The Other Worldview E-Book

Peter Jones

• Herausgeber: Kirkdale Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 630

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

"A must-read for every concerned American--and especially for every Christian who weeps at the graveside of his culture." --R.C. SproulA cataclysmic change has occurred as our culture has shifted toward belief in "Oneism."Every religion and philosophy fits into one of two basic worldviews: "Oneism" asserts that everything is essentially one, while "Twoism" affirms an irreducible distinction between creation and Creator. The Other Worldview exposes the pagan roots of Oneism, traces its spread throughout Western culture, and demonstrates its inability to save."For bodily holiness and transformed thinking . . . we depend entirely on one amazing thing: the incredibly powerful message of the Gospel to a sinful world, which is the ultimate expression and goal of Twoism. The only hope is in Christ alone."

Leseprobe

THE OTHER WORLDVIEW

EXPOSING CHRISTIANITY’S GREATEST THREAT

PETER JONES

FOREWORD BY

R.C. SPROUL

The Other Worldview: Exposing Christianity’s Greatest Threat

Copyright 2015 Peter Jones

Kirkdale Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

KirkdalePress.com

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Kirkdale Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are author’s own translation or are taken from the English Standard Version (ESV), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (ASV) are from the American Standard Version. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) are from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission. NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® and NIV® are registered trademarks of Biblica, Inc. Use of either trademark for the offering of goods or services requires the prior written consent of Biblica US, Inc.

Scripture quotations marked (NKJV) are from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-57-799622-4

Kirkdale Editorial Team: Brannon Ellis, Joel Wilcox, Abigail Stocker

Cover Design: Josh Warren

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1A Ticket to Ride—But to Where?

Part 1Coming Apart

Chapter 2The Rise and Fall of Secular Humanism

Chapter 3Carl Jung’s Dream for a “New Humanity”

Chapter 4The Perennial Philosophy—The Origin of Contemporary Spirituality

Chapter 5The Sixties Spiritual and Sexual Revolution

Chapter 6A Destructive Generation

Part 2Given Over

Chapter 7A Cosmology of Radical Egalitarianism

Chapter 8Pagan Cosmology of Synthesis: The Joining of Reason and Spirit

Chapter 9Salvation by Shaman

Part 3Not Giving Up

Chapter 10Christian Compromise with Culture

Chapter 11A Whole or Holy Cosmos?

Chapter 12Blowing the Mind

Chapter 13Gospel Power: A Given-Over Savior

Subject and Name Index

Scripture Index

FOREWORD

Wait just a minute. How in the world did we get to the place where we are? The sun has set on the British Empire and the grand experiment of America has blown up in the laboratory.

We can ask about the grisly impact of two world wars on Western civilization. We can look to the impact of the Holocaust, where the battle-hardened commander of the Allies, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, wept when he beheld the ghost-like, emaciated survivors of Hitler’s death camps and the Final Solution to the “Jewish problem.” We can read our resultant culture through the lens of Nietzsche’s nihilism or Jean Paul Sartre’s assessment of humanity as “Nausea” with “No Exit” in sight.

America has passed through a revolution—nay, two revolutions. The first was the revolution of the 18th century, whereby the United States secured its independence from England. We often forget that over a century and a half of colonial culture had elapsed before the Boston Tea Party was even imagined. The Revolutionary War was fought to preserve the colonial culture—its customs, mores, form of government. There was already an established American way of life that was being sorely threatened by whimsical changes in Great Britain’s parliament from which the colonies were to be governed.

To be sure, America was already changing without any great assistance from England. Jonathan Edwards had already decried the declension of values, religion, and customs initiated by the Pilgrims and Puritans who settled the country earlier and who sought to establish “a light set on a hill.”

The French Revolution was altogether different. It involved a self-conscious effort to turn the traditional, established national culture upside down. It was a war against the prevailing French way of life.

America’s second revolution—the cultural revolution of the 1960’s—was similar to the French Revolution in that its goal was to bring radical change to the forms, structures, values, and ethics of the status quo. It sought to bring in a New Age with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Now the dawn of the New Age is long past. Aquarius is now at high noon. This revolution, in its inception, was relatively bloodless. But its consequences have been exceedingly bloody. In just one example, America has witnessed and sanctioned the murder for hire of over 60 million unborn babies. Living, personal beings are routinely pulled and cut to pieces in the name of women’s health and liberty.

We have seen the noonday sun reveal the destruction of the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of sex, and the sanctity of the sacred itself. The culture is not merely post-Christian and post-modern. It has become not only neopagan, but neo-barbarian.

Ideas have consequences. The ideas of the New Age, of our age, have their roots in ancient Gnosticism. That particular philosophy embraced a form of pantheism or monism: God is “the One”—the sum of everything. All is God, and God is all.

Of course if everything is God, then nothing is God—the very word “God” can point to nothing individuated from everything. It becomes a meaningless, unintelligible word.

Peter Jones has labored to show the distinction and impact of a zeitgeist of Oneism (monism) versus Twoism (duality). The Twoism of which Dr. Jones speaks is not an ancient form of dualism which embraced equal and opposite forces of good and evil. No, it is a cosmic duality that sees—sharply and vividly—the distinction between creature and Creator and the relationship between the two.

This is not a simple problem of arithmetic wherein we learn to count from 1 to 2. These numbers have suffixes. The suffix -ism is added to the 1 and the 2. The suffix -ism adds to a simple number an entire worldview or philosophical standpoint embraced by either.

Dr. Jones provides for us a clear map. This map traces the historical paths, the philosophical routes, and the cultural lanes that have brought us to the Age of Aquarius. It is a must-read for every concerned American—and especially for every Christian who weeps at the graveside of his culture.

