As a Protestant standing in the tradition of the magisterial Reformation, I take it as axiomatic that sola Scriptura is properly defined as “Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith.” This stands in contradistinction to solo Scriptura, which says “Scripture is the only rule of faith.” Now this means that sola Scriptura implies that there are other rules of faith, albeit, fallible ones. Here we would place such things as our Confessions of Faith, our catechisms, and the ministerial decrees of Councils.
But if sola Scriptura means that there are other rules of faith, albeit fallible ones, to what exactly does the word “faith” refer? We speak of “the faith once for all delivered” (Jude 3), and by this we surely mean such Scriptural teachings as creation, the Fall, the nature of the Godhead, the deity of Christ, the inspiration of the Scriptures, justification by faith, the Last Judgment, the recreation of the heavens and the earth, and so on. This much all catholic-orthodox Christians of whatever affiliation agree.
But it’s a curious fact about Protestantism generally that the farther we have gotten in time and in worldview from the Reformation, the more we have expanded our sense of the scope of “the faith” that is taught in the Scriptures. Whereas Calvin could say that the Scriptures teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go, many Protestants today insist – sometimes practically upon pain of anathema – that the Scriptures do, in fact, teach us how the heavens go right along with how to go to heaven. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” is logically and theologically expanded to include the space-time date when this occurred, and the genealogies of Genesis are taken in a rigidly literalistic fashion so as to provide absolute historical-chronological certainty.
Now, this is not a post about young earth creationism. That’s just an example that comes to mind as I think about the question “What are we looking for in the Scriptures?” Other examples could be raised, including a variety of theonomic cultural reconstruction schemes. What I’m basically talking about is a mentality that I call by various names: “the Encyclopedia Assumption,” “biblical maximalism,” and / or “biblicism.” This is the notion that the Scriptures say something definite (either explicitly or implicitly) about pretty much everything we could ever think about, and since they are the only infallible rule of faith, whatever they say about whatever we are thinking about must have the final word.
This view, which for the rest of this post I will call by the hybrid name “biblicist maximalism,” is an odd view to me for several reasons.
First, it assumes a notion of certainty that is more closely tied to our Enlightenment-oriented world than to the world of the Scriptures themselves. Prior to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the highest end of man was considered by pagans to live the virtuous life as determined by reason, and by Christians adapting and transforming what was good in pagan thought, to live the right life before God as determined by God. After the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the highest end of man was considered mastery and possession of nature, chiefly attained by means of rationally certain inquiries into nature’s workings and subsequent technological harnessing of those workings.
At first this worked well for Christians, as they were on the forefront of scientific advance. But as the world became increasingly secularized, faith was increasingly pushed back to the margins of society. As faith became marginalized the Enlightenment-oriented notion of certainty, of rationally mastering and controlling the external world, infiltrated the Protestant view of the Scriptures by making them, not Reason, the chief guide of rationally certain inquiries. Since Christians were losing the intellectual and cultural battles on practically every front, it made sense to retreat to something that could never be beaten in battle: the Scriptures. To adapt an old hymn a bit, “On the Bible the solid rock I stand / all other ground is sinking sand.” Notice, though, how those most opposed to the Enlightenment simply baptized Enlightenment standards of Truth. This is an “antithesis”? This is fundamentally “Hebraic” and different from what, say, Thomas Aquinas did with Aristotle and the Scriptures?
Second, biblicist maximalism seems an odd view because it only works by reducing the Scriptures to “the Bible”- that is, by wrapping them up inside leather covers and pretending that they are a self-contained, self-validating, self-interpreting whole needing no input from outside. But this too, is an Enlightenment-oriented assumption. For, prior to the rise of Modern scientific ways of thinking, there was no such thing as “the Bible.” What there was, in fact, and indeed, what there had always been, were “the Scriptures.” To save space here, for an explanation of what this means I refer the reader to Joel Garver’s “The Bible in the Middle Ages.” Here I will only say that for the millions of times every day that we glibly speak of “the Bible” (“the Bible says…”, “the Bible teaches…,” “Open your Bibles to X passage…”, etc.), just about all of our talk about “the Bible” would have been completely incomprehensible to people living as early as 500 years ago.
This nixes the notion that biblicist maximalism is the norm for the Church, because it means that nobody in the first 1500 years of the Church – not even the Apostles themselves – could have been biblicist maximalists. For much of the Apostolic era itself, the New Testament wasn’t even completed, let alone bound up between self-contained covers to make it more convenient to splay it open on a laboratory table and practice scientific hermeneutics upon it in order to gain certainty about its “original meaning” and then turn that into a Universal Particular Rule for All Time. Biblicist maximalism would have been an impossible position to hold prior to the advent of the printing press and the scientific method. This should give us pause, especially because we believe the Scriptures are addressed to everyone. We should not be so hasty in our provincial polemical needs that we implicitly deprive all pre-Modern Christians of the ability to understand the Scriptures.
Third, biblicist maximalism seems an odd view because it only works in a historical and cultural vacuum. It’s impossible for the Scriptures to function the way the biblicist maximalist wants them to, because no one – not even the biblicist maximalist himself! – can get away from the spatial and historical mediation of the Scriptures. For one thing, the very shape and form and grammar of the Scriptures are spatially-historically situated, and cannot be divorced from space and time so as to stand, like some Platonic Form, above the messy world of contingency and change from which the mind must fly upward to certainty. This is Plato, not Paul, which is pretty ironic, since biblicist maximalists love to imagine that there is a stark dichotomy between “Greek” and “Hebrew” thinking. What was that about “autonomy,” again?
Furthermore, “the Bible” – once such a thing actually exists – is a cultural artifact which has passed through innumerable and complicated spatial-historical mediations to the individual person who clutches it to his breast in order to pretend to have an unmediated, divinely-guaranteed certitude of an encyclopedic grasp of reality. The number of Protestants who are rocked to their faith’s core when a Roman Catholic apologist tells them that an early Church Council decided what books would be in the Bible is ample testimony to the intellectual shallowness of the basic assumptions of biblicist maximalism. “The Bible” can’t function the way the biblicist maximalist wants it to, because it isn’t the sort of thing the biblicist maximalist imagines it to be.
I might be able to formulate other reasons why the biblicist maximalist view seems odd to me, but I think these are enough to start with.
Let me say in closing that I do recognize a spectrum of sophistication among biblicist maximalists. Not every biblicist maximalist is a crass Jack Chick Fundamentalist. Not every biblicist maximalist would be dismayed to learn, say, that a Church Council compiled the Table of Contents in his Bible. Not every biblicist maximalist would disrespect pre-Reformation engagement with Scripture by pretending that it was basically just a lot of Hellenized hooey which the Reformation, thankfully, managed to sweep away. Not every biblicist maximalist is going to inconsistently glory in explicit denigration of Aristotle by means of implicit adulation of Kant.
Nevertheless, I think that every kind of biblicist maximalist is at some level going to have cognitive dissonance because he has replaced reason, the normal, natural tool which man’s mind uses to find truth, with one of the objects that the tool is designed to grasp. That is, he has in effect transformed the Bible into Reason, thus crippling the ability of both to lead him to Truth. While the biblicist maximalist thinks of his view as a very high view of the Scriptures, I think that ironically it is a very truncated view of the Scriptures because it limits what the Scriptures can and do say to “answers” about the merely provincial concerns of the day.
To go back to my earlier example, the Very Great and Pressing Need that many Protestants today feel to answer “evolutionism” will be a historical curiosity to believers living 500 years from now. They will wonder why so much energy was expended on so trivial an issue, when the universal relevance of the Scriptures remained untouched by the decline of the frame of mind, on both sides, that gave rise to the creation controversy.
Granting that whatever the Bible says about any subject is true, is the Bible an encyclopedia that explicitly or implicitly addresses every question we might have? As a classical, magisterial Protestant, I find it necessary to ask the question “What Are We Looking for in the Scriptures?” And perhaps more importantly, why are we looking for that in them?
Gabe,
I would say that hammering out a positive statement is precisely the need of the day, and that the only point of the essay was to point that out. Our understanding of Scripture’s purpose and function has been whacked out by centuries of bigoted anti-Romanism (among the results of which are that we instantly break out into hives at the mere sight of anything that we think “looks like” something Rome might say), failed attempts to deal positively with the physical sciences, and, most recently, a century or so of nutbrained, reactionary Fundamentalism.
I would say that at a bare minimum the Scriptures are for showing us all things necessary for salvation – whatever those things are. They tell us about living a godly life, how to avoid apostasy, and what the nature and goal of the Church are. Beyond that, I don’t pretend to have nice neat little sets of definitive, positive answers. That’s why I need other people’s insights. But basically, I don’t suppose that the Scriptures are all that concerned to tell us about things we can figure out on our own by using the created gifts God has given us.
Gabe,
I certainly don’t reduce the Scriptures to “things which pertain to a person’s personal relationship with God.” I agree that the Scriptures are about the redemption of the creation. But are they meant to tell us how old the earth is? Are they meant to tell us how best to arrange a political order? Do they tell us whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy is the best constitution? Do they tell us whether the Trojan War really happened or whether Atlantis really existed? Do they say anything about the truth value of F=ma or the possibly changing values of the speed of light across different inertial reference frames? What does any of that have to do with redeeming creation?
Now I would say that there are things not related to a person’s personal relationship with God (as you put it) that Scripture does give us relevant general principles, for instance, about economic justice and obedience to the governing authorities and how to think about war and peace and the sorts of vocations that are proper for a Christian to pursue. For that matter, as generations of believing archaeologists and cultural anthropologists have shown, it is possible to get quite a bit of true historical data from the Scriptures.
But do the Scriptures give us some sort of Universal Pattern for liturgy or ecclesiastical government in a world of changing cultures, each of which has its own peculiar problems which the Gospel must address? Our Roman brothers would say Yes to the ecclesiastical government question, but to my mind it’s a rather huge leap from “God prepared the world for the Gospel by using the Roman Empire” to “And God sanctified the cultural form of the Roman Empire, and requires all Christians everywhere and at all times to submit to Rome.” Do the Scriptures say anything definite about an issue like that? Are they meant to say anything definite about an issue like that? Closer to Reformed circles, were the Scriptures given so that Theonomist Reconstructionists could insist that all nations get their civil law from Old Testament Israel’s case law?
I guess I don’t understand what you want in terms of a “positive answer.” What sorts of things would you see as falling under “redeeming the creation,” about which Scripture has something definite to tell us?
What are the Scriptures?
Wow. Ask something easy next time.
I’m going to restate something I said on RefCath some time ago which passed without commentary. The Scriptures are the true interior of every man. I tend to think of the contents of Scripture as something akin to a living organism that interacts with a human nervous system, a social web of relationships, or even the intricate interdependencies of an Empire.
For example – am I the only one who believes that a person who interprets the last two verses of Psalm 137 to indicate that God is OK with smashing small infants against a rock reveals more about the state of their interior than it does about the actual content of the Psalm? Especially when this interpretation hardens into dogma and becomes the accepted interpretation of a clan, an ethne’ or a nation. Similiter for a group who believe that this same Psalm speaks metaphorically in instructing the faithful to be ruthless in dealing with sinful motions of the heart as quickly as they emerge.
Now, I have to admit that that statement sounds pretty Emergent and pantheistic, even to me, but I think it obtains. The modernist “scientific” viewpoint is a creation of the Scriptures reacting upon the abandoned Western provinces of the Roman Empire, particularly after the schism of the churches hindered both West and East by depriving both of the instrument by which the Scriptures are apprehended – the Undivided Church (Eph. 4:25).
Now, true, I am an Orthodox convert, and I believe ex corde that the Orthodox Churches in their conciliarity compose the one Undivided church of apostolic times. But I am no triumphalist. I do not believe that the Eastern churches can digest the Western experience apart from the restoration of the West, and for that it may be necessary for the West to remain heterodox for a while even though I, coward that I am, had to jump ship.
I agree that the Bible doesn’t tell us “everything” about these sorts of things.
However, I do believe that the Bible tells us *some* things about these sorts of things, and where the Bible speaks, we are required to listen.
The Bible may not give Bishop Ussher’s date of October, 4004 B.C., for the creation of the earth. But it does give us clearly dileneated geneaologies of real human beings that actually existed. And while a person might be able to “tweak” the number this way or that, I don’t think anyone can justify “tweaking” 2 and a half million years of human evolution into those genealogies. The first humans were Adam and Eve, and they lived on Earth about 6,000 years go, give or take a few years.
