“The texts here assembled are ‘classics’—not in the sense that they answer all legitimate questions about Christianity, but that, when they were written, they made their readers think hard about the faith, and that they continue to do so today. This is a most worthy collection.”

Mark A. Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, University of Notre Dame

“This reader on the classical traditions of Christian apologetics is, to my knowledge, unmatched in basic compendia. It will equip and encourage thoughtful Christians to develop equally compelling defenses of the faith in our post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic, post-Postmodern era where global interdependencies plunge many into new varieties of suspicion, contempt, and hostility that demand reasonable and faith-filled encounter, dialogue, and debate.”

Max L. Stackhouse, De Vries Professor of Theology and Public Life Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary

“In an age of historical amnesia such as ours, nothing could be more helpful than to know how the church, in its long march through time, has addressed the opponents of Christian faith. This collection is superbly done and will bring much needed wisdom to our own times.”

David F. Wells, Distinguished Senior Research Professor, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

“Bill Edgar, one of evangelicalism’s most valued scholars and apologists, has given us in this work with Scott Oliphint a classic destined to be used for generations. I highly recommend it to all who are called to defend the faith.”

Chuck Colson, Founder, Prison Fellowship

“For years I have wanted a collection of primary sources in apologetics to use in my classes. Now we have an excellent one. Editors Edgar and Oliphint have made good choices in the selections used. A number of them are fascinating pieces rarely considered today, but very timely.”

John Frame, J. D. Trimble Chair of Systematic Theology and Philosophy, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando

“Understanding apologetics as explicating, affirming, and vindicating Christianity in the face of uncertainty and skepticism, Edgar and Oliphint have skillfully selected the best primary sources to introduce us to this ongoing task. Their work fills a gap in scholarly resources and highlights the strength, wisdom, and solidity of the prominent defenders of our faith.”

J. I. Packer, Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology, Regent College

CHRISTIAN

APOLOGETICS

PAST AND PRESENT

Christian Apologetics Past and Present: A Primary Source Reader (Volume 2, From 1500)

Copyright © 2011 by William Edgar and K. Scott Oliphint

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Amy Bristow

Cover photo: National Portrait Gallery and Bridgeman Art Library

Interior design and typesetting: Lakeside Design Plus

First printing 2011

Printed in the United States of America

The volume editors' Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Hardcover ISBN:                978-1-58134-907-8

ePub ISBN:                        978-1-4335-3169-9

PDF ISBN:                         978-1-4335-3167-5

Mobipocket ISBN:             978-1-4335-3168-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Christian apologetics past and present : a primary source reader / William Edgar and K. Scott Oliphint, eds.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-1-58134-906-1 (hc)

1. Apologetics—History—Sources.  I. Edgar, William, 1944–  II. Oliphint, K. Scott, 1955–  III. Title. BT1109.C57 2009

239—dc

222008050655

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

TS  23   22   21   20  19  18  17   16  15  14  13  12  11

14   13   12   11   10    9   8    7     6   5     4    3    2    1

Contents

Introduction to Volume 2

Part 1. The Reformation, Post-Reformation (Protestant), and Catholic Reformation

Part 1 Introduction

1. Martin Luther

2. John Calvin

3. Robert Bellarmine

4. John Owen

5. Follow-Up

Part 2. Modernity and the Challenge of Reason

Part 2 Introduction

6. Blaise Pascal

7. Joseph Butler

8. Jonathan Edwards

9. William Paley

10. Friedrich Schleiermacher

11. Follow-Up

Part 3. The Global Era: Christian Faith and a Changing World

Part 3 Introduction

12. Søren Kierkegaard

13. Abraham Kuyper

14. James Orr

15. Benjamin B. Warfield

16. G. K. Chesterton

17. J. Gresham Machen

18. Cornelius Van Til

19. C. S. Lewis

20. Hans Urs von Balthasar

21. Lesslie Newbigin

22. Francis A. Schaeffer

23. Follow-Up

Part 4. Issues Today and Tomorrow

Part 4 Introduction

24. Alvin Plantinga

25. Merold Westphal

26. Os Guinness

27. Jean-Luc Marion

28. William Lane Craig

29. Francis Collins

30. Follow-Up

General Index

Scripture Index

Introduction to Volume 2

In the first volume of Christian Apologetics Past and Present we presented primary texts from the close of the apostolic age until the eve of the Reformation. Here we move from the Reformation to the present age. Because of the limitations of space, we could only choose a handful of texts from among the vast numbers available. Further, the cost of obtaining permission for the many publications not yet in the public domain makes republishing all of them prohibitive. As a compromise we have added to the fuller texts a series of “follow-up” sections, briefly describing some of the significant apologists we had to omit, with a list of their major writings for further study. We hope this will reassure those who will rightly wonder why we made certain selections, or why their favorite apologist was not always featured!

As in volume 1, we provide an introduction to each major historical section, and then each chapter introduces its featured author, highlighting any significant fact bearing on the person and the text. The texts themselves are virtually untouched, including now-unconventional punctuation, though quotation marks have been Americanized, and the ligatures æ and œ are rendered ae and oe to match modern typography. Headings in readings are modified in form for greater uniformity, but not in content. Diagnostic questions follow each text, to prompt reflection or discussion.

Like the first volume, this one can be used in a variety of ways. It is ideal for classes on the history of apologetics. It can also work well for discussion groups. But we trust it will also be used by individuals who need resources for their own work.

We want once again to express our thanks to Jeffrey Waddington for his willingness to gather all of the material and keep it in one format, and also for his brilliant spade work in tracking down texts and obtaining permissions from the publishers. We especially want to thank our wonderful editors at Crossway for their careful, patient guidance through the many choices we had to make, particularly because of the often unwieldy body of material we are presenting. Thom Notaro’s concern for both details and the whole is deeply appreciated.

We offer these pages with a due sense of humility, knowing how much more could have been done. But we also offer them with gratitude, knowing that the authors represented here surround us as “a great cloud of witnesses,” whose work deserves to be better known by those who have come after them.

PART ONE

The Reformation, Post-Reformation (Protestant), and Catholic Reformation

Part 1 Introduction

We enter the very early years of the modern era. The so-called Middle Ages were on the wane.[1] Although it is oversimple to do so, we may speak of the emergence of two broad, overlapping movements: the Renaissance and the Reformation.

First, a new cultural mode emerged that would later be characterized as the Renaissance. It began much earlier than the Reformation, lasting roughly from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. The great poet Petrarch (1304–1374) was perhaps the first to reject the traditional way of organizing history and to call the previous era “medieval.” Indeed, it became common currency to speak of the Middle Ages somewhat pejoratively as a term for an intermediate period between the glorious classical past of Greek and Roman antiquity and the “modern” period in which the ancients were rediscovered and the authoritarianism of the church could be challenged. Petrarch so admired the contemporary Italian poet Dante that he deemed his work to be a renascita, a “rebirth” of poetry as good as or better than anything written in classical times.[2] The word conveys the idea that something new was happening in Europe, built on the foundation of antiquity, thus a new birth.

At the heart of the Renaissance spirit was humanism. A new respect for the humanities had spread across Europe. Humanism (not to be confused with the derogatory modern sense of that term) was a new form of learning that critically reexamined basic sources for education, society, and the church. Humanists wanted a return to the sources (ad fontes), and they looked for a rebirth of classical languages, of Greek rhetoric, of science and art. Many reasons lay behind the desire to look again at such fundamental issues as philosophy, learning, the arts, technology, and so forth. One reason is no doubt the devastating effects of the plague. Known as the Black Death, this pandemic was perhaps the worst in all recorded history. Some seventy-five million people died worldwide, up to fifty million of them in Europe. It began in the fourteenth century but was not finally eradicated until the seventeenth.[3] This phenomenon had the double effect of leading people to doubt the authority of the church and to search for new, more serious ways to live before God. In addition, civic humanism looked to ancient societies in order to learn how social organization might better generate the good. There was considerable incentive to rethink political life, particularly because there was such confusion at the time.

The second great movement, the Protestant Reformation, was at the heart of a renewal in apologetics. By the fifteenth century both decadence and some reforms were in evidence. Corruption was widespread in the church of the late Middle Ages. Bishops collected large revenues from their dioceses but rarely made pastoral visits to them. Many priests were uneducated, barely able to say the Mass, let alone understand it. When they did understand it, the Latin religious services often remained unintelligible to the faithful. Indeed, there was a great distance between clergy and laity.

Into this dark situation a number of individuals and movements came to reform the church. New religious orders were instituted, such as the Dominicans, who specialized in preaching, or the Brethren of the Common Life, who featured the “modern devotion,” cultivating the simple imitation of Christ. Remarkable figures such as John Wycliffe (ca. 1329–1384) in England and Jan Hus (ca. 1372–1415) stressed a return to the Bible, and a faith based on the love of Christ rather than conformity to rituals.

But none of these developments would have the enduring power of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. This defining moment not only for the church but also for the emergence of modern Europe was certainly connected to the Renaissance. Humanism itself inspired religious renewal. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) was the greatest humanist of the era. Among other accomplishments, he produced critical editions of various early Christian texts, including the Latin version of the New Testament (1516). In so doing he dismantled the monumental achievement of Jerome, whose Latin Vulgate and surrounding commentaries had been the standard for more than a thousand years. Though Erasmus would never formally embrace the Reformation, he contributed to it in many ways. For example, in Matthew 3:2, John the Baptist exhorts his Judean listeners with the word metanoeite, which the Vulgate had translated in terms of doing penance. Erasmus translated it resipiscite, which is closer to “repent.” Likewise, he pointed out the paucity of references to Mary in the Bible. For the 1519 edition of his text, Erasmus revised the Latin translation of Gabriel’s greeting to “gracious Mary,” rather than “Mary full of grace,” a change that made her less available as the repository for merit or good works held up in popular piety. Luther, Calvin, and most of the other Reformers were deeply influenced by Erasmus and his type of humanism.[4]

The rise of the city was also important. The late medieval city was known as the “foyer of modernity.”[5] The German Reformation is not conceivable without the economic improvements, empowerment of the laity, and secularity of the city, which was decreasingly under the direct control of the church. In the towns the individual began to have unprecedented responsibility. Social ties were less hierarchical and more horizontal. This had both negative and positive results. There was considerable disorientation because the traditional rules were more difficult to apply. There was anxiety and confusion. At the same time people were beginning to sense their importance and their accountability to God and to society in unprecedented ways.

Finally, the printing press played a crucial role in disseminating the ideas of the Reformation. By the sixteenth century the number of universities in Europe had risen from twenty to seventy. Not only was there greater education, but literacy was on the rise as well. The invention of the printing press was nothing less than a revolution because it enabled educated people and readers to discover the new ideas about religion. Martin Luther called print technology a gift from God. By the time he died (1546), over 3,400 editions of the Bible had appeared in High German and 430 in Low German. As is well known, Luther’s work contributed to the standardization of the German language and culture.

The Reformers thought not that they were innovating but rather that they were being faithful to the true foundation. Protestant sympathizer Jeanne d’Albret, in a famous quip to Cardinal Armagnac, affirmed, “I am not planting a new religion but restoring an old one.” Notably, the Reformers were returning to the authority of Scripture, even when its teaching appeared to contradict church tradition. The Reformation also stressed the accountability of the individual to God, along with the liberating grace of the gospel to everyone who believes. Three central convictions set off the Reformation from even the finest of the previous efforts at reform.

First, God is at the center of all of life. Previously it was thought that if one were faithful to church life and were generally decent, then paradise would be assured. Now putting God first—not only his requirements, but his love—was fundamental. Where do we learn about this God? Primarily in the Scriptures. Thus the authority of the Bible took on a radically new importance.

Second, one can have God at the center only if one is right with him. The Reformers stressed the gravity of sin but also the power of the gospel to save. Salvation is the free gift of Christ’s righteousness, rather than a process of improvement. Again, the knowledge of that way to God is through the Scriptures, which declares us justified before God when we believe.

Third, the Reformers understood Christ in a different way from their late-medieval forebears. Previously Christ was thought of as a terrifying judge, austere and unapproachable. One of the reasons Mary was elevated to such prominence is that she was more like a mother, more approachable. The Reformers understood Christ as coming to earth full of grace, “clothed in the gospel.” He was not only God but our elder brother.

These Reformation principles resonated with many people who had been confused about the most basic elements of the Christian religion. But the Reformation could not have occurred without the extraordinary work of many gifted leaders. In addition to Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin, a host of other figures, men and women, rose to greet the new ideas and spread them.[6] In most countries where the Reformation took a foothold there was opposition, some of it fierce. In France, despite the initial attraction to the Huguenots (the name given to Protestants there) by many in the population, and despite numerous attempts at peace and concord, the Reformation was rejected, and by the eighteenth century fierce persecutions forced tens of thousands to flee. Instead of promoting the cause of biblical religion, the French Enlightenment with its rationalistic skepticism would become a most influential force throughout Europe.

In England the Reformation took root but would struggle to define how far the cleansing from Rome could go. Scotland became Reformed under the leadership of the fiery John Knox. In the Netherlands, despite great opposition from the so-called Holy Roman Empire, the Protestant Reformation in its Calvinist expression gained much ground.

It must not be imagined that throughout all of these changes the Roman Catholic Church was quiescent. Partly in reply to Protestants, and partly because of its own desire for reform, the Church of Rome made strong efforts at its own overhaul. We shall label this movement—often known as the Counter-Reformation—the Catholic Reformation, especially since one cannot reduce it merely to reactions to Protestantism. To be sure, many attempts were made to condemn various Reformers and their writings. But also, various movements came into prominence seeking to redefine the Catholic Church and its spirituality. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) founded the Society of Jesus, known as the Jesuits. His followers were known for their respect for education and missions. The Council of Trent met from 1545 to 1563. Though it was opposed to doctrines such as the Protestant view of justification by faith alone and the supremacy of the Scriptures over conscience, yet it also contained elements of reformation, for example in worship and church discipline.

Again, a significant amount of apologetics during this time concerned the polemics between Protestants and Catholics. On the Protestant side, it was necessary to defend the Reformed religion against its detractors, especially those who thought it was a departure from the true church. One thinks of Luther’s famous statement at the imperial Diet of Worms in 1521: “Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.”[7] Or think of John Calvin’s “Address to King Francis I,” the preface to the Institutes of the Christian Religion, in which he defends the evangelical believers before the king against the charge of heresy.

Similarly, the Roman Catholic polemicists defended the papacy and the role of tradition against the Protestant approach. At the same time, the literature is broader than attacks against Protestantism. It includes philosophical treatises and devotional works. A crucial figure was Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). He did write polemical works against the Protestants,[8] but he is best remembered for his large output on metaphysical and theological subjects, where he argues for moderate realism.[9] Possibly the most powerful representative of Catholic apologetics was Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), the Italian Jesuit whose Disputations concerning the Controversies of the Christian Faith against the Heretics of This Age was as much a systematization of Catholic theology as it was an orderly account of the polemics of the past sixty years.[10] But he too contributed a good deal to positive, devotional literature. Indeed, the text we have chosen to present here is not a treatise against Protestantism, but a meditation on piety.

Accordingly, although a good deal of sixteenth-century apologetics involved polemics between the two major communions, Roman Catholic and Protestant (the Orthodox world was considerably separate), some traditional apologetics was done as well. In France, on the Protestant side, Philippe de Mornay (1549–1623) explained his method of reaching out to pagans and Jews in Truth of the Christian Religion (1581). The Roman Catholic Pierre Charron (1541–1603) defended the existence of God from the self-refuting nature of atheism, the bankruptcy of non-Christian religions, and the inability of Protestants to reason successfully without the church, in The Three Truths (1595).

In Italy and Spain, which were not much affected by the Reformation, one could find various works against the Averroists, who argued that Islam was compatible with Aristotle and, by implication, was compatible with the Christian religion. Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) wrote a remarkable, irenic apologetics summa, On the Truth of the Christian Faith (1543). Somewhat similar to the first book of Savonarola’s Triumph of the Cross (1497), presented in volume 1, there are broad discussions of God and the human soul, of the main Christian mysteries—the Trinity, the Incarnation, and others—and then two dialogues. The first is between a Christian and a Jew, discussing the Old Testament prophecies, and the second is between a Christian and a Muslim, discussing the Qur’an. Finally, the treatise argues for the superiority of the Christian religion over all others.

Apologetics in the medieval period was quite varied, as we have seen. The Roman Catholic Church reached the apex of its theological output with a number of other remarkable scholars, including Anselm, Abelard, and, supremely, Thomas Aquinas. It is fair to say that most often, theology and apologetics overlapped so much that they were almost equivalent. Disputations were frequent but mostly between various understandings of Christian problems: the place of reason, the authority of the Fathers, mystical theology, doctrinal orthodoxy, and so forth. The only objections to the faith from the outside that were carefully studied were typically from Jews or Muslims (“Saracens”).

At the dawn of the modern era, all this was changing. To be sure, in the sixteenth century the major disputes were internecine, since almost all scholars believed in the Christian faith. Even the skeptical Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) felt that we could live with paradoxes because, in the end, we may rest in the authority of the church. Yet there were winds of change, so that by the seventeenth century we find, alongside the development of post-Reformation orthodoxy, the rise of deism, indifference, Socinianism, and, of course, the force of the Enlightenment.

1. Although controversial, Johan Huizinga's volume The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1954) indicates the number of ways in which spiritual and cultural trends were on the decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe. He finds there that faith becomes superstition, beauty becomes ostentation, and courtly love becomes formalist. Style replaces substance. In theology confidence in God is diminished.

2. The word Renaissance was coined in the nineteenth century by French scholars. See J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994).

3. See David Herlihy and Samuel K. Cohn Jr., The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

4. Of course, Luther was disappointed that Erasmus would not join the Protestant movement, and they also disagreed about free will. Yet Luther admired Erasmus no end and made use of his New Testament translation for his own German Bible.

5. Jacques Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l'Au-delà (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1980), 430.

6. Because the Protestant Reformation is one of the most richly mined fields in historical studies, there are many excellent accounts of it. Carter Lindberg's The European Reformations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) presents a thorough and balanced account of the various wings of the Reformation, from Germany to France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History (New York: Viking, 2003) places the Reformation in the context of European social and cultural issues. For a nice, succinct presentation of the Reformation and its relevance for today, see Carl R. Trueman, Reformation: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Dundas, ON: Joshua, 2000). Countless studies on different aspects and different personages exist as well.

7. "Speech at the Diet of Worms" (1521), in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (New York: Wilbur B. Ketcham, 1895), 186.

8. See, for example, his Defensio catholicae fidei contra anglicanae sectae errors (1613). It was a treatise dedicated to the princes of Europe, arguing against the oath of allegiance required by James I of his subjects.

9. See his Disputationes metaphysicae (1597).

10. Three vols., 1586, 1588, 1593. We know of no English translation of this work.

CHAPTER 1

Martin Luther

(1483–1546)

Because so much has been written about Martin Luther, and so much is known, we will confine our biographical comments to providing an introductory context for the work excerpted below.

Luther was born in Eiselben, Germany, in 1483 and died in the same city in 1546. Well educated and destined, according to his father’s wishes, for a career in law, Luther changed his course in 1505 when a terrifying experience caused him to commit himself to the ministry.[1] In that year, he entered the monastery of the Augustinian Hermits in Erfurt and was ordained a priest in 1507. By 1511 Luther became a doctor of theology. Having previously lectured at the (then new) University of Wittenberg, Luther became a professor of that institution, and he maintained that post until his death.

It was the Peasants’ War that changed the way many would understand the Reformation. Because of the war, Erasmus turned against Luther. Luther responded with perhaps his best theological treatise, The Bondage of the Will (1525). During the course of his life Luther completed a translation of the entirety of Scripture and wrote biblical commentaries, theological works, and the Great Catechism for pastors, as well as a Short Catechism for broader use.

In 1546, nearly thirty years after nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg, Luther was buried at that same church. His influence cannot be overestimated, both in Catholic and Protestant circles.

Luther is best known as the man who sparked the Protestant Reformation. Dissatisfied with the corruption of the church that he witnessed as a pastor, he determined to challenge many of its practices, initially, by nailing Ninety-Five Theses to the castle church door of the University of Wittenberg. The castle church door was the standard location for announcements and for disputations such as this to be posted. Luther also sent the theses to the archbishop, who, together with his councillors, reviewed them. The councillors concluded that elements of Luther’s theses were in direct opposition to church teaching and thus were heretical. Their report, together with Luther’s theses, was then sent to the pope. Following this conciliar judgment, a series of debates, disputations, and councils ensued in which Luther’s challenges to the church were taken up. Facing some of the most formidable theologians of his time, Luther was ordered to recant his views and to submit himself to the authority of the church.

While debates are ongoing as to the exact time of Luther’s “conversion,” there is little doubt that his definitive break with Rome took place over the course of the year 1520, in which the work excerpted below was written. During that year, Luther wrote three works that move definitively toward a Reformation of the church. The first is an appeal to the emperor (also meant to stir the laity) to do away with the authority of the pope, masses for the dead, and other Romanist teachings. The second work, addressed primarily for the clergy, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, is Luther’s exposition and denial of the efficacy of the Romanist sacramental system, particularly focused on the Romanist view of the sacrament of communion. Luther denies transubstantiation and argues for communion in “both kinds,” that is, partaking of both bread and wine (in the Romanist system, only the priest partakes of the wine).

Luther’s third work, Concerning Christian Liberty (or On Christian Freedom), written in the fall of 1520, is the one we have included here. It extols one of Luther’s central theological themes—justification by grace through faith, and not by works. Though, as we have said, these three works mark Luther as a Reformer, it will become clear below that Luther does not envision himself, at this point, as anything but a priest of the church. He is in no way hostile toward Pope Leo X, to whom this work is addressed, and he seeks to argue as one whose allegiance is still within the Romanist church. Note, for example:

Wherefore, most excellent Leo, I beseech you to accept my vindication, made in this letter, and to persuade yourself that I have never thought any evil concerning your person; further, that I am one who desires that eternal blessing may fall to your lot, and that I have no dispute with any man concerning morals, but only concerning the word of truth. In all other things I will yield to any one, but I neither can nor will forsake and deny the word. He who thinks otherwise of me, or has taken in my words in another sense, does not think rightly, and has not taken in the truth.[2]

The context for Concerning Christian Liberty includes the fact that, in June of the same year, Luther was already censured by the pope as heretical. His books were ordered burned and he was given sixty days to recant his views. Though he appeals to Pope Leo in this work, it is clear that the relationship between him and the pope is all but broken. Luther has not recanted his views, and instead of burning his works, he later (in December) burns the papal bull that declares him a heretic. Clearly, Luther’s goal in all of his writings to this point was to reform the church, not to conform to what he saw to be unbiblical teachings propagated within it.

As Luther explains to the pope, he is not interested in attacking the pope’s person. He is, however, concerned with the deep and abiding corruption that seems to persist in the church over which this pope is the head. Luther, in other words, distinguishes between the person of the pope and the church, which is itself, according to Luther, corrupt.

Your see, however, which is called the Court of Rome, and which neither you nor any man can deny to be more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom, and quite, as I believe, of a lost, desperate, and hopeless impiety, this I have verily abominated, and have felt indignant that the people of Christ should be cheated under your name and the pretext of the Church of Rome; and so I have resisted, and will resist, as long as the spirit of faith shall live in me. Not that I am striving after impossibilities, or hoping that by my labours alone, against the furious opposition of so many flatterers, any good can be done in that most disordered Babylon; but that I feel myself a debtor to my brethren, and am bound to take thought for them, that fewer of them may be ruined, or that their ruin may be less complete, by the plagues of Rome. For many years now, nothing else has overflowed from Rome into the world—as you are not ignorant—than the laying waste of goods, of bodies, and of souls, and the worst examples of all the worst things. These things are clearer than the light to all men; and the Church of Rome, formerly the most holy of all Churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell; so that not even antichrist, if he were to come, could devise any addition to its wickedness.[3]

Clearly Luther sees himself as a reformer at this point, and he is convinced that the church needs significant reform.

Is it not true that there is nothing under the vast heavens more corrupt, more pestilential, more hateful, than the Court of Rome? She incomparably surpasses the impiety of the Turks, so that in very truth she, who was formerly the gate of heaven, is now a sort of open mouth of hell, and such a mouth as, under the urgent wrath of God, cannot be blocked up; one course alone being left to us wretched men: to call back and save some few, if we can, from that Roman gulf.[4]

In August of 1518, Luther met with Cardinal Cajetan, the papal legate in Wittenberg. Cajetan had established himself as an able Romanist theologian. He had been given the task of meeting with Luther in Augsburg in order to convince him to recant those teaching which opposed the Romanist church. Luther describes his discussion with Cajetan to the pope this way:

I believe it is known to you in what way Cardinal Cajetan, your imprudent and unfortunate, nay unfaithful, legate, acted towards me. When, on account of my reverence for your name, I had placed myself and all that was mine in his hands, he did not so act as to establish peace, which he could easily have established by one little word, since I at that time promised to be silent and to make an end of my case, if he would command my adversaries to do the same. But that man of pride, not content with this agreement, began to justify my adversaries, to give them free licence, and to order me to recant, a thing which was certainly not in his commission.[5]

Included in Luther’s introductory letter to Pope Leo is his assessment of some of the discussions and debates that preceded the writing of this work. John Eck, an able and astute Romanist theologian, had studied and critiqued Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in some detail. By the summer of 1519, Eck and Luther were engaged in an official debate, the Leipzig Disputation, wherein they discussed such matters as penance, purgatory, and papal authority. So, according to Luther:

While I was making some advance in these studies, Satan opened his eyes and goaded on his servant John Eccius, that notorious adversary of Christ, by the unchecked lust for fame, to drag me unexpectedly into the arena, trying to catch me in one little word concerning the primacy of the Church of Rome, which had fallen from me in passing. That boastful Thraso,[6] foaming and gnashing his teeth . . .[7]

Luther’s Concerning Christian Liberty is an apologetic work. There are two important aspects about this apologetic that should not escape our attention. First, it is a theological apologetic. Luther is not engaging discussions such as the existence of God or the possibility of miracles. Rather, he is attempting to purify, to reform, that which calls itself the church of Jesus Christ. Second, we should note that there is, always and everywhere, a need for apologetics within the church. While much of apologetics deals with rank unbelief, that unbelief, even if in nascent form and shrouded in Christian terminology, can take its place within the church itself (since elements of unbelief remain within every Christian) to such an extent that the urgent need of the hour is to expunge such teaching from Christ’s church.

Luther was a pastor-theologian, concerned to stand on the authority of Scripture alone in order that his sheep might grasp the centrality of grace in the gospel of Christ. This work is a defense of that grace-soaked gospel against all attempts to mix with it the vinegar of the Christian’s own sin-tainted efforts.

1. Accounts differ as to what drove Luther to the monastery. Possibilities offered by historians are (1) a bolt of lightning that almost killed him, (2) a lightning strike that killed his friend, and (3) an abusive childhood.

2. Martin Luther, "Concerning Christian Liberty," trans. R. S. Grignon, in The Five-Foot Shelf of Books, The Harvard Classics 36 (New York: P. F. Collier, 1910), 354–55.

3. Ibid., 355.

4. Ibid., 356.

5. Ibid., 357.

6. A foolish soldier.

7. Ibid., 357.

Concerning Christian Liberty

Part 2

Beginning of the Treatise*

Christian faith has appeared to many an easy thing; nay, not a few even reckon it among the social virtues, as it were; and this they do because they have not made proof of it experimentally, and have never tasted of what efficacy it is. For it is not possible for any man to write well about it, or to understand well what is rightly written, who has not at some time tasted of its spirit, under the pressure of tribulation; while he who has tasted of it, even to a very small extent, can never write, speak, think, or hear about it sufficiently. For it is a living fountain, springing up into eternal life, as Christ calls it in John iv.

Now, though I cannot boast of my abundance, and though I know how poorly I am furnished, yet I hope that, after having been vexed by various temptations, I have attained some little drop of faith, and that I can speak of this matter, if not with more elegance, certainly with more solidity, than those literal and too subtle disputants who have hitherto discoursed upon it without understanding their own words. That I may open then an easier way for the ignorant—for these alone I am trying to serve—I first lay down these two propositions, concerning spiritual liberty and servitude:—

A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.

Although these statements appear contradictory, yet, when they are found to agree together, they will make excellently for my purpose. They are both the statements of Paul himself, who says, “Though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all” (1 Cor. ix. 19), and “Owe no man anything, but to love one another” (Rom. xiii. 8). Now love is by its own nature dutiful and obedient to the beloved object. Thus even Christ, though Lord of all things, was yet made of a woman; made under the law; at once free and a servant; at once in the form of God and in the form of a servant.

Let us examine the subject on a deeper and less simple principle. Man is composed of a twofold nature, a spiritual and a bodily. As regards the spiritual nature, which they name the soul, he is called the spiritual, inward, new man; as regards the bodily nature, which they name the flesh, he is called the fleshly, outward, old man. The Apostle speaks of this: “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Cor. iv. 16). The result of this diversity is that in the Scriptures opposing statements are made concerning the same man, the fact being that in the same man these two men are opposed to one another; the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh (Gal. v. 17).

We first approach the subject of the inward man, that we may see by what means a man becomes justified, free, and a true Christian; that is, a spiritual, new, and inward man. It is certain that absolutely none among outward things, under whatever name they may be reckoned, has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or liberty, nor, on the other hand, unrighteousness or slavery. This can be shown by an easy argument.

What can it profit the soul that the body should be in good condition, free, and full of life; that it should eat, drink, and act according to its pleasure; when even the most impious slaves of every kind of vice are prosperous in these matters? Again, what harm can ill-health, bondage, hunger, thirst, or any other outward evil, do to the soul, when even the most pious of men and the freest in the purity of their conscience, are harassed by these things? Neither of these states of things has to do with the liberty or the slavery of the soul.

And so it will profit nothing that the body should be adorned with sacred vestments, or dwell in holy places, or be occupied in sacred offices, or pray, fast, and abstain from certain meats, or do whatever works can be done through the body and in the body. Something widely different will be necessary for the justification and liberty of the soul, since the things I have spoken of can be done by any impious person, and only hypocrites are produced by devotion to these things. On the other hand, it will not at all injure the soul that the body should be clothed in profane raiment, should dwell in profane places, should eat and drink in the ordinary fashion, should not pray aloud, and should leave undone all the things above mentioned, which may be done by hypocrites.

And, to cast everything aside, even speculation, meditations, and whatever things can be performed by the exertions of the soul itself, are of no profit. One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life, justification, and Christian liberty; and that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of Christ, as He says, “I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in Me shall not die eternally” (John xi. 25), and also, “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John viii. 36), and, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matt. iv. 4).

Let us therefore hold it for certain and firmly established that the soul can do without everything except the word of God, without which none at all of its wants are provided for. But, having the word, it is rich and wants for nothing, since that is the word of life, of truth, of light, of peace, of justification, of salvation, of joy, of liberty, of wisdom, of virtue, of grace, of glory, and of every good thing. It is on this account that the prophet in a whole Psalm (Psalm cxix), and in many other places, sighs for and calls upon the word of God with so many groanings and words.

Again, there is no more cruel stroke of the wrath of God than when He sends a famine of hearing His words (Amos viii. 11), just as there is no greater favour from Him than the sending forth of His word, as it is said, “He sent His word and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions” (Psalm cvii. 20). Christ was sent for no other office than that of the word; and the order of Apostles, that of bishops, and that of the whole body of the clergy, have been called and instituted for no object but the ministry of the word.

But you will ask, What is this word, and by what means is it to be used, since there are so many words of God? I answer, The Apostle Paul (Rom. i.) explains what it is, namely the Gospel of God, concerning His Son, incarnate, suffering, risen, and glorified, through the Spirit, the Sanctifier. To preach Christ is to feed the soul, to justify it, to set it free, and to save it, if it believes the preaching. For faith alone and the efficacious use of the word of God, bring salvation. “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved” (Rom. x. 9); and again, “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” (Rom. x. 4), and “The just shall live by faith” (Rom. i. 17). For the word of God cannot be received and honoured by any works, but by faith alone. Hence it is clear that as the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works. For if it could be justified by any other means, it would have no need of the word, nor consequently of faith.

But this faith cannot consist at all with works; that is, if you imagine that you can be justified by those works, whatever they are, along with it. For this would be to halt between two opinions, to worship Baal, and to kiss the hand to him, which is a very great iniquity, as Job says. Therefore, when you begin to believe, you learn at the same time that all that is in you is utterly guilty, sinful, and damnable, according to that saying, “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. iii. 23), and also: “There is none righteous, no, not one; they are all gone out of the way; they are together become unprofitable: there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Rom. iii. 10–12). When you have learnt this, you will know that Christ is necessary for you, since He has suffered and risen again for you, that, believing on Him, you might by this faith become another man, all your sins being remitted, and you being justified by the merits of another, namely of Christ alone.

Since then this faith can reign only in the inward man, as it is said, “With the heart man believeth unto righteousness” (Rom. x. 10); and since it alone justifies, it is evident that by no outward work or labour can the inward man be at all justified, made free, and saved; and that no works whatever have any relation to him. And so, on the other hand, it is solely by impiety and incredulity of heart that he becomes guilty and a slave of sin, deserving condemnation, not by any outward sin or work. Therefore the first care of every Christian ought to be to lay aside all reliance on works, and strengthen his faith alone more and more, and by it grow in the knowledge, not of works, but of Christ Jesus, who has suffered and risen again for him, as Peter teaches (1 Peter v.) when he makes no other work to be a Christian one. Thus Christ, when the Jews asked Him what they should do that they might work the works of God, rejected the multitude of works, with which He saw that they were puffed up, and commanded them one thing only, saying, “This is the work of God: that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent”; “for Him hath God the Father sealed” (John vi. 27, 29).

Hence a right faith in Christ is an incomparable treasure, carrying with it universal salvation and preserving from all evil, as it is said, “He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” (Mark xvi. 16). Isaiah, looking to this treasure, predicted, “The consumption decreed shall overflow with righteousness. For the Lord God of hosts shall make a consumption, even determined (verbum abbreviatum et consummans), in the midst of the land” (Isa. x. 22, 23). As if he said, “Faith, which is the brief and complete fulfilling of the law, will fill those who believe with such righteousness that they will need nothing else for justification.” Thus, too, Paul says, “For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness” (Rom. x. 10).

But you ask how it can be the fact that faith alone justifies, and affords without works so great a treasure of good things, when so many works, ceremonies, and laws are prescribed to us in the Scriptures? I answer, Before all things bear in mind what I have said: that faith alone without works justifies, sets free, and saves, as I shall show more clearly below.

Meanwhile it is to be noted that the whole Scripture of God is divided into two parts: precepts and promises. The precepts certainly teach us what is good, but what they teach is not forthwith done. For they show us what we ought to do, but do not give us the power to do it. They were ordained, however, for the purpose of showing man to himself, that through them he may learn his own impotence for good and may despair of his own strength. For this reason they are called the Old Testament, and are so.

For example, “Thou shalt not covet,” is a precept by which we are all convicted of sin, since no man can help coveting, whatever efforts to the contrary he may make. In order therefore that he may fulfil the precept, and not covet, he is constrained to despair of himself and to seek elsewhere and through another the help which he cannot find in himself; as it is said, “O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in Me is thine help” (Hosea xiii. 9). Now what is done by this one precept is done by all; for all are equally impossible of fulfilment by us.

Now when a man has through the precepts been taught his own impotence, and become anxious by what means he may satisfy the law—for the law must be satisfied, so that no jot or tittle of it may pass away, otherwise he must be hopelessly condemned—then, being truly humbled and brought to nothing in his own eyes, he finds in himself no resource for justification and salvation.

Then comes in that other part of Scripture, the promises of God, which declare the glory of God, and say, “If you wish to fulfil the law, and, as the law requires, not to covet, lo! believe in Christ, in whom are promised to you grace, justification, peace, and liberty.” All these things you shall have, if you believe, and shall be without them if you do not believe. For what is impossible for you by all the works of the law, which are many and yet useless, you shall fulfil in an easy and summary way through faith, because God the Father has made everything to depend on faith, so that whosoever has it has all things, and he who has it not has nothing. “For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that He might have mercy upon all” (Rom. xi. 32). Thus the promises of God give that which the precepts exact, and fulfil what the law commands; so that all is of God alone, both the precepts and their fulfilment. He alone commands; He alone also fulfils. Hence the promises of God belong to the New Testament; nay, are the New Testament.

Now, since these promises of God are words of holiness, truth, righteousness, liberty, and peace, and are full of universal goodness, the soul, which cleaves to them with a firm faith, is so united to them, nay, thoroughly absorbed by them, that it not only partakes in, but is penetrated and saturated by, all their virtues. For if the touch of Christ was healing, how much more does that most tender spiritual touch, nay, absorption of the word, communicate to the soul all that belongs to the word! In this way therefore the soul, through faith alone, without works, is from the word of God justified, sanctified, endued with truth, peace, and liberty, and filled full with every good thing, and is truly made the child of God, as it is said, “To them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name” (John i. 12).

From all this it is easy to understand why faith has such great power, and why no good works, nor even all good works put together, can compare with it, since no work can cleave to the word of God or be in the soul. Faith alone and the word reign in it; and such as is the word, such is the soul made by it, just as iron exposed to fire glows like fire, on account of its union with the fire. It is clear then that to a Christian man his faith suffices for everything, and that he has no need of works for justification. But if he has no need of works, neither has he need of the law; and if he has no need of the law, he is certainly free from the law, and the saying is true, “The law is not made for a righteous man” (1 Tim. i. 9). This is that Christian liberty, our faith, the effect of which is, not that we should be careless or lead a bad life, but that no one should need the law or works for justification and salvation.

Let us consider this as the first virtue of faith; and let us look also to the second. This also is an office of faith: that it honours with the utmost veneration and the highest reputation Him in whom it believes, inasmuch as it holds Him to be truthful and worthy of belief. For there is no honour like that reputation of truth and righteousness with which we honour Him in whom we believe. What higher credit can we attribute to any one than truth and righteousness, and absolute goodness? On the other hand, it is the greatest insult to brand any one with the reputation of falsehood and unrighteousness, or to suspect him of these, as we do when we disbelieve him.

Thus the soul, in firmly believing the promises of God, holds Him to be true and righteous; and it can attribute to God no higher glory than the credit of being so. The highest worship of God is to ascribe to Him truth, righteousness, and whatever qualities we must ascribe to one in whom we believe. In doing this the soul shows itself prepared to do His whole will; in doing this it hallows His name, and gives itself up to be dealt with as it may please God. For it cleaves to His promises, and never doubts that He is true, just, and wise, and will do, dispose, and provide for all things in the best way. Is not such a soul, in this its faith, most obedient to God in all things? What commandment does there remain which has not been amply fulfilled by such an obedience? What fulfilment can be more full than universal obedience? Now this is not accomplished by works, but by faith alone.

On the other hand, what greater rebellion, impiety, or insult to God can there be, than not to believe His promises? What else is this, than either to make God a liar, or to doubt His truth—that is, to attribute truth to ourselves, but to God falsehood and levity? In doing this, is not a man denying God and setting himself up as an idol in his own heart? What then can works, done in such a state of impiety, profit us, were they even angelic or apostolic works? Rightly hath God shut up all, not in wrath nor in lust, but in unbelief, in order that those who pretend that they are fulfilling the law by works of purity and benevolence (which are social and human virtues) may not presume that they will therefore be saved, but, being included in the sin of unbelief, may either seek mercy, or be justly condemned.

But when God sees that truth is ascribed to Him, and that in the faith of our hearts He is honoured with all the honour of which He is worthy, then in return He honours us on account of that faith, attributing to us truth and righteousness. For faith does truth and righteousness in rendering to God what is His; and therefore in return God gives glory to our righteousness. It is true and righteous that God is true and righteous; and to confess this and ascribe these attributes to Him, this it is to be true and righteous. Thus He says, “Them that honour Me I will honour, and they that despise Me shall be lightly esteemed” (1 Sam. ii. 30). And so Paul says that Abraham’s faith was imputed to him for righteousness, because by it he gave glory to God; and that to us also, for the same reason, it shall be imputed for righteousness, if we believe (Rom. iv.).

The third incomparable grace of faith is this: that it unites the soul to Christ, as the wife to the husband, by which mystery, as the Apostle teaches, Christ and the soul are made one flesh. Now if they are one flesh, and if a true marriage—nay, by far the most perfect of all marriages—is accomplished between them (for human marriages are but feeble types of this one great marriage), then it follows that all they have becomes theirs in common, as well good things as evil things; so that whatsoever Christ possesses, that the believing soul may take to itself and boast of as its own, and whatever belongs to the soul, that Christ claims as His.

If we compare these possessions, we shall see how inestimable is the gain. Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation; the soul is full of sin, death, and condemnation. Let faith step in, and then sin, death, and hell will belong to Christ, and grace, life, and salvation to the soul. For, if He is a Husband, He must needs take to Himself that which is His wife’s, and at the same time, impart to His wife that which is His. For, in giving her His own body and Himself, how can He but give her all that is His? And, in taking to Himself the body of His wife, how can He but take to Himself all that is hers?

In this is displayed the delightful sight, not only of communion, but of a prosperous warfare, of victory, salvation, and redemption. For, since Christ is God and man, and is such a Person as neither has sinned, nor dies, nor is condemned, nay, cannot sin, die, or be condemned, and since His righteousness, life, and salvation are invincible, eternal, and almighty,—when I say, such a Person, by the wedding-ring of faith, takes a share in the sins, death, and hell of His wife, nay, makes them His own, and deals with them no otherwise than as if they were His, and as if He Himself had sinned; and when He suffers, dies, and descends to hell, that He may overcome all things, and since sin, death, and hell cannot swallow Him up, they must needs be swallowed up by Him in stupendous conflict. For His righteousness rises above the sins of all men; His life is more powerful than all death; His salvation is more unconquerable than all hell.

Thus the believing soul, by the pledge of its faith in Christ, becomes free from all sin, fearless of death, safe from hell, and endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of its Husband Christ. Thus He presents to Himself a glorious bride, without spot or wrinkle, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word; that is, by faith in the word of life, righteousness, and salvation. Thus He betrothes her unto Himself “in faithfulness, in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies” (Hosea ii. 19, 20).

Who then can value highly enough these royal nuptials? Who can comprehend the riches of the glory of this grace? Christ, that rich and pious Husband, takes as a wife a needy and impious harlot, redeeming her from all her evils and supplying her with all His good things. It is impossible now that her sins should destroy her, since they have been laid upon Christ and swallowed up in Him, and since she has in her Husband Christ a righteousness which she may claim as her own, and which she can set up with confidence against all her sins, against death and hell, saying, “If I have sinned, my Christ, in whom I believe, has not sinned; all mine is His, and all His is mine,” as it is written, “My beloved is mine, and I am His” (Cant. ii. 16). This is what Paul says: “Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ,” victory over sin and death, as he says, “The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law” (1 Cor. xv. 56, 57).

