David Breese - President, Christian Destiny, Inc., a national organization committed to advancement of Christianity through evangelical crusades, literature distribution, university gatherings, and radio and television; publisher, The Destiny Bulletin; former teacher; Christian minister.

 I want to join in the congratulations that are certainly and legitimately due to so many who are here today. We've looked at ourselves with a sense of accomplishment. And rightly so!

I would simply suggest that, as a consequence of this last election, we should remember that we were the benefactors of a protest vote that produced a tremendous result.

Next time, however, we must be the benefactors of an approval vote.

You can only enjoy a protest vote one time. After that, it's time to produce. In two years we must have that approval vote. Beyond that, we must plan on that vote of bright anticipation.

People must be satisfied with what we have done, but by that time we must have planted in their minds a great anticipation for the future.

I would advise the conservatives to heed the words of Daniel Burnham who said "Make no little plans...they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high and hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram, once recorded, will never die. But, long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with mounting intensity." That's the kind of conviction we must be identified with before a world that is looking in our direction with greater interest and expectation than ever before. It is asking the question, "Now what? What are you going to do?" I hope that each one of us is newly convinced that our answer is "just watch us." The days to come are filled with promise. We brightly anticipate the accomplishments that God in his providence has before us. So, all of that to say "amen" to where we are now.

This evening I've been invited to talk about a subject that has been of great interest to me down through the years. I had the opportunity in the old days to teach philosophy as well as history and apologetics. That's the way we argue for the truth of the faith. Out of it I became very concerned with the basic question of why the culture is what it is today. I am interested in not simply why did we do this or that or the other little kinetic activity. Rather, what's behind our activity? What's the deep fountainhead that makes the issues of life what they are in times like these?

It is most interesting that one of the scholars wrote a profound thing about the early church. He said we should have great respect toward these intrepid people. We must remember about the early church that they had no Sundays. They had no books about the faith. Travel and communication were very chancy and very perilous. They lived in the midst of great difficulties, but they thought of themselves as being pioneers of a new humanity, harbingers of a new kingdom. They still speak to us across the centuries.

Perhaps if we believed what they believed, then would we achieve what they achieved. There's a great lesson there. One produces achievement not primarily because of his talent, not primarily because he has a clever idea or two, but because of what he believes. If you believe a great truth, deep within the heart, inevitably that must issue in solid achievement. If you find a person who's deficient in what he accomplishes and you wish to help, take him back to what he believes. It is what we believe, the foundation of our faith, that produces the results we aspire to today.

With that in mind, I began thinking about what's wrong with the culture. We have desperate problems both here and in all the earth. We have men's hearts failing them for fear concerning what is taking place now and in their apprehensions for the days to come.

It occurs to me that there is an answer to the questions, "Why is the culture what it is today?" and "What might we do in response to it?" It is apparent when we remember that there are basic ideas moving with a strong force upon our society. These ideas that are essentially subversive, undermining the truth.

I finally became convinced that there are seven men who rule the world from the grave. With your permission, I'd like to talk with you about these seven men. Perhaps then we may come up with an expanded understanding as to why our world is what it is today. We have thought streams that fog the thinking of society. There are millions of people who think that they make independent decisions. Alas, they do not. Rather they are carried along by the stream of thought which takes them in erroneous directions.

What are these thought streams and who is behind them?

First of all, and in a sense the founder of a kind of new culture, is Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin, as you know, was an Englishman. He was invited to be the biologist on a trip which a small vessel made to the archipelago at the west side of South America. There he spent five years. He examined trees and plants and animals, then began writing letters about them to the British scientific community. When he returned he gave the world what we now call the Theory of Evolution.

Much could be said about the theory of evolution, and there isn't time to do all of that tonight. But basically, what Darwin held before the world was a new determinism. Darwin's determinism insisted that you are what you are because of a biological force that moves through history. You are biologically determined.

Darwin gave us the idea of natural selection and said that's why the world is what it is today.

