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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Further Reading

(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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