Cosmology material from Covenantal Apologetics
P. 11 – Artists such as “Picasso and Mondrian depicted a world without any kind of trustworthy transcendent meaning.” We could say that non-representational art, as well as ‘evil’ and pessimistic art (term a la Schaeffer) suggests a world into which God has not spoken—thus meaning is relative and is determined by the individual. Only LOGOS provides transcendent, trustworthy meaning (see p. 25—bow before Logos in order to abandon one’s preference for irrationality).
P. 24 – Excellent on the relation between faith and reason. Argument (all) from reason requires an appeal to final authority—a foundational assumption which is regarded as authoritative. Thus reasoning is necessarily circular because it is based upon faith that the founding assumption is authoritative. The question for the skeptic, says Oliphant, is “On what basis should I accept your circle over mine?”
P. 25 – The only way to think properly about faith and reason (and their relationship to one another) is to ‘take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ’ (2 Cor 10:5). The beauty of this apologetic approach is that it is naturally and centrally focused on the reality of God’s revelation in Christ and of course the gospel.
Pp. 30-31 – The entrance of sin and suffering in the world was a function of cosmic rebellion, a frontal attack upon Adam and Eve’s right relationship with God (a relationship based upon knowing, enjoying, and reflecting God by faith in, and obedience to His Word).
P. 40 – Here is the useful illustration of the distance between God and the creature likened/analogous to the distance between a man and a snail. The snail cannot transcend his own character to converse with the man—the ontological difference is prohibitive. If there is to be communication it must come from the condescension of the superior being. We think about the disparity between God’s character and ours—and this represents an unbridgeable chasm from our side. These thoughts are essential to our understanding of the voluntary ‘covenant condescension’ of God.
P. 45 – The unbeliever willfully chooses irrationality—he convinces himself that what he knows about the world as actually true (by reason of general revelation) is not true. He distorts both who we are (image of God) and who God is. We are at war with our true identity. Though surrounded with facts which speak of his covenant identity; we seek the impossible and unattainable, absolute autonomy. Man’s refusal to acknowledge God is not done in ignorance; it is culpable rebellion (no excuse, Rom 1). This is irrational because it militates against the world as it really is. A tactic to use with the unbeliever who has convinced himself of autonomy: Ask him, “How can it be that you think that you are worthy of complete trust so that you are the origin of truth itself?”
P. 46 – Probing questions can uncover the unbeliever’s self-diagnosis—for imbedded in the sinful heart is self-deception—a commitment to knowing but suppressing (denying the world as it is, and denying one’s own identity). Oliphant’s helpful illustration shows that the make-believe road (the yellow brick road) can’t get you out of Oz. A foundation of unbelief (imagination) is basically irrational (note Calvin on the futility of descending into the labyrinth of self—self cannot provide the way out). The preconditions of knowledge and life are: who God says He is, and what God says we are (Acts 17:28). The foundations of unbelief mean that knowledge is not the same for unbeliever and believer alike. In the transcendental method of apologetics there is a worldview (epistemological) collision.
Pp. 52-53 – Either we bow the knee to Christ (LOGOS) and affirm the truth of what God says, or we oppose Him and attempt to ‘create’ a world of our own making. Our confidence in Christian apologetics is tied to the fact that the unbeliever cannot make sense of things by means of the illusory world of his imagining—that position self-destructs, for it does not match the way the world is.
All of God’s facts in the world are servant facts. Unsaved men will answer for how they handled these facts—even ‘two plus two’ will condemn the unbeliever on judgment day, for facts glorify God. The unbeliever distorts and perverts the meaning of facts. (Note the testimony of Psalm 19; and the finely tuned parameters making life possible, also note the testimony of God in the Wisdom literature: God designing and feeding His creatures, etc.)
