We are pleased to announce the paper selections and program for the Covenantal Apologetics Colloquium, which will be held online on Saturday, December 5th, at 7pm (eastern). We’ll be streaming the event live through Google Hangouts On Air.

“Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1: Implications for the Apologetic Method of Cornelius Van Til”

Abstract

Van Til self-consciously sought to defend the Reformed system of doctrine in his apologetic and polemical encounters. This paper argues for the methodological foundations of Van Til’s apologetic method in Chapter 1, “On Holy Scripture,” particularly with regard to the divines’ treatment of natural and special revelation. The paper examines each paragraph of Chapter 1, noting how the presuppositional commitment of the divines to the self-attesting, supreme authority of Holy Scripture is reflected and applied in the realm of apologetics by Van Til. In this way, the paper seeks to contribute to the discussion of the consistency of Van Tillian apologetics and the Westminster Standards.

Ryan E. Noha is a member of Hope Presbyterian Church (OPC) (Grayslake, IL), under care of the Presbytery of the Midwest. He is a student in the M.Div. program at Mid-America Reformed Seminary (Dyer, IN).

“Covenantal Apologetics: The Only Foundation for Consistent Christian Ethical Engagement”

Abstract

This paper defends the claim that the covenantal approach to apologetics provides the purpose and the means for both critiquing opposing non-Christian ethical systems, and for proving the supremacy of Christian-theistic ethics. The authors argue for the ontological, epistemological, and teleological contingency of ethics upon the covenant-­making God of the Bible.

Colton R. Strother is an M.Div. student at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He lives in Kansas City where he serves as a Pastoral Resident at Emmaus Church.

Samuel G. Parkison is an M.Div student at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife Shannon live in Kansas City with their son, Jonah. Samuel also serves as a Pastoral Resident at Emmaus Church.

“A Wild Stab in the Dark: Exposing Eminem’s Existentialism”

Abstract

This paper attempts to apply the principles of covenantal apologetics to the latest album by American rapper Eminem as a gateway into contemporary postmodern thinking. The worldview of Eminem developed in his latest album, The Marshal Mathers LP2 (2013), will be shown to have deep affinity with the atheistic existentialism of Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of postmodernism. This allows the philosophical thought of Nietzsche to penetrate today’s culture without anyone actually reading his books, but simply listening to its application in the lyrics of Eminem and other influential artists that espouse a similar philosophy. After establishing Eminem’s worldview, this paper provides an internal critique in terms of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, as well as the one and the many. It will become evident that Eminem’s worldview is far from a coherent system and must either borrow capital from the Christian worldview or reduce to absurdity.

Daniel Ragusa is an M.Div. student at Mid-America Reformed Seminary in Dyer, Indiana. He is a member of the United Reformed Churches in North America and his home church is West Sayville Reformed Bible Church in Long Island, NY. 

Looking forward to the Covenantal Apologetics Colloquium, I thought I might share some reflections on the uniqueness of Covenantal Apologetics (CA) and, in that sense, on what makes it worthy of special attention. I won’t here offer a detailed definition of CA, since this is done elsewhere (see especially Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics), nor a technical comparison with other methods, since I’m not out to bore readers nor to appeal to the lowest possible number of them. But even without the technical detail, much can be said about the general ethos of CA toward distinguishing it from other ways of thinking about the defense of the faith. So that’s what I aim for here, to answer in broad strokes this question: what is covenantal apologetics all about?

You might say that covenantal apologetics is distinguishable from other approaches to apologetics first of all because it bothers to distinguish itself from other approaches. Put it this way: CA is, more than any other approach to apologetics, methodologically self-conscious, so much so that it may frequently be found busy with questions related to the very nature and possibility of apologetics—an undertaking one might judge apologetically uninteresting, even a waste of time. But CA seeks in all things, in apologetics, too, to be self-consciously under the authority of the Word of God. Consistent with the Reformed spirit, with the ongoing sanctification of the believer and the purification of the church until the Lord’s return, CA is actively concerned with the theological purity of the apologetic endeavor, with faithfulness to the Christ of the Scriptures in all aspects of Christian encounter with unbelief and the suppression of the truth, even where that means self-scrutiny.

This is because CA believes that apologetics—the defense or vindication of the faith—is the duty of every Christian. It is a Christian duty. Christians are called not simply to confess Christ, but to proclaim the full counsel of God, to give reasons for our hope, to take every thought captive, to watch our doctrine and mind our witness. But apologetics is not an arbitrary command; it is implied even in the redemptive nature of Christian truth, interrupting as it were a world captive to the truth-suppressing industries of idolatrous image-bearers.

CA is built on the conviction that apologetics, if we think especially of that notion of theologico-methodological self-scrutiny, ought to flavor the whole of the theological encyclopedia. Every discipline may be energized and sharpened by apologetic readiness. Perhaps this is nothing more than the common historical observation that doctrine takes shape in the heat of conflict. But the ethos of CA adds at least this: the clarification and articulation of the authoritative teaching of Scripture in the heightened intensity of conflict is our business so long as there is opposition to be opposed, and opposition there will be until the end. In that sense apologetic awareness throughout the church’s theological apparatus is a much needed service to the body of Christ and to her witness to the world until Christ’s return. It is part of already-not-yet stewardship. Paul writes that Jesus himself gave to the church leaders for the equipping of the saints, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph 4:12-14). Apologetics is the duty of individual Christians, and of the church, for her own safeguarding and for her witness to the nations.

CA considers Christian truth as a unit, such that every doctrine relates to every other, and all doctrines stand in equal relationships to their center: the one, true, tri-personal God, creator and lord of all. In that sense CA views apologetics as the sharpening of the full counsel of God, as in a sense delivering systematic theology, as the concerted testimony of the canonical Scriptures, to and for the church in the present age.

Many thanks to Reformed Forum for sponsoring the Covenantal Apologetics Colloquium. For further information, post questions in the comment section below (or here), or contact RF via email.

Introduction

The following is a response to Scott Swain’s post at Reformation21, “Theses on Natural Theology.” But it is more than that. I take the opportunity, in interaction with Swain, to advance the discussion. I want to emphasize that, while I am critical of a number of Swain’s claims, my goals, as follows, are constructive: to push for increased theological precision and increased exegetical faithfulness in discussions of this topic, and to make the distinctions necessary for considering the possibility of sound and legitimately named ‘natural theology’.

I come from a school of thought in which natural theology is, particularly in the already-not-yet, either a contradiction in terms and distinctly un-Reformed, or a species of dogmatic theology, sharing its principia. I believe the latter is possible, as did Van Til, but extremely rare, but I also suspect that the distinction may be even finer than most have acknowledged. For example, when we say that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are ‘persons’, are we to any degree at all doing natural theology? How can we distinguish between ‘good and necessary consequence’ and ‘natural theology’? Or where does one end, and the other begin? Maybe these are easy questions, but I am still wondering.

I am grateful for Swain’s contribution to this enduring biblical, theological, and confessional question. His piece attempts to put natural theology in a more favorable light than I am accustomed to. So that’s kind of the context for the present query. I’m interested in where and how, within a shared Reformed theology and confessional framework, our approaches to the nature and status of natural theology diverge. Maybe our approaches don’t, in the end, differ much at all. I hope that what follows will get us closer to finding out.

Opening quibbles: Definition, purpose, and argumentation

Swain’s opening paragraph says that early modern Reformed discussions of natural theology are not of a kind with Enlightenment projects by the same name, and that therefore those historic early Reformed natural theologies dodge the critiques coming from later Reformed thinkers. Swain says, “Here natural theology is not treated as a pre-dogmatic discipline but as a discipline that is dependent upon dogmatic theology for its success.”

This characterization is unclear. If natural theology is “dependent upon dogmatic theology for its success,” then the distinction between natural and revealed theology must be finer than, and perhaps other than, Swain tells us in his post. Later in the post Swain defines natural theology as theology carried out by ‘natural reason’, with natural reason as its “epistemological principle,” which I take to mean principium cognoscendi. If the earlier statement appears to mean that natural reason depends for its success in theologizing upon dogmatic theology, all kinds of wires are crossed here. And if natural reason ‘depends’ upon dogmatic theology, then it is not clear how Swain understands either or both natural theology and natural reason.

Swain proceeds to provide what appears to be an explanation of this statement. He says: “the terms of early Protestant natural theology are largely set by biblical commentary on texts such as Romans 1–2.” As for Romans 2, I can only think that 2:14–15 could be relevant, but even there Paul is arguing that sin is universal and so also, and justly so, is condemnation. The gentiles’ having the law written on their hearts means that the gentiles convict themselves: “their conflicting thoughts accuse and even excuse them on that day . . . when God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus” (2:15–16). General revelation convicts the sinner even from within his own moral consciousness. Romans 1 appears to me to contain no endorsement of the conduct or soundness of natural reason.

Swain also says that “the noetic effects of sin upon natural theology” are recognized by the early Reformed theologians as “effects which require assistance from the epistemological principles of dogmatics (i.e., Holy Scripture, the Holy Spirit) if they are to be overcome.” The Holy Spirit and Scripture are the principia cognoscendi of theology (Swain’s “epistemological principles”). Notice that they are also the primary agents in effectual calling and the application of redemption. That is not a coincidence. So, again, what is natural theology, and what sort of principium is natural reason? And in what sense is natural theology distinguishable from dogmatic revealed theology? Swain’s characterization of early modern Reformed natural theology is elusive.

This leads to a second question: what is Swain’s goal here? Perhaps I am misreading, but if Swain wishes to make the historical theological point that early Reformed theologians understood natural theology as vindicated or endorsed or whatever by Romans 1 and 2, then that is one thing; the only thing missing is quotation from these theologians substantiating the historical observation. If the point is in fact programmatic, or even dogmatic, that in agreement with these historical writers, it is the case that natural theology finds its charter in Romans 1 and 2, then I think Swain’s post vastly undervalues the claim it makes. There is no exegesis given—neither Swain’s own nor historical—nor is it at all obvious that these chapters put natural reason in a positive light. Further complicating the question of purpose, the historical interest Swain’s introduction evokes is disappointed when he produces for us a definition of natural theology not from our Reformed forbears but his own. It is not then clear at all what the procedure is here, or what the goal is: to tell a story or to make an argument.

In fact Swain closes his introduction with two statements that appear to offer clarity:

1. “Based upon earlier Protestant treatments of natural theology,” he says, “I have come to see the importance of natural theology for a number of spheres of Christian intellectual and practical inquiry”; and
2. “I have come to the conclusion that, far from detracting from revealed theology, it is only in giving natural theology its due that we can fully appreciate the true honor and dignity of revealed theology.”

The spheres from (1) receive no further attention in the post, nor is the notion of a fuller appreciation of “the honor and dignity of revealed theology” thanks to natural theology revisited. No harm done, I suppose, since these two claims are largely wide of the main issue, which is perhaps twofold: what is the value—truth-value, perhaps, or doxological value—and the nature, of natural theology?

Swain characterizes the relationship between natural and revealed theology as one of ‘opposition’. Or perhaps this is too wooden on my part. He compares the two as follows. The principium of natural theology is natural reason, “as opposed to revealed theology,” the principia of which are special revelation and the illumination of the Holy Spirit. The thing to notice is that the two projects, natural and revealed theology, have distinct principia. How this is meant to be reconciled with Swain’s emphasis on continuity between them (in his introduction and later) is not clear, but it is a central question if the vindication of natural theology by natural reason is the question at hand.

Most curious in this regard is the definition of natural theology offered, which looks as much like a definition as it does an undecorated affirmation of the viability of the thing. Swains says: “Natural theology considers the existence, attributes, and operations of God insofar as they may be known through God’s works of creation and providence by means of natural reason.”

But does it do this? Which God? “God’s works of creation and providence” are biblical doctrines. So is the object of natural theology the God of the Bible? If the principia of natural and revealed theology are distinct, some account of the possibility of their soundly and knowingly referring to the same object is needed. In fact, Swain’s post contains no argument for the viability of natural theology. As noted, I believe the viability is within reach, but the issue of principia must be sorted out.

‘Natural’ reason, the ordo salutis, and biblical anthropology

‘Natural’ in the phrase ‘natural reason’ appears to indicate something like ‘by nature’, or ‘man’s default state’. Biblically or theologically speaking then, ‘natural’ reason means the ratiocination of the unregenerate. Given the ambiguities in Swain’s definition of natural theology, however, we cannot be exactly sure who the natural theologian is, or whether Swain believes natural theology is as equally viable for the unregenerate as for the regenerate. So the question is, how does “natural” modify “reason”?

