The Dutch Reformed thinker and poet Willem Bilderdijk recalls in a letter to a friend in 1822 what his former teacher once said: “When examining the truth of Christianity, you must be as much a heathen as a Christian in order to judge freely.”^[1] This troubled Bilderdijk for the simple reasons that it failed to honor Christ, first and foremost, and to account for the antithesis between believers and unbelievers. He writes,

This beautiful sounding precept, which then dismayed me, is indeed of the evil one and seduces whoever accepts it: because it contains [1] unfaithfulness to God and the Savior to whom we are sanctified in baptism and [2] a fundamental apostacy. — No, we must cling with all of our soul to the Savior, value and hold fast with our heart the Grace that has called us, and fight Unbelief in God’s might and not under the Banner of Reason.

By the “Banner of Reason,” Bilderdijk has in mind not reason in itself but reason understood specifically as an autonomous source of knowledge that can function independent of God and his revelation. And so, he recognized that if believer and unbeliever alike fight under the Banner of Reason, then (autonomous) reason must triumph in the end. For the believer to raise the Banner of Reason is for him to desert his Commander; it is “a fundamental apostacy.” Bilderdijk continues,

Then it will not be difficult to see the falsity of the feigned refutations [of God]. They gleam in the eye, but one must not let himself be moved into the standpoint of those who cannot see the light of truth from their standpoint. I must not close my eyes with the blind man in order to debate with him whether or not the sun shines. If someone denies that I have a good library or a well-stocked cellar, I must not shut up the room or cellar, but bring him in there with me. Or, if he is too crippled to go up and down the stairs with me, then let him talk, and I will enjoy my privilege in gratitude toward God who gives me these refreshments for soul and body. — If I can refute the unfortunate by the communication from there, so much the better; but to set aside my possession and consciousness of it in order to refute his arguments from those arguments themselves would be folly.

Believers and unbelievers view all things from different “standpoints” or “worldviews,” as Bilderdijk speaks of elsewhere. For the believer to adopt the unbeliever’s mode and position of seeing in order to debate with him would be as foolish as someone debating a blind person as to whether or not the sun is shining by closing his own eyes. He deprives himself of that which alone can recognize the thing in question. The Christian must not set aside his “possession,” graciously given to him by God, in order to refute the arguments of unbelievers by the unbeliever’s own arguments. Is it not telling that it is typically those fighting for the faith who are lured under the “Banner of Reason” and not the other way around? Neutrality is a myth.

Bilderdijk realized that someone could object to this as simply begging the question (petitio principii). He responds,

All feeling is petitio principii and cannot be disproved or proved by reason. And so it is with the Feeling of Grace [Genadegevoel], that is, with Religion. It is of God, it is the working of God’s Spirit in our heart, and the mind must receive it from our heart. Without this, intellectual Religion is a mere Historical or Philosophical view, nothing more, and does not prove Christianity but Paganism.

This Romantic version of “faith seeking understanding” is basic to the Reformed theology that Bilderdijk sought to defend and promote. A test case is the believer’s reception of the Bible’s sixty-six books as holy and canonical and his undoubted belief in all things contained in them. The Belgic Confession, which Bilderdijk affirmed, states that the believer receives these books and believes all things in them “above all because the Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that they are from God” (article 5). As Bilderdijk said, “[I]t is the working of God’s Spirit in our heart, and the mind must receive it from our heart.” The mind is not independent, but dependent upon the heart and the Spirit.

In apologetics, the believer must not set aside “his possession and his consciousness of it” in order to argue from the unbeliever’s resources. Rather, “we must cling with all of our soul to the Savior, value and hold fast with our heart the Grace that has called us, and fight Unbelief in God’s might and not under the Banner of Reason.”

And so Bilderdijk did. As Herman Bavinck writes of him, “Against the Revolution, he raised the banner of the Gospel.”^[2]

^[1] Willem Bilderdijk, “Aan Mr. Samuel Iperuszoon Wiselius,” in Brieven 3 (Amsterdam, 1837). All quotations in this article are taken from here. All translations are my own.

^[2] Herman Bavinck, Bilderdijk als denker en dichter (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1906), 216, my translation.

Going hand-in-hand with what we said in a previous post about rendering God not God, Van Til points up how unbelieving thought assumes a neutral view of reality, and in so doing renders every aspect of reality as a final arbiter between God and man: “Now Romanism does not go nearly so far as this. It does hold to the possibility of true propositional knowledge about God as an antecedent being. Even so, Romanism is so largely monistic in its philosophy of being that it cannot do justice to the Christian idea of revelation. Following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas talks about being as such before making the distinction between the divine and created being. And this is fatal to Christian theology. It constitutes an attack on the basic distinction between God as self-contained and man as his creature. Being as such is a pure abstraction. Hegel was quite right in maintaining that it can be interchanged with non-being. To attempt to say one word about it is to attempt to make Reality as a whole, inclusive of God and man, the final subject of predication. It is, in effect, to deny that created reality is what it is, as exclusively revelational of what God is in himself to himself. It is, in effect, also to deny that all of man’s knowledge is true to the extent that it is a restatement by man of the revelation of God. Conversely, it is to maintain, in effect, that man is able to make true predication about reality without a priori self-consciously, revelational activity on the part of God. To talk about being as such is to talk about possibility as such. And to talk about possibility as such is to assume the idea of logic as such. And to assume the idea of logic such is to assume the idea of consciousness as such. And to assume the idea of consciousness as such is to deny the fundamental distinction between the self-contained consciousness of God and the dependent consciousness of man. In other words it is to assume that man can employ the laws of logic and by means of them legislate for reality” (An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 200, emphasis mine). Believing in any “as-suchness” whatsoever renders the creature superior to the Creator. It makes that thing – as such – the final arbiter of reality, of even God himself. This is how we end up with so many bad theologies of God. We come to a question about God, and we try to answer that question in keeping with the rules of abstract concepts of being, act or becoming, justice, logic, goodness, etc. Here is a quick example. God cannot possibly foreordain certain people unto eternal perdition. And certainly God cannot on the day of judgment sentence a whole mass of people unto eternal punishment. Why not? Because, then God would not be good or just. Did you see that? Did you see how what follows the “then God would” is a kind of third party, supposed neutral legislator that has its own independent existence apart from God. Goodness and justice – as understood by fallen rebellious man – become standards to which God Himself must be held accountable. Contrary to this, for Van Til, we must begin with God as the “concrete absolute.” That is to say, only in God is goodness or justice concrete and not an abstraction. God IS good. God IS just. He defines what goodness and justice is, not us. And certainly not goodness or justice as such. There does not exist — at least outside of our own rebellious and fallen minds – any “as-suchness” whatsoever.