ISMS

At this late hour of history we are living in a day of “isms.” Some of them  are Rationalism, Relativism, Humanism, Materialism, Hedonism, and  Postmodernism. These isms are undermining the foundations of societies that  were built on what we call Judeo-Christian values, the values set forth by the  Bible, Old and New Testaments. These include such notions as absolute truth,  the sanctity of life, the value of work, and the worth of one’s word. The isms deny these values and the faith they are built on. As a result, millions are  building their lives on falsehoods and are facing a multitude of problems as their  “buildings,” their lives, fall apart as the foundations of sand crumble. 

The purpose of this work is to examine these isms to try to understand  them and why they are wrong, and to learn what is true, with the hope that  readers who are facing these problems may find help in rebuilding their lives, and those who are on a firm foundation will have information to help others who  are not. Obviously a work of this length is not intended to be exhaustive. It is  designed to be an introduction, to stimulate interest and further, deeper study. 

One fact I hope you will grasp in these pages is the importance of ideas.  Everything there is began with an idea. All creation is God’s ideas. Everything  you use in life was an idea in someone’s head before it became a physical reality.  The same is true for the values on which we base our lives. They did not just  happen. Someone conceived of an idea as to what is true and how we should live  our lives. That idea caught on, became widespread, and began to be the basis for  much of society. We will see some of that in this work. Never underestimate the  power of an idea. Marxism existed as an idea in Marx’s head before it enslaved  millions in Europe and Asia and led to the deaths of probably 50,000,000 people  in the attempt to force communism on them. I hope you will see that ideas have  consequences. 

We begin with the very first ism, the one that underlies all the others  listed above.

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Egotism 

The word “egotism” comes from the Latin word ego, which means “I”  (the Greek word is also ego) and signifies self-centeredness and pride. Self centeredness and pride go together because it is pride to be self-centered. That is,  we should be God-centered, for he is our Creator and the only one who is rightly  at the center of angelic and human life, but pride puts itself above God, making  self its own god, and thus centering one’s life in oneself. Before yielding  ourselves to God, you worship you and I worship me. 

Where did this terrible pride begin? There are two passages of Scripture  that tell us the ultimate origin of pride. One is Is. 14.3-17, especially vs. 12-14,  which are highlighted below, and Ezek. 28.1-19, especially vs. 11-15, 17a, which  are also highlighted. 

Isaiah 14.3-17 

³And it will come to be in the day that I AM will give you rest from your  sorrow and from your trouble and from the hard service in which you  were made to serve, ⁴that you will take up this taunt against the king of  Babylon and say, “How has the oppressor ceased, the place of torture  ceased! ⁵I AM has broken the staff of the wicked, the scepter of the  rulers, ⁶that smote the peoples in wrath with a continual stroke, that ruled  the nations in anger with a persecution that none restrained. ⁷The whole  earth is at rest, is quiet. They break forth into singing. ⁸Yes, the fir-trees  rejoice at you, the cedars of Lebanon, saying, ‘Since you have been laid  low, no hewer has come up against us’. ⁹Sheol from beneath is excited  over you to meet you at your coming. It stirs up the dead for you, all the  chief ones of the earth. It has raised up from their thrones all the kings of  the nations. ¹⁰All they will answer and say unto you, ‘Have you also  become as weak as we? Have you become like us? ^11Your pomp has been  brought down to Sheol, the music of your stringed instruments. The  maggot is spread under you, and worms cover you. ¹²How you have  fallen from the heavens, day star, son of the morning! You have been cut down to the ground, who weakened the nations! ¹³And you said in your  heart, “I will ascend into the heavens, I will exalt my throne above the  stars of God, and I will sit on the mount of congregation in the  uttermost parts of the north. ¹⁴I will ascend above the heights of the  clouds. I will make myself like the Most High.” ¹⁵Yet you will be  brought down to Sheol, to the lowest parts of the pit. ¹⁶They that see you 

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will gaze at you. They will consider you, saying, “Is this the man who  made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, ¹⁷who made the world like  a wilderness and overthrew its cities, who did not release his prisoners to  their home?”’” (emphasis mine) 

Ezekiel 28.1-19 

¹The word of I AM came again to me, saying, ²“Son of man, say to the  prince of Tyre, ‘Thus says the Lord I AM, “Because your heart is lifted up  and you have said, ‘I am a god. I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the  seas,’ yet you are man and not God, though you set your heart as the heart  of God. ³Look, you are wiser than Daniel. There is no secret that is hidden  from you. ⁴By your wisdom and by your understanding you have gotten  riches and have gotten gold and silver into your treasuries. ⁵By your great  wisdom in trade have you increased your riches and your heart is lifted  up because of your riches. ⁶Therefore thus says the Lord I AM, ‘Because  you have set your heart as the heart of God, ⁷therefore, look, I will bring  strangers upon you, the terrible of the nations, and they will draw their  swords against the beauty of your wisdom, and they will defile your  brightness. ⁸They will bring you down to the pit, and you will die the  death of them that are slain in the heart of the seas. ⁹Will you yet say  before him who slays you, “I am God,” though you are man and not God,  in the hand of him who pierces you? ¹⁰You will die the death of the  uncircumcised by the hand of strangers, for I have spoken it,’ says the  Lord I AM. ¹¹And the word of I AM came to me saying, ¹²‘Son of man,  take up a lamentation over the king of Tyre and say to him, “Thus says  the Lord I AM, ‘You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and  perfect in beauty. ¹³You were in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious  stone was your covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the diamond, the  beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the  carbuncle, and gold. The workmanship of your tambourines and of your  flutes was in you. On the day that you were created they were  prepared. ¹⁴You were the anointed cherub who covers, and I placed you,  so that you were on the holy mountain of God. You have walked up and  down in the midst of the stones of fire. ¹⁵You were perfect in your ways  from the day that you were created, till unrighteousness was found in  you. ¹⁶By the abundance of your trade you were filled within with  violence and you have sinned. Therefore I have cast you as profane out of 

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the mountain of God, and I have destroyed you, covering cherub, from the  midst of the stones of fire. ¹⁷Your heart was lifted up because of your  beauty. You have corrupted your wisdom because of your brightness. I  have cast you to the ground. I have laid you before kings, that they may  see you. ¹⁸By the multitude of your iniquities in the unrighteousness of  your trade you have profaned your sanctuaries. Therefore I have brought  forth a fire from the midst of you. It has devoured you. And I have turned  you to ashes on the earth in the sight of all them that see you. ¹⁹All they  that know you among the peoples will be astonished at you. You have  become a terror, and you will nevermore have any being.’”’” 

The passage in Isaiah begins with a word to the king of Babylon, probably  Nebuchadnezzar, who first conquered Judah and Jerusalem, and the passage in  Ezekiel begins with a word to the king of Tyre, but it is obvious in the midst of  both that they turn from these human, earthly kings to a heavenly figure. Is.  14.12 reads, “How you have fallen from the heavens, day star, son of the  morning!” Ezek. 28.13 says, “You were in Eden, the garden of God,” and v. 14, “You were the anointed cherub that covers, and I placed you, so that you were on  the holy mountain of God. You have walked up and down in the midst of the  stones of fire.” 

We would say in our day of computer technology that these human kings  morph into another being. This could not be an earthly being, but only a  heavenly one.  

Conservative students of Scripture are virtually universally agreed that  this being in none other than Satan. Isaiah tells us that he “said in his heart, “I  will ascend into the heavens, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God” (v.  13). V. 14: “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will make myself like  the Most High. (emphasis mine) 

Ezekiel says that this figure was “full of wisdom and perfect in beauty” (v.  12), and that he was “in Eden, the garden of God.” (v. 13) V. 14 adds that he was  “the anointed cherub who covers” and that he was “on the holy mountain of  God….” So we see that Satan was probably the highest of all the angels. Cherubs  were heavenly beings who had to do with revealing the glory of God while  covering it sufficiently to keep it from destroying those who saw it (see Ezek. 1.4- 28 and chapter 10). That is why he was called “the anointed cherub who covers.”  But something went terribly wrong. 

Satan was not content to enjoy this exalted position in the service of God.  Ezek. 28.15 says of him, “You were perfect in your ways from the day that you  were created, until unrighteousness was found in you.”

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Unrighteousness was found in Satan. What was this unrighteousness?  Isaiah tells us: the word “pomp” in v.11 is one of the Hebrew words for pride,  and Ezekiel continues in v. 2, “Because your heart is lifted up, and you have said,  ‘I am a god. I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas,’ yet you are a man  and not God, though you set your heart as the heart of God….” 

V. 17: “Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty.” Satan exalted  himself in his own mind and intent to the place of God, puffed up by pride in the  great gifts God had given him (Jn. 3.27, 1 Cor. 4.7), and made himself the center  of the universe. He was the original egotist. 

It appears that Satan had angelic followers in his rebellion against God.  Mt. 25.41 mentions “the devil and his angels,” and some interpret Rev. 12.4 as  referring to a third of the angels who rebelled with Satan. Rev. 12.7 again  mentions Satan as the dragon, “and his angels.” Satan and his angels were cast  out of Heaven (Is. 14.12, Ezek. 28.16, 17). 

Satan was not willing just to accept what had happened. He wanted to be  worshipped as God was, and is. He had his angels who, I am sure, worship him,  but when God created the skies and the earth and gave man dominion, Satan  was not willing to be worshipped by only himself and his angels. He wanted  everything that rightly belonged to God. Thus he set about to seduce the man  and woman whom God had created to rule under him. There was one tree in the  Garden of Eden that Adam and Eve might not eat from, the tree of the  knowledge of good and evil. That was Satan’s means of approach to Eve. 

