We turn to pp. 302–304 of Geerhardus Vos’s book, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments to discuss the nature of New Testament revelation. Vos explains how the new dispensation in Christ is the final dispensation of revelation. Referencing Hebrews 1:1–2, we discuss how this revelation is organic, progressive, and climactic in Christ.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 05:58 The New Dispensation
• 07:42 Hebrews 1:1–2
• 14:33 Organic Revelation
• 23:01 Progressive Revelation
• 35:26 Climactic Revelation
• 45:56 Christ and the Apostles
• 52:11 Conclusion

Links

• Grace in Common episode on organic theology
• Vos Group #1: An Introduction to Geerhardus Vos’ Biblical Theology
• Vos Group #2: The Nature and Method of Biblical Theology, Part 1
• Vos Group #3: The Nature and Method of Biblical Theology, Part 2

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

We turn to pp. 299–301 of Geerhardus Vos’s book, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments. Vos discusses three ways in which the structure of New Testament Revelation can be determined from within Scripture itself.

1. From indications in the Old Testament
2. From the teachings of Jesus
3. From the teachings of Paul and the other apostles

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:07:43 The Structure of New Testament Revelation
• 00:15:11 Organic vs. Artificial
• 00:21:32 Old Testament Indications of the Nature of Revelation
• 00:27:04 The Old and the New
• 00:38:23 The Teaching of Jesus
• 00:43:00 Abrogation and Perfection
• 00:52:03 Hebrews 10:19-24 and the Era of Religious Fellowship
• 00:56:58 Paul and the Teaching of the Other Apostles
• 01:01:21 Hebrews 1:1-2
• 01:06:06 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:06:03 Carlton’s Introduction to Sinclair Ferguson
• 00:15:21 Theology for Life
• 00:20:05 The Inspiration of Scripture
• 00:37:42 The Accommodation of Scripture
• 00:40:59 The Usefulness of Doctrine for Pastoral Ministry
• 00:49:32 The Redemptive-Historical Character of Scripture
• 01:02:38 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne

At Reformed Forum we often speak about the organic unity of the Scriptures. This is the basic idea that the Old Testament is naturally related to the New Testament. I’m using “naturally” in distinction from “artificially.” In the Old Testament God is revealing his plan and purpose to his people of old, but he’s revealing it to them in “seed” form.

Just as soon as Adam and Eve sin in Genesis 3, God promises to provide the seed of the woman who would crush the head of the serpent. He promises them a redeemer, no one other than Jesus Christ.

There in Genesis 3 we see Christ, but he is revealed in shadowy form—as a seed compared to a full flowering plant. God’s full plan of redemption in Jesus Christ has not fully unfolded. Later on, we see it in greater detail as God reveals himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We see it through Moses and the Mosaic Covenant through David and the Theocratic Kingdom. In all of these stages, we come to see more and more the greatness and the fullness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ so that when Jesus Christ comes in the flesh and he accomplishes his perfect work of redemption. He is fulfilling that which was depicted and revealed in advance throughout the Old Testament.

Just as a seed is planted and then watered it comes to sprout from the ground. Over time it grows and matures into a larger plant. We then begin to see it bud and eventually it will blossom into a full flower. All the beauty and grandeur we see in that process over time is part of a whole. No phase is discreet and unrelated to the whole. The parts are naturally—as opposed to artificially—related to one another. What we see in the growth of that plant over time is the unfolding of what it is intended to be from the very beginning.

Likewise, when we read of the Apostles speaking about Christ as the fulfillment of the Old Testament, they are underscoring that Christ is the sum and substance of Old Testament revelation. The Apostles are not artificially placing Christ onto the Old Testament Scriptures as if they’re somehow engaging in some form of reader response theory. Jesus is not tacked onto the message of the Old. The Scriptures from beginning to end are all about Jesus Christ. He is the sum and substance of the word of God. He is the word of God incarnate and all of his word is organically related.

A listener of Christ the Center raised a useful question about Bavinck, noting that he denies the speculative conception of “innate ideas” in Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, pp. 69–73 and wondered what such a denial might imply. 

In response to that excellent question, we should grasp that Bavnick clearly denied the philosophically speculative notion of “innate ideas” that leads to mysticism. However, while Bavinck denied the speculative notion of innate ideas found among the philosophers, he endorsed the notion of “implanted knowledge of God” found in Calvin’s theology of the sensus divinitatis. Bavinck says,

At the same time we must speak of the “implanted knowledge of God” in some sense. This means simply that, as in the case of language, human beings possess both the capacity and the inclination to arrive at some firm, certain, and unfailing knowledge of God. We gain this knowledge in the normal course of human development and in the environment in which God gives us the gift of life. From the entire realm of nature, both exterior and interior to us humans, we receive impressions and gain perceptions that foster in us the sense of God. It is God himself who does not leave us without witness.

Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:54

It is this original capacity and inclination before the fall that received the “impressions” from God in his self-disclosure that was “interior” to Adam as the image of God. In that way, God did not leave created Adam without a witness. This Calvinistic notion of “implanted knowledge of God” differs from the philosophically speculative notion of “innate ideas.” God did not create Adam with abstract “innate ideas” but with a personal “implanted knowledge of God” that underwrote his natural religious fellowship with God—a fellowship that according to Bavinck precludes the need for ontologically reproportioning grace as found in the donum superadditum (see RD 3:576–77). This is Bavinck’s way of stating what Vos termed the “deeper Protestant conception” of the image of God (see Vos’ RD 2:13–14).

Lane Tipton, Ryan Noha, Rob McKenzie, and Camden Bucey pull up to a table for the first podcast recording at the new Reformed Forum headquarters in Libertyville, Illinois. We discuss the new facility, the new course we recording in our Fellowship in Reformed Apologetics, and the current interest in natural theology.

For those watching the video, one of the cameras ceased recording after a few minutes. This led to a lack of visual coverage for Ryan and Lane and cinematography reminiscent of that capturing Dr. Claw in Inspector Gadget.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 02:39 The New Reformed Forum HQ
• 13:46 Van Til’s Doctrine of Natural Theology
• 24:22 The Current Interest in Natural Theology
• 31:53 Natural Arguments in the Public Square
• 36:55 Natural Theology and the Doctrine of Sin
• 41:41 The Need for a Renewed Calvinist Militancy
• 48:31 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton, Rob McKenzie, Ryan Noha

We turn to the mailbag today to answer questions from listeners. We discuss the “organic” unity of the Scriptures, Van Til’s understanding of the phenomenal world, why the covenant of works and the covenant of grace point to something better than Eden, and vital and formal aspects of covenant membership.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:04:57 Update on Reformed Academy
• 00:15:38 The “Organic” Unity of the Scriptures
• 00:25:04 Van Til and the Phenomenal World
• 00:41:18 Covenant Advancement in the Garden
• 00:48:16 Vital and Formal Aspects of the Covenant
• 01:08:42 Conclusion

Links

• Lane Tipton lesson from Union with Christ: The Benefits of His Suffering and Glory — The Gospel, the Old Testament, and the Two Estates in Romans 1:1–4

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Ryan Noha

Dr. William Dennison, pastor of Emmanuel OPC in Kent, Washington, speaks about J. Gresham Machen’s theological method as disclosed through his radio addresses just a few years prior to his death. Machen understood that the modern world and the church were in a state of emergency. While many of Machen’s listeners would have thought about the economic volatility of the depression or perhaps the political unrest of fascism and communism. Moreover, many of these listeners would have expected Machen to discuss solutions to these ailments along the lines of those advocated by progressive modernists. Yet, Machen called his listeners to Christ and his kingdom, which transcends this visible world.

Machen speaks often about the benefits of reason, experience, and common sense. In these radio addresses, however, he states clearly that all these elements are to be viewed in subordination to the truth of God’s Word. Specifically, they function in the manner that God, the Creator and Ruler over all things has created them to function. We know this from the Bible.

Dennison, “J. Gresham Machen’s Theological Method”

Machen rejected a general appeal to categories such as reason, experience, empirical facts, common sense, and rhetoric as a means of establishing common ground because of his deep understanding of the effects of sin upon all of man’s faculties. Dennison connects this aspect of Machen’s theology to that of his colleague at Westminster Seminary, Cornelius Van Til.

As a man whose theology appears to still be under development, Machen was neither blindly following the evidentialist tradition of Old Princeton leaning upon Thomas Reid and Scottish Common Sense Realism nor that later mature apologetic system of Van Til.

Further Reading

• William Dennison, “J. Gresham Machen’s Theological Method” (PDF article)
• Machen, J. Gresham. Things Unseen: A Systematic Introduction to the Christian Faith and Reformed Theology. Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 2020.
• Bahnsen, Greg L. “Machen, Van Til, and the Apologetical Tradition of the OPC.” In Pressing Toward the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, edited by Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble, 259–94. Philadelphia: The Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986.
• Hart, D. G., and John R. Muether. “Why Machen Hired Van Til.” Ordained Servant 6, no. 3 (July 1997): 65–68.

Participants: Bill Dennison, Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

In 1894, B. B. Warfield published an article in which he compared the views of the Westminster divines and the Reformers on the mode of inspiration. According to Warfield, the Reformers argued for a mode of concursus while the Protestant Scholastics argued for dictation. Dr. Jeff Stivason analyzes this characterization, speaking to Warfield’s historical context and his understanding of progressive orthodoxy.

Jeff Stivason is pastor of Grace Reformed Presbyterian Church (RPCNA) in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania and professor-elect at Reformed Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh. His article, “Is Warfield’s Claim True that Calvin is Better than Westminster on Inspiration?” is available in the Westminster Theological Journal Vol. 81, No. 2 (Fall 2019), pp. 279–293.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Stivason, Jim Cassidy

I often receive questions about Barth’s views on the Bible, which admittedly is a challenging topic. According to Karl Barth, the Bible is not revelation. The Bible is one of three modes of Barth’s doctrine of the Word of God. While Barth can say that the Bible is the Word of God, he will not, however, affirm that it is the revelation of God. Only God’s act of grace in Jesus Christ is revelation. Scripture, like the church’s preaching, merely witnesses to the Word of God in revelation. Consequently, the Bible is not inerrant.

Barth is also clear that there is a kind of becoming to the Bible as the Word of God. “The Word-of-Godness” (that’s my expression, not Barth’s) of Scripture is not inherent in Scripture itself. Rather, its “Word-of-Godness” is actualized “from above,” as it were, through God’s act of grace and self-disclosure in Jesus Christ. In other words, the “Word-of-Godness” that Scripture becomes arises not from Scripture itself, but from God.

The New Testament cites the book of Isaiah more than any other Old Testament book. Scripture itself treats the book as a literary work by a single author. In this episode, Will Wood, discusses critical approaches to this prophecy that tend to view the book of Isaiah as a composite work of many different people and even different groups. All the while, we will come to see that the question of authorship is not self-contained; it raises significant issues regarding fundamental matters of the faith.

