One or Two

Seeing a World of Difference

Romans 1 for the Twenty-first Century

Peter Jones

Main Entry Editions, Escondido, CA

One or Two: Seeing a World of Difference

Romans 1 for the Twenty-first Century

© 2010 by Main Entry Editions

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations in books and critical reviews. For information, write Main Entry Editions, PO Box 416, Escondido, CA 92033-0416.

First digital edition: 2012

Published in the United States of America

Cover Design: Sarah Sisco

Manuscript Editor: Rebecca Clowney Jones

Digital typesetting: Nicholas Lamme

ISBN 13: 978-0-9746895-3-1

ISBN 10: 097468953X

Editor’s Note:

Bible translations are taken from the English Standard Version, unless otherwise indicated. Any parenthetical reference without book and chapter is from Romans 1. Biblical references use the briefest Chicago Manual of Style abbreviations. Most are clear, but several may be confusing. Jo is the abbreviation for Joshua, not Job, for example.

The usual preface for internet sites (http://www) has been eliminated (e.g. truthXchange.com), unless the webpage does not use the usual preface.

The author’s preference to capitalize pronouns referring to God but not those referring to Jesus is meant to emphasize the incarnation, not to evidence any lack of confidence in the deity of Jesus Christ.

Contents

Author's Note

Preface

1. Are You a One-ist or a Two-ist?

2. Apocalypse Now

3. The Church in Danger

4. Meet Paul

5. The Garden-Variety Lie

6. The Lie about God

7. The Truth about God

8. The Lie about Spirituality

9. The Truth about Spirituality

10. The Lie about Sexuality

11. The Truth about Sexuality

12. One or Two: The Stakes

13. Two-ism: Making a World of Difference

14. Jesus Joins One and Two

Study Questions

Author's Note

My reasons for writing this book, based on Paul’s text in Romans 1, are as follows:

- to be as biblical as possible while writing about the crisis of twenty-first century human culture;

- to frame the modern issues with biblical categories in order to name with accuracy the protagonists in our present struggle for truth and sanity in a world seduced by the Lie;

- to help non-Christian seekers come to understand the spiritual issues of life and the worldview they have adopted, consciously or unconsciously, and to consider the power of the biblical worldview of truth;

- to strengthen the faith of the rising generation of Christians (who have been born into a world increasingly hostile to Christian truth) by helping them see the coherence of a biblical Two-ist worldview, as well as understand the attraction of the coherence of the One-ist Lie;

- to show both lay and clerical believers the clear lines between One-ism and Two-ism, so that they can distinguish orthodoxy from heresy in the present Church, in order to resist with discernment the thoughts and practices of those “progressive evangelicals” whose teachings lead believers into pagan apostasy;

- to offer an approach for “worldview evangelism” that will open the mouths of believers intimidated by political correctness (and who rightly seek to avoid a moralistic version of the gospel), in order, God willing, to start a revival of gospel-centered, Two-ist witness in the lion’s den of One-ism;

- to oppose to the all-invasive contemporary, multi-cultural synthesis of modern discourse, in order to stimulate the recovery of an “antithesis” approach to reality, where the options of One-ism and Two-ism are clearly stated, and for a renaissance in antithesis preaching, antithesis scholarship, antithesis art, music, literature, science, law and commerce, to the glory of God, the Creator and Redeemer, who is blessed forever. Amen.

Preface

Your best friend is turning to Buddhism; your young nephew is confused about his sexuality; your wife is learning new spiritual techniques from a spiritual guide; you are beginning to wonder if Christianity is too restrictive. If these and other such issues are a concern to you, your friends or your loved ones, then this book is for you.

How you face such questions will be determined by your worldview—what you think when you’re not even thinking about it! Your worldview is shaped by your culture, and the culture we now live in is not the same as it was a generation or two ago. Now don’t worry. I’m not trying to take us back to the 1950s. This is not a book about nostalgia, but I want to speak especially to those who have never lived in a time when the spiritual atmosphere was any less foggy than it is now. I have lived through the revolution of spirituality that occurred in the West since the 1960s, and it is there that I start my story.

John Lennon, famous member of the Beatles rock band, accumulated phenomenal fame, riches and Eastern spiritual experience in his tragically shortened life. Since money couldn’t buy him love, he wrote to a famous TV preacher to ask what love really is. I knew John before he was asking that question. He was a school friend with whom I played both music and hooky in the 1950s at Quarry Bank High School for Boys in Liverpool, England. At age sixteen, we lost contact. At age twenty-three, in 1964, we both arrived in America, though on different planes (in both senses of the word). John would deeply influence modern culture. I would write about it.

After studying in the US for a decade, I married Rebecca Clowney and accepted a teaching job in France, where I lived for seventeen years with my growing family. When I returned to the US in 1991, culture shock knocked me flat. I had never seen or even read about such radical changes as those I saw. The “Christian” America of my 1960s student days had become not only post-Christian, but anti-Christian. When I first set foot on American soil, I discovered a nation so Christian I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Christian ministers could even play golf for free, and that’s the way it will be in heaven—I’m counting on it!

Seriously, the change from “Christian” America to “anti-Christian” America is the burning subject of this book. I feel like a historical artifact, someone who has seen these momentous events from their beginning to their contemporary fulfillment. How could America, the great sending nation of the missionary enterprise of the twentieth century, become the incubator and exporter of the most toxic anti-Christian ideology the modern world has ever seen—all in my lifetime? On the answer to this question hangs the survival of our faith and especially that of our children and grandchildren.

Perhaps I noticed cultural trends because I was not the proverbial “frog in the water.” Having left the French “frogs” behind, I was plunged into the scalding waters of the American melting pot, which smelled more like a witch's brew. In the providence of God, I noticed cultural changes that others are only now coming to recognize. The issues I saw in 1991 are growing in strength by the day. Who of us alive in the 1960s would have believed that the state of Massachusetts would sponsor tax-funded programs to teach twelve-year-old children specific techniques of homosexual sex? I don’t know that I would have believed it even in 1991, when I began my research and writing. But, this has happened.

The post-1960s generation can’t understand how revolutionary these changes are. The current situation is all they have ever known, so they assume that our times are normal and that our cultural lot is improving. The older generation, on the other hand, feels confusion and distress. They have lived through the “real American Revolution,” yet are often unable to articulate the nature of the change.

Western culture, often called Christendom, is being hijacked by a spiritual ideology that I call Neopaganism.[1] The irony is sumptuous. As a culture, we have largely freed ourselves of any restraining notions of God the Creator, but when we need civic pomposity, we claim to “hold these truths to be self-evident.” We recite our official documents of yesteryear, proclaiming that our “rights” (including the right to stick our finger in the Creator’s eye) are “endowed by the Creator.” This disjunction between our past and present creates the great moment for religious paganism to take political and social power. Christianity as a social force is on the decline. Now that Postmodernism has finished its blitzkrieg, people are hoping for a savior to clear the rubble and to reconstruct. Massive economic and environmental problems create fear and stimulate a search for global solutions.

Neopagans are the darling of a variety of movements. They lead the way in the “green” movement, in systems of wealth distribution, in planetary programs for social justice, in solutions to supposedly man-made global warming, in interfaith conferences, in the normalization of all sexual expressions, and in the promotion of globalist theories through the United Nations (UN). Kernels of truth in these theories give politicians and power brokers an excuse to seize geopolitical power.

I am not alone in thinking this to be a crucial hour. Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, whose wisdom I greatly respect, said in December 2009:

The freedom to conduct Christian ministry according to Christian conviction [in America] is being subverted and denied before our eyes…The threats to our religious liberties are immediate and urgent… the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage, and religious liberty are very much in danger at this very moment.”[2]

We have never seen times like this in the United States of America or in the West in general. In the 1950s, the headmaster of my state school in Liverpool, England began every day in the school assembly with a Bible reading and a prayer. In those years, on US soil, the very Christian Moody Science films were disseminated in schools and in the military, and were often aired on television. Times have changed. To celebrate Thanksgiving (2009), National Public Radio read President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation—with every mention of God expunged! Disney’s Fairies Franchise, aimed at young girls, takes “independence” (from the Creator) to another level. They suggest that when kids ask, "Why do leaves turn color?" or "Why are there dew drops?" their parents should answer: "The fairies did it!”

How Is the Church Faring?

Large sections of the Christian Church, intimidated by this religiously pagan agenda, are responding in ways that endanger a clear pronouncement of the gospel. Christians can begin to believe that the culture’s rejection of the Church is due not to the timeless confrontation between God’s power and worldly power, but to an overly narrow understanding of the gospel. This attack on the Church comes from the inside. The search for cultural approval has led some Christians to modify both their message and their behavior. They criticize the Church for having been focused on individual salvation at the expense of social justice. This faulty emphasis on sin, repentance and the cross made them forget that God’s gospel of love for the world involves the creation of a this-worldly kingdom that will eliminate poverty, disease and war. They believe that God should not be known so much through the revelation of biblical truth or through His work of vicarious atonement, as through human love and mystical experience. It sounds good, especially to Christians who may indeed have fallen prey to God’s critique of being “arrogant, overfed, and unconcerned” (Ez 16:49, NIV). Defining spirituality as a combination of social justice and mysticism, however, constitutes the essence of the new religious paganism.

If you weren’t around to see the revolution, you might attribute such changes to generational progression. The revolutionaries, however, knew something major was afoot. In 1965 Barry Maguire’s song, Eve of Destruction, hit the top of the charts. David Horowitz and Peter Collier (Berkeley Students for a Democratic Society leaders) later wrote a book about the 1960s entitled Destructive Generation. Bob Dylan caught the “eschatological” character of the times in his 1963 song, The Times, They Are A’Changin:

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land,

And don’t criticize what you can’t understand.

Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.

Your old road is rapidly agin’.

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand,

For the times, they are a-changin’.

This was, as others said, “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”

After centuries of a worldview canopy of biblical Two-ism (God is outside His creation), the West is rushing headlong into the brave “new” world of pagan One-ism (God is the creation). As the New Spirituality eagerly resuscitates the ancient words of pagan philosophers and priests, Christians must consider the ancient wisdom of the apostle Paul, which turned the world upside down. Paul’s gospel shook emperors from their thrones, brought adulterers like Augustine to their knees in repentance and ended the mad dash to generalized sexual perversion and moral decay. If there is any hope for us in the twenty-first century, gorged as we are on materialism, One-ist pagan spiritualities, endless sensual fantasies and cock-eyed global utopian illusions, the old rabbi must speak to us again.

If you have felt the force of this “new” thinking, this book is for you, because Paul’s One-ism and Two-ism will bring clarity to your situation. Without such penetrating analysis, we cannot wisely answer questions posed by our contemporaries. The light offered by the apostle will show that the real issue roiling behind every debate about public policy, personal morality, spirituality, religious truth or the Church’s strategy and message is a very simple question: Is reality One or Two? Once you understand this question and answer it, you will start “seeing a world of difference.”

[1]. See my books, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back (1992) and Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America (1997).

[2]. See albertmohler.com/2009/11/23/why-i-signed-the-manhattan-declaration.

Part 1

A Church in Need of Romans 1

Chapter 1

“They exchanged the Truth for the Lie…” —Paul, Romans 1:25

Are You a One-ist or a Two-ist?

One and Two refer to two antithetical worldviews—One-ism or Two-ism. The “ism” part makes the word into a distinctive system, or theory. So One-ism is the theory of oneness. Two-ism is the theory of twoness. Now, while I take responsibility for coining these terms, I take no credit for inventing the meanings they convey.

One-ism believes that “all is one” and shares the same essential nature. Theologians use the term “consubstantiality.” As you probably know, “con” means “with” in Latin, and you know what “substantial” means — “substance” or “essence.” In One-ism, everything shares the same essence. In a word, everything is a piece of the divine.

Two-ism believes that while all of creation shares a certain essence (everything apart from God is created), the Creator of nature, namely God, is a completely different being, whose will determines the nature and function of all created things.

Everything you do and think is affected by how you answer the question, “Are you a One-ist or a Two-ist?” The apostle Paul clearly describes these two options (and there are only two) in one of the most staggeringly simple and ideologically profound verses of the Bible: “They exchanged the truth about God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen” (Rom 1:25). Here Paul identifies only two possible kinds of worship: worship of creation or worship of the Creator. Behind each is a consistently worked out, timeless worldview: either One-ism or Two-ism. Paul calls One-ism “the Lie,” and Two-ism “the Truth.” All humanity falls into one category or the other. There is no third way. This is Paul’s surprising One-Two punch, which serves as the inspiration and structural outline for the following pages. I have written this way because Paul, who wrote in the first century, speaks in an oddly direct fashion to those of us living in the twenty-first. His wisdom will help dissipate our cloud of confusion.

I do not expect the message of this book to receive praise from all lips. Its key argument contradicts what many people today consider to be true.

Regressive or Progressive?

Politicians hold out the hope of transformation and an improved society. The truth we need is progressive—as today’s newspeak phrase, “going forward,” would suggest. Error is “regressive” and “backward looking.” Old news is bad news. Futurists boldly believe they are creating a new worldview. The Futurist website Zeitgeist, for example, declares: “The human value system…must be updated and changed through education and thoughtful introspection….[and] the environment surrounding that value system must change to support the new worldview.” Addressing gay leaders in the White House in 2009, President Obama used his presidential bully pulpit to declare that the foes of homosexuality are holding on to “worn arguments and old attitudes.”

Christians must not allow self-identified futurists and progressives to lay claim to truth, be they presidents, professors or pastors. It is all spin. To be sure, history changes and technology develops. The twenty-first century is “new” relative to the twentieth century, just as the moment I am typing this sentence is “new” relative to the moment I typed the last sentence. That is what time does—it creates new events that become history! We are facing new opportunities and problems, especially those of globalism and technology. How do we organize ourselves in a world that communicates instantly from any point on the globe, even from space? What unique applications of ethical principles should be applied to cloning, stem-cell research or euthanasia? We must use our minds creatively and wisely to find intelligent responses to these new questions.

But a “new worldview”? Although many of our practical and technical problems are new, the only worldview solutions on offer are very old. To call a belief system “progressive” or “regressive” is a “spin zone,” obscuring the truth. Be assured. The spin stops here!

Just as Christianity makes no bones about going backwards to Paul, to Jesus and even to Moses’ account of the creation of man, contemporary progressive thinking also goes backwards, appealing to the ancient Lie, which consists of notions popular thousands of years ago. The “new” spiritualists, who argue most strenuously for biological and spiritual evolution, exhort their disciples to return to the spirituality of the past for morality and wisdom. Among themselves, intellectual pagan One-ists call themselves “traditionalists” (see chapter 2). Some researchers believe that science is poised to bring a new age of understanding, not through new texts, but through old ones, such as the ancient Gnostic Hermetica, the medieval Kabbalist Zohar or the fifth century BC Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita. Contemporary gurus (who teach methods of relaxation, meditation and altered states of consciousness to West Coast yuppies in sweet-smelling gyms on Sunset Boulevard) also take their customers back to the Bhagavad Gita, while Western gurus (who teach oneness with nature for the sake of ecological survival) find their models of spirituality in the ancient nature worship of Mayan, Aztec, Incan and North American Indian peoples. Are these also “worn arguments and old attitudes”? If so, what does “progressive” mean?

In spite of claims that humanity is ever evolving to higher stages of consciousness, the spiritual options practiced with such zeal in the twenty-first century have been known forever. Let’s be honest. There is nothing new. Thousands of years ago an ancient text recognized this fact. The author of the Book of Ecclesiastes says:

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. (Eccl 1:9–10)

Seeing today’s utopian futurists in this ancient text brings them down to size. Solomon the Wise testifies against the reckless self-confidence that boasts “we can work it out." If even the Beatles couldn’t, why should we succeed?

There is nothing wrong with going backwards. Everyone does it. But here is something (sort of) new. According to Paul, you don’t need a three-inch thick phone book to access the inventory of spiritual possibilities. Many people believe there are as many different ways to enlightenment as there are days in the year. In fact, there are only two, and they have been around forever. That has been the truth since the world began, and it will remain the truth until God steps in to put an end to our arrogance.

The New Rome

Not only does everyone appeal to the past, our times quite resemble the old days of the apostle Paul. Were the rabbi to land at Dulles International Airport and take a tour of Washington D.C., he would find many similarities to the pagan Roman Empire, in which he wrote to the small community of Christians in the capital city. I elaborated on this parallel in a previous book, Capturing the Pagan Mind (2003), which readers can consult at their leisure. Google has millions of references to America as the "New Rome." Consider these facts:

- Rome was invaded by the religions of the East, so that pagan syncretism and religious tolerance produced in the Roman Empire, in the words of one historian, a common, interfaith world religion;

- Rome was sports- and entertainment-mad, and choking on sexual excess;

- Rome dominated the civilized world politically and created a global empire.

As I look at modern culture imploding around us, I am reminded of Italian Frederico Fellini’s x-rated Satyricon, the 1969 sexual extravaganza loosely based on the story of a Roman courtier at the time of Nero (AD 37–68). I did not watch the film, but the story recounts bawdy episodes of Roman debauchery, including prostitution orgies, homosexual and hermaphrodite trysts, gay marriage and pedophilia. Such parties occurred at the precise time when Christians were being burned on poles to light up Nero’s garden soirées, and when the apostle Paul was beheaded for (among other things) writing Romans chapter 1. At that same time, Nero married two homosexual lovers—Pythagoras, to whom he acted as a wife, and Sporus (whom he had castrated and made empress), to whom he related as a husband. Was Paul’s opposition to homosexuality based on “worn arguments and old attitudes”? If so, then Nero’s view of sexuality was just as worn and old, since it was typical of the ancient pagan world.

A few years after Paul’s death in AD 66, Tacitus, the Roman historian, described Christians as “haters of humanity,” even though Christians were rescuing cast-off newborns. They were “haters” (perhaps more accurately “hated”) because they refused to go along with the cruelty and the perversions of the day, justified back then as part of the pax romana, for the common good. So here we are, in 2010, with the world turned on its head. Even in 1969, few would have dreamed that such ancient perversions, recaptured by voyeuristic Hollywood to feed the culture’s newly-awakened fantasies, would become culturally accepted realities and even be protected from criticism by the new “hate crimes” law of the land—all for the common good!

Rome was pagan and then was Christianized, while America was “Christian” and now is becoming pagan. A worldview understanding of recent changes can be greatly enriched in light of the long, historical perspective we get when we hear what Paul, an ancient Roman citizen, a Jewish rabbi and a Christian apostle, has to say to us today. Paul gives us categories to understand our own culture and to engage as wise Christians in the struggle for truth.

Of Dreams and Revolutions

The cultural revolution I have lived through is unlike anything in modern Western history except, perhaps, the French Revolution, when a civilization, influenced by a small minority, rejected its religious and philosophical roots to adopt an ideology antithetically opposed to all it had known. From its founding until the 1960s, American culture was defined by patriarchal, heterosexual and Judeo-Christian presuppositions. In one generation, this worldview has been largely replaced by a radically egalitarian, omnigendered, pansexual, multi-religious (and One-ist) belief system that has turned our contemporary world upside down.

There was another revolutionary time like ours. In AD 312 the pagan Roman Empire converted to the Christian Faith under Constantine, turning away from deeply ingrained polytheism and widespread sexual license in order to adopt (imperfectly, to be sure) biblical ways and standards. Constantine’s nephew, affectionately known as “Julian the Apostate,” later tried to promote a revolutionary return to paganism, eliminating Christians from teaching and military service and promoting the official worship of Isis, goddess of magic and the underworld.

Julian failed. His famous last words in AD 360, as he finally submitted to Jesus, were: “You have conquered, Galilean.” Ironically, the real American Revolution (in the 1960s, not the one in 1776) returns us to the pagan empire Julian so desperately wanted to restore. Julian’s wish is being fulfilled today.

Julian the Apostate’s Last Laugh?

Richard Noll, an unbelieving Harvard researcher, wrote two books about Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychologist (1875–1961) and disciple of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Jung rejected the Lutheran Christianity of his youth and developed spiritual but anti-Christian psychological theories about the unconscious self that have thoroughly infiltrated our modern world. Even seminaries (liberal and not-so-liberal) have been teaching Jung as the great source of hope for spiritual counseling. Noll, however, seeking a historic figure whose influence would parallel that of Jung, chose Julian the Apostate. You may never have heard of Jung, but this is what Noll says, with no religious agenda:

Jung ranks with the Roman emperor, Julian the Apostate, as one who significantly undermined orthodox Christianity and restored the polytheism of the Hellenistic world in Western civilization. I realize that this is quite an incautious statement…[but] for a variety of historical and technological factors—modern mass media being the most important—Jung has succeeded where Julian failed…[the result is that] the patriarchal monotheism of the orthodox Judeo-Christian faiths has all but collapsed, and filling the void, we find Protestants, Catholics and Jews adopting alternative, syncretistic belief systems.[1]

An unbelieving Harvard researcher has understood that in one generation the Lie of paganism has established itself as “Christian” Truth. This upheaval is not normal history; the revolution was orchestrated.

Cultural Leaders

Carl Jung played a major role in the cultural upheaval. An ex/anti-Christian, he hawked his occult spiritual wares as “scientific psychology” and deeply influenced our culture’s leaders (e.g., George Lucas and his Star Wars trilogy). Jung was determined to undermine the Christian faith on which so many unthinkingly depended. While he was busy in the academic world, my ex-friend John Lennon and the Beatles (“more popular in the entire planet than Jesus”) taught millions that drugs and “imagination” could produce a utopian world without religion but with peace and justice for all.

One man in the Sixties who joined with the Beatles in their approach exemplifies the radical nature of the revolution. Timothy Leary proclaimed to the hippie generation: “Our aim is to transform American society spiritually and have thirty million Americans taking LSD.” His mantra was “turn on, tune in and drop out and reject the values of your parents.” He believed that “to use your head you have to go out of your mind.” “Turning on” was accompanied by sexual license and public nudity. “If it moves, fondle it” and “If you’ve got it, flaunt it” became the “liberating” mantras of sexual freedom. Leary advocated open rejection of Christianity. “Good for Eve who stood up for herself and took the fruit. Forget it, Jehovah. Get back in your squad car and go back to headquarters.” Leary’s “delusional hope for radical change” ended like all utopian fantasies. He could only face the reality of death by smoking marijuana and sucking on balloons filled with laughing gas. Appropriately, in 1997, some of his disciples, the Heaven’s Gate cult of Rancho Santa Fe, CA (not far from my home) sought to join O’Leary’s ashes, already in space, by committing mass suicide to get on the Hale Bopp comet! But I digress…

Media Influence

The information class has enormous social powers of influence. From the moment the TV became a dominant factor in our culture (I remember that, too), the all-powerful nabobs of the news and the sirens of the screen have promoted their ideology of moral, sexual and philosophical relativism. This relativism is especially strong in the media and on university campuses:

- In a 2008 poll, only six percent of the national press corps considered themselves conservatives.

- In 2004 The Boston Globe described campus leftism as “a Left Wing monopoly” that is “radical, aggressive and deeply intolerant.”[2]

The ideology of the media and academia was, for a time, driven by anti-Christian secular humanism. Now it is mostly driven by anti-Christian, all-inclusive pagan One-ism. The slant of the press and Hollywood, and the control of the campus by politically correct feminist multiculturalists are well-documented. So also is the dumbing-down of a population fed on evocative video images unaware of the grand ideas of the past. You can graduate from most universities without one credit in American History. Western Civilization courses, if they exist, have been rewritten to exclude the influence of dead, white, male chauvinists. Two generations of students have already drunk from this fountain of anti-knowledge.

The precursors of this ideology studied the “science” of population manipulation. Edward L. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud (Jung’s mentor), became an expert in collective mind control. Basing his theories on his uncle’s notion of “the unconscious,” Bernays believed that the true masters of society are not politicians but those who control information. His theories have proven true. Historically, it might be better to say that both Jung and Freud succeeded where Julian failed.

The Sixties: Dream Come True?

Thirty million Americans are not taking LSD, but they are practicing yoga. One in five American women is training to be a yoga instructor, according to the Department of Labor’s figures for 2009. Also, the broader goal of transforming American spirituality by rejecting Christianity, ridding society of “religion,” and finding sexual and spiritual liberation has come true.

One event illustrates such progress in transforming both sexual and religious norms. At the invitation of the President-Elect Obama, an openly homosexual bishop prayed at the Presidential inaugural ceremonies. This choice reflected the new administration’s acceptance of homosexual behavior, while the bishop used the limelight to announce biblical apostasy. He declared that his prayer would not be Christian, because he was “horrified” at how “specifically and aggressively Christian” previous inaugural prayers had been. With Interfaith pastoral tact, Gene Robinson prayed to the “God of our many understandings.”

In all Christian history, there has never been an openly homosexual bishop—until the Year of our Lord (now called Common Era, the “Lord” having been retired to the dust bin of history) 2003, when Robinson was consecrated. Not only is Robinson not a heterosexual bishop; he is not a Christian bishop. In an act of public defiance of the God of the Bible (the canonical book of his Church, which he had sworn to uphold), this self-affirming syncretist prayed to the gods of all religions and peoples.

And so, the double-edged sword of polysexuality and polytheism (Interfaith) slashes at the cultural and religious roots of our society. Don’t be surprised at this terrible twosome. Once more, Jung has succeeded where Julian the Apostate failed. Jung’s ideal religion of the future included both the acceptance by Christianity of all other religions and the practice of homosexuality.

Polysexuality

On April 29, 2009, the US House of Representatives passed its “hate crimes” bill, making drag queens and kings, transgenders, crossdressers, exhibitionists, voyeurists, those who enjoy various fetishes (oral, anal or group sex, sadomasochistic leather bondage sex, necrophilia, incest and bestiality), lesbians, gay men, pansexuals and pedophiles, into a federally protected class under civil rights laws—as they were in the ancient pagan world.[3] Even an amendment to exclude pedophiles from these protected classes was voted down. The bill is needed, so its text claims, to deal with “a serious national problem” (hate crimes against people in these categories).

The truth is, in a nation of three hundred million inhabitants, there is no nationwide epidemic of hate against LGBT individuals. FBI hate crime statistics for 2007 cite 16,929 murders in the US, of which five were classified as motivated by bias against sexual orientation. Of course, that is five too many, but how many of the remaining 16,924 murders were not caused by hate? This bill, claiming to deal with an “epidemic” of hate crimes, actually lays a legal foundation for the criminalization of a particular kind of hate speech. Jewish commentator, Don Feder, says that the real goal of the homosexual movement is to “use the state to crush dissent.” Any pastor, youth leader, theologian or ordinary Christian believer who teaches what the Bible says about normative heterosexuality over against abnormal sexual practices, would then be placed outside the law. By the same token, the bill gives free rein to the approval of the ideological speech and practice of sexual perversion, which will be taught in schools, as early as kindergarten. In the wings await the triads (ménage à trois), the quads, and the quints, who are already seeking the legalization of their polyamorous conjugal arrangements.

Such events as the outlandish gay parades in San Francisco are legalized by this bill. The California Senate Education Committee passed legislation designating May 22nd as Harvey Milk Day. The California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers testified in favor of the bill. How drastically things have changed since my boyhood in England, when head teachers read the Bible aloud and prayed at the beginning of a school day.

Polytheism

England is not immune from similar changes, though Christianity is still its official religion, since the Queen is head of the church, and Parliament names bishops. In spite of this, British culture, like American culture, is post-Christian, even anti-Christian. In England:

- In 2008 Caroline Petrie, an experienced Community Nurse, was suspended for praying with an elderly patient;

- An experienced foster mother, having previously housed eighty parentless children, was struck off the official register, and her only means of support was denied, for allowing a Muslim girl in her care to convert to Christianity. She had tried to discourage the girl, offered alternatives, tried to find places for her to practice the faith of her birth, but all to no avail. The girl insisted on becoming a Christian, and the foster mother lost her job;

- Adoption agencies, nurses, firemen, registrars of clinics, elderly care homes, and foster parents in “Christian” Britain are being punished for Christian beliefs. Will the English punish their Queen for being “Defender of the Faith”?

The 1960s goals have largely succeeded, but they have created a moral and social vacuum into which is rushing a One-ist spirituality more powerful than most of us can imagine.

You may find the next chapter, which deals with the full revelation of paganism, discouraging, but please bear with me. It is a necessary part of understanding how to move forward in faith and hope with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

[1]. Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York: Random House, 1997), xv.

[2]. By “Left Wing,” I am not speaking so much of politics as of ideology.

[3]. I realize that putting these horrors in writing may offend you. This is not my intent. I am trying to expose such behavior, because our own children and grandchildren are affected by it. I beg you to understand my motivations.

Chapter 2

“You will be like God.” —The serpent, Genesis 3:5

"I am uncreated, as old as God" —Harold Bloom

Apocalypse Now

The final scene of the acclaimed film, Apocalypse Now, depicts a machete massacre of both the crazed Colonel Kurtz (US Special Forces soldier gone rogue) and of a sacrificial cow. The scene captures the violent, ideological and spiritual crisis of the 1960s revolution, including the confrontation of Western “Christian” capitalism with Eastern native Marxism.

“Apocalypse” means “revelation” or “unveiling.” The 1960s began a pagan apocalypse that shredded what sociologist Peter Berger calls the “sacred canopy” of our culture, namely its presuppositions and its worldview. The canopy of Christian “Two-ism” is in tatters and a new canopy of pagan One-ism is stretching over our culture. This day of pagan revelation was foretold by some strange seers.

Prophecies of a Pagan Revival

I sensed what was happening when I entitled a 1997 book Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America. But the speed of the change from a Christian or secular humanist culture into a post-Christian, anti-Christian, spiritually pagan one took me by surprise. Events were more bizarre than I imagined, as if a scenario were being played from a script. In fact, predictions were numerous that pagan, esoteric religion would bloom in the twenty-first century. British sociologist, Christopher Partridge, predicted “the re-enchantment of the West.” Others declared the revival of the Perennial Philosophy or the Old Religion.

Nineteenth Century: The eccentric German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) predicted that the “death of God” would become common belief. His replacement candidate for the divine position was Superman (Übermensch)—the free, new man, whose will to power nothing could obstruct. Nietzsche’s Superman was modeled on the masculine idol of classical Greece—brave in battle, beautiful in form, and homosexual by choice. Nietzsche’s ideal recalls the eighteenth-century theosophist Franz von Baader, who prophesied the return of the “original androgyne” and of an end-time Sodom and Gomorrah. In his day, Nietzsche was considered a lunatic and died, insane, in the arms of his doting sister. His ravings are now received as the lucid essence of revived pagan theology, spirituality and sexuality.

1920s: Some twenty years after Nietzsche’s death, Jessie Weston, author of eleven books on the Grail legend (the mystical human quest for divine self-realization), predicted a day when this mystery would be revealed.

1930s: Freemason Foster Bailey predicted that the Piscean Age would give way to the Age of Aquarius, bringing a day of “restoration of the mysteries” and the “externalization of that superb and sublime inner process of awakening.” A Grand Master would re-establish the Mysteries and blend the “inner” with the “outer” in a great consummation. The Masonic order would fulfill its true destiny. Bailey echoed revelations received by his wife, Alice, from her Tibetan Master, a spirit guide, that the world would be saved through the UN.

1950s: Carl Gustav Jung, a modern Gnostic, predicted that the West would produce a yoga based on Christianity, beginning a “new spiritual epoch” in the history of the West. An Eastern reinterpretation of Christianity would produce a self-realizing “spirituality” through yogic techniques (of which Jung was an expert).

1970s: Buddhists looked to a future moment of general enlightenment. The first Western Buddhist Teachers’ Conference met in Dharamsala, India to plan the global transmission of Buddhist teaching.

The Pagan Underbelly of Western Religious History

Pagan spirituality has deep roots in Western culture. The predictions above foresaw the green shoots now appearing in the spring of a new pagan era.

Though few knew to what he was referring, the nineteenth century British playwright, George Bernard Shaw, a notable opponent of Christianity, ambiguously affirmed, “there is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.” What is this “one religion” that was clearly not Christianity? Though pagan spirituality is secretive, it is sometimes known by its initiates as the religio perennis, the “eternal religion.” Some New Agers described the Age of Pisces (the Christian era) as a two-thousand-year interlude between pre-Christian paganism and the pagan Age of Aquarius. Now the interlude is over, and the true religion will reign once more. This one, secretive religion has had many names. You will find a few (of the hundreds that exist) listed in the following chart:

Movement or Sect

Synonymous Term of Description

Isis Worship

True Religion, Veiled in Deep Silence

Gnosticism

The Great Mystery, Sacred Secret, the religion in which all men agree

Free Masonry

Ancient Universal Mysteries, Sacred Secret, The religion in which all men agree

Theosophy (Madame Helena Blavatsky)

The Secret Doctrine, The Secret Teaching of All the Ages

Theosophy (Alice Bailey)

The Mystery of the Ages, hid from the beginning

Wicca

The Old Wisdom (“as above, so below” – phrase also in Freemasonry, Gnosticism and Sufism)

Buddhism

Realization of True, Ultimate Reality, The Ultimate Truth, The Fourfold Path

Jungian Transpersonal Psychology

Collective Unconscious, Monomyth, Primordial Wholeness

Sufism

Awakening to the “unmanifest or unseen world (al-ghayb)."

The Perennial Philosophy (Gottfried Leibniz)

Unitive knowledge of God

Forgotten Truth (Huston Smith)

The Primordial Tradition

The Eternal Script, Maharishi

The text of the Hindu Veda

Magick

Conscious evolution through directing energy

The Perennialist School (Frithjof Schuon)

God is One and Universal; all religions are one.

I will expand on one example: The Perennial Philosophy, a term coined by Gottfried Leibniz a seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher. In his book, The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley defines the term as belief in a divine Reality substantial to all things. In the soul he sees something identical with the divine, a notion found in the lore of all primitive peoples and in every higher religion.

Peter Occhiogrosso, author of The Joy of Sects, a six-hundred page encyclopedia of world religions, argues that the Perennial Philosophy is like an underground well that feeds each religious stream. Pagan mysticism holds all religions together in a way that those sailing on the surface may not realize. Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998), author of The Transcendent Unity of Religions, was an exponent of the religio perennis and a chief representative of the Perennialist School. For him, God is One and universal, and all religions are one, including all variations of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths, as well as Asian religions and indigenous schools of thought. If all streams come from the great river of truth, everyone can drink from that “living water.”

Many thinkers have been strongly influenced by the Perennial Philosophy. Joseph Campbell, popular mythologist and guru to George Lucas, associates it with the basic pagan myth. Huston Smith, the great religious syncretist, admits that Huxley’s book, The Perennial Philosophy, converted him from secular humanism to mysticism. Stanislav Grof, a modern transpersonal psychologist, associates the book with mystical or paranormal states that he finds in North American, Mexican and South American shamanism; in Vipassana, Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism; in Hindu Siddha Yoga and Tantra; and, in the mysticism of the Christian Benedictine order. Bishop Stephan Hoeller, of the Ecclesia Gnostica of Los Angeles, identifies the Perennial Philosophy with the basic defining notions of ancient and modern Gnosticism.

Perhaps the most surprising proponent of this philosophy is Prince Charles, of the British royal family. In 2006 he spoke at a conference, "Tradition and Modernity," sponsored by Sacred Web Journal, dedicated to applying Traditional first principles to the modern world. By “Tradition,” Charles means the Perennial Philosophy. the Prince is a patron of the Temenos Academy, which “has long been committed to the Perennial Philosophy” and has published books by the English witch, Caitlin Matthews, author of Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom (in which she predicts the coming of the Sophianic Millennium).

“Traditionalists,” argues Charles, are not unhappily stuck in the past, but defend it because “in the pre-modern world all civilizations were marked by the presence of the sacred.” Charles believes that the Perennial Philosophy will restore the wisdom of ancient pagan religions to our spiritually starved world. He specifically admires Jewish Kaballah and the mysticism of the Bushmen of Botswana. Only this great Tradition, says Charles, will solve “the environmental crisis of the twenty-first century.”[1]

The terms I’ve discussed in this section evoke a tradition of divine gnosis or secret knowledge, communicated through a line of special individuals. This secret knowledge, however, is the essence of what Paul calls the Lie, which makes man divine and denies a transcendent Creator. It is the same lie as that first spoken by the Serpent in the Garden: “You will be like God.”

The Great Coming Out Party

The only novel aspect of this mystical “going within” is that it is coming out— into the public square. The hidden esoteric tradition, once known only to initiates as “the one true religion,” has arrived at a moment of open revelation, to provide the principle of the unity of all the religions, as many predicted.

Today, everyone is out of the closet, not just homosexuals, lesbians, crossdressers and transgenders. Porn addicts show no shame. Graphic reports of sexual oddities sneak into the evening news. Oprah shamelessly attacks the God of her Christian past, and talk show host David Letterman jokingly denies his interest in sex with monkeys, while admitting his adultery with female members of his staff. Radical feminists demand that their sisters be “sinarticulate,” that they “liberate the inner slut” and “re-establish the consciousness of the Sacred Prostitute.” The only taboo is taboo itself. The veil has been lifted, and a bright future beckons.

Lauren Artress, a “Christian” priestess at Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, knows a sure-fire route to futuristic spiritual life. Through her friend Jean Houston (Hillary Clinton’s channeler in the White House), Artress discovered the labyrinth. This circular maze was used in pagan Greek, Egyptian, American Indian (the Medicine Wheel) and Hindu Tantric traditions. Walking the labyrinth helped Artress lose track of direction and of the outside world, and she found her mind quieted for mystical contemplation and a feeling of wholeness. She believes this mysticism will infuse Christianity with power for our global world of transformed human beings. She states on the Grace Cathedral website that “the veil of mystery that hangs over [the labyrinth] can now be lifted…we are rediscovering a long-forgotten mystical tradition that is insisting to be reborn.” The veil has also been lifted from Tantric yoga. A book entitled, Lifting the Veil: Practical Kabbalah with Kundalini Yoga (1991), proposes masturbatory Tantric sex as the way to spiritual liberation.

For Rabbi Yehuda Berg, the secret wisdom of Kabbalah, hidden for centuries, is now revealed for a society fraught with social and spiritual problems. Human transition inspires many “progressive” spiritual circles. Mysteries, no longer celebrated in secret, are, like Kaballah, available to all.

Prophecies Fulfilled

By the end of the twentieth century, the predictions I cited above had been more than fulfilled.

Nietzsche’s prediction came true in the 1960s, when seminaries taught the Death of God as the victory of secular humanism. Of course, the only god who “died” was the one Nietzsche railed against—the God of the Bible, the transcendent Creator. The “god within,” the androgynous Übermensch, was alive and kicking. In 1974 David Miller, a Death of God theologian, triumphantly predicted that the death of God would bring about the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.

The Age of Aquarius, serenaded by Dylan and other 1960s bards, slipped into the party on the coattails of Eastern mysticism. The Freemason, Henry C. Clausen, states:

Today we are at the threshold of a new era. All signs point to this fact… We look toward a transformation into a New Age using, however, the insight and wisdom of the ancient mystic. This new world view is emerging because there has been a recent correlation between modern physics and the mysticism of Eastern religions.[2]

The Holy Grail predictions were fulfilled in Dan Brown’s planetary phenomenon, The DaVinci Code, and Jung’s foresight about yoga has long ago been proven accurate. Fifteen thousand internet sites advertise yoga programs in New York. Attendance at yoga classes has increased exponentially. Spending on yoga classes increased from thirty million dollars in 2005 to three billion dollars in 2008, and some yoga programs are covered by welfare. In 2005 the national Christians Practicing Yoga network was launched, and Yoga for Christians hit the bookstores. Reverend Alan Jones, a Jungian who is Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, finds a new form of Christianity based on the wisdom that emerges from the practice of yoga.

Buddhist hopes for the spread of the Dharma have also been realized. East and West have merged, as hippies went east to Katmandu and gurus came west to Wasco County, Oregon (where Osho Rajneesh set up his compound and parked his Rolls Royces). Who said Buddhists do not proselytize? By the 1990s, the Dharma had created Bhuddist categories in the bookstores of the New World. Sales of Buddhist books increased thirty-five percent in 2006. JuBu books (for Jews becoming Buddhists) are now a separate category. The West throws upon its doors, at taxpayer expense, to the Dalai Lama in eager anticipation of his “innocuous” lectures on “peace.” Behind the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s façade as a sensitive, democratic, enlightened man of the world, stands a religious figure who believes in supernatural powers and occult practices by which to exercise influence on social and political events, for the sake of a worldwide pagan agenda.

More to Come

Mystical Jewish Kabbalah is solving all Madonna’s social and spiritual problems. Well, maybe not all. Her gorgeous twenty-two-year-old Brazilian boytoy, Jesus Luz, may have left the fading senior megastar before this book goes to press. Witches and radical feminists announce the imminent second coming of the Goddess and her Sophianic Millennium. Spiritual homosexuals announce an omnigendered, eschatological Sodom. Spiritualists (perhaps disappointed by Aquarius) await December 21, 2012, when the Mayan calendar predicts that the next cycle of rebirth, renewal and resurrection will raise humanity to higher levels of animistic enlightenment. “Christian” Emergents speak of a Deep Shift (Brian McLaren) or The Great Emergence (Phyllis Tickle), when a modified Christian gospel will emerge as part of the pagan program of spirituality, social justice and human unity. Less “Christian” religionists await the Global Shift in human consciousness, a “new alignment” based on Quantum Spirituality. On December 28, 2009, the Right Worshipful Tom Sturgeon of the Masons declared that the secret ritual would be published for “the greater good.” Apocalyptic Muslims anticipate the coming of their savior, the Māhdī. Apocalyptic Buddhists and Theosophists believe Maitreya, their Messiah, has descended from the Himalayas and has taken up residence in the Indian-Pakistani community of London, where he remains, for the moment, incognito.

From 2001 to 2008, the number of publicly identified Wiccans and Neopagans has more than doubled. They now hold academic seminars sanctioned by the American Academy of Religion. During the 2009 MTV music video awards, actor Jack Black urged the audience to join hands and pray to “dear, dark lord Satan.” In 2009 Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book was finally published, after seventy years locked in a family vault. It reveals Jung’s interest in séances, astrology and witchcraft. Jungian psychology may finally be openly practiced as paranormal/occult shamanism.

