Subjectivism: Why it will end the human race and damn the souls of men

By Linda Kimball

"Barbarism is that which prevailed from the days of Adam down through ten generations to the time of Noah. It is called barbarism because of the fact that in those times men had no ruling authority or mutual accord, but every man was independent and a law unto himself after the dictates of his own will." (John of Damascus, "The Fount of Knowledge," cited in Political Apocalypse, Ellis Sandoz, p. 131)

As pre-flood barbarism was an anarchy of selfishness in accord with Nietzsche's moral philosophy, "You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, it does not exist," it is no different from its' "enlightened" and supposedly "evolved" modern Western counterpart. The animating spirit of both pre-flood and post-flood barbarism is "there is no fear of God before their eyes," (Rom. 3:18) and "they do not love the Truth" (2 Thes. 2:10).

In our "enlightened" age hatred of immutable Truth is cloaked in deceptive terms such as subjectivism, scientism, postmodernism, syncretism, moral relativism, universal evolution, evolutionary biology, and deconstruction (1). As evolution implies continuous change it is a two-pronged fork, a hellish spike scepter of relativism and deconstruction that with one tine serves up an anti-creation account – an inverted exegesis that reduces man in the spiritual image of the Holy Trinity to evolved ape, and with the other argues that since humanity has evolved from lesser to greater biological organisms, the same change process is in play in the area of morals and biblical infallibility. (2) Therefore, all that can be known at present – and forever – is that there is no absolute or fixed certainty in either the area of morality or the Revealed Word of God.

In his well-known book, "The Battle for the Bible," (1976) the late Dr. Harold Lindsell foresaw the ominous eventuality of apostasy once the doctrine of biblical inerrancy was largely scrapped as is increasingly the situation today:

"It is my contention that once biblical infallibility is surrendered it...will end up as apostasy at last. It is my opinion that it is next to impossible to stop the process of theological deterioration once inerrancy is abandoned.... " (The Battle for the Bible, pg. 142

Universal Madness

Modern barbarism is the universal madness (raging soul sickness) issuing in demonic darkness foreseen by the dark prophet Nietzsche. It was the apostate Christian philosopher Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor who pronounced the death of the Christian God and saw that His death had already begun to cast its first shadows over Europe, and though the event itself is far too great,

".... too much beyond most people's power of apprehension, for one to suppose that so much as the report of it could have reached them," still its advent was certain, and it was men like Nietzsche who were "the firstlings and premature children of the coming century," the century of the "triumph of Nihilism." (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Eugene Rose, p. 44)

Calling himself the Antichrist, Nietzsche went on to say that because apostate Christians had murdered the God of Revelation in the 19th century there would follow two calamitous consequences (two Judgments) during the 20th century and beyond.

First, the 20th century would become the bloodiest, most catastrophically destructive century in history, and second, a universal madness would break out and as it reached its fullness in time would turn the West upside-down. Having rejected the Light that came into the world (John 3:19) Western 'elites' would turn back to irrational ancient occult doctrines and Gnostic pagan and mystical pantheist conceptions. Lucifer would be hailed as the first free-thinker and genetic creator of man, totalitarian communism and socialism would become heaven on earth, and love would no longer be the summation of the Ten Commandments but rather unconditional acceptance of the evil in man. In this way everything perverse and abnormal would be good and normal so that male would also be female and female also be male while universal sodomy, pederasty, lesbianism, sadism, incest, rape and bestiality would become the norm.

"Pilate said to him, 'What is truth?'" (John 18: 38)

Nietzsche has been right on both counts. Our age is a darkly twisted, obscenely inverted time in which the things that everyone really know to be true, good, decent, and right, are treated as unheard of, intolerant, judgmental, hateful, bigoted, anti-science and evolution, backward, stupid, narrow-minded, moronic, alarmist, divisive, racist, xenophobic and homophobic because the prevailing climate is one of moral relativism. For example, a majority of Americans, both Christian and secular, deny that there is any absolute truth, especially when it comes to matters of personal and private vice. This penetrating darkness is even deeper in Europe where most people have a live-and-let-live attitude, and voice opinions like, "What is right for you may not be right for me, and what is right for me may not be right for you." (3)

