I.3.ii. Applications of Theological Truth
Here divisions will mean the three-fold way of knowing why we believe, knowing what we believe, and then knowing how to live out that belief. This “why,” “what,” and “so what” of our faith goes by the names apologetics, dogmatics, and ethics. Since we have already shown the nature of dogmatic (or systematic) theology under the previous methodological division, here we will only set forth the nature of apologetics and ethics. However, in so doing, we will have much to say about how each of them relate to dogmatic theology.
Another topic we are forced to introduce at this point will be the unity of the knowledge of God in the nature of things. Our analysis of the divisions between natural and supernatural theologies will have to wait. For now we would only observe that Romans 1:19-20 and 2:14-15 cumulatively teach a natural theology in general and natural law in particular. Moreover, we insist that they are related as a species to a genus, the latter knowledge of God’s justice fit for temporal relations being the smaller circle (or species) within the larger circle (or genus) of God’s attributes clearly perceived in the things that have been made. Hence natural law is a species of natural theology, and both are right reasoning about general revelation. This will be crucial to understand in relating apologetics and ethics to the whole system of Christian truth. Let us then define each.
Natural theology is the study of God in all of nature. Some immediately place natural theology within the debate about true and false theology, or begin comparing pagan to a kind of redeemed natural theology. But such has been the fountainhead of many an anti-intellectualism.
Theological truth is, first and foremost, an object of the mind that rightly corresponds to the reality of God and the things of God. Hence it must be treated in its objective sense first. Note how Paul roots the subjective knowledge about God in the antecedent communicating act of God. The object “what may be known” is first of all truth per se—and only then can be distorted by the sinful mind that Paul goes on to talk about.
“For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:19-20).
Natural law is the study of that particular attribute of God in nature that we call justice. As with natural theology, so with natural law. God reveals objectively first—in this case to conscience with moral truths—such that any distortions presuppose real and knowable righteous requirements.
“For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them” (Rom. 2:14-15).
The Scholastics would call such objects of the mind “common notions” or even “principles,” that become the first premises of deduction in our apologetic and ethical reasoning. The former out of natural theology in general and the latter out of natural law in particular.
APOLOGETICS
Apologetics is the art and science of the rational defense of the faith. It is an art because it is a skill in which one engages and may even improve upon; but it is also a science because it has an objective subject matter. James Anderson calls it “the reasoned defense of the Christian faith,”1 and Frame adds his own: “The discipline that teaches Christians how to give a reason for their hope.”2 Still another is offered by William Lane Craig in “the branch of Christian theology which seeks to provide rational justification for the truth claims of the Christian faith.”3
It is often asked whether apologetics is the duty of every Christian, or only those so gifted. We may divide the biblical data into precept and example.
Biblical texts by precept. The classic text is, “but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense (apologia) to anyone who asks you for a reason (logos) for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15); “Contend for the faith” (Jude 3); “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4-5).
Biblical texts by example. Paul was doing both positive and negative apologetics on Mars Hill (Acts 17:22-34); “but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ” (Jn. 20:31); “And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks” (Acts 18:4).
In speaking of apologetics in its function as art or science, we might distinguish between “knowing” versus “showing.” The former regards the science, whereas the latter regards the art. Dr. Anderson’s three components to apologetics are something we can all agree to: (i.) proof - Offering reasons to believe that the Christian worldview is true or reasonable; (ii.) defense - Countering reasons to believe that Christian worldview is false or unreasonable; (iii.) offense - Offering reasons to believe that non-Christian worldviews are false or unreasonable.4
In what sense is apologetics foundation to faith? It is here that we begin to clearly see a sharp divide between various schools of apologetics.
Fideism. Pascal, Kierkegaard, and the core of today’s Reformed Epistemology all said that faith “has its own reasons.” On the face of it, there is something of an equivocation occurring here. Different fideists make this emphasis in different ways, and we should not overgeneralize. On the street level we are told that, “You can’t argue people into the kingdom” and “You can’t build a ladder of reason up to God.”
Classicalism. Philosophical proofs precede the use of evidence for specific articles of faith for two main reasons: (a) because Monotheism in general simplifies our metaphysical options, (b) because necessary truth simplifies our epistemological options. With classical apologetics’ “philosophy first” approach, there are no other rational options left but the consideration of evidence for the three monotheistic religions. All else has been eliminated as a violation of the law of noncontradiction, and so there is no going back: no escape except into utter irrationality.