From all this you will again understand why so much importance is attributed to faith, so that it alone can fulfill the law and justify without any works. For you see that the First Commandment, which says, “Thou shalt worship one God only,” is fulfilled by faith alone. If you were nothing but good works from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head, you would not be worshipping God, nor fulfilling the First Commandment, since it is impossible to worship God without ascribing to Him the glory of truth and of universal goodness, as it ought in truth to be ascribed. Now this is not done by works, but only by faith of heart. It is not by working, but by believing, that we glorify God, and confess Him to be true. On this ground faith alone is the righteousness of a Christian man, and the fulfilling of all the commandments. For to him who fulfils the first the task of fulfilling all the rest is easy.

Works, since they are irrational things, cannot glorify God, although they may be done to the glory of God, if faith be present. But at present we are inquiring, not into the quality of the works done, but into him who does them, who glorifies God, and brings forth good works. This is faith of heart, the head and the substance of all our righteousness. Hence that is a blind and perilous doctrine which teaches that the commandments are fulfilled by works. The commandments must have been fulfilled previous to any good works, and good works follow their fulfillment, as we shall see.

But, that we may have a wider view of that grace which our inner man has in Christ, we must know that in the Old Testament God sanctified to Himself every first-born male. The birthright was of great value, giving a superiority over the rest by the double honour of priesthood and kingship. For the first-born brother was priest and lord of all the rest.

Under this figure was foreshown Christ, the true and only First-born of God the Father and of the Virgin Mary, and a true King and Priest, not in a fleshly and earthly sense. For His kingdom is not of this world; it is in heavenly and spiritual things that He reigns and acts as Priest; and these are righteousness, truth, wisdom, peace, salvation, etc. Not but that all things, even those of earth and hell, are subject to Him—for otherwise how could He defend and save us from them?—but it is not in these, nor by these, that His kingdom stands.

So, too, His priesthood does not consist in the outward display of vestments and gestures, as did the human priesthood of Aaron and our ecclesiastical priesthood at this day, but in spiritual things, wherein, in His invisible office, He intercedes for us with God in heaven, and there offers Himself, and performs all the duties of a priest, as Paul describes Him to the Hebrews under the figure of Melchizedek. Nor does He only pray and intercede for us; He also teaches us inwardly in the spirit with the living teachings of His Spirit. Now these are the two special offices of a priest, as is figured to us in the case of fleshly priests by visible prayers and sermons.

As Christ by His birthright has obtained these two dignities, so He imparts and communicates them to every believer in Him, under that law of matrimony of which we have spoken above, by which all that is the husband’s is also the wife’s. Hence all we who believe on Christ are kings and priests in Christ, as it is said, “Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, that ye should show forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvellous light” (1 Peter ii. 9).

These two things stand thus. First, as regards kingship, every Christian is by faith so exalted above all things that, in spiritual power, he is completely lord of all things, so that nothing whatever can do him any hurt; yea, all things are subject to him, and are compelled to be subservient to his salvation. Thus Paul says, “All things work together for good to them who are the called” (Rom. viii. 28), and also, “Whether life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all are yours; and ye are Christ’s” (1 Cor. iii. 22, 23).

Not that in the sense of corporeal power any one among Christians has been appointed to possess and rule all things, according to the mad and senseless idea of certain ecclesiastics. That is the office of kings, princes, and men upon earth. In the experience of life we see that we are subjected to all things, and suffer many things, even death. Yea, the more of a Christian any man is, to so many the more evils, sufferings, and deaths is he subject, as we see in the first place in Christ the First-born, and in all His holy brethren.

This is a spiritual power, which rules in the midst of enemies, and is powerful in the midst of distresses. And this is nothing else than that strength is made perfect in my weakness, and that I can turn all things to the profit of my salvation; so that even the cross and death are compelled to serve me and to work together for my salvation. This is a lofty and eminent dignity, a true and almighty dominion, a spiritual empire, in which there is nothing so good, nothing so bad, as not to work together for my good, if only I believe. And yet there is nothing of which I have need—for faith alone suffices for my salvation—unless that in it faith may exercise the power and empire of its liberty. This is the inestimable power and liberty of Christians.

Nor are we only kings and the freest of all men, but also priests for ever, a dignity far higher than kingship, because by that priesthood we are worthy to appear before God, to pray for others, and to teach one another mutually the things which are of God. For these are the duties of priests, and they cannot possibly be permitted to any unbeliever. Christ has obtained for us this favour, if we believe in Him: that just as we are His brethren and co-heirs and fellow-kings with Him, so we should be also fellow-priests with Him, and venture with confidence, through the spirit of faith, to come into the presence of God, and cry, “Abba, Father!” and to pray for one another, and to do all things which we see done and figured in the visible and corporeal office of priesthood. But to an unbelieving person nothing renders service or work for good. He himself is in servitude to all things, and all things turn out for evil to him, because he uses all things in an impious way for his own advantage, and not for the glory of God. And thus he is not a priest, but a profane person, whose prayers are turned into sin, nor does he ever appear in the presence of God, because God does not hear sinners.

Who then can comprehend the loftiness of that Christian dignity which, by its royal power, rules over all things, even over death, life, and sin, and, by its priestly glory, is all-powerful with God, since God does what He Himself seeks and wishes, as it is written, “He will fulfil the desire of them that fear Him; He also will hear their cry, and will save them”? (Psalm cxlv. 19). This glory certainly cannot be attained by any works, but by faith only.

From these considerations any one may clearly see how a Christian man is free from all things; so that he needs no works in order to be justified and saved, but receives these gifts in abundance from faith alone. Nay, were he so foolish as to pretend to be justified, set free, saved, and made a Christian, by means of any good work, he would immediately lose faith, with all its benefits. Such folly is prettily represented in the fable where a dog, running along in the water and carrying in his mouth a real piece of meat, is deceived by the reflection of the meat in the water, and, in trying with open mouth to seize it, loses the meat and its image at the same time.

Here you will ask, “If all who are in the Church are priests, by what character are those whom we now call priests to be distinguished from the laity?” I reply, By the use of these words, “priest,” “clergy,” “ spiritual person,” “ecclesiastic,” an injustice has been done, since they have been transferred from the remaining body of Christians to those few who are now, by hurtful custom, called ecclesiastics. For Holy Scripture makes no distinction between them, except that those who are now boastfully called popes, bishops, and lords, it calls ministers, servants, and stewards, who are to serve the rest in the ministry of the word, for teaching the faith of Christ and the liberty of believers. For though it is true that we are all equally priests, yet we cannot, nor, if we could, ought we all to, minister and teach publicly. Thus Paul says, “Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. iv. 1).

This bad system has now issued in such a pompous display of power and such a terrible tyranny that no earthly government can be compared to it, as if the laity were something else than Christians. Through this perversion of things it has happened that the knowledge of Christian grace, of faith, of liberty, and altogether of Christ, has utterly perished, and has been succeeded by an intolerable bondage to human works and laws; and, according to the Lamentations of Jeremiah, we have become the slaves of the vilest men on earth, who abuse our misery to all the disgraceful and ignominious purposes of their own will.

Returning to the subject which we had begun, I think it is made clear by these considerations that it is not sufficient, nor a Christian course, to preach the works, life, and words of Christ in a historic manner, as facts which it suffices to know as an example how to frame our life, as do those who are now held the best preachers, and much less so to keep silence altogether on these things and to teach in their stead the laws of men and the decrees of the Fathers. There are now not a few persons who preach and read about Christ with the object of moving the human affections to sympathise with Christ, to indignation against the Jews, and other childish and womanish absurdities of that kind.

Now preaching ought to have the object of promoting faith in Him, so that He may not only be Christ, but a Christ for you and for me, and that what is said of Him, and what He is called, may work in us. And this faith is produced and is maintained by preaching why Christ came, what He has brought us and given to us, and to what profit and advantage He is to be received. This is done when the Christian liberty which we have from Christ Himself is rightly taught, and we are shown in what manner all we Christians are kings and priests, and how we are lords of all things, and may be confident that whatever we do in the presence of God is pleasing and acceptable to Him.

Whose heart would not rejoice in its inmost core at hearing these things? Whose heart, on receiving so great a consolation, would not become sweet with the love of Christ, a love to which it can never attain by any laws or works? Who can injure such a heart, or make it afraid? If the consciousness of sin or the horror of death rush in upon it, it is prepared to hope in the Lord, and is fearless of such evils, and undisturbed, until it shall look down upon its enemies. For it believes that the righteousness of Christ is its own, and that its sin is no longer its own, but that of Christ; but, on account of its faith in Christ, all its sin must needs be swallowed up from before the face of the righteousness of Christ, as I have said above. It learns, too, with the Apostle, to scoff at death and sin, and to say, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. xv. 55–57). For death is swallowed up in victory, not only the victory of Christ, but ours also, since by faith it becomes ours, and in it we too conquer.

Let it suffice to say this concerning the inner man and its liberty, and concerning that righteousness of faith which needs neither laws nor good works; nay, they are even hurtful to it, if any one pretends to be justified by them.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. What is Luther’s primary concern in this text?

2. Since apologetics deals with elements of unbelief, what area(s) or aspect(s) of unbelief is Luther combatting?

3. What does Luther mean when he says, “No work can cleave to the word of God or be in the soul”? Is this correct?

4. Why does Luther call works “irrational things”?

5. How would you describe the relationship of faith and works in this article? Is Luther right in his assessment of them?

*Excerpt from Martin Luther, "Concerning Christian Liberty," trans. R. S. Grignon, in The Five-Foot Shelf of Books, The Harvard Classics 36 (New York: P. F. Collier, 1910), 353–97.

CHAPTER 2

John Calvin

(1509–1564)

Jean Cauvin, better known as John Calvin, is the most influential theologian of the church since Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. He may also be the most influential thinker in the modern West in terms of the impact of his ideas on civilization. He was a man of peace born into a world of upheaval. He loved quiet and seclusion and yet was destined to interact with the world’s most prominent people. Aristocratic in leanings, he yet sowed the seeds of modern democracy.

Calvin also is one of the most misunderstood figures in all of history. Even during his own era he was severely criticized, not only by Roman Catholic polemicists, such as Sadoleto, but also by rivals from various quarters, the most astringent of which was Jérôme-Hermès Bolsec, who was condemned by the Geneva council for heresy and then wrote a bitterly critical biography against his principal adversary.[1] Today Calvin is either loved or hated. For some he is the clearest, most profound voice of sound theology of all times; for others, the most heinous and tyrannical church ruler to have lived. No one is indifferent to him.

The Cauvin family lived in Noyon, a small town in Picardie dominated by the cathedral of Notre Dame. Jean’s father, Gérard, was a notary, the registrar of the ecclesiastical court. His mother, Jeanne Le Franc, was an innkeeper’s daughter, though of higher station than Gérard. Their second son, Jean, was born on July 10, 1509. Jeanne died young, in 1515, and the boys (there were three of them, and possibly a fourth, who may have died early) were brought up by their father in the typical way for the time. Life in Noyon was hard, and the boys were treated like little adults. Gérard intended his sons for the priesthood. Accordingly, John was consigned to a prominent Catholic family who took him to Paris in about 1520 to attend school. There he studied Latin and then natural and moral philosophy. In school he developed fine skills in debating and disputations and became a master of logic. His readings would have included the Scriptures, the works of Aristotle, Boethius, Pierre d’Ailly, and Euclid, and other classics at the time.

In 1525 or 1526 Gérard moved young John out of theology and into civil law, which he studied at the University of Orléans. We are not entirely sure of the motives for this switch. Possibly because the Reformation was in full swing at this time, Gérard foresaw a decline in Roman Catholicism and thus guided the lad into a more promising future. After his licentiate, John presumably attained the title of doctor, meaning he could teach. He wrote his first book, De clementia, a learned commentary on Seneca’s text by this name, in which the revered Roman philosopher appeals to Nero about how to run an orderly empire. Calvin showed himself already to be a master of philosophy and the literary arts. Upon Gérard’s death in 1531, Calvin felt free to pursue theology once again.

We do not know much detail about Calvin’s conversion. His most extensive description can be found in his Commentary on the Psalms, where he compares himself to King David and acknowledges that out of an “abyss of mire,” God brought him “by a sudden conversion” (conversion subita) to a different frame of mind.[2] Of the date, we can only conjecture it must have happened sometime between 1528 and 1532. Calvin goes on to compare his life with David’s, especially in his constant battles against opponents, whether within or without the church. In the fall of 1533 he found himself implicated in a scandal initiated by Nicolas Cop, rector of the university and sympathizer with the Reformation. Cop gave a speech (possibly inspired by Calvin), centering on the grace of God, in which he attacked the theologians on the Sorbonne. It was interpreted as “Lutheran” by many in Francis I’s entourage. Calvin fled Paris and began to distance himself from traditional Roman Catholicism. In 1534 pro-Reformation placards were posted throughout France, and again Calvin was implicated.

He traveled to Basel early in 1535, then to Ferrara in the spring of 1536. By August 23, 1535, Calvin had finished the first edition of his magisterial Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published in Latin in March of 1536. It would grow in subsequent Latin and French editions until reaching its full measure in 1559. In the summer of 1536, at the age of 26, Calvin arrived in Geneva. It was a republic surrounded on all sides and vulnerable to the duchy of Savoy, the kingdom of France, and other Swiss cantons. Geneva allied with Bern as the Reformers made a serious bid for the city in the 1530s, and on May 25, 1536, the general assembly of its citizens voted “to live by the gospel,” thus officially embracing the Reformation. Three months later, the fiery Guillaume Farel persuaded Calvin, who was taking a detour on his way to Strasbourg, to stay and help with the reformation of the city of Geneva. Calvin became a “reader in theology,” and eventually a preacher and pastor, although never ordained, as far as we know. Though he enacted a number of reforms in Genevan social life, it must not be thought that he, anymore than the other Reformers, was against the authority of the church. Indeed, the Reformers had a high view of the church’s place in God’s provision. For Calvin, the Holy Spirit guides believers into a proper understanding of the Scripture, but not without the teaching ministry of the church.[3]

Geneva renounced the Mass, destroyed its monasteries, and refused papal authority. Nevertheless, Calvin hoped for a more thorough reform. For example, he wanted each individual to subscribe to a Protestant confession of faith. In April 1538 he was banished from Geneva and ended up in Strasbourg, where he worked with Martin Bucer. His principle ideas were never in question, but in style he became more urbane and polished, and deeply concerned for the life of the church. He married a widow, Idelette de Bure, in 1540. She came with two children, and together they had a son who died very young. Idelette died in 1549, leaving Calvin a deeply bereft man.

In 1539 Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto brought a strong challenge to Geneva to return to Catholicism. Calvin replied in what is perhaps his best piece of polemical writing. Then, realizing how weak they were without a leader, the Genevan magistrates urged Calvin to return to their city, which he did in 1541. Calvin spent the rest of his life in Geneva. He led in the reform of church government, worship, and every part of the life of the city. He preached several sermons per week. He established schools and the great university of Geneva. He cared deeply for his own native land, both by writing to French churches and ministers and by protecting the Huguenot refugees who came to Geneva. Though considering the desire of the Synod of 1559 to adopt a confession of faith hasty, he helped draft much of the Gallican Confession. He wrote treatises and commentaries, and enlarged the Institutes to its final form. While never quite unopposed, his leadership was well recognized in these years. Although he became a citizen only in 1559, at his death in 1564 a large crowd assembled to pay him homage.

“One enters into the Institutes as though into a cathedral, a sort of gigantic edifice where the succession of words, paragraphs, and chapters testifies to the glory of God and the enterprise of man.”[4] This work is arguably the greatest theological treatise of all time. A systematic statement of the Christian faith, it is chiefly apologetical in the broadest sense. The first edition, in Latin, contained six chapters of eloquent, Renaissance humanism. Published in Basel in 1536, it was in part a circumstantial response to the attacks of Guillaume Budé, whose Movement from Hellenism to Christianity (1535) was a spirited assault on the Protestant Reformation, particularly, as he saw it, in its disregard for tradition and for the holiness of the Mass. Calvin the lawyer-theologian responded with a volume proving that the Reformed faith was indeed the historic Christian position. His preface, addressed to Francis I, warned the monarch against those who would fill his ears and heart with false calumnies. He asked the king to “give a hearing to our cause.”

The term institute, or institution, derives from the classical tradition of pedagogy.[5] Thus the book was meant for education. The term also was used of popular law manuals of the time. Not unlike Plato’s Republic, the book served as a training manual in the art of living by the proper code, in this case for fallen human creatures redeemed by God’s grace. The church, the state, and indeed every area of life should be lived under the rule of Christ. The form of the first edition was close to that of Luther’s catechism, treating the law, the creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the sacraments, and Christian liberty.

When Calvin expanded the Institutes in Latin (1539), then in French (1541), he added more material, moving away from the Lutheran pattern. Significantly, these newer editions begin with the Augustinian, and universal, question of knowledge: the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self. Some have argued that this is Calvin’s most revolutionary move: beginning not with various attributes of God, or with the doctrine of Scripture, or even with “my only comfort in life and in death,” but with the knowledge of God. From the treatment of God’s revelation, Calvin moves on to underscore and expand on the issues of sin, justification, Christian liberty, predestination, and church life. Other editions followed: in Latin (1543, 1550) and in French (1545, 1551). The 1550–1551 versions introduce numbered paragraphs within the chapters.

The third and final complete overhaul was published in 1559, with a French translation in 1560. It was four and one half times longer than the 1536 edition. While historians have a particular interest in the 1541 edition, since it marked such a clear statement of the Reformed faith for most of Calvin’s lifetime, the final edition contains the full riches of Calvin’s thought. Readers may be struck with its personal and pastoral character in the midst of involved theological statements. They will also take notice of the two stylistic goals Calvin set for himself: clarity and brevity.

The two selections here reproduced are representative of Calvin’s apologetical concerns. Book 1 of the Institutes, on “The Knowledge of God the Creator,” is a radical statement of epistemology based on divine revelation. Strikingly, Calvin makes piety, not intelligence, the prerequisite for knowing God. In this section we find the fullest treatment of general revelation, including God’s revelation as opposed to human invention, the abundant clarity of revelation, his refusal to engage in long and laborious proofs (1.5.9), and the necessity of Scripture.

The selection from book 2, “The Knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ,” focuses on human anthropology. It covers such subjects as natural corruption, common grace (as we now call it), and freedom of the will. Again, one is impressed with both the tightness of Calvin’s arguments and his pastoral concern for giving God credit where credit is due.

1. Histoire de la vie, moeurs, actes, doctrine, constance et mort de Jean Calvin, jadis ministre de Genève, published in Lyon (1577), thirteen years after Calvin's death.

2. "Preface," Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), xl. There has been considerable discussion of the exact meaning of this text, with theories ranging from a Damascus Road type of conversion to a typological description of changed orientation.

3. Farel and Calvin presented the city council with Articles on the Organization of the Church and Its Worship at Geneva, January 16, 1537.

4. Bernard Cottret, Calvin: A Biography, trans. M. Wallace McDonald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 309.

5. The French word instituteur means schoolteacher.

Institutes of the Christian Religion

First Book (Chapters 4–9)

and Second Book (Chapters 4–5)*

Book First

Of the Knowledge of God the Creator

Chapter 4. The Knowledge of God Stifled or Corrupted, Ignorantly or Maliciously

Sections

1. The knowledge of God suppressed by ignorance, many falling away into superstition. Such persons, however, inexcusable, because their error is accompanied with pride and stubbornness.

2. Stubbornness the companion of impiety.

3. No pretext can justify superstition. This proved, first, from reason; and, secondly, from Scripture.

4. The wicked never willingly come into the presence of God. Hence their hypocrisy. Hence, too, their sense of Deity leads to no good result.

1. But though experience testifies that a seed of religion is divinely sown in all, scarcely one in a hundred is found who cherishes it in his heart, and not one in whom it grows to maturity so far is it from yielding fruit in its season. Moreover, while some lose themselves in superstitious observances, and others, of set purpose, wickedly revolt from God, the result is that, in regard to the true knowledge of him, all are so degenerate, that in no part of the world can genuine godliness be found. In saying that some fall away into superstition, I mean not to insinuate that their excessive absurdity frees them from guilt; for the blindness under which they labour is almost invariably accompanied with vain pride and stubbornness. Mingled vanity and pride appear in this, that when miserable men do seek after God, instead of ascending higher than themselves as they ought to do, they measure him by their own carnal stupidity, and, neglecting solid inquiry, fly off to indulge their curiosity in vain speculation. Hence, they do not conceive of him in the character in which he is manifested, but imagine him to be whatever their own rashness has devised. This abyss standing open, they cannot move one footstep without rushing headlong to destruction. With such an idea of God, nothing which they may attempt to offer in the way of worship or obedience can have any value in his sight, because it is not him they worship, but, instead of him, the dream and figment of their own heart. This corrupt procedure is admirably described by Paul, when he says, that “thinking to be wise, they became fools,” (Rom. 1:22). He had previously said that “they became vain in their imaginations,” but lest any should suppose them blameless, he afterwards adds that they were deservedly blinded, because, not contented with sober inquiry, because, arrogating to themselves more than they have any title to do, they of their own accord court darkness, nay, bewitch themselves with perverse, empty show. Hence it is that their folly, the result not only of vain curiosity, but of licentious desire and overweening confidence in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, cannot be excused.

2. The expression of David (Pss. 14:1; 53:1), “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,” is primarily applied to those who, as will shortly farther appear, stifle the light of nature, and intentionally stupefy themselves. We see many, after they have become hardened in a daring course of sin, madly banishing all remembrance of God, though spontaneously suggested to them from within, by natural sense. To show how detestable this madness is, the Psalmist introduces them as distinctly denying that there is a God, because although they do not disown his essence, they rob him of his justice and providence, and represent him as sitting idly in heaven. Nothing being less accordant with the nature of God than to cast off the government of the world, leaving it to chance, and so to wink at the crimes of men that they may wanton with impunity in evil courses; it follows, that every man who indulges in security, after extinguishing all fear of divine Judgment, virtually denies that there is a God. As a just punishment of the wicked, after they have closed their own eyes, God makes their hearts dull and heavy, and hence, seeing, they see not. David, indeed, is the best interpreter of his own meaning, when he says elsewhere, the wicked has “no fear of God before his eyes,” (Ps. 36:1); and, again, “He has said in his heart, God has forgotten; he hideth his face; he will never see it.” Thus although they are forced to acknowledge that there is some God, they, however, rob him of his glory by denying his power. For, as Paul declares, “If we believe not, he abideth faithful, he cannot deny himself,” (2 Tim. 2:13); so those who feign to themselves a dead and dumb idol, are truly said to deny God. It is, moreover, to be observed, that though they struggle with their own convictions, and would fain not only banish God from their minds, but from heaven also, their stupefaction is never so complete as to secure them from being occasionally dragged before the divine tribunal. Still, as no fear restrains them from rushing violently in the face of God, so long as they are hurried on by that blind impulse, it cannot be denied that their prevailing state of mind in regard to him is brutish oblivion.

3. In this way, the vain pretext which many employ to clothe their superstition is overthrown. They deem it enough that they have some kind of zeal for religion, how preposterous soever it may be, not observing that true religion must be conformable to the will of God as its unerring standard; that he can never deny himself, and is no spectra or phantom, to be metamorphosed at each individual’s caprice. It is easy to see how superstition, with its false glosses, mocks God, while it tries to please him. Usually fastening merely on things on which he has declared he sets no value, it either contemptuously overlooks, or even undisguisedly rejects, the things which he expressly enjoins, or in which we are assured that he takes pleasure. Those, therefore, who set up a fictitious worship, merely worship and adore their own delirious fancies; indeed, they would never dare so to trifle with God, had they not previously fashioned him after their own childish conceits. Hence that vague and wandering opinion of Deity is declared by an apostle to be ignorance of God: “Howbeit, then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods.” And he elsewhere declares, that the Ephesians were “without God” (Eph. 2:12) at the time when they wandered without any correct knowledge of him. It makes little difference, at least in this respect, whether you hold the existence of one God, or a plurality of gods, since, in both cases alike, by departing from the true God, you have nothing left but an execrable idol. It remains, therefore, to conclude with Lactantius (Instit. Div. lib 1:2, 6), “No religion is genuine that is not in accordance with truth.”

4. To this fault they add a second—viz. that when they do think of God it is against their will; never approaching him without being dragged into his presence, and when there, instead of the voluntary fear flowing from reverence of the divine majesty, feeling only that forced and servile fear which divine Judgment extorts—Judgment which, from the impossibility of escape, they are compelled to dread, but which, while they dread, they at the same time also hate. To impiety, and to it alone, the saying of Statius properly applies: “Fear first brought gods into the world,” (Theb. lib. 1). Those whose inclinations are at variance with the justice of God, knowing that his tribunal has been erected for the punishment of transgression, earnestly wish that that tribunal were overthrown. Under the influence of this feeling they are actually warring against God, justice being one of his essential attributes. Perceiving that they are always within reach of his power, that resistance and evasion are alike impossible, they fear and tremble. Accordingly, to avoid the appearance of condemning a majesty by which all are overawed, they have recourse to some species of religious observance, never ceasing meanwhile to defile themselves with every kind of vice, and add crime to crime, until they have broken the holy law of the Lord in every one of its requirements, and set his whole righteousness at nought; at all events, they are not so restrained by their semblance of fear as not to luxuriate and take pleasure in iniquity, choosing rather to indulge their carnal propensities than to curb them with the bridle of the Holy Spirit. But since this shadow of religion (it scarcely even deserves to be called a shadow) is false and vain, it is easy to infer how much this confused knowledge of God differs from that piety which is instilled into the breasts of believers, and from which alone true religion springs. And yet hypocrites would fain, by means of tortuous windings, make a show of being near to God at the very time they are fleeing from him. For while the whole life ought to be one perpetual course of obedience, they rebel without fear in almost all their actions, and seek to appease him with a few paltry sacrifices; while they ought to serve him with integrity of heart and holiness of life, they endeavour to procure his favour by means of frivolous devices and punctilios of no value. Nay, they take greater license in their grovelling indulgences, because they imagine that they can fulfil their duty to him by preposterous expiations; in short, while their confidence ought to have been fixed upon him, they put him aside, and rest in themselves or the creatures. At length they bewilder themselves in such a maze of error, that the darkness of ignorance obscures, and ultimately extinguishes, those sparks which were designed to show them the glory of God. Still, however, the conviction that there is some Deity continues to exist, like a plant which can never be completely eradicated, though so corrupt, that it is only capable of producing the worst of fruit. Nay, we have still stronger evidence of the proposition for which I now contend—viz. that a sense of Deity is naturally engraven on the human heart, in the fact, that the very reprobate are forced to acknowledge it. When at their ease, they can jest about God, and talk pertly and loquaciously in disparagement of his power; but should despair, from any cause, overtake them, it will stimulate them to seek him, and dictate ejaculatory prayers, proving that they were not entirely ignorant of God, but had perversely suppressed feelings which ought to have been earlier manifested.

Chapter 5. The Knowledge of God Conspicuous in the Creation, and Continual Government of the World

This chapter consists of two parts: 1. The former, which occupies the first ten sections, divides all the works of God into two great classes, and elucidates the knowledge of God as displayed in each class. The one class is treated of in the first six, and the other in the four following sections: 2. The latter part of the chapter shows, that, in consequence of the extreme stupidity of men, those manifestations of God, however perspicuous, lead to no useful result. This latter part, which commences at the eleventh section, is continued to the end of the chapter.

Sections

1. The invisible and incomprehensible essence of God, to a certain extent, made visible in his works.

2. This declared by the first class of works—viz. the admirable motions of the heavens and the earth, the symmetry of the human body, and the connection of its parts; in short, the various objects which are presented to every eye.

3. This more especially manifested in the structure of the human body.

4. The shameful ingratitude of disregarding God, who, in such a variety of ways, is manifested within us. The still more shameful ingratitude of contemplating the endowments of the soul, without ascending to him who gave them. No objection can be founded on any supposed organism in the soul.

5. The powers and actions of the soul, a proof of its separate existence from the body. Proofs of the soul’s immortality. Objection that the whole world is quickened by one soul. Reply to the objection. Its impiety.

6. Conclusion from what has been said—viz. that the omnipotence, eternity, and goodness of God, may be learned from the first class of works, i.e., those which are in accordance with the ordinary course of nature.

7. The second class of works—viz. those above the ordinary course of nature, afford clear evidence of the perfections of God, especially his goodness, justice, and mercy.

8. Also his providence, power, and wisdom.

9. Proofs and illustrations of the divine Majesty. The use of them—viz. the acquisition of divine knowledge in combination with true piety.

10. The tendency of the knowledge of God to inspire the righteous with the hope of future life, and remind the wicked of the punishments reserved for them. Its tendency, moreover, to keep alive in the hearts of the righteous a sense of the divine goodness.

11. The second part of the chapter, which describes the stupidity both of learned and unlearned, in ascribing the whole order of things, and the admirable arrangements of divine Providence, to fortune.

12. Hence Polytheism, with all its abominations, and the endless and irreconcilable opinions of the philosophers concerning God.

13. All guilty of revolt from God, corrupting pure religion, either by following general custom, or the impious consent of antiquity.

14. Though irradiated by the wondrous glories of creation, we cease not to follow our own ways.

15. Our conduct altogether inexcusable, the dullness of perception being attributable to ourselves, while we are fully reminded of the true path, both by the structure and the government of the world.

1. Since the perfection of blessedness consists in the knowledge of God, he has been pleased, in order that none might be excluded from the means of obtaining felicity, not only to deposit in our minds that seed of religion of which we have already spoken, but so to manifest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe, and daily place himself in our view, that we cannot open our eyes without being compelled to behold him. His essence, indeed, is incomprehensible, utterly transcending all human thought; but on each of his works his glory is engraven in characters so bright, so distinct, and so illustrious, that none, however dull and illiterate, can plead ignorance as their excuse. Hence, with perfect truth, the Psalmist exclaims, “He covereth himself with light as with a garment,” (Ps. 104:2); as if he had said, that God for the first time was arrayed in visible attire when, in the creation of the world, he displayed those glorious banners, on which, to whatever side we turn, we behold his perfections visibly portrayed. In the same place, the Psalmist aptly compares the expanded heavens to his royal tent, and says, “He layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters, maketh the clouds his chariot, and walketh upon the wings of the wind,” sending forth the winds and lightnings as his swift messengers. And because the glory of his power and wisdom is more refulgent in the firmament, it is frequently designated as his palace. And, first, wherever you turn your eyes, there is no portion of the world, however minute, that does not exhibit at least some sparks of beauty; while it is impossible to contemplate the vast and beautiful fabric as it extends around, without being overwhelmed by the immense weight of glory. Hence, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews elegantly describes the visible worlds as images of the invisible (Heb. 11:3), the elegant structure of the world serving us as a kind of mirror, in which we may behold God, though otherwise invisible. For the same reason, the Psalmist attributes language to celestial objects, a language which all nations understand (Ps. 19:1), the manifestation of the Godhead being too clear to escape the notice of any people, however obtuse. The apostle Paul, stating this still more clearly, says, “That which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has showed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead,” (Rom. 1:20).

2. In attestation of his wondrous wisdom, both the heavens and the earth present us with innumerable proofs, not only those more recondite proofs which astronomy, medicine, and all the natural sciences, are designed to illustrate, but proofs which force themselves on the notice of the most illiterate peasant, who cannot open his eyes without beholding them. It is true, indeed, that those who are more or less intimately acquainted with those liberal studies are thereby assisted and enabled to obtain a deeper insight into the secret workings of divine wisdom. No man, however, though he be ignorant of these, is incapacitated for discerning such proofs of creative wisdom as may well cause him to break forth in admiration of the Creator. To investigate the motions of the heavenly bodies, to determine their positions, measure their distances, and ascertain their properties, demands skill, and a more careful examination; and where these are so employed, as the Providence of God is thereby more fully unfolded, so it is reasonable to suppose that the mind takes a loftier flight, and obtains brighter views of his glory.[1] Still, none who have the use of their eyes can be ignorant of the divine skill manifested so conspicuously in the endless variety, yet distinct and well ordered array, of the heavenly host; and, therefore, it is plain that the Lord has furnished every man with abundant proofs of his wisdom. The same is true in regard to the structure of the human frame. To determine the connection of its parts, its symmetry and beauty, with the skill of a Galen (Lib. De Usu Partium), requires singular acuteness; and yet all men acknowledge that the human body bears on its face such proofs of ingenious contrivance as are sufficient to proclaim the admirable wisdom of its Maker.

3. Hence certain of the philosophers[2] have not improperly called man a microcosm (miniature world), as being a rare specimen of divine power, wisdom, and goodness, and containing within himself wonders sufficient to occupy our minds, if we are willing so to employ them. Paul, accordingly, after reminding the Athenians that they “might feel after God and find him,” immediately adds, that “he is not far from every one of us,” (Acts 17:27); every man having within himself undoubted evidence of the heavenly grace by which he lives, and moves, and has his being. But if, in order to apprehend God, it is unnecessary to go farther than ourselves, what excuse can there be for the sloth of any man who will not take the trouble of descending into himself that he may find him? For the same reason, too, David, after briefly celebrating the wonderful name and glory of God, as everywhere displayed, immediately exclaims, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” and again, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings thou hast ordained strength,” (Ps. 8:2, 4). Thus he declares not only that the human race are a bright mirror of the Creator’s works, but that infants hanging on their mothers’ breasts have tongues eloquent enough to proclaim his glory without the aid of other orators. Accordingly, he hesitates not to bring them forward as fully instructed to refute the madness of those who, from devilish pride, would fain extinguish the name of God. Hence, too, the passage which Paul quotes from Aratus, “We are his offspring,” (Acts 17:28), the excellent gifts with which he has endued us attesting that he is our Father. In the same way also, from natural instinct, and, as it were, at the dictation of experience, heathen poets call him the father of men. No one, indeed, will voluntarily and willingly devote himself to the service of God unless he has previously tasted his paternal love, and been thereby allured to love and reverence him.

4. But herein appears the shameful ingratitude of men. Though they have in their own persons a factory where innumerable operations of God are carried on, and a magazine stored with treasures of inestimable value—instead of bursting forth in his praise, as they are bound to do, they, on the contrary, are the more inflated and swelled with pride. They feel how wonderfully God is working in them, and their own experience tells them of the vast variety of gifts which they owe to his liberality. Whether they will or not, they cannot but know that these are proofs of his Godhead, and yet they inwardly suppress them. They have no occasion to go farther than themselves, provided they do not, by appropriating as their own that which has been given them from heaven, put out the light intended to exhibit God clearly to their minds. At this day, however, the earth sustains on her bosom many monster minds—minds which are not afraid to employ the seed of Deity deposited in human nature as a means of suppressing the name of God. Can anything be more detestable than this madness in man, who, finding God a hundred times both in his body and his soul, makes his excellence in this respect a pretext for denying that there is a God? He will not say that chance has made him differ from the brutes that perish; but, substituting nature as the architect of the universe, he suppresses the name of God. The swift motions of the soul, its noble faculties and rare endowments, bespeak the agency of God in a manner which would make the suppression of it impossible, did not the Epicureans, like so many Cyclops, use it as a vantage-ground, from which to wage more audacious war with God. Are so many treasures of heavenly wisdom employed in the guidance of such a worm as man, and shall the whole universe be denied the same privilege? To hold that there are organs in the soul corresponding to each of its faculties, is so far from obscuring the glory of God, that it rather illustrates it. Let Epicurus tell what concourse of atoms, cooking meat and drink, can form one portion into refuse and another portion into blood, and make all the members separately perform their office as carefully as if they were so many souls acting with common consent in the superintendence of one body.

5. But my business at present is not with that stye: I wish rather to deal with those who, led away by absurd subtleties, are inclined, by giving an indirect turn to the frigid doctrine of Aristotle, to employ it for the purpose both of disproving the immortality of the soul, and robbing God of his rights. Under the pretext that the faculties of the soul are organised, they chain it to the body as if it were incapable of a separate existence, while they endeavour as much as in them lies, by pronouncing eulogiums on nature, to suppress the name of God. But there is no ground for maintaining that the powers of the soul are confined to the performance of bodily functions. What has the body to do with your measuring the heavens, counting the number of the stars, ascertaining their magnitudes, their relative distances, the rate at which they move, and the orbits which they describe? I deny not that Astronomy has its use; all I mean to show is, that these lofty investigations are not conducted by organised symmetry, but by the faculties of the soul itself apart altogether from the body. The single example I have given will suggest many others to the reader. The swift and versatile movements of the soul in glancing from heaven to earth, connecting the future with the past, retaining the remembrance of former years, nay, forming creations of its own—its skill, moreover, in making astonishing discoveries, and inventing so many wonderful arts, are sure indications of the agency of God in man. What shall we say of its activity when the body is asleep, its many revolving thoughts, its many useful suggestions, its many solid arguments, nay, its presentiment of things yet to come? What shall we say but that man bears about with him a stamp of immortality which can never be effaced? But how is it possible for man to be divine, and yet not acknowledge his Creator? Shall we, by means of a power of judging implanted in our breast, distinguish between justice and injustice, and yet there be no judge in heaven? Shall some remains of intelligence continue with us in sleep, and yet no God keep watch in heaven? Shall we be deemed the inventors of so many arts and useful properties that God may be defrauded of his praise, though experience tells us plainly enough, that whatever we possess is dispensed to us in unequal measures by another hand? The talk of certain persons concerning a secret inspiration quickening the whole world, is not only silly, but altogether profane. Such persons are delighted with the following celebrated passage of Virgil:[3]—

Know, first, that heaven, and earth’s compacted frame,

And flowing waters, and the starry flame,

And both the radiant lights, one common soul

Inspires and feeds—and animates the whole.

This active mind, infused through all the space,

Unites and mingles with the mighty mass:

Hence, men and beasts the breath of life obtain,

And birds of air, and monsters of the main.

Th’ ethereal vigour is in all the same,

And every soul is filled with equal flame.[4]

The meaning of all this is, that the world, which was made to display the glory of God, is its own creator. For the same poet has, in another place,[5] adopted a view common to both Greeks and Latins:—

Hence to the bee some sages have assigned

A portion of the God, and heavenly mind;

For God goes forth, and spreads throughout the whole,

Heaven, earth, and sea, the universal soul;

Each, at its birth, from him all beings share,

Both man and brute, the breath of vital air;

To him return, and, loosed from earthly chain,

Fly whence they sprung, and rest in God again;

Spurn at the grave, and, fearless of decay,

Dwell in high heaven, art star th’ ethereal way.[6]

Here we see how far that jejune speculation, of a universal mind animating and invigorating the world, is fitted to beget and foster piety in our minds. We have a still clearer proof of this in the profane verses which the licentious Lucretius has written as a deduction from the same principle.[7] The plain object is to form an unsubstantial deity, and thereby banish the true God whom we ought to fear and worship. I admit, indeed that the expressions “Nature is God,” may be piously used, if dictated by a pious mind; but as it is inaccurate and harsh (Nature being more properly the order which has been established by God), in matters which are so very important, and in regard to which special reverence is due, it does harm to confound the Deity with the inferior operations of his hands.

6. Let each of us, therefore, in contemplating his own nature, remember that there is one God who governs all natures, and, in governing, wishes us to have respect to himself, to make him the object of our faith, worship, and adoration. Nothing, indeed, can be more preposterous than to enjoy those noble endowments which bespeak the divine presence within us, and to neglect him who, of his own good pleasure, bestows them upon us. In regard to his power, how glorious the manifestations by which he urges us to the contemplation of himself; unless, indeed, we pretend not to know whose energy it is that by a word sustains the boundless fabric of the universe—at one time making heaven reverberate with thunder, sending forth the scorching lightning, and setting the whole atmosphere in a blaze; at another, causing the raging tempests to blow, and forthwith, in one moment, when it so pleases him, making a perfect calm; keeping the sea, which seems constantly threatening the earth with devastation, suspended as it were in air; at one time, lashing it into fury by the impetuosity of the winds; at another, appeasing its rage, and stilling all its waves. Here we might refer to those glowing descriptions of divine power, as illustrated by natural events, which occur throughout Scripture; but more especially in the book of Job, and the prophecies of Isaiah. These, however, I purposely omit, because a better opportunity of introducing them will be found when I come to treat of the Scriptural account of the creation (infra, chap. 14 s. 1, 2, 20, sq). I only wish to observe here, that this method of investigating the divine perfections, by tracing the lineaments of his countenance as shadowed forth in the firmament and on the earth, is common both to those within and to those without the pale of the Church. From the power of God we are naturally led to consider his eternity since that from which all other things derive their origin must necessarily be self-existent and eternal. Moreover, if it be asked what cause induced him to create all things at first, and now inclines him to preserve them, we shall find that there could be no other cause than his own goodness. But if this is the only cause, nothing more should be required to draw forth our love towards him; every creature, as the Psalmist reminds us, participating in his mercy. “His tender mercies are over all his works,” (Ps. 145:9).

7. In the second class of God’s works, namely those which are above the ordinary course of nature, the evidence of his perfections are in every respect equally clear. For in conducting the affairs of men, he so arranges the course of his providence, as daily to declare, by the clearest manifestations, that though all are in innumerable ways the partakers of his bounty, the righteous are the special objects of his favour, the wicked and profane the special objects of his severity. It is impossible to doubt his punishment of crimes; while at the same time he, in no unequivocal manner, declares that he is the protector, and even the avenger of innocence, by shedding blessings on the good, helping their necessities, soothing and solacing their griefs, relieving their sufferings, and in all ways providing for their safety. And though he often permits the guilty to exult for a time with impunity, and the innocent to be driven to and fro in adversity, nay, even to be wickedly and iniquitously oppressed, this ought not to produce any uncertainty as to the uniform justice of all his procedure. Nay, an opposite inference should be drawn. When any one crime calls forth visible manifestations of his anger, it must be because he hates all crimes; and, on the other hand, his leaving many crimes unpunished, only proves that there is a Judgment in reserve, when the punishment now delayed shall be inflicted. In like manner, how richly does he supply us with the means of contemplating his mercy when, as frequently happens, he continues to visit miserable sinners with unwearied kindness, until he subdues their depravity, and woos them back with more than a parent’s fondness?