I think an eminently sound way to answer this question is to situate it within a Reformed redemptive-historical anthropology, as Swain does, though only briefly. He writes, “In the state of nature after the fall, natural theology is severely corrupted but not absolutely extinguished.” This is somewhat confusing, however, since it misses if not begs the question; the issue is the status of natural reason as the determining principle of natural theology.

If we take account of reason within the already-not-yet we should find that we have, according to traditional taxonomy: (1) reason non posse non peccare (all men of Rom 1 and 3); and (2) reason posse non peccare–the former the unregenerate and the regenerate the latter. So in terms of reason, we then have (1) the inability to reason righteously; and (2) reason in principle restored.

The former is more often the one referred to as ‘natural’ reason. But it would seem that the principium cognoscendi of the unregenerate—his ‘natural reason’—is incapable of righteous reasoning. So the claim that natural reason is an active and sound principle of natural theology implies one of two things: (1) the totally depraved mind can reason righteously, in denial of our classical doctrine of sin and corruption; or (2) natural theology is an activity of the unregenerate in which true may be separated from God-honoring or righteous. Even Abraham Kuyper, the foremost modern formulator of the theology of common grace and the antithesis, who believed that natural reason could function soundly in observation and calculation, wouldn’t go that far.

Does Swain then have the regenerate in mind as the hypothetical practitioner of natural theology? This alternative, on his account, also faces difficulties. As Swain indicates, the principia of revealed theology are the Spirit and Scripture. These are also the means and agency of effectual calling, the very principles of new obedience and resurrection life. The question is, then, can the regenerate reason rightly, about God no less, on the principle of natural reason, independent of the Spirit and Scripture?

We should ask: can the regenerate do anything at all ‘rightly’, independent of Scripture and the Spirit? Why would he ever want to? To affirm the former—that the regenerate can act or think ‘rightly’ apart from the Spirit and Scripture—is basically to say that sanctification and good works are possible without the enabling indwelling of the Holy Spirit, or to say that the Spirit operates independently of Scripture. Or, again, am I unjustly and too closely associating regenerate righteousness and truth? I would rather think that the burden of proof is his who claims that those whose thinking is futile and whose hearts are darkened and who are by nature children of wrath, are capable of uttering, through throats like open graves, between curses and bitterness, theological truth.

The creature’s reason and the Creator’s revelation

Swain says that “Revealed theology is the light in which natural theology sees light and by which it is perfected (Psalm 19).” He also says that “Natural theology is always intrinsically incomplete and therefore incapable of producing religion that is pleasing to God.”

To me these statements are much easier to understand if we swap general and special revelation for natural and revealed theology, if, that is, we are thinking in terms of God’s design and activity in revealing himself through the general-particular or natural-supernatural organism of revelation, rather than of two distinct methods of theology with mutually hostile principia. If the former is in fact what is meant, I feel very much at home; but if it is indeed the latter pair that is meant—natural and revealed theology, both activities of the image-bearer—the issue is raised once again whether the purported natural theologian is regenerate or unregenerate, which is the same as to ask whether the theological method in view is Christian or not Christian, sound or futile.

Suppose the believer and the unbeliever both undertake the same natural theological reasoning; word for word, they articulate the same natural theological claims. How can we distinguish their theologies? One example is this: says Aratus, “in him we live and move and exist.” Aratus’ theology is theologia falsa; it is idolatry. The apostle Paul, who declared that “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit,” also says, “in him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28, 1 Cor 12:3). Paul’s is theologia vera, or theologia naturalis regenetorum, natural theology of the regenerate used to show the truth of revelation and the falsity of bare theism. The key here though is principia; Paul might be doing something we may call ‘natural theology’, but not by the strength of his pre-conversion ‘natural’ reason. Nor is Paul’s theology true merely because he is regenerate, but because his theological method is consistent with the principia of his regeneration (see K. S. Oliphint, Reasons for Faith, 12–13).

According to some interpretations, the unbeliever is prone to err, since he attempts to suppress the truth which is in fact insuppressible, and so the Christian under grace, on different principia, may improve upon or perfect the unbeliever’s reason. Sounds good enough. But according to Paul, all men suppress and obscure, and then they do not still retain true but acutely fallible knowledge; rather, they replace the object and content of their admiring cognition with idols, creatures instead of the Creator, and this replacement is the outworking of their principium, natural reason. Certainly special revelation improves, perfects, and completes general revelation; but according to Paul there is no improving, perfecting, or completing of natural reason. Natural reason does not require improvement; it must be undone completely, uprooted, burned, and reborn—in a word, crucified and resurrected. For natural reason to accomplish anything—“apart from me you can do nothing”—it must be changed in principle, at the level of principia. It must be reborn not of natural principia, the will of man, but of supernatural principia, the will of God (John 1:13). As it is, the completion and perfection of natural reason is hell.

So on the side of the fallen sinner, some account must be taken of the complexity in Romans 1 where there appears to be a distinction between ‘knowing God’—knowing and perceiving all these particular things about him—and the suppression of that truth in unrighteousness that blossoms into idolatry and essentially a turning of the Creator/creature ethic upside down: worshiping the creature instead of the Creator. Paul says in no uncertain terms, “no one understands; no one seeks after God.” The image-bearers’ intentions here are so unequivocally wicked that divine wrath consists merely in allowing these desires to be fulfilled, in ‘giving them over’ (vv. 24, 26, 28) to their sinful desires. This is what is meant by the comparison between total depravity and utter depravity; the unregenerate has no resident righteousness, but were it not for common grace he would be much worse.

Missing from Swain’s discussion is then an account of sin as portrayed here in Romans 1 in terms of what becomes of this objectively clear revelation in the hands of the totally depraved. Our Reformed doctrines of sin and of regeneration wrought by the Spirit in and through the Scriptures and the ordinary means, must be determinative in how we handle this material. To say, as Swain I think does, that the noetic effect of sin amounts to increased possibility of error (Merold Westphal, not much of a Reformed thinker, takes this view), or that natural theology and revealed theology are “discordant” as a result of sin, seems insufficiently appreciative of Romans 1 and 3. Swain says that “natural theology is severely corrupted but not absolutely extinguished.” But Paul in Romans 1 in particular does not teach that natural reason is severely corrupted; he teaches not a matter of degree but of basic, antithetical disposition. The distinction is principial, at the level of principium. The natural man is not dull, nor has he merely grown dim; he is sharp and lively, but in principle evil, and he wants to be as evil as he can be. His passions and his mind claw and tear at the Lord’s hand restraining the full development of his wickedness.

The whole point of Romans 1 is sin and suppression, rebellion and idolatry. The clarity of natural revelation—as distinct from natural theology, an act of God rather than an act of man—is defended by Paul in Romans 1 in service of the main point of the chapter, in order to contrast it with the idolatry of sinful suppression. General revelation is clear but nevertheless always, certainly since Genesis 3, fails to impart true doxological knowledge. That failure is to the credit of so-called ‘natural’ reason. Natural reason is the principium cognoscendi of idolatry, even before the face of God, in the theater of God’s abundant self-display, even while in him we live and move and have our being. Natural revelation is a gracious gift of God, and serves as the evidence brought against the idolatrous inclinations of natural reason, “the mind that is set on the flesh.” The natural mind is “hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom 8:7).

Exegesis of Romans 1

Continuing on the question of the exegesis of Romans 1, Swain says this: “Natural theology also addresses . . . especially human beings in their moral and social capacities” (Rom 1.26). Rom 1:26 reads as follows: “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.”

The verse says that God allows sinners to pursue and to realize the dishonorable passions that burn within them, and one example is given: unnatural relations between women. Swain says that this verse is related to the value of natural theology for addressing moral and social issues.

Another reference to Romans is this. Swain writes, “In terms of morals: natural theology (or, more precisely, natural law) addresses that which may be known about divine worship and human ethics through creation and providence by means of natural reason” (Rom 1.21–32).

The verses cited in this case begin, “For although they knew God, they did not honor him,” and end, “Though they know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.” Verse 32 is quite possibly autobiographical (see Acts 8:1), as it recalls Paul’s participation in the murder of Stephen. Swain says that this passage has something positive to say about unregenerate reason relative to articles of worship and godly ethics.

In both cases, the association of these verses with Swain’s claims regarding the viability of natural reason is baffling. In fact, I see no positive role whatsoever for ‘natural’ (fallen) reason in Romans 1:18–32, where the thrust of the passage appears to be the clarity of general revelation and the wickedness of idolatry. Swain claims that the early Reformers found in Romans 1–3 vindication of the theologizing endeavors of the unregenerate (or the regenerate somehow on alien principia). I would be glad to see the best attempt at making that work, but it just doesn’t sound feasible.

Conclusion

I would like to do three things in conclusion. The first is to rehearse my claims regarding Swain’s piece: In the preceding, I have attempted to argue that the principle weakness in Swain’s claim is that it is ambiguous; it is difficult to tell whether it is historical or dogmatic. The difficulty is compounded by this, a second claim I make: there are no arguments of any kind, either historical or exegetical. Swain encloses the names of several early Reformers in parentheses, indicating that he has read their work and that in his view his own statements enjoy their support. But there are no quotations, nor even citations. Even his definition of natural theology is a brand new one, and evidently not time-tested. Also not a single passage of Scripture is quoted or explained. Proof texts appear in parentheses, but none of these references is explained, and many of the connections counterintuitive. Swain seems at many places to conflate revelation, God’s revealing himself, and theology, the image-bearers response to revelation. The crucial connections between soteriology and principia are neglected, and, consequently, we face a dilemma: if the regenerate is the natural theologizer, he operates on the principles of Scripture, Spirit, and the existence of the triune God, and it is not clear whether he is in fact doing anything properly called ‘natural’ theology, or certainly not essentially distinct from revealed theology. If the unregenerate is the natural theologizer, his cognition is wholly evil, debased, corrupt, and an instrument of unrighteousness. In this sense, too, we are still a long way from knowing just what so-called ‘natural’ theology is.

The second thing I would like to do is to propose a seriously amateur theory as to why the early Reformers were so penetrating, and why their work has repaid something like four centuries of careful attention, and even a resurgence of interest today. My uninformed guess is that it must have at least something to do with context, and possibly the salient feature of their context was that they were Reformers in an age of reformation. They had every license and duty to scrutinize their predecessors—the fathers, the medievals, even their own training—all in the name of Scripture, the solas, and Reformed confession. So perhaps there is some embarrassing irony then when in the present day early Reformed literature sits in seats of honor and is thought qualified to stand in for biblical dogmatics. Are we missing the basic thrust of their example? I’m grateful to a friend for bringing this quote from Herman Bavinck to my attention:

The faith of the sixteenth century became the orthodoxy of the seventeenth. People no longer confessed their beliefs, but they only believed their confessions. Among most of the people this orthodoxy prepared the road for rationalism. Religion became a matter of reason, the truth regarding eternal things was now dependent on historical proofs and rational argument, and the certainty of faith became confused with rational insight (Herman Bavinck, Certainty of Faith, p. 41).

Finally, when Swain’s piece was posted, he announced it on Twitter describing it as an “in-house” discussion, and he opens the post itself referring to the critical stance some contemporary Reformed theologians have taken relative to natural theology. I conclude my comments with a short list of examples of in-house literature which may fit this description, though much of it is more constructive and exegetical than merely critical. I trust that the reader will find that the arguments made in the following publications are substantial; furthermore they are confessional and biblical, or at the very least they mean to be. Once again, I am grateful to Swain for his contribution. I hope works such as these will be accounted for in further reflection on this question.

Richard Gaffin. “Epistemological Reflections on 1 Corinthans 2:6–16.” In Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics. P&R, 2007.

Jeffrey K. Jue. “Theologia Naturalis: A Reformed Tradition.” In Revelation and Reason.

Scott Oliphint. “The Irrationality of Unbelief” and “Cornelius Van Til and the Reformation of Christian Apologetics.” In Revelation and Reason.

–––––. “Primary and Simple Knowledge,” in Theological Guide to Calvin’s Institutes. P&R, 2008.

–––––. “Is There a Reformed Objection to Natural Theology?” Westminster Theological Journal 74, no.1 (2012).

Introduction

To say that the history of the Western church and in particular of its theologizing has been specifically Western or White European theologizing is to state something obvious, and if so probably insignificant, but also potentially misleading. But it is a common saying, and uncommonly examined. My guess is that the saying is assumed to be if not profound, certainly sufficiently innocent, obviously true, and in any case useful. One writer argues that, in light of the ‘strangeness’ of Western theological history to Christianity’s newest host cultures, we ought to be engaged in “thinking the faith from the ground up.” This is the thesis of Simon Chan’s text, Grassroots Asian Theology: Thinking the Faith from the Ground Up (IVP Academic, 2014).

