Can your worldview make sense of your experience?

Greg Bahnsen summarizes a central feature of our epistemology and apologetic method in this quotation:

If the way in which people reason and interpret evidence is determined by their presupposed worldviews, and if the worldviews of the believer and unbeliever are in principle completely at odds with each other, how can the disagreement between them over the justification of Biblical claims be resolved?  It might seem that all rational argumentation is precluded since appeals to evidence and logic will be controlled by the respective, conflicting worldviews of the believer and unbeliever.  However this is not the case. 

Differing worldviews can be compared to each other in terms of the important philosophical question about the "preconditions of intelligibility" for such important assumptions as the universality of logical laws, the uniformity of nature, and the reality of moral absolutes.  We can examine a worldview and ask whether its portrayal of nature, man, knowledge, etc., provide an outlook in terms of which logic, science and ethics can make sense.  It does not comport with the practices of natural science to believe that all events are random and unpredictable, for instance.  It does not comport with the demand for honesty in scientific research, if no moral principle expresses anything but a personal preference or feeling.  Moreover, if there are internal contradictions in a person's worldview, it does not provide the preconditions for making sense out of man's experience.  For instance, if one's political dogmas respect the dignity of men to make their own choices, while one's psychological theories reject the free will of men, then there is an internal defect in that person's worldview. 

It is the Christian's contention that all non-Christian worldviews are beset with internal contradictions, as well as with beliefs which do not render logic, science or ethics intelligible.  On the other hand, the Christian worldview (taken from God's self-revelation in Scripture) demands our intellectual commitment because it does provide the preconditions of intelligibility for man's reasoning, experience, and dignity. 

In Biblical terms, what the Christian apologist does is demonstrate to unbelievers that because of their rejection of God's revealed truth, they have "become vain in their reasonings" (Rom. 1:21).  By means of their foolish perspective they end up "opposing themselves" (2 Tim. 2:25).  They follow a conception of knowledge which does not deserve the name (1 Tim. 6:20).  Their philosophy and presuppositions rob one of knowledge (Col. 2:3,8), leaving them in ignorance (Eph. 4:17-18; Acts 17:23).  The aim of the apologist is to cast down their reasonings (2 Cor. 10:5) and to challenge them in the spirit of Paul: "Where is the wise?  Where is the disputer of this world?  Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" (1 Cor. 1:20). 

In various forms, the fundamental argument advanced by the Christian apologist is that the Christian worldview is true because of the impossibility of the contrary.  When the perspective of God's revelation is rejected, then the unbeliever is left in foolish ignorance because his philosophy does not provide the preconditions of knowledge and meaningful experience.  To put it another way: the proof that Christianity is true is that if it were not, we would not be able to prove anything. 

What the unbeliever needs is nothing less than a radical change of mind—repentance (Acts 17:30).  He needs to change his fundamental worldview and submit to the revelation of God in order for any knowledge or experience to make sense. He at the same time needs to repent of his spiritual rebellion and sin against God. Because of the condition of his heart, he cannot see the truth or know God in a saving fashion.   (Always Ready, 121-122, emphasis added)

True spirituality means the Lordship of Christ over the total man

Despite our constant talk about the Lordship of Christ, we have narrowed its scope to a very small area of reality.  We have misunderstood the concept of the Lordship of Christ over the whole of man and the whole of the universe and have not taken to us the riches that the Bible gives us for ourselves, for our lives and for our culture.

The Lordship of Christ over the whole of life means that there are no platonic areas in Christianity, no dichotomy or hierarchy between the body and the soul.  God made the body as well as the soul and redemption is for the whole man.  Evangelicals have been legitimately criticized for often being so tremendously interested in seeing souls get saved and go to heaven that they have not cared much about the whole man.

The Bible, however, makes four things very clear: (1) God made the whole man, (2) in Christ the whole man is redeemed, (3) Christ is the Lord of the whole man now and the Lord of the whole Christian life and (4) in the future as Christ comes back, the body will be raised from the dead and the whole man will have a whole redemption.…

The conception of the wholeness of man and the lordship of man over creation comes early in Scripture.  In Genesis 1:26-27, we read, "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.  And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."  From the very beginning, therefore, man and woman, being created in the image of God (both of them!), were given dominion (lordship) over the whole of the created earth.  They were the ones who bore the image of God and, bearing that image, they were to be in charge, to tend the garden, to keep it and preserve it before their own Lord.  Of course, that dominion was spoiled by the historic, space-time Fall, and therefore it is no longer possible to maintain that dominion in a perfect fashion.