The Present: A New Pagan Era

Esoteric spirituality of all kinds is available to all. You know some of these terms: A Course in Miracles, Alchemy, American Indian Vision Quest, Ancient Mythology, Arkashic Record, Aryuvedic Medicine, Astrology, Bahá'í Unity, Buddhism, Buddhist/Christian Dialogue, Chakras, Channeling, Christian Monastic Mysticism, Crystals, Divination, Dream Work, Druidism, Eastern Meditation, Eckankar (soul travel), Ecofeminism, Enneagram, EST, Feng Shui, Gnosticism (ancient and modern), Goddess worship, Hare Krishna, Hermeticism, Higher Self, Hinduism, Holism, Human Potential Movement, Hypnosis, I Ching, Iridology, Jungian Transpersonal Psychology, Kabbalah, Karma, Mandalas, Mantras, Mind-altering drugs, Neopaganism, Numerology, Occult, Pantheism, Paranormal, Parapsychology, Past Life Regressions, Reiki, Reincarnation, Religious Syncretism, Rolfing, Sacred Technologies, Santeria, Scientology, Shamanism, Sufism, T’ai Chi, Tantrism, Tarot Cards, Teilhardism, Theosophy, Therapeutic Touch, Tikkun, Transcendental Meditation, Ufology, Urantia Book, Visualization, Wicca, Yoga, Zen.

The list could be much longer, including, for example, all the interpretations about Jesus. But I will spare you.

The worldview clash is clear—the Revealed Religion of the Bible against the occultist Perennial Philosophy of religious naturalism. Biblical Two-ism clashes with esoteric spirituality, which claims both the democratic right to influence public policy and the ideological right to silence the traditional view as “hate speech.”

In primitive cultures, Paganism has been practiced for millennia in its animist/spiritist forms. Its more subtle but more virulent form is perhaps found in the US, where it has been spruced up and ingeniously promoted by intellectuals and civic leaders with a fully developed ideology for the global future. America once sent educated missionaries of the Christian gospel. Now it sends graduates of “metaphysical spirituality” courses to promote a profoundly anti-Christian spiritual message.

As the Christian worldview is marginalized, it is ancient paganism, not secular humanism, that rises to supplant it. This is the future we face: the Lie gussied up as the only true answer to both the planet’s physical woes and to our highest spiritual aspirations. The urgency to create a utopian planet is driven by prophecies of cataclysmic natural disasters such as global warming, which, in light of an embarrassing cooling trend, has been renamed “climate change.” Are predictions of devastating natural disasters part of an ideological commitment among the ruling elite to create a planetary utopia? Since there is no god but us, they say, we must save ourselves, and the situation is urgent. There is no time for debate. Only power in the hands of the elite—who have understood the truth of human divinity—will save us. Behind the hot air of climate change, “science” is the religious myth of pagan One-ism.

Like gas escaping from a tiny crack in the earth’s crust before a major volcano spews lava that will consume all in its path, so the sparks of alternate spiritualities hint at a hot flow of religious paganism that threatens to bury our churches and send Christians scurrying to the hills in fear.

The “New” Christianity

The Lie arrives in force at a moment when its opponents are severely weakened. Reverend Alan Jones, mentioned above, approvingly cites an apostate Christian who calls the God of the Bible an “unfeeling bastard.” For Jones, belief in the biblical God “has proved exhausting and destructive…[and] exclusionary.” He can’t wait for “a more generous and inclusive version of the Old Story to emerge.” [3] He believes mystical spirituality will unite the world’s religions and its peoples. This syncretist cleric’s favorite image is the baby Jesus in the lap of the smiling Buddha.

Brian McLaren, a leader of the Emergent Church Movement, and author of Generous Orthodoxy, says that Alan Jones “is a pioneer in re-imagining a Christian faith that emerges from authentic spirituality. His work stimulates and encourages me deeply.” In 2007 Phyllis Tickle, a recognized spokeswoman for the Emergent village, spoke at a public meeting where I asked her, “Does ‘spiritual emergence’ include all the religions?” Seated next to Brian McLaren, whom she calls the “new Martin Luther,” she replied without hesitation: “Yes.” She, McLaren and others are taking unsuspecting evangelicals into a new flavor of the same paganism about which the apostle Paul warned us. Emergent, progressive “Christianity” is committed to the One-ist unity of all religions.

Part of the “Great Emergence” is the work of Roman Catholic Brother Wayne Teasdale, a lay monk and teacher of “interspirituality,” who combined the traditions of Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism. He believed that we are at the dawn of a new consciousness, entering “the Interspiritual Age.” This movement has been called a new Pentecost, a new work of the Spirit, who is bringing all religions together. Such an interfaith spirit signals the final act in the death of the God of the Bible. It is a spirit thoroughly comfortable with an open display and practice of ancient occult Mysteries.

Lively churches that have remained faithful to the Scriptures still exist, but Christianity has largely been erased from Western public memory. For instance, the Preamble of the new Constitution for the European Union attributes the formation of Europe to Greco-Roman civilization and the Enlightenment—but not to Christianity, whose influence reigned in Europe for sixteen hundred years.

The decline, so obvious in Europe, is now apparent in America. Atheistic secular humanism wore away at Christian belief by lulling Christians into satisfaction with wealth and success, and by its relentless mockery of supernaturalism and the miraculous. The secularists succeeded so well that missions experts no longer consider Christianity to be a predominantly Western religion. But the secular humanists were in for a surprise—their time was up, too.

The Anemia of Secular Humanism

The Lie profited from the knock-out punch that unbelieving postmoderns delivered to atheism. The god of human reason, champion of the West for two hundred years, has left the ring in defeat. Modern thinkers had the gall to ask for proof that human reason can solve our problems! But you can’t prove by reason that reason is true, because you have to assume reason in order to use it. Of course, all religions begin with faith in certain unprovable presuppositions. Rationalism needs as much faith as any religious system, since rationality is its last court of appeal. Postmoderns are embarrassed by the hubris of secular humanists, who refuse religion and spirituality in the name of reason. Skeptical of all overarching explanations of reality, including rationalism, postmoderns have seen their influence take hold in the Western university system.

General dissatisfaction with the secular worldview has also grown, due to the atrocities committed in its name. Two world wars, genocides in Soviet Russia and Communist China, and the pollution caused by irresponsible industrialization have given a bad name to the society created by secular humanism.

The Vacuum of Meaning

Having debunked rationalism, and denied theism, Postmodernism has destroyed the past, yet offers no hope for the future. The vacuum of meaning it created has been an open invitation to paganism. People are placing their hopes in the New Spirituality, in “unreason” not reason, in mythos not in logos. If reason failed us, perhaps unreason will save us; if logical analysis was not enough, perhaps the ancient myths of spiritual empowerment will lift us to new heights of human achievement.

Everyone thought the late twentieth century would be atheistic and thoroughly secular. But, instead, it has been “sacralized.” The religious table groans under the smorgasbord offerings of the New Spirituality. “All you can eat for five dollars!” (Well, perhaps a little more than that, by a quick check on the price of a consultation with a hypnotherapist.) The choice of spiritual sweetmeats is endless, and the delicacies of the Perennial Philosophy abound in the marketplace.

Conversions from Secular Humanism

The old secularists are converting. Former Marxist, Vaclev Havel, president of the Czech Republic, now wants to “lift the Iron Curtain of the Spirit” by discovering what all the religions have in common. The new sacred canopy is redemptive interfaith. Through this “divine revolution” we will save the planet. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Empire, and a pure product of the atheistic Marxist system, now preaches a form of religious conversion. He calls for a “new synthesis” to incorporate democratic, Christian and Buddhist values in a new version of the Ten Commandments that affirms “the sense of oneness with nature and each other for the future planetary community.”[4]

The materialist has become a mystic. Be careful, though. For Gorbachev, “democratic” means some form of humanistic Socialism (as in the old East German Democratic Republic) and “Christian” means a Christianity reinterpreted through pagan Buddhism. The “new synthesis” is made up of spiritually hungry secular humanists converting to Neopaganism. A pagan philosopher, Richard Tarnas, feels this new synthesis coming on:

The collective psyche seems to be in the grip of a powerful archetypal dynamic in which the long-alienated modern mind is breaking through…to rediscover its intimate relationship with nature and the larger cosmos.[5]

The modern mind is searching for spiritual One-ism, what we used to call an occult relationship with nature.

Bolivia: Microcosm of the Global Future?

Before we leave Gorbachev, let me introduce you to his South American avatar. I spent a week teaching pastors in Bolivia, where social and political unrest rumbled around us. The day before our conference, President Evo Morales announced plans to take over all three branches of the government to bring about a totalitarian workers’ utopia. Morales used to be an atheistic Marxist. Now he is a shamanistic Marxist, reviving the ancient Bolivian animism of spirit worship, and insisting that Andean paganism reflects the true soul of Bolivia. A shadow cabinet of shamans helps him decide public policy. One television commentator assured us that Morales will be “energized by the gods” and “all the powers of the cosmos.” The new kid on the block—born to the union of socialism and pagan religion, is forcing Bolivian pastors to think deeply about their situation and their Christian response.

The gloves are off. The Lie has come in full force, now that it is claiming political power. The eventual prize—planetary religious and political power— is enormous, and One-ists are eager to grasp their pearl of greatest price, a humanly constructed this-worldly utopia. But there is a price. If the pagan Lie is to be more than an expression of pro-choice, individualistic, ego-building spirituality (typical of the old “New Age”), then the movement must give a coherent account of all human phenomena. It must produce a compelling worldview for the twenty-first century planetary community.

Reconstructing: From Marginal Cult to Master Plan

Paganism is now a respected academic discipline. With the publication of the first pagan textbook (Barbara Davy’s Introduction to Pagan Studies), paganism took its seat in the university faculty room. Books on paganism are published by university presses at Duke, New York, Pennsylvania, Columbia and Oxford. Graduate work in “metaphysical spirituality” is available at many universities and colleges. The University of Arizona offers its Sophia Project, in a program entitled “Entity Communications Study” (contacts with non-humans, deceased people, other-worldly beings, Spirit Guides, Angels, Extraterrestrials and a Universal Intelligence). Naropa University in Colorado offers graduate degrees in contemplative education. The University of Santa Monica dispenses a doctorate in Spiritual Psychology. One lecturer in Religion and Contemporary Society at a British university considers paganism to be the fastest-growing religion of the new century.

In 1997 June Singer (a Jungian and a Gnostic) exhorted her fellow pagans to build their own cosmology based on the “joining of the opposites” and on their own choice of gods. She sought a coherent, all-encompassing, attractive and religiously pagan account of the nature of existence. That work is near completion. The late Thomas Berry, one of the architects of the rising planetary civilization, called for a new pattern of human presence on the planet, what he called “our great work.”[6] This work is to “rediscover the spirituality of the ancient peoples.”

Ecofeminists also hope to build a feminist, nature-and-goddess-worshiping “cosmology.” After experiencing the ravages of secular humanism, intellectual pagans hope to reconstruct the world with “a new cosmology,” or, as one Unitarian Universalist minister put it, a new “cosmotheology” for “the new universe.”

Postmodern deconstructionists said there is no metanarrative (overarching worldview), but religious pagans didn’t seem to hear them and are busy constructing a new one to explain everything. In other words, we are seeing not a breakdown of law and order, but a redefinition of it; not unrestrained immoral behavior, but a justification of it; not a laxity about sexual perversion, but a legalization of it; not a materialistic rejection of God, but a spiritual redefinition of God that turns Him into the goddess.

Intellectual Neopagans dismissed the term “New Age” as narcissistic, focusing only on personal bliss and freedom. Today’s spiritualists are “progressive” or “integral,” eager for a coherent worldview to save the planet. The new systematized paganism includes:

- a powerful spiritual experience, based on the subconscious, that provides an exit from rationalism;

- a resolution of the conflict between science and religion;

- an end to religious strife;

- a compelling analysis of Western philosophy and a critique of rationalism, materialism and consumerism that is as sharp as some Christian versions;

- an enchanted, passionate, environmentally-informed view of nature;

- an all-encompassing geopolitical vision of planetary harmony;

- a destruction of the illogical church/state wall of separation and the spiritualization of life in the public square;

- a theory of planetary economics; an all-inclusive, cradle-to-grave, spiritually inspired educational policy;

- a powerful, therapeutic psychology that delivers from anger and greed and proposes an experience of rebirth;

- a liberating redefinition of ethics, namely eco-ethics;

- a radical liberation from narrow heterosexuality into the pleasant paths of pansexuality; and

- an evolutionary account of history and human significance.

Thousands of progressives in academics, the media and politics, along with liberal church leaders are joining to produce a pagan cosmology to repair our deconstructed world. Such a worldview, proposed as “timeless perennial truth,” is full of exuberant, infinite possibilities.

People are attracted to the new cosmology not only because it proposes progressive ideas and behavior, but because it explains and justifies them, so that they can be adopted in good conscience. Having absorbed the worldview makeover, which appeals to freedom, civil rights and progress, people respond: “Oh, I get it. Why not? Makes sense to me.”

Our Response

All the elements of cultural implosion that we have seen in this chapter are part of the same ideology. “To each his own” is the mantra, but in fact, the Lie is working to destroy Christian influence in our culture. Though they claim that all of us are free to choose our lens in the spiritual kaleidoscope, pagans will not allow Christians the freedom to keep looking at life from a Christian perspective. To save the planet, the new paganism must have total control. “But,” you will say, “That Lie has been with us since the beginning.” Yes, but our cultural situation has changed. Once deeply influenced by the Christian faith, our society now faces a relentless takeover by the forces of spiritual apostasy—“for the good of humanity.”

Our present situation makes it easy for us to read Paul’s words in Romans 1. This first-century, bald-headed, bandy-legged, squinty-eyed Jewish rabbi walks onto our present twenty-first century stage, looks around slightly bemused, and, to our amazement, speaks powerfully, incisively and precisely to us about our present situation. His divinely inspired analysis reminds us that there are only two kinds of spirituality. We hear and understand, for we see the cosmic conflict between two deeply opposed worldviews: One-ism and Two-ism.

To make sense of our time, God has provided divine help from two thousand years ago.

[1]. “An Introduction from His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales,” Sacred Web Conference, September 23–24, 2006, Myer Horowitz Theatre, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Many of Charles’ fellow speakers were experts in Sufism, the One-ist version of Islam.

[2]. Emergence of the Mystical: The Supreme Council 33rd Degree, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern Jurisdiction, USA (Copyright 1981 by The Supreme Council, Mother Council of the World). See biblicaldiscipleship.org/Cults_NewAge/thesis/chapter4.htm.

[3]. Alan Jones, Re-imagining Christianity: Reconnect Your Spirit without Disconnecting Your Mind (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004), 3, 5.

[4]. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Environment: Act Globally, Not Nationally,” Interview with the Los Angeles Times (May 8, 1997).

[5]. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 440.

[6]. See Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (1991).

Chapter 3

“Can’t we all get along?” —Rodney King

“Between the creature and the Creator, a great gulf is fixed.” —J. Gresham Machen

The Church in Danger

I am both moved and encouraged as I speak to students eager to do something new and effective for Christ. Yet Christians born into the post-Christian setting are often unaware of the revolutionary nature of our recent history. Instead of recognizing the real enemy, they are tempted to blame the problems they see in the Church on the failings of the previous generation. If their optimism blinds them to the real opposition to the gospel, they will lack wisdom to combat today’s version of the Lie. Neopaganism infects the Church by dressing up as the Christian Faith. The Devil has not changed tactics since the Garden. If Christians fall for the deception, the Church’s witness will suffer for years to come.

Blaming Fundamentalists

Blaming the previous generation of Fundamentalists has been a favorite argument of the Emergent Church movement, which sees little wrong with the culture and everything wrong with the Church. Books like UnChristian, Quitting Church, Ten Things I Hate About Christianity, They Like Jesus but Not the Church or Death by Church, and the Hollywood movie, Lord Save us from Your Followers, lay the blame on fearful old Fundamentalists. It is true that Fundamentalism got a lot of things wrong:

- Hard-nosed rationalists tried to argue opponents into the Church;

- Gnostic-leaning holiness groups rejected the flesh and the “world,” creating “holy huddles,” in which they awaited the rapture and the destruction of the evil creation;

- Self-serving materialists ignored the poor and fostered forms of racism;

- Odd-ball independents performed peculiar rites in the name of the Christian faith. (One church celebrated Halloween in 2009 by burning non-King James Bibles, as well as “satanic” books by Billy Graham, John MacArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll, John Piper, Chuck Colson, and Mark Driscoll, to name a few);

- “God-hates-fags” fundies and money-obsessed televangelists encouraged legalism, pride and hypocrisy.

From these errors, preserve us, O Lord!

But our most dangerous enemy is not bad televangelists, mega churches, religious commercialism or closed-minded, fearful, rationalistic, unloving Christians. Nor is it the elderly Fundamentalist, often a well-meaning Christian, caught in the vortex of a cultural and spiritual revolution he has never understood.

In fact, such a critique of previous generations is grossly unfair. The gospel, even in its Fundamentalist version, has always sought to help the poor. The immense missionary movement that began in the nineteenth century, shedding its blood all over the globe, brought to the poor of the third world not only the gospel but schools, hospitals, business ethics, fairness and political democracy. My good friend, Vishal Mangalwadi, an Indian Christian theologian, argues that evangelical missions was a major factor in the creation of modern India.

We also need to remember with gratitude that the Fundamentalists of a generation or two ago bravely defended God’s transcendence, the pillar doctrine of the Bible, against liberal attack. The great “Fundamentalist” and brilliant theologian, J. Gresham Machen, in his 1923 book, Christianity or Liberalism, distinguished so-called “Christian” liberalism from genuine Christianity, and in a well-known paragraph, explained why he allowed himself to make such a shocking claim:

The truth is that liberalism has lost sight of the very centre and core of the Christian teaching… one attribute of God is absolutely fundamental in the Bible… in order to render intelligible all the rest. That attribute is the awful transcendence of God. It is true, indeed, that not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But He is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed.[1]

Christianity in any age must affirm the “fundamentals” of biblical revelation and respect the “otherness” of God’s Word. The Christian faith begins with a presupposition that God has revealed Himself to us in a way we can understand truly, though not exhaustively. Christianity begins with revelation, not with reason. God is not subservient to our reason, but is the transcendent Creator who must be approached in humility and faith.

The Real Enemy

The “oddballs” serve as an excuse to remake the gospel into a movement of human flourishing that replaces sola scriptura with a culturally safe spiritual enlightenment. Such is the makeover package proposed by the Emergent Left, which blames Fundamentalism for its “modernist,” polarizing opposition to “Christian” liberalism. Either/Or thinking, proposed by the likes of Machen, creates unnecessary antagonism rather than mutually-affirming dialogue. Under the influence of such argumentation, our young people are coaxed into believing that cultural opposition will disappear if only the Church will tweak its witness techniques, update its vocabulary, and participate more heartily in compassionate care for the earth and its inhabitants. In 2008 InterVarsity Christian Fellowship sponsored a major student conference called "Human Flourishing" for a “big dreams” social agenda. Absent is an awareness of the rising cultural power of the pagan Lie that long ago claimed this social agenda for its own “big dreams” utopia.

Tweaking the system is not the answer, because pragmatic issues are not the question. The menace that has pushed Christianity to the margins of society is not our Fundamentalist fathers, but the Father of all Lies. We stand in a frenzy of spiritual apostasy, facing powers perhaps stronger than any since the first century. Against the Church stand the unseen forces of the Evil One, the god of this world, who, as always, “desires to have us.”

In my hearing, Brian McLaren rejected the somber vision of the book of Revelation, stating that the world is getting better. Considered a leader in spiritual formation, inter-religious dialogue, ecology and social justice, McLaren is associated with futuristic groups that worship the earth and reject its Creator. He was a featured speaker at the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion and Public Life. This group is devoted to the “challenges of pluralism and the transnational movement of peoples, cultures and belief systems.” Other featured speakers have been radical liberals such as Hans Kung (the Catholic apostate), Michael Lerner (a Kabbalist), Thich Nhat Hahn (a Buddhist poet), Elaine Pagels (a pro-Gnostic New Testament scholar), Mary Evelyn Tucker (a Buddhist/Christian professor of the environment), Starhawk (a witch), Peter Russell (a New Age guru), Diana L. Eck (lesbian professor of Religion at Harvard) and Karen Armstrong (an apostate nun). When McLaren speaks to such groups, he does not challenge them with the unique Word of God, but seems, rather, to be in his element.

Consider some of the suggestions for solving the Church’s problems:

- The Church’s difficulties are self-imposed; we have the gospel all wrong and need to modify it;

- We should avoid mentioning sin, the cross or personal salvation, since these terms don’t sit well today;

- Christians should drop their concern with personal survival in the afterlife, to focus on helping the poor and saving the environment.

Such solutions are subtle expressions of the Lie. The gospel has always been unpopular (1 Cor 1:18). As for the life to come, even the apostate bishop, John Shelby Spong, now that he’s seventy-eight, says: “I believe deeply that this life that I love so passionately is not all there is.”[2] He is right: “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb 9:27). Opposition arises not when we get the gospel all wrong, but when we get it right! The Lie cannot stand the Truth of Christ’s cross, as the apostle Paul said not long before Nero severed his head from his body:

And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. (Col 2:13–15)

Open Hearts, Closed Mouths

Failure to see the revolutionary character of the pagan opposition to the gospel produces theological confusion, which is exacerbated by the need to conform. East and West have come together, the world has become a village, and our leaders call for the unity of the planet and even the end of the nation-state. The call of “One planet, One humanity” wraps itself in the spirituality of pagan One-ism, beckoning us to religious unity and peace. Americans will never forget Rodney King’s plaintive call, “Can’t we all get along?” The pressure to end racial and cultural tensions has given rise to an ideological and religious relativism, so that anyone claiming to know truth as distinct from error is considered a religious terrorist. Confused about what is going on in the culture, believers adopt a survival mindset. Intimidation and threats affect evangelical student ministries. Christian beliefs about God, morals and sexuality are classified by campus militants as malice, bigotry and even “hate.”

As I was writing this book, I received a call from a Christian campus worker, who recounted that his students are “scared to death” to speak of their faith, and are faced with threatening calls to “all get along.” Not giving offence, appearing cool, not disturbing the radical Left—these are the keys to university survival. Believers have hearts of love, but their mouths are clamped shut for fear of offending.

Several years ago, I was the guest of fourteen Christian campus ministries at a state university. Before my lecture, held in the “spirituality building” of the sprawling campus, a ministry staff member whispered to me: “Most of our work is done under the radar.” Even the “spirituality building” had little place for Christianity, though it welcomed all versions of One-ism, as was indicated by the plush offices of the major non-Christian religions. This Interfaith structure had trouble welcoming Two-ist spirituality, even though it was represented by at least fourteen Christian student groups! Open, clear speech about the Christian gospel is no longer possible.

Under politically correct intimidation, we have lost our boldness. Groups once known for unapologetic gospel preaching and evangelism are changing their approach. When Christianity was popular, student groups sponsored campus-wide meetings with well-known speakers who pronounced the uniqueness of the Christian faith. No longer. Says one campus minister: “We now have created a hybrid kind of meeting based on community, healing and friendship. We love, serve, befriend. We create trust; we want to be a kind of hospital for people.”

The reasoning is that if believers cannot speak for Christ, they can at least act like Christ. Love for the poor and hurting is essential to the gospel, but shorn of biblical cosmology and wiped clean of the distinctives of biblical ethical living, this approach is false advertising, at best. In the name of the “common good,” it may suck the life-blood from the next generation of Christians, escorting them into the waiting arms of gospel-denying “progressive” liberals and evangelicals.

The apostle Paul, chained to a pagan Roman prison guard, with his physical life hanging in the balance, didn’t ask his fellow Christians to pray for his safety, but for boldness of speech:

Pray also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. (Eph 6:19–20)

The Lie has clothed itself in tolerance and closed the mouths of Christians who would rather dig wells in Africa than turn Africans to the wells of salvation found in the atoning work of Christ. (I am all in favor of digging wells, by the way.) Here is the burden of this book: only a clear understanding of the two worldviews based on either the Truth (Two-ism) or the Lie (One-ism) will open our mouths to speak the truth with love and courage that honors the person of the triune God. Our examination of Romans 1 will help us to see why Paul was so bold.

Hot-button Issues

Christians are hesitant to speak out partly because they lack confidence in their understanding of the truth they confess. If you see yourself in the previous pages, intimidated into silence, but graciously committed to social justice because no one finds that objectionable, perhaps you don’t see how your Christian worldview can answer the culture’s “hot-button” issues. If so, you need a worldview overhaul. Perhaps the two hottest issues are Christian uniqueness and homosexuality. According to the “progressives,” these two are the tiresome, secondary issues constantly raised by up-tight, unloving, obnoxious, right-wing fanatics, who obstruct a kinder, more loving Christianity.

These two issues are not secondary, however. They are fundamental because each evokes a theme of profound moral and spiritual import—the nature of God and the nature of humanity—basic theology and basic anthropology. “Theology,” because interfaith allows so many different kinds of gods that the true God is eliminated; “anthropology,” because when the Bible describes the image of God in human beings it includes the male/female distinction.

If these two issues are secondary, why do One-ists promote answers to them whenever possible—publicly and loudly? Christians are silent, whereas the religious Left identifies these issues with the very heart of its message. This is symbolized by the public elevation of the homosexual, interfaith Bishop Gene Robinson. Notice those two terms I deliberately juxtaposed: homosexual and interfaith. If we fail to speak out when the progressives put forward their agenda, our silence may be read as consent.

You may sense that these issues are neither questions of mere social change, as the progressives would argue, or of traditional morality, as conservatives sometimes see them. In this book, I offer you a perspective that I hope will renew your confidence in the gospel and encourage you in your relationships with those who disagree with you.

Let’s turn to the two burning issues.

Christian Uniqueness

In our postmodern, “all is one” multicultural world, where all truths are merely personal, the rising generation of Christians is often embarrassed by the biblical claim that Jesus is the only way. In the 1960s, when it was “in” to be an individualist, the Jesus People used to raise their index finger in the air and say “Jesus is the only way!” Today’s young believers were born into a world steeped in coexistence, radical tolerance and all-inclusive oneness. On campus, they are accused of prejudice, intolerance, stupidity and closed-mindedness. Chuck Colson was dismayed to learn that in a training session for eight middle-school evangelical Christian student leaders, all but one refused the notion that Christianity was uniquely true. They claimed: “We shouldn’t hurt other people’s feelings by claiming our way is right.”[3] This is before they went to college!

Young Christians feel the impact of Interfaith in subtle ways. Many “cutting edge” Christians now define Christian witness as either the pursuit of mystical experience or as deeds of social justice. These categories are subtle because all genuine believers seek to love both God and neighbor. There are biblical ways to bring these two aspects of the Christian life together, but “progressive” Christians declare: “doctrine divides, the Spirit unites.” Both mystical experiences of “spirit” and deeds of social justice become a common denominator for all religions. Acts of mercy are the same whoever does them, so there is no offense, only cultural approbation. The call is potent. These two agenda (“Spirit not doctrine” and “deeds not creeds”) function as a powerful invitation to Interfaith syncretism for many naïve believers.

A friend sent me an advertisement concerning an event organized by the Houston Interfaith Power and Light, called “Faith Voices for the Earth: A Contemplative Candlelight Service.” Notice how this Interfaith event, which brings together Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Unitarian Universalists, intentionally joins mystical spirituality (“contemplative service”) and social action. Say the organizers: “In our dialogue and our action, we are finding common ground as we seek to care for the Earth and each other.”

Eager to be engaged in acts of mercy and justice, evangelicals are joining another social justice movement, appropriately called One, promoted by Bono and Bill Gates. The One website encourages pastors, priests and gurus of all religions to send in their sermons on social justice, with the intention of showing that all religions are finally one where it matters most— helping the poor.

Such notions will destroy the Christian gospel. The gospel of Two-ism tells us we are all poor, and that only the bread of God’s atoning death gives life to our hungry souls. If Christians remain unaware of the wiles of the Devil, they will inevitably (though sometimes unwittingly) adopt elements of his Lie, and thus weaken their gospel witness. The danger is real.

How many naïve Christians will be seduced by the “mystical Christianity” propagated by famous One-ists? Here are a few influential ones:

Huston Smith: Professor Emeritus of Religion and Philosophy at Syracuse University and convinced proponent of the Perennial Philosophy, Smith proposes his book, The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition. (Remember Prince Charles and his “Tradition”? )

James S. Cutsinger: An authority on the Philosophia Perennis, Cutsinger edited an anthology of Christian mystical writings, published by World Wisdom Books, a company dedicated to the exposition of the timeless Truth of the Perennial Philosophy.

The Theosophical Society: This group invites attendees to “come join us at our National Conference, Mystical Heart of Christianity: Moving Beyond Literalism, for a stimulating exploration of esoteric Christianity.”[4] This society was founded in the nineteenth century by the occultist, Helena Blavatsky, and has since spread throughout the world. God is the universe, the “impersonal It,” and man is becoming, through states of ecstasy, the incarnation of “God.” Theosophists believe that the Aquarian Age and the brotherhood of all faiths will help the world evolve. Their mission is to prepare us for the World Teacher, Maitreya, whose message is: “Share, and Save the World,” in order to create “a new civilization.” Maitreya is already here incognito, through his spokesman, Benjamin Creme, who announces: “the peoples of the world are ripe and ready for change. Maitreya will remind them of the essentials, justice and peace, without which there is no future for man.”

The Lucis Trust: Founded by Alice Bailey as the Lucifer Trust, this organization and publishing house is an offshoot of the Theosophical Society and has supervised the UN Meditation Room since 1952. (It shortened its name for obvious reasons.) Its goal—to bring all religions and nations together—should be easy, since shared spiritual experience and collective service achieve global synthesis better than doctrine. Our religious future belongs to mysticism and social action.

Having claimed the terrain of social justice, the occult spiritualists attempt to redefine “the heart of Christianity” as one more expression of the mystical truth in all the religions. Some evangelicals naïvely drop the gospel to adopt the same deeds-only agenda of the pagan Lucis Trust, whose “gospel” includes occult planetary control.

The “common ground” of mysticism is making headway in once Christian groups. The historically Baptist Bethel University in St. Paul, MN, sponsored an Interreligious Symposium in 2009, promoting “common ground” between Buddhism and Christianity. One would think that Christians with an ounce of discernment would deduce that Christianity has nothing to do with Buddhism, but a panel found “common ground” in meditation! One is reminded of McLaren’s statement that Christian witness to Buddhists is to make them Buddhist followers of Christ.

Homosexuality

A young woman from an upbeat church on the West Coast wrote to me about a discussion in her small group. One young man said homosexuality was a non-essential issue. If one church doesn’t approve of your sexuality, he suggested, just find one that does. Three quarters of eighteen- to thirty-year-olds think homosexuality is a valid lifestyle. Little wonder Christians remain silent. Some in the Emergent Left actively affirm the normality of “evangelical Christian” homosexuality. InterVarsity Press[5] recently published a book, Love Is an Orientation, by Andy Marin, an evangelical author. Marin lives in the Chicago neighborhood known as Boystown and seeks to build deep bridges to the homosexual community. He is a sincere and sensitive soul. However, in seeking to develop an approach based on non-judgmental, loving acceptance, he refuses to call homosexuality a sin or to make any value judgments about “gay marriage.” For him, showing 100% total love and acceptance is how one shows God’s love.

Is 100% acceptance a valid approach for Christians? Will it change a sinner’s heart? Does love not include truth-telling? For the sake of some subjective notion of love, are we creating a morally vacuous universe, without offering a real solution to the real problem of sin and evil? Biblical worldview is lacking in such an approach.

The apostle Paul, living in gay Rome, hits homosexuality head-on to show its iconic value for religious paganism. If we fail to explain the pagan/homosexuality connection, we deprive homosexuals of truth and leave them in a One-ist worldview. Christians who follow the Scripture on this issue receive the same accusations of prejudice, intolerance and closed-mindedness that they received about the uniqueness of the gospel.

When Carrie Prejean, a top candidate for Miss World 2009, was asked her opinion of gay marriage, she affirmed her belief in exclusive heterosexual marriage. The Los Angeles Times (April 30, 2009) dismissed her opinion as “the vapidity of a blond bimbo [revealing] the intellectual failings of her dogmatic adherence to an outdated moral paradigm.” Some young Christians may well imitate the deeply thought-through wisdom of Hannah Montana, who says of the Prejean controversy: “I am a Christian and I love you—gay or not—because you are no different than anyone else! We are all God’s children…Everyone deserves to love and be loved.” Hosanna, Hannah!

“Interfaith” Christianity makes the same point. Not homosexuality, but heterosexism (belief that heterosexuality is normal) is the real problem, because it supposedly stems from a narrow-minded monotheistic view of God. The “broad-minded” interfaith movement frames the discourse and closes the mouths of Christian students living on multicultural, pansexual campuses.

Worldview Clarity

Paul deals with both interfaith and homosexuality in Romans 1. They have nothing to do with “traditional versus progressive” thinking. They were as “traditional” in Paul’s day as they claim to be “progressive” in ours. They are as old as the Fall. Deeply interrelated and extremely significant, they require not silence, but an answer. There is a logical and historical connection between interfaith and intersex, between polytheism and polysexuality, between all religions and an omnigendered society. Modern interfaith thinkers favor the moral rights of sexual minorities and propose that we spring open “the lockbox of monocultural ethical analysis.” But these progressive proponents of interfaith and intersex are not advancing into a glorious future where all sexual preferences are culturally accepted. They are regressing into the past perversions of ancient pagan cultures, from which the pagan West once sought deliverance by turning to Christianity.

Value judgments are thrown around about outdated thinking, but few in the modern face-off do any serious worldview thinking. They trust, instead, in their forward-looking intuitions. The campus Left accuses the campus Right of “hate speech,” but merely declaring something to be wrong is now placed in the “hate speech” category. Who establishes right speech and wrong speech? According to this logic, the final arbiter of speech codes (the new Left) becomes the real hate speaker who declares what is “wrong.”

Even non-religious public lectures that challenge the reigning multicultural orthodoxy are met not by polite debate but by violently angry students. At Smith College in 2008, a well-respected East Coast women’s college, the Republican students invited a researcher to speak on the absence of evidence that homosexuality is genetically pre-determined. Lesbian activists began to chant and smash on pots and pans, while others came in through the windows to add to the din. After twenty minutes of mayhem, the campus police entered the scene and (for safety reasons) ushered out—the speaker! This gave the lesbians control of the stage. Demanding silence, they then gave a thirty-minute “free speech” rant to the befuddled audience.

The Source of Conflict

How do we explain this raw confrontation in an ivory-towered university dedicated to the reasoned exchange of opposing views? To me, it means that our present culture is locked in a struggle between two antithetical views on ultimate meaning and value—what Paul calls the great struggle between the Truth and the Lie. Each side seeks control of the sacred canopy, under which the society lives. Sacred canopies are chosen by general consent and presupposed as true. Replacing them usually involves conflict. Gideon discovered this, when, under cover of darkness, he tore down the sacred canopy of Baalism that had been erected by his own father. Radical progressives have been working in the night of our present spiritual and moral crisis to replace our canopy, stretching out over our culture a new pagan canopy that asks us to accept the idealistic notion of a this-worldly utopian future.

The need for antithetical worldview thinking has never been more needed. If Christians, in the name of love, harmony and human flourishing, fail to recognize the clamor of the religious war, they will not be armed to defend the Truth of the Christian gospel.

Only Two Worldviews

“Time out, Dr. Jones! You exaggerate—and you lack tact! You can’t make such accusations, calling people liars if they disagree with you. And you can’t claim the Truth for yourself. You are one mentally-handicapped Fundamentalist!”

Well, I will bear that moniker, if necessary, but I am trying to be biblical. The uniqueness of God and His Word is the essence of my faith, that of the Christian Church for two thousand years, and that of God’s people, Israel, for thousands of years before that. Armed with that assurance, I will offer a sound and sane definition of the Lie and the Truth, two mutually exclusive faiths. If one is true, the other must be false.

You will never understand cultural conflict, debates in the Church, or your own questions about life if you do not understand that the world is divided over Truth. A timeless antithesis exists: Is everything God (One-ism), or is reality divided into the Creator and everything else (Two-ism)?

In Romans 1:25, the apostle Paul compares “the Lie” to “the Truth,” presenting only two possible religious ways of seeing reality. The delusional Lie, which shimmers in thousands of fantasy points of light, denies the existence of God the Creator, who rules over His vast creation. In the absence of the Truth, the Lie attempts to redefine cosmic existence as “divine” rule by creatures.

A good lie takes time to think through. As a child, my brother-in-law told his dad that a nail had “fallen” into the wall socket, thus shorting the circuits. His lie was not a very good one! (To my father-in-law’s credit, he painstakingly attempted to reproduce this miraculous event before dealing with his son.) The devil’s Lie has been fooling people ever since its first edition in the Garden of Eden. Since then, its seductive invitation to utopian fantasy for a new humanity has been reshaped to seduce each generation.

As the opposition ostracizes and threatens them, believers sometimes reinvent their faith to meet the demands of a “spiritual,” but godless, culture. If the Church keeps silent on worldview and accepts the redefinition of the gospel as this-worldly social justice, she may survive, but only as another version of paganism.

Lutheran theologian Frederic Baue answers his own question, “What comes after the Postmodern?” with these words—“a phase of Western or world civilization that is innately religious but hostile to Christianity…or worse, a dominant but false church that brings all of its forces to bear against the truth of God’s Word.”[6]

What Response Will Believers Offer?

Retreat: Some Christians wait in a ghetto for the Second Coming, the Rapture or the Millennium. This solution fails to take seriously our Lord’s command to be salt and light in the world.

Reclamation: Another option is to put Humpty Dumpty back together. A Christian conference, “The Great Reversal: How Christians Will Change the Future,”[7] advertises with the soothing words: “Never fear! We can take back the culture from the secularists.” Responsible political action is valid, but there are errors in the conference statement: 1. The main enemy of the gospel is no longer secularism but religious paganism; 2. American culture does not belong to Christians; and, 3. Politics cannot change hearts.

Revival: A third option remains: fearlessly preach and live the gospel, reflecting, by the power of the Holy Spirit, the divinely transformed world to come. I pray that optimistic, enthusiastic young Christians will seize the challenge to speak the truth as well as living it. Today’s seductive version of the Lie needs a compelling Christian response, steeped in biblical worldview and the Truth. We speak the Truth not in order to take back America, but in order to win hearts to Jesus, whatever the cost, be it social rejection or physical persecution. For such a revival of truth-speaking, we need to understand what Jesus understood—the origin of the Lie and its relation to the Truth.

Paul wrote a satisfying and necessary analysis of the Truth to the church in Rome in the first century, but his message is relevant for us, since we are in a twenty-first century Global Empire of pagan One-ism. I hope to lead you, gracious reader, in a careful analysis of Paul’s teaching, in particular of Romans 1:18–32. If I am faithful to Paul’s text, the ideas will not be mine, but those that flowed from the pen of a Christ-appointed apostle, called as a spokesman of Christ to reveal his mystery to the Church.

Paul’s words to the twenty-first century are Christ’s words to the twenty-first century. May they lead us to a revival of courageous faith by firing our hearts with God’s love, and opening our mouths to speak God’s truth.

[1]. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1987), 62–63.

[2]. “Interview,” ReadTheSpirit.com (October 18, 2009).

[3]. Chuck Colson, “The Offensive Truth, Relativism and Our Kids,” BreakPoint (June 20, 2007).

[4]. Mystical Heart of Christianity: Moving Beyond Literalism, a conference held in Holyoke, MA (Oct 31–Nov 2, 2008). See the Theosophical Society in America’s website: theosophical.org/events/conferences/national08/index.html.

[5]. I hate “picking on” groups like InterVarsity, which was so helpful to me when I served as president of an International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) group at the University of Wales. A generation ago, InterVarsity was a clarion voice for the gospel. If they continue to speak the gospel clearly, I will extol them. If they fail to do so, I will call them to return to their former love of Jesus Christ and His Word.

[6]. Frederic Baue, The Spiritual Society: What Lurks Beyond the Postmodern (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001), 16.

[7]. conference.americanvision.org.

Part 2

The Meaning of Romans 1

Chapter 4

“I am the apostle to the pagans.” —Paul, Romans 11:13

"Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost." —Paul, Romans 11:13

Meet Paul

The celebrities of Paul’s day did not drive white Cadillac stretch limos. They rode white horses. Paul (called Saul at the time) arrived in Damascus as a scary religious superstar on a white horse. He had the full legal authority of official Judaism to imprison and execute Jews who followed the Jesus heresy. But something strange interrupted his journey. Jesus Christ appeared in all his divine glory before the Jewish academic-turned-thug. As in similar Old Testament events (when God appeared in visible, glorious form, scaring various prophets half to death), the force of the divine revelation knocked Paul off his horse and blinded him. He not only hit the rocks, he hit rock-bottom. Immediately, this brilliant, leading light of Judaism was stripped of all self-importance. When he saw the resurrected Jesus, Paul instantaneously realized that most of what he had believed about God, and everything he had believed about Jesus, was false. In fact, he had just been confronted with the triune God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. His life would never be the same again. Of this he speaks in the first seventeen verses of Romans 1, where he is at pains to hold up the essential truth about God as a trinity of divine persons. He speaks of God the Father (v 1), the Son of God (v 2), and God the Spirit (v 4), revealing the amazing, impenetrable mystery of the Trinity (see chapter 7).

Paul’s Credentials

Following the literary convention of his day, Paul introduces himself in the first verses of Romans 1, explaining who he is and by what authority he writes: “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God” (v 1). Since the incident on the horse, Paul’s life had really changed. From being an “apostle” of the human High Priest, he was now “set apart” by a particular act of God as an “apostle” or “direct spokesman” of the divine Jesus Christ—an official emissary of the Creator and Redeemer of the universe. You may not believe that, but that’s what he claims to be.

The “gospel of God” for which Paul is set apart is “the gospel…promised [by God] beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures” (v 2). The connection with the Old Testament prophets is explicit. Like them, Paul met God directly and received a divinely revealed message—the same message that had already been disclosed by God in its promissory form to the prophets who wrote the Old Testament Scriptures. Shockingly, Paul claims to have equal authority with Moses and the prophets. He clarifies this when he uses parallel phrases to describe the gospel: a “hidden mystery now revealed,” or “the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past” (Rom 16:25, NIV).

The “mystery” of God’s saving plan is “hidden,” but where? In a cave in India? On gold plates buried in a wooden box in New York? In some guru’s mind? No, the mystery is hidden in the Old Testament, as St. Augustine wrote: “The New is latent in the Old; the Old becomes patent in the New.” The essential nature of the gospel is what the apostles, through the Spirit’s inspiration and their knowledge of Jesus’ teaching, discover in the pages of the Old Testament Scriptures as they are completed and fulfilled in the New Scriptures for the growing Church. But Paul throws us a curve ball.

