Biblical Answers to the Following Helped Shape Western Culture

Biblical answers to the following helped shape Western culture

By Jay Wegter

1. Do truth, meaning, dignity, authority, purpose, and the sacredness of life come from God or from man? The fixity of God’s order is the foundation of cultural forms which point us to God. Today’s cultural forms, (such as MTV) are animistic and unhealthy because they deny God’s moral order in the cosmos. Man’s place in this moral universe has been a consistent theme in art. The creation does not deserve worship; it bestows worship as the general revelation of God Himself (Rom 1:18-23; Ps 19).

2. Is meaningful contact with God mediated by self alone, or by the machinery of religion, OR by God’s self-revelation, the infallible Word of God? The Protestant Reformers stressed that the Holy Spirit mediates the grace of God to the individual by means of the gospel. The Roman Catholic Church in essence had usurped the role of the Spirit—arrogating to itself the power of dispensing divine grace.
3. What is divine grace? Why is it needed and how does it come to men? The cult of the virgin denies that God can work directly with the believing sinner through the gospel. The backdrop, or need for grace was the knowledge that we are terribly fallen, darkened, morally deformed, and idolatrous. Therefore we need moral restraint and ethical education—and most of all divine grace. The Five Solas of the Reformation were intended to recover the biblical gospel: Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura, Solus Christus, Soli Deo Gloria. God’s good and wise laws safeguard love and humanness, and divine grace delivers and transforms. Divine grace was the overarching theme until the age of Enlightenment.

4. Where does man find substantial hope for the future? The grace of God in the gospel teaches us that the hope of the world depends upon the fact that the Son of God became man. The incarnation is the condition necessary for full atonement to be made in order to reconcile us to God. The cross of Christ takes on the severing (or separations caused by sin—separation from God, from man, from truth, from ourselves, from life). The cross also reunites the transcendentals necessary for an understanding of beauty which glorifies God. Hope will not be found in sinful man’s utopian schemes. Gospel ‘utopia’ is the coming new heavens and new earth where righteousness dwells (2 Pet 3:13).

5. How is a society to envision personal freedom and liberty, and how is it achieved? Westerners take personal freedom for granted and consequently seldom ask the question, where does the concept of personal freedom originate? Is the source of human rights from God or from the state or from the king—does it matter? Is mankind most free within God’s design (telos), or is he most free when he is liberated from divine design? Is it freedom in design? Or is it freedom from design? The cultural arts today have a strong preference for the latter. Are the standards of human flourishing established by God or by man? What social institutions should be positively sanctioned by the state and why?

6. Why should government be limited? America’s constitutionalism is grounded upon a clear understanding of the total depravity of man. Calvin echoed Aristotle’s morphology when he described the tendency of the state to deteriorate from monarchy to tyranny (David W. Hall, The Genevan Reformation and the American Founding, p. 96). Depraved men will always hunger for absolute power. God’s laws are ‘king’ (Lex Rex) (Ibid, p. 183ff.), man’s ‘kingship’ must be limited so as to limit totalitarianism—for human kings are subject to the laws of God. Constitutionalism was birthed by the truths of the Reformation.

7. How is evil to be restrained? How will those who reject biblical theism restrain and remove evil? Will it be by oppression and despotism, by statism and a reign of terror, by marshal law and by state police? (H. R. Rookmaaker, The Creative Gift). We are back to the truth that man is in desperate need of moral education. Man is a sinner and must be controlled—but it will be either by the Bible or the bayonet. Christian freedom issues from being restored to God through Christ so that His commands are not burdensome (1 Jn 5:3). Humanistic freedom has autonomous man and reason as the standard. We could designate this ‘an unrestrained vision of freedom’ (Thomas Sowell) in which the state determines rights.

8. Why does a biblical knowledge of the Holy Trinity become the basis for equality in relationships? God’s order in creation includes social order. The real battleground today is in created social order. To refuse to see created social order is a visceral reaction coming from man’s rebellion against God. Our triune God is a social being—this social dimension of God is bound up in His very being. Three persons and one essence—this means that unity and diversity are contained in His own being (as equal ultimacy). And, it means that the relationship between unity and diversity are resolved in God’s own being.

God did not have to dream up social order—it had already been eternally in existence in the Godhead. To go against God’s blueprint and structure for marriage, family and church is to go against God’s nature. God’s triune nature is the source of social laws which are to govern the structure of marriage, and family, and church. “If God created . . . [the] social spheres [of marriage, family, and church] for a purpose, then they are sovereign and the state is not sovereign over . . . [these] social spheres” (Abraham Kuyper). The human race was created in the image of God who is three Persons so intimately related as to constitute one Godhead.

The balance of unity and diversity in the Trinity gives a model for human social life because the Trinity implies that both individuality and relationship exist within the Godhead. God is “Beingin-Communion.” Over against radical individualism, the Holy Trinity implies that relationships are not created by sheer choice but are built into the very essence of human nature that is made in the image of God. The Trinity is the foundation for male and female being equal in dignity and value, yet having different roles. The difference in roles within the Trinity will continue for all eternity (1 Cor 15:28).

Because of diversity with perfect equality; the Trinity forms the pattern for relationships without inferiority. Rousseau spelled out a vision in which the state would destroy all social ties; the individual would only have to be loyal to self; since the state was the ‘liberator’, each person would be dependent upon the state (no wonder this inspired so many totalitarian regimes).