Why A Blog Called “All Things Christian”?

Welcome to the initial entry on my new blog, “All Things Christian.” Why would I assign this title to my blog? Briefly stated, “All Things Christian” is my way of expressing the following truths which the Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians:

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Cor 10:3-5).

Like Paul, I wage war with neither the world’s deceptive stratagems and disingenuous tactics nor the world’s volatile and fiery weapons. My quest is to proclaim the good news’s transformative power as it is in Jesus Christ concerning the things of this present evil age. My pursuit is to persuade as many as possible to abandon worldliness with its hostilities to the Creator and to surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ. My chief weaponry is reasonable argumentation governed by the sufficiency of God’s revelation in both the world he created and the word he has spoken.

In keeping with the Apostle’s stated mission, “All Things Christian” signals that I am devoting this blog to engage in warfare against hostilities that endeavor to overthrow the Creator’s ordering of both creation and of the new creation. This means that no enmities are off-limits for me to engage. My objective is to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and to take captive every thought to bring thoughts into obedience to Christ.”

This blog’s objective follows a good pedigree. Augustine wrote, “A person who is a good and true Christian should realize that truth belongs to his Lord. Wherever it is found, gathering and acknowledging it even in pagan literature, but rejecting superstitious vanities and deploring and avoiding those who ‘though they knew God did not glorify him as God or give thanks but became enfeebled in their own thoughts and plunged their senseless minds into darkness. Claiming to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the image of corruptible mortals and animals and reptiles’” [Romans 1:21-23] (On Christian Teaching, 2.75).

Another in the same trajectory as Augustine is Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch theologian and statesman (1873-1920). His inaugural address titled “Sphere Sovereignty” at the dedication of Free University of Amsterdam in 1880 is remembered for a single line: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!” (Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader, ed. James D. Bratt (Eerdmans, 1998, 488). This was Kuyper’s rebuttal to anyone who might allow for theology to have its own department in a university but would dismiss the notion that theology is a constituent aspect of every academic discipline whether the sciences, medicine, law, economics, history, psychology, languages, etc. This is why Kuyper confidently affirms, “Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: Mine!”

In the latter half of the last century, Arthur Holmes, while teaching at Wheaton College, wrote a little book, All Truth Is God’s Truth, drawing upon Augustine’s dictum. His book upholds the concept that God owns all knowledge because God is the author of knowledge, though Holmes does this by focusing on God’s ownership of all truth. He defends the proposition that all truth, regardless of its origin, is God’s truth. The title expresses a truism, a platitude, even a banality, that seems cleverly assigned because it expresses a maxim with which no thinking Christian would disagree but promote. Of course, truth, regardless of its source, is in concert with the Author of Truth.

Holmes’ desire is for Christians not to shy away from difficult questions that inevitably arise from whatever branch of human knowledge one chooses to study. He expresses the firm conviction that any truth that scholars may find within their discipline of study can be reconciled with their Christian faith. Thus, All Truth Is God’s Truth became a major impetus and resource for educators in Christian academia to integrate the truths discovered in their disciplines with Christian belief.

Mindful Christians agree with the idea of truth’s unity, as belonging to God, which attacks the false dichotomy of sacred and secular truths. Yet, thoughtful Christians take issue with the book’s somewhat unguarded implicit subtext though Holmes does not directly subvert Scripture’s authority. Informed Christians readily acknowledge that the Bible is not the only source of all truth because Christian affirmation of Scripture’s sufficiency has never meant that truth is not found outside the pages of the Bible. Holmes is too wise to argue that Scripture is deficient. Nevertheless, whether Holmes implies it many Christian educators and administrators have drawn a subtle implication from Holmes’ reasoning as they equate all sources of truth from two Books of Revelation—the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. Certainly, it is correct that Scripture instructs us that we live within a universe that God created and where his presence is inescapable. However, the inference that many extrapolate from Holmes’s argument entails an epistemology that moves beyond the warrants of Scripture. While it is right to acknowledge that every human, made in God’s image and after his likeness, has access to some of God’s truth, it is not correct to assume that humans separated from Christ are neutral, honest seekers of truth or that they can correctly process truth apart from the transforming of their minds by the Spirit. Because of improper epistemological assumptions, while many educators in Christian colleges and universities affirm that Scripture is the primary source of truth, they subtly elevate knowledge gathered from secondary sources to be on par with the truth revealed in Scripture. The widespread embrace of evolutionary science advanced under the innocuous designation BioLogos, which sanitizes and conceals the embrace of Theistic Evolution, testifies to the impact of improper epistemological assumptions that subvert Scripture’s sufficiency and authority.

