In this sermon, the speaker discusses two streams of experience that have led him to believe that there is a deficiency in the church. He highlights the frustrations and misuse of energy within the church, as well as the catastrophic state of the world that is cut off from the Christian mind expressed through the church. The speaker also touches on the increasing distractions and unreality in society, which compound the problems faced by those who cannot think and face reality. Additionally, he shares a personal experience of encountering a lack of affection and congeniality in New York City, emphasizing the twisted and deformed nature of the environment. The sermon concludes with a discussion on the impact of apostolic living on the world system and the importance of bringing Jews to an awareness of their calamity as a consequence of not considering God.

There's something that I felt that I needed to write, an article for a secular magazine about the appropriateness of God in the considerations of men. And if time permits and the Lord directs, I have that paper, and I'll share it. But it's opening up a whole prospect for something, that maybe we've come to an hour where the Church needs to be heard, where the perspective of the Kingdom needs to be expressed in a world that is antithetical and opposed. I'll throw you another nice word, inimical, that means opposed. The world is inimical to God and to the thoughts of God, and it wants to do everything in its power to keep those things at arm's length, lest its own vested interests be challenged or threatened. Because thought is not some kind of innocuous, harmless activity. If thought does not have consequences, it's not really thought. And it's surprising to what degree the Church is somehow suspicious of thought, or of thinking, as if perhaps it's unspiritual. Well, it is, if the thinking itself is earthly. But if it's heavenly, there's nothing more appropriate to the spiritual life than right thinking. So something is brewing, and praise the Lord for my library, and I was able to pick out a man who has addressed this question profoundly, virtually unknown to the American Church, and perhaps maybe even his own country, whose name is Harry Blamires, B-L-A-M-I-R-E-S. And this is his first classic book that started with another title in England, called A Christian Mind in America. So let's see how the Lord will direct us into this, because it was tripped and triggered by something that was on time for today, in that Holocaust paper, where I think the last time we were talking about the testimony of the prophets, and the indictment of God, the controversy that God has with his nation, that has been expressed through the prophets historically, and I raised the question, when have we as a nation, I'm identifying myself with the nation Israel, and the Church should, ever answered this indictment, or indeed even heard it, and reminding the reader that Israel itself came to a place of revival when the King Josiah, when the book of Deuteronomy was found, pent up in the wall somewhere, and was read to the people, after a long ignorance, and they saw what the divine requirement was, and it sparked revival, because in it are the Deuteronomic blessings and curses, choosing life or death, and you don't know that, you live in oblivion, but ignorance of the law, even the world says, is no excuse. So, we were looking at the curses of Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, and we're reviewing the fact that even though Israel may be ignorant or indifferent to covenant and to covenant obligation, it does not absolve them from the penalty of covenant, and that these, one writer says, that these judgments as punishment are to be understood as an actualization of the covenant curses. So you see, this whole language, and the thought of it, is totally alien, not only from Jewish consideration, but even from the consideration of the church. The word curse itself sounds like some hobgoblin, like a Halloween archaic kind of a thing. Curse, it does not have a modern ring. It's totally archaic and ancient to modern men, but to God it's current. To God it's powerfully topical and relevant. It does not become extinct merely because modern thought and modern men have moved away from the idea of it. To God it's present, and he will require it. So that not the least part of the church, particularly toward the Jew in the last days, is to bring Jews into connection with their own history and their own scripture and their own thought. They need to understand how God thinks, because on the day of judgment, that's what men will face. They will face things not as they think them, but as God thinks them. So if the church itself is out of tune with God's thought, how shall it bring others to that awareness? And they will share part of the penalty of what men will have to suffer for their ignorance. So can you understand something of the enormous task of the church to bring a reluctant world into the thinking of God, which alone is truth. My definition of truth is everything as God sees it. But if the world itself has been contaminated, if its own mindset has been weakened and distorted or subverted by the current thoughts of the world, that the word curse is painful even for its own consideration, or the word judgment, it will not be in any place to bring that view to the consideration of those whose view is secular rather than godly. Remember we talked about the principalities and powers of the air. There are two value systems in conflict, two mindsets, two ways of perceiving reality itself. Reality itself is up for grabs. How is it to be defined and to be understood is