(10) Rational thinking

The nature and status of human rational thinking is a central theme of philosophy, and we can certainly agree with the claim that philosophy has to do with thinking and a special kind of thinking at that.  It is correct to see in the birth and development of philosophy the beginning of science also since we find here the discovery of the power of theoretical thinking for exploring and explaining the world around us.  Anaximander, for example, attributed thunder storms to the compression of wind within a dense cloud rather than to the activity of the gods.  If our human task is to develop and cultivate the potential God laid in creation then the discovery and development of theoretical thinking was a great achievement.  Unfortunately, two less-than-positive developments are found together with the discovery of theoretical thought.  Firstly, the positive ability of theoretical thought to give us new perspectives on the world by mentally splitting up reality to permit a focused analysis of specific isolated elements was uncritically taken to give us a truer picture of the world than that given in our everyday experience.  This signalled the beginning of a reductionist spirit in which theory becomes the correct way to make the world comprehensible as it reduces the rich, multifaceted character of reality to only one or two basic elements.  In consequence, the number and nature of the factors used to explain reality was severely limited even while there appeared to be a number of options available; some chose water, some air, some fire etc.  While this may not have been so serious at an early stage of the development of theoretical thought, the prejudice, very much alive today, that science is necessarily reductive and that physics will soon give us a single true unified picture of the world, is a serious misconception.

The second negative development set philosophy more immediately off-track.  In the absence of a proper recognition of the Creator, this gift of theoretical thought was soon elevated to divine status.  Xenophanes (c.570-475 BC), admiring what he took to be pure and universal in us, projected consciousness (life, sensitivity and thought) on to his idea of the One god, supreme above the others.  Something that God had made for our good got turned into an idol (Romans 1:25).  This god is conceived as pure consciousness, “complete he sees, complete he thinks, complete he hears”.  The notion of “completeness” that Xenophanes uses would set off a powerful tradition that sees god as a motionless thinking, as a simple (as in not being made up of parts) spiritual being.  This idea of “divine simplicity” was unfortunately adopted by some early Christian intellectuals and has since caused havoc in Christian theology, putting a road block in the way of understanding the reality of the covenanting God who meets us in the Bible.

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Two links worth checking out

The Faith-in-scholarship blog often has great pieces. A recent one explains the excellent Church Scientific project. It's called could a Christian worldview enhance science?

Jonathan Chaplin has a great piece at the Center for Public Justice

Before justice acquired a reactive, corrective inflection due to the fall, it was what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls “primary justice”–a rich relational lattice enabling the development of flourishing human societies in tune with God. It still is. Humans need just familial, neighborly, cultural, geographical, economic, and political relationships if they are to fulfill their original calling to be images of God tending and unfolding creation’s gifts. Justice is constitutive of the Gospel because it is constitutive of being human. Human history testifies to our necessary, stumbling, occasionally impressive, and often oppressive, attempts to build institutions that facilitate the doing of justice in each of these areas.

(9) Criticism and criteria

Philosophy as a deep kind of thinking, as specialised logical analysis, as an exercise in wonder, as critical, as a search for wisdom and as rational: what should we make of all these ideas?  A good place to start is the idea of being critical.  Since we will not be able to agree with all the above ideas and the ways in which they have been thought through, we will need to be critical ourselves.  Being critical has often been equated with incessant questioning, with a sceptical attitude that refuses to be duped.  This gives us the image of philosophy as a kind of thinking that reflects more deeply than usual by uncovering assumptions and presuppositions that we often take for granted, and have perhaps never given much attention to.  Or perhaps being critical involves questioning convictions that are held on to with great passion and are rarely subjected to rational scrutiny.  While these certainly have a place, at its root ‘to be critical’ means to hold something up for judgement according to some criteria.  It is not a mark of being critical just to question everything.  Instead, we need a firm hold of the basis or principle on which we build our judgement.  This “firm hold” is nothing other than an element of faith that is inseparable from our thinking; we must trust and be committed to the criteria we use to make our judgements.  So we can see that simply playing off philosophy as “critical” against religion as “dogmatic,” with the accompanying claim that philosophy is based on “reason” whereas religion is based on “faith” is actually a lazy way of understanding things that needs to be critically questioned!