The Bible may (or may not) tell us whether to have a monarchy, aristocracy, etc. But it does tell us that the Scriptures are supposed to be the highest documents in the land, and that all nations are judged, based on whether they are obedient to the Scriptures. Even while the OT was being written, it wasn’t written merely for Israel. God also judged the surrounding nations according to the same moral laws and principles. If you have a monarchy, then the king had better consult the Bible for all his law-making and law-enforcement. If you have an aristocracy, the same goes. If you have a democracy, then the President, Congress, and Supreme Court had better make the Scriptures the first document they consult in any case. Anything less, and the nation is asking for judgment.
The Scriptures may say nothing specifically about “F=MA” or the speed of light. But the Scriptures do say that Jesus upholds ALL things by the word of His power. That includes the “laws of physics”, and the properties of light. Jesus is the one who created those things, and the one who keeps those things running.
The Scriptures may say nothing about the battle of Troy, or the current boundaries of Greece. But the Bible does say that God sovereignly chooses the boundaries of all nations, and all peoples.
So, when you ask, “Do the Scriptures speak to every subject?” I guess I would have to answer, “That depends.” The Scriptures certainly DO speak to every subject, but they do not provide 100% of all data and information about every subject.
Agreed?
I don’t have any time to enter into this discussion right now, but another relevant topic here would be the perspicuity of Scripture. Is Scripture “clear”? If so, how much of it is clear? All? Most? Some? If not all, what exactly are the “clear” points? And what exactly do we mean by “clarity,” anyway?
You guys talk. I’ll be back in a day or two.
;-)
The Scriptures are perfectly clear. I am muddy.
But are they meant to tell us how old the earth is? Are they meant to tell us how best to arrange a political order? Do they tell us whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy is the best constitution?
Oh Timbo. Let me offer some fundie Kool-aid here.
The Bible does effectively tells us how old the earth is, at least post-light (which is post-first life) earth. There are genealogies and there are chronologies. The chronologies have numbers. They are specific. To brush them aside as “not the point” assumes that you know the point, an assumption that I rarely grant anyone.
The Bible also gives us certain political principles. It shows us when tribalism is effective, when monarchy is effective, and when empire is effective. I’m not so into democracy.
It isn’t EASY though. That’s the problem with America’s Christian Right. Not just anybody ought to try to come up with these formulas.
The Bible is easy when it comes to salvation. If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.
It isn’t easy to come to the other conclusions, but that fact alone doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Wisdom is the goal. This takes generations.
Ditto to Wedgie. Especially the bits about democracy, and the age of the earth.
When’s Andrew Matthews gonna post about theocracy?
After all, isn’t that what Evangelical Catholicity pays him for?
[...] Enloe On the O vs. the A. Papist. Our Own David Bennett the [...]
I’m all for theocracy. Amen! I’d love to hear someone post about it . . .
Brethren,
This isn’t an easy topic. But it’s worth noting that Tim’s exposition here is in essential points the same as that of Calvin, and of Hooker in Book I of the Lawes, in his discussion of the sufficiency of Scripture. I don’t take it that Tim is denying Steven’s point that Scripture is the school and center of wisdom, and that wisdom is integral and comprehensive. But I don’t think that one can wave away Tim’s point by saying that no one really holds the kind of position he’s arguing against, or that only a handful of Clarkians do: many of Van Til’s less gifted intrepreters do also, in the Reformed world; and in the broader evangelical world too one finds this sort of thing. Conservative Lutherans might be very strict about chronology, but given their view of Law and Gospel, they of course do not tend at all toward a sort of regulative principle of all knowledge.
peace
Peter
Peter, that’s almost exactly what I was going to say: I’m less concerned to pin labels on the position I’m describing (it crosses school boundaries within conservative Protestantism quite easily) than to engage the position critically and see if any discussion about alternatives can emerge. I don’t care if it’s Clarkian or Van Tilian or Fundamentalism or any other -ian or -ism. Fundamentally it’s just a bad assumption about Scripture, one which would not be recognized as reasonable by most Christians before the scientific revolution and the rather unfortuntate ghetto-izing reactions to it that have occurred in conservative circles over the last 100 years or so. Most disturbingly to me, it guts the ability of Christians to profitably apply the Scriptures to the real world of their experience.
Steven, I’m not sure what you mean by “offering Fundie Kool Aid.” I mean, I understand the reference to unthinking dupes, but I wrote my post with what I thought was a sufficient amount of care to avoid labeling anyone in particular an unthinking dupe. Although since you bring it up, the commonplace view of Fundamentalists as irrational Kool-Aid drinkers didn’t come about for just no reason at all.
Joseph, to the conclusion of your #6, yes, agreed. But you don’t have to look very far within Protestantism to find people who hold any of several varieties of the basic position I outlined. To me, the key point of my exposition is the simplistic radicalization that has overwhelmed interpretation of sola Scriptura since the Reformation. It seems that the farther we as Protestants got from the initial, catholic humanism-colored faithful rationality of the Reformers, the less resources we had to deal with the problems with which the Modern world presented us. Consequently, we have become increasingly simplistic regarding what we think the Scriptures are for and what they tell us, and increasingly arrogant about our own interpretive abilities relative to them.
It’s something of a bitter irony for those of us who wish to be more catholic in our Protestantism that we ourselves are crippled each and every day in a hundred ways in our own theology by this radically uncatholic, sectarian, reductionistic radicalization of a great Reformation slogan. For us as Modern Protestants, the Bible has taken the place of reason, and the result has been that, locked up inside our own heads, we have increasingly marginalized ourselves, created our own bogeymen, and made it virtually impossible to actually DO what we want to do: be catholic Protestants. It’s only by a happy inconsistency that anybody holding this view ever does anything significant culturally.
You know, this post is really about fidelity to the Reformation vision. Was that vision a form of radicalism, willing to toss antiquity out on its ear and start all over again from a “pure” blueprint? Or was it a conservative thing, concerned just with purging some entrenched abuses and trying to get back to a healthy and traditional way of doing things? Is biblicist maximalism a legitimate outgrowth of the Reformation vision, or a blight upon it that we’ve adopted to our own very great peril?
Hmmm! My interest was aroused when Tim (in comment #4) said:
“Are [the Scriptures] meant to tell us how best to arrange a political order? Do they tell us whether monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy is the best constitution? Do they tell us whether the Trojan War really happened or whether Atlantis really existed? Do they say anything about the truth value of F=ma or the possibly changing values of the speed of light across different inertial reference frames? What does any of that have to do with redeeming creation?”
Over at De Regno I’ve debated this question a bit with Darryl Hart and a W2K clone who seems to believe everything that comes out of Michael Horton’s mouth.
Their argument seems to be that since the Bible isn’t all that concerned with “Christian” ways of doing plumbing then it is equally useless in matters of politics. One might as well argue that because we now have the technological capability to perform brain surgery that the Bible is inapplicable to bio-ethical questions.
Apparently, for some, politics, which is systematic inquiry devoted to questions of authority, order, and the common good, seems far removed from the concerns of biblical revelation.
On the contrary, I suggest these are precisely the kinds of questions Scripture is concerned with! I suggest that anyone who misses this obvious fact demonstrates superficial aquaintance with the content of Scripture and betrays implicit acceptance of pragmatic political philosophy, i.e., that social forms may be arbitrarily modified or dispensed with.
Of course Tim’s point is not to circumscribe biblical ethics to a sphere of cultural irrelevance, but to issue a timely warning about the distortions of that kind of “biblical maximalism” that tends to usurp the legitimate function of tradition and/or reason.
Far be it from me to minimize the roles of tradition and reason, but these good and necessary things were never meant to function apart from the light of special revelation. Since y’all brought up the ultimate fundamentalist theologian, Gordon Clark once helpfully observed that there never was a time when natural revelation was issued without the accompaniment of special revelation. Along with the moral law inscribed on his conscience, Adam also received propositional intruction from his Heavenly Father concerning his moral and cultural responsibilities.
The Bible may not be a technical manual for every sort of practical task the cultural mandate necessitates, but it has a great deal to say about how society should be ordered for the fulfillment of mankind’s collective responsibility, i.e., to glorify God. And guess what? The Bible doesn’t prescribe a secular arrangement for the peaceful coexistence of the antithetical eschatological cities.
What does the Bible prescribe? Or, better, what is the proper application of scriptural revelation to the realm of politics? To put it simply, Scripture is the authoritative record of the founding and development of humankind’s primary social institutions: family, church and state. Scripture has much to say about their purposes and ideal conditions. Scripture may have nothing to say about Troy and Atlantis, but it does tell us of Eden, the conditions of primordial human life, Enoch, the first city, Ararat, the institution of the Lex Talionis, Babel, Egypt, Israel, Babylon, and the Heavenly Jerusalem.
The Holy Scriptures are more than mere records of God’s salvific acts in history. They are universally binding legal documents that testify to the everlasting covenant. These covenant documents may be entrusted to the Church, and the covenant may have been made with God’s elect, but all men are obligated to submit to God’s Lordship instantiated in Messiah Jesus’ reign. This submission is required to take concrete form in personal and corporate acts of confession and obedience.
There may not be exact parity between particular old covenant and new covenant laws, for after all, there has been a change in administration. But we must take care to hold political views that account for the covenant’s universal validity. Christ is King in more than name only, and it is only by his leave that the potentates of earth reign.
I would also suggest that our view of political authority should recognize the civil minister’s function as covenant representative. In other words, we should seek the political structure that best images God’s authority.
Basically, I’m arguing that Scripture is the seminal political document for all time. It is there we find the divinely sanctioned account of the origin, meaning and purpose of man’s social life.
What does all this have to do with redemption? Quite simply, man does his duty and waits for God to test his work. The only work that will last is that which is inspired and sustained by faith in Jesus Christ. Not only man’s personal life, but his collective life also should aspire to the divine approbation at the Last Day.
Well, I think I’ve said enough for now.
In response to Tim’s last question (#21), I’d say the Reformation was a mixed bag. To the degree the Reformers held up Christ as our only hope of salvation & encouraged biblical literacy and the Bible’s authority, they are to be commended. But there is a degree to which they encouraged private judgment and undermined (intentionally or not) the sacral foundation and bonds of the social order. This real fault must repudiated and exorcized from the spirit of Protestantism.
Andrew,
Thanks for those points. I’d be interested to see a separate post laying out some particulars of that foundation you’ve laid in comment #22 sometime in the future.
Regarding your last comments (#23), I’m not so sure. Yes, the Reformers encouraged people to read Scripture, to understand what was being said to them, etc. But it is hard for me to see how encouraging these things necessarily includes the undermining of “the sacral bonds of the social order.” Luther encouraged the putting down of social revolutionaries by force. Geneva during Calvin’s influence could hardly be called a disordered society. Zwingli’s refusal to act in opposition to the civil magistrate is well documented. When I read what you say, I have a hard time seeing you as doing anything other than commiting the age old fault of conflating the magisterial and radical Reformations.
Is the only way to uphold “the sacral bonds of the social order” to keep the masses in complete subversion, to demand that they remain illiterate, not read the Bible, not understand what is going on when they go to church? I know your answer to these questions will be, “No.” But then, you should have little problem with the project of the Reformers. It could be argued that others appropriated their ideas in a way that undermined the social order. But I would suggest that this was a MISappropriation. The Reformers continually labored to strike a balance between rejection of spiritual tyranny on the one hand, and repudiation of spiritual anarchy on the other. And they did not seek to subvert the proper order of the state, nor (at least in my estimation) can they be rightly interpreted as encouraging others to do so.
I don’t think the Scriptures are irrelevant or inapplicable to the various issues that have been highlighted. But at the same time I don’t think the Scriptures are blueprints for those issues. Does that make my point any clearer?
By the way, Andrew, what did Clark mean when he said, as you put it, “there never was a time when natural revelation was issued without the accompaniment of special revelation”? I haven’t read ten pages of Clark, so I’m genuinely curious.
Well, while the Bible does give us general guidance about justice in the leaders of the State and the duties of citizens toward the State, it doesn’t give us a divinely-approved constitution for the State.
Yeah, church polity is a big one too. Although I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, I admit the immediate impulse for my post here was seeing Andrew Sandlin describe the New Testament as providing a “pattern” for the church in contradistinction to “accidents of history” that have accreted themselves to the Church over the millennia.
