HOW TO CAPTURE A ONCE GREAT NATION

Capturing a nation starts with capturing the mind through propaganda disguised as “the news.” In “When a Nation Forgets God,” Erwin W. Lutzer explained the ascendancy of National Socialism. Spirituality would be redefined as a “private matter” strictly between oneself and God:

·       Right from the beginning Hitler sought to marginalize the church to guarantee that no Christian influence would be allowed to inform government policy. Worship would have to be a private matter between a man and his God; at all costs the official state policy would have to be based on humanistic principles to give Hitler the freedom to do what was “best” for Germany. He said that the churches must be “forbidden from interfering with temporal matters.” The state would have to be scrubbed clean of all Christian convictions and values.

In order to accomplish this, any public manifestation of Christianity would have to be either removed or secularized for the sake of the “greater good” of the Volk:

·       Since Germans had for centuries celebrated Christmas and Easter, Hitler had to reinterpret their meaning. Christmas was turned into a totally pagan festival; in fact, at least for the SS troops, its date was changed to December 21, the date of the winter solstice. School prayers were banned, and carols and Nativity plays were forbidden in the schools; and in 1938 even the name Christmas was changed to Yuletide. Crucifixes were eliminated from classrooms. Easter was turned into a holiday that heralded the arrival of spring. If religion was tolerated, it had to be secularized so that it would be compatible with the state’s commitment to the greater good of a revived Germany. Most of the churches bowed to the cultural currents and endorsed the “Positive Christianity” that was in line with government policies. (Lutzer)

“Positive Christianity” was promoted by Hitler to bring Christianity into conformity with the goals of National Socialism:

·       Article 24 of the party platform demanded, “liberty for all religious denominations in the State so far as they are not a danger…to the moral feelings of the German race.”

The Church offered some token resistance. Therefore, Hitler invited some of the reluctant pastors to meet with him:

·       Hitler began by reproaching his guests, treating them to a tirade about how he was misunderstood. “Peace,” he said, is all that he wanted. “Peace between Church and state.” He blamed them for obstructing him, sabotaging his efforts to achieve it…”You confine yourself to the Church. I’ll take care of the German people.”

However, Pastor Martin Niemoller was not to be intimidated:

·       “You said that, ‘I will take care of the German people.’ But we too, as Christians and churchmen, have a responsibility toward the German people. That responsibility was entrusted to us by God, and neither you more anyone in this world has the power to take it from us.”

Niemoller paid dearly for his courage, and the fledgling movement was shattered:

·       More than two thousand pastors who had stood with Niemoller and Bonhoeffer withdrew their support. They believed that appeasement was the best strategy; they thought that if they remained silent they could live with Hitler’s intrusion into church affirms and his political policies. (Lutzer)

·       Niemoller was later imprisoned for what we today call “hate speech”…He had violated a new law for the “Prevention of Treacherous Attacks on State and Party.” (Lutzer)

Hitler’s propaganda machine was a restless beehive of activity. Evil was disguised as righteous concern for the welfare of the German people. According to Lutzer, all of “this happened under code words such as freedom, peace, and fairness.” He argues that:

·       With God and religion removed from government, the values of Hitler’s socialism filled the vacuum. The church would increasingly become the enemy of the state.

However, the Church is supposed to be the light of the world:

·       “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.” (Matthew 5:13-15)

But wasn’t Germany as Christian nation? It seems that Germany had been ripe for Hitler. It also seems that the Lutheran Church, the largest German church, had, from the 18th century, largely abandoned their traditional faith. In “Hitler’s Religion,” historian Richard Weikart had written that, by the time of Hitler, much of German Christendom had already seriously compromised their Biblical faith:

·       Beginning in the eighteenth century and increasing dramatically through the nineteenth century, German Protestantism had largely adopted theological liberalism, especially in the university theology faculties. Theological liberalism tended to dismiss many parts of the Bible as historically unreliable and rejected the miraculous. It opposed the idea of the inherent sinfulness of humanity and stressed the immanence rather than the transcendence of God.