8. To this purpose the Psalmist (Ps. 107) mentioning how God, in a wondrous manner, often brings sudden and unexpected succour to the miserable when almost on the brink of despair, whether in protecting them when they stray in deserts, and at length leading them back into the right path, or supplying them with food when famishing for want, or delivering them when captive from iron fetters and foul dungeons, or conducting them safe into harbour after shipwreck, or bringing them back from the gates of death by curing their diseases, or, after burning up the fields with heat and drought, fertilising them with the river of his grace, or exalting the meanest of the people, and casting down the mighty from their lofty seats:—the Psalmist, after bringing forward examples of this description, infers that those things which men call fortuitous events, are so many proofs of divine providence, and more especially of paternal clemency, furnishing ground of joy to the righteous, and at the same time stopping the mouths of the ungodly. But as the greater part of mankind, enslaved by error, walk blindfold in this glorious theatre, he exclaims that it is a rare and singular wisdom to meditate carefully on these works of God, which many, who seem most sharp-sighted in other respects, behold without profit. It is indeed true, that the brightest manifestation of divine glory finds not one genuine spectator among a hundred. Still, neither his power nor his wisdom is shrouded in darkness. His power is strikingly displayed when the rage of the wicked, to all appearance irresistible, is crushed in a single moment; their arrogance subdued, their strongest bulwarks overthrown, their armour dashed to pieces, their strength broken, their schemes defeated without an effort, and audacity which set itself above the heavens is precipitated to the lowest depths of the earth. On the other hand, the poor are raised up out of the dust, and the needy lifted out of the dung hill (Ps. 113:7), the oppressed and afflicted are rescued in extremity, the despairing animated with hope, the unarmed defeat the armed, the few the many, the weak the strong. The excellence of the divine wisdom is manifested in distributing everything in due season, confounding the wisdom of the world, and taking the wise in their own craftiness (1 Cor. 3:19); in short, conducting all things in perfect accordance with reason.

9. We see there is no need of a long and laborious train of argument in order to obtain proofs which illustrate and assert the Divine Majesty. The few which we have merely touched, show them to be so immediately within our reach in every quarter, that we can trace them with the eye, or point to them with the finger. And here we must observe again (see chap. 2 s. 2), that the knowledge of God which we are invited to cultivate is not that which, resting satisfied with empty speculation, only flutters in the brain, but a knowledge which will prove substantial and fruitful wherever it is duly perceived, and rooted in the heart. The Lord is manifested by his perfections. When we feel their power within us, and are conscious of their benefits, the knowledge must impress us much more vividly than if we merely imagined a God whose presence we never felt. Hence it is obvious, that in seeking God, the most direct path and the fittest method is, not to attempt with presumptuous curiosity to pry into his essence, which is rather to be adored than minutely discussed, but to contemplate him in his works, by which he draws near, becomes familiar, and in a manner communicates himself to us. To this the Apostle referred when he said, that we need not go far in search of him (Acts 17:27), because, by the continual working of his power, he dwells in every one of us. Accordingly, David (Ps. 145), after acknowledging that his greatness is unsearchable, proceeds to enumerate his works, declaring that his greatness will thereby be unfolded. It therefore becomes us also diligently to prosecute that investigation of God which so enraptures the soul with admiration as, at the same time, to make an efficacious impression on it. And, as Augustine expresses it (in Psalm 144), since we are unable to comprehend him, and are, as it were, overpowered by his greatness, our proper course is to contemplate his works, and so refresh ourselves with his goodness.

10. By the knowledge thus acquired, we ought not only to be stimulated to worship God, but also aroused and elevated to the hope of future life. For, observing that the manifestations which the Lord gives both of his mercy and severity are only begun and incomplete, we ought to infer that these are doubtless only a prelude to higher manifestations, of which the full display is reserved for another state. Conversely, when we see the righteous brought into affliction by the ungodly, assailed with injuries, overwhelmed with calumnies, and lacerated by insult and contumely, while, on the contrary, the wicked flourish, prosper, acquire ease and honour, and all these with impunity, we ought forthwith to infer, that there will be a future life in which iniquity shall receive its punishment, and righteousness its reward. Moreover, when we observe that the Lord often lays his chastening rod on the righteous, we may the more surely conclude, that far less will the unrighteous ultimately escape the scourges of his anger. There is a well-known passage in Augustine (De Civitat. Dei, lib. 1 c. 8), “Were all sin now visited with open punishment, it might be thought that nothing was reserved for the final Judgment; and, on the other hand, were no sin now openly punished, it might be supposed there was no divine providence.” It must be acknowledged, therefore, that in each of the works of God, and more especially in the whole of them taken together, the divine perfections are delineated as in a picture, and the whole human race thereby invited and allured to acquire the knowledge of God, and, in consequence of this knowledge, true and complete felicity. Moreover, while his perfections are thus most vividly displayed, the only means of ascertaining their practical operation and tendency is to descend into ourselves, and consider how it is that the Lord there manifests his wisdom, power, and energy,—how he there displays his justice, goodness, and mercy. For although David (Ps. 92:6) justly complains of the extreme infatuation of the ungodly in not pondering the deep counsels of God, as exhibited in the government of the human race, what he elsewhere says (Ps. 40) is most true, that the wonders of the divine wisdom in this respect are more in number than the hairs of our head. But I leave this topic at present, as it will be more fully considered afterwards in its own place (Book I. c. 16, see. 6–9).

11. Bright, however, as is the manifestation which God gives both of himself and his immortal kingdom in the mirror of his works, so great is our stupidity, so dull are we in regard to these bright manifestations, that we derive no benefit from them. For in regard to the fabric and admirable arrangement of the universe, how few of us are there who, in lifting our eyes to the heavens, or looking abroad on the various regions of the earth, ever think of the Creator? Do we not rather overlook him, and sluggishly content ourselves with a view of his works? And then in regard to supernatural events, though these are occurring every day, how few are there who ascribe them to the ruling providence of God—how many who imagine that they are casual results produced by the blind evolutions of the wheel of chance? Even when under the guidance and direction of these events, we are in a manner forced to the contemplation of God (a circumstance which all must occasionally experience), and are thus led to form some impressions of Deity, we immediately fly off to carnal dreams and depraved fictions, and so by our vanity corrupt heavenly truth. This far, indeed, we differ from each other, in that every one appropriates to himself some peculiar error; but we are all alike in this, that we substitute monstrous fictions for the one living and true God—a disease not confined to obtuse and vulgar minds, but affecting the noblest, and those who, in other respects, are singularly acute. How lavishly in this respect have the whole body of philosophers betrayed their stupidity and want of sense? To say nothing of the others whose absurdities are of a still grosser description, how completely does Plato, the soberest and most religious of them all, lose himself in his round globe?[8] What must be the case with the rest, when the leaders, who ought to have set them an example, commit such blunders, and labour under such hallucinations? In like manner, while the government of the world places the doctrine of providence beyond dispute, the practical result is the same as if it were believed that all things were carried hither and thither at the caprice of chance; so prone are we to vanity and error. I am still referring to the most distinguished of the philosophers, and not to the common herd, whose madness in profaning the truth of God exceeds all bounds.

12. Hence that immense flood of error with which the whole world is overflowed. Every individual mind being a kind of labyrinth, it is not wonderful, not only that each nation has adopted a variety of fictions, but that almost every man has had his own god. To the darkness of ignorance have been added presumption and wantonness, and hence there is scarcely an individual to be found without some idol or phantom as a substitute for Deity. Like water gushing forth from a large and copious spring, immense crowds of gods have issued from the human mind, every man giving himself full license, and devising some peculiar form of divinity, to meet his own views. It is unnecessary here to attempt a catalogue of the superstitions with which the world was overspread. The thing were endless; and the corruptions themselves, though not a word should be said, furnish abundant evidence of the blindness of the human mind. I say nothing of the rude and illiterate vulgar; but among the philosophers[9] who attempted, by reason and learning, to pierce the heavens, what shameful disagreement! The higher any one was endued with genius, and the more he was polished by science and art, the more specious was the colouring which he gave to his opinions. All these, however, if examined more closely, will be found to be vain show. The Stoics[10] plumed themselves on their acuteness, when they said that the various names of God might be extracted from all the parts of nature, and yet that his unity was not thereby divided: as if we were not already too prone to vanity, and had no need of being presented with an endless multiplicity of gods, to lead us further and more grossly into error. The mystic theology of the Egyptians shows how sedulously they laboured to be thought rational on this subject.[11] And, perhaps, at the first glance, some show of probability might deceive the simple and unwary; but never did any mortal devise a scheme by which religion was not foully corrupted. This endless variety and confusion emboldened the Epicureans, and other gross despisers of piety, to cut off all sense of God. For when they saw that the wisest contradicted each other they hesitated not to infer from their dissensions, and from the frivolous and absurd doctrines of each, that men foolishly, and to no purpose, brought torment upon themselves by searching for a God, there being none: and they thought this inference safe, because it was better at once to deny God altogether, than to feign uncertain gods, and thereafter engage in quarrels without end. They, indeed, argue absurdly, or rather weave a cloak for their impiety out of human ignorance; though ignorance surely cannot derogate from the prerogatives of God. But since all confess that there is no topic on which such difference exists, both among learned and unlearned, the proper inference is, that the human mind, which thus errs in inquiring after God, is dull and blind in heavenly mysteries. Some praise the answer of Simonides, who being asked by King Hiero what God was, asked a day to consider. When the king next day repeated the question, he asked two days; and after repeatedly doubling the number of days, at length replied, “The longer I consider, the darker the subject appears.”[12] He, no doubt, wisely suspended his opinion, when he did not see clearly: still his answer shows, that if men are only naturally taught, instead of having any distinct, solid, or certain knowledge, they fasten only on contradictory principles, and, in consequence, worship an unknown God.

13. Hence we must hold, that whosoever adulterates pure religion (and this must be the case with all who cling to their own views), make a departure from the one God. No doubt, they will allege that they have a different intention; but it is of little consequence what they intend or persuade themselves to believe, since the Holy Spirit pronounces all to be apostates, who, in the blindness of their minds, substitute demons in the place of God. For this reason Paul declares that the Ephesians were “without God,” (Eph. 2:12), until they had learned from the Gospel what it is to worship the true God. Nor must this be restricted to one people only, since, in another place, he declares in general, that all men “became vain in their imaginations,” after the majesty of the Creator was manifested to them in the structure of the world. Accordingly, in order to make way for the only true God, he condemns all the gods celebrated among the Gentiles as lying and false, leaving no Deity anywhere but in Mount Zion where the special knowledge of God was professed (Hab. 2:18, 20). Among the Gentiles in the time of Christ, the Samaritans undoubtedly made the nearest approach to true piety; yet we hear from his own mouth that they worshipped they knew not what (John 4:22); whence it follows that they were deluded by vain errors. In short, though all did not give way to gross vice, or rush headlong into open idolatry, there was no pure and authentic religion founded merely on common belief. A few individuals may not have gone all insane lengths with the vulgar; still Paul’s declaration remains true, that the wisdom of God was not apprehended by the princes of this world (1 Cor. 2:8). But if the most distinguished wandered in darkness, what shall we say of the refuse? No wonder, therefore, that all worship of man’s device is repudiated by the Holy Spirit as degenerate. Any opinion which man can form in heavenly mysteries, though it may not beget a long train of errors, is still the parent of error. And though nothing worse should happen, even this is no light sin—to worship an unknown God at random. Of this sin, however, we hear from our Saviour’s own mouth (John 4:22), that all are guilty who have not been taught out of the law who the God is whom they ought to worship. Nay, even Socrates in Xenophon (lib. 1 Memorabilia), lauds the response of Apollo enjoining every man to worship the gods according to the rites of his country, and the particular practice of his own city. But what right have mortals thus to decide of their own authority in a matter which is far above the world; or who can so acquiesce in the will of his forefathers, or the decrees of the people, as unhesitatingly to receive a god at their hands? Everyone will adhere to his own Judgment, sooner than submit to the dictation of others. Since, therefore, in regulating the worship of God, the custom of a city, or the consent of antiquity, is a too feeble and fragile bond of piety; it remains that God himself must bear witness to himself from heaven.

14. In vain for us, therefore, does Creation exhibit so many bright lamps lighted up to show forth the glory of its Author. Though they beam upon us from every quarter, they are altogether insufficient of themselves to lead us into the right path. Some sparks, undoubtedly, they do throw out; but these are quenched before they can give forth a brighter effulgence. Wherefore, the apostle, in the very place where he says that the worlds are images of invisible things, adds that it is by faith we understand that they were framed by the word of God (Heb. 11:3); thereby intimating that the invisible Godhead is indeed represented by such displays, but that we have no eyes to perceive it until they are enlightened through faith by internal revelation from God. When Paul says that that which may be known of God is manifested by the creation of the world, he does not mean such a manifestation as may be comprehended by the wit of man (Rom. 1:19); on the contrary, he shows that it has no further effect than to render us inexcusable (Acts 17:27). And though he says, elsewhere, that we have not far to seek for God, inasmuch as he dwells within us, he shows, in another passage, to what extent this nearness to God is availing. God, says he, “in times past, suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless, he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness,” (Acts 14:16, 17). But though God is not left without a witness, while, with numberless varied acts of kindness, he woos men to the knowledge of himself, yet they cease not to follow their own ways, in other words, deadly errors.

15. But though we are deficient in natural powers which might enable us to rise to a pure and clear knowledge of God, still, as the dullness which prevents us is within, there is no room for excuse. We cannot plead ignorance, without being at the same time convicted by our own consciences both of sloth and ingratitude. It were, indeed, a strange defence for man to pretend that he has no ears to hear the truth, while dumb creatures have voices loud enough to declare it; to allege that he is unable to see that which creatures without eyes demonstrate, to excuse himself on the ground of weakness of mind, while all creatures without reason are able to teach. Wherefore, when we wander and go astray, we are justly shut out from every species of excuse, because all things point to the right path. But while man must bear the guilt of corrupting the seed of divine knowledge so wondrously deposited in his mind, and preventing it from bearing good and genuine fruit, it is still most true that we are not sufficiently instructed by that bare and simple, but magnificent testimony which the creatures bear to the glory of their Creator. For no sooner do we, from a survey of the world, obtain some slight knowledge of Deity, than we pass by the true God, and set up in his stead the dream and phantom of our own brain, drawing away the praise of justice, wisdom, and goodness, from the fountain-head, and transferring it to some other quarter. Moreover, by the erroneous estimate we form, we either so obscure or pervert his daily works, as at once to rob them of their glory and the author of them of his just praise.

Chapter 6. The Need of Scripture, as a Guide and Teacher, in Coming to God as a Creator

Sections

1. God gives his elect a better help to the knowledge of himself—viz. the Holy Scriptures. This he did from the very first.

2. First, By oracles and visions, and the ministry of the Patriarchs. Secondly, By the promulgation of the Law, and the preaching of the Prophets. Why the doctrines of religion are committed to writing.

3. This view confirmed, 1. By the depravity of our nature making it necessary in every one who would know God to have recourse to the word; 2. From those passages of the Psalms in which God is introduced as reigning.

4. Another confirmation from certain direct statements in the Psalms. Lastly, From the words of our Saviour.

1. Therefore, though the effulgence which is presented to every eye, both in the heavens and on the earth, leaves the ingratitude of man without excuse, since God, in order to bring the whole human race under the same condemnation, holds forth to all, without exception, a mirror of his Deity in his works, another and better help must be given to guide us properly to God as a Creator. Not in vain, therefore, has he added the light of his Word in order that he might make himself known unto salvation, and bestowed the privilege on those whom he was pleased to bring into nearer and more familiar relation to himself. For, seeing how the minds of men were carried to and fro, and found no certain resting-place, he chose the Jews for a peculiar people, and then hedged them in that they might not, like others, go astray. And not in vain does he, by the same means, retain us in his knowledge, since but for this, even those who, in comparison of others, seem to stand strong, would quickly fall away. For as the aged, or those whose sight is defective, when any book, however fair, is set before them, though they perceive that there is something written are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly. God therefore bestows a gift of singular value, when, for the instruction of the Church, he employs not dumb teachers merely, but opens his own sacred mouth; when he not only proclaims that some God must be worshipped, but at the same time declares that he is the God to whom worship is due; when he not only teaches his elect to have respect to God, but manifests himself as the God to whom this respect should be paid.

The course which God followed towards his Church from the very first, was to supplement these common proofs by the addition of his Word, as a surer and more direct means of discovering himself. And there can be no doubt that it was by this help, Adam, Noah, Abraham, and the other patriarchs, attained to that familiar knowledge which, in a manner, distinguished them from unbelievers. I am not now speaking of the peculiar doctrines of faith by which they were elevated to the hope of eternal blessedness. It was necessary, in passing from death unto life, that they should know God, not only as a Creator, but as a Redeemer also; and both kinds of knowledge they certainly did obtain from the Word. In point of order, however, the knowledge first given was that which made them acquainted with the God by whom the world was made and is governed. To this first knowledge was afterwards added the more intimate knowledge which alone quickens dead souls, and by which God is known not only as the Creator of the worlds and the sole author and disposer of all events, but also as a Redeemer, in the person of the Mediator. But as the fall and the corruption of nature have not yet been considered, I now postpone the consideration of the remedy (for which, see Book 2 c. 6 &c). Let the reader then remember, that I am not now treating of the covenant by which God adopted the children of Abraham, or of that branch of doctrine by which, as founded in Christ, believers have, properly speaking, been in all ages separated from the profane heathen. I am only showing that it is necessary to apply to Scripture, in order to learn the sure marks which distinguish God, as the Creator of the world, from the whole herd of fictitious gods. We shall afterward, in due course, consider the work of Redemption. In the meantime, though we shall adduce many passages from the New Testament, and some also from the Law and the Prophets, in which express mention is made of Christ, the only object will be to show that God, the Maker of the world, is manifested to us in Scripture, and his true character expounded, so as to save us from wandering up and down, as in a labyrinth, in search of some doubtful deity.

2. Whether God revealed himself to the fathers by oracles and visions,[1] or, by the instrumentality and ministry of men, suggested what they were to hand down to posterity, there cannot be a doubt that the certainty of what he taught them was firmly engraven on their hearts, so that they felt assured and knew that the things which they learnt came forth from God, who invariably accompanied his word with a sure testimony, infinitely superior to mere opinion. At length, in order that, while doctrine was continually enlarged, its truth might subsist in the world during all ages, it was his pleasure that the same oracles which he had deposited with the fathers should be consigned, as it were, to public records. With this view the law was promulgated, and prophets were afterwards added to be its interpreters. For though the uses of the law were manifold (Book 2 c. 7 and 8), and the special office assigned to Moses and all the prophets was to teach the method of reconciliation between God and man (whence Paul calls Christ “the end of the law,” Rom. 10:4); still I repeat that, in addition to the proper doctrine of faith and repentance in which Christ is set forth as a Mediator, the Scriptures employ certain marks and tokens to distinguish the only wise and true God, considered as the Creator and Governor of the world, and thereby guard against his being confounded with the herd of false deities. Therefore, while it becomes man seriously to employ his eyes in considering the works of God, since a place has been assigned him in this most glorious theatre that he may be a spectator of them, his special duty is to give ear to the Word, that he may the better profit.[2] Hence it is not strange that those who are born in darkness become more and more hardened in their stupidity; because the vast majority instead of confining themselves within due bounds by listening with docility to the Word, exult in their own vanity. If true religion is to beam upon us, our principle must be, that it is necessary to begin with heavenly teaching, and that it is impossible for any man to obtain even the minutest portion of right and sound doctrine without being a disciple of Scripture. Hence, the first step in true knowledge is taken, when we reverently embrace the testimony which God has been pleased therein to give of himself. For not only does faith, full and perfect faith, but all correct knowledge of God, originate in obedience. And surely in this respect God has with singular Providence provided for mankind in all ages.

3. For if we reflect how prone the human mind is to lapse into forgetfulness of God, how readily inclined to every kind of error, how bent every now and then on devising new and fictitious religions, it will be easy to understand how necessary it was to make such a depository of doctrine as would secure it from either perishing by the neglect, vanishing away amid the errors, or being corrupted by the presumptuous audacity of men. It being thus manifest that God, foreseeing the inefficiency of his image imprinted on the fair form of the universe, has given the assistance of his Word to all whom he has ever been pleased to instruct effectually, we, too, must pursue this straight path, if we aspire in earnest to a genuine contemplation of God;—we must go, I say, to the Word, where the character of God, drawn from his works is described accurately and to the life; these works being estimated, not by our depraved Judgment, but by the standard of eternal truth. If, as I lately said, we turn aside from it, how great soever the speed with which we move, we shall never reach the goal, because we are off the course. We should consider that the brightness of the Divine countenance, which even an apostle declares to be inaccessible (1 Tim. 6:16), is a kind of labyrinth,—a labyrinth to us inextricable, if the Word do not serve us as a thread to guide our path; and that it is better to limp in the way, than run with the greatest swiftness out of it. Hence the Psalmist, after repeatedly declaring (Pss. 93, 96, 97, 99, &c). that superstition should be banished from the world in order that pure religion may flourish, introduces God as reigning; meaning by the term, not the power which he possesses and which he exerts in the government of universal nature, but the doctrine by which he maintains his due supremacy: because error never can be eradicated from the heart of man until the true knowledge of God has been implanted in it.

4. Accordingly, the same prophet, after mentioning that the heavens declare the glory of God, that the firmament sheweth forth the works of his hands, that the regular succession of day and night proclaim his Majesty, proceeds to make mention of the Word:—“The law of the Lord,” says he, “is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes,” (Ps. 19:1–9). For though the law has other uses besides (as to which, see Book 2 c. 7, sec. 6, 10, 12), the general meaning is, that it is the proper school for training the children of God; the invitation given to all nations, to behold him in the heavens and earth, proving of no avail. The same view is taken in the 29th Psalm, where the Psalmist, after discoursing on the dreadful voice of God, which, in thunder, wind, rain, whirlwind, and tempest, shakes the earth, makes the mountains tremble, and breaks the cedars, concludes by saying, “that in his temple does every one speak of his glory,” unbelievers being deaf to all God’s words when they echo in the air. In like manner another Psalm, after describing the raging billows of the sea, thus concludes, “Thy testimonies are very sure; holiness becometh thine house forever,” (Ps. 93:5). To the same effect are the words of our Saviour to the Samaritan woman, when he told her that her nation and all other nations worshipped they knew not what; and that the Jews alone gave worship to the true God (John 4:22). Since the human mind, through its weakness, was altogether unable to come to God if not aided and upheld by his sacred word, it necessarily followed that all mankind, the Jews excepted, inasmuch as they sought God without the Word, were labouring under vanity and error.

Chapter 7. The Testimony of the Spirit Necessary to Give Full Authority to Scripture. The Impiety of Pretending That the Credibility of Scripture Depends on the Judgment of the Church

Sections

1. The authority of Scripture derived not from men, but from the Spirit of God. Objection, That Scripture depends on the decision of the Church. Refutation, I. The truth of God would thus be subjected to the will of man. II. It is insulting to the Holy Spirit. III. It establishes a tyranny in the Church. IV. It forms a mass of errors. V. It subverts conscience. VI. It exposes our faith to the scoffs of the profane.

2. Another reply to the objection drawn from the words of the Apostle Paul. Solution of the difficulties started by opponents. A second objection refuted.

3. A third objection founded on a sentiment of Augustine considered.

4. Conclusion, That the authority of Scripture is founded on its being spoken by God. This confirmed by the conscience of the godly, and the consent of all men of the least candour. A fourth objection common in the mouths of the profane. Refutation.

5. Last and necessary conclusion, That the authority of Scripture is sealed on the hearts of believers by the testimony of the Holy Spirit. The certainty of this testimony. Confirmation of it from a passage of Isaiah, and the experience of believers. Also, from another passage of Isaiah.

1. Before proceeding farther, it seems proper to make some observations on the authority of Scripture, in order that our minds may not only be prepared to receive it with reverence, but be divested of all doubt.

When that which professes to be the Word of God is acknowledged to be so, no person, unless devoid of common sense and the feelings of a man, will have the desperate hardihood to refuse credit to the speaker. But since no daily responses are given from heaven, and the Scriptures are the only records in which God has been pleased to consign his truth to perpetual remembrance, the full authority which they ought to possess with the faithful is not recognised, unless they are believed to have come from heaven, as directly as if God had been heard giving utterance to them. This subject well deserves to be treated more at large, and pondered more accurately. But my readers will pardon me for having more regard to what my plan admits than to what the extent of this topic requires.

A most pernicious error has very generally prevailed—viz. that Scripture is of importance only in so far as conceded to it by the suffrage of the Church; as if the eternal and inviolable truth of God could depend on the will of men. With great insult to the Holy Spirit, it is asked, who can assure us that the Scriptures proceeded from God; who guarantee that they have come down safe and unimpaired to our times; who persuade us that this book is to be received with reverence, and that one expunged from the list, did not the Church regulate all these things with certainty? On the determination of the Church, therefore, it is said, depend both the reverence which is due to Scripture, and the books which are to be admitted into the canon. Thus profane men, seeking, under the pretext of the Church, to introduce unbridled tyranny, care not in what absurdities they entangle themselves and others, provided they extort from the simple this one acknowledgement—viz. that there is nothing which the Church cannot do. But what is to become of miserable consciences in quest of some solid assurance of eternal life, if all the promises with regard to it have no better support than man’s Judgment? On being told so, will they cease to doubt and tremble? On the other hand, to what jeers of the wicked is our faith subjected—into how great suspicion is it brought with all, if believed to have only a precarious authority lent to it by the good will of men?

2. These ravings are admirably refuted by a single expression of an apostle. Paul testifies that the Church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets,” (Eph. 2:20). If the doctrine of the apostles and prophets is the foundation of the Church, the former must have had its certainty before the latter began to exist. Nor is there any room for the cavil, that though the Church derives her first beginning from thence, it still remains doubtful what writings are to be attributed to the apostles and prophets, until her Judgment is interposed. For if the Christian Church was founded at first on the writings of the prophets, and the preaching of the apostles, that doctrine, wheresoever it may be found, was certainly ascertained and sanctioned antecedently to the Church, since, but for this, the Church herself never could have existed.[1] Nothing, therefore can be more absurd than the fiction, that the power of judging Scripture is in the Church, and that on her nod its certainty depends. When the Church receives it, and gives it the stamp of her authority, she does not make that authentic which was otherwise doubtful or controverted but, acknowledging it as the truth of God, she, as in duty bounds shows her reverence by an unhesitating assent. As to the question, How shall we be persuaded that it came from God without recurring to a decree of the Church? it is just the same as if it were asked, How shall we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Scripture bears upon the face of it as clear evidence of its truth, as white and black do of their colour, sweet and bitter of their taste.

3. I am aware it is usual to quote a sentence of Augustine in which he says that he would not believe the gospel, were he not moved by the authority of the Church (Aug. Cont. Epist. Fundament. c. 5). But it is easy to discover from the context, how inaccurate and unfair it is to give it such a meaning. He was reasoning against the Manichees, who insisted on being implicitly believed, alleging that they had the truth, though they did not show they had. But as they pretended to appeal to the gospel in support of Manes, he asks what they would do if they fell in with a man who did not even believe the gospel—what kind of argument they would use to bring him over to their opinion. He afterwards adds, “But I would not believe the gospel,” &c.; meaning, that were he a stranger to the faith, the only thing which could induce him to embrace the gospel would be the authority of the Church. And is it anything wonderful, that one who does not know Christ should pay respect to men?

Augustine, therefore, does not here say that the faith of the godly is founded on the authority of the Church; nor does he mean that the certainty of the gospel depends upon it; he merely says that unbelievers would have no certainty of the gospel, so as thereby to win Christ, were they not influenced by the consent of the Church. And he clearly shows this to be his meaning, by thus expressing himself a little before: “When I have praised my own creed, and ridiculed yours, who do you suppose is to judge between us; or what more is to be done than to quit those who, inviting us to certainty, afterwards command us to believe uncertainty, and follow those who invite us, in the first instance, to believe what we are not yet able to comprehend, that waxing stronger through faith itself, we may become able to understand what we believe—no longer men, but God himself internally strengthening and illuminating our minds?” These unquestionably are the words of Augustine (Aug. Cont. Epist. Fundament. cap. 4); and the obvious inference from them is, that this holy man had no intention to suspend our faith in Scripture on the nod or decision of the Church,[2] but only to intimate (what we too admit to be true) that those who are not yet enlightened by the Spirit of God, become teachable by reverence for the Church, and thus submit to learn the faith of Christ from the gospel. In this way, though the authority of the Church leads us on, and prepares us to believe in the gospel, it is plain that Augustine would have the certainty of the godly to rest on a very different foundation.[3]

At the same time, I deny not that he often presses the Manichees with the consent of the whole Church, while arguing in support of the Scriptures, which they rejected. Hence he upbraids Faustus (lib. 32) for not submitting to evangelical truth—truth so well founded, so firmly established, so gloriously renowned, and handed down by sure succession from the days of the apostles. But he nowhere insinuates that the authority which we give to the Scriptures depends on the definitions or devices of men. He only brings forward the universal Judgment of the Church, as a point most pertinent to the cause, and one, moreover, in which he had the advantage of his opponents. Anyone who desires to see this more fully proved may read his short treatises, De Utilitate Credendi (The Advantages of Believing), where it will be found that the only facility of believing which he recommends is that which affords an introduction, and forms a fit commencement to inquiry; while he declares that we ought not to be satisfied with opinion, but to strive after substantial truth.

4. It is necessary to attend to what I lately said, that our faith in doctrine is not established until we have a perfect conviction that God is its author. Hence, the highest proof of Scripture is uniformly taken from the character of him whose Word it is. The prophets and apostles boast not their own acuteness or any qualities which win credit to speakers, nor do they dwell on reasons; but they appeal to the sacred name of God, in order that the whole world may be compelled to submission. The next thing to be considered is, how it appears not probable merely, but certain, that the name of God is neither rashly nor cunningly pretended. If, then, we would consult most effectually for our consciences, and save them from being driven about in a whirl of uncertainty, from wavering, and even stumbling at the smallest obstacle, our conviction of the truth of Scripture must be derived from a higher source than human conjectures, Judgments, or reasons; namely, the secret testimony of the Spirit. It is true, indeed, that if we choose to proceed in the way of arguments it is easy to establish, by evidence of various kinds, that if there is a God in heaven, the Law, the Prophecies, and the Gospel, proceeded from him. Nay, although learned men, and men of the greatest talent, should take the opposite side, summoning and ostentatiously displaying all the powers of their genius in the discussion; if they are not possessed of shameless effrontery, they will be compelled to confess that the Scripture exhibits clear evidence of its being spoken by God, and, consequently, of its containing his heavenly doctrine. We shall see a little farther on, that the volume of sacred Scripture very far surpasses all other writings. Nay, if we look at it with clear eyes, and unbiased Judgment, it will forthwith present itself with a divine majesty which will subdue our presumptuous opposition, and force us to do it homage.

Still, however, it is preposterous to attempt, by discussion, to rear up a full faith in Scripture. True, were I called to contend with the craftiest despisers of God, I trust, though I am not possessed of the highest ability or eloquence, I should not find it difficult to stop their obstreperous mouths; I could, without much ado, put down the boastings which they mutter in corners, were anything to be gained by refuting their cavils. But although we may maintain the sacred Word of God against gainsayers, it does not follow that we shall forthwith implant the certainty which faith requires in their hearts. Profane men think that religion rests only on opinion, and, therefore, that they may not believe foolishly, or on slight grounds, desire and insist to have it proved by reason that Moses and the prophets were divinely inspired. But I answer, that the testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason. For as God alone can properly bear witness to his own words, so these words will not obtain full credit in the hearts of men, until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit. The same Spirit, therefore, who spoke by the mouth of the prophets, must penetrate our hearts, in order to convince us that they faithfully delivered the message with which they were divinely entrusted. This connection is most aptly expressed by Isaiah in these words, “My Spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed, saith the Lord, from henceforth and forever,” (Isa. 59:21). Some worthy persons feel disconcerted, because, while the wicked murmur with impunity at the Word of God, they have not a clear proof at hand to silence them, forgetting that the Spirit is called an earnest and seal to confirm the faith of the godly, for this very reason, that, until he enlightens their minds, they are tossed to and fro in a sea of doubts.

5. Let it therefore be held as fixed, that those who are inwardly taught by the Holy Spirit acquiesce implicitly in Scripture; that Scripture, carrying its own evidence along with it, deigns not to submit to proofs and arguments, but owes the full conviction with which we ought to receive it to the testimony of the Spirit.[4] Enlightened by him, we no longer believe, either on our own Judgment or that of others, that the Scriptures are from God; but, in a way superior to human Judgment, feel perfectly assured—as much so as if we beheld the divine image visibly impressed on it—that it came to us, by the instrumentality of men, from the very mouth of God. We ask not for proofs or probabilities on which to rest our Judgment, but we subject our intellect and Judgment to it as too transcendent for us to estimate. This, however, we do, not in the manner in which some are wont to fasten on an unknown object, which, as soon as known, displeases, but because we have a thorough conviction that, in holding it, we hold unassailable truth; not like miserable men, whose minds are enslaved by superstition, but because we feel a divine energy living and breathing in it—an energy by which we are drawn and animated to obey it, willingly indeed, and knowingly, but more vividly and effectually than could be done by human will or knowledge. Hence, God most justly exclaims by the mouth of Isaiah, “Ye are my witnesses, saith the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen, that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he,” (Isa. 43:10).

Such, then, is a conviction which asks not for reasons; such, a knowledge which accords with the highest reason, namely knowledge in which the mind rests more firmly and securely than in any reasons; such in fine, the conviction which revelation from heaven alone can produce. I say nothing more than every believer experiences in himself, though my words fall far short of the reality. I do not dwell on this subject at present, because we will return to it again: only let us now understand that the only true faith is that which the Spirit of God seals on our hearts. Nay, the modest and teachable reader will find a sufficient reason in the promise contained in Isaiah, that all the children of the renovated Church “shall be taught of the Lord,” (Isa. 54:13). This singular privilege God bestows on his elect only, whom he separates from the rest of mankind. For what is the beginning of true doctrine but prompt alacrity to hear the Word of God? And God, by the mouth of Moses, thus demands to be heard: “It is not in heavens that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart,” (Deut. 30:12, 14). God having been pleased to reserve the treasure of intelligence for his children, no wonder that so much ignorance and stupidity is seen in the generality of mankind. In the generality, I include even those specially chosen, until they are ingrafted into the body of the Church. Isaiah, moreover, while reminding us that the prophetical doctrine would prove incredible not only to strangers, but also to the Jews, who were desirous to be thought of the household of God, subjoins the reason, when he asks, “To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” (Isa. 53:1). If at any time, then we are troubled at the small number of those who believe, let us, on the other hand, call to mind, that none comprehend the mysteries of God save those to whom it is given.

Chapter 8. The Credibility of Scripture Sufficiently Proved in so far as Natural Reason Admits

This chapter consists of four parts. The first contains certain general proofs which may be easily gathered out of the writings both of the Old and New Testament—viz. the arrangement of the sacred volume, its dignity, truth, simplicity, efficacy, and majesty, sec. 1, 2. The second part contains special proofs taken from the Old Testament—viz. the antiquity of the books of Moses, their authority, his miracles and prophecies, sec. 3–7; also, the predictions of the other prophets and their wondrous harmony, sec. 8. There is subjoined a refutation of two objections to the books of Moses and the Prophets, sec. 9, 10. The third part exhibits proofs gathered out of the New Testament, e.g., the harmony of the Evangelists in their account of heavenly mysteries, the majesty of the writings of John, Peter, and Paul, the remarkable calling of the Apostles and conversion of Paul, sec. 11. The last part exhibits the proofs drawn from ecclesiastical history, the perpetual consent of the Church in receiving and preserving divine truth, the invincible force of the truth in defending itself, the agreement of the godly (though otherwise differing so much from one another), the pious profession of the same doctrine by many illustrious men; in fine, the more than human constancy of the martyrs, sec. 12, 13. This is followed by a conclusion of the particular topic discussed.

Sections

1. Secondary helps to establish the credibility of Scripture. I. The arrangement of the sacred volume. II. Its dignity. III. Its truth. IV. Its simplicity. V. Its efficacy.

2. The majesty conspicuous in the writings of the Prophets.

3. Special proofs from the Old Testament. I. The antiquity of the Books of Moses.

4. This antiquity contrasted with the dreams of the Egyptians. II. The majesty of the Books of Moses.

5. The miracles and prophecies of Moses. A profane objection refuted.

6. Another profane objection refuted.

7. The prophecies of Moses as to the sceptre not departing from Judah, and the calling of the Gentiles.

8. The predictions of other prophets. The destruction of Jerusalem; and the return from the Babylonish captivity. Harmony of the Prophets. The celebrated prophecy of Daniel.

9. Objection against Moses and the Prophets. Answer to it.

10. Another objection and answer. Of the wondrous Providence of God in the preservation of the sacred books. The Greek Translation. The carefulness of the Jews.

11. Special proofs from the New Testament. I. The harmony of the Evangelists, and the sublime simplicity of their writings. II. The majesty of John, Paul, and Peter. III. The calling of the Apostles. IV. The conversion of Paul.

12. Proofs from Church history. I. Perpetual consent of the Church in receiving and preserving the truth. II. The invincible power of the truth itself. III. Agreement among the godly, not withstanding of their many differences in other respects.

13. The constancy of the martyrs. Conclusion. Proofs of this description only of use after the certainty of Scripture has been established in the heart by the Holy Spirit.

1. In vain were the authority of Scripture fortified by argument, or supported by the consent of the Church, or confirmed by any other helps, if unaccompanied by an assurance higher and stronger than human Judgment can give. Till this better foundation has been laid, the authority of Scripture remains in suspense. On the other hand, when recognising its exemption from the common rule, we receive it reverently, and according to its dignity, those proofs which were not so strong as to produce and rivet a full conviction in our minds, become most appropriate helps. For it is wonderful how much we are confirmed in our belief, when we more attentively consider how admirably the system of divine wisdom contained in it is arranged—how perfectly free the doctrine is from everything that savours of earth—how beautifully it harmonises in all its parts—and how rich it is in all the other qualities which give an air of majesty to composition. Our hearts are still more firmly assured when we reflect that our admiration is elicited more by the dignity of the matter than by the graces of style. For it was not without an admirable arrangement of Providence, that the sublime mysteries of the kingdom of heaven have for the greater part been delivered with a contemptible meanness of words. Had they been adorned with a more splendid eloquence, the wicked might have cavilled, and alleged that this constituted all their force. But now, when an unpolished simplicity, almost bordering on rudeness, makes a deeper impression than the loftiest flights of oratory, what does it indicate if not that the Holy Scriptures are too mighty in the power of truth to need the rhetorician’s art?

Hence there was good ground for the Apostle’s declaration, that the faith of the Corinthians was founded not on “the wisdom of men,” but on “the power of God,” (1 Cor. 2:5), this speech and preaching among them having been “not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power,” (1 Cor. 2:5). For the truth is vindicated in opposition to every doubt, when, unsupported by foreign aid, it has its sole sufficiency in itself. How peculiarly this property belongs to Scripture appears from this, that no human writings, however skilfully composed, are at all capable of affecting us in a similar way. Read Demosthenes or Cicero, read Plato, Aristotle, or any other of that class: you will, I admit, feel wonderfully allured, pleased, moved, enchanted; but turn from them to the reading of the Sacred Volume, and whether you will or not, it will so affect you, so pierce your heart, so work its way into your very marrow, that, in comparison of the impression so produced, that of orators and philosophers will almost disappear; making it manifest that in the Sacred Volume there is a truth divine, a something which makes it immeasurably superior to all the gifts and graces attainable by man.

2. I confess, however, that in elegance and beauty, nay, splendour, the style of some of the prophets is not surpassed by the eloquence of heathen writers. By examples of this description, the Holy Spirit was pleased to show that it was not from want of eloquence he in other instances used a rude and homely style. But whether you read David, Isaiah, and others of the same class, whose discourse flows sweet and pleasant; or Amos the herdsman, Jeremiah, and Zechariah, whose rougher idiom savours of rusticity; that majesty of the Spirit to which I adverted appears conspicuous in all. I am not unaware, that as Satan often apes God, that he may by a fallacious resemblance the better insinuate himself into the minds of the simple, so he craftily disseminated the impious errors with which he deceived miserable men in an uncouth and semi-barbarous style, and frequently employed obsolete forms of expression in order to cloak his impostures. None possessed of any moderate share of sense need be told how vain and vile such affectation is. But in regard to the Holy Scriptures, however petulant men may attempt to carp at them, they are replete with sentiments which it is clear that man never could have conceived. Let each of the prophets be examined, and not one will be found who does not rise far higher than human reach. Those who feel their works insipid must be absolutely devoid of taste.

3. As this subject has been treated at large by others, it will be sufficient here merely to touch on its leading points. In addition to the qualities already mentioned, great weight is due to the antiquity of Scripture (Euseb. Prepar. Evang. lib. 2 c. 1). Whatever fables Greek writers may retail concerning the Egyptian Theology, no monument of any religion exists which is not long posterior to the age of Moses. But Moses does not introduce a new Deity. He only sets forth that doctrine concerning the eternal God which the Israelites had received by tradition from their fathers, by whom it had been transmitted, as it were, from hand to hand, during a long series of ages. For what else does he do than lead them back to the covenant which had been made with Abraham? Had he referred to matters of which they had never heard, he never could have succeeded; but their deliverance from the bondage in which they were held must have been a fact of familiar and universal notoriety, the very mention of which must have immediately aroused the attention of all. It is, moreover, probable, that they were intimately acquainted with the whole period of four hundred years. Now, if Moses (who is so much earlier than all other writers) traces the tradition of his doctrine from so remote a period, it is obvious how far the Holy Scriptures must in point of antiquity surpass all other writings.

4. Some perhaps may choose to credit the Egyptians in carrying back their antiquity to a period of six thousand years before the world was created. But their garrulity, which even some profane authors have held up to derision, it cannot be necessary for me to refute. Josephus, however, in his work against Appion, produces important passages from very ancient writers, implying that the doctrine delivered in the law was celebrated among all nations from the remotest ages, though it was neither read nor accurately known. And then, in order that the malignant might have no ground for suspicion, and the ungodly no handle for cavil, God has provided, in the most effectual manner, against both dangers. When Moses relates the words which Jacob, under Divine inspiration, uttered concerning his posterity almost three hundred years before, how does he ennoble his own tribe? He stigmatises it with eternal infamy in the person of Levi. “Simon and Levi,” says he, “are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly mine honour be not thou united,” (Gen. 49:5, 6). This stigma he certainly might have passed in silence, not only that he might spare his own ancestor, but also save both himself and his whole family from a portion of the disgrace. How can any suspicion attach to him, who, by voluntarily proclaiming that the first founder of his family was declared detestable by a Divine oracle, neither consults for his own private interest, nor declines to incur obloquy among his tribe, who must have been offended by his statement of the fact? Again, when he relates the wicked murmuring of his brother Aaron, and his sister Miriam (Num. 12:1), shall we say that he spoke his own natural feelings, or that he obeyed the command of the Holy Spirit? Moreover, when invested with supreme authority, why does he not bestow the office of High Priest on his sons, instead of consigning them to the lowest place? I only touch on a few points out of many; but the Law itself contains throughout numerous proofs, which fully vindicate the credibility of Moses, and place it beyond dispute, that he was in truth a messenger sent forth from God.

