“Noetic Effects of Sin” Objections

It is true that natural theology presupposes a particular view of human nature. However, such a conception need not be equated with one theological tradition in an exclusive way. Roman Catholics emphasize the prerequisite of a natural propensity toward God as the summum bonum of human existence, the Reformed have tended to emphasize the noetic effects of the fall, and Lutherans the dichotomy between the theology of the cross and the theology of glory. This third view touches on human nature in that the vanity of sinful man would have God unveiled on his own terms, rather than through the scandal of the cross.

On the one hand, none of these three emphases need be set in opposition to the others; yet on the other hand, each of the three, pressed out of context surely will deemphasize or altogether reject the others. Therefore a balanced view of human nature, requisite to the reality of natural theology, would be one that holds the essential goal-directedness of man, complete with an intellect made capable of receiving revelation from God, and yet, in his unregenerate state, the intellect doing the bidding of his depraved soul in rebellion against God and resistant to any God who is revealed most specifically in Christ to restore that chief end.

Although this category was introduced in our exegetical chapter, a few more points should be made, especially in light of the assessment of Sudduth (which I agree with), that this is “the most common objection to natural theology in the Reformed tradition.”1 Let us take note of two basic forms that this objection can take.

Form 1. As opposed to prelapsarian natural theology and redeemed natural theology, postlapsarian natural theology is the construct of “natural man,” that is, man, not only blinded by sin but in rebellion against God.

Form 2. If propositional knowledge is not equivalent to true belief (even if it entails true belief), and if such belief is unwarranted, then true natural theological propositions uttered by unbelievers need not constitute true belief.

In other words, the first form will be what I have called “the soteriological critique of nature,” whereas the second form will maintain an “unreliable belief” in the unregenerate, even if, or through, true propositions.

The Soteriological Critique of Nature

As to the first form, here natural theology takes on dimensions both intentional and sinister. Anyone familiar with the debate over apologetic methodology will recognize the basic points:

1. All human beings born to the race of Adam have inherited his sin nature.

2. This sin nature is not merely one of inability to seek for God, but a positive rebellion.

3. This inability and rebellion affects every part of man, including his intellect.

4. Only a change of state—from unregenerate to regenerated—will reorient man to the proper use of his intellect.

5. Given 1-4, it follows that the “natural knowledge of God” is an improper starting point either for apologetics or for a system of theology.

In more entrenched Reformed circles, the first three points can even be expressed in terms of covenant theology: e.g., Human beings are always in a covenant relationship with God—either as covenant keepers or covenant breakers.

Even in the most sober reflection of earlier Reformed scholasticism, the whole question of the four states of man had an impact on how natural theology was conceived. Having already surveyed the views of Calvin, Vermigli, Junius, Turretin, Brakel, and Mastricht on the legitimacy of discursive reasoning in natural theology, it is sufficient to conclude that—unless one wants to argue that they were inconsistent—nothing they believed regarding the noetic effects of sin would lead them to believe that true natural theological propositions can be false on the ground that the unbeliever thinks or expresses such propositions. The only legitimate questions will concern the profitability of natural theological arguments in apologetics encounters and of natural theological conclusions as antecedent to our further theologizing as Christians.

That form of natural theology which is allowed in Van Tillian thought may be thought of as a combination of those two questions. In other words, there may be demonstrations of God’s existence that can be of profit within the circle of Christian presuppositions.

Scott Oliphint writes,

“Even Jonathan Edwards, who, Sudduth points out, clearly stipulates that ‘we first ascend, and prove a posteriori, or from effects, that there must be an eternal cause . . . nevertheless maintains ‘that in fact all such knowledge depends on our moral temperament or the proper orientation of our passional nature . . . So like many other Reformed thinkers, he viewed natural theology as operating most effectively in the context of the Christian life.”2

Such phrases as “we first ascend” and “most effectively” cannot be ignored. If the natural knowledge that unbeliever’s have—however distorted in the whole process of their reasoning—is indeed true knowledge, and if the one deliberately articulating the natural theological lines of reasoning is a Christian anyway (whether in making the case to an unbeliever or utilizing the information in his doctrinal system), it is still unclear why so much of Van Tillian thought is devoted to criticizing this quintessentially Christian activity because of the noetic effects of sin. Again, we are not talking about the unregenerate activity.