Will Wood is Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Will Wood

We turn to pages 214–216 of Geerhardus Vos’s book, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments, to discuss the kernel and divination theories of the reception of prophetic revelation. Critical scholars seek to identify human beings as the origin of the prophetic message. Vos defends the orthodox notion that God reveals himself in objective verbal revelation to the prophets, who delivered that inspired and inerrant message to the people.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

We gather around the table in Wimberley, Texas to discuss the authority of the self-contained Triune God of Scripture. The absolute, self-sufficient God nevertheless established a covenant with man by an act of special providence. In that act, the authority of God’s word is diplayed—entirely independently of man’s response. Whether Adam obeyed or disobeyed, God’s infallible word would be proved.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, Lane G. Tipton

In this episode of #VosGroup, we turn to pages 200–201 of Vos’ book Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments to continue our discussion of critical theories of prophetism.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

Thank you to everyone who visited reformedforum.org/donate throughout the year. We are tremendously grateful for your generous support. Be assured that we’re setting the stage for another big year as our board continues to think and pray about our next steps.

We’re looking forward to another full year of Christ the Center. January 25 marked our 10th anniversary. Jeff, Jim, and I recorded that first episode during my first year in seminary—three homes and three children ago. Things have changed over the years, but our goal has stayed the same. Our mission is to present every person mature in Christ (Col. 1:28).

Episodes

• 524 — Marcus Mininger, Uncovering the Theme of Revelation in Romans 1:16–3:26
• 533 — Michael Kruger, How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church
• 540 — The Nature of Apostasy in Hebrews 6
• 542 — Bill Dennison, Karl Marx
• 551 — The Impeccability of Jesus Christ
• 555 — Darryl Hart, Still Protesting
• 556 — The Deeper Protestant Conception
• 566 — Glen Clary, The Liturgies of Bucer, Calvin, and Knox
• 570 — Danny Olinger, Geerhardus Vos: Reformed Biblical Theologian, Confessional Presbyterian
• 571 — Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto, Bavinck’s Philosophy of Revelation

Participants: Adam York, Bill Dennison, Camden Bucey, Cory Brock, Dan Ragusa, Danny Olinger, Darryl G. Hart, Glen Clary, Jared Oliphint, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, Lane G. Tipton, Marcus Mininger, Michael Kruger, Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

In this installment of #VosGroup, we turn to pages 198–199 of Vos’ book Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments to consider critical theories of prophetism. We extend and amplify the material in these pages more than usual by connecting Vos’s teaching to the theology of Karl Barth and other modernist approaches.

Broadly, the term can be associated with “instrument of revelation” and this is so important to note. For Vos, contra Barth, there is a direct, organic disclosure of God’s revealed truth in our calendar-time history. It is not in a distinct, third-time dimension that Barth calls Geschichte that “revelation” occurs. For Barth, revelation is Jesus Christ in a distinct time dimension, God’s third time for us, that “revelation” occurs. Revelation is Jesus Christ. The Scriptures, the prophets and calendar time history are not themselves revelation–they only point to revelation. Revelation is a “supra-historical” event in a time dimension altogether different from our calendar time.

But Vos would say this is fundamentally wrong–it is a different religious conception of “revelation” altogether. God speaks directly to Adam in the Garden of Eden in terms of positive, special, verbal revelation. God’s voice can be heard, speaking with inerrant and inescapable authority, in Eden. It is this initial self-revelation from God, in the Garden of Eden, prior to the fall, that supplies us with our conception of revelation. God both acts and speaks in calendar time history, and that special is initially given to Adam under the covenant of works. God’s revelation in nature (image of God) is by divine design subordinate to God’s revelation in positive categories. In other words, Genesis 2:7 (image of God) and Genesis 2:15–17 (Covenant) demand the idea that God reveals himself with absolute authority and clarity directly in history.

Vos says, “But the Reformed have always insisted upon it that at no point shall a recognition of the historical delivery and apprehension of truth be permitted to degenerate into a relativity of truth. The history remains a history of revelation. Its total product agrees absolutely in every respect with the sum of truth as it lies in the eternal mind and purpose of God.”

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

Jeff Waddington speaks about the characteristics of natural and special revelation and their relationship to one another. Jeff recently delivered a lecture at Westminster Theological Seminary on the subject.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington

Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto speak about Herman Bavinck’s Philosophy of Revelation (Hendrickson Publishers). Drs. Brock and Sutanto have edited a new annotated edition of Bavinck’s Stone Lectures, which were delivered at Princeton in 1908. Other than his Reformed Dogmatics, this is Bavinck’s most important work. We are blessed to welcome new editions and translations of these works. Along with James Eglinton, Brock and Sutanto are also editing Bavinck’s Christian Worldview, scheduled to be published by Crossway next year.

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

Dan Ragusa introduces us to the theological method of Petrus Van Mastricht, Dutch Reformed theologian, who maintained consistent Reformed orthodoxy against Cartesian influences. Van Mastricht wrote a polemic against Balthasar Bekker, a critic of paganism but a proponent of Cartesianism. In his polemic, Van Mastricht addresses the issue of Scriptural authority, theological method, and the proper end toward which all theologians and philosophers must be directed: worship of the one, true, and living God. Dan Ragusa is a PhD student at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Readings

• Daniel Ragusa, “Beginning with Scripture, Ending with Worship: An Analysis of Petrus van Mastricht’s Polemic against Balthasar Bekker“
• Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology Volume 1: Prolegomena
• Adriaan C. Neele, The Art of Living to God

Participants: Camden Bucey, Dan Ragusa

Currently, amidst the Reformed discussion concerning God’s simplicity and immutability, there has been repeated references to the anthropomorphic language of Scripture. It is commonly understood that language attributing human emotions or physical features to God is not meant to be understood “literally.” A typical example is Deuteronomy 26:8, “And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders.” God does not have physical body parts, so such language is immediately classified as anthropomorphic and seldom given a second thought. The same goes for a passage that attributes emotion to God, such as Genesis 6:6, “And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” Certain theologians claim that God cannot experience emotion in any way, because that would suggest that he undergoes change or is affected by creation. This, it is claimed, would compromise the Creator-creature distinction by making God somehow dependent on the world he has made. In such cases, the anthropomorphic language of Scripture has become a sort of throwaway, a means of dismissing semantic possibilities that do not accord with particular historical or confessional understandings of God. My aim here is not to address the concerns of the current debate directly, but to raise a question that may reorient us to God’s divine purposes in using human language. Is the way in which many theologians treat anthropomorphic language, as a tool that God uses to convey something that cannot be taken “literally” (whatever that means), a helpful way of processing this language? To me, the approach seems to assume a fairly shallow view of the nature of language and God’s purposes for it. More specifically, it misses the worship we should give to God in response to reading it. Let me explain this after examining the concept of anthropomorphic language itself. Anthropomorphic language is often treated as a unique instance in which God speaks to us in covenantal condescension. He comes down to our level and communicates something in terms that we can readily understand. This seems relatively simple, but there is a lot of mystery and complexity here that goes overlooked. First, consider the fact that all language is anthropomorphic. All human language with reference to God is an occasion wherein the infinite is related to the finite. In revealing himself to us, God always speaks anthropomorphically. Human language is just as much a part of being human as is having body parts or emotions. There is a profound sense in which, from the very outset of Scripture, God speaks anthropomorphically. He uses human language to express something of his infinite love, wisdom, and divine intentionality. Second, labeling language as anthropomorphic does nothing to explain such language. It appears to explain it, but the question that I do not see being asked is this, “Why did God choose to use this language?” Surely, if God wanted to speak to us in a more literal manner, he could have done so. God is the author of Scripture, and it is he who chose to reveal himself in this way. Why? Why use poetic and metaphorical language—of arms and hands and emotions—rather than language that is plainer? In other words, what is God’s intention for using this language? Some, no doubt, would say that his intention is to communicate on our level. But that answer needs to be more developed. If by “communicate on our level,” we mean, “say something that is not really true about God,” then that should give us pause. Is that God’s intention—to dish up dialogue that, in the end, is semantically vapid? Does God present his children with linguistic ornaments just so they can dismember them and see what lies behind? I think that is a shallow way to read Scripture. It leaves out the richness of divine-human communication. Third, is “anthropomorphic” even a valid category for language? This is related to the first point, but introduces a distinct problem: we assume that human language is merely human. And so we must move, as it were, from the merely human language to what it might say about God. But God himself is the giver of language and is everywhere reflected in it. What’s more, Jesus used language in conversing with the Father (John 17). If Jesus is one person with both a human and divine nature, must we not also say that his divine nature was engaged in speaking with the heavenly Father? And if so, does that not mean that language cannot be merely human? God is profoundly involved with human language. And because everything that God has created reflects him, we simply cannot say that language is merely human. Language has divine origins. In that sense, all language is really theomorphic. Our use of language reflects the God who communicates with himself in three persons and who has blessed his creatures with an ability that analogously reflects what he, as the original communicative being, does. So, using the phrase “anthropomorphic” actually gets the whole thing backwards: it assumes that our language is the original and that God has fit himself to it, when in reality God’s communication is the original, and he has endowed us with the ability to communicate as a gift that is derived from and reflective of his loving communion. It seems that I am raising a lot of questions without offering many answers. So, let me get to the real point. This “anthropomorphic” language in Scripture seems to be expressing something very different about God’s intention for human language. To me, it seems to express the awe-inspiring truth that the creator of heaven and earth has condescended, has come down, and has spoken to us. In so doing, God brings us to marvel. He is not afraid to condescend in human language, to take on syllables and syntax, to enter the world of words, for that world is ultimately a reflection of his own communicative nature. Nor is God, in an even more profound sense, afraid to take on flesh. The Incarnation is the climax of God’s revelation, of God’s speech to us, for there he not only utters words to us; he utters the Word, his eternal Son, in the power of the eternal Spirit. How could God do such a thing? It is here that God draws our attention to the response we should have to his revelation, be it literal, metaphorical, anthropomorphic, or incarnational: worship. We worship God for the greatness of his mysterious grace in speaking to us—not because he condescended in human language and life, but because language and life themselves have divine roots. They are gifts. Why would God give such gifts to us? I do not know. I cannot know. But I can worship him for such gifts because they reveal the inexhaustible truth of salvation, of what God has come down to do for sinners. I believe that the whole debate over anthropomorphic language is missing something quite basic to the nature of God, something that goes well beyond our ability to articulate his nature and essence: God speaks. Creation, redemption, salvation—he speaks all of it. I hear it, and I want to worship because God has come so far, to a creature who is so low, to do something so incomprehensible.

