In the latest episode of Christ the Center, we explore the fascinating intersection of science, faith, and philosophy through the life and contributions of Robert Boyle, the seventeenth-century chemist often dubbed the father of modern chemistry. Our guest, Dr. Edward B. Davis, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Messiah University, shares his extensive knowledge on Boyle’s experiments, the development of Boyle’s Law, and the broader implications of Boyle’s work on the relationship between emerging scientific disciplines and religious thought. We also delve into the historical context of Boyle’s era, his influence on the mechanical philosophy, and how his devout Anglican faith shaped his understanding of the natural world. Listen as we explore the complex relationship of how scientific inquiry and religious belief have related throughout history.

Links

• Edward B. Davis CV
• Edward B. Davis on ResearchGate
• Dr. Davis’ article, “Robert Boyle, the Bible, and Natural Philosophy“

Chapters

• 00:00:07 Introduction
• 00:02:00 Christianity and History of Science
• 00:12:45 The Philosophical and Methodological Awareness of Scientists
• 00:18:52 Gaining Humility through Historical Perspective
• 00:25:02 Robert Boyle in Historical Context
• 00:37:28 Boyle’s Scientific Pursuits
• 00:41:57 Robert Boyle and James Ussher
• 00:44:03 Natural Philosophy
• 00:51:33 Boyle’s Views Contrasted with Deism
• 00:54:24 Boyle’s Contributions
• 00:59:13 Dr. Davis’ Scholarship on Boyle
• 01:03:41 Researching Boyle
• 01:08:13 Reading Dr. Davis’ articles
• 01:10:21 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Edward B. Davis

Chad and Emily Van Dixhoorn speak about Gospel Shaped Marriage: Grace for Sinners to Love Like Saints (Crossway, 2022). While many books on marriage cover the same well-trod ground and even follow a common formula, this book is distinct. Drawing from Scripture and the writings of Puritan minister William Gouge, Augustine, and others, they provide a brief assessment of the biblical design for marriage and offer real-world advice on married life from a grace-filled perspective.

Chad Van Dixhoorn (PhD, Cambridge) is professor of church history at Westminster Theological Seminary and an OPC minister. He is the author of Confessing the Faith and God’s Ambassadors and editor of The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly (1643–1652).

Emily Van Dixhoorn (MAR, Westminster Theological Seminary) is a stay-at-home mom who leads and loves Bible studies and women’s retreats. Her first publication was a study guide to the book Confessing the Faith, a commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. Chad and Emily have five children.

Chapters

• 00:07 Introduction
• 01:38 Introducing Gospel-Shaped Marriage
• 09:08 What to Look for in a Spouse
• 15:53 Growing with Your Spouse
• 19:36 Marriage and the Fourfold State
• 28:28 The Early Morning Orange Juice Incident
• 32:07 Gouge and Biblical Submission
• 42:33 Serving Others Together
• 52:37 Hopes for the Books
• 55:01 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Chad Van Dixhoorn, Emily Van Dixhoorn

In 1904, the same year Herman Bavinck published Christian Worldview, Bavinck published a book titled Christelijke wetenschap (Christian Science) in which he commented on a movement to “build science . . . on the foundation of the Christian faith.” Cory Brock joins us to speak about this book and Bavinck’s views on the subject.

Dr. Cory C. Brock is assistant minister of St. Columba’s Free Church and part-time lecturer in theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary. He is the author of Orthodox yet Modern: Herman Bavinck’s Use of Friedrich Schleiermacher and co-author of Neo-Calvinism: A Theological Introduction.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 06:22 A Different Type of “Christian Science”
• 15:38 The Antithesis and Scientific Presuppositions
• 19:42 The Trinity and Creation
• 23:58 The Image of God and the Hope of Christian Science
• 31:12 Theology as Queen and Servant of Science
• 38:40 Science in the New Heavens and New Earth
• 43:14 Sin, Knowledge, and the Christian University
• 49:01 Non-Christians and Science
• 59:03 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Cory Brock, Ryan Noha

Roman Catholicism entered the mainstream of American national life the morning following the November 8, 1960 election when John F. Kennedy won and became the president. While it may seem strange to people who did not grow up in the era, Protestant voters were wary of a Roman Catholic potentially serving as president of the United States. Yet the Vatican may have been even more wary of “Americanism.” While it did not necessarily inhibit Catholics from being Catholic it also was a form of exceptionalism that potentially risked the expansion of Christendom as understood by Catholics.

In this episode, D. G. Hart revisits the arguments of his book, American Catholic: The Politics of Faith during the Cold War, explaining the historical reasons why the relationship between Roman Catholicism and Americanism changed in the 1960s and how it continued to develop in subsequent decades.

Darryl G. Hart is Distinguished Associate Professor of History at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. He is a host of the Paleo Protestant Pudcast with Korey Maas and Miles Smith as well as the Religious Nationalism podcast with Crawford Gribben.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:04:47 Roman Catholicism and Politics in 2021
• 00:07:34 Religion in the Public Square
• 00:11:14 The Literature on American Politics and Catholicism
• 00:16:07 Writing on Roman Catholicism as a Protestant
• 00:20:55 Catholicism and the Conservative Movement
• 00:27:19 Protestant Fears about a Catholic President in 1960
• 00:33:02 Catholic Antipathy toward Americanism
• 00:45:49 John Courtney Murray and Catholic Thinking on Church and State
• 00:56:29 Catholic American Public Intellectuals
• 01:01:56 The Limits of Americanism
• 01:08:56 Neo-Americanists and a Modern Faith
• 01:18:21 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Darryl G. Hart

Camden Bucey reviews Stewards of Eden: What Scripture Says About the Environment and Why It Matters (IVP Academic, 2020) by Dr. Sandra L. Richter, the Robert H. Gundry Chair of Biblical Studies at Westmont College. In this book, Dr. Richter addresses humanity’s role as stewards of creation—those entrusted to care for that which God has placed in their charge. In exploring this theme, Richter addresses issues such as the ethics of sustainable agriculture, the consumer’s role within the supply chain, and even mining practices and pollution in light of Scriptural examples and biblical-theological themes.

Richter speaks about the old covenant people of God and their relationship to the land as renters or lessees rather than landlords. She addressees the land grant aspects of their covenant relationship to Yahweh in Deuteronomy. She then moves to a discussion of their tithing and offering practices, developing their responsibilities and dependence upon the Lord. The Sabbath rest required in and of the land is also an indication of practices that encourage sustainable agriculture (Exod. 23:10–12; Lev. 25:4–7). This may add dimension to the Lord’s statement to the people that by abiding by these laws, they shall prolong their days in the land (Deut. 5:33; 30:18; 32:47). This statement may refer to the Lord’s allowance for them to remain. In other words, by obeying the Lord, he would not exile them. Even though that may be the primary dimension, perhaps there is a secondary dimension referring to the viability of the land itself. If these laws have practical application for sustainable agriculture, then the people may not be “exiled” because they destroyed the fruitfulness of the land (p. 24).

Chapter three is titled “The Domestic Creatures Entrusted to Adam.” The author enters into a discussion of the Sabbath and its role in organizing and in a sense, restricting, man’s task. The Sabbath prevents man from becoming totally absorbed in the task of subduing creation (p. 30). This is placed within a larger discussion of the supply chain and the ethical responsibilities of producers and consumers within that economy. Old Testament law established and required a close connection between the Israelites and their livestock for example, particularly when it came to slaughter. They were allowed to slaughter the animals they raised, but according to Leviticus 17, they were required to consider the animal’s life and bring the animal before a priest first. In support of this point, the author references Jacob Milgrom, who commented that the method of slaughter in ancient Israel ensured the animal would be rendered unconscious and die a swift, humane death. Animal death always confronted the Israelites, but they were never to take it lightly. Most people today never give a thought to the lives and deaths of their food. I would venture to say that many young people might not even know their food was alive in the first place.

