Critical race theory has swept the land. Indeed, nearly every institution – businesses, governments, churches, schools, news outlets – preaches some form of critical race theory. What is critical race theory? I’ll given you a non-academic but memorable and accurate definition I heard from a podcaster. It’s the idea that black people are the relentless victims of relentless white racism, all the time, everywhere, and that explains everything. What is more, this state of affairs is permanent. There will never be a time when white people are not vicitimizers and persons of color – POC as they are now called, or, if you’re super woke, BIPOC, which stands for Black, Indigenous, People of Color – are not their victims. This idea is then used to justify everything from criminal justice reform – which is the theory that there are too many black people in jail, not as a result of their own criminal activity, but strictly due to white racism; as a result, those already convicted of crimes must be let out of prison and those who perpetrate new crimes must not be punished – to reparations for slavery.
The rot of critical race theory has penetrated so deep into our society that even the 2020 Trump campaign came up with a reparations program they called the Platinum Plan, which promised to invest $500 billion in black communities. Who was going to foot the bill for this was not made clear, but obviously white Americans would pay the lion’s share of it. When Trump promises to invest $500 billion in the black community, he is promising to steal the money – either through direct taxation or, what is more likely, through inflation – from other Americans to pay for it. If this, or some similar, program is ever implemented, it will fail to achieve the stated goal of racial equality, thus brining on more calls for even bigger reparations programs in the future until the wealth of the entire nation is squandered by this cultural Marxist nonsense. The only winners will be the critical race theory hustlers such as Robin DiAngelo, the politicians who promise that Shangri-La is but one Congressional Act away, and the bureaucrats who implement the programs.
Oh, and I haven’t even gotten around to mentioning the growing strength of the globalist technocrats, who seek to undermine sovereign nations and impose a one world tyranny government on us all. Just last week, the Vatican announced a new initiative called the Council for Inclusive Capitalism with The Vatican where Antichrist and friends – by friends I mean the Rothchilds, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the UN among others – to “make the world fairer, more inclusive and sustainable.” I have no doubt that, if these people get their way, the world will be poorer, more subject to tyranny and less free. At least for most of us. For the technocratic elite, it will be a boom time. In short, they will create a neo-feudalist society in which they will own everything, while you and I, as a recent video from the World Economic Forum put it, will own nothing.
Depressed yet?
As I mentioned above, there is simply no good news to report. The bad guys are going from strength to strength and those who stand for liberty and truth are daily beaten down.
It’s almost seems as if we’ve been given a ringside seat to watch the collapse of our civilization. And, in fact, I think that is what we’re seeing.
I’m not alone in this opinion, either. Gordon Clark and John Robbins both thought so, too. In his essay “The Religious Wars of the 21st Century,” John Robbins wrote, “The West has been in collapse for more than a century.”
In A Christian View of Men and Things, Gordon Clark wrote,
Like a building, providing we can escape the evils of analogy, society is bound together by many girders, beams, joists, and planks. Some of these may loosen without an evident crash; and even after the crash the debris may reveal a number of jointed combinations. The termites on one of these jointed pieces may still optimistically believe there has been no collapse. It is this condition that the mid-twentieth century seems to be facing (53-54).
Commenting on Clark’s work in the Foreword of A Christian View of Men and Things, John Robbins noted that, “the collapse of the West can be viewed as the collapse of the attempted Thomistic synthesis of human philosophy and Christ, and the West’s fatal choosing of non-Christian philosophy, not Christ.”
Western civilization is the child of the 16th century Protestant Reformation, but today in 2020, very few people in the West believe the doctrines of grace – that salvation is by grace alone, through faith (belief) alone, in Christ alone – taught by Martin Luther, John Calvin and others. As important as the doctrines of grace were for forming a new civilization, there was another component of the spiritual and intellectual revolution that was the Reformation. That component was epistemological.
Epistemology is a big, scary looking technical word and many people are put off by this. But the actual idea behind epistemology is very simple. Epistemology is a Greek word used for the most basic discipline in philosophy, which answers the question, how do you know?
Everyone makes truth claims. But unless someone can give a coherent answer to the question, how do you know? there is no reason to listen to him. In one of the quotes from John Robbins above, you may recall that he mentioned that, “the collapse of the West can be viewed as the collapse of the attempted Thomistic synthesis of human philosophy and Christ.” So what does this mean?
In short, Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century Roman Catholic philosopher, attempted to combine the epistemology of Aristotle with the revelation of Scripture. This is the “synthesis” that Robbins mentioned. Thomas took one-part Aristotelian philosophy and mixed it with one-part Scripture and thought that he had built an unassailable philosophic system.
Now Thomas was a very brilliant fellow. But unfortunately for him, and for those who follow him, Aristotelian philosophy and Biblical Revelation don’t mix. They’re like oil and water in that way. And the central problem with Thomistic philosophy is that it attempts to graft Aristotle’s empirical epistemology onto the Bible.
Above we discussed the term “epistemology” and defined it as the philosophic discipline that answers the question, how do you know? But what is “empirical epistemology”?
