In our age of secular humanism, the masses of the West have bought into the idea of the tabula rasa of the Enlightenment, the concept of the human mind being a blank slate, without any religious pre-commitments. “Man can be irreligious,” it is said, either in the totality of his being or at the very least in the public sphere. This has been the perceived direction of the West, a departure from its Christian social order, and moving towards a more ‘neutral’ civilization as it concerns public values, philosophy, religion and politics. But this process of secularization, that is to say, the purging of religion from public life, is nothing but a farce, for culture is inevitably religious, the reflection of a people who are inescapably religious by nature.
The secular West has attempted to build on a two-storey view of reality, where the lower-storey, being the public square, is where most people place the sciences, mathematics, and facts, things which we think we can know for certain, whereas the second floor, being the private sphere, is where our personal preferences, values determined by the ego, religion and all other things not deemed ‘rational’ are placed. These have nothing to do with the rational, empirically verified and neutral facts in the lower-storey, and as a result, they cannot be imposed on such facts.[1] But this two-storey view of reality is impossible to live by, no one can possibly separate his beliefs, values and morality from the public sphere. We are by nature ‘religious’ beings, and therefore all that we examine in the sciences, all that we study in academia, all that we decide in legislation, will be shaped and interpreted by our religious worldview. We all have a worldview, the lens by which we see the world and interpret its facts and evidences.
As a late apologist defined it, a worldview is:
a network of presuppositions (which are not verified by the procedures of natural science) regarding reality (metaphysics), knowing (epistemology), and conduct (ethics) in terms of which every element of human experience is related and interpreted.[2]
A worldview, however, is not free from religious influence, on the contrary, our worldview and our religion are inseparable. As James writes to the church: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27). True religion is to glorify God in all that we do, in every possible aspect of creational interaction and function; it is to consecrate the Lord as holy in the core essence of our being (1 Peter 3:15). But just as there is ‘true’ religion as defined by God’s written revelation, so there is ‘false’ religion, antithetical to the truth, the worship of the creature instead of the Creator (Rom. 1:25). To put it more simply, our worldview is the structure of our presuppositions, what we believe to be true concerning reality, knowledge and ethics; while our ‘religion’ is the direction of that respective structure (our worship), it is the underlying motive rooted in the condition of the human heart.
As we survey the West, we witness at present the flourishing of different religious worldviews, differing perspectives and interpretations of reality, all made possible by this two-storey view of reality, for anything goes, up in the second-storey. The secularist has merely exchanged the biblical God for the created man, the Muslim has counterfeited the true God with an unknowable essence indistinguishable from nature, the Hindu and the Buddhist have exchanged the Creator and his creation for an illusion and a pure oneness of nothingness in Brahman and Nirvana. All these worldviews, aside from the true religious worldview of Christian theism, has ‘humanism’ as its unifying basis. Man has rejected God’s just governance and has substituted his unified (special and creational) revelation with an illusion, redefining the metaphysical, the moral and the epistemological. His creaturely word, he thinks, has been made law, and he imagines himself as creator, judge and sustainer of all things.
This is the ‘antithesis’ that we as Christians must uncover as we fulfill our apologetic mandate, and by antithesis, I mean a conflict between two opposing forces, or two opposing worldviews, the One-ist worldview of creation worship and the Two-ist worldview of Creator worship. One-ism, as portrayed by Paul in Romans 1, and as exposited by the scholar Dr. Peter Jones, is the worldview in which there is no Creator-creation distinction; all is reduced into a pure oneness, some absolutized aspect of creation.[3] And is always the case with ‘One-ism,’ it is ego-centric, man-centric, in that man is the measure of all things. Man would rather worship a false image or creational aspect so that he may preserve his pretended autonomy (his independence from God) than to bow down before his Creator God. As Greg L. Bahnsen defined it:
“Autonomy” refers to being a law unto oneself, so that one’s thinking is independent of any outside authority, including God’s. Autonomous reasoning takes itself philosophically as the final point of reference and interpretation, the ultimate court of intellectual appeal; it presumes to be self-governing, self-determinative, and self-directing.[4]
This is, as Peter Hitchens terms it, the religion of ‘selfism,’ what now defines the predominant worldview of the West. This is the religion of One-ism, under which falls Islam, Hinduism, Marxism, Darwinism, etc. But One-ism is not alone, it wages war against the one true worldview, as the Psalmist depicts in Psalm 2:1-3:
Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.”
