I realize after my previous post why no one will ever join me at Reformed Word dot org: I don’t know how to say what I mean in proper theological jargon! I am also afraid that what I am advocating is unique, which is probably not a good sign that others will come to the same conclusion. I’ve only made it half way through the Derek Thomas episode of Castle Church, but I have to write before it all slips away in a blur of work and children. Being autistic, I am very bad at laying out my thoughts in a way comprehensible to others, but I must try. I shall attempt to explain my understanding of Epistemology, what Dr. Thomas got wrong and what Church leaders ought to be doing.
When I read Van Til, I am come to a very different conclusion from many others, I think. His invention is called “Presuppositional Apologetics”, but the apologetics parts doesn’t seem that important. I boil down his approach to an extremely expansive take on Romans 1: that all people know God but willfully put down that knowledge, because they’d rather not. Moreover, this is true of worldly-Christians (read Arminian) or even the best of us, in that we think we’re being logical, but really we using pseudo-rationality to further our own ends. Van Til came to his conclusion rather alone because he has read so much Kant and Calvin, a rare combination. Kant tried to show that we know nothing about the Noumenal world, only that which is mitigated through our senses, a Phenomenal world. Van Til showed that even logic is not fool proof in the hands of the ungodly, and we must examine (like Kant) what are the necessary preconditions for Rationality to be possible, in order to maintain unassailable presuppositions.
What this means practically is that no system of thought is safe that does not rest on God’s Word, and even there we are prone to misinterpretation, and only by God’s grace do we know anything. After all, our knowledge is analogous to God’s knowledge: it is not perfect or exhaustive like His. God knows everything about everything, where it comes from, where it’s going, its actualities and its potentialities. In the Garden of Eden, Evidentialism failed Eve because she held God’s word and Satan’s word in equal weight, and her own decision cast the deciding vote. Absolutely Everything is moral and must always be regarded as such, even if we cannot decern the morality of it ourselves yet. The Word of God must be our Norming Norm, and no intellectual endeavor is trustworthy alone.
So when I hear Derek Thomas say that it’s right and proper for a pastor to be a lover of books, I’m a little mixed. Surely this is adiaphoros, neither good nor bad on its own, merely part of Paul’s personality. Peter said Paul’s writing were hard to understand, and though Paul wanted his parchments, John wouldn’t write with pen and ink what he had to say (3 John). If it is possible to do a thing as a heathen, then we cannot call that thing especially Christian. No unbeliever can preach a true sermon about Christ’s sufficiency. No unbeliever can be joyful and sorrowful in the midst of affliction and persecution. No unbeliever will reason that God breathed out His Word in the Bible or that His handiwork is on display in every atom and cell and galaxy. On the other hand, scholarship and the academy are done MOSTLY by heathens in a heathen way. Any study of books which can be done without drawing closer to Christ is at best adiaphora. Christian’s should love God with the whole mind, but is that really what’s going on? If you can do a thing and not feel convicted, awestruck and grateful, it is necessarily not a Christian thing.
Dr. Thomas calls this worldly aspect of theology “Philosophical Theology”. I suppose I think too much of the word Theology to permit such vain, not-Christ-saturated things to be called Theology. What I take from Van Til (and no one else seems to) is that we must make EVERY AREA of life inescapably Christian. If we can do science without God, we’re doing it wrong. If unbelievers can engage in New Testament Biblical Theology and Q-vs-Johannine Biblical Theology, then it’s not Biblical Theology. Am I wrong?
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