Lane Tipton speaks about his new course on Van Til’s doctrine of revelation, which is the third course in our Fellowship in Reformed Apologetics. In this course, Dr. Tipton covers:

1. The implications of the self-contained and immutable Trinity for a doctrine of revelation in the work of creation and in the special act of providence in covenantal condescension
2. The distinctive character of natural revelation and the natural knowledge of God in Reformed theology, set in comparison and contrast to the views of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth
3. The relation between natural and supernatural, or general and special revelation, giving special attention to Van Til’s key essay, “Nature and Scripture”
4. The Vosian doctrine of eschatology as it bears upon the distinction and the relation of God’s revelation in nature and God’s revelation in covenant (and in Scripture).

The course gives sustained attention to a close reading of central primary sources in Van Til’s corpus that bear on his doctrine of the revelation of the self-contained Trinity in nature and in covenant.

Before sharing one of the lectures from the course, Lane and Camden compare and contrast Cornelius Van Til’s theology with that of Thomas Aquinas on the natural knowledge of God as well as man’s religious fellowship with God.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:01:23 The Fellowship in Reformed Apologetics
• 00:17:51 Van Til and Thomas Aquinas on the Natural Knowledge of God
• 00:23:33 Differences between Roman Catholic and Reformed Natural Theology
• 00:31:15 Thomas Aquinas on the Natural Knowledge of God
• 00:38:10 Aquinas on Ontological Re-Proportioning to Participate in the Essence of God
• 00:44:35 Preview Lecture on Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Knowledge of God
• 01:11:24 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

Glen Clary delivers a plenary address at the Reformed Forum 2018 Theology Conference at Hope Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Grayslake, Illinois. Download the handouts.

Participants: Glen Clary

Dominic Legge, O. P. speaks about the deep connection between Thomas’s Christology and his trinitarian theology. Dr. Legge is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Director of the Thomistic Institute Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Participants: Camden Bucey, Dominic Legge, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy

Jeff Waddington spoke at the fifth annual Reformed Forum Conference, which was held October 5–7, 2018 at Hope OPC in Grayslake, Illinois. The theme of the conference was “Seeing God: The Deeper Protestant Conception.” The speakers addressed important theological challenges and controversies facing the contemporary Reformed church by exploring the theologies of Thomas Aquinas, Karl Barth, and Geerhardus Vos on the beatific vision and glorification of man.

Participants: Jeff Waddington

Dr. Lawrence Feingold brings us a Catholic’s perspective on Thomas Aquinas and the important connection between his doctrines of the Eucharist and the Beatific Vision. Dr. Feingold is Associate Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis. He is the author of The Eucharist: Mystery of Presence, Sacrifice, and Communion and The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters. Dr. Feingold expresses the deep congruence between Thomas’s metaphysic and doctrines of the Beatific Vision and Eucharist. Rather than treating different loci of his theology and philosophy as disparate elements, it is much better and more appropriate to embrace Thomas as a monumental thinker developing an organic whole. While we have deep differences with the Roman Catholic tradition, we found this conversation to be utterly stimulating and instructive. Our understanding of Thomas and Catholicism was sharpened, and we trust listeners and viewers will benefit from careful consideration of Dr. Feingold’s teaching.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Lawrence Feingold

Jim Cassidy previews his address at the 2018 Reformed Forum conference by speaking about Barth on the analogy of being and the analogy of faith and how his views relate to the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Jim and Camden also speak about Barth’s views of natural theology and how they relate to the views of Cornelius Van Til. This is in response to recent remarks from Dr. Michael Allen on the Credo Magazine podcast (around minute 37). If you’d like to jump directly to that portion of our discussion, you can watch it on YouTube.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy

We have compiled a list of suggested reading to help those coming to the 2018 Theology Conference. We realize people like have neither the time nor financial budget to work through each of these titles in advance of the conference. Nonetheless, even a first-level reading of a few of these resources will help attendees make the most out of the conference. One of the things we love most about our events is the personal interaction. Working through the issues together is what makes the Reformed Forum community so special. Study and contemplate the deep mysteries of the God-man relationship and the future consummation. In October, let’s take the discussion to the next level.

