Common Grace, Psychology, and the Ghost of Abraham Kuyper

https://zacharyconover.substack.com/p/the-lie-behind-all-truth-is-gods   

In a time when Evangelicals are speaking in materialist terms of anxiety beginning in the hippocampus and resiliency and character being tied to the development of neural networks, we find an equally robust embrace of psychology (which ironically is rather subjective), dealing with concept of 'mind' as much as brain. Though I note that often the two seem to be conflated and confused. I suppose they would say integrated.

In some cases what is being referred to as psychology is more properly psychiatry. I find this more and more when I listen to programmes like Focus on the Family wherein the guests are speaking of mental questions in physiological terms - brain chemicals, nervous system responses, and the like. This seems to be more the direction they are headed.

For them all truth is God's truth and yet they oblivious to the fact that existence is broken, nature (as we know it) is sundered from a greater dimension of reality. Things like being and existence, let alone causality elude us, and as such I find that all their musings, let alone their conclusions, are misguided and erroneous if not often dangerous and even heretical.

Now when the worst elements of psychology (subjective questions of mind, motivation and behaviour) are combined with psychiatry (brain-related physiology, hormones, and chemicals) and then synthesized in the form of Evangelical discussion, I find that I'm listening to people that worship a different God, people that are laying the groundwork for their children to be materialists and ultimately atheists. They would contend this of course, but I think a similar thing happened centuries ago with the embrace of Enlightenment rationalism. It was a different road (or rather roads), but it led once orthodox Protestant Christians to Unitarianism and ultimately humanism. It's hard not to see how this present Evangelical course will lead to an embrace of evolutionary humanism in a subsequent generation.

I find it noteworthy that they also explicitly reject the Sufficiency of Scripture. They do so on multiple fronts but just today I heard a Focus on the Family spokesman stating that most pastors are not trained in these fields and are thus unqualified to help the people in the congregation with mental health issues. This constitutes a rejection of not just the authority of Scripture but the nature of Biblical anthropology. Instead, Focus turns to the academy for its guidance. Needless to say it vexes me to no end when I hear that organisation described as Fundamentalist. In reality they are syncretist Evangelicals drifting in the direction of Theological Modernism at a rapid pace.

Materialism already dominates cultural thinking. Rather than denounce it and be willing to embrace living in the wilderness (so to speak) as second-class citizens, the Evangelical movement once again is moving the goal posts and re-defining the terms in order to forge a compromise. For my part, I think they crossed the line long ago into what is a functional apostasy. They speak of Christ and the gospel but these concepts have been gutted and redefined, and I believe many of the people in those circles are deceived and lost. This compromised thinking plays out everywhere in thinking but it especially dominates their ecclesiology. Now that it's invading and overtaking anthropology, it won't be long before soteriology and theology proper are also affected. Some would say this is already happening.

Conover offers some helpful comments in the linked article. It's refreshing to find someone (almost a voice in the wilderness) challenging these assumptions which now so govern and dominate not only Evangelical circles, but many Confessional ones as well.

For Evangelicals this way of thinking works because they tend to have a lower view of the Fall, and one often not worked out in any kind of detail. In Confessional Reformed circles, the vehicle for entry (as it were) is Kuyper's doctrine of Common Grace. This question is complicated by the fact that Common Grace means different things to different people. There is a legitimate concept of Common Grace in terms of restraint and longsuffering. This includes the role of the state in the New Testament. This is the paradigm which Peter hints at near the conclusion of his second epistle. The world is sustained so that the Church may bear witness against the world and the celestial powers and that the grace of God might be magnified.

But the Kuyperian teaching regarding Common Grace goes much further. And when the Kingdom is defined in extra-covenantal terms and incorporates culture and civilisation, the doors are wide open. Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) kicked the door open even wider and provided a justification for the unbeliever (unwittingly) contributing to the Kingdom. Kuyper was responding to the collapse of Christendom in the face of Enlightenment Liberalism, revolution, and industrialisation. His paradigm influenced 20th century Evangelical movements and continues to plague the Church even today.

Not wishing to sound like Pontius Pilate, it needs to be said that 'truth' can also be a slippery concept. Truth can be confused with fact and vice versa. Truth also must be held within a larger paradigm of assumptions. The world's 'truth' may be true in one sense but it inevitably is built on false foundations and if this is not examined carefully, the 'truth' embraced by the Church under the 'all truth if God's truth' mantra, will lead to grievous error and un-Christian thinking. Focus on the Family typifies this kind of egregious thinking, but that 'ministry' is by no means alone.

As Conover says, unbelievers get some things right. But it must be clarified. They get the form right, not the substance. Whatever truths they express are not grounded or rooted in the deeper fundamental truth that is found in Christ. The gulf or chasm between Christian regenerate thought and that of the unbeliever is a span that cannot be bridged by common grace. Only redemptive grace can do this. I suppose it might be said that I tend toward a hyper-Calvinist view on this point while I think Kuyperianism introduced a strong dose of Arminian (even Finneyite or Pelagian) thinking into contemporary Reformed circles.

This kind of antithesis between the believer and unbeliever is not conducive to building cultures and civilisations especially when Christians constitute a minority. This was the scenario Kuyper was trying to overcome and his model unfortunately sold the Church out and opened the floodgates of the world. Evangelicalism finds the overlap because that movement was motivated by the same concerns and yet lacked the necessary intellectual rigour. Thanks to figures like Francis Schaeffer and later Charles Colson, Kuyper was re-packaged for the Evangelical masses and now I constantly hear his concepts echoes on Christian radio, in pulpits, and in books - often by people who don't know who Kuyper is but have nevertheless imbibed (to some extent) his ideas.

Evangelical thinkers and proponents of psychology believe they can take the world's models and simply factor in Christian anthropology and the realities of sin and arrive at a full-orbed and effective method of diagnosis and treatment. But they are mistaken in that they bring with them secular assumptions and thus the end result is not a full-orbed expression of God's truth at all, but syncretism. I find it rather glaring and am startled by how few seem to see it. I am struck listening to Focus regarding the size of their audience, their influence, and the fact that there aren't more voices speaking out in protest. As I listen I think of someone like Albert Mohler who was formerly on the board of Focus and still openly collaborates with them. It either testifies to his lack of discernment (which I think is demonstrable) or to his ignorance, or perhaps to his cowardice and unwillingness to disown this influential organization which works to undermine Biblical truth as much as it might attempt to buttress it.

I found the comments to be interesting as well - it's also noteworthy that the voice of protest (in defense of Kuyper) was offered by a career military man who spent years as a recruiter no less - a salesman of death and deceit, a person who is characterized by syncretistic thinking and ethical compromise. And it's also telling (and very sad) that based on this testimony, he was then hired by a Reformed seminary as a recruiter. You cannot make this stuff up.

While in many ways the protest seems like voices in the wilderness, there are those speaking out against these trends and yet all too often the response comes in the form of Theonomic-Dominionism which is just as problematic and every bit as compromised. Truly, we walk a razor's edge and there are great perils on either side. This is not to suggest that everyone who is captivated (to some extent) by psychology or even Dominionism's pseudo-holistic approach to epistemology are lost. Rather I would say they are in danger, in peril of losing their way and risk being tied in with the larger patterns of deception at work in the Church and the world.