Yet, when a man comes under the blood of Christ, his whole capacity as man is refashioned.  His soul is saved, yes, but so are his mind and body.  As Christians we are to look to Christ day by day, for Christ will produce his fruit through us.  True spirituality means the Lordship of Christ over the total man.   — Francis Schaeffer, Art & the Bible

Presuppositional commitments

Why do so many of our Christian young people lose their faith when confronted with the secularism of the university?  Greg Bahnsen offers an answer in the midst of an exhortation:

"One must be presuppositionally committed to Christ in the world of thought (rather than neutral) and firmly tied down to the faith which he has been taught, or else the persuasive argumentation of secular thought will delude him.  Hence the Christian is obligated to presuppose the word of Christ in every area of knowledge; the alternative is delusion." (Always Ready, emphasis added)

Creative reading

"I never remain passive in the process of reading: while I read I am engaged in a constant creative activity, which leads me to remember not so much the actual matter of the book as the thoughts evoked in my mind by it, directly or indirectly."       — Nicolas Berdyaev

The revolution continues

For the latest effort by the Obama administration to promote the homosexual lifestyle (it is still a chosen lifestyle!!) check out the article from Onenewsnow.

Bahnsen article on the Areopagus address (Acts 17)

Our reading from Bahnsen last week included his comments on Paul's address to the Athenian intellectuals in Acts 17.  I mentioned that his longer treatment of that passage was included as a chapter in his book Always Ready.  It is also available online from Covenant Media Foundation.  Here is the link in case you don't have the book, or would like to have the article in an electronic format (e.g., it's easier to extract quotations you may want to save).  Enjoy.  Read it twice.

Embryonic stem-cell research

     My good friend and colleague in the ministry, Pastor Paul Viggiano, continues to raise a strong public witness for Christ-centered, Bible-shaped social policy in his editorial on embryonic stem cell research in this week's online Daily Breeze.  Read his telling commentary here.  Thanks, Paul, for your faithful witness, and compelling argument.  Let us pray that God will open the ears and hearts of those who make these terrible choices…from the President on down.

Expect more poison from pastors

   Peter Jones' latest e-newsletter "InsideOut" is a report from the recently concluded National Pastors' Conference (held in San Diego, February 9-14, sponsored by Zondervan and InterVarsity Press).  

   He notes the conspicuous absence from the festivities of an inerrant, trustworthy Bible as "the only infallible rule of faith and practice" (let alone actual biblical exposition!), Christ the Lord (as opposed to the human "Jesus" who is definitely "in"), and the resurrection of the body (as part of a distinctly Romans 8 eschatology).

   Instead Jones saw "various new forms of old-fashioned though very cool liberalism."

   Take a look at the newsletter, and if you don't already subscribe, go to Peter's home page and get on the list.

The Apologist's Evening Prayer

From all my lame defeats and oh! much more 

From all the victories that I seemed to score; 

From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf 

At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh; 

From all my proofs of Thy divinity, 

Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me. 

Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead 

Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head. 

From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee, 

O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free. 

Lord of the narrow gate and the needle's eye, 

Take from me all my trumpery lest I die. 

— C. S. Lewis

Our pro-abort president

   Over on his "The Quick and the Dead" blog ("So Far, So Bad"), George Grant has compiled a list of President Obama's pro-abortion actions since before the inauguration.  It's a nasty start for the pre-born, and a big boost to the bloodsuckers.  Read 'em and weep.

Giving a Bible to an atheist

   This morning during our worldview discussion group, I mentioned a YouTube video I'd seen several weeks back by the Penn of Penn & Teller about a man who gave him a Bible after a show.  It is a pretty amazing little video.  Penn is an avowed atheist, but seemed genuinely touched by the man's gift (I assume the man was a Gideon).  Pray that God's word will not return to him void.

