The Spirit of the Age

What worldview are you operating off of? If you are a Christian you might tell me that you operate off of a Christian worldview. Maybe you do and maybe you don't. Just because you are a Christian doesn't mean that you are acting in accordance with your professed beliefs.

Postmodernism, to use an expression of Francis Schaeffer, is like a bad London Fog. It seeps in through the cracks and permeates everything.

The point is is that you could be more postmodern in your beliefs than you are aware of. Unless we become aware of our tendencies to think in the wrong way we will never correct our thinking. This is why I spelled out a lot of this in one of my previous post, Postmodern "Split". You might be asking, "How important is this, really?"

Francis Schaeffer, in his book The God Who Is There, said:

The Christian is to resist the spirit of the world. But when we say this, we must understand that the world-spirit does not always take the same form. So the Christian must resist the spirit of the world in the form it takes in his own generation. If he does not do this, he is not resisting the spirit of the world at all. This is especially so for our generation, as the forces at work against us are of such a total nature.

He then quotes these words attributed to Martin Luther:

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

Postmodernism is the spirit of the age that we face in our generation. The problem is that even in the most biblical and theologically accurate churches an accommodation to this world-spirit has occured. Although most of them probably are not aware of this and think that they are standing strong against the spirit of the age. The reason this is is that they have a precommitment already in place to the dichotomy, splitting reality into two different spheres.

This is a serious issue. As Nancy Pearcey writes in her book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Study Guide Edition) "This dichotomy in our minds is the greates barrier to liberating the power of the gospel across the whole of culture today... it is the single most potent weopon for delegitimizing the biblical perspective in the public square today."

Because we already start from a two realm view of reality we have a hard time seeing where we are at fault. We easily slip into accepting the worlds perspective of things without ever realizing that we are doing so. We stand strong on our confession of faith, while at the same time compartmentalizing that faith. We defend the truthfullness of the Bible and then limit its application to only the "religious" area of life. Without being aware of it, we put God in a box.