Contemporary and Ancient Kosmic Systems; 1 John
1 John
All worldliness is merely an
expression of the thinking and the logical extension of the thinking of Satan.
Two things characterise the thought of Satan at the time of his fall in
eternity past. First of all there is the emphasis on autonomy, meaning self-law
or independence, where the creature has the right to think and live
independently of God, where the creature is going to be the final reference
point for defining reality. This is going to express itself both in terms of
religious ideas as well as philosophical ideas. On the other hand, it is
antagonistic or hostile to God and so it is going to express itself in all of
its concepts ultimately in ways of attacks on God. As such the cosmic system
not only has various religious systems but various philosophical systems.
Almost every philosophical system has as its starting point something in the
creation. When the starting point is in the creation rather than in the thought
of the creator you have started with an autonomous principle that will always
end up in conclusions that are antagonistic to the Word of God and antagonistic
to Scripture.
Loving the world, therefore,
is a major problem for the believer because it is a way of thinking that
produces a way of living and action that is antithetical to God’s plan,
purposes and procedures. But we grow up inside that cosmic system. The world
system describes another word that we can use that relates to it: culture,
human viewpoint culture. There is a vast array of cultures in this world but
every one of them has as its starting point something in the creation.
Worldly thinking is something
we all grew up with, and not one of us grew up apart from it. The whole process
of the spiritual life is a process of getting rid of that cosmic thinking and
replacing it with Bible doctrine.
The danger for the Christian
life is clearly illustrated in a quote from Francis Schaeffer:
“Apart from Christ, anything which seems to be spiritual
power is actually the power of the flesh. The real problem is this. The church
of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, is tending to do the
Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. Though we know
the power of the Holy Spirit can be ours we still ape the world’s wisdom. We
trust its forms of publicity, its noise, and imitate its ways of manipulating
men. If we fight the world with copies of its own weapons we will fail because
the devil will honour these with his own, but our Lord will not honour these
with us for that does not give Him the glory. They may
bring some results but they will not be the ones the Lord wants. Our hand will
be empty of honour for God because He will not be getting the glory. We must
not try to serve the Lord with our own kind of humanism and egoism. In this war
if Christians win a battle by using worldly means they have really lost.”
The problem with worldliness
is that it imbeds a value system and an approach to life and a solution system
that we don’t even question; it comes right out of our mouth. Every single one
of us has a sin nature and if we don’t deal with it in terms of sin it is not
going to be properly dealt with, it may just be whitewashed over. The sin
nature is motivated by a lust pattern which is going to move everybody in one
direction or another.
The world in which we live in
today is a postmodern world, and postmodernism
affects the way all of us think. Gene Brown:
When we moved into a society of relative thinking we
abandoned the thinking that travels with absolutes. You can see examples of
this all around you continuously as people on their own determine what is right
and wrong and freely challenge any accepted norms and standards. Even those of
us fed on absolutes find ourselves being sucked into dividing up guilt or
explaining why we or someone else is not responsible for their actions. In
relative thinking one is only interested in answers; truth is not an issue and
can even be considered something of a problem in that is narrows the field of
answers. Absolutes demand belief; relativism just demands answers. Hebrews 4:2
describes one of our major problems today. We have now embraced philosophical
and religious concepts that do not require belief, only acceptance or answers.
Dallas Willard of the
That is, we have a facade
that looks right. Jesus called the Pharisees whitewashed sepulchres that on the
inside were dead men’s bones. On the outside there is this facade of applying
the Word and obeying the Word, giving all the right answers and having all the
right things to say.
“…
To believe something requires absolutes, even if it is a lie but an absolute
nevertheless.”
In postmodernism all cultures
have equal value and you can’t judge one over against the other. That is the
kind of thinking that dominates today. We have to have a historical
intellectual process here to understand it; we can’t just think that this has
just happened. In human viewpoint there are three basic systems of thought:
rationalism, empiricism, and mysticism. Logic and reason are not necessarily
wrong; it is the independent use of logic and reason that is wrong.
