Spiritual Warfare

Europe is depopulating itself, dying by its own hand, with America maybe fifty to seventy-five years behind. A dysfunctional (because post-Christian) Western “liberal democracy” is losing to political globalism and to radical Islam -- in both cases, intellectually and morally dysfunctional, and totalitarian societies. Amidst all of this, Christians have been effectively sidelined, mostly by their own apathy and incompetence.[1]

Whittaker Chambers, a Communist spy who about 1938 had converted to Christianity, said to his wife, “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.”[2] His comment was, I suppose, about the state of the Western leadership and of the institutional Church, not of God, or he would hardly have converted.

The title, “Witness”, of his autobiography, is meant in its deepest sense, standing for what one believes to be right, at any cost to oneself — “Men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable”.

Whittaker Chambers is one of the great (but ignored, and/or despised) heroes of the 20th century. He came to understand the deep nature of spiritual warfare, and what was at stake in world civilization. But he saw little hope that Western leadership could, or would, deal with the realities, that it had bought too far into a compromise-and-get-along mentality to stand up against Communism, mortal enemy of everything for which Western Civilization had stood. Chambers understood that without God, we have no hope against the enemy, and that the beauty of Western Civilization had arisen out of Biblical faith.

Chambers describes in detail Communist strategy, using local small groups of utterly committed persons, who were knit together in a vast and secret network, infiltrating the institutions of a given society to undermine and erode local tradition and belief, rendering them susceptible to Communist mind-control.

It has become a platitude that a society can be changed by just such a dedicated minority. Everyone seems to recognize it but Christians—who continue on their self-absorbed, institutionalized way, forgetting that it was small, local groups of Christians who won the Roman empire because they knew how to die well, who would not hold back their lives, if required, for their witness to Jesus as Savior and Lord, including over Caesar. And, it was a small group of mostly Christian patriots who won their freedom from mighty Great Britain.

In quite a different setting, Whittaker Chambers was fighting the same battle, which can be summed up as: Either Jesus is Lord, or civil government will be lord. Either God will rule, or we will be ruled from the Tower of Babel.

That is the apocalyptic stuff of Armageddon, whether seen as a continuing and on-going battle between freedom and totalitarianism, or the final denouement anticipated by Christians at the return of the King. It is the stuff of J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, much of Witness reads like The Lord of the Rings, only in real time.

Many of us here today (2009) lived through those episodes. The drama continues, not on continental fields of battle, but in the comparatively muffled, hushed, but unabated halls of politics and commerce.

The whole of Biblical spiritual life is built on and for freedom. The law of God itself is meant to produce a free people. The Tower of Babel knows nothing of freedom except that self-worship which a tyrant keeps for himself.

The winner in this struggle for world authority will be whichever worldview can continue to stand in the open, honest contest of ideas in the public square. The winner will be whichever view, whichever community representing that view, can do so with truth, righteousness, and love, the community which can hold the intellectual, moral, and spiritual high ground.

Or, more accurately, the winner will be whoever can restore that open, honest arena of public debate, the high ground which has been so badly compromised and contaminated by cowardice, power struggle, and mind-control throughout Western culture. It hardly exists in politics, education, the media, or the Church, and is badly beleaguered within the scientific community.

Yet the Church and scientific communities have common interests. They both are based on a common Biblical source, and (in their better moments) both rest their cases on objective truth.

But—there will be no secure winning on the side of freedom, truth, or righteousness if the Biblical worldview cannot be defended, and that rests on evidence for the existence of God. The Tower of Babel, which rests on one or another theory of evolution, cannot consistently produce any of those values. Ideas have consequences.

Those small groups of dedicated warriors who will restore sanity to Western Civilization must know and believe that truth and righteousness are their foundation, that they can enter the public contest with intellectual, moral, and spiritual integrity—or they will be made to look and feel like fools.

At bottom that means being able to explain why they believe in God. The best way to convince others that you stand on the intellectual, moral, and spiritual high ground is to be in demonstrable fact standing there. Helping honest persons do that is our task in these pages.

