Author: Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.
Publication details: Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2002
“ … Christian education is for the kingdom of God.”
Cornelius Plantinga Jr.
“Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed, to consider well [that] the maine end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternall life, Jn. 17: 3. and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.”
The Founders of Harvard College, 1643
Engaging God’s World is a primer for students beginning college. In it, Plantinga, now President of Calvin Theological Seminary, exhorts his young students embarking on their college careers to regard their higher education in the light of their Christian faith and ideals. Plantinga spells out the main themes of the Christian faith (from a Reformed perspective) and shows how crucially God-centered and Christ-centered higher learning can shape and direct our worldviews. In Calvin College, he says, “faculty and staff would knead the yeast of the gospel through everything that happened on campus,” to the end that students’ lives and imagination would be “permeated with the spirit and teaching of Christianity.” Such a thoroughgoing vision of Christian higher education (in Calvin College) is derived most directly from Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper’s understanding of the Lordship of Jesus Christ over “all things” (Eph. 1: 22).
This Puritan and Reformed influence is felt throughout Plantinga’s book. The conviction of the Christian’s role of involvement in the all of life is demonstrated clearly in Plantinga’s perspective of the world as God’s good thing (creation), though now fallen, and in the necessity of engaging with this world to reform it according to God’s own standard. Christ-centered higher learning thus teaches students to rightly handle scriptural knowledge as well as secular knowledge, to develop good critical judgment and analytical skills, and ultimately, to strive to “tilt forward” God’s restoration of the world through deliberate, hopeful service and sacrificial contribution.
Clearly in view is God’s redemptive purpose for the restoration of this material reality we call our world. When thoughtful Christians join in God’s great mission to make “all things new,” we are declaring two things. Firstly, the Lordship of Jesus Christ over all things; and secondly, the determination of God to bring about the message of shalom to the world he created and loved. Corrupted by evil and distorted by the terrorism of God’s hostile enemies, creation now suffers from a dis-ease, characterized so typically by a lack of peace and harmony and justice. Returning shalom to such a world entails the thoughtful Christian’s dedicated service “For Christ and His Kingdom.” Plantinga explains the significance of the word for peace. Shalom in the OT meant precisely this “restoration of peace, justice and harmony,” and in the NT it referred prophetically and hopefully to “the coming of the kingdom” of heaven. Shalom means much more than maintaining or ushering in times of political peace and the absence of war: “In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight—a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, all under the arch of God’s love.” God’s restoring redemption has abundance in mind, abundance of life, abundance of joy and happiness, abundance of blessing. In this view, we understand that life is truly sacred: “the whole of it stands under the blessing, judgment, and redeeming purposes of God.”
The thoughtful Christian’s presence in the broken world reminds it of its own inexpressible yearning for an eden long lost. The world’s deep longing (sehnsucht) for shalom is perhaps most properly (if not completely) articulated in human culture: “the visual arts, music, drama, landscapes, poetry, and friendships that can arouse human desire for sheer goodness …” The point of all such yearning, of course, is that it is an “inconsolable secret.” Our desires are passionate and strong when that which we long for is unfulfillable. Plantinga quotes usefully from C.S. Lewis and Augustine, two persons who understood full well the tragic meaning and feelings behind such a word as sehnsucht. But even if we finally get what we long for, we discover that all earthly dreams and aspirations are not final: “something in us keeps saying ‘not this’ or ‘still beyond’.” Beyond the earthly thing we long for, Lewis says, is a greater longing for the ultimate reality that Christians know to be God. Augustine hit on the term summum bonum, the “supreme good,” to express what all earthly joys simply point toward. In his Confessions, Augustine addresses the summum bonum of the world: “O Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If it were not that our human sehnsucht drove us to God as the true and eternal Beauty who can be found by the earnest seeker, we would not have such a hopefulness in view. Such hope and hopefulness directs all Christian enterprise toward the renewal and restoration of the earth.
Plantinga details what this hope means in his chapters on Creation, The Fall, and Redemption, providing for his readers the basis and foundation for Christian faith and faithfulness in the world. Plantinga’s chapter on Vocation in the Kingdom of God takes the college reader through thought-provoking discussion on exactly what it means to engage with God’s world in the way we work and live “For Christ and His Kingdom.” Christian readers are to discern and derive principle from the brush strokes of God’s story so that their application in the nitty gritty details of untidy and contemporary human life reflects insightful consideration of the demands of their faith. Thinking, reflective, deliberate Christians are in view here.
While Engaging God’s World was intended originally for college students embarking on their college careers, Plantinga’s reflection of the Christian’s role in God’s restoration project of the earth is a must-read for the larger Christian readership. It is not a loud or angry book. It is rather quietly challenging, both informing and inspiring the reader to articulate and work out his faith in authentic ways by first reorienting his mind and perspective to the viewpoint of the good news of God.
