication
The encouragement of a less talented individual could bring confidence and greater motivation to the more talented individual. He may lack the spirit to continue. The production of the less talented person does not increase, but the effect of his encouragement multiplies the production of the talented person. The encouragement is a force multiplier. God knows this effect that encouragement has. If you are a wife, you could do this for your husband. If a child, you could do this for your parent or a parent for a child.
The day after I learned “force multiplication,” while working out I listened to a podcast of William Lane Craig and Stephen Meyer. They discussed with a host the existence of God and origins. If you have one good argument for the existence of God, that will help. Craig is now well-known for the “Kalam cosmological argument” for both the existence of God and the origin of the universe.
Stephen Meyer argues for the same conclusion as Craig, but gets there with what he calls “inference to the best explanation.” His inference is a God hypothesis, part of the name of his magnus opus, Return of the God Hypothesis. He says that the choice of God as a hypothesis best explains the available data, whether the irreducible complexity of the cell or the information found in a strand of DNA.
If it is true that God is the explanation for everything, then one would think more than one argument exists for that. It’s like doing a math problem and checking the outcome of your figures by the use of a second method. Joining the inferential argument by Meyer, a more inductive approach, to the philosophical argument, more a deductive tact, it becomes a force multiplier to Craig.
The Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
Each true path ends in God. And those are not the only ways to reach that same outcome. Several more exist than the inductive argument of Meyer and the deductive one of Craig.
As I think about force multiplication, I am reminded of the statement, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” A church is a body. Each body part fits into the whole. Each body part functions in a greater way by fitting into the whole body. A church can outperform the actual summation of the abilities of each member by their working together.
When you were reading this post, you perhaps thought of other force multipliers for the church, your family, and your individual life. You think, prayer. Maybe you added, God’s working in your life, or Bible knowledge. As powerful as America is, its rebellion against God can and will debilitate its apparent advantages. The United States could lose its technological dominance very quickly. God Himself is the ultimate force multiplier.
Bifurcation in Beauty: Dualism of Spiritual/Sacred and Natural/Secular, Pt. 2
Bodily Resurrection as Paradigm for Unity Regarding Beauty
Jesus’ Bodily Resurrection
The bodily resurrection of Jesus reveals a paradigm for the unified physical and spiritual. It contradicts a denigration of the physical. Bodies are not the product of chance. God created them and they have a purpose, His purpose.
The Greeks in Corinth according to Gnosticism, joining others across the Roman Empire, denied bodily resurrection. God’s creation of the material world deems it valuable. Just like God redeems sinful mankind, He will also redeem His physical creation. God created man in His image in a physical body. Paul also commands in 1 Corinthians 6:20, “Glorify God in your body.”
In addition to creating a physical world and man in a physical body, God took human flesh and raised it from the dead. The Greeks and others were fine with a spiritual sort of phantom resurrection, Jesus as an archetype or an avatar. However, the power in Christianity, and why the Empire persecuted Christians, was because Jesus really did bodily rise.
Future Bodily Resurrection
In the future, believers in resurrected physical bodies will inhabit a new physical creation. Jesus rose as a firstfruit of that future resurrection. It is more than an archetype. It is a true, real, factual, and historical event that presupposes other future events. As such it sits at the foundation of the gospel message. God requires a belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ as a prerequisite for one’s own future bodily resurrection.
As a result of a natural and spiritual split, Corinthian unbelievers justified fornication with the statement, “Meats for the belly and the belly for meats.” They considered sex to be natural or physical and as such has no intrinsic moral value. It is the consequence of blind and materialistic selection. It is, therefore, neutral. Nothing spiritual or sacred would exist on that plain.
Sanctified through Thy Truth (and Beauty)
Known Truth
Jesus, God the Son Incarnate, the Creator and Sustainer of all heaven and earth, prayed to God the Father in John 17:17: “Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.” The Word of God sets apart someone unto God. Being set apart means a boundary, which is the Word of God, the truth. On one side of that boundary of truth is someone sanctified and on the other side is someone not.
