Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Book review: The Other Worldview by Peter Jones

The twentieth book I read in 2017 is The Other Worldview: Exposing Christianity's Greatest Threat by Peter Jones.  Jones's proposition is that all worldviews boil down to what he terms either Oneism or Twoism; that is, that either the universe is all there is and if there is a God or creator He is somehow a part of it, or that God exists apart from His creation.

This is a clever delineation, in one sense, in that it allows Jones to sweep scientific materialism, classic polytheism, pantheism, atheism, and the New Age movement into a single category.  Twoism as a term, however, suffers from confusion with dualism, a concept that it has nothing to do with, and Jones is, indeed, forced to address the issue and clarify his meaning early on. In addition, Jones must classify Islam and Judaism as Oneist, though they are non-Trinitarian and thus, in his mind, insufficiently Oneist.  In the end, I'm not sure the conceit was worth the hoops he has to jump through to support it.

The early chapters on the rise (really, the renaissance) of Twoism are very interesting, as the author draws a line from classical paganism through the Spiritualist movement, Jungian psychology, and the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, revealing some rather surprising connections.  (Jung was certifiable, yo, attributing his psychological theories to an occultic spirit-guide with wings and horns named Philemon, who arranged a personal introduction to Gnostic deity Abraxas and entrusted Jung with the responsibility to become prophet of a new religion and save the world.  I couldn't help but recall Niles Crane's discomfort with Daphne Moon's claims to have psychic power over and against his scientific worldview and wonder what he would have thought if Frasier hadn't ended a year before the publication of The Red Book, which contained Jung's private diary of his spiritual experiences.)

As is often the case with "what's wrong with the world" books, however, I found the later chapters rather meandering and inconclusive.  Once the author has identified the disease, one rather expects him to point to the cure.  Given that Jones is an orthodox Christian, however, he can provide no cure but the one prescribed in the Bible: the necessity for human beings to place their faith in Jesus Christ and wait for God to put things right.  There is no public policy solution or twelve steps to a better, more vibrant you, which is anticlimactic.

In the nitpicking category, I'm not at all sure which side of the circle on the cover of the book is supposed to be the "good" or Twoist side: the black stripes or the red web.  In addition, the cover blurb from the foreword by R. C. Sproul announces that the book is "for every concerned American -- and especially for every Christian who weeps at the graveside of his culture," which a) is the purplest of overly dramatic prose, and b) suggests that a Christian worldview is coterminous with 20th-century American culture, which would certainly be news to 99% of Christians who have lived in the world anywhere else ever, including the apostles and church fathers.

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