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I layed out the...Reformed Worldview (Its NOT blueprint!)

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Reformed Worldview: creation...fall...redemption

Blueprint Worldview: ???

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This is implicit admission by Kuyper himself that his theory of common grace conflicts with Reformed predestination. Predestination threatens Kuyper's common grace. Therefore the only thing to do when proclaiming common grace is to ignore predestination.

This is a damning indictment of common grace.

Predestination may never be ignored, that is, really, denied by silence.

Predestination may not be ignored in the matter of the Reformed worldview.

Whatever supposedly Christian worldview can make its way and hold its own only by ignoring predestination is thereby exposed as false.

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Reformed Worldview: creation...fall...redemption

Blueprint Worldview: ???

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Fred-

Let's keep it short and sweet.

First, your three question marks reveal a lot. If you don't know what it meant by the "blueprint worldview" how can you possibly claim it's different than, or similar to any other worldview?

Secondly, "Creation...fall...redemption" as a short definition of the Reformed worldview hardly states what is uniuqe, or essential, to the Reformed view, don't ya think? How is it a "worldveiw" at all?

Now, you pretty matter-of-factly distinguished the Reformed worldview from the Blueprint worldview, so I was just interested in why you did so. Thats all. But since you have no working definition for the blueprint worldview, should I assume you don't know what the blueprint worldview is?

Doc's the expert (it's his upcoming book), but I'll try. At the core of the Blueprit Worldview is, I would say (Doc can correct me when he gets back from Toronto if I'm wrong), the belief that everything that happens in the world--let's get more specific, every evil that occurs in the world--is either predetermined by God for a glorious and good reason/purpose or specifically allowed by God for a good reason/purpose. THe issue is what sort of providence God exercises, and both the Reformed and Arminian worldviews agree in that the exercise of God's providence is exhaustively meticulous and includes all the evil that happens in the world. Whether you assume God specifically determines all things (evil included) or specifically allows all evil for good reasons, I would say you typify an understanding of God's providence that is 'blueprintish'. Did Kuyper deny that God exercises a providence that is exhaustively meticulous, i.e., did he deny that there is a divine reason for every "occurence" of evil? Does Reformed theology on the whole deny this?

Gotta go.

Peace,
Tom

"No one's ever eaten a donut hole because they don't exist." Starkman

Edited by - TGB on 11/24/2002 01:16:34 AM

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Tom, I wrote that that was something that I had put into my art history and drawing classes, to teach my college art students how to integrate faith and learning.

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Anxiety and praise were intimately interconnected in Calvin's experience. Bouwsma speaks of him as "a singularly anxious man," viewing human existence as a perpetual crisis of anxious indecision, echoed even in the deep contingency of nature itself. 32 Throughout his life, Calvin searched for assurances of God's order in the fragile world around him. His mother had died when he was but four years old, his father quickly remarrying and shunting him off to a neighboring family where he received his earliest education. Exiled in later years from France, the home and country he most loved, he never felt fully at home in Geneva. Moreover, he and his wife lost in infancy all three of the children born to them. His own personal world, therefore, as well as the cosmos at large, remained ever uncertain. 33

“The will of God is the cause of all things.”

John, go to bed, and quit worrying.

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Al-

I bet you could make Calvin out to be an open theist if you needed to. Very good. I want you defending me if I'm ever on trial. You ought to write a book directed to Ware, Sproul, Piper, and company arguing that the open view is perfectly consistent with Calvin and Reformed thought and accusing THEM of perverting Calvin's thought.

Thanks,
Tom

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from: "The Grace That Shaped My Life" by Nicholas Wolterstorff, http://www.calvin.edu/125th/wolterst/w_bio.pdf.

