Fighting the Good War

Session 2, Lesson 134 (Wednesday, August 11, 2021) (COVID-19, Zoom)

I. The Four Enemies: 1. Self/Flesh, 2. Sin, 3. World, Aeon, Age, 4. Satan, Enemy, Adversary. The Devil…

II. The Nine Strongholds…II Corinthians 10: 3-6… The Weapons, Eph. 6: 14-18

1. Selfishness… 2. Pride… 3. Sexual Sin… 4. Frustration… 5. Fear… 6. Stress…

7. Negativity… 8. False Guilt… 9. Hurt…

III. The Sophistries. Arguments. Reasonings. Ideas. Thoughts. Teachings. Narratives. Stories. Paradigms. Frames. World Views. Lies. Falsehoods. Deceptions…

A. Of the Four Enemies…in my life and around me, we, us.

B. Key Passage: II Corinthians 10: 3-6 (above)

C. Other Passages: Romans 12: 2; I John 2: 15-17; Isaiah 5: 20-25; Isaiah 8: 11-17…

IV. A Thought: “Catechesis For A Secular Age.” Tim Keller in Conversation with James K. A. Smith. Comment Fall 2017, p 55.

Narrative of Secularism: So my best way of doing this – I got some of this from reading Charles Taylor – is to intentionally catechize for our secular age. One feature to counter would be the buffered self, which comes down to this: You have to be true to yourself, and nobody can tell you who you are, and you have to look inside yourself and not base your understanding or identity on anything outside but on only what’s true to you. And the buffered self is tied up with exclusive humanism – which basically means, in the end, you’ve got to be happy, and that happiness is defined as material happiness. So ultimately, you can’t put yourself in a position where you’re not doing what makes you most happy. It would be wrong to sacrifice your happiest life just to serve somebody.

Another facet of secularism that catechesis has to counter is an idolatry of reason and rationality that basically promises science and technology will solve our problems.

J. Smith: Secularism is the water we swim in.

T. Keller: Right. So the catechism doesn’t actually inoculate people. You get kids who are growing up in our churches, and maybe they’re catechized, and maybe they go to youth group, and then they’ll suddenly say, “Well you know, if two people love each other, I don’t know what’s wrong with that. Why can’t they just have sex?” You say, “Oh the Bible says…” Okay, here my question is, what happened? Here’s what happened: The narratives that you’ve got to be true to yourself and that nobody has the right to tell anybody else what to do and that you’ve got to find out what makes you happy – all those narratives have just come right in through songs and through sitcoms, and our training didn’t even make them notice that there was anything wrong with those.