Part 2 of 4
Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.Isaac Newton’s Principia, “The First Law of Motion”
Nature is not simple.Gary North, Is the World Running Down?, (1988), p. 36
Influence or Cause?
Dr. Gary North, another 20th Century religious thinker – cut from the same Puritan cloth as Newton and whose Unconditional Surrender (Institute for Christian Economics,1988) manifests the same “moral government theology” (also known as “New School Calvinism”) described in part 1 – was also an avowed Postmillennialist who wrestled with these same issues. In two of his least read books, but which might be his most relevant to our discussion here, they were Dominion & Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (ICE, 1987) and Is the World Running Down? (1988). In them, he faces squarely these two conflicting worldviews: the doctrine of a “spiritual” entropy in amillennialism in contrast to the rejection of entropy in postmillennialism.
The reader will recall that the Amillennialist tends to be “Augustinian” or “Calvinist” in orientation, because he believes that Original Sin as manifested in the “sin nature” of man, cannot be overcome until the Resurrection. The notion of being “Born Again” with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit does not constitute a spiritual experience of sufficient power to overcome the tendency of human morals to degrade. Man’s will as an attribute or faculty of function is itself corrupt.
The Premillennialist shares in the Amillennialist’s skepticism and believes also that the human condition cannot be resolved until the General Resurrection.
[It can be argued that premillennialism is just a different form of amillennialism in the sense that the worldview is the same, they merely differ in the chronology of prophetic fulfillment.]
Furthermore, the Premillennialist interjects mysticism into the equation by insisting that “spirituality” itself comes from the renunciation of one’s moral agency in “surrendering” it to God. How a moral faculty endowed from the Creator can be regarded as “evil” which requires repudiation remains unanswered? Simple obedience in response to a clearly Divine directive is not enough for Premillennialists.
Premillennialists require the analysis of motives and a person’s psychological condition. Obedience is suspect because it may be insincere. “Pure motives” are required derived from continuous “testing” and constant introspection, agonizing prayer vigils, and sometimes, self-inflicted harm through fasting, alms giving, and other acts of self-sacrifice which grow from self-loathing.
Charles Finney’s courtroom-style sermons (he was once an attorney) set the standard for this style of introspective preaching, an unfortunate parody of Christ’s maledictions against the Pharisees. In spite of Finney’s postmillennialism and revivals, his doctrines ended in the same swamp of Augustinianism: the universal and total depravity of man.
Thus, Postmillennialists may not be entirely free from these pitfalls, either, especially if they are newly converted churchmen to the doctrine. The very title, Unconditional Surrender – perhaps North’s most popular book – itself suggests some kind of abdication, forfeiture or obliteration of the will.
To their credit, Moral Government theologians and other New School Calvinists (such as North) did not mean “surrender” in the sense of a mystical sublimation of moral agency into a spiritual possession. For them, it meant a decision to heed the moral laws of God which can be objectively known. Yet as Churchmen, they got confused. They did not think that these laws can be rationally apprehended by the mind (because it too is a fallen faculty) but must be absorbed into a spiritual impulse or instinct which guides the will. (More in future installments).
Regardless, Postmillennialism as a doctrinal position contains within it the affirmation of the all-sufficiency of the Atonement of Christ. Both judicially and experientially, freedom from Original Sin can become an existential reality.
Returning now to Gary North’s books cited above, as a gifted writer, instead of making us guess where his logic might be taking us – unlike the “hucksterism” of so many academics who make you listen to their long-winded digressions before finally telling you what they are talking about – North tells us what he is going to tell us in the opening pages of his Preface in Is the World Running Down?:
Which is more important, the effects of Christ’s resurrection in history or the effects of Adam’s Fall (God’s curse upon the ground) in history? My answer . . . is going to make a lot of very dedicated Christians unhappy. I answer that the effects of Christ’s resurrection are more important, as time goes by, than the effects of Adam’s Fall.
Spoken like a true Postmillennialist, he spends the next 300 pages demolishing the notion of Original Sin as the dominating principle in the Universe as expressed in the Law of Entropy.
[Dominion and Common Grace will be discussed in the next installment.]
Entropy & Newton’s Worldview
The Newtonian worldview figures prominently in North’s analysis because it lies at the foundation of modern Christian cosmology and apologetics, while the “pseudo-modern” cosmology which arose since General Relativity, has instead reintroduced the chaos of pagan cosmology in the form of competing and contradictory natural forces typical of a polytheism.
