5/13 Lecture – A New Front in America’s Culture War

Dear Friend:
America was the world’s beacon of freedom because it was founded on truths such as “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . .”
These ideas did liberate America: but are they true?
Now, a typical high school graduate no longer believes that anyone knows ‘the’ truth or can know the truth. For him, anyone who claims to know the truth is a bigoted fundamentalist.
Why, because (for him) human beings were never created. They evolved by chance. Evolution endows inequality, not equality.
Why has postmodern America rejected the very idea of knowable truth? Truth that can be put in words: whether the words of Scriptures, Creeds, Mathematical equations, or the Declaration of Independence?
The problem began with the Declaration of Independence itself. Thomas Jefferson’s original draft said, “We hold these truths to be sacred.”  He meant that these truth were revealed in sacred Scriptures. Under pressure from Benjamin Franklin, “sacred” was changed to “self-evident” . . . an arrogant myth that we know these truths not through revelation, but through common sense.
American Christians accepted the (epistemological) absurdity that truth is known through “Common Sense.” Why? Because that myth was invented by a Scottish apologist, Thomas Reed, who was trying to save God and science from David Hume’s skeptical Rationalism. For two hundred years Christian educationists taught and perpetuated America’s foundational myth of Common Sense. They justified it by proof-texts such as Romans 1: 18-32. Only a few theologians, who took the doctrine of Total Depravity seriously, questioned the myth. But even they did not oppose it effectively.
It was left to Sigmund Freud, an atheist, to debunk the myth that human rationality leads us to truth. In passages such as 1 Corinthians 1 and Romans 1, the apostle Paul teaches that Revelation of the Gospel is needed precisely because the wisdom of man does not lead him to truth or morality. Common sense leads to foolishness of nature worship, idolatry, sexual perversion and ethical destruction. Truth can indeed be known . . . it ought to be known . . . but the god of this world has blinded unbelievers’ eyes.
Unknowingly Freud agreed with Paul that reasoning (without grace) is a rationalization of irrational phobias, lusts, instincts, hatreds, and desires. Plato and Aristotle would have agreed with Freud that human logic cannot know the truth, and human words cannot communicate truth, unless the universe is created by Logos, and unless the human mind is made in the likeness of Logos (John 1:1-14).
Rejection of the Bible’s logo-centric worldview had to explode America’s myth of Common Sense. Common Sense is dead. The questions are:
How can Truth have authority unless it can be known?
Can man be free without Truth?
How will Americans know the Truth after the demise of Common Sense?
Joseph Campbell, who followed Freud and Jung, taught that since no one can know the truth, we have no option but to turn to myths. Mythology must replace theology. According to him, the Bible, like ancient European and Asian myths, was a great story. It was alright for ancient times. Our age needs new stories that address issues confronting us.
Therefore, said Campbell, Hollywood must create myths for our new and different age.
Today, every American university teaches Campbell. He has won over America, including evangelical seminaries and missionary agencies. I cannot think of a single preacher in America who still uses the old English phrase, “the Gospel Truth.” On the other hand, there is no dearth of prominent Christians who teach that the Bible is a story. Therefore, missionaries ought to be “story-tellers” (not “witnesses,” i.e., truth-tellers.)
The late Francis Schaeffer saw this coming. He wept over the evangelical folly that is undermining Truth – the very foundation of freedom. He knew how Higher Criticism that turned Bible into myths, paved the way for Fascism in Germany – the birth place of Protestant Reformation. Schaeffer pleaded that in an age that doubts the very notion of
Truth, the church needed to talk about “true Truth,” not Bible “stories.” Evangelicals did not listen to their prophet. They lost America. They have speeded up America’s destruction.
On Tuesday, May 13, at 7 pm, at Redeemer Lutheran Church, 61 Mississippi Way, Fridley, MN, I will begin a 7-part lecture series, “Why Christianity Lost America and How to Return America to Greatness.” The first lecture, which will recount the foregoing intellectual history, is entitled “Returning America to Truth.”
We need finances to film, edit, and upload these lectures on social media. Dr. Ashish Alexander has come from India to help turn these lectures into a book, tentatively called, “The Church and the Healing of the Nations.” That incidentally, is the theme of 15 or so Sunday sermons that I am preaching in different churches, during May and June. We need to film and upload these sermons as well.
Minnesota Mission is meant to begin a movement that will equip every church to double-up as college classrooms, Monday to Friday, offering high quality, accredited, affordable, online university education. The American church will be equipped, once again, to make pursuit of Truth – Veritas – a principal purpose of college education. If Academic Pastors recruits and mentors 15 students, then 100,000 churches can disciple 1.5 million students in Year 1.
In a four-year program American churches could disciple 4-6 million young people. That will begin to re-establish the cultural authority of Truth!
Minnesota Mission is opening a new front in America’s culture war.
Please pray for us and donate on www.RevelationMovement.com.
Thank you for blessing and healing the nations.
Yours Prayerfully,
Vishal Mangalwadi