Heritage Presbyterian Church Adult Sunday School

1. P e t e r J o n e s
Director of truthXchange
A Worldview & Culture Teaching Series by Ligonier Ministries
Adult Sunday School
Summer 2019

2. Lesson Slide
8 2
Where Is Society Headed?
The Big Question
How can we make sense of the
breakneck spiritual and social changes
happening right now in our culture?
and
How should Christians respond?

3. Lesson Slide
8 3
Where Is Society Headed?
Lessons in the Series
1. Explaining Modern
Culture
2. The Rise & Fall of
Secular Humanism
3. Carl Jung’s Alternative
Spirituality
4. Paganism in the
Shadows
5. Paganism in the
Spotlight
6. Pagan Sexuality
7. From Personal
Spirituality to
Worldview
8. Where Is Society
Headed?
9. Unbiblical Responses
10.Articulating a Biblical
Worldview
11.Living in Holiness
12.Thinking with a
Discerning Mind

4. Lesson Slide
8 4
Where Is Society Headed?
Lesson Introduction
• With society’s acceptance and adoption of a pagan
worldview, one may ask where society is headed
• It is becoming increasingly hostile to the Christian
worldview, which clearly distinguishes between
Creator and creation. It seeks to eliminate this
distinction in all areas of life and culture.
• In this lecture, we will see where society may be
heading if it continues to worship the creation rather
than the Creator

5. Lesson Slide
8 5
Where Is Society Headed?
Scripture Readings
• 13 "Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and
the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those
who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow
and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who
find it are few.
Matthew 7:13-20
• Though they know God's decree that those who
practice such things deserve to die, they not only do
them but give approval to those who practice them.
Romans 1:32

6. Lesson Slide
8 6
Where Is Society Headed?
Teaching Objectives
1. To explore the direction society may be
headed as a result of its adoption and
promotion of oneism
2. To show the manner in which oneist thinking
is being promulgated today
3. To contrast the oneist worldview with the
Christian worldview

7. Lesson Slide
8 7
Where Is Society Headed?
Watch Lecture 8

8. Lesson Slide
8 8
Where Is Society Headed?
A Destructive Generation?
• Many positive changes and great progress
• Technological advances in medical science
• Better education and health care has lifted many from poverty
• Increased awareness and protection of human rights
• Growing awareness of the importance of a clean environment
• Accessibility of information via personal computers and the
internet
• Spreading ideals of freedom and democracy
• Global recognition of the oneness of humanity
• Many negative changes and a societal “coming apart”
• Breakdown of family and traditional marriage
• Economic, cultural, and foreign policy betrayals of many
vulnerable (e.g., rural, traditional, conservative) communities

9. Lesson Slide
8 9
Where Is Society Headed?
Dim Prospects
• The generation of the 60s sexual revolution has borne
its fruit in their children (the millennial generation)
• Single-parent homes
• Absentee fathers and overwhelmed mothers
• Poverty and children who roam the streets instead of study in class
• The result is an “unChristian” generation that is coming
“unglued” (Kinnaman & Lyons). These authors portray
this generation as exposed to:
• “more violence, dissolving family structures, pornography, and sex
before and outside marriage…substance abuse and addiction are
widespread; that STDs, AIDS, teenage pregnancy, single
motherhood, absent fathers, and abortion are common; that
profanity is normal; that one in six millennials is in debt; that one
in four is divorced; that suicide is the third leading cause of death;
and that they are a fatherless generation. Of the 20-somethings
from Christian homes, 60 percent no longer have any connection to
church.”

10. Lesson Slide
8 10
Where Is Society Headed?
The Death of Marriage
• Marriage is now viewed as a public celebration of an
individual act of mere self-expression, with no long-term
commitments, buttressed by no-fault divorce
• Nearly half of all American marriages now end in divorce,
creating problems of family conflict, physical/mental health,
and poor educational and economic outcomes
• Many have given up on the institution of formal marriage with
the added insecurities that follow
• Co-habitation related to infertility or child welfare
• Child welfare related to poverty, deprivation, and the
penal/welfare systems
• Fatherless households related to generational dependence on the
state
• Survival mentality related to moral compromise in order to escape
a dysfunctional unbringing or to get ahead