Richter then turns to the wild animals that God has entrusted to Adam. Responsibilities include the protection of habitat for species. She points to Deut. 22:6–7 as warrant for protecting native species. It demonstrates the principle of preserving the means of life and thereby upholding sustainability. Even during wartime, the Israelites were to consider the long-term effects of their treatment of creation. For example, Deut. 20:19 does not permit the Israelites to cut down the trees of a city or region they are besieging. They were permitted to each of the trees but not to cut them down. Many of the fruit-bearing trees of the region (e.g. olive, date) take as many as twenty years to reach full production. Destroying the trees in warfare would have implications for generations to come. One thing I greatly appreciated is the author’s skill in studying biblical examples such as these while prompting further thought for our contemporary context.

Overall, this is an important contribution to the theological communities served by publishers such as IVP Academic. Readers who prefer books that connect the dots on practical matters will appreciate the many case studies and examples the author provides throughout its pages. Some readers may experience a knee-jerk reaction to various portions of the book. Perhaps that reveals a greater issue: that we may be taking our cues on creational stewardship from the talking points and news cycles of our political parties and media outlets of choice rather than from Scripture. Whether or not you agree with the author’s conclusions on specific matters, you may be provoked to think more deeply about your principia and why you hold your specific views on these issues, if you hold any at all.

Participants: Camden Bucey

Dr. Carl R. Trueman joins us to speak about his significant new book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Crossway), in which he addresses the factors undergirding modern culture’s obsession with identity. Sexual identity in particular has dominated public discourse since the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision in 2015. Tracing influential thought from Augustine to Marx and beyond, Trueman explains the historical and intellectual phenomenon of the modern conception selfhood. Trueman writes,

My aim is to explain how and why a certain notion of the self has come to dominate the culture of the West, why this self finds its most obvious manifestation in the transformation of sexual mores, and what the wider implications of this transformation are and may well be in the future.

Dr. Trueman is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College. He is an esteemed church historian and previously served as the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life at Princeton University. Trueman has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including The Creedal Imperative, Luther on the Christian Life, and Histories and Fallacies. Trueman is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carl Trueman

David VanDrunen speaks about his forthcoming book, Politics After Christendom (Zondervan Academic), reflecting upon the status and responsibilities of Christians in their contemporary pluralistic political communities. Dr. VanDrunen presents a biblical-theological model of political engagement and exploring themes such as race, religious liberty, justice, authority, and civil resistance.

David VanDrunen is Robert B. Strimple Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary California. He is the author and editor of several books, including Aquinas Among the Protestants, God’s Glory Alone: The Majestic Heart of Christian Faith and Life, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought, and Divine Covenants and Moral Order: A Biblical Theology of Natural Law.

Participants: Camden Bucey, David VanDrunen

Dr. Jordan J. Ballor, senior research fellow and director of publishing for the Acton Institute, joins us to speak about Abraham Kuyper’s public theology. Dr. Ballor is a general editor of Abraham Kuyper’s Collected Works on Public Theology published by Lexham Press. Kuyper was something of a polymath/renaissance man. Along with being an influential theologian and also a journalist, he served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands between 1901 and 1905. He established the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands, which upon its foundation became the second largest Reformed denomination in the country behind the state-supported Dutch Reformed Church.

Jordan J. Ballor (Dr. theol., University of Zurich; PhD, Calvin Theological Seminary) is a senior research fellow and director of publishing at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty. He is also a postdoctoral researcher in theology and economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as part of the “What Good Markets Are Good For” project. 

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy, Jordan Ballor

Shawn Ritenour, Professor of Economics at Grove City College, speaks about the basics of economics and the Christian principles upon which the study must be based. Dr. Ritenour is the author of Foundations of Economics: A Christian View (Wipf & Stock).

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Shawn Ritenour

James Eglinton, Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, and Cory Brock speak about Herman Bavinck’s book, Christian Worldview. Sutanto, Eglinton, and Brock together have translated and edited this work and Crossway has brought it to print for the first time in English.

In the book, Herman Bavinck deals with pastoral concerns that arose within a culture that exchanged modernistic certainty for an appreciation of the unrecognizable and unknowable. Apart from the triune God revealed in Scripture, the culture was grasping for meaning.

Christian Worldview marks a new phase in his theological development. He spent the 1880s and 90s in Kampen wherein his main dialogue partners were liberal Protestants or materialist atheists. In 1900, two years before Bavinck moved to the Free University in Amsterdam, Friedrich Nietzsche died and something of a cult of his ideas developed in the Netherlands. Bavinck sought to address these new theological concerns. He developed a wholistic vision of all things and a wholistic way of living. He situated science and wisdom under a broader category of “worldview.”

Nathaniel Gray Sutanto is a teaching elder at Covenant City Church in Jakarta, Indonesia, and an adjunct faculty member at Westminster Theological Seminary. He is the author of God and Knowledge: Herman Bavinck’s Theological Epistemology.

James Eglinton is the Meldrum Lecturer in Reformed Theology at New College, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Trinity and Organism, Herman Bavinck on Preaching and Preachers and Bavinck: A Critical Biography (forthcoming from Baker Academic).

Cory C. Brock serves as minister of young adults and college at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, and is an adjunct professor of theology at Belhaven University.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Cory Brock, James Eglinton, Jim Cassidy, Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

Jim Cassidy discusses two recent publications from Lexham Press. In Challenging the Spirit of Modernity: A Study of Groen van Prinsterer’s Unbelief and Revolution, Harry Van Dyke places Groen van Prinsterer’s foundational work into historical context. Van Prinsterer addressed the inherent tension between the church and secular society, and Van Dyke demonstrates how this work still speaks into the fractured relationship between religion and society. Abraham Kuyper’s Collected Works in Public Theology was created in partnership with the Abraham Kuyper Translation Society and the Acton Institute. It marks a historic moment in Kuyper studies.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy

Dr. Vern Poythress speaks about the hermeneutical issues of interpreting Genesis 1–3 and how biblical interpretation relates to contemporary scientific study.

Dr. Poythress is Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Biblical Interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary and the author of Interpreting Eden: A Guide to Faithfully Understanding and Reading Genesis 1–3 (Crossway). The publisher writes:

Christians have long discussed and debated the first three chapters of the Bible. How we interpret this crucial section of Scripture has massive implications for how we understand the rest of God’s Word and even history itself. In this important volume, biblical scholar Vern Poythress combines careful exegesis with theological acumen to illuminate the significance of Genesis 1–3. In doing so, he demonstrates the sound interpretive principles that lead to true understanding of the biblical text, while also exploring complex topics such as the nature of time, the proper role of science, interpretive literalism, and more.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy, Vern Poythress

Dr. Ransom Poythress has written Richard Dawkins in P&R Publishing’s Great Thinkers series. Poythress speaks about Richard Dawkins’s system of thought. Since the early 2000s, Dawkins has been an outspoken advocate of what has been termed the New Atheism. Poythress discusses Dawkins’s beliefs and advocates methods for approaching those who believe likewise. Dr. Poythress is assistant professor of biology at Houghton College in Houghton, New York.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Ransom Poythress