This boundary over which someone can pass implies a law. A law implies a lawgiver. God is the lawgiver from the beginning. The distinction between the two sides of that boundary, set apart from the other, implies a penalty. Does the penalty occur? It does.
God the lawgiver established natural laws and moral laws. None of these are arbitrary. It is not that you just may or may not be sanctified by the truth, that is His Word. You are in fact sanctified by the Word, which is the truth. Every thing in the Word of God sets a person apart from something else, which would not be of the nature of God.
Think on These Things
In Philippians 4:8, the Apostle Paul in the New Testament of the Word of God, commands:
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
Scripture commands, “Think on these things.” One of “these things” is “whatsoever things are lovely.” This commands a person to think on something lovely because he can also think on something unlovely. When he thinks on something unlovely, he breaks that command, “Think on these things.” He is then not sanctified by the truth. As in the nature of God, truth and beauty are inextricably connected.
By definition, a fact is something true or proven true. Everything in the Word of God is true and proven true. Truth is in accord with a fact, which is also reality. Scripture is reality. Because of the nature of the Word of God, you know it is true. You are certain of its truthfulness. Since God’s Word is true, you can and should know what is beauty or loveliness by which to be sanctified.
The Contradiction
On the one hand, within the confines of the physical or natural, men deny morality or objective beauty because it is deterministic machinery. On the other, in the realm of the spiritual, men cannot know if or what exists in this realm. Morality is necessary to adjudicate behavior, but it has no objective meaning. The spiritual allows for freedom beyond the restrictions of the physical. It must be private and subjective.
The contradiction comes in the incapability of natural causes to regulate morality. They are just natural. And yet the spiritual cannot judge morality because it follows personal freedom. Neither can the spiritual judge morality because it is subjective. It isn’t knowable. Everything becomes secular through this contradiction.
God is the author of the physical and spiritual world. The sacred does not isolate to the spiritual. Truth, goodness, and beauty proceed from Him. They are knowable and objective through the whole world and everything in it.
When churches and their leaders today give a wide latitude of acceptable aesthetics, they come from at least a variety of the secular view that finds beauty in the realm of freedom from objective meaning. Meaning is assigned. It is not knowable. There are other reasons, pragmatic ones, for this treatment of beauty, including lust. But the underlying thinking comes from the dualism that finds truth only in the physical world, even if it is deterministic.
Keep Them Coming
As I write this, a few hours ago a notification appeared on my computer telling me about a film called, The Jesus Revolution. That would catch my interest anyway, but more so when I saw a name actor was in it, Kelsey Grammer. I watched the trailer and found it used a book written by Greg Laurie, the most well known Calvary Chapel pastor today. Grammer plays Chuck Smith, the pastor of the first Calvary Chapel, who tutored Laurie.
A major character in the story is Lonnie Frisbee, played by the actor who is Jesus in the series, The Chosen. Someone could call that an ironic choice since that’s how Frisbee styled himself. Years ago I wrote a post, “A Modern Revival That Wasn’t,” that would help in understanding. I’ve also witnessed closely The Calvary Chapels and other California spin-offs.
The trailer shows rock music and dressing like a hippie an important part in the Jesus’ Movement. Lonnie Frisbee visits Chuck Smith and Smith must decide he will change the entire aesthetic of his church. As a result, his church explodes with numerical growth and spawns this movement all over the world. Is the Jesus of the Calvary Chapel Movement the Jesus of the Bible? He is different than the one up to that moment in historical Christianity.
Smith accepted a new, different Jesus, an innovative aesthetic, and a novel spirituality to gather and keep massive numbers of people. It also turned away older members. The trailer reveals them to be terribly wrong in not welcoming a new kind of church, dress, people, and culture. The environment for acceptance of this new movement relates to the bifurcation of truth that required turning beauty into a subjective, private notion.
