161 - The Decline and Fall of the Impact of the Christian Worldview [A]

The Decline and Fall of the Impact of the Christian Worldview
Ephesians 4:17–21
Ephesians Lesson #161
August 14, 2022
Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Father, we’re thankful that You have revealed Your Word to us. It teaches us to think in terms of truth, to think in terms of reality as You’ve created it, to think in terms of absolutes, and yet we live in the midst of a world, a system of thinking that is contrary to that, that teaches us that we’re all just the consequence of an accidental electrical discharge hitting a massive protoplasm and somehow it all developed over millions of years into intelligent sentient beings.

“Father, we recognize that this is false, but so much flows from those evil ideas, so much has penetrated what was once a nation that was focused on Your Word and transformed it into a nation that is hostile to Your Word. We know that the only hope for stability and life comes from being grounded upon Your Word, which is our sure and certain foundation.

“Father, we pray that as we study today You will open our eyes to what is going on around us, how it has influenced us, and how it is influencing our families, and challenge us with what the Scripture says that we are not to be pressed into the mold of the thinking of the world around us.

“So Father we pray for insight that in Your light we will see light, and we pray this in Christ’s name, amen.”

Slide 2

Open your Bibles with me to Ephesians 4, but we’re really not going to spend a lot of time there, but that’s our focal point. We are looking at this week “The Decline and Fall of the Impact of the Christian Worldview.”

Last week we looked at the rise and development of the Christian worldview. I titled the message a little differently. I titled it “The Rise of Christianity’s Impact,” and somebody thought subjectively, personally about that. People are being impacted by the gospel all around. The reason we think subjectively is because of a man named Immanuel Kant who we will teach today.

What we’re talking about is the impact of an external worldview that impacts how we think and how we look at life, and it shows up in all kinds of subtle and interesting little ways. We’re talking about the fact that from the time of the birth of the church in A.D. 33 until roughly the midpoint of the 1600s, we saw the advance, the rise, the penetration of a Judeo-Christian worldview into the Western European civilization, and it transformed it.

When we listen today to the voices of Critical Race Theory blaming the white Europeans for all that’s wrong in the world, that’s just a false label, they’re blaming Christians for what’s wrong in the world. Prior to Christianity, the nations of Western Europe, the various pagan tribes that inhabited Europe, the Goths, the Vandals, the Saxons, and various other tribes, were just as pagan and just as barbaric as any African tribes, any tribes or groups in Asia, or anywhere else in the world because those ethnic groups, those tribal groups, those clans that rejected God all had very similar types of religions.

Christianity changed that—biblical Judaism in the Old Testament changed that. It had an impact at times to the cultures around them, but it didn’t penetrate very far—but Christianity did, and Christianity had a transformative effect in everything that we enjoy and are blessed with in our life is the consequence of the impact of a Judeo-Christian worldview on Western European civilization starting in the first and second century.

Slide 3

What we’ve been studying in our look at Ephesians 4 is that there is a contrast in the way that the Gentiles, what Paul calls speaking to the Ephesians, “the rest of the Gentiles,” the way they thought, the way they lived, their value systems, the decisions they made. There’s a difference between how they thought, lived, acted, and talked, and how Christians are to think, live, act, and talk. It’s a contrast.

He starts off in Ephesians 4:17, which we have studied for several weeks now, the command is “that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility—or in the vanity or the emptiness, the fruitlessness, the purposelessness—of their thinking.”

Why is our thinking purposeless as unbelievers? It is because we cannot think as God would have us to think, we can’t think within the framework of the reality of God’s creation, and we can’t therefore develop our thoughts on a sure foundation.

Not only that, but it penetrates everything else in our thinking, our (Ephesians 4:18) “understanding is darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of ignorance.” We’re not ignorant of everything, but we’re ignorant of the important things. We’re ignorant of those things which enable us to accurately, truly understand everything else.

The result of that is (Ephesians 4:19) we’re given over to lasciviousness, to licentiousness, sexual immorality, “to work out all uncleanness with greediness,” which, in a parallel passage in Colossians, Paul says is fundamentally idolatry. We’re worshiping the creation rather than the creator, Romans 1:18.

Then the contrast (Ephesians 4:20), “But you have not learned Christ in such a way.”

The reason I’m reminding you of this is so those who weren’t here will understand why I’m going to do what I’m going to do today. We have to understand the contrast between the world around us and the world that is around us in the church.

