Bavinck's Christian Worldview

[Music] welcome to Christ the center your weekly conversation of reformed theology we're now up to episode number 622 my name's Camden Busey I'm here in Grayslake Illinois at the Reformed forum office in studio and I'm delighted to be back today with an international panel we're going to be speaking with several people we've got a large group and a tremendously excited to speak about a new book by Herman bobbing titled Christian worldview it's new for us in English and we have a new translation and an addition here a reprint of and a translation of the second edition on his book Christian worldview which has been translated and edited by Nathaniel Gracie Tonto James Eglinton and Corey Brock we have as guests before we introduced them and talked to them briefly let me introduce to you our our colleague we have Jim Cassidy who serves as pastor of South Austin OPC in South Austin Texas welcome back Jim it's good to see you hey Camden this is great I'm looking forward to this discussion it should be a lot of fun mm-hmm really excited to have you with us today and looking forward to talk about this obviously we love Bob Inc and anything we can do to talk about him and promote his work we're happy to do so and that is really what's up for us today because we have these brothers with us with the gray and Cory had been on the program before talking Babak but we're pleased to welcome the whole crew so let me introduce to you first we'll introduce dr. James Eglinton who is the Meldrum lecture lecturer in reformed theology at New College in the University of Edinburgh he's the author of Trinity and organism as well as a forthcoming volume Bob Inc a critical biography coming out from Baker academic next year welcome James it's great to meet you great to see you and talk to you today thank you it's great to be here well you're very kind to join us so we have you from overseas so we're represented from multiple continents today because we also have gray suit on tone if annual grace to Tonto the full academic name here who is a teaching elder at covenant City Church in Jakarta Indonesia and also studied at the University of Edinburgh Under Eglinton has written several things on Babak and is widely publishing check his CV out level link to that in the episode description welcome back to Ray it's always good to talk to you too great to be back yeah thanks for joining us at the time for you I think we're pushing 10:33 p.m. where it's 933 a.m. for me so so thank you for persevering we're happy to have you and looking forward to a fun conversation and I'm also very pleased to welcome to the program Corey Brock he also studied at Edinboro and Corey is the Minister for young adults and college at First Presbyterian Church none other than in Jackson Mississippi he also serves as adjunct professor theology at Belhaven University nearby welcome back Corey it's good to see you too thanks yeah well it's been a little while like don't recall the last time we spoke but we had a good conversation last time and I'm excited to talk today about this subject matter and a continue our conversation and promotion of this kind of Bhavik renaissance you know I mentioned before just with the the publication of reform dogmatix in English I think the first edition came out was widely available around 2003 if I'm not mistaken and um you know til then there wasn't a whole lot available I think our reasonable faith was out and that's not even the the direct title I've got a copy here of the forthcoming the wonderful works of God people might be able to see on the video but other than that for English speakers there wasn't a whole lot available to my knowledge but that led to a great increase in scholarship on term and bobbing such a tremendous thinker and now we're reaping the benefits and we can actually see you know in terms of like a historical theological study what these translations can do so now as we see other translations you know on figures like Maastricht and and others so much of the Protestant scholastics are now being translated and made available in English for the first time I pray and hope that there will be a Renaissance you know 1820 years now down the road in those areas - it's always helpful for us to learn the originals and to read primary sources in the original languages we know just you know for every seminary student they're not nowadays don't have a working knowledge of Latin and certainly not Dutch another another languages but we have some some very capable scholars with us today even before we get started James I'd like to introduce you to our audience and let you speak a bit about some of your scholarly work and how you got to studying Bob Inc in the first place and I see on your on your page for the University of Edinburgh that you have a you not only can speak and write but in English and Dutch but also in French and in Scottish Gaelic I'm understand so tell me a bit about your scholarly work and and just introduce yourself if you would to the listeners would love to hear it yeah sure so I did my undergrad in law at the University of Aberdeen which I enjoyed in parts and not in others but I so there was my I guess major I guess some us terms and but in the Scottish University System you can make up not so other classes something like a minor so I did a year of New Testament Greek and takes in theological classes and really logged in so then I finished my law degree I went to seminary to the Free Church College in Edinburgh and studied under Donald McLeod who would quarter Felice Gaer Mumbai Vinc sometimes I'm in class and would encourage us to think about researching him more and so one thing led to another and ended up doing a PhD I'm back in University of Edinburgh and discovered him through that so I moved into that just as the English translations and the dogmatix were starting to appears confidentially it was a really good time to enter that fields I wanted to work on a clear loading who were there's a lot of space to do in your work which is really difficult for some theologians because there's so many interpreters you've been around and there's some really crowded fields and really attractive yes so much of the seminal work has been done and I can't repair parts it's very hard not to be peripheral and those conversations of you trying to says I know it is my wares for diving just so much unexplored territory and space to be something really fundamental um I just thought works so I fell into through that I didn't want to work on the illusion he wrote in English except I'll only do this PhD once and I want to use the useless as a chance to pick up a new language so I thought let's go for some of your own Dutch as well and there weren't really that many people around working on Dutch theology back there more people know it's a busier environment should we say but if so I was really drawn to it because there's so much potential to create new things oh they're time for such a great thinker and so winsome and a real role model if he wants to be a Christian theologian and the mainstream Academy and engage with people who differ from you and how they think about theology I think is a really superb example about to do that he's tremendous I'm never disappointed reading Bhavik and and he's such a wonderful example and I mean even if I didn't agree with him pretty much on every single page I still would enjoy reading him and find him very fruitful so he is just a tremendous