Bifurcation in Beauty: Dualism of Spiritual/Sacred and Natural/Secular
You have heard, “Life imitating art or art imitating life.” In that vein, art imitates worldview.” Even when someone says, this is his worldview, his art may contradict what he says is his worldview. The art or his aesthetic is a better or more accurate expression of his worldview than other means of expressing it.
You could see what was important to Jesus by His reaction to the corrupting of the temple, His Father’s house. When someone blows his top because you dinged his car, that says something about the priority of his car, more than if you asked him. A person’s music has that way of explaining the meaning of a person’s life.
Worship of and Love for God
One biblical and historical element of worship of God is music. The Bible is full of music. Worship is an offering to God. God regulates the offering. It must be what God wants for Him to accept it.
Someone said, “You are what (or who) you worship.” Whatever you give God, that’s what you think about Him. If you give that to Him, then that expresses who you are, as much as it does who God is.
You can say you love God, like you can say you know God. If you don’t do what He says, you neither love Him or know Him, which overlap. The love shines through what you offer. It is like giving God the present you wanted, not what He did. You love yourself.
The “life imitating art” part of the equation says that art affects life. Life changes by the art influencing it. A person especially changes by the thoughts expressed about God through the music offered God.
The Meaning
What I have written assumes that art means something. It also says that art itself is not subjective and personal. Scripture says this, when it says that God is worshiped in the beauty of His holiness.
Beauty, which relates to aesthetics or art, is not in the eye of the beholder. It is objective in its meaning. Holiness is beautiful. That would mean that the unholy is not beautiful. Everything is not beautiful in its own way. Some is beautiful and some is not.
God separates from what falls short of the perfections of His attributes. That is the holiness of God. God will not receive as worship what falls short of His attributes. He separates from that as characteristic of His nature.
Bifurcation of Beauty
How is it that today churches do offer God the profane, that is, what conflicts with His attributes? Churches bifurcate beauty, just like they do with truth. They separated the spiritual or sacred from the natural or secular. Like there is total truth, one truth like one God, there is total beauty.
Churches and their leaders (or perhaps the leaders just pander to the people) went along with the split. They regarded and treated spiritual things as sentimental and emotional, not on the same plain as the natural and the secular. Church is an escape from the real world.
The music offers that escape and that feeling, which lifts someone emotionally, and is seen as a sacred or spiritual experience with God. That’s what church does as its most essential. People leave with a skip in their step, ready to go in the real world, the secular one, even thinking it was God.
Some churches and their leaders would disagree they do what I described in the previous paragraph. They explain it as something different, so removed from what occurred, because now that is the norm for a church. It’s been done so long, it’s just church now. It follows the trajectory of a revision of true worship, not true worship.
A church with corrupt music and worship doesn’t see its art as negative or corrupted. That is instead something profane to the extreme like a Mapplethorpe exhibit of a crucifix in a jar of urine, pushed by the National Endowment of Arts in the late 1980s. Certain extreme or exotic modern or even postmodern forms, those are wrong. Not the profanity churches now perform and consider worship.
Tell-Tale
Without the church doing much to anything to help it, the world’s culture has decayed. Churches veered off objective beauty, or one beauty. Something is either beautiful or it is not. Beauty is not related to secular or spiritual or even sacred.
Music isn’t sacred because it is used in the church; it is sacred because it is sacred. That also means it is beautiful, because, again, beauty relates to the glory of the Lord. A corruption of beauty, used in worship in the church, does not become beautiful by a church using it, what some today call, “redeeming” it.
The music someone plays and enjoys, and especially for someone who says he is a Christian, by that you can tell who he is. I know some of you readers hate that. You deny it sharply and often angrily. The reasons for the heat also help explain what is happening.
It is easy today for professing Christians to stand up against decadent culture. They can point out what’s very horrible in bad books in schools and their curriculum. Meanwhile, their churches are decaying at perhaps a little slower pace but a continuous one that isn’t far behind the world.