Slides 4 and 5

We have these two commands in this section of Ephesians. On the one hand (Ephesians 4:1), the positive command “to walk worthy of the high position to which we were called.”

What is that high position? We are members of the body of Christ. We are members of His church. His church is also elevated by being called “the bride of Christ.” Therefore, we have a unique identity, and we are to live in conformity to that identity.

Some of your fathers may have said to you, “Your friends may do this, but you can’t. You can’t do this because you’re part of our family.” My father said, “You’re part of the Dean family. We don’t live like that. We have good manners, we’re kind, we’re gentle, we read the Scriptures, we’re focused on the Word.”

There’s a standard of thought, a standard of living, that is to be part of the family of God. This is part of what the Bible describes as spiritual warfare.

2 Corinthians 10:4–5 says—and I have translated this anew in order to get the importance of what is being said here, “For the weapons of our warfare …”

The text is usually translated “not fleshly.” What it means is they’re not the product of the sin nature. See, that gets to the fact that the way we fight the war doesn’t come from the tools of the sin nature, it comes from the tools of the Scripture. It’s methodology. How we do what we do is as important as what we do. If we do a right thing in a wrong way, it’s still wrong. So, we’ve got to learn the right way and the right thing to do and the right way to do it.

“For the weapons of our warfare are not those of the sin nature, but mighty in God for the demolition—total destruction—of strongholds,”

It’s a military imagery here of fortifications. The deep-seated thought systems that we have imbibed from the world have fortified themselves in our soul, and it’s only the Word of God that is going to demolish them.

We are to be involved in this demolition of these stronghold (2 Corinthians 10:5) “by dismantling the arguments—that’s the Greek word. It refers to arguments or imaginative rationalizations. We’re going to talk about some of these this morning—and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God …”

So, if we’re fighting knowledge, what do we fight it with? Emotion? No. We fight it with knowledge. So, this is all about thinking.

A lot of people think that Christianity is about being pumped up, feel good, motivated, all of those things, but it’s the Word of God that should do that, not artificial singing of praise choruses, which have a theology that is a quarter of an inch deep and 20 miles wide. We have to think, not emote. It’s not about feelings.

So, we have to “dismantle these arguments—or these imaginative rationalizations—and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, by bringing every thought—not every emotion—into captivity to the obedience of Christ.”

It’s the same thing Paul says in Romans 12:2, “do not be pressed into the mold of the thinking of the world, but be transformed by the renewing of your thinking, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

Slide 7

So last time I started a massive project, and that is to summarize 2,000 years of history into just a few short minutes because we have to understand how we got where we are today. All of you have been asking this question. Every day you get up, you watch the news, and you say, “What is going on? Why is this so crazy?” And your next-door neighbor is saying “Isn’t it wonderful!” Your kids are saying, “Isn’t it great!” You’re thinking, “Have they lost their minds? What’s happened?”

This is a timeline, and what I’m showing in this chart is basically that there’s always an external worldview that is putting pressure on the church. In the ancient world it was Neoplatonism and Rationalism. Plato taught that reality is in this ideal world.

Then we have Aristotle. He said, “No, Plato, you’re all wrong. It’s not this ideal world that we somehow get in touch with intuitively, but it is what we see. It’s concrete. It’s what we see, what we taste, what we touch, what we smell, what we hear. It’s empirical. So, his theology is Empiricism.

Now that developed in the ancient world, but after the Cross, after Christianity began, in the early church they’re living in a world that is dominated by Platonism and Neoplatonism, where material things are not as important. It’s the immaterial and the spirit. So, they denigrated the physical, and that’s why you ended up with monasticism. “We’re going to go off and just think about the spiritual things, and we’re going to give up food and water” and all of these other things that they did because the physical is not important, and the spiritual is. So, this was reshaping Christianity. You ended up with allegorical interpretation that I talked about the last time.

Then that’s replaced by Aristotelianism Empiricism, which comes through Thomas Aquinas.

Slide 8

Now we’ve gone through this chart many times. I just want to remind you that there are only four ways you know things.

First, you know that by reason. Rationalism is the idea that we are born with innate ideas and through the independent or autonomous use of reason and faith in human reasoning ability and intellectual accomplishments, we can derive with Truth without God. We don’t need God. It is based on the method of an independent use of logic and reason.

