Four Pillars

David Greentree Jnr. 8th September 2008

In the last few years, the global Anglican Church has woken up to realise it has been quietly separating into two very distinct groups for the last fifty years. Recent arguments over the ordination of women and gay clergy are symptoms of a fundamental divide that goes much deeper. The two groups are now so divergent that they barely speak the same language. Evangelical Anglicans have characterized the debate as the issue of biblical authority. However, liberal Anglicans have refused to engage on this issue, focusing rather on practical issues such as the ordination of women and gays.. What needs to be realised is that these issues are all symptoms of a deeper divide. Liberals believe in a group of ideologies that no longer, if they ever did, draw their authority from the scriptures.

“The four pillars” is a name I have given to this group of post modern ideologies that have taken root in our society. They are a profound intellectual effort to understand the nature of evil and propound a systematic process of education to remedy the ills of the modern world. But because they are not based in biblical Christianity, their proponents will find themselves at logger heads with orthodox Christians.

You will more easily recognize the four pillars under their common names of Socialism, Environmentalism, Feminism and Multiculturalism (embracing moral relativity).

Socialism addresses the age old issues of greed, political power and class inequality. Feminism seeks to identify and redress the injustices done to women by men and empower women to defend themselves. Environmentalism is an understanding of our relationship with the earth, emphasising how destructive human behaviour is to the natural environment. Multiculturalism looks at the history of racial conflict and the commonality between cultural moral beliefs, and extends that into a culturally based moral relativity.

The four pillars identify some of the most pressing and obvious moral failings of our times. To use a parlance that bible-believing Christians would be more familiar with, the four pillars have identified four facets of the sinful nature that are having a disastrous effect on human kind. Furthermore, they are aspects of human sin that the institutional Church has often ignored. In doing so, biblical Christians have left a moral void which others have tried to fill.

My personal experience is informed and coloured by the three years I lived in Japan, a modern capitalist society that has had little influence either from biblical Christianity or much of the four pillars ideologies. My experiences there brought home to me the reality of the achievements of the four pillars ideologies. Until I went to Japan, I did not realise how much socialism had affected and developed the Australian psyche. Japan is in many ways a bureaucracy, but in others ruthlessly capitalist. I had never seen a truly homeless person until I walked the back streets of Tokyo. In Australia there are people who are homeless, some by choice, and many by reason of addiction or mental illness, but for anyone who wants help, there will always be help, albeit sometimes with strings attached. There is a massive safety net of unemployment benefits, government social workers and charity organisations to help those who want help. Virtually none of this exists in Japan. In Tokyo, there are people living on the streets under blue tarpaulins who literally have no where to go and no one to turn to. And they die when it snows.

I also hadn’t realised the profound effect of feminism in Australia. My mother is a doctor, and my father an Anglican priest, so Mum always earned several times more money than Dad, and Dad most nights cooked dinner and picked us up from school. Japan gave me the contrast to appreciate what feminism has contributed to Australian society. My younger sister also lived with me in Japan while we both taught English. When talking with my adult female students during one class, I related the anecdote of how my sister and I had fought so much over who would wash the dishes that we had each put in money to buy a dishwasher. The women looked at me with blank incomprehension. It wasn’t until later that I realised that they had never seen a man wash dishes before. Jokingly I asked why they didn’t all buy dishwashers, which even in 2005 were still uncommon in Japan. And then I found out why. One of them blurted out, “I couldn’t spend money on something frivolous like a dishwasher. I would be a bad housewife.” I can only say I was shocked by the treatment of women, particularly housewives, in Japan, and my sister came home fuming from her time there. Having experienced that, I would not for all the world undo the marvellous work feminism has wrought in our society.

I don’t think I need to go into great detail about the achievements of the environmentalist movement in Australia. It is enough to say I spend an average of a month a year camping, hiking or engaged in some other form of bush walking, and I love Australia’s pristine wildernesses. Japan has its own form of environmentalism, but its neighbour China has not. Since the 2008 Olympics, we are all painfully aware of the devastation wreaked on a country by unbridled capitalist ambition, and I would also not wish that on Australia.

The last ideology is perhaps a mismatched group of ideologies that would not necessarily recognize themselves as part of the same group. But I saw a common theme running through, and four seemed a good number of pillars to have. I refer to the beliefs about multi-culturalism, anti-racism and moral relativity that run through our society. This group of ideologies sees the universality of humanity and human experience and moral worth of human beings, a fact lost for example in ante-bellum Louisiana (black slavery), or Nazi Germany (Semetic genocide).

This group of ideologies extrapolates from the commonality of human experience to the equality of validity of cultural beliefs. This in turn necessitates a belief in the cultural relativism of morality. And since cultures are almost infinitely divisible into subcultures, one comes at last to the individual moral relativism that is pervasive in the West “It might be wrong for you, but I think its okay for me.”

These ideologies are real solutions to the problem of human moral failings. All four of these ideologies are motivated by people who have seen something is wrong with the world and are motivated by the best intentions to try to rectify it. But (well, I’m a Christian, so for me it is a “but”) each of them has deeply anti-Christian elements.

