Philosophical Materialism in the Church

https://www.saintstephenslutheranchurch.org/single-post/2019/08/14/where-does-religion-come-from

Virtually every time I turn on NPR there's an add for the 'Hidden Brain' show - I think it must be quite popular. Just from the clips they play, it's evident to me the show attempts to wrestle with various thought-related conundrums from an entirely materialistic standpoint. It is (needless to say) utterly godless in its approach to knowledge, ethics, existence, meaning, and a host of other questions. You are your brain - humans are just a mass of cells, and the attempt to extrapolate some kind of meaning, purpose, ethics, or hope from this model is an exercise in futility. In other words, the show is a waste of time.

Our culture is completely given over to psychology - people love to turn inward and obsess over themselves and find answers in 'science' - the epistemological arbiter of our culture. Of course I would contend that in addition to psychology being pseudo-scientific, what 'Hidden Brain' is doing is not science at all but primarily philosophy - an attempt to flesh out a scientific worldview. In other words it is (despite the fact that it has no named god) a humanistic religion that only can offer the vain and empty hope that evolution supposedly provides.

I was not surprised (but nevertheless appalled) to discover a mainline Lutheran congregation posting an article in support of the programme - specifically the episode on the origins of the religion. As expected, the assumption is that religion evolved to meet certain needs given the limited availability of knowledge to prehistoric man. The assumption is that modern man can move on - the assumption being that religion is mere superstition that increasingly has no value and in fact is hindering man from further evolutionary development.

This show likewise had a programme on 'Creating God' - again an obscene and foolish attempt to explain why man in his evolutionary process felt the need to 'create' the divine. I'm sure the reason is that was a means of providing explanation and causality for that which could not be explained - something science and the fine folks at Hidden Brain can now do (or so they foolishly claim) and as such the 'God Hypothesis' is obsolete - or at best must be radically redefined.

The article demonstrates that mainline churches embrace such thinking. This is not to say that all members and ministers within these bodies embrace such atheism, but many do. It leaves one baffled as to why they even bother with Church at all. The words and rites have no content - they are at best empty cultural expressions that can only find meaning in redefinition. These folks cannot be reckoned as actual Christians in any kind of meaningful sense - let alone the categories of Scripture.

Such thinking categorically rejects the concept of revelation. There are no Scriptures - or they only have meaning when defined culturally and humanistically, and through the lens or filter of academic study. The latter is required to delineate the text and reveal its meaning. Subsequent experts in cultural anthropology, psychology, and sociology are needed to provide some kind of application.

While the linked example is glaring - clearly a 'church' that is no church and a 'church' in which no Christians are present, this kind of thinking is slowly but surely creeping into Evangelical circles. They're a long way from embracing the 'Hidden Brain' approach to such questions but the underlying assumptions about authority, development, and the academy are embraced. The end result is increasingly becoming a question of nuance as opposed to absolute difference.

This is additionally true when it comes to the pragmatism that dominates so much of the Evangelical sphere. Meaning and ethics are weighed in terms of results and spirituality increasingly looks like behaviouralism sometimes hiding behind or dressed up with a 'Christian' vocabulary.

Like 'Hidden Brain' a great deal of behaviour, spirituality, and ethics has to do with training ones brain and the embrace of positive thinking and the patterns of behaviour connected to it. The Scriptural categories of mortification, self-denial, obedience, and even faith are being re-cast in terms of psychology and categories determined by an atheistic academy. It's troubling to say the least. And as far as the Lutheran congregation in Wilmington, Delaware - they are to be pitied for they are lost.