He called Eve’s attention to the tree and told her that “in the day you eat  from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and  evil.” (Gen. 3.5) When Eve “saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a  delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took  of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her husband with her, and he ate” (Gen.  3.6). Satan tempted Eve to have the pride he had: “you will be like God.” He hit  his mark, for Eve saw “that the tree was to be desired to make one wise,” and she  ate. Eve, desiring to be like God, made herself the center of the universe and  worshipped herself. She had gone the way of Satan and thus fallen from the  exalted place that God had made for her and Adam, just as Satan fell from his  exalted place. Adam joined her in this disobedience to God. 

So was pride, egotism, introduced into Heaven and earth. We had our  first ism. And we have reaped the fruit of that fall into sin ever since. We have  lived under God’s curse of the earth (Gen. 3.16-19), and the bitterest fruit is  death. Adam and Eve fell into spiritual death immediately (Gen. 3.7-11), their  spirits dying toward God (Eph. 2.1) and their fellowship with him being cut off.  Physical death began with the slaying of animals to make skins to cover the  nakedness of the first couple (Gen. 3.21). They eventually died physically, and 

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every living thing that has lived has died, with the exception of Enoch (Gen. 5.24)  and Elijah (2 Kings 2.11) and those who are alive at present. So will everything  living in the future die, with the exception of those alive at the Lord’s coming. So  bitter is the fruit of sin, founded in egotism. 

A few other passages of Scripture will round out our understanding of  this sin of egotism. In Is. 13.19 we read of “Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the  beauty of the Chaldeans’ pride.” The Hebrew word for “pride” in this verse is  the primary word used for “pride” in the Old Testament. Its basic meaning is “to  be high or exalted,” and it can be used in a positive sense, such as the high and  exalted position of God, or in a negative, for pride, to exalt oneself or to be  exalted in one’s own eyes. Without going into detail, for it is not the purpose of  this work, let us just say that history can be seen as a tale of two cities, not  London and Paris, but Jerusalem and Babylon. Jerusalem ultimately is the city of  God, the Jerusalem above (Gal. 4.26, Rev. 21.2), and it is and will be God’s capital  on earth after the return of Christ. Is it not remarkable how much Israel and  Jerusalem are at the center of the news today? That is because they are at the  center of God’s heart and of his plans (Ezek. 5.5). 

Babylon is the opposite. Babylon, babble, confusion, is the city that  symbolizes all that is against God, the world organized by Satan in opposition to  God. It is the capital of false religion (Rev. 17) and of the world’s systems (Rev.  18). Babylon was a mighty and beautiful city in ancient days, and it became, not  an expression of the glory of God for which the Chaldeans were thankful and  worshipful, but “the glory of the Chaldeans’ pride.” 

Nebuchadnezzar, the first and greatest king of Babylon (Daniel’s head of  gold, Dan. 2.38), was walking on the roof of his palace in Babylon and said, “Is  this not great Babylon, which I have built for a royal dwelling by the might of my  power and for the glory of my majesty?” (Dan. 4.30) He did not recognize and  honor God as the one who had exalted him to his high position, but was puffed  up with pride as if he had brought himself so far. Such is the pride of man in  things God has given. See also Jer. 49.16 and 50.31-32 and Ob. 3 in this  connection. 

The people of God themselves fell into pride, as Hos. 5.5 and 7.10, among  other passages, show us. These verses say that their pride testifies against them.  Neh. 9.10 says that Pharaoh and his people “acted arrogantly” toward Israel, and  then vs. 16 and 29 of that chapter say that Israel “acted arrogantly.” 

Zeph. 3.11 shows us the end of pride among the people of God: “In that  day you will not be put to shame for all your doings in which you have  transgressed against me, for then I will take away from the midst of you your  proudly exulting ones, and you will no more be haughty in my holy mountain.” 

Praise him!

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We find the same pride in the New Testament. We saw in Gen. 3.6 that  when Eve  

“saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that  the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she  also gave to her husband with her, and he ate” John writes in 1 Jn. 2.16, “For all  that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of  life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.” “Good for food:” “the lust of  the flesh.” “A delight to the eyes:” “the lust of the eyes.” “To be desired to make  one wise:” “the pride of life.” The Greek word for “pride” in this verse has to  with boasting, particularly boasting about things one does not have or cannot do.  We see it again in Ja. 4.16. 

In Mk. 7.22 the Lord Jesus tells us that pride, among others sins, is from  the heart. What we are inside governs what comes out of us. The Greek word for  “pride” in this verse has to do with showing oneself above others.¹ [¹Richard C.  Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans  Publishing Co, 1973, 101] This word also occurs as an adjective in Rom. 1.30. 

Paul warns us in Rom. 12.3 not to think too highly of ourselves. The verse  is actually a play on the word for “think,” employing three words that contain  the same root. It cannot really be translated into polished English in a way that  captures what Paul says. Henry Alford gives what he calls a clumsy attempt: “…  not to be highminded, above that which he ought to be minded, but to be so  minded, as to be soberminded”²[²Alford’s Greek Testament, Grand Rapids: Baker  Book House, 1980, 441]. That does not seem so clumsy to me, and it captures the  three uses of “think” or “be minded.” The adjective form of this word, proud,  occurs in Rom. 1.30 and 2 Tim. 3.2 

Another Greek word used, meaning to be swollen with pride, is found in  1 Tim. 3.6 and 6.4, and in 2 Tim. 3.4. In the first of these places it is applied to an  overseer or elder in a local church. Paul writes that he is not to be one recently  converted (literally neophyte) so that he will not be swollen with pride. A young  Christian might not yet have overcome a sin natural to man, or one not seasoned  in the faith and in the church might be swollen with pride at being an overseer.  Christians are certainly not exempt from being proud! 

In the second of these verses Paul says that anyone who does not accept  the teaching of the Lord Jesus and his apostles is swollen with pride and knows  nothing. It would require some measure of pride to put oneself above the Lord  and his apostles! 

Finally, 2 Tim. 3.4 occurs in the passage about the difficult time of the last  days where Paul lists a number of sins that will prevail with many men. One of  these is to be swollen with pride.

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The last Greek word to be considered literally means “puffed up,” quite a  good picture of pride. Paul tells his readers in 1 Cor. 4.6 not to be puffed up for  either Apollos or himself. That is, do not claim to be a follower of one or the  other, being puffed up about following the one who is “right.” This reminds us  of 1 Cor. 1.11-13, where some said, “I am of Paul,” some, “I am of Apollos,”  some, “I am of Cephas,” all taking pride in following the right one. Then there  came the most spiritually proud of all: “I am of Christ.” I can remember thinking  as a boy that my denomination was superior to all the others. This word appears  again 1 Cor. 4.18 and 19. 

One of the more dangerous ways in which pride tries to claim us is seen in  1 Cor. 8.1, using the same word: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” The  more we learn of the Bible and spiritual truth, especially if we know Hebrew and  Greek and so forth, the easier it is for us to become proud of what we know,  especially if we are around some “ignorant” people we can look down on. God  have mercy on us. Ja. 3.1 says, “Let not many become teachers, my brothers,  knowing that we will receive a greater judgment.” 

Paul reaches the opposite ultimate in 1 Cor. 13.4: “Love … is not puffed  up.” 

Finally, he tells us in Col. 2.18 not to be led astray by those who are puffed  up by their fleshly mind because of their various religious experiences, some  spectacular. We are not about religion, but about knowing God intimately,  walking with him, trusting him, obeying him. 

Let us take warning from Ja. 4.6 and 1 Pt. 5.5, both quoting Pr. 3.34 in the  Greek version of the Old Testament: “God resists the proud, but gives grace to  the humble.” We all know the scourge of egotism in our lives. God give us  grace to humble ourselves before him. 

Rationalism 

To begin our review of rationalism we need to look first at the general  field of how we know things. How do we gain knowledge? Rationalism is one of  the candidates for how we know things. We will use a few philosophical terms,  but don’t be scared away by that. I’ll keep it simple and define the terms. Just so  you know, the general field of how we know things is called epistemology, from  the one of the Greek words for “know” and “knowledge.” 

Another candidate for how we know is empiricism, from the Greek word  for “experience.” It is the belief that we know by experience and observation. It  contrasts with rationalism in that the latter is the belief that we know primarily  by reason. The word “rationalism” comes from the Latin word for “reason.” 

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These two ideas have been competing with each other since ancient times. Plato  and Aristotle and many others dealt with these concepts. 

We are looking at isms from a Christian standpoint, so we need to state  at this point that the Bible would not argue with either rationalism or empiricism  as ways to know truth, but it also sets forth the belief that we can know certain  things only by revelation. For example, in Rom. 1.18-21 Paul writes that the  existence of God is known by both observation and reason. As we observe  creation and then reason from it, the existence of God is evident. How could  anything be there if no one made it? It is simply impossible, statistically and  otherwise, for something to come into being out of nothing without a maker.  Any reasonable (rational!) and honest person would believe that. 

Paul adds in Gal. 1.15-16, “But when God who separated me from my  mother’s womb and called me through his grace was pleased to reveal his Son in  me….” Paul knew about God by observation and reason. He knew God by  revelation. It is a cardinal truth of Christian faith that we cannot know God by  our own efforts, but only by his revelation of himself to us. 