scholar and a figure to study really significant just for people who don't know above in States I mean everyone should be having idea but some people might be listening for the first time and not know but bobbing states are 1854 to 1921 so we're speaking about some very interesting somewhat tumultuous times but there's a lot going on in the culture and we're gonna get into that as we talk about this book Christian worldview I'm curious brothers whoever wants to pick up the question and run with it how this particular project came about if you could give us a little bit of a background about this original publication its editions and then how you picked it up and translated it how did the what what I'm holding in my hands now what's the story behind it how did it get here yeah I mean we could say I think it was about three or four years ago at a conversation with Johnny Gibson who is now the old testement professor at Westminster Theological Seminary and Johnny as an Old Testament guy was really interested so in reformed theology and of course in reformed theologians and his favorite one of his favorites anyway would become involving mm-hmm and he's eating through the dogmatix I think at the time and he just asked you know are there a lot of other works that haven't yet translated and I said you know there's this one book that I'm constantly reading through and I'm using all the time for my own PhD work it's called Christian worldview in the Dutch and he just had a glimmer in his eye and he says that's gonna sell like hotcakes and it just did for heaven he came and sought her for cross way and so he had a good connection with them and send an email out to them and they invited a proposal on it and so I got working on the proposal met with Justin Taylor I think in ETS 2017 finalized it all and said to work and of course I I knew that this is too important of a work for me to tackle on my own and I wanted Corey and James to be involved from the very beginning this is definitely one of the more mature epistemological works by bombing I definitely think that in this particular work along with philosophy of Revelation we see him developing his organic epistemology in a more self-conscious way because he's dedicating this focus and time and energy toward it and in 1904 when he first published Christian worldview he also published another book called crystal a great inch cup which you know translation would be Christian scholarship that's kind of a companion volume to this work they were published at around at the same time and there he tries to develop the principles that we find here to the different sciences that we see in the universities whether it be the Natural Sciences the humanities religious studies and tries to show how a Christian perspective can actually impact these different fields in a unique way so in here we see a more fundamental orientation maybe where he's developing a Christian worldview for metaphysics epistemology and ethics there he tries to apply it to different fields of scholarship so you see this focus on bobbing maybe it's also because he's transitioning to the four University of Amsterdam which James could tell you a lot more about because he just wrote the biography and so he's wrestling with what makes a reformed University distinct what makes a Christian worldview distinct and so 1904 he wrote those two works and then which anticipated 1908 philosophy of Revelation and but the principles of course you see here are organically built from the dogmatix and it's 1897 work on the principles of psychology but definitely a strongly epistemological focus as he transitions into Amsterdam yeah that's the worry about the book and also how it came about it's great Coria there's also a couple other things to mention I think one is in his own context bobbing saw Christian world view as a prequel to the philosophy of revelation so and he keep putting that aside and mentions it explicitly and you know we published philosophy of revelation a year ago or so and we met with you about that canden and so this was an important book to read alongside philosophy of Revelation and that way it'll be important for anybody doing study in bothering to read those two together but also there's a contemporary reason to and that's that the discussion about worldview and Christian worldview in any worldview has been very prominent in the past couple years in reformed theology in the States especially a lot of people are asking questions about whether the concept is valid and whether we need to dismiss the idea of worldview altogether right now there's a lot of disparaging comments on the subject it's it's become kind of the the pastime of some people's trash worldview thinking or say it's just enlightenment thought and there are some good critiques of the evolution that the concept has undergone in American evangelicalism sure well we wanted to offer this book has kind of more of an original primary source to think well what were the best thinkers thinking about what this word means in the early 20th late 19th century it's brilliant yeah James I'm wonder if we could pick up on something gray said in terms of the Free University and some of the other contexts can you situate this book for us within Bhavik biography and that might shed some light on us historically and help us I just to I think probably the best way to think about this book is to understand it as one of the key early publications in a new phase of diving still logical development so we think of bombings life he spent the 1880s and 90s as a professor in a small seminary company in the theological school and his main dialogue partners at that stage were either liberal Protestants or they were materialist atheists so they were there was this trend towards atheism in Dutch intellectual culture but where it was a kind of atheism that said we don't need God but we still retain all of the moral trappings of theism so it's still wrong to steal it's wrong to kill it's still wrong to oppress people in the Dutch East Indies still wanted all those things but there's no God and we don't need a church to tell us any of those things and back in those decades having believed that orthodoxy ism was going to win out and that sin it wasn't going to be too long before the Dutch as a nation turned back towards the best kind of Calvinism and because what they were trying to system it wouldn't work and he thought that people would really prize consistency ultimately and then they would come back to your really healthy well Orthodox Calvinist worldview in life you for the whole nation but then everything changes in 1900 just two years before he moves to the pre University of Amsterdam but that's the year in which Friedrich Nietzsche dies and Nietzsche had had almost no impacts in the Netherlands in his own lifetime but then after he dies it's almost like a culture in each develops and in Dutch society whether all these intellectuals and poets and political activists who really start to run with meecher's ideas that have godless dance because we have killed them we have to revalue our values and all of a sudden this as a species at eight years and it's completely novel the idea that there may be no gods and because of that we don't know if any two values still remain so when bank in the 1880s and 90s was debating with Duchy NIST's he had a common moral framework that you could discuss with them and share with them and talk into and there was still a