Transcript 009 Putting Religion in Its Place

009 Putting Religion in Its Place
Church & Culture
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
“The ‘secular revolution’ affected every part of American
culture-not only higher education but also the public schools,
politics, psychology, and the media. In each of these areas,
Christianity was privatized as ‘sectarian,’ while secular
philosophies like materialism and naturalism were put forth as
‘objective’ and ‘neutral,’ and therefore the only perspectives
suitable for the public sphere.”
- Nancy Pearcey
Church & Culture
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
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Compromising with a secular mindset
 Many Christians have adopted a mindset of
relativism and pragmatism
 E.G. Lawyer, a deacon in church, his job was to find a
way to break contracts
▪ Is he just doing his job?
▪ Is his work involving him in breaking moral principles?
 What would he do if he had a Biblical Worldview?
 Many Christians learn to “adapt” – they
“compartmentalize”
▪ They do what “is necessary” in their “professional” lives
while believing, studying, and professing faith in their
private lives
Church & Culture
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
Many Christians keep their faith and religious beliefs in
one pocket and their jobs in another
 Many Believers came to think that to speak about their
faith was to show a decidedly Christian bias in the work
place
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 Believers were “pressured to adopt a naturalistic, secularized
approach to the subject matter of their field.”
 Can you think of how this might apply to your own field?
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Are the concepts you practice in your profession
“neutral?”
 Should you practice them without regard to a biblical
worldview?
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Do you separate your work and belief into a public /
private dualism?
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009 Putting Religion in Its Place
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To bring Biblical truth, Christian truth, back
to the work place, we must first understand
how we reached this point
If we can understand how this public private
dualism came to be, we can come to
understand how it works in our culture today
If we can learn how it works we can develop
ways to counter its effect in our culture
Church & Culture
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
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Nature means knowledge of worldly things known by reason
alone
Grace means the knowledge of God and the “mysteries of
faith”
Problem: if it is possible to know the things of this world
through man’s reason alone; there is little need for “grace”
 Grace, the second story, is increasingly irrelevant for our day to
day affairs
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Reason, human knowledge, is quite capable of understanding
“the state, society, science, economics, philosophy-in fact
everything outside of theology”
Even Christians began accept the split between nature where
man came to knowledge on his own and controlled the
growing first story and grace where God’s influence was
confined to the upper story
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009 Putting Religion in Its Place
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Religion seen as a “negative check on what reason was allowed to
say”
 It had no positive impact on daily life in the first story
The reason/faith dualism grew to a point where grace or faith was
understood as being arbitrary, reason was understood as
independent source of truth
 William Ockham denies that God can be understood by an rational
category
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 God’s plan of salvation is arbitrary, it is based on His discretion and not fixed by
any law that man could discern
 Religion is not understood from that which is rational but is derived from
revelation which is accepted by faith
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Reason and faith are now seen as two independent categories
“Why do we need revelation at all?”
Reason holds truths that are known apart from divine revelation
Reason can even be used to judge divine revelation – reason is now
the yardstick for judging truth
Church & Culture
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
Reason is now accepted as the rule, the “yardstick” of truth
Many, now begin to accept Reason as truth and see
revelation, religion as less than the truth
 Moving through 14th Century Europe Reason becomes more
and more autonomous from revelation
 With flowering of the Renaissance and the period of
Enlightenment Reason is accepted as being able to discover
truth without the need of revelation
 Based on the many new scientific discoveries,
Reason/science is coming to be seen as the “sole source of
genuine knowledge”
 Nature is now the only reality and Reason/science the only
way to truth
 Welcome to scientific materialism
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Church & Culture
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
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Religion was not the only “casualty of scientific
materialism,”
Arts, beauty, creativity, and morals were not subjects for
scientific investigation
Those who defended the subject matter of the arts,
morality, religion, humanities came to be known as
“Romantics” and this movement was call “Romantic
Movement”
Romantics rejected materialism and favored idealism
instead
Idealism understood that the ultimate reality was the mind,
the Spirit, or the Absolute and not materialism
Unfortunately Romantics agreed that the study of nature
was the responsibility of science and that Idealism was
concerned only with the upper story of arts and humanities
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009 Putting Religion in Its Place
Modern Forms of
Dualism
The Enlightenment is given
authority over the rational
world, composed of
material, objective and
scientific knowledge, (the
lower story or the public
sphere)
Romanticism was allowed
authority over religion,
morality, the arts and
humanities, (the upper
story or the private sphere)
This is a basic diagram of
Modern day dualism or
secularization
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Romanticism
Religion &
Humanities
Enlightenment
Science &
Reason
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
Descartes’ Secular
Dualism
17th Century Renee Descartes’
sharp distinction between mind
and matter – “I think, therefore
I am” intended as a positive
spiritual affirmation – meant to
defend the mind, to “prove the
existence of the human spirit “
Mind
Spirit,
Thought,
Emotion, Will
What survived was Descartes’
concept of a mechanical
universe .
Mind was placed into the upper
story where it was irrelevant to
material world known by
science.
With John Newton and the
discovery of gravity, nature,
matter came to be seen as a
huge machine governed by
natural laws
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Matter
A Mechanical,
Deterministic
Machine
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
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Nature now seen to be a machine, governed by natural laws
 Pictured to be like the gears of a clock
 There was no room for “the human soul or spirit”
 Crucial for religion but unnecessary for nature
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Science/nature seemed to be a better choice
 The religious wars of the 1500s saw Christians killing Christians
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Led to the conclusion of many that universal truths are not
“knowable in religion”
Gives rise to new philosophies like positivism, scientific
materialism, that grant science an exclusive on knowledge
(lower story)
Everything else is consigned to the upper story which is
private beliefs and cultural traditions
Church & Culture
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
Immanuel Kant
Nature is infallibly determined
in accordance with the laws of
nature
Freedom
The
Autonomous
Self
Puts freedom in the upper story
to accommodate the
“Romantics”
Man vs machine
Science with its clockwork
image becoming the enemy of
human values
Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives
birth to Romanticism – humans
are not part of the machine
Creation of universal (moral)
law was the function of God
now it is assumed to be the
function of the individual
human will
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Nature
Newtonian
World
Machine
009 Putting Religion in Its Place
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Kant puts freedom / autonomy in the upper
story
Autos = self, nomos = law
His ideal was to be influenced by nothing but
one’s own moral will.
He defines autonomy as being subject to only to
laws imposed on oneself by oneself
“The lower story is what we know; the upper
story is what we can’t help believing”
The lower story is publicly verifiable facts; the
upper story is socially constructed values
This is the modern dichotomy fact/value
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009 Putting Religion in Its Place
Today’s
Dichotomy
Darwinism offers a persuasive
explanation for the beginning of
life
Value
Socially
Constructed
Meanings
Naturalism is now a complete
and comprehensive system
The lower story is now without
the need for dependence on
the upper story
The upper story is only that
which is human subjectivity;
religion and morality are only
human ideas
Cultural patterns emerge
gradually over the course of
human evolution, arising by
naturalistic causes and lasting
only as long as they are
expedient for survival
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Fact
Publicly
Verifiable
Truth
009 Putting Religion in Its Place