[Gospel Culture]

The following are 'potent quotables' from Joseph Boot's Gospel Culture: Living in God's Kingdom.

On the Western Cultural Perspective. "The insightful Canadian philosopher George Grant understood the West’s present cultural perspective well: 'Justice is understood to be something strictly human, having nothing to do with obedience to any divine command or conformity to any pattern “laid up in heaven.” Moral principles, like all other social conventions, are something “made on earth.” Human freedom requires that the principles of justice be the product of human agreement or consent, that is, they must be the result of a contract, and these principles must therefore be rooted in an understanding of the interests of human beings as individuals rather than in any sense of duty or obligation to anything above humanity. The terms of the contract may well change as circumstances and interests change. But the restraints free individuals accept must always be “horizontal” in character rather than “vertical.”' In this rejection of vertical accountability for horizontal relativity, modern man is conferring on himself the contractual right to redefine his gender irrespective of creational chromosomes; the right to murder (abortion); the right to polygamy, sodomy, bestiality or any sexual predilection; the right to suicide; the right to euthanize children and the elderly or sick; the right to homosexual “marriage”; the right to prostitution and pornography; the right to suppress worship of the living God and the free speech of Christians; the right to blasphemy and endless violations of Sabbath—all dressed in the garb of freedom and human dignity, which amounts to nothing but radical autonomy."

The Reality of Different Cultures. "[If] a person travels to Saudi Arabia, Syria or Pakistan, they experience Islamic culture—expressed in everything from law and education, to art and diet. If one goes to the major cities of India, there one experiences Hindu culture as the social order. In North Korea and China, one encounters Marxist-oriented cultures. The traveller in Tibet encounters Buddhist culture, and so forth. In the West today, we increasingly experience a humanistic, secular culture, deeply influenced by pagan spirituality, which at the same time displays the cultural vestiges of Christianity."

Two Directions for Culture. "There are many structures in God’s creation, but only two directions. We are either oriented toward God or toward idolatry in marriage, family, church, state, art, science and every other sphere. We will either seek to serve and glorify God in each area of life, or our lives will have an apostate direction, with no central place for God and his revelation."

The Gospel as Culture. "[Implicit] in the Christian gospel is a particular vision of culture—indeed, the gospel is a culture, because it is centred on the worship of the living God, through Jesus Christ, and the enthronement of Christ as Lord over the heart, mind, soul and strength of every believer. That the gospel forms a new culture is thus an inescapable deduction from the meaning of both terms. If culture is the public expression of the worship of a people, and the gospel restores man to true worship (i.e. of the Creator, not the creation), then the gospel restores man to true culture, which is the kingdom of God... Since the so-called Enlightenment, Christians have steadily surrendered the various organs of culture— education, law, arts, charity, medicine, government—almost entirely to the increasingly humanistic state. We have progressively retreated into a pietistic bubble, concerned largely with eternal verities and keeping souls from hell, and we have faithlessly limited Christ’s jurisdiction to the institutional church. The result has been the marginalization of the Christian church and a change of religion in the public sphere."

Our Relativistic Culture. "We see examples daily in the media of people in the grip of a radical relativism, unimaginable even twenty-five years ago. As abstracted and generalized people reduced to self-created group identities, we no longer know what a human being is. This condition has advanced to such a degree that we are essentially unsure if there are any human norms that transcend radical autonomous desire and subjective self-identification. We are not even confident of the intrinsic value of the human person made in God’s image, whether pre-born, newborn, disabled, aging, sick or despairing. Indeed, we are so fundamentally uprooted that we are no longer assured of the scientific and chromosomal reality of the binary gender distinctions of male and female, of normative human sexuality, or of the oldest institutions known to the human race—marriage and family. Our profound confusion today is such that some people are not even sure that they occupy the right age group or gender, were born into the right people group, or even gestated by the right species, since they “feel” like something else. No one dares to challenge these inner fictions, since all that is left of the human personality is the notion that autonomous and subjective feeling has the absolute existence of God himself. As such, there is no longer a basis for differentiation of any objective kind. And thus, in a world mired in the irrational fluidity of all things, where the possibility of normative differentiation between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, reality and unreality, has collapsed, culture has not simply reached a bump in the road, but has been sucked into a kind of vortex of democratic insanity, spiralling toward what Cornelius Van Til called “disintegration into the void.”... the vain rantings of Nietzsche’s over-men, who have gone beyond good and evil, declare the reasonable and sane to be sick, mad or malevolent and demand that the voice of plain reason be silenced in the face of the cultural conjurers’ reimagining of the world... It naturally follows that modern political doctrine rests, typically, on a set of beliefs that flatly contradict what God says about humanity. It is not that our culture denies that there is evil in the world, but we refuse to locate that evil in the heart of man (who is thought of as inherently good and perfectible), blaming instead the environment and spheres of social order like the family, the church and private property, as well as other structures of alleged inequality that supposedly war against an original equality and unity in the human race."