maybe the profoundest statement of what the church is about. Not only to declare it, but to reveal it by its lifestyle, which would put it in direct conflict and opposition to what the world purports reality to be and upon which the whole commercial venture of the world is staked. So it's not just some harmless exchange of views, but threatening a whole system predicated on an unreality that has certain values implicit in it. Fun, pleasure, the avoidance of pain, success, all of these concepts have their origin from below and not from above. And the unhappy fact is that the church itself has been profoundly affected by these views. Its thinking, if it thinks at all, and it's essentially a non-thinking church, and that's the view that this brother takes, is colored by and very much affected by the world. It reserves its spiritual thinking for Sunday and thinks that spiritual thoughts have only an application to Sunday affairs, the narrow things that pertain to the church and not to the world. It is even in an unconscious agreement with the world that there's a secular and a sacred, and east is east and west is west and never the twin shall meet. That the secular is for the world and the spiritual for the things that pertain to the issues of the faith and the kingdom. That is not God's view. And in the paper that I wrote that I might share with you later, I'm saying to secular readers, according from Isaiah, according to this word, if this word is not in them, how does that go from Isaiah 28? They have no light, they have no light in them, according to the word, or they have no light in them. And Isaiah spoke that into Israel, not for its spiritual consideration, but for its secular consideration, because it was involved in relationships with the world and trying to find a wisdom to extricate and to maneuver itself from threatening predicaments, when it was not considering God and his word and the light of his word. And that's what we essentially do today. Okay, so in bringing the issue of the Holocaust to the consideration of Israel and Jewry, we have a profound opportunity for the first time in modern times to bring them into the view of Deuteronomy. And by Deuteronomy, into the view of the scripture, and by the scripture, into the view of God. That's the whole precious key. So Jews are quintessential secular people. We are in the advance of the secular mind. We have formed it. If you just take the greatest geniuses of the modern times that have influenced modern thought, they're almost invariably Jewish. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and who's the guy that affects the way in which we bring up children? Dr. Spock, Jewish. Eric Fromm, Jewish. Einstein, Jewish. Steven Spielberg, Jewish. Oppenheim, Jewish. And I'm not saying that to condemn the word Jewish, but somehow in the absence of the knowledge of God and the thought of God and the mindset of God, the minds that we have been given have been opened to the things that are of the world, which we can powerfully shape and affect and impact. As a secular people, we are entirely outside the biblical, let alone the Deuteronomic context. And few ever think to examine our calamities in its light. In fact, in the paper that I wrote, I'm suggesting that the whole reason for the calamity, whether it's the struggle between Palestinian and Israeli, is the absence of the consideration of God in the affairs of... God didn't intend to be left out. Few ever think to examine our calamities in its light. It's not the least of the church's prophetic tasks to introduce this mindset to secular rejecting mentalities. Imagine the screech and the howl. And what would it take to succeed in this? That ours is just not another opinion, but that we are absolutist in our convictions, single-minded, we're not offering another alternative. We are saying this is the definitive truth. And any life outside of it or at variance with it throws that life into a necessary disjunction with God and opens it to the calamity of judgment and consequences, whether in their bodies, their minds, their souls, their spirits, their marriages, their community, their society, their world. To live outside of God in God's way is to suffer the consequence because we are made, the God who made the world fashioned us to live in a world of righteousness. So tumors, cancers, nervous breakdowns, emotional disorders... It's ultimate insanity. Insanity itself is the last statement. In fact, the final and the last statement to suicide is man's stubborn self-will who would rather die at his own hand than submit to the wisdom and the way of God. And in fact, Nazism is national suicide. Not only national suicide, it implicates and draws the world into death. It is the philosophy of death. Nihilism, N-I-H-I-L-I-S-M, is that attitude of total loss of hope, of total cynicism and despair, when nothing works and nothing matters anymore and anything goes. And mankind gives itself over to a certain revelry in hatred, bloodlust, destruction and violence. It celebrates death. We are perilously at a threshold of the world being inducted into that with the failure of its last idealisms. And for man who has lived through it, for example, when I made my hitchhiking odyssey that resulted in my conversion, I was in that state. I was moving toward that nihilistic dejection and despair. Having been a Marxist, having been a pragmatist existentialist, I had tried the philosophies and the ideologies of the world and they were zero. I didn't know that there was a God as an alternative. I was in a rather hopeless condition. And in the course of that journey, who is it who gets assassinated in Texas? President