An Apologetic Thermopylae

No.241: December 20, 2024

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is usually a paid subscription feature but today’s is free. Please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

Merry Christmas a few days early! I am very pleased to share you with you that the latest issue of Reformed Faith & Practice, a publication of Reformed Theological Seminary, has at long last appeared. The issue consists mainly of the five presentations given at RTS’s Faith & Work Colloquium held last February. They are all worth reading. I will tell you that my contribution, beginning on page 32, is by far the most fun bit of theological writing I’ve ever undertaken. If the question interests you whether the products of our labors endure into the new heavens and the new earth (and, I daresay, it should interest you), I recommend cozying up to the fire and setting aside some time to read it. And I hope it helps to energize your own labors for God’s glory and your neighbor’s good.

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Speaking of theological writing, today I would like to follow up on a segment I wrote in Wednesday’s Quarter Inch, wherein I expressed exasperation with Andrew Walker’s attempts to champion natural law. In shorthand, I explained natural law as the view that one is able to ground objective moral norms from natural principles alone, without the aid of special revelation. Its cousin, “natural theology,” is the view that one can prove or establish the truth about God by way of natural principles alone, without the aid of special revelation. One can take issue with these definitions, but they are certainly defensible; to my mind, this is what “natural law” and “natural theology” has always meant.* My contention is that Dr. Walker is simply changing its meaning into something else entirely and that it is confusing and he should stop using this language.

* There are always caveats. Many of the early Reformed scholastics included natural theology as a category in their dogmatic systems, but it was not an exercise of “unaided” reason—it was an exercise of “believing” reason. By the end of the 18th century, that had changed and “natural reason” had been untethered from faith and made into something very much “unaided.”

These are longstanding and massive theological and intellectual questions that an alarming number of people (some of whom seem to have discovered the issues ten minutes ago) think can be resolved in the space of a Tweet or two. Since the very beginning Christian theologians have wrestled with the relationship between faith and reason, Holy Scripture and pagan philosophy, and the questions are really complicated and quite endless. Does Christianity have its own epistemology or theory of knowledge? Or does it stand in need of intellectual resources outside the “deposit of Faith”—say, a little supplementation from Aristotle or Plato? Is faith the end result of rational thinking or is it the prerequisite for rational thinking? Do we believe because we first understand, or do we understand because we first believe?

In the 20th century a Dutch theologian and philosopher by the name of Cornelius Van Til, deeply influenced by the neo-Calvinism of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, sought to clarify these questions, particularly as they relate to Christian apologetics. To say that his views were controversial would understate the matter; they decisively cut against the grain of prevailing mainstream opinion. Van Til relentlessly maintained that all human thought and all human “predication” rests on the Christian view of the world and the “self-attesting Christ of Scripture.” It would be impossible for me to unpack all that that might mean in this newsletter, but for now it means that the enterprise of “natural law” and “natural theology” is, according to him, a deviation from a consistently Christian view of human knowledge.

This, to put it mildly, upsets a lot of people. Every decade or so brings a renewed and energetic assault on Cornelius Van Til. People invested in the “retrieval” of the Medieval synthesis of Thomas Aquinas (i.e., “synthesizing” Christian thought with the philosophy of Aristotle) particularly have it out for Van Til. For example, The Davenant Institute published a whole volume critiquing Van Til. (You will see from James Anderson’s review, it was not a very compelling effort.) J.V. Fesko gave another crack at Van Til in his book, Reforming Apologetics. (James Anderson took a lengthy and worthwhile walk through that book, too.) Now Keith Mathison has published another: Toward a Reformed Apologetics: A Critique of the Thought of Cornelius Van Til. (No doubt James will have a crack at that one, too; he’s already done a video dialogue with Mathison about it.)

Westminster Seminary, Van Til’s institutional home, has published a collection of essays in defense of their man and his method. Actually, they published it but there was a printing error on some pages that needed fixing. The new corrected version should be out next month, and you can pre-order it here. I contributed a chapter on Herman Bavinck’s influence on Van Til.

Now, if you go on to social media, you will see a cohort of neophytes chortling about Van Til, posting little quotes and tidbits from him and his foes, usually with the implication of, “Man, this Van Til guy is a moron!” Look: people do not, decade after decade, devote the time and energy to interact with and critique and write whole books about a moron. They do this because Van Til was—and there really isn’t any other way to put this—brilliant. Substantive. Challenging. Deeply learned. Not at all without fault—I’ve been deeply critical of him at times, myself. But I bring this up to simply tell you that you may very safely ignore anyone who has anything to say about Van Til and related issues on Twitter. They do not know what they are talking about.

That was all just a preamble to what I wanted to say. For far too long, these debates have centered around what seem to me secondary intellectual matters. Bluntly: whether Van Til was fair to Thomas Aquinas or whether he was right about the Reformed Scholastics is interesting, but also irrelevant. The question is and should be: are Van Til’s ideas biblical? And it is on this question that his critics simply fail. They fail because they never even engage the salient biblical texts in any rigorous way.

I realize that is a pretty brash and bold statement. But it has the credit of being true. In 1995* Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. wrote a seminal journal article entitled, “Some Epistemological Reflections on 1 Corinthians 2:6-16.” It has been reprinted in a number of other places, most recently in this handsome volume of Gaffin’s collected shorter writings. In this essay, Gaffin painstakingly exegetes the text of Scripture and finds—with no guile or manipulation whatsoever—many, if not all, of Van Til’s own characteristic emphases. This is is not, to my mind, even debatable.

* As an aside, I wonder if Greg Bahnsen managed to read it before his death in December of that year. He would have adored it.

And this is the ground upon which the debate must play out. I have grown so tired of the stale, recycled nonsense about “fideism” and “circular reasoning” and “Van Til doesn’t think unbelievers can know anything” and “Did you see what he said about the Trinity?”

I am making this my new personal code: Unless you can show me (or point me to somebody who has shown) any fundamental flaw in Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.'s exegesis of 1 Corinthians 2:6-16, or (to be more reasonable) that you have read it, digested it, and understood it, I cannot and will not take your enthusiasm for natural law/theology seriously, nor your smug dismissals of Cornelius Van Til and "presuppositionalism."

Gaffin’s essay has not nearly garnered the attention it deserves, and I am going to do my utmost to make it a new litmus test. Van Til’s conception of faith and reason is essentially Paul’s conception of faith and reason. And if you are a Christian who really wants to continue bashing Van Til, then you are obliged to disentangle and differentiate his view from Paul’s. To do that, you will have to engage Gaffin and demonstrate how he has misread it or gotten it wrong.

The Persians once discovered that if you want to add Greece to your Empire you have to go through that narrow strip of land at Thermopylae, the “Hot Gates.” If you want to add Greek philosophy to Christian epistemology you have to go through a small 22-page journal article by Richard Gaffin.

Or, better, as he puts it in the essay: “1 Corinthians 2:6-16 is the death blow to all natural theology.”

Prove him wrong, or hold your peace.

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Last night we had the wonderful pleasure of watching Babette’s Feast again. It is such a strange, and strangely moving film. We are adding it to our annual “Christmas season” stack of films, even though it isn’t a holiday movie at all. It’s just a feasting film.

If you haven’t seen it, you really need to fix that. At its broadest level, it is a stunning critique of a theological nature/grace dualism—i.e., that the body and material things do not matter, and only “spiritual” things are important. Oh, boy, does humble Babette teach them otherwise!

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Thanks for reading The Square Inch Newsletter. Have a wonderful weekend and a Merry Christmas!