The Bible has no quarrel with either rationalism or empiricism as means of  gaining knowledge. Both are valid. The problem arises when people deny the  truth, even the possibility, of revelation. There have always been skeptics who  question any claims of truth beyond what is obvious in this world, but religious  beliefs held sway in the world from time immemorial. Usually one religion  claimed the allegiance of all in its area. Beginning in about the fourteenth  century, there occurred the Italian Renaissance. It was centered on a rediscovery  of ancient Latin and Greek literature and was led by such men as Petrarch and  Boccaccio. In bringing this literature into the culture dominated by Roman  Catholicism for centuries, these men introduced non-Christian ideas such as  Greek and Latin mythology and the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. In this  context the historical criticism of the ancient literature was developed so as to try  to determine the original text where there were differing versions available, and  to use various means of trying to understand the meaning of what was written.  Later on these methods were applied to the Bible with great consequences, which  we will see later.¹[¹Williston Walker, A History of the Christian Church, New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959, 280-281.]  

This introduction of new ideas was the opening of the door which  eventually led to the widespread rejection of Christianity as it was perceived and  the secularization of society. While there is much to be regretted with these  developments, it must be understood that what was perceived as Christianity in  that day was anything but the faith of the Bible. Roman Catholicism held  complete dominance over all within its jurisdiction, held to many unscriptural  doctrines, and was shot through with corruption and immorality. The break with 

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that institution had to occur, and there were two breaks, the secular, turning  away from God and religion, and the Protestant Reformation, originally an  attempt to reform Roman Catholicism. 

Walker adds that by the middle of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance  “attitude toward the church was one of indifference. It revived widely a pagan  point of view, and sought to reproduce the life of antiquity in its vices as well as  its virtues. Few periods in the world’s history have been so boastfully corrupt as  that of the Italian Renaissance.”² [²Walker, 281-282.] 

One of the few greatest inventions in the history of the world added  impetus to the spread of these and other ideas. It was the printing press,  developed by Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany. It is perhaps ironic that  his first publication was the Bible in 1453, for the art of printing was and is used  to spread the Bible and everything else good or bad. 

Though the Renaissance began in Italy in the fourteenth century, it did not  begin to take hold in Germany till near the end of the fifteenth century, and it  moved on from there to France, England, and Spain. The climate for the  development of modern rationalism was in place. 

Into this turmoil of ideas stepped three philosophers in the seventeenth  century. They were René Descartes of France, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz of  Germany, and Baruch Spinoza of Holland. Without going into the complexities  of philosophy, let us just say that these three men set forth the claims of reason as  the primary means of gaining knowledge. The belief that reason is the primary  means of knowledge is rationalism. Descartes’ famous statement is, “I think,  therefore I am.” Because he exercises his ability to reason, to think, he knows that  he exists. Reason is the way to knowledge. Rationalism. 

Descartes, Leibniz, and, Spinoza all believed in God, so they were not the  ones who tried to do away with God and faith in favor of secularism and reason,  but their work laid a foundation in thought for those who would come later and  make that very attempt. It had already been accepted by many that reason was  the key to knowledge, and it was only a short step from that position to the belief  that there is no truth but that of reason. There is no God. There is no revelation.  Faith is superstition. 

Another stream of thought that led to this point is that of Deism, the belief  that there is a God, but that he created the universe, gave it laws to operate by,  and now takes no active role in its workings. He sits back and watches. There  were both Christian and anti-Christian forms of Deism (though there cannot  actually be “Christian Deism” because Deism is unscriptural, Col. 1.17, Heb. 1.3).  Both forms believed that the chief purpose and focus of religion is morality.  Again this is unchristian, for the primary purpose and focus of Christianity is a  personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ based on giving him his 

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rightful place of worship, faith, and obedience. This relegating of God to a place  of non-involvement in the universe is not far from relegating him to non existence. 

In the eighteenth century there developed what is known as the  Enlightenment. It starts with the belief that religion and faith are not true, that  they are superstition, and that those who follow them are walking in darkness.  Thus when people develop the courage to throw off the bonds of religion and  step into the light of reason (rationalism), they have been enlightened. Those  of us who believe the Bible is true would say this was an endarkenment, not an  enlightenment. But we cannot judge too harshly, for remember that the  prevailing religion of that day was anything but biblical Christianity. It was  largely superstition, a holding to traditions and authorities that science could  prove to be untrue, such as the notions that the earth was the center of the  universe and the sun and other bodies revolved around it. Galileo had been  forced to recant these teachings by inquisition on penalty of death in 1633. 

We have mentioned historical criticism as it was applied to ancient Greek  and Latin literature. Particularly in Germany, beginning in the seventeenth and  eighteenth centuries, these methods were applied to the Bible. Some good has  come of this, for the study of the many ancient manuscripts of the Bible have  resulted in a more accurate Hebrew and Greek text, but the corner was turned  with those who not only applied human reason to the Scriptures, which is only  reasonable (!), but who also denied the supernatural, and thus denied revelation,  miracles, and so on, and said that human reason is the only means of  understanding the Bible. Such was Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a professor in  Hamburg, Germany in the eighteenth century. He did admit the existence of  God, but he was a Deist who said that “all that is true is that natural religion  which teaches the existence of a wise Creator, a primitive morality, and  immortality – all ascertainable by reason”³[³Walker, 481]. 

We said in our introduction to this work that egotism, pride, underlies  all the other isms. In rationalism we see the pride of man in his intellect and  reasoning ability exalted to the highest place. I do not need knowledge from  God. I am capable in myself of learning all I need to know by the power of my  own intellect. Such is the pride of man. 

The battle with this rationalist approach to the Bible, and thus to Christian  faith, goes on to this day. The Bible is just a historical document, to be studied as  any other historical document would be. There is no such thing as revelation. All  we can know about the Bible is what we can learn by human intelligence, study,  and reason. Miracles are impossible. Anyone who believes otherwise is in the  darkness of superstition. Anyone who hears God speak is insane, or at least  unstable.

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All that we have seen here and more that came after it led not only to  these beliefs about the Bible, but also to the increasing secularization of society as  a whole. An increasing number of people take no thought about God or religion  as far as we can tell. They are secular people whose lives have no place for God  or faith. We will see more of the effects on life of this condition as we continue. 

How are we to respond to the belief of the rationalists that reason is the  only means of gaining knowledge? First, we would agree that reason is a means  of gaining knowledge. We believe that God is our Creator and that he made us  with reason. We are capable of rational thinking, though all to often we follow  our emotions and live by feelings, but that is another topic. Second, we would  say that the argument of the empiricists also contains truth. It is not the only  means of knowledge, but it is a means. Reason and experience have their places. 

But we would hold that neither of these approaches can satisfy man’s  inner need. We were made by God and for him (Col. 1.16) and we need a  knowledge that cannot be supplied by these methods. That knowledge consists  of truth, propositions that we believe are true, but it also includes knowing God,  not knowing about God, but knowing God. I know information about all the  people whom I would call friends, but I have personal relationships with them  that I call knowing them. Just as I can know another human being, I can know  God. 

We cannot expect anyone who has never experienced God in that way to  understand this fact. We can see why they say people who hear God speak are  insane, but by this we do not usually mean that we hear him speak out loud,  though there have been reports of that, but that we “hear” him in our hearts. We  have thoughts, but more than just thoughts in our brains. They are in our hearts.  We know it is God speaking to us. 

Many, perhaps all of us, have had the experience of knowing some truth  in our heads, but not really grasping it in our spirits. Then God somehow reveals  that truth to us, and though we do not have any new knowledge, we do have  new knowledge! It is living in our hearts and not just setting there in our brains.  It changes our lives. 

And yes, all this requires faith. What is faith? Is it the willing suspension  of reason to believe something we know cannot be true? No! I cannot explain  faith, but Paul writes that “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the  speaking of Christ” (Rom. 10.17). We hear the truth of the good news and we  know we have heard Christ in our hearts. We know that what we have heard is  true. We have experienced revelation. One who has not done so cannot be  expected to understand it or even to believe it. But it is the most important reality  of our lives. We know we have met God and we know him.

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I am coming to believe more and more that faith itself is a gift of God. For  example, in Phil. 1.29 Paul writes, “For to you it has been given for Christ’s sake  not only to have faith in him, but also to suffer for his sake….” It has been given  to have faith in him. It is a gift. And Paul says in 1 Cor. 12.9 that faith is a gift of  the Spirit. 

Why do some experience faith from hearing the speaking of Christ and  revelation and the knowledge of God and others do not? I cannot say. It is all the  grace of God and the wisdom of God. Why have I experienced the grace of God  and someone else has not? I cannot say. If I said that I have done something to  deserve it and the other person has not, then it is not grace, but works. I don’t deserve it. It is grace. We do have to admit that at some point our reason, the  reason of rationalism, reaches its limit. God is beyond us. He is not just  greater then we are. He is a totally different order of being from us. We cannot  understand him and his actions fully, but we do believe that he has revealed to  us enough for us to find salvation and meaning and a deeply satisfying  relationship with him. We cannot prove any of this. We can only give testimony  and trust God to speak through it. 

There is one aspect of this matter that we have not dealt with yet, but have  saved till last, believing it to be a large part of the answer insofar as we can grasp  an answer. The Bible teaches that human beings consist of body, soul, and spirit,  the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual. Knowledge by the five senses,  sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, is knowledge by experience and observation  and comes by way of the body, for the fives senses are physical. Knowledge by  reason has to do with the logical thinking of the mind and has to do with the soul  (psuche in Greek, from which we get “psychology”). Knowledge by revelation  comes from God by way of the spirit. There is no conflict in Scripture among  experience and observation, reason, and revelation. They are all given by God to  enable us to have well-rounded knowledge, not only a partial knowledge.  Blessed is the person who knows with his senses, with his reason, and with his  spirit. And blessed be God. 