Life—understood biblically as the enjoyment of the covenant communion bond with God in a holy kingdom—is brought into close association with God’s word from the beginning. It was Adam’s response to the word of God (in either obedience or disobedience) that characterized his probation: obedience to it would entail eschatological life as symbolized in the tree of life, while disobedience would incur death away from the life-giving presence of God. Even in the pre-redemptive state, God’s word was to regulate the communion bond of life into which Adam was brought. The covenant relationship was not a joint-venture between God and Adam, but the sovereign imposition of God by which he brought man into personal fellowship with himself to be graciously and lovingly ruled by his word and so with him find fullness of life. Adam was to live in accordance with God’s interpretation of himself and his surroundings, not his own autonomous interpretation. Adam, for one, could not have intuited from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that it was forbidden and would lead to death without a special word revelation from God. Vern Poythress writes,

Verbal communication was one aspect of personal communion between God and man. Through his Words God also gave guidance and direction in both general [Gen. 1:28] and specific [Gen. 2:17] ways. … When he created man, God never intended that man should find his way in the world just by using his mind and observing the trees and the soil around him. God spoke. God instructed. And because it was God who spoke, he spoke with absolute authority, the authority of the Creator. This speech was designed to govern everything else in human life.[1]

From the beginning man was not to live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (see Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4; Jn. 4:34). This principle will run throughout redemptive-history as the communion bond between God and his people is established, maintained, and consummated by the power of his revealed word, which is to be life (even resurrection life) for them.[2]

[Y]ou have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God; for: “All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you. (1 Peter 1:23-25).

In contrast to the life-giving word of God, the twisted words of the serpent stood in opposition as death stood in opposition to life. The words of the serpent sought to compromise and ultimately destroy the very communion bond that was Adam’s life by injecting into it suspicion and doubt as to the good and gracious character and purpose of God. Sinclair Ferguson captures this well,

In Eden the Serpent persuaded Eve and Adam that God was possessed of a narrow and restrictive spirit bordering on the malign. … [The serpent’s temptation] was intended to dislodge Eve from the clarity of God’s word. … But it was more. It was an attack on God’s character. … The Serpent’s tactic was to lead her into seeing and interpreting the world through her eyes (what she saw when she looked at the tree) rather than through her ears (what God had said about it). … In both mind and affections God’s law was now divorced from God’s gracious person. Now she thought God wanted nothing for her. Everything was myopic, distorted ‘now.’ … [W]hat the Serpent accomplished in Eve’s mind, affections, and will was a divorce between God’s revealed will and his gracious, generous character. Trust in him was transformed into suspicion of him by looking at ‘naked law’ rather than hearing ‘law from the gracious lips of the heavenly Father.’ God thus became to her “He-whose-favor-has-to-be-earned.”[3]

The Serpent’s words were a targeted attack aimed at severing the wholesome life-giving fellowship of union and communion that Adam enjoyed with God. For Adam to submit to the word of God meant life, but for him to submit to the word of the serpent meant death. So because of his silence before the forbidden tree, Adam failed to counter the serpent’s venomous lies with the truth of God and so incurred death away from the life-giving presence of God. Rather than experiencing joy in the presence of God, a lethal fear entered his heart, a fear of the source of life, God himself (3:10). Into this situation the grace and mercy of God resounds in the words of curse pronounced upon the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” The dark communion bond between the woman and the serpent is severed by the interjection of enmity and ultimate triumph over the serpent is promised. The communion bond of life with God is restored and consummated in the resurrection of Jesus Christ whose Gospel Word and Spirit are now the power of life for all who are united to him by faith.

[1] From the forward to John Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief, ed. Joseph E. Torres (2^nd ed.; Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2015), xix. For more on this see Vern S. Poythress, In the Beginning Was the Word: Language: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2009). See also Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, ed. William Edgar (2^nd ed.; Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2007), 125-26. [2] For a concise biblical theology of the centrality of the word of God in human living, see Vern S. Poythress’s forward to John Frame, Apologetics: A Justification of Christian Belief, xviii-xxii. [3] Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, & Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters (Wheaten, IL: Crossway, 2016), 80, 81, 82.

This episode was recorded just prior to our 2017 Theology Conference on The Reformation of Apologetics. We discuss the theological approach of scholasticism as it pertains to Thomas Aquinas, the Reformers, and Cornelius Van Til.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy

This episode was recorded live at our 2017 Theology Conference on The Reformation of Apologetics. In celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation and the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Cornelius Van Til, we consider the connection between Reformed apologetics and the five solas. The solas summarize the theological principles of the Reformation, and while one may not consider apologetics to be a major discipline of the Reformation, we seek to show how the Reformation dictates a consistent apologetic method. We contend that to be a covenantal apologist, one must be a Reformed theologian. Moreover, to be a consistent Reformed theologian, one must be a covenantal apologist.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, Lane G. Tipton

The more I read orthodox theology, the more apparent it becomes that a fundamental tenet of Christian belief is either embraced or ignored (to various degrees) by any given author. For me, this choice or tendency on the part of the author has dramatic implications for the truth of what he or she says. That tenet is this: Scripture is the very speech of God. Most conservative Christians are quick to grant the validity of this tenet and would even affirm its centrality to our thinking about God. But I find in some orthodox theology an inconsistent working out of this tenet in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and language. This is not the place to pose and proliferate on theoretical questions concerning how Scripture as the speech of God influences our understanding of the nature of reality, or human thought, or language—those are oceans that even the best theologians that I have read have trouble navigating. I myself have only just begun exploring these issues and hope, by God’s grace, to write about them in the future. But I would at least suggest that confessional, orthodox theologians ask themselves a simple question when they begin thinking about a particular doctrine or body of thought in the above areas: What does God himself say about X in Scripture? Put differently, what does God’s speech tell us about his own nature and the nature of reality (metaphysics), how we acquire knowledge of him and the world that he has made (epistemology), and how our communicative behavior (language) functions to reveal both our epistemology and metaphysic? I believe that meditating on Scripture as the speech of God is absolutely critical in answering these questions. In the paragraphs that follow, I hope to explain why. To begin with, if the Bible is the speech of God, it is the highest, most trustworthy, and most illuminating authority we have—on everything. In my understanding, that is why the Reformers were so adamant about the maxim sola Scriptura. Scripture alone is sufficient for us because Scripture alone is the speech of God—the verbal revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the medium of human language. Given this fundamental belief of Reformed theology, I cannot help but be puzzled as to why some theologians would first turn to a “respectable” figure in the history of human thought when they begin thinking about metaphysics, epistemology, or language—especially a figure outside the Christian tradition. Plato is not God, and neither is Aristotle, or Locke, or Wittgenstein. And yet the inanity of the previous sentence does not keep some theologians from turning to such figures first (sometimes through an intermediary such as Aquinas) when questions of metaphysics arise, for instance. Now, let me be careful. I do not want to downplay the value of these thinkers and others when it comes to “big questions” of philosophy and theology. I did my undergraduate work at a liberal arts institution. I have benefited greatly from reading as widely as I can. To reaffirm the words Carl Trueman once uttered, echoing many before him, we learn a great deal not from reading only those who agree with us, but from reading those who disagree with us, those who differ from us. So, this is not a question of whether great figures in the history of human thought should be mined for their insight. It is a question of where Christian theologians are to begin. What will be their foundation for inquiry? When the question is put that way, I cannot help wondering, why do we not always begin by asking what God himself has to say about metaphysics, about the nature of human knowledge, and about language? Why not always begin with the speech of God in Scripture? The inspiring thing about these questions is that when we do begin with the speech of God, I find that the whole world—our perception of God and reality, as well as human knowledge—takes on a linguistic dimension. In other words, the very fact that the triune God speaks, as revealed in Scripture means that he has created, sustains, and governs everything by word. Should this not profoundly shape the areas of human thought mentioned above? Should we not have a metaphysic, epistemology, and view of language grounded in and shaped by God’s speech?

A Linguistic Metaphysic

Take metaphysics, for instance. Some might argue that Scripture does not have a metaphysic (at least, not a developed one as can be found in Aristotle’s Metaphysics). But I would contest this. I believe that Scripture has a metaphysic yet to be fully developed in the church, though some have certainly begun to explore this. Perhaps what people mean when they say that Scripture does not have a metaphysic is, “Scripture does not have a metaphysic that looks like other metaphysical theories in human history.” But should it? Would we not expect the speech of God to be clearly distinct—even relatively radical—as compared to merely human speech? Or perhaps people mean, “The purpose of Scripture is not to give us a view of metaphysics, but a clear exposition of what God has done in history to redeem his people.” I understand the sentiment behind that statement, but what about the words of 2 Timothy 3:16–17? “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” We would be hard pressed to teach anything—much less be “complete”—if God did not reveal the nature of reality to us. In other words, if the purpose of Scripture is to reveal what God has done in history for our salvation so that we may use this to teach others, how can we do so without having a basic view of reality that is itself dictated by God? This has led me to believe that Scripture does (in fact, must) have a metaphysic. In fact, Scripture begins to lay this out for us in the first chapter of Genesis. The very first page of Scripture tells us that all of reality came into existence by God’s speech (Gen 1), and Scripture elsewhere reminds us that all things are held together by the eternal Word of the Father (John 1:1; Col 1:17; Heb 1:3), who stood behind God’s speech at creation. Scripture’s metaphysic is thus linguistic. All things exist and draw their nature from the language, the speech, of the triune God, which governs the world and guides it to the ends that he has set for it. It is the divine voice—the Father uttering the person of his Son in the power of his Spirit—that has created, sustains, and governs all things. God’s voice has the power to bring the world into being, to sustain it, and to melt it away. As the psalmist wrote, “The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts” (Ps 46:6). This linguistic metaphysic, I believe, should be where theologians begin when they ask what something is, when they ask about the nature of reality. To ask what something is, biblically speaking, is to ask what purpose that thing serves in the spoken plan of God, as revealed in Scripture (God’s written speech). It is to ask what God’s speech has done to create it, sustain it, and direct it to his revealed ends. An apple, for instance, is not merely a piece of produce from the malus pumila tree. That might be true in the context of botanical science, but in the context of redemptive history, an apple is a life-sustaining gift from a garden-speaking God (Gen 1:12). It exists as a revelation of God’s gracious providence, as a means of sustaining God’s image-bearers as they work to steward the world (Gen 1:29). That understanding might not appear in the Latin, and it certainly will not appear in Aristotle, but that does not make it any less true—at least, not for the biblically minded theologian. To discern what something truly is, to understand the nature of the world in which we live, we must turn first to God’s speech in Scripture, not to the thought of a philosopher or even to that of another godly theologian. When we turn to God’s speech, we find a metaphysics of word. That metaphysic certainly does not resemble the neat categories of form and matter, substance and accidents, or potentiality and actuality. But, again, I ask, should it?

