"OnceAWesleyan's Response to my Comments

I'll post my response to these comments tomorrow, Lord willing

ME: It gives me no end of joy to see a Calvinist point to "experience" as the authenticator of the right presuppositions with which to approach the Bible :-)

OAW2 –Appeal to the Spirit of the living God is an appeal to experience? Well I guess to a hammer everything looks like a nail. This started when you questioned me, “Where does the right worldview come from?” This is basically a question asking, ‘how do we know what we know.’ We are shut up to three basic approaches to this question.

Reason: This is the approach of the Rationalist. Man, starting from himself, can develop the right worldview. (I would put ‘tradition’ as a subcategory here.)

Intuition: This is usually associated with mystical type approaches to truth.

Revelation: This is the reality that before people can have a Worldview that comports with true Knowledge of God. God must crush the unbelievers previous Worldview that is designed for the very purpose of suppressing God. In revelation God make Himself known. People only reason accurately about God once God has revealed Himself to them. They never autonomously reason their way to the God of the Bible. While there is such a thing as Natural Revelation there is no such thing as natural Theology because the unbeliever using his God hating Worldview suppresses the truth from Natural revelation that ontologically he can’t help but know to be true, since he is made in the Imago Dei.

This is standard Christianity. The mind experiences the noetic effects of sin and like the rest of man is dead (I Cor. 2:14, Romans 8:7). In unrighteousness man builds Worldviews that are lies because they are from the Father of lies. Now Christ is not only Priest and King but He is also Prophet, which is to say that He is the chief interpreter of reality. If we would interpret reality correctly we must think our thoughts after Him. The Spirit of Christ has been sent to lead us into all truth. Scripture teaches us that ‘God’s Word is Truth.’ In light of this if you will re-read my original answer you will see that I included all of these in answering you as to where right Worldviews come from.


ME: I accept the strong possibility that there are clear presuppositional leanings a person will likely have after conversion that they might not have had prior to conversion. But I have two or three serious questions.

OAW: I would like to be clear here about how dramatic a difference conversion makes in our thinking and presuppositions. Let’s take a hypothetical Western Pagan Scientist. Before conversion when the Scientist picked up a fossil he looked at it and saw evidence of billions and billions of years driven by godless evolution. Being Elect, our Scientist is regenerated and is given the mind of God and in Sanctification grows in the mind of God. Now our Scientist picks up the same fossil and looking at it see evidence of Creation.

What changed? Well in conversion His beginning point was changed and with his beginning point being changed His Worldview went from the anthropocentrism of Evolution to the Christocentrism of Biblical Christianity.


ME: Since among those I would consider genuinely converted we find countless different understandings of the Bible, we are forced to a) deny most of them a true conversion or b) consider the conversion presuppositions very broad indeed.

OAW: Or we conclude that

c.) Sanctification is a process that requires the continual work of the Spirit of God to bring His people in harmony, and that God has good reasons for not bringing that harmony of thinking about yet.

d.) That there is room for SOME elasticity in a Biblical Worldview. That would fit nicely with the idea that God is both one and many. It would stand to reason that since in God both Unity and Diversity are equally ultimate you would find in Christian World views both a Unity that identifies them all as Christian and a Diversity that accounts for the elasticity.

e.) That an individual’s Theology has not yet caught up to their conversion. I must admit, though that I believe, that many of those who are Christians in an objective sense need to be born again.


ME: I think I can follow the reasoning of the Reformed epistemologists. They seem to be using the same sort of "microreason" that people use every day in all sorts of different contexts, from blog discussions to scientific laboratories to choosing jello. These are rules of logic like a=a, if a=b and b=c then a=c, and so forth. The difference seems to be in the presuppositions, what possibilities are allowed (e.g., are miracles possible? can someone rise from the dead?).

OAW: Actually, I’ve always thought of Biblical epistemology to be of the ‘macroreason’ variety. Biblical epistemology does not compartmentalize reality and so seeks to see the whole and how the parts inner-connect. For example, Biblical epistemology understands that there are distinctions between History and Literature, and Economics but we them all as but subsets of Theology.


