Human Beings in the New Systems

In the absence of Judeo-Christian morality and Greek teleology, each of these visions offered a shining, exciting new purpose to humanity. The philosophy of the American founding represented the apex of a philosophy that could provide all four elements of meaning necessary for the building of a civilization: individual purpose and communal purpose, individual capacity and collective capacity.
 
But romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and scientific progressivism did away with the individual need for meaning. The four elements of meaning collapsed downward into two: communal purpose and communal capacity.
 
The individual virtually disappeared in each of these domains. Individuals were only valuable as members of the collective: as sources of the general will, to be embodied in the unified culture of the state; as members of economic classes, who could unite to overthrow the nature of humankind itself; as citizens to be cultivated by the state, their expertise to be placed in service of the greater good.
 
And human beings did find meaning in the new systems. But the new systems of thought, unchecked by the old morality, unconstrained by the willingness of single individuals to stand up to the collective, could only end one way: in blood. The worst sins of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sprang from various combinations of romantic nationalism, collectivist redistributionism, and supposedly scientific governance.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

Religion's Response to Modernization

Secularization is almost a synonym for modernization. It is that aspect of modernization that produces the values of secularism, by which he means "the restructuring of thought and life to accommodate the absence or irrelevancy of God."
 
These developments affect all persons, Christians and unbelievers alike. They have great power to shape the consciousness of those within society. In so doing, they have created an atmosphere in which unbelief seems natural and belief seems odd. Yet the church seems blissfully unaware of this condition, like the proverbial frog in the kettle. While this is a time of great peril, Wells believes that it is also a time of great opportunity. In the providence of God, times of reformation in the church's life frequently come out of times of disorder and chaos. God often tears down before he builds up, and this may be one of these times.
 
Unfortunately, religion, evangelical Christianity in particular, is not responding very well to this challenge, in Wells' judgment. He opened No Place for Truth with an account of the first day of his systematic theology course, in which a student complained after class about having to take systematic theology, which so obviously had no bearing on his future ministry. This sets the discussion of the entire book.
 
Wells points out that theology has generally been comprised of three elements:
 

(a) The confessional element - is the body of beliefs the church has inherited and holds, which crystallizes into doctrine.

(b) The reflective element is the church's endeavor to understand the meaning of being the recipient of God's Word in the present age. This in turn must proceed down three avenues. It must be biblical theology, covering the whole of Scripture and establishing the connections among the different parts. It must be historical theology, surveying the history of God's working in the church in the past. This will give the church the ballast necessary to assimilate the spiritual benefits of the past and to relativize the present with its pretentiousness. It must also be contemporary theology (although Wells does not use these terms), relating the content of the confession to what a given period considers normative.

(c) The third element is the cultivation of a set of virtues grounded in the first two elements. It is a matter of the church obtaining the wisdom that comes from basing its practice on its beliefs.'

 
The evangelical church has, however, been strongly influenced by the forces of modernization and has done poorly at carrying out these tasks of theology. Wells says, "As the nostrums of the therapeutic age supplant confession, and as preaching is psychologized, the meaning of Christian faith becomes privatized. At a single stroke, confession is eviscerated and reflection reduced mainly to thought about one's self." The pastor seeks to pattern the pastoral office and function in terms of the two roles that the culture most admires: the manager and the therapist. This is what theology is reduced to: reflection in the academy and practice in the church.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Spiritual Vagrants in the Modern World

The transition from a world in which God and his truth were accorded a central and often public place to one in which they have neither did not happen overnight, of course. It came in fits and starts, amid confusion and sometimes conflict. A longer view indicates that it came in two basic stages, however.
 
In the first, God began to disappear from public view, and the whole noisy human enterprise took his place. In the second, the whole human enterprise was itself displaced and the organizing center of life was assumed by the extraordinarily pervasive and impersonal forces that modernization has unleashed on the world. We have thus become the pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God's creatures replaced their Creator and exiled him from his own world. As it turns out, we too have lost our center through this transition.
 
It is now considered better to look good than to be good. The facade is more important than the substance - and, that being the case, the substance has largely disappeared. In the center there is now only an emptiness. This is what accounts for the anxious search for self that is now afoot: only the hungry think about food all the time, not the well fed, and only those in whom the self is disappearing will define all of life in terms of its recovery, its actualization.
 
We have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives - including the soil in which our Christian faith grows - is constantly shifting.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Modernity is the Consequence of Modernization

By modernization, Wells means the process by which, for the sake of manufacturing and commerce, our society is organized into cities. This process results in the rise of modernity's values. He says, "In this context, the term modernity refers to the public environment created largely by urbanization, the moral etiquette, style of thought, and relationships of which are shaped by the large, impersonal structures that fill it."
 
The effect of this modernization is to create two separated spheres, the public and the private. The one world is defined by personal relations, and is made up of small, insulated islands of home, family, and personal friends. The other is defined by the functions within the capitalistic machine. In this great system of production and distribution, persons are valued not for who they are or what they believe or hold as values, but for what they do. In this realm, in fact, personal relations may actually be a hindrance, since much efficiency depends on being impersonal. This anonymity also works against accountability. The worker is disengaged from any sense of responsibility for the product manufactured, any accountability to the ultimate consumer of the product.
 