lot they depended on Christianity for even if they'd reject its belief in God but then after the death of Nietzsche there's a completely new kind of atheists above Incas staring at and he is no common language anymore to talk with with lemon he doesn't have any common guaranteed set of moral commitments that are just Givens and he realizes fairly quickly after the the death of Nietzsche and the Dutch cultured meter springs up but his theological phone's from the previous couple of decades also faced the same existential threats from Nietzsche because you know the Nietzsche and ubermensch this new way of being human that Nietzsche dreams up where it's all about domination chopping down the tree if the ISM and so that all the branches of whether that's you know liberal Protestantism and Catholicism or or Calvinism it's all of these different branches of geology I'll face the same existential threat surviving then starts to invest a lot of energy and as well as promoting Calvinism and promoting Christianity and encouraging people within different traditions within Christianity to to think a lot about what it means to be Christian and face the protective nature as well so this so Christianity emerges as a really major public human badniks life and then from kind of 1919 or two onwards in 1904 with this publication so it's why you get lots of publications about Christian Science there's evacuates just go away head glistened on Christianity Christian worldview so he's trying to gather some kind of like a broadly theistic coalition that recognizes that in this context they stand or fall together even if you know he's not relativizing theological difference but there's this new setting with your face and you thought that they haven't faced before that with a completely new kind of atheism so the super mensch is coming and he doesn't come with pruning shears to snip up some parts of this that's going with the axe and axe is gonna chop the whole thing down there's this new threads and because of that Christianity has to be stressed alongside defending Calvinism but one of the ways I try to understand this is that you know if you if you lived by a stream and it's what you get your water from it sustains you and it's you think that it's the stream you know where you have most beautiful clean water and there's lots of other streams that flow off some kind of common river and you know that someone is coming to build a dam a few miles up everything that flows from will dry up you go and tackle the person who's building the dam and that for babbling cos Nietzsche and he's trying to convince everyone I'll spell that there's streams within be kind of a broad Christian view of Christian traditions that they're all facing this new back together and so he's trying to convince all these liberal theologians the modern theme at times that their opposition to him was really myopic but Babic isn't the threatened and they face the big threat they face is Nietzsche so you know with that being said so we've already we've got this tremendous context at this turn of the century and this is what Bob Inc is fighting and he's trying to awaken Christians to deeper more thoughtful approach to the challenges ahead and one way he does that in this book is present the Christian worldview on that as we've already alluded to is indicating you know that word is means a lot of things to a lot of people and so I'm curious as to how Bhavik defines the term if he's appropriating an idea that's already existence within you know Dutch Calvinism or how does bhavan come to use this term and what does he mean by it as he's addressing here these challenges yeah he hadn't really done much with the term world you also in the 1880s and 90s so he dealt with it a little bit really early in his academic career he was a review of a book by James hora the scholar state lodge and he looks a bit about worldview but he really doesn't mention him I've seen those decades something that becomes extremely important because of the existential threats to that being able to view all of life holistically to the lens of the catholic christian faith that comes away again through Nietzsche's it's this turn of the century which changes everything and if you if you pick up speak expecting a really neat definition of worldview you know you can write just the juice in two sentences and see you know walk away from without it being an efforts you'll probably be disappointed that's not what I mean he's trying to do he is trying to ask a series of short basic and profound questions then he thinks you need to ask and answer put together in order to live well within the worlds and before the face of God questions about Who am I what is the world and then what do I do and living within the worlds and so it's about me actually prefers to speak the language of world and life yeah because it's not just this kind of abstract cosmology or something you know facile social model or something like that but you know you have a Christian worldview if you drive a certain kind of car or if you you know read a certain newspaper or something like that I Christian worldview something that develops organically as you lived within the once having engaged with these questions about what it means for me to be mean to exist what it means for the what is the world's and then thinking field and how do I live to the glory of God within the walls so the Christian worldview something that springs up and grows up in that soil but you have to break up the dry hard and grind in the first place to let them sit so that it become more fruitful I think it's worth mentioning to that Christian world in light view from Bob Inc is essentially like saying Christian philosophy he sees this is Christian philosophy and the reason he prefers world and life views because world is a reference to epistemology and ontology and life is a reference to wisdom and ethics and and so that's why he doesn't want to shorten the term to world need and and that that speaks to a lot of the issues actually that are brought up in the contemporary world in the conversation about a worldview just even switching the terminology to world in life where life references human action wisdom and things religion is an address to some of the criticisms that are out there about the mutation of the concept every time yeah you know it's that just for the the reader the listener there's only three chapters here the whole book including the scripture index I mean is about a hundred and forty some pages but the first chapter is thinking and being second chapter being and becoming the third chapter becoming and acting Labov Inc does prevent or provide it should say provide a very holistic understanding of the Christian just of a human living in this world and what are the necessary preconditions to use some fan Tilian terms but to carry on what URIs and Cory on page 55 he finishes that chapter just saying you know the the same God needed by the pious believer and the philosopher is the one who makes himself known to both in his works it's the same word who made all things and who in the fullness of time became flesh the same spirit who renews the face of the earth changes the heart of the sinner and thus various philosophies ometer day the true philosopher is a lover of God and Christianity eros philosophies a Christian is a true philosopher and I just loved how he how he worded that and what that means for him at these two are not a competing