The EICC is addressing the church’s urgent need to retain and equip the next generation of Christian cultural leaders to be able to formulate, articulate and credibly defend the truth, freedom, and goodness of the gospel of Jesus Christ – the Christian faith – in the midst of the intellectual and practical challenges of our day. We’re doing this through the delivery of targeted High Impact Training programs, which are held at the new EICC Centre for Reformational Culture, and which are heavily subsidized by EICC scholarship support.
You can help by becoming an EICC Builder! EICC Builders are those individuals and families whose shared concern for this urgent need has led them to pray for the work as well as to give on a monthly basis. This stable base of recurring support is essential, and we have set a five-year goal to add +500 new EICC Builders. The monthly scholarship involved for each delegate on a High Impact Training program is: ½ 1
Scholarship $45.00
Scholarship $85.00
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Scholarships $175.00
Scholarships $250.00
These are guidelines only, gifts of any amount are gratefully accepted.
Becoming a Builder is easy: simply tear off and complete the attached donor card and mail it back to us in the postage-paid envelope. Your tax receipt will be issued and mailed to you at year end. Or donate online at www.ezrainstitute.ca
Partner with us… become a monthly EICC Builder today! EZRA INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIANITY
PO Box 9, STN Main, Grimsby, ON L3M 4G1
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Editor
RYAN ERAS EICC Founder
JOSEPH BOOT
2 Editorial Ryan Eras 4
Recovering the Christian Mind Joe Boot
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The Eschatological Arc of Christian Apologetics Andrew Sandlin
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Whose Rainbow? Peter Jones
29 Life is Religion: Remembering H. Evan Runner John Hultink 37
Book Review: Francis A. Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible Jeremy W. Johnston
Jubilee is provided without cost to all those who request it. Cover design by Barbara L. Vasconcelos. Jubilee is the tri-annual publication of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity (EICC), a registered charitable Christian organization. The opinions expressed in Jubilee do not necessarily reflect the views of the EICC. Jubilee provides a forum for views in accord with a relevant, active, historic Christianity, though those views may on occasion differ somewhat from the EICC’s and from each other. The EICC depends on the contribution of its readers, and all gifts over $10 will be tax receipted. Permission to reprint granted on written request only. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement Number: PM42112023 Return all mail undeliverable to: EICC, PO Box 9, STN Main, Grimsby, ON L3M 4G1, www.ezrainstitute.ca
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
To receive Jubilee please visit, www.ezrainstitute.ca/jubilee Or write to us: EICC, PO Box 9, STN Main, Grimsby, ON L3M 4G1 jubilee@ezrainstitute.ca
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JUBILEE EDITORIAL: ISSUE 25
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RYAN ERAS Ryan Eras is Director of Content and Publishing at the Ezra Institute, responsible for developing and producing the EICC’s print and web content, and serves as managing editor for Ezra Press and its imprints, and editor for the Ezra Institute’s journal, Jubilee. He holds a BA in History from Tyndale University, and an MI in Library and Information Science from the University of Toronto. Ryan has served in several educational and support roles, providing bibliographic research and critical editorial assistance for several popular and academic publications. Ryan and his wife Rachel have four children.
The theme of this issue is Cultural Theology, a term whose meaning isn’t immediately clear. Just imagine the time we had trying to settle on a cover design that captured that idea. To talk coherently about ‘cultural theology’ you first need clear definitions for the two words that make up that term, and a sense of the relationship between them. What is culture? Culture, as we’ve said elsewhere, is most readily understood as the concrete, public expression of the deepest values, priorities, and loves of a society. In other words, it is “applied belief,” or “externalized religion.” Life is religion, as Evan Runner observed. These religious beliefs express themselves in a society’s laws, education system, arts and entertainment, political organizations, and more. For instance, we punish with our strictest laws those things that we find most intolerable; we nurture, through education, those values that we are most interested in passing on to the next generation; we depict – and consume – in our art and entertainment those ideas, settings, personalities and relationships that are most important to us. When it comes to building culture, the question is not whether, but which? The activity of culturebuilding is inescapable; it is hardwired into our DNA. In her book The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy L. Sayers begins by considering the question “what is man?” and she starts at the Bible’s account of the creation of man. We are told that man is created in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), and Sayers writes that we have man, the image-bearer, in front of us, but at this point in the biblical narrative, we are not actually told much about what God is like. If we bear the image of God, what exactly is it that we’re reflecting? The one thing we do know about God at this point in world history is that God creates, and that what he creates is good. “The characteristic common to God and man,” writes Sayers, “is apparently that: the desire and ability to make things.” It only remains to be seen what kind of culture we will make. The creation mandate – also called the cultural mandate – is God’s command to Adam and Eve, and all human beings since then, to get to the
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business of making – figure out how this world has been made, and work within those created realities to develop their potential (cf. Gen. 1:28). Just as the things that God makes are “very good” because God is good (Gen. 1:31; Mark 10:18; 1 Tim. 4:4), so the things that we make are reflective of our character – what we value, love, and worship. These loves will be our guiding principles for building culture. If we love God, that love will show itself not only in our church life and personal devotions, but in our political activity, our entertainment, our purchasing habits, educational choices, and much else besides. Cultural theology, then, is the discipline of understanding what God’s Word says about culture, and applying that understanding to those various cultural spheres. Cultural theology is an approach that aims to get to the root of all human activity by examining the god concept at work in a particular cultural sphere. Because we live in a self-consciously individualistic age, the divide is becoming more clear between what Peter Jones calls One-ism and Two-ism – worship of the Creator, and worship of the creature. As I write this, we’re less than a month away from the Ezra Institute’s inaugural H. Evan Runner International Academy for Cultural Leadership. After participating in several different in-depth, intensive training programs over the years, we’ve seen the growth and lasting change that results from the opportunity to be together with likeminded people, sitting in tutorial with godly and experienced teachers. Providentially, this 16,000 sq. foot facility, the Centre for Reformational Culture, set on 24 acres of prime Niagara Escarpment, is sending us a very clear message for what to do with the materials God has given us. The Centre, renovated to accommodate 30-40 delegates plus 4-6 faculty at a time for multi-day programs, is especially well suited to delivering the type of sustained and impactful learning experience necessary to truly begin to address and formulate a foundational theology of culture. The Centre is a warm, comfortable, intimate environment where delegates can fellowship, worEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Editorial: Issue 25
ship, pray, interact with their peers and faculty, and sit under the tutelage of world-class faithful scholars and qualified lay instructors. The teaching at the Runner Academy is delivered in lecture format, and in tutorials around the fireplace, over meals, during walks on the property… in short, in methods suited to meaningfully shaping and impacting the hearts and minds of future leaders. To plant in hearts and minds what it means to hold a truly scriptural life and worldview and to begin to see what is involved in formulating, articulating and credibly defending and advancing a God-honoring vision for all of life, and to lead others in that same task. This issue of Jubilee is meant to be a focused introduction to some of the themes and subjects that we explore in greater depth at the Runner Academy. They are rooted in the eternal truths of God’s Word, and by virtue of that, they have something to say to the particular challenges and struggles in the church and culture today. IN THIS ISSUE
Joe Boot discusses a program for recovering a soup-to-nuts approach to thinking as a Christian in every area – not just about traditionally Christian things like devotions and apologetics. If the world belongs to Christ (and it does), then we
have a responsibility to bring our thinking in line with His Word. Andrew Sandlin unpacks the relationship between apologetics – the defense of the faith – and eschatology – questions about the goal and end of history. An understanding of the full gospel of Jesus, including His plans for history, has an impact on our approach to apologetics because it acknowledges the full scope of both the depravity of man, and the restoration of all things in Jesus Christ. Peter Jones squarely addresses the rainbow flag: a symbol most commonly associated with LGBTQ+ movements today, but with an older heritage in God’s faithfulness to His covenant. In posing the question ‘whose rainbow?’ we are actually asking questions about ultimate authority for the meaning and determination of life. John Hultink, who was a student of H. Evan Runner, remembers the life, testimony and influence of his teacher, and gives some insight into the reasons why he was a fitting namesake for the Runner Academy. In this issue’s book review, Jeremy Johnston introduces Francis Schaeffer’s classic work Art and the Bible.
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JOSEPH BOOT JOE BOOT is the founder and President of the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity and the founding pastor of Westminster Chapel in Toronto. Before this, he served with Ravi Zacharias as an apologist in the UK and Canada, working for five years as Canadian director of RZIM. Joe earned his Ph.D. in Christian Intellectual Thought from Whitefield Theological Seminary, Florida. His apologetic works have been published in Europe and in North America and include Searching for Truth, Why I Still Believe and How Then Shall We Answer. His most noted contribution to Christian thought, The Mission of God, is a systematic work of cultural theology exploring the biblical worldview as it relates to the Christian’s mission in the world. Joe serves as Senior Fellow for the cultural and apologetics think-tank truthXchange in Southern California, and as Senior Fellow of cultural philosophy for the California based Centre for Cultural Leadership. Joe lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenny, and their three children, Naomi, Hannah, and Isaac.
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The Christian
Mind
THE COLLAPSE OF THE CHRISTIAN MIND
SOME YEARS AGO I was speaking in
California in the Santa Cruz area on the issue of Christian apologetics. My subject was the centrality of Christ in the task of engaging the culture. After my lecture, I was taken to lunch by a very pleasant young couple. One of the first questions they asked me with a smile was how long I had been an apolo-jedi. I appreciated the joke, but as the conversation went on it highlighted a typical misperception of the real challenge confronting Christians today and how we are to face it. I am convinced that the urgent task before God’s people in our time is the recovery of a Christian mind – most especially for those in ecclesiastical and cultural leadership – not just the training of an elite group of Christian Jedi to defend key features of biblical doctrine against traditional objections. This is because the greatest problem of our era is not a lack of arguments or evidences; at a much deeper level, we have experienced the near total collapse of the Christian world-andlife-view in the culture and tragically, often in the church. We do not need better evangelism techniques or smarter apologists. What we need is a wholesale recovery, and in some instances a fresh discovery, of what it means to think Christianly and therefore to be Christian. The questions challenging believers in the West today are qualitatively different from those we faced even twenty-five years ago, because there is no longer a mutual understanding of reality that can undergird a common discourse; the old shared foundations have eroded beneath us. Consequently, it is increasingly unusual to find oneself interrogated by unbelievers about the nature or possibility of miracles, the reliability of the New Testament text, the character of sin,
whether good works are enough to be acceptable to God, or whether or not God is triune (unless speaking with a Muslim). Most of these questions don’t even occur to your average millennial or Z generation young adult because such questions already presuppose an underlying broadly Christian worldview and biblical literacy. For the first time in centuries we typically find ourselves in discussion with ordinary people where our most basic religious presuppositions about the nature of reality are antithetical to one another. This situation affects the kinds of questions we each deem relevant to addressing the existential and theoretical problems of life. The pervasiveness of anti-Christian worldviews in every aspect of cultural life has had a profound impact on the contemporary church. A few cultural prophets saw this emerging problem back in the 1960s. One such individual was Harry Blamires, whose 1963 book, The Christian Mind, had a deep impact on me. He opens this short classic by recognizing the commonplace fact that the thinking of modern people has been secularized. But critically, he goes on to point out that this disaster is not the primary challenge for Christians: Tragic as this is, it would not be so desperately tragic had the Christian mind held out against the secular drift. But unfortunately, the Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history…there is no longer a Christian mind. There is still of course a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian spirituality.… As a spiritual being, in prayer and meditation, [the Christian] strives to cultivate a dimension of life unexplored by the non-Christian. But as a thinking being, the modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion – its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Recovering The Christian Mind
the religious view of life, the view which…relates all problems – social, political, cultural – to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God’s supremacy…1 Blamires’ assessment was right on point. And given that many professing Christians today don’t even accept a biblical morality in the manner Blamires understood in the ‘60s, it is clearly no longer enough to speak of equipping Christians to answer a few isolated questions about their ‘personal faith,’ as though all they require is a couple of seminars on dealing with the main objections and all shall be well. Instead, Christians need renewal and reformation in terms of a comprehensive scriptural view of reality, while learning to understand and respond to the underlying religious motives shaping our culture. We need this so that we will be enabled to reformulate the questions of our time by explaining the root and meaning of the unbeliever’s own queries and difficulties – both real and imagined. This can only be done from the standpoint of a consistently Christian world-andlife-view, as Blamires understood: There is something before the Christian dialogue, and that is the Christian mind – a mind trained, informed, equipped to handle data of secular controversy within a framework of reference which is constructed of Christian presuppositions. The Christian mind is the prerequisite of Christian thinking. And Christian thinking is the prerequisite of Christian action.2 In the lives of our children, family and friends who have wandered from orthodox faith and rejected or sidelined biblical truth, adopting unscriptural worldviews and lifestyles, today’s believers have witnessed firsthand that the Christian mind, and thus the Christian way of life, is collapsing around us. The band-aid solutions on offer to our hemorrhaging faith are not up to the task. We need a radical, root and branch response to the crisis of our time. This requires the development of a Christian mind, a total Christian view of reality and the defense of the Christian philosophy of life as rooted in the scriptures – a cultural apologetic capable of confronting systematic unbelief, with systematic belief. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
By this I do not mean an elitist intellectualizing of the faith – a new evangelical scholasticism, but rather relearning to think and live by the Word of God in regard to every aspect of life: from human identity and sexuality, to marriage and family, law and politics, economics and the arts, science, business, media, education, and all things besides. THINKING CHRISTIANLY
To some, this kind of programmatic agenda might seem a bit alarmist, overly radical or simply unnecessary. As Roy Clouser framed the question of the Christian skeptical of worldview thinking, “While one can articulate a Christian view of God, a Christian view of how to stand in right relation to God, and a Christian view of ethics, why is it necessary to articulate a distinctly Christian view of everything?”3 This seems like a fair question. After all, isn’t our faith centred in the hope of heaven, an afterlife and “For the first time deliverance from an evil world? Why do we in centuries we need a distinctly Christian view of everytypically find thing, since on this view everything is not ourselves in really very important? And besides, isn’t it only in the areas of morality and spiritudiscussion with ality that Christians and non-Christians ordinary people disagree? Isn’t the vast majority of daily life where our most and thought basically value-neutral? Many Christians will agree that we certainly should think about ‘Christian’ things and themes, we should be ‘spiritual people,’ but surely there isn’t a distinctly Christian view of everything? How could there be? Why should there be?
basic religious presuppositions about the nature of reality are antithetical to one another.”