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Though there are strands in the Reformed tradition for which sovereignty is God's principal attribute, I don'tthink I ever thought of God much in terms of sovereignty. God was majesty for me, indescribable majesty. Andgraciousness, goodness; God is the one who blesses, blessing calling for gratitude. To be human is to be that point in the cosmos where God's goodness is meant to find its answer in gratitude: John Calvin told me that.
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Page 9
Now everything was different. Who is this God, looming over me? Majesty? I see no majesty. Grace? Can this begrace? I see nothing at all; dark clouds hide the face of God. Slowly the clouds lift. What I saw then was tears, aweeping God, suffering over my suffering. I had not realized that if God loves this world, God suffers; I hadthoughtlessly supposed that God loved without suffering. I knew that divine love was the key. But I had not realizedthat the love that is the key is suffering love.

I do not know what to make of this; it is for me a mystery. But I find I can live with that. The gospel had neverbeen presented to me as best explanation, most complete account; the tradition had always encouraged me to livewith unanswered questions. Life eternal doesn't depend on getting all the questions answered; God is often as muchbehind the questions as behind the answers. But never had the unanswered question been so painful. Can I live thisquestion with integrity, and without stumbling?

It moved me deeply to discover one day that John Calvin alone among the classical theologians had written of the [suffering of God. Whenever he wrote of it, it was, so far as I could discover, in the same context:that of a discussion of injustice.

To wreak injustice on one of one's fellow human beings, said Calvin, is to wound and injure God; he said that the cry of those who suffer injustice is the cry of God.

To Be Human

There's been a grace that's shaped my life. It came to me in the form of being inducted into a tradition of the Christian church, and in the form of participating in an institution, and in other ways as well which I haven'tmentioned: in the form of persons such as my wife, my children, my friends.

But was it grace I experienced when I heard God saying to me, in the voice of the Palestinians and the SouthAfrican blacks, you must speak up for these people? When God confronted the reluctant Jeremiah with his propheticcall, was that grace? And was it grace I experienced when fny son was killed?

God is more mysterious than I had thought-the world too. There's more to God than grace; or if it's grace to one, it's not grace to the other-grace to Israel but not grace to Jeremiah. And there's more to being human thanbeing that point in the cosmos where God's goodness is meant to find its answer in gratitude. To be human is alsothis: to be that point in the cosmos where the yield of God's love is suffering.

http://www.calvin.edu/125th/wolterst/w_bio.pdf.

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Now, this does not equate the "OPEN"-ness of God (above) with the "Open-ness" of God (of the Open-Theists), but there is some shared ground.

............................

Come on board, Tom. We've been waiting for you.

Edited by - fred on 11/25/2002 06:47:29 AM

God in Pain

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http://www.addall.com/Browse/Detail/1562121766.html


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God of Weakness: How God Works Through the Weak Things of the World
Author: John Timmer
Binding: Paperback, 103 pages
Publisher: CRC Publications
Published Date: 07/01/1996
List: USD $9.75
ISBN: 1562121758

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Creation, Fall, and What?

+ Kurt C. Schaefer +
Professor of Economics
Calvin College

We Christian academics hope to engage a culture that describes itself as post-modern, post-industrial, de-constructive, post-empirical, post-patriarchal, or post-Christian, depending on the faction being addressed.

These are fair descriptions of the habits of mind and heart of our secular colleagues; without a transcendent point of reference, their discourse can rarely be described positively or actively, and is best defined passively as "the world that came after the other ones." It is a land of weightless waiting, of spaces without windows, of sketches without perspective.

If we are to engage this post-Christian academy, it is essential that we frame up Christian thinking in categories that resist our intellectual peer pressures. It has become popular to categorize the distinctives of the Christian worldview by pointing to the theologies of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. This is more than a fad, and well on its way to becoming a new orthodoxy.

The discussion usually proceeds as follows: All the universe was good when creeated by God, and was createdsubject to His law, His intentions for the ordering and disclosure of the creation. The Fall, the moral rebellion of humans, has "bent" all of this well-created structure somewhat, deforming it into directions that do not conform to God's intent. The work of Christ and His followers is to redeem the creation, to be actively involved in every facet of the fallen world, bending it back to conform to God's good ways. Thus individuals need to be redeemed, but by our efforts so do such things as political institutions, economic systems, and academic enterprises.

