Not just Christian philosophers but also prophets

Here is a prophetic call from a Christian philosopher, H. Evan Runner, from The Christian Philosophical Enterprise in the Light of Biblical Prophecy:

Well, why have I taken all this time to develop these thoughts, and how had I thought to relate them to us of the Association for Calvinistic Philosophy? I wanted to bring out clearly that we who are members of this Association and are Christ's men -- we are called to be prophets, we are meant to be prophets, in our thinking, critiquing, writing, publishing, in our instruction of the new generation, in the way we organize and finance (budget) our Association's efforts. That means that we are to be God-possessed, possessed by the Spirit of God, God-driven in our personal lives and work as members, and in our organized activities. Remember Professor Greydanus' words, "To possess in faith the testimony of Christ the Lord regarding Himself in such a way that it governs your inner being and very existence, all that you do and say, is to have the Spirit of prophecy. He of whom this can be said is a prophet."

We members of this Association are prophets. That means -- let us make bold to say it -- that we are not in the first place philosophers, that is, that is not the ultimate truth about our lives and work, either as individual members of this Association or in our collective work as an Association. We are prophets, and our being philosophers, or, to put it more modestly, our being engaged in philosophical work, must be understood as a moment of our lives as prophets. We may not, we cannot, actually, separate our philosophical task from our prophetic calling as men, and it is the prophetic calling which works through in our philosophizing, not vice versa.

Our task as Christian men [and women] who are engaged in philosophical work is to be witnesses to God's glory, to glorify God in His exaltedness far above all His created works, in His holiness.

Further, our task, again as Christian men [and women] engaged in philosophical work, is to be witnesses to the sovereignty and glory of God in all His works of creation, to the reconciliation of all things to God's sovereign Rule through Jesus Christ, to the coming of the Kingdom.

Again, as Christian men who are engaged in the work of philosophy, we are to point men to their lostness, their alienation in the creation, to their having lost the meaning of their lives in the world, the meaning of experience, to point them to the fact that the real nature of the
transcendental and transcendent horizons of human experience -- the continued revelational witness of God's Order -- escapes them.

Once more, in the philosophical work that we as Christians engage in, we are prophetically, thus not by our own wisdom or in our own strength, but in the power of the Holy Spirit, to bring to the light in our critical analyses the spirit of the lie, of suppression and distortion that is at work in the world, however many traces of the truth may be found, and at the same time to point to the gracious revelation of the Way, the Truth and the Life and the age-old community of the Truth and fellowship in the Way and the Life, the Church of Jesus Christ, already known in the Old Testament, out of which our analysis springs.

It is in the Church of God that the community of scholars is born and flourishes, nowhere else. Finally, as Christians engaged in our philosophical task, we are to go on the offensive to extend God's prophecy to the ends of the earth, to all the nations of the world, and, in pushing outward, always to be busy proving, that is, putting to the test, the spirits that are at work everywhere in the world, confident that He who is in us, and who by His Spirit binds us together in the bonds of love, is greater than he that is in the world, and that our Lord's intention is, as He has told us, the establishment of His supremacy over all His creation and the fulfillment of the creation design. All, however, in His own time and in His own way.