Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (26 page)

What it took to bring him to Christianity was someone who was not afraid of that subculture—who knew that the real problem for Lecrae was not his culture but his sin and brokenness. A white man named Joe loved the black teenager enough to enter into his culture and speak his language. Today Lecrae is the president and co-founder of Reach Records, and is the winner of several Dove Awards and a Grammy Award. His album
Anomaly
was the first album ever to top both the Gospel Albums and the Billboard 200 chart.

In a conference presentation, Lecrae said a key turning point in his life was when he grasped what comes after conversion—when he understood that “Christianity is not just religious truth, it is Total Truth.”
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In other words, the real transformation came when he realized that Christians are called to roll up their sleeves and work out the implications of a biblical worldview for justice and politics, for science and scholarship, for art and music—and all the rest of life.

“We’ve limited Christianity to salvation and sanctification,” he said. But “Christianity is the truth about everything. If you say you have a Christian worldview, that means you see the world through that lens—not just how people get saved and what to stay away from.”
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Lecrae’s message is that we do not need to be afraid of cultural differences because Christianity has the resources to speak to every culture. Quoting from my book
Total Truth
, Lecrae says the reason Christians hold back from being salt and light in the world is that they are trapped in the sacred/secular divide. “We live fractured and fragmented lives. Church and family rarely speak to our work and public life. We navigate between two separate worlds.”
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“Most religions tell you not only how to be right with God but how to interpret the world we live in,” Lecrae explains. “Historically, Christians have been good at the first function, ‘saving souls,’ but not at helping people interpret the world around them. We limit spirituality to salvation and sanctification.”

Salvation is the crucial first step in the Christian life, of course. “But how do we deal with politics, science, economics, bioethics, TV, music, and art? Typically, we leave people to their own devices. We usually don’t operate out of a biblical worldview.” Instead, “we tend to have bifocals, half seeing things as spiritual and half seeing things as secular.”

Where did the sacred/secular split come from? Not from the Bible. It came from the Greeks. And the reason is that they thought matter was eternal. “A great divide was born when the Greek philosophers argued that matter was pre-existing and eternal—that matter contained the ability to resist the Creator,” Lecrae explains. “As Christians, we refute that claim with the doctrine that only God is pre-existing and eternal, ex nihilo. He is the source of all creation.” The implication is that no part of creation is inherently bad or evil. “Everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim. 4:4).

Most evil consists of “a perversion of good things,” Lecrae explains. “God gave us the ingenuity and tools to make a butcher knife, so we can use it to murder or serve food to the homeless.”
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How can we heal the sacred/secular split, which marginalizes and disempowers Christians? “How do we break free of this split that robs the gospel of its power to redeem every aspect of our lives?” Lecrae asks. The answer is to understand that “Christianity is saving truth and it’s sanctifying truth, but we believe that it’s Total Truth. It is the truth about every aspect of life from economics to masculinity to marriage. God has the right view on all of these things.”
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This is not just pious talk for Lecrae. He has worked hard to understand how the principle of total truth applies to his own work. In contrast to some Christians, who might be prone to write off hip-hop music as evil, he is determined to cultivate the genre’s creativity and artistry. Lecrae once told me that discovering total truth has enriched his art—that it “liberated” him to address all areas of life in his lyrics. Christian music is music that addresses any subject area from a biblical perspective.

Christians are called to be ambassadors for Christ (2 Cor. 5:20)—and that means we need to prepare ourselves as thoroughly as any professional working in international relations. When I lived in the Washington, DC, area, I often met graduate students preparing to be ambassadors and diplomats, and I discovered that they were very familiar with the concept of worldview—not because they were reading Christian books on the subject but because it was the focus of their secular graduate studies. Their courses taught that the critical factor in engaging a foreign culture is not learning the language but the worldview.

“Most people are intimidated by worldviews that they don’t understand,” Lecrae says. To overcome our fears, we need to be driven by compassion for those who are suffering under the tyranny of false idols. In a rap titled “Truth,” Lecrae talks about people in the grip of “idols in their heart.” His music aims to release people from the power of false gods by counterposing the power of truth.