Stay with me here. This is important. The Church is bigger than what Christians first thought. In Romans 16:25, Paul speaks about “my gospel” which he calls “the proclamation of Jesus Christ.” He explicitly claims to make a personal contribution to the original gospel preached by the apostles before him:

Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly. In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to men in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets. (Eph 3:2–5, NIV)

Paul has a particular insight into the mystery of the gospel that had not yet been clearly seen: “This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles [pagans] are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus” (Eph 3:6, NIV). The mystery is the inclusion of spiritually unclean pagans into Christ’s Church. Paul is called as “the apostle to the Gentiles [pagans]” (Rom 11:13) and must instruct the Church in the theological implications of the pagan inclusion. Paul underlines this in Romans 1:5, in his authorial introduction. He has a divinely given authority to teach the Christians in Rome in the name of Christ: “We received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles [pagans] to the obedience that comes from faith” (NIV). Like Moses, who taught Israel, Paul teaches the Church. Paul’s gospel is a new “insight” because Paul fully comprehends the true nature and extent of grace as it includes the most unworthy (the pagans). For our immediate purposes, it means that Paul, in Romans 1, will teach the Church, with divine authority, how non-Christian pagans think, so Christians can understand how to preach the gospel to the pagan mindset.

And you thought Paul was simply a very energetic missionary!

Good News from God: The Gospel Concerning His Son

Paul develops a cosmology in Romans 1:18–32. Because we cannot understand the gospel until we understand God and human rebellion, Paul doesn’t discuss the gospel in depth until he has laid a worldview foundation. He doesn't begin his description of the gospel until Romans 3. However, in his introduction of himself as a divinely appointed revealer of the gospel, we get a foretaste of what he will later say about the love of God, which is the ultimate answer to paganism’s misguided hopes for contact with the divine.

The answer to utopian hopes is found in the complex and unique person of Jesus—the mediator between the Creator and the creature (see chapter 14). Paul knows that he is only an emissary and so is determined to know nothing but Christ crucified. Jesus Christ is the central and significant character in the gospel story. As Paul presents his argument, he underlines three aspects of Christ’s person and work in the first four verses: the Son (v 2), the Son of David (v 3), and the Son of God in power (v 4). These three titles anticipate the main theme of Romans, already capturing the essential content and power of the gospel for which Paul will one day sacrifice his life, when he goes to pagan Rome without shame or fear.

The Son

It is sometimes argued by less than orthodox theologians that Paul presents a human Jesus who is mystically adopted as the divine Son at the moment of the resurrection. They argue that Jesus was a human prophet who so wowed his followers that they posthumously acclaimed him a “god”—just as pagans do. Needless to say, there are a number of problems with this approach.

Though pagans claim the contrary, one cannot become divine. You are either divine or not divine. “Divine” means, among other things, that you have always existed. But all of us have had a birthday. The argument that one can be divine is, at the very least, a profound confusion of categories. We will examine the implications of this belief (as seen in Romans 1:25) in detail below.

Paul’s terminology does not support such an argument. He states “his Son” (v 3) in absolute categories, referring to the eternal Son’s pre-existent relationship with the Father, who subsequently takes on Davidic flesh. From this perspective, and uniquely in the case of Jesus, divinity comes before humanity.

Paul expresses this absolute understanding of the Son in other texts. In verse 9, he repeats the phrase, speaking of God, “whom I serve with my whole heart in preaching the gospel of his Son" (NIV). For Paul, the depth of God’s amazing love is uniquely demonstrated in the death of “his Son.” Had Jesus been a man or an angel, his death would not have been a convincing proof of the infinite love of God. Paul says “God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” which he then describes as “the death of His Son” (Rom 5:8-10, NIV) or “His own Son” (Rom 8:3 , NIV; Gal 4:4). The apostle John says the same thing, adding the word “only”: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 Jn 4:9). There is only one Son like this. And both John and Paul say there is a “sending.”

God sends from somewhere “his own Son in the likeness of sinful man” (Rom 8:3; Gal 4:4). The “somewhere” becomes clearer in Paul’s words to the Philippians—it is the Son’s state of pre-existent divine glory with the Father:

Christ Jesus…being in very nature (of form) of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature (or form) of a servant, being made in human likeness. (Phil 2:5–7 cp Heb 1:3, 8)

Clearly, for Paul, the Son is first and foremost divine. But he is also human.

The Son of David

There are two very old and persistent heresies about Christ. The first denies the divinity of Christ (e.g., Ebionitism and modern day Liberalism), believing that Jesus was just a human being. The second denies the humanity of Christ (e.g., Gnosticism or Docetism), believing in a mystical notion of Christ as a bodiless spirit, which leads to thinking that the fleshly body is either evil or unimportant. By using the title, “the Son,” Paul rejects all forms of anti-supernaturalism. By using the title, “Son of David,” he rejects all forms of matter-denying, physical body-rejecting Gnosticism. This was his gospel to the end, as he says in one of his last letters: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel” (2 Tm 2:8).

Why Is this Good News (Gospel)?

Paul clearly affirms the humanity of Jesus, as we see in the phrase: “His Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh” (v 3). He literally speaks of the Son who is “from the [physical] seed of David,” to which he adds “according to the flesh.” Paul’s use of the term “flesh” always refers to the human condition. When he says later, “I am speaking in human terms” (Rom 6:19), the literal wording is “I am speaking according to the flesh.” Of the future resurrection he declares: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor 15:50), that is, human beings are incapable of producing the final glorified kingdom of the new heavens and earth. The reference to David also affirms that Jesus was sent as the Messiah, the human deliverer of God’s people.

So, if the flesh is so weak, why this insistence on the human flesh of Jesus, and why is this good news?

It is because the Messiah is first and foremost the deliverer from the consequences of sin. In a text already cited above, Paul answers our question: “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:3).

The major human problem is a sinful rebellion against the Creator. Sin has to be dealt with where sin took place, in human rebellion. So Christ deals with sin by taking on our flesh and absorbing sin’s punishment, which we deserve, in his body on the Cross. This is part of what Paul will call the gospel which is “the power of God for salvation” (Rom 1:16).

But there is much more power involved.

The Son of God in Power

The emphasis on the flesh is important not just because the good news offers the solution for human sin but because physical matter is the essence of God’s good creation. “Everything created by God is good” (1 Tm 4:4), says Paul, to the great consternation of all Gnostics throughout history. This is good news about the first creation, in spite of the spoiling effect of sin. News about the second creation is just as good and involves another mighty demonstration of God’s power. The second or new creation shows that God will not allow sin to have the last word about the original creation He so carefully and beautifully made.

If flesh and blood, that is, human beings on their own, cannot inherit the coming kingdom of God, it is because “the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power” (1 Cor 4:20). The power God used at the beginning to create the world is now deployed to transform it, shown, first of all, in the resurrection of Jesus. This is why Paul states: “His Son who…was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord…” (Rom 1:4).

Since Christ was already the divine Son, this phrase cannot mean that at the resurrection Jesus became the Son of God. In Jesus’ resurrection, the demonstration of unparalleled power, he is recognized for who he really is—both human Messiah and divine Son. Jesus knew this. Following God’s revelation concerning Jesus to Peter, Jesus says: “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God after it has come with power” (Mk 9:1). Notice the reference to “power.” A week later, in anticipation of the imminent resurrection, Jesus is transfigured. His “clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them” (Mk 9:3, NIV). From heaven, God declares to Peter, James and John, “This is my Son whom, I love. Listen to him" (Mk 9:7, NIV). Not until the resurrection would Jesus’ disciples finally understand that he was the true human Messiah, raised bodily, and also the divine Son.

The good news of the resurrection is not only that sin was defeated, but that new life was created. Paul says that our human bodies, “sown in weakness,” will be “raised in power” (1 Cor 15:43). That is good news, not just for the human Jesus, but for those who believe in him. Paul says later in Romans, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom 8:11). Believers will be raised like Jesus. But that’s not all. The resurrection is good news for the physical cosmos: “The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:21). The original creation, cleansed from sin, will be remade into an unimaginably glorious home for life in eternity.

This is very good news, you must agree.

Paul’s Passion for Preaching the Gospel

Having met this stunning person, and having understood how he explains and solves the enigmas and problems of human history, Paul was daily fueled by an unquenchable desire to make the good news of Jesus known throughout the world. Paul had seen the transformation in a number of people in Rome, including some higher-ups in Caesar’s palace (not the one in Vegas). He was keen to visit them and to build up their faith (vv 8–13). He thought big. He wanted to go to Rome to reap “a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles” (v 13, NIV). Driven by the “obligation” to extend the call of Jesus “both to Greeks and non-Greeks” (v 14), Paul felt that Rome (v 15), the very capital and religious soul of the pagan Empire, was indispensable. But it would also be a point of departure for Spain (Rom 15:24), the very edges of the Empire. This guy’s vision was unstoppable, although most scholars think he was not the first Spanish missionary. Nero put Paul to death in AD 66. Others would take the gospel to Spain and elsewhere.

I once took part in a silent two-hour walk from the coastal Italian towns of the Forum of Appius and the Three Taverns to Rome, along the cobblestones of the Via Appia, the very road on which Paul had walked as a manacled Roman prisoner. Even without chains, I found the walk hot and tiring (though fascinating). Wealthy estates lined the road, and I wondered what Paul felt, stumbling wearily along. Then it happened. After two long hours, I turned a corner, to see, towering above me, the massive walls and gates of this fabled ancient city. The Jewish bandy-legged prisoner, chained to Roman legionnaires and headed straight for prison and execution, was not quaking in fear and shame. He was filled with courage and optimism, as he doubtless repeated to himself what he had told the Roman Christians:

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” (Rom 1:16–17, NIV)

It was this power, not that of the vast armies of Syria or Greece, that overturned the Roman imperial megalith. That gospel power can promise a clean sheet, deliver a pure conscience, and impart the gift of Christ’s righteousness to those who believe. Such a message for pagan Rome—of freely imputed righteousness—filled Paul with the courage to face anything the pagan world could throw at him. This is how he ends chapter 8 of the Romans letter:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.(Rom 8:38–39, NIV)

Why Does Paul Write Romans 1:18–32?

With indomitable confidence, Paul was ready to take on the whole world system of paganism of his day. He left us a brilliant account of that godless worldview (vv 18–32). Since that same account fits our situation perfectly, get ready for a clear, logical description of our state from a highly trained lawyer.

Paul’s argument is a tour de force, unmatched in the writings of those who oppose it. The reasoning contains an explicit and implicit analysis of two worldviews, that of theism (Two-ism) and that of paganism (One-ism). Two-ism maintains that God placed distinctions in the natural world, whereas One-ism rejects those distinctions. Two-ism maintains that the main distinction is the one between the Creator and His creatures, whereas pagan One-ism confuses the two, making nature divine. Two-ist spirituality worships and serves God by honoring Him and giving Him thanks, whereas pagan One-ism worships creation and the self. In the sexual arena, Two-ism respects the “natural” order of the marriage union with its heterosexual distinctions, whereas One-ism erases sexual distinctions and produces, in the name of freedom, a culture of pansexuality. Notice how the order of sane thinking is overturned by making nature its own creator; the order of divine worship is overturned for the worship of images, and the order of sexuality is overturned for unnatural sodomy.

For Paul, there are no half-measures, and everything is ultimately simple. There are only two worldviews. They are opposed to each other and cannot be blended, interfaithed, or syncretized. Paul’s “antithetical” awareness leads to these stark, rhetorical questions: “What partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols?” (2 Cor 6:14–16)

Paul could have added explicitly but affirms implicitly in Romans 1:18–32: What fellowship has the truth with the lie? (v 25); “the natural with the unnatural” (v 26); the heterosexual with homosexual, the heterocosmological with the homocosmological?

The Lie begins with a rejection of Natural Law. I don’t use this term in any technical, theological sense, but just to mean what is naturally obvious to every creature when they roll out of bed in the morning, put their feet on the floor and decide to take on another day. Clarity about Natural Law, at least logically, is the first step in evangelism. Believers can certainly begin our relationships with unbelievers in loving actions and attitudes. We can speak of what God has done for us in our own experience and on the cross. Sooner or later, however, we get to the definition of who God is. Understanding the gospel depends on understanding God the Creator. Knowledge of the person of God and of the fallenness of humanity must precede the good news of salvation, because it establishes our dire need of salvation.

The second half of Romans 1 is focused on pre-evangelism. It tells us what we are all responsible to know—truths about the structures of creation that should call us to repentance and to Christ. Because all human beings know these things down deep inside, they are “without excuse” (v 20). This is precisely what many in the modern church avoid saying. They avoid it, as we saw in the last chapter, by laying the blame for opposition to the Christian faith on Christians for their judgmental, loveless attitude. This explanation makes the truth and acceptance of Christianity depend on mere sentimentality. It goes without saying that Christians should be loving. Judgmentalism from a sense of personal superiority is severely condemned in Scripture. We are all “without excuse.” Today’s situation cannot be explained in such a simplistic way. The modern world, now deeply infiltrated by the pagan spiritual idea of human beings as good and divine, systematically refuses to hear the description of its fallen state. Indeed, paganism is a religious system devoted to the suppression of any notion of human sin and guilt. Its sacred canopy serves as a rug under which such notions are pushed. But, as Paul will demonstrate in Romans 1, the Christian message to a fallen world begins with a clear description of how that world has bought the pagan Lie about existence.

Two enormous problems can be seen in the present difficulties of the Church:

1. The New Spirituality does not want to hear about the person and rights of the Creator and the rebellion of creatures because it is a religious system specifically and cleverly designed to reject them, and thus it increasingly rejects Christian pre-evangelism as “hate speech.”

2. Many modern Christians, both liberal and evangelical, have lost their nerve, refusing to believe what Paul lays out so clearly in Romans 1. In much of Evangelicalism today, I fear that we short-circuit spoken witness for the sake of acceptance, in some cases taking giant steps towards apostasy. We start with God’s love or with “my experience of God’s love,” with “me and Jesus” and “how I feel loved,” but we forget to ask who offers to love us, and what kind of love He offers. We leave people with a vague Santa Claus in the sky who loves everyone. We dare say nothing about the dangers of mysticism or of breaking from the creational norms of sexuality.

Not so Paul. Before he gets to his exposition of the love God shows us in the gospel, Paul determines to show us the nature of God as good Creator, beneficent Sustainer and just Judge, as well as the character of human culpability. This is not because Paul is motivated by hate, but because he is compelled by love. It is because the gospel of divine love only makes sense in this light. If we follow Paul’s example, it is clear that before the Church can take the gospel to the contemporary pagan world, believers must understand the pagan worldview.

Daniel and his friends were commended by King Nebuchadnezzar for knowing the Babylonian culture ten times better than the magicians of the court. We Christians must, with sensitivity and courage, explain to unbelievers that their worldview is a consistent rejection of the goodness of the created order that makes human life possible. Only by understanding that will unbelievers then seek to know the true God of saving grace.

Having examined briefly the foundation Paul laid in the first verses of Romans 1, I now invite you to join with me in the analysis of verses 18–32.

Chapter 5

“…[they] exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen.” —Paul, Romans 1:25

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” —Moses, Genesis 3:6

The Garden-Variety Lie

After watching the soft, enticing, 3-D beauty of the imaginary world, Pandora, in the movie, Avatar, some viewers had suicidal thoughts, hoping to discover a utopian Pandora if they could only leave this world. Unfortunately, our utopian creations are often artificial and fanciful. But if Paul is right that there is only one Truth and one Lie, then we need to know which utopia is real, and which is imaginary.

Not everyone can be speaking truth, because versions of truth contradict one another. I suppose everyone might be lying, but that would be a cruel fate, since all of us want to make the world a better place. We hope that the best is yet ahead, somewhere over the rainbow, where things will be wonderful. We have searched in several directions to find our meaning.

Take science, for instance. Geophysics got a lot easier once we could study the globe from the outside. But scientists cannot fly outside the universe to send back pictures of the cosmos, as the astronauts did when they took those stunning pictures of the blue planet earth. We cannot roam the outer reaches of our mental world, either—standing outside ourselves, our world, our brains—to make meaningful statements about the whole of life.

The Ant Colony

Human beings are like a colony of ants, deep in the hold of an ocean liner. The ants may find their way to the sugar in the cook’s cabin and think they have created utopia, but from their corner on the lowest deck, they cannot see the decks above or the vast ocean that threatens their existence, should the ship’s engines fail. They know neither their port of origin nor their destination.

Because we are embedded in existence, we cannot prove our worldview objectively, and so we all function by “faith.” Even non-religious people make ultimate, unproven faith statements about the world. The statement, “There’s no meaning to life,” claims to know the meaning of life (that it has no meaning). In that sense, even atheists are religious, because they make belief statements without proof to support them.

In fact, the very act of speaking expresses confidence in an underlying structure of meaning that allows us to communicate. We believe in speech and in the meaning of words. We make verbal and written contracts and expect others to stick by their word. So the confident statement “I don’t believe there is any meaning in life,” counts on a belief that speaking makes sense—even though the statement affirms the contrary! Here, “belief” and “meaning” are inexplicably tied together.

Being human means thinking about being human. Making sense of it all is daunting, but we all do it, using some kind of religious worldview. Overwhelmed by the vastness of life, we are still sense-seeking and sense-making beings, and so we construct a worldview, as consistently as possible. Many of us don’t stop to worry about these issues and assume that we live quite sensibly. Our culture assumes that we will gradually figure out more things. Anything new must be better, right? But old notions were new once, so perhaps that’s not a great way to build a worldview. The passage of time does not guarantee wisdom. I’ll bet you know some pretty foolish old people. So what worldview choice is the best?

The One-Two Choice

Some time ago, we hosted a Russian lady for a few weeks. We took her into a supermarket and no sooner had she set foot in the door than she stood stock-still. “Are you ok?” I asked her. She shook herself out of her temporary trance and answered, “I’m fine, it’s just….” She stopped speaking and looked at the rows of canned goods, cookies, cereals and house supplies. “How do you ever decide?” She explained to us that when she went shopping, there were only two choices: meat or no meat; vegetables or no vegetables.

Our choice of worldview is not as baffling at it seems. In spite of what we are told, there is no grocery-aisle full of paths to wisdom. Paul tells us in this text that there are only two ways of finding spirituality: One-ism or Two-ism. Scholars sometimes refer to them as esoteric or exoteric.

Esoteric religion (One-ism)

In ancient Greek, eso means “into,” “within” or “inner.” Applied to religion, esoteric means a quest for the divine within the self. The higher self or the deeper subconscious is the source of spiritual experience. So you go within to discover ultimate truth.

Exoteric religion (Two-ism)

Exo means “out of,” “outside” or “outer.” Applied to religion, exoteric means a quest for a divinity that stands outside the self and outside human reality.

One religion looks inside for truth and the other looks outside. There are no other directions possible. Both quests seek spirituality. Both hope to create a better world, to help you know yourself and live with others. But in spite of this common vision, they could not be more antithetical. It is a little like the ditty about two opposing views of the Bible: “Both study Scripture day and night, but one sees day and the other sees night.”

The choice we make affects the way we read our world. An esoteric read will deliver very different conclusions than an exoteric read. Does the world create itself, or is there a Creator, different from the world? Is reality One or is it Two?

One-ism (all-is-one) is an esoteric read on reality. It maintains that everything can be explained by everything else. There are no qualitative distinctions to be found in the universe. The world creates itself and humans are “co-creators” along with everything else. In this system, reality is One. Think of one big circle. Everything is contained within it: rocks, trees, planets, human beings—even God, as a kind of energy. Everything is connected to everything else. There is nothing outside the circle.

Two-ism (all-is-two) is an exoteric read on reality. It maintains that the world is made by a Creator who is uncreated and radically different from His creatures. There are two forms of existence: the created and the one who created it. The two, while deeply related, are qualitatively distinct. Think of two circles, connected but distinct and essentially different.

Into the middle of our muddle comes a Word from the outside, from the upper circle, in language we understand. Quite mysterious—too good to be true. This Word/Truth makes sense to us. It claims to be the Word of the One who, from the outside, made everything—things we know about, and a lot of things we know nothing about. This Word proposes a worldview model different than all the other options, for it contains the objectivity or “outside perspective” for which we crave. As such, it makes sense of our deepest human longings for meaning and significance by giving an overview of the whole.

One hint of the truth of this Word from the outside is its uniqueness. All other explanations come from inside reality, and find their source in subjective Oneness. The bright hope of a Word from outside propels our interest in space travel and our extravagant spending on research projects sponsored by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). However, eventual messages from Martians or staccato sounds of extraterrestrial intelligent life would still come from within the finite cosmic system.

The many versions of the Perennial Wisdom, discussed in chapter 2, all teach that human beings are the source of meaning and that all is one. They speak of One-ism with one voice, claiming to be “the one true religion.” But the Word from outside the universe claims our attention, for it is entirely other, and gets us shaking in our boots. It more than answers our hope! It reveals the Truth of Two-ism.

To speak in postmodern terms, there are only two “metanarratives”—an ultimate story from within the universe, or an ultimate story from outside the universe. A word from within, or a Word from without. Either creation is divine or the Creator is divine. It is one or the other, but cannot be both. To claim that creation is divine is to deny true divinity to the Creator. To say creation is divine, while deep down knowing it isn’t true, would be the most foolish fantasy one could ever believe.

Twenty-Five Words that Changed the World—Romans 1:25

The stark choice between esoteric and exoteric, between One-ism and Two-ism, has existed from the beginning. Since everyone is calling on past sages for wisdom on spirituality, allow me to do the same. I cited at the beginning of the chapter what the apostle Paul says about spirituality as he writes to believers in Rome two thousand years ago. Paul had a top-notch education, a brilliant mind, a life-changing religious experience and a passionate heart. He was a bold, sacrificial, hard working, humble, tough rabbi/teacher/church planter who died a martyr. The original Christians to whom he ministered lived in the social and religious capital of the first century Greco-Roman empire, which was teeming with spiritual methods and techniques—quite like the world in which we live.

Paul’s pen is filled with kryptonite. His writing explodes off the page with passion and urgency about life-determining truth (which we can’t afford to get wrong), and the place of God’s high reputation in human affairs. I know of no other text, biblical or otherwise, that puts worldview issues more clearly and succinctly. This one-liner tops Descartes’ cogito ergo sum or Einstein’s E = MC2.

The twenty-five words we will examine contained incendiary ideas for Paul’s day. They describe two religious worldviews that spawned two different civilizations—Imperial Rome (based on One-ism or paganism) and the civilization of Christendom (based on Two-ism or biblical theism). Within two hundred and fifty years, these words had overturned one of the greatest pagan civilizations in human history, and given birth to a Christendom that would dominate a large part of the world for seventeen hundred years.

In Romans 1:25, Paul defines One-ism and Two-ism, though he doesn’t use the terms. He reduces the possible spiritual and religious options to their essential elements.

Here is the text, set up with its elements clearly distinguished:

They exchanged

the truth about God for

the lie, and

[they] worshiped and served

the creation rather than

the Creator.

The Satanic Invader

Paul uses “they” and “Lie.” Who are “they” and what lie did they embrace?

In his letter as a whole, Paul insists that sin infects everyone, whether Jew or Greek (Rom 2:1–17; 3:9). “They” refers to humanity as a whole and takes us back to our first parents and their disobedience. This will become clearer when we discuss the nature of the Lie. If Paul is referring to Adam and Eve (and thus to all humanity), then we all accept and repeat this lie. According to Paul, it is second nature for all of us to accept the Lie and refuse the Truth.

Paul is also referring to a long process of decline, by which the original Lie develops into a system of pagan thinking and practice. This is a process, because “they became futile in their thinking” (Rom 1:21). The original Fall of humanity drops a seed of corruption into the world that flowers into a system of pagan, idolatrous thinking and practice. Paul sees that system at work in the pagan religions of the first-century Greco-Roman empire. It is this system that Paul calls “the Lie.”

“A Lie” or “The Lie”?

Your version of the Bible will either say “a lie” or “the lie.” Here we have a Greek to English translation decision to use the definite article (“the”) or the indefinite article (“a,” “an”). You may think, "Who cares?" But the implications are important. There are numerous reasons to use “the Lie,” and virtually none, in my opinion, to use “a lie.”

Ready for a little Greek? It won’t be hard. The word for “lie” in Greek is pseudos, which you’ll recognize from “pseudonym.” In this text, Paul uses the definite article before pseudos, just as he does before the word for “truth” in the same sentence: “the lie” and “the truth.” Ancient Greek has no indefinite article, so to make something indefinite, you often drop the definite article. When the definite article appears, the author usually intends something quite specific. This is not always the case, however, so I need to add some weight to my argument.

We can look for other translation clues in the same passage. “Truth” has a specific meaning, as indicated by its only other use in this chapter, in verse 18. Here the wicked suppress “the truth” about God the Creator. If the truth about God as transcendent Creator is a definite notion, then why shouldn’t its opposite, the suppression of that truth, be just as definite? This is precisely the sense of “truth” in verse 25, which has to do with the correct worship of the Creator, who is blessed forever. If that is the essential Truth about God, then the essential Lie would be its denial, which is precisely what our text affirms.

At the risk of “knocking down an open door,” as the French would say, I will bring a few more arguments in favor of using “the lie,” instead of “a lie.” Romans 1:25 is the pivot verse for the entire section (vv 18–32), so we need to look at the literary structure. The sentence has four elements that form two parallel couplets, the second of which unpacks and defines the first. In each element, the definite article appears, maintaining a literary balance and identifying the characteristic element of each individual phrase as a highly specific notion:

They exchanged

the truth about God for

the lie

And worshipped and served

the creation rather than

the Creator

These four definite articles, reflecting the antithetical character of Paul’s thinking (see 2 Cor 6:14–16), here refer to four realities—truth, lie, Creator and creation. The truth consists in the worship and service of the Creator; the lie consists in the worship and service of the creation.

Paul has in mind a specific notion of “the Lie,” just as in 2 Thessalonians 2:11, where he again refers to “the lie” (“For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie,” NIV). Jesus taught in a similar fashion. He says to his unbelieving hearers:

You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he speaks the lie [to pseudos], he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies (Jn 8:44, NIV).

This text is interesting for a number of reasons:

- It associates "the lie" with the Devil;

- It refers to “the lie” spoken at “the beginning,” that is, in the Genesis narrative of the Fall;

- It uses the same term Paul used, “the lie” (to pseudos).

Jesus, like Paul, compares two specific notions of “the Truth” and “the Lie.”

The weight of evidence makes me conclude that Paul means the original Lie of Satan in the garden. Our theory about “they” (our original parents) fits with our theory about “the Lie” (of the tempter in the Garden of Eden). A prophet with the same authority as Moses but with a post-resurrection perspective, Paul comments on what Moses said about humanity in Genesis 3. Moses and Paul make a dynamic duo.

The Garden

In Genesis 3, Moses describes in vivid detail the coming of the Lie. The Scriptures reveal that God creates Adam and Eve, the first human couple, to live with dignity in a special relationship with Him. He sets them in a utopian garden setting with no frustrations, fears, pain or sorrow. They communicate with their Maker in ways that only humans can. Unlike the animals, they are in His “image,” which does not make them divine but does make them persons. When Adam looks for a mate for fellowship and reproduction, bestiality is out of the question. God gives Adam a wife, Eve, who is complementary to him, mentally, physically and spiritually—another person, both like and unlike himself, created in God’s image, to whom is also given dominion over the earth (Gn 1:28).

They fall in love—with each other and with God the moment they are created! But their idyllic setting is not without danger. God is testing His human creatures to see if they will be faithful when evil raises its ugly head. How could they turn away from the transcendent source of their life, who had stooped to relate personally with them? Theirs is an utterly foolish rebellion.

The Lie came into human reality when an outside agent says to Eve: “You will not surely die” (Gn 3:4). He boldly contradicts God’s warning that Adam and Eve would die if they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Satan, “the Liar from the beginning,” presents God as the Arch-Liar. Eve must decide between two authorities: the Creator or the created Satan.

Eve heard the great Lie, the first lie in human history and the origin of all other lies, from Satan, through the mouth of a serpent. Satan, a rebellious angel, whose origin is clouded in mystery, rejects the Creator’s right to define human existence, just as he himself had denied and suppressed the truth of the Creator/creature distinction (see Rom 1:18). Satan suggests that God’s laws for human life are unfair. When Adam and Eve rebel, God does not destroy them right away. He gives them over to their passion, and to their passion fruit. Their choice will bring consequences, namely expulsion from His presence and from the garden (Gn 3:22–24). God gives them over to the results of their sin. Paul repeats the notion of God “giving them over” in Romans 1:23, 25 and 26. God still gives people over to their sinful choices.

Satan makes Adam and Eve a false promise of deity (“you will be like God,” Gn 3:5). The power of that seduction is behind Paul’s statement that we “worship the creature” as if he were divine (Rom 1:25). Eve wanted “wisdom” from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but got the “wisdom” of committing evil, what Paul calls “claiming to be wise, but becoming fools” (Rom 1:22).

This original Lie denies the truth of God’s Word and the existence of a transcendent Creator, whose Word spoke the world into existence. Satan the interloper makes God out to be the intruder rather than the sovereign Creator, responsible for the beauty and the complexity of the creation. The Lie was sugarcoated. Satan dangled before Eve not just eye-catching fruit, but the seduction of a humanly-created utopia. Satan played on the fact that Eden was not God’s last word about creation. (Paul makes this clear in 1 Corinthians 15:45.) The test would not have endured eternally, and the fruit of the tree of life (some form of endless, “resurrected” life) would have been the reward for Adam and Eve’s faithful obedience. In other words, God intended eternal utopia for His creation, but on His terms, not Satan’s, and not Adam’s or Eve’s.

Satan proposes the unrealistic dream that human beings, once they sense their own divinity, can bring about the end of the garden probation and realize that final, utopian state, using their own wisdom. That is what Satan proposed to Jesus, the last Adam, in the other great temptation scene, which took place not in an idyllic garden but in a hostile wilderness:

The devil took him [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’” (Mt 4:8)

The answer of Jesus, the faithful Son, is the one Adam and Eve should have given. From that moment on, as Paul says, “They [the human race] exchanged the truth about God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” Their failure corrupted the world. When Jesus successfully fought off the Tempter’s false promise to hand him the nations, he was able to announce the coming of God’s utopia, specifically: “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mk 1:14–15).

Throughout history, Satan has used the same sugarcoated Lie that suppresses the truth everyone knows—an eternal, powerful God made the universe and is its Creator and Re-creator. Today’s version is mouthed by globalist politicians, UN documents on the planet’s future, leaders of the world’s religions, and self-proclaimed “progressive” Christians (including many Emergent evangelicals). They say we can create a utopia where all people get along, universal justice rules and humans live in unity with nature. Based on delusional fantasy, it will become a planetary nightmare.

Salvation does not emerge from spiritual powers within the human breast or from idyllic systems of human evolution and spiritual transformation. Global unity will not overcome egotism and greed. Just as divorce and remarriage will not solve an egotist's problems, so a system cannot create utopia in a world tainted by selfishness. Yet, the original Lie floats in the atmosphere, like Peter Pan, enchanting us with promises of divine capabilities and luring us to produce our own Neverlands. Thus, in a thousand seemingly original ways, we worship and serve creation.

The Lie’s Effects

Paul discusses three areas that change completely according to the choice we make between the Truth and the Lie:

1. theology (what we believe about God);

2. spirituality (how we worship);

3. behavior (specifically, how we live our sexuality).

We see these three areas in Romans 1. In verse 18, Paul says we “suppress the truth” in “godlessness and wickedness.” Notice that all three elements are present: thought/theology (truth), spirituality (godlessness), and behavior (wickedness).

These three areas are repeated in condensed form in the middle of Paul’s argument (v 25). This verse serves as a summary of the section as a whole (vv 18–32). I have laid verse 25 out to show these three areas, as determined by three verbs, “exchange,” “worship,” and “serve.”

1. They exchanged the truth about God for the lie (conceptual/theological thinking, worked out in verses 18–21);

2. They worshiped the creature rather than the Creator (spiritual activity, described in vv 22–23);

3. They served the creature rather than the Creator (behavioral/sexual actions, worked out in v. 24, 26–28. This leads on to other dysfunctional behavior mentioned in vv 29-32).

Paul likes threes, because he has put in two more sets of them. He describes three “exchanges” by which humans deliberately choose the Lie over the Truth:

1. We make a thought exchange (v 23);

2. We make a worship exchange (v 25);

3. We make a sexual exchange (v 26).

Paul also describes three “givings over,” which refer to God’s temporal judgment (prefiguring the final judgment) of those who deny God and choose to live in a way that fails to reflect His will.

1. God gives us over to our lust and impurity (v 24);

2. God gives us over to our dishonorable passions (v 26);

3. God gives us over to a debased mind (v 28).

The Twenty-Five Words—for You

It is said of the beautiful Cleopatra that her nose changed the course of world history. The twenty-five words discussed in this chapter not only changed the course of world history; they reveal the true meaning of all history. Throughout time, the two possible religious choices have always remained the same. Paul is not expressing an abstract theory or a wild opinion. He describes the ultimate issues of truth and falsehood, obedience and disobedience, life and death—as they are affected by the only two possible worldviews: One-ism (worship of creation) or Two-ism (worship of the Creator). In the chapters that follow, we will take a look at the three areas that Paul treated: theology, spirituality and sexuality. Let’s dig in.

Chapter 6

“By their unrighteousness [they] suppress the truth… they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”—Paul, Romans 1:18, 21

"The First Peace is that which comes from within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers." —Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

The Lie About God

Mother Nature Loves You

In Evan Almighty, Hollywood’s cleverly titled farce about Noah’s Ark, Morgan Freeman plays God. Freeman’s incarnation of God is one part groovy yoga instructor, one part Vegas magician and one part high-end, New Age life coach in Deepak Chopra pajamas. No part of him, however, suggests the Old Testament deity who wipes out His creation with a flood and starts again—which is the whole point of the story of Noah’s Ark. There you have it—a stark contrast between two types of God. The choice is not really between a cool God and a mean one. The issue goes deeper.

The worship of creation is our attempt to fill the gaping hole made by our refusal to worship the true God, who created all things. In Romans 1:18–20, Paul makes a series of earth-shaking statements about human beings who stand before the Creator. They know God, but “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” about Him (v 18). They know God because “what can be known about God is plain …in the things that have been made” (vv 19–20). They know God exists and long to connect with Him, yet deliberately reject Him and the evidence of His creative handiwork.

G. K. Chesterton said, “When men cease to believe in God they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything!” The Lie about God is a substitute, taken from within creation. This is One-ism, or paganism (paganus comes from the Latin word meaning “of the earth”). In Paul’s words, “they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles” (v 23). This description includes not only religions that deny a transcendent, triune Creator but non-religions that claim human autonomy.

Paul urges the Christians living in Rome (la citta eterna) to understand the profound difference between the Christian faith they have espoused and their old pagan ways. There are only two kinds of god we can worship and serve: the gods we create or the God who creates us.

Only Two Kinds of God

Romans 1:25 uses a verb for “worship” that was used in Greek literature for all forms of religious activity in temples and mystery cults throughout the ancient world. When Paul goes to Ephesus, for instance, his preaching clashes with pagan service to the Great Mother, the Goddess Artemis, “whom all Asia and the world worship” (Acts 19:27). We ascribe to the object of our worship ultimate power and offer it our devotion.

Worshiping and serving the creation turns nature into God. If you worship and serve rocks, trees, animals, stars, human beings, etc., you have made them “God,” and we are back to our One-ism circle in which everything created is divine. God is no longer a personal being, distinct from everything else. “One circle” unity is attractive, though, because it seems to answer the human longing for wholeness and concord.

The One-ist God of Human Empowerment

You doubtless know people with a poor self-identity, who seem to waste their lives in a debilitating haze of personal insecurity. A bad self-image produces all kinds of consequences—psychological depression, illness or violent behavior that can end in a jail sentence. Pagan oneness is, at first glance, intriguingly upbeat. Many who write about the glorious future of the planet or host websites inviting people to save that planet are attractive, optimistic people. The brilliant scholar and world expert of Shakespearean literature at Yale University, Harold Bloom, describes his discovery of a “truth” about himself that transformed him. He realized that he was “uncreated, as old as God.” This is a logical conclusion. When old New Ager, Shirley MacLaine, ended her five-hour ABC TV miniseries, Out on A Limb, in 1987 with the words, “I am God,” everyone thought she was nuts. Not any longer. When you google “tree-huggers” you get “disambiguation pages” (this term is considered offensive language), but tree-hugging is logical if you believe that all of nature is divine. The brilliant ex-Christian pagan, Thomas Berry, who died in June 2009, called for an Earth community with a common future for all species, including trees. If Harold Bloom is right, that he is as old as God, then he and the trees share divine attributes and should be worshiped. Bloom, MacLaine and Berry were transformed in their deepest being by believing in their essential divinity. Trees, if they share in the divine essence, surely merit a hug or two.

The One-ist God of Gaia, Goddess of the Future

When my wife first looked at the Grand Canyon, she cried. A humanist French friend at her side was also overwhelmed by the power and beauty of the canyon. Creation is, like true love, a many-splendored thing. Creation-worshiping religions replace the Creator of the Grand Canyon with the Canyon itself. They look within and see their own longing for spiritual life and experience; they see the “evolving” life-creating powers of nature; they feel overwhelmed by something much greater than themselves and experience non-physical powers. These are the elements that make up pagan religions that worship nature as divine. The magnificence and dynamism of creation take the place of a relationship with a real, transcendent, personal Maker of heaven and earth.

Ex-rationalists and ex-secular humanists, who have abandoned materialism for spirituality, see biological evolution not as the chance intermingling of atoms, but as the proof of nature’s divinity. “God” is just the name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, in the biosphere and in all human cultures. This ceaseless creativity, beyond human rational control, demands some kind of faith that nature will be kind to us in the future. Mother Nature surely loves us, they believe. The postmodern spiritualist, having concluded that reason alone is an insufficient guide for living, will use reason as a helpful tool, but no longer allows it the last word. Faith in the all-powerful goodness of nature now functions as the organizing principle for the future.

Robert Müller, assistant secretary-general of the UN under U Thant, Kurt Waldheim and Javier Perez de Cuellar, is a leading “earth spiritualist.” From his long-held position of enormous authority and influence, he promoted, as a model for the future planetary community, the holistic worldviews of the Aztec, Mayan and Incan civilizations.[1] These South American civilizations worshiped the powers of the earth and produced amazing art and architecture. However, their worldview included unspeakable cruelty, including self-inflicted blood-letting, masochism and human sacrifice, to placate their nature gods. Their much-admired “holistic” cosmology had, like Obiwan Kenobi, a light and a dark side, but such moral ambivalence hardly inspires confidence as a model for the future planetary community. Alas, people with a worldview like Müller’s continue to dominate the utopian thinking of UN bureaucrats and powerful NGOs in international gatherings.

As we have seen, optimistic, utopian hopes have been with us since Eden. A Babylonian text from around 1125 BC, called the Marduk Prophecy, shows such hopes, as it predicts the coming of the warrior god Ningirsu:

[a] king…who will rule. The rivers will carry fish, the fields and plains will be full of yield. The grass of the winter (will last) to summer…He will set evil aright. He will clear up the disturbed…The clouds will be continually present. Brother will love his brother. A son will fear his father as if he were a god…The bride will marry. She will fear her husband. He will be compassionate towards all people. The man will regularly pay his taxes. That prince will [rule all] the lands.[2]

In spite of such well-meaning dreams, the Babylonian empire was soaked in violence.

Eighteenth century Western Enlightenment appealed to the same optimistic, One-ist premise. A generation before Darwin, the great evolutionary philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), believed that God was not beyond the creation, but was the creative process itself. By the same token, man was not the passive spectator of reality, but its active co-creator. Hegel set the philosophical context for the German Romantics (Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Coleridge and Steiner), all of whom believed that the relation of the human mind to the world was participatory, that is, One-ist.

One modern version of the Babylonian prophecy comes from the British medical researcher, James Ephraim Lovelock (1919–). A consultant for NASA, he “developed” the Gaia Hypothesis, named after the Greek earth goddess. He speculated that living and non-living parts of the earth form a complex interactive system that can be thought of as a single organism. Humanity is the evolving nervous system and brain of the planet, the instrument by which Gaia (nature personified) becomes self-aware. Through evolution, Gaia seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for the planet, so the future is rosy, as long as humans cooperate.

“Spiritual” science now vies with rationalistic science for the attention of the brilliant. Quantum physics has been brought as evidence for the old magical and shamanistic teachings once dismissed as nonsense. Just as good and evil are part of the same spiritual unity, it is argued, so on a physical level there is no ultimate distinction between particles and waves. Modern day mystics conclude that science corroborates what spiritualists of all kinds—animists, Hindus, Buddhists, even materialistic atheists—have claimed for millennia: all is one; the universe is self-creating and evolving into better and better forms.[3]

The One-ist God of Spiritual Evolution

“Kick it up a notch,” says TV cook, Emeril Lagasse. That is what contemporary evolutionary spiritualists have done. They believe that the Mother Goddess of evolution is not limited by the human mind. Goddess Nature herself is the final arbiter of the evolutionary process and will ensure the mutation of human consciousness. The present human mind, be it ever so spiritual, is not her last word. Though biological evolution may reach an endpoint, we must be ready for an evolution of consciousness into “a new terrestrial species.”

This evolutionary goddess is roaring toward us with the power of a hurricane, and the first winds are felt through the cracked walls of the Church. “Evangelical” Richard Foster, for example, endorses the ideas of the spiritual evolutionist, Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard, who was excommunicated by the Roman Church, saw the world as a form of Gaia. It is the divinity-infused body of God, the “one world-womb” from which a “new humanity” will arise through the evolution of consciousness into “the all-inclusive One.”

Spencer Burke, once a megachurch Fundamentalist pastor, whose website is called “The Ooze,” endorses the book, Thank God for Evolution, by the Rev. Michael Dowd. On another site (spencerburke.com), he says of the book: “Like orphans united, spirituality and evolution come face-to-face in this daring book.” Michael Dowd began his spiritual pilgrimage as a Pentecostal but has since married a Unitarian Universalist, with whom he travels, empowering people of all ages and theological orientations to know real freedom, to live in deepest integrity, and to fulfill their mission through the liberating notion of biological and spiritual evolution.

