I spent some time thinking about the episode and had some time to make a running attempt at an irenic response.
Speaking as a fool, I’m a retired Marine Officer with 21 years of service from the foxhole to the flag pole. I have over 14 years of executive experience in business. I have three Masters degrees in technical, military, and theological disciplines. Finally, I’ve been studying theology intensely (including philosophy) for 28 years and have been an Officer in the PCA for 15 years.
Bottom line up front – I find you well informed and helpful on many things and, when I criticize your posts it is not to dismiss you as a thinker.
Yet, I can’t help but notice how readily you hand wave and profoundly complicated theological and philosophical subjects in which you have little training and make sweeping conclusions.
When men criticize you about your thoughts on excarnational thinking they are not dismissing Charles Taylor as a thinker, they are criticizing your appropriation of his broader thoughts and the particular application you made. You ought to be able to have the humility to recognize that your observations may miss the mark in making a point.
When you recently wrote that the PCA and other denominations are “schismatics”, it’s another example of you making a sweeping generalization with the very kind of confidence you decry in this recent conversation.
In fact, it seems you picked this conversation out to confirm that you could confidently aver how obnoxious others are who have confidence in certain areas. How was disagreeing with you about your specific post about excarnational thinking an example of a thinker who digs in his heels and can’t think beyond a small footprint of though?
Let me ask you this humbly (and I do mean that): If I was trying to demonstrate how over-confident or missing the mark you were on City policy or conservative thought would you respect my choice of a man who has a Masters Degree in Economics and is working on his PhD?
I ask this because your guest’s apprehension of the state of Reformed theological training and of presuppositional thinking seemed to me to be more of an autobiographical reflection of his immaturity.
I write this not as a died-in-the-wool Van Tillian. I write it as someone who dialogs regulary and has wrestled with this ideas not merely as a student but in the world of men and women for almost 3 decades.
I’m not a fan of many of Keller’s disciples but I don’t recognize the gloss provided for either Keller or Van Til’s thought.
I didn’t attend Westminster Theological Seminary but do you not realize how insulting and dismissive of that school or even of so many men whom I know that think much more critically than averred.
Is it not ironic that your guest noted that in investigating a belief that someone must try to cast it in its best possible light but his description of presuppositions is swept away so as to leave any adherent in the heap of close-minded anti-historical automatons?
There are valid criticisms of some schools that have followed Van Til’s thinking but those who wrestle with it do so out of respect for the thinkers.
Even the claim that Van Til’s ideas are novel does not necessarily survive historical scrutiny. I don’t expect you (or the guest) to have studied post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics but if one studies the progression of thinking across the periods of the development of Reformed orthodoxy, the introduction of Cartesian thinking ended up having a profound effect on intellectual and theological approach. Without understanding this development it is careless to ignore the intellectual milieu when most thinkers were Christian in their thinking to a period in the 20th century where Christian thinking had been greatly influence by Enlightenment ideas. As one example, Van Til is in the tradition of Ectypal/Archetypal theology that had largely been displaced even though it was the predominant mode of distinguishing between the creature’s knowledge and the Creator’s knowledge of reality.
I’ll share in a separate comment an excerpt from Van Til from The Infallible Word that articulates what his primary concern was with respect to how man sees himself in a world created by God. This does not mean that man does not need to learn about the world that God created (science, arts, economics, social theory, etc) but we also deny that a creature does so in a place where he becomes the oversteer and knower of truth in a way that escapees that he is, in the end, a creature. Not only a creature, but one who fell in sin and whose faculties are not destroyed but are ethically hostile to his Creator. This is not something that can be inferred but only comes through Revelation.
Here are some notes from Van Til's Chapter from The Infallible Word. I'll let the reader decide whether Van Til was represented accurately in this interview. Much ink has been spilled on presuppositionalism, but Van Til wrote primarily in terms of a classical Archetypal/Ectypal distinction in theology that had been obscured in theology after the rise of Cartesianism. He is not wholly novel as averred.
How is natural theology necessary?
Scripture does not claim to speak to man in any other way than in conjunction with nature. God's revelation of Himself in nature combined with His revelation of Himself in Scripture form God's one grand scheme of covenant relationship of Himself with man. The two forms presuppose and complement one another.
It was necessary in the garden as the lower act of obedience learned from avoiding the tree of knowledge of good and evil man might learn the higher things of obedience to God. The natural appeared in the regularity of nature.