Kennedy, who had represented for men like myself a last political kind of hope that idealism and principles and lofty considerations would have a place in the conduct of American politics. But with his murderous death that could come in a moment by the most, what's the word? Precarious, that's not the word. Oh Lord, it is a word. Insane, inane, wild and precarious circumstances by some dolt, some jerk who wants to get his name in the paper and is so hungry himself for some kind of recognition out of the obscurity and nothingness of his own life that he doesn't think it too desperate a thing to shoot a president. That's how Reagan got shot and that's how Kennedy's brother got shot by men in impulse out of the vacuity of their own life without the godly mindset or the fear of God that that mindset, with which that mindset is compatible. Who do things like that? That there's no man safe from the predators of a nihilistic kind and not only presidents can be knocked off, entire nations or six million Jews systematically. So we are at the threshold again of an even greater demonstration of this nihilistic spirit because the world does not know a divine alternative. It has been kept as a Sunday thing and even there it is effete, E-F-F-E-T-E. Worthless, impractical, far-fetched. Even its doctrines are questionable. Its references don't carry weight. The church itself does not subscribe to what it believes. It does not live as if it believes what it says it believes and therefore the world is not impressed. So we're going to project a divine perspective, another mindset of how to view reality and how to live. It will not be possible except that we can convey that with the conviction of a people who live it, which throws that person or that church into a complete disjuncture with the world and invites the barbed attack of the powers of the air who are threatened by anyone who is going to blow the whistle on unchallenged premises by which all the world lives in error. See there is a principle of causation there, of the conjunction between sin and its consequences, wickedness and what follows, which is lost to the world that doesn't see this linkage. It doesn't have the sense of causality or causation that believers would have knowing God who has told us, Whatsoever man sows, that too shall he reap. The world does not examine its calamities in this light and the church's prophetic task is to introduce this mindset to secular rejecting mentalities which overthrows the world. These are they which turn the world upside down was the statement made about the apostolic messengers. It's not that they just turned the religious world upside down, they turned the world upside down. They convert, what's the word, they controvert the values of the world. It was more than just a demoniacal woman that was touched in Acts 16 but a whole system that makes profit through her and when that was touched, all hell broke loose. Right down through the magistrates, in the marketplace, it all goes together and into the jail after being whipped and so on and so forth. They touch something. Unconsciously even, there's a logic, there's a consequence that flows out of apostolic living that will affect the world system, controvert its values, show it to be insane and predicated on death and unreality and insanity and bring a recoil against that one who threatens those things is the whole issue of what the church ought to be in the world. What better means of re-entry into the lost biblical perspective indeed to the God of the Bible than to bring Jews to an awareness of their calamity as being the consequence of not having taken God into their consideration. And what comfort can be ministered to Israel except that the true unremitied cause of her sorrows be made known and is not every other comfort a false comfort. So let me read a little bit from Harry Blamwise and we can just respond to this. Even his title is significant, The Secularist Heresy, that it's kind of a violation against truth. He talks about the Christian thought and the Christian view being confined to personal morality and spirituality. That's where it's safe. And that's where the world would like to keep it as a personal or Sunday matter. Outside of public discussion of the issues that really affect men where they live. They don't want it at the board meeting or in the political debates or the issues of how to resolve the situation in Israel over whose land it in fact is. But if you keep it to the realm of personal morality and spirituality, it's safe and it's acceptable and you can continue to enjoy your tax deductible benefits. But from the point of the spheres of political, cultural, social and commercial life, the world is dominated by its own pragmatic and utilitarian thinking. Christian influence is restricted to the narrow field of personal relations and moral attitudes. You cannot enter these spheres as a thinking Christian. There's no one to communicate with Christianly. There's no field of discourse in which your presuppositions can be understood, let alone accepted or discussed. In other words, if you try to bring the Christian mind into the public debate, your language and your mentality is altogether alien and foreign to what other men speak. You have to come with a whole set of categories that they don't understand because it's predicated upon invisible things. It's predicated upon a dimension that the world is not willing to consider, namely, eternity and eternal consequences. They may be willing to consider eternity chronologically as something that happens after death, but they don't want the issue of eternity brought into time where it profoundly