Category: Theology

Ask The Pastor — Alienism’s Strange Blend

Dear Pastor,

Weren’t you saying something recently about how Alienism is a strange blend of Gnosticism (eschewing the physical in one sense) and Marxism (eschewing the spiritual in another sense)?

Habakkuk Mucklewrath 

Dear Habakkuk,

First, a little background before I try to answer your question.

Biblical theology includes the subcategory of Anthropology. Anthropology is incredibly important because if we get the doctrine of man wrong it means we have our doctrine of God wrong also since there can be no improper and errant doctrine of anything that does not begin with a errant doctrine of God.

In Biblical anthropology man is a bipartite being comprised of body and soul. Through the centuries some have argued that man is a tripartite being desiring to add that man is body, soul, and spirit. I think this is significant error but I don’t want to get into that right now.

When we say that man is body and soul we look to Genesis where the text teaches us that God formed man from the dust of the ground (body) and breathed into him the breath of life (soul). So, we do see these two parts of man. However, having established that it is not as if those two parts are not minutely integrated. Because we believe that there is the closest relationship possible to body and soul we speak of things like “mind-body relationship,” and we routinely recognize the effect that the mind has on the body and the body has on the mind.

Because this relationship is so intimate between mind and body some have eschewed the idea of “dichotomy” when speaking of man and have opted instead for the idea of “modified unichotomy.” When speaking this way there is the admission still that man is body and soul (mind) but what is added, by speaking of “unichotomy” is the intent to see the closest possible relationship between the body and soul in man.

What many heresies throughout Church History have done is to overturn this Biblical anthropology. This was the problem with many of the Christological debates in Church History.  Apollonarianism, for example, wanted to deny that Jesus had a human soul, insisting that instead of a soul that Jesus, the man, was indwelt by the eternal Logos. Likewise, different forms of Gnosticism went the other direction and insisted that Christ was not really incarnated because it was not possible for the Divine to take on human flesh.

This anthropological error finds itself in many quarters today. For example in Marxism, with its materialism, there is the conviction that man has no soul but is just matter in motion. On the other end of the spectrum we see a Gnosticism that, while not well thought out, still suggests that the only really important aspect of man is his spiritual or soul-ish component.  This Gnostic Christianity, for example, is outraged whenever any Christian theologian speaks of man in terms of his material and corporeal realities, seemingly insisting that in Christ Jesus corporeality is sloughed off.  In this modern Gnostic Christianity there seems to be some kind of consensus that when the Scripture teaches,

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

The old that is “gone” is man in his God-given corporeality so that man now no longer is to be considered in his manishness with all the attendant DNA and familial God-givenness. Seemingly, once man is in Christ, man as a “new creation” no longer is man but is now a “Spiritual being.” This is just a updated version of Gnosticism where man’s corporeality and materiality is denied in favor of a super-spirituality.

This brings us to the term “Alienism.” It is the term that has been landed on to describe these types of Gnostics. Other terms might be used. One that has been banded about is “Oikophobia,” which literally means “fear of home or household.” Alienism and Oikophobia are attempts to communicate the tendency in these kinds of Gnostics described to so identify with their Spiritual-ness that they no longer see that they bear any significant relationship to who God has made them to be in their corporeal reality. For the Alienist any talk of family, land, place, ethnicity, nation, tribe, clan, race, is verboten since who we are in Christ has erased those categories and made them insignificant.

Now, to your question, I do think that in Alienism (as a form of Gnosticism) and in Marxism, where the only reality is the material, there is a common core. My theory is, is because each have lost their ability to make distinctions in this matter (i.e. — Marxism = all is material, Gnosticism = all is Spiritual) they therefore have a great deal in common even though they give the weight of reality to opposite ends of the spectrum.

For the Marxist, if all is material then even the spiritual is material and so monism. For the Gnostic if all is spiritual then even the material is spiritual and so monism from the other direction. The Marxist pours all the spiritual into the material and so all is one. The Gnostic pours all the material into the Spiritual and so all is one.

At the end of the day they really can be theoretical allies, since each is chasing one-ness. And when you throw in the bad anthropology factor of the Alienist Christians, it is not a wonder that they don’t see that they, at times, are chasing one-ness (Monism) from the opposite directions. It is also interesting that both Marxism and Christian theonomic Alienism also both pursue a type of Egalitarianism. If indeed all reality is monistic then it, by necessity, must be the case that egalitarianism must be prized.