Evidentialism. This starts with evidence for specifics of the Christian faith, on the ground that it brings people closer to the gospel. At the center is usually evidence for the Scriptures, uniqueness of Christ, and the resurrection. The trouble with this is threefold: (a) it only applies to that demographic that has already assented to monotheism, (b) it allows everyone else safe haven back in irrationality as if it were not, (c) its level of certainty never rises beyond higher degrees of probability for being true.
Presuppositionalism. All people reason only from their basic presuppositions. Our basic commitment is to Scripture, and thus we presuppose the biblical worldview in our defense of the faith. While the noetic effects of sin blind the unbeliever to the real meaning of evidence, we may expose the inconsistency of the unbeliever’s various beliefs with (a) their own basic commitments and / or (b) some basic preconditions to rationality and ethics. This latter indirect proof is called a “transcendental argument.” The basic problem with this method is that it is circular whenever it gives its own reasons.
It is a different matter to ask in what sense apologetics is a foundation to dogmatics. And yet here again those same schools will have something to say. Among the Reformed in our day, the debate is squarely between the classical and Presuppositional schools.
First, notice how different this question is from the previous! And remember the distinction between knowing and showing. Apologetics, especially as an art, is especially interested in “showing” reasons for faith. But when we speak of our reasons for believing things, as Christians who are analyzing our own, whole body of beliefs, we have to consider a different way of thinking about that.
The modern Dutch Reformed tradition has done a great disservice to our theology by blurring this distinction. I will mention the seeds of that even in Bavinck. But what Van Til got out of the two Dutch masters, Bavinck and Kuyper, was this: We may feature apologetics before our dogmatics; so long as our apologetics presupposes God. The articles of faith must be the presupposition and not the conclusion to any argument. But this contradicts the very nature of what an argument is! An argument is, by definition, the presentation of reasons for a conclusion. We rightly call an argument that assumes its conclusion in its premises a circular argument.
Bavinck so correctly diagnosed the Kantian turn in all areas of theoretical thought: except one. The frontier between apologetics and prolegomena Bavinck took to be a compromise waiting to happen. Here is how he put it:
For theology, as an independent scientific enterprise, has its own first principles and does not borrow them from philosophy. Placing apologetics at the head of all the other theological disciplines, as this occurs in Schleiermacher and others, is explicable only from the fact that these theologians no longer recognized theology’s own principles and were forced to look elsewhere for a foundation on which the building of theology could rest.5
Note the potential for equivocation: theology “does not borrow [its first principles] from philosophy.” What exactly does this mean? Does it mean the verdicts of the philosophers? If so, then we should have no disagreement. But does it really come to mean that theology does not borrow from natural theology or metaphysical objects of reason at all, for its first principles? If so, then we descend into irrationalism. He goes further to infer from theology’s ultimate authority that it “does not need the corroboration of philosophical reasoning.” Corroboration? What of clarification? And is the only kind of corroboration that of satisfying the skeptic’s demand for signs? What of the growing Christian mind’s desire to rightly order his thoughts?
Note also in the above Bavinck quote the ghosts of Schleiermacher and the mixing of philosophy. To be concise, natural theology became conflated not merely with philosophy per se, but “the verdict of the philosophers.” We see the very same thing in Barth. He railed against natural theology just insofar as he railed against Schleiermacher. The two were joined at the hip. Over the course of the Enlightenment, natural theology had become reduced to natural religion, or at least to the attempt to meet religion’s “cultured despisers” on their own terms and on their own turf. This recasting of natural theology was then read back into the Scholastics, and especially read back into Thomas.
Van Til’s occasional qualifications. “If then the human consciousness must, in the nature of the case, always be the proximate starting point, it remains true that God is always the most basic and therefore the ultimate or final reference point in human interpretation.”6 Now if this were the consistent presuppositionalist position, what disagreement would he have with the classical position? None - if he understood it. But the reality is that Van Til and his tradition are not consistent with this statement.
Van Til’s more typical condemnation of ‘extra-dogmatic’ starting points. “Calvinism cannot find a direct point of contact in any of the accepted concepts of the natural man. He disagrees with every individual doctrine of the natural man because he disagrees with the outlook of the natural man as a whole.”7 While lip service is paid to the presence of general revelation and common grace, he then turns around and categorically states: “There is no speech or manifestation of grace in nature.”8
Note that Van Tillians make these points in the context of apologetics, yet the original point regards dogmatics. Van Til uses the analogies of a military campaign blasting opponents out of their hiding places, the blueprints of a house being shared among two contrary architects, and the two directions of a highway and its signs. All three of these analogies make it clear that Van Til’s concern regards the effect of “common truth” apologetics on the rest of our system. In short, Van Til was confusing the art of apologetics with epistemology proper.