Now it is legitimate to ask us for the criteria we will use in our judgements about philosophy.  Despite showing in the previous paragraph that any answer to this question must involve faith, our answer will still be controversial.  Let us just say for now that any answer should be controversial because it concerns the choice we make about the basis and origin of the meaning of our lives.  The direction of our lives is at stake in such a choice.  If we are to seek a Christian philosophy, then our orientation must come from God’s word.  God’s word is primarily revealed in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, and Jesus as the image of the invisible God is witnessed to by the written word of God found in the Bible.  The Bible also directs our attention to the “glory of God”, the law and commandments of God that are wordlessly spoken throughout creation (Psalms 19, 104, 119).  If we take Jesus as the key to the meaning of the Bible and the Bible as the key to the meaning of creation, then we will have a sure guide to walk in God’s ways through our life, and also in philosophy.

As we saw earlier, we learn from God’s word that we are creatures made in the “image of God”, that we find our home in God’s good creation and that we are given the task to rule over, to care for, to cultivate and develop creation (See §2-5).  Our definition of philosophy must therefore reflect this.  So as a first approximation we will take philosophy to be one way in which we can bear God’s image in caring for and developing creation.  Since this is a definition that can serve for all human activities it may seem of little consequence. However, it will help us sift through the ideas we enumerated earlier and give us criteria to make (admittedly fallible) judgements about their worth.  In particular we will stress that philosophy is a human activity that fits into created reality and cannot be understood apart from the reality in which it is embedded.  As Dooyeweerd notes in the above quote, reality is a coherence of many interrelated meanings (see also §7) and philosophy is itself part of this coherence and not something above it.  As a human activity it has no special relationship to God, no privileged role in guiding life or setting out what is ultimately true.  When people divorce themselves from their true identity as image bearers of God and fail to recognise that meaning and purpose come from God, the source of true wisdom (Proverbs 1:7, Colossians 2:2-3), that all creation belongs to God and is made by, through and for him (Romans 11:33-36), then philosophy can become a vehicle of false religious hope and faith.  On these grounds we are forced to question one of the most important and long-standing convictions to be found in the history of philosophy.  Again and again we will confront the high esteem given to Reason by many philosophers:  that Reason is the highest and best in us, that Reason is the key to reality, that Reason is that which is unchanging and unconditionally reliable, that it is what is most godlike in us, that it is independent of particular cultures and faith commitments.  This veneration of Reason is central to much western philosophy, which has taken itself to be the exercise of Reason par excellence.  To ask critically whether assigning such a status to Reason properly helps us understand what is going on in philosophical thought is not an easy task and we shall have to keep returning to it.

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Dooyeweerd on the nature of philosophy

“The intent of philosophy is to give us a theoretical insight into the coherence of our temporal world as an inter-modal coherence of meaning. Philosophic thought is bound to this coherence within which alone it has meaning.” Dooyeweerd New Critique I, 24

(8) The question "what is philosophy?"

The question which we here deal with is clearly important and fundamental when considering the possibility and outline of a Christian philosophy.  Unfortunately, we will not easily find a satisfactory answer; certainly not one that will satisfy everybody.  It has been well said that the question “what is philosophy?” is itself a philosophical question and one that has received many different answers.

Let us at least begin with some common ideas without yet making any judgement about them.  Firstly, philosophy involves and is about thinking.  The twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger at the end of his career even preferred to speak of “thinking” rather than philosophy, meaning by it a special and deep kind of thinking, and provocatively claimed that ‘science does not think’. In this way he stressed the difference between philosophy and science.  Others have seen science as the very pinnacle of human thought about reality so that philosophy is left with the task of clarifying the concepts and arguments we use both in science and in everyday life.  In this way philosophy becomes a specialised kind of thinking related to logical analysis.  So called “analytic” philosophy which is the predominant form of philosophy in universities today tends to follow this line.  The well-known Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga is a leading figure in analytic philosophy and once described philosophical reflection as “not much different from just thinking hard”.  Philosophy has also been said to start with a feeling of wonder, as Plato has it in the Theaetetus (155d)[1] and as Aristotle repeated (Metaphysics A 982b10)[2] – and also to involve reflection that goes deeper than usual thinking.  Let’s explore these ideas a bit further.

That people were struck by a feeling of awe at the world around them, and drawn by such a feeling to wonder at the origin of it all, certainly predated the beginnings of philosophy in 6^th century BC Ionia.  This is clear from the many myths that describe the birth of gods and of human beings.  From its inception, usually identified with Thales of Miletus, philosophy had an ambiguous relation to these myths.  It is quite possible that the importance of Miletus as the birth of philosophy, being home also to Anaximander and Anaximenes, was due to its importance as a trade-route with the older cultures of Babylon, Egypt, Lydia, and Phoenicia.  Contact with such cultures would have confronted the Greeks with creation myths quite different from their own. The early philosophers both drew on these myths for inspiration and ideas, as Thales did in identifying water as the ultimate element, but also showed a critical attitude – as far as we know Thales made no link to the gods and gave a more ‘naturalistic’ and structural account of reality.  Often the critical attitude has been emphasised and from this we get the idea that philosophy is in tension with religion as well as the idea that philosophy must be a kind of thinking that is critical. 