On the insufficiency of "general revelation" and the necessity of "special revelation"

Last night at the discussion group we were talking about “general revelation,” and I mentioned that though our Confession of Faith (I.1) emphasizes the redemptive necessity of “special revelation,” Dr. Van Til made the point that — even before the fall of mankind into sin — it was necessary that God reveal himself “specially,” directly, verbally to our first parents.  Thus we need special revelation (as it is found now in Holy Scripture) not only to set out the hope of redemption and God’s works of grace to bring it about.  Human beings would not have been able to have “any fruition of [God] as their blessedness and reward” (WCF VII.1) — i.e., live life fully as God intended to their blessedness and his glory — had not the Creator spoken to them covenantally (i.e., with words of promise and command),even before the entrance of sin into the world.  And those words implied a clearer and deeper revelation of God himself to his human creatures.

Here is one passage (from his An Introduction to Systematic Theology) in which Van Til discusses this matter:

Originally in Paradise God gave, as we say, in addition to the revelation of himself that appeared in nature and in man, a positive thought communication of himself.  God walked and talked with man.  Here was true theophany.  We may think of this theophany as given to man for the purpose of communicating to him a more intimate knowledge of God.  It is true that it was by way of this positive revelation that God also communicated to man his will and purpose for man with respect to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil [and, we might add, the “cultural mandate,” Gen. 1:28, that defined the scope of God’s calling upon his human creatures—RW].  Yet in this very fact God revealed himself to man and made himself known in such a way as man could not have known him from the study of the created universe alone.  We cannot artificially separate the knowledge of God that man received or could receive by his reflection on man and the created universe in general, and the knowledge of God that man received from God by direct communication.  The revelation from the created universe did place man face to face with God and not merely with the idea of the existence of God.  Yet it was through the revelation by direct communication that God's purpose and plans with respect to the universe appeared more fully still.  And by revealing his purposes and plans more fully, God also revealed himself more fully.  And it is only in relation to this fuller revelation of God that the facts of nature and man could appear in their proper light.

This direct revelation to man stopped after the entrance of sin insofar as it was an original loving communication.  God did often speak directly to man after the entrance of sin, but it was always either in judgment on sin or in mercy for the purpose of the removal of sin.  Thus God spoke to Cain and Abel in order to reveal to them the way of sacrifice, the way of redemption.  Then, again, he spoke to Cain afterward by way of judgment on his rejection of the sacrifice.  In both cases, we may say that there is a new revelation of the plans and purposes of God.  The revelation as it was originally given, that is, a loving self-communication of God to his creature as creature, could not be continued.  If God was to continue his communication with his creature, it was to be either by condemnation or by atonement.

So then, we must single out this original communication of God to man and say that after the entrance of sin, only the tradition of it remained.  Man was, of course, responsible for this tradition.  To this tradition must be added the fact that God has from time to time spoken to individuals that were in close connection with the line of the redemptive work of God, of his judgment on them and on all those who hate the Israel of God.  In the third place, we must add the fact that some men have actually heard the revelation of mercy as given in the Old Testament times to Israel as a people, and in New Testament times to the church.  Yet, for all that, it remains a fact that the actual communication of God with man as man has ceased since the entrance of sin into the world.  (pp. 187-188, emphasis added)

What this means (among other things) is that any human being, in order to understand himself and his place in the world properly, and to grasp the meaning of human existence as a whole — must have recourse to the “direct communicaton” (i.e., “special revelation”) of God contained in Scripture.  The Bible’s relevance is not limited to those who are looking for a way to be saved (as important as that redemptive concern is).

Conversely, when human beings reject the Bible (i.e., “suppress the truth in unrighteousness,” Rom. 1:18) — as we all do by nature — we are disconnecting ourselves from the only source of truth that can enable us to pursue any truly “human” activity (science, art, social organization, jurisprudence, etc.) fully and properly.

This is true in principle (as Van Til also emphasized).  In actual practice, non-believers regularly borrow (steal!) from the Christian worldview (and the Bible that informs it) in order to function at all — all the time denying the existence of the Triune Creator and the authority of his word in Scripture.

Take your pick

"If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed." — Mark Twain

"Common ground" is not "neutral ground"

Greg Bahnsen made the following observations regarding Van Til's teaching about "common ground," originally published in an issue of the SCCCS Penpoint newsletter (I've edited it slightly here for brevity and clarity):

   Cornelius Van Til was granted a God-honoring, biblical clarity about the issue of "common ground" between those who adhere to the Scriptures and those who repudiate or compromise the teaching of God's word — whether outright unbelievers or followers of false religions, theological modernism, Romanism, or the cults.

