Chapters

• 00:00:07 Introduction
• 00:05:41 Introduction to Carlton’s Course on Calvin’s Institutes
• 00:13:56 The Church and the Academy
• 00:20:58 Approaching a Course on the Institutes
• 00:30:30 The Natural Knowledge of God
• 00:37:52 Natural Theology, Ethics, and “Formal” Truth
• 00:49:48 The Reformation Worship Conference
• 00:57:28 Machen 2.0
• 01:10:39 Calvin and the Threefold Office of Mediator
• 01:12:52 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne

Chapters

• 00:00:07 Introduction
• 00:05:07 The Effects of Sin
• 00:21:08 God Is Self-Sufficient and Self-Complete
• 00:37:24 Aspects of Non-Christian Thought
• 00:48:40 The Contradiction of a Developing Absolute
• 00:56:57 Three Types of Consciousness
• 00:58:49 Kuyper and Common Grace
• 01:03:23 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

Chapters

• 00:07 Introduction
• 08:29 Review Up to This Point
• 12:59 Man’s Knowledge of God and of His Environment
• 19:29 Human Knowledge Is Entirely Dependent upon God
• 22:29 Theology Proper and the Image of God
• 33:27 Types of Knowledge of God
• 41:29 Human Knowledge Can Be True though Never Comprehensive
• 43:39 Realism and Anti-Realism
• 52:39 The Mysterious Depth Dimension to All Human Knowledge
• 56:09 The Full Bucket
• 58:52 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 02:28 God’s Knowledge of the World
• 07:41 The Plan of God to Create the World
• 13:13 The Pantheistic Switch
• 24:31 God’s Free Knowledge Does Not Imply an Eternal Creation
• 35:32 Refusing to Concede to Rationalism
• 43:10 Man’s Knowledge of God
• 49:46 Devotional Thoughts on the Creator-Creature Distinction
• 56:45 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

We also announce the arrival of Lane Tipton’s book, The Trinitarian Theology of Cornelius Van Til.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:02:16 New Book: The Trinitarian Theology of Cornelius Van Til
• 00:12:28 Reviewing Chapters 1–2 of the Book
• 00:23:38 A Christian Theory of Being
• 00:35:30 The Bible and Christian Experience
• 00:37:50 Ontology and Epistemology from the Garden of Eden
• 00:42:59 Epistemological Authority
• 00:48:35 Satan’s Tactic in Temptation
• 00:55:16 God’s Knowledge and Being are Coterminous
• 01:00:52 Pantheism
• 01:06:04 Consequences of Saying that God’s Knowledge Changes
• 01:15:44 Biblical Examples of God’s Knowledge in Relation to Creation
• 01:21:00 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

Dr. Anderson is the Carl W. McMurray Professor of Theology and Philosophy and Academic Dean (Global and New York) of Reformed Theological Seminary. He is the author of David Hume (Great Thinkers) published by P&R Publishing, What’s Your Worldview: An Interactive Approach to Life’s Big Questions, and Paradox in Christian Theology.

Participants: Camden Bucey, James Anderson, Jim Cassidy

Cory Brock is Minister of Young Adults and College at First Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Jackson, MS. He also serves on the faculty of Belhaven University teaching biblical studies. Nathaniel Gray Sutanto is Assistant Pastor at Covenant City Church in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Cory Brock, Dan Ragusa, Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

Participants: Andrew Compton, Camden Bucey

Links

• The Bavinck Review
• Messiah’s Reformed Fellowship (URCNA), Manhattan

Participants: Camden Bucey, Dan Ragusa

As for “Old Princeton Theology” in the booklet on Common Grace, I have scarcely referred to it. Elsewhere I have expressed disagreement with its apologetics. In this I was following Kuyper. But never have I expressed a basic difference with its theology or its basic epistemology. (p. 177)

In context Van Til is defending himself against a number of charges leveled against him by William Masselink. Masselink asserts that Van Til disagrees with Old Princeton (among others such as Kuyper, Hepp, etc.) on the matter of epistemology. And here Van Til retorts that while he does disagree with Old Princeton on apologetics, he does not disagree “with its theology or its basic epistemology.” This surprised me, in part, because I have always thought of Van Til’s criticism of Old Princeton as a criticism—first and foremost—of its epistemology. Of special interest here is what Van Til says about Warfield’s notion of “right reason” (for example in Defense of the Faith, 350). Is Van Til’s criticism against Warfield’s notion of how the unbeliever knows, or against his approach to the unbeliever apologetically? Or is it both? I won’t try to answer that question here. But, it seems to me, it is awfully difficult to separate out Warfield’s idea of “right reason” (which seems to be an epistemological issue) from his apologetic method. Is Van Til being completely consistent with himself here? Again, I raise the question not to answer it here. It seems the answer would be complex enough to warrant a longer study. Or, at the very least, it seems to warrant further discussion. Now it’s your turn. Thoughts?

