RTS Washington DC: Dr. Gray Sutanto "Bavinck's Christian Worldview"

thank you very much dr. Scott Fred it's a pleasure to be here with you at Artie SDC let me just put this on I do have handouts for you so that you could follow along with a lecture a few quotes there for you as well so that we can understand this particular book better again it's a privilege to be here discussing Christian worldview this is an important book by blobbing and I'm glad to have translated it with James Eglinton and Corey Brock bring it to the english-speaking world because it is really a significant text we're gonna spend some time this evening just talking about its context its significance its arguments why did bobbing like Christian worldview what was those arguments in this particular text and why is it significant for 21st century readers today alright so this are the three things we're gonna discuss in this particular evening lecture so let me just again introduce Herman bobbing once again because I think to understand why here a Christian worldview we need to know something about who he is and what are the motivations behind him writing this particular text Herman bobbing of course was born in 1854 to 1921 in the Netherlands hit his PhD at Leiden University and he was a professor at Kampf of seminary and then at the Free University of Amsterdam with Abraham Kuyper he was a kind of theological right-hand man to Abraham Kuyper but I think right now we're starting to recognize that Bowden was a genius in his own right and not just someone under kuipers shadow he's of course most famous in the english-speaking context here today for his Magisterial for volume reform dogmatix where we see not only a great and clear survey of Christian doctrine and the development of historical theology but also a really great systematic modern explanation articulation of reformed Christian doctrine what is perhaps less well known about Herman bobbing was that he was not just a theologian he was a very concerned public thinker and he also spent a lot of his time thinking very clearly and very important on the relationship between theology and the other academic disciplines the relationship between theology specifically to other areas of life he was concerned to articulate why a Christian worldview or a theologically Trinitarian perspective would be very helpful in addressing the promise of modern life the different fields of study within modern scholarship and so on and a widely so in his own context behind writing the Christian worldview there was an 1876 Higher Education Act in the Netherlands that specifically argued and this is of course not surprising in the modern era this was coming up this Higher Education Act specifically argued that theology no longer belong in the universities theology could be taught in the churches in the seminaries but a university would teach empirical science a university would teach religious history a university would teach religious studies but not specifically theology which presupposes that god of course reveals himself in the modern age that's more and more being doubted and therefore university studies a lot of the scholars and public theologians started to say and rights and push in public policy they began argue that theology shouldn't be in the universities and only be in the seminaries so Bobby was very very motivated therefore to rights against this particular movement and therefore to show that theology still belong in the university that theology should fill be taught as a science as an academic discipline as a proclamation of public knowledge just as much as the Natural Sciences just as much as religious history just as much as any other academic discipline theology belong to the University and therefore less this kind of context that motivated him therefore to discover and to tease out the relevance and the power and the significance of the Christian perspective to other areas of life but interestingly enough before we even get to the Christian worldview book ten years before here a Christian worldview he didn't actually emphasize a Christian worldview he emphasized instead a Calvinistic worldview and only as he progressed as if the illusion and only as he progressed through it the times that he move on from a Calvinistic worldview to a Christian worldview now we're at RTS here with a reformed seminary I'm not saying that bobbing became less reformed as he matured no this was a result of particular context and shifts within his own day that allowed him therefore and forced him to think more clearly about this and to move from emphasizing a Calvin school view to a Christian one but it's worth thinking about what he was saying about a Calvinistic worldview ten years before a Christian worldview was published this is a quote now that I have for you there in your handouts ten years before he wrote Christian worldview he wrote an article called the future of Calvinism and this is where he really teased out the idea that Calvinism is a whole life system that Calvinism in a very high period fashion tells you a distinct view of every area of life now this is very interesting let me just read not the quote for you the worst reform and Calvinistic bobbing says there however though cognate and meaning are by no means equivalent the former being more limited and less comprehensive than the latter reform expresses merely a religious and ecclesiastical distinction it is a purely theological conception the term Calvinism is of wider application and denotes a specific type in the political social and civil spheres it stands for the characteristic view of life and the world as a