As the global topography of confessing Christianity has shifted, interest in emerging localized theologies—Asian theology, African theology, Latin American Theology, and so on —has increased. And these themed endeavors are propelled by movement-like charters grounded principally in the complaint that Christian theology until recently has been written by white European men, coupled with the inference that the theology then too suffers from the particular narrowness of a singular sociology. Accordingly the charge is afoot that, therefore, ‘our own’ theology must be written for ‘our own people’. Best of all, this makes for plenty of fodder for professorial tenure and spills academic ink as quickly as we can produce it.

Certainly the Christian faith should lead from the regeneration of individuals to the transformation of society, of particular societies in particular times and places. And we should not expect that the goal of missions and world evangelism is cultural uniformity—a single, global Christian mono-culture. So there should be Christians of all nations. Conversion is not from or out of culture and context; it includes all aspects of the present, ‘among you’ kingdom of God, as we look forward to the eschatological kingdom. So, a fruit of the gospel taking hold in a new land and among a new people would be the renewal of a new culture, not the shedding of culture nor of the importing and imposing of culture.

To this I think we may all agree, and even cheer. But some caution is in order. “All races and all ethnicities and all cultures,” John Piper reminds us, “will be present in hell.” Cultural or ethnic diversity is an amoral phenomenon; to say ‘many people groups are represented here’ is no moral improvement on ‘there are many people here’. Our focus should be on where, covenantally, ‘here’ is: in Adam or in Christ. So our interest in the multiculturalism of the kingdom should be carefully monitored. My concern is that the vision of a multi-colored world Christianity bearing endlessly the fruit of [pick your socio-cultural] demo-theologies is too often embraced without caution.

In what follows, I’ll address three points of unease with the typical rhetoric of ‘[pick your socio-cultural] theology’.

The claim that ‘Western theology is not helpful for non-Westerners’

No Western theologian ever set out to do Western theology for Westerners. The contemporary diagnosis is that this is in fact is false, and that theology done by Westerners is particularly, inevitably, and irrecoverably Western theology. Our failure to recognize Western parochialism is attributable to cultural-monism, or colonialism, or modernism, or a general lack of interest in other cultures. In some sense this is undeniable. But in another sense, it is a hermeneutic of panicked suspicion and trial-by-angry-mob. To simply dismiss all theology which pre-dates our post-colonial post-enlightenment ‘humility’ is to disregard two important things.

First, that many of these theologians were very seriously invested in hermeneutics and methodology and in reading Scripture as Scripture; that is, they were invested in a Scripture vs. sinful man and sinful culture distinction. To put it another way, faithful biblical interpreters were very aware of a cultural distinction, but not a pluralistic or relativistic one. They were engrossed in a covenantal in-Adam/in-Christ cultural distinction—in fact not a distinction but an antithesis of revelational-covenantal origin. We may inquire with some seriousness into the consistency of this distinction in any or all areas of historic Christian thought, but this in fact is the first and primary cultural distinction with which Christians should be concerned, and which in the best cases characterizes historic reflection on the data of Scripture, particularly when anthropology and culture in view.

Second, the depreciation of historical theology due to a well-intended concern for Euro-centrism, implicitly—not secretly but anyway by implication—depreciates the work of the Spirit in guiding the church via the ordinary means of the preaching and writing of extraordinary men. Of what use are old books, or books from far and different places? Distinctions of culture, history, and geography are vastly superficial compared to the active sustenance of the church by the Spirit of Christ. The life-giving Spirit is thicker than blood and culture. And certainly no one invested in the faithfulness and usefulness of theological reflection would deny that among the most valuable gifts the Lord bestows upon the church are theologians and biblical interpreters (Eph 4:11-12; 1 Cor 12:28), some great—Augustine, Luther, Calvin—and some small.

The idea that ‘we must go back to the Bible and do grassroots theology for the [pick your socio-cultural] context’

Again, there is much of value here. But precision in terms of where the variable of socio-cultural context meets the business and content of biblically grounded theology is at a premium. The worst of this rhetoric gives the impression that everything goes but the Bible. I can imagine the appeal of this idea, particularly when Scripture is translated into a language for the first time. Must we also translate multi-volume systematic theologies in order to have healthy preaching, teaching, learning, and ministry? It seems a little overbearing—some will say ‘neo-colonial’—to insist on importing, say, 19^th century Dutch Reformed theology fast on the heels of the first translation of the Bible. It seems overly selective, for one thing, but it also makes a strong magisterial impression on new converts: ‘here is your Bible, and here are your authoritative interpreters’. Caution is warranted.

But reckless biblicism should also be avoided. And the thing to remember is that the Bible itself is not biblicistic. Scripture itself enjoins extra-scriptural reflection upon Scripture, and expects faithful readers to approach Scripture with a somewhat developed notion of its divine nature and authority in place as a kind of unshakable a priori. Remember that the attributes of Scripture are mutually implicative; they imply each other. So if Scripture is necessary for salvation, it is necessary as the authoritative word of God. And it must be intelligible if it is to impart saving knowledge of the gospel, and it alone must be adequate for this purpose. So ‘biblicism’ is perhaps not actually the problem here; it is a crippled doctrine of Scripture that leads one to say, or at least to imply, that extra-biblical reflection on the teaching of Scripture is devoid of biblical authority and is in fact nothing more than the muck and naiveté of cultural embeddedness. If this were true, Scripture could not command the people of God to talk about, reflect upon, teach, preach, or proclaim the word of God, and even to preserve those reflections for posterity; it could only require recitation, and only in Hebrew and Greek—and down the road, perhaps not even that; all creaturely language will be abandoned. And there would be no such thing as dogmatic theology. We could achieve only dispensable and shifting cultural application. So the Bible itself speaks against biblicism, and the idea that theology needs completely to be rebuilt for each new [pick your socio-cultural] context implies a dangerous and indeed unbiblical depreciation of the formulation, proclamation, and defense of doctrine. This is a non-starter.

Theology for whom?

My third and final curmudgeonly complaint is that [pick your socio-cultural] demo-theology sounds so self-important. I think that “theology” says quite enough about the purpose of what we do. That purpose is God. Nor is it any enhancement to tag theology with the banner of a given (or self-selected) cultural identifier. Anyway, as for me, I am not so interested in the demographics of the theologizer; I am interested in the faithfulness of the theology—and I mean faithfulness to Scripture, not to a generation of man. The usefulness of doctrine—in any context—depends upon its faithfulness to the Word of God in Scripture, not upon its faithfulness to man, since it is primarily God who works in us to complete what he has begun.

Paul condemns divisions in the church: “one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos’” (2 Cor 3:4). Precisely the error Paul has in mind is Christian sub-culture parochialism. No doubt on other occasions Paul himself sided with some folks against others; but Paul’s divisiveness, if we may call it that, was always doctrinal. That is, his concern was unequivocally faithfulness to revelation and to the one, self-consistent gospel. His jealously for the purity of the gospel led him to curse angels (Gal 1:8) and publicly rebuke Peter (Gal 2:11-14). And Jesus says, “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Matt 12:50). But the dissension and tribalism in Corinth that Paul sought to undo exalted a non-doctrinal metric: people groups. And isn’t this very distinction between genealogy and faith in the Word the substance of Paul’s law/gospel discussion in Romans 3:21-4 and Galatians 3? God is able from the stones to multiply ethnic diversity.

Paul’s response to the strife in Corinth is to emphasize the servanthood of gospel workers (2 Cor 3:5-9). In other words, Paul’s view is that theology should never find itself without a charter; it should be eagerly attentive to the word of the Lord and the work of the church that is founded upon and sustained by that word. An irksome lack of self-image haphazardly plugged with tribalism indicates neglect of this most determinative identity: “whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present of the future—all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (2 Cor 3:22-23).

I am Reformed, not because I wish to be associated with particular persons or skin colors or a socio-cultural narrative; but because I believe the Reformed faith to understand and to interpret Scripture most faithfully. One can be any sort of person and be Reformed; this is because ‘Reformed’ is a doctrinal designation, not a socio-cultural one. And this follows the example and teaching of Paul, even of Jesus himself. Of course ‘Reformed’ is not the point here; but it is a case in point. My fear is that sub-culture-demo-theologies are a substitute, displaying laziness or even subversiveness, for rigorous attention to Scripture. And certainly the tendency toward demo-theologies does fail to partake of the urgency of Paul’s gospel—of his preaching, evangelism, missions, and doctrinal rigor. I fear that interest in a culturalized Christianity, meandering into demothasized religiosity, indulges in an intellectual extravagance unauthorized by Scripture and unbecoming of Christian servants.

Conclusion

Perhaps there is something in the way theology is often done that evokes these concerns. Perhaps Evangelicalism’s post-post-modern sensibilities are not solely to blame; maybe there is in fact something amiss in the way we present theology.

For the theologian who teaches theologians as his subject matter, I think he has well earned native distaste. Faithful theologians teach theology from Scripture, and entrust the cultural conundrum to the Holy Spirit, in his management of the universal church and his blessing the conveyance of the doctrines of Scripture and of good and necessary consequence. Non-speculative, exegetically and biblical-theologically guided theologizing will never be alien to the ear that is primed to hear.

I teach systematic theology far from my home and my native culture, and I have never heard anyone say, ‘that teaching of Scripture does not apply here’. And if I ever do hear something like that, I can say already that the problem will not be with Scripture or with biblically sound theology. Nor is the cause or even the catalyst of theological breakdown necessarily or primarily cultural. Breakdowns in the interpretation of Scripture are ascribed properly, ultimately, to finitude or to sinfulness.

There is need for and great wisdom in cultural adaptability in Christian witness, just as there is, we may say, from person to person in local church ministry. Paul became all things in order to witness to all, even “a servant to all,” he says, that he “might win more.” But Paul embraces with his whole heart this adaptability in order to witness to the self-same truth, “for the sake of the gospel” (1 Cor 9:19-23), and no other (Gal 1:6-9). My view is that Scripture and theologizing according to Scripture’s own self-witness are neither one of them subject ultimately to variations of culture or era, that the only always important demographical distinction is between under-wrath and under-grace, and that for all the wonderful variety of the body of Christ, to which believers are called and for which they are gifted in untold variety and variation, “there is one body and one Spirit . . . one hope . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4-6).

Choose your sub-culture demo-theologies may certainly produce helpful, edifying, and biblically sound insights. There is no reason from the mere idea of such things to reject a priori the possibility that they offer insights good and necessary for the church in accordance with the gospel. Indeed if it is true that, for example, protestant theology, has throughout its relatively brief history been produced by the same type of people, then it stands to reason that folks of different types will excel at exposing blind spots and heralding refreshing insights. But of course the premise is dubious, since to group, say, a 16^th German with a 17^th century Frenchman with an 18^th century Scotsman with a 19^th century Dutchman with a 20^th century Texan with a 21^st century South Korean, even if they are indeed all of the same gender, is to stretch the guilty demographic beyond usefulness. Such a motley gathering has far too little in common to ascribe its theological fellowship to anything cultural or sociological. That just cannot be the most likely explanation. And if the premise is dubious, the endeavor itself is something of an imprudent balancing act. But anyway I have not in the preceding claimed that it is impossible for such theologies to produce anything good or helpful, or that they never have. My purpose here has been to articulate some general theological concerns that I think any such endeavor would be wise to keep in mind.

So for example, if we say that the Bible is a treatise on the Christian interpretation of reality, we run the risk of granting implicitly that reality, prior to biblical Christian interpretation of it, is a-religious or a-theological, even non-Christian. And so long as we treat Scripture in this way, the notion of a pre-interpreted a-theological world will haunt us. Or we might say that the Bible is the presentation of and an invitation into the Christian narrative. This approach offers a captivating incorporation of reality into the Bible’s ‘worldview’ or ‘drama’, simultaneously constituting reality and constituting it Christian, and there is much to be said for this approach culturally and hermeneutically. But at the same time, this approach may easily concede, in a similar manner, that reality is up for grabs, that reality rests uninterpreted until incorporated by an individual or community into a people-defining story line, or even that reality just is the Christian or any other world-constituting narrative.

Conversely, the coordination of nature and Scripture means that if in our reasoning we adopt a methodology which treats nature as a-religious or a-theological, as many versions of ‘realism’ in fact do, our methodology implies rather pointedly the non-necessity of Scripture as a rule of life and confession. Scripture remains true and uniquely important but becomes in some areas—‘realism’, for example—dispensable. So nature and Scripture are a unit, and their coherence and coordination should be approached with care.

Here the tradition of Geerhardus Vos distinguishes itself. Biblical theology in the Vosian tradition incorporates the doctrines of general and special revelation in both pre- and post-lapsarian contexts into the eschatological trajectory of redemptive history, even of creation itself. It recognizes there is a protological general-special coordination and that after the fall this coordination remains in place. So the Vosian tradition specializes in constructive sensitivity to the correlation between nature and Scripture.