The theory of evolution took hold in England. In my opinion, it did so not because it was true but because it offered several new layers of insulation between people and God. They were already drifting away from their spiritual roots. Evolution helped them forget the fact that they would one day have to stand in judgment before the God of the universe. So evolution was accepted, a basically anti-Christian philosophy. Darwin gave us the determinism that man is what he is, not because of God, but because of natural selection.

Now, think for just a moment. If that is true, I defy anyone to tell me where morality comes from? What is the difference between good and evil? What deserves credit and what produces blame? What happens to the moral valence of the universe if everything is chemistry? It is gone, dear friends, and if you and I are the same substance as an animal or the same substance as the vegetation that grows across the hillsides -- if that is true, it is all over! Lose the argument to the evolutionists and you have lost every other argument in the process. This because there is no final truth to stand on.

What is the true determinism that makes life what it is? It is this. It is the will of man responding affirmatively to the will of God. Your life and mine know blessing and capability to the exact degree that we persist in that conformity to the will of God. So the great question of life is not what the trees and the plants and the flowers and the monkeys and the animals who are my antecedents made of me! Rather the great question of life is this. It is the question, "Lord, what will you have me to do?" Lose that as the basic question of life and proper motivation disappears. You may become like Henry David Thoreau, who made a two o'clock in the afternoon appointment with a beech tree. That, however, is the natural outgrowth of an evolutionary point of view.

Darwin established a beachhead with the idea of natural selection! Then came Karl Marx.

Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848. About 1863, he came out with Das Capital and advanced the idea that the world is what it is because of the class struggle between the bourgeois and the proletariat. He introduced "dialectical materialism." He told the world that it is what it is because of the thesis, (the status quo), the antithesis (the countervening force overwhelming the thesis) and the producing of a new synthesis. He taught that soon the world would move into the last wave of history. He promised that thesis, antithesis, and synthesis would produce equilibrium; it would bring to pass utopia.

There is simply no sense to that proposition. When you study just a bit of Das Capital, you realize that Marxism is mere words strung together with no meaning.

Communism, however, became the excuse for tyrants to take over an entire people and work their deadly work upon them and, they hoped, the whole world.

We may say here tonight, "communism is passé." But think once again. A couple of things should be said about that. It remains in the world as the excuse for China controlling one-fourth of the world's population and to persist in its dictatorial program there. Communism also justifies China's ambitions one day to conquer the world.

What might have been the difference in history if there had been a perceptive Christian brain trust that could have taken the idea of communism and refuted it early? What if we could have taken that absurd idea and strangled it at a beginning? What might the difference have been? The difference might well have been that ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty million lives -- Solzhenitsyn's estimate -- sixty million lives would have been spared.

Tragically, this Marxist nonsense was allowed to become the commanding philosophy of a segment of the world, and the result has been fearful carnage.

We have been told that communism is passé. But no one has told me why I should accept a new statement that tells me that the Russians no longer have thirty thousand nuclear weapons, eleven thousand of which are pointed at the United States. There are still serious considerations to face in that regard.

The third man, and the one who did some terrible damage, maybe the worst of all, is one who is not well known, perhaps, to many of us. His name, Julius Welhausen. What did Julius Welhausen do to influence and damage our ideas about reality? It is this. This man was an Old Testament scholar. He came up with a new idea as to what the Bible is.

What do you believe the Bible is? Perhaps you say, correctly, all scriptures given by inspiration of God. It is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, instruction and righteousness that the men of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works. It is passe graphe, the written word, given to us as the word of God.

Well, Welhausen looked at this and he said, "Let me give you a more exalted view of the Bible. We must think of the Bible as the finest of human documents, the best notions of thoughtful men. These documents have been put together by perceptive people, and they are to be respected as a great guide for life. But we need not think of them as being the products of divine inspiration."

What he actually did was to take the gas out of the tank. He took the octane out of the gas. He took inspiration out of the Bible, and the Bible became a human book. Higher criticism, a denial of the inspiration of the Bible was the result.