According to Collin Garbarino, author of "Moral Relativists in the University: They Aren't Who You Think They Are," young conservatives arriving on campus are as morally relative as liberals. While a liberal faculty certainly promotes the idea that "good" is a relative term defined by the individual and the only "bad" is to infringe on another person's ability to express their own version of "good," the battle for conservatism was lost long before students ever met their first college professor. In my experience, said Garbarino, freshmen arrive on campus as moral relativists. (The Aquila Report, August 24, 2014)

In other words, it's Christian and Jewish parents who impress their own moral relativism upon their children. Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., reports that polls show that Catholics are as relativistic, both in behavior and in belief, as Protestants. Sixty-two percent of Evangelicals say they disbelieve in any absolute or unchanging truths, and American Jews are significantly more relativistic and more secular than Gentiles. (A Refutation of Moral Relativism, Peter Kreeft)

In "What We Can't Not Know," a penetrating examination of the lost world of unchanging truths, moral absolutes, and morally-grounded common sense that we all really do know about right and wrong, author J. Budzisewski, professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, writes that the pervasive darkness within both our churches and society requires lots of lies:

"...the public relations of moral wrong require lies, and a lot of them...There are the lies about whether infidelity and promiscuity really hurt anyone. There are the lies about whether the living child is really alive, or really a child. Next come lies about the meaning of fairness, the nature of promises, and what the "committed gay relationship" is really like. Amid all of them is the lie about how hard it is to know what to do." (p. 195)

And then there are the lies about whether the Bible is the inerrant, infallible, authoritative Word of God written by men inspired by the Holy Spirit or is really nothing more than a book of myths and morals written by superstitious men in our prescientific, pre-evolutionary past. And since this is the case, say relativists (liars), then why not say that God made and ignited a Cosmic Egg (Big Bang) which generated matter and energy. Then after billions of years of God-directed evolution eventuating in the suffering and death of millions of life-forms (making God the cause of death and evil), man inexplicably fell from grace even though God is the guilty party. If everyone feels that this version of events feels right then why not make it the indisputable account? After all, who can know truth?

The Truth about Evil

Subjectivism begins with pride (love of self), and a will turned toward evil, the perfect anti-God, anti-truth, anti-authority, anti-higher knowledge state of mind:

"Our first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly corrupted; for the evil act [would] never [have] been done had not an evil will preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For "pride is the beginning of sin" [Ecclus. 10:13?]. And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction. . . . This falling away is spontaneous; for if the will had remained steadfast in the love of that higher and changeless good by which it was illumined to intelligence and kindled into love, it would not have turned away to find satisfaction in itself. . . . The wicked deed, then that is to say, the transgression of eating the forbidden fruit was committed by persons who were already wicked." (Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods et al., in Augustine, Basic Writings, 2:257-58; 14.13)

R.C. Sproul comments:

"Augustine...identifies the cause of the first transgression as pride. But he recognizes that the presence of pride is already evil. He does not shrink from declaring that the first actual sin was committed by creatures who were already fallen. They fell before they ate the fruit." (Sproul, Willing to Believe: The Controversy Over Free Will, p.53)

In "Against the Heathen," early Church Father Athanasius writes that a haughty spirit filled with pride and conceit of self-preceded pre-flood man's fall. A haughty spirit led them to make light of the immutable truth and moral law of the Holy God, and deliberately disregarding what they knew to be true they began to seek in preference things in the lower or man-centered universe. Thus, in preference to the Holy God and higher knowledge, they fell into worship of self, sexual pleasures and acquisition of status and things. Moreover, as they attributed the existence of all things animate and inanimate to nature they worshipped and served matter, movement and energy.

The truth as to evil said Athanasius,

"....is that it originates, and resides, in the perverted choice of the darkened soul" which, "materialized by forgetting God" and engrossed in lower things, "makes them into gods," and thereby "descends into a hopeless depth of delusion and superstition," whereby "they ceased to think that anything existed beyond what is seen, or that anything was good save things temporal and bodily; so turning away and forgetting that she was in the image of the good God, she no longer... sees God the Word after whose likeness she is made; but having departed from herself, imagines and feigns what is not (and then) advancing further in evil, they came to celebrate as gods the elements and the principles of which bodies are composed...." (Against the Heathen, New Advent)

What is Truth?

Since the fall, all men and women – like dumb sheep – have obeyed the lusts of the flesh, worshipped the gods of intellectual arrogance and appetites, followed after the prince of the air and allured by his lies packaged as gleaming nuggets of esoteric truth dutifully slouched toward hell.