Concrete example. When Thomas spoke of the impossibility of any potentiality in God as a reason for the simplicity of God,9 he wasn’t commending to us any crisis of faith that causes us to go back to Aristotle to resolve. He was tracing out a means of confirming for our reason what already comports to our faith. In fact, it is really dubious to relegate this line of reasoning to apologetics to begin with.
The basic fear summarized. By allowing any philosophical reasoning to “come before,” or to function as the reason for, any article of faith, it is supposed that such truths of nature are held as an authority above the authority of Scripture.
Reformed classical apologetics takes a two-tiered approach which corresponds to the very nature of reality. In dogmatics, there is God and all other things. Consequently there are necessary truths and contingent truths. The objective methods relevant to apologetics correspond to these two tiers. The pronouncements of logic are not naked form, telling us nothing about the world. Since we already do know about the world, there is nothing at all unnatural about the a posteriori element of Thomas’ Five Ways, for example, and yet the deductive conclusions drawn from necessary truths tell us quite a bit about reality.
This first tier of the classical approach is what is commonly labeled “natural theology.” At its core are the demonstrations of God’s existence, roughly corresponding to the five classes: 1. ontological (being); 2. cosmological (cause); 3. epistemological (mind); 4. axiological (morality); and 5. teleological (design).
Once the existence of God is established, the apologist proceeds to the questions of Scripture’s reliability, Christ’s unique claims, and the resurrection. He may even circle back, as an overlapping field of the two tiers, to address the verdict of science and the problem of evil. But note that the evidential questions are always subordinate to the philosophical proofs concerning ultimate metaphysical commitments. Why is that?
To give a common sense example, what good is it wrangling with a Mormon over proof-texts from either book, when behind that is a very different view of the authority of the books being used. Getting the order of apologetics right was perfectly captured by the mock creed of liberalism in the middle of the twentieth century (I do not know who came up with this): I believe there is no God, and Jesus Christ is his Son. We can see the problem at once. To borrow a metaphor from Lewis, the speaker has sawed off the metaphysical branch his confession is sitting upon.
We may thank the presuppositionalist for reminding us that we are not after a bare and powerless theism, but the God of Scripture and Christ of the cross. Well said! But we would remind our brothers of Machen’s elbow back to the liberal gutting of metaphysical theology: “Jesus was a theist.”10 So simple, we think, it need not be said. But its opposite was being assumed, and so it did need to be said. And so in the same way, we insist that apologetics may undergird dogmatics in the right way precisely by clarifying what must be true about God. This “must be” is the realm of logical necessity. It is fought in the trenches of natural theology.
ETHICS
Ethics is the art and science of right human action in light of what it says about God. Here again I would appeal to professors Anderson and Frame for their own angles: “Ethics is “the study of morality—that is, norms of conduct and norms of character”11 or else, “The Christian life—understood as “living under God’s law, in God’s world, in the presence of God himself.” 12
It is crucial that we make our definition capture the objective sense of ethics for the same reason as in apologetics. Just as revealed truths from God and about God are that to which the mind conforms in natural theology, so it is that the moral principles impressed upon the conscience are what they are, and not anything contrary. Natural law is objective. Thus ethics must be objective. There is a right thing to do.
As John Murray noted, “Our study is not empirical ethics but the biblically approved ethic.”13 Ethics without objective and knowable righteousness is nothing but a tragedy of ever degrading anthropology, hardly even worth that lesser name. Paul distinctly focuses on a requirement as the object of this knowledge in Romans 2:14. This is an object of divine righteousness that the natural law and Mosaic law hold in common. As he add that this substance in the Mosaic law—the absence of this law among the Gentiles notwithstanding—is yet “written on their hearts” (v. 15).
In what sense is ethics “biblical” or “Christian”?