R.C. Sproul

Orlando, Florida

2015

PREFACE

I recently watched the third installment of The Hobbit in a packed theater with my wife and one of our daughters. It was an epic adventure, to be sure, but what I noticed most was a certain longing underneath it all. It made me wonder if the continued popularity of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien represents a nostalgia for a cultural past that is no more. One keen observer sees an important difference between these two literary giants:

Whereas C. S. Lewis tries to make us comfortable in what we already believe by dressing up the story as a children’s masquerade, Tolkien makes us profoundly uncomfortable. Our people, our culture, our language, our toehold upon this shifting and uncertain Earth are no more secure than those of a thousand extinct tribes of the Dark Ages; and a greater hope than that of the work of our hands and the hone of our swords must avail us.1

These authors’ vast mythical vision of the confrontation between the forces of good and evil reveals a sense that the Christian West was threatened by an evil that would destroy all remembrance of a culture based on Christian principles. In the 1940s, it was easy to identify this evil with Nazism and Marxism. These authors were no doubt concerned as they saw the religious soul of Western culture making way for the self-assured triumph of secular humanism.

The present book is written especially for readers one-third my age. I write it as an uncomfortable eyewitness to a massive shift in Western culture, where the dark forces of Sauron have taken power in the once-Christian Shire of Western culture. First appearing as secular humanism, these forces have now grown into a much more formidable opponent of Christianity: a full-blown cosmology of pagan lore, seen perhaps most clearly in Hollywood’s many other religiously inspired blockbusters—Star Wars,The Matrix, the Marvel franchise—that do not share the worldview of Tolkien or Lewis.2

My plea is not a nostalgic appeal to return to the good old days of yore but an attempt to clarify the confrontation between the only two ultimate worldviews—the only two fundamental patterns of belief that underlie how we make sense of the world. I call these “Oneism” and “Twoism.” These terms are my shorthand for what I believe the Apostle Paul is getting at when he describes the heart of idolatry and falsehood as exchanging the truth for “the lie” and exchanging worship of the Creator for worship of the creature (Rom 1:25).

Over the last two generations, I have watched the Oneism of ancient paganism overtake the centuries-old Western cultural structures rooted in basic notions of biblical truth (Twoism). The lie of Oneism is on the rise, in large part because it is now being presented as an articulate cosmology capable of explaining the whole of human existence, claiming to define “the right side of history,” and demanding to be culturally normative. This attempt to dismantle the Christian worldview’s belief in a divinely created universe of structure and order not only undermines right knowledge of and worship of the Creator, but severely hinders people from hearing and understanding the Christian (Twoist) gospel at all.

In the United States, the millennial generation is the first to be immersed from birth within such a coherently antibiblical system. In many areas of the United States and in its educational institutions, this generation has been given a worldview based on the presuppositions of paganism and an outright rejection of God, the personal Creator. For many young people, these voices have drowned out serious consideration of the Christian worldview, which is now vilified—like money used to be—as the source of all kinds of evil. Thus, traditional Western culture is under siege, and the immediate casualties are the millennials, who have unwittingly been seduced by aging progressivists (my peers, mind you!).

How can one speak to a generation steeped in the old paganism dressed in new clothes? My answer to this most pressing question is unpacked in the pages below: only by a robust cosmology of God-honoring Twoism. Describing the essence of “the lie” and showing the full extent of the truth is the only way forward. We Christians need a deep understanding of both the gospel and the pagan system around us—the system into which the gospel speaks and which it unequivocally judges so that it may fully redeem.

I can only imagine what God will do with a rising generation of Christian millennials trained to think “antithetically” or Twoistically, as did the Apostle Paul and the early Christians who, in spite of being a small minority in a hostile pagan empire, turned it upside down for the glory of Jesus Christ.

CHAPTER 1

A TICKET TO RIDE—BUT TO WHERE?

A Map of London and a Map of Life

Three of my children live in London. Whenever I visit them, I’m amazed by the London Tube. The Underground, as it is also known, first opened in 1863 and now carries over a billion passengers each year, everywhere, in one of the biggest cities in the world. To get anywhere quickly, though, you have to know the destination of the train. Otherwise you could spend days hopping on and off, never getting where you need to go.

Some people live this way, figuratively getting on the first train that shows up, or the one the most people are taking. Few think about the destination until they end up in a station of life they do not welcome, at the end of a journey they finally regret.

A worldview contains a series of convictions and conclusions about the nature of the world that provide fundamental meaning and direction for our lives, just as the Tube map will direct a journey across London. Though our beliefs often are unarticulated inklings or unexamined hunches, we all have a worldview—the simple act of opening our mouths to speak shows a belief that life has significance and somehow fits together. Interpreting a map of life is more complicated than that of the London Underground, so we sometimes give up and hop on the next train that comes by.

Our culture, too, seems to have boarded a train headed in a different direction than the one it originally was following. Perhaps this was out of a conviction we were headed the wrong way, or perhaps we’ve given up on thinking about where we’re finally going. But how many destinations are there, ultimately?

A Book’s Origins—in a Little Autobiography

Let’s begin our journey with a snapshot from my own. Influential 20th-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whom we shall meet often in these pages, once described a dream in which he found himself on a rainy night in my hometown, Liverpool, England—“a sooty, dark, dirty city.”1 Thank you, Carl, for that not very flattering, though accurate, description! About 30 years after Jung had his dream, I found myself on an uncharacteristically sunny day with someone even more famous than Jung. Lunchtime had rolled around at Quarry Bank High School for Boys, and the thought of fish and chips was irresistible to my friend and me. In defiance of the school rules, we climbed over the wall and went on a 20-minute jaunt to our favorite “chippy” on Penny Lane.

“Penny Lane” probably gives it away: My old schoolmate was John Lennon, later to become a household name as one of the Beatles. He later wrote (with some exaggeration) of Penny Lane’s “blue suburban skies.” At the time, of course, no one could foresee his star-studded future—certainly not the headmaster, who caned us on our backsides later that day, unimpressed with either one of us.