departments of knowledge or investigation in Christianity on the one hand philosophy and the other or to have some sort of content divided of you know some sort of realm of númenor faith and then the realm of like a practical reason where you know the philosophers trying to investigate nature which has nothing to do with God it's it's all bound up and and knowledge of this world necessarily involves knowledge of God whether we acknowledge that or is this how the world is made so that's that's a helpful way to put it and I think that that little paragraph for those few sentences is a world of a window into a whole world of kind of above Enki and thought yeah yeah I do think that you know picking up of what both of you guys said that you know bobbing is after a very holistic vision of all things in a holistic way of living and he unfolds science and wisdom under this category of worldview and worldview stems out of science and wisdom but will view circles back around to science and wisdom so I do think that he gets that a kind of he doesn't get really get a definition of worldview let's say but the method of building worldview TV shows it to you yeah he lives at 51 in pages 50 and 51 he talks about how at a couple of lines after that first full paragraph it says just a sense perception it's the basis of all science the results of science are and remain the starting points of philosophy so he's trying to argue there that you start off with science and sense perception and you get your material from there but he doesn't want to limit it to just science because a few lines I've heard that it says that wisdom is grounded on science so science is a starting point for wisdom but it's not limited to it it aims above science and seeks to press through to first principles and tries they're forced to trace back all the sciences back to their first principles and then he's gonna argue the very beginning of that the next paragraph a couple lines down it says the world rests and thoughts and that ideas control all things so he's trying to say you start off with science you started with sense perception you build up with the data inductively then you trace back all this data to the first principles once you get to the first principles you realize that ideas control all things and then in the next page it says that it is built on the realities of ideas because it is indeed the science of the idea business after you did and because it sees the idea of the whole in the parts and of the general in particular it tacitly proceeds from the Christian faith which states that the world is grounded in wisdom and a real system in his whole and all in his parts and of course he talks about the organic motif there so try to say once you get to the first principles you find out that the first principles for every science are actually divine ideas and so a worldview seeks to find the unity behind prett sciences a unity behind the first principles and those principles for religion all different sizes are actually the same and you asked about sources to cabin he starts there Friedrich von Trendelenburg who is a German empirical idealist and some people think that empiricist and idealism they're basically a binary between the Oldenburg's existence actually contradicts that because he's an empiricist but at the same time you are you is that as you empirically study the world you're gonna discover that ideas govern the whole thing and he cites that German philosopher there so that's an interesting magnet being at page 50 and 51 he gets at the method of worldview very clearly yeah you know that that carries on just on the to just be pulling quotes all the time but just the the reference to the being and becoming chapter right at the beginning says the second problem solved in a worldview is that of being and becoming of unity and multiplicity of God and world and that just you know me I love Cornelius Van Til and and I read him a lot and then very indebted to his mode of thinking and I think he's often misunderstood especially by his critics but nevertheless my thought as I was reading that is how much you know Bob Inked language is maybe in the lurking in the background of Van tills comments on the problem of the one and the many of unity and diversity and he applies that to the subject object relations and his own epistemology I can't help but think you know do we have any understanding or awareness that that you know Van Til was conversant with all of these works no doubt he was reading a lot of this stuff in Dutch but were there any thoughts in in terms of babak's influence on Van Til and others you know in the space I don't know Stoker or or other that that next wave or generation of kind of Dutch thinkers definitely you can trace it I'd be interested to see where the footnotes go with respect to been till exciting yeah or his letters I need that partially had been working on a lot of his you know transcribing a lot of his letters it'd be curious to keep that in mind as we read the letters to figure out you know what's what's going on in the background but you know it's interesting to me to see that Van Til is not novel I mean he never said he was but people often assume that what he's thinking is he's just coming up with all these ideas and he's inventing them all and you can have you know different thoughts about how faithful he might be to the tradition or if he's departing from it or developing it but I think a book like this shows that this is in the air I mean the worldview thing is I mean James or James had mentioned before his war had written the Christian view of world right and bobbing reviews it positively so you can find a review I don't think it's translated yet as far as I know and then of course a precedent for this particular book and the caipira movement as a whole is Krone van prinster he tries to argue that the French Revolution has to be understood as a whole system that this is actually a manifestation of a whole atheistic anti-ballistic system of belief and that you have to trace it back down to first principles again and I think that bobbing is there for picking up on those pre kite period moves and of course Abraham Kuyper looms larger as well but I do confess that as I you know as we were translating this as we saw the importance of it at least speaking for myself I did see this whole pitting again of you know 17th century reformer at the doxy there were four metaphysics as if that's one thing and then 19th century world view is just idealism and subjective idealism particularly right I just that's a false binary I actually think that a Christian worldview depends upon a Christian ontology and that's what Bobby was doing is just trying to show that we all felt this disunity that secularism has brought about between our beings and ourselves and our beings in the world and can we have a unified Christian vision of all things we did an efficient ontology and we have subject and object reconciled we have the world and ourselves reconciled we can make as a progress but at the same time there's still a unity within the progress he's trying to show that ontology is the root of worldview and worldview is basically a a unified vision of ontology oh and I think that's something that that's the best if we want to read that so I think that's the best way we should read that so well not as you know someone who breaks away from reform orthodoxy but he's basically following this not just bobbing Hyperion and