This urbanized modern workplace not only undercuts accountability, but it also has a similar effect on the cogency of religious belief and morality. Because of the wide range of worldview, cultural and ethnic difference, and personal values found in such close proximity, the values of each inhabitant have to be reduced to the lowest common denominator in order to eliminate antagonisms among the competing views. And when the public life is divested from the private world, it becomes connected instead to the machinery of the technological age. There also is a strong orientation to the future, as persons are "forced to anticipate and adapt to the oncoming change. "
 
In this modern society, the centers of culture have nothing to do with geography. Rather, they are involved with "a number of large, interlocking systems that form the structure of society." These are, for example, the economy; the political government (world, federal, and state); the universities that generate and disseminate knowledge; and the mass media, which do the same for the images by which we understand ourselves.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Modernization and the Issues

Modernity has been hard at work reducing evangelical faith to something that is largely private and internal. Belief has shrunk from being a contemporary confession of God's truth in the church and beyond to being simply a part of personal identity and psychological makeup. Many evangelicals quietly assume, perhaps even without much thought, that it would be uncouth and uncivil to push this private dimension too noticeably or noisily on others or into the public square.
 
The right of each individual to his or her own private thoughts and beliefs is held to be both axiomatic and inviolable. So it is that the particularities of evangelical faith - the things that make it different - are dissolved. Modern culture grants me absolute freedom to believe whatever I want to believe - so long as I keep those beliefs from infringing on the consciousness or behavior of anyone else, especially on points of controversy. So it is, as John Cuddihy has suggested, that civil religion is always a religion of civility: the edges of faith are rounded off, the angles softened.
 
Modernity is not simply an issue; it is the issue, because it envelops all our worlds - commerce, entertainment, social organization, government, technology - and because its grasp is lethal. There is no part of culture that can gain any distance from it and hence no part of culture that is neutral or safe. All of culture is touched by the values and appetites, the horizons and hopes that modernity excites.
 
Worldliness is a religious matter. The world, as the New Testament authors speak of it, is an alternative to God. It offers itself as an alternative center of allegiance. It provides counterfeit meaning. It is the means used by Satan in his warfare with God.
 
Worldliness, as we have seen, is that set of practices in a society, its values and ways of looking at life, that make sin look normal and righteousness look strange. It is the view of the world that puts the sinner at its center and relegates God to the periphery.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Costs & Benefits of Modernization

The benefits of a modernized world are obvious and innumerable. Modernization has liberated us from the provincialism of small towns, opened the world to us, linked us to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world. With our technological achievements we have made our world more comfortable, in some ways safer, certainly more productive. In this century alone we have come close to doubling our life expectancy. We have enlarged our knowledge of the world, secured freedoms once only dreamed of, expanded rights, opened the doors of education, lifted hopes, and mightily multiplied our prosperity.
 
But in order to enjoy these manifold benefits, we have had to pay some stiff costs. Modernization has also blighted our lives by cutting our connections to place and community, elevating our level of anxiety, and greatly diminishing our satisfaction with our jobs. It has spawned pervasive fear and discontent. It has contributed to the breakdown of the family, robbed our children of their innocence, diluted our ethical values, and blinded us to the reality of God.)° It has made us shallow. It has made its empty.
 
Those who thought that affluence could be made to compensate for or offset the drain on the human spirit that modernization has exacted were sorely disappointed. While we now bask in relative plenty, the very means of amassing that plenty - the reorganization of our world by the processes of modernization - has diminished our soul.

- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

Three Developments in Modernization

Norman Cantor has argued that three developments in particular have given birth to the growing sense of nihilism in art, architecture, literature, dance, theater, and rock music.
 
First, biotechnology, which built on the discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA, has succeeded in driving home the idea that human life is defined by impersonal genetic codes rather than personal choices. This perception has greatly diminished the sense of human significance.
 
Second, astounding advances in computer science and technology have reproduced or surpassed many of the tasks that were once thought to be defining marks of human uniqueness.
 
Third, new communications technology has not only brought news, sports, and entertainment from around the world into American living rooms each day but has also given vast new power to multinational corporations and forced the last pockets of Marxism into desperate disarray. Like computer technology, the new communications technology has expanded human capability and increased human efficiency, but it has diminished human stature. We have been dwarfed by our own inventions and in many ways have become irrelevant to their workings. For these and many other reasons, we have come to feel small, empty, unspecial, meaningless.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

The Process of Modernization

The process of modernization is driven by four main realities: capitalism, technology, urbanization, and telecommunications.
 
