Brick Walls
The Union soldiers were giving it everything they had. Their artillery was firing, their horses
charging. They had superior arms,
superior numbers. All the advantages
were theirs. But the sons of the South
stood firm, unmoved. Atop the hill the
Union soldiers wanted to take, they spied the leader of the Southrons
(Southerners). General Jackson stood
impassive, as his would-be attackers confessed in admiration, "There
stands General Jackson, like a stone wall.” Thus Stonewall Jackson earned the moniker that
he will bear for the rest of history.
That's what stone walls do, they stand. They do not march. They do not attack. The goal in building a wall is to make it
immovable, to make it withstand whatever attacks may come, whether it be a
direct assault, or slow but steady erosion.
I too have been compared to a brick wall. Sadly, the comparison came in the form of a
complaint, not a compliment. I have been
the victim of what has been called the conjugation of adjectives. We conjugate adjectives not with differing
endings, but by choosing carefully among nuances of what would otherwise be
synonyms. Thus some would conjugate care with money this way: “I am frugal;
you are tight-fisted; he is just
plain cheap.” In like manner, “we want to be firm in our convictions; we fear we may
be closed-minded; but those who speak
with me sometimes complain that they feel like they are talking to a brick wall.”
In one sense, this is as it should be. While we don't want to be pigheaded—while we
want to listen carefully to those we are speaking with—we recognize that when
we are talking to each other, particularly when we are engaged in godly
disputation (that is, a peaceful, calm, argument) what we are experiencing is a
battle between two brick walls. The wall
represents the sum total of our convictions, each brick representing something
that we believe. We compare our
different convictions and see which wall stands sturdier. We parry into the wall of our opponent, seeking
out its weakest point, all the while trying to make his wall crumble.
The First Vital Characteristic of a Sound Wall
A sound wall will have at least two vital
characteristics. First, it will be built
upon solid ground. Jesus spoke not of
walls but of houses when He said, "Therefore whoever hears these sayings
of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on
the rock: and the rain descended, the
floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for
it was founded on the rock. But everyone
who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like the foolish
man who built his house on the sand: and
the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house;
and it fell. And great was its
fall" (Matthew 7:24-27).
Jesus' choice of “a
house” for a metaphor adds something to our understanding of a worldview,
something that would be missed by mere “walls.”
Houses are made of walls, but they are not made merely to stand. Instead they are the very places in which we
live. Our worldview is the same. It
is the intellectual home in which we live.
It shapes our lives, and is shaped, too often, by our lives. But one thing both images have in common is
this: walls, like homes, are susceptible
to being undermined. If the wall is
built on solid ground, the assault of the environment will wash off a wall like
water off a duck’s back; or if the wall is built on sand, the assault can cause
the wall to crumble. Our convictions,
the things that we affirm, must be built upon a rock, lest we see our wall fall
like the one that surrounded Jericho.
Four Bricks at the Bottom
If the wall represents all of our convictions, those bricks
that lie on the bottom of the wall are our most fundamental, or foundational,
convictions. These are the most
difficult ones to change, for changing them requires undoing all that has been
built upon them. These foundational
bricks are also the sturdiest bricks in our wall, if they are laid rightly on
the bedrock. They influence the bricks
that come later.
When you got up this morning, you made a decision to wear
whatever shirt you are wearing. You
probably didn't give it a great deal of thought, but nevertheless, it required
making a decision. You did not choose
your clothes randomly. The choice was
not, however, a foundational issue (though, as we will see, you made that
decision on the basis of your foundational convictions). At the bottom of the wall is not your
favorite color, but your convictions about the most important things in
life. (If what you wear is among the
most important things in your life, then your wall is in need of a major
overhaul.) There at the bottom is the
brick that affirms your epistemology; and beside it, the one
that affirms your teleology; and beside that, the one that affirms your anthropology;
and beside that, the one that affirms your theology.
And now I'm talking to a brick wall. What are all these -ologies? You may be wondering, "How can I have a
conviction about my epistemology, when I can't even pronounce it, let alone
know what it means?" What's the
point of having a teleology, when you can't tell what one is? That's the scary part. We all have convictions, but we don't always
know what they are. And whether we are
conscious of them or not—whether we have thought through them carefully or
not—they determine the shape and the sturdiness of the rest of the wall.