After the fall, the natural appears under to curse of God and not merely regular. God's curse on nature is revealed along with regularity. The natural reveals an unalleviated picture of folly and ruin and speaks to the need for a Redeemer.
To the believer the natural or regular with all its complexity always appears as the playground for the process of differentiation which leads ever onward to the fullness of the glory of God.
What is the authority of natural revelation?
The same God who reveals Himself in Scripture is the God who reveals Himself in nature. They are of the same authority even if the former is superior in clarity than the latter. We are analogues to God and our respect for revelation in both spheres must be maintained and it is only when we refuse to act as creatures that we contrast authority between natural and special revelation. What comes to man by his rational and moral nature (created in God's image) is no less objective than what comes to him through the created order as all is in Covenant relationship to God. All created activity is inherently revelational of the nature and will of God.
What is the sufficiency of natural revelation?
It is sufficient to leave men without excuse for their sin and denying the God they know they are created to worship but insufficient at revealing the grace of God in salvation. Natural revelation was never meant to function by itself (as above) but it was historically sufficient as it renders without excuse. God's revelation in nature is sufficient in history to differentiate between those who would and who would not serve God.
What is meant by the perspicuity of natural revelation?
God's revelation in nature was always meant to serve alongside His special revelation. God is a revealing God and the perspicuity of nature is bound up in the fact that He voluntarily reveals. Both natural and special revelation would be impossible if God remained incomprehensible as He is in Himself (archetypal theology). Man cannot penetrate God as He is Himself - he cannot comprehend God. But created man may see clearly what is revealed clearly even if he does not see exhaustively. Man need not have exhaustive knowledge in order to know truly and certainly.
God's thoughts about Himself are self-contained but man is an analogue who thinks in covenant relation to the One who created him. Thus man's interpretation of nature follows what is fully interpreted by God. Man thinks God's thoughts after him - not comprehensively but analogically.
The Psalmist doesn't declare that the heavens possibly or probably declare the glory of God. Paul does not say that the wrath of God is probably revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Scripture takes the clarity of God's revelation for granted at every stage of human history. The God who speaks in Scripture cannot refer to anything that is not already authoritatively revelational of Himself for the evidence of His own existence. Everything exists that is His creation.
It is no easier for sinners to accept God in nature than it is for them to accept Him in Scripture. The two are inseparable in their clarity. We need the Holy Spirit to understand both. Man must be a Christian to study nature in a proper frame of mind.
How does Greek natural theology and the natural theology of Kant result in denying any rationality higher than itself?
Neither allow analogical reasoning to understand the world. They start from nature and try to argue for a god who must be finite in nature. It starts with a "mute" universe that has no revelation and makes it revelational only with respect to the autonomous mind of man. No distinction is made between Creator and creature.
Kant's great contribution to philosophy consisted in stressing the activity of the experiencing subject. It is this point to which the idea of a Copernican revolution is usually applied. Kant argued that since it is the thinking subject that itself contributes the categories of universality and necessity, we must not think of these as covering any reality that exists or may exist wholly independent of the human mind. The validity of universals is to be taken as frankly due to a motion and a vote; it is conventional and nothing more.
Plato and Aristotle, as well as Kant, assumed the autonomy of man. On such a basis man may reason univocally (have the same mind as God) and reach a God who is just an extension of the creature or he may reason equivocally and reach a God who has no contact with him at all. Man is left with either God being part of nature (pantheism) or being so transcendent that He cannot get into nature (deism).
We're now left with a world where the scientist supposedly interacts with the physical world and can learn about the world apart from any reference to God and "ministers" who speak about God's revelation that has no reference to history and interaction with the world. Man is fractured intellectually where reason deals with things of the world and faith deals with things that cannot affect reason or the world.
The very idea of Kant's Copernican revolution was that the autonomous mind itself must assume the responsibility for making all factual differentiation and logical validation. To such a mind the God of Christianity cannot speak. Such a mind will hear no voice but its own.
That’s a fascinating show. As to the method I was trained in evidential apologetics at Biola while studying in stacks at Westminster seminary in Escondido CA. A presuppositional institution. It was closer than BIOLA, 90 minute drive versus a 20 minute drive. Westminster had a considerable collection of evidentialist books due to the librarian being in evidentialist(even though Presbyterian).