An Epistemology of Word

Epistemology has a similar foundation when we examine the speech of God in Scripture. Scripture reveals two things very plainly: (1) God has spoken into existence a world that everywhere “speaks” about him, i.e., offers revelation of God (Ps 19:1–3); and (2) God speaks directly with his people to guide them in paths of wisdom. The bedrock question of epistemology—what is truth and how do we know that something is true—is again based on the speech of God. God tells us what is true in his revelation. This is what Reformed theologians have come to call a revelational epistemology. It is an epistemology that stands firmly on the grounds that God speaks to reveal himself and to reveal what we can faithfully know about his world. So, when we turn to God’s speech, we find an epistemology of word. Again, let me re-emphasize my point here. I am not saying that examining the thought of philosophers is a fruitless endeavor. Despite our fundamental disagreements with them, we can learn much from reading Plato’s Gorgias, or considering satirists such as Voltaire, or rationalists such as Leibniz, or empiricists such as Locke and Hume. But biblical theologians should never begin there. That is not their foundation. Their foundation is God’s speech in Scripture.

A Christian Philosophy of Language

Lastly, language likewise must be understood according to God’s speech. This is perhaps the most profound truth I have ever encountered and something I plan on studying for the rest of my life, and well into eternity. Language—what I have in another article (“Words for Communion”) defined as communion behavior—is not a human faculty; it is a divine disposition that has been gifted, with creaturely restraints, to God’s image bearers. Language is a behavior that allows for interpersonal communion. It is a behavior that God sees fit to use in infallibly revealing himself to us throughout history. It is a behavior that God calls us to take up in prayer. It is a behavior that God calls us to take up in worship. It is, in essence, a behavior that is at the heart of God’s very being and at the heart of our being as image bearers. A Christian philosophy of language begins with the Trinity—the speaking God we encounter on every page of Scripture—and moves from there to humanity. Once more, it is not that we cannot learn something from Aristotle’s view of language (though his etymological discussions are humorous at times), or Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games,” or Austin’s speech-act theory, or Saussure’s structuralism, or Chomsky’s generative grammar, or Derrida’s deconstructionism. We can learn something from all of them even when we have deep disagreements. (I would argue here that Kenneth L. Pike’s language theory is a far more biblical and Trinitarian approach to language than most others, and is often left unconsidered in many discussions of language.) But the point is that we should not begin there. We begin with the speech of God. When we do, we find a view of language that is deeply personal and purposive according to the ends that God has declared for his creation in Scripture.

Conclusion

Now, I’m sure that to some academics what I’ve just said is a blend of naivety and fideism. Some might read this article and conclude that I am merely a biblicist who attempts to elevate himself over all other “thoughtful” human beings. I cannot control what others might think of my motives. But I know my own history. I know what is on my bookshelf and how I have been blessed by great thinkers of the past and present. I also know that my God is a God who speaks. And that truth—the tenet that Scripture is the very speech of God—takes precedence over any thought that mankind could develop. We can interact with the thoughts of men, but we should not begin there. Once we do, we are in danger of pandering to something less than divine revelation. What we end up saying will be attractive to the world, and even to much of Christian academia these days, but will it be pure? Will it be something that aligns with the speech of God? Titus 1:15 says, “Everything is pure to those whose hearts are pure.” Theological “purity,” if we might call it that, is found only in adherence to the speech of God, a speech that has made our hearts pure, and a speech that should purify our thinking as well.

Camden Bucey reviews Yves Congar’s The Meaning of Tradition.

Participants: Camden Bucey

K. Scott Oliphint speaks about the incomprehensibility of God as detailed in his book, The Majesty of Mystery: Celebrating the Glory of an Incomprehensible God (Lexham Press). As creatures, we will never and can never comprehend fully God’s mysteries. Indeed, this must even be an epistemological and methodological starting point. Standing upon this biblically-based notion of mystery, Dr. Oliphint drives us to doxology—to worship our glorious God.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, K. Scott Oliphint

Today we speak about John Murray’s “The Attestation of Scripture,” a chapter in The Infallible Word. Scripture attests to its own character and authority. Being God’s Word and our ultimate authority, it could be no other way. Murray writes,

The doctrine of Scripture must be based upon the witness of Scripture just as any other doctrine in the whole realm of Christian confession. The objective witness is that Scripture is authoritative by reason of the character it possesses as the infallible Word of God and this divine quality belongs to Scripture because it is the product of God’s creative breath through the mode of plenary inspiration by the Holy Spirit.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy

Dr. Michael J. Kruger speaks with us about A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament. This volume introduces each New Testament book in the context of the whole canon of Scripture, helping a wide range of readers with a rich, redemptive-historical guide to each book. Dr. Kruger is President and Professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. He received his B.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his M.Div. from Westminster Seminary California, and his Ph.D. from New College, The University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is the author of three books on the issue of canon, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Crossway, 2012), The Early Text of the New Testament (Oxford, 2012; edited with Charles Hill), and The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate. In addition to his faculty duties, he currently serves part-time as the Pastor of Teaching at Uptown Christ Covenant Church in downtown Charlotte. Dr. Kruger has spoken on Christ the Center episodes 217 and 283, and his wife, Melissa Kruger, has spoken on episodes 276, 297, and 301.

Links

• Romans Bible study video series

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Michael Kruger

Today we welcome Vern Poythress and Iain Duguid to speak about Reformed hermeneutics and the tradition of biblical interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary. Along with G. K. Beale and Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., Poythress and Duguid have contributed to Seeing Christ in All of Scripture: Hermeneutics at Westminster Theological Seminary. We speak about the book and the importance of interpreting Scripture according to Christ. Dr. Poythress is professor of New Testament interpretation and Dr. Duguid is professor of Old Testament at Westminster. Westminster Seminary Press is offering a PDF copy of the book for free.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Iain Duguid, Jeff Waddington, Vern Poythress

The relationship between nature and grace has been deemed the central thought of the theology of Herman Bavinck (1854–1921). Getting the relationship right is important for a proper understanding of the interaction between the natural and the supernatural, creation and re-creation, the church and the world. Jan Veenhof, the successor of G.C. Berkouwer at the Free University of Amsterdam, penned a 700-page dissertation entitled Revelatie en Inspiratie that treated Bavinck’s doctrine of revelation. A small section of it has been translated and published in a booklet by Albert M. Wolters entitled Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck.[1] Roman Catholicism: Nature/Grace Dualism Veenhof begins his study by placing Bavinck’s nature/grace formulation within its polemical context against the Roman Catholic viewpoint. Bavinck was keenly aware that the Catholic formulation of the relationship between nature and grace was not a mere peripheral error, but a systemic one. In the New Testament, the concept “world” has two denotations: (1) the world as fallen under the dominion of sin and (2) the same world as the object of God’s love (Jn. 3:16–17). Bavinck observes that this qualitative opposition was substituted by Catholicism for a quantitative one. He writes,

In Roman Catholicism, “the world” more and more loses the ethical significance that it has in the Scriptures. That which is natural is not sinful [a qualitative opposition], but it is that which constitutionally does not attain the supernatural [a quantitative opposition]. The supernatural is a donum superadditum. … Consequently Christianity and grace, which have entered the world to enable us to attain the supernatural, the visio Dei, do not reform and recreate the existing order, but only complement creation. Christianity transcendently supervenes upon the natural, but does not penetrate and sanctify it. Thereby Roman Catholicism, which calls itself catholic in a preeminent sense, has altered the nature of the catholicity of the New Testament. The catholicity of the Christian principle, which purifies and sanctifies everything, has been replaced by the dualism that puts the supernatural in a separate position alongside, or rather in a transcendent position above the natural. Creation and re-creation remain two independent quantities over against each other.[2]

What you find then in Catholicism is not the annihilation of the natural, but its devaluation. The natural is incomplete in and of itself and needs to be complemented by Christianity and grace to raise it, or better yet consecrate it to a higher order. The opposition then is not between the holy and the unholy, but between the consecrated and the profane. In Bavinck’s words, “It reduces the ethical to the material, and looks upon the natural as something non-divine not because and insofar as it is impure, but because it is incapable of attaining the supernatural. Catholicism makes the cosmos profane.”[3] Bavinck saw the Reformation as replacing this dualistic world and life view of Catholicism. The Reformers, according to Bavinck,

rediscovered the natural, restored it to its rightful place, and freed it from the Roman Catholic stigma of being profane and unconsecrated. The natural is not something of lesser value and of a lower order, as though it were not susceptible to sanctification and renewal, but rather required only to be bridled and repressed. It is just as divine as the church, though it owes its origin not to recreation but creation, though it is not from the Son but from the Father.

Grace, then, is not a substance to be added to the natural that raises it to a higher supernatural order (a quantitative transformation). Instead, grace liberates man from sin (a qualitative transformation). It is not opposed to the natural, but only to sin. In this way, grace has only become necessary because of sin. It is not necessary absolutely, but only per accidens. In short, the physical opposition of the natural and supernatural in Roman Catholicism is replaced by the Reformers with an ethical opposition of sin and grace. The recreating power of grace then does not result in a second creation, nor does it add substantially to the already existing natural order; rather, “it is essentially reformation.”[4] Grace reaches as far as curse is found. “Grace is the power of God that liberates mankind from sin also inwardly, in the core of its being, and shall one day present it without spot or wrinkle before God’s face.”[5] Veenhof’s comment is apt: “Grace militates against sin in the natural, but it does not militate against the natural itself; on the contrary, it restores the natural and brings it to its normal development, i.e., the development intended by God.”[6] In Bavinck’s own words, “Grace does not repress nature, including the reason and understanding of man, but rather raises it up and renews it, and stimulates it to concentrated effort.”[7] Bavinck was also aware of the lack of harmony amongst Protestants on this topic. He saw Calvin’s position as the most agreeable. He writes, “In the powerful mind of the French Reformer, re-creation is not a system that supplements creation, as in Catholicism, not a religious reformation that leaves creation intact, as in Luther, much less a new creation, as in Anabaptism, but a joyful tiding of the renewal of all creatures.”[8] For more on the nature/grace dualism in Roman Catholicism see a previous interview with Dr. Lane G. Tipton entitled Nature/Grace Dualism. The Eschatological Outlook of Bavinck’s Nature/Grace Formulation While Bavinck’s position could be summarized from the above discussion as “grace restores nature,” it is important to note that he is not advocating mere repristination, that is, the restoration of an original state or condition. In other words, grace does not simply bring us back to the Garden in Bavinck’s thought. While the original order is restored in the sense that sin’s qualitative and ethical influence is expelled, it is not “as though nothing had happened, as though sin had not existed, and the revelation of God’s grace in Christ had never occurred. Christ gives more than sin took away; grace did much more abound.” “The redemption by grace of created reality, the reformation of nature, is not merely repristination, but raises the natural to a higher level than it originally occupied.”[9] Bavinck understood there to be an eschatology in the Garden before the entrance of sin into the world:

The pre-Fall situation of man, and of the whole earth, was a temporary one, which could not remain as it was. It was of such a nature that it could be raised to a higher glory, but could also, in case of man’s transgression, be made subject to vanity and corruption.[10]

Grace does not restore man to this original, sub-eschatological state of temporariness; rather, grace brings the world to this higher glory. “The fact must not be neglected, however, that this higher glory constitutes the goal to which the earth had been directed from the beginning. Therefore it is certainly not added to the creation as a foreign component.”[11] Bavinck’s formulation that “grace restores nature” understands nature as having imbedded in it an eschatological goal, which grace achieves. For Bavinck understands that grace

does not grant anything beyond what Adam, if he had remained standing, would have acquired in the way of obedience. The covenant of grace differs from the covenant of works in the road, not in its final destination. The same benefits are promised in the covenant of works and freely given in the covenant of grace. Grace restores nature and raises it to its highest fulfillment, but it does not add a new, heterogeneous component to it.