1. Capitalism emerged as a defining force in Europe following the collapse of the old medieval synthesis, but it did not effect evident changes until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when industrialization got under way, and it did not reach its full intensity until technology became both ubiquitous in society and indispensable to the functioning of capitalism. At the same time, however, capitalism has developed a profound dependence on the sorts of freedom typically provided by democratic societies. But in societies that have afforded rights of free association, unrestricted travel, and a belief in the propriety of the capitalist economy, capitalism has successfully reorganized the social structure for the purposes of manufacturing, production, and consumption. It has concentrated populations into cities and produced massive systems of finance, banking, law, communications, and transportation. In short, it has changed the shape of our world, how we relate to it, where we live, how we experience our work, and the values and expectations that we bring with us in order to be adaptable to and successful in this public sphere.
 
2. Technology is, of course, essential to modern capitalism. Its importance lies not simply in the fact that it facilitates the production of knowledge, makes possible medical and engineering breakthroughs, and is now indispensable to all modes of production. Equally important is the fact that it also rationalizes all of life. People who live in technologically logically dominated societies are prone to think naturalistically and to subject all of life to a calculus of benefits - to assume that whatever is most efficient is most ethical.
 
3. Modernization has also been driven by the stunning growth of urbanization, which has now spread beyond the West to become a worldwide phenomenon.  During the twentieth century, this trend has been amplified in America by mass migrations of peoples from Asia and Central and South America. They have brought with them their own ethnic identities, cultural habits, languages, religions, and values - all of which have been brought into close proximity to one another in our cities. The new multicultural environment has produced a secular ecumenism and a powerful demand for pluralism, for mutual tolerance, for private space in which to hold one's beliefs, live one's own lifestyle, do what one wants to do. Thus far, the Constitution seems to be securing this much for each person, within the boundaries of the law, but it seems to be producing an encompassing relativism as well.
 
4. Finally, modern telecommunications has made us all citizens of the whole world. Television is perhaps less a window on the world than a surrogate eye that preselects what images of the world we will be exposed to. Still, we have become witnesses of an extraordinary range of events that daily shape and shake the world. Television gives to us a psychological transcendence of space, both physical and cultural, linking us to other people around the world. The bonds that television creates, unlike those that once prevailed in the small towns of America, are entirely synthetic - even if it doesn't seem that way. The communion that television provides - the communion of common voyeurs - can seem as real as that of a local neighborhood. And television also produces mass communal reactions to material that is bound to any specific context, to wholly homogenized information, to the fads and fashions and disconnected sound bites of mass culture. It spins out information in such abundance as to rob most of it of any value.
 

- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 

The Description of Modernity

…depicted in the first two chapters of No Place for Truth.
 

somewhere between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century lies a great historical divide. The period before that could be called the Age of the West; the new period he calls simply Our Time. On the other side of that line, Europe was the center of the world, politically and economically; now America is. In the earlier period, there was a sense in which Judeo-Christian values were at the center of culture, even if they were not believed in personally. Now, however, there is no such set of values. Rather, they have been displaced and replaced by a loose set of psychological attitudes, which are now referred to as modernity.' This new period, Our Time, is not restricted by geography. It is not the civilization of any one group of people, in any one place. It is not political in nature. The soil from which it springs is that which capitalism and democracy produce, and it especially depends on technology and urbanization. But it may be found virtually anywhere that the requisite conditions are present.

The Enlightenment world that has characterized much of modernity was an optimistic one. It was based on a strong confidence in human reason and its ability to solve humanity's problems unaided. This confidence, in turn, was based on an illusion, however, according to Wells-an illusion that an impersonal force was at work in the world promoting only the ends that the Enlightenment envisioned. This has not proven to be the case, however. For the fruits of this Enlightenment have been far from positive in many cases. Violence is present in our society in many forms. The powerful run roughshod over the weak. Many of the unborn never have an opportunity to live. Industry pollutes the earth. The elderly are encouraged to die and make room for those coming after them.
 
What shapes the modern world is not powerful minds but powerful forces, not philosophy but urbanization, capitalism, and technology. As the older quest for truth has collapsed, intellectual life has increasingly become little more than a gloss on the processes of modernization. Intellectuals merely serve as mirrors, reflecting what is taking place within society. They are post-modern in the sense that they are often disillusioned with the emptiness of the old Enlightenment ideals, but they are entirely modern in that they reflect the values of the impersonal processes of modernization. 

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Ten Features of Modernism

Modernism can actually be clustered into two general types, a more moderate form and a more extreme form, which I term soft modernism and hard modernism, respectively.
 
Soft modernism shares with its forerunner, premodernism, belief in the rationality of the universe and in human ability to know and understand the truth. Both believe that inclusive explanations of reality, or in other words, integrative metaphysical schemes or worldviews, can be constructed.
 
Hard modernism goes beyond its soft counterpart, however, by excluding anything other than this. On the terms of hard modernism, reality is limited to what can be experienced, thus excluding supernaturalism of any kind. Knowledge is restricted to what can be known through reason and experience, excluding any sort of intuition. What is not logical is not considered real.
 
Several salient features of modernism should be noted.
 
1. Naturalism. Reality is believed to be restricted to the observable system of nature. Its immanent laws are the cause of all that occurs.
 
2. Humanism. The human is the highest reality and value, the end for which all of reality exists rather than the means to the service of some higher being.
 
