Dutch Windmill, Van Til and Thoughts on Inter-disciplinary Theology and Innovations

This is a later post in the day than usual! Just got back from my vacation!

One of the amazing place we visited was a historic Dutch town in America. If you follow this blog for sometime you know I love Dutch Reformed theology and also the contribution of Dutch Americans to Christian theology and apologetics, namely Cornelius Van Til. It was a treat to see places with last names of Kuyper and other other Dutch family names around this town that often I see as last names of authors in the books of theologians and thinkers.

And one of the things I love about Dutch Neo-Calvinist Reformed thinkers such as Van Til, Kuyper and Bavinck is their observations of the inter-relationships of spheres and things, and inter-disciplinary nature of knowledge and sphere sovereignty.

One treat during my trip was seeing Dutch windmills. It totally blew my mind and also got me thinking tangent to the topic of Cornelius Van Til, inter-disciplines and innovations and appreciation for the truth of the Christian worldview.

But first about windmills!

Windmills are amazing. The thought about harvesting free wind which there are plenty in Holland to use as energy is such a innovative creativity. And it is amazing how wind power is used for many applications for many different fields. It is used for agriculture for grinding grain. Those who eat bread and pastries would appreciate that!

But there’s another application as well. During this trip I got to learn the answer to the question I always had in the back of my mind: How did the Dutch manage to reclaim so many land that was swamp or from the sea going back centuries ago before modern technology? I learned about about a particular type of windmill called the Tjasker. Here’s the wikipedia page. You can see the picture above where using wind power it pumped water from the land into a canal to reclaim the land from being taken over by water. Here’s a youtube video:

Here’s a drawing of how they work:

Impressive right?

So windmill technology is also used for the area of geography and not just making food with grinding grain (though of course making food is the domain of agriculture and that is dependent upon geography).

Seeing a working windmill up close I was struck at the incredible wood work and especially the same type of technology you would expect with ships. The amount of ropes and wood and “sails” for the windmill is amazing. I love how the technology for ships has applications for windmill. Windmill technology and sailing ship technology are similar; someone a long time ago thought about using technology from one domain to another domain. Throughout history that’s how innovation happen and even technological and scientific revolutions like how Gutenberg creatively thought about using the winepress for the printing press. I have written and reviewed books on this theme elsewhere: Review: Where Good Ideas Come from and Review: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. What blows my mind here is how often innovation presupposes the inter-relationship of different domains, as if the world is a unity. I won’t rehearse the philosophical theme of Universals and Particulars (see the second half of my VAN TILLIAN TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY: IT’S ORTHODOX STATUS AND APPLICATION TO THE ONE AND THE MANY) but its fascinating how in a Christian worldview in the West there’s a presupposition that there can be unity and diversity with the name “University.” I think people from all over the place can innovate; but sustained innovation doesn’t happen in a vaccum; and it can be boosted by one’s worldview.

Here windmill technology and naval technology also inter-related in another way: Some windmill has a third application as sawmills. These helped the Dutch to build wooden ships in an industrial scale that led them to be a sea power. With that commercial power it made them rich before the era of steel technology.

So all this thought about innovation and inter-relationship of spheres and domains got me thinking about Cornelius Van Til and theology. I think a major thing I learn from Van Til after his point about the need to be faithful to Scripture is how there’s an inter-relationship of everything in light of the unity of the Christian worldview. Of course we have to relate things properly; but still we haven’t discovered or explore or dwell on every inter-relationships of things and spheres yet; we are not all-knowing. But they are out there and there are benefits and chief among them for me is to worship God to see how amazing God’s World is and how His Creation has diversity and unity. It didn’t come about irrational chance that is at root irrational. I worship Him! But other benefits also follows: innovations, inventions and also deeper theology and deeper philosophy and new inter-disciplinary fields.

Van Til’s students in particular John Frame and Vern Poythress has run with Van Til’s theme of the inter-relationships of things and spheres with their Triperspectivalism (I personally think it should be called Tri-Dimensionalism so people don’t confuse it with relativism). See my review of Review: Theology in Three Dimensions by John Frame, All Four Volumes of John Frame’s Theology of Lordship Series and Vern Poythress latest exploration of Christian worldview to historical method in Redeeming Our Thinking about History: A God-Centered Approach” By Vern Poythress. They done a good job of showing areas we don’t particularly thikn as related as actually needing each other; see for example John Frame Quote On How Love Require the Laws of Logic.

Following Van Til’s disciples’ examples I too tried to explore and expound on the inter-relationship of things. I have written before on how Biblical Theology and Systematic Theology don’t need to clash; see my Quick Thoughts on the Inter-relationship of Biblical Theology and Systematic Theology. With a Christian worldview I think we can solve the debate in biblical archaeology between Maximalists, Minimalists in light of Presuppositional Apologetics. See also The inter-relationship of loving what is good and hating what is evil and the priority of love, Biblical Covenants and Hermenuetics Part 7: Inter-Relationship of Covenants and THE INTER-RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ESCHATOLOGY AND APOLOGETICS: IMPLICATIONS FOR APOLOGETICS AND ESCHATOLOGY.

Glory be to God with how there’s unity and diversity because of our Triune God, and for this foundation for inventions, innovations, nuances and intellectual depths! May we worship God!

Advertisement