It could be said, then, that in Bavinck’s thought grace restores nature unto its eschatological goal. For Further Study For more on the relationship between nature and grace see the 2016 Reformed Forum Regional Theology Conference, God’s Word in Our World: Nature, Grace, and the Foundation of Divine Revelation. The plenary address by Dr. Camden Bucey pertains especially to the above essay: Nature, Grace, and the Eschatology of Salvation. Notes [1] Jan Veenhof, Nature and Grace in Herman Bavinck, trans. Albert M. Wolters (Sioux Center, IA: Dordt College Press, 2006). The booklet can be purchased here. [2] Herman Bavinck, De katholiciteit van christendom en kerk (Kampen, 1888), 19. Quoted by Veenhof, 10-11. [3] Bavinck, Katholiciteit, 21. Quoted by Veenhof, 11-12. [4] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:578. [5] Ibid. [6] Veenhof, 18. [7] Herman Bavinck, De Bazuin XLIX, 43 (October 25, 1901). Quoted by Veenhof, 18-19. [8] Bavinck, Katholiciteit, 32. Quoted by Veenhof, 15. [9] Veenhof, 24-25. [10] Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 3:182. [11] Veenhof, 25.

Jeff Waddington and Camden Bucey speak with Dr. Vern Poythress about his book Reading the Word of God in the Presence of God: A Handbook for Biblical Interpretation. Providing both theological foundations and practical strategies for interpretation, Dr. Poythress explains the simple yet astounding truth that God is present in his Word and speaks to us as we read. With pastoral sensitivity, he combines linguistic theory, hermeneutics, systematic theology, and expert biblical knowledge into a compelling work both instructive for advanced students of the Bible and accessible for beginners.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Vern Poythress

Lane Tipton and Camden Bucey speak about creation and covenant from 30,000+ feet (literally) on their way to our Austin Theology Conference at Providence OPC in Pflugerville, Texas, April 30, 2016.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

Dr. James J. Cassidy delivers the third plenary address from our Austin Theology Conference at Pflugerville, Texas on April 30, 2016. Download the handout for the lecture. The theme of our conference was God’s Word in Our World: Nature, Grace, and the Foundation of Divine Revelation. Download the audio from each of our sessions:

• Lane Tipton, “Covenant and Nature: Paul’s Eschatology of the Natural in 1 Corinthians 15:45”
• Panel Discussion with Lane Tipton, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy, and Camden Bucey (Christ the Center, episode 436), “Nature and the Means of Grace”
• Camden Bucey, “Nature, Grace, and the Eschatology of Salvation”
• Jim Cassidy, “Creation and Covenant: Why Karl Barth Didn’t Go Far Enough in His Rejection of Natural Theology”

Dr. Camden M. Bucey delivers the second plenary address from our Austin Theology Conference at Pflugerville, Texas on April 30, 2016. The theme of our conference was God’s Word in Our World: Nature, Grace, and the Foundation of Divine Revelation. Download the audio from each of our sessions:

• Lane Tipton, “Covenant and Nature: Paul’s Eschatology of the Natural in 1 Corinthians 15:45”
• Panel Discussion with Lane Tipton, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy, and Camden Bucey (Christ the Center, episode 436), “Nature and the Means of Grace”
• Camden Bucey, “Nature, Grace, and the Eschatology of Salvation”
• Jim Cassidy, “Creation and Covenant: Why Karl Barth Didn’t Go Far Enough in His Rejection of Natural Theology”

Lane Tipton, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy, and Camden Bucey speak about nature-grace dualism and the means of grace. This was a live panel discussion held during our Austin Theology Conference at Providence OPC in Pflugerville, Texas, April 30, 2016. Download the audio from each of our sessions:

• Lane Tipton, “Covenant and Nature: Paul’s Eschatology of the Natural in 1 Corinthians 15:45”
• Panel Discussion with Lane Tipton, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy, and Camden Bucey (Christ the Center, episode 436), “Nature and the Means of Grace”
• Camden Bucey, “Nature, Grace, and the Eschatology of Salvation”
• Jim Cassidy, “Creation and Covenant: Why Karl Barth Didn’t Go Far Enough in His Rejection of Natural Theology”

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy, Lane G. Tipton

Dr. Lane G. Tipton delivers the first plenary address from our Austin Theology Conference at Pflugerville, Texas on April 30, 2016. The theme of our conference was God’s Word in Our World: Nature, Grace and the Foundation of Divine Revelation. Download the audio from each of our sessions:

• Lane Tipton, “Covenant and Nature: Paul’s Eschatology of the Natural in 1 Corinthians 15:45”
• Panel Discussion with Lane Tipton, Glen Clary, Jim Cassidy, and Camden Bucey (Christ the Center, episode 436), “Nature and the Means of Grace”
• Camden Bucey, “Nature, Grace, and the Eschatology of Salvation”
• Jim Cassidy, “Creation and Covenant: Why Karl Barth Didn’t Go Far Enough in His Rejection of Natural Theology”

John Piper recently released a book called A Peculiar Glory, where he explores what it means for Scripture to be self-attesting. In this companion video to the book, Michael Reeves interviews Piper on the book and the topic. In the interview, Piper cites a number of influences including Calvin, Edwards, and the Westminster Catechisms, and Reeves mentions similarity between A Peculiar Glory and some of John Owen’s work. They talk about both the helpfulness and the limits of historical, evidential arguments in light of the self-authenticating nature and authority of Scripture itself; there are points where they both seem to be channeling Van Til without mentioning him (see Van Til’s article on “Nature and Scripture,” for example). So I commend both the book and the video to you. See for yourself.

Jim Cassidy and Camden Bucey preview our 2016 Theology Conference in Austin, Texas with a conversation on nature and grace. Christians have proposed many different theologies regarding relationship of God’s creation to his Word and supernatural works. Those formulations have great implications for many other areas of theology. Listen as we gear up for another great event.

Links

• “Nature and Scripture” — Christ the Center, episode 240 with K. Scott Oliphint
• “Nature/Grace Dualism” — Christ the Center, episode 244 with Lane G. Tipton
• “God in Mathematics” a transcript of a conversation between Jerry Bowyer and Vern Poythress in Forbes.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy

In our last post, (a while back!) I argued that Jenson had in fact compromised the creator creature distinction and I said that we would flesh that out a bit, which is what I plan to do here. So, if Jenson has damaged the crucial theological distinction between Creator and creature what are the implications? First, let me identify the problem. When discussing the univocity of address between Jesus the man and the eternal God, Jenson cannot adopt the view that God is communication and man is communication, but their conversation is separate from one another. Quite the contrary, if the address of Jesus, the adopted Son, to the Father is univocal (as Jenson argued), then there must be an epistemological correspondence between the conversation of God and man. Moreover, if there is an epistemological correspondence then God is no longer hidden. Now, before critiquing this apparent problem let us explore one way in which Jenson might free himself from this difficulty. He might appeal to Kant’s theory of transcendental unity of apperception as applied to the Godhead. According to Kant, self – consciousness is not really consciousness of self; rather a self – conscious person is merely identifying his experiences as his own. So, says Jenson, “If the ‘I’ is not primally identical with the focus of consciousness, then the self is not a ‘self’-contained or ‘self’-sustaining something.”[1] Jenson applies this concept to theology. For him, “It should always have been apparent that Father, Son, and Spirit could not each be personal quite in the same way.”[2] Jenson’s conclusion is, for example, the Spirit, is then someone’s Spirit, so that he (the Spirit) cannot be an autonomous someone.[3] But the end of such reasoning is that the Persons of the Godhead are not fully self-aware.[4] That is, each person of the Triune Godhead could only identify their experiences ad extra, but not necessarily be aware of themselves individually. So, perhaps Jenson could argue that the hiddenness of God resides at just this point. However, this seems an unlikely position due to the fact that Jenson seems to follow Barth’s model of the Trinity. For Barth, the Trinity was a threefold repetition of the divine ousia. Jenson, consistent with his understanding of being as communication, interprets Barth’s view by suggesting that the doctrine of the Trinity is merely a “set of identifying descriptions” to back up the name “God.”[5] Thus, for Barth, God is a uni-conscious being. However, Jenson, sensitive to the criticism of Modalism that was leveled against Barth, asks if “we can interpret the differing personalities of the Father as the Father, and the Father as the Trinity, ontologically.”[6] His answer is alarming and consistent with Barth. He says, “All suggestions at this point must have an arbitrary air, as we again strain the limits of language.”[7] However, Jenson does attempt to strain the limits of language but in the end he can only affirm the “oneness of the one Trinity.”[8] Consequently, it appears that Kant’s theory of transcendental unity of apperception as applied to the Trinity cannot be sustained over against a God that is solely uni-conscious.[9] Therefore, we return to our original assertion. When discussing the univocity of address between the man Jesus and the eternal God, Jenson cannot adopt the view that God is communication and man is communication, but their conversation is separate from one another. To do so would ontologically and narratively sever the Son from the Father, according to Jenson’s way of thinking. Second, to posit that the univocal correspondence of conversation between the eternal God and the man Jesus would make Scripture more than what Jenson has alleged it to be. For example, if all that I have claimed thus far concerning Jenson’s understanding of language, per a cultural – linguistic model follows, then, for Jenson, the Bible is not a set of truth propositions that have cognitive correspondence between man and God. The statements found in Scripture are only ontologically true insofar as they are intra-systemically consistent. Thus, whether Jenson would admit to it or not, the Bible is reduced to pious feelings set forth in speech. Therefore, to snatch a line from Cornelius Van Til with slight modification, Jenson’s “theology is anthropology still; the ‘cool smile’ of Feuerbach may perhaps now be thought of as a sardonic grin.”[10] Though Jenson obviously believes that Scripture is simply pious feeling set forth in speech he is still unable to extricate himself from the difficulty Jesus’ univocal address creates. That is, if the man Jesus of Nazareth was adopted to be the Second Person of the Trinity, and that adoption is constituted by Jesus’ address to the Father, then Scripture must be more than pious feeling set forth in speech. Moreover, Scripture, at least the address of the Son in Scripture, must have a cognitive correspondence between man and God at that point, which pulls God out from His hiddenness and makes the unknown God knowable. Therefore, we must conclude that although Jenson’s view of God and his revolutionized analogia entis lays the groundwork for the temporalizing of God, it is the incarnation (i.e. the adoption of Christ) that wholly temporalizes God. Furthermore, it is this wholesale temporalizing of the deity that raises a final point that we will address in the final post; our being enfolded into the Triune God or as Jenson puts it, our deification.   [1] Jenson, ST 1, 121. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid. [4] It’s interesting that Oliphint notes that ideas depicting Christ as schizophrenic have begun to surface in discussions of Christology and the incarnation. Cf. Oliphint, 287-88n14. [5] Jenson, God after God, 98. [6] Jenson, ST 1, 122, Cf. 119. Jenson also calls the Trinity “a conceptually developed and sustained insistence that God himself is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ,” (ST 1, 60, Cf. 46). However, one must be sympathetic with Jenson’s attempt to free himself from the charge of Modalism because of the Biblical narrative itself (ST 1, 96-100). [7] Jenson, ST 1, 122. [8] Ibid., 123. [9] Obviously, Jenson could say that God, as a uni-conscious being, is not self-aware. However, this does not seem to be the direction that Jenson wants to go due to his view of God as free act. [10] Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism: An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and Brunner (Philadelphia, PA: P & R Publishing, 1947), 244.

