This is a continuation of my comments on the book, Christianity on the Offense: Responding to the Beliefs and Assumptions of Spiritual Seekers (1998), by Dan Story.
Story calls on Christians to challenge and examine their own world view presuppositions and also those of others and to think logically and clearly about what they believe and why they believe it. He presents and explains the use of tools to carry out this examination. He shows "that the majority of the arguments hurled against Christianity are relatively easy to respond to" by the use of these tools to examine the unprovable and unsupportable presuppositions of those challenging Christianity. He also correctly states that "Secular humanism has usurped Christianity as the guiding social force in Western culture," and he identifies the most dangerous of the new world views.
Taking the world views in the order of their appearance, Story uses the same set of questions to examine each. Each of these philosophies has millions of adherents and each has affected modern Christianity as we know it.
Pantheism: Everything is God. Each person is innately divine and, ultimately, everything is absorbed into the one reality.
Christianity: God is personal and Truth is absolute. This absolute truth can be known and understood. Reality is ultimately rational. "Christianity encourages people to confirm its truth-claims. (Acts 17: 11)
Naturalism: There is no God, there is only nature and natural laws. Reality is what we can see, feel, taste, hear, and measure. All of reality can potentially be measured and understood.
Secular Humanism: This is the prevailing world view in modern Western society. It began as the rationalism of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Man is God and is the ultimate measure of what is true. Humans are of ultimate value. The human mind is potentially the master of all reality.
Postmodernism: This is the newest and the most rapidly growing of the modern world views challenging the Christian ἐκκλησία, and potentially the most dangerous. Postmodernism rejects human reason and logic as a source of truth because it declares that there is no absolute truth. Since there is no absolute truth, ethics are relative, all religions are equally true, and personal experience is more important than any external authority. There is no ultimate basis for proven knowledge of any kind. Modern Western culture is seen as repressive to the individual. There is a deep distrust of reason and logic; truth is subjective, pluralistic, and collectivist, and is not reachable by reason. Your truth may not be my truth.
Story correctly points out that the postmodernist philosophy leads to chaos on may levels. Since chaos is quite uncomfortable, it can eventually lead to the imposition of authoritarian measures to restore order. If there is no standard on which to base judgement, how is it possible to oppose the Hitlers of the world?
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