Relativism 

“The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar  eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil,  confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe.” So begins Paul Johnson’s  Modern Times. He refers to the first test of Albert Einstein’s general theory of  relativity. This and following tests were positive, proving “that space and time  are relative rather than absolute terms of measurement.”¹[¹Paul Johnson, Modern 

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Times, New York: HarperPerennial, 1992, 1.] Let me confess that I am not  scientific and I do not understand this, but the theory states that the absolutes of  the physics of Isaac Newton, long the standard in physics, were not exact. For  example, it had been observed that “the motions of the planet Mercury deviated  by forty-three seconds of arc a century from its predictable behavior under  Newtonian laws of physics.”² [²Johnson, 1.] 

One result of this proving of the theory was that Einstein became an  international hero. Another was that for most people, like me, unable to  comprehend the science, “relativity never became more than a vague source of  unease…. All at once, nothing seemed certain in the movement of the spheres….  At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a  popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good  and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably,  relativity became confused with relativism.”³ [³Johnson, 3-4.] 

Relativity became confused with relativism. Relativity is a scientific  theory that has to do only with how the universe operates and has nothing to do  with good and evil and value. But the popular mind, unable to grasp the science,  applied relativity in every area and came up with the false belief of relativism,  a belief that largely governs the thinking of the world today. The dictionary  defines relativism as “a view that ethical truths depend upon the individuals and  groups holding them.”⁴[⁴Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield,  Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1965, 723.] Relativity is science, but the  confusion resulted in an ism that is undermining the moral foundations of the  world today, resulting in untold personal and social harm and millions of  devastated lives. 

The primary application of relativism is in the area of sexual morality.  Whereas the Judeo-Christian value of sexual relations within marriage only was  the accepted norm for nearly two thousand years, it no longer is. We have  teenage pregnancy and venereal diseases, single moms and thus children with  no father, at least in the home (and now we are seeing single fathers with no  mother in the home as more and more mothers do not want their children),  adultery, casual sex on every hand, and the destruction of millions of unborn  babies because they are an inconvenience. Something like 70% of black children  are born out of wedlock.⁵[⁵Minority women make up about 14% of the female  population, but they have about 32% of the abortions. Over 333 black babies are  aborted every day. More blacks die of abortion than of AIDS, violent crimes, accidents, cancer, and heart disease. [https://www.nrlc.org/outreach/bal/,  cnsnews.com] We have even had attempts to teach homosexuality as an  acceptable lifestyle to five-year-olds! And we have media that approve of the  immorality and make it appear to be healthy and normal. Virtually all of our 

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means of communication and entertainment, movies, television, print, the  internet, are shot through with the glorification of immorality. The Playboy  Philosophy is indeed a philosophy, a way of understanding the world, a world  view. 

“No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public  misapprehension.” He “believed passionately in absolute standards of right and  wrong.” “He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social  pandemic….”⁶ [⁶Johnson, 4.] Thus does Satan take advantage of any opportunity  to bring suffering and sorrow into the world. 

It is indeed a fact that what we call western civilization, primarily Europe  and the Americas, was founded on Judeo-Christian values. Those values have  promoted disciplined behavior and good government and led to the most  prosperous societies for the most people in the history of the world. Now we are  seeing the foundations crumble. We are seeing government replacing God,  trying to a job that only God can do, and government is out of control on every level. It will soon have no choice but to go bankrupt and default on its massive  debt or print money to cover it, thus bringing on ruinous inflation that will  destroy the value of our currency, affecting those living on retirement savings  the most. They could see their wealth disappear almost overnight. 

Judeo-Christian values are absolute values. They are not relative. There is  a God, the God of the Bible. He is love, but he is also righteous. His love will  forgive sins and save sinners, but his righteous requirements must be met. He  does not just overlook sin. It must be paid for. Since we could not pay for it  ourselves except by spending eternity in hell, his love provided a way to punish  sin and still save us. He sent his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to live a sinless life in  this world, so as to qualify him to pay for sin (a Lamb without blemish), and to  die for us, in our place, that we may be forgiven and receive justification from  God. 

I use the term “justification” deliberately, for it is a legal term, just as  “righteous” is. To be justified legally means that someone goes to court to appear  before a judge to be convicted, found guilty, or justified, acquitted, and he is  acquitted. Because the Lord Jesus died for us, taking away our sins, when we  accept what he has done for us by faith and receive him as our Savior, we are  justified, acquitted. God says, “Not guilty!” and slams down that gavel with a  sound that Satan hates to hear, but that is music in the sinner’s ear! 

The modern relativistic mindset says that there are no absolute values.  Whatever is right for you is right for you, but it may not be for me. Whatever is  right for me is right for me, but it may not be for you. We all remember, “If it  feels good do it.” Most people just ignore God, if they think of him at all, but  those who feel some need to do what they want to do and still feel acceptable to 

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God usually stress the love of God and do away with judgment and hell. “I’m  not a bad person. I’m not hurting anyone. Besides, God is love and he wouldn’t  send anyone to hell.” The person who thinks that has never seen himself through  God’s eyes. The closer we get to God the more we realize how bad we really are  in ourselves. We do not compare with God very favorably. Jesus Christ is the  standard. He was perfect. No matter how good we are, we are not perfect, not  even close. 

It is shocking that most Christians now do not accept absolute truth. One  poll showed that 72 percent of Americans agreed that there is no such thing as  Absolute Truth. Even more to the point here, 64 percent of born-again Christians agreed. More than half of evangelical respondents said that many religions can  lead to eternal life, despite the central evangelical tenet that Jesus is the sole path  to eternity with God. A large percentage of young people raised in church,  though the exact number is in dispute, leave the church when they go off to  college or soon after they graduate. 

Once again we see the pride of man, egotism, raised up against God. We  do not need God’s truth if there is such a thing. I am capable of making my own  decisions about right and wrong. If my beliefs disagree with yours, that is fine.  What is good for you is good for you. What is good for me is good for me. 

What are we as believers in God and his word as absolute truth to do in  the face of such relativistic thinking? For one thing we need to learn about the  nature of truth. There are several good writers and speakers today who teach  what is called apologetics. That does not mean apologizing for our faith! The 

word “apologetics” comes from the Greek word used in 1 Pt. 3.15 for “defense”:  “… always ready for a defense to all who ask an account of you for the hope that  is in you.” Apologetics is the defense of the faith. Can you give a good reason for  why you have hope in Christ? If you tell someone that he needs to believe the  Bible and he says to you that that’s alright for you, but all truth is relative and the  Bible is not alright for him, how do you answer? 

One of the leaders among those who teach and write about apologetics is  Norman Geisler. You might want to look him up online and check into some of  his books. He makes the case that truth is always the same, though our beliefs  may differ. For example, people used to believe that the world was flat and that  the sun revolved around it. Now we believe that the world is spherical and  revolves around the sun. Truth did not change. The earth has always been  spherical and has always revolved around the sun. Our beliefs changed as we  learned scientific truth that could be demonstrated to be true. If the world had  been flat, Magellan would never have sailed around it, but would have turned  back or gone over the edge!⁸[⁸Norman L. Geisler, “Truth Under Fire,” Journey: 

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Dubuque, Iowa, Emmaus Bible College, Winter 2010, 17.] Truth is not affected by  our beliefs, but our beliefs can and should be affected by the truth. Geisler points out that relativism “fails because it either affirms that  relativism is absolutely true, which is self-defeating, or it claims that it’s just  another relative statement….”⁹[⁹Geisler, 15.] If it is absolutely true, there is  absolute truth, which means relativism is not true. If it is just another relative  statement, then it is not true itself because there is no absolute truth. Get it?  Geisler also gives several examples of everyday truth that everyone agrees on  everywhere and at all times. If you buckle your child into a car seat, you want to  be absolutely certain that the child is safe. You will not accept a statement from  the child seat manufacturer that it is safe for him, but may or may not be for you.  You demand absolute truth. It is the same with how much money is in your bank  account, with medicine you take, with relationships (Is my husband or wife  cheating on me or not?), and with court proceedings. You must tell the absolute  truth, the whole absolute truth, and nothing but the absolute truth. Geisler  humorously writes that the judge will not say, “Raise your right hand. Do you  swear to tell the relative truth, the whole relative truth, and nothing but the  relative truth, so help your future experience?” The judge will demand absolute  truth.¹⁰ [¹⁰Geisler, 16.] 

One more quote: “Relativists believe that relativism is true for everyone.  OOPS…because if it’s true for everyone, everywhere, and at all times, what is it?  It’s not relativism; it’s absolutism.”¹¹ [¹¹Geisler, 19.] 

I believe what Geisler says, but it seems to me that all the examples he  gives are material in nature, but such things as belief in God and the spiritual  world and right and wrong are of a non-material nature that cannot be  scientifically proved. I believe there is a God and I believe he is the God of the  Bible, but how do I prove that? I do not know. I believe that God has proved  himself to me as I have trusted in him and tried to obey him, not very well, I  confess, and walked with him. I believe he made himself known to me one day. I  believe I have experienced revelation from God. I cannot prove that any of this  that I believe is true. All I can do is give testimony and share my experience or  share the good news and trust God to use it to speak to someone. There is such a  thing as faith, and the Bible says that without faith it is impossible to please God  (Heb. 11.6). We have quoted Rom. 10.17: “… faith comes from hearing, and  hearing through the speaking of Christ.” I pray that Christ will speak to someone  livingly in his heart through what I say. 

