As the Waters Cover the Sea, 3

Continued from "As the Waters Cover the Sea, 2"

Goals and Strategy

In the struggle to reclaim all knowledge to the service and glory of  Christ, the victory belongs to His people. Nevertheless, to achieve that end the Church needs clearly defined goals and a winning strategy. This requires that Christians carefully derive their objectives and methods from Scripture.

Perhaps the greatest danger in doing this lies in adopting the attitudes and practices of integrationism or syncretism. Integrationists follow a modern version of the Thomistic approach.

They reason, "Since all truth comes from God, we can pick up truth wherever we find it. And since the truth we find in Aristotle or modern biology has equal validity to the truth we find in Scripture, we can simply put them together."

While this may sound enticing -- for all truth does indeed come from God -- the integrationist does not give God's Word its rightful place as the final arbiter of truth. Therefore, he fails to see the necessity of corrective measures to knowledge propagated by those in rebellion to God.

This does not deny that unbelievers have a capacity to apprehend certain functional  knowledge which permits them to live and act in the world that God created. But the integrationist fails to acknowledge the basis and nature of the unbeliever's knowledge.

You see, the unbeliever is actually double-minded. At base all men know God as His creatures, but as sinners all men refuse to acknowledge their Creator and live by His revelation. Hence we can say that men both know and do not know God; they know Him in judgment and in virtue of natural revelation, but they do not know Him in blessing unless it is in virtue of supernatural revelation and saving grace. Though hampered by his moral condition, the unbeliever's scholarship is not completely defunct. he can attain knowledge despite himself. In principle his unbelief would preclude understanding of anything, for (as Augustine said) one must believe in order to understand. However, in practice the unbeliever is restrained from a consistent self-destructive following of his unbelieving system. (Always Ready, Greg Bahnsen [Robert R. Booth, ed.], Atlanta [American Vision] and Texarkana [Covenant Media Foundation], 1996, p. 38)

As a consequence of the unbeliever's double-mindedness -- which results from suppression of the truth at a presuppositional level -- every fact he knows carries with it the taint of unbelief. In order to redeem knowledge from the unbeliever's grasp, the believer must discern what the unbeliever has apprehended that conforms to God's created order and place it within the context of Biblical presuppositions.

To be continued

As the Waters Cover the Sea, 2

Continued from "As the Waters Cover the Sea"

One the Church's needs today includes present day Joshuas and Calebs -- farseeing individuals who will educate themselves in the Biblical theory and methodology of knowledge and who will digest the seminal works that set out Biblical paradigms for various fields (law, government, economics, art, music, literature and the sciences) and then pass the legacy on to others. As pastors, church officers, Sunday school teachers or leaders of other church ministries, they must whet the flock's appetite for a godly understanding of every facet of life.

Those with a stake in the status quo -- including professional ministers and teachers -- will oppose them. For this reason self discipline and self motivation will mark this vanguard, and the going will not be easy.

Consider, for example, a former student of mine who caught the vision of grounding all his knowledge in Scripture. He used to visit me every time he came home from the prominent evangelical college where he studied. He would share with me his frustration at profs who opened class with a verse of Scripture and a word of prayer and then opened a humanist text and taught the class from the same perspective one could find in any secular humanist school.

This student voluntarily undertook a dualist education. He listened carefully in class, but when he returned to his dorm, he would study with his Bible in hand to unlearn everything he learned in class. Then he would relearn it from the perspective of Scripture. He earnestly pursued this strenuous practice, although the stress of it exacted its toll on him in terms of his health.

He went on to graduate school and became a respected professional in his field. Nevertheless, his commitment to remain faithful to his God in the realms of knowledge cost him the strength of his youth. If the Lord calls you into the battle to appropriate all knowledge to His glory, then you must also face the personal costs and sacrifices for such a life calling.

You will engage the enemy in this war of conquest, so you will need to face the reality of that war. With wars come casualties; people suffer. And because the enemy recognizes the far-reaching consequences of ideas, he will not permit us the luxury of ivory-tower somnambulance. Although he will most certainly engage us in our flesh and spirit, he will not prevail.

As the Waters Cover the Sea

The following post represents a second draft of the fifth chapter of my book Christian Methodology. In it, I discuss the means and the standards Christians should use to appropriate knowledge possessed by unbelievers in the prevailing culture.

