I’m coming back to law on Friday, but I thought this might be a good follow-up to my Saturday post on humans being the kind of creatures who, from the beginning, were made by God to live by faith in the Word of God. Perhaps today’s thought will be something good to start your week.
Let me be blunt: Jesus Christ is useless news, not even good news, if we don’t put Him in the proper context. Let me explain with some thoughts on Romans 1:18-32 and how I’ve read them wrong most of my life. Read correctly, Jesus Christ, who is the Gospel, is GREAT news!
The context for the diminution in our day of the glory of Christ and of why He is such GREAT news is that, unbeknownst to us (at least to me), a cosmological revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries changed the nature of the way the gospel was understood in the following centuries. Cosmology addresses how the cosmos works/functions.
Follow me quickly, here. I think it will be worth it. See what you think.
A Short Summary of the Cosmological Revolution
In the 18th century, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant changed the way people began to understand the world. Thinking switched from cosmology to epistemology, that is, how do we know things. He said we only have TRUE knowledge of the phenomenal world, i.e., the things we can empirically measure, e.g. matter and energy. Values may be real, but we can’t know them like we do “things.”
Nietzsche comes along in the 19th century and says that’s silly. If we can’t know them, i.e. values, they aren’t real! He says they were made up by some people to give them control over other people. Freud later explains that we made up God, too, to justify the values that gave some control over others. Dewey brings it into education. Can you see why our kids are taught to hate the idea of a Christian heritage? Can you see why Christian nationalism is scary to so many?
It also explains why Kuyper said 100 years ago that, even then, people saw Christianity as “‘Fit for children and old women, not for us men!’ The modern philosophy, which gains the day, considers itself in ever-increasing measure as having outgrown Christianity.”
How The Revolution Changed the Gospel
Now let’s consider how this shift from cosmology to epistemology changed the gospel and the way I read Romans 1:18-32.
Those verses do speak about knowledge, which would be epistemology. We should know there is a God of eternal power who created.
So, Christian thought leaders, taking their cue from Kant that epistemology, not cosmology, was the key, reduced Christianity and the gospel to people getting the right ideas in their heads. This reduced Christianity to an ideology, an alternative to Marxism, CRT, nihilism, rationalism, colonialism, etc. It becomes, “I follow Jesus. You can follow who you want, but my ideas are better.”
This revolution also explains why, to my recollection, all the Biblical and Christian worldview training programs I attended (and my Christian political training programs) focused on knowing the correct “values” and spent little, if ANY, time on who Christ is and NONE on cosmology. As Herman Bavinck wrote 100 years ago, metaphysics and its resulting cosmology disappeared from our theology.
The God of “Values”
It seems to me we bought the Kantian lie that knowledge is the critical thing. And we tried to solve the “values problem “ with a nondescript, Christ-less God because what we wanted was simply an “absolute” upon with we could posit objective values. Muhammad and Judaism offer that kind of God. This helps us understand why Abraham Kuyper also said “apologetics”—proving-that-God-exist—has “advanced us not one single step” in “saving the ‘Christian heritage.’”
Worse yet, the world has moved past Kant’s philosophy to Nietzsche’s and nihilism, i.e., there are no values, just stuff and we give the stuff the value that seems to work at the moment. This explains why transgender ideology makes perfect sense to some people.
Christianity is one cosmology behind the times in understanding what has happened, but its confusion over homosexuality and transgenderism proves we are “catching up” to the times.
Applying the Foregoing to Romans 1:18-32
Now let’s put this understanding of a cosmological revolution to the test by applying it to what Paul writes in Romans 1. He says knowledge is NOT our problem! He says man “knew God” (v. 21). I think we can take that back to the very beginning, though by Noah that knowledge was largely gone. God “gave them over” as Romans 1 puts it.
In other words, I believe Romans 1:18-32 is describing cosmology—the way the world works and where it is headed after the Fall unless we and it can be rescued from the COSMIC-IN-NATURE LEGAL CURSE resulting from the Fall.
Consider Galatians 3:9 (KJV): “For as many as are of the works of the LAW [we are ALL under the law of God!] are UNDER THE CURSE: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them.”
This is not a description of people who break this or that rule or law of God. This is cosmology and it is a product of law.
The problem is no fallen person can atone for his own sin to get out from under the curse, much less bring others with him. A new Adam and new creation is needed and that is who Christ is! (1 Corinthians 15:45, 49).
The Gospel (Good news) Cosmology We Need
Now the good news (gospel) of Christ:
“Christ hath REDEEMED us from the curse of the law ... being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.” Galatians 3:13.
“But of God are ye in Christ Jesus who of God is MADE UNTO US, wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and REDEMPTION” (1 Corinthians 1:30).
“In Christ” is the new creation we needed (2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians. 6:15) so that we can again see rightly (epistemologically) how the original creation was to work and how the new one in Christ now works (cosmologically).
What a Christ! What great news! “He that glories, let him glory in the Lord! (1 Corinthians 1:31)
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