The Gospel Scope & Soft Sciences

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The Gospel Scope & Soft Sciences

July 31, 2022

We are nearing the end of the Gospel Scope and I hope it has been a blast to listen through! The Gospel of Jesus Christ is far more reaching that we could ever anticipate. Christ even rules and reigns over the soft sciences such as, economics, sociology, law, psychology, philosophy, political science, etc... Bryce and I walk through a few principles, or tools, Christians ought to remember when engaging the soft sciences. We also give some examples. Thanks so much for listening! For The King!

Key Text:

* Proverbs 1:7

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Transcript

Here are a few tools in the tool belt and we'll walk through how these would apply to some of those fields we just named. So, the Doctrine of Total Depravity, Man Being Made in the Image of God, The Law of God. These are three very broad and very important doctrines, tools, in the Christian's tool belt when he goes to construct.

For the unbeliever to try to build up a system, it's as if you're trying to build a house without nails. Yeah, it doesn't hold together. There's no binding unit in your construction.

Exactly. Don't think I will even ask you to make Jesus Lord of your life. That's the most preposterous thing I could ever tell you to do.

Jesus Christ is Lord of your life. Whether you serve him or not, whether you bless him, curse him, hate him, or love him, he is the Lord of your life because God has given him a name that is above every name so that the name of Jesus Christ, every knee shall bow and tongue confess that he is Lord. Some of you will bow out of the grace that has been given to you, and others will bow because your kneecaps will be broken by the one who rules the nations with a rod of iron.

And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible.

[Music] I thought you were reading. You were reading.

Proverbs 1 verse 7. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction." Welcome to the For the King podcast. I am your host, Bryce Ramsey, where we proclaim the edicts of the king, namely, chiefly, that Christ reigns.

Here we go. I was kicked off by the somehow divine prerogative of Rocky. For some reason, he thought that I wasn't getting a podcast with him anymore.

I got convicted, actually. I got busy, but that didn't mean that. I mean, I ain't no quitter.

I assumed so I needed to get reviewed. I told Bryce that I thought I kept doing the podcast or whatever, and he was like, "Dude, I didn't quit. I'll still do it." But he was sending quitting signals.

His posture, his demeanor. It's how I said it. You looked me in the eyes and you said, "I identify as a winner." So I said, "All right, he must be a winner." So Bryce is apparently back on the podcast.

So I guess we'll just keep doing this dumb thing as a host and co-host team. So let's get into the beef. Let's get into the salami of the episode.

The salami. We are talking about the gospel, the scope of the gospel, and the soft sciences. So again, continuing on this gospel scope series where we're applying the gospel to every area of life, showing Christ's dominion over anything you can think of.

So if there's a big topic that we've missed on that you're like, "Man, how does the gospel, how does Christ's victory over sin and death apply to that?" And you're scratching your head. Well, scratch no longer, my friend. Go to your email and reach out to me at forthekingpodcast@gmail.com and we can hit on that.

Bryce and I can tell you how the gospel applies to all things. That's what we're trying to do here in the podcast. Christ is king for the king.

So what are the soft sciences? The soft sciences are those sciences that are not concerned with the finding out of material mechanisms in the world, but rather how humans connect with one another. That's why they're called soft. The hard sciences, we'll do the hard sciences next week, but a hard science would be something like physics or chemistry, things like that.

But the soft sciences, some examples of soft sciences would be philosophy, political science, sociology, law, psychology, economics. Those are great examples and some big fields, right? Those fields do impact a lot of what happens in society. They're hugely important.

So Alfred Maynard Keynes, I've talked about this guy before, he's like the founder of modern-day Keynesian economics. He was a homosexual in a pedophile. These ideas, economics is an important thing for us to think about as Christians.

And we want to show how Christ reigns over these kind of things. Do you have any thoughts, Bryce? I keep going. Let me keep trucking along.

We'll get Bryce involved in a second because usually he does have some good things to say. So I started off with that proverb, Proverb 1.7, that you must fear the Lord to begin on your path of getting knowledge. This is presuppositional apologetics or just presuppositional living.

Every human is a presuppositionalist. You come in with biases about the way you're going to do things in your life. So if you want more on that topic, Bryce and I filmed a podcast called "Pre-suppositional apologetics, the correct way to defend the Christian faith." You can go back and listen to that episode on us.

