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The False God of “Science”

“Modern recent studies in the history of science have shown that the pseudo-sciences continued to be influential well into the seventeenth century. As a result, these studies have further undercut the original premise that the beginnings of modern empirical, scientific, and inductive methods can be clearly differentiated from medieval, and Renaissance theology, pseudo-science, and occult philosophy. These re-evaluations by historians of science point the way toward the general and much-needed revaluation of the relative influence of science and pseudo-science on the intellectual foundations of the modern epoch as a whole.”

Stephen McKnight

Sacralizing the Secular — p. 22

Interestingly, Aristotle said that philosophy is the queen of the sciences but here Aristotle was wrong because philosophy is but a handmaiden to the Queen of the sciences which is Theology.  In either case, “Science” as a neutral and objective body of ideas does not exist. Ancient tradition claimed a foundation in philosophy. The genesis of modern science where it has had the feature of being scientific is in theology, as notable historians (e.g. Whitehead) have acknowledged. “Objectivity” has a basis in Christian philosophy or Christian theology, or else has no objective basis. The Christian must not be cowed by “science has proven…” Rather, the contest is the philosophy of ultimate despair vs. revelation of truth.

Again we would insist that science is dependent upon Theology. Theology remains the Queen of the Sciences. I couldn’t give a rat’s tush when Fauci, for example, tells me that “I’m just following the science,” because I don’t know what theology he’s following that yields up his “Science.”

Consider this scenario. Two scientists stumble upon the same fossil. One of the scientists is an Evolutionist. The other scientist is a Creationist. One scientist looks at the shared fossil and says … “This fossil, by the principles of science, proves Creation in 6 days.” The other scientists looks at the shared fossil and says “this fossil, by the principle of science, proves Evolution and that the world took billions and billions of years to come into existence.”

Same fossil… different science.

The difference is not in the fossil. The difference is in the science because the different sciences are what they are because of the different theological presuppositions.

Science is dependent upon theology.

Blowing Out The Candles After My Birthday Wishes

What can you get me for my Birthday?

1.) The Gospel Coalition goes bankrupt
2.) Together 4 The Gospel is converted
3.) Ron Burns becomes an officially recognized stand up comic
4.) Ligon Duncan Does the voice over for a Foghorn Leghorn animated movie
5.) A membership for John Piper to the NRA
6.) Joe Carter actually reading what he writes before published
7.) The understanding that it is not mean to put MLK in the same sentence as the word “whores.”
8.) Joe Biden has a day where he remembers what it was like to be Joe Biden
9.) The PCA revoices their denomination
10.) Kevin DeYoung decides being “cool” is no longer his life goal
11.) Al Mohler no longer is allowed to be in charge of hiring and firing people
12.) Doug Wilson learns what a false dichotomy is
13.) Tim Keller repents before the pancreatic cancer metastasizes
14.) Aimee Byrdd gets a publicity photo AFTER getting her hair and nails done
15.) Rev. Todd Bordow decides bestiality should be a crime
16.) Darryl Gnostic Hart changes his mind and admits that Nero did violate God’s law by executing Christians
17.) John MacArthur realizes the contradiction in being both Dispensational AND Reformed
18.) Rev. Greg Johnson gets a non-gay haircut
19.) Russel Moore would realize that funding Mosques with Baptist money is not Christlike.
20.) Mike Horton would no longer support same-sex cohabiting as long as the word “marriage” isn’t used.
21.) R. Scott Clark is demoted from “I’m the God of what it means to be Reformed.”
22.) Westminster Seminary California moves to Seoul Korea. It would make it easier on all their students.
23.) R.C. Sproul Jr., Doug Phillips, Tullian Tchvidijian, Mark Driscoll and Bill Hybels hold a conference on “They Used To Hang On Our Every Word & We made Millions.”
24.) Gordon Clark, Van Til, Bahnsen, and Rushdoony finally get the respect they deserve.
25.) The Reformed world realizes that Critical Race theory was supposed to be the punch-line to a really bad joke.
26.) Carl Trueman would live up to his last name.
27.) J. V. Fesko… dude, you have to quit writing books on apologetics. I’m wearing myself out with laughter.
28.) The OPC finally admits… “Yes, we are really a Sorority.”
29.) The PCA finally admits… “About those San Francisco bath-houses….”
30.) David VanDrunnen’s confession, “I was getting stoned with my Jesuit Bro’s when I first thought of R2K.”
31.)  Sodomite but celibate ministers who want to tell the world that they are sodomite but celibate is no longer a thing.
32.) Joel Belz and Marvin Olasky are required to publish a magazine from the perspective of a Christian Worldview.
33.) Matt Chandler compares his sermons to the writings of Marx

34.) I no longer have to mumble incoherently to hide my shame when someone asks, “So, what do you do for a living.”
35.) The brick and mortar Conservative American Seminaries at my front door … all in a pile of rubble.

