“Greater Than Scripture” Objections
In our fourth of seven theological objections to natural theology, we detect a fear that natural theology is either a philosophical siren calling out toward a ship to seduce simple Bible readers, or else a bouncer of elitism disallowing any doctrine that does not have a sophisticated clearance at its checkpoint.
For many, the legitimization of objective natural theology would amount to a de-legitimization or dethroning of supernatural theology, at least theoretically with the march of knowledge. Rather than enumerating different kinds within this genus of objections, it is better to describe these as three concerns.
Often, one of these is conceived of as leading to the others. Those three are as follows:
1. Clarification equals improvement concern. To ground systematic theology in knowledge outside of Scripture suggests a more “accurate summary” than, or “improvement” upon, Scripture. Objective natural theology is such a ground.
2. Conceptual conditions concern. To ground divine truth in objective natural knowledge outside of Scripture assumes an equality of sources of revelation, thus making the present consensus of natural reason (philosophy, science, morality) the ruler over the Scriptures.
3. Up from Scripture to “real studies” concern. To ground divine truth in a natural knowledge fit for philosophical inquiry leads to the theologian “graduating from” Scripture.
While this fourth category of objection overlaps with some others, the defining characteristic of the three “concerns” within this category is the alleged elevated position of nature and reason over Scripture. That superior status awarded to nature and reason may be conceived as an authority, or it may be conceived as a field of study more worthy to be entertained.
Clarification Equals Improvement Concern
James Barr described “much evangelicalism” as being “willing to allow reason or natural theology to be a support to revelation,” but not “any power to modify revelation.”1 This is a curious expression. While revelation cannot be “modified” in itself, the concern seems to be that the data of special revelation will be made to answer in the court of general revelation, with man’s reason presiding as the judge.
One might also assume a zero-sum game with respect to available explanations for this or that truth: e.g., Either x is a natural law principle or x is a matter of God’s command.
This silent premise has not been alleviated by the “science versus religion” narrative. Christians have not been unanimous on how to respond as it relates to the “two books,” that is, the books of Nature and Scripture. For one school of thought, God’s word will never contradict God’s world, and therefore one should be as ready to privilege one as the other.2 These are typically old-earthers. For another school, the authority, clarity, and sufficiency of God’s word converge to imply a priority of Scripture over nature—not that general revelation needed to be corrected by special revelation, but that the combination of finitude and sin in the human knower requires constant overruling.3 These are typically young-earthers.
Having said that, this suspicion of reason using nature for a greater word is larger than the debates about science and Scripture.
Let us call this first concern the “clarification equals improvement” concern. If natural theological reasoning is said to clarify biblical truth with extra-biblical words, then biblicist sensibilities will infer that natural theology has a meaning that is more true than biblical meaning. It is a kin to the problem of systematic theology per se, which John Frame somewhat ironically recognizes in the opening to his own Systematic Theology (2013). He wrote that,
“we should not look to [definitions] to find what something ‘really is,’ as though a definition gave us unique insight into the nature of something beyond what we could find in the Bible itself. A theological definition of omniscience doesn’t tell you what omniscience really is, as if the biblical descriptions of God’s knowledge were somehow inadequate, even misleading or untrue.”4
With natural theology, the temptation would always be to explain what is “really going on” with God behind all those anthropomorphisms or counterfactuals. If the plain sense of the narrative is not good enough for us, it is a sign that we are more beholden to natural theology than to the Bible. So goes the first concern.
Conceptual Conditions Concern
If natural theology as a more real background is dangerous, there is a sense that natural theology as a “foundation” to systematic theology is far worse. Robert Jenson hints at the reason that is usually given for this: “In the modern period, it has often been supposed that the prolegomena to theology must enable the enterprise … this effort must be judged mistaken.”5 The mistake of which he speaks is the result that “theological prolegomena lay down conceptual conditions of Christian teaching that are not themselves Christian teaching.”6
Using Jenson’s language, we can call this second concern the “conceptual conditions” concern. In other words, many fear that if natural theology is delivering any truths antecedent to biblical truths, then natural theology becomes a judge and arbiter of what counts as rational in dogmatic theology. It does so at the “front door,” if we can switch architectural analogies. The preambles of faith become the rationalist gatekeeper for articles of faith.
Natural theology is commonly under suspicion for its potential foundationalist role. Stanley Hauerwas cites George Hendry and Nicholas Wolterstorff as two thinkers who insisted that the five ways of Aquinas are not “a natural theology” in some foundationalist sense. The medieval context is sharply contrasted to the Enlightenment, so that in the former such arguments served only to “relate their belief in God to the nature and conditions of the world,” rather than to serve the demands of evidentialism.7 There is that word “demand” again. As we saw in the second category of objections, demonstration is viewed as an anxiety-packed reaction to unbelief, which is initiating.
David Fergusson sounds the same note:
“For Aquinas, the arguments of natural theology were brought within the presentation of the Christian faith, grounded upon Scripture and the teaching of the church.”8
For Van Til, the Christian must seek a “‘systematic’ arrangement of the facts of the universe.”9 He was drawing back on Bavinck to the effect that “non-revelational” natural theology involves a “synthesis” between conflicting systems at the foundation. Natural theology begins by rooting our knowledge of God outside of the Christian system and in an autonomous system. In other words, the debate about natural theology at this point has more to do with prolegomena than apologetics, which is only another way to say that the debate is about method for one’s overall theology.