But we want to apply that same ideology to these soft sciences that we're talking about here. So we're going to talk about a few doctrines that you must have in your pursuit of these fields. In your tool belt.

In your tool belt, exactly. You need your hammer, you need your framing square, you need your tape measure. Exactly.

That's a good analogy. Your pencil. Your pencil.

Your chalk line. Chalk line. Your mallet.

No. No, not really. That's not in your tool belt.

Okay. So here are a few tools in the tool belt and we'll walk through how these would apply to some of those fields we just named. So the doctrine of total depravity.

Man being made in the image of God. The law of God. These are three very broad and very important doctrines, tools in the Christian's tool belt when he goes to construct economics.

When he goes to construct sociology. When he constructs psychology. When the Christian goes about that he takes out his tools that every Christian has.

The armor of God. The sword of the spirit. You take out your clothing for the day.

What you're equipped with. And you go do your job as an economist or whatever according to those tools. Yeah.

So give me some commentary, Bryce. Yeah. Give me some thoughts.

And to, for the unbeliever to try to build up a system, it's as if you're trying to build a house without nails. Yeah. Yeah.

It doesn't hold together. There's no binding unit in your construction. Exactly.

So ultimately to build a system that is not based upon the word of God is to be contra reality. And when you are against reality, you have dumb sorts of ideologues who then proclaim that a woman is a woman. Or a woman is to each of their own.

Which is neither of those are definitions. Exactly. So you are standing firmly planted in midair.

Yeah. You're not building anything. You don't have any range.

You don't have any solid construction. It's ultimately building upon sinking sand. Exactly.

And not upon the sure foundation of Christ and his word. And as we hear in Colossians, in Christ has deposited all the wisdom and knowledge of God. Exactly.

So there is no wisdom. There is no knowledge apart from Christianity. Yeah.

This is hugely important to the Christian life. This isn't some minor detail Bryce and I are exposing. Think about what we're doing here.

As you've been traveling with us and listening to this podcast, we're taking the gospel and we're blowing it up so that it does what it was intended to transform the cosmos. Yes. Bur the new world.

Christ did not come into the world to condemn the world. But in order that through him, the world might be saved. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

Exactly. It's a blood-bought world. Exactly.

Jesus is coming and he's redeeming all of creation. Exactly. And that's how, when you think about Solomon, Solomon spoke all sorts of wisdoms in terms of natural theology and specifically in this case, the soft sciences.

Yeah, he did. Solomon taught these things. Good point.

And who is the greater Solomon? It's Christ. So Christ informs all these areas of block. So if you want to start getting in there, you have anything else to add or you want to start getting in there? No, that's good.

That's just good commentary on these things. So let's start applying it a little bit because we want to keep these gospel scope series pretty short and easily-- sorry, I just dropped my phone-- easily digestible. So Bryce knows a little bit more about psychology than me.

So we can walk through that. That is where the doctrine of total depravity and man being made in the image of God really comes into play here. There are some of these soft sciences that you have to play more towards some of these tools in the tool belt for the Christian.

So just do some rudimentary Freudian psychology or some stuff about hymn that you might know and talk about how a Christian might do psychology or counseling, things like that. So fundamentally, the basis for-- so the psyche has to do and relates with the intellect and a sense of the person's mind, the person's spirit, if you will. The expression.

Yeah, the expression of that. So we want to begin with the Christian doctrine of the note called the noetic effects of the fall. And this is talking about the depravity of one's mind specifically.

So a lot of psychologists and therapists will take for granted that the person, one, really has a coherent mind that's really pursuing some sort of truth. Or they set these sorts of unbiblical conceptions of a person's unconscious self that you really need to tap into. Or it's really essentially just a re-publication of following your heart, essentially.

That what's in your mind is what you are. That's what we have in the psychological community today is that what is in somebody's mind is that even though I was born biologically a male, I actually can't in my psyche be a female. Yeah.

Right? So it-- Your identity. Exactly. Yeah.

So then what they've done is they have separated identity. And really, they've gone into a Gnostic heresy where their spirit or, in this case, their psyche-- Their psyche, yeah. --is really what determines their identity or their truth.

