Cementing Over The Stairway To Heaven

No.263: June 20, 2025

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 a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with 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,

Today I would like to tie together some hanging threads in my writing over the past several years. That isn’t quite right. Not “hanging threads.” I think what I am going to do is point out how certain things are “rhyming.” And not in a good, harmonious way.

Perhaps it started with “When The Future Dries Up.” That was my first real crack at expressing my skepticism about the recent enthusiasm in Reformed theological circles for 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas. No, actually I’d already been “Doubting Thomas” long before that. I should start there.

My basic problem with Thomas is his neat (one might say naïve) separation of faith and reason, “supernatural” knowledge and “natural” knowledge. Thomas built a two-story house out of nature and grace. On the lower level you find the mundane world of human experience, which is known and governed by reason accessing natural law (or “natural revelation”). The upper level is where you find sublime (I don’t say that sarcastically: they are sublime) “heavenly” truths about God and salvation, and those are only known by faith accessing “supernatural” revelation. The stairway to heaven is initially paved by reason, which can lead a person up nearly—but not quite—to the upper floor, but you still need special grace to kick in to get you there in the end. This is simplistic, but enough to give a fairly decent sketch of the paradigm.

What’s the problem? Well, leaving aside the woefully inadequate grasp of the noetic effects of sin on the natural man (left to himself he stumbles around drunk and blind on the bottom floor and can’t even find the stairs, and, moreover, is dead set on not going upstairs even if he did), sooner or later somebody was bound to come along and argue that the upper floor is completely superfluous. Man is capable of grasping the natural world with his natural reason, bending it to his will, understanding it and exploiting it for his benefit (have you seen our technological advancement?); why, exactly, do we need an upper floor at all? It must be superstitious nonsense that there is an “up there.” Moreover, since reason is clearly supreme down “below,” why shouldn’t one assume it is supreme everywhere? Why shouldn’t it be the measure of all things? Why should I believe something that needs an extra boost of the “supernatural” to even reach? That seems the, well, reasonable thing to assume.

Meet Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who, alongside possessing the most ironic name of all time (“God With Us”?), cemented over the entry to Thomas’s stairway—those “proofs” to get you from the bottom step to the top step didn’t really work; not on their own, anyway. By sealing it up can we “make room for faith,” by which he disingenuously meant “protect” faith and the things of faith from the critical acid of rational critique (really: he did claim he was doing God a favor by leaving the upper floor undisturbed by the critical mind of man). Supernatural things can’t come downstairs, but reason can’t go upstairs, either. Kant’s absolute divide between the “noumenal” (upper floor) and “phenomenal” (lower floor) was handed to him on a ready-made silver platter by Thomas Aquinas himself, with his two-story construal of nature and grace. Kant secularized the late Medieval nature/grace scheme in service of Aufklärung (“Enlightenment”) philosophy.

The upshot is that suddenly God and faith and Scripture have nothing to do with human knowledge of the phenomenal world. We get along just fine without it. As Stanley Fish once put it, God was “kicked upstairs and out of sight.” Thus, the Enlightenment was nothing less than a modern revival of Epicureanism. (“Modern Paganism,” Peter Gay called it; see the opening chapters of N.T. Wright’s History & Eschatology for an incredibly impressive discourse on the Enlightenment as Epicureanism; Charles Taylor calls it the “immanent frame.”) We’re locked in Kant’s phenomenal realm—or Thomas’s ground floor, if you prefer. And that means we are on our own, and all we have is our reason to guide us. The Bible and faith is for knowledge of things on the upper floor, not a manual for how to think, live, and move on the lower.

That essay, “When The Future Dries Up” agitated quite a few people (well, among those aware of my existence). Rehabilitating (or revitalizing) Thomas is popular these days, and there are respectable institutions and organizations and guilds really devoted to it, even in the world of Reformed theology. Even a Baptist seminary professor like Matthew Barrett cannot get enough of Thomas Aquinas (for everything but the ecclesiology and sacramentology, it would appear). Strange times. And, look: I understand that it can be an interesting and nuanced and scholarly discussion. I know that differing interpretations of Thomism have always proliferated—which “Thomism” is often the more pertinent question. I also suspect Thomas isn’t really to blame for half the stuff people blame him for (—okay, that probably includes Immanuel Kant. I admit there were a lot of other factors, after all. Heh.) But then …

Stephen Wolfe publishes that terrible book. You may remember he said that he was building his “Case for Christian Nationalism” from “Reformed Theology” which, he further claimed, borrowed precisely this nature/grace scheme from … Thomas Aquinas.

