I’ve been writing on this subject a lot and for a long time, but among the few things that motivated me to write this one was a new book written by Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of Modern Self.  This is not an endorsement.  I haven’t read the book.  I just thought that people might have thought I had read the book because of the content of this post.  Hearing about the book and reading some reviews of the book were one motivation, but not the main one.

God made man in His image.  One definition of the image of God, found right in Genesis 1, is God’s likeness in man.  One noted characteristic that distinguishes man among many is his upright walk and upward gaze.  Watch yourself when you walk outside, how you look upward.  The glory of man is the glory of God, man finding His navigation by looking toward His Creator as his North Star.

True believers in God through history looked upward to find their identity and the true meaning of themselves.  They received that from God.  He defines reality.  Some now call that viewpoint “premodern.”  Premodernism measured and measures according to God.

Transcending man, beyond and separate from him, comes from God truth, goodness, and beauty; hence, those three are called the transcendentals.  Before man gets to specifics such as truth and goodness, he arrives at beauty in the immensity, order, and proportionality of the revelation of God.  These are the “invisible things of [God] from the creation of the world [that] are clearly seen” (Romans 1:20).  These are the “heavens declaring the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).

As we work our way through scripture, God’s Word reveals the glory of God, declared by the heavens  that He created and sustains, to be the perfections of His attributes.  God manifests Himself to mankind first through creation, and that revelation, which everyone knows is the glory of God.  But mankind as a race does not glorify God.  He does not worship God in His transcendence.  What happens or what has happened, and what is the result of that?

When man receives beauty from God’s revelation of Himself, this is objective or absolute.  God is the standard for beauty, so for something to be beautiful, it is judged according to God.  This was premodern thinking about beauty.  It is the truth about beauty.

Beauty was not in the eye of the beholder to premoderns, because it isn’t in the eye of the beholder.  Beauty isn’t subjective.  It was according to the revelation of God, the plain qualities revealed therein. Those are objective.  Beauty starts with God, so it is immutable.  It cannot progress.  It is transcendent, so invariable.

The truly or actual authentic is the original, like leather to naugahyde.  The latter is inauthentic.  Related to beauty, authenticity patterns after the revelation of God.  In scripture, this is termed the beauty of holiness.  Holiness is this transcendence, separation, or majesty.  Only that is acceptable to God.  If the opposite of beauty is ugliness, then subjective “beauty,” which isn’t beauty at all, is both ugly and inauthentic.

Modern and then especially postmodern thinking looks at man and then inward for beauty.   Man first is the measure and then self. This turns from the upward gaze to the inward.  Self becomes the standard, and this is subject, that is, from the perspective of self. Authentic with postmodernism means be true to you.  Jesus, however, said if any man would come after Him, let him deny his self (Luke 9:23).  The beauty of God’s holiness is the glory of God, which is seen in the face of Jesus Christ, not in the face of man or in himself.  Man’s heart is deceitful and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9).

Attributes according to the nature of man are sensual and distorted by depravity.  It moves beyond lasciviousness to all out sexual perversion.  This turn inward for authority also rejects any critique.  The idea here, even though it is never applied consistently, is that the acceptable judge is self.  Criticism, on the other hand, assumes objective criteria.  There is nothing to criticize or reject if any and everything can be good, because it’s all according to the eye or ear of the beholder.

Postmodern authenticity is sheer self approval.  This is letting you be you, which can be an anthem for postmodernism.  Oddly, narcissism in postmodern psychology says you should be other than you. Applying an objective standard, one from God, and denying self is hate speech worthy of a restraining order or worse. The narcissist apparently presents objective beauty in contradiction of self identity. This is considered harm on the level of physical violence. These concepts undergird future rejection of freedom of speech and further down the road, reeducation camps.

Opposite of God as standard, self as standard is ugly. You reader might like it, but your like of it is not what deems it beautiful.  Popular art is ugly, and all the iterations of it, and this in music, drawing, painting, architecture, and fashion.  Truth and goodness cannot be separated from God, so with the ugly will follow evil and lies.

