False Antitheses
What splits humanity in two is not economics, sexuality, race, or vocation, but Jesus Christ.
Dear friends and supporters:
Even though sinful, God-resisting humanity knows everything is not right in the world, all men, as Cornelius Van Til declared, unavoidably know God. They may not acknowledge this fact, but it’s a known fact nonetheless. How do they, then, account for the manifold imperfections in the world? They can never afford to answer, at least consistently, “Because of man’s sin against a Holy God.” To the intelligent, covenant-breaking man, that explanation simply won’t do, because it would put him face to face with his Maker whom he tries every waking moment of every day to avoid. Therefore, he creates false antitheses. That is, he explains the imperfections and brokenness and “out-of-kilterness” of the world by holding that something other than sin is to be the root of it all.
Economic Antithesis
For Marxists and many other Leftists, the basic antithesis of the world is economic. This was the great burden of Marx’s and Engels’ writings. One reason Marxists so detest Christianity is because it declares that something other than economic factors is man’s basic problem and need. For Marxists, the great war is between the proletariat (the workers, “wage slaves”) and the bourgeoisie (the capitalists, middle class, or owners of the means of production). In today's advanced free-market economies, these very expressions have almost lost their meaning, since “ownership of the means of production” is hard to pinpoint in cyberspace! Classical Marxism (though not Cultural Marxism) thus loses much of its appeal in post-industrial societies. Nonetheless, this class-warfare idea that economics is at the root of the antithesis was one of the great false antitheses in the 19th and 20th centuries and accounted for more misery, suffering, and death than almost any other factor.
Sexual Antithesis
To feminists, the antithesis is sexual. Some go so far as to suggest that men and women “live in different conceptual universes.” The problem isn’t human sinfulness, they suggest, but males, who, since humanity first walked the earth, have been able to dominate and subjugate women in virtually every area of life. The feminist answer to this is to suggest that sexuality is not a category inherent in the human condition. Rather, we are all “genders.” A gender is a social construction. For example, there may be several genders: homosexual, lesbian, transgender, and androgyny. According to the feminists, the reason we have male domination is because males have put themselves into a position to define gender. If we can change that, we will no longer have men and women, at least as traditionally understood, but rather a number of self-chosen genders. To feminists, man versus woman is the basic antithesis. Women must destroy this socially constructed male domination in order to achieve the perfect world. To the transgendered, by contrast, the “binary” conception of sexuality is the antithesis that must be revoked. Sexuality must be endlessly in flux.
Racial Antithesis
To racialists, the basic antithesis among mankind is, of course, racial. This idea has a long history, going back even to the biblical world. Many Jews of Jesus’ day, for instance, not having properly understood the Old Testament prophets, thought of themselves as inherently superior because of their race (Jn. 8:33). After God included Gentiles on equal footing within Christ’s church, breaking down the wall separating Jew from Gentile (Eph. 2:13-17), many Gentile Christians began to claim a racial superiority, or at least, damned the Jewish race. This fostered in some quarters a “Christian” antisemitism, which the Bible itself would never permit.
This racialism has been an acute problem with many races as long as races have inhabited God’s earth, and it is pervasive today. The real problem, say the white supremacists, is the blacks and the Jews who are polluting the “gene pool.” We need an “ethnostate.” Not so, say the religious anti-racialists, both white and black; it’s these whites who have enslaved us for so long, and created a “systemic” racism. No, you have both got it wrong, some Asians hold; it is we who are demonstrably superior intellectually and in almost every other way.
To all these groups and many others the basic difference between humans is racial. Some still attempt to mix this with Christianity: “Christian” racialists and kinists. The idea is that WASPS are destined by God to take dominion in the earth by dominating all other races. It is difficult to imagine a more repugnant, contra-Christian idea.
Vocational Antithesis
A new antithesis on the Right has emerged: blue-collar workers versus white-collar workers (though in our Information Economy, there are comparatively few actual white-collar workers left). We’re even hearing about “Blue-Collar Christianity,” and that white-collar workers are effeminate. This is nothing more than a revived class warfare, and class warfare is just as evil on the Right as it is on the Left. In my vocational life I myself collected and hauled tires for recapping, written books, cut pipe and glass, delivered lectures, worked as a mover, taught junior high English, cooked Burger King fries, pastored churches, and much else. None of these tasks is inherently more masculine than the other.
