Holiness and Cultural Apologetics

Cultural apologetics has become more and more necessary as our culture has become both more “religious” and more anti-Christian. It provides a way of speaking to people about the gospel in terms they understand.

I came to cultural apologetics through culture shock. For eighteen years, I taught theology in secular, “godless” France. When I returned, American culture was still religious but was changing religion. After being back for six months, I wrote my first book in English: The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age (1992). I argued that the New Age movement was not a weird sect but a major apostasy that would change the very soul of the culture. Twenty-four years later, I’ll let the reader decide if I was right.

Over those years, I have used a number of phrases to describe the raging religious conflict: orthodoxy and gnosticism, Christianity and paganism, monism and theism. I finally settled on a simple formula—Oneism or Twoism, a phrase I came to from staring hard and long at Romans 1:25, where the brilliant Apostle Paul takes us to ground zero of the nature of our humanity. There are only two ways of being human. You either worship creation (in a thousand different ways) or you worship the Creator. Read More