Danny’s Reviews > Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning > Status Update

the great events of the New Testament have all the wonder and beauty of a myth. Yet they happen in a specific place, at a particular date, and have empirically verifiable historical consequences. The realm of empirical fact is imbued with profound spiritual meaning. Christianity unifies the two realms. The biblical worldview fulfills both the requirements of human reason and the yearnings of the human spirit.

A common metaphor…was that creation is a book written by God. Therefore it seemed appropriate to interpret it the same way as…the Bible. This led to the idea that the creation is overlaid with multiple layers of moral and spiritual meanings. Scholars call this the emblematic worldview because it conceived nature as a collection of emblems (signs or symbols) to be probed for moral and spiritual meaning.

Common sense: There seem to be certain concepts held by all people across all cultures and across all time-for example, that effects have causes, that the material world is real, that there is genuine good and evil, that we are free moral agents, that reason is a valid test for truth, and so on. These concepts are not only universal, they are also necessary for functioning in the real world.

The test of any worldview is two-fold: 1) Is it internally logically consistent? 2) Does it fit the
real world? That is, can it be applied and lived out consistently without doing violence to human
nature?

There are obvious parallels between the fate of art and the fate of religion in the modem
world. Beginning in the Enlightenment, both were stripped of their traditional status as avenues of truth. Both were out on the defensive and reduced to private, subjective experiences. Both were kicked out of the fact realm and relegated to the value realm

Christians began to divide the created world into two spheres, sacred versus secular. They recast morality in terms of negative rules, as though holiness could be achieved simply by avoiding certain parts of creation. They lost the biblical teaching that all of created reality comes from God's hand and is intrinsically good.

Because the material world was regarded as the source of evil and corruption, the monk withdrew into the monastery to contemplate spiritual ideals. Because nature was thought to have little value, the monk did not own property. Because the physical body was a source of sin, the monk suppressed bodily desires through ascetic practices-simple food, coarse clothing, the rejection of sex and marriage.

The path to wisdom was to withdraw from the physical world known by the senses, in order to contemplate the realm of ideals or universals known by the inner eye of reason. The ultimate goal of life was to escape from the prison
house of the physical body and ascend to the spiritual realm.

The main philosophical influence on Byzantine culture was neo-Platonism, which mixed Greek thought with Eastern mysticism. The result was a sharp dualism that regarded the material world as the realm of death, decay, evil, and corruption.

And in the new creation, they will be re-unified. Eternally. The doctrine
of the physical resurrection means that the physical world matters. It matters to God and it
should matter to God's people.