Lectures on Calvinism - Part 3

George Lucas has said that his purpose in creating the Star Wars trilogy was to “introduce America to Buddhism.” And he has proven to be quite the effective evangelist for his cause. Our pluralistic culture is rocketing toward this pantheistic religion. (As an aside, every Christian teenager should read Dr. Peter Jones’ book Gospel Truth, Pagan Lies which describes in 90 short pages the nature of this pagan religious movement among us) What is fascinating is that Abraham Kuyper saw this coming 107 years ago. He notes that in the west, Protestantism in general seems to be making little progress where there is no truly Calvinistic worldview. He writes: “This accounts for the fact that among Protestant nations Pantheism [pan meaning ‘all’, and theism meaning ‘god’, hence the believe that everything is in some sense divine or ‘god’], born from the new German Philosophy and owing its concrete evolution-form to Darwin, claims for itself more and more the supremacy in every sphere of human life, even in that of theology, and under all sorts of names tries to overthrow our Christian traditions, and is bent upon exchanging the heritage of our fathers for a hopeless modern Buddhism.”

Is this not what we see in our own day?! I think part of the reason Kuyper’s words are so poignant today is because Communism had not arisen on an international political scale - he could see the real issues more clearly than many who would follow him in the twentieth century. Communism was doomed because it attempted to have no belief in the divine, but Kuyper could see the underlying pantheism that has a more consistent balanced view of life, even if it is wrong. The great battle we face today is not communism but the worldview of paganistic/pantheistic/pluralistic Buddhism in its many forms. Yes, Islam stands ready and waiting as a worldview force to be reckoned with in the west, but it will only have its day in the courts of our culture if we first utterly yield the cultural ground to Lucas’s Buddhism.

So what is the solution according to Kuyper? He asks: “And why did we, Christians, stand so weak in the face of this Modernism [early stages of western Buddhism]? Why did we constantly lose ground? Simply because we are devoid of an equal unity of life-conception, such as alone could enable us with irresistible energy to repel the enemy at the frontier. This unity of life conception, however, is never to be found in a vague conception of Protestantism winding itself as it does in all kinds of tortuosities, but you do find it in that mighty historic process, which as Calvinism dug a channel of its own for the powerful stream of its life...Without this unity of starting point and life-system we must lose the power to maintain our independent position, and our strength for resistence must fade away.”

It is only with the truly biblical worldview of Calvinism that we will be able to win back our culture. It alone has the power to array principle against principle against these other worldviews and prove victorious in our culture. So, let's know it first of all, and then live it out and proclaim it in relevant ways to the glory of the One who has given us the truth that will set us free.