Evaluating the Natural Theology of Vos

I bring you a thud on the battlefield between the Classical and Presuppositional forces. Geerhardus Vos’ Natural Theology has been released, and this review will be mixed. To spare anyone the time (it only takes a single day to read), money ($25.00), but mostly the letdown, I do have to say that if anyone on either side is hoping to be “vindicated” by Vos, if you are a dishonest reader, you may see only what you wish, and if you are an honest reader you will have to settle for what is nearly always the case in history: a chewing of the meat and spitting out of the bones. Of course, the bone is where to find meat.

A few exceptions that the Reformed Classicalist can honestly point out:

1. Whatever else Van Til took from Vos, he could not have taken his view on the legitimacy of natural theology.

2. Vos (with Warfield) believed that natural theology belonged within the scope of theological encyclopedia.

3. Vos was classical in treating the field of nature in its objective, comprehensive sense, rather than the reductionistic Van Tillian sense of “the sinful nature” or “what sinful man does with x” or “natural man’s capacity to x,” or “natural religion,” etc.

On the other hand, the Reformed Classicalist must be honest about ways in which Vos’ wrestling with Enlightenment beasts cause many twists and turns of language that can be read in a way that provide seeds of the coming subjectivism. I have made this case elsewhere about even the "soteriological critique of natural theology” among the Reformed Orthodox. We should not be terribly surprised to find it in any post-Kantian Reformed author that does not get all the way behind Kant’s Critique.

The reader must bear in mind that these were lecture notes in Vos’ first teaching position at the school that would eventually be called Calvin College in Grand Rapids. Muller indicates they were first delivered sometime between 1888 and 1893, and that the extant manuscripts are from around 1895 to 1898. The introduction by J. V. Fesko is an interesting read in its own right, not least because of how it evidences theological retrieval’s cautious exercise in not claiming too much too soon. I have addressed elsewhere how Fesko did not go far enough in restoring the claims of natural theology, especially in his chapter on Aquinas in Reforming Apologetics (2019). The persistent fear of a “rational foundation” remains in this introduction as well. Time prohibits me from a polished critique, but here are at least some notes on the relevant sections.

1. ‘Natural versus Revealed’

Note that in Vos, the equivocal, contrasting terms are still applied: “natural theology” and “revealed theology.” Yet the distinction Vos makes between them as to source and method is still valid: “its source of knowledge and method of treatment differ” (3). One should make one further distinction within source in order to eliminate the equivocation. As to ultimate source, God is the Author of both “books,” whereas to formal source, we may then distinguish between nature and Scripture.

2. What is meant by “Nature”?

The definition Vos gives to nature strikes at the heart of another crucial equivocation: “All that is subject to the normal link between causes and effects, and that works according to fixed laws, from the beginning of creation” (4). Even this will require elaboration. However Vos at least points us outside of ourselves; whereas for the Van Tillians, the idea of the “natural” is restricted to the subjective performance of natural, that is, fallen man.

So when a Van Tillian hears of “natural theology” what he hears is “how sinful man does his” theology, and then the clause “apart from Scripture” becomes a red herring addendum. What is missed is that such “natural knowledge” is not considered in its objective form (a) independent of all finite minds (b) to which finite minds more or less conform. The Van Tillian is preoccupied with the soteriological question and cannot, for the life of him, hear the distinction.

Now we do not deny that the sinful nature is a proper object of consideration in this study. We deny that “nature” may be reduced to this. Paul does not do so in Romans 1:20 by the phrase “things that have been made.” His field of “nature” is all created things that can be thought about. 

3. Vos justifies the first distinction

He goes on to justify the division between the natural and revealed by pointing out that “Revelation is something that does not remain continually, while nature continually bears witness” (4). We can recognize this element clearly enough; but we might ask, “Why then call general (or natural) revelation ‘revelation’ at all?” There must be at least one additional defining characteristic of revelation but its principle of originality, as opposed to continuation. He admits a “wide sense” and “narrower sense” in just this way. In the end, we can hardly fault Vos for not anticipating an irrational divorce between the natural and revealed in the generation following him. 

4. Metaphysics versus Natural Theology

Vos distinguishes between metaphysics (about first principles as such) and natural theology, which can also be viewed as a part of philosophy, but which treats first principles “as they find their unity in God’s thoughts and acts” (6). There are two ways to read this. A Van Tillian may find his first anchor here and insist that what is in view is the theologian being self-consciously working upon that unity of the one true (triune) God’s thoughts and acts. Whereas Vos may only mean an objective unity quite apart from the knower’s grasp of that. 

5. Erroneous Historiography

Vos did more than paint with a broad brush in his historiography. He pits the Reformation against natural theology (10) as surely as the “Calvin versus the Calvinist” adherents would do over a broader terrain of issues. For him, the Reformed Scholastic retained natural theology as useful in conversing with unbelievers, but not as a foundation for dogmatics. He holds out Alsted as a bright exception.