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

. . . though we may rely proximately on some philosophy, such as Scottish Common Sense Realism, the epistemology of the Stoics, or of Aristotle, or of modern externalism, for the articulating and expressing of epistemological realism presupposed in Scripture, ultimately our reason for endorsing it (apart from its indispensability in life) is that though there is no revealed epistemology, some account is presupposed or implied in Scripture itself, in its testimony to the objectivity of the created order, including human writings, and their success in being able to gather reliable information from such sources.[5]

Helm himself ultimately endorses a form of realism, but allows, also, the possibility of Christianity identifying itself with versions of idealism, commending both Jonathan Edwards and Robert Adams in this regard as viable options.[6] Again, a dualism is assumed: reason has the freedom to construct and select an existing philosophy, because Christian special revelation, as far as Helm is concerned, says nothing about epistemology or metaphysics per se. The difference here, from the first position, is that no particular philosophy, whether realism or idealism, has a more organic connection to Christianity, so long as the philosophy in question warrants the use of our intellect, and conceives of external reality as epistemically accessible. The third option maintains that Christianity possesses a complete alternative. Though Christianity may plunder other philosophies for tools and insights, and though Christianity may pose answers that show a formal similarity with other philosophies, Christianity has the sufficient internal resources for the construction of a complete worldview. This position, thus, takes shape in two ways. The first holds that because Christianity provides a unique worldview that cannot subsume alternate philosophies without compromising its substance, Christian theology must coin new conceptual terms and tools in order to convey its content. T.F. Torrance, for example, holds to this position:

Knowledge of new realities or events calls for correspondingly new ways of thinking and speaking, in which new concepts and terms have to be coined, or in which ordinary forms of thought and speech have to be stretched, adapted and refined and to make them appropriate to the new realities to which they are intended to refer.[7]