This makes for some strange alliances. You will find, at times, the most ardent Materialist and the most ardent Christian theonomic Gnostic Alienist both supporting the idea that realities like ethnic distinction don’t exist or are superfluous. This can happen because each have embraced the presupposition of Monism at some foundational level. Now, the good Alienist Christian theologians would never admit this but when their doctrines begin to play out their concrete cash value is a kind of Egalitarianism.

Indeed, I’m so convinced about this that I would wager good money that within a generation the Christian Alienists will be embracing the idea that gender is a social construct. Their Gnosticism pushes them in that direction.

In the end the Biblical Christian embraces a Unichotomy in their Biblical anthropology because the Biblical Christian understands that body and soul are not to be separated or divorced. Christ is our great King and Spiritually provides the basis of unity for all those who claim Christ. However, these Spiritual realities as who we are in Christ do no negate creational categories as those pertain to who we are in our humanity in terms of our God-given corporeality.

The fact that God takes our corporeality serious even after conversion is seen in our Covenant theology. God makes a promise to us and to our children. Grace, by God’s ordination, does run in familial lines, and that not because of our blood but only because God is faithful to the generations. Family matters to God. When a man ceases to care about the creational categories of home, lineage, and place man has given up basic covenant theology and has become an Alienist.

Whether such a man remains Christian, when embracing this kind of Gnosticism, only God can say.

Thank you for your question Habakkuk. You probably got more of answer then you thought you might receive.

 

Thumbnail Sketch of James K. A. Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom”

Finished James K. A. Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom; Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation.” There are some quality ideas in the book about the way pagan culture works in us to shape us via its liturgies. I was glad for this reminder of the necessity to be epistemologically self conscious about what is seeking to form me. There are also some excellent reflections on what happens in our Church liturgies from the opening of God’s Greeting to the closing of the Benediction.  So good are these insights that I can recommend this book just for that chapter.

However, having said that Smith’s idea that the social imaginary has priority over a Christian worldview is not convincing. In this argumentation Smith is tipping his postmodern hand over and over again as seen in the advocacy of narrative over discourse, and the use of a host of what might be characterized as false dichotomies; orthopraxy precedes orthodoxy, instinct trumps rationality, animal desire precedes human reflection, heart informs mind, liturgy shapes worldveiw, habit creates thinking about habit, social imaginary over worldview thinking, and pre-cognitive over cognitive.

The idea that a sanctified imagination is to be prioritized and preferred above sanctified rational thought begs any number of questions. For example, Smith insists that liturgy trumps worldview and yet our Churches are Liturgy thick with little to show in terms of Christ formation. Smith might well counter that we have to re-think our Liturgy and that might well be true but how do we re-think our liturgy without using a worldview to correct a weak liturgy?

Smith’s insistence that the heart (desire) takes precedence over the mind (rational) is thin at best and dangerous at worst. The very idea that the heart and mind are to be dichotomized like this is the work of some kind of dualistic fever. When it comes to the use of the word “heart” in Scripture a survey reveals, when taken in context, that approximately 8 out of 10 verses in Scripture that what is being spoken of is a person’s mind. 1 out of 10 verses relate the heart to volition. Another 1 of 10 verses have the heart standing for the emotions. This indicates that in its overwhelming usage in Scripture heart and mind are synonymous. Smith makes too much capital out of the difference between head and heart. 

Having said that Smith does lay his finger on the pulse of a real problem in the Church in the West today and that is the fact that so many of our children in both our Churches and our Church colleges end up having a Christianity that is only marginally different then the paganism all around them. Somewhere, Christian worldview training isn’t enough. Now, for my money I would say that is due to the fact that we are allowing the culture to interpret us as opposed to or interpreting the culture. Our Christian worldview training is failing because, at the end of the day it is not getting to the essence of thinking God’s thoughts after him. Smith realizes this and is to be lauded for that realization however, I am not convinced that his solution of a consecrated imagination as shaped and formed by worship habits is the answer. In fact, I’m convinced it is not the answer. Indeed, the answer that Smith offers up sounds to much like the idea that the Worship service is to be used as a vehicle of manipulation to form people quite without their being aware of how they are being formed. I fear there is more of Edward Bernays in Smith’s theories then there are Jesus Christ.

At the end of the book Smith changes focus to the Christian University and as he explains his vision I think what Smith wants to build is a Christian commune as a University. He prescribes potentials courses which would reduce the amount of academic work in favor of “learning to read a stranger in a coffee shop,” or to be involved in matters that are directly related to “issues of poverty.” Given the disappearance of the Christian mind in the West today this idea strikes me as potentially disastrous if it was to be followed.

Smith’s book has much to recommend it and I think it is well worth a read but at the end of the day his worldview about social imaginary is not a worldview that I can regard as wholesome.