Empiricism says no that’s not right. We have sense perceptions. We learn from the things that we do, from what we see, taste, touch, hear. That’s an external experience, which gives birth to the scientific methodology, which is really a blend of the two, but it’s still faith alone in human ability. The method is an independent use of logic and reason.

Now historically, you have Platonism, but it went bankrupt. It couldn’t answer the big questions of life. Then you had Aristotelianism and it went bankrupt. It couldn’t answer the details of life.

“Well, if I can’t get there through logic and reason, I have to get there through irrationalism. I reject logic and reason, so I’m just going to jump to the conclusions I want to because I can’t get there logically or rationally anymore.” And so that gave birth to mysticism, which emphasizes an inner private experience or intuition.

Again, it’s still faith in human ability, that I had this dream in the night, and I believe I can correctly interpret it, and I can know truth because I’m so brilliant and I’m so smart and I’m omniscient that I can properly interpret my feelings. That concept of assuming that we are omniscient, that we know enough to be able to go from a minute amount of data to understanding everything is the heart of arrogance.

So, the methodology in mysticism is non-logical, non-rational, non-verifiable. We have revelation, though, that says that God has indeed objectively revealed Himself to us, and that that is used in Scripture to say this is the light of the Word. God is light and when He reveals Himself, that revelation is referred to as light. The psalmist says in Psalm 27 that “in Your light we see light.”

So, if we reject God, then we have rejected light, and what does that mean? That means we’re in darkness. That’s exactly what Paul is talking about in Ephesians 4:17–18 where he says we walk in the futility of our mind because our understanding is darkened. We’ve rejected light, so we’re just like the men in Plato’s cave. We’re trying to figure out what the cave looks like, and we don’t have any illumination.

Revelation doesn’t reject logic and reason. You use logic and reason to understand the Scriptures, but you do it under the authority of God and not independently of God.

Slide 9

This leads like everything else to a worldview. The foundation of all thought begins with metaphysics. It’s like an iceberg. We see everybody’s life, what they do, and the product of their lives, but that’s based on certain things that are below the surface.

With an iceberg, only 10% is visible. The rest is not visible. This is what happens in life. We see what’s visible, we never talk about what’s below the surface, but what you see in terms of what’s happened in our world and in our culture is what’s above the surface. What we don’t talk about, what’s never discussed, is how that relates to our basic understandings, first of all, of reality, what’s called metaphysics.

What’s out there? Is there a God or no God? Is He personal or impersonal? How you answer those questions is going to change everything above that level, and if you reject God or you don’t think that God has spoken, then everything above it, that you build on. Jesus used the analogy of building a house on quicksand, and it’s going to be destroyed. It cannot stand the storms of life.

Once you understand God, you understand how we know truth. We know truth because God revealed truth, and in the light of God’s truth, we can understand everything else. That leads to how we know what’s right and wrong.

You have a lot of people today, you to say something, and they’ll say, “No, you’re wrong, but you can be wrong, and you can be right, and I will have another view and I’m right in my view. Everybody has their own view of what’s right or wrong. And that’s okay.

That’s irrational. That’s illogical. No wonder people can’t do math anymore. They don’t know how to think. Four times in the last month I’ve had checkers who can’t figure out how to give me the right change when I’m exchanging something.

For example, they give me four ones, and I don’t want the ones, so I say, “I’ll give you back the four ones and some extra change which equals five dollars, and you give me a five-dollar bill.”  “O-h-h, wait a minute.” And they have to lay it out on the counter and count it like they’re counting on their fingers. They don’t know how to do it.

I’ve had them say, “Well, I understand what you’re trying to do, but I just don’t trust it, so I’m going to have to go to a manager.” They can’t think because we have a worldview that denigrates reason, intelligence, and absolutes.

So all of that explains what we mean by a worldview. In a Judeo-Christian worldview, God is the ultimate reality. He is a Triune God. He is One and Many at the same time. That answers the fundamental question that philosophers have struggled with for centuries. They can’t explain unity and diversity at the same time. They go to one or the other, but their minds can’t put it together, and you can put it together either if you’ve never heard this before. That’s one of the basic issues in philosophy. Only the Bible answers these questions,

Slide 10

So we saw the impact that in the early church you have rationalism, idealism, and mysticism from Neoplatonism and then Empiricism. But then we see it repeated after the Reformation. After the Reformation you have a return to pagan thinking with Christians. They’re thinking in a nonbiblical way.

