When I was in college, everyday seemed like a battle, a challenge to my faith.  I did my undergraduate work in comparative religions as a Christian at a secular school.  We covered every kind of system of thought from world religions, secular religions, cults, contemporary theology and every aberrant theology you could find plus Biblical criticism.  We also covered philosophies centered around religious ideas such as metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, psychology, and existentialism.  Other movements such as liberation theology, feminist theology, environmental theology and the New Age movement were also covered.  In retrospect, I can only describe it as a four year Sword fight.  In addressing the onslaught of human wisdom, I learned to evaluate each system of thought and break it down to its core components in order to do any sort of critical analysis.  I also had to do this because I had conviction to follow the Biblical mandate to “test all things by scripture and hold fast to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).  The truth is that we all believe or have believed false things at one time or another, whether that be the advice of a friend, stories from grandparents, something we read on the Internet or just cultural myths.  Some people still believe in things like astrology, evolution or that murdering people will be rewarded in heaven with seventy virgins.  The heart of man is deceitful and wicked and the beliefs of man testify to that fact!

In the spirit of taking every thought captive against the knowledge of God, to the obedience of Christ, I am sharing this process that I employed as a means of filtering through all of the information that comes our way as we go through life.  We are given information daily from various sources, some is true, some is innocuous, some is false and some is dangerously false.  Just in the last week, I had a friend ask me about a trend in the church, I had a coworker recommend a book to me, I observed a family friend give counsel to a family member, I had a customer tell me how she finds peace and a business associate tell me about a seminar they are sending their employees to.  In all but one of the above situations, I could think of Biblical passages that showed the advice being given was contrary to the Word of God and I would consider them dangerously false.  So with that, I feel compelled to write the following:

When we speak of deconstructing systems of thought, we are basically saying that we need to take a belief system, a religion, a philosophy, a doctrine, or a process, and reduce it to its component parts to determine the viability of the system.  Then we can subject the component parts to other tests for truth.  One of the things to consider is the goal of this process.  In my opinion, the goal should always be truth. 

By “truth”, I am referring to universal, absolute truth that is never false, valid for all people, transcends time and place, unaltered by individual experience or opinion, and can consistently interpret reality.

To say that there is no absolute truth is a self-defeating statement, so we will operate from the awareness that absolute truth exists.  It is possible to derive a logical consistency and arrive at plausible conclusions within a false system.  So you may reason something is true, but if it is built on the sinking sands of false presumptions, then it will likely not be true or not be transcendentally true over time.  In evaluating systems, we also need to recognize that we live in an open system.  Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty shows us that at an atomic level predictability in nature is only probable, not deterministic.  This is important because many false beliefs stem from adherence to a closed system that has fallaciously defined opposing views out of existence rather than proving opposing views to be false.  A good example is empiricist Dave Hume’s argument against miracles in which he redefined nature to be an unalterable system to make miracles impossible, he never proved that miracles did not happen. He built a compelling, eloquent argument, but his argument rested on a faulty foundation of false assumptions.  Hume later wrote in his writings on natural religion that you cannot look at nature and be insensitive to the probability of a Creator, which I take as a testimony of the truth of Romans 1:20.

Another example is the belief system of evolution, which has been widely accepted and it’s influence is far reaching.  I always found it hypocritical that this idea of evolution needs to be open for new species to evolve, yet those who embrace it are discriminatory in the application of an open system that would allow someone to walk on water or rise from the dead.  I know some would argue about my requirement that evolution is only possible in an open system, however their argument is not with me, but with biology and chemistry that does not provide the basic framework to allow for evolution, which means evolution requires miracles, largely because God made everything after it’s “kind!” This closed system ideology has had a negative influence on disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, archaeology, even theology.  This thinking in theology has produced false doctrines on creation such as theistic evolution, gap-theory, and day-age theory, as well as multiple theories to redefine the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Living in a post-modern world, people no longer concern themselves with what is true and what is right, instead they ask “will it work” and “how does this make me feel.”  The Post-Modern world is a soundbite, microwave culture that does not believe in deferred gratification or care about absolute truth, the driving factors are largely pursuing comfort, not virtue.  In the past, words had meaning and systems of thought were constructed to seek out knowledge and truth.  Since these noble principles have largely faded in the name of progress, tolerance and self-esteem, I am going to attempt to provide some guidelines to help people evaluate the truth of what they are hearing, and as always, within a Biblical worldview.  The way I see it, if the Bereans were bold enough to put the Apostle Paul’s words to the test of scripture, then all Christians should be bold enough to question anything from anyone in today’s world, under the light of scripture of course!

¹¹ Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.  – Act 17:11