Most Evangelicals Are Secular Rationalists

RELIGIOUS RATIONALISM

Modern Evangelicalism has been seduced into secular rationalism and doesn’t even know it. When I was in seminary, an emphasis on the literal Word of God and evidentialist apologetics was the answer to the secular skeptics. Rather than argue for a middle ground between faith and reason, called Psyche, Evangelicals surrendered the soul to intellect and began to try to play the religious game on the rationalist field. Their time and energy was spent proving a literal space/time resurrection, believing the alternative was no resurrection at all. They couldn’t understand the German theologians who spoke of ‘salvation history,’ which is the realm of Psyche, the realm that Jesus and Paul spoke about. For Jesus, the Kingdom of God, or kingdom not of this world (rationalistic world) was Psyche. It is what we call today the dream world. But again, evangelicals had unwittingly bought into secular rationalism by believing Freud and other scientists who said dreams were neurologically produced. Psyche sees dreams as neurologically ‘received.’ We dwell in a Realm that exists between fact and fiction called soul. Soul is the sea in which we swim – sort of like radio and television signals are the sea in which a TV monitor radio receiver swims.

Evangelicals lost, and are losing the battle. Fortunately, by default and psychic equilibration, evangelicals are returning to soul, though they don’t realize it. The new emphasis on ‘narrative theology,’ and ‘entertainment theology,’ and other such emphases reveal the need for the middle realm of soul – the story, the myth, the truth of the Logos that can neither be proved empirically nor disproved. It can be demonstrated scientifically by the ubiquitous nature of mythologies and archetypal religious features. Evangelicals are tired of defending defenseless and senseless doctrines that produce nothing but intellectual factions and rationalist sparring. Those who are good at memorizing facts and building ideological systems are successful, but most of them have no spiritual or soulful life to speak of. How could they? They are without the Source.