Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (25 page)

These rationalist ideas did not stay locked inside art galleries. In architecture they inspired the International style—the glass-and-steel boxes that look like cubist buildings—which populate so many cities today. Architects began to think of themselves as social reformers who would lead the way in restructuring society according to a rational plan. They persuaded many cities to build huge housing projects, promising to solve a host of social problems in one fell swoop, from poverty to crime to drug abuse. The most influential was Le Corbusier, who called his buildings “machines to live in” because they had the functional efficiency of machines. Architects accepted the rationalist premise that humans are complex mechanisms whose problems can be fixed simply by slotting them into “machines to live in.”

Many of the housing projects decayed into concrete prisons—dreary, depressing, seedbeds of crime and social pathology—until they were finally dynamited to the ground. As one social critic writes, the decaying housing projects still seen in cities around the world remain a visible expression of “the materialist and rationalist conception of human life.”

When ideas come out of the university and into public policy, it is easier to identify their flaws. A “materialist and rationalist conception of human life” fails to take account of our full humanity; thus its consequences are inhumane. Because Christianity has a much richer view of human nature, its consequences are humane and life affirming.

Abstract Art

The art movement that the public finds perhaps most puzzling is abstract art. Why did some artists stop painting objects at all? Because they were influenced by pantheism. The first abstract painter was Kandinsky, who embraced a blend of Eastern and Western mysticism. He argued that the way to oppose philosophical material
ism
was to get rid of material
objects
. In his words, abstract art would liberate the mind from “the harsh tyranny of the materialistic philosophy,” becoming “one of the most powerful agents of the spiritual life.”

The purpose of an abstract painting, then, is to free the mind from its preoccupation with material objects and draw the viewer up to the spiritual realm. The goal is to impart a sense “of the Buddhist mystical state known as
sunyata
, the great void, or emptiness.”
4

Francis Schaeffer offered a fascinating phrase to describe this kind of content-free religious experience: He called it “mysticism with nobody there.” It may lift us out of the ordinary, mundane world, but to connect with what? Not with a transcendent person who loves us and communicates with us, but with sheer emptiness. The void.

Mark Rothko painted several large, dark, monochromatic panels for the Rothko chapel in Houston. What was he saying with these somber, melancholy paintings? The person who commissioned the paintings said they express “the silence of God, the unbearable silence of God.”

Shortly after finishing the paintings, before the chapel even opened, Rothko committed suicide. A mysticism with nobody there is not enough to give a sense of significance and meaning to life.

Postmodernism

What about postmodernism? How is it expressed in the arts? Recall that postmodernism is the claim that there is no “metanarrative” or universal story line valid for all people at all times. Each community has its own story line for making sense of the world. How would an artist give that idea visual expression?

By refusing to give a work of art any coherent overall design. This explains why deconstructionist artists favor the pastiche or collage—a patchwork of disconnected images that defy any attempt at interpretation.

For example, the famous collages by Robert Rauschenberg, says one art historian, “juxtaposed images in ways to suggest random incoherence, to which the artist—and viewer—can bring no meaningful order.” What was Rauschenberg saying with these disconnected images? That “life’s random occurrences … cannot be made to fit in any inherent hierarchy of meaning.”

Postmodern architecture has its own version of the pastiche or collage. As one journalist puts it, postmodernism “has brought us girders hanging unfinished out of the edges of buildings, archways cut off in space, and walls which don’t meet walls.” Ravi Zacharias describes seeing a building designed by a postmodern architect. “I had just one question,” Zacharias says. “Did he do the same with the foundation?”
5
It was an apologetics argument put in artistic terms.

Whether in art or literature, education or psychology, mathematics or science, every theory or movement is inspired by an underlying philosophy. If you master the strategic principles in this book, they will equip you to identify and engage critically with the ideas that have shaped the Western world in every subject area.

What Wags Your Theology?

A Romans 1 approach will even help you sort out claims in theology. Robert Garcia is a philosophy professor, but as a teenager, he went to a Lutheran college to study theology. At the time, the vogue was neo-orthodoxy, a movement to “demythologize” the Bible, stripping it of its supposedly mythological elements. Initially the young freshman was puzzled. Why was the teaching in the classroom so different from what he had learned at home and church?

Garcia finally discovered that neo-orthodoxy was strongly influenced by the philosophy of existentialism. He realized that the best way to understand the
theology
was to walk down the hallway to the
philosophy
department and study the existentialism that had inspired it.

This was a crucial insight. Virtually every form of theology has been influenced to some degree by philosophy. Consider the leading schools of liberal theology. Classic nineteenth-century liberalism recast Christianity in terms of Hegelian idealism. It essentially identified the Holy Spirit with Hegel’s quasi-pantheistic Absolute Spirit. Salvation was redefined as the gradual unfolding of the purposes of an immanent deity in and through the historical process. It would be manifested in the progressive recognition of the universal Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man—“the transformation of the world itself into a human Brotherhood,” in the words of liberal churchman Lyman Abbott.
6

More recently, liberation theology redefined Christianity in terms of Marxism. Gustavo Gutiérrez, who coined the term, writes, “Liberation theology categorizes people not as believers or unbelievers, but as oppressors or oppressed.”
7

Feminist theology recasts Christianity in terms borrowed from secular feminism. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza says a feminist hermeneutic “does not appeal to the Bible as its primary source but begins with women’s own experience and vision of liberation.”
8

A popular theology in many mainline seminaries is process theology, an offshoot of process philosophy. With roots in neo-Platonism (see Principle #2), it holds that God is in the world as the soul is in the body. Thus God is not infinite but finite. God is not omniscient (all-knowing) or omnipotent (all-powerful). This is process theology’s answer to the problem of evil: God is doing the best he can. God does not have the power to foresee the future or to prevent evil from happening.
9

The cutting edge today is postmodern theology, inspired obviously by postmodernism. Like secular postmodernism, it denies that humans have access to any timeless, universal truth, even in Scripture. In
The End of Apologetics
, Myron Penner writes, “We can, of course, say objectively ‘true’ things directly—like, for example, that it is –27°C outside this morning or that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling to himself the world. The point, however, is first that these sorts of objective ‘facts’ or statements are only approximately true and are made from a finite, contingent perspective.”
10
By citing Scripture (2 Cor. 5:19), Penner is asserting that even
its
statements are “made from a finite, contingent perspective.” Humans are trapped in the prison house of language after all.