What is light and easy, sentimental and emotional, and entertaining also sells. Salzburg and Vienna and the rest of Europe went for Mozart’s music because of the former, the light and easy, etc. His dad Leopold, however, liked the selling part of it. It wasn’t lost on the religious leaders that Mozart also boosted their prominence and position.
Church Consumers
Entertainment, Not Worship
Church attenders become consumers, which is the opposite of worship. They also confuse that feeling from true spirituality. It doesn’t matter, because that feeling and spirituality are on the same plain. When the congregants leave their meeting, they take that experience as preparation for the real world. That’s also now constituted as God. The people think they’ve associated with God because it is indistinguishable from Him. It is actually more aligned with the world they enter after their assembling ends.
Even Baptist meetings have long encouraged the decadence of consumerism. They entertain a crowd. The feeling is an apparent sanctified one, which is a lie. The one who does this the best, a kind of circus-master, is a wanted commodity. It or he improves the spirit of the meeting, again this superficial, sentimental emotionalism. God is using his talent. Most cannot resist the popularity of it. It is its own pop music.
How could churches permit a philosophy in conflict with God? Some don’t judge music. Even though arts are full of meaning, they relegate it to meaninglessness. It is in this meaningless realm of spirituality, not like what occurs where there is meaning, eight to five, a real life. Many also judge against the extreme and deem themselves better by comparison.
Loss of Discernment
Young people in church often feel left out. If they get this music, it at least might connect them to the real world. This is the acquiescence to youth culture. Their hormones are raging and they chafe under parental authority. They look happier and parents think the church succeeds at keeping them. Its young people are happy. At least they can smile to the rhythm, the feeling, and the allurement.
Churches lose their discernment, described in a biblical way as unable to distinguish the holy from the profane. It occurs through incrementalism. Men won’t separate from it. They won’t say no to it. It gets worse and then doesn’t stop getting worse. To explain it requires something more than a thirty second sound byte. Even if you can, the Bible doesn’t have a play button to give the kind of proof necessary for such diminished discernment.
Country music or Country Western arose in church settings. It grew among church going young people in the Bible belt. They took the sentimentality and feelings that corresponded to the bifurcation of beauty in the church. Country western stars, who began in church, brought a more intense version of it to the world. It produced an even more extreme response.
Holy and Profane
Ryman Auditorium, the temple of country music, looks like a church building. It gives people, especially young ones, that feeling they had at church, making their experience in the world indistinguishable from church. The entertainers at church just do a lesser version of the same thing. This contrasts with Ezekiel 44:23:
And they shall teach my people the difference between the holy and profane, and cause them to discern between the unclean and the clean.
The country stars were good at country music. What started in church succeeded in the world. The success in the world, more excessive in its effect, travelled back to the church. The church accepts it, because that’s the domain of the spiritual.
To Be Continued
King Arthur and the Reality Of and Belief In the Supernatural: A Paradigm for Bifurcation of Truth
Part One
The Story of King Arthur
If you were like me, you heard the story of King Arthur and his Round Table as a child. The archaeologist Nowell Myers wrote: “No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.” I understand someone using his life to chase down this story. In the United States, journalists and historians both speak of the Kennedy era as Camelot. It insinuates a metaphor of utopianism.
When I read, heard, or saw the tale of King Arthur, I wondered if he was real. I wouldn’t have agreed the fanciful aspects of the Arthur story were true. Was he a true character though or just legend like Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox? The extraordinary figures, like Merlin, and magical qualities did not extinguish the wonder, rather enhanced it.
How does someone leap from the imaginations of the supernatural and yet inquire of the historical? The two seem to contradict. Do they? Supernatural and historical?
I would speculate that the Arthur saga disappears without human vulnerability to paranormal intervention. Normal doesn’t explain a planet hanging in space with the beauty and complexity of earth. The imagination of the human mind takes a trajectory into the supernatural. Man knows God. This is his default position.
Carlisle Castle
My wife and I have lived for a few months in the Northern England city of Carlisle. Saturday we walked around and through Carlisle Castle. We left the castle to return on foot to our flat, a small studio apartment, but we stopped along the way into the lobby of Tullie House Museum.