These questions themselves belie the collapse of a Christian mind. Beyond the unbiblical diminishing of the goodness and value of the totality of creation – a latent dualism which divides reality into an upper and lower storey (the upper level being superior and good, the lower lesser or evil) – a fundamental confusion in these objections is equating thinking Christianly with thinking about Christian things. Blamires writes: To think Christianly is to accept all things with the mind as related, directly or SUMMER 2019
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indirectly, to man’s eternal destiny as the redeemed and chosen child of God. You can think Christianly or you can think secularly about the most sacred things – the sacrament of the altar for example. Likewise you can think Christianly or you can think secularly about the most mundane things.… There is nothing in our experience, however trivial, worldly, or even evil, which cannot be thought about Christianly.… The fact that many people are writing about things Christian is in itself irrelevant to the question whether there is still a Christian mind.4
To establish this point biblically is important. How do we know there is such a thing as a Christian view of everything? One critical expression that is repeated in several places in Scripture is that “fear of the Lord is the foundation of true knowledge” (NLT) or, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (HCSB: Ps. 11:10; Prov. 1:7; 9:10, 15:33). The word translated foundation or beginning in this passage literally means the key or principal part. Jesus makes the same “Clearly, what Paul point when rebuking erroneous and misleading interpretations of the law is saying here is in Luke 11:52, “Woe to you experts in that knowing God the law! You have taken away the key of through Christ affects knowledge!” The key to knowledge is the everything, including knowledge of God, especially as revealed ‘all knowledge’, not in the scriptures.
some artificially restricted ‘spiritual knowledge.’.”
The apostle Paul therefore directs us to Christ Himself as the one who alone gives true understanding: “by Him you were enriched in everything – in all speech and all knowledge” (1 Cor. 1:5). Clearly, what Paul is saying here is that knowing God through Christ affects everything, including ‘all knowledge’, not some artificially restricted ‘spiritual knowledge.’ Then a little later in 1 Corinthians 3:20-23 Paul discusses the godless wisdom of the world that rejects the Word of God, “The Lord knows that the reasonings of the wise are meaningless…everything is yours and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.” We must not spiritualize this text away into a pious sentiment. It clearly means that every area of knowledge, in fact every
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area of life in all creation, belongs to those who belong to Christ. Truth and life are not captive to the meaningless reasonings of unbelievers. On the contrary, they know neither truth nor life as they should. The implication of this is that, although unbelievers know many things partially, their knowledge of all things suffers from a critical lack. Roy Clouser writes, “there is some kind of mistake with respect to every kind of truth and knowledge that can’t be avoided if one does not know God but can be avoided if one does know God.”5 What I am not saying here is that if you want a distinctly Christian view of quantum mechanics, the mating habits of the common cockroach, or the intricacies of human physiology, you need only look up the relevant text in Scripture. Clearly the Bible does not give us exhaustive or encyclopaedic knowledge of all things and disciplines – it does not intend to. Part of the task given to human beings at the beginning of creation was to observe, discover and name created entities and their functions, bringing out the potential of creation by learning about God’s laws for all aspects of created reality in light of His Word. A distinctly Christian view of all things therefore centres, not on finding a prooftext for thermodynamics or heart disease in the Bible, but on recognising Christ as the religious foundation (key) to all knowledge and taking full account of what the scriptures say about God, his creation, his law and his work in history in all our observations, thinking, theorizing and living. To reject the triune God and the creation, fall, redemption, consummation paradigm of the scriptures is to make a tragic and perilous religious mistake that sets aside the key (principle part) of all true knowledge, misdirecting our total understanding. THINKING UNCHRISTIANLY
Those who reject Christ and the revelation of His Word obviously do not have a Christian view of things. This does not make them neutral. It does not mean they do not have a religious foundation for their thinking, something that takes the place of the living God. The unbeliever’s ‘explainer’ for reality will always posit something that ‘just is,’ that is ‘self-existent,’ something that does Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Recovering The Christian Mind
not depend on anything else for its being. Everybody either believes in the living God or will give something else, something created, the status of divinity that belongs only to God, which the Bible calls idolatry. It is this foundation that impacts all knowledge and all truth.
Everything is made dependent on the physical/ biological facet of reality and so every other facet is diminished in status as less important or less real. The importance of the physical/biological aspect of creation is therefore overestimated relative to everything that is said to be dependent on it.
Over the centuries, unbelievers have tried to give divine status to everything from planetary bodies, to emperors or states, to numbers and ideas, to logic or human reason, to matter, energy and much else besides. Clouser’s explanation of this is instructive:
By contrast, the truly Christian mind will regard everything as equally real, equally dependent and equally subject to God and his law-Word, so that no one part of the cosmos explains or generates all the rest. The Christian mind has a nonreductionist worldview because it does not reduce the universe in part or in whole to one or more aspects of the cosmos, or even to God. Scripture unequivocally asserts the distinction between the Creator and creation, meaning the dependency of all creation directly on God, “A Christian making every facet of creation equally real, should say, these with no part reduced in its importance or are all wrong. They role relative to the rest. This is what marks are all examples out the basic framework of a truly Chrisof regarding part tian mind. This framework establishes that there is a Christian view of everything. of creation as the
Those who don’t see the divine as the biblical transcendent creator will make it some part of the world instead. And regarding anything in the world as selfexistent will slant, guide and control the (deeper) content of every concept…. The name given to this way of explaining, the way that identifies what part of the world all the rest depends on, is “reduction.” A reductionist explanation is one that claims to have found the part of the world that everything else depends on…. A Christian should say, these are all wrong. They are all examples of regarding part of creation as the creator. The ultimate explainer is no part of creation at all. Every one of these divinity candidates is real, but they all depend on God.… The Christian would adopt a systematically non-reductionist approach to every sort of theory, every sort of knowledge, and every concept of everything.6
The attempt to replace God and worship the creature rather than the creator (cf. Rom. 1) can therefore take on remarkable and deceptive forms, so that man’s creative idolatry can appear very sophisticated. These idols then shape people’s thinking and through them, culture. One common example is when people take the physical and biological aspects of reality (material reality) and use them to explain everything else. The physical and biological are said to be truly real and everything else, non-physical properties like logical thought, beauty, love, number, are either illusory or just by-products of what is physical (what philosophers call epiphenomenal). Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
For example, it means that the immaterial aspects of creation (spirit, thought, emotion, ideals of beauty) are not higher, more real, or more important than the body. The earth is not less important than heaven, nor are spiritual exercises more holy than doing the gardening. In other words, a Christian mind would destroy all artificial divisions of sacred and secular. Law and politics, the body and human sexuality, art and culture, marriage and family are as important and as subject to God and his law-word as church services, prayer and personal devotions.
creator. The ultimate explainer is no part of creation at all.”
This may seem quite abstract, but the real-world consequences of reductionistic unbelieving thought are devastating when consistently applied. Atheistic materialism helped give us both Nazism and Communism that took millions of lives in the twentieth century. The loss of a Christian mind will always have destructive consequences. THE NONSENSE MACHINE
This brings us to the present predicament of Western culture. As with the example of material SUMMER 2019
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reductionism, it is also possible to try and make the linguistic aspect (sign mode) of creation, in concert with our thinking, into a divinity concept that determines reality. This particular reduction marks our present culture and constitutes one of the imposing idols of our time. We live in very strange days in the West. If ever there were an illustration of St. Paul’s ‘reasonings of the wise’ being meaningless (1 Cor. 3:20), the present cultural posture is an exemplar. If ever there were a time for believers to see the need for a Christian perspective of everything, that time is now. Verities, virtues and norms that went largely unquestioned for centuries have “One should not look been subject to radical revision, while for objective meaning truth has increasingly been reduced to a matter of power and identity polias such in the thinking tics. Even the notion that human beand use of language ings have a real and definitive nature of the revolutionaries, or that ordinary empirical perceptions because that about social and biological reality are would presuppose valid have been assaulted at almost that reality has every level of cultural life.
a pre-established givenness.”
The noted English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton has discussed the character of this sustained attack on Judeo-Christian culture (Western civilization) since the mid twentieth century: The left-wing enthusiasm that swept through institutions of learning in the 1960s was one of the most efficacious intellectual revolutions in recent history and commanded a support among those affected by it that has seldom been matched by any revolution in the world of politics.7
Although the roots of this intellectual revolution predate the 1960s, it was during this period that its principles came to a prominent and influential flowering in cultural life – ideas that have only developed and grown in power since. The goal of this movement was not simply the creation of a new opaque academic discourse to entertain bohemian intellectuals living in echo chambers insulated from popular culture. Rather, it was nothing short of a social subversion and cultural transformation of the WestSUMMER 2019
ern world, carried out under the noses of the so-called bourgeois (property-owning middle class) they attacked, and funded by bourgeois taxes and naïve donations. The justification for this revolutionary action centres around a reimagined concept of liberty: Two attributes of the new order justify the pursuit of it: liberation and social justice. These correspond roughly to the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution.… It means emancipation from the structures, from the institutions, customs and conventions that shaped the bourgeois order, and which established a shared system of norms and values at the heart of Western society.… Much of their literature is devoted to deconstructing such institutions as the family, the school, law and the nation state through which the inheritance of Western civilization has been passed down to us.8
What most of us, having been raised in a broadly Christian social context, see as the normal and necessary structures of society and social order, these new thinkers regard as ‘structures of domination’ that must be subverted and destroyed. These ideas have forcefully made their way, not just into journals, abstract art galleries, universities and academic libraries, but into our courts, hospitals, parliaments and senates, in fact into the classrooms of our youngest children. What Christians are facing today is a radical desire for a clean sweep of history – an agenda that has always motivated humanistic revolutionaries. As such, fraudulent and often unintelligible theories of language, identity and social order are passed off as the key to renewal and liberation within human society. There is no understanding modern Western culture without grasping this basic revolutionary motive. The essential idea of the revolution is that meaning is no longer something objective or transcendent – that is, something that transcends human signification (language), culturally conditioned perceptions and customs. One should not look for objective meaning as such in the thinking and use of language of the revolutionaries, because Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Recovering the Christian Mind
that would presuppose that reality has a pre-established givenness. The meaning is simply in the use – the way they use and manipulate language to reimagine reality. Language becomes a tool to subvert established meaning, because established meaning is oppression. Meaning as something ontologically real or given is a Christian conspiracy. So, by the conjuring of the revolutionaries, new language spells will alter social reality. Scruton has creatively called this assault on meaning and truth the nonsense machine. By a linguistic emancipation from reality and real knowledge, one eliminates real argument and reasoned engagement so that every question simply becomes one of power and politics. “No need to ask what the revolution means or what you might achieve by means of it. Nothing means anything and that is the revolution, namely the machine to annihilate meaning.”9 One influential user of the nonsense machine is Judith Butler. Cultivating an obscure style (a necessity for sounding profound as a possessor of a hidden knowledge), this leading lesbian and feminist scholar influenced a whole generation of social theorists to regard the very idea of man and woman as mythical creations of language repetition. What most people in every culture through all of history have taken to be a real condition – that of being a man or woman – are for Butler and those like her an imaginary formation. What people generally believe to be a physical and direct perception is just a sophisticated illusion generated by language. It is important to notice immediately the reductionism here and the new ‘explainer’ (divinity concept) for everything; reality is generated by human intellect and the signs (language) they use and repeat! Because the reality-denying theories of radical feminists like Butler are now taught as facts in Western classrooms to small children, we should not pass over what appears radical and bizarre too quickly – for the radical and bizarre is becoming a legally-enforced norm. Interacting favorably with the writings of another feminist scholar, Monique Wittig, Butler writes: There is no reason to divide up human bodies into male and female sexes except Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
that such a division suits the economic needs of heterosexuality and lends a naturalistic gloss to the institution of heterosexuality.… A lesbian…transcends the binary opposition between woman and man; a lesbian is neither a woman nor a man. But further, a lesbian has no sex; she is beyond the categories of sex…; one is not born female, one becomes female, but even more radically, one can, if one chooses, become neither male nor female, woman nor man.10
One can see straight away the thought presently saturating popular culture, a direction that overtly contradicts the foundational teaching of Scripture. Notice also the thinly veiled Marxist root of this radical re-creation of being human. The claim is that the only reason we historically recognise a distinction between male and female is that it suits the capitalist desires of heterosexual men, to pretend that this distinction and relation is natural (according to “On a givenness of nature which is an illusion). The argument here is that the very linguistic use of the terms male (man) and female (woman) is productive of a culture that privileges heterosexuality and endorses marriage and family – which is oppression. This is why we are in the midst of cultural conflict now over the use of pronouns. For such theorists, the term female should not need to imply an opposite (male) and viceversa.
this view, “sex” is simply a political and cultural interpretation of the body. Human body parts are just a discontinuous set of attributes upon which the language of “sex” imposes an artificial unity.”