Postmodern Christians typically reject apologetics, claiming that if you use reasons and arguments to defend biblical truth, then you have capitulated to “Enlightenment modernism.” Yet the line of reasoning you have learned in
Finding Truth
is informed by Scripture itself—which means its roots are
pre
modern, and its relevance is
trans
historical, applying to all cultures and historical periods.

In all the examples above, liberal schools of theology have redefined classic Christian theology in the shape of an idol-based philosophy. Yet they continue to use traditional theological terminology. Garcia told me, “My college professors insisted on using orthodox Christian terms and language, but vested with meanings imported from secular philosophies. That is what made their teaching so baffling and deceptive.”

Moreover, liberal theologies are not taught objectively, as a way to gain a critical understanding of them. Instead, Garcia says, they are “taught in a triumphalistic spirit, as sources of enlightenment and liberation from your-parents’-naive-supernaturalist-Christianity.” This goes a long way toward explaining why students who study theology at leading seminaries and universities often end up rejecting the orthodox Christianity they started out with.

In every field, Christians must learn critical thinking skills. Otherwise, we may simply absorb idol-based philosophies from the intellectual atmosphere.

When I was in my early twenties, working my way through Bible school in Los Angeles, I had a job as a teller at First Savings and Loan. We were carefully trained to discern the difference between genuine and counterfeit bills. By the same token, we must all train ourselves to discern the difference between worldviews, which are the currency of thought.

Critique and Create

At its best, apologetics includes not only the
critique
of idols but also the
creation
of life-giving alternatives. Christians often have a habit of defining themselves by what they are against. Yet to oppose what is wrong, it is most effective to offer something better—to “overcome evil with good” (Rom. 12:21).

If science is often used to bolster arguments for materialism and determinism, then Christians should make it their goal to do better, more accurate science. If literature is used to glamorize sin and brokenness, then Christians should fire up their imaginations to create higher quality, more inspiring works of fiction. If movies and music are vehicles for emotionally “hooking” people into Hollywood worldviews, then the best countermeasure is to create more compelling, more beautiful forms of art that express a biblical worldview. And if philosophy can lead to atheism, the solution is to craft more reasonable, more incisive, more truthful ways of thinking. As C. S. Lewis wrote, “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”
11

I’ve had philosophy majors in my classes whose parents and pastors warned them
not
to study the subject, quoting Paul’s warning not to be taken “captive” by philosophy (Col. 2:8). But as Dallas Willard points out, when Scripture commands us to avoid “vain philosophy,” it does not mean we should avoid
all
philosophy. After all, when Scripture commands us to avoid immodest clothing, it does not mean we should avoid
all
clothing.
12
In every area of life, our aim should be to counter the bad by cultivating the good.

A Total Book for Total Truth

A major barrier to cultivating the good in every area is that modern culture reduces Christianity to only one part of life—to a message of salvation, telling you how get to heaven. As a result, few think of Christianity as a worldview giving fundamental principles that apply to all of life.

Yet Scripture itself teaches that knowledge of God provides a universal framework. Consider these passages: “The fear of the L
ORD
is the beginning of wisdom” (Ps. 111:10; Prov. 1:7; 9:10; 15:33). In Christ are “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3). Christianity is the key to “all that is good and right and true” (Eph. 5:9). Are these passages really teaching that the fear of the Lord is the foundation of
all
wisdom, the key to all that is true? That claim seems radical.

But now that we have learned about idols, the biblical claim is easier to understand. The Bible is simply describing how
all
systems of thought work. All start with something that is regarded as ultimate, unconditioned, divine—which in turn functions as the controlling motif for everything that follows. The fear of some “god” is the beginning of every proposed worldview. In this regard, Christianity is like every other answer to the riddle of the universe. Its starting assumptions provide the logical basis for everything that follows.

That’s why Scripture insists that all truth begins with God. The Bible relates the plot line of universal, cosmic history. All true knowledge finds a place within its story line.

Allan Bloom, author of the bestselling book
The Closing of the American Mind
, says that through much of American history, the concept of a unified truth came from the Bible. It created a “common culture, one that united the simple and the sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old … as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things.”

But as the Bible loses influence, the West is losing its sense of any unified truth. “The very idea of such a total book is disappearing,” Bloom laments—and with it, the idea of total truth. Parents send their children to school to learn specialized skills so they can get a job. But they have lost the ideal of becoming a whole person living out an integrated vision of life. “Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the whole is lost.”
13

Yet the idea of total truth is being regained today—often in unexpected places.

Crazy Crae: How Do We Break Free?

“God met me where I was at—baggy jeans and earrings.” With those words, the celebrated hip-hop artist Lecrae Moore begins his story.
14
Growing up without a father, he experienced a childhood of abuse and neglect. He filled his life with drugs, theft, alcohol, sex, and gang activity. He was so wild that his friends nicknamed him “Crazy Crae.”
15
He was a poster child for every stereotype of urban subculture.