Holmes urges Christian educators to engage their educational disciplines rigorously, arguing that a solid faith can manage tensions, turbulence, and conflicts that arise as their investigative work seeks to understand better God’s created order. Certainly, Holmes achieved this objective.

Since Holmes, many scholars have advanced this cause of integrating faith and learning, a continual theme of collegiate faculty workshops. Virtually every faculty workshop that I have attended throughout the past thirty years has proceeded on the assumption that faculty and student alike must “integrate faith and learning,” an ad nauseam idiom that few seem to realize has become an utterly banal expression.

Intervarsity Press has published the Christian Worldview Integration Series designed to promote “a robust personal and conceptual integration of Christian faith and learning” for college and university professors and students. J. P. Moreland and Francis J. Beckwith wrote the Series Preface that provides the guardrails for the IVP book series. Their concern is to assist Christian thinkers to “learn about and become good at integrating” their “Christian convictions with the issues and ideas” they encounter within their academic disciplines. They speak of “personal and conceptual integration.” What do they mean by integrate? They mean “to form or blend into a whole.” They, like the vast majority of Christian educators, believe that integration is a work that humans must do. For them, conceptual integration entails “our theological beliefs, especially those derived from careful study of the Bible, are blended and unified with important, reasonable ideas from our profession or college major into a coherent, intellectually satisfying Christian worldview” (“Series Preface,” in Doing Philosophy as A Christian, 9; emphasis original). What is personal integration? It is “to live a unified life, a life in which we are the same in public as we are in private, a life in which the various aspects of our personality are consistent with each other and conducive to a life of human flourishing as a disciple of Jesus” (Ibid., 10).

Invariably, those who advocate “integration of faith and learning” treat this integration as the work of humans, that we must do it. I have taken issue with this prevailing view among Christian scholars. I have long contended that the notion that we must “integrate faith and learning” is actually counterproductive, even subversive to the cause of Christian education. I have even suggested that such an endeavor unintentionally threatens to disintegrate what God, the Creator, has already integrated into a harmonic whole. Thus, I was delighted to discover Old School, New Clothes: The Cultural Blindness of Christian Education, co-written by Ronald E. Hoch and David P. Smith. Hoch and Smith affirm what I uphold. They contend that integration “as a human activity taking place in God’s creation . . . can be accurately understood only when viewed as subservient to and defined by the integration that God created. Indeed, precisely because God created all things with an already existing integration or harmony, it only confuses the matter when the term integration is used, first and foremost, as something humans do” (Hoch & Smith, 2-3). Their point is my own. Integration is not a human work; it is a work that belongs to God alone. God established his created order that is fully integrated into a comprehensive, cohesive, and coherent whole. God’s work is integration; our work is to examine what God has integrated so as to discover, to distinguish one thing from another, to discern relationships, to acknowledge what God has integrated harmoniously, to worship the Creator, to glorify him, to give thanks to God for the knowledge and insight that he bequeaths to us.

Now, I trust that readers will grasp something of the fullness of the title of this blog—“All Things Christian.” Nothing lies outside the sphere of Christ’s Lordship. If Jesus owns every square inch of his creation, this means that anything within the sphere of Christ’s Lordship may draw my attention and become a topic on which I offer commentary. This includes prevailing issues of our current era.

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