Ken Wilber

Into the spiritual mishmash steps Ken Wilber, whose influence has caused many left-wing Emergents to ooze into evolutionary spirituality. Wilber has produced a world philosophy, “weaving together…science, morals, ethics, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world’s great wisdom traditions.” He concludes that all major worldviews are “basically true.” Postmodernism is “so yesterday,”he argues, and critiques it for being itself “culturally situated.”[4]

Wilber has a powerful, upbeat message: “The universe is winding up, not down.” Deep religion and global consciousness will descend on humanity until we all realize the truth of the “holon—every entity and concept shares a dual nature: as a whole unto itself, and as a part of some other whole.” He ties this awakening to evolution to create a system that affirms everything as it is, as holons, yet still hopes for a better, richer holonic future. His catch phrase is “transcend and include.”

To show our progress toward utopia, Wilber charts nine phases of spiritual evolution through human history (see chart below).[5] The most primitive system is at the bottom. Wilber places Two-ism in Phase 4 and his own system in phase 7, the “integrative” vision of reality. Two more mythico-spiritual states lie ahead, before humanity becomes totally identified with the divine. Wilber’s final phase is “Integral Spirituality,” the non-dual joining of matter, consciousness and spirit into an undifferentiated One—a perfect description of One-ism.

Phase 9

Integral-Holonic

Phase 8

Universal Holistic

Phase 7

Integrative

Second Tier Consciousness

Phase 6

The Sensitive Self (Green egalitarianism)

Phase 5

Scientific Achievement (Enlightenment Rationalism)

Phase 4

Mythic Order (an All-powerful Other: Theism, Two-ism)

Phase 3

Power Gods (Magical-mythical)

Phase 2

Magical-Animistic

Phase 1

Archaic-Instinctual

First-Tier Consciousness

Wilber is illogical, for in the true circle of One-ism, there can be no linear progress. His evolutionary “progress” simply twists the lens of a One-ist kaleidoscope to rearrange the sparkling bits into a new form. Such theorizing is pure speculation, without a shred of evidence to back it. The chart is also deceptive, because all the systems he mentions exist simultaneously in history. Worst of all, Wilber sidesteps the conflict between One-ism and Two-ism. Eight of his nine steps are One-ist, and he presents the only Two-ist system (the “Mythic Order,” or belief in an All-powerful Other) as one more primitive stage. I will deal with Wilber’s huge influence in chapter 12.

The One-ist God of Emerging Spiritual Unity

Such integrative spirituality merges with a popular movement of upbeat religious unity, known as Interfaith—all religions worshiping the same god. Study of the world’s religions is fascinating, but sooner or later, Paul’s analysis rings true: there are only two basic systems—either creation is divine and self creating, or creation owes its existence to a Divine Creator.

Belief in nature as God is evident in “hard core” paganism, but polytheism and animism share belief in a primary animating force, in which even Albert Einstein placed his faith. It is astonishing to see how strongly classic Eastern religion and modern liberal “Christian” thinking are inspired by the same basic belief. “Christian-Feminist” theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruether, recommends the worship of pagan goddesses as more beneficial to women than Christianity. She prefers “the nature and fertility religions” of paganism, including the worship of Baal.[6] “Christian” bishop, John Shelby Spong, describes God not as an external, supernatural being who rules humanity, but as the power of love flowing through everything. Lloyd Geering’s latest book title says it all: Coming Back to Earth: From Gods to the God to Gaia. Geering, New Zealand’s prominent Presbyterian apostate, predicts that the global community will return to the worship of nature.

Pagan theorists who define God as “a primary animating force,” blend easily with Spong’s notions of the divine as entirely immanent. That is why Interfaith is doing so well and includes both liberal “Christians” and Universalist-Unitarians, who identify God with the future cosmic evolution of the biological universe.

The worship of creation comes in many forms, from all the great Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism) to the nature religions of ancient Greece and Rome, to the animism of Africa and South America, and to Western esoterism. I saw these groups come together physically when their representatives met in Chicago in 1993 for the Parliament of the World’s Religions. They agreed that their religions were fundamentally the same. I watched eight thousand delegates from one hundred and twenty-five religions lock arms and dance to the sound of an American Indian tom-tom drum. I did not join arms. Christian Two-ism cannot join the dance. As Paul said, “What portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?” (2 Cor 6:15). When you walk into a pitch-black room and turn on a bright light, darkness disappears. The room is not half-dark. Dark and light have no fellowship. Mixing a personal God with an impersonal force does not produce a half-personal God. Interfaith tries to make Christians think they are welcome to join its party. But one question cries out for an answer: “Who is your God?” A Christian who wants to join the “one universal religion” must first sign the “statement of faiths”: all religions are equally true and worship the same One-ist god. The Chicago Parliament avoided the problem by not inviting biblical Two-ists to its choreographed celebration of religious unity.

The left wing of the Emergent movement, still occasionally calling itself evangelical, includes an interfaith component due to a sad ignorance of basic worldview. Emergent leader Brian McLaren says that the “missional” goal of the Church is not to make Christians out of Buddhists but to make “Buddhist followers of Jesus.”[7] McClaren is putting light and dark in the same room, and hoping for dawn, I suppose. At best, he will bring dusk.

Interfaith religious expressions, though self-consciously one, appear different because of their specific ways of describing the nature of the world. Some are world-affirming, others world-denying; some are pantheistic (Hinduism), others atheistic (Buddhism); some are materialistic, others spiritual; some are sexual, others asexual; some are ascetic, others libertine. Western atheism is also a form of creation worship, since it believes in the self-sustaining capacity of material reality and in the power of the human mind to observe the process with no need of a transcendent Mind.

Within a given religion, we see apparently contradictory forms. Hinduism includes both world-affirming (procosmism) and world-denying (acosmism) traditions, expressed in Vishnu (the procosmic preserver) and Shiva (the acosmic destroyer). Also in Hinduism, most Tantrists say there can be no enlightenment without sexual practice, whereas most celibates (brahmacharya) say enlightenment requires sexual abstinence. In Buddhism, the ascetic Brahmanic philosophy is opposed to the joyous, life-loving, and worldly notions embraced by Vedism. Gnosticism also has both ascetic and libertine forms.

All these variations hold in common the belief that nothing but this-worldly reality exists. They are all forms of One-ism that explain the world by the world. To say that the world causes itself is to give it divine attributes and, in one way or another, to worship it. In such a system, the worshiper worships himself, since he is part of the world, and his thoughts grant to the world this elevated status.

When I lecture, I always hear a question about Judaism and Islam, which seem to be exceptions, since they affirm a God who is “other.” Practically speaking, most Jews no longer believe in the Bible, for the god of rabbinic Judaism has become an impersonal force, driving many into forms of pagan spirituality that seek the “god” within. One might well argue that any “theistic” system that is not Trinitarian cannot have a personal God—but more on this later. Allah is a “singularity” and is unknowable—more like an impersonal force. He swears by elements within the creation, as the Quran shows.[8] If he swears by creation, can he truly stand above it as Creator of all? Jehovah will only swear by Himself (Heb 6:13). Muslims are tempted by Sufism, a thoroughly One-ist spirituality. The twelfth century Muslim Sufi master, Ibn Arabi, a sort of Al Gore of the Middle Ages, stated with poetic flourish:

My soul is a Mosque for Muslims,

A Temple for Hindus,

An Altar for Zoroastrians,

A Church for Christians,

A Synagogue for Jews,

And a Pasture for Gazelles.

Sixty-five percent of Americans believe that “many religions can lead to eternal life,” and thirty-seven percent of that group are self-identified evangelicals. Such figures are surprising to us, but Interfaith has been around for a long time. The Hindu Rig Veda states: “Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names.”[9] A modern historian describes the general religious situation at the time of the New Testament as a worldwide “theocracy,” a sort of universal syncretism. When Paul went to Athens, he noticed altars to all the gods, expressions of an ancient religious interfaith (Acts 17:22–23). In Miletus, a priest advertised himself as a priest of all the gods, and the goddess Isis was known as “the goddess of a thousand names.”

Old Testament prophets constantly denounced the worship of Baal and Asherah, Canaanite male and female gods personifying the powers of nature. Elijah locked horns with King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, a pagan witch, who tried to make God’s people believe that Baal and Jahweh were the same. Shock and awe in the form of fire from heaven put the people right and they all declared: “The Lord, He is God! The Lord, He is God!” (1 Kgs 18:39).

In our modern world, interfaith unity is encouraged by well-funded groups dedicated to the worship of a One-ist god. Here is a sampling: Parliament of the World’s Religions, United Religions, International Interfaith Center, Peace Council, Temple of Understanding, United Nations Spiritual Forum, World Conference on Religion and Peace, World Congress of Faiths, World Faiths Development Dialogue, World Fellowship of Inter-Religious Dialogue, and the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders.

Religious agreement about an interfaith nature god is a prerequisite for global utopia.

The One-ist God of the Future: The New Global Man

He claims he has constant “conversations with God,” and has sold millions of books to prove it. In one, entitled Tomorrow’s God, Neale Donald Walsch informs us that such a god is not a singular super Being, but the extraordinary process called life. This is one more example of “cosmic humanism,” which is no longer focused on individual expression, as it was in the 1980s. Pagans seldom talk about New Age, chakras, crystals, LSD, and expensive weekends to get in touch with their higher self and find inner peace. The nature god, as Wilber shows, has bigger plans for the planet—to save it, organize it, unify it and perfect it. Yes, the so-called New Spirituality has a heady, fantastic vision of global utopia. Hundreds of websites and international organizations are devoted to the realization of this goal. A few examples must suffice. Notice how thoroughly One-ist are the titles and concepts.

- Link TV proposes a series of films called “The Journey toward Oneness,” produced by Global Spirit and sponsored by the Alliance for a New Humanity. These programs illustrate the optimistic vision of “unity consciousness,” expressed in the teachings of the Dalai Lama, the Sufi poet, Rumi, the indigenous people of North America, the wisdom of the labyrinth, African ancestor worship and the Kogi people of South America;

- The World Foundation for the Discipline of Peace bases its notion of global peace on “oneness.” International Peace Centers teach a Living Peace Curriculum based on the ancient earth wisdom teachings from North America. Oneness with divine nature is the essential inspiration for this animistic definition of world peace;

- An Interfaith movement called One, promoting social justice, is gaining a following among evangelical churches that want to engage in acts of mercy.

Many world leaders speak of “a new world order,” based on oneness, and of “world citizenship,” freed from the disruptive influence of national sovereignty and promoted by a reinvigorated UN capable of governing our planet. A movement called Renaissance 2 captures this optimistic apocalyptic fervor. They declare that in the next decade we will be challenged by the convergent economic, ecological and cultural crises that mark a great shift in our culture and biosphere. They ask the world, “Are you ready for what comes next?”

What comes next is the secret that lies behind the holy books and spiritual techniques—the pagan, One-ist divinized Humanity. This unifying global god will be worshiped and served in an attempt to realize the diabolical design of the original Lie in Eden—a human utopia liberated from the Creator’s control. The closer we come to this ultimate fantasy, the closer will be our final nightmare. When Man is God, then so is the State, for do we not need wise leaders who know what is best for us? Welcome, tyranny.

Pure Fantasy

The apostle Paul calls “One-ist” views of God “the Lie,” clever as it may be, to feed on our innate desire for utopia. In the light of the evil embedded in our history and in our hearts, our self-created utopian dreams are illusory. Like poor Michael Jackson, who died such a sad death, after trying all his life to create Neverland, we go on choosing fantasy over reality. The utopian theme song could well be the 1960s pop song: “This Is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” A less well-known stanza of this ode to the God/Goddess Aquarius, Bringer of Spiritual Water, begins:

Harmony and understanding

Sympathy and trust abounding

Angelic illumination

Rising fiery constellation

Traveling our starry courses

Guided by the cosmic forces

Oh, care for us; Aquarius!

These lyrics from the 1960s have become the blueprint for a planetary religious and political community now in final dress-rehearsal mode. Guilt has been wished away and evil is no threat, since final accountability and divine judgment are dismissed as useless, primitive notions. Paul’s words, uttered two millennia ago, address our twenty-first century, besotted with utopian notions of newness and change. We have been taken in by one more version of One-ism. There are still only two options, as Paul so rightly saw: worship of the creation or worship of the Creator.

We now have the pleasure of considering that Creator.

[1]. scp-inc.org/publications/journals/mayan/index.php, see note 96.

[2]. Tremper Longman III, “The Marduk Prophecy,” The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World, ed., William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 481.

[3]. See Frank Stootman, “The Spirituality of Quantum Mechanics,” On Global Wizardry: Techniques of Pagan Spirituality and a Christian Response, ed. Peter Jones (Escondido, CA: Main Entry Editions, 2010).

[4]. Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 2001).

[5]. Wilber, Theory of Everything, 43.

[6]. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985).

[7]. Brian D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 264.

[8]. Allah swears by the sky (SS 86:1), the moon (SS 74:32–34) and the stars (SS 53:1), among other things.

[9]. Quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008), xiii.

Chapter 7

“For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity…the truth of God…worship and service of the Creator.” —Paul, Romans 1:20, 25.

The Truth About God

In 1993 I heard Robert Müller, Assistant General Secretary of the UN and a New Age mystic, affirm that at the UN, there is no “In the beginning, God created.” His statement tells you a lot about the UN but not much about God.

We examined the god of One-ism in last chapter. To examine the nature and character of the God of Two-ism, the Creator who makes everything and is Himself uncreated, we will consider the programmatic statements that Paul makes in Romans 1 about the true God:

- God is Creator ("the things that are made,” “the Creator who is blessed forever,” vv 20,25);

- God has incommunicable attributes (“his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature,” “the immortal God,” vv 20, 23);

- God is Judge (“the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men,” v 18);

- God is Personal (“the wrath of God,” v 18; “God has shown it to them,” v 19; receives our thanks, v 21).

God as Creator

The Bible’s first line is not a heart-warming affirmation that “In the beginning Jesus died for my sins.” It opens with a statement about the nature of the world: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1). The Bible stakes its reputation on the fact of creation, its goodness, and on the necessity of the Creator, who stands outside of creation as its Maker. German liberal theologians are capable of outlandish heresies, but one Old Testament scholar, Klaus Westermann, got things right. He noted that the Genesis description of creation differs from all other ancient creation stories because Genesis asserts that there is only one Creator and that all else that was or could be, could never be anything but a creature.

British theologian, Colin Gunton, argued that there are only two possible answers to the question of origins: a created universe made by a divine, free, personal agent, or a universe that creates itself. So a German, a Brit and the apostle Paul all agree that there are only two worldview options. What more proof do we need?

Creation includes angels, humans, galaxies and the whole of the finite cosmos. Paul says God’s “eternal power and divine nature” (v 19) can be seen in the creation and express His utter transcendence and otherness. Only God has no beginning. When Harold Bloom says he is “uncreated,” he has rejected his Torah upbringing and, as he proudly admits, swallowed the pagan “Gnostic” myth of his own divinity. But Harold had a birthday. And though yours may be more recent than mine, we both have birthdays. Whatever the gurus and shamans tell us, we can never be God, because we have a birth date on our curriculum vitae. The world also had a birthday.

The Bible hails God as Creator in its very first verse. We hear a ringing echo of that verse in Paul’s argument against Gnostic tendencies in the first century Church: “For everything created by God is good” (1 Tm 4:4). Six verses later, he adds: “God is the Savior [benefactor] of all” (1 Tm 4:10), which shows that creation is good for everyone. James, the brother of Jesus, agrees: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (Jas 1:17). The last book of the Bible reminds us that this truth will continue throughout eternity. In heaven, the living creatures and the twenty-four elders praise God for being the Creator: “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.” (Rv 4:9–11).

The Bible’s First and Last Word

In Romans 1, Paul issues an indictment against humanity. Because God’s “eternal power and divine nature…[are] clearly perceived; ever since the creation of the world … [human beings] are without excuse” (v 20). The cosmos is the work of a sovereign and holy Creator, a reflection of His character and power and the theater of His glory. Yet unbelievers fail to give God thanks (v 21). Can one be thankful without thanking someone? It makes no sense to thank a system, so if you get rid of God, you can only thank nature, whose divinity you share, so you are basically thanking yourself.

Perhaps this is why atheistic scientists, dissatisfied with the “orthodoxy” of fairy-tale evolution, often turn to some form of theistic realism. Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) came close. An atheist, Crick admitted that the odds of chance events causing the universe are so astronomical as to be ludicrous. He came to believe that life appeared almost as a miracle and that the evolutionary theory, on which he had based his life, was impossible. He speculated that Earth may have been “seeded” by a visitation of intelligent beings from another planet. This whimsical theory displaces, but does not solve, the problem.[1] In the inimitable words of Ann Coulter, bless her cotton socks, “thus was God narrowly averted,” or, as the French would say, “Oof!” (Translation: “that was close!”) What has science done for us, if its prizewinners bail on us with fairy tales? Having “clearly perceived” the true character of the created universe, Crick, for one, must admit that theories of evolution are inadequate before the mystery of a disturbingly intelligent cosmos. Remember the reaction of my wife’s humanist friend before the Grand Canyon? Like thousands who gaze on the splendor of the Canyon, she “clearly perceived” the Creator’s hand, but did not thank Him.

The late English astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who coined the term “big bang,” was even more courageous than Crick. In spite of his atheism, he stated that the idea of the origin of life by chance is absurd. He calculated the chances of randomly obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell to be 1 in 1040,000. The number of atoms in the known universe is ridiculously small by comparison (10^80). Hoyle also argued that fifteen billion years was not long enough for the chance formation of complex higher life forms. The random emergence of the simplest cell, he said, would be like a tornado sweeping through a junkyard, and assembling a Boeing 747. He concluded that the amazing cellular order of the natural universe had to be the outcome of an external intelligent design, a theory so obvious he wondered why it was not widely accepted as self-evident.

Philosopher Anthony Flew (1923–) was long considered the greatest atheist of the twentieth century. Just before his eighty-first birthday, however, Flew became a theist. Noting that even Albert Einstein believed in an Intelligence behind the complexity of the physical universe, Flew embraced the notion of intelligent design, believing it impossible for evolution to account for the fact that one single cell can carry more data than the combined volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. These great minds jettisoned the fantasy of a chance universe in favor of the “common sense” idea that the world was designed intelligently. Fred Hoyle’s question reverberates in the philosophical air: Why is this not widely accepted as self-evident?

The popular Harvard biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, sees order, even holiness, in the creation. Gould admitted in 1977 that the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record constituted “the trade secret of paleontologists.”[2] This is not the place to discuss the flaws in Darwinian evolution (e.g., problems in the fossil record, the evolution of organic from inorganic matter, how male and female evolved at all, let alone simultaneously, assuring reproduction and the survival of the species). Evolutionary theory leaves so many essential questions unanswered that attachment to it cannot be due to scientific argument. Dr. Michael Ruse, an ardent evolutionist and ex-Christian, author of Darwinism Defended: A Guide to the Evolution Controversies, freely admits that evolution is promoted as more than science—it is a religious ideology.

Starring the droll Ben Stein in blazer, tie, shorts and sneakers, the movie Expelled uncovers with Colombo-style “dumb” questions, how the religiously doctrinaire evolutionists maintain a stranglehold on the academy in the name of science. “Following the evidence where it leads”—as scientists are presumably trained to do—can cost you your job if you buck the reigning orthodoxy of naturalism. Off-limits to young students is the “unspeakably holy” ground on which some of the best scientific minds have finally stood—where Paul says we all stand, without excuse, before the evidence of God as Creator. As far as I know, Crick, Hoyle and Flew never turned to the God of the Bible.

God’s Incommunicable Attributes (vv 20, 23)

The ancient gods of Greece and Rome were like humans on steroids. Modern pagans, like Shirley MacLaine, declare with charming modesty: “I am God.” Not many will happily worship Jupiter or Shirley, but the biblical God is worth worshiping. He is unique, stunningly complex, powerful and wise. In light of this uniqueness, which gives the Bible a “ring of truth,” theologians have spoken of God’s “incommunicable attributes.” This doesn’t mean that God can’t communicate (after all, He invented communication), but that He has qualities that we neither share nor comprehend.

- God is independent; we are dependent.

- God is eternal; we have a beginning.

- God is immutable; we change.

- God is infinite; we are finite.

- God is all-powerful (omnipotent); we are not.

- God is all-knowing (omniscient); our knowledge is limited.

- God knows things before they happen; we have no sure knowledge of the future.

- God’s presence is felt in every nook and cranny of the cosmos (omnipresent); we are limited in space and time.

- God is absolute; we are relative.

- God is the perfect being; we are derivative beings.

The first part of each statement cannot be applied to human beings. MacLaine, Bloom and others are silly enough to do so, but we all know how ludicrous it is to say, “I am eternal,” or “I am totally independent,” or “I am everywhere.” God can say this, because it is true of Him. Who would want to worship a God without such qualities? The paltry little god I see in the mirror each morning inspires neither worship nor awe! As the wrinkles appear on Shirley’s aging face, she doubtless has the same problem. The “incommunicable attributes” of the real God, as He reveals Himself in Scripture, make Him fundamentally different from the things and persons He made. Let’s examine a few of these qualities more closely.

The Alterity of God

You know the phrases “alter ego” or “alternative solution.” “Alter” means “other,” so “alterity” is a good description for God because He is “other.” Moses says to Pharaoh: “there is no one like the Lord our God” (Ex 8:10). Moses is not offering Pharaoh one more tribal deity for his collection. God is totally other and distinct. It was Moses who wrote Genesis 1:1, remember. The special name for God, Yahweh, “I am who I am,” which doubtless means, “I am the self-existent one,” is never employed for other gods in a generic sense. The gods of paganism are pantheistically identified with everything in creation and with all other gods. The “I am” God has His own name and His own existence, and can be found nowhere else but “there.” Solomon says it this way: “But will God really dwell on earth with men? The heavens, even the highest heavens, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!” (2 Chr 6:18, NIV). The Psalmist also captures this truth: “Who is like the Lord our God, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?” (Ps 113:4–6, NIV). “There is none holy like the Lord; there is none besides you; there is no rock like our God” (1 Sm 2:2).

Like a critic previewing Lion King, the prophet Isaiah puts the record straight: “He [the Lord] sits enthroned above the circle of the earth” (Is 40:22, NIV). God is above, beyond and outside the earth, because He existed before it and created it. God is not an element within the circle of life, as Disney likes to say. “The blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords…whom no one has ever seen or can see,” has His own unique domain of divine existence, a dwelling of “unapproachable light” (1 Tm 6:15–16).

These are lofty notions, but we all desire to worship something greater than and different from ourselves. A transcendent God is the only one I can worship—a God who blows my circuits. True knowledge of this God must be a special knowledge that goes beyond a common, natural knowledge. One-ist worship of nature gives an impression of transcendence but quickly becomes “ho hum,” since our “thoughts and prayers” never get farther than the ceiling of creation. The circle of life is a closed system, in which the “heavens” are like brass.

The Omnipresence of God

God’s great difference doesn’t stop Him from being everywhere present in the world. God is omnipresent in a number of ways. Because He is spirit and doesn’t have a body, He is not bound by the limits of space. God has the eyes of a hawk, so to speak. Here are just a few of the Bible’s many affirmations that nothing gets by God:

The Lord’s throne is in heaven; his eyes see…the children of man. (Ps 11:4)

His eyes are on the ways of a man, and he sees all his steps. (Jb 34:21)

[He] rules by his might forever…[his]eyes keep watch on the nations. (Ps 66:7)

In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. (Ps 95:4)

God prolongs the life of the mighty by his power; they rise up when they despair of life. He gives them security, and they are supported, and his eyes are upon their ways. (Jb 24:22-23)

God is everywhere present, not just as Lord but as an owner who cares for His creatures. God watches over us both in judgment and in tender care. His own hands made creation, and He claims rightful ownership and control over it. Nothing happens that is out of His control.

The Aseity or the Independence of God

God is not dependent on anything within creation and will only swear by Himself (Is 45:23; Jer 22:5; Heb 6:13). The role of creation is to “declare the glory of God,” (Ps 19:1) and the whole earth is filled with it (Ps 72:19); but God will not share His glory with the heavens or anything else (Is 42:8). “The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him” (Hb 2:20).

There is a kind of glory “due his name” alone (Ps 29:2). That is why He declares in Exodus 20:5, “I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” This is not a pique of egotistical pride, but a statement made in the context of idolatry. His people fail to see the distinction between God and creation. In our text (v 23), Paul says that humans willingly exchange the glory of this majestic God for images of humans beings and animals (see Ps 106:20), and thus attempt to undermine God’s unique person.

The Immutability of God

You’ve heard of mutants that morph into weird forms. God is an “immutant.” Addressing an audience of West Coast beach people on the arcane subject of God’s incommunicable attributes, I sensed I was losing them, so I said, “If anyone has one of these attributes, I’ll give you a free book.” An athletic guy in his early forties came up to me afterwards and said, “You owe me a book. My wife says I never change!” He got us all laughing, but changelessness is no joke when applied to God. In the last book of the Old Testament, God assures us of His faithfulness by saying: “I, the Lord, do not change” (Mal 3:6). No one else can make that statement. We see the same attribute in Psalm 110:4: “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind.” Changelessness is inherent to God’s being. James 1:17 describes God as “the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” Shadows change as light moves. We who have birthdays also have shadows. We stand in the way of light, blocking it to produce a shadow. God has no birthday and is not subject to the change of time. Light is not behind Him, but ceaselessly issues from Him. In His independence from Creation, God sheds light on us, both spiritually and physically. “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Nm 23:19).

The Infinity/Eternity of God

Paul describes God in our text as “the immortal God,” comparing Him to “mortal man” (v 23). This agrees with other Scriptures that reveal a God who has no beginning and no end (Hb 1:12). No human being can ever be God. God “alone has immortality” (1 Tm 6:16). Beware of any system that tells you that you can become God.

About four thousand years ago, Abraham “called on the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God” (Gn 21:33). Three thousand years ago, the Psalmist declared: “Are you not from everlasting, O Lord, my God, my Holy One?” (Ps 9:7). You are the God who “sits enthroned forever…” (Ps 45:6). Psalm 90:2 describes God’s existence before His act of creating the vast but finite cosmos: “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”

Harold Bloom probably read these psalms as a kid, since he grew up in a Jewish home and prepared for his bar mitzvah. His conversion to paganism, causing him to exult, “I am uncreated, as old as God,” shows just how antithetical these two ways of conceiving of God really are. Whom do you wish to worship, the God of the Bible, Harold Bloom or maybe the twelfth century Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, who claimed that there was “something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable.” Whether he knew it or not, Eckhart was claiming one of the incommunicable attributes of God, thus reflecting a pagan understanding of God.

God as Judge

God as Judge is not strictly an incommunicable mystery of His being, because we have a sense of justice and can judge others (much to their dislike). God is a qualitatively different Judge, however, because He is the transcendent and holy Creator. His judging is part of His condescension or humiliation, as He reaches down to creatures in righteousness and gives us a conscience and a sense of right and wrong. We tend to squirm when we read the opening statement of the passage we are studying: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (v 18). When we hear the word “wrath,” we think of an irate father losing his temper with his son and smacking him “upside the head,” as the expression goes. This has nothing to do with divine wrath. The prophet Habakkuk speaks to God as “you who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong” (Hb 1:13). God’s judgment is not capricious or hasty, but pure and righteous. Because of human rebellion, the gracious revelation of the transcendent God to fallen creatures is necessarily the revelation of His wrath. One of those fluffy, soft, pure white hotel towels, set against the ones we’ve been using and washing for years in my home, would show how shabby ours are! God’s purity, by its very existence, judges our shabbiness.

Without ultimate justice, earthly life would be hell. In the world of pagan Oneness, there is no judgment, present or final, because there is no notion of sin or of a personal God who could be offended. In biblical Two-ism, righteous judgment is fundamental, for it infuses the cosmos with personal, moral significance, constantly calling humanity to a higher standard.

You cannot have God the Creator, dressed in drag as a benign Mother Nature. We implicitly know God as Judge because we know He has created the moral order. Paul reminds the pagans of his day that while their belief system denies the possibility of a moral universe, they daily accuse their friends and neighbors of “injustice.” Our awareness of morality reminds us that God is Creator. As Paul says in Romans 2:1, “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.” Paul starts with a “therefore” because he is referring back to what he has already said: we know about the divine Creator, but deny the evidence.

We all feel the force of Paul’s accusation. We live in a moral universe we did not create, and we must act as if morality exists, for only then is human life bearable. Ultimately, the moral standard pressing in on us is holiness, which is the essence of the created life in which we live.

Wrath and Holiness

When you hear the word “holy,” you may think of people like Mother Theresa, who choose an altruistic lifestyle and have an impeccable public record. This is a misconception. The root meaning of “holy” is “set apart for a specific function in a rightful place.” God is holy because He has a distinct “place,” separate from the creation, with a very different form of existence. Anyone claiming to be a “Jesus follower” should note that this is what Jesus believed about God. He says that God is the Father in heaven (in His own place, with His own form of existence, in Mt 6:9) distinct from the creation. By respecting that as we pray, we hallow or render holy God’s name. But God is not the only one to have a holy place. Creatures also have distinct, holy places. God’s work of creation makes a cosmos by establishing distinctions, by separating things out, and by giving each thing—plants, angels, animals, the earth or people— its special place and function.

This understanding of holiness lies at the root of biblical morality. Maintaining divinely ordered distinction is the sine qua non of a holy cosmos. The unholy appears when Adam and Eve attempt to cross the line between “creaturehood” and the divine Creator. Maintaining these created distinctions is the guiding principle of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:2-17.

1. “You shall have no other gods before me” separates the true God from the false.

2. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image” separates worship of the transcendent God from idolatry.

3. “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain” means that God’s name must not be confused with created things, but must be hallowed in its heavenly reality.

4. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy…for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth” distinguishes one day from all the others and shows the difference between creational work and rest.

5. “Honor your father and your mother” sets apart fathers, mothers and children for their specific familial role.

6. “You shall not murder” underlines the holy character and distinct identity of each created person.

7. “You shall not commit adultery” shows that marriage itself is “set apart” by God.

8. “You shall not steal” indicates the way in which property is set apart as belonging to an individual.

9. “You shall not bear false witness” shows how important God finds the distinction between truth and falsehood.

10. “You shall not covet” indicates not only the above principle of private property, but also our submission to God’s design in giving us all the good things we need for our particular “set apart” service for Him.

Imagine yourself in a room full of friends and acquaintances. You’re sitting up front, watching a large screen on the wall. Suddenly, instead of the movie you thought you were going to watch, you see yourself as a two-year old, stomping your feet and shouting, “No,” at your mother. Then you are in your second-grade class, taking the lunch money out of the teacher’s desk…and so it goes. There is also a voice over—your own voice speaking the thoughts that went through your mind. All your evil thoughts and actions, your lies, your lust, your hate, your pride, your anger, your subtle and not-so-subtle betrayals of enemies and friends—all are projected for everyone to see. And they are all true. That is a picture of final judgment. You are without excuse, because those Ten Commandments are not some ancient code. They are written on your heart (Rom 2:16). God’s holy law, written into the cosmos and on our conscience, is plain to see.

That scene is scary, yet even scarier would be a universe without laws, without ethical norms, conscience, accountability or guilt. The popularity of crime series on TV shows how eager we are to see the criminal found and punished. Without moral structures, we would become like the children in William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies (literally, Beelzebub) stranded on a desert island, devouring one another.

The revelation of God’s just wrath has a present and a future aspect. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven” (v 18) because God is still giving people over to their rebellion (see vv 24, 26, 27). That’s why we see behavior even more shocking than that in Golding’s novel. God’s righteous judgment “will be revealed” in the future day of wrath, however (Rom 2:5). Just as the Holy Spirit gives believers present proof of future glory, so present judgment is a down payment on the judgment of the final day.

The present “giving over” shows God’s “divine forbearance” (Rom 3:25), giving sinners a chance to see the effects of their sin, and to come in repentance to Christ for salvation. God arranges all things so that “every mouth will be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God” (Rom 3:19), but also so that we will seek “the righteousness of God revealed apart from the Law” (Rom 3:21). That righteousness is available to us through faith in Jesus Christ, whereas the Law can only condemn us.

God is Personal as Trinity

You may be bothered by terms like “wrath,” “Lie” and “Truth.” However, if we really do live in a personal, moral universe, such terms are unavoidable. We will one day stand before the Maker of all things to give a final accounting. Describing the options as the Truth and the Lie and declaring the ultimate issues to be of vital personal and eternal significance makes sense, even as it makes us uncomfortable!

There are no holy distinctions in a world of One-ism. Even good and evil cannot be distinguished, and we should give equal respect to both. In the Oneness soup, there are no alphabet noodles—no names, no you! Personal identity vanishes into the black hole of impersonal union. Not so in a reality that begins with the divine as personal.

I heard a mainline minister say that we don’t need such a complicated doctrine as the Trinity anymore. Wrong! We have never needed it more, for it is at the very core of the biblical revelation of God and unique among the religions of the world. The onrush of both paganism and Islam, for whom Trinity has no meaning (also true of Judaism), makes the distinctiveness of biblical revelation shine. The Trinity puts personhood at the very center of existence, originating with God. God is not a solitary being, eternally lonely until He creates us. God is independent and does not need us, because He is both one and three. I cannot explain this, but I see its absolute importance—a godhead made up of three distinct persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, existing in personal communion forever. This Trinitarian God establishes my sense of personal identity within reality. The distinction between the creature and the Creator reflects the very nature of God, in which divine distinctions are maintained within an organic personal unity.

You may think Two-ism is just as fanciful as pagan utopian hopes. We are at the limits of human comprehension, but a God of endless majesty and complexity is the only being worth worshiping. That God became Man does not make us gods, but it does make Jesus’ death infinitely valuable. Given our mortality and moral weakness, if such a God does not exist, we are left with pagan fantasies that promise a perfect world and wish away evil by redefining it as good. Even Charlie Brown would not be so gullible. Our hopes lie in what the God from the outside has done to solve guilt, sin and death. In chapter 14, we will look in depth at that solution, but first let us examine Paul’s argument that our beliefs about God determine our spiritual practice. Spirituality is not neutral, nor are all spiritualities the same. Just as the two objects of worship (nature or the Creator) are antithetically different, so are the spiritual practices that serve them.

[1]. See profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/Views/Exhibit/narrative/neurobiology.html.

[2]. Stephen Jay Gould, The Richness of Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 263–64.

Chapter 8

“They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles…and worshiped and served the creature.” —Paul, Romans 1:23, 25

"Feed the God within." —Phyllis Tickle, while leading a communion service

The Lie About Spirituality

The Return of the Shaman

When I read Romans 1:23 as a boy, I would think of the strange practices of primitive tribes described by the missionaries that came to my home church in Liverpool. To understand the text for my culture, I had to think of an idol as a new car, a luxury home, a well-paying job or good looks. Ah! That made sense. Idolatry could be condemned as the inner life of selfishness and self-worship, an interpretation which, though valid in one sense, seemed to push the Romans text into the mists of time.

Not any more! Now eight-year-olds are asking, “Mommy, what’s a shaman?” Can you answer that question? A shaman, through states of trance, acts as a medium between the visible world and the invisible spirit world, practicing magic or sorcery for purposes of healing, divination, or control over natural events.

The occult shaman is a model of spirituality in the twenty-first century. The key to vibrant, authentic, contemporary spirituality and its promise for the future is seen as the resurgence of ancient shamanic traditions. Eastern mysticism, ancient Gnosticism, pre-Christian Goddess worship, channeled messages from the lost mythical city of Atlantis, and the mysteries of the Zodiac—all offer answers for our modern plight, based on a sense of continuity with the ancient shamans, who commune with the powers of nature.

So don’t put your Bibles away yet. Paul’s two-thousand-year-old wisdom speaks with pertinence to our present situation. The apostle’s contemporaries, though they rejected the Creator, still needed spirituality. This is the kind they produced: “[they] exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles…[they] worshiped and served the creature” (vv 23, 25).

Fast-forward two thousand years. On a recent plane trip, a cheery middle-aged lady with long painted nails, fingers covered in silver rings and wrists hidden by countless bracelets, plopped down next to me and asked me what I was reading and why. I rarely talk to people on planes, because I can catch up on important but less urgent reading. But I had just been encouraging college students to speak courageously about their faith, so I answered my seat companion honestly: “I’m reading about global warming because I’m writing a book from a Christian perspective on the spirituality that drives green alarmism.” She replied: “You don’t know who’s sitting beside you!” She didn’t resemble Oprah Winfrey, and besides, we were both in economy. “No, I don’t,” I said. “Who are you?” She told me her name and, beaming with pride, informed me that she was the first hypnotherapist to be given an academic lectureship at a recognized university. On cue, she uttered those famous words: “You know, I’m not religious, but I am very spiritual.” She assured me that everyone is spiritual and should worship the god of his or her choosing, because ultimately all gods are the same.

How many such conversations have you had? They tell us something profound about our time. To worship all the gods, whoever they might be, is to worship creation, as Paul points out in Romans 1. The gods of our own choosing are in man’s image. Of course, the New Spirituality, magnanimous in its non-judgmental unity, cannot accept someone who thinks there is true and false spirituality, a true God and false gods. Such divisive, arrogant opinions are unacceptable! Sophisticated culture, says sociologist Robert Bellah, is beginning to envisage “the unity of consciousness,” which rejects “univocal understandings of reality” (one narrow way of belief).[1] Bellah echoes New Age guru Marilyn Ferguson, who is convinced that “everything is one… a coherent unity.”[2] Bellah’s broad view of a “unity of consciousness” (pagan consensus) blurs the true debate, which is not between narrow fundamentalists and tolerant syncretists, but between those who believe that reality is One and those who believe it is Two.

The Spirituality of One-ism

My encounter on the flight from San Francisco illustrates the dramatic change of thinking that has occurred since the 1960s— a change that has taken most of us by surprise.

From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Western history was the playground of rationalism, often called “secular humanism.” In the middle of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx dismissed religion as the “opiate of the people,” and in 1927 Sigmund Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, predicting the end of religion, which he considered an illness that needed healing. These predictions came true only by robbing the Christian religion of its dominant place in Western civilization. Many predicted the end of religion, but few predicted the death of secular humanism.

You might think secular humanism is powerful. After all, isn’t there a generation of “new atheists”? The new atheism, however, does not threaten the gods of the New Spirituality, but only the God of the Bible. You might expect atheism to contradict the prediction of Mark C. Taylor, who is a postmodern deconstructionist professor at Williams College. Taylor foresees the twenty-first century as dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago. Part of the reason for the rebirth of religion is that Postmodernism has shown atheism to be irrational and ignorant. Atheism is in decline worldwide, whereas forms of spirituality are rising to take its place. You see this in the political realm; Marxist regimes (the political form of secular humanism) have disappeared, leaving a void that spirituality is filling. Even on the Western campuses, versions of “god” are back. The title of a secular literature conference in 2006 suggests something is afoot: God is Undead: Post-Secular Notions in Contemporary Literature and Theory.

I hope I’ve not confused you. What I’m saying is this: during the last two hundred years, modern Western civilization worshiped its own rational prowess. Today, the earthly spirits are back, making the apostle Paul’s description of the ancient pagan world applicable to our present situation. How has this happened?

East Meets West

The hippie search for personal, mystical enlightenment in the 1960s seemed to be a minor footnote in the history of spirituality. But Woodstock and the Yellow Submarine signaled the demise of secularism as a dominant cultural force. Hippies went east and gurus came west. The eastward spiritual trip was a rejection of both Christianity and rationalistic humanism. The message embedded in the plaintive tunes of Joan Baez and the Beatles is now buried in the Western consciousness via satellite communication and globalism. The long-haired hippies and bearded gurus played the first bars of the global symphony. Western secular humanism did not survive the meeting of the East and the West. The hippie seekers of spiritual One-ism finally changed the Western soul.

Author of the novel, The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (after a time spent in India, the land of his birth and the land of two hundred and fifty million gods) tells about his great surprise upon his return to New York in 2008. The psychics and mystics, once familiar only in Greenwich Village, had moved to mainstream New York City. The many-armed gods of Hinduism, incense sticks, Tibetan scrolls of the Buddha, and OM signs had caught the imagination of Western spiritual seekers. He tells of a one-time atheist friend who became absorbed in Jewish mysticism, and whose wife was seeing a medicine man in Chinatown for roots and crystals.

But the influence is not one-way. Western pragmatism had a powerful transforming influence in Buddhism. No longer limited to influencing individual meditational practice, Buddhism now sees its calling as a force for change and for social justice on the global stage. Since it has no personal god or dogma, it is the religion of choice for ex-secularists. Albert Einstein would have been thrilled. He saw Buddhism as the one religion that could cope with modern scientific needs. In a word, Buddhism is positioning itself as a cosmic religion for a unified planet.

Going Backwards to Leap Forward

Transformed human consciousness, part of the evolution of the cosmos, has become the new savior of mankind. But to catch the wave of the future, we must jump backwards—not the usual direction for evolution! The French anticipated our embarrassment, out of their long experience, and kindly invented a sophisticated explanation: reculer pour mieux sauter—“back up for a better leap forward.”

Twenty-first century “progressives” tell us that for cultural blessing, we must return to pre-modern, pre-Christian cultures and their notions of oneness with nature. So the “progressives” are also “regressives.” They criticize Christianity as old and worn out, but exhort us to sit at the feet of ancient Andean and American Indian shamans or Eastern gurus, who alone understood the mystery of the human relationship with the earth. Materialistic rationalists have “desouled the Earth,” so we must go to Black Elk, Sitting Bull or the Aymara medicine men of South America to learn deep spirituality from the earth. Against all expectations, twenty-first century Westerners are turning to witch doctors for the spiritual secrets of the future universe.

As we saw earlier, paganus means “of the earth,” or “those who work the earth,” a “person of the place” (whether town or country) who preserved local customs. “Pagan” is contrasted with alienus, the “person from elsewhere.” Physical place includes geosacred concentrations, the place for earth-based divination. In other words, physical place is the source of spiritual life. That place can be a clearing in a wood, a bloodline, or the entire physical cosmos—nature. Inasmuch as the local customs were associated with gods or spirits, paganism was associated with the worship of the earth as a spiritual entity. That is precisely what contemporary spiritualists say and do.