I also believe in free will and that a person can reject Christ. In this  connection I believe that virtually all unbelief in God is willful. People do not  want to believe in God because they want to be free to sin with impunity. Paul  Johnson, whose book Modern Times we quoted at the beginning of this chapter, 

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also wrote a book called Intellectuals. It shows from the lives of twelve famous  intellectuals who did not believe in God, or at least the God of the Bible who  demands righteousness, that these people lived immoral lives and wanted to do  away with God so as to be immoral without penalty. It is a very interesting and  informative read. “Men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds  were evil.” (Jn. 3.19) 

The truth, the absolute truth, is that a great many of those who claim that  truth is relative want that to be true so that they can indulge in the common old  everyday sin of immorality, garden variety, not even anything lofty, without  having to give an account to God. If there is no God, there is no spiritual truth,  and if there is nothing beyond this world, there is no accountability. Go for it!  Tomorrow we may die. 

Humanism 

There is an abundance of material available on humanism. Google  “humanism” and you will get over 47,000,000 responses! There are also many  books in print on the subject. One of the leading ones is The Philosophy of  Humanism by Corliss Lamont, much celebrated by humanists. Corliss-lamont.org  tells us that he “was born to Wall Street wealth, yet he championed the cause of  the working class, and was derided as a ‘Socialist’ and a ‘traitor to his class’.”  Born in 1902, he lived into 1995. He was a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard  in 1924 and did graduate work at Oxford and Columbia, where he received a  Ph.D. in philosophy in 1932, according to the back of his book, The Philosophy of  Humanism. Other information provided there is that he was a director of the  A.C.L.U. and taught at Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard. He was a member of the  American Humanist Association (see americanhumanist.org) and was its  president emeritus. Lamont was active in humanist causes virtually all of his life.  Because of his prominence in the humanist movement and the importance of his  writings, much of what will be said about humanism in this work comes from his  book, The Philosophy of Humanism, one of many books that he wrote or edited. 

Humanistic thinking has been around since ancient times as a man- and  this-life-centered way of thinking. It began to develop in the more modern form  in fourteenth century Italy as an aspect of the Renaissance (see pgs. 7-8 above).  “Renaissance Humanism was first and foremost a revolt against the other 

worldliness of mediaeval Christianity, a turning away from preoccupation with 

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personal immortality to making the best of life in this world.”¹[¹Corliss Lamont,  The Philosophy of Humanism, New York: Continuum, 1990, 19-20]. Further, “the  Renaissance also constituted a revolt against the authority of [Catholicism] and  against the religious limitations on knowledge”²[²Lamont, 20]. Lamont was  strongly opposed to any belief in God and the supernatural. This will come out a  bit more as we go along. 

Before going any further we should define “humanism.” A pair of  quotations from Lamont will give it from the horse’s mouth: “Humanism, in  brief, is a philosophy (or religion) the guiding principle of which is concentration  on the welfare, progress, and happiness of all humanity in this one and only  life”³[³Lamont, ix]. When he says “religion,” he means a religion without God.  Later he writes that humanism is “a philosophic system in which mankind’s  interests upon this earth are the first word and the last word…”⁴[⁴Lamont, 19]. So humanism is a totally man-centered philosophy aimed at creating the best life  possible on this earth for the most people, ideally, all people. There is no life after  death. That is the end. 

Lamont continually denies the supernatural. There are varieties of humanism, some being religious, but Lamont writes that his humanism is  “naturalistic Humanism”⁵[⁵Lamont, 22]. That is, the natural universe is all there  is, with nothing supernatural. This continual assault on God and the  supernatural (Macbeth, “Methinks he doth protest too much.”) is only thinly  veiled when he writes that “thinkers of depth and acumen have advanced the  simple proposition that the chief end of human life is to work for the happiness  of man upon this earth and within the confines of the Nature that is his home”⁶  [⁶Lamont, 3]. “Within the confines of Nature” means that there is nothing outside  or beyond the natural universe. Nothing spiritual, nothing supernatural. And the  clear implication that those who believe in God and the supernatural are not  “thinkers of depth and acumen.” No, they are in the darkness of superstition.  Humanism “considers all forms of the supernatural as myth…”⁷[⁷Lamont, 13]. 

It is of great interest to see just how strongly humanism is related to rationalism, the subject of a previous chapter. We saw there that  rationalism exalts human reason to the highest level. Lamont writes that the  “moving principle” of rationalists in England is that it “unreservedly accepts the  supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics  verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or  authority”⁸[⁸Lamont, 25-26]. Then he goes on to quote an English rationalist, J. A.  Hobson, who wrote in Rationalism and Humanism, that British Rationalists should  “move on to Humanism as ‘the next step’”⁹[⁹Lamont, 26]. He then adds, “In 1957  the British Rationalists changed the name of their monthly journal to The  Humanist”¹⁰ [¹⁰Lamont, 26].

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Along this line of reason, Lamont writes, “It is the tenacious attempt of  reasoning men to think through the most fundamental issues of life, to reach  reasoned conclusions on first and last things, to suggest worthwhile goals that  can command the loyalty of individuals and groups”¹¹ [¹¹Lamont, 4]. Man will  solve his own problems. In addition, humanism “looks upon reason as the final  arbiter of what is good and true and beautiful…”¹² [¹²Lamonnt, 12]. 

So we see a very close connection between rationalism and humanism,  both recognizing reason as man’s greatest asset in gaining knowledge and  evaluating alternatives. Rationalism is a part of humanism, and humanism can be a part of rationalism. 

We also saw in looking at rationalism that empiricism, which includes  observation and experience, is also one of the primary ways of gaining  knowledge. Humanism also includes this method, as seen in its continual  reference to science as the means of knowledge and problem solving. There is the  exaltation of both reason and science. 

Lamont gives his ten basic principles of humanism. I will not quote what  he writes fully, but will attempt to summarize. These statements come from  pages 12-14 of his book, The Philosophy of Humanism. First, Nature is all there is  and there is no supernatural. 

Second, man is a product of evolution and has no conscious existence after  death. 

Third, man has the potential of solving his own problems using reason  and science. 

Fourth, people are free of any determinism and are the masters of their  own destinies, within certain unnamed limits. 

Fifth, ethics and morality are based on this-worldly values based in  relationships and the happiness, freedom, and progress of all people. Sixth, people “attain the good life” by a mix of personal satisfaction and  development and significant work that contributes to the good of others. Seventh, the appreciation of art should be a part of the experience of all  people through the development of art and the awareness of the beauty of  nature. 

Eighth, humanism believes in democracy, peace, and a high standard of  living for all. [My note: this primarily means socialism.] 

Ninth, humanism believes in the full development of civil liberties for all  based on parliamentary government. 

I will quote the tenth: “Humanism, in accordance with scientific method,  believes in the unending questioning of basic assumptions and convictions,  including its own. Humanism is not a new dogma, but is a developing 

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philosophy ever open to experimental testing, newly discovered facts, and more  rigorous reasoning.”¹³ [¹³Lamont, 14.] 

In addition to these ten principles, humanism also has three humanist manifestos. The first was published in 1933, the second in 1973, and the third in  2003. These manifestos state the principles of humanism in much the same way  as Lamont’s ten principles. Manifestos I and II are printed in Lamont’s book that  we have been using, and all three can be found online. Go to  americanhumanist.org or google “humanist manifestos.” 

There is a famous poem, written by William Ernest Henley, that might be  called the poetic statement of humanism. It is entitled “Invictus,” which means  “unconquerable”: 

Out of the night that covers me, 

Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 

I thank whatever gods may be 

For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 

I have not winced nor cried aloud. 

Under the bludgeonings of chance 

My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 

Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

And yet the menace of the years 

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll. 

I am the master of my fate: 

I am the captain of my soul. 

As believers in God and the supernatural and the eternal life of believers,  how are we to respond to humanism? For one thing, we have already stated in  dealing with rationalism that both reason and science are valid means of  knowledge, in their areas. Reason is valid as a tool of the mind of man to think  rationally and reach logical conclusions. God made us with reason. We should  use it and not be unreasonable. Science is valid in the material world, nature, as  Lamont has it. We are all the beneficiaries of science. This computer I am typing  on at this moment is a wonderful (when it works or when I can work it!) tool 

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developed for us by science. The electricity that powers it also powers our lights,  our appliances and tools, our heat and air conditioning, and so on. I am so  thankful for it. I can’t type! This word processor forgives and fixes my errors as a  typewriter never did. 

But reason and science have no say in spiritual and supernatural truth  except in a secondary way. That truth is revealed to us in our spirits. We cannot  expect a person with a dead spirit (Eph. 2.1) to comprehend this, but we who  know the Lord know that we know the Lord and have heard from him. We know  what it is for the word of God to come alive to us as the Spirit of God brings it to  life. We do not deny the validity of reason and science because we have spiritual  knowledge. We embrace them. All means of knowledge come from God. We  thank him for them. 

Humanism believes in developing a worldwide democratic society with  civil liberties and prosperity for all. In this light it is instructive to read Lamont’s  statement, “Philosophy should have much to say on why the human race,  despite all its much-vaunted progress, fought two devastating world wars within  the space of thirty years, and still faces the awful possibility of the Great Nuclear  War.” He rather presumptuously adds, “Indubitably philosophers possess the  right and duty to pass some severe moral judgments on modern man.”¹⁴ [¹⁴Lamont, 10.] He then writes, “The fact is that the entire world is in want of a  sound and dynamic philosophy adequate to the spirit and needs of this twentieth  century…”¹⁵ [¹⁵Lamont, 11]. 

