Christianity as the Universal Reality Template

Christianity alone provides real reality. This is so true that when other faith systems arise that deny Christianity, they inevitably ape Christianity despite their denial. In order to see this we have to keep in mind that real reality can never go away despite the attempt of competing worldviews to scrub reality clean of Christianity. What happens with false faiths and worldviews is that they always end up including the inescapable realities that Christianity openly and forthrightly teaches, but they often include them in such a way that they are masked or muted.

It is important to be able to identify this masking or muting that happens in false worldviews because this can provide the opportunity to expose the deficiencies in alien worldviews. Further exposing this masking or muting can lead to the opportunity to show the superiority of Christianity in accomplishing what the false worldview is seeking to accomplish with its mutated Christian categories.

Denying Supernatural and Divine Attributes Doesn’t Make Them Go Away

Let’s take materialism as our first example. In materialism we have a worldview and faith system where there is a complete denial of the Christian teaching of the existence of both God and the supernatural. However, all because materialism denies God and the supernatural, it doesn’t mean that God or the supernatural disappear in their faith system. For the materialist, since everything is natural, we must expect to find the supernatural dwelling among the materialists’ natural, since in essence what they do is to collapse the supernatural into the natural. Since the supernatural is an inescapable reality, we find it cropping up in the materialists’ category of the natural as they end up investing the natural or material with supernatural and divine qualities.

Consider what the naturalist does in his worldview. He insists that he does not believe in the supernatural and yet he ends up espousing a religious belief in the supernatural nature of nature. This can be seen in how he ascribes supernatural and divine characteristics to nature. As one example, matter becomes invested with the divine supernatural attribute of eternality. The materialist Carl Sagan once said, “The cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be,”¹ thus ascribing the supernatural attribute of eternality to nature.

However, not only do we find the divine and supernatural attribute of eternality ascribed to nature by those who deny both the divine and the supernatural, but we also find them ascribing the divine attribute of aseity to matter. In classical theology, aseity is the affirmation that God’s being is from Himself. Aseity teaches that God is self-existent or ontologically independent, for He does not depend either for His existence or for His characteristics on anything outside Himself. Now the naturalist in his worldview denies the existence of God and the idea that any God has aseity, and yet he ascribes aseity to the god of his system. For the naturalist—the person who denies the divine and the supernatural—it is matter that has the divine and supernatural attribute of aseity. The existence of matter is derived from matter itself. The divine attribute that the materialists deny to God is ascribed to matter.

The point is that the inescapable categories that Christianity teaches are a part of real reality that can be denied, but that never go away. Other faith systems and worldviews can attempt to scrub their respective worldviews clean of them, but upon close examination it can be seen that the real reality that Christianity teaches never goes away.

Denying Predestination Doesn’t Make It Go Away

We see this principle again in the doctrine of predestination that is taught by Christianity. Predestination, in Biblical understanding, is the doctrine by which we confess God’s exhaustive sovereignty that extends from eternity past in the decrees of God to eternity future as seen in the fulfillment of all that God ordained.

Predestination is an inescapable category. The question is never whether or not predestination is true but rather what or which predestination we will be predestined with and by. Either we will acknowledge and bow to a supernatural predestination or, denying that, we will be governed and controlled by a naturalistic predestination—governance and control that God predestined for the disobedient who seek to cast Him from their thinking.

Those false faiths that deny God’s predestination and seek to function as if predestination is not true will not suddenly discover the disappearance of predestination, but rather will find their wills bound, as God predestined, by a naturalistic predestination of some false idol seeking to ascend to the seat of God.

That naturalistic predestination is a reality in America can be seen in the increase of statism as the federal government seeks to predestine the lives of the citizenry. Wherever we find a dramatic increase in centralized planning, there we find a state that is seeking to take on the prerogative of predestination. R. J. Rushdoony likewise suggested that when a worldview denies God’s predestination, naturalistic predestinations enter the vacuum:

With the doctrine of predestination, Christians were dramatically freed from dependence on church and state. Predestination freed man from the custodial care of institutions. His determination and salvation came from God, not church or state. It is not an accident but an inescapable fact that the decline of the doctrine of predestination had led to statism and to power-hungry churches …

If the doctrine of predestination is weakened, then church and state are exalted and their powers enhanced.²

Wherever we find the state implementing school-to-work programs that try to channel individuals to precise places in the work force, there we find an example of naturalistic predestination. The language of the “school to work” legislation reveals that the state is embracing the role of predestinator of the future careers of individual students. As B. K. Eakman notes, “The underlying assumption (of School to Work) appears to be that it is not cost effective to have mere individuals making choices about their own lives, that they must be regimented and controlled for their own good and for the good of society.”³

Aldous Huxley caught this sense of naturalistic predestination when in his Brave New World he wrote,

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery And Conditioning Centre, and in a shield, the World State’s motto, Community, Identity, Stability … ‘We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future …’ He was going to say ‘future World Controllers’ but correcting himself, said ‘future Directors of Hatcheries,’ instead.⁴ (Emphasis added)

Examples could be multiplied, but we must understand the connection between abandoning the truth of supernaturalistic predestination and the rise of naturalistic predestination. Predestination is an inescapable reality that never goes away. One significant implication of this is that when people deny God’s supernatural predestination, they do not escape the fact that their wills are conditioned by the will of some naturalistic predestinating source. Another significant implication of this is that just as God predestines to the end of advancing His Kingdom, so naturalistic predestinators predestine to the end of building up their respective kingdoms. It is part of God’s irony that naturalistic predestination always serves God’s supernatural predestination.

What we see here then is that whenever man seeks to overthrow God’s predestination so that he may experience full libertarian freedom, what happens is that his freedom is constrained by naturalistic predestinating agents.

All of this teaches us that if we are a people who desire political and economic freedom, we must be a people who embrace the Biblical teaching of God’s predestination; for when the church loses the high notion of predestination, the consequence is the reduction and constraint of individual freedoms in the societal realm.

Conclusion

Christianity teaches the nature of real reality and though people may deny what Christianity teaches, that real reality that Christianity teaches always shows up somewhere in their worldview. Whether it is a denial of the necessity of churches, catechism or ministers resulting in the embrace of public schools as churches, and curriculum as catechism or teachers as ministers, what is denied as true as taught by Christianity is surreptitiously embraced as true by their functional equivalents in worldviews hostile to Christianity. The denial of the need for a Messiah mediator manifests itself in the embrace of the psychologist as mediator: what is denied as true as taught by Christianity is surreptitiously embraced as true by its functional equivalents. One may hear the denial of the categories of objective guilt and sin and later find that the initial denial is shown as false, as one observes angst and dysfunction serving as the masking equivalents to what was earlier denied. Where one hears people prattle against faith, or religion or the Kingdom of God, there you will somewhere find their own version of faith, religion and a transcendent kingdom.

The reality that Christianity teaches can be and often is denied by false faith systems; but a close examination will always result in finding the real reality that Christianity affirms somewhere affirmed in false faith systems in a twisted but present fashion.