Jones Other Worldview

Exposing Christianity's Greatest Threat
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-57799-623-1
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

'A must-read for every concerned American--and especially for every Christian who weeps at the graveside of his culture.' --R.C. Sproul A cataclysmic change has occurred as our culture has shifted toward belief in 'Oneism.' Every religion and philosophy fits into one of two basic worldviews: 'Oneism' asserts that everything is essentially one, while 'Twoism' affirms an irreducible distinction between creation and Creator. The Other Worldview exposes the pagan roots of Oneism, traces its spread throughout Western culture, and demonstrates its inability to save. 'For bodily holiness and transformed thinking . . . we depend entirely on one amazing thing: the incredibly powerful message of the Gospel to a sinful world, which is the ultimate expression and goal of Twoism. The only hope is in Christ alone.'

Peter Jones (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is the author of many books, including One or Two: Seeing a World of Difference, The God of Sex: How Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality, and The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age.He is the executive director of truthXchange and an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jones, Peter

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

A TICKET TO RIDE—BUT TO WHERE?

A Map of London and a Map of Life

Three of my children live in London. Whenever I visit them, I’m amazed by the London Tube. The Underground, as it is also known, first opened in 1863 and now carries over a billion passengers each year, everywhere, in one of the biggest cities in the world. To get anywhere quickly, though, you have to know the destination of the train. Otherwise you could spend days hopping on and off, never getting where you need to go.

Some people live this way, figuratively getting on the first train that shows up, or the one the most people are taking. Few think about the destination until they end up in a station of life they do not welcome, at the end of a journey they finally regret.

A worldview contains a series of convictions and conclusions about the nature of the world that provide fundamental meaning and direction for our lives, just as the Tube map will direct a journey across London. Though our beliefs often are unarticulated inklings or unexamined hunches, we all have a worldview—the simple act of opening our mouths to speak shows a belief that life has significance and somehow fits together. Interpreting a map of life is more complicated than that of the London Underground, so we sometimes give up and hop on the next train that comes by.

Our culture, too, seems to have boarded a train headed in a different direction than the one it originally was following. Perhaps this was out of a conviction we were headed the wrong way, or perhaps we’ve given up on thinking about where we’re finally going. But how many destinations are there, ultimately?

A Book’s Origins—in a Little Autobiography

Let’s begin our journey with a snapshot from my own. Influential 20th-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, whom we shall meet often in these pages, once described a dream in which he found himself on a rainy night in my hometown, Liverpool, England—“a sooty, dark, dirty city.”1 Thank you, Carl, for that not very flattering, though accurate, description! About 30 years after Jung had his dream, I found myself on an uncharacteristically sunny day with someone even more famous than Jung. Lunchtime had rolled around at Quarry Bank High School for Boys, and the thought of fish and chips was irresistible to my friend and me. In defiance of the school rules, we climbed over the wall and went on a 20-minute jaunt to our favorite “chippy” on Penny Lane.

“Penny Lane” probably gives it away: My old schoolmate was John Lennon, later to become a household name as one of the Beatles. He later wrote (with some exaggeration) of Penny Lane’s “blue suburban skies.” At the time, of course, no one could foresee his star-studded future—certainly not the headmaster, who caned us on our backsides later that day, unimpressed with either one of us.

I mention my school days with John not to gain reflected glory but because I see a certain historical irony: The same headmaster who caned John and me began each school day with Bible reading and prayer. Quarry Bank, though a state school, was typical in that regard; at that time, Christianity was my culture’s accepted religion, and England was fairly representative of the rest of the West. Long after my days at Quarry Bank, I became a Christian theologian dedicated to distinguishing biblical spirituality from its many counterfeits, especially those expressed in today’s versions of Eastern or New Age spirituality. I write books as an observer of the spiritual state of the contemporary West, which has changed dramatically since my high school days. On the other hand, John left Quarry Bank in 1956, when our ways parted for good, and later became a devoted follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and an impassioned spokesman of Eastern-style spirituality.

Though exposed to the same Christian culture as I was, he would try hard to marginalize Christianity. For example, in his hit song “Imagine,” John asked us to conceive of a world without religions or notions of an afterlife, in which we can realize our innate personal and social potential for ultimate peace and harmony. The influence of such thinking is clear in the common quip, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” Bill and Hillary Clinton requested that “Imagine” be played on the National Mall on New Year’s Eve, 2000, to usher in the third millennium.

In 1964, I came to the United States to study, arriving at Logan Airport in Boston shortly after the Beatles reached America. I came to further my education and discovered a culture even more apparently Christian than the one I had left. “Fortress America” was the epicenter of Christianity in the 20th-century world, the nation sending countless missionaries to the ends of the earth. Christianity was everywhere, as evidenced by innumerable radio and TV stations, thousands of Christian schools and colleges, scores of Christian publishers, and church buildings as far as the eye could see. I thought I had died and gone to heaven—for one thing, on Mondays, ministers could play golf free of charge, and I know that’s the way it will be in heaven!

What eventually broke the spell was the Western cultural revolution of the late 1960s, for which my schoolmate was such an influential spokesperson. At the time, the revolution did not seem particularly revolutionary. It involved a handful of hippies whose influence seemed negligible. Ironically, most of the immense changes we see today have come from the convictions and assumptions—the worldview—of that handful of outliers.

“Cataclysmic” Cultural Change

I have been both a participant in and a keen observer of this tumultuous time from the Sixties through today. In my lifetime, Christianity has ceased to be the religion of heritage or choice for a great many people in the West. How could such a huge change take place in such a short time? Even as some sociological experts in the 1960s spoke of living in a “surprise-free world,”2 an ideological revolution was actually exploding under their noses.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a respected American scholar with a PhD from Harvard, quoted above, was both a Marxist and feminist voice in the Sixties. Having converted to Christianity later in life, she said of the cultural revolution in which she had participated so enthusiastically, “Within a remarkably brief period … occurred a cataclysmic transformation of the very nature of our society.”3 Fox-Genovese is not alone.4 A large part of my motivation in writing this book is out of my concern to explain the origin and nature of this transformation and its ongoing effects within contemporary Western culture.

The rules have changed—the trains have gone off the track. In our time, the old canopy of a more or less Christian civilization has been shredded, replaced by a new overarching structure of spiritual beliefs and practices. Many of the traditional plausibility structures that gave life meaning and significance under Christian influence in the West are unrecognizable:

1.Morality is relativized by varied (and often contradictory) personal or social convictions.

2.Honesty means being true to one’s inner commitments and longings more than to external expectations or objective facts.

3.Acceptable models of sexuality and family allow various combinations of persons and genders.

4.Marriage is often functionally indistinguishable from mutually convenient cohabitation.

5.Motherhood is celebrated in the same breath with abortion on demand.

The meaning and context of spirituality and religion have undergone a paradigm shift no less fundamental. The notion of God now allows for polytheism (many gods) or pantheism (a god identical with the universe). The average millennial in the United States, for example, no longer defines a vital spiritual life as knowledge of and communion with the infinite-yet-personal Creator and Lord of heaven and earth who is revealed in the Bible. Spirituality has become a do-it-yourself life hobby that blends ancient Eastern practices with modern consumer sensibilities. If religion is merely a tacit admission that we’re all grasping blindly for the same thing, then who can judge anyone else for being “spiritual but not religious”?

I may sound nostalgic for the good old days, but I’m not making a case for returning to the Western culture of the Fifties. In that era, people were just as sinful and had just as many problems, such as institutional racism and sexism—not to mention overexuberant headmasters with canes! Nevertheless, that culture, with variable degrees of success and consistency, existed under what sociologist Peter Berger called the “sacred canopy” of a basic Christian worldview, so that fundamental ideas—about God, morality, sexuality, family, marriage, motherhood, spirituality, and religion—were understood from a Christian perspective, consciously or unconsciously. People broke the rules, but everyone was assuming pretty much the same rules.

I have watched this “cataclysmic transformation” occur in the space of one generation. I’ve thought long about it, lectured all over the world on it, and written books about it. I pray that by God’s grace, this reflection and research will allow me some...