36.) Sean Michael Lucas’ classrooms and church pews are empty when he teaches
37.) Peter Leithart would repent of Federal Vision
38.) The members of Joel Beeke’s Church discover the ability to look outside of themselves to Christ and so take communion.
39.) Churches all across America closed on Sundays with little signs that say, “Will be reopening when we take all this seriously.”
40.) Dr. Joe Boot’s influence expands in proportion to his moving in the right direction on the familialism issue.
41.) Kim Burgess gets the hearing he deserves and the respect his knowledge of Biblical theology demands.
42.) Mark Chambers, Dan Brannan, and Mickey Henry are each made teaching Elders somewhere in America.
43.) Sam Perry receives a call from a congregation who will cherish and honor his abundant abilities.
44.) Baptists of the world deciding once and for all if they are going to follow their ecclesiology as Anabaptists or their soteriology as Reformed.
45.) Lutherans realizing that they cannot be both Arminian and Reformed.
46.) Every Cultural Marxist minister out of their pulpits so that their Church pulpits would be gloriously empty on Sundays.
47.) That a millstone would be placed around the neck of the New Perspective on Paul and so be cast into the sea.
48.) The ability to decide if the covenant is monopleuric or diplueric and if both where and how and in what ways.
49.) Deep and sustained Repentance by D. A. Carson for creating “The Gospel Coalition.”
50.) The ability to meld all the strengths and eliminate all the weaknesses of Gordon H. Clark and Cornelius Van Til.
51.) The ability of Reformed ministers who are evidentialists to repent of their Arminianism.
52.) Seminary programs requiring courses that explain, disassemble, and banish all forms of Marxism as expressions of the Christian faith.
53.) Fathers that catechize their children with the confessions as existing in Worldviews.
54.) The embracing of Biblical Kinism just as our Fathers embraced it for centuries. (See Achord & Dow book for proof)
55.) The reversal of the influence of postmillennialism and amillennialism upon the modern church.
56.) Joel McDurmon finally gets his wish to Pastor a Black Marxist congregation.
57.) Bojidar Marinov is returned to Bulgaria for violating his visa.
58.) Gary North publicly repents for calling his father-in-law a racist in “Baptized Patriarchalism.”
59.) That any idiot who goes about with racism on his lips should be boiled in fatback and buried with a stake of turnip greens through his heart.
60.) That every Pastor should serve as loving and generous a congregation as exists at Charlotte Christ the King Reformed Church.
61.) That all Biblical Christians everywhere would have the kind of blessed life I have had.
62.) People who believe that “race is a social construct” would quit writing books seeking to explain why CRT is evil.

It’s my Birthday and I’ll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to
You would cry too
If this happened to you.

Humanism in “Christianity”

Genesis 3:4 Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Last week we spoke about generic humanism seeking to make the case that we in this culture are awash in humanism. This morning we want to look at what we might call in a purposely contradictory manner, “Christian Humanism.”

By that, I mean that doctrinaire humanism that has come into the visible Church and its theology all the while calling insisting that such humanism is the pure gold of Christianity theology.

As we look at the text this morning we note that the sin of our first parents was to turn away from God’s legislative word to embrace themselves as god and own their own word as legislative of all reality. Like Nebuchadnezzar who we considered last week, this was straight-up humanism.

The temptation here was that each man could be His own god, knowing and so determining good and evil. Like the King of Babylon who stands as a representative for Lucifer in Isaiah 14:14 our first Parents resolved to

“Ascend above the heights of the clouds,”

They said

‘I will be like the Most High.’

In the pursuit of this man as God theology, our first parents as God had sought to not only know all reality independent of God but to order all reality as their own God. This is humanism. Man with the Fall had attempted to destroy God’s world as well as all God interpreted facts and instead had sought to create his own anti-reality brought into existence by his creation of the meaning of all facts. Facts would still be god-dependent but the god that all facts would be dependent upon would be man as the new god in town.

Too often we read this text as a children’s story and we reduce it to trees and fruit. It is that but it is much more than that.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil and the prohibition of the eating of that fruit was about the Creator-creature distinction.

