Sand and Stone

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell--and great was its fall.

This is the conclusion to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (found in Matthew 7:24-27). The "words of mine" to which he refers were the entire sermon. The immediate context is his warning that not everyone who calls him Lord will enter the kingdom. It does not suffice merely to hear the words of Jesus or even to acknowledge that what he says is true. One must act upon what he has said. He assures us that the man who hears and acts has built his life upon a solid foundation, a rock that will provide insurmountable support against the assaults that inevitably come. Note that Scripture repeatedly instructs us that the fear (respect, obedience, harkening, heeding) of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Such a wise man builds on the words of Christ.

In contrast, the foolish man (and in Scripture foolishness has a moral dimension) may hear the words of Christ but ignores them. He may acknowledge their wisdom but he does nothing with them. He builds his life on another foundation, one that proves incapable of withstanding life's assaults. And everything he has done comes to nothing but ruin.

Why do I insert this commentary here? We have just finished discussing several ways of handling the confrontation between biblical Christianity and the philosophical materialistic naturalism that underpins Darwinism. A man must consider carefully the foundation upon which he builds his life. Not all foundations are structurally sound. Not every form of knowledge is wisdom.

The Way Forward

In his book Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, Phillip Johnson described three ways he has seen people who have professed Christian beliefs handle the dispute between Darwinism and Christianity. One could simply apostasize and embrace full-throated naturalism by deciding that naturalism provides the best description of reality, overthrowing any pretense to maintaining Christian conviction. One could also try to reshape Christianity according to naturalism, accommodating Christianity by jettisoning the miraculous and other supernatural aspects of biblical Christianity. This is theological liberalism. Or one could become a fideist, the epistemological equivalent of holding one's hands over one's ears and shouting down opposing ideas--believe despite everything. This may seem attractive at first but is intellectual suicide and actually disobedience to God, who has commanded us to "take every thought captive" (2 Corinthians 10:5).

And that is the key to the real way forward. We do what Paul says and take on the philosophies of the age, expose them, and defeat them. We do not simply roll over and accept the soothing public pronouncements of the science educators. We ask the hard questions, both of them and of their facilitators in the media.

It might seem a daunting, impossible task. Yet the three "titans" of modernism were Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Two have already fallen. If the evidence continues to mount up as it has against Darwinism, how long can it stand?

A City upon a Hill, or Vanity Fair?

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that a city set upon a hill is not easily hidden. It attracts attention, exposed as it is. Just so, the deeds of the righteous are on public display. It is not desirable that the light instilled in a man by the Spirit of God should be hidden. The idea of a godly community brought before the attention of men as an example has deep roots in American political ideas, going all the way back to John Winthrop's famous address on board the Arabela, "A Model of Christian Charity." Toward the end of this sermon, he observed,

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken... we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world.

Winthrop warned that being the focus of attention has significant drawbacks if the community loses faith with God.

Vanity Fair, other than being the title of a book by Thackery, is a community described by John Bunyan in his The Pilgrim's Progress, as a place that will not abide righteousness and does its level best to kill those who try to live for God. Although it purports to be at peace with its godless ways, it shows through its persecutions of the godly that it cannot abide being reminded of its depravity.

The difference illustrated by these two communities is that between a society founded upon a desire to honor and obey God and one that will not have God in its thinking but is devoted entirely to the satisfaction of human desire. Furthermore, Vanity Fair is a society that will actively persecute those who try to live and think biblically.

Is the America of the 21st century Winthrop's city on a hill or Vanity Fair?

But what is the correct, Christian way forward? What has the American church gained in the past thirty years by becoming more active in politics, especially as it has become increasingly identified with the Republican party? Some would say the results of the recent national election shows a repudiation of both the party and the church.

What is more effective--change at the ballot box or change in the human heart?

A New Religion Established

Although not often considered in these terms, a religion may be the same as a worldview--the way in which one thinks about life as a whole and answers the "big questions" about reality. They are the governing principles by which one lives or how a society is shaped. In this manner, everyone has a religion, even those who deny they have a religion.

Phillip Johnson has identified three signal events as critical to understanding the Western worldview as it now exists:

1. The triumph of scientism. Johnson cites as an illustration the Darwin Centennial of 1959 [which makes for very interesting consideration in 2009, both the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of Origin]. The 1959 event was held at the University of Chicago, also the site of the first self-sustaining atomic chain reaction and the Miller experiment that purported to show how life could have originated from inorganic substances and energy. At the time of the centennial celebration the scientific community could look back on breathtaking achievements that had elevated the prestige of science to stratospheric heights. The virtual establishment of materialistic naturalism as the most successful philosophy led Sir Julian Huxley to wax eloquent in explaining his hopes that science was destined to become mankind's new religion.