So, you have Descartes, and Descartes puts forth a rationalism or idealism which is just a modern view of Plato’s ideas. First you have the rationalists, then you have the empiricists, John Locke, Berkeley, and others, and so what happens is that this enlightenment kind of thinking produces modernism, and modernism rejects the authority of God’s Word. And this permeated the culture until you get to the end of the 19^th century. You have this explosion with invisible Christianity, that is, within all of the churches because during the 19^th century this kind of thinking was coming out of the universities primarily in Germany, but then it penetrated England and eventually the US.

This explosion with invisible Christianity that split churches all up and down the spectrum was called “the Fundamentalist Modernist Controversy.” The liberals were the modernists. The word that you often find describing them in the literature is that they were progressive, and they rejected God as their foundation.

Immanuel Kant publishes “The Critique of Pure Reason” about the same time you have the beginnings of the American War for Independence, and that leads to pure subjective mysticism and emotionalism.

It always goes through this cycle. Once you get through mysticism, you don’t know truth anymore and the culture collapses. It happened in the ancient world, and we’ve seen a repeat. What changed things was Christianity came in and Europe is an intellectually bankrupt culture because when you end up in mysticism, you’re just living in irrationality, and Christianity came in and blew it away. It transformed Europe into all the wonderful things that we’ve experienced in our lives.

Then that pattern repeats itself now and we’re in a mystical, emotional, subjective period of time when everything around us is collapsing in terms of the structures of our culture and civilization. What’s going to change it? Again, it can only be the Word of God. That’s the only thing that gives answers.

Slide 11 Skipped

Slide 12

So, we saw this ascendancy, this rise of the influence of Christian worldview up until the Enlightenment,

Slide 13

and then it breaks down,

Slide 14

and we go in the downward direction, and we see this into incremental decline of Christian thought.

Slide 15

So, I want to briefly summarize this. It is going be much more brief than I had thought it would be, but we had communion, and we are a little short of time.

I want to look at the fact, last time I mentioned the rationalist and the empiricist, but I have seven people who were extremely influential here. I left Jeremy Bentham out, so we have Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jonathan Edwards—I added in there for a little fun if I have time to talk about it—Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and John Dewey. Each one contributes something a little different.

Slide 16

So, what we’re saying here is that Enlightenment thinkers, first the rationalists, then the empiricists, shifted the authority for knowledge, the answer to the question “How do I know truth?”

The Bible says you start with Scripture. God is truth. The world says, “No, that’s not right. We can start with human reason because it is superior to any God of the Bible.” How can it be superior to a God who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, and who created all things, including your puny little brain?

So, they shifted the focus for not knowing truth from revelation to, first, the autonomous interpretation of human reason, and then the autonomous interpretation of human experience.

The culture is the result, but the point I’m making is we’re not to live, think, act like the rest of the Gentiles. If you don’t know how the rest of the Gentiles are thinking, how do you know you’re not thinking like them? That’s our point.

This is heavy application, but the reason the church today is in such a mess is that they don’t get this. They’re going to come in and say, “Let me give you five ways to have a financial success.” The Bible doesn’t break it down like that. That’s just paganism.

Slide 17

So, all of this pagan thought is just the thinking of Satan. It mirrors the thinking of Satan, and you’ll see as you go through these two basic characteristics. You don’t have to remember all the details I throw out, but I want you to look for this.

On the one hand Satan wants to be independent of God. That’s called autonomy. “I’m going to be like God, independent of God.” That is pure raw arrogance.

The other side that you see is antagonism to God, hatred of God, hatred of His Word, hostility to God.

Slide 18

We will start with the first guy, this is Jeremy Bentham. This guy was a real piece of work. According to one of his admirers and one who was deeply influenced by him and also an early progressive, G.W. Foote, in his book Infidel Deathbeds said:

“Bentham exercised a profound influence on the party of progress [Do you hear that? This was written in the mid-1700s.] for nearly 2 generations. [I’m not going to ask you how many of you have heard of Jeremy Bentham, because most of us have picked up elements of his thinking from the world around us. That’s how influential he is, and it’s subtle.]

He’s the Father of Philosophical Radicalism, and which did so much to free the minds and bodies of the English people, which counted among its swordsmen historians like …”

So, the point is, he is recognized as having this profound influence. He certainly does.