David F. Wells. The Courage to Be Protestant: Reformation Faith in Today’s World. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2017. Pp. xiv + 218. $22.00. In The Courage to Be Protestant, David F. Wells exposes the postmodern project as built upon the shifting sand of the autonomous self. He issues a clarion call for the evangelical church to stand against (certainly not upon) this foundation and instead build its house upon the only lasting foundation: the rock of the revelation of God in Scripture. This would require the church to recover the doctrines of the Reformation, which, far from being irrelevant, concretely answer the postmodern problem. Wells further observes that the emergence of the autonomous self paralleled a perceived cosmological change: man no longer viewed himself as existing in a moral world in which he found an objective reference and standard outside of himself, but in a psychological or therapeutic world in which subjectivity reigns and the self is liberated from all external constraints, whether God, the past, or religious authority. The evangelical movement has not remained unaffected by the spirit of the age, but has in many ways submitted itself to its dictates under the false guise of relevancy and reaching the culture. So what is the church to do? “It is time for us to recover our lost universe. What we need to do is to think, once again, with an entirely different set of connections. The connections are not primarily in reference to self, but to God. The connections that have to be reforged in the moral world we actually inhabit rather than the artificial world of appearances we have manufactured. It is about making connections into the world of reality that endures rather than the one that does not” (134). Herein is the comfort of the true gospel: no matter how disillusioned the world becomes in its therapeutic world and no matter how forceful the world pushes the autonomous self, it will always be, at bottom, a fantasy that will never correspond with reality. Man cannot refashion after his own imaginings the world God has created. The church must call postmoderns back to reality, to turn from self to God in faith and repentance. This is nothing less than the Great Commission: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. In the opening chapter, Wells surveys the history of the evangelical movement from the end of the Second World War to the present. The major weakness that has eroded evangelicalism over the span of seven generations has been “the decline in the role that biblical doctrine once played” (3). This decline, he argues, arose from a “diminished interest in the Word of God in the life of the church” (4). This is evident not so much in the forthright rejection of the Word, but deafness to its call not to be conformed to this world. The Word came to be heard not as challenging, but as “endorsing our way of life today, our cultural expectations, and our priorities” (4). Scripture was smuggled out of the moral world and into the new psychological world so that Christianity became “increasingly reduced to private, internal, therapeutic experience” (15). Consequently, the doctrinal foundation of postwar evangelicalism—which had agreed upon the essentials of the authority of inspired Scripture and the centrality and necessity of Christ’s substitutionary atonement—was compromised and soon crumbled. Out of the debris arose new experiments in how to “do church,” such as the marketing movement made infamous by Willow Creek that capitulated to consumerist modernity and the subsequent emergent movement that sought to recover the personal and relational dimensions in a postmodern form that elevated experience at the expense of objective doctrinal truth. Both were built upon sand and their collapse was inevitable. “Once the truth of Scripture lost its hold on the practice of evangelical faith, that faith lost its direction in the culture” (19). Wells calls the church away from the binding authority of culture (sola cultura) to that of the Word of God (sola Scriptura). Wells concludes the chapter by noting the parallel between the needed repairs today and what Protestant Reformers faced five hundred years ago. He begins with four differences. First, Luther inhabited a religious world, while today secularism has expelled religion from the public sphere and confined it to private life. Second, in the sixteenth century the reality of sin, which belongs to a moral world, was not in dispute as it is in today’s psychological world. In the past there was right and wrong, but today “we are comfortable or not, psychologically healthy or not, dysfunctional or not, but we are never sinners” (25). Third, the concept of salvation has migrated out of the religious world and into the therapeutic world. “It is no longer about right standing with God. Now it is about right standing with ourselves. And that is all it is about. It is about self-fulfillment, self-esteem, self-realization, and self-expression” (25). Fourth, Luther was able to identify his enemy as the power and teaching of the Catholic Church, but today the enemy is illusive and amorphous. The factors that shape the present culture are constantly changing: massive urbanization that creates anonymous cities, globalization that spawns profound relativism, capitalism that encourages a consumer mentality, technology that expands our natural powers but evacuates God from the world, and rationalization that idealizes human techniques. There are also substantial similarities. First, there is no confidence that Scripture is sufficient in and of itself to direct and sustain the Christian life. The Catholic Church supplemented Scripture with tradition and a magisterium, while postmoderns look to “psychology, cultural savvy, and business techniques to do the same kind of thing for us” (29). Second, while the Catholic church reduced the effect of sin to a sickness and postmoderns have gone further in rejecting any and all moral absolutes, neither conforms to Scripture, which teaches that man is dead in his sins. “[T]hen as now, dead people had to be given life. … God’s grace accomplished this transition then, and the same grace is accomplishing it today” (31). Third, the sufficiency of the death and resurrection of Christ had to be recovered in the Reformation as it does today. For neither Rome nor postmoderns can say with the apostle Paul, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). In chapter 2, Wells excavates the foundation of postmodernity: the autonomous self. This is the wholly free self severed from the outside world and loosed from all external constraints. It is embodied in the person who “rejects all orthodoxies on principle, and for whom the sole purpose in life is realizing the full potential of their individual sense. All morality, mystery, and meaning are to be found in the self, not in God” (35). One problem with this is that “in the absence of what is [objectively] true, all that remains are power and manipulation” (64). Chapter 3 explores two contrasting ways of thinking about God. “The one comes from Scripture and the other comes from our culture” (67). All people have an internal sense that God exists and a moral sense written on the fabric of their nature. For this reason, they are always in need of a center. We cannot change the center, but we can lose the “ability to see it, to recognize it, to bow before it, to reorder our lives in light of it, to do what we should do as people who live in the presence of this center, this Other, this triune, holy-loving God of the Bible” (69). In his sin, man as sought all of these things around a different center: the self. Yet the self has not thrived as the center. In fact, the consequence of this humanism has been the disintegration of the self. Why? “The self that has been made to bear the weight of being the center of all reality, the source of all our meaning, mystery, and morality, inevitably becomes empty and fragile. When God dies to us, we die to ourselves” (84). In addition, the constantly changing postmodern culture demands a constantly changing self—it is perpetually uprooted and homeless. Postmodern man remakes and projects himself a million times over as he seeks to answer the question, Who am I? “This question lies behind the many answers that we hear in contemporary anthropologies today: ‘I am my genes,’ ‘I am my past,’ ‘I am my sexual orientation,’ ‘I am my body,’ ‘I am what I do,’ ‘I am what I have,’ ‘I am what I know,’ and many others likes these. The emptiness of the self is signaled in every one of these identifications” (86). The way forward is to recover a Reformed worldview that believes in what Wells refers to as the “outside God.” Evangelicalism has fashioned faith in terms of the “inside God” who aids man in his private life in terms of self-realization and self-esteem. The church must find again the outside God who has revealed himself in Scripture and tells man who he is as made in his image. This “will reach into our lives, wrench them around, lift our vision, fill our hearts, makes us courageous for what is right, and over time leave behind its beautiful residue of Christ-like character” (103). In chapter 4 Wells argues that “what has made the psychological developments that have come into bloom in the self movement so powerful is that they have coincided with some deep cultural shifts that are outside the self. Indeed, the self movement has been the internal counterpart to the external changes that were happening as the world modernized. “Our internal life, with its disconnects, loss of roots, moral ambivalence, and psychological confusion, is really just a mirror of the external world we inhabit with all its change, anonymity, ruthless competition, and loss of transcendence” (111). The transition from a moral world to a psychological world has brought about four fundamental changes, which together tell the story of the emergence of the autonomous self. The first shift is from virtues, which are objective norms in a moral world that are enduring for all people, in all places, and in all times, to values, which represent the moral talk of a relativistic world. The second shift is from character, which is good or bad, to personality, which is attractive, forceful, or magnetic. “Here was a move out of the older moral world, where internal moral intentions are important, to a different world. This is a psychological world. This often entails a shift from what is important in itselfto what is important only as it appears to others” (117). The third shift is from nature, which is something common to all human beings (e.g., the image of God), to self, which is unique to each individual. One effect of this was the rise in personal rights and the decline in personal responsibility. “As we left behind the moral world, as we entered the world of the individual self, rights proliferated and responsibilities disappeared. … Private choice has a privileged position, and anything that limits that choice is a violation of individual freedom. It becomes an act of self-violation, an assault, a mutilation. These personal rights are then often hitched up to the language of the civil rights movement” (128). The fourth and final shift is from guilt, which is what we are in a moral world before God on a vertical level, to shame, which is what we feel subjectively in a psychological world before other people on a horizontal level. Accordingly, salvation has to do with becoming (or feeling) entirely shameless. Sin is no longer a moral breach, but a disease or emotional deficit, and the self is believed to contain its own healing mechanisms. In light of these shifts, Wells argues that the church needs to recover the forgotten moral world. “We live in the postmodern world not just as postmoderns, consumed by the present age, but as those who are of eternity and whose eyes are on the ‘age to come.’ We live not simply as those born again, but as those who belong in God’s world, those who are learning to think their thoughts after him” (142). In the fifth chapter, Wells observes that the West has brought upon itself a strange contradiction, which he labels the “American paradox.” On the one hand, it has “built an outward world of great magnificence.” On the other hand, this new world is “inhospitable to the human spirit.” He continues, “[I]n this world, this artificial world, we have all become psychological vagrants. We are the homeless. We have no place to stay” (145). It is this paradox that Wells credits for the rise of spirituality in the West, which he explores in this chapter along with its biblical alternative. Postmodern spirituality is “private, not public, individualistic, not absolute. It is about what I perceive, about what works for me, not about what anyone else should believe” (152). What is needed is a proper spirituality that this from above, not one that begins from below. “One starts with God and reaches into sinful life whereas the other starts in human consciousness and tries to reach ‘above’ to make connections in the divine” (145). The spirituality from “above” lives in a moral world, while the spirituality from “below” lives in a psychological world. The latter is “lethal to biblical Christianity. That is why the biggest enigma we face today is the fact that its chief enablers are evangelical churches, especially those who are seeker-sensitive or emergent who, for different reasons, are selling spirituality disconnected from biblical truth” (147). True spirituality in which heaven juts into the life of the believer, a life that is hidden with Christ in God, has been lost to the inner voice that is impotent and deceptive. “In the earthly kind of spirituality, we speak because there is no one who has spoken to us. … In the biblical spirituality, by contrast, there is address. We are summoned by the Word of God. We stand before the God of that Word. He speaks” (160-61). Having begun the book with a brief historical survey of the evangelical movement, the final chapter is a wake-up call to return to its doctrinal roots in the Protestant Reformation. The church is irrelevant unless it stands against the culture and people find in it something different than businessmen and psychologists. “Churches that actually do influence the culture—here is the paradox—are those that distance themselves from it in their internal life. … If the church is to be truly successful, it must be unlike anything else we find in life” (191). Such a church will bear three marks: the Word of God is preached, the sacraments are rightly administered, and discipline is practiced. Preaching, for one, must demonstrate the sufficiency of Scripture for God’s redemptive work and for our life in this world. The biblical text must be rightly divided and the people need to be addressed in their world and needs. “What we really need is a way to understand our lives. We need to understand how to live in God’s world on his terms. We need not only comfort but also a worldview. … It ought to be a preacher’s goal to be able, bit by bit, Sunday by Sunday, to show what it means to have God’s Word in this world” (199). In many ways this book will aid preachers to do just that. This is a timely volume for our day in which objective truth has been eviscerated and all we have been left with are autonomous selves vying for power and control in a therapeutic world. May the church, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, be found faithful in carrying out its prophetic mission to the world, calling all people everywhere to repent and believe. May the church not be found shaking hands with the spirit of the age, but wrestling against it in the whole armor of God. The gates of hell shall not prevail. Semper reformanda.