For the Vosian, Scripture is re-interpretation of reality. By ‘reality’ we mean ‘nature’ or ‘the world’ or ‘the cosmos’, or the image-bearer’s context as a whole—creation itself. By ‘re-interpretation’ we mean not a repeated interpretation but an explanation of reality that is corrective of false interpretation, and in this sense redemptive.

Vos’ view of Scripture is an alternative to those views, explicitly articulated or implied in method, which uproot Scripture from its native soil in nature and history, or which, in one way or another, obscure, dissolve, or misconstrue the distinction-in-relation between nature and Scripture. For the truthfulness and trustworthiness of special revelation, it is essential to affirm the prior revelatory abundance of non-verbal general revelation as the context for forthcoming speech from God in creaturely language.[1] And the fact that special revelation was a necessary presupposition for the creature’s righteous, integrity-confirming interpretation of general revelation even before the fall, makes all the difference. Before the entrance of sin, special revelation was essential to a correct and Creator-honoring interpretation of the world, an interpretation prioritizing the Creator’s Lordship primarily in the garden-temple and by implication in all of creation and all aspects of life. Only this interpretation could have been covenant-confirming. The point is that nature and Scripture constitute by divine institution an interpretive unit, an organic whole, the rendering asunder of which represents sin, transgression, and covenant-breaking in its most primal form.

This is all somewhat abstract. I hope in what follows to substantiate this line of thinking through an investigation into the classical ‘attributes of Scripture’—authority, necessity, perspicuity, and sufficiency (the order is not important)—employing a Vosian view of the coordination of nature and Scripture, and referring often to the very rich treatment of these themes in chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession. This is what I attempt here: a discussion of redemptive history and the attributes of Scripture.

I. Authority

Westminster Confession chapter 1, on Holy Scripture, concludes with this statement on the authority of Scripture:

The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.

So the last word of WCF chapter 1 is a resounding declaration of the supremacy of Scripture in the life of the church in all matters. And here section 1.10 the confession casts the authority in practical terms, naming even specific occasions in which its authority should be carefully heeded. But Scripture is not simply a more authoritative voice. Its authority it not distinguished primarily by degree but by kind.

The authority of Scripture is Scripture’s self-authentication, self-attestation, or self-attested trustworthiness (Bavinck’s term). To affirm the authority of Scripture is to affirm that Scripture bears authority because it is the word of God, and additionally to affirm its uniqueness on this count. Scripture alone is self-authenticating or self-attesting—because no one bestows authority upon God, nor is divine authority subject to authentication by a third party. He is the eternal I AM and Lord of all.

Self-attestation, in other words, is authority understood as an attribute of Holy Scripture, as an implication of Scripture’s nature as divinely authored special revelation. Scripture has divine authority because it is the Word of God, because its primary author is God.

Self-attestation is the core of biblical authority; it is its particular nature. Self-attestation means that the authority of Scripture is of a distinct category, not an exceptional degree—not more but another kind of authority. The implication of Scripture’s uniqueness as the very speech of God is that it is self-attesting.

Generally speaking, authentication or attestation means the confirmation or verification of the genuineness or trustworthiness of something. Recently, a cashier betrayed a seriously unwound sense of humor by asking to see my ID when I attempted to purchase a bottle of wine. The cashier was requesting verification (authentication, etc.) of my legal entitlement to make that purchase. But Scripture authenticates itself. When God speaks, no one asks for his ID. There is no need. There is no court of authentication in which God may be required to vindicate or explain himself, since the Lord is the judge of judges and the king of kings. There is no measure of veridicality by which the trustworthiness of Scripture ought to be evaluated. Notice that to appeal to an external authority even in positive defense of the trustworthiness of Scripture is to subject Scripture to that external authority; this is to treat Scripture as less than divine. This subjugation—again, even in defense of Scripture—re-arranges the structure of Christian epistemology at ground level, and it violates the most basic fact of Christian religion: the unqualified ontological supremacy of God a se.

John Locke argued that we ought to believe anything that God says on the basis of the fact that God has said it, and that this, taking something as true on the basis of the authority of the speaker or author, is the core of faith. And it is easy to sympathize with his view. But then he also argued that all claims to divine authorship must be established by sufficient evidence. And so, while appearing to affirm a healthy doctrine of revelational authority, by delegating to empirical realism this role of adjudication, Locke undermines the self-attesting authority of Scripture, rendering it a matter of subjective evidentialist autonomy; and there is no recovery from a position like that. As a river never runs higher than its source, so the conclusion can never exceed the nature of the evidence. Self-consistency for Locke will undermine all supernaturalism. By contrast, we affirm that if God says it, it is true; and by the nature of the case, that is, according to Christian-theistic principia (versus subjective, univocal, empiricist principia), God’s speech is not subject to external authentication of any kind. Scripture attests to its own authority. Thus maintaining consistently the coordination of our ontology with our method leads to a sound notion of the self-attestation of Scripture.

Much more can be said. In order to dig a bit deeper, I propose we distinguish between individual and ecclesial dimensions of self-attestation.

I. a. Self-attestation and the church

On the ecclesial side, it is important to affirm a proper church-Scripture prioritization: the self-authenticating Scripture precedes and gives existence to the church. In Roman Catholicism, the recognition by the church of Scripture as authoritative represents Scripture’s having authority. After I defended my dissertation, a faculty member performed the investiture of the degree of doctor; he wielded the power of the university and of the college of deans, and by extension the authority of the ministry of education, and so on. Before the ceremony I was ABD; after, by the power of ceremony and pronouncement, I was officially Dr. Shannon. Likewise, recognition and official ecclesial pronouncement is what makes a piece of writing Holy Scripture.

‘Recognition’ is perhaps not the most helpful term here, since we may say both that we recognize something which precedes our recognition of it and that the recognition of something constitutes the thing. We might say that Rome treats its recognition as bestowal; the Reformed, by contrast, as ‘acknowledgement’ or ‘confession’. But however we nuance the terminology, the Roman church holds that the ‘community’, or the church, is endowed with revelatory authority, and that this communal endowment precedes the authority of the Scriptures.

We should note that in some sense, the Reformed view is similar—we speak of ‘apostolic teaching’, the teaching of a fixed group of individuals as such, as the authoritative teaching. We say “Paul believed” this or that, or “Peter emphasized” this or that; and we mean that indeed the Lord himself teaches these things in the Bible. But to alter slightly the terms, as the Roman Church does, so that the community precedes the authority of the text, makes all the difference. We rather affirm that Spirit-inspired, Scripture (OT)-bound teaching constituted the authoritative, apostolic dispensation and constitutes the true church today. We can see this in the fact that Paul defends his apostolicity by demonstrating consistency in what he taught with what the leaders in Jerusalem were teaching. And at one point he even calls Peter out. The church is the work of the Spirit; the church does not wield the Spirit. So however nuanced the discussion becomes—and it does indeed require care and precision—the Reformed maintain priority of the self-attesting Scripture over the image-bearers who acknowledge the Bible’s authority. Bavinck writes, “[a]ll of them explain the continued existence of the church in terms of the leading of the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of Christ, but this has its organ, the pope in the case of Rome, the organism of the church in the case of Schleiermacher, and for Anabaptism, in every individual believer.”[2]

Admittedly, this story of Roman Catholic doctrine is rather haphazardly told and retold, and often superficially. That is, if you read Roman Catholic literature on the authority of Scripture, you will encounter a lot more complexity, and you may wonder whether the narrative I’ve just recycled is trustworthy. We might point to Eph 2, which says that the “household of God” is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (2:19, 20). But what does this text really say? Is the church built on community, on the persons of the apostles? In some distinct ways, I think it is.

In fact there is widespread agreement on the ‘authority of Scripture’, generally speaking, but it is construed variously, accounted for in multiple distinguishable ways, and observed in hermeneutics with varying degrees of consistency. But anyway, the point is that Scripture, by virtue of its divine nature and authority, gives life to the church, even creates the church, and not the other way around. The Bible itself is explicit about this, but anyway this is simply to say that the church must be founded upon true, revealed confession; it is the truth of God upon which the church is built. “On this rock I will build my church” – the rock is Peter’s confession, revealed to him by the Father in heaven, not Peter’s confession (Matt 16:18). Bavinck’s observations are helpful:

In virtually all theologians today, one can now find the idea that the church existed before Scripture and can therefore also exist independently of Scripture. The church rests in itself, lives from itself, i.e., from the Spirit, who dwells in it. Holy Scripture, which proceeded from the church at its beginning in the freshness and vitality of its youth, though its norm, is not its source. The source is the personal living Christ who indwells the church. Dogmatics is the description of the life, the explication of religious consciousness, of the church. In that process, as its guideline, dogmatics has Scripture, which interpreted the life of the church first and most clearly. Hence the church is actually the author of the Bible, and the Bible is the reflection of the church.[3]

My point is that consistent affirmation and application, particularly at the hermeneutical level, of biblical authority in the form of self-attestation, sets Reformed ecclesiology apart.

I. b. Self-authentication and the individual believer

The individual dimension of self-authentication also deserves attention. How do you know that the Bible is the word of God? Put differently, why do you believe that the Bible is the word of God? Self-attestation makes this question a favorite of critics of the faith. To critics, self-attestation sounds something like ‘I call out of bounds any unwelcome inquiry into the rationality of my religious beliefs’; or ‘I refuse to allow my Christian beliefs to be questioned or critiqued’; or ‘The Bible says so (or at least I think it does, on my interpretation), so I don’t have to listen to anyone else’s opinion on the matter’.

No doubt, well hid behind the superficiality of the wording, lie concerns which deserve our attention, but the issue here is whether Scripture is self- or other-authenticated. To pierce the façade of this challenging line of questioning, we must recognize the essential distinction between, on the one hand, private, personal, subjective epistemic experience or epistemic account, and on the other, the intrinsic authority of inscripturated divine speech. We might call this a subjective/objective distinction. Herman Bavinck hints at this distinction when he says, “there is a difference between a motive for believing and the final ground for faith.”[4]

Objectively speaking, Scripture bears unique, intrinsic authority, reflecting the authority and even the ontological uniqueness of God himself. On account of this authority, the Bible ought to be believed. But subjectively, the individual Christian is often led by the Spirit to recognize the authority of Scripture by means of various kinds—ordinary means, in most cases, such as the testimony of the church. So Augustine: “I indeed would not have believed the gospel had not the authority of the Catholic church moved me.”[5] Where Augustine says, ‘I believe because the church led me to believe’, he speaks of his own, private epistemic experience. He is describing the means which the Spirit used to lead him to the truth, to conviction and the confession that the Bible is the Word of God. This is what Bavinck calls a “motive” for believing. Notice that this is part of Augustine’s personal testimony; it is not his doctrine of Scripture.

Alternatively, the “final ground for faith,” the objective ‘reason’ for believing that what the Bible says is true, is the Scripture’s own divine authority. No other reason—no other more ultimate account for Scripture’s claim on our allegiance—can be given. Bavinck puts it this way:

The church with its dignity, power, hierarchy, and so forth always made a profound impression on Augustine. It continually moved him toward faith, supported and strengthened him in times of doubt and struggle; it was the church’s firm hand that always again guided him to Scripture. But Augustine does not thereby mean to say that the authority of Scripture depends on the church, that the church is the final and most basic ground of faith. Elsewhere he clearly states that Scripture has authority of itself and must be believed for its own sake.[6]

The doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration teaches that Scripture is the Word of God and that all of the words of the Bible are God’s words. The Bible is inspired and trustworthy in its every word. So we deny a distinction between Scripture and the Word of God, such as is found in the thought of Karl Barth. Bavinck says that dividing between the word of God and Scripture “renders the authority of Scripture completely illusory.”[7] And indeed maintaining this distinction undermines the authority of preaching. Anywhere where this distinction is taken seriously, the ‘encounter’ with the Word of God will be subjectivized and true religion undermined.

In my view, the rending asunder Scripture and the Word of God makes theological knowledge impossible. We must affirm that Scripture reveals but also that Scripture is revelation. Without the divine, revelatory nature of Scripture, we are not obliged—and not even able—to think God’s thoughts after him. So without the divinity of Scripture, without identifying Scripture with the Word of God—God’s very own words—religion takes decisive steps toward subjective mysticism. In Bavinck’s view, “[w]ithout this certainty,” the certainty that comes from affirming the divine origin of Scripture, “there is no comfort in either life or death.”[8] If he means to draw our attention to question 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism, he means that there is no salvation.

