Dr Paul Allen

It is critical for us who would preach the Gospel to ponder what sorts of presuppositions our listeners bring to the conversation. Today, sadly, there are many trends that have poisoned the culture and thus make our task much more difficult. But difficult does not mean impossible. It helps to describe modern mindsets, not to despair of them, but rather to look at them with some insight rather than being only vaguely aware of them. If we are more clear on the presuppositions that people bring to the table, we can better direct our message to them and ask them to consider whether or not these notions are helpful or even right. For indeed, most people carry their preconceptions subconsciously. Bringing them to light can act as a kind of medicine or solvent, which will assist us in clearing the thorns so that the seeds of truth can be sown. I list here six presuppositions; I’ve tried to avoid an overly philosophical analysis, instead using a more descriptive approach. The first

The Reformed Church of France, Paris, France (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) “I have raised up one from the north, and he shall come; from the rising of the sun he shall call on My name; and he shall come against princes as though mortar, as the potter treads clay” (Isa. 41:25). Isaiah here returns to his former argument that only God is all-powerful and only He can determine the future. When God says that He “raised up one from the north,” some see this as relating to Cyrus and others as relating to Jesus Christ . But John Calvin maintains that Isaiah denotes two different things, for when he says “from the north” he means die Babylonians , and when he says “from the rising of the sun,” he means the Medes and Persians. It is as if the Lord had said, “Two changes shall happen that are worthy of remembrance; for I will raise up the Babylonians, whose empire I will exalt on high, and next shall come the Persians, who shall become their masters.” God was displaying His power before th

Karl Marx 1882 (edited) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Writing in a very different revolutionary era, Karl Marx declared that the modern age would sweep all conventional morality and political structures aside in a complete transformation of values. In his memorable words, “all that is solid melts into air.” We are in the age of the advanced meltdown of those values. What Marx promised is now happening before our eyes. What can explain it? A witness to the collapse of Marx’s revolution, that great Russian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , explained it with four simple words: “Men have forgotten God .” And so they have. Nothing else can explain the great shift in worldview we are witnessing. The word for the process that is driving this shift of worldview in the West is secularization. In the context of the late modern age, secularization is fully evident even where we thought it was absent — in the United States of America . For decades, the conventional wisdom held that Europe was b

Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, smoking cigar. Español: Sigmund Freud, fundador del psicoanálisis, fumando. Česky: Zakladatel psychoanalýzy Sigmund Freud kouří doutník. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) But He said to them, “Why are you so fearful ? How is it that you have no faith?” And they feared exceedingly …(Mark 4:40–41a). “I don’t need your religion,” hearers of the Christian message sometimes reply. “That’s just a crutch for those who are too weak to cope with life on their own.” So goes one of the most frequently heard objections to the faith. How should we respond? The roots of this response go back to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Many of the leading thinkers of that period were skeptical as to the existence of God . But as means of travel improved and Westerners began to move about the world, an undeniable truth began to make itself clear—there was religious activity everywhere. Man, it seemed, was incurably religious. This presented a problem for

Image via Wikipedia For a century and a half secular humanist scholars predicted the demise of religion, which Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud dismissed respectively as the opiate of the people, and a mental illness. But the materialistic utopia never materialized. Instead, people have awakened to “spirituality.” Not God but materialistic secular humanism is  dead . One of the Death of God theologians, David Miller (whom we did not read in class) later gave the game away. In his book,  The New Polytheism  (1974) ,  he made the shocking claim that “at the death of God we would see the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.”  The Postmodern deconstructionist, Mark Taylor, observed that “the 21st century will be dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago.” A secular literature conference in 2006 boasted the title  God is Undead: Post-Secular Notions in Contemporary Literature and Theory  and included a lecture entitled “Secularism in