Thomas Berry, an ex-Roman Catholic priest and theologian, has had enormous influence in international gatherings such as the UN. He rejects the term “theologian,” claiming to be a “geologian.” He doesn’t teach geology, mind you, but about how to experience the innate spiritual and occult powers of the earth. Berry’s approach (summarized in his book, The Great Work) sees “God” not as someone distinct from the earth, but as the spiritual essence of the earth, the true object of worship. A better example of what Paul is describing—worship and serve creation— you could not find, and this from an ex-Christian theologian who knows precisely what he is doing. Berry admired his mentor Jung, who said that the belief that God is outside of man is “systematic blindness.” In his therapy, Jung tried to get clients in touch with their “inner deity,” revealed from the depths of the soul, the “unconscious.”

Berry admired the spirituality of the ancient peoples of the American continent, who believed that animals and humans are relatives and that worship should be directed to “totemic carvings.” It may sound quaint and harmless, but Berry names it as shamanism. Such teaching is far from harmless. My friend, Marcus Toole, who works as a chaplain with the Cree Nation, knows shamanism first hand. He notes that in the ceremony of the sun-dance “as many as forty people will neither eat nor drink and will bounce up and down from 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM, blowing whistles, shaking rattles and channeling their prayers to the Thunderbird Spirits, the Buffalo Spirits, the Sun Spirit, etc., seeking visions and spirit helpers.” Marcus adds that “the point of the sun-dance is to sacrifice one’s body [often to the point of making oneself ill] to the spirit world for the purpose of receiving answers to prayer, spirit power and cleansing from wrongs done.”[3]

Berry’s recommendations remind us of those violent South American tribal practices in religions admired by Robert Müller. The cruel side of nature worship is conveniently passed over in favor of the cleaned-up version, which speaks only of “green” care for Mother Nature. People now seek healing by “harnessing the consciousness of a dolphin,” or by “vortex experiences,” in which participants experience the “human energy system interacting with the earth.” Mind manipulation erases the God-made distinction between human beings and the rest of nature. A website called Healthy and Green Living promotes indigenous spirituality, proposing five simple, happy phrases:

- The earth is sacred, and so is everything which lives in or upon it;

- Everything is alive and has spirit;

- Everything is related;

- It is vital to connect with others through group ritual;

- You can experience Spirit directly and with joy.

Shamanism for Beginners

Such “joyful direct experience with Spirit” is Shamanism 101 for beginners. By the techniques of mediums and shamans, people today can have direct (but not always joyful!) encounters with the deities or spirits. Bolivian President Evo Morales is not the only one to consult shamans. So does Western apostate Christian, Alison Leonard, a contemporary religious feminist. In the void she felt when she threw out her Christian faith, she experimented with earth-based, feminine-oriented experiences and with spiritual encounters with non-human life forms. She now says she has had an experience of the divine feminine in its pre-Christian and post-Christian shamanistic forms.

The Prince Charming of Modern Day Paganism

These practices are not reserved for the lunatic fringe in expensive workshops or faeric forest clearings. Some influential world leaders are on the pagan path to spirituality. We discussed Prince Charles’ fascination with the Perennial Philosophy. As a young man, Charles went to Africa and struck up a friendship with the South African explorer, Sir Laurens van der Post. A mystic, sage and personal friend and follower of Carl Jung, Sir Laurens influenced Charles for the rest of his life. He took the Prince to spend time with the Bushmen of Botswana. Having visited there in 1987, Charles spoke of the sense of wonder that the Bushmen inspired in him by their inner spirituality and wise understanding of how nature worked at a deeper, mysterious level. Charles does not go into more detail, but another Westerner does.

In his book, Bushman Shaman: Awakening the Spirit through Ecstatic Dance, Bradford Keeney describes his research into the spirituality of the Bushmen and his initiation into their shamanic power. “You are danced until your body collapses from fatigue. At that moment you fall into a deep state of relaxation and inner stillness, receiving the same benefits as classic meditation.” How interesting that Charles has already publicly refused his role of “Defender of the (Christian) Faith,” and has said he will be “defender of faiths.” Perhaps one day we will see an interfaith, spiritual Britain, ruled by a Shamanic king! Bolivia, move over.

Stanislav Grof

I have mentioned Carl Jung’s influence on our post-Christian world, and we have discussed a few of his disciples, like Thomas Berry, Sir Laurens van der Post, and Stanislav Grof. The latter is a “transpersonal, neo-Jungian,” who describes the deep experiences of the transpersonal realm (in which Prince Charles was dabbling). Jung called this the “collective unconscious,” whereby we are aware of the spirit-world. Using shamanistic techniques, Grof shows how to create “altered states of consciousness.” Here is a list of his “technologies of the sacred,” each of which is capable of introducing people into the transpersonal or paranormal realm:

- Breathing techniques (that produce “non-ordinary states of consciousness…to unleash the inner healer within the psyche”);

- Sound technologies (drumming, rattling, use of sticks, bells and gongs, music, chanting, mantras);

- Dancing (Sufi whirling dervishes or Bushmen trance dancing);

- Social isolation and sensory deprivation (vision quest, desert or cave isolation);

- Sensory overload (super physical stimuli, extreme pain);

- Physiological means (sleep or food deprivation, purgatives, laxatives, blood-letting);

- Meditation, prayer (Hatha, Kundalini or Tantric yoga, Christian mysticism, exercises of Ignatius Loyola);

- Psychedelic stimulation (hashish, peyote, LSD).

Grof says his approach is “essential shamanism,” the only real hope for solving “the psychospiritual roots of malignant aggression and insatiable greed.” Greed and aggression are not seen as moral problems, but as a failure to be in touch with one’s divine self. Grof, a highly respected researcher and psychologist, published by New York University Press, organizes conferences on psychological theory. He believes that our only hope for the peace and prosperity of the planet is the radical inner transformation of humanity and its rise to a higher level of consciousness through paranormal states.

Grof’s workshops are no Sunday School. His shamanistic methods produce bizarre psychic phenomena, such as visions of divine light, encounters with various blissful and wrathful deities, communication with spirit guides and superhuman entities, contact with shamanic power animals, direct apprehension of universal symbols, and episodes of religious and creative inspiration. He believes that the spirit beings that appear are “ontologically real…not products of metaphysical speculation or pathological processes in the brain.”[4] Grof describes these experiences as “shamanic crises,” in which deep connections with animals, plants and elemental forces of nature are created. Presented to the twenty-first century with optimistic enthusiasm, such techniques go right back to Romans 1:23: “exchanging the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.”

Joining the Opposites

The goal of One-ist spirituality is an irrational trance-like state, called variously: a “unitive” experience of nature, “inner stillness,” “unity and wholeness,” “genuine mysticism” or “timeless unity with Spirit.” All experience must be unencumbered by dogmatic religion. The Hindu guru, Rajneesh, known for his many Rolls Royce cars and his even more numerous sexual adventures, taught that good and evil are only two aspects of the same reality.

In the make-believe world of One-ism, distinctions are anathema. All distinctions, like true and false, right and wrong, good and evil, Creator and creature, Christ and Anti-Christ, are considered relative, meaningless notions. The goal of the mature spiritual person is to “join the opposites,” to create unity out of difference and so to take control of life. True spirituality means creating your own reality by making an amalgam of your dark and light sides. In the “peak experiences” of spiritual transport, the fragmentation of the mind and body is overcome and a sense of oneness occurs. The person who “goes within” via trance states succeeds in silencing the mind and its conflicting messages of objective reality, as well as any troubling judgments of conscience.

Both interfaith movements and hard-core pagan spirituality reject religious dogma for two main reasons:

1. Doctrine in its ultimate form involves divine revelation from a transcendent God, a source of knowing that must be utterly rejected;

2. Doctrine requires thought, which is the enemy of mystical states of wholeness/irrationality.

Both the ancient Gnostics and the Hindu gurus exhorted believers to “flee the mind.” One-ism abhors the mind and doctrine, as well as the distinctions they make. Zen Enlightenment is “understanding the unity of man and universe…as a state of Oneness in which all distinction of ‘I’ and ‘Not I,’ ‘Knower’ and ‘Known,’ ‘Seer’ and ‘Seen,’ are set aside.”[5]

Such thinking is associated with Buddhism, yet similar views are held by Emergent leaders. Doug Pagitt, pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis, calls for a re-examination of “the idea that there is a necessary distinction of matter from spirit, or creation from creator.”[6] I pray that once he examines that distinction, he will retain it with all his heart! To reject it means to adopt pagan One-ism, even if some “Jesus” still walks the halls of his church. From what I have read of Pagitt’s work, I’m afraid he may already have decided the issue, in favor of One-ism. The English Emergent, Kester Brewin, espouses Carl Jung’s idea of the ability to hold opposites together in a single frame, and exhorts believers to adopt a spirituality that “rejects simplistic, monochrome, flat answers and embrace the multi-dimensional, full-color complexity of our situation.”[7] Is he embracing interfaith spiritual One-ism? There seems little love lost on Two-ism.

Playing with Fire

This Left edge of Evangelicalism is playing with fire. Phyllis Tickle, mentioned in chapter 2, is a lay reader in an Episcopal church led by a gay vicar. She was promoted at the National Pastors’ Conference by InterVarsity Press, Zondervan and Youth Specialties as a “wise woman.” At that conference, pastors were encouraged to spend time with her and gain from her great wisdom, which includes her total acceptance of homosexuality as a valid lifestyle and her dabbling in religious syncretism. The latter is evident in her description of the contemporary movements of spirituality in all the religions as “the Great Emergence.” Tickle sees in this interfaith revival a new work of the Spirit and “a new reformation” (without sola scriptura). This “evangelical” spirituality promotes the same doctrine-free mysticism promoted by pagans. It is little wonder that Rob Bell, a colleague of Tickle says, “[W]e’re rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion.”[8] No kidding! Tickle’s epithet for McLaren, “a new Martin Luther,” is peculiar, since he makes little use of the Bible and hopes for “Buddhist followers of Jesus.” As oxymorons go, this “oxy” is more moronic than “military intelligence” or “educational television.”

Let’s see how this works. Since Buddhists do not believe in God, to be followers of Jesus, they would have to believe in Jesus’ God, but then they would no longer be Buddhists, since Buddhists do not believe in God. Or am I missing something? Well, then, let’s suppose Jesus could be a Buddhist, who did not believe in God (which is basically what the ancient Gnostic heretics said he was), but then the whole foundational notion of God has disappeared, and the term evangelical means nothing. (Need I add that Jesus would no longer be worth following?)

Evangelicalism and “Sacred Contemplative Technologies”

McLaren, in a popular blog, admits his fascination with “ancient practices” because such spirituality “becomes a part of a much deeper movement in our culture.” In the evangelical “contemplative” movement, terms like “spiritual formation, “soul care,” “spiritual direction,” “lectio divina” and “contemplative prayer” are now commonplace and seem to parallel the Easternization of spirituality in the culture at large. Having rejected the Reformation’s return to Scripture (from medieval mysticism and folklore), contemplatives consciously go behind the Reformation precisely to medieval monasticism, seeking techniques for the realization of states of ecstatic union. In one sense, it all sounds very “traditional” and pious, but such a move is naïve at best. Medieval spirituality was highly influenced by pagan Eastern mysticism, especially in the thought of Pseudo Dionysius, a sixth-century Eastern church father, who taught inward mystical experience as the true reality that transcends all intellectual knowledge of God. He encouraged leaving behind “the operations of the intellect…in order to arise by unknowing towards the union…with the superessential Radiance of the Divine Darkness.”[9] This is not what the Reformation emphasized, in shining the bright light of God’s spoken and written Word into a dark spiritual period.

The Church is awash in “sacred technologies,” but at sea regarding theological certainties. Not all the pagan sacred technologies mentioned above are yet employed, but some are, and the connection is not innocent. Note the following practices common in some evangelical circles:

- irrational mysticism (the search for non-ordinary states of consciousness as the sign of true spirituality);

- “Christian” mantras (repetition of biblical phrases or words);

- centering prayer (developed in the 1970s, derived directly from The Cloud of Unknowing);

- the enneagram (a psychological paradigm derived from the Egyptian mysteries, Pythagoras and the Sufi mystics);

- the labyrinth (a circular prayer-walk, found in many religious traditions, to produce union with the divine);

- lectio divina (meditative reading that awakens contemplation beyond the text);

- yoga (“yoked to god” in Sanskrit).

I am not saying that every Christian who has walked a labyrinth or gone to a yoga class is a pagan. But I warn all Christians and the Church that these techniques, no matter what Christian twist is put on them, view reality from a One-ist perspective. Evangelical leaders of the contemplative movement have ditched the theology of the Reformation to cite Roman priests known as mystics and devotees of religious syncretism: Fathers Thomas Keating, Thomas Merton, Basil Pennington, Bob Ochs, Richard Rohr, and Anglo-Catholic mystic, Evelyn Underhill, as well as the influential modern Buddhist philosopher, Ken Wilber. The “New Monastics for a New Humanity in a New World” will not save us from the Lie.

The “Great Emergence” of the interfaith movement assumes that all the religions agree on the inner core of mystical “spirituality.” Is it any wonder that some evangelical contemplative leaders now deny the atonement of Christ as the central truth of the gospel and openly fellowship with all religions? Synagogue 3000, a group of mystical Kabbalistic rabbis, invited Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt, Dwight Friesen, and Dieter Zander to attend their 2006 meeting as advisors. Both groups spoke of deep spiritual fellowship. This trend silences the gospel and draws unsuspecting Christians into interfaith commitments that lead to One-ist heresy.

A pastor wrote me, concerned about the use of pagan worship techniques, including the labyrinth, in some State Conventions of Southern Baptist churches. When he warned of the dangers of such techniques, he was assured that they were only used to “go deeper with God.” This pastor is seeing straight, and large sections of Evangelicalism are being seduced by religious One-ism.

The Power of Modern Religious Syncretism

Syncretism is facilitated by the “global village” in which movements on one side of the globe instantly affect the other. The East brought mystical spirituality west, not only to ex-secularists, but to mainline churches. In modern ecumenism, Eastern spirituality is the motor and means of global interfaith programs. “Doctrine divides, the spirit unites” now defines “spirit” as the animating force of all religions.

As a specific example, a group called the International Council of World Religions & Cultures includes representatives of all races, religions, nationalities and socio-economic strata. Their logo depicts Mother Nature as a winsome wench, exactly as ancient religions depicted the Goddess. Who can resist a global union of nations, peoples and religions for the “common good”?

A hyped-up description of planetary crisis is combined with an apocalyptic optimism for a dawning spiritual utopia. The argument goes like this: the world is in a mess; economies are desperately uncertain; the globe is warming to infernal levels; cataclysmic ecological disasters threaten our survival; we are overpopulated and spinning out of control. Only spiritual transformation will save us. But never fear. The “human factor” is here! Spirituality and human potential now embrace all dimensions of the cosmos.

Pagan Power Conspiracy?

Is pagan ideology intent on taking control of planetary life? Perhaps the changes are due to the flow of history, in which each generation hopes for a better life, with a dash of scientific advance to help it along. I cannot read hearts, but I have attended enough pagan conferences to know that their leaders hope to take over organizations and political structures in order to impose One-ist spiritual principles. They are believers, who truly think such an approach will solve the world’s ills. But One-ism and Two-ism cannot be blended, so one approach will win out. It is no longer foolish to imagine a vast network of pagan thinking, based on One-ism, face-to-face with the only other antithetical possibility, Two-ism, which, like its champion, Jesus, does not take up the sword in its own defense.

From its baby days as a marginal cult, this pagan spirituality is morphing into a new civilization. Listen to what futurists say. Futurist historian Theodore Roszak makes a revolutionary and deeply spiritual prophecy about the major direction of world culture:

We can discern…a transformation of human personality in progress which is of evolutionary proportions, a shift of consciousness fully as epoch-making as the appearance of speech or of the tool making talents in our cultural repertory.[10]

Futurist Alvin Toffler believes “we are witnessing the sudden irruption of a new civilization on the planet.”[11] Thomas Berry says we live in the ecological era whose secrets are revealed by “philosophers and gurus of the earth,” who are developing a new cosmology for a new planet, from new revelations of the spirit. We need the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist and the power of the shaman.

Berry’s book title, The Great Work, was inspired by a term he found in the writing of Alice Bailey, who speaks of “God’s great and glorious unfolding plan for the destiny of the nations,” known “in esoteric traditions as ‘the Great Work.’”[12] This “divine” occult plan will help humanity evolve and prepare teachers to guide it, with the help of the UN (where Bailey’s Theosophical Society oversees the Meditation Room).

Lloyd Geering (see chapter 6) takes the prize for clarity among the futurists. He sees our time as critical for tomorrow’s global culture. Promoted by the Jesus Seminar, Geering’s books are essays for the future earth community. Having totally rejected his Christian past, he states that the universe cannot be explained from sources outside itself, because the universe has no outside. He offers a precise prediction of this new civilization: it will not be “Christian” or “dualistic” because Christianity is destined for extinction. The new global world will be monistic (his term) and its spirituality “psychosomatic,” based on “mystical union” with the earth. One cannot get more pagan than Geering.

Such is the future of our world if nature-worshiping visionary shamans get their hands on the levers of planetary power to solve the human problems of “malignant aggression and insatiable greed.” To reject worship of the Creator is to worship creation. However, there is another kind of spirituality, so take heart.

[1]. Robert Neelly Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 246.

[2]. Marilyn Ferguson, Aquarius Now: Radical Common Sense and Reclaiming our Personal Sovereignty (North Beach, ME: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2005), 127.

[3]. Marcus Toole, “The Red Road to Despair,” Global Wizardry, 87–97.

[4]. Stanislav Grof, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 68.

[5]. Alan Watts, The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 121.

[6]. See Doug Pagitt’s contribution to Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 142.

[7]. Kester Brewin, Signs of Emergence (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 86.

[8]. Andy Crouch, “The Emergent Mystique,” Christianity Today (November, 2004).

[9]. I am indebted for this citation and other insights on contemplative spirituality to my dear friend, Pam Frost. See “Pagan Contemplative Techniques,” in Global Wizardry, 186-202.

[10]. Cited in Lauren Artress, Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Tool (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), ix.

[11]. See his book, Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave (Nashville: Turner Publishing, 1995).

[12]. Alice Bailey, The Destiny of the Nations (New York: Lucis Publishing Company, 1978).

Chapter 9

“They honored God and gave him thanks….They worshiped and served… the Creator who is blessed forever! Amen.” —Paul, Romans 1:21, 25

You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them." —Moses, Exodus 20:3-5

The Truth About Spirituality

My five-year old grandson, Kellen, resisted his mother’s advice to put on a jacket with these words: “Mama, I’m not cold. God made me like this! I’m not like other people.” Christians are not like those who worship nature or their inner divinity. Christians are warm to worship God, because they bask in the love of Christ and naturally give him thanks and praise.

Paul is so full of praise for God that it bubbles up constantly, as we see in Romans 1:25: “the Creator, who is blessed forever, Amen!” This mini-refrain is a shortened form of Old Testament hymns of praise. (“Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting! Amen and Amen,” Ps 41:13; “Blessed be his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory! Amen and Amen!” Ps 72:19; see Ps 89:52, 106:48). These Old Testament texts celebrate the God who really exists, His amazing, mysterious, immortal being, and His acts of goodness. To praise the transcendent and loving God, who is radically “other,” is the essence of biblical spirituality. From the depth of their created being, creatures praise their Creator (“God made us like this!”). In biblical piety, God is blessed, praised, honored and thanked for His acts of creation but also because of His act of redemption. Unbelievers neither “honor God nor give Him thanks” (v 21). In their rebellion, they reject the Creator’s existence and thank and honor what God made, including themselves, so they cannot praise God as Savior.

Jesus, Worthy of Praise

Paul’s praise to the “Creator, who is blessed forever” reappears in Romans 9:5, where he calls Christ “God over all, blessed forever. Amen.” He recognizes the divine nature of Christ in two ways:

1. he explicitly affirms it— “Christ who is God over all”;

2. he ascribes to Christ the same blessing he ascribed to God in Romans 1:25, with exactly the same terminology— “Christ…blessed forever. Amen.”

We not only owe praise and blessing to God for His act of creation, but also for his divine incarnation and work of gracious redemption accomplished through the Son. Such blessing captures the ultimate experience of true worship, described in the book of Revelation. John takes us into the heavenly courtroom, where, in the background, the entire created cosmos is worshiping:

I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” And the four living creatures said, “Amen!” and the elders fell down and worshiped. (Rv 5:13–14)

The Great Little Amen

Did you notice the little word, “Amen”? Paul uses it often. The four living creatures say it. “Amen” is a little word with a big meaning. Saying “amen” binds you to an affirmation, in this case, the expression of praise. “Amen” acknowledges, in complete faith, the certainty of the statement. The “amen” of the worshipers binds them as a solemn oath. Our “amen” is a response of faith and commitment to the object of our praise, namely God. Jesus is even called the “Amen” of God (Rv 3:14). Paul wants believers to say the “amen” of praise to both God the Creator and to Christ. Old Testament believers also said “amen” to a curse on the worship of idols (described in v 23). God says, “Cursed be the man who makes a carved or cast metal image, an abomination to the Lord, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and sets it up in secret.” The people are then to say, “Amen!” (Dt 27:15). The opposition between Two-ist and One-ist spirituality is stark: we affirm the former with all our hearts and curse the latter.

Paul takes his cue from the Old Testament spirituality of Israel. After their deliverance from certain death at the hand of Pharaoh, Moses and the people of Israel sing a song of praise to the Lord:

I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.” (Ex 15:1–2)

It’s funny: singing was absent in all the pagan gatherings I have attended. One-ist self-worship doesn’t sing too well. Pagans have no idea whom to thank, but the psalmist says: “I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify and honor your name forever” (Ps 86:12). The singing Roman church “with one voice…honors the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 15:6). Giving thanks to the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ for everything is what Christians do (Col 3:17).

Theistic spirituality does not celebrate our inner divinity, but offers a life of praise to the external God who has done all things for our good. Theistic spirituality is stunning and unique. Spiritual worship is not a state of ecstatic trance, whereby “in the spirit,” as power-wielding shamans, we manipulate the divine, demand favors from the gods, and seek inner knowledge. Rather, life in the Spirit is worship and service to God for what He has done. The focus is on God’s gracious actions for His people, not on the emotional state of the worshiper.

In Romans 1, Paul limits his discussion of worship to the worship of God as Creator. But in Romans 12, he explicitly includes God as Savior. Paul implies that these two passages should be read together for a full description of worship. Notice the clear parallels between these two passages:

Romans 1:18ff

Romans 12: 1–2

Undiscerning minds

Discerning, transformed minds

Worship of creation

Spiritual worship

Dishonoring their bodies

Offering holy bodies

In light of these parallels, it is fair to mine Romans 12:1–2 for Paul’s teaching on a theme he began in Romans 1:18ff.[1] In Romans 1, Paul says that the fundamental orientation of our lives are “worship and service of the Creator.” In Romans 12, Paul takes into account God’s saving work in Christ, and fully develops that idea, calling it “spiritual service,” literally, “worship,” to be expressed in our bodies and our minds.

Holy Bodies: Acceptable Behavior

We are told that all religions experience the same mystical union with the divine. But the differences between One-ism and Two-ism, even in spirituality, are enormous! After writing eleven chapters (Rom 1:1–11:36) explaining the gospel and its application to Jews and pagans, Paul begins Romans 12 with a huge “therefore,” a pivotal word that commands attention. Paul says:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.(Rom 12:1–2)

The total devotion of “worship” and “service” can be given to God, or to something else. Worship should not be judged on its intensity, but on its object. Worshiping and serving the transcendent Creator produces not self-worship but self-sacrifice, which is the very reason we were created. As Moses says, “It is the Lord your God you shall fear. Him you shall serve” (Dt 6:13).

Two-ist Spirituality: The Sacrifice of Holy Bodies

When Paul says “present your bodies” (Rom 12:1), he is recalling the Old Testament priests who were called “to present themselves and minister in the name of the Lord” (Dt 18:5). Priests were separated to be entirely devoted to and made holy for service to God. When David prepares his son Solomon to build the temple, he gives him “the plan for the divisions of the priests and of the Levites, and all the work of the service in the house of the Lord” (1 Chr 28:13). In the New Testament, all believers are called to and enabled for priestly service.

Our “spiritual service,” says Paul, is to offer ourselves as living sacrifices. Priestly service always involved sacrifice. Paul wants believers, who come to Christ as needy sinners, to think of themselves both as full-time priests and as full-time “sacrifices.” Here is the kicker—in the Old Testament, all the sacrifices were dead, but Paul calls for a “living” sacrifice, a life sold out for God, ready even for martyrdom. The acceptable living sacrifice, pleasing to God, is not a few bucks in the offering plate, but our bodies, entirely devoted to His service. Spirituality is not a mystically produced high, but a rational, conscious commitment to self-sacrifice. We often feel that “spiritual service” means giving God our “spiritual” side: our dreams, aspirations, imagination, good intentions, moments of ecstasy or our vast vision for His kingdom. God says, “No, I want your body!” Why our bodies?

There are at least two reasons. First, our body language must be in sync with our public speech. We all hate hypocrites. Jimmy Swaggert, the TV evangelist, is a sad and obvious example. While condemning the degeneracy of our culture, he was cavorting with prostitutes. Second, our physical bodies visibly witness to God the Creator of everything, physical and material. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,” says Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:5, citing Psalm 24:1, which continues: “for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers” (Ps 24:2).

Gnostics and the Body

Christianity is not like the old heresy called Gnosticism.[2] “Christian” Gnostics rejected both the creation and the body, claiming that the spirit/soul was the only important thing. The body was an unworthy receptacle, made by the foolish Creator god who, for his sins, would one day be bustled off to Hell. They worshiped the great impersonal Spirit, the “Father of the Totalities,” behind all things. They had good reason: they loved the freedom that bodiless “spirituality” gave them. Such spirituality left them unencumbered by daily, earthly constraints of physical living—like marriage, childbearing, or an eight-to-five job. One of their favorite expressions was abasileutos—without a king, expressing radical autonomy. You find the same notion in Hinduism, according to famous twentieth-century guru, Krishnamurti, who declared that the truth of Hinduism is “No authority, no master.”

Autonomy is the essence of One-ism. Spiritual feminists consider “egalitarian creative autonomy” as “the pillar of the modern world.” They refuse the constraints of their biological makeup, stating that “biology is not destiny.” Our culture is committed to the realization of spiritual and physical autonomy and freedom. Such freedom was the goal of the “kingless” Gnostics. Some were ascetic, denying the reality of the body, whereas others were libertarian, doing anything they chose with the body. Both brands deny the Creator. Today’s spiritualists are like the Gnostic libertarians, who believed they could do anything they wanted with the body, “dishonoring …their bodies among themselves” (v 24). We will discuss this more fully in the next chapter.

Paul denounces Gnosticism when he says: “Everything God created is good” (1 Tm 4:4). The Bible is deeply committed to the physical and the corporeal—because God created them. The creation is a beautiful, physical thing. The body is “sown,” or created by God, a natural or physical body (1 Cor 15:44). Christian spirituality includes the created body because salvation presupposes the goodness of creation, and Jesus’ physical body was raised. This is why Christian spirituality does not seek “out-of-body experiences.” We are not saved out of creation. We are reconciled to it and to its Creator.

Christianity begins like a crime novel, with a missing body— not an ecstatic “out-of-body” experience, a spiritual idea, a social program or a moving poem. It starts not with an empty body or an empty mind, but with an empty tomb. God the Creator would not leave the body of Jesus in the grave. Jesus’ bodily resurrection is a sign of the future of his people and of creation as a whole. “The creation, and we ourselves, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:23).

By starting with the body, Paul emphasizes that the God who saves us is God the Creator, who made us. “You were bought with a price (the body of Jesus), so glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:20). If God respected His work in saving and raising the body of Jesus, so should we, not only in our sexuality, but also in our spirituality. To be spiritual, God’s way, we should not seek to get outside our bodies through trance or mystical transport. We should not get in touch with the unconscious by denying the place of the mind in our physical body. The body is not something to be mistreated or exchanged at death for another imprisonment in matter, in an endless cycle of re-incarnation. Rather, “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Cor 5:10).

The Gnostics denied the incarnation. They could not believe that God would assume a human body. According to them, Christ sat on the branch of a tree laughing, watching the man, Jesus, die on the cross. Paul, on the other hand, gives great dignity to our corporal reality. He states that “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God. You are not your own” (1 Cor 6:19). “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Cor 3:17).

To be spiritual, we need to remember that we are physical! We must not deface the created bodies we have been given: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions” (Rom 6:12). Pornography has no place in a holy body, nor does any kind of sex outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage. We cannot claim to be spiritually in touch with Jesus while at the same time practicing perverted forms of sexuality. We must live now in the body that pleases God, so that when we come to the end of our lives, we believers can say, with Paul: “it is my eager expectation…that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death” (Phil 1:20). The body is front and center in biblical spirituality as the means and place of spiritual service to God. But it is not just the body. It is a holy body that is acceptable to God.

Holiness and the Body

The Old Testament sacrifice had to be “an animal …without blemish” (Lv 3:1). An Israelite brought the best of his herd, not an old haggard he-goat or skeletal excuse for a cow. To be received by God, the sacrifice had to be spotless, an outward sign of holiness. As we mentioned earlier, holiness is mostly about cosmology—how the world is divinely put together. We live in a morally and physically structured universe that we did not create. Our lives are workable because we act as if the laws of morality are as true as the physical laws of nature. Ultimately, the moral standard pressing in on us is holiness, which is the shape of the material universe in which we all live.

Remember that to be “holy” is to be set apart for a specific function in a rightful place. God is holy, because He is separate from the creation, with a distinct “place” that only He can fill. God has created us in distinct holy places and functions. Two-ism recognizes the distinctive nature of these different places and functions. Because One-ism refuses to acknowledge them, it is profoundly unholy.

If holiness is the key to the cosmos, then witnessing to that holiness in our bodily conduct is the central calling of Christian believers. Forgive me, but I am going to use a four letter word—submission. Are you back in your chair? Biblical submission is an essential part of biblical spirituality. Submission brings honor and glory to God as Creator. Take biblical marriage, for example (see chapter 11), which is not about subservience or freedom, but about the harmony of male and female roles, lived with dignity out of love for God.

Biblical submission is ennobling, not demeaning. It rejoices in the distinctive creation structures, made for our good by the will of a loving Creator. Submission is integral to biblical spirituality. We are commanded to submit to created structures—magistrates, church leaders, employers, husbands, parents, Christ and God—because all creation is “set apart” to reflect the holiness of God.

If holiness is the essence of righteousness, then sin is the very essence of unholiness. So Paul exhorts the ex-partying pagans of the church in Rome: “Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness” (Rom 6:13).

As Paul puts it, “none of us lives to himself” (Rom 14:7), so Christian holy living is corporate. Individual holiness and righteousness build up the body of Christ, whereas individual unholiness and sin cause the body to suffer. Even in the Old Testament, the priestly holy service was to be performed not only by a designated priestly tribe, but by the whole body of the saints. The Lord says, “you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex 19:6), an idea that is picked up by the apostle Peter, who describes the Church as “a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pt 2:5). Christ’s goal is to “present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph 5:27). The Church is not a place to service our own needs, but a place to serve God by serving others in corporate witness to the holy name of God.

Spirituality in Two-ism is service. Some of what we call spiritual activities, like prayer and praise, are called “service” in the New Testament—responses provoked by God’s act of grace. In Hebrews, the writer reminds himself and his readers: “through [Jesus] then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name” (Heb 13:15).

In the Old Testament, “sacrifices of praise” were “brought into the Temple” as part of the sacrificial system (Jer 17:26). Hosea tells the people to say to the Lord: “Take away all iniquity; accept what is good, and we will pay as bulls the offering of our lips” (Hos 14:2). Praise to God is more valuable than an offering of expensive bulls. Speaking about God and to God are aspects of a life of sacrifice. The book of Hebrews speaks of other activities, like “do[ing] good and shar[ing] what you have,” as “sacrifices…pleasing to God” (Heb 13:16). This doubtless includes: obedience to the spiritual overseers, who “have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God” (Heb 13:7, 16, 24); faithful attendance in the Christian assembly (10:25); and feeding one’s soul at the “altar” where Jesus’ offering of his flesh and blood is celebrated (Heb 13:10, 12). Spiritual sacrifice includes the essential elements of the Church, as described in the Scripture—hearing God’s Word, receiving the sacraments of baptism and communion, and submitting to church discipline.

Being a Christian is a life-long program that involves your entire being, because you have a holy identity: “As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’ So glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:20). Christians have a noble calling—to reflect to the world who God is. The Cherubim cry: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Is 6:3). By our intentional holy living, we show “the whole earth” that creation is not a chance, evolving mass; not animals in a life and death battle for survival; not an autonomous, self-defined existence—but the gloriously finely-tuned product of a God who has His own holy place and has given us ours. Our life of sacrifice is a response to God for His gift of mercy. The holy ones become holy.

Transformed Minds: Wise Thinking

Paul’s “therefore” affects not only our bodies, but our minds. God wants renewed/transformed minds: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2).

Many think that walking in the Spirit means a rejection or suppression of the mind. Not so. Paul speaks of a renewed mind, but he also uses its opposite, a depraved mind. The Greek verb “discern” is the same in Romans 12:2 (“a transformed mind to discern”) as in Romans 1:28 (“And since they did not see fit to [discern] God, God gave them up to an [undiscerning or depraved] mind to do what ought not to be done”). Don’t miss the parallels. A depraved mind is “undiscerning”; a renewed mind is “discerning.” The depraved mind misunderstands God’s will and does what ought not to be done. The discerning mind knows God’s will and does what ought to be done. Paul describes the depraved mind: “By their unrighteousness,” people “suppress the truth” (v 18). Though they knew God as Creator, “they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (v 21).

So we see that there are two ways of using the mind: one is the Truth, the other is the Lie. You will find this stark antithesis throughout Paul’s letters. He contrasts the “wisdom of God” and the “wisdom of this world” (1 Cor 1:21); being “conformed” to the world with being “transformed” in our mind. We can only know God’s will for our lives by acquiring the wisdom of God.

The Mind Goes to College

When I first came to the States in the 1960s, evangelistic methodology on campus was to reach the BMOC (big man on campus), often the star football player, whose conversion would have a snowball effect. Things have changed. Christian college ministries now work “under the radar” in the atmosphere of multicultural interfaith. Intimidation of Christians is a fact of college life that evokes several possible reactions:

- Fear: Use the Soft-sell Approach

The multi-culti worldview pressures Christians into silence. Certain evangelical student ministries, once known for unapologetic gospel preaching and evangelism, now want to be known only for their kindness to all.

- Apologize: Modify the Message

Some Christians believe that modifying our message will improve our reputation with outsiders. If we avoid mentioning sin (especially sexual sin), the cross or personal salvation, we will be fine. Let’s tweak our techniques, update our message, and participate more heartily in compassionate care for the earth and its inhabitants.

- Assimilate: Adopt the Culture’s Agenda

Kester Brewin, an English Emergent leader, believes we must recognize “our dependence on the host culture.” The culture, “essentially good,” differs little from the Church anyway. Brewin advises Christians to “completely rebirth the church into…[the] culture… and adapt to it. We must resist the idea that the main goal of the church is getting people saved.”

But how can that be? In my town I pass a Lutheran church whose billboard announces: “We are a community of sinners saved by grace alone by faith in Christ alone.” The basis of that community differs radically from the worldly culture where I live. Paul insists on the conflict between this world and gospel truth. There is “no partnership between righteousness and lawlessness…[there is no] fellowship of light with darkness” (2 Cor 6:14).

Christian holiness involves a clear analysis of the godless culture and a deliberate rejection of its ideology. Paul says: “let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God” (2 Cor 6:14–7:1). Though unbelievers are made in God’s image, with a sense of God’s truth, “they suppress it in unrighteousness”(v 18). The separation command is ideological, not physical. He warns against fellowship with false brothers, not with unbelievers:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. (1 Cor 5:9–11)

Paul shows a healthy mistrust of the culture intertwined with a robust love for sinners, but our love does not encompass the ideology of the world. Humans are made in God’s image and produce wonderful things like language, foie gras, and a Picasso painting. But their worldview is tainted by the Fall. Paul says that the “wisdom of this world,” is foolish (1 Cor 1:20), blind (2 Cor 4:4), evil (Gal 1:4) and Satanic (Eph 2:2). Let’s not be fooled. The culture has a mind of its own, a worldview that we must understand with our minds in order to avoid “conformity” to it. The anti-gospel worldview is increasing in intensity and openly forcing Christianity to the margins of Western society, changing everything we once thought normal, calling good evil and evil good. Paul does not advise us to adapt to the culture. Instead, he says, “you must no longer walk as the pagans do, in the futility of their minds” (Eph 4:23). The contemporary “Christian” exhortations to conform to the culture and to adapt our message to its assumptions and norms must be resisted as expressions of “the Lie.” We have a clear word from Romans 12: “Do not be conformed to this world.”

Transformation (Rom 12:2)

Given our desire for popularity, how do we avoid conformity to the One-ism of our culture? The answer lies in a transformed mind. Paul is not asking us to rectify a few historical dates. He wants a gospel brainwashing—a mind-cleansing transformation that affects everything about the way we think. He uses “transformed” in another text as well: “we all, with unveiled face [recalling Moses on Mount Sinai] beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed” (2 Cor 3:18). This text reminds us of another mountain, the Mount of Transfiguration, where Jesus was “transformed before them, and his face shone like the sun” (Mt 17:2). In all three texts, transformation occurs when we see God’s glory and are changed from the inside out by its power. Jesus’ transformation anticipates his resurrection, when he is the first to enter the future dimension of resurrected life. Seeing clearly who God is changes us from top to bottom. It changes how we live and think, and it prepares us for a resurrected place in a transformed, new creation world.

In this business of rational discernment, there are, again, only two kinds of minds:

1. the transformed mind, which understands who God is, worships and serves the Creator and builds a worldview on that truth. This Two-ist, transformed mind prepares us to offer our bodies as a spiritual act of worship.

2. the debased mind, which makes nature god, worships and serves the creation, and builds a worldview on the Lie. In this One-ist spirituality, the mind is silenced, or used to despoil God’s creation.

But, you will protest, it is impossible to live the life you say we must live! I don’t want to leave you, dear reader, with a sense of hopelessness. You and I both know that we can’t be holy. One-ism tries to pretend we have no sin and guilt, but we cannot offer holy bodies. Ours are sin-stained. Our minds are not transformed minds. They are screwed up minds. God’s demands drive us to despair. We long for purity, but see filthiness. We yearn for wisdom, but when we “look within,” as the One-ists want us to do, we see folly and selfishness. Our inner self is not some pure “higher self,” but putrid hypocrisy and mental delusion. Christian Spirituality needs one more essential ingredient. To be truly spiritual, our hearts need to be set aflame, but how?

The Body and Mind of Christ

Our hearts will be set on fire by the holy body of Jesus and the mind of Christ. Paul’s heavy agenda of Christian spirituality (Rom 12:1–2) is not a series of rules and obligations. This kind of worship is only possible by knowing the Creator as personal Savior. As a gentle pastor, Paul begins chapter 12 with the following words: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God.” The verb translated “appeal” can mean “entreat,” “encourage,” “implore” or “plead.” More to the point, the appeal is based on the “mercies of God.” In other words, the heart of “acceptable” spirituality is a response to divine mercy by people who need it more than food or clothing.

After King David commits adultery and has a good friend murdered, he begs God for pardon:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin! ….Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. (Ps 51:1)

Divine mercy transforms One-ist self-worship into God-honoring Two-ist spiritual self-sacrifice. Divine mercy is what makes Two-ist spirituality so different from One-ism. There is a real God, separate from us, who stoops to act on our behalf. True spirituality is based on what God has done for us, not on what we “divine beings” do for ourselves and others. The One-ist utopia is always threatened, because, while All Is One, all is one disgusting mess, which the fantasy of altered states of consciousness will not change. Going within to some trance-like state may, like a drug-induced high, soothe us temporarily, but it won’t change the state of things when we emerge from our reverie. The objective nature of evil and of our sinful hearts will always ruin the fantasy world of Planet Pandora. However, the gift of a “clean heart” produces “the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart” (Ps 51:17), which becomes a heart on fire for God, for His people and for the nations, with the real hope of a new heavens and earth.

His Holy Body

God the Son offers us his holy body. As Paul says, the Son “gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age” (Gal 1:4). Only the “holy body” of Jesus makes it possible for us to offer holy bodies to God.

Only he is the Holy One of God; the true, final priest, after the order of Melchizedek; the perfectly obedient Son, who does the will of God; the perfect, efficacious sacrifice for sin. The sacrifice of the body of Christ is completely acceptable to the holy God, and it is through that sacrifice alone that we can be made holy.

His Holy Mind

We depend not only on the holy body of Jesus, but on his mind. Paul asks, “Who has known the mind of the Lord?” (Rom 11:32). We come to the truth in humility before a God whose wisdom blows us away. Yet elsewhere, Paul tells us to have “the mind of Christ” (Phil 2:5, 6–11). The gospel cannot make sense without the wonder of Two-ism: the transcendent Second Person, in unimaginable condescension, takes on the form of the creature, and dies the death of a criminal to bring reconciliation between hate-filled, rebellious creatures and their Maker. The vicarious atonement of the God/man, Jesus, is unique in the annals of religious history, and the denial of the gospel of the cross by leading evangelicals today is a stake in the heart of the unique message of our faith for lost sinners.

The Result—Burning Hearts

When grace vanquishes our rebellious hearts and humbles our pride by the truth of God’s love, we are fired up to use our bodies and minds for His glory, not ours. Belief in the gospel of God is not mere intellectual assent, but a belief “in your heart” (Rom 10:9). God’s undeserved grace makes believers “obedient from the heart” (Rom 6:17) and motivated by the mercy of God revealed in Jesus, rather than by fear of the consequences of divine rules or by purely moralistic obligation.

Dear reader, if you are not a Christian believer, you are either “One-istically” suppressing sin and guilt or trying to appease it through moralism. This produces both despair and its twin brother, pride. I encourage you to throw yourself on God’s mercy and hear the amazing, liberating truth of the gospel. God sees those who place their faith in the sinless body, perfect mind and compassionate heart of Jesus, as perfectly holy in body, mind and heart. The Christian message is not just good news—it’s the great news of God’s gift of forgiveness to undeserving sinners. We give Him ourselves, corrupt and unholy; He gives us the perfection and beauty of His beloved Son, Jesus.