Epistemology is a
big, fancy word for how we know what we know.
It is the true foundation for all the rest of our convictions, because
it tells us how we reach our convictions.
It is the study of truth, and how we know it. You may not have known that word, but long
before you picked up this book, you did have certain convictions about how to
determine what you believe.
Some people have an epistemology that goes something like
this: "Whatever is the common
consensus, that is what I will believe.
Everybody knows, for instance, that there is no such thing as objective
truth, and that truth is relative.
Therefore I believe that there is no objective truth.”
Sadly, this almost anti-epistemology is the dominant
epistemology of our age. It drives what
we as a culture will affirm, and more importantly, not affirm, about who God
is, who man is, what our purpose is, and what is right and wrong. At the lowest level of most people's walls
stands the silly affirmation that there is no objective truth.
It is true that this is what most people believe. The trouble is, what most people believe is
false, and demonstrably so. "All
truth is relative" is not only a truth claim, but a universal and
objective one. The statement contradicts
itself. It is clearly and immediately
utter folly. It is not mere sand; it is
quicksand. It need not wait for the rain
to fall and the wind to blow, but falls of its own weight. It has become “common wisdom” not because it
is wise, but because too many of us do not carefully examine our foundation.
Teleology is the
doctrine of ends or purposes. We all
have fundamental convictions about what we exist for, what our lives are for,
what goal it is we are to be pursuing.
But again, too often, we do not examine our teleology. Too many of us see our purpose as the
attainment of pleasure, or of comfort, or of riches. When King Solomon considered these things as
the end of our being he reached a wise conclusion, that all such pursuits are
vanity, chasing after the wind. Without
a transcendent perspective, without the ability to touch those things which lie
beyond the sun, none of these purposes can satisfy, for they all meet their end
in death.
Why, then, do so many build their life around these
pursuits? Why chase after the wind? Again, too many of us do not examine our
foundation.
Anthropology is a
fancy word for the doctrine of man. What
do we think we are? Are we fundamentally
good, or naturally evil? Are we mere
bodies? Are we souls in bodies, or souls
and bodies? Are we born with rights, or
are they gifts from the state? Are we
distinct from the animals, or not? Are
we the product of the divine hand of God shaping us from the dust and endowing
us with dignity, or are we the product of mindless happenstance, an accident
that crawled out of the primordial ooze, a grown-up worm? The dominant view in our age is the latter
view. Daily, students across the country
in government schools are taught that humans are the result of random genetic
mutations, and the blind process of natural selection. We are cosmic dust, and we will return to
dust. Some students have taken this
teaching to heart, and have taken to blowing other “dust” away with guns.
Theology is the
study of God. Is God aloof? Is He merely loving and merciful, or is He
wrathful, and to be feared? Is He
omniscient, knowing all things, or does He not know the future? Is He omnipotent, that is, all-powerful, or
is He merely strong? Is He knowable, and
how does He reveal Himself? Is He a force,
or a person? Is He a jealous God, or is
He happy if we will but worship something, no matter how unlike Him that
something might be? Did He make us, or
do we make Him? How we understand the
nature of God will have a profound influence on how we look at other issues. It will shape what we think about ourselves,
about our culture, about our nation, about our labor, about everything.
These are the foundational issues. We cannot add to our knowledge until we know
the source of knowledge. We cannot know
what we should be doing until we know what the end goal is. We cannot know who we are until we know what
we are. We cannot know how to relate to
God until we know that there is a God, and what He is like.
There are, of course, other foundational issues: our understanding of right and wrong, or
ethics; our understanding of the universe, or cosmology. What we believe about these things
determines, or at least ought to determine, what we believe about everything,
including what we believe about what shirt we ought to be wearing.
The Second Vital Characteristic of a Sound Wall
I mentioned that there are two necessary things for a sound,
immovable wall. The first is a firm
foundation, a rock that will not be moved by outside assaults. The second is careful construction. Even a wall built upon the rock of Gibraltar
will tumble if the wall itself is not carefully constructed. One could have an outstanding foundation, and
still have a shaky wall. The very
function of the bottom, the foundation of the wall, is to set down the proper
placement for the rest of the bricks.