I have contended that the corruption of truth, let’s say in the form of an unscriptural doctrinal statement, is not the on ramp to the broad road.  Instead, it is ugliness, what is this subjective aesthetic.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s not called ugliness.  It is called beauty, but it really is ugliness.  It proceeds from the imaginations of men, which is a denial of God.  It is an alluring and easy access to the broad road and then a speedy fast lane down that road away from the nearest on ramp.  This is the road to perdition.

God is worshiped through self denial.  If any man comes to Him, he starts with denying himself. An unwillingness to deny self is worshiping the creature. This is apostasy   Perversion and distortion follow.  Good is evil and evil is good, but first ugly is beautiful and beauty is ugliness.  It is the music hall and the art museum of Sodom and Gomorrah.  It is blasphemy to the name of God that ends in eternal destruction.  It will not enter the kingdom of God.  His eyes are so pure that He cannot look upon it.

It is an easy transition from beauty as personal taste, to a self scripted truth and goodness.  The god of man’s own imagination is very compliant.  He is sovereign and to them a benevolent master, much better than the One and True God, who is judging them and will judge them according to His holy and immutable standard. 

Contemporary evangelicalism has for the most part inculcated postmodern culture, rejecting the beauty of God’s holiness for the faux authenticity of self-fulfillment and advocating another Jesus made in the image of self.  Each person chooses his own identity.  Love is not defined by God and fruit of the Holy Spirit, but is a strong feeling of attraction to what pleases self.  Everyone finds his own meaning by expressing himself according to his own feelings and desires.

The institutions of divine authority, including parents, who curb or constrain self-expression, which is the total freedom to be themselves, what they call authenticity, is on the order of a hate crime.  This will cause their selves to be “unwell.”  It requires them to be someone other than who they see themselves to be, which is their definition of themselves.  Violating these boundaries is the new immorality, a narcissistic personality disorder.  From their perspective, the only hope of a future relationship is found in not just the absence of criticism or judgment, but the acceptance of what they themselves see as their true identity. 

The high octane of personal pleasure fuels faster speed down the broad road.  Without the restrictions God has designed to impede, provided through His ordained institutions, including true churches and a father and mother, the adherents to self fulfillment will continue their hurtle toward the catastrophic end.  They police themselves from the bromides of their own self help manuals.  God, however, will still judge them according to His Book.

As Romans 1:25 says, they have turned the truth of God into a lie.  They have turned the beauty of God into ugliness.  It is the ultimate form of suicide, spiritual suicide, ending in eternal separation from God in the lake of fire.

This could be a part two to the first post this week.

Thirty-three years ago, my wife and I, married two weeks, moved with nothing to California, the San Francisco Bay Area, to start a church.  We stayed until July of this year, 2020, when we moved to Southern Oregon, Jackson County, to begin again.  The church in California is solid with good leaders trained in our church.  Now we’re missionaries, but we’re doing the same thing that we did when we came to California, except with a lot more knowledge and experience.  Lord-willing we’ll do it a few more times, if the Lord tarries and we live.

I can say that I’ve now been at two places to start two churches, but I’ve also seen enough in other places to know what I’m about to tell you.  I should say that it corresponds to what you will read in the Bible too.  The latter should precede the former, but that’s not always how it occurs in real time.  Sometimes life experience seeks out the teaching and application of the Bible.  The two feed off of each other, but the Bible reveals the truth.  It is the final authority.

My experience is that the most difficult issues for a church are the ones where a desire of the flesh clashes with what the church teaches.  It looks like someone won’t consider scriptural teaching because he knows it means giving up something that he doesn’t want to lose.  If the church would go ahead and allow for his desire, it seems, he might listen and come along.  He won’t change on it.  He can find a church that won’t challenge this desire of the flesh.  Will the church confront and disallow this continued disobedience to scripture with the threat of his leaving?

