"The spirit of our age or culture, however, is not only antithetical to the perspective of God's Spirit as generally revealed in the Scriptures; it is in particular antithetical to the Biblical view of antithesis itself. The enmity or antithesis between the regenerate and unregenerate mind, as presaging the final antithesis of heaven and hell is renounced by the modern spirit in the hope that all the world might some day "live as one."
This erasing of the antithesis was the motivating theme and arousing sentiment of the song popularized by ex-Beatle John Lennon, in which he proposed, "Imagine there's no heaven; it's easy if you try, no hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today." The song went on to preach that we should imagine that there is no country, no possessions, and "no religion too" - so that we might finally achieve a "brotherhood of man" where any and all antithesis, especially that proclaimed by the Bible, will be eliminated forever in a social, political, economical and religious monism of perpetual peace. It all begins, sings the modern siren, by imagining that there is no heaven and no hell. The God-ordained antithesis must not be conceded.
Even where the expression of the modern spirit is not as pronounced or poetic as John Lennon's song, we see around us everyday in the media. The contemporary spirit is one of egalitarian democracy and enlightened tolerance, and these attributes are nothing if not meant to be all encompassing. It is not enough that political democracy permits one to believe as he sees fit; there is as well the "epistemological democracy" which insists that no belief-system is inherently superior to any other.
The Biblical antithesis between light and darkness, between God-honoring wisdom and God-defying foolishness, between the mind of the Spirit and the mind of the flesh is an offense to the modern mentality. Nobody has the warrant to deem his perspective as more authoritative or imbued with any special epistemological privilege over others. All philosophical points of view must be rendered equal honor as worthy of our attention and having something worthwhile to contribute to our thinking. We must respect each other.
Accordingly, our age is characterized by intellectual pluralism and the spirit of rapprochement, not at all by a recognition of, or a regard for, a categorical antithesis between Christian and non-Christian viewpoints.
The result of neglecting the God-ordained perspectival antithesis between Christianity and the world is, as one might naturally expect, a failure of nerve in maintaining any distinctive and unqualified religious truth, a truth which would stand out clearly against every view which falls short of it or runs counter to it. "Nobody is wrong if everybody is right" has become the unwitting operating premise of modern theology.
The cognitive agnosticism of post-Kantian religious thought precludes identifying any clear-cut line of demarcation between truth and error - and renders the advocating of one a disreputable social faux pas. Modern theology is, accordingly, simply loath to press the fundamental antithesis between scholarship which submits to the revealed word of God and autonomous reasoning which either ignores or denies it. The inevitable result of suppressing this antithesis is that Christian theology loses its basic character and joins hands with what should be its very opposite: religious relativism. That is what has transpired in our age of anti-antithesis. For instance, there are no genuine "heretics" in the thinking of modern theologians - for the same reason there are no citations for indecent exposure in a nudist colony: viz. the preconditions for making those charges simply do not hold." - From the 1987 Van Til Lectures, Dr. G. Bahnsen
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