It matters not what the natural man might conjure to “cast away” the cords, in the end he cannot escape the truth, for he lives in God’s world and cannot help but presuppose the Two-ist worldview of the biblical faith in his living and thinking. The fact that there are clear distinctions within creation itself alludes to the fundamental distinction between Creator and creation, for to deny this would be to render all of reality distinction-less, part of a vast undifferentiated oneness. This we know to be false, for we live in such a way that presupposes distinctions within creation, and thus a distinction between Creator and creation. In this distinction, inspired Scripture also informs us that man has fundamentally a derivative being and derivative knowledge, that is, he derives his being and knowledge from the Creator, having been created in God’s image.[5] And, given this distinction and the nature of this relation, the Creator God of the Bible is the legislator, standard and judge for justice, righteousness, holiness, goodness, and beauty. Man therefore, being subject to the Creator, has a conception of these things because of his derivative being and knowledge, and though in his pretended autonomy he seeks to redefine such things, he cannot deny that this notion of the just, right, sacred, good and beautiful originate from somewhere (or someone) beyond himself. The One-ist worldview of the natural man thus makes war against the truth of the Two-ist biblical worldview, for in denying the Creator-creation distinction, and not only in essence but in the nature of the relationship between God and man, it denies the sovereign reign of Christ the Lord who has wrought the salvation of God’s people and is working even now to redeem and restore the whole created order.
There can be no dualism of the sacred-secular in created reality, not when all things are under the righteous reign of Christ, not when all of creation bears the mark of the Creator. The truth is, though there are many competing perspectives on the church, the state, family, education, law, science, economics, marriage and sexuality, there is only one right and true perception and conception of the various aspects of created reality, and that is that which aligns with God’s propositional, inspired written revelation, the only authoritative interpretation of creation. There is thus a false and idolatrous way of perceiving the world and its many moving parts, resulting from man’s pretended autonomy, and a right biblical way where God is glorified and Christ is honored as the sovereign king, the result of heeding God’s word as the ultimate authority for all our knowledge. It is this also that forms part of our apologetic task, for though we are called to uncover the antithesis of our world, we are also called to be missionally the light and salt of the earth (Matt. 5:13-16), proclaiming the truth of God’s word as light shines in the darkness, and preserving the goodness of God’s creation by applying it. This is no privatized gospel playing according to the rules of the secularist’s two-storey view of reality, no, this is a comprehensive gospel that encompasses every inch of God’s domain, that is to say, all of created reality, every sphere of society, every thought of man. It is only in the liberty and transformation of the gospel that man can realize his role in interpreting this world after God, dedicating this world to God, and ruling over it for God.[6]
[1] Mark L. Ward, Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption (Greenville, SC.: BJU Press, 2016), 34-36.
[2] Gary DeMar, ed., Pushing the Antithesis: The Apologetic Methodology of Greg L. Bahnsen (Powder Springs, GA.: American Vision Press, 2010), 42-43.
[3] See Peter Jones, One or Two: Seeing a World of Difference (Escondido, CA.: Main Entry Editions, 2010). ; See also Joseph Boot, Gospel Witness: Defending & Extending the Kingdom (Toronto, ON.: Ezra Press, 2017).
[4] Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ.: P&R Publishing, 1998), 1.
[5] Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics, Second ed., ed. William Edgar (Phillipsburg, NJ.: P&R Publishing, 2003), 31.
[6] Ibid., 41.