Why is it Called Reformed Classicalism?
Like any other “ism,” this set of ideas called Reformed Classicalism is a viewpoint. Sometimes this suffix “ism” signifies an entire worldview, whether philosophical or religious, such as dual-ism or monothe-ism. Other times it only refers to a political ideology, as in conservat-ism or social-ism. It can even be used about a method like empiric-ism. I am laboring this introduction because one of the confusions that should be avoided happens when we assume that all “isms” are equal. In other words, we can get the idea that each “ism” is attempting to bite off and chew just as much as any other ism. This creates unnecessary stumbling blocks, not the least of which is that the one proposing his “ism” is being immodest: claiming to rebuild whole worlds when, really, all he may be doing is to reclaim some old wisdom as a corrective, or else show some innovation but always consciously on the shoulders of many giants who came before.
With all of that precaution out of the way, let us begin with this thing I am calling Reformed Classicalism.
Classical – the Word and Idea
People naturally think of the ancient Greeks or Romans when they think of this word. Or perhaps they have some tune of Mozart or Bach floating in their heads. That is understandable. The word “classical” simply means that which is the highest expression of something. The adjective is relative in that sense. It can apply to anything from architecture to music to philosophy to any other number of human endeavors.
Now because Western Civilization is what it is (or was what it was), and because I am going to just have to assume that my reader is sympathetic to that valuation, it follows that we can also speak of a general “classical” framework encompassing both philosophy and theology. So much so, that a general grouping of ideas has often been called “The Great Tradition.”
The fact that there is disagreement about the boundaries of this says nothing other than that people of different worldviews and ideologies will have different opinions about what makes something “great” to begin with. But there is a basic level of agreement that there was a “pre-modern” way of looking at the world. That outlook had been replaced by a newer way alternatively called “The Enlightenment” or “Modernity,” or, eventually, “Postmodernity.”
What then was characteristic about the classical way of thought? At the risk of oversimplification, our understanding has to begin with two very basic yet broad principles: 1. Reality is objective and knowable; and 2. supernature (or metaphysics) is ultimate, whereas nature (or physics) is subordinate. The modernist will also make a claim on reality being knowable—but since he denies the supremacy of supernature, he deprives himself of the tools of rational analysis. Hence the modernist cannot finally hold on to the reality outside of his own mind, which is why the more overt nonsense of postmodernism was the inevitable dead end.
This narrative will be protested at once. One might ask, “Were not the ancient pagans materialists, at least with respect to the belief that the cosmos has always existed?” Yes, indeed, for the most part they were. However, the majority of their philosophers seemed almost driven to the absurdity of that presupposition by their incessant quest for the supreme arche—the fundamental principle or element that “made the world go round,” so to speak. Increasingly the answers to that ultimate question kept coming back to either Mind, or else to some other transcendent aspect of Being. They had the sense, against the narrative of their so-called gods, that mere materialism could not contain the straw that stirred her. Better, then, to say that they were “materialist on paper.” Being good Greeks, yes, they had to check that box. However, their two intellectual giants, Plato and Aristotle, left to the West an inheritance of reason over mere nature: a way that the world is and a way to query its causes, even its ultimate causes.
Now, fast-forwarding to slay another sacred cow of anti-classical mythology: When Christian theology took flight, its own two medieval giants, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, did not simply baptize Plato and Aristotle in Christianese. To borrow a metaphor which Augustine himself used on a few occasions, the theologians of the church plundered the intellectual gold of philosophical Egypt (or Athens), burning with the fires of redeemed reason all that was dross.
It was important for me to use the word “classicalist” rather than either “Augustinian” or “Thomist” or some other narrower descriptive term. There are several unhelpful fixations that this avoids, but it also communicates the perfectly defensible idea that this view faithfully works within the majority position of thinking Christians throughout the whole of church history. It is bigger than even the greatest of merely mortal theologians.
But to speak of the “classical” in a day such as ours is to speak of a kind of recovery, or what has more recently been called “theological retrieval.” What exactly did these Christians believe that has, in some sense, been neglected? And, incidentally, that is an important way to put it because the idea that such and such was “lost” is nearly always an overstatement that begins to distort our view toward the past. The church has always had its advocates for the classical way; but in the modern era they have been like lone lanterns in dark alleys of chronological snobbery.
Let me mention just five essential elements of “classical Christian thinking” that became unfashionable within modern and postmodern forms of theology. For the sake of the true beginner, each of these has a link leading to one of my resources on the specific subject.
2. Classical theism.
Each of these are bound to start a fight or two, and so rather than attempt to defend these here, I simply mention them in passing as the answer to what makes the classical view distinct. However, it may help to at least mention their opposites to give some sense of what one is left with in their absence.
1. Nominalism and eventually the overthrow of metaphysics.
2. Relational theism (theistic personalism, open theism, etc.).
3. Apologetics of contingencies, presupposing God or Scripture, or fideism.
4. Voluntarism, antinomianism, pluralism, progressivism, or relativism.
5. Biblicism or Experientialism.
Again—shots fired. No immediate defense forthcoming. Unfortunate as that may seem, I have written and spoken on all of these topics in various formats. My purpose here is simply to give a beginner’s framework. But what about that other word?
