The Christian’s Response to Worldly Philosophies

Introduction

Start with God, Not Your Mind

This, not your mind, is the beginning of knowledge (Prov. 1:7).

God does not use the teleological, the cosmological, the argument from complexity, He simply asserts the reality of Himself (Ex. 3:14).

We ought to view the denial of God along the lines of flat earth or someone denying gravity. We can be nice and cordial and neighborly to that person, but we are gonna be pretty limited in trusting him with much.

Make Him the Center of Everything

There is no thing that has nothing to do with God.

The Law regulates even the most mundane parts of life (Lev. 19:19, 27; 11:46-47; 14:33-53).

We see this even more as we extend to the rest of the Law (Ex. 23:19; Num. 15:37-41; Deut. 22:6-8).

Stop fragmenting your life into the sacred and secular and instead live your life entirely by His authority and for His glory (Col. 1:15-17).

There is no neutral territory.

How do you get along with a man who believes in a flat earth? Who denies gravity?

How do you teach history neutrally?

How do you teach math without values?

Evaluate Everything Through Him

Learn to see the world the way He sees the world (1 Cor. 9:9).

Learn to evaluate subjective things on the basis of objective realities:

Does God say anything about taste (Prov. 24:13)?

Does He say anything about beauty (Ex. 28:2)?

We can learn to recognize beauty by paying attention to the Creator of beauty:

Does this thing reflect God’s character and/or creation in some way?

Does this thing seek to subvert or support the things we ought to be thinking of?

Is there any skill involved in making this?

Does this reflect beauty in a recognizable way for it’s time and place?

Colors and shapes communicating various ideas at various times.

Think of the world and everything in it as something made by a designer with purpose.

Balance, Balance, Balance

Much of modernism and post-modernism is about over-reactions and over-corrections to legitimate concerns.

There are “grains of truth” in all of this. We need to see those, acknowledge them, and seek the boundaries of those things.

“You will be like God”

Just because you can’t know everything, doesn’t mean you can’t know anything.

Be careful with all or nothing arguments.

They exist, but they should be rare.

Recover Godly Traditions

We have cut ourselves off from both good and bad traditions.

We have made becoming Recabites an impossibility.

Recognize that we can hold to traditions and build on them without destroying them.

Conclusion