Objections to Theological Realism Answered

Part 4 of The Nature of Theological Truths

I suppose there may be countless objections to what I am calling “theological realism,” not the least of which would be objections to realism per se. That will have to be defended another day. For now I would commend anyone who takes an interest in that to the writings of Étienne Gilson from a prior generation, and Ed Feser in ours, and in particular his book entitled Scholastic Metaphysics. It is best to focus here only on those misgivings that many in the Reformed community would have. We will notice a common thread. Whether in its Barthian, Van Tillian, or broader Evangelical anti-classical iterations, what always seems to emerge is a suspicion that reasoning about (1) more universal truths in (2) extra-biblical language takes one away from either (a) the heart of the gospel or (b) the authority of Scripture. Needless to say, I disagree. We can get a sense of this general misgiving with five particular objections, or are they really five angles on the same objection?

Objection 1: Rooting truth in objective natures outside of Scripture leads to “graduating from” Scripture.

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 understandable fears 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.

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 [1]. 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 [2]. 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 [3].

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” [4].

The Reformed Classicalist reply to the danger of locating the meaning of words in lower things is not to deny the ontology of words meaning things, but to raise the sense of meaning to refer to ultimate things, which “ground in eternity” both the lower things outside of the text and the words of the text themselves. In such a grounding, Scripture still remains the ultimate authority over 1. ultimate things, 2. proximate extra-biblical things, and 3. express biblical words. Recognizing this order simply does not necessitate that those ultimate things (or “theological universals”) can be defined by human reason apart from Scripture. Wherever Scripture speaks to them, the Word of God is our source of definition: our “norming norm without norm.” And all the while, reason rightly recognizes theological universals giving order to theological particulars.

Objection 2: Systematic theology as a more “accurate summary” implies an “improvement” upon Scripture.

Frame’s Systematic Theology (2013) opens off by saying, “Definitions are useful, but we should be warned that they are rarely, if ever, found in Scripture itself” [5]. He recognizes that this is inevitable in theology, and in fact is akin to what is happening in each translation of Scripture. If this was all that was said, fair enough. However, he elaborates 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” [6].

We might ask, however, inadequate for what? If the Bible contains no definition of x, then how exactly would a definition given be competing for that authoritative lexical meaning? We may get that idea to be sure, and Frame’s point is worth pondering. Given that Frame elsewhere appropriates the Van Tillian doctrine that “facts” are inseparable from their overall interpretive grid [7], and that there are no such things as “brute facts,” that is, uninterpreted facts, there is, to put it as charitably as possible, the potential to divorce “facticity” and “objective truth” such that the circle of Christian truth and all other circles claiming “facts,” have no common set of truths that are proper objects of all finite minds.

Naturally Van Til, and the gentler version of his view in Frame, will deny this conclusion by pointing to where they affirm all of the classical attributes of general revelation. Let us grant the intent of the words and simply set out the warning that the Double Truth theory of Averroës and the Neo-Orthodox poles of their dialectical emerging truth, both lurk in the segregation of truth as such from a “Christian” or “biblical” interpretation of truth. If Frame’s concern about brute facts is met by a biblical interpretation, then we must shift the question asked earlier about how the Bible “contains” all of the facts of theology, in Hodge’s words. How does Frame propose to raise each biblical fact above the realm of mere brute fact? He will say it is God’s interpretation that does so. But this interpretation, which verse precisely gives that for this other verse? Do we see the problem yet? The only way to interpret the point is in a circle, a circle that is larger than any point and encompasses many such points. You are doing systematic theology, and no such circles are “in” Scripture, but are drawn by universals with reason.

Objection 3: Realism could subtly do with objects what Liberalism did with divine acts.

This is simply a misunderstanding of the real problem with that liberal tendency to determine revelation by God’s acts apart from his words. Vos, Machen, and Packer (just to name a few noteworthy examples), all had to make the argument that the words of Scripture are necessary for our understanding of the acts of God, as they pushed back against that modern tendency to begin reducing revelation to divine actions apart from propositional revelation. Here our “object with a nature” is an event. In this case it is a divinely initiated event, a biblical miracle. It is not enough to say that God’s word precedes God’s action. The revealed words must also form a window of authoritative speech back to the event.

Against those theologians who would restrict revelation to the mighty acts of God, Packer said, “Leave a man to guess God’s mind and purpose, and he will guess wrong; he can guess it only by being told it” [8]. Vos put it in this way:

“The usual order is: first word, then the fact, then again the interpretative word. The Old Testament brings the predictive preparatory word, the Gospels record the redemptive-revelatory fact, the Epistles supply the subsequent, final interpretation” [9].

Let us then avoid two extremes between a creeping liberalism of God’s mighty acts and a narrow biblicism to fight it. Words are not self-referential, but historical actions are even less so. In the place of these two extreme atomisms, let us note that God’s word is the definitive window, and that precisely to the objective reality. Let us not point only to the window: ink patterns which a liberal can sound out as well as us. But there is a world of difference between divorcing act from word and uniting word to thing. The critic may see the commonality in the priority of something to which the word answers, but in doing so he neglects the opposite tendencies: the divorcing of the liberal and the uniting of the realist.

Objection 4: If objects in nature (or reason) have any priority over Scripture’s words, it is neutral nature or autonomous reason.