Modern socialism has always been at its heart an Atheist ideology. Religion is the opiate of the masses. The majority of early feminists were Christian, but modern feminism has a distinctly atheist aura about it, as if calling God “Our Father” automatically prevented Christians sympathizing with the feminist agenda. Environmentalism has been heavily influenced by Hindu and Buddhist thought, particularly Gaia concepts and mother earth worship. Elements of Shinto animism can be seen in it, and there is an increasing trend towards a Hindu style asceticism among many adherents (if riding your bicycle in the middle of winter while wearing shorts and sandals and being a vegetarian is not ascetic, what it?). And multi-culturalism embraces the notion that all faiths are equally valid, and there are many paths to God, while dismissing any claim of the uniqueness of Christ as bigoted and/or culturally imperialist.

For these reasons, proponents of any of the four pillar ideologies, whom I shall call four-pillarists, are often viewed with suspicion by biblical Christians. The current schism in the Anglican Church between “liberal” Anglicans and “evangelical” Anglicans might be better understood in light of the four pillars. The evangelical Anglicans identify themselves as biblical Christians, while the liberal Anglicans often have adopted four pillarist agendas which lead them into scepticism of traditional interpretations of the bible.

What is driving the schism is a conflict of ideologies. Both groups are highly motivated to find a solution to the problem of sin, and have found their raison d’etre in different ideologies. Evangelicals are committed to the bible as the “Word of God”, providing a divine template, and indeed divine mandate, to reform society. Liberals find an equal justification in their actions in the post modern ideologies I have described. Individual issues such as the ordination of women and homosexuals are expressions of their ideologies. They are a symptom, not a cause of the conflict that has been raging in the background for over a century.

So in the bitter infighting in the Anglican Church, what we have is not a struggle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light (and both sides like to think of themselves as the forces of light). It is two groups of people, trying to achieve the same thing – the salvation of mankind. It is a clash of ideologies by very determined adherents. Four pillarism has a track record of success. It is no use biblical Christianity trying to point out the flaws in an ideology that is tackling real issues that biblical Christianity has neglected. If biblical Christianity believes the bible is God’s method of salvation, it should spend less time ridiculing those people who are doing the best they can in human strength and more time trying to demonstrate that biblical Christianity is God’s plan, not a human idea, and that it operates in the strength of God (or not at all.)

"For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does."