The less ways that a church might clash with people’s desires of the flesh, the more people a church might keep.   Today these desires are totally accepted by society and most churches.  The church that won’t accept them is now an outlier.  Will the church require compliance to scripture in those areas that conflict with people’s desires of their flesh?  When one person is allowed freedom to disobey, that resistance will spread.  What one person gets away with will transmit to others.  Soon, that’s not the belief and practice of the church anymore.  The church has not kept that teaching.  Then it easily affects other churches, that also give up on that truth.

Church leaders don’t want to lose people, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t lose anything, when they don’t lose the people they have because they have relented to their people’s desires of the flesh.  They will give up teachings and practices that clash with those desires.  Leaders imagine their church will lose a majority of its younger people, because they want the music, dress, entertainment, social media, and friends of the world.  With the internet, they can find a version of Christianity that will allow for anything.  Leaders know that, some competition is occurring here, pressuring them to compete against potential departure, like keeping a customer.

The item coveted by the flesh is an idol.  Covetousness is idolatry (Col 3:5).  Jeroboam wanted to keep his people in the Northern Kingdom, so he built altars with golden calves at Dan and Bethel (1 Kings 12).  They might have an instinct against the convenience of the fleshly desire to obey by traveling down to Jerusalem to worship.  Jerusalem offered an invisible God.  Jeroboam provided a visible alternative, which could compete with the convention, tradition, or norm, the old way, of Jerusalem.  The visible calf was the comfort Aaron offered in Exodus 32 when fear struck the people at the base of Mt. Sinai.

Early in California I ran to the grocery store to pick something up there and a church member was two people ahead in the express lane.  He sat down one bottle of hard liquor on the counter.  I didn’t know about this.  So what do I do?   I wanted to say nothing.  I wanted to stare at candy bar selection to my right, play like I didn’t see him.  These are the most difficult issues in a church.

I look at the giving records of the church, and certain members with very high paying jobs are giving little to nothing in the offering plate.  They just drove their new expensive car into the church parking lot, so they can afford that.  Do you think they want that conversation about giving?

Someone with no time for evangelism has plenty of time to hang out with friends.  He or she has regular recreation and party time.  Ask for a fun trip and he’s ready to go.  He “can’t” come to a work day.  Entertainment references and pop knowledge come from his lips, but rarely to never a scripture verse or biblical expression.  Is he or she going to like your confrontation over this deluge of popular culture?

Is it appropriate that one of the women of your church shows cleavage?  A partial view of her breasts is readily available?  This isn’t the Trinity.  This isn’t the doctrine of justification.  This is whether God allow for women revealing this body part in public.  If you talk to her or have one of your ladies talk to her in a kind way, how’s that going to go?

I could give many more examples, but these are the most difficult issues in a church.  A church leader might think that any one of these issues might send someone away from the church.  A person who leaves might not even say that’s the reason.  He can find something else to leave about, that will sound legitimate to him.

Instead of dealing with an issue of the desires of the flesh, one might chalk that up to an issue of growth.  Here is a weak person, who just needs to be given time to grow.  One year later, he still needs time to grow.  Ten years later, when he’s worse or at least no better than ten years before, he still needs time to grow.  The issues remain.

How a person responds to scripture on any issue is one of the chief indicators of true conversion (James 1:19-27).  The major reasons for church gathering according to Hebrews 10:24-25 are provocation to love and good works and exhortation.  Scripture is profitable for reproof and correction.  In preaching the Word, the preacher reproves and rebukes.  Paul commanded Timothy in Titus 2:15 to rebuke with all authority.  I know that’s not all of what the Bible teaches about relationships in the church, but the most difficult issues in a church are when someone considering membership or a church member functions according to desires of the flesh and that practice must be be addressed in the ways the passages say:  correct, reprove, rebuke, etc.

Consider these two statements.  “We had thirty show up.”  “We had fifteen show up.”  Which of these is better?  Let’s say that thirty were showing up until a desire of the flesh was confronted, and now fifteen are showing up.  When you report that you had thirty, that sounds better than fifteen.  Thirty sounds like you might be doing a better job.  I understand.  Many church philosophy books or church growth manuals today explain the plan for getting thirty by allowing for desires of the flesh.

