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
I am sorry that you took a few pot shots at the Bible’s stories and people who are story-tellers.
First of all, post-modern people are more open to narratives than to propositions. So there is a practical reason to look again, not only at the Bible’s stories but also its Grand Story. In our view the Bible is not primarily a book of propositions but the story of how God has acted in the world, from creation, to the present, to the glorious future toward which we are moving. It is not only the fact that he is the great deliverer, but the story of what he did on the ground to deliver Israel from 400 years of slavery and sink the Egyptian army without their ever having to lift a sword. And before that he acted to defeat the gods of Egypt through the ten plagues. It is not only the proposition that God is a God of love but his act of sending Jesus to die for us that makes it credible. It is not only a proposition that death is not the end but that Jesus burst forth from a real tomb as evidence. And we are not only given the fact of a final triumph but the story of how the rider on a white horse will conquer evil and capture the Beast and the false prophet and cast them into hell.
In fact, I would say that the truth of the Bible comes mostly out of its stories of how God has acted. They are often working out the consequences of what God did. Peter didn’t get the idea that the Good News was going out to the Gentiles through contemplation, but because God poured out the Holy Spirit on them just as at Pentecost.
My wife and I are missionaries. We and some of our colleagues work with people groups who are either totally ignorant of, or hostile toward Christianity. We have tried to reduce the Grand Story of the Bible to 24 inter-connected narratives. They are being used with great success. The hearers are enthralled and want to discuss the implications in their own lives and villages. We would never get to first base with unadorned propositions.
If I may be allowed to mediate between these two positions, I have lately been studying the letter of James and have been pondering his caution to not be double minded. I think that James is saying that our commitment to God must be so complete that our words and actions never disagree. To hear must be to obey; to believe must be to act on that belief; the mind and the heart are united. Another way of saying this is that we act out who we are. I think this is where the concept of story is important. The propositional truth of who God is and what He is like is explained through His actions. God is not double minded and the Biblical stories show what He is really like. I am amazed at all the Psalms that review the works of God, the Exodus, the Patriarchs, etc. Through the stories, we can decipher the very character of God. It seems to me that the propositional truths and the stories are two sides of the same coin.
Dear Ronald,
Thanks for your response to the post above. This was obviously a very condensed version of what Dr Mangalwadi presented in his lecture. Now that we have the lecture uploaded on this Web site , I would invite you to go through it in its entirety. I hope we can reengage in this issue as we humbly learn from the Lord and each other’s experiences.
Warm regards,
A