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Quran verses taken out of context? Thousands of Christian deaths say “No.”

Posted by :admin On : September 19, 2014
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Category: Archives, Christianity, Culture Wars, Islam

Rep. John Bennett, R-Sallisaw said: “The Quran clearly states that non-Muslims should be killed. Arab is the ethnicity, not Muslim or Islam. Be wary of the individuals who claim to be ‘Muslim-American.’ Be especially wary if you are a Christian.” Mike Jones’ in his editorial[1] (“Out of Line-Bennett’s Muslim-bashing goes too far.”) accused Bennett of cherry-picking verses from the Quran and using them out of context. However, Jones is either naive or woefully uninformed with regard to the Quran and Muslim persecution of Christians around the world in the name of Islam. There are 109 verses in the Quran that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Unlike practically all of the Old Testament verses of violence which are limited by the historical context in which they are presented, those in the Quran are mostly open-ended and not constrained by time or context in its call for war on non-believers.[2] For many countries dominated by an emboldened Muslim faith, the rallying cry has become “convert to Islam or die.”

Open Doors ministry reported that of the fifty countries with the worst persecution, forty-one are Muslim.[3] Exhortations to violence and persecution against infidels (any who do not believe in Allah or his messenger Mohammed) are found in the particulars of the Quran and are practiced by many of its followers, especially in countries dominated by Islam. Both the Vatican and the Center for Study of Global Christianity reported that 100,000 Christians died in 2012 because they were Christian—devout, nominal, or cultural. Christians were killed for their beliefs or ethnicity, killed while worshiping in a church, murdered because they were children of Christians, or killed because of their Christian witness.[4] Most of the deaths were at the hands Muslims and committed in the name of Islam as dictated by the Quran.

Bennett’s charges that the Council on American-Islamic Relations has ties to terrorist organizations are called unfair by Jones. However, CAIR’s founders had direct ties with known terrorist organizations, and its continuing ties to terrorist organizations are extensive and well-documented. In defense of CAIR, Jones notes CAIR’s condemnation of ISIS’ actions including its recent highly publicized beheadings. For CAIR and other Muslim organizations, ISIS has become a Muslim-Islam public relations nightmare. But in truth, ISIS’ actions reveal what a world dominated by an unrestrained Islam may look like. Such world domination by Islam is the unifying call of almost every Muslim-dominated nation and Muslim terrorist organization. CAIR’s condemnation of ISIS is about PR, not revulsion at their deeds. Otherwise, CAIR condemns the Quran which says, “[Remember] when your Lord inspired to the angels, ‘I am with you, so strengthen those who have believed. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved, so strike [them] upon the necks and strike from them every fingertip.’” [Quran, Sura 8:12]

The tenets of Christianity speak of God’s creation of all peoples with one blood and mandate that we treat each person we meet with kindness, patience, and dignity. It is those biblical principles of Christianity and its predecessor upon which the nation was founded and made it possible for all faiths including Muslims to live and practice their religions in freedom. America’s story is not one of perfection but an example of what can be. But the reality is that Christians are being persecuted by the millions and killed by the tens of thousands throughout much of the Islamic world. A second reality is that that same Islamic world threatens America. And whether they are Christians or Muslims who reject the Islamic jihadist mentality promoted by the Quran, Americans must recognize the growing Islamic threat to their safety and religious freedom. This vigilance is not born of fear as Mr. Jones believes but a somber recognition of what’s happening everyday all over the globe.

If Jones really wants to understand the real meaning of fear, he should visit Christians in Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, or dozens of other cities in northern Iraq. He will be able to easily find Christians because many of their homes and businesses have been marked with the Arabic symbol for N. N stands for Nazarenes by which is meant Christians. Such markings effectively give license to steal from, maim, rape, and kill the inhabitants. The Nazis used the same tactic to mark the homes and businesses of Jews with the Star of David which also marked the beginning of the genocide.

Larry G. Johnson

[1] Mike Jones, “Out of Line – Bennett’s Muslim-bashing goes too far,” Tulsa World, September 14, 2014, G1.
[2] “What does the Religion of Peace Teach About…Violence?” TheReligionofPeace.com Guide to Understanding Islam. http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/quran/023-violence.htm (accessed September 15, 2014).
[3] “World Watch List Countries,” Open Doors. http://www.worldwatchlist.us/ (accessed September 15, 2014).
[4] Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra, “Counting the Cost (Accurately),” Christianity Today, August 21, 2013. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/september/counting-cost-accurately.html (accessed September 16, 2013).