On the Biblical view, the level playing field is where God conducts His campaign to convert the world back to Himself. God has created the world as the common ground upon which He will meet the rest of us, an open, level playing field, where, in an astonishing act of grace, He invites, “Come, let us reason together...” to form a freewill covenant (Isaiah 1:18). God does not tilt the ground in His own favor, He meets us where we are, and engages us in honest dialogue, setting us free to make an honest choice for or against His covenant.

Most people, including most Christians, today believe that religion is inherently inaccessible to the processes of reason, that religious claims can by nature be neither proven nor disproven. This alleged conflict between the philosophy of Athens and the revelation of Jerusalem was experienced early in Christian history, some Christians rejecting any attempt to explain the Christian faith reasonably.

Their fear was wrongly conceived. The danger was not philosophy or reason per se, it was the inherently abstract, impersonal, (and unproven) presuppositions of Greek philosophy entrenched in the impersonal Greek worldview. Again, “One false premise, and logic does the rest...” False ideas have consequences.

Moreover, much of Christian resistance to seeing God as reasonable is, I think, inspired by hidden motives to protect from the exposure of one’s own misdeeds. A first item on God’s agenda is always the integrity of our relationship to Him. If we do not want to face that honestly, we do not show up for the discussion, or we immerse ourselves in a pretend religion.

On the theological side, much of the tragedy of Christian history can be traced to the failure of Christians to distinguish between the philosophical tools of thinking, which the Greeks pioneered, from their worldview.[3] And so elements of the erroneous worldview were imported, along with their very legitimate intellectual tools, into Christian theology. The unBiblical results of such reasoning led many Christians to reject reason because the Greeks were thought to own the intellectual high ground.

But it may be that Christians are on the brink of rectifying their error and becoming able again to pursue clear thinking about matters of religion. Some very competent Christian apologists have been, and are currently, on the scene.[4]

Christian truth-seekers have a potentially instant alliance with other truth seekers of all persuasions to defend the common ground, the level playing field of public debate. And believers in relative truth are seriously vulnerable to anyone with a bit of common sense and courage. The phrase, “believers in relative truth” is, after all, an oxymoron. If truth is relative, there is no truth left in which to believe. Instant chaos is implied, even if not understood.

The first rule of spiritual warfare is thus the preservation of that open, level playing field, where all views are welcome, but each view is open to challenge by others to determine whether it is indeed the truth (“Come, let us reason together....”). The rule can be expressed as: Thou shalt be a truth-seeker – at any cost to thyself. This level playing field is the foundation of all honest pluralism, and of the American Constitutional order.

The subversion of truth is therefore the first sign of spiritual warfare (see Genesis 2-3, John 8:31 ff., and Romans 1:18 ff.). God is a God of truth. He has nothing to offer but truth, and certainly nothing to fear from truth. Truthseeking, from God’s point of view, is the royal road to finding Him. So He insists on truth.

As its name suggests, the Tower of Babel is not a tower of truth.[5] It is a Tower of unity by mind-control and coercion, the only options left in a cosmos without moral order. So truth-seeking and truth-speaking are the first and fundamental obligations of the people of God -- at any cost to themselves. Without that prior obligation to truth, none of the law or grace of God has substance or meaning. The true God, by Biblical test, is the one who can show up and prove His own case, the one who can keep his promises.[6] Truth in the Bible, including theological truth, is an essentially personal and relational thing, not abstract. Jesus can say with a straight face, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14).

Being relational is no excuse for intellectual sloppiness. It is precisely relationship above all else which compels intellectual honesty. When we are less than clear, when we are less than consistent, our relationships fall apart. And when our relationships fall apart, so do we. Truth-seeking is the Biblical way of doing things.[7]

That self-destructive behavior has, of course, been abetted with the gleeful cooperation, sometimes, of secularists and pagans.

So why reason at all? Because there is no other way to unite freedom, truth, and the discipline required for community survival. The only alternatives to reasoning together are chaos and totalitarianism of one brand or another.

Dr. Earle Fox is IAI's Senior Fellow in Philosophy of Science and the Worldview of Ethical Monotheism.

This article is an extract from the Preface (D-4) of Dr. Fox's book A Personalist Cosmology in Imago Dei: Personality, Empiricism & God, Vol. I.

See also Dr. Fox's new Book Abortion, the Bible and America

The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the Institute.