Much of this is neatly packed into two sections of Westminster Confession chapter 1. Section 4 names the objective or final ground of trust in Scripture: God himself.[9] Section 5 describes various evidences—features and characteristics of Scripture—as persuasive indications of its uniqueness, and as the means by which the Spirit may bring us to acknowledge the divine origin and authority of Scripture.[10] Notice, then, that the Confession makes this distinction: by evidences we may be “moved and induced” to reverence of Scripture, but “full persuasion and assurance” is by the inward work of the Spirit. Evidence is the means by which we may be stirred and challenged; only the Spirit of Christ can humble the sinner before the Bible. One’s attitude toward Scripture is a covenantal, soteric matter, since its authority is derived from the ontology of its triune author. The authority of Scripture is not a question of brute ‘science’, adjudicated in terms of neutral factuality, evidentialism, or one brand or another of autonomous ‘realism’. And the apologetic implications can’t be missed either: the persuasive means available to human apologists and evangelists are clearly defined and clearly distinguished from the Spirit’s role of convicting and converting. Accordingly, Westminster Confession 1.6 affirms that soterically efficacious Spirit-indwelling is the necessary condition for subjective acknowledgment of biblical authority and self-attestation: “we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God as necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the Word.”

‘How do you know that the Bible is the word of God?’ is an ambiguous question. It means either (or both), how did you come to believe that? and on what grounds should it be believed? I might answer: “I was indeed moved by the testimony of the church, the power of preaching, and by the efficacy of the Scripture’s teaching—that is, by the real change that I saw in people and experienced in myself, wrought by the teaching of the Bible. But ultimately God changed my heart so that I see in the Bible the very words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

II. Necessity

The key in terms of necessity, as for other attributes of Scripture, is to put our backs toward abstract notions. Scripture is not ‘abstractly’ necessary. It bears a particular kind of necessity: redemptive-historical necessity.

The opening sentence of the Westminster confession affirms the clarity of general revelation and its sufficiency for revealing God and convicting the sinner, but also the insufficiency of general revelation for redemption. Thus, here in the very first sentence of the confession we see the redemptive necessity of special revelation, the indispensability of a redemptive word from God.[11] And the following sentence, speaking of “the better preserving and propagating of the truth,” represents concern for what we might call ‘practical’ or even ‘historico-practical’ necessity. And so, the Westminster Confession opens with a dual affirmation of what I shall call the practical and the redemptive necessity of Scripture.

II. a. Historico-practical necessity

The necessity of Scripture is redemptive-historical. Accordingly, when we speak of the necessity of Scripture we have in mind the movement of redemptive history, and most specifically our own post-apostolic context in which the canon of Scripture is closed. So, to paraphrase the confession, Scripture is necessary for the preservation and faithful proclamation of the gospel, that Word of God that is constitutive of the people of God. Notice, however, that Scripture is necessary in this sense given God’s redemptive purpose, which is free and uncompelled; this necessity is not absolute or generic. Historical necessity is conditional upon particular circumstances of history, and this history, of course, proceeds by God’s Word (common) grace only. So we could say, in God’s plan for and sovereignty in redemption, he has given us his inscripturated Word, even the very words of eternal life, for the safe-keeping and preservation of and by the church, until he brings all his enemies under his feet and the number of the elect is complete. “Seek the Lord while he may be found” (Isa 55:6) means, in part, ‘read your Bible’.

The necessity of Scripture for this practical purpose, the preservation and propagation of the gospel, implies the necessity of Scripture for the preservation and faithfulness of the visible church itself as the institutional means for gospel proclamation. We may develop then, now with necessity in mind, what we have already said about the authority of Scripture relative to the church. Above I put authority in ecclesiological terms; the question of necessity is a more obviously practical one, having to do with gospel faithfulness and soundness of ministry. So necessity is a matter of method, and of the consistent and persistent application in the life of the church of the Scriptures as authoritative. The ‘necessity of Scripture’ says that this application, and consistency in it, is the divinely instituted means for the ministry to and perseverance of the visible body of Christ. This is no small matter, and since it is a practical matter we are open to creaturely though Scripture-bound oversight on the one hand, while we affirm unattenuated biblical authority on the other.

It should not escape our attention that this practical necessity of Scripture has significant implications for how we view history itself. As noted at the outset, one’s view of Scripture and one’s view of history are mutually informative. And in this case, we should emphasize that the practical necessary of Scripture implies a thoroughly redemptive view of history.

Bavinck points out that “Scripture, like revelation, is an organic whole that has gradually come into being; the mature plant was already enclosed in the seed, the fruit was present in the germ.”[12] Scripture, as special revelation, is organic and progressively unfolding because revelation itself is, too, and so is the Lord’s redemptive work in history. As the revelation of the gospel unfolds, so Scripture is augmented and enriched, and these two—revelation and inscripturation—track with the historical progress and development of revelation itself. So Bavinck: “Revelation and Scripture both kept pace with the state of the church, and vice versa.”[13] And since these are coordinate, says Bavinck, “one can never draw conclusions for the present based on conditions prevailing in the church in the past.” So the necessity of Scripture in the historico-practical sense is a reflection of the redemptive-historical context. In our case, in the already-not-yet, revelation is concluded and canon is closed; so the Scripture is necessary. And so, Bavinck concludes, for this dispensation Scripture is not only useful and good but also decidedly necessary “for the being (esse) of the church.”[14]

The implication, again, is that the necessity of Scripture is not absolute or generic; there are conditions on its necessity. Those conditions are redemptive-historical, so that for the sake of precision we might say that Scripture is necessary as what it is: the mode of God’s maintaining his church and preserving his gospel in the already-not-yet. This qualification is important because, conversely, the necessity of Scripture is a tenuous notion when it is not considered within a biblical understanding of redemptive history or even of history as itself the history of redemption. Scripture is necessary with the full force of the call, “repent and believe, for the kingdom of heaven is near,” with the full force of eschatological anticipation. As Jesus warns, “as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man” (Matt 24:38–39). And crucial part of the believer’s anticipation and readiness is discernment (Matt 24:23-28), for which inscripturated revelation is essential.

Indeed, without the eschatological anticipation of the biblical view of history, Scripture floats whimsically above the created order like dispensable fiction. In such a rootless state, the necessity of Scripture becomes paper-thin and Christian truth claims dissolve into pluralism. So on the one hand, if history itself is taken as impersonal and purposeless, or as static and ‘taken for granted’, the necessity of Scripture becomes a kind of pointless abstraction. And on the other hand, where the necessity of Scripture is construed abstractly, severed from the historical movement of redemption and eschatology, as nothing more than ‘a most important book’, a gap between religion and reality takes shape.

An important implication of this understanding of necessity as redemptive historical is that one cannot affirm the necessity of Scripture and then understate the necessity of missions, evangelism, and the active preservation of sound teaching. So we can’t say that the Bible is necessary but then sympathize with any notion that salvation—the saving work of the Spirit—will operate independently of the truth-content of Scripture, or that the expansion of the kingdom will proceed apart from the sound preaching and teaching of churchmen. In Acts 4, Peter preaches that “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” This is not an emotional outburst on the part of Peter; it is a soteriological reality, both terrifying and wonderful.

The necessity of Scripture puts before us the mystery of the Lord’s working salvation through ordinary means. In the execution of his sovereign and immutable determination to save, the Lord deigns to contend with the forces of history. By placing the hope of redemption in the seed of the woman, the proto-gospel ordains marriage and procreation as an essential ordinary means for the building of the kingdom of God, the arrival of the second Adam, and the completion of the number of the elect (Gen 3:15). And this genetic housing of the promise displays throughout Scripture not divine racial favor, but rather a priestly mediatorial function for the sake of all people (Gen 12:1–3; Ex 19:6; 1 Peter 2:9; Rev 5:9). Consequently, the faithful preaching of the word by finite men serves both evangelism and the purification of the church as she looks forward to glorification (1 Cor 1:21; Rom 10:14–15). That the word of God is “living and active” is crucial to the biblical doctrine of the necessity of Scripture, and in fact lies at the heart of Christian theism.

Once again, Bavinck summarizes nicely: “The brevity of life, the unreliability of memory, the craftiness of the human heart, and a host of other dangers that threaten the purity of transmission all make the inscripturation of the spoken word absolutely necessary if it is to be preserved and propagated.”[15] So, Scripture is necessary for the preservation and proclamation of sound doctrine, and even for the movement of the gospel itself and the kingdom, until the return of Christ.

II.b. Soteric necessity

In this second sense, Scripture is necessary we might say as an interpretive or re-interpretive interruption. Without an authoritative and corrective and even judging word from God, man will always suppress the truth in unrighteousness by interpreting autonomously both himself and the world.

As Kuyper taught, the sinner’s basic assumption is that the abnormal is normal, even that the fallen is normative. The sinner takes his own moral, religious, scientific self as trustworthy and regulative.

This assumption is fundamentally wicked and sinful; it is of the essence of sin and covenant breaking. As Oliphint argues, following Van Til, it is the essence of irrationality and cognitive disarray.[16] This interpretive autonomy begins when “the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Gen 3:6). Eve’s autonomy represents a breakdown in the creational, revelatory organism of the covenant between God and man. That is, general revelation even in the pre-lapsarian context was on the one hand sufficient to declare much about the divine nature and God’s requirements for man, but on the other hand it is incomplete. General is the context for special, even in the pre-lapsarian order. The prohibition which the Lord speaks to Adam in Gen 2:17 is the specific covenantal and probationary statute according to which Adam is to interpret everything that surrounds him: all is given of God to man, to enjoy and to keep (Gen 2:16), save the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17). Adam’s remaining and indeed growing in covenantal integrity before the Lord consists in his acknowledging, preserving, and participating in the perfect interpretative coordination of general and special revelation. But autonomy interrupts, and in a single interpretative adjustment man declares “I am lord.”

The Lord’s response to sin, by his uncompelled, de-merited favor, is the crushing of the incarnate Son on our behalf. We see on the cross both grace and judgment, or grace through judgment. In the same way, Scripture itself as redemptive word represents the soterically necessary judging and redeeming interruption of the sinner’s interpretive self-worship. As God’s soterically efficacious interpretation of his saving deeds, Scripture is necessary because the sinner’s primary endeavor in life is to explain away God and the sinner’s own beholdenness to his Creator. Van Til says somewhere that the “unbeliever is a busier man than he appears to be.” The sinner’s chief occupation in all that he does is the suppression of the truth in unrighteousness. Since this truth surrounds the image-bearer and even calls to him from his own moral self-consciousness, obscuring the knowledge of God is no easy undertaking. So the normal in fact is the abnormal, and fallen man can no more reason toward a true interpretation of himself and the world than dry bones can take on flesh and breathe new life into their own nostrils. Truth and life come from God. Thus the soteric necessity of Scripture.

Van Til brings together nicely the historical necessity with this soteric or regenerative necessity: “If an authoritative interpretation were not given to the redemptive facts, if the interpretation were left to men, it is certain that the redemptive revelation of God would not be able to reach the ends of the earth and maintain itself to the end of time.”[17]

III. Perspicuity

It may help to distinguish three aspects of the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture. First, Scripture is meant for all. The notion of the perspicuity of Scripture stands for the simple affirmation that Scripture is clear and intelligible, that reading and interpretation of the Bible is not the exclusive domain of the clergy or the academy, and that only the Lord judges the consciences of men. Scripture is clear and accessible. Westminster Confession 1.7 reads:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.

So the Reformed insist that Scripture is perspicuous, or clear, and this much is implied by the necessity of Scripture, as we have understood it. We affirmed above that Scripture is necessary for the faithful preservation of the apostolic teaching, and even for salvation itself. How ‘necessary’ for such purposes could a text be if it were opaque and impenetrable? If the Bible were unclear, it could not possibly be necessary, much less the ordained means for the faithful preservation and propagation of the gospel. So in one sense to say that Scripture is intelligible is simply to affirm an implication of its necessity.

Notice also that there is named nowhere in Scripture an authoritative interpreter of created nature. The final section of WCF chapter 1 affirms what is an implication of this generally accessibility, that the Bible neither names nor needs a designated, authoritative interpreter. So WCF 1.10 subjugates all competing voices, “all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits,” to Scripture, and to the pious interpretation of Scripture by individual regenerate Christians, interpreting Scripture with the aid of the regenerating Holy Spirit, or more cautiously, “the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.”

Rome has traditionally inveighed against the impious and corrosive individualism of Protestantism. A large part of what they have in mind are these implications of the perspicuity of Scripture. Van Til says that perspicuity is opposed to clericalism and the “Roman Catholic notion that no ordinary member of the church may interpret Scripture for himself directly.”[18] And Bavinck says that “the denial of the clarity of Scripture carries with it the subjection of the layperson to the priest, of a person’s conscience to the church.” “It alone,” that is, the clarity of Scripture, says Bavinck, “is able to maintain the freedom of the Christian; it is the origin and guarantee of religious liberty as well as of our political freedoms.”[19]

Second, in WCF 1.9 we find what is called the ‘analogy of faith’: “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.” Perspicuity also means, in other words, that where there are difficult passages, these may be interpreted in light of those passages which are more easily understood. This aspect of perspicuity is an implication of the idea that Scripture is a self-consistent unit. Scripture, says the confession, “is not manifold, but one” (1.9). Scripture in a sense talks to itself, and our task as interpreters is to step into the seamless unity Scripture’s self-witness.