This was done by ordinary people – Part III

Posted by :admin On : June 13, 2014
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Category: Archives, Christianity, Culture Wars, Humanism

Adolf Hitler believed that “…Christianity preached ‘meekness and flabbiness,’ and this was simply not useful to the National Socialist ideology…” Hitler hated Christianity, but as a practical man, he was a pretend Christian and found the German Christian church temporarily useful in consolidating Nazi power. In time he subverted much of the church and changed its basic ideology.[1]

At the beginning of 1933, the German church stood at a crossroads. The great majority of German Lutheran churches chose the path of Hitler and the Nazis instead of the teachings of Jesus Christ.[2] All of German life was to be synchronized under Hitler’s leadership, and “…the church would lead the way.” The majority of churches called themselves “German Christians” and advocated a strong unified church seamlessly wedded to the state that would restore Germany to her former glory. The union of the state church with the Nazi regime required churches to conform to Nazi racial laws and ultimately swear allegiance to Hitler as the supreme leader of the church and by doing so “…blithely tossed two millennia of Christian orthodoxy overboard.”[3]

There was a minority of Christians and churches in Germany that opposed Hitler and the German Christians. The resistance centered within the new “Confessing Church” led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, and a few others. When Hitler heard of a potential church split because of objections to his policies, he summoned several dissenting church leaders including Niemöller to the Reich Chancellery. He lectured the assembled churchmen and said all he wanted was peace between Church and state and blamed them for obstructing his plans. Hitler warned them “…to confine yourself to the Church. I’ll take care of the German people.” Niemöller responded that the Church also had a responsibility toward the German people that was entrusted to them by God and that neither Hitler nor anyone else in the world had power to remove that responsibility. Hitler turned away without comment, but that same evening the Gestapo ransacked Niemöller’s rectory while searching for incriminating material. Within days a homemade bomb exploded in the hall of the rectory.[4]

As Nazi pressure was ratcheted up against the dissenting churchmen, Bonhoeffer and Niemöller were criticized by their fellow churchmen for opposing Hitler and his policies. Eventually over two thousand would choose the route of appeasement and safety and abandoned support of Bonhoeffer and Niemöller’s efforts in resisting the Nazis. “They believed that appeasement was the best strategy; they thought that if they remained silent they could live with Hitler’s intrusion into church affairs and his political policies.”[5]

However, not all Confessing Church pastors and lay leaders bowed to Hitler’s demands, but they would pay a price for their courage. In 1937, a remnant of more than eight hundred were arrested and imprisoned including Niemöller who spent the next eight years in prison, seven of which were in Dachau, one the Nazis’ most infamous concentration camps.[6]

We have identified three groups of churches in Nazi Germany of the 1930s: the apostate German Christian church, the Confessing church which became the silent church of appeasement, and a faithful remnant that became the suffering church.

In the twenty-first century, the enemy of the American church is still the one that Bonhoeffer identified as the “…the most severe enemy” that Christianity ever had—humanism.[7] We are seeing the same patterns and methods used by Hitler to marginalized and make powerless much of the American Christian church through its seduction by the humanistic spirit of the age. The god of Hitler has been replaced by the god of humanism and its lesser god of equality in all of its destructive humanistic definition and interpretation.

In America there is an apostate church that has abandoned any pretense of adherence to the gospel message. Biblical truths are twisted, mocked, or dismissed altogether. Others champion a social gospel or preach a gospel of health, wealth, happiness, harmony, and cheap grace in place of the cross and death to self. Eighty years ago, Bonhoeffer described “cheap grace.”