move yeah standing on a reformer at the dogs he but bringing a lot of dare I say romantic and new unified visions of life that have been have been brought out in 19th century philosophy well it's a very pastoral question either des embers read in the book at hand here today bothers Christian worldview that this new generation had arisen that exchanged modernistic certainty for an appreciation and the unrecognizable and unknowable so he keeps talking about these shifts in the culture and he seemed to have a very pastoral heart right at the beginning of what he's attempting to address with this little book is answer some of the you know these existential questions that people are having as they're they're kind of tossed to and fro in in the world and not knowing how to make sense of it because a previous secular unbelieving way of making sense of the world that's fallen apart and you know but without the the trying God as revealed in Scripture and as he has revealed himself even in the world if you're not going to start there as your starting point epistemologically ontological ii however you want to begin you're not gonna find the answer and you're only gonna find meaninglessness and so I found this this isn't just a you know some sort of abstract book were some contemplation about some some bizarre epistemological facts this is a pastoral book in many ways yes and it began in a pastoral context towards his students as well because the so the first edition before was a book it was a wrecked Oriole address to the students of the three universities so I'm by my kid or they've been out for two years but the the rector post changed every year so he was director for a year and then you would give lectures to the students I give a lecture at the beginning of your years rector another one at the end so this is his closing address of the students as rector so to get the oldest in the Netherlands in that period it was me you were really a the very front line those huge debates the Bolivian existential and had a huge bearing on what your life would be like and you know point your convictions would go on to be I think once the students of the free university to hold fast to their faith the parsha they're in the heart of Amsterdam the part of the wider culture and they're not hermetically sealed from that because this new conventionally reformed universities are not confession reform based on the reform principles explicitly I should say other universities so it is pastoral its these aren't abstract concerns he's trying to help his students navigate really choppy waters well he he acqua ends the book passed orally in just the very last two pages he says that a true Christian world and live view is a way of being not merely a way of knowing and he talks about how to imbibe that way of being the what has to be present is what must be present for at SRI Dogma Titian to do dogmatix and that's communion with the Living God he says that religion true religion in the sense of Calvin said is a precondition for any Christian world in life you it cannot be a mere intellectualism it has to be brought on through the life prayer that means a brace true communion of God and that's the last thing he says from the words how the ends the third chapter the that's interesting it sounds a whole lot like vos doesn't it you know the way in which vos develops his idea in his ideas and his theology really as a holistic system with regard to the precondition the necessary precondition of communion with the Living triune God I have a question about it's more of a historical curiosity than anything can you situate this volume in the historical context especially relative to kuipers lectures on Calvinism because I as I as I read Piper's lectures on Cal um I see there really somebody who is developing a Christian worldview self-consciously developing Christian world and life view something that's gonna be holistic and organic in terms of how we view life and epistemology and ontology and everything we're how do we situate bobbing volume here relative to to the lectures on Calvinism it's an interesting comparison having himself was actually critical of kuipers lectures on Calvinism appreciate in some ways but privately critical and directly towards kuiper there's a really fascinating lecture from having to caper about his lectures on Calvinism where he said that he having doubted but the American audience was familiar enough with but all of this philosophical background the kind of stuff that we haven't managed Christian blog you to make sense of what paper was actually saying so he felt the caper had really aimed over people's heads because they didn't have thick enough background that was necessary to make sense of that Neo Calvinist worldview so he was critical in that regard and and he was also critical of kuiper attempting to articulate the specifics of a Christian worldview in another culture in American culture as a Dutchman so he he said so he thought that you cannot you can't tell other people what this has to look like in their culture you do this where you're from so you let this world you develop more organically but having a person which is kind of skeptical about whether a Christian worldview in America would ever take the shake that guy Pro restraint encouraged them so there's there's really interesting critique very I think there's some a little bit of tension in the background as likely with personalities as well yeah and then of course Pavan gives stone lectures in Princeton or by Elektra this and then he also got the East by his wife's remarks and it wasn't she thought he was really struggling to connect with his audience some of they didn't seem to understand what he was saying you know yeah and philosophy of Revelation the take of kuiper it came back to haunt him because his wife basically said Herman this is happening to you too revelation was definitely not philosophically light ya know I'm writing a chapter on Piper and Bob excuse of Calvinism because of course you know you asked the question about Piper's lectures and Calvinism they really show that with bobbing you know the word Calvinism is just it just placed so massively in the chi period and banking imagination especially involving earlier writings right and you know interesting li and ba beings lectured the future of Calvinism he argues that Calvinism is a broader term than the term reform reform it's just about doctrine and it's about ecclesiology but Calvinism is a whole world in my view it has to do with you know reforming the whole culture has to do with performance science art and and and every sphere of life because that's what Calvin was doing in Geneva and the Dutch could do their own context in the Americas to do in their own context that's what papi was envisioning and so I guess that's one also ideological connection between Kairos lectures and Calvinism and Bobby's own thought is that they have always seen Calvin and Calvin's work in Geneva as an exemplary model to follow that Christianity ought to leaven everything in Christianity is not just a purl but our to live in every area of life just to imitate Calvin Geneva but in our own context what do we do now to leaven and to show how Christianity impacts every every area of life that's fascinating right let's get into some of the more nuts and bolts I mean we've been talking a lot about some of these things and alluding to them but I'm curious more how Babak works out this epistemology