It is important to note that the analogy of faith and the self-interpretation of Scripture are affirmed, we might say, a priori; they are not hypotheses confirmed inductively, by sufficient evidence, and thus relegated to the whims of subjective experience. If the primary author of Scripture is the one true God, one essence in three persons, perfect and self-existent to all eternity, then his Word must also be self-consistent and unified, even in its richness and complexity. Contradictions and discrepancies are apparent only, though they may persist. It is a basic part of Christian theism that God is one and faithful. And since this is true, God’s Word is clear and intelligible, unified and unbreakable, even if it is at many points mysterious to the finite image-bearer. This theological unity, which lies behind the notion of perspicuity, is why we say that no doctrine should be built on a single verse. (Nor, in fact, may infallibility be challenged a posteriori. Such a challenge represents a confusion of categories.) It is a disservice to perspicuity and Christian principia to build a doctrine on sparse textual evidence. In fact, every theological dogma, every claim of systematic theology, should have the full support of the whole text of the Bible. Scripture interprets Scripture.

Third, by affirming the clarity and intelligibility of Scripture, the doctrine of perspicuity declares in the face of the great mystery of divine truth delivered in created media that God can be known and that theology is possible. It is of the essence of the doctrines of revelation and of Christian theism that God comes to man and makes himself known. The lord in this sense condescends, and accommodates divine truth to our finite capacities. And the possibility of true religion and the truth of Christian confession depend on this accommodated knowledge, this accommodated theology, being a re-statement, in creaturely form, of divine self-knowledge, rather than a re-interpretation. Between archetypal and ectypcal knowledge of God there must be a measure of common domain, or Christian theism is severed from true theology. We affirm a dual notion of truth, distinguishing between God-as-he-is-in-himself and God-as-he-reveals himself, unto the squandering of biblical truth. So in light of perspicuity, theologico-epistemological priority falls to the plain, self-interpreted meaning of Scripture. God reveals himself in fisherman’s Greek, without the need of an erudite interpreter—indeed, despite the erudite interpreter (1 Cor 1:18–31). If the creature cannot by repeating what Scripture says or by affirming what Scripture implies say true things about God, nothing true about God can be known or affirmed. “The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile” (1 Cor 3:20).

Scripture gives us clear, self-consistent, positive (kataphatic) knowledge of God and his saving truth; but the rich truth given in Scripture will always resist our efforts at a clean and comprehensive systematization—because we are finite, not because God’s truth benefits for our conceptual tidying.

The great mystery here is that inscripturated revelation depends upon our knowledge of created things. Special revelation draws freely from the lexicon of creaturely existence. So can the Bible really give us truth about an infinite God, if its vocabulary is limited to the stuff of creaturely experience? The danger here is that the divinity of Scripture dissolves into the soil of a finite world. If this happens, Scripture could not vindicate any claim to positive, contentful knowledge of God. We would not in the end have revelation, but only non-referential religious talk and religious non-realism.

To avoid this corruption of creatureliness, we might emphasize the heavenliness of Scripture. But there is a danger here, too: we might exaggerate the self-interpretation of Scripture so that it sounds like self-referentiality. Scripture becomes hermetic, self-referential divine speech. When we read the Bible we are eve’s dropping on private divine conversation. Doing theology would be like attempting to interpret a private divine language. God says things, but this is all we know, that he says them, and even the idea of God ‘speaking’ must be re-interpreted in mystical fashion. So the claim that Scripture’s self-interpretation is impenetrable and inaccessible to the creature ends in mysticism: there is a God, but we cannot know anything about him. Theological predication is equivocal and thus meaningless.

Conversely, we might concede the worldliness of revelatory means while extoling the divine otherness of Scripture’s true content. The notion of accommodation works like a sieve, catching the misrepresentations that encumber worldly modes of expression. Different from metaphor, which Scripture uses self-consciously, creaturely anthropomorphisms are like helpless revelatory indicators, pointing upward into the boundless, ineffable heavens—to what, no one knows.

We believe that Scripture is clear and self-interpreting as special revelation within a context of general revelation. The world that we know by experience is given by God, created by God, filled with God, revelatory of God—including ourselves as creatures of God and even more acutely as image-bearers. So when Scripture uses human language, it borrows from a lexicon of created things, yes, but these created things are already revelatory. The principle reason that this use by God in Scripture of created things—words and concepts and things—does not undermine the possibility of true knowledge of God or reduce God to a creature is that the world is revelatory of God in the first place; the world is given-of-God, and the innate coordination of general and special revelation is by prelapsarian, protological design. The lexicon God borrows from is his own.

What is foreign in this context is the sinner’s autonomous, self-glorifying interpretation of himself and his world. In other words, Scripture is not a divine word dropped into a brute and godless, non-divine world. Scripture is inspired interpretation of God’s redemptive activity in history and in his own revelatory creation. We must maintain throughout the full scope of Christian theism, and the clarity of God’s written Word.

IV. Sufficiency

To keep things interesting here in this closing section, I will say first what the sufficiency of Scripture is not. Sufficient does not mean comprehensive; it is not the case that everything the church will ever need—articles of government or organization, for example—can be found in the Bible. Westminster Confession 1.6 confirms that “there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be preserved.”

Nor is Scripture an encyclopedia of apostolic or prophetic deeds and utterances. Much is left unrecorded (Jn 20:30, 21:25). Nor does it mean that the Bible an the exhaustive collection of inspired writings. We know that apostolic writings have been lost, and there is no reason to deny the possibility that some of this may have been inspired. But all that is needed for salvation is contained in Scripture; all truth necessary for eschatological peace with God and consummate covenant communion with our Creator and judge is given in Scripture. So Bavinck: “Quantitatively revelation was much richer and more comprehensive than Scripture has preserved for us; but qualitatively and in terms of substance, Holy Scripture is perfectly adequate for our salvation.”[20] And the confession: “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture . . .” (1.6)

Notice the implication of sufficiency for confessionalism: the stark distinction between authoritative, divinely inspired revelation and ‘authoritative’ human tradition, between the ‘norming norm’ and the ‘normed norm’, is affirmed in our confession. The Westminster Confession is is self-limiting. The confession includes a list of the books of the Bible (1.2) as the closed (1.6) canon of inspired and authoritative biblical texts, and specifically excludes the apocrypha (1.3). The confession affirms the authority of Scripture over all traditions of men (1.10) and relegates those things not addressed in or by Scripture to “Christian prudence and the light of nature” (1.6). So the confession itself gives us a clear philosophy of confessionalism, in which secondary literature is subordinated to the canonical Scriptures; and it offers even this very notion of tradition as part of its summary of the teaching of Scripture. In this sense the confession is aware of its own secondary status and of that status as established by the Bible.

Notice of course that Scripture developed over the course of redemptive history. For a time, there was no Scripture. And the text of Scripture grew as redemption approached the fullness of time. But at each point along the way, whatever Holy Scripture the people of God possessed was sufficient. Though this does not mean that still today, any smaller portion of Scripture than the whole of it is sufficient, that for example we could dispense with the NT and still have a redemptively sufficient Bible. As Vos writes, “[w]hen cut loose from what went before and came after, Jesus not only becomes uninterpretable, but owing to the meteoric character of His appearance, remains scarcely sufficient for bearing by Himself alone the tremendous weight of a supernaturalistic world-view.”[21]

The NT records and interprets the redemptive work of the incarnate Son, the messiah of the OT—who was sent in the fullness of time, who spoke in “these last days,” who is the eschatological priest, the final prophet, the fulfillment of all of God’s promises, and the sum of all things. The Holy Spirit no longer adds, but only enlightens and applies. Jesus in fact says that he must leave so that he can send the Spirit (John 16:7). So there is a shift here in God’s redemptive activity, and it is a shift from accomplishment to application. Accordingly, revelation will now turn from deed to explanatory word. As Bavinck says,

In Christ God’s revelation has been completed. In the same way the message of salvation is completely contained in Scripture. It constitutes a single whole; it itself conveys the impression of an organism that has reached its full growth. It ends where it begins. It is a circle that returns into itself. It begins with the creation of heaven and earth and ends with the recreation of heaven and earth.[22]

I close with a quote from another Dutch Reformed writer, highlighting the organic and unified nature of Scripture—even as this unity and perfection is implied in the redemptive purpose of inscripturated special revelation—and thus, we hope, of our understanding of it:

All these matters overlap and are involved in one another, and it is well to see that they do. The four attributes of Scripture are equally important because if we did not have them all, we would have none. The whole matter centers on an absolutely true interpretation that came into a world full of false interpretation.[23]

Notes

[1] See Vern S. Poythress,“Rethinking Accommodation in Revelation,” Westminster Theological Journal 76, no. 1 (2014): 143–156.

[2] Bavinck, RD I, 469.

[3] Bavinck, RD I, 468. The biblical notion of tradition, writes Bavinck, is of “the doctrine and practices that had been received from the apostles and were preserved and reproduced in the churches” (RD I, 483). See Herman Ridderbos, Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures.

[4] Bavinck, RD I, 457.

[5] Augustine, “Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manicheas,” 5,6:PL 42,176

[6] Bavinck, RD I, 457.

[7] Bavinck, RD I, 461.

[8] Bavinck, RD I, 461.

[9] WCF 1.4 reads, “The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.”

[10] WCF 1.5 reads, “We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the church to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God: yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.”

[11] In addition, notice in WCF 1.1 (quoted below) that the Westminster divines understood Scripture as representing finality, but not uniqueness in terms of redemptive-historicity. The “former ways,” whose obsolescence occasioned inscripturation, also bore redemptive-historical necessity. Their very passing into disuse is a function of this redemptive-historical modus on God’s part and demonstrates the redemptive-historical essence of special revelation in any and all its forms. WCF 1.1 is as follows: “Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation. Therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing: which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary; those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased.”

[12] Bavinck, RD I, 471.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Bavinck, RD I, 471.

[16] See “The Irrationality of Unbelief: An Exegetical Study,” in Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics, K. Scott Oliphint and Lane G. Tipton, eds. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007).

[17] Cornelius Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 225.

[18] Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 226.

[19] Bavinck, RD I, 479.

[20] Bavinck, RD I, 491.

[21] Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments, 302.

[22] Bavinck, RD I, 491.

[23] Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 227.

As I think about these topics and discuss them with friends, I find it remarkable that they appear at once crucial to our understanding of church and worship, but also rather conspicuously non-essential. I am less comfortable with the latter observation, admittedly, but I think it holds true. Here is what I mean.

Notice that within the world of conservative, English-speaking evangelicalism, there is clear division and unceasing debate on ecclesiology and baptism, some two thousand years into the New Testament era. At its best the debate betrays diligence and reverence for the subject matter. It betrays this in its specificity and in its intensity. These are intense and involved, in-house debates. And the importance of the issues in question is beyond dispute. As a friend put it recently, one’s ecclesiology, implicitly or explicitly, constitutes one’s answer to such practical and fundamental questions as: to whom do we preach on Sunday mornings? and can a Christian lose his salvation?

Such questions can and should be and often are treated with tremendous care and solemnity. As noted, the great significance of ecclesiology and one’s view of baptism is unmistakable. But theologians, I think, see so immediately the depth and complexity of these matters that they are perhaps prone to bypass the plain and simple practicality in view.

I think of unbelievers and the unchurched, and how it must appear from their point of view that evangelical baptists and presbyterians, indistinguishable on his socio-cultural atlas, cannot come to terms even on something as mundane as ‘what the church is’ and ‘who can really be a member.’ I would have to think that to the unchurched this borders on the absurd. The confusion and civil disarray must appear to him as a kind of jejune and shameful idiosyncrasy of small-minded Bible-thumpers.

Now I am not suggesting that we take this demography as normative, but I think it is useful in the following way. The distinction between the ‘normal’ and the Bible-thumper, so clear on the unbeliever’s map, is perhaps neither more nor less ‘important’, whatever that might mean, than distinctions drawn in the theological laboratory (paedo v credo, for example), but it bears a unique brand of urgency that should not be forgotten. What I mean is that we have two pairs of classes in view: baptist and presby, churched and unchurched. The former distinction is theologically complex and comparatively in-house (where the house is the church universal). The latter is also theologically complex, but since it is not in-house (or it’s a different, far larger house), the theological focus shifts accordingly. Ecclesiology and baptism, generally speaking, are relevant in either context, but the context is different and I think this is significant.

