Relocating To Elfland

My family and I are currently reading through G. K. Chesterton’s The Poet and the Lunatics. It’s marvelous.

This description of one Amos Boon (in “The Shadow of the Shark”) made me laugh; it belongs up on the wall in a few seminaries:

“Anyhow, travelling about alone with nothing but a big Bible, he had learned to study it minutely, first for oracles and commandments, and afterwards for errors and contradictions; for the Bible-smasher is only the Bible-worshipper turned upside down.”

“The Theologian is absolutely dependent upon the pleasure of God, either to impart or not to impart knowledge of Himself. Even verification is here absolutely excluded. When a man reveals something of himself to me, I can verify this, and if necessary pass criticism upon it. But when the Theologian stands in the presence of God, and God gives him some explanation of His existence as God, every idea of testing this self-communication of God by something else is absurd; hence, in the absence of such a touchstone, there can be no verification, and consequently no room for criticism.” (Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, p. 251)

In this same section, Bavinck makes the following point:

“A religion that fails to furnish comfort and satisfaction to the moral needs of people is certainly false. Conversely, not every religion in which people look for comfort or satisfaction is true.” (p. 1.552)

Many evangelicals today hold to Christianity because they think it meets their felt needs (e.g., comfort and satisfaction). But the fundamental question is not whether Christianity meets my felt needs (and thus accords with my value judgments), but rather whether it is true.

A Christianity that simply affords pleasing experiences, that merely supplies  me with things I personal value, is a Christianity that is ultimately nothing more than a competitor to psychotropic drugs. I really don’t need a Christian praise-band to give me the emotions that attend music. I don’t need a Christian counselor to hold my hand and affirm my self-esteem. I don’t need to go to church to get a latte. I can find other religions (and for that matter non-religious groups) that teach kindness and respect toward one’s neighbor. I can even find other ideologies that offer comfort on my deathbed. And I can get all this without a pastor telling me I am a sinner who can be saved from everlasting ruin only through the blood-letting of the Son of God. All the good stuff is available elsewhere.

“Value judgments either depend on factual judgments or are illusory.” (Bavinck, p. 1.548)

Hence, for example, the impossibility of distinguishing the “historical Jesus” from the Christ of faith, as liberal theology attempts to do.

Hence also the impossibility of constructing human ethics (what ought to be) without a warranted theory of reality (what is). Value judgments, constantly made everywhere by theists and anti-theists alike, must themselves be grounded in something else. It is not enough to say, “I (or we) believe this is good,” or, “That is how things ought to be,” without a defensible basis outside the value judgment itself. This may seem obvious, but it is remarkable how many people think that because they hold to a certain structure of values, and make judgments based on those values, that should be the end of all discussion.

“If Christian revelation, which presupposes the darkness and error of unspiritual humanity, submitted in advance to the judgments of reason, it would by that token contradict itself. It would thereby place itself before a tribunal whose jurisdiction it had first denied. And having once recognized the authority of reason on the level of first principles, it could no longer oppose that authority in the articles of faith.” (Bavinck, p. 1.516)

“If Christianity is a religion of redemption in the full and true sense of the word and hence seeks to redeem human beings from all sin, from the errors of the mind as well as the impurity of the heart, as much from the death of the soul as from that of the body, it in the nature of the case cannot subject itself to the criticism of human beings but must subject them to its criticism. The revelation that comes to us in Christ through Scripture in fact takes that position toward us. It does not put itself on a level below us to ask for our approving or disapproving judgment on it but takes a position high above us and insists that we shall believe and obey.” (Bavinck, p. 1.505)

Here’s a thought on the history of language that I’ll bet most of us have never had:

“Judged by the Greek of Plato and Demosthenes, the NT is full of barbarisms and solecisms; but the marriage between pure Hebrew and pure Attic that resulted in Hellenistic Greek, between the mind of the East and the mind of the West, was the linguistic realization of the divine idea that salvation is from the Jews but intended for all humankind.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 1.434)

I’ve been reading through Bavinck’s material on general and special revelation, and it has tacked down some loose pieces in my thinking about the relationship of faith and reason. In the biblical schema of human knowledge, there are three basic components: from God’s side (1) revelation (both general and special), and on man’s side (2) reason and (3) faith. Scripture presents the interplay of these components in three different contexts: 

First is the pre-Fall context. Here man received from God both general revelation (in nature and history) and special revelation (e.g., Gen 2:16–17). His reason and faith were perfectly integrated such that he received God’s revelation with a reasonable faith and a believing mind. It was not the case (and this is important) that he engaged God’s general revelation by means of reason and God’s special revelation by means of faith. Things were not so compartmentalized. Adam took in general revelation believingly, and he took in special revelation rationally. At no point (prior to the Fall) were his faith and reason operating independently from each other, nor did his faith and reason operate at any point autonomously from divine revelation. 

Second is the post-Fall context among the unredeemed. In the post-Fall context, from God’s side we find a flurry of new special revelation that is redemptive in nature (messages of grace, “good news”). Fallen man, however, can neither believe this special revelation nor understand it; both his faith has turned to unbelief and his reason has been darkened by the Fall. And this affects his apprehension not only of special revelation but also of general revelation. Man may be able to dodge special revelation, but he cannot escape the general revelation of God that confronts him in every created thing, including himself; and he wars against the revelation of God, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18). This does not mean, however, that man has become a brute. He retains the faculties of reason, but he does not know created things truly because he does not receive in them the revelation of God (he is like someone trying to understand a piano while firmly rejecting the whole notion of music). 

