Elsewhere I have written of the sense in which natural theology encompasses supernatural theology. In doing so, I have been careful to qualify such a thesis with the important truth that wherever Scripture speaks to a matter which may otherwise fall under the category of natural theology, the word of God has interpretive priority over our own grasp of that truth. Granting that qualification, it is still the case that truths of objective nature—whether of the laws of logic, an internal moral sense, a relation of two or more divine attributes to each other, or an evidential fact surrounding the empty tomb of Jesus—these all are what they are external to the ink patterns that we encounter in Scripture (not independent of their meaning, mind you). To say that truths about objective natures “encompass” Scripture is important at least in the sense that one can reason about them using extra-biblical language and on the basis of extra-biblical premises. 

We now come to what may appear to be a contradictory thesis to that one. Human reasoning is also “inside of the story” that the Bible uniquely reveals. One of the consequences of this is that such reasoning will be subject to what is often called the four states of man: that is, 1. Innocence, 2. Sin, 3. Grace, and 4. Glory.

In this study, I will leave aside the question of whether or not classical theologians prior to the Reformation ever sufficiently addressed the redemptive-historical context in which theological reasoning has always taken place. It is plain enough that wherever covenant theology is undeveloped, so too this question would tend to be neglected. This is the invaluable contribution of Reformed Scholasticism to this subject. 

Here is the conundrum in a nutshell.

Where the Reformed have not been sufficiently realist (whether or not a scholastic method is used), the objective nature of the truth in theological reasoning is undermined; but where our classical philosophical foundations are not always reforming by the Word, we may just as rightly say that such foundations will tend to drift from the very real (and therefore realist) context in the truths of the biblical flow of human reason’s history.

To say it another way, realism without covenant theology will not remain rational realism in the end. It would have ignored the real natures of a nature that has been altered in some ways. I suggest that we never pit the classical metaphysical outlook of realism against what Reformed-covenant theology has said about the nature of man in his fourfold state. Such “states” represent the real nature of things, whether we are speaking of essential man, or that same objective nature in the fall, in redemption, and then in glory. These four states are the only real contexts in which man ever reasons about God. 

The Nature of Theological Reasoning Per Se

Before we can speak directly to what I am calling the four states of theological reasoning, we must define our terms. Three preliminary matters are in need of clarity. First, our definitions of theology per se must be coherent. This will especially be the case for what are commonly termed natural theology and supernatural theology. Second, if theology concerns both God and “all else in relation to God,” then the effects of the latter on our view toward the former must be explored. Third, we must not speak past each other on the ideas we have of common grace.

To our first preliminary matter, we must know what we mean by “theological reasoning,” in no matter what state of man. As I have written of the definition of theology previously, I will not belabor the basic points here. For our purposes, we will use the convenient Thomistic description of theology as our study of God and all else in relation to God. Now our only source for any human act of true theology is divine revelation (Rom. 1:19; 2 Pet. 1:20-21). This has been divided between supernatural and natural. Although some matters do not always admit of such a neat distinction, as Muller said of the natural kind,

“In terms of its object and ultimate source (God—his power, wisdom, and goodness), this knowledge is supernatural, but in terms of the means of approach to this knowledge, it is entirely natural.”1 By contrast, “A supernatural revelation is necessary if there is to be any true religion. It alone provides true, saving knowledge. It alone teaches true worship of God.”2

Of the natural, Junius gives more of a description than concise definition: “Natural theology is that which proceeds from principles that are known in relation to itself by the natural light of the human understanding, in proportion to the method of human reason.”3 Mastricht set down a rule here which was not always followed among the Reformed: “natural theology must be carefully distinguished from pagan theology as such, because the latter is false and the former is true.”4

Note the words—not simply that the latter is potentially true, but that it is true. In other words, Mastricht was treating the nature of a body of theological knowledge in its objective sense: i.e. true ideas (objects) standing over all finite minds, to which those minds may conform to greater or lesser degrees. There is another important qualification to be made here. By a “method of reasoning,” we will not mean simply a method of conducting an apologetic encounter with an unbeliever.5 We mean any act of reasoning about God or his world, designed to advance either theoretical or practical knowledge.

Most basically, natural theology is the knowledge of God “in the things that have been made.” This definition has the obvious advantage of using the Pauline language of Romans 1:20. It also has the potential to serve as a bridge of understanding between what classicalists and presuppositionalists each have as their agenda in the debate over method.

Negatively stated, presuppositionalists are concerned to not allow the notions of the unregenerate mind serve as our starting points; and classicalists are concerned to not allow that to prevent us from getting dialogue going.

