humanism

A long time ago I posted an article on George Mueller’s “strategy for showing God”. Unfortunately, due to a malfunction somewhere in the system, it was not updated and I lost three months’ worth of posts. Ouch. That hurt. Mueller, as you may know, is famous for the orphanages he ran, though he actually did a lot more besides. John Piper wrote a wonderful article on Mueller, which I linked to at the time and here I link again. I insist that you read it, for if you don’t, I’m convinced that your Christian journey will be stunted forever. (My goodness, I am treating my readers like my children. “Eat your vegetables or you’ll go blind.”)

Mueller’s reason for opening the orphanages was not merely to change the world for the better on a humanistic scale. In his own words, he gave as his main reasons for doing so:

1. That God may be glorified, should He be pleased to furnish me with the means, in its being seen that it is not a vain thing to trust in Him; and that thus the faith of His children may be strengthened. 2. The spiritual welfare of fatherless and motherless children. 3. Their temporal welfare.

So in my unlearnedness in such matters, I decided to post my thoughts on a private forum to see what I might glean from others who have trodden the path of public service before me. So far only one person has responded, but perhaps others will join in. I posted my query because I am tired of straddling the fence on mission projects and causes. There are so many public service projects going on, and half of them I think are as rooted in humanism as anything else even though they have the banner “Christian” over them. In fact, the world has come to expect that the church is there to serve its “felt needs”. While I sympathize with the world in its plight, I do not want to be sucked into slavery trying to save it from itself.

When I was younger I was very interested in many relief projects but my interest was shot down by others on the grounds that 1) to do practical things for people was not going in the “power of the spirit”, i.e., miracles, and 2) it was based on pure humanism.

As to the first, I was thinking the other day about when Jesus told His disciples they would do greater miracles than He did. Jesus couldn’t do miracles in some places because the people lacked faith. But the ones He did the greatest miracles in didn’t believe in Him. When He was sought out by people who wanted to do His works, He told them that the work of the Father was that they should believe on Him. He also said, “Blessed is he who has not seen and yet believes.” Most of the people who have believed in Jesus have died without ever witnessing a true miracle. When you consider how many converts have been made without seeing a miracle, that has to be a great miracle out of the “power of God”. Ironic.

The e-letter that I mentioned by John Fenn in the previous post made me reconsider point number two. He was addressing universalism. He made a very good case concerning God’s provision for those living without knowledge of either the spiritual law or of the specific knowledge of Jesus Christ. He spoke of these “lovers of the truth” who instinctively obey the law written in their hearts as those who will flow into the truth when they hear it and be born again into the kingdom. Paris Reidhead (“Ten Shekels and a Shirt“) made an equally valid point about those living in darkness who knew more about God than he ever imagined, who knew all about the judgment of God and didn’t care — “monsters of iniquity” he called them. It must have been daunting to learn that he went to Africa to help people who didn’t want to be helped. Living in the ungrateful society we inhabit in the West, it is easy to fear that the people we serve may all be of the second variety, but what if many are also of the first kind?

Bruce Olson discovered the first kind among the Motilone Indians of Colombia. How else could it be that they had any idea they needed to know the way back to God? How could they have had a true prophecy among their people that one day God would send them a yellow-haired prophet to show them the way? They already involved God in the affairs of their everyday lives. They just didn’t know who He was exactly. When Olson showed up, they were ready to believe.

If Fenn is correct about how God operates among lovers of the truth who have not yet heard or understood Jesus Christ, it changes the paradigm completely of who we think we are serving in the “dark” world. We know, of course, that we ought to do good until all people in a general sense and that we ought to do good in particular to the brethren.

Gal 6:10 As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all [men], especially unto them who are of the household of faith.

Too often this thinking degenerates into helping only those members of the same “club” which some call “church”. In that “church” are often people as dysfunctional and liable to suck us away as those unwashed masses in the world. Then you have to wonder who are you helping and to what end? It’s not always an easy answer, in any case.

Here I have to bring up the Sermon on the Mount. It is the favorite for religious modern liberal activists. They tend to see this as THE gospel of Christ and very often it is a Cross-less gospel. The point, according to them, is to make the world a better place by making people care for one another. They have no problem loving their neighbor, and in fact, lift love of neighbor ahead of loving God, which is backwards of the commandments. Often they try to enforce love of neighbor through politics according to their own understanding about how to fix others. But Jesus was not talking about a matter of enforcement or changing society. He was talking about a personal choice as He addressed a select group of people — mainly those of the household of Israel.

