 For those of you visiting with us this morning or new to this class, we've begun a series on Sunday morning that we're calling A Theology of Public Life, Lessons for Lot in the City of Sodom. And if you're unsure what a theology of public life entails, what that's all about, Charles Matthews describes it as answering the question, what has Washington to do with Jerusalem? That's sort of what we're gonna be talking about. What has Washington to do with Jerusalem? We're gonna go a bit around our elbow to get to our thumb to get to that answer to that question. But I pray that the formative work that we're gonna do here before we get to the answer to that question will be helpful to you. A sound biblical theology of public life is comprised of or consists of principles to help instruct the disciple of Christ in how to faithfully engage the public in the cause of Christ. Now that certainly entails the Great Commission. Certainly entails preaching the gospel and we are called commanded to go into the world with the gospel, preach the gospel to every creature. But it goes beyond the preaching of the gospel to the ways in which a genuine Christian, genuine believer is to live out their faith in this lost world in which we are pilgrims and sojourners. We have a responsibility to this lost world not only with the gospel, but to address or engage this world with the cause of Christ. So that's not limited to merely discussing a life of public theology. That's not exactly what we're talking about, right? A life of public theology. In other words, just living out our theology in public. But more, it's refusing to be modern day monastics and living openly in accord with what we believe. But it's more than that. It's a theology of public life. In other words, engaging the public sphere in accord with what we believe. We see those examples of that throughout scripture. We're gonna talk about those some as we go. Paul tells us in 1 Timothy chapter two that we're to pray for those in authority so that we might lead a quiet and peaceable life. Well, the relatively quiet and peaceable life, that has been the experience of the church now in our country for the past 250 years since our founding. And we've not been compelled by necessity as brothers and sisters who went before us to answer this question in the way that they have or to deal with this issue in the way that they have. But our brothers and sisters in history certainly have been compelled to consider this subject and it certainly appears that we're going to need to do that as well. The time has come for us to think soberly and biblically about a theology of public life. So a theology of public life is a very broad subject. And so what we've done is a limit the scope of our study to two parts at the forefront of our concern. Part one, we're entitling Leviathan Rising. It's a broad overview of our responsibility for and relationship to the government as instituted by God. And we're gonna cover in part two, a social injustice. Little play on words. We'll deal more specifically with the subject there of social justice. By way of brief review then, as we get into our subject this morning, our objectives for this series are relatively simple. The first objective is to better understand the times in which we now live. And that's what we've spent last Sunday and now this Sunday doing. We wanna understand the times in which we live, the background of this subject, why it has become so important, maybe give some understanding as to why things have seemed to have changed so much in the last several years. And we want to objectively interpret our current circumstances from a biblical worldview. So first, we wanna better understand the times in which we now live. Secondly, we wanna determine from the Bible how it is that a believer should think and believe and act and engage. We cannot be modern day monastics. We've been called out of this world, but we are charged with being ambassadors for Christ to this world and we wanna be faithful in our responsibilities. And then third, having thought through those things, we wanna prepare ourselves to do that which we have determined with the Lord's help to do. And that's an important step. Also, we wanna think through what it is that we're responsible to do. And by the end of this study, we'll have some concrete plans in mind for what we are to do. And we'll be excited about talking through those with you. But then we as a church want to be faithful in laboring to do what it is we've determined to do with respect to this. So if you're following along your outline, we're in part one, Leviathan rising, we're covering point A now, the rise of the new religion. I've broken this first section, the rise of the new religion out into two parts. Last time we were together a couple of weeks ago, we considered out with the old. And so this morning we're gonna think about in with the new, out with the old, in with the new. And I want this to be casual. I'd like to be able to open it up for questions. If you have questions, please feel free to stop me. I just wanna have a casual conversation about these issues in hopes that it'll help us think more about this issue we're facing. In out with the old a couple of weeks ago, we described, if you remember, the generational replacement that's been going on in our country with respect to Christianity in particular. As millennials in particular are abandoning any affiliation with religious norms or traditions. Quite often that means a shift from old moral codes that have been traditionally upheld by Christianity. Those old moral codes now seem to be oppressive to true freedom and they are establishing a new moral code of their own making. We'll talk about that. That's what the social justice movement is. And as we add now adults to the population, these adults, many of them millennials are increasingly describing themselves as nuns. Not N-U-N-S but N-O-N-E-S. Agnostic, atheist or nun referring to no religious affiliation at all. And just for purposes of our understanding, anyone have a, understand the difference between an atheist and an agnostic? Can someone explain that for us? The difference between an atheist and an agnostic? Yeah, Noel. Thanks brother. I'll wait for a mic to come around for Noel. Hi guys, good morning. So new millennials are beginning to describe themselves as nuns, N-O-N-E-S. That includes either atheistic, agnostic or no religious affiliation whatsoever. We have that microphone yet? Oh, here we go. So we're looking at the difference then between atheist and agnostic. What do you got brother? An atheist would say, you could say like they would say definitively God does not exist. Whereas an agnostic would say, well, I don't know. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. Yeah, very good, very good. So athas or atheistic, no God, ag or agnosis, meaning no knowledge, right? So an atheist would say there is no God, an agnostic would say, I don't know. That's a good, fair description of atheists or agnostics. And others just have no religious affiliation at all. However, that term, nun, as we've talked about, N-O-N-E, is highly deceptive. And what we're seeing today is both the institution and the development of what we would characterize or describe as a new religion. They would themselves often describe it as a new religion. And it's really not a new religion, it's really an old religion wrapped up in new wrapping paper. And we're gonna take a look at that today. There are many today who are describing the social justice issue as a new religion. The social justice itself really isn't the new religion. Social justice seems to be the morality of the new religion. And what the new religion actually appears to be is a repackaged secular humanism, a repackaged secular humanism. And we're gonna talk about that some this morning just so we understand what that is. We're calling it a new religion, but it has very old roots. Secular humanism has been around for a very long time. And what the secular humanists in our day have done is they've now co-opted or adopted cultural or social Marxism as the morality of their new religion. We're gonna put all that together for you so we know at the end of all this exactly what that means. Secular humanists have now, it's interesting if you think about secular humanism, one of the objections that atheists or secular humanists themselves have had about secular humanism in the past is they don't believe that it can last or that a society can last apart from an objective morality. Right, apart from an objective morality, cultures, countries crumble. And we've seen that in history. And so the thought is by those who object to secular humanism is that without an objective transcendent morality, a morality that comes from outside you, the individual, without that, then societies can't last. They eventually crumble and die. But what's interesting about today's version of secular humanism is they seem to have adopted a morality that is somewhat objective and that's the morality of social justice and we're gonna see how those two things are connected. All right, so we're gonna talk about both a little bit here this morning. Let me give you first, I wanna give you an introduction of a broad overview, a very broad overview of secular humanism. And to do that first, I want you to turn with me to Romans chapter one. So we're gonna talk about it, I wanna give you a broad overview to secular humanism. But first I wanna, I want us to see the basis for that in the Bible from Romans chapter one. This is actually a text that we're gonna talk about this morning during the morning service and the sermon. And in Romans chapter one, why don't you look beginning at verse 22? Actually, let's back up a little bit and let's just begin at the beginning of our text. We're gonna be covering that this morning. So verse 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. So first thing they're doing, we've talked about this in the sermon so far, men are suppressing the truth in their unrighteousness. In their sin, men are shoving off any knowledge of God. They don't like to retain God in their knowledge. And so they want to disavow anything to do with God. They suppress the truth of God in their sin because verse 19, the way in which they do that, what may be known of God is manifest in them for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead so that they are without excuse. Because although they knew God, they did not respond in accord with that knowledge by glorifying him as God, nor were they thankful, but they became futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darken. We're gonna talk about what all that means this morning. And professing to be wise, pretending to be wise, claiming to be wise, they were made fools. And they changed or exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man and birds and forfeited animals and creeping things. In verse 23, the glory of God is not something that can be changed, right? We don't add to his glory. We don't take away from his glory. So what Paul means there in context is that they exchanged the glory, which should have been the object of their worship, the glory of God. They exchanged that for something else. They put something else in its place and worshiped that instead. They changed or exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man. I like the contrast there, right? Incorruptible God into an image like corruptible man, birds, forfeited animals and creeping things. This is what we would call the dark exchange, right? The dark exchange. What man does in suppressing the truth of God in their unrighteousness can't get rid of the knowledge of God altogether. Can't get rid of the fact that the knowledge of God or the law of God is written upon their heart. They're made in the image of God. Solomon says that eternity is bound up in the heart of man. So they can't get rid of all of the knowledge of God. So what do they do? They cover it over with false religion, right? It's a dark exchange. They exchanged that verse 25, exchange the truth of God for the lie and serve the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever, amen. So part of this dark exchange is the covering up of the truth with a lie. It's the exchange of true religion, the worship of the true and living God with false religion and the worship of what is a figment of man's imagination, okay? So secular humanism is a result in our day of that dark exchange. There are many false religions in this world, many false religions. All of them, all of them represent this act of sinful man to cover up the truth of God with a lie and secular humanism