Satan hates God. Satan was cast out of heaven because of his pride in his position and his beauty rose to the point of placing himself on the level of God. As a result of his rebellion, Satan was not only demoted and stripped of every precious stone that was his covering, he was cast out of heaven. So Satan really hates God. It is a vicious, snarling, consuming hatred—something almost beyond our human ability to comprehend. But Satan had no power to strike back at God directly. His only alternative was to strike at God by robbing the Creator of His relationship with man—His special creation.
Humanism’s opposition to God’s plan for mankind encompasses all of human history. The humanistic spirit of the world is of satanic origin and has been present within human society since Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden. All through history, this humanistic spirit of the world is the spirit of rebellion of man against God. It is the essence of Original Sin that infects all of humanity.
In the eleventh century BC, King David wrote, “The fool hath said in his heart: there is no god.” [Psalm 14:1. KJV] But it was the Greeks of the fourth through sixth centuries BC that gave form and body to the man-made philosophy of humanism that would impact the world second only to Jesus Christ. Carried to its conclusion, humanism denies the existence of God for Nature is all there is. And all of life on earth including man is the product of Nature’s long evolutionary process that occurred by chance and was devoid of a supernatural Creator. Man is not fallen and in no need of a redeemer for man is master of his own destiny as he strives for happiness, freedom, and progress in this life for there is no life after death. Truth is whatever man wants it to be to address the needs of the moment. Truth is relative and is not some infallible standard beyond time by which man must be guided. As a result, moral values and concepts of right and wrong must be based on human experience and therefore are autonomous and situational.
The civilization of ancient Greece has fascinated mankind for 2,500 years. Philosophy, politics, much of arithmetic and geometry, and several categories of Western art were invented in an amazingly short four centuries by the Hellenes, the ancient Greeks.[1] In the early sciences, rhetoric, warfare, and grace of manners, the Greeks far excelled all civilized peoples who came before. The incalculable influence of those four centuries of Greek life and thought throughout the world has lasted to the present day where it spreads its tentacles throughout the modern Western world. Greek culture was divided into two periods: the Classical period which ended with Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BC was preoccupied with the ideal. However, the succeeding Hellenistic period (323 BC – 146 BC) was concerned with reality, that is, “relating the exploits of gods, heroes, and common mortals to everyday life and familiar emotions.”[2]
The culture wars are not of recent origin but extend far back into man’s history. It is a battle of worldviews between Christianity and humanism expressed through the humanistic spirit of the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer called humanism or the Greek spirit the greatest danger to Christianity since its beginning.[3]
The spread of the ideas, culture, customs, and philosophy of humanism of the ancient Greeks is called Hellenization. Much of the ancient Greeks’ early efforts to Hellenize the world were done at the point of a sword, and the Jewish people were not exempted. One of the most famous stories of resistance to Greek Hellenization was the Maccabean Revolt recorded in the writings of Eusebius and Clement and in the Septuagint within a few decades of the actual events. [The Septuagint includes the Apocrypha which is not a part of the Jewish Old Testament or Protestant New Testament. However, the Apocrypha is included in the Catholic Bible.]
The events of the Maccabean Revolt are recorded in the first book of the Maccabees. The story begins with Antiochus Epiphanes, a Seleucid king whose empire was based in northern Syria and whose culture was primarily of Greek origin. He was one of the successors of Alexander the Great. Antiochus’ empire stretched southward into Judea which had been incorporated Judea as part of his empire when his father (Antiochus III) defeated the Egyptians in 198 BC.[4] Judea was important because it was the southern border of Antiochus’ kingdom and the front line with his Egyptian enemies that lay to the west.
Antiochus III attempted to Hellenize the Jews but eventually backed down. But his son reinstated his father’s program of Hellenization and outlawed the central tenets of Judaism including observance of the Sabbath and circumcision. Antiochus also defiled the Temple by opening it to non-Jews, erecting an altar to the god Zeus, and sacrificing swine.[5] Many Jews succumbed to the cultural imperatives of Greek Hellenism, but some chose to resist unto death.
The story begins when a local Greek official attempted to force Mattathias to make a sacrifice to a Pagan god. Following the murder of the Greek official, Antiochus directed many reprisals against the Jews, but many resisted. From their village of Modi‘in located a few miles northwest of Jerusalem, Mattathias and his five sons became leaders of the resistance against Antiochus and fought for the liberation of the Jews. Mattathias soon died, but the revolt continued under his son Judah called Maccabeus which means “the Hammer” in Hebrew. Antiochus responded by sending a powerful army to put down the insurrection. But after three years of this David versus Goliath battle, Jerusalem was recaptured by the Maccabees and the Temple purified in 164 BC.[6]
Some believe that early Christianity was essentially “Hellenized” at its birth, a product of the significant influence of the Hellenistic thought and culture on the newly arrived Christian faith.[7] Russell Kirk (writing from a Catholic perspective) stated that, “…Hellenic thought had been woven inextricably into the fabric of Christian teaching, so that it was next to impossible to distinguish Judaic threads from Greek…”[8] More correctly stated, it was elements of Platonic thought rightly understood that intersected and were consistent with Christian teaching and doctrine. This leads only to an appearance of integration between the two. Although one may accept the importance of Greek cultural influences on early Christianity (the New Testament was written in Greek), Christians vigorously defend the source for Christian tradition and doctrine as the inspired word of God revealed to the Hebrews and later to the Apostles. Christian faith and teaching is not an offshoot of Greek Hellenization whose philosophy of humanism is diametrically opposed to the revelation of God to the Hebrews and New Testament doctrines of the Christian church. This contrast is evident in Paul’s sermon to the Greeks at Mars’ Hill.