In recent years Lecrae has spearheaded the Unashamed movement, which takes its lead from Romans 1:16. The hip-hop artists associated with Lecrae and Reach Records even call themselves the “116 clique.” (Lecrae has the number 116 tattooed on his right arm.) The Unashamed movement aims to inspire people to live out biblical truth with confidence in every area of life.

No area is off limits. No area is too “scary” because you might lose your grip on your Christian convictions. Let me end with a final quote from Lecrae: “What we need to realize is that Christianity is total truth not just religious truth. Because it is total truth, it is relevant and applicable to all areas of life.”
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The five strategic principles in
Finding Truth
can help you live an unashamed life, whether at work, at school, or with your family and friends. They will provide you with the tools to recognize what’s right and what’s wrong with any worldview—and then to craft a biblically informed perspective that is both true and humane.

PART 1—“I Lost My Faith at an Evangelical College”

1.
David Kinnaman writes, “The significant spiritual and technological changes over the last 50 years make the dropout problem more urgent. Young people are dropping out earlier, staying away longer, and if they come back are less likely to see the church as a long-term part of their life.” Cited in “Five Myths about Young Adult Church Dropouts,” Barna Group, November 16, 2011,
www.barna.org/teens-next-gen-articles/534-five-myths-about-young-adult-church-dropouts
.

2.
Cited in Allen C. Guelzo, “The Return of the Will,” in
Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion
, ed. Sang Hyun Lee and Allen C. Guelzo (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 133. The problem is that although God is knowable through general revelation, humans suppress that knowledge and are therefore in need of redemption—which is why we also need the Bible, or special revelation, with its message of redemption.

3.
See Robin Collins, “The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe,” in
The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology
, ed. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012).

4.
Dennis Overbye, “Zillions of Universes? Or Did Ours Get Lucky?,”
New York Times
, October 28, 2003. To counter the implications of fine-tuning, some cosmologists propose that there are multiple universes besides our own (the Many Worlds hypothesis). Most of those universes would be dark, lifeless places, but a few might possibly have the right conditions for life—and ours just happens to be one of them. This is sheer speculation, of course, since it is impossible to know if any other universes actually exist. “The multiverse theory requires as much suspension of disbelief as any religion,” comments Gregg Easterbrook. “Join the church that believes in the existence of invisible objects 50 billion galaxies wide!” The only reason for proposing such a far-fetched idea is that it makes our own universe seem a little less like a freak improbability. Gregg Easterbrook, “The New Convergence,”
Wired
, December 2002.

5.
George Greenstein,
The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos
(New York: William Morrow, 1988), 85–90; and Paul Davies, “A Brief History of the Multiverse,”
New York Times
, April 12, 2003. Elsewhere Davies writes that “the seemingly miraculous concurrence of numerical values” for nature’s fundamental contrasts is “the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design.”
God and the New Physics
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 189. For more on fine-tuning, see Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards,
The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004) and my book
Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 188–91.

6.
Paul Davies, “The Secret of Life Won’t Be Cooked Up in a Chemistry Lab,”
Guardian
, January 13, 2013. Earlier Davies wrote, “Trying to make life by mixing chemicals in a test tube is like soldering switches and wires in an attempt to produce Windows 98. It won’t work because it addresses the problem at the wrong conceptual level.” “How We Could Create Life: The Key to Existence Will Be Found Not in Primordial Sludge, but in the Nanotechnology of the Living Cell,”
Guardian
, December 11, 2002.

7.
See Stephen C. Meyer,
Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

8.
Cicero,
On the Nature of the Gods
, bk. II, chap. XXXVII; and “The Tusculan Disputations,” trans. C. D. Yonge (New York: Harper, 1877), 39.

9.
See my treatment in
The Soul of Science
, coauthored by Charles Thaxton (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), especially chapter 10;
Total Truth
, especially chapters 5 and 6; and
How Now Shall We Live?
, coauthored by Chuck Colson and Harold Fickett (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1999), chapters 6 through 10. On the broader outworkings of Darwinian thought in philosophy and culture, see
Total Truth
, chapters 7 and 8, and
Saving Leonardo
(Nashville: B&H, 2010), chapters 3 and 6.

