Cornelius Van Til, the American Reformed apologist and long-time professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, held that there was no neutral ground on which the believer and the unbeliever could engage each other. There was a sharp epistemological antithesis between the two because, Van Til maintained, true knowledge could only be rooted in a proper understanding of God and of the nature of man. His critics raised the question of how one was then to present the gospel to the unbeliever, because without any common ground, it appeared that there could be no way of doing so.

Unwilling to compromise in his conviction that the thought of Christians and non-Christians was entirely irreconcilable, Van Til believed that the point of contact between the two could only ever be a head-on collision. However, he believed in the need to share the gospel, and found that the best way to do so was by means of the metaphysical point of contact within the natural man. Van Til writes in his book, The Defense of the Faith,

With Calvin I find the point of contact for the presentation of the gospel to non-Christians in the fact that they are made in the image of God and as such have the ineradicable sense of deity within them. Their own consciousness is inherently and exclusively revelational of God to themselves. No one can help knowing God for in knowing himself he knows God. His self-consciousness is totally devoid of content, unless as Calvin puts it in the Institutes, man knows himself as a creature before God. There are no atheistic men because no man can deny the revelational activity of the true God within him...Every human being is by virtue of his being made in the image of God accessible to God. And as such he is accessible to one who without compromise presses upon him the claims of God.

Thoughts?

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The Dutch philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd, makes the observation in his Roots of Western Culture, that the underlying foundation of all of life is religious. Christianity, he notes, establishes an antithesis that "pertains to the relation between the creature and his creator, and thus touches the religious root of all temporal life." His subsequent thoughts on this bring to light the profound tension that exists between our faith and this world, between belief and unbelief. Dooyeweerd says,

The religious antithesis does not allow a higher synthesis. It does not, for example, permit Christian and non-Christian starting points to be theoretically synthesized. Where can one find in theory a higher point that might embrace two religious, antithetically opposed stances, when precisely because these stances are religious they rise above the sphere of the relative? Can one find such a point in philosophy? Philosophy is theoretical, and in its constitution it remains bound to the relativity of all human thought. As such, philosophy itself needs an absolute point of departure. It derives this exclusively from religion. Religion grants stability and anchorage even to theoretical thought. Those who think they find an absolute starting point in theoretical thought itself come to this belief through an essentially religious drive, but because of a lack of true self-knowledge they remain oblivious to their own religious motivation.

The absolute has a right to exist in religion only. Accordingly, a truly religious starting point either claims absoluteness of abolishes itself. It is never merely theoretical, for theory is always relative. The religious starting point penetrates behind theory to the sure, absolute ground of all temporal, and therefore relative, existence. Likewise, the antithesis it poses is absolute.

Therefore, says Dooyeweerd,

to arrive at the true and decisive meaning of this antithesis and, at the same time, to penetrate to the real source of the differences of opinion concerning its significance, it is necessary to take into account the religious ground motives (religieuze grondmotieven) of Western civilization. They have been the deepest driving forces behind the entire cultural and spiritual development of the West.

One can point to such a ground motive in every religion. It is a spiritual force that acts as the absolutely central mainspring of human society. It governs all of life's temporal expressions from the religious centre of life, directing them to the true or supposed origin of existence. It thus not only places an indelible stamp on the culture, science, and social structure of a given period but determines profoundly one's whole world view. If one cannot point to this kind of leading cultural power in society, a power that lends a clear direction to historical development, then a real crisis looms at the foundations of culture. Such a crisis is always accompanied by spiritual uprootedness.

A spirit is directly operative in the religious ground motive. It is either the spirit of God or that of an idol. Man looks to it for the origin and unshakable ground of his existence, and he places himself in its service. He does not control the spirit, but the spirit controls him. Therefore specifically religion reveals to us our complete dependence upon a higher power. We confront this power as servants, not as rulers.

I have long disliked the way in which the word religion is thrown around and trampled on. What is worse, I think, is the way evangelicals have grabbed onto this culture's use of the word and adopted for itself the false distinction between Christianity and religion. Dooyeweerd here begins to offer a helpful corrective to the lines of demarcation we have unwittingly drawn.

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In a comment to this past Monday's post on mortifying modernity, Wayne Sparkman, who is the director the historical center of the Presbyterian Church in America, posted a portion of an introduction C. S. Lewis wrote for a translation of Athanasius' On the Incarnation. What Lewis says in this introduction is so important that I had to reproduce it almost in full here. Please note that this is quite a lengthy quotation, but it is well worth your time to consider the wisdom of Lewis on this point.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about 'isms' and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light. Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o'clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why—the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity ('mere Christianity' as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books. It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, 'But how could they have thought that?'—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were 'influences.' George Macdonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity. They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to think—as one might be tempted who read only con- temporaries—that 'Christianity' is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so. Measured against the ages 'mere Christianity' turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in François de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe—Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed 'Paganism' of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet—after all—so unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life:

an air that kills
From yon far country blows.