Truth however, is neither the seductive lies of the devil nor the opinions, fleeting feelings and perverted choices of fallen men but rather the Second Person of the Holy Trinity (John 16:6). Jesus is the embodiment of the wisdom of God; He is the eternally unchanging Word of God. John 1:10 tells us that everything seen and unseen was created ex nihilo by the spoken Word of the Son of God, which means that Jesus Christ was active and present long before His incarnation, therefore eternally co-existent with the Father. Jesus Christ is therefore God just as the Father and Holy Spirit are God, thus the Word of the Old Testament's creation account is Jesus Christ of the New Testament (John 1:1). Jesus Christ is the Word. His Word is Truth even as He Himself is Truth, the same today as yesterday and for always. Truth then is Jesus Christ Who teaches, "The truth will make you free."

Truth is fidelity to Jesus Christ, hence Truth is an objective social good meant to be shared by all mankind. But like their father the devil, subjectivists hate Truth and work to suppress it, and herein lay the psychological violence which is the evil fruit of moral relativism:

"The clue to the mentality of the liar, in his hatred of truth, is his hatred of God. And this hatred of God floods over into hatred of those whom God loves, the innumerable millions for whom his divine Son died." (The Roots of Violence, Vincent P. Miceli, S.J., p. 29)

In "The Poison of Subjectivism," C.S. Lewis warns that subjectivism will certainly end the human race and "damn our souls." Because Lewis was an orthodox Christian he agreed with the fundamental teachings of his Lord and savior Jesus Christ and the Old Testament prophets that salvation presupposes sin (soul sickness) and the need of repentance, therefore repentance logically presupposes an objectively real Moral Law and need of a Savior. It follows that Jesus Christ, our Savior, did not die for our opinions:

" He did not say that His blood was the blood of the new and everlasting covenant and that it would be shed for you and for all so that opinions may be forgiven; He did not say, "I am a way, a truth, and a life"; He did not say, "Let he who is without opinion cast the first stone"; He did not say to that dark tempter, "It is said, 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God,' but hey, Satan, whatever works for you." (4)

In this light we can see that moral relativism will surely damn our souls because just as it suppresses objective truth and reality, so it eliminates Moral Law, thereby trivializing repentance, imperiling salvation and ending the human race, not by flood as in the days of pre-flood subjectivists, but by fire, reserved for the post-flood world and its "enlightened" subjectivists.

Lewis sees farther than most, thus he argues that human kind will be ended because the entire human race is becoming increasingly Westernized, thereby relativized. The tragic irony here is that America, which at one time was a fortress of Christian light, is now the primary source of moral relativism (demonic darkness) in the world today. This is because America's collapsing Christian denominations no longer defend Biblical infallibility, objective truth and moral law.

Os Guinness comments:

"....it is a point of fact that in many, if not most parts of the Western world, what was still left of the Christian foundations of the West have collapsed or are collapsing. The Christian church is on the defensive everywhere. The Christian faith is derided among the thought leaders of our societies, and now we are told it is being abandoned in droves – even if many of the defectors are not really atheists or even agnostic, but in limbo between the....halfway houses of 'believing without belonging' or still 'belonging without believing.'" (Renaissance: The Power of the Gospel However Dark the Times, Os Guinness, p. 18)

Erwin Lutzer concurs:

"No nation has turned away from so much light in order to choose darkness. No nation has squandered as many opportunities as we have. We can only call on God for mercy, and if it pleases Him He will come to our aid....if we humble ourselves, weeping for this nation, God may yet intervene and restore decency to this crazed world. Most of all, we should pray that millions would be converted and belong to God forever. People change their minds only when God changes their hearts." (Erwin W. Lutzer, Where Do We Go From Here?: Hope and Direction in our Present Crisis)

Guinness sums up the downward spiral of the West:

" Western cultural elites have disregarded God for more than two centuries, but for a while the effects were mostly confined to their own circles. At first, they disregarded God. Then they deliberately desecrated Western tradition and lived in ways that would have spelled disaster if they had been followed more closely. But now in the early twenty-first century, their movement from disregard to desecration to decadence is going mainstream, and the United States is only the lead society among those close to the tipping point.... Soon, as the legalization and then normalization of polyamory, polygamy, pedophilia and incest follow the same logic as that of abortion and homosexuality, the socially destructive consequences of these trends will reverberate throughout society until social chaos is beyond recovery. We can only pray there will be a return to God and sanity before the terrible sentence is pronounced: "God has given them over" to the consequences of their own settled choices." (p. 20)