Reformed – the Word and Idea
What does it mean to “reform” a thing but to fix that which is deformed? But a quick cautionary principle is in order here. The magisterial Reformers and the churches that are associated with their names, whether in Switzerland, Germany, Holland, or on the British Isles, were precisely reformers and not revolutionaries. They were pruning within the catholic faith and not laying an ax to it. The Reformers saw themselves as true catholics and the late medieval Church of Rome as the latecomer and deviant. Their arguments were as filled with citations of church fathers as they were of Scripture proof texts. The critic is free to disagree with their use. They are not free to rewrite history and paint the Reformers as those without a history.
Moreover, there was no “Roman Catholic” church that everyone assented to until gradually throughout the Middle Ages. Romanism was really a late medieval innovation; culminating in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and crystallizing in the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. Contrary to popular objections like, “Where was your church, Brother Martin, before such and such?” we have no burden to prove that anything was “un-catholic” before 1517. We actually like the word “catholic” and are happy to consider all Christendom and ourselves included as such. The word just means “universal.” But Roman-Catholic is a square-circle—a contradiction in terms. It is no more universal than any other particular within a set. The idea of a local, physical hierarchy, or line, that makes the church what it is, is frankly the opposite of catholicity.
And with apologies to John Henry Newman’s saying that to be rooted in history is to cease to be Protestant—aside from only working on an equivocal application of the word signifying “protest”—it is a very selective historiography, and one which has to ignore the plain uses of concepts like the rule of faith and apostolic tradition, as well as to read the Patristics in an anachronistic manner.
Now if to be “reformed” is also to be properly “catholic” then why not simply use the label “Reformed catholicity”? My answer is that though that is a legitimate concept, and the title to an excellent book on the subject by Drs. Allen and Swain, nevertheless it too would not quite encompass all that I have in mind by classical. That said, what the Reformation did emphasize in those five solas, so long as these are all properly defined, is indispensable to the gospel. And if they are essential to the gospel, then there can be no proper Christian thinking without them.
Now one of the maxims of the Reformation era (which has also been taken out of context by enterprising schismatics in each generation) is in the Latin ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbi Dei. This means “The church is reformed and always being reformed according to the word of God.” It is not purely and simply semper reformanda, that is, “always reforming,” which can come to mean a willy-nilly revolt against any and all constraints. The word is the immediate “material” change agent, chiseling away at more deformation which we must assume will be with us until Christ returns.
A Reformed Classicalist will be as keen to assure our Reformed brethren that we only strengthen the commitment to sola Scriptura, as we will to dispel the Romanist straw men that we undermine true ecclesiastical authority and good works. But more to the point of the need for such a school of thought, it is those five points of the classical view above that we would bring to bear against the anti-intellectualism and antinomianism that has been perpetrated on the Reformed churches over the past few generations.
I speak of the damage that has been inflicted by views which have deviated from the historic Reformed confessional standards and reflections of the best Reformed theologians. Presuppositionalism in apologetics and pluralism in ethics lay siege to the citadel of the potential Reformed mind and will.
There are barely any Christian thought curricula in Reformed seminaries—and here I am using “Christian thought” in the technical sense of the classification that includes apologetics, philosophy, history, and ethics—and up until recent years there were no Reformed liberal arts colleges or universities. Who is the Reformed philosopher of note today? There is none. Where is the public policy or a Supreme Court nominee from the Reformed world? Nowhere to be found.
Why?
The answer is as clear as day to anyone who has read outside of the narrow prescriptions of the Van Tillians or the Gospel Coalition. For nearly a hundred years, the Reformed mind has been told to be very much afraid of the “autonomous” and the “common” and the “neutral” and the “triumphalist” and the “objective” and the “universal,” and other such naughty descriptives meant to rule out precisely classical modes of thought or attendant actions, or any words or sources that would amount to the same.
Worse yet, until very recently virtually everyone who saw the problem with Van Tillianism also happened to have a very shallow to non-existent background in ethics. Some were simply pietists who didn’t want to take sides in the contentious matters of politics; others were closet leftists waiting for an opportune time to articulate their views with impunity. So if you wanted to learn from an expert on theological retrieval, you would not be getting the connection to defending Western Civilization in its political manifestations.
From the other side, if you wanted to find a Reformed voice that was against the progressive downgrade into all-out Marxism, you could only go to those who rejected philosophy and the classical incommunicable attributes of God. Biblicism would be your only weapon against the leftward slide; and you would be told that “natural law” means essentially the law of the jungle, or the judgments of the pagans, or the autonomous attempts of man to construct society on his own steam.
That is still largely the state of things. You must choose between an unbridgeable chasm between Scripture and nature, or an unbridgeable chasm between the civil and ecclesial sphere.
Reformed Classicalism rejects this choice, root and branch. People speak of a “post-war consensus” in Western liberal democracies. Well, Reformed Classicalism is a rejection of “the post-war consensus in the Reformed church.” Do we want to retrieve the mind of the Christian church before Hume and Kant received the most uncontested hall pass in the history of human thought? If so, then the Reformed Classicalist challenges the retrievalists to be consistent. Let the fathers, the scholastics, the Reformed Orthodox, the Puritans, the Princetonians—you name it—let them speak their whole mind about God and all things related to God. Let us retrieve their metaphysics and method of apologetics, their exegesis and their ethics.