Some presentations of transformationalism seem to breathe more than a little of this over-realized eschatology. Christ is Lord over all right now and when Christ returns, all things will be reconciled, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Christ is Lord but not until then. So, as such discussions often do, this one really seems to pivot on definitions. No orthodox Christian denies transformation. We confess that God the Spirit is transforming his people. Yet, Reformed folk deny entire sanctification and our eschatology ought to follow the analogy. We should be appropriately restrained about our expectations for cultural transformation.

Carl Trueman has waded into the swamp that is the current discussion of transformationalism. In today’s post at Ref21 he clarifies his earlier post. He’s been raising some of the same questions that Darryl Hart and others have been raising for some time. Worldview is a funny thing. We all have one, they’re unavoidable but it’s not always clear that everyone is using the word in the same way at the same time.

These posts also discuss the closely related issue of transformationalism. The connection is this: It is often said that it is God’s plan to “transform” cultures or cultural enterprises and the key to this transformation is a Christian worldview. Sometimes a great deal has been claimed by advocates of a transformational ethic about what has been accomplished or, depending upon one’s eschatology, what shall be accomplished in future.

I sympathize with those who doubt the extravagant claims made by some advocates of transformationalism. In this regard reading James Bratt’s biography of Kuyper has been very illuminating. Kuyper was truly amazing but he was also truly human. He lived in a given time and place. He grew, he erred, and he sinned. He started as a Socinian, became a pietist, then became a confessional Reformed Christian, then fell into the Keswick error, repented of that (returning to a confessional view of piety) but also stopped attending Lord’s Day worship services, at least for a time, apparently out of frustration with Reformed preaching. Bratt’s discussion of this episode is quite brief and I’m not sure that I understand what happened. Instead of attending to worship, he wrote devotional articles for De Heraut.

Bratt’s biography also places Kuyper in his time and place. The Netherlands was (and remains) a very small place. The Netherlands are 16,000 square miles. Nebraska is 77,000 square miles. It is one thing to talk about a a pervasive, transforming Christian influence in a small country like the Netherlands. It is quite another to talk about transforming the United States (3.7 million square miles), in which one could fit the Netherlands about 250 times, the West, or even the world.

I’m still uncertain what it means to talk about Christian baking or Christian math orChristian hotels.  I understand what it means to say that Christians bake, do math, or operate hotels. These are good things and Christians should do them, i.e., they should fulfill their vocations to the glory of God and to the welfare of their neighbors. As I’ve argued here before it seems a little hyperbolic to append the adjective Christian to enterprises taken up by Christians that are shared by non-Christians. Are Christians, by virtue of their faith, better plumbers, bakers, or mathematicians than non-Christians? I don’t think so and it would seem to require us to reject or significantly modify Kuyper’s doctrine of Gemeene Gratie to say that they do. To be sure, I recognize that non-believers do not honor God with their lives or work but doesn’t our doctrine of providence teach us that they, despite their rebellion to God, produce things and services of temporal value? Their lives testify against them, that they are image bearers and rebels and that’s the point. Their rebellion doesn’t obliterate their status as creative image bearers.

To raise questions about the rhetoric used by some transformationalists is not to doubt that God is active in the world. To deny that is deism. No Christian may doubt that God is transforming something or someone. There is abundant testimony in Scripture that God is transforming his people into his image and that transforming work does have a real, if not always observable, effect on his people and, in turn, on other people and endeavors. One difficulty may lie with the assumption that we can know or perceive the quality or quantity of the transformation.

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