Keeping allowing for desires of the flesh long enough and in order to keep people, and then these desires become part of the doctrine and practice of a church.  Much longer and this characterizes almost all the churches of the entire country.  Churches that have kept reproving desires of the flesh, they are far away and few between and are now so far out of the mainstream that Christians think they’re some kind of a cult.  They’re bad.  They are in fact perverting the grace of God that allows for desires of the flesh.

So few people are denied desires of the flesh that they must be permitted.  Grace justifies their permission.  The church becomes like the world.  The church that isn’t like the world is now wrong.  This all started with the most difficult issues for a church.

Anonymous comments, some I did publish and most I didn’t, and others under my most recent post, in which I briefly mentioned President Trump, were typical of what I get when I ever say his name.  They are angry, insulting, unhinged, foul, devoid of reason, and carnal.  And they want me to be a better Christian, or just a Christian period, by not uttering the name, Trump.  It would have been easier for me not to have written more about Trump, but I’ve chosen to double down and write something right away, because the point of putting on the pressure — they would censor if they could.  I’d say at least forty percent of the Democrat party would like public religious or biblical speech illegal and punished.  It starts with intimidation.

I do not believe these are days for mincing words. I’m 63 1/2 years old & I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.

— Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM) December 13, 2020 

I’m 58 2/3 years old and I’m pretty sure that Moore picked up the terminology “Trumpism” from her good friend, David French, when she was directed to his just published article on The Dispatch, where he is senior editor, entitled, The Dangerous Idolatry of Christian Trumpism.  He’s also a columnist at Time, and was a guest this morning on the Morning Joe show on MSNBC.  The Dispatch was a publication launched in October 2019 by men notoriously neoconservative and never-Trump, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg.  Trump, of course, has been hated by the pure neocons, ever since he came on the scene, pummeling Governor Jeb Bush out of the 2016 primaries.

For a start, whatever Trumpism is, Beth Moore herself, her kind, and their teaching are more dangerous than it.  This is not to approve of much of what French exposed in his piece, even though I do understand the thinking of those people more than I do Moore’s and French’s.  A very destructive problem is this faulty thinking that Trumpism, whatever it is, is the problem.  I’m saying that I don’t know what Trumpism is because it is a word that serves as a vessel to pour many different definitions that might suit the one who uses it.  Whatever it is though, I would evaluate Trumpism as a net gain in the United States, compared to the absence of Trumpism.  It’s not a replacement for Jesus Christ.  It isn’t the formation of a new gospel.  It isn’t the answer, but it is a safe space ironically to find an answer.

Some of what is called Trumpism is not true.  One should say that everything from the left is not true.  The left lives in a world of lies or that a world that is a lie, both.  Neoconservatives aren’t biblical Christians, which are the only Christians, that is, biblical ones.  They are so associated with progressives now that they aren’t even liberal enough anymore to show up on Fox News.  Their associations with the left annul them.  They are relegated to CNN and MSNBC purgatory.

Just as an aside, who is the crowd of people that the Southern Baptist Convention or evangelicalism is going to receive and keep, who apparently accepts the gospel and this Woke thinking that accommodates the left?  They think they’ll pick them up, while they ignore the deplorables?  Or maybe they think they already have the people who, as President Obama put it, “cling to their guns and religion”?  They don’t, but those are far more likely to consider the Bible than the ones they are attempting to impress.  Those people have already sold their souls.

Trumpism has a Wikipedia page, certainly written by leftists there.  You know that you’ve got make-believe when a big part of the definition is “narcisissm,” which is constitutive to critical theory.  Narcissism was introduced to psychotherapy by the God-denying atheist, Sigmund Freud.  Those who use it, like it’s being used today, I read apply it in Freud-like manner.  It’s not what we might think, sinful pride, from scripture.  The labeling of Trumpism, which includes Trump supporters, as narcissists is an aspect of critical theory through a marriage of Marxism and Freudianism.

