http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16195822/entranced-by-the-supremacy-of-christ
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A Most Harmful Medicine: How Subjectivism Poisons a Society
Many people know C.S. Lewis as the author and creator of Narnia. A slightly smaller group know him as a remarkably effective Christian apologist. An even smaller group appreciate him as a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature. Fewer recognize him as a prophet of civilizational doom. But he was.
In a number of essays, in his lectures on The Abolition of Man, and then in his novel That Hideous Strength, Lewis clearly, patiently, and methodically identifies and warns his readers about an existential threat to Western civilization, and indeed to humanity as a whole.
This threat is a pernicious error that enables tyrannical power and totalitarianism. It’s a fatal superstition that slowly erodes and destroys a civilization. It’s a disease that can end our species and damn our souls. Lewis calls it “the poison of subjectivism.”
Doctrine of Objective Value
Until modern times, nearly all men believed that truth and goodness were objective realities and that human beings can apprehend them. Through reason, we examine and study and wonder at reality. When our thoughts correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of truth. When our emotional reactions correspond to the objective order of reality, we speak of goodness.
Lewis refers to this as the doctrine of objective value, or, in shorter form, “the Tao.” The doctrine of objective value, Lewis writes, is
the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. . . . And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). (Abolition of Man, 18–19)
Poison of Subjectivism
The poison of subjectivism upends this ancient and humane way of viewing the world. Reason itself is debunked — or we might say today that reason is deconstructed. Instead of the human capacity to participate in the eternal Logos, reason is simply an epiphenomenon that accompanies certain chemical and electrical events in the cortex, which is itself the product of blind evolutionary processes. Put more simply, reason is simply an accidental and illusory brain secretion.
“Under the influence of this poison, moral value judgments are simply projections of irrational emotions.”
Under the influence of this poison, moral value judgments are simply projections of irrational emotions onto an indifferent cosmos. Truth and goodness are merely words we apply to our own subjective psychological states, states that we have been socially conditioned to have. And if we have been socially conditioned in one way, we might be socially conditioned in another.
Education Old and New
Lewis thus refers to the apostles of subjectivism as “conditioners” rather than teachers. Under the old vision of reality, the task of education was to “train in the pupil those responses which are themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists” (22). Teachers accomplished this through initiation; they invited students into the same experience of reality in which they lived.
The new education merely conditions. Having removed all objective value and consideration from reality, they are “free” to shape and mold future generations into whatever they want. Having seized the reins of social conditioning, they will condition for their own purposes (wherever those happen to come from) and with little or no regard for the constraints of custom, tradition, truth, or goodness. Lewis concisely describes the difference in the old and new education:
The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds — making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation — men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda. (24)
How Subjectivism Conditions
Lewis shrewdly demonstrates the subtlety of conditioning in his fiction. In Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien forces Winston to confess that 2+2=5 under the threat of having his face eaten by rats. In Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, Mark Studdock is conditioned with both carrots and sticks, lures and threats. He is enticed chiefly by social pressure, as his conditioners work on his desire to be “on the inside,” his “lust for the Inner Ring.” Accordingly, they work on his fear of being left out, cast out, and ostracized. Social pressure, more so than direct threats of physical violence, are the tools of Lewis’s conditioners.
In this, Lewis was remarkably prescient. Who among us can’t recognize the impression-shaping propaganda in social-media algorithms, in Twitter bans, in the cancellation of YouTube channels? What we hear and say daily, what we scroll past and click through, what we see and come to assume — all of these are meant to condition us by detaching us from the Straight, the True, the Good, even the Normal. Such conditioning is meant to aid the sinful human tendency to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
Richard Hooker, the English Reformer and a hero of Lewis, once wrote of the destructive effect of ungodly customs.
Perverted and wicked customs — perhaps beginning with a few and spreading to the multitude, and then continuing for a long time — may be so strong that they smother the light of our natural understanding, because men refuse to make an effort to consider whether their customs are good or evil. (Divine Law and Human Nature, 43)
The poison of subjectivism removes the ordinary checks to such error and evil by denying that good and evil objectively exist at all. And yet, because we live in God’s world and not the world of our fevered imaginations, we can’t escape the pressure of the objective moral order, pressing upon us both from our conscience and from the Scriptures.