Then we should consider the term philosophy itself which derives from two Greek words philos and sophia which together mean the “love of wisdom”.  Here we can find the notion that philosophy can help us discover the meaning of life and show us how to live a good life.  Early on in the history of philosophy, ethics took an important role such that for many it became a kind of alternative religious way of life for intellectuals.  We could think of the religious cult that grew up around the legendary Pythagoras or later when Plato spoke of philosophy as a conversion of the soul from darkness to light, from the world of change to reality itself which is understood to be a divine order. As the philosopher comes to know this changeless order he becomes divine so far as is possible for a mortal (Republic 518c-d and 500c-d).  While this view became less common with the advent of Christianity, in our increasingly post-Christian age it is experiencing something of a revival as the likes of Luc Ferry and Alain de Botton try to show us how to live a good secular life with the help of philosophy.  Finally, and possibly the most important and pervasive idea about philosophy is that it has to do with reason and being rational.

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[1]"I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

[2] “The fact that this science is not productive is also clear from those who first engaged in philosophy.  For human beings originally began philosophy, as they do now, because of wonder”

Further reading

These introductory posts have tried to lay some of the Biblical foundations for a Christian philosophy. While it may overlap with theology, what is covered is perhaps better described as ‘worldview’. In his book The Relation of the Bible to Learning, Evan Runner lay great emphasis on the fact that “the Word of God is one,” a living and active power that speaks to and redirects the heart and so provides guidance for the whole of life. This directing power must also guide theology and so should be distinguished from it. Runner’s book and its sequel Scriptural Religion and Political Task, can be found in Walking the Way of the Word: The collected writings of H. Evan Runner Volume 2, (Paideia Press, 2009.)

One book that was drawn on for much in these sections and which covers similar topics is Albert Wolter’s classic Creation Regained: Biblical basics for a Reformational Worldview, (Eerdmans, 1985/2005.) From Wolters is taken the claim, made in section 4, that “There is nothing in human life that does not belong to the created order” (p.25). His short paper “The Foundational Command:‘Subdue  the Earth!’” is very helpful in understanding the cultural mandate. Also The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview by Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton, (IVP, 1984), deals with creation, cultural mandate and the dangers of dualism. Richard Middleton’s recent A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology, (Baker Academic, 2014), is a rich resource and was especially helpful for section 4; the quote there is from pp.101-102. The claim that God’s Word is “first published in creation, then republished in Scripture” is helpfully explained in Society, State, and Schools: A case for structural and confessional pluralism, by Gordon Spykman et. al. (Eerdmans, 1981) pp.151-155. Andre Troost has covered “The relation between the revelation of creation and Word-revelation” in chapter 2 of his book The Christian Ethos, (Patmos, 1983.)

The table of aspects and questions in section 1 is adapted from Science in Faith: A Christian Perspective on Teaching Science edited by Arthur Jones pages 18-19. The reference to Oscar Cullmann in section 2 is to his “Immortality of the soul or resurrection of the dead?” Herman Dooyeweerd’s summary of the cultural mandate in section 3 is from Roots of Western Culture, (Paideia Press, 2012), p.30. This is a good place to start getting an insight into the worldview or “religious ground-motive” that propels reformational philosophy. The social perspective hinted at in section 3 is based on the principle of “sphere sovereignty” articulated by the Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper in “Sphere Sovereignty” (1880) see pp.461-490 of Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader edited by James D. Bratt, and chapter 3 of Lectures on Calvinism, (Eerdmans, 1931.) Dooyeweerd discusses sphere sovereignty in chapter 2 of Root of Western Culture. Some of the implications of this principle for society will be explored in the later sections; however, it will also become apparent that the basic principle is fundamental to the whole working out of a reformational philosophy. The quote from Vollenhoven in section 6 comes from §13 of his Introduction to Philosophy Edited by John J. Kok and Anthony Tol, ‘being-subject’ as the ‘point of orientation’ comes from §17, and Tol’s gloss is from Anthony Tol Philosophy in the making: D.H.Th. Vollenhoven and the emergence of reformed philosophy page xvii fn23. Johan van der Hoeven’s "In memory of Herman Dooyeweerd. Meaning, time and law" Philosophia Reformata 43: 130 -144, is helpful in understanding the key idea of meaning in Dooyeweerd.

