Part 3 of The Nature of Theological Truths

Definition and Analogy

Let me begin this section by defining exactly what I mean by NATURE, as I perceive that a faulty definition is ordinarily where our stumbling blocks begin. I am using the word nature in its more philosophical context of what makes a thing what it is. In other words, my primary focus is not on the physical universe, or material phenomena. Hence God has a nature. So does man and virtue and music and water and propositions and you get the idea.

It may seem obvious enough what I mean by SCRIPTURE. However, it is at least important to note that while Scripture is more than propositional, it is not less. Scripture is God’s written revelation whereby he communicates his purposes in creation, redemption, and restoration of all things in Jesus Christ. Such communication is irreducibly propositional. By this I mean not only that there are portions, and genres, more obviously “propositional” than others, but also that it takes the form of making truth claims.

This is often badly misunderstood. Narrative, for example, does not mean “non-propositional,” as, from a grammatical perspective, narratives are mostly declarative sentences about what is (or was) the case. Even poetry is making declaration. If not, then it is not clear what any alternative interpretation could have going for it. Either it communicates truth or not. And if it does, then such truth can be translated into propositional form. Now let me offer a straightforward proposition of my own: Nature and Scripture are mutually informing lenses, but Scripture is a corrective lens.

There is one more pair of definitions that are necessary here, and which parallel the first pair. General revelation will correspond to nature and special revelation will correspond to Scripture. Now what do we mean by this second set of terms?

General revelation is God’s communication of himself “in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20), whereas special revelation is God’s communication of himself in his word. Both are communications by God and about God. General revelation is so named because its audience, content, media, and end are all general; and vice versa with special revelation. In other words, of those things generally revealed, it is to all people, about the outer reaches of God’s attributes, through all things created, and for the general ends of intelligibility in the world and condemnation for having suppressed it (Ps. 19:1-5, Rom. 1:19-20). By contrast, the Bible is specifically illuminated to the elect, bringing the means of salvation to light, in the pages of Scripture, and for their sanctification and glory (Jn. 17:17; 1 Cor. 2:7).

Two ideas of John Calvin will help give shape to our imagery. The first is his doctrine of a twofold knowledge of God. He wrote, “It was necessary, in passing from death unto life, that they should know God, not only as Creator, but as Redeemer also; and both kinds of knowledge they certainly did obtain from the word. In point of order, however, the knowledge first given was that which made them acquainted with the God by whom the world was made and is governed. To this first knowledge was afterward added the more intimate knowledge which alone quickens dead souls” [1]—and so Calvin proceeds to unpack the sense in which the Spirit and the Word are necessary to know God in truth.

This parallels his oft-quoted opening principle that, “Our wisdom, insofar as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves” [2]. The point is not that Calvin treated the two starting points as equal in every respect. As a classicalist, I am happy to affirm, together with my presuppositionalist brethren, that Calvin would have agreed with Bavinck, Van Til, and others in maintaining that natural theology is of no advantage to knowing God in a favorable way—that is, in a way that the sinner will not instantly distort—unless or until one has already been regenerated and that Scripture functions as its interpreter [3]. 

However, as Turretin pointed out about natural theology, “The question is not whether this knowledge is perfect and saving … but only whether any knowledge of God remains in man sufficient to lead him to believe that God exists and must be religiously worshipped” [4]. Let us bring in that second idea from Calvin. When speaking about the necessity of Scripture, he appeals to the imagery of spectacles. Fallen human beings in relation to the truths of general revelation, are like old men trying to read a book with impaired sight. With the aid of glasses, they can begin to make out the words:

“so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly” [5].

Again, the issue is not whether Scripture is the corrective lens placed over the sum of nature. All parties among the Reformed agree here. The issue, to use Calvin’s metaphor, is whether or not the “ink patterns” (in the old man’s book) or “the starry skies above us or moral law within us,” to use Kant’s expression, are indeed all and exactly what they are, whether or not we slipped on those Scripture-spectacles. “Let God be true though every one were a liar” (Rom. 3:4) is really an epistemological statement in this regard. And it is such that demands a realist account of the whole field of divine speech: all objects in created reality being divine speech and ultimately about divine perfections (real essence).  

In considering how general revelation and special revelation can be mutually informing lenses, we are especially honing in on the things of nature and the words of Scripture. These are not in competition with each other, as they are two distinct activities of God: creating the nature of things and inspiring the words of the Bible. So before we can speak of human handling of these objects, whether in our natural theology, natural law, or Scriptural exegesis, or the movement from exegesis to doctrine, it must be first understood that all revelation proper is a divine act [6]. Its ontology is not to be conflated with all that might go wrong in the human response.

To speak about “it” as objective is to speak wholly of its ontology, and not the way that the word “objective” is so often used to mean one more form of subjectivity, for instance, when we speak of an “objective point of view” as that which is an unbiased perspective. While granting that meaning, it must be stressed that this is not how a theological realist account is using the term. The realist says that “Truth is objective,” and by it means that the real nature of that truth under consideration is what it is independent of my subjectivity. 

Revisiting the Order of Being and the Order of Knowing

We will recall the Augustinian insight that words are signs that point to things, as surely as non-verbal signs point beyond themselves to things. This will mean that, even granting the most authoritative words conceivable—even these words will mean things. And all things have natures. Now the most authoritative words will be the most true words, but true words will mean the things that they mean with perfect correspondence. Hence it is unthinkable that the words of the Bible could be authoritative at the expense of that correspondence, or in any sense, apart from that correspondence. To recognize this is not to place “the authority” of the object with a nature “over” the authority of the biblical words that so correspond. For one, the same God that spoke the word into inscripturated form spoke the nature into objective form. The notion that the correspondence of our knowledge, via the Bible’s words, to the truth of the objective nature, somehow undermines biblical authority is to confuse the order of knowing with the order of being, among other confusions.