Introducing Marxist class warfare under the guise of masculinity is pernicious. Class warfare is evil. All of it. The antithesis is not between blue-collar and white-collar workers. Where is the real antithesis?
The Real Antithesis
All of these alleged antitheses — economic, sexual, racial, and vocational — are false antitheses. The great antithesis between humans is between covenant-keepers and covenant-breakers. What splits humanity in two is not economics, sexuality, race, or vocation, but Jesus Christ. The great division within humanity is between those who, on one hand, worship and serve the creature and those who, on the other, worship and serve the Creator. This is the basic division in humanity. This is the great chasm that bisects all other apparent differences. Those of different economic standing, those of different sex, and those of different race and nation and vocation each stand on different sides of the biblical antithesis. There are wealthy and middle income and poor Christians, as well as non-Christians; male and female Christians, as well as non-Christians; black, Asian, and white Christians and non-Christians; blue- and white-collar Christians and non-Christians; and so on.
If sinful man can successfully redirect this antithesis to something else, he will joyfully do it. Why? Because it furnishes an alternative explanation for the world's sin. Then something other than sin is the source of the world's problems, and the individual is relieved of the responsibility of blaming himself. In other words, false antitheses create victims and scapegoats.
Mankind’s Problems Are Sin Problems
The great economic problems of the world are at root sin problems. Socialists and other coercive redistributionists who wish to use the arm of the state to commit legalized theft, or, on the other hand, materialistic capitalists who deny God's holy redistributionist plan of tithes and offerings and who refuse to voluntarily help their poor brethren as the Bible demands are both sinners. The problem is not economics; it is sin.
Likewise, the sexual problems in the world are at root sin problems. Men refuse to assume their proper leadership role in the family, church, and elsewhere and forfeit their responsibility to women. Many men, on the other hand, abuse and otherwise mistreat and demean women, and refuse to cherish their wives and protect and assist other women. Some women wish to arrogate to themselves roles of leadership that God never intended for them, not content with one of the greatest roles of all: rearing up godly children.
Racial problems are, moreover, sin problems. Racial pride in lineage or skin color is a particularly repellant sin. Racists hate other races and look on each other with suspicion and malevolence because they have never been washed in the blood of the Lamb, for whom a great number “out of every kindred, and tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation” have been prepared (Rev. 5:8). If they were to abandon their evil racism, they would be forced to reckon with the evil of their own hearts.
Vocational resentments, too, are sin problems. White-collar workers often patronize blue-collar or manual workers, and blue-collar workers resent the white-collar workers and today’s cognitive classes. Both need each other, and neither is superior to the other in God's cultural order.
Everything is wrong, A. W. Tozer once said, until God sets it right. He put it right supremely by Christ’s atoning death and glorious resurrection and ascension.
This is the only way the basic antithesis between humans can be overcome.
Personal
I had such a great time seeing so many of my friends and addressing the annual truthxchange symposium in Pasadena. This long-time ministry champions the Christian worldview, in particular against all forms of paganism and neopaganism infecting our culture. Like CCL, it’s a think tank, and a highly productive one at that.
Dr. Peter Jones is one of the great war horses of the Faith, an astute New Testament scholar who refused to remain sequestered in the academic guild but pressed out boldly and courageously to apply the Faith in culture. His rigorous Christian critique of neo-paganism in church and culture (“Oneism”) as opposed to the Creator-creature distinction (“Twoism”) is unsurpassed.
Peter, now in his 80s, will be retiring from truthxchange at the end of the year, but his decades-long kingdom investment will persist.
Please pray for my father-in-law Donald Habedank. He’s in his late 80s and has lived a full, rich life for the Lord and is in his last days. We are praying that the Lord takes him softly and swiftly.
Thank for your friendship.
Yours for the cosmic Lord,
Founder & President, Center for Cultural Leadership
Isaiah 49:1–2
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