On the other hand, there is some practical good in teaching the unbelieving to look on one another’s best interests. It won’t make them righteous, but it does make the world a bit more liveable. It brings to mind where Paul talked about praying for those in authority:

1Ti 2:2 For kings, and [for] all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.

It wasn’t for the sake of society at large, but so the saints could function well. Society enjoys the positive fallout of the peace of the saints. Reidhead noted that the happiness of mankind is a byproduct and not a prime product of the kingdom of God. God’s purposes always come first and society-at-large reaps the benefit.

This knowledge that there are many seekers of the truth scattered in among those who love darkness shines a whole new light on what good we do as we engage in helping the world materially and socially. By this, I certainly don’t mean to imply that we involve ourselves in a sort of spiritual blackmail that the world must convert if we are to help it. But I do mean to say that our efforts are assuredly not in vain if we keep in mind George Mueller’s points of strategy. It is essentially the same strategy that applies to our helping ourselves.

Keeping these things in mind, it’s much easier to consider the Sermon on the Mount in its proper place, as secondary to loving God. I am convinced that the Sermon on the Mount is about the Lord of the work and not about the work of the Lord. Those who live out of its spirit, bring the kingdom of God near to the nations in the most mundane things.

I’d like to share a sermon by Paris Reidhead, “Ten Shekels and a Shirt“, that I didn’t quite understand the first time I saw it posted somewhere. Perhaps it was the terms in which it was addressed by the poster that threw me. I had almost the impression that if we don’t all do some amazing thing like sell ourselves into lifetime slavery as some of the early Moravians did, we have not truly given ourselves over to the Lord.

Now you can imagine what thoughts were turning over in my mind at the trajectory of what would happen if every Christian believer in the world went on a works-based frenzy and did this. I wondered what would happen to families and children if we all threw ourselves simultaneously into some machinery that crushed out our lives and that of our posterity? What would happen to the whole world, in fact? Thankfully, God is more practical than this. He doesn’t send us willy-nilly to the ovens.

But I think the real point to the sermon is why do we do anything that we do? Is it for God or for ourselves that we do it? Reidhead tears the mask off of humanism in our works, even the works of the missionary on the field, evangelism, charities and other good works. I thought to post this after finding the Cross missing from the words of many well-intentioned people who are leading others straight out of the faith and hindering those who would enter. If it’s true that wolves don’t stick around too long when the emphasis is on the Cross in our lives, the blood of Jesus and the like, then — by George — let’s talk about these things all the time!

The Cross has much more application to our lives than sitting around in a doorway of hope. It’s about the path beyond, too. If I muse a bit much on meditation for some tastes, then let me add that meditation is listening to God and learning His ways. It’s what you do when you ponder your Path. It has no lasting benefit except for those who know the Cross! How can you know His ways if you don’t know His Cross? How can you obey Him in anything else if you won’t obey His Cross?

Sometimes I think of the Path of God as a river with people camped to the right and to the left of it. On one side of the river are those trying to save the lost through the preaching of repentance and remission of sins. On the other side are the folks who want to show the entire world the love of God through many channels, keeping in mind that it is the love of God that leads us to repentance. Both have access to the same river and are able to have communion with one another, though they may look a bit cross-eyed across the river sometimes at one another.

Then there are the fringes camped so far out there that they have cut themselves off from the stream. There is no life in their words and they water no one. The one group preaches such a stringent hell-fire and damnation message that it seems no one can be saved. For these legalists, salvation is about pulling your butt out of the fire. On the opposite side are teachers against the necessity of the work of the Cross in a personal way. They declare that the Cross is no longer important in a practical way for whatever reason they dream up — there are many variations on this thinking. Salvation for them is about making humanity happy.

Somewhere in the middle is the “now, but not yet” bunch who believe the kingdom of God is in us but does not yet have full expression in the earth. (I would be in this group.) And I tend to favor floating in the river, which is why I catch it from both camps on either side. It’s also why I favor a contemplative experience of God but won’t join causes like “Make Poverty History” and things like that. In the first instance, you have nothing to contemplate if you don’t have the Cross. In the second, you can’t make poverty history unless you can change the hearts of evil humanity — how are you going to do that without a Cross?