is just another form of that. It has a religious fervor. It has a religious theology. It has a religious doctrine. It has a religious morality. It has a religious mission. We're gonna talk about eventually the sacraments of the new religion. This is for all intents and purposes, a new religion. And that new religion, secular humanism packaged up the way that it is today, has four essential components, right? That characterize it or qualify it as secular humanism. First, it involves a dethroning of God. It involves a dethroning of God. The foundation of humanist belief from start to finish is the denial of God and the supernatural, denial of God and the supernatural. Atheism is the belief that there is no God, no supernatural creator, no divine moral lawgiver and no ultimate judge of man's actions. The humanists have come up over the years with a three different, what they call manifestos, humanist manifestos. In the humanist manifesto two written by Paul Kurtz is his name in 1973, it says this, we find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural. It is either meaningless or irrelevant to the question of the survival and fulfillment of the human race. As non-theists, we begin with humans, not God, nature, not deity. I think that's a good definition of what secular humanism is. As non-theists, we begin with humans, not God, nature, not deity. We can discover no divine purpose, no providence for the human species. While there is much that we do not know, humans are responsible for what we are or will become. No deity will save us, we must save ourselves. If you're an atheist, save yourselves from what? I would ask, you know. All right, so the first step of the first essential component to a secular humanism is a dethroning of God. Any questions so far? Okay, all right. Secondly, after dethroning of God, you need the deification of man. Secular humanism involves the deification of man. Humanity is the supreme authority. Paul Kurtz again, a leading humanist writer, says that God himself is man deified. The goal becomes for the secular humanist in deifying man, the goal becomes an authentic life, not constrained by external forces imposed upon him. Secular sociologist Charles Taylor said this. He says, the understanding of life which emerges with the romantic expressivism of the late 18th century is that each of us has his or her own way of realizing our humanity. All right, we each have our own way of realizing our humanity. We each have our own responsibility for realizing or fulfilling our own humanity and that it is important to find out and live out one's own humanity as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside. What do you think that model is that they're primarily referring to? Religion, Christianity, okay? By society, by the previous generation or by a religious or political authority. So the aim of secular humanism is for each individual person to find their authentic self, right? Their authentic identity to live an authentic life and an authentic life is defined as one not constrained by moral codes or not constrained or compelled by external moral forces imposed upon him from outside not surrendering to conformity. That's gonna become important so we consider how this thought is prevalent today. The defecation of man. Third, there is a foundation of humanist ethics involved with secular humanism. Humanists reject any moral code that exists outside themselves. Again, humanist manifesto two. The traditional supernaturalistic moral commandments are especially repressive of our human needs. They are immoral insofar as they foster illusions about human destiny, heaven, and suppress vital inclinations. Now it's interesting if you start looking at secular humanism as it relates to the scientific community, in particular the writings of secular humanists over the last couple of centuries. The repression they're talking about is a sexual repression. The repression of what they would consider to be natural desires that are expressed through human sexuality. That becomes extremely important as we consider where we are today with LGBTQ movement and the rise of transgenderism. Carl Truman wrote a book and that's an excellent book. I highly recommend it to you. It's called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. And in the book, Carl Truman begins to break down the thinking of today. How did we get to this point in society where it is completely acceptable or common to hear someone say, I am a man trapped inside a woman's body? You go back just a couple of decades, they would have laughed you out of town. If anyone said anything remotely close to that, you would have been a sick disease individual. We've gotten to the point in today's society where that's not only common, but acceptable. And if you don't accept it, you're a bigot, okay? So he says, how do we get to this point where we can make such a statement? And there's a way that that has developed. We'll talk about it some. All right, so there is a foundation of humanist ethics. We don't want to repress our human needs or suppress vital inclinations and the way that that movement typically conceives of those things is sexual. Christian moral codes are baseless. They are without warrant and do not allow people to fulfill their conceptions of an authentic or a good life. In other words, anything that is imposed upon you from the outside limits or restricts your ability to live out an authentic or a real life. It inhibits your person and anything seen to inhibit your person is considered to be repressive or oppressive. And if it's oppressive, it's immoral, right? So the objective of humanism is to do away with those moral codes. They've done a pretty good job of that. Herbert Schneider calls morality and experimental art saying that it is the basic art of living well together. What is morality? It's just living well together. Doing our best to live well together. We want to be good neighbors to one another. The secular humanist motto has become in our day in absence of an objective morality. It's become do no harm. So as long as you can live your life and do no harm, you're willing, able to pursue your own interests, live by that mantra, do no harm, and that's where their morality comes from. Moral right and wrong, therefore, must be conceived of in terms of moral standards