in the world and life view and he makes a comment about his you know regarding his understanding of thinking and being and how it might serve to reconcile the human being with God the world and and life I mean what are what are some of the ontological foundations and the ways in which Bhavan connects subject and object and human with God let's get into a little bit of the theological particular zhan this because I think it's helpful to understand and might connect this book more with more than the traditional textbook we might find it like with reformed dogmatix for example it might be helpful just to say that these shorthand terms thinking being becoming acting thinking and being thinking for Bob Inc here stands for the intellectual life of the human subject that's what he means and being stands for existence outside the subject so any object in the world that can be known that's what he means by being thinking this the process of consciousness and intellectual processing representations in the human mind and so these little shorthand phrases have a ton of baggage attached to him they're largely being picked up from in in conversation with the thought life of the manual con this is this is graze area of particular enjoyment I think I love that you said that was such GUI Cori Boardman definitely I think so the particularity is of Bobby's argumentation here he's always gonna posit Christianity as the more holistic alternative to two options and respect to the first chapter on epistemology is going to argue that Christianity is the holistic alternative to rationalism and empiricism and he argues that ironically both rationalism and empiricism can't bridge the subject-object distinction right so this is in page 32 I'm not going to read it and you people could read it for themselves but page 32 he says that in empiricism you're always going to distinguish between the representations that you get from the impressions from the outside and the thing in itself and so you're actually getting a ever greater gap between the image or the idea of the thing and the thing itself even though the impression from the thing outside creates the idea within us and rationalism on the other hand tries to move from the mind to reality and say if I have these ideas I need to I need to project them onto reality in some way but both can't actually secure an equal Ultima see if I could put it that way or an array or equilibrium or an equipoise equipoise ax t man it's like all 11:15 p.m. here we're trying to articulate more as well but but a but an equal place for both subject and object and hold them both together an intention and yet still connected distinct but connected unity but diversity right and so he tries to show that both of these movements in modern thought can actually bridge that gap and bobbing ultimately says that the only way we can bridge that gap is that we have to presuppose the know ability of the external world of course but interestingly enough and this is why I argue that he's not a common-sense realist on page 40 at the top of it again I'm not going to read it he says that the no ability of the external world is of such a great presupposition then you have to justify it so he says that both empiricism and rationalism can't purchase the nobility of mix ternal world we have to believe in the nobility of the external world but we can't just posit the nobility we have to actually provide some justification for it some reasons to believe that we can believe in the externality of the world and and that it's accessible to us and so in the rest of the chapter I think he appeals to at least three doctrines to justify why it is that the world is knowable to the subject and in the subject of an object can be held together distinct but still United and the three I think doctrines that he refers to would be the doctrine of creation through the Word of God and that this creation from the Word of God unites diverse things together precisely because they are all stem from the divine ideas in God so the divine ideas hold natural and supernatural things together and therefore in creation we're gonna see both spiritual things and material things come together even the way we know things so creation is in their divine ideas and it's the I think we reform Orthodox doctrine of divine ideas that you see in the reformed scholastics is gonna quit Johan I'll step there and also at the same time I think this organic decree that that binds all things in history you know particulars and universals individuals the subject and the objects together so again page 51 I will read this one he says there it is the same divine wisdom that created the world organically into connected whole and plant it in us the urge of a unified worldview if this is possible it can only be explained on the basis of the claim that's that the world is an organism and has first been thought up as such only then do philosophy and worldview have a right and ground of existence as it is also on this high point of knowledge that's subject and object harmonize as the reason within us corresponds with the brink it yeah of all being and knowing so he's saying why do the ideas in our minds which are different from physical things outside correspond well because you're they're both partaking in this organic universe right ordained trying God pattern after the ark tipple divine ideas and God is really not in other words that's a gift of common grace yeah so the when I read the Reform dogmatix he seems to in this regard place a premium and the doctrine of the Trinity as the precondition for understanding both unity and diversity within the created order does the doctrine of the Trinity come out I mean you mentioned several others here gray but I haven't read the book yet so I'm asking out of ignorance what role does the doctrine of the Trinity have then with regard to answering these questions about the know ability of the external world yeah so I think massively at least with regard to the law Goss doctrine it's gonna appear here pretty significantly as well when he talks about the doctrine of creation on page 46 he specifically appeals to the doctrine of creation of all things by the word of god and he capitalizes the word there at in reference to the second person of the trinity that it is the explanation of all knowing and knowing about the presupposition behind the correspondence between subject and object and he talks about how God has ordained what is seen and what is unseen to go together and to be able to be made known to us so I do think that it's more implicit here I think at least in this particular section that because there is a sense in which there's distinction in God not a substantial or essential distinction of course but a personal distinction that creation is you know through God but through the Word of God specifically that there's also diversity within creation and hence we are not surprised that spiritual ideas can still communicate to us physical realities that drogyn us realities connected precisely because there's article unity and diversity in God but I yeah and you guys could correct me if I'm wrong here at Corey and James especially like I do think that the Trinity is more explicit in the dogmatix but I think that all the seats of the Trinity are still within this particular book mmm yeah I agree with with you entirely they're great and again if we remember that this is an address by Bank it's just regular to the students is the