We began our brief discussion on Christian worldview by identifying a few of the most-fundamental elements. It is unsurprising that we would need to begin our conception of the world by beginning to think about the world’s Creator.
Without the Creator, there would be no world to view.
All theology, all philosophy, all science is drawn back to piece #1.
1. The Independent Triune God
A Christian worldview inevitably and understandably must begin with the existence of God.
1A. God is the only Being Who has life in Himself (John 5:26). He doesn’t need anything to sustain His existence. He is completely independent in being, nature, and existence.
1B. This God revealed Himself to us as Triune; one in essence, three in person.
Each person is distinct from the other, yet united in the divine essence.
This independent Trinity inter-dwells and communicates within Himself in perfect love and harmony.
2. The Triune God Created
2A. The Triune God, without “needing to”, imagined and created all things that exist, either by creating out of nothing (Isaiah 66:1-2) or by ordaining and guiding their creation through creational means.
This Triune God alone is independent and uncreated, but everything else depends on Him for its existence. Both for it’s source — there would be nothing other than God if He had not chosen to create — and for it’s continued existence, for God could withhold His providential, enabling hand at any time, if it weren’t for His faithfulness and loving-kindness. Therefore…
3. All Creation is Dependent
3A. All Creation is distinct from God as contingent, created things.
Every atom is its own distinct atom. Every person is their own distinct person.
Without the creating acts of God, there is nothing that would exist.
In addition, if the Triune God were to remove His upholding providence, all things would cease to exist.
3B. This great diversity all finds its unity, source, and historical place first in the mind of God and then in the single plan enacted by that omnipotent mind. (Isaiah 46:9-10, Eph. 1:4-6, 11, Romans 8:28)
Additional note:
We call these first three points The Creator-Creature Distinction. All of our future development of worldview must stand upon this inescapable distinction.
God is God, and we are not.
Human beings are created beings, and it is exactly how God created us. We are purposefully created beings. We will not become gods ourselves, nor “melt” back into God’s divinity.
Even after we die — even after the great 2nd Coming — we will always remain created beings. Indeed, we will be glorified human beings(!), and we will forever grow in sanctification, righteousness, and holiness. We will forever grow in love and knowledge of God in eternity. And the Creation-Creature Distinction will remain.
4. Communicating Truth Analogously
4A. Everything we’ve described to this point is an analogous description.
While technically all descriptions are analogous, the descriptions about God, His essence, His plan, and His actions are even further removed from the reality they are describing.
We could never capture, in our human words or human thought, the mind or plan of God to the extent that He perfectly knows His own mind and plan.
Our limitedness, our creatureliness, would create an infinite chasm between us and the Independent God if it weren’t for His love and plan for humanity.
4B. For God’s analogous revelation to us does not make our human knowledge or human descriptions false or worthless. Instead, our analogous knowledge is exactly the kind of knowledge that God means for us to have and for which God has intentionally created us to have and use. God Himself uses this capacity for analogous knowledge when He reveals Himself to us, both through His creational (general) revelation and through his special revelation.
And so we continue with more foundational truths about God’s World and our relationship to this world and to this God.
5. God’s Sovereignty, Will, and Providence
God alone is uncreated. Everything else is created by God and owes its existence to God.
But this doesn’t only include the material elements of the universe. This includes the very canvas of space and time within which creation is fixed. This includes the immaterial universal abstract realities of logic, or morality, of justice, of wisdom, of love.
The counsel of God is to be understood as his eternal plan for all that exists or will happen in time. This decree must be distinguished from its execution in time as well as from God himself. God is not identical with his decree; his self-knowledge is not exhausted in creation, providence, and redemption. God’s counsel is both the “efficient” and “exemplary” cause of all that is. God’s counsel is also a single and simple decree, the world plan of a single “artistic” vision, though creatures can only see it unfolding in space and time as a multiplicity.
(Bavinck, RD 2)
5A. All things that are not God, whether material or immaterial, temporal or eternal, were created by God, having their conception in the eternal mind of God from eternity past. This has several consequences.
5B. All facts of creation, from the free acts of human beings to the movement of all the dust in the universe find their source and continual dependence on the mind of God. All things come about according to the one plan of God from eternity past. This one plan governs all things whatsoever that may come to pass, including all the real-life willful choices that we make as human beings in history. God’s providence makes possible and directs all of creation-history.
Preservation itself, after all, is also a divine work, no less great and glorious than creation. God is no indolent God (deus otiosus). He works always (John 5:17), and the world has no existence in itself. From the moment it came into being, it has existed only in and through and unto God (Neh. 9:6; Ps. 104:30; Acts 17:28; Rom. 11:36; Col. 1:15ff.; Heb. 1:3; Rev. 4:11).
(Bavinck, RD2 [301])
5C. All things therefore find a central unity among them via the one mind and one plan of God. And yet the true distinction and variety of every individual person, of every individual atom, is upheld and given value in itself through the fact that it was made uniquely by God.
Thus, the mind and plan of God, who, as Trinity, is Himself the epitome of the interpenetration of unity and diversity, provides the foundation for all relationship between unity and diversity.
