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August 8 - August 24, 2023
the Islamic concept of divinity is missing key elements of personhood. For example, consider the qualities associated with relationship. Only within a relationship can God express interpersonal attributes such as love, sympathy, intimacy, self-giving, and communication. Only between distinct persons can there
be giving and taking, initiating and responding, sharing and self-revelation, union and communion.
Only a God of love is fully personal. Thus the Trinity is crucial for maintaining a fully personal concept of God.
As theologian Robert Letham writes, “Only a God who is triune can be personal.… A solitary monad cannot love and, since it cannot love, neither can it be a person.” Therefore it “has no way to explain or even to maintain human personhood.”
As Udo Middelmann explains, “Islam is a religion of resignation.… Allah made the world, and you must accept the way it interacts with you, even should it kill you. You are allowed no questions,
no doubt, no individual responsibility. Negation of self is your salvation.”
To quote Middelmann again, “Its spirituality is repetitious and impersonal, not a chosen and deliberate love of God with all your heart, mind and soul.”
Muslims are not even required to understand what they recite. Many are not Arabic and do not speak the language. A book by two Muslim authors says, “It is not uncommon to meet people who know a great deal of the text by heart but have not the slightest understanding of the world view that permeates it.” But this is acceptable, the authors say, because in Islam “understanding is secondary” to recitation and ritual. 59 Thus Islam proves the reductionist principle once again—that a lower view of God leads to a lower view of the value, status, and dignity of the human person.
Historians have often wondered how such mind-staggering barbarism could emerge in modern civilized Europe. The answer lies in the power of idols. Nazi doctrine was organized around the idol of race. An individual’s race (Aryan or Jewish or Slavic) was said to determine that person’s views, character, and even worth. Communist ideology was organized around the idol of economic class. A person’s economic class (capitalist or proletarian) was held to be the all-determining factor.
But when idol-centered worldviews are applied in the political realm, there will be some people who do not fit in the state’s prescribed box—and who will literally be suppressed and even killed.
The lesson is that idol-based ideologies are invariably dehumanizing, and if unchecked they lead to repression, coercion, oppression, war, and violence. In the twentieth century alone, they have taken far more lives and created more havoc than all the religiously motivated witch hunts, inquisitions, and wars of the previous centuries.
When Romans 1 says God gives people up to the destructive impact of their idols, that does not mean only personal behavior. Worldviews are also incarnated in the classroom, the boardroom, the courtroom, the legislative chamber, and the theater of war.
Instead of absolutizing one piece of the puzzle, Christianity offers the entire puzzle with all the pieces in harmony, creating an image of enchanting beauty. It gives a far richer, fuller, more complex vision of reality than any other worldview. Christianity includes the valid insights of all other worldviews, while avoiding their weaknesses.
Religions and worldviews that deny the biblical God must treat something else as the ultimate reality (Principle #1). With the exception of the other monotheistic religions, they deify something immanent within the cosmos. They absolutize some aspect of creation as the ultimate explainer. Then they reduce everything else to that single category (Principle #2).
Romans 1 starts its teaching on idols by saying that the “wrath of God” is revealed from heaven.
He allows them to choose ways of thinking and living that are self-destructive, tearing down the honor and dignity of others and themselves.
As Thomas Johnson writes, the text implies “that there are proper ways for people to honor themselves,” namely, by accepting God’s view of them. “When people accept their status as image-bearers of the Creator, placed in this world to fulfill his mandates, there is honor for all.” But when they create God substitutes and recast their self-understanding in the image of an idol, then there is dishonor and destruction for all.
Communicating a Christian worldview should be like inviting people to open the door and come out. Our message ought to express the joy of leading captives out of a small, cramped world into one that is expansive and liberating.
when Paul says he is “not ashamed of the gospel,” he is saying that a Christian worldview will not let you down. It will not disappoint. 69 Christianity fulfills the human hunger for a unified, integrated worldview to live by. It has the intellectual resources to provide a holistic, internally consistent guide to life.
A worldview is meant to give a systematic explanation of those inescapable, unavoidable facts of experience accessible to all people, in all cultures, across all periods of history. In biblical terms, those facts constitute general revelation.
The undeniable fact is that humans do make choices. This fact serves as evidence that a person is not “a very, very small part of a big, big machine.” Instead humans are personal beings capable of willing and choosing—which means their origin must be a personal Being, not the blind forces of nature.
It is ironic that people who reject Christianity—who think that without God they can finally be free—end up with philosophies that deny human freedom.
The liberating message of the gospel is that we do not have to earn or work for salvation; that both justification and sanctification are by “hearing with faith” (Gal. 3:2, 5). But the Reformers did not mean that we cannot choose whether to have ham or turkey on our sandwich for lunch. By contrast, materialism holds that humans only think they are choosing ham or turkey. In reality their behavior is driven by natural forces such as neurons firing in the brain—just like sodium reacting with chlorine. All Christians agree in rejecting this materialist conception of humans as mere robots or meat
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civilizations as a whole cannot survive without the conviction that people can be held responsible for their actions.
the questions of free will because it is so central to human dignity. The ability to choose from among alternatives makes a host of other distinctively human capacities possible—creativity and problem solving, love and relationships (robots do not love), even rationality itself (if our minds are preprogrammed to hold an idea, then it is not a rational decision). “Unless human beings are morally responsible,” says law professor Jerome Hall, “justice is only a mirage.” Unless humans have free will, we will not develop a sense of identity or self-worth (because everything I do is really the work
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No matter how hard people work to suppress their knowledge of God, creation itself keeps challenging them. “Human life is a continual wrestling match with God and his created order,” writes Thomas Johnson. 14 When talking with skeptics and agnostics, we can show that their worldview fails to account for reality as they themselves experience it. The truths of general revelation cannot be ultimately suppressed.
A worldview is like an internal map that guides us in navigating reality.
Such compartmentalized thinking is what George Orwell famously called “doublethink,” and it functions here as a philosophical coping mechanism. When a worldview fails to account for all of reality, what do adherents do? Do they say, “I guess my theory has been falsified; I’d better toss it out”? Most people do not give up that easily. Instead they suppress the things that their worldview cannot explain, walling them off into a conceptual area separate from reality—an upper story of useful fictions. Wish fulfillment. Illusions.
An effective strategy in apologetics is to help people see more clearly where their worldview really leads. When they realize that idol-centered worldviews fail the practical test, that insight may open them to the case for a biblical worldview.
The Bible does not define faith as a leap to something that has no logical ground within its own worldview—a useful falsehood. When Paul writes, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), some Christians seem to think he is speaking metaphorically and means “by faith, not reason.” But Paul is speaking literally and he means sight. Non-material realities are invisible. They cannot be seen. Faith is “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1 KJV). It can take tremendous faith to act on the basis of realities we cannot see, but it is not a logical contradiction. Given the evidence, such
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In Romans 1, Paul warns that idols lead to destructive behavior, to moral and social breakdown.
When we hear people talk about ideas that are false, yet necessary for a humane social order, that is a signal that they have bumped up against the hard edge of a reality that does not fit their worldview. They have stumbled upon the truths of general revelation. And they are seeking to suppress those truths by demoting them to useful fictions. It’s remarkable how Paul’s description in Romans 1 of the dynamics of suppression makes sense of the latest modern worldviews.
But a useful fiction is still a fiction. And to hold it, when your own worldview denies it, is irrational. We might even call it a form of secular mysticism.
Francis Schaeffer in The God Who Is There observes that every worldview containing a two-story dualism leads ultimately to “mysticism” in the sense that adherents must affirm truths that their own worldview cannot rationally explain.
Romans 1 says God “gives people up” to pursue their idols ever further, increasing the gap between what they profess and what they practice. We can picture worldviews falling along a continuum: The more consistently people work out the logic of their worldview, the more reductionistic the result will be, the wider the gap, and the further its leap into irrational mysticism. The choice facing them becomes ever clearer: Will they follow the evidence of general revelation? Or will they cling to their theories in the face of the evidence?
contradiction. Paul writes that those who build their lives on idols become “futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts [are] darkened” (Rom. 1:21). The Greek word for futile means unproductive, ineffectual, failing to achieve its purpose. As this example clearly shows, idol-based worldviews do not produce what a philosophy of life is meant to give us—a coherent, logically satisfying worldview that makes sense of all of life.
to be foolish is to fail to connect ideas or link them into a meaningful structure, a coherent whole. Scripture is giving a spot-on description of the fragmented, fractured, internally contradictory two-story worldviews that result from embracing idols.
No wonder Paul writes that those who reject the Creator “are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). The phrase means “without a defense,” and it originally referred to a legal defense in a courtroom. In the Greek, the word is anapologétos, which has the same root as the word apologetics. The passage implies that those who adopt Creator substitutes end up with two-story worldviews that are not defensible as logically consistent, coherent, or realistic. Their worldviews do not fit reality as they themselves experience it.
When God gives people up to their idols, they experience a growing conflict between their worldview and their lived reality.
This is the tragedy of the postmodern age. The things that matter most in life, that are necessary for a humane society—ideals like moral freedom, human dignity, even loving our own children—have been reduced to nothing but useful fictions. They are tossed into the attic, which becomes a convenient dumping ground for anything that a materialist paradigm cannot explain.
Christianity continues to affirm the unity of truth as a coherent, logically consistent whole. In Christ, all things still “hold together” (Col. 1:17).
G. K. Chesterton wagers that secularists reject Christianity not because it is a bad theory but because it seems “too good to be true.” For the materialist, “the universe is a universal prison.” It shackles humans in an interlocking chain of cause and effect. Thus when a secularist encounters the biblical view, “it is like believing in fairyland to believe in such freedom.” If secularists find Christianity “incredible,” Chesterton concludes, that is because it is so incredibly positive in affirming a high view of human freedom and dignity.
today it is a biblical worldview that coheres in a logically consistent system. It liberates us from cognitive dissonance, imparting a profound inner unity and peace. It accords with the natural human longing for a life of integrity and wholeness. (The word integrity comes from the Latin word for wholeness.) When talking with secular people, we can show them how Christianity fulfills their own highest hopes and ideals.
if the eternal truths really are “in man’s head,” then the logical conclusion is that they are not eternal after all. They are merely human constructs, relative and changing. In our day, postmodernism has drawn that conclusion. It holds that humans have no access to an objective or extra-mental world.
If we use the metaphor that a worldview is a mental map, postmodernists keep walking off their map. It is too small to account for the full geography of who they are.
postmodernism is a form of anti-realism, the view that reality is a social construction.
Louis Dupré says that the central challenge of our age is the lack of any integrating truth: “We experience our culture as fragmented; we live on bits of meaning and lack the overall vision that holds them together in a whole.” As a result, people feel an intense need for self-integration. Christianity has the power to integrate our lives and create a coherent personality structure, but only if we embrace it as the ultimate, capital-T truth that pulls together all lesser truths. Our commitment to Christian truth “cannot simply remain one discrete part of life,” Dupré says; it must “integrate
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When we read in Romans 1 that those who worship idols are “without excuse,” those words may seem harsh. In this chapter, however, we have met several scholars who openly acknowledge that their reductionist theories clash with the facts of experience. They are aware, at some level, that they harbor a severe contradiction.
You would think that when people realize they hold inconsistent beliefs, they would look for better ones. As we have seen, however, many scholars entrench themselves even more deeply in their reductionism. To acknowledge the evidence from general revelation would point them toward the biblical God—and so they suppress the evidence.
At least for some people, the purpose of proposing reductionist theories is to deny the Creator and to expropriate his divine power.
