RTS Papers / History of Christianity II / Spring 2017
Confusing the Boundaries in the Sub-Disciplines of Philosophy
There are really two questions of common ground: 1. between God’s knowledge and ours; 2. between the believer’s knowledge and the unbeliever’s knowledge.
In the first arena there is a basic difference between God’s knowledge and ours. The knowledge that God has is archetypal and the knowledge that we have is ectypal. The first is unlimited, in which everything known is always known in terms of all of its relations to all other things. In short, it is omniscience. The second is quite limited, so much so that we can barely call it “science” inside of the set of “omni-science.”
This would make our knowledge a sub-set of God’s knowledge; but this would further imply that what set we know would be co-extensive with that same finite set in God’s mind. For Van Til this would imply the dastardly conclusion that we know as much about those things as God does, for the knowledge set is identical. This is the first part of his debate with Clark. This sort of “sub-set of omniscience” does not simply maintain the law of identity (as Clark maintained) but goes as far to make our knowledge identical to God’s knowledge. This eradicates the Creator-creation distinction.
Now to the second arena of knowledge, that field between the knowledge of the believer and the knowledge of the unbeliever. This was the second half of the Van Til - Clark debate. It is not that unbelievers cannot know facts. It is that they cannot know them by virtue of their ultimate commitments. The metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of the unbeliever are incompatible with the many truths to which the unbeliever assents. Moreover Van Til held to common grace; but he located it within the covenant that God made with Adam. Thus the knowledge of things is always covenantal knowledge. In our day K. Scott Oliphint even suggests a name-change to “Covenantal Apologetics” on the basis of Van Til’s reasoning.
There is also a moral dimension to knowledge—or epistemology is ethical. One cannot separate the commitments of our heart (ethics) from the direction of our mind (epistemology), nor in turn from the objects (metaphysics) in that view. In other words, epistemology is holistic. No aspect of it can be so easily compartmentalized.
We can certainly agree that the three sub-disciplines of philosophy are inseparable from each other: that they are perspectives on each other, to borrow from Frame. But can we not also say that they may [must] be distinguished without being divorced? Why must we accept the subtle suggestion that to distinguish them is to divorce them?
Van Til’s Epistemology Proper. First we should examine a point at which many would claim Van Til as absolutely prophetic in light of postmodernity’s critique of modernism’s “prejudice against prejudice.” For Van Til, standards of truth always exist within systems of truth. This point has been well clarified by Frame’s treatment of circular reasoning. One can only ever evaluate a truth claim by criteria that are presupposed by his system. When the Christian puts forth the Bible as his norming norm, he is not doing anything differently in this sense than any other view must.
We must ask whether the language of “circular reasoning” is really the best to express this concept. Students of basic logic will recognize the fallacy of circular reasoning. It occurs when we assume in one of our premises that which we are trying to conclude. Sometimes presuppositionalists will justify using this language more broadly by making a distinction between a vicious circle and a more virtuous circle.
Now there is that aforementioned ethical dimension to this epistemological reality. What we reason from, in terms of our intellectual categories criteria, is equated by the Van Tillian school with terms of our allegiance or sense of obligation to a personal [or impersonal] authority. To speak of intellectual preconditions is to speak entirely about authorities. No doubt the two ultimately come together. But one senses a category mistake brewing. It gets thicker when we explain this equation in terms of more familiar Reformed theological categories, such as that of the covenant.
There are only two kinds of thinkers: covenant keepers and covenant breakers. Those who stand in a violent relationship to God’s covenant are never neutral toward the objects of thought. True enough (cf. Romans 1:18-32). While this has the advantage of subordinating an aspect of epistemology to the Bible, there remains the disadvantage of a truncated definition of epistemology to begin with. If one is debating whether or not the knowledge that God possesses may be revealed so as to constitute objects of knowledge that are outside of our minds, then it begs the question to confine “knowledge” to “what all those in Adam know.” The set “All those in Adam” are all of finite minds. Such a conception, while rooted in biblical theology, is not open to the possibility of knowledge being first and foremost objective in God’s mind and thus revealed. If on the other hand a Van Tillian can accept this point — that objects of knowledge are primarily known by God — then he must surrender his reduction of knowledge to being only what those in the covenant know, and by implication how they “do” in knowing it.
So Van Til speaks of the believer and unbeliever doing radically different things with “2 + 2 = 4.” No doubt many implications of this knowledge can be imagined. No doubt many believers and unbelievers have speculated and inferred and dug back into their presuppositions concerning this mathematical truth. But the truth (x) of the proposition itself: is this really equivalent to “what persons A and B do with x”? It would seem as if Van Til and the presuppositionalists are in the habit, at this point, of confusing objects of knowledge per se with the various actions of subjects upon that knowledge — or at least the manifold morphings of that knowledge set given (a) finitude and (b) sin. This is a serious equivocation.
There is another possibility. Van Til speaks of “two senses to the word ‘knowledge’” used by the biblical authors. One regards the creation and renders the sinner guilty, the other is redemptive and spiritual. Van Til wants to stress the noetic effect of sin, that is the corruption of the mind which suppresses the truth in unrighteousness (cf. Rom. 1:18). What comes into clarity, especially in his treatment of Lutheran and Arminian theologies, is that Van Til understands epistemology soteriologically. Now let me be clear that I do not deny that man’s existential relationship to God is going to determine what he sets his mind upon.
But with Van Til we do not have a healthy intersection between epistemology and soteriology. We have a confusion of categories. What we find in the Van Tillian confusion of philosophical categories, then, is a simultaneous confusion of those categories in philosophy with certain doctrines of theology, especially with respect to the doctrine of salvation.