Discerning God’s Will

That’s quite a mindful! The goal of holy living, transformed thinking and heart-felt emotion gives us the wisdom to act. The Bible does not give us a list of all that each of us must do. If it did, we’d have to cart our Bibles to church in a wheelbarrow, and new editions would outpace iPod models and overwhelm Kindle memories. We discern the will of God in light of the basic holiness of body and mind shown in Two-ism. When we bow to the Father/Creator and accept His Son as the only path to knowing Him, He gives us the Spirit, who resides in our hearts to interpret the Scriptures and to lead us along the path He wants us to take. The Spirit teaches us the nature and character of God and the world He made, helping us discern His will as we mature in Jesus.

The will of God is something we do. This is why Jesus teaches us to pray “your will be done” (Mt 6:10) and affirms for himself the principle: “my food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish His work” (Jn 4:34). Paul specifies some things that Christians should do and not do. As to sexuality, he says: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thes 4:3). Thus the transformed, discerning mind, says Paul in Romans 12:2, will do what is good (not evil) as well as what is well-pleasing (offering our bodies as holy) and perfect (a sign of Christian maturity). These are Christ’s goals for his bride, the Church, whom he will present to God, mature and complete in his image at the end of time.

In 1738, a prim and proper clergyman, John Wesley, met the transforming power of grace—with unimaginable effects. In a period of unusual social and moral degradation in England, Wesley travelled a quarter million miles on horseback in all kinds of inclement weather, to preach forty thousand sermons. He wrote two hundred and thirty-three books, including a commentary on the whole Bible and, with his brother, Charles, he penned nine thousand hymns. The revival he led (along with George Whitefield) transformed the lower classes by the power of the gospel and helped England avoid a bloody revolution similar to that of France. It also produced a majority in Parliament, which William Wilberforce persuaded to end the slave trade.

Let me remind you what Wesley said: “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” This is the secret to true spirituality, as the modern hymn says:

Let the cross be our glory and the Lord be our song

By mercy made holy, by the Spirit made strong…

If such a revival could happen in eighteenth century Britain, what could God do in our ungodly twenty-first century with holy, wise and heart-warmed living sacrifices? If the gospel is true, it is worth living for, and what is worth living for is worth dying for.

In a world of confusion and error, truth is a precious commodity. Speaking it clearly is worth the insults, social ostracism or legal consequences that Christians now risk, especially as they speak truth in the area of sexuality. We have found Paul’s reasoning about God and spirituality to be surprisingly pertinent for the culture of the twenty-first century. It would be foolish to dismiss what he has to say about sexuality, which is a logical extension of his argument, and the subject to which we turn in the next chapter.

[1]. See G. K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Worship (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2008), 216-22.

[2]. See Peter Jones, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992).

Chapter 10

“For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.” —Paul, Romans 1:26–27

"Androgeny is the sacrament of Monism." —June Singer

The Lie About Sexuality

Our media and leaders dismiss Biblical teaching against homosexuality as “worn arguments and old attitudes” or as “prejudice hiding behind piety.” Mainline churches declare the Bible’s statements on the subject to be out of date. Intimidated evangelicals remain silent or openly endorse homosexual behavior, thus denying essential elements of the Bible they say they revere. Even orthodox churches stretch their ecclesiological rules to accommodate new cultural attitudes, or they consider homosexuality a secondary issue, hardly worth a place in contemporary discourse.

Six Pesky Verses?

One Emergent spokesman and visiting professor at Fuller Seminary, Tony Jones, writes off Romans 1:26 as one of “the six pesky Bible verses” that deal with homosexuality. In his opinion, there are only six bits of text on the subject (in fact there are more like twelve, but who’s counting?), and they don’t add up to a biblical case against the practice. Treating them as self-contained independent statements, Jones removes them from their theological and logical context, allowing himself and his pro-homosexual colleagues to avoid the force of biblical teaching. You may not agree with Paul, but you must admit that his argument in our Romans 1 passage follows a logical development that extends over at least eleven verses (vv 18–28). Paul’s argument is connected by three “exchanges”:

- a thought exchange, by which we deny the person of God and become “futile” in our thinking (v 21);

- a worship exchange, by which we worship nature rather than God (v 23);

- a sexual exchange, by which we overturn the natural for the unnatural (vv 26–27).

Paul’s argument is cogent, connected and powerful—a robust, theological tour de force, unmatched in the writings of those who oppose it. His logic is bulletproof, and we understand it because our world increasingly resembles the pagan Roman Empire. Some critics say that Paul was speaking of exploitative relationships of domination and that he didn’t understand homosexuality as we know it today—a loving, mature, stable commitment. But Paul argues (v 27) that men burned with desire for each other, not that one exploited the other. Paul knew that Nero had already had at least two homosexual marriages. His readers were aware that their great ancient hero, Alexander the Great, had had a long, passionate love affair with Hephaestion, whose death caused Alexander extreme grief. The longevity or monogamy of homosexual relationships is irrelevant for Paul. Instead, he discusses “natural” or “unnatural” sexuality, and describes forms of practical rebellion (vv 18–21) against God the Creator.

Homosexuality and Worldview

In these verses, Paul describes the pagan worldview. We are in the presence of timeless questions about God and the world, about idol worship and perverted physical sexual activity, not social or behavioral oddities, as modern liberals like to argue. An ancient Jewish text, the Testament of Naphtali, makes the contrast between the hard-wired created order and pagan perversions of idolatry and sexuality:

Sun, moon and stars do not alter their order; thus you should not alter the law of God by the disorder of your actions. The Pagans, because they wandered astray and forsook the Lord, have changed the order and devoted themselves to stones and sticks, patterning themselves after wandering spirits. But you, my children, shall not be like that: in the firmament, in the earth, and in the sea, in all the products of his workmanship discern the Lord who made all things, so that you do not become like Sodom, which changed the order of nature.[1]

Notice how the order of worshiping God is overturned for worshiping images, and the order of heterosexuality is overturned for sodomy. Is Paul’s mention of homosexuality here just a “pesky verse”? I believe that Paul’s argument shows a deep theological reflection on the implications of the being of God and the character of creation. We know Paul is developing a logical argument, since he uses the phrase, “for this reason.” Here is what he says:

For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. (vv 26–27)

Paul often uses this phrase to build a logical argument from a previous comment. In 2 Corinthians 13:10, Paul says he writes “for this reason,” namely, his prayers for their “restoration” mentioned in the previous verses. In Romans 13:5–6, Paul says Christians pay taxes “for this reason,” namely, their relation to authority developed a few verses earlier. (See also Eph 1:15; 3:1, 14; 1 Thes 3:5, 7 and 2 Tm 1:6.)

To return to Romans 1, the reason (v 26) God gives rebels over to their preferred behavior (practicing homosexuality) is because “they exchange the truth for the lie and worship and serve creation” (v 25). The rejection of God as Creator plays out as a rejection of God’s holy creation structures (the natural). If you dismiss the Creator of the “natural” you will eventually reject the category of “natural” and move to the “unnatural.” Worshiping creation as divine produces “unnatural” uses of the created order. So, apostate theology leads to the misuse of sexuality.

Here is Paul’s logic: just as the misuse of the notion of the divine becomes worship of the created order; just as the misuse of elements in the creation becomes cultic worship and service to objects, so the misuse of created sexuality becomes a corporeal celebration of the “unnatural.” Paul is not a homophobe. He doesn’t go after homosexuality to enforce a harsh, moralistic code. Indeed, his “for this reason” is followed by a long list of rebellious behaviors:

every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity… envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice…. gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. (vv 29–31)

No one is left out, at least of the people I know! And in case you never did any of these things, you are guilty if you “approve of those who practice them” (v 32). Paul singles out homosexuality because it expresses, at the deep, personal, sexual and corporeal level, a worldview that has effectively eliminated God the Creator.

For Paul, there are no half-measures. Just as there is no fellowship between righteousness and unrighteousness, or light and darkness, so there is no fellowship between heterosexuality and homosexuality (v 26). There is no gender blur. As embodied expressions of reality, these antithetical sexual lifestyles of natural/creational and unnatural/anti-creational stand at the intersection of two contradictory worldviews.

The Link between Homosexuality and Paganism

Newsweek’s non-judgmental article (July 2009) on “polyamory” (the committed, loving relationship of three or more persons of any sex) notes that this relationship was created when some brave people questioned rules left over from their Judeo-Christian background and “ended up pagan.” That is precisely Paul’s argument in Romans 1. If you get rid of theistic Two-ism, you “end up” a pagan One-ist. Since the 1960s, a cultural metamorphosis has overturned the worldview of Christendom. At the heart of that movement is the Gay agenda, which is affecting not only the US, but the world.

At a global level, The Earth Charter (a UN nature-worshiping document that intends one day to determine how we live on the planet), states the need to “eliminate discrimination in all its forms, …including sexual orientation.”[2] “Eliminate discrimination” is a weasel phrase for promoting and normalizing sexual anarchy and silencing all other opinions on the subject. During the summer of 2009, two UN agencies—the United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)—issued guidelines for sex education of children around the world. Five- to eight-year-olds are told that “touching and rubbing one’s genitals … ‘can feel pleasurable.’” Nine- to twelve-year-olds learn: how to get and use both condoms and emergency contraception; the “signs and symptoms” of pregnancy; and ways of experiencing sexual pleasure and orgasm. They learn that abortion is safe and discuss “homophobia, transphobia and abuse of power.”[3] The Conservative Jewish Rabbi, Harold M. Schulweis, confesses that in the past he did not celebrate gay unions, but now he does, because it is a very courageous thing to do and is part of “the evolution of religious mores.”[4] What the rabbi calls evolution of morals is the rise of Neopaganism, or One-ism. This worldview has always been the natural spiritual home for homosexuality, as any self-respecting rabbi should know.

In their rush to adapt to the culture, liberal Christians and other religious leaders may fail to see what leading homosexuals have always believed. Modern gay theorists agree with Paul about the religious role of homosexuality.

The Homosexual as Shaman

Contemporary One-ist spirituality holds up the occult shaman as a model for the future. This is not new. In the history of paganism, the priest/shaman was commonly a homosexual. As One-ist spirituality captures hearts and minds, so will homosexual practice. You may see the term “androgyny,” which means the joining of male (andros) and female (guné) in one person. It can apply equally to the bisexual or the homosexual.

When God led His people into the land of Canaan, He instructed them not to “follow the abominable practices of those nations,” including sexual deviancy (Dt 18:9). This text should not surprise us. Pagan homosexuals themselves see their sexuality as an essential element of pagan belief. A gay spokesman at a Pagan Spirit gathering in 1985 made the claim: “We feel there is a power in our sexuality…[a] queer energy that most cultures consider magical. It is practically a requirement for certain kinds of medicine and magic.” Another gay pagan confirms the spiritual dynamic: “It is simply easier to blend with a nature spirit, or the spirit of a plant or an animal, if you are not concerned with a gender-specific role.”[5] This spiritual element is documented throughout the history of pagan cults, in which the shaman was often a homosexual.

The connection between androgyny/homosexuality and pagan religion has existed all over the world, and throughout time. Here are some examples:

- In nineteenth-century BC Mesopotamia, androgynous priests of Istar engaged in trance-like ecstasies and contact with spirits of the underworld;

- In ancient Canaanite religions, effeminate priests served the goddesses Anat, Cybele and Rhea;

- In the Roman Empire, androgynous priests castrated themselves publicly as an act of devotion to the Great Mother;

- In Hinduism, anyone who unifies the sexes in sexual practice has reached the highest self-identity;

- In the Medieval West, Alchemists who transformed heterosexual energy into androgyny produced spiritual “gold” ("a tremendously deepened sense of the oneness of all….beyond gender differences”);

- The pagan spiritualist Jacob Böhme (1575–1624) believed the ideal human state was androgyny;

- In ancient Aztec and Inca religions, homosexual and bisexual priests were common; in American Indian religious practice, homosexual transvestite males are its shamans;

- In Latin America and the Caribbean Islands, homosexuals were magicians with supernatural powers; frequenting gay temple prostitutes was a means of sanctification;

- Jewish Kabbalah celebrates the ideal of the first cosmic androgyne, and in its modern form, is committed to “global, spiritual oneness.”

No geographical or historical connection can be made between ancient goddess worship, Medieval Alchemists, South American Incas, animists in the jungles of Borneo, ancestor worshipers in the African bush, Eskimos of the Arctic, and Aborigines of the Australian desert. Yet the same sexual/religious combo appears time and again. In all these places, we see One-ist pagan ideology. A study by Phillip Steyne comes to the following conclusion: “Man, in such diverse parts of the world [is] committed to and involved in the same religious practices.”[6] Shamanistic homosexuality is an organic expression of One-ist spirituality.

Homosexuality and the New Spirituality

A contemporary gay theorist, Toby Johnson, believes that gay consciousness represents a new religious paradigm. He should do his history homework, as other gays have done. One gay site exults:

What we have found actually surprised us; expecting to find “maybe something” to explain our personal feeling that there must be a spiritual “meaning” to our way of love and relating, we have found that not only are there such roots, but they are the most precious parts of virtually all of the ancient spiritualities of our species.[7]

Though Johnson’s paradigm is not new, present spiritual thinking in the gay community not only fits with the past but creates a plan for the future. Johnson is inspired by Joseph Campbell’s comparative (interfaith) religions approach. Campbell, a follower and friend of Carl Jung, was regularly featured on PBS, which taped some thirty interviews of Campbell by Bill Moyers. Some of these were filmed at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch. Indeed, Lucas named Campbell as his guru, and the Stars Wars series magnified the influence of both the interview series and Campbell’s books (Power of Myth, Hero with a Thousand Faces). Campbell spread Jungian ideas and influenced a whole generation, including Johnson, who believes:

- A transformation of religious consciousness is occurring because of exposure to other religions. The interfaith atmosphere has softened our moral and religious taboos, making homosexual liberation and gay identity possible.

- Gay people, as “different” and “queer,” have a privileged perspective on religion that undermines the authority of traditional religious institutions.

- Gays, in their relationships with members of the same sex, see the world with the harmonious vision that is the goal of mystical religion. Gay consciousness is “pre-Edenic” and free of “original sin.”

- Religion is not about God but about how human beings should live harmoniously to further the evolution of Earth (Gaia) into a collective level of self-awareness and transcendent consciousness (God).

- The “real cause” of homosexuality is resonance with the “karmic vibes” of Gaia. Through their psychic powers, gay people have an experiential “gaydar”—a karmic resonance with “planetary consciousness,” Gaia and cosmic “unity.”

- The experience of homosexual attraction, the pang of longing inspired by same-sex beauty, and the ecstatic consciousness of homosexual orgasm are reverberations—and potential recollections—of humanity’s common mystical oneness with Gaia.

- There is a world savior: the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, portrayed as a lovely, androgynous young man, usually bare-chested and in a relaxed meditation pose. He saves the world by willingly and compassionately incarnating into the forms of all sentient beings, to free them from suffering. All human beings are incarnations of this one single Being (a mythological version of the planetary mind Gaia).

- The role of gay identity is to alert human beings to the problems of overpopulation and to free them from dualistic thinking, so we can all live in a peace rooted in our awareness of common planetary identity.

- Gay consciousness represents a new religious ideal that recognizes consciousness—life itself—as “God” and “heaven,” here and now.

Modern gay spirituality echoes historical expressions of homosexual shamanist spirituality, while adding a modern touch. It shows the power of the homosexual lifestyle in a world concerned about planetary unity and in tune with interfaith ideals. It also vindicates the logic of St. Paul. The twenty-first century rejection of “dualistic thinking” is a rejection of the Two-ism of biblical revelation. The open practice and approval of homosexuality is precisely what Paul affirmed two thousand years ago—that homosexuality flows directly from the One-ist worship of creation.

The mechanism seems to function this way: androgynous people, whether homosexual or bisexual, join the physical opposites, experiencing a world without distinctions, which is the goal of traditional monistic spirituality. The homosexual priest thus symbolizes the destruction of created distinctions in the pagan conjunctio oppositorum—the joining of the opposites.

The common experience of pagan mystics is expressed by a well-known mystic and manic-depressive of the 1950s, John Custance, who recounts that in states of trance he felt so close to God that he was God, with a sense of being “utterly and completely immortal.” In that state, he says, “I am even male and female…I reconcile Good and Evil and create light, darkness, worlds, universes.”[8] This classic description of the pagan experience of joining the opposites includes the blurring of the male/female distinction. Shirley MacLaine wonders in her book, Going Within, whether the point of life is to “balance both the masculine and the feminine in ourselves…to express ourselves for what we truly are—androgynous, a perfect balance.”[9]

Jung, Shamanism and Homosexuality

The last word should go to Jung, who succeeded (where fourth century Emperor Julian failed) in turning the Christian world back to paganism. By now, you won’t be surprised to discover that Jung energetically promoted homosexual shamanism in the modern world. He made the pagan theory of sexuality understandable for modern minds. Fascinated by the medieval Alchemists, Jung taught that we have everything we need to fuse the opposites within us. For Jung, homosexuals are true pagan One-ists, who have succeeded in transcending the opposites—what the Hindus call “bindu.” In the 1950s, Jung claimed that “we are only at the threshold of a new spiritual epoch” and believed that he was developing “the world’s final, unitary religion, which, like Marxism, was an historical inevitability.” Jungian theory holds that only those who are able to integrate the opposite-sex psychology into their own self-identity can proceed into the higher phases of self-development (Self and God-Self). The “gender-polarized” populace is left on the lower levels to marry, divorce and remarry their own potential indefinitely until they finally learn that what they are looking for is within themselves.

I stated above that Paul did not single out homosexuality because it was the worst sin but because it symbolizes a deeply embodied expression of the apostate worldview of One-ism. Convincing proof of this comes from one of Jung’s disciples, who was with him on his deathbed—the American psychologist and Gnostic, June Singer. With great understanding of her master’s thought, she states that the archetype of androgyny appears in us as “an innate sense of …and witness to …the primordial cosmic unity, functioning to erase distinction.” She calls homosexual androgyny “the sacrament of monism.” In 1997 she stated her belief that the Age of Aquarius would be the Age of the Androgyne, and that “age” would be the final victory of the cosmology of One-ism.[10]

Lloyd Geering agrees that the future global world will be monistic, not dualistic. From this faith affirmation about the nature of the world, he draws the spiritual conclusion that we will experience psychosomatic, mystical union with the earth. This One-ist union with the earth will determine what you do with your body, including your sexuality. The great goal of pagan unity finds physical expression in the act of homo-erotic love. Geering’s approach clearly spiritualizes homosexuality.

Virginia Mollenkott once called herself “an evangelical lesbian feminist” but she eventually sought spirituality in pagan mysticism. She sees a unique spiritual calling for gays and lesbians as “God’s Ambassadors.” Mollenkott claims she was told by her “guardian angel, a Spirit Guide, the Holy Spirit or Jesus [she is not sure]” that a “great shift is occurring in the world, and you are a part of that shift.”[11]

Multifaith Becomes Multisex

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that every Sufist or interfaith proponent is a practicing homosexual or pederast. There is a deep connection, however, between the ideology of interfaith pagan syncretism (held up as a great goal and value for the modern world) and pansexuality, as our brief journey through history has shown. Is this where our modern world is headed? The much respected cultural commentator and lesbian, Professor Camille Paglia, who lectures at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, believes that society should “return to pagan worship, which includes tolerance of homosexuality and even of man-boy love.”[12]

The new Bolivian Charter attempts to join the God of its Catholic past with Pachamama, the Andean earth deity. Evo Morales sees native spirituality as the essence of the new Bolivia, where homosexuality is legitimized, as it was when the Incas occupied the same land. Once more, multifaith leads to multisex; polytheism to polysexuality. The parallels between the acceptance of interfaith and the acceptance of pansexuality are striking. The latter is the social outworking of the former: In interfaith, all religions are the same. The God of theism is but one human notion of the divine, and all gods and religions are equally valid. To claim that there is only one, unique and transcendent Lord is repugnant.

In polysexuality, all sexual choices are the same. Heterosexuality is but one practice among a host of sexual choices. The thought that humans are made in the image of a unique God who has determined the distinctions of sexuality is repugnant.

If you think this is just theory, go see Ray Kurzweil’s movie, The Singularity Is Near, endorsed by Bill Gates. Kurzweil is an electronics genius. I have experienced his genius, because someone gave me (!) a Kurzweil 512 electronic piano, which I enjoy playing daily. Kurzweil is also a “futurist” and in his movie promotes “singularity,” by which he means a cybernetic form of One-ism. The movie tells the story of Ramona, Ray Kurzweil’s female alter ego. It begins with footage of Kurzweil creating and demonstrating his virtual creation at the 2001 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, where Ray—as Ramona—sang Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” In the movie, the female clone of Kurzweil struggles to be recognized as a real human being. The “fact” of androgyny is proposed as an essential aspect of the future.

Our Present Situation

Individual homosexuals don’t necessarily understand the deep meaning of their lifestyle choice. I do not write with any “holier-than-thou” moral superiority. For the Christian, respectful consideration and toleration of other human beings is mandatory. We are all noble creatures made in God’s image and fallen sinners in need of grace. Christians must not only tolerate homosexuals; they must love them. However, Christians must not tolerate ideas that oppose or suppress the saving knowledge of the glory of God.

In the homosexual experience, there are many touching stories of great pain and some stories of moving, faithful friendships. Some have lived for years with an agony of internal conflict and doubt when, after years of prayer, God didn’t “take away” their desires and make them feel heterosexual. On the practical, personal level, homosexuality is often the result of excruciating suffering from a dysfunctional parental relationship between, for instance, a son and his non-affirming, emotionally empty father. No one can stand in judgment of fellow sinners and sufferers. But within that nexus of suffering, homosexuality is a compensatory mechanism to fill a lack of affirmation that should have come from a healthy father-son relationship. I have heard ex-homosexuals testify that there is no such thing as a homosexual—only a heterosexual with problems.

Some homosexuals find in the same-sex attraction the satisfaction of merging with what they already are. As Rumi put it, “I have been looking for myself! …I looked into my own heart and there I saw Him.” This desire for sameness is, on the sexual level, an expression of spiritual pagan One-ism, the belief that all is one and all is the same. To justify homosexuality, one must ultimately reject the Two-ist worship of the Creator and, in its place, worship created nature, which, like the pool into which Narcissus stared, is a reflection of the created self.

A gay blog states that all homosexuals are forced to develop a spiritual philosophy of some sort, in order to survive the moralistic judgments handed down by the religious community. Certainly, a dysfunctional relation with one’s Father/Maker/God results in a compensatory spiritual relationship with the earth, a desperate hope for meaning and love, which the earth can never fulfill.

For the first time in American history, the head of a once “Christian” nation and the most powerful office holder in the world, the President of the United States, stated in a public speech to the homosexual Human Rights Campaign, that a gay relationship was “just as admirable as a relationship between a man and a woman” (October 9, 2009). He later added: “No one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hand of the person they love.” That homosexuals should be treated with fairness under the law, we all agree. But do we wish to hold up homosexuality to our rising generations as “admirable,” even desirable? Which is it? Are homosexual relationships “admirable,” deserving of presidential approval? Or are they “unnatural…shameless acts” that receive divine judgment? We all have to decide, knowing that these two views are on a collision course. In the short term, full acceptance of homosexuality has a bright future and will seek to silence biblical teaching.

What should Christians do? Well, I have to keep speaking and writing the truth of Romans 1 and other passages. All faithful Christians, while loving their neighbors, must speak the truth whatever the consequences, as did Christians in the first century. They had no civic or legal protection from the all-powerful religious authorities, from the police, from a general population that wanted, at any price, the social pax romana of “bread and circuses” (Big Macs and ball games), or from an emperor besotted by his totalitarian power and his unbridled sexual fantasies. In spite of this, Paul and his flock did not retreat from identifying Roman religion as “futile, foolish thinking,” or its worship of idols as vanity, or its practice of homosexuality as soul-destroying deviancy. This was not correctus politicus, but it was truth, which would one day, through the blood of the martyrs, save civilization from self-destruction—until now. Now we hurtle headlong as a world community into the short-sighted seduction of the same pagan Lie, believing it will save our planetary empire.

Only the Truth will save us, and that truth must include God’s design for human sexuality.

[1]. Testament of Naphtali 3:1-5. Hosea (4:7ff) speaks of a glory exchange resulting in pagan idolatry and sexual perversion. See also Revelation 2:20–25.

[2]. See the Earth Charter, Section III, no. 12 at earthcharterinaction.org/content.

[3]. portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=42114&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html.

[4]. Maria L. La Ganga, Hector Becerra and Rebecca Trounson, “Marriage ruling is a religious quandary,” Los Angeles Times (May 20, 2008).

[5]. These two quotes are cited in George Otis, The Twilight Labyrinth (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 180.

[6]. Phillip Steyne, Gods of Power: A Study in the Beliefs and Practices of Animists (Houston, TX: Touch, 1990).

[7]. spirit-alembic.com/ishvara.html.

[8]. Peter Buckley, “Mystical Experience and Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol 7, no. 3 (1981): 517.

[9]. Shirley MacLaine, Going Within (New York: Bantam, 1990), 197.

[10]. June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1977), 20–22.

[11]. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Sensuous Spirituality: Out from Fundamentalism (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 24.

[12]. privat.ub.uib.no/BUBSY/playboy.htm.

Chapter 11

“Because we are members of his body…therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”—Paul, Ephesians 5:30-31

“Human sexuality should not be the occasion to divide the church.”—Mark S. Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

The Truth About Sexuality

The second quote on the facing page is from Mark S. Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, spoken as that church admitted practicing gays to ministerial office.[1] If Hanson is right, why does the apostle Paul use one man/one woman marriage as the picture of the mystery of the gospel, and compare the Church to the bride in a heterosexual, monogamous marriage (Eph 5:22ff)?

Religious pagans see homosexuality/androgyny as the sacrament of One-ism. The apostle Paul, without using the term “sacrament,” sees heterosexuality as the God-given reflection of Two-ism—a picture of the deep meaning of the created cosmos.

Heterosexuality is no longer a moral anchor for our society and the Church is beginning to agree. At the major political/religious event of Ted Kennedy’s funeral mass (August 2009) in the Minor Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, US President Barack Obama delivered the eulogy, in which he alluded to Kennedy’s support for gay rights. One of the “Prayers of the Faithful” was a petition to end divisions “between gays and straights.” On this issue, church and state are hopelessly intertwined, as the following list of pro-gay religious denominations and “Christian” leaders indicates: the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, portions of the Presbyterian Church USA, many faculty members at Calvin College (Christian Reformed Church), the left wing of the evangelical Emergent movement (represented by figures like Phyllis Tickle, Tony Jones and Spencer Burke), other evangelicals like Jay Bakker (son of Jim and Tammy Faye) and Peggy Campolo. This is the short list.

Sexuality is tightly tied to the theological structure I mentioned in the last chapter. You will remember that Paul’s logic follows three connected exchanges:

1. A thought exchange. “Futile thinking” (v 21) exchanges the truth that God is the Creator, clearly stated in Genesis, for belief in creation as an object of worship (v 25). This leads to…

2. A worship exchange. The dreadful worship exchange divinizes mankind but makes us grovel before totems of animal deities (vv 23–24). “They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” (Ps 106:20). This leads to…

3. A sexual exchange. God created “natural” male/female heterosexuality (Gn 1:27). Erasing the Creature/Creator distinction leads us to erase all God’s created distinctions. We exchange natural sexual activity for that which is contrary to God’s good and natural design. In doing so, we brand the deepest aspects of our physical being with a searing apostasy. The sad irony is that worshiping nature causes us to go “against nature,” into the practice of homosexuality. Such practice goes against our true human nature.

Never has it been more urgent to understand Paul’s Spirit-inspired teaching on sexuality. In Romans 1:26, Paul uses key terms (in italics) that we must examine: “For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature” (Rom 1:26).

Paul’s Terminology

Dishonorable

Paul does not develop a discourse on the rightness of heterosexuality here, but his use of the term “dishonorable” naturally evokes its opposite, the honorable. Paul has stated that those who reject God as the Creator “dishonor their bodies among themselves” (v 24). The dishonorable is contrasted with the natural, which God created and sanctioned as holy, or honorable. God says of the Levitical priests who sacrificed to idols, and had thus become practicing pagans: “They shall not come near to me, to serve me as priest, nor come near any of my holy things…, but they shall bear their shame [dishonor] and the abominations that they have committed” (Ez 44:10–13).

In chapter 7 we discussed the honor we owe the unique God. The truly “honorable” is associated with God as Creator. What is pleasing to God and in accord with His creative intentions for the cosmos reflects the honor due to Him. Obeying those in authority as God has ordered the creation, is honorable (Rom 13:7; 1 Tm 6:1). So is sexual holiness (1 Thes 4:4).

Natural

Paul talks about heterosexuality as God-ordained in Romans 1 by using the term “natural” to mean the essence of something. He speaks of a tree that is “by nature a wild olive tree” (Rom 11:24), or pagan deities that “by nature are not gods” (Gal 4:8). Going back to the essence of a thing for Paul means going back to its original created reality. Thus he argues that though pagans do not have the written law of Moses, they “by nature do what the law requires” (Rom 2:14). He means that because they are creatures, made in the image of God, pagans have an innate (natural) sense of right and wrong, though in their lives they suppress it. Concerning the created structures of male/female difference, Paul argues that even on the level of visual effect, “nature itself teaches you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory” (1 Cor 11:14–15).

His arguments for distinctive male and female roles are always based on created “givens”: “For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” (1 Cor 11:8–9). Chronological created order, role distinctions and fundamental equality characterize his thinking. He then adds, recognizing God’s primary, creational role: “for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God” (1 Cor 11:12). God is the ultimate source of sexuality and of its implications in human behavior. Whenever Paul defends a complementary role between the sexes, he bases his teaching on creational structures and principles. For example, he mentions “the law” (1 Cor 14:34) and says, “Adam was created first” (1 Tm 2:11–14). Paul sees the Creator’s design as paramount in the area of sexual identity and practice.

Do you see the organic relationship between “unnatural” rejection of the Creator, “unnatural” worship of humans and animals, and “unnatural” practice of homosexuality? Our thinking, our worship and our sexuality are fundamentally related. This Pauline logic can move in any direction. Mess with your sexuality, and you will mess with your worship. Mess with your worship and you will mess with your thinking about God. Mess with your thinking about God and you will mess with your sexuality. No matter which exchange you make, you will begin to adopt a One-ist spirituality and ultimately expose yourself to the judgment of God.

As far as I know, the New Testament scholar Richard Hays has never read the quote about homosexuality as “the sacrament of monism,” yet he states that Paul sees homosexual behavior as a “sacrament of the anti-religion of human beings who refuse to honor God as creator.” Now that we see the structure of Paul’s argument, it should not surprise us that he considers heterosexuality as linked securely to theism and as an essential affirmation of Two-ism.

Heterosexuality: A Key to Creation

The Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, appointed by President Obama in 2009 and answerable to him, is charged with “the quest for deeper understanding of humans” in order to “manage society’s most critical challenges.” Those who sever their cultural moorings from biblical truths and believe in ongoing evolution wonder if there is such a thing as “the normative human being.” Radical egalitarian Virginia Mollenkott, who wrote Omnigender, thinks there are no norms for sexual identity. But if we abandon sexual norms, why keep any norms for theology and spirituality? How can we manage “society’s critical challenges” if those who live in and create them are in constant flux? In Scripture, God gives us clear parameters for human self-understanding and behavior.

To understand who human beings are, we must begin with God. Let’s recap what we have already seen about God:

- God is Creator, and everything else is creation;

- His “eternal power and divine nature” (Rom 1:19) are seen and known in what He created;

- God is “other,” different from us and from everything else—the “Creator/creature distinction”;

- God is holy; not only morally pure, but “set apart” from His creation, having a special place and function;

- The unique God, from His special place, creates the world and gives us our own special place and role.

We humans derive our meaning and character from our created identity, which is our distinct, holy, significant and created place. The roles God gives us are personal roles, because we are in a relationship with a personal God. Our deviation from the “norm” that God created for us is not a failure to meet some impersonal set of rules. It is a personal offense against our Creator and incurs His righteous anger against our unholiness (v 18).

Adam and Eve: The Crown of Creation

Genesis 1, to which Paul constantly refers in Romans 1, is one of the foundational texts of Western civilization. On December 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations, in its “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” recognized in “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,…the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Most of that Declaration derives its authority from Genesis 1, which celebrates the nobility and uniqueness of the original heterosexual couple, relative to all other created things. In Genesis, God creates the natural cosmos and six times declares it “good.” When He creates Adam and Eve, He declares His work “very good” (Gn 1:31). Everything leads up to the creation of Adam and Eve, who are the crown of creation. Nothing else is created after they come into existence. With them, God’s work has reached its pinnacle. It is finished and fulfilled.

Adam and Eve: The Image of God

The most amazing thing that is said about the first couple is that they were created in God’s image (Gn 1:26). This is astounding, in light of the fact that the God of the Bible will not allow any images to be made of Him. Here is what He says to Israel about making anything in His image:

Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal. (Dt 4:15–17)

This is precisely what Paul says rebellious creatures do—they “exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles” (v 23). There are to be no images of God, because He is transcendent and “other.” There is nothing in the created universe that can be like Him in any way, unless God makes and declares it to be like Him. Male and female humans are not God, but they are in His image. Like God, Adam and Eve have the capacity for personal communion: in the Garden they commune with God, in spite of His otherness, and they commune with each other, in spite of their male/female differences. Like God, they have “dominion” over creation as stewards of God’s work (Gn 1:26–27). It is because human beings reflect the character of their Creator that they have nobility and “rights.”

Adam and Eve: Viceroys for God

The psalmist David puts this concept to poetry. In Psalm 8 he celebrates God’s transcendent glory being known in the world: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.” He sees that glory in “your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place” and in the glory of humanity: “You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet.” The psalm ends: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” The character of God is seen in the things He has made. This is true supremely in human beings, but creation as a whole bears the stamp of God’s specific being.

Created Separations

Genesis 1 uses the term “separate” five times. The Creator/creature distinction determines the way God creates. God brought forth cosmic matter from nothing, and turned the original “chaos” (unformed matter) into ordered cosmos. He makes cosmos out of chaos by making distinctions—separating things out and giving each thing its place and function. These separations are immediately pronounced “good.” One-ism tells us that separation is evil and that we should “join the opposites” by eliminating them. But God says separation is good. (By “separation” I do not mean the sad kind that is caused by sin and hatred. I am speaking of distinctions.)

Because everything is separate and distinct, everything must be named. Thus God called the light “day.” He called the darkness “night” (Gn 1:5, 8, 10). God gives the first human being a specific name, “Adam,” and Adam names the animals (Gn 2:19) and his wife (“Woman” in Gn 2:23 and “Eve, the Mother of the Living” in Gn 3:20). Though God is ultimately the One who names all things, He gives Adam a position of viceroy in naming the animals and even in naming his wife. Adam and Eve, in their role of dominion over the animals indicate the special role of humanity in the created cosmos. So does the fact that God allows humans to share in His glory, in a mysterious way.

Far from giving humans a place of honor and glory, One-ism rejects the idea that man has a special place. Man is seen as a blight on nature, the cause of all our woes. Certainly, humanity is responsible (our glory) and often sinful (our shame), but the Bible will not give up its notion of human nobility.

Separated and Named as Holy

Old Testament Jewish commentators see a connection between God’s acts of creative “separation” and the notion of holiness required of Israel. Moses uses the same verb, “to separate,” in Numbers regarding the priests (“you are to set the Levites apart from the other Israelites,” Nm 8:14) as he does in the creation account of Genesis. Levites may enter the Temple “because they are consecrated” (made holy, set apart, 2 Chr 23:6). To separate and make holy are synonymous terms. This is true also of naming. In Leviticus, God says, “These are my appointed [called/named] feasts, the appointed [named] feasts of the Lord, which you are to proclaim as sacred assemblies” (Lv 23:2, 21). These special assemblies are set apart by God, named as “holy” by God.

God’s handiwork in creation, His fingerprint on reality, is seen in His acts of separating and naming, which render the cosmos holy. God is triune, in three distinct persons. Thus, personal distinction must appear in the creation He makes. The primary distinction between God and creation is reflected in all the other differences He puts within the creation. In this way, creation “images” God.

In God’s crowning act of creation—the human couple, made in His image—the difference between male and female is underlined as an essential part of cosmic holiness. After “dominion,” we expect to read about artistic creativity, rationality or vocation. Instead, God mentions our heterosexuality! Why? Because “difference” is essential to creational existence.

Practical Implications

This difference has practical implications. Eve is created as a helper different from Adam (Gn 2:20), to contribute elements only she can bring. Everything in creation is “very good” except one thing. It is “not good that Adam be alone” (Gn 2:18). There are essential elements in the cultural mandate that Adam cannot accomplish alone. God says: “I will make him a helper fit for him” (Gn 2:18). Eve fits Adam in every way. She is equally valuable, but crucially and essentially different. Eve is entirely necessary because the human task, as the Bible describes it, was (and still is, until further notice) to make the earth habitable and fill it with offspring. From this perspective, without any moral judgment, homosexuality is a creational dysfunction and homosexual marriage an oxymoron. The crown of creation is the heterosexual human couple. You may not agree with Moses, but that is what he says.

Heterosexuality expresses the Two-ist truth about the cosmos. In order to make the cosmos work, two distinct entities must collaborate to produce “dominion.” This is true of the lower forms of creation. When creation is renewed after the Flood, God commands Noah to take the “male and female [of all the species], to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth” (Gn 7:3). With regard to the human race, here is the biblical programmatic statement, quoted by Jesus (Mk 10:7) and Paul (Eph 5:31), regarding human Twoness: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gn 2:24). As creatures of God, we instinctively know this to be the good and right form of sexuality.

Heterosexual Fidelity: A Picture of God’s Faithfulness

Moses’ successor, Joshua, at the time of his death, commands the people:

You may not mix with these nations remaining among you or make mention of the names of their gods or swear by them or serve them or bow down to them,…but you shall cling to the Lord your God. (Jo 23:6)

The relationship of God with His people is compared to two people clinging to each other in a marriage relationship. Though God is the transcendent Lord, radically distinct from His people, and they are mere creatures, yet they are to “cling” to Him with faithfulness and are not to run after other spiritual lovers/pagan gods. They are commanded to “fear the Lord your God,…serve him [remember Rom 1:25] and hold fast to him” (Dt 10:20).

In the same way, says Moses, a man should cling to his wife in heterosexual life-long faithfulness, and, in so doing, two sexually distinct beings become deeply united, in “one flesh.” In this cleaving, faithful and exclusive commitment, Israel does not become God, nor God Israel, and so it is in the one-flesh relationship of marriage. Two distinct people do not cease to be male and female, but enter a communion of true “oneness” that produces a multiplying, fruitful dominion.

I hardly know anyone more different from me than my wife. She likes sweet breakfasts; I like savory. She reads maps; I guess. She looks at the details; I look at the big picture. She plays music by sight; I play by ear. She’d rather eat inside; I prefer outside. She is a night-owl; I’m a morning bird. She loves Home Depot; I love Sports Authority. We have been married since 1971. We’ve had a few arguments and a lot of laughs from our differences, but when we use them to work together, we make a unified, powerful team, by God’s grace.

Heterosexuality: A Key to Redemption

Heterosexuality is the capstone of the creation of the cosmos, since it pictures for us both the “otherness” of the Creator and our communion with Him. God also uses heterosexuality to represent the redemption of the cosmos. The gospel is prefigured in the Old Testament text we examined (Gn 2:24) because the Creator who reveals His righteous wrath to rebel creatures (v 18) is the Redeemer who reveals His righteous love in the gospel (v 17).

It has become common to encourage Christians to show one hundred percent acceptance and zero percent judgment, especially when it comes to the issue of homosexuality. Such acceptance is seen as the only way to demonstrate God’s love. Acceptance of other people is essential, for no man can judge another. But speaking of God’s love without explaining who God is depersonalizes both God and love. There is no such thing as love in general. It must be directed to a person and used to build others up and bring them to Jesus Christ in true human maturity. Each person’s responsibility as a created human being is one hundred percent acceptance of who God is. Have we exchanged the God revealed in Scripture for a sentimental notion of a non-judgmental, Ho-Ho-Ho Santa Claus or a spiritual force, which we are sure the culture will embrace?

We are doing a disservice to sinners if we hide the truth. Because God has embedded in our human identity a sense of the “natural,” Christians can appeal to this sense in encouraging unbelievers to seek reconciliation with its Author. The “natural” is a call to spiritual sanity, to holiness, and to forgiveness through the Holy One of God. The gospel cannot make sense without knowing who God is, as the transcendent Creator who made the world a holy place, set apart to honor and please Him. Without this there is no sense of God’s loving condescension in grace to save the lost.

Buried in the well-known text about Christ and the Church is a citation of Genesis 2:24. How does Paul get there? I will cite the whole text and comment on a few key expressions.

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. (Eph 5:21–33)

Wives and Submission

You may blanch at this “out-of-date” view of gender roles and its dehumanizing notion of “submission.” Even evangelicals have consigned submission to the dust-heap of history. Sally Morganthaler, an evangelical “facilitator” at the ETREK program, gave a course in 2007, entitled “Beyond Power: Leadership in a Gender Flattened World.” She teaches future pastors, living in our “new world…with it[s] aversion to hierarchy” to consider a “collaborative and whole-brained” leadership, “outside of hierarchy.”[2] With such thinking so prevalent in the Church, I realize that I am swimming upstream. But I plead with you to give this “piece” a chance! Even if Paul’s statement does not fit with anything you have been taught, please allow the deep reasoning of these ancient words to challenge your modern assumptions.

Submission has nothing to do with enslavement or dehumanization. There are very real abuses of authority, of course, but the biblical notion of submission proposes a joyful acceptance of the holy design that God put in place for the good of humanity. The verb “submit” is sometimes translated in the Old Testament as “be still.” It suggests a moment of thought about the nature of reality as God made it. In Psalm 37:7, the psalmist says: “Be still [submit] before the Lord and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way.” The answer to inner turmoil (Jb 30:27) is silent submission to the will of God. Thus the psalmist exhorts himself: “For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence [submit], for my hope is from him” (Ps 62:5).

