Nickel-plating gold

Bret Weinstein, as many readers know, is an evolutionary biologist who has come on a long, and now familiar, journey from trusting Western institutions to seeing them as thoroughly, and even maliciously, corrupted. Most of you are probably acquainted with his departure from the woke Evergreen University over diversity, his realisation that the COVID response defied science and logic, and his coming round to perceiving that the overwhelming degree of error points to a deep-seated conspiracy of lies rather than to incompetence.

Well, recently he has surprised by many by describing our current situation as, at heart, a spiritual problem to which the old Christianity appears the sole solution. And this presents him with a dilemma, because he is an atheist. The problem, he says, is that we modern people need to recover the traditional wisdom of religion, but we can’t, having explained it away. He seems to propose solutions like praying (whilst knowing there is no God) because prayer mysteriously changes us in any case. In other words, in order to escape the fate of living the lies that are destroying society, he suggests living a lie that can save it, which certainly seems a counsel of desperation.

His dilemma reminds me of the only book I actually took out from our school library to read, back in 1967: Bishop John Robinson’s notorious Honest to God. What I remember most from it was Robinson’s persistent complaint that “modern man” can no longer believe in the traditional faith of miracles, a divine Jesus and a Father God. “At fifteen years I’m a lot more ‘modern’ than he is,” I reasoned, “but I believe in those things, so what’s his problem?”

His problem, of course, was that in academia he had unconsciously imbibed the fashionable secular Enlightenment worldview, had tried to graft it on to Christianity, and had ended up with a self-contradictory dog’s breakfast. This would appear to be Weinstein’s problem too. Although he has already had to rethink much of what he believed to be true, he can’t see that such open-mindedness must include his core belief in naturalistic evolution as the true source of everything, especially everything in the human mind. If he were willing to examine the evidence for that belief dispassionately, he might find his dilemma disappeared.

The truth is that there is nothing that “modern man” is constrained to believe, particularly in contradiction to the biblical worldview. A quick flick through YouTube shows that there are modern people who believe in a flat earth, gnosticism, unreformed Stalinism, hermetic magic and all manner of nonsense they may have been persuaded about for a host of reasons. Weinstein is quite at liberty to recognise that the materialist evolutionary theory that is part and parcel of the loss of Western values (and which has massive evidential problems) is itself subject to re-evaluation. In other words, he can change his mind and immediately dissolve the cognitive dissonance in his position. In Greek, “change of mind” is metanoia, which is usually translated as “repentance,” based on the Latin for “thinking again.” If he repents, Weinstein will be able to practice the Christian principles he sees as necessary as truth, rather than as pretence. Job done, by removing what he’s trying to add to Christianity to improve it.

Fast forward to last Sunday’s sermon by my pastor, Mike, on the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7. He touched on interpretations of Jesus’s apparent harshness to her request for her daughter’s healing that fail to recognise that Jesus is God, and so knows what he is doing (as the Evangelists fully recognise in their writing). Specifically, he mentioned “feminist theologians” teaching that this was a learning experience for the fully-human Jesus, as the wise gentile woman confronted his unconscious racism and misogyny.

Mike described this as “fire-alarm preaching,” that is he warned us that if we hear preaching like that we should treat it like a fire-alarm, and get out of the building. He added that if we want to save others, we should press the real fire alarm on the way out! As far as he knows, he told me afterwards, he’s not heard that expression from anyone else, so if “fire alarm preaching” becomes common coinage, remember you heard it first from Mike Hudson.

I got to thinking about the principles defining such “fire alarm preaching,” and concluded that often, at least, it comes from trying to graft a secular ideology on to the pure and sufficient teaching of Christ, prioritising the ideology. Inevitably at some point Jesus (or his word in Scripture) will turn out to be wrong, and instead of worshipping him as God, you will insist that God turn to “modern man” to be corrected. Modern man must then inevitably become the true God, and though Christ might still be named reverently, Christian faith has gone.