Historically what happens is that rationalism and empiricism always produce a
reaction of some form of scepticism, because ultimately when we push it far
enough human reason and human experience always are going to fall apart. They
can’t provide ultimate answers. So the result is scepticism. That is the
problem we see in postmodernism. If everything is relative there is no truth.
We all know that the basic problem with that is that if there is no truth, is
it true that there is no truth? So ultimately it implodes upon itself because
it is illogical. And it is a form of mysticism because the emphasis then shifts
from reason to emotion. Mysticism is based upon the idea of some sort of inner
private experience, some sort of intuitive flash, into the ultimate meaning of
life. Its development is non-logical, non-rational and non-verifiable. It is
irrational; just the opposite; it rejects reason and logic as unnecessary. All
of these represent human attempts to face life, describe life, understand life,
and to understand life’s problems.
In contrast the biblical
Christian believes in the priority of revelation: that God has spoken and on
the basis of the objective revelation of God we can understand things. God is
understandable, logical and rational, and meaning is communicated through
language. In postmodernism language is fluid. It is nothing but a cultural
invention in order to gain power over people. So they attack the very core of
meaning itself and the expression of meaning in language, and try to destroy
all meaning and logic.
How did this come about? It
begins after the Reformation in a period called the Enlightenment, starting in the
1600s and lasting until about 1780. Descarte is the
father of rationalism; John Locke is the father of modern empiricism, and
together they form the thinking of the Enlightenment. There were good aspects
to the Enlightenment and negative aspects but ultimately the Enlightenment is
based on the assumption that man on the basis of human reason and intellect
alone can come to the ultimate answers to solve all of man’s problems. It is
called the Enlightenment in contrast to what went before, referred to as the
Dark Ages. What does that conjure up? We’ve all heard that term,
it conjures up images of a bunch of Catholic priests in a monastery trying to
impose horrible things on people. It is an attack on Christianity. There were
good things there and there were bad things there but the terminology
“Enlightenment,” the term itself, is an attack on Christianity.
In the history of thought
rationalism and empiricism dominate until a German philosopher by the name of
Immanuel Kant comes along and makes a radical shift in the development of
thinking. All of this is what is called modernism. The core of modernism is
that man can solve problems on his own on the basis of reason: ultimately
everything is rational, everything has meaning, and man can on his own understand
all of reality. But Kant came along and said that life really consists of two
spheres. There is an upper sphere which he called the noumenal and a lower sphere that he
called the phenomenal—all the different things that we see, the details of
life, everything that we cam know. In the noumenal we have ideas, absolutes,
and God. But for Kant you can’t know the noumenal, so there is like a brick
wall there and man has no idea what is upstairs. In his mind man has a sort of
translating device that categorises all of reality. So when you look at things
“out there” all you can know is your own perceptions. You can’t know things as
they are, you can only know things as you perceive them. Well that destroys all
absolutes and all universals; you can only know what you, you can’t know what
anybody else knows. So this begins to break down the whole concept of
knowledge.
So we see an assault on and
decline in thinking. Always in history when rationalism and empiricism are
rejected they are always replaced with scepticism and existentialism. Existentialism
basically says the only way you can find any meaning in life, since we can’t
find it through reason and experience anymore, is if we create the meaning for ourselves.
Existentialism, then, ultimately becomes bankrupt because it starts off with
borrowing too much from rationalism and empiricism. Then we end up in the
modern era of what is called postmodernism which as its roots as far back as
the 1930s-1950s with certain thinkers, but it is those
intellectual thinkers and those ideas that kind of filtered down in the
universities and colleges, down into the classrooms, and destroys all kinds of
things in terms of absolutes.
The Scripture teaches us that
we are not to be conformed to the thinking of the world around us. In order to
fulfil that we have to understand something about the thought forms of the
world around us and how it impacts our view of everyday events.