Dialogue 2

Noland and Elder VanTithesis meet to focus more on the question of natural theology and of reason being at the foundations of Christian thinking. 

Noland. Thank you for meeting with me. Maybe we’ll get more clarity on each other’s position. Were you able to read that abstract of my dissertation? I wouldn’t torture you with the whole thing.

VanTithesis. Yes, I have. I must say, we were very happy with your teachings on the doctrines of grace and the other ones on the Reformed confessions and catechisms. But the moment you start talking about apologetics or philosophy, you start to sound like one of those restless souls who would take us back to Thomas Aquinas.  

N. Nevermind what it would mean to go “back” to Thomas—I hear he’s been quite dead. 

VT. Oh, you know what I mean, though. You will say that this or that early Reformed writer held Thomas in high esteem, or used the scholastic method, and so forth. But surely you also know that the view of grace and the sacraments held by Aquinas is a departure from the gospel as upheld in all of the Reformed confessional standards. 

N. Even if that is the case, it would not follow that he is not worth reading in other respects. That said, my own thesis really doesn’t depend on any formal defense of Aquinas anyway. I still want to understand what you would mean by natural theology.

VT. It is just as I was saying the other day. Natural theology is reasoning about God apart from revelation—

N. But just a moment. You admit that there is general revelation.

VT. Yes, but general revelation does not get us to truly knowing God.

N. I grant that it is not given that we may know him in a saving way; but Paul says that “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” (Rom. 1:20).

VT. You forgot the last part.

N. I know the part you mean. I didn’t forget it. But I don’t see how it changes the point. 

VT. It changes the whole thing! This knowledge is a convicting knowledge, and that is all. They are guilty because what God had communicated, they should have known.

N. Paul goes further, though—in fact, they did know. And besides, how exactly could they be guilty for how they responded to that knowledge if it was no knowledge at all? What else is the reason for their inexcusability but what they did in their reason?

VT. Exactly, autonomous reasoning is of no use here.

N. What! This is a red herring. All you’ve done is to dress up reason with an adjective meant to signal pious disapproval. But the fact remains that reason is guilty of mishandling what reason knew. And this knowledge is about God through nature.

VT. So what? If this is what natural man does with it, then the burden of proof is on you to show why we should make so much of it. 

N. What could be wrong with “making so much of truth” when all that means is to affirm that it is true?

VT. Again, the unbeliever does not mean the same thing we mean by “truth.” That is why.

N. He may not mean the same as us, but surely he does not get to make it mean whatever he wants to, does he? What I am talking about is not the unbeliever’s meaning and our meaning. I am honing in on the truth itself. 

VT. We are only going in circles. I agree there is a truth in itself. But it is to no point because the unbeliever does not see truth as it is in itself, that is, as it is in the mind of God.

N. Perhaps an example may help?

VT. Feel free.

N. Let’s take the proposition, “An immutable thing cannot be an mutable thing at the same time and in the same relation.” The truth of this proposition is as certain as that 2 + 2 = 4, wouldn’t you agree?

VT. Of course.

N. Now, I think you would agree that unbelievers utter that mathematical proposition all the time and that they mean what we mean by it, as far as the basic math is concerned; but then you will deny that the unbeliever would mean the same thing by the terms “immutable” and “mutable” insofar as those relate to ultimate presuppositions. Is that right?

VT. That’s exactly right. I’m happy to see that you are not resorting to straw men about we presuppositionalists. We do not deny common ground in totality. Believers and unbelievers alike know which bathroom to use—or, at least, they used to! But the point is that, when it comes to matters that touch upon ultimate issues, the unregenerate heart is in a state of rebellion and so has no other set of presuppositions to operate within but those which are in antithesis to the truth. 

N. Very well. But I wonder even about these ideas of immutability and mutability. Would you say that the unbeliever believes nothing about these as we do, or some-things about these?

VT. You may have to clarify what you have in mind. Certainly they would not ascribe these to God and things in the world in the same way as we would at all. They couldn’t afford to. 

N. Sure. But perhaps we might use the words “relative immutability” and “relative mutability”—so that we might discern how much or how little common meaning there is between the unbeliever’s notion and our own.

VT. I am afraid that if we use them, we will enable the unbeliever in the very thing I am talking about. What on earth is “relative immutability”? If God cannot change, then there can be nothing relative about that at all. And I think I know where you are going in any event. The unbeliever will know something of things that tend to change more than other things, and so forth. 

N. Yes, that is part of it. But before you dismiss that, perhaps we can keep two other things in mind along with this. The first is a consideration of those three ways in which things can be said: whether univocally, equivocally, or analogically; and the second is the question of whether all created things are communications by God, about God, in one way or another—keeping Romans 1:20 in mind. 

VT. I can keep those in mind all day. But if you are defining these things as a Thomist, all you will accomplish is to multiply by three your original stalemate with the unbeliever. Now, in addition to immutability, you will need him to mean the same as you by analogy, and then the same by such things being divine revelation. 

N. Actually, I am more concerned with what you mean by them than with the unbeliever. In other words, do you grant that the concepts of immutability and mutability are what they are, such that anything that what we (believer or unbeliever) mean by them will be true only by analogy, and that in speaking about immutability we are speaking about that which can only be divine? 

VT. That would be true if and only if said propositions are true. But I deny that of the unbeliever’s propositions. 

N. Am I to understand, then, that in all that the unbeliever says about immutable and mutable things, such propositions cannot be true in any sense about any property or predicate of the things so spoken? 

VT. Let me slow down for a moment to see what you are trying to get me to commit myself to.

N. May I add another clause to bring even more clarity?

VT. Sure. 

N. In speaking of a relative degree of the objects “immutability” and “mutability” earlier, what I was really driving at was not to suggest that these can become more like each other in themselves, but that, in keeping with the analogical relationship between our words and things, or our ideas and things, that our subjective representations (whether in words or thoughts) can come closer to or stray further from the objects of which they are a likeness. And this is so in such way that the unbeliever speaks truly in saying, “A soul that never dies is more like the divine than a body which is even now dying.” 

VT. Are you going to give me Plato’s immortality of the soul as a bridge to the immutability of the triune God?

N. Something much more modest than any bridge—Is the statement true? That is all.

VT. This is of no use in the real world. In the real world, the sinner is at war with God, and on the rare occasion he even allows a statement like that, he will have a dozen more to put that soul into the place of God.  

N. You are avoiding the question. Whether this was impractical in “the real world” or not, intellectual honesty demands that you retract your original viewpoint that such statements cannot be true because an unregenerate speaker uttered it. You are relativizing truth itself to your own frustrations in apologetics encounters. And I think it is that which will go bad in the real world. 

VT. How so? In the actual conversations on the street, the practice of demolishing the presuppositions of one’s opponent beats endless pontificating from the terms of the enemies of Christ.

N. I suppose if that is what the classical position was doing, but let me ask you this. If the unbeliever cannot make head or tail out of any positive demonstration of theism or evidence for the Christian faith in particular, how exactly do the terms of the presuppositionalist’s demolition job fare any better? 

VT. They do better because the unbeliever’s worldview can never get off the ground. Showing the premises to be irrational, the conclusions can never follow. One cannot advance their forces if they are always rebuilding their fort.  

N. I can’t fault the strategy as to its efficiency. But coming back from metaphors to realities, what I mean to ask is how the unbeliever can understand what it means for his premises to be incoherent if he means something fundamentally different than you by the laws of logic? Or by being and cause and good, and so on?

VT. Well I can see we are getting nowhere again. I’m not sure how else to explain things to you.

(To be continued)