Which method we use its a big issue, some say relational evangelism is the only way, some say presupposition is the only way. I found on light train trips 30 minute one way to San Diego in my commute each day, you have about 15 minutes to talk to someone, evidentialism fits nicely since a single point is sufficient. Norman L Geisler the grandfather of apologetics said: “Evidentlist apologists are one steppers, Classical apologists or two steppers.”
Occasionally I built friendships and we could talk on the train for months, cumulatively.
Paul rarely had time for relational apologetics. In ACTS it is recorded that he routinely steps outside the synagogue doors and engages , he deolegmai’d the people passing by.
‘As was his practice’
The Greek verb διαλέγομαι (dialegomai) primarily means to engage in a dialogue or discussion, often involving reasoning or argumentation
In the end chapter 18 of the book of Acts Apollos:
..he greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he powerfully REFUTED the Jews in public, demonstrating by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.
At the same time our STANDARD handbook of apologetics at BIOLA(a Baptist institution), was written by a Catholic philosopher.
Peter Kreeft
Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions
In the 90s when I attended BIOLA there were no decent writings on bioethics from a Christian viewpoint, that were not Catholic. I have engaged since the 90s with “First Things” magazine. An intended political gathering for Roman Catholics and hard-core evangelical and conservative Jews. A lot of cross pollination there.
So much the Catholic who developed the initial view of the inflationary big bang.
“In the chapters to follow we will consider Lemaître’s conception of the relation between science and religion, and survey his exceptional contributions to cosmology, where he was a real pioneer. But to briefly summarize here, Lemaître’s cosmology was built in two phases. In the first, Lemaître found independently of Friedmann that Einstein’s equations admit non-static cosmological solutions. Simultaneously, he took into account American observations of galaxy velocities, to which he gave a physical meaning by interpreting them as clues to an expanding universe. In a second phase, Lemaître dared an even bolder hypothesis, which was in part a logical extension of the theory of the expanding universe. If the universe is expanding, he reasoned, in the past it had to have been much denser and, long ago, was condensed into a “primeval atom” whose successive splits have shaped it as it is now.”
I spent some time thinking about the episode and had some time to make a running attempt at an irenic response.
Speaking as a fool, I’m a retired Marine Officer with 21 years of service from the foxhole to the flag pole. I have over 14 years of executive experience in business. I have three Masters degrees in technical, military, and theological disciplines. Finally, I’ve been studying theology intensely (including philosophy) for 28 years and have been an Officer in the PCA for 15 years.
Bottom line up front – I find you well informed and helpful on many things and, when I criticize your posts it is not to dismiss you as a thinker.
Yet, I can’t help but notice how readily you hand wave and profoundly complicated theological and philosophical subjects in which you have little training and make sweeping conclusions.
When men criticize you about your thoughts on excarnational thinking they are not dismissing Charles Taylor as a thinker, they are criticizing your appropriation of his broader thoughts and the particular application you made. You ought to be able to have the humility to recognize that your observations may miss the mark in making a point.
When you recently wrote that the PCA and other denominations are “schismatics”, it’s another example of you making a sweeping generalization with the very kind of confidence you decry in this recent conversation.
In fact, it seems you picked this conversation out to confirm that you could confidently aver how obnoxious others are who have confidence in certain areas. How was disagreeing with you about your specific post about excarnational thinking an example of a thinker who digs in his heels and can’t think beyond a small footprint of though?
Let me ask you this humbly (and I do mean that): If I was trying to demonstrate how over-confident or missing the mark you were on City policy or conservative thought would you respect my choice of a man who has a Masters Degree in Economics and is working on his PhD?
I ask this because your guest’s apprehension of the state of Reformed theological training and of presuppositional thinking seemed to me to be more of an autobiographical reflection of his immaturity.
I write this not as a died-in-the-wool Van Tillian. I write it as someone who dialogs regulary and has wrestled with this ideas not merely as a student but in the world of men and women for almost 3 decades.
I’m not a fan of many of Keller’s disciples but I don’t recognize the gloss provided for either Keller or Van Til’s thought.
I didn’t attend Westminster Theological Seminary but do you not realize how insulting and dismissive of that school or even of so many men whom I know that think much more critically than averred.
Is it not ironic that your guest noted that in investigating a belief that someone must try to cast it in its best possible light but his description of presuppositions is swept away so as to leave any adherent in the heap of close-minded anti-historical automatons?
