If I were to call you a humanist would you deny it? Would you want to fight about it?
A simple working definition of Humanism is someone who emphasizes a person's capacity for self-realization through reason; while rejecting religion and the supernatural…
According to the Humanist Manifesto of 1933 humanism regards the universe as self-existing and not created... man as a part of nature that has emerged as a result of a continuous process…and that the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.
Now I would bet we have a hundred percent on the “I’m not a humanist list.”
But what if you are more affected by Humanism than you realize? What if while aiming and claiming to be a follower of Jesus Christ and a Christian in the purest sense, you were by action a humanist?
At any point in our lives either privately or in a church setting that we begin to operate in our own strength and our own abilities we become affective humanists.
When we fail to passionately pray for the power of God to be poured out in our lives we are being humanists. When we fail to realize that apart from Christ we can do nothing...we are in being humanist. When we reject the miraculous and the supernatural and the intervention of God we are being humanists.
Christianity has no greater enemy in all the world than Humanism. Humanism is the face and force of atheism. Atheism immediately gets the attention of everyone, but humanism sounds so, so human. And there in lies the danger.
When all we do and all we claim and all we expect is what humans can do, we are affective humanists. When we fail to throw ourselves upon the grace and mercy of God, we are humanists. When everything we design and do can be explained and accomplished by mere humans we are humanists in the purest sense. Whether it is by creed or deed, when we give no room for the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our ministries…we are nothing more and nothing less than Affective Humanists!
As believers we claim the Divine Creator reached down to man as the Suffering Redeemer in order to provide for each of us the Holy Indwelling. And we either choose to live our lives affected by Him or affected by humanism. Reject humanism expect a miracle!
1 comment:
By and large, we have become a people who ignore the "supernaturalness" of the spiritual realm. And this applies to more than just what we would refer to as miracles.
The spiritual world is all around us (we wrestle not against flesh and blood...), and yet most people are oblivious to the constant interaction that we have with spiritual beings. There are angels, both elect and fallen, unclean or evil spirits, and most importantly, God, the Holy Spirit. We believe, at least we have "head knowledge" that the Spirit of God is with us and dwells in us, but most of us don't live in way that demonstrates this 24/7/365 presence of God in us.
And wasn't Jesus casting out demons every few chapters throughout the gospels? And His disciples were doing the same in the gospels and the book of Acts. But where are the demons now? Have we psychologized and sociologized and evolutionized them out of existence? No, they're still here, and they are all involved in an ongoing battle in the spiritual realms. And we are all participants as well; we can choose to be active participants (as with prayer and fasting) or we can participate passively.
We are presented with the secular, humanistic, evolutionary viewpoint constantly in our culture. It is inescapable. And it is easy for us to fall prey to the philosophy that scientific knowledge is the ultimate knowledge. And so we measure our theology against the precepts of the natural sciences and the social sciences and try to make sure that everything "fits". Should we not instead measure the "theology" of science against what God has revealed to be true in the Bible?
I am very much concerned with the youth of today and their total indoctrination into the world of neo-darwinistic evolutionary thought. It is always presented as fact--with no proof necessary--on TV, in books and newspapers, and in textbooks. Even those scientists who believe the biblical account of creation seek to show that scientific discovery fits in with biblical creation rather than with a godless, undirected process of "creation"of the cosmos followed by a process of microbe to man evolution.
But shouldn't biblical revelation trump scientific discovery? Shouldn't we believe what God said because God said it--and not because science agrees or disagrees? Science claims to have most, if not all, of the answers. However, scientific hypotheses are constantly changing. God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Part of our problem with accepting humanism, in effect, even if not accepting it as a theological framework, stems from our belief in science and technology as a savior of sorts. We believe that there will be a better medicine, a better procedure, a better device to cure this illness or treat this disease or solve that problem. And it isn't that curing diseases and solving problems is a bad thing. It's just that it becomes very easy to look to man to fix man's problems and to give man the credit for the solution.
I could go on, but as my comment is now as long as your original post, I guess it is time to call it quits for now.
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