Secularism: Ignoring the Eternal

Students of history realize that no society can survive, no civilization can function, without some unifying system of thought. All societies are made up of different people, different jobs, different values, and different classes. In a broad sense, all societies are melting pots.

How do the parts fit together to make a whole? What makes a society a unified system? Some kind of glue is required in order for the parts to stick together. The glue is found in a unifying system of thought, what we call a “world view.” Various world views can spring from diverse sources. The world view can be built upon a philosophy system such as Platonism or on a religion as in the case of Old Testament Israel. Other civilizations have been unified by a common mythology. Still others came together by a devotion to the state and a particular political philosophy.

Yet in all societies we find elements of philosophy, religion, mythology, and politics, all competing for the rank of dominance. One of these elements will inevitably emerge as the dominant view to order and unify the society.

What dominates American culture? Is it religion? Is it philosophy? Is it mythology? Is it statism? I am sure we will hear voices from each of these claiming theirs as the dominant system. It is difficult to isolate America’s dominant world view precisely because our culture is so diverse. We have an unusually free and open society where the battle of ideas takes place.

If there is a consensus among analysts of American culture they would agree that our unity is no longer (if ever) based on a religious system. Nor is mythology a likely candidate. Though we live in society with an ever-accelerating growth of central government we are not (yet) totally statist. That leaves one option, philosophy. But which philosophy? Is our world view found mainly in humanism? Pragmatism? Existentialism? Positivism?

Each of these schools of thought, as well as others, is flourishing in our day. They compete with each other. They coexist, not always peacefully, and make for strange bedfellows. The question that is provoked is one of common denominator. Is there one dominant philosophy that can include these other schools as subheadings? Is there an umbrella world view that is broad enough to cover these other systems?

We believe that one current ism has emerged as the dominant world view of our culture. Before we explore it, however, it is important to understand the anatomy of an ism.

Ism is a suffix added to the root of a word. These three letters, when added to a root word, change the meaning of the term dramatically. It is one thing to be social, quite another to embrace socialism. It is one thing to be human, something else to adopt humanism. See, for example, how the following words are changed merely by adding the suffix ism.

• national / nationalism
• impression / impressionism
• feminine / feminism
• exhibition / exhibitionism
• natural / naturalism
• behavior / behaviorism
• military / militarism
• moral / moralism
• peace / pacifism
• plural / pluralism
• liberal / liberalism

The list could go on. As soon as we put the suffix on the word it changes the word into a system of thought, a way of looking at things, a world view. Philosophers use the German word Weltanschauung to describe it. A Weltanschauung is a systematic way of looking at the world. It conditions how we interpret the meaning of daily life.

Again, we do not all look at things the same way. We all exist, but are not all existentialists. We are all thinking subjects but we do not all embrace subjectivism. We all have relatives but are not all relativists.

When Melville's Captain Ahab set out on his maniacal quest for the great white whale, Moby Dick, he tacked a gold doubloon to the mainmast and promised it as a reward for the first sailor to spot Moby Dick. As the sailors passed the gleaming coin they contemplated its meaning to them. One saw it as a symbol of great seamanship, another for how many cigars it would buy. The half-wit cabin boy, Pip, declared, “I see, you see, we all see.” In his simple-mindedness Pip understood that everyone on board viewed the gold coin in a different way. How the sailors viewed life, how they viewed the world, determined how they viewed things in the world, including the gold coin.

The dominant ism of American culture, the ism reflected in the news media, the film industry, the novel, and the art world is secularism. Secularism is the umbrella that shields the various competing philosophies beneath it. Secularism has the necessary common denominator to tie together humanism, pragmatism, relativism, naturalism, pluralism, existentialism, and several other isms.

What then, is secularism? What gives it the glue necessary to unify the other isms? To understand secularism as an ism we must first look at its root, secular, before we can see what magic is performed upon it by the addition of the suffix ism.

A Secular Priesthood

Historically, the word secular is a positive word in the Christian’s vocabulary. The church has always had a good view of that which was regarded as secular. In the Middle Ages, for example, men were ordained to a specific role in the priesthood that was called the “secular priesthood.” These were men who had responsibilities which took them out of the institution of the church to minister in the world where there were specific needs requiring the healing touch or the priestly mission of the church.