5. The many striking miracles which Moses relates are so many sanctions of the law delivered, and the doctrine propounded, by him.[1] His being carried up into the mount in a cloud; his remaining there forty days separated from human society; his countenance glistening during the promulgation of the law, as with meridian effulgence; the lightnings which flashed on every side; the voices and thunderings which echoed in the air; the clang of the trumpet blown by no human mouth; his entrance into the tabernacle, while a cloud hid him from the view of the people; the miraculous vindication of his authority, by the fearful destruction of Korah, Nathan, and Abiram, and all their impious faction; the stream instantly gushing forth from the rock when struck with his rod; the manna which rained from heaven at his prayer;—did not God by all these proclaim aloud that he was an undoubted prophet? If anyone object that I am taking debatable points for granted, the cavil is easily answered. Moses published all these things in the assembly of the people. How, then, could he possibly impose on the very eye-witnesses of what was done? Is it conceivable that he would have come forward, and, while accusing the people of unbelief, obstinacy, ingratitude, and other crimes, have boasted that his doctrine had been confirmed in their own presence by miracles which they never saw?

6. For it is also worthy of remark, that the miracles which he relates are combined with disagreeable circumstances, which must have provoked opposition from the whole body of the people, if there had been the smallest ground for it. Hence it is obvious that they were induced to assent, merely because they had been previously convinced by their own experience. But because the fact was too clear to leave it free for heathen writers to deny that Moses did perform miracles, the father of lies suggested a calumny, and ascribed them to magic (Exod. 9:11). But with what probability is a charge of magic brought against him, who held it in such abhorrence, that he ordered everyone who should consult soothsayers and magicians to be stoned? (Lev. 20:27). Assuredly, no impostor deals in tricks, without studying to raise his reputation by amazing the common people. But what does Moses do? By crying out, that he and Aaron his brother are nothing (Exod. 16:7), that they merely execute what God has commanded, he clears himself from every approach to suspicion. Again, if the facts are considered in themselves, what kind of incantation could cause manna to rain from heaven every day, and in sufficient quantity to maintain a people, while any one, who gathered more than the appointed measure, saw his incredulity divinely punished by its turning to worms? To this we may add, that God then suffered his servant to be subjected to so many serious trials, that the ungodly cannot now gain anything by their glamour. When (as often happened) the people proudly and petulantly rose up against him, when individuals conspired, and attempted to overthrow him, how could any impostures have enabled him to elude their rage? The event plainly shows that by these means his doctrine was attested to all succeeding ages.

7. Moreover, it is impossible to deny that he was guided by a prophetic spirit in assigning the first place to the tribe of Judah in the person of Jacob, especially if we take into view the fact itself, as explained by the event. Suppose that Moses was the inventor of the prophecy, still, after he committed it to writing, four hundred years pass away, during which no mention is made of a sceptre in the tribe of Judah. After Saul is anointed, the kingly office seems fixed in the tribe of Benjamin (1 Sam. 11:15; 16:13). When David is anointed by Samuel, what apparent ground is there for the transference? Who could have looked for a king out of the plebeian family of a herdsman? And out of seven brothers, who could have thought that the honour was destined for the youngest? And then by what means did he afterwards come within reach of the throne? Who dare say that his anointing was regulated by human art, or skill, or prudence, and was not rather the fulfilment of a divine prophecy? In like manner, do not the predictions, though obscure, of the admission of the Gentiles into the divine covenant, seeing they were not fulfilled till almost two thousand years after, make it palpable that Moses spoke under divine inspiration? I omit other predictions which so plainly betoken divine revelation, that all men of sound mind must see they were spoken by God. In short, his Song itself (Deut. 32) is a bright mirror in which God is manifestly seen.

8. In the case of the other prophets the evidence is even clearer. I will only select a few examples, for it were too tedious to enumerate the whole. Isaiah, in his own day, when the kingdom of Judah was at peace, and had even some ground to confide in the protection of the Chaldeans, spoke of the destruction of the city and the captivity of the people (Isa. 45:1). Supposing it not to be sufficient evidence of divine inspiration to foretell, many years before, events which, at the time, seemed fabulous, but which ultimately turned out to be true, whence shall it be said that the prophecies which he uttered concerning their return proceeded, if it was not from God? He names Cyrus, by whom the Chaldeans were to be subdued and the people restored to freedom. After the prophet thus spoke, more than a hundred years elapsed before Cyrus was born, that being nearly the period which elapsed between the death of the one and the birth of the other. It was impossible at that time to guess that some Cyrus would arise to make war on the Babylonians, and after subduing their powerful monarchy, put an end to the captivity of the children of Israel. Does not this simple, unadorned narrative plainly demonstrate that what Isaiah spoke was not the conjecture of man, but the undoubted oracle of God? Again, when Jeremiah, a considerable time before the people were led away, assigned seventy years as the period of captivity, and fixed their liberation and return, must not his tongue have been guided by the Spirit of God? What effrontery were it to deny that, by these evidences, the authority of the prophets is established, the very thing being fulfilled to which they appeal in support of their credibility! “Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them,” (Isa. 42:9). I say nothing of the agreement between Jeremiah and Ezekiel, who, living so far apart, and yet prophesying at the same time, harmonise as completely in all they say as if they had mutually dictated the words to one another. What shall I say of Daniel? Did not he deliver prophecies embracing a future period of almost six hundred years, as if he had been writing of past events generally known? (Dan. 9, &c). If the pious will duly meditate on these things, they will be sufficiently instructed to silence the cavils of the ungodly. The demonstration is too clear to be gainsaid.

9. I am aware of what is muttered in corners by certain miscreants, when they would display their acuteness in assailing divine truth. They ask, how do we know that Moses and the prophets wrote the books which now bear their names? Nay, they even dare to question whether there ever was a Moses. Were any one to question whether there ever was a Plato, or an Aristotle, or a Cicero, would not the rod or the whip be deemed the fit chastisement of such folly? The law of Moses has been wonderfully preserved, more by divine providence than by human care; and though, owing to the negligence of the priests, it lay for a short time buried,—from the time when it was found by good King Josiah (2 Kings 22:8; 2 Chron. 34:15),—it has continued in the hands of men, and been transmitted in unbroken succession from generation to generation. Nor, indeed, when Josiah brought it forth, was it as a book unknown or new, but one which had always been matter of notoriety, and was then in full remembrance. The original writing had been deposited in the temple, and a copy taken from it had been deposited in the royal archives (Deut. 17:18, 19); the only thing which had occurred was, that the priests had ceased to publish the law itself in due form, and the people also had neglected the wonted reading of it. I may add, that scarcely an age passed during which its authority was not confirmed and renewed. Were the books of Moses unknown to those who had the Psalms of David in their hands? To sum up the whole in one word, it is certain beyond dispute, that these writings passed down, if I may so express it, from hand to hand, being transmitted in an unbroken series from the fathers, who either with their own ears heard them spoken, or learned them from those who had, while the remembrance of them was fresh.

10. An objection taken from the history of the Maccabees (1 Macc. 1:57, 58) to impugn the credibility of Scripture, is, on the contrary, fitted the best possible to confirm it. First, however, let us clear away the gloss which is put upon it: having done so, we shall turn the engine which they erect against us upon themselves. As Antiochus ordered all the books of Scripture to be burnt, it is asked, where did the copies we now have come from? I, in my turn, ask, In what workshop could they have been so quickly fabricated? It is certain that they were in existence the moment the persecution ceased, and that they were acknowledged without dispute by all the pious who had been educated in their doctrine, and were familiarly acquainted with them. Nay, while all the wicked so wantonly insulted the Jews as if they had leagued together for the purpose, not one ever dared to charge them with having introduced spurious books. Whatever, in their opinion, the Jewish religion might be, they acknowledged that Moses was the founder of it. What, then, do those babblers, but betray their snarling petulance in falsely alleging the spuriousness of books whose sacred antiquity is proved by the consent of all history? But not to spend labour in vain in refuting these vile calumnies, let us rather attend to the care which the Lord took to preserve his Word, when against all hope he rescued it from the truculence of a most cruel tyrant as from the midst of the flames—inspiring pious priests and others with such constancy that they hesitated not, though it should have been purchased at the expense of their lives, to transmit this treasure to posterity, and defeating the keenest search of prefects and their satellites.

Who does not recognise it as a signal and miraculous work of God, that those sacred monuments which the ungodly persuaded themselves had utterly perished, immediately returned to resume their former rights, and, indeed, in greater honour? For the Greek translation appeared to disseminate them over the whole world. Nor does it seem so wonderful that God rescued the tables of his covenant from the sanguinary edicts of Antiochus, as that they remained safe and entire amid the manifold disasters by which the Jewish nation was occasionally crushed, devastated, and almost exterminated. The Hebrew language was in no estimation, and almost unknown; and assuredly, had not God provided for religion, it must have utterly perished. For it is obvious from the prophetical writings of that age, how much the Jews, after their return from the captivity, had lost the genuine use of their native tongue. It is of importance to attend to this, because the comparison more clearly establishes the antiquity of the Law and the Prophets. And whom did God employ to preserve the doctrine of salvation contained in the Law and the Prophets, that Christ might manifest it in its own time? The Jews, the bitterest enemies of Christ; and hence Augustine justly calls them the librarians of the Christian Church, because they supplied us with books of which they themselves had not the use.

11. When we proceed to the New Testament, how solid are the pillars by which its truth is supported! Three evangelists give a narrative in a mean and humble style. The proud often eye this simplicity with disdain, because they attend not to the principal heads of doctrine; for from these they might easily infer that these evangelists treat of heavenly mysteries beyond the capacity of man. Those who have the least particle of candour must be ashamed of their fastidiousness when they read the first chapter of Luke. Even our Saviour’s discourses, of which a summary is given by these three evangelists, ought to prevent everyone from treating their writings with contempt. John, again, fulminating in majesty, strikes down more powerfully than any thunderbolt the petulance of those who refuse to submit to the obedience of faith. Let all those acute censors, whose highest pleasure it is to banish a reverential regard of Scripture from their own and other men’s hearts, come forward; let them read the Gospel of John, and, willing or unwilling, they will find a thousand sentences which will at least arouse them from their sloth; nay, which will burn into their consciences as with a hot iron, and check their derision. The same thing may be said of Peter and Paul, whose writings, though the greater part read them blindfold, exhibit a heavenly majesty, which in a manner binds and rivets every reader. But one circumstance, sufficient of itself to exalt their doctrine above the world, is, that Matthew, who was formerly fixed down to his money-table, Peter and John, who were employed with their little boats, being all rude and illiterate, had never learned in any human school that which they delivered to others. Paul, more over, who had not only been an avowed but a cruel and bloody foe, being changed into a new man, shows, by the sudden and unhoped-for change, that a heavenly power had compelled him to preach the doctrine which once he destroyed. Let those dogs deny that the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles, or, if not, let them refuse credit to the history, still the very circumstances proclaim that the Holy Spirit must have been the teacher of those who, formerly contemptible among the people, all of a sudden began to discourse so magnificently of heavenly mysteries.

12. Add, moreover, that, for the best of reasons, the consent of the Church is not without its weight. For it is not to be accounted of no consequence, that, from the first publication of Scripture, so many ages have uniformly concurred in yielding obedience to it, and that, notwithstanding of the many extraordinary attempts which Satan and the whole world have made to oppress and overthrow it, or completely efface it from the memory of men, it has flourished like the palm tree and continued invincible. Though in old times there was scarcely a sophist or orator of any note who did not exert his powers against it, their efforts proved unavailing. The powers of the earth armed themselves for its destruction, but all their attempts vanished into smoke. When thus powerfully assailed on every side, how could it have resisted if it had trusted only to human aid? Nay, its divine origin is more completely established by the fact, that when all human wishes were against it, it advanced by its own energy. Add that it was not a single city or a single nation that concurred in receiving and embracing it. Its authority was recognised as far and as wide as the world extends—various nations who had nothing else in common entering for this purpose into a holy league. Moreover, while we ought to attach the greatest weight to the agreement of minds so diversified, and in all other things so much at variance with each other—an agreement which a Divine Providence alone could have produced—it adds no small weight to the whole when we attend to the piety of those who thus agree; not of all of them indeed, but of those in whom as lights God was pleased that his Church should shine.

13. Again, with what confidence does it become us to subscribe to a doctrine attested and confirmed by the blood of so many saints? They, when once they had embraced it, hesitated not boldly and intrepidly, and even with great alacrity, to meet death in its defence. Being transmitted to us with such an earnest, who of us shall not receive it with firm and unshaken conviction? It is therefore no small proof of the authority of Scripture, that it was sealed with the blood of so many witnesses, especially when it is considered that in bearing testimony to the faith, they met death not with fanatical enthusiasm (as erring spirits are sometimes wont to do), but with a firm and constant, yet sober godly zeal. There are other reasons, neither few nor feeble, by which the dignity and majesty of the Scriptures may be not only proved to the pious, but also completely vindicated against the cavils of slanderers. These, however, cannot of themselves produce a firm faith in Scripture until our heavenly Father manifest his presence in it, and thereby secure implicit reverence for it. Then only, therefore, does Scripture suffice to give a saving knowledge of God when its certainty is founded on the inward persuasion of the Holy Spirit. Still the human testimonies which go to confirm it will not be without effect, if they are used in subordination to that chief and highest proof, as secondary helps to our weakness. But it is foolish to attempt to prove to infidels that the Scripture is the Word of God. This it cannot be known to be, except by faith. Justly, therefore, does Augustine remind us, that every man who would have any understanding in such high matters must previously possess piety and mental peace.

Chapter 9. All the Principles of Piety Subverted by Fanatics, Who Substitute Revelations for Scripture

Sections

1. The temper and error of the Libertines, who take to themselves the name of spiritual, briefly described. Their refutation. 1. The Apostles and all true Christians have embraced the written Word. This confirmed by a passage in Isaiah; also by the example and words of Paul. 2. The Spirit of Christ seals the doctrine of the written Word on the minds of the godly.

2. Refutation continued. 3. The impositions of Satan cannot be detected without the aid of the written Word. First Objection. The Answer to it.

3. Second Objection from the words of Paul as to the letter and spirit. The Answer, with an explanation of Paul’s meaning. How the Spirit and the written Word are indissolubly connected.

1. Those who, rejecting Scripture, imagine that they have some peculiar way of penetrating to God, are to be deemed not so much under the influence of error as madness. For certain giddy men[1] have lately appeared, who, while they make a great display of the superiority of the Spirit, reject all reading of the Scriptures themselves, and deride the simplicity of those who only delight in what they call the dead and deadly letter. But I wish they would tell me what spirit it is whose inspiration raises them to such a sublime height that they dare despise the doctrine of Scripture as mean and childish. If they answer that it is the Spirit of Christ, their confidence is exceedingly ridiculous; since they will, I presume, admit that the apostles and other believers in the primitive Church were not illuminated by any other Spirit. None of these thereby learned to despise the word of God, but everyone was imbued with greater reverence for it, as their writings most clearly testify. And, indeed, it had been so foretold by the mouth of Isaiah. For when he says, “My Spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed’s seed, saith the Lord, from henceforth and forever,” he does not tie down the ancient Church to external doctrine, as he were a mere teacher of elements;[2] he rather shows that, under the reign of Christ, the true and full felicity of the new Church will consist in their being ruled not less by the Word than by the Spirit of God. Hence we infer that these miscreants are guilty of fearful sacrilege in tearing asunder what the prophet joins in indissoluble union. Add to this, that Paul, though carried up even to the third heaven, ceased not to profit by the doctrine of the law and the prophets, while, in like manner, he exhorts Timothy, a teacher of singular excellence, to give attention to reading (1 Tim. 4:13). And the eulogium which he pronounces on Scripture well deserves to be remembered—viz. that “it is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect,” (2 Tim. 3:16). What an infatuation of the devil, therefore, to fancy that Scripture, which conducts the sons of God to the final goal, is of transient and temporary use? Again, I should like those people to tell me whether they have imbibed any other Spirit than that which Christ promised to his disciples. Though their madness is extreme, it will scarcely carry them the length of making this their boast. But what kind of Spirit did our Saviour promise to send? One who should not speak of himself (John 16:13), but suggest and instil the truths which he himself had delivered through the word. Hence the office of the Spirit promised to us, is not to form new and unheard-of revelations, or to coin a new form of doctrine, by which we may be led away from the received doctrine of the gospel, but to seal on our minds the very doctrine which the gospel recommends.

2. Hence it is easy to understand that we must give diligent heed both to the reading and hearing of Scripture, if we would obtain any benefit from the Spirit of God (just as Peter praises those who attentively study the doctrine of the prophets [2 Pet. 1:19], though it might have been thought to be superseded after the gospel light arose), and, on the contrary, that any spirit which passes by the wisdom of God’s Word, and suggests any other doctrine, is deservedly suspected of vanity and falsehood. Since Satan transforms himself into an angel of light, what authority can the Spirit have with us if he be not ascertained by an infallible mark? And assuredly he is pointed out to us by the Lord with sufficient clearness; but these miserable men err as if bent on their own destruction, while they seek the Spirit from themselves rather than from him. But they say that it is insulting to subject the Spirit, to whom all things are to be subject, to the Scripture: as if it were disgraceful to the Holy Spirit to maintain a perfect resemblance throughout, and be in all respects without variation consistent with himself. True, if he were subjected to a human, an angelical, or to any foreign standard, it might be thought that he was rendered subordinate, or, if you will, brought into bondage, but so long as he is compared with himself, and considered in himself, how can it be said that he is thereby injured? I admit that he is brought to a test, but the very test by which it has pleased him that his majesty should be confirmed. It ought to be enough for us when once we hear his voice; but lest Satan should insinuate himself under his name, he wishes us to recognise him by the image which he has stamped on the Scriptures. The author of the Scriptures cannot vary, and change his likeness. Such as he there appeared at first, such he will perpetually remain. There is nothing contumelious to him in this, unless we are to think it would be honourable for him to degenerate, and revolt against himself.

3. Their cavil about our cleaving to the dead letter carries with it the punishment which they deserve for despising Scripture. It is clear that Paul is there arguing against false apostles (2 Cor. 3:6), who, by recommending the law without Christ, deprived the people of the benefit of the New Covenant, by which the Lord engages that he will write his law on the hearts of believers, and engrave it on their inward parts. The letter therefore is dead, and the law of the Lord kills its readers when it is dissevered from the grace of Christ, and only sounds in the ear without touching the heart. But if it is effectually impressed on the heart by the Spirit; if it exhibits Christ, it is the word of life converting the soul, and making wise the simple. Nay, in the very same passage, the apostle calls his own preaching the ministration of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:8), intimating that the Holy Spirit so cleaves to his own truth, as he has expressed it in Scripture, that he then only exerts and puts forth his strength when the word is received with due honour and respect.

There is nothing repugnant here to what was lately said (chap. 7) that we have no great certainty of the word itself, until it be confirmed by the testimony of the Spirit. For the Lord has so knit together the certainty of his word and his Spirit, that our minds are duly imbued with reverence for the word when the Spirit shining upon it enables us there to behold the face of God; and, on the other hand, we embrace the Spirit with no danger of delusion when we recognise him in his image, that is, in his word. Thus, indeed, it is. God did not produce his word before men for the sake of sudden display, intending to abolish it the moment the Spirit should arrive; but he employed the same Spirit, by whose agency he had administered the word, to complete his work by the efficacious confirmation of the word. In this way Christ explained to the two disciples (Luke 24:27), not that they were to reject the Scriptures and trust to their own wisdom, but that they were to understand the Scriptures. In like manner, when Paul says to the Thessalonians, “Quench not the Spirit,” he does not carry them aloft to empty speculation apart from the word; he immediately adds, “Despise not prophesying,” (1 Thess. 5:19, 20). By this, doubtless, he intimates that the light of the Spirit is quenched the moment prophesying fall into contempt. How is this answered by those swelling enthusiasts, in whose idea the only true illumination consists, in carelessly laying aside, and bidding adieu to the Word of God, while, with no less confidence than folly, they fasten upon any dreaming notion which may have casually sprung up in their minds? Surely a very different sobriety becomes the children of God. As they feel that without the Spirit of God they are utterly devoid of the light of truth, so they are not ignorant that the word is the instrument by which the illumination of the Spirit is dispensed. They know of no other Spirit than the one who dwelt and spake in the apostles—the Spirit by whose oracles they are daily invited to the hearing of the word.

Book Second

Of the Knowledge of God the Redeemer, in Christ, as First Manifested to the Fathers, under the Law, and Thereafter to Us under the Gospel

Chapter 4. How God Works in the Hearts of Men

The leading points discussed in this chapter are, I. Whether in bad actions anything is to be attributed to God; if anything, how much. Also, what is to be attributed to the devil and to man, sec. 1–5. II. In indifferent matters, how much is to be attributed to God, and how much is left to man, sec. 6. III. Two objections refuted, sec. 7, 8.

Sections

1. Connection of this chapter with the preceding. Augustine’s similitude of a good and bad rider. Question answered in respect to the devil.

2. Question answered in respect to God and man. Example from the history of Job. The works of God distinguished from the works of Satan and wicked men. 1. By the design or end of acting. How Satan acts in the reprobate. 2. How God acts in them.

3. Old Objection, that the agency of God in such cases is referable to prescience or permission, not actual operation. Answer, showing that God blinds and hardens the reprobate, and this in two ways; 1. By deserting them; 2. By delivering them over to Satan.

4. Striking passages of Scripture, proving that God acts in both ways, and disposing of the objection with regard to prescience. Confirmation from Augustine.

5. A modification of the former answer, proving that God employs Satan to instigate the reprobate, but, at the same time, is free from all taint.

6. How God works in the hearts of men in indifferent matters. Our will in such matters not so free as to be exempt from the overruling providence of God. This confirmed by various examples.

7. Objection, that these examples do not form the rule. An answer, fortified by the testimony of universal experience, by Scripture, and a passage of Augustine.

8. Some, in arguing against the error of free will, draw an argument from the event. How this is to be understood.

1. That man is so enslaved by the yoke of sin, that he cannot of his own nature aim at good either in wish or actual pursuit, has, I think, been sufficiently proved. Moreover, a distinction has been drawn between compulsion and necessity, making it clear that man, though he sins necessarily, nevertheless sins voluntarily. But since, from his being brought into bondage to the devil, it would seem that he is actuated more by the devil’s will than his own, it is necessary, first, to explain what the agency of each is, and then solve the question,[1] Whether in bad actions anything is to be attributed to God, Scripture intimating that there is some way in which he interferes? Augustine (in Psalms 31 and 33) compares the human will to a horse preparing to start, and God and the devil to riders. “If God mounts, he, like a temperate and skilful rider, guides it calmly, urges it when too slow, reins it in when too fast, curbs its forwardness and over-action, checks its bad temper, and keeps it on the proper course; but if the devil has seized the saddle, like an ignorant and rash rider, he hurries it over broken ground, drives it into ditches, dashes it over precipices, spurs it into obstinacy or fury.” With this simile, since a better does not occur, we shall for the present be contented. When it is said, then, that the will of the natural man is subject to the power of the devil, and is actuated by him, the meaning is not that the will, while reluctant and resisting, is forced to submit (as masters oblige unwilling slaves to execute their orders), but that, fascinated by the impostures of Satan, it necessarily yields to his guidance, and does him homage. Those whom the Lord favours not with the direction of his Spirit, he, by a righteous judgment, consigns to the agency of Satan. Wherefore, the Apostle says, that “the god of this world has blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine into them.” And, in another passage, he describes the devil as “the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience,” (Eph. 2:2). The blinding of the wicked, and all the iniquities consequent upon it, are called the works of Satan; works the cause of which is not to be sought in anything external to the will of man, in which the root of the evil lies, and in which the foundation of Satan’s kingdom, in other words, sin, is fixed.

2. The nature of the divine agency in such cases is very different. For the purpose of illustration, let us refer to the calamities brought upon holy Job by the Chaldeans. They having slain his shepherds, carry off his flocks. The wickedness of their deed is manifest,[2] as is also the hand of Satan, who, as the history informs us, was the instigator of the whole. Job, however, recognises it as the work of God, saying, that what the Chaldeans had plundered, “the Lord” had “taken away.” How can we attribute the same work to God, to Satan, and to man, without either excusing Satan by the interference of God, or making God the author of the crime? This is easily done, if we look first to the end, and then to the mode of acting. The Lord designs to exercise the patience of his servant by adversity; Satan’s plan is to drive him to despair; while the Chaldeans are bent on making unlawful gain by plunder. Such diversity of purpose makes a wide distinction in the act. In the mode there is not less difference. The Lord permits Satan to afflict his servant; and the Chaldeans, who had been chosen as the ministers to execute the deed, he hands over to the impulses of Satan, who, pricking on the already depraved Chaldeans with his poisoned darts, instigates them to commit the crime. They rush furiously on to the unrighteous deed, and become its guilty perpetrators. Here Satan is properly said to act in the reprobate, over whom he exercises his sway, which is that of wickedness. God also is said to act in his own way; because even Satan when he is the instrument of divine wrath, is completely under the command of God, who turns him as he will in the execution of his just judgments. I say nothing here of the universal agency of God, which, as it sustains all the creatures, also gives them all their power of acting. I am now speaking only of that special agency which is apparent in every act. We thus see that there is no inconsistency in attributing the same act to God, to Satan, and to man, while, from the difference in the end and mode of action, the spotless righteousness of God shines forth at the same time that the iniquity of Satan and of man is manifested in all its deformity.

3. Ancient writers sometimes manifest a superstitious dread of making a simple confession of the truth in this matter, from a fear of furnishing impiety with a handle for speaking irreverently of the works of God. While I embrace such soberness with all my heart, I cannot see the least danger in simply holding what Scripture delivers. Even Augustine was not always free from this superstition, as when he says, that blinding and hardening have respect not to the operation of God, but to prescience (Lib. De Predestina. et Gratia). But this subtilty is repudiated by many passages of Scriptures which clearly show that the divine interference amounts to something more than prescience. And Augustine himself, in his book against Julian, contends at length that sins are manifestations not merely of divine permission or patience, but also of divine power, that thus former sins may be punished. In like manner, what is said of permission is too weak to stand. God is very often said to blind and harden the reprobate, to turn their hearts, to incline and impel them, as I have elsewhere fully explained (Book 1 c. 18). The extent of this agency can never be explained by having recourse to prescience or permission. We, therefore, hold that there are two methods in which God may so act. When his light is taken away, nothing remains but blindness and darkness: when his Spirit is taken away, our hearts become hard as stones: when his guidance is withdrawn, we immediately turn from the right path: and hence he is properly said to incline, harden, and blind those whom he deprives of the faculty of seeing, obeying, and rightly executing. The second method, which comes much nearer to the exact meaning of the words, is when executing his judgments by Satan as the minister of his anger, God both directs men’s counsels, and excites their wills, and regulates their efforts as he pleases. Thus when Moses relates that Simon, king of the Amorites, did not give the Israelites a passage, because the Lord “had hardened his spirit, and made his heart obstinate,” he immediately adds the purpose which God had in view—viz. that he might deliver him into their hand (Deut. 2:30). As God had resolved to destroy him, the hardening of his heart was the divine preparation for his ruin.

4. In accordance with the former methods it seems to be said,[3] “The law shall perish from the priests and counsel from the ancients.” “He poureth contempt upon princes, and causeth them to wander in the wilderness, where there is no way.” Again “O Lord, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened our heart from thy fear?” These passages rather indicate what men become when God deserts them, than what the nature of his agency is when he works in them. But there are other passages which go farther, such as those concerning the hardening of Pharaoh: “I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.” The same thing is afterwards repeated in stronger terms. Did he harden his heart by not softening it? This is, indeed, true; but he did something more: he gave it in charge to Satan to confirm him in his obstinacy. Hence he had previously said, “I am sure he will not let you go.” The people come out of Egypt, and the inhabitants of a hostile region come forth against them. How were they instigated? Moses certainly declares of Sihon, that it was the Lord who “had hardened his spirit, and made his heart obstinate,” (Deut. 2:30). The Psalmist, relating the same history says, “He turned their hearts to hate his people,” (Ps. 105:25). You cannot now say that they stumbled merely because they were deprived of divine counsel. For if they are hardened and turned, they are purposely bent to the very end in view. Moreover, whenever God saw it meet to punish the people for their transgression, in what way did he accomplish his purpose by the reprobate? In such a way as shows that the efficacy of the action was in him, and that they were only ministers. At one time he declares, “that he will lift an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth”; at another, that he will take a net to ensnare them; and at another, that he will be like a hammer to strike them. But he specially declared that he was not inactive among them when he called Sennacherib an axe, which was formed and destined to be wielded by his own hand.[4] Augustine is not far from the mark when he states the matter thus, That men sin, is attributable to themselves: that in sinning they produce this or that result, is owing to the mighty power of God, who divides the darkness as he pleases (August. de Praedest. Sanct.).

5. Moreover, that the ministry of Satan is employed to instigate the reprobate, whenever the Lord, in the course of his providence, has any purpose to accomplish in them, will sufficiently appear from a single passage. It is repeatedly said in the First Book of Samuel, that an evil spirit from the Lord came upon Saul, and troubled him (1 Sam. 16:14; 18:10; 19:9). It were impious to apply this to the Holy Spirit. An impure spirit must therefore be called a spirit from the Lord, because completely subservient to his purpose, being more an instrument in acting than a proper agent. We should also add what Paul says, “God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth,” (2 Thess. 2:11, 12). But in the same transaction there is always a wide difference between what the Lord does, and what Satan and the ungodly design to do. The wicked instruments which he has under his hand and can turn as he pleases, he makes subservient to his own justice. They, as they are wicked, give effect to the iniquity conceived in their wicked minds. Every thing necessary to vindicate the majesty of God from calumny, and cut off any subterfuge on the part of the ungodly, has already been expounded in the Chapters on Providence (Book 1 Chapter 16–18). Here I only meant to show, in a few words, how Satan reigns in the reprobate, and how God works in both.

6. In those actions, which in themselves are neither good nor bad, and concern the corporeal rather than the spiritual life, the liberty which man possesses, although we have above touched upon it (supra, Chap. 2 sect. 13–17), has not yet been explained. Some have conceded a free choice to man in such actions; more, I suppose, because they were unwilling to debate a matter of no great moment, than because they wished positively to assert what they were prepared to concede. While I admit that those who hold that man has no ability in himself to do righteousness, hold what is most necessary to be known for salvation, I think it ought not to be overlooked that we owe it to the special grace of God, whenever, on the one hand, we choose what is for our advantage, and whenever our will inclines in that direction; and on the other, whenever with heart and soul we shun what would otherwise do us harm. And the interference of Divine Providence goes to the extent not only of making events turn out as was foreseen to be expedient, but of giving the wills of men the same direction. If we look at the administration of human affairs with the eye of sense, we will have no doubt that, so far, they are placed at man’s disposal; but if we lend an ear to the many passages of Scripture which proclaim that even in these matters the minds of men are ruled by God, they will compel us to place human choice in subordination to his special influence. Who gave the Israelites such favour in the eyes of the Egyptians, that they lent them all their most valuable commodities? (Exod. 11:3). They never would have been so inclined of their own accord. Their inclinations, therefore, were more overruled by God than regulated by themselves. And surely, had not Jacob been persuaded that God inspires men with divers affections as seemeth to him good, he would not have said of his son Joseph (whom he thought to be some heathen Egyptian), “God Almighty give you mercy before the man,” (Gen. 43:14). In like manner, the whole Church confesses that when the Lord was pleased to pity his people, he made them also to be pitied of all them that carried them captives (Ps. 106:46). In like manner, when his anger was kindled against Saul, so that he prepared himself for battle, the cause is stated to have been, that a spirit from God fell upon him (1 Sam. 11:6). Who dissuaded Absalom from adopting the counsel of Ahithophel, which was wont to be regarded as an oracle? (2 Sam. 17:14). Who disposed Rehoboam to adopt the counsel of the young men? (1 Kings 12:10). Who caused the approach of the Israelites to strike terror into nations formerly distinguished for valour? Even the harlot Rahab recognised the hand of the Lord. Who, on the other hand, filled the hearts of the Israelites with fear and dread (Lev. 26:36), but he who threatened in the Law that he would give them a “trembling heart”? (Deut. 28:65).

7. It may be objected, that these are special examples which cannot be regarded as a general rule. They are sufficient, at all events, to prove the point for which I contend—viz. that whenever God is pleased to make way for his providence, he even in external matters so turns and bends the wills of men, that whatever the freedom of their choice may be, it is still subject to the disposal of God. That your mind depends more on the agency of God than the freedom of your own choice, daily experience teaches. Your judgment often fails, and in matters of no great difficulty, your courage flags; at other times, in matters of the greatest obscurity, the mode of explicating them at once suggests itself, while in matters of moment and danger, your mind rises superior to every difficulty.[5] In this way, I interpret the words of Solomon, “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord hath made even both of them,” (Prov. 20:12). For they seem to me to refer not to their creation, but to peculiar grace in the use of them, when he says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord as the rivers of water; he turneth it whithersoever he will,” (Prov. 21:1), he comprehends the whole race under one particular class. If any will is free from subjection, it must be that of one possessed of regal power, and in a manner exercising dominion over other wills. But if it is under the hand of God, ours surely cannot be exempt from it. On this subject there is an admirable sentiment of Augustine, “Scripture, if it be carefully examined, will show not only that the good wills of men are made good by God out of evil, and when so made, are directed to good acts, even to eternal life, but those which retain the elements of the world are in the power of God, to turn them whither he pleases, and when he pleases, either to perform acts of kindness, or by a hidden, indeed, but, at the same time, most just judgment to inflict punishment,” (August. De Gratia et Lib. Arb. ad Valent. cap. 20).

8. Let the reader here remember, that the power of the human will is not to be estimated by the event, as some unskilful persons are absurdly wont to do. They think it an elegant and ingenious proof of the bondage of the human will, that even the greatest monarchs are sometimes thwarted in their wishes. But the ability of which we speak must be considered as within the man, not measured by outward success. In discussing the subject of free will, the question is not, whether external obstacles will permit a man to execute what he has internally resolved, but whether, in any matter whatever, he has a free power of judging and of willing. If men possess both of these, Attilius Regulus, shut up in a barrel studded with sharp nails, will have a will no less free than Augustus Caesar ruling with imperial sway over a large portion of the globe.[6]

Chapter 5. The Arguments Usually Alleged in Support of Free Will Refuted

Objections reduced to three principal heads:—I. Four absurdities advanced by the opponents of the orthodox doctrine concerning the slavery of the will, stated and refuted, sec. 1–5. II. The passages of Scripture which they pervert in favour of their error, reduced to five heads, and explained, sec. 6–15. III. Five other passages quoted in defence of free will expounded, sec. 16–19.

Sections

1. Absurd fictions of opponents first refuted, and then certain passages of Scripture explained. Answer by a negative. Confirmation of the answer.

2. Another absurdity of Aristotle and Pelagius. Answer by a distinction. Answer fortified by passages from Augustine, and supported by the authority of an Apostle.

3. Third absurdity borrowed from the words of Chrysostom. Answer by a negative.

4. Fourth absurdity urged of old by the Pelagians. Answer from the works of Augustine. Illustrated by the testimony of our Saviour. Another answer, which explains the use of exhortations.

5. A third answer, which contains a fuller explanation of the second. Objection to the previous answers. Objection refuted. Summary of the previous answers.

6. First class of arguments which the Neo-Pelagians draw from Scripture in defence of free will. 1. The Law demands perfect obedience and therefore God either mocks us, or requires things which are not in our power. Answer by distinguishing precepts into three sorts. The first of these considered in this and the following section.

7. This general argument from the Law of no avail to the patrons of free will. Promises conjoined with precepts, prove that our salvation is to be found in the grace of God. Objection, that the Law was given to the persons living at the time. Answer, confirmed by passages from Augustine.

8. A special consideration of the three classes of precepts of no avail to the defenders of free will. 1. Precepts enjoining us to turn to God. 2. Precepts which simply speak of the observance of the Law. 3. Precepts which enjoin us to persevere in the grace of God.

9. Objection. Answer. Confirmation of the answer from Jeremiah. Another objection refuted.

10. A second class of arguments in defence of free will drawn from the promises of God—viz. that the promises which God makes to those who seek him are vain if it is not in our power to do, or not do, the thing required. Answer, which explains the use of promises, and removes the supposed inconsistency.

11. Third class of arguments drawn from the divine upbraidings,—that it is in vain to upbraid us for evils which it is not in our power to avoid. Answer. Sinners are condemned by their own consciences, and, therefore, the divine upbraidings are just. Moreover, there is a twofold use in these upbraidings. Various passages of Scripture explained by means of the foregoing answers.

12. Objection founded on the words of Moses. Refutation by the words of an Apostle. Confirmation by argument.

13. Fourth class of arguments by the defenders of free will. God waits to see whether or not sinners will repent; therefore they can repent. Answer by a dilemma. Passage in Hosea explained.

14. Fifth class of arguments in defence of free will. Good and bad works described as our own, and therefore we are capable of both. Answer by an exposition, which shows that this argument is unavailing. Objection drawn from analogy. Answer. The nature and mode of divine agency in the elect.

15. Conclusion of the answer to the last class of arguments.

16. Third and last division of the chapter discussing certain passages of Scripture. 1. A passage from Genesis. Its true meaning explained.

17. 2. Passage from the Epistle to the Romans. Explanation. Refutation of an objection. Another refutation. A third refutation from Augustine. 3. A passage from First Corinthians. Answer to it.

18. 4. A passage from Ecclesiastes. Explanation. Another explanation.

19. 5. A passage from Luke. Explanation. Allegorical arguments weak. Another explanation. A third explanation. A fourth from Augustine. Conclusion and summary of the whole discussion concerning free will.

1. Enough would seem to have been said on the subject of man’s will, were there not some who endeavour to urge him to his ruin by a false opinion of liberty, and at the same time, in order to support their own opinion, assail ours. First, they gather together some absurd inferences, by which they endeavour to bring odium upon our doctrine, as if it were abhorrent to common sense, and then they oppose it with certain passages of Scripture (infra, sec. 6). Both devices we shall dispose of in their order. If sin, say they, is necessary, it ceases to be sin; if it is voluntary, it may be avoided. Such, too, were the weapons with which Pelagius assailed Augustine. But we are unwilling to crush them by the weight of his name, until we have satisfactorily disposed of the objections themselves. I deny, therefore, that sin ought to be the less imputed because it is necessary; and, on the other hand, I deny the inference, that sin may be avoided because it is voluntary. If any one will dispute with God, and endeavour to evade his judgment, by pretending that he could not have done otherwise, the answer already given is sufficient, that it is owing not to creation, but the corruption of nature, that man has become the slave of sin, and can will nothing but evil. For whence that impotence of which the wicked so readily avail themselves as an excuse, but just because Adam voluntarily subjected himself to the tyranny of the devil? Hence the corruption by which we are held bound as with chains, originated in the first man’s revolt from his Maker. If all men are justly held guilty of this revolt, let them not think themselves excused by a necessity in which they see the clearest cause of their condemnation. But this I have fully explained above; and in the case of the devil himself, have given an example of one who sins not less voluntarily that he sins necessarily. I have also shown, in the case of the elect angels, that though their will cannot decline from good, it does not therefore cease to be will. This Bernard shrewdly explains when he says (Serm. 81, in Cantica), that we are the more miserable in this, that the necessity is voluntary; and yet this necessity so binds us who are subject to it, that we are the slaves of sin, as we have already observed. The second step in the reasoning is vicious, because it leaps from voluntary to free; whereas we have proved above, that a thing may be done voluntarily, though not subject to free choice.

2. They add, that unless virtue and vice proceed from free choice, it is absurd either to punish man or reward him. Although this argument is taken from Aristotle, I admit that it is also used by Chrysostom and Jerome. Jerome, however, does not disguise that it was familiar to the Pelagians. He even quotes their words, “If grace acts in us, grace, and not we who do the work, will be crowned,” (Jerome, in Ep. ad Ctesiphont. et Dialog. 1). With regard to punishment, I answer, that it is properly inflicted on those by whom the guilt is contracted. What matters it whether you sin with a free or an enslaved judgment, so long as you sin voluntarily, especially when man is proved to be a sinner because he is under the bondage of sin? In regard to the rewards of righteousness, is there any great absurdity in acknowledging that they depend on the kindness of God rather than our own merits? How often do we meet in Augustine with this expression,—“God crowns not our merits but his own gifts; and the name of reward is given not to what is due to our merits, but to the recompense of grace previously bestowed?” Some seem to think there is acuteness in the remark, that there is no place at all for the mind, if good works do not spring from free will as their proper source; but in thinking this so very unreasonable they are widely mistaken. Augustine does not hesitate uniformly to describe as necessary the very thing which they count it impious to acknowledge. Thus he asks, “What is human merit? He who came to bestow not due recompense but free grace, though himself free from sin, and the giver of freedom, found all men sinners,” (Augustin. in Psalm 31). Again, “If you are to receive your due, you must be punished. What then is done? God has not rendered you due punishment, but bestows upon you unmerited grace. If you wish to be an alien from grace, boast your merits,” (in Psalm 70). Again, “You are nothing in yourself, sin is yours, merit God’s. Punishment is your due; and when the reward shall come, God shall crown his own gifts, not your merits,” (Ep. 52). To the same effect he elsewhere says (De Verb. Apostol. Serm. 15), that grace is not of merit, but merit of grace. And shortly after he concludes, that God by his gifts anticipates all our merit, that he may thereby manifest his own merit, and give what is absolutely free, because he sees nothing in us that can be a ground of salvation. But why extend the list of quotations, when similar sentiments are ever and anon recurring in his works? The abettors of this error would see a still better refutation of it, if they would attend to the source from which the apostle derives the glory of the saints,—“Moreover, whom he did predestinate, them he also called; and whom he called, them he also justified; and whom he justified, them he also glorified,” (Rom. 8:30). On what ground, then, the apostle being judge (2 Tim. 4:8), are believers crowned? Because by the mercy of God, not their own exertions, they are predestinated, called, and justified. Away, then, with the vain fear, that unless free will stand, there will no longer be any merit! It is most foolish to take alarm, and recoil from that which Scripture inculcates. “If thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?” (1 Cor. 4:7). You see how everything is denied to free will, for the very purpose of leaving no room for merit. And yet, as the beneficence and liberality of God are manifold and inexhaustible, the grace which he bestows upon us, inasmuch as he makes it our own, he recompenses as if the virtuous acts were our own.

