What mental image comes to mind when you hear the word “worldview”? It’s a popular word and one that should be used often.
But what does that word “worldview” mean to you?
And what does it mean to your neighbor, especially if that neighbor is not a Christian?
More importantly, how do you even begin to put a worldview together?
STEP ONE: ELIMINATE MASCULINITY IN THE CHURCH
I’ve a confession to make. If you’re like me, you go to church, sing some hymns or spiritual songs, listen to a sermon, listen to someone else pray (except when you’re in a church that allows congregational participation) then go home and forget the experience.
Take this morning for example. The song leader extols the virtues of “He loves me” repeated many times. Now you could be forgiven for making a mistake on the meaning of these words if you did not realize the “he” meant Jesus. Otherwise it sounds just like any other romantic song.
And there, in the midst of the regular Sunday worship service, we sing and hear of the feminization of the culture — starting first in the church.
Ann Douglas, in her provocative book, The Feminization of American Culture, had this to say about Christianity and how churches were feminized. The hymns played an important part. After pointing out that “In Puritan days, congregations chanted ‘hymns’ which were drawn from the psalms,” Douglas comments that one of the problems of this was it “necessitated a certain disrespect for easy comprehensibility” (p. 217).
STEP TWO: FEMINIZE THE CULTURE WITH MUSIC
In the first part of this discussion topic, I highlighted the feminization of culture with hymns. Here, I want to look at music.
If your life is similar to mine, then we’ve both spent an awful amount of time trying to make up for a bad education. Public schooling was my background. It was not good. Here’s why. Being hostile to Christianity, public school secular education left out anything that might point to God. That, according to St. Paul in Romans chapter one, is most of the creation.
Now it is through the arts that the secularization and feminization of culture has received one of its strongest influences. I was never taught this at school, though. Based on faulty philosophy and faulty conclusions, education began the “dumbing down” process which continues today.
Consider this:
Step 3: USE MUSIC FOR THE MORAL REVOLUTION
In this series on the feminization of culture, I’ve wanted to get you thinking about communication. In particular, communication with music.
First, I highlighted how hymns were used to help eliminate a rigorous intellectualism in the church and replace it with a more emotional environment.
Second, I drew your attention to how music is an important ingredient in communication, and how we can contradict ourselves by having the wrong music with the right words.
One composer who understood this was Richard Wagner. Remembered often because his music was popular with German Nazism, it is also important to remember what Wagner contributed to musical development in another way. He contributed to a moral — better known as an anti-faith — revolution with his particular style of music.
[Author: Gerardus D. Bouw, Ph.D. This article was originally published in 1988 by the then Tychonian Society. It is now named The Association For Biblical Astronomy, 4527 Wetzel Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44109. Click here for more details.]
To hear tell, geocentricity, the ancient Biblical doctrine that the earth is fixed motionless at the center of the universe, died over four centuries ago. At that time Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish astrologer, suggested the sun and not the earth was the center of the universe (heliocentrism). Copernicus knew his proposal was heretical to Christian thought and the Bible. Thus he delayed the publishing of his idea for about thirty years. For the next hundred years a debate raged in scientific and theological circles. By 1650 the consensus shifted from geocentricity to heliocentrism, even though there was no scientific evidence favoring either model.
Geocentricity has not been without its spokesmen over the years. Among the educated scientists who attested to geocentricity were three generations of Cassinis (astronomers who dominated French astronomy from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries), and astronomers and educators ordained by the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church well into the twentieth century. Others, such as John Jasper (a famous black, nineteenth century Baptist preacher from Richmond, Virginia) and William Lander (a nineteenth-century English writer) were quite vocal in their belief that geocentricity is truly a Biblical idea. They, as well as reformers such as Luther, perceived the world (and Christians, in particular) would not only bring into question the authority of the Bible but also weaken science itself by embracing heliocentrism.
R.J. Rushdoony left this life in February, 2001, just 10 years ago. At that time I wrote a tribute to a remarkable man, a friend, and a mentor. Here’s my updated version of that tribute.
It is with sadness, yet a spirit of hope, that the tribute was written to acknowledge a great man, Rousas John Rushdoony. His greatness, however, remains one of the best kept secrets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, except for a relatively small devoted and loyal following that Dr. Rushdoony accumulated in his lifetime.
“Rush”, as he was fondly called by his friends, was a unique man. I did not have the opportunity to meet him more than a dozen times during the 21 years of our association. But I thoroughly enjoyed every moment with him.
Step 5: RADICALLY CHANGE THE THEOLOGY
This piece of historical information should get your mind racing!
In trying to understand the cultural changes of recent centuries, one has to look at religion. “Culture,” as Henry Van Til argued, “is religion externalized.”
Step 4: Preach Psychology Rather Than Theology
If you want to radicalize the church and feminize it, there is not much left to do after you’ve replaced the Psalms with hymns and accompanied the hymn with 19th century romantic style music.
A remaining task is to feminize the preaching, and that’s pretty easy to do. Now I happen to think there is a place for women in the church, and there’s even a teaching role for them. But, if only women do the teaching, you can be certain that some things in the Bible will be left out.
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What Would a “Spiritual” Revival Look Like?
Charles Hodge, in his history of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, written in the 19th century, was critical of the revival period known as the Great Awakening. Why? His opinion seems to cut against common acceptance that this was a mighty work of revival, and that the Holy Spirit manifested Himself in a particular way during this period.
Charles Hodge (no known relation to this writer) would not accept this view so readily. In his opinion, the church was in a worse state two years after the Awakening than it was two years earlier. Thus, he was not so ready to accept the Awakening was the work of the Holy Spirit.
His criticism, therefore, begs the question. And if you allowed yourself to dream for a few minutes, what would a spiritual revival look like to you?
I dreamed a dream. There was a spiritual revival under way.
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A Mark of Sovereignty
From time to time there are news items explaining why some people find it necessary to leave home. Taxes — property taxes to be precise.
In a period of rising house prices, it is easy to forget that with rises in prices come increasing property taxes. And property taxes can mean financial ruin for many whose income cannot rise to meet the increased tax burden.
One resident in Massachusetts some time ago was suffering when her tax bill increased from $2,200 to $3,500, while income remained fixed at $12,000 a year. The result? Sell the family home, with all its sweat and tears (it was built by the current owner and her late husband) and memories.
While the stock market may be on the move up again and there is little evidence that the real estate market is out of the doldrums, the banking fiasco in the US, together with fevered home buying, indicated personal debt was on the increase. So, too, were home prices, since a good portion of the debt went into home buying. Property prices were bound to increase — and property taxes along with them.
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