In order to answer that, we must first rightly divide the concept of God's law. When we speak of a natural law / moral law equation, we are implying that all mankind is under this kind of law. That means that God's mandates in Scripture (1) prior to the covenant of grace made with Abraham and (2) the moral law dimension of Israel's law, are both alike given to all mankind. Let us call this moral / natural law “image-of-God shaped” and let us call the remainder of the law to Israel “priest-of-God shaped.” In other words, God gave a natural law in regard to the whole moral nature of mankind. Murder, adultery, theft, and false witness are what they are because of what they say about God via the whole image. On the other hand, rules for cleansing of utensils and garments of priests, the sacrifices, clean and unclean foods, and the observance of holy feasts, these are what they are because of what they say about God in Christ's redemptive work to come. When Christ the Substance came, these shadows had served their purpose.
When the Meditator of salvation appeared, the shadows receded into their proper light. But no such thing happened with the image of God as such. Typological priests are no longer priests. But man and woman are still man and woman. The magistrate still bears the sword and children must still honor their parents. It is all really very simple.
So there is this rationale for the division of the law into 1. moral, 2. ceremonial, and 3. civil—that the ceremonial and even the civil code of theocratic Israel were designed for a very unique typological people in redemptive history.
We will have more to say about this in our treatment of the covenants and law. For now it suffices to say that if there is a logically intersecting field in which natural and moral laws are at one, then the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and natural law principles will very often be traveling down the same inferential paths. Those who keep these two utter strangers in our ethical reasoning are at war with the Christian tradition. One does not need to be a theonomist in some hard Reconstructionist sense to recognize this synergy of the natural and moral.
Separating theology and ethics, Bavinck said, “had the effect of increasingly depriving ethics of its theological and Christian character.”14 How explicitly we see ethics being taught in the Scriptures will depend on our doctrine of the covenants, law, church, as well as our Christology and Eschatology. Specifically, if the natural law doctrine is true, then ethics begins rather early in our biblical theological narrative: as in, in the beginning! Man has the law written on his heart in Adam (cf. Rom. 2:14-15). It follows that in our dogmatics, the seeds of our ethics will be germinating and sprouting throughout our doctrines of man and the covenants and law.
Now in J. V. Fesko’s book Reforming Apologetics, there is much to be commended in the exposure of Van Til’s misreading of the Reformed record. The middle chapters on the “worldview” concept bring up some questions, however, concerning what kind of Reformed Classical ideas are being recovered. We have no qualms with the critique of German Idealism’s pet project of spinning the whole universe around one Idea marching through history and so forth. Nor do we deny that the “central dogma” model of theologizing, as critiqued by Muller and Van Asselt, was amiss.
What we would ask both critiques is this: Are we to conclude that there is nothing more central in the sense of being more necessary than other things? Of course they would not say so, since they grant the principial status of the heads of doctrine in the loci method. So the difference is a matter of emphasis? But then back to Fesko, worldview is conceived as a primary “obstacle” in the recovery of the book of nature. In speaking of the German idealist origins of the worldview concept, with its four attributes,15 he suggests that we distinguish between worldviews to the degree that we: 1. reject a “common doctrine of humanity,” 2. insist on a “single principle from which one deduces” the worldview, 3. give exhaustive-systematic explanation of reality, and 4. render competing worldviews incommensurable.
One can see how the presuppositionalists have been guilty of all four. But as to whether the driving premise in that guilt is that there is a biblical worldview, covering all terrain, is simply a non sequitur. Now he does make a distinction between Historic Worldview Theory (HWT) and the more “benign” descriptions of “one having” a worldview. Fesko is reacting to exhaustiveness: but what kind? The Van Tillian fallacy that the part can only be known in reference to the whole? Or is any theoretical exhaustiveness committing the same error? At best Fesko is unclear. In layman’s terms, since the Bible is not designed to give an explicit program of economics or child rearing or educational pedagogy, we ought not so triumphantly use phrases like “Growing Kids God’s Way.” Fair enough. But are we not neutering even the Confession’s value of “good and necessary consequence” to suspect the worldview concept as the culprit?
It is best to conclude, as Fesko blessedly does, “that worldviews overlap at certain points and cannot be entirely incommensurable.”16 Now if we are consistent with this, it will be proper to speak of a Christian worldview that is true theology about all things in relation to God—each sub-section according to principles and methods proper to their nature. The Van Tillian appropriation of HWT disallows that last half of the sentence in banishing common notions (marginalizing the extra-biblical insight as “autonomous” or “neutral”); but the new classicalists may reject the first part of the sentence out of fear of returning to some dread “Western Civilization / Natural Law complex” that will only keep the “Christian Right” afloat. Oh the humanity! And I mean that literally because, as all of your favorite dead theologians would tell you, that is precisely the only way to preserve humanity on this temporal and ethical plane.