Our Cultural Insanity
The result, as Lewis again so ably highlights, is a kind of absurd tragi-comedy. It would be funny if it were not so sad. In Lewis’s memorable words, “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful” (27).
As prophetic as Lewis was in his warnings, not even he seemed to have imagined the insanity that subjectivism would lead to. While he clearly saw that such poison would infect our sexuality, the most twisted form that he portrayed was the grotesque femininity of Fairy Hardcastle. But compared to the demented debauchery of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, Miss Hardcastle seems almost quaint.
What’s more, Lewis thought that the practical need for results in the hard sciences would limit the infection of subjectivism when it comes to research. But in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing technological and scientific advances employed in the service of subjectivism. Some of the latest “advances” in medicine are used not to heal, but to maim; not to restore the body to its proper function, but to mutilate the body and render it impotent or barren. In a literal fulfillment of Lewis’s warning, “We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Readiness Is All
What then can be done to stave off civilizational doom, the end of our species, and the damnation of souls? Books could be written (and have been written) in answer to that question. But a simple answer runs like this: we can cultivate communities that, by the grace of God, love God and the objective order that he has made, and are ready to act in a world poisoned by subjectivism.
“We can cultivate communities that, by the grace of God, love God and the objective order that he has made.”
Such communities include churches where the good news of Jesus is faithfully proclaimed in word and deed, where refugees from the world are welcomed in the name of Jesus, and where apostles of the world are refuted by the word of God. These communities include families that glory in God’s goodness in manhood and womanhood, that seek to live fruitfully on God’s mission in the world, and that raise children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
These communities include schools that love the truth and do the good, that explain reality without explaining it away, that seek to form students into mature Christians who live with resilient joy in the midst of this broken world.
Such is the need, and the hour is late. But the readiness is all, and our God is still in heavens, and he does all that he pleases.
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How to Lead Teens Deeper into Their Bibles
Audio Transcript
Welcome back on this Monday. Today we have a wonderful ministry question on preaching — right in your wheelhouse, Pastor John. A young pastor writes in to ask you this: “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for this podcast. I listen every time a new episode is released, and I’m thankful for the impact that your biblical insights have made on my life. My question for you is about expository preaching and its place in student ministry.
“I am the student pastor at my church, responsible for sixth- through twelfth-grade ministry. Whenever we gather for our youth worship time on Wednesday nights, I typically preach through books of the Bible in an expositional way. I try my best to apply the text to them in ways they can understand. However, I sometimes question whether I should preach expository sermons to the students because I don’t believe it’s common practice in youth ministries. I love God’s word and want my students to come to love God’s word, but should I teach my students in a way that is more application-focused? I would appreciate your thoughts on this. Thank you.”
Well, I have endless thoughts about preaching. I could just go on and on and on. I love preaching. I believe God has appointed preaching to be part of the gathered worship of his church, on the Lord’s Day especially, and I think all of it, all the time, should be based on and saturated with Scripture. That’s what preaching is. It is a God-ordained way of saving sinners and sustaining and growing saints. I think it’s relevant for old people, middle-aged people, young people, children.
So, I’m thrilled that our young pastor-friend is in a church and leading a youth group where he is doing exposition. Originally I had in my head a lot of thoughts, but I boiled it down to three, so here are the three thoughts I can squeeze into our few minutes together.
Deal with the Reality-Factor
First, as you unfold the meaning of particular biblical texts, be sure to stress what I call the “reality-factor.” Now, you don’t need to use that phrase. That’s just my phrase, but here’s what I mean.
Some years ago, it hit me that it is possible to do a great deal of explaining about how the thought of the text actually flows, how the words and clauses relate to each other, without actually dealing with the reality of what the words are trying to communicate. It just clobbered me that we can do this. We can stay at the surface of grammar and not get to reality.
“Preaching is a God-ordained way of saving sinners and sustaining and growing saints.”
For example, in Philippians 2:12–13 it says, “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.” Now, suppose in your exposition that you point out to the students how the first clause is an imperative command: “Work out your own salvation.” Then you explain how the second clause is not a command but an indicative, a statement of fact: “It is God who works in you, both to will and to work.”