Positively stated, presuppositionalists will recognize a natural theology of the regenerate; and classicalists will insist on natural theology as data for doing theology rather than merely as arguments for the unbelieving ear. And it is just in those two positive conceptions where a friendly dialogue could be achieved: namely, where the redeemed mind reckons with natural theological categories in his integration of the data supernaturally revealed. After all, for every individual who did become regenerate at some point, much of the knowledge of God previously (not to mention subsequently) revealed in nature has been retained—albeit corrected—and put to great use in the task of his or her theological reasoning. 

Owen encompasses all theology as being “in God’s words, either the natural world of His creation or the written and transmitted word.” Yet he seems to restrict the clarity of the former to that time before “the obliteration of the natural word by the infection of sin.”6 Supernatural revelation is seen by Owen as the replacement to natural revelation in this sense. Without suggesting that Owen was confused on the matter himself, it does not take too much imagination to see how this can come to mean that supernatural revelation is a wholesale alternative to natural revelation. Certainly it should be—if the two were actually competing for the same job description; but that is to beg the question. Those who would follow Owen on this point would draw a line between “revelation” and “theology,” to which we can all agree.

While natural revelation is God’s activity in nature, natural theology is man’s activity in response. Likewise with the supernatural: God’s activity is the inspiration of Scripture, ours its reading and humble attempt to conform our interpretation to God’s. 

Now does natural theology have a standard method? Is it wholly a posteriori? Brakel draws forth an account where that knowledge of God impressed upon all men from birth is a capacity rather than a conscious ascent. We reason it out as we mature. Consequently the development of this natural knowledge of God begins in the works of God.7 Brakel was operating in the same general way as did Thomas; and if there is any doubt that he winds up in a classical mode, he continues, “Likewise the innate knowledge of God enables man, by observing the works of God in their created nobility, to increase in the knowledge of God and by means of the visible ascend to the invisible One.”8

He brings up the seldom considered factor of what I will call “conversational testimony,” namely that “mention being made of God” that we hear from family, friends, and even culture, sloppy and even blasphemous though it may be, which nevertheless “causes the innate knowledge … to be activated.”9 

Specially revealed and generally revealed truths are mutually antecedent. In other words, we come to understand things in Scripture by means of truths already understood in the nature of things; and conversely, we come to discern our world for what it really is by the word of God. In these two distinct ways, nature informs us in Scripture and Scripture informs us in nature. Two obvious examples of the former are the ABCs and laws of logic. We see examples of the latter in how the biblical doctrine of sin reveals our own selfish behavior and cautions us against investing trust in princes.

There is a second preliminary consideration. I mentioned that if theology concerns both “God and all else in relation to God,” then the effects of the latter on our view toward the former must be explored. This is why the fourfold state of human nature must be in our field of inquiry when it comes to theological reasoning. Where else is theology ever done besides within these four states? 

Now let us combine these two truths.

Theologically speaking, there is God and then there is all else in relation to God. Where does man fit into this scheme as an object of reflection? He is not merely a subject that reflects dispassionately about God and everything else. He is one of those objects within “everything else.”

And what sort of a thing is man here? The only answer we have known in our experience is a combination of the second and third states. All mankind is in sin and some within that same class are also redeemed. What follows from this? These states make God and all else “moving targets” of sorts. That is because we are moving either away from God or back toward him, and some combination thereof, all in the same person. It has been said that man seeks after God in the same way that a bankrobber seeks for a cop. If this is a valuable insight in evangelism, it is equally true about much of our theology. 

For good or for ill, theology is an activity of the mind in concert with the whole soul. So we must strike a balance here. On the one hand, “reasoning” is subjective, whereas there is also an objective Reason: “Let God be true, though everyone were a liar” (Rom. 3:4). We do not want to define the truth of God down to the performance of man in handling that truth. Owen presses theology “in the abstract” into God’s light, as opposed to our response insofar as it is illumined by God.10 However one makes those divisions, there is “our theology,” the performance of which is determined by our overall state. 

In speaking about this relationship of theological reasoning in the context of the “states” of man, one could view the question either psychologically or covenantally: that is, one can be viewing the image of God in either its structural or its covenantal dimensions. So one’s “Godward orientation” (toward either God or idols) determines sound reasoning; and one’s covenantal relationship to God determines the ends of reasoning.

Putting these together, naturally, the soul’s orientation toward God answers to the covenant of grace and the orientation toward idols answers to the covenant of works. Although there is overlap since, as we have seen, those who are “in” the third state of human nature nevertheless have indwelling sin (Rom. 7:18). A Christian may still suppress this or that truth in unrighteousness; or he or she may simply have a blindspot embedded from worldly categories. 