On this view, “sex” is simply a political and cultural interpretation of the body. Human body parts are just a discontinuous set of attributes upon which the language of “sex” imposes an artificial unity. This synthetic unity then becomes a language ‘regime,’ forming perceptions and forcibly shaping relationships through which our bodies are then perceived. Butler thus quite seriously asks the question, “Is there a ‘physical’ body prior to the perceptually perceived body? An impossible question to decide.”11 In other words, the body is just a perception, and perceptions are formed by linguistic signs. The body is therefore less than fully real. SUMMER 2019
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To those not acquainted with this school of deconstruction, it sounds like nonsense – which in fact it is, in that it bears no resemblance to reality. But it is a sophisticated gibberish that makes “The body then is the uninitiated think that, in their nothing ... intellect and ignorance, they must be missing a prolanguage can recreate found insight into reality hidden in the the body and reality obscure assertions of these radical intelto conform to personal lectuals. But like the gnostic pretenders in the early church who professed a desires.” secret knowledge as the key to reality, the new gnostic claim, wrapped in technical academic verbiage, is in fact very simple. The naming of normative sex (and sexual relations) is an act of oppression and domination that must be rejected for humanity to be free. Whatever a human being is (and they cannot tell us), language makes reality – words are magic! The cultural and political task is thus clear to Wittig and Butler: “to overthrow the entire discourse on sex, indeed, to overthrow the very grammar that institutes ‘gender’ – or ‘fictive sex’ – as an essential attribute of humans and objects alike.”12 The repetition of words like man and woman, rigid codes of ‘hierarchical binarisms,’ must be altered – that is freedom. Only then can a subversive repetition of human identity become possible. In Butler’s judgment, prior to the creation of identity through use of language, there is no integral self, “there is only a taking up of the [language] tools where they lie.”13 Butler predicted thirty years ago that “the loss of gender norms would have the effect of proliferating gender configurations, destabilizing substantive identity, and depriving the naturalizing narratives of compulsory heterosexuality of their central protagonists: ‘man’ and ‘woman.’”14 This could only be done by extending the idea of the political to questions not traditionally seen as political. For Butler and the numerous theorists that have followed in her footsteps, the political is the very signifying practices that establish, regulate and deregulate identity, which is why some of the most foundational theological and philosophical questions have now become matters of politics, for politicians and courts to rule on! SUMMER 2019
The implications of this for thinking about the body are far-reaching. Gender is not written in the body – the binary of male and female is mythical and ‘unnatural’ – there is no ‘real’ ontology of gender, ontology is not a foundation but a political creation. A number of social theorists took a phrase from the surrealist playwright Antonin Artaud, ‘body without organs,’ and deployed it to interpret the body as merely a biological receptacle in which the self-creating intellect is contained. The body awaits an identity which the individual must forge for themselves or assume from the ‘differences’ around them. The body without organs is one’s body before being actualized in relationships; it is the image of what is left when all the supposedly cultural impositions are left behind – it has no nature. Butler thus demands a “reconsideration of the figure of the body as mute, prior to culture, awaiting signification.”15 The body then is nothing; it is not real before culturally conditioned perceptions of it and it is malleable in terms of one’s desire – intellect and language can recreate the body and reality to conform to personal desires. To accomplish this magical transformation requires an extension and new configuration of politics to enforce a new language repetition, taking the dust of my desires, the idol of my organ-less body and breathing life into the person by a linguistic incantation. The parody of biblical creation is striking. Roger Scruton identifies this as a revolution accomplished by the literature and language of spells. He summarises the effect of it all very well: The resulting nonsense, although it cannot be easily deciphered intellectually, can be deciphered politically. It is directed nonsense and it is directed at the enemy. We are to discard the old hierarchies, the binary structures, the trees of the bourgeois family and the capitalist machine and reform ourselves as… grassroots communities of underground activists.… The assault is aimed primarily at the language through which the enemy lays claim to the world.16 Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Recovering the Christian Mind
Scruton identifies their enemy as rational argument and truth. But behind the assault on meaning and truth, the real enemy is clear – God Himself and the gospel of Jesus Christ which lays claim to all the world. The contrast between the Word of man as magic with the power to remake the world and the Word of God as that which governs all things could not be clearer. Can any believer be in any doubt that there is a Christian view of everything, and that we must recover the Christian mind? RETHINKING THE TASK
Developing a Christian mind is part of the task given to God’s people, though it has been longneglected and we are paying the cultural price for our negligence. Forging truly Christian thinking about everything is a fundamental part of the mission assigned to us in God’s covenant. It is part of the cultural mandate given at creation which has never been abrogated. Scripture tells us that all of reality is ordered and structured in complete dependence on the Word of God, and that this is the framework for Christian thought and action. The origin and destiny of all creation is in Christ and nothing exists of itself or for itself. This confession is our faith foundation. As the apostle Paul declares, “For from him and through him and to him are all things to him be glory forever” (Rom. 11:36). This truth implies that as creatures of God we are at home in creation, in the body, embedded within created reality and attuned inescapably to the Word of God. Our historical task is to both become and make willing citizens of the Kingdom of God as creation is turned into a God-glorifying culture by faithfulness and obedience. Through Christ, the kingdom becomes a redirecting force in history. This glorious task involves our whole person, in every aspect of life. This obviously includes our bodies. In 1 Corinthians 6:15, Paul writes “the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. God raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. Don’t you know that your bodies are part of Christ’s body?” Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The entirety of our earthly existence must therefore become members of Christ – not just the ‘soul,’ as though that is the “real” part of us, but our humanity in its integral fullness and unity. In short, we belong to the covenant, “with all our heart and our life, with our soul and body and with everything we have and do. Our “All these foreign hopes, and our goals, our past, present and visions generally our future all belong to the covenant.”17 have the same This is why Paul writes in a manner that effect: the rebukes and brings into judgment aposredemption of tate humanistic culture which hates and Jesus Christ is denies the body, while challenging believsevered from the ers to forge a Christian mind: Therefore brothers, by the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this age but be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Rom. 12:1-2).
given condition of life in this world: the Father’s good creation.”
Note that presenting our bodies to God is our spiritual act of worship. There is no dualism here. As Christians we must not be conformed to the apostasy of this age regarding human identity and sexuality but must be transformed and renewed in mind. We may well feel ill-equipped to stand for truth and provide a Christian alternative for the redirection of culture, but this will only be true if we surrender the Word of God and rely on ourselves and our own understanding. The late Canadian philosopher Bernard Zylstra wrote that we have lost the strength of the Word because of a reliance on …visions foreign to the scriptures. All these foreign visions generally have the same effect: the redemption of Jesus Christ is severed from the given condition of life in this world: the Father’s good creation. Hence our hesitance in understanding the Bible’s kingdom vision. But this is our Father’s world, claimed by the new Lord, Jesus Christ. Our task is to regain the biblical vision…18
This can be done by faith. The transformation of our minds and the manifest kingdom life of SUMMER 2019
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Christ will come to pass by obedience and reliance on the Word and omnipotent working of the Holy Spirit.
1 Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should A Christian Think? (Michigan: Vine Books, 1963), 3-4. 2 Blamires, The Christian Mind, 43. 3 Roy Clouser, ‘Is there a Christian View of Everything from Soup to Nuts’? Pro Rege, Vol. 31 (June 2003): 1. 4 Blamires, The Christian Mind, 45-46. 5 Clouser, ‘Is there a Christian View?’, 2. 6 Clouse, ‘Is there a Christian View?’, 6. 7 Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London: Bloomsbury,
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2015), 159. 8 Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, 3. 9 Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, 174. 10 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York, Routledge, 1990), 153. 11 Butler, Gender Trouble, 155. 12 Butler, Gender Trouble, 154. 13 Butler, Gender Trouble, 199. 14 Butler, Gender Trouble, 200. 15 Butler, Gender Trouble, 202. 16 Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, 189. 17 J.M. Spier, An Introduction to Christian Philosophy (New Jersey: Craig Press, 1966), 5. 18 Bernard Zylstra, ‘The Kingdom of God: Its Foundations and Implications,’ Originally published as a mimeograph by the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto.
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The Eschatological Arc CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS of
APOLOGETICS IS THE REASONED
defense of the Christian faith. “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts,” writes the apostle Peter, “and always be ready to give a defense [ἀπολογία, apologia] to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear” (1 Pet. 3:15). To Peter, it doesn’t suffice simply to say, in good multicultural fashion, “You have your beliefs, and I have mine. My beliefs need no reasons any more than yours do. Each of us lives in his own conceptual universe.” The Christian must be prepared to declare not just what he believes, but also why, and why it is not just superior to all alternatives, but why all alternatives are diabolically false: “casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). The task of apologetics is the coherent, reasoned defense of the Christian faith with the goal of persuading the unbeliever in the face of all its competitors. Eschatology is the study of the future and of finality. It tries to answer the question of where history is going, and how it will all end. What does eschatology have to do with apologetics? Everything. Why? Because the arc of the Christian faith is inescapably eschatological. In the best-known account of apologetic preaching in the Bible, for instance, the apostle Paul’s sermon to the cultured elite at Athens (Acts 17:22f.), he concludes with eschatology: Truly, these times of ignorance [the preChristian era] God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead. (vv. 30-31) Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Jesus’ resurrection drew attention the ticking eschatological clock, winding down inexorably to the fearsome and ominous judgment of the world. For Paul, the faith is about God’s telos (direction or goal) for history. To defend the faith is to defend its eschatology. For Peter also (1 Pet. 3:15), we Christians give an apologetic answer for our hope, and hope is forward-looking, eschatological (Rom. 8:24). In fact, to Peter’s way of thinking, the word “hope” is a stand-in for the faith itself. To give an apologetic for the faith is to give an apologetic for hope, because the faith is hope-grounded and -directed. This means that it is eschatologically grounded. This was precisely the message of the primitive church. “And now I [Paul] stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made by God to our fathers” (Acts 26:6). “For the hope of Israel I am bound with this chain” (Acts 28:20). And note Paul’s explanation of God’s plan in Romans 5:12: “And again, Isaiah says: “There shall be a root of Jesse; and He [Jesus Christ] who shall rise to reign over the Gentiles, in Him the Gentiles shall hope.” Jesus Christ was the promised hope of the Jews, just as He is now the pledged King of the Gentiles, over whom He rules. The gospel is not just backward-looking, to the cross and resurrection, but forward-looking, to the advancing kingdom and eternal life with the Triune God. This message stands squarely within God’s eternal purposes. THE ESCHATOLOGICAL ARC
God created the cosmos and deputized man to exercise dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:28-30). Man sinned, eliciting God’s judgment, but God in His grace promised to rectify this disobedience by sending a sin- and Satan-crushing redeemer (Gen. 3:15). That redeemer, Jesus Christ, God’s Son, died for the sins of the world and rose victo-
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P. ANDREW SANDLIN P. ANDREW SANDLIN is Fellow for Public Theology and Cultural Philosophy with the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity. Andrew is an ordained minister in and Executive Director of the Fellowship of Mere Christianity, Faculty of Blackstone Legal Fellowship of the Alliance Defending Freedom, and De Jong Distinguished Visiting Professor of Culture and Theology, Edinburg Theological Seminary, a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, and is President of the Center for Cultural Leadership. He founded CCL in 2001 with the conviction that only eminently-equipped cultural leaders will actually create a new Christian culture — and that only transformed Christians can transform the present anti-Christian culture of the West. Andrew was born into a devout Christian home. He has been preaching and teaching and lecturing for 30 years. A consummate eclectic, Andrew has been a pastor, assistant pastor, youth pastor, Sunday school superintendent, Christian day school administrator, home school father, foundation’s executive vice president, journal editor, scholar, author and itinerant speaker. Andrew is married to Sharon and has five adult children and three grandchildren.
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riously from the grave and presently rules from His heavenly throne, incrementally winning over His enemies by the gospel, and punishing those who refuse to trust the good news, the gospel, preached by His followers (Acts 2:22-36). As more unbelievers become Christians, and are properly discipled, they reorient all areas of their life and thought by God’s Word, the Bible, and they begin to extract the poison of sin in the world, and to rule in the earth, by the Holy Spirit’s power (Dan. 7:18, 27; Eph. 1:3, 15-23). This victory is not platonic or ethereal, epitomized in pious refrains like, “Jesus reigns in the throne room “There is only one of my heart.” Rather, biblical eschatolhuman history, and ogy is visible, tactile, and cultural: it can one plan, and God be observed.1 Christians treat all people in Jesus Christ as created in God’s image. Parents rear is redeeming all their children in the nurture and admocreation within it by nition of the Lord. Christians influence the Spirit’s power all spheres of life for the Lord. Surgeons, physicians, and nurses conform to biband His people’s lical principles of health and healing. obedience.” Painters, architects, dancers, sculptors, graphic designers, playwrights, and other artists are governed by godly standards of beauty and truth. Business operators employ Christian economic truth in meeting the needs of their customers. Scientists and technologists explore creation and manipulate it in accord with its divinely established norms. Politicians govern within the sphere of God’s moral law. And so on. Christian culture is a vital product of Christian eschatology.2 History ends with the globalization of this Christian kingdom. The basic arc of the Christian story is: creation-fall-redemption 3 That is also a summary of the telos of human history. There is no separate “religious history” beside or even inside “secular” history. God doesn’t have a religious plan and another secular plan. There is only one human history, and one plan, and God in Jesus Christ is redeeming all creation within it by the Spirit’s power and His people’s obedience. THE PRIMITIVE ESCHATOLOGICAL COMMUNITY
The primitive church was inescapably an eschatological community. Jesus himself launched His ministry in eschatology. He embodied the SUMMER 2019
incursion of the kingdom of God promised in the Hebrew Scriptures (Luke 1:31-33), and He came preaching that kingdom (Matt. 4:17). Healing the sick, raising the dead, and exorcizing demons externalized the roll-back of Satan’s competing but doomed reign: “Or how can one enter a strong man’s [Satan’s] house and plunder his goods, unless He [Jesus] first binds the strong man? And then He will plunder his house” (Matt. 12:29). On the cross, Jesus made a spectacle of the demonic powers (Col. 2:9-15), and His resurrection crushed death’s power (1 Cor. 15). At His ascension He assumed His heavenly, Davidic throne (Dan. 7:13-14; Acts 2:22-36), from which He showers His church with His Spirit’s power (Acts 2:14-21) to fulfill her calling to disciple the nations for Him (Matt. 28:18-20). The sequence of history since our Lord’s earthly redemptive work is: His resurrection; His present reign as He gradually subdues all enemies; His second advent; the final general resurrection; His delivery of the kingdom to His Father; and, finally, His subduing the last enemy, death itself (1 Cor. 15:20-28). The reality of the resurrected and reigning Lord suffused the primitive church, which in time, spearheaded by the apostle Paul’s missionary travels, spread the gospel from Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) to southeastern Europe and beyond. The eschatological apologetic of “righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come” (Acts 24:25) was a key part of the motive force for this gospel proclamation. The primary, imminent eschatological judgment on the minds of the first evangelists was the destruction of apostate Jerusalem, which prefigured the final judgment at the end of history.4 That A.D. 70 conflagration was a judgment paving the way for grace, the “beginning of sorrows” (Matt. 24:8, ὠδίν, “birth pangs”) of the kingdom: Through the horrific judgment on apostate Jerusalem, God was birthing an expanded purpose and people – a multinational, multiethnic, global church that He had promised from early days. Despite fierce oppression (the Book of Revelation is an account of Christian victory over the church’s initial two great earthly persecutors: apostate Judaism and imperial Rome5), the kingdom message and life became so pervasive and Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The Eschatological Arc
powerful that in AD 313 the Roman emperor Constantine officially recognized the Christian faith.6 Just as God had promised in Revelation, He used His people to bring the great Roman Empire to its knees. THE MEDIEVAL ECCLESIASTICAL COMMUNITY
Unfortunately, the ardor of eschatological enthusiasm cooled. As early as the later patristic church, eschatology was reduced to ecclesiology. The kingdom was conceptually enclosed in the church, and the faith became ecclesiasticized.7 Not the outward march of worldwide gospel victory, but the internal unfolding of sacerdotalism, liturgy, and ritual increasingly occupied Christianity. The post-apostolic apologists, though wellintentioned, had already synthesized the biblical message with the sophisticated paganism of the time, Greek philosophy, in an effort to make the faith credible to its early cultured despisers.8 This compromise did have its critics (like Tertullian), but the church in many places embraced the unstable alliance between biblical truth and Greek philosophy. By the High Middle Ages, the most towering Christian thinker of all, Thomas Aquinas, had specifically fashioned a theology incorporating leading thoughts of Aristotle, the pre-Christian pagan intellectual who in the Middle Ages was considered the paradigm for all rational belief.9 The medievals were able to maintain this unstable alliance with Aristotle by creating a “doubledecker” epistemology. Common reason and experience, accessible to all people, Christian and non-Christian alike, constituted the lower deck of nature. Salvation, dogma, the church, the sacraments, and eternal life occupied the upper deck of grace. Unaided reason was autonomous on the lower deck, but if it were to succeed on the upper deck, it was invited to submit itself to Jesus Christ.10 Assumptions common to both Christian and non-Christian ruled in the world; distinctively Christian assumptions ruled in the church. The Roman Catholic historian Christopher Dawson observed that when the Enlightenment later needed a paradigm for its super-exaltation of reason, it had one ready at hand: the scholastic Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
nature-grace distinction;11 it simply lopped off the upper deck of grace. This arrangement could survive only as long as the church held hegemony in society. When the Enlightenment broke that hegemony, it also broke any distinctive Christian influence. The compromised church itself was, therefore, responsible for its own subversion from the eighteenth century onward: for today’s radical secularization and re-paganization we have scholasticism to thank. SCHOLASTIC APOLOGETICS
It should come as no surprise that this ecclesiasticized faith should have developed its own distinctive apologetic method. Today we call this the classical method of apologetics; it could also be called scholastic. A double-decker epistemology requires a double-decker apologetics. The apologetics of the lower deck invites non-Christians to assess the truth claims of Christianity by a neutral, autonomous reason. We can all agree (can’t we?) that we should never accept any unreasonable teaching, take nothing on faith alone until it has been tested by our unaided reason.12 This is the cornerstone of scholastic apologetics. Unbelievers can be gratified that Christians make no demands of their autonomous reason “As early as the but merely to consider the possibility that later patristic Christianity is true. Perhaps they can be persuaded to accept the physical resurrecchurch, eschatology tion of Jesus. If so, then maybe they can was reduced to be guided on to assume that if someone ecclesiology. The rose from the dead, He could possibly be kingdom was the Son of God, especially if He had preconceptually dicted He would rise from the dead. And enclosed in the so on. It’s a case of climbing up to the up13 per deck one doctrine at a time. But then church, and the the perceptive non-Christian might wish faith became to ask why, if his unaided reason suffices ecclesiasticized.” in the lower deck, it should not also suffice in the upper deck. Why should he surrender his autonomous reason after it had gotten him safely into the upper deck? This would mean, for example, that he need not affirm the doctrine of the Trinity, which is not especially appealing to unaided human reason. In fact, why should there be an upper deck at all?14 Autonomous human reason qualified to deliver a verdict on the vast range of verifiable human experience should SUMMER 2019
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not be expected to draw the line at the mysteries of the church or Christian dogma. Autonomous reason should be free to operate anywhere and everywhere. This way of thinking is precisely how the Enlightenment eventually lopped off the upper deck, and how scholastic apologetics aided in the erosion of the Christian faith and our de-Christianized modern world.