These three categories-creation, fall, and redemption-may have served well when the Christian academic's chief concern was to distinguish his thought from that of other, more "dualistic" Christian academics, although I have my doubts about even this. All of the Anabaptists I know would agree that alcohol was created good, and is now subject to the curse of the Fall. The disagreement enters only when discussing whether alcohol is best redeemed by putting it in one's veins or one's gas tank.

In any event, the Christian mind's primary battle in our day will not be against sisters and brothers in the Lord, but against a thoroughly secularized majority of academic colleagues. I have already hinted at the weakness in the Creation-Fall-Redemption scheme for meeting this challenge: It maintains the Christian distinctives about origins and sin, but it condenses too many issues into the rubric of "redemption." This single category is left with a burden it cannot bear, in a way that primes us for compromise with the secular motifs of our day.

For if our puny, fallen, human efforts at bending the wills of the principalities and powers around us are considered "redemption," if they enter my thought in the same category that contains Christ's absolutely unique work of atoning, prophesying and Lording, then, I will argue, I am primed to think that my works carry salvific significance. There is then no category of intellect to restrain me from wholesale promotion of thinly frosted secular movements as heralds of the coming of God's kingdom on earth; I am biased away from seeing any distinctive functions for church, state, family or school in these "last days," and biased toward elevating one of these institutions to monolithic power above the rest; I am inclined toward being triumphalist, arrogant and totalitarian, while risking a turn away from observing the necessity of the salvation and sanctification of persons by God himself; in short, I am poised to become a loyal subscriber to the twentieth-century mind. And, as pointed out two paragraphs ago, I risk all of these things without providing a compelling rationale against "dualistic" believers who may think of God's work as a purely personal, individualistic operation.



Let me suggest that we proceed by splitting the "redemption" category into sub-categories, set up in ways that create some tension and space between us and the secular folk we hope to engage. Try these: Creation, Fall,

Justification, Office, and Consummation.

Justification

Redemption, whether in "particular" salvation of persons or in "common grace" movements to restrain sin and promote righteousness in the world, is entirely of God's initiative and work. We might be tempted to say we're "redeeming" something of these that are actually His work, but I don't think we would be silly enough to say we are capable of "justification of" or "atonement for" these things, yet these are what are required by both individual sin and the corruption of social structures. Using"justification" as a category of thought would put a brake on our era's high claims for human volition and sufficiency and (corresponding) low place for transcendence. Otherwise our traditions may carry us for another generation or so, but the absence of a bulwark for the mind will result in the gradual erosion and loss of our distinctiveness.

Said differently, in our modern urgency to "make a difference" for some "cause," we stand in danger of surrendering the reformation's theology of the cross. We have received some limited revelation of God's glory and righteousness in His works of creation, common grace, and history. But God's clearest self-revelation comes in the person of His Son and in that Son's work on the cross. In the cross, we see God hiddeen in pain and humiliation, arevelation that, more than the other revelations, cripples our attempts at self-redemption or world-redemption through the refinement of the will or intellect. In Christ's brokenness, our presumptions about our knowledge of God are broken, for this is not a God we would naturally recognize as a God; in Christ's seeming weakness and foolishness, our illusions about knowing how to "fix the world" and ourselves, even if we are believers, are shown to be weak and foolish; for in Christ's disgraceful, painful revelation we see that God can not be known by those who savor their own natural analysis and knowledge of God. We would not recognize God in Christ, without being given faith by God himself; we are inclined toward every kind of progressive foolishness about our usefulness to the creation, unless we die with Christ and have our confidence shattered; we naturally suffer self-delusions about the grandeur of our subduing and being fruitful and multiplying and filling creation mandates, about our ability to function as if there had been no fall, unless Christ first shows us to be what we are: feeble, forgetful pilgrims, even on our best days. It is in Christ's humiliation, and in our own, that we will be saved and come to know God's ways.

