Living at the crossroads
by Goheen and Bartholomew.
Preface: the way the world actually is, and the way the world will someday is an important part of the Christian message cosmologically. Someday the world will be the kingdom of God.
Page 7, evolution and creation are two incompatible stories. With the creati story comes the fall, the flood, redemption, and the consummation of histor Page 8, both stories claim to be true and both claim the whole of our lives, both evolution and God's story.
Page 32, Jesus as personal Savior, is He personal savior only? Or is he also Creator, Ruler, Upholder, Owner, Interpreter, Definer, Judge, and Redeemer Without those last eight, you have an emaciated worldview, that is pretty much void of teleology, cosmology, and Logos doctrine.
Page 33, Our Lord called the cosmos into existence. His relationship to the universe is ultimate reality.
Page 38, God's creational pattern, His blueprint for our lives, is the plan by which we acknowledge His Kingship over us. Conformity with that plan equa order. And as it says in page 39, that order is our wisdom in living unto God Conformity to that order is our very calling. It is life's wisdom.
Page 40, The pagan worldview, is an extensive worldview. It also includes a view of good and evil, of order and disorder, of all parts of the origin of creation, the very fabric of the world, redemption and consummation. Paga worldview wants ‘redemption now’—through revolt, Marxism, political mean new world order, utopian dreams, etc. But through Christ’s judgment and reign, evil, corruption, disorder, will be removed without changing the entire nature of creation.
Page 41, the above is joined to the meaning of history.
Page 43, Humanity as the image of God, is to reflect God's glory so that we behold God's glory and through Christ are able to do so. And it's impossible not to have human life in response to God. We will either be in communion with God or in rebellion against God.
page 46, to deny that we're in rebellion against God, is to deny the meaning our creaturehood. page 47, it is to minimize the scope of sin, it is to choose a new life center, revolting new life center that is idolatrous.
Page 48, the seriousness of sin. It is rebellion against the very structure of reality and the very structures of reality. It is self-defeating and self-destroying.
Page 49, sin is parasitic. It uses created faculties, which are gifts and energ but it corrupts and pollutes and redirects them. It defiles and distorts and disfigures and sullies them in the process.
Page 49, Sin misdirects and pollutes and corrupts the good part of God's creation. Sin communicates a false view of the world.
Page 54, On the vastness of Christ unifies reality. And in Him is the consummation of history. His reunification of what sin has broken will be as far as the curse is found. He's going to reclaim and restore creation as far as the curse is found.
Page 56. The problem with private piety and a private Jesus versus the cros defeating the powers which enslave the cultural and social individual life. Therefore, we must insist in our biblical cosmology that the scope of redemption is cosmic. The cross is all far-reaching. The cross has settled the course and outcome of cosmic history.
Pages 57 and 60, the mission of the church is to make known God's rule ove all creation. We are to make that known in our words and our actions and o cosmology and our doctrine of Logos.
Page 59, the church is placed on Christ's side for the great cosmic battle for the creation itself.
Page 64, falling into the trap of the sacred and the secular is a dualism, whi hides and conceals the centrality of cosmology. That's one of its great dang of splitting spiritual and physical reality.
Page 65 what drives this split, this dichotomy between spirit and physical, i secularization, and of course, the worldview of Immanuel Kant, as well as th popularization of Kant's worldview, which is nothing less than postmodernism.
Page 69. Postmodernism is a much deadlier foe than previous counter-religious forces in human history. It's important for the Christian community understand this quite well.
Page 70 postmodernism opposes all-embracing worldviews as a vision of lif Postmodernism completely rejects totalizing worldviews, rejecting our comprehensive worldview in favor of cultural relativism.
Page 72, even though postmodernism advances relativism, there is a growi dependence on human reason.
Page 80, Renaissance humanists so greatly thought they could explain the autonomy of nature that there was no longer any need for the realm of grac Nature ate up grace. Reason, empirically oriented, thought it was able to examine and observe all the natural and social laws of the world and do all this without appealing to or dependence upon divine revelation.
page 81. Sadly, there has been a synthesis between the gospel and classica humanism. We see this in the setting aside of biblical cosmology.
Page 83, Thomas Aquinas, and the two stories. Those two stories were com apart in the Renaissance—never to be rejoined in Western culture. Hard dualism began to inject itself.
Page 84, Nature separated from God's ordering world is the humanist view. The world was conceived as being ordered by built-in laws, resulting in a se sustaining, autonomous creation.
Page 85, man grasps existence from his Creator to become a creator himse He grasps existence in order to shape it according to his own will in an act o autonomy, and shall we say, imagined ownership and pursuit of utopian dreams.
Page 86, the Reformation (Renaissance?) accelerated the secularizing trend The reformers affirmed, the goodness of creation.
page 89, science poised to be dominant idol of the West, quite early at the time of the Renaissance. Aquinas discerned God's order, purpose, and will, page 96, but the Deism and Enlightenment view of God abandoned a comprehensive worldview, which included both the spiritual and the physica Page 97, scientific humanism makes the gospel merely private taste and preference.
Page 98, The West's new faith in science and man. Faith will take on real lif and flesh in the social, political, and economic realms. Thus, the West's new faith reaches into every area of life, socially, politically, economically. Page 100, 105, the creation structures are like coiled springs, compress the and they will eventually spring back with great force. Why? Because God's world is designed to operate in a certain way. Counterfeit worldviews are delusional; reality will make delusion crumble.