Free University it was an address that kuiper gauge to the students relatively close by to this on the chronology where he said sites the rationale for how to study these different disciplines within the tree university and do so Christianly which is entirely and explicitly based on this lagos idea as well that if you're a Christian biologist you're studying plants and animals but really what you're studying is the logos and all of these things and it's the same if you're a Christian lawyer or a Jew or a Christian social anthropologist so there's this Lagos doctrine that's been used to explain the sense in which all of these different avenues of inquiry and I Christianized and hang together and holds together within a single Christian University so agree with great entirely the Lagos doctrine is really important as an aspect of thinking and a Trinitarian way about all of life and had to study across the university but what makes it a university rather than just a fragmented arbitrary collection of departments but I think and I agree with grey also that the Trinity is is more obviously prominent in the reform dogmatix because of the nature of the well the purpose of the Rockland dogmatix certainly dogmatic theology is there'd be something really surprising if the Trinity wasn't very clearly explicitly stated and regulated would be big disappointment of that one case but I think one of the key things about banks handling of the Trinity which is really interesting and kind of idiosyncratic as well then is emphasis that there's just three and one pattern in the Trinity of unity and it is a form of unity university but for bi think that three and one patroness is unique to God and yet it's also in some sense having revealed in the whole of the creation but not through triadic patterns rather the Trinity reveals the general principle and pattern of diverse things that exist together in unity so the Trinity enables a creation that is like the Trinity that is like the Trinity you pass the Trinity preserves itself as being unlike anything else within the creation and I think that the Christian worldview is really consistent with that where the there's a there's a really strongly Trinitarian the Trinity is is through all of this and runs through the whole thing but it's not stated explicitly because he's not trying to articulate out doctrine of the Trinity within the doctrine of God so he's doing something different but it's really profoundly Trinitarian actually yeah it seems it seems that his doctrine of the vestiges particularly then plays in here and I might my own reading above Inc is that he significantly improves upon Augustine or Edwards where Edwards and Agustin both tried to find these sort of forced triads within the created order in order to you know sort of prove the vestiges doctrine whereas I think Bhavik takes a much more sort of sane approach where that the pattern of the one in many is found within creation which which is a revelation of the one in many within the original triune God so it seems to me that that is extremely significant when developing a Christian world life view especially with an eye towards the University and sort of universal knowledge and science so yeah it's very good yeah and I think it's this is a useful point to revisit you know the question having through the Eternity area really Trinitarian and that's the core of his worldview he's trying to articulate and a Trinitarian worldview is having a social Trinitarian which I don't think he was at all obviously the anachronistic anyway though this develops post diving but I think diving shows a very different way to think in a trinitarian way wearing the term that I use anyway in my writings is a trainer farm way about the world's and about yourself and about the life thing you will live in the world and he manages to do that showing that you do need to think about the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit's and how you view the worlds and understand yourself and what you be with in the world but you can do that in a way that also preserves just the sheer uniqueness and other nests of the formulas regards but preserves that also as a unique object of worship that you simply cannot find it anywhere else that transcends the world and yet has also made eminent within it and you can into how you will live within the world so I think that's really profound and something that's prominent I'll being kind of subtle in this book as well but really important it's important to to bring this discussion to bear on some of the contemporary discussions around worldview it's interesting that the epistemic issue that Bob think is critiquing in that first chapter the failure to United subject and object to create a sort of Con Thien vu all over again of the difference between representation and thing in itself is exactly the critique one of the common critiques against the concept of world view today that that you know that one of the common metaphors that has been used and a lot of worldview literature in the 20th century is the image of world view as spectacles as colored lenses that and everybody has a world view everybody puts on glasses and through those reds colored glasses they see the world and so they're divided from the world and there's sort of a conte in it's a Content metaphor almost that's that's been used for this idea and Bobbie doesn't mean that and it's interesting that he's critiquing exactly that problem in using Christian worldview to unify subject and object just to say that people the presupposition as people actually do know the world through their representations as to deny that contine dualism and unfortunately that's the way the worldview has been used more like ideology then of a means by it and it is important that we we state that difference because that's one of the domains that will it's the most criticism from some of our colleagues in the reformed world right now so it's the same thing with the word presupposition right I mean that word has been sort of abused and misused and taken out of context especially the way in which Van Til intended it and has sort of been used as a as an idealistic bat that you can use to pop people over the head with and charge them with you know bias or inappropriate bias or whatnot but anyway it's a similar similar phenomenon on the way which worldview and and presupposition have been used in Michigan our metaphor is Matt making the developing review is more like Matt making it's it's working in sketching boundaries and rework and trying to constantly come back and understand the map you've been given rather rather than something like spectacles through which you perceive reality yeah I wonder how much of that is borrowing from Calvin's discussion and book one of the Institute's where he talks about the spectacles of Scripture and whatnot but of course that was all being developed and used prior to the Enlightenment and then post enlightenment here yeah so you're advocating you know something to me that sounds a lot more like you know understanding an organic and Trinitarian foundation situatedness existence but that notion of I guess if maybe to coin a phrase some sort of like divine archetypal and ech type or cartography there we go it's mapmaking is a better way to think it's a cartography that we're using to justify because we've experienced it that we're looking for a domain for a prefers principles that makes sense of exactly what we do not