3. But it is added, in terms which seem to be borrowed from Chrysostom (Homil. 22, in Genes.), that if our will possesses not the power of choosing good or evil, all who are partakers of the same nature must be alike good or alike bad. A sentiment akin to this occurs in the work De Vocatione Gentium (lib. 4 c. 4), usually attributed to Ambrose, in which it is argued, that no one would ever decline from faith, did not the grace of God leave us in a mutable state. It is strange that such men should have so blundered. How did it fail to occur to Chrysostom, that it is divine election which distinguishes among men? We have not the least hesitation to admit what Paul strenuously maintains, that all, without exception, are depraved and given over to wickedness; but at the same time we add, that through the mercy of God all do not continue in wickedness. Therefore, while we all labour naturally under the same disease, those only recover health to whom the Lord is pleased to put forth his healing hand. The others whom, in just judgment, he passes over, pine and rot away till they are consumed. And this is the only reason why some persevere to the end, and others, after beginning their course, fall away. Perseverance is the gift of God, which he does not lavish promiscuously on all, but imparts to whom he pleases. If it is asked how the difference arises—why some steadily persevere, and others prove deficient in steadfastness, we can give no other reason than that the Lord, by his mighty power, strengthens and sustains the former, so that they perish not, while he does not furnish the same assistance to the latter, but leaves them to be monuments of instability.

4. Still it is insisted, that exhortations are vain, warnings superfluous, and rebukes absurd, if the sinner possesses not the power to obey. When similar objections were urged against Augustine, he was obliged to write his book, De Correptione et Gratia, where he has fully disposed of them. The substance of his answer to his opponents is this: “O, man! learn from the precept what you ought to do; learn from correction, that it is your own fault you have not the power; and learn in prayer, whence it is that you may receive the power.” Very similar is the argument of his book, De Spiritu et Litera, in which he shows that God does not measure the precepts of his law by human strength, but, after ordering what is right, freely bestows on his elect the power of fulfilling it. The subject, indeed, does not require a long discussion. For we are not singular in our doctrine, but have Christ and all his apostles with us. Let our opponents, then, consider how they are to come off victorious in a contest which they wage with such antagonists. Christ declares, “without me ye can do nothing,” (John 15:5). Does he the less censure and chastise those who, without him, did wickedly? Does he the less exhort every man to be intent on good works? How severely does Paul inveigh against the Corinthians for want of charity (1 Cor. 3:3); and yet at the same time, he prays that charity may be given them by the Lord. In the Epistle to the Romans, he declares that “it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy,” (Rom. 9:16). Still he ceases not to warn, exhort, and rebuke them. Why then do they not expostulate with God for making sport with men, by demanding of them things which he alone can give, and chastising them for faults committed through want of his grace? Why do they not admonish Paul to spare those who have it not in their power to will or to run, unless the mercy of God, which has forsaken them, precede? As if the doctrine were not founded on the strongest reason—reason which no serious inquirer can fail to perceive. The extent to which doctrine, and exhortation, and rebuke, are in themselves able to change the mind, is indicated by Paul when he says, “Neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase,” (1 Cor. 3:7) in like manner, we see that Moses delivers the precepts of the Law under a heavy sanction, and that the prophets strongly urge and threaten transgressors though they at the same time confess, that men are wise only when an understanding heart is given them; that it is the proper work of God to circumcise the heart, and to change it from stone into flesh; to write his law on their inward parts; in short, to renew souls so as to give efficacy to doctrine.

5. What purpose, then, is served by exhortations? It is this: As the wicked, with obstinate heart, despise them, they will be a testimony against them when they stand at the judgment-seat of God; nay, they even now strike and lash their consciences. For, however they may petulantly deride, they cannot disapprove them. But what, you will ask, can a miserable mortal do, when softness of heart, which is necessary to obedience, is denied him? I ask, in reply, Why have recourse to evasion, since hardness of heart cannot be imputed to any but the sinner himself? The ungodly, though they would gladly evade the divine admonitions, are forced, whether they will or not, to feel their power. But their chief use is to be seen in the case of believers, in whom the Lord, while he always acts by his Spirit, also omits not the instrumentality of his word, but employs it, and not without effect. Let this, then, be a standing truth, that the whole strength of the godly consists in the grace of God, according to the words of the prophet, “I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes,” (Ezek. 11:19, 20). But it will be asked, why are they now admonished of their duty, and not rather left to the guidance of the Spirit? Why are they urged with exhortations when they cannot hasten any faster than the Spirit impels them? and why are they chastised, if at any time they go astray, seeing that this is caused by the necessary infirmity of the flesh? “O, man! who art thou that replies against God?” If, in order to prepare us for the grace which enables us to obey exhortation, God sees meet to employ exhortation, what is there in such an arrangement for you to carp and scoff at? Had exhortations and reprimands no other profit with the godly than to convince them of sin, they could not be deemed altogether useless. Now, when, by the Spirit of God acting within, they have the effect of inflaming their desire of good, of arousing them from lethargy, of destroying the pleasure and honeyed sweetness of sin, making it hateful and loathsome, who will presume to cavil at them as superfluous?

Should any one wish a clearer reply, let him take the following:—God works in his elect in two ways: inwardly, by his Spirit; outwardly, by his Word. By his Spirit illuminating their minds, and training their hearts to the practice of righteousness, he makes them new creatures, while, by his Word, he stimulates them to long and seek for this renovation. In both, he exerts the might of his hand in proportion to the measure in which he dispenses them. The Word, when addressed to the reprobate, though not effectual for their amendment, has another use. It urges their consciences now, and will render them more inexcusable on the day of judgment. Thus, our Saviour, while declaring that none can come to him but those whom the Father draws, and that the elect come after they have heard and learned of the Father (John 6:44, 45), does not lay aside the office of teacher, but carefully invites those who must be taught inwardly by the Spirit before they can make any profit. The reprobate, again, are admonished by Paul, that the doctrine is not in vain; because, while it is in them a savour of death unto death, it is still a sweet savour unto God (2 Cor. 2:16).

6. The enemies of this doctrine are at great pains in collecting passages of Scripture, as if, unable to accomplish any thing by their weight, they were to overwhelm us by their number. But as in battle, when it is come to close quarters, an unwarlike multitude, how great soever the pomp and show they make, give way after a few blows, and take to flight,[1] so we shall have little difficulty here in disposing of our opponents and their host. All the passages which they pervert in opposing us are very similar in their import; and hence, when they are arranged under their proper heads, one answer will suffice for several; it is not necessary to give a separate consideration to each. Precepts seem to be regarded as their stronghold. These they think so accommodated to our abilities, as to make it follow as a matter of course, that whatever they enjoin we are able to perform. Accordingly, they run over all the precepts, and by them fix the measure of our power. For, say they, when God enjoins meekness, submission, love, chastity, piety, and holiness, and when he forbids anger, pride, theft, uncleanness, idolatry, and the like, he either mocks us, or only requires things which are in our power.

All the precepts which they thus heap together may be divided into three classes. Some enjoin a first conversion unto God, others speak simply of the observance of the law, and others inculcate perseverance in the grace which has been received. We shall first treat of precepts in general, and then proceed to consider each separate class. That the abilities of man are equal to the precepts of the divine law, has long been a common idea, and has some show of plausibility. It is founded, however, on the grossest ignorance of the law. Those who deem it a kind of sacrilege to say, that the observance of the law is impossible, insist, as their strongest argument, that, if it is so, the Law has been given in vain (infra, Chap. 7 sec. 5). For they speak just as if Paul had never said anything about the Law. But what, pray, is meant by saying, that the Law “was added because of transgressions”; “by the law is the knowledge of sin”; “I had not known sin but by the law”; “the law entered that the offence might abound?” (Gal. 3:19; Rom. 3:20; 7:7; 5:20). Is it meant that the Law was to be limited to our strength, lest it should be given in vain? Is it not rather meant that it was placed far above us, in order to convince us of our utter feebleness? Paul indeed declares, that charity is the end and fulfilling of the Law (1 Tim. 1:5). But when he prays that the minds of the Thessalonians may be filled with it, he clearly enough acknowledges that the Law sounds in our ears without profit, if God do not implant it thoroughly in our hearts (1 Thess. 3:12).

7. I admit, indeed, that if the Scripture taught nothing else on the subject than that the Law is a rule of life by which we ought to regulate our pursuits, I should at once assent to their opinion; but since it carefully and clearly explains that the use of the Law is manifold, the proper course is to learn from that explanation what the power of the Law is in man. In regard to the present question, while it explains what our duty is it teaches that the power of obeying it is derived from the goodness of God, and it accordingly urges us to pray that this power may be given us. If there were merely a command and no promise, it would be necessary to try whether our strength were sufficient to fulfil the command; but since promises are annexed, which proclaim not only that aid, but that our whole power is derived from divine grace, they at the same time abundantly testify that we are not only unequal to the observance of the Law, but mere fools in regard to it. Therefore, let us hear no more of a proportion between our ability and the divine precepts, as if the Lord had accommodated the standard of justice which he was to give in the Law to our feeble capacities. We should rather gather from the promises how ill provided we are, having in everything so much need of grace. But say they, Who will believe that the Lord designed his Law for blocks and stones? There is no wish to make any one believe this. The ungodly are neither blocks nor stones, when, taught by the Law that their lusts are offensive to God, they are proved guilty by their own confession; nor are the godly blocks or stones, when admonished of their powerlessness, they take refuge in grace. To this effect are the pithy sayings of Augustine, “God orders what we cannot do, that we may know what we ought to ask of him. There is a great utility in precepts, if all that is given to free will is to do greater honour to divine grace. Faith acquires what the Law requires; nay, the Law requires, in order that faith may acquire what is thus required; nay, more, God demands of us faith itself, and finds not what he thus demands, until by giving he makes it possible to find it.” Again, he says, “Let God give what he orders, and order what he wills.”[2]

8. This will be more clearly seen by again attending to the three classes of precepts to which we above referred. Both in the Law and in the Prophets, God repeatedly calls upon us to turn to him.[3] But, on the other hand, a prophet exclaims, “Turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the Lord my God. Surely after that I was turned, I repented.” He orders us to circumcise the foreskins of our hearts; but Moses declares, that that circumcision is made by his own hand. In many passages he demands a new heart, but in others he declares that he gives it. As Augustine says, “What God promises, we ourselves do not through choice or nature, but he himself does by grace.” The same observation is made, when, in enumerating the rules of Tichonius, he states the third in effect to be—that we distinguish carefully between the Law and the promises, or between the commands and grace (Augustin. de Doctrine Christiana, lib. 3). Let them now go and gather from precepts what man’s power of obedience is, when they would destroy the divine grace by which the precepts themselves are accomplished. The precepts of the second class are simply those which enjoin us to worship God, to obey and adhere to his will, to do his pleasure, and follow his teaching. But innumerable passages testify that every degree of purity, piety, holiness, and justice, which we possess, is his gift. Of the third class of precepts is the exhortation of Paul and Barnabas to the proselytes, as recorded by Luke; they “persuaded them to continue in the grace of God,” (Acts 13:43). But the source from which this power of continuance must be sought is elsewhere explained by Paul, when he says, “Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord,” (Eph. 6:10). In another passage he says, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption,” (Eph. 4:30). But as the thing here enjoined could not be performed by man, he prays in behalf of the Thessalonians, that God would count them “worthy of this calling, and fulfil all the good pleasure of his goodness, and the work of faith with power,” (2 Thess. 1:11). In the same way, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, when treating of alms, he repeatedly commends their good and pious inclination. A little farther on, however, he exclaims, “Thanks be to God, which put the same earnest care into the heart of Titus for you. For indeed he accepted the exhortation,” (2 Cor. 8:16, 17). If Titus could not even perform the office of being a mouth to exhort others, except in so far as God suggested, how could the others have been voluntary agents in acting, if the Lord Jesus had not directed their hearts?

9. Some, who would be thought more acute, endeavour to evade all these passages, by the quibble, that there is nothing to hinder us from contributing our part, while God, at the same time, supplies our deficiencies. They, moreover, adduce passages from the Prophets, in which the work of our conversion seems to be shared between God and ourselves; “Turn ye unto me, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith the Lord of hosts,” (Zech. 1:3). The kind of assistance which God gives us has been shown above (sect. 7, 8), and need not now be repeated. One thing only I ask to be conceded to me, that it is vain to think we have a power of fulfilling the Law, merely because we are enjoined to obey it. Since, in order to our fulfilling the divine precepts, the grace of the Lawgiver is both necessary, and has been promised to us, this much at least is clear, that more is demanded of us than we are able to pay. Nor can any cavil evade the declaration in Jeremiah, that the covenant which God made with his ancient people was broken, because it was only of the letter—that to make it effectual, it was necessary for the Spirit to interpose and train the heart to obedience (Jer. 31:32). The opinion we now combat is not aided by the words, “Turn unto me, and I will turn unto you.” The turning there spoken of is not that by which God renews the heart unto repentance; but that in which, by bestowing prosperity, he manifests his kindness and favour, just in the same way as he sometimes expresses his displeasure by sending adversity. The people complaining under the many calamities which befell them, that they were forsaken by God, he answers, that his kindness would not fail them, if they would return to a right course, and to himself, the standard of righteousness. The passage, therefore, is wrested from its proper meaning when it is made to countenance the idea that the work of conversion is divided between God and man (supra, Chap. 2 sec. 27). We have only glanced briefly at this subject, as the proper place for it will occur when we come to treat of the Law (Chap. 7 sec. 2 and 3).

10. The second class of objections is akin to the former. They allege the promises in which the Lord makes a paction with our will. Such are the following: “Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live,” (Amos 5:14). “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: but if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it,” (Isa. 1:19, 20). “If thou wilt put away thine abominations out of my sight, then thou shalt not remove,” (Jer. 4:1). “It shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and do all the commandments which I command thee this day that the Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth,” (Deut. 28:1). There are other similar passages (Lev. 26:3, &c). They think that the blessings contained in these promises are offered to our will absurdly and in mockery, if it is not in our power to secure or reject them. It is, indeed, an easy matter to indulge in declamatory complaint on this subject, to say that we are cruelly mocked[4] by the Lord, when he declares that his kindness depends on our wills if we are not masters of our wills—that it would be a strange liberality on the part of God to set his blessings before us, while we have no power of enjoying them,—a strange certainty of promises, which, to prevent their ever being fulfilled, are made to depend on an impossibility. Of promises of this description, which have a condition annexed to them, we shall elsewhere speak, and make it plain that there is nothing absurd in the impossible fulfilment of them. In regard to the matter in hand, I deny that God cruelly mocks us when he invites us to merit blessings which he knows we are altogether unable to merit. The promises being offered alike to believers and to the ungodly, have their use in regard to both. As God by his precepts stings the consciences of the ungodly, so as to prevent them from enjoying their sins while they have no remembrance of his judgments, so, in his promises, he in a manner takes them to witness how unworthy they are of his kindness. Who can deny that it is most just and most becoming in God to do good to those who worship him, and to punish with due severity those who despise his majesty? God, therefore, proceeds in due order, when, though the wicked are bound by the fetters of sin, he lays down the law in his promises, that he will do them good only if they depart from their wickedness. This would be right, though his only object were to let them understand that they are deservedly excluded from the favour due to his true worshipers. On the other hand, as he desires by all means to stir up believers to supplicate his grace, it surely should not seem strange that he attempts to accomplish by promises the same thing which, as we have shown, he to their great benefit accomplishes by means of precepts. Being taught by precepts what the will of God is, we are reminded of our wretchedness in being so completely at variance with that will, and, at the same time, are stimulated to invoke the aid of the Spirit to guide us into the right path. But as our indolence is not sufficiently aroused by precepts, promises are added, that they may attract us by their sweetness, and produce a feeling of love for the precept. The greater our desire of righteousness, the greater will be our earnestness to obtain the grace of God. And thus it is, that in the protestations, if we be willing, if thou shalt hearken, the Lord neither attributes to us a full power of willing and hearkening, nor yet mocks us for our impotence.[5]

11. The third class of objections is not unlike the other two. For they produce passages in which God upbraids his people for their ingratitude, intimating that it was not his fault that they did not obtain all kinds of favour from his indulgence. Of such passages, the following are examples: “The Amalekites and the Canaanites are before you, and ye shall fall by the sword: because ye are turned away from the Lord, therefore the Lord will not be with you,” (Num. 14:43). “Because ye have done all these works, saith the Lord, and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not; and I called you, but ye answered not; therefore will I do unto this house, which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to Shiloh,” (Jer. 7:13, 14). “They obeyed not thy voice, neither walked in thy law; they have done nothing of all that thou commandedst them to do: therefore thou hast caused all this evil to come upon them,” (Jer. 32:23). How, they ask, can such upbraiding be directed against those who have it in their power immediately to reply,—Prosperity was dear to us: we feared adversity; that we did not, in order to obtain the one and avoid the other, obey the Lord, and listen to his voice, is owing to its not being free for us to do so in consequence of our subjection to the dominion of sin; in vain, therefore, are we upbraided with evils which it was not in our power to escape. But to say nothing of the pretext of necessity, which is but a feeble and flimsy defence of their conduct, can they, I ask, deny their guilt? If they are held convicted of any fault, the Lord is not unjust in upbraiding them for having, by their own perverseness, deprived themselves of the advantages of his kindness. Let them say, then, whether they can deny that their own will is the depraved cause of their rebellion. If they find within themselves a fountain of wickedness, why do they stand declaiming about extraneous causes, with the view of making it appear that they are not the authors of their own destruction? If it be true that it is not for another’s faults that sinners are both deprived of the divine favour, and visited with punishment, there is good reason why they should hear these rebukes from the mouth of God. If they obstinately persist in their vices, let them learn in their calamities to accuse and detest their own wickedness, instead of charging God with cruelty and injustice. If they have not manifested docility, let them, under a feeling of disgust at the sins which they see to be the cause of their misery and ruin, return to the right path, and, with serious contrition, confess the very thing of which the Lord by his rebuke reminds them. Of what use those upbraidings of the prophets above quoted are to believers, appears from the solemn prayer of Daniel, as given in his ninth chapter. Of their use in regard to the ungodly, we see an example in the Jews, to whom Jeremiah was ordered to explain the cause of their miseries, though the event could not be otherwise than the Lord had foretold. “Therefore thou shalt speak these words unto them; but they will not hearken unto thee: thou shalt also call unto them; but they will not answer thee,” (Jer. 7:27). Of what use, then, was it to talk to the deaf? It was, that even against their will they might understand that what they heard was true, and that it was impious blasphemy to transfer the blame of their wickedness to God, when it resided in themselves.

These few explanations will make it very easy for the reader to disentangle himself from the immense heap of passages (containing both precepts and reprimands) which the enemies of divine grace are in the habit of piling up, that they may thereon erect their statue of free will. The Psalmist upbraids the Jews as “a stubborn and rebellious generation; a generation that set not their heart aright,” (Ps. 78:8); and in another passage, he exhorts the men of his time, “Harden not your heart,” (Ps. 95:8). This implies that the whole blame of the rebellion lies in human depravity. But it is foolish thence to infer, that the heart, the preparation of which is from the Lord, may be equally bent in either direction. The Psalmist says, “I have inclined my heart to perform thy statutes alway,” (Ps. 119:112); meaning, that with willing and cheerful readiness of mind he had devoted himself to God. He does not boast, however, that he was the author of that disposition, for in the same psalm he acknowledges it to be the gift of God. We must, therefore, attend to the admonition of Paul, when he thus addresses believers, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure,” (Phil. 2:12, 13). He ascribes to them a part in acting that they may not indulge in carnal sloth, but by enjoining fear and trembling, he humbles them so as to keep them in remembrance, that the very thing which they are ordered to do is the proper work of God—distinctly intimating, that believers act (if I may so speak) passively in as much as the power is given them from heaven, and cannot in any way be arrogated to themselves. Accordingly, when Peter exhorts us to “add to faith virtue,” (2 Pet. 1:5), he does not concede to us the possession of a second place, as if we could do anything separately. He only arouses the sluggishness of our flesh, by which faith itself is frequently stifled. To the same effect are the words of Paul. He says, “Quench not the Spirit,” (1 Thess. 5:19); because a spirit of sloth, if not guarded against, is ever and anon creeping in upon believers. But should any thence infer that it is entirely in their own power to foster the offered light, his ignorance will easily be refuted by the fact, that the very diligence which Paul enjoins is derived only from God (2 Cor. 7:1). We are often commanded to purge ourselves of all impurity, though the Spirit claims this as his peculiar office. In fine, that what properly belongs to God is transferred to us only by way of concession, is plain from the words of John, “He that is begotten of God keepeth himself,” (1 John 5:18). The advocates of free will fasten upon the expression as if it implied, that we are kept partly by the power of God, partly by our own, whereas the very keeping of which the Apostle speaks is itself from heaven. Hence, Christ prays his Father to keep us from evil (John 17:15), and we know that believers, in their warfare against Satan, owe their victory to the armour of God. Accordingly, Peter, after saying, “Ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth,” immediately adds by way of correction, “through the Spirit,” (1 Pet. 1:22). In fine, the nothingness of human strength in the spiritual contest is briefly shown by John, when he says, that “Whosoever is born of God does not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him,” (1 John 3:9). He elsewhere gives the reasons “This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith,” (1 John 5:4).

12. But a passage is produced from the Law of Moses, which seems very adverse to the view now given. After promulgating the Law, he takes the people to witness in these terms: “This commandment which I command thee this day, it is not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it,” (Deut. 30:11, 12, 14). Certainly, if this is to be understood of mere precepts, I admit that it is of no little importance to the matter in hand. For, though it were easy to evade the difficulty by saying, that the thing here treated of is not the observance of the law, but the facility and readiness of becoming acquainted with it, some scruple, perhaps, would still remain. The Apostle Paul, however, no mean interpreter, removes all doubt when he affirms, that Moses here spoke of the doctrine of the Gospel (Rom. 10:8). If any one is so refractory as to contend that Paul violently wrested the words in applying them to the Gospel, though his hardihood is chargeable with impiety, we are still able, independently of the authority of the Apostle, to repel the objection. For, if Moses spoke of precepts merely, he was only inflating the people with vain confidence. Had they attempted the observance of the law in their own strength, as a matter in which they should find no difficulty, what else could have been the result than to throw them headlong? Where, then, was that easy means of observing the law, when the only access to it was over a fatal precipice?[6] Accordingly, nothing is more certain than that under these words is comprehended the covenant of mercy, which had been promulgated along with the demands of the law. A few verses before, he had said, “The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live,” (Deut. 30:6). Therefore, the readiness of which he immediately after speaks was placed not in the power of man, but in the protection and help of the Holy Spirit, who mightily performs his own work in our weakness. The passage, however, is not to be understood of precepts simply, but rather of the Gospel promises, which, so far from proving any power in us to fulfil righteousness, utterly disprove it. This is confirmed by the testimony of Paul, when he observes that the Gospel holds forth salvation to us, not under the harsh arduous, and impossible terms on which the law treats with us (namely, that those shall obtain it who fulfil all its demands), but on terms easy, expeditious, and readily obtained. This passage, therefore, tends in no degree to establish the freedom of the human will.

13. They are wont also to adduce certain passages in which God is said occasionally to try men, by withdrawing the assistance of his grace, and to wait until they turn to him, as in Hosea, “I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face,” (Hosea 5:15). It were absurd (say they), that the Lord should wait till Israel should seek his face, if their minds were not flexible, so as to turn in either direction of their own accord. As if anything were more common in the prophetical writings than for God to put on the semblance of rejecting and casting off his people until they reform their lives. But what can our opponents extract from such threats? If they mean to maintain that a people, when abandoned by God, are able of themselves to think of turning unto him, they will do it in the very face of Scripture. On the other hand, if they admit that divine grace is necessary to conversion, why do they dispute with us? But while they admit that grace is so far necessary, they insist on reserving some ability for man. How do they prove it? Certainly not from this nor any similar passage; for it is one thing to withdraw from man, and look to what he will do when thus abandoned and left to himself, and another thing to assist his powers (whatever they may be), in proportion to their weakness. What, then, it will be asked, is meant by such expressions? I answer, just the same as if God were to say, Since nothing is gained by admonishing, exhorting, rebuking this stubborn people, I will withdraw for a little, and silently leave them to be afflicted; I shall see whether, after long calamity, any remembrance of me will return, and induce them to seek my face. But by the departure of the Lord to a distance is meant the withdrawal of prophecy. By his waiting to see what men will do is meant that he, while silent, and in a manner hiding himself, tries them for a season with various afflictions. Both he does that he may humble us the more; for we shall sooner be broken than corrected by the strokes of adversity, unless his Spirit train us to docility. Moreover, when the Lord, offended and, as it were, fatigued with our obstinate perverseness, leaves us for a while (by withdrawing his word, in which he is wont in some degree to manifest his presence), and makes trial of what we will do in his absence, from this it is erroneously inferred, that there is some power of free will, the extent of which is to be considered and tried, whereas the only end which he has in view is to bring us to an acknowledgment of our utter nothingness.

14. Another objection is founded on a mode of speaking which is constantly observed both in Scripture and in common discourse. Good works are said to be ours, and we are said to do what is holy and acceptable to God, just as we are said to commit sin. But if sins are justly imputed to us, as proceeding from ourselves, for the same reason (say they) some share must certainly be attributed to us in works of righteousness. It could not be accordant with reason to say, that we do those things which we are incapable of doing of our own motion, God moving us, as if we were stones. These expressions, therefore, it is said, indicate that while, in the matter of grace, we give the first place to God, a secondary place must be assigned to our agency. If the only thing here insisted on were, that good works are termed ours, I, in my turn, would reply, that the bread which we ask God to give us is also termed ours. What, then, can be inferred from the title of possession, but simply that, by the kindness and free gift of God, that becomes ours which in other respects is by no means due to us? Therefore let them either ridicule the same absurdity in the Lord’s Prayer, or let them cease to regard it as absurd, that good works should be called ours, though our only property in them is derived from the liberality of God. But there is something stronger in the fact, that we are often said in Scripture to worship God, do justice, obey the law, and follow good works. These being proper offices of the mind and will, how can they be consistently referred to the Spirit, and, at the same time, attributed to us, unless there be some concurrence on our part with the divine agency? This difficulty will be easily disposed of if we attend to the manner in which the Holy Spirit acts in the righteous. The similitude with which they invidiously assail us is foreign to the purpose; for who is so absurd as to imagine that movement in man differs in nothing from the impulse given to a stone? Nor can anything of the kind be inferred from our doctrine. To the natural powers of man we ascribe approving and rejecting, willing and not willing, striving and resisting—viz. approving vanity, rejecting solid good, willing evil and not willing good, striving for wickedness and resisting righteousness. What then does the Lord do? If he sees meet to employ depravity of this description as an instrument of his anger, he gives it whatever aim and direction he pleases, that, by a guilty hand, he may accomplish his own good work. A wicked man thus serving the power of God, while he is bent only on following his own lust, can we compare to a stone, which, driven by an external impulse, is borne along without motion, or sense, or will of its own? We see how wide the difference is. But how stands the case with the godly, as to whom chiefly the question is raised? When God erects his kingdom in them, he, by means of his Spirit, curbs their will, that it may not follow its natural bent, and be carried hither and thither by vagrant lusts; bends, frames, trains, and guides it according to the rule of his justice, so as to incline it to righteousness and holiness, and establishes and strengthens it by the energy of his Spirit, that it may not stumble or fall. For which reason Augustine thus expresses himself (De Corrept. et Gratia, cap. 2), “It will be said we are therefore acted upon, and do not act. Nay, you act and are acted upon, and you then act well when you are acted upon by one that is good. The Spirit of God who actuates you is your helper in acting, and bears the name of helper, because you, too, do something.” In the former member of this sentence, he reminds us that the agency of man is not destroyed by the motion of the Holy Spirit, because nature furnishes the will which is guided so as to aspire to good. As to the second member of the sentence, in which he says that the very idea of help implies that we also do something, we must not understand it as if he were attributing to us some independent power of action; but not to foster a feeling of sloth, he reconciles the agency of God with our own agency, by saying, that to wish is from nature, to wish well is from grace. Accordingly, he had said a little before, “Did not God assist us, we should not only not be able to conquer, but not be able even to fight.”

15. Hence it appears that the grace of God (as this name is used when regeneration is spoken of) is the rule of the Spirit, in directing and governing the human will. Govern he cannot, without correcting, reforming, renovating (hence we say that the beginning of regeneration consists in the abolition of what is ours); in like manner, he cannot govern without moving, impelling, urging, and restraining. Accordingly, all the actions which are afterwards done are truly said to be wholly his. Meanwhile, we deny not the truth of Augustine’s doctrine, that the will is not destroyed, but rather repaired, by grace—the two things being perfectly consistent—viz. that the human will may be said to be renewed when its vitiosity and perverseness being corrected, it is conformed to the true standard of righteousness and that, at the same time, the will may be said to be made new, being so vitiated and corrupted that its nature must be entirely changed. There is nothing then to prevent us from saying, that our will does what the Spirit does in us, although the will contributes nothing of itself apart from grace. We must, therefore, remember what we quoted from Augustine, that some men labour in vain to find in the human will some good quality properly belonging to it. Any intermixture which men attempt to make by conjoining the effort of their own will with divine grace is corruption, just as when unwholesome and muddy water is used to dilute wine. But though every thing good in the will is entirely derived from the influence of the Spirit, yet, because we have naturally an innate power of willing, we are not improperly said to do the things of which God claims for himself all the praise; first, because every thing which his kindness produces in us is our own (only we must understand that it is not of ourselves); and, secondly, because it is our mind, our will, our study which are guided by him to what is good.

16. The other passages which they gather together from different quarters will not give much trouble to any person of tolerable understanding, who pays due attention to the explanations already given. They adduce the passage of Genesis, “Unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him,” (Gen. 4:7). This they interpret of sin, as if the Lord were promising Cain that the dominion of sin should not prevail over his mind, if he would labour in subduing it. We, however, maintain that it is much more agreeable to the context to understand the words as referring to Abel, it being there the purpose of God to point out the injustice of the envy which Cain had conceived against his brother. And this he does in two ways, by showing, first, that it was vain to think he could, by means of wickedness, surpass his brother in the favour of God, by whom nothing is esteemed but righteousness; and, secondly, how ungrateful he was for the kindness he had already received, in not being able to bear with a brother who had been subjected to his authority. But lest it should be thought that we embrace this interpretation because the other is contrary to our view, let us grant that God does here speak of sin. If so, his words contain either an order or a promise. If an order, we have already demonstrated that this is no proof of man’s ability; if a promise, where is the fulfilment of the promise when Cain yielded to the sin over which he ought to have prevailed? They will allege a tacit condition in the promise, as if it were said that he would gain the victory if he contended. This subterfuge is altogether unavailing. For, if the dominion spoken of refers to sin, no man can have any doubt that the form of expression is imperative, declaring not what we are able, but what it is our duty to do, even if beyond our ability. Although both the nature of the case, and the rule of grammatical construction, require that it be regarded as a comparison between Cain and Abel, we think the only preference given to the younger brother was, that the elder made himself inferior by his own wickedness.

17. They appeal, moreover, to the testimony of the Apostle Paul, because he says, “It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy,” (Rom. 9:15). From this they infer, that there is something in will and endeavour, which, though weak in themselves, still, being mercifully aided by God, are not without some measure of success. But if they would attend in sober earnest to the subject there handled by Paul, they would not so rashly pervert his meaning. I am aware they can quote Origen and Jerome[7] in support of this exposition. To these I might, in my turn, oppose Augustine. But it is of no consequence what they thought, if it is clear what Paul meant. He teaches that salvation is prepared for those only on whom the Lord is pleased to bestow his mercy—that ruin and death await all whom he has not chosen. He had proved the condition of the reprobate by the example of Pharaoh, and confirmed the certainty of gratuitous election by the passage in Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.” Thereafter he concludes, that it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. If these words are understood to mean that the will or endeavour are not sufficient, because unequal to such a task, the Apostle has not used them very appropriately. We must therefore abandon this absurd mode of arguing, “It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth”; therefore, there is some will, some running. Paul’s meaning is more simple—there is no will nor running by which we can prepare the way for our salvation—it is wholly of the divine mercy. He indeed says nothing more than he says to Titus, when he writes, “After that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us,” (Titus 3:4, 5). Those who argue that Paul insinuated there was some will and some running when he said, “It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth,” would not allow me to argue after the same fashion, that we have done some righteous works, because Paul says that we have attained the divine favour, “not by works of righteousness which we have done.” But if they see a flaw in this mode of arguing, let them open their eyes, and they will see that their own mode is not free from a similar fallacy. The argument which Augustine uses is well founded, “If it is said, ‘It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth,’ because neither will nor running are sufficient; it may, on the other hand, be retorted, it is not ‘of God that showeth mercy,’ because mercy does not act alone,” (August. Ep. 170, ad Vital. See also Enchirid. ad Laurent. cap. 32). This second proposition being absurd, Augustine justly concludes the meaning of the words to be, that there is no good will in man until it is prepared by the Lord; not that we ought not to will and run, but that both are produced in us by God. Some, with equal unskilfulness, wrest the saying of Paul, “We are labourers together with God,” (1 Cor. 3:9). There cannot be a doubt that these words apply to ministers only, who are called “labourers with God,” not from bringing any thing of their own, but because God makes use of their instrumentality after he has rendered them fit, and provided them with the necessary endowments.

18. They appeal also to Ecclesiasticus, who is well known to be a writer of doubtful authority. But, though we might justly decline his testimony, let us see what he says in support of free will. His words are, “He himself made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his counsel; If thou wilt, to keep the commandments, and perform acceptable faithfulness. He has set fire and water before thee: stretch forth thy hand unto whether thou wilt. Before man is life and death; and whether him liketh shall be given him,” (Ecclesiasticus 15:14–17). Grant that man received at his creation a power of acquiring life or death; what, then, if we, on the other hand, can reply that he has lost it? Assuredly I have no intention to contradict Solomon, who asserts that “God has made man upright”; that “they have sought out many inventions,” (Eccl. 7:29). But since man, by degenerating, has made shipwreck of himself and all his blessings, it certainly does not follow, that every thing attributed to his nature, as originally constituted, applies to it now when vitiated and degenerate. Therefore, not only to my opponents, but to the author of Ecclesiasticus himself (whoever he may have been), this is my answer: If you mean to tell man that in himself there is a power of acquiring salvation, your authority with us is not so great as, in the least degree, to prejudice the undoubted word of God; but if only wishing to curb the malignity of the flesh, which, by transferring the blame of its own wickedness to God, is wont to catch at a vain defence, you say that rectitude was given to man, in order to make it apparent he was the cause of his own destruction, I willingly assent. Only agree with me in this, that it is by his own fault he is stript of the ornaments in which the Lord at first attired him, and then let us unite in acknowledging that what he now wants is a physician, and not a defender.

19. There is nothing more frequent in their mouths than the parable of the traveller who fell among thieves, and was left half dead (Luke 10:32). I am aware that it is a common idea with almost all writers, that under the figure of the traveller is represented the calamity of the human race. Hence our opponents argue that man was not so mutilated by the robbery of sin and the devil as not to preserve some remains of his former endowments; because it is said he was left half dead. For where is the half living, unless some portion of right will and reason remain? First, were I to deny that there is any room for their allegory, what could they say? There can be no doubt that the Fathers invented it contrary to the genuine sense of the parable. Allegories ought to be carried no further than Scripture expressly sanctions: so far are they from forming a sufficient basis to found doctrines upon. And were I so disposed I might easily find the means of tearing up this fiction by the roots. The Word of God leaves no half life to man, but teaches, that, in regard to life and happiness, he has utterly perished. Paul, when he speaks of our redemption, says not that the half dead are cured (Eph. 2:5, 6; 5:14) but that those who were dead are raised up. He does not call upon the half dead to receive the illumination of Christ, but upon those who are asleep and buried. In the same way our Lord himself says, “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God,” (John 5:25). How can they presume to set up a flimsy allegory in opposition to so many clear statements? But be it that this allegory is good evidence, what can they extort out of it? Man is half dead, therefore there is some soundness in him. True! he has a mind capable of understanding, though incapable of attaining to heavenly and spiritual wisdom; he has some discernment of what is honourable; he has some sense of the Divinity, though he cannot reach the true knowledge of God. But to what do these amount? They certainly do not refute the doctrine of Augustine—a doctrine confirmed by the common suffrages even of the Schoolmen, that after the fall, the free gifts on which salvation depends were withdrawn, and natural gifts corrupted and defiled (supra, chap. 2 sec. 2). Let it stand, therefore, as an indubitable truth, which no engines can shake, that the mind of man is so entirely alienated from the righteousness of God that he cannot conceive, desire, or design anything but what is wicked, distorted, foul, impure, and iniquitous; that his heart is so thoroughly envenomed by sin that it can breathe out nothing but corruption and rottenness; that if some men occasionally make a show of goodness, their mind is ever interwoven with hypocrisy and deceit, their soul inwardly bound with the fetters of wickedness.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. While book 1 of the Institutes is quite diverse, what theme or themes hold chapters 4–9 together?

2. What are the similarities and contrasts between general and special revelation for Calvin?

3. What is meant by the “seed of religion”?

4. Do you agree that man is a “microcosm”?

5. What are the chief obstacles to believing in God, as described in these chapters from books 1 and 2?

6. In book 2, chapters 4–5, Calvin discusses free will. What are his chief concerns?

7. How is God’s sovereignty different from determinism?

*Translated by Henry Beveridge.

1. Augustinus: Astrologia magnum religiosis argumentum, tormentumque curiosis.

2. See Aristot. Hist. Anim. lib. i. c. 17; Macrob., in Somn. Scip. lib. 2 c. 12; Boeth. De Definitione.

3. Aeneid, bk. 4. 724, sq. See Calvin on Acts 17:28 Manil. lib. 1. Astron.

4. Dryden's Virgil, Aeneid, bk. 6. 1. 980–990.

5. Georgica 4. 220. Plat. in Tim. Arist. lib. 1 De Animo. See also Metaph. lib. 1. Merc. Trismegr. in Pimandro.

6. Dryden's Virgil, bk. 4. 1. 252–262.

7. He maintains, in the beginning of the First Book, that nothing is produced of nothing, but that all things are formed out of certain primitive materials. He also perverts the ordinary course of generation into an argument against the existence of God. In the Fifth Book, however, he admits that the world was born and will die.

8. Plato in Timaeus. See also Cic. De Nat. Deorum, lib. 1 ; Plut. De Philos Placitis, lib. i.

9. Cicero : Qui deos esse dixerunt tanta sunt in varietate ac dissensione, ut eorum molestum sit enumerare sententias.—Cicero, De Nat. Deorum, lib. 1 and 2. Lactant Inst. Div. lib. 1 etc.

10. Stoicism was a school of Greek philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in the early third century BC. [Eds.]

11. Plutarch. lib. De Iside et Osiride.

12. Cicero, De Nat. Deor. lib. 1.

1. The French adds, "C'est-à-dire, témoignages célestes"—that is to say, messages from heaven.

2. Tertullian, Apologet. adv. Gentes: "Quae plenius et impressius tam ipsum quam dispositiones ejus et voluntates adiremus, instrumentum adjecit literature," etc.

1. The French adds, "Comme le fondement va deuant l'édifice"—as the foundation goes before the house.

2. The French adds, "La détournant du seul fondement qu'elle a en l'Ecriture"—diverting it from the only foundation which it has in Scripture.

3. Augustin. De Ordine, lib. 2 c. 9 "Ad discendum dupliciter movemur, auctoritate atque ratione: tempore auctoritas, re autem ratio prior est," etc. "Itaque quamquam bonorum auctoritas imperitae multitudini videatur esse salubrior, ratio vero aptior eruditis: tamen quia nullus hominum nisi ex imperito peritus fit, etc., evenit ut omnibus bona, magna, occulta discere cupientibus, non aperiat nisi auctoritas januam," etc. He has many other excellent things to the same effect.

4. The French adds, "Car jaçoit qu'en sa propre majesté elle ait assez de quoi ètre révérée, néantmoins elle commence lors à nous vraiment toucher quand elle est scellée en nos coeurs par le Sainct Esprit."—For though in its own majesty it has enough to command reverence, nevertheless, it then begins truly to touch us when it is sealed in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

1. Exod. 24:18; 34:29; 19:16; 40:34; Num. 16:24; 20:10; 11:9.

1. Lactantius: Coelestes literas corruperunt, ut novam sibi doctrinam sine ulla radice ac stabilitate componerent. Vide Calvin in Instruct. Adv. Libertinos, c. 9 and 10.

2. For the Latin, "ac si elementarius esset," the French has, "comme s'ils eussent étépetis enfans a l'A, B, C"—as if they were little children at their A, B, C.

1. The French adds, "dont on doute communément"—on which doubts are commonly entertained.

2. The French adds, "Car quand nous voyons des voleurs, qui ont commis quelque meurtre ou larrecin, nous ne doutons point de leur imputer la faute, et de les condamner."—For when we see robbers who have committed some murder or robbery, we hesitate not to impute the blame to them, and condemn them.

3. Ezek. 7:26; Ps. 107:40; Job 12:20, 24; Isa. 63:17; Exod. 4:21; 7:3; 10:1; 3:19.

4. Isa. 5:26; 7:18; Ezek. 12:13; 17:20; Jer. 2:23; Isa. 10:15.

5. The French adds, "D'où procède cela sinon que Dieu besongne tant d'une part que d'autre?"—Whence this, but that God interferes thus far in either case?

6. The French is simply, "Car si cela pouvoit ètre en l'homme, il ne seroit par moins libre enfermé en un prison que dominant par toute la terre." If that could be in man, he would be no less free shut up in a prison than ruling all the earth.

1. The French is, "Mais c'est comme si un capitaine assembloit force gens qui ne fussent nullement duits à la guerre pour éspouvanter son ennemi. Avant que les mettre en oeuvre, il ferait grande montre; mais s'il fallait venir en bataille et joindre contre son ennemi on les ferait fuir du premier coup." But it is as if a captain were to assemble a large body of people, in no wise trained to war, to astonish the enemy. Before coming into action they would make a great show; but if they were to go into battle, and come to close quarters with the enemy, the first stroke would make them fly.

2. August. Enchir. ad Laurent. De Gratia et Liber. Arbit. c. 16. Homil 29, in Joann. Ep. 24.

3. Joel 2:12; Jer. 31:18; Deut. 10:16; 30:6; Ezek. 36:26; Jer. 31:18. Vid. Calvin. Adv. Pighium.

4. The French is, "Et de fait cette raison a grande apparence humainement. Car on peut déduire que ce serait une cruauté de Dieu," etc.—And, in fact, humanly speaking, there is great plausibility in this argument. For, it may be maintained, that it would be cruelty in God, etc.