3. The scientific method. Knowledge is good and can be attained by humans. The method best suited for this enterprise is the scientific method, which came to fruition during this period. Observation and experimentation are the sources from which our knowledge of truth is built up.
 
4. Reductionism. From being considered the best means for gaining knowledge, the scientific method came increasingly to be considered the only method, so that various disciplines sought to attain the objectivity and precision of the natural sciences. Humans in some cases were regarded as nothing but highly developed animals.
 
5. Progress. Because knowledge is good, humanly attainable, and growing, we are progressively overcoming the problems that have beset the human race.
 
6. Nature. Rather than being fixed and static, nature came to be thought of as dynamic, growing, and developing. Thus it was able to produce the changes in life forms through immanent processes of evolution, rather than requiring explanation in terms of a creator and designer.
 
7. Certainty. Because knowledge was seen as objective, it could attain certainty. This required foundationalism, the belief that it is possible to base knowledge on some sort of absolute first principles. One early model of this was found in the rationalism of Rene Descartes, who found one indubitable belief, namely, that he was doubting, and then proceeded to draw deductions from that. An alternative was empiricism, the belief that there are purely objective sensory data from which knowledge can be formulated.
 
8. Determinism. There was a belief that what happened in the universe followed from fixed causes. Thus, the scientific method could discover these laws of regularity that controlled the universe. Not only physical occurrences but human behavior were believed to be under this etiological control.
 
9. Individualism. The ideal of the knower was the solitary individual, carefully protecting his or her objectivity by weighing all options. Truth being objective, individuals can discover it by their own efforts. They can free themselves from the conditioning particularities of their own time and place and know reality as it is in itself.
 
10. Anti-authoritarianism. The human was considered the final and most complete measure of truth. Any externally imposed authority, whether that of the group or of a supernatural being, must be subjected to scrutiny and criticism by human reason.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Tenets of Postmodernism

This modern period has, in turn, given way to the postmodern, and its ideology to postmodernism. This represents the convergence of several movements in different intellectual disciplines.
 
In many ways, the beginning inspiration was from the French school of literary criticism known as deconstruction. In history, there is the new historicism, in which history is not merely the objective discovery of the past, but actually creates it. In philosophy, neo-pragmatism holds that words refer not to objective, extralinguistic entities, but to other words. Certain basic motifs have emerged, countering the modern view. Although these will be described at greater length by several of the thinkers we will examine, they can be briefly summarized here.
 
1. The objectivity of knowledge is denied. Whether the knower is conditioned by the particularities of his or her situation or theories are used oppressively, knowledge is not a neutral means of discovery. 
 
2. Knowledge is uncertain. Foundationalism, the idea that knowledge can be erected on some sort of bedrock of indubitable first principles, has had to be abandoned.
 
3. All-inclusive systems of explanation, whether metaphysical or historical, are impossible, and the attempt to construct them should be abandoned.
 
4. The inherent goodness of knowledge is also questioned. The belief that by means of discovering the truths of nature it could be controlled and evil and ills overcome has been disproved by the destructive ends to which knowledge has been put (in warfare, for instance).
 
5. Thus, progress is rejected. The history of the twentieth century should make this clear.
 
6. The model of the isolated individual knower as the ideal has been replaced by community-based knowledge. Truth is defined by and for the community, and all knowledge occurs within some community.
 
7. The scientific method as the epitomization of the objective method of inquiry is called into question. Truth is not known simply through reason, but through other channels, such as intuition.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Rise of Postmodernism

The current dissatisfaction with modernity, intellectually, has appeared in a wide variety of disciplines. One of the first was architecture, where modernism had attempted to develop a homogenized style that broke with the past and its indigenized designs by attempting to universalize, to belong everywhere because it did not belong anywhere in particular. Postmodern architecture broke with this by having many styles, reflecting interests of both the past and the present. It is one expression of our multiculturalism. But because it is not driven by any hard ideology, as was modernism, in its eclecticism it really does not have any definite purpose at all.
 
In the old Enlightenment belief, there was confidence in the possibility of rational, objective scholarship. This has been rejected by postmodernism, intellectually. In the absence of any assent to a body of universal truth, even those conclusions that are presumably objectively discovered by scholars are seen to be only results of these scholars' interests and dispositions. Given the belief in relativism, there is great difficulty in insisting on the universal validity of one's findings. Even science, thought of as the paragon of objectivity and rationality by the modernists, is seen not to be exempt from this relativizing influence. Thomas Kuhn has shown that what scientists observe is very much affected by their anticipation of what they are looking for and what they consider possible. In literature, deconstruction holds that words do not have any meaning in themselves. They mean only what we want them to mean. These same phenomena can also be seen in postmodern theology.
 