There is a sense of which I was ordained as a secular clergyman because I was ordained to the teaching ministry, not to an ecclesiastical office within a local congregation. I was commissioned to go to the university and become a teacher in the secular world. It is this secular world that can be distinguished, to some degree, from that sphere we have set apart and called the church, or the sacred realm. Often, in the minds of many Christians, the distinction between sacred and secular is the distinction between the good and the bad, but that is not the way it has been used in church history. Secular was simply a different sphere of operation.

The word secular has its origins and its roots in the Latin language and comes from the word saeculum which means “world.” The secular priest is one who ministers in the world.

There is another Latin word for “world,” mundus. One notable place it is used is on the tombstone of Athanasius, a fourth-century bishop who was a leading defender of the faith. His tombstone read, Athanasius contra mundum--”Athanasius against the world.” If both words, saeculum and mundus, mean “world,” what is the difference?

The people in the ancient world understood that, as human beings, they lived in time and space. We still talk that way. Our life is spatial, geographical. There is a certain “whereness” to our lives. We live within a time frame. Jesus talked about “this age,” the present age. So in Latin the word for this world, in terms of time is saeculum. The word for this world, in terms of space, is mundus.

The secular refers then to this world in this time. Its point of focus is here and now. The accent of the secular is on the present time rather than on eternity. I live right now. I can look at the clock and watch the second hand move. I can hear it ticking.

Try a little experiment. Look at your wristwatch, if it has a second hand, or at a clock. Watch the entire face of the clock. Now wait until the second hand reaches 12. Look quickly at the 6. Watch the second hand sweep toward the 6. The 6 is still future as the second hand approaches it. What happens when the second hand reaches 6? Does it stop? No, unless your clock breaks. Now the 6 is past. It’s over, gone forever. That part of your life is gone in an instant. We have just experienced time as it passes us by.

The question we ask is this: Is that all there is? Is there only time? This time? This secular moment? Or is there something else? Is there eternity beyond this world and this time? What we are really asking is, is there a God beyond this world who has always existed and will always exist? Does my personal life extend beyond the limits of this world?

We could ask the question another way. We start with the easy one. Where are you right now as you read these words? Can you identify your location? Are you in Chicago or San Francisco? What are you doing this moment? (I trust that you are reading.)

Those questions are easy. Let’s make them a little more difficult. Where will you be tomorrow at exactly the same time? What time is it now? Add twenty-four hours and guess where you will be and what you will be doing. It has to be a guess, doesn’t it? You don’t know for sure because you can’t possibly know for sure. You may have plans for tomorrow. You may even have a specific activity marked on your calendar for this specific time. The odds may favor that your guess will be correct. But you don’t know for sure because you don’t know that you will be alive at this time tomorrow or that the place you intend to be will still be there tomorrow.

These are the limits of being time-bound creatures. We guess about tomorrow; we hope for tomorrow; but tomorrow is always shrouded a bit in mystery for us. That is because we are secular. We live in a world of time.

Let’s make the experiment even more difficult. Now note the time, the day, the month, and the year you are reading these words. Write them down. Now add one hundred years. Five hundred years. Where will you be one hundred years from now? Five hundred years? What will you be doing then?

Some of you are smiling. You’re perhaps thinking, “Hey, that’s not so difficult. I’ll be in the boneyard somewhere pushing up daisies. I’ll be fertilizer for the cemetery or part of the ingredients of ‘Soylent Green.’” Perhaps you’ll say, “I’ll be dead, but some of my genes will still be around in my great-grandchildren.”

Secularism Versus Christianity

This is precisely where Christianity and secularism collide. This is the point of conflict. The biblical world view has a long-term view of human life. The term is much longer than that of secularism.

For secularism, all life, every human value, every human activity must be understood in light of this present time. The secularist either flatly denies or remains utterly skeptical about the eternal. He either says there is no eternal or if there is we can know nothing about it. What matters is now and only now. All access to the above and the beyond is blocked. There is no exit from the confines of this present world. The secular is all that we have. We must make our decisions, live our lives, make our plans, all within the closed arena of this time--the here and now.

That obviously brings conflict with Christianity. In the New Testament the biblical world view is always concerned with the long-term. The Bible teaches us that we are created for eternity. The heart of the New Testament message is that Christ has come to give us a life that wells up into eternal life. The startling news is that we will get out of this world alive.