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church…In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin…Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner…Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.[8]

Apart from the apostate church, there is also a faithful but mostly silent church in America that is content to preach the gospel and ignore the culture. Erwin Lutzer wrote, “Whether in Nazi Germany or America, believers cannot choose to remain silent under the guise of preaching the Gospel…we must live out the implications of the cross in every area of our lives. We must be prepared to submit to the Lordship of Christ in all ‘spheres’.”[9] Yet, as we live out the implications of the cross in every area of our lives, we must understand that the culture wars in which we soldier for Christ are not about maintaining the American dream however one may define it. Rather, the culture wars are about restoring the biblical understanding of truth in all spheres of our national life. To do so one must speak the truth in the face of lies, stand on biblical principles when others compromise, and take right actions in spite of consequences. A hostile culture and an adversarial government and culpable legal system will extract a price from those that dare to oppose them. What is accomplished by such opposition when it seemingly brings only hardship, suffering, and defeat? “Suffering communicates the gospel in a new language; it authenticates the syllables that flow from our lips…It is not how loud we can shout but how well we can suffer that will convince the world of the integrity of our message.”[10]

In recent years the forces of humanism have gained sustained power and critical mass in all spheres of American life and have become openly hostile and threatening to the true church of Jesus Christ. However, there is a bold remnant of the faithful church that is listening to the voices of modern Bonhoeffers and Niemöllers who are speaking out in those spheres of American life against the evils that have spread over America and much of the church. Such boldness follows the path of costly grace, and very soon that remnant may be able to claim the cloak of the suffering church.

Most in the American church cannot comprehend the meaning of the suffering church. It is something that happens “over there,” something that is foreign to their thinking. They believe the American church somehow has been exempt from the consequences of costly grace. To suggest otherwise is almost heresy. But the Apostle Paul would disagree.

…it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may be glorified with him. [Romans 8:16-17. RSV] (emphasis added)

In the dark days of World War II, Bonhoeffer wrote, “When God calls a man, he bids him come and die.” On April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer answered Christ’s final call. After two years in prison, he was hanged on the direct order of Adolph Hitler who ended his own life three weeks later in an underground bunker in Berlin.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2010), pp. 166, 171.
[2] Erwin W. Lutzer, When a Nation Forgets God,” (Chicago, Illinois: Moody Publishers, 2010), p. 44.
[3] Metaxas, pp. 151-152, 176.
[4] Lutzer, pp. 19-20.
[5] Ibid., p. 21.
[6] Metaxas, pp. 293, 295.
[7] Ibid., p. 85.
[8] Lutzer, pp 117-118.
[9] Ibid., p. 33.
[10] Ibid., pp. 120-121.

Baphomet – Another symbol of American cultural decline

Posted by :admin On : May 23, 2014
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Category: Archives, Culture Wars, Truth, Worldview

These days it seems that nonsense and silliness have more than their share of the headlines. If you haven’t followed the moral indignation of the Left regarding the 2012 placement of a privately-funded monument depicting the Ten Commandments on Oklahoma’s State Capitol grounds, then you probably haven’t heard of Baphomet. Baphomet is a supposed depiction of Satan, a goat-headed figure with horns, wings, and a long beard sitting on a pentagram-shaped throne surrounded by smiling children. The New York-based Satanic Temple has proposed to erect a statue of Baphomet on the Capitol’s grounds in response to the erection of the Ten Commandments monument which a Satanic Temple spokesman says opened the door for placement of their statue on the property. [1]

But sometimes a pesky cultural rash evidenced by an overabundance of nonsense and silliness (e.g., the Baphomet statue) is merely a symptom of a more serious disease that is attacking the culture’s central nervous system—its central cultural vision. A culture’s central cultural vision develops over time as an expression of the collective worldviews of its citizens which create a pattern, design, or structure that fits together in a particular way to explain the world. This explanation of order generally must have a coherence or consistency to give that society orientation and direction for living life. The central vision of a culture reflects its citizens’ values, those things and ideals it considers worth fighting for. Healthy cultures become diseased and decline for two reasons. First, a culture declines and ultimately fails as it loses it cohesiveness or ability to unify its citizenry. Second, even if a culture maintains unity and cohesiveness, its vision of order needed to answer the basic questions of life must over the longer term be based on truth.

In America, the central cultural vision of the Founders and the American colonists before them was based on the principles of biblical Christianity. However, in spite of voluminous historical evidence from the colonial period and founding era, secularists and humanists deny the special role that Christianity played in America’s founding.

A popular culture that misreads and wars against the validity of a morally sound central cultural vision will either be destroyed or cause that society to disintegrate. That is happening in America. The post-Christian and post-modern worldviews misread and are warring against the morally sound central cultural vision upon which the nation was founded, that is, the principles flowing from the biblical Christianity.

Due to rampant radical egalitarianism, surgically precise efforts to separate church and state, and a growing humanistic worldview, all evidence of our Christian cultural heritage is being swept from America and its institutions. Even our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of religion and speech are no longer sacrosanct from such assaults.