No wonder the Church was unable to stand! Their compromise had opened the door to pantheism, panentheism, positivism, and even spiritism. This “Christianity” had already ceased being the light of the world and had become focused exclusively on their private experiences. Weikart cites Heine to highlight the compromised status of the Church:

·       In 1835, the poet Heinrich Heine asserted, “Nobody says it, but everyone knows it: pantheism is an open secret in Germany. We have in fact outgrown deism. We are free and want no thundering tyrant.”

However, they were ripe to substitute one “thundering tyrant” for another. Weikart is convinced that Hitler represented one breed of pantheist who believed that serving god was a matter of acting as an agent of natural selection to remove the inferior races:

·       Hitler’s devotion to nature as a divine being had a grim corollary: the laws of nature became his infallible guide to morality. Whatever conformed to the laws of nature was morally good, and whatever contravened nature and its ways was evil. When Hitler explained how he hoped to harmonize human society with the scientific laws of nature, he emphasized principles derived from Darwinian theory, especially the racist forms of Darwinism prominent among Darwin’s German disciples. These laws included human biological inequality (especially racial inequality), the human struggle for existence, and natural selection. In the Darwinian struggle for existence, multitudes perish, and only a few of the fittest individuals survive and reproduce.

A Biblical faith should have stood confidently against such unbiblical nonsense, but the Church had already forgotten about the One who had given them birth and His Word.

ARE CHRISTIANS OPPOSED TO SCIENCE?

The hostility to Christianity is intense, even snowballing. In Can Science Explain Everything, John C. Lennox mentioned a conversation he had with an esteemed Cambridge professor of science - and he had invited two others to witness his shaming of Lennox - 50 years ago:

• “Lennox, do you want a career in science?” “Yes, sir,” I replied. “Then,” he said, “in front of witnesses, tonight, you must give up this childish faith in God. If you do not, then it will cripple you intellectually and you will suffer by comparison with your peers. You simply will not make it.”

Evidently, his faith hasn’t crippled him intellectually. Instead, Lennox points out the double-standard. Had it been a Christian professor pressuring an atheistic student to reject his atheism in favor of his career, the Christian would have been brought up on charges.

Is the Christian faith opposed to science? Lennox observes that it couldn’t possibly be:

• If science and God do not mix, there would be no Christian Nobel Prize winners. In fact, between 1901 and 2000 over 60% of Nobel Laureates were Christians.

According to Lennox, there are many others who share his observations:

·       C.S. Lewis sums it up well when he says, “Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.”

·       Recent historians of science, like Peter Harrison, are more nuanced in their formulation of the way in which Christian thought influenced the intellectual landscape in which modern science arose, but they reach the same basic conclusion: far from hindering the rise of modern science, faith in God was one of the motors that drove it.

Lennox also cites the fact that the “great pioneers” of modern science were “convinced believers in God” – “Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, and Clerk-Maxwell…” It didn’t seem that their belief had crippled them intellectually.

Instead of a conflict between Christianity and science, Lennox claims that the conflict is actually between two rival worldviews – atheism and Christianity. Lennox cites physicist Sean Carroll, as a prime example of the former:

• We humans are blobs of organized mud, which through the impersonal workings of nature’s patterns have developed the capacity to contemplate and cherish and engage with the intimidating complexity of the world around us ... The meaning we find in life is not transcendent…(The Big Picture)

However, this battle isn’t being wagged with scientific evidence but with denunciations and contempt. Lennox cites physicist Stephen Weinberg as one example of the many bullies:

·       The world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion. Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.

Is Christianity a threat to science and civilization? If so, where is the evidence? Instead, it seems that wherever the Bible has gone, it has bequeathed both of these gifts. The late theologian B.B. Warfield had observed:

·       Hospitals and asylums and refuges for the sick, the miserable and the afflicted grow like heaven-bedewed blossoms in its path. Woman, whose equality with man Plato considered a sure mark of social disorganization, has been elevated; slavery has been driven from civilized ground; literacy has been given by Christian missionaries, under the influence of the Bible.