ME: There is some level on which the reasoning of the converted and the reasoning of the unconverted seems to be the same basic micro-reason and experiential reasoning. I can account for Reformed epistemology simply by saying the presuppositions are different without saying the reasoning is different.

OAW: OK… this makes sense. Surely you must admit that the reasoning is different. Someone who is reasoning while suppressing the truth in unrighteousness is surely going to be reasoning differently then somebody who isn’t. Now clearly when unbelievers get things right in their pagan Worldviews with their microreasoning it is an instance where they have imported Christian Capital into their Worldview in order to get it off the ground. It’s as if they have to sit in God’s lap in order to slap him in the face. Because the unbeliever could only go insane (Nietzsche) or kill themselves (all those who hate Wisdom love death) with a consistent unchristian reasoning and Worldview they import Christian capital into their non-Christian Worldviews. They hence become walking contradictions and it is precisely at those points of contradictions that God honored evangelism can happen.


OAW; I really don’t know what you do with Romans 1:18-32 or what you do with the reality of the noetic effects of sin. In my humble opinion these seem to be major problems for you.


ME: What do the two worldviews each look like specifically?

OAW: What, you want me to write a book on your blog?

Briefly – Very briefly, Seed of the serpent vs. Seed of the woman, the antithesis – another Christian 101 doctrine.

A Christian Worldview
-- Epistemology - Revelation – To the law and to the testimonies
-- Axiology – God is the ultimate value – All that we do is for His Glory
-- Ontology -- Personal creator
-- Teleology – Kingdom of God (I prefer postmillennial)

Pagan Worldview
-- Epistemology – Reason or intuition
-- Axiology – Man, individually or corporately, is the ultimate value
-- Ontology – Time + Chance + Circumstance / Chaos and Dark night
-- Teleology – Utopian or Nihilistic

The Christian worldview coheres because it corresponds to reality. The pagan worldview and putatively Christian worldviews that are laced with pagan presuppositions are full of contradictions and do not cohere because they do not correspond to reality.


ME: The words of the Bible make an aweful lot of sense when we look at ideas and concepts we find in the writings contemporary with each individual book.

OAW: Surely if the World is the way that God made it we can expect cultures that have deviated from the word of God to still retain vestiges of the rejected authority of God in their culture.

As I said earlier, it is impossible to have a pagan worldview without some Christian capital in it to make it successful. Therefore, given that, I would contend that where we find Hittites with certain habits concerning covenants or where we find similar flood accounts (Gilgamesh epic) or where we find patriarchy being shared what we are seeing when inspired writers appeal to the same sort of thing are not examples of shared constructed reality but rather what we are seeing is non-Christian cultures maintaining their defiance of reality by incorporating enough of real reality in order to make sure the wheels of their psuedo-realities don’t fall off.

So if the biblical writers are in dialog with their own worlds and if they share many elements with it is because, in the end, the World they all live in is God’s world. They have, at the same time, everything in common and nothing in common with pagans. They have everything in common because it is God’s world and pagans can’t get away from that. Real reality is what it is. but they have nothing in common because the pagan is by means of his fallen epistemology is denying what ontologically he can’t escape, while the believer’s epistemology is seeking to re-interpret God’s reality after him and so is complimenting his confessed ontology.


ME: It won't help my PR to mention Bultmann at this point, but there seems to be some truth (to put it in my words) to the idea that we can't rationally use cell phones, lap tops, and believe the Space Shuttle really flies and then arbitrarily reject the micro-reason that has brought these things in some other area of our thinking.

OAW: LOL. Those things would have never come into being were it not for a Biblical Christian Worldview where the belief obtains that God is a God of order. The rise of Science is beholden to Christianity and in cultures where Christianity goes into eclipse you can look forward to the kind of Science that we find in Huxley’s BNW or in Lewis’ Space Trilogy, or you can look forward to the eclipse of Science.