America’s central cultural vision built upon biblical Christianity is in danger of utter removal because of a loss of an understanding of the uniqueness of its worth, the loss of America’s ability to exclude those things which strike at the heart of its central cultural vision, and America’s inability to distinguish that which counts for much and that which counts for little. With the steady dismantling and removal of the central cultural vision upon which the nation was founded, America is staggering in a moral stupor as it drinks the poison of humanism with its disintegrating notions of the autonomous individual, relativism, radical egalitarianism, progressivism, and denial of a supreme being. [2]

Without its central cultural vision firmly anchored in transcendent unchanging biblical truth, America will continue its cultural drift to oblivion in a sea of competing voices, each clamoring for recognition of their particular brand of truth. The Baphomet statue controversy is one more fitting symbol of America’s cultural decline because of its loss of cohesion and flight from transcendent truth. If there is doubt about this assessment, one needs only to look at Baphomet’s competitors who also want space for a monument on the Capitol grounds: a Hindu leader in Nevada, an animal rights group, and the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. [3]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Sean Murphy, “Satanists want Baphomet statue in Oklahoma,” 3NEWS, January 7, 2014. http://www.3news.co.nz/Satanists-want-Baphomet-statue-in-Oklahoma/tabid/417/articleID/327468/Default.aspx (accessed May 6, 2014).
[2] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods-Humanism and Christianity-The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishing, 2011), pp. 404-405.
[3] Murphy, “Satanists want Baphomet statue in Oklahoma.”

Sickness in the Soul of the American Republic – Part II

Posted by :Larry G. Johnson On : February 28, 2014
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Category: America, Archives, Christianity, Culture Wars, Government

In Part I we described the sickness in the soul of the American Republic as being caused by a loss of unity and the denigration of the truths upon which the nation was founded. At its founding, America’s unity was derived from a central cultural vision that reflected a Christian worldview whose truths rested upon biblical principles. For those that adhere to the central cultural vision of the Founders, certain actions must be taken to not only defend but reverse its decline in American society. To restore the central cultural vision of the Founders, these actions must be taken by Christians but also by non-Christians who believe in the biblical moral code as a guide for living life and governing the nation.

John Adams said that our Constitution (the framework for governing) was made only for a moral and religious people, and by morality and religion he meant Christian morality. In other words, morality in government must flow upward from the morality of its citizens. Without a moral citizenry, there is no hope for a moral and just government. Therefore, moral reformation must start with the individual, that is, morality begins with us and our families. Humanists war against the individual through exaltation of self. Exaltation of self leads to egotism and loosens the bonds of moral restraint and weakens relationships with God, spouse, family, and community. From such comes a devaluation of a society’s moral traditions, heritage, and history. For a regeneration of both private and communal morality in the American Republic, we must adhere to and teach our children and grandchildren the standards of biblical morality.

Moral degeneration has affected every sphere of American society. We have mentioned the individual and family, and here we see the attack on the traditional view of marriage and the elevation of homosexuality in society; the fragmentation of family structure through divorce and co-habitation; and the devaluation of life through abortion, assisted suicide, and in some cases calls for infanticide. Moral degeneration in other spheres includes government, politics, education, arts and entertainment, economics and business, and religion. As humanists gained dominance in these spheres, the individual can have little direct or sustained impact on these monoliths propagating the humanist worldview. However, the collective worldviews of like-minded individuals who actively stand against humanism’s onslaught can turn the tide.

In the education sphere, humanistic policies and practices in conflict with biblical standards of morality are dictated to schools and universities by an entrenched academic establishment and federal bureaucracy. If change is to come in the sphere of education, it will be a long process and must come from concerted action by our elected representatives who ultimately control the purse strings and can reign in insulated institutions and bureaucracies immune to the wishes of the people. However, in the near term there is still power to hinder if not change humanistic policies and practices at the local and state levels. To do so we must have the courage to speak out against immorality in public education, elect officials that hold the Christian worldview, and hold those elected officials accountable for their actions and inactions.

Likewise in economics and business, the individual can take a stand and hold accountable businesses for breaches of morality through public exposure and withholding one’s dollars from support of such businesses. Economic policies are typically a function of government which will be addressed as part of the discussion on government and politics. The arts and entertainment field are blatantly humanistic in worldview and offer little opportunity for influence. However, we must remember that they are businesses and sensitive to loss of patronage and revenue. We must make our positions and concerns regarding immorality known to the leadership of this sphere of American culture and withhold patronage and revenue where those concerns are not sufficiently addressed.