“The fallen mind is not so much constitutionally impaired as ethically twisted; it exists to rebel against its Maker.”
ESCHATOLOGICAL (WORLDVIEW) APOLOGETICS
This scholastic apologetics had broken decisively with the eschatological apologetics of the Bible. For one thing, biblical apologists did not posit autonomous reason as a legitimate adjudicator of the faith. They knew that depravity extends to the human intellect, not just the will, affections, body, and emotions. “[T]he carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be” (Rom. 8:7). The fallen mind is not so much constitutionally impaired as ethically twisted; it exists to rebel against its Maker. For this reason, Jesus declared to the Jews that they must accept Him, trust Him, and submit to Him, in order to have eternal life. At Pentecost, Peter did not offer up factual truth claims for his audience to evaluate; he declared the crucified and risen Jesus Christ as Lord of the universe to whom they must submit if they were to escape eschatological wrath. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, indicted the Jews for turning their backs on God’s prophets and His final prophet, His own Son. In Romans 1, Paul arraigns both Jew and Gentile for turning their backs on God’s revelation in creation and in Scripture. The only hope for each is to cast themselves on the grace and mercy of the redemption found only in Jesus Christ. He did not imply or declare that their autonomous, unaided reason was equipped to judge God’s revelation. Reason is always captive to the heart, and the heart is inescapably religious (Luke 6:45).15 Sinners’ great problem is moral, not intellectual. They need to repent of their autonomous reason that led from reverent Creator-worship to idolatrous creatureworship (Rom. 1:24-25). The gospel challenges
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sinners to give up their sin, including first of all their intellectual autonomy.16 The gospel presupposes a worldview, to which, at least in summary, the sinner must submit. The fact that this idea sounds unsettling to us shows how far we’ve drifted from the Bible’s teaching. A worldview is simply a way of viewing the world. It’s a set of assumptions that everybody has by which we interpret what goes on around us and inside us. There is a Christian worldview and a Buddhist worldview, a Hindu worldview and a secular worldview, New Age worldview, Marxist worldview and variations and combinations of each. Whatever we experience in this world, we interpret through the grid of our instinctive assumptions. Those assumptions comprise our worldview. Worldviews are like pancreases: everybody has one, even if we don’t know it or think about it. This is why we may call biblical apologetics “worldview apologetics,” or presuppositional apologetics.17 The faith is not an upper deck that sinners climb to by their autonomous reason, but God’s “worldview revelation” that sinners embrace when the Spirit illumines their reason, which they submit to Jesus Christ when He allows them to grasp that all alternatives to the faith are false. It is sometimes supposed that we worldview apologists deny the role and importance of human reason in apologetic declaration. We do not. Obviously the gospel is addressed to human reason. But it is never addressed to an autonomous, unaided human reason. It is addressed to a reason that, by the illuminating power of the Spirit, can see the bankruptcy of its non-Christian worldview. To trust Jesus Christ is to trade a creatureworshiping worldview for a Creator-worshiping worldview. And this approach is not limited to the educated or intellectuals. The non-Christian unschooled stock clerk, who knows nothing of worldviews, must be confronted with his own autonomous reason (“I make my own way in the world and nobody tells me what to do”) no less than the most self-aware educated skeptic. Man’s root problem is ethical, not intellectual. The gospel assumes that we grasp certain truths, that we adopt a basic worldview. We don’t preach the gospel in an intellectual vacuum. The Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The Eschatological Arc
minute we say, “Jesus saves,” we must ask, “Who is Jesus? and “Saves us from what?” and then we must face the fact that the gospel presupposes a worldview. To say that certain beliefs are incompatible with the reception of the gospel – for instance, that God did not create the world but that it merely evolved, that man did not fall into sin but is inherently good, that man need not rest in God’s grace but can earn eternal life, that miracles do not occur – is to say that the gospel presupposes a worldview. This is why at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry John the Baptist laid the groundwork by preaching repentance (Matt. 3:1-2). His listeners who refused to repent of their sins would face God’s righteous judgment (vv. 7-12). Jesus continued that message of repentance as part of His gospel preaching (Matt. 4:17). This is why the gospel is understandable only in terms of a moral universe. 18 The gospel doesn’t harmonize with a conceptual universe in which man is his own god, in which truth is relative, in which guilt is merely subjective, in which there is no final judgment, in which all religions lead to the same place, and in which Jesus is one great religious figure among many. The gospel is simply incompatible with these ideas. This is another way of saying that the gospel demands that sinners give up certain false ideas before they can be saved. So, when we preach the gospel to poor, hellbound sinners, we’re preaching a gospel that demands that they repent of their rebellious thinking, not just their rebellious emotions, their rebellious morals, their rebellious will, and their rebellious instincts. The gospel presupposes a worldview. This is why the Bible starts with Genesis 1:1 and not John 3:16.19 Second, biblical apologists did not identify the faith we must defend as religious experience contained within the walls of a church. “History, not the heart, is the locus of divine revelation.”20 The heart is the locus of God’s dealings with the individual, but the locus of divine revelation is God’s unfolding kingdom in history. The gospel is the good news of the kingdom. It is the small stone that Daniel saw in his vision, striking the feet of the ancient world empires and eventually growing into a mountain to engulf Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
the earth (Dan. 2). It is the tiny mustard seed that grows to a mighty tree. It is the small leaven that eventually leavens the entire lump (Luke 13:18-20). Jesus must reign, until He puts all enemies under His feet (1 Cor. 15:25). This is what God is doing in the earth; He is restoring and enhancing creation, what man lost in the Garden of Eden.21 The consummate kingdom will come in its fullness when the New Jerusalem descends to the resurrected earth in which both God and man will live eternally “This is what God is (Rev. 21:1-4). This is the kingdom populated by the blood-bought, the present deputies of doing in the earth; the cultural mandate, whom God intended He is restoring all along to be His people overspreading the and enhancing globe and cultivating it for His glory. They creation, what will be victorious in this task, and then the man lost in the Lord returns and the eternal state (on earth) Garden of Eden.” begins. The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, straddling the Middle Ages and early Modernity, was primed to restore the eschatological apologetics of the Bible. But, despite is great successes in other matters, it did not do this. Its concentration on recovering a monergistic soteriology22 left other scholastic errors largely unchallenged. The Reformation’s individualistic soteriology left the door open for an individualistic eschatology: Reformation eschatology remains restricted to the future of the individual in a curious way, and it is only with great difficulty that it is transferred to an approach which comprehends the whole world. This is directly related to the fact that Reformation soteriology deals primarily with the salvation of the individual and turned to the salvation of the world only with great effort. It is significant that Calvin, who was an inexhaustible and a masterful commentator, did not write a commentary on the Apocalypse of John, and scarcely drew upon it for the development of his eschatology…. In contrast to biblical eschatology, his, too, is generally a reversal of the fundamental aspects. In the Bible the view is directed primarily toward the world and history, whereas in Calvin the perspective is one of the individual and the “final resurrection….”23 SUMMER 2019
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The faith, however, cannot be reduced to an existential telos: Jesus’ dying and rising to provide a unique religious experience and to take souls to heaven to await the resurrection. The arc of the Bible is eschatological, and the arc of that eschatology is victory.24 When we defend the faith, we defend its victorious eschatology. We preach to sinners that God commands them to abandon their sin, trust His Son, and join the ranks of the redeemed, conquering the world, the flesh, and the Devil in His name. And they are destined for earthly victory. H. EVAN RUNNER ACADEMY
The H. Evan Runner Academy aims to participate in this victorious eschatology by equipping delegates with a worldview apologetic thrust that will guide them their entire lives. Paul tells us “not [to] be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God” (Rom. 12:2). We can know the will of God for our own lives and for history by the transformation of our minds, away from world conformity, to Christ-conformity. This “...we work to open means that worldview stands at the Christians’ eyes heart of God’s plan for history. A man is to their cultural or becomes what he thinks in his heart responsibility: (Prov. 23:7). Our mind shapes our lives.
to bring in every area of life and thought under the authority of Jesus Christ and His Word.”
We live during the Information Revolution. It is no less consequential than the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Ideas have always had consequences, but today, due to digital technology, those consequences can be unleashed almost instantaneously. Ideas are not everything, but our world increasingly privileges ideas, good ones and bad ones. Mostly bad ones. The cognitive elite, the interlocuting “thought leaders,” enjoy momentous influence. The Runner faculty intends to help our delegates identify the ubiquitous false ideas they’ll encounter, and, even more importantly, embrace a rock-solid Christian worldview so that they can live their lives, and influence others around them, for God’s glory, expecting eventual victory. In this way, we fulfill our God-given part in the victorious eschatological arc.
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MY PERSONAL STAKE
My stake in the H. Evan Runner Academy is not only ministerial; it is also personal. I am a cultural theologian. By gifts, calling, and training, I apply the truth of Christian revelation prophetically to contemporary culture. By God’s matchless grace, I was born into and reared within a devout Christian home. My father has been a powerful, Bible-believing gospel preacher for 60 years. My late mother has sung God-honoring music in thousands of churches in the United States and abroad. I always knew and believed that Jesus Christ saves from sin, and that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, but in my late teens and early 20s I encountered Reformational thinkers like Francis A. Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til. A little later I traced their own ideational lineage back to the Reformational fount: Groen van Prinsterer, Abraham Kuyper, and Herman Dooyeweerd. They were “Reformational” in that they were among the first Christians to recognize that the faith is a worldview that stands as an antithesis to and wishes to vanquish all competitors to a full-orbed Christianity. They were not trying to find commonality with non-Christian ways of thinking; they were trying to crush them. They wished to purge the last vestiges of scholasticism from the church and to overthrow all anti-Christian ideas. With their exalted view of creation and creational norms, they were worldaffirming and not world-denying. They wanted a Christian culture, a Christian world. They were utterly serious about the Lordship of Jesus Christ in the earth. As a pastor at the time, I led my church in a Reformational direction. Later I worked as executive vice president at the Chalcedon Foundation, another Reformational ministry. In 2001 I launched the Center for Cultural Leadership, an educational foundation (“think tank”) committed without reservation to Reformational thought and life. Our objective is to influence Christians to influence culture in a distinctly Christian way. Through books, essays, sermons, lectures, our website, personal contact, and annual symposia, we work to open Christians’ eyes to their cultural responsibility: to bring in every Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
The Eschatological Arc
area of life and thought under the authority of Jesus Christ and His Word. When I met Dr. Joseph Boot, leader of the Ezra Institute, I found a brother-in-arms. God knit our hearts together. Like me, Joe comes from a devout Christian family and discovered as a young man the Reformational truth that there’s no neutrality in the world, that all thoughts must be brought into captivity to Jesus Christ, and that our goal is cultural reclamation. If Jesus is Lord anywhere, He is Lord everywhere. Rarely have I encountered a Christian leader nourished in such humility, sincerity, and guilelessness. While indubitably successful, Dr. Boot is not interested in building his own fiefdom. He’s interested in building the kingdom of God. The Runner Academy and its spectacular property at the Centre for Reformational Culture came about as nothing short of a miracle. It is God’s work, not man’s. Several years ago I quoted my life’s Bible verse to Joe, Isaiah 64:4: “For since the beginning of the world, men have not heard nor perceived by the ear, nor has the eye seen any God besides You, Who acts for the one who waits for Him.” God did just that. Our prayer is exceedingly faith-drenched, marinated in holy ambition: if it pleases God, we hope that He uses us to help turn North America and, eventually, the world back to Him. If this ambition sounds unrealistic and excessive, it is likely because we are veering toward the damning sin of unbelief. God’s hand is not shortened; it is our faith that is too often shortened. God is willing to do unprecedented things if His people only believe Him and march forward boldly. This is precisely what the Runner Academy, the Ezra Institute, the Center for Cultural Leadership, and truthXchange intend to do. Will you join us in this God-honoring, world-conquering venture? 1 2
H. Henry Meeter, The Basic Ideas of Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1960 edition). P. Andrew Sandlin, Christian Culture (Mount Hermon, CA: Center for Cultural Leadership, 2013).
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3 4
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Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture (Ancaster, ON: Paideia Press, 2012), 28-36. George Peter Holford, The Destruction of Jerusalem (Nacogdoches, TX: Covenant Media, 2001). David Scott Clark, The Message from Patmos (London: Forgotten Books, 2018). Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars (London: SCM Press 1955), 270-274. Joseph Boot, For Mission, The Need for Scriptural Cultural Theology (Grimsby, ON: EICC Publications, 2018). Michael W. Kelley, The Impulse of Power (Minneapolis: Contra Mundum, 1998), 155-166. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1991), 175-190. The analogy is Francis Schaeffer’s. See his The God Who Is There, in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1982), 1:209-224. Christopher Dawson, “Rationalism and Intellectualism: The Religious Elements in the Rationalist Tradition,” Enquiries into Religion and Its Culture (London and New York: Sheed & Ward, 1933), 146-148, emphasis supplied. Clark H. Pinnock, Reason Enough (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity, 1980), 9-13. Clark H. Pinnock, “Climb One Doctrine At a Time,” Christianity Today, August 6, 1982, 64. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967 edition), 209-259. Herman Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought (Grand Rapids: Paideia Press, 2012), 127. Cornelius Van Til, The Intellectual Challenge of the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1977). John M. Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1994). David Wells, The Courage to be Protestant (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 138. Ibid., 45. Scott J. Hafemann, “The Covenant Relationship,” Central Themes in Biblical Theology, Scott J. Hafemann and Paul R. House, eds. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 21. Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985, 2005, second edition).
