What I’ve Been Reading, Listening to, and Watching this Week
Christian Worldview
What R. C. Sproul Says: “It’s been said that no civilization can function without some unifying philosophical perspective. Even if you have all different kinds of views (humanism, existentialism, positivism, hedonism, and pluralism) competing, there must be some kind of overarching atmosphere of environment that makes it possible for even these to coexist in a given society. And when the historians and philosophers seek the common term, that lowest common denominator that incorporates features of all of these, usually the term we hear is secularism.”
My Take: Throughout the course of 12 lectures, R.C first walks his audience through the major secular worldviews present in America today. Then he turns to the Christian worldview in the context of science, economics, government, art, and literature. You can watch the first lecture for free, but it is worth the cost to get access to the entire series. As missionaries to the world around us, it is important for Christians to understand how the unbelieving culture thinks.
Who Do You Say I Am?
What Peter Leithart Says: “Jesus bursts onto the scene in Mark as a strong man, conquering enemy after enemy. … Jesus is so strong that some … accuse Him of casting out demons by the power of the prince of demons. Jesus responds with a little parable, an allegory: No one can plunder the strong man unless he can bind him. Only a stronger man can bind and plunder a strong man. Jesus is that stronger man, the royal “son of God,” the Davidic warrior-king, who has come to demon-infested Israel in order to take the human plunder from the devil’s house. … Then, quite suddenly, as soon as Peter confesses Jesus as the Christ, Jesus veers off in a completely different direction. Jesus has been going from strength to strength, from one triumph to another. Once Peter confesses that he is the Christ, Jesus starts talking about rejection, defeat, death. … Peter can’t accept this. Jesus is going to be rejected, captured, killed? Jesus is the stronger man. He can’t lose. … At this point especially, Peter and the rest of the Twelve need to be given new hearts, eyes, and ears. Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” and Peter gets the answer right: Jesus is the Christ. But Peter doesn’t know anything unless he sees the full answer: “Jesus is the Christ who must suffer and die and rise again.” Neither do we. Unless we know Jesus the rejected Christ, we don’t know Jesus at all. Knowing that the Son of God is the stronger man who casts out demons, stills storms, feeds multitudes isn’t enough. Unless we know that being “Son of God” means being mocked, rejected, scourged, spit on, our hearts are still hard, our eyes blind, our ears deaf. Unless we know that Jesus is strongest in weakness, we don’t really know the stronger man.”
My Take: Amen.
Why Revisionist History Is Important
What Chris Calton (Mises Institute) Says: “‘It’s hard for people not versed in history to get the point on why historical interpretation changes. In the general culture “revisionist historian” is a term of abuse. But that is what we do. Revising history is our job. So every historian is a revisionist historian in some sense’ (quoting historian Eric Foner). … History, as Mises tells us and Rothbard reminds us in the previously linked writings, is not an a priori science. But when analyzing the empirical evidence of history – the primary tool of the historian is documentary evidence – the Misesian historian can apply the a priori knowledge gained from praxeology to the analysis. Armed with proper theory, then, a Misesian historian is able to offer a new interpretation of history that fits both the empirical evidence and the sound theory of human action.”
My Take: Pick up a newspaper or a textbook. Or watch the evening news or a documentary. Whether they are covering history, science, current events, or entertainment, chances are you are receiving a full dose of secularism. If Christians don’t apply a scriptural worldview on most sources of information to filter out the humanistic perspectives, we will get filled with all kinds of incorrect information. And we won’t understand that we are in the midst of a battle and are being overrun by the enemy. “Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed” (Psalm 2 ESV). The nation’s are as angry today as they were 3,000 or so years ago when Psalm 2 was written. And that includes the attractive (unbelieving) news anchor informing us about white racism and the respected (unbelieving) scientist explaining how many billions of years old the earth is. Christians should take everything we hear from the world with a grain of salt. And work very hard to get reliable, scriptural sources of information about history, science, politics, and everything else. Starting with the Bible.
What Douglas Wilson Says: “For Christians the enemy is always unbelief. But in our time, the culture of unbelief is a metastasized secularism, taking the form of every manner of sexual perversion. The sexual revolution has set up her guillotines in the square, and the Terror is about to commence. That will be seen when every form of copulation must be applauded, as though we were a stadium full of North Korean cheerleaders. That will be the culmination of it all. But the commencement of this sexual revolution—in which many Christians and Christian institutions are already complicit—is the demand that feminine feelings must be treated as the foundational measurement of social justice. If your classical Christian school, or if your Reformed church, sets policy in order to prevent hurt feelings, or worse yet, sets policy to prevent hypothetical hurt feelings at some indeterminate time in the distant future, your institution is already toast.”
My Take: Much of the evangelical church is giving in to the world today. It may be succumbing to the left with its social justice and white racism agenda or the right and its big government “compassionate conservatism” or populist restrictions on free trade. In either case, the answer is to return to the Bible and mine scripture for what it can tell us about how to understand and operate in the world and culture around us. What we learn from it will likely be a lot more than we expected.
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