Finally, you draw attention to the connection between those two clauses with the word for, pointing out that the second clause, the statement “it is God who works,” is the basis or the ground or the motive (which is what for means) for the first clause, the command to “work out your salvation.” Maybe you even go further, and you say, “This is typical in the New Testament, that indicatives ground imperatives.” Then you stop — end of exposition.
Well, the problem with stopping there is that we haven’t even touched the reality behind the clauses and their logical connection until we answer the question, How does this work in life? Why does it work for me to work out my salvation because God is at work in me?
Real Exposition Exposes Reality
There’s a vast difference between words and clauses on the one hand and the realities they reveal on the other hand. Here you can see how artificial is the distinction between exposition and application. This just blows people away when I point it out (at least some people, those who have particular ideas about preaching), so let me say that again. How artificial it is to distinguish between exposition and application! Because we’re not really doing exposition of the reality behind the words until we are dealing with real life and telling how it works.
The question is, at ten o’clock tonight, after these students are at home, having heard this exposition, and now they’re in their bedroom with their computer or with their family in the den — what will it look like for these students to work out their salvation? What is that reality like? What will it feel like for them to experience the reality of God working in them? Do they have any sense at all what that verse is talking about? What’s the reality? How does it feel? How does it work? How will they make the connection between those experiences of God working in them and them working?
We really don’t know what this text means until we can explain not just the words, clauses, logic, and grammar, but the realities as they arise later tonight, at ten o’clock in the bedroom, in the kitchen — in other words, how the text works in people’s lives.
No Small Task
That requires huge effort on the part of the preacher because he’s now working at two levels. There’s the level of words, grammar, and logic — we call that the text — and the effort to explain how the parts of the text fit together. On the other level, we ask, What realities is this author, with these words and this grammar and this logic, trying to communicate to my mind and my heart and my hands?
Language and reality, the two levels, are both absolutely crucial. You can’t do a shortcut around the grammar, around the logic, around the words, but if you stop there, you haven’t done the kind of exposition that needs to be done.
It is real head-work, and it is real heart-work, but the payoff for the students will be huge. So, that’s my first suggestion — deal with the reality-factor as well as the text-factor. Your students will love it because it will touch their lives, their reality.
Take Doctrinal Depth-Tours
Second, in your exposition through texts, take doctrinal depth-tours — not doctrinal detours, but doctrinal depth-tours. Now, I just made that up. I have never in the history of the world said that before. This is my new term, which I thought of for this pastor.
Here’s what I mean. Depth-tours are like detours, but they’re depth-tours because you’re not going away from where you should go. That’s what a detour is — you go away, and you wish you didn’t have to go. But a depth-tour? You want to go on this road because it will build doctrinally strong people.
Without depth-tours, I just don’t know how you can build doctrinally strong youth groups, doctrinally strong people. What I mean by that is people, youth groups, who have a clear, deeply rooted understanding of really important biblical doctrines.
Roads to Take
Now, you can’t do everything as a youth pastor. You’re working in tandem with other groups, worship services, sermons, lessons, and classes in your church, maybe even in the home or in the school.
What I mean is to take depth-tours on doctrines like God’s sovereignty, God’s holiness, God’s grace, God’s justice, the deity and humanity of Christ, the deity and personhood of the Holy Spirit, the nature of sin both as action and disease of the heart, the nature of redemption and propitiation and regeneration, calling, faith, justification, sanctification, walking by the Spirit, perseverance of the saints, the nature of the church. What happens when you die? The second coming, eternal life, the new heavens and the new earth.
If a young person studies texts of Scripture without ever taking doctrinal depth-tours, he’s like a person who lines up all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but never puts them together to see the beauty of the picture that they make. In fact, you can be pretty proud of putting those pieces in line. You can say, “Look, my pieces are all lined up!”
For example, someone might recite the entire first chapter of Ephesians by heart and never have paused to study the doctrine of election. It’s the totality of the big picture that holds a person, isn’t it? It’s the picture that takes hold of a sixteen-year-old and keeps him for sixty years, holding him for a lifetime — who God is, what he’s doing. How did Christ save sinners? How does the Christian life work? Where’s it all heading?