Tim Keller Channels George Orwell

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.”

Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, part 1, chapter 3, pp 32

“I think Genesis 1 has the earmarks of poetry and is therefore a “song” about the wonder and meaning of God’s creation. Genesis 2 is an account of how it happened… For the record I think God guided some kind of process of natural selection, and yet I reject the concept of evolution as All-encompassing Theory.”

Tim Keller
The Reason for God — pp 97-98

Keller refuses to accept either 6 day creationism, nor full blown evolution. Keller is also on record as saying, “You’ve got some problems with the theistic evolution….” As a result Keller goes for the “messy approach” that seeks to combine all of them and none of them. Of course the “messy approach” means that Keller has just embraced contradiction. In point of fact, Keller has exceeded Orwell’s “double-think,” moving on to the hallowed ground of “triple-think.”

Examining Keller’s quote above we easily detect Keller’s contradiction in terms of the most basic tenet of Reformed Christianity (Keller is a Presbyterian minister) and that is God’s exhaustive sovereignty. What Keller has posited here is that God and some other agency called “Natural selection,”  co-operated together unto the end of creation. Now, Keller does seem to give God the upper hand but notice that Keller’s God is merely guiding Natural selection. Where did this Natural selection that God is guiding come from?

Do keep in mind also that one of the core tenets of Natural selection is the arrival of species by a random process of time plus chance plus circumstance. The whole idea of Natural Selection is that it is not guided. Meanwhile the whole idea of a sovereign God is that He doesn’t cooperate in creation by guiding another independent agent called “Natural selection,” to a agreed upon end. When reduced to its essence, Keller has a Sovereign God guiding a process that is by definition a random process of chance. This is classic Orwellian double think taken up as Evangelical art form. In saying everything Keller has said nothing.

Keller does indeed reject Evolution as a all encompassing theory of origins but at the same time he has also rejected the Sovereign God of Reformed Christianity as a all encompassing theory of origins. The result is a mish mash of contradictions as combined with a miasma of pseudo-intellectualism.

Indeed so great is Keller’s faith in his “Natural selection guiding god” that Keller can testify with all the fervor of a true believer,

“How could there have been death before Adam and Eve fell? The answer is, I don’t know. But all I know is, didn’t animals eat bugs? Didn’t bugs eat plants? There must have been death. In other words, when you realize, ‘Oh wait, this is really complicated,’ then you realize, ‘I don’t have to figure this out before I figure out is Jesus Christ raised from the dead.’ ”

So, Keller can not have enough faith to believe the Scripture that death did not enter until after Adam’s fall but he does have enough faith in his “Natural selection guiding god” that (s)he could have it all figured out even if he can’t figure it all out. If one is going to have that kind of faith why not place it in the Biblical record?

Some, in speaking out Keller’s defense have noted that Keller often speaks differently in different contexts. I am not surprised by this in the least. In point of fact it is exactly what we would expect in someone practicing Orwellian double think. There is nothing intellectually sophisticated in any of this. It is all Orwellian double and triple think. In short we see Keller channeling Orwell,

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

How would you refute Dr. Landon Jackson? Or would you?

Recently a third party known to all involved wrote to our mutual friend what we find below. How would you respond?
_____________

The well meant or free offer of the Gospel has long been a debated point among Reformed Churches and to date those who champion the “free offer of the Gospel” have, for the most part, won out in the contemporary Reformed Church.  The well meant or free offer of the Gospel teaches that God offers the Gospel to be accepted by those He has ordained, from eternity past, to be passed by in terms of salvation. Those Reformed who have opposed the well meant or free offer of the  Gospel have done so on the basis of its contradictory nature. They have noted the inconsistency in saying that God offers the reprobate to saved all the while having determined that they are vessels created for wrath.

The opposition to the well meant or free offer of the Gospel is not the same as opposition to the General call that finds all men everywhere being commanded to repent. One can deny the well meant offer of the Gospel and still be a passionate evangelist.

The dangers of the well meant offer of the Gospel is not only found in its contradictory nature but also in what it potentially works on those who hold to it. Those who hold to the well meant (free) offer of the Gospel run the danger of being so earnest about seeing souls saved that they will define down law so impoverishing gospel in order to make it easier for people to enter into the Kingdom. If God really intends for those He has determined to pass by to have a bonafide opportunity to accept the Gospel, so the reasoning goes, then we must do everything in our power to remove every obstacle. What eventually begins to happen is that the obstacles of the legitimate demands of the Law are removed so that people can more easily accept the offer of what is now a non Gospel, “Gospel.” God has a well meant offer of the Gospel for everyone, elect and reprobate alike, therefore we must make sure that nothing gets in the way of that well meant offer — even the truth.