We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such people do not know what it looks like from without. Seen from there, what is left intact despite all the divisions, still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity. I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age. It is not enough, but it is more than you had thought till then. Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth. For you have now got on to the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared with the swamps, and so broad compared with the sheep-tracks.

The present book, [On the Incarnation], is something of an experiment. The translation is intended for the world at large, not only for theological students. If it succeeds, other translations of other great Christian books will presumably follow. In one sense, of course, it is not the first in the field. Translations of the Theologia Germanica, the Imitation, the Scale of Perfection, and the Revelations of Lady Julian of Norwich, are already on the market, and are very valuable, though some of them are not very scholarly. But it will be noticed that these are all books of devotion rather than of doctrine. Now the layman or amateur needs to be instructed as well as to be exhorted. In this age his need for knowledge is particularly pressing. Nor would I admit any sharp division between the two kinds of book. For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that 'nothing happens' when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

What do you think? Does this prompt you to head over to the local library and start reading some classics?

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JT points to a blog interview with J. Mark Bertrand, the author of the book, of (Re)Thinking Worldview: Learning to Think, Live, and Speak in This World. Looks like a title I need to pick up. When asked why he wrote the book and why we need to reconsider the idea of worldview, Bertrand said this:

It dawned on me that everyone in the church was talking about worldviews, and at the same time most of them really weren’t. What I mean is, the rhetoric had been adopted while the reality had not. When I was first introduced to the worldview concept—the idea that we build perceptual frameworks that then influence our interpretation of new information—the potential for theology and apologetics seemed explosive. Today, though, there are all these burning fuses and nothing’s blowing up.

The problem? For one thing, the worldview concept was too watered down. When an idea is popularized, it is often streamlined. That means the ambiguities and nuances are stripped away. To take a philosophical concept and make it applicable in a Sunday School setting, a certain amount of streamlining is necessary. But if you go too far, you’re left with a caricature. Where the worldview concept is concerned, I think that’s often all we’re communicating: a parody of the original insight. As a result, it’s lost its power. Worldview thinking should shake things up. All too often, though, you embark on a promising journey only to end up at some predictable, predetermined destination—a place you could have reached without any help from 'the biblical worldview.'

Because it was so watered down, and the results so accommodated to the wisdom of our age, I thought it was time to rethink worldview. The alternative would be to abandon the concept, and that would be a tragedy.

Good stuff. I'll add it to my wishlist.

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If you study and read and think about the things I do long enough, you begin to see how all these different things begin to fit together--or at least how they should. You will have heard me use the word "worldview" here before, and what that basically denotes is the foundational beliefs and principles that govern your life (Weltanschauung, by the way, is the German word from where we get the word "worldview"). Of course, in the realm of semantics there are a number of varying definitions of the word, but I think that will suffice as a basic understanding of the word. Everybody has a worldview, whether they are conscious of it or not.

We live in an age of declared relativism, where people confess the right to believe whatever they want. You hear of those who put together their own religion composed of differing parts from all different religions that they find attractive. Truth becomes a hazy standard that is entirely up to the individual to determine, and no one truth need apply for anyone else but that individual, let alone a community or society.

Those of us who are Christians all share the very same basic root of our worldview--the person and work of Jesus Christ--but from there we are confronted with a great deal of diversity in our interpretations of what it means to live with that as our foundation. This post is not meant to try and convince you that one or another Christian worldview is the one you should follow; that is a more indirect purpose of my other posts. What I want to encourage you to do instead is to work to ensure that your worldview is comprehensive and coherent.

I have a number of regular people who comment on this blog who remind me, through the things that they say, of the need to determine the validity of my worldview on a regular basis. Some of today's leaders in the Church decry things like systematic theology as outdated and irrelevant for Christians in the 21st century. However, I am of the firm conviction that systematic thought of any sort is certainly not without its place. The fact is that if you assume a set of beliefs and principles that guide your life, and you do not apply those consistently to each area of your life and thought, glaring contradictions will emerge in short order. Look at the way we criticize politicians when they say one thing and do another. So it is when people look at us as Christians and see that contradiction as well. If you believe something, you need to live like you believe it.

Certainly, it is challenge to work towards a comprehensive worldview. But as a Christian, it is essential. If you are going to claim Jesus Christ as your Lord, he needs to be Lord of your entire life. You might interpret this in a different way than I do, but you cannot relegate his rule to only one part of your life. It has to impact all of it. I am constantly confronted with the fact that I do not live like this, but instead live sinfully before the face of God, giving my allegiance to other things in my life and in this world. I am grateful for those who help me see the idols I inadvertently worship and the misconstrued beliefs that I hold to. Though I often live like it, I am not the sole arbiter of truth, and need the community of believers to guide me in the wisdom of God.

Surround yourself with a community of believers who strives earnestly to discover what it means to live as Christians in this world and how to do that faithfully. If your current worldview has contradictions in it, work to resolve those. There is no divorce in the Christian faith, no part that is left untouched by the transforming power of the gospel. How you live and what you believe is not an indifferent matter. A comprehensive worldview enables you to live more and more as faithful servants of God in this world. Easy? No. Essential? Yes. Rewarding? Beyond measure.

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