The Trump supporter believes in liberty, which is tied to individuality, even in the definition of Americanism.  For the Christian, which isn’t every Trump supporter, this is the individual relationship with God, rights God gives an individual (not a group), and individual salvation or redemption.  God saves individuals, not groups.  A major appeal of Trump to true believers is the individualism he represents in his beliefs, which to him probably stems from the era from which he comes, this being a far more prominent view, and then the Presbyterian church in which he grew up.  It was a liberal church, but today it would look conservative.  

The left puts its emphasis on the group — think group identity — and what you hear most often today, community, as in “community organizer.”  Individualism is equated with narcissism.  These are people so concerned for their own liberty, that they neglect the group.  The practical purpose of critical theory is said to redirect individual narcissism towards collectivism.  The individual lacks in critical reflection, destining for himself to act upon his own self-interests.  One symptom then of this narcissism is the demonization of others, anyone different.  Freud was Jewish, and especially at that juncture in history, saw this as the narcissism too in nationalistic tendencies that reject other ethnic identity, which later critical theory pointed out the need for this narcissism to find its expression in an autocratic leader.

Between the two, scripture, therefore, God, teaches individual rights:  the right to life and the right to property.  You don’t have true freedom if someone can play horseshoes in his neighbors front lawn or invade his refrigerator.  Marxism believes that the state is God.  At the root of its equality is equality of outcome, accomplished at the group level, the community.  Capitalism is narcissistic because the person wants to keep what he owns instead of sharing it all with others.  Anyway, you get the picture.

The protection of individual rights is the purpose of government.  Trump supporters, not blind to Trump, don’t see Trump as a ruler who wants absolute power.  I am a Trump supporter.  I don’t see it.  Trump was the de-regulator.  He unchained individuals to innovate, much like we saw with the production of ventilators and then the vaccine.

The oligarchy of Big Tech is where I see autocracy. These Democrat governors closing their states for business are the autocrats.  Trump was criticized during the pandemic for not “providing leadership,” which would mean a national mask mandate, something like that.  Trump allowed the states the power reserved by the constitution to the states.  His threat of intervention, which he didn’t really use, came with the endangerment of the citizens in Democrat run cities.

The freedom of religion is the right of the individual, as seen in the free exercise clause.  Trump encouraged and supported the individual freedom to gather and worship against the Democrat instinct, like a state church, to conform to the state.  The point of nationalism is the protection of individual rights again.  Open borders destroys private ownership.  People can’t be free if they are not protected, which is why the first role of government is protection.  Protection requires borders and walls.  These ideals have also been chosen to be superior to the alternative.

The left will call the individualism of Trump, not only narcissistic, but cultic.  The only cultic tendency that characterizes Trumpism, that I see, yes, is taken to an extreme by some people.  I don’t see it as a dangerous extreme, but I do see it as a necessary extreme right now to combat the collectivism of the left.  I’ve heard the left call them black or brown shirts, which is a lie.

True Christians believe in the sovereignty of God.  They believe God is the author of history.  They believe that God brought Trump in whatever way they compare him to other leaders in world history whom God has providentially caused or allowed to gain power.  Some probably have a cult like belief in this.  They’re wrong to think that way, but I see them as a necessary, even providential, deterrent to the Marxists and Communists.  They have far more adherents to their wicked, dangerous, and destructive collectivist cult.  They are warped and blinded in far worse ways than the simplicity of the most fervent MAGA hat wearers.

A means to an end, Trumpism allows Americans to keep being Americans.  Trump hasn’t come close to living like the country he wants to allow Americans to have.  He hasn’t lived it himself, but he has fought for those who believe in it.  Others who have said they have believed in it wouldn’t and didn’t fight.  They capitulate still.  If one of them had fought like he has, we may have preferred one of them to him.  This is what we got, like Israel got Samson and Cyrus in the Old Testament.