Take note of the continued reference to happiness as a goal of humanism.  However, happiness is not a right goal. If your goal is happiness you will not be  happy, because that is self-centered in itself, and happiness is a by-product of  being other-centered, first of all, God-centered, and then other-centered. 

I will quote one more statement at some length to complete this thought: 

… Humanism is the viewpoint that men have but one life to lead and  should make the most of it in terms of creative work and happiness; that  human happiness is its own justification and requires no sanction or  support from supernatural sources; that in any case the supernatural,  usually conceived of in the form of heavenly gods or immortal heavens,  does not exist; and that human beings, using their own intelligence and  cooperating liberally with one another, can build an enduring citadel of  peace and beauty upon this earth. 

It is true that no people has yet come near to establishing the ideal  society”¹⁶ [¹⁶Lamont, 14]. 

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Ah! There you have it. People have been trying to establish an ideal  society by their own intelligence and efforts from time immemorial. Why have  they been unable to accomplish it? Because too many of them do not want to  accomplish it. For many the ideal society is having control over millions of  people so they can exploit them. They do not care what happens to the people  under them so long as they control the means of power. 

The fundamental problem with humanism, despite its lofty ideals, many  of which are indeed praiseworthy, is that it cannot change the hearts of people.  The problem with the world is sin and humanism has no answer for that. Even  Christianity, which does have an answer for it, admits that it will not succeed in  establishing an ideal society on earth. Only the return of the Lord Jesus Christ in  glory and power to deal with Satan, the antichrist, and sinful people will bring  about the righteous kingdom the humanists want. And notice that it is a  kingdom, not a democracy. A democracy lends itself to mob rule, what we are  experiencing in the United States to some degree at present. The Lord Jesus is the  only one qualified to be the benign dictator of the earth, for he alone is pure love  that will not exploit people. 

Scripture is very instructive, as always, on the matter of knowledge. In 1  Cor. 2.14-15 Paul writes, “But the soulish man does not receive the things of the  Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him and he is not able to know them, for  they are spiritually judged. But the spiritual man judges all things….” Our  English translations usually use the word “natural” where I have “soulish,” and  that is a correct translation, but the Greek word is psuchikos, which comes from  the Greek word psuche, “soul.” It is good to see the word “natural” in this  connection because it uses the word that humanists use for the universe. It is all  natural with no supernatural. 

And that is just the point. The soulish man is limited to the natural. His  spirit is dead toward God (Eph. 2.1) so all he has to work with is his soul, his  psychological aspect, the mind, emotions, and will. That is exactly what Lamont  says: man has to use his intellect, his reasoning ability, to solve his problems.  That limits a man to his soul, with no input from the Source of all truth. Jude 19  makes a very interesting statement: “These are they who cause divisions, soulish,  not having spirit.” That is, like the man in 1 Cor. 2.14, they are soulish, limited to  their soul ability. They are without spirit. That is, they have a spirit, but it is dead  toward God. 

The only solution to man’s problems in this age is the personal change of  heart that comes with the bringing alive of his spirit when he turns to the Lord, is  forgiven, and receives the Holy Spirit into his dead spirit, making it alive toward  God. As he surrenders himself to God, the kingdom of God comes in his heart  and he experiences the righteous rule of King Jesus. The only ultimate solution to 

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man’s problems, since most will not have this Man to rule over them, is his  personal, bodily return to take the throne of the earth. Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!  Amen! 

Materialism 

Materialism can refer either to a philosophy that says the material is all  there is, or to the devotion of life to having material things. The latter is what we  are concerned with in this chapter, but we should note that the philosophy of  materialism helped to lay the foundations of modern acquisitive materialism. 

The philosophy of materialism says that everything that exists and the  only thing that exists is matter, physical material. You might think that this is like  humanism, which denies the spiritual and supernatural and says that there is  nothing beyond nature, but materialism goes a step further than humanism. It  really does mean that there is nothing but matter. There is no spiritual or  supernatural, but there is also no intellect or thought. Wow! Now there’s a plan!  What we think are intellect and ideas are really only biological occurrences in  our physical bodies. 

If it is true that the material is all there is, then we humans are just  products of evolution. We are nothing more than physical beings. While we live  we had better make the most of it, because when we die, that’s it. Hasta la vista,  baby. You’re outta here. 

If that is true, then what we said earlier holds true: There is no  accountability. Go for it! Tomorrow we may die. Get all you can get now ‘cause  there’s no pie in the sky bye and bye. Materialism. Do you see that ideas have  consequences? 

And that is the materialism we are concerned with, the variety  characterized by the acquisition of material things. How did this lust for things  come about? 

In the first place, we are born that way. The Bible teaches that there is  what the theologians call original sin. That term is not in the Bible, but the reality  is. Ps. 51.5 says, “Look, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother  conceived me.” Paul writes in Eph. 2.3 that we “were by nature children of  wrath.” By nature. That is, we were born that way. We are not sinners because  we sin. We sin because we are sinners. What is the most selfish human being  there is? A baby! A baby is totally self-centered. He (or she!) does not care if he  hurts his mother. He does not care if his mother gets no sleep. He does not care if  he breaks his mother’s prized possession. He does not care whom he 

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inconveniences. He is a little sinner! He is not accountable for what he does yet,  but when he is old enough to be accountable, such things are considered wrong.  The Bible calls it sin. So it only comes natural that we lust for things. We want  what we want, whether it is candy as a baby or an expensive sports car as an  adult, or anything in between. 

Then there are the ideas that take hold in society and become the basis for  life. For centuries, almost two millennia, in the western world, those ideas came  largely from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Morality was defined for the most  part as sex within marriage only. There was respect for life, both unborn and  born, young, middle-aged or old, healthy or sick. People valued work and took  pride in their work. People valued their word and mostly told the truth. You  could find many exceptions to all of these statements, but they were the norm. 

Then people such as Darwin came along, people who taught, or were  thought to have taught, that the natural world is all there is. There is no God and  there is nothing spiritual or supernatural. We are all products of evolution, just  physical and mental beings who will one day die and cease to exist. There was  Marx, who taught that we are all tools of economic determinism. Religion is “the  opiate of the people.” That is, religion was invented by the ruling classes to help  keep the oppressed classes under control. There is no truth in religion. Marxism  will eventually establish utopia and the government, necessary now to deal with  the oppressors and free the enslaved working classes, will wither away. He failed  to mention that those who controlled the government under Marxism became  the oppressing class. Stalin is believed to have killed 20 or 30 million people  trying to enforce collectivized agriculture and such projects, as did Mao in China.  By the way, the people who were killed were working-class. 

Freud taught that we are all governed by our sexuality. He set forth the  sexual interpretation of dreams and said that his examination of such revealed  the secret knowledge hidden in dreams. 

… Freud was preoccupied with anatomizing religion, which he saw as a  purely human construct. In The Future of an Illusion (1927) he dealt with  man’s unconscious attempts to mitigate unhappiness. “The attempt to  procure,” he wrote, “protection against suffering through a delusional  remoulding of reality is made by a considerable number of people in  common. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever  recognizes it as such.¹[¹Johnson, Modern Times, 7-8.] 

I suppose I will never recognize my belief in God as a delusion! Thank the Lord!

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If we are all so motivated and there is no truth in the idea of God, why not  just live as we please and get all we can get for ourselves? 

As this kind of intellectual thinking was drifting down to the masses  (don’t ever think that intellectual ideas don’t get to the masses; repackaged, they do: “If it feels good, do it.”), “the American dream” began to develop. The  United States had been economically booming for decades, and World War I  thrust this country onto the stage as a world power. Then came the roarin’  twenties. Life was good. People began to dream of amassing greater wealth and  the things it could buy. The Great Depression threw a wrench into the works, but  notwithstanding it, James Truslow Adams was the first to use the term “the  American dream” in 1931 in his book, The Epic of America. He wrote, 

The American Dream is “that dream of a land in which life should be  better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each  according to ability or achievement…. It is not a dream of motor cars and  high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and  each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are  innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are,  regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position².  [²memory.loc.gov.] 

What is the American dream? It probably cannot be exactly defined, but it  seems to envision freedom and opportunity to achieve the life one wants to have,  his dreams, usually with economic prosperity and home ownership as part of the  concept. And the fact that anyone could achieve his dreams is a part of the  dream. In America, any white boy, and now girls and blacks and browns, can  grow up to be President. A look at home ownership percentages in the twentieth  century is enlightening, but notice the decline after 2010. This will have been due  to the lingering effects of the housing crash of 2008. 

1900 – 46.5% of Americans owned their homes 

1910 – 45.9 

1920 – 45.6 

1930 – 47.8 

1940 – 43.6 

1950 – 55 

1960 – 61.9 

1970 – 62.9 

1980 – 64.4 

1990 – 64.2

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2000 – 66.2³[³census.gov.] 

2010 _ 67.2  

2017 _ 63.7⁴[⁴statista.com] 

It is remarkable that as many people owned their own homes as did  before World War II. This has long been a prosperous nation. But World War II  let loose an economic engine in the United States unlike anything ever seen in the  world before that time. So many people went to work in factories, including  especially women who had never worked outside the home before, in the war  effort. These people, who probably had had their needs met by an agricultural  life but had had little cash, suddenly began to have regular paychecks. They  could buy things. This is American – supply and demand. People with money  demanded. People with ingenuity supplied! The engine kept roaring long after  the war. 