Bill Dennison speaks about Karl Marx, leading us through his biography, influences, and his intellectual effects upon social and political history. Dr. Dennison is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Covenant College and the author of Karl Marx in P&R Publishing’s Great Thinkers series.

Participants: Bill Dennison, Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington

Here are some clear cut commands—not therapeutic suggestions. Paul is not only explicit about the standard to which Christians are called, he is also explicit about why we are to obey that standard.

Participants: Jim Cassidy, Mark A. Winder, Mark Jenkins

In this episode, we answer questions from our listeners and discuss a few things we’ve been contemplating recently. We discuss a proposed reading list for the works of Cornelius Van Til, worshiping on Sunday, Evangelicals and Catholics Together, and African worldview and theology. It’s a wide-ranging conversation and one we hope you enjoy.

Dissertations/Theses Mentioned

• Leonardo de Chirico, Evangelical theological perspectives on post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism
• Trevor H. G. Smith, Christian Theology Emerging from the Akan Single-Tiered Unitive Perspective on Reality

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy

This week on Theology Simply Profound, Rob and Bob discuss the riot that place in Ephesus. From Acts 19, we see the conflict between this present evil age and the age which is to come. Among other things, we talk about whether the Christian is to try to make the same kind of impact on our cities as Paul and his company did in Ephesus. What should our posture be in this world and what should we expect from the world that we live within?

Participants: Rob McKenzie, Robert Tarullo

Dan Ragusa speaks about Herman Bavinck’s Trinitarian theology and its implications for a revelational epistemology and worldview. Bavinck argues for an organic connection between general and special revelation, which results in a “triniformity” in both.

Links

• The Bavinck Review
• Messiah’s Reformed Fellowship (URCNA), Manhattan

Participants: Camden Bucey, Dan Ragusa

In June 2011, we spoke with Bill Dennison, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Covenant College, about Transformationalism and Christian Higher Education. In that episode, we touched upon his article, “Dutch Neo-Calvinism and the Roots for Transformation: An Introductory Essay” from the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 42/2 (June 1999). We only had a few minutes to discuss the article in episode 180, and so today, we pick up where we left off. Dennison contends that while Dutch neo-Calvinism sought to transform culture in response to the threat of the Enlightenment, they stood upon a foundation of Enlightenment principles to do it. Many of the themes discussed in this episode were developed and applied in our twelve-part series on Christ and Culture, in which Dennison debated Darryl Hart, Nelson Kloosterman, and Doug Wilson.

Previous Episodes with Bill Dennison

• In Defense of the Eschaton
• Transformationalism and Christian Higher Education
• Machen and Bultmann at Marburg
• Paul’s Two-Age Construction and Apologetics

Participants: Bill Dennison, Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy

What do we do when the government tells us that we must turn in people who are of a certain ethnic group so that they might be killed? Do we adhere to scripture that tells us to be obedient to the governing authorities or do we adhere to scripture that tells us that we should not murder? Are we sinning regardless or can we choose. In the 1940’s the Ten Boom family along with others help hide the Jews who were being hunted by the Nazi army for extinction. They lied, they stole and the disobeyed direct orders from their occupied government. This wasn’t just in Holland, but many German Christians also hid Jews to protect them. Were they right or was this a lack of faith?

Participants: Rob McKenzie, Robert Tarullo

In his book Created & Creating (IVP Academic), William Edgar offers a rich biblical theology contending that Christians must engage in culture. Dr. Edgar is Professor of Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. He joins us to speak about this wonderful book.