Primary Sources

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics
  • CD I/2, section 14.
  • CD II/1, section 31.3
  • CD I/1, section 6
  • CD III/1, section 41.2
  • CD III/1, section 45.1
• Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, Preface to the Second Edition
• Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 1: Theology Proper
• Logos Resources
  • Barth’s Church Dogmatics: https://www.logos.com/product/5758/barths-church-dogmatics.
  • Vos: https://www.logos.com/product/48797/reformed-dogmatics
  • Van Til: https://www.logos.com/product/3994/the-works-of-cornelius-van-til

General Reading on the Beatific Vision

• Hans Boersma, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition

Thomas Aquinas

• Daria Spezzano, The Glory of God’s Grace: Deification According to St. Thomas Aquinas
• Dominic Legge, The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas
• Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters
• Levering and Dauphinais, eds., Rediscovering Aquinas and the Sacraments

Karl Barth

• Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis
• McCormack and White, eds., Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue
• James J. Cassidy, God’s Time For Us: Barth on the Reconciliation of Eternity and Time in Jesus Christ

Catholicism and Protestantism

• Cornelius Van Til, The Confession of 1967
• Cornelius Van Til, The New Synthesis Theology of the Netherlands
• Cornelius Van Til, The Great Debate Today
• John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II?
• William M. Shea, The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America

* Check back for updates.

“Yet the Aristotelianism of Rome, with its idea of potentiality, offers, we are bound to think, a point of contact with the underlying philosophy of Dialecticism. Rome occupies an intermediary position.”[1] What has Basel to do with Rome? In the above quotation Van Til is making a startling point. On the one hand earlier on in the paragraph he acknowledges that Rome has way too much orthodoxy in it for there to be an easy alignment with “the theology of Crisis.” Nevertheless, Rome’s theology and the theology of Basel are not devoid of all commonalities. So, when he speaks of “the Aristotelianism of Rome” he has in mind, of course, the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Van Til, rightly or wrongly, always associates Roman Catholicism with Thomism. But what is most important here for our purposes is to identify what he means by Rome’s “idea of potentiality.” We need to be brief here (a fuller scholarly treatment of this subject is beyond our purview). But the idea of “potentiality” entails what some call a chain, or scale, of being. Potency is understood opposite of actuality. And every thing has potency, which means it has potential toward actualization. Only God is pure actuality, having no potency in himself. Everything else is on its way toward actualization. This idea is often connected with the idea of the analogia entis – or analogy of being. Things on the scale of being – God who is the greatest being, man as an actualizing agent – relate to one another analogically. While there is much dissimilarity between God and man – God is fully actualized, we are not – there is also a commonality as well: God and man are both beings. So, it is an analogy based on the fact of what God and man have in common: being. And while God and man differ quantitatively in their being they are not qualitatively different. So, what has this to do with Barth (here Van Til uses the broader term “Dialecticism,” but he has primarily Barth in mind)? After all, does Van Til not know that Barth absolutely rejected the analogia entis (goes so far as associating it with the anti-Christ)? Does Van Til not know that Barth speaks about the “qualitative difference between eternity and time?” Where in the world could Van Til find common cause between Aquinas and Barth? While it is true that Barth begins with the “qualitative difference between time and eternity” he does not stay there. Especially as his theology develops from the time of his Romans commentary, he recognizes that he cannot stop with the qualitative difference if God and man are ever to be reconciled. Somehow God and man, time and eternity, the Creator and creature must be brought together. At the same time his actualistic doctrine of God does not allow him to have a God who is eternal or timeless in the absolute sense. So he speaks about “God’s time.” For Barth God’s time is his time of grace in the eternal decree who is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is himself both the electing God and the elect man. With that, then, Jesus Christ is both the eternal God and the temporal man. And he is such in his eternal nature. There is for Barth no logos asarkos, that is a Christ who is ever understood as being without flesh and therefore without time. Jesus Christ is himself “God’s time for us.” That means that God and man, eternity and time, are co-terminus realities. The relationship between God and man is relative and not absolute. For God is forever and from all eternity this God who has time for us in Jesus Christ. To be sure, this is not the same thing exactly as Thomas’ analogy of being. It is more like an analogy of God’s time. And while the construction differs, what remains as a common ground between Thomas and Barth are their commitment to placing God and man in a relative relationship rather than an absolute one. Both Thomas and Barth then stand over against the Reformed understanding of how God and man relate. For the Reformed God and man relate covenantally. They both have a relationship in absolute distinction from the beginning. The way in which they relate, then, is not through some kind of ontological bond. Rather, the bond is covenantal. It is a relation established by God and guaranteed and sealed by divine fiat – not through bringing God and man in under a common ontological reality (being for Thomas, time for Barth). But there is one last commonality between Thomas and Barth, and it is based on the commitment to their respective views of analogy. And that is they both stand in antithesis to the Reformed Faith. Reformed theology will not allow this common sharing or an ontological bond between God and man. For the problem between God and man is not ontology. The problem is a matter of hamartiology. And the solution is soteriological and covenantal. And therein lies the difference between the Reformed Faith on the one hand and Thomas and Barth on the other.