Pp. 62-64 – God’s free decision to condescend (in order to deliver) is both cosmic and redemptive. LOGOS is the true light who comes into a sin-darkened world. The Word (as the cosmic light of the world) continues to enlighten. Vos notes that the LOGOS is life-giving and light-giving. As such He reveals the light of the knowledge of God to all people. History can be properly defined ONLY of what the second Person of the Trinity has condescended to do—both in creation and for His people. Thus Logos is our philosophy of history.
Pp. 67-68 – Immanuel Kant was the most influential philosopher since the Enlightenment; he hoped to assign reason to its proper place. He set out to remedy both schools: empiricism and rationalism. He hoped to show the relationship between reason and faith. Kant sought to show that much of what we know transcends experience. In order to know, our experience must be synthesized with our own internal categories. He argued that we impose our own mental categories on our experiences in order to know and understand them.
For Kant, it is the faculty of reason that produces the higher, purer concepts of God and the soul. He is forced to conclude that there can be no real knowledge of those things that reason alone assumes. Kant splits knowledge—splits the mind. Kant suggests that things such as God and the soul, by definition, cannot be known. There is no experience of such things.
How opposite is the proclamation of God’s Word: man is without excuse because he is immersed in a virtual ‘sea’ of divine revelation. We could express this inescapable knowledge as a double negative: mankind cannot NOT know what God has so clearly revealed. Kant is saying the opposite that there has been no covenant condescension; no perspicuous authoritative self-revelation by our Creator.
Pp. 70-71 – For Kant (and for countless Westerners who have imbibed his philosophy), since there is no experience of God, faith can have no access to real knowledge; it cannot be known; only (blindly) believed. For Kant (and this may be applied to countless objections to the Christian faith), there is absolutely no category for the Christian reality of God’s covenantal condescension.
Kant, by his philosophical position, has assumed then that: 1) we humans have no experience of God, and 2) faith has been divorced from knowledge and relegated to an ‘upper story’ leap (into irrationality). By divorcing faith from knowledge, in order to attempt to understand the concept of the divine, Kant has rejected the God of Scripture and invented an idol in His place.
The Bible is clear; all men at all times and in all places (by virtue of being created in His image), live in God’s world, experience God persistently, and know God. And this knowledge comes because God has condescended covenantally to reveal Himself “through the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20); in His Son (Heb 1:1-3); and through His Word. We would say to Kant, true, we cannot move from the finite to the infinite (any more than a snail can commune with a human); but Kant has failed to consider that God (the infinite) has moved to the finite. He condescended convenantally in Christ our cosmic and redemptive Lord. We are guaranteed for all eternity to have true and certain knowledge of Him. Now whether we rejoice in the truth of God (in Christ), or suppress the truth of God (in Adam); it is indicative of our covenant status before Him. Salvation is knowing God (Jn 17:3; 2 Pet 1:1-4).
Pp. 90-91 – Christ changes the nature of death for those who believe. Shame and guilt, born of their disobedience motivated Adam and Eve’s self-deception. Since that fateful day, mankind has imagined that hiding from God is possible.
P. 93 – In what sense is God man’s environment? 1) He condescends in order to relate to His creatures on their level. 2) He has made us covenant creatures in His image and likeness. 3) He reveals the knowledge of Himself to us (works of creation) and in us (sense of deity).
P. 95 – Humility is incumbent upon us, for we are taken from dust and to dust we return. We are made of the same ‘stuff’ as plants and animals. Man, as God’s appointed vice regent, through rebellion dragged the whole creation into the bondage of decay (Rom 8:19-20).
P. 97 – God is man’s ultimate environment, but fallen man construes the world in such a way that he will not have to face God. (As the image of God, man is responsible to God in all of his thinking, living, and doing.) The image of God revealed in male and female in the Garden prior to sin became a source of shame after the fall. Fig leaf clothes could not hide their real guilt. Mankind now attempts to hide and cover up whatever remains of that fractured and broken image of God. We pretend that access to God by way of His revelation is impossible. In our suppression we might even come to think that our environment or context is a barrier to sure and certain knowledge of God (as if our problem is metaphysical and not ethical). This issue of pretended barriers is what Paul is exposing in Acts 17.