Trumpism, the word itself, is a type of critical theory tool.  Words are power.  David French and Beth Moore want you, Trump supporter, to be ashamed of yourself.  Don’t be.

Well known Christian leaders today remind people that we’re not on earth to sustain America, but to serve God and His kingdom.  It’s true.  How does that thought change evangelistic efforts right now?  Does it stop parents in churches from thinking about how they will educate their children?  Does that mean ignore the deluge of sewage that comes through the media and the easy accessibility to it?  What if your people don’t have a job because the economy is shot?  If the church budget shrinks, what does that do to mission support?  When you go to plan your week, how will you do church with the shut down or new regulations?  How is hospital visitation?  How does your church relate to the fast downward slide of Christianity?  How will your church relate to “wokeness”?

The word “bowels” is used in the King James Version of the Bible, translating the Greek word, splankna, which is used eleven times in the New Testament.  Here are related ones (9 of the 11):

2 Corinthians 6:12, Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own bowels.

2 Corinthians 7:15 And his inward affection is more abundant toward you, whilst he remembereth the obedience of you all, how with fear and trembling ye received him.

Philippians 1:8 For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the bowels of Jesus Christ.

Philippians 2:1 If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies,

Colossians 3:12 Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;

Philemon 1:7 For we have great joy and consolation in thy love, because the bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee, brother.

Philemon 1:12 Whom I have sent again: thou therefore receive him, that is, mine own bowels:

Philemon 1:20 Yea, brother, let me have joy of thee in the Lord: refresh my bowels in the Lord.

1 John 3:17 But whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?

A modern reader is not usually familiar with that concept, bowels or affections, in scripture.  The reason is it is a premodern conception.  You can read it in writings from the pre-New Testament and New Testament era.  Predmodern theologians, like Jonathan Edwards, talked and wrote about it.  From the above usage, it is common, not remote.  It is also authoritative, a divine understanding, not just a cultural one, as some moderns might think or report.

The New Testament contrasts splankna with the word, “belly,” the Greek word koilia, which is used twenty-two times in the New Testament.  Here are the related ones (4 of these):

Mark 7:19 Because it entereth not into his heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all meats?

Romans 16:18 For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.

1 Corinthians 6:13 Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord; and the Lord for the body.

Philippians 3:19 Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.)

Something being authentic sounds great.  Authentic leather, not naugahyde.  You go to the National Archives in Washington, DC to see the authentic Declaration of Independence, not a cheap copy.  That was the meaning of authentic for the early years of my life, what I would have thought the word, authentic, meant.  If you buy an authentic Babe Ruth bat, you don’t want it to have been mass produced in China.  Some external, verifiable means must be made to show the Babe had his fat fingers around that bat handle.  I took a mission trip to Mexico in high school and in the market, a man selling watches would pull one out to sell, declaring, “Only one of its kind!”  He sold it for a low price and then immediately pulled out an identical watch, saying again, “Only one of its kind!”  He sold watches that were not authentic.

The word “authentic” is now being used in an inauthentic way.   Now it is a commonly used word to justify bad beliefs and behavior from adherents.  They call what they’re doing authentic, but it is now a postmodern technical term.  Don’t think they mean “authentic” when they say it.  Now, however, young people especially like “authentic” better than authentic.  They aren’t authentic Christians.  They are “authentic” Christians.  They get more approval for being “authentic,” than authentic, but when they stand before God, He will inform them that they are naugahyde.  They are not the real thing.  They will be judged, not upon their own feelings or impressions, what they like, but based upon what God says.

Before I dig into the lie of “authenticity,” you should consider too that the word “alternative” today relates to authentic.  When I was in my teens and twenties, we started hearing about someone with an “alternative lifestyle.”  It seemed like a joke at the time.  A sad one.   Alternative is a big tent word to describe something “authentic to the subject” or “authentic to the person.”  It has mainly related to arts, but this is also where postmodernism got its beachhead.  Art was the first casualty of postmodernism, but it also, like a virus, started superspreading to other realms of reality.  It still uses art to spread, like the coronavirus attacks the respiratory system, postmodernism latches hold of art easier and then spreads from there.