Its thesis is simple: the cultural mandate, declared at the dawn of human history, and reiterated through the different episodes of redemptive history, culminating in Jesus’ Great Commission, is the central calling for humanity.

Previous Episodes featuring William Edgar

• The History and Legacy of the Huguenots
• How Did Evil Come Into the World?
• Francis Schaeffer’s Christian Spirituality

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, William Edgar

Marcus Mininger is Associate Professor in New Testament Studies at Mid-America Reformed Seminary in Dyer, Indiana. Today he joins us to speak about his article, “Eschatology and Protology, Christ and Culture: Marriage as a Biblical Test-Case” MAJT 25 (2014): 117–140. The substance of this article was first delivered as a lecture at Mid-America’s Alumni Conference on April 9, 2014. The relationship between Christ and culture has elicited many different responses within the Reformed tradition. Mininger offers an insightful way to consider the matter through typology and a redemptive-historical consideration of creation.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Marcus Mininger

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, Lane G. Tipton

We introduce two new books from InterVarsity Press: Created and Creating: A Biblical Theology of Culture by William Edgar and Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition: A Systematic Introduction by Craig Bartholomew.

A Special Offer from IVP

Through the end of October 2016, visit ivpress.com and use the code 40556 for 40% off on volumes in the Reformation Commentary on Scripture series. If you call IVP at (800) 843-9487, you can also receive $2 flat rate shipping. The commentary on Romans 9–16 edited by Philip Krey and Peter Krey is forthcoming.

The Reformation Commentary on Scripture (RCS) gives you access to a wealth of Reformation-era commentary on Scripture that is largely unknown and for the most part unavailable in English. While the giants of the era, such as Luther and Calvin, will be presented, you will also be introduced to a host of figures with whom you might be unfamiliar, yet who contributed to the Reformation in important ways. In doing so, the RCS demonstrates both the unity and diversity of thought that characterized this vital period in the history of the Church.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Rob McKenzie, Robert Tarullo

Reformed Media Review turn their attention beyond our typical discussions about theological books to speak about podcasts. Reformed Forum has been producing podcasts since 2008. But we’re not merely producers, we love to listen to podcasts ourselves. We look at our podcast clients and speak about some of our favorite programs, including 99% Invisible and Radiolab. While many of our favorites are not theological in nature, they often discuss matters of interest to Reformed theologians. Listen to our fun conversation, and be sure to tell us your favorite podcasts by commenting.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Jonathan Brack

Tertullian is famous for saying, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” (Apologeticus, Chapter 50). The persecution of Christians isn’t an objectively good thing, yet in God’s providence, he can and does use evil for good (Gen 50:19–20). I was saddened by the U. S. Supreme Court’s decision to legalize homosexual marriage nationally, but we should interpret these events in light of God’s omnipotence, wisdom, and ultimate desire to bring glory to himself. Government endorsement of homosexual marriage is not pleasing to the Lord, but that does not preclude him from using it to build his Church and advance his kingdom. When the United States government makes decisions clearly opposed to both special and general revelation, we are reminded that Christians are a pilgrim people. In his common grace, the Lord has given the civil government as a blessing to the world to restrain evil and promote justice (cf. Gen 4:14–16; Rom 13:1–7). However, God’s common grace—including its institutions—ultimately serve the purposes of his special grace. God has delayed final judgment and given indiscriminate non-salvific blessing because he has more people to save. He has elected people whom the Spirit has yet to apply Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Therefore, this present age is a mixture of redeemed and unredeemed, of covenant keepers and covenant breakers, of those in Adam and those in Christ. The Church exists in this present evil age as a body of believers whom have been called out of darkness into Christ’s marvelous light (1 Pet 2:9). The Church does not find its identity in the present evil age. As those found in Christ, we are a pilgrim people sojourning unto our homeland in the age-to-come, the New Heavens and New Earth. Indeed, “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:20). We must recognize eschatological tension here. On the one hand, Christians have been redeemed and presently are seated with Christ in the heavenly places (Eph 2:6). We have come to the heavenly Mt. Zion (Heb 12:18–24). Yet on the other hand, a Sabbath rest remains for the people of God (Heb 4:8). Let us therefore strive to enter that rest (Heb 4:11). The U. S. Supreme Court’s decision will not cause the world to end immediately. But even when the world that now exists (2 Pet 3:7) does end, it will end with the glorious and climactic victory of Jesus Christ.

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified (Romans 8:28–30).

Remember that this glorious image of Christ is formed in us first through suffering. We are conformed to Christ’s suffering so that we too might share in his subsequent glories (Phil 2:5–11; 3:10–11). Let us not be surprised or defeated when God’s law is challenged by our governments. This is to be expected. Indeed, it is but one providential way through which God purifies his Church and testifies to the world of his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

Vern Poythress joins us to speak about his book Redeeming Mathematics: A God-Centered Approach. Dr. Poythress explains how the Triune God of the Bible is the foundation for mathematics by arguing that the harmony of abstract mathematical truths, the physical world of things, and the personal world of our thinking depends on the existence of the Christian God.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Vern Poythress

In March Intervarsity Press plans to release a book by John Walton with a contribution from N. T. Wright titled, The Lost World of Adam and Eve. Wright’s excursus follows Walton’s chapter titled, “Paul’s Use of Adam Is More Interested in the Effect of Sin on the Cosmos Than in the Effect of Sin on Humanity and Has Nothing to Say About Human Origins.” Wright’s piece is called, “Excursus on Paul’s Use of Adam.” However, from the Intervarsity website it’s difficult to tell if Wright wrote only the Excursus or chapter nineteen as well. Nevertheless, as a foretaste of what is to come next month I want to briefly review chapter two in Wright’s book of collected essays, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues (New York, NY: Harper One, 2014). Wright begins chapter two, “Do We Need a Historical Adam?,” by observing two common theological drivers in today’s discussion. The first is the presupposition that if people let go of an historical Adam, “they are letting go of the authority of Scripture” (26–27). Wright contends that this is a sociocultural bugaboo which works in tandem with an inaccurate view of how biblical authority actually functions. In other words, if you read Wright as critiquing what is described as “the American Inerrancy Tradition” (or the AIC, cf. Five Views of Inerrancy, Zondervan, 2013) coupled with Dispensationalism,” Wright’s favorite American target, then you have identified the people to whom he is referring. The second theological driver is a favorite of Wright. It is his unceasing refrain that the Bible is not about how we get saved (27). For Wright, this is a particularly important issue for Reformed theologians who view Adam as a federal head. However, according to Wright, by reading Paul as saying that we are either in Adam condemned or in Christ and saved is to misread the Biblical text or, at the very least, to read too narrowly. Having dismissed these theological hang-ups Wright’s own construction concerning the historical Adam goes something like this. Adam’s sin meant not only that he died but that he no longer reigned over the world (34). To put it tersely, Adam’s death meant that he had lost God’s image, which when translated is to say that he had lost his vocation or calling in the world. Thus, God’s plan for kingdom expansion had been derailed. God no longer had a priestly vice-regent. However, in Jesus God’s plan was set right again. Jesus fulfilled his vocation and is enthroned as the reigning king. He is now where the last Adam was supposed to be (35). So, what does this have to do with an historical Adam? Well, according to Wright, Israel too is in Adam and Israel bears the solution to the problem of God’s derailed kingdom. To be specific, the link between Israel and the historical Adam is found in God’s choosing of Israel. [Now, pay attention, because here is the move.] In the same way that God chose Israel from among the nations to engage in a demanding vocation, which they failed to fulfill, perhaps, speculates Wright, in like manner God chose Adam and Eve from among the early hominids to represent the whole human race in order to take God’s kingdom forward into the world. Here is Wright’s quote:

And it leads to my proposal: that just as God chose Israel from the rest of humankind for a special, strange, demanding vocation, so perhaps what Genesis is telling us is that God chose one pair from the rest of early hominids for a special, strange, demanding vocation. This pair (call them Adam and Eve if you like) were to be representatives of the whole human race, the ones in whom God’s purpose to make the whole world a place of delight and joy and order, eventually colonizing the whole creation, was to be taken forward. God the creator put into their hands the fragile task of being image bearers. If they fail, they will bring the whole purpose for the wider creation, including all the nonchosen hominids, down with them. They are supposed to be the life bringers, and if they fail in their task the death that is already endemic in the world as it is will engulf them as well. (emphasis his, 37–38)

Well, what can we say to Professor Wright? Perhaps we might suggest what he already knows; his construction is unique and wholly speculative. And perhaps we might even send Professor Wright to our brother in the Lord, Benjamin B. Warfield. Now, this brother of ours, like Wright, surely had a concern for science. Who would deny it? But listen to what he says about the unity of the human race. He wrote,

The assertion of the unity of the human race is imbedded in the very structure of the Biblical narrative. The Biblical account of the origin of man (Genesis 1:26–28) is an account of his origination in a single pair, who constituted humanity in its germ, and from whose fruitfulness and multiplication all the earth has been replenished. Therefore the first man was called Adam, Man, and the first woman, Eve, “because she was the mother of all living” (Gen 3:20). (emphasis mine, “On the Antiquity and Unity of the Human Race,” quoted from Biblical and Theological Studies [P&R, 1968, p. 259])

And again,

[It] would be truer to say that the whole doctrinal structure of the Bible account of redemption is founded on its assumption that the race of man is one organic whole, and may be dealt with as such. It is because all are one in Adam that in the matter of sin there is no difference…. The unity of the old man in Adam is the postulate of the unity of the new man in Christ. (261)

Yes, we need an historical Adam. But we need more than an Adam who was historical. We, like Warfield before us, need to affirm the authority of Scripture by taking our stand on what it says about the unity of the human race in Adam that we might also take seriously what it says about the One Man, Jesus Christ.

I just received a copy of Vern Poythress’ latest book Redeeming Mathematics: A God-Centered Approach (Crossway). I’m looking forward to reading this book—not because it will help me with any homework—but because it addresses the foundations of reality itself. Even among theologians and apologists with otherwise strong doctrines of the antithesis in epistemology, numbers and counting have occupied supposedly neutral territory. Philosophers have long debated the nature of mathematics perhaps because it presents a unique challenge to historically dominant philosophical models. Dr. Poythress is eminently qualified to write a book that strikes at the heart of these issues. He holds a PhD in New Testament as well as a PhD in Mathematics from Harvard University. He also is a thoroughgoing Van Tilian who thinks deeply about the necessary preconditions for reality—which of course includes mathematics. This book is the next in an ongoing series. For several years, Dr. Poythress has been examining different fields of study serving the overarching purpose of demonstrating the foundational role of the Triune God of Scripture to ground all things. We hope to speak with Dr. Poythress about this in future, adding another conversation to the many we have already been pleased to share:

• Redeeming Philosophy
• Chance and the Sovereignty of God
• Logic: A God-Centered Approach
• Redeeming Sociology
• A God-Centered Approach to Language
• Redeeming Science
• Harmonizing the Gospels
• Inerrancy and Worldview

Dr. Vern Poythress comes to the program today to speak about his book, Redeeming Philosophy. In today’s discussion, Dr. Poythress helps us examine the roots of Western philosophy, uncover some of its limitations, and find answers to our questions in dependence upon God’s word. Dr. Poythress is the author of a number of books, including Redeeming Science, In the Beginning Was the Word, Redeeming Sociology, and Logic. He has also spoken on Christ the Center episodes 52, 98, 188, 235, 332, and 356, and on Philosophy for Theologians episode 20.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Vern Poythress

Dr. David Garner comes to the program to speak about the topic of his new booklet, “How Can I Know For Sure?” from the Christian Answers to Hard Questions Series, published by P&R Publishing. Church members and especially college students are breathing in the air of popular postmodernism, and the question of certainty requires an answer. Dr. Garner argues that to find answers we must look to the Bible as God’s authoritative word for mankind. Dr. Garner is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, PA.

Participants: A. Craig Troxel, Camden Bucey, David Garner, Jared Oliphint

Dr. Vern S. Poythress, Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, PA, speaks about his new book, Chance and the Sovereignty of God: A God-Centered Approach to Probability and Random Events (Crossway). The fifth in a series of “God-Centered Approaches,” Chance and the Sovereignty of God explores the mathematics of probability as well as the relationship of God’s sovereignty to chance events. Today, Dr. Poythress explains how Christians can approach chance in practical events as well as in academic study, whether scientific or mathematical. Dr. Poythress is the author of a number of books, including Redeeming Science, In the Beginning Was the Word, Redeeming Sociology, and Logic. He has also spoken on Christ the Center episodes 52, 98, 188, and 235, and on Philosophy for Theologians episode 20.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Jeff Waddington, Vern Poythress

Dr. James N. Anderson speaks about his recent book What’s Your Worldview?: An Interactive Approach to Life’s Big Questions, published by Crossway. The book takes the reader through important theological and philosophical questions in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style, leading to a label and description of the reader’s own worldview. Dr. Anderson explains the setup of the book and a number of ways it might be used, and also discusses the idea of a worldview and what important elements constitute one. Dr. Anderson is associate professor of theology and philosophy at the Charlotte campus of Reformed Theological Seminary. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, writing about paradox in Christian theology. That study became his book, Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Nature, and Epistemic Status, which was the subject of a previous episode of Christ the Center.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, James Anderson, Jared Oliphint

History

• Ancient Greek History – Free Online Video – Free iTunes Audio – Free iTunes Video – Course Materials – Donald Kagan, Yale
• Ancient Israel – Free Online Video & Resources – Free Online Video – Daniel Fleming, NYU
• The Roman World – Free iTunes Video – Rhiannon Evans, La Trobe University
• Early Modern England: Politics, Religion & Society under the Tudors and Stuarts – Free Online Video – Free iTunes Video – Free iTunes Audio – Course Materials – Keith E. Wrightson, Yale
• Early Modern Germany – Free iTunes Audio – David Wetzel, UC Berkeley
• European Civilization from Renaissance to Present – Free iTunes Audio – Carla Hesse, UC Berkeley
• European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present –Free Online Video – Free iTunes Video – Free Online Audio – Thomas Laqueur, UC Berkeley
• Rethinking the Black Liberation Movement – Free Online Video – Abdul Alkalimat, University of Illinois

Philosophy

• Philosophy for Beginners – Free iTunes Video – Free Online Video & Audio – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
• A Romp Through the Philosophy of Mind – Free iTunes Audio –Free Online Audio – Marianne Talbot, Oxford
• Ancient and Medieval Philosophy – Free iTunes Video – Free Online Video – David O’Connor, Notre Dame
• Philosophy of Religion – Free iTunes Audio – Free Audio Online – T. J. Mawson, Oxford

Political Science, International Relations, and Law

• History of Political Theory – Free iTunes Audio – Wendy Brown, UC Berkeley
• The Moral Foundations of Politics – Free Online Video – Free iTunes Video – Free iTunes Audio – Course Materials – Ian Shapiro, Yale

Michael Burdett has a great review of Alain de Botton’s “School of Life” and introduction to the growing movement known as “transhumanism” in The Marginalia Review of Books. Transhumanism is a movement that seeks to overcome the limitations of the present human condition. Primarily through scientific and technological advances, proponents of transhumanism believe they may transcend the present human condition and perhaps achieve immortality. Transhumanism shares much with its older cousin, secular humanism. Burdett notes that both espouse,

the central values of reason and science, human progress, and the value of our present life. Both focus on the flourishing of humanity and the improvement of the human condition through rational and scientific thinking. But transhumanism then takes these shared humanist ideals and advocates the enhancement of the human species through biotechnology and information technology, moving beyond the utilization of these technologies for therapeutic purposes alone.