But we could lay a proper foundation, and then proceed to pay little or
no attention to that foundation. We
could place the rest of the bricks carelessly, thoughtlessly, such that the top
of our wall does not match the bottom of our wall. If we begin wrong, building upon the sand, we
will end wrong, no matter how careful we might be from that point forward. It is possible to begin well, and still to
have our wall collapse.
Consider, for instance, the way most Christians vote. Most Christians have an anthropology that
affirms the dignity of man—that we are all made in the image of God. We do not see ourselves, nor other people, as
mere tools for our own comfort, nor as insignificant bundles of
protoplasm. We value life. Most Christians likewise uphold an ethic that
affirms that it is wrong to put to death humans who have not committed a
capital crime. We also affirm a theology
that says that we have an obligation to uphold the law of God, that He may and
does impose obligations upon us, including a prohibition against murder. Yet many Christians are perfectly comfortable
supporting men and women for political office who, for political reasons, will
not stand for the protection of all unborn human life. The foundation of the wall says to protect
life, to give no support for those who treat any unborn child as a mere
inconvenience. But later on we find that
we have added bricks that don't fit in the wall. Suddenly a candidate's view on taxes, or
worse, his or her reelectability, trumps what is supposed to be on the
foundation.
No Christian would come out against the Eighth Commandment,
which forbids stealing. Our theology
affirms that God has the right to impose obligations upon us. Our ethic affirms that God's law is the
arbiter of right and wrong. Our
anthropology affirms that we are required to obey God. It affirms also that all men are entitled to
the fruit of their own labor. And so,
while a Christian might commit a theft, yet as with any other sin, none would
dare fall into a lifestyle of theft or argue that theft is the right thing to
do. Most Christians, however, are
utterly comfortable in asking the state to do their stealing for them. God, Paul tells us in Romans 13, gave the
state the power of the sword for the purpose of punishing evildoers. But some Christians ask the state to use that
sword not to punish wrongdoers but to rob their neighbor to finance the
education of their children. In other
words, they ask the state to tax their neighbors to pay for government schools. A Christian who would never go next door with
a sword and plunder his neighbor to raise the cash to buy a home often has no
difficulty asking the state to do the same:
to tax the neighbor (at the point of the sword, for the state punishes
us when we fail to pay what it requires) to fund the program the helps some
people to buy a home. Here again, while
we may affirm truths in our foundations, we do not build upon that foundation
in a consistent and coherent way.
Sadly, many Christians who possess what appears to be a
sound theology, and who claim to believe that God is who He says He is, build
on their wall a conviction that the state is actually God. In our prayer life we ask that God would
provide our daily bread. But in our
practice we ask the state to provide our daily bread for us. We ask the state to be our refuge, and our
security. We, like the pagans around us,
do this without thinking. We look at the
foundation of our wall and find it to be sound.
But we do not check to see if the rest of our convictions match the
foundation.
Worse still, sometimes we move our foundations to match our
less important convictions. Suppose, for
instance, that we understand that God has made us for work, for exercising
dominion over His creation. But at the
same time, we discover that we don't much care for work, that stealing is far
easier. We may discover that our own
pleasure or ease trumps the call of God.
We then adjust our understanding of God to fit our desire not to work. We create a god who either doesn't know that
we are stealing, or doesn't care that we are stealing, or just does not exist
at all.
We will confuse our anthropology and our theology, making
ourselves out to be God. All things
exist for us. We determine right and
wrong. God will simply have to
adjust. This is precisely what Paul is
talking about in Romans chapter 1. We
construct a god, and worship the creation rather than the creator, in a futile
attempt to ease our own consciences.
Prior to God's sovereign work of regeneration, we all
construct a view of reality that will allow us to do and to be what we
wish. (This, by the way, is why so many
buy into the foolishness of relativism:
to imagine that we can construct our own reality, a reality in which
there is no higher law to which we are accountable, in order to escape the wrath
of God.) And after God has given us new
life, we still find subtle ways to justify our sin, while trying to hold onto
the God we worship.