Wells asserts, however, that the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is more complex than we sometimes recognize and acknowledge. The very fact that we insist on being postmodern, rather than merely antimodern, indicates a desire to transcend the recent past, which in turn reflects belief in progress. And this in itself is a clearly modern conception. Thus, even postmodernism has not fully freed itself from modernism.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Walking in/by the Spirit

The central role of the Spirit is most clearly spelled out in Galatians 5:13-6:10, where with a series of verbs modified by the phrase pneumati ("in/by the Spirit"), Paul urges the Galatians to "make a completion" (3:3) by means of the same Spirit by whom they had been converted. They are commanded to "walk in the Spirit," and promised that those who so walk "will not fulfdl the desire of the flesh" (v. 16); such people are "led by the Spirit," attested by "the fruit of the Spirit" (w. 22-23), and are not under Torah (w. 18, 23). Since they "live by the Spirit" (= have been brought to life by the life-giving Spirit), they must also "behave in accordance with the Spirit" (v. 25). Finally, only those who "sow to the Spirit" in this way "will reap the eternal life" that is also from the Spirit (6:8).
 
Two things are clear from this passage: that the Spirit is the key to ethical life, and that Paul expects Spirit people to exhibit changed behavior. The first instruction, "walk by the Spirit," is the basic command in Paul's ethics. The verb "to walk" was commonly used in Judaism to refer to a person's whole way of life. Paul adopted it as his most common verb for ethical conduct (17 occurrences in all). All other commands proceed from this one. The primary form that such walking takes is "in love" (Eph 5:2; Gal 5:6), hence love is the first-mentioned "fruit of the Spirit" (Gal 5:22; cf. 5:14; Rom 13:8-10).
 
The key for Paul lay with the Spirit as a dynamically experienced reality in the life of both believers (Gal 3:2, 4) and community (3:5). Paul's expectation level was high on this matter because for him and his churches the Spirit was not simply believed in but was experienced in tangible, visible ways. If our experience of the Spirit lies at a lower level, we must resist the temptation to remake Paul into our image and thereby find comfort in a Paul that did not exist. Paul's answer was "walk in/by the Spirit," and he assumed that such a walk was available to those who had already "experienced so many things" of the Spirit (Gal 5:4). He does not tell us how to do that because such a dynamic life in the Spirit was presumed by him.
 

- Gordon D. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God. p106-107.

The Mind of the Spirit

The term φρόνημα has no exact equivalent in English, and even in Greek its semantic range is wide enough that only context will define its sense. Given the semantic range of φρόνημα, the phrases often translated “mind of the Spirit” and “mind of the flesh” can refer to the divergent frames of mind, cognitive dispositions, or cognitive approaches of the Spirit and of the flesh. In today’s terms, one might think partly of how outlooks and character are shaped by the different worldviews, or approaches to reality, of these two spheres. One mind focuses on the matters of God; the other is oriented around only matters involving the self and its desires (Rom. 8:5–6).
 
Philo, who often employs the term φρόνημα, may provide a sample of Diaspora Jewish intellectual usage. He generally uses the term to mean disposition, attitude, or character. As such, it is a settled direction of the personality, not a matter of fleeting thoughts; certainly, this must be true also for Paul, who plainly depicts the corrupted mind of Romans 1:28–31 not as a matter of fleeting thoughts but as a matter of characteristic ones. This disposition may be intelligent, philosophic, untrained and undiscerning, free or slavish, proud or broken, noble, enduring, mature, or brave and courageous. (As one expects from Philo, such aspects of character often correlate with masculinity or with being effeminate.)
 
Because ancient intellectuals often associated such aspects of character with one’s way of thinking, it is not surprising that for Philo the term φρόνημα often has cognitive associations, including in ways associated with the sort of intellectual thought elsewhere addressed by Paul. Thus, for Philo φρόνημα ideally contemplates matters beyond heaven rather than lowly ones. It can be divine, viewing matters from a divine perspective and desiring nothing earthly. It can be subject to or avoid pleasure. Ideally, it should think not only of its own locale but with wise knowledge about the cosmos.
 
Paul certainly includes cognitive associations, because he clearly associates the meaning of this noun with the cognate verb φρονέω, which occurs in Romans 8:5. Yet Paul means even more than exclusively “disposition,” “character,” “attitude,” or “frame of mind,”because he uses the same language in relation to the mind of the Spirit (see 8:27). That is, for Paul, the new way of thinking is empowered by God’s own activity.
 
The mind-frame of the Spirit thus not only contemplates God and shares God’s agendas; it depends on God, recognizing the liberation accomplished in Christ (Rom. 8:2) and the consequent power to live a new way (8:3). This is the perspective that Paul has been communicating in previous chapters: believers are righted by Christ, not themselves (cf. 3:21–5:11), and this righting includes a new life in union with Christ (5:12–6:11). Just as Paul depends on Christ for being righted, he depends on God’s Spirit for being able to appropriate the cognitive moral character consonant with one who is righted. One who behaves by the new identity is thus walking by the Spirit. For Paul, the new frame for thinking is effective because it depends on the reality of Christ and thus of the new identity in him.