generated in a particular society. It's interesting. If you read literature on this subject, in particular, if you read secular humanists or you read sociologists, many will refer to what one sociologist, Charles Taylor, called a social imaginary. A social imaginary. And I don't know if you've wondered this. I've thought about this myself. Like you watched the news and over the past several years, we've seen this collective change in the way that people think and talk. And it's as if there's a puppet master behind the scenes pulling all the strings and there is pulling all the strings. People tend to exhibit group think in all of this. How is it that one campus in California can be shouting out cancel culture and driving a conservative speaker out of off the campus while a campus on the East Coast with no relation to that campus is doing the exact same thing for the exact same reason? Where does this collective group think come from? It's called what they've called social imaginary. And basically what it entails is what we don't realize is that the writing or the thought of social elites ends up trickling down. People who, for example, a lot of what goes on in science or sociology today, psychology today is related to the study of Sigmund Freud. A lot of what Freud taught and wrote about has been completely rejected and debunked. But there are a couple of kernels involved with what Freud has taught that are widely accepted. And it's interesting to think about how the thought and writing of Sigmund Freud has crept into a culture where a vast majority of the population has never even read the first word from Sigmund Freud. But it's this trickle down effect. You have people at the top, secularist thinkers, last week when we were together we looked at an example of that with A.C. Grayling who's a leading secularist humanist writer and how that thought process trickles down into the population. And before you know it, you have, as is the case in our day, an entire population thinking in the same way, reacting in the same way. Where did this group understanding of victimhood come in or this social justice morality? It seems to have all come together at one time. A widespread across our country and we know that we're not fighting a battle against flesh and blood. We're fighting spiritual forces, spiritual warfare. So we understand a biblical conception of how that works. But it's amazing how that just infiltrates the thinking of people in our culture. I'm gonna give you another example of that in a minute that I think really explains where we're at today. But it's called the social imaginary. We as a culture, I wanna give you an example of how that impacts even us and the way that we think. We think today differently than my dad's generation thought. And there are reasons for that. And we've used that example many times of the frog in the boiling pot of water. You put a frog in a pot and you turn the temperature up on the pot, the frog is incapable of sensing the gradual increase in the temperature and a frog will boil to death. Well, brothers and sisters, we are in this culture. We're not to be of the culture. We're in this culture and we, in solidarity with the culture, are influenced. This can influence our thinking, the way that we think and feel and believe and act. And so we've gotta be really, really careful to anchor and ground ourselves in the truth of God's word, laboring in the word of God to transform or renew our minds so that we're not influenced by the thinking of this wicked culture. Cordless Lamont said this, another humanist. The humanist, for the humanist, this is interesting. Stupidity is just as great a sin as selfishness. And the moral obligation to be intelligent ranks always among the highest of duties. Well, to the secular humanists, who do you think they believe the stupid people are? That's right. Those who would put their faith in a mythological God. The implication of that statement by Lamont, who's also a leading humanist writer, is that only intelligent people, leading elitist secular humanists, only intelligent people are capable of making correct moral choices, leading to the assumption that intelligent people are to act as the moral compass for the rest of society. And that ends up with power in the hands of a select few humanist elites to create dogma that all others must follow. That's where we got to last time when we were looking at the example of A.C. Greeling and those poor kids that were taken to the Creation Museum in Ohio, right? And he saw that as an act of a human rights violation to take those poor kids to the Creation Museum. And who do you think it is that will be leading the charge to legislate against taking your kids to the Creation Museum as soon as he's able? Humanist A.C. Greeling. Lastly, the pursuit of secular humanism. The pursuit of secular humanism is radical autonomy and social equality. Radical autonomy, meaning that there's nothing that is acceptable that could be said to impinge or constrain the free actions of the self and then social equality, meaning social justice and equality of outcomes. We'll talk about that more as we get to the social justice subject. Okay, that's a quick broad overview of secular humanism. It begins with the dethroning of God. It continues with the deification of man. Right, and we see it's pursuit of ethics, it's pursuit of morality and the pursuit of autonomous, the autonomous individual. What questions do you have any questions about that brief overview? Oh, brother, yes, Tom. Morning, brother. Morning, brother. The Christians, specifically Christian leaders that are out there espousing or supporting the social justice, have they been influenced by this same secular humanism? Yes, I believe so, brother. Yeah, it's a really good question. That's one of the reasons we wanted to cover that social justice issue in the second part of this study is because it is absolutely wreaking havoc on the professing church today. We talked about it last time that a part of the problem with this is that what we see largely in United States today is a sham counterfeit Christianity. The Lord's Church, the genuine church has always been there, always will be. The Lord says, I'll build my church and he's faithful, right? But what has been predominant in our country is a fake counterfeit Christianity, a