To cite Fesko again,

“The initial covenant relationship between Adam and God, though broken due to Adam’s sin, was still functional and operative for the last Adam. Epistemology did not change, general revelation did not change, and God’s supernaturally revealed commands to Adam did not change.”3

In other words, the divine truth in nature is not altered and may not be ignored, disobeyed, or divorced from the sphere of grace. Natural theology and natural law cannot be exiled back behind the wall of “pre-fall epistemology.” Yet this is the whole aim of the argument from the noetic effects of sin. This natural knowledge was only pure before the fall, and is only renewed now for the Christian.

Following the turn of the twentieth century Dutch Reformed thought discussed in the historical chapter, what I have called the soteriological critique of nature reached its most systematic expression. By that I mean that it pulled together a greater collection of doctrinal concerns. The “natural” descriptive in both natural theology and natural law was subsumed, by prominent theologians, under the prospects of man’s subjective performance in its prelapsarian and postlapsarian states.

Thus in Herman Hoeksema’s treatment of the image of God, he criticized the scholastic conception of “natural attributes of the soul, such as reason and knowledge, intellect and will” which, he went on to argue,

“led to the Roman Catholic theory of the image of God as a donum superadditum (super-added or extra gift). According to Rome, man is naturally good, and man with the additional gift of the likeness of God, according to which he is able to seek the higher, spiritual things of God, was spiritually perfect. Man, therefore, can lose the image of God and still be naturally good, although he is no longer able to perform spiritual works. That this theory is very closely related to the theory of common grace goes without saying.”4

Sudduth astutely observes about Hoeksema, as representative of a wider trend in twentieth century Reformed theology, a tendency “to link knowledge of God and original righteousness.”5 In other words, the natural knowledge of God is recast as consisting in a more expansive sort of model of human activity—whether in seeking for God (natural theology) or in living the good life individually or collectively (natural law). Since total depravity renders those activities impossible, it follows that there is no natural knowledge to find in the image of God. Indeed, the image of God must be conceived as lost in every sense worth thinking about.

Hoeksema combined this rationale with the previous “God of the philosophers” objection, in allowing a light of nature, yet one “that cannot serve as an adequate principle for any kind of natural theology. A theology that ignores the revelation that has now come through Christ Jesus can never be any more than mere philosophy of man, always creating his own god and worshipping an idol.”6

Such fixations on soteriology as the sum and center of theological reflection do not address objective natural knowledge. Consequently they never get around to dealing with the actual subject matter of natural theology. It is not that the noetic effects of sin are irrelevant to any project of natural theology. It is simply that by reducing the whole question to the subjective, the modern Reformed opponent of natural theology winds up shadow-boxing against a straw man.

Beyond that, the more extreme representatives of this criticism, such as Hoeksema, are out of step with their own Dutch confessional tradition.

The relevant section in the Canons of Dort states that,

“There remain, however, in man since the fall, the glimmerings of natural light, whereby he retains some knowledge of God, of natural things, and of the difference between good and evil, and shows some regard for virtue and for good outward behavior.”7

In summary, the objection from the noetic effects of sin, at best, can temper the kinds and extents of our arguments to unbelievers. They can remind us that the moral problem is causing a great deal of the intellectual problem, and that this will factor in more or less on a case by case basis. As a comprehensive objection against natural theological reasoning, it simply does not make good on any of its relevant claims. It has the support of neither Scripture nor Reformed tradition.

It would also prove too much in the practical exercise of apologetics. If the unbeliever’s distortion of this natural knowledge is decisive to evade positive demonstrations for God’s existence, it has never been made clear how this same distortion will not prove fatal to his grasp of negative demonstrations concerning his unbelieving presuppositions, or to those same elements in indirect, or “transcendental,” proofs.