Slide 19

What are his views? His view of God is that there is no God. He was an atheist. He rejected the existence of God. There’s no higher authority than mankind. God’s just some invisible being who is capricious and insane, and we don’t need Him. He said, “Religion has inflicted the deepest injury upon humanity.”

For Bentham, human reason is the highest authority, because, of course, you know that none of us are omniscient, but he thought we were. He deifies each individual, thus laying the foundation for what we see today, moral relativism. Everyone does what’s right in his own eyes because you’re God.

Slide 20

Second, he rejected the depravity of the human race. Humans are basically good. He doesn’t recognize the fact that he can’t even talk in terms like good and evil because he doesn’t have a God for whom things would be evil, who defined sins. So thus, every human being can determine what is best in each situation.

Slide 21

This was called utilitarianism. You make your decision not based on some biblical absolute of what’s right or wrong, but whatever you at the time determine is going to produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

What’s wrong with that? (Answer) How do you know what’s going to produce the greatest good? When do you know the impact of this? Two weeks? Two years? Two decades? Two centuries? You don’t. It assumes human omniscience. That’s absurd.

Slide 22

The fourth thing, he believed that there should be no restrictions on homosexuality as long as it produced no bad consequences, like maybe AIDS, or monkeypox, or whatever. He’s the first person to publicly come out in favor of homosexuality in over a thousand years.

A Christian Emperor of Rome, Philip the Arab, was the first to start putting legal restrictions on the homosexual practices of the priests and the fertility religions. By the sixth century, homosexuality is proscribed by law—proscribed is the opposite of prescribed. That means it’s prohibited—in the Roman Empire, and it is throughout Western Civilization until Bentham comes along.

Slide 23

He is also a strong advocate for what became radical feminism in the early 19^th century. He’s the godfather of Stuart Mill, who in turn was the godfather of one of the best known atheist and intellectuals in the 20^th century, Bertrand Russell.

Slide 24

John Stuart Mill was an atheist. He followed and expanded on Bentham’s utilitarianism. Bentham’s his godfather. The families were very close.

Most important, he’s one of the earliest supporters of feminism—develops the ideas that become radical feminism in the early 19^th century—and gender egalitarianism, which was considered necessary to destroy the family. You can’t separate these different issues.

A lot of people today want to compartmentalize them, but if you go back read these philosophical thinkers, they see the interdependence and interconnectedness of all of these ideas because their ultimate goal is to destroy the family as it was known, to destroy the nuclear family, the biblical family. They hate Christianity.

He was opposed to traditional economics based on the biblical concept of family that had dominated Western Civilization. He said we’ve got to get rid of this and get rid of this whole family concept, so he lays the groundwork intellectually for free sex, easy divorce, destruction of Divine Institution #2 which is marriage and #3 which is family.

Slide 25

Then we come to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Paul Johnson in his book The Intellectual says he’s “… the first of the modern intellectuals, their archetype and in many ways the most influential of them all.”

Rousseau is not a commonly understood person. He wasn’t taught that much when I was in high school, not that much when I was in college, but he is the main influence behind everybody I’m going to talk about, whether you are talking about Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, any of these guys that come after him, they are all indebted to Rousseau.

Slide 26

Edmund Burke, that great English parliamentarian and thinker, said, “There is a great dispute among their leaders [the leaders of the French Revolution] which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau [they consider Rousseau the model, what they were trying to attain to] … He is their standard figure of perfection.”

Slide 27

So, Rousseau was an atheist. He didn’t believe in God. He said all religions are equally valid. In terms of human beings, he said there’s no inherent depravity, human reason is ultimate, man is corrupted through the shift from primitive state of nature to urban sophistication. So, when you start moving into the big cities, that’s when men get greedy. That’s when they get selfish and arrogant.

So, what’s the solution? If the problem is social, then the solution is going to be social. This is when you start getting ideas that will become what we call today Social Justice.

His view of the nature of humanity led to the further development of progressivists ideas. His trust in the gradual improvement or perfection of the human race through the progress of mankind. So, we’ve got to go back to a more primitive state.

Slide 28

His view of man leads to a utopian view of the future. That’s what we see with all the social justice movements, and everything on the left today is all about bringing in a man-centered utopianism perfection.