weak, formalistic, moralistic sham, a husk of something that's true. And so what's happened is that, I think this is the reason for it, what's happened is that because those professing, their Christian churches in name only, those professing churches have latched on to something that is counterfeit, they're not adhering solely to the word of God. They are lackeys to every wind of doctrine that comes along. They're tossed to and fro like children. And so when a movement like this comes through, we've seen it multiple times in church history before, a movement comes through. The church is only too quick, the professing church, only too quick to gobble it down, to jump on the bandwagon. And most of the time what you see is not only does the professing church gobble down the error, but then they turn and they persecute those who don't, right, the genuine church, the true church that's taking a stand against it. So yeah, I think what you see today, if in that brother, we together are in the same kind of a boat, we have to be able to see it clearly, understand it, diagnose it, interpret it from a biblical worldview, so that we can take a biblical stand against it and not be swayed by it. And I think the social justice issue, it's amazing to me that churches, pastors, that we would have a short time of go otherwise would have considered faithful and orthodox sound biblical. We can no longer consider to be because they've given in to what essentially is a false gospel. And we'll talk about that when we get to the social justice issue, but it's really making its rounds through the church today. Okay, any other questions or thoughts about any of that? Yeah, Alfredo. I was curious, why do you think that at least among some relatively orthodox Christian leaders, it's rather like, why has it been difficult for them to say treat social justice the same way that they would treat a subject like say, like if they were doing an analysis of Hinduism, they might treat that as something fundamentally like unbiblical presuppositions about the world, like why wouldn't it be any different for something like critical theory or social justice? Why would it be? Give me any different for critical theory or social justice. Yeah, I think there's an element of that, right? Doing good to your neighbor, loving one another, right? Right now, the big or the mantra under which social justice spreads in the church is love, right? We need to love our brothers and sisters and this is the way that we demonstrate our love for them and it's removing those things which are oppressive. We're gonna see in a second, we'll catch a glimpse of it in the way that people begin to think about what is oppressive and what isn't. We've moved out of the realm in which, like if you go back to, for example, my dad's generation, right? Boomers, as the kids would call them nowadays, baby boomers, that generation and before. To somebody from that generation, oppression was a theft of property or an injury to your person, right? That was what oppression was. Somebody who attacked you or attacked or damaged your property. Today, that's not the definition of oppression anymore, is it? Harmful words are oppressive. That's the psychologized man. Harmful words are oppressive. Harmful thoughts are oppressive. Harmful attitudes can be oppressive or oppressive and so our definition of what is a victim or our definition of what is oppressive is completely changed. And yeah, I think a lot of the professing church is bought into that nonsense. So we'll get there. Okay, all of this is fundamentally based upon a change or a shift in the way that man thinks today. And I wanna introduce to you, this is what we're sort of talking about. We're touching on it. All of this depends upon a fundamental shift in the way that man thinks today. Carl Truman wrote this book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. It begins to trace the development of this shift in a chapter in the book entitled Reimagining the Self. And so I wanna give you some of what is contained in that chapter. I think it's really helpful. The shift begins with a change in worldview. And I think it helps us to be knowledgeable of what this change in worldview looks like. It's a change from what is called a mimetic worldview to a poetic worldview. A mimetic worldview to a poetic worldview. Mimetic, two Greek words. Mimetic is where we get our word mimic from. Mimetic regards the world as having a given order, a given structure, a given meaning. You didn't come up with it yourself. It's been given to you. It's been handed to you. Human beings are required to discover that meaning, to learn that meaning and to conform to it. Something that exists outside of them and their purpose in life is to understand what it is and to conform to it. We've often thought about culture in that way, right? When people immigrate to our country, in the past, I know people have used terms like assimilate. You wanna move into the culture and you wanna assimilate. You're no longer Dutch, you're American, right? You're no longer Italian, you're American. You're no longer German, you're American, right? Assimilate into the culture. That's an example or an illustration of a mimetic worldview. The culture, the norms, the codes, the morality all exists outside of you. Your worldview is to understand what that is and to conform to it. True self is something given and something learned, right? It's something given, something learned. When you go to school, you're learning how to conform to society. You take civics, you take government, you take economics. You conform your thinking to the culture or conform your thinking to those external norms. That's a mimetic worldview. The poetic worldview means that the world is merely raw material and circumstance for you to make of it as you will. Human beings are free to create meaning and to create purpose for themselves and no one can or should dictate meaning to you. The true self is something that the individual himself or herself creates and not imposed on them by anyone else. If anyone imposes their worldview on you, that's oppressive or repressive. The poetic worldview is essentially humanistic. I can see the difference, can't you? The poetic, not poetic, poetic. Poetic worldview is man-centered. Man-centered eventually, it's not necessarily