To understand the reformational approach to reading the Bible, as well as the books already mentioned, one should consult Calvin Seerveld’s How to read the Bible to hear God speak, (Dordt Press, 2003.) Cornelis Veenhof described the atmosphere in the Netherlands surrounding the birth of reformational philosophy as “When the Scriptures Fell Open”. Prominent among those he mentions is the Amsterdam preacher S. G. de Graaf whose four volume Promise and Deliverance (Paideia Press, 2012) was deemed significant enough to be the only major translation project undertaken by Evan Runner. An important historical account of how evangelicalism has repeatedly fallen for a reduced understanding of Biblical faith is Keith Sewell’s The Crisis of Evangelical Christianity: Roots, Consequences, and Resolutions (WIPF & Stock, 2016.)

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(7) Created reality as ‘meaning’

Early on in in his main work: A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Dooyeweerd writes: “Meaning is the being of all that has been created and the nature even of our selfhood” (NC I, 4).  It is a statement that has intrigued and confused.  Dooyeweerd, however, wastes no time in explaining that his point is that nothing in reality stands by itself in its own strength.  Anything, any moment or aspect, any individual or institution in some way expresses something of something else.  In some way it refers beyond itself, and ultimately to God.  Echoing Saint Augustine’s famous saying “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee”, Dooyeweerd described reality as restless.

This restless referring and expressing suggested to Dooyeweerd the idea of meaning.  We might also think of expressions like “the meaning of life,” or “the meaning of history” to get a sense of what he was getting at by using this term.  It has something to do with the direction and purpose of things, of all reality. The idea of meaning is used by Dooyeweerd to point towards a religious dynamic, the movement of creation as Saint Paul expresses it when writing to the Romans “For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen” (11:36).  In other words, reality expresses the will of God and refers back to God.

As with Vollenhoven’s use of the term ‘subject’, so too here it is useful to contrast what Dooyeweerd is saying with what other philosophers might be expected to say with the same term.  We would expect philosophers to take the term ‘meaning’ as designating something about how reality may appear to us.  Reality-in-itself is just so many bits of matter with no inherent meaning at all.  It is only when the human subject, in the sense rejected by Vollenhoven, confronts it that reality gets cloaked with meaning, value, even emotion.  Meaning then is a term related to human experience as something quite separate from reality.  On the one side, the human subject which bestows meaning on things; on the other, the object meaningless-in-itself.

Dooyeweerd responds to this picture by saying that it holds no relation to our experience.  Each element of reality is interconnected with the rest of reality.  The way things interrelate in both stable and changing ways is at the very heart of reality, and the term ‘meaning’ designates this dynamic interconnectedness.  By saying that reality is meaning, Dooyeweerd rejects the idea that anything could exist in-itself or could be known of itself.  Philosophical notions like “substance”, “essence” and, “subject” are to be abandoned, or at least seriously questioned, as they reveal attempts to disconnect some element of reality both from its relation to other elements of reality and from its very nature as a dependent creature, from, through and for God.

We can now summaries the key Biblical principles that lie at the heart of reformational philosophy.  (1) The richness of creation demands that philosophy does justice to diversity. (2) Humans have responsibility primarily realised in tasks that are always limited in scope. (3) Creational diversity and human responsibility do not have meaning in themselves but in relation to each other and ultimately to the command to love God above all else. (4) The interaction between the ordered cosmos and human responsibility to develop creation’s potential can be helpfully understood in terms of a dynamic coordination of structure and direction.

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(6) Created reality as ‘subject’

How does our view of reality as God’s creation translate into reformational philosophy?  We have seen that it requires us to recognise the goodness and the richness of the world around us as well as human responsibility within creation.  Philosophers like to use words in a precise way, so it would help to have a word that we can use to refer to the whole of reality that will direct our analysis according to the biblical principles outlined above.  We could just use the word ‘creation’, but that already carries lots of different meaning and would not help give the direction needed.  Instead, we want a word that has, or can be given, a fairly precise meaning that brings out something of philosophical significance from the belief that reality is indeed God’s creation.

A number of options can be suggested from the writing of different reformational philosophers.  We shall start with Vollenhoven’s characterisation of reality as ‘subject’. He writes “That which is created is completely dependent on the Creator, that is to say, wholly subject to his sovereign law, Word revelation, and guidance”.