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22 Monergism, from the Greek words ‘mono’ – one, and ‘ergos’ – work, maintains that individual salvation is by God’s grace through Christ alone and not a cooperative affair between a gracious God and merit-seeking man 23 Otto Weber, Foundations of Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 2:672. 24 J. Marcellus Kik, An Eschatology of Victory (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971).
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21 PAGE NO.
RAINBOW?
PETER JONES Editor’s note: This article is adapted from the forthcoming book from Ezra Press. COMPETING SYMBOLISM
In Genesis 9 the rainbow is depicted as the work of God, the Creator of heaven and earth, recalling both God’s righteous judgment and His eventual blessing. Specifically it reassures humanity that God will never again destroy the earth by flood: I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.... When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth. (Gen. 9:8-17)
God’s rainbow signifies a gracious promise of the divine Creator to sustain and ultimately redeem His creation. This principle is repeated at the end of the Bible: “around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald” (Rev. 4:3). Once more the rainbow is associated with what God tells us, from His throne of authority, about the future of the earth. Here the rainbow again symbolizes the cosmic rule of Him “who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it” (Rev. 10:6). In 1978, at the request of San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the artist and gay rights activist Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag, sometimes called the “gay pride flag” or “LGBT pride flag,” which gave visual identity to the diversity of the LGBTQ+ movement. Visually inspired by the stripes of the American flag, “Baker was drawn to the deceptive simplicity of a field Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
of stacked stripes as a symbol for many stitched together as one.”1 Milk, the first openly avowed homosexual to be elected to public office in the US, is still its most famous LGBTQ+ elected official. Regrettably, Milk was murdered that same year by a disgruntled fellow city supervisor. The rainbow flag, however, quickly became a universally recognized symbol. When the Supreme Court passed the Same-Sex Marriage act in 2015, as if on cue, the White House was bathed in multi-colored floodlight. Now, nearly a halfcentury after Baker’s design made its debut, the homosexual movement has emerged from the closet, and has claimed the rainbow. So, we ask: Who owns the rainbow? This seemingly incidental question about the ownership of a colorful flag is really the most ultimate question any human being can ask: Who holds ultimate authority? who is in charge? who defines reality? Is it God the eternal Creator, or human creatures? The Apostle Paul asks the question in a different way: Should we worship the Creator or the creature (Rom. 1:25)? This is not merely a question of morality. It is, rather, the decisive question of cosmology, of cosmic and human origins, of the ultimate meaning of existence, of the true source of our identity and of our hope. The question every human being must ask is, “Who is God and who is man”? (Ps. 8:4). In 2018, Stephen D. Smith, professor of Law at the University of San Diego, published a book entitled Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac.2 Smith clearly shows how the pagan thinking of first-century Rome has returned to dominance in the West. He lays out the two worldview systems that faced off at the beginning of Western history, namely pagan religion and early Christianity:
PETER JONES is Fellow for New Testament Theology and Christian Worldview at the Ezra Institute, Associate Pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church (Escondido, CA), Director of truthXchange and Scholar in Residence at Westminster Seminary, CA. Born in Liverpool (and a friend of John Lennon), Peter attended the University of Wales, then did his graduate work at Gordon Divinity School, Harvard Divinity School and Princeton Seminary. Peter is the author of several books, including The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back (1992), Spirit Wars (1997), Gospel Truth/ Pagan Lies (1999), Capturing the Pagan Mind (2003), Cracking DaVinci’s Code (2004, co-author, James Garlow), Stolen Identity (2006), The God of Sex (2006), One or Two: Seeing a World of Difference (2010) and The Other Worldview (2015). truthXchange equips and empowers the church to communicate the gospel lovingly and effectively to a culture that has lost the crucial distinction between worshiping creation and worshiping the Triune God. Peter and Rebecca have seven children and numerous grandchildren.
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Whose Rainbow?
The pagan gods were actors (albeit powerful and immortal actors) of and within this world. The God of Judaism and Christianity is by contrast “the creator of the world…who dwells beyond space and time…pagan religion locates the sacred within this world…an immanent sacred. Judaism and Christianity, by contrast, reflect a transcendent religiosity: they place the sacred, ultimately, outside the world.3
Based on the observation of the French sociologist Emil Durkheim (1858-1917), that the religious nature of man “is an essential and permanent aspect of humanity,”4 Smith concludes that “behind a façade of secularism…the old rivalry in the West between paganism and Christianity, or between immanent and transcendent religiosities, shows signs of becoming reinvigorated.”5 That rivalry is also reinvigorating discussions “...the subject is so about sexuality. culturally volatile,
many pastors, even well-meaning orthodox pastors, do not want to or do not know how to deal with the issue.”
A QUESTION OF WORSHIP
Our culture increasingly favors the non-binary, eliminating distinctions wherever it can, especially in areas of spirituality and sexuality. A non-binary culture that identifies human will as the ultimate standard is a culture that necessarily does not worship the Creator. This is classic paganism. In this way, ever since the Sixties Revolution, Western culture has become steadily more pagan. The once marginal agenda for which the hippies clamored, namely radical freedom from God and from “heteronormative” sexual morality, has become public policy enshrined in law. With a society now so opposed to its Christian heritage, it is critical for Christians to understand the binary character of life. In fact, every human being must choose between these two mutually exclusive societal visions. The theological data about the nature of existence precede any human opinions on the subject and define not only the difference between creatures and the Creator, but also the sexual distinction of male and female. Behind the current divisive issue of sexual identity is the deepest of questions: Is there a personal Creator, or does Nature create itself?
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As it was five hundred years ago, at the birth of Protestantism, the Church is once again pressed to define orthodoxy. But the cultural challenge to the gospel of Jesus Christ comes to us as a different question than the one posed in the sixteenth century. At the Reformation the essential question was, “Can I save myself by my good deeds”? Answering this question resulted in what have come to be known as the five solas of the Reformation: Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. Roman Catholics and emerging Protestants agreed on beliefs about God as Creator, the Trinity, and Christ’s historical birth, death and resurrection. Current discussion does not begin with salvation, but with questions about the nature of sexuality. Two questions stand out: “What defines each individual’s deep personal identity?” and “How does sexuality relate to the heart of the gospel?” Because these questions are so essential and the subject is so culturally volatile, many pastors, even well-meaning orthodox pastors, do not want to or do not know how to deal with the issue. Afraid of upsetting members who might have sinful sexual temptations, they choose to ignore the issue. But silence is deadly. The flames of this current apostasy are raging through our churches and our silence will have all the soothing effect of gasoline on those flames. Christians must respond boldly and faithfully. Our response must go to the heart of the issue. And we must avoid emotionalism, moralism, hatred, bigotry, or mere traditionalism. Many Millennial Christians, who are now becoming the Church’s leaders, need a clear statement of the truth, for this generation is leaving the Church in droves because of its perceived mistreatment of homosexuals. If we are to understand sexuality, we need to hear a holistic account of what the Bible says about it. As we deal with the volatile issue of alternate sexuality (homosexuality, lesbianism, transgenderism, transvestism, agenderism, drag, etc.) and its relationship to biblical faith, we need to remember two important principles: First, there must be no contempt for gay persons. Christians may never show contempt for anyone, for we are all made in God’s image. We Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Whose Rainbow?
must not demonize homosexuals, demonstrate bigotry toward them, or otherwise mistreat or slander them from a position of self-described “righteous anger.” The problem is much bigger than any one person. Many who claim an alternate sexual identity have experienced suffering and rejection, whether from abuse by sexual predators or from heartless treatment by people close to them who have judged and dismissed them. This attitude is both unbecoming of Christians, as well as functionally useless. Jeffrey Satinover, a recognized authority on homosexual problems, notes that while the present normalization of homosexuality increases the likelihood that a young person will adopt a homosexual lifestyle, “ridicule, rejection, and harsh punitive condemnation…will be just as likely to drive him to the same position.”6 Second, a Christian discussion of the issue must avoid moralism. All human beings, by virtue of being made in the image of God, are noble, yet fallen, creatures. No one can speak from a position of moral superiority. A Christian, more than anyone else, knows how deep and wide are the mercies of God, as well as the vileness of his own sin. The forgiven Christian will communicate God’s forgiving love, which each of us needs. If God is rich in “kindness, forbearance and patience…that lead to repentance” (Rom. 2:4), so must God’s people be. We cannot begin with accusations of deliberate sin. Many homosexuals have known sexual desire for their own gender since childhood. Before treating the question of sin, we must deal with the question of a fallen world, and of homosexuality as out of step with original creation – as “unnatural,” as Paul says in Romans 1:26. The new ethical norm, the “golden rule” of the new morality goes like this: “The deepest moral law is to be true to oneself.”7 “Follow the desires of your heart;” “Do not judge others.” “To love is to accept all—no discriminations, no distinctions.” Because there is no God outside of us, there is no law outside of us. It is essential to see that this ideological apostasy is happening at two essential levels of human existence in the West—the sexual and the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
spiritual. For discussion, they may be conceptually separated, but as an ideology they belong strictly together. This is a biblical theme, as Jesus warns the church in Thyatira (Rev. 2:20). “Beware,” he says, “of the woman “... it is crucially Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and important to is teaching and seducing my servants to evaluate the practice sexual immorality [sexuality] and deep spiritual to eat food sacrificed to idols [spiritualimplications ity].” This amalgam is called “the deep of the driving things of Satan” (Rev. 2:4). The current integration of homosexuality into the life of the culture and the church is portrayed as a harmless personal orientation, to be celebrated along with all other personal orientations. But it is crucially important to evaluate the deep spiritual implications of the driving agenda of radical sexualization. Both sexuality and spirituality get to the essence of who we are as human beings. A book I wrote a decade ago, The God of Sex, expresses this notion in its subtitle: How Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality. A reviewer catches the thesis: “[Jones shows that] Christians must understand the connection of spirituality and sexuality if we are to communicate relevantly to our postmodern culture.”8 I have not changed my mind since then. The integral relationship between the two is clearly stated by an openly identified homosexual author in his powerful book about the history of homosexuality: Coming Out Spiritually:
agenda of radical sexualization. Both sexuality and spirituality get to the essence of who we are as human beings.”
[O]ne of the important themes of this book is that we cannot do either of these realities justice in our lives without the other. Sexuality without spirituality becomes boring and addictive and even cynical; spirituality without sexuality becomes disengaged and diseased, that is, disincarnated.9
When a non-binary pagan like the author here cited, and a binary Christian like me agree, it is worth noticing! The point is essential – sexuality and spirituality cannot be separated. The two kinds of sexuality, homo or hetero, imply two kinds of spirituality, pagan worship or worship of the Creator. SUMMER 2019
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Both sexuality and spirituality must be seen as part of the same phenomenon, building either an integrated hetero- or homo-cosmological vision of the world of the future. A NEW DAY FOR SEXUALITY
As Kristin Luker, professor of law and sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, concludes: Men and women of a certain age have lived through a revolution as disorienting and historically important as any of the revolutions we routinely recognize as such…. That revolution questioned a whole set of assumptions about what were the right ways for men and women to relate to one another sexually, how “The real power sex was and should be related to maleness and femaleness, and how of contemporary and where marriage and sex should culture has been coincide. The opening up of what in brainwashing had been taken-for-granted truths us into dismissing has changed the world.10
God’s glorious plan for sexuality as tired religious platitudes.”
The revolution in marriage is not imaginary: from the 1960s to 2009, out-of-wedlock births in the USA rose from seven to forty percent. In Europe it is close to sixty percent.11 Following the Obergefell decision, Paul Kengor, a contemporary specialist in the study of Marxism, stated with shock: [T]his is the only time that a majority of everyday Americans have agreed with communists in one of their sharp, atheistic stances against marriage and the family…it is a breath-taking development to behold…both sides recognize that organized religion and traditional biblical and natural law arguments have no merit…an American majority…no longer holds fast to the traditional-religious boundaries that navigated the lives of their ancestors.12
How has this sudden departure from our deepest roots occurred? During my boyhood, no one mentioned homosexuality. How is it that two generations later barbaric Dionysian sex orgies are normal fare for university students? In 2018 SUMMER 2019
the annual “Sex Week” at Chicago’s Northwestern University featured a dominatrix named “Lady Sophia” who taught the students various BDSM (bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism) practices. Says the advertising: “What better way can you learn about the basics of BDSM than from a professional domme in Chicago?”13 No one bothers to ask why students need to know the basics of BDSM. What happened? The real power of contemporary culture has been in brainwashing us into dismissing God’s glorious plan for sexuality as tired religious platitudes. Under the mystical sway of the cultural dominatrix, we deviate from Scripture’s teaching about creational and biological differences between men and women, on whom is imprinted the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27). Progressives hold Christians on a short leash: they must limit their faith to “caring for the least, or being the merciful Samaritan, or welcoming the outsider or washing people’s feet.”14 While these are essential elements of a life lived in obedience to Jesus, “progressive” Christians who dismiss the Bible’s teaching on sexuality unwittingly adopt a form of creation-denying Gnosticism. They cannot truly care for people if they invite them to adopt the ancient Gnostic heresy, which threw God the Creator into Hell.15 Our culture has tried to make a human right out of what Paul describes as sexually “unnatural” (Rom. 1:26). For Paul, homosexuality is unnatural not only for believers, but for everyone, because it is out of order with the physical cosmos as God the Creator made it. Engaging in homosexuality is both a rejection of the real, natural world and of God Himself, who is both moral judge and the intelligent Creator of all things. To deny the authority and goodness of God’s created design is serious heresy, and the eviscerated message of “love” will not help to bring the neighbor into a true relationship with the God of love. In fact, it may push him down the path that leads to destruction. Secular sociologist Philip Rieff, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966),16 states that “the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.”17 This was reaffirmed by a cover story in The Nation in 1993, noting that if the Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Whose Rainbow?