Now, this is surely as unfair to Aquinas as it is to the Reformed tradition. But the fact of the matter is that Wolfe argued that political science and civic organization is entirely a matter of natural reason and “natural principles” and that the Bible really has nothing useful to say about it. Full stop. The Bible is for “heavenly,” not “earthly” ends. He then requisitioned the beautiful theological maxim, “Grace does not destroy nature” and wielded it as shield for the “natural inclinations” that form the bedrock basis of his ethno-nationalism (to wit: I don’t like, much less love, people who are different from me and I can form a homogenous nation if I please and fancy it the kingdom of God on earth). The Bible, the “upper floor” stuff, is not allowed to rearrange my intellectual and psychological furniture on the bottom floor. And [short summary of Wolfe’s X Account for the last three years] that’s “real” Reformed Theology and if you don’t know this you’re a moron. Boomer.

Excuse me while I reach for my emergency barf bag.

Let me remind you of my assessment of the problem (which, for whatever it’s worth, he never even tried to answer):

What difference does all this arcane theological hair-splitting make? Simply this: untethering reason from faith, nature from grace, is the road to Deism, naturalism, and/or materialism. At one point Bavinck summarizes a problem with various attempts at a “naturalistic” account of the image of God, and observes: “It erases the boundaries that exist between the state of integrity and the state of corruption, and allows man to keep intact the image of God, which exists in something purely formal, even after the fall” (RD II:539).

This expresses Wolfe’s precise view, and explains why, for him, the fall formally did nothing whatsoever to man’s natural inclinations (see ch.2). They remain trustworthy; indeed, the link between our fallen world and the original state is so undamaged that we can work from our own experience and our own inclinations all the way back to the Garden: “Thus,” he writes, “the basic, near-universal structures of our fallen world—and the instincts we have for these structures—help us to imagine what an unfallen world would be like” (87). Do you prefer people who are like you? It must be the original design. Do you see that humans need an authority figure to order their communities? It must be the original design. And so on.

No need to rehash all of that, except to note that illustrating the problem by way of quoting Mein Kampf turned out to be rather prescient on my part.

Moving on, I now find myself over the past month writing “Of Rocks and Trees,” and it dawns on me that I am explaining at great length to a Reformed systematic theology professor the problems involved in separating and “siloing” faith and reason, natural and supernatural knowledge. (If you don’t care to read it—but I think you should—those problems are: it’s unbiblical, it isn’t Reformed in the slightest, and it isn’t true—I guess the last one was redundant after the first.)

I am not alarmed that there is an ivory tower academic theological discussion going on. The Reformation and its relationship to Medieval theology is ripe for it—or maybe over-ripe by now and we should all move on to better things. But I’ll tell you what makes me uncomfortable: the complete lack of imagination I see among the Thomist Retrievalist/Natural Theology/Natural Law crowd for what the implications of their view might be. Rest assured: “We don’t need special revelation for natural knowledge!” has implications, and somebody is going to draw them. Immanuel Kant did.

And so has Stephen Wolfe. I’ve answered him at some length from a Neo-Calvinist (well, in this case, just plain old “Calvinist”), Bavinckian perspective (which does not conceive of nature and grace as a two-story house), but I do not recall seeing him answered or critiqued by anyone who champions Thomas’s nature/grace, natural/supernatural scheme—that is, seen him critiqued him on those grounds. Brad Littlejohn (when he was at Davenant) wrote a fairly critical (if still all-too-complimentary) review of Wolfe’s book that never even mentions Wolfe’s explicit appeal to Thomism to justify his methodology. I appreciate, even love, this wonderful paragraph:

In response, we must stress that the love of the familiar is only prima facie; not ultima facie. Wolfe says almost nothing about the capacity of our shared human nature to overcome the minor barriers of cultural and linguistic difference—never mind the implications of the gospel. The foreigner may be harder to love than the neighbor, but it need not take long for him to become a neighbor. Wolfe is right that grace does not destroy nature, to be sure; but grace seems almost an unwanted intrusion into a political imaginary containing many basic premises that are more at home in paganism, with its reflexive privileging of kinship bonds over the duties of universal humanity, and its drive to self-assertion rather than self-denial. For example, what Wolfe calls “natural aspirations for national greatness” (p. 171) looks suspiciously like what St. Augustine called libido dominandi.