Coupled with the above positive prescription is a negative assessment of Thomas Aquinas, who, in Torrance’s view, has a position “in which the doctrine of the One God was divided from the doctrine of the Triune God, as though the doctrine of the One God could be set out rationally by itself, while the doctrine of the Triune God could be accepted only on the ground of divine revelation.”[8] Torrance critiques that strand of Christian-theism which holds that Aristotelian realism is somehow closer to Christianity than other forms of philosophy, as if a continuum exists between the two. For Torrance, Christian theology deals with a distinct subject matter—a subject matter that finds its ground, authority, and intelligibility on its own terms. Cornelius Van Til coincidentally echoes this kind of position. In his critique of Bavinck, he endorses the position that only one principium must sustain all of the sciences, the principium cognoscendi of God’s revelation. So, “[I]t is difficult to see how dogmatics is to live by one principle if it is not the same principle that is to guide or thinking both in theology and in other science . . . we shall have to apply that principle when we work out an epistemology no less than when we are engaged in dogmatics proper.”[9] As an implication, in Van Til’s view, no “amount of trimming” can bring the substantial principles of Aristotelianism (or Idealism) “into shape for Christian use.”[10] Hence, Christian-theism forms a whole unit, not a composite of an alien philosophy and a set of theological propositions. Nonetheless, Van Til poses a different fashion of applying this third position. In this second way, instead of coining new terms, following the Torrancean endorsement, Van Til sees value in using existing philosophical terms and refilling them with content grounded in divine revelation. In that way, Van Til was comfortable in, say, utilizing the language of limiting concepts, or a method of implication, and other distinctly idealist terminology in order to put them into use for Christian-theism, provided that we give them sufficient redefinition. One might still wonder, however, if the decision to pour new content into old terms may render oneself unnecessarily vulnerable to misinterpretation. In an essay responding to Van Til’s theory of knowledge, Stoker critiques Van Til for his tendency to incorporate Idealist terms in his writing precisely because it might lend itself to serious misunderstandings, even while he notes that Van Til does redefine them biblically.[11] Knowledge of the history of interpretation of Van Til’s works vindicates Stoker’s concerns, Van Til has been accused of being a fundamentalist, on the one hand, and an idealist on the other hand—two mutually exclusive points of criticism.[12] The misunderstanding, of course, is because of that decision to utilize the language of a pre-existing philosophy. In any case, both Van Til and Torrance hold to a view that, I think, presents a consistent approach despite the significant theological differences between them. For the two theologians Christian-theism is a unit that justifies itself, sufficient within itself, and potent by itself. In it one encounters the true Triune God, who has the authority and capacity to inform us that which we need to know about the world. Divine revelation is thus the norming norm for the pursuit of knowledge, most directly in theology, more directly in anthropology (and thus in philosophy and history), and, perhaps, a little less directly in all the other sciences. The distinction between general and special revelation, in turn, doesn’t entail an epistemological dualism. Christianity, again, isn’t a composite hybrid, but a consistent whole and must be treated as such. So, I offer and collate here three views, at least, with regard to the relationship of philosophy to Christianity. A further question for more reflection could be this: underlying this debate is a more fundamental disagreement relative to the sufficiency of Scripture—in what way is Scripture sufficient, and how is it to be used as a norm in the fields outside the sphere of theology? Is Scripture’s referential application limited, or universal? That, perhaps, is the question to be answered. Notes [1] Herman Bavinck, “The Theology of Albert Ritschl”, The Bavinck Review 3 (Trans. John Bolt; 2012): 123. [2] Christian-theistic Platonism still persists even today, though in a different form. See, for example, Keith Yandell, “On Not Confusing Incomprehensibility and Ineffability: Carl Henry on Literal Propositional Revelation,” Trinity Journal 35.1. (2014), pp. 61-74, and “God and Propositions,” in Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects (ed. Paul Gould; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), pp. 21-35. [3] J.P. Moreland, “The Argument from Consciousness,” in The Rationality of Theism (ed. Paul Copan and Paul K. Moser; New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 208-210. Charles Taliaferro, The Golden Cord: A Short Book on the Secular and the Sacred (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), p. 115. [4] Paul Helm, Faith, Form and Fashion: Classical Reformed Theology and its Postmodern Critics (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2014), pp. 64-5. For his discussion on reason as a function of general revelation, and of its judicial role in “natural” matters, see pp. 57-9 [5] Helm, Faith, p. 65. (italics mine). [6] “Such idealism has certainly not been a mainstream Christian view, which is that the external world is independent of our minds, both human and divine, but sustained by the immediate power of God. However, little that Christian theology claims is straightforwardly called into question by such receptive idealism.” Helm, Faith, p. 49. See also page 49, note 9. [7] T.F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), p. 20. [8] Torrance, Christian Doctrine, 10. Whether Torrance’s contention that this form of Thomism is wholly assumed by the Post-Reformation Protestants is right, however, is debatable. [9] Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, 2^nd ed. (ed. William Edgar; Philipsburg, P&R, 2007), p. 95. Emphasis mine. [10] Van Til, An Introduction, p. 96. Van Til critiques Thomas Aquinas in a manner almost identical with Torrance when he charges Aquinas for being speculative, constructing a “half-Christian, half-Greek” position on page 98. See also Paul Maxwell, “The Formulation of Thomistic Simplicity: Mapping Aquinas’s Method for Configuring God’s Essence.” JETS 57 (2014), pp. 371-403 [11] Hendrik G. Stoker, “Reconnoitering the Theory of Knowledge of Prof. Dr. Cornelius Van Til,” in Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Philosophy and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (ed. E.R. Geehan; Philipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1971), p. 53. [12] Stoker, “Van Til’s Theory of Knowledge” 54. Later on Stoker still admits the value of utilizing and redefining philosophical categories from a Christian perspective: “Your predilection for using these terms (giving them genuinely biblical meanings) is probably a result of your intensive and extensive knowledge of the philosophy of the absolute idealists and of your conviction of the necessity to criticize them. Your use of the terms expresses accordingly a fundamentally reformative (i.e., genuinely biblical) criticism of this philosophy.” Ibid. 55.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy

Theological Advance

For Bonhoeffer, this enclosing of the all—even God—in the I had marvelous theological significance. Imagine how an always present God “existent only in, or for, the consciousness of human beings”[2] was far better than, say, a Barthian conception of God—a “God who ‘comes’ and never the God who ‘is there.’”[3] For Bonhoeffer, locating God in the self-consciousness meant that God “is there.” But this raises the question with which we ended our last post; namely, how does this make Christ haveable? To answer this question Bonhoeffer would have to engage in Christology. He must identify or describe this Christ who both transcends the conscious self and who is enclosed within the self. In Bonhoeffer’s Outline for a Book found in his Letters & Papers from Prison, he gives us a toe hold, “Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest, most powerful, and best being imaginable—that is not authentic transcendence…”[4] Nor, says Bonhoeffer, does the transcendence of God have anything to do with the transcendence of epistemological theory.[5] Thus, Bonhoeffer rules out traditional metaphysical and epistemological ideas of transcendence. So, what remains?