gay-rights cause, which was twenty-five years ago still “a small and despised sexual minority,” was to survive and eventually succeed, it needed to invent for itself “a complete cosmology.” The term cosmology is not referring to peripheral personal rights or individual choices but to an allconsuming worldview reinterpretation of all the elements of human society. 18 A GAY COSMOLOGY
Such a cosmology is now well-developed. Homosexuality was first presented mildly, as an issue of individual civil rights, the exercise of which would not disturb the peace of the dominant heterosexual culture. For those who saw clearly, the intent was not to remain undisturbed in the closet but to challenge the norms of Western culture philosophically and to change the presumption of its heteronormativity. Thus the movement would redefine the meaning of existence for everyone. As early as 1970, the Gay Revolution Party manifesto said: “The gay revolution will produce a world in which all social and sensual relationships will be gay and in which homo- and heterosexuality will be incomprehensible terms.” This is none other than a revived and re-interpreted egalitarian Marxism for the twenty-first century.19 It is inevitable that we should now see these radical and destructive ideas brought into the nation’s schools via the LGBTQ+ notions of a “comprehensive sexuality” agenda. In Texas, the “Welcoming Schools” program (issued by the powerful homosexualist Human Rights Campaign) instructs teachers to “integrate the LGBT propaganda throughout the classroom experience, and…into the youngest grades.”20 As part of this indoctrination, pornographic terms and images are introduced to young children, and elementary school teachers are being told not to use the terms “girl” and “boy,” in order to be more ideologically inclusive.21 That is, more non-binary. Pagan spirituality and pagan sexuality arrived in the West at the same time. While one might attribute a change in sexual choices to identity issues or civil rights, the accompanying spiritual upheaval places the Sixties revolution in a deeper, religious domain. The hippies sought not only Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
free sex, but a free search for the divine self, based on a belief in the god within. That is why hippies went east and gurus came west. Though the term “New Age” is passé, the New Spirituality that emerged from it has gone viral. That no one talks about the New Age is not because it disappeared, but because it succeeded so triumphantly. The New Age has gone viral in the “spiritual but not religious” self-definition of its followers. Acceptance of non-binary spirituality is all of a piece with the acceptance of non-binary sexuality. In both areas there is no longer right and wrong, true and false. This blurring of both sexuality and spirituality has taken place because of a major change of worldview, a cultural revolution that affects all areas of our contemporary world. Apparently great numbers of evangelicals feel that the Church needs to catch up with this “progressive,” Creator-denying view of love and of the nature of human beings. Screwtape22 could never have invented a better strategy for undermining the Christian faith. The acceptance of normalized homosexual practice, while often driven by compassion for those who are suffering, neces“Though the term sarily entails capitulation to unparalleled radical ideology, which drowns any notion “New Age” is of moral purity. This ideology redefines passé, the New human sexuality as the freedom to express Spirituality that any and all sexual inclinations. In the name emerged from it of civil rights, we are sweeping aside Chrishas gone viral.” tian definitions of nation, family, church, marriage, and human sexuality – definitions grounded in the nature of the world as created by God. Such a culture also undermines the deep meaning of the gospel, which is focused on the person and being of the Creator. MARXISM AND SEXUAL CONFUSION
As the twentieth century moved on, socialism and Marxism developed from an economic program to redistribute income for the unfortunate workers to a social agenda of radical egalitarianism.23 To the great surprise of Marxists the success of Western capitalism had taken care of citizens’ material needs. Workers did not feel a need to be economically liberated, and in order to survive, the movement had to morph into a program for the liberation of the psyche and of sexual fantasies. The goal of SUMMER 2019
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Whose Rainbow?
this cultural neo-Marxism24 was and is not only a classless society but a classless mind. It is a “cosmology” based on egalitarianism, and thus it includes views on sexuality, which, it states quite openly, is a wholesale program of “identity politics.” Demonstrating that Marxism was never just a movement of economic justice, it declares quite clearly: …our conception of socialism is not limited to restructuring work and economic activity. It embraces altering the full range of social, cultural, political and familial structures and power relations…all the institutional forces that affect our lives.25
So the current church conflicts regarding both sexuality and spirituality are not happening in a vacuum. Sexual confusion fits perfectly into a God-denying theory of human identity. In their desire to show love to hurting fellow human beings, believers are inadvertently helping to build a godless culture in which all the binary distinctions that remind us of God the Creator have been eliminated. This binary structure emerges as the focal point of the struggle between two over-arching political, cultural and religious visions of existence. TOLERANCE AND APOSTASY
It is no longer considered an individual’s right to maintain varying, even opposing, positions on this subject. We have all read about Christian bakers and photographers who have had their businesses taken away for refusing to participate in gay weddings. But it gets worse. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the tech millionaire and LGBTQ+ activist Tim Gill called for the punishment of Christians who refuse to take part in same-sex weddings. In the interview, the sixty-three-year-old Colorado resident – who has funneled over four hundred million dollars into pro-LGBTQ+ social reform causes over the last twenty years – proclaimed that it’s time to “punish the wicked.”26 The sexuality issue has led some to consider the church not merely a relic of the past, but a current and wicked threat. How will the church find a place in our non-binary
“...the unity of the Christian faith is at stake, unity based on clear thinking about the meaning of the gospel to the human situation.”
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culture to preach with faithfulness and clarity the gospel of divine love for sinners? Not only is this a problem for the Church. It is a problem in the Church. I wish to state here with all seriousness my deep conviction that the contemporary struggle to define human sexuality constitutes the next great apostasy in the Church of Jesus Christ – introducing into the heart of the church’s thinking and practice a notion of human sexuality that will ultimately undermine not only marital and family structures, but our understanding of God and the gospel. Already churches and denominations are splitting into warring factions, as progressive and conservative Christians are unable to agree over the nature of human sexuality as it touches the essential meaning of the gospel. “Apostasy” is a stronger term than “heresy.” Heresy means a deeply important disagreement on a particular doctrine. Apostasy, as Merriam-Webster’s defines it, is “an act of refusing to continue to follow, obey, or recognize a religious faith” or the “abandonment of a previous loyalty.” The Greek root is apo—away from, and stasis—standing. So apostasy is standing totally away from or revolting from something once considered fundamental. Many believe the window of opportunity for arresting this movement is closing. Southern Baptist leader Albert Mohler states that Christians in the United States now face an inevitable moment of decision.27 Journalist Terry Mattingly sees the same issue looming on the evangelical horizon: “There is no way to avoid the showdown that is coming.”28 So the unity of the Christian faith is at stake, unity based on clear thinking about the meaning of the gospel to the human situation. This split became evident when Christians responded with strong opposition to the biblically orthodox Nashville Statement on Sexuality. In the public debate concerning homosexuality, Christian consensus has unraveled. Our problem has planetary implications. Younger Christians are feeling the burden of enormous social pressure to conform to the culture’s redefinition of justice and freedom. What is happenEzra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Whose Rainbow?
ing, even in the Evangelical church, reflects an ideological movement of global proportions. The “best way forward” must face this need squarely.
of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler – not even to eat with such a one (1 Cor. 5:9-11).
We do not have the luxury of shrugging off opposition to the historic understanding of biblical sexuality. The issue has pierced to the heart of the faith. By naïvely Christianizing pagan views of sexuality and spirituality, Christians are laying a match at the doors of their churches and will watch in horror as the conflagration guts the edifice, leaving behind only the ashes of a Christian belief system.
Paul encourages us to get out into the world, recognizing that in its rebellion against God, the world has set up its own rebellious standards. Christians must not conform their message to the message of the world, but take the message of the gospel of salvation to lonely, broken sinners just like us. Only a compelling and courageous account of what it means to love both God and neighbor will truly represent the gospel of Jesus Christ to our culture, which has eliminated God the Creator in favor of setting our own agenda.
Ken Wilson, David Gushee and Rob Bell, lamenting the departure of Millennials from church, have chosen to compromise with the pagan, non-binary culture. To rescue the Church from oblivion, Rob Bell is willing to compromise on homosexuality: I think culture is already there and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2,000 years ago as their best defense, when you have in front of you flesh-and-blood people who are your brothers and sisters, and aunts and uncles, and co-workers and neighbors, and they love each other and just want to go through life.29
It is heart-wrenching to see these and other progressive evangelicals seeking spiritual guidance from anti-Creator, self-identifying culture. As David Wells notes, “Evangelicalism has lowered the barricades. It is open to the world.”30 “Open to the world” can be a good or a bad thing. Will we use openness to evangelize the world or to let it evangelize us? Our authoritative teacher, the Apostle Paul, lays down a principle for our situation: I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people – not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
1 Kelly Grovier, “The History of the Rainbow Flag,” BBC, last modified June 15, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160615the-history-of-the-rainbow-flag. 2 Steven D. Smith, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac (Eerdmans, 2018), 111–12, 114. 3 Smith, Pagans and Christians, 114. 4 Smith, 46 citing Emil Durkheim, the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans, Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, [1912] 1995), 1. 5 Smith, 46 and 218. 6 Cited in Peter Jones, The God of Sex: How Spirituality Defines Your Sexuality (Escondido, CA: Main Entry Editions, 2006), 13. 7 R. R. Reno, “Empire of Desire,” in First Things (June/July 2014), 28. 8 Christendom Awake, http://www.christendomawake.org/pages/jones/godofsex/godofsex. htm. 9 Christian De La Huerta, Coming Out Spiritually (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), xi. 10 Kristin Luker, “Sex, Social Hygiene, and the State: The Double-Edged Sword of Social Reform,” Theory and Society Vol. 27, No. 5 (Oct, 1998), pp. 601-634. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/657941. 11 Robert VerBruggen, “How We Ended Up With 40 Percent of Children Born Out of Wedlock,” Institute for Family Studies, last modified December 18, 2017, https://ifstudies.org/ blog/how-we-ended-up-with-40-percent-ofchildren-born-out-of-wedlock. SUMMER 2019
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12 Paul Kengor, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage (WND Books, 2015), 202–5. 13 Michael Jones, “Chicago dungeon master to teach college students BDSM practices,” The College Fix, las modified March 26, 2018, https://www.thecollegefix.com/chicago-dungeon-master-to-teach-college-students-bdsmpractices/. 14 “The Nashville Statement: A Plain Language Translation,” A Daring Existence, last modified August 30, 2017, https://adaringexistence. wordpress.com/2017/08/30/the-nashvillestatement-a-plain-language-translation. 15 See Peter Jones, Stolen Identity: The Conspiracy to Reinvent Jesus (Colorado Springs: Victor Books, 2006), 33. The Goddess Zoe breathed upon “the face of God and her breath became an angel of fire…and threw him down into Hell under the abyss.” Citation from the ancient Gnostic text, Hypostasis of the Archons 95:8ff. 16 Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Intercollegiate Studies Institute; 1 edition, 2006). 17 The useful analysis of Rieff by Rod Dreher, “Sex after Christianity,” The American Conservative (March/April, 2013). 18 Cited in Rod Dreher, “Sex after Christianity,” The American Conservative, last modified April 11, 2013, www.theamericanconservative.com/ articles/sex-after-christianity. 19 Gay Liberation Front: Manifesto. See https:// sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/glf-london. asp. Printed by the Russell Press Ltd., 45 Gamble Street, Nottingham NG7 4ET and revised 1979 and reprinted by Gay Liberation Information Service, 5 Caledonian Road. London N1. 20 Mass Resistance, last modified September 7, 2017, http://www.massresistance.org/docs/ gen3/17c/MR-TX-Library-Meeting_081217/ meeting.html. 21 Mass Resistance. 22 See C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 1942), a series of imaginary letters from a senior Demon, Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, a Junior Tempter, intended to undermine the faith of Christians. 23 Paul Buhle, “Marxism, the United States, and the Twentieth-Century,” Monthly Review, 61 (May, 2009), optimistically states: “The realiSUMMER 2019
ties of a collapsing ecosystem are as fearful as the threats of nuclear war in the first decade of Monthly Review’s existence. Still, there are lots of prospects in front of us and around the corner. Marxism, always unfinished, is going to be a big help in figuring out what they are and what to do about them.” 24 This is the judgment of the Polish Catholic bishops: “The gender ideology (movement) is the product of many decades of ideological and cultural changes that are deeply rooted in Marxism and neo-Marxism endorsed by some feminist movements and the sexual revolution. This ideology promotes principles that are totally contrary to reality and an integral understanding of human nature.” Cited in http://barbwire. com/2014/12/11/gender-identity-executiveorder-president-obama-trojan-horse. 25 Buhle, “Marxism,” 100. 26 Andy Kroll, “Meet the Megadonor Behind the LGBTQ Rights Movement,” Rolling Stone, last modified June 23, 2017, https://www. rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/ meet-the-megadonor-behind-the-lgbtq-rightsmovement-193996/. 27 Al Mohler, “God, the Gospel, and the Gay Challenge—A Response to Matthew Vines,” AlbertMohler.com, last modified April 22, 2014, https://albertmohler.com/2014/04/22/ god-the-gospel-and-the-gay-challenge-aresponse-to-matthew-vines/. 28 Mohler, “God, the Gospel, and the Gay Challenge.” 29 Mario Diaz, Pastors Supporting Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ in Grave Danger, BarbWire, last modified August 19, 2015, http://barbwire. com/2015/08/19/pastors-supporting-samesex-marriage-in-grave-danger%e2%80%a8. 30 David Wells, No Place for the Truth or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 128.
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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R E M E M B E R I N G H . E VA N R U N N E R
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JOHN HULTINK
H. EVAN RUNNER WAS a character. His personal traits and demeanor made quite an impression on a classroom full of freshman college students about to participate in their first course in philosophy. In my mind’s eye, I can still see him standing there behind the lectern, twirling his glasses and gesticulating. By the time I arrived at Calvin College in the fall of ‘64, Runner had been teaching there for thirteen years and had perfected his technique. He was a natural teacher. And what a teacher he was. A gifted communicator.
Runner had no difficulty making our first day in his philosophy class a memorable one. After some introductory remarks about what he hoped to achieve during the course of the semester, he informed the class that what he expected each student to achieve by the end of the term was to submit a paper answering the enquiry, “What is a thing?” I couldn’t believe it. How do you answer a question like that? What thing? There are a million things. At first I thought that perhaps it was a trick question. Or perhaps one of those really deep questions a psychology professor once posed to his graduate students on their final exam when he wrote on the blackboard, “Why?”, and left the room, leaving the students to figure it out. After the better part of an hour’s reflection, the brightest student in the class wrote, “Why Not?”, handed in his exam paper and later received an A for his effort. It became apparent, during the course of the semester, that there would be no two-word answers to Runner’s enquiry, “What is a thing?”, when our professor began lecturing about the “structure of creation,” “cosmic modalities,” “subject and object relationships,” and “anticipatory and retrocipatory moments.” Well, at least I had an answer to the question what the difference is between high school and college. And 40 years Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
later, as I write these words and am rapidly moving toward the “higher reality” that Evan Runner has achieved, I now also realize that no one other than God will ever have the definitive answer to what a “thing” really is. Runner’s classes were never boring. He constantly had our heads spinning, our hearts pumping and our spirits soaring. Runner was a man with a mission. That was another thing that was apparent that first day in his philosophy class. This wasn’t just another course in yet one more class. This was a man with a mission and this man was looking for converts. It would not be an overstatement to say that what H. Evan Runner hoped to achieve in his lifetime was the de-secularization or better, the Christianization, of higher education. Toward that goal Runner dedicated his life. And toward that goal Runner inspired his students to become participants in the various sciences to reclaim them in the name of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It is why many of Runner’s students became professors at Christian colleges, teachers at Christian grade and high schools, ministers and leaders in various Christian cultural organizations. In some respects, Runner’s influence extended to students around the globe, directly or indirectly. Even Chuck Colson, president of Prison Fellowship, came under Evan’s influence. And learned to love Kuyper.
John Hultink was born in The Netherlands in 1943 where he lived long enough to master the language. In 1952, he immigrated with his parents and four brothers to Canada. He attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan from 1964-1968 where he had the good fortune to study under Dr. Evan Runner who fundamentally changed his outlook on life. Since then, in one way or another, he has been involved in promoting The Philosophy of the Law Idea about which the reader will learn more by reading his article in this journal.
