Positively Bad!

An important Christian leader and author was recently describing a situation among people who needed to behave themselves with dignity and respect. The Christian leader concluded in several ways that the people were guilty of being negative and that they should be deliberate in finding positive ways of dealing with issues.

Some 30 to 40 years ago, the notions of positive thinking began to invade the vernacular of the church as those ideas simultaneously overwhelmed the minions of pop-psychology. As time went by, the language of the pulpit and the people of the ONE faith (there are not multiple “faiths” as is noised abroad in the media…Christianity is the one Faith – Ephesians 4:5) began to suffer from the inappropriate substitution of “positive” for “good” and “negative” for “bad.” Eventually, the condition became so acute that there are now people in leadership roles that have no capacity to say “good” or “evil/bad” since those terms are definitive of an old way of thinking. Positivism has won the day and Christians can no longer say what they mean.

Perhaps you are reading this and saying to yourself, “What difference does it make? After all, everyone KNOWS that I mean “good” when I say “positive.”” Perhaps you are right, when you are talking to people from the older frame of reference…anyone old enough to remember the 60’s. However, there are younger people that only know the more recent frame of reference; who only know the positive/negative referents. Should we Christians be vague in our communication and then expect them to make a clear decision about Jesus? (Those of you who practice vague communication should stop carping about the dominant movement of Calvinism with its strong and thoroughly inaccurate treatment of theology. At least they are strong enough to have a disciplined position…)

More importantly, this “positive” way of communicating was borrowed from evolutionary doctrine. Now we find ourselves in a diabolical frame of reference. Think about it. If evolutionary doctrine is true, then there can be no value judgments regarding good and evil. If evolutionary doctrine is true, then the first chapters of Genesis are a total fabrication and the tree of the knowledge of positive and negative should be more appropriate than the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Furthermore, the fruit juice of that tree has not been effective in the makeup of Adam’s progeny and there was no real need for Jesus to die for unguilty people (and, of course, if true, then the Calvinists win the day with their ridiculous notion of total depravity…another expression of evolutionary doctrine) since they could never understand when they did something wrong. Again, the terms “positive” and “negative” should be used in their technical capacity to show direction, not value. The very negative activity of digging a proper foundation is GOOD in relation to building a proper house (Matthew 7:26…notice that the man was a fool and not merely working from a negative disposition). The very positive activity of building a casino or brothel (see how the evolutionary terminology has embedded itself in your consciousness when you read this) is evil. Digging a foundation is negative because it removes and discovers (like criticism…so “constructive criticism” is impossible) what lies beneath. Erecting a building is positive because it adds material and purpose that was formerly missing. The value of the activity is established on the basis of its relationship to God (Luke 18:19).

Finally, positive thinking is evolutionary in origin and trajectory because it can be used for value judgment by those who want to join forces with evil and shift the basis of good and evil at will. If homosexuality is truly evil but positivism wins the day, then there is no basis for calling it bad. The minority opinion has to be absorbed into the majority opinion and the language shifted (the basis for this is the expansion of guilt-ridden democracy…Greek laden Americanism that feels guilty because it has departed from the one true God (Romans1:20-22)) to accommodate the “positive” aspect of existence. Evolution says, “All must be incorporated into the whole and we will see in the end which direction was the most positive.” It is another way of saying, “Existence is its own justification.” That idea is as stupid as the entire world in 1939 saying, “Hitler is a part of the whole and we must leave him alone to see whether his negativism is the force of the will to power that evolves and includes us all (Chamberlain).” Thank God that not all of the thinkers of that day had evolved in a positive way and made up their minds to crush evil with force when it was necessary (Churchill). The church of today would be confused as to what side it should be on. Leadership should only be allotted to those who think and speak clearly according to a cruciform frame of reference. The knowledge of good and evil embedded in each of us needs clear direction, not soft sell whoo haah based on Psalm 14.

Botanical Conundrum

I have been enjoying a lot of driving time through the hills of north Georgia and Tennessee for several weeks and have watched as the leaves have changed from green to all sorts of yellow, orange, red, and brown.   Yesterday, I found myself thinking about evolution and how it is such a thoroughly childish “scientific” idea.  The more I thought about it the more disappointed I became in the wasted years of the past century that many people have devoted to studying something so patently absurd and so easy to disprove.  The evolutionists are not even aware of the childlike nature of their position. 