5D. God does not learn things. All choices and events of history are exactly as they are because God first envisioned them in His mind and then created the entirety of spacetime history. God does not wait and react to events. All events unfold according to His one plan for history. Although there are many times within this one plan when God interacts with and relates to human beings in ways that appear to humans as reactionary. But this is merely so from our limited perspective and is another example of anthropomorphic analogy (4A).
The counsel of God is to be understood as his eternal plan for all that exists or will happen in time. Scripture everywhere assumes that all that is and comes to pass is the realization of God’s thought and will and has its model and foundation in God’s eternal counsel (Gen. 1; Job 28:27; Prov. 8:22; Ps. 104:24; Prov. 3:19; Jer. 10:12; 51:15; Heb. 11:3; Ps. 33:11; Isa. 14:24–27; 46:10; Prov. 19:21; Acts 2:23; 4:28; Eph. 1:11; etc.). It is even a human privilege to act on the basis of deliberation and planning. In the case of rational creatures idea and purpose precede action. In a far more sublime sense this is true for the Lord our God, apart from whose knowledge and will nothing comes into being. Among Christians, accordingly, there can be no disagreement over the existence of a divine counsel.
(Bavinck, RD2)
6. God Created Human Beings in His Image
In distinction from all other things that God has made in His Creation, Human beings were uniquely created in “the Image of God”. The Imago Dei.
6A. Like the rest of creation, God created human beings and called them “good”, because He had created them good. But even more than good, by creating human beings in His Image, with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness.
The essence of human nature is its being \[created in\] the image of God. The entire world is a revelation of God, a mirror of his attributes and perfections. Every creature in its own way and degree is the embodiment of a divine thought. But among creatures, only man is the image of God, God’s highest and richest self-revelation and consequently the head and crown of the whole creation, the imago Dei and the epitome of nature, both mikrotheos (microgod) and mikrokosmos (microcosm). Even pagans have recognized this reality and called man the image of God. Pythagoras, Plato, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, and others distinctly state that man, or at least the soul of man, was created as God’s image, that he is God’s kin and offspring.
(Bavinck, RD2 [284])
6B. God bestowed upon humanity a privileged place in His world, and He called on them to rule over and to advance His creation, in accordance with His righteousness, wisdom, and love, as He would reveal to them in His Word. This is the cultural task of humanity: to spread the worship of God and the love of God in all aspects of human action and society.
7. The Fall
In the garden, God gave Adam and Eve the probation testing. Would Adam and Eve obey God at His Word, or would they attempt to use their own “autonomous” minds and reasoning powers to determine whether God was telling them the truth or not?
Did God really say you cannot eat from any tree in the garden?
When God forbid them from eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, was God doing the right thing?
Adam and Eve put “God in the dock”, and placed themselves above God as the ones with the “authority” and autonomy to decide whether God was worthy of being obeyed.
7A. Adam and Eve disobeyed and plunged the world into sin, death, and the curse. Now all creation groans under the pain and corruption of sin and death. Human beings are sinful from conception and are not even capable of doing good unless God sees fit to restrain the sin within them and enable them to do some good.
The first sin, the sin for which our original human ancestors are responsible, has had calamitous consequences for them as well as all their descendants and unleashed a flood of misery on the human race. In consequence, humanity as a whole, and every person in particular, is burdened with guilt, defiled, and subject to ruin and death. These facts are so potent and so obvious that they have also frequently been noted and acknowledged outside the circle of special revelation.
(Bavinck, RD3 [317])
7B. This is the Total Depravity of all mankind. It pervades every part of who we are, including our ability to think and to reason, which is also now continually tainted and influenced by sin.
7C. There is no neutral individual, society, culture, or worldview.
Apart from the restraining grace of God, sinful humans become sinful societies. There is no culture that is morally or spiritually neutral in their thoughts and relationship to God. The natural path of natural man is to hate God and the inherent authority and ownership that God holds over him.
Man was not created as a neutral being with morally indifferent powers and potentialities, but immediately made physically and ethically mature, with knowledge in the mind, righteousness in the will, holiness in the heart. Goodness, for a human being, consists in moral perfection, in complete harmony with the law of God, in holy and perfect being, like God himself (Lev. 19:2; Deut. 6:5; Matt. 5:48; 22:37; Eph. 5:1; 1 Pet. 1:15–16). That law is one and the same rule for all persons. Scripture knows of no two sorts of human beings, no double moral law, no two kinds of moral perfection and destiny.
(Bavinck, RD2 [292])
7D. All human beings then, as sinful, exist under the common thread of God’s “common wrath”. God’s wrath is the righteous requirement of God’s justice that sinners deserve.
The new covenant also leaves us in no doubt whatsoever about the sinful condition of the human race. The whole gospel is based on this assumption.
(Bavinck, RD3 [317])
Q & A 8
Q. But are we so corrupt that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined toward all evil?
A. Yes, unless we are born again by the Spirit of God.
But thankfully there is also God’s…
8. Common Grace
but we’ll dive into that later.