I became one of Runner’s converts. I may not have been one of his brightest students, though l certainly became one of his most ardent disciples. That was one of Evan’s many gifts – helping students come to grips with their calling in life. There was nothing that Evan Runner would not do for “his students” to further that end. To some he gave a roof and shelter; to exceptional students, private tutorials; with others he would SUMMER 2019
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sit for hours in the campus coffee shop assisting them in their studies and careers; to all he was an inspiration and willing friend. Never will I forget the day when my turn came to prepare a paper for the Groen Club – the locals’ term for the student club named for the nineteenth-century Dutch politician and scholar Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer. The combination of joy and anxiety could not have been greater if I had been asked to escort the queen to the student prom. Runner genuinely loved his students; Runner was also a hard taskmaster. Runner did not suffer fools or foolish insights gladly. And there was no higher calling during four years of college life for a “Runner student” than to succeed admirably in the writing and presentation of his Groen Club paper. Dr. Tunis Prins, another of my Calvin philosophy professors, who was of the opinion that Plato was a Christian 400 years before Christ’s incarnation, would have “...we do not act in to spend most of the semester looking at my empty seat. God’s place, for God
has not relinquished His sovereignty ... our human acts are always and everywhere acts in response to the mandate God has delegated us to perform.”
So I went to see Dr. Runner at his home to review the assignment (“The Nature of Revelation”), and to ask him for copies of old Groen Club papers written by some of his better students to help me come to grips with my assignment. As usual, Runner dropped whatever he was doing and went to collect an armful of student papers. This meeting with Dr. Runner was helpful, but it did nothing to arrest my anxiety. He extracted a student paper from the pile and said, “Here is an example, John, of what you do not want to do.” The title of this particular student paper was something like, “Calling, Task and Culture.” Dr. Runner then went on to explain that this otherwise capable student had made the fatal error of confusing vice-gerent with vice-regent – spoiling the entire paper. For Dr. Runner, teaching was not solely a classroom affair. Wherever two or three are gathered together, there he would teach. So he proceeded to teach. “A vice-regent, John, is someone who acts in the place of a ruler, like the vice-president of the United States who acts in the place of the presi-
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dent when he is unconscious or dead. We do not act in God’s place. God is sovereign; always present, always sovereign. Christians are always and everywhere God’s vice-gerents. All our authority, all our power, is delegated to us by God, who is the ruler and supreme head. So we do not act in God’s place, for God has not relinquished His sovereignty, nor, contrary to popular academic opinion, is God dead; our human acts are always and everywhere acts in response to the mandate God has delegated us to perform. CORAM DEO! So you see, John, that we are God’s vicegerents; not His vice-regents.” I saw. And I went home, in fear and trembling, to write a Groen Club paper on “The Nature of Revelation.” As I walked back to my residence, I whispered, “And God help me, if I get it wrong.” Besides Dr. Prins’ class, I would have to find a few more non-essential classes to skip. What was it that inspired such dedication in Runner’s students? What drove his students to the outer limits of their abilities? Runner was very fatherly in recognizing a student’s abilities. He never asked a student to perform beyond the talents God had given that student. And those talents varied widely. But the admiration and dedication on the part of the students did not. Why was that? POPULAR PHILOSOPHY AND MISSIONARY ZEAL
The breadth and depth of the Christian insight formulated by Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven and their academic associates, which became known by the name The Philosophy of The Law-Idea, does not readily lend itself to popularization. And unlike Camus’ and Sartre’s existentialism, does not readily absorb itself into the public psyche. What does lend itself to popularization and broad public comprehension is the religious dynamic of the Philosophy of The Law-Idea. No one understood this better than H. Evan Runner, who as a young man had a driving passion to go to Korea or China as God’s missionary. With the northern march of the communists and the demise of the Kuomintang in the late ‘40s this was not advisable.1 (Think of Steve McQueen in “The Sand Pebbles.”) Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Life is Religion
That missionary zeal which failed to find its outlet in the fields of Korea and China, Evan Runner brought with him into the classroom. When he had completed his doctoral studies and years of preparation teaching high school students Greek and Latin, the fertile fields of Calvin College, with its thousands of students and scores of professors, became his mission field. Like most missionaries, Evan Runner was not always warmly received. Especially not after he gave a public address entitled, “Rudder, Hard Over,”2 the intent of which was clear, even to the unsuspecting. This public speech was a not-so-subtle criticism of the academic direction that Runner saw Calvin College taking. The students loved it. Here was a man who shared their youthful idealism, unfettered on their part by bitter experience; here was a man who breathed a warmth and a power into his presentation of the Word of God that few had witnessed from the pulpit. Evan Runner took his students by the hand and led them to a field where lay hidden a treasure of such magnitude, it defied human comprehension. Evan Runner, a man who did barely a stitch of physical labor during his entire 86 years on earth, took hold of a shovel and excavated that field until that exquisite treasure lay exposed for all his students to behold. “Here,” he said, like a proud father at the birth of his child, “this is the kingdom of God. Sell everything you own and everything you desire to own in this life that beckons you. Abandon your dreams of personal glory and greatness, riches and wealth; relinquish your self-centered ambitions and aspirations and join me for the rest of your lives to labor in the vineyard of the Lord.” Missionary zeal in and of itself would not have been enough for Runner to inspire his students and extract a commitment from them which few professors, (Calvin Seerveld was another) anywhere in North America could match. What Runner accomplished in his lifetime through his students is unusual in the extreme. THE BATTLE FOR ULTIMATE ALLEGIANCE
The reason for Runner’s success with his students was this: Runner was a committed Christian, Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
teaching Christian students, at a Christian liberal arts college. When Runner, the professor, stood in front of the class looking at all those students, he saw himself, so to speak, sitting among his students. Runner was one of us. He knew our needs before we did; he understood our deepest conflicts before we gave voice to them; he already knew how we struggled in the depths of our being to attempt to relate our Christian faith to learning. He knew that the college’s claim of offering students unity in diversity (say uni-versity) was false. Stones for bread. He knew because he had walked in our shoes, struggled with our questions, lived with our frustrations. He understood us; knew exactly where to take us. About his own education, which included three years at Harvard and exposure to some of the finest humanist minds of his day, Runner stated in an interview in 1979: “I was becoming a bit skeptical about the meaning of my research projects. I was just accumulating facts, facts, facts, but my ability to unify them and see sense in them was not keeping pace.... My life was just a lot of bits and pieces; it wasn’t pulled together.”3 Sentiments every college and university student can relate to. And this Evan Runner understood and appreciated. About his experiences at the University of Pennsylvania, Runner stated the following: I had a year course in modern philosophy from Henry Bradford Smith, one of America’s best logicians. He was the one who at the end of the first lecture dared us to leave the faith of our homes behind us and follow the course with an open mind. He said, ‘This class is made up of all kinds of people – orthodox Protestants, Orthodox Jews, liberal Jews, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox Christians, and unbelievers like myself. How can we possibly discuss together unless we have some common basis? And since it can’t be any of those things, what else is there except that we can build a fund of rational ideas together? And that’s what modem philosophy is all about.’ Well, I was impressed with that. That’s the day I walked home through the park and stood SUMMER 2019
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in front of a tree and took out my pocketknife and scratched my initials in the tree and thought: ‘Do I dare or don’t I dare?’ I finally decided I didn’t dare let go of my faith. I learned from that later how important it is to grasp a student in the first week – when those fundamental decisions are being made that determine the whole direction of his life.4
That day in 1935, at the University of Pennsylvania, in Henry Bradford Smith’s class, was the turning point in young Evan’s life; it was the day God decreed to take control of the young student’s life and save him from himself. It was the day God decreed that Howard Evan Runner would become His missionary to students at Calvin College and elsewhere. Which serious student, at one point or another in his life, has not stood alongside Evan in that park, carving his initials into that tree, to weigh his allegiances to God’s great adversary? “Give up your faith in God, empty your mind of everything your mother taught you about God as you sat on her knee, abandon the faith of your home, and come, follow me, on this exciting, humanist experiment.” Which of us has not faced that temptation – even in the sanctity of the Christian classroom?
“‘Do I dare or don’t I dare to let go of my faith?’ Evan understood the terrifying struggle that engages every student in the battle of the spirits.”
On that day, God said: “No, Evan. You will not eat the poisonous fruit from Henry Bradford Smith’s tree. Go. Carve your initials into that tree; carve them deep into your mind as well, so that this act may become a lasting memorial to you of My covenant faithfulness. The cry of your young heart, that I reveal to you the relationship of My Word to learning, has been answered. I will send you to Westminster Theological Seminary; there you will meet My servant, Cornelius Van Til. At Westminster, I will introduce you to My ‘blustering’ servant, Klaas Schilder. Then I will send you to the Free University founded by My servant, Abraham Kuyper. There you will find My faithful servants, Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd. They will provide you with the tools required to perform the task I have decreed for you.” SUMMER 2019
Evan Runner’s academic experiences, his youthful exposure, during the formative years of his life, to Henry Bradford Smith; his probing search to forge unity into the segmentation of his academic endeavours; the unifying power of the Word of God as he came to understand the coherence of God’s creation under Van Til, Schilder, Vollenhoven, Dooyeweerd – these all served to make Evan Runner a man of God, missionary to countless students. Yes, Howard Evan Runner understood his students better than they understood themselves. Runner, the professor, saw himself in every student he ever taught. He understood the perils those students faced when they set foot on campus. He knew: The tree with his initials loomed ever larger in his memory. God would never let Evan forget. “Do I dare or don’t I dare to let go of my faith?” Evan understood the terrifying struggle that engages every student in the battle of the spirits. Is it really imperative, dear God, that I must choose between academic respectability in the eyes of my worldly colleagues and faithfulness to You?” He understood and it became his mission in life to take as many of those students as God would grant him, and lead them to that field where lay hidden that great treasure. Students sensed Runner’s uncompromising commitment; they realized that this man believed what he said. Teaching wasn’t merely a means to earn a livelihood for Evan Runner. It was his life. He lived and breathed his convictions. At times the Spirit who propelled Evan Runner became palpable in his words. One such time was on the occasion of the opening of the Institute for Christian Studies, where Evan Runner gave the keynote address. Runner’s grasp of history is comprehensive. And in the opening of the Institute he saw the efforts and blessings of a lifetime come together. As he spoke, his words vibrated with a holy passion: What a day this is to be alive! How full of consequences for the life of future generations! How crucial for all the English-speaking nations, and even, as Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Life is Religion
we hope, for far beyond! We come today introducing into the life of this nation and of this continent a new institution. More weighty is the fact that for the English-speaking world it is even a new, an unheard-of kind of institution. The emergence of this new thing means that a new concentration of forces is taking shape. It signifies a re-organization of our human and material resources to accomplish a task not yet undertaken. There is a realignment with the avowed purpose of carrying out the Christian mission in higher education in a manner and to a degree never hitherto attempted on our continent. This is a radical Christian proposal for radical times. Karl Marx is justly celebrated for his remark: ‘To be radical is to go to the root of the question. Now the root of mankind is man.’ Since Marx, all of us are being driven more and more to the root of the question. Our attention is now going to have to be centered upon things which previously, if they have been given any consideration at all, have been considered only very incidentally and peripherally. This charting of a new course is what clearly marks the event we are witnessing here today as an historic event. Events of this kind are to be experienced only very infrequently.... Today, on this high day of our own corporate life, what high privilege it is to be alive and present in this chamber! Such a rush of feelings and sentiments surges through us, now that we are come to this moment! Above all else, we are grateful to God on high, that He still, at a late hour in our history, graciously grants us the historical freedom to take this significant and decisive step that we are taking here this day.5
After two thousand years of Christianity, what is this “new thing” that Evan Runner was talking about? What is this “Christian mission in higher education in a manner and to a degree never hitherto attempted on our continent”? The answer to that question is the answer to Runner’s success with his students. Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
LIFE IS RELIGION
The institution that became the exclusive, dominant voice of Christianity in the Western world for more than a millennium, the Roman Catholic church, and in a real sense, our Mother, got it fundamentally wrong. Under the influence of Greek philosophy, the Roman Catholic church developed a view of reality (life) which effectively divided the life of the Christian into two compartments: the compartments of a) nature and b) grace. Among evangelical Christians this compartmentalization is better known as the a) secular and b) religious. Opponents of Christianity never tire of pointing out that “religion” is for the church and, perhaps, for the home. But religion has no place in the public affairs of mankind. Runner radically broke with this dualistic view of life; this idea that there is a domain of nature, the secular domain, where Christians and non-Christians have everything in common. Runner coined the phrase: Life Is Religion. (The insight underlying this phrase did not originate with Runner, just the phrase.) “The institution The assertion that “Life is Religion” is that became based on the insight that faith is a human the exclusive, function. It is common for unbelievers to dominant voice contend that Christians have faith; unbeof Christianity in lievers, atheists, agnostics, pagans do not. Such is not the case. Faith is as much a huthe Western world man function as is reasoning. To live out of for more than a one’s faith is man’s inescapable condition. millennium, the No one acquainted with the writings of Roman Catholic Bertrand Russell would accuse Russell of church, and in being a Christian. But Russell wore his a real sense, our faith on his sleeve. Russell believed pasMother, got it sionately in human freedom, human autonomy. Freedom and autonomy were the fundamentally shrines at which Russell worshiped. In his wrong.” book, Why I am Not a Christian, Russell wrote an article entitled “A Free Man’s Worship.” Is not this Russell’s creed when he proclaims: Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, SUMMER 2019
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tomorrow himself to pass through the gates of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow fall, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built...6
Russell was not a Christian, though he did have faith. Only instead of worshipping the true God, Russell “worships at the shrine his own hands have built.” As do all who do not worship the true God who revealed Himself in Scripture (cf. Isa. 44:8b – “You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other rock; I know not one.”) Evan Runner never tired of pointing out to his students that all men are religious. It is man’s inescapable condition, as Russell has so eloquently demonstrated. When Henry Bradford Smith dared the young Evan Runner and his fellow classmates to abandon their respective faiths and approach the study of modern philosophy “with an open mind” he was, in fact, selling all his students a bill of goods. It was deception of the worst kind by an individual in a position of “Either man stands power and trust. What Henry Bradford Smith actually asked his students to do in service of the true was to place their trust in so-called auGod or he worships tonomous human reason, the faith to an idol. But worship which Smith himself subscribed.
someone or something, he will.”
Runner helped his students to see that our lives are made of whole cloth. There are no seams, no dualisms. Either man stands in service of the true God or he worships an idol. But worship someone or something, he will. Therefore it is imperative for Christians to discard the false dualism of nature and grace as articulated by the Catholic church. The whole man is religious and life in its entirety is a walk before the face of God, in obedience or disobedience. Nature and grace do not stand in opposition to each other. Faith (grace) is not a super-added gift. It is man’s creaturely condition. At issue is whether that faith is directed at God or at an idol. The insight that ‘life in its entirety is religion’ (CORAM DEO), throws a “new” light on our understanding of the entire human enterprise.