It was about ontology – God is God and man is not.
It was about epistemology – Man can only know in light of God’s knowledge
It was about anthropology – Man is most human when he walks in obedience
It was about axiology – God’s legislative Word is the ultimate value
It was teleology – Man’s end/destiny is God-dependent

And in the surrendering to the Tempter our first parents were the first practitioners of humanism.

As we considered last week that humanism is characteristic of men not limited in their passions, power, or resources.

It was characteristic of the builders of Babel.
It was characteristic of Pharaoh.
It was characteristic of Nebuchadnezzar.
It was characteristic of Herod

Elsewhere in Scripture, it was characteristic of the Gnostics that Paul, Jude, and John dealt with.

Alas, this humanism is also characteristic in the visible Church. Indeed, you and I will have need to fight our orientation towards the self as god our whole lives and will not be completely done with that until we cross to the other side.

Yet this idea of living a God-centered life remains the goal of all Biblical Christians. We live with the maxim of “to God alone be the Glory.”

This idea is the reason for the Reformed Chruch’s existence. Consider these three forms of Unity … especially this Synod of Dordt that we are confessing. What is the passion? The passion is to eliminate every particle of man being able to boast before God that in any way he was contributory to His restoration to and acceptability before His maker.

This emphasis on sola Dei Gloria is what distinguishes us. This is the major reason why we need to continue to exist. The Methodists, most Baptists, The Roman Catholics, the Lutherans, the Pentecostals don’t teach to “God alone be the Glory.” In all these traditions any claims of Sola De Gloria — “To God alone be the glory” is mixed with an alloy of human contribution which takes glory from God. Linguistic deception enters in if and when they talk about the Glory of God alone.

And to be honest we must admit that much of the Contemporary Reformed Church has fallen down in this area as well. For example, by mixing our doctrine with Liberation theologies or R2K or Federal Vision or New Perspectives on Paul we have stripped the meaning out of “to God alone be the Glory and so have become incipiently practitioners of humanism.

Having set the table I would like now to consider some ways in which humanism has entered the visible Church. Of course, we must limit ourselves here with just a few examples lest we go far into the night in our service.

The first example I want to consider is what remains yet the most popular understanding of the Atonement which is anchored in a kind of humanism that ought not to be named in the visible Church. This is the idea that Christ died for everybody.

This thinking is ubiquitous but it is generally found in Arminian churches. Its proper name is the Governmental theory of the Atonement. In this understanding of the Atonement Christ dies in order to give a general satisfaction for the dishonor done by sin to God’s governmental order.

The death of Christ is seen as a demonstration of how seriously God takes sin BUT it is not an actual payment for actual sins committed.

The effect that the death of Christ has in this theory of the atonement is to make it possible for God to forgive sins once an appeal has been made to that end. God is not forgiving sin because the Son paid for those particular sins. God is forgiving sin because a generic principle has been upheld and with that principle being upheld God can in the future be forgiving upon a proper appeal.

You see the death of Christ makes forgiveness possible but it does NOT make forgiveness actual. In this theory, there is no actual correlation between the death of Christ and the payment for your sin. The death of Christ is merely the proclamation that sin, generally speaking, is deserving of God’s wrath but it is not particular people’s sins who are being particularly paid for. In this view of the atonement, there is neither expiation (sins being taken away) nor propitiation (the price of sin being paid for). What is communicated is merely that generally speaking God’s government was violated and so God’s government must be restored.

Obviously, this fits for Arminians since Arminians don’t believe that the Death of Christ is the salvation of sinners but instead believe that the Death of Christ makes salvation possible upon a proper appeal.

Perhaps this illustration will get to the matter at hand.

A certain king one day discovered that an unknown thief had stolen a golden chalice from his treasury. He brooded on the insult to his honor. He was a most wise king. Finally he came upon a solution. To rectify the insult to his honor he had to punish someone, and who else but his beloved daughter? She was the most esteemed and flawlessly virtuous maid in the kingdom, and her beauty was legendary. She was the apple of her father’s eye. And so he concluded, what could be of more value, than the suffering of one so virtuous? So much honor would be rendered to the king that she should be innocent yet suffer willingly; surely that would be more than sufficient to restore the insult of the transgression. He told the fair maid, and she recognized his great wisdom and did dutifully agree to be beaten for the crime. And so the great king did beat his beloved daughter. He beat her in the public square, and he did beat her sore, that apple of his eye. And she was so dutiful in the suffering that as he beat the harder she did not ask for respite, terrible though her wounds were. And all his couriers and all the townsfolk did behold that terrible beating, of one so fair, and they were overcome by this display of the wisdom of the king; that having been robbed of a chalice he should then furthermore beat his precious daughter.

