The Nature of Theological Truths

Part 1 of The Nature of Theological Truths

Is Theology Ontological or Lexical?

Of the ordinary questions treated in theological prolegomena, it is asked whether theology is a science or a wisdom, or whether it is theoretical or practical. There are also the divisions of the true and false, the natural and supernatural, the archetypal and ectypal. Curiously absent from these preliminary considerations is whether theology is lexical or ontological. To be fair, what I have in mind here is not wholly omitted. For example, Francis Turretin commented that there are two senses of a word being in Scripture: first, “as to sounds and syllables,” and second, “as to sense and the thing signified” [1]. Theology is only in the latter sense. The reason for this is that theology is a science and so treats “objectively” of God [2]. 

There is a great need to raise the more fundamental epistemological question, “What is truth?” and to apply it very specifically to theology. It may seem to some that this would be the more obscurantist enterprise of the philosophical theologian. However even the most orthodox systematic theology today can be undermined by the modernist and postmodernist paradigms on truth. The church has spent so long without a broad consensus response to either spirit of the age, that we may rightly call these no longer secular “challenges,” but something more like twin spells that we have been under. We are like the fish in the story who do not know they are wet.

Modernism only grants a truth that can be placed on a petri dish, and Postmodernism only grants a spirituality that is not so arrogant as to call itself truth.  When expressed in these stark terms, each of us may think we have resisted such philosophies. However they each have more subtle forms and may be transmitted like a virus through prolegomena depleted of proper immunities. 

Now what, more precisely, do I mean by the question of whether theology is lexical or ontological? Set in the context of biblical authority and sufficiency: Are the words of Scripture determinative for meaning in themselves or because of the nature of each thing they describe?

It may seem to the reader that I have played a trick on them—a sort of Euthyphro dilemma applied to theological epistemology. The reply may well come back, “Why can it not be both?” If at any point the student of theology becomes frustrated with such a pontification, he may also naturally ask, “Why should this matter?” In addition to the aforementioned spells of modernism and postmodernism, there are also many pious sounding pitfalls along the way. Then there are the very common “street level” ways that the problem is presented to us. Who has not fielded the objection that the Trinity is “not biblical” on account of the word not being in Scripture?

It must be remembered throughout that the following inquiry is not concerned with establishing the scope of natural theology in apologetics. We are restricted here to method in systematic theology, and here the question of what constitutes a theological truth cannot be neglected. My thesis is simply that theology is both lexical and ontological, but it is lexical because it is ontological. To say it another way: the order of being will be determinative to the order of our knowing. In order to demonstrate how this is the case and why it matters, this essay will proceed under the following headings in order: (1) What are the truths of Scripture? (2) Modernism, Postmodernism, and “Theological Things”; (3) Retrieving Truth I: Words, Ideas, and Things; (4) Retrieving Truth II: Theological Realism; (5) The Complex Lenses of Nature and Scripture; (6) Two Objections; (7) Traditional Biblical Attributes in a Theological Realist Mode; and finally some concluding thoughts. 

What Are the Truths of Scripture?

That the Scriptures are truth is unquestionably the Bible’s own understanding of itself: “Your word is truth” (Jn. 17:17). Jesus here speaks not of the Word that is his own identity, but of the inscripturated word. Moreover, both the whole of that word and each part of it are utterly true. Of the whole it says, “The sum of your word is truth” (Ps. 119:160), which is the same scope that Paul has in mind by the “whole counsel of God’s word” (Acts 20:27). This can also be seen in Christ’s own general reference to the three parts of the Hebrew canon: “in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms” (Lk. 24:44).

Now what about each part? Two statements of Jesus are crucial. First, “Scripture cannot be broken” (Jn. 10:35); and second, “For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Mat. 5:17). These two function as examples of how the Scriptures must be considered truth as to both kind and degree. 

Of the first statement, B. B. Warfield points to the fact that the word for “‘broken’ here is the common one for breaking the law,” so that “it is impossible for the Scripture to be annulled, its authority to be withstood, or denied” [3]. If this is the best understanding of what is meant by “broken,” that it is a violation of law, rather than a segmenting or divorcing one part of Scripture from another, then how does it factor in here?

It at least shows us two things. It is another testimony to Jesus’ high view of the Old Testament as God’s word; but it also shows us that to have any lower view is a form of disbelief akin to disobeying a commandment. After all, the text quoted from in Psalm 82 is not a literal imperative. As the Pharisees would “break” the Scriptures by failing to apply the truth of one part of the canon to another, so any attempt to divorce one genre from another, one “dispensation” from another, or to divorce Jesus from Paul, or any other number of “canons with the canon,” would break the Scriptures into artificial kinds, one being somehow “less truth” than the other. 

In the second statement of Jesus, we can see that each part of Scripture is true in terms of degree. Note our Lord’s qualifier: “not an iota, not a dot.” The quality of preservation, namely, that these will not pass away anymore than the rest of the propositions, makes little sense to express unless Jesus is including the most nuanced part of divine meaning in that authoritative Scripture.