Office

Since a fallen creation cannot redeem itself, fallen humans, even redeemed fallen humans, have not been put in the position of redeeming the fallen creation. Instead, we are given an office.

The Christian doctrine of election, which is typical of but not unique to Calvinism, presupposes the Christian doctrine of "Office": we are elected to something, a status, an estate, or more precisely a set of offices that we hold as God's own people. God has also set institutions in particular offices, with responsibilities and restraints peculiar to their offices. These duties and restrictions for people and institutions correspond to God's purposes for His creation, while recognizing mankind's rebellious inclination to obstruct these purposes.

For example, every member of the Body of Christ has a limited participation in the three great Offices Of Christ. Whereas He is the Great High Priest who offered a once-for-all atonement for sin, we are made a "nation of priests" whose access to God allows offerings of worship and service; whereas He rules as Lord of the Universe and His Church, we are eventually made to reign with Him and share His victory over evil; whereas He is the Anointed Prophet whose teaching supersedes all other prophets, we are the agents through whom God continues to proclaim the Good News of God's Kingdom.

Beyond this general office of all believers, God places specific believers in distinctive offices: Some are apostles, some evangelists, some prophets, some elders, some deacons, some teachers. Persons hold these "offices," or "estates," and carry out their functions, whether they are locally acknowledged as formal "church offices" or not. Those who marry are likewise placed in a special, honorable "estate," or office, within which there are different responsibilities and expectations for behavior than for those who do not bear the office. Parents are also given an office, for which particular behaviors are appropriate. Parents are to retain supervision over their children, for example, even though the state might efficiently provide "better specialists" to nurture our children.

It seems arbitrary to the modern mind that some persons or institutions should be set aside for special responsibilities and restraints upon their freedom. But let me draw an analogy from political life. (This is mere analogy; it does not establish the superiority of any particular political system.) It is somewhat "arbitrary" that the President of the United States is not allowed to compose binding legislation nor manipulate the judicial process through which it is enforced. The president may be just as gifted a writer and legislator as members of Congress, and there might be great efficiencies in condensing the three functions of government into a single office. Yet legislation and enforcement are not considered legitimate components of his "office." This "arbitrariness" in assigning duties is intended to prevent a greater arbitrariness and evil: arbitrariness in the use of power. It is an election, not an exercise of the will nor the possession of an ability, that conveys these limited powers to a president and makes their exercise legitimate.

In a similar way, the order of Christian offices may seem arbitrary, but it is not haphazard. Offices reflect both God's intent for the creation, and the need to continue to restrain sin. So, for example, to some ancients it seemed arbitrary that humans should be restricted to having sexual relations only with other humans (rather than the whole animal kingdom), and be further restricted to intimacy within marriage only. But Scripture attests that the estate of marriage exists both because this was God's intent for human intimacy from the beginning, and in order to restrain the exercise of sin.

Parents are likewise restricted by scripture to behave within their families in ways that befit their office. Parents who run their families like armies cease to function as parents. Spouses who run their marriages like stock markets cease to function as spouses. Church officers who
behave like game-show hosts cease to function as church officers.

Just as it seems arbitrary to the modern mind that some persons should be set aside for offices with special responsibilities and restraints upon freedom, it seems arbitrary that God may have set aside particular institutions to hold distinctive offices within His "economy." Consider, for example, what this might mean for the institutional church and for institutions of higher learning. Why should the church not, as a church, turn its attention to taking official (a word whose root is "office") positions on social issue policies, as it strives to redeem the creation? Is not the church gifted with members interested in (if not informed about) the relevant issues? Is it not entrusted with much social influence to bring about good, and called to express Christ's lordship over the entire creation? And why should the Christian College not, as a College, function primarily as an advocate for "activism," a trainer of young minds in the "appropriate" ways of advancing God's peace and justice on earth? Does it not have the necessary expertise and resources conveniently gathered in one place? Is there not urgency that the pressing needs of our day be addressed by Christians?

