Part Five Last time I drew attention to some fallacious ideas which circulate on the airwaves and in popular culture. There are many more. In fact, even Christians have manufactured some pretty misleading mottoes and aphorisms which they use as watchwords instead of Scripture. Perhaps I’ll come back to that later, but right now I want to press on with the subject of worldviews. As we have seen, a worldview is essentially an interpretation and outlook on life and its …
Category: Worldview
A review of David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, Yale University Press, 2013, 376 pages, paperback. Among the most learned and entertaining, if not sometimes infuriating writers on the theological scene today is David Bentley Hart. He is the author of such notable books as The Doors of the Sea, The Beauty of the Infinite, and Atheist Delusions. Alongside this is his impressive portfolio of articles (in particular for First Things). His ‘Christ or Nothing’, ‘Laughter …
Part Three The Bible has a very specific and definitive outlook on the meaning of life. In the parlance of modern culture such an outlook is called a “Worldview.” There has been a lot of talk about worldview in recent years, and this is on the whole a good development. Worldviews are very important, and appreciation of them, and of the Christian-Biblical Worldview in particular, is without doubt a great benefit. Briefly: What a Worldview is A worldview is basically …
Part Two I have begun this series with this three-part introduction, trying to bring attention to the matter of Truth and the authenticity of our allegiance to it as Christian parents. My concern is that Christians nowadays do not prize Truth for what it is – an attribute of God – but rather treat it as something they can use a bit of when they think it needful. Francis Schaeffer used to say that the Church should live out what …
Part One Positive thinking is not the same as having a hopeful or joyful frame of mind. Christians are to have joy in their lives, a joy fed by a sure hope. However, in today’s church culture, filled so often with upbeat songs, sentimental stories, and man-centered messages, there is a big push to keep it positive and slanted towards the light side. Positive thinking in this vein will always tend to produce wrong views of God. He simply …
This is the first in a series of ongoing posts at Telos Ministries We have all read the statistics of young people who flee the Faith in which they have been reared soon after hitting college. There is more than one reason for this defection. The first and most obvious issue is probably the state of the heart. Is this individual actually saved? I’m not asking, “did they think they were saved?”, I’m asking “were they saved?” Now, before someone …
Part Two Jesus as the Word Even though the teaching of the “Word” or “Logos” appears prominently and explicitly in the prologue to John’s Gospel, the theme runs through the whole of the Gospel.[1] John stresses the words of Jesus as having special significance as words: Rhemata is used nine times for His words (5:47; 6:63, 68; 8:20;10:21; 12:47, 48; 14:10; 15:7), and three times for the words of God spoken by Jesus (3:34; 8:47; 17:8). John employs logos three …
With your indulgence, I’m going to repost a set of three studies on Jesus Christ as the Logos of God. They are a bit long, but hopefully useful. It may sound somewhat unseemly for anyone to refer to the Lord Jesus Christ as “the Logos of God,” but to conceive of Him (momentarily) in this abstract way opens up new lines of inquiry that are harder to see under His personal name. And, after all, the Apostle John was …
PART FIVE Natural Theology and Methodological Naturalism How can scientific naturalism be a child of Christian theology? That is a good question. One would think that such a methodology, disposed as it is to serve the worldviews of materialists and atheists, and presented by them as indispensable to good science, would have been contrived by them, but such is not the case. In fact Cornelius Hunter contends that, What we need…is a clear understanding of what naturalism is. Naturalism’s adherents …
Part Four The Definition of Science In the course of writing about the idea of science in his Systematic Theology, Reformed writer Michael Horton notes that “Britain’s Royal Society was founded by Puritans.” – The Christian Faith, 339 n.48 The Puritans saw no clash, either ontological or methodological, in pursuing science as a response to God’s revelation. The fact that God created the world and created man in His image meant that to find out what God had done was …