If you see a weird avant-garde photograph or painting, maybe a toilet seat hanging from the wall with graffiti on it, you might think, ugly.  Others call it alternative and then authentic.  Someone is an authentic person if he does what you tell a toddler is scribble-scrabble.  Apparently it takes more ability to do it as an adult.  I was going to say, skill, but I couldn’t write that word for what they do.  Actual art takes skill.

Some “authentics” or “alternatives” do have some ability, but they make their niche, find their audience by pushing something new or different, that rings true and good and beautiful to themselves.  Their audience feels smart accepting their edgy, gritty alternative production, because it is authentic.  They acknowledge that they “get it.”  There is nothing to get.  There was nothing to get when Andy Warhol reproduced his Campbell’s Soup can, except to be authentic to himself, embrace his inner Warhol.

To give the impression that they are playing three dimensional chess, “authentic” is too called “next level.”  Someone has reached another level, like he’s taken the elevator up to a floor not yet built.  Why be held back by an actual building?  Let your mind go somewhere different. This is in the “next level” like Steve Jobs talked about when he said he used LSD in the days just before starting Apple in order to “think different.”  It is having a personal experience, going somewhere in one’s own imagination, that pushes into something no one has done before.  Sometimes, even often, there are good reasons why someone has never done something.  A person’s strange thoughts or impulses, arising from a heart deceitful and desperately wicked, do not correlate to objective beauty, lacking in the symmetry, order, and proportion of God’s creation.

I recently saw someone pushing the photography of an “artist,” who looked like a recent or present meth addict, taking photos of young alternative musicians in variations of neon light, leaving the appearance of diverse states of darkness and odd colors.  Some of his photos, like some of my bad ones through the years, were blurry, except on purpose.  They were not real.  They were not what a person really looks like.  And that’s why they are “authentic.”  They take the point of view, even if demented, of the subject, and by approving of it, you are accepting this different point of view, the alternative point of view, like the acceptance of an alternative lifestyle.

Here’s a man with a wife and children.  They look normal.  Here’s a man with another man.  One of the two appears a little different, more like a woman.  This is an alternative lifestyle.  In reality, it is a perversion of what is good.  On the leftist value list, it is, “love is love.”  It’s love to him.  It’s authentic to him.  Authentic never had this meaning before.  This is good evil and evil good.  This is beauty in the eye of the beholder.  They want to make the alternative normal and authentic by changing the word.  Language is power in postmodern philosophy.  They change the perspective.  This is again part of critical theory.

Let me clue you in.  What I’m describing in truth is just rebellion.  They are people who want to do what they want to do and be accepted for it.  They don’t want to be judged by objective standards.   There’s something very interesting to this, because these same proponents don’t live in that world.  It is not a world that really exists.  It is made up by them.  For example, they don’t want an avante-garde maid with an authentic view of “clean.”  Clean is still clean, just like the coronavirus is indifferent to authenticity.  They don’t want to fly in an “authentic” airplane, work in an “authentic” skyscraper, or cross an “authentic” bridge.  They don’t want planes built with arbitrary standards, beautiful to the beholder, but instead still according to musty old laws and standards.  They don’t, however, want that reality in their judgment of themselves, because then they can get away with what they want.  When you approve of them or just play along with them, this is not three dimensional chess, but a fool or a group of fools or at least scorners.

The English word “genuine” comes from genu, the Latin for knee, and it originated with reference to a custom of a father acknowledging paternity of a newborn child by placing it on his knee.  It really was his child.  His feelings didn’t matter.  There really was a reproductive act followed by conception and birth of a child.  Now someone is “genuine” if he acts however he wants.  His natural hair color is brown, but he’s not being true to himself if he doesn’t dye it light blue.