I don’t know all the ins and outs of Sandlin’s view, but the basic idea strikes me as a bad way to think about the Scriptures because it effectively “freezes” human development at one particular, and quite idealized, point in time, as if having done something in way X at time Y, God is setting down an ontologically inviolable rule for all time. On the one hand it seems obvious that a person couldn’t say that since the OT order has been superseded by the NT order. But then, what exactly is the NT order? How comprehensive is it? Does it leave anything to what the WCF calls “the light of nature”? Are “historical accidents” necessarily something we should try to eliminate, and if so, how could we go about doing that without being hopelessly anachronistic in terms of the “pure” pattern we seek to replace the accidents with?
Interestingly, Sandlin deployed his concept of NT pattern against the Catholic pattern of ecclesiologically imitating the Roman Empire. But Sandlin’s view, if I understood what he was saying at that time, partakes of the same thing he identifies as a problem in the Catholic view: the reification of a specific historical form. I see no reason in the world why the form of the Church, going out to ALL NATIONS, must imitate the sociocultural-historical circumstances of the Apostolic Age.
The virtue of saying that is a virtue that only exists in the Protestant mind – or rather, a certain type of Protestant mind, the “biblicist maximalist” one, which seeks absolute certainty on every issue imaginable by reference to specific items in the Scriptures. A mind not constrained by such an assumption isn’t going to inherently have problems with appealing to other sources of information for forming judgments.
Descriptive or prescriptive is a good way to put it. I’d say the prohibition of homosexuality is prescriptive because of the nature of creation – “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” But I’m not sure the book of Acts, which is a historical document, should be prescriptive for polity.
Not to mention that the NT data on church polity is pretty scant and, depending on the interpreter, offers a model ranging from congregationalist, through several varieties of presbyterian, to episcopal and papal.
And, to my mind, reading the NT data against the backdrop of the OT, 2nd Temple Judaisms, and Hellenism only makes the available data more complex and unclear – not less so.
I’m inclined to agree with an Anglican friend of mine who thinks that if God really cared so much about the details of church polity, he would have given us a lot better information. Of course, as an Anglican, he believes church history gives us a strong preference for some version of episcopacy.
I also find it interesting that most conceptions touted in our day as “the church of the New Testament” smell a lot like a spiritualized version of American democracy and modern egalitarianism. I would venture that whenever you hear someone say something like, “We’ve got to get back to the church of the New Testament and do things this way: __________”, it’s a pretty safe bet that something closely resembling their own preconcocted understanding of societal propriety is bound to follow.
This is not to decry all attempts to understand the New Testament data concerning polity, of course; just to say that we should not be overly confident or dogmatic with regard to our own opinions on the matter.
In regard to church polity . . .
Some of you have probably already seen this, but just in case you haven’t . . .
Ray Sutton wrote a little book, “Captains and Courts”, in which he argues that the Episcopalian form of Church government is not only permitted, but is required by Scripture.
The complete book is available here:
http://www.biblelighthouse.com/govt/captains_and_courts.htm
Several posts above suggest that we should not get overly dogmatic about the fine details of church polity, and I agree. But I do have to admit that Sutton’s book impressed me. It convinced me that Episcopalian Church government is much better grounded in the Scriptures than I once believed.
Well, I’ve been out of the loop a while, but I’ll be able to catch up soon with the great discussions here at EC.
Jonathan, RE: 24, I agree with you that the Reformers tried to strike a balance between spiritual tyranny and spiritual anarchy, and attempted a conservative reformation of the Church. Such was their intent.
However, I draw a distinction between good intentions and the historical outworking of theological tendency. By opposing faith to ex opere operato (which are not mutually exclusive), the Reformers succeeded in prying apart sign and referent in the popular imagination. Covenantal objectivity was ambiguated and the sacral foundation of monarchical authority was undermined. It is in this way that the Reformation prepared the way for the Revolution.
Tim, I wanted to find the right quotation from Clark, so sorry to take so long to get back to you.
To give you a little context, my understanding is that, originally, Clark merely held to the view that special revelation was a necessary condition of knowledge. Furthermore, he always held to a rationalist epistemology, and disparaged the possibility of empirical knowledge. Consistent with this orientation, Clark argued against the validity of the Aristotelian-Thomistic proofs for God’s existence, but I think it can be shown he had a soft spot for Anselm’s ontological “proof.”
Later, his views radicalized to the point that he denied human beings could know any proposition that hadn’t been deduced from Scripture. For Clark, if a proposition couldn’t be known with absolute certainty, it had to be classed as mere opinion.
Well, here’s the man himself:
“The beclouding effects of sin upon the mind as it tries to discover God and salvation in nature may best be seen in the divergent results obtained among the pagan religions. The ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and Romans looked on the same nature that is seen by the modern Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist. But the messages they purport to receive are considerably different. This, which is so evident when these far away religions are mentioned, holds true also within Western civilization. What the humanist and logical positivist see in nature is entirely different from what the orthodox Christian believes about nature. Even if the humanist professes to discover in experience certain moral ideas and spiritual values that are at least superficially similar to those of the Bible, it can well be supposed that he actually learned them from his Christian heritage and not from an independent study of nature and man. The kindly atmosphere of humanitarianism is notably absent from societies to which the Christian message has not been taken.
“The existence of divergent conceptions of God, of moral ideals, and above all of schemes of salvation show the power of sin in the mind of man; but they also show the inadequacy of general revelation. It is not because of sin alone that man fails to get God’s message. The truth is that nature has less of a message than some people, particularly some Christian people, think.
“The planets above and the plants below show some of the wisdom and power of God; that is to say, they show it to those who already believe that God has created them. Even to a devout Christian, however, the universe does not show the full power and wisdom of God, for God has not exhausted himself in his creation. No doubt the stellar systems display a vast and unimaginable power, yet a greater number of stars with more complicated motions is conceivable. Therefore, omnipotence is not a necessary conclusion from the stars.
“Neither is righteousness. The moral attributes that the Bible ascribes to God are still less deducible from from an observation of nature. Indeed, the problem of evil–physical calamities like earthquakes and tragedies caused by wicked men–has led some philosophers to deny God altogether or to posit a finite god. John Stuart Mill thought that the universe tended imperfectly toward the production of good; modern humanists are more likely to say that the universe is neutral with repect to the hopes and aspirations of man; while Bertrand Russell and Joseph Wood Krutch counsel bravery in the face of inevitable defeat. These various opinions, though partly due to human sinfulness, depend as much, I believe, on the inadequacy of general revelation in itself. God’s message in the heavens is simply not extensive enough to cover these questions.
“Again, the Hebrew-Christian view that “the Heavens declare the glory of God” does not, in my opinion, mean that the existence of God can formally be deduced from an empirical examination of the universe. If on some other grounds we believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, we can see that the heavens declare his glory; but this is not to say that a person who did not believe in God could demonstrate his existence from nature…
“Now, finally, the inadequacy of general revelation is most obvious in the case of ideals or ethical norms. And this inadequacy is not solely the result of sin, but it is an inherent inadequacy. The exposure of infants in Greece, temple prostitution in Babylonia, human sacrifice in Canaan and elsewhere, were not practices which those societies condemned; they had full sanction. These were their norms, these were their moral ideals. Similarly, contemporary humanism, though some of its values are superficially similar to Christian precepts, diverges more and more from the biblical identification of right and wrong. Jesus is no longer regarded as sinless, but is accused of minimizing the values of scientific intelligence, of holding inferior sociological views on labor and property, and even of insisting on too rigid a sexual standard.
“If now, someone wishes to argue that this ethical divergence does not indicate the inadequacy of general revelation, but merely the darkness of the sinful mind, the clinching reply, for a Christian, is that God spoke to Adam before the fall and gave him commands that he could not have otherwise known.
“When Adam was creted and placed in the Garden of Eden, he did not know what to do. Nor would a study of the Garden have led to any necessary conclusion. His duty was imposed on him by a special divine revelation. God told him to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue nature, to make use of the animals, to eat of the fruit of the trees, with one fateful exception. Thus moral norms, commands and prohibtions were established by a special and not a general revelation. Only so could man know God’s requirements, and only so later could he learn the plan of salvation”
Gordon H. Clark, “Special Divine Revelation as Rational,” Revelation and the Bible, Carl F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958).
Not that anyone’s interested in my opinion on this subject, but my view is that human beings possess innate knowledge (true propositions) of God and their duties to him, and that this knowledge is triggered by the experience of empirical phenomena (e.g., the glories of creation). This rudimentary knowledge is incomplete, however, without the supplement of special revelation. I agree with Clark that without the transmission of special revelation through tradition, the knowledge of God and his ways soon fades from human consciousness.
Andrew,
Thanks for looking that up. I’m curious: how would you say Clark’s views differ from Van Til’s on this point, if at all? I don’t have my Van Til books where I can get to them, so I can’t look it up myself.
To be honest, Tim, I’m not familiar enough with Van Til to say what he thought of the status of general revelation apart from special revelation. Certainly, he made statements to the effect that the unregenerate mind “knew nothing at all,” in the sense that the autonomous world-view system was false.
Clark held that the unregenerate could and did know true things, with which I doubt Van Til would have disagreed.
The main difference between the two was whether man can know what God knows, whether at any point our knowledge and God’s intersect.
For Clark, God and man can know the same propositions, while for Van Til, man only knows truth that is analogical to God’s Truth. Clark charged that this meant that man can’t know truth at all. OTOH, Van Til charged Clark with blurring the Creator/creature distinction and denying divine incomprehensibility.
My view is that in this controversy not enough attention was paid to the fact that there is a difference between true propositions and the total system of God’s Truth (all true propositions and their logical relations). We can ascribe to man’s knowledge that he can know some true things and some of their logical relations without ascribing omnipotence to man, i.e., man doesn’t make something true just by thinking it, as God does. Clark never claimed that man knows as God knows, only that he knows some of what God knows. Clark would say that there is a quantitative, not qualitative, difference between God’s knowledge and man’s quite apart from considerations as to the modes of their knowing.
If there is a difference between God and the contents of his knowledge, it seems possible that human beings can apprehend (as different from grasping comprehensively) some propositions of the latter without having a direct apprehension of the divine essence. Perhaps the Eastern distinction of energies/essence can be helpful if applied here. Both Clark and Van Til seem to have confused divine knowledge with divinity itself.
Nah. Archetype/Echtype dude.
God has both, and we only have the echtype. That would have done the trick.
Sure, Steven, God has the totality of truth (archetypal knowledge), and we have a portion of it (ectypal), and God knows the extent of the knowledge we possess/are capable of. But this has to do with the architectural structure of divine knowledge in comparison to human knowledge, not with the truth value of individual propositions, i.e., a philosophical question Clark thought was important to insist upon.
So, Steven, is God’s archetypal knowledge equivalent to the divine essence? And if so, doesn’t this make creation necessary?
Well, I’d even say that ectypal is created knowledge, not just “a portion” of the archetypal knowledge. There is a difference in quality, though there is a true analogy. Ectypal knowledge is still “real” and “true.”
Now I would affirm that God’s archetypal knowledge is equivalent (depending of course on what we mean by this) to the divine essence. The doctrine of divine simplicity would require this, and I do not buy the 20th cent. fad of tossing that doctrine out.
So, “doesn’t it make creation necessary?”
In one sense yes, and in one sense no. Not a super emboldening answer, I know.
I believe the best I can do is say that God is always completely free from all external forces. I would not say that He is free from His own nature, however, lest I turn him into some sort of arbitrary and changing being.
However it works out that God “decided to create,” it is then that creation itself became necessary.
I’m aware of the popularity of this dilemma right now, but I think it is an improper question along the same lines of “Can God heat a burrito so hot that He himself cannot eat it” (Homer J. Simpson). It finds a more sophisticated form, to be sure, but it proposes basically the same problem- Freeing God from Himself.
Perhaps Peter Escalante can give you a better philosophical response, as I really don’t intent this to be smug. It is just that I simply do not know all of the appropriate terms and maneuvers that are traditionally available. I have read Muller’s Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics and found his work on simplicity very good. I also recognize simplicity’s role in the dogmatic thought of folks as disparate as Augustine, John of Damascus, and Herman Bavinck. Lewis Ayres is also quite persuasive in his Nicaea and Its Legacy that divine simplicity is one of the core foundations of Nicene orthodoxy.
I’m keeping it for now, and thus God’s archetypal knowledge is God’s essence.
Great response, Steven. I’d love to hear Peter’s thoughts on the subject.
At present, my position on the matter is:
1) creation isn’t necessary;
2) the divine essence is simple;
3) knowledge concerning creation is complex.