We must also distinguish between multiple senses of the order of knowing. The question is not whether God’s word has the primacy of determination in meaning for each and every object it describes. Of course it does. In a renewed order of knowing, God’s word is the way in which he is Lord over all meaning [7]. But the line between what is explicitly said and what is implicitly derived (or presupposed) remains. So there is no final reason for a Reformed classicalist like myself to be at odds with my Reformed presuppositionalist brethren over the priority of God’s ultimate interpretation of all things, to use Van Tillian language [8].

Rather, the question is whether each truth has an objective nature (in its order of being) such that the totality of relations in each truth is what it is (a) apart from our subjectivity and (b) that those relations aid the intelligibility of our very fallible grasp of that truth.

In other words, even for all of the objects of truth explicitly described by Scripture, they were true before the inspired author was inspired; and each truth (yes, even one as concise as “Jesus wept”) is a composite of multiple objects of truth, none of which are explicitly stated in the text in question. 

These latter points are where the Presuppositionalist may stumble over my thesis. My purpose here is not to upbraid, but to invite him into this model. For anything of general revelation to “come first” may seem to derive biblical truth from extra-biblical authority, or to rest articles of faith upon the dictates of reason. However, at this point we are really only speaking of an order of being, where X-nature (e.g. that the possibility of our resurrection logically follows the actuality of Christ’s resurrection) must be the case by virtue of Y-nature (e.g. the validity of the logical relationship Paul used in 1 Corinthians 15:12-20), and both X and Y are divine speech of objects with natures. That we finite reasoners may be wrong about any number of attributes of X and Y, and so must be corrected by scriptural interpretation of X and Y, is granted.

This seems to be the view held by Bavinck. While he rejected natural theology in the hands of the pagan, he embraced it in the mind of the redeemed. As a set of maxims, he could say, “Nature precedes grace; grace perfects nature. Reason is perfected by faith, faith presupposes nature” [9]. This is at one with the Reformed classicalist position. This was clearly the distinction made by Junius, Turretin, and Mastricht as well. Natural theology is objectively true and useful to the Christian, even in apologetics (though not restricted to apologetics, as we shall see).

Take those three aforementioned examples given by Beeke and Smalley: Acts 17:26, Titus 1:12, and 1 Corinthians 15:33. These three passages are filled with words about things. There is a shared field of objective meaning between the Spirit-inspired biblical author and the pagan authors (and their pagan readers). Let me make three additional observations about the words so used:

1. They will have at least analogous referents when used by extra-biblical texts, otherwise the biblical author would not have cited them if they were wholly equivocal.

2. Such objective (albeit analogous) meaning came into the mind of those extra-biblical authors and audiences prior to whatever biblical corrections were needed to their interpretations.

3. The meaning of what each truth is is “objective” insofar as it has exactly the qualities that God designed of it.

So there is never any need to pit God’s objective speech in his word against his objective speech in his world. When we speak of how Scripture’s lens corrects this or that deliverance of natural theology or natural law, we must not mean that God’s objective speech in nature is what is being corrected by Scripture, but rather man’s quite fallible and manipulative distortion of that speech is the proper object in need of correction. 

One last set of verses will keep us on the path of prolegomena, preventing the discussion from the question of apologetic starting points. When we speak of how general and special revelation inform each other, another group of texts that must be considered are those where the Bible is practically demanding us to abstract from the level of words to objects of mind.

Consider, for instance, 2 Timothy 1:13, 2:25, and 1 John 4:6. What are the “good deposit” and “pattern of sound words” that Paul charges Timothy to handle? And what can John mean by his test of true teachers that they “listen to us”? What on earth are such things? My short answer is that they are not anything “on earth” at all, or at least, not taken in an atomistic sense. But surely, someone may reply, this is nothing to the point because these are at least “things” in special revelation and not outside.

While I would like to agree with that, I must ask the person who says it: What exactly do you mean by “in”? Are we to take this lexically or ontologically? If lexically, there is no other pattern of sound words that say, verbatim, “sound words,” nor “good deposit,” nor “listen to us.” If ontologically, in what being exactly does such a pattern or teaching exist? There is a suspicion at this point to think that any such attribution is moving “beyond” the words of Scripture to something “more profound.”

I take it that the Barthian antipathy to “scientific theology” is partly motivated by this suspicion, that this sort of systematic theology, aiming for some “greater” insight into the meaning of the words, is to leave our posture of submission to Scripture behind in order to exalt the theologian as philosophical lord over the text. This is a worthwhile reproof if indeed one is guilty of it. As Michael Allen put it, “Theology goes terribly awry when it becomes a surrogate for either listening to the Word or speaking the gospel” [10]. We owe it to any Reformed synthesis to show how it is our Nature-Scripture synthesis is not only not guilty of this, but can function best at preventing that very thing.

_________________________

1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.6.1

2. Calvin, Institutes, I.1.1

3. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:105, 108, 322; Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2003), 81; An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2007), 91, 112, 133

4. Turretin, Institutes, I.1.3.3

5. Calvin, Institutes, I.6.1

6. cf. Duby, God in Himself, 126-28.

7. Frame, for example, acknowledges that “natural revelation is a necessary means of interpreting Scripture … Nevertheless, once we have reached a settled interpretation as to what Scripture says, that knowledge takes precedence over any ideas supposedly derived from natural revelation” - Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2013), 5. This is a sound statement, as far as it goes, that can make for common ground between classicalist and presuppositionalist.

8. cf. Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 60-61.

9. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:322.

10. Michael Allen, “The Knowledge of God,” in Allen & Swain, ed., Christian Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 29.