Next, we must think through the implications of the Free offer of the Gospel. If we posit that there is, on God’s part a universal desire to save all in some sense based upon an intrinsic reluctance in God to bring wrath to bear on humans, then that same reluctance exists to have brought the wrath to bear on Christ the human. This would give us then a universal reluctance, on the Father’s part to save any. If the free offer of the gospel is predicated on this universal reluctance to punish then we likewise must posit a universal retraction of the gospel.

Dr. Landon Jackson

Man as Homo Sapien vs Man as Homo Liturgicas

“… Before we articulate a worldview, we worship. Before we put into words the lineament of an ontology or an epistemology, we pray for God’s healing and illumination. Before we theorize the nature of God, we sing His praises. Before we express moral principles, we receive forgiveness. Before we codify the doctrine of Christ’s two natures, we receive the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Before we think we pray. That’s the kind of animals we are, first and foremost: loving, desiring, affective, liturgical animals who, for the most part, don’t inhabit the world as thinker or cognitive machines.”

James K. A. Smith
Desiring the Kingdom; Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation — p. 34

What is being advocated by Smith is the idea that doxology precedes theology. Smith casts this as an approach that is contrary to what he styles as an enlightenment approach where humans are seen as biological idea containers. Smith prefers what he styles as an “embodied approach” where a person’s loves and desires serve as the foundation for subsequent acquirement of a knowledge base. He styles his approach as “pre-cognitive.” Smith’s interest is to move education from a collection of information in the interest of a proper world and life view to a pursuit of pre-cognitive character formation that will result in a proper world and  life view. Smith contends that we are hearts before we are minds and as such the Church should be more concerned with right worshiping practices that satisfy the desires of the heart. Consistent with this is Smith’s appeal that worship should go after the imagination before it goes after man’s rationality.

There could well be truth in this, especially as applied to children growing up in the Church. Certainly covenant children, immersed in Biblical Christianity from the tenderest of years, may well have caught Christianity before they were explicitly taught Christianity.  For covenant children I think that we would have to admit that there is an embrace of Christianity that is pre-cognitive in the sense that they are Christian before they are epistemologically self conscious Christians.

Also, I agree that there is much to be said for capturing the imagination of the saints as well as their rationality. I do agree that imagination is a powerful tool for shaping character formation.  Too often Reformed Christians have let their imaginations atrophy in favor of the syllogistic and the linear logic.

Having said that though I do have some observations concerning the quote above.

1.) Is it really the case that we worship before we have a worldview? Without a worldview how do we know who or what we are worshiping? How can one worship if they don’t know who or what they are worshiping?  Is it really the case that we sing the praises of a God we know not the nature of? If we do not know His nature then what kind of praises could we possibly be singing? If we do not have an ontology why would we pray at all, never mind praying for healing and illumination? If we do not have a Biblical epistemology why would we think that this ontologically unknown God could illumine us?

2.) Why would we think we have the need for forgiveness unless we first had some kind of structure that informed us of moral principles? Doesn’t the asking of forgiveness presuppose an already existing moral principle paradigm?

3.) Why would we even come to the Eucharist to take the body of Christ if we didn’t first have some kind of understanding that the body of Christ we are partaking in is distinct, in some sense, from the body of Christ in heaven? This sense of distinctness would imply some kind of nascent understanding of two natures.

4.) “Before we think we pray?” Really, I can’t even come close to making heads or tails of that statement.

I agree with Smith that men can not be reduced to thinking or cognitive machines. Man is a modified unichotomy so that his body and soul, imagination and rationality, his being part of what he is doing and yet observer of what he is doing, enters together into everything he does. But I do not agree with Dr. Smith when he suggests that, when it comes to knowing, our pre-cognitive self precedes our cognitive self. I do not agree that doxology precedes theology. This is to say too much. Neither would I agree with anyone who suggested that our embodiment is secondary to our thinking. Clearly that would be to say too much in the other direction since all our thinking happens as embodied beings.

I understand that Dr. Smith is warning us against a hyper-rationality that does not have the capacity to understand that an idea must be examined in its embodied context. I appreciate Dr. Smith’s, Polanyi like exhortation for us to dwell in our knowing pursuits. I am slow though to give this postmodern feel its head to quickly lest one loses one’s head to a irrational and un-examined experiential ooze.

We shall see where Dr. Smith goes with this idea in the rest of his book.