Evangelizing a Postmodern World

Well, this is the last installment of the December seminar and our service. Carlos Cuellar is going to be preaching, and that'll be the last installment of the post series on postmodernism, but this is the last. Sunday school session that we're going to have on this topic as a part of our December seminar. We've learned a lot over the last, month.

We're going to learn even more today. Today we're happy to have Chris Niswanger, with us. he lives in Costa Mesa. And his wife is also here and his wife's mother is here and by the way, Randy and Phyllis, his wife is from Albania.

knows of the Lincoln Center and the Provost, and so you guys will have to talk to them. today, but Chris, received his, Doctor of Law degree from Trinity Law School some time ago, and he recently completed his Master of Arts degree in Communications and Culture from Trinity Graduate School. He's also the host of the Apologetics.com radio broadcast, and, this is a man who is on the front lines engaging the culture and interacting with the lost and helping believers to, to do the same.

Part of why we're learning all that we're learning about, postmodernism is not just so we can be smarter and not just so we can be protected from error, but also evangelistically so that we can engage our culture and, and bring others into the light that we ourselves have experienced through Christ.

And so here to talk to us today about engaging our culture, evangelizing people. in this postmodern world is Chris Niswanger. We're very happy to have you with us, Chris. Let's give him a warm welcome.

Thank you, Pastor. In preparation for this, I, I don't like to go to churches where I don't have any idea what's going on there because you don't really know what to say. So I've been listening to a lot of the sermons by the pastor and also by Pastor Mike Berry, and I have to tell you how, how singularly I am impressed I am by the level of theological education that they're giving the congregation here because it's a really, a rare treat, and You find these diamonds all over the place, all over Southern California, you'll find, the really good churches that you could actually tell somebody in good conscience, Hey, why don't you go and check out this church?

And this is one of those churches.

So I just think that you guys are really blessed by that and should appreciate what they're giving you. Other than that, you guys have already had a bunch of postmodernism over the last few weeks. So, in talking to some, pastors I know and some friends about it, I was, I was, I was asking him what can I go and what can I talk to these people about? And, one of the pastors told me, why don't you tell them about all the crazy stuff that nobody ever talks about, cause it's so crazy.

That everybody's scared to talk about it because they'll say things like, well, they can't possibly believe that, and they do. So we'll talk about some of those things. we've been blessed by God to live in a very strange time in history. As far as information, just about every nonsense under the sun is almost omnipresent right now.

We have access to things just through the internet and through public libraries. Just the quantity and the quality of information is something that's never happened before. When Christianity was born into the world 2000 years ago, It was the same situation where there was an absolute sea of theological and philosophical nonsense sweeping the landscape, and Christianity came into that and beat it back step by step by strong arguments, stronger ideas, stronger ethics, and of course by the power of God working through His Spirit in the churches, and that's the same way that it happens today.

It's not really that we're in a worse situation than we were then.

We're actually in a better situation in that the churches are so strong, but it's bigger than it was before. We never really had to deal with the import of, Eastern religion and existentialism before, but now, you can go down the street and there's a Buddhist temple and there will be a Muslim mosque and there will be all of these things, so it's in our face in a way that it wasn't before. And so we have to take it to the people. We have to take it to the culture, and we have to do the same things that the apostles did in the first century by continuing to preach and have better truth.

And, of course Christianity is truth, but it's still better truth. And so there are two ways that we do this. One is tearing down every stronghold that sets itself up against the gospel of Jesus Christ. You actually have to look at what they're saying calmly and respectfully, analyze what they're saying, and then rip it to pieces, tear it apart, because that's, what we do.

The other thing is to clearly and consistently hold to those truths of the gospel once and for all delivered to the saints. Because that is the power unto salvation. That's what can transform a culture. It's not going to be our great arguments.

We always have these talks with, young apologists and try to make sure that they understand that apologetics is not the beginning and end of their theology. everybody gets into a thing, usually it's eschatology, the end of the world, the end of the world, the end of the world, and people forget to read, the 1st 65 books of the Bible. that's a And unstable thing to do. And the other thing is to get so into arguing with people that you forget to have a well grounded and well-rounded theology through all of scripture.

That's much more important comparatively. Now where postmodernism comes from, it's a weird a road. You have to go all the way back to the beginning before even Plato and Aristotle. You're talking about a guy named Parmenides, and Parmenides was an ancient Greek philosopher that said that nothing ever changes, nothing is new.

All truth is static, and the reason that he knew this is because nothing can come out of nothing, and if anything were to ever change, it would be going from being something to being nothing or from nothing to being something, and that can't happen. So all change is an illusion. And another guy came out after him and said, what, that can't possibly be true. Everything is constantly changing.

Everything is in a state of flux. No one ever steps into the same river twice because if he steps in once, then he steps in again. Everything in the universe is moved, so nothing is the same from moment to moment. Even the laws of logic are changing in history.

And that's what boiled to the surface, the arguments between Plato and Aristotle. What Plato said is there are these eternal unchanging forms, but this entire world that we experience is all an illusion. We interpret it, but it's never the way it really is. You have to get in touch with the forms.

And if you remember that famous Plato, that famous portrait by Raphael, Plato is pointing up to the eternal forms, and there's only one of them, which might be his pagan god. But Aristotle is pointing down with four fingers because all we can experience is the changing reality. All that we experience is matter in motion. Now later on as that progressed, you get to the time of the Middle Ages and you have a guy named Anselm who's arguing that all of us know God innately because this perfect idea that we have of God can't be other than it is.