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Once Runner convinced the Christian student that “Life is Religion” and that all men are at heart religious beings serving either the true God or an idol, the question followed: “What implications does this have for a Christian worldview, a Christian philosophy? The answer is indeed radical, does indeed go to the root of the question. For fallen man it means that God’s revelation of Himself must of necessity form the foundation of all human scholarship. Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd acknowledged this radical belief in their formulation of the “Philosophy of the Law-Idea.” That philosophy itself is worthy of an article, but it is anchored in three profoundly confessional statements. The first is that God is Creator; the second, that the human race, through its representative head, Adam, fell into sin; and the third, that all those who confess the name of Christ, the new Adam and representative head, are granted new life in this life and the next. This “new thing” that Evan Runner refers to in his keynote address at the opening of the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS) is an academic enterprise that is based on a biblically informed understanding of man and the creation. It was indeed a new thing. I know of no other academic enterprise that declares that all of created reality – God’s cosmos – can only be properly understood on the rock-solid basis of a confession that 1: God created the cosmos out of nothing 2: He placed man (Adam) at the head of that creation as steward, but Adam became a rebel and served Satan 3: Christ took Adam’s place and redirected the entire creation back to God Law, as understood by the formulators of the Philosophy of the Law-Idea, is an expression of God’s will (Rev. 11:4). Law, in the form of God speaking, is the divine mechanism whereby He commanded the entire creation into existence. At the heart of this “new thing” lies our understanding of this biblical idea of law. I have always considered the most important insight Dr. Runner taught to be his explanation of Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
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law. In his book The Relation of the Bible to Learning, he writes: “Law is every Word of God by which He has subjected the creation to His will or rule. Law is thus nothing other than the will of the Sovereign God for creation.”7 Rooted in this understanding of Law, the Philosophy of the Law-Idea worked out a biblical understanding of the unity and diversity of all that God created. This understanding of law opens a window to viewing creation as it has never been understood before. This foundational view of the law “enables” us to “grasp” the biblical revelation found in Colossians 1:16-17: “For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.” In an attempt to share his insight into God’s law with his audience on the occasion of the opening of the ICS, Dr. Runner stated, God’s Law is God’s Word. Because God is God, His every Word is Law. For the very first words of the Bible we hear, “And God said, ‘Let there be’” this and that. All such creative words are the Law. The Law is what causes creatures and the whole creation to hang together; it determines the condition of all creaturely existence. It itself is concentrated in the religious Law of life: Walk before Me according to My commandments and live (cf. 1 Kgs. 3:14). Here we have the heart of the creation. The Law determines what it means to live before God, or to die before God. The Jews were the people of God’s choice. He made Himself known to them; to them He gave Himself. They were His people and He was their God. He was with them and for them. The Law simply gives expression to this covenantal fellowship. It is the Word of the living God by which the people of His choice live before His face, by which they are enabled to bring all the potentialities and capacities which God Himself has laid in human existence, both individual and collective, to the fullest and richest possible realization in a service of God. This is the true Kingdom of God, and here is the true Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
joie de vivre (joy of life) which makes one to dance before Jehovah.8
In an attempt to illustrate the life-giving power of God’s Law, Runner quotes the example used by R.B. Kuiper who tells the story of the slightly peculiar old lady who went to visit a friend. When her hostess disappeared into the kitchen for a few minutes, the peculiar old lady got out of her chair, and walking about the salon, found a bowl of tropical fish behind the grand piano. In a sudden inspiration she reached her hand into the bowl, lifted out one of the fish and dropped him tenderly onto the rich carpeting that covered the floor. As she did so she muttered to herself, ‘Wicked old woman, keeping you shut up in that little old bowl! I’m going to give you the freedom of this whole salon.
“Law is every Word of God by which He has subjected the creation to His will or rule. Law is thus nothing other than the will of the Sovereign God for creation.”
Runner, who quotes this illustration in his book, The Relation of the Bible to Learning, goes on to note: Of course, the fish promptly proceeded to expire. Why? Because it had been removed from that law area for which God had created it. And so it is also with man: he can be free to live as man only when he is in the Law-environment for which he was created. That ‘environment’ is the full range of the divine Law for the creation, is every Law-word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. In this sense, the Law (God’s will) is the condition of man’s freedom.
As an expression of God’s will, God’s rule, Law is the only key that will open our minds to understanding creation in all its unity and diversity as created by God. AFTERTHOUGHT
A few weeks ago, I visited my old friend, Henry VanderGoot, in Grand Rapids, Runner’s hometown. As we were reminiscing over supper we SUMMER 2019
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recalled some of our Calvin College experiences. “You know,” Henry said, “it is almost 55 years ago John, that we, as freshmen, sat in Runner’s course: Philosophy 101. We are now well into our seventies. Most of life lies behind us. Was there any one single event in our entire lives that was more meaningful and provided us with more insight, in terms of grappling with the unity and diversity of creation than that one, “...so it is also with single course, in Runner’s class where man: he can be free we struggled to come to terms with the to live as man only question: What is a thing?”
when he is in the Law-environment for which he was created.”
Do you understand this, dear readers, as you yourself attempt to come to terms with reality in the 21st century? Do you comprehend what a priceless gift Evan Runner bequeathed to his students? A gift that served them well all the days of their lives. That gift is now available to you through the Ezra Institute. You cannot sit in on Dr. Runner’s lectures. Evan Runner has gone to be with his Lord and Saviour. If Christ is your Lord and Saviour also, you will see Evan Runner at the great and wondrous resurrection that is rapidly approaching. But some of the fruits of our lives outlive us. Such was the case in Dr. Runner’s life. The day young Evan stood in the park, considered his professor’s proposal to abandon his Christian faith, and carved his initials into that tree is now 84 years ago – years that bear witness to God’s profound love and covenant faithful-
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ness. In God’s merciful providence, and to your great benefit, Evan Runner himself became like a tree – a tree planted by streams of living water, which yielded its fruit in season. Great and blessed was the company of those who ate freely from that tree. Thankful are they to have carved their initials therein.
1
Harry Van Dyke and Albert M. Wolters, “Interview with Dr. H. Evan Runner” in Hearing and Doing: Philosophical Essays Dedicated to H. Evan Runner, ed. John Kraay and Anthony Tol (Toronto, ON.: Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1979), 337. 2 H. Evan Runner, “Het Roer Om” (Rudder Hard Over), Torch and Trumpet 3 (April-May 1953): 1-4. 3 Van Dyke and Wolters, “Interview with Dr. H. Evan Runner,” 346. 4 Van Dyke and Wolters, “Interview with Dr. H. Evan Runner,” 338-339. 5 Runner, “Point Counter Point,” An address delivered on October 7, 1967, in Toronto, on the occasion of the opening of the Institute for Christian Studies. 6 Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship” in Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Topics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), 115-116. 7 Runner, The Relation of the Bible to Learning (Toronto, ON: Wedge Publishing, 1970), 50. 8 Runner, “Point Counter Point.”
Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
BOOK REVIEW Francis A. Schaeffer’s
Art & the Bible “What is the place of art in the Christian life? Shouldn’t a Christian focus his gaze steadily on ‘religious things’ alone and forget about art and culture?”1 So begins Francis A. Schaeffer’s watershed book, Art and the Bible, which encourages believers to come to terms with what the Scriptures say about arts, culture, and Christianity. Schaeffer’s small book emboldens Christians to be appreciators of art as well as critics and creators of it. When Schaeffer wrote Art and the Bible in the latter half of the twentieth century, Christians were notoriously suspicious of arts and culture. Today, many in the church and many in society-at-large either ignore the arts – giving no thought to the aesthetics of music, architectural design, visual arts, drama, poetry, fiction, films, sculptures – or they reject the arts wholesale as controversial, distracting, worldly, or simply wasteful. Schaeffer laments that Christians tend “to relegate art to the very fringe of life. The rest of human life we feel is more important. Despite our constant talk about the Lordship of Christ, we have narrowed its scope to a very small area of reality.”2 With Art and the Bible Schaeffer sets out to challenge the evangelical church’s tendency to marginalise the arts by showing his readers that all reality is under the Lordship of Christ, and this no less extends to the arts and culture that surround us. The importance of art and creativity should not be a surprise to Christians who mean to take the Bible seriously. Genesis, for example, begins with God creating a beautiful universe filled with shapes, patterns, colours, and creatures on a cosmic canvas that He spoke into existence. We don’t often think of the universe as a work of art partly because it has been said that “art is essentially useless.” However, the same could be said about God’s remarkable artistic masterpiece, the universe. The aseity of God reminds us that this Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
beautiful universe was not created by the Lord because it was necessary.3 So what purpose does the universe serve? Besides declaring the glory of God, it also declares that its Maker delights in creating beautiful things. Schaeffer writes, “Come with me to the Alps and look at the snow covered mountains. There can be no question. God is interested in beauty. God made people to be beautiful. And beauty has a place in the worship of God.”4 Likewise, art as a thing of beauty, can also declare the beauty of our God: Schaeffer writes, “A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God.”5 We need to be like our Creator, whose interest in sheer beauty is plainly evident in creation. The church has become careless with her theology of beauty, choosing instead to focus on matters that are more pragmatic. An example Schaeffer cites is the proliferation of “ugliness” in “evangelical church buildings,” albeit highly functional buildings.6 This is why Schaeffer goes on to argue that we are not only called to be appreciators of God’s created beauty, but also makers of new beauty. Because God made Adam and Eve in His own image, human beings are the only species in the universe that create things. God endows men and women with the impulse to be creative, whether it is visual arts, musical arts, literary arts, culinary arts, dramatic arts, fashion, landscaping, construction, etc. Art is and has been a major part of the human experience, from the prehistoric cave paintings in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France to the CGI of blockbuster film franchises. Art has also played a prominent role in religious experiences, whether pagan idols, gothic cathedrals, stained-glass windows, church music, or poet-preachers. To ignore art would be to ignore an essential part of what makes us image-bearers of God.
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JEREMY W. JOHNSTON Jeremy W. Johnston is the Arts columnist for Barnabas magazine (Sovereign Grace Fellowship of Canada) and author of All Things New: Essays on Christianity, culture and the arts. He divides his time as a teacher of Classical Studies and English at Hillfield Strathallan College and a professor of Creative and Critical Thinking at Mohawk College. He holds a Master’s degree in Education and an Honors degree in English Literature and Humanities from the University of Western Ontario. He has also studied Bible, Apologetics, and Theology at Peace River Bible Institute in Alberta and Toronto Baptist Seminary in Ontario. Jeremy and his wife, Laurie, have been homeschooling their four children for over 15 years. They attend Pilgrim Baptist Fellowship in Hamilton, Ontario. For more information, please visit www. jeremywjohnston.com.
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Book Review: Art & the Bible
Although the Bible is not an exhaustive treatise on all matters of the human experience, it does have a lot to say about art. Schaeffer concisely addresses what the Word of God has to say about artistic endeavours, recounting the biblical significance of artists and their artwork, such as the textiles, sculptures, furnishings, and other design elements for the Tabernacle and for Solomon’s Temple. Schaeffer also speaks to David’s poetry and music, as well as Ezekiel’s use of drama and dance. He points out that although some art is designed for specific purposes, there is a great deal of biblical art that simply conveys God’s delight in beauty. Schaeffer also reminds us that some of the greatest works of art have been created through the lens of a Christian worldview. Because Christians know and are becoming more and more like the most creative being in the universe, we also ought to be “the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.”7
and the arts. He effortlessly makes intellectual ideas intelligible for lay readers and he writes with biblical authority coupled with pastoral affection. Art and the Bible is an essential primer for Christians seeking to understand and engage the world of arts and culture. The book is made up of two essays: in the first essay, Schaeffer makes his case for the significance of art in the Bible and the need for a non-dichotomous Christian worldview. In the second half of the book, Schaeffer unpacks various competing perspectives on art, how we can know the difference between good and bad art, and what sort of art Christians should be making in our present time and place. Schaeffer concludes by emphasising the aim of the Christian life “is to be a thing of truth and also a thing of beauty in the midst of a lost and despairing world.”11
In spite of a biblical perspective on beauty and the arts, and in spite of a long and established Christian artistic heritage, why do so many contemporary Christians still steer away from the arts? The reason, Schaeffer points out, is that many Christians hold to a bifurcated view of reality. Our culture has divided the world into secular and sacred domains and has accepted a nonbiblical “hierarchy between the body and the soul.”8 Christians, who are immersed in this culture, are often tempted to put tremendous emphasis on saving “souls” for the sacred realm while ignoring the fact that saved men and women have minds and bodies as well. Schaeffer writes in Art and the Bible that “if Christianity is really true, then it involves the whole man, including his intellect and creativeness.” The gospel of Jesus Christ, Schaeffer argues, brings “the lordship of Christ over the total man.”9 Addressing this secular and sacred dichotomy is a common theme in much of Schaeffer’s writings, where he argues that Christianity has implications for all aspects of the human experience, from ecology and politics to arts and culture. Schaeffer writes, “Christ is the Lord of our whole life and the Christian life should produce not only truth – flaming truth – but also beauty.”10
During the latter half of the twentieth century, two of the most influential and well-known apologists were C.S. Lewis and Francis A. Schaeffer. Yet today, very few in the Christian church have even heard of Schaeffer, much less read his work. During his lifetime, however, Francis Schaeffer wrote several important books and produced a number of influential film documentaries on topics facing both the modern church and the modern world. Through the lens of a Christian worldview, he explored and examined topics as diverse as environmentalism, ecology, education, arts, spirituality, philosophy, and politics. His observations and insights are still timely and relevant today.
Schaeffer’s Art and the Bible is a brief and highly readable treatment of the subject of Christianity SUMMER 2019
WHO WAS FRANCIS A. SCHAEFFER?
Schaeffer and his wife Edith also founded a ministry for disenchanted and searching individuals who were seeking genuine answers to their honest questions. This ministry began in the mountains of Switzerland at a chalet, which became known as L’Abri (“the shelter”). The ministry eventually expanded to locations around the world where people still come, experience hospitality, meaningful work, and authentic Christianity while having their questions heard by compassionate Christians and answered with biblical truth. Schaeffer believed that only Christianity has the answers humanity seeks, and Christians shouldn’t Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Book Review: Art & the Bible
be ashamed in offering up those answers in truth and in love. He writes in his book, True Spirituality, “How beautiful Christianity is – first, because of the sparkling quality of its intellectual answers, but second, because of the beautiful quality of its human and personal answers.”12 Ultimately, Schaeffer devoted his life to leading people to Jesus, the One who declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
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Francis A. Schaeffer, Art and the Bible (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 13. 2 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 13. 3 The aseity of God is His attribute of independent self-existence, that is, He is the uncreated Creator. 4 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 26. 5 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 18. 6 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 26. 7 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 91. 8 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 14. 9 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 16. 10 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 48. 11 Schaeffer, Art and the Bible, 94. 12 Francis A. Schaeffer, True Spirituality (Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 2001), 144.
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