The biblical starting point for understanding the world is found on page one of Genesis. We read, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). We look at the earth and we see that it has a beginning in space and time. But before there was even a world, there is One who transcends the world, One who is outside of the restrictions of this space and time order that we call the world--namely God. "In the beginning, God." At the core of our Christian faith, we believe in a God who is beyond the confines of this planet and who is eternal. All judgments that God makes, all things that He does, are done from the perspective of the eternal.

In philosophy, we say that God considers everything sub specie aeternitatis. That is merely a fancy Latin phrase meaning that God considers everything "under the species" or auspices, or from the perspective of, the eternal. The admonition and rebuke that Christ brings to this world is that men are only thinking of the short-term. They are thinking of the now and only the now, instead of the long-term consequences of their behavior. Jesus says that He comes from above. He descends from the eternal realm. He calls the Christian to live his life in light of eternity. A Christian's values are to be measured by transcendent norms of eternal significance.

I write a column in TableTalk, the magazine of Ligonier Ministries, and I call it "Right Now Counts Forever." I chose that title for a reason. If there is one message that I can give to my generation it is this: Right now counts forever. What you and I do now has eternal significance. The now is important because it counts for a long, long time. The secular is important because it is linked forever to the sacred.

When I chose that title I was acutely aware that we, as Christians, are being pressed on every side by the philosophy of the secularist. The secularist declares, "Right now counts for...right now!" There is no eternity, there is no eternal perspective. There are no absolutes. There are no abiding principles by which human life is to be judged, embraced, or evaluated. All reality is restricted or limited to the now.

We see this view in different forms in theology. We have seen an attempt in the twentieth-century theology to produce a secularized gospel. Remember the "Death of God" movement? One of the most important books that came out of that movement was called The Secular Meaning of the Gospel by Dr. Paul Van Buren. Van Buren talked of synthesizing classical Christianity with the philosophy of secularism. That simply cannot be done without first declaring the death of God. Secularism as an ism must include within its world view at least an implicit atheism.

The death of God, in terms of the loss of transcendence and the loss of the eternal, also means for us the death of man. It means that history has no transcendent goal. There is no eternal purpose. The meaning of our lives is summed up by the ciphers on our tombstone: "Born 1925, died 1985." We live between two points on a calendar. We have a beginning and an ending, with no ultimate significance.

We need not go to a library and take down a dusty tome of philosophy to be exposed to the world view of secularism. The media screams it. We think, for example, of the beer commercial that says, "You only go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto you can get." We see a man on a sailboat, the wind blowing his hair and the salt spray splashing in his face. He's having a fantastic time right now. Pepsi calls ours "The Now Generation." "Do it now!" "Get it now!" The message that comes through is, "You'd better get it now because there is no tomorrow ultimately." Life is to be consumed in the present. Our philosophy must be a philosophy of the immediate.

The secularists of Jesus' day summed up their philosophy like this: "Eat, drink, and be merry. For tomorrow you die." Contrast that with Jesus' words: "Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven." Think in terms of eternity. Think of the long-range implications. This touches us most directly, not simply in how we handle our bank accounts, but at the level of how we invest our lives. Life is an investment and the question that modern man has to answer is, "Am I going to invest my life for short-term benefits or for long-term gains?" Every time we are faced with a moral decision, with the temptation to do something now that may have harmful aftereffects, we are caught in the tension between two world views.

We cannot escape the secular. The world is our dwelling place. At times, Christians have sought to escape this world, to abandon it as an ungodly place. But where do we go? If we flee to the desert we have not left the world. Even monasteries have clocks. Our task is not to escape the secular, but secular*ism*. We must embrace the world without embracing worldliness.

The theologians who have sought to combine Christianity and secularism are on a fool's errand. It cannot be done. The root concepts of Christianity cannot be unified with the root concepts of secularism. If we seek to breed them the result will be a grotesque hybrid. It will be sterile, like a mule, powerless to reproduce. If we seek to effect a synthesis between two radically conflicting world views, we must inevitably submerge one into the other. The result of such bastardization can be neither Christianity nor secularism. If a Christian buys into secularism his world view is no longer Christian. If a secularist buys into Christianity he is no longer a secularist.