The unbeliever’s ‘me vs them,’ to my mind, stands as a helpful reminder that, for all the diligence and seriousness rightly devoted to ecclesiology and baptism and such things, precision and clarity are at a premium: what exactly are we doing? It ought to be clear and precisely understood that the principle undertaking here is the grateful and obedient searching of the Scriptures and the stewardship of the oracles of God. Various alternatives vie for prominence: literary eloquence, theological sophistication, argumentative force, professional or social distinction, the thrill of the polemical hunt, or self-glorification in some other form. But what ought to be foremost in the mind and most evident to the observer—to the unchurched, the weaker brother, or the seasoned interlocutor—is merely the proper orientation of the people of God to the Word and the proper method of seeking God while he may be found. A fine example of this has been clear to me in the preaching of the senior minister at my church in Philadelphia. He preaches warning, he preaches encouragement, he preaches the gospel and the love of Christ, even in these various ways addressing directly at times the unbeliever, all with the force and richness of the full canonical witness. So that’s what I mean.

Not that anyone was mistaken about this, but in my own learning I have barely scratched the surface of the biblical teaching and the historical writing on ecclesiology and baptism. And my point here is that the importance of these issues cannot be overstated, but it can be rather imprecisely stated, or anyway implicitly misconstrued. I’ll just add that in all likelihood I’m talking to myself here.

My initial thought was to put briefly into writing a few introductory comments toward a redemptive historical response to a purified ecclesiology—positively stated, to articulate the starting point for an ecclesiology rooted in a redemptive-historical (Vosian) understanding of biblical revelation. I had planned to do this without bothering with baptism, but as it turns out baptism has quite something to do with ecclesiology. Even more surprising: I am interested in this connection. But the redeeming fact is that both provide an opportunity to reflect upon or even better to explore the fruit of viewing Scripture as divinely inspired interpretation of the organic and unified but historically progressive redemption of God in Christ.

I expect that what follows will come across at least to some readers as a perhaps unfocused and overwrought defense of baptizing babies. Perhaps, but that would be a miscategorization. In my view the rejection of paedo-covenanting is a gift of particular commitments one level down, at the level of ecclesiology, and of additional commitments even further down, at the level of this relation between the sacrament and the redemptive historical nature of revelation and even of the historical nature of redemption. Ecclesiology then is the common ground between our sacramentology and our understanding of the historicity of redemption and revelation. Baptism fits nicely, and most naturally, into a mature ecclesiology, and ecclesiology saves our sacramentology from exegetical atomism. Additionally, as the primary ordinary context for the Lord’s shepherding and sanctifying of his people, the church itself, as active in its prescribed tasks, is where faithful theology begins and should remain.

I have heard it said that there is no such thing as a Reformed Baptist. Now that’s a catchy thesis. So that’s what I am after in what follows: ecclesiology and redemptive history. Oh, and baptism.

I agree that the “essence of the church consists in believers alone,” to quote Herman Bavinck (RD, 4:306). But there is no warrant in that assertion to go on to say that the church should consist only of the regenerate. Baptists often argue: baptism represents faith-union to Christ; therefore infants (and children) cannot be baptized and thus are not members of the church or the covenant body. Note the assumption, implicit in this way of putting it, that ‘baptism represents faith-union’ implies ‘baptism represents only faith-union with Christ’.

Allow me to dispense with a bit of pedantry. The inference here is invalid. ‘Baptism represents faith-union with Christ’ does not imply that ‘baptism represents only faith union with Christ’. When I say that the inference is invalid, I mean that [(A: Baptism represents faith-union) implies (B: Baptism represents only faith-union)] is false. The statement is false because of the relationship that it affirms between the two clauses, implication. So we say that the inference is invalid, since, regardless of the truth value of the component propositions, it is never true that [(A is B) implies (B is A)].

Nonetheless either or both claims may still be true. And all in fact agree that A is true: baptism represents faith-union. Is B true? Paul’s argument in Rom 2–4 that circumcision was of no independent value under the old covenant, as neither was it for Abraham, means that under the old covenant, where circumcision sits in for baptism, A was true but B was false. The circumcised were not always the regenerate. The sign represented faith-union, but in fact the sign was primarily of the covenant, not only of vital union. So under the new covenant, the truth of B would represent pointed discontinuity between circumcision and baptism and between OT and NT ecclesiastical structures. On the contrary, I think we may assume continuity, since without it Abraham should have no place in Rom 4 and the OT saints of Hebrews 11 should be deemed fideists. But anyway if that were the case, B would require specific, explicit support in the NT. And there is none. No single verse in the NT reverses the OT status of B (as false) by teaching that under the new covenant all but those making credible confession are refused the sign of the covenant and excluded from the covenant community. To put it another way, all paedo-covenanters happily affirm credo-covenanting. Everyone is a credo-baptist. But many who affirm credo-covenanting renounce paedo-covenanting arbitrarily.

Or we might put it this way: it is often claimed that ‘no single verse affirms paedobaptism’. This statement is helpful on at least three counts. First, it reminds us that, in complementary fashion, no single verse affirms credo-exclusive baptism; better said, no single NT verse renounces paedo-covenanting. The argument from silence is a draw. Second, it reminds us that, consequently, proof-texting will not resolve this issue and that instead we must look to sometimes implicit ecclesiastical structures, to a theology of the sacrament, and to the movement of redemptive history (any one of these alone will do, but they are related such that none bears neglect). And if ecclesiology, sacramentology, and redemptive history are where it’s at, the claim is exceedingly dubious; it is either false or true only on a most unfortunate interpretation: Peter never turned to the camera and said, ‘let me be clear: we baptize kids, and so should you’. But even if true, as a premise it is irrelevant, since—and here is the third point—it derives its purported punch from an assumption of OT/NT discontinuity. There is newness, yes, but newness within organic unity or I’m a Marcionite’s uncle. Surely the burden of proof is on the discontinuer, on the re-definer of the sign, the theology of the sacrament, and the order of the visible body. Note the lengths to which the author of Hebrews goes to prove that Christ satisfies, fulfills, supercedes and thus abrogates the sacrificial system and the priesthood.

So anyway, in my experience, it is often believed that a ‘purified’ ecclesiology is the pride of the NT era. It is argued, as it is necessary for the rejection of paedobaptism, that the distinction between vital and formal covenants is an OT reality only, and that the NT church is pure, and vital only. Or put it this way: if you begin with a purified ecclesiology, you find that it has implications for one’s view of baptism, which will then be taken to represent in subjective, self-declarative fashion only the individual sinner’s entering into faith-union with Christ. Baptism becomes a reactive, ecclesial stamp on public confession. Given a purified ecclesiology, in other words, baptism has to be the closest possible visible correlation to actual regeneration, which is an epistemological problem. But let’s address this ecclesiological issue first.

In my understanding the present age, as the common grace era, is a ‘mixed’ age, when the wheat and the tares grow together. God’s working redemption unto his own glory is the singular purpose of history since Gen 3, so there is some analyticity here: the present age just is, by God’s design, the mixed age. Accordingly, the individual believer, the church, and the world are all mixed realities until the number of the elect is complete and the Lord returns. The church still looks forward to entering the Lord’s rest, when the ‘not yet’ will be fulfilled, the ‘already’ consummated, the saints revealed in glory, and the church and individual believers attain incorruptible and imperishable holiness. In this sense, a pure church is an eschatological reality yet to come. Faithfully we strive for unity and purity in the church; but we are not expected to shift by our own effort the epochs of redemptive history.

As noted, there is an epistemological angle here, as well. Were we to set out to purify our congregations of all those who would eventually fall away—or conversely, to bring into membership all those who have faith but are outside the church—we would face the insurmountable difficulty of discerning who was who. (Nor are the sacraments intended for this purpose.) In this sense a great deal of pressure is exerted on the necessary connection between baptism and regeneration and on our epistemic rights to this connection. Calvin quotes from Augustine’s commentary on John, saying that “many sheep are without, and many wolves are within” (Inst., 4.1.8). When Christ returns, the distinction will be made public—but not until then. Like ecclesiology, the epistemological situation is redemptive-historically qualified, and it is a common grace reality.

Bavinck brings the ecclesiological and the epistemological together: “The visible and invisible church are two sides of the one and same church. The same believers are viewed in one case from the perspective of the faith that dwells in their heart and is only known with certainty by God; and in the other case they are viewed from the perspective of their witness and life, the side that is turned toward us and can be observed by us. Because the church on Earth is in process of becoming, these two sides are never—not even in the purest church—identical” (RD, 4: 306).

With Bavinck (and Calvin, Augustine, et al), then, I believe that the NT teaches—presupposes, rather, or better yet, inherits from the OT—the distinction between vital and formal covenants or covenant bodies, such that the mystical body of Christ is not identifiable with the visible church community. This discrepancy is not an impediment to the church’s mission; it is part of the Lord’s design for the church. NT ecclesiology, reflecting the OT notion of a covenant people, assumes it. Bavinck calls these “two sides” of “one and the same church.” But the point is that there is no one-to-one correlation. As noted, the vital/formal distinction is more generally accepted regarding the OT people of God. The OT covenant people comprised the whole of Israel (formal covenant), but the Lord kept for himself a remnant which would not bow the knee to Baal (vital covenant). So my point is that the vital/formal distinction is trans-testamental, and the church, as a trans-testamental visible body, by design and anyway unavoidably is a mixed reality.

The vital/formal distinction is impressed upon us by the apostasy passages in Hebrews 10 and 2 Peter 2, and by such things as non-soteric uses of “sanctify” in Heb 10:29 and 1 Cor 7:14–15. In my understanding, Hebrews 10:26–29 communicates the intensification of covenant curses and blessings within the context of the vital/formal distinction. The author says “how much worse” the punishment will be for the one who profanes the blood of the greater covenant, the blood of the Son by which he was sanctified, than for the one who has set aside the Mosaic law. The transgressor here is within the visible church (the formal covenant), but not the invisible one (the vital), and the author of Hebrews assumes OT–NT continuity in terms of the vital/formal distinction. But this is not an isolated instance. Much of the book of Hebrews, in fact, rather conspicuously assumes OT–NT continuity in terms of a danger of falling away and a soterically serious ‘becoming’ (Bavinck’s language) of the church, as evidenced by the use of Ps 95 in 3:7–11: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion . . .” Similarly, Peter argues that the ‘state’ of the one who has escaped the defilements of the world through knowledge of Christ and who then returns to the swine trough will be worse than at first. He is a branch which was “in me,” says Jesus, but which is taken away (John 15:1–2). Again, to my understanding, Peter teaches an intensified accountability of the greater covenant which presupposes a vital/formal distinction—not an intensified accountability representing a redrawn and purified ecclesiology.

The vital/formal distinction affords a richer understanding of baptism as symbolizing both covenant blessings and curses. Surely, baptism symbolizes union with Christ and entrance into resurrection life; but it also represents the waters of judgment, through which not only the faithful remnant but all of Israel passed, and through which Noah passed, but also Ham and Canaan. 1 Peter 3:20–22 associates baptism with the Noahic flood, and Jesus refers to his own crucifixion as a baptism, saying that he looks forward to it with “great distress” (Luke 12:50). So in this view, baptism brings the greater covenant to bear on the formal covenant community in terms of both blessings and curses. The use of Ps 95 in Heb 3 makes no sense without continuity in terms both of promised blessings and of threatened curses, and of course the same would be true of the Lord’s supper (1 Cor 11:27–29).

Behind the notion of an ecclesiological shift from OT (mixed) to NT (pure), one often finds the idea that there is a parallel soteriological amplification from lesser to greater. The NT church is said to be pure because the soteric realities inaugurated by Christ are greater than those enjoyed by the OT saints. In my view, this theory of soteriological amplification confuses ordo and historia salutis categories. My view is that Scripture teaches a trans-testamental unity as regards the ordo, so that developments in historia do not constitute shifts in soteriological realities. Indeed, the gospel was preached beforehand to Abraham, and those who are of faith are blessed along with him (Gal 3:8–9). And Paul’s point here, intensely articulated in Gal 1, is that there is only one gospel. And if Paul teaches that ‘in Adam’ and ‘in Christ’ are two categories exhaustive of the set of all image-bearers (1 Cor 15), certainly we would prefer to say that Moses and John the Baptist died in Christ. There appears to be no tension in Scripture between the progress of historia salutis and the unity of the ordo salutis. So Calvin: “The covenant made with all the patriarchs is so much like our own in substance and reality that the two are actually one and the same. Yet they differ in the mode of dispensation” (Inst., 2.10.2). If this distinction is maintained, we may avoid both an over-realized ecclesiology and an unwieldy soteriological distinction between the OT and NT eras.