   Van Til called for faithfulness to the Lordship of Christ in all of our thinking.  Thus our ultimate presuppositions must regulate every phase of our reasoning, including our argumentation in defense of the faith.  There is no neutrality.  Only the presupposed truth of God's self-revelation — which all men know even if suppressed in unrighteousness — makes intelligible their claims to knowledge about anything whatsoever and makes justification of those claims possible.  Thus the all-encompassing apologetical challenge issued by Van Til was that without the Christian God men could not, in principle, prove or know anything at all.

  Van Til wrote:

The implication of this for Christian apologetics is plain.  There can be no appeasement between those who presuppose in all their thought the sovereign God and those who presuppose in all their thought the would-be sovereign man.  There can be no other point of contact between them than that of head-on collision. (The Intellectual Challenge of the Gospel)

   Van Til's critics sometimes misconstrued this challenge as saying that there is no common ground between the thinking of believers and unbelievers.  Van Til affirmed that there is indeed common ground, but it is not religiously neutral common ground.  He wrote:

It is this fact, that the natural man, using his principles and working on his assumptions, must be hostile in principle at every point to the Christian philosophy of life, that was stressed in the writer's little book, Common Grace.  That all men have all things in common metaphysically and psychologically, was definitely asserted, and further, that the natural man has epistemologically nothing in common with the Christian.  And this latter assertion was qualified by saying that this is so only in principle.…  So far then as men self-consciously work from this principle [of sin, autonomy], they have no notion in common with the believer.  Their epistemology is informed by their ethical hostility to God. (The Defense of the Faith)

   When we deal with men on the level of their theory of knowledge (epistemology), Van Til held that we must remember the doctrine of "total depravity" — and thus challenge in every area of life and at every point all who repudiate or compromise the Scriptures.  In philosophical principle they could not make anything intelligible in any aspect of human experience.

"When through the woods and forest glades I wander…"

The new masthead photo above is a shot I took a few years back in the high country of Yosemite, while Sherry and I were driving home from a visit to Sonora.  You really need to get out sometimes!

More on the OED volunteers (see post below)

Simon Winchester concludes his description of the vast army of volunteer readers, without whose help the whole project would have been impossible — with this tribute:

Sons of gardeners and college servants, daughters of chemists and boat-builders, ministers in all churches known to Christian (including that of Pitsligo, Banffshire) and to infidel, criminal and company and constitutional lawyers, schoolmasters from Holland and Birmingham and California and from all points between, doctors responsible for every part of body, mind, and animal, scholars of Welsh and Greek, Aramaic and Chaldean, Icelandic, Persian, Slavonic, and English place names, elderly divines, young and muscular civil engineers, theatre critics, one ophthalmic surgeon (James Dixon, author of Diseases of the Eye, 1855), mathematicians, men who were antiquarians, naturalists, surgeons (and one man — Joseph Fowler of Durham — who was all three), businessmen, novelists (including Beatrice Harraden, who wrote the breathless Ships that Pass in the Night, became a suffragette, and went on to write The Scholar's Daughter, involving much derring-do among a cast of lexicographers), phoneticians, bibliographers, an iron merchant-cum-antiquarian named Richard Heslop who gave Murray advice on mining and iron-forging terms, botanists, aldermen, naval historians, geologists and geophysicists, jurists, palaeographers, Orientalists, diplomats, museum keepers, surgeons, soldiers (W. C. Minor was both, of course), climbers (John Mitchell was killed while climbing, to Murray's unspeakable grief), zoologists, grammarians, patent officers, organists, runic archaeologists, fantasists, anthropologists, men of letters, bankers, medievalists, and Indian administrators — these and a thousand more professions and pastimes occupied those men and women who otherwise devoted hours, weeks, perhaps even years of their time to read for Murray and Bradley, and later for Craigie and Onions.  The range of interests of these hundreds was prodigious; their knowledge was extraordinary; their determination was unequalled; and yet their legacy — aside from the book itself — remains essentially unwritten.  Only their names, in long lists in the volumes, the parts, and the sections, exist to make some readers stop and wonder for a moment — just who were these people? 

*  *  *

We know these things, but we do not really know why so many people gave so much of their time for so little apparent reward.  And this is the abiding and most marvellous mystery of the enormously democratic process that was the Dictionary — that hundreds upon hundreds of people, for motives known and unknown, for reasons both stated and left unsaid, helped to chronicle the immense complexities of the language that was their own…  They became footnotes in eight-point Clarendon type in a preface to a volume of [the greatest literary enterprise of history].  That was truly their only reward — and yet in all likelihood they, and scores of others like them, surely wanted no other.   