For these indubitable reasons, I don’t see how it can reasonably be maintained that such knowledge can be equated with the divine essence.
The reason why the “hot burrito” question is improper is because it poses a logical contradiction: eating a burrito too hot to eat. I’m not attempting to “free God from himself,” rather, I’m affirming that God is bound by the law of non-contradiction, actually, that the law is God thinking.
Who is actually trying to save God from himself? God is constrained by his own nature. The doctrine of divine omnipotence must be qualified by the given that logical impossibilities are impossible even for God.
I do share with Clark the concern that we not throw out rationality when speaking about God (and I fully admit that discursive rationality has its limits).
Well, I’m willing to be schooled here, so let me know where you think I might be in error.
I dunno; I guess my problem in this whole thread, the problem I highlighted in the post to begin with, is this extreme pessimism some Protestants (usually Reformed) have about man’s natural knowledge. It’s like a quasi-Manichaean view of the Fall has infilitrated the idea of Total Depravity, so that nothing man does outside of regeneration is worthwhile or good, but all of it is a disgusting lump of utter evil – so let’s just stick with what God has said, in the Bible, and we’ll be so much better off.
But this seems to end up betraying one of its own central ideas: the noetic effects of the Fall. Apparently man’s noetic processes are only worthless if he’s thinking outside of the Bible. A regenerate man (all glory to God Alone, of course, for the regenerate status) might as well be back in Eden, hearing God perfectly and with no distortion. To borrow from Jim Jordan’s recent remarks in the De Regno Christi discussion on the Federal Vision and from things he’s said elsewhere, just sit in your study for twenty years studying the Bible’s own symbolic language of BLOOD and GUTS and HAIR, and study with literalistic precision the phenomena of biblical chronology, and you’ll have near-perfect insight into perfect Truth. Otherwise, you can’t know anything of consequence, because everything else is satanic and deceptive and “Greek,” but we want to be “Hebraic.”
I am sorry, but this is just making the Bible do more work than it was meant to do. In the name of radicalized anti-Enlightenment polemics it seems to swallow central epistemological features of the Enlightenment hook, line, and sinker. Kantian idealism transposed into biblical hermeneutics forces the Bible – rather, it’s so-called “plain meaning” – to take the place of logic itself, and the result is a solipsistic “system of truth” that, when viewed in light of the history of redemption as it has played out thusfar, is really nothing more than preaching to the Reformed choir. But, we’ll never cease to be reminded by advocates of this view of how sinful and autonomous it is to think Aristotle had anything good to say…..
Friends,
I’m on the road and haven’t the time to write much here. But in brief, the traditional view is that a) God is One, which is philosophically explicated as the doctrine that God is simple; the divine simplicity is common doctrine, against modern process views and so forth; b) creation is absolutely not necessary, though God’s Word, the principle of creation, is necessary; and c) God’s knowledge is not different from Himself, and is therefore simple.
Some Eastern Orthodox will quibble with the implications of the last assertion, since these tend to misunderstand the Western articulations of simplicity. I think close consideration will reveal these quibbles to be unfounded, but some important matters are highlighted by the dispute- especially with regard to early patristic teachings on the Word as the visibility, as it were, of God, and as the pattern of creation.
On the question of knowledge of God, I have little good to say about the writings of Gordon Clark, and thus, will say only that about them. The best recent treatment of the topic I know of is that of Gregory Rocca, “Speaking the Incomprehensible God.” It isn’t perfect, of course, but it is very good. Reformed readers should be aware that the sort of discourse Rocca employs was comfortable second nature to the early Reformed, and that one isn’t at all departing from the parameters of Reformed thought by learning from it.
peace
Peter
Who is actually trying to save God from himself? God is constrained by his own nature. The doctrine of divine omnipotence must be qualified by the given that logical impossibilities are impossible even for God.
Barth comes to mind, as well as the whole anti-”being” work that’s come out of postmodern philosophy.
I take your point that logical contradiction is not the same thing (though Prof. Simpson’s dilemma is actually about “heating” a burrito too hot, not eating it).
The “simplicity entails loss of freedom” argument basically says that if God is not free to do other than His nature (the way He is), then He is not free. The charge goes that If God willed to create, then therefore He “had to” create. Thus He isn’t free to not create because He was eternally willing to do so, and He has to do what He wills. That’s how I’ve heard the argument made.
But creation is “necessary” only insofar as God’s free willing to create makes it necessary. It is not necessary on its own.
So the dilemma, in my opinion, seems to be all wrong. God is not less free if He is bound to His Will.
Tim, I’m in total sympathy with your criticism of modern biblicism. Reason and tradition have their necessary roles as well. Also, it seems plain to me that the Fathers and even the biblical writers themselves utilized elements of Greek thought in their writings. Both Plato and Aristotle as well as many lesser figures contributed greatly to the advance of human knowledge.
However, the Greeks tended to produce abstract theories about the nature of reality that biblical revelation fills with more specific content. So, I would insist that the holy scriptures complete and perfect our natural knowledge (at least in metaphysical, ethical, and political matters).
The natural is not an end in itself, but in fact all of creation was intended to represent and convey information about spiritual realities. The tradition of faith and its most precious possession, the Holy Scripture, is the key (though not the textbook) to unlocking the mysteries of the universe.
And so, I value much of what Jim Jordan has to say about biblical symbolism with the caveat that his interpretations must be submitted to the judgment of the entire Church. What is good can be kept; what is bad should be discarded.
To borrow from Jim Jordan’s recent remarks in the De Regno Christi discussion on the Federal Vision and from things he’s said elsewhere, just sit in your study for twenty years studying the Bible’s own symbolic language of BLOOD and GUTS and HAIR, and study with literalistic precision the phenomena of biblical chronology, and you’ll have near-perfect insight into perfect Truth. Otherwise, you can’t know anything of consequence, because everything else is satanic and deceptive and “Greek,” but we want to be “Hebraic.”
Eh, I think you just have to understand Jim (not exactly possible, I know). He doesn’t deny natural revelation or common grace. He just thinks the Bible is the best of the best, and wonders why in the world we should be learning extra-biblical stuff when we don’t know the Old Testament.
Once we learn the book of Leviticus, all of the Psalms, and the divine symphony found in the text, then we can move on and do lots of good with other stuff. Why put the cart before the horse?
Why put the cart before the horse?
Because the Bible isn’t the horse?
I should clarify that last, as it was meant as a purely rhetorical response to a purely rhetorical statement. Part of the problem here is precisely the dichotomizing tendency in this variety of Reformed thought: EITHER you go with the Bible OR you go with corrupted natural revelation. EITHER you are regenerate and Really Know stuff OR you are autonomous and Don’t Really Know stuff. EITHER you are Greek OR you are Hebraic. And so forth.
This is the problem, and it alludes to the “quasi-Manichaean” point I made above. Creation in its fallen state is useless for telling us any truth. It might as well be wholly evil, just like us. We need special revelation if we are to Really Know anything at all. This is kind of an Augustinian divine illuminationist theory on steroids. Until we are regenerated, there’s no point in grasping after truth, because all we can do is twist and distort. After we are regenerated, well, that whole noetic problem of sin pulls a surprising vanishing act – whereas BEFORE all we had was uncertain opinions of men, NOW we have certainty of Truth. Because the Bible says something about everything, we have no need of looking anywhere else but the Bible for answers to any question we might come up with.
Again, EITHER / OR. If I didn’t know better, I’d think there was something, uh, Greek going on with that kind of thinking. Classical Christian thought understood that knowing truth is a BOTH / AND. Even the Reformers understood this. It’s this really introverted quasi-Fundamentalism of many Reformed people that thinks it’s better than the rest, but in reality, all it issues forth in is Reformed people talking to each other and down to everyone else. How terribly banal.
Steven and Peter,
I’m not really committed to denying the identity between God’s knowledge (of created things) and his essence. Nor do I have a stake in the “simplicity entails loss of freedom” gambit. Simplicity is to my mind a non-negotiable element of the orthodox doctrine of God.
However, simplicity can be cashed out in different ways, and in some respects God isn’t simple (e.g., the ontological relations between the hypostases )–forgive me if I’m just stating the obvious.
Thanks for the dialogue.
But Tim, surely it should be uncontroversial to say that the New Testament’s primary source is the Old Testament.
To best understand the New Testament doctrine of God, the best source to consult would be the Old Testament.
To best understand the New Testament doctrine of Christ, the best source to consult would be the Old Testament.
To best understand the New Testament doctrine of salvation, the best source to consult would be the Old Testament.
I don’t see a problem with that.
Again, once we’ve got Leviticus mastered, then we are free to move on to other sources. But I don’t see that many Christians mastering Leviticus, so we’ve still got a lot of work to do.
I don’t think that’s such an outrageous request at all.
Oh I see, perhaps I’m getting a bit off-track.
Since I was addressing the comment about Jim and the FV discussion, I was thinking of theology specifically.
If Tim is talking about knowledge in general, then I would agree with him that we should use all sorts of other stuff, though of course we’ll always have room for skepticism, but hey that’s life.
I’m not sure Jim Jordan’s concern is in the same area, simply because Jim’s concern is mostly about the bible.
Though of course, 2 Tim. 3:16-17 does tell us that the Bible is good for every good work, so I wouldn’t say that it is unimportant in any endeavor. It may not be the most specific text-book for the task in hand, but certainly its principles are worth knowing.
Steven and Tim,
I think Steven is correct that you two are primarily coming at things from two different angles. Tim is talking about knowledge in general, whereas Steven seems to be focusing on knowledge of God and salvation. From what I know of Tim, though, I think that even here he’d probably argue that a decent training in the liberal arts is essential to have an intelligent understanding of the Scriptures as well. So, in a sense, training in such disciplines does go before the Scriptures, for it enables us to grasp the concepts present and taught in Scripture, literary structure, and so forth.
Kind of like how a guy who just got through high school and has a bunch of Bible verses memorized but no intellectual equipment which enables him to understand those passages rightly will wind up preaching ridiculous sermons about how real men pisseth against a wall; while an educated dude with a BA in Lit. and Philosophy and an MDiv from RTS Jackson will have the intellectual tools to be able to tell us all about the New Creation in John’s Gospel.
I say keep your piss soaked walls… I’ll take the guy who can tell me about the New Creation, thank you very much.
;-)
You could be right, Jonathan, about two different angles. I do hope that in the spirit of this site, though, that posts and comments like these are being generally interpreted not as fully developed positions, but as ongoing inquiries among people of equally good faith. I’m fairly sure about much of what I say, but some other things I say are things I’m currently working through, and on which I might profit from the input of others.
This is about more than the Bible per se, of course. You are right that in one respect I’m talking about the liberal arts, and the knowledge that they bring and how they help to illuminate everything else, including the Scriptures. But I think their subject matter, even when it is the work of really smart people who also happen to have been pagans, often has a great deal of relevance to our lives. Certainly it had great relevance to our forebears in the faith, and I doubt we can stand on their shoulders as on the shoulders of giants if we think they were just babies playing stupid games with autonomous philosophy, but we are adults so we know better.
I have never been a Van Tilian presuppositionalist, despite being 7 years at New St. Andrews, a bastion of that theory. I was always uncomfortable with the central elements of that position, for reasons I’ve tried to make clear here, but now that I am studying the humanities in even greater detail, the weaknesses of the position are becoming ever more apparent to me. Other than the slurs on the possibility of really meaningful, created, natural knowledge, the goodness of creation even after the Fall, and the attempt to make the Bible give a detailed answer to everything we could ever ask so that we never have to be without “certainty,” it just seems to me that the position results in Reformed people talking only to each other and winding up perpetuating numerous falsehoods about other positions.
Lastly, Steven, I only mentioned Jordan as a recent example that I saw. I have read his Through New Eyes and a smattering of essays, but I would not call myself an expert on his theology. Nevertheless, the “Bible Only” theory which, perhaps ironically, my time at New St. Andrews taught me to abhor seemed writ large in his comments on De Regno Christi, and that seemed a good example to show I wasn’t merely speaking generically in all this. I know that Dr. Leithart has a lot of respect for Jordan, and I have a lot of respect for Dr. Leithart (as well as all my teachers at NSA – I would not be where I am today without them), so I am not meaning to sound like a little jerk in these comments. To some degree, students ought to be free to question their teachers, and once they move out from their teachers’ shadows into their own, free, but respectful, inquiry ought all the more to be able to obtain.