Various Methods
Now, there are different ways to do this. You can do an expository series of messages through texts, and then you can do a doctrinal series separately. You could say, “We’re going to do five weeks, kids, on election and predestination, and we’re going to do five weeks on sin and what it is, on what kind of disease you have in your heart” — and so on.
I’m not at all opposed to topical messages like that because they’re all expository — meaning, if I’m going to explain anything, it’s going to be exposition of the Scripture. That’s where my explanations come from.
Or you can take these doctrinal depth-tours that I’m suggesting within the time of exposition. Fifteen minutes, say, of your thirty-minute message might be devoted to painting the big doctrinal reality behind one word in your text, like justification. It’s not either-or. You can mix it up in various ways.
I think students love to see how reality actually fits together, really fits together, and they love to see how texts actually work. Some combination of exposition of texts, where they get their noses in the grammar, and efforts to build their doctoral knowledge — both of these are crucial.
Ask Provocative Thought-Questions
The last thing I would say is this. If your students hear good preaching on Sunday morning, I probably wouldn’t turn the Wednesday-evening teaching time into another sermon. I would create a more interactive Socratic method of teaching, probably.
Now, you know your situation better than I do, but this is what I would do if I were the youth minister and I had a good pastor who was doing real preaching on Sunday. I probably wouldn’t try to do the same thing on Wednesday, but would train these students on how to look at the text, how to look at the Book, and how to ask really good thought-questions, because questions are the key to understanding.
“Train students on how to look at the text, how to look at the Book, and how to ask really good thought-questions.”
Lots of times, people hear me say “participatory” or “interactive,” and they think, “Oh, I’ve been in those kinds of groups. Everybody shares their ignorance.” That’s not at all what I mean. I teach like this generally. I stay in control. I’m asking the questions, right? If students ask stupid questions, then you delicately and wisely guide them toward good questions. You don’t let everybody just share their ignorance. You know where you want to take them, and you take them there by training them to get there themselves.
You’re modeling how to pose really good questions about what you see in the text and getting them to look and think and speak — and then correcting them so that they get better and better at reading their Bibles. It is possible to do very serious exposition and doctrinal teaching this way. You can do this Socratically.
The key is really good questions, provocative questions. I’ve been in so many groups where the leader says, “Who said this?” The students are looking at each other and saying, “That’s the most stupid question. It says that Peter said this. Why is he asking me that? That is such a stupid question. ‘Who said this?’” Those are not the kinds of questions that get anybody excited about anything. They have to be thought-questions, hard-thinking questions, questions that really have to pay off in textual understanding and real-life experience.
So, those are my three suggestions for handling the word with your youth group. Deal with the reality-factor, take doctrinal depth-tours, and ask provocative thought-questions. Then of course — and this would be a whole different episode — soak it all in earnest prayer, because if God doesn’t show up, then everything is in vain.
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Amusing Ourselves from Death
Audio Transcript
Amusing Ourselves to Death — that was the great title to a book written by Neil Postman and published in 1985. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Maybe you’ve heard of it or even read it. It was a great title before the digital age. And it’s a great title for the digital age. And I’m borrowing it for this episode, with one change: amusing ourselves from death — today’s theme in a clip from a John Piper sermon preached in the summer of 1996.
Before we get into it, here’s a little context for the sermon, and why eternal realities were especially on the forefront of Pastor John’s mind at the time. Evangelist Billy Graham was in Minneapolis for a five-night rally. By then, Graham was 77 years old. He spoke for a week in the Metrodome, which was just steps away from Bethlehem Baptist Church. It was a huge gathering, well attended, and local reports put attendance for the final evening right around 100,000 people. All of that was happening the same week as this sermon from Pastor John. And that’s why he’ll mention the Dome in a little bit. With that, here’s Pastor John in June of 1996.
Death is sad — and death is terrifying if there’s a holy, just God who’s going to call everybody to account.
If you don’t believe in God — if there is no God, and death is simply the end of a long summer — it’s just sad. It’s sad. And the reason it’s sad is because life as we know it in this world is the basis of everything that makes us happy — family, friends, leisure, food, sex, job, work, meaning. If you don’t have life, you don’t have any of that. And to lose that feels sad, but it doesn’t feel terrifying. It’s not terrifying to fall asleep thinking you never wake up. It’s over — no consciousness ever again. That’s not terrifying. It’s sad to lose things that you know, but it’s not terrifying to go to sleep and never wake up again. Zero consciousness.
