In recent weeks, our examination of a Christian view of law led us to consider the cosmological revolution that took place from and after the 18th century. Today, I’m going to look at how Christianity succumbed to that revolution, the expression of it by the U.S. Supreme Court, and the secret to a launching a successful Christ-centered counter-revolution.
How Christianity Succumbed to a New Cosmology
What happened over the centuries, theologically speaking, is that the admitted incomprehensibility of the absolute and independent being of an infinite and invisible God who is pure spirit slowly gave way to the unknowability of God.
The transition was aided by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He said that God and the knowledge of God could not be known in the same way we can know the phenomenal world of physics, by sense perception. The knowledge of God, unknowable by sense perception, was confined to a distinct and separate realm, what Kant called the noumenal realm.
As the knowledge of God went beyond and over our horizon, so did any knowledge of the essential nature of things beyond “facts” that could be observed such as the essential nature of marriage, male, and female. The essential nature of things, it was said, was beyond empirical knowledge, and it is. It is what Justice Brown-Jackson doesn’t know what a woman is, not essentially. Knowledge of the unseen essential nature of a thing must be revealed, and in this new two-storied cosmos, the centuries- old inquiry into the nature of a thing beyond its empirical qualities, what we call metaphysics, died.
Here we would do well to recall what Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck said in the early 20th century, namely, that “Christianity is done for” in the absence of metaphysics. And why? Because the Bible repeatedly and resoundingly declares that all things are in some way revealing the otherwise unseen glory of the invisible God.
How Christianity Tried to Save Itself and What Happened Instead
To save some knowledge of God, Christianity (I use that word as a brand name) succumbed to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. The real world was said to be “out there,” and the phenomenal world of every-day life was just one Christians were passing through, as the old hymn put it. A disembodied “spiritual” life of the soul in a non-physical Heaven became the telos of the gospel. In other words, this new “Christianity” put God right where Kant had placed Him—”upstairs” in a two-storied cosmos.
At the same time, scientists were increasingly telling us that the cosmos was ordered and moved by invisible but discoverable laws of nature. Those laws made the life-giving and ordering presence of the Holy Spirit largely unnecessary. But they also made the revelation of an essence beyond physics (a metaphysical reality) seem unnecessary to a proper ordering of society. We were told that all we needed to know in the phenomenal world of our existence could be known by scientific investigation and ordered accordingly.
But, after Nietzsche said it was irrational to believe in an invisible world we admittedly cannot know, and Freud explained why we had created the concept of God, this is what people were were left with:
We can’t know the essential nature of a thing beyond what we can see and measure, and, therefore, we alone can, and must, determine what a thing is and what it is for. This was our new cosmology.
This meant we can do with things whatever serves our enlightened self-determined ends.
The cosmos was no longer a whole in which its diversity could be studied, known, and further ordered and developed in an integrated way toward a fuller revelation of the glory of God. This is a Christian cosmology.
Instead, after Nietzsche, the cosmos disintegrated into bits and pieces. It was left for re-assembling by the autonomous self. This became the new cosmology.
The New Cosmology and SCOTUS
The new cosmology matured in our nation’s law during the 20th century, culminating in these words by the United States Supreme Court in 1992 (Planned Parenthood v. Casey)*:
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.
This isn’t just the end of law as spiritual (Romans 7:14)—law as pointing to something beyond nature conforming to the essential nature of things—but the end of even the possibility of an integrated, harmonious cosmos. Everyone was now god.
The Secret to Restoring an Integrated Cosmology
As best I can tell, the only way to return to an integrated cosmos that glorifies God is to remember the “secret” the Lord reveals to them who fear Him: His covenant (Psalm 25:14).
I’ve spoken of that covenant previously in terms of ordering our understanding of law (and all things, including our political endeavors) according to God’s covenant purposes. Doing so keeps our labors from being in vain. But today I offer it as the secret to recovering an integrated cosmos in our thinking. It is the key to a revolution against the new cosmology.
A Critical Text for Restoring an Integrated Christian Cosmology
Specifically, I would turn our attention to Jeremiah 33:19-21 (KJV):
And the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah, saying, Thus saith the LORD;
If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in their season; then may also my covenant be broken with David my servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne; and with the Levites the priests, my ministers.
It is hard to miss that this comparison takes us back to Genesis 1:3-5 (KJV) and the first recorded words of God on the first day:
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
To this, we need to add the Genesis 1:14 respecting the fourth day:
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.
In other words, after creating the firmament of Heaven (Day 2) and then the dry ground (Day 3), God delegated his direct rule over night and day to celestial forms of being. the sun, moon, and stars.
By similitude or analogy, God was saying that the fixed and certain order of the Heaven—day and night—and the subsequent delegation of authority over them to celestial beings is of a nature, an essence, that is like the covenant God made with David as an imperial king. (Christ, of course, becomes the Levitical High Priest until the end of the age, but that’s for another day.)
And now let’s trace this through to a new rightly ordered and integrated cosmos.
Tracing the Outworking of the the Christ-centered, Integrated Cosmos
What we will now see is that God’s covenant provides what we need: A living foundation for an integrated cosmos that encompasses all things. That foundation is real (of a metaphysical nature) because it is grounded in the covenant of grace between the God the Father and His Son!
Consider first Psalm 2. Beginning in verse six, God, the LORD, speaks about the “kings and rulers” who think they can can “take counsel against the LORD and His anointed.” He says, “Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.”
And then His Son, His anointed, responds:
I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me,
“Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.”
After Jesus Christ has made manifest the God who “is light, and in [whom] is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5, KJV)—conforming to the rudimentary physical revelation of God on the first day—God the Father says through Paul that He has “made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself: That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him” (Ephesians 1:9-10, KJV, emphasis supplied)
This is the reintegration of a cosmos that is under the curse of death (Romans 5:12; Galatians 3:10, 13) and disordered by sin. And, it gives the sense of this warning in verses 10-12 of Psalm 2:
“Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.
Paul’s words also give weight to the consolation at the end of Psalm 2:12: “Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.”
Putting our trust—our faith—in the covenant promises of God and not in being able to manipulate U.S.Supreme Court precedents over the last 100 years grounded in the new cosmology will bring about the cosmological revolution we need.
And next week, I think I will demonstrate what happens to parental rights when Christians put their trust in Supreme Court precedents resting on a disintegrated cosmos. It isn’t pretty.
Casey was abortion decision and its holding that abortion was a constitutional right was reversed in 2023 by the Dobbs decision. But the reversal treated abortion as a medical procedure, not as an inherent wrong rooted in any essential understanding of what a woman and procreation are. In other words, the result in Casey was reversed, but the cosmology it expressed was not repudiated.
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