I mention my school days with John not to gain reflected glory but because I see a certain historical irony: The same headmaster who caned John and me began each school day with Bible reading and prayer. Quarry Bank, though a state school, was typical in that regard; at that time, Christianity was my culture’s accepted religion, and England was fairly representative of the rest of the West. Long after my days at Quarry Bank, I became a Christian theologian dedicated to distinguishing biblical spirituality from its many counterfeits, especially those expressed in today’s versions of Eastern or New Age spirituality. I write books as an observer of the spiritual state of the contemporary West, which has changed dramatically since my high school days. On the other hand, John left Quarry Bank in 1956, when our ways parted for good, and later became a devoted follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and an impassioned spokesman of Eastern-style spirituality.

Though exposed to the same Christian culture as I was, he would try hard to marginalize Christianity. For example, in his hit song “Imagine,” John asked us to conceive of a world without religions or notions of an afterlife, in which we can realize our innate personal and social potential for ultimate peace and harmony. The influence of such thinking is clear in the common quip, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” Bill and Hillary Clinton requested that “Imagine” be played on the National Mall on New Year’s Eve, 2000, to usher in the third millennium.

In 1964, I came to the United States to study, arriving at Logan Airport in Boston shortly after the Beatles reached America. I came to further my education and discovered a culture even more apparently Christian than the one I had left. “Fortress America” was the epicenter of Christianity in the 20th-century world, the nation sending countless missionaries to the ends of the earth. Christianity was everywhere, as evidenced by innumerable radio and TV stations, thousands of Christian schools and colleges, scores of Christian publishers, and church buildings as far as the eye could see. I thought I had died and gone to heaven—for one thing, on Mondays, ministers could play golf free of charge, and I know that’s the way it will be in heaven!

What eventually broke the spell was the Western cultural revolution of the late 1960s, for which my schoolmate was such an influential spokesperson. At the time, the revolution did not seem particularly revolutionary. It involved a handful of hippies whose influence seemed negligible. Ironically, most of the immense changes we see today have come from the convictions and assumptions—the worldview—of that handful of outliers.

“Cataclysmic” Cultural Change

I have been both a participant in and a keen observer of this tumultuous time from the Sixties through today. In my lifetime, Christianity has ceased to be the religion of heritage or choice for a great many people in the West. How could such a huge change take place in such a short time? Even as some sociological experts in the 1960s spoke of living in a “surprise-free world,”2 an ideological revolution was actually exploding under their noses.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a respected American scholar with a PhD from Harvard, quoted above, was both a Marxist and feminist voice in the Sixties. Having converted to Christianity later in life, she said of the cultural revolution in which she had participated so enthusiastically, “Within a remarkably brief period … occurred a cataclysmic transformation of the very nature of our society.”3Fox-Genovese is not alone.4 A large part of my motivation in writing this book is out of my concern to explain the origin and nature of this transformation and its ongoing effects within contemporary Western culture.

The rules have changed—the trains have gone off the track. In our time, the old canopy of a more or less Christian civilization has been shredded, replaced by a new overarching structure of spiritual beliefs and practices. Many of the traditional plausibility structures that gave life meaning and significance under Christian influence in the West are unrecognizable:

1.Morality is relativized by varied (and often contradictory) personal or social convictions.

2.Honesty means being true to one’s inner commitments and longings more than to external expectations or objective facts.

3.Acceptable models of sexuality and family allow various combinations of persons and genders.

4.Marriage is often functionally indistinguishable from mutually convenient cohabitation.

5.Motherhood is celebrated in the same breath with abortion on demand.

The meaning and context of spirituality and religion have undergone a paradigm shift no less fundamental. The notion of God now allows for polytheism (many gods) or pantheism (a god identical with the universe). The average millennial in the United States, for example, no longer defines a vital spiritual life as knowledge of and communion with the infinite-yet-personal Creator and Lord of heaven and earth who is revealed in the Bible. Spirituality has become a do-it-yourself life hobby that blends ancient Eastern practices with modern consumer sensibilities. If religion is merely a tacit admission that we’re all grasping blindly for the same thing, then who can judge anyone else for being “spiritual but not religious”?

I may sound nostalgic for the good old days, but I’m not making a case for returning to the Western culture of the Fifties. In that era, people were just as sinful and had just as many problems, such as institutional racism and sexism—not to mention overexuberant headmasters with canes! Nevertheless, that culture, with variable degrees of success and consistency, existed under what sociologist Peter Berger called the “sacred canopy” of a basic Christian worldview, so that fundamental ideas—about God, morality, sexuality, family, marriage, motherhood, spirituality, and religion—were understood from a Christian perspective, consciously or unconsciously. People broke the rules, but everyone was assuming pretty much the same rules.

I have watched this “cataclysmic transformation” occur in the space of one generation. I’ve thought long about it, lectured all over the world on it, and written books about it. I pray that by God’s grace, this reflection and research will allow me some success in analyzing what is happening now and what Christians, who are called to be salt and light, can do about it. The goal is not to recover a 20th-century Western culture, but to preach the gospel clearly in our own time and bless the culture with God-honoring living.

The changed culture in which we live is the only one young readers have known. There’s nothing wrong with being young. As George Bernard Shaw is thought to have said, with obvious regret, “Youth is wasted on the young,” and we all admire the energy, enthusiasm, and creativity of youth. Still, a lack of knowledge about the recent past can create problems. Current generations may accept contemporary beliefs and lifestyle choices as normal without realizing just how abnormal they were a few short years ago. Both young and old Christians may seek wisdom uncritically from the surrounding culture, whose assumptions and values are often decidedly un-Christian. While we should desire to understand our culture in order to bear witness to Jesus in it, we must avoid conforming to its expectations just to garner its affirmation.5 Most importantly, as the church, we must call all cultures—and ourselves—in every generation to the rule that judges all other rules—the rule of faith, the law of true freedom, the Word of God.

The World of Difference in a World of One or Two

In these confusing times, I have good news for my fellow travelers: The Tube map for our life journeys is not as complicated as it seems! Contrary to our culture’s assumptions, there are only two trains, moving in opposite directions and arriving at two very different destinations.