"[There is] a recurrent theological-political illusion concerning the human person: people are born without sin, and so we can change people by doing away with the evil in society by getting back to an unspoiled condition that humanity supposedly lived in in his primitive past—a condition of absolute social equality. So, if we abolish marriage and the family, no one will be subject to hierarchy anymore and women and children will not feel subjugated. If we eliminate binary gender norms, no one will feel oppressed by distinctions anymore. If we eliminate income inequality, no one will be greedy anymore. If we open our borders and embrace Islamists returning from fighting with ISIS and find them money and housing, they won’t want to crucify and behead Christians anymore or plot against our country... The key obstacle is all hierarchy (except the privilege of belonging to a new cultural elite), because the principle of hierarchy is a reminder of the distinction between man and God."

"The cultural theologian Andrew Sandlin has summarized it like this: Liberals [progressives] since the French Revolution have engaged in one massive liberation project, what has been called “the oppression-liberation nexus.” The liberal religion has become one of never-ending clawing for the liberation of humanity from every tyranny—real or imagined: the secularists must be liberated from the religionists, the parishioners from the clergy, the enlightened from the unenlightened, the citizens from royalty, the poor from the rich, the workers from the capitalists, blacks from whites, women from men, wives from husbands, children from parents, debtors from creditors, employees from employers, homosexuals from heterosexuals, convicts from law abiding citizens—and soon, if the trajectory persists, polygamists from monogamists and pedophiles from prison guards. The Great Liberation now extends even to non-human nature: the liberation of “the environment” from rapacious humanity... If the human race had adequately learned anything by now from our historical experience, it should have been that our rejection of God and the image of God in man leads to the endless defacing and destruction of that image and the steady decay of diverse cultural life, as the political sphere overreaches itself to try to play a messianic role in people’s lives."

"The Bible makes plain that there is a real archenemy of the Christian and the gospel: the adversary, called Satan or the devil. Jesus refers to his fall (Luke 10:18) and his kingdom (Matthew 12:26), identifying the character of the evil one and his martial strategy—murder and lies: “He was a murderer from the beginning and has not stood in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). Moreover, Satan’s work is likened to that of a thief who comes “to steal and to kill and to destroy” (John 10:10). Death, robbery and deception are at the root of the worldview of witchcraft. Jesus is clear that lies and murder were on Satan’s mind from the beginning. This “beginning” is a plain reference to the Garden of Eden, where God made man, male and female, in his own image and likeness (Genesis 1:1–27). Because of his hatred of God, the adversary wanted to destroy man as man—that is, as God had made him as the divine image-bearer—and after seeing mankind cursed to return to the dust, Satan provoked the first human murder—of Abel by his brother Cain (1 John 3:12). Clearly, Satan was—and is—a rebel against God, and the primordial crime he incited embroiled the human race in his rebellion, which centred around denying that man is created in God’s image... Thus, from the beginning, Satan’s word was a lie, a word of negation and a denial of God’s creation and purpose: God in jealousy seeks to prevent man from realizing himself. This self-realization Satan claimed to have, and his offer to Eve was precisely an opportunity for mankind to recreate itself in a new image, an image divorced from God and based entirely on man’s creative will.… The nature and psychology of man thus cannot be understood without a realization that man, created in the image of God, is now trying to abolish that creation and to institute a new and satanic creation."