In other words, transhumanism is akin to a sci-fi version of the Babel narrative in Genesis 11. Though no less a desire to “make a name for ourselves” (Gen 11:4), it may be friendlier than other forms of human autonomy. As a sort of religious belief in its own right, critics have noted that transhumanism may be a kinder, gentler form of atheism. Atheism 2.0, exemplified by figures such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris was harsh and often vitriolic toward all forms of religious belief. But transhumanism as the next iteration of atheism is open to spiritual questions of transcendence, transformation, and even glorification, though in a qualified sense. As a theologian, apologist, and technophile, this movement connects several of my interests. Many years ago, I was introduced to transhumanism through the research and writings of Ray Kurzweil, a leading futurist. Kurzweil has worked for decades in the field of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. He has identified the exponential rate of increase in machine intelligence and foresees a future “singularity” in which the rate of increase will eventually increase so rapidly, it will seem instantaneous (think Terminator 2). It may sound far-fetched, but Kurzweil’s beliefs are plausible enough and his predictions accurate enough to fuel this burgeoning movement. There are plenty of websites, a magazine, and documentaries (e.g. Transcendent Man and Plug and Pray) featuring aspects of the transhumanist movement. It’s a fascinating topic that I suspect we may address in a future episode of Christ the Center.

Daniel Schrock reviews Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation by James K. A. Smith. In this first book of what is planned as a three-book set, Smith describes the liturgical structures that influence and shape our thoughts and affections. For Smith, malls, stadiums, and universities are all venues that express a form of cultural liturgy. Listen as Daniel Schrock, pastor of Third Reformed Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, PA, describes and interacts with this book.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Daniel Schrock

Jonathan Brack reviews Popologetics: Popular Culture in Christian Perspective by Ted Turnau, a book on apologetics in the midst of pop culture.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jonathan Brack

We welcome William Edgar, Professor of Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, PA, to the program to reflect upon Francis Schaeffer’s life and thought. Dr. Edgar focuses on Schaeffer’s Christian spirituality in Schaeffer on the Christian Life: Countercultural Spirituality, a unique and welcome addition to the literature on Schaeffer. Having spent time with Schaeffer at L’Abri in Switzerland and having been deeply influenced by Schaeffer’s ministry, Dr. Edgar’s book brings a warm tone to a rich and insightful treatment of the Christian life.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Jim Cassidy, William Edgar

In a recent blog post, Michael Horton shares a number of helpful points about the mindset of unbelief. In what presents itself as objectivity, the unbeliever actually brings a host of baggage with him or her. This is especially the case in the hard sciences, where supposedly neutral thinkers entertain new claims in an open and objective fashion. He writes,

Scientists disagree about all sorts of things: from matters as metaphysical as string theory to details over genetic mutation. In fact, as Michael Polanyi argued years ago, scientists belong to a concrete, historical community of interpretation. They too have lives, histories, and experiences within which they interpret reality.

Polanyi is useful here, but he’s not the only one. You could also reference Thomas Kuhn or even Michel Foucault at this point. People often fail to recognize their fundamental commitments—their presuppostions. These presuppositions guide, shape, and even control one’s thoughts about truth claims and the world around them. They’re individual and pervasive. We might expect that this wide variety of epistemic contexts would lead to a equally wide variety of approaches to the “big questions” of hard science. Yet this is precisely what has not happened in the history of scientific thought. There has been and continues to be a strong resistance to major paradigm shifts. Horton writes,

We all remember the ill-fated pronouncements of the church in relation to Copernicus and Galileo, but it was scientists who made the biggest fuss at least initially over the new cosmology. Not unlike religious communities, the scientific community resists massive paradigm shifts. That’s good, because we’d be starting over every day if it were otherwise. It takes a lot of anomalies to overthrow a well-established paradigm. But it happens.

The reigning paradigm does what it can to snuff out competing paradigms. As Horton comments, this tendency can be a good thing, but it can also allow a form of scientific fundamentalism to masquerade as open inquiry. Horton continues:

Of course, none of us is neutral. We all come to the evidence with big assumptions about reality. The Holy Spirit alone can bring conversion, but he does so through his Word. And he also uses supporting arguments and evidence that reveal too many devastating anomalies—indeed contradictions—that our reigning worldview can’t accommodate. One thing is for certain: to say that miracles do not happen because they cannot happen is as vicious a circle as any argument can be. In fact, it’s not an argument at all, but mere assertion.

A paradigm can prevent someone from accepting a truth claim if for no other reason than he has no working interpretive grid for that claim. Peter Berger developed his notion of “plausibility structures” along these lines. The Christian may speak to an unbeliever about miracles, but a naturalistic paradigm (worldview, episteme, etc.) has no way of incorporating the existence of miracles—ergo, they cannot exist. But the challenge to the gospel is deeper than getting such a person to admit the presence of miracles. Indeed, it’s even greater than proving the historicity of Christ’s resurrection. The Christian apologist must not only overcome a paradigm, he or she must also offer the correct “paradigm” in its place. Lane Tipton’s article, “Resurrection, Proof, and Presuppositionalism: Acts 17:30-31” in Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics argues exegetically that denotation and connotation can never be separated. In other words, it’s not enough to argue the case that something happened; the biblical apologist must also present the biblical understanding of what it means. This is critical for the apologist seeking to be faithful to Scripture, and it is precisely what Paul did at the Areopagus. Consider the following: the Stoicist can acknowledge the resurrection of Christ; it’s simply an unusual occurence, an “atomic swerve.” He has a plausibility structure that allows for resurrections. But such a “belief” in Christ’s resurrection is not a saving belief. The task of apologetics is greater than proving facts. It goes to the very heart of the gospel and ultimately seeks to defend that gospel on the only foundation it can: the self-authenticating, self-interpreting, Word of God.

Nathan Sasser, Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Pastors College for Sovereign Grace Ministries and PhD student at the University of South Carolina, comes on the program to talk about worldview, epistemology, culture, politics, eschatology, and the upcoming Clash conference.

