Innate Ideas in Early Reformed Thought

Whether man is born with innate ideas has been a subject of controversy among Reformed theologians since the beginning. To say that something is innate is to say that the thing is “natural,” in the sense of being born with it. But surely an “innate idea” is an odd idea on the face of it. How could an idea exist where no conscious or deliberate knowledge of the content of that idea exists?

One may suppose that an infant can have ideas, but these are of the same sort that we have when stimuli from our immediate surroundings press in upon us. Even then, the assimilation of such “data” into our minds is dependent upon a whole matrix of prior experience. Infants begin with a bare minimum of such experience, even if we include the bonds formed with their mother—or even from other familiar voices.

When proponents of innate ideas tell us what they mean, it usually comes down to either an “impression” on the soul—such will lay dormant until they are confronted with learning later on—or else a capacity to know.

The “innate ideas” doctrine was most famously criticized by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). One should always ask, in situating some historic criticism: Whose version of this idea was in the crosshairs? The answer in this case is clear. Most immediately, he was criticizing the rationalist doctrine of René Descartes, though similar ideas in Plato, much further removed in time, and Gottfried W. Leibniz in his own time, may also have been in view.

It may be that his description of these ideas prejudiced the whole question, calling the Greek expression for common notions “primary notions,” and then defining these as “stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first being; and brings into the world with it.”1

From that standpoint, the problem is simple. All knowledge arises from experience. We should not neglect that Locke was raised in a Calvinistic home, and that he first attended Oxford when its vice-chancellor was none other than John Owen. Could he have confused the Reformed doctrine with the rationalist doctrine at one or a few points? That possibility should certainly be on the table.

John Calvin on Innate Ideas

In the Reformed tradition, going back to Calvin, the candidate for what was innate would have been understood as the “seed of religion.”2 This he describes as a “natural instinct” and “sense of deity”3 that all human beings possess. It is this that is from birth. To be unable to articulate such a sense as a fully formed idea is no more problematic than to for an infant or small child to be unable to fully express their love for and dependence upon her father or mother.

David Steinmetz writes that Calvin “appealed to an innate sense of divinity which he derived from Cicero rather than from St. Paul, and used the notion to clarify what Paul had written about the Gentiles in Romans 1:18-32.”4 That may be, as to the Reformer’s own education. However, in his Institutes and relevant commentary, he appeals to the biblical teaching. More importantly for our purposes, Calvin did not pit this internal sense of God against the external divine communication.

On the Apostle’s words in Romans 1:20, Calvin wrote,

“God has presented to the minds of all the means of knowing him, having so manifested himself by his works, that they must see what of themselves they seek not to know—that there is some God; for the world does not exist by chance, nor could it have proceeded from itself.”5

The closest Calvin comes to in description of the nature of this “sense” is something of “the memory of which [God] constantly renews and occasionally enlarges.”6 This is helpful in terms of clarity. It offers something concrete by which we can affirm both an original divine sense in all human beings and an ongoing experience by which additional knowledge is supplemented. We are still left to wonder what could be meant by calling the original sense as “idea,” much less “knowledge.”

Unsurprisingly, Calvin’s views have been subject to debate. There is a kind of “exclusive immediacy interpretation of Calvin,”7 that is, the theory that Calvin’s doctrine of natural knowledge of God “involves no inferential element at all.”8 This view builds itself, especially developed by Alvin Plantinga, on Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis. This is not in denial that there is a kind of knowledge gained through media and argumentation, but it denies that we first “arrive at belief in God by way of argument or inference from other beliefs.”9

Francis Turretin on Innate Ideas

Turretin denied the presence of “actual knowledge” from the beginning of each person’s experience, and used the expression tabula rasa a few years before Locke did so. But it is important to note that this is a denial concerning knowledge and not “principle and potency” or “a natural faculty.”10 In other words, the faculties of reason in general, and conscience in particular, may be granted. Later he seems to grant intuitive knowledge coming with the faculty — a “twofold inscription on the heart of man: the one of God in the remains of his image and the natural law; the other of the Devil by sin.”11 The “conscience exerts itself both in observation … and in consciousness.”12 Religion, like sin, is not merely imitative. Its basest forms which include the worship of animals demonstrate that there is a natural instinct.13

Under natural knowledge, he divides between innate—closely associated with “common notions”—and acquired—which creatures gain “discursively.”14 This breakdown is often linked to the division between principles and conclusions.15 Stephen Grabill summarizes Turretin on this point: “The first principles of nature are ‘true and sure,’ whereas the conclusions are ‘obscure, often erroneous and fallible.’”16

Wilhelmus à Brakel on Innate Ideas

Brakel affirmed a kind of innate knowledge, but then distinguished: “This does not mean that man, in his existence, is immediately conscious of God; rather this consciousness comes gradually with an increase of age. Such knowledge is innate in man as reason is innate—which man also does not initially exercise.”17

What then connects what is innate with what is acquired? Brakel does not draw out any detailed theory of construction of knowledge as his contemporary, Locke. It is simply that what we call innate is the capacity and the sense. Though he does say,

“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. That which is visible could not possibly communicate to man that there is a God if prior to that he did not have an impression of God in his soul.”18

But what is this impression? It is at least “an acknowledgement that God exists.”19 However, this is brought to conscious and deliberate experience “by means of instruction.”