From that day to this, major segments of the population of the world who call themselves Christians are not Christians in fact. This is because they do not hold the Bible as divine instructions from God. So they are rationalists, denying divine inspiration.

Christianity was built on inspiration. Then it turned to rationalization. A rational religion may be interesting, but it has no power to change the lives of people. What was the consequence? Religious liberalism broke upon the world in the last quarter of the last century. It invaded the thought life, the realm of academia, of especially Northern Europe. So those religionists were unable to resist the dreadful predations of communism, nazism, fascism, the new occult movements.

The United States also has been profoundly influenced by the stealing of inspiration from the Bible. If the Bible is no longer the word of God, then there are no clear instructions from Heaven. When there is no clear word of God, the people perish. Sadly, Christianity, to a great extent, is not what it used to be, and doesn't have the answer that it used to have to the world. This will continue so long as we ourselves willingly divest ourselves of the authority of holy scripture given by inspiration from God.

Yes, Welhausen rules the world from his grave. The results have been fearful. They could be described at great length.

Think now about the fourth man who rules from his grave. His name, John Dewey.

John Dewey had amazing influence in the United States. He took the chair of education at Columbia University in 1904. There was at that time no department of education as a part of the United States government. So this man single-handedly was, for all practical purposes, the department of education. He called the tune, he decreed what education was and what it was supposed to prove. Dewey became a most profound influence in American education for fifty years. The results have been quite astonishing. We've heard messages here during these days as to the most unfortunate situation in modern education. But that became possible because education changed its form and its purpose under the leadership of this man.

What Dewey was, was a humanist. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. Let me read you one paragraph from the Humanist Manifesto. "We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of the supernatural. It is entirely meaningless or irrelevant to the question of the survival and fulfillment of the human race. As non-theists, we begin with humans, not God. Nature may have indeed a broader and deeper meaning than we now know, but any new discoveries, however, will but enlarge our knowledge of the natural. We can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. While there is much that we do not know, we know that humans are responsible for what they are and will become. No deity will save us. We must save ourselves."

This was the philosophy that became the lodestone of American education for the first half of this century. Autonomous man, operating without divine guidance, makes up the culture. It was in that culture that multiplied millions of our young people were brought up with a humanist background. By the way, we talk about the grave problem of crime now amongst teenagers, and well we should. But I ask you a question. If you have a young man with a humanist background, if he is told there is no God, if he's been told every day of his life that he is an animal, the result of an evolutionary process, what do you do to keep him from acting like an animal? What will he do when he gets to the place where he can make decisions on his own? He has believed the wrong thing about himself and about the purpose of life. This can lead to disaster. Also, if he has believed that wrong thing because of the influence of a humanist system that we ourselves have set up, we have no one to blame but ourselves for the tidal wave of immorality that will break upon the world. It is the natural consequence of a godless belief system that has been built into the minds of young people. Let's move ahead one step to another gentleman whose influence was profound. His name, Sigmund Freud.

Sigmund Freud is called the father of psychoanalysis. Freud was in pursuit of the question, "What is the wellspring of the human personality? Why is the individual like he is?" What he gave us by way of an understanding of the human personality is the components of id, and ego, and superego, but the personality has a basic motivation that drives it on. That is libido! He said, and at least what the world understood was, that you are what you are because of your inhibition of or your expression of your sex drive. So, the world is made what it is because of libido. It is out of that conviction that a whole new generation was formed with a permissive attitude about sex. That was very different from the old days. The new attitude was self-expression.

The new idea was "there's no necessary connection between sexuality and morality because, in fact, there is no such thing as morality."

With Freud, the doctrine of objective value is gone. People were told, "Do it now; express it now." And, particularly, "Don't inhibit your sex drive because you may end up some kind of a warped and stunted personality." Sigmund Freud is to be credited for that.