5. The French adds, "Veu qu'en cela il fait le profit de ses serviteurs et rend les iniques plus damnables"—seeing that by this he promotes the good of his servants, and renders the wicked more deserving of condemnation.

6. The French is "Où est-ce que sera cette facilité, vu que notre nature succombe en cet endroit, et n'y a celui qui ne trébuche voulant marcher?" Where is this facility, seeing that our nature here gives way, and there is not a man who in wishing to walk does not tumble?

7. Orig. lib. 7 in Epist. ad Rom. Jerome Dial. i in Pelagium. For the passage in Augustine, see the extract in bk. 3. c. 24 s. 1.

CHAPTER 3

Robert Bellarmine

(1542–1621)

Roberto Francesco Romolo Bellarmino was no doubt the most able of the polemical theologians associated with the Catholic Reformation. Bellarmine was born in Montepulciano to a noble family that had lost most of its wealth. His mother, Cinzia Cervini, was the sister of Pope Marcellus II. As a young man he memorized much of Virgil and composed religious poetry. He entered the Jesuit order at the behest of Cinzia, becoming a novice in Rome, where he stayed for three years. He studied at Mondovi and Padua, then, in 1569 he was sent to Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, where he became well acquainted with the “heresies” of the day, particularly stemming from Protestantism. Upon ordination he became widely known as an excellent preacher and theologian, and gained appreciation from Catholics as well as many Protestants.

Bellarmine taught at the university, but after seven years in Leuven, he suffered declining health and was sent to Rome in order to recover. Pope Gregory XIII prevailed upon him to teach at the new Roman College (Collegio Romano). He became rector of the Roman College under the new Pope, Clement VIII. In 1599 he was named cardinal, then “cardinal inquisitor.” Interestingly, he served as one of the judges of Giordano Bruno, whom the court condemned to be burned at the stake for holding various anti-Catholic doctrines, including alleged pantheism. In 1602 he was name archbishop of Capua, whereupon he served his diocese with dedication.

Under Pope Paul V (1605–1621) Bellarmine engaged in a number of controversies. He defended the papacy against the theologians of the Republic of Venice, who disputed the Pope’s authority. He argued with the English king James I (famous for the publication of the King James Bible in 1611) over the claims of Catholicism upon great Britain. It was Bellarmine who summoned Galileo, notifying him of an impending trial should he not give up his views on the mobility of the earth around the sun. At first Galileo seemed to recant, but then he claimed he was coerced into acquiescence. Bellarmine wrote a certificate denying this claim and asserting that the Copernican doctrine could “no longer be held.”

Bellarmine retired to his birthplace and wrote several treatises there, including the one we are presenting. He was put forth as a candidate at the conclaves of the next three papal elections, though he never won. He died in Rome, and in 1929 he was beatified and a year later canonized as a saint, both under Pius XI.

Bellarmine wrote extensively. One of his first major works was De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (On church scriptures), in 1613. In it he lays out a Catholic doctrine of Scripture in relation to the church. As spiritual director at the Roman College he wrote a children’s catechism and a catechism for teachers. Both were widely published. He wrote various treatises against what were deemed to be heresies. His tract against Gulielmum Barclaeum was an attack against Gallicanism. He also wrote a treatise entitled the Fifteen Marks of the Visible Church, no doubt in response to Calvin’s approach, which limited the marks to three. He wrote a discourse on civil government in which he reviewed various forms of government, favoring monarchy as altogether the best. In 1618 he wrote a devotional work on the seven last words of Christ.

His major work, one that would occupy over eleven years of his life, was the Disputations concerning the Controversies of the Christian Faith against the Heretics of This Age (1586–1593). It is a three-volume synthesis of Catholic thought, much of which is a polemic against Protestant views, or at least his perception of those views. Bellarmine believed that “Lutherans” trusted exclusively in their reason to interpret the Bible, without the magisterial role of the church. He faulted Calvin for skepticism about church councils. He argued that only with a divinely guided church can we hope to make sense of the Word of God. He even affirmed that one of the glories of the Scripture is its obscurity. Enormously popular, it would reach over one hundred editions in the century and a half following its publication. Perhaps the most weighty section of the Disputations are five chapters that defend the papacy. Bellarmine celebrated monarchy as the best form of civil government, and then made the analogy to the church. A strong papacy would preserve both unity and order in the church.

The text we present here is another devotional book, not without its apologetical bent, called, The Mind’s Ascent to God by the Ladder of Created Things (1614). The Protestant historian A. G. Dickens once remarked, “In its saints, many of us have found the permanent significance of the Catholic Reformation.”[1] Their writings are nevertheless distinctly Roman Catholic in feeling. The Mind’s Ascent was written, along with other so-called ascetical works, during Bellarmine’s annual retreats. These retreats were required of the Jesuit Order, and each member had to take eight to ten days and follow the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. The text was first published in Antwerp, in 1615. Before Bellarmine’s canonization in 1930 the work had gone through sixty editions and had been translated into some fifteen different languages. It has been praised by numerous laypersons and clerics alike.

By the time Bellarmine wrote his ascetical works, he was in his mid-to-late seventies and suffering considerably. Many of the ideas in these manuals, which are really sermons, can be found in his earlier work. The Mind’s Ascent belongs to a loose-knit genre, the “ladder of ascent” tradition. Asian religions often picture release from the burdens of life as a ladder. One can think of the ziggurat towers of the Babylonians (no doubt the kind of edifice Jacob saw in his vision recorded in Gen. 28:10–22). The Bible describes steps toward God, such as in the Psalms of Ascent, depicting the way people climbed the steps up into the temple (Ezek. 40:26, 31). In fact Bellarmine states in the introduction that the reason for his fifteen stages up the ladder is Solomon’s precedent. From these ancient times to the history of the church, the genre developed, occasionally giving us classics of Western spirituality. We may think of John Climacus’s Ladder of Divine Ascent, or Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Journey to God.

Again, Bellarmine tells us that his title, The Mind’s Ascent to God by the Ladder of Created Things, is modeled on Saint Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in deum, except that instead of the journey, Bellarmine substitutes the ladder. And although he uses the term mind, we can be sure he is thinking of the soul itself, albeit with an important rational component. There is a logical progression in each of these steps, from one to fifteen. Step one is “The Consideration of Man”; step two, “The Consideration of the Macrocosm”; step three, “The Consideration of the Earth”; and so on. With step nine he moves to discuss the angels, and then, from steps ten to fifteen, God himself is discussed. We have chosen steps twelve and thirteen, as they tell us of God’s wisdom.

Step twelve invites the reader to consider the wisdom of God in relation to his omniscience, particularly focusing on his knowledge of our life. The theme of the ladder is used throughout. We are reminded, “You number my steps,” says Job (14:16, NASB). God not only knows our ways, but has mercy on our sins and insufficiencies. Step thirteen moves us into God’s practical wisdom, defending his choices made as the Creator of all things. He touches on God’s providence and even predestination.

1. A. G. Dickens, The Counter Reformation (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 200.

The Mind’s Ascent to God by the Ladder of Created Things

Steps Twelve and Thirteen*

Twelfth Step

Consideration of the Greatness of the Wisdom of God by the Likeness of Corporeal Magnitude

Chapter 1. The Breadth of the Wisdom of God Consists in the Perfect Knowledge of All Things

How truly the Apostle wrote at the end of his Epistle to the Romans, that God is alone wise,[1] we may easily understand, if we will consider carefully the breadth, the length, the height, and depth of the wisdom of God.

And to begin with the breadth. The wisdom of God is described as very wide, because God knows distinctly and perfectly all things that are in nature, from the first angel to the last worm; not only does he know their whole substance, but also their parts, properties, powers, qualities, actions. Hence those words, “Thou numberest my steps,”[2] and, “The ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and he pondereth all his goings.”[3] And if he numbers and considers each step, how much more the actions of the mind, good or bad. And if God reckoneth the hairs of our head, according to the Word of the Lord, “The hairs of your head are all numbered,”[4] how much more doth he know all the members of the body and all the powers of the soul. And if he knows the number of the sands of the sea and the drops of rain, as we gather from the Wise Man,[5] how much more may we believe that he knows the number of the stars and of the angels. And if all the idle words of all men are to be brought into judgement, as the Lord himself declares,[6] certainly his ears will at once hear all the voices of all men, and not only the voices of the body, but also of the mind, that is, the thoughts and desires. How great then, and how boundless, is this breadth of wisdom which comprehends at once all things that are, that have been, that will be, and that can be.

And this divine mind is not worn out by such a variety of separate and inferior things, as the foolish wisdom of some philosophers would have it. Perchance we might imagine this, if God had to obtain knowledge from things as we do: but since he sees all things in his own being, there is no danger of wearing out: although the acquiring of knowledge by seeking after it, which is the method of mankind, is far more noble than the entire lack of knowledge which is the portion of brutes, in the same way as it is more excellent to be blind, in the way animals are, than not being blind, to be unable to see, as stones: and other members of the body are not more worthy of honour than the eyes because they can not be blind, but the eyes although they can be blind, are more worthy of honour since they have the faculty of seeing, as Saint Augustine rightly argues in his books on the City of God.[7]

Hence, my soul, thou oughtest at every time and in every place to be careful what thou doest, what thou sayest, what thou thinkest, since thou dost never act, speak, or think without God seeing, hearing, observing thee: for if thou wouldst not dare to do or say anything evil though urged thereto by the strongest desire, if thou thoughtest that thou wert heard or seen by man, how darest thou think those things with an angry God looking upon thee?

“Be it so,” saith Saint Augustine in his rule for nuns, “that what you do is seen by no man, it is beheld by him who looketh from above, and from him nothing can be hid.”[8]

And Saint Basil, in his book on virginity, addressing a virgin shut up alone in her cell, warns her to reverence her Bridegroom present everywhere, and his Father and the Holy Spirit and the countless multitudes of angels, and with them the holy spirits of the Fathers: “For there is no one of them,” he says, “who does not see all things in every place.”[9]

O thou blessed soul of mine, if thou considerest always that thou art continually in view of this assembly, even in the darkness and silence of midnight: what a perfect life wilt thou spend, how carefully wilt thou avoid all levity and wandering abroad.

This is indeed the word which the Lord spake once to the patriarch Abraham, “Walk before me and be thou perfect”;[10] that is, bethink thee that thou art always seen by me, and without any doubt thou wilt be perfect.

Chapter 2. The Length of the Wisdom of God Is Displayed in the Knowledge of Things to Come

The length of wisdom appears in knowledge of future events: for God so clearly sees, that from eternity itself he saw what will happen in the last days and beyond, even in eternity, and indeed nothing greater than this length can be thought of.

“Thou understandest my thoughts long before,” said David in the Psalms; and a little after, “There is not a word in my tongue but thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether”;[11] that is, all things future, and all things past. The books of the prophets are full of the clearest and truest predictions, which were not spoken by themselves, but, as sings Zacharias, “God spake by the mouth of his holy prophets which have been since the world began.”[12]

And this foresight and prediction is proper to God alone, as God himself says by Isaiah, “Show the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods.”[13] And that from the many we may consider the few, Isaiah thus speaks, “Thus saith the Lord to his Anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him, etc.,”[14] where the Persian monarchy is foretold and Cyrus the first king of the Persians is called by his own name, and the reason is added why God willed to exalt Cyrus, namely, because it was he who should loose the Babylonian captivity: and all these things were fulfilled about two hundred years later. And by the similitude of an immense image whose “head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his feet part of iron and part of clay,”[15] Daniel clearly foretold four kingdoms, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, and in the time of the last monarchy, the kingdom of Christ, that is, the Christian Church, greater than all the other kingdoms: and next he so plainly describes the wars of the successors of Alexander the Great[16] that certain unbelievers have suspected that those descriptions were written after the wars were ended.

And, setting aside all the rest, Saint Luke tells how Christ himself bewailed the overthrow of Jerusalem, which was to happen after many years, and he so distinctly describes everything in detail as if he were telling, not of future, but of past, events.

I omit numberless other prophecies, of which, as I said, the books of the prophets are full.

Next are the astrologers and certain other diviners, who as though desirous of being imitators of God, are altogether ridiculous: for it cannot be that they predict the truth concerning future events, unless perchance now and again they happen to get near the truth. For, since in all causes and happenings the will of God presides and rules, and can hinder the lesser causes when it wills, no one can foretell the truth unless God hath willed to manifest his will to him, as he often manifested it to his prophets.

And so this is true that demons desired to be considered gods specially because they established oracles and foretold future events, as Saint Augustine testifies in his books on the City of God. And the same celebrated doctor of the Church in his book on the divining of demons openly shows their divination to be false, as their divinity is false: for they declare nothing plainly but that which they themselves are about to do; or what has already taken place, they by their natural swiftness represent to those at a distance as about to take place; or again, that which from daily experience they consider will take place, as mariners foretell many things of the winds, husbandmen of the weather, physicians of diseases; and when the devils are asked about things to come which they know not, they make answer in ambiguous words or in equivocation, and when those things prove false, they lay the fault on their interpreters or soothsayers.[17]

Therefore our Lord only, “Whose wisdom is infinite,”[18] founded true oracles, and foretelleth the truth in all things which shall come to pass both by happenings and by choice.

Chapter 3. Of the Manifold Height of the Wisdom of God

God’s wisdom is most high and far surpasses the wisdom of men or of angels. The height of wisdom is discerned by nobility of the object, of its power, of its form, and of its action.

The object of divine wisdom both natural and proportionate is the divine Essence itself which is so high that it has no proportion to any understanding either angelic or human: and angels of the highest order cannot ascend to see God unless they are lifted up by the light of glory: and this is the reason why in holy writ God is said to be invisible: “To the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God,” saith the Apostle in his former Epistle to Timothy,[19] and he afterwards adds: that God dwelleth in light that cannot be approached.[20]

Then secondly, power, which in us is an accident, is in God a divine substance, and therefore exists in him in a much higher and nobler degree than in us. The form also is the higher the more it doth represent: and therefore those angels that have fewer and more universal forms are said to have so much the higher knowledge.

How great then is the height of divine wisdom, which has no form but its own Essence, which is but one, and is sufficient of itself alone for God to represent and to know himself and all things which are made, shall be made, or may be made.

And in the last place, that wisdom is accounted most sublime which knoweth most by fewest acts: but God by one single act of intuition perfectly knoweth himself and all other things.

The wisdom of God therefore hath the pre-eminence and ought to be called most high.

Lift up thine eyes now, O my soul, and see how vast a distance there is between thy knowledge and that of thy Maker. For thou by many acts in running hither and thither canst hardly know any one thing perfectly, but thy Maker doth by one only act most clearly and distinctly see himself and all others. And yet thou thyself, now lying in darkness, mayst, if thou wilt, ascend so high upon the wings of faith and love that after laying down this mortal body, being changed from glory to glory, thou mayst, in the light of God, see God who is light.[21] And being make like unto God, thou also at one beholding and that lasting for ever, shalt be able to see God in himself and thyself and all creatures in God. “For what is there that he doth not see,” saith Saint Gregory, “who seeth him that seeth all things? How great then shall be that pleasure, that glory, that plenty of all things, when thou art admitted to that inaccessible light and art a partaker in all the good things of thy Lord.”[22] The Queen of Sheba, when she heard of the wisdom of Solomon and saw the wonderful order of the servants of his house, was so astonished that, as the Scripture saith, “There was no more spirit in her,” and she said, “Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants, which stand continually before thee, and that hear thy wisdom.”[23] And what proportion is there between the wisdom of Solomon and the wisdom of God, who is the only wise, yea Wisdom itself? And what is the order of his servants compared with the nine orders of angels of God of whom “Thousand thousands ministered unto him and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him”?[24]

Surely if thou couldst taste of these things even in a small measure, thou wouldst most willingly do or suffer anything that thou mightest obtain the favour of God. Therefore in the meantime “humble thyself under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt thee in the day of visitation”;[25] I subject thine understanding to faith, that thou mayst be exalted to vision; subject thy will to obey the commandments that thou mayst be exalted “into the glorious liberty of the children of God”;[26] humble thy flesh also to patience and labour, that God may glorify it and exalt it to eternal rest.

Chapter 4. The Depth of the Wisdom of God Is Manifest in the Knowledge of Our Thoughts and Especially of What Is to Come

It remains for us to consider the depth of the divine wisdom, which consists chiefly in the discerning of the reins and the heart, that is, in the knowledge of men’s thoughts and desires, especially those which are to come. For we read, “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but God looketh upon the heart”;27] “Thou alone knowest the hearts of the children of men”;[28] “Thou understandest my thoughts”;[29] “He knoweth the hidden things of the heart”;[30] and “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” where the Septuagint translates, “the heart of man is deep and unscrutable,” and Saint Jerome expounding this passage, rightly shows that Christ is truly God because he saw the thoughts of men, which God alone can see;[31] “And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?”;[32] “But he knew their thoughts”;[33] “Why reason ye these things in your hearts?”[34] Therefore every thought and desire of men, although present and really existing, is so deep that neither angels nor demons nor men can search or penetrate into it, but far deeper is the thought or desire of things to come: for not only are men and angels not able to penetrate it, but they cannot penetrate the way by which God, who alone knows it, cometh to the knowledge thereof. And this David seems to wish to signify when he says, “Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me.”[35] For that ex me signifies in Hebrew phrase, “before me” or “over me,” and the sense is “Thy knowledge is more wonderful than I am able to understand how it exists.” For he adds, “It is high and great and I cannot attain unto it,” that is, it is raised above my knowledge, and I cannot by any reasoning reach up to understand it. But he speaks of the knowledge of future thoughts: for he had said, “Thou knowest my thoughts long before”: of the foreknowledge of these thoughts and ways he says, “I cannot attain unto it.” It may perchance be answered that God sees those future thoughts in his eternity, to which all things are present, or in the predetermination of his will: but if it were so, such knowledge would not be wonderful, for we ourselves are easily able to know what we are about to do, or what things are before our eyes. But the Scripture saith that God searcheth the reins and the heart and that there he sees what man desires and thinks or what afterwards he will desire and think. But this is exceeding wonderful, that God by searching the hearts and reins sees what is not yet in being there, and what depends on the choice of the will whether it ever shall be. Therefore as it pertains to the depth of the power of God to make something out of nothing, and to call those things that are not, but shall be, as the things which are, so it belongs to the depth of the divine wisdom that by searching out the reins and the heart, to see what is not yet there and as if it already were, and which doubtless will exist.

Chapter 5. Elevation of the Soul to the Divine Physician Who Searcheth the Heart and Healeth It

But since I undertook not to dispute questions but to stir the soul to rise up to God, rouse up thyself, my soul, and mount above thyself, as Jeremiah advises, “Let us lift up our heart unto God in the heavens,”[36] and consider that profound abyss of the divine wisdom which searches the depth of the heart and sees many things which the heart cannot see. O blessed Peter, when thou didst say to thy Lord, “Though I should die with thee, yet will I not deny thee,”[37] surely thou didst not speak with a double heart, but with sincerity and uprightness, nor didst thou see the infirmity of thy heart which thy Lord saw in it when he said, “Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice”:[38] for that most skilful Physician saw the weakness in thine heart which thou sawest not, and that was true, and the Physician foretold not what the sick man boasted of. But give thanks to the Physician who, as he foresaw and foretold the disease, breathed into thy soul from above the powerful medicine of repentance and quickly cured it.

O good, O kind, O most wise and powerful Physician, cleanse me from my secret faults.[39] How many are there which I do not bewail nor wash away with tears because I do not see them. Let thy grace be ever present with me, by which thou searchest the reins and the hearts, and do thou discover to me the evil desires and evil deeds which I do not see, but which thou seest, and looking mercifully upon me, open such a fountain of tears that while there is time, they may be cleansed and washed away by thy grace. Amen.

Thirteenth Step

Consideration of God’s Practical Wisdom

Chapter 1. The Breadth of God’s Practical Wisdom Is Clear from the Creation of Things and Their Disposal in Number, Measure, and Weight

We have considered the wisdom of God as it is in theory: his practical wisdom is now to be considered, which we may also call his effective wisdom. This wisdom has its breadth, length, height, and depth: the breadth is known by creation, the length by the preservation of things created, the height by the work of redemption, the depth by providence and predestination.

And to begin with creation. “God hath made all things in wisdom,” as it is said in the Psalms,[1] and poured it forth over all his works, as the Wise Man writes.[2] As we therefore know the power of the worker in the creation of all things out of nothing, so by the wonderful workmanship which we discern in everyone of them do we admire the wisdom of the Creator: for “He hath disposed all things in measure, number, and weight.”[3] With this savour God hath seasoned all things and by this savour we come to understand how delightful is his wisdom, how amiable and how desirable.

All created things, then, have a certain number, a certain measure, a certain weight both to distinguish them from God, who hath no measure because he is immense, nor number, because he is One and simple in his Essence; nor weight, because his value and his price surpass all price and value: and also since they are all good and beautiful, as Moses most truly said, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.”[4] All created things, then, have the measure which is necessary to attain the end for which they were made: nor can anything be added to or taken from that measure without making the thing deformed and useless, and therefore not so good as it was: “God hath made everything beautiful in his season.”[5] Therefore to the heavens God gave a very spacious measure, since they have to embrace all things beneath them; to the air, far shorter measure than the heaven, but greater than to the earth and waters which form one globe and are enclosed on all sides by the air. He gave to the elephant a body of huge bulk that it might carry very heavy weights and even a tower full of men: to the horse less, because it was made to carry only one rider; he made birds small that they might build their nests on branches of trees; bees and ants very small, that they might hide themselves in the holes either of hives or in the earth.

The same thing we may say of number. God made one sun, since one was enough to lighten the whole earth and to make day by his brightness: he also made one moon, since one is enough to give light in the night: he willed that there should be many stars, that in the absence of sun and moon, as happens at their conjunction, they might in some measure disperse the darkness of night. And not only to all things in general did he assign the fitting number, but also established the number of parts in each separate thing, that no addition or diminution can be made. God hath given man two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet, one nose, one mouth, one breast, one head, and thus he appears a very beautiful and comely creature: invert the order, put on any man one eye, two noses, one ear, two mouths, one hand, and one foot, two hearts and two heads, and nothing more useless or more hideous could be made.

Lastly, God hath given to each thing weight, that is, he has given to each thing the value that its nature requires. By the word weight or price we understand the qualities which make things good and precious, and there are three things necessary to perfection: number, that nothing be wanting; secondly a proper proportion of parts; and lastly, internal and external qualities, as loveliness of colour in the outward surface of the body, and inward power which is useful or necessary for our various actions. But indeed it is wonderful to consider what virtue God gave to each thing, however tiny and small, so that it would seem he willed to show his power in great things, and in small his wisdom. Who can conceive what virtue there is in a grain of mustard seed, which is so very small that it can scarce be discerned by the eye and yet it produces a large tree, so that even birds lodge in its branches, as he who is truth itself says in the Gospel.[6] And this is not peculiar to mustard seed, but is common to all seeds in the virtue of which lie hid roots, trunks, branches, leaves, blossoms, and fruit of the greatest trees. Indeed if we had not learnt this by experience we should not easily persuade men that from so small a seed so many and such different things could ever spring. And who could conceive that in an ant, a fly, a flea, and such very tiny creatures, there should be nimble feet, a head, a heart, exterior and interior senses, and that in their own way, although as yet imperfect, they possess wisdom and judgement? And lastly, who would suppose that in these and other very small creatures there should be power to pierce and enter the living flesh, so that not only do they become most troublesome to men, but also to elephants and lions which they terrify?

Great, therefore, is the Lord, and great is his wisdom as well in the smallest as in the greatest things. Galen, that prince of physicians, though a heathen, admired the divine artifice when he perceived it in the human hand, and cried out in praise of the Creator. What then, O Christian, oughtest thou to do, who art assured that not only the bodies of men and other creatures but also the heavens, the stars, the angels, and the immortal spirits were made with incredible wisdom by the same most wise Creator?

Chapter 2. The Length of the Practical Wisdom of God Manifest in the Preservation of Things

Now the length of the practical wisdom of God appears in the preservation of things; as we have already said, its breadth is shown in their creation. Therefore the great and admirable wisdom of God is seen in his preservation of created things and giving them power to continue, and especially such as are of a corruptible nature. And first, if a man considers how God nourishes herbs, plants, living creatures, and the very bodies of men, and makes them thrive and grow so that they are preserved for a long time, he cannot sufficiently wonder at the wisdom of God. For with earth and water he nourishes plants and herbs and causes that the nourishment passes from the root to the trunk, and from the trunk to the branches and fruits by a certain force drawing it upwards and making it run into every part in a wonderful order and measure. Men likewise, and some beasts, he nourishes by herbs and fruits, and so orders that the nourishment enters and penetrates to all the parts interior and exterior with incredible ease and pleasure. God deals as a very skilful and kind physician who knows how to mix his drugs that they may be taken by the sick man not only easily but with pleasure, for meats are certainly physic, which unless mortal men frequently take, they cannot escape death. But God, our most loving and wise physician, first gives a savour to the food, that it may be eaten with pleasure; next he varies it in numberless ways so as to remove distaste; and lastly by various changes in the mouth, stomach, liver, and heart the meat is changed into a juice, so thin and subtile that, without cutting out a way and giving pain, it passes through all the arteries and veins and pores of the body and into all parts of the flesh, bones, and nerves when we do not perceive it, and even when we are asleep. Philosophers wonder at this skill and art of nature when they examine it, but what cunning can there be in inanimate things void of sense and skill in reasoning? It is therefore not natural skill but the wisdom of the Creator that is to be admired, for he not only made nature, but found out a way by which these wonders might be done. Hear the wisdom of God speaking in the Gospel: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin . . . and God clothes them.”[7] It is therefore not natural skill, but God, who makes the lilies grow, and clothes them with beauty as with a garment; and the same may be said of the nourishment and increase of all things living, as the Apostle bears witness, when he says, “Neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.”[8]

And if the wisdom of God feeds, nourishes, and preserves in mortal life plants and animals in so wonderful a way, think, if thou canst, O my soul, how God doth feed the minds of angels and of men in life which is eternal. For on earth we are fed with earthly food prepared though it be by the divine wisdom; but in heaven wisdom itself is the meat and drink of those who live for ever. O happy shouldst thou be if thou couldst thoroughly understand what this is: “God shall be all in all”;[9] what, I say, when God the highest and infinite good shall be to all the saints food and clothing and life and all things: surely thou wouldst loathe all things present and only mind and seek the things that are above. But let us proceed to the rest.

It is also almost like a miracle that for the preservation and continuance of man’s life God hath given to the smallest things continual motion which, though lasting long, yet causes no fatigue. Men take great pains to make a clock in which the wheels by force of weights turn twenty-four hours without stopping. With what great wisdom, then, does God act, who causes the nourishing faculty to act also continually and without stopping so long as plants and animals live, and also that lungs and arteries should move continually for seventy years or more. For of necessity the nourishing faculty must work, and the heart and arteries be in movement from the beginning of life to the end. And so in those who reach eighty and ninety years, it is necessary that their hearts and arteries should be moving all that time. And before the Flood, when men lived to nine hundred years, it was necessary that the heart and arteries, things fragile and delicate, should work continuously without any pause or rest for nine hundred years. Truly those who do not wonder at these things and do not in them perceive and adore the divine wisdom, must be altogether deprived of the light of wisdom.

To this we may add, thirdly, that the wisdom of God, although it can, without any labour of men or other animals, and even without the service of the sun and other secondary causes, both produce and preserve herbs and trees, so that all living things may have their proper food: yet he willed to use the service of secondary causes and by the labour and industry of men and beasts, that no one might be idle, but that every one should exercise their strength. And he willed also that, among men, some should be rich and some poor, that all might have opportunity for cultivating virtue and might be united in the bond of charity. For the rich may exercise liberality and mercy, the poor patience and humility. The rich need the labour of the poor to till their fields, to feed their cattle, by divers trades to prepare the things which are necessary for all. The poor again need the help of the rich to give them money and tools with which they may provide for themselves food and clothing and other necessaries. And there is no reason why the poor should complain of the divine wisdom: for God, who knows all and loves everyone, gives to each what will bring him to everlasting life, foresees what will be useful; just as earthly physicians order fasting for some persons and cause them to be bled, and to others they order meat and wine and bid them enjoy themselves that they may recover health. Doubtless very many poor folks attain eternal salvation, who if they had been rich would have perished eternally, and although the rich may be saved if they seek to be rich in good works and give that willingly which they received from our common Lord, not to store but to bestow, yet it cannot be denied that poverty is a safer, smoother, and quicker way to heaven than wealth. Our divine Master doth not deceive us. He saith, “Verily I say unto you, that a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven”;[10] and again, “Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,” and “Woe to you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation”:[11] nor does the Apostle deceive us when he says in his former Epistle to Timothy, “They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition”;[12] and what the Lord and his Apostles taught by word the same they confirmed by example, for the Lord said of himself, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head,”[13] and the Apostle says of himself and his fellow Apostle, “Unto this present hour we both hunger and thirst and have no certain dwelling-place,”[14] that is, we have no home of our own. And it cannot be doubted that the wisdom of God and the sons and disciples of wisdom made choice of the smoothest and safest road to life. But because “the number of fools is infinite”[15] few choose the way of their own accord, but many turn aside from it with their whole affection and strength.

Lastly, the length of the divine wisdom is seen in that, as it is itself eternal, so it hath implanted in all things a most vigorous instinct to preserve themselves, to prolong their life and being as far as they can. We see men, when they perceive that their lives are in danger, moving all things, sparing no cost or pains to preserve them; we see creatures of all kinds struggle beyond their strength with stronger, lest they should lose their life; we see a candle when burning and near going out bestirring itself twice or thrice and putting forth a great flame, so that it seems to be striving as much as it can not to go out. We see drops of water hanging some time upon wood or stone, becoming globes and holding together as long as they can lest they should fall down and perish. We see heavy things ascending contrary to nature and light things unnaturally fall that there may be no vacuum, lest they, being apart from other things, should not be preserved.

But it is yet more wonderful how for the propagation of the species God has endowed parents with so strong and almost inconceivable affection for their young. We see a hen, weakened by bringing up her chickens, although weak and feeble, fight bravely against kites and dogs and foxes: and how many troubles and labours women gladly bear in bringing forth and rearing their children, everybody knows. The cause of this is the counsel of the divine wisdom who to keep up this propagation as a shadow of his eternity hath ingrafted in all animals, even in brutes and wild beasts, a very strong love for their young. For as there are many animals for whose destruction men lie in wait, either for their own profit, such as hares, bulls, deer, thrushes, quails, partridges, almost all fishes; or lest they should do harm, as wolves, foxes, serpents, and numberless other such creatures: many kinds of animals would have perished long since had not the wisdom of God, by this very affection, provided for their preservation and propagation. But if a natural love for this life so short and full of trouble exists in all living things, what should be our love for the blessed and eternal life? O blindness and folly of man! All things strive even beyond their strength to preserve this very short life, a mere shadow of eternity; and man, endowed with reason, will not work for the true eternity of a most happy life, I do not say beyond, but even according to his strength. All things by natural instinct fear temporal death and shun it beyond all evils; man, endued with reason and taught by divine faith, neither stands in fear of everlasting death nor spurns it, at least not as he is accustomed to fear and shun the evils of this temporary life. And so truly did the Preacher say, “The number of fools is infinite”:[16] and truly did he who is the Truth say in the Gospel, “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”[17]

Chapter 3. That the Height of the Practical Wisdom of God Is Perceived in the Work of Redemption

Now the height of the practical wisdom of God is seen in the work of our redemption; says Saint Augustine, “I was not sated in those days with the wondrous sweetness of considering the depth of thy counsels concerning the salvation of mankind.”[18]

It was surely a most high counsel by the shame of the Cross to repair all the damage which the craft of the devil had caused through the sin of the first man, and so to repair it that the work repaired should become more beautiful than it was before it needed restoration. Four evils sprang from the sin of the first man: an affront to God by the pride and disobedience of Adam; the punishment of the first man and of all the human race by the loss of the grace of God and of eternal happiness; the sorrow of the angels who were greatly saddened by the injury done to God and the misery fallen upon man; the triumph of the devil and all the evil spirits who rejoiced over man overcome and cast down by them. All these evils the wisdom of God bore away and turned to greater good by the mystery of the Cross, so that not without cause does the Church sing, “O happy fault which had such a Redeemer.”[19]

For if a tailor by his own industry and the addition of some ornament could so amend a garment old and precious, but cut and torn by some accident, that it became more beautiful and precious than before, it might truly be called a fortunate rent, which gave occasion to such mending. The first man waxed proud by the craft and subtlety of the devil, sought to be like God, disobeyed him and transgressed his commandments, so in some way he took to himself the honour due to God. But Christ, the Second Adam, who is the wisdom of God, “Humbled himself and became obedient unto death,”[20] and restored to God honour much greater than that which the first Adam by pride and disobedience had taken away. For Adam was a mere man, and if he had obeyed God he would have obeyed him in a very slight matter. For what great matter would it have been for our first parents to abstain from the fruit of the forbidden tree when they had plenty of others better? Therefore the sin was indeed the greater and so much the more serious as the obedience would have been easy and have involved no labour. But Christ was God and Man and humbled himself to obey God his Father in a thing most hard and laborious, to wit in the death of the Cross which was full of sorrow and shame. Wherefore if we consider the eminence of the Person and the depth of humility and obedience, nothing can be imagined greater or more meritorious or more honoring to God than that humble obedience of Christ. Therefore our Lord said very truly in the Gospel, “I have glorified thee on the earth,”[21] for indeed Christ Jesus glorified God the Father with an unspeakable glory before the angels of God and before all the holy spirits of the prophets and others to whom those things were made known. And if the angels sang together at the birth of Christ for the humility of the manger, “Glory to God in the highest,”[22] much more did they sing the same song with greater joy for the humility of the Cross.

Moreover, man himself, if he had not sinned, would have reached only to an equality with the angels, but now by the redemption which is in Christ Jesus mankind hath obtained that one Man, exalted above all the angels, should sit on the Right Hand of God and become the head and Lord both of angels and of men; for concerning Christ the Apostle Peter thus writes in his former Epistle, “He is gone into heaven and is on the right hand of God; angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him”;[23] and his fellow Apostle Paul to the Philippians, “Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth.”[24] Therefore the Son glorified the Father by the humility of the Passion after an unspeakable measure, and the Father also after an unspeakable manner hath glorified the Son by exalting him to his Right Hand, which glorification hath so affected the whole human race, that they are indeed ungrateful who do not recognize the immense benefit and who do not give God thanks. Because not only is Christ God and Man, but his Mother, who nevertheless is human only and not God, was exalted above all the choirs of angels; wherefore as they are possessed of so great an increase of the glory which they would not have possessed had not man sinned, men may rightly say, “O happy fault which deserved to have such a Redeemer!”

Moreover, the holy angels, as they were saddened by the fall of the first man, the sore disgrace of their younger brother, so did they exceedingly rejoice over the full redemption wrought by Christ. For if there be joy in heaven among the angels in heaven over one sinner that repenteth,[25] how much more may we believe that there was very great rejoicing in the presence of those same angels that, in behalf of mankind, Christ as Man had fully satisfied the justice of God and that by the key of his Cross the kingdom of heaven was opened to all believers. Nor is it to be supposed that the holy angels took it ill that God raised the Man Christ and the most blessed Virgin above them; for there is no envy in the angels, but they are full of the truest and most burning love; and charity envieth not, is not puffed up, is not saddened on account of another’s good, but rejoiceth and exulteth together with all good men when any good befalls them, as much as if it were their own. And so the Church truly sings, “Mary is taken up into heaven, the angels rejoice.”[26] It does not say the angels are sad, but, the angels rejoice, because they see the Virgin Mother of God raised above the choirs of angels to the heavenly kingdom. The angels know that God hath done it most justly, who doeth all things in perfect wisdom and justice, and their will is so inseparably united to the will of God by the bond of love, that what pleases God pleases them also, and can never displease them. But the devil, who rejoiced for a time because he had overcome and cast down the first man, became afterwards more sorrowful over the victory of Christ than he was joyful before. For from that victory of Christ it came to pass that not only men, as was Adam, but even women and children insult the devil and triumph over him. For it would not have been a disgrace to the devil to be conquered by Adam in Paradise when he had no ignorance nor weakness but was armed with original righteousness, which so subdued to reason the lower part of his nature that it could not rebel, unless the mind itself first rebelled against God. But for the devil now to be overcome by a mortal man, a pilgrim subject to ignorance and concupiscence, is a very great disgrace; and yet he is overcome by the grace of Christ, and so overcome that many display trophies of chastity, patience, humility, charity, although the devil eagerly and constantly casts his fiery darts of temptation and persecution. And in this matter the height of the divine wisdom is specially to be admired. For God saw struggle to be necessary for the human race in order that man should escape worldly honours and the like, which are the snares of the devil and draw such as are led captive to destruction and perdition. What, therefore, did he determine in order that those things should become distasteful to man and that the contrary, purity, poverty, humility, patience, and contempt of the world, should be delightful? He himself came down from heaven and, taking the form of a servant, made this bitter medicine, which was necessary to the sick man, so sweet and pleasant by his example, that many men now love fasting more than feasting, poverty more than riches, virginity more than wedlock, martyrdom more than daintiness, to obey than to command, to be despised than to be honoured, to be governed than to rule, to be humbled than to be exalted. For who, seeing God in human form, full of wisdom and grace, and who can neither deceive nor be deceived, poor, lowly, patient, and pure, and what is more wonderful, for the redemption of mankind nailed to the Cross, and willingly shedding his precious Blood, dying of most ardent charity, who, I say, would not be encouraged and incited to imitate him? This was a wonderful and high contrivance of God’s wisdom, of which Isaiah sings, “Declare his doings among the people.”[27] But even to this day this most high wisdom of God seems to be foolishness, not only to the wise of this world[28] as saith the Apostle in the former Epistle to the Corinthians, but also to the carnal and sensual men who believe in Christ, but refuse to follow his steps, whom the same Apostle called the enemies of the Cross of Christ.[29]

But thou, O my soul, do thy diligence to suck honey out of the rock and oil out of the flinty stone, that is, wisdom out of the folly of the Cross. Consider attentively and carefully who he is who hangs on the Rood and why he so hangs: and when thou hast found that it is indeed he who sitteth above the cherubim,[30] yea, indeed, who sitteth on the right hand of the Majesty on high,[31] thou wilt easily understand that he does not hang there for his own offences, nor because of his weakness or the power of others, but willingly, through his most ardent desire to satisfy the divine justice for the sins of all the world, for the honour and glory of God the Father, for the eternal salvation of the elect, and, as the Apostle speaks, “that he might present it to himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle”;[32] and lastly for thy sake, “because he loved thee and gave himself an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.”[33] When, I say, thou shalt have learnt this to be most true, let love rise from the bottom of thy heart to such a benefactor, and seek to imitate him, begin eagerly to thirst after the glory of God, the salvation of all mankind, but especially for the beauty and glory of the whole Church and thine own eternal salvation. Begin to long for a perfect hatred of sin, for purity of heart and perfect righteousness, that at length thou mayst also desire to share in the Cross of thy Lord and to glory in tribulation and afflictions, that hereafter thou mayst also be partaker of his resurrection glory, and not with the wicked to punishment.

Chapter 4. The Depth of the Practical Wisdom of God Consists in Providence and Predestination and the Judgements of God

There remains the depth of practical wisdom which consists in the providence and predestination and in the judgements of God: for it is written, “Thy judgements are like the great deep.”[34]

First, then, the providence of God is exceeding wonderful, because it governs all created things immediately, and directs them to their end. “He careth for all alike”;[35] that is, God cares for all without exception, so that no sparrow falls to the ground without the providence of God, as the Saviour saith.[36] He that can count the multitude of things which are in the whole universe, the same may in some measure guess at the greatness of the wisdom of God, ruling and directing all things in general and particular. Indeed one chief Pastor might rule the whole Christian world by a general providence, but not by particular, which comprehends every Christian, and therefore many bishops are called to the charge: and one may rule many provinces by a general providence, but not by particular, which concerns every citizen, and therefore he employs viceroys or deputies or presidents. But God takes care of everyone as of all, and of all as of such. “A sparrow shall not fall on the ground without your Father. The very hairs of your head are all numbered”;[37] and lest even one should perish, his providence is always watching over us. The young of the ravens forsaken by their parents are not forsaken by God.[38] How safely, therefore, mayst thou rest, my soul, in the bosom of such a Father, even in the midst of darkness, among the mouths of lions and dragons, among numberless legions of spirits; cleave only to him in true love, holy fear, with certain hope, assured faith, undoubting.

But not only doth the providence of God care for each singular and present thing, but it reaches from one end to the other, ordering all things sweetly.[39] Therefore God is called the King of ages,[40] because he himself established the order of the ages and disposed the succession of kingdoms and the vicissitudes of times and changes from all eternity. To God nothing new, nothing unforeseen, nothing unthought of can happen. “The thoughts of mortal men are miserable and our devices are but uncertain,”[41] but God knows all things to come as certainly as things past and present, and disposed in his own mind before the foundation of the world the order and succession of all things. Therefore our holy Mother Church sings publicly and securely that God’s providence erreth not in the order and disposition of thought.[42]

But because the reason of divine providence is entirely hidden and his “judgements like the great deep,”[43] it comes to pass that some, seeing that very many evils are committed among men and left unpunished, rush into the mistake of believing either that human affairs are not governed by the providence of God, or that all those evil things are done by the will of God; both of which opinions are wicked, but the latter is worse than the former, as Saint Augustine writes.[44]

But what misleads men into the greatest of errors is their seeing one part of the divine providence and not discerning another part, whereas they ought to wait for the issue of things which will be manifest to all in the last judgement; they venture rashly to judge before the time, and are greatly deceived. Therefore the Apostle cries in the former Epistle to the Corinthians, “Judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts.”[45] Saint Augustine illustrates this matter with a remarkable parable: “If anyone,” he says, “were to look only on a single mosaic pavement, he might blame the workman as ignorant of order and composition, namely because he sees a little part of his work, the greatest part he sees not: if he saw all the parts and their connection, doubtless he would praise with wonder the work and the workman.”[46]

So therefore many see the wicked prosper and the righteous punished and afflicted, and they do not know what God reserves hereafter either for the iniquity of the wicked or for the patience of the righteous, and so they break forth into blasphemous words or say with those who spoke with Job, “God walketh in the circuit of heaven: he seeth not,”[47] or with those others which say, “Everyone that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and he delighteth in them.”[48]

Saint Augustine frequently uses another parable taken from poetry. For if anyone begins to listen to an heroic song and says in the beginning or the middle, the verse is not good, he is rightly considered foolish: for he should wait until all the syllables are sounded and then he may find fault if the song does not please. And so those persons are altogether foolish who dare to blame the most orderly providence of God before the whole scheme of providence has run out.