Brakel argues against those who attempt to give definition of this innate knowledge as a “mental image.” His reasoning is instructive. Essentially it would make the creaturely mind possess the infinite, rather than having to operate off of reflections of God proper to the creature precisely in or through created things. This is easy to skip over without notice. In one crucial statement he says,

“Thus, the knowledge of God would not be obtained by man as created objects from God's revelations about Himself and His creatures, but from within ourselves, derived from this innate mental image.”20

Notice the contrast. If the “mental image” idea is erroneous, it is partly because man’s discursive reason, starting a posteriori from effects, is the correct way to proceed. Brakel had other reasons to reject it, having to do with the essence of idolatry.

If it is not a mental image, the question as to the nature of this inner sense or impression remains. It is best to understand it as that knowledge which has been gradually taught and inferred over the course of life. Presuppositions do indeed form, a posteriori, in order to function later a priori. “Where do the natural knowledge of God and morality originate?” He answers that, “They do not originate from a new gift which God bestowed upon man after he lost the image of God. There is not a word in Scripture to suggest this.”21

Brakel is Thomistic with respect to the order of advancing in natural knowledge. He says,

“Man does not acquire knowledge about matters from within himself but rather from his own observation with the five senses … From childhood on we observe the works of God in nature without reasoning about them or paying special attention to them … [and so] created with the ability to reason as well as to acknowledge God, [he] is capable of knowing God in due season.”22

It should be clear here that Brakel is not denying the role of reason in the acquisition of such knowledge. He is denying that reason, or any other conception of the “interior” of man, is the original source from which such knowledge is acquired.

Concluding Thoughts

To say that a full conception of what innate ideas are is a mystery is an understatement. Yet the insoluble dimensions of the question do not render it a pointless discussion. Brakel’s argument against the “mental image” model is one example that shows this. Outside of philosophical circles, this whole question may seem irrelevant. However, students of both apologetic methodology and theological prolegomena have an interest in it because of its implications for belief formation. If human beings already possess knowledge of God prior to any arguments being presented to them, then (so it is suggested by some) any such arguments are superfluous, distortive, or even oppressive to simple faith, as demands are made to believe things only on the ground of good evidence.

However, innate ideas are actually irrelevant to all such arguments. The notion our conclusions here settle anything in those debates arose within twentieth century schools of thought—i.e., Barthianism, Van Tillianism, and Reformed Epistemology. These erroneously believed that the function of classical natural theology was to establish a ground of knowledge that was not already possessed apart from such rational demonstration. Certainly knowledge acquired by persuasion adds to our knowledge. It increases our guilt in that Romans 1:20 sense, but it does not first establish it.

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1. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), I.2.1 [59].

2. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.4.1.

3. Calvin, Institutes, I.3.1.

4. David C. Steinmetz, “The Scholastic Calvin,” in Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment, Carl Trueman and R. Scott Clark, ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers; Reprint edition, 2007), 25.

5. Calvin, Commentaries, XIX:II.71

6. Calvin, Institutes, I.3.1.

7. cf. T. H. L. Parker, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959), 9, n.1; Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 171-7; Dewey Hoitenga, Faith and Reason from Plato to Plantinga (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 155-7. 

8. Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (New York: Routledge, 2016), 60.

9. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 60.

10. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Volume One: First through Tenth Topics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing), I.1.3.2 [6].

11. Turretin, Institutes, I.1.3.11.

12. Turretin, Institutes, I.1.3.5.

13. Turretin, Institutes, I.1.3.8.

14. Turretin, Institutes, I.1.3.4.

15. Turretin, Institutes, I.2.7; I.3.1-6

16. Stephen J. Grabill, “Natural Law and the Noetic Effects of Sin: The Faculty of Reason in Francis Turretin’s Theological Anthropology,” Westminster Theological Journal 67 (2005): 261-79; cf. Turretin, Institutes, I.8.21

17. Wilhelmus à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, Volume 1: God, Man, and Christ (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 1992), 5.

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

19. à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:5.

20. à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:6.

21. à Brakel, The Christian’s Reasonable Service, I:17.

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