It is not uncommon in modern philosophy to speak of ‘subject’ or of ‘subjectivity’.  Descartes, the so-called ‘father of modern thought’, sought to overcome scepticism and provide a foundation of certainty in science by starting from the thinking subject.  Descartes took the Cogito (‘I think’) as the source or principle of its own activity which can master the world which it confronts as its object.  This ‘turn to subjectivity’ puts freedom and rationality at the heart of our self-understanding and our view-point on the ‘external world’.

Vollenhoven’s notion is quite different.  As a creature, a human being must acknowledge that she finds herself called to be responsible.  There is already God’s Word that called us and the world into existence (Genesis 1), that gives us a task (Gen 1:28 & 2:15), that invites us to live under God’s blessing, represented in Genesis 2 by the tree of life, and that warns us against choosing our own path, represented by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  As human beings we find that we “stand in subjection” to God’s command.  God is King and we are ‘subjects’.

The term subjectivity, in Vollenhoven, refers not just to us as human beings but to the whole of creation as called forth by God’s word and as being sustained by the same word. He takes this ‘being-subject’ of the cosmos as the point of orientation for philosophy. Anthony Tol notes that "this ‘point of orientation’ characterises the being of created reality not as a theoretical-intellectual is, nor a practical-moral ought, but, in emphasising address and response, a poetical-religious can"

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,

their starry host by the breath of his mouth.

He gathers the waters of the sea into jars;

he puts the deep into storehouses.

Let all the earth fear the Lord;

let all the people of the world revere him.

For he spoke, and it came to be;

he commanded, and it stood firm. (Psalm 33:6-9)

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(5) Good and evil: Fall and redemption

So far we have perhaps sounded a little too upbeat.  That’s because we haven’t faced the sense of hopelessness we can feel in the face of gross injustice, we have not heard the cries of those who suffer poverty, illness or psychological brokenness, we have missed the cry of the lonely, the abandoned, the violated.  We have focused on the goodness of creation but all too often we see the pollution of creation.  The Bible speaks eloquently of the groans of creation in its bondage to decay.  Any Christian view of life and the world must wrestle with, while never fully understanding, the reality of evil and sin.

We must affirm the Biblical view that the goodness of creation is not done away with after sin enters the world. However, it does become more poignant.  We can only get close to the full tragedy of evil when we see that it perverts and destroys what was so wonderfully made.

This brings us to our first point: Sin is as wide, though not as deep, as creation.  To return to Genesis, we see that sin had its effect on all the relationships humans find themselves in: our relation with each other, with God’s creation and most fundamentally with God (Genesis 3).  At the heart of a Christian understanding of life we must place alongside the comprehensive nature of God’s good creation, the comprehensive nature of the fall into sin. This in turn leads us to acknowledge the comprehensive nature of the redemption brought through the life, death and resurrection of Christ.

The comprehensive nature of sin challenges any split between a sacred realm of life and a secular realm just as much as does the comprehensive nature of creation.  Sin can be just as present in a prayer meeting as in a board meeting; the church can be just as consumed with power as a government. Therefore, we must remind ourselves that Christ came to “reconcile all things to God, whether on heaven or earth, visible or invisible”.  The Gospel is not about God abandoning his creation; it is about turning it around from death to life, from ruin to renewal.  Those who are in Christ have died to their old life and their new life covers all human activities in the world, the promise is for a “fullness of life”, not a reduced life of narrowly defined spiritual activities.

A helpful way of setting these biblical truths to work in philosophy is by distinguishing structure and direction.  Structure refers to the original intention of God for all areas of life to bring glory to God and blessing to neighbours.  It is short-hand for the ordered goodness of creation.  Though this structure is certainly obscured and distorted by evil, it remains effective. God is faithful to creation and God’s word upholds its diverse integrity. So when considering how to understand or involve oneself in a cultural task as a Christian, the first guiding principle is to look for and affirm the goodness of God’s order for that activity.  We can be sure that the task God has set, when worked on in obedience, brings blessing. 

Direction refers to the way that humans choose to respond to God’s call for responsible stewardship and development of creation’s potential. This response can be either in a direction that follows God’s laws, which brings blessing, or a way that ignores God and sets out on a human path which brings curse (this theme of blessing and curse is very prominent in Deuteronomy; in Proverbs it is expressed in terms of wisdom and folly).  So a second guiding principle is to discern the ways in which specific cultural tasks have been bent to human desires away from God and thus distorted in ways which bring a curse on us and our neighbours, and to discern the ways in which people have engaged in that task so as to honour God and bring blessings to those nearby.  We can draw together the Biblical themes we have been exploring and think Christianly about any subject under the sun by asking these two questions: What is structural or in other words creational? And what is directional?

