It’s Tuesday, and so some quotes. This comment from the thinking housewife can start this off.
The gnostic aspect is our ruling class’s intellectual error in misconceiving our civilization as a cosmic fact, a necessary part of the universe that must and will continue to exist. Eric Voegelin masterfully elaborated on this in his Walgreen-sponsored lectures in 1952. He used the phrase ‘propaganda for moral insanity’ in describing the symptoms of gnostic intoxication, getting all of reality’s defaults precisely backwards all the time, with elites who are confused by their dream conception as it blurs the structure of reality as it truly is.
And in the church the gnostic heresy is there. There is an expectation of bigger, better, brighter. In the search for that, we can forget what is good, what is righteous, and what is needed. From John Piper’s blog.
Brothers, we are not witchdoctors. I say that because several years ago I heard a pastor say, “I feel like a witchdoctor because I come to people’s situations of crisis, I pray over them, and I do the things I am supposed to do and go and visit them and stand up and preach my sermons. I just feel like everybody expects some kind of magic from me in every area of my life.”
And when I heard the pastor saying that I heard exhaustion. And it was the kind of exhaustion that comes when we expect that we ourselves are going to be the vehicle of God’s grace and of God’s kingdom building, rather than God’s Spirit working through us. There is a sense of exhaustion, a sense of fatigue, a sense of disappointment when we see people who we have poured our lives into walk away. Or we see ministries that we’ve been pouring our lives into not seem to grow, and we feel as though we are failing because we don’t have the magic — we don’t have the stuff.
But Scripture doesn’t call us to magic.
Scripture call us to faithfulness and the Scripture tells us that the fruit that Jesus brings forward often happens long, long, long after we have eyes to see those things. It is really startling to me when I look at the New Testament. Everybody seems to have a messiah-complex except for the actual Messiah, who is able to walk away from the crowds and see God’s purpose, and is able to see God’s plan, and is able to rejoice in that kind of tranquility.
I want to encourage you, pastors and church leaders, that as we move toward faithfulness and try to carry out the ministry that’s been given to us, let’s not do that by magic. Let’s not do that by our own abilities and by our own gifts. And let’s not despair when we look around and say, “I don’t see what I expected to see.
There are signs of light. Consider this address to the UK Parliament by John Lennox.
The irony is that it was the Bible that saturated Europe with the idea that a rational, intelligent God created and sustains the universe and set the stage for modern science. “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver” (C.S. Lewis). Far from belief in God hindering science, it was the motor that drove science.
Yet, it is insisted, we must choose between God and science. Not so. We no more have to choose between God and science as an explanation for the cosmos than we have to choose between Sir Frank Whittle and science as an explanation for the jet engine. These explanations do not compete or conflict but compliment each other – both are necessary. God is not the same kind of explanation as science is. God is the explanation of why there is a universe at all in which science can be done.
That is why there still are, as there always have been, distinguished scientists who believe in God. There is a strong link between the rational intelligibility of the universe and the rationality of God.
Some atheists would like to break that link but the attempt fails. For, the doing of science involves believing that science can be done which in turn involves trusting our human cognitive abilities. However, according to atheism, those abilities are the product of mindless, unguided natural processes. If that is the case, why should I trust anything they tell me? If you believed that your computer was the product of mindless processes would you trust it? Of course not.
Atheism’s reduction of thought to the meaningless firing of synapses in the brain undermines the foundations of the very rationality that is needed to construct or understand or believe in any kind of argument whatsoever including those that are used to defend atheism. Atheism, therefore, does not simply shoot itself in the foot; it shoots itself in the brain. The ultimate irony here is that atheism would appear to be at war not only with God but also with science. It looks very much as if atheism fits Dawkins’ definition of a delusion: a persistent false belief held in the teeth of strong contrary evidence!
In a Guardian interview recently the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking said: “Heaven is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark”. I am afraid I yielded to the temptation of the one-liner and replied: “by the same token, atheism is a fairy story for those afraid of the light”.
We have a binary choice. We can turn to Jerusalem and read that, live that, which causes faithfulness in God, or we can turn away. But when we turn away, we end up losing rationality, we will lose that which makes the West Great, and the fundamental decency of the Christian and Jewish Ethic that has civilized much of the globe will go. It has before: as the Germans abandoned the witness of a thousand years of Faith from Hildegard of Bingen to Sophie Stahl, within a generation, as the Russians did their orthodoxy, the moral and ethical codes that replaced were not sustainable and enforced by coercion. We are no smarter and no more virtuous than the Germans and Russians of those generations.
The UK Chief Rabbi, writing in the Spectator makes this plainly clear. (Hat tip Bruce Carlton)
But not, I submit, for readers of The Spectator, because religion has social, cultural and political consequences, and you cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact. That is what the greatest of all atheists, Nietzsche, understood with terrifying clarity and what his -latter-day successors fail to grasp at all.
Time and again in his later writings he tells us that losing Christian faith will mean abandoning Christian morality. No more ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’; instead the will to power. No more ‘Thou shalt not’; instead people would live by the law of nature, the strong dominating or eliminating the weak. ‘An act of injury, violence, exploitation or destruction cannot be “unjust” as such, because life functions essentially in an injurious, violent, exploitative and destructive manner.’ Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite, but there are passages in his writing that come close to justifying a Holocaust.
This had nothing to do with him personally and everything to do with the logic of Europe losing its Christian ethic. Already in 1843, a year before Nietzsche was born, Heinrich Heine wrote, ‘A drama will be enacted in Germany compared to which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity restrained the martial ardour of the Germans for a time but it did not destroy it; once the restraining talisman is shattered, savagery will rise again… the mad fury of the berserk, of which Nordic poets sing and speak.’ Nietzsche and Heine were making the same point. Lose the Judeo-Christian sanctity of life and there will be nothing to contain the evil men do when given the chance and the provocation.
Richard Dawkins, whom I respect, partly understands this. He has said often that Darwinism is a science, not an ethic. Turn natural selection into a code of conduct and you get disaster. But if asked where we get our morality from, if not from science or religion, the new atheists start to stammer. They tend to argue that ethics is obvious, which it isn’t, or natural, which it manifestly isn’t either, and end up vaguely hinting that this isn’t their problem. Let someone else worry about it.
Choose to read towards Jerusalem and accept some limits on your actions. The alternative was tried last century, and the blood still seeps into this present age.
