A quote from C.S. Lewis, as explained by Dr. Ravi Zacharias,

“In A Pilgrim’s Regress, C.S. Lewis wrote about a man who ordered milk and eggs from a waiter in a restaurant. After tasting the milk he commented to the waiter that it was delicious. The waiter replied, “Milk is only the secretion of a cow, just like urine and feces.” After eating the eggs he commented on the tastiness of the eggs. Again the waiter responded that eggs are only a by-product of a chicken. After thinking about the waiter’s comment for a moment the man responded, “You lie. You don’t know the difference between what nature has meant for nourishment, and what it meant for garbage.”

This morning I was involved in a brief exchange with one who advocates advertising for those who advocate Homosexual, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transvestite acceptance into the Church of Jesus Christ as normative.

http://roomforall.com/about-us/purpose/

That brief exchange reminded me of this C. S. Lewis quote. In Lewis’ story the Spirit of the Age had captivated John (Lewis’ main Character) and insisted that what was intended for nourishment was garbage. My conversation was the inverse. Unlike Lewis’s story where nourishment was taken for garbage, my conversation was a case where someone was insisting that moral garbage was morally healthy. My conversation partner didn’t know the difference between what God had intended for misery and what God had meant for pleasure.

The Spirit of the Age when uninformed by the Spirit of Christ always teaches this kind of upside down world, where good is evil and evil is good. Bertrand Russel, the 20th Century renown Atheist caught something of how this achieved methodologically speaking,

“The social psychologist … will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influence of home are obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age ten. It is for the scientist to make these maxims precise and discover how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies of policeman”

Luther said 500 years ago on this score that,

“It is the nature of all hypocrites and false prophets to create a conscience where there is none, and to cause conscience to disappear where it does exist.”

Our prevailing zeitgeist is not interested in creating a conscience that tells us that snow is black or that cow milk is a secretion akin to urine or feces. No, what our Spirit of the Age is set upon convincing us is that morality is pluralistic and that the only evil that exists is the person who declaims against the evil of immorality.

And many are the children — young and old alike — who have been convinced that “snow is black,” and who will seek to destroy anyone who insists that, “no, snow really is white.”

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.

This is a comparing and contrasting of Richard Scary’s children’s book as published in 1963 vs. 1991. Imagine what it would look like if it were updated for 2011?

Connection between Greek word used for “Hell,” and garbage dumb.

Matt. 5:22 But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell (Gehenna – garbage dump) fire….29) And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell (Gehenna – garbage dump). And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell(Gehenna – garbage dump).

Matt.10:28 And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell (Gehenna – garbage dump).

Matt.18:9 And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell(Gehenna – garbage dump) fire.

Matt.23:15 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell (Gehenna – garbage dump) than yourselves.

Matt.23:33 Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell(Gehenna – garbage dump)?

Mark 9:43 And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell(Gehenna – garbage dump), into the fire that never shall be quenched:…45) And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell(Gehenna – garbage dump),, into the fire that never shall be quenched:…47) And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell (Gehenna – garbage dump), fire:

Luke 12:5 But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell (Gehenna – garbage dump); yea, I say unto you, Fear him.

James 3:6 And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell (Gehenna – garbage dump).

We see Jesus used the word gehenna, for hell, and his audience understood Gehenna was a phrase likening the place of Hell to Jerusalem’s garbage pit.

Gehenna (translated as Hell) was the place outside of the old city of Jerusalem called the Valley of Hinnon where waste was dumped; not only trash and garbage were disposed of there, but also corpses of humans and animals were burnt in the dump. In translating the Bible, the word Gehenna was used as a picturesque means of giving concrete meaning to the idea of a real Hell. Gehenna was a place of despoliation, rotting, and total destruction and disintegration.

Hell thus is defined as that place where nothing has relationship to anything else. As the refuse in a garbage dumb is random and unrelated everything that follows the culture of hell exists in isolation from everything else. Hell is the denial of God and without God there can be no meaning. All is random. All is chaos. All lacks cohesion. All is one large mass of unrelated, rotting total destruction and disintegration.

I submit that this definition of Hell is part of that which is being pursued by modern man.

Illustration — University / Multiversity

In this sense, the modern European philosophers/village atheists are creating hell for themselves and their disciples! The very definition of postmodernism, critical theory, deconstructionism, and multiculturalism is this idea that there is no God that exists who provides objective, meaning, and order. There is no God who exists as one who provides an integration point for all of reality. Whenever man throws off God, man builds a Hell culture.

And sometimes, that cultural Hell is more literal than we’d like to think.

We find the fire of Hell that will not be quenched in our abortuaries where saline burning is often used to destroy infants. We find the fire of Hell that will not be quenched in the burned out lives of sexual perverts who die young in the attempt to satiate their fiery lusts.

Understand that for Biblical Christians we can build heavenly cultures because we have God as our total integration point for all reality and meaning. The pagan and God hater though can only integrate himself into total nothingness. The pagan and God hater, because of their hatred of God is a total abstraction who can have no genuine relationship to anyone or anything else because the only being who can provide the concrete point of relationship has been denied.

Far better men then myself have called this integrating into the void. It is the garbage dump aspect of Hell where all is chaos and random because all integration and meaning is absent. The best that man without God can do in this setting is to try and use his own fiat (self-creating and legislating) word in order to impose and force meaning on the particulars that have no inherent meaning. In such a situation it becomes the war of all against all as all seek to be the meaning makers.

Fallen man literally lives in intellectual hell and he takes that intellectual hell and incarnates it into culture.

The consequence of the Gospel in people’s lives is that they leave their cultural hell and begin to see God’s will done on earth as it is done in heaven.