The development, in rationalist systems of the eighteenth century, of a truly foundational natural theology represents a basic alteration of perspective and a loss, not an outgrowth or further refinement, of the orthodox system.

We must object strenuously, therefore, to the all-too-frequent and utterly erroneous claim that orthodox or scholastic Protestant theology generally viewed natural revelation and the natural theology drawn from it as a foundation on which supernatural revelation and a supernatural theology can build.

—Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 1:309.

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).

In the last post we asked if Jenson had gone beyond Barth. Has he temporalized eternity? Jenson is certainly bolder in his assertions linking eternity and time, but has he really achieved a consummation between the two? Frankly, at this point his theology appears no more threatening than that of Barth. However, we may not see a storm cloud in the sky but we sure can smell the rain. Therefore, we must now consider the person of Jesus Christ in Jenson’s thought. Because, according to Jenson, this is the epitome of God’s temporality and so to this we now turn. To begin, let us return for a moment to our discussion of Jenson’s revolutionized understanding of the analogia entis as it relates to his archetype ectype distinction. Again, it is vital to remember that God’s being is utterance, which is in contradistinction to “an unspoken mental form.”[1] Thus, “being itself must be such as to compel analogous use of language when evoking it.”[2] So, again we are to understand that being is an irreducible grammatical construction. Following Jenson’s logic, we may conclude that God has being in precisely the same way that creatures have being. Whatever God means by “be” is exactly what it means for Him or a creature to be.[3] “Therefore,” says Jenson, “insofar as ‘being’ says something about God or creatures, ‘being’ must after all be univocal rather than analogous.”[4] But what does Jenson mean by saying that being, as shared by God and creatures, must be univocal? Again, let us remember that for Jenson “being is conversation.”[5] But how can the conversation of God and man be shared univocally when the word of God is hidden behind the word of Scripture? In order for God’s word in conversation to be univocal with our word in conversation, and vice versa, what is attributed to one thing must be identical when attributed to another.[6] Thus, the question is; what is identical in the conversation that God shares with man? Before pursuing this question further I will demonstrate what Jenson does not mean. Jenson does not mean that the statement “God is good” and the statement “Paul is good” share a univocity, and the reason is simple. According to Jenson, “good” is not an essential element of the nature of God or man. Hence, Jenson is clearly defining the parameters of what may be considered univocal and what may not be. Therefore, the only thing that can be considered univocal between God and man is being, and being is conversation. So again, what univocal element does the conversation between God and man share? It seems that Jenson has become entangled in a difficulty. If he says that the language of God and the language of man coincide at any given point then some type of cognitive knowledge between God and man must exist, which is exactly what Jenson does not want to maintain. But if he says that God and man share univocally in being, in the sense that God is communication and man is communication but their conversation is separate from one another, then he has really said nothing about the univocity that supposedly exists between Creator and creature. Perhaps this is the position that Jenson wants to maintain, for prior to this he has maintained that our conversations are surely not identical with one another, though he would certainly disagree that this univocity says nothing about God’s relationship to man. However, Jenson’s view of analogy, as applied to the incarnation, brings a new dimension to the discussion. Jenson begins his discussion of the Persons of the Godhead by affirming an adoptionist Christology. Thus, Jesus of Nazareth was the adopted Son of God. He became what He was not.[7] Jenson claims that the Nazarene was merely a man as set forth in the narrative of Scripture. Moreover, this man from Nazareth was adopted to be the eternal Son of God. But what constitutes the adoption of Jesus? For Jenson, “Primally, it denotes the claim Jesus makes for himself in addressing God as Father.”[8] In fact, posits Jenson, “This Son is an eternally divine Son only in and by this relation” of address.[9] So, for Jenson, the adoption of Christ is established in the univocal address of the Son to God as Father. Let me say it another way. The utterance of Jesus, the man from Nazareth, addresses the Father, and both man and God understood that conversation in a univocal manner. This appears to create a difficulty for Jenson but he puts off answering the crucial point for the time being. He says, “When trinitarian reflection recognizes the Son as an eternal divine Son, a question will indeed arise about the relation of his divine identity to his reality as creature, but this is a question of secondary reflection, whose systematic place is further on.”[10] However, this particular topic is not taken up again. Jenson does deal with pre-existence in light of the birth of Christ, but the notion of the univocal address that constitutes Sonship does not appear again. Yet, the relation of the Son’s “divine identity to His reality as a creature” is no secondary matter, especially as it relates to the univocal relationship of being between God and man. It is at this very point that Jenson can no longer maintain his distinction between Creator and creature. In our next post we will flesh this out.   [1] Jenson, ST II, 38. [2] Ibid., 37. [3] Ibid., 38. [4] Ibid. Following Thomas, “being,” says Jenson, “used simultaneously of God and creatures must, as we use it, mean in the case of God ‘first archetypical causation of created being’ and in the case of creatures just ‘being.’” [5] Ibid., 49. [6]Oliphint, Reasons {for Faith} (Phillipsburg, NJ: P& R Publishing, 2006), 98. [7] For Jenson there is no pre-existence of the Son in any traditional sense, Cf. Jenson, ST 1, 141. [8] Jenson, ST 1, 77. [9] Ibid, emphasis mine. [10] Ibid., 78.

In our last post we left two questions begging to be asked. First, how can Jenson talk about ontological truth statements in Scripture? Second, how is he able to identify God as ontologically equivalent with the word of Scripture? Today we take up Jenson’s answers to these questions. In the cultural–linguistic model of language Jenson has found an explanatory model.[1] There are two crucial concepts that attend the cultural-linguistic model of language that are useful for understanding Jenson’s thought. The first attending idea is the theory of “intrasystemic consistency.”[2] This category deals with the functional coherence of a given system. Unlike the idealist who defines coherence as the intelligent and consistent integration of any fact with all other facts; the cultural–linguistic model speaks in terms of systems. Thus, the internal consistency of a system is the meaning of coherence. The second notion that must be taken into account is that of ontological truth statements.[3] According to the cultural-linguistic model, these statements deal with the truth of correspondence. Whereas, philosophically such a notion usually has to do with the correspondence of the idea I have in my mind to what is “out there;” however, for the cultural-linguistic model it has more to do with understanding one’s own system among many others. Correspondence, then, is not an attribute that any one system can itself possess.[4] So, how can these concepts help us to understand Jenson’s view of God as ontologically present in a mere Scriptural witness, while at the same time remaining unknowable? Jenson claims to adopt the cultural-linguistic model of intrasystemic consistency because it is found in Scripture.[5] There is, says Jenson, a “theology of culture” that permeates Scripture. So, according to Jenson, “every culture is a religion and the body of every religion is a culture;” the religion of Israel is no exception.[6] Furthermore, according to Jenson, this intrasystemic consistency is known as dramatic coherence.[7] Thus, after a grammatical and cultural discussion of words like “god” and “eternity” Jenson says, “We summarize this chapter so far: the God to be interpreted in this work is the God identified by the biblical narrative.”[8] The point is clear. Jenson is defining the system in which his theology is to be situated. He is dealing with the God of the biblical narrative. Jenson is not dealing with the Canaanite idols or the expressions of the divine found in Buddhism; instead, he is interpreting the God found in the system of the Biblical narrative.[9] Having established the system in which he will converse, Jenson can now begin to use ontological truth statements. Since according to the cultural-linguistic model an intrasystemic true statement may be ontologically false in a system that lacks the appropriate concepts and categories of reference, but situated in its respective system as part of the system, the statement is now ontologically true.[10] Thus, it is possible according to a cultural-linguistic model of language for Jenson to posit an ontic equality between God and the narrative of Scripture, which is exactly what he does.[11] However, these ontic statements need not correspond to what is beyond their own system. In his, The Nature of Doctrine, Lindbeck writes,

The ontological truth of religious utterances, like their intrasystematic truth, is different as well as similar to what holds in other realms of discourse. Their correspondence to reality in the view we are expounding is not an attribute that they have when considered in and of themselves, but is only a function of their role in constituting a form of life, a way of being in the world…[12]

Therefore, when Jenson talks about the narrative of Scripture being ontologically identifiable with God he is only being consistent with his own system as he sees it. That is not to say that the language corresponds with a being that stands over against the narrative. Nor are we to think that the grammatical logic of the narrative will correspond to anything beyond the system itself. Rather, we must simply and only think of these statements in the Scripture as having ontological status within the Biblical system as Jenson sees it. To use the terminology of the cultural-linguistic model, these ontological truth statements merely express “a form of life, a way of being in the world.” This view is consistent with Jenson’s own understanding of Christian narrative in that insofar as “theological propositions are factual propositions, they be logically and epistemically homogeneous with propositions of first – level proclamation and prayer, as is ‘God is love.’”[13] Thus, ontological truth statements, according to a cultural-linguistic view, are simply statements that produce intrasystemic consistency in both the thought and life of the community. Yet, the question remains; can these ontological truth statements provide any cognitive knowledge concerning God? Again, the answer must be, no. Our language cannot communicate anything cognitive about God. The event of God’s act cannot be known through intuition, reason, or theoretical categories. God does not adapt himself to our cognitive efforts.[14] So then, the ontological truth statements about God in Scripture are simply and only statements that will enable a community to function and communicate consistently with one another. The nagging question at this point is; has Jenson really gone beyond Barth? Jenson is certainly bolder in his assertions linking eternity and time, but has he really achieved a consummation between the two? At this point his theology appears no more threatening than that of Barth. After all, he still maintains a distinction between God and creation that can only be penetrated by an unknowable act, while at the same time, adopting a cultural-linguistic view of Scripture that enables the community to make ontological truth statements without the burden of correspondence. Therefore, we must now consider the person of Jesus Christ. According to Jenson, He is the epitome of God’s temporality and to Him we will turn in the next post.   [1] Jenson, ST 1, 18 n43. [2] George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984), 64. [3] Ibid. [4] Ibid., 65 [5] Jenson, ST 1, 51. [6] Ibid. [7] Ibid. 55. [8] Ibid., 57. [9] Ibid., 55 – 56. [10] Lindbeck, 65. [11] Jenson, ST 1, 59. [12] Lindbeck, 65. [13] Jenson, ST 1, 20. [14] Ibid., 227.