Slide 29

He rejected marriage. See, his ethics are awful. He rejected marriage, so he lived with a woman for about 30 years. She outlived him. She gave him five children, each of which he never named, which denies their humanity, and he took them to an orphanage where the fatality rate was in excess of 60%, assuming they would die. Lovely person.

Slide 30

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher. Where he’s important is up until Kant people did believe, even though they disagreed how you got to it, that there was objective truth. From Kant on nobody believes in objective truth. No intellectual believes there’s objective truth anymore. You only know your perceptions. You don’t know an apple as it is, you only know your perception of the apple.

Slide 31

Then there’s the lovely Karl Marx. He’s an ethnic Jew. His father converted to Christianity when he was young, so that he could hide his Jewishness. So Marx was reared and confirmed as a Lutheran. There’s a possibility he might have actually been saved, but something happens, nobody knows what, in his late teens and he changes and becomes a hate-filled, embittered, angry person.

Anybody who knew him at the time, they always talk about how hateful he was, how angry he was at everything, and he was virulently anti-Semitic. He saw that man’s basic problem was class warfare, the struggle between freedom and equity, so he wants to guarantee equal outcomes. To those who have, goes to those who don’t have. It’s stealing from the rich to give to the poor, and that destroys personal responsibility, and what the Bible teaches about labor.

Slide 32

He said, “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality.”

Anybody see the contradiction that statement? Is that an eternal truth? See, he is foreshadowing postmodernism. He said communism abolishes all eternal truths. “Wait a minute. You just stated an eternal truth.” You get into this stage where rationalism always goes to irrationalism.

Slide 33

He rejected total depravity. His ethics were utilitarian going back to Jeremy Bentham, and he is filled with anger, hatred, bitterness.

Slide 34

He wrote a lot of poetry. In one of his poems called Invocation of One in Despair he said, “So a god has snatched from me my all, in the curse and rack of destiny. All his worlds are gone beyond recall. Nothing but revenge is left to me. I shall build my throne high overhead.”

Nobody knows what happened when he was a teenager, but he is mired in the quicksand of vindictiveness.

Slide 35

In Human Pride, this was the name of another poem, he said, “Then I will walk triumphantly, like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom. Every word of mine is fire and action. My breast is equal to that of the Creator.”

Notice a contradiction, so many atheists are mad at God. How can you be mad at somebody that doesn’t exist?

Slide 36

About the Jews he said, “The fact that the Jews have become so strong as to endanger the life of the world causes us to disclose their organization, their purpose, that its stench might awaken the workers of the world to fight and eliminate such a canker [the canker is Jews].”

Here’s a Jew who’s anti-Semitic, a self-loathing Jew.

Slide 37

His influence is that his ideology is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions in the following years up to today and the economic enslavement of hundreds of millions. And yet you look out on the ideological landscape today, and we’ve got Black Lives Matter and we’ve got ANTIFA, and we have, of course, the overt Marxism of Cuba and the socialism of Western Europe, and the Marxism of China and Russia, and this is what it leads to. This is the thinking of the rest of the Gentiles.

Slide 38

Darwin comes along and says we’re all just the result of an accident; so therefore, there’s no purpose in your life or my life. He doesn’t go quite this far, but what they’ll do with that is say “except for whatever we assign to it.”

Darwin came from a long line of freethinkers; that is, Unitarians and atheists and rejected God. Therefore, he didn’t believe in total depravity or sin.

His ethics basically provided a scientific foundation for situational ethics, utilitarian ethics, moral relativism. There’s nothing that’s true, you just do whatever you think is best, and the next person is going to say that’s wrong, but that’s okay because you can’t talk to your neighbor anymore and tell them what’s right or wrong.

He laid the foundation for eugenics, which was selective breeding and social Darwinism, which led to the Holocaust and Nazism. You talk to liberals and you point that out, and they say no, social Darwinism is a wrong conclusion from Darwinism.

No it isn’t! It is an absolutely correct conclusion from Darwinism. You just don’t like where the logic takes you because you fundamentally reject logic as a means to getting to truth. It’s impossible to really carry on a good conversation with committed leftists, those who have really bought into a pagan worldview.

Slide 39

Then we had John Dewey who is the father of modern American education. Everybody who’s breathing in this room is a product of John Dewey’s philosophy in education to one degree or another. Thankfully in Texas, not as much as in other places.