whole which is brought from the powerful mana the French reformer Calvinist is the name of a reformed Christian and so far as he reveals a specific character and a distinct physiognomies not merely in his church and theology but also in social and political life in science and arts notice what he was doing this here probably counterintuitive to some of us here today but he's making a strong distinction between being reformed and being being Calvinistic he is saying that that being a reformed just means a purely ecclesiastical distinction be reformed means to hold on to particular set of theological doctrines for your church as Dogma but Calvinism is more all-encompassing than that he is using of course Calvin and Geneva here in this KY period imagination he's suggesting here that if you're a Calvinist you're not satisfied with merely confessing a doctrine you're not satisfied merely confessing a theology you want to also show that reformed theology has implications for every area of life and therefore a distinct theological perspective a social and political life and it's science and an art Calvinism was a whole life system but of course bobbing would this ten years before Christian worldview and a B have a emphasized the Calvinistic will be there now why did he therefore shift from a Calvinistic worldview to a Christian worldview well ten years before he wrote the Christian worldview he was still very optimistic by the influence and persuasiveness of Christianity for the Dutch modern culture he saw that there are other of course less than ideal forms of Christianity gaining influence particularly in Roman Catholicism and liberalism but he thought that no matter what would happen no matter what kind of opposition's would arise against the Reformed Church it would still be less than ideal forms of Christianity but there are still forms of Christianity nonetheless so bombing thought what I needed to do at that point is just to emphasize that Calvinism is the best form of the most holistic form of the Christian perspective over against real makalah's ISM and liberalism and yes theological liberals might say that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead or that Jesus wasn't fully divine but theological liberalism would still say that Christianity was a good thing for the world that Christianity had a good moral influence and so bobbing thought I just needed to him besides Calvinism as the best form of Christianity over other forms of Christianity but that slowly began to change once we got to the turn to the 20th century turn to the 20th century he saw a more holistic form of unbelief on the rise he no longer saw his opponents therefore merely as Roman Catholics or Lutheran's right about this or theological liberalism he saw more thoroughgoing atheism on the rise taking hold in the younger and taking home the imagination of Dutch culture and so he started to see okay actually I needed to emphasize Christianity over against unbelief and not just Calvinism over against other forms of less-than-ideal Christianity and the specific figure he has in mind here is of course Nietzsche he thought that Nietzsche presented a thoroughgoing kneel ISM that needed therefore a thoroughgoing Christian worldview in response so he says this in the very beginning of our text Christian worldview he says here in the 20th century we no longer need God there is no place for him in our world let the old Herman and the force continue to worship God but we though the youth of Zarathustra of course referring to meet you know that God is dead and will not be resurrected the convergence of this rejection of Christianity and the inner discord that disturbs us in modern life gives occasions the question whether the two phenomena exists any causal relation again what are those two phenomena rejecting Christianity on the one hand and this feeling of this court in the modern life this feeling that there's no unity between you and how you live no unity between you and the world no more unity between you and something larger than you you and God there's this innate this court in modern life and he's saying here this is because he thinks there's a causal relationship between rejecting Christianity on the one hand and this modern discord so this is what motivates him to write Christian worldview in Christian rule of you is going to suggest that Christianity is distinct answers and gives a distinct reflection on epistemology how we know things metaphysics being what is truly existing and finally ethics Christianity will give good holistic perspectives on three of these areas so what was Bobbi's argument specifically if that was why he was motivated the right Christian or adultery analysis aim Wallis bombings arguments specifically I think we now tend to think about Christian worldview as a kind of armchair exercises there are a lot of criticisms against the Christian worldview as a kind of rationalistic comfortable exercise of the middle-class some people might say where you kind of just sit down in your office and you start to just construct a worldview put pen to paper and start to discuss what it might look like to be a Christian but bobbing interesting ly enough breaks that stereotype bobbing argues that to construct a Christian worldview yes you need to see the unity and holism behind all things but you have to start actually with sense perception look at what he says here in this particular passage before you at the bottom of that first page just a sense perception is the basis of all science the results of science are and remain the starting point of philosophy yet it is incorrect that philosophy