2. Art imitates life. Recall our exploration of the phenomenon of Inherit the Wind. This was the Hollywood version of the Darwin Centennial. Remember how the film concludes--Spencer Tracy picks up a Bible in one hand, a copy of Origin in the other, hefts them in his hands as if weighing them, shrugs his shoulders, and puts both in his briefcase. The implication is that reasonable people will find accommodation for both perspectives. This is a more effective cultural anesthetic than the abrasive comments made by people like Richard Dawkins or either of the Huxleys.

3. God expelled: The U.S. Supreme Court's decision on school prayer. The importance of the decision does not lie so much in the actual disallowance of prayer in the public schools but in its symbolism--God has been made irrelevant to a "good" education, for if he were important he would be discussed there. But now God is rarely to be found in the public classroom. And any attempt to re-introduce him is met with a loud and vigorous negative response.

The Dangers of Accommodation

I remind the reader of the definition of Darwinism given in the 1995 statement by the National Association of Biology Teachers: "The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments." Recall also the words of evolutionary biologist George Gaylord Simpson: "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind." Furthermore, recall how science has come to be associated in the contemporary mind with not just materialism--philosophical as well as methodological--but with reason and rationality.

In what way, then, can biblical Christianity and Darwinism (materialistic naturalism applied to biology) coexist? The philosophical underpinnings of naturalism insist that only science may speak about objective reality and that faith is commensurate with irrationality or at best personal subjective opinion or preference. In this culture, peace is afforded only on the materialist's terms--we can paper over the differences so long as theists agree with the superficial reassurances of the science educators: "All the scientists are saying is that all living things are related and that a certain amount of natural variation occurs in nature." But that is not "all" the scientists are saying and it is dishonest to perpetuate this superficiality.

If theists don't confront and expose the truth about Darwinism and warn one another about the quicksand of naturalism at its core we will succumb to the cultural naturalism that surrounds us and threatens to engulf our children. If they are unprepared to deal with this mindset they may abandon the biblical faith, relegating God to the periphery or the private sphere of life if they retain him at all.

Naturalism is widespread throughout the various categories of human thought. It applies equally well to the humanities and to the social sciences especially. It is rampant in popular culture and entertainment, the sphere from which so many people take their ideas today. The idea of objective truth does not survive the "death" of God, hence the widespread acceptance of relativism, multiculturalism, and many other features of postmodern thought. Because we do not live in isolation from the world we cannnot retreat behind walls or moats.

A Hitch in Our Intellectual Giddy-Up

"A natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised."

Paul speaks of the "natural man," meaning the spiritually unregenerate man, the man dead in sin and trespassess. This is the state in which we are all born. It takes a gracious act of the Spirit of God by which he breathes new life into a spiritual corpse to bring a man into life and renewed understanding. But until that happens, such a man rejects what he does not understand--he thinks it is foolishness, stupidity, irrationality, "anti-science." But he does so lacking understanding. It is as if an ant rejected the reality of the Empire State Building because she couldn't grasp the concept.

We Think We're So Smart

God's wisdom does not come by the application of man's wisdom--far from it. In fact, God states explicitly that he will destroy the wisdom of the "wise" (those men who esteem themselves wise according to the wisdom of this world or are so esteemed by others) and the cleverness of the "clever." And we are a clever people, aren't we? We just love the well-turned phrase, the snappy retort, the elegent insight. We feast on irony.

But what does our cleverness profit us? What becomes of the man wise according to this age? What of the intellectual [and here I have to insert a recommendation that anyone who has not already read Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals needs to run right out and acquire a copy; it frightens me that people are crowing about the "return" of intellectualism to this nation's seats of power when the track record of intellectuals in power is truly scary] and the academic elite? What of the clever debater? God has bypassed them all. He does not communicate his message through those who have figured it all out for themselves and condescend to explain it to the rest of us. Instead, God spoke through a rag-tag group of common fishermen and social marginals. And when he did include an intellectual he first literally knocked said intellectual off his high horse and then schooled him for fourteen years before setting him loose on the world.

"God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that he may nullify the things that are.." It's an upside-down, inside-out, backwards way of doing things. Precisely not the way of this world.

Why? "So that no man may boast before God."

"Hey, God, I'm pretty hot stuff. Me, I've got it all figured out. I know the score. Lucky for you I'm around, right?"

Wrong.