But if there’s a holy, just God of truth, who has a law, who has a glory, and we will one day give an account to that God for everything good or evil we’ve ever done, and he will render that to us, then death is terrifying if we’re not right with God.
Silent Slave Master
The existence of God in relationship to death is a terrifying thing. Hebrews 2:14–15 says it’s a slave master if you’re afraid of death. And it says in verse 15 that everybody has been held in bondage all their life long by the fear of death.
I thought about that. A lot of people would deny that. A lot of people who don’t believe in God would say, “We’re not afraid. We are not living a life of bondage. I mean, look at us: Do we look like we’re in bondage? We’re the freest of all people, doing what we want to do. What in the world do you mean that everybody is held in slavery and bondage by the fear of death? What are you talking about? Where’s this verse coming from?”
“Even people who don’t believe in God are subconsciously ruled by the fear of death, one way or the other.”
Here’s what I think it is implying. I think even people who don’t believe in God, and who on the surface are not feeling terrified, are subconsciously ruled by the fear of death, one way or the other. It’s a silent slave master. One of its main forms of slavery is by putting you in the dreamworld of denial. Now, you don’t experience it this way, but the way you can tell if you’re in it or not is by considering what you are willing to think much about. Denial of the death that terrifies manifests itself in all kinds of ways of escaping from having to think long or much about your mortality and about your death.
It’s one thing that Americans will not let themselves think long about, and therefore we surround ourselves with all kinds of distractions and narcotics to escape from what we know we’d be afraid of if we thought about it. And therefore, it is ruling us from underneath.
Cruising Toward Death
I thought of this analogy. It’s like the cruise control on our station wagon. It doesn’t work, but I know what cruise control is for. The fear of death is like a cruise control in the soul that is set roughly at 55 miles an hour of contentment and ease.
Now, if something begins to happen where your life begins to slow down to a pace of pensiveness and reflection and thoughtfulness, and big realities start to come into your consciousness so that you start to ask some big, significant questions, that cruise control is going to bump back up to 55 in a big hurry so that you don’t have to get into thinking about and dealing with those big thoughts that you can have when your life slows down to a restful pace. It’s late at night, it’s quiet, the stars are out, the kids are asleep — and you start to ask the big questions. The fear of death, not even consciously, says, “Quick — turn it on. Turn it on. Get the volume up. Get moving. Start doing something. You can’t deal with that.”
Then it works the other way. Sometimes God, in his common graces — and we’ve all experienced this — moves into your heart and begins to rev up your inquisitive motor, and you start to inquire and think, and it’s a kind of new day. You buy books, and you pursue, and you want to know how to solve mysteries. It’s not the same reflective atmosphere that I was talking about a minute ago. It’s energy, it’s inquiry, it’s pursuit, because you know there’s something vital out there, and at that 65 or 75 miles per hour you might in fact find it. And so, the cruise control takes the foot off the accelerator and brings you back down to the ease and comfort of 55. The TV is just right. The leisure is just right. The family is just right. The work is just right. You don’t need to ask any of those questions or make any of that pursuit.
Our Inner Law
This is what I think the writer here means when he says, “We are being held in bondage, all our life long, by the fear of death” (see Hebrews 2:15). There’s a slavery. Everybody who does not come to terms with reality — with God, with sin, with guilt, with punishment, with death, and with hell — if you don’t come to term with those realities, you must be in denial. You must be living a life governed subconsciously, or perhaps consciously, by the fear of death.
“If you’re not right with God, that law written on your heart is going to make you a slave to the fear of death.”
Some of you know what it’s like to live consciously in horrible anxieties all the time. So whether subconsciously or consciously, this is the case. Romans 2:15 says that the law of God is written on every human heart, your conscience bearing witness with that law, either condemning or affirming.
So I, on the authority of the Bible — the same Bible that Billy Graham holds up, and he seems to get a lot of approval — that same Bible says that everybody in this room, everybody that will go to the Dome tonight or has been there, has the law of God written across your heart, and it is damning you or affirming you, according to whether you are right with God. And if you’re not right with God, that law written there is going to make you a slave to the fear of death.