Tim,
Though I’m probably more sympathetic to VanTillianism than you are, I hear what you’re saying, and think you have a point. No doubt there is much that can be learned from ancient philosophers and Medieval and Modern non-Christian philosphers and Scientists. I think this is indisputable, and has been the opinion of the Church through the ages by over-whelming majority.
In focusing on Scripture above, I wasn’t meaning to imply that I took this as your central point, just that it’s something I’ve heard you talk about in the past that relates directly to the angle Steven is looking at things from.
Part of the difference here no doubt stems from where you both are at in your studies right now… Steven finishing up Seminary, and you doing grad. work in the Liberal Arts. Knowing what studies/issues others are currently immersed in is always important to keep in mind when engaging in discussions such as these.
And yes… we should always keep in mind that posts here should not necessarily be taken as refined theses stemming from prolonged study and contemplation (though rarely they may be), but as conversation pieces on topics which are still currently being worked out by us. Speaking for myself at least, this is the primary reason I post anything on the internet: to have my thinking shaped by interacting with others on topics I’m currently working through.
I think Tim’s views and my own are probably like overlapping circles. We agree on the center of the issue, but our particular emphases are noticeable as well.
I would initially embrace the title “Biblical Maximalist.” Without hearing it defined, I would assume that it means getting the “maximum use” out of the Bible, in which case I’d be the first in line.
I think the Bible does speak to a whole lot more than personal salvation, and in fact, this realization was the reason I became Reformed in the first place. I am a theocrat and wouldn’t mind seeing a rebuilt Christendom. I also happen to believe that Western European culture is the best (though not perfect) culture in the history of the world, and I believe that this is in part thanks to its faith and that faith’s permeation and reworking of the earlier pagan-rooted structures. In due time, however, there is no reason this couldn’t also happen all over the world.
I also get nervous when folks suggest less Bible because I just don’t believe that it rightly identifies our current problem. Christians are simply not too overly literate in the Old and New Testament right now. Just because they can abuse the Bible, doesn’t mean they are getting maximum use out of it. It doesn’t even necessarily mean they are trying to make the Bible do things it isn’t designed to do (thought it might mean that). More often than not, it simply means that they have not yet become skilled in it.
I think that the Old Testament particularly shows us an integrated lifestyle of religion, politics, aesthetics, community, etc. Of course, it also gives us the “Enoch factor” seen in the lineage of Cain (Gen. 4:16- 26). The ungodly are the first to build cities, the first to dwell in tents, the first to play harps, and the first to forge metal. The pagans have a technological leg up.
But this doesn’t mean we have to reject technology or urban dwelling (as John Murray sometimes spoke of). Rather, I think it means we have the task of sorting through the pagan heritage and separating the good from the bad. This can be abused when Christians assume that it will be overwhelmingly bad, but I think it can also be abused by assuming that it is overwhelmingly good. The task is varied.
I also quite agree with an essay Peter Leithart wrote on “middle grace.” He argued that cultures benefit by proximity to the gospel. Thus the Greeks, being closer to the Hebrews and sometimes acquainted with their writings, produce a great deal in harmony with Biblical wisdom. Cannibal tribes in the South Pacific are a long way from this.
And I believe that a reading of the Church Fathers will show that they often tried to explain Plato’s genius by a supposed Hebraic influence. Augustine even speculates that Plato was in Egypt at the same time of the prophet Jeremiah.
And isn’t it interesting that the true “natural law” and “common grace” doctrines that have lasted over the centuries in the Church typically identify these as Noahide phenomena? This isn’t Van Til’s “autonomy” at all, even if some Van Tillians have erroneously labeled them as such.
I too am sick of the Hebrew/Greek language, however, I do think we may can understand the best of its suggestions. You see, there really is no such thing as “Hebrew thinking,” but there is the literature of Yahweh thinking, and it does bring a distinct view of things. The canon of the Old Testament is just about the bulk of Hebrew literature in our possession, and so we are talking about a specific divinely instituted literature over and against the myriads of “Greek” artifacts. The New Testament, written in Greek, is a fine piece of Hebrew and Greek thought brought together. Though, since as I’ve mentioned, the New Testament’s primary source book is the Old Testament, I will give the primacy of “thinking” to the prior canonical story, I will not say that all of the “Greek” questions are inappropriate.
IN FACT, the Bible itself presents us with a picture of the remnant Hebrews infiltrating other cultures (Egypt, Babylon, Rome) and glorifying them. A Pentecostal vision would show us a transfigured world, with each culture retaining its various distinctives, even academic and philosophical distinctives. And again, I believe that the Bible teaches this vision, so I wouldn’t consider it to mean “less Bible” in my coming to use other cultures’ capabilities. To embrace their various questions would not be a threat at all.
Indeed, my Biblicism requires it.
Steven, I greatly appreciate your comment #55, and am in the main in agreement with it. For the record, I also do not recommend “less Bible,” and one thing I learned well from Dr. Leithart at NSA was the poverty of our contemporary understanding of the Old Testament. That really does need to be addressed, and am glad that many such as Leithart and Jordan are addressing it. I haven’t read the Leithart article on “middle grace”; do you know where it can be found?
As for your basic stance on “Greek” stuff, you seem quite a bit more balanced to me than most who might otherwise feel themselves targets of my essay, and I appreciate in that respect your clarifications concerning the wrong attributions many Van Tilians apply to these matters. I do know that as with any position there is a spectrum of Van Tilianism. Some are more radical than others, some are more careless than others. It’s the radicals and the careless whom I would be highlighting with phrases like “biblicist maximalism” and all the rest of my critiques about false readings of classical antiquity.
Tim,
The Leithart article is called “Did Plato Read Moses? Middle Grace and Moral Consensus” and it is from Biblical Horizons, Occasional Paper No. 23. I know you can order this from BH, and the best bet is probably to send Jim Jordan an email. You can find it in the comments page on the dashboard, I’m sure.
Or if you have closer connection with Leithart, you could send him an email.
And you’ve nailed it on the head when you mention the misreading of classical antiquity. I think most Van Tillians are starting to fess up to the fact that he was reading secondary sources of Aquinas which have now been heavily critiqued. He took the basic assumption, coming from the Dutch tradition, that antiquity was always in its worst form, and went to town. Van Til’s great affinity for Bavinck helped provide a balance though, as Bavinck is steeped in the Reformed scholastics (who are themselves well-versed in the medievals), and Van Til is definitely not as bad as some of the later Dutch guys.
Most Reformed folk do this with the medieval and patristic periods across the board. Typically they’ll go easy on Augustine, but this doesn’t mean they’ve read him either. I used to do all this, and it took the realization that I was just flat wrong on what the documents say to break me out of this phase. Most Reformed tykes that behave like this also suffer from an invincible ignorance.
If natural law is essentially the 10 commandments, then TRs and theonomists can beat up on it all they want, and they’ll still end up advocating the same thing.
But of course, my skiddishness from the use of “biblicism” as a negative comes from the popularity of the White Horse Inn and similar entities. In the name of rejecting biblicism, they usually end up rejecting the bulk of historic Christian tradition, as well as even the basic Schaeffer-inspired vision of a self-conscious culture. Any assumption that culture will just wax and wane and is not to be too much of a concern is one that bothers me greatly, and these neo-neo-Calvinists typically argue that the Bible isn’t concerned with it. I don’t want to grant them that.
I think it is also very difficult to prove what the Scriptures are “primarily concerned with.” Glorification is the great neglected loci of Reformed soteriology, and I would include most of what goes by “transformationalism” as falling under it.
Steven,
These are really excellent comments. You are expressing the old center position of the Protestant doctors here, which moderns- either Van Tilians or their quasi-dispensationalist opponents- seem unable to attain.
Your remarks about Van Til are spot on; he was restrained by his love for Bavinck, who is a better guide altogether, though Van Til does have some very useful things to offer here and there. But Van Til and his followers were profoundly damaged by misreading history.
Again, these are excellent posts- and I hope that more Reformed people acquire and follow the sort of map you’ve laid out here.
peace
P
How complicated all this becomes! Here we have a book of books from God. Read it. Believe it.
Umberto Eco’s answer to deconstuctionism, *Six Walks Through the Fictional Woods* brilliantly argues that books create their own readers. A book may seem obscure at first, and we may miss a lot, but as we read it over & over and see more & more what is there, we are transformed into the right kind of readers for that particular book. This answers deconstruction.
But is also explains the Bible, which is 100% effective at changing people, via the Spirit. The Bible exists in the Church, not first in the Academy (which is 99.9% of the problem at the present time, and in this discussion, and with Peter Enns & Co.). In the Church it is read, preached, sung, eaten, etc. Or it should be. It is preciously little done today, which is why the world is falling apart just now.
In my 58 years, I have found repeatedly that people who think we need loads of extra-Biblical stuff to help us read the Bible think that because they don’t know the Bible. If I were to ask them to describe and explain the rite in Leviticus 1, they cannot do so. But they are sure that we need a bunch of ANE stuff to help us. These arguments would have credibility if they came from people who knew the Bible. I don’t mean that as an insult, just as a description of fact.
If I say, “The rites in Leviticus are microchronic recapitulations of the founding events of that cosmos,” I’m likely to draw a blank. But I learned this NOT from any ANE stuff, but simply by observing that the rituals in Lev. 1 duplicate events in the lives of Moses and Jacob, thereby enabling the one fallen-away to walk back through the steps of creation in order to be restored. This is but one example.
What do we expect from the Bible? Nothing at all. We open ourselves up to whatever and everything it says. We allow it to change us. We take it all seriously. We bring no filter. Now, in fact we do bring filters and baggage, but we are open to jettisoning them instantly when we see them for what they are.
The Bible is not ANE literature. It is anti-ANE literature. It was produced by a line of men, “holy” men (i.e., men who were priests or closely linked to the Temple and priesthood/Levites), men who were at odds with 98% of their idol and icon loving society 90% of the time. It is not written in parole Hebrew, but in scribal Hebrew (as all old languages have a written, and hence relatively unchanging form), and beyond that in heiratic Hebrew. It is written by men in a tradition who referred back to earlier writings in the same line, just as Mahler begins his 5th symphony by duplicating the beginning of Beethoven’s 5th.
If you want to understand the Bible, you study the Temple, Tabernacle, Garden, etc., for THAT is the primary context for the Biblical writings. The Bible GIVES you that context by providing page after page of descriptive information; you don’t need a bunch of ANE nonsense to give you context. Song of Solomon takes place in the lily & pomegranate laden Temple courtyard, for instance, and this would be obvious if commentators knew the Bible instead of running off to spurious ANE supposed-parallels. This is just one example.
The Bible was written in the Church (Garden, Tabernacle, Mountain, Temple, etc.) by Churchmen (priests, holy men, Levites, prophets) and needs to be heard (not read silently, but heard in community) in the Church.
Not in the classroom first of all. Not by private individuals first of all. But in The Great Conversation.
FWIW
Rev. Jordan,
It’s come to my attention that I may have inadvertently done you an injustice in some of my remarks above. FWIW, I would like to apologize to you if I said anything grossly in error about your views or needlessly offensive to you. As I said above, I am not an expert on your views, and I merely took what I do know of your views and tried to make sense of it in the context of my broader concerns. If I’ve done you wrong, then I humbly ask your forgiveness.
At the very least, I will refrain in the future from mentioning your work until I have a much broader familiarity with it.
Just out of curiosity, who qualifies to take part in this Great Conversation? Who weighs the voices?
I’m not trying to be snarky. It is an honest question. I entirely agree with you that the Bible is the property of the Church first and foremost, not of the Lockman Foundation, or the Zondervan Corporation, or of Wheaton Graduate School, or of Westminster California. The Orthodox Church, of which I am a member, has some very serious and increasingly stringent qualifications as to who can join this Conversation, who can represent the Orthodox in this Conversation, and who can change what the Orthodox say in this Conversation.
It will be interesting to see the Reformed reclaim the Bible from the Academy. I will be especially interested to see if this rescue results in a change in hermeneutic.
#61. Oh, no. I’m used to people not quite getting what I’m after. My remarks were more general “answers” to your original posting, as part of Conversation.
[...] also been some really fine discussion on the intentions and limits of the Bible over at Evangelical Catholicit…. Jim Jordan and Peter Escalante are always gold, and this account is no different. If I could start [...]
Great, Rev. Jordan, I’m glad to hear that. FWIW, I do recall enjoying your Through New Eyes a few years ago at NSA in Dr. Leithart’s theology class. I’m about due for a re-reading of it, in fact.
#62. Protestants and post-Protestants (like me) believe that all have a voice in the Conversation. At the same time, some have more of a voice than others. Those who have been examined and ordained have more to say. Councils have more authority. And so forth.
I was teaching on early Genesis a few years ago at a church and I mentioned that man is made of dust and later discussed the diet of the serpent as eating dead things returning to dust, and how this related to the prohibition in Leviticus 11 on eating things that have died without human hand. Etc. Afterwards an 11-year old girl came up to me and asked, “Pastor Jordan, if man is made of dust, and the serpent eats dust, does that mean that Satan wants to eat us up?”
To which I replied, “Wow! Yes indeed. In fact, the Bible also says that the devil is like a roaring lion seeking to eat us up.”
Well, I’d never made that connection before. It was this 11-year-old’s contribution to the Great Conversation that enabled me to see it. I could now link it with Jesus’ eating us in Revelation 3, and with many other passages.
Well, given what you said about Councils (an idea I as a conciliarist fully support) then here’s a question: would you be in support of the idea of, if nothing else, a pan-Protestant Council to determine some of the presently divisive issues highlighted in my original post? We all know how issues such as young earth creationism have caused havoc in various denominations, and the rhetoric on all sides has, in my opinion, often been very outlandish and unreasonably alarmist. This great perceived “crisis of biblical authority in our age” is exactly that – an artifact of our age, and once our age is gone it’s likely all this action-reaction polemicizing over issues that are, frankly, of relevance only to a certain type of Reformed culture warrior, will be gone, too.
A related theme: while I agree that ordained men (you, Dr. Leithart, etc.) have more authority than laymen (me), where do you see ordained Protestant men standing relative to the rest of the Church? The rest of the Church has a long, very culturally profitable history of using what Van Tilians derisively call “autonomist” and “syncretizing” thought to answer all manner of questions that don’t appear to be directly addressed by Scripture, yet here we have this philosophy of Van Tilianism – in some ways heavily indebted, evidently, to that Enlightenment-propagator Kant – that is, honestly, barely of yesterday, pretending to tell everyone else where to get off. Not to mention, as I said in the post above, making the Scriptures out to be something that would seem completely incomprehensible to just about everyone living prior to the advent of the scientific age.
I’m a firm believer in the great tradition of a present generation being able to “stand on the shoulders of giants” to see farther than they, and so I don’t have a problem per se with men questioning the categories and language of old Confessional documents on the basis of “what the Bible says.” But where does this “of yesterday” Van Tilian approach to the Bible and biblical authority fit in with your beliefs about the authority of the Church? How confident should you be in your interpretations of Scripture when they are very idiosyncratic, or at least, when it is you who bears the burden of proof relative to the bulk of the Christian tradition? And how ready to separate should one be over issues like young earthism and theonomic assumptions about the Bible’s supremacy over, say, Aristotle?
#64
What a delightful post!
The Great Conversation, for better or worse, has gone Online, so please read what a worthy Orthodox priest has to say about eating and being eaten. This conversation is too close in χρόνος not to be partaking of καίρος.
#69. I’m a bit confused by this. Young earth creation is the position of the church for the last 3000 years, until quite recently. If the church is being troubled, it is by those who contradict the chronology of the Bible, which has never been questioned before. Van Til’s approach to the Bible, as the self-attesting word of God, is simply tradition. Or purified tradition. It is certainly not new. The “fundamentalist” view of the Bible is that of the Father, of the Medievals, of the Reformers. It is the tradition.
Ok, now it makes a little more sense. On your view, that YEC is the tradition, my initial article is quite backwards in its assumptions. Unfortunately I am currently separated by 2,000 miles from 90% of my library, so I can’t check anything, but my understanding is that it’s YEC that’s the novelty and a rather less specific, general commitment to “creation in 6 days” (whatever the 6 days mean) that’s the tradition. But at least the way you’ve stated it the militancy makes sense.
As for Van Tilianism being a “purified” tradition, I very much doubt that. I’m trying to work all this out in my mind, but I suspect that Van Tilianism is basically a sanctified form of Kantianism – which makes all the rhetoric about “syncretism” with “autonomous” thought quite ironic.
It seems there are different issues being confused here, though. “Self attesting Word of God” surely is the tradition about the Scriptures, as any number of patristic, Medieval, and Reformation sources will readily confirm. That aspect of Van Tilianism is spot-on. But this whole bit of “Bible as self-contained and only significant source of reliable truth and anyone who thinks they can understand general revelation apart from being regenerate and exegeting Scripture” is very much at odds with the tradition.
Tim, I do wonder about what you are trying to say.
The Bible teaches that God made the cosmos. This has not been questioned by any self-identified Christian before the 1930s. Those who have questioned God the Creator started by altering the status of scripture to that of naive myth.
What are the “theonomic” assumptions that would make the Bible superior to Aristotle?
How would these assumptions be “theonomic” rather than simply Christian?
Do you imagine than van Til would prefer the Bible to Euclid for geometry?
I do not believe he has ever taught that sort of biblicism so I really struggle to see your point……
I suspect that Van Tilianism is basically a sanctified form of Kantianism – which makes all the rhetoric about “syncretism” with “autonomous” thought quite ironic.
this whole bit of “Bible as self-contained and only significant source of reliable truth and anyone who thinks they can understand general revelation apart from being regenerate and exegeting Scripture”
These sorts of charges are where your controversy will arise. I don’t think its fair to pin this on “Van Tillianism.” Some of his disciples? Perhaps. Some of the other Neo-Calvinists? Perhaps. Pop-culture in the American Reformed scene? Absolutely.
Steven,
Did I make a “charge” or voice a “suspicion”? I think it was the latter.
It is true that there frequently arise differences, sometimes great, between a Master and some of the Master’s later disciples. I’ve seen relative moderate Van Tilians and I’ve seen Van Tilians who seem to always have their undies in a bunch about the latest, greatest form of “autonomy” and “compromise.” Van Til and Bahnsen and Frame don’t sound anywhere near as angry as many self-professed followers of Van Til, and whatever faults one may find in their works they are surely much more careful than your garden variety pop-Internet Reformed war-monger. My former teachers at New St. Andrews are quite well-balanced men intellectually and spiritually, and I would never dream of imputing to any of them the “angry” and “undies in a bunch” sort of Van Tilianism.
I’ve read some Van Til for myself (all of Christian Apologetics and some of A Christian Theory of Knowledge, a few essays I found here and there) and I’ve read large chunks of Bahnsen’s last book expositing Van Til, so I’m not entirely unacquainted with the rudiments of the position. But surely this isn’t going to turn into one of those typically American individualist objections to generalization along the lines of “all generalizations are false.” There is surely some warrant for speaking of “Van Tilianism” as a generality, assuming that every reasonable person understands there are going to be exceptions to the generality.
Hans, I would never deny that God made the cosmos. That’s not the issue at all. And at any rate, YEC was only a preliminary example in my post; I had no intention of starting a huge argument about creationism. Perhaps I should have picked a different example.
Aristotle’s Politics is also just an example. I’m trying to work my way through these issues, and as I’m presently getting very closely into several of Aristotle’s texts, not to mention Medieval texts using Aristotle’s Politics as their basis, and since most people on this blog believe in Christendom, it seemed an apt example to illustrate what I was getting at in the post.
Also, although there are so many posts on this thread now that it’s difficult to remember how this has all progressed, I’m not sure that Van Til and Van Tilianism were originally on the table – I think they came up subsequently and by implication. I don’t presume that Van Til would prefer the Bible to Euclid on geometry, but I have seen some who profess Van Til’s philosophy online prefer to talk incessantly about how “the self-contained ontological Trinity” is the necessary presupposition for all thought, so unbelievers who deny God don’t have any rational basis for their mathemtatics…and this rather than, uh, just doing geometry. It gets to the point where it’s really just a functional denial of the goodness and knowability of creation as creation. At that point it’s not profound Christian thinking but just goofy Christian retreatism from the real world.
Tim,
Fair point about charges vs. suspicions. My apologies.
However, I think that of the current Van Tillians who are publishing and being recognized in the least, the Moscow bunch would be the ones most considered “Radicals.” Bahnsen, as author of Theonomy would be the previous radical, with perhaps Gary North varying between progressive and comic relief. Frame would be much more towards the middle, and Scott Oliphant would be straight up Van Tillian.
I will grant you that all of these men have misrepresented Thomas Aquinas and some of the other medievals. But you yourself say that none of the contemporary writers (I’m sidelining North here) are really who you are talking about.
So then, are we left with the internet warrior and self-manufactured soapbox stander? If so, then let’s just brush them off rather quickly. Why let them be “Van Tillians”? Jonathan and I fought hard to keep the “Calvinist” title when discussing the Lord’s Supper, even though we admitted plenty of later Calvinists mucked it all up. Trashing the labels trashes the larger community.
I’d encourage the same for Van Tillianism. He had his faults, which we’ve mentioned earlier in this thread. But I don’t think that he or his “system” is really guilty of rejecting natural revelation.
I think we have to be careful here because of all of the emotive terms that you’ve used. Quasi-manichaen is particularly strong. I also don’t think Van Til is guilty of Kantianism, though he uses some of the terms and illustrations. He does the same with Hegel. I’m sure Van Til would describe this as “plundering the Egyptians.”
Okay.
1. Creationism as a “science” is relatively new, because “science” is relatively new. Believing that the 6 days were ordinary days and that the chronology of the Bible is airtight is traditional and believed by virtually every theologian in the history of the church until recently. I myself don’t buy all of creation science, because I see too much modern science in it. But I do stand with the church historical on this matter, simply because no other option seems to work as regards reading Genesis One. The creation science people ARE on the right side of the continental divide.
2. Van Til always dealt with 20th c. expositors of older writers. He was doing apologetics, not church history. He spoke to the now, not to the past. Beyond that, everybody in his day and for a couple of centuries took the view of Aquinas that he took. Joel Garver dealt with the “real” Thomas at the Biblical Horizons conference a couple of years ago. Cassettes are available. (So, you see, we Vantillians continue the Conversation.) But to fault CVT for not being up to date with the 1990s is a bit anachronistic.
3. Beyond that, as an exorcist, CVT was looking for the flaws. He had rough things to say about C. S. Lewis, for instance. But that was not all there is to say, and CVT read the Narnia books nightly to his wife as she was infirm in her last years. Similarly, CVT had appreciations for Aquinas. But his calling was an an intellectual exorcist.
4. No real Vantillian denies that unbelievers can understand the universe. In fact, they MUST understand some aspects in order to suppress other aspects. Truth is inescapable. Some truths are absolutized in order to crush other truths. What Vantillians affirm is that the unbeliever, when he gets philosophical, cheats. He assumes that the universe is rational to the human mind, and he has no reason to believe that. The connection between the human mind and the cosmos is a Creation doctrine, and only on creational presuppositions can it be held. From an evolutionary standpoint (and all pagan religions believe in a self-developing cosmos), man as a mere whitecap on the ocean of being may just be a joke, and may understand nothing at all.
5. At the same time, Vantillians are in Dooyeweerd’s camp in saying that the unbeliever MUST have a god, and makes something in the creation into his god. This god then suppresses other truths in the creation. Hence, unbelievers have a true but distorted understanding of some aspects of reality. They are inevitably reductionists, and hence omit much that is important.
[First paragraph edited, because I had to leave to take care of a little one before I got to finish it]
Well, Steven, I don’t feel the Moscow bunch are radicals, because they are the ones who are responsible for firing me up for “Medieval Protestantism” and its corollary in the discipline of history of taking the Medieval Church very seriously as the backdrop to the Reformation. A radical “Van Tilian” (maybe scare quotes every time I use the term will help?) in my book would be somebody who never missed an opportunity to trash “pagan thought” as contrasted with a “biblical worldview” while at the same time never writing anything substantial about the former, thus indicating a large unfamiliarity with the former. I’ve seen some otherwise intelligent Reformed pastors and theology students online do this frequently over the years, but no, I’m not going to give names. It’s one thing to have some acquaintance with and to critically disagree with Plato or Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas; it’s something else entirely to slur them as a bunch of fools when at the same time one doesn’t show much acquaintance with them. This does not describe the Moscow group as I experienced their teachings for 7 years.
It would be interesting to me to see a “Van Tilian” (scare quotes) describe using Hegel or Kant as “plundering the Egyptians.” That would at least firmly root the paradigm in Augustine, though it would then for that very reason require a great softening of the rhetoric of “autonomy” and “syncretism.” Also the rhetoric of “purity,” so near and dear to many Reformed hearts, would have to be softened.