11. Lesson Slide
8 11
Where Is Society Headed?
The Plague of Pornography
• In this age of streaming video and widespread internet
access, porn use has become increasingly widespread among
men and women
• Jung and the 60s optimism predicted sexual fantasy would
produce human maturation, but sexual freedom has actually
produced slavery to empty images and impersonal shells of
sexuality
• The effect of porn on marriage and male-female relationships
is devastating!
• Porn acts like an addictive drug that rewires the neuro-plastic
brain, producing an over-sexualized, narrow, and even violent
mental life
• The immoral misuse and decline of heterosexual sex and marriage
has inevitably created conditions in which many now support
same-sex marriage, which represents a new definition of the
human being

12. Lesson Slide
8 12
Where Is Society Headed?
The Rise of Homosexuality
• In its scale and velocity, the moral revolution we are
witnessing on the issue of homosexuality is without precedent
in human history
• Not looking at a span of centuries or even one century
• This revolution has taken place within a single generation
• Sociologist Philip Rieff saw in the 1960s:
“The West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality…Sexual
liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.”
• Today there is no “normal” sexuality. Indeed, any attempt to
say so is shamed, punished, and in some places even
criminalized as discriminatory bullying.
• Based on the promising notions of “liberation,” the theory to
believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority
and self-definition is derived from a pagan understanding of
existence, with this theory’s implementation ultimately
producing social and personal implosion

13. Lesson Slide
8 13
Where Is Society Headed?
Coming Apart: The
Sociological Reality
• Since the 1960s America has become deeply divided
• A new lower class has all but abandoned four unifying virtues
of the cultural success of America’s founding:
• Honesty, industry, marriage, religion
• The new upper class (“a hollow elite”) has profited from the
founding virtues without retaining the conviction to insist
upon them
• More broadly speaking, what has come apart is the old
Christian consensus
• The elimination of sexual distinctions is how a civilization
commits suicide. At its most profound level, the attack on
contemporary culture is an attack on the creed that lies at
the very foundation of Western civilization: “I believe in God
the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.”

14. Lesson Slide
8 14
Where Is Society Headed?
Oneism Institutionalized
• A leading British theologian wrote to Peter Jones on
April 2, 2014, as Parliament formalized same-sex
marriage:
“The Rainbow Flag flew over Whitehall this past weekend, and
our Deputy Prime Minister urged us to raise a glass in
celebration. The Times carried an article about the upcoming
marriage of two women who will be known as “Mrs and Mrs”.
…Romans 1:32 is now, it seems, official government policy.
When the waters of Oneism that have been beating the
shoreline for many years come fully in, the house on the cliff
top collapses with apparent, but not real, suddenness.”

15. Lesson Slide
8 15
Where Is Society Headed?
Busting the Binaries
• Behind multisexual liberation is the effective systematic
promotion of ideological Oneism and the determined elimination
of the binary structure of theistic Twoism, which Scripture
teaches is the way the world was made
• Oneists describe what seem to be civic or political issues, but
which hide a deep spiritual program below the surface. Common
oneist terms in public life:
• Transgressing or denying boundaries
• Denying the subject/object distinction
• Breaking taboos
• Abolishing “either/or”
• As above, so below (no distinction between the divine and the human)
• Non-duality
• Oneness-all is one
• Oneists feel the necessity of obliterating the Twoist distinctions
God has placed in creation, and they do it partly by using terms
that evoke human rights and global oneness

16. Lesson Slide
8 16
Where Is Society Headed?
A Spectrum of Genders?
Agender
Androgyne
Androgynous
Bigender
Cis
Cisgender
Cis Female
Cis Male
Cis Man
Cis Woman
Cisgender Female
Cisgender Male
Cisgender Man
Cisgender Woman
Female to Male
FTM
Gender Fluid
Gender Nonconforming
Gender Questioning
Gender Variant
Genderqueer
Intersex
Male to Female
MTF
Neither
Neutrois
Non-binary
Other or *Customized
Pangender
Trans
Trans*
Trans Female
Trans* Female
Trans Male
Trans* Male
Trans Man
Trans* Man
Trans Person
Trans* Person
Trans Woman
Trans* Woman
Transfeminine
Transgender
Transgender Female
Transgender Male
Transgender Man
Transgender Person
Transgender Woman
Transmasculine
Transsexual
Transsexual Female
Transsexual Male
Transsexual Man
Transsexual Person
Transsexual Woman
Two-Spirit
In 2014, as mainstream an institution as Facebook (in)famously
offers its users a wide list of genders for self-selection:

17. Lesson Slide
8 17
Where Is Society Headed?
New Gender Symbols

18. Lesson Slide
8 18
Where Is Society Headed?
Coming Soon to an
Elementary School Near You?

19. Lesson Slide
8 19
Where Is Society Headed?
Destroying Spiritual
Binaries
• In interfaith approaches to religion
• Moving beyond our deadlock, our polarization, our binary, either/or
thinking
• Advocating a “religionless” and “creedless” Christianity
• Announcing the arrival of an age of pure inner experience, with the
godhead defined in less dualistic terms, e.g., praying to God as our Mother
the nourishing spirit of mother earth
• In refusing to use the term “evil”
• Avoiding the gross simplifications of moralistic language in describing acts
of jihadists
• Avoid moral clarity because “evil” things must be included in the union of
all things
• Jung joined the binary of good and evil to produce a deeply
relativized view of morals, allowing the individual to decide what is
good or evil
• Without spiritual binaries, heaven and hell (theological liberalism),
human and animal (naturalistic evolution), human and technology
(transhumanism)—all are one and therefore indistinguishable

20. Lesson Slide
8 20
Where Is Society Headed?
Destroying Cultural
Binaries
• Political correctness denies any distinctions between
cultures, religions, or value systems. Thus, politically correct
multiculturalism dominates the public square and the
university campus and affects domestic and foreign policy.
• Destruction of the gender binary began with radical
feminism’s rejection of patriarchy and the ultimate patriarch,
God the Father. Now we are starting to eliminate the
male/female gender binary and their associated relationships
(mother, father, husband, wife).
• Homosexual leaders call for deconstruction of the gender
binary, and this destruction is often set in motion on college
campuses, as a sort of lab for the future
• In this fuzzy utopian fantasy, society was supposed to evolve
into a great big happy androgynous paradise where everyone
is equal to everyone else in every way. Instead the wheels
are coming off.

21. Lesson Slide
8 21
Where Is Society Headed?
The New is not New
• John Oswalt, Old Testament scholar, makes an important
statement about ancient paganism in The Bible among the
Myths (section: “Denial of Boundaries”)
In the ancient world, boundaries between realms (humans and gods,
gods and nature) were eliminated. All the boundary-crossing
behaviors of the ancient world (such as cult prostitution, incest, and
homosexuality) are not “primitive behaviors…or unfortunate
aberrations…They are theological statements, necessary expressions
of the worldview of which they are part.”
• The new “complete cosmology” is applied to everyone. At its
heart, ancient/modern oneism:
• Makes man a god
• Joins opposites
• Rejects the moral order of good and evil
• Dismisses the objective reality of created human nature
• Erodes the old humanity of the (admittedly imperfect) Christian
civilization, which is indeed coming apart

22. Lesson Slide
8 22
Where Is Society Headed?
Study Question Answers
1. There is a growing attempt to redefine human
civilization based on the notion that man is god. True
2. Melanie Phillips stated that sexuality is the battering
ram against the fundamental tenets of Western culture,
in order to destroy it and replace it with a new type of
society altogether.
3. Pagan thinking even seeks to try to eliminate the
distinction between true and false. True
4. Pitirim Sorokin, an escapee from Stalin’s Soviet Union,
stated that the first essential mark of civilization
requires that men take responsibility for their offspring.
5. The totalitarian state seeks to obliterate the distinction
between itself and its citizenry. True

23. Lesson Slide
8 23
Where Is Society Headed?
Discussion Questions
1. Many today argue that the Christian notion of hell needs
to be discarded, and that a loving God would not damn
anyone. Explain how this line of reasoning is influenced by
oneist ways of thinking.
2. Peter Jones explains that it is not only toleration of non-
Christian sexuality that is demanded, but also silence from
the opposition. When should Christians voice their
opinions in this matter, and how should they do it?
3. If the educational system is promulgating an essentially
pagan worldview, how can Christian churches and families
best counteract such teaching?
4. If paganism seeks to eliminate oppositions, including the
distinction between right and wrong, how can there be
any sense of justice? Contrast this pagan impulse with the
Christian view of justice.

24. Lesson Slide
8 24
Where Is Society Headed?
Next Lesson
In such an apostate society, people are no longer confronted with the
notion of the image of God reflected in the reality of “natural law,” the
awareness of a Creator and in the human being as responsible for the
creational mandate, in sexual distinctions of male and female, and in
the functioning of moral conscience. The Oneist train is headed to
destruction—but we also can’t just jump off the train of culture; we
need to keep moving toward some future. Paul has given us his
guidelines.

25. Lesson Slide
8 25
Where Is Society Headed?
Resources by Peter Jones
• Only Two Religions (study guide)
• Only Two Religions (evangelism tool)
• truthxchange.com (website)
• heritage-pca.org (website)
• The Other Worldview (book)
• The Pagan Heart of Today’s Culture
(booklet)