“We cast down
imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against God and bring
every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5 KJV)
Because world-views lead to their own respective
consequences, it is not sufficient for Christians to season our culture by the adding
of a bit of Christian flavor. For the
sake of the preservation of our society, we are in dire need of a total overhaul
of our vision of what it means to be human.
Every person holds a world-view of sorts, although people don’t often
reflect deeply on the particulars. A
world-view is, according to the BING definition, “a view
of all life: a comprehensive and usually personal conception or view of humanity, the
world, or life.”
O. Hobart Mowrer, one-time president of the American
Psychiatric Association, had such an overhaul (an intensely personal one) of his own world-view. As an adherent of Freud’s (a noted
psychiatrist) dismissive views on guilt, Mowrer early on argued that every expression
of personal guilt was a harmful pathological sickness which demanded release by
means of psychoanalysis. Yet when he
himself was admitted to a mental institution following on his own breakdown, he
came to recognize that confession (as opposed to denial) of his own guilt was
precisely the path to his own healing. So
after his release he was dismayed to discover that churches were also
dismissing the concepts of sin and guilt along the lines of Freud. However, other leaders from the field of psychology
have expressed the same observations as Dr. Mowrer about the necessary connection
between confession of guilt (sin) and personal healing, including M. Scott
Peck, Karl Menninger, and Paul Pruyser.
At the risk of oversimplification, it seems necessary to
state that our culture is experiencing the clash of two major world-views. The dominant one being promoted in the public
arena, the secular view, dismisses such notions as transcendent purpose,
values, morality, free-will, and accounttability. The second, Christian, world-view holds that
under God our Maker, there is an over-arching purpose to life, that human
beings have innate value (not merely
a utilitarian one), that we are not
mere machines but have a soul and consequently free-will, that there is a solid
foundation for morality, and that we will all be held accountable to God who
will judge the entire world according to His righteousness.
Three days of reflection after the tragic cold-blooded murder
of 27 innocent people, including 20 defenseless little children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut raises a
multitude of questions as to how this could have happened. One leading voice is stating that this
senseless violence must stop once and for all.
Certainly we can sympathize with his frustration. But his statement is an expression arising
from his own world-view. God does have
an answer, but His answer is connected to the dealing with human guilt once and
for all by the death of His Son on the cross, and the working of the Holy
Spirit within the lives of redeemed sinners.
Apart from God’s answer human nature has not a ghost of a chance of changing.
Discussions regarding the shooter’s actual culpability are
typically being framed in light of his mental and family history. Questions are being asked for the purpose of
understanding his motives. But if sin is
real, that is the one factor that does defy the rational. Sin is the moral error of raising one’s sense
of self-importance above all others, and most especially above God. To neglect our misuse of personal freedom and
responsibility, to cloud matters of right and wrong, and to brush aside the universal
human tendency to act against our own consciences (including the cold-blooded and calculating shooter), by instead proposing a
mechanistic answer alone, completely misses a fundamental clue about the evil
we all experience in the world. I am not
pleading that we neglect mental illness in favor of spiritual realities. We ought to give serious attention to
both. Christians fully affirm that there
is a material aspect of our being. But
we argue that under God we are so much more than that.
We need religious revival today. By “religious,” Christians mean regaining the
vision that all of life makes sense only when we are in right relationship with
the God who made the heavens and the earth at the beginning of time, who sent
His Son Jesus Christ for our redemption from sin in the fullness of time, and
who invites us to live in union with Him in the present time. Every aspect of our lives (heart, soul,
strength, and mind) is transformed by our connection to God, alone. To neglect this vision in place of the
prevailing, failing mechanistic view of life is tantamount to missing the
gigantic elephant in the room.
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