Now this idea of divine meaning will be particularly important to my own thesis. If Jesus considered the iota and the dot to be inspired, then we may ask whether this primarily regards punctuation and correct spelling (which we have no reason to exclude) or also that which punctuation and correct spelling do in the intentions of an author.

To discern the function of punctuation and correct spelling requires only that we imagine their alternatives. Short of the exact punctuation and spelling that we have, what else would we have but either 1. a different referent of truth, or else 2. nonsense altogether? But in either set of alternatives, what we would be missing is precisely the same object of truth. The difference will not be restricted to ink patterns or sound waves, but rather objects of mind and meaning.  

Another perspective on how Scripture itself communicates about its truth is to ask what sorts of truths we might expect. Beeke and Smalley cite three examples from Acts of which we can make great use. These are truths affirmed by Scripture but which are also affirmed by pagans. They are located in Acts 17:26, Titus 1:12, and 1 Corinthians 15:33. Now the point is not to suggest that the Scriptures are “relying” on any worldly wisdom. Quite to the contrary, the pagans are living off of borrowed epistemological capital. Having said that, the objects of truth that are affirmed by both pagan sources and the Bible are, to some degree, the same objects of truth when uttered by both sources. Beeke and Smalley say of this, “Paul asserts truths held in common with Greek Stoic philosophy” [4]. Augustine and Calvin had both said the same about many things taught by Plato or Cicero, and naturally Thomas attributed the same to Aristotle. 

It matters little whether we call such a truth philosophical or theological, or whether we are dealing with a mixed or pure article of the faith. We can at least say that what Paul, in Acts 17, is pointing to is a truth that is independent, or “outside,” of his own mind as well as the minds of those at Mars Hill listening to him. Here we have an object with a nature, that reality of there being such a God, whatever else may be true of him. We are not speaking exclusively of theological truths and moral truths. It is also the case for truths about the physical world. Beeke and Smalley approvingly cite the argument of Vern Poythress that what scientists call the laws of nature are really “the word of God, specifying how the world of creatures is to function” [5].

One more perspective on how Scripture speaks about its own truth is to view things from a dilemma. The purpose of the dilemma will be to force us away from what is often called a “biblicist” view that is too simple. In my analysis of Hodge’s theological method—though I very much favor it over other moderns, as that of Barth—I have mentioned that his heading, section 6 of Chapter 1, presents a dilemma:

“The Scriptures contain all the Facts of Theology” [6]. Is that so? The dilemma is, quite frankly, inevitable for every other Reformed view but the one in this very thesis. Is this a fact, namely, that the Scriptures “contain” all the facts of theology? If not, then it is a false statement. If so, then where are those exact words in Scripture?

To get a handle on the horns of this dilemma, let us bring in a very pertinent expression from the Westminster Confession. Such a fact as “all facts are contained in Scripture” must only be biblical “by good and necessary consequence.” Hodge himself acknowledges that general revelation truths will in some way come to the aid of such implications. We can say that all theological facts are “contained” in the Bible, not by exhausting all of its presuppositions or implications, but in such a way that those presuppositions and implications wholly fit within the general totality of truth that is expressly communicated. It seems to me that Reformed Presuppositionalists, Reformed 2K Advocates, and Reformed Classicalists can all agree to this as far as it goes. But can we be more specific? Are the general boundaries of that “totality” explicit? And if they are not, then in what sense does Scripture “cover” the whole field of theological meaning as its supreme authoritative determiner? Our choices at this crossroad are really reduced to two: back to a crass biblicism or else onward to the very realist fabric of theology.

Modernism, Postmodernism, and “Theological Things”

What I am going to call “theological realism” is just my label for the unstated rule prior to the Enlightenment. By understanding what Modernism and Postmodernism make of these real “objects” or “things” that I am calling theological truths, we stand a better chance of finding common cause against the unbelieving paradigms. The most concise way one can put things is this: Modernism rejects that theological things are real objects, while Postmodernism rejects that any objective things can be known at all. Why do I put things in this way? We live not only in a post-theological intellectual climate, but virtually nowhere in our educational background is there much philosophy either.

We absorb the reigning philosophy second hand through either popular culture or else at the implication level in other fields of study. It is therefore entirely plausible that the majority of those who even qualify as well read and orthodox Christian thinkers have uncritically assumed the modern or postmodern starting points. 

First, we must note that for Modernity all that was left of “objects” were physical phenomena, or that which can be empirically tested. This may seem simple enough at first glance, until one studies out the course of the two main schools of early modern philosophy, the Rationalists and Empiricists, and how they failed to account for even their own first principles. So it is what they will have in common that interests us. Douglas Kelly follows Eric Vogelin’s thesis in discerning a Gnostic core of Enlightenment thought [7]. A radical divorce between matter and form, proximate cause from ultimate cause, the supposedly “real” world from the immaterial dimensions of thought that give us the ability to tell what is real in the first place.