[1] Van Til, C. (1947). The new modernism: an appraisal of the theology of Barth and Brunner. The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Philadelphia. P. 8.

Jim Cassidy and Camden Bucey discuss theological methodology in light of Calvin’s view of natural theology. As a starting point for the discussion, they turn to Thiago M. Silva’s article, “John Calvin and the Limits of Natural Theology,” Puritan Reformed Journal 8, 2 (2016): 33-48.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy

It is often assumed that Karl Barth’s thought is the antithesis of medieval scholasticism. It is true that Barth is exceedingly critical of Aquinas. But does Barth offer us a better theological program than that offered in Scholasticism? Van Til answers that question with a resounding no. For instance, in Common Grace and the Gospel Van Til says:

In the first place it means that we cannot join Karl Barth in reducing God as He is in Himself to a relation that He sustains to His people in the world. Barth virtually seeks to meet the objector’s charge that Christianity involves a basic contradiction by rejecting the idea of God as He is in Himself and of God’s counsel as controlling all things in the world. He says that Calvin’s doctrine of God’s counsel must be completely rejected. Only when it is rejected, is the grace of God permitted to flow freely upon mankind. And that means that God’s love envelops all men. To be sure, for Barth there is reprobation but it is reprobation in Christ. The final word of God for all men, says Barth, is Yes. It matters not that men have not heard of the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. For Jesus of Nazareth is not, as such, the Christ. All men are as men, of necessity in Christ. All grace is universal or common grace. From the historic Christian point of view this is simply to say that the concept of grace is so widened as no longer to be grace at all. How truly Herman Bavinck anticipated, as it were, this most heretical of heresies of our day when he pointed out that in the last analysis one must make his choice between Pelagius and Augustine. The grace of God as Barth presents it is no longer distinguishable from the natural powers of man. All men to be men, says Barth, must have been saved and glorified from all eternity in Christ. This is how Barth would meet the objection against the idea of the sovereign grace of God. There is no longer any sovereign God and therefore there is no longer any grace. (pp. 154-155)