At any rate, I’ve always thought of my own broad viewpoint, as expressed in the initial post that started all this, as very much a legitimate Reformed option, because some of its major rudiments were communicated to me by guys like Michael Horton and R.C. Sproul. I’ve never been impressed with any Reformed person who claims, without significant qualification, that for 2,000 years Christians flubbed a bunch of stuff up because they took Plato and Aristotle too seriously instead of just reading their Bibles. That’s what I mean by the “Fundamentalism” aspect of my exposition, and I don’t think Calvin or the Reformed Scholastics would recognize it as legitimately Reformed.
Friends,
Tim’s point is scored well against a number of really existing tendencies held by real people, some of whom are well known in the Reformed world. I myself don’t blame Van Til for the worst excesses of certain of his disciples, and in fact think he had much good to offer, but the man himself had errors enough: the chief of them being the polemic, rather than philosophical (that is, wisdom-loving; but one might just as easily say “philokalic” instead), principle of his thought. Modernism in thought begins with the purported “problem” of knowing, which then occasions the epistemological project; from Descartes to Kant to Husserl, the best and bravest of misguided moderns have made the first business of thought the securing of its own existence against the threat of deception, unintelligibility, doubt. This is is radically faithless, and radically stupid. It substitutes a “fight against skepticism” (in line with modern demagogical “war on X” mobilization techniques) for love of reality. Van Til’s project is a direct continuation of this trajectory, however well-intentioned. It is an apologetic wrongly elevated to the status of a Christian philosophy; whereas classical apologetic is an *application* of Christian wisdom. The remarkable uniformity with which Van Til’s more radical disciples openly reject the teaching of the Reformers regarding reason, common grace, and natural law (all of which they hardly understand, having straw-man notions of these) is a sign that Van Til was only a “purifier”of the tradition in the sense that Hooker’s “puritan” opponent Cartwright was: which is to say, he wasn’t one. If one wishes to find a modern Dutch school continuator of the tradition of Christian wisdom, look to Dooyeweerd, not Van Til. More can be said about the modernism of Van Tilianism in thought and politics, but the comments field is not the appropriate forum for fuller exposition.
Some thoughts for Rev Jordan:
To your first point, I fear you are overgeneralizing somewhat about the church tradition regarding Genesis; it is considerably more various than you seem to make out, and in ways which make a difference. For instance: if I recall correctly, you somewhere cite Seraphim Rose against Kalomiros’ “Orthodox Evolutionism” as if the patristic tradition Rose adhered to was identical in all chief points with your own account: but it certainly isn’t. The Cappadocian view that garments of skin means our gendered material bodies, et c, is *very* far from the idea that Eden looked more or less like what we see around us now. And similar points could be made about antique Christian ideas of cosmic chronology. Which is not to endorse any of these: only to say that things aren’t nearly as simple as you suggest. And the creation science people do very often share the same sort of Newtonian and even positivistic conception of cosmos and nature their opponents do; which is at least part of Tim’s point. Moderns- including even supposedly antimodern moderns- often have more in common with each other than either do with premoderns.
To your second point, what you offer by way of explanation of Van Til’s wild goofs regarding past masters does little to excuse them. I myself have the deepest respect for Francis Schaeffer, but I won’t justify his inanities regarding the Greeks or the medievals, and we shouldn’t try to do so for Van Til either. He could have made his point just as pointedly, and more enduringly, had he not made those mistakes. And again, Tim is correct here: with very, very few exceptions (Joel Garver, Cynthia Neilsen, and Bryan Spinks come to mind), Reformed people usually have no idea what they’re talking about in these matters, and thus shouldn’t pontificate about them, let alone, in tones of accusation and condemnation: which is, however, exactly what Van Til did.
To your fourth: you make a fair point here: the doctrine of fatherly creation is the distinctive of revealed religion, and it is generally either obscured, deformed, or badly attenuated in extra-Israelite polities- though you yourself make very helpful qualifications about Noahide traditions being regenerated through contact with prophecy. But to say that all pagan cosmologies are evolutionary without qualification, as if in the modern sense of the word (which is how your readers will take you) is wide of the mark, and precisely the kind of simplistic overstatement which ought to be avoided.
Lastly, although I am deeply sympathetic to your earlier points about the perspicuity of the Scriptures (and to your excellent point about its composition by sages working in a tradition of extraordinary subtlety and rigor), it is also true that divine discourse presumes certain things it does not explicitly teach: rules of grammar, an understanding of tropes and figures, and a knowledge of those created things to which it refers. Thus, while the Bible is certainly not ANE literature in its purport, the meaning of its elements can be assisted by a knowledge of ANE literature or what archaeology can reveal; this is merely following through on the implications of the hermeneutic methods of the Reformers. But my guess is that you don’t dispute this.
peace to all
Peter
Hmmm. Well, as I look at the history of the church on early Genesis, everyone I find simply adds up the years in the chronology and finds the age of the earth. Whatever else might be mixed in with it, that hermeneutical procedure seems pretty clear.
Blog discussions aren’t usually the place for 20-page discourses. It seems to me that ancient paganism is evolution with personality. Conflict is ultimate, and the fittest survive. The cosmos is essentially self-creating. Perhaps, though, I should have limited my remarks to Baalism, which is what I had in mind.
I don’t dispute your last paragraph. I find, however, that often “knowledge from ANE, archaeology” can be a red herring that obscures the meaning of the text. The letters to the seven churches in Rev. 2-3 move era by era through the periods of the Old Creation history. But this is completely obscured by Ramsey and others who want to find the allusions to the particular cities and the history of those cities. Since the letters are to churches, not cities, Ramsey’s methods are suspect, and even if they might shed some possible extra aspects to the content of the letters, the first meaning is in the OT allusions.
To be honest, I don’t have much use for common grace and none at all for natural law. Every time someone tries to explain these and put a good face on them, they wind up sounding exactly like the “straw man” that I reject. But as you say, this is probably not the place to get into all the various things these terms are supposed to mean.
Rev. Jordan,
Your comments about biblical scholarship could be taken a lot more seriously if they were not accompanied by your rather evident bias against “academia.” To me, you come across as having an axe to grind against the academy. Certainly, your sweeping generalizations about Bible scholars not knowing the contents of the Bible above were and are unfair, and inaccurate. And if being familiar with the Bible means entertaining fantasies and delusions like seeing “OT creation history” reviewed in Revelation 2-3, I’ll have to pass. It’s a shame you muddy the water with these sorts of bizarre “observations,” because from time to time it is quite evident you have interesting and keenly insightful commentary to offer on biblical allusions.
On Rev. 2-3 you’ll need to consult Eugenio Corsini, *The Apocalypse*, trans. Francis J. Moloney, pub. Michael Glazier, 1983. The fact that you refer to a well-argued and often cited position as fantasies, delusions, and bizarre does not, frankly, encourage me to believe you know very much about the Bible. I’m afraid you’ve sharpened my ax for me.
Rev. Jordan -
Forgive me for “muddying the waters” here, but I have been be-deviled all my life with the Bible/Science (or general/special revelation) fissure that runs through our culture like the Valles Marineris. The theologians in my adopted tradition appear to be treating this canyon like a non-starter, which may be the best way to go about it at the present time. The cracks in the reductionist enterprise grow wider with each passing decade, but for a lot of people, including, perhaps, some in your pew, returning to a pre-modern mental paradigm isn’t an option.
A very wise Reformed gentleman of my acquaintance said that the primary virtue of the Fathers was that they were both wise, and innocent. We, unfortunately, have eaten the apple and have been thrust from that particular garden. I think that Cartesian rationalism is a novum in the development of human consciousness and that the responsibility of the Church at this point of time is to deal with it, digest it, and perchance redeem it.
Just don’t ask me for particulars at this time. I think some possible signposts are out there, but they definitely aren’t in the mainstream of either Christian or non-Christian thought.
On a happier note, Paul, I thought your article in SBL on Galatians was excellent. Of course, that’s been Peter Leithart and my opinion for a while, but you really put a foundation under what for us was more of a speculation. Good stuff.
#82. As a devotee of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (as well as of others), I fully believe that the God who is new every morning is always adding new things into history for us to deal with. The race is maturing, in Christ, for Jesus is the first Grownup in history (acc. to Galatians). As ERH argues, new kinds of people emerge in history: explorers, inventors, etc.
This is a version of what Van Til argues: that the race matures in epistemological self-awareness. One cannot go back before Descartes or Kant, but one can go forward by answering their errors. ERH answers Descartes’s absurd “I think therefore I exist” with “Others speak to me, and that’s how I know I exist.” In the same way, Van Til answers Kant’s epistemological ultimacies with the ontology of the Triune God, showing the epistemological implications of that ontology.
Rev. Jordan,
I’ll have to check out Corsini and what exactly he says. I’m not sure if this makes your position “well argued and often cited” though. A quick scan through Beale and Osborne (two respected evangelical commentaries on Revelation) shows no familiarity at all with your proposed reading of the structure of the letters. As for me, I gladly admit that my knowledge of the Bible is inadequate on many fronts, but I’m still a work in progress. Thanks for the comments on the article regardless.
Rev. Jordan -
Thank you. Mr. Rosenstock-Huessy (Christ as the first “grown-up”) sounds like a good supplement to my reading in Barfield, Hofstadter, and Polanyi. Kant and Van Til I know only by hearsay, and both have poisoned somewhat to me by the ferocity of their acolytes.
Mule,
Let me enthusiastically second Rev Jordan’s endorsement of Rosenstock’s work (and that of his best disciple, Harold Berman).
I’d like to hear more by private correspondence, if you’re willing, about your interest in Barfield and Polanyi (I presume you mean Michael). I have a longstanding appreciation of both; one of my fondest memories is of an especially delightful conversation late at night, under the stars, a few paces from the tomb of Seraphim Rose; the topic was Barfield and knowledge.
Rev Jordan,
Your reflections in #84 illustrate my earlier point. Even granting that God is adding new things in the historical actualization of man, men would essentially proceed in wisdom by assimilating new expressions of insight, not essentially by refuting error: that latter operation is accidental to the development of wisdom, though it is often enough the external occasion of it. You cannot place polemos before eros: or you will wind up sounding much like the Baalist account of things you yourself have just recently denounced here. And with regard to Van Til: his “answer”to Kant looks to more traditional eyes like a mere substitution: “ontology”, as Voegelin pointed out, is an early modern misconstruction of being-as-object which is already proto-Kantian (both historically and intrisically) in character.
peace
P
Peter -
I just finished Barfield’s Unancestral Voice, and will be doing a series of five essays on that work on my undervisited blog.
Barfield is a hard nut to crack. I think he wants us to start thinking in an entirely different way (“What does this plant ‘want’ to do?”) rather than just add to our collection of objects for contemplation.
I never would have picked up on your use of “substitution” vis-a-vis Rev. Jordan before reading that book, but yes, I see it as a very apt use of that word in the way Barfield also uses it, in the sense of it being an activity of the “hot” adversary Ahriman.
Interestinger and interestinger
My understanding and general of philosophy is limited, I’m no biblical scholar, and a layman to boot. But I can comment on science – as a geologist who at one time ran a geochronological laboratory I have some very definte views on Creation Science. And as some have commented above – the CS’tists fall into the trap of committing the eror of aproaching science via the modernist paradigm. Only, their arguments and supporting data is substantially weaker. I have perosnally conversed with a well known CS’ist on his efforts to disproof geochronology – and similarly to how Tim describe the efforts of the van Tillians against “Greek philosophy”, they have not made the effort to truly understand their opposition. Their proofs are often anecdotal, much like Illuminati-style conspiracy theories.
Not that the geochronologists are shining examples of fidelity to the data either – I’ve seen very appaling treatment of data -especially tracking, ie filtering the data to support an outcome.
In essence, it appears that they CS’ists view the scientific enterprise as an effort to arrive at absolute truth – something that is very much not. As I always say – if you build your faith on scientific theories, do not be surprised if it all crumbles when the theories get altered / disproved.
Sad thing is, a lot of CS’ist theories only serve as parody-material for those that scoff at the Church – it is that bad. And their academic integrity has often been shown to be very shaky – making use of clearly disproven facts etc – strawman arguments left, right and centre.
