Peter Jones - The Other Worldview: Exposing Christianitys Greatest Threat

THE OTHER WORLDVIEW

EXPOSING CHRISTIANITYS GREATEST THREAT

PETER JONES

FOREWORD BY

R.C. SPROUL

The Other Worldview: Exposing Christianitys Greatest Threat

Copyright 2015 Peter Jones

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ISBN 978-1-57-799622-4

Kirkdale Editorial Team: Brannon Ellis, Joel Wilcox, Abigail Stocker

Cover Design: Josh Warren

CONTENTS

Wait just a minute. How in the world did we get to the place where we are? The sun has set on the British Empire and the grand experiment of America has blown up in the laboratory.

We can ask about the grisly impact of two world wars on Western civilization. We can look to the impact of the Holocaust, where the battle-hardened commander of the Allies, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, wept when he beheld the ghost-like, emaciated survivors of Hitlers death camps and the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. We can read our resultant culture through the lens of Nietzsches nihilism or Jean Paul Sartres assessment of humanity as Nausea with No Exit in sight.

America has passed through a revolutionnay, two revolutions. The first was the revolution of the 18th century , whereby the United States secured its independence from England. We often forget that over a century and a half of colonial culture had elapsed before the Boston Tea Party was even imagined. The Revolutionary War was fought to preserve the colonial cultureits customs, mores, form of government. There was already an established American way of life that was being sorely threatened by whimsical changes in Great Britains parliament from which the colonies were to be governed.

To be sure, America was already changing without any great assistance from England. Jonathan Edwards had already decried the declension of values, religion, and customs initiated by the Pilgrims and Puritans who settled the country earlier and who sought to establish a light set on a hill.

The French Revolution was altogether different. It involved a self-conscious effort to turn the traditional, established national culture upside down. It was a war against the prevailing French way of life.

Americas second revolutionthe cultural revolution of the 1960s was similar to the French Revolution in that its goal was to bring radical change to the forms, structures, values, and ethics of the status quo. It sought to bring in a New Age with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Now the dawn of the New Age is long past. Aquarius is now at high noon. This revolution, in its inception, was relatively bloodless. But its consequences have been exceedingly bloody. In just one example, America has witnessed and sanctioned the murder for hire of over 60 million unborn babies. Living, personal beings are routinely pulled and cut to pieces in the name of womens health and liberty.

We have seen the noonday sun reveal the destruction of the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of sex, and the sanctity of the sacred itself. The culture is not merely post-Christian and post-modern. It has become not only neopagan, but neo-barbarian.

Ideas have consequences. The ideas of the New Age, of our age, have their roots in ancient Gnosticism. That particular philosophy embraced a form of pantheism or monism: God is the Onethe sum of everything. All is God, and God is all.

Of course if everything is God, then nothing is Godthe very word God can point to nothing individuated from everything. It becomes a meaningless, unintelligible word.

Peter Jones has labored to show the distinction and impact of a zeitgeist of Oneism (monism) versus Twoism (duality). The Twoism of which Dr. Jones speaks is not an ancient form of dualism which embraced equal and opposite forces of good and evil. No, it is a cosmic duality that seessharply and vividlythe distinction between creature and Creator and the relationship between the two.

This is not a simple problem of arithmetic wherein we learn to count from 1 to 2. These numbers have suffixes. The suffix -ism is added to the 1 and the 2. The suffix -ism adds to a simple number an entire worldview or philosophical standpoint embraced by either.

Dr. Jones provides for us a clear map. This map traces the historical paths, the philosophical routes, and the cultural lanes that have brought us to the Age of Aquarius. It is a must-read for every concerned Americanand especially for every Christian who weeps at the graveside of his culture.

R.C. Sproul

Orlando, Florida

2015

I recently watched the third installment of The Hobbit in a packed theater with my wife and one of our daughters. It was an epic adventure, to be sure, but what I noticed most was a certain longing underneath it all. It made me wonder if the continued popularity of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien represents a nostalgia for a cultural past that is no more. One keen observer sees an important difference between these two literary giants:

Whereas C. S. Lewis tries to make us comfortable in what we already believe by dressing up the story as a childrens masquerade, Tolkien makes us profoundly uncomfortable. Our people, our culture, our language, our toehold upon this shifting and uncertain Earth are no more secure than those of a thousand extinct tribes of the Dark Ages; and a greater hope than that of the

These authors vast mythical vision of the confrontation between the forces of good and evil reveals a sense that the Christian West was threatened by an evil that would destroy all remembrance of a culture based on Christian principles. In the 1940s , it was easy to identify this evil with Nazism and Marxism. These authors were no doubt concerned as they saw the religious soul of Western culture making way for the self-assured triumph of secular humanism.

The present book is written especially for readers one-third my age. I write it as an uncomfortable eyewitness to a massive shift in Western culture, where the dark forces of Sauron have taken power in the once-Christian Shire of Western culture. First appearing as secular humanism, these forces have now grown into a much more formidable opponent of Christianity: a full-blown cosmology of pagan lore, seen perhaps most clearly in Hollywoods many other religiously inspired blockbusters