With the advent of Materialism and Darwinism in the West in the 19th century certain changes came about in our perception of reality that does a great deal to explain how we have arrived at the point we are in the 21st century.
Take the issues of “knowledge” and “will” as just two examples.
With the introduction and embrace of the evolutionary Weltanschauung knowledge is no longer regarded as the internalization of an external object into a soul that no longer exists through a contemplative process that no longer can happen because neither external object, nor non-corporeal soul nor the mind thinking exists. Now knowledge is, as Dewey said, “the adaptation of an organism to its environment.”
This explains the 20th century rush to mass man (Edward Bernays), sociology (Herbert Marcuse), psychology (Sigmund Freud), historicism (Franz Boas), and the art of propaganda (George Creel). All of these disciplines are committed to bypassing knowledge, in the Christian sense, in order instill pseudo-intuition by creating environment. If knowledge is merely the adaptation of an organism to its environment then manipulating the environment is EVERYTHING. Man is no longer considered to be a rational being with a set nature, as in Christianity, but rather man is chameleon with no set nature who can be manipulated by those who control his existential environment.
This also explains movements like “Church Growth,” and “Emergent Church,” because both concentrate on conversion by means of creating an environment where the human organism can adapt in a direction they desire. The newer movements in Christianity from the advent of Darwinism have had very little to do with Biblical Christianity. Whether one is considering the Social Gospel movement (Walter Rauschenbush, Washington Gladden) of the beginning of the 20th century or the Liberation Theology of the Mid-20th century (Gustavo Gutierrez) or the Church Growth movement (Donald McGavern) or the current Emergent Church movement what they all have in common is this social engineering view of Christianity that redefines and so plays down the historic Christian understanding of “knowledge,” in favor of “adaptation.” These movements have had more in common with Joesph Goebbels then they do Jesus Christ.
Now, when all of this is combined with the redefinition of the “will” as set it is defined in a Materialist / Darwinian worldview much else is explained about the current contours of our church and culture. In Biblical Christianity the will is the mind choosing. In Biblical Christianity as that will is in bondage to sinful human nature all it can choose is sin, all the time. According to Biblical Christianity it is only in regeneration that the human will is set free to choose other then sin. However, with the advent of Materialism-Darwinism the will is no longer regarded as the faculty by which the individual Christian overcomes his appetites, but rather the will is the supreme appetite to orgasm which can not and should not be controlled.
With this definition of the will one understands the explosion of all things pertaining to sex in our current culture. If there exists no external reality, and if there is no soul, or no mind all that is left is the will to gratify the primal urge to satisfy the sexual appetite. Man finds his being and identity in whatever orgasm he can achieve.
Linking these two thoughts together on Humanist understandings of “knowledge” and “will” one sees that the cultural elites are cynically creating environments where control is achieved by exploiting the new definition of “will.” It is as if in order to adapt to this culture (hence having “knowledge”) one must pursue a will to orgasm. As such man is enslaved both to the environment created and to the conditions of that environment. Enslaved, both because, for modern man, God is dead, and because modern man can do nothing else but conform to the environment created for him.