This is the essential presuppositionalist objection. For most who hear it, the objection is confined to “starting points” in apologetics encounters with the unbeliever. For those a bit more studied up on things, there is an awareness of the debate about prolegomena. In other words, there is another “starting points” controversy between Van Til and the historic Reformed tradition. I realize that Van Tillians will not agree with that characterization already. However anyone who has seriously read Van Til knows all too well how he was critical of everyone from Calvin down to Bavinck for not going far enough in untethering Reformed theology from the “Romanist” notions of Thomas’ natural theology. Bavinck himself provided canon fodder for Van Til at this point. In Volume I of the Reformed Dogmatics, he wrote,

“The Christian theologian who sets forth the content of his faith in his dogmatics, because and insofar as he is a Christian, can only take his position within the Christian faith itself” [10].

This is the oft-repeated phrase of Van Til, to “take one’s stand in Scripture.” It is one thing to confess that all truth is God’s truth; and, after all, what else do we defend or operate out of but the “Christian system,” or let us call it, “the reality that God has made”? Amen and amen! But we equivocate when we refer to this totalizing system as “all revelation” or “God’s truth” out of one side of our mouth, and then out of the other, when natural theology or natural law is found repugnant for whatever reason, this is deemed “outside of revelation” (i.e. outside of Scripture). Modern Reformed authors commit the fallacy of equivocation at this very point quite a bit, and it is a tiresome spectacle to behold.

They will correctly label “revelation” both general and special in all cases—until we come to the controversies over foundations to faith (apologetic starting points) or foundations to systematic theology (dogmatic starting points). Then, for no other reason but a caricature about what natural theology and natural law are, suddenly the dichotomy is between “revelation versus reason” or, in other words, “revelation” (now, only meaning special revelation) and “nature” (now as defined by autonomous reason).

Lutheran theology has its own brand of this, which the likes of Robert Jenson derive from Barth’s reduction of natural theology to Enlightenment natural religion. For instance,

“In the modern period, it has often been supposed that the prolegomena to theology must enable the enterprise … this effort must be judged mistaken” [11], the mistake, that is, that “theological prolegomena lay down conceptual conditions of Christian teaching that are not themselves Christian teaching” [12].

The burden of proof ought to be squarely on the critic of natural theology or natural law to show where its advocate has defined any of their terms, or drawn any of their inferences, on any basis that is contrary to Scripture or that is altogether uninterested in submitting itself to Scripture. Perhaps the charge will stick in this or that case. But without that investigation, we have begged the whole question.

Objection 5: A metaphysical theology of “God in Himself” is opposed to a relational “God in Act”

This is the Barthian objection, and it is most concisely advocated in Colin Gunton’s Act and Being (2002), and most ably dissected in Steven J. Duby’s God in Himself (2019). In the Barthian view of things, what we see in the economy of the Trinity’s works is what God is. There is no going behind Christ for an account of his being. Gunton goes as far as to charge classical theism with a dualism where the incommunicable attributes, situated as they were as a foundation to everything else we know about God, are opposed to all that relates God to the world and to other persons [13]. This certainly begs a lot of questions—I suggest they all orbit around a presupposition about sequence being essential to divine knowledge and will—that far exceed the purposes of this essay. Short of establishing that (which Gunton did not), there is no good reason to believe that the traditionally conceived incommunicable attributes are in dualistic tension with God’s activity in the world.

For Duby, God himself is the object of theology. Divine aseity plays an early role in this classical view. For example, central to God’s self-sufficiency is the Trinitarian eternal love that needed nothing for love to be [14]. God is all that he is independent of all that he creates, but—contra Barth, Torrance, Gunton, and McCormack [15]—this is not to suggest an a priori account of our theologizing about that. What God is, independent of his effects, and the means by which he communicates that, are clearly two distinct subject matter. It may be that we arrive at the knowledge of the former entirely, a posteriori, through the complex of effects in nature and grace.

In fact, the Bible itself gives us its own “back behind the human Christ.” This is true both about God’s having already dealt with Israel for centuries, but also with clear statements about the preexistent Word (Jn. 1:1-14).

In fact, “the incarnation itself actually informs us that there is an objective basis for distinguishing between God’s outward works and God’s own inward life.” Duby lists three ways this is the case: 1. The very concept of incarnation signifies that which is preexistent is sent, revealed, and giving of himself. 2. By the events of Christ’s life, the Son sets forth “the immanent tri-unity and love of God.” 3. The “assumption of a human nature in the unity of his person … implies that the Son according to his divinity does not occupy a common order of being with creatures” [16]. All of this to say that God in himself is the larger context for the incarnation, not the other way around, nor even side by side.

Summary

Much more could be said in response to any of these five objections. No doubt those who have these misgivings will be most unsatisfied with how I have characterized them. No straw men were intended. Suffice it to say, I do not think that the arguments against doing classical theology in a realist mode have made good on their claim, and in fact it is the critics who have more to answer for in the setting up of straw men.

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1. John Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 76-77.

2. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch, 75.

3. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch, 80.

4. Sailhamer, The Meaning of the Pentateuch, 82-83.

5. John Frame, Systematic Theology (Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2013), 3.

6. Frame, Systematic Theology, 4.

7. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1987), 71-73; 77-80.

8. J. I. Packer, Fundamentalism and the Word of God (Leicester, UK: InterVarsity Press, 1958), 92.

9. Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2015), 7.

10. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, I:78

11. Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: The Triune God (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3.

12. Jenson, Systematic Theology, 9

13. Colin Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 13; 16.

14. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 15.

15. Duby, God in Himself, 4-5.

16. Duby, God in Himself, 161.