He was born into a Christian home, and his mother was always asking him, “Are you right with Jesus?” It’s very possible he was saved. He was brought up in a strong Calvinistic home, but when he got into college, he began to turn his back on his Christianity.

Slide 40

He’s mentored by William James, who was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s godson. (Emerson was a transcendentalist. I didn’t have time to go into him. He’s another bad guy.)

His view of God, he rejected Christianity by his early 30s. His major influences were Rousseau, Kant, Descartes, Darwin,

Slide 41

and G. Stanley Hall, who said “other racial stocks than ours will later advance the kingdom of man [notice that, not the kingdom of God but the kingdom of man] as far beyond our present standpoint as it now is above the lowest savage.”

They’re indebted totally to Darwin.

Slide 42

Dewey’s educational theories broke new ground and continued to wield influence at the dawn of the 21^st-century. He wanted to replace all home education was social education under the State.

Does that sound familiar? What’s going on in Loudoun County in Virginia is that parents have no right to go to the school board meeting or to tell the school board what should be going on in the classroom. That’s Dewey to a tee. He said that school was not an educational institution, it’s primarily a social institution to teach what’s called today Social Justice.

He said education is the regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness.

Slide 43

He was one of the co-authors of the Humanist Manifesto that came out in 1934. He said, “The deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought.”

Where do we get our morals? (Answer) From others. The relativism. We don’t get our morals from an absolute. You get up from being in that social environment of school.

Slide 44

What does the Scripture say? Proverbs 1:7, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

You start with God.

Psalm 36:9, “… in Your light we see light.”

Proverbs 1:7, “… but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”

Slide 45

This is what the Scripture says, and my point of going through all of this horrible quicksand of paganism is that we’ve all been infected by it to one degree or another, because this is the cultural water in which we swim.

Just as the early church was impacted by Neoplatonism, the Late-Medieval church was impacted and distorted by Aristotelianism, and then the same thing repeats again after the Protestant Reformation, you get the impact of Enlightenment Rationalism and Enlightenment Idealism, and then you get into the Modernist Period, all of that, what does Scripture say?

Scripture says that you are no longer to walk—that’s a metaphor for how you think, how you live, how you act, how you talk. You are not to carry on like the Gentiles around you. There is a difference.

We’re going to get into that in the subsequent verses. This is the set up for that, is to understand why Paul provides this contrast in the next section of Ephesians 4, that we are to live differently because we are new creatures in Christ.

Slide 46

That’s why he concludes this by saying (Ephesians 4:20), “But you have not learned Christ in such a way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth—not a truth—is in Jesus.”

Do you want to base your life on the truths developed by hundreds of different men and women of limited knowledge? Or do you want to base your life on the revelation of a God who is omniscient and who created all things and is absolutely truth, on the life of One who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by Me.” (John 14:6)

That is an audacious claim by Jesus. Either it’s true or He’s insane or crazy or deceptive. But you can’t say He’s a good man or nice guy and He helped a lot of people. He is either who He said He was—the only way to God, or He is a complete crazy, psychotic nut job, and He doesn’t look like that. That’s the issue.

Closing Prayer

“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to go through this quickly and understand the trends, the thinking of the world around us. The world, apart from having an anchor of absolute truth, is just a wash in the tempest waters of relativistic thinking.

“Father, we pray that we would not be this way because as believers we have something different, something better, something that provides a foundation and stability, and that we are a part of a countercultural movement. We are not to be pressed into the mold of the culture around us, but transformed by the renewing of our mind, and we must realize this isn’t something that we can do in just an hour on Sunday morning, but it is a lifetime process that we must be dedicated to.

“Father, we pray for some who are here who may have never trusted in Christ as Savior, that through the Communion Service and through this message, they would understand that You have solved the problem of sin. You sent Your Son, He died for our sins, and that our salvation is not based on who we are or what we do, but on trusting Christ as Savior. But then the issue is to grow spiritually or to just sort of wither up on the vine. We can’t lose our salvation, but we can just stay a crying baby all our lives. That’s the next challenge, and some here need to decide whether being a Christian is something worth their life or whether they’re just going to play games with You. Father, we pray that You would make that clear to them.

“And above all, Father, we pray that each day, again and again and again, we would make decisions in favor of trusting You, following Your Word. We will fail many times, but we have forgiveness of sin. But if we pursue the walk by the Spirit, then we will grow and mature. We pray these things in Christ’s name, amen.”