The idea here is that whoever did steal the chalice would be so overcome with pity for the daughter that they would decide to repent and appeal for clemency from the King who then could grant forgiveness because his daughter upheld the honor of the King’s governmental structure.

You see, for a great many Evangelicals, the Cross of Christ is not an objective, vicarious substitution for particular sinners. Sin and guilt is not remitted at the Cross but is only made potentially remittable upon later appeal and the Cross becomes only a public declaration of divine justice designed to stimulate sinners to choose to follow God. This is called the Governmental theory of the Atonement. In this theory, the Father punishes the Son on the Cross NOT as a substitute paying for the designated penalty of a designated elect. Rather the Father is using the Son’s death as a cosmic public demonstration to all sinners everywhere at all times that justice for sin and disobedience has been paid in the abstract. Not for any one concrete individual or any concrete group (Church) but only in the abstract. The effect of the Atonement is still dependent upon fallen man and not God.

Now, that God has made this public declaration of abstract justice “whosoever” is welcome to return to God if they will. Preaching thus becomes an explanation of why Christ was such a victim of the Father and how feeling sorry for Christ should be a motivator for man’s repentance. This is where the pitiful sentimental pietistic Preaching comes from that so often happens in our pulpits today. God is not commanding all men everywhere to repent. Instead, Jesus is “softly and tenderly calling, calling for you and for me.”

Note in all this man remains sovereign in his salvation. Here is the humanism. God has provided an abstract justice but it is up to man to decide whether or not he’ll feel sorry enough for poor poor Jesus hanging on the Cross, punished by the Father, to actually choose him to be the sinner’s savior.

The humanism here is seen by the move from what God has done to provide atonement to what God is offering to individuals if they will but choose to accept what He has offered. The shift is from the Objective work of God providing forgiveness in the work of Cross to an Elect people to the subjective opportunity for all people to decide or not decide to buy into this forgiveness. Man remains the center.

And so Humanism enters the Church. The emphasis will inevitably fall upon the wisdom of man to buy into what God offered. The preaching will become man-centered pleading, begging, and cajoling men to buy the eternal life lotto ticket.

And so in the words of Tennyson

A lie that is half the truth is the wickedest lie of all
For a lie that’s all a lie can be met with and fought outright
But a lie that is half the truth is a harder matter to fight

Our next example of humanism in the visible Church exists as in many Reformed denominations. It is called the well-meant offer of the Gospel, or alternately the well-intentioned offer of the Gospel.

The Well-meant offer of the Gospel teaches that with the Gospel call that God is genuinely offering salvation to those God has predestined to be vessels of destruction. Of course, such a thing if true, would place a contradiction in God.

The contradiction would be that while God’s will has predestinated the end of all individuals God’s will also desires the salvation He has eternally set aside to be those who would harden their heart against the Gospel.

We wonder how it cannot be the case that the so-called “well-meant offer of the Gospel” involves a Calvinist in sheer contradiction. That God is gracious only to some in predestination but gracious to all in the gospel call, and that God wills only some to be saved in predestination but wills all to be saved by the gospel, is flat, irreconcilable contradiction. It is an absurdity.

In brief, the well-meant offer of the Gospel has God desiring the salvation of the reprobate that He has determined from all eternity to harden their hearts against Him.

This is a move of humanism because in embracing the well-meant offer of the Gospel one has moved the acceptance or refusal of the Gospel from God’s eternal predestinating decree to man’s decision to respond or not respond to the Gospel call.

This non-God centered doctrine has in its sights not only the doctrine of God’s predestinating decree it has in its sights the doctrine of Limited Atonement. Is it really the case that God desires all hearing to receive Christ when Christ’s death is particular for only some who are hearing the Gospel command to repent?

Those who affirm the “Well meant offer of the Gospel,” insist that those who disagree with the same are guilty of making God’s offer hypocritical. They say that a God who calls on some to repent who are not elect is not being genuine. This is a not well thought out charge.

That all men are responsible to answer affirmatively God’s command that all men everywhere repent can not be translated into meaning that all men are able to repent. That the reprobate are responsible though not able to answer God’s summons to repent is not to say that the summons to repent is not genuine. The fault is not in God’s summons. The fault lies in man’s hatred of God.

You cannot infer an indicative from an imperative. Ought does not imply can. Responsibility does not imply ability.

Evangelistic preaching as a universal offer of salvation made in love to all who hear and stamped with the explanation that God desires to save to every sinner without exception is a move towards humanism that fails to honor God’s majesty.