But “grace seems an unwanted intrusion” for a reason. He has untethered the natural order from the supernatural on purpose, and paganism is all that is left. And he justifies it with appeal to the Thomistic nature/grace scheme. If Wolfe is wrong in this (as I’m sure he must be because there is no way Thomas Aquinas himself would approve of this nonsense), I want someone who embraces the paradigm to explain his false step—clearly and decisively (no scholastic sic et non labyrinth), so that a child can see it and understand it. Or, alternatively, does this case study actually expose a very real underlying vulnerability in Thomas’s system?

It seems to me Calvin’s answer is much simpler (not to mention biblical): we do need—desperately need—the Bible to illumine our “natural” knowledge, things like the definition of and duties to our neighbor as well as the role, realm, and nature of the State’s authority; that the noetic effects of sin are deep and real and our “natural inclinations” are corrupt and deceived; “nature” alone is not going to cut it. We need the Word to be a “lamp to our feet and a light to our path,” which is describing a “down here,” “bottom floor,” earthly reality. And, beyond Calvin, I simply wonder if Thomism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and perhaps “retrieving” it is a kind of naïve romanticism.

This came home to me quite viscerally while watching this exchange in James White’s “debate” (such as it was) with white supremacist apostate Corey Mahler:

Mahler: Is there truth in creation that can be discerned by reason and the other attributes—abilities of man given us by God?

White: Um, if you're talking about natural revelation and natural law there a lot of discussion about that. There's major distinctions there. Uh, ultimately Scripture is the only lens through which we are to look at creation itself. And so while there is truth revealed in creation it is always truth that must be first and foremost interpreted within the lens of Scripture. Most of the time, unfortunately, that proper arrangement gets reversed.

Mahler: What about the sort of truth that we usually call scientific truth, such as gravity? Can those be discerned from nature?

White: Well, they can be discerned from nature but the only way to understand them appropriately as to how they relate to other natural laws is, again, in light of the one Creator and his purposes revealed in Scripture.

Mahler: Would you say that we need Scripture, then, to know that fire burns when you stick your hand in it?

White: Um, no. Uh, but the consistency of understanding how that happens and why that happens comes from understanding that we are not in a random universe. In other words, it'll hurt tomorrow and the reason I can know that is because God created the universe in a certain fashion.

Mahler: So God has created rules that govern this universe, correct?

White: The only way we can understand properly— the fallen man can discover things. But if he does not have the foundational principles of God's creative decree in mind, you end up with all the absurdities that we're getting in science today, like scientists literally defending transgenderism and the arguments going on amongst atheists right now, which I find extremely humorous, about the same—the same issue.

Mahler: So God has created rules for this universe. Is man subject to the rules of the universe that God has created?

White: Well, we live in this world. We—every time we—if we try to rebel against the law of of gravity, you know, jump out of an airplane without a a parachute you'll see what the result is.

Mahler: So man cannot fly.

If you are not quite getting the gist, don’t feel bad. Mahler wants to argue that racial differences are the product of biological and sociological laws of nature—such that not even God can (or will) overcome. Man cannot fly, and black people cannot be sanctified to the level of a white person. The inferiority of brown people is akin to the laws of gravity. (I will here just note that Stephen Wolfe said on X that he “doesn’t take a side” in this debate. Do with that what you will.) And, remember, grace does not destroy nature. If it’s a natural law, grace can’t change it.

White handled himself very well in this debate. And despite not having a clue at the time where Mahler was trying to take this, his answer is the necessary one—the vitally necessary one: true knowledge and understanding of nature must be subject to the special revelation of God in the Scriptures. What would you do if you didn’t believe that? You’d get into an argument with Corey Mahler of all wretched and ignorant fools about the scientific “facts” of whether it is true that black people inherently have lower IQs than whites, or the percentages of crime committed by this or that people, or the history of transatlantic migration and settlement and who “owns” the land of a nation. You would “answer a fool according to his folly, and become like him” (Proverbs 26:4).

At the risk of tanking any future lucrative opportunities from the retrievalist project, I’m not shy to say that I am still waiting to hear what the upside is of “retrieving” Thomas’s Medieval nature/grace scheme and trying to fold it into Reformed theology, or, as all too many do, pretend it is Reformed theology simpliciter. Because from my vantage point, it was a liability when the Enlightenment came along and it seems a decided liability now that the Nazis are back—this time quoting scholastic theologians.

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