The Gospel &

Reformational Christianity

The Lord's Prayer exhorts us to pray that the will of God may be done on earth as it is in heaven.  It is difficult not to see this as a calling for the heart-felt desire for the transcendent will of God - expressed in the lawful governance of creation - to come and invade the earth.  Our understanding of the gospel is that in Jesus' death and resurrection, the Kingdom of God - as inaugurating the rule of love, humility, suffering and justice - has indeed invaded the earth.  However, life in the present age should be marked by a fuller expression of the realities of the Kingdom as signs of the fullness of God's reign in the age to come.   This prospect should encourage us to live in the present in a way that we describe as reformational – seeking to live now in ways that promote healing, hope and something of a new vision for the various spheres of our social order.

The secularism of the outlook of our modern age had its more significant beginnings in the ways in which the philosophical work of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), began to impact the educated European public of the second half of the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the radical character of the spiritual roots of these outlooks were articulated in the works of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and the father of positivism, Auguste Comte (1798-1857).  The more open, ‘liberal’ outlook of the Anglo-Saxon world saw secular activities (politics, business, farming, education) as ‘spiritually’ or ‘religiously’ neutral.  In this it was generally supportive of spiritual/religious activities – with the proviso that they remained within the sphere of personal life, and did not affect the neutrality of secular concerns.

Suffice it to say that both radical and liberal ‘secularism’ – as outlooks that seek to deprive the various temporal callings of secular life in the here and now from access to the transcendent dimensions of human existence – are contrary to both the gospel and reformational Christianity.

This ‘box’ of our website seeks to open up the Biblical roots of a perspective that is characterised by an inner transformation of our hearts, minds and souls that flows into all of our actions in everyday secular life.

PROVOKING

Short 2 page Articles

ILLUSTRATIVE

Short 2-5  page Articles

SUBSTANTIAL

In-depth & Challenging  Articles