so, but eventually so it's atheistic, right? Because man is the one who determines. The self is sovereign and the self dictates where meaning comes from and what's authentic or not or inauthentic, okay? Nimetic versus poetic. Reasons for the shift. One example Truman gives in the book that is a reason for this shift is the change or the shift from what was an agrarian society to an industrialized or a technological society today. And if you think about it for people who had to plant and trust God for the increase who were dependent upon the environment, they couldn't plant in December and reap a harvest in April. That's not gonna go very well and they're going to starve. There were authoritarian, objectively authoritarian laws at work that compelled men to conform to forces that were beyond their control, that existed outside of themselves, that transcended what they could do themselves. And for millennia, that was also expressed in religious terms where people who abandoned the truth of God exchanged the truth of God, Romans chapter one, verse 25, exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who was blessed forever and gave themselves over to false religion for millennia. This became a huge part of life that was determined for you from the outside. But that changed, right? It's changed today, hasn't it? As mankind has become more and more through technology, more and more in control of their circumstances, more and more in control of engineering seeds and engineering plants and controlling the watering of those plants and even genetically engineering plants and seeds and animals, right? Mankind has taken more and more control over their circumstances, over their culture, so to speak. And so there's been this gradual shift in the mind of man from a memetic worldview to a poetic worldview, from that which is imposed upon me from the outside to that which I make for myself. A man becomes more and more self-involved, self-absorbed, man-centered, essentially humanistic. Another example of this is medical treatments or medical advancements. Diseases that just a few decades ago would have meant a death sentence today are cured. We don't see any more. Some of them absolutely wiped off the planet. Maybe the China virus with it eventually. Maybe it may have been medical advances that created that thing in the first place. But diseases that once were a death sentence are now curable. Truman says, all these developments have served to weaken the authority of the natural world and persuade human beings of their power. In other words, over time, as we advance, in particularly with technology, the more that we advance, the more humanistic we become, right? The more man-centered that we become and the less God-dependent we believe ourselves to be, we go from a mimetic worldview to a poetic worldview. Reality is increasingly something that we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires. Increasingly not something that we must conform ourselves to or passively accept. The shift from a mimetic to poetic is one in which the transcendent crumbles gives way to man's will. Given purpose, collapses, crumbles, and any purpose I choose for myself, any purpose I choose to create for myself, human nature is something that I invent. Human nature is something that I have control over, even at the point of identity. Identity is something that I have control over. These two terms, mimetic and poetic, serve to explain the ways in which people have traditionally thought about themselves in the world, right? Two polar opposites, two polar opposite worldviews. And that shift from mimetic to poetic really has taken place in the 20th century. Since after the Industrial Revolution, we've seen that shift from mimetic that had been in place for millennia to now poetic and psychologized man. We've seen that shift take place in the 20th century. Mimetic worldview works within a traditional view of culture. Sociologist Phillip Reef says this. He says, culture directs people outward. Culture directs people toward community purposes, right? Communities in which the self is realized or the self is satisfied for millennia, we found meaning or purpose in community. And Reef talks about this in terms of four different kinds of men, four different kinds or categories of mankind. First is political man. That arose with Plato and Aristotle, where political man is somebody who's involved in civics, involved in public life. That might have been your grandfather sitting in front of the TV, ranting and raving about politics and how this country was going downhill. And he would roll over in his grave to see what it's become today. Involved in civics, involved in public life, and it's in that political sphere in which he finds meaning, finds a sense of self or purpose. There was religious man. Religious man was something that Reef describes as a medieval period man where literally the entire focus of his existence was the church, the community of the church and the sacred order of the church, the functions of the church, the mission of the church. Medieval man or religious man. Third was economic man. Economic man rose during the Industrial Revolution, found his meaning or sense of purpose in trade, in making money, work, production. It's interesting, there's an example, I wanna read this to you, of economic man and the way that economic man thinks. Let me read this to you from Truman. Let's see here. Let's see if you can relate to this. So relating economic man to what today has become psychologized man. He says, take for example, the issue of job satisfaction. Why they do job satisfaction surveys. So let's say we're gonna do a job satisfaction survey, something that's significant for most adults. They wanna have satisfaction on the job. He says, my grandfather, left school at 15, spent the rest of his working life as a sheet metal worker in a factory in Birmingham, the industrial heartland of England. If he had been asked, if he found satisfaction in his work there, there's a distinct possibility he would not even have understood the question. Given that it really reflects the concerns of psychological man's world. In other words, job satisfaction wasn't something that was a priority to economic man. What was a priority to economic man? Putting food on the table, caring for your family. It was