Therefore, my soul, if thou be wise, hinder, as much as thou canst, the doing of evil, for so God commands thee; but why he suffers the evil to be done, leave to his judgement, which may be hidden but cannot be unjust.

Chapter 5. Of the Profound Mystery of Predestination and of Reprobation

But although the reason of the providence of God in governing human affairs is very deep, the reason of his predestination and of eternal reprobation is without comparison far deeper. For why God fills many of the wicked with temporal goods and leaves their sins unpunished in this life, and on the contrary why he allows many innocent persons to be pressed in need and unjustly troubled, afflicted, tormented, and killed, we cannot search out particularly, but we can assign some likely general cause. For God often makes the wicked rich in temporal goods, to reward some of their good moral works, though he will not give them eternal life: or that he may allure them with temporal benefits to conversion from their sins and lead them to hope for eternal blessings: but sometimes he does not punish sins in this life because he will punish them sufficiently in hell. He allows the righteous to be afflicted with want ignominy and various troubles, sometimes that he may purge their light sins in this life, sometimes that he may crown their patience and humility and other good deeds with greater glory in eternal life. But why God loved Jacob and hated Esau before they had done either good or evil, who can tell? And this is what the Apostle wonders at in his Epistle to the Romans for they were twin brothers, sons of one father and mother, and yet God loved one by predestination and the other he hated by reprobation.[49] And lest any one should perchance say that God foresaw the good works of the one and the evil of the other, the Apostle forestalls the answer, saying that this was done that “the purpose according to election might stand,”[50] and he alleges the words of God to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”[51] Who indeed will not wonder if one persevered a long time in good works and at the end of life failed and perished, as Judas the betrayer, and another persevering a long time in evil deeds and in the end of life entirely changed, passed to Paradise, as the good thief? But thou wilt say, Judas betrayed Christ and the thief confessed Christ. It is true: but could not Christ have looked on Judas as he looked on Peter and inspired Judas with that powerful grace which no hard heart can refuse? And could not Christ have given to both thieves who hung beside him faith and repentance as he gave to one, and, or suffer both to die in their sins as he suffered the one? And who can tell a reason why God taketh away some, lest wickedness should alter their understanding, as Wisdom speaks of Enoch,[52] and many he takes not away but suffers them to fall from virtue to vice and to end their days therein? What shall we say of whole nations, whereof some very early, others very late, are called unto faith, without which no one can be saved? “For he that believeth not is condemned,”[53] and as the Apostle says, “Whosoever shall call upon the Name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? and how shall they preach except they be sent?”[54]

These are, therefore, very high and profound secrets which the eternal Father has hid in the abyss of his wisdom, whereat the Apostle wonders, but does not declare, when he says, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgements, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord or who hath been his counsellor?”[55]

This only is lawful for us to know, that with God there is no iniquity and that at the last day there will be no one who shall not truly say, “Righteous art thou, O Lord, and true is thy judgement”;[56] and, moreover, this secrecy is profitable to us all, since it comes to pass that the wicked shall not despair of salvation nor the righteous presume on it: and also good men shall not be hopeless of the conversion of the wicked, but pray for all and carefully seek their salvation: and again, no one, however good and holy he may be, can be proud, when no one knows what to-morrow may bring forth, but all work out their salvation with fear and trembling.[57]

And thou, my soul, having considered all these things, “Do thy diligence to make thy calling and election sure,” as the Apostle Peter advises thee in his later Epistle.[58] What good works those are which make our calling and election sure the Apostle John teaches, when he says, “My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.”[59] For love is that with which no one is condemned and without which no one is saved: but charity is shown by works, namely when anyone either bestows alms on the poor or forgives injuries from enemies not for hope of temporal reward or for inordinate affection for the creature, but out of inward and pure love of God and the neighbour. And since it is not enough to begin but “he that endureth to the end shall be saved,”[60] the Apostle saith, “Take heed,” that is with anxiety and care and diligence to give oneself to the business of eternal salvation. And truly there is no sign more likely of divine election, than when a man, being more careful about his salvation than any other thing, prays continually to God for the gift of true repentance, of true humility and perfect charity and perseverance unto the end: and not content with prayer only, strives also, as far as he can, to seek and to find the kingdom of God and his righteousness as our Saviour admonishes us.[61]

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. How does Bellarmine move from is to ought in these chapters about the breadth, length, height, and depth of God’s wisdom?

2. Is the gospel of God’s grace well represented in these passages?

3. How successful is the metaphor of the ladder of created things for Bellarmine’s purposes?

4. Compare Bellarmine’s approach to sin and predestinating mercy with John Calvin’s.

5. What is the apologetic value of these pages?

6. Evaluate the claim “O happy fault which deserved to have such a Redeemer!”

*Excerpts from Robert Bellarmine: Spiritual Writings, translated and edited by John Patrick Donnelly, S.J., and Roland J. Teske, S.J. Copyright © 1989 by The Wisconsin Province of the Society of Jesus. Paulist Press, Inc., New York/Mahwah, NJ. Reprinted by permission of Paulist Press, Inc. www.paulistpress.com.

1. Rom. xvi. 27.

2. Job xiv. 16.

3. Prov. v. 21.

4. St. Matt. x. 30.

5. Ecclus. i. 2.

6. St. Matt. xii. 36.

7. St. Aug., de Civ., xxi. c. 1.

8. St. Aug. Ep., ccxi, no. 10.

9. St. Basil, de Virg., c. 7.

10. Gen. xvii. 1.

11. Ps. cxxxix. 3. Vulg.: “omni novissima et antiqua.”

12. St. Luke i. 70.

13. Isa. xli. 23.

14. Isa. xlv. 1.

15. Dan. ii. 31.

16. Dan. xi. 5.

17. St. Aug., de Divinit. Daemonum, c. 3, no. 7.

18. Ps. cxlvii. 5.

19. 1 Tim. i. 17.

20. 1 Tim. vi. 16.

21. Ps. xxxvi. 9; 2 Cor. iii. 18.

22. Dial. iv. 33.

23. 1 Kings x.

24. Dan. vii. 10.

25. 1 St. Pet. v. 6.

26. Rom. viii. 21.

27. 1 Sam. xvi. 7.

28. 2 Chron. vi. 30.

29. Ps. cxxxix. 2.

30. Ps. xliv. 21.

31. Com. Jer. L.

32. St. Matt. ix. 4.

33. St. Luke vi. 8.

34. St. Mark ii. 8.

35. Vulg.: “Mirabilis facta est scientia tua ex me.”

36. Lam. iii. 41.

37. St. Matt. xxvi. 35.

38. St. Mark xiv. 30.

39. Ps. xix. 13.

1. Ps. civ. 24.

2. Ecclus. i. 10.

3. Wisd. xi. 20.

4. Gen. i. 31.

5. Eccles. iii. 11.

6. St. Matt. xiii. 31.

7. St. Matt. vi. 28.

8. 1 Cor. iii. 7.

9. 1 Cor. xv. 28.

10. St. Matt. xix. 23.

11. St. Luke vi. 20, 24.

12. 1 Tim. vi. 9.

13. St. Luke ix. 58.

14. 1 Cor. iv. 11.

15. Eccles. i. 15, Vulg.

16. Eccles. i. 15, Vulg.

17. St. Matt. vii. 14.

18. Conf. ix.6

19. Benediction of the Paschal Candle: Exultet.

20. Phil. ii. 8.

21. St. John xvii. 4.

22. St. Luke ii. 14.

23. 1 St. Pet. iii. 22.

24. Phil. ii. 9.

25. St. Luke xv. 7.

26. Office Assumption B.V.M.

27. Isa. xii. 4.

28. 1 Cor. ii. 14.

29. Phil. iii. 18.

30. Ps. xcix. 1.

31. Heb. i. 3.

32. Eph. v. 27.

33. Eph. v. 2.

34. Ps. xxxvi. 6.

35. Wisd. vi. 7.

36. St. Luke xii. 6.

37. St. Matt. x. 29.

38. Ps. cxlvii. 9.

39. Wisd. viii. 1.

40. 1 Tim. i. 17. Vulg.: “regi autem seculorum.”

41. Wisd. ix. 14.

42. Hymns Rector potens and Rerum Deus tenax vigor: Brev. Rom. for sixth and ninth hours.

43. Ps. xxxvi. 6.

44. St. Aug., de Ordine I, c. 1, no. 1.

45. 1 Cor. iv. 5.

46. St. Aug., de Ordine I, c. 1, no. 1.

47. Job xxii. 14.

48. Mal. ii. 17.

49. Mal. i. 2, 3; Rom. ix. 13.

50. Rom. ix. 11.

51. Rom. ix. 15; cf. Exod. xxxiii. 19.

52. Wisd. iv. 11.

53. St. John iii. 18.

54. Rom. x. 13.

55. Rom. xi. 33.

56. Ps. cxix. 137.

57. Phil. ii. 12.

58. 2 St. Pet. i. 10.

59. 1 St. John iii. 18.

60. St. Matt. x. 22, xxiv. 13.

61. St. Matt., vi. 33.

CHAPTER 4

John Owen

(1616–1683)

John Owen, homeschooled in his early years, exhibited such remarkable genius that, after a brief period of tutelage in a private academy in Oxford, he enrolled at Queen’s College at the age of twelve. In his youth, Owen opted for four hours’ rest a night, a choice that he later regretted as it took its eventual toll. He seems to have been converted sometime during the end of his university years; about this time Laud was appointed chancellor of Oxford. In 1643 Owen married, and he subsequently fathered eleven children, all but one of whom died in early childhood. He was, from the beginning of his prolific career, always a polemical pastor. His first published work, in 1642, was A Display of Arminianism.

The epitaph on his monument in Bunhill Fields reads, in part, “John Owen, D.D., born in the county of Oxford, the son of an eminent minister, himself more eminent, and worthy to be enrolled among the first divines of the age.” Given the magnitude of his writing and his depth of insight, Owen is easily among the finest of Puritan theologians.

Even so, there has yet to be a definitive biography written of Owen’s life. According to Andrew Thompson,

The sources from which the modern biographer must draw his notices of Owen, besides those already named, are to some extent the representations of adversaries, who could not be silent on so great a name, or withhold reluctant praise; the not infrequent allusions to Owen in the lives of his contemporaries; the statements of general history and biography,—such as are to be found in the pages of Neal, Calamy, Middleton, Palmer, and others; and, perhaps the most valuable and interesting of all, the many unconscious touches of autobiography which may be found in his prefaces to his various works.[1]

The work that we are excerpting here, A Dissertation on Divine Justice, was written in 1653, two years after Owen had been appointed dean of Christ Church, Oxford. It is another excellent example of a theological apologetic, that is, a defense of a specific theological/biblical doctrine of Scripture. In his “Preface to the Reader,” Owen is explicitly self-conscious both about the differences between a theological apologetic and an atheological[2] apologetic and about his own goal in this Dissertation. As with so much of what Owen has written, it is best to quote him at length in order better to understand his rationale for writing this work.

The exertions of Satan against the truth of the gospel may be distinguished into two divisions. In the first, as the god of this world, he endeavors to darken the minds of unbelievers, “that the light of the glorious gospel of Christ may not shine unto them.” With what success he exercises this soul-destroying employment we cannot pretend to say; but there is reason to lament that he hath succeeded, and still succeeds, beyond his utmost hope. In the other, he carries on an implacable war, an unremitting strife; not, as formerly, with Michael about the body of Moses, but about the Spirit of Christ, about some of the more distinguished articles of the truth, and the application of each of them in order to cultivate communion with God the Father, and with his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,—against the hearts of the godly and the new creature formed within them.

In this situation of affairs, most Christian writers have made it their study to oppose that first effort of the devil, whereby, through means of his instruments, he openly endeavors to suppress the light, both natural and revealed; but they have not been equally solicitous to succor the minds of believers when wrestling, “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” and almost ready to sink under the contest. Hence, I say, a very minute investigation hath been set on foot by many of those articles of religion which he has openly, through the instrumentality of the slaves of error and darkness, attacked, and the vindication of them made clear and plain. But those which, both from their relation to practice and a holy communion, full of spiritual joy, to be cultivated with God, the old serpent hath reserved for his own attack in the hearts of believers, most writers, (partly either because they were ignorant of his wiles, or because they saw not much evil publicly arising thence, and partly because the arguments of the adversary were not founded on any general principle, but only to be deduced from the private and particular state and case of individuals,) have either passed over or very slightly touched upon.

For while they are warmly employed in disputing whether theology be an art or a science, and whether it be a speculative or practical art or science; and while they attempt to measure it exactly by those rules, laws, and methods which human reason has devised for other sciences, thus endeavoring to render it more plain and clear,—they find themselves, to the grief and sorrow of many candidates for the truth, entangled in inextricable difficulties, and left in possession only of a human system of doctrines, having little or no connection at all with true theology. I hope, therefore,—“if the Lord will, and I live,”—to publish (but from no desire of gainsaying any one) some specimens of evangelical truth on the points before mentioned, as well as on other subjects.

As to the work that I have now in hand, the first part of the dissertation is concerning the cause of the death of Christ; and in the execution of which I have the greatest pleasure and satisfaction (though proudly defied by the adversaries, so conceited with themselves and their productions are they), because “I have determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified,”—at least, nothing that could divert my attention from that subject.[3]

Owen has two primary goals in view in this Dissertation. The first is that he is concerned to refute the heresy of Socinianism.[4] By the time of Owen’s writing, Socinianism had developed into a full-fledged theological system. Among its heretical tenets were its denials of the doctrine of the Trinity, of most of the essential attributes of God as understood in traditional orthodoxy, and—directly addressed by Owen here—of the necessity of a substitutionary atonement for sin. Owen’s second goal is to address even some among the orthodox who themselves were not convinced that a substitutionary atonement is absolutely necessary, with respect to God’s own power, in order for him to appease his justice.

This latter category of objections can become quite complex, given the interrelationship of such notions as necessity (in relation to God’s actions) and God’s will, power, and justice. Because of this complexity, Thompson’s comment on the Dissertation is worth noting.

In the midst of these engagements, Dr. Owen produced and published, in Latin, one of his most abstruse dissertations,—“Diatriba de Divina Justitia, etc.; or, the claims of Vindicatory Justice Asserted.” The principle which it is the design of this treatise to explain and establish is, that God, considered as a moral governor, could not forgive sin without an atonement, or such provision for his justice as that which is made by the sacrifice of Christ. It had fallen to his lot some months before, in certain theological discussions to which he was called by his office, “to discourse and dispute on the vindicatory justice of God, and the necessity of its exercise on the supposition of the existence of sin”; and his hurried treatment of the subject, in the brief hour which was allowed him, had the rare success of bringing many over to his views. Owen was convinced that his principle “struck its roots deep through almost the whole of theology.” He saw plainly that its effect, if established, was to raze the very foundations of Socinian error;—yet he was grieved to find that many excellent divines, who held views in common with him on all the great truths of the evangelical system, wavered on this, and that some honored names had lately given a new sanction to the opposite opinion; among whom were Dr. Twisse of Newbury, prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly, in his “Vindiciae Gratiae, Potestatis, ac Providentiae divinae,” and the venerable Samuel Rutherford of St. Andrew, in his “Disputatio Scholastica de divina Providentia.” This made him the more readily accede to the wishes of those who had received benefit and confirmation from his verbal exposition of the subject, that he would enter on its more orderly and deliberate investigation.[5]

Thus Owen sets out to explain the necessity of the atonement, not only to ward off those theological heresies that threaten the very orthodoxy of the church, but also to provide clarity to those who themselves are orthodox, as to the nature of God’s justice and how that justice demands an atoning sacrifice.

Owen is well aware of the theological intricacies of his subject. His hope, as he himself says, is that it would spark a public disputation on the topic.

But whatever shall be the decision of the serious and judicious with respect to this treatise, if I shall any how stir up an emulation in others, on whom the grace of God may have bestowed more excellent gifts, to bring forward to public utility their pious, solid, and learned labors, and shall excite them, from their light, to confer light on the splendor of this university, I shall be abundantly gratified. Farewell, pious reader, and think not lightly of him who hath used his most zealous endeavors to serve thy interest in the cause of the gospel.[6]

Owen’s concern is that more light be shed on such an important topic and that his Dissertation be a catalyst for such discussion. He is, however, well aware that his topic—given its depth and range of theological doctrines—can in no way be exhausted. As Thompson notes, in the argumentation of the Dissertation, Owen “felt himself dazzled at times by the luster of those interior truths to which his thoughts were turned.” So, in the end, no matter how diligently we pursue and seek to penetrate the truth of Holy Scripture, Owen’s own admission is a fitting guide to us all.

Those points . . . which dwell in more intimate recesses, and approach nearer its immense fountain, the Father of light, darting brighter rays by their excess of light, present a confounding darkness to the minds of the greatest men, and are as darkness to the eyes breaking forth amidst so great light. For what we call darkness in divine subjects is nothing else than their celestial glory and splendor striking on the weak ball of our eyes, the rays of which we are not able in this life, which is but a vapor and shineth but a little, to bear.[7]

1. Andrew Thompson, “The Life of Dr. John Owen,” in The Works of John Owen (Albany, OR: Ages Software, 2000), 4.

2. That is, an apologetic addressing those who do not believe in God.

3. John Owen, The Works of John Owen, ed. W. H. Gould, Ages Digital Library CD ed., 23 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1977), 10:660–62.

4. Some hold that Socinianism is a precursor to present-day Unitarianism. In any case, Owen’s defense of the necessity of the substitutionary atonement is much needed today as well.

5. Thompson, “Life of Dr. John Owen,” 41.

6. Owen, Works of John Owen, 10:666.

7. Thompson, “Life of Dr. John Owen,” 42.

A Dissertation on Divine Justice

or, The Claims of Vindicatory Justice Vindicated; wherein That Essential Property of the Divine Nature Is Demonstrated from the Sacred Writings, and Defended against Socinians, Particularly the Authors of the Racovian Catechism, John Crellius, and F. Socinus Himself; Likewise the Necessary Exercise Thereof; Together with the Indispensable Necessity of the Satisfaction of Christ for the Salvation of Sinners Is Established against the Objections of Certain Very Learned Men, G. Twisse, G. Vossius, Samuel Rutherford, and Others

Chapters 1–3

Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance? God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world?

—Romans 3:5–6

Chapter 1

The introduction—The design of the work—Atheists—The prolepsis of divine justice in general—The divisions of justice, according to Aristotle—The sentiments of the schoolmen respecting these—Another division—Justice considered absolutely; then in various respects.

In this treatise we are to discourse of God and of his justice, the most illustrious of all the divine perfections, but especially of his vindicatory justice; of the certainty of which I most firmly believe that all mankind will, one time or other, be made fully sensible, either by faith in it here, as revealed in the word, or by feeling its effects, to their extreme misery, in the world hereafter, Romans 2:8, 9, 12; 2 Thessalonians 1:7–9. But as the human mind is blind to divine light, and as both our understandings and tongues are inadequate to conceive of God aright and to declare him (hence that common and just observation, that it is an arduous thing to speak of God aright), [and much darkness rests upon divine things], that we may handle so important a subject with that reverence and perspicuity wherewith it becomes it to be treated, we must chiefly depend on his aid who was “made the righteousness of God for us,” himself “God blessed for ever,” 1 Corinthians 1:30; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Romans 9:5. But whatever I have written, and whatever I have asserted, on this subject, whether I have written and asserted it with modesty, sobriety, judgment, and humility, must be left to the decision of such as are competent judges.

We think proper to divide this dissertation into two parts. In the FIRST PART, which contains the body of our opinion, after having premised some general descriptions of divine justice, I maintain sin-punishing justice to be natural, and in its exercise necessary, to God. The truth of this assertion forms a very distinguished part of natural theology. The defense of it, to the best of my abilities, both against Socinians, who bitterly oppose it, as well as against certain of our own countrymen, who, in defiance of all truth, under a specious pretext, support the same pernicious scheme with them, shall be the subject of the latter part.

In almost all ages there have existed some who have denied the being of a God, although but very few, and these the most abandoned. And as mankind, for the most part, have submitted to the evidence of a divine existence, so there never has existed one who has ever preferred an indictment of injustice against God, or who hath not declared him to be infinitely just. The despairing complaints of some in deep calamities, the unhallowed expostulations of others at the point of death, do not bespeak the real sentiments of the man, but the misery of his situation: as, for instance, that expostulation of Job, Job 10:3, “Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress?” and among the Gentiles, that of Brutus, “O wretched virtue! how mere a nothing art thou, but a name!” and that furious exclamation of Titus when dying, related by Suetonius, “who, pulling aside his curtains, and looking up to the heavens, complained that his life was taken from him undeservedly and unjustly.” Of the same kind was that late dreadful epiphonema of a despairing Italian, related by Mersennus, who, speaking of God and the devil, in dread contempt of divine justice, exclaimed, “Let the strongest take me.”

But as “the judgments of God are unsearchable, and his ways past finding out,” Romans 11:33, those who have refused to submit to his absolute dominion and supreme jurisdiction (some monstrous human characters) have been hardy enough to assert that there is no God, rather than venture to call him unjust. Hence that common couplet:—

“Marmoreo tumulo Licinus jacet, at Cato parvo,

Pompeius nullo; credimus esse deos?”

“Licinus lies buried in a marble tomb, Cato in a mean one,

Pompey has none;—can we believe that there are gods?”

And hence Ulysses is introduced by Euripides, expressing his horror of the gormandizing of the man-devouring Cyclops, in these verses:—

“O Jupiter, behold such violations of hospitality; for if thou regardest them not,

Thou art in vain accounted Jupiter, for thou canst be no god.”

Beyond any doubt, the audacity of those abandoned triflers, who would wish to seem to act the mad part with a show of reason, is more akin to the madness of atheism than to the folly of ascribing to the God whom they worship and acknowledge such attributes as would not only be unworthy but disgraceful to him. Protagoras, therefore, not comprehending the justice of God in respect of his government, hath written, “With regard to the gods, I do not know whether they exist or do not exist.” Yet, even among the Gentiles themselves, and those who were destitute of the true knowledge of the true God (for they, in some sense, were without God in the world), writers, of whom Seneca and Plutarch were the most distinguished, have not been wanting who have endeavored, by serious and forcible arguments, to unravel the difficulty respecting the contrary lots of good and bad men in this life. Our first idea, therefore, of the Divine Being, and the natural conceptions of all men, demand and enforce the necessity of justice being ascribed to God. To be eloquent, then, in so easy a cause, or to triumph with arguments on a matter so universally acknowledged, we have neither leisure nor inclination. What, and of what kind, the peculiar quality and nature of sin-punishing justice is, shall now be briefly explained. And that we may do this with the greater perspicuity and force of evidence, a few observations seem necessary to be premised concerning justice in general, and its more commonly received divisions.

The philosopher Aristotle, long ago, as is well known, hath divided justice into universal and particular. Concerning the former, he says that he might compare it to the celebrated saying, “In justice every virtue is summarily comprehended,” Ethic. ad Nicom., lib. 5. cap. 1, 2; and he affirms that it in no wise differs from virtue in general, unless in respect of its relation to another being.

But he says that particular justice is a part thereof under the same name, which he again distinguishes into distributive and commutative. The schoolmen, too, agreeing with him (which is rather surprising), divide the divine justice into universal and particular; for that excellence, say they, is spoken of God and man by way of analogy. Nor is it like that bird mentioned by Homer, which goes by a double name, by one among mortals, by another among the immortals,—

“The gods call it Chalcis, but men Cumindis,” Hom.;—

but is understood as existing in God principally, as in the first analogized being. Nor do later divines dissent from them; nay, all of them who have made the divine attributes the subject of their contemplations have, by their unanimous voice, approved of this distinction, and given their suffrages in its favor.

But, farther, they assert that particular justice, in respect of its exercise, consists either in what is said or in what is done. That which is displayed in things said, in commands, is equity; in declarations, truth;—both which the holy Scriptures (Romans 1:17; 3:21; Ezra 9:15; Nehemiah 9:8; Deuteronomy 4:8; Psalm 119:7; Hebrews 6:10; 2 Timothy 4:8; 2 Thessalonians 1:5.) do sometimes point out under the title of Divine Justice. But the justice which respects things done is either that of government, or jurisdiction or judgment; and this, again, they affirm to be either remunerative or corrective, but that corrective is either castigatory or vindicatory. With the last member of this last distinction I begin this work; and yet, indeed, although the most learned of our divines, in later ages, have assented to this distribution of divine justice into these various significations, it seems proper to me to proceed in a manner somewhat different, and more suited to our purpose.

I say, then, that the justice of God may be considered in a twofold manner:—First, Absolutely, and in itself. Secondly, In respect of its egress and exercise.

First, The justice of God, absolutely considered, is the universal rectitude and perfection of the divine nature; for such is the divine nature antecedent to all acts of his will and suppositions of objects towards which it might operate. This excellence is most universal; nor, from its own nature, as an excellence, can it belong to any other being.

Secondly, It is to be viewed with respect to its egress and exercise. And thus, in the order of nature, it is considered as consequent, or at least as concomitant, to some acts of the divine will, assigning or appointing to it a proper object. Hence, that rectitude, which in itself is an absolute property of the divine nature, is considered as a relative and hypothetical attribute, and has a certain habitude to its proper objects. That is to say, this rectitude, or universal justice, has certain egresses towards objects out of itself, in consequence of the divine will, and in a manner agreeable to the rule of his supreme right and wisdom,—namely, when some object of justice is supposed and appointed (which object must necessarily depend on the mere good pleasure of God, because it was possible it might never have existed at all, God, notwithstanding, continuing just and righteous to all eternity). And these egresses are twofold:—

1. They are absolute and perfectly free,—namely, in words.

2. They are necessary,—namely, in actions.

For the justice of God is neither altogether one of that kind of perfections which create and constitute an object to themselves, as power and wisdom do, nor of that kind which not only require an object for their exercise, but one peculiarly affected and circumstanced, as mercy, patience, and forbearance do; but may be considered in both points of view, as shall be more fully demonstrated hereafter.

1. For the first, it has absolute egresses in words (constituting, and, as it were, creating an object to itself); as, for instance, in words of legislation, and is then called equity; or in words of declaration and narration, and is then called truth. Both these I suppose for the present to take place absolutely and freely. Whether God hath necessarily prescribed a law to his rational creatures, at least one accompanied with threats and promises, is another consideration.

2. There are respective egresses of this justice in deeds, and according to the distinctions above mentioned;—that is to say, it is exercised either in the government of all things according to what is due to them by the counsel and will of God, or in judgments rewarding or punishing, according to the rule of his right and wisdom; which also is the rule of equity in legislation, and of truth in the declarations annexed. In respect of these, I call the egresses of the divine justice necessary, and such that they could not possibly be otherwise; which, by divine help, I shall prove hereafter: and this is the same as saying that vindicatory justice is so natural to God, that, sin being supposed, he cannot, according to the rule of his right, wisdom, and truth, but punish it. But antecedent to this whole exercise of the divine justice, I suppose a natural right, which indispensably requires the dependence and moral subjection of the rational creature, in God, all the egresses of whose justice, in words, contain an arrest of judgment till farther trial, in respect of the object.

It now, then, appears that all these distinctions of divine justice respect it not as considered in itself, but its egresses and exercise only; to make which clear was the reason that I departed from the beaten track. Nay, perhaps it would be a difficult matter to assign any virtue to God but in the general, and not as having any specific ratio of any virtue. But that which answers to the ratio of any particular virtue in God consists in the exercise of the same. For instance: mercy is properly attributed to God, so far as it denotes the highest perfection in the will of God, the particular ratio or quality of which,—namely, a disposition of assisting the miserable, with a compassion of their misery,—is found not altogether as to some, as to others altogether and only, in the exercise of the above-mentioned perfection; but it is called a proper attribute of God, because by means of it some operation is performed agreeable to the nature of God, which, in respect of his other attributes, his will would not produce. This kind, therefore, of the divine attributes, because they have proper and formal objects, thence only derive their formal and specific ratios. But all these observations upon justice must be briefly examined and explained, that we may arrive at the point intended.

Chapter 2

The universal justice of God—The idle fancies of the schoolmen—The arguments of Durandus against commutative justice—Suarez’s censure of the scholastic reasonings—His opinion of divine justice—The examination of it—A description of universal justice from the sacred writings—A division of it in respect of its egress—Rectitude of government in God, what, and of what kind—Definitions of the philosophers and lawyers—Divisions of the justice of government—A caution respecting these— Vindicatory justice—The opinions of the partisans—An explication of the true opinion—Who the adversaries are—The state of the controversy farther considered.

We are first, then, briefly to treat of the universal justice of God, or of his justice considered in itself and absolutely, which contains in it all the divine excellencies. The schoolmen, treading in the steps of the philosophers, who have acknowledged no kind of justice which has not naturally some respect to another object, are for the most part silent concerning this justice. And once, by the way, to take notice of these [hair-splitters], on this, as almost on every other subject, they are strangely divided. Duns Scotus, Durandus, and Paludamus deny that there is commutative justice in God.

For the Master of the Sentences himself calls God an impartial and just distributer, but says not a word of commutation. Thomas Aquinas and Cajetan do the same; though the latter says “that some degree of commutative justice is discernible.” So also Ferorariensis, on the same place; and Scotus, in the third book of his treatise, “Of Nature and Grace,” chap. 7. Durandus, in particular, contends, with many arguments, that this kind of justice ought not to be assigned to God;—first, Because that this justice observes an equality between the thing given and received, which cannot be the case between us and God;—and, secondly, Because that we cannot be of any service to him (which he proves from Romans 11:35; Job 22:3, 35:7; Luke 17:10), whereby he can be bound to make an equality with us by virtue of commutation;—and, thirdly, Because that we cannot make an equal return to God for benefits received;—and, finally, That as there is no proper commutative justice between a father and his children, according to Aristotle’s opinion, much less can it subsist between God and us.

But the same Durandus likewise denies to God distributive justice, because he is not indebted to any one. He, however, acknowledges some mode of distributive justice, and Pesantius follows his opinion.

But Gabriel, on the same distinction, asserts commutative justice to be inherent in God; for there is a certain equality, as he says, between God and man, from the acceptation of God the receiver. Proudly enough said, indeed!

But what shall we say of these triflers? They resemble those advocates in Terence, whose opinion, after Demipho, embarrassed by the cheats of Phormio the sycophant, had asked, he exclaims, “Well done, gentlemen; I am now in a greater uncertainty than before!” so intricate were their answers, and resembling the practices of the Andabatae.

Hence, Francis Suarez himself, after he had reviewed the opinions of the schoolmen concerning the justice of God, bids adieu to them all, declaring, “That the expressions of Scripture had greater weight with him than their philosophic human arguments,” Opusc. 6. de Just. Div. sec. 1. But with much labor and prolixity he insists that both distributive and commutative justice are to be ascribed to God that so he might pave the way for that rotten fiction concerning the merits of Roman Catholics with God,—a doctrine which, were even all his suppositions granted, appears not to follow, much less to be confirmed. This opinion of Suarez concerning vindicatory justice, as it is deservedly famous in scholastic theology, we think proper to lay before you in few words.

In his discourses concerning the justice of God, he contends that the affection of punishing, which he calls “a perfection elicitive of the act of punishing,” is properly and formally inherent in God; and it is so because it hath a proper object, namely, to punish the guilt of sin, which is honorable; nor does it include any imperfection; and, therefore, that some formal and proper divine attribute ought to correspond to that effect.

He farther maintains that this affection of punishing is neither commutative nor distributive justice. His conclusions here I do not oppose, though I cannot approve of many of his reasonings and arguments. In fine, he contends that vindicatory justice in God is the same with universal, or legal, or providential justice, which we call the justice of government. But he makes a dishonorable and base conclusion from a distinction about the persons punished, namely, into such as are merely passive sufferers, and such as spontaneously submit themselves to punishment, that they may satisfy the punitory justice of God; reasoning in such a manner, that after he has forced the whole doctrine concerning the commutative and distributive justice of God to become subservient to that sacrilegious and proud error concerning the merits of man with God, and even of one from the supererogation of another, he strenuously endeavors to establish a consistency between this doctrine of vindicatory justice and a fiction not less impious and disgraceful to the blood of Christ, which “cleanseth us from all sin,” about penal satisfaction, to be performed by such ways and means as God hath never prescribed, or even thought of.

“Ut turpiter atrum

Desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne.”—Hor.

Dismissing these bunglers (who know not the righteousness of God), then, from our dissertation, let us attend to the more sure word of prophecy. That word everywhere asserts God to be just, and possessed of such justice as denotes the universal rectitude and perfection of his divine nature. His essence is most wise, most perfect, most excellent, most merciful, most blessed; that, in fine, is the justice of God, according to the Scriptures, namely, considered absolutely and in itself. Nor would the holy Scriptures have us to understand any thing else by divine justice than the power and readiness of God to do all things rightly and becomingly, according to the rule of his wisdom, goodness, truth, mercy, and clemency. Hence the above-mentioned sophists agree that justice, taken precisely and in itself, and abstracting it from all human imperfections, simply means perfection without intrinsic imperfection; for it is not a virtue that rules the passions, but directs their operations.

Hence it presides, as it were, in all the divine decrees, actions, works, and words, of whatsoever kind they be. There is no egress of the divine will, no work or exercise of providence, though immediately and distinctly breathing clemency, mercy, anger, truth, or wisdom, but in respect thereof God is eminently said to be just, and to execute justice. Hence, Isaiah 51:6, he is said to be just in bringing salvation; Romans 3:25, 26, just in pardoning sin; Revelation 16:5, 6, just in avenging and punishing sin; Romans 3:5, 6, just in all the exercises of his supreme right and dominion, Job 34:12–14; Romans 9:14, 15, 18, he is just in sparing according to his mercy; just in punishing according to his anger and wrath. In a word, whatsoever, by reason of his right, he doeth or worketh “according to the counsel of his will,” whatever proceeds from his faithfulness, mercy, grace, love, clemency, anger, and even from his fury, is said to be done by, through, and because of his justice, as the perfection inducing to, or the cause effecting and procuring, such operations. It is evident, then, that justice, universally taken, denotes the highest rectitude of the divine nature, and a power and promptitude of doing all things in a manner becoming and agreeable to his wisdom, goodness, and right.

The more solemn egresses of this justice, to which all particular acts may be easily reduced, have been already pointed out; but equity in legislation, fidelity and truth in threatenings and promises annexed to it, in which God is often said to be just, and to execute justice, I think may be passed over, as being too remote from our purpose. But as it appears that some light may be thrown on this subject which we are now treating of, from the consideration of the relation of rectitude and divine wisdom, that is, of universal justice, to government and judgment, we must say a few words on that head.

But rectitude of government, to which that justice analogically corresponds, is that which philosophers and civilians unanimously agree to be the highest excellence, though they have variously described it. Aristotle calls it “a habit by which men are capable of doing just things, and by which they both will and do just things”; attributing to it aptitude, will, and action. Cicero calls it “an affection of the mind, giving to every one his due”; understanding by “affection” not any passion of the mind, but a habit. The civilians understand by it “a constant and perpetual will, assigning to every one his due.” The propriety of their definition we leave to themselves. That “constant and perpetual will” of theirs is the same as the “ habit” of the philosophers; which, whether it be the proper genus of this virtue, let logicians determine. Again; as they constantly attribute three acts to right, which is the object of justice,—namely, “to live honestly, to hurt nobody, and to give every one his due,”—how comes it to pass that they define justice by one act, when doubtless it respects all right? therefore it is, they say, that to give every one his due is not of the same extent in the definition of justice and in the description of the acts of right.

But let them both unite in their sentiments as they please, neither the “habit” or “affection” of the philosophers, nor the “living honestly and hurting nobody” of the civilians, can be assigned to God; for in ascribing the perfection of excellencies to him, we exclude the ratio of habit or quality, properly so called, and every material and imperfect mode of operation. He must be a mortal man, and subject to a law, to whom these things apply.

Moreover, those (I speak of our own countrymen) who divide this justice of government into commutative and distributive rob God entirely of the commutative, which consists in a mutual giving and receiving. For, “Who hath first given to him?” “Who maketh thee to differ from another?” “He giveth not account of any of his matters.” But distributive, which belongs to him as the supreme governor of all things, who renders to every one his due, is proper to himself alone. This we have above asserted to be the justice of government or judgment. Of this justice of government frequent mention is made in the sacred writings. It is that perfection of the Divine Being whereby he directs all his actions in governing and administering created things, according to the rule of his rectitude and wisdom. But this excellence, or habitude for action, in no wise differs from universal justice, unless in respect of its relation to another being. But what is a law to us, in the administration of things, in God is his right, in conjunction with his most wise and just will; for God, as it is said, is a law unto himself. To this justice are these passages to be referred, Zephaniah 3:5; 2 Chronicles 12:6; Psalm 7:9; Jeremiah 12:1; 2 Timothy 4:8, with almost innumerable others. But in all the effects and egresses of this justice God is justified, not from the reason of things, but from his dominion and supreme right. Thus, Job 14:14; 33:12; 34:12–15. And this is the first egress of the divine rectitude in works.

The other egress of this justice is in judgment, the last member of the divisions of which, above mentioned,—namely, that by which God punishes the crimes of rational beings, to whom a law hath been given, according to the rule of his right,—is the vindicatory justice of which we are treating.

Here again, reader, I would wish to put you in mind that I by no means assert many species of universal justice, or, so to speak, particular or special justices, as distinct perfections in God, which others seem to do, but one only,—namely, the universal and essential rectitude of the divine nature variously exercised; and therefore I maintain that this vindicatory justice is the very rectitude and perfection of the Deity.

Some of the schoolmen, however, agree with me in opinion; for Cajetan upon Thomas grants that vindicatory justice in a public person differs nothing from legal and universal justice; although he maintains that there is a peculiar species of justice in a private person,—a position which, I confess, I do not understand, since punishment, considered as punishment, is not the right of a private person. God certainly does not punish us as being injured, but as a ruler and judge. But again, concerning this justice, another question arises, Whether it be natural to God, or an essential attribute of the divine nature,—that is to say, such that, the existence of sin being admitted, God must necessarily exercise it, because it supposes in him a constant and immutable will to punish sin, so that while he acts consistently with his nature he cannot do otherwise than punish and avenge it,—or whether it be a free act of the divine will, which he may exercise at pleasure? On this point theologians are divided. We shall consider what has been determined on the matter by the most notorious enemies of divine truth, and especially by those of our own times.

1. Then, they own, “That such a kind of justice is applicable to God, which were he always inclined to exercise, he might, consistently with right, destroy all sinners without waiting for their repentance, and so let no sin pass unpunished.”

2. “That he will not pardon any sins but those of the penitent.” Nor do they deny, so far as I know,—

3. “That God hath determined the punishment of sin by the rule of his right and wisdom.” But they deny,—

1. That perfection by which God punishes sins either to be his justice or to be so called in Scripture, but only anger, fury, or fierce indignation,—expressions denoting in the clearest manner the freedom of the divine will in the act of punishing; although some of Socinus’ followers, among whom is Crellius, have declared openly against him on this point. Again, they deny,—

2. That there is any such attribute in God as requires a satisfaction for sins, which he is willing to forgive, but maintain that he is entirely free to “yield up his claim of right,” as they phrase it, at pleasure; that, therefore, divine justice ought, by no means, to be reckoned among the causes of Christ’s death. Nay more, say they, “Such a kind of justice may be found in the epistles of Iscariot to the Pharisees” (they are the words of Gitichius ad Luc.), “but is not to be found in the holy Scriptures.”

Such are the opinions of those concerning whom we are disputing at this present day, whether they be heretics because they are not Christians. Between their sentiments and ours on this point there is the widest difference; for we affirm the justice by which God punishes sin to be the very essential rectitude of Deity itself, exercised in the punishment of sins, according to the rule of his wisdom, and which is in itself no more free than the divine essence.

This kind of justice Faustus Socinus opposes with all his might in almost all his writings, but especially in his Theological Lectures of the Savior, book 1. chap. 1, etc.; Moscorovius, also, on the Racovian Catechism, chap. 8. quest. 19; Ostorodius, a most absurd heretic, in his Institutions, chap. 31., and in his Disputations to Tradelius; Volkelius, Of the True Religion, book 5. chap. 21; also Crellius, the most acute and learned of all the adversaries, in that book which he wished to have prefixed to the Dissertations of Volkelius, chap. 28, and in his Vindications against Grotius, chap. 1; in a little work, also, entitled, “Of the Causes of the Death of Christ,” chap. 16. He pursued the same object in almost all his other writings, both polemical and dogmatical, and likewise in his commentaries;—a very artful man, and one that employed very great diligence and learning in the worst of causes. Michael Gitichius has the same thing in view in his writings against Paraeus, and in his dispute with Ludovicus Lucius in defense of his first argument;—a most trifling sophist, a mere copyist of Socinus, and a servile follower of his master. Of mightier powers, too, rise up against us Valentinus Smalcius against Franzius; and (who is said to be still alive) the learned Jonas Schlichtingius. All these, with the rest of that herd, place all their hopes of overturning the doctrine of the satisfaction of Christ in opposing this justice.

But these are not the only adversaries we have to do with: there are others, pious, worthy, and very learned divines, who, respecting the point of Christ’s satisfaction, are most strictly orthodox, and who, though they cannot find in their hearts directly to deny that such an attribute or power is essential to God, yet maintain all its egresses and its whole exercise respecting sin to be so free and dependent on the mere free motion and good pleasure of the divine will, that should not that oppose, God might by his nod, by his word, without any trouble, by other modes and ways besides the satisfaction of Christ, if it only seemed proper to his wisdom, take away, pardon, and make an end of sin, without inflicting any penalty for the transgression of his law; and this, it is said, was the opinion of Augustine. By which, I will say, rash and daring assertion,—be it spoken without offense, for they are truly great men,—by their nod and breath, they suspend and disperse the very strongest arguments by which the adversaries feel themselves most hardly pushed, and by which the belief of Christ’s satisfaction is strongly supported, and deliver up our most holy cause, I had almost said defenceless, to be the sport of the Philistines. Nay, not very long ago, it has been discovered and lamented by the orthodox, that very considerable assistance has been imprudently given by a learned countryman of our own to these aliens, who defy the armies of the living God. “For if we could but get rid of this justice, even if we had no other proof,” says Socinus, “that human fiction of Christ’s satisfaction would be thoroughly exposed, and would vanish,” Soc. of The Savior, book 3. chap. 1, etc.