"Satan wanted humanity to join his project— to oppose God—and to build an order in which men are subordinate gods and servants to the dark lord—the evil one... to be human in the diabolic scheme meant independence from God and remaking oneself as, essentially, a new god. God’s original design— for human beings to pursue true wisdom and godly power to work, serve and subdue all things in terms of the rule of the triune and sovereign Creator—had been corrupted. The new human pursuit became a quest for an autonomous knowledge, wisdom and power— godless resources that could be used to create a new man and a new world in light of the satanic plan of negation, opposing the living God by parodying his creation and kingdom."

Western Culture as Witchcraft. "[The] foundation of all devilry is rebellion against God, which seeks knowledge, power and dominion through a negation of God’s Word and purpose—this is the essence of the magical worldview. As such, there is no “white” or “good” magic. Any attempt to deny and overturn God’s creative Word and divine purpose and to lawlessly manipulate circumstances to bend to my will, whether by spiritual powers and forces or by various political means, is a form of witchcraft, and evil on its face. At root, witchcraft implicitly involves the attempted remaking of man as a god with an autonomous source of knowledge and power, which is, in the final analysis, demonic."

"It is not incidental that the triumph of secularism in the public space has led to the growth of occultism and paganism in the private. C.S. Lewis pointed decades ago to a fundamental religious shift in the West, one which I would describe as clearly moving toward the pantheistic—toward the worldview of witchcraft: 'We who defend Christianity find ourselves constantly opposed not by the irreligion of our hearers but by their real religion. Speak about beauty, truth and goodness, or about a God who is simply the indwelling principle of these three, speak about a great spiritual force pervading all things, a common mind of which we are all parts, a pool of generalized spirituality to which we can all flow, and you will command friendly interest. But the temperature drops as soon as you mention a God who has purposes and performs particular actions, who does one thing and not another, a concrete, choosing, commanding, prohibiting God with a determinate character. People become embarrassed or angry.'"

"Some forms of primitive occult practice seek to engage spirits or demons directly to raise tables, levitate or move a glass on an Ouija board, but for the most part the rituals of witchcraft, from Hindu meditation to the Wiccan’s coven, are directed toward nature-based divinities, primarily goddess worship. This is not due to any notion of a moral or personal relationship to a deity, but is a personification of an impersonal nature or “pure spirit,” of which man himself is a part—that is, man is asserting himself as his own god... researcher Linda Harvey has noted in regard to the goals of the witches’ coven: Ultimately…the practitioner worships the self, whose instincts and desires are empowered by occult spiritual forces. The focus of witchcraft is to take control of one’s own (or another’s) life. The enlightened witch invokes the goddess of choice…at the height of the ritual, there is an intense feeling of spiritual power, when the priestess believes she becomes one with the goddess and nature/earth.… The godhood of self is a stated pillar of witchcraft, as expressed in the 1974 Principles of Wiccan Belief, adopted by the council of American Witches. The introduction states: “We are not bound by traditions from other times and other cultures, and owe no allegiance to any person or power greater than the Divinity manifest through our own being.”

"Although modern sorcery and occult arts are varied and inconsistent—they include everything from primitive dancing and sex acts (to induce rain or fertility), voodoo dolls, spells and talismans, to very elaborate enacted rites and rituals in covens, as well as various alternative healing practices proffered as science7—all teach that some sort of mystic correspondence exists between the metaphysical realm and the material world, so that the manipulation of forces or energy or powers to bring about man’s will requires some corresponding action, technique or drama on earth."

"[The] implicit objective of witchcraft or magic arts, as well as their moral root—the desire of the practitioner to become a god with autonomous knowledge and power, grounded in overt rebellion. Behind this rebellion lie the powers of darkness. Paul is clear that the Christian is thus in a battle, not against flesh and blood, “but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world powers of this darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in the heavens” (Ephesians 6:12). Their malevolent stratagem, however, is typically to disguise their evil as enlightenment (2 Corinthians 11:14). Not surprisingly, therefore, satanic strongholds are more often than not erected in areas of human philosophical thought and speculation masquerading as wisdom. So the apostle writes, “The weapons of our warfare are not worldly, but are powerful through God for the demolition of strongholds. We demolish arguments and every high-minded thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God, taking every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4–6)."