belongs and needs to be brought. That's the Christian view. We 20th century Christians have chosen a way of compromise. We withdraw our Christian consciousness from the fields of public, commercial and social life. When we enter these fields, we are compelled to accept for purposes of discussion the secular frame of reference established there. We have no alternative except that of silence. I can remember back in East Germany before the walls came down on a trip with Dan Shield and my interpreter that the Lord was giving me something on the back of an envelope to say to elders. I was upstairs, they were downstairs. It was our last meeting before we left East Germany and something was growing in my spirit from all of the propaganda that's to be seen visibly everywhere, train stations, public places, platforms, 40 years of German-Soviet relations and brotherhood and friendship which was a complete lie. The East Germans hated the Russians. They still remember the rapes when the Russians came at the last stages of the war and just looted, pillaged and raped like vandals. This is all propaganda stuff and just a lot of other things that were just a lie. I said to these guys, I was writing on the envelope, how long are you going to suffer the lie? You have an obligation to stand for truth and not to allow these propaganda lies to be disseminated without raising an alternative voice. And they thought I was mad. Like what has that to do with anything spiritual? Talk to us about what we should do as the church that we could increase in numbers or how do we conduct our meetings and stuff like that or government, but don't give us this stuff that we have some kind of an obligation to stand for the issue of truth and righteousness in the world. We're not going to be heard by communist authorities and it would put us in a place of jeopardy even so much as to raise the questions. And Dan Shield and my interpreter were opposing me that somehow I was flipping out and I was going beyond the things that were spiritual and I was beginning to touch the things that are political. So that was the first sounding of something that has since grown stronger. To allow men to live in East Germany who everyday see those slogans which are patent lies and have in some way to condescend to them is to contribute to their death, to the death of their minds, to the death of their personalities. I wish that you guys could be in my shoes. You know you could in those days travel by subway from West Germany into East Berlin. You cross a certain train station and then you're in East Germany. That's how finely drawn the borders were and you get up into the train station in West Berlin the snazziest up-to-date shops, shopping malls streets, I mean it was a jewel. West Berlin was a showcase of Western success and prominence and affluence and luxury and then you get down the steps and into East Germany it's like the clock has turned back 30, 40 or 50 years. The buildings are grey and unpainted there's been no repair, no restoration since World War II there are bombed out sections that are still barren, there's no advertising because there's no private enterprise there's no free market, it's all socialist grocery and this kind of store, just grab and grey. And I got out of the train station and there was a bus waiting to pick up people coming off the train, it was like 5 o'clock, take them home from work and I'm looking at people standing in the bus holding on to the straps or we came alongside them at a red light and there wasn't one conversation going on. They were like a bunch of specters, they were dead pieces of meat who just served the economy to produce and are fed sufficiently to function and brought back the next day. There's no life, there's no hope there's no reality, there's no truth, there's nothing on the horizon that could be expected and they're living in a world of unreality where the clock has turned back and it's still the Nazi, communist, statist mentality of the other guys in the West are the enemies and they're the threat and that we represent the socialist future and they know it's a lie and no one is blowing the whistle on the lie and they're living in a lie and in that is the church. The church is a little beacon of light but it's light is not going out into the darkness so I'm telling them that they have an obligation to stand for what is made in God's image and not allow man to become atrophied and stunted and hopeless and become a prospect of death dead even while they live. That someone needs to blow the whistle on the lie and say this is not true and this ought not to be promulgated and publicly stated. We don't love the Russians it has not been 40 years of fraternal brotherhood it's been an unspoken tension of resentment and hatred and it will remain that until we face it and that's truth, that's reality, that's hope. But what does it take for those elders to come into the public place and to say that? See, Kit Katz is leaving the next day and driving out and back into West Germany but they'll remain and have to suffer the backlash to their statement. You know, to prick the bubble that any one place that is predicated on a lie is to challenge the entire thing that is raised up upon it and the reaction and the backlash is disproportionate to the one statement that you're making. See what I mean? The whole thing rises up in alarm because it's fearful that it might be brought down if anyone continues to insist on truth. God has made us biologically to live in truth and in righteousness or we go haywire. Our minds snap our varicose veins bulge, our organs become tumored we begin to experience rot when we go on in