In the article “What is your paradigm?,” I examined four popular (and often overlapping) paradigms – that is, modes of thinking that might call a “worldview” – that people in the contemporary West often have when it comes to thinking about God.  None of those paradigms, I argued, was compatible with a biblical paradigm.  In this article, I want to examine what a biblical paradigm is and why it differs from the assumptions that many people (even Christians!) in North America and Europe often hold.

The biblical paradigm begins with an acknowledgement of the rationality of the world – because the world is the creation of a perfectly rational God – and the possibility of human reason to apprehend God, because God has created humans in his image, with the capability of seeking God.  Yet human reason has also been deeply corrupted by sin. Because we are rebels against God, much of what God has said and done will seem unfair to us, and we will be inclined to find excuses to reject God, despite the evidence.  All of us are guilty of much worse crimes than we imagine.  We are not basically good, and there is no human (aside from Jesus) who is truly innocent.  We are therefore not innocent victims when tragedies strike or diseases threaten.  And yet, in the midst of this sin, God has provided redemption.  Offering more than simply forgiveness, he has given those who believe in Christ the gift of adoption and the promise of glorification and life with him forever (see Romans 8:1-4, 14-25; and Ephesians 1:3-2:10).  God’s goodness and mercy are far greater than we imagine, yet because unredeemed sinners are enemies of God, they are objects of God’s wrath, and they will perceive God’s actions toward them and others as unjust (Romans 5:8-10; see also Revelation 16:9-11).

Thus, it is not surprising, from the Reformed evangelical perspective, if people’s sinful reason will lead them to reject God, because their reason has been distorted by sin.  The Christian’s task in apologetics, then, is to try, in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, to break through the sin-induced barriers that people have erected in their own minds that prevent them from seeing the evidence of God’s existence and truth in creation and in the gospel message (Romans 1:18-23; 2 Corinthians 4:3-4).  Reformed evangelicals believe in making rational arguments and grounding our beliefs in truths that are rationally cohesive, but we also know that human reason, in its current form, has been distorted by sin, and that people who claim to be making rational arguments are often reasoning from the basis of presuppositions and paradigms that reflect sinful values and sinful distortions of the truth.  Rather than except these arguments at face value, we want to examine the paradigms on which these arguments are based and determine whether or not these paradigms are justified.

From a Reformed evangelical perspective, God’s creation also looks different, because unlike the eighteenth-century deists (and many modern American Christians), Reformed Christians do not believe that God’s primary purpose in making the world was to make people happy – at least not in a temporal way.  Instead, God’s purpose in creating the world was to reveal his glory – that is, the full character of the Trinity (Psalm 19:1; Colossians 1:16).  God’s purpose in creating humans was that they should seek God (Acts 17:26-27) and serve as caretakers and managers of God’s creation (Genesis 1:28; Psalm 8:6) in preparation for an eternal relationship with God.  Thus, when people suffer in a sinful world, it may not be a sign of God’s absence, but rather an indication that God is working through the suffering to redirect them to himself and give them the greatest gift that one could ever hope to have: an entrance into the relationship that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have had with each other from all eternity (2 Corinthians 4:17; Romans 8:17-18; John 17:20-26).

Maybe the idea of reexamining the paradigm on which all of your values and assumptions are based is an unfamiliar concept, but now that you are aware of it, you may be asking a question: How can you know which paradigm is true?  If a biblical paradigm, from a Reformed evangelical perspective, says that humans are corrupted with sin and in need of redemption, and if a contrasting, widely held paradigm says instead that humans are basically good and capable of self-improvement, how can you tell which paradigm is correct?  Is it simply a matter of a leap of faith or a matter of personal preference?

I believe that we can engage in reasoned dialogue to discuss the relative merits of each paradigm, and I intend to do that on this site.  If my paradigm is correct, I would expect to be able to have confidence in tools of logic such as the law of non-contradiction or the evidence of empirical data.  I recognize, of course, that my reason is tainted with sin, so I know that I cannot trust unaided reason to invariably arrive at the truth.  That realization should humble us.  But at the same time, I am not afraid to engage in reasoned dialogue, and I hope that you won’t be either.  I just want to make sure that we’re aware at the outset that we need to be prepared to reexamine our paradigms at the same time that we’re reexamining the evidence for whatever question we have about the Christian faith.  Just because God refuses to fit into our current paradigm doesn’t necessarily mean that he doesn’t exist.