Religious organizations are not exempt from humanistic influence. And because religion is closely tied to biblical standards of morality, there have been significant declines in patronage, membership, and revenue in those religious and church organizations that have abandoned biblical precepts and morality in favor of a humanistic worldview in matters such as abortion and homosexuality.

We now turn our attention to government and politics for the remainder of this article. Many Christians disdain any involvement with politics and government, having bought into the erroneous liberal argument regarding separation of church and state. This is a tragedy and responsible to a large degree for the sickness that pervades our Republic. However, apart from individual morality and concerted and sustained prayer by Christians, our efforts to influence and change government and politics offers the greatest opportunity to advance a moral reformation of America.

America is a republic by which is meant that power is “…lodged in representatives elected by the people. In modern usage, it differs from a democratic state, in which the people exercise the powers of sovereignty in person.” [Webster] The American Republic is a constitutional democracy (as opposed to an absolute democracy) in which the constitution is a body of fundamental laws and customs that are just and join together various regions, classes, and interests of a country. The beauty and longevity of the American Constitution occurs because “…it is in harmony with laws, customs, habits, and popular beliefs that existed before the Constitutional Convention.” [Kirk, p. 416.] Constitutional safeguards against abuses by the majority or dictatorial officials and bureaucrats include separation of powers among the federal branches and a division of powers between the federal government and states.

In humanism’s effort to remake America in its image, the safeguards built into the Constitution must be weakened or made of no effect. Additionally, the voice of the people through its elected representatives must be muted or diminished in relation to the wishes of a regal presidency and a radicalized judiciary. For anyone with eyes and ears and who is concerned about the future, the massive attacks on the Constitution and the republican form of government in America over the last five years are abundantly clear.

The attacks become obvious when one understands President Obama’s “above-the-law” attitude and actions that include his many instances of unilateral violation of the constitutional separation of powers between the executive branch and the legislative and judicial branches; seizing powers allotted to the states; imposition of illegitimate executive orders; non-enforcement of laws passed by Congress; and vocal denigration of the judiciary and its decisions with consequent promotion of disrespect of the law. Through judicial activism of liberal judges usurping the role of the legislature in making laws, the courts have appropriated unto themselves a law-making role never intended by the Founders. Additionally, their power to decide what is right and wrong is all too frequently based on man’s law, not God’s laws. These abuses of power by the judiciary have significantly undermined the Founders’ meaning and intent with regard to the Constitution.

For Christians and those non-Christians who also adhere to the biblical worldview of morality, it is imperative that we become actively involved in electing and supporting men and women who will defend the Founders’ intent with regard to the Constitution; who will uphold biblical standards of morality, both privately and publicly; who will govern based on Christian principles; and who will tighten the reigns on humanistic bureaucracies and government-funded institutions that impose their policies, practices, and regulations that conflict with the laws and directives of the elected representatives of the citizenry.

Humanists will scream that such mixing of morality and politics is nothing more than a ruse by religious zealots attempting to impose a theocracy on the nation. But, an examination of the historical record reveals otherwise. In the founding era, politics was defined as the science of government and considered a part of ethics. This definition of politics includes “… the protection of its citizens in their rights, with the preservation and improvement of their morals.” (emphasis added) [Webster] Therefore, the active involvement of government and politics in the moral well-being of its citizenry is not of recent invention but a pattern established and followed by the Founders.

There is one other action that only Christians may take. It is more important than all of the actions listed above but not a replacement for those actions. Ultimately, the preservation of the Christian worldview as the dominant central cultural vision of America depends on her people’s reliance on the principle expressed in God’s covenant with ancient Israel: “…if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. [II Chronicles 7:14 RSV.] We must work and pray.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

Noah Webster, “Republic,” American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, Facsimile Edition, (San Francisco, California: Foundation for American Christian Education, 1995).

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 3rd Edition, (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991), p. 417.

