Friday, February 16, 2018

(2) Philosophy and Worldview

Philosophy must start somewhere and the aim of reformational philosophy is to be a philosophy that is in line with scripture.  This means it is important to say something about the world and life vision that finds its inspiration in the Bible.  To do this we shall make some comments about the key Biblical themes of creation, fall and redemption with particular emphasis on the first since, as we have already indicated, that is what gives context to philosophical activity.

Creation includes everything that is not God.  There are three points about creation that are relevant in this context which will be explored in this and the following sections:

1.      Creation is good.
2.      The human task is to develop creation.
3.      Creation is ordered (given structure) by God

The Bible’s story of creation is described in terms of God commanding by his Word and creation responding in obedience.  After each response God affirms what he has made.  And we see that the whole of creation, in all its rich diversity is considered very good.  We should be careful not to equate this goodness with other-worldly notions of perfection, or think of goodness only in relations to our own desires.  Creation is set up to fulfil the purposes given to it by God; that is what is central.  Creation is God’s kingdom (Psalm 24); it reveals his will (Psalm 19); and should be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4)

To believe in the God who has revealed Himself in the Bible is to understand ourselves and the world we live in as God’s world; we were made to be at home in this world. We are part of God’s good creation and thus are part of His ongoing purposes.  Life is of one piece and the fundamental question for the Christian is to what extent one’s life is a walk of obedience to God.  That following Christ has implications for the whole of life is often resisted by Christians and it is worth considering why this is.  In reformational philosophy this resistance is attributed to a basic “dualism” that underlies it, though it is worth noting that today there may be a lot of emphasis given to “integrating” the two realms or spheres that form this dualism.  The basic idea is that life can be separated into a natural and a supernatural realm.  The natural realm is constituted by the common world in which all people live whether they are Christian or not.  Here people build homes for themselves, live together in society, develop science and pursue various social and personal goals without much concern for “religious” issues.  It is a realm that is largely neutral with regard to religion and, in that sense, is sometimes described as “secular”.  The supernatural realm is then that realm of life that is unique to Christian experience.  It is primarily found in the church community and involves distinctive activities like worship, prayer, Bible reading and some specific moral teachings.  This sphere is directly affected by religion in the sense that God’s grace brings an individual into this sphere, or adds this to one’s common life.  So, as well as being a car mechanic and football fan you become someone who prays, reads the Bible and attends church.

It is important to see that this is a very persuasive position.  It is a “ground motive” that affects us all such that it often acts like ‘common sense’ and can be very difficult to resist.  We need to see what’s wrong with this view at its heart.  The key is to see that our whole life belongs to God. There is no sphere of our existence that can be hidden from God or that can be kept back from the claim of Christ’s Lordship.  So the problem with this view is that it undermines the integrity of our religious situation.    The whole of reality is created, sustained, and ordered by God; it is comprehensively distorted, though not destroyed, by the fall; and the whole of reality is taken up in God’s redemptive work through history to reconcile all things to himself.  The great Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck summarised this stance simply like this: “God the father has reconciled His created but fallen world through the death of His Son, and renews it into a Kingdom of God by His Spirit.” What this means is that any attempt to divide reality up into a 'secular' or 'natural' sphere and a 'spiritual' or 'supernatural' sphere undermines the comprehensiveness of the central biblical categories of creation, fall and redemption.

We must therefore resist any view that sees salvation as taking us out of this world, and so sees our destination as a spiritual realm beyond this world.  Such a view finds no support from the Bible. However it does hold a striking resemblance to certain pagan Greek ideas of the world of matter as evil, or a principle of imperfection, and of a non-physical soul as our true self which is trapped in the body and longs for its release into a purely spiritual world.  One important source of these ideas has been Plato’s dialogue the Phaedo, which has unfortunately been more influential in many Christians’ understanding of spirituality and eternal life than 1 Corinthians 15, as the New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann once noted. This Greek inspired view has both minimised the value of our earthly lives and cut off whole chunks of our life from the renewing power of the Gospel.  While it is true that most Christians would reject the more extreme forms of this view it is still common for Christians to think of their life in terms of sacred and secular and so find it strange that the Gospel is relevant to the whole of life. The effect of this deep lying dualism is to deny the lordship of Christ for the greater part of our life!  It leads us to assume that work and play, food and drink, business and politics, art and entertainment are somehow outside of our Christian calling.

This is really important.  When the comprehensive character of creation is taken out of a Christian view, when we start with a reduced Christian faith that covers only Sunday service and private Bible study, then we cut out any relevance the Christian faith can have for life, and in doing so we condemn Christianity to irrelevance.  A Christian philosophy cannot solve these problems, indeed it will suffer from them. Seeing how such a philosophy can give distinctive insight and direction in the different sectors of life can, however, play its part in encouraging a more wholehearted Christian life.

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