From his chapter “Entropy & Social Theory,” North writes:
From the days of Isaac Newton, there have been major unanswered (and seemingly unanswerable) questions associated with modern physics. Gravity is a big question. How do stars and planets influence each other, as Newton claimed, “at a distance”? If there is no substance linking them, then how does one produce an effect on the other, or both on each other? This question baffled scientists right up until the end of the nineteenth century, when they finally agreed to stop asking. They had first proclaimed that a substance called the ether fills interstellar space, and then they spent almost two centuries trying to find any evidence of its existence. They failed, and after Einstein and other modern physical theorists began writing in the first decade of this century, scientists finally abandoned belief in the ether. They now face a major question: “ether/or?” Or what? They could answer, as Newton did, that it is God who holds the mass of the universe together, not the ether. They could say that an invisible, yet undiscovered physical force holds it together, “but we will not call it the ether.” They could say that nothing holds it together, but somehow it displays incredibly predictable regularities. They are so hostile to the idea that a personal force (God) holds it together that they would prefer to believe that nothing does. Or they could say that it is held together by statistical formulas. More and more, they are drifting toward the last solution. Until they agree, however, they just repeat endlessly, “Gravity holds it together,” for want of a better magical incantation. (p. 32)
It can be argued, if not already anticipated by the reader, that this connecting “substance” has been found in plasma physics, of which Professor James M. McCanney has been a leading proponent. It must not be forgotten that Einstein’s paper which won for him the Nobel Prize in 1921, was published in 1905 as “The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” and became the foundation of the Special Theory of Relativity. To be distinguished from the more questionable “General Theory of Relativity” (which tries to explain the correlation of light with time), Special Relativity seeks to explain photoelectric effects of light upon matter.
When Christians today speak of “natural law,” they have in mind a universe that can be observed by man, and that conforms to rigorous mathematical laws, from the far reaches of the galaxy to the boiling water in the tea kettle on the stove. Now, Christians do not really believe in a universe totally governed by such laws. They believe in miracles. These miracles are seen as miracles to the extent that they violate natural law. They also believe in human “free will” that is outside the mechanical cause-and-effect, clock-like predictability of Newtonian natural law. Nevertheless, except where man is concerned, Christians believe that the universe is coherent, and that God’s creation reflects His own orderly nature. Because most people have been influenced by this originally biblical worldview, they also believe in a world that is coherent, yet which also allows freedom and responsibility for human beings. The high school science textbooks of the public schools have not presented the case for twentieth-century quantum mechanics. The average person cannot grasp quantum mechanics. To this extent, the average person has been gracefully spared a personal confrontation with the impersonal and irrational world of modern physical science. (p15)
Again, North, writing in 1988, could not have known what plasma physics would become in the 21st Century. McCanney’s “Comet Model” has explained how creation is ongoing and has perfected the Newtonian worldview of an orderly universe:
Christians and humanists have borrowed from each other. Isaac Newton was an Arian monotheist, not a trinitarian Christian, although he kept his theological views to himself. His theories of physics were based on his faith in the providential control of all things by God. He even devoted the last decades of his life to a study of the dating of the exodus.
Nevertheless, his mathematical formulas could be used, and were used, by anti-Christian thinkers of the Enlightenment to defend the idea of autonomous natural law that governs an autonomous universe. They took his views far down the road toward atheism, which had not been Newton’s intent. So compelling was Newton’s vision of mathematically governed reality that Christians like Cotton Mather hailed the new science of Newtonian mechanics as essentially Christian. It was so close to Christian views of God’s orderly being and the creation’s reflection of His orderliness, that the Christians unhesitatingly embraced the new science. Christians did not see (and still generally have not seen) the danger to their view of the cosmic personalism of the universe that autonomous natural law systems pose. What we find, then, is that Christians were not fully self-conscious epistemologically, and neither were the pagans. (p. 183-184)
The notion of “autonomous natural law” is an act of faith, just as the belief in a First Cause Creator. While Christians might be shortsighted to think that “science” proves the existence of God, the method of “presuppositional” apologetics does not use science this way, but rather challenges the atheist with his many unproven assumptions and inferences from his “science.” He does not “own” the scientific method in the sense that he can use it to disprove the existence of God.
As a polemicist and an apologist, North’s book Is The World Running Down? was a response to Jeremy Rifkin’s Entropy: A New World View (NY: Bantam, 1980,1981), in which the dogma surrounding Original Sin, found its way into scientific nomenclature.
As North bleakly states it,
Now, however, a new world view is about to emerge, one that will eventually replace the Newtonian world machine as the organizing frame of history: the Entropy Law will preside as the ruling paradigm over the next period of history. Albert Einstein said that it is the premier law of all science; Sir Arthur Eddington referred to it as the supreme metaphysical law of the entire universe. The Entropy Law is the second law of thermodynamics. The first law states that all matter and energy in the universe is constant, that it cannot be created or destroyed. Only its forms can change but never its essence. The second law, the Entropy Law, states that matter and energy can only be changed in one direction, that is, from usable to unusable, or from available to unavailable, or from ordered to disordered. (p. 67)
North’s pessimism has since been proven unjustified. In science The Laws of Thermodynamics, particularly Entropy, have been refuted by plasma physics. In Christian doctrine, it is refuted by postmillennialism.
Consequently, the optimistic worldview of Newtonianism – with an orderly universe directed toward beneficent ends – still stands because it is rooted in the postmillennial message of the New Testament.
The Nagging Questions
How then is there any certainty in the moral realm? Moral agency introduces the principle of uncertainty. We might say that “sanctions” guarantee a specific outcome. But only if right choices are made. What if humanity chooses self-immolation, to love its sin more than fearing its penalty?
If we are hoping to elevate the human race to a higher ethical and metaphysical existence, and if that outcome depends exclusively upon right choices, how then does humanity create the necessary memory loop to avoid the degeneracy which affects all civilizations? Again and again, the biblical accounts tell us that social degeneracy occurs because the people “forgot” what had been learned by previous generations.
(to be continued)
