“Beginning and ending with man, there is pessimism. Why? Because man is fallen. He is in rebellion against God, refusing to bow to God and purporting to even be God. Thus, beginning and ending with man, there can only be a compounding of evil, and matters can only wax ever worse…. The bad new, however, gets worse. As a consequence of having abandoned the supernatural and, if only inadvertently, absolutizing this age, what we will witness is death on a whole sale basis as a way of so called, “life.” That is what we have witnessed during the past century. We are so immunized against death that we have come to accept it without comment though millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of people have been put to death in the name of applied social science.
That leads us, ultimately, to pessimism and despair. Ah, but the Biblical Christian is highly and eternally optimistic, in the best sense of that term. Why? Because the Biblical Christian has good news.”
Dr. Glenn R. Martin
Professor of History / Political Science
Prevailing Worldviews
Observations
1.) The failures of the 20th -21st centuries are theological failures. The deaths of the million Christian Armenians at the hand of the Muslim Turks, the death of hundreds of millions of Christians by the Communist Russians, the deaths of millions of Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies by the National Socialist Germans, the deaths of hundreds of millions of Chinese under Communist Mao, the almost complete destruction of the Khmer people by the Communist in Cambodia, the untold slaughter of Cubans by Castro Communism, and the tens of millions of deaths at the hands of American Humanists in abortuaries throughout this country have all been torture, murder and death pursued because of faulty theology.
Bad theology kills people.
2.) Sound theology requires our first and last consideration to be the God of the Bible. Should we ever start with man as our first consideration then man becomes our ultimate principle and eventually man, over the course of time, will become absolutized, and so will begin to put other men to death in the name of applied social science and with the best of intentions. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.
3.) Scripture says, speaking of Wisdom (and the Lord Christ is Wisdom incarnate), “All those who hate me love death.” As Dr. Martin notes, the West has embraced death as seen in,
a.) Our dwindling birthrates — to the point we no longer are at replacement levels
b.) Our habits of abortion and euthanasia,
c.) Our immigration rates, which are working to replace us as a definitive people
Now as if this were not bad enough, the West is doing this dance with death, and as Martin notes, is calling it the very essence of life.
Isaiah 5:20 — “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
When we strike out at God (and that is what the West has been doing since the French Philosophes) the result is that we kill ourselves.
4.) The “absolutizing of this age” that Martin speaks of is key. What has happened is that this age is being driven by worldview assumptions that are not Biblical. Yet, what the Church has done, by absolutizing this age, is that it has reintepreted Biblical Christianity through the grid of this present age with the result that the tenets of Cultural Marxism (the Theology informing this age) are now identified as the tenets of Biblical Christianity. That is how “absolutizing this age” happens. The result of this is that now Christian ministers, usually quite unaware of what they are doing, are committed to “helping” their people fit into this present absolutized age when what they should be doing is aiding their people in seeing that this present absolutized age stands in defiance to and rebellion against the God of the Bible and His Biblical Christianity.
5.) Martin’s beef against “applied social science,” refers to how the West has been conquered by various strands of the humanist Social Sciences like “neo-orthodox theology,” “Boasian Cultural Anthropology,” “Marxist Economics,” “Freudian – Rogerian – Skinnerian, etc. Psychology,” “Spencerian – Durkheimian – Webberian, etc.” Sociology, the “Legal Positivism” of men like Christopher Columbus Langdell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the “Educational Theory” of men like Dewey, Rugg, and others, The theories of Kinsey on human sexuality, and The Logical Positivism of the Vienna circle passing as Philosophy. More of the applied social sciences could be listed but you get the gist.
Martin’s problem with the applied social sciences, as exampled above, was that they all were products of differing humanist theologies that were at war with Biblical Christian theology. Martin understood that the humanist applied social sciences were killing us as a people precisely because the applied social sciences, though passing themselves as being the very definition of enlightenment, were in fact, but the dust of death. Martin understood and taught that these social sciences desperately needed reinterpreted through a Biblical grid and his reward for his brilliance was often the back of the hand from his colleagues.
6.) We should on the optimistic note that Martin ended on. The Biblical Christian can remain optimistic because he knows that God is Sovereign and he has good news for those who desire to be delivered from the humanist applied social science house of death. The Biblical Christian, armed with God’s truth, can stand against the humanist social sciences that are killing us, as a people, and can say “this is the way of the abundant life, walk ye in it.” The Biblical Christian, armed with God’s truth, can say to those weary of the culture of death as built by the practitioners of the applied social sciences, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”