A constant temptation, especially in philosophy, is to make direction a matter of structure.  This happens when we take some aspect of creation as the source of evil or imperfection in the world.  As Christians we must reject such views as contradicting the clear teaching of Jesus that evil comes from the human heart. It is not about contamination from some part of created reality (Matthew 15:11).

Once we identify some aspect or area of creation as evil, the follow-up claim is that some other feature of creation is the source of goodness and human hope for salvation. This also is a denial of a fundamental Christian truth: that salvation comes from God.  However, as Christians we easily adapt this view through a sacred/secular distinction, which makes certain areas of life the privileged channels of God’s grace and other areas as more susceptible to evil and sin.

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(4) An ordered cosmos

This world that we live in is not haphazard or arbitrary.  God created the world in an ordered and patterned way.  This is quite explicit in Genesis 1, where it describes God’s separating out light from darkness, sky from earth and land from sea and creating rich vegetation and varied animals, each ‘according to their kind’.

The Bible refers to this ordering of creation in many ways: God’s law, ordinances, wisdom and so on.  A good example is Psalm 19 which describes the glory of God declared in creation before meditating on God’s law:

7 The law of the Lord is perfect,
    refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
    making wise the simple.
8 The precepts of the Lord are right,
    giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant,
    giving light to the eyes.
9 The fear of the Lord is pure,
    enduring forever.
The decrees of the Lord are firm,
    and all of them are righteous.

10 They are more precious than gold,
    than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
    than honey from the honeycomb.
11 By them your servant is warned;
    in keeping them there is great reward.

 Psalm 19:7-11

Those familiar with the Bible’s wisdom literature will have less difficulty understanding what to modern minds appears to be a sudden shift in Psalm 19, from the way of the sun across the heavens in verse 6, to God’s law revivifying human life in verse 7.  That is because such literature takes for granted a creation wide perspective on God’s kingship that is foreign to modern perplexities about how to relate nature and culture. We should be careful not to project such concerns back into the text.

The point is that God’s ordinances extend from the natural world through to the structures of society, to the world of art, to business and commerce. As always when reading the Bible, we do not look for detailed prescription on how to live, but for the very bread that sustains our life, the lamp that will light our path, the power of the gospel to redirect our living before God. We do not get a detailed theory, but a directing principle that shows us that human civilization is normed throughout. We are to open our eyes in faith and see that everywhere there are limits and proprieties, standards and criteria: in every field of human affairs there are right and wrong ways of doing things.  There is nothing in human life that does not belong to the created order.  Everything we are and do is thoroughly creaturely, and requires of us a responsible response to our Creator.

Here we confront an important issue for Bible-believing Christians. The problem is that the Bible does not address itself directly to many of the issues that confront us in modern society. This strengthens the temptation for Christians to retreat from any effort to engage culture in a distinctively Christian way. It thus continues the cycle of privatising our beliefs and secularising our public lives. How then are we to "discover limits" and discern "right and wrong ways of doing things"?

In the Old Testament the Israelites were given the Torah, God's laws for being a holy nation. However, in Exodus 18:15-16 we are told that the people brought their cases to Moses, and he decided between one person and another and made known to them “the statutes and instructions of God”. What is interesting is that the word for “instructions” used here is “torah” in the plural, and this episode comes before the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. We have the Torah before the giving of the Torah! We can make sense of this when we look at the idea of wisdom. Both wisdom and Torah are linked to God’s intent at creation. So, various psalms speak of the creating word by which God ordered creation in Genesis 1. These psalms explicitly identify creation by word as creation by God’s commands, statue, or decree, using these terms as rough equivalents (Psalms 33:6-9; 119:89-96; 148:5-6). This is the same range of terms used for the divinely revealed law that Israel is required to obey. Thus there is a fundamental unity between God’s word in creation and God’s Torah for Israel. Torah cannot be limited to the written law revealed at Sinai; it holds for the entire created order. This insight leads Psalm 148:8 to describe even the wind as obedient to the Creator’s word, while the poet in Psalm 119:91 says to the Lord God, “All things are your servants.” Law is embedded in creation and grounds all proper creaturely functioning. A particularly revealing example of this is given in Isaiah where we are told that wise farmers know how properly to till the soil and thresh their grain for maximum benefit because “His God instructs him and teaches him the right way” (28:24-29). Just where we would normally say that they learned these skills from trial and error, and from being apprenticed by other, more experienced farmers, we are referred to God's direct revelation.  From these points the biblical scholar Richard Middleton has concluded that “in principle there is no difference between wisely discerning God’s will structured into the created order and obeying God’s revealed word.” This perspective continues in the New Testament. In numerous places we are exhorted to discern God's will, to work out our salvation, to practise discerning right from wrong and so on (Romans 12:1-2, Hebrews 5, Philippians 2)