Yeah. Which is fundamentally flawed. That really began with the pragmatists back in the-- about 1880, I believe, and so on, with people like William Purse and James-- Pursey? I think it was actually James Purse.

It was actually-- Well, William James and James Purse. Yeah. That's what it was.

William James and James Purse. And it led on to many-- the view changed over time. But this pragmatism is essentially that-- these were psychologists.

William James is a very famous psychologist. It's essentially teaching that your words have power and they're efficacious in the world. And whatever you speak into the universe, the universe gives back to you.

Yeah. So this isn't just some obscure, new age-y topic. This is psychology in the soft sciences at universities that are being taught these things.

Exactly. Yep. That your words have power, right, that you can-- if you look at yourself in the mirror and say that you're beautiful 100 times, you'll all of a sudden be beautiful.

You'll be beautiful. Or it's just the-- For a dragon. Yeah.

It's just paganism at its core. So that's the biggest critique against modern psychology. And then if we want to get into-- Well, I kind of want to bring up Alfred Maynard Keynes and Freud a little bit.

Mm-hmm. I'm sorry. Alfred Kinsey.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I brought up the Psychology Institute.

Kinsey and Freud were just-- they had this presupposition of humans being inherently like these very sexual creatures. Like Kinsey from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University Bloomington, who is not canceled, by the way. The guy that we're about to bring up is not canceled.

OK? He's allowed to get away with this stuff, and there's still parade around his name. But he has a chart on his-- I forget what the name of his work is. But there's a chart in his study where it says number of orgasms that these different age groups have had because his goal was to show that humans are inherently sexual, and they are usually gay.

You're usually born gay, was what they're trying to-- They're trying to get your psyches born manufactured in a way where you're already orienting yourself to being gay. It's not a learned behavior. So there's a chart where it says number of orgasms, and it has like zero to two-year-olds.

Like he was somehow stimulating literally two-year-old kids into what he was thinking they were having orgasms. And that comes from a Freudian psychology that humans are here. There's different stages of their development, and it's all sexual the whole way through.

Yeah. And that's-- like just as Plato and Aristotle thought that humans were necessarily political beings, Freud thought that humans were necessarily sexual beings. Exactly.

So anything that we do in life is for the simple hedonistic desire of sexual gratification. So he thought that the reason why a baby will purse their lips or smack their lips or want to suck on the mother's breast to receive milk-- and again, this all goes back to ideology-- but it's all from a sexual desire. So it fundamentally turns children into sexual creatures.

And ultimately, this leads to the ideology that, I mean, their sexual creatures were sexual creatures. The age group doesn't really make a distinguishing factor. Exactly.

So then, in comes pedophilia. So but notice the specialization of psychology itself is the one who's informing the application of pedophilia in society. Exactly.

And then, yeah, Carl Jung has this conception of the collective unconscious. I mean, there's so much-- Consciousness, yes. There's so much in the Jungian conception.

But again, it's essentially just you have the power in your school. The collective unconsciousness is something different. But he talks about the darkness, the dark self, that each person has the shadow, which is the darkness within you.

And you are able to overcome that through-- it's essentially just rationalism all over again, but you can overcome that through-- he wouldn't use the words meditation, but a proper contemplation of one's life, taking ownership and responsibility over your actions and conquering these things. But the Christian conception is, yes, you do have this shadow, this darkness within you. But the only way to overcome it is through the blood of the lamb.

Yeah, exactly. Who takes away this into the world? So the Christian conception is forgiveness of sins. The Jungian conception is self-abasement of sin.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I wanted to bring in the gospel of this, obviously. That's the point is how the gospel triumphs on all these other starting points for the same field.

All these different traces of psychology we've just named had the starting point that humans are just animals. It's Darwinistic, rationalistic. But if we understood that humans are made in the image of God, that we're made worshiping beings, and that we're totally depraved from the get-go, your psychology would be totally different.

You would address the human as both body and soul. You would address them the way they really are, not some facade of psychology where you're hyping up the psyche to reinterpret itself or to present its identity a certain way, that you know the identity already going into a counseling session, that this person is a depraved image bearer of God. Everyone's identity, that's not saved, obviously.