By now it should be understood by the reader that for Jenson, God is the act of utterance.[1] For Jenson, as I argued in my last post, God is to be identified by and as wholly temporalized in the narrative of Scripture. However, in a seemingly contradictory move, Jenson also believes that to reduce God to a set of propositions is to devolve “into the biblicisms of modernity.”[2] Following Barth, Jenson dismisses the notion that to simply adopt Biblical language is adequate to apprehend God.[3] God is ineffable.[4] Thus, before we can understand Jenson’s view of Scripture we must understand how the God who is to be identified by the narrative of Scripture is known in and from the narrative. Only then may we know the functional place of Scripture within the life of the church. Therefore, how can we speak about the veracity of man’s knowledge of God? Can man know God cognitively? According to Jenson, “God’s knowability is not a dispositional property.”[5] Defining what he means by “dispositional property” Jenson explains, “That is, it is not his possession of qualities that adapt him to satisfy some exterior effort, in this case our cognitive effort.”[6] Clearly, for Jenson, cognitive knowledge of God is impossible. In fact, says Jenson, our union with God “transcends the mind’s natural ‘cognitive capacity.’”[7] So, how does man come to know God? How does God pierce historie in order to make Himself known? For Jenson, the answer is simple; God reveals Himself.[8] However, it is a matter of primary importance to remember how God is said to reveal Himself. According to Jenson, the way in which God discloses Himself is in act. For Jenson, this is a primary theological category. God is free event. In fact, God must be taken “as invariant through the event.”[9] He is not the gift that the event brings; He is the event. In other words, God reveals His whole self in the event of His act. But what is the event of God’s self-revelation? According to Jenson, it is conversation. Furthermore, Jenson argues that this self-revealing act of conversation is the narrative of Scripture. He writes,

At several places in this chapter and before, a conceptual move has been made from the biblical God’s self-identification by events in time to his identification with those events; moreover, it will by now be apparent that the whole argument of the work depends on this move. In each case in which it has been made, it has been conceptually secured in that context. But it is now possible, and high time, to justify it directly.

Were God identified by Israel’s Exodus or Jesus’ resurrection, without being identified with them, the identification would be a revelation ontologically other than God himself. The revealing events would be our clues to God, but would not be God. And this, of course, is the normal pattern of religion: where the deity reveals itself is not where it is.[10] Two important points stand out in these lines. First, the revealing events of Scripture are the act of God. They are the event of God’s self-revelation in utterance. Second, these events ontologically identify the person of God. They do not point to God; rather the narrative acts are God. Therefore, initially it appears that Jenson has gone beyond Barth in claiming that the act of God can be identified. After all, Barth claims that,

When on the basis of His revelation we always understand God as event, as act and as life, we have not in any way identified Him with a sum or content of event, act, or life generally. We can never expect to know generally what event or act or life is, in order from that point to conclude and assert that God is He to whom this is all proper in an unimaginable and incomprehensible fullness and completeness. When we know God as event, act and life, we have to admit that generally and apart from Him we do not know what this is.[11]

Thus, Barth maintains that even the act of God is unknowable. And so, for Barth, Scripture is only a witness to God’s act. Therefore, it would be untenable to suggest that Scripture could claim an ontic status with regard to the being of God. So, has Jenson gone beyond Barth at this point? We must remember that, according to Jenson, Barth was not fully able to extricate himself from the material doctrine of being. Thus, for Barth the fundamental resemblance between God and creatures is that God is Being and creatures are beings. However, Jenson says that the analogous use of language is what constitutes the analogy of being making it an irreducibly grammatical construction. Therefore, God and the Biblical narrative are ontologically one. However, this move by Jenson seems to lock him into three positions that he is unwilling to endorse. First, to posit an ontic equality between God and Scripture sanctions the “biblicism of modernity” that Jenson has previously repudiated. Second, an ontic equality between God and Scripture suggests that we can have cognitive knowledge about God. This is something that Jenson denies because the event of communication cannot occupy cognitive categories because it is an event that “transcends natural cognitive capacity.” Moreover, to claim that we can say, “God is good” is to posit something about the very nature of God. But if God is by definition a free act that can chose His own nature, then it is impossible for us to say that God is “anything” other than free decision. Any other claim goes beyond our ability to know. So, how does Jenson answer this apparent problem? It is true that for Jenson, God is free utterance. He is communication. However, God is the word to which all other words respond.[12] He is not necessarily our word. He does not depend on a prior word or language.[13] In other words, God is the word that stands apart from the word of Scripture, whether in English or Swahili. God’s word remains hidden as it were behind the word of Scripture. Thus, a dual conversation takes place. According to Jenson, God is conversation and man is conversation but their conversations do not correspond at any given point, nor can they, for such a correspondence would entail an epistemological correspondence that Jenson wants to deny. Therefore, the word of Scripture is a witness to God’s word and serves as a vehicle for encounter, but Scripture is not His word. Scripture must become His word – event.[14] Thus, Jenson is able to maintain a distinction between God as his own word and the word of Scripture. But the question that begs to be asked is how can Jenson talk about ontological truth statements in Scripture? How is he able to identify God as ontologically equivalent with the word of Scripture? We will take up these questions in the next post.   [1] Jenson, God after God, 190. [2] Jenson, ST 1, 29. [3] Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 195. [4] Ibid., 190. [5] Jenson, ST 1, 227. Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics II. 1, 205, “But is God really an object of human cognition? Is an object of human cognition God? No postulate, however necessary, can compel this to be true.” [6] Jenson, ST 1, 227. [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid., 124. [9] Ibid., 50. [10] Ibid., 59. [11] Barth, Church Dogmatics II. 1, 264. [12] Jenson, God after God, 190. [13] Ibid. [14] Jenson, ST 1, 28.

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.

In this short essay, I want to draw out the nature and downfalls of a salient principle of analytic philosophy: the primacy of rational intuition. Philosophers think of rational intuition as the capacity in human persons to believe (and know) certain propositions immediately, that is, without basing their belief on other evidential beliefs or logical inferences. Propositions like what is known must be believed, it is necessary that 2+2=4, and murder is wrong are intuitive because we find ourselves convinced of their truth simply by reflecting on them; we believe them because they seem to us to be true. In his important book, Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke argued that for something to be intuitive is “very heavy evidence.” He went on to say, “I really don’t know, in a way, what more conclusive evidence one can have about anything, ultimately speaking.” For Kripke, then, there is a definitive priority given to our intuitive seemings. Analytic philosophy has shared Kripke’s belief in the primacy of rational intuition for much of the twentieth century, and it has definitively characterized how analytic philosophers have argued for their theories of knowledge, reality, and morals. For example, in analytic epistemology philosophers design test cases to invoke intuitions in their peers that either support or undermine various analyses of knowledge. The most famous use of test cases was by Edmund Gettier in his three page article, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Arguably, the most widely accepted understanding of knowledge in the modern period was the justified-true-belief model. Knowledge was thought to be justified belief in a true proposition. Gettier, however, presented two test cases where a person has justified true belief, but does not seem to have knowledge. Gettier’s small paper was thought to be so powerful because of the way it showed that our intuitions contradict a prominent theory of knowledge. The problem for philosophers since has been to develop an analysis of knowledge that does not fall prey to critiques similar to Gettier’s. So far, a multitude of philosophers have presented accounts of knowledge only to be met by a plethora of published test cases that undermine their analyses. As a result, many philosophers are now skeptical about whether it is possible to analyze knowledge. The apparent inability of philosophers to account for the nature of knowledge has also led to skepticism about whether our intuitions are reliable indicators of the truth. This skepticism with regard to our intuitions has been additionally supported by surveys that suggest our intuitions are in some sense culturally affected. Last month I was able to attend the American Philosophical Association’s central meeting in Saint Louis, Missouri. Although it was a common theme running through many of the lectures, the question of the reliability of our intuitions was at the forefront of the secession on philosophical methodology. Studies were presented of how people from different cultures and of different genders answered philosophical questions. These studies were intended to help determine whether intuitions are universally shared or relative to particular groups of people. Maybe the only time everyone in the room came into agreement was when a participant paraphrased the following quote from philosopher, Peter van Inwagen: “There is no established body of metaphysical results. . . . In metaphysics . . . you are perfectly free to disagree with anything the acknowledged experts say.” It was clear from the discussion that those in the room thought that van Inwagen’s statement held true not only for metaphysics, but for philosophy as a whole. If we are perfectly free to disagree with anything the acknowledged philosophical experts say, then perhaps it would be best to disagree with the priority they have placed on rational intuition. Any ultimate source of evidence that allows for such widespread confusion and disagreement is clearly not doing its job. What if philosophers used Scripture as their ultimate source of evidence, and rational intuition as a subordinate source? Philosophers could then rely on the perfect Word of God to build an epistemological, metaphysical, and moral framework—like the theological framework set forth in the Westminster Confession of Faith—from which they could then address the ancient problems of philosophy. I think this is the most productive way forward for contemporary philosophy, primarily because it is the only way we can avoid being taken “captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Col. 2:8). I am not suggesting that Scripture is the only source of evidence that God has given to man. Rational intuition is clearly essential to everyday life and to philosophy as a discipline. What I am suggesting is that Scripture provides us with the most conclusive evidence possible, ultimately speaking, because “it is the Word of God” (WCF 1.4). Sources — The quote in paragraph three is from Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1972; reprint, 2013), 42. The quote in paragraph nine is from Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics [Boulder: Westview Press, 1993], 13–14. Edmund Gettier’s article was originally published in Analysis 23 (1963): 121–123. I also consulted Alvin I. Goldman, “Philosophical Intuitions: Their Target, Their Source, and Their Epistemic Status,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 74 (2007): 1–26; Robert Audi, Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2011); and William G. Lycan, “Epistemology and the Role of Intuitions,” in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology (ed. Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard; New York: Routledge, 2014), 813–822.