What Van Til says here takes some unpacking. I will do so in several points. First, Van Til notes Barth’s rejection of Calvin’s view of God’s eternal decree (cf. CD II.2, 67-76). Calvin affirms an absolutum decretum. This is the view that God, from eternity past, has elected some onto eternal life and some unto eternal damnation (i.e., double predestination). Barth believed that this was abstract theology, beginning as it does with an abstract decree of God-in-himself. Barth proposes instead a thoroughly Christological revamping of God’s decree. The idea is that Jesus Christ himself forms the two sides of election. In his humanity he is the elected man, and in his divinity he is the electing God (CD II.2, 76). And it is this relation-in-act which constitutes God’s being as it is. As he will later say, God’s “being is decision;” i.e., his decision to elect humanity in Christ’s humanity (CD II.2, 175). Second, this means that God’s grace is to and for all of humanity in the humanity of Jesus Christ. The humanity of Jesus Christ, in the eternal decision of election, is the vicarious humanity of all humans. In other words, because his humanity is the object of God’s electing grace and since his humanity represents all of humanity, that means all of humanity receives the electing grace of God. All humans are elect. God’s grace is – as Van Til says above – permitted to flow to all mankind. That means that God’s grace is universal. Or, we might say, common. It is given to all men, regardless of whether or not they consider themselves Christians. Grace is common to all – believer as well as unbeliever. Third, Van Til says that Barth’s position is that God’s being as well as man’s being is constituted by relation to one another. There is no abstract God, or God-in-himself. God’s being is a being-in-relation (to man). Likewise, man’s being is a being-in-relation (to God). This relation is found in Jesus Christ who is himself the relation between man (his humanity) and God (his divinity). Man’s being then is a being of grace. Humanity is elected man and therefore is “full of grace.” This applies not just to his status as elect, but to his very being. Van Til is troubled by this, in part, because if everything is grace then nothing is grace. If every man is a recipient of grace then grace has lost its meaning. Grace can be understood as grace only over against condemnation. And while Barth affirms Christ is both the elect man and reprobate man, yet no man is actually reprobate. All are elect. That turns what Calvin regarded as special grace into common grace. Common grace and the Gospel are confused in Barth. Fourth, as he said earlier, this makes Barth’s position almost indistinguishable from the analogia entis of Scholasticism. Van Til notes

For it is of the essence of the analogy of faith … that the ideas of God and man be thought of as correlative to one another. God is then nothing but what He is in relation to man through Christ, and man is nothing but what he is in relation to God through Christ. If the idea of correlativity between God and man was already involved in the analogy of being, it came to its full and final expression in the idea of the analogy of faith. (Common Grace, 130)

In other words, just as man and God are related to one another by the common idea of being (something the two share), so likewise with Barth’s view of analogy. God and man are related, they are as Van Til says elsewhere, “correlative” to one another in the eternal decision of God in election in Christ. For Thomas it was being that served as a common ontological notion which God and man have in common. For Barth it is God’s act of electing grace which holds them in common. But in either scenario God becomes dependent on something other than himself in his existence. God’s being as the electing God depends on his relation to man, just as man depends on his relation to God in Christ for his being. In God’s Time for Us I argue that this relation occurs in the “time” of God’s grace in Christ. This “time” serves as a substitute for a metaphysical notion of being. But whether we are talking about time or being, either way there is an ontological tertium quid which serves as an abstract ontological commonality relating God and man. Barth, no less than Thomas, fails to properly maintain the creator-creature distinction. And with that, he – no less than Thomas – fails to properly maintain the antithesis between believer and unbeliever (since grace is common to all). This gives the unbeliever a certain kind of autonomy and libertarian freedom to believe as he wants about God. Barth, in some ways, out-scholasticizes and out-rationalizes even Thomas himself! If nature is grace for Barth then all theology is natural theology, even while it is at the same time gracious theology. If Barth were consistent with his theology, then there really could be no Nein! to natural theology, but only a full and unequivocal yes and amen.

Bob LaRocca leads a discuss on Thomas Aquinas’ Second Way. The Second Way is an argument for the existence of God from efficient causes. The flow of the argument is as follows:

1. We perceive a series of efficient causes of things in the world.
2. Nothing exists prior to itself.
3. Therefore nothing is the efficient cause of itself.
4. If a previous efficient cause does not exist, neither does the thing that results.
5. Therefore if the first thing in a series does not exist, nothing in the series exists.
6. The series of efficient causes cannot extend ad infinitum into the past, for then there would be no things existing now.
7. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.

Visit this site for more information regarding Thomas’ Five Ways.

Participants: Bob LaRocca, Jared Oliphint, Jonathan Brack, Nate Shannon

Bob LaRocca brings Thomas Aquinas’ famous first way to the table. Thomas’ ways have become staples in apologetic discussions.

Participants: Bob LaRocca, Jared Oliphint, Jonathan Brack

Bibliography

Other Formats

• Zotero RDF
• Dublin Core RDF

Participants: Camden Bucey, James Dolezal, Jeff Waddington