conditions of life that are contrary to truth and to righteousness. And we have an obligation as stewards with dominion over creation to stand for what is made in God's image. That's why we can't stand to see the environment itself despoiled or raped or wasted and what then should we say of man? So, just across the border at the sea, the vivid contrast is startling. I came from California to New York to be trained for Jewish missions my own native city and I came on the first Saturday morning to the Jewish bakery around the corner in Queens and I walked in and I said to the woman, Hi! And I thought she was going right away to the phone to call the cops. She went white like, what is it? All they know is brute transaction. What do you want? And you get it and you slap your money down, you get your change. But to express any kind of affection or human endearment or, what's the word? Congeniality. Congeniality, cordiality a normal kind of, is strange. That's how twisted and deformed that New York environment is. Anybody who lives there knows that the waiters are gruff. You feel like they're doing you a favor to take your order. It's another environment, another mentality entirely twisted and distorted and millions are predicated on that reality. The last days Antichrist rule will be employing these automatons who have lost natural affection and are without conscience and are capable of the fiercest cruelties without batting an eyelash. They're being prepared for it by a kind of a mindset that is taking place and of course what they're seeing in violence or the flight from reality as is expressed in the emphasis on entertainment and the more bizarre the entertainment the more ghoulish the more spectacular the more the need it becomes sated, it becomes dull you need now, first there were three acts of murders now you need twelve, or you need a chainsaw murder now you need a blood spree through an entire community one rape, now you need pillage it's more and more bizarre now the films are bringing the animated cartoons in with the thing so that the child talks to a genie that is depicted through animation in the same reality I'm just reading the review of another film where the kid was given tin soldiers or a little toy Indian thing and was put into a certain closet a piece of furniture they got at a garage sale with a miraculous thing where the little things come alive and the little kid becomes the lord to those things and then a whole relational thing between toys that have been made alive and figures with a child I mean, the more cunning the more bizarre the amusement and the entertainment to distract and to keep people who cannot think and face reality but need increasingly to be distracted and compensated in it by unreality so compulsive problems yet more I think that there's a justification for Christians not only standing outside of movies that are literally pornographic but outside of movies that are promulgating an unreality that destroys mind and heart and soul and spirit and if you've not heard this before the day that I took my TV set out of the house in the first Ben Israel is when I came into the darkened room to see all of the Ben Israel kids watching on my TV set a film that had no violence and no sex and nothing in it that was externally or visibly offensive it was a love story about Olympic athletes an American and a Russian athlete but what was being expressed in that was so utterly subversive of the truth was so stupidly romantic in the most unrealistic way was so ungodly and the concepts and the values that were being expressed in that relation would be and my kids would just gaga I couldn't bear to see the moment longer I just went and I pulled the plug out of the wall and the next day the set was up for sale because I realized in one fell swoop that it's even more dangerous when it purports to be realistic than when it is clearly and ostensibly bizarre and highly imaginative but whatever it is, whether it's the one or the other it's a calculated thing against the image of God in man and as you've not heard this before it's worth repeating again on the tape entertainment it's like next to eating and drinking and clothing and a place to live that's the next need that has got to be gratified but the word that is more revealing is the word amusement which is a negation of the word muse like anytime the letter A is a prefix to the word that follows it negates that word a theist negates theism or the belief in God amusement negates music and to muse is to reflect and to contemplate, to ponder and to think if you rob that capacity from man he's no longer man you have stolen his humanity he just becomes an object for consumption and production or reproduction but you've robbed him of what is essential to his humanity I don't know if I get to it even here he talks about the difference between even being scholarly and thinking that it's not enough just to be one who computes facts and is careful but thinking is an adventure thinking is taking risks thinking is contemplating and comparing something with something and coming to a decision in order to act upon it based on right value in the light of scripture what God says is true that's thinking that's why I admire Karl Barth and why man like that lives to be 86 years of age and to the day of his death he is as clear as a bell because the very process of thinking in scripture is life-giving not just to the mind but to the whole spirit and that's why when Mom Broga was languishing after her stroke my one reiterated thing to her was get back into the word get the word into you not just to read it like mechanical babble but to contemplate