(The Meaning of Everything, 212-215)

A notable anniversary

   Today, 29 January, marks the anniversary, in 1884, of the publication of the first segment of what was then called the New English Dictionary — later the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).  It was first published in paper-bound sections (“fascicles”) of 352 pages each (12 x 8 x 1”).  These sheaves of pages would eventually be bound together in hard covers as whole volumes — 12 in all in the first edition.

   The Dictionary was first conceived in 1858, as a project of the Philological Society of England.  It was another “imperial-scale” project undertaken with boundless optimism and energy by subjects of Queen Victoria.  The making of the Dictionary took 70 years, the complete first edition being published in 1928.

   The twelve volumes of the first edition comprised 15,490 pages of single-spaced printed text.  All 414,825 words considered at the time to make up the English language were included — defined, with preferred and variant (and even obsolete) spellings listed, etymologies recorded, and pronunciations recommended.

   In addition, the history of the use of each word was traced by means of 1,827,606 illustrative quotations, complied from over 5 million citations submitted by thousands of volunteer readers.  (I’ll make a separate entry or two about these readers.)

   “Pastor, how do you know all this?” you may ask.  Well, the fascinating story of the Oxford English Dictionary is told by Simon Winchester in The Meaning of Everything (2003).  I’ve had the book sitting on my shelf for a while, and finally got around to it, and what a wonderful story it is.

   In 1998, Winchester had written a book (Sherry gave it to me for Christmas one year) about one of the sub-stories related to the OED in his The Professor and the Madman.  It told the story of William Chester Minor — an American, a surgeon in the United States Army who served during the Civil War.  After the war Minor traveled to London where eventually he killed a man.  He was tried and found “innocent by reason of insanity” (one of the first successful uses of the “insanity defense”).  He was nevertheless confined to a lunatic asylum at Broadmoor, where he became one of the volunteer readers for the Dictionary, and a particularly good one.

   These are both wonderful books — well-written and full of interesting characters.  I recommend them highly.

   Anyway, happy anniversary OED!

James A. H. Murray served as editor of the Dictionary for 36 years — during the most formative period of its production.  Here he is pictured in the “Scriptorium” that was built behind his home in Oxford.  On the walls are hundreds of pigeon-holes into which the citation slips were sorted and stored.

Red Hot Lies

   If you are like me, you don't need someone to convince you that 90% of what we read or hear on "the News" is outright lies or truth "spun" completely out of any useful shape.  

   But if Christopher Horner — in his new book about "How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed" — is even half correct, the "red hot lies" of global climate change alarmism have risen to the level of a fanatical religious faith, and its hysterical advocates are on their own kind of "jihad" to stampede the American people into handing over more and more of their freedom — and their money — to the government regulators, who promise to "save the planet," from our fear of "global warming."

   I heard part of an interview with Horner a couple of weeks ago on C-SPAN's "Book TV," and decided his was "news" I should learn a bit more about.  I purchased a download of the unabridged book from iTunes (for less than the book itself costs!), though I wish I had the hard copy for all the footnoted documentation.  I'm about a third of the way in, and it's quite a story.

   Click here for a more extensive article about Horner and his new book.

   This is not really the story of a "vast conspiracy," but — more relevantly for those of us who want to think Christianly about everything (i.e., putting all we hear to the test — holding on to the good, rejecting evil in its many forms, 1 Thess. 5:21) — this is a stunning example of the way in which an intellectual and moral consensus in a "democracy" (arising in the humanist flow) can then become as totalitarian and propaganda-oriented as in any dictatorship.

   It is also interesting, and disheartening, to see again how the "insiders" — once they have consolidated their protected positions (in media, academia, and government) can sit safely behind their walls of privilege and protection, and systematically vilify and demonize (and, according to Horner, threaten and even persecute) their opponents, without ever being forced to come out in the open and fight fairly (e.g., by actually dealing with arguments).

   This kind of thing happens in the church as well.  Just think, for example, of all the topics and perspectives that are never represented in the pages of New Horizons.

   Well, that's enough on that.  You might want to pick this "red hot" book up and give it a look.