should be no more than the summary of the results of the various sciences and that he should be set together only as the wheels of a clock wisdom is grounded on science but it's not limited to it it aims above science and seeks to press through to first principles and tries to trace the leading ideas in all the different disciplines really quickly here there are three important terms right then you just saw there's science there's philosophy and then there's wisdom science takes a look at the empirical phenomena the sense perceptible reality is that we encounter in everyday life so he says that that's where everyone has to start but if you're gonna do philosophy you're not going to be satisfied with empirical phenomena you're going to look behind empirical phenomena and start to therefore look at the connecting realities that all of these empirical phenomena reveal to you and wisdom therefore tries to see the unity behind all of the parts press through to above science to these first principles these foundational things that undergird all the empirical phenomena that we see so when we start with sense perception in wisdom we follow philosophy to these first principles and then he says here once we get to the first principles we see that there are ideas uniting ideas behind every discipline and it does this therefore above all is to seek for the final ground of all things and builds a worldview thereon then it is presuppose that the world rests in thought and that ideas control all things there is no wisdom other than that that which is in and out of the faith in the realm of unseen and eternal things it is built on the reality of ideas because it is the science of the idea and because it seeks the idea of the whole in the parts and of the general in the particular it possibly proceeds from the Christian faith which states that the world is grounded in wisdom in his whole and in all his parts he's saying here once we get to the first principles behind all the empirical phenomena that we see you're going to end up with unseen realities you're going to start to connect diverse parts into unity and you're going to start to connect particulars into general wholes you're going to see therefore that once we start with visible realities you're gonna end up with invisible realities because you're gonna see a wisdom behind every single discipline that we study now that's the general method of how to construct a Christian worldview according to bobbing let me just try to tease out his argument here as he applies it to two different areas first of all in epistemology and second of all in ethics first of all in epistemology here bobbing is gonna try to tease this out and apply to how we know what we know to the discipline of epistemology and when he's relating it to pistil mala ji we have to keep in mind again that he's writing in the 19th century and he's addressing very particularly 19th century problems epistemological problems and the most pervasive question that was wrestled with by pathologists in the 19th century is how subjects connect with objects how the ideas in our minds connect with physical reality outside of us because ideas are very different than physical reality isn't it consider this chair for example this black chair that we have here before us that all of you are sitting on when you take a look at this chair a lot of these 19th century epistemology were thinking your idea of the chair in your mind and the chair itself are very different things isn't it the idea in your mind well you can't touch it you can't feel it you can't taste it it's something outside space and time is something you firm Oh something that you can't actually tangibly feel right but physical objects like chairs they are tangible you're out there in space and time so you have an idea of the chair in your mind and then there's the chair itself but the idea is very different than the physical object so how in the world and you maybe some of you think well this just seems like silly talk but this is a really serious problem in the 19th century how in the world can mental images mental representations truly correspond with physical realities when mental ideas are nothing like physical objects that was a specific problem and so a lot of skepticism arose out of this because ideas have nothing to do with physical objects right now this was the problem that Bobby was trying to address here two general responses came up out of that to this particular issue the first response was a non-starter for bobbing but it was a serious option in the 19th century and it continues to be so I think today first option was a kind of materialism that says well we know chairs precisely because you and the chair you're both actually just reducible to physical objects your idea of the chair it's reducible to just an aggregate of chemical parts in your body telling you that there's a chair and therefore you're instinctively responding to it but for bobbing materialism can't be a good starting point because if you reduce ideas to physicality physicality kept communicating meaning or truth physicality can tell you that what you're getting at is actually meaningful and truthful and reliable yes it might tell you things about how you instinctively react to things outside of you but physical objects don't communicate reality there's on the other hand in the 19th century this kind of option what bobbing calls dynamism which basically says you can Mel chairs because all of your reducible to immaterial virtual things you went to chair are basically partakers of one pantheistic soup so to speak and the reason why you're in it you know the