During the English Civil War, royalists occupied Carlisle Castle under the command of Sir Thomas Glemham. From October 1644 to June 1645, the Scots besieged the castle under Major General Sir David Leslie. The battles fought in the Civil War included Scottish Covenanters. Isaac Tully was in Carlisle the whole time and he wrote in his diary a journal of the siege now possessed by the British Museum in what are called the Harley Manuscripts. Isaac Tully’s family, who built the Tullie House in Carlisle, was a member of the merchant guild.
Carlisle Castle and Tullie House Museum dovetail at this siege during the English Civil War. Hundreds of years later my wife and I walked into both. As we passed through the lobby of Tullie House, we noticed an exhibition beginning there on February 4 on the The Legend of King Arthur. My mind raced back to my childhood.
Arthur at Tullie House
Apparently, one tale in the King Arthur story relates to Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, a Middle English rhyme written about 1400. Middle English is the very difficult English of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written at a similar time. This early English poem features Sir Gawain, the apparent nephew of King Arthur and an English knight of the Round Table. This permits the city of Carlisle to claim King Arthur as its own and motivates it to feature an exhibition with his name.
The main museum leadership stood in the lobby last Saturday at about 4:30pm. I asked the two older men and woman whether Arthur originated in Carlisle. A conversation ensued for five to ten minutes. One of the men smiled and said several English towns or cities claim King Arthur. I asked, “Is he real?” All three laughed, while knowingly looking to each other. The other man said, “Come to the exhibition!” The woman answered, that was a difficult explanation.
Supernatural
I told the three museum employees that I thought it was interesting that some or many think about a historical derivation to the story and yet it includes the supernatural in it. All three of them just stood and stared in silence. No. Comment. What turned them from very talkative and engaged to frozen incapability to reply? I said the one word, “Supernatural.” They smiled in silence and I smiled back with a small laugh. I laughed because I knew why they said nothing in reply.
Continuing, I said something like the following: “The instinct for the supernatural in these stories complements the understanding of the supernatural in the world that they see. They know all this, as complex as it is, didn’t take place by accident. It is not a natural only world.” The three still just stood and smiled with no comment. It is a government funded museum and exhibit.
If the three museum workers showed agreement even by nodding “yes,” then as government employees, they use their positions to confirm the supernatural. Nothing supernatural can be a fact. I would enjoy even a minimal philosophical agreement that, even if not themselves, others enjoy the supernatural element of the King Arthur narrative, mirroring what they accept in the real world.
Two Other Examples of Shunning the Spiritual, Supernatural, Religious, or Biblical
York
This experience reminded me of a trip my wife and I took to York earlier, where we walked into a shop in the Shambles there. Something on a sign in the shop mentioned ghosts. The two young ladies said the shop was haunted and talked of a few experiences of validation. So I asked them, “So you believe in the supernatural?” I continued, “This is not just a physical world. There are spiritual beings. It is more than just a natural world.” I stood waiting for an answer, and they stood staring at me.
Castle Gift Shop
Before we walked home from the castle, passing through the lobby of the Tullie house, my wife and I stopped one more time into the castle shop. It is an English Heritage site and has a large assortment of items to purchase. In one of the two rooms, bottles of alcoholic beverage filled several shelves to buy. On a small table, three bottles sat and a young man said that today they offered some for a sample. Two were alcoholic. One was not.
My wife and I sampled the non-alcoholic beverage, a Ginger flavored one. Though non-alcoholic, it was intended, he informed us, to give the same kind of initial kick that alcohol gives. He said that the company started during the days of the temperance movement in England, which continued today selling these non-alcoholic type drinks. I mentioned to him that the United States had a period of prohibition of alcohol. He knew about it.
