4 comments

1. Really grateful for this series. I was in an online book club two years ago reading through The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis and I was the only Reformed Christian in it; the rest were Calvinistic Baptists. One of the participants was quite the MacArthurite.
   When Lewis talks about the idea of nature and the problems surrounding its perception, I suggested that the problems can be addressed if we consider nature as creation. She was gobsmacked but also too indoctrinated by the MacArthurite stuff to not see it as suspicious. Because she couldn’t wrap her head around it and because she’d never heard it from MacArthur and his school of dispensational Calvinistic Baptists.
   A lot of problems can be resolved if we respect that there really is nature, grace and a genuine way the two interact. The way they interact is how we may also distinguish between the Reformed tradition, the Roman Catholic tradition and the Anabaptist tradition. Sadly, Baptists have adopted some ways of thinking about nature and grace from the Anabaptists and are blissfully ignorant of their appropriations. They simply take it as is.

   Reply ↓

2. As a psychiatrist I have always found Johnny Mac’s ignorant stance annoying. Too many Christians have bought into the idea that there is no place for psychiatric care. Years ago I treated a pastor who was severely depressed for several months before he finally sought help. After we eventually found a combination of medications that eliminated his symptoms, he told me that he knew why God had allowed him to experience this. He confessed having told many people that they just needed to ‘get over it’ or ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ or something to that effect. He was convicted of his having sinned in this matter.

   Medicine has certainly been co-opted by Pharma profits, and for psychiatry it also fits with the materialist worldview: you are nothing but molecules in motion. If I am going to have coronary artery bypass surgery, I want the most technically proficient surgeon around. His hands matter, his heart does not! But in my field, worldview is CRUCIAL! For psychologists (who are non-medically trained people) their ethical standards forbid treatment of anyone for discomfort of same-sex attraction. They are buying into all the tranny insanity as well. Organized psychiatry is just as bad, but my licensure is with a state medical board, and so my worldview and open professing of Christ is only a problem if our medical board decides it is (not going to happen anytime soon here!).

   There is much more that I might write on this subject. If you might welcome a submission about this subject, please let me know. Note my email is slightly different than in past comments.

   Reply ↓

3. Dear Scott,
   Those who deny that there can be a Christian mathematics in the sense of a Christian view of it should reply to non-absurd argument made, for example, in Roy Clouser’s _The Myth Of Religious Neutrality_.
   You, surprisingly, said there is a Christian interpretation of the significance of mathematics. This is, perhaps, broad enough to include a view of what mathematics is and what it means. If so, that admission would be encouraging.

   Reply ↓

   • Baus,

     It’s only surprising because you haven’t been reading the HB. I’ve been saying this for years. I’m well aware of the transformationalist argument for Christian math. I read it in Foundations of Christian Scholarship 40 years ago. I’ve dealt with it as a Christian college prof.

     Talk of Christian math is nothing more than a shibboleth at best. At worst, it’s a form Gnosticism. It’s a game that I refuse to play.

     • Of Christian Plumbers, Unions, Meat Offered To Idols, And Tent-Making
     • Christian Banking?
     • There Is A Christian Worldview
     • World and Life View: License to Baptize?

     Of course there’s a Christian interpretation of the significance of things. That’s part of the Christian worldview but the tradition just didn’t talk this way until the late 19th century and for good reason.

     The only person I can think of who did talk this way during the Reformation was Peter Ramus (d. 1572). He claimed to have discovered “Christian logic.” I read his logic text. It’s cribbed from Aristotle. He was a fraud whose only real contribution was pedagogical, by dividing things into twos. That was probably the beginning of the end of “Christian math” or “Christian plumbing” or even “Christian history” for me. I had to answer the question dozens of times as a prospective history teacher as to how I was going to “integrate” my faith and my discipline. The unstated and unproven assumption behind the question is that we all know that there is a distinctively Christian version of history.

     There isn’t. There’s good history (that which accounts for facts the most adequately) and that which does not. There’s a Christian theology that explains the meaning and significance of history but Christians don’t have some Gnostic insight into history (other than that everything that happens comes under the general providence of God). We still have to dig for facts and evidence and make sense of them.

     The reason that so much Marxist historiography fails is that their eschatology too often wipes out or marginalizes facts and evidence that doesn’t fit their eschatology.

     2 + 2 is 4 for pagans and Christians. The pagans can’t always make sense of why that is or why it isn’t other than it is and we can but there’s just math.

     The bigger problem, as I say, is that too many Christians ignore nature as a category and refuse to distinguish nature and grace.

     Reply ↓

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.