But College and Church might well need to avoid these inclinations if a great deal of evidence indicates that to do otherwise is to act outside the office God has given these institutions, and thereby to gradually cease to
function in the tasks God has given them to do. The institutions would risk losing their legitimacy and purpose.

Some Latin American Universities may make a case-in-point. I understand that, a generation ago, much of the Latin academy turned away from the classic Western curriculum, motivated by the need to be "relevant," to flee the "ivory tower" and "do praxis education," to "prepare students' wills, not merely their minds." As one might anticipate, the new curriculum was built largely on the epistemology of Marx. I have walked the Orwellian campuses of Bolivia's University of La Paz and University of Santa Cruz. You will find in such places entire buildings painted in the likeness of Che Guaverra. You will find faculty offices decorated with posters announcing benefits for guerrilla movements of liberation. You will find student aromas of Chinese tea and clove cigarettes. What you will often not find is the spirit of a university. You will search long and hard for open scholarly reflection and discourse on the direction of thought and action. By abdicating its proper office, a university may cease to function as an institution of higher learning.

The same sort of analysis might be done for the mainline/oldline/sideline churches of the United States. They have generally turned from transcendence to immediacy, from theology to praxis, from equipping the saints to recruiting the cadres. They therefore have few intellectual categories for separating the permanent from the passing, the confessional from the contingent. As a result, they face a sad irony: In the attempt to become more relevant to public life, they have become irrelevant. No one much cares what the National Council of Churches has to say about anything. Even their own church members are disenfranchised, and, by the thousands, are voting with their feet. The churches' uncritical acceptance of The Great Modern Leveling Project has left the world "less level": a smaller number of institutions now exercises more unchecked power, as the institutions of transcendence have, by their own actions, been marginalized.

That the turn away from an understanding of "office" has become so common among believers is very sad, but that these attitudes should be accepted by the leadership of our churches and colleges is especially disturbing. It is the
offices of elder and teacher that are given the special responsibility of maintaining the idea and doctrine of office; if it dies here, it will be difficult to revive elsewhere.

Does this mean that Christian academics should not be involved in social issues, or that church members should keep their beliefs in water-tight separation from their political behavior? Of course not. It only means that we engage in politics primarily in our office as citizens, not in the office of academic or elder. This is not intellectual dualism; our faith obviously should and will influence our political behavior. The doctrine of "office" merely helps us frame our thinking with the finesse and sensitivity about the order of institutions that the creation and our own sin require.

Some of these ideas have been popularized under the title of "sphere sovereignty." I think it is better to think of them under the biblical rubric of "office," for two reasons. Scripture has much to say about "offices," but relatively little about "spheres." If I present an unfounded idea about spheres, it will be difficult for anyone to refute, and so the category of "spheres" fails a major test for usefulness of intellectual categories. But if I say something about "offices," we have a long tradition and some textual sources upon which to draw in evaluating my claims. Said differently, if we move to a "story line" theology (e.g., creation-fall-redemption) instead of a classical theology (organized around topics like God, sin, atonement, church order), while using loose categories like "redemption" and "spheres," it is very likely that our repackaging of the theology will also affect its contents. Using "office" as an element of the story line helps insure that our beliefs are not made to change when we express them differently.

But beyond the need for grounded discourse on the issue, I prefer to think of "offices" rather than spheres because, when we frame our thoughts as a discussion of "spheres," our attention is immediately directed to "the particulars"; we are drawn toward drawing boundary lines among the artifacts that already exist, trying to decide which "sphere" they belong in. I would rather have the freedom to say that some artifacts that we encounter were never meant to be; they are not appropriate to any office that God has given. I think that a discussion of "spheres" biases us toward accepting too much of the status quo around us and making valiant attempts to redeem it, whereas discussion of "offices" opens more space for judging and rejecting some of the things that surround us.

There are, of course, some scriptural examples of people acting outside of their office. For example, David ate of the priestly bread (though this may have been an action within his office of ancestor of the Messiah). These examples generally crop up under truly urgent, extreme situations, often during eras in which the legitimate officeholders were remiss in their duties. Our own situation is just the opposite. Each time the college or the church steps farther out of its office, the action becomes precedent for a wider departure in the future. It has all become so common that we have by-and-large forgotten how to act otherwise, and it is this very behavior that is leading to disfunction in our institutions.