It will take a number of installments to complete this chapter, and you will have an opportunity to participate in the editorial process as I prepare this chapter for inclusion in the published version of Christian Methodology.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9)

For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. (Habakkuk 2:14)

Israel, as a mighty wave, flowed out of Egypt and across the wilderness. She stood poised to run upon the land of Canaan like a flood. Her people had the potential to sweep away the old, effete pagan culture and to replace it with a society in harmony with the character of Yaweh, Lord of the covenant.

Their covenant Lord had liberated them from their enslavement to the Egyptian gods and culture. On Sinai, He had given them a blueprint for a new society -- a redeemed one. True greatness lay within their grasp.

Similarly, the Church of our Lord Jesus sits encamped on the frontiers of opportunity. Heir to generations of development with respect to the application of biblical truth to thought and life, New Covenant Israel possesses the basic elements  necessary to displace prevailing humanist culture with the Scriptural world and live view. The King has, in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20), issued a mandate that Christians disciple all nations and teach them to observe Christ's commands. This conquest must include a restructuring of all human knowledge in accordance with revealed paradigms.

The Church has not yet embraced the full vision of what it means to bring every thought into captivity to Christ (II Corinthians 10:5). Like the spies sent into Canaan (Numbers 13 & 14), some individuals and organizations have made forays into enemy-occupied territory, and they have reported back to us of the magnificent world available to Christ's people, if they would only exercise the will to become the Church militant once again.

Joshua and Caleb painted a glorious picture of a land that God had promised them -- one that flowed with milk and honey. Today, men like Rushdoony and Bahnsen have likewise opened our eyes to the possibilities of a culture that functions in terms of godly justice. DeMar has provided a glimpse of Scriptural political theory, and North has unfolded the possibilities inherent in a Biblical approach to economics. Nickel has demonstrated that even mathematics should be viewed from the perspective of Scripture.

These, and others like them, have barely scratched the surface. Nevertheless, they have spied out the riches of wisdom and knowledge that await us.

CONTINUED HERE

Slow Practice

Three or four months ago, my wife returned to practicing her French horn after a hiatus of several years. She took a series of lessons from an excellent teacher to help her get back on track, and it has worked out very well.

In preparing her to play in church, he had her practice at a faster pace than she would actually have to play. That really helped, and she has improved measurably. I noticed, however, that she still misses a note here and there.

That got me to thinking about martial arts and self defense practice. When you want to improve a technique's precision, you practice it in slow motion.

I suggested to my wife that, since she seems to have adapted to the faster tempo, maybe once a day she should slow the piece way down and concentrate on hitting each note with precision. She said, "That's exactly what I need."

Here is a principle that I believe applies to more than martial arts and music. I think you could generalize it to include how you practice any or all of your vocational skills:

Increase the tempo for performance; decrease the tempo for precision.

Evaluation for Excellence

Whether you're competing in the business world or the job market (or competing to keep the job you have), the key to success is excellence. Employers and clients with their heads screwed on straight want to keep excellent service because excellence represents more value for each dollar spent.

That means to recession-proof your business, employment or present job, you need to rise above the mediocre. This raises the question: if excellence is the key to success, what is the key to excellence?

Henry over at assessment.com provides a great insight into what it takes to rise to excellence in one's work:

One comment that is heard time and again about those who demonstrate excellence is, "He/she is a natural at it." They don’t seem to struggle to be excellent; it just flows. That is always a sign of motivation, and therein lies the first key: Motivation is required for excellence. Motivation is what we like to do naturally. It’s like being right or left-handed. We don’t even think about it. We just write. The same is true for people known for excellence. They have a group of motivations that work in concert to help them perform at a higher level. Like all motivations, these were inborn and are as much a part of them as being blue-eyed or tall. But there is a second key: Motivation can be developed. People who demonstrate excellence have identified their motivations and worked hard to develop them. They have added knowledge, skill, experience and practice to consistently produce at the highest levels. By the way, there is a flip side to these two keys, and it is this: The best we can be with low motivation is adequate. No matter how hard we work and desire it, in the long run we will never be excellent at something without high levels of motivation in that area. In other words, if we toil in areas where we have low motivation, we resign ourselves to mediocrity.

He has not told the whole story, to be sure, but what he says makes sense. We tend to be good at what we like, and we tend to like what we're good at.

The Motivational Assessment Personality Profile (a test you can take for free over at assessment.com) will scientifically analyze how various job talents and skills motivate you. You can pay to get more information and insight from the test, but if you are like me, you will be surprised at the insights you get even from the free evaluation.

I recommend you take the free test. But don't buy anything yet, at least until my next post on this subject. Until then, I'd be pleased to hear your reactions to the test results in the comments section.