So while two camps eye each other suspiciously across the river, they both dip into the same stream of life. They will see eye-to-eye on a few things, namely the Cross, the Blood of Christ, repentance, and knowing God as indispensable. The fringes cannot give a cup of water to the thirsty — they have none to give, having placed themselves too far from the Source. Both of them are humanistic, the goal being to save humanity for its own sake and happiness, inasmuch as they can discern what it needs to be saved from.

I choose to make the river the priority, in case you ever wondered at the lack of moral causes and organizations showcased on this site. I choose my battles carefully, shaking hands on both sides of the river with those who do feel called to tackle some issues in this world. Though there must be scant benefit to these things, I prefer the option of doing all to the glory of God. I believe that Reidhead summed it up in the middle of his sermon: “Didn’t God intend to make man happy? Yes. But as a by-product, and not a prime-product.”

A growing trend in the churches of the Western World deeply troubles me. Call it apostasy, call it “doctrines of demons”, call it humanism and it is all one and the same boiling cauldron of lawlessness. The worldly church loves with an unholy love stripped of all righteousness and justice and calls it “the love of God”. They teach their fellows that there is no difference between the repentant and the [willful] sinner, that all may participate in the celebratory victory of Jesus Christ.

To that, I raise the question: How can you enter resurrection if you’ve never passed through death? How can you have forgiveness if you’ve never had repentance? For if you don’t have those things first, you have no right to drink of the cup of Christ. “But, but, but…..,” protest the rising voices. “You are unloving.” But I reflect on this:

Jhn 13:35 By this shall all [men] know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

“One to another” in the context here does not refer to everyone in the world, but to disciples. And my objection is that these love everyone except the Lord’s disciples. Nor can they love the disciples unless they first subvert them into lovers of the world. In fact, they persecute the disciples, wearing them down if possible to bring them into submission to their humanistic gospel.

There is a naive idea that we ought to fellowship with any and all believers, even if they bring uncleanness into the equation. This is spiritual harlotry. The spirit is seductive and will suck the unaware into academic circular discussions and spiritual filth that will militate against their own souls. How can light have fellowship with darkness, righteousness with unrighteousness? Some, bless their hearts, want to dialogue with these firebrands, in hopes of bringing them back.

And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all [men], apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; [2 Tim 2:24-25]

If, on the other hand, we are dealing with those who think themselves to be mature teachers and will not regard sound doctrine, we have advice from the first century church:

…but if the teacher himself turn and teach another doctrine with a view to subvert you, hearken not to him; [The Didache, 11:2]

Timothy continues in this vein:

…in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves … Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. [2 Tim 3:1-7]

We are there. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have tasted and handled. I believe we are living in the days of a ripened humanism.

…humanism is a philosophical statement that declares the end of all being is the happiness of man. The reason for existence is man’s happiness. Now according to humanism, salvation is simply a matter of getting all the happiness you can out of life. [Paris Reidhead, "Ten Shekels and a Shirt", sermon]

Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth [John16:13]. Not one person I have ever heard argue for the humanistic gospel has testified of being apprehended by God, brought to his knees in repentance, and radically transformed from a state of death and sin into a state of life. They read books, gather speakers and teachers; they swim in suppositions about things that may or may not be and declare them as fact. They posture and they strut, but not one ever speaks of the ongoing reality of the Cross or the power of the blood of Jesus in his own soul! Nor do they open the way that others may access the Door of the Kingdom.

I’m afraid that it’s become so subtle that it goes everywhere. What is it? In essence it’s this! That this philosophical postulate that the end of all being is the happiness of man, has been sort of covered over with evangelical terms and Biblical doctrine until God reigns in heaven for the happiness of man, Jesus Christ was incarnate for the happiness of man, all the angels exist in the…, Everything is for the happiness of man! AND I SUBMIT TO YOU THAT THIS IS UNCHRISTIAN !!! Isn’t man happy? Didn’t God intend to make man happy? Yes. But as a by-product and not a prime-product! [Reidhead]

The humanistic gospel is the most self-righteous and self-serving gospel I have ever heard. It is the gospel of “niceness” rather than love and salvation. Its adherents compass land and sea to make one proselyte and then make him twice the child of hell as themselves [Mat. 23:15]. The worst humanists are the ones who call themselves believers. Flee this pollution!