The impact of the Christian missionaries has also borne witness to this principle. However, Western culture often associates missionaries with the imperialists, who had wanted to stamp out native cultures, and the colonialists who economically exploited them. However, new research has exposed the fallacies of these many stereotypes.

Robert Woodberry, professor of sociology, University of Texas, had devoted 14 years to investigate why certain countries had developed thriving democracies, while neighboring countries became failed states. Andrea Palpant Dilley writes that:

·       Woodberry already had historical proof that missionaries had educated women and the poor, promoted widespread printing, let nationalistic movements that empowered ordinary citizens, and fueled other key elements of democracy. Now the statistics were backing it up: Missionaries weren’t just part of the picture. They were central to it. (Christianity Today, Jan/Feb 2014, 38)

To his amazement, Woodberry was discovering that a long denigrated ingredient – the missionary – was actually central to the creation of successful states. He writes:

·       “Areas where Protestant missionaries had a significant presence in the past are on average more economically developed today, with comparatively better health, lower infant mortality, lower corruption, greater literacy, higher educational attainment (especially for women), and more robust membership in non-governmental associations.” (39)

·       Pull out a map, says Woodberry, point to any place where “conversionary Protestants” were active in the past, and you’ll typically find more printed books and more schools per capita. You’ll find too, that in Africa, the Middle East, and in parts of Asia, most of the early nationalists who led their countries to independence graduated from Protestant mission schools. (41)

Woodberry’s thesis has been gaining support. Philip Jenkins, professor of history, Baylor University, claims:

·       “Try as I might to pick holes in it, the theory holds up.”

What doesn’t hold up are the assertions of its detractors. They have to explain why the Christian West, while it was still strongly influenced by the Bible, had forged ahead of all the rest of the world educationally, scientifically, and in many other ways.

HOW IS IT THAT CERTAIN THINGS ARE UNCHANGING WITHIN OUR OF WORLD MOLECULES-IN-MOTION?

Science depends upon unchanging laws. Without these, there can be no experimentation and replication, confident findings, predictability, and even textbooks to record the findings. Without unchanging verities, there can be no knowledge, nothing that we can say that will remain unchanged in the next moment.

Yet we do have knowledge and publishable scientific findings. What then accounts for knowledge or any knowledge in a sea of molecules-in-motion, and what keeps our unchanging laws immutable as they are?

WHICH IS THE SUPERIOR PARADIGM: ID OR NATURALISM?

One Facebooker presented this thoughtful challenge:

·       How do you prove something is ID? You can't because there is no solid evidence to support such a claim. Your means of "proving" ID is simply labeling phenomenon we don't understand as supernatural. I think that sort of thinking stunts progress. If everyone simply shrugged their shoulders and attributed things they don't understand to the supernatural we wouldn't do much in the way of trying to learn why and how things work.

This is a charge commonly but mistakenly made against intelligent design (ID). I therefore responded:

“Thanks for your challenge. I think that this same challenge cuts even deeper against naturalism. There is no direct evidence that anything is natural or that has ever happened naturally. Even the tiniest atom is a marvel of design. Even the elegant, immutable, and causal laws of science give evidence of ID (not to mention consciousness, freewill, life, fine-tuning of the universe, and even the very existence of the laws of science, which are unable to create something out of nothing).

How do we know that something is designed? If we see a name scratched out in the rock, we automatically perceive that it had been designed. We easily recognize the products of design. However, how do we detect non-design? It seems that even chaos is patterned. This observation seems to indicate that the entire world is unable to deviate from design. Perhaps the universe is telling us something!

And the laws of science? They too seem to be designed. Just look at E = MC2. It is precise, unchanging, universal, and knowable. It provides evidence of an unalterable relationship among elements that ordinarily seem to be disparate – energy, mass, and even the speed of light (precisely squared). Do explosions (Big Bangs) create such order, immutability and universality? Hardly!

Why then is naturalism the prevailing belief of science? There is not a single shred of evidence that supports it. Therefore, it seems that we should conclude that it is simply an alternative religion or God-substitute, perhaps no more than a "shrugging of the shoulders?"