In Van Til’s philosophical translation of his theological heritage, metaphysics was functionally translated to “common ground” and epistemology to “antithesis.” One was restricted and the other the moral duty that followed. Because the sinful creature never means the same thing [metaphysics] as God, and because the unbeliever never means the same thing [metaphysics] as the believer, the proper stance against the unbelieving interpretation is antithesis. Could we summarize Van Til by saying that there is a common ground “out there” in general revelation, but not a common notions “in here” where reasoning about that revelation is done?
What all could it mean that believer and unbeliever share no epistemological common ground? If Billy Believer hears from Suzie Skeptic that “A thing must be logically consistent with itself and logically consistent with its necessary preconditions,” is Billy at war with his biblical commitments if he assents? That would be nonsense! A Van Tilian would reply, “Ah, but it is Suzie who is being inconsistent with her presuppositions.” Point granted — but what of it? Let us simply answer the question. And it is a question of first-order epistemology, or, of the metaphysics of knowledge: Is that proposition uttered by Suzie a true proposition (quite independent of Suzie’s consistency or Billy’s assent) — Yes or no? The classicalist insists that the only proper Christian answer and the only proper rational answer are one and the same. The answer is YES! Otherwise we are back to Averroes and his Double Truth theory.
The Van Tillian Reductionism of ‘NATURE’ and ‘OBJECT’ to Perspective
It is impossible to read Van Til and his diverse progeny without being struck by a universal antipathy to natural theology in general and natural law in particular. Over the past two decades, with the rise of so-called “post-foundationalist” theology we detect that this antipathy has spread to a negative redefinition of objective truth.
In short, the concepts of nature and object have fallen on hard times, and not only in the arguments of explicitly postmodern thinkers, but also in the inherent direction of the thinking of Reformed perspectivalists.
I use the label “perspectival” at this point to draw a larger circle than that which might otherwise be indicated by surveying literature on apologetics. Virtually anywhere that epistemological considerations are in view, we now see that one can hardly be Reformed without confessing “We’re all perspectivalists now!”
Central to the Van Tillian view of natural theology is what many regard to be the aforementioned misreading of Thomas Aquinas. On a more popular level, such as in Schaeffer’s works, Aquinas’ philosophy had nature “eating up” grace. The great Catholic thinker had an insufficient view of the fall. The will was fallen, but the mind was not. In the more extensive critique Van Til gave, Thomas’ doctrine of analogy depended upon the scale of being in which God was “in” the same category as all other beings. God, man, and rocks were all members of a more general class. This was an analogy between equals. But as a matter of fact, Aquinas stated that right reasoning was always a response to divine revelation, even citing Romans 1:19 in Question 1 of the Summa.
Now in fairness to Van Til’s reading of Aquinas, there are points, at first glance, in which Thomas divides between truths of reason and truths of faith. It is as if these are two divorced fields of inquiry, one that could be conceived without the aid of divine revelation and the other that would be wholly inaccessible but for the Scriptures and the Church. Thus there is a Romanist apologetic that gives a nod both to the biblical interpretation and to man’s interpretation, the former in articles of faith and the latter in articles of reason. But is Thomas responsible for this? Is natural theology in itself to blame? From this, Van Til concludes, “The Roman Catholic system is a system that is made up of two mutually exclusive principles, the Christian and the non-Christian.” But even on Thomas’ most ambiguous categorization the larger Van Tillian thesis does not follow. General revelation is not “the non-Christian system.” It is God’s truth outside of Scripture.
A positive note needs to be made about Van Til’s doctrine of general revelation. Just as his followers claim he has been misread about the subject of common ground, so it is often said that he denied general revelation. Not quite. He wrote that “The supernatural could not be recognized for what it was unless the natural were also recognized for what it was.”
Perhaps more confusing to his critics is that Van Til ascribed to general revelation a few of the attributes we often associate with special revelation. God’s speech in the whole of creation is necessary, authoritative, sufficient, and perspicuous.
There is an important qualifier—general revelation possesses these four things for its distinctive purposes. So general revelation is absolutely sufficient to do what Paul says it does in Romans 1. That it is not sufficient to regenerate does not mean that it is insufficient per se. On this point Van Til shows greater sophistication than in his reduction of nature to neutrality.
The upshot is that a fact always needs to be explained by God himself. We might ask: What if x fact is not explicit in the Bible? Then (1) does general revelation not operate with x? or (2) is it improper or impious to examine x’s truth or falsity? or (3) is x merely lacking in a degree of authority, or in kind?
Take the issue of extra-biblical sources for biblical theologians. Here I am not speaking exclusively of critical scholars. Let us cite the example of the New Perspectives on Paul. Scholars such as Dunn, Sanders, and Wright have utilized Jewish texts in the centuries surrounding the New Testament, the literary corpus of Second Temple Judaism. Evangelical critics of the NPP have argued that this is suspect, at least in the sense that one cannot make the extra-biblical normative for the biblical.
We may choose to say that relevant extra-biblical facts are determinative in some way for our understanding of biblical facts. Consider for example the “ABCs” and “123s” — that is, language and quantity per se that are not taught in Scripture — but which are necessary epistemological prerequisites for understanding the truths of Scripture. The moment we claim this, in order to give the scholars breathing room for their sources, then it is difficult to see how we cannot do the same for certain philosophical data. It may be argued that “philosophical data” is very different from our own language and numerical values. But I would like to hear someone explain that difference without using entirely philosophical data!
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