General Flashcards
The Two Primary Worldview Questions
What is the origin, nature, and destiny of the cosmos?
What is the origin, nature, role, and destiny of man?
The four simple, subsidiary “philosophical” questions:
- The Ontological Questions
- The Epistemological question
- The Axiological Question
- The Teleological Question
- Who am I? How do we exist?
- How do we know?
- What, if anything, is the ultimate value?
- Where are we going?
What must a good worldview have?
Enduring answers to the larger questions which are applicable to the whole of life.
The Three presuppositions of the Biblical Christian Worldview
- The Kingdom of God is Spiritual.
- Man is Prophet, Priest, and King under God
- There is no Institutional Interposition between God and Man
Twin Constants of a Biblical Christian Worldview
- God is Sovereign
- Man is depraved
Biblical Christian answer the ontological question
Biblical supernatural ontology - That the God of the Bible created everything that exists including man
Biblical Christian answer to the epistemological question
Biblical revelation epistemology - That man knows on the basis of God’s disclosure of the truth of Himself and all that exists to man in verbal, propositional form.
Biblical Christian answer to the axiological question
Biblical theistic axiology - That the Biblical God is the ultimate value, but that man created in the image of God is of infinite, eternal value
Biblical answer to the teleological question
Kingdom of God teleology - That God and His rule are in ultimate control and are determinative of direction in time
Biblical definition of government
Government is a gift of God for the orderly procedure of man in a fallen world.
Biblical view on Education
The Biblical Christian begins with an assumption of a mastery of reading, writing, and math.
Three additional objectives:
-Know God as applicable to all of life
-Know all other worldviews fully and fairly
-Reinterpret everything on the basis of Biblical presuppositions and a Biblical Worldview
Biblical view of Law
God IS Law.
Law is therefore objective
All law comes from God
Biblical view on Economics
Belief in freedom of enterprise and private property.
A Market tempered with justice.
Work as a form of worship
Presuppositions of the rationalist worldview
- The inherent goodness of man
- The perfectibility of man
- The inevitability of progress
Rationalist answer to the ontological question
Deistic supernatural ontology - That God theoretically started everything but then went wandering off never to have further relationship with His creation including man
Rationalist answer to the epistemological question
Rationalistic epistemology - That man knows on the basis of his own intellect, his own cognitive ability; that by taking thought he can come to a knowledge of the truth
Rationalist answer to the axiological question
Humanistic axiology - That man and particularly the awesome potential of his intellect is the ultimate value
Rationalist answer to the teleological question
Kingdom of Earth teleology - That some yet-to-be-discovered natural force is in ultimate control and determinative of direction in time
Rationalist view of law
Law is to be based upon the immutable laws of nature
Rationalist view on the civil-social area
Democracy replaces the Holy commonwealth
Rationalist view on Government
Government is of, for, and by man
Rationalist view of marriage
It is a union instead of communion. (God is taken out of the equation.)
Definition of Majoritarianism
The majority is deemed to be sovereign
Rationalist view on economics
That man needs to search out and apply the laws of nature in the area of economics. (Divorced from justice)
Three major expressions of rationalism in the west
- French Revolution - Advent of Revolutionary west
- Darwinian Hypothesis
- Marxist analysis of history
Four Consequences of the Rationalist Worldview in America
- Christian-Rationalist Conglomerate (Shift from Bible to man’s intellect)
- Biblical to Evangelical Christianity (Separation of church from the outside world)
- American Revolution
- American Constitutional Order and System
Utilitarianism
- Greatest good for the greatest number of people.
- Plain/Pleasure equation
- Universal Male Suffrage
- Parliamentary (or Congressional) Revolutionizing Reform
- A Powerful Executive
- Popular Mass Education
- Relative Law - No Absolutes
Romanticism-Transcendentalism
- Seek absolute moral and rational freedom.
- View nature as alive and the permanent abode of an immanent, all-pervasive cosmic mind
- Sovereign man has unlimited potential
- Twin imperatives: Liberty and Equality
Essence of the last three centuries
Happiness, freedom, and equality
How was Transcendentalism implemented?
Reformism - Changed from the inside out
Three stages of revolution (Romanticism-Transcendentalism)
- Educational or voluntary stage (Educate man to his true nature - his true “godness”)
- The political stage (Legislate liberty and equality)
- The military stage (American Civil War)