a purpose outside of yourself. You found purpose, found meaning, found the necessity of hard work in your job and your trade, right? Says that question really reflects the concerns of psychological man's world to which he did not belong. But if he did understand the question, he probably would have answered in terms of whether his work gave him the money to put food on his family's table, shoes on his children's feet. If it did so, then yes, he would have affirmed that his job satisfied him, right? His needs were those of his family and in enabling him to meet them, his work gave him satisfaction. That's how you judged on the job satisfaction in that time period, right? Focused on someone other than you. And, you know, think about that today. We can have the same mentality if we're not influenced by a psychologized man, right? I can do this work and take satisfaction in it because this is a job that God has blessed me with. God has provided work for me and this is the means that God has blessed me with through which I put food on the table and shoes on my kids' feet, right? That's not unfortunately how people tend to think today, right? He says my grandfather was, if anything, Arifian Peter Reef, economic man whose economic production and the results of that for others, his family, were key to his sense of self. Now, he says, if I am asked the same question, and maybe you think about this too, if somebody asked you, do you have job satisfaction, right? They gave you a job satisfaction survey. How would you think about that? He says my instinct is to talk about, he's a teacher, a professor, right? My instinct is to talk about the pleasure that teacher teaching gives me about the sense of personal fulfillment I feel when a student learns a new idea or becomes excited about some concept as a result of my classes. Now, he says the difference is stark. It is, isn't it? You think about the difference between those two things. Job satisfaction for his grandfather was empirical, outwardly directed, unrelated to his psychological state. For members of mine and subsequent generations, the issue of feeling is central. And that issue of feeling represents the shift from a memetic worldview to a poetic worldview. It also represents the shift from what Reef would call economic man to psychologized man. And psychologized man is what we see today. Psychologized man is characterized not so much by finding an identity through outward directed activity, but finding identity rather through an inward quest for personal psychological happiness. I wanna submit to you though too that in a similar way to that in which Truman would differ from his grandfather in his understanding of job satisfaction, it's also an indication of how easily influenced you and I are by how thinking in the culture affects us as well, right? And if you think about that just for a moment, we're absolutely bombarded with it, right? This worldview occupies every square inch of media, is the predominant prevalent view taught indoctrinated in the schools. Our politics has seeped into every area of life. So influence is how we think in those areas also. We are heavily influenced and influenceable. So it can impact us and we need to remain anchored to God's word. The psychologized man, what Reeve called the psychologized man, others have called expressive individualism and it describes what it means today to be a modern person. Very different, a very different way in which people today think about what it means to be a human being, what it means to be a person, what it means to relate to the world around us. The inner life is that which characterizes what it means to be an authentic person. Now this happened with a couple of reversals, a couple of shifts in our thinking. The first reversal was this. Psychologized well-being becomes the focus rather than socialization. It used to be with our kids, as our kids were growing up, we wanted them to be socialized, right? Part of the object or the intent of school was for children to become socialized, to learn social behaviors, social norms. I remember reading one time, said that the object of parenting was to teach your kids to be well-liked, right? That's socialization, thinking outside of themselves, adapting to and conforming to social norms. Well, with this psychologized well-being, I quote, therapy ceases to serve the purpose of socializing an individual. Instead, therapy today seeks to protect the individual from the kind of harmful neuroses that society itself creates through its smothering of the individual's ability to be her or himself. In other words, society's just trying to hold you down, keep you from being your authentic self. The second reversal in thinking is that commitment, commitment is no longer focused outside oneself. In other words, commitment is not focused in necessarily politics, religious commitment or economic commitment, workplace commitment. Rather, commitment is first and foremost to the self and is inwardly directed. Sounds like Romans one, doesn't it? We have abandoned God and we are idolatrous, worshiping ourselves rather than God, the dethroning of God, the deification of man. You think that way if that shift has taken place in your thinking as it has, we see it all over the place today, don't we? Outward institutions then become in effect servants of the individual and their inner sense of well-being rather than servants like they were before of themselves. Outward institutions become in effect the servants of the individual. They cease being places of personal formation where, for example, on college campuses, they cease being places where students go to learn and for personal formation, they begin to be places where students go to be encouraged or affirmed in their thoughts and beliefs. Any school environment today that would challenge what someone thinks is repressive, oppressive, it's part of that old guard, that old notion of oppressive moral institutions that needs to be torn down, now they need to support and encourage and affirm the student where they can be their authentic self. That's what has given rise today of schools of safe places. Schools are required to be safe places, not where students are to be challenged but where students are to be affirmed and reassured. The result is then this slow but steady psychologizing of the