Secularism, the Church and the World: An overview of the ideas and history

Before I get into any real detail I realize I will need to start with an apologetic and explain how we arrived at our current culture’s understanding, which is neither typical nor historical normative even here.  I won’t recommend social engineering, but social transformation.  To do so I will start with a broad view of where we are at today, and why the church has largely failed focusing on saving souls not lives.

To say “I shouldn’t legislate morality/my morality according to my faith” is parroting the culture’s understanding and is indefensible biblically.  This runs contrary to the Gospel and Christ’s command to be salt and light to the earth and to honor him in all things.

Culture is religion in action as it is religion.  I will define religion as the foundational belief/trusted structure of the culture for understanding the world and our place in it. Religion forms the framework for how the culture makes sense of and acts in the world.  God and scripture assume this is historically the case.  I will develop this later but the bible is clear giving the great commission in Matthew 28 to make disciples and Christ’s claim that “All power has been given to me.”Christ is called “our Lord and savior” and there are frequent exhortations in the Psalms (Psalm 2, kiss the son lest be become angry) to the kings and people to honor God as king.  

Today we as a culture hold the former statement on morality not the latter biblical focus.  Keep your religion to yourself, be tolerant, don’t bring God into it are all new and in some ways bizarre frameworks.  Have we become somehow irreligious?  On the contrary, we have adopted a deformed religion known as secularism.

The  west has inherited the end fruits of the less than humble era titled “the enlightenment” itself a regression from early humanism.  Our contemporary religion is “Secular Humanism” and it arose with the mantra “man is the measure of all things.  This was accompanied by a blind faith claim that mankind is developing/evolving towards a perfect state, led to by science and the gradual phasing out of “superstitious” religion.

A perfect example of the modernist mindset that arose from this, as well as the vestigial Christianity of it's time. We were then becoming more consistent to the point of abandoning Christianityt as we have today

Broken, sinful and fallen as we are we not only make ourselves the center but fail to unite the created order together in our thinking.  Dichotomies have long been the norm, a divide between the spiritual and the physical.  Plato held that the Spirit was good, matter was evil and less real.  This thinking invaded the church in the form of Gnosticism, Docetism and still does today.  The Catholic concept of the Donum Superadditum, where Adam needed extra Grace in the garden of Eden which he lost before he sinned is likewise guilty of this error as it makes the material deficient.  Aristotle was more focused on this world with potentiality and actuality.  Everything is a potential something else, a nut is a potential tree that actualizes into a tree.  So he focused on particulars where Plato focused on ideas/absolutes. Yet he would shudder at how far we’ve taken naturalism. For the majority of history it was the spiritual world that was more real or superior, however in the last 500 years Aristotle has been misunderstood and kicking Plato’s tuckus as the material world has become treated as the real.   Our contemporary embrace of dichotomies had a negative effect on gender relations as I previously detailed here discussing the family model.

The medieval world struggled with this too, yet when John Calvin comes on the scene he affirms the goodness and unity of all creation.  Calvin affirmed Adam was sufficient in himself, the material body as much a part of him as his soul or spirit.  God was lord over all creation, uniting both physical and spiritual and redeeming it all to himself.   This explains the physical resurrection as well as the eternality of the spirit. Yet this (sadly) did not take hold in an increasingly irrational “rationalistic” world where the mind of the finite creature man measured all things.

In the context of the reformation secularism as a philosophy of government began to take root.  Starting with the Anabaptist separation of church and state, Europe began to suffer the Wars of Religion which furthered the spread of this kind of secularism.  Originally this was about institutions, there would be no state churches in secular societies.  Many Countries in Europe didn’t follow suit and still don’t in some sense as some still possess state churches (Denmark or England for instance) though functionally they’ve taken on secularism to a tee.  The early form of secularism didn’t keep God out of the government, but politicians out of church offices and pastors out of government.  The idea of keeping God out of anything was still absurd and the word atheist only came into existence in the Elizabethan age.  Rather Secularism originally rose in and for a Christian context for a Christian pluralism, one where the consensus of society was still the same religion in different flavors.