Thinking God’s Thoughts
God has called us
to think His thoughts after Him. Our epistemology will not only establish
the source of our convictions about our
convictions, but will establish the source of all of our convictions. When
we believe that His Word is truth, we have discovered our source for
truth. We are to believe what He
affirms. We are made disciples of
Christ, students in His school. As His
students we are to believe all that He teaches; and as His emissaries, as
disciplers of the nations, we are to teach all others to do the same.
We are loving God with our minds when we learn to value what
He values—when we agree with Him. What
flows from there is the rest of our lives, for as a man thinks in his heart, so
he is. This is the essence of faith,
that we believe God. When He tells us
His epistemology, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we are
to believe Him—at all the levels of our wall.
We reject the siren call of relativism, because we are not caught in the
grip of the fear of men. We will be (and
are) called closed-minded, narrow, bigoted, because we affirm that there is
only one truth, and Jesus is His name.
We do not merely say we believe it, but it shapes the rest of our
thoughts.
When God says that we
are made for His glory—that our telos, our purpose, is to seek first His
kingdom and His righteousness—we will not merely agree with our lips, but with
our lives. We will not allow the world's
brick (that we live for personal peace and affluence) to find a foothold on our
wall. We will make our decisions in
light of that final goal. If X does not
serve our purpose, then we will not do X.
If the shirt we are thinking of wearing does not glorify God, we will
simply not wear it.
When God says that all
men everywhere bear His image, we believe that, as well, and refuse to deny
that dignity in anyone, no matter how young, no matter the circumstances of
their conception, no matter how old, and no matter the pain in which they
live. We will reflect this conviction
not only in our political views, but in our relationships with others. We will treat all around us with an appropriate
dignity. We will treat people as ends,
and not as means.
When God reveals His
law to us, our ethic is established.
We do not wrestle over competing theories of the right, for God has told
us what is right in His law. We will not
object that God's law is out of date, or overly harsh, or inapplicable in our
day. When God says, "Thou
shalt..." we know we must. And when
He says, "Thou shalt not..." we know we may not. We do not make our moral decisions in the
context of the state (that is, what is legal is good, what is illegal is bad),
nor in the context of the common consensus of the community.
When we fail to think God's thoughts after Him, our wall not
only crumbles, but we are in sin. Saint
Augustine argued, in fact, that all sin is a failure to love “ordinately” (“in
a regular, methodical manner,” American
Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster, 1828). We sin every time we love something more than
we ought, and every time we love something less than we ought. We sin when we do not love in order, loving first things first, and
last things last. And this is precisely
what the devil is at work doing. It is
not the Union troops that seek to make our wall topple, but the minions of the
devil. Their goal is to see us think the
devil's thoughts after him, to misdirect our affections, and conform us to the
pattern of this world. And he succeeds
because we do not think through our worldview.
We do not build our foundations carefully, and we do not build carefully
upon our foundations. We mix our mortar with the water of the Word,
and the oil of the world, and find that our thoughts do not cohere.
Our call is to build our wall. We need to build it high and wide. But the most important requirement is that we
build it well, that it rest upon the solid rock that is the wisdom of God, and
that we lean not on the sand of our own understanding.
© 2001 R.C. Sproul Jr.
Review Questions
1. Mr. Sproul uses the idea of a wall to
illustrate what three aspects of the Christian worldview?
2.
In Matthew
7:24-27, Jesus used the metaphor of building “a house.” How did Mr. Sproul relate this to worldview?
3.
What were
listed as two vital characteristics of a sound wall?
4. Match each of the following terms with
its defining question.
a. epistemology 1. Who is God?
b. teleology 2. What is man?
c. anthropology 3. What is the purpose of life?
d. theology 4. What is right and
wrong?
e. ethics 5. How do I know what I know?
5.
When man’s
goal in life is to pursue pleasure and comfort, he can be said to have poor—
a.
epistemology
b.
teleology
c.
anthropology
d.
theology
e.
ethics
6.
When the
“common consensus” of society is used to determine what a man believes, he can
be said to have poor—
a.
epistemology
b.
teleology
c.
anthropology
d.
theology
e.
ethics
7. List two examples of how a Christian
may “begin well” (good foundation), yet not build a stable wall.
8. List two examples of how a Christian
may “build on their wall a conviction that the State is actually God.”
9.
When God
reveals His law to us, what is established?
10.
So, what
makes up a person’s “worldview”?