Paul ties submission to “dominion” in the creation accounts. Immediately after Genesis 1:27, which speaks of the image of God in the man and the woman, God declares to the first couple: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion…” (Gn 1:28). For dominion, or true humanity, to function there must be submission. This is affirmed in Psalm 8:6, a classic text regarding human dignity: “You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put [submitted] all things under his feet.” Paul uses this psalm to describe the victory of Jesus and to celebrate His cosmic lordship: “and he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church” (Eph 1:22).

Very practically, “one flesh” only works if there are roles. Paul here speaks of the husband as the head of his wife, and of the wife submitting to that headship. Biblical submission is neither of two cultural extremes:

1. Biblical submission is not egalitarian, creative autonomy, which feminist theorists consider the pillar of the modern world. In thoroughly egalitarian relationships, the partners (as many as they may be) do as they please. Open marriage, blithely accepted in pockets of our culture, is egalitarian polygamy. Experience in such relationships (starting with Lamech in Genesis!) quickly shows that they are not the answer to a maiden’s prayer or a direct line to human well-being;

2. Biblical submission is not Islamic dehumanization based on inherent misogyny practiced in the context of male chauvinistic polygamy. Surah 4:34 says: “Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other…[the woman is] to be admonished and beaten.”

In our Ephesians text, the wife is different from, but not inferior to, her husband. She is a beloved, inseparable, equal, monogamous partner, for whom the husband must sacrifice his very life. Biblical submission is ennobling because it recognizes and rejoices in the holy distinctions that are dignified in the structures of creation. The text may seem to advocate dominion for the husband and submission for the wife, but the notions are not so simple. For one, the man is never told to force his wife to submit: She is called by God to submit to her husband. The woman cannot force her husband to love her: he is called by God to lay down his life for her. Submission is a Christian mindset relative to God’s general design, in which everyone submits, as I mentioned in chapter 9. Both submission and dominion are expressions of the “holiness as separation” theme that we have discussed.

The Profound Mystery of Christ and the Church

The Bible’s use of heterosexual marriage as the normal, created structure for sexuality in the original creation is also an announcement of future cosmic salvation. Genesis 2:24 precedes Genesis 3:15, often called the protoevangelium, the “first statement of the gospel,” in which God declares to Satan: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” This is a prophecy about the Messiah’s victory over Satan at the cross. But in Genesis 2:24, God embedded in the structure of creation a proto-protoevangelium that declares the essence of God’s recreative, redemptive purposes.[3]

As noted in chapter 4, Paul’s “mystery” that was “kept secret for long ages” (Rom 16:25) is now revealed in the very gospel Paul preaches. Paul is “a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures” (Rom 1:1–2). In this role as apostle, Paul boldly uses the Old Testament to teach us post-resurrection truth. As Paul puts it later, what “was written in former days was written for our instruction” (Rom 15:4). He sees that Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and ascension are all “in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3) and that the gospel was “preached beforehand to Abraham” (Gal 3:8). The mystery hidden in Old Testament shadows and types steps into the light in the person and teaching of Jesus and in the inspired preaching of Paul and the apostles. Paul gives praise to

him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but has now been disclosed through the prophetic writings. (Rom 16:25–26)

The terms “my gospel,” “my preaching,” and the “revelation of the mystery” refer to Paul’s Spirit-inspired interpretation of the Old Testament in light of the coming of the Messiah, prophesied in Genesis 3:15 and 2:24.

In Ephesians 5:21-33, Paul turns his Spirit-filled apostolic mind to marriage and the meaning of Genesis 2:24. At creation, God gives us a structure (heterosexual marriage) that helps us understand the mystery he will reveal, namely that of Christ, who saves and loves the Church. A dynamic in the original couple reflects the final redemption. The wife submits to her husband because God has given him a role of spiritual headship (due to no achievements of his own) to lead (not force) his wife, by acts of sacrificial love, both physical and spiritual. That is a tall order for selfish, fallible husbands!

The husband’s care and love for his wife symbolize Christ’s care and love for the cosmos, and the Church. The radically “other” God, distinct by nature from the creation, has condescended to redeem the creature. Sameness will not work. Christ and the Church are not interchangeable. The Church does not create, redeem or hold authority over Christ. Built into creation is the good news of its recreation. The symphony of God’s remarkable work in history inspires us to honor the male/female distinctions that God set forth in the original “good” creation as a foretaste of the glorious transformed cosmos to come. Sexuality is the reflecting pool of the entire cosmos.[4]

Homocosmology or Heterocosmology?

We have considered the only two religious systems: One-ism and Two-ism, and their effects on theology, spirituality and sexuality. These two systems can be expressed in another way. I make up my own terms here, so bear with me.

Homocosmology (One-ism, Making a World of Sameness)

Homocosmology defines salvation as a worldwide consciousness of Oneness in a self-evolving nature. Existence is an evolving, monistic sameness, in which distinctions are illusions to be suppressed. This theory affects the three areas of our Romans 1 text:

- Homotheology makes God and nature one and the same. The divine is a principle of unity and sameness;

- Homospirituality worships the sameness of reality, whether objects of nature, images of the self, or experiences of joining the opposites;

- Homosexuality celebrates sexual sameness and an ideal door into the deep things of nature.

Heterocosmology (Two-ism, Making a World of Difference)

In this worldview, existence has distinctions, opposites, paradoxes and analogies, divinely written into the creation in the beginning by a God who is other than all He has created. Salvation comes from the outside, from the Creator who, in condescension and grace, establishes reconciliation with His rebellious creatures. We see ramifications in the same three areas:

- Heterotheology maintains the Creator/creature distinction, and honors God as the unique Author of life.

- Heterospirituality follows God’s Old Testament stipulations not to worship and serve anything in creation, but only God Himself (Dt 4:8-10).

- Heterosexuality is a physical, sexual picture of communion and difference. A man and woman express, in heterosexual love, a picture of the difference and communion between God and His creation, and between Christ and the Church.

You or a friend may be facing a choice between these two options. In the third part of this book, I want to talk about the ultimate exchange and show you (I’m biased!) more advantages of Two-ism, the greatest of which is Jesus himself.

[1]. Los Angeles Times (August 18, 2009), A12.

[2]. See theooze.com/etrek.

[3]. I am indebted to my pastor, Ted Hamilton, for this as yet unpublished insight. Audio of his 2009 lecture, “Creation Sexuality,” can be found at truthXchange.com/resources/lectures.

[4]. For a biblical overview of the women’s issue, see Rebecca Jones, Does Christianity Squash Women? (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005).

Part 3

Romans 1 and You

Chapter 12

Songs need a listener as much as a singer;

singing is an act of two.

But there is only One.

Art is an act of two.

But there is only One.

Love flows through the interplay of two, the lover and the beloved.

But there is only One.

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever know.”

—Annie Mann, from the movie Magnolia

One or Two: The Stakes

We stand at a crucial juncture in history, teetering on the edge of spiritual and social disaster. Will the world be seduced by the erroneous fantasy of One-ism or seek the sane, natural, and supernatural truth of biblical Two-ism? Will the Church hold to orthodoxy or, in the name of social justice or mysticism, naïvely join forces with interfaith paganism? Right now, the Lie is succeeding so well that progressive optimists would see my very questions as a sign of insanity. In spite of the misgivings expressed in the plaintive song on the facing page, many are on a giddy, planet-saving “Journey toward Oneness,” carried along by “Global Spirit” (modern animism) to build a New Humanity, based on unitive consciousness.

The International Peace Center teaches a “Living Peace Curriculum” inspired by the ancient earth wisdom of Native North American Indian religion. For me, that is insanity—animistic spirit-worship as the basis of future world peace. This oneness will include the gender blur of the rising generation, which refuses to be confined to normal heterosexual distinctions. The New York Times describes the proponents of this omnigendered society as the “forward-thinking cohort” of the population. This self-proclaimed “paper of record” welcomes with open arms the pansexual chaos of future days in which nothing is right or wrong except saying that something is right or wrong.

In the sophisticated twenty-first century we are buying the original lie of Eden, hook, line and sinker (or should I say, hook, line and sinner?). The Lie was and still is the seductive offer of a human utopia, liberated from the Creator’s control and based on the false claim that there is no God but the world itself. The inmates will run the asylum. Such an arrangement has never worked, as human history attests. In spite of this, many blindly chose to believe Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), an American historian and philosopher of technology and science. Prior to World War I, he stated that Western intellectuals were nearly unanimous in believing that the human race could arrive at a state of “universal beatitude.” Instead, we reached a state of world war, twice in twenty-five years! Marxism promised us the New Man. In his place we got Joseph Stalin, paranoid dictator and mass murderer. Nazism promised us the blond haired, blue-eyed Aryan Ubermensch. In his place, we got Adolf Hitler, brown-haired, brown-eyed megalomaniac, ironically the descendent of a Jewish grandmother, and twisted inventor of “The Final Solution.” Folks, human beings cannot save themselves, for the problem lies within!

Cheese or Ice Cream?

When traveling in France, I sometimes bought lunch in truck-stop cafes. Though cheap, the menu was healthy, and for my final course, I could choose cheese or ice cream. I was surprised to see gritty French truck drivers choose cheese. What would you choose? Cheese or ice cream? Savory or sweet?

The great choice before every human being is not between cheese or ice cream. Would that it were so simple! We all have an ultimate, life or death choice between two all-inclusive, life-determining worldviews: One-ism or Two-ism. Your choice will affect your thinking, your spirituality and your sexuality. This is your major choice in life, a choice faced by every human being on earth. As sinners, we are One-ists by birth. But we can choose to become redeemed Two-ists. God’s leaders often laid the choice before the people:

Moses, at his death, says to the Israelites as they prepare to enter the Promised Land: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live” (Dt 30:19).

Joshua, Moses’ successor, makes the same appeal before his death. Israel, now in possession of the Promised Land, is surrounded by pagan tribes and nations. Joshua lays out the choice between One-ism and Two-ism, between the nature gods or nature’s Creator. Notice, as Paul argues in Romans 1:25, that there are only two choices (both sets of pagan gods fit the One-ism mold): “choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods…beyond the river, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Jo 24:15).

Elijah, during the reign of King Ahab (869–850 BC), one of Israel’s most evil kings, calls on the people to decide between Baal, the god of the forces of nature, and Jahweh, the God of Israel’s deliverance. Baal is supposed to be the god of storms, but it is the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel” who creates the rain everyone so wants. Standing before a confused people, Elijah says to the prophets of Baal: “you call upon the name of your god, and I will call upon the name of the Lord, and the God who answers by fire, he is God” (1 Kgs 18:24). When the fire fell, the people made their choice. They “fell on their faces and said, ‘The Lord, he is God’” (1 Kgs 18:39).

Jonah, instead of going east of Israel to Nineveh (the great Assyrian city across the river from the modern city of Mosul, Iraq), travels due west. Jonah takes a ship manned by a pagan crew, headed in the opposite direction from Nineveh! A storm arises and so do questions about God (as is the case in life and death situations). The scared sailors “each cry out to his god.” They want to know which god is causing the storm. Jonah speaks up: “I fear [on good days!] the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” Here again is the great choice before which each person stands: the storm gods of nature or the one Creator God who made nature and controls the storms?

Paul, the apostle, proposes this same choice in Romans 1:25: the worship and service of creation or the worship and service of the Creator.

The Bible confronts us with the ultimate choice between One-ism and Two-ism. Fence-sitting is not allowed. Why are so many eager to choose the seductive Lie of One-ism?

One-ism’s Seduction

When compared with materialistic secularism or Postmodernism, both of which have left a gaping spiritual hole in our collective heart, spiritual One-ism seems to have a lot going for it. Jean Houston, an occult channeler and guru to ex-first lady Hillary Clinton during the 1990s, sensed the end of an era. She said: “we are living in a state both of breakdown and breakthrough” and, since human reason has failed us, we need a “new alignment that only myth can bring.”[1] She teaches throughout the world (paid by the UN) that we will be saved by Isis, the Egyptian goddess of magic. One liberal Christian minister gave up on secularism because she realized that intellect was not the way to experience the Sacred, but rather imagination and mystery.

The Lie of One-ism offers the “new alignment” that Houston wants. It offers optimistic peace-making strategies to solve hunger, poverty, oppression, war and human alienation. Apparently, with just the right policy decisions, there is still hope for the planet. In fact, we can arrive at a planetary peace and personal wellbeing never before possible—all this and spirituality as well!

Global Politics

One-ism claims to rid the world of the cold war “us versus them” mentality. Marxism versus Capitalism, the good guys versus the bad guys—such thinking will bring a nuclear holocaust. We need bipartisanship, cooperation and synthesis. A future world of One-ist peace and prosperity beckons if we can only see the wisdom of planetary governance and the end of the nation-state. The world will forego its wars and find a convergence of benevolent world socialism, human flourishing and soul-promoting spirituality.

But the problem lies within us!

Green Sense

One-ism profits from the belief that the industrial West has created so much pollution that we are threatened by an ecological meltdown. We need a spirit of global cooperation to rid the planet of man-made environmental disasters and to produce a green, sustainable and healthy world. We have a collective responsibility to save both humanity and the planet, but part of the price tag is One-ist worship of the earth as the Goddess, Gaia.

But the problem lies within us!

Global Religion

Religious wars (“my religion is better than yours”) are out. It is now believed, thanks to Postmodernism’s rejection of normative truth, that our world needs a period of religious peace and cooperation, created through interfaith projects and the comparative study of religion (mystery, myth and imagination). Radical pagan feminism is waiting for the coming of the Goddess Sophia, who, they believe, brought Christians, Jews, Gnostics and Pagans together in the first century religious pax romana. One “minister” encourages his fellow progressive Christians to “cast a wider net and include non-dualistic [One-ist] interpretations of Jesus, the kingdom of God, incarnation, evil and salvation [because] religious dualism [Two-ism] is a major root-cause of violence and war.” Interfaith syncretism answers the question, “Can’t we all get along?” with an enthusiastic “Yes we can!”

But the problem lies within us!

Personal Harmony

Our number one goal as a culture seems to be personal well-being, whereas our number one enemy is guilt. Guilt is an illusion, according to One-ism. Spiritual techniques offer ways to silence the illusions and reconcile you to your higher self, which allows you to flourish according to your deep, unconscious (true) being. You need healing from the unresolved dualistic trauma of your birth, which has deeply wounded you. The consciousness of and unity with mother and Mother Nature that is lost at birth can be regained through “natural” spirituality. You can be reunited with nature and become personally whole, connected with the Source of All Things. You will have a sense of belonging to the cosmos and will be reborn, with no fear of death. Such spiritual experiences give moments of euphoria and psychological deliverance, unhindered by externally imposed moral limitations.

But the problem lies within us!

Sexual Choice

Socially imposed heterosexual duality is seen as restrictive, because it drives all other sexual identities outside the pale of legitimacy. Self-affirming One-ist spirituality, on the other hand, worships an all-inclusive, loving God, who reserves a place for all human beings and all sexual choices. Homosexuality, in particular, allows one to see the world with the harmonious, non-dualistic vision of mystical religion. It eliminates the old world, polarized by the battle between the sexes, and (by seeing homosexuality in non-moral, non-judgmental categories) frees the human psyche of the false burden of “original sin.” This freedom produces well-rounded, positive citizens, who enjoy all civic rights— including marriage.

But the problem lies within us!

A Viable Future

Neopagan reconstruction is committed to a better, more humane future through physical and spiritual evolution. If the universe is self-emergent, self-sustaining and self-fulfilling, then evolution, in form and in consciousness, will lead to the evolving of a unique earthly species—the new, radically transformed human. A gathering called the Great Rethinking Conference is “an international organization dedicated to assisting in the birthing of a new humanity, and thereby, the realization of the successful cultivation of a sustainable and workable world.”[2] The faculty is a Who’s Who of One-ist spiritual leaders. Among the more recognizable names are Deepak Chopra, Ram Dass, Lynne McTaggart, Stanislav Grof, Alex Grey, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Tom Robbins, Huston Smith and Marianne Williamson.

This is one of many movements of great power and influence that attract people to One-ism. It is up-beat, forward-looking and utopian, proposing a new day of healing both for the individual and for the planet. This is such good news… but, like jokes, there is also bad news: The problem lies within us!

One-ism’s Deception

Such a utopian vision is more fantasy than reality. The promised global utopia may become humanity’s worst nightmare.

Global Politics

Globalism seems to be a necessity, since, as Disney says, “it’s a small world, after all.” Political, industrial, environmental and financial mechanisms have been created to deal with genuinely global problems. Acid rain does not stop at the border; global warming (or cooling) is, as its name suggests, global. The great danger of globalism, however, is the disappearance of nation-states, which, for all their weaknesses, still serve as a system of checks and balances for flawed humanity. If those barriers fall, we will all be part of one-world totalitarianism. The new spiritualists long for a geo-political structure that will facilitate their redemptive programs. The freedoms we know could evaporate quickly in the hands of well-meaning central planners with utopian visions for the planet.

Socialist utopias have never worked. Usually, they are unmitigated and thoroughly inhuman disasters. I mentioned the genocidal regimes of Stalin and Hitler. I could add Pol Pot, Mao and Kim Jong-Il. From these the New Spirituality claims to deliver us, but alas, One-ist spirituality is no defense against totalitarianism. Ancient Rome was very spiritual, but absolute imperial power corrupted the commander-in-chief/priest-emperor absolutely.

Green Sense

In a biblical worldview, man is God’s viceroy, charged with caring for and exercising dominion over the earth. Two-ists are to be as interested in our environment as One-ists. However, care for the earth must not become a pretext to seize political and religious power. Socialist Carol Browner believes that rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change, but Abraham Lincoln would not have agreed. He said you cannot make a weak man strong by making a strong man weak. Suppressing the dynamic of wealth-creation would impoverish everyone. Browner wants to rid the world of the free enterprise system, but to do so in the name of “global warming” would cost billions of dollars and hurt the poor to solve a problem many scientists do not even believe exists. Remember that only twenty or thirty years ago, we were worried about scientifically proven “global cooling.” In spite of the Al Gore mantra that the “manmade” global warming science is conclusive, 31,000 scientists signed a document disagreeing. Ecological stewardship is essential, but human hubris can make it dangerous. Worshipers of the earth, with a uniquely this-worldly perspective, can exaggerate problems as a means of coming closer to global political control.

Spiritually speaking, pagan green thinking asks us to learn our morals from the earth, rather than from the Creator of the earth. You have no doubt heard arguments appealing to the morals of the animal world as examples for us to follow. Such thinking creates even greater moral confusion for our young people.

Global Religion

Peace between religions is desirable, if by “peace” we mean tolerance of views other than our own. One-ist religions share so much in common that they don’t have much trouble tolerating one another. The conflicts that arise between such groups are usually due to political, tribal or racial tensions. However, One-ism, while desiring to be all-inclusive, does have a problem with Two-ism. While accusing Christian fundamentalism of intolerance (due to claims that Christianity is the only way to God), all-inclusive One-ism is utterly intolerant of Christian orthodoxy. Biblical Christianity is ignored or even persecuted. Interfaith is right in seeing that most religions have a common core, but it will not admit the validity of Two-ism.

Two examples make the point:

1. One hundred and twenty-five different religions (including Witchcraft) gathered at the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions, but biblical Christianity was not invited. The Parliament was based on the principle that all religions are finally the same, but biblical Christianity did not fit, and was treated as a pariah. Though it apparently did not exist, biblical Christianity was the butt of many critiques and was the religion over against which interfaith people defined themselves.

2. Ken Wilber is a leading Neopagan Mahayana Buddhist thinker, appreciated by Bill Clinton, Brian McLaren and Rob Bell. We saw his chart of the spiritual evolution of humanity that places biblical theism fourth from the bottom, just under the next best system—Enlightenment Rationalism. Spiritual history has moved on (see chapter 6).

As we saw, Wilber’s ladder has two problems: all his systems exist simultaneously in history, so there is no “progression”; and eight of his nine steps are One-ist. The main defining question in analyzing religious systems is the One-ist versus Two-ist, the esoteric versus exoteric question. If religious peace can occur only by suppressing the antithesis that separates One-ism and Two-ism, then it is by definition an unstable, ephemeral and false peace based on subterfuge.

Personal Harmony

No one can deny the immediate stress-relieving effects of One-ist spirituality. Expert spiritualists will testify that the experience of timeless unity with Spirit is not an idea, but a direct apprehension of spiritual reality. It is even claimed that mystical religion, as opposed to dogmatic religion, is more scientific, because it relies on direct experiential evidence and testing. The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief.

States of spiritual mysticism are usually created by techniques of physical stimuli, such as sensory overload or mind control through a variety of contrived bodily stimuli.[3] A Dutch anesthesiologist, Dr. G. M. Woerlee, studied people who had “near-death experiences,” which include a sense of inner peace, calmness and an inability to be disturbed by danger. He found the root cause of this state to be biological in nature.[4] Mild to moderate oxygen deprivation upsets the function of the prefrontal cortex, the seat of all things intellectual, to produce states of non-rational euphoria, which, he notes, is the goal of all spiritual gurus. Another researcher found that rhythmic light and sound stimulation increased blood flow in the brains of elderly subjects, changing their cognitive functioning.

If physical stimuli, under controlled circumstances, have such “spiritual” effects, it is not surprising that physically-stimulated spiritual seekers speak of “direct experiential evidence and testing.” A yellow-robed Indian guru at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (1993) pointed his chubby finger at me at and said, with a twinkle in his eye and in a rich, curry-deepened voice: “You need faith. I don’t. I meet the gods directly.” If this altered state of consciousness is created by a psychosomatic overload, perhaps its derived spiritual truth is doubtful and its absence of fear illusory.

By speaking of the physical stimuli in One-ist spirituality, I do not deny its spiritual repercussions. The paranormal world of the occult is real, and practitioners have regularly spoken of the cruelty with which they are treated by demonic powers. The altered states of consciousness so religiously and constantly sought via “technologies of the sacred,” may be, at first, “physical” states in which, as in hypnosis, the initiate gives up conscious control and is opened up to “powers” that lead from the true God to the gods of this world. Says yoga meditation life coach, Jennifer Macaluso-Gilmore: “When you step out into the unknown, anything is possible in your life.” But leaving behind your God-endowed rational awareness and self-control in order to give yourself over to unknown spirit power is the first step to losing your personal identity and, eventually, your soul. Toward the end of her life, the Russian princess Helena Blavatsky, founder of the occult Theosophical Society, wrote to an old friend and declared: “I would gladly return, be Russian, be Christian, be Orthodox. I yearn for it. But there is no returning; I am in chains, I am not my own.”[5] We discard at our peril our rational self-consciousness, which God has told us should be under the control of His Spirit.

Sexual Choice

What kind of a sexual world is One-ist utopianism preparing? Professor Bernice L. Hausman teaches a course at Virginia Tech called “Studies in Theory: Representing Female Bodies,” which explores androgyny. A required assignment instructs students to “choose one day in which [they] dress and comport themselves in a manner either more masculine or more feminine than they would normally.” Hausman’s published works include a book, Changing Sex: Transsexualism, Technology, and the Idea of Gender, and articles such as“Do Boys Have to Be Boys?” and “Virtual Sex, Real Gender: Body and Identity in Transgender Discourse.”

Hausman is only one of many radicals forming the minds of our future citizens. Oberlin College in Ohio was founded in 1833 by two Presbyterian ministers. The Christian evangelist, Charles Finney, was its second President. Today students are taught that the Arab television network, al-Jazeera, is the best source of news about Iraq and the Middle East; they are exhorted by campus-sponsored speakers to have sex whenever they wish; and they are encouraged to “get promiscuous” at orgies hosted by the college and attended by both students and faculty. Some eight hundred to a thousand students (one-third of student body) typically attend the annual college-sponsored, administration-approved “Safer Sex Night,” an orgy held on campus. The Oberlin Review, the student newspaper, described the scene: “Educational, sexually explicit videos played on TV screens, and students sat in booths in g-strings and halter tops.” Other students, the paper reported, simply go naked. Students can enter something called the “Tent of Consent” to interact sexually with other consenting adults.

Not to be sexually discriminatory, in the spring, Oberlin hosts another on-campus sex party in the spring called the “Drag Ball,” which is the final event of the school’s annual “Transgender Awareness Week.” Organized by students and faculty to “celebrate Oberlin College’s queer community,” this event is the culmination of a week of “talks and film screenings to celebrate the experiences of transgender, transsexual, intersex and other gender-variant people.”

Such orgiastic, disturbingly animalistic sex is not exceptional, and many colleges offer academic credit for such “studies.” Will these liberated future teachers, senators and governors ensure that the coming utopia will be a haven of human goodwill and selfless service?

It doesn’t begin with college. Children are indoctrinated in pansexuality long before that. The Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) has clubs for homosexual and lesbian students on college, high school and middle school campuses and promotes workshops like “Pleasure Physiology and Sex Toys” in its internet publication, GSA Network News. Another homosexual organization working in schools, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), was founded by Kevin Jennings, who was named Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education by the Obama administration. Jennings favors teaching homosexual techniques to children. His government-backed project of “Safe Schools” will mean eliminating any criticism of, or warnings about, homosexuality. Children must be taught—by official government programs—to embrace homosexuality and all forms of deviant sex, backed up by hate crime laws now in vigor.

It is disturbing to see how successfully the pro-homosexual movement is ingratiating itself into the lives of children. Official organizations such as the GSA, the GLSEN and OpenArms Youth Project, normalize homosexuality for children as young as twelve or thirteen and create “safe” zones at school where children can experiment in various forms of “dating.” Kevin Jennings was inspired by Harry Hay, an early outed homosexual who supported the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). One has to wonder how “safe” will be the schools of tomorrow. In the meantime, for confused teens, hundreds of websites promote the deviancy, “helping” homosexual children to no longer “feel alone.” In the Sixties, the generally heterosexual mantra of liberation was: “If it moves, fondle it.” Today, the omnisex mantra is: “You are what you are—embrace it.”

This view of sexuality is flooding the culture as a religious value. The Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Transgender (LGBT) Scholarship and Mentorship Program, part of The American Academy of Religion, is designed to “nurture and promote promising theologians and religious scholars interested in LGBT studies.” The program statement outlines its goals to create within religious institutions a welcoming environment for all gender identities. The Religious Institute, a nonprofit, multifaith organization supported by more than 4,800 clergy, religious scholars and seminary presidents and deans, is dedicated to advocating, in faith communities and in society at large, sexual “health” (free-sex), education (condoms) and justice (normalization and legalization of homosexuality).[6]

Such organizations will do nothing to stop the slide into sexual chaos. On the contrary. We will see San Francisco-style Gay Pride parades in every town and hamlet across the fruited plains; naked men servicing each other in the streets; transvestites, outlandishly dressed in provocative clothing, shamelessly flaunting their wares; topless lesbians publicly making love in front of families with kids. This sexual utopia will look far more chaotic than the intergalactic bar-room scene in Star Wars. In the omnigendered society, you will see a man wearing a dress, lipstick and high heels, hired to teach the second grade in your child’s elementary school and using the ladies’ bathroom; homosexual Christian ministers and Supreme Court Justices; a transvestite Senator; why not a lesbian President of the United States? It must be—in the interests of antidiscrimination! Some of these scenes are already unfolding on our national stage. Speaking out against them will incur the risk of a fine or even jail time for “hate speech.”

In this utopia, those who oppose such sexual aberrations will lose their freedom of speech and religion; schools will be required to teach all forms of sexual expression; sensitivity training at businesses for transgenderism and pansexuality will be mandatory; health clubs, rest rooms and locker rooms will be pansexual; landlords and property owners will be unable to deny rental or sale on the basis of “gender identity or expression”; all crimes against self-identified transgender or homosexual persons will receive extra penalties as a hate crime; bodily mutilations to change one’s sex will become part of mandatory tax-payer insurance coverage; unelected tribunals, like the “Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination,” will have broad powers to harass people and impose huge fines for discriminatory behavior.

Under the guise of a new day of taboo-free liberation, everyone’s desires and fantasies must be publicly respected. Our modern culture, because of sexual morals and the ease of internet technology, is awash in active, guilt-free forms of heterosexual and homosexual immorality and pornographic obsession. But sexual anarchy will cause the collapse of stable families, where children can be raised sanely. The family is the bedrock of Western civilization. To eliminate it as a source of cultural authority leaves the individual standing alone against the collectivist state.

Can we stop this omnigendered sexual juggernaut, and if so, by what ideology? If we are already shocked by the sexual anarchy we see now, what will the pansexual utopia look like?

Moral Relativism

If the goal of One-ism is to “join the opposites” and embrace the antinomies, then evil is just as much at home in the pagan circle as good. By definition, there is nothing outside the One-ist circle, so evil must be included. One-ists believe that the coming Ultimate Reality is beyond good and evil.

In June 2009 the Rev. Jesse Jackson added former Chicago Democrat Congressman Mel Reynolds to his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition’s payroll. In jail on fifteen convictions for committing wire and bank fraud, for lying to the Federal Election Commission, and for sleeping with an underage campaign volunteer, Reynolds was among the one hundred seventy-six criminals pardoned by President Clinton. This is a first in American politics: an ex-congressman who had sex with a subordinate…won clemency from a president who had sex with a subordinate…then was hired by a clergyman who had sex with a subordinate! His new job? Youth counselor! Though, in some sense trivial, this event indicates what has happened to our culture’s moral sensitivity. How do you build a better culture with such people in authority?

At a much deeper level, moral relativism is expressly practiced in modern witchcraft; witches believe that the spiritual power available to them is neither good nor evil. This is essentially what Carl Jung thought. After a visit to India in 1938, Jung stated how impressed he was that Buddhists and Hindus were able to integrate “evil” into their natural world. He observed that Indian spirituality contains as much evil as good, but does not believe in either. He warned the West not to think of good and evil as opposites. We must each reconcile the light/good and the dark/evil sides of our personality. Jung built this principle, called “individuation,” into his influential theory of psychological wholeness.

Goddess-worshiping feminists hold the same view. Darkness is an aspect of the goddess, as in Hindu worship of the goddess Kali, who is covered in blood and holds the bodies of dead babies. As goddess of destruction, she teaches that both good and evil must be embraced to achieve wholeness in a world riven by duality (Two-ism). She stands as an evocative image of the powerful, autonomous spiritual woman of tomorrow.

In the One-ist system, there are no evil actions. It makes no difference whether we slander or praise, love or hate, murder or save someone. Where there are no ultimate moral distinctions, there is no absolute moral responsibility. The Man/God is liberated from moral restraints.

One consistent spiritual One-ist, Neale Donald Walsch, openly states that Hitler went to “heaven” (whatever a this-worldly “heaven” means).[7] Imagine Hitler nonchalantly sitting on a pink cloud, minding his own business, playing a harp like any other self-respecting angel, because, according to Walsch, his deeds were not evil, they were merely mistakes! But I am joking about the pink clouds. That is not the heaven I envisage. The utopian heaven of One-ism is chilling, for if it has no moral order, it inevitably becomes a monstrous “hell.” And, since there is no transcendence, it will be “hell on earth.”

A Viable Future

The fantasy world of the One-ist state seduces those who blithely believe it will give us unity, sweetness and light. Such an entirely “this-worldly” hope offers no objective evidence that the “new human species” will save us, and it sets us up for dashed hopes and untold suffering.

In sum, One-ism fails to provide real hope and is unable to answer the deepest human needs of ethics, personhood, mystery, spirituality and ultimate significance, because:

- by relativizing good and evil, it is ultimately amoral and egotistical;

- by rejecting the God of Two-ism, it is impersonal at heart;

- by focusing on this-worldly reality, it lacks true mystery and cannot evoke genuine worship;

- by manipulating the brain through mystical/physical techniques, it opens us to evil, occult, spiritual enslavement to the god of this world;

- by dismissing the true God as the objective source of significance, it has no basis to make meaningful statements and is merely self-referential.

In all these ways, One-ism is profoundly “anti-human.” It closes itself off from fellowship with God, the transcendent Creator of all things and the ultimate source of human dignity. Currently, this movement is progressing. The number of Christians is plummeting in America, while the number of non-believers is skyrocketing. A 2009 study of Americans’ religious beliefs shows the beginnings of a major realignment in the country’s relationship with God. Protestants will soon be a minority for the first time since the Pilgrims arrived on the North American continent.

One-ism is not viable, and the biblical, Protestant foundations of the culture are eroding. Americans, though interested in God, do not think existing institutions are helping them draw closer to Him. Whatever the faults of our churches, the optimistic discourse about “the birthing of a new humanity” or a “new human species” will bring us all down. The “new” optimism is only a tired repeat of the old Marxist idealism, which believed that the “new man” would emerge from the old. How do we purge selfishness from the old as he morphs into the new?

With its added power and planetary reach, global utopia will doubtless be history’s most terrifying experiment, a mixture of Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Orwell’s Animal Farm. I see the specter of a future world community melting into a mixture of anything-goes selfishness of the ruling elite, which justifies all its actions as acts of benevolence for the common good. It all ends in ruthless totalitarianism, controlled by an elite class of occult shamans.

One-ism exchanges the God of Two-ism for “the god of this world,” who is not a god but a creature, the epitome of Evil. Without the true personal God, without the heavenly Father, we creatures—lonely orphans in an impersonal universe, worshiping idols of their own making—are left to ourselves to devour one another.

The prophet Hosea pled with apostate Israel to come back to sanity and return to God, their Father, with these touching words: “return to the Lord; say to him, ‘Take away all iniquity…Assyria cannot save us…We will never again say “Our gods” to what our own hands have made, for in you the fatherless find compassion’” (Hos 14:3).

This has been a depressing chapter for you, I am sure. But in the final chapters, we will find relief, for we will meet the only true God, who gives genuine hope not only for a meaningful life right now, but also for the true, utopian “new man,” whose identity we already know and who invites those who believe in Him to join Him in a transformed “new heavens and a new earth.”

[1]. Jean Houston, The Passion of Isis and Osiris: A Gateway to Transcendent Love (New York: Ballantine, 1995), 2.

[2]. greatmystery.org/about.html.

[3]. See chapter 6 and our think tank compendium, Global Wizardry, which describes such techniques.

[4]. Dr. G. M. Woerlee, Mortal Minds: the Biology of Near-Death Experiences (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005).

[5]. Walter Leaf, A Modern Priestess of Isis (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1895), 219.

[6]. religiousinstitute.org.

[7]. Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, bk. 2 (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 1997), 35.

Chapter 13

“Something unspeakably holy—I don’t know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world.” —Stephen Jay Gould

"Stand in awe of Him" —King David

Two-ism: Making a World of Difference

A scene in the movie, The Lord of the Rings, shows the band of heroes hopelessly surrounded by thousands of orcs in the Mines of Moria. Then, miraculously, the ugly crowd, in a squealing frenzy, dissolves into the shadows. Relief registers on the travelers until… a far more fearsome enemy emerges from the depths of the earth—a Balrog, demon from the beginning of time.

Christians were relieved when secular humanism, long-time enemy of biblical supernaturalism, scurried off into the shadows. Little did we realize that a demon from the beginning of time now threatens our “Fellowship of the King.” That demon comes in disguise, offering spiritual help from the one place where it cannot be found: within the human soul. It tempts us to find our “unconscious” to be our true self, through which we commune with the powers of nature, reach personal enlightenment, and affect the salvation of the planet. That solution is empty, for “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). Our “unconscious” is just as sinful as any other part of us and is in league with the Father of Lies. Only God can understand and transform our subconscious, and if we fail to turn to Him, the Author of Life, we choose eternal death. As the Scripture says: “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind” (Jer 17:10).

A demon-filled man, whom Jesus healed, had amazing experiences in the tombs—utterly free of all societal controls. But he was bound to the self-destructive forces of evil. Jesus freed him from his invisible demonic shackles, and this happy man ended up sitting at Jesus’ feet, clothed and in his right mind. Why, then, do evangelical Christians have such a hunger for irrational spiritual experience? They seek “spirit” over Scripture, experience over doctrine, deeds over creeds, and Jesus the social activist over Jesus the Lamb of God and Lord of the cosmos. In so doing, they are caught up in the pagan rush to the mystical, Creator-denying worship of nature.

The fundamental truths of the Bible and the person of God are under attack in mainline and evangelical churches alike. Is reality actually One-ist? Is the cosmos self-creating? Is God an impersonal force? Is any religion just as good as another? Is Christianity only a “spirit” that inspires community? Is gender blur nothing but a teenage fad? Is Jesus merely an effective community organizer?

Problems with Two-ism

“But,” you say, “Two-ism has its own problems,” and I reply: “I hope so!” A credible account of this complex universe and of the Lord who made it necessarily entails a gripping declaration of an incomprehensible mystery. We are forced out of our comfort zone and onto our knees. Think Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Paul. God asks Job, “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him?” All Job can say is, “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth” (Jb 40:1–4). When Paul meets the risen Lord Jesus, all he can stammer is, “What shall I do, Lord?” (Acts 22:10). True religion starts when we are pinned to the wall by the all-powerful God, who made the universe. There is nothing ho-hum about Him.

If God is unimaginably transcendent and “other,” we will obviously not understand everything about Him. God says to Isaiah:

My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways….For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Is 55:8–9)

The Psalmist agrees: “You have multiplied, O Lord my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you!….Your thoughts are very deep!” (Ps 40:5; 92:5). Given this knowledge gap, it is inevitable that what God reveals to us doesn’t always compute in our puny minds: “The Lord knows the thoughts of man, that they are but a breath” (Ps 94:11).

To say that we can’t understand God is not a cop-out. Our natural instinct is to bring God down to our level and judge Him by human norms (precisely what One-ism does). I do not mean, however, that we can understand nothing of God. We don’t need to bring God down to our level, because He stooped to communicate with us, which is amazingly good news. We can truly know Him, though we will never understand everything about Him. There are many logical and moral imponderables in Two-ism. Two of the more difficult questions are about suffering and foreknowledge.

Suffering: Though I cannot explain all that God intends in allowing suffering, God’s transcendence gives intrinsic meaning to life, even its moments of soul-testing suffering. His mysterious involvement in the most incomprehensible human suffering of all—what happened to Jesus on the cross—assures me that suffering is finally redemptive.

Foreknowledge: Our perspective and God’s are in many ways irreconcilable. It is a mystery that even the Christian Scriptures don’t resolve. They juxtapose the perspectives and ask us to function within the two parameters—God’s sovereign knowledge and justice and our human knowledge and moral responsibility. Paul exhorts Christians to “…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil 2:12–13). God works, we work, and we await the full story. Another example is Peter’s remarks to the Jews in his first sermon in Jerusalem: “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23). In these and other Scripture passages, human evil and divine good are mysteriously and inextricably related, and produce an ultimate good.

Advantages of Two-ism

Two-ism and Personhood—Romans 1:1–4, 17–18

Unlike the impersonal divine force of One-ism, Paul’s God is the personal triune Creator, revealed as God the Father (v 1), God the Son (vv 3–4) and God the Spirit (v 4). God as Trinity is essential to Christianity, because the Trinity establishes both personhood and love as an essential part of the fabric of existence—past, present and future. We are not the beginning of God’s love story. Love and personhood were inherent to the nature of the Creator long before the creation. Love existed eternally within the Trinity. Both “otherness” and love are bound up in the triune God. Father, Son and Spirit are totally united, yet remain distinct. Hence religions that claim to be theistic but deny the Trinity (such as Islam and modern Judaism) fail to respect the truly personal character of God. What’s more, Jesus brings the already personal God right into our human world, as he reveals to us the Father.

God’s “person-ness” has implications for us. One-ists call humans “earthlings,” reducing us to one life form among many. Two-ism, however, gives us a basis not only for human rights, but for human relationships. The obvious superiority of the human species within the created order is explained in Two-ism by “the image of God,” which marks each human being. Because we are made in His image, we can enter into a personal relationship both with other human beings and with God Himself. We are “fit” for intimacy. If God is a force that flows everywhere, and if we and the rest of creation are a part of that same force, then God is impersonal and we can never have a relationship with Him—or even with one another.

On the practice green, my atheist friend, Jack, tried to stump me with the problem of “extra-terrestrial life.” Trying to concentrate on my putting stroke, I nevertheless pointed out that even life on another planet would still be created existence. One-ism gives the impression of transcendence in its worship of the cosmos, but if we could travel to the edge of the five hundred billion galaxies, we would still not get beyond the physical reality of creation. Beyond all that is the transcendent Lord, personal both in his Trinitarian being and in His relationship with human beings, made in His image.

God’s transcendence is fundamental to our personhood. The relationship we have with one another is based on the prior personal nature of God and His plan to make us in His personal image. There is a further implication. Because we have a cosmos where personhood is an integral part of reality, we can have “love”—so celebrated in our popular songs. It is the love between the persons of the Trinity and the condescension of God in reaching out in love to creatures that establishes a model for selfless human love among human creatures.

Two-ism and Ethics—Romans 1:19

I’m sure you have people in your life who help keep you straight! I know that my friends and family will let me know when I do not keep my word. If I were to cheat in my weekly golf round—though I’m sorely tempted to use my “foot wedge” occasionally—I would certainly lose friends! Think about it for a moment. We are rightly horrified when we see a child abused, a woman battered, or a young boy stuffed with drugs and sent out to eviscerate pregnant women as a tactic of war. Our hatred of injustice cannot emerge from a One-ist world. The “wrath of God” (v 19) is a sign of God’s personal and moral superintendence of His creatures. He is the One who gives ethical significance to existence.

If we are all one, and there are no distinctions, then we are no different from animals that survive by tearing apart their prey. If we derive from an impersonal amoeba, or are the result of an evolutionary “survival of the fittest,” why do we feel such deep moral outrage? The atheist Jewish philosopher, Mitchell Silver compares the god of the New Spirituality to his own atheism, and finds that the foundation for morality remains “obscure” for both systems. Such obscurity does not bode well for humanity. We are equally capable of landing humans on the moon or reducing them to cadavers in concentration camps. It is God (the Person who makes and gives the Law) who provides the explanation of morals.

The Creator/creature distinction makes sense of my human, fallen reality. I don’t know about you, but when I “look within,” I don’t see the divine attributes necessary to save myself, let alone humanity. Not only am I lacking in power, but my heart can’t be trusted to serve others rather than myself. When I look within, I see sinful thoughts, selfish actions and a guilty conscience that I can’t ignore. The fantasy world of One-ism tells me that I should banish guilt from my mind, but mind games and meditation can’t erase the evil I’ve done or create the selfless acts I fail to do. Just as I can’t change the physical face I see in the mirror each morning, so I can’t change the face of the soul I see in the mirror of God’s requirements. I prefer painful reality to cock-eyed fantasy. And there is hope, since, as Paul says, “the law drives me to Christ.”

