"Ultimate reality" is the highest, deepest, eternal, unchangeable, source and ground of everything we see, touch, and experience with our five senses. It's that which gives being and meaning to everything finite, mortal, changeable. It's also that toward which we creatures look and live - whether we know it or not - our telos; our goal and purpose.

The Heidelberg Catechism rightly says, for all Christians who allow the Bible to absorb the world for them - who see reality through the biblical story - that the purpose of life is to glorify God - a personal being who is ultimate over us and everything else - and enjoy him forever. This should be clear to all Christians, but many Christians have been influenced to think otherwise even about the Bible because of dabbling in movements such as the New Age Movement or the Gospel of Health and Wealth or even naturalistic humanism.

Only a loving and covenant-making personal God can provide humans with unique dignity, worth, and rights. Blind nature cannot do that. So, for the Christian, "secular humanism" is an oxymoron.

We, including many Christians, read the Bible through "eyes" conditioned by, and even accommodated to, modern Western culture plus the influences of messages and ideas from other cultures that are alien to the worldview of the biblical writers. Therefore, in order fully to understand the Bible and allow the Bible to absorb the world (rather than the world - culture - absorb the Bible) we must practice an "archaeology" of the biblical writers' implicit, assumed view of reality.

Today, under the influences of Eastern religions and philosophies imported into the West, many Christians confuse God's Spirit with our spirit and think our spirit is a spark of the divine, "the God within everyone." That's not how the biblical writers thought about our spirits or souls.

Before you disagree make sure you understand. In other words, we must make sure that we can describe another's theological position as he would describe it before we criticize or condemn. Another guiding principle should be 'Do not impute to others beliefs you regard as logically entailed by their beliefs but that they explicitly deny'.

Humanism cannot survive on a purely secular platform.