Political language according to Orwell

"Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."  

— George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1945)

He did it…

   According to CNN, President Obama did sign the order on Friday that struck down a rule that prohibits U.S. money from funding international family-planning clinics that promote abortion or provide counseling or referrals about abortion services.

   In signing the President said, "It is time we end the politicization of this issue."  Since when is fulfilling campaign promises to your pro-abort supporters, “de-politicizing” an issue?  

   Properly understood, “politics” is more than cynical scheming.  It is ethics enacted in the public sector.  Laws permitting and funding abortion should never be “de-politicized.”  Obama's claim is nothing more than the restoration of an ethic of death.  "All those who hate me love death," says God's Wisdom.

   What’s more, Obama promised, "In the coming weeks, my administration will initiate a fresh conversation on family planning, working to find areas of common ground to best meet the needs of women and families at home and around the world."  Do you imagine that pro-life voices will be invited to become part of this “fresh conversation?”  Not likely.

And so it begins…

   According to news reports from anonymous officials close to the administration, President Obama was expected to sign an executive order today (one day after the 36th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion) ending the 8-year ban on federal funds for international groups that perform abortions.

   The so-called "Mexico City policy" — which bans U.S. taxpayer money from going to international “family planning” groups that either offer abortions or provide information, counseling or referrals about abortion — was instituted by President Reagan in 1984, lifted by President Clinton in 1993, and reinstituted by President Bush in 2001 as (one of his first acts in office).

Wisdom for this discouraging week from Marse Robert

"The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope."  — Robert E. Lee

Roe v Wade Anniversary: YHWH and his chosen instruments

   Those of us who stand for the defense of the pre-born and biblical grounds are understandably concerned for the avowed pro-abortion commitment of our new president.  Will he make good on his campaign promises to Planned Parenthood and other death merchants?  Time will tell.

   It is comforting to remember that God has more than once raised up leaders to do his will — whether they intend to or not.  I was reading Isaiah 45 this morning, and share here with you YHWH’s words to Cyrus, his chosen instrument:

Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus,

whose right hand I have grasped,

to subdue nations before him

and to loose the belts of kings,

to open doors before him

that gates may not be closed:

“I will go before you

and level the exalted places,

I will break in pieces the doors of bronze

and cut through the bars of iron,

I will give you the treasures of darkness

and the hoards in secret places,

that you may know that it is I, the Lord,

the God of Israel, who call you by your name.

For the sake of my servant Jacob,

and Israel my chosen,

I call you by your name,

I name you, though you do not know me.

I am the Lord, and there is no other,

besides me there is no God;

I equip you, though you do not know me,

that people may know, from the rising of the sun

and from the west, that there is none besides me;

I am the Lord, and there is no other. (vv. 1-6)

Get the picture?

An apt reminder for the 36th anniversary of Roe v Wade

     Pro-life efforts have been an integral aspect of the work and ministry of faithful believers since the dawning of the faith in the first century. Through all the convulsions of the patristic era, into the upheaval of the medieval epoch, on toward the Renaissance and Enlightenment, through the great missions movement and the emergence of America, and into the modem period, the true church has always stood for the sanctity of all innocent life—in contradistinction to the pagan consensus for abortion, infanticide, abandonment, and euthanasia. Admittedly, there have been dark days when the institutional church failed to uphold its covenantal responsibilities, but, thankfully, those days have been short-lived aberrations.
     Whenever believers have successfully defended the helpless, their efforts have adhered to a predictable pattern—a covenantal pattern. The elements in that pattern, like the commitment to life itself, has remained remarkably consistent: an emphasis on the necessity of orthodoxy, the centrality of the church, the indispensability of servanthood, the importance of decisiveness, and the primacy of patience. 

— George Grant, The Third Time Around:

A History of the Pro-Life Movement 

from the First Century to the Present

Looking for something to read?

Some of you may have come across these lists elsewhere already, but I thought I'd pass them on anyway.  It's a wide range of topics, but there you go… that's why we call it a WORLD-view.  Anyway, you might find something to tickly your fancy (if you're pile of "to read" books is not already 6 feet tall).

     Maybe you have some recommendations of your own.  If so, go ahead and jump in on the "comments."

