Brad discusses something that has been bothering him since his Twitter spat with Timothy Keller: Why are all the Reformed Theo-Bros always talking about worldviews. Brad unpacks the buzz words they use to uncover the will to power, the righteous arrogance, and the relativism at the heart of this theological system. After listening to this you will understand why Reformed pastors and theologians--John MacArthur, Timothy Keller, John Piper--often consider themselves the most intellectual, the most relevant, and the most manly.
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Hello, welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and today I want to talk about something that has kind of been bothering me for a while.
It is something that came out of the kind of back-and-forth I had with Timothy Keller a while back.
So some of you know and some of you will remember that Timothy Keller went on a tweetstorm about how sex outside of heterosexual marriage is dehumanizing and had some other things to say.
I commented on that and he commented back and blah blah blah.
Well, one of the things that came out of that was a lot of Timothy Keller fans who were talking to me on Twitter.
Talking is a nice word, I would say.
Yelling, arguing, whatever.
And a lot of them were what you would call reformed Theo bros, and I'll explain what that means in a minute.
But one of the things that they kept going on and on about is worldviews, right?
Worldview, worldview, worldview.
And that was the thing that kept being thrown out.
And I understood it at the time, but it also occurred to me that it's somewhat niche.
And it might be something that some of you have seen or heard and were kind of unsure about.
I also think it has wider implications for our public sphere and what we take to be truth and facts and other things, and so I want to talk about that.
Why are Reformed Christians, especially Reformed theologians, but also philosophical types, and especially the bros on Twitter who take themselves to be intellectuals and philosophers and theologians, why can they not stop talking about worldviews?
And I just want to get into that just for a second.
So what does it mean to be Reformed?
Some of you know all too well, some of you've been to seminary, some of you have grown up in the Reformed world, others of you don't know what that is.
So to be Reformed means in sort of general terms to come out of a Calvinist tradition that understands God's grace to be all-pervasive.
It also means that God is omnipotent in the Most expansive use of that term has predestined everything to happen in the world and is sort of in control not only of what happens to the Earth and the cosmos but what happens to humans and their destiny.
So, if you've heard of Calvinism, if you've heard of predestination, this is where that comes from.
Now, one of the things that is also true about Reformed theologians and Reformed thought is that there's a sort of pervasive idea that the entire world is gods, right?
That there's no sort of sectioning off the world into a private religious sphere or a religious versus secular or sacred versus profane.
There's no kind of idea that there's a place for religion, and then there's a place for everything else.
That there's a place for business, and a place for school, and a place for work, and then there's a place for faith, right?
The idea is that God is in control of all things.
God, in essence, has dominion over all things.
And thus, the world is his.
And so, let me read just a little bit from an article by a Reformed theologian, Jay Shim, who works at Dort College, which is sort of a known Reformed school in the heartland of this country.
The article is called, Reformed Theology as Worldview Theology, the Public Nature of the Gospel and Spirituality.
And here is how Shim puts it, "...the whole and every part of the world, and the whole of human life, must reflect the creation principles that are restored in Christ's redemption.
This comprehensive view of God's redemptive history shapes the all-embracing Calvinist worldview and life system.
The width and depth of God's salvation shapes the public with God's world-embracing and at the same time world-reforming spirituality." As a result, Calvinist spirituality leads Christians to participate in the reforming work of Christ in all aspects of human life, with a confession that this work, no matter how sincere and faithful that the work may be, is not of humans, but of God in Christ, who actually reforms the world.
In every moment of our participating in the work of Christ, through success and failure, we should maintain deep personal piety.
So, Shim, in that sort of paragraph and a half, says a form of the word reform about, you know, 20 times, and so you can see how there's this idea that in Reformed theology the world, in the most expansive sense, is being reformed, and God is using humans, Christians, to do that work, even though it is, as Shim says, God's work, Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swadge episode.
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