Let's now think of John Maynard Keynes. He and his ideas came at a very interesting time upon the United States. It was the beginning of the 1930s. We had a depression in 1929. It was fantastic. Many of you can think back to fathers and grandfathers who told you stories of those days.

Well, something had to be done, and so we had an election in 1932 that swept Franklin Roosevelt to power. Roosevelt began to ask, "How can we get out of this? What can we do?" He said, "We have to have a whole new understanding of economics and what money is all about."

At about that time there arrived on the scene a most interesting gentleman from England, John Maynard Keynes. He said, "I have a new plan for you." So they sat down and talked.

What was Keynes' influence? He said, "Up until now, we used to think of money as being something of static value and the budget as something that was supposed to be balanced. The government was simply to be the almost non-involved controller. Individual initiative would make the world what it would be. But, Keynes said, "No, that's not true. We must think of money, because we are in a Great Depression, as being a vehicle, a tool by which the government produces prosperity." It is therefore the duty of the government to borrow money, parcel it out to stimulate the economy. The government then becomes responsible for not only prosperity but survival.

So, money became a manipulative tool in the hands of government. The government was admonished by Keynes to get involved in what they called "dynamic debt." Spend yourself rich! What is the consequence of that? Well, you know the story of this last generation. Keynes was only rescued with his economic theories by the oncoming of World War II. This because, of course, when you have a war, all economic bets are off. What's it worth to win? Everything! What does it cost to lose? Everything! Therefore, economic theory is shut off until the war is done. But now, Keynesian economics continues! So Keynesian economics now controls the economics of the world.

Think of the United States and its debt. The federal government alone owes 4,700,000,000,000. We must borrow one billion, one hundred million dollars every day to keep up with the pretense of prosperity that we say we now have.

The consequence of that unreality is that the United States is now the net debtor nation of the world. We have more debt than anybody else. Japan, our archenemy in World War II, is the net creditor nation of world. And what's the reason? The reason is what we came to believe about economics. Namely, that debt is a very good thing and that it can be very easily managed because it produces prosperity.

Listen, if you're going to dance, you've got to pay the piper. And the day to pay the piper is coming in America as inevitably as we are meeting here tonight. That will be an awful day indeed!

There is now no known economic theory in the world that gives us any help in solving the fearful problem of the potential economic collapse that is coming upon us as surely as death and taxes. It is inexorably moving upon the culture of our time.

Finally, let's note the seventh man who rules the world from his grave. He is most interesting.

Something happened in World War II. The liberal community, once the war had run its course, reeled in incredulity. They saw that their theories about utopia hadn't worked. They said, "We haven't brought to pass a bright new and unproblemmaticized day. Forty million have died on the battlefields across the world, now what?" Everything seemed up for grabs. The war had exploded the old certainties. Man wondered ,"How shall we understand religion, how should we understand philosophy, how will we newly define what people are supposed to be and the attitude of the human heart?"

Into that scene stepped a very interesting individual. He was born in 1813, he died in 1855, and his works were not translated in the West for one hundred years. Then they appeared at the time of the close of World War II. Who was he? His name was Soren Kierkegaard. He was called the "Melancholy Dane."

This man had some most provocative views about religion and about life itself. It has been suggested that they grew out of his personal concerns. One was an unfulfilled religious need. The other was the problem of unrequited love. Pressing personal concerns can give you a new philosophy about many things.

Kierkegaard, as difficult as he is to read, still is very interesting. What Kierkegaard said, in effect, is this: "There is no objective value. There are no things that are always true. Truth is experience. Truth is involvement. Truth is encounter. When it hits you, you holler, yes, indeed! It is experience that makes truth."

So he made a dual contribution, as it were, to life. In the realm of philosophy, the effect of Kierkegaard is called existentialism. In the realm of religion, his views are called neo-orthodoxy. I rather guess that everyone in this room has had a brush with one or another of those views and what they may mean. First of all, existentialism in philosophy, how to handle life.