Where Bavinck places the exact seeds of this is not perfectly clear, but he seems to lament that along the path from Reformation to Modernity, “Dogmatics was thus divided into two parts: the foundations of theology and the articles of faith.”10 He links the natural theology foundation to the method of Roman Catholic dogmatics and even the Socinians and rationalists, the problem being that natural theology is made “the preamble of faith … antecedent to revealed theology” so that “reason was emancipated from faith and revelation.”11
Up from Scripture to “Real Studies” Concern
If a theology that is rooted in an objective natural theology would hold sway over Scripture, then one more problem follows. The theologian might naturally fix his mind on this higher natural study. This fear extends even to biblical theologians in their field. In John Sailhamer’s book The Meaning of the Pentateuch (2009), the quest for a compositional strategy to discover Mosaic intention comes to mean the “verbal meaning” of Moses as opposed to the Augustinian connection between word (verbum) and thing (res).
Sailhamer appears to have several of the fears covered here running through his second chapter entitled, “Finding the Author’s Verbal Meaning,” namely, that an extra-biblical source tends to extra-biblical ends, lorded over the church by an extra-biblical academic (or even ecclesial) authority. Yet Sailhammer sees the claims of rooting meaning in the nature of things, external to the text, as the culprit.
First, Augustine’s hierarchy of being apparently gives the impression that once the believer has come into contact with the blessed things of the God of Scripture, he has moved beyond the need to depend on the words of Scripture.12 Second, if the meaning of words is wrapped up in the objects of history that they narrate, then in the modern world this will tend toward an elite class of critics who lord their extra-biblical sources over us.13 Third, if, on the other hand, the meaning of words is wrapped up in those things that a church tradition assigns to them, then we arrive at something like the magisterium of Rome.14
When the object of revelation is no longer the words of the Bible, reasons the critic, then “the new ‘biblical’ reality was located outside of the text of Scripture and thus far out of the reach of any control by the biblical words.”15
Evaluating “Greater than Scripture” Objections
How should we answer each of these concerns?
First, in response to the “clarification equals improvement” concern, this may be a helpful warning at best. At worst it is a straw man. While treating extra-biblical statements as an improvement upon divine revelation would be one extreme error, surely type-casting such statements is the opposite error. This assumes that such “graduation” could be the only role of extra-biblical clarifications. Let me cite two examples for comparison with each other. It may be the case that there is more biblical data for the doctrine of the Trinity than for divine simplicity. However, part of the method for concluding both doctrines is the same. What they have in common are inferences not expressly set forth in Scripture, e.g.,
1. Oneness and threeness only contradict if someone claims that x is one and three at the same time and in the same relation. But in the case of the Trinity, the referent of oneness is essence and the referent of threeness is person.
2. In the First Cause there can be no potentiality. An organization of parts would imply the potentiality of each part and the whole. Therefore, the First Cause cannot be composed of an organization of parts.
On the other hand, both doctrines are also built on premises that have much direct biblical justification. When we think about it, we begin to see ways in which this is true concerning many Christian doctrines.
Second, to the “conceptual conditions” concern, this will fail for the same reason as the warranted belief objection. Recall that for Plantinga, the aim was to show how Christian theistic belief is reasonable apart from any demonstrations of natural theology or evidence. The new believer has not flouted his epistemic duties in believing in God in this way of faith. Now it is not the new believer, but the theologian and his system, that are supposedly taken out from under the weight of this secular burden or demand. My reply is simply that in both forms (for the individual believer and for the theological system) conclusions derived from natural theology are not antecedent so as to restrict access, but to inform. They can add information without nullifying belief that has been getting on without such information—so long as those beliefs (in the individual) or doctrines (in the system) are not in fact erroneous.
Finally, my answer to the “up from Scripture to real studies” concern is not to downplay the danger, but rather to place the burden of proof on the critic to produce exact criteria and examples for when this is happening. When we read the early church fathers, it is understandable to conclude that they often seemed to place more weight on the authority of a philosopher than they should have relative to Scripture. However, this recognition is a far cry from showing exactly where the line is between a study of truths derived from natural theological demonstrations and an associated diminishing esteem for Scripture.
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1. James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 108.
2. cf. Hugh Ross, Creation as Science: A Testable Model Approach to End the Creation / Evolution Wars (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2006), 38-39.
3. cf. Richard B. Gaffin Jr., No Adam, No Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2015), 8; Jonathan Sarfati, Refuting Compromise (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2004), 35-66.
4. John Frame, Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2013), 4.
5. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.
6. Jenson, Systematic Theology, I:9.
7. Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001), 26-27
8. David Fergusson, Creation: (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 65.
9. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1976), 15.
10. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume One: Prolegomena (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 101.
11. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:105.
12. John Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 76-77.
13. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch, 75.
14. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch, 80.
15. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch, 82-83.