Dr. George Grant’s Favorite Books of 2008

1. Stress of Her Regard (newly restored edition) by Tim Powers
2. Practical and Pious by A.C. Cheyne
3. Truths We Confess by R.C. Sproul
4. Punic Wars and Culture Wars by Ben House
5. A Prodigal God by Tim Keller
6. The King Alfred Saxon Tales Tetrology by Bernard Cornwell
7. The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
8. Tales from the Perilous Realm by J.R.R. Tolkien
9. The Reason for God by Tim Keller
10.What’s So Great About the Doctrines of Grace by Richard Phillips
11. The Living Church by John R.W. Stott

David Bahnsen’s Favorite Books of 2008—with David’s brief commentaries

1. God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, Walter Russell Mead
     It is not just the best book I read in 2008. It is the best book I read by far. It is one of the best books I have ever read, and I hope to read it every year for the rest of my life. No book has ever done a finer job of covering the historicity and integration of religion and economics in the Anglo world. The book is a descriptive and prescriptive masterpiece, evaluating the unique elements in England and later America that gave birth to this empire of freedom we enjoy today.

2. The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark
     Reason, science, and morality have progressed because of Christianity; not despite it.

3. Liar's Poker: Rising through the Wreckage on Wall Street, Michael Lewis
     I have to confess, rarely has a book been so hard to put down once I started reading it (and he wrote this in 1989, believe it or not)

4. Democracy's Good Name: The Rise and Risk of the World's Most Popular Form of Government, Michael Mandelbaum
     The author of the paradigm-shifting Case for Goliath and Ideas the Conquered the World returns to top shelf in this extraordinary work documenting how democracy came to be the prominent form of government on planet earth and what conditions exist today that pose a threat to it.

5. Economic Facts and Fallacies, Thomas Sowell
     Sowell, whom I wish more than anything was the first black President in American history, ruffles the feathers of those whose economic logic can always be reduced to redistributionism. The book is not as insightful as Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, but it is equally cogent and needed in today's atmosphere of economic illiteracy.

6. The Return of History and the End of Dreams, Robert Kagan
     A short but sweet piece from one of the most important foreign policy minds alive today. Kagan's Dangerous Nation convinced me several years ago that I have been fed a load of bull about the founding fathers being isolationists; his newest piece convinced me that China and Russia remain as great of a threat as the Islamic terrorists do.

7. Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, Michael Lewis (ed.)
     I reviewed this a week or so ago, and remain blown away that the things I read were written as commentary of the 1987 crash, the 1998 meltdown, and the dotcom crash, as it sure felt like I was reading current events.

8. King of the Club, Charlie Gasparino
     The story of the rise and fall of Richard Grasso, the head of the New York Stock Exchange over the last couple of decades, and the ultimate victim in Eliot Spitzer's despicable and self-serving series of crusades from 2002-2006. Grasso, of course, did not resign in the midst of a massive hooker scandal while serving as the moral watchdog on Wall Street (that would be Spitzer). Grasso resigned for taking the paycheck that the compensation committee gave him.

9. Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, Natan Sharansky
     The man whose Case for Democracy finalized my conversion out of paleo-conservatism outdid himself with this delightful repudiation of multi-culturalism

10. Blue Blood and Mutiny: The Fight for the Soul of Morgan Stanley, Patricia Beard
     Not all of you would find it interesting. I read it cover to cover, barely stopping to eat. But I am a Sr VP at the company ... =)

Dr. P. Andrew Sandlin’s Best Books Read in 2008 with Andrew's comments

1. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, by Peter Gay. Perhaps Gay’s swan song, but a sweeping work revealing the godlessness, egomania and hatred for the past on the part of every leading modernist from Charles Baudelaire to Andy Warhol. Lushly illustrated with color photos. Discloses (albeit unintentionally) why were are in the mess we’re in today.

2. God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, by Walter Russell Mead. Shows the national roots of the global free market in Holland and traces how the Protestant Faith alone furnishes the rationale and ambiance for burgeoning global wealth.

3. The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World, by David Wells. Potent distillation of his major works of the last 15 years or so. A searing indictment of the man-centered, market-driven, compromising, theologically impoverished evangelicalism, seeker-sensitive and Emergent Movement of our day.

4. Modern Uncertainty and Christian Faith, by G. C. Berkouwer. A prophetic work from the early 50s, when the author was less enamored with Barth and Rome. Blisters liberalism and neo-orthodoxy and opposes “the new Christianity in the old church.”