Even apart from Kant’s divide, the Modern outlook had already quarantined metaphysical “things” as unknowable sentiment. Rationalism did this by reducing the metaphysical to the rational and axiomatic (thus defined as dwelling in the individual and finite cogito); while empiricism did this by reducing the objects of knowledge to those taken in by the senses. With Hume’s skepticism neither one of these were any longer tenable [8]. The modern Gnostic impulse paradoxically conceived of “natures” as “unnatural,” and the “essence of things” as “non-objects.”

Second, postmodernism simply takes Kant’s divide in the Critique to the more radical end of denying any objective or universal field of meaning over any two cultures, between any text and reader, or even between any two minds. Duby summarizes the movement from Kant to Heidegger as a critique of “ontotheology,” where ultimate being was previously sought as a ground for understanding the place of all other beings [9]. When Lyotard described the essence of postmodernism as “incredulity at metanarratives,” this must be understood as more than skepticism about “big stories” that explicitly attempt to narrate all things, but to be consistent, the slightest detail in the most parochial story would have to be judged imperialistic if all were forced to concede to its claims over every mind.

The trouble of course with postmodernism is the same as the trouble with modernism. Next to no one, whether friend of foe, demands full consistency of them. If we did, we would be obliged to follow Hume’s advice at the end of his Enquiry and commit both paradigms to the flames, since they fail their own criteria. No modernist propositions are either strictly analytical or strictly empirical (contra Hume); and postmodernism is a metanarrative (contra Lyotard). Exposing such philosophical nonsense should have been easy. And yet in a post-Christian context, the exhausted old master theology had fearfully retreated from its traitor-handmaid, philosophy, and then slavishly copied the offspring of the Enlightenment. 

Nor is the loss of “theological things,” as objects of the mind, restricted to the realm of dogmatic theology. It can plague biblical theology as well, and its errors can become popular and seductive in the church.

To give one recent example, we might remember that at the core of N. T. Wright’s rendition of the New Perspective on Paul was an antipathy to “doctrinal formulation and linear, logical reasoning, a predisposition against conceiving of the relationship of God and man in vertical terms” [10]. In order to restructure our outlook on justification, Wright had to give “righteousness” itself a makeover. Of course that was not the impression that he had. He even appealed to J. I. Packer’s entry in a theological lexicon for its meaning: “it is an act of faithfulness to his covenant promise to [Israel]” [11], a bit out of context of course. 

Now the critics of Wright correctly identified the root of the problem. In fixating on one thing that righteousness does, Wright eschewed the question of what righteousness is [12]. Not coincidentally when Wright condemned the Reformed doctrine of imputed righteousness, he recapitulated the Roman charge of legal fiction, but in an anti-realist manner: “Righteousness is not an object, a substance or gas which can be passed across the courtroom” [13]. Similarly J. D. G. Dunn maintained that “God dealt with his people’s sins in accord with the covenant (although not in terms of ‘some abstract ideal of justice’)” [14].

In short, both in the conception of what righteousness was, and in how they hear their Reformed opponents talk about what it does, those such as Wright were restricting the meaning of theological truths not merely to the horizontal, left-to-right, narrative level of meaning, but also to the lexical-apart-from-ontological meaning. They opposed the Reformation doctrine, at a foundational level, because of their departure from realist thinking. 

Supposing that instead of following Hume and Kant, the Christian mind got back behind them. That is the sort of thing that retrieval theology is all about at its best. What I would suggest is that while we are retrieving this or that ancient truth that the Reformed tradition holds in common with the church fathers or the medieval scholastics, that we ought to retrieve a better handle on the concept of truth itself. How did those before the Enlightenment conceive of theological truths as truths? We will make two giant steps forward by looking back. In our first act of retrieval, we will look first to the thinking of Augustine on how words and things relate to each other, and second to the thinking of Thomas Aquinas on analogical predication. Then in our second act of retrieval, we look at the larger metaphysical vision of realism and apply it the very normal way that we all do systematic theology.

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1. Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, I.1.1.2

2. Turretin, Institutes, I.1.1.7

3. B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Louisville: SBTS Press, 2014), 139.

4. Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, Volume 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), 217.

5. Vern Poythress quoted in Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, I.223.

6. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology. I:15

7. Douglas Kelly, Systematic Theology: Volume One (Ross-shire, UK: Christian Focus Publications, 2008), 240-43.

8. The last line of Hume’s Enquiry famously puts the stake in the heart of any Enlightenment dream of objective knowledge. Although Hume meant it as a stab against Scholastic metaphysics, later philosophers have pointed out that Hume’s twofold criteria for meaningful statements falls by its own weight, as it is neither strictly analytical or strictly empirical. Thus he said, “If we take in our hands any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion” - Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 114.

9. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 104-07.

10. Guy Prentiss Waters, Justification and the New Perspective on Paul (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2004), 121.

11. N. T. Wright, Justification (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009), 64-65; cf. 32.

12. cf. John Piper, The Future of Justification (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 62, 71, 73.

13. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 98.

14. J. D. G. Dunn, in Waters, Justification and the New Perspective on Paul, 102.