10.
With the Judeo-Christian religion “a new way of thinking is introduced into the Western world.” Its God “is very different from the divinities of earlier philosophies. He is a personal God, not an abstract principle.” C. H. Perlman,
An Historical Introduction to Philosophical Thinking
, trans. Kenneth Brown (New York: Random, 1965), 96–97. “To Greco-Oriental thought, whether mystical or philosophical, the ultimate reality is some primal impersonal force … some ineffable, immutable, impassive divine substance that pervades the universe or rather is the universe.” By contrast, in biblical thought, “God is neither a metaphysical principle nor an impersonal force.… Hebraic religion affirms God as a transcendent Person.” Will Herberg,
Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion
(New York: Boucher, 2007), 48.

11.
Étienne Gilson,
God and Philosophy
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1941), 19–20, 37, 42.

12.
Paul Bloom, “Religion Is Natural,”
Developmental Science
10, no. 1 (2007): 147–51.

13.
Cited in Martin Beckford, “Children Are Born Believers in God, Academic Claims,”
Telegraph
, November 24, 2008.

14.
C. S. Lewis,
Miracles
(New York: HarperCollins, 1974), 150.

15.
Around the 1930s, a new field called the sociology of knowledge began to investigate how even scholars and scientists fail to fit the ideal of objectivity, but are influenced (often unconsciously) by their prior expectations and assumptions. The sociology of knowledge was founded by philosopher Max Scheler and sociologist Karl Mannheim.

16.
See Thomas K. Johnson,
The First Step in Missions Training: How Our Neighbors Are Wrestling with God’s General Revelation
(Bonn: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2014), 23–24.

17.
See Margaret Heffernan,
Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
(New York: Walker, 2011).

18.
Johnson,
First Step
, 23.

19.
David Powlison, “Idols of the Heart and ‘Vanity Fair,’”
Journal of Biblical Counseling
, October 16, 2009.

20.
Similarly, in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he warns against “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5). Again, idolatry is the sin driving the other sins.

21.
The Larger Catechism of Martin Luther
, trans. Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), 9.

22.
Cited in Pericles Lewis,
Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 36. For a fuller discussion of the trend to treat art as a religion, which started with Romanticism, see
Saving Leonardo
, chapters 7 and 8.

23.
John Calvin,
Institutes of the Christian Religion,
1536 ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 4.17.36.

24.
“In the ancient world there was no banking system as we know it today, and no paper money. All money was made from metal, heated until liquid, poured into moulds and allowed to cool. When the coins were cooled, it was necessary to smooth off the uneven edges. The coins were comparatively soft, and of course many people shaved them closely. In one century, more than eighty laws were passed in Athens to stop the practice of whittling down the coins then in circulation.” This money, which was less than full weight, was described as “debased.” Donald Grey Barnhouse,
Romans: God’s Glory
(Philadelphia: Evangelical Foundation, 1964), 18, cited at Blue Letter Bible, s.v. “
dokimos
,”
www.blbclassic.org/lang/lexicon/lexicon.cfm?Strongs=G1384&t=NASB
.

25.
In using the term
exchanged
, Paul is echoing a verse from the Old Testament: “They made a calf in Horeb and worshiped a metal image. They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” (Ps. 106:19–20). An echo goes back even further to Genesis 1:26, where the cultural mandate gives humans stewardship over the rest of creation. “God created human beings for ‘dominion’ over these creatures, but fallen human idolaters now bow before the likenesses of animals.” Richard B. Hays,
Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 211, n. 26.