Unreliable Belief—even if through True Propositions

Coming to the second form of this category, we must consider combining the insights about warranted belief with the Van Tillian concerns about the noetic effects of sin. This is exactly what Sudduth does. After establishing that “total depravity does not entail that unregenerate people have no true beliefs about God,” Sudduth explores how challenges from more recent epistemology might modify our conclusion. He says,

“There is a long-standing tradition in western philosophy according to which propositional knowledge, while it entails true belief, is not equivalent to true belief. After all, one might acquire a true belief by accident, but intuitively it seems that an accidentally true belief cannot constitute knowledge. True belief is transformed into knowledge only by some third condition that eliminates this element of epistemic luck. I will refer to this third condition as ‘warrant’ … Our central question, then, is whether the Reformed doctrine of sin, specifically the idea of total depravity, is incompatible with naturally produced theistic beliefs in unregenerate human persons having enough warrant for knowledge.”8

The consequence of this line of inquiry is that the soteriological critique of nature could find new life from analytical philosophy. Let us suppose that “unwarranted belief” could drive a wedge in between the objective natural knowledge of God and the subjective act of the unregenerate mind. That objective knowledge is represented by propositions.

Sudduth begins with a proposition of his own to clarify this: “[K] Unregenerate persons possess some natural propositional knowledge of God.”9 He then infers, “If we supposed that knowledge is merely true belief, the Reformed doctrine of sin would be logically consistent with [K].”10

What will drive the wedge between the true propositions held by the unregenerate and warranted belief is what Sudduth calls a “strong unreliability thesis.” It is represented in the proposition: “[N] No natural belief-forming cognitive process in unregenerate persons reliably produces any true beliefs about God.”11

Note the difference between this and Plantinga’s appropriation of the sensus divinitatis. Whereas for Plantinga, proper function is attuned to general revelation per se, here the qualification of “unregenerate” narrows the real function of true cognition about God to regenerate persons. What is reliable or unreliable is defined in terms of either a track record (actuality) or analyzed nature (propensity).12

But this presents an initial problem for this model. Measured track records constitute an inductive exercise. At best, the argument for unreliability must be probabilistic, and any qualification to admit the slightest true theistic belief overthrows the whole of [N]. In short, the problem with this model will be the more general problem of induction applied to this question. On the other hand, Sudduth points out, “propensity” can mean a more a priori critique of the disposition of the human faculty as a whole.13 The trouble here circles back to Romans 1. It proves too much, since now “unreliability” would have to include an unreliability to produce knowledge sufficient to consciously suppress.

Moreover, in the strong unreliability thesis, we must ask a similar question to the one already asked about sufficiency of natural theological conclusions. In this case: Unreliable for what? If by a reliable production of “any true beliefs about God,” we have all of the same dilemmas that we have seen throughout our exegetical and historical sections; and these are not alleviated by equating “knowledge” to “true belief.”

It could be amended to imply only any further true beliefs about God (treated as NTβ) rationally inferred from those which the thesis will not deny, because they are innate (treated as NTα). There is a hint, borrowing from Calvin, that the division could be between “earthly things” as opposed to “beliefs about God as output.”14 Luther has been said to have a more robust doctrine featuring the same basic dichotomy.15 However, it begs the question as to whether either Luther’s or Calvin’s dichotomizing reason in things below versus reason in things above would thereby preclude any valid and sound inferences about God from natural knowledge.

The second form of this objection becomes an exercise in stretching the bounds of a model to deny what even that reductionistic model would never have conceived of denying.

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1. Michael Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009), 111.

2. Scott Oliphint, “Is There a Reformed Objection to Natural Theology?” WTJ 74 (2012), 172.

3. J. V. Fesko, Reforming Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 202.

4. Herman Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, Volume I (Grandville, MI: Reformed Free Publishing Association, 2004), 290.

5. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 120.

6. Hoeksema, Reformed Dogmatics, I:29.

7. Canons of Dort, 3rd and 4th Point of Doctrine, Article 4, in Christian Truths Summarized: The Creeds and Reformed Confessions (United Reformed Churches in North America), 72.

8. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 128, italics mine.

9. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 127.

10. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 128.

11. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 128.

12. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 129.

13. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 129.

14. Sudduth, The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology, 129—cf. footnote no. 4 on Calvin.

15. cf. B. A. Gerrish, Grace and Reason: A Study in the Theology of Luther (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2005), 12, 25-29; Jordan Cooper, Prolegomena: A Defense of the Scholastic Method (Just & Sinner Publishing, 2020), 95.