Speaking theologically, what was Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Was he a German liberal or might we label him a conservative evangelical Christian? Bonhoeffer’s use of Kantian Transcendentalism as a theological beginning point seems to disqualify the latter. However, some remain unconvinced. For example, some contend that Bonhoeffer was a conservative Christian and could even be described as an evangelical. So, in this, our last post, I want to examine Bonhoeffer’s views which touch upon conservative and evangelical Christianity.

The Nature of Scripture

All believers are concerned with how Christ and history relate because our faith is rooted in history. Benjamin B. Warfield once wrote, “… Christianity is a supernatural religion and the nature of Christianity as a supernatural religion, are matters of history …”[1] For Bonhoeffer the matter was not so easily settled. He had been influenced by Hegel, Lessing, and Troeltsch all of whom believed in one way or other that a big nasty ditch separated the contingent facts of history from absolute meaning.[2] In his 1933 lectures on Christology, now printed as Christ the Center, Bonhoeffer illustrates the influence of these men, saying, “Historical research can never absolutely deny, because it can never absolutely affirm.”[3] And again, “Absolute certainty about an historical fact is in itself never attainable.”[4] According to Bonhoeffer, the Bible is no different from any other flawed history book.[5] In fact, he says, this is of particular importance for the preacher. Why? Because, says Bonhoeffer, “There may be some difficulties about preaching from a text whose authenticity has been destroyed by historical research.” Bonhoeffer offers help to the pastor in this situation; don’t stand on that destroyed text for long but like a man crossing a river covered in ice floes move about over the whole Bible![6] But to make matters even worse Bonhoeffer says that verbal inspiration will not prop up a historically flawed Bible.[7] In fact, it’s quite the reverse. According to Bonhoeffer, the doctrine of Scripture’s verbal inspiration actually “amounts to a denial of the unique presence of the risen one.”[8] So, whatever pietistic sounding Bonhoeffer quotes we might be able to marshal about Scripture we must also take these into account.

The Nature of the Person of Christ

Bonhoeffer’s view of history also affected his Christology. He wrote, “As a subject for historical investigation, Jesus Christ remains an uncertain phenomenon; his historicity can neither be confirmed nor denied with the necessary absolute certainty.”[9] What, according to Bonhoeffer, does this mean for something like the empty tomb? Is the Bible’s account of the historical fact of the resurrection in question? Bonhoeffer says of historicity of Christ’s tomb, “This is and remains a final stumbling block, which the believer in Christ must learn to live with in one way or another. Empty or not empty, it remains a stumbling block. We cannot be sure of its historicity.”[10] Not surprisingly, Bonhoeffer says that since there is no absolute ground for faith that can be derived from history “the historical approach to the Jesus of history is not binding for the believer.”[11] Bohoeffer says, “We have Christ witnessing to himself in the present, any historical confirmation is irrelevant.”[12] And of course, Christ’s witnesses to me in the present is found in my brother who is Christ pro me.

The Nature of Justification

The doctrine of Christ pro me naturally leads us to think of the Gospel. For Bonhoeffer, humanity is either in Christ or in Adam. This means, for Bonhoeffer, that a person is either turned inward upon one’s self and alone (that is, in Adam) or he comes to recognize Christ in his self–consciousness and his need for others in community (in Christ). According to Bonhoeffer, this turn means that a man no longer seeks justification in himself but in Christ alone.[13] To continue, “The Christian no longer lives of himself, by his own claims and his own justification, but by God’s claims and God’s justification.”[14] The Christian is, says Bonhoeffer, justified by an alien righteousness.[15] However, this raises an important question. From where does this declaration of justified come? For Bonhoeffer, it comes from outside oneself. But from where does it come? It is from the lips of my neighbor.[16] For when I go to my brother to confess, I go to God.[17] He speaks the message of salvation to me, speaks forgiveness to me, and brings me assurance. According to Bonhoeffer, in the presence of another Christian and “there alone in all the world the truth and mercy of Jesus Christ rule.”[18] I am justified by my brother’s word spoken to me, for in him, Christ stands for me. What was Bonhoeffer? The truth is plain. When Warfield described the Ritschlian school of thought he said that there was a strong tendency in evangelical circles to look upon this neo–Kantianism with favor. Warfield continued, “Such a tendency was, indeed, little creditable to either head or heart; and can be esteemed merely a fresh example of that shallow charity which ‘thinketh no evil,’ only because it lacks the mind to perceive or the heart to care for the evil that is flaunted in its face.” Let us admire Bonhoeffer insofar as we are able and, yes, we are able. However, let us also keep a careful and caring eye on what is being flaunted in our face.

[1] B. B. Warfield, “The Church Doctrine of Inspiration” reprinted in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1948), 121. [2] Cf. pages in 78, 83, 910 in Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000). [3] Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center (NY: Harper San Francisco, 1978), 72. [4] Ibid. [5] Ibid., 73–74. [6] Ibid., 73. [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid. [9] Ibid., 72. [10] Ibid., 112. [11] Ibid. [12] Ibid., 73. [13] Bonhoeffer, Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 31. [14] Ibid. [15] Ibid., [16] Ibid., 32. [17] Ibid., 109. [18] Ibid.

Michael Allen and Scott Swain discuss whether Christians and churches can be both catholic and Reformed. In their book Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Baker Academic), Allen and Swain suggest Reformed Christians can commit not only to the ultimate authority of Scripture but also to receiving Scripture within the context of the apostolic church. This manifesto presents a case that to be Reformed means to go deeper into true catholicity rather than away from it. At the same time, it means holding fast to sola Scriptura. Michael Allen is Associate Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology and Dean of Students and Scott Swain is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Academic Dean at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jared Oliphint, Michael Allen, Scott Swain

Bavinck in the first volume of his Reformed Dogmatics is very clear about revelation becoming nature. God reveals himself in, by, and with nature. Bavinck is clear that revelation is not “abstractly supernatural,” somehow floating above and apart from nature (442). Here the saying is relevant that grace perfects nature (443).

Barth, however, rejects the idea that revelation becomes nature. Revelation cannot become one with nature. Rather, in revelation (which is the transcendent act of God in Jesus Christ) God takes up nature, destroys it, and replaces it. This is because nature has no capacity for grace. There is an infinite qualitative difference between eternity and time, God and nature. God in his act of revelation cannot become nature, but rather through grace says no to nature as he takes it up, destroys it, and makes it something wholly new.

This view of nature seems wholly akin to an Anabaptist notion of nature. Nature according to Anabaptistism, and for Barth, is inherently problematic. It is not-God, and as such is sin, fallen, and evil. Nature has only non-reality, non-existence. Contrary to Bavinck’s notion of grace perfecting nature, for Barth grace obliterates nature. Death and nothingness is eschatology.

This is, of course, a similar view of nature as one might find in so much of American evangelicalism, especially of a pre-millennial sort. The body is bad, something to be shed that our souls might go to heaven to be with Jesus forever. This world is something to be shed, to be escaped, to be raptured out of. We must be careful in amillennialism that we do fall prey to a similar trap. Jesus will purge the world with fire, at the palingenesis. But he does not do so to destroy it. He does it to renew it, and perfect it as a New Heavens and New Earth. This is Bavinck’s view, and I believe it is the most consistently Reformed.

In our last post we concluded that juxtaposing Bonhoeffer against himself might not be the most useful way to determine whether the man was a pietistic evangelical or a German liberal. So, how do we sally forth from what some might consider a safe method of departure? Well, let’s begin with Bonhoeffer’s theological and philosophical background and then consider how he appropriated it to his own theology.

Theological and Philosophical Background

In Germany, less than fifty years before Bonhoeffer emerged on the scene, Nietzsche, had made an astute observation. He claimed that God had “bled to death under our knives.”[1] The knives that Nietzsche had in mind were the quills of the philosophers. Through their unbelieving reason he contended that they had murdered God. Surely, Immanuel Kant was one of the more prominent assailants. After all, when Kant published his book, The Critique of Pure Reason, in 1781 he described it as a Copernican Revolution. Kant’s primary purpose in the Critique was to define the limits and scope of pure reason. In order to accomplish the task he had to answer a crucial question, “What are the necessary conditions of possible experience?” According to Kant, two complimentary conditions need to be met. First, something must be given to our senses. Kant calls this something a percept or a perception (and at times impressions). Second, a percept must be brought under a mental concept. Or to put it another way, a percept must be brought under the constructive powers of the mind or what Kant calls the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental analytic. Kant’s pedagogical mode of expression for all of this was that concepts (the empty a priori categories of the mind) without percepts (discrete bits of data tethered to our sense experience) are empty and percepts without concepts are meaningless. Now, do you see what effectively Kant has done? Follow his logic for a minute. If human beings can know only perceptions which are then constituted by the constructive powers of the mind, then what is the theological implication? God is not a percept that can be processed through the time/space manifold of the transcendental aesthetic so to be understood by the transcendental analytic. Thus, Kant’s conclusion was that human beings cannot know an imperceptible God. If God exists and created, thought Kant, then He created in such a way so as to forbid creation from knowing it.

Enter Bonhoeffer

Now, what does all this have to do with Bonhoeffer? Well, Bonhoeffer recognized this background and accepted it as the Sitz im Leben of the German theological and philosophical landscape. We might even say that Bonhoeffer believed Kant to be asking the right questions—questions worthy of a theologian. In fact, while in America studying at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer critiqued his American students, saying, “questions such as that of Kantian epistemology are “nonsense,” and no problem to them, because they take life no further” than what is pragmatic.[1] America focused on William James not Immanuel Kant. And Bonhoeffer thought that this was wrongheaded and frustratingly without depth. He wrote that Americans order up theology and philosophy as one ordered a car from the factory![2] But what Bonhoeffer did not accept were the conclusions of his colleagues and the theological answers they gave in light of Kantian transcendentalism. For example, Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s student and close friend, wrote in his biography that Bonhoeffer “saw Barth establishing the majesty of God by methods of Kantian transcendentalism.”[3] According to Bonhoeffer, Barth had allowed Kant the privilege of asking the questions but problematically he had also allowed Kant the privilege of dictating the answers. For Bonhoeffer, Barth’s response to Kant was to make God remote or wholly other. But, according to Bonhoeffer, Kant had already done that. For Bonhoeffer, this was unacceptable. The task of the theologian was to bring God near while answering not ignoring men like Kant. Consequently, Bonhoeffer decided to address the situation in his post-doctoral habilitation called, Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology. And, not surprisingly, in these opening pages, he writes, “At the heart of the problem is the struggle with the formulation of the question that Kant and idealism have posed for theology.”[4] In this work Bonhoeffer set out to make God immanent rather than transcendent or wholly other. But in order to do that he had to find a way to answer Kantian objections to the knowability of God. How he did that is for our next post. [1]Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche; Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 97. [1] Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 161. [2] Ibid., 158. [3] Ibid., 134. [4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Act and Being (Minneapolis, Min.: Fortress Press, 2009), 27.