Participants: Jared Oliphint, Nathan Sasser

Dr. Vern Poythress, Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary, speaks about his book Inerrancy and Worldview: Answering Challenges to the Bible (Crossway). In this important book, Dr. Poythress provides a worldview-based defense of inerrancy by demonstrating the influence various worldviews have on views of the Bible.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Vern Poythress

Jeremiah W. Montgomery is the pastor of Resurrection Orthodox Presbyterian Church in State College, Pennsylvania. Rev. Montgomery joins us to speak about writing Christian fiction. Montgomery has written The Dark Faith, which is the first book in The Dark Harvest trilogy and published by P&R Publishing. In light of this book, Montgomery shares his insights into the fantasy genre and its usefulness for the exploration and communication of Christian themes.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Jeremiah Montgomery, Jim Cassidy

I recently came across a promotional poster for Greek Intervarsity, a part of the well-known Intervarsity Christian Fellowship campus ministry. As a fraternity member myself, I appreciate the focus of this organization greatly. I would have benefited from a Christian influence “on the inside.” Yet there are a few things worth noting regarding the underlying message of this well-intentioned promo. In accord with other Reformed thinkers, I’m slightly perplexed by the evangelical preoccupation with influencing the wider culture through the presidency and presidential elections. Evangelicals place too much emphasis on the presidential cycle to the exclusion of baser concerns. But even more significant is that the premise of this message is flawed from a logical standpoint. It may very well be the case that the salvation of a potential future president during his or her fraternity/sorority days might exclude the candidate from future activities necessary to the attainment of the presidency in the first place. The presidency is not decided on elections alone. One must have certain connections with those with political power, influence, and money. These connections don’t just happen randomly. We should not be so naïve as to think the mode in which these connections are formed would always be appropriate for Christians. Transformation from within is a good idea so long as transformation is always defined as the regeneration of souls by the Holy Spirit. However, transformationalism is more often cast in terms of socio-political and cultural influence, and it frequently comes at the expense of biblical polity. I’m not convinced that “ministry activities” within fraternity and sorority houses are the greatest idea, though I would be happy to be convinced otherwise. This is one person’s story, but in my experience, I needed to excise myself from my surrounding influences when the Lord called me to repentance. I kept my closest friends, but in general, the ethos of the Greek environment was a great detriment to my spiritual walk. Toward the end of my time on campus, several young men were meeting for bible study in my fraternity house, but without the necessary ecclesiological emphasis that would engender a relationship with a local church, the study was misguided at best. Indeed, I had some friends that would attend services on Sunday morning because the girl sleeping over the night before insisted. There was no accountability, shepherding, discipline, or call to repentance. Though it may have a potentially useful role in such an endeavor, a campus ministry is not a suitable replacement for the local church. This is not an indictment of campus ministries, especially those that want to focus on the Greek system. I wish someone would have had more of this focus while I was an undergraduate Greek student. But I also desire that as a Church, we engage in this needed ministry critically and with an appropriate view of our goals and the means by which we seek to achieve them. * One small matter of statistical accuracy—you can’t make out the statistical reference in the image, but my fraternity was founded in 1856, 21 years before the supposed founding of social fraternities. That 68% might be a tad bit lower.

Hart’s response to Jim Cassidy’s excellent post that addresses the consistency of Vos/Van Til/Kline has fueled some brief thoughts that I hope are helpful in clarifying some of the issues. Hart begins by stating,

I have puzzled often about the lack of support in Vossian circles for two-kingdom theology. Many Vossians I know — and I consider myself to be one — find the spirituality of the church agreeable but balk at 2k. Why 2k is distinguished from the spirituality of the church is anyone’s guess, or why Geerhardus Vos’ distinction between this age and the age to come do not put a kabosh on tranformationalism [sic] is another of those brain-teasers you see in the back pages of World magazine (NOT!).

If we rephrase what is said above, a few things become clear. First, Hart sees no inconsistency between 2K (in the line of himself, Van Drunen, etc.) and Vos. Second, Hart reveals that he has only two categories for “kingdom” thinking: 2K and transformationalism. It should go without saying that parts of 2K are compatible with Vos and other parts are not, so a bit of nuance is called for when speaking on the matter of consistency/inconsistency. And what if 2K and transformationalism were absolutely not the only two choices in this matter? What if there was an option that didn’t hermetically seal off one kingdom from another, yet didn’t see Christian engagement outside the church as an automatic attempt at transforming culture? Hart goes on:

Whether Jim believes 2kers disagree with this point is not entirely clear. But he should be aware of how important covenant theology is to both David VanDrunen (see his piece in the Strimple festschrift) and Mike Horton (see his dogmatics) at least in part because they studied with Kline. In other words, 2k is not opposed to Jim’s point about the covenantal context of creation. I suspect that most 2kers affirm it, especially of those who studied with Kline.

Instead of engaging Cassidy’s specific points, Hart opts to emphasize that 2K proponents do understand covenant theology in general (not as it particularly relates to Cassidy’s point) as important, listing a couple examples of their work for support of this point. He also notes that 2K proponents studied under Kline, so the reader is left to assume that studying under Kline means that Kline’s students both understand and apply his teaching correctly. However, that kind of argument doesn’t work on even a mere observational level. There are plenty of students who studied under Kline who see quite a few inconsistencies between Kline and 2K. Finally, Hart says:

First, where does the Bible require believers when interacting in the public square to engage in apologetics? When Joseph, Daniel, Jesus, and Paul engaged pagan rulers, did they first explain the covenantal context of creation before carrying out orders or answering questions? Second, the public square may presume a covenantal context, but do we need to go to first principles for everything we do with unbelievers in our neighborhoods and communities? Do we need to explain the covenant or creation before we explain to city council the need for a new stop light at a busy intersection? Do we need to appeal to the creator of the universe before opposing a pay raise for public school teachers? Do we even need to give a covenantal account of the universe before declaring war on Iraq?

The objection is that there is no Scriptural support that requires believers to engage the covenantal antithesis in actual conversation, interaction, and operation. Hart reads Cassidy as if he is claiming that the covenantal antithesis must be stated whenever a believer interacts outside the church context, but this confuses what Cassidy and others are saying. Cassidy’s (and other critics of 2k) point is to state what principles lie behind what may or may not be said in actual conversation. Nowhere does Cassidy (or Van Til) state that we must point out the epistemological principles to the unbeliever in every situation. So who is Hart objecting to in the above two paragraphs? Cassidy never claimed such requirements for believers, nor did he claim we need to explain first principles before doing mundane tasks like requesting a new stop light. No, the straw man Hart portrays exists elsewhere, not in Cassidy’s post. Hart assumes an application from his post that Cassidy does not himself state. The closest one could come to such a claim is in reading the following from his post:

There is no safe territory upon which the unbeliever can stand and do right by one kingdom, but not right by another. In every kingdom he is wrong. Even his own cultural endeavors testify against him. And if we, as Christians, do not (lovingly!) point that out to him, who will?

Cassidy is not, I believe, saying we need to point out the difference in every cultural engagement. What he sought to demonstrate were the principles behind these cultural engagements that will hopefully inform conversations with unbelievers, equipping us with an awareness of the reality of who the unbeliever is and how consistent/inconsistent he or she is with his or her simultaneous drive for autonomy and knowledge of the true God.

Today we welcome Dr. David Skeel and James Sweet to speak about recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that impact the church. Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC was a recent case that raised several important questions. Oyez.org asks, “Does the ministerial exception, which prohibits most employment-related lawsuits against religious organizations by employees performing religious functions, apply to a teacher at a religious elementary school who teaches the full secular curriculum, but also teaches daily religion classes, is a commissioned minister, and regularly leads students in prayer and worship?” Our guests discuss the decision and explain its significance for Christians. David Skeel is the S. Samuel Arsht Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Pennsylvania and an elder at Tenth Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Philadelphia. He has written an op-ed on the case for the Wall Street Journal. James Sweet is counsel and Director of Special Projects for Westminster Theological Seminary and former chairman of Drinker, Biddle, and Reath.

Participants: Camden Bucey, David Skeel, James Sweet

In this episode, Darryl G. Hart speaks about his latest book From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism. Hart argues that evangelicals ought to reclaim the conservatism of decades past as he delves into a number of historical and cultural trends in this engaging discussion.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Darryl G. Hart

Jared Oliphint and Camden Bucey speak about a number of topics in today’s open discussion, but the discussion gravitated toward theologizing in today’s connected culture. With the proliferation of social media, particularly Twitter, theology seems to be growing and spreading in new ways. Jared and Camden speak about these changing dynamics—particularly the role of polemics.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint