Rapture Fever

A Commitment to Cultural Irrelevance 95
fimdamentalism faces the same dilemma that humanism faces:
a radical break between the upper storey and the lower storey.
The Two-Storey World of Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism’s lower storey is the world of work, economics,
professional training, art, institutions, authority, and
power, i.e., the “secular” realm. This realm is governed not in
terms of the Bible but in terms of supposedly universal “neutral
reason” and natural law. (So far, this is basically the thirteenthcentury
worldview of Thomas Aquinas and medieval scholastic
philosophers.) The Bible supposedly does not speak directly to
this realm, we are assured by both the fundamentalists (“We’re
under grace, not law!”) and the secular humanists (“This is a
pluralistic nation!”). Thus, there is no theological or judicial
basis for Christians to claim that they are entitled to set forth
uniquely biblical principles of social order. Above all, Christians
are not supposed to seek to persuade voters to elect political
rulers who will enforce biblical laws or principles. This means
that rulers must not be identifiably Christian in their social and
political outlook. Christians are allowed to vote and exercise
civil authority only insofar as they cease to be explicitly biblical
in their orientation. In short, only operational humunfits should
be allowed to rule. This is political pluralism, the reigning
political gospel in our age - in an era which believes that only
politics is gospel!
Crumbs from Humanism’s Table
This view of the world - “the world under autonomous
man’s law” – leads Christians to an inescapable pessimism regarding
the Church’s present and its earthly future, for this
view asserts that Christians will always be under the humanists’
4. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute
for Christian Economics, 1989).