June 1, 2020

In a culture given to humanism and its seminal value of autonomy, submission to authority is not esteemed; rather, authority is disdained.

All authority, however, is divinely ordained but not all authority figures act congruent with their divine commissioning. Nevertheless, Christians are mandated to obey divinely ordained authority with a singular exception: when obedience to human authority conflicts with obedience to God. The Christian norm is that obedience to human authority is obedience to God, but when human authority is inconsistent with divine authority, divine authority supersedes human authority.

In the Creation Mandate,¹ divine authority was delegated to mankind to steward the Creator’s physical universe. Since the fall of man, however, mankind has been in rebellion against divine authority. Nevertheless, for the first fifty-four hundred years of history, mankind tepidly submitted to God. In most cultures, people revered a god or gods that served as external reference points to define truth and physical reality.²

About seven hundred years ago, a change occurred. William of Occam posited a theory that mankind did not need an external reference point to define truth and physical reality. This eliminated the need for a transcendent God and emboldened mankind to believe that, in and of themselves, mankind could define truth and physical reality. This meant that the understanding of truth and physical reality did not require transcendent absolutes. Man could define truth and reality using his own mind and sense perception. Consequently, the idea of a necessary God as the transcendent Creator and external reference point has been progressively rejected over the past seven hundred years. This ideology is called nominalism.

Nominalism elevated man and denigrated God, which emboldened the bias to humanism innate in the fallen nature of mankind. Prior to nominalism, biblical authority was highly regarded even by those who did not embrace a Christian view of God. But with the rise of nominalism, there has been an evolving decline in both biblical credibility and authority.

This pattern of disdain and disregard for Scripture began slowly. In the past two hundred years, it accelerated. Here is a brief synopsis of the deterioration and what is likely to happen in the future, particularly in the USA.

• Fourteenth century: William of Occam posited nominalism—an ideology that disconnected the transcendent Creator from truth and reality.
• Seventeeth century: Francis Bacon posited that knowledge is neutral, that is, knowledge exists independent of God.
• Eighteenth century: The Enlightenment era was an effort to inaugurate a secular society based on the predicate of atheism—a corollary of nominalism.
• Nineteenth century: Education at all levels (primary, secondary, universities, and seminaries) was disconnected from theology. Secular education became normative.
• Twentieth century: Public policy, economics, and social norms were disconnected from biblical norms.
  • Public policy and legal rulings were no longer made based on a biblical worldview.
  • Economics was disconnected from scriptural norms through Keynesian economics.
  • The governance of sexual relationships was changed from biblical norms to the humanist norm of mutual consent. Abortion was legalized to support the social sexual standard of mutual consent.
  • With sexual relationships decoupled from biblical norms, the biblical norms for the family—including marriage, divorce, and parenting—were rejected. Marriage was no longer a biblical covenant between a man and a woman; it was simply another option for social order. Cohabitation became normative even among professing Christians. And the definition of a family was deemed to be a human construct that could include any number of people.
• Twenty-first century: Secularization of everything is normative. Biblical authority is summarily rejected as the basis for defining right and wrong in any context.
  • Secular social norms (e.g., homosexuality and transgenderism): The full expression of human autonomy means that sexual preference and gender identity are defined by each person.
  • Secular government at all levels: Atheists protest any religious symbology on public property based on their own definition of separation of church and state. Public policy is decoupled from biblical teaching.

What is coming? Without divine intervention, the pattern of secularization will continue to disconnect any vestiges of Christianity from the culture. There will be no tolerance of Christian norms.

• Mandatory public education for all will be defined by the secular state that will promote secular norms. Private schools and homeschooling will either be banned or forced to capitulate to the secular norms.
• Christianity based on biblical norms will be banned. Secular (false) churches will meet publicly and the true church will be forced underground following the pattern of present-day China.
• The USA will soon move to bondage under socialism. The experiment will fail and morph into a dictatorship following the pattern of Germany in the 1930s.
• Economically, the USA will degenerate into third-world poverty.

Because secularization is a worldwide phenomenon and the USA is the economic leader of the world, the pattern of the USA will impact the world.

The USA was founded as a democratic republic in the eighteenth century during the rise of nominalism. And the USA is following a historical pattern noted by eighteenth-century scholar Alexander Tytler (1747–1813), a Scottish professor of history at the University of Edinburgh. He studied the history of democracies and developed the Tytler Cycle, a nine-phase theory of the cycle of democracies. The nine phases are listed below using the USA as an example:

1. Bondage began with the Puritans in the sixteenth century in England. In the seventeenth century, the Puritans immigrated to the British colonies in America because of religious persecution, but the bondage of the mother country continued.
2. Faith was stirred during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the people turned away from the oppressive rule of the king of England to faith in God.
3. Courage emboldened patriots who sought freedom through the eighteenth-century War of Independence.
4. Freedom was achieved by the eighteenth-century patriots who were victorious and founded the USA.
5. Abundance was realized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries based on Christian norms that dominated the culture during the Industrial Revolution.
6. Selfishness set in by the middle of the twentieth century. Narcissism arose as people squandered their prosperity on self-pleasures and self-fulfillment.
7. Complacency became common. Toward the end of the twentieth century, memory of Christian norms faded. People forgot their heritage; narcissism and hedonism became ensconced.
8. Apathy toward Christian norms followed ensconced narcissism and hedonism leading to relativistic norms in the twenty-first century.
9. Dependence will follow apathy as people no longer seek to solve their own problems, rather they look to government. This will lead to socialism that will fail and decay into a dictatorship.

The USA appears to be in phase 8. Apathy is the cultural attitude toward Christian norms that has enabled humanistic norms to be introduced and widely accepted even by many professing Christians.

Though the USA was founded on Christian norms, the USA was founded downstream of nominalism. Consequently, the rejection of God and biblical authority that came from nominalism, impacted the USA from its beginning. Specifically, the Christian view of God as the external reference point for defining truth and reality was challenged and humanistic relativism eventually prevailed. The unraveling of the USA from Christianity occurred in the midst of the Tytler cycle and, perhaps, has accelerated the cycle.

The social decay of nominalism has occurred with little resistance from Christians who have functioned as if they are powerless to stop it. Nominalism has given humanism unprecedented support and Christians have tacitly agreed.

The failure of the Christian community to resist the unprecedented rise of humanism reveals that the Christian community is not well enough grounded in the Christian faith to fight the battles. Biblical illiteracy and a lack of commitment to Scripture are so pervasive that professing Christians do not know God’s truth. Therefore, they cannot respond to the humanists and credibly offer a biblical view of truth and reality. When Christians are impotent, the world is lost. Such is the condition today.

May the Christians of the world repent and return to the authority of Scripture as the basis for defining truth and reality. Only then can Christians stop the decay and lead a lost world to the Creator’s definition of truth and reality.

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1. Genesis 1:26–28.
2. Physical reality is the tangible expression of intangible truth.

Seminar: Strategic Life Alignment