Science itself is not the rock solid enterprise that the media, and many theologians deem it to be. There are severe arguments, and changing theories all the time. When properly understood, it is not much of a threat to the church – that is why I like what our friend Mule wrote about the Orthodox approach. But I guess if your theology is all about protecting the truth of doctrine as expressed by subset XYZ of division ABC of the branch 123 of Christainity, you must deify science if only as an opponent. If your focus is the Cross and the Sacraments, these things become side issues.
Paul Owen: A glance at Beale shows you’re right. Which is maybe odd since he uses Corsini and Chilton betimes. At the same time, what makes it into a given commentary on Revelation has a lot to do with one’s filter. I notice Beale does nothing with C. E. Douglas, for instance, though he does have the occasional use for Farrer. A “Barfieldian” (since he’s been mentioned) recasting of symbolico-cosmic reality is not, I think, in Beale’s range of vision.
Peter Escalante: I’m afraid I do not recognize the Van Til you are writing about. Perhaps 12 hours of conversation over a litre of Lagavulin would help. You see CVT merely as refuting error. I see him engaged in an argument that is based on very valuable “new” insights that greatly advance the power of the Christian understanding of reality. If there is anyone in the 20th century who, Barfieldlike, advances the move from first to final participation, it is CVT. Evidently, however, you have not read CVT the same way. So, I’ll drop it for now.
(Of course, if what you’re reacting against is “disciples” who think that a “transcendental argument for God” constitutes some kind of certain proof, you are right to do so. The scholasticization of CVT is not something I admire.)
Rev Jordan,
How remarkable. I was just about to post an addendum saying that if you’re ever in my part of California, I’d offer you Napa’s best over a half-day to give you my reading of the natural law tradition. So I’ll make that offer still: and accept yours too. That makes a full 24 hrs, split between the two topics. The chronology of how that would work shouldn’t pose too much of a problem; that is, after all, your forte.
I would like to add here- though I’ve said this earlier- that I do think that Van Til has many good things to offer, despite what I do take to be his deep mistakes of principle. And yes, as I said earlier, although I think the man himself has errors enough, it is indeed really his more radicalized disciples- who could serve as textbook illustrations of Voegelin’s dwellers in “second reality”, just as their system(s) can serve as textbook illustrations of what Voegelin calls “gnosis”- I was mostly after. But I would gladly give your reading of VT a fair hearing- but as you suggest, some things can only really happen in person.
peace
Peter
I’d like to go back to the original essay and it’s title: What Are We Looking for in the Scriptures? What I offer here is not a critique of Mr. Enloe or his essay. Rather, I want to explore this question.
1. As I wrote above, we should be looking for whatever the Bible says to us. If it says that Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt, then that’s what it means. That’s a “scientific” fact; either a woman transformed into salt or encased therein. Jesus believed it really happened in space and time. If it says Abraham lived 175 years, then that’s how long he lived. That’s a chronological fact. If we decide that this fact is unimportant, we are taking issue with the Holy Spirit, who thinks that it IS important.
2. But more to the point: Why are we “looking” in the Scriptures? We are never told to read the Scriptures, but to hear them. The Scriptures originated as writings, not as oral traditions, but as writings written with semi-poetic cadence designed to be read intoned/chanted to others. We have control over what we read, but not over what we hear. We cannot close ears as we can close eyes. Listening involves submission. Moreover, hearing creates community, while reading is private. The assumption in the question is that of an individual looking into the Bible. Though “we” is the pronoun, the question pushes us toward a distributive use of “we”: each one of us.
3. Then again, if we “hear” the Bible, then we are not looking into it. Rather, the Word of God is looking into us. Our business is not first of all to sort through the Bible, but to be sorted by the Bible. Credo ut intellegam.
4. The model of the student looking into the Bible on his own and debating what it means is the triumph of the academic, the awful black robe of the Reformation preacher. (I write as a Calvinist of sorts.) We must insist that the Scriptures be heard and sung in the Church as the right context for the important but secondary academistic “looking” into them.
5. A final note: Conservative seminaries teach everything but the Bible, which is why so many scholars don’t know the Bible and Biblical theology very well. Your graduate knows a smattering of Greek and Hebrew grammar, apologetics, systematics, and history — but not the content of Leviticus or Ezekiel or 2 John. Nor does he have a clue of how to sing the psalms, which are the center of Christian worship until the 19th-20th century. Nor has he a clue how to conduct serious worship. He is, in others words, completely and totally unprepared for pastoral ministry. That will have to change. Until the Bible is heard and sung at the Table (weekly, of course), when we who “look” into it for this and that we shall continue to lack orientation.
I reiterate that these remarks are not directed at Mr. Enloe’s essay, and are only reflections on the nature of how the question is phrased.
Well, to #92 I’d just say that while I agree with the hearing-not-looking bit, my essay was titled What are *WE* Looking For in the Bible?”, not “What am *I* Looking For in the Bible?” I’m very much interested in the maintenance and health of Christian *communities* over time, and if I didn’t think the Protestant *community* was being harmed by this view of the Scriptures and its numerous attendant polemic crusades, I wouldn’t bring it up at all. Further, I’m not a big fan of the individual interpreter, a phenomenon which is certainly encouraged by a fact I noted in the essay about how “the Scriptures” have been transformed by Modern assumptions into “the Bible.” In fact, I think it is “the Bible” and not “the Scriptures” that is largely responsible for the sort of airtight, comprehensive, floor-by-floor, “clear and distinct ideas” made into a “system of doctrine” foundationalist type of approach to truth that I see so many professed “Van Tilians” (scare quotes) use.
The point Rev. Jordan raised earlier about the witness of the historic Church is actually right in line with my own view, except for the nagging half-remembrance I have from a great deal of study years ago that the witness of the historic Church on creation is neither the young earth view nor the old earth view, but something far less specific, and, in some ways, far more profound. Honestly, the idea that the united witness of “most” Christian theologians through the centuries is young earth creationism strikes me as just the sort of story that a culturally persecuted minority would tell itself to make itself feel better and keep the monsters at bay. It certainly excludes St. Augustine, and probably many of the other major Fathers as well, and for that reason it just doesn’t ring true to me.
Let me go on record as saying two things here: (1) If I could be convinced that in fact the Scriptures unambiguously and definitively teach that the earth is young, I’d believe it, no questions asked, and (2) I’m not fool enough to believe that present scientific consensus constitutes an unimpeachable witness to truth, so just because I am against young earthism does not mean that I am to a proportional degree for old earthism. Other than the larger questions the issue raises and the fact that I think in conservative Protestant circles it needlessly sucks a lot of energy away from more constructive endeavors, it’s not of much interest to me, and I’m rather agnostic about how old the earth is.
Mr. Enloe, I figured you’d agree with what I wrote, which is why I tried to make it clear that I was just offering some rambling thoughts occasioned by the question itself and not tackling anything you’ve put out here.
I appreciate your last paragraph. I can only say that I was dragged kicking and screaming into a young-earth position years ago by men who forced my nose into the text until I could not make excuses any longer. I’ve since found out from looking at the history, which you can find in Martin Anstey’s book and in several essays by James Barr and in Stanley Jaki’s *Genesis One Through the Ages*, that the history of theology in the area of the age of the cosmos and the days of Genesis One is almost uniform. Augustine, of course, does not count because his “Scriptures” included mistranslated Latin Wisdom of Solomon and a statement that the universe was created instantly. The same Augustine added up the years in his Septuagint OT and discovered the date of creation.
As a postmil I believe we’re still living in the early church, and much more remains to be learned and thought through. My own book on Genesis One is just my own contribution to the discussion. Perhaps some paradigm will come forth 300 years from now from Christians in Sri Lanka that will resolve present issues to everyone’s satisfaction.
But as for me, I do believe the matter is quite important, because to my mind the kinds of hermeneutical moves and premises employed by evangelicals during the 20th c. to evade the “plain sense” of Genesis 1 and 5 has repercussions right down the line to the virgin birth and resurrection.
FWIW. Pax.
Rev. Jordan, I’m grateful for this conversation because it’s reminded me yet once again of distinctions within positions that can be easily papered over. I have a lot more respect for a young earth position that is the result of a non-reactionary and thorough look at the text, wanting soberly to see what the text teaches on its own terms, than one that is the result of a reactionary program designed merely to meet a passing fad in the unbelieving world.
That said, I’ll just have to disagree with you on Augustine, but with you I’ll hope for those Sri Lankans to fix the mess in a few hundred years. As long as we can all talk about it now, as brothers, and not separate over it as enemies, I’m content.
Tim, just a request for clarification. What do you disagree with Rev. Jordan about “on Augustine?” Are you disagreeing that Augustine is idiosyncratic with the rest of the tradition in his affirmation of an “instantaneous” creation? (Which, no matter what other views you think out there, is pretty unique to Augy).
I think Jordan’s point about “the tradition” is simply this: When Christians of the past read the OT, they assumed you could add up the years and come up with an actual date of creation. There were differences of opinion and conundra caused by various passages (and even Genesis 1, for someone like Augustine, was one of those conundra), but the basic assumption was always in place that the OT provides an accurate chronology about real space-time happenings. Even Augustine, as Jordan points out, endeavored to add up the dates.
Modern evangelicals tend to reject this approach altogether (i.e., the validity of biblical chronology), because it embarrasses them. And whatever you think about Genesis 1 being literal six days or not, that’s only going to change the basic chronology by a little bit. (Even a “day-age” theory would have to place the literal Adam only about 6,000 years ago, and we’re right back to being laughed at by archaeologists and anthropologists instead of geologists.) Our entire “modern” approach to “defend” the Bible by making the chronology stuff not important, a shell that contains a deeper spiritual/moral kernel for us to digest (but which, as a shell, can simply pass through our system undigested), is what Jordan is attacking. Thus, I think the spirit you have shown is on a par with his, despite your disagreements over Genesis 1. You both agree that we need to HEAR what Scripture says to us, modern scoffers be darned.
Historically in the Church, one thing that pretty much everyone thought they were hearing from Scripture was that biblical chronology is a valid enterprise (whatever scuffles might have to happen over this or that detail). This fits so tightly with Reformed “covenant” theology and so forth (our covenant Lord always calls on His earlier works to ground our trust in Him in the present: but those earlier works keep going, all the way back. What earlier works was God appealing to when He spoke to Moses, or Abraham? Spiritualized fables that report things as a chronology but which actually are not meant to be chronological at all?), that I agree with Rev. Jordan that it is important.
Just more to think about…
Xon, I disagree with Rev. Jordan simply dismissing Augustine’s witness. I believe Augustine is not a figure that anyone can afford to ignore. Disagree with him, yes. Dismiss him, no. I disagree with the “Church Babies” characterization of the patristic era, and instead hold to the (ironically) traditional notion that later generations stand on the shoulders of giants to see if they can see farther.
At any rate, I’m really not interested in debating the actual specifics of young earth creationism, and further, I entirely reject the mere rhetoric of saying that people who disagree with oneself are “embarrased by the Bible.” That’s not a rational argument, it’s a rhetorical slur. And at least in my case, it’s simply absolutely not true.
Well, I’ll admit right up front I don’t like being laughed at or being considered stupid. Anybody for whom that is a non-issue has a remarkable freedom to become or believe whatever they want. If they have truly adapted to it as part of the opprobrium crucis, I don’t mind admitting that their sanctrification is light-years ahead of mine.
But that is nothing compared to the cognitive dissonance I experience by having two sources that I trust being in such profound disagreement. I can see three ways out of the dilemma – 1) Mounting a counter-offensive using the same tactics and weaponry of the opponent – the Creation science approach. 2) A rejection of the validity of scientific inquiry as currently practiced as a means of obtaining information about the cosmos. 3) Dislocating the traditional view of the Bible from the same Universe described by scientific discourse.
None of these three particularly appeals to me. Have I left one out?
#97. I’m certainly not dismissing Augustine per se. But where he build his entire discussion and wrestles with a problem created solely by a mistranslation of a text in the apocrypha, I don’t see why anyone should take that discussion seriously as regards how to consider what the real Scriptures say.
Rev. Jordan, thanks for your charitable approach throughout this. FWIW, I don’t in any way feel I’m on a sufficient level of theological study to engage you in great detail. If NSA taught me anything it was to know my limitations and not get all puffed up because I have a little knowledge and try to make out that I have way more than I do and start erasing proper distinctions such as elder-younger and so forth.
While I remain firmly committed to the main points of my original post (and really, held to that basic position for several years before I ever went to NSA and throughout my entire time there), I’m glad we had this exchange. It’s been very helpful to me, but I think I better bow out of it with you so that I don’t inadvertently cross any lines I shouldn’t.