Page 106, God turns out the lights on a rebellious culture. God will not give glory to idols, Isaiah 42:8.
Page 108. Our culture of modernism as well as post-modernism makes a fa claim to be religiously neutral. We need to know how far removed our cultu is from biblical worldview. Knowing how far removed our culture is, will be tantamount to knowing what time it is philosophically in our culture. The failure to know what time it is in our culture is the very cause of us to unintentionally accept many idols of our culture, or at least try to coexist w them in a detent arrangement. Note what time it is in our culture and the message of Romans chapter one.
Page 110, you can't assert, which view of reality is correct. You can't assert which view of reality is correct if you derive God's creation order from an autonomous universe. You must derive God's creation order from His revelation. But postmodernism cannot assert which view of reality is correc They are left with blind relativism and moral ambiguity.
Page 114. There is a vacuum at the center of our culture. It cries out to be filled. Will it be filled with capitalism, consumerism, Marxism, what will fill th vacuum? It reduces all to what is bought and sold. The gift of sexuality becomes a product to be consumed, bought and sold. In the Middle Ages, th cathedral was the center of culture. for the understanding of reality emanat from the cathedral. But nature ate up grace. But now the market is the high value. Today the mall and Amazon and social media are the center of cultur What does it mean to follow Christ in all areas of culture?
Page 121? This is an incredible task today because our culture has experienced a kind of captivity, which has determined the culture's mandat Page 123, The religious nature of secularism, it's very negative, but Christia is serving the needs of secularism today in the third world. We must witnes to Christ's lordship in every area of life. and culture. That would involve reclaiming comprehensively the scope of the gospel. This is nothing less tha biblical cosmology.
Page 128, The alternative is privatized religion.
Page 129, we must press for social reformation. And again, that only will ta place where regeneration through the gospel is occurring.
Page 130, there is a need for contextualization, where biblical truth meets today's idolatrous worldview in a quiet ‘train wreck’.
Page 133, not a single square inch of life exists where God has not claimed that “this is mine."
Page 134, The greater the perceived tension between the gospel and the world's worldview, the healthier the church will be, the deeper the consciousness of reality in God, and the deeper the embrace of the tension the more powerful and healing our witness. If we do not lose sight of this hu antithesis, we will not lose our ability to be salt and light. We must reject th dominant myth of our time.
Page 136, the myth that the culture is religiously neutral, and therefore, we can turn a blind eye to creational structures. We must totally be aware of creational structures and embrace the tension to avoid the twin dangers of either withdrawal from the culture, or absorption of the culture, into the culture. The missionary mindset has to be incredibly aware of the tension. Page 138, part of discerning the creational design, is to understand how idolatry has rejected teleology and cosmology, and the worldview of popula culture reshapes the categories that God has determined, and that God governs by that design, that creational design of the categories He has determined. So, what about contextualization here? If we are to contextuali it demands that we discern number one, God's creational design. Number two, how the cultural idolatry warps creation-relational design, obscuring cosmology, teleology, and transcendence. And number three, we must understand that healing potential and the healing properties of a biblical cosmology and the categories that God has determined.
Page 140, we must stand against the idol of our culture. The church will embody a different life form, an alternative community, a countercultural body. This is a guiding, hopeful sign of the shalom of the kingdom. Page 141, the church is to have a merciful witness.
Page 142 We are to have a tolerant and longsuffering witness, a principled pluralism, the right to live out different faith commitments, and yet emphas the antithesis.
Page 143, Til Christ returns, the church's mission will involve conflict and suffering.
Page 146 Christianity's worldview has legs. We must operate by those legs. Page 150. How will this cause possible politics to be downstream of worldview?
Page 153? Sports competition, scholarships, other ways to interface with ou lost world, Page 156, also through creativity and art, Page 158. Exposure to art and involvement in creativity helps stir our imaginations and will help bring out the different sides of ourselves into harmony.
Page 162, An idolatrous perspective of the world is what we're exposing in t book.
Page 163, we're exposing it in part by the creational order.
Page 165, and education, a secular education, that proclaims to be purpose based actually has a worldview that is inimical to biblical worldview. The Enlightenment worldview, basically is what we have in mind here, is inimica to biblical worldview.
Page 169, recognizing Christ's creation-wide redemption. Education cannot have purpose unless we have meaning as human beings.
Page 170, Idolatry and Education theory. Enlightenment Scientism is teachi our children to accommodate to a culture. What we need is to have a witne which involves a clash between assumptions. This is a missionary encounte Page 171, "We must work within our Christian worldview and our Christian education of philosophy to discern idolatrous foundations of culture and to know that it has dictated the shape of education philosophy, and idolatrous foundations of culture, and has taught dogmatically its humanistic tradition Accommodation to Enlightenment story makes religion shoved into a privat category and perpetuates the myth that culture is religiously neutral and merely pluralistic.
Page 172, acknowledging education and that culture's fundamental commitments are not neutral, but to a great degree in opposition to the gospel. We must acknowledge it as very difficult for any individual to stand against the power of the humanist tradition within the public school system Page 174, The value of worldview studies, we become aware of the scope o the gospel and the scope of our mission, and understand that our culture's faith, so to speak, in secular culture and secular worldview, creates the unbearable tension between the two stories. These two stories are incompatible, as we mentioned earlier. This culture war lately seems to be spilling into the streets. What is the value of community in this task of bring them missiologically our worldview to an idolatrous worldview?
Page 178, we can be confident that our deeds of justice, now our kingdom deeds that will never be lost.