There are valid criticisms of some schools that have followed Van Til’s thinking but those who wrestle with it do so out of respect for the thinkers.
Even the claim that Van Til’s ideas are novel does not necessarily survive historical scrutiny. I don’t expect you (or the guest) to have studied post-Reformation Reformed dogmatics but if one studies the progression of thinking across the periods of the development of Reformed orthodoxy, the introduction of Cartesian thinking ended up having a profound effect on intellectual and theological approach. Without understanding this development it is careless to ignore the intellectual milieu when most thinkers were Christian in their thinking to a period in the 20th century where Christian thinking had been greatly influence by Enlightenment ideas. As one example, Van Til is in the tradition of Ectypal/Archetypal theology that had largely been displaced even though it was the predominant mode of distinguishing between the creature’s knowledge and the Creator’s knowledge of reality.
I’ll share in a separate comment an excerpt from Van Til from The Infallible Word that articulates what his primary concern was with respect to how man sees himself in a world created by God. This does not mean that man does not need to learn about the world that God created (science, arts, economics, social theory, etc) but we also deny that a creature does so in a place where he becomes the oversteer and knower of truth in a way that escapees that he is, in the end, a creature. Not only a creature, but one who fell in sin and whose faculties are not destroyed but are ethically hostile to his Creator. This is not something that can be inferred but only comes through Revelation.
Here are some notes from Van Til's Chapter from The Infallible Word. I'll let the reader decide whether Van Til was represented accurately in this interview. Much ink has been spilled on presuppositionalism, but Van Til wrote primarily in terms of a classical Archetypal/Ectypal distinction in theology that had been obscured in theology after the rise of Cartesianism. He is not wholly novel as averred.
How is natural theology necessary?
Scripture does not claim to speak to man in any other way than in conjunction with nature. God's revelation of Himself in nature combined with His revelation of Himself in Scripture form God's one grand scheme of covenant relationship of Himself with man. The two forms presuppose and complement one another.
It was necessary in the garden as the lower act of obedience learned from avoiding the tree of knowledge of good and evil man might learn the higher things of obedience to God. The natural appeared in the regularity of nature.
After the fall, the natural appears under to curse of God and not merely regular. God's curse on nature is revealed along with regularity. The natural reveals an unalleviated picture of folly and ruin and speaks to the need for a Redeemer.
To the believer the natural or regular with all its complexity always appears as the playground for the process of differentiation which leads ever onward to the fullness of the glory of God.
What is the authority of natural revelation?
The same God who reveals Himself in Scripture is the God who reveals Himself in nature. They are of the same authority even if the former is superior in clarity than the latter. We are analogues to God and our respect for revelation in both spheres must be maintained and it is only when we refuse to act as creatures that we contrast authority between natural and special revelation. What comes to man by his rational and moral nature (created in God's image) is no less objective than what comes to him through the created order as all is in Covenant relationship to God. All created activity is inherently revelational of the nature and will of God.
What is the sufficiency of natural revelation?
It is sufficient to leave men without excuse for their sin and denying the God they know they are created to worship but insufficient at revealing the grace of God in salvation. Natural revelation was never meant to function by itself (as above) but it was historically sufficient as it renders without excuse. God's revelation in nature is sufficient in history to differentiate between those who would and who would not serve God.
What is meant by the perspicuity of natural revelation?
God's revelation in nature was always meant to serve alongside His special revelation. God is a revealing God and the perspicuity of nature is bound up in the fact that He voluntarily reveals. Both natural and special revelation would be impossible if God remained incomprehensible as He is in Himself (archetypal theology). Man cannot penetrate God as He is Himself - he cannot comprehend God. But created man may see clearly what is revealed clearly even if he does not see exhaustively. Man need not have exhaustive knowledge in order to know truly and certainly.
God's thoughts about Himself are self-contained but man is an analogue who thinks in covenant relation to the One who created him. Thus man's interpretation of nature follows what is fully interpreted by God. Man thinks God's thoughts after him - not comprehensively but analogically.
The Psalmist doesn't declare that the heavens possibly or probably declare the glory of God. Paul does not say that the wrath of God is probably revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Scripture takes the clarity of God's revelation for granted at every stage of human history. The God who speaks in Scripture cannot refer to anything that is not already authoritatively revelational of Himself for the evidence of His own existence. Everything exists that is His creation.
