Theology
Want to learn more about our theology? Dive in by reading one of these articles from Call of the Church.com
One of the leading culprits in the story of western spiritual decline is our universities. They are intensely formative for the worldview of our society. There is a serious problem, however, with our universities. They are pagan and humanistic in their outlook toward all of life.
The most important Christian thinker in the last 400 years? I would say: Cornelius Van Til. The implications of his work have barely begun to be realized. Van Til speaks of “apologetics” in the broadest sense as the Biblical, intellectual foundations of all of human activity.
Calvin holds that man unavoidably, by virtue of his innate knowledge of God, is in contact with the truth. Aquinas, on the other hand, insists that man is only potentially, and not necessarily, in contact with the truth about God.
The Christian Nationalism of today that is making waves in the church and occasionally in some national media outlets is a branch of Christian Reconstructionism. It seeks to reconstruct our nation and its laws in obedience to God’s law. These ideas are relatively new on the American church scene.
The story of Job asserts the creational authority of God and thus defends the heart of Christian social doctrine and authority.
Yet we Christians have spent a lot of the last 300 years on our heels because we are stumped by the problem of hardship and evil in the face of an unbelieving world. We have been, as Van Til, would say, “off the Queen Mary”.
“They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.” (Ephesians 4:18)
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. What is knowledge and how does man know?
The Christian West was built by men who were committed to the Bible as the authority for all of life.
Today, we know that the Christian West has fallen. The big question is, “Why?” No one is answering that question better today than Kevin Swanson of Generations.org.
Presuppositionalism teaches that man reasons based on his ethics. Most fundamentally, this involves belief in God or unbelief. Where his ethics fail to support any reasoning at all, he borrows from the Christian worldview which highlights the inconsistencies of his unbelieving worldview.
Thomas Aquinas and others after him have argued that fallen man has a natural inclination to the good. Even such an eminent reformed divine as Mastricht held to this view. Yet all sides agree that fallen man is not as bad as he could be. The key question is, “Why?”
The preaching and teaching of the reformers brought revival to many locales and reinvigorated the church, but in terms of controlling the trajectory of the West it did not defeat the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Why?
Atheism is irrational by its nature. The atheist must hold to the laws of logic or all meaning disappears. But he cannot claim those same laws of logic are universal and unchanging. So, his claim of rationality fails.
Many people think of the Reformation as a one-time historical event. But there is a saying in the reformed community, “Reformed and always reforming”. There is much work and growth toward maturity ahead on the part of the church.
More and more Christians are waking up to the fact that Christianity is true AND everyone already knows it is true (Ro 1:18-20). Asserting God’s truth to a rebellious world is not “fideism”. It’s calling men to obey what they already know is true.
We know a thing by its most basic distinction from other things. What distinguishes theonomy from competing views is belief in the authority of scripture for all of the life, not as a mechanics manual but as God’s sufficient word unto every good work (2 Tim 3:17).
Van Til’s system of thought begins with the reformed, orthodox doctrine of God and seeks to carry its implications through every area of human thought with strictness and rigor. This may sound logical and simple but it is an approach that is at odds with much of the Western tradition which begins philosophy with man’s musings about himself and the world rather than what we know to be true from the Bible.