That's not in Christ. When you go into psychology, that's going to totally change the way that you would treat somebody in their psyche, their immaterial mind. And then that would also, when you're talking to somebody that's been saved by the gospel of Christ, then you can tug on the new creation and say, "You shouldn't be living that way.

You can't be believing these lies," and tug that out of them. Your presuppositions will impact the way that you go about doing these fields. We already hit on philosophy.

Bryce and I did a discussion on philosophy a few weeks ago, so you can go listen to that. But same thing happens in philosophy. Your presupposition is going into philosophy.

I wanted to really hit on economics and law, and then law kind of gets into political science. But presuppositions in economics... I think you mean economics. What did I say? Oh, economics? I don't know which one it would be.

Economics sounds super intelligent, dude. You're just trying to be mad at people. I'm getting points.

I'm trying to get points. That's it. Yeah, reputation.

So this is where, in economics, is where the law of God... Again, you also need to understand the depravity of man, but the law of God comes in very strong here. That God binds us to not steal, thou shall not steal, and that we ought to care for the poor, and he puts up certain restraints in humanity where we are to care for the poor through God's church, not the welfare state. So any economic system that emphasizes theft or emphasizes the lack of private property is subverting and transgressing the law of God, and is therefore immoral and wicked ideology, because it had bad faulty starting points.

So that's why we wholesalers, Christians, reject socialism, and what blossoms out of the gospel as the gospel is applied in a Christian society? Free market capitalism. That's white supremacy. But that's apparently white supremacist to say.

And it's just... Apparently it is. Apparently it is. And that's just because, I guess, white people have been the ones that have believed the gospel and applied the gospel in the West, which is true.

White people came here and applied the gospel to our society, but it has nothing to do with them being white, and it has everything to do with the law of God. Exactly. That's the point.

So it's not white supremacist, although they're going to say that because they're going to identify us with it. But that's why your presuppositions matter, and the gospel does matter when we're thinking about economics. Reject socialism, except free market capitalism.

And that's because the law of God shows us that private property is an important thing. Right. So one of the effects of the gospel is a... And this is, again, Rocky and I, we abhor the prosperity gospel.

We don't think that just because you believe in the gospel, that God promises health, wealth, and prosperity. But the effects of believing the gospel in a proper ordering of wisdom according to God's commandments is that the society that you live in will be blessed and prosper. This is the whole point of Deuteronomy 28.

This is Deuteronomy 28. It's not just for Israel. It's for all the nations who are obedient to the commands of God, that you will be blessed in the produce that you have, your livestock will be blessed, God will bring forth the rains to your crops, you'll be blessed with money.

The reason that many third world countries are so impoverished is actually due to sin and paganism. The lack of the gospel. The lack of the gospel.

Yeah. But the only thing that can transform these third world countries is the gospel. Exactly.

It's... There's no coincidence that every first world country had its roots in the Reformation that you see today. Yeah, Protestantism. It's Protestantism going out to the nations that you see these first world countries popping up.

So there is a direct correlation to the gospel proclamation. And again, the scope of that gospel being the effects of it, a nation that is prosperous and has an abundance of blessing. Exactly.

So yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. Amen to that.

So the last thing we're gonna get into is we wrap up here thinking about the soft sciences. And I just chose the biggest, most broadest of these. There's more we could go into.

Would be law and political science. So what presupposition do we have to understand law? I don't know, God's law, Christ or chaos. It's either God's law or man's law.

Those are the two options. So when you go about making a law that all of society is bound by to do, it better not be a subjective law that humans have come up with will we know we had a thin air. It better be God's law.

Such as homosexuality is ought to be legislatively bound in society. Yeah. Think about that.

Abortion ought to be given to the world as a way. Think about like those laws don't come out of thin air. What do they do? They apply their subjective reasoning in our age to our country.

Their atheistic secularism. They applied that. And what do we get? A law that every human in our society has to abide by.

That it is legal to abort and to have sodomite marriage. They're starting points of these things. They don't happen in a thin air.

They don't happen in a vacuum. And the same thing we'd say for all the laws that we had in this country that the secular atheists are trying to undo. They're always saying it's just white men oppressing us.

And it's like no, it's God's law that you hate that's oppressing you. That was applied by our founding fathers. That's why John Jay, the first Supreme Court justice would quote the Old Testament law in his decision making.