I began explaining to him why the prohibition movement started in the United States and referred him to the Ken Burns three part documentary on the Prohibition. He wrote it down. I told him that in part the prohibition occurred for biblical reasons. Before he answered me, he put his hand over the English Heritage Site logo on his shirt, warned us that this was not the opinion of his employers, and then he commented on the temperance movement in the United Kingdom. He felt the pressure to offer a disclaimer that was nothing more than a historical observation, because of its thread-like proximity to something scriptural.
Bifurcation of Truth
What I am illustrating is the real-life bifurcation of truth in the world. People segregate the spiritual from the physical. They divide the natural from the supernatural. They treat the Bible and anything religious as distant from facts and even history. Few to none will make mention of it.
I would expect little different in the United States to what I’m describing in England. A vast majority of people relegate the truth, if it is in the Bible or if it is moral or even religious, to a different category of information. They would not call it knowledge. They see it as a matter of faith, which is relativistic, individual, private, and subjective.
Employees in public institutions in a widespread manner, almost exclusively, will not talk about anything even related to the supernatural in a public setting. I will often mention the Bible. I did not even do that in this instance. That alone brought total silence.
Post Enlightenment Dualism
Previous to the Enlightenment, no divide existed between the natural and the spiritual, a rebellious invention of human derivation. Both proceeded from a single mind, consolidated in a unified whole. Man reflected the image of God, which also fulfilled his purpose. This is also the truth about man. He is not the product of an accident of nature.
Modern science arose from believers in God, who saw His invisible hand in all matter and space. The arrangement of the parts with mathematical precision turned to a conception of a machine with its varied innerworkings, contraptions, and mechanisms. The body functioned according to scientific laws with the mind regarded as operating as an independent entity. The concession to man as mere device gave way to everything no longer the design of a Creator.
The recalculation of man as outgrowth of natural causes did not occur solely by rationalistic determinations. Man wants what he wants. To get it, he eliminates God, a final judge, to stop him from getting what he wants or judging him for wanting it. What I describe, however, is the means by which people discarded God for their own lust. His inclusion in a conversation interrupts their self-approval and personal autonomy and violates their conscience. As a feature of their fallenness, they avoid that conversation with its awkwardness, painfulness, anxiety, or anger.
The Requirement of Censorship with the Separation of Church and State: The Truth of the Bible Requires Institutional Adherence
Recent Twitter Files reveal widespread and coordinated censorship there. Where vile language acceptable, those speaking truth have lost their jobs. Long before, state institutions censored the most important truths in human history without recrimination.
Before you continue, I offer you a guide. This post will move outside of most people’s box. I ask you not to delve into the establishment clause of the first amendment of the United States Constitution. Before you jump to practical ramifications, consider the truth of the post.
The Truth, the Logos
When you read Genesis 1 in the Bible, you are reading the account of the beginning of all time, space, and matter. Everything originates with God out of nothing. That is the explanation for everything. It does not even exist without Him, but He also sustains it.
The Bible record is truth as well as is the truth. Scripture presents itself as the truth. Jesus, God the Son, said to His Father God in John 17:17, “Thy Word is truth.” It might make you feel good and help your life, but that is just a byproduct of its truth. It works because it is the truth. The truth is one, because God is one. Nothing in this record contradicts any other part. God does not deny Himself.
God created man in His image and with His likeness. He intended man to reflect Him in his nature. Men should treat and look at the world in every aspect like God would. They should follow what God says, the truth, for and about everything. God expects men to view the world, see it, like He does.
Modernists speculate a fully naturalistic origination and continuation of all things. They opine this as progress from the superstition of ignorance. In fact, the premoderns had it right. It never was a natural world. The Greeks were right in their concept of cosmos, which they called logos, an intelligence that permeated all space and matter and in contrast to random and chaotic naturalism.
People in John’s day understood his Logos in John 1:1, who He said was Jesus Christ, was the source for this cohesion, intelligence, and order. Paul wrote that in Christ were hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3) and that by all things consisted (1:17). That was the Logos.