I latched onto this as I tried to understand the surprising changes in the West which emerged from the culture wars of the Seventies and Eighties. Two simple terms, “one” and “two,” often surface in the contemporary debate over spirituality—I sometimes say that if you can count from one to two, you can be a theologian. The terminology of one and two will drop you in the very nerve center of the culture, like getting off the tube at Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square instead of getting off in a regional substation like Plumstead or Cockfosters. If we are going to defend the gospel in our modern world, we need to understand what lies behind “the one” and “the two.”

How do these simple terms describe spirituality? Peter Occhiogrosso gives us a hint in The Joy of Sects, a work that discusses all the major religions. While he does not use “one” or “two” in his title (who could resist the one he has?), he nevertheless boldly states: “… under and through each of the great traditions runs a stream … a single stream that feeds each of these traditions from a single source … the Perennial Philosophy.”6 He defines the Perennial Philosophy as a system that “seeks to break down duality (twoness) and return us to the unitive condition [oneness], to see that we are already one.”7 Spirituality teacher Andrew Cohen uses a similar argument in a lecture titled, “The Significance of Non Duality: There is Only One, Not Two.” Throughout the lecture he repeatedly asks, “Why is it important that there is only one, not two?”8

One and two also figure in discussions of the “Easternization” of the West.9 In American Veda,10Philip Goldberg reasons that America has become Hindu, pointing to a general acceptance of the ancient Sanskrit notion of “Advaita,” which means “not two.” Advaita affirms that all is one. The emphasis on oneness is essential to all Eastern religions that have found fertile soil in the West, including ancient ones like Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Taoism, as well as more recent additions like Sufism, Neoplatonism,11 Gnosticism, and Kabbalah.

Carl Jung also explained existence in terms of one or two,12 as has Father Thomas Keating, a Roman Catholic interfaith mystic who teaches that the high goal of spirituality is to move from the awareness of twoness (distinctions in the real world) to the nondual state of oneness.13 The same terminology is to be found in the writings of some Protestant leaders14 and at the heart of contemporary utopian interspirituality discussions.15

One or Two?—We Get One Answer

The examples above might seem arbitrary or idiosyncratic, but they actually lead us to the very center of present fascination with spirituality and the meaning of existence. Human beings have forever asked questions about this. The most essential one is: Why is there something rather than nothing? The question itself is a conundrum, for how can there be nothing if there is someone asking about it? So the second question must be: What is the nature of that something?

It might seem reductionist to insist that there are only two possible answers to these ultimate questions. However, 20th-century theologian Colin Gunton, considered one of the most important British theologians of his generation, stated:

There are, probably, ultimately only two possible answers to the question of origins, and they recur at different places in all ages: [either] that the universe is the result of creation by a free personal agency, or that in some way or other it creates itself. The two answers are not finally compatible, and require a choice, either between them or an attitude of agnostic refusal to decide.16

The nature of reality can be examined another way, by asking what controls reality. We do not control much, if anything, in our lives: Our time and place of birth, our parents, our health, and our lifespan are out of our control. In this vulnerable position, we have the same two choices: to believe in impersonal fate or in personal providence.

In either case, here we reach rock bottom. Either the transcendent Creator—one God in the unending interpersonal life and love of the Trinity—is at the origin of everything created and sustains it all, or the universe itself, in all its seeming variety, is all there is. And in either case, whether we worship nature or the Maker of nature, we are dealing with a statement of faith and an expression of worship. We cannot step out of the universe to find an objective point of view. We must make a faith decision between these two alternatives—and there are only two. If God and nature make up reality, then all is two, and everything is either Creator or creature. On the other hand, if the universe is all there is, then all is one.

This choice is exemplified in the stark separation between two points of perspective: that of the Bible, and that of Camille Paglia, a contemporary philosopher. The Bible begins by saying: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth [i.e., nature]” (Gen 1:1). Paglia begins her book Sexual Personae very differently: “In the beginning was Nature.”17 These two views of reality have always existed, but because we have lived for centuries in a Christian environment, the reemerging conflict startles us. Paglia wrote what she did in conscious opposition to the perspective on the world put forth in Genesis.

Christian thinking starts not with Paglia’s view of existence but with that of the Bible. Robert Sokolowski, a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, puts it this way:

Christian theology is differentiated from pagan religious and philosophical reflections primarily by the introduction of a new distinction, the distinction between the world, understood as possibly not having existed, and God, understood as possibly being all that there is, with no diminution of goodness or greatness.18

Such a distinction describes two completely different types of beings who can never be confused or blended—reconciled, yes, but never blended. One is totally independent, sufficient, and blessed, and would be so even if the universe had never existed. The other is totally dependent: living, moving, and having its being in the free goodness and love of another.19

Creator and Creature: The Bible’s First and Last Word

This biblical, Christian method of thinking makes deep sense of reality. It was the essence of the faith of Israel in the Old Testament. According to the Bible, God’s existence and identity is the proper frame for our own. Only from this starting point can we find true knowledge of God, creation, and ourselves. The Bible begins and ends with this assumption.

In the Beginning

Genesis 1:1 begins with the majestic declaration of difference, delivered into a world mythology that affirmed only sameness. This declaration affirms the radical uniqueness and primacy of the Creator. It establishes the indissoluble distinction between the Creator and what he has freely made out of generosity and love. After this statement, the rest of the Bible is, in some sense, commentary.

Biblical thought always begins with the affirmation of God’s uniqueness, freedom, goodness, and love. In Isaiah 40, God is described as “the Creator of the ends of the earth” (Isa 40:28). Psalm 33 restates the opening of Genesis: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made … For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Psa 33:6, 9). Psalm 104 makes similar statements from the viewpoint of a human praising the Creator, God. God’s great answer to Job (Job 38–39) is not a philosophical discourse but a speech that overwhelms us with its unambiguous statement of God’s lordship over all creation. Nehemiah says of God’s creative power, “You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you” (Neh 9:6NIV).