As we began to explain the material workings it didn’t explain away God but we acted as though it did. Society gained a means to excuse ourselves from needing him to explain the natural world.  With increased knowledge came an increase in the arsenal of depravity.  We could now make excuses.

Enter David Hume, the avowed and oft misunderstood Scottish Atheist.  Hume is known for denying miracles and supposedly succeeding in more than committing numerous logical fallacies.  Alas his success was all the latter.  His points  concerning miracles are summed up as

1.      Scepticism: We need to be skeptical of a witness to a miracle in regards to their education, intelligence, integrity or reputation and if they are lacking in any safely disregard them. 

a.       This extensive list and endless qualifications means almost anybody can be excluded, an ad hominem to say the least.  Further he disregards evidence from the discussion whatsoever

2.      Exaggeration: People are drawn to exaggeration, therefore they will gullibly believe a miracle claim. 

a.       This is a non-sequitor it won’t make their claims or belief false and I would add it is quite presumptive.

3.      Ignorance: Most are just ignorant barbarians and gullible in this way. 

a.       Again, an Ad homiem fallacy and a non-sequitor not addressing the logic of the discussion at all.  Also, people know more or less how they world they live in works, give them some credit.

4.      Diversity:  Religions Competing claims means they all cancel each other out, none are true/can be known to be true. 

a.       This is supposedly his strongest, but again is a non-sequitor.  Two people can claim an object is one color and disagree, but that doesn’t mean both are wrong or that it’s unknowable.  The issue is the perceivers not the thing perceived.  Variety of claims doesn’t make a truth unknown or unknowable, it merely provides the observation of different positions.

You can see the vitriol today among the New Atheists grounded in this, as Richard Dawkins who said when asked how to address theists “mock them” likewise calling them “stupid.”  Likewise the assertion that a miracle goes against the laws of nature even Hume couldn’t say for certain.  Rather he asserted the laws may change, but we haven’t seen a miracle yet (blind faith, a claim he assumes to be true and doesn't substantiate).  To counter him further, if there is a divine agent it is not a break of the natural order, neither would it be if I moved an object that otherwise would remain at rest.

So what does this have to do with anything?  Hume’s arguments won popularity, and now the spiritual wasn’t just less important but altogether unknowable and an intrusion into the natural world.  In the age of Deism now it really seemed as if the spiritual was beyond reach or any import.  Enter Immanuel Kant and his Kantradictions.  Incidentally his book was published 5 years after the start of the American Revolution, and at another time I will detail for you just how differently the founding fathers thought.

Kant essentially divides reality into the Neumonal (the world as it is “Der ding an sich” or thing in itself, where God is and his knowledge, metaphysical) and the Phenomenal world (the way we perceive it to be and which is observable, the physical).  The Neumonal is akin to Plato's metaphysical, absolute truth and the Phenomenal aligns greatly with Aristotle and his physical/particular focus.  Kant assumes Hume is correct and the spiritual is unknowable, since the mind of man allegedly can’t discover it. Hence there is an unbridgeable chasm between the two He then tries to correct this by acknowledging we perceive the world and cross from the world we perceive to God in the Neumonal by “faith”, blind unthinking faith not the faith of your grandpa mind you.  Of course he tells us to live as if we live with as if knowledge, and claims to know with certainty by his reason something about the Neumonal world.  General Revelation for Kant and Hume is altogether impossible, and Special Revelation even less so.

I find it sadly ironic that his name means “God with us” and yet he believed God was unknowable and unable to approach us.  Both Kant and Hume neglect that the general knowledge of God and general revelation exist and point to God.  Such a sense of the divine would be cruel and unexplainable in any other framework.  Furthermore, God is an acting party revealing himself in his creation and in his word.

The mistakes of Hume and Kant were followed by logical positivism, the philosophical expression of naturalism and secularism.  Simply put “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist”.