- Craig S. Keener, The Mind of the Spirit: Paul's Approach to Transformed Thinking, 2016

The Images of Holy Spirit

Adding to the images of "anointing," "seal," "down payment," and "firstfruits" , one can draw firm conclusions:
 
1. The wide variety of images and figures of speech in itself indicates that no single one will do. The work of Christ, applied by the Spirit in Christian conversion, simply has to many facets to be captured by a single image. In almost every case the choice of images is related to the perspective on the human condition that is addressed in the context. Thus, propitiation responds to our being under God's wrath; redemption to our being enslaved to sin; justification to our guilt before God's law; reconciliation to our being God's enemies; sanctification to our being unholy; washing to our being unclean; and so on.
 
2. The images tend to be used in keeping with the emphasis of the moment, thus the point in context is what is at issue, not the precise timing or relationships in conversion.
 
3. There is no such thing as Christian conversion that does not have the coming of the Spirit into the believer's life as the critical ingredient. However variously expressed, the presence of die Spirit is the one constant.
 

- Gordon D. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God. p94.

The Spirit as Holy

For Paul, "holiness," that is, walking by means of the Holy Spirit, has two aspects. On the one hand, it means abstaining from some sins—absolutely. Since in Christ believers have died to both sin (the flesh) and the law, they are to serve God "in the newness of the Spirit" (Rom 7:6). They must put to death the former way of life (Rom 6:1-18; 8:12-13; Col 3:5-11), portrayed in Galatians 5:19-21 as "the works of the flesh," which refers to life before and outside Christ. Such a life is no longer an option for the new people of God, who indeed have become a people by the indwelling of the Spirit of God. Paul, therefore, understands "putting to death" the works of the flesh as the empowering work of the Spirit (Rom 8:12-13).
 
On the other hand, "holiness" also (especially) means the Holy Spirit living in believers, reproducing the life of Christ within and among them, particularly in dieir communal relationships. To do otherwise is to "grieve the Holy Spirit o f God" (Eph 4:30), who by his presence has given them both unity and mutual growth. For this reason, Paul's most common language for the people of God is "the saints" (= God's holy people). They live differendy in their relationships with one another, and are empowered to do so, because they are Spirit people, whatever else they may be.
 

- Gordon D. Fee, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God. p109.

Unity in the Spirit

Unity is a dominical value, as our Lord’s prayer in the garden shows (John 17). And unity in the Spirit is an apostolic value, as both Paul’s writings and his practice show. Recall that Paul instructs the Ephesian believers to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3). To live this way is to walk in a manner worthy of their calling to be Christians (Eph. 4:1). Paul practiced what he preached. His espoused theology and his operational theology were one. And so he entreats Euodia and Syntyche—both of whom were gospel workers with him—“to agree in the Lord” (Phil. 4:2–3). These women need to heed his earlier general admonition to the Philippians that if they have “any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy,” then the way to complete Paul’s joy was to be unified in mind and in love (Phil. 2:1–2). Humility needs to replace rivalry and conceit (v. 3). To give a different Pauline example, what the Jerusalem church thought of the Gentile mission mattered to him. He rejoiced that “the right hand of fellowship” with its leadership had been extended to him (Gal. 2:1–10)—even though it is clear from the argument of his Galatians letter that, if he had thought that the Galatian leaders’ approval would have risked the integrity of his message of grace, he would not have mentioned it (Gal. 1:6–10; 2:11–14).
 
However, the NT nowhere mandates that a dull uniformity of Ecclesiastical polity is to be pursued. There is every indication that the Pauline communities developed differently from that in Jerusalem. “The right hand of fellowship” does not mean organizational homogeneity, nor that one apostolic leader such as Peter rose above all others (contra the claims of the church of Rome). 

In fact even the Pauline communities themselves may have differed in organization. The first letter to Timothy, for example, speaks of elders and deacons (1 Tim. 3:1–13), but the letter to Titus refers only to elders (Titus 1:5–9). His Corinthian correspondence refers neither to elders nor to deacons. In contrast the Jerusalem church seems to have ultimately come under the presidency of James the brother of Jesus (Acts 15:1–21). Indeed there is some extrabiblical evidence that the leadership of that church may have been kept within Jesus’ own family.

- Graham A. Cole, He Who Gives Life: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 2007

Unity in the Spirit-filled Reality

In Ephesians, Paul writes about the corporate life of God’s people as the church. In this great company both Jews and Gentiles have their place as the new temple of the holy God indwelt by the Spirit of God (Eph. 2:11–22). The unity established by Christ’s death needs maintenance, though. Indeed the Ephesians ought to be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (4:3). When they gather, they are not to behave as the Gentiles do (5:6–11). Christian meetings are not to be debauched as though all were drunk with wine and out of control (5:18). In contrast, the Spirit is to fill them as God’s temple with group practices that are other-person-centered. In relation to one another, they are to address one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs and submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. In relation to the Lord Jesus himself, they are to sing and make melody in their collective heart to him. And as for the Father, they are to give thanks to him for everything. A congregation where such practices are found, motivated by other-person-centered regard—whether vertically in a Godward direction or horizontally in a fellow believer’s direction—is a Spirit-filled reality, a true temple of God. Understood as above, Ephesians may provide better tests for evaluating a church’s health than the acreage of the church’s parking.
 