the word what is the word but the thoughts of God which are contrary to our thoughts and higher than our thoughts for there is something before the Christian dialogue and that is the Christian mind a mind trained and formed and equipped to handle data of a secular controversy within a framework of reference which is constructed of Christian presuppositions the Christian mind is the prerequisite of Christian thinking and Christian thinking is the prerequisite of Christian action the church suffers from misuse of energy under the appalling catastrophe of a world cut off from the church isn't that a remarkable statement the appalling catastrophe two streams of experience in my life that of study and that of practical day-to-day contact with fellow Christians have converged to convince me that under all the frustrations of inactivity from which church people suffer under all the misuse of energy, mental and manual which the church delights in and under the appalling catastrophe of a world cut off from the church there lies a deficiency, a gaping hole where there ought to be the very bedrock basis of fruitful action, the Christian mind that the world that is cut off from the Christian mind expressed through the Christian church is an appalling catastrophe I don't know how to say this, the reason that I can't take Clinton seriously I don't care what he says the voice betrays it, there's a resonance of an unreality like a boy playing with toys and what is the great center there in Washington D.C. where the military make their decisions Pentagon, I spoke there once Yeah, it was a Christian lunch for people who were employed at the Pentagon I don't know how many people, it was quite sizable and I remember the Lord gave me something out of Revelation totally bizarre from a secular view about last days things and beast system and I'm talking to men who are working in the system it was such a clash of mentalities, but the question is which of the two mentalities that were represented that day over the table is the true reality is the true mentality, and which is the fiction that men are able to play in because it provides their salaries, their retirement, they have budgets they can buy and have stealth bombers made they have a whole system of death that makes a certain kind of sense if you give yourself to certain suppositions and certain views that purport to be truth but if you challenge those premises then it's an Alice in Wonderland, it's a make-believe but the world is paying the bill and finances that whole center of a Pentagon what a complex, and now the CIA has built one in Virginia that eclipses the Pentagon the military thing, a real recent instance of when the two worlds collide however imperfectly the Christian world is represented so long as it is seen as threatening the secular, the violence that is poured out upon it is so disproportionate that it shows you that this is not just a harmless issue of difference of opinion, but worlds and world systems, and thought systems in contention, and that was the issue of Waco, however fluky that Davidian branch thing was it represented to the opposite a threat so it's a picture of what we can expect here's a definition of how the world thinks to think secularly is to think within a frame of reference bounded by the limits of our life on earth it is to keep one's calculations rooted in this worldly criteria to think Christianly on the other hand is to accept all things with the mind as related directly or indirectly to man's eternal destiny as the redeemed and chosen child of God one is predicated on a narrow, this world is everything now, there's nothing that lies beyond it, the foundation of the Christian line is the reality of an invisible life to come that has implications even in the present, the thinker challenges current prejudices, he disturbs the complacent he obstructs the busy pragmatists you know what a pragmatist is? or pragmatic thought, it's distinctively American it's whatever works is right that's pragmatism if it works, if it satisfies, it's right he questions the very foundations of all about him and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives and purposes which those who are running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate, the thinker is a nuisance he is a luxury that modern society cannot afford he hates indecision and confusion he firmly distinguishes right from wrong, good from evil he is at home in a world of clearly demarcated categories, he's committed he works toward decisive action here he's comparing the difference between a thinker and a scholar, a scholar evades decisiveness, he hesitates to praise or condemn, he balances conclusion against competing conclusion so as to cancel out conclusiveness he is tentative, skeptical, uncommitted in fact we have made a fetish of balance are you balanced? Tolerant and balanced which is a worldly value but the prophetic man is profoundly unbalanced, especially from the world view, and extreme and decisive, he says the church is false to itself when it rejects the thinker and so far as it adopts the fashion of the secular world and tries to submerge thought under learning, a prophecy under scholarship it strives to secularize itself and to destroy itself, it's true that God has mercy and judgment but until we see judgment radically we don't understand mercy but if we want to balance judgment by mercy we have neither judgment nor mercy there's a certain radicalness in thinking God's thoughts but even the value of balance as a value is a worldly thing so a prime mark of the Christian mind is that it cultivates the eternal perspective, it looks beyond this life