It was Aristotle who said that in the mind of every wise man resides the corner of a fool. Perhaps the reverse is also true. Perhaps inside the head of every fool resides the corner of the wise man. In biblical terms foolishness is deemed a moral act as well as an intellectual one. It involves more than mental error; it is also wicked. We are not to suffer fools gladly. Yet there are times we can learn something even from the fool.

What, apart from wickedness, could ever motivate someone to seek an unholy alliance between Christianity and secularism? Is any good motivation to be found there? I think there is. The secularist reacts negatively to religious people who are "so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good." He reacts against a kind of distorted religious faith that neglects the vital concerns of this world. He rejects a reservation mentality where Christians isolate themselves from the pain and struggles of this world. Many professing Christians have "dropped out," preferring to look to the future world alone. They embrace a spurious spirituality, which gives license for neglecting this world.

We Are Called to Be Secular People

Such a standpoint cannot be found in the New Testament. The Christ of Scripture was profoundly concerned with this world. This world was the site and purpose of the Incarnation. The God of heaven so loved this world that He sent His Son to redeem it. This is the world God created. This is the world God is redeeming. There is no other theater of God's redemptive action than this world. There is a profound sense in which we are called to be secular people.

When Harvey Cox wrote The Secular City, it was clear that one of his grand passions was that the church be "where the action is." On this point he was echoing the plea of Martin Luther that the church be "profane." What Luther meant by a profane church was not that the church should indulge in uttering obscenities or use gutter language. Rather, Luther was playing with the Latin roots for the word profane. Profane originally meant simply "outside of the temple." In Luther's terms a profane church is one that moves out of the temple and into the world.

There is a tendency for Christians to seek shelter in the temple. The disciples wanted to stay on the mount of transfiguration. At the death of Jesus they huddled in the upper room with the doors shut because they feared the Jews. Jesus sent them down from the mountain of transfiguration. He virtually broke down the door of the upper room to send them to the uttermost corners of the earth. Our Lord had no time for isolationism. He had an agenda for the world.

Luther also argued that a mature Christian must be secular in the sense that he must embrace the world. He detected a normal pattern in a growing Christian. The pattern begins with conversion, often followed by a sense of withdrawal from and rejection of this world. This period of retreat is marked by preoccupation with spiritual matters. But at the point of maturity there must be a kind of re-entry into the world. This is not a return to worldliness. It is not a fall into secularism. It is a new appreciation of the world as the theater of redemption. It is recognizing that this is our Father's world and not a place to be despised or ignored.

The Christian must distinguish between the secular and the sacred, but never separate them. To separate them is to deny the agenda of Christ. The voices of the theologians who go too far in embracing secularism serve as a warning to us. They don't separate the secular and the sacred; they confuse them. They stress the now and neglect the eternal. We must guard against stressing the eternal so much that we neglect the now. A Christian world view must be concerned with the temporal and the eternal. There must be no false dichotomy between the two.

At the core of our moral behavior are actions. Every action not only has a cause, but also a result. Results, or consequences, take us to tomorrow and beyond. What did Macbeth say? "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time." But for the Christian, there is no "last syllable of recorded time." Our lives are forever. Beyond the secular or saeculum there is the eternal. That is what the Christian faith is all about.

Why should a person be worried about salvation in terms of personal redemption if there is no eternal dimension? What is the mission of the church if secularism is correct? Why should we be concerned about the redemption of individuals if there is no tomorrow? All we can really do is minimize pain and suffering for a season. The secularist can never offer ultimate answers to the human predicament because, for him, there are no ultimate answers--because there is no ultimate realm. This side of eternity is the exclusive sphere of human activity. It is not by accident, as we will see, that most of those who accept secularism and who are thinking people, ultimately embrace a philosophy of despair. That despair will manifest itself in escapism through drugs, alcohol, and other forms of behavior that dull the senses from the message that is being proclaimed, indeed screamed, from every corner of our culture: "There is no tomorrow ultimately." It is a philosophy of despair and it is right now competing for people's minds in the United States.

In the chapters to follow, we will be looking at the elements that make up secularism: secularistic existentialism, secular humanism, and positivism. Although these different philosophies may seem to be on a collision course with each other, they all embrace one common point, namely, the denial of the transcendent and the eternal. Look for it in your culture. Be aware of it when you see it. We need to understand this world and this society in which we live.