The Uniqueness of Twoness

Colin Gunton noted that this view of creation and providence was unique in the ancient world:

Far from being one ancient myth among many, [the Genesis account] was unique in saying things that no other ancient text was able to say.… The Bible is different, and, it might be suggested, the conveyor of a unique message, and so could not be dismissed as simply another instance of ancient myth.20

Before the Sixties (when it became popular to dismiss the Old Testament faith as one instance of Near Eastern religious mythology among many), even many critical scholars affirmed the uniqueness of the biblical account. For example, Claus Westermann contrasted the Genesis account with Babylonian creation myths in the following way:

What distinguishes the [Genesis] account of creation among the many creation stories of the Ancient Near East is that for Genesis there can be only one creator and that all else that is or can be, can never be anything but a creature.21

G. Ernest Wright, a 20th-century Old Testament professor at Harvard—following the example of his mentor, archaeologist William Albright—taught that the difference between the Old Testament and the other religions of the ancient world was so significant that no evolutionary or developmental account of Israel’s religion could make sense of it.22 Gunton, Westermann, Wright, and Albright all highlight the difference in kind between ancient Near Eastern cosmologies and the unique message Genesis carried into the ancient world. As John Oswalt, a modern Old Testament scholar, has concluded, “[T]here are only two worldviews: the biblical one … and the other one.”23

Knowledge of God in Twoness

The Apostle Paul would agree. The one true God’s “eternal power and divine nature can be seen in what he has made” (Rom 1:20), and what he has made expresses his transcendence and distinctiveness. All human beings get a glimpse of these characteristics of our Creator in his creation (Rom 1:20). But Paul says that “they exchanged the truth about God for [the] lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25).24 I read that verse many times before I realized that Paul was declaring the existence of only two ways to live and think—only two ways to believe. Human beings, he says, worship and serve either “the creature” or “the Creator.” Such a simple yet profound contrast, Paul!

“Creator” and “creation” underlies all human knowledge of God and ourselves; this theme runs throughout the New Testament. Hebrews 11 explains: “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible” (Heb 11:3NIV). Paul summarizes who the true God is, the God in whom we believe, in Romans 4, saying, “[God] gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Rom 4:17). Colossians 1 sheds more light on this revealed mystery when it ties creation and its significance directly to Christ, who is also the source of our re-creation: “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him” (Col 1:16NIV).

In the End

The Bible ends with the same declaration: God is Creator. Revelation 4 quotes the citizens of heaven, with whom we will be praising God as our Maker and Lord for all eternity, saying: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being” (Rev 4:11NIV). Clearly, our identity will always be creaturely, though glorified, and God will always be the one Creator to whom all glory belongs and from whom our glory comes. This is the Bible’s first and last word.

Our Worldview Alternatives: Oneism and Twoism

I claim, with the Bible, that there are only two worldviews—one based on the ultimacy of the creation, and the other based on the ultimate, prior, and all-determining existence of the Creator. Creation and Creator are the only alternatives as divine objects of worship—the only possible explanations of the world we know. The conflict is between two mutually exclusive, antithetical belief systems. Our choice will affect the answers we give to those two important questions: Is there something rather than nothing? And if there is something, what is that something like?

For the sake of simplicity, I call these two alternatives Oneism and Twoism.25 They are not mere variations on a general spiritual theme, but the only two timeless, mutually contradictory ways to think about the world.26 In these two terms (Oneism and Twoism), there is a universe of difference. These are the only two destinations on the tracks we can travel; let’s map them out in more detail now.

Oneism

Oneism sees the world as self-creating (or perpetually existing) and self-explanatory. Everything is made up of the same stuff, whether matter, spirit, or a mixture. There’s one kind of existence, which, in one way or another, we worship as divine (or of ultimate importance), even if that means worshiping ourselves. Though there is apparent differentiation and even hierarchy, all distinctions are, in principle, eliminated, and everything has the same worth. This is a “homocosmology,” a worldview based on sameness. The classic term for this is “paganism,” worship of nature.

Twoism

The only other option is a world that is the free work of a personal, transcendent God, who creates ex nihilo (from nothing). In creating, God was not constrained by or dependent on any preexisting conditions. There is nothing exactly like this in our human experience of creating; our creative acts are analogous to God’s. There is God, and there is everything that is not-God—everything created and sustained by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This worldview celebrates otherness, distinctiveness. We only worship as divine the distinct, personal, triune Creator, who placed essential distinctions within the creation. This is a “heterocosmology,” a worldview based on otherness and difference.27 This is often called “theism.”

Both of these worldviews, whether implicitly assumed or explicitly embraced, require the same fundamental certainty. In other words, if one is ultimately true, the other must be false. In the moral universe of the Bible, knowledge is never neutral. That’s why Paul calls these worldviews “the truth” and “the lie” (Rom 1:25).

What’s Ahead: Getting Off the Oneist Train

In the pages that follow, I show the ways that intellectual and cultural influences today are promoting a Oneist view of reality—a train headed in the opposite direction from the biblical view. I want to alert the church to the danger of adopting subtle expressions of this new spirituality out of a failure to see its underlying nature and motives.

The rapid success of Oneist thinking in the 20th-century West forces us to ask if our culture has been “given over” (to use Paul’s words in Romans 1:24, 26, 28) to a traditionally pagan cosmology. If so, is there a way for our culture to step off this train and get back to the Twoist platform? What power could possibly stop the Oneist train from hurtling to destruction? There may be no return, unless it is through spiritual revival and miraculous conversion—not to a nostalgic Fifties lifestyle or to an old-time, fundamentalist, made-in-America religion, but to the heart of the Bible’s Twoist worldview. Twoism is as old as history, based on the biblical witness to the person and historic achievement of Christ, who was himself “given over” for our sins and raised for our justification.28

I want to take you on an Underground tour, not of London, but of the deep explosive forces below the surface of our religious turmoil. The power and success of these forces is sometimes discouraging. However, by faith in the Creator, God, who has redeemed his people and revealed his purposes concerning his creation, I am confident that we will not get lost. By God’s grace, we will find the map that leads genuine seekers back to the right station. Welcome aboard.