Many soldiers returned home and started businesses who before had been  farmers or wage earners of one sort or another. The prosperity generated by  business ownership was unparalleled in history or anywhere else in the world.  Notice the increase in home ownership from 1940, before the war, to 1950, after  the war: from 43.6% to 55%, the biggest jump on the chart. And it has continued  virtually unabated since. 

The point of all this is that the merging of the ideas generated by such  thinkers as Darwin, Marx, and Freud, that man is nothing more than a product of  nature who ceases to exist at death, with the prosperity touched off by the World  War II economy, set the stage for the rise of the materialism we see today. 

Increasingly we have seen society gravitate toward the belief that the acquisition of material things will bring happiness. As we look around today, the  obviousness of wealth is almost stunning. Homes of three, four, five thousand  square feet that are worth half a million or a million dollars or more are  commonplace, and they are loaded with everything money can buy. Not the  exception, but commonplace. Automobiles costing $50 – $100,000 or more are not  the exception. They are commonplace. Everyone has all the latest electronics. Our  super-sharp advertising businesses know just how to market everything so that  everyone “has to have it.” There has always been a desire to keep up with the  Joneses, but now we must roar past them in our $80,000 SUV on the way to our  $500,000 house, or maybe our $250,000 second home. 

These things are not wrong in themselves. I do not believe God wants  people to be poor and in want, and I do not believe there will be any poverty in  the kingdom or in Heaven. Indeed, the Bible says in Dt. 8.18, “But you shall  remember I AM your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he  may establish his covenant which he swore to your fathers, as at this day.”

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The problems come when people believe that these things are the meaning  of life and that which will give happiness. They are not and will not. Paul writes  in 1 Tim. 6.9-10, 

But those who wish to be rich fall into temptation and a trap and many  foolish and harmful desires, which plunge men into ruin and destruction,  for a root of all the evil things is the love of money, in longing for which  some have been deceived from the faith and have pierced themselves  through with many sorrows. 

One of the most obvious results of materialism is the psychological  condition of the children of these people who give their lives to piling up money  and getting things. Many of these children have everything money can buy, nice  cars, TVs, computers, smart phones, MP3s, iPODs, all the other electronic  gadgets, and they do not know if they are loved or not because their parents, too  busy making money, do not have time for them. Children need time, not just  quality time, but lots of time! What do children do when they do not know if  they or loved or not? They look for love is all the wrong places. Teenage sex is  just as much a product of materialism as it is of relativism. Drugs and  “weird” (to us old fogies!) dress are really cries to be noticed. Does anyone know  I’m here? Does anyone care? Does anyone love me? And about 5000 teenagers  commit suicide every year, one every 100 minutes. A hundred a week. Not to  mention those who arm themselves and shoot up their schools. 

What is going on? We are sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind  (Hos. 8.7). God’s word plainly teaches that we are not merely physical beings.  We are spiritual, and only the relationship with God, who is Spirit, will satisfy.  Col. 1.16 says that we were made by Christ and for Christ. Our purpose, and thus  our meaning, in life is to be his. Yes, we must feed the body, the part of us that is  material, and clothe it and exercise it and treat its diseases, but that is not the  purpose of life. That is incidental. Bill Gilliam said that our body is our earthsuit.  (Lifetime Guarantee, p. 69) It is what lives in the body that matters, the soul and  the spirit. The body will die and decay if this age does not end first. The soul  (psychological and personality aspect) and the spirit will live forever. And the  body of those who die in the Lord will be raised one day, incorruptible. It is the  spirit by which we know God and learn truth from him, and it is there that we  gain the relationship that makes life meaningful and joyful. 

We think things will make us happy. Happiness is a by-product. You will  never find happiness by trying to find happiness. You will find happiness when  you forget about it and seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness (Mt.  6.33). All the things you need (not necessarily want) will be added to you, and 

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you will know God, whom to know is life eternal and life filled with meaning  and joy and deep satisfaction. 

Materialism is a lie, one of Satan’s tools for dragging people into  misery. “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” (Ps. 14.1) “The fear of I  AM is the beginning of wisdom.” (Prov. 9.10) Do you want to be a rich fool or a  wise believer in God? 

Hedonism 

Hedonism is a sure sign that a society is in decline. Instead of working to  build, people are working to retire early and live a life of pleasure. Others are  getting all the pleasure they can afford by whatever means without waiting to  retire. Hedonism, from the Greek word “hedone,” “pleasure,” is “the doctrine  that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life.”¹[¹Webster’s Seventh  New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1965,  385.] Pleasure is not wrong in itself. Ps. 16.11 says of God, “In your right hand  there are pleasures forever.” The determining factors are the kind of pleasure  and its purpose. Please do not think that what follows is an indictment of  everyone in the United States or the western world. I would say hedonists are the  minority, but a large enough minority to cause concern. And may of them have  much influence on others, especially the young. 

There is an ancient philosophy of hedonism. Google “hedonism” and it  will take you a while to come to the philosophy. The first page and beyond  consist of sites for hedonism resorts in the Caribbean (read as nudity and sex  resorts), “wild & erotic adult women vacations,” “video results from hedonism.”  You get the idea. There are nearly 18,000,000 responses to “hedonism” on  Google. I did not look at any of these sites and recommend that you avoid them,  too.  

The ancient philosophy took various forms. For example, 

Hedonism’s history is bedevilled by two false and damaging  

assumptions: that it advocates only bodily pleasures, and that they are  invariably sinful and degrading. In fact, most philosophers seem to share  this distrust of the body and advocate rational hedonism, regarding  spiritual and intellectual joys as more lasting, and less likely to produce  painful or inconvenient consequences. A rare exception is Aristippus (435- 356 BC), a body-centred, radical hedonist who identified good and evil  with pleasure and pain. He was frequently depicted as the embodiment of  shameless, irresponsible sensuality. Epicurus (341-270 BC) also defined 

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life’s goal as happiness, but found it in tranquillity, arising from wisdom  and virtue, rather than in active sensual enjoyment.² 

[²answers.com/topic/hedonism] 

It seems that most of today’s hedonists follow Aristippus’ lead. They are not all  involved in moral depravity, but there is certainly a life devoted to pleasures of  all sorts without much regard for doing good. 

As noted above, many people today work hard so they can retire early  and pursue their pleasures. We live in a society where it is possible for people to  make enough money in a few years of hard work to retire at 50 or 55, or younger,  move to a gated golf community on the beach, and play golf and lie in the sun  every day. I want to emphasize strongly that I do not think these things are  wrong in themselves. It is when they are made the goal of life that a problem  arises. 

It is easy to see how the isms we have been considering would lead to  hedonism. Relativism says there is no absolute truth and whatever is good for  you is acceptable. Secular humanism says there is no God or spiritual or  supernatural. If that is true there is no accountability, so do what you please. 

Materialism says you are just a physical being and agrees with humanism about God and the spiritual and the supernatural, so enjoy those bodily  pleasures and any others you desire. When you die, that is it, so get it while you  can. Hedonism. 

Howard F. Didsbury, Jr., writes, 

The hedonistic society is captivated by the siren call of  instantaneous gratification…. In this society, there is no call of personal  service for the general good; rather there is established an unassailable  tyranny of the here and now—the concentration of interest on and the  pursuit of everything for the present moment. 

In this society there is little or no concern for the past and little  thought of the future beyond what new commodity or excitement  tomorrow may bring…. 

In place of citizens of a community or a nation, the model high-tech  society is peopled with constant, dedicated “consumers.” In the hedonistic  society, the good citizen is the tireless, voracious consumer whose  constant consumption keeps the economic growth wheels turning and the  society humming with activity. The declared objectives of increasing  material prosperity and expanding industrial output can be maintained  only by the vigilant cultivation of virtually insatiable appetites. A  monastery in Kyoto, Japan, has this inscription: “I know I am wise for I 

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know when enough is enough.” This is an idea foreign to a sensate  society…. 

The main technique employed to create catalogues of endless wants  is applied psychology as exemplified in modern advertising. Over time it  serves as a form of operant conditioning in the arousal and perpetuation  of insatiable desires. In such a society, everything can be made into a  consumer item. In fact, even religion is “sold” as a personal consumer  item. “I found faith, and I feel good.” [The web site I got this quote from is  no longer available. You can google Howard F. Didsbury, Jr.] 

In addition to the private people who pursue a life of pleasure, many of  our public figures, entertainers and athletes, and royalty in some parts of the  world, appear to live totally for pleasure. They have tons of money so they can  do virtually anything. They seem to want to be seen in the right places with the  right people, the beautiful people. It almost seems as if some of them want to be  worshipped. The adulation of their fans sometimes looks like worship. 

In our society, the primary expression of hedonism has to do with sexual  immorality. Education boomed after World War II, and it is a matter of fact that  more educated people tend to be less religious, thus loosing the restraints on  immorality. Prosperity almost always reduces faith in God as people feel need  less keenly, further loosing the restraints. “The pill” came along in 1960 and  made sex much “safer,” greatly reducing the chance of pregnancy. All of these  factors were on the scene when the sexual revolution, the hippie drug culture,  and the Playboy philosophy erupted in the mid- to late-1960s. Almost overnight  we turned from a firm stance on the value of sex only in marriage to “free love”  (actually, free lust). Living together increasingly replaced marriage. And our  entertainment media are shot through with immorality. Virtually every movie  and TV show has the obligatory bedroom scene without benefit or marriage. 