Webster, “Politics,” American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828

Sickness in the Soul of the American Republic – Part I

Posted by :Larry G. Johnson On : February 21, 2014
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Category: America, Archives, Culture Wars, Truth, Worldview

The soul of a republic can be viewed as its central cultural vision—that collective worldview that animates and informs all of society. Rooted in their hearts and minds, that vision is also supported and invigorated by its citizens. However, the American Republic is comparable to the demise of high civilizations in ancient times in that certain elements of alienation have entered into America’s central cultural vision which has weakened its citizens’ love for and belief in its compelling purposes. [Reinsch, p. 98.] These elements deny the value and truth of the Republic’s beleaguered central cultural vision and attempt to replace it with multiple centers of cultural vision based on arbitrary and ever-changing inventions of man. In other words, the sickness of the American Republic’s soul is cause by a loss of unity and the denigration of the truths upon which the nation was founded.

Loss of Unity

Culture is a product of the collective consciousness of a group seeing certain felt needs, “…a complex of values polarized by an image or idea.” The very foundation of the cultural concept is unity that presupposes a general commonality of thought and action. As a culture is formed and begins ordering its world to bring the satisfactions for which it was created, directions must be imposed on its members. These directions, limits, and required behaviors radiate through a center of authority with a subtle and pervasive pressure to conform. This pressure may range from cultural peer pressure to moral and legal restraints. Those that do not conform are repelled of necessity. Thus, in any culture there are patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Without such patterns, the culture is unprotected and disintegrates over time. Every culture has a center which commands all things. Weaver calls this center imaginative rather than logical and “…a focus of value, a law of relationships, an inspiring vision…to which the group is oriented.” The intrinsic nature of culture compels that it be exclusive rather than all inclusive. Cultures fail and disintegrate without the power to reject that which does not adhere to its central force. [Weaver, pp. 10-12] When a culture’s complex of values is polarized by an image or idea, we describe this image or idea as its central cultural vision, that is, its collective worldview.

In America, disunity is pandemic in every facet of cultural life including government, education, family, politics, standards of moral behavior, arts, economics and business, and religion. Disunity is evident as the war of words flow from daily newspaper headlines and radio and TV sound bites. This disunity occurs because of the ubiquitous attack on America’s original central cultural vision.

Denigration of Truth

For a culture to survive over the long-term, its central cultural vision must be based on truth. In other words, a culture’s central cultural vision must be informed by and reflect that which is true. In Western civilization, the Christian worldview reflected this truth. Since the nation’s founding, this central cultural vision has been under assault by the humanistic worldview that gained ascendance in Europe during the eighteenth century. The core of the battle revolves around the truth about the nature of man—who he is.

In the Christian worldview, the Supreme Being (God) created matter out of nothing and formed the universe. He impressed certain principles upon that matter, from which it can never depart, and without which it would cease to be. These principles dictate rules of action and applies to animate and inanimate objects. These “laws of nature” must invariably be followed by the universe and the created matter therein. One exception was man, the pinnacle of God’s creation, who was allowed to choose to follow or depart from those principles as they relate to human nature. Those principles are truths that are intrinsic, timeless, and are essential elements that provide a coherent and rational way to live in the world. These absolutes are called by various names: permanent things, universals, first principles, eternal truths, and norms. [Johnson, p. 392.] These absolutes were revealed to man by God through His creation and His revelation to the ancient Hebrews and first century Christians.

The humanistic worldview regarding truth is one of cultural relativism which requires a suspension of judgment since all belief systems contain some truth within while no one belief system has all truth. For humanists, all social constructions are culturally relative as they are shaped by class, gender, and ethnicity. Thus, there can be no universal truths because all viewpoints, lifestyles, and beliefs are equally valid. As a result, no man or group can claim to be infallible with regard to truth and virtue. Rather, truth is produced by the free give and take of competing claims and opinions—i.e., truth can be manufactured. [Johnson, pp. 392-393.] Man is merely the end-product of a long evolutionary process that occurred by chance and not the result of some supernatural Creator.

The central cultural vision of colonial Americans and the nation’s Founders was built on the truth of Christian principles. The assault by the opposing forces of humanism was repelled until the mid-twentieth century when they gained critical mass in the various spheres of American life.

For those that adhere to the central cultural vision of the Founders, we will examine in Part II what must be done to defend and reverse the decline of the central cultural vision of the Founders?

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

Richard M. Reinsch II, Whitaker Chambers – The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2010), p. 98.

Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order – The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, (Wilmington, Delaware: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1995, 2006), pp. 10-12.

Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), pp. 392-393.