Two-ism and Knowledge—Romans 1:2, 19

Paul assures us in verse 19 that what we know of God is not a human projection, but a genuine revelation from God, the source of all things. Because God speaks through His creation, none of us lives in a meaningless universe. In that same created reality, we meet the mystery of persons, the longevity of faithful friendships and the moving expressions of self-sacrifice that are inexplicable without the person of God quietly overseeing our existence. In one sense, we are earthlings, but we are so much more.

God not only reveals Himself through creation, but to creation. To know God more deeply in the mystery of His person, we need His personal self-revelation in Scripture: “the gospel of God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures.” The Bible is not a security blanket for fearful fundamentalists, but an indispensable component of Two-ism. In One-ism, the creature claims to be divine and to have no need of special, divine revelation from a God outside the circle. The One-ist goes within to find truth. Remember our ants on the ocean liner? If they want to know they’re on their way to Sao Paulo, it will have to be because the captain tells them, in ant language. The distinction between the Creator and the creature in Two-ism shows us that the God who is outside and above the circle of the earth is the One who speaks into it. If God had not revealed Himself to us, we would know little about His true being, since we would know only what we can glean from examining a glorious sunset or discovering delightful creatures at the bottom of the sea. Christians cling tightly to the Bible because it is a Word from our captain, telling us in ant language where we’re headed. In that Word we discover that He is other than us, but also that He is a Person who extends love to us. The Bible is a mighty, merciful act of God. Just as the Word had to become flesh, so it had to become text. Such an “objective” source of real knowledge also explains human rationality.

The “death of God” (which, remember, occurred when I was in graduate school) spells the disappearance of the Author of the world, who gives truth and meaning to our history and experience. Once God is out of the picture, we only have interpreters, or readers, of existence. How can we read the universe without God? If, however, there is an objective source for rationality and language outside of the created realm to which our sense of significance refers, then we are not condemned to the endless relativism of socially-generated meaning in which Postmodernism leaves us. Significance is not socially generated; it is divinely generated. I know that is a faith statement, but it’s a statement that makes sense in a world where reason must be exercised daily. The literary critic, George Steiner, believes that any “coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning…is underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.” Kevin Vanhoozer describes Steiner’s position: “There is a Word in the words to which the reader is responsible.”

Two-ism and the Cosmos—Romans 1:20

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” Philosophers can’t really answer that question, but we all know that we were born into “something.” Long ago, King David recognized this: “Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” I know of no better answer to this question of the philosophers. The revelation from the Creator begins with an amazing opening chapter, Genesis 1. Read it! Creation of matter occurs when God speaks it into existence. In nature we see intricate, deep-seated design such as that of a human cell. We hear deep-seated structure in the creative, unexpected improvisations of modern jazz. We sense the harmony of tastes in a French meal (especially if compared to pot-luck suppers, where the pot is often pourri). In His unspeakably glorious creation, God shows Himself as the unsurpassed artist, standing behind and explaining all our attempts at creativity. Genesis describes how God sanctifies matter by separating the material elements for various functions. He places His holy stamp on what He makes, granting creatures place, function and significance. You may recall what the committed evolutionary scientist from Harvard, Stephen Jay Gould, said about the beauty of the world: “something unspeakably holy—I don’t know how else to say this—underlies our discovery and confirmation of the actual details that made our world.”

The real, objective nature of the world has given rise to genuine science, for which we are all most grateful. But while science can help explain the “how?” it knows nothing of the “why?” or the “who?”—questions we human beings are made to ask.

Two-ism and History—Romans 1:20

In verse 20, speaking of God’s invisible attributes, “eternal power and deity,” Paul uses the phrase: “ever since the creation of the world.” For him, the universe had a beginning and will have a meaningful consummation. Cosmic history is not an endless karmic cycle of eternal matter, but moves from an absolute beginning to a logical fulfillment, thus answering our deep need of significance and purpose. Life is not a random crowd of amorphous, relativistic individuals trying to make sense of a meaningless universe, but is ordered in meaningful relationships by its Creator. Our world is not governed by a mindless fate that leaves us vulnerable to the whims of cruel human dictators, but is governed by a just and all-powerful King. Though life seems random, meaningless, lonely and cruel at times, there is a God who will accomplish all His purposes and bring to fruitful conclusion all His promises. We can trust God to direct both the cosmos and our work in it.

Our longing for utopia, for consummation, is God-given, built into the world and into the human psyche. Scripture reveals that the original creation was only the first of two stages to bring the cosmos to its ultimate perfection (see 1 Cor 15:45). The second stage will arrive when God acts on the original creation to transform it into the future and final physico-spiritual reality of the new heavens and the new earth. This magnificent future utopia cannot be produced by human action, any more than human action produced the creation of the world or the resurrection of the corpse of Jesus.

One-ist spirituality seeks to escape history. Hindus call the everyday world of events “maya,” or illusion. For them, as for all One-ists, true living is found in altered states of consciousness. An Indian Christian tells of a Hindu he met in Mumbai who claimed to view life in terms of both/and. He rejected the biblical, Two-ist view based on either/or. As a large truck barreled towards them, they both jumped out of the way. The Christian reminded his Hindu friend that a consistent One-ist would have stayed in the middle of the road, where he could have been a both/and One-ist and become one with the truck’s front bumper!

The God of Two-ism created history, with all its distinctions, and He loves and respects the reality He made. In His Son, He enters history to save it. Christianity is not a mere collection of fine ideas or beautiful poems. It is the account of an event that took place in time and space, not “done in a corner” as Paul says to Agrippa (Acts 26:26), but in plain view. It thus promises an abundance of real, good things for this life, and even better real things in the life to come.

How will history end? Our dreams of utopian consummation, as lovely and “evangelical” as they seem, are paltry in relation to what God has in store for us. The sustainable planet, the solar-powered Lexus, a lifespan of one hundred fifty years—all rank poverty compared to what God is creating for those who love Him. The wealthy Rancho Santa Fe neighborhood near my town is one of the most expensive places on the earth, but it will seem like a slum compared to the new earth prepared by the resurrected Jesus in his transformed body. Everyone who lives within the boundaries of the Rancho Santa Fe “covenant” (including the champion golfer, Phil Mickelson) dies. Being Phil’s neighbor might be fun, but I want a better neighbor than a pro golfer. Jesus himself is waiting for us in a transformed cosmos, which only he, the Creator of matter, has the capacity and the will to recreate. All other utopias will disappoint us, because they are built on a false view of reality, tainted by a rose-colored view of human nature and forever marred by the inevitability of death.

Christians must care for the earth and seek the good of the cities, states or countries in which they live. However, our goal on this earth is not the man-made peace we might briefly patch together. It is the God-made peace offered to us in Christ. As we offer hospitality, care and selfless service to others, we do it for the glory of God, with His name on our lips.

Two-ism and Human Aspirations—Romans 1:21, 25

Our entire existence is a reaction to God’s work. For Two-ists, that reaction includes worship, thanks, praise and prayer.

Worship: The human soul longs for a worthy object of worship. As Paul indicates, One-ism worships nature and the self, whereas Two-ism worships the Other, who is the Creator (v 25).

Thanksgiving: One-ists “do not give thanks” (v 21). Imagine an MC capping off an evening of appreciation by saying, “Finally, I would like to thank myself.” A well-known philanthropist (and philanderer) places daily, full-color announcements of his generosity in the Los Angeles Times. In one ad, among the pictures of people he was helping, he placed twelve pictures of himself! One-ists are like Donald Sterling—full of thanks to themselves. Genuine thanks is always offered to someone else and only makes sense in a Two-ist cosmos, where God is the source of all good gifts.

Praise: The sister of thanksgiving, praise, also makes sense only in Two-ism. One-ists do not “honor [or praise] him as God” (v 21). But we are made to praise, and genuine praise is impossible in a One-ist world. The One-ist poet, Ranier Marie Rilke (1875–1926), in his poem, “I Praise,” gives a sad account of praise in a One-ist universe as addressed to no one in particular, while hoping that a nameless “someone” will hear:

Tell us, poet, what do you do?

I praise.

But how do you bear these dark and deadly days?

How do you endure?

I praise.

And the Nameless, the Unnameable,

How do you call out to that?

I praise.

How heartrending that no one hears such praise, which becomes self-praise. How different the words of the poet, David: “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you: You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him, and stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel” (Ps 22:22).

Prayer only makes sense in Two-ism: When a One-ist prays, he is meditating on himself, talking to himself and becoming reconciled with himself (the gods within). Two-ist prayer addresses the personal God, who is a real person, distinct and other—a Father who listens and is in heaven to hear us.

Two-ism and Human Sexuality—Romans 1:26–28

A barrage of public arguments and political actions defend an evolving sexuality. Our nearly universal belief in evolution leads inevitably to fluid sexual definitions. But if the biblical revelation is true, then sexuality must be heterosexual. Part of the separating and naming process of God at creation gives place and meaning to Adam and Eve, “male” and “female.” This basic distinction, which God knits into the fabric of creation, reminds us of the main distinction between creature and Creator. Such distinctions are not a curse, as One-ism believes, but the key to our understanding of reality and our fulfillment of the cultural mandate. Heterosexual marriage “fills the earth,” sanctifies and matures both partners via their “differences,” and symbolizes God’s love for the Church. Oh, and by the way, it offers the best sex you could ever have.

Two-ism Provides a Reason to Live—Romans 1:15–16

Remember Paul, the prisoner, walking to certain death with the fires of gospel passion in his eyes? He eagerly pressed on “to preach the gospel…in Rome” (v 15). This was the driving force of his life of which he was “not ashamed” (v 16). Knowing his martyrdom loomed, he declared: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” That is real living. Ask any couch potato who hates the thought of one more football game.

Chariots of Fire is the true story of two British Olympic runners. Eric Liddell is a devout Christian, and his sister begs him to leave competition to join the family in its Christian mission in China. Eric explains that he has “a lot of running to do first.”“You’ve got to understand,” he pleads, “God made me for …China. He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure. To give it up would be to hold Him in contempt. … To win is to honor Him.”

Eric worships God his Creator first by winning an Olympic gold medal, and later by being martyred for his faith in a Japanese prison. “To honor Him” is the entire calling of each Christian, who runs knowing that the “crown of life” awaits him. “To honor Him” is the only motivation powerful enough to make a human life truly meaningful. Eric Liddell’s race, and the apostle Paul’s race, are inspiring. They made it to the end. But the real runner is the incomparable Jesus—out ahead of us.

Chapter 14

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. —Paul, Ephesians 2:14-16

Jesus Joins One and Two

I hope you have been intrigued by the God of Two-ism, who is Jesus’ God and Father. Jesus and Two-ism are inextricably joined. You can’t have the Two-ist God without Jesus, and you can’t have Jesus without the Two-ist God.

No religious leader in history compares to Jesus. They are all flawed. Buddha abandoned his wife and children for personal enlightenment. Mohammed kept child brides. Moses was kept from entering the Promised Land. But not a word of scandal has ever been associated with Jesus. This is not because the Bible sugarcoats its heroes. Scripture ruthlessly exposes King David as an adulterer and a murderer. It records King Solomon’s idolatry, although his rule was the high point of the glory of Israel. Jesus’ disciples would not have broken with Jewish historical honesty, had they found flaws in Jesus. But there were none, as Pilate and the Roman soldiers recognized at his death.

Jesus the Person

The only “flaw” found in Jesus was the claim he made that would have merited stoning, had it not been true: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). In saying this (as C. S. Lewis and others have noted), Jesus is proven to be one of three things: a nut-case, a charlatan or God in the flesh. Jesus is the ultimate truth-speaker, and this is a claim greater than any religious teacher has ever made. Jesus announces that he alone constitutes a direct, unique, understandable, personal expression of the wholly other, transcendent God, the God who in His essence is wrapped in unapproachable mystery. The New Testament supports his outlandish claim. The founders of Christianity were willingly executed for believing that Jesus was the unique human expression of God the Creator. Paul says that Jesus is “the [visible] image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15) and that before the incarnation, he shared “the form of God” and had “equality with God” (Phil 2:6). The author of Hebrews writes that Jesus bears “the exact imprint of his [God’s] nature” and, together with the Father and the Spirit, as the eternal Son, created the world (Heb 1:3,10). The apostle John, a close, intimate friend of the earthly Jesus, states clearly and unequivocally that, as the eternal Son before creation, Jesus was God and together with the Father created the cosmos (Jn 1:1–2).

We need to pause for a moment and take in what this means. The early followers of Jesus were not One-ists. A One-ist might say that Jesus was divine like everyone else, or that he was a very special human guru with an inside line to God. The apostles, however, were all convinced Two-ists, who confessed the Creator God, majestically other than any created being. In accordance with the Old Testament rule, they considered idolatrous any image drawn from created reality to represent God. Yet they call this real flesh-and-blood man the “very image of God.” This is the deepest mystery of any religion. In Jesus, and in him alone, the Creator and the creature are brought together in one person.

God Became Man

The ultimate pagan declaration is “Man becomes God,” but the Christian declaration is: “God became Man.” Some religions portray divine men or gods appearing as humans, but they are all expressions of One-ism, a system in which the gods are part of the world and the world is part of God.

The Incarnation is a stupendous miracle and an impenetrable mystery. This is the only place where the Creator and the creature are mysteriously joined in the same person—“without confusion,” as the early Church Fathers affirmed. When Jesus says that “no one has seen the Father except he who is from God” (Jn 6:46), he is referring to the transcendent God the Father, and to himself, the Son. Later in the Gospel Jesus says: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9) because “I and the Father are one” (Jn 10:30). His opponents understood that Jesus was calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God (Jn 5:17). Jesus is also described as “the only Son from the Father” (Jn 1:14) whose rightful place for all eternity is “at the Father’s side” (Jn 1:18).

The two incompatible realities rush toward each other, and meet in the peaceful, willing womb of an underage, unwed mother. This had never happened before and will never happen again. The Creator inexplicably, yet truly, becomes a creature—not to make humans divine, but to reconcile a holy God and sinful humanity by wiping out the guilt of sin for those who believe. Jesus knows that the Father sent him to do this: “I know the Father [and] I lay down my life for the sheep” (Jn 10:15).

If you are not confounded, you should be. This is mystery on steroids. Just as the Bible juxtaposes our human will and God’s divine will without explanation, so it juxtaposes the two natures of Jesus—human and divine. Everything the human Jesus is and does has eternal and all-powerful effects. He controls the winds and the waves, heals sickness with a word, sees into the heart of each person he meets, loves men and women alike with all his heart yet without a hint of impropriety or sexual sin. He takes on a raging spiritual battle with the devil after a forty-day fast, and touches with compassion those who approach him—even those who are considered unclean. To know Jesus when he was on earth was to be utterly changed.

The Death of Jesus

The Christian gospel of salvation is unique in world religions precisely because of Two-ism. The hopes of One-ism are fulfilled by Jesus in the truth of Two-ism. Since there are two circles, and there is alienation between those circles because of the sin of the human creature, the only hope of salvation is for God, by His great wisdom and justice, to reconcile the two. Only in Two-ism do divine condescension and grace have deeply moving significance. In the logic of One-ism, if we are part of divine nature, we condescend to save ourselves, which is nonsense. Only Jesus is the creature who is also Creator, human and yet divine. Only in Two-ism do we have objective redemption and genuine forgiveness that so strikingly affect the human conscience and bring definitive release to the guilt-stricken soul.

The Resurrection of Jesus: A Mind-Blowing Future

Two-ism holds great mystery, but it is not fantasy. The gospel is more like a police novel than romantic religious poetry. The great mystery is not attained through physically-stimulated altered states of consciousness but through a dead body that disappeared from a well-guarded tomb. The answer to this “whodunnit” meets the deepest longing of the human soul.

The One-ist version of the resurrection is easy. It was spiritual. This objection is not new. The ancient Gnostics taught it. Thomas Jefferson believed it. In Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, he removed all references to the miracles and to the divine nature of Jesus from the New Testament. His book ends with these words: “There they laid Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed.” Since the body has no ultimate meaning, it is sloughed off in order to liberate eternal spirit. Who cares what happened to the body? Maybe it decomposed in a forgotten corner. Maybe the disciples stole it.

Inquiring minds do care! You wouldn’t want your Agatha Christie novel to explain the whodunnit with a “who cares?” To deal with Jesus, you have to account for the empty tomb, for the disappearance of a body placed there just a few days before, for the fact that the tomb was guarded by soldiers and blocked by a massive stone. With no explanation, the dead body of Jesus went missing. Hundreds of witnesses saw him alive after that, and many of these were later willing to be killed rather than deny what they saw. They gave their lives for their testimony regarding the truth of the resurrection, since for over a month they lived with the resurrected Jesus.

The physical resurrection of Jesus is not a footnote in the origins of Christianity. It is not the intriguing conundrum of a religious suspense novel. If that is all there were to the life of Jesus, Christianity would be a delusional misrepresentation of the truth. Christianity states baldly that Jesus rose from the dead. On the truth of this startling claim it stands or falls. As Paul put it, “If Christ be not raised, our faith is in vain.”

The resurrection of Jesus is the one documented, visible, historical event in the whole of human history that describes an occurrence as stupendous as the original Big Bang.[1] It is the Big Re-Bang. Following the creation of matter, it is the regiving of new life to the hopelessly dead matter of a human corpse. No human being was around to witness creation (as God reminded Job), but scores of people witnessed this miracle, which had never been done before, and has never been done since. The risen Jesus appeared to believers, which, for some, was why they became believers. Like the original creation of the cosmos, everyone saw the physical effects—the empty tomb.

To know the risen Jesus, who is now with the Father, is still to be utterly changed. His perfect life is our claim to righteousness, and his death is our claim to the forgiveness of the Father. That death is the efficacious and definitive solution to cosmic and personal evil. His human life and physical resurrection guarantee the future physical life of the cosmos.

The resurrection didn’t occur just to give us a good news story, however. Jesus’ body was raised because it is a part of God’s good creation. God will not allow His “Holy One [to] see corruption” (Acts 2:27). Death and evil will not triumph over Jesus, whose dead body will “put on immortality” (1 Cor 15:53). The mortal body of Jesus is changed by a miraculous act of God, an act so stunning its only equivalent is the first creation, when God spoke the physical cosmos into being. Can God do this? Surely He can, since this is the same God, the Creator, who now reaches to His creation as the Savior. If you have been looking for the New Man in Marxism or One-ist spirituality, turn your eyes instead to Jesus. He’s your New Man. He is called the “Last Adam,” but also the “first among many brothers.” What is true of Jesus, is true of the New Adamic humanity that Jesus is raising up for the New Heavens and Earth, and it can be true for you.

A Last Word of Hope from Romans

You may think such a triumphant picture does not fit with a phrase that shows up over and over in the text we’ve examined (vv 18-32). That phrase is “God gave them over.” These words make God seem vindictive, delighting in “giving over” sinners to their chosen sins, so they get what they deserve. But a surprise awaits you. God does give over rebellious creatures to their sinful preferences, be it their lusts, their dishonorable passions or their debased mind. When He gives them over to their sin, they end up in idol worship, autonomous thinking, and deviant sexual practice. But this is not God’s final word on the subject.

What Paul says in Romans 1 must be understood in light of what he writes in Romans 8:32: “God did not spare His own Son.” God’s people cry for deliverance: “Spare your people, O Lord, and make not your heritage a reproach, a byword among the nations” (Jl 2:17). God hears that cry and spares sinners, but the only reason He can justly spare sinners is because He did not spare His own Son. To understand Paul’s statement, it is helpful to read what God says to Abraham: “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld [or spared] your son, your only son, from me”(Gn 22:12). God stayed Abraham’s hand at the last minute, but Abraham was willing to sacrifice his own son. Isaac’s life could not have atoned for the sins of the world, and God provided a ram as a substitute for the boy. The Abraham story is one of many that prepare us to understand the cross of Jesus. What Abraham did not have to do, God did. Here is a glimpse into the deeply personal mystery of the triune God that human beings cannot fathom. We can only behold it in awe—God did not spare His own Son. This is one of the clearest statements, both of the Trinity and of God’s personhood, in the whole of biblical literature. It declares that between the persons of the Trinity there is, at the very least, a depth of “personal” love that far outstrips the tender passion of Abraham for his long-awaited and well-loved son, Isaac. In the flesh, the Son dies for our sins, and this act, says Paul, is the ultimate expression of God’s love (Rom 5:8). In other words, God’s personal love for sinners is “commended” or “proved” by the death of the Son. The context makes this clear. “For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:7–8).

But the verse goes on…"God did not spare His own Son, but gave him up for us all.” The verb translated “gave up”is the same one used in Romans 1:24, 26 and 28 where God “gave up” sinners to their sins. We know what the verb means because of a text from the eighth century BC: “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” [literally gave him up to our sins, as in Rom 4:25] (Is 53:6). The sins that we gladly embrace, for which we are judged, are placed by God on His sinless Son, who, as a sacrificial offering, takes God’s judgment against sinners upon himself in their place. This produces people of whom Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians: the unrighteous, the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, men who practice homosexuality, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers and swindlers. Yet these “have been washed, sanctified, and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by the Spirit of our God” and they “will inherit the kingdom of God to enjoy the marriage supper of the Lamb forever” (1 Cor 6:9–11). No one is excluded, unless they turn their backs on the offer of Jesus and prefer the foul flavor of their sins.

A Voice from the Twentieth Century

In the 1920s, a young Christian leader and scholar, J. Gresham Machen, professor at Princeton Seminary, saw the collapse of gospel faithfulness in the churches of his day. Determined liberals and seemingly well-meaning evangelicals were denying the uniqueness of the Christian faith. Many were swept up in a movement of “Christian unity” that rejected the transcendence of God, the deity of Christ, his virgin birth, the necessity of Christ’s substitutionary atonement for sin, his physical resurrection, and a fully trustworthy Bible. Machen saw, when many did not, that even “minor” compromises over doctrine would end in an epic clash for the survival of gospel truth. In a courageous book, published in 1923, he described the issues as a choice between paganism and Christianity (Christianity and Liberalism). Though he was charged with bigotry and intolerance, his analysis has proven right, as the present state of the mainline Presbyterian Church USA, of which he was a member, now shows.

Intriguingly, Machen is recognized by none other than Harold Bloom, one of the leading pagan thinkers of our day. Bloom was raised in a Jewish home and became Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He eventually became a Gnostic, announcing that he was “uncreated, as old as God.” He utterly renounced the Old Testament and the biblical notion of the Creator/creature distinction. If ever two men stood at opposite theological poles, it would be Bloom and Machen. Bloom claimed to be God, whereas Machen defended God’s absolute uniqueness and transcendence. Yet in 1992, Bloom said of Machen:

I have just read my way through [Christianity and Liberalism] with distaste and discomfort but with reluctant and growing admiration for Machen’s mind. I have never seen a stronger case made for the argument that institutional Christianity must regard cultural liberalism as an enemy to faith.

Machen understood that the real conflict in the culture and the Church of his day was the importance of the doctrine of God’s transcendence:

Liberalism has lost sight of the very centre and core of the Christian teaching… the awful transcendence of God. It is true, indeed, that not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But He is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed.

Machen’s description fits the conflict we face today. Behind our culture’s philosophical waffling is the same issue, which is just as vital for the twenty-first century as it was for the twentieth: Is One-ism or Two-ism true? Is everything one, “as old as God” and divinely self-creating? Or is a “great gulf” fixed between the Creator and the creature?

Your Choice

One-ism is everywhere, and though the winners may write history, they don’t always get it right. Temporal success and large numbers are no guarantee of truth. True history is written by the only real winner—the one who conquered death and sin. Jesus writes history.

The social power held by the newly victorious interfaith, multi-cultural liberals gives them no control of truth. Truth is not personal power, and each individual is responsible to make the right truth choice. Neither the progressive liberal nor the awed futurist can take the dentist’s drill for you. The progressives cannot die in your place. For these ultimate questions, you are on your own. The Lie and the Truth have battled for all the ages, but you, alive right now, must decide between them for yourself and your own life. There is no compromise. Are you a One-ist or a Two-ist? Will you seek meaning by plunging into the One-ist bath? Or will you make a world of difference by respecting God’s Two-ist structures?

Non-Christian readers, I want you to know that I write this book as a sixty-nine year old. As I enter the final stage of my public ministry and contemplate the inevitability of my own death, I increasingly realize that Jesus is my only hope. He is the unique champion of the Two-ist faith, a faith that he believed to his last dying moment. He joins the hope of unity with the reality of personal identity. In that sense, he and he alone, joins One-ism with Two-ism, not by erasing the distinctions between creatures and their Creator, but by reconciling those creatures with the Creator. This man had not a cent to his name, but he revolutionized the world. He courageously spoke truth to power and also to his friends. Almost in the same breath he called Peter an angel and a demon, and yet spoke comfort and hope to notable scoundrels and innocent sufferers.

His life and faith make sense of the world around me. His death washes me clean. His resurrection gives me new life and the hope of eternal life. Even though Jesus spent Easter vacation splayed out on a cross, being tortured to death, seemingly a total loser—I look to him in hope, for one day every knee will bow to him. Every person will see him and agree that he is the Lord of the cosmos. That will be the best Easter Sunday ever! Because he, the innocent victim, stood in my place and bore my sin, I will one day share in his righteous rule. I will remain a creature, but a transformed creature, fit to have fellowship with him forever. Because of Jesus, this utopian dream is not fantasy. It is a guaranteed promise, and incredibly good news. Jesus, by his life, death and resurrection, is the only figure in human history who can guarantee a God-produced physical/spiritual utopia. I am betting my life on it, and with Jesus, the odds are sure, for he will be there, as Scripture says: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb 13:8).

What will it be? Cheese or ice cream? The French truckers I mentioned were free to leave the table without having either cheese or ice cream, but you must stay and choose—not between cheese and ice-cream, but between the only courses on life’s menu: One-ism or Two-ism. One tastes sweet, but is deadly poison. The other may seem hard to chew at first, but becomes sweeter and more nourishing the longer it is in your mouth. It offers an aroma of life, for now and for eternity. The Lie or the Truth, which will it be for you? It’s a choice that lasts for eternity. Paul’s and the Bible’s question hangs in the air, demanding a response: “Choose this day whom you will serve.” Will you worship and serve “the creation” or “the Creator”? It is up to you to decide—while the restaurant is still open, and you still have the menu in your hands!

To the rising generation of Christians who may read this book, and to Christians generally, I can only exhort you, as Paul did, not to be conformed to this intimidating world, but, in detecting its One-ist blur, to discern the will of God through the clarity of holy living and transformed Two-ist thinking. Let me encourage you to embrace the simple lucidity of Paul’s analysis, what I have called One-ism or Two-ism, and be agents of gospel clarity in a world of deadly, mind-numbing confusion. Paul’s coherent analysis will pull the blinders off your eyes and deprogram the One-ist brainwashing you may have endured through high school and college. Let it open your imagination to render praise to God in music, poetry, art and science. Let it open your mouth to speak the wisdom of God in a world of foolish fantasy and fearful conformity. I must tell you that some of the brightest young people I have met understand this. Upon seeing what Romans 1 actually says, a top Christian law student wrote: “Absolutely amazing. I have never heard this way of perceiving reality or understanding the fight. I am encouraged…[to be] re-focused on the gospel…The dichotomy is appalling and astoundingly clear.” After being shown the ancient text of Romans 1, another wrote that she had acquired “new categories and a framework for viewing the world which I had never thought of before.”

One-ism will suck you into the Abyss, but the solid truth of Two-ism is a rock on which to stand forever. It brings us into the light, changes our hearts and lights up our God-made minds. There is a God-honoring way to worship, a holy way to behave, a right way to live out our sexuality. There is an effective discourse for evangelism through word and deed that meets the needs of the sinner. That is a message our imploding, self-absorbed world needs to hear. Binge drinking and hooking up will lead you only to despair. The transforming message of God’s grace will affect not only your life but that of your friends. The early Christians believed and understood. They knew the task required holy bodies and transformed minds, fired up by the truth of God’s grace and imbued by the love of Christ. Because of that love, they cared little for popularity, social standing, or even their lives, which they laid down for the honor of Jesus and for the glory of God. If they could do this, so can I and so can you.

Believer or non-believer, let the truth of Two-ism bring you to Jesus. Let his Two-ist mind be in you, because he understood perfectly the Creator/creature distinction. He was the great teacher of the true nature of God. He lived Two-ism in both realities. He was in the form of God, but, in condescending love, left his transcendent glory and humbled himself to death on a cross. This is the power of the gospel.

A fortune-teller had her office down a back street, close to Westminster Chapel in London, where Martyn Lloyd-Jones was pastor. Lloyd-Jones preached the Bible thoroughly and opposed liberalism in the Church. Hearing him, as I did on a few occasions, one sensed the power of God in his words and in his demeanor. One Sunday, having seen the crowds go by month after month, the fortune-teller decided to slip in the back of the church to see what was so attractive. At the end of the service, this expert in the occult arts bowed her knee to Jesus and declared: “What I heard and saw this morning was clean power.”

The Lord is looking for holy, fired up, grace-filled minds, driven by clean power—sons and daughters who discern His will and bring sense to our imploding culture by speaking the message of God’s love to people who think they are god or who do not think at all. The apostle Paul has a word for you, because the task is not easy:

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. (Eph 6:11-13)

Like Martin Luther, who said, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” will you not stand for Jesus in this difficult hour the way he stood for you? The prayer Paul requested that his fellow believers pray for him, in a pagan prison, is what I pray for you, and what I hope some of you will pray for me:

Pray also for me, that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak. (Eph 6:19–20)

I pray that you will not only start seeing a world of difference between One-ism and Two-ism, but that in the clean power of the Holy Spirit, you will also start making a world of difference.

[1]. I use this term only to represent the power of the original creation by God, not in an evolutionary scientific sense.

Study Guide Questions

Study Guide Questions

Chapter 1

Are You a One-ist or a Two-ist?

Discussion and Reflection

1. Does it shock you to think that there are only two religions? Why or why not?

2. In what ways does Christianity go backward into the past? Forward into the future? How does One-ism go backward or forward?

3. What differences do you notice in the generation above and below you? Which of these differences are due to the shift from a Two-ist view of the world to a One-ist view?

4. Where do you see a One-ist theme in the culture around you?

5. Have you yourself been affected by One-ism? In what areas?

Application

1. Consider keeping a One-ism notebook, in which you jot down examples of the New Spirituality that you find in the culture.

Chapter 2

Apocalypse Now

Discussion and Reflection

1. Have you heard of any of the schools of thought mentioned on the chart in this chapter? If so, how did you hear of it, and have you had any experience of it?

2. How might practicing yoga or walking a labyrinth reflect a One-ist perspective?

3. How would you describe the religio perennis—the Eternal Religion—to someone who’s never heard of it before?

4. Is the Church affected by One-ist thinking? If so, in what areas?

Application

1. Write out in your own words a definition of Postmodernism, Paganism, Rationalism.

2. Read Hosea 4:1-3. How does this passage relate ecology to morals?

3. How has your moral sense been challenged or affected by the pressure to learn our morals from the earth?

Chapter 3

The Church in Danger

Discussion and Reflection

1. Do the two hot-button issues mentioned in this chapter keep you from speaking freely about Jesus? If so, how have you tried to show or speak of the gospel to your friends and neighbors?

2. How are “interfaith” and “intersex” related?

3. What problems of the church in your culture might be due to the sins of the last generation, and which might be due to the fact that Christianity is, in itself, offensive to non-believers?

4. If you are a Christian, do you feel intimidated and silenced in your work or school surroundings? If so, how has this intimidation shown itself? How have you responded?

Application

1. In light of this chapter, consider how Christians should interact with non-Christian mercy ministries or community work.

2. Consider whether it is ever right to be silent about the gospel. If so, when?

Chapter 4

Meet Paul

Discussion and Reflection

1. Why do you suppose Paul hated Christians enough to seek their imprisonment and death?

2. How was Paul’s thinking transformed when he met the resurrected Jesus?

3. Why does Paul call himself “the apostle to the gentiles (pagans)”?

4. Using the arguments and Scripture references cited in this chapter or found in other passages, explain why Jesus did not “become” God.

5. What do you think Augustine means by the New Testament being latent in the Old and the Old Testament becoming patent in the New? Can you think of a few examples?

6. Why does Paul spend so much time in the early chapters of Romans discussing pagan thinking?

Application

1. Consider your verbal witness to the gospel of Jesus. Have you lost the courage to speak up or use Jesus’ name in conversation? If so, what in Paul’s teaching or attitude encourages you to be bolder?

2. Read the book of Acts and examine Paul’s life to see how he relates to various audiences. What lessons can you learn about speaking the truth of the gospel in a variety of friendly and hostile situations?

Chapter 5

The Garden-Variety Lie

Discussion and Reflection

1. Why do you think we all long for some kind of utopia? How could this longing help you talk to someone who is not a Christian?

2. How did Satan use Eve’s desire for utopia to draw her away from God? Does he use the same tactics today? Where do you see such tactics?

3. What examples of “esoteric” religion or spirituality do you see in your culture?

4. How is Jesus’ temptation like and unlike that of Adam and Eve? (See mainly Genesis 3 and Luke 4)

5. Practically speaking, what does it mean to “worship and serve”?

6. What is the difference between what we often call an “idol of the heart” and physical idols used in pagan worship? Do you see the latter in our culture? Is one worse than the other? Why or why not?

7. Are you convinced that there are only two religious systems? Can you think of any that might not fit the One-ist vs. Two-ist categories? Why might they really belong to one camp or the other?

Application

1. What does your utopia look like? Does it match God’s idea of utopia?

2. This week, keep a record of “new” expressions of spirituality that are really versions of One-ism. You may see these in magazine articles, in TV reports, in films or in books you see in bookstores. You may hear your friends using terms that are drawn from a One-ist way of thinking.

Chapter 6

The Lie About God

Discussion and Reflection

1. If we all know, deep down, that God exists and we long for spirituality, why do we refuse God so readily?

2. Why do One-ist systems eventually become tyrannical, cruel and inhuman?

3. Where in our culture do you see evidence of belief in spiritual evolution?

4. Consider Isaiah 40:21-26. How does this passage relate to the Gaia theory (that the earth is god)?

5. Why do you think One-ist systems often have two versions—a world-denying version and a world-affirming version?

6. Read Isaiah 41:21-24. What do we find out about idols?

Application

1. Please choose an appropriate movie from the following list, or watch another movie of your choice. Based on what you are learning in this book, be ready to explain whether it has a basic One-ist or Two-ist message about life and spirituality. Here are a few suggestions, but please pay attention to the movie ratings. I am not encouraging you to expose yourself to inappropriate or offensive material. If you do not wish to watch a film, then choose a book or a television program. The Lion King, Avatar, The Lives of Others, Water, Pocahontas, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Gladiator, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Matrix.

Chapter 7

The Truth About God

Discussion and Reflection

1. What qualities does God have that we humans can never share?

2. What qualities do humans have that do reflect God’s character and that we thus “share” with Him, as humans, made in His image?

3. Is believing in Intelligent Design the same as honoring the Creator? Why or why not? Does it fall into the One-ist or the Two-ist camp?

4. How do non-Christians show thanks? Whom or what do they praise?

5. Why is the Trinity so important? How does this change the way we think of Islam and Judaism particularly, which are often seen as Two-ist religions?

6. Is God as Judge a terrifying thought for Christians? Why or why not?

Application

1. How does your Christian living change when you think of “holy” in its meaning of “set apart”?

2. As you read the Bible, write down all the things that are “set apart.” Can you better understand why these distinctions exit, now that you have the One-ist/Two-ist structure presented in this book?

Chapter 8

The Lie About Spirituality

Discussion and Reflection

1. Do you see evidence of shamanism, witchcraft or other obvious forms of pagan spirituality in your neighborhood or culture?

2. Is pagan spirituality influencing the Church? In what ways?

3. Try to define these terms in your own words: shaman, Christian mysticism, yoga, joining the opposites.

4. In a sentence or two, summarize what the following thinkers teach: Stanislav Grof, Thomas Berry, Lloyd Geering, Brian McLaren, Marilyn Ferguson. What do they all have in common?

5. Name four or five principles of the New Spirituality.

Application

1. This week, pick one of the above names, or another One-ist name in this book, and do a little more research, so you will know how to analyze that thinker’s position, in order to explain it to someone else. If you feel lost, you can often find help on well-respected Christian apologetics websites.

Chapter 9

The Truth About Spirituality

Discussion and Reflection

1. What does the word “amen” signify? Give a few of its uses in Scripture. What is God’s “Amen” to us?

2. Why don’t pagans sing much?

3. In what ways does Two-ist (theist) spirituality differ from its One-ist counterpart?

4. What are the three aspects of our worship and service, as described in Romans 1:18-32? What does Romans 12:1-2 add to a Two-ist understanding?

5. How does our sacrifice of ourselves differ from the sacrifices made in the Old Testament?

6. Why does God care so much about our bodies?

7. What does submission have to do with holiness (being “set apart”)?

Application

1. How does the knowledge that you have been “set apart” as holy to God change the way you think about your relationship with Him, with others? How does it change your attitude to yourself and your role?

2. Why is it not hopeless for us to think of having holy bodies and transformed minds?

Chapter 10

The Lie About Sexuality

Discussion and Reflection

1. Describe the overall Christian worldview of which our sexuality is a part.

2. Why is Tony Jones wrong to say that the Bible has only six pesky verses about homosexuality?

3. Why is homosexuality a natural outworking of One-ist pagan thinking?

4. Define androgyny. Why does it fit with One-ism?

5. Why does Paul choose to talk about homosexuality if it is not the “worst” sin?

Application

1. Consider how the approach in this chapter might change the way you think about homosexuality, and the way you might talk about it with others. Try writing down what you might say to someone who is tempted by lesbianism or homosexuality.

Chapter 11

The Truth About Sexuality

Discussion and Reflection

1. Do you think issues of sexuality will divide the Church? Should they? Why or why not?

2. Why do pagans say that androgyny is the “sacrament” of One-ism (monism)?

3. Explain the three exchanges in Romans 1. How are they linked?

4. What are some of the distinctions or separations God put into creation?

5. How is heterosexuality tied to creation? To redemption?

6. Describe the original human couple and their job on earth. How is their relationship a picture of the gospel? Of Christ’s relationship to the Church?

Application

1. In what area are you tempted to disregard the separations God has placed in creation? Do you feel rebellious against any of the authority structures under which God has placed you? Has seeing the structure of One-ism and Two-ism helped you to see how these structures are good?

Chapter 12

One or Two: The Stakes

Discussion and Reflection

1. List some of the occasions in the Old Testament when God called His people to choose between Him and other gods or idols. Try to find ones not mentioned in this chapter.

2. Explain why One-ism is attractive in at least two of the following categories: Politics, Ecology, Religion, Personal Life, Sex, the Future.

3. Why is One-ism empty in the end?

4. Are any Christian young people that you know dabbling in alternative sexuality? Alternative spirituality? If appropriate, share some examples from your own circles.

Application

1. Consider how you may be tempted to think in a One-ist way about your own life.

2. Find out what sex education program is offered in your local schools. Reflect on ways of assuring that your child receives a solid understanding of sexuality, in a worldview context.

3. If you are a student, reflect on the approach taken by your professors. Analyze whether they are approaching their subject from a One-ist or a Two-ist perspective. If appropriate, you might ask them if they consider themselves One-ists or Two-ists.

Chapter 13

Two-ism: Making a World of Difference

Discussion and Reflection

1. What enemies of the Christian gospel have threatened it over the last centuries? Which seems the most powerful now?

2. What is difficult about Two-ism? About One-ism?

3. Try to write out a brief description of Secular Humanism, Postmodernism and the New Spirituality.

4. Describe the One-ist utopia. Compare it to the Two-ist utopia.

5. What does Two-ism offer that far outshines One-ism?

Application

1. In your everyday life this week, try to notice the ways in which our culture destroys the differences God put in the world. If the occasion arises, try to defend those differences graciously in conversation. It might also be helpful to keep a notebook: “Making a World of Difference,” where you reflect on created differences and on One-istic flattening of those differences.

Chapter 14

Jesus Joins One and Two

Discussion and Reflection

1. In what ways does Jesus bring us into communion with the totally “other” God?

2. What is unique about Jesus?

3. What does Jesus’ resurrection accomplish for those who put their faith in him?

4. Why is the empty tomb so important for Christians? Why not just believe that the disciples resurrected him in their minds, by faith?

5. How can God be totally just and not “give us over” ultimately, and finally, to our sin and punishment?

6. What reflections in this chapter might help you explain the Christian faith to your friends and family?

Application

1. Did you consider yourself a One-ist or a Two-ist before beginning this book? (Ok, you never heard the terms before, but you know what I mean.)

2. How has this book changed your thinking?

If you would like to learn more, you can find articles, other books, a blog, lectures, a catechism of paganism, and other help on my website: www.truthXchange.com

Other Books by Peter Jones

THE GNOSTIC EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: AN OLD HERESY FOR THE NEW AGE • A concise comparison of Gnosticism and the “New Age” spirituality.

SPIRIT WARS: PAGAN REVIVAL IN CHRISTIAN AMERICA (TEMPORARILY OUT OF PRINT) • Documents the effects of pagan spirituality on the church and society. A thorough study of the differences between pagan and Christian experience and theory.

CAPTURING THE PAGAN MIND: PAUL’S BLUEPRINT FOR THINKING AND LIVING IN THE NEW GLOBAL CULTURE • Why Paul’s gospel and theology is just as relevant for today’s pagan culture as it was for the pagan culture of his day.

GOSPEL TRUTH, PAGAN LIES: CAN YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE? • A concise comparison of pagan thinking and the five biblical answers to them.

CRACKING DA VINCI’S CODE: YOU’VE READ THE FICTION, NOW READ THE FACTS • An analysis of Dan Brown’s attack on the church and the Christian faith, as seen in his novel, The Da Vinci Code, Co-author, James Garlow.

STOLEN IDENTITY: THE CONSPIRACY TO RE-INVENT JESUS • Which Jesus do you believe in? A study of the “Dan Brown Jesus” and the biblical Jesus.

THE GOD OF SEX • How your view of God changes your view of sex and vice versa. This book shows how spirituality and sexuality are inextricably linked.

ON GLOBAL WIZARDRY: TECHNIQUES OF PAGAN SPIRITUALITY AND A CHRISTIAN RESPONSE • Essays from the 2008 truthXchange think tank. Examines pagan spiritual techniques from a variety of cultures, and offers a Christian response to such practices. Helpful in learning to recognize pagan spirituality in the culture today.