Chief among the causes of the eclipse of objective right and wrong is an ethical dualism that has always had incubators in the non-Reformed world, in groups such as the Lutheran Pietists, the extreme form in the Anabaptists, the American frontier revivalists, and finally the full retreats of the mind in Fundamentalism and the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements.
But it has been an ethical pluralizing tendency in the Reformed world that finds three inroads: 1. the ordinary Baptist tendency to separate the ecclesial and civil sphere (which, protests notwithstanding, is just a softer brand of the Anabaptist error), 2. the republication brand of covenant theology following Kline (which joins itself with a Lutheran take on the forms and uses of the law), and 3. the cultural phenomena of trying to appease the gods of political correctness.
This final cause is multi-faceted. It picked up steam right at the turn of the millennium with exhaustion over “culture wars” and embarrassment over the failure of the “Religious Right” to deliver a significant victory in such wars. Analyzing this confluence of sociological and theological causes is an interesting topic for another day. For our purposes let us not try to plug up irreparable dams but to re-plunge ourselves in the pure streams of God’s design for the ethical image.
Why study non-biblical or non-Christian ethics?
Again, Dr. Anderson’s list is instructive: (a) To understand why people today hold the ethical beliefs they do; (b) To gain a better appreciation for the rationality of the Christian worldview and for the cogency and comprehensiveness of Christian ethics; (c) To benefit from the insights of non-Christian ethicists (common grace); (d) To benefit from the failures of non-Christian ethicists.
A few more principles should be kept in mind.
Intellectual seclusion (in the name of avoiding the “secular”) leads to secularization. The main reason that this is the case is that, having put our moral reasoning on autopilot, (a) we will still have an intrinsic need to make sense of our whole ethical world; and (b) the secularist will happily have done our thinking for us. We are right now living out the classic case of this. One party honestly doesn’t know why their inherited definition of social justice is (a) Marxist and (b) bound to the same results as overtly secular applications of Marxist theory, and the other side isn’t sophisticated enough to go deeper than to impolitely “break the news” to them.
The gospel itself can easily be compromised in the same motion. Another element Bavinck noted is that after Kant, those who were the more conservative “ethical theologians” still cast Christianity in a unique role: it was the power that fulfilled ethics. So the Golden Rule is still universal to man, but the gospel helps us fulfill it. Creating tensions between gospel and morality where there are none only guarantees a never ending pendulum swinging in each generation from liberalism to legalism and back again.
Now as a final point I would say this. Anyone who remembers the 1991 debate between R. C. Sproul and Greg Bahnsen will hopefully recall the opening statement by Dr. Sproul. In it, the more general concern of the Reformed Classicalist was put on display and so will drive home the point of this section. A comparison was made between presuppositionalist thought and Neo-Orthodox thought. No doubt this was exactly the kind of thing that makes the Van Tillians reassure themselves that they have been misunderstood. After all, did not Van Til write two books against Barthianism and so on and so forth. Point missed. But since I do not want my reader to miss the point, let me make it plain.
The recovery of classical theology in the Reformed world is either a farce or a fool's errand if it does not feel the weight of Sproul's words in that opening statement. As Thomas had long ago pointed out about the double truth theory: a thing cannot be true in nature and false in Scripture, or true in revelation and false in reason, or true in philosophy and false in theology, etc. Whether the exact language is the same in an Averroes or a Barth or a Van Til is nothing to the point.
It is our rational ability to connect necessary divine truths in natural theology and to become socially meaningful ethical actors via natural law—all of that is lost if we embrace a system of thought that calls God's truth in nature so many laws unto themselves.
Dogmatics itself is undone in due time without an objective apologetic and ethic, rooted in the recovery of natural theology and natural law.
(#ethics #ethical #morality #apologetics #fideism #classicalapologetics #presuppositionalism #rational)
1. James Anderson, Apologetics, RTS Lectures Notes (August, 2016), 2
2. Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God, 1
3. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, xi
4. Anderson, Apologetics, Lecture Notes, 2.
5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I.55
6. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 97.
7. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 146.
8. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 64.
9. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I. Q.3. Art.2
10. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 57.
11. Anderson, Pastoral and Social Ethics: Lecture Notes (April, 2018), 2.
12. Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, 3
13. John Murray, Principles of Conduct (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 15
14. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I.56-57
15. J. V. Fesko, Reforming Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019), 98
16. Fesko, Reforming Apologetics, 148.
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