Christological Innovation

In Bonhoeffer’s earlier 1933 lectures on Christology he approached the same theological matter from a telling and unique angle. In these lectures he describes the issue of transcendence and immanence as the difference between the question of “who” and “how?”[6] According to Bonhoeffer traditional Christology has always left theologians wrongly speculating on how to fuse a metaphysical transcendent God with a finite and immanent man. Instead, Bonhoeffer shifts the Christological question from the “how” by asking “who,” to which Bonhoeffer responds, “He is the one who has really bound himself in the freedom of his existence to me.”[7] In other words, the Christ who transcends my self-consciousness has ensured his enclosure in it.

The Church to the Rescue

However, Bonhoeffer understood the problem in his theology. It was centered on self. He writes in Act and Being, “All that we have examined so far in this study was individualistically oriented.”[8] Yet Bonhoeffer contended that if his theology is solipsistic then, like idealism, it had failed.[9] But a logical question emerges. Why? If God has enclosed himself in the I, then what more do I need? Bonhoeffer had two answers. First, in his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer established one essential criteria for his doctrine of the Church, “every concept of community is essentially related to a concept of person.”[10] Accordingly, after having found other definitions of ecclesiology wanting Bonhoeffer writes, “for the individual to exist, ‘others’ must necessarily be there.”[11] This ethical dimension is picked up in Act and Being when Bonhoeffer says, “every member of the church may and should ‘become a Christ’ to the others.”[12] The second and more significant answer comes from Life Together written in 1936. Bonhoeffer says that the Christian needs his brother because “the Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s heart is sure.”[13] Why? Because Bonhoeffer says, “When I go to another believer to confess, I am going to God.”[14] The other believer acting on the authority of the Christ enclosed in his I is able to declare me forgiven[15] and give me certainty and assurance of having been forgiven and I am able to do the same for him. [16] Thus, for Bonhoeffer, the ecclesia extracts the individual from the potential solipsism of idealism as well as supplies me with a present and haveable Christ in my brother who is Christ pro me. Cornelius Van Til once said that you can tell a good deal about a system of theology that has been informed by Kantian philosophy. Bonhoeffer’s theology has certainly drunk deeply from the Kantian well and as a result there is more of man than God in it. The result is personally unsatisfying. However, there are those who vigorously argue that Bonhoeffer is an evangelical to whom we must listen today. In fact, some contend that Bonhoeffer experienced a conversion while in America and though he may once have been a German liberal he became an evangelical Christian. We will head in that direction next time.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Acts and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 80. [2] Ibid., 57. [3] Ibid., 85. [4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (NY: The Macmillan Co., 1971), 381. [5] Ibid., 282. [6] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology (NY: Harper Collins, 1978), 30. [7] Ibid., 48. [8] Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 113. [9] Ibid. [10] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 34. [11] Ibid., 51. [12] Bonhoeffer, Act and Being, 113. [13] Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayer Book of the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 32. [14] Ibid., 109. [15] Ibid., 111. [16] Ibid., 113.

Links

• Covenantal Thoughts

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

modernity is Protestant, so to reject modernity is to reject Protestantism. Perhaps that is the underlying message of Rose’s article. Barth finally fails, because he remains, at the end of the day, a theologian of the Reformation.

As I understand Congdon (and company), to be modern is to be Protestant, and since Barth is thoroughly modern and Protestant in his ontology (event over metaphysics, the incapability of fallen man to know God, etc), to call Barth’s program a failure is to call the Reformation a failure. In other words, Rose’s beef with Barth is over the fact that he is not a Thomistic Roman Catholic. In my opinion, Congdon, et al., have penetrated to the heart of Rose’s contention precisely. So, in light of this, I have several thoughts:

1. While I agree with the Young, Restless, and Barthian guys’ tagging of Rose’s agenda, I cannot concede their contention that modernity is identified with Protestantism. That is simply anachronistic and inaccurate. It is inaccurate because first of all modernism has made its way into Roman Catholicism, evidenced I believe by Vatican II (and even before that evidenced by the Leo XIII’s and Pius X’s attempt to stave off modernism in the church by decrees establishing Thomism as the official doctrine of the church and binding priests with the anti-Modernism Oath, respectively. HT: Camden Bucey). Second, the rise of modernity occurred after the rise of Protestantism and was, in effect, a self-conscious move beyond the Reformation. That the Enlightenment occurred within and among Protestants does not mean it constitutes Protestantism. That is simply the historical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. Remember, Kant’s influence was nearly 300 years after the rise of the Reformation. Therefore, it is incorrect to read modernism back into the Reformation.
2. As for Rose, I agree with him that Barth was modern and not orthodox. Now, that being said, I believe that Rose is far from having proven that Barth’s modern commitments necessarily arise to a failure. Especially if the alternative is medieval rationalism. Proving the failure of Barth’s newly constructed modernism requires, I believe, a thoroughgoing transcendental critique. More on that anon.
3. Modernism and Thomism have more in common than Rose and the young Barthians will admit. In fact, they are both so fundamentally and essentially (not in an ontological sense) of a cloth that it must be said the Reformation stands over and against both Thomism and Modernism. In other words, the dividing line is not between Thomas and Modernism, ultimately. The dividing line – with regard to the principium cognoscendi externum of theology – is really between Calvin and the Reformed confessions on the one side and Thomas and Modernism on the other. Both of the latter, over against the Reformation, deny the epistemic priority of God’s verbal, inscripturated revelation in matters of church doctrine and life. There is a word for this phenomenon: rationalism. And Thomas, Modernism, and Barth are all guilty of it.

In closing, this charge of rationalism, especially relative to Barth, needs a defense. While I can only be brief here, I offer the following two points to consider and would welcome pushback from Rose, Congdon, and Grow:

1. Barth was right to rise up against against both the analogia entis and his neo-Protestant professors to critique the theological structures which enabled them to support the Kaiser in his attempt at European dominance. However, Barth did not go far enough. He allowed modernism’s commitment to ontological dualism to stand, and with that its denial of God’s verbal, inscripturated revelation to man. In other words, Barth never exited the park which contained the playground of the theologians, even as he dropped a bomb on it. If Barth is correct to say that the event of revelation is not directly given to us in “our time,” then there is no direct revelation of God to us here and now. Scripture and preaching are only witnesses to revelation, but they are not revelation itself. This means that two problems in Barth’s system arise at once. Relative to epistemology, no direct revelation entails the dual and simultaneous problems of rationalism and nominalism/skepticism. On the one hand it entails nominalism because we here-and-now cannot know God, having no access to his direct revelation. We only have witnesses to revelation. But how is the theologian to know if those witnesses are reliable if he has no final arbiter to compare them to? Who is to say St. John’s witness is not more reliable than St. Paul’s? Or, who is to say that Polycarp’s witness is less dependable than St. Luke’s, or St. Peter’s compared to Thomas Aquinas? If there is no direct revelation, then all are equally valid witnesses. Even a dead dog is able to witness to revelation.
2. On the other hand, it also entails rationalism. We are the ones who do the naming. We are speculating about who God is. Barth speaks piously about Jesus Christ, yet the Christ he talks about is a Christ he has constructed as his fundamental starting point from the words of merely fallible humans. In other words, Barth’s Christomonistic prolegomena is built upon the resources of man’s own “natural theology” no less than medieval Scholasticism. His system is nothing other than a modern reconstruction of the very natural theology he so passionately dismissed as the invention of the anti-Christ. And it is at this point, the point of Barth never having escape the very thing Rose is seeking to promote, which constitutes Barth’s fatal failure. It is the failure of all would-be autonomous man-made theologies. It is the failure of not just another equally valid expression of Christianity, but of another religion altogether.

Participants: A. Craig Troxel, Camden Bucey, David Garner, Jared Oliphint

Related Publications by Dr. Helseth

• Right Reason and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2010.
• “‘Right Reason’ & the Science of Theology at Old Princeton Seminary,” in The Confessional Presbyterian, Volume 8, 2012.

Participants: Camden Bucey, David Filson, Jared Oliphint, Paul K. Helseth

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington

Participants: Bob LaRocca, Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Paul Maxwell

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, K. Scott Oliphint

Links

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Jonathan Brack, Nate Shannon

Participants: Bob LaRocca, Camden Bucey, Daniel Schrock, Jared Oliphint, Jonathan Brack

• Daniel Schrock Hume’s Argument Against Miracles
• Hume entry on Wikipedia
• Hume’s works on the Gutenberg Project

Participants: Bob LaRocca, Camden Bucey, Daniel Schrock, Jared Oliphint, Jonathan Brack

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Jonathan Brack, Nate Shannon