"Because all men need power, if we do not receive it from above, we will seek it from the created order below. Where God is replaced by chance or fate as the determining power over all things, meaning gives way to meaninglessness and the motive force for all things is no longer power from above, but primitive and regenerating power from below."

"If we are to understand the radical changes in our society today as inspired by diabolic principalities and manifest in ideological strongholds that set themselves up against the knowledge of God (Ephesians 6:12; 2 Corinthians 10:4–6), then we must grasp the essential instrumentality of modern political life as engaged, wittingly or not, in witchcraft—employing a “secret” (elitist) knowledge in an attempt to join opposites. The goal of modern civil government has long ceased to be focused on the administration of justice. It is increasingly about the creation of a cosmic man who is divine, to join what God has separated and create a unified, distinction-free community that represents the end of all struggle. The purpose of such manipulation is power—the power to control and transform in terms of a revived religious image of humanity."

"Our current culture is thus bent on defacing the image of God by denying that man is man and woman is woman, by negating the God-given nature of marriage and by politically manipulating people to believe and act as though an illusion were true—that homosexuality is normative, gender is fluid and that androgyny is the human ideal. Harvey has noted: Homosexuality and crossgender sexuality are embedded in witchcraft ritual, says Christopher Penczak in Gay Witchcraft. He notes that “Magick as a spiritual path is one filled with transgenderism. A magician of any sort must fluidly shift shapes between genders.” Knowledge of both masculine and feminine aspects of oneself is the reason “why gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people were recognized as potentially talented in the mystical arts.”30 None of this should surprise us, since, in the worldview of ancient pagan witchcraft, the original man was neither male nor female, but an androgynous figure possessing both sex characteristics. The hermaphrodite has always been important to pagan mythology, symbolizing the undifferentiated life force in which all conflicts are resolved—a sign and symbol for both perfection and chaos. We see the same idea in tantric symbols of Tibetan and Chinese origin.31 “The Philosopher’s Stone, the Original Man, the Androgyne and the sphere were expressions of totality, and as such, symbols of a finally abolished multiplicity, symbols of the whole and at the same time of Nothingness.”32 Further, the egalitarian political community is a kind of Philosopher’s Stone on a large scale—the “original man” of vast, even global, proportions. Such an ideal, utopian city is in fact the “final symbol for man’s divinization.”

"The radical cultural confusion and irrationality of our time with regard to gender, marriage, sexuality and spirituality is not incidental, but basic to the revival of the worldview of witchcraft. Occultism is corrosive for every aspect of life and society. Each one seeks their own way, their own spiritual ascent by their own path and falls headlong into their own abyss. The erroneous hope is that political formulas, utopias and egalitarian signs and symbols34 will transition the inclusive, gender-fluid social order into a divine state. The problem for autonomous man is that sexuality is a fixed aspect of God’s creation that proves a roadblock to man’s desire to remake himself by his own magic words."

"Great effort is being put into embryonic research and reproductive technologies, the goal of which is knowledge for the purposes of manipulation and the creation of a new man. Many strains of witchcraft in times past abhorred pregnancy accidentally produced from their perversions and orgiastic rituals and so would abort the fetus, then to be cut up and eaten by members of the order. In our own time, we have the mass slaughter of unborn babies on a scale well beyond that imagined in earlier societies. We have widespread promiscuity, the abhorrence of reproduction and the sale of babies’ body parts, by government-funded organisations like Planned Parenthood, on a black market for all manner of “research.” These practices all stem from the worldview not of science, but of witchcraft. An autonomous realm of knowledge is sought for the acquisition of lawless power, so that man might become a god. Social sorcery is all around us. The modern Simon Magus believes that he has solved the riddle of existence, like Pythagoras of old, and that he “has changed the universe into what he wanted it to be (abolition of good and evil, fusion of opposites etc.), he gained a supra-rational power, a vantage point where he usurps the right of deciding the real and the unreal, being and non-being.”35 Such is the point our society has arrived at today. And, on such a basis, politicians, judges and cultural elites make their rulings on marriage and sexuality and publish their curricula. Like the father of Gnosticism, they are poisoned by bitterness and bound by iniquity (Acts 8:23), though they walk in ignorance."