Teaching

"He shall judge the world in righteousness..." (Ps. 9:8) Part of developing as a normal individual is the ability to accept certian aspects of life as objective realities. Fire burns, oil is greasy and rotten eggs smell. Getting your driver's license for instance has to do with proving to the authorities your ability to both operate a vehicle and to know and keep the rules of traffic laws. Left is left, red means stop and so on. There really is no room to be philosophical about these categories in life. You either accept them and live accordingly or you don't and sooner or later you crash, hurting yourself and others.

If there are such objective realities we need to accept as part of life so as to be deemed "normal" and not cause crashes, shouldn't there be such objective realities for us as Christians?

On the day of Pentecost Peter the apostle pointed to the Holy Spirit's outpouring and said: "This is that!" and there was no second opinion about that! From this point on there were no other interpretations of this spiritual reality.

If God judges the world in righteousness, there has to be right and wrong to begin with. This means God has the right view of the world! Jesus sees the world "the right way" so to say.

We as followers of Jesus need to lay down our own views of the world and adopt a Biblical "worldview".

This is a process and it depends on how consistent you are in reshaping and reforming your worldview.

Here I suggest three general categories of people groups based on their world view, i.e. perception of reality:

1) THE COMPLETE PAGAN:

Worldview summary: The world came to be on its own and God is an optional character we somehow have to fit into the picture for moral and philosophical reasons. Every person defines their own spirituality. Sticking to Biblical doctrine and lifestyle as defined by the New Testament is equal to being narrow minded. The Church is an oppressive institution that limits freedom of expression.

Unfortunately many people, even after becoming Christians, have this mindset working in them on a subconscious level. Doubts, fears and rebellion shaped up by their former worldview still influence their decisions. In order for such people to truly be set free and transformed, they need to have their moment of divine confrontation and surrender to Christ's full authority, allow him to reconstruct their worldview from the ground up.

2) THE CHRISTIANIZED PAGAN

Worldview summary :God did create the world, man is sinful and Christ is a Redeemer. However, the Church is an institution that doesn't connect with "real life" too well. Theology is abstract, spirituality is an attribute of religious ceremonialism and man can never be Christlike. Christianity is a cultural element, but the actual teaching, way of thinking and lifestyle patterns of the Bible are considered irrelevant to modern man.

Christianized pagans probably best describe the state of present day Christendom in the Western hemisphere. Eastern Orthodoxy is similar, even though it never experienced the Protestant Reformation of the Middle Ages and its even more tribal and primitive on societal level.

People who become born-again Christians in this cultural and civilizational context, struggle with thought patterns and way of perceiving the world shaped more by moral relativism and humanism than the Bible. Christianized paganism explains why we lose such huge percentage of our young people to the world. As children, these youths go along with their parents' religion, but the lack of true spiritual substance at home opens the door for rebellion later in life.

Christianized paganism is the primary reason for the downfall of Christianity in the United States and Western Europe.

One brief point: the reason we have so many christianized pagans in our churches is the compromise leaders have made with the Gospel. Humanism, in essence claims:

a) That man is fundamentally good.
b) That modernism and science are higher authorities which over-ride God's supreme moral law.
c) The Church is an obstacle to progress.

In micro-loans social pressure has been successfully used in the last 30 years to create a system, which uses the existing social dynamics. The repay rate in the micro-finance industry sometimes beats the banking industry. In micro-financing small groups lend small amounts of money and they guarantee for each other, since they don't have any collateral to guarantee their loans. Turns out social pressure is even more powerful of a tool in molding mindsets than threats of repossession, which the banking industry has used traditionally.

In a similar way, liberals first succeeded in portraying themselves as the heirs of the Enlightenment (completely and shamelessly discarding the huge influence faith had in the minds and lives of the Enlightenment era scientists, philosophers and other creatives). By usurping the position of legitimizers, liberal minds took control of educational institutions and began to produce whole generations of influencers who now control the media. The cycles closes when liberal politicians and media begin to legitimize each other, thus removing critical thinking and labeling each person who dares to question their legacy as "fringe", "fundamentalist" and "extremist".

This whole culture has seriously and may be forever impacted educational institutions such as seminaries. Craving for legitimacy in society, theologians, rank and file pastors and denominational leaders succumbed to secular humanism, watering down the message of the Gospel. This has now given way to the seeker sensitive movement, which has capitalized both on the spiritual vacuum left by religion on modernism, creating a new hybrid of a system, which incorporates both.

The only problem of course remains the systemic creation of semi-converted (Christianized) pagans, who are more cultural Christians than true disciples of Christ.

George Barna (http://www.barna.org)and his research have proven very valuable in identifying and analyzing the above mentioned trends.

[To be continued...]

George P. Bakalov