The biblical answer to the question of how I as an individual may be filled with the Spirit is subtle. One of the stories in Acts provides the way forward, I believe. In Acts 4:23–31 we find Peter and John rejoining their friends after a brief stay in custody. They had been interrogated by the chief priests and elders about a healing incident in the temple and about their preaching Christ (Acts 4:1–22). In a unity of response to the apostles’ report the disciples call upon the sovereign Lord in prayer to “look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word [the gospel] with all boldness” (v. 29). The Lord answered their prayer: “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness” (v. 31). Significantly these disciples did not pray that they might be filled with the Spirit in order to respond appropriately to the hostility they had encountered. Instead they prayed for the boldness they needed, and in so praying they were filled with the Spirit. When they made the object of their prayer the godly need in that hour, then the fullness came. If I want to be filled with the fullness of the Spirit, then let me set my heart on doing the will of God and call upon him for the enablement to do so (e.g., to preach the gospel faithfully and effectively next Sunday). Unlike idols, the living God answers prayers (cf. Isa. 46:1–7 and Ps. 116:1). 

- Graham A. Cole, He Who Gives Life: The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, 2007

Pseudo-gospels

In most of the world churches are liable to be swamped by the so-called prosperity gospel, and in the richer parts of the world churches struggle to guard the gospel against metamorphosing into what we might call the therapeutic gospel. These two closely-related pseudo-gospels threaten to displace the authentic Christian and Biblical gospel.

The prosperity gospel, in its crudest form, is the message that God wants you to be rich, and if you trust him and ask him, he will make you rich.

What happens to the prosperity gospel when I already enjoy prosperity? It metamorphoses into the therapeutic gospel. In its simplest form, this false gospel says that if I feel empty and I come to Jesus, Jesus will fill me. The promise of objective goods (money, wife, husband, children) metamorphoses into the claiming of subjective benefits. I feel depressed, and Jesus promises to lift my spirits. I feel aimless, and Jesus commits himself to giving me purpose in life. I feel empty inside, and Jesus will fill me.

The therapeutic gospel is the gospel of self-fulfillment. It makes me, already healthy and wealthy, feel good.

- Christopher Ash, Job: The Wisdom of the Cross, 2014.

The Prosperity Heresy of Positive Faith

It has two main and very different manifestations: 

(1) a kind of “New Age” positive thinking religion rooted in the nineteenth-century quasireligious movement called “New Thought,” 

 (2) a neo-Pentecostal, charismatic religion touted by television evangelists that revels in miracles. 

On the surface these two manifestations seem radically different, but below the surface they share much in common. For both, God is a kind of cosmic vending machine who must provide health and wealth to all who have “positive faith” expressed in words of faith—spoken affirmations or declarations that create reality through divine power. Both treat prayer as magic without realizing it. Both deny God’s sovereignty and put God and his power at human disposal. Both elevate health and wealth to the status of ultimate goods. Both claim to be Christian while distorting biblical, historical, classical, orthodox Christianity to the point that it is unrecognizable.
 
The “New Age” manifestation of this heresy is promoted by various “positive thinking” spiritual gurus influenced by the nineteenth-century movement known as New Thought, which will be described later. It is not Pentecostal or charismatic and often includes belief in reincarnation. Its god is not personal, transcendent, or holy but an impersonal power resident in every-thing. The human mind is able to tap into it through positive thinking and speaking. The neo-Pentecostal manifestation of this heresy is also influenced by nineteenth-century New Thought, but it is blended with twentieth-century Pentecostalism and charismatic spirituality and heavily influenced by the “divine healing” movement of nineteenth and twentieth-century Christian revivalism. It is closer to orthodox Christianity but takes it in a very different direction through its emphasis on God as guarantor of health and wealth.

- Roger E. Olson, Counterfeit Christianity: The Persistence of Errors in the Church, 2015.

Emotion Does Not Produce Faith

Faith for Tillich does involve passionate emotions; “but emotion does not produce faith.” Faith cannot be confused with emotional outbursts or feelings of rapture, though it can involve such things.
 
Faith for Tillich also includes a cognitive component, but only “as an inseparable element in a total act of acceptance and surrender.” If one reduces faith to a cognitive act, faith would be confused with mere belief. It would lose its quality as a living reality.
 
Similarly, faith involves the will, but “faith is not a creation of the will.” To reduce faith to an act of the will is to confuse it with a mere act of obedience to a moral imperative.
 

- Paul Tillich and Pentecostal Theology: Spiritual Presence and Spiritual Power, p90-91

Faith on Tillich's Theology

Faith for Tillich does involve passionate emotions; “but emotion does not produce faith.” Faith cannot be confused with emotional outbursts or feelings of rapture, though it can involve such things. Faith for Tillich also includes a cognitive component, but only “as an inseparable element in a total act of acceptance and surrender.” If one reduces faith to a cognitive act, faith would be confused with mere belief. It would lose its quality as a living reality. Similarly, faith involves the will, but “faith is not a creation of the will.” To reduce faith to an act of the will is to confuse it with a mere act of obedience to a moral imperative.
 
