Where Are We Today?
January 29, 2021 🕑 11 min.
Note
The following was written to update a few friends on how God has been leading my family and me over the past year. By request, it has been adapted for wider distribution.
I was concerned in the summer of 2020 when I started hearing critical theory—though I had not yet heard the term—coming from various church leaders in my local community, across our country, and around the world. At that time, I knew something was wrong at a gut level, but didn’t yet have the words to express, or research to back up, my gut reaction, other than, “A war is being waged over the hearts and minds of men.” (I’m pretty sure that’s Gandalf, though I can’t find the exact quote at the moment.)
It’s tempting to think that culture has changed radically in the last decade or so, but what we’re seeing in the world today is really the logical conclusion of the last few centuries of philosophical progression. Indeed, some thoughts even trace their lineage back to antiquity, and others, of course, back to the garden of Eden. Critical theory, which really woke me up to the problem, is only one component of the cultural transformation. Others include pandemic response, economic planning activities, election interference, media communications, and so on. Regardless of the application space, the characteristic that unites these is the inability for dissenting opinions to be voiced, let alone heard. Most of the time, you’re not even able to ask the question. Where are we today? I’ll borrow and augment a phrase from Michael O’Fallon and say the war for epistemology is well underway, what’s at stake is the future of the Christian church and western civilization as we know it, and much of the church unknowingly finds itself on the wrong side.
That’s a bold statement, I know, so before I go on, let me clarify some of what I mean. I’m not saying God’s not in control. I am supremely confident that God will accomplish all his holy will. That said, I am fully aware that at no time has he promised to preserve for us any particular way of life, either for the church or for our country. Am I afraid of what’s going on in the world today? Concerned, but not afraid, for history tells us that the church experiences the most substantial growth, both in terms of new souls justified and lives further sanctified, in times of persecution. I eagerly look forward to how God grows his people in the rest of my lifetime, but I know it won’t necessarily be pleasant.
What do we need to do? I’ve heard a number of people saying things like, “We just need to have faith and focus on the gospel.” The mental picture that comes to mind when I hear that is of a squad of swordsmen in the midst of battle. Beleaguered by enemy forces (though they don’t realize it), their squadmaster encourages them, shouting, “Hold on to your swords, men!” You look at the squad and realize that’s not the most useful advice. One guy has his hand on the hilt, but hasn’t drawn it yet. Another’s resting his hand on the pommel, using it as a walking stick. A third, the most eager of the group, is holding it like a baseball bat, but he’s holding it backwards, grasping the blade near the point, as blood runs down his hands from self-inflicted wounds. A fourth has faith in the countless hours he’s logged as a swordsman in a video game, though he doesn’t even know how to grip his weapon correctly yet. None of these men have been trained in swordsmanship, let alone battle, and their squadmaster doesn’t realize the precarious spot they’re in.
So what do we need to do? I want to be really careful here, because I never want to be misunderstood for arguing that the world needs God plus something, the Bible plus something, the gospel plus something. We need the Bible, yes, but we need the truths of scripture to permeate and direct every nook and cranny of our thoughts, words, and actions: we need a biblical worldview. Various polls over the last few decades have warned of the decreasing percentages of Christians holding a biblical worldview. One from ~5 years ago indicated only ~40% of evangelicals held to it; one from last year said that number was down to ~20%. Restrict the respondents to church leaders and you don’t get numbers that are too much higher. We need to realize that all truth is God’s truth, and that God’s truth is total truth impacting all areas of our lives. We can no longer allow the secular/spiritual, public/private, fact/value split to exist in the minds of believers.
How did we get here? That’s a rather long story that I’ll save for another time, though I’ll happily point you to a number of resources to find out. My wife says I have a tendency to give too much homework, so I’ll try (mostly unsuccessfully) to restrain myself and only ask that you do two things in the near term: Read Live Not By Lies, by Rod Dreher, and Expository Apologetics, by Voddie Baucham Jr. The first will give you an indication of where we are today and where we’re headed, while the second answers, “What do we do about it?” In addition to the two books, set aside an hour every other day over the next three weeks to listen to the following lectures:
Reflexivity | Michael O’Fallon
Diversity, Inclusion, Equity | James Lindsay
Critical Race Theory and Christianity | Tom Ascol
The Grievance Gospel | Josh Buice
The Great Reformation | Michael O’Fallon
The Problem is Enmity, Not Ethnicity | Darrel B. Harrison
The Road to Serfdom | Rod Martin
Woke Hermeneutics | Tom Buck
Overcoming the Sins of Our Fathers | John Connell
Social Justice vs Authentic Biblical Justice | Phil Johnson
These fairly concisely summarize much of what I’ve been learning over the last many months. The focus is on the critical theory side of things, but occasionally they branch out into some of the history and broader context. I was glad to have stumbled upon these lectures late in the game, after having come to the conclusions myself before hearing them. How did I come to these same conclusions? That’s what the rest of the reading list is for:
The Law, by Frédéric Bastiat (1850): An examination of the meaning and implications of the phrase “law is justice”.
