Worldview

Lay Face Down and Clutch the Grass

Tony Reinke Apologetics, Art, N.D. Wilson, Worldview

If you enjoyed N. D. Wilson’s brilliant book Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World, I think you will enjoy his new DVD by the same title. The new “bookumentary” is just as artistic, personal, creation marveling, Creator worshiping, and as serious about worldview, graveyards, hell, art, evil, and enjoying hotdogs, ice cream, shorelines, and butterflies. It’s a 50-minute worldview film about God and life that will edify your soul and give you a new appreciation for the marvelous world in which we live. And it’s a project that has quite a lot of potential uses in campus and community outreach (study guide included).

Props to Wilson (@ndwilsonmutters) and director Aaron Rench (@aaronrench; also the executive director of Collision: Christopher Hitchens vs. Douglas Wilson) for pulling off a thoughtful, edifying, and artistic new film.

You can buy the movie from Canon Press ($22) or watch the trailer here:

Why humans require a worldview (and why dogs don’t)

Tony Reinke Worldview

Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness [(New York City: Henry Holt, 1973) p. 26], writes:

“…[man] needs a goal that tells him where to go. The animal has no such problems. Its instincts provide it with a map as well as with goals. But man, lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits him to think of many directions in which he could go, needs an object of total devotion; he needs an object of total devotion to be the focus point of all his strivings and the basis for all his effective—and not only proclaimed—values. He needs such an object of devotion for a number of reasons. The object integrates his energies in one direction. It elevates him beyond his isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and gives meaning to life. In being devoted to a goal beyond his isolated ego, he transcends himself and leaves the prison of absolute egocentricity.”

Sin and Worldview

Tony Reinke Psychology, Reformed spirituality, Reformed theology, Sin, Sin in Culture, Sinfulness, Worldview

“The great danger is always to single out some aspect or phenomenon of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of human apostasy [sin], as the villain in the drama of human life. Such an error is tantamount to reducing direction to structure, to conceiving of the good-evil dichotomy as intrinsic to the creation itself. The result is that something in the good creation is declared evil. We might call this tendency ‘Gnosticism’… In the course of history, this ‘something’ has been variously identified as marriage and certain kinds of foods (the Gnostic heresy Paul warns Timothy against in 1 Timothy 4), the body and its passions (Plato and much of Greek philosophy), culture in distinction from nature (Rousseau and much of Romanticism), institutional authority, especially in the state and the family (philosophical anarchism and much of depth psychology), technology and management techniques (Heidegger and Ellul, among others), or any number of things. There seems to be an ingrained Gnostic streak in human thinking, a streak that causes people to blame some aspect of God’s handiwork for the ills and woes of the world we live in.”

—Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Eerdmans, 2005) p. 61.