26.
Richard B. Hays,
The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics
(New York: HarperOne, 1996), 387. Sarah Ruden, a scholar of Greco-Roman culture, says the main form of homosexual behavior that Paul was most likely to observe in his day was pederasty, most frequently the sexual abuse of young male slaves by their masters, although freeborn boys were vulnerable to being raped as well. Among the Greeks and Romans, the active partner was praised as virile and masculine, even when they were cruel and vicious, while the passive partner (the victim) was regarded as weak and disgusting. But Paul treats the active partner as equally guilty and degraded, and in fact condemns homosexuality as a form of injustice (the word for “unrighteousness” in Romans 1:18 is often translated “injustice”). Because pederasty was accepted in Roman culture, and the perpetrators even admired, “Paul’s Roman audience … would have been surprised to hear that justice applied to homosexuality, of all things.” “No Closet, No Monsters? Paul and Homosexuality,” chap. 3 in
Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time
(New York: Image Books, 2010).

27.
Cited in
Soul of Science
, 184–85.

28.
Roy Clouser,
The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories
, rev. ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 104.

29.
Not all forms of reductionism are problematic. In some cases, a good understanding of a system’s components enables one to predict all the important properties of a system as a whole. That is to say, some things really are merely the sum of their parts. Take, for example, the kinetic theory of gases. As John Polkinghorne writes, we can use “the kinetic theory of gases to reduce the concept of temperature (originating in the thermodynamics of bulk matter) to exact equivalence to the average kinetic energy of the molecules of the gas.”
Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science
, s.v. “Reductionism,” ed. G. Tanzella-Nitti and A. Strumia, 2002,
http://inters.org/reductionism
.

30.
Herman Dooyeweerd describes how absolutization leads to reductionism: Those who look for ultimate reality within creation “will be inclined to present one aspect of reality … as reality in its completeness. They will then reduce all the others to the point where all of them become different manifestations of the absolutized aspect.… Think of modern materialism, which reduces all of temporal reality to particles of matter in motion. Consider the modern naturalistic philosophy of life, which sees everything one-sidedly in terms of the development of organic life.… [Humans tend] to absolutize the relative and deify the creature.”
Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options
(Grand Rapids, MI: Paideia Press, 2012), 42.

31.
John Horgan, “More Than Good Intentions: Holding Fast to Faith in Free Will,”
New York Times
, December 31, 2002. Francis Schaeffer offered this analogy: When a person’s worldview is too “small,” it’s like trying to stuff a person into a garbage can—an arm or a leg will always stick out.
True Spirituality
in
The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer
(Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1982), vol. 3, 172–73.

32.
John Searle, interview by Jeffrey Mishlove,
Thinking Allowed: Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery
, 1998,
www.williamjames.com/transcripts/searle.htm
(italics added).

33.
The book was Gene Edward Veith,
Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture
(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994).

PART 2—PRINCIPLE #1: Twilight of the Gods

1.
Albert M. Wolters,
Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), 4.

2.
Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton,
Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 89.

3.
David Kinnaman,
You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church … and Rethinking Faith
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2011), 190. A study by Fuller Seminary found that the single most important factor in whether teens hold on to their Christian convictions in college is whether they found answers to their questions while still in high school: “The more college students felt that they had the opportunity to express their doubt while they were in high school, the higher [their] levels of faith maturity and spiritual maturity.” Lillian Kwon, “Survey: High School Seniors ‘Graduating from God,’”
Christian Post
, August 10, 2006.

4.
Bradley Wright, “If People Leave the Faith, When Do They Do It?,” Patheos, January 28, 2012,
www.patheos.com/blogs/blackwhiteandgray/2012/01/if-people-leave-the-faith-when-do-they-do-it/
. Wright cites a study showing that those most likely to leave are ages seventeen to twenty. The next most likely to leave are a year or two younger (ages fifteen to sixteen). After age twenty, the numbers decline somewhat, then finally drop off after age twenty-six.

5.
Christian Smith, director of the Center for the Study of Youth and Religion at the University of Notre Dame, reports that teenagers today often define faith primarily in terms of “meeting emotional needs.” Their one-dimensional understanding is the product of “an overwhelmingly relativistic and privatized cultural climate,” as well as “youth leaders who have not challenged that climate.” Cited in Chris Norton, “Apologetics Makes a Comeback among Youth,”
Christianity Today
, August 31, 2011.