Existentialism, in effect, says, "This moment has no causes, this moment has no consequences. It stands by itself. Therefore, do it now, enjoy it now. Steal it now. There's no tomorrow. No ethical standard obtains, but rather it is what you feel at this given moment." That's the whole story of life. Existentialism.

Those who say they can define existentialism probably mean that they don't know what it is, because existentialism defies definition. It really says there are no definitions. There are only feelings. There are only impulses. That's it!

So the idea of objective value is gone. Experience is it! That's the way it works, and that's what it's all about.

C.S. Lewis called this the poison of subjectivism. And he wasn't far wrong. Watch out for existentialism! It denies the doctrine of objective reality.

Neo-orthodoxy is the religious view that Kierkegaard brought to the world. What is neo-orthodoxy? It is existentialism in religion. A neo-orthodox person may call himself a Christian. But ask him the question, "Do you believe in the inspiration of the Bible?" He will say, "Yes."

What does he mean? He means what happens when you read the Bible, not what happened when the Bible was written.

You say, "Do you believe in being born again?" He says, "Yes." But, what does he mean? He means an existential experience with a supposed personality of Jesus, a psychological reaction to something. But the objective value of the deity of Christ and the finished work of the cross is gone under a neo-orthodox point of view.

That's a quick sum of these seven men. But put all of that together and we have a world that has moved into what I call The Age of Diffusion.

We have a world that is walking around saying, "Who can I trust? What can I build my life on? What is real?" These kids in school by the millions are saying, "What is life's purpose? How should I plan, and what should I live for?" They're weeping on the inside because nobody has the answer. Not their church, not their government. They get answers that are quasi-legitimate from their friends, and the degradation of society progresses. Why? Because it believes the wrong thing!

 

Hold ere this truth before your eyes,

That all the world is lies and lies.

 

That's the way it is in virtually every realm of human activity we can name today.

You know what God says about this generation? "For this cause God shall send them strong delusion that they should believe a lie, that they all might be judged to believe not the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness." In my opinion, a perfect description of what is happening in our time.

Final question. Where do we go from here? I would simply like to extend a set of suggestions.

Number one, let's newly announce that we believe in a doctrine of objective value. All things are not relative. There is final truth that cannot be changed. Secondly, let's dedicate ourselves to being personal illustrations of that objective value to live the reality that God has built into the universe.

Thirdly, let's take what we might well call "the spiritual initiative," the proof that you believe something, that you believe it is true beyond question. It motivates your life to accomplish something that can be remarkable!

Then, let me make a suggestion that might sound a little more exotic. How about a new aspiration for leadership on the part of many of us or all of us? How about looking again at the stars and things beyond ourselves and saying, "Those who have corrupted modern thought up until now will not have their way. I will be an exponent of objective truth."

You commit yourself to aspire to leadership, and I promise heaven's purposes will begin to work in your life and the capability that comes from eternity will be poured into your soul.

The way it was put perhaps best, I think, was by Gill Robb Wilson, who used to be the editor of Flying magazine. Listen to what he said:

 

So long as this is a free man's world,

somebody has to lead.

Somebody has to carry the ball

in word and thought and deed.

Somebody's got to knock on doors

that have never known a key.

Somebody has to see the things

the crowd would never see.

Hotter than thrusts when the boost is hit.

Somebody's faith must burn

faster than mach when the rocket's lit.

Somebody's mind must turn.

Somebody has to get the proof

for what the designers plan

and test the dreams that the prophets dream

on behalf of their fellow man.

Somebody has to think of pay

in terms that are more than gold.

Somebody has to spend himself

to buy what the heavens hold.

Somebody has to leave the crowd

and walk with his fears alone.

Somebody has to take the thorns

and weave for himself a crown.

It's ever thus as the ages roll

and the record's written clear.

Somebody has to spend himself

as the price of each frontier.

Somebody has to take a cross

and climb to a rendezvous

where a lonesome man with a will to lead

can make the truth shine through.

 

God, give us men like that for this exciting and demanding generation. God bless you all.