When Jesus said the truth would set you free, He wasn’t talking about being true to yourself.  People are judging you, you know, and instead of just caving to those around you, like parents, go off and do what you want, chase your dream, and be true to yourself.  That is now being genuine, the real mccoy.  No, truth was actual truth, the Word of God, and paying attention to and following what God said would set you free, free from sin (John 8:32-36).  There is an actual objective standard, one that doesn’t relate to your feelings or what you want, but to what God says, that is true.

In the spirit of language being power within postmodern philosophy and the more narrow critical theory, changing the meaning of the word authentic brings so-called “power” to the proponent of such progressivism.  God’s Word says, don’t do what you want to do, but do what God wants you to do — “he that doeth the will of God abideth forever” (1 John 2:17).  The new authenticity exalts the legitimacy of one’s own desires and then acts on them.  For a young person, he might add, I’m going to stop trying to please my parents and do whatever I want to do.  I’ll set up “boundaries,” again not with the normal meaning of the word, but with a meaning that I get zero counsel, intervention, or actual truth from my parents.  If the parents cross those arbitrary boundaries, they violate personal space like a trespasser, like a breaking and entering crime.

The power of changing the definition of authenticity brings faux liberation to the one using the term.  It isn’t really liberation, because it is bondage to sin and depraved self and the world system.  It makes a virtue out of the quixotic pursuit of being true to yourself.  If you are not “true to yourself,” then you are a fake.  Where does this stop?  You want to fornicate with multiple women, and if you don’t, then you are just being a fake.  Someone tells you this is wrong, but that’s just wrong to the speaker.  Even by listening to this person, you are just pandering to them.  That’s not authentic, it’s fake, not real.

The “authenticity,” which isn’t authentic, that I’m describing in this piece, has come into the worship of a church.  Professing Christians want to give something real to God, something they really feel, and that is whatever they feel.  What they feel is gritty and urban and sensual.  The judgment on this comes from the view of the subject.  Worship, however, is based on the view of the one worshiped.  What does God want?  Looking at reality only or primarily from the perspective of the subject, especially on worship, misrepresents reality.  God is not pleased.  Very God is not really pleased.  You may comprehend in this lifetime how much He dislikes it, but you will in eternity.  It really is not worth the risk of waiting to find out.

Part of “authenticity” revolves around being free to be who you are.  It isn’t “who you are.”  It’s just what you want.  God defines who we are, not ourselves.  He is the Creator, the Designer.  Another aspect of this is that for someone to be free to make the choice, he must be able to make the choice he wants, which means not condemning that choice.  Whoever condemns the choice is taking away freedom, because he brings “psychological damages.”  The guilt-riddenness might result in suicide, because of the rejection of the choice.  The accusation here is the power of language to murder the one, who committed suicide.  Especially young people are buying into this to bring liberation. 

At one time, what is now called “authenticity” would have been recognized as hedonism.  Leaders reward the impulsiveness that Paul called on Timothy to flee.  Holiness and piety are labeled prudery and transparently fake.  Those supporting objective truth or transcendent goodness and beauty are mere whitened sepulchers, painting on their religion from the outside with their externals.  What is missed, however, is that they purvey their own left-wing legalism, a new standard mandated around personal freedom.  Without allowing for authenticity of spontaneity and originality, the freedom constantly invent, and opportunity to dress and perform as one wants, they won’t stay.  They’ll cancel.  This threat weighs heavy on decision making, providing a totalitarian loss of freedom to anyone who sees it differently.

If people will not feel guilty or regret in this lifetime, except for not “chasing their dreams,” they will face God, nevertheless.  This effects their entire eternity.  At the root of human flourishing is the eternal kind.  This sacrifices the permanent on the altar of the immediate.  I hope they fail at doing what they want to do.  Failure in the short term has a better opportunity for long term success.

Churches don’t want to lose their young people.  A majority of evangelical churches and to varying degrees even fundamentalist churches pander to authenticity themselves.  They justify the changes by marginalizing them as cultural issues.  They are doctrinal conservatives and cultural relativists.  They haven’t given up on justification by faith, they would say, but they want to keep the next generation, so they accommodate this lie.