PART 1

COMING APART

In chapters 2–6 we will examine early 20th-century utopian visions of humanity based on the fundamental notion of liberation. Certain cultural leaders sought liberation from the old shackles of Western Christian values, such as monogamous sexuality and a narrow theistic spirituality based on biblically revealed religion.

Chapter 2 will deal with the great enemy of Christianity in the modern period (from the 18th to the 20th century), namely secular humanism or materialistic Oneism, and its belief that reason would save humanity—a belief that eventually led to its own decline.

Chapters 3 and 4 will look at the way that decline was enabled by the promotion of spiritual Oneism (that is, pagan mythology). We will specifically see such thinking in the optimism of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who envisioned the arrival of a new humanity. As Jean Houston, counselor to Hillary Clinton, would later say: “Only myth will save us.”

Chapter 5 will consider how Jung’s notions of sexual and spiritual liberation for healthy psyches broke out on the cultural surface during the Sixties’ cultural revolution and its popular mantra, “Make love, not war.” The cultural revolution was also a sexual and spiritual revolution. The optimistic hope of human progress through freedom from the past animated the Sixties’ revolutionaries, who hoped to bring in a new day of human well-being, the Age of Aquarius.

Chapter 6 shows that many high hopes for a new day were dashed when free sex and cohabitation severely undermined the family structure and the moral virtues it presupposed. We will examine how Oneist thinking (deliberately) undermined the old culture by destructing “the binaries.” From great optimism has come great pessimism; the liberated culture has “come apart.”

CHAPTER 2

THE RISE AND FALL OF SECULAR HUMANISM

Two challenges to Western Christianity are currently contributing to the religious turmoil described in chapter 1. The first, secular humanism, is the subject of this chapter.

The Dominance of Secular Humanism—A Nonreligious Oneism

The imminent threat to Christianity in the middle of the 20th century was not perceived as an invasion of other religious systems but as the subjugation of the “Christian” West to nonreligious materialism: secular humanism, which aimed to annihilate religion altogether.

The Roots of Secular Humanism

What we call secular humanism began as plain humanism. In the 15th century, Renaissance humanism saw itself as rebirthing humanity on the ancient pagan Greek model of rational thought, well summarized in a fifth-century-BC classic statement by Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.” The Reformation inadvertently handed humanism a key tool for its anti-tradition arsenal. The right of the individual Christian to weigh the beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church against the ultimate authority of the Word of God (a good thing in itself) became for some humanists a means of replacing the Word of God with autonomous human reason.

During the 17th century, thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, and Locke began the process of making this secularized humanistic thinking mainstream, claiming intellectual autonomy for the human mind apart from religious tradition or divine revelation. Though a deeply religious man, 17th-century French mathematician René Descartes sought to prove existence based on human reasoning alone with his famous statement, “Cogito ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am.” It is often claimed that Descartes laid the foundation for 17th- and 18th-century continental rationalism.1

Humanism’s respect for intelligence and rationality gave rise in Western culture to creative, independent thought that produced countless scientific and technological advances. Such progress laid the foundation for exploits as astounding as landing a man on the moon. However, independent human thought gradually came to be seen as the only norm for all truth—the ultimate source of all meaning, a rationalistic Oneism. People began to conclude that belief in a world created by God and in things spiritual was merely superstitious, primitive myth to be abandoned as unthinking delusion. For the modern man, religion had to go.

Thus, roughly between the 18th and the 20th centuries, the Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, dominated the Western mind as the great opponent of Christianity. Only the ability of the human being, based no longer on faith in God but on faith in reason itself as the criteria of truth, would save us. A powerful optimism in the capacities of mankind to bring about a better world took the West by storm. Reason would replace primitive religious superstition and bring about the coming, glorious kingdom of man on earth.

This optimistic human vision as a religion of humanity is appropriately associated with the French Revolution. In 1789, the Paris revolutionaries built an altar to the goddess Reason right in the middle of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, the very center of European Catholic Christianity.

Intellectual Leaders of Secular Humanism

Revolutionary 18th-century philosopher Voltaire delivered a bone-chilling statement about Christianity: “Ecrasez l’infâme,” literally, “Crush the horrid thing.” The horrid thing Voltaire had in mind was Christianity—its superstition, dogma, institutions, ethics, and view of man. Voltaire’s theme became the battle cry of the 18th-century Enlightenment, a cry directed against Christianity itself.

Atheist humanism took over the intellectual elite of Europe. Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte I asked Pierre-Simon Laplace, a great French scientist who helped develop mathematical astronomy and statistics, about the place of God in his work. Laplace reportedly replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”2

Many serious social observers and philosophers in the 19th century predicted the final victory of secularism and the disappearance of religion altogether:

•Ludwig Feuerbach, a 19th-century philosopher, called Christianity a delusion and God “a gigantic human projection,”3 essentially “man writ large.”4

•Charles Darwin further drove faith in God as Creator from the scientific track with another variation of secular humanism. He posited the theory that all creatures were produced from a common ancestor by an unguided, impersonal process of natural selection worked out through randomly occurring variations. Most of his later followers have held that life on earth came about by mere chance, and man is “the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.”5 Darwin thereby effectively made God superfluous and the creation (including humanity) a purely physical, self-generating, but mindless mechanism.

•Karl Marx dismissed religion as the “opiate of the masses.” Marx saw religious belief as a sign of a wrongly ordered society. He believed that once society had been rationally organized the need for faith would disappear.6 “Man,” said Marx, “is the supreme divinity.”7

•Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th-century German thinker, considered life to be a strictly this-worldly phenomenon, rejecting the notion of a world beyond. He took opposition to divine truth to its logical extreme, going so far as to declare, “God is dead.”8 This theme would reappear in Western thinking in the Sixties, espoused by a number of leading theologians.