1.      Analytic: True insofar as math, self-evident and needs no proof.  If you can’t measure an object it doesn’t exist (number of chairs)

2.      Synthetic: Descriptive of nature and perceptions (the color of a chair for example)

3.      Metaphysical: The immaterial denied. And is nonsense

Since God and the spiritual couldn’t be measured, it was concluded they don’t exist.  Of course Logical positivism can’t be measured but consistency is a difficult thing to live when man is the measure of all things.

So religion became grounds for morality not truth, and increasingly not even that as it loses all authority as secularism does to religion.  Religious belief became values, “science” became the realm of facts.  Therefore to bring “God into this” suddenly became an absurdity.  Religious truth was unknowable in an increasingly individualistic society where it became about personal peace and affluence as Francis Schaeffer notes. 

Faith is now viewed derisively, as unthinking and feeling based.  As simple values for personal fulfilment it is demanded they be kept out of the public sphere.  It is little wonder then we have consumer religion today, and where people don’t vote as Christians but as Secular humanists as we are told to “keep it to yourself.” 

With this materialism came the rise of scientism wherein science is the facts.  Statistics and studies became Holy Scripture, the scientist our clergy in the field of “reason.”  The fact that they change all the time is altogether ignored.  It’s the “Hard Sciences” and their narrative that guide due to the mind of man being the center of reason in this schema.  Man’s failure to find consensus on the true religion brought society to the conclusion that there isn’t one and modernity with its neglect or even denial of the metaphysical took root.

Darwin’s popularizing of evolution (his grandfather posited the theory, as did an ancient Greek atheist named Anaximander who Plato thought was stupid) led to the doubt in the bible, since man was already the ultimate authority and this theory in the enlightened realm of science couldn’t be wrong in any way.  Further every mind must have evolved differently, with no intended design and simply being chemical in makeup.  Relativism then naturally followed as each individual became truly an island.

Increasingly we’re seeing an imposed morality of relativism become enforced due naturalism’s assumptions that

1.      Reality=nature

2.      man is an animal,

3.      truth is therefore relative (which negates the other two, but again consistency is best left out of this if you want to indulge your depravity)

Therefore it is bigoted to impose your views on others, but this is exactly what the culture and its natural secular humanism does to you and me.  You will vote your beliefs, you can’t avoid it it’s simply a matter of what and in whom will you believe.  The consensus is the postmodern ethic, and it’s bored its way into our culture and into Christians who are swimming in this ocean but don’t notice it.

This decay and relativism is why Abortion is a big issue, and gender identity.  A video not long ago showed a man asking college students if they were fine with him identifying as a 6”5” Chinese woman, many were.  

Of course how do you define what a 6 foot 5 Chinese woman is with no absolutes?  It borrows from a concrete reality because it has to.  So far it’s brushed off as not affecting others, but that’s naïve and we can simply wait for the day when someone can identify as someone else’s spouse/parents.  The death of moral facts has become real, and with it is going all truth at all as all relativism has left us with is being “our true self”. 

This explains today our division of “Church and State” as we understand it today.  Church is private, State is Public and God only belongs in the former.  This is the culture’s consensus and the morality and religion it enforces on us, make no mistake about it.  Every legal system is founded on a morality and morality on religion, we’ve simply capitulated to that of secularism.

                                                             

Albert Mohler on the dissapearance of God from the culture.

Essentially though these thoughts didn’t begin in the enlightenment, that’s only where they took root.  It began in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were told by the Serpent “you shall be as God’s.” The culture is coming apart, un-tethered due to its loss of God or even the concept of truth as the center as everyman becomes a morality unto himself.  I expect the book of judges to become current events. Indeed Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledged the implications, claiming after modernity a universal madness would breakout in the 20th century, and all truth would come unhinged with the death of the concept of God.
Having bought into this humanist and secular system, Christians have only hastened its effects and made Nietzsche's predictions true.  Next week I will dive into the biblical and Christian model, and detail how we are to transform not engineer society acting as a prophetic and influencing voice while winning souls to Christ.

And I leave you with the prophetic words of Francis Schaeffer on Humanism looking to what I will cover later.