"... as in the days of Noah....and of Lot (Sodom) so will it be in the days of the Son of Man." Luke 17: 26-28

A stunning spiritual transformation of consciousness is rapidly shifting Western and American thinking away from the supernatural God of Revelation and biblical religion and toward a 'new' pagan/mystical pantheist religion of nature and goddess worship (Gaia), evolution, relativism and androgyny, the pagan ideal. In his book, "The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Tradition," James Herrick calls it the "New Religious Synthesis."

The New Synthesis reverses and inverts each major tenet of God's Revealed Word. For instance, the Holy Triune God is supplanted by a universal life force called evolution, the principle miracle-producing power of an evolving man-centered universe infused with divine consciousness. Moreover, human beings are no longer created but rather the conscious products of the universal life force evolving upward toward a divinity of their own and can now achieve ever-higher levels of consciousness by directing their own evolution. Man's rational self-consciousness as well as science, the instrument of his autonomous will, supplants the Mind of God and is the first inkling of man's own latent divinity.

Moreover, immutable truth, Moral Law, history and Christian-based holidays and tradition are rendered obsolete because the idea of continuous change (evolution) makes them absurd.

The New Synthesis is rooted in common mystical experiences and telepathic revelations from disembodied intelligences while 'Science' is divine Reason's instrument which,

"...provides theological insight to guide our quest for spiritual awareness and attainment. Among science's greatest revelations – second only to its confirmation of evolution as the operative principle of the cosmos – is that monism and pantheism are proven by deep inspection of physical matter. This massively significant discovery confirms ancient ideas about universal unity originally delivered through shamans and mystics and still reflected in tribal spirituality." (pp. 33-35; 250-251)

What all of this means is that the rebellion, apostasy, idolatry and subjectivism that has characterized the modern age since its beginning is actually an ominous neon arrow pointing to the Judgment and end of the West and America. And when these evils finally prevail throughout the world, then as a thief in the night will come the Day of the Lord (2 Pet. 3:10) and the unrepentant soul-sick human race will meet its' allotted fate:

"Their destruction will overtake them while they dream of happiness, and please themselves with vain amusements. There will be no means to escape the terror or the punishment of that day." However, the Day of the Lord, "will be a happy day to the righteous. They are not in darkness; they are the children of the light. It is the happy condition of all true Christians." (Matthew Henry, commentary on 1 Thessalonians 5:2)

The Day of the Lord – when?

As no man can see what lies beyond the horizon no one can say when the Day of the Lord will be. So in the light of all of this bad news what are faithful Christians to do? For one thing, said Guinness, we can recognize that the faithful and orthodox in each tradition, whether Eastern or Roman Catholic and Protestant are actually closer to Jesus and each other than to the liberal subjectivist revisionists in their own traditions. In other words, a remnant according to the election of grace is slowly but surely emerging from the wreckage. (Roman 11:5)

Though the final factor in the future is unknown it is sure because we can trust that our Lord will build His church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Therefore, as faithful and orthodox believers we can and must repent of our sins, trust in God, stand on His Truth, edify and comfort the saints and proclaim His gospel. We are to be busy about the Father's business in making disciples and seeing the power of the gospel transform lives. We must trust in God and His gospel and challenge the darkness with the only hope there is – the hope brought into being through the presence of the promised Holy Spirit (Romans 8:2-25); the future hope of the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:6); the redemption of the body and of the whole creation (Romans 8:23-25), the glorious return of Christ (Titus 2:11-14) and eternal life in paradise – the inheritance of the saints (Titus 3:5-7).

2015@Linda Kimball

(1) Scientific Neutrality, Biblical Deconstruction, and Modernist Christians in a Man-Centered Universe, Linda Kimball, 2015

(2) The Problems with Moral Relativism, Robin Schumacher, Christian Post, 9/23/12

(3) Moral Relativism, Ligonier.org

(4) American Christians and Moral Relativism, Selwyn Duke, American Thinker, Feb. 2010

© Linda Kimball