to another one, it is supernaturally oriented, and brings to bear upon earthly considerations the fact of heaven and the fact of hell, and the word supernatural itself is at the heart of what is offensive in Christian thought to the secular world because it wants to be eminently rational it wants categories that it can handle that don't threaten the things that are visible and seen that can be weighed and calculated and measured but to introduce the supernatural is to bring the dimension that is outside man's control, it is what God brings, God's intervention God's act, and this upsets the whole apple cart because men want systems that they can engineer and structure conclusively and completely which is what Marxism is socialism is, to say that there's a God, that God is supernatural and can bring the supernatural into the world of men is the deepest offense to rational men they're willing to entertain irrational or non-rational phenomena that is bizarre but it doesn't open them to consider God they're more disposed to consider demonic realm, and a fantasy realm a spirit realm, but they're not willing to consider God as a spirit and in the realm of the supernatural there's a way in which the world will allow Christian thought and references in a sanctimonious way like for example opening sessions of congress with prayer, or swearing at a witness by having his hand on a bible it doesn't mind the decoration but it doesn't want the substance here's what this man says about the charge against higher ecclesiastical dignitaries by the very nature of their position they are involved officially on platforms, on committees as chairman, as overseers, in many laudable activities dominated by secular thinking of an educational, social, or cultural kind in other words they endorse or they do not threaten the committees that they sit on they're not challenging the premises, the unspoken foundations by which those committees do their work they sanction them by their presence or endorse them in the discussion of practical affairs these dignitaries find themselves in exactly the same position as the schizophrenic Christian layman no one else is thinking in terms of an earthly life played out in time against the background of eternity with the issue of salvation as its dominating concern so the bishop pushes that kind of thing to the back of the mind and joins the discussion with a mind operating within the accepted secular frame of reference but there is a difference, as a bishop by virtue of his office, of his known ecclesiastical dignity, he feels it is his inescapable duty to drag in the Christian overtone it may be merely that he says a brief prayer at the beginning of the meeting, or it may be that he remarks how the church is very concerned about this or that social problem or he inserts a pious platitude I'm sure God's blessing will be upon this or we must all pray that this will succeed whatever it is, the final result is an unfortunate one, for the impression is left that here, the church has made its contribution, that the Christian view has been heard, along with others and that in fact, the Christian mind has been at work this represents the faith and it has given its blessing and sanctioned what is going on, and that's the role that the world appreciates the church playing, and that it will sanction and bless and promote, and give tax exemption for, but if the church expresses a view foundationally different, and contradicts the assumptions and challenges its premises and the things upon which it is predicated then, it will not be so warm to the representatives of the church the Christian mind's realization that all is not over when you die, is something which affects not only the future, but the present to believe that men will be called to account for each wrong committed, and each good committed is itself enough to give an urgency to human deliberations and decisions which the secular mind cannot appreciate that something is being worked out that there's a drama, that things are being weighed that there's a day of judgment, when there'll be an eternal consequence for how we have lived our life is totally outside the perception of men in the world. The belief that the thoughts and actions of every hour are molding a soul which is on its way to eternity that we are choosing every moment of our lives in obedience or disobedience to the God who created and sustains all that is, that we are always responsible, that we are committing ourselves with every breath to salvation or damnation is the issue. And then I'll end with this Do we as Christians mentally inhabit the world presented to us by the faith of the Church as the real world? As the real world? Do we ourselves inhabit that world? Like, is this for Bible study? Or do we inhabit that world? Is that our reality? Is that our framework? I'm often enjoining Christians to steep their eyeballs into the apostolic scriptures and make that the predicate of their reality. Not what you see naturally. That's deception. But this is the reality. But to do that and to steep yourself into that and to make this the foundation of your being and your thought and every reflection is affected, is to put yourself in opposition to what men see. And so he's asking, do we inhabit the world that we profess to believe, the scriptural world presented to us by the faith of the Church as being the real world? Do we bring this kind of picture of the human situation to bear upon our discussion of human affairs? Do we in this respect ourselves think Christianly? The truth is for the most part we don't. Our personality does not bear the imprint of our attempts to live this life.