Empirical epistemology – sometimes just called empiricism – is the idea that sense experience furnishes us with knowledge. “Seeing is believing” is a popular way to express this idea. If you ask someone who believes in empirical epistemology how he knows such and such a thing, he may respond by saying, “I saw it with my own two eyes.”
But while it certainly seems that sense experience furnishes us with knowledge, a little reflection shows that there are serious problems with this approach. Gordon Clark spent a great deal of time in his writings showing the problems with empiricism. I will not go into detail on his arguments here, but a few simple tests will help show some of the problems with the notion that sense experience furnishes us with knowledge.
Ask yourself this, have your eyes or ears ever played tricks on you? Most of us would say that our eyes have fooled us at one time or another. Perhaps you’ve been out on a hot day and thought you saw water in the distance. As it turned out, it was just the heat reflecting off the ground that made it appear there was a lake ahead. Depending on the light, an object can appear to be different colors. What is the object true color? How do we know?
Most of us have experience of a passing locomotive with its horn blaring. It’s one pitch as it approaches us, but the pitch seems to drop when it passes. This is known as the doppler effect.
Very clearly, our senses can be fooled.
Going back to Thomas, he attempted to use flawed empirical epistemology to reason to the conclusion that God exists. But starting as he did with a flawed premise, his proof, unsurprisingly, was invalid.
Over the centuries as philosophers have poked holes in Thomas’ attempt to combine Aristotle and Christ, it has become clear that the two cannot live under the same roof. One must choose, either human philosophy or Christ. As John Robbins noted, the formerly Christian West chose human philosophy and has been in collapse ever since.
If there is to be any hope of a recovery of Western civilization, even on a modest scale, a new Reformation will be required. And that new Reformation must purge out the Aristotelian empirical leaven and return to the Christian epistemology, which is not sense experience, which is not unaided human reason, but revelation alone.
The Bible, as John Robbins noted many times, has a systematic monopoly on truth. This does not mean that non-Christians cannot speak or write or think what is true. In fact, because their minds are lighted by Christ himself – Christ, the Apostle John tells us in his gospel account, is the light that lightens every man who comes into the world – they have innate ideas that are true. But the catch is, they cannot give an account of the of these innate ideas. Knowledge is justified truth belief. If a man cannot give an account of his truth claims, the most he can say is that he has an opinion that such and such is true. He cannot have knowledge.
Take something simple such as theft. Christians certainly condemn theft, but they are not alone in this. People of diverse religious backgrounds, and no faith background at all, condemn theft. But only Christians can be said to know that theft is wrong, because only Christians can appeal to the Scriptures in faith. Christians know that theft is wrong because God said, “Thou shalt not steal.”
But there’s another aspect of theft that is a problem for non-Christians: defining what theft is in the first place. For example, this past summer a representative of Black Lives Matter defended looting in Chicago by saying, in effect, it was people just taking what was rightfully theirs in the first place. According to a report in mystateline.com, “‘I don’t care if someone decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store, because that makes sure that person eats, Ariel Atkins, a BLM organizer said, according to NBC Chicago. ‘That makes sure that person has clothes. That is reparations’ Atkins said. ‘Anything they wanted to take, they can take it because these businesses have insurance.’”
According to the BLM representative, taking the property of a business is okay, because they are insured. If you’re a Christian, I trust that you would not accept this definition.
From her comments, one supposes that Ariel Atkins would agree that theft is wrong, but then goes on to define theft in a way so that the taking of another’s property under certain circumstances is not theft.
I hope this short discussion of theft serves to convince you of the difficulties, apart from the Word of God, of coming to agreement on a simple idea such as theft. And if human philosophy cannot resolve a simple issue such as defining theft and giving a coherent reason for why it is wrong, why would we expect it to solve more complex problems?
Closing Thoughts
Jesus told his disciples that “without me you can do nothing.” More and more each day we see the truth of this played out before us on our television and cell phone screens.
The West has turned its back on Christ and, as a branch separated from its vine withers and dies, so too is it withering away. Our descent into barbarism is accelerating. If we continue at our current pace, it would seem that a tyrannical government is the only option for restoring any semblance of order in the West.
But as hopeless as things seem from a human perspective, and as surprising as this may sound to some, the answer to our problems is known. Indeed, the word is near us, in our mouth and in our heart. It is the revelation of Jesus Christ in the 66 books of the Bible.
It was the widespread preaching of and belief in the Gospel of Jesus Christ that began to create an entirely new and just civilization 503 years ago in 1517, and it is only through the widespread preaching of, and belief in, the Gospel of Jesus Christ that that civilization, what we call the West, can be saved from the forces that are tearing it apart in 2020.
As Christians, it is not our job to save Western civilization. Only God can do that. It is, however, our job to be faithful witnesses of his truth. Perhaps God is done with the West and has purposed its destruction and a return of the Western nations to feudalist tyranny. Perhaps he intends a new Reformation. Perhaps he has something else in mind. I do not pretend to know.
But what I can say with certainty is that if America and the West remain on their current path, their destruction is sure.
Whatever the fate of our nation and the nations of the West, our calling is to be faithful, in word and in deed, to our calling in Christ. Let us be found faithfully doing our master’s business, come what may.
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