What else might we speak of? We spoke last Friday at Labri about how R2K is a move towards humanism. We have spoken previously of Federal Vision being a move towards humanism. We have looked at how continuationism in Revelation ends up being a humanism move. We have talked about how CRT and Cultural Marxism and Intersectionality in the Church are moves towards humanism. We have spoken relentlessly about how the denial of distinctions and the embrace of egalitarianism in the church is a move towards humanism. We have spoken repeatedly on who Barthianism / neo-Orthodoxy is humanism.

And all of this is so much in the Church we sometimes find ourselves asking ourselves… “Where is the Church.”

The Church is supposed to be the one place where one discovers a radical God-centeredness. No humanism is allowed.

But remember as we said at the outset that humanism… man desiring to de-god God and en-god himself will always be something we fight against. I’m sure there is humanism in myself and in this church that I don’t see. A humanism that sorrowfully needs repenting of. I’m confident that I am a hypocrite on this subject.

However, every minister is a hypocrite inasmuch as He is always required to preach a way that is far greater than what he has attained himself.

So we plead for God to open our own eyes to what is displeasing to Him while we inveigh against Humanism in the Church.

When we discover humanism in ourselves we can rejoice that God receives penitent sinners for the sake of Jesus Christ. When we discover our own selfishness, self-centeredness, desire for self-aggrandizement, we can fall on our face and confess our sins knowing that God receives those who own their sins…. even the sin of humanism.

In Christ’s death Christ paid for this sin of humanism in the Church and reminds us that only by being satisfied with His forgiveness can we constantly be putting off the sins of a ugly stinking humanism.

Praise God for His great grace towards humanist sinners like us.

Book Review — Schwarz’s “You Can Trust the Communists to be Communist”

Completed Dr. Fred Schwarz’s “You Can Trust The Communists to be Communists.” You can tell I think this is an important book because I only occasionally re-read a book. This is the third time I’ve read Schwarz’s book.

Its chapter on the Materialistic dialectic probably should be read every year.

The book is dated having been written in 1958 but the material remains important in understanding the basics of Communism. Now, people will ask; “Why read a book like this when Communism fell in 1989?”

The answer to that is three-fold,

1.) I’m not convinced that Communism really fell in 1989

2.) Even if the Easter Bloc did fall, China remains
3.) Communism thrives here in the West

As such, there is a need to stay up with what Communism is, how it functions, how it moves forward, how it recruits, and what its purpose is.
Schwarz gives us all that and more.

This book is needed for Biblical Christians because it helps us to understand our own faith. I remain convinced (though legion are the people who disagree with me) that is not enough to know what we believe and why we believe it but that we must also know what we do not believe and why we do not believe it. Knowing the inner-working of other Christ denying faith systems makes us more able to instantly locate the fault in any system anywhere we encounter it.

Of course, this means that Communism is a faith system and so a religion. That it is a faith system and religion the Communists would never agree because a “faith-system” is not a corporeal or material something and so cannot be true. The Commies insist that their Communism is Scientific and so indisputable. However, that is just Marxist bovine scat. Communism is a full-blown religion that requires of its adherents faith in the unseen.
Schwarz gives us a chapter on how Communists organize (we saw that come to the fore especially in Obama’s campaigns for President) with the creation of a multitude of false fronts that can easily dissipate with the wind only to be re-created somewhere else as needs be. Schwarz gives us a chapter on how Communists recruit, noting that intellectuals find Communism appealing because it provides a purpose in life and a reason for existence — something nothing else yields except a muscular Biblical Christianity. In the chapter on Communist organization, Schwarz gives us the five circles of communist commitment and how they interlock.

Schwarz gives a chapter on the Communist necessity of violence and terrorism as their technique for seizing and maintaining power. We see this technique being used today in our streets and in the demand to mask and social distance. All of these are just contemporary versions of the Communist philosophy of violence as to the seizing and maintaining of power here in the States. A key thing to remember is that there cannot be Communism without constant terror and violence. Communism thrives on the conflict of interest and so can not allow harmony of interest.

Schwarz gives us insight into how the Communist model works in a top-down fashion and so explains why Communist states so easily crush any opposition that arises (think Hong Kong). Communism thrives on the strong man model as the system requires everyone to reflect the decisions of the Strong man at the top.

There is a good deal more, but if you read this book and understand it you will have a better grip on knowing the times we are in right now and what should be done.

In the end Communism can only be defeated by a Muscular Christianity. R2K and Federal Vision and Keller Christianity need not apply.