5. The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, by Thomas Sowell. Copiously documented application of author’s instant classic A Conflict of Visions: The Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. Shows how the prevailing socio-political vision of our time (liberalism) is commandeered by arrogant intellectuals whose lofty, Utopian vision, impervious to empirical falsification, wreaks havoc on every society in which it’s tried.

6. The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, by Tim Tzouliadis. Remarkable, page-turning account of all the Americans who immigrated to the Soviet Union in the 30s in search of respite from the Great Depression only to suffer and die miserably in Stalin’s Hellish gulags — and, perhaps more searingly, an account of how the U. S government did almost nothing to help them, consistently turning a blind eye and deaf ear. Not a book for the faint-hearted. A blood-boiling book. Thanks to Elizabeth Miller for the recommendation.

7. The New Science of Politics, by Eric Voegelin. An understated précis of the author’s main political thesis — that political tyranny, from Puritanism to Stalinism, derives from Utopian Gnosticism. Thanks to Jason Escalante for the recommendation.

8. The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom, by Slavomir Rawicz. Controversial but absorbing autobiographical tale of a Pole incarcerated in Siberia during WWII but who, along with a handful of others, escaped and walked to freedom in northern India. One of the most bracing survival tales of modern times.

9. Tortured for His Faith, by Haralan Popov. This is a serendipitous re-read.

10. Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith. Arguably the best English-speaking thriller in 2008. Follows the trail of a child serial killer in the Soviet Union in the early 50s through the eyes of the detective investigating the gruesome crimes amid a statist machinery committed to the proposition that “murder doesn’t exist in the Soviet Union.”

The inescapable fact of our own createdness

The Bible requires men to believe that God exists apart from and above the world and that he by his plan controls whatever takes place in the world. Everything in the created universe therefore displays the fact that it is controlled by God, that it is what it is by virtue of the place it occupies in the plan of God. The objective evidence for the existence of God and of the comprehensive governance of the world by God is therefore so plain that he who runs may read. Men cannot get away from this evidence. They see it round about them. They see it within them. Their own constitution so clearly evinces the facts of God's creation of them and control over them that there is no man who can possibly escape observing it. If he is self-conscious at all he is also God-conscious. No matter how men may try they cannot hide from themselves the fact of their own createdness. Whether men engage in inductive study with respect to the facts of nature about them or engage in analysis of their own self-consciousness they are always face to face with God their maker.         

— Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith

I love this…but reassuring?

"There is no fate so enviable as to be unjustly 'sacked' in a civilized country."

"Humanist" dehumanization

Many of our surviving grandparents’ generation can remember where they were when they heard the news of the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor.  I can remember where I was on November 22, 1963, the day John Kennedy was assassinated (I was at school and it was a “history dress up day,” and one of my classmates was dressed up as President Kennedy).  Even the youngest of you can remember what you were doing on September 11, 2001, when terrorists flew airliners into the World Trade Center towers in New York City.  

     But almost no one (who was an adult at the time) remembers where they were or what they were doing when, on January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion across our nation.  People (including believers) didn’t notice, because they weren’t paying attention.

     For many of us, it was not until a few years later, when Francis Schaeffer produced his film series How Should We Then Live?, that we became aware of what had happened.  In his discussion of “sociological law” and “arbitrary absolutes,” Schaeffer used the Roe v. Wade decision as a prime example of the use of law to dehumanize a huge segment of the American population (the pre-born), and provide the legal justification for their wholesale slaughter.  In the ensuing 36 years, nearly 50 million babies have been murdered under the guise of “safe and legal” abortion.  Today 4000 more “legally” dehumanized people will meet their deaths.  And we have a president-elect who promises to tear down any remaining legal “hinderances” that prevent a woman’s “freedom of choice” to kill her child.

     In the flow of “humanist” thinking and action, dehumanization becomes the rule rather than the exception.  It has often been pointed out that the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857) declared blacks non-persons before the law; but now “by an arbitrary absolute brought in on the humanist flow [Roe v. Wade], millions of unborn babies of every color of skin are equally by law declared non-persons” (Schaeffer’s words).  This is the hypocricy of “humanism.”  We are “for humankind,” but we get to decide who will be “human.”

     “Pushing the antithesis” here means letting the Creator-God tell us what true humanness is, and affording all who fit his category the full protection of the law.  Pray God it will be so again soon.