We can summarise this perspective by saying that God’s Word is first published in creation, then authoritatively republished in Scripture to guide God’s people in differing historical circumstances. In the revelation of the law at Sinai, God simply articulates relevant aspects of God’s creational Word for Israel in their particular historical context, with their specific needs for moral and social restoration. God’s Word in creation gives constant direction; the articulation of this directing Word in changing historical circumstances requires wisdom as evidenced by the early church in Acts 15.

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(3) The cultural mandate

Understanding Christianity in terms of the salvation of our souls has led to a seriously reduced understanding of the “Great Commission” to make disciples of all nations.  We will only get a fuller understanding if we go back to the first commission God gave to humans.  That is the “cultural commission”, often referred to as the “cultural mandate”.

In Genesis 1:26-30 and 2:15 God gives Adam and Eve oversight of the whole of creation.  We are to act as the stewards of creation both to preserve and to develop.  It is this role of authority concerning creation given to humans, both male and female, that is the central meaning of the image of God.  We reflect to the world the character of God through continuing God’s work of ordering and developing creation.  As with the goodness of creation this is a point that is reaffirmed in many of the Psalms (Psalm 19; 104). It is also central to the picture the New Testament gives us of God's coming kingdom (Matthew 19:28; Luke 22:24-30; Matthew 25:23; 1 Corinthians 6:1-6; Revelation 5:10).

This is a neglected theme, and is of great relevance for understanding the whole-of-life implications of Christianity needed to sustain an authentic Christian philosophy. Therefore, we will spend a little time drawing out three elements of the human task to develop creation:

a.      God’s task to humans is creation-wide.

b.      Human authority is always limited

c.      Our task is always to be seen in the context of service

The first point is foundational.  To all those who would say that the primary task of a Christian is to evangelise, and that everything else is of secondary or even of no importance, it should be pointed out that evangelism has no meaning unless it is a discipleship of every nation in the Gospel of Christ.   It is worth remembering that the Gospel of Jesus was the announcement of the coming kingdom (Mark 1:15, Matthew 4:17), that is the rule of God over all things, for which we are taught to pray (Matthew 6:10, Luke 11:2).  Everything is to be done to the glory of God and for the blessing of one’s neighbour as affirmed in Jesus’ summary of the law (Matthew 22:34-40). Nothing can be excluded from this, from the making of clothes to farming, governing to refuse collection, artistic crafts to commerce. Each of these tasks can be engaged in so as to invite God’s kingdom to come or so as to take a share of God’s inheritance while refusing to recognise him as Father. Anything less than this is a reduction of the Gospel.

An implication of this is that we are to develop creation and its great potential.  Our task involves an opening up of the richness of creation bringing forth new possibilities.  This means that historical development and change is a natural and good part of God’s purposes for human life.  Historical change can often be guided by a spirit of human rebellion against God, as made clear at the tower of Babel. Nevertheless, as Christians we should not be reactionary in our evaluation of historical change.

Our freedom to get involved in cultural activities is creation wide.  However, there is also an important sense of limitation.  We do not own the world, “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it”. Therefore, our cultural activities and social roles always take on a limited form in contrast to God’s unlimited sovereignty.  These activities and roles have the quality of tasks and responsibilities we hold before God.  For example: to maintain justice and order in public life, to bring children into the world, to worship God and proclaim the message of salvation, to pass on the wisdom of one generation to the next, to produce goods for human use and enjoyment.

Each of these tasks should be seen as a genuine Christian vocation.  When we pray; “your will be done here on earth as it is in heaven”, we should be reminded of our own role in fulfilling these tasks, and others as well, all in the service of God.  The Lord’s Prayer must be prayed from within the work office, within the board meeting, within the courtroom. God’s Will is to be done in each and every situation.

We are touching here on a basic perspective on social institutions that is quite different from that commonly held today. We shall explore this more later on.  For now, it is enough to say that in understanding a school, or a business, a government or hospital as something formed in response to God-given tasks means that we must reject the view that such institution are basically arbitrary structures that exist to serve the interests and goals of the individuals that make them up.