Home About Anglican Future Essential Theology Hot Topics The Discipline of Theology Four Pillars Reformation or Revolution? Abortion Creationism and Genesis GAFCON Philosophical Arguments Louise's Page		Four Pillars David Greentree Jnr. 8th September 2008 In the last few years, the global Anglican Church has woken up to realise it has been quietly separating into two very distinct groups for the last fifty years. Recent arguments over the ordination of women and gay clergy are symptoms of a fundamental divide that goes much deeper. The two groups are now so divergent that they barely speak the same language. Evangelical Anglicans have characterized the debate as the issue of biblical authority. However, liberal Anglicans have refused to engage on this issue, focusing rather on practical issues such as the ordination of women and gays.. What needs to be realised is that these issues are all symptoms of a deeper divide. Liberals believe in a group of ideologies that no longer, if they ever did, draw their authority from the scriptures. “The four pillars” is a name I have given to this group of post modern ideologies that have taken root in our society. They are a profound intellectual effort to understand the nature of evil and propound a systematic process of education to remedy the ills of the modern world. But because they are not based in biblical Christianity, their proponents will find themselves at logger heads with orthodox Christians. You will more easily recognize the four pillars under their common names of Socialism, Environmentalism, Feminism and Multiculturalism (embracing moral relativity). Socialism addresses the age old issues of greed, political power and class inequality. Feminism seeks to identify and redress the injustices done to women by men and empower women to defend themselves. Environmentalism is an understanding of our relationship with the earth, emphasising how destructive human behaviour is to the natural environment. Multiculturalism looks at the history of racial conflict and the commonality between cultural moral beliefs, and extends that into a culturally based moral relativity. The four pillars identify some of the most pressing and obvious moral failings of our times. To use a parlance that bible-believing Christians would be more familiar with, the four pillars have identified four facets of the sinful nature that are having a disastrous effect on human kind. Furthermore, they are aspects of human sin that the institutional Church has often ignored. In doing so, biblical Christians have left a moral void which others have tried to fill. My personal experience is informed and coloured by the three years I lived in Japan, a modern capitalist society that has had little influence either from biblical Christianity or much of the four pillars ideologies. My experiences there brought home to me the reality of the achievements of the four pillars ideologies. Until I went to Japan, I did not realise how much socialism had affected and developed the Australian psyche. Japan is in many ways a bureaucracy, but in others ruthlessly capitalist. I had never seen a truly homeless person until I walked the back streets of Tokyo. In Australia there are people who are homeless, some by choice, and many by reason of addiction or mental illness, but for anyone who wants help, there will always be help, albeit sometimes with strings attached. There is a massive safety net of unemployment benefits, government social workers and charity organisations to help those who want help. Virtually none of this exists in Japan. In Tokyo, there are people living on the streets under blue tarpaulins who literally have no where to go and no one to turn to. And they die when it snows. I also hadn’t realised the profound effect of feminism in Australia. My mother is a doctor, and my father an Anglican priest, so Mum always earned several times more money than Dad, and Dad most nights cooked dinner and picked us up from school. Japan gave me the contrast to appreciate what feminism has contributed to Australian society. My younger sister also lived with me in Japan while we both taught English. When talking with my adult female students during one class, I related the anecdote of how my sister and I had fought so much over who would wash the dishes that we had each put in money to buy a dishwasher. The women looked at me with blank incomprehension. It wasn’t until later that I realised that they had never seen a man wash dishes before. Jokingly I asked why they didn’t all buy dishwashers, which even in 2005 were still uncommon in Japan. And then I found out why. One of them blurted out, “I couldn’t spend money on something frivolous like a dishwasher. I would be a bad housewife.” I can only say I was shocked by the treatment of women, particularly housewives, in Japan, and my sister came home fuming from her time there. Having experienced that, I would not for all the world undo the marvellous work feminism has wrought in our society. I don’t think I need to go into great detail about the achievements of the environmentalist movement in Australia. It is enough to say I spend an average of a month a year camping, hiking or engaged in some other form of bush walking, and I love Australia’s pristine wildernesses. Japan has its own form of environmentalism, but its neighbour China has not. Since the 2008 Olympics, we are all painfully aware of the devastation wreaked on a country by unbridled capitalist ambition, and I would also not wish that on Australia. The last ideology is perhaps a mismatched group of ideologies that would not necessarily recognize themselves as part of the same group. But I saw a common theme running through, and four seemed a good number of pillars to have. I refer to the beliefs about multi-culturalism, anti-racism and moral relativity that run through our society. This group of ideologies sees the universality of humanity and human experience and moral worth of human beings, a fact lost for example in ante-bellum Louisiana (black slavery), or Nazi Germany (Semetic genocide). This group of ideologies extrapolates from the commonality of human experience to the equality of validity of cultural beliefs. This in turn necessitates a belief in the cultural relativism of morality. And since cultures are almost infinitely divisible into subcultures, one comes at last to the individual moral relativism that is pervasive in the West “It might be wrong for you, but I think its okay for me.” These ideologies are real solutions to the problem of human moral failings. All four of these ideologies are motivated by people who have seen something is wrong with the world and are motivated by the best intentions to try to rectify it. But (well, I’m a Christian, so for me it is a “but”) each of them has deeply anti-Christian elements. Modern socialism has always been at its heart an Atheist ideology. Religion is the opiate of the masses. The majority of early feminists were Christian, but modern feminism has a distinctly atheist aura about it, as if calling God “Our Father” automatically prevented Christians sympathizing with the feminist agenda. Environmentalism has been heavily influenced by Hindu and Buddhist thought, particularly Gaia concepts and mother earth worship. Elements of Shinto animism can be seen in it, and there is an increasing trend towards a Hindu style asceticism among many adherents (if riding your bicycle in the middle of winter while wearing shorts and sandals and being a vegetarian is not ascetic, what it?). And multi-culturalism embraces the notion that all faiths are equally valid, and there are many paths to God, while dismissing any claim of the uniqueness of Christ as bigoted and/or culturally imperialist. For these reasons, proponents of any of the four pillar ideologies, whom I shall call four-pillarists, are often viewed with suspicion by biblical Christians. The current schism in the Anglican Church between “liberal” Anglicans and “evangelical” Anglicans might be better understood in light of the four pillars. The evangelical Anglicans identify themselves as biblical Christians, while the liberal Anglicans often have adopted four pillarist agendas which lead them into scepticism of traditional interpretations of the bible. What is driving the schism is a conflict of ideologies. Both groups are highly motivated to find a solution to the problem of sin, and have found their raison d’etre in different ideologies. Evangelicals are committed to the bible as the “Word of God”, providing a divine template, and indeed divine mandate, to reform society. Liberals find an equal justification in their actions in the post modern ideologies I have described. Individual issues such as the ordination of women and homosexuals are expressions of their ideologies. They are a symptom, not a cause of the conflict that has been raging in the background for over a century. So in the bitter infighting in the Anglican Church, what we have is not a struggle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light (and both sides like to think of themselves as the forces of light). It is two groups of people, trying to achieve the same thing – the salvation of mankind. It is a clash of ideologies by very determined adherents. Four pillarism has a track record of success. It is no use biblical Christianity trying to point out the flaws in an ideology that is tackling real issues that biblical Christianity has neglected. If biblical Christianity believes the bible is God’s method of salvation, it should spend less time ridiculing those people who are doing the best they can in human strength and more time trying to demonstrate that biblical Christianity is God’s plan, not a human idea, and that it operates in the strength of God (or not at all.) "For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does."
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