Yeah. Exactly. Because that was their foundation.

Yeah. Their law is an application. God's law was America's law.

Yeah. American law is an application of the principles in God's law. Applied to our society today, the general equity of all those things.

That's just what you do in a Christian society. So really, they don't have... The secular atheist doesn't have any beef with the white man. They really have beef with God's law.

They hate God. And they use the white man as a scapegoat. Yeah.

And then political science like Bryce brought up, John Jay, all of our founding fathers, if you read the Federalist Papers, in their mind was the presupposition that humans are inherently evil. Therefore, what system we're going to... What system of government are we going to make politically in America? We're going to make a constitutional republic. That's how we're going to do things because of the sinful nature of man.

Yeah. They literally talk about it. You need checks and balances.

Yeah. Checks and balances. You need people to keep one another in line.

Separation of powers. Without one person being the sole authority and power. Yeah.

Separation of powers is important. And that's why Christians reject things like dictatorship, democracy. Christians reject an unfettered democracy.

Oh, wait. We're for democracy, right? We love... Aren't we in a democracy? No, dude. You will hear that term.

So I'm going to have an episode on the podcast here soon, walking through democracy. But this is... I just put this on my Twitter for the podcast here. Democracy? Question mark.

More like a theocracy with Demas as the God. Okay. That's all democracy is.

But what about Ewan McGregor in Star Wars when he says, "What about democracy?" You're right. That's kind of hard to argue with. Well, they brainwash the American public to think that we're living in a democracy.

Francis Schaeffer said democracy is the tyranny of the 51%. Exactly. So democracy... Sorry, not humans.

Christians hate democracy. Christians hate unfettered democracy. We have democratic elements in our constitutional republic, but it's not unfettered democracy.

It's good to have a few... It's not the form of the government. Exactly. It's not the form of the government.

The form of the government is republican. Exactly. So you don't want a democracy as a Christian because of why? The depravity of man.

The mobs are not smart. You're average humans depraved in mind. That's not good to have them ruling.

So that's why we reject certain forms of government and political science and the way you're applying law. Again, our founding fathers, one of the documents say, "We have inalienable rights from who? God, the creator." Yeah. So you have to have a source of where rights come from, presuppositions where those come from, where law comes from, for political science, for psychology, for economics, all that stuff.

There are starting points from God's word as it goes forth to the nations as we proclaim the gospel to people and teach them to obey all that Jesus has commanded them. Yeah. And Jesus has the logo.

So these things will be applied to society. But I'm not under the law. I'm under grace.

You're under grace. So we forget about the law. Yeah.

You know, why don't we just unhitch the Old Testament? We don't need that. Legalism. We don't need the Old Testament.

Oh, I agree with you. That's what I'm trying to get at. We don't need it.

Yeah. Bryce and I are obviously on a different spectrum of Christianity. We actually take God's word seriously.

Yeah. So we're going to wrap that up there, folks. That's been 25 minutes of maybe more than enough for you guys.

I don't know. But if you have any inquiries or any... We're going to finish up the gospel scope next week. I'm sorry.

Two weeks from now. I'm sorry. Because I revamped the podcast.

I'm sorry. And we'll be going through the heart sciences and the gospel. So thanks for bearing with us through this series.

And after that, we got something real special for you guys with a post-milluscatology. Uh-oh. Coming up here soon.

So hope you guys will enjoy that. I just started a Twitter. So it's for the king pod.

That'd be my little act or whatever. But I've got some dicey comments on there I've been doing. I'm really enjoying that.

You're trying to just... Put myself out there. And the reputation of other people. Yeah.

Well, Eric Kahn and Brian Sauvay and Dan... I've started following them on there. There's some Christians doing some work on Twitter. It's pretty cool.

Yeah. So obviously, I won't be on there 24/7. But you'll see my podcast on there.

I'll be interacting with anybody if you want to comment on the things I'm doing on there. So check us out there. Reach me at forthekingpodcast@gmail.com. And I have a website forthekingpodcast.com. I just released a new blog last week.

So check that out. Thanks, Price, for really sticking with me here. I thought you were going to be going forever.

So thanks for coming back. I think that's it, folks. So thanks for listening.

And to the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, we honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. Sole day-o-gloria.

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