Within the framework of limited responsibility before God and for the blessing of our neighbour we can outline a different approach.  God appoints humans to perform certain tasks that are communal in character. Humans respond through the formation of different social organizations.  So we have marriages, families, businesses, churches, governing authorities, schools and so on.  Each exists by responding to distinct cultural tasks.  These tasks are neither all-encompassing nor individualistic; they are limited and communal tasks.  We can evaluate institutions on the basis of their openness to God and others and on the basis of their distinctive tasks.  We can also be critical when one particular task starts to dominate and usurp or undermine the role of other societal tasks.  In such a situation we can see the real danger of a move away from recognising God’s total authority over human culture and towards an assertion of human authority based in one of the social spheres.

The final point is that human cultural activity is designed to be honouring to God, a blessing to those it affects and an act of stewardly love to the rest of creation.  Dooyeweerd summarised the cultural mandate by saying that God created humans as rulers of creation so that the powers and potentials which God has enclosed within creation are to be disclosed by men and women in their service of love to God and neighbour.  This will have a radical impact on the way we think about the role of an artist or the place of a business enterprise in society, the task of national governments and the role of universities, and indeed about the vital task of philosophy.

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(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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(1) Philosophy and the richness of creation (continued)

So, the example of a children's party, a fairly ordinary and practical event which can provide our first step towards a philosophical exploration of the richness of creation.  To the child, their birthday party is a very simple thing; it means presents, friends, food and fun. For the poor parents, however, there is much more going on!  First, there will be the decision as to who, and how many, will be invited. Invitations will need to be designed and sent out. Then, where to hold the party; a space is needed big enough to contain the number of children invited. Since the children will be doing a lot of running around the space will need to be big! How big, and what entertainment to put on, old-fashioned party games, or a hired magician, will depend in part on what the parents view as a reasonable cost for such a party. However, there will also be social expectations, perhaps very high and pressuring, that the parents will feel more keenly than the children. With games come prizes; how will they be distributed, and what happens when boisterous play upsets one of the little guests? Food is also an important component, and thought will need to go into when this is given to the children and how they might be encouraged to eat some healthy food rather than going straight for the crisps and cake! The timing for what happens at the party may also be important; for how long will each activity hold the attention of the kids; when is the appropriate time to bring in the cake and sing happy birthday?

In reformational philosophy it is standard to give expression to the richness of creation by recognising that in reality we experience a number of different dimensions or ‘aspects’.  Much more will be said about these later; for now we start by listing the 15 ‘modal aspects’ that, give or take a few, all reformational philosophers have come to recognise.  Questions have been added to help see how recognising these aspects will help us explore the variety of ways created things can function.

Table 1(adapted from Arthur Jones 1998, 18-19)

Aspects	Key Questions
Numerical	How many?
Spatial	How big?
Movement	How fast?
Energy	How reactive?
Biotic	How productive?
Psychic/sensitive	How stimulating?
Analytic	How intelligible?
Historical	How creative/skilful?
Aesthetic	How imaginative?
Lingual	How clear?
Social	How sociable?
Economic	How valuable?
Jural	How just?
Ethical	How loving?
Faith	How trustworthy?

 Have a look back at what was said about planning a child’s birthday party.  With a bit of effort you should be able to see that most, if not all, of the 15 aspects are present.  You may want to try and imagine a children’s party that completely avoids one of the aspects.  In trying this you may be surprised at how hard it actually is. 

So we now have an example of recognising the richness of creation.  Its practical use is that a good children’s party will need to consider all of these factors and ensure that they are all in order.  However, it also raises a problem.  What looked simple now looks too complicated and we might wonder what has happened to the simplicity of having fun while celebrating a child’s birthday.  This problem is actually a very significant and long-standing philosophical one: the problem of unity and diversity.

Without trying to solve this philosophical problem right now, we can say that it is common for one aspect to take the lead, so to speak, in specific contexts.  In the context of a children’s party it is the social element of friends having fun together and marking an important point in a child’s life. This means that the social element is the leading aspect which should provide focus for the parents in their planning and all the other elements that are part of the party should serve this one.  If the parents considered only the health and safety of the children, or only worried about getting all the numbers right, then the chance of a good birthday party would be significantly reduced.

You might like to try this exercise on other planned events, projects or communities you are involved in. Do you discover that there are always many factors involved in a successful outcome even if many of these seem minor and often go unnoticed? Have you experienced events where the little things became so important that the main purpose was lost sight of?

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