There is a third preliminary matter: theology in its relation to common and special grace. That two different things have been meant by “common grace” is simply a fact. One can deny that one or the other definition has any soundness to it, but to proceed in the argument as if the other side has said nothing to the point is beneath the dignity of Christian conversation and scholarship. There is grace in its universal sense; and then there is grace in the particular redemptive-historical flow. One implication of theological realism is that grace doesn’t become grace only in the particulars of narrative and historical development. The concept of “unmerited favor” or “undeserved blessing,” etc. is what it is in both creation and in response to sin. That the Hebrew word for “grace” (חֵן) was first used at the time of Noah is granted, but this does not settle the matter. 

VanDrunen comments that “Scripture reveals God in his work of creation as a God of abundant generosity but not of mercy.”11 It is crucial here to recall the simple difference between grace and mercy.

While mercy is the relenting of justice deserved by the guilty, grace is a broader concept. It is any unmerited blessing at all. There is no prerequisite of wrongdoing. The mere distinction between Creator and creation is a sufficient condition for every gift to be considered gracious.

Certainly the information about God in all creation is among the greatest gifts in nature. If anything is common grace, then the invisible things of God (Rom. 1:20) given as glory in the whole world (Ps. 19:1-3) must be chief of common graces, without which no other grace in the original could be worthy of the name. That it is in “common” only means that its audience, content, medium, and ends share this quality.

What the Remonstrants and Socinians added to this concept by premises about alternative means of salvation should not be allowed to distort the simple meaning of the idea. Yet the Reformed soteriological critique of natural theology, I am afraid, has followed the Romanist and Remonstrant right out of the Garden of Eden and defined this concept by reactionary polemic as well.

Robert Letham goes as far to say that, “The idea of common grace is a theologoumenon (theological opinion) and does not have confessional status.”​12 Does he really mean the term or the whole idea? If the latter, what constitutes the idea? Whatever it is, the theological reading of Scripture must be our guide—not either fear of synergism or hyper-inductive word searches.

How does this factor into the subject of theological reasoning in man’s fourfold states? It is simply that how one treats common grace will typically run parallel to how they treat natural theology and natural law. One will either tend to treat these things primarily as to their objective essence or else only see them through the lens of man’s subjective handling of them. Since that poor human handling is the result of sin, the essential and corrupted versions of grace and nature will be reduced to the historical timeline of our fourfold states. And since distorted doctrinal systems (e.g. Arminianism and Socinianism) restructure salvation so as to open the door to common grace as salvific, the door is then also open to an opposite impulse: a reactionary insecurity that would blame the wrong culprit. Objective common grace and objective natures as such are overshadowed by the subjective treatment of the same.13

There was a spectrum of opinion among the Dutch Reformed in that Common Grace Controversy of the 1920s, from Kuyper to Van Til to Hoeksema. A clue as to the utterly subjective approach to the question is found in Van Til:

“The question of where he may find a point of contact with the world for the message that he brings is a matter of grave concern to every Christian minister and teacher. The doctrine of common grace seeks, in some measure at least, to supply this answer.”14

Van Til placed the doctrine of common grace within a “Christian philosophy of history.” It is helpful that he qualified that mission statement of the doctrine of common grace—“in some measure”—for this doctrine, like any other, most certainly does not begin in our questions about it but in what God is or has done. Common grace is first a thing with an objective nature. It is first a field of divine communication: good things that God has given in the world.

Adam did not deserve to have these by virtue of being a creature. All who were born to the race of Adam are doubly undeserving by virtue of being both creature and sinner. This second strike against us recalls the need for special grace; but it neither initiates nor terminates the reality of common grace. There is a tension here between the intrinsic good of the truth revealed in nature and the error of supposing that such can be a universal ladder of rational ascent to God.

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1. Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume One: Prolegomena to Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 286.

2. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, I:298.

3. Franciscus Junius, A Treatise on True Theology (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014), 145.

4. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, Volume 1: Prolegomena (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), 78.

5. For instance, Cornelius Van Til seems to collapse a natural theological “method of reasoning” into the particular modes of “defense of all Christian doctrines.” Hence he can write a book entitled A Christian Theory of Knowledge, which hardly ever departs from the business of distinguishing a properly Reformed mode of defense versus Roman Catholic and Arminian modes: e.g., A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1976), 11.

6. John Owen, Biblical Theology: The History of Theology from Adam to Christ (Grand Rapids: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1994), 20.

7. Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service: Volume 1 (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 1992), 5-7

8. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:7.

9. Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:8.

10. Owen, Biblical Theology, 17.

11. David VanDrunen, Divine Covenants and Moral Order: A Biblical Theology of Natural Law (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 61.

12. Robert Letham, Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 650.

13. Willem van Asselt sees the influence of Scotus here. The “Subtle Doctor” taught that even in ectypal theology, “natural human reason is unable to reach to God. For that reason revelation is necessary and forms the foundation of ‘our theology’”; Introduction to Reformed Scholasticism (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 119.

14. Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2015), 3.