chairs because you both partake in this absolutes substance then you can't really feel there's this unifying pantheistic unity that make you in a chair correspond to one another and bobbing just says that just sounds like superstition that's basically a response to that but interestingly enough in his Christian worldview he basically suggests not that we reject the deliverance s of the materialist scientists or the so called superstitious dinah mists instead he says what if God has made a diversity of parts into the world and so we have material objects and immaterial objects and we shouldn't reduce the one to the other of course we're material objects we are psychosomatic holes as human beings and we were laid with the world and of course ideas are not reducible to physical objects because everything is related together by divine ideas but not into cyst monistic cosmic soup rather everything reveals the plan and wisdom and ideas of God even within matter and so bombing is therefore suggesting that creation is a diversity of parts were made up of bodies physical objects yes but also of ideas and spirits and souls and we should resist the tendency to reduce one thing to the other and he's saying here if you're a Christian this is what you're going to get you're going to get a holistic perspective that could take account of the materialist perspective and to get account of the dynamic perspective the immaterial is perspective you don't have to choose between the materialism or in materialism you can actually get both precisely because the universe is a unity and diversity it's an organism of diverse parts that are unified together according to the plan of God why because in God there's an absolute unity and diversity God is three and one there are three persons but one in essence in a simple God and that perfection in God is multiplied and diversity of parts in all of creation profoundly he was suggesting that if your Trinitarian you can make best sense of both materialism and materialism without rejecting the deliverances of either one let me now as well move on to the issue of ethics and I think this one particularly is haunting for those of us now in the 21st century living after two world wars bobbing is here going to be suggesting in the issue of ethics he's wrestling with the question in the 19th century what happens when we rule out transcendent ethical norms and to seek them out in history as a lot of the German philosophers were doing in that day again if your analyst if you're starting all with unbelief you're not gonna believe in God and therefore you're not gonna believe that goodness exists outside of you right now what are the consequences of that belief and here's bobbing suggestion bobbing suggestion is the moment you get rid of transcendent belief in God and therefore and the transcendent goodness that exists outside of you that norms your life you're gonna end up trying to ground that goodness trying to ground those ideals and something else outside of God because God doesn't exist the first starting point that you're gonna locate that in true beauty true goodness true value is therefore no longer in God but in yourself but not just in yourself in a particular people group because if God doesn't exist in goodness as an out there you're gonna try to find goodness as arising out of history as developing out of history and he's going to start to say well the moment you say that it's developing an arising out of history you have to answer the question which history Israelite history the Asian histories the European histories and bobbing is here saying if you read the German philosophers in 1904 what are they saying about where we can find true epical goodness in the German culture in the German people God isn't exist so we have to find goodness somewhere else where can we find goodness and who we are in this European nation so bombing observes this particular claim people are always saying in 1904 the German spirits shall heal the world but that is how the so-called pure historical view turns out to be the most biased construction of history if the theory or the system requires it then the primal human is a wild animal that the most uncivilized peoples are the representatives of the original human race then Jesus did not come from Israel but from the Aryans particularly haunting isn't it valving is there suggesting that if you get rid of belief in God and you locate the good in the historical and the history is your own people group you're gonna end up with a rabbit kind of fanatic racism that is profound and he was really observing that 1904 way before the rise of the Nazi regime now he therefore it suggests right after this his conclusion about that particular argument is that relativism appears then to be impartial as it wants to know of no fixed norms and claims to be concerned with and to speak of only the concrete the historical but it makes the relative itself into the absolutes and therefore exchange is true freedom for coercion real faith for superstition he's saying there that what the German philosophers of as they are doing is already idolizing themselves as the absolute standard and therefore adjudicating on the basis of that standard other people groups and saying oh this is less developed this is not yet the true good and the ideal we have exemplified what you can is we are the pinnacle of progressive evolution again profound and is easy therefore to see the relevance of this particular kind of argumentation to the 21st century what bothering is of course saying here is that get rid of Christianity and racism ensues in a perhaps racially tense climate