In sum, faith assumes “being grasped and changed by Spiritual Presence,” without which faith is degraded “into a belief, an intellectual act produced by will and emotion”. Human capacities cannot ultimately account for the reality of faith.
 
Faith as an intellectual capacity is impossible in part because of the pneumatological nature of revelation. The Spiritual Presence grants not abstract meaning but rather “meaning-bearing power which grasps the human spirit in ecstatic experience”
 
“Faith is the state of being grasped by the transcendent unity of unambiguous life— it embodies love as the state of being taken into that transcendent unity”. The quality of our love, however, is not the basis of justification. In justification, “we surrender our goodness to God” and affirm unambiguous life in the midst of the ambiguity and estrangement of finite existence. Justifying faith as a transformative reality also locates justification within regeneration and healing as the more encompassing soteriological reality. Tillich is adamant in maintaining that “faith means being grasped by a power that is greater than we are, a power that shakes us and turns us, and transforms us and heals us.”

- Paul Tillich and Pentecostal Theology : Spiritual Presence and Spiritual Power, p90-92

Theology and Philosophy

The Task of Theology

The task of theology is to acquire not observational knowledge about God (as in naturalistic empiricism) or conceptual mastery of him (as in idealistic rationalism) but an understanding of his will and purpose disclosed in Jesus Christ, an understanding that eventuates in obedience. What characterizes theology is not the comprehension of divine mysteries nor the apprehension of human possibilities but fidelity to the Word of God, which involves acknowledging human limitations but also confessing the gift of divine illumination in the midst of these limitations.
 
Theology can never be definitive, for it is always a contemporary exposition of the definitive biblical word. It does not precede proclamation in the form of prediscussion but follows it in the form of reflection (Thielicke).
 
From the evangelical perspective, our knowledge of God is neither synthetic nor analytic in the purely philosophical sense. We do not take the way of idealism, seeking to analyze the individual parts of a comprehensive unified picture of reality. Nor do we take the way of empirical rationalism, striving for a unified vision of the various facets of experience. Instead, our task is simply to reiterate or reaffirm what is given in revelation, humbly listening to God’s Word and then endeavoring to translate this Word into human thoughts, words and actions. At the same time, we try as best we can to arrive at a coherent or comprehensive picture of reality by interpreting the whole of experience in the light of God’s Word. This picture will always be incomplete and open–ended, however, since the total vision of reality lies beyond the compass of human reason, even one informed by faith.
 
A Case for Theonomy
 
Theology’s criterion is the will and purpose of God as demonstrated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, attested in Holy Scripture. The focus of theology is neither on divine essence nor on human existence but on divine existence in humanity as we see this in Jesus Christ. Philosophy is inclined to champion autonomy, trusting in the self for direction and certainty, as opposed to heteronomy, submission to an external standard or power alien to the self (Kant). Theology presents a case for theonomy, in which the self submits to an authority beyond the self that is at the same time its ground and goal.
In philosophy reality signifies either mind or matter, or an underlying unity between them, such as force or energy. In theology the prime reality is the living God, who brings the world of temporality and materiality into being and creates the energy that vitalizes this world. Moreover, this living God is not reducible to mind or thought but instead constitutes a dynamic unity of will and intelligence, of being and action. He is the self–existing and self–sustaining One (Causa sui) whose knowledge encompasses all human perceptions and conceptions but at the same time infinitely transcends them.
 
Idol by Imagination v.s. True God
 
I agree with Pascal that the God of the philosophers is something other than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is the difference between an idol created by the imagination and the experience of the true God. The relation between theology and philosophy is not one of synthesis or correlation but one of conflict and contradiction.
 
The passionate concern of theology is “God’s search for man,” not “man’s quest for God” (Barth). Our knowledge of God is based on God’s gracious initiative toward us, not on our perceptivity or striving. For Plato we reach the ultimate principle of unity by “pure intelligence.” For Plotinus we reach this principle by inward purification and ecstatic self–transcendence. For Kant we reach it by practical reason or moral will. For the theologian we receive it when we are confronted by the living Christ in the awakening to faith.

- Donald G. Bloesch, A Theology of Word and Spirit: 

Authority & Method in Theology, pp39-44.

 
 

 

The Supposed Warfare between Christianity and Science

Real science arose only once: in Europe. China, Islam, India, and ancient Greece and Rome each had a highly developed alchemy. But only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry. By the same token, many societies developed elaborate systems of astrology, but only in Europe did astrology lead to astronomy. Why?

 
The answer lies in the Christian West’s view of God, creation and humanity. Unlike cultures elsewhere, “Christians developed science because they believed it could be done, and should be done.” 
 
Philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead noted in Science and the Modern World that the medievalists insisted on “the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality.”
 
Lacking any doctrine of creation, these other cultures could only posit a universe that is, “a supreme mystery, inconsistent, unpredictable, and arbitrary. For those holding these religious premises, the path to wisdom is through meditation into mystical insights and there is no occasion to celebrate reason.” But Christianity, on the contrary, “depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension.”

- Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: 

A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith, 2011.