Consummation

Finally, we need to affirm two truths about the consummation of all things: The rule of Christ will not be fully manifest until He returns, and His rule involves judgment as well as redemption.

Just as the leaders of the Reformation rejected the doctrine of individual "perfectionism," we need to reject the popular modern tendency toward social perfectionism. Put in its most crass form, this is the notion we are somehow "bringing in the Kingdom on earth" by our efforts on behalf of peace and justice. Christians do need to work, but they also need to wait: We need to expect that, while we will win the battles God gives us to win, efforts to change our own actions or our social structures will often not bring about a justice or peace that would meet any pure, abstract definitions of these terms. We should expect tares to grow up with our wheat. We should expect that our best efforts will yield negative side-effects and new opportunities for sin

Said differently, the doctrine of consummation leads us to be humble. It teaches us to refuse to think that we have nailed down "the Christian answer" well enough that others should either eagerly accept it or be subjected to it by force. It moves us to distinguish the confessional from the contingent, to cling to the first and be tentative about the second. It leads us to evaluate social change not only according to the egalitarian justice it promises, but also according to its ability to restrain sin.

If we fail in this humility, we risk raising to creedal status our favorite policy options, for which our expertise is weak and passing, and thus risk choking off inquiry and ultimately embarrassing the Gospel. Without Consummation as a category of thought, we are drawn toward the political in-ushering of God's kingdom through a theology of context and praxis; we look to immediate human need and history for truth and, with such a fallen source, are pulled apart into neo-orthodox/theonomist/feminist/bourgeois/liberation/pop-psychology/gay/healthand-wealth/pantheistic/you-name-it fragments-a process that gradually kills all categories of thought. Without Consummation as a hope, we risk condensing "redemption" into a vague renewal of the earth and its "sacramental" character, neglecting the personal atonement so clearly articulated by the personal, self-revealing Lord Over History; we risk thinking of Christ as merely one who has bonded with the world, who dislikes violations of its harmonies, rather than as the Transcendent Lord who has atoned for sin by the shedding of His blood.

Consummation also involves judgment. Living as a Christian involves more than conferring "redeemed" status on clever mutations of secular ideas. Some things are fit only for a Lake of Fire. They must be rejected. We must separate ourselves from them, just as we attach ourselves to things that will eventually be consummated as good.

May God be with us as we seek together to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

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It might take a year or two to begin to understand Calvinism. But you won't do so by reading books. Its a transformation of outlook.

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You will eventually run out of places to hide my friend! Dealing with Calvin straight up hasn't worked. It's too easy to demonstrate where Calvin stood on this issue. Hanging you hopes on "mystery" won't fly because we end up in agnosticism. Now I need to toss out the books and just pay attention to how Reformed people actually live? Fine by me. I'd be happy to do so. Have done it a bit. And what I've found so far is that how Reformed people live is the surest way of exposing the fallacy of the blueprint worldview.

Where else will you run Freddieeeee!

Tom

"It might take a year or two to begin to understand Calvinism. But you won't do so by reading books. Its a transformation of outlook." Al & Fred

Edited by - TGB on 11/26/2002 08:05:17 AM

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Bottom line - God gets glory.

Bottom line - we try to listen to his voice, do what he says and be
faithful. When we do this, good things tend to happen.

Bottom line - God is God. Whether he knows and/or even "determines"
the future is not relevant to what ACTUALLY happens. Things happen, good and bad. We deal with it in His grace. Life goes on. He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him!

Bottom line - there IS a cosmic battle going on. Satan clearly would
want to use such a man as killed Bonnie. God COULD have prevented that. He didn't. Did he "cause" or "allow" it? Who cares! He could have prevented it - he didn't. Now the only question is, can he use it? OF COURSE! And he is.

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