How are we as Christians to respond to this growing reality in the western  world? The Scriptures are always a good starting point in search of an answer to  such a question. The Greek word for “pleasure,” hedone (pronounced (he-don EE), occurs only five times in the New Testament. As we look through these uses,  we see that pleasure is not seen as an evil thing in itself, though there are evil  pleasures, but it is seen largely as a thing of this world and therefore not as  something for a Christian to pursue. 

In Lk. 8, in the parable of the sower, the Lord Jesus describes four kinds of  soil, four kinds of hearers of the word, and in v. 14 he speaks of thorny soil. He  had said in v. 7 that the thorns choke the word, and in v. 14 he explains that the  thorns are the worries and riches and pleasures of life. Some hear the word and  may even have good intentions of living by it, but they are so taken up with 

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matters of this life that the word is choked by the thorns and nothing comes of it.  There is nothing here that says that the pleasures of life are evil, or the worries  and riches either. Worry is ultimately unbelief, which is evil, but we all have  matters of life that we can worry about if we choose to, and there are those who  are given riches by God for his purposes. Money is not in itself evil, but the love  of it is (1 Tim. 6.10). In the same way, pleasures are not necessarily wrong,  though there are sinful pleasures, but living for them is. All these things are of  this world, this life, and are not to be what we are taken with. If we are, they will  choke the word of God right out of our lives. We will give up eternity for a few  years of pleasure. That is just foolish. 

Ti. 3.3 uses this very word, “foolish,” saying that “we were once foolish,  disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures….” As the Lord  said in Lk. 8.14, Paul does not say here that pleasures are wrong, but that  enslavement to them is foolish, disobedient, and deceived. Why? Because they  will rob us of the word of God, just as the Lord said in Lk. 8.14. We will not have  time for it, or for prayer or fellowship with God’s people. If we are taken up with  pleasures, we will not have even the desire for the things of God. 

James has a very helpful passage on the results of pursuing pleasures. In  4.1-8 he says that the source of our temptations in our desire for pleasures (v. 1).  He has harsh words for those who pursue the pleasures of the world instead of  the Lord, and these can be Christians as well as the lost. Again, there is no  statement that pleasures are wrong in themselves, but that they can wage war in  our members. We can be led astray by them. James gives a word that is of such  great help in strong temptation: “But he gives a greater grace.” He goes on to say  not to be proud, to submit to God, to resist the devil (and he will flee from you),  to draw near to God (and he will draw near to you). But if we listen to our desire  for pleasures as the object of our affections, we will be tempted. And James adds in 1.15, “Then lust, having conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full  grown, gives birth to death.” 

The final verse that uses this word is 2 Pt. 2.13. In vs. 9-10 Peter writes of  the unrighteous, “but especially those who go after flesh in defiling lusts and  despise lordship.” “Those who go after flesh in defiling lusts” are likely those  who indulge in sexual immorality. Other sins are also mentioned in this passage.  Then in v. 13 Peter writes that these are those “considering self-indulgence in the  day a pleasure.” Such activities are usually pursued at night. These who have  given themselves over to pleasure pursue it day and night. It is their life. Peter  says that these people are “like unreasoning animals of instinct, born for  capturing and destruction.” There are people who live like animals morally, but  they are not animals. They are humans accountable to God. How utterly foolish  to spend one’s life in the pleasures of this world, including especially the sinful 

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pleasures, when in God’s right hand there are pleasures forever (Ps. 16.11), not  just for this world. 

So we see that God intends for us to have pleasure, but that pleasure is to  be in him and his word and his people and his work. Those who know the  pleasures of God know that there is no greater pleasure than the sense of his  presence and blessing. Pleasure is like happiness. If you pursue it, you are not  likely to find it, but if you pursue God, you will find pleasures beyond  imagination forever. 

Postmodernism 

What is postmodernism? Ah, what is postmodernism? The online  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, “That postmodernism is  indefinable is a truism.”¹[¹http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/]  Postmodernists deny any absolute truth, some, any truth at all, and do not even  agree among themselves as to what postmodernism is. It is not so much a  particular school of thought as a kind of general way of thinking that denies  modernism, but has no specific philosophy to put in its place. 

That leads to the question as to what modernism is. If we want to know  what postmodernism is, do we not need to know what modernism is? Yes, that  would help. Put succinctly, modernism is “the optimism of there being a  scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain” our world.²   

[²http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html] Philosophy has  always sought to come up with a system of truth that would explain everything  that is. We might even eliminate the phrase “religious truth” from this definition,  for many modernists do not believe in God or the supernatural, and modernism  itself begins with the Enlightenment, when there began the turn from religion  and superstition to reason and science. “Broadly speaking, the hope was that the  search for truth by means of reason and the natural sciences would replace  superstition, irrationalism and fear and lead to an ordered world in which men  thought for themselves instead of following custom or the beliefs that had been  held unquestioningly for generations.³ [³http://www.galilean library.org/manuscript.php?postid=43790] “Postmodernism is largely a reaction  to [this] assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality.”⁴ [⁴http://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/gengloss/postm-body.html] One of the  most important thinkers on postmodernism, referred to often, is Jean-François  Lyotard. In discussing postmodernism, he wrote: ‘I define postmodern as  incredulity toward’” narratives that explain (or perhaps contain) all others.⁵  [⁵http://www.galilean-library.org/manuscript.php?postid=43790] So 

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postmodernism arises from a reaction to the belief that some system can explain  the universe. In addition to this more philosophical reaction, there is also the  fundamental pessimism of postmodernism that the modern approach cannot  produce a just world that works for the good of all.  

There is a reaction to capitalism as an economic system, with the  belief that it produces wealth for a few at the top of the heap and poverty  for all the rest. This belief ignores the obvious fact that the United States,  the world’s preeminent capitalist nation, has produced the most wealth  for the most people in the history of the world. Yes, there are poor here,  but the middle classes and wealthy classes far outnumber them, and most  of the poor here are far better off than most of the rest of the world. In  addition, poverty has been decreasing in the world at large in recent  years. 

Postmodernism, insofar as it is uniform, favors a world  

government and an economic system that would have to be called  socialist, again ignoring an obvious fact, that virtually every socialist  nation, with the exception of western Europe and its “descendants” has  exploited the masses for the few on top. Who had the wealth in the  communist utopia of the Soviet Union? The government leaders who ran  everything. They had all the wealth and the masses were in dire poverty.  The Chinese were virtually all poor until China began to move toward  capitalism while maintaining control by the communist party. They now  have a stock market, about as capitalist as a nation can get!  

Postmodernists “challenge the core religious and capitalistic values of the  Western world and seek change for a new age of liberty within a global  community. Many prefer to live under a global, non-political government  without tribal or national boundaries and one that is sensitive to the  socioeconomic equality for all people.”⁶ 

[⁶http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/postmodernism.htm] Was Stalin’s  murder of 20 or 30 million peasants in an effort to collectivize agriculture  “sensitive to the socioeconomic equality” of all people? 

We have seen that postmodernism more or less rejects belief in God,  especially the God of the Bible. They tend to be atheists or agnostics, though  some prefer eastern religions.⁷ 

[⁷http://www.allaboutphilosophy.org/postmodernism.htm] Norman Geisler,  referred to in our study of relativism, writes about Alan Watts, who “was  converted from a kind of nominal form of Christianity to Zen Buddhism.” He 

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points out that Watts claims that there is no truth, or at least that no truth can be  known, but that he denies what he says by converting from a false religion,  Christianity, to a true one, Zen Buddhism. He says that Watts would say that he  is making no truth claim, but that one cannot deny the truth by ignoring it.⁸ [⁸Geisler, 14-15.] 

We see that postmodernism tends to be a mix of some of our other isms.  Relativism says that there is no absolute truth. Postmodernism agrees and may  go so far as to say that there is no truth at all, or at least that none can be known. “Humanism, in brief, is a philosophy (or religion) the guiding principle of  which is concentration on the welfare, progress, and happiness of all humanity in  this one and only life.”⁹[⁹Lamont, ix. Font added.] Postmodernism prefers a  “global, non-political government without tribal or national boundaries and one  that is sensitive to the socioeconomic equality for all people.” [quoted above] Materialism says that since there is no spiritual or supernatural, man should  live for all he can get in this life: live the good life. Postmodernism. 

Postmodernism is difficult to define, because to define it would violate the  postmodernist’s premise that no definite terms, boundaries, or absolute truths  exist. They believe that truth is relative and truth is up to each individual to  determine for himself. The primary fallacy of postmodernism is that it says that  there is no truth, which is in itself a truth statement. It is self-contradictory. 

The Bible and Christianity teach that there is absolute truth, that the Lord  Jesus is the truth (Jn. 14.6), and that God cannot lie (Ti. 1.2, Heb. 6.18). It is in him  that we find truth, and that truth sets us free (Jn. 8.32). 

Closing Prayer  

Dear Lord, We thank you for your reality in our lives and for our personal  relationship with you. We thank you for truth, and for making your truth known  to us. We ask you to enable us by your grace to be witnesses to the truth during  our time on this earth and to draw to you many who are walking in the darkness  of isms. And we pray heartily for your return, for we long to see you and fall at  your feet in worship and love for all you have done for us. We long for the day  when our King, the Lord Jesus Christ, will rule the world in righteousness, when  truth will prevail, and when all the isms have become…

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WASMS. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. Amen. 

Copyright © 2018 by Tom Adcox. All rights reserved. You may share this work with  others, provided you do not alter it and do not sell it or use it for any commercial purpose.  “Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10.8). Also you must include this  notice if you share it or any part of it. 

Old Testament quotations are the author’s updates of the American Standard Version.  New Testament translations are the author’s. 

a – w

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