self and what Truman calls the triumph of the inward-directed therapeutic over traditional outward-directed educational philosophies. That which challenges or attempts to falsify my psychological beliefs about myself and thus disturb my inner sense of well-being is by definition harmful and must be rejected. Institutions must be transformed to adjust the new morality. The aim is no longer a conformity of the individual, it's conformity to the individual. Everything is expected to conform to what the person believes is their authentic self. Otherwise it's just external authority which is oppressive. So-called external or objective truths then are simply constructs designed by the powerful to intimidate or control or harm the weak. Overthrowing those oppressive institutions like schools that don't conform or churches for example, becomes the aim of all these institutions. Personal authenticity is found through the public expressions of inward desires. So what this mean, let's summarize then and we'll talk about this one more week and we'll summarize it and how this has been systematized today. But what essentially has happened is that the inner psychological person has become sovereign. The psychological self dictates everything. Identity becomes then as unlimited as your imagination. If the psychologized self is sovereign, you can be whoever you wanna be. That's when we get, for example, the white woman who identified it as an African-American woman, right? We have men identifying as women, women identifying as men. We have more and more letters added to the acronym. And more and more predominantly, identity is wrapped up in sexual terms or sexual ethics. If you think about it in terms of those moral codes that are imposed by Christianity, the moral codes that, except for the first table of law, right? Commandments one through four, they want nothing to do with because that has to do with the worship of God. But the second table of the law, dealing with how we are to love one another, the thing that is, are the one commandment that is seen to be oppressive or repressive while the others remain currently anyway socially acceptable. The one that is repressive is the admonition against, or the command against adultery. Because it represses what secular humanists would consider natural desires, natural expressions now of identity and are born out of a repressive or an oppressive moral code that has no warrant or basis. And so where's the fight been with secular humanism? Homosexuality, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, the sexualization of our culture, the sexual revolution in the 60s, not a cause of what we see today, the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s was a symptom of what we see today. It's just an example of what we see today. It wasn't the cause of it, but it arises out of wanting to deconstruct or do away with those oppressive moral codes. We'll talk about that more soon. I must not tailor my psychological needs to the nature of society that would create anxiety for me and make me inauthentic. Therefore, refusing to bake me a cake causes psychological harm. Words that cause psychological harm will need to be policed and suppressed. Used to be just simply damage to property or harm to someone's person. And now words and thoughts are a means of oppression. That's being characterized now today as hate speech. And we already see freedom of speech under attack. It's going to be more under attack. And then we see the rise of the new morality. The new morality that is helping to solidify or galvanize the movement is social justice, which is borrowed from Marxism. And we'll talk about that. That which oppresses, that which stifles the expression of our authentic selves, which is whatever our psychological self has determined. Psychological self is sovereign. That is the norm, the rule. Prioritizes, they prioritize victimhood, the sovereign right of the individual to find his own existence and the dignity of the individual. We'll talk about dignity some next week also. Right of time. Any last minute questions? This was a tough subject to sort of track and follow today. I pray it's somewhat helpful. It'll make more sense as we keep going through the lesson of the series, and we'll get more to a clear development of this next week, so Uncle Ron. And then, time for maybe two questions total. Yeah, Uncle Ron. Okay, so you and I talked a little bit on Friday about Armenians and their view that man chooses God. You know, ask Jesus into your heart. Oh yeah, yeah. So do you think that that weakens the church so that social justice and other causes can come in because it's man-centered? Yeah, absolutely. Right, man-centered gospels today, man-centered teachings today. You'll find this morning just the example of the Apostle Paul in Romans chapter one to be dramatically not man-centered. To be dramatically God-centered. And so a man-centered theology, man-centered preaching, man-centered worship, man-centered churches have opened themselves wide open to this error. And you see it pouring into the church, the professing church. So yeah, I definitely agree with that, brother. Last question, one more. The last thing that you was talking about, I can't remember the two terms, but is that like kind of like the enlightenment, like repackaged? Yeah, yeah, a lot of that secular humanistic thought came or rose during the enlightenment. And we're gonna talk about one in particular, probably here soon, that it started with. So yeah, a lot of it came from the enlightenment period. So good question. Okay, let's pray and get you out of here. Father in heaven, Lord, thank you for the blessing in a church like this to be able to talk about a subject like this. Please help us, Lord, to understand the, this world in which we live. Help us to understand our place in it as ambassadors for the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord, help us to be faithful to you in it. Help us to take the torch that's been passed down to us and to run our race with faithfulness. And I pray, Lord, as we seek to honor you in that, that you give us much fruitfulness for the cause of Christ and for the growth of the church. May you be glorified in these things. We love you. Be with us now as we seek to worship you and may you be magnified in Jesus' name. Amen.