In the current case, phase 3 feminism and critical race theory are, of course, the ideologies. Notice, though, how the interpretation also depends on a strictly theological ideology called “kenotic Christianity,” which misinterprets Philippians 2 to say that Jesus emptied himself of his divinity in the Incarnation, contrary to historic Christian teaching.

I’ve written extensively on that on The Hump (use the search function on “kenotic” if you’re interested), because kenosis has contaminated more recent “Evangelical” thinking than you’d ever imagine. If Jesus is “only human” they can pin any error on him to suit whatever modern ideology they favour. And since Jesus is our revelation of God, the Open Theists take his invented “self emptying” to be characteristic of God himself, and so God hides the future even from himself and learns from (human) experience – so much for eschatology and promises. Scripture too is “kenotic,” being as fallibly human as Jesus is supposed to be. The theistic evolutionists, in turn, use kenosis to deny God’s role in creation, since he graciously liberates creation to create itself through evolution, even when it ends up in supposed waste and cruelty. Meanwhile the hypercharismatics use it to claim that Jesus did all his wonderful works as a mere man empowered by the same Spirit that empowers us mere men to do greater works than he did (meaning, actually, the empowering of greedy super-apostles to pretend to do miracles).

You can corrupt the gospel quite happily without invoking kenotic theology, though. Creative, and always selective, interpretation of Scripture is sufficient to persuade the ignorant or biased listener. Most of today’s examples have their roots in Marxism of one flavour or another. For example, the ideologies of pro-abortionism or the LGBTQ+ agenda depend on uncritical espousing of principles of compassion, equality and love, either ignoring, downplaying or creatively reinterpreting biblical teaching on the sanctity of life and sexuality.

Anti-racism (for which read “critical race theory” in modern praxis) has an even easier job of mis-applying apostolic teaching on the unity of mankind in Christ, since “racism” is not even a significant subject in the Bible, being an essentially recent development from Muslim, and later Christian, colonialism. In the early church it was cultural prejudice between Jew, Greek, Barbarian and Scythian that had to be overcome, not skin colour. St Augustine was a Berber, St Cyril an Egyptian, and the royal eunuch converted by Philip was an Ethiopian, who could presumably no more change his skin colour than in Jeremiah’s time (Jer. 13:23).

Liberation theology arose from classic Marxism, which is why, in these days when Marxism has abandoned the Proletariat in favour of minorities, it has somewhat gone out of fashion. But as I recounted here, Evangelical views on development, the environment and other things have been deeply influenced by Marxist analyses at the expense of rightly dividing Scripture.

In the ancient past, it was, I believe, Platonism grafted on to the gospel that produced gnosticism, and Platonic ideas have persisted in the modern church in the persistent belief that we will spend eternity in heaven as disembodied spirits. It’s within my lifetime that most
Evangelicals have started to take more seriously the biblical teaching on a general bodily resurrection to a newly-created “heaven and earth.” How did we forget that the risen Jesus, our forerunner, has “flesh and bones, as you see I have,” (Lk. 24:39)?

That last example is a reminder that not all “fire alarm preaching” arises from conscious espousal of novel worldly ideologies. As you ought to know by now (if you’ve followed this blog for any length of time), worldviews are held largely unconsciously. A religious conversion will certainly affect your worldview, but your worldview proper will include unconsidered assumptions such as “There’ll always be an England,” or “Pornography is victimless,” or “Humans are bad for the planet,” and so on. If Christians three centuries ago thought that slavery was part of the natural world order, it is near-certain that equally unbiblical ideas will be part of our shared worldview, and will be promulgated from the pulpits without any fire alarms going off, to the detriment of the gospel and of the culture. “The price of (gospel) freedom is eternal vigilance,” as Churchill almost said, or “Semper reformans” as our protestant Reformers wisely taught.

Those worldview assumptions, for some folks, might well include, “Evolutionary theory explains the human condition.” But Bret, as George Gershwin might have put it:

To find your direction
In natch’al selection
It ain’t necessarily so.