It is no easier for sinners to accept God in nature than it is for them to accept Him in Scripture. The two are inseparable in their clarity. We need the Holy Spirit to understand both. Man must be a Christian to study nature in a proper frame of mind.
How does Greek natural theology and the natural theology of Kant result in denying any rationality higher than itself?
Neither allow analogical reasoning to understand the world. They start from nature and try to argue for a god who must be finite in nature. It starts with a "mute" universe that has no revelation and makes it revelational only with respect to the autonomous mind of man. No distinction is made between Creator and creature.
Kant's great contribution to philosophy consisted in stressing the activity of the experiencing subject. It is this point to which the idea of a Copernican revolution is usually applied. Kant argued that since it is the thinking subject that itself contributes the categories of universality and necessity, we must not think of these as covering any reality that exists or may exist wholly independent of the human mind. The validity of universals is to be taken as frankly due to a motion and a vote; it is conventional and nothing more.
Plato and Aristotle, as well as Kant, assumed the autonomy of man. On such a basis man may reason univocally (have the same mind as God) and reach a God who is just an extension of the creature or he may reason equivocally and reach a God who has no contact with him at all. Man is left with either God being part of nature (pantheism) or being so transcendent that He cannot get into nature (deism).
We're now left with a world where the scientist supposedly interacts with the physical world and can learn about the world apart from any reference to God and "ministers" who speak about God's revelation that has no reference to history and interaction with the world. Man is fractured intellectually where reason deals with things of the world and faith deals with things that cannot affect reason or the world.
The very idea of Kant's Copernican revolution was that the autonomous mind itself must assume the responsibility for making all factual differentiation and logical validation. To such a mind the God of Christianity cannot speak. Such a mind will hear no voice but its own.
That’s a fascinating show. As to the method I was trained in evidential apologetics at Biola while studying in stacks at Westminster seminary in Escondido CA. A presuppositional institution. It was closer than BIOLA, 90 minute drive versus a 20 minute drive. Westminster had a considerable collection of evidentialist books due to the librarian being in evidentialist(even though Presbyterian).
Which method we use its a big issue, some say relational evangelism is the only way, some say presupposition is the only way. I found on light train trips 30 minute one way to San Diego in my commute each day, you have about 15 minutes to talk to someone, evidentialism fits nicely since a single point is sufficient. Norman L Geisler the grandfather of apologetics said: “Evidentlist apologists are one steppers, Classical apologists or two steppers.”
Occasionally I built friendships and we could talk on the train for months, cumulatively.
Paul rarely had time for relational apologetics. In ACTS it is recorded that he routinely steps outside the synagogue doors and engages , he deolegmai’d the people passing by.
‘As was his practice’
The Greek verb διαλέγομαι (dialegomai) primarily means to engage in a dialogue or discussion, often involving reasoning or argumentation
In the end chapter 18 of the book of Acts Apollos:
..he greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he powerfully REFUTED the Jews in public, demonstrating by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.
At the same time our STANDARD handbook of apologetics at BIOLA(a Baptist institution), was written by a Catholic philosopher.
Peter Kreeft
Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions
In the 90s when I attended BIOLA there were no decent writings on bioethics from a Christian viewpoint, that were not Catholic. I have engaged since the 90s with “First Things” magazine. An intended political gathering for Roman Catholics and hard-core evangelical and conservative Jews. A lot of cross pollination there.
So much the Catholic who developed the initial view of the inflationary big bang.
“In the chapters to follow we will consider Lemaître’s conception of the relation between science and religion, and survey his exceptional contributions to cosmology, where he was a real pioneer. But to briefly summarize here, Lemaître’s cosmology was built in two phases. In the first, Lemaître found independently of Friedmann that Einstein’s equations admit non-static cosmological solutions. Simultaneously, he took into account American observations of galaxy velocities, to which he gave a physical meaning by interpreting them as clues to an expanding universe. In a second phase, Lemaître dared an even bolder hypothesis, which was in part a logical extension of the theory of the expanding universe. If the universe is expanding, he reasoned, in the past it had to have been much denser and, long ago, was condensed into a “primeval atom” whose successive splits have shaped it as it is now.”
THE BIG BANG
REVOLUTIONARIES THE UNTOLD STORY
OF THREE SCIENTISTS WHO
REENCHANTED COSMOLOGY
JEAN-PIERRE LUMINET
page 81
Lemaître was a Belgian priest