Think about it for a moment.  Why is all evolution centered on animal life?  Look at the way all evolutionary doctrine presupposes a certain botanical background.  Never mind that (if evolutionists are correct) it would be necessary for the botanical background to come up from an evolutionary process as well.  The evolutionist establishes his workshop of development squarely in the midst of trees and grass and shrubs and a fruity/nutty environment that just so happens to agree with the digestive systems of the animal things. And what a lucky coincidence that the carbohydrates and proteins are already properly developed and stable in their abundant support for the MILLIONS of years that it takes to get animals to the upright and rational stage.  It’s as if someone coordinated the effort on the part of plants to be wholesome for the benefit of the animals that would come along.  Sounds suspiciously like the order of creation in Genesis 1.

 And then we have the same absurdity in the realm of theology.  Calvinists think they are so grown up in their understanding of God vs. most of mankind.  Their development of the limited and limiting notions of pre-determination is all processed in a framework of love.  It’s very much like the botanical background above.  Calvinists skip over the part about God caring for that which He created to try and advise Him on what few things in His workshop are worthy of Him.  They want to get all the developmental details of what is worth having in the Eternal Realm firmed up without noticing that God’s love was put into operation before there was any sense of what is worthwhile.  And then, of course, all the Calvinist hype is designed to avoid the crazy notion that God/Jesus (Jesus IS God) is willing to BECOME sin itself in order to cleanse that for which He declared His love.  We are all better off continuing to be confessing sinners while we remain in the workshop of Grace (1 Corinthians 3:10-11).  Our only alternative, it would seem, is to become so “good” that we turn Pharisee and lock in our homeland as Hell (John 8:33).  There is one remedy: cling to the cross.

God doesn't grade on the curve.

I have never done the research to find if the works of Clarence Larkin were impacted by real scholars or others with influence in Biblical Studies.  Larkin, heavily influential over the flawed thinking of modern End Times prognosticators like Tim LaHaye, John Walvoord and Hal Lindsey, self-published a book in 1918 with lots of charts and pictures of his own that illustrated his ideas of the biblical messages in Revelation, Daniel, etc.  Between page 127 and 128 is a chart that I ran across a few years ago when doing research on the ridiculous notion that the fig tree of Matthew 24 represents Israel (many of the end times “experts” have whipped up foolish frenzies over this passage by their calculations regarding Israel becoming a nation in 1948).  This chart of Larkin’s shows the 7 church “ages” he has calculated on the basis of his notion of each of the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 being representative of that idea.  When you do the math, his system comes out to be a Bell curve.  100 years of Ephesus, 150 years of Smyrna, 300 years of Pergamos, 900 years of Thyatira, 250 years of Sardis, 150 years of Philadelphia, and 100 years of Laodicea (years are approximate… Note that Larkin’s perspective is the old school notion that there was no overlap between the eras. This overlap idea is a more modern development (from the 70’s…probably invented by LaHaye) that overlaps Philadelphia and Laodicea in order to claim that there can be some “true Christians” in what they are designating as the “Laodicea” era). 

A Bell curve is a measurement of human conditions or activities and largely anti-biblical (Good example of a Bell curve in operation is to survey a busy Wal-Mart parking lot in relation to the entry doors…most people gather in the middle lanes instead of on the fringe where they may actually be closer to the door according to proximity absolute). When the Holy Spirit wrote the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew, there was no Bell curve of 6 generations, 12 generations, 58 generations, 12 generations and 6…or some such nonsense.  Larkin’s interpretative overlay is a purely human construct and should be discarded as unsupportable.  A good test for it would be: can we make it work in Ethiopia?  What do we know about the history of the church in Africa from 33 AD to the present?  Does the biblical message apply to Christians throughout the world at all times or only to select persons who are in an area where some measure of history was recorded and preserved (Calvin’s ridiculous notion of the elect…another Bell curve dynamic)?  If the YES goes to the universality of the message, then we have to reject Larkin’s work and his heir apparent in “End Times” studies, Tim LaHaye.