I have found very helpful the following: Jonathan M. Brack and Jared S. Oliphint, “Questioning the Progress of Progressive Covenantalism,” Westminster Theological Journal 76 (2014): 189–217. See also the related discussion.

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PART I. God and Logic: Two Popular Proposals

“God and logic” is a popular topic these days, and it certainly deserves the attention. From what I’ve seen, approaches to this topic fall into one of two complementary errors.

Many writers argue that logic as we know it (Aristotelian logic, for the most part) is the logic of God. These proposals fail to maintain distinctive Protestant commitments such as the doctrines of revelation and Scripture, and even classic, ecumenical doctrines such as the Creator/creature distinction and the aseity and triunity of God. This approach proves itself misguided when we consider its implications for theology proper. In short, if we take Aristotle’s logic to be identical to God’s logic, we end up with Aristotle’s God.

Other writers go too far in the other direction when they argue that logic is a created thing, or that logic is man-made, or something along those lines. I can sympathize with the impulse here: at many points in our theologizing we run up against what appear to be simple and intractable contradictions; if God is exempt, those contradictions become much less daunting, or they disappear entirely. Unfortunately this view disappoints as well, for at least one reason: if we accept it, we’re invited to think of God as not only incomprehensible to us, but ultimately incomprehensible (illogical, disordered), even to himself. We’re also left in the unenviable position of having to defend our devaluation of logic, while that very defense will take the form of logical argumentation. Oops.

So there are the two approaches that I see in the literature: (1) logic as we know it (Aristotelian) exists eternally with God, and is even the logic of God himself; (2) logic is a created thing and only created things can be held accountable to it in only relatively limited ways. I would like to propose a third approach.

God and Logic: A Third Approach

(3) There is an original, uncreated logic, which is the logic of the triune God. This logic is eternal, infinite, simple, triune, and personal. It is the self-coherence of God; it is the divine, triune, self-consistency. The relationship between the logic of God and logic as we know it, such as Aristotelian logic, is complex. I’ll make two suggestions:

(3.1) First, logic as we know it depends upon the original logic of God. For example, God is. Therefore, it is false that God is is false. The law of the excluded middle works in the created order because God, as uncreated, eternally is. I would go so far as to say that the act of creation and the continuing providence of the triune God are the sine qua non of logic as we know it.

(3.2) Second, logic as we know it is often falsely credited with its own self-sufficiency—it is taken to be ultimate; in other words, (3.1) is often denied, implicitly or explicitly. It is denied by non-theistic or anti-theistic writers who claim that logic is, that Christian theism violates the laws of logic, and that, therefore, Christian theism is false, or irrational. This line of thought takes logic as we know it to be ultimate in and of itself, as self-existent.

I described above those theistic philosophers who take logic as we know it to be the eternal logic of God. This is also a denial of the dependence of logic as we know it upon the original logic of God, since it describes God in terms of logic, rather than describing logic in terms of God: its methodology is creatio-centric.

The second alternative I described above had to do with those perhaps overzealous defenders of the Creator/creature distinction who claim that logic is a created thing; they also deny the organic dependence of logic as we know it upon the eternal logic of God. They claim that the two are utterly unrelated and unrelatable.

Logic as We Know It, According to the Third Approach: Facing Christ as Lord

If it is true that the original logic is the (logic of the) triune God, it would seem that one must believe in the triune God to understand logic rightly, or ultimately, or truly, or something like that—to account for it, we might say. If that is the case, the simple truths of logic like the laws of identity, the excluded middle, and non-contradiction, set before us the question of the very foundation of our thinking and our understanding of the world. There appear to be two basic alternatives: recognition of the triune Creator God as Lord and judge of all, or affirmation of the self-sufficiency and ultimacy of the laws of logic. Either God is our logic, or logic is our God.

PART II. Logic and Christianity and Alleged Difficulty

Suppose I show up at work Monday morning and begin telling my co-workers about my weekend. Suppose part of my story goes like this: “At church yesterday, we heard a great sermon from our pastor. Also, on the way to church, we got a flat tire and ended up missing the entire worship service.” My colleague might say, “Well, wait a second; which is it? Did you go to church and hear a great sermon, or did you get a flat and miss the whole thing?” If I continue to affirm both that we went to church and heard a great sermon and that we got a flat and missed the whole thing, then my colleague has good reason to doubt my story—it’s either completely false or partially false or just mixed up. Some how, he thinks, something is fundamentally wrong with the whole narrative. And he’s probably right.

The principle at work here is something like this: nothing that is (logically) self-contradictory is believable, or even possible. And here’s the issue: it is frequently said that Christian theism suffers from precisely this problem. Critics often attempt to demonstrate logical incoherence within Christianity, and the implication is that if they succeed, Christianity will not be (rationally) believable, or even possibly true. And, in fact, it does not appear too difficult to find examples of such difficulties internal to the faith.

Here’s one example: The witty adage, “can God create a stone that is too heavy for him to lift?” is meant to point out logical incoherence at the heart of the idea of omnipotence. If we affirm that God is omnipotent (that there is no limit to what God can do, as in Matt 19:26), then we will want to deny that there is anything too heavy for God to lift, and we will want to deny that there is any kind of rock that God cannot create. Omnipotence appears to force us to affirm contradictory propositions.

If we define believability and possibility in terms of logic, if we treat logic as we know it as ultimate—even more ultimate than God—then Christianity faces tough challenges. And it should face problems if we take logic as we know it to be ultimate and self-sufficient. Taking logic as we know it as ultimate is to mistake the analogue for the original, and thus, in effect, to take the (created) world itself as ultimate and self-sufficient.

The Insufficiency of Logic as We Know It

Consider this syllogism:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

Is this argument is sound? Sure it is—unless my cat is also named Socrates. Since I might have a cat named Socrates (or a dog or a gecko or an uncle), we have to clarify what we mean when we say “Socrates,” and we also have to stipulate that every time we say it, we mean the same thing: every time “Socrates” is uttered or appears on the page, it refers to the same entity, whether man or cat or gecko or uncle. (We also have to hope that the referent is the same in the speaker’s mind as it is in the hearer’s, which is not always easy to establish.) Not only that, but we also have to repeat all this to every person who reads this argument, every time it is read. Or we could simply assume that all this is the case, as we often do: that “Socrates” refers to the ancient Greek philosopher, the teacher of Plato, and that each time “Socrates” appears in the argument, it still refers to Plato’s teacher. (And that “Plato” doesn’t refer to someone else’s cat who studied philosophy under my cat or my dog or my uncle.)

Another problem arises, one that has to do not with the terms but with the things the terms refer to: What happens if, while we’re reading this argument, Socrates (the man) ceases to exist, without explanation, or if Socrates (the man) turns into a frog or a six digit number, or if Socrates (the man) turns out to be just part of a dream I’m having right now? The argument would, of course, fall apart. So we have to assume that the referent of the term “Socrates,” not the mental object but Socrates himself, also remains the same, that Socrates is self-identical through time.

One of the enduring problems in philosophy is the nature of the self: how is it the case, or what does it mean, that I am the same person that I was twenty years ago? If my, say, three-year-old self were sitting right here next to me, would we look or act or think like identical beings? Nowadays we know that each individual has his own, unique genetic code; and that helps. But when we say, “Socrates,” are we referring to an ancient Greek’s genetic code? Is Socrates, or any person for that matter, nothing more than his genetic code? “Teacher of Plato” is not in Socrates’ genetic code. And I, for one, am much more than my genetic code. There is no mention in my genetic code of my wife or my child, of my education and experiences, of my tastes, preferences, hobbies, or habits. My closest friends do not know my genetic code. Do they not know me? Logic cannot enter this morass; it must simply assume that Socrates is knowable and self-identical through time.

We now see that at least two assumptions must be maintained in order for this syllogism to work—that the terms, always and by everyone, refer to the same entity, and that referents of the terms remain perfectly self-identical. We’re beginning to see that logic operates with a kind of artificial snap shot of the world, a kind of ontological freeze-frame; it operates on the assumption that the world is ontologically flat or monotone, or mono-ontological, to coin an unfortunate term. But it’s rather obvious that reality isn’t like this. The world isn’t, ever, ontologically flat or linear or unitary or whatever. It isn’t mono-ontological.

Mono-ontological vs. Triune-o-logical

Vern Poythress has discussed this in more detail in his article “Reforming Logic and Ontology in Light of the Trinity” (Westminster Theological Journal 57, no. 1 [1995]), and in much greater detail in his forthcoming Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought (Crossway 2013). In the article, he observes that, “syllogisms can operate only with unitarian ontology. Hence syllogistic reasoning is itself tacitly unitarian.” With this spurious ontology in mind, Poythress concludes that, “there is no such thing as a valid syllogism in the Aristotelian sense” (204-5). He means, I think, that logic doesn’t actually describe any actual things, because the unitarian ontology it assumes is nowhere to be found—it too, is an abstraction.

Take the law of identity for example, which says that A=A. It is true in an obvious sense that God is self-identical, or that if you have God, then you have God. But how exactly is this the case? Consider the persons of the Trinity. If you have one person of the Trinity, you have God. But if you have God, it is not so obvious that you have one person of the Trinity.

In God, self-identity is fundamental, basic, rock-bottom. If not, we are tri-theists. But in God, non-identity is also fundamental, basic, and rock-bottom. If it isn’t, we are modalists. The law of identity in God, that God eternally and unchangeably is who he is, is so sure that we say it is a se, of itself or to itself. But God’s identity is a rich and incomprehensible, Triune, personal identity. Logic as we know it should be used with an understanding that behind it lies the irreducibly triune personality of God. But often, as we’ve seen, it is not.

Cornelius Van Til wrote, “God has determined whatsoever comes to pass. Man’s moral acts are things that comes to pass. Therefore man’s moral acts are determined and man is not responsible for them.” And so, he says, “From the point of view of a non-Christian logic the Reformed Faith can be bowled over by means of a single syllogism” (Common Grace and the Gospel, 73). If we are treating logic as the self-sufficient determiner of possibility, we’d have to surrender either moral responsibility or the full sovereignty of God. (See Rom 9:19ff.) The simple fact that Scripture won’t allow us to surrender either of these to the demands of logic is an indication that logic as we know it must be leading us astray somehow.

The way through such apparent difficulties, I think, is to understand logic as (3.1) derivative and reflective of the original uncreated logic of the eternal triune God, and to remember that [~(3.2)] we should not, therefore, take logic to be the independent determiner of possibility and believability, particularly when Scripture invites us not to.

Triune Theism and the One-and-Many Fabric of Reality

According to the Christian Scriptures, the triune God is the creator of this one-and-many universe. It is because the one-and-many God is self-consistent and self-existent that logic works. At the same time, it is because God the creator and sustainer is himself essentially one-and-many that reality is too rich to be captured, or much less governed, by syllogisms and propositions and laws of logic.

After the flood, the Lord renews his covenant with Noah. Part of the re-creation language in that renewal goes like this: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen 8:22). This is an extraordinary utterance. It appears to be a divine utterance that is essentially and irreducibly one-and-many: In a single word and with a unified declaration God has determined that history should be a certain way, and that way, notice, is change and variation—plurality. As far as I know, there is nothing intrinsic to winter that produces the spring, nor is there anything intrinsic to summer that invites the fall. These changes are neither naturally nor logically necessary. Although, I think, seasonal changes are attributable to the motion of planetary bodies—the earth, the moon, and the sun—and to gravitational force, gravitational force is not logically or naturally necessary either, nor is the existence of any of these bodies. (I’m sneaking in a bit of the cosmological argument here!) And if this is the case, in Gen 8:22 God sovereignly and singly ordains variation and genuine historical change. We may, I think, marvel as the seasons change throughout the year at this stable flux and unified variation, this basic one-and-manyness of the natural world; it is a deeply Christian reality.

The richness of the one-and-many fabric of the created order is beyond the explanatory power of logic, but logic is a tremendously powerful tool; indeed, it is sublime, and, if understood rightly, reflective of the nature and the majesty of God. Van Til says somewhere that “the unbeliever takes for granted the ultimacy of the universe.” This is a helpful insight. Problems emerge when logic as we know it is treated as ultimate, as self-sufficient and self-existent, particularly when we’re dealing with Scripture. Logic itself is sometimes thought to be the first and the last, that through which all things were made and in which all things hold together; but that honor belongs to Christ alone.

See also:

• “Thought Thinking Itself? Christianity and Logic,” by Scott Oliphint
• “Believing Contradictions,” by Nathan Sasser
• “Does A=A?” by Nathan Shannon
• “Reforming Ontology and Logic in Light of the Trinity,” by Vern Poythress WTJ 57 (1995)