what we have experienced so in that way it's more like cartography and wonderfully you know I'm wondering here then with all this being said and and certainly we want people to purchase this book you know from Crossway a Christian worldview by Bob Inc but there are many other books by Bhavik that are also very important and given his organic his organism and the very nature of his theological system and thought it's helpful to to not just know one sliver or one portion of what Bob Inc is saying but to kind of know the whole so I you know a more practical question certainly people could buy this book it's it's not long it's affordable and people can read it and understand a good portion of it without a whole lot of background to Bhavik nevertheless if either or any of you were to suggest some sort of program of becoming introduced to Babak a program of reading or exposure where might you've situate this book and would you recommend some other books or chapters or essays to help guide somebody into not just what Bhavik thought but really how he thought how how would you suggest somebody just getting started to cut their teeth on on the world of bobbing I will say that it's important for the reader to know that this book does require at least some basic background in Western philosophy that that it's not a popular level read so it largely it would depend on the reader to some degree Camden kind of problem with their background but of course the new the new trend the new edition of Magnolia Dei the wonderful words God is a great place for anybody to start because it's it's a popular level dogmatic text from from bobbing that's intended for everybody and announces purpose in writing it by I'd be interested in what the other guy so to say yes I think that it's interesting to look at the sudden babblings on lifetime because he was really committed to writing from the highest level of scholarly audience and he aims dogmatix of that but in his own lifetime there were criticisms of it in newspapers but it was too expensive and you need to have a really high level of university education to appreciate it and it's not the kind of thing that will end up in everyone's everyone's shelf so after you finish the system I think someone spends a long time the best part of a decade revising it to produce the second edition he then invests years of his life and trying to write a shorter summary of it but he aims to the first one this is then aimed for Laura I can first and second year junior college level university level students but then after that he then invest that's more time and writing a third book which just isn't an English Ed's I can handbook to the guidebook to the Christian religion which is aimed upper-level high school students or high school seniors so it's it's more popular still and he obviously write so much in terms of journalism so I love it's like I'm just explicitly and good in general popular audience Christian world views Corey was saying is in university students and again presupposes score he said no logic philosophy presupposes that you know your way around just this kind of Calvinist culture that then working at the time so there are other texts that I think you can use to try and get into having better more introductory so I released a book a couple of years ago called Herman I think impeaching and preachers which is designed in part to fill that need where they are his texts on preaching and on church worship and his only published sermon as well which I think are fairly accessible to seminary students people who are used to listening to preaching you know this is having communicating its as doctrine to ordinary people in the pew so that book I think is a fairly accessible intro text there's also that the new biography that comes out next year which is I tried to write it anyway as some kind of overview of fizzy of his life but also his intellectual development I try and touch on all of the key works including this one and also its dogmatic since they developed because for fond epics to try and set them in some kind of a context as well so that leaders get who the person is who's producing these works in these times so I hope that it's also a kind of map that helps you locate and understand better his publications as you interact with them there's also an abridged version of his dogmatix which is available in English that's one volume and for I don't agree you want to chip in anything else I think that pretty much covers it all I I do think that this is one of the first stuffs we should go to if we're interested specifically in bombings views on epistemology specifically I do think that he represents his mature thought here very well along with of course philosophy of Revelation so it would be interesting I think if somebody just picks up his principles of psychology which isn't about psychology the way we would know it today is if it's human behavior but it's really a study of the cognition of all the human faculties right I mean is that various parts of the human soul right and so he talks about the distinction between representations and sensations distinction between idea and impressions these are very technical terms that he's defining in principles of psychology which he wrote in 1897 and he's presupposing those definitions I think in this book and he further averse them out and teases the modern philosophy of revelation so you'll have very nitpicky it seems like anyway nitpicky discussions on these particular concepts in philosophy of revelation but he's really building on previous work on it on cognition before that it's brilliant well there's so many places to go so much to to read now and we're very thankful for the efforts of folks like you to provide this for many of us Anglophones who are now you know the recipients of the fruit of your labor by being able to read books like this in English so this book is available now I believe a Christian worldview by Herman Babak it's published by Crossway big thanks to them for getting on board and producing this book and translated and edited by our guest today Nathaniel gray suit on - James Eglinton and Corey Brock brothers thanks so much for joining us today it's been a pleasure it's always wonderful to speak with you and we thank you for your contribution thank you for having us yeah oh my god we'll have to talk soon especially to you James as we await this critical biography of Bhavik next year is there any I know book publishing is a goofy subject sometimes but there is there any estimate in it when in the year we might expect it yeah it should go to the printers and mate okay hope it'll be available in wonderful well will we look forward to that very much so and love to talk again at that time but until then you can find people online you can find cross way across way dot org you'll find information about various institutions and places linked to in the episode description and of course we're online it reformed for m dot org and get in touch with us through the contact page all of our contact info is available online if you'd like to get ahold of us but we encourage you to stay up to date in terms of what's going on in the website and future events and publications and whatnot we love hearing from you but until the next time we do want to thank everybody for listening and we hope you join us again on that next time on Christ the Center you

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Published: Thu Nov 28 2019