Of our own countrymen, the only one I know is Rutherford, a Scotch divine, who roundly and boldly asserts “punitive justice to be a free act of the divine will.” Nor is he content with the bare assertion, but, supported chiefly by his arguments to whom the schoolmen are so much indebted, he defends the fallacy against both Cameron and Voetius, those two thunderbolts of theological war; though, in my opinion, neither with a force of argument nor felicity of issue equal to his opponents. But both the one and the others grant that God hath decreed to let no sin pass unpunished without a satisfaction; but that decree being supposed, with a law given, and a sanction of the same by threatenings, that a satisfaction was necessary. But that punitive justice necessarily requires the punishment of all sins, according to the rule of God’s right and wisdom, this is what they deny, and endeavor to overturn.

But to me these arguments are altogether astonishing,—namely, “That sin-punishing justice should be natural to God, and yet that God, sin being supposed to exist, may either exercise it or not exercise it.” They may also say, and with as much propriety, that truth is natural to God, but, upon a supposition that he were to converse with man, he might either use it or not; or, that omnipotence is natural to God, but upon a supposition that he were inclined to do any work without himself, that it were free to him to act omnipotently or not; or, finally, that sin-punishing justice is among the primary causes of the death of Christ, and that Christ was set forth as a propitiation to declare his righteousness, and yet that that justice required not the punishment of sin, for if it should require it, how is it possible that it should not necessarily require it, since God would be unjust if he should not inflict punishment? Or farther, they might as well assert that God willed that justice should be satisfied by so many and such great sufferings of his Son Christ, when that justice required no such thing; nay more, that setting aside the free act of the divine will, sin and no sin are the same with God, and that man’s mortality hath not followed chiefly as the consequence of sin, but of the will of God. These and such like difficulties I leave to the authors of this opinion (for they are very learned men) to unravel; as to myself, they fill me with confusion and astonishment.

But this I cannot forbear to mention, that those very divines who oppose our opinion, when hard pushed by their adversaries, perpetually have recourse in their disputations to this justice as to their sacred anchor, and assert that without satisfaction God could not pardon sin consistently with his nature, justice and truth. But as these are very great absurdities, it would have seemed strange to me that any men of judgment and orthodoxy should have been so entangled in some of these sophisms as to renounce the truth on their account, unless I had happened at one time myself to fall into the same snare; which, to the praise and glory of that truth, of which I am now a servant, I freely confess to have been my case.

But to avoid mistakes as much as possible in discussing the nature of this justice, we will make the following observations:—

1. There are some attributes of Deity which, in order to their exercise, require no determined object antecedent to their egress; of this kind are wisdom and power. These attributes, at least as to their first exercise, must be entirely free, and dependent on the mere good pleasure of God only; so that antecedent to their acting, the divine will is so indifferent as to every exercise of them, on objects without himself, that he might even will the opposite. But if we suppose that God wills to do any work without himself, he must act omnipotently and wisely.

There are, again, some attributes which can in no wise have an egress or be exercised without an object predetermined, and, as it were, by some circumstances prepared for them. Among these is punitive justice, for the exercise of which there would be no ground but upon the supposition of the existence of a rational being and its having sinned; but these being supposed, this justice must necessarily act according to its own rule.

2. But that rule is not any free act of the divine will, but a supreme, intrinsic, natural right of Deity, conjoined with wisdom, to which the entire exercise of this justice ought to be reduced. Those men entirely trifle, then, who, devising certain absurd conclusions of their own, annex them to a supposition of the necessity of punitive justice, as to its exercise: as, for instance, that God ought to punish sin to the full extent of his power, and that he ought to punish every sin with eternal punishment; and that, therefore, he must preserve every creature that sins to eternity, and that he cannot do otherwise. I say they trifle, for God does not punish to the utmost extent of his power, but so far as is just; and all modes and degrees of punishment are determined by the standard of the divine right and wisdom.

Whether that necessarily require that every sin should be punished with eternal punishment, let those inquire who choose. “Nobis non licet esse tam disertis.”

3. But the existence of a rational creature, and the moral dependence which it has, and must have, upon God, being supposed, the first egress of this justice is in the constitution of a penal law; not as a law which, as was before observed, originates from the justice of government, but as a penal law.

For if such a law were not made necessarily, it might be possible that God should lose his natural right and dominion over his creatures, and thus he would not be God; or, that right being established, that the creature might not be subject to him, which implies a contradiction not less than if you were to say that Abraham is the father of Isaac, but that Isaac is not the son of Abraham: for in case of a failure in point of obedience (a circumstance which might happen, and really hath happened), that dependence could be continued in no way but through means of a vicarious punishment, and there must have been a penal law constituted necessarily requiring that punishment. Hence arises a secondary right of punishing, which extends to every amplification of that penal law, in whatever manner made. But it has a second egress, in the infliction of punishment.

4. And here it is to be remarked, that this justice necessarily respects punishment in general, as including in it the nature of punishment, and ordaining such a vindication of the divine honor as God can acquiesce in: not the time or degrees, or such like circumstances of punishment, yea, not this or that species of punishment; for it respects only the preservation of God’s natural right and the vindication of his glory, both which may be done by punishment in general, however circumstanced. A dispensation, therefore, with punishment (especially temporary punishment), by a delay of time, an increase or diminution of the degree, by no means prejudiceth the necessity of the exercise of this justice, which only intends an infliction of punishment in general.

5. But, again, though we determine the egresses of this justice to be necessary, we do not deny that God exercises it freely; for that necessity doth not exclude a concomitant liberty, but only an antecedent indifference. This only we deny,—namely, that supposing a sinful creature, the will of God can be indifferent (by virtue of the punitive justice inherent in it) to inflict or not inflict punishment upon that creature, or to the volition of punishment or its opposite. The whole of Scripture, indeed, loudly testifies against any such indifference, nor is it consistent with God’s supreme right over his creatures; neither do they who espouse a different side contend with a single word brought from the Scriptures. But that God punishes sins with a concomitant liberty, because he is of all agents the most free, we have not a doubt. Thus, his intellectual will is carried towards happiness by an essential inclination antecedent to liberty, and notwithstanding it wills happiness with a concomitant liberty: for to act freely is the very nature of the will; yea, it must necessarily act freely.

Let our adversaries, therefore, dream as they please, that we determine God to be an absolutely necessary agent when he is a most free one, and that his will is so circumscribed, by some kind of justice which we maintain, that he cannot will those things which, setting the consideration of that justice aside, would be free to him; for we acknowledge the Deity to be both a necessary and free agent,—necessary in respect of all his actions internally, or in respect of the persons in the Godhead towards one another. The Father necessarily begets the Son, and loves himself. As to these and such like actions, he is of all necessary agents the most necessary. But in respect of the acts of the divine will which have their operations and effects upon external objects, he is an agent absolutely free, being one “who worketh all things according to the counsel of his own will.” But of these acts there are two kinds; for some are absolute, and admit no respect to any antecedent condition.

Of this kind is his purpose of creating the world, and in it rational creatures, properly adapted to know and obey the Creator, Benefactor, and Lord of all. In works of this kind God hath exercised the greatest liberty. His infinitely wise and infinitely free will is the fountain and origin of all things; neither is there in God any kind of justice, or any other essential attribute, which could prescribe any limits or measure to the divine will. But this decree of creating being supposed, the divine will undergoes a double necessity, so to speak, both in respect of the event and in respect of its manner of acting: for in respect of the event, it is necessary, from the immutability of God, that the world should be created; and in respect of the manner of doing it, that it should be done omnipotently, because God is essentially omnipotent, and it being once supposed that he wills to do any work without himself, he must do it omnipotently. Yet, notwithstanding these considerations, in the creation of the world God was entirely a free agent; he exercised will and understanding in acting, although the choice of acting or not acting, and of acting in one particular way or another, is taken away by his immutability and omnipotence.

There is another kind of the acts of the divine will which could have no possible existence but upon a condition supposed.

This kind contains the egresses and exercise of those attributes which could not be exercised but upon a supposition of other antecedent acts, of which we have treated before. Of this kind are all the acts of the divine will in which justice, mercy, etc., exert their energy. But these attributes of the divine nature are either for the purpose of preserving or continuing to God what belongs to him of right, supposing that state of things which he hath freely appointed, or for bestowing on his creatures some farther good. Of the former kind is vindicatory justice; which, as it cannot be exercised but upon the supposition of the existence of a rational being and of its sin, so, these being supposed, the supreme right and dominion of the Deity could not be preserved entire unless it were exercised. Of the latter kind is sparing mercy, by which God bestows an undeserved good on miserable creatures; for, setting aside the consideration of their misery, this attribute cannot be exercised, but that being supposed, if he be inclined to bestow any undeserved good on creatures wretched through their own transgression, he may exercise this mercy if he will. But again; in the exercise of that justice, although, if it were not to be exercised, according to our former hypothesis, God would cease from his right and dominion, and so would not be God, still he is a free and also an absolutely necessary agent; for he acts from will and understanding, and not from an impetus of nature only, as fire burns. And he freely willed that state and condition of things; which being supposed, that justice must necessarily be exercised. Therefore, in the exercise of it he is not less free than in speaking; for supposing, as I said before, that his will were to speak anything, it is necessary that he speak the truth. Those loud outcries, therefore, which the adversaries so unseasonably make against our opinion, as if it determined God to be an absolutely necessary agent, in his operations ad extra, entirely vanish and come to naught. But we will treat more fully of these things when we come to answer objections.

Finally, let it be observed that the nature of mercy and justice are different in respect of their exercise: for between the act of mercy and its object no natural obligation intervenes; for God is not bound to any one to exercise any act of mercy, neither is he bound to reward obedience, for this is a debt due from his natural right, and from the moral dependence of the rational creature, and indispensably thence arising. But between the act of justice and its object a natural obligation intervenes, arising from the indispensable subordination of the creature to God; which, supposing disobedience or sin, could not otherwise be secured than by punishment. Nor is the liberty of the divine will diminished in any respect more by the necessary egresses of divine justice than by the exercise of other attributes; for these necessary egresses are the consequence, not of an absolute but of a conditional necessity,—namely, a rational creature and its sin being supposed, and both existing freely in respect of God, but the necessary suppositions being made, the exercise of other perfections is also necessary; for it being supposed that God were disposed to speak with man, he must necessarily speak according to truth.

Chapter 3

A series of arguments in support of vindicatory justice—First, from the Scriptures—Three divisions of the passages of Scripture—The first contains those which respect the purity and holiness of God—The second, those which respect God as the judge—What it is to judge with justice—The third, those which respect the divine supreme right. A second argument is taken from the general consent of mankind—A threefold testimony of that consent—The first from the Scriptures—Some testimonies of the heathens—The second from the power of conscience—Testimonies concerning that power—The mark set upon Cain—The expression of the Emperor Adrian when at the point of death—The consternation of mankind at prodigies—The horror of the wicked, whom even fictions terrify—Two conclusions—The third testimony, from the confession of all nations—A vindication of the argument against Rutherford—The regard paid to sacrifices among the nations—Different kinds of the same—Propitiatory sacrifices—Some instances of them.

These preliminaries being thus laid down, to facilitate our entrance on the subject, I proceed to demonstrate, by a variety of arguments, both against enemies and against friends from whom I dissent, that this punitive justice is natural to God, and necessary as to its egresses respecting sin. But because, since the entrance of sin into the world, God hath either continued or increased the knowledge of himself, or accommodated it to our capacities by four ways,—namely, by the written word, by a rational conscience, by his works of providence, and, lastly, by the person of Jesus Christ, his only-begotten Son, and by the mystery of godliness manifested in him,—we will show that by each of these modes of communication he hath revealed and made known to us this his justice.

I. Our first argument, then, is taken from the testimony of the sacred writings, which, in almost numberless places, ascribe this vindicatory justice to God.

The passages of holy Scripture which ascribe this justice to God may be classed under three divisions. The first contains those which certify that the purity and holiness of God hostilely oppose and detest sin. Whether holiness or purity be an attribute natural to God, and immutably residing in him, has not yet been called in question by our adversaries. They have not yet arrived at such a pitch of madness. But this is that universal perfection of God, which, when he exercises [it] in punishing the transgressions of his creatures, is called vindicatory justice; for whatever there be in God perpetually inherent, whatever excellence there be essential to his nature, which occasions his displeasure with sin, and which necessarily occasions this displeasure, this is that justice of which we are speaking.

But here, first, occurs to us that celebrated passage of the prophet Habakkuk, Habakkuk 1:13, “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity.” The prophet here ascribes to God the greatest detestation, and such an immortal hatred of sin that he cannot look upon it, but, with a wrathful aversion of his countenance, abominates and dooms it to punishment. But perhaps God thus hates sin because he wills to do so, and by an act of his will entirely free, though the state of things might be changed without any injury to him or diminution of his essential glory. But the Holy Spirit gives us a reason very different from this, namely,—the purity of God’s eyes: “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil.” But there is no one who can doubt that the prophet here intended the holiness of God. The incomprehensible, infinite, and most perfect holiness or purity of God is the cause why he hates and detests all sin; and that justice and holiness are the same, as to the common and general notion of them, we have shown before.

Of the same import is the admonition of Joshua in his address to the people of Israel, Joshua 24:19, “Ye cannot serve the LORD” (that is, he will not accept of a false and hypocritical worship from you): “for he is an holy God; he is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions nor your sins.” God, then, will not forgive transgressions,—that is, he will most certainly punish them,—because he is most holy. But this holiness is the universal perfection of God, which, when exercised in punishing the sins of the creatures, is called vindicatory justice; that is, in relation to its exercise and effects, for in reality the holiness and justice of God are the same, neither of which, considered in itself and absolutely, differs from the divine nature, whence they are frequently used the one for the other.

Moreover, it is manifest that God meant this holiness in that promulgation of his glorious name, or of the essential properties of his divine nature, made face to face to Moses, Exodus 34:5–7; which name he had also before declared, chapter 23:7. That non-absolution or punishment denotes an external effect of the divine will is granted; but when God proclaims this to be his name, “The LORD, The LORD God,” etc., “that will by no means clear the guilty,” he manifestly leads us to the contemplation of that excellence essentially inherent in his nature, which induces him to such an act. But that, by whatever name it be distinguished, in condescension to our capacities, is the justice that we mean.

That eulogium of divine justice by the psalmist, Psalm 5:4–6, favors this opinion: “For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee. The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity. Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the LORD will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.” But those who deny this hatred of sin and sinners, and the disposition to punish them, to be perpetually, immutably, and habitually inherent in God, I am afraid have never strictly weighed in their thoughts the divine purity and holiness.

To the second class may be referred those passages of Scripture which ascribe to God the office of a judge, and which affirm that he judges, and will judge, all things with justice. The first which occurs is that celebrated expression of Abraham, Genesis 18:25, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” These are not the words of one who doubts, but of one enforcing a truth acknowledged and confessed among all; a truth upon which the intercession of this faithful friend of God for the pious and just inhabitants of Sodom is founded: for Abraham here ascribes to God the power and office of a just judge; in consequence of which character he must necessarily exercise judgment according to the different merits of mankind. This the words in the preceding clause of the verse, accompanied with a vehement rejection and detestation of every suspicion that might arise to the contrary, sufficiently demonstrate: “That be far from thee to do,”—namely, “to slay the righteous with the wicked.” God, then, is a judge, and a just one; and it is impossible for him not to exercise right or judgment. But that justice wherewith he is now endowed, and by which he exerciseth right, is not a free act of his will, (for who would entertain such contemptible thoughts even of an earthly judge?) but a habit or excellence at all times inherent in his nature.

But this supreme excellence and general idea which Abraham made mention of and enforced, the apostle again afterward supports and recommends: Romans 3:5, 6, “Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance? God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world?” Unless he were just, how shall he judge the world? Therefore, this most righteous of all judges exerciseth justice in judging the world “because he is just.”

For why should God so often be said to judge the world justly, and in justice, unless his justice were that perfection whence this righteous and just judgment flows and is derived? Acts 17:31,“He hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained”; and in Romans 2:5, the day of the last judgment is called “the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”

But, again, on this very account the justice of God is celebrated, and he himself, in an especial manner, is said to be just, because he inflicts punishment and exercises his judgments according to the demerits of sinners: Revelation 16:5, 6, “Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus. For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy.”

But all retaliation for a crime proceeds from vindicatory justice; but that God exercises that justice, and is thence denominated just, is evident. The Holy Spirit establishes this truth in the plainest words, Psalm 9:4, 5, where he gloriously vindicates this justice of God: “Thou hast maintained my right and my cause,” says the psalmist; “thou satest in the throne judging right. Thou hast rebuked the heathen, thou hast destroyed the wicked, thou hast put out their name for ever and ever.” God exerciseth justice and determines causes as he sits upon his throne,—that is, as being endowed with supreme judiciary power,—and that as he is a judge of righteousness, or most righteous judge: Psalm 119:137, “Righteous art thou, O LORD, and upright are thy judgments.”

Thirdly, It now remains that we take a view of one or two of those passages of Scripture which, in consideration of this divine justice, assert the infliction of punishment for sin in itself, and as far as relates to the thing itself, to be just. To this purpose is that of the apostle to the Romans, Romans 1:32, “Who knowing the judgment,” or justice, “of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death.” Whatever, or of what kind soever, that justice or right of God may be of which the apostle is speaking, it seems evident that the three following properties belong to it:—

1. That it is universally acknowledged; nay, it is not unknown even to the most abandoned of mankind, and to those schools of every kind of wickedness which the apostle is there describing. Whence they derive this knowledge of the divine law and justice shall be made to appear hereafter.

2. That, it is the cause, source, and rule of all punishments to be inflicted; for this is the right of God, “that those who commit sin are worthy of death.” From this right of God it follows that “the wages of” every “sin is death.”

3. That, it is natural and essential to God: for although, in respect of its exercise, it may have a handle or occasion from some things external to the Deity, and in respect of its effects may have a meritorious cause, yet in respect of its source and root, it respects himself as its subject, if God be absolutely perfect. If belonging to any other being, it cannot agree to him.

You will say that this right of God is free; but I deny that any right of God which respects his creatures can, as a habit inherent in his nature, be free, though in the exercise of every right God be absolutely free. Neither can any free act of the divine will towards creatures be called any right of Deity; it is only the exercise of some right. But an act is distinguished from its habit or root.

And now it appears evident that this right is not that supreme right or absolute dominion of God, which, under the primary notion of a Creator, must be necessarily ascribed to him; for it belongs not to the supreme Lord, as such, to inflict punishment, but as ruler or judge. The supreme dominion and right of God over his creatures, no doubt, so far as it supposes dependence and obedience, necessarily requires that a vicarious punishment should be appointed in case of transgression or disobedience: but the very appointment of punishment, as well as the infliction of it, flows from his right as the governor; which right, considered with respect to transgressors, is nothing else than vindicatory justice. The apostle, therefore, signifies that that is the justice always resident in God, as a legislator, ruler, and judge of all things; which, by common presumption, even the most abandoned of mankind acknowledge.

To these may be added two other passages which occur in the writings of the same apostle: 2 Thessalonians 1:6, “Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you.” A recompense of tribulation is a real peculiar act of vindicatory justice; but that belongs to God as he is just. Thence the punishment of sin is called in Hebrews 2:2, “A just recompense of reward”; and by Jude, verse 7, “The vengeance,” or justice, “of eternal fire”; because, namely, it follows from that justice of God that such crimes are justly recompensed by such a punishment.

But we will not be farther troublesome in reciting particular proofs; from those already mentioned, and from others equally strong, we thus briefly argue:—That to that Being whose property it is to “render unto every man according to his deeds,” not to clear the guilty, to condemn sinners as worthy of death and to inflict the same upon them, to hate sin, and who will in no wise let sin pass unpunished, and all this because he is just, and because his justice so requires, sin-punishing justice naturally belongs, and that he cannot act contrary to that justice; but the passages of Scripture just now mentioned, with many others, assert that all these properties above recounted belong to and are proper to God, because he is just: therefore, this justice belongs to God, and is natural to him.

It matters not what we affirm of vindicatory justice, whether that it be meant of God essentially, and not only denominatively, that it has an absolute name (for it is called “holiness” and “purity”), that we have it expressed both in the abstract and concrete; for, what is more than that, it is affirmed expressly, directly, and particularly, oft-times, in the passages above mentioned, that it requires the punishment of sinners, that it implies a constant and immutable will of punishing every sin according to the rule of divine wisdom and right. Impudent to a high degree indeed, then, must Socinus have been, who hath maintained that that perfection of Deity by which he punisheth sin is not called justice, but always anger or fury. Anger, indeed, and fury, analogically and effectively, belong to justice.

So much for our first argument.

II. The universal consent of mankind furnishes us with a second, from which we may reason in this manner: “What common opinion and the innate conceptions of all assign to God, that is natural to God; but this corrective justice is so assigned to God: therefore, this justice is natural to God.”

The major proposition is evident; for what is not natural to God neither exists in him by any mode of habit or mode of affection, but is only a free act of the divine will, and the knowledge of that can by no means be naturally implanted in creatures; for whence should there be a universal previous conception of an act which might either take place or never take place? No such thing was at the first engraven on the hearts of men, and the fabric of the world teaches us no such thing.

But the minor proposition is established by a threefold proof:—

1. By the testimony of the Scripture;

2. By the testimony of every sinner’s conscience; and

3. By that of the public consent of all nations.

First, The holy Scriptures testify that such an innate conception is implanted by God in the minds of men. Thus the apostle to the Romans, Romans 1:32, “Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death.” He is here speaking of those nations that were the most forsaken by God, and delivered over to a reprobate mind; yet even to these he ascribes some remaining knowledge of this immutable right of God, which renders it necessary that “every transgression should receive its just recompense of reward,” and that sinners should be deserving of death in such a manner that it would be unworthy of God not to inflict it. That is to say, although the operations of this observing and acknowledging principle should often become very languid, and be even almost entirely overwhelmed by abounding wickedness,—for “what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves,”—yet that mankind must cease to exist before they can altogether lose this innate sense of divine right and judgment. Hence the barbarians concluded against Paul, then a prisoner and in bonds, seeing the viper hanging on one of his hands, that “no doubt he was a murderer, whom, though he had escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffered not to live.” Here they argue from the effect to the cause; which, in matters relating to moral good or evil, they could not, unless convinced in their consciences that there is an inviolable connection between sin and punishment, which they here ascribe to Justice.

Justice among them, according to their fabulous theology, which was particularly favored by the bulk of the people, was the daughter of Jupiter, whom he set over the affairs of mortals, to avenge the injuries which they should do to one another, and to inflict condign punishment on all those who should impiously offend against the gods. Hence Hesiod, speaking of Jupiter, says,—

“He married a second wife, the fair Themis, who brought forth the Hours,

And Eunomia, and Justice, etc.,

Who should watch o’er the actions of mortal men.”—Hesiod in Theog. 901

Again, the same author says,—

“Justice is a virgin, descended from Jupiter,

Chaste, and honor’d by the heavenly deities;

And when any one hath injured her with impious indignity,

[Instantly she, seated beside her father, Saturnian Jupiter,

Complains of the iniquity of men,” etc.]—Hesiod in Oper. 256

Also, Orpheus in the hymns,—

“I sing the eye of Justice, who looketh behind her, and is fair,

Who likewise sits upon the sacred throne of sovereign Jupiter

As the avenger of the unjust.”

Hence, these common sayings,—

“God hath an avenging eye;

God hath found the transgressor.”

In all which, and in numberless other such passages, the wisest men in those times of ignorance have announced their sense of this vindicatory justice.

And among the Latins, the following passages prove their sense of the same:—

“Aspiciunt oculis superi mortalia justis.”

“The gods above behold the affairs of mortals with impartial eyes.”

“Raro antecedentem scelestum,

Deseruit pede Poena claudo.”

“Seldom hath Punishment, through lameness of foot, left off pursuit of the wicked man, though he hath had the start of her.”—Horace

Also, that celebrated response of the Delphic oracle, recorded by Aelian:—

“But divine Justice pursues those who are guilty of crimes,

Nor can it be avoided even by the descendants of Jupiter;

But it hangs over the heads of the wicked themselves, and over the heads of their

Children; and one disaster to their race is followed by another.”

All which assert this vindicatory justice.

This, then, as Plutarch says, is the “ancient faith of mankind”; or, in the words of Aristotle, “opinion concerning God,” which Dion Prusaeensis calls “a very strong and eternal persuasion, from time immemorial received, and still remaining among all nations.”

Secondly, The consciences of all mankind concur to corroborate this truth; but the cause which has numberless witnesses to support it cannot fail. Hence, not only the flight, hiding-place, and fig-leaf aprons of our primogenitors, but every word of dire meaning and evil omen, as terror, horror, tremor, and whatever else harasses guilty mortals, have derived their origin. Conscious to themselves of their wickedness, and convinced of the divine dominion over them, this idea above all dwells in their minds, that he with whom they have to do is supremely just, and the avenger of all sin. From this consideration even the people of God have been induced to believe that death must inevitably be their portion should they be but for once sisted in his presence. Not that the mass of the body is to us an obscure and dark prison, as the Platonists dream, whence, when we obtain a view of divine things, being formerly enveloped by that mass, it is immediately suggested to the mind that the bond of union between mind and body must be instantly dissolved.

It must, indeed, be acknowledged, that through sin we have been transformed into worms, moles, bats, and owls; but the cause of this general fear and dismay is not to be derived from this source.

The justice and purity of God, on account of which he can bear nothing impure or filthy to come into his presence, occurs to sinners’ minds; wherefore, they think of nothing else but of a present God, of punishment prepared, and of deserved penalties to be immediately inflicted. The thought of the Deity bursting in upon the mind, immediately every sinner stands confessed a debtor,—a guilty and self-condemned criminal. Fetters, prisons, rods, axes, and fire, without delay and without end, rise to his view. Whence some have judged the mark set upon Cain to have been some horrible tremor, by which, being continually shaken and agitated, he was known to all. Hence, too, these following verses:—

“Whither fliest thou, Enceladus? Whatever coasts thou shalt arrive on,

Thou wilt always be under the eye of Jupiter.”

And these:—

“As every one’s conscience is, so in his heart he conceives hope or fear, according to his actions.

“This is the first punishment, that ever in his own judgment no guilty person is acquitted.

“Do you think that those have escaped whom a guilty conscience holds abashed, and lashes with its inexorable scourge, the mind, the executioner, shaking the secret lash?”—See Voss. on Idol. book 1. chap. 2

It is the saying of a certain author, that punishment is coeval with injustice, and that the horror of natural conscience is not terminated by the limits of human life:—

“Sunt aliquid manes: lethum non omnia finit,

Lucidaque evictos effugit umbra rogos.”

“The soul is something: death ends not at all,

And the light spirit escapes the vanquished funeral pile.”

Hence the famous verses of Adrian, the Roman emperor, spoken on his death-bed:—

“Animula vagula, blandula,

Hospes comesque corporis,

Quae nunc abibis in loca?

Pallidula, rigida, nudula,

Nec, ut soles, dabis joca.”

“Alas! my soul, thou pleasing companion of this body, thou fleeting thing, that art now deserting it! whither art thou flying? to what unknown scene? All trembling, fearful, and pensive! What now is become of thy former wit and humor? Thou shalt jest and be gay no more.”

“That which is truly evil,” says Tertullian, “not even those who are under its influence dare defend as good. All evil fills nature with fear or shame. Evil doers are glad to lie concealed; they avoid making their appearance; they tremble when apprehended.” Hence the heathens have represented Jove himself, when conscious of any crime, as not free from fear. We find Mercury thus speaking of him in Plautus:—

“Etenim ille,” etc.

“Even that Jupiter, by whose order I come hither,

Dreads evil no less than any of us:

Being himself descended from a human father and mother,

There is no reason to wonder that he should fear for himself.”

Hence, too, mankind have a dread awe of every thing in nature that is grand, unusual, and strange, as thunders, lightning, or eclipses of the heavenly bodies, and tremble at every prodigy, specter, or comet, nay, even at the hobgoblins of the night, exclaiming, like the woman of Zarephath upon the death of her son, “What have I to do with thee? art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance?” Hence, even the most abandoned of men, when vengeance for their sins hangs over their heads, have confessed their sins and acknowledged the divine justice.

It is related by Suetonius, that Nero, that disgrace of human nature, just before his death, exclaimed, “My wife, my mother, and my father, are forcing me to my end.’’ Most deservedly celebrated, too, is that expression of Mauricius the Cappadocian, when slain by Phocas, “Just art thou, O Lord, and thy judgments are righteous!”

But, moreover, while guilty man dreads the consequences of evil, which he knows he has really committed, he torments and vexes himself even with fictitious fears and bugbears. Hence these verses of Horace:—

“Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,

Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala finxit,” [rides?]

—ideas for the most part ridiculous, but, as the old proverb says, “Tis but reasonable that they should wear the fetters which themselves have forged.” Hence the guilty trembling mob is imposed upon and cheated by impostors, by vagrant fortune-tellers and astrologers. If any illiterate juggler shall have foretold a year of darkness, alluding, namely, to the night-season of the year, the consternation is as great as if Hannibal were at the gates of the city. The stings of conscience vex and goad them, and their minds have such presentiments of divine justice that they look upon every new prodigy as final, or portentous of the final consummation. I pass over observing at present that if once a conviction of the guilt of any sin be carried home to the mind, this solemn tribunal cannot thoroughly be dislodged from any man’s bosom either by dismal solitude or by frequent company, by affluence of delicacies or by habits of wickedness and impiety, nor, in fine, by any endeavors after the practice of innocence. The apostle in his epistle to the Romans, chap. 2, enters more fully into this subject. Two things, then, are to be concluded from what has been said, that mankind are guilty, and that they acknowledge,—

1. That God hates sin, as contrary to himself, and that therefore it is impossible for a sinner with safety to appear before him. But if God hate sin, he does it either from his nature or because he so wills it. But it cannot be because he wills it, for in that case he might not will it; a supposition most absurd. And, indeed, that assertion of Socinus is every way barbarous, abominable, and most unworthy of God, wherein he says, “I maintain that our damnation derives its origin, not from any justice of God, but from the freewill of God”; Socinus de Serv. p. 3. cap. 8. But if God hate sin by nature, then by nature he is just, and vindicatory justice is natural to him.

2. That our sins are debts, and therefore we shun the sight of our creditor. But I mean such a debt as, with relation to God’s supreme dominion, implies in it a perpetual right of punishment.

And such is the second proof of the minor proposition of the second argument; the third remains.

Thirdly, The public consent of all nations furnishes the third proof of this truth. There are writers, indeed, who have affirmed (a thing by no means credible) that some nations have been so given up to a reprobate mind that they acknowledge no deity. Socinus hath written that a certain Dominican friar, a worthy honest man, had related this much to himself of the Brazilians and other natives of America. But who can assure us that this friar has not falsified, according to the usual custom of travelers, or that Socinus himself has not invented this story (for he had a genius fertile in falsehoods) to answer his own ends? But let this matter rest on the credit of Socinus, who was but little better than an infidel. But nobody, even by report, hath heard that there exist any who have acknowledged the being of a God, and who have not, at the same time, declared him to be just, to be displeased with sinners and sin, and that it is the duty of mankind to propitiate him if they would enjoy his favor.

But a respectable writer objects,—namely, Rutherford on Providence, chap. 22. p. 355,—that this argument, that that which men know of God by the natural power of conscience must be naturally inherent in God, is of no weight. “For,” says he, “by the natural power of conscience, men know that God does many good things freely, without himself; as, for instance, that he has created the world, that the sun rises and gives light;—and yet in these operations God does not act from any necessity of nature.”

But this learned man blunders miserably here, as often elsewhere, in his apprehension of the design and meaning of his opponents; for they do not use this argument to prove that the egresses of divine justice are necessary, but that justice itself is necessary to God; which Socinians deny. What is his answer to these arguments? “Mankind acknowledge many things,” says he, “which God does freely.” To be sure they do, when he exhibits them before their eyes; but what follows from that? So, too, they acknowledge that God punishes sin, when he punishes it. But because all mankind, from the works of God and from the natural power of conscience, acknowledge God to be good and bountiful, we may, without hesitation, conclude goodness and bounty to be essential attributes of God: so likewise, because, from the natural power of conscience and the consideration of God’s works of providence, they conclude and agree that God is just, we contend that justice is natural to God.

But as mankind have testified this consent by other methods, so they have especially done it by sacrifices; concerning which Pliny says, “That all the world have agreed in them, although enemies or strangers to one another.” But since these are plainly of a divine origin, and instituted to prefigure, so to speak, the true atonement by the blood of Christ, in which he hath been the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,—that is, from the promise made of the seed of the woman, and from the sacrifice of Abel which followed,—the use of them descended to all the posterity of Adam: therefore, though afterward the whole plan and purpose of the institution was lost among by far the greatest part of mankind, and even the true God himself, to whom alone they were due, was unknown, and though no traces of the thing signified,—namely, the promised seed,—remained, yet still the thing itself, and the general notion of appeasing the Deity by sacrifices, hath survived all the darkness, impieties, dreadful wickedness, punishments, migrations of nations, downfalls and destructions of cities, states, and people, in which the world for these many ages hath been involved; for a consciousness of sin, and a sense of divine and avenging justice, have taken deeper root in the heart of man than that they can by any means be eradicated.

There were four kinds of sacrifices among the Gentiles:—First, the propitiatory or peace-making sacrifices; for by those they thought they could render the gods propitious or appease them, or avert the anger of the gods, and obtain peace with them. Hence these verses on that undertaking of the Greeks, in the exordium of Homer:—

“But let some prophet or some sacred sage

Explore the cause of great Apollo’s rage:

Or learn the wasteful vengeance to remove

By mystic dreams; for dreams descend from Jove.

If broken vows this heavy curse have laid,

Let altars smoke and hecatombs be paid:

So Heaven atoned shall dying Greece restore,

And Phoebus dart his burning shafts no more.”—Pope’s Homer

They were desirous of appeasing Apollo by sacrifices, who had inflicted on them a lamentable mortality. To the same purpose is that passage of Virgil,—

“The prophet first with sacrifice adores

The greater gods; their pardon then implores.”—Dryden’s Virgil

Hence, too, that lamentation of the person in the Poenulus of Plautus, who could not make satisfaction to his gods:—

“Unhappy man that I am,” says he, “today I have sacrificed six lambs to my much-incensed gods, and yet I have not been able to render Venus propitious to me; and as I could not appease her, I came instantly off.”

And Suetonius, speaking of Otho, says, “He endeavors, by all kinds of piacular sacrifices, to propitiate the manes of Galba, by whom he had seen himself thrust down and expelled.” And the same author affirms of Nero, “That he had been instructed that kings were wont to expiate the heavenly prodigies by the slaughter of some illustrious victim, and to turn them from themselves upon the heads of their nobles”; though this, perhaps, rather belongs to the second kind. But innumerable expressions to this purpose are extant, both among the Greek and Latin authors.

The second kind were the expiatory or purifying sacrifices, by which sins were said to be atoned, expiated, and cleansed, and sinners purified, purged, and reconciled, and the anger of the gods turned aside and averted. It would be tedious, and perhaps superfluous, to produce examples; the learned can easily trace them in great abundance. The other kinds were the eucharistical and prophetical, which have no relation to our present purpose.

In this way of appeasing the Deity, mankind, I say, formerly agreed; whence it is evident that an innate conception of this sin-avenging justice is natural to all, and, therefore, that that justice is to be reckoned among the essential attributes of the divine nature; concerning which only, and not concerning the free acts of his will, mankind universally agree.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Why do you think Owen calls God’s justice “the most illustrious of all the divine perfections”?

2. Why does Owen make a distinction between God’s justice absolutely considered and his justice “with respect to its egress and exercise”? What does this distinction tell us about God’s character?

3. What does Owen mean by God’s commutative justice? Does he think this is an aspect of God’s justice? Why?

4. What is the difference between justice as an essential attribute of God’s nature, and justice as a free act of God’s will? Which does Owen affirm?

5. Does Owen recognize any way in which God’s justice could be both necessary and free?

CHAPTER 5

Follow-Up

The period that we have just surveyed arguably contains some of the best, greatest, and most astute theological minds in all of church history, and in significant numbers. For that reason, the selections included here give only a little byway of introduction to this most prolific and theologically penetrating era.

Included among the greatest minds of this period was Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), an Aristotelian theologian and Roman Catholic. In keeping with his Aristotelianism, Suárez was a proponent, against William Ames and other Reformers, of a natural theology that could be universally argued and understood. Suárez’s Disputationes metaphysicae (1597) was a highly influential and innovative modification of Aquinas’s metaphysics, arguing for a univocal notion of being and against a Thomist notion of analogy and participation.

Pierre Du Moulin (1568–1658), in his Treatise of the Knowledge of God, argues, in the line of Calvin, that there is indeed a true knowledge of God given in and through nature, but that revelation is necessary in order to understand any of it aright. He sets out distinctions between reason and revelation that have implications for an apologetic that takes seriously the necessity of revelation for any Christian defense. His theological defenses include The Anatomy of Arminianism and The Buckler of the Faith, whose full title is, The Buckler of the Faith; or, A Defence of the Confession of Faith of the Reformed Churches in France, against the Objections of M. Arnoux the Jesuite wherein All the Principall Controversies between the Reformed Churches and the Church of Rome Are Decided.

Perhaps the best-known polemicist of this era was Francis Turretin (1623–1687). His three-volume Institutes of Elenctic Theology, used as a systematic theology text for years at Princeton Seminary, is a masterful exposition of Reformed thinking set in the context of the heresies and aberrant theologies of his day. Much of the exposition, set out under the different loci of systematic theology, is devoted to a refutation of Romanist, Socinian, and Arminian tenets.

As we have said, many, many more could be mentioned here. Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), for example, wrote an extensive commentary on Augustine’s City of God, which he dedicated to Henry VIII. He also wrote The Truth of the Christian Faith (1526) and other philosophical and theological treatises. Any theological survey of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will produce a list of figures long enough to occupy a lifetime of fruitful research and education.

PART TWO

Modernity and the Challenge of Reason

Part 2 Introduction[1]

Though periodizations always exhibit certain relativizing tendencies, it would be difficult to overestimate the concentric influence in Western thought brought about by the “critical thinking” of René Descartes (1596–1650).[2] With the publication of his Discourse on Method (1637), in which the famous dictum Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is denoted as a philosophical method, the concerns, characteristics, and course of thinking in the West were radically changed. Spelling out the details of that change—its precursors and progenies—is impossible to do in this (or perhaps any other) piece. We will, however, highlight a few areas relevant to our examples and discussions in this volume.

The first thing to note about this period is that it was not, at least not solely, an attempt to overthrow the accepted authorities. It was, rather, an attempt to show how those accepted authorities might properly merge with current, new, philosophical considerations. Thus, when Descartes employed his methodology of indubitables, he was not interested in denying the reality of the faith, or the authority of his (Romanist) church. What he did want to maintain is that if there was going to be a foundation of knowledge, it would have to begin with the individual. Any other authority, including the church, was insufficient for an epistemological foundation.

Because the implications of Descartes’s method were almost immediately seen, they had to be reckoned with by those authorities that were otherwise virtually unchallenged. In his thorough and incisive assessment of the Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel notes how this methodology introduced an entirely new status for philosophy vis-à-vis other institutional authorities:

From the 1640s . . . beginning on the continent with the onset of the Cartesian controversies in the United Provinces and, in England, with the intellectual ferment and proliferation of the religious sects resulting from the Civil War (1642–7), this hitherto prevailing pattern of confessionally regulated cultural cohesion progressively disintegrated, initiating one of the most decisive intellectual and cultural shifts in western history. As the supremacy of theology waned, non-theological accounts of man, God, and the world, that is, the New Philosophy, especially Cartesianism, penetrated with such novel and unsettling consequences that rulers, however unaccustomed to such a role, found themselves compelled to intervene.[3]

There was, therefore, significant, serious, and radical change taking place all across Europe. The challenge of the new philosophy forced both the church and the state to take it seriously.

Not only so, but this new methodology, in all its various aspects and permutations, both served to make philosophy “individualized,” in that its foundation could be ascertained only by reason, and, combined with the Newtonian “scientific revolution” of the day, undermined the philosophical methodology, largely Aristotelian, that was taught in the universities and sanctioned by the church. In other words, Descartes’s method undermined virtually every institutional authority previous to it and located the authority for the discovery and propagation of knowledge squarely in reason itself.

Originally mostly matter for learned wrangling in Latin, very soon the hugely divisive issues at stake also began to be debated in taverns, passenger barges, and popular pamphlets in the vernacular. One of the most fiercely contested issues was the status of philosophical reason itself, the Cartesio-Cocceians, as their opponents expressed it, maintaining that “philosophy is a divine truth as sure as Holy Scripture, a Letter of God, and infallible, a measuring-rod of Scripture, so that whatever contradicts it is false” while the Aristotelio-Voetians insisted that philosophy should not be free in the way that Descartes envisaged, indeed has no independent status or absolute validity but is merely ancillary to theology.[4]

This “relocation” of reason, from its status as servant to God’s revelation to its supremacy changed the focus of apologetic debate and discussion ever since.[5] Some of the selections in this part of the book—specifically (at least) Butler, Edwards, and Paley—will show clearly, especially compared to discussions preceding (e.g., Owen), that the appeal is no longer to, say, the authority of Scripture, or the ecclesiastical confessions, but arguments now proceed on the basis of one’s determination of “the evidence,” and that such evidence is thought to be in accordance with reason. So, for example, Butler’s argument against the deists takes for granted that deists are rational, and it simply asks them, based on the probable consistency of the natural with the supernatural, to include revealed religion as rational.

What began to develop during this time was a new coupling of ideas, a substitute for the way many were thinking prior to this time. Whereas theology had previously sought to explain the differences in natural theology as due to the presence, or lack, of regeneration, such that the divide was between regenerate and unregenerate,[6] this exalted view of reason moved the divide. No longer were many theologians thinking in terms of those who were, and those who were not, regenerate, but they began to view natural theology as a “reasonable” enterprise and thus as a foundation to biblical revelation itself. In other words, as we will see in some of the selections that follow, the foundation of theology, and thus of apologetics, was no longer the authority that intrinsically resided in Scripture as the Word of God, but rather it was located in the individual, in reason itself, such that any appeal to biblical revelation had to pass first through the “universal” tenets of reason. So, as Muller notes, even in Reformed circles, and due to the adoption of a Socinian and Arminian methodology, the adoption of a new principium for theology, substituting reason for revelation, began to erode orthodoxy itself. “The development, in rationalist systems of the eighteenth century, of a truly foundational natural theology represents a basic alteration of perspective and a loss, not an outgrowth or further refinement, of the orthodox system.”[7]

There are myriad implications and complications that accrue to this seismic shift in thought and life in the West, and we cannot mention those here. For someone attuned to the discussions that ensue in this section, as compared to many of the previous selections, it should be obvious that the theological “earth” has shifted at this point. That shift, as we will see in coming sections, will culminate in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant’s