More, however, must be said. Fallen man is without exception a believer; he is at every point a man of faith. He always believes in something, he always assumes something, for without a set of basic beliefs (principia, we might say) he could have no epistemology, he could account for nothing. But the faith-commitments of fallen man turn out, upon examination, to be irrational. Perhaps he believes in a realm of forms, or a noumenal realm, or a Weltgeist, or “laws” of logic, or whatever. But why is such blind faith warranted? None of these faith-commitments can fund a coherent epistemology: given any one of them, at the edge of human thought always lies a void, an unexplained and unexplainable blank. The realm of forms is “just there”; the noumena is “just there”; the Weltgeist is “just there,” unexplained and unexplainable and (which is very important) unable to explain the world that confronts us. If ultimate reality is idea, whence come concrete particularizations? If the noumena is that of which nothing can be predicated, how can we even ascribe to it “existence” (whatever that means)? If laws of logic are “just there,” is it not equally plausible that they are “just not there” (without a basis for attributing order and uniformity to the universe, for example, how can Hume’s objection to these things be countered)? Is an impersonal Weltgeist adequate to account for consciousness, for love, for beauty, for morality? It is true that the Triune God of the Bible is also “just there”; but at least, given Him, things can be accounted for. Reject Him, and there is no substitute. All the idols turn out to be lying imaginations that can neither speak nor save; given them, there is no basis for making the slightest sense of the world. 

It is not the case then that “faith” can be confined to the realm of special revelation, and “reason” given dominion in the sphere of general revelation. Such a schema does not take account of the idolatry of unbelief, or the epistemological implications of such idolatry. As Milbank and others have argued, from a Christian point of view there can be no legitimate “secular.” Secularity is religiously idolatrous. It is epistemologically, morally, and aesthetically impossible, borrowing whatever stability it has from outside itself. It is cosmically treasonous, and all of its territory is graciously but authoritatively claimed by the gospel. (I leave aside here the matter of “common grace,” though it certainly pertains to the issues at hand.) 

Third is the post-Fall context among the redeemed. As noted above, from God’s side after man’s Fall we find a flurry of special revelation that is redemptive in nature. But God must also give to man the gift of faith, since his heart has become wicked and unbelieving; with this gift of faith, man can once again believingly respond to God’s special and general revelation. Man’s reason having been darkened and made futile, the things of revelation are foolishness to him (however much he may borrow from them to construct some sort of coherent worldview); and so God also gives to man a sound mind, a renewed mind, that he may know God truly in all things, and know all things truly in God. 

This is a very rough sketch and would need nuancing and revision at points, but I hope I am making some progress in organizing my thoughts.

I will be writing a lot about Bavinck this year. I’m reading through his Reformed Dogmatics, and it is mind-bending stuff. For example, he identifies (p. 1.61) three sources from which Christian theology derives its material: they may be alliterated as canon (scripture), creed (confession and teaching of the church), and Christian consciousness (experience). What is helpful about this triad is that it identifies the three main “players” in Christian theology: God Himself (the source of authoritative revelation), the community of faith (both historical and contemporary), and the individual Christian (the uniqueness of each particular soul and life). Christian theology listens to its God both communally and individually. 

But already in this statement we can see the necessity of a certain order or priority in the triad – an order which has gotten badly out of whack in our times. I would like to think it goes without saying that when we Christians think about theological questions, our task is to interact with the divine answers to these questions, as recorded in the biblical canon; but the briefest survey of modern Christianity will reveal that an awful lot of us think we are competent to supply the answers to the questions. Now certainly many Christians would not want to put it that way; but in practice what drives discussions of what we are to think and how we are to behave? Is it really “What has God said in scripture about this or that?” (In our individualistic times, do we even think to ask, “How has the church reflected and spoken about this or that?” Our Roman Catholic friends would perhaps be more inclined to ask such a question.) Or is our reflexive impulse to ask, “What do I think (or worse still, how do I feel) about this or that?”

Christian consciousness is a site for receptive reflection in theology; Christian experience is the sphere of practical outworking in theology. But if Christian theology is to remain in any sense Christian, it cannot derive from (it cannot be grounded in) the thought and experience of the individual. My ideas and experiences simply have no normative role in Christian theology; they do not (they may not) determine what I am to believe or do.

We should also say, over against Roman Catholic teaching, that the collective thought and experience of the church is likewise without normative status, in the sense that it stands fully under the judgment of the canon – as much as the individual, the church as a whole is receptively to reflect on the Word of her God and obediently to apply it in her corporate experience. But to give high churchmanship its due, at least in the community of faith there is the safety of many counselors. Christendom may err; but if it is Joe Christian contra Christendom, I will go with Christendom every time. (Here I must commend Chapter 7 in Robert Letham’s recent work, The Westminster Assembly: Reading Its Theology in Historical Context, pp. 120–58.)

Again, I would like to believe this is obvious. At any rate, Bavinck’s treatment of the theological triad provides a great deal of help in organizing our thinking about where theology comes from, and how it is constructed.