Different Disciples for a Dystopian Age
The late, but great statesman, diplomat, scholar, and Christian, Dr. Charles Malik, both warned of and described the present cultural situation in his 1982 address at Wheaton College.
“The problem is not only to win souls, but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lose the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world. Indeed, it may turn out you have actually lost the world.” [1]
The little book that Malik published on this theme was called The Two Tasks. The first task is to evangelize souls; the second task was to evangelize minds. Malik warned us all of the left’s[2] long walk through our universities. He was saying if we don’t produce Christian scholars to populate the faculties, we will produce future generations of leaders who are cut off from their nation’s history and first principles. Now, forty years on, Malik’s warning has become our reality.
The American Revolution was about equality of opportunity and required liberty and morality to flourish. The French Revolution was about equality of result and required tyranny and the guillotine. The present revolutionaries running through the streets of America don’t know the difference. Marxist-socialist theory taught in most of our universities has been dumbed down to burn it down, tear it down, shout it down, shut them up, and we will have a utopia of freedom and equality.
The word utopia means an imaginary world, it is no place because it doesn’t exist. What does exist is dystopia - a society that is dehumanizing and unpleasant. It is a tyrannical stew, a brew of Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Fahrenheit 451. Huxley’s fear was no one would read or be informed because we would amuse ourselves to death.[3] Orwell warned of Big Brother who controls your thoughts, words, and punishes those who violate those codes. If you can’t say it, you can’t refine and articulate it, and you can’t think it. Vonnegut portrayed a society of betrayal and distrust, a world of censorship and denial of liberty.
It is alarming, if you care to be alarmed, that our present revolutionaries don’t know the difference between MLK and BLM. Martin Luther King’s protests were peaceful, principled, and built on the Christian narrative reflected in the Declaration of Independence; what he called America’s promissory note. Of course, King was a sinner; we all are and have fallen short of God’s standard[4], but that doesn’t invalidate his life any more than the sins of the church cancel out its ideals and message. One day, every knee shall bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord[5]. We live to please God and to worship him only.
Black Lives Matter, the organization that is, holds to a very different creed. They are deceiving the public by marching through our culture, not to improve it, but to destroy it. To redefine the family, to break down the heterosexual dominance, as they put it, and to make valid any configuration of self-identifying people a family. If there is one thing that must be done to address the problem of the black underclass, gang violence, bad schools, and fatherless families, it is to strengthen the black family. A major change needed will be for the government to end its patronage system, and as Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley recently wrote, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.
We are at war! It is a cultural war, but, more profoundly, it is a war of ideas. Behind those ideas are persons and, finally, only two persons, God and Lucifer. We are in what writer Michael Walsh so eloquently calls The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. In his high culture exposition, he describes it this way:
“…a modern Devil’s Pleasure Palace, a Potemkin village built on promises of ‘social justice’ and equality for all, on visions of a world at last divorced from toil and sweat, where every man and woman is guaranteed a living, a world without hunger or want or cold or fear or racism or sexism [or any of the other “isms” the Left is forever inventing] …The Corpses of untold millions have died in the attempts of the literally Unholy Left to found the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth … something wicked this way has come, and we are in the fight of our lives. How, or even whether, we choose to fight it is not the subject of this book. The subject is why we must.” [6]
Why would we, the church, dirty our hands and join the fight? Why not just stick to souls? Because our disciples have failed and we have lost the culture. We’ve been making our kind of disciples for the past fifty years and look at what we have accomplished. The disciples we have produced have allowed the culture to be taken over by leftist ideology that is clearly anti-Christian, anti-gospel, and has cut off at least two generations from the biblical, literary, social, and cultural foundation of a working society. Those young people tearing down statues are our disciples.
We must make different disciples in order to get a different result. The church must take some responsibility as to why our members have not created our own Amazons, Googles ,Facebooks, movie studios, or television networks - all the new titans who run our society. So where do we begin? Let me suggest one place as a starting point that has not changed in 2000 years.
“We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments. We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.” - 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 NLT
To be continued…
[1] The Two Tasks, Charles Malik, IVP, 1980 page 32
[2] By “left” I am talking not about the Democrat Party per se. Politics are downstream from religion or world view, then comes culture at midstream and then politics merely reflects the culture. Take political correctness and the cancel culture as examples of downstream results of upstream beliefs. By “left” I refer to Marxist-Socialist Critical Theory that actually are rooted in Lucifer’s words to Eve, “Hath God said?” Something that questions the authority and veracity of God. Its more modern manifestation has been the Frankfurt school, the critical principle, Hegel’s Thesis, antithesis, synthesis dialectic and truth becoming a work product of logic and reason alone outside of divine revelation. The left’s philosophy is more prevalent in the democrat party right now, but hopefully that can change, and all hope is not lost. It also exists among Republicans in popular forms but is not baked into its principles.
[3] Also found in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, great book.
[4] Romans 3:23
[5] Romans 14:11, Philippians 2:10
[6] Michael Walsh, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, Encounter Books, New York, 2015, pages, 15,16.