In this account, he provides later Van Tillians with an anchor in suggesting that the Scholastics were at least partly driven by their Semi-Pelagianism. Even if true, this comes in the context of their natural theology being “scientific” in character, rather than the “practical” aims that the fathers had of demonstrating to real unbelievers. 

So he says, “whenever the human race ‘and human reason’ are not viewed as entirely corrupt, it becomes easier to try to build a theology on the basis of human reason alone” (8). Certainly that would be the culprit, if one is in fact guilty of it. However, we may ask for a short list of attributes of such a system—that is, a theology that is in fact “built on” human reason “alone.” What sort of criteria would such a claim have to make good on?

6. Reason as a “Source”

There are two ways in which reason is conceived as a “source.” These are usually conflated in such discussions. First, reason can be seen as a source for theological knowledge. Second, reason can be seen as a source for the subjective certainty of one’s faith. Both are often called reason “grounding” faith, or acting as its foundation. Vos manifestly commits the fallacy of equivocation in his use of both in the same line of thought. In showing how not all of the Scholastics viewed reason as a “source of knowledge,” he turns to Anselm and Abelard as representatives of two different approaches. For the latter, “truths of faith do not gain practical certainty for us until they are demonstrated on rational grounds” (9). That may be interesting and relevant to the discussion in this or that way. However, it is still not the same thing as rational grounds for theological knowledge per se. 

7. Culprit in Cartesianism

Vos wants to lay some blame at the feet of Descartes. The trouble was that the rationalist “needed the idea of God to guarantee certainty for the reliability of the rest of our knowledge … He therefore did not use this idea of God for religious or theological reasons, but for purely philosophical considerations. As a result, natural theology became the maidservant of philosophy” (11-12). 

It is doubtful that Vos sees the certainty element per se as the culprit here. More likely it is the two steps of 1. God being reduced to a mere first principle by one (Descartes or otherwise) who is disinterested in the subject matter, and then 2. the inevitable morphology of theology to whichever philosophy (now unhinged) makes up the spirit of the age. 

8. Division of systems

Vos divides the systems of religion under three heads 1. Monism, 2. Pluralism, 3. Atheism, the last being “not, strictly speaking, a scientific theory” (19); the others being further subdivided. The fact that he puts pantheism, deism, monotheism, and theism under the first head is instructive. Dualism and polytheism make up the second category. 

Given Van Til’s emphasis on the radical dichotomy between Creator and creation, we wonder how this struck him, that monism was conceived in terms of one reality, or all owing to one ultimate cause (20). Of course he speaks of a “dualism in the universe” (21) to describe what Pantheism denies. 

9. Pantheism and evil

There is no controversy with Vos on his assessment that Pantheism means “no immortality … no moral  freedom,” and while sin is likewise recast, Vos understands this in a way similar to the way most modern theologians have read Augustine. So in Pantheism “being … is considered to be sinless,” whereas sin is “something negative, as a privation of something real.” It does not occur to Vos or other moderns to ask how a distinction can be made between 1. being and 2. privation-of-being if no distinction can be made between any two things at all—that is, if no one thing is primal over other things. Ironically, Platonism was less Pantheistic at this key point than most of the modern critics of Pantheism! But it is no wonder that Augustine’s treatment of the origin and nature of evil is conceived as saying something similar to the Eastern worldview.

10. Pantheism and Simplicity

We can catch a glimpse of the premise that leads today’s theistic personalists to infer that divine simplicity issues forth into something like pantheism. He says, “Pantheism places an absolute emphasis on the primary unity and absoluteness of God and on His elevation above all division and contradiction. But as a result, it can no longer explain how the many came from the one, the finite from the absolute” (24). Why is classical theism not guilty of this? Vos answers that it is because while we agree that God is simple and absolute, we deny (what the Pantheist fixes to this) that the origin of his effects are necessary or that this is a self-development (25). 

11. Pantheism and Abstraction

In criticism of Pantheism, Vos says, “The normal way for people to arrive at a pantheistic notion of God is, like Spinoza, to turn the logical abstraction of substance into a metaphysical being that must then be the same in everything” (26).

We must meet the challenge that a Christian’s natural theology is guilty of the same. At least part of this was built into the criticisms of Feuerbach and Freud. However, in the abstraction of true natural theology, it is not “of the same substance” in the conclusion as in the premise a posteriori—whether the argument regards motion, cause, goodness, necessity, perfection, or directed ends. 

While Vos does not so much defend the analogia entis at this point, he does at least say this: “The fact that we give this being the one name ‘substance’ everywhere only means that it has the same relationship to the phenomena everywhere, not that it is metaphysically the same everywhere” (26).

12. Pluralisms 

Vos’ definition of pluralism is helpful: “It is the theory that accepts the necessary existence of more than one divine principle” (29). He could have used the word “ultimate” instead of “divine” at first. But it will come to the same. His division between purely metaphysical dualisms and those with an ethical character, as well as description of polytheism, is uneventful.  