At the end of the 19th century, popular atheism started to influence the new science of psychology. Sigmund Freud, in The Future of an Illusion, referred to himself as a “godless Jew” and is reputed to have said, “The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.”9 As a psychologist, he went on to argue that religion (including Judaism) is a “mass delusion” or “collective neurosis” which formally enshrines our “infantile” longing for an all-powerful protective (but also threatening) father figure. He thus considered religion a serious pathological condition, the great obstacle to mental health, from which the future world would doubtless be healed. This emphasis has not disappeared. Richard Dawkins, one of the New Atheists, defined faith as “a kind of mental illness” in 1976, an argument he still uses.10

Among many sophisticated intellectuals of the 20th century, it became axiomatic that religion would eventually give way to the evident “truth” of secular humanism. One example is British writer Evelyn Waugh. Raised within the upper-class British educational system, Waugh attended a preparatory school for boys that was based on “sound principle and sound knowledge, firmly grounded in the Christian faith.” At the age of 17, he recorded the following in his journal: “In the last few weeks I have ceased to be a Christian. I have realized that for the last two terms [of the school year] at least I have been an atheist in all except the courage to admit it myself.”11Waugh recalled that his tutors assigned books that were generally subversive of faith, and “[W]e were left to suggest our solutions and encouraged to be unorthodox.” He remembered that half his class “were avowed agnostics or atheists.”12 This occurred in a school system that was ostensibly Christian.

Waugh’s testimony is representative of a period of about two centuries during which the secular humanist program was an immense success. Even the church was invaded in full force and began seeking to reinterpret the Christian message in anti-supernatural terms. In the 19th century, secularism in Christian dress, known as theological liberalism, became a powerful factor in the Christian movement, in particular influencing scores of seminaries, divinity schools, and other institutions for the education of the ministry to make as their goal the revising of the Christian faith to reflect the secular humanist spirit of the modern age.

Liberalism was motivated by the desire to redefine Christianity according to the sensibilities of modern people. It reinterpreted the gospel as social justice and saw Jesus only as an example, not as a divine-human Savior. The New Testament message was often described as an ancient version of Marxist theory, in which Jesus was a revolutionary like Che Guevara but in ancient Palestine, seeking radical change in the social and economic power structures of his time.

In the late 1960s, when I studied New Testament at Harvard, demythologization was a popular topic. It sought to transform the old Christian faith into 20th-century psychology. Traditional beliefs and key biblical events were emptied of their historicity. Skeptical scholars wrote books denying the miracles in the Gospels, including Jesus’ physical resurrection, thus tearing the heart from the Christian gospel and eliminating the faith of many in the mainline churches.

With the appearance of the “death of God” movement in the Sixties, the disappearance of traditional Christianity seemed strangely confirmed, even in “Christian” America. American theologians like Thomas J. J. Altizer, Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, David Miller, and William Hamilton celebrated in the new world the final triumph of Nietzschean deicide. Rational man had come of age, no longer needing “the God hypothesis.” As my fellow theological students and I studied this radical “Christian” theology in the late 1960s, we saw it as the final triumph of liberal, secular humanism.

Predictions of the disappearance of Christianity have seemed to be confirmed by its demise as the dominant social force in Western society.13 This is new; there was a time in recent Western history, in spite of the dominance of secular humanism among the intellectual elite, when hardly anyone openly put the existence of God into doubt. For instance, in 1890, the Supreme Court of the United States defined religion as “one’s views of one’s relation to his Creator, to the obligations they impose of reverence for his being and character and obedience to his will.”14 There was no other definition of God but that of a personal transcendent Creator! Thanks in large part to secular humanism, this is no longer the case in public discourse.

The New Secular Humanism

So, what is secularism or secular humanism, and what has it become? It is now known under other names. As an intellectual discipline it is called philosophical materialism; as a social movement it is known as modernity; as a somewhat religious expression it is described as atheism; as a political theory it is practiced as Marxism; and for many people, it is an un-thought-out, default way of living as if God did not exist. All these expressions of secularism reject the supernatural as a holdover from superstitious, primitive faith systems. Without any reference to God, secularism attempts to describe rationally the whole of existence from a this-worldly materialistic perspective with the human being at the center of existence. Thus, all these expressions of secular humanism can be called Oneist (though not of the “spiritual” kind) because they seek to describe the world by the world, using this-worldly human reason, with no reference to an external, transcendent Creator. Making reason ultimate is a form of worship.

This secular humanist view still often influences Western universities. Some readers will recognize a description of professors who exhibit in their classrooms a ferocious antagonism to spirituality. Secularism has affected all areas of Western society, claiming for itself exclusive access to reality. The scientific mind, committed to naturalism, is the only way of knowing anything. But this is not the whole story. Something strange happened on the way to the 21st century. Despite the secularists’ confident prediction of the “withering of religion,” it is secular humanism that has recently been withering.

The Death of Secular Humanism?

Against all expectations, modern science itself has contributed to the demise of all-knowing secular humanism. The Enlightenment belief in a human rationality capable of plumbing the deepest secrets of the natural world has been undermined by discoveries like quantum physics and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that observing subatomic particles prevents the ability to know the true nature of their physical reality. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, believed that no one really understands quantum physics, with its notions of indeterminacy and nonlocality.15

Perhaps an even stronger argument against secularism, however, is its catastrophic fruits. Its optimistic belief in humanity and profound self-confidence fostered two world wars that claimed untold millions. Its emphasis on social justice supported totalitarian fascism, eventually ending in massacres by the likes of Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot. Its overemphasis on human supremacy and progress ultimately produced hyperindustrialization and a series of ecological disasters. Its focus on individual self-realization promoted soulless consumerism that ignored an absolutely essential aspect of human existence: spirituality.

Postmodern Critique

“Rationalism, the Enlightenment’s path to earthly salvation, has reached a dead-end,” said Christian philosopher Vishal Mangalwadi. “Therefore many sensitive people are hoping that nonrational mysticism might enlighten us.”16 The culture is at the end of the line with no spiritual resources to face the deep problems of life. Secular humanism has proven inadequate to provide for all of life’s dimensions, many of which are not merely rational.