Although humanism was a constant enemy of Christianity from the first century, it became rooted within church doctrine during the thirteenth century. Just as he did with Eve, Satan began whispering in the ears of the Churchmen. His scheme was to redefine the condition of fallen man, and Satan used the philosophy of the ancient Greeks to do it. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) revered the 4th century B.C. Greek philosopher Aristotle. Through study of Aristotle’s writings, Aquinas believed that man revolted against God and was fallen but not completely. He believed man’s will was fallen but not the intellect. Therefore, in addition to the Bible, men could rely on human wisdom as well as the teachings of non-Christian philosophers.[9]
Through Aquinas’ efforts, elements of Aristotle’s non-Christian philosophy and other church traditions were accepted by the church as a source of authority alongside the Bible. Because Aquinas’s unfallen human reason was now autonomous and equal to scripture, more and more of the pronouncements of the church were based on pagan Greek and Roman philosophies. Eventually those pronouncements became more important than many teachings of the Bible. Human reason was now autonomous, but unhooking human reason from biblical revelation created a fundamental problem. If one starts with man’s ideas and reason as opposed to the absolutes found in the Bible, fixed standards for determining values, morals, law, and truth no longer have meaning and truth descends into relativism. This is pure, undiluted humanism.[10]
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All through man’s time on planet earth, his story is awash with Satan’s attempts to destroy him by subverting the truth of the God’s Word through the humanistic spirit of the world as described above. But in every age there have been men of God who spoke truth and stood firm in the face of overwhelming opposition from apostate churches and pagan cultures of their age.
Os Guinness described these men as possessing a “prophetic untimeliness”—independent thinkers out of step with the conventional wisdom of their generation. These were men of great discernment, vision, having a different perspective and commitment, and not at home in the age in which they lived. Not all such men who possess independent thinking are guided by eternal truths as revealed by God. Where such occurs, the independence of their thinking will be misguided, flawed, and ultimately lead to failure or corruption. But for the man who follows God, the foundation for their independent thinking is anchored in the truth of the His eternal Word and not his or her “genius or social stubbornness.”[11]
Having succumbed to the siren song of the humanistic spirit of the age, the modern church has largely been overwhelmed with the quest for relevance and reinvention to accomplish Christ’s mission but at the cost of faithfulness to Jesus Christ. This has occurred because the church has failed to balance the twin commands of Christ—“go ye into all the world” and “be ye separate.” In most of today’s churches the “going” into the world has far surpassed “separation” from the world. For many, this “going” has come to mean being culturally relevant through accommodation of the spirit of the world within the church. In other words, the world has evangelized the church instead of the other way around.
But where are those prophetically untimely men and women in our present age? There are a few such men and women in Western civilization who are ringing the bell of truth, but not many are heard. Their messages are being muffled under the din emanating from an inward-turned modern world consumed with the moment while ignoring the eternal. Thus, these messengers of truth have been reduced to being a voice “crying in the wilderness” because Christian pacifists and false teachers in the culture wars hold the microphone and dominate the platform. Guinness believes there should be more Christians who develop the trait of prophetic untimeliness.
The answer…is to regain the courage of “prophetic untimeliness” and develop the art of “resistance thinking” and so become followers of Jesus who have the courage to become “untimely people” despite the mesmerizing lure of the present age and its fixation with the future.[12]
The church needs many more faithful Christians with the art of “resistance thinking.” Such thinking correctly balances the “go ye” with the “be ye separate” and requires a stubborn awareness of the elements of the contemporary age that don’t fit with the Christian message. Where the gospel is easy, comfortable, and a natural fit with the prevailing self-centered humanistic spirit of the age, then its demands for self-denial and sacrifice are not present and neither is the true gospel of Jesus Christ.[13]
In the remainder of this series on resistance thinking, we will examine the current dismal state of evangelicalism, the causes, and the cure through development of the art of resistance thinking.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 2010), p. 85.
[2] J. M. Roberts, The New History of the World, (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 211.
[3] Marcus Cowper, History Book-An Interactive Journey, (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2010), pp. 20-21.
[4] Steven H. Werlin, “The Maccabean Revolt: Between Tradition and History,” Society of Biblical Literature, https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/TB5_Maccabees_SW.pdf (accessed March 27, 2017).
[5] “The Maccabees/Hasmoneans: History and Overview (166-129 BCE),” Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-the-maccabees (accessed March 27, 2017).
[6] Ibid.
[7] John Herman Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927, 1940), p. 46.
[8] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991), p. 74.
[9] Francis A Schaffer, How Then Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 1976), pp. 51-52.
[10] Ibid., pp. 52, 55.
[11] Os Guinness, Prophetic Untimeliness-A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance,” (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2003), pp. 19-20.
[12] Ibid., p. 20.
[13] Ibid.