On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill (1859): An examination of the relationship between authority and liberty.
The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1888): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
The Road to Serfdom, by F.A. Hayek (1944): A clarion call to the socialists of all parties in England that the cultural trends the author was seeing there closely paralleled what he’d observed in Germany and Austria before the rise of the National Socialist (Nazi) party. 76 years later, it reads like it was written to the world yesterday.
The Twelve Days of the Aspen Executive Seminar, by Mortimer Adler (1972): A brief history of the political and economic questions facing the world today, which have been hotly debated since well before this country was founded.
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, by Thomas Sowell (1987): The inability for people to effectively dialogue on the issues of the day stems from the paradigmatic disconnect between diametrically opposed visions of human nature.
The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World, by R.C. Sproul (2000): A whirlwind overview of western political thought from antiquity to today.
Political Visions and Illusions: A Survey & Christian Critique of Contemporary Ideologies, by David Koyzis (2003): A walk through the counterfeit redemptive narratives of the most prevalent ideologies of our day, supporting the author’s thesis that “ideology is idolatry”.
Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, by Nancy Pearcey (2004): A rich historical examination of how the church inadvertently pushed itself to where it is today, combined with exhortations on what to do about it.
Expository Apologetics: Answering Objections with the Power of the Word, by Voddie Baucham Jr (2015): A framework for approaching the defense of the faith by identifying, analyzing, and then refuting counterfeit worldviews.
Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher (2020): A warning that the cultural circumstances in the world today bear remarkable similarities to various societies over the last century before their embrace of totalitarianism, and recommended practices from Christians who weathered the storm and kept the faith alive.
And then these two are on deck for me:
Law, Legislation and Liberty, by F.A. Hayek (1973-1979)
Strong and Courageous: Following Jesus Amid the Rise of America’s New Religion, by Jared Longshore and Tom Ascol (2021)
I’m ashamed it’s taken me so long to wake up to where we are in the world today. From a young age, growing up in a multicultural environment, I was trained well in apologetics, particularly with respect to how Christianity relates to other world religions. That informed much of my growth, particularly from middle school through college. I even applied to some seminaries for postgraduate studies, but wound up setting that aside for fear that such a path would just give me a bigger hammer with which to bludgeon my opponents, who were usually within the church. My relative lack of maturity meant I approached the defense of the faith from the wrong perspective.
In response to that, God started taking us on a journey emphasizing the importance of how he’s designed us for intimate community. Some of our thinking here often paralleled questions a friend has asked numerous times: “How does our head knowledge translate into heart/hand knowledge-in-action?” I had plenty of experience, both in myself and in the church, with people intellectually assenting to the correct things, but then not seeing the impact the kingdom of God should be having in our lives and on the world around us. The pendulum started swinging in the direction of “it’s less important what you believe than how you live that out.”
Gracefully, in the past few years, God has pulled us back to center, uniting the two sides of the journey that were seemingly at odds with each other. What you believe is of the utmost importance. How you live that out is of the utmost importance. The connection that weds the two is your worldview. To whatever extent we see believers not living out every aspect of their lives in accordance with the truths of scripture, the disconnect is due to holding one or more logically inconsistent ideologies, behind which lie evil spiritual strongholds, in tension with biblical truth.
Through the circumstances of the past few years, and a small mountain of books to go along with them, God has revealed to us his calling on my life: To prepare his people for the current and coming spiritual warfare by training them in the “martial” arts of worldview analysis, logical argumentation, and effective communication. I’ve been working this calling out in building up a local club geared toward just that. It’s encouraging to see people analyzing the worldview implications of things like The Eagles’ “Hotel California” or concepts like the depravity of man. How exactly this develops in the future remains to be seen; we’re just taking one step of faith at a time.
Can one be held accountable for what one did not know? That’s a fun philosophical question to ponder. Regardless, this letter is my attempt to open the door for you and point you in the right direction such that you can know what’s going on and what our responsibility is in the midst of it. One day we’ll stand before God and be held accountable for how we led those he gave us to lead in this time. We can thank him ahead of time for his grace and mercy. Do I expect everyone to have the same response we did? No. How exactly God wants to use you in this time is up to him. Should I have written this months ago? Possibly, but I wanted to make sure my thoughts were well-measured and I wasn’t speaking out of a charged emotional state. Months ago there was too much frustration; today there’s hope for a painful, but ultimately bright, future.