Quotables: Creation Regained

Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview by Albert Wolters

All of this raises the question of the relationship of what I have been calling “worldview” to theology and philosophy. This is a subject of some confusion, since in the common parlance any comprehensive perspective on things that appeals to the authority of the Bible is called “theology,” and any such perspective that appeals instead to the authority of reason is called “philosophy.” The trouble with this way of speaking is that it fails to make a distinction between the life-perspective every human being has by virtue of being human and the specialized academic disciplines that are taught by professors of theology and philosophy. Moreover, it makes the mistaken assumption that theology cannot be pagan or humanistic and that philosophy cannot be biblical. The difference between Christian and non-Christian cannot so easily be divided between two academic disciplines. {p. 9}

A worldview is a matter of the shared everyday experience of humankind, an inescapable component of all human knowing, and as such it is nonscientific, or rather {since scientific knowing is always dependent on the intuitive knowing of our everyday experience} prescientific, in nature. It belongs to an order of cognition more basic than that of science or theory. Just as aesthetics presupposes some innate sense of the beautiful and legal theory presupposes a fundamental notion of justice, so theology and philosophy presuppose a pretheoretical perspective on the world. They give a scientific elaboration of a worldview. {p. 10}

Another way [of explaining the distinctiveness of the reformational worldview] is to say that its characteristic features are organized around the central insight that “grace restores nature”–that is, the redemption in Jesus Christ means the restoration of an original good creation…In other words, redemption is re-creation…What must be avoided here is the view that grace includes something in addition to nature, with the result that salvation is something basically “noncreation,” supercreational, or even anticreational. In such a view, whatever it is that Christ brings over and above creation belongs to the sacred realm, while the original creation constitutes the secular realm. {p. 12}