perhaps in today's day we do well to retrieve some of babak's instincts here we need to locate goodness progress and truth not in ourselves but in a God that is outside of us and this God bothering is going to argue at the end of this lecture didn't just remain the transcendent ethical ideal the log us but rather he came in history yes goodness and truth and beauty is located in history but it's not located in our history but it's located in the history of the Incarnate God man Jesus Christ he shows us what is truly good he shows us what is truly ideal transcendence and imminence go together in Christ so why then therefore his bombings Christian worldview exemplary for us today I hope you're you've seen already in those brief sweeps of his argumentation in epistemology and in ethics that bombing is hauntingly preached in two particular movements even in our own day skepticism relativism and yes triumph allistic imperialism but bombing this Christian worldview is exemplary for us today because he reminds us of Christian habits of mind that we've probably largely forgotten in a 21st century perhaps so well there are three particular things I want to point out about why bother Christian worldview who remains exemplary for 21st century Christians first the obvious Christian worldview was patiently inductive in other words it took seriously as we saw the deliverances of the recent cutting-edge research he was wrestling with the deliverances of the naturalistic scientists he was wrestling with the sceptics the philosophers of his day he was wrestling with even the most superstitious of philosophers of his day the pantheism that arose in the 19th century he was wrestling with the German philosophers who tried to suggest that the German culture was the strongest and most of all spirit of his day in other words when bobbing was developing the Christian worldview he didn't just say well we have a Christian worldview and we therefore shouldn't read anything outside of our camp bobbing is suggesting that if you have a Christian Rovi you could be and about it and therefore as you're engaging with the most recent cutting-edge research you're going to start to see how Christianity could actually fill in gaps in particular person's philosophies it could offer a more holistic answer and a resolution to the questions of our day in other words therefore if you want to emulate bobbing you're gonna resist the temptation to just read bobbing you're gonna read 21st century cutting-edge research what are the enduring questions of our day what is the cutting-edge research of our day today recently saying and how does the Christian perspective address those particular questions of our day we're not wrestling with pantheism anymore we're not wrestling with the subject object economy anymore not as much anyway perhaps but there are enduring questions and new questions that we have to wrestle with in our own day that we have to therefore address as Christians it was patiently inductive and therefore be patient look at what people are saying and show how the Christian perspective helps what people are saying and secondly bothers Christian worldview deepens understanding rather than simplifies what do I mean by this car we'll be thinking perhaps simplifies rather than deepens it reduces complex thinkers into an ism or a worldview in order to do none save them what do I mean by this when we think about worldview thinking specifically we tend to simplify thinkers rather than deepen our understanding of thinkers right we say well you know constantly Carter there are advocates of modernism so we're not going to read content big hard we're just gonna say modernism bad so therefore kind of neat hard or bad that's a simplification of content big heart rather than a deepening of content a card but if you are as I said before patiently inductive we're gonna be patiently showing how Christianity could address the particular issues of Descartes and cons rather than reduce them to particular ISM same with maybe Foucault or terra da you might say they're just post modernists again that's a simplification rather than in deepening bonding resist that and all always brings the Christian worldview at the end of his treatises rather than at the beginning because he wants to wrestle with issues and each individual deeply and particularly before he shows how the Christian perspective helps them so therefore we're not just going to be reducing fingers to an ism we're gonna trace each thinker to their first principles show how they need help from the Christian perspective as well thirdly and finally we might say that Baba Christian worldview was confidently rather than impatiently Trinitarian in other words he did not begin with a deductive starting point in order to rule out other forms of unbelief immediately but rather patiently shows their one-sidedness like materialism and in materialism or relativism and absolutism and shows how the triune God fulfills a more holistic vision in other words he didn't immediately argue for the inability of Christianity but rather the inescapability of Christianity that's I think crucial and important he's gonna grant the unbeliever all the room that he needs and he's gonna follow the unbeliever to the arguments and the conclusions of the unbeliever he's gonna be confident about that because he knows no matter where the reasoning goes no matter where the research goes Christianity and the triune God are inescapable realities that we will encounter at the end of the day and we'll have to account for thank you you

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Published: Fri Jan 24 2020