6/12/13

In Creation Regained, Albert M. Wolters contrasts dualistic worldviews within broad Christianity with what he calls a reformational worldview:
I would like to briefly identify the basic difference between a reformational worldview and other Christian worldviews. 
One way of seeing this difference is to use the basic definition of the Christian faith given by Herman Bavinck: "God the Father has reconciled His created but fallen world through the death of His Son, and renews it into a Kingdom of God by His Spirit." The reformational worldview takes all the key terms in this ecumenical trinitarian confession in a universal, all-encompassing sense. The terms "reconciled," "created," "fallen," "world," "renews," and "Kingdom of God" are held to be cosmic in scope. In principle, nothing apart from God himself falls outside the range of these foundational realities of biblical religion. 
All other Christian worldviews, by contrast, restrict the scope of each of these terms in one way or other. Each is understood to apply to only one delimited area of the universe of our experience, usually named the "religious" or "sacred" realm. Everything falling outside this delimited area is called the "worldly," or "secular," or "natural," or "profane" realm. All of these "two-realm" theories, as they are called, are variations of a basically dualistic worldview, as opposed to the integral perspective of the reformational worldview, which does not accept a distinction between sacred and secular "realms" in the cosmos. 
That is one way of explaining the distinctiveness of the reformational worldview. Another way is to say that its characteristic features are organized around the central insight that "grace restores nature"--that is, the redemption in Jesus Christ means the restoration of an original good creation. . . . In other words, redemption is re-creation. . . . It is plain how central the doctrine of creation becomes in such a view, since the whole point of salvation is then to salvage a sin-disrupted creation.