13. Against Materialism

Like anyone else, Vos was a creature of his time. His argument against materialism grants the evolutionary claims of the order of development in the cosmos: “the organic rests on the foundation of the inorganic, and in just the same way the rational rests on the foundation of the organic … However, they are wrong when they claim that there is in the organic nothing but the inorganic. Rather, in the organic there is in the inorganic something new. In the moral, there is the organic plus something new, etc. The ‘new’ is something for which the theory of evolution has no explanation” (34). Vos parallels Bavinck on this “organic” language, though both would be pleasantly surprised, I would think, by the newer science of molecular biology as well as the rise of information theory. In fact, Vos would have a stronger card to play in the “new” conditioning the “old” precisely by informed life. 

14. Analogy of origins

His section covering the four theories of the origins of religion (37-45) has an obvious application to the origin of the knowledge of God in each individual mind. In the case of the origin of religion in history, we have four choices: 1. Development, 2. Revelation, 3. Inference, and 4. Intuition. It is the last two that usually vie for acceptance as an epistemology.  

15. Ontological Argument

Vos absolved Anselm from the charge that he calls “realism,” which he allows his critics to say is positing the reality of the greatest conceivable being from the concept. This was already the charge of Gaunilo. But Vos does take issue with his making existence a predicate, as did Kant.

He acknowledges the stronger form in the Proslogion, where to deny extra-mental existence to “than which none greater can be conceived,” implies a contradiction. However, Vos maintains that even here Anselm confuses the logical-modal meaning of  “necessary existence” with its metaphysical meaning (49-50). But all he gets around to is saying that you can have one without the other: i.e. a thing being modally necessary “to me” and yet not necessarily existent (metaphysically), and vice-versa. Well, that is true; but whether that applies to a necessary being is the very question we are asking and so Vos’ criticism begs that question.

16. Cosmological and Teleological Arguments

Set side-by-side with Craig or Feser (representing the two basic modes of cosmological argument) the treatment by Vos strikes us as primitive, and the influence of Kant at least with respect to the cosmological reducing itself to the ontological is evident. For him the argument against infinite regress “does not lie in the concept of causality itself … But the reason is rather to be found in the innate idea of something absolute which has the ground of existence within itself” (55). 

In one sense, this is true. There must be some reason why the premise “every effect must have a cause” does not imply that God is caused. It is that God is not an effect, by definition; and yet this definition is not established by the cosmological argument. Of course if we grant this, then one weakness cited by Vos is no longer a weakness: namely, that a pantheist can use the same argument. 

He also shows how Locke employed the same reasoning to an eternal Mind (rather than treat this as a separate epistemological argument). This highlights the fact that—even though Vos has exposed how Kant’s critiques were only against modern versions of the arguments, rather than attempts to deal honestly with those of Augustine, Anselm, or Aquinas—Vos then does not himself showcase the greater Christian thinkers when he draws forth each argument. With the exception of his analysis of Anselm, the survey by Vos is entirely of modern versions or responding to modern objections. This is especially true of the teleological where the Thomistic reasoning of goal-intendedness is not even hinted at. Vos goes right through Hume's Dialogues to evolutionary objections. Perhaps this is owing only to the fact that these were lecture notes in an infant form.

17. Ethical Argument

If it was not already clear, by the time Vos arrives at a fourth category of argument, the ethical, the influence of Kant is present. Vos wants his reader to know that these are not to be considered “proofs,” since they still leave premises uncertain and borrowed from the other arguments (anticipating Flew’s “leaky bucket” objection), and where the conscience suggests “evidence” being accountable to God, this “flows from the idea of God that is already innate in us apart from it,” (69) i.e., apart from this evidence. On the other hand, “the idea of the good and its opposite, which is innate in us, points, like every idea does, to the existence of a being outside of us in which it has its reality and foundation” (69). For Vos, all such arguments are both valid and compelling; yet there is a noticeable shift away from letting discursive reasoning, inference, be the source of religious certainty. 

18. Wrap Up

Vos ends his work with sections on the argument from the consent of the nations, fielding what are now called de jure objections on the development of religious belief, and then a final chapter on the immortality of the soul. He does not hold the argument from the religious impulse in all nations in high esteem. For him “such issues cannot be decided by a roll-call vote” (76). In one sense, such an argument is the widest application of the ad populm fallacy. However, when Cicero and others argued a portion of natural law in what is practiced by all, it seems to me that the rationale was not that the thing is true on the ground that the majority says so, but that because all in fact do so, this is evidence that the thing requires a natural (original) explanation. I do not myself rank it among the highest of natural theological arguments. However it is not invalid if properly situated.

That Vos allows for kinds of immortalities (93-97) shows greater sophistication than the nonsensical criticisms of today’s theologians who reject “immortality” because Plato’s idea of immortality was this or that. I bring this in last not only because Vos treated the subject last, but because it is a good window into the struggle against Van Tillianism. Biblicism that rejects natural theology as foundational must, as Augustine said long ago, leave us “slaves to signs,” pressing ink patterns out of their role as windows to true concepts and real objects of reason.