No Bifurcation of Truth
Paul was also emphatic in the truth of Christ’s bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Jesus showed Thomas the wounds in His hands. He was one, whole Person. A physical body was the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Both body and spirit glorified God. This contradicted a pagan dualism, that separated truth into separate spheres of the spiritual and physical.
This New Testament presentation matches the Old Testament concept of truth, “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). Every aspect of knowledge falls under the purveyance of God’s truth. Even though someone may divide the truth into various fields such as government, economics, math, and biology, it still is one cohesive, orderly truth proceeding from the one mind of one God.
Whatever field or region under the sovereignty of one truth splinters from the one, or whenever it does, it becomes distorted, superficial, meaningless, and subjective. The greatest advancements today in philosophy and science come in what Stephen Meyer calls “the return to the God hypothesis.” The universe is fine tuned. A cell is irreducibly complex. In philosophy, only God explains the existence of everything that exists. It’s impossible for something that exists not to have a reason for its existence.
Separating the truth from government, art, music, and economics, leaves any one in chaos and moral relativism. The gospel does not stand apart from all the truth of the Bible. And the gospel itself cannot and should not be divided into separate components of different degrees of subjective value. For instance, it is good for social reasons and perhaps psychological ones but not to reconcile to God and appease His holy wrath.
Religion the Truth, Equal with Facts
The state is good with religion as long it isn’t the truth. If it becomes the truth, it is equal with facts, science, math, and engineering. True religion cannot just stop with the true definitions of a man and of a woman. Next it says you go to Hell if you reject Jesus Christ. Even worse it limits your marijuana use.
Much of the philosophical conversation today revolves around what I here write. One faction, even considered conservative now, bemoans the loss of Western Civilization and its advantages. It is the water in which we swim, even if no longer Judeo-Christian ethics.
Classically liberal intellectuals warn readers and listeners. They won’t like the disappearance of Christianity, hearkening Nietzche’s prophecy about the death of God in the 19th century. However, if you remove the resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Christ, the consummation of all things in the future literal, physical reign of Jesus Christ, you eradicate all of Christianity. It is a whole that cannot be separated into disjunctive parts.
Total Truth
For a long time Christians self-censored by backing away from total truth (the title of Nancy Pearcey’s book). They stopped bringing the truth to all the subjects and every institution, all ordained by God. The dismissal of one is the dismissal of all.
A moral statement is either true or false. True moral statements come from the Word of God. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, nothing else the Bible says is true. Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 15. You cannot chop the Bible up like that. The moral values become meaningless without the truth of the history and the scientific declarations.
The table of nations in Genesis 10 is the truth. The prophecies of Daniel 11 are the truth. What scripture says all over about men and women is the truth. These are not subjective and relativistic. They are objective. They are true. All these writings should be taught everywhere as truth, not in religion class as an alternative along side the lies of other religions.
The separation of church and state, which is not in the United States Constitution, necessitates censorship. Anything church related is only church related and stays in the church. Only state stuff belongs in the state, which as many of you know, includes everything in the world, including biblical issues like marriage and parenting practices. Then the state labels all of theirs science and facts and outside of the state, unless cooperating with the state, subjective, private, and even conspiracy. If it is truth, it is your truth, subjective truth, which is fine as long as you keep it outside of institutions.
Take Moses into the Supreme Court Building
For awhile the state has been fine with a sculpture of Moses with the two tablets on the Supreme Court building. It is a decoration. It is a ritual. Maybe it’s even an archetype into which you read whatever you want. They cannot use it as grounds for decision making, even if its self-evident truths form the basis for logic, argument, and morality.
Perhaps a government and big business or oligarchical complex now joins in widespread censorship. Let’s just say that complex does censor the citizenry of the United States and other Western countries. Christians already censored themselves by segregating themselves away from God’s world and keeping the truth away from its institutions, whose very existence arises from that truth.
God requires more than talking about the truth at church. He requires adherence to the truth in every institution. This is the teaching of all nations. True discipleship requires national adherence. Churches at least should adhere, but their goals are further than that. They want the knowledge and dominion of His truth everywhere.
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