Why You and I and John MacArthur Need to Dump our Enlightenment Lenses

Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash

When asked whether he reads novels, Pastor John MacArthur once said, “I like reality. I'm not into fantasy. And you have to push me very hard to read any kind of novel… I would rather deal with reality. There's too much truth I have yet to learn to muddle my mind with fiction.” 

These words convey a great deal more meaning than might first appear. MacArthur clearly makes categorical distinctions between “real” and “fake” and between “truth” and “fiction,” which reveal his operating assumptions. 

Most of us never even stop and examine what these words really mean. Why?  Because we assume we already know what they mean. 

Truth itself, here, is defined as reality. But “reality,” in this case, takes its definition not from Christian or biblical categories at all. Am I making a leap?

We are All Children of the Enlightenment 

The Enlightenment and all its subsequent offspring taught us that what’s “real” is the material world. What we can feel, touch, and taste. Sensory data thereby becomes the final, absolute source of all truth. 

If this is new to you, stay with me because this next part is really, really (really!) important. It has far-reaching ramifications that affect our daily lives. 

Kant (an Enlightenment founding father) redefined how we know what’s real and true, and redefined what is real and true. He pictured truth like a house with an upper and lower story. In the lower story are those “facts” we can truly know: the material world, and sensory data. As Nancy Pearcey described it: “empirical science, which is held to be objectively true and testable.”

The upper story is where religion, morals, and values rest. To again quote Pearcey, “The upper story is the realm of morality and theology, which are treated as private, subjective, and relative.”

THEOLOGY, MORALS, VALUES

———————————————————

SCIENCE, FACTS, MATERIAL WORLD

In other words, according to Kant, you can know what’s in the lower story but only guess at or dismiss what’s in the upper. 

Where do Christians land?

Conservative, Bible-believing Christians may look at Kant’s upper and lower story and think: I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that only the material world is real. I don’t think that we can only know truth through sensory data.

Don’t we? MacArthur’s a conservative bible-believer, and his words suggest otherwise. 

We often assume things without knowing it. Basic assumptions get wired into us early on, and we carry those lenses, often without a clue. For example, if you grew up speaking only English and, as an adult, starting learning French, you would still think in English. You would still perceive reality by English categories and definitions. It’s the air you breathe. 

In other words, we can’t drop those materialist, Enlightenment lenses if we don’t take pains to unlearn them. This creates a quandary for Christians. It might be one of the most important conversations of our day. 

Does MacArthur believe in the non-material world? Does he believe in angels, the Holy Spirit, and biblical miracles? Of course. 

The problem is, even though we, as Christians, believe in the power and existence of an unseen God, of non-material truths, and of miracles — we are still operating within that two-story truth paradigm. 

We still accept *their* definition of what’s “real.”

Even the fact that we call them “miracles” is a problem. Miracles are thus nothing but an uneasy appendix to our material world. The word “miracle” is a tidy way of packaging and shelving the problem. Miracles are anomalies in our materialistic framework. We allow for the truth of them because, well, we must. 

We assume that the material world is ordered according to scientific laws. But even that concept was new to the Enlightenment. Before that, people believed that truth, values, morals, theology, and science all held together in harmony. They observed predictable patterns of cause and effect in a mysterious and magical world. Reality itself as metaphor.

As Lewis points out in his book Miracles, in which he makes a similar point, the natural world is a constant stream of miracles happening all the time. I don’t care how many lab coats you have; you don’t actually understand photosynthesis. You can’t put the sun in a test tube.

A healing in the Bible is considered a miracle. Yet every time our body heals itself when we break a bone or get a cut, for example, the same miraculous event happens. It’s just that it’s happening outside of our usual pattern. Whether the healing follows the patterns we are accustomed to or not, it’s still magic. God created these patterns so He could sometimes prove His existence by disrupting them. 

Photo by Sunguk Kim on Unsplash

For that matter, evolutionary theory itself is the miraculous, faith-building story of matter behaving without laws, without cause and effect, and unobservable through sensory data… all of which is conveniently overlooked. But that’s another story.

The point is, we still act like the most *real* thing is the periodic table, the Dow Jones, and doctor paperwork.

“Far too often today, children are taught, both at school and at home, to equate truth with fact. If we can’t understand something and dissect it with our conscious minds, then it isn’t true. In our anxiety to limit ourselves to that which we can comprehend definitively, we are losing all that is above, beyond, below, through past, over that small area encompassed by our conscious minds.”

—Madeleine L’Engle

Many Christians, I think, are uncomfortable with this tension. But we have swallowed the world’s paradigm for so many years now that we have no other solution to offer. 

Which is tragic. We are the ones with a radical new paradigm.

“The world of the Bible (both the old and new testaments) is the world of story; story which may be able to speak to us as the word of God”

—Madeleine L’Engle

A man once mentioned to Tolkien that he “welcomed the proximity of mass production robot factories… because it brought his university into ‘contact with real life.’” Tolkien railed against this definition of reality—“The notion that motor cars are more “alive” than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more real than, say, horses is pathetically absurd.”

What is Real?

Lewis and Tolkien knew that there is far more “truth” and “reality” in a fairy tale, for example, than in an encyclopedia.

Far from fiction being a lie or a non-reality, as MacArthur suggests, a good story gives us the best glimpses of truth. To quote L’Engle again:

“Lie and story are incompatible. If it holds no truth than it cannot truly be story… And yet we are still taught that fairy tales and myths are to be discarded as soon as we are old enough to understand reality.” (Emphases mine)

Our modern definition of reality looks like the stiff, wooden back of a wardrobe found in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. You can see it, feel it, taste it, touch it. On finding this, after Lucy’s claims of a magic world, Peter and Susan are satisfied; there can be nothing else there. 

When Peter asks the professor, “Do you really think there can be other worlds all over the place?” The professor replies, “Nothing is more possible.”

To learn more about this, stick around. Now that I have finished my graduate program, I intend to publish articles much more frequently!