In our day that intellectual challenge has been particularly difficult for the rationalists. Recent philosophy has called philosophy itself into question. The movement or mood generally known as postmodernism has deconstructed the secular religion of reason and progress. Many of the children of the secular humanists have chewed up the legacy of their intellectual parents and spat it out. Human reason, once considered our contact with the objective meaning of the universe, is now rejected as a futile exercise in subjectivity. This critique of reason argues that we cannot escape our limited, human situation as temporal, thinking bodily beings. We are miniscule elements in a seemingly infinite cosmos, unable to stand outside it to make true statements about its essential nature. Postmodernists are not rejecting thought as such. They only reject rational thinking and objective observation as the only sure means of grasping the meaning of reality.

The Wizard of Is

Postmodern thinkers argue that so-called rational truth, like all truth, is “socially generated.” Truth is a subjective opinion with no infallible relationship to the way things actually are. As Bill Clinton memorably said, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”17 As a philosophy, postmodernism deconstructs the validity of the claim of rational discourse to be an objective account of the true nature of things. Truth, taken in this sense, is merely personal power that one person or social group attempts to impose on others or to employ for selfish ends. A rational explanation has become impossible.

French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault is a classic example of this trajectory in the recent history of philosophy. In the 1950s he was a paying member of the French Communist Party and a convinced secularist. He left it when his suspicion grew that Marxism was just one more ideology of power with no relationship to the way things actually are. Foucault argued that truth claims were merely power grabs; others’ condemnation of his homosexuality was only the straight majority view, powerfully and arbitrarily imposed on a victimized homosexual minority for purposes of social control.

In 1959, Foucault received his doctoral degree on the basis of a thesis published two years later as Madness and Unreason: History of Madness in the Classical Age.18Foucault accused Descartes (who coined “I think, therefore I am”) of being able to doubt everything except his own sanity. In other words, Descartes held on to his reason as his chosen anchor to reality only by denying a very real possibility, namely his own insanity. Descartes was not as objective as he thought himself to be after all.

Though secularism is still influential, the postmodern way of thinking is firmly entrenched in our culture, and its critique of modernist hubris makes sense. Since postmodernism is not a passing fad, the demise of secularism, which it so mercilessly criticizes, is highly likely. One postmodern writer speaks, for example, of “the embarrassing intolerance of atheism.”19 Atheistic secularism’s complete dismissal of the value of religion is embarrassing to postmodern intellectuals who have become convinced of the subjective character of all worldviews. For them, tolerance has become one of the great values to be respected, even the tolerance of religion and spirituality.

Beyond the postmodern critique, two other factors have seriously dented humanist self-confidence. First, in spite of the popularity of New Atheism,20 atheism is under intellectual pressure from various expressions of theism. Antony Flew, one of the most renowned of the 20th-century atheists, became a theist toward the end of his life; he believed in some sort of personal creator god, though not necessarily the one who reveals himself in the Bible. He was unable to account for the mystery of the personal, thinking, planning, self-critical, and self-conscious human being, who cannot be explained purely from physics or chemistry. He stated, “It is simply inconceivable that any material matrix or field can generate agents who think and act. Matter cannot produce conceptions and perceptions … such a world … has to originate in a living Source, a Mind.”21 In spite of Flew’s hesitations, the only true candidate for this role is the personal, Trinitarian, transcendent God revealed in Scripture.

Second, atheism is under spiritual pressure, since many, recognizing that the material world is insufficient in and of itself, are simply hungry for spirituality—whether as an explanation for the way things are or as an answer to the longings of the human soul. That includes those who say they are “spiritual but not religious,” who are turning away in droves from the religion of secular humanism and its profound sense of futility and alienation between humanity and the rest of the universe. People understandably long for wholeness. As one spiritually hungry atheist, Sam Harris, grants, “There is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”22

A new way of thinking that began to incubate in the first part of the 20th century sought to find in the “primitive superstition,” long rejected by secularists, the very answer to the deepest needs of modern man. Rationalism is, therefore, not only criticized for its inability to give a satisfactory justification of its own significance. It is also criticized for making man—via reason and observation—the norm of everything and thereby eliminating any spiritual or religious dimension to life that reason and experimentation can’t master.23

The Rebirth of Religious Oneism

The Death of Postmodernism, Too?

We are not simply witnessing the waning of secular humanism. As Richard Tarnas, a progressive spiritualist, notes, the end of secular humanism is also the end of postmodernism. As a reasonable critique of rationality, postmodernism is, in some ways, the “last gasp of enlightenment philosophy [which] presupposes a metanarrative of its own, one perhaps more subtle than others, but in the end no less subject to deconstructive criticism.”24 Postmodernism is circular because it must presuppose its own rational thinking in order to criticize the rationalism of secular humanism. The gaping irrational hole produced by deconstructive postmodernism cries out to be filled by a new paradigm, a new, unifying, nonrational principle, a metanarrative, a grand récit—a mythical world that can bring mind and spirit together.

There is a future for the postmodern mindset, since it is adaptable to the great spiritual changes in contemporary society. Its focus on the personal and on individual and communal experience fits perfectly with the rise of this new sense of mystical spirituality. From this perspective, one group of scholars, the Bible and Culture Collective, describes a bright future in postmodernism: “[Postmodern] deconstruction appears atheistic and anarchistic to many. Others have noted a mystical tendency in postmodern deconstruction, and have argued that deconstruction is amenable to mysticism and negative theology25 in Jewish-Christian thought.”26 David Tacey, a Roman Catholic theologian, sees a particularly happy fit between Buddhism, the mysticism of Meister Eckhart, and the postmodern consciousness.27 Postmodernism contributes, to the future of human development, its emphasis on pluralism, complexity, and ambiguity, but Tarnas notes that these emphases “are precisely the characteristics necessary for the potential emergence of a fundamentally new form of intellectual vision.”28 He intimates that human development needs help from other sources.

The Death of God

David Miller provided a hint of this move from secular humanism—weakened at its core by postmodernism—to a renewed fascination with spiritual Oneism. Miller occupied a key leadership position on the publications committee of the Society of Biblical Literature but was also associated with the “death of God” theologians of the Sixties