And then Thomas Aquinas came right after him and said, what, we can't know God as He really is. All we know is the world of change, and we infer from that that a God must exist, but you can't really know Him as He is. And when he said that, that caused the Reformation. Now I know there's lots of things that caused the Reformation, but that's one of the big ones, because all these reformers started saying, what, if we don't have the scriptures, the revelation from God that he's given us in the verbal propositional revelation of Scripture itself, We can't really get to God by just looking at nature alone.

Maybe we would know this bare fact that God exists by knowing that there must be a first mover or a first cause or teleology or design, but we can't know God as we need to know Him in order to be saved. The things that we really need to know in order to live this life, we need to know because God has spoken to us in His word. And so that's the difference between natural theology, which has its place, and revealed theology, which is everything that we have to know that we can't know from nature.

Now certainly there's an overlap between the things that all men know about God because it says in Romans chapter 1 and 2 that all men know that God exists.

They suppress the truth and unrighteousness, but they all know, so nobody's without an excuse. nobody has an excuse. God's going to hold all men accountable for the fact that they know that he exists and some of his moral attributes. In other words, everybody knows God exists.

Everybody knows some right from wrong. But in order to know how to have salvation, in order to know how to be restored from the fall, in order to come back into communion with God and be saved, well, that's restricted to the content of Scripture alone. And that's what they were saying. Solo scriptura does not mean that it is the only source of knowledge.

It never meant that when they said it. And when people try to attack Christians for holding the solo scriptura, we don't mean that now. We mean it as the sole infallible source of knowledge that we have. So it's not like, we don't go to the doctor and we don't use medicine because it's not sole scriptura.

That's not what we mean. We mean the sole infallible source of knowledge that we have that we use as a lens to judge all other claims or pretensions of knowledge is the things that we find in scripture. Everything that we don't find in scripture, well, we might be pretty sure that it's true or even possibly certain that it's true, but everything is subject to Scripture itself. Now the reason I go through all of this stuff that I that I know you guys already know having listened to a lot of the sermons here is because this is the thing that this interpretation of postmodernism that's happening in the church is attacking.

It's attacking our rock bottom foundation, our source of truth, because it's saying that, well, there is no truth. It's a sweep back to Heraclitus and those guys that said everything is changing, everything is historically conditioned. Right now we believe this Christianity, but later people will believe another Christianity. Here's one of the quotes by Brian McLaren, and I always use Brian McLaren because he's willing to say what a lot of the guys in the movement aren't willing to say because if they say what they're really mean, we'll understand what they mean.

But Here he says, I don't think the liberals have it right, so he wants us to understand that liberal theologies, and liberal in theology isn't like liberal in politics, you have liberals and conservatives in politics and they're on different sides of political issues. A liberal in theology, that's shorthand for I don't believe the Bible, but I still want to be a pastor, so. I don't think the liberals have it right, but I don't think we have it right either. None of us have arrived at orthodoxy.

I'd have to say we probably have a couple of things right, but a lot of things are wrong and even more spreads out unseen and unimagined. But at least our eyes are open to the fact that we don't know. To be a Christian in a generously orthodox way is to not claim to have the truth captured and stuffed and mounted on a wall. I don't think we've got the gospel right yet.

What does it mean to be saved, quote unquote? And the thing that occurs to me is we should not make men pastors who don't know what the gospel is yet. We should not make them deacons or elders. We should put them in catechical classes so that they can become Christians, because I'm not saying you have to know everything about the Bible to be a Christian, for goodness' sake, nobody does.

That's why we have a church. Different people have different gifts and that type of thing. But if you really think that nobody's figured out the gospel yet, you have a, you have to be pretty bold to get in front of a pulpit and start preaching to people. And accept positions in a church which you don't think anybody knows.

Now the fact that he says you have a couple of things right, well, he says what those are sometimes, and it's usually ethics, but that Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, is the eternal Son of God that was born of a virgin, lived, taught, suffered, and died in our place and rose from the dead on the 3rd day physically and is seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven are not the things. Those aren't the things. Those are our historical interpretation and this and that but.

Anyway, here are some of the ideas, the philosophical ideas from which we get to here, because postmodernism isn't new.

It's just a new interpretation for the church. In other words, there's always been people that believe this stuff, but not us, certainly not within evangelicalism or American Christianity, Protestantism. We, we never had a problem with this stuff. Scientism.

There was an idea that came along that you could only know things through touching, tasting, and feeling them. Those were the things you knew. Everything else you didn't really know, right? And that gradually came in through the Enlightenment in the 16 and 700s to the idea that that was the only way you could know anything.

So the scientific method through testing and analysis of empirical information, the things you see is the only way you can know anything, and anything that you can't know from that either can't be known or is nonsense. So scientism leads to positivism. The way it came down for us is of course through guys like Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton came up with the laws of gravitation, and gravitation basically explained how everything happens.

All two particles of matter in the universe attract each other equal to the mass times the distance and inversely proportional to the square root. If something has inertia, if something is moving in a certain direction, it will continue to continue to move in that direction until some outside force acts upon it, right? And if you just, extrapolate this through the universe, you can pretty much explain everything that happens, and so you don't need God and you don't need rationality, you don't need the spirit, you don't need revelation.

All you need to know is that little balls are bouncing off each other.

And you can explain everything in the universe through the relationships of the little balls that bounce off each other. Now of course when you say something like that you have now limited knowledge to a very small bandwidth. You have really said that the vast majority of human experience as we know it. is false, does not exist.

The relationships you have with your families doesn't really exist. It's just a chemical reaction. What it is to be human, the seeking after truth, your communion with God, all of the things that we have our societies, ethics, all of these things are illusions. Now one thing that we always have to keep in mind any philosophy that tells you that everything that you experience in life is ultimately an illusion is bad philosophy.

You can pretty much assume it's nonsense if it's just all they really have to say is that everything that you experience is not is untrue because that itself would be an experience which would have to be untrue, but that's the basic root of scientism. Now the guys that became postmodernism, they weren't into scientism. Scientism became modernism. Now modernism is also no friend of Christianity.

so we're not saying, well, I have friends that do say what we need to do is get away from modernism and go back to away from postmodernism and go back to modernism the way it was, but they were never our friends, guys like Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein and a lot of the great minds of the last century or so were no friends of Christianity because they really did believe everything can be explained through scientific methodology. Anything that can be known will be known through the senses.

That's like the root of modernism. And it came out in literature through the works of people like Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman and many others, but never was it friendly to Christian thought, and it has had the most devastating effect on Christian, Christian thought modernism, evolutionism, Darwinism, Marxism, all of these things are manifestations of the modernistic scientistic interpretation.

The reaction to that was romanticism. Really it's, it's humanity and the spirit and poetry and art. This is the way we really find out what we are. We can't know anything through the sciences.

Everything that we know is known through aesthetics and beauty. This is how we know what we really are. Now we're starting to swerve over into what became postmodernism. The first major guy that could be described as having that postmodern ethos was right after Immanuel Kant.

Now what Kant said is that all the people that say you can understand through rationality and logic. And all the people that say you can understand everything through empiricism or through the senses are both wrong. Really, the mind pre-interprets everything that comes into it, so you can never know the real world at all. That's what he said.

Now the effect of him was his disciple Hegel. GFW Hegel, who dominated German and continental, we'll make a distinction here between continental and American philosophy or English philosophy, but continental philosophy from Hegel was all spiritual. Postmoderns tend to be pantheistic, not materialistic. Like Karl Marx, the great communist, was materialistic.

He was a student of Hegel, but he took everything Hegel said and he made it material. All that exists is matter in motion for Marx. All that exists is spirit in motion for Hegel. And so everything is ultimately irrational.

It's the force of the will. And then you have Hegel's other most famous disciple. His two most famous were Marx and Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard is the most pure early advancement of postmodernism because what he said is everything is an act of the will. We don't know anything, but we embrace things through our spirit.

What you embrace with infinite passion is truth for you. Might not be truth for them, but it's truth for you because it's all an act of the spirit. And he was a Lutheran, but I don't think the Lutherans agreed with that. And from Kierkegaard we get Friedrich Nietzsche.

How many of you guys have heard of Nietzsche? because everybody has to read him in college. why they make you read him in college? Because he's horrible.

He took everything Kierkegaard said about God and made it about atheism. Everything is the power of the will. We need to get rid of this slave mentality that comes from Christianity and get back to the great morality that comes from the Romans and the Greeks because they understood the will to power. All that ethics is is conquering.

Knowledge is power. Now you've always heard knowledge is power, but what knowledge is power really means is that power is all there is. When we think we know something, really we're just exercising power to control others. And from Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche we come into Heidegger, who, who's going through an amazing revival right now.

Heidegger was the most important central philosopher of the Nazis in Germany, and Heidegger was appropriating a lot of this philosophy, this postmodern philosophy, in order to say that what truth is, is the interpretation of ourselves that we have as a community. Now you guys have probably heard the term community in churches more in the past 5 years than you have in the entire rest of your life. All anybody talks about is community, community, community, and the thing is, well, of course there's some truth in it.

We are a community.

The church is a community. But he was justifying by it the master race and their relationship in the interpretation of truth for them, and that every society had its own truth, and this was ours. That being you can't interpret being. Matter.

There is no matter. There is nothing except for consciousness and existence and your interpretation of yourself, so this is the turn to hermeneutics and interpretation. And later we get all those guys that we, that we see in the movies from the 60s with the little glasses and the cigarettes and they're always wearing like that French hat and, saying things that nobody understands. The beat generation because they were all cool, daddy, cool.

And that is existentialism from guys like Jean-Paul Sartre and coming into our own day, Jacques Derrida. And Richard Rorty, people that are saying basically no one can read a book, no one can understand what a book says, it's reader response, it's your interpretation of it. There is no truth. There's only interpretation.

What does that do to somebody who has a Bible in their hands? When you say that no real truth can be communicated through a book, it's only the way that you interpret it. And why does it make you want to read their books? That's what I always thought was funny.

So Derrida writes this entire book that's that's really a refutation of Christianity in which he refutes what's called logocentrism. Now logos is the is the word for word that we find in Scripture itself, and God even represents Himself by the word logos. So the idea that you can actually obtain truth through words and sentences is exactly what they're trying to destroy. The reason why is that's exactly how God communicates to us in words and sentences.

So in postmodern thought there's this huge reaction against propositions themselves, like a proposition is, I am standing in front of the pulpit, subject, object, copula. Almost every sentence that you can make, every thought that you can have, is one of four kinds of ideas. I am this, I am not this, I am partially this or I am partially not this. Almost everything you can possibly think is in propositional form.

We are here. We are not here. Almost everything. You can't really think of anything, at least no one has so far, that isn't in that form, and they're saying that that form is false because there's no distinction between the object and the subject.

Everything is ultimately one ergo pantheism. Everything is ultimately God. We're just God working out his issues. God's trying to figure it all out too.

We're just helping him here. So it's very weird stuff, but In Christianity, the fact that God chose to write down his thoughts for us and communicate them to us in the propositional form of a book written in sentences says a lot about the only ways that Christians can interpret the world metaphysically. In other words, we're not guessing when we say that God thinks propositionally because He wrote us a book full of His truth propositionally. So when it says that I am the way and the truth and the life and no one can come to the Father except through me, it's a sentence with a subject and and an object that's meant to communicate information.

So if anybody says, what, you have to do it as a narrative, it's more of a story, and you just take the story in and it's all the interpretation of your community. That is a refutation of the fact that God can actually communicate truth through sentences. You get back into the neo-Orthodox guys like Karl Bart and Brunner, and that's all they were saying. They were all saying, Well, the Bible is not the word of God.

We get the word of God through it. I've never been able to figure out what that means, for goodness' sake. Like you could be reading a cookbook and get the word of God, right, because we're not getting the word of God from the cookbook, we're just getting the word of God through it. The idea that scriptures written in propositional sentences are not the way that God communicates also refutes the fact that Christ spoke to us in propositions, propositional sentences.

So these are problems inherent within any of these ideas that try to refute God's ability to communicate to us truthfully. And what, you'll find this all over the place. Like I go to a Presbyterian church. The Presbyterians were all into this from the 1930s.

We were basically done. I'm still a Presbyterian, but if you find a good Presbyterian church, you've been lucky. The odds are against it. Oh, that's terrible.

Anyway, So here's a basic framework for it. I call it clamor, C L A M O R, and the C in clamor. is for communitarianism. Now of course we believe in communities, but there are 3 forms of communitarianism in modern postmodern thought.

Epistemological communitarianism. Epistemology just means your theory of truth or how things. This is always the point in the speech where everybody goes to sleep, so don't worry, I won't wake you now. Truth.

You think certain things, but they say you can only know things in the context of a certain community, right? Your community knows truth. Now this was, of course, the theory of guys like Wittgenstein, who, who has read Wittgenstein in their, in their philosophy classes? Yeah, all of you, obviously.

Well, he's seen as if not the most influential philosopher of the entire last century, the 2nd after Heidegger. People usually say it's one or the other. So this is the guy that influenced all of your professors when you went to the university, and what Wittgenstein said is that all what you can think, what you're allowed to think is limited by your language and your linguistic ability. Everything is a language game, and within that language game there's an understanding of things.

So there's an epistemological limitation to the language that you have, and language only exists within the context of a community. Therefore, every community's interpretation of truth they're trapped in. So you can't know real truth. You can only know the truth of your community, which, because he was Roman Catholic, as was Heidegger.

This falls into line with the fact that they have an infallible teaching community which infallibly interprets the scriptures and reality for everyone else. So it really flies in the face of people that, had a guy 500 years ago stand up before the entire Roman Catholic community and say, unless you can convince me by scripture or sound reason, I cannot, I will not recant. Who said that? Martin Luther, that's right.

Now, when you go back through the Bible itself, generation after generation, day after day, you often had one guy standing up against all of Israel, God's chosen people, with a Bible in his hands saying God said, And the entire community trying to kill him. Who was Jesus condemned by? The religious community in which he existed? The entire temple had become corrupt.

So the idea that you must always submit your thoughts to the teaching of your religious community, it's not a Christian idea. You always submit your thoughts to God as He has revealed Himself in Scripture. If the religious community is wrong, you need to find another religious community that has truth, because all religious communities are not created equal. Some of them are good and some of them are bad, and the postmodern thinkers, when they're saying you just have to be a part of a good religious community, well, which one is good for goodness' sake?

Well, they're all good to them, but they're not all good to us. We need the ones that believe scripture. There's this big argument that goes on, especially when we talk with Roman Catholic, scholars, when they always say, well, you Protestants wouldn't even know what the scriptures were if it were not for Mother Church. And we always say, well, you wouldn't know what the church was if it weren't for the scriptures.

We read the scriptures and we find out there's a church and we find out what the church is supposed to be and what its powers are and what its organization is supposed to be, and we also find out what it's supposed to believe. So do we measure what we think scripture says by what the church pronounces, or do we measure what the true church is by measuring it by scripture? Well, it's going to have to be the teachings of the apostles and the prophets, and then we look around and we see which churches believe that, and that's the true church.

It can't just be that an organization calls themselves the church, and now you just have to believe whatever they say, even if it's directly contrary to the content of scripture.

It doesn't make any sense. We all have these problems though, and sociological communitarianism, that's why they tend to be communists, when we get back to liberal and conservative, conservatives politically tend to believe in the freedom of the individual and limitations of the state. And liberals tend to believe in a powerful overarching centralized government because it's all about the community and the community should basically win if there's ever any conflict between the individual and the community.

So socialistic communitarianism also and ecclesiological communitarianism that the church is right no matter what it says because that's your community.

Like at this church, you wouldn't have that problem because the pastor would sit down to you and show you by scripture, and you would talk about scripture and you would all be expected to submit your minds to the teaching of scripture on a subject. No one would ever tell you, Well, we're not gonna argue about scripture. We're just gonna tell you the way it is and you have to believe it. That's, that's not the way Jesus did it.

Jesus was God and he still spent page after page giving clear arguments from the Old Testament and from their present experience about what the truth was. The apostle Paul in Romans spent 16 chapters arguing theology. That's why, it's hard to read. It's a tough read because he didn't just say, what, I'm an apostle.

Suck it up, people. You never find that with the apostles. They're always arguing clearly and giving you scripture so that you'll know and understand not only what the truth is, but how you can be sure of it. The second thing is legalism.

Postmodernism is rife with legalism. Now legalism is not the view that the moral law of God is the standard for human behavior. Legalism is the view that you are saved on the basis of your legal obedience. So it's very different from that.

Now the way you get to the legalism and postmodernism is you'll probably notice if you cause like I go to postmodern churches all the time, I have a lot of, there's a lot of Christians that go there. I'm not saying you're not a Christian if you're like into the postmodern thing, but you'll see a heavy emphasis on social action. We're gonna do things. We're gonna change the world.

We're gonna feed the poor. We're gonna do all these things, and I think it's all great. I'm always like, more power to them. At the same time, that's not salvation.

That's not the gospel, that's the law. I'm all for the law because the law is love God and love your neighbor as yourself. It's certainly not the gospel. The gospel is Jesus Christ died to save sinners.

Believe in Him and you'll have everlasting life. The gospel is completely outside of you. The law is what you're trying to become in your spirit as God sanctifies you through this life, but the law, being nice to other people is not the gospel. The Pharisees had to be nice to other people, and Jesus was constantly telling them that because of their blind and almost berserk obedience to the law in against faith in God and believing that he was the Messiah, they had no life in them.

So we always have to be careful of thinking that the law is the gospel. If a person is truly justified before God on the basis of faith alone through grace, grace alone through faith apart from works, then there will be a necessary effect in their behavior. If you're justified, you will be sanctified because God doesn't abandon His children. At the same time, you can't replace justification with sanctification, and if you say that it's just the things that people do that make them a Christian, as many of the postmoderns do, good people, they're real Christians.

Well, not in the Bible, unless you think David, shacking up with Bathsheba was good people. or Abraham or any of the other people that had moral failures in Scripture. Perfection is not really the standard of Christian behavior. Repentance and striving for a righteousness that we will not perfectly attain in this life, that is Christian behavior.

Now the reason that this is such major legalism is because of the agnosticism that's the A in it. Agnosticism is that we don't really know. Like you guys have met agnostics, they don't want to call themselves an atheist because it's socially awkward, so they say they're an agnostic. Well, maybe there's a God.

I don't know. So agnosticism is the idea that you can't really know, and if you can't really know, you can't really have faith. So they emphasize room for doubt and that truth is comprehensive. Which it is.

God knows all truth and so God is the comprehensive interpreter of all things. But just because God's knowledge is comprehensive doesn't mean that our minds as beings created in His image are not apprehensive. Just because God knows everything and we can't be God doesn't mean we can't know anything. We can certainly know some things.

We're created in His image and likeness so that we can know things on the created level as He created them. I know that 1 + 1 is equal to 2. Does God know it? Well, the postmodern would say no, you can't even ask the question.

It doesn't even have a meaning. what? God knows that 1 + 1 is equal to 2, or he's not very bright. Those are your options.

God is not comprehensible, but he's certainly apprehensible to us. And, and what is the main way that he's given us that he's apprehensible? The things that he's taught about Himself in Scripture. We can know Him because he has communicated Himself to us.

Another thing is scripture as without authority. They're constantly trying to expand or reduce the size of the canon. Well, we need to bring in other books. We need to bring in the Gnostic Gospels and all these other things that have never been a part of Scripture.

Or, there's lots of things in Scripture we, we need to cut out those portions with the apostle Paul because he's a little too, moral on some things like homosexuality and, and that thing. So in this, the fact that we can't know gives them all kinds of room to cut out the things that we do know. Mysticism, the rejection of what they call Western thought in order to bring in some great ideas that they think are from Eastern thought. And so you get into meditation and disciplines and practices and a lot of things that while they might not be bad in and of themselves, the way they interpret them become absolutely pagan.

The idea that we should stop focusing so much on scripture and start focusing more on our own spiritual awareness, huge problems in that because the only thing that can let that any of your inner spiritual awareness is Christian spiritual awareness is measuring it by scripture. So it's not that there's anything wrong with disciplines per se. There's a huge problem with disciplines as a replacement for the authority of scripture. And revisionism, some of the things that are revised in postmodern thought are God.

God is not the all knowing, all powerful Creator of all things. God is a moderately knowing, pretty powerful guy who's trying to do the best he can under the circumstances. Now you might think to yourself, yeah, but that's not the God of Scripture, but they've already dealt with Scripture. Scripture isn't exactly God's word.

Scripture is the things that nice guys who experienced God wrote about him a long time ago. So we don't have to follow scripture scripture, we have to follow our experience of God because God's beautiful. So we're really trying to experience beauty, not truth. That's the postmodern ethos.

About man? Well, postmodernism doesn't have a doctrine of man. You have to have an anthropology before you can tell people what they should and should not do. That's the thing about secularistic humanistic psychology is it has a doctrine of man that comes from evolution, and they have an idea of what they think men are.

That destroys your ability to counsel them or to tell them what they should be. If we're going to have a psychology, it has to be informed by scripture because that tells us what human beings are and what is best for them. And so you can only help people psychologically if you first know what a healthy person is supposed to be like. And that's why, so often we go to counselors and they give us counsel that is ill, that makes us sicker, there was that pastor, the story of the pastor who, he always felt like he should cuss when he was doing sermons and things like that, and he went to a counselor and the counselor told him, well, finally you're just going to have to do it.

Get it over with. Get it out of your system. So he went in and did it and he got fired. He didn't feel better after that.

The idea that you should indulge sin or that you have to get rid of these ideas that weigh you down and you have to get rid of guilt, people should be guilty sometimes. Every time you do something wrong, if you're not guilty, that's the psychological problem. Now of course there is false guilt. I'm not saying that people should, be bound up under the weight of their past sins, but a little guilt can certainly be healthy and keep you honest.

Christ, a lot of, recisions about Christ's deity in postmodern thought. They have to focus on his humanity because they've already said God is unknowable. And if God is unknowable and can't reveal Himself in Scripture, how can that Christ was God? So Christ becomes the Christ from the movies that you've seen about Jesus that are put out by the secular world where he's just another guy, trying to get by.

But he thinks he's God, so he's a little strange, but he's not the divine Lord of glory. The church, the church becomes the central communitarian instrument of truth and so everybody has to bow to the church whether or not what it's teaching is in alignment with scripture, and they will actually tell you that, which is, a powerful movement back from traditional Protestant theology. Salvation, salvation is not that Christ died for your sin. This is in line with their views of grace and faith.

If salvation is a view that Christ died for your sin, that makes God a cosmic child abuser. Now this is a phrase from, their books and their teachings. If God sent His only Son to die for our sins, that's child abuse. He would never do that.

He's a God of love. Well, I think that if an entire humanity fell into sin, And we're going to by God's justice, have to die and suffer eternally, and he interceded in that by sending His Son in order to save us, but his son vicariously took on that penalty for us that is love. And he certainly would have been just to just leave us to ourselves and allow us to suffer the due penalty of our sin, but he did not. But to say that it's somehow evil for him to do things the way he did is to impugn the righteousness of God and God's love.

God has to retain both His justice and His love. He didn't throw out his justice when he saved us. That's what the Muslims say. Well, God just says, OK, he's going to accept you even though you've sinned.

our God's not arbitrary. Our God knows right and wrong and good and evil, and so he did not throw out justice. He dealt justly with our sin. Another thing is their view of grace.

Grace is just being nice to people. grace in Christian thought is the powerful working of the Spirit of God in the heart. Grace is also not the same thing that it is in some Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic thought in which grace is a substance that you eat in the mass that goes into your body and gives you virtues and good habits. That's not what grace is either.

Grace is when God looks on His children with love and affection and works in them to bring them faith. Now faith. In postmodern thought is just believing, but not necessarily believing any intellectual content. Faith in Christian thought has always been believing certain things are true.

If you do not believe that I am the one I say I am, you will die in your sins, was Jesus's thing. So faith is always intellectual, it's never sub-intellectual. It's not passionless, but it's never passion alone. Faith is always a belief in something and, more important than that, a belief in someone, the person and work of Jesus Christ is the object of our faith, and wider, the belief that the entire contents of the 66 books of Scripture are true.

Now in postmodern thought that is not faith. And of course the law for the Christian, what they should do morally is summed up from the moral law of God, which is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. And we also learned about it in the 10 Commandments and in many different stories in scripture like the things that David did and the things that Elijah did. We learn from all of these things in the practice and the faith and practice of Christ Himself, what we are supposed to do and how we are supposed to live.

In postmodern thought, it's just love in some a barren empty sense, so it can mean anything. It transforms into a nebulous, disconnected interpretation of life, but it's not the law of God. It's not love God and love your neighbor in a definitive sense so that we can know what that is. So here is the way that we tend to respond as Orthodox evangelical churches to postmodernism just to sum up here first, they have to be evangelized.

Now I'm sorry if that seems weird that you would have to go to a church and be an evangelist, but it's very common for people in postmodern churches, in the strictly postmodern churches, to have never heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because you don't want to offend anybody. And it is true the gospel is offensive because it has bloody crosses and animal sacrifices and sin and death and hell and redemption, so I agree it's pretty offensive comparatively. At the same time, the postmodern churches have to be evangelized.

The second thing is that revelation. In words is not open to a given community's abstract revision. The duty of the Christian is to receive scripture and to see what it says there as being true, especially as mediated through teachers and those given special gifts of teaching, but not through just the fact that they have some a ministerial position, but the fact that what they're teaching is actually what Scripture says, always to be measured by Scripture. Another thing is a recommitment to justification of faith alone.

But not in the absence of social justice when the postmodern churches can attack the evangelical churches and say you guys don't do anything, you just sit in your churches and pray. Well, if there's any truth to that, then we need to react to that. It doesn't mean that we give up justification by faith alone and just start doing social work. That's not the answer to that.

The thing is that we continually affirm justification by faith alone and continue to advance that in our faith and our practice outside the doors of our churches. In other words, it has to be answered. If we haven't done enough, then we will do twice as much as they do. Not because it will save us, but because we are already saved.

Guilt, grace, and gratitude. We were guilty. God saved us through grace alone, and out of gratitude we do good works, not because it earns us a righteousness before God, because it doesn't. We can't add anything to the work of Christ.

It's complete. And another thing is a caution and respect for those who have come before us in the faith. The postmoderns have also been able to attack us as if we just created Christianity within the last 50 or 100 years, and there's this entire wealth of Christian thinkers through history that we just blow off. Well, there might be a little truth to that, but that's because so many people in the last 2000 years were heretical and had weird ideas about God.

So, but what we don't do is we don't say that the church fathers and different thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas and even the reformers don't have something good to teach us. In other words, we counter that by having a healthy respect for the people that have come before, because Christianity didn't start 100 years ago. It has been progressive through history, and I think we have a purer faith now than the church fathers did. The argument of a lot of the postmoderns is these guys were earlier, therefore they were purer, and they completely forget that almost every book in the New Testament was refuting heresies within the church.

And that the church fathers, they agreed about very little. They agreed about the deity of Christ. They agreed about the Trinity. They agreed about justification.

They agreed about the contents of the Bible, but that was about it. Everything else they fought over. So there is no unified early church that we can look to because they had all of the doctrines right. That's mythical.

It didn't exist. And so the way I would end is just by saying that there are valid criticisms that the postmodern organizations have given to evangelical Christianity. If they are really the ones that are doing all of the great social work and feeding the poor and things like that, that doesn't just make us look bad because they will know us by our love. It makes us look fake.

So we have to be careful about that. We can't let them be the ones doing all the good works. other than that, we have to fight constantly for not only the legitimacy and the historicity, but the veracity of the Christian faith in the light of those who would turn it into a mere system of ethics, because the essence of liberalism is always the reduction of Christianity to ethics. That is always the end of Christianity because that's what the Pharisees did.

Are you a true Jew? Here, get circumcised. Do these things, then you're a true Jew. That wasn't what made a true Jew.

Jesus said he could bring up children from the stones, and he said that we are an engrafted branch into Israel. So that the continuation of these things is always that we have to believe true things in order to be Christians and we don't compromise the preaching of the gospel just because it might be offensive to the world. One of the reasons that postmodern churches explode is because just about anybody can go there comfortably. There's nothing you really have to believe to go.

So it is nice as a stepping stone organization, but I think you don't really have a reason for going is the problem. It's a nice community, but you could go to Toastmasters or you could. You can start a club. So it's like, Saturday night bars, except for it's at church on Sunday morning, and, and you don't want that, you don't want your church to become that.

Why don't we close in prayer? Lord our God and Father, we praise you and thank you for this time. I praise you for this church, Lord God, and the leaders that you've ordained here to preach the word. We praise you for your gospel, for your gospel of grace that we are saved by grace through faith, apart from our works, Lord God.

Not in such a way as that you then leave us as orphans, but you teach us by your Spirit to will and to do according to your good purpose day by day. We praise You, Lord God. For the churches in the United States and around the world, we pray that you protect them from false ideas that might try to influence them and intrude into the purity of their theologies. We pray that you would give us a renewed sense of our mission in this life to proclaim the gospel and to Inasmuch as you allow it, Lord God, to transform the culture.

So that people might recognize good from evil. We praise you for these things in Jesus' holy name. Amen. Sure.

Sure, if you'd like. Does anybody have any questions? I don't know, I don't know how long I've been a believer. My father was a pastor in the Assemblies of God.

That's one of the reasons I'm not Pentecostal. And And, sometime when I was a kid or a teenager, but, the, the time when I really know I was a Christian was my early 20s. I'm gonna be 40, the next year. So, when you grow up in the church, you don't necessarily have a birthday.

That's the problem. I can't say like, well, it was April 11th at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I don't, I don't have one of those, but it's almost nicer to have one of those because there's a danger to growing up in the church and you guys that have grown up in the church understand that. It's all so normal to you, and you've always been around it, so it's easily easy to take it for granted.

And then you meet these people that are like, 35 and they've come to know the Lord and they're into it. They, they have been, in a wasteland in a desert for 35 years and they are flipping out and you're like, wow, that's cool. Lord, why didn't you give me that blessing? Because, it's, it's actually a greater blessing to have been raised in the faith and to have, had your parents catechize you in it from the time you were young, that covenantal relationship where it goes from parents to children through generations.

That's, God's ultimate plan is that it would happen that way. So, I'd give it 20 years, something like that. Yes, sir. Well, I, I'm in a, with a group called Apologetics.com.

We have a radio show we do on KKLA, 99.5, but it's not on until midnight on Friday night. So we have about 10,000 to 15,000 live listeners and about 40,000 to 50,000 podcast listeners. So it's, it's through iTunes and so we have a lot of people and we fight with everybody and it's a lot of fun because we don't take it very seriously. We're not one of those apologetics ministries that, writes books and detailed analysis.

We just We just love Jesus and so we'll fight with you. if you're an atheist, we can do that. It'll be fun. Hey.

I have two questions. one, a lot of times when I, jumped to the Crusades, Yeah Yeah. Comments on that argument and if you have any thoughts on that. Well, the thing about going to the Crusades is, it's a straw man.

You can never say that because atheists have done bad things, therefore atheism is evil. That's not why atheism is evil, and you can never say that because Christians have done bad things or people that claim to be Christians, therefore Christianity is evil. What you can do is look at the real thoughts that the people say, or that's their, basically their platform. And say this is either good or evil or this is consistent or inconsistent with what those people did.

Now when you look at the teachings of Jesus Christ and he says not only love your neighbor as yourself but love your enemies. It's really hard to then say that that justifies picking up your swords and going over to, the Middle East to kill all the Muslims. So what happened was in direct contrast to what was taught in the scriptures themselves. It was a bad interpretation of theology that was in direct conflict with historical Christianity, with historical Christian thought.

So, if a Buddhist goes into a 7-Eleven in China and shoots a bunch of people, you can't really blame Buddhism because Buddhism doesn't teach shooting people in a 7-Eleven in China. But Buddhism does teach other things like that, life is ultimately nothing. And that your entire purpose in life is to become nothing, and we can critique that, but you can only critique the things sensibly and rationally that are consistent with the teachings of the system itself. Christianity is the only and the best ethical system that has ever been presented.

That's why everybody adopts it and revises it. that you, that the essence of all human obligation is to love God and love your neighbor as yourself, and then he continues to pile on that obligation. I even want you to love your enemies, and I want you to be at peace with all men as much as it has to do with you. it's pretty heavy and I'm not a pacifist because I think there's always a time to protect other people and to do things that are necessary in order to protect yourselves and your society, but of course Jesus is, got a pacifistic thread in there.

We're not supposed to be the aggressor certainly we're not supposed to be causing evil and we're not supposed to chase down people and beat them with sticks. So the idea that Christianity causes violence is basically absurd, and any reasonable person, even if they're an atheist, that's going to take the teachings of Christianity seriously and try to deal with them, can't make that an argument. Hey. to an atheist, I have to find out what flavor of atheist.

There's the guy that just, hasn't seen the evidence. There's the guy that's never read the Bible, so he doesn't really know what he's atheistic about. There's the guy that's very educated and has read all the philosophy books and so he's a very serious atheist. and you have to get into somebody's head and see, OK, what is your problem with God?

Because Christians, of course, don't really believe in atheists. We believe that the atheists knows there's a God and they're suppressing the truth and unrighteousness, and there's all kinds of reasons for unbelief, and you have to be willing to engage with the person on a 1 to 1 basis and find out what those are. If they're philosophical reasons, those are pretty much the easiest to deal with, but if it's personal reasons or things that have happened in their life that have given them an exacerbated hatred for God, well, arguments aren't very helpful in that regard.

So yeah, it depends on, it depends on the person.

Most of the atheists I meet are young kids that took a philosophy class in junior college and they've decided they're atheists. So by the time they're 23 or 24, that might start to, get a little old. That's what usually happens. And then they start to really think deeply about life, like everybody is like a socialist and a, and a democrat when they're like 23, but by the time they have 4 kids, they're all Republicans.

Have you ever noticed that? It's that thing. Sir, yes. It's like Yeah, well, you still have to ask the question of what is proof, because every different philosophy, somebody who's philosophically educated doesn't mean that there's one philosophy they'll end up in.

So what would that atheist accept as proof? well, like some people that are like we go back to scientism, they will only accept as proof some a consequence of the scientific method and analysis of matter. In that way, you can't prove that God exists because God's a spirit, so they're setting up the question in a way that can't get to the answer. Now guys like Thomas Aquinas and his summma Theologia and a lot of other great theologians did try to deal with it in that way.

They go from teleological arguments of design and from first mover arguments, cosmological arguments that show that there has to be something that is the explanation of all of this stuff. But, very hard to prove to somebody that's only going to take tangible things that they see. so basically the Christian answer to that is that's not proof. What you want is proof will not prove anything.

It won't just not prove the existence of God. You can't even prove that we're both in the room at the same time. How do that your senses are an accurate representation of the external world in order to believe that I exist in order to give you the proof? If you only believe what you see, touch, and taste, you've limited knowledge to a way that you can't really justify any knowledge, so you can't even justify that you're an atheist.

And so we bring in the fact that no, we're going to have to bring in other things if we're going to have a reasonable dialogue about this and you're only going to take science as proof. We're going to have to bring in things that you can't know from science like that other minds exists, that the human being is more than just matter and motion, more than just the cumulative relationship of his parts. they might be presupposing that, but that's not an answer, that's just their faith.

They just have faith that they're just an accident of nature.

Let's, so there's something that they would have to prove then, but ultimately the way that we can interpret ourselves. is ultimately irrational unless we include something like the transcendental God that has created us all in His image that is eternal and unchanging, giving us a ground for the laws of logic that give us the ability to do the sciences in the first place and that give us a ground for ethics and our interpersonal relationships with each other. So someone that's denying that logic is universally valid and someone that's denying that there are any ethics, right or wrong, well, they, they're pretty safe.

They deny all truth in order to save atheism.

So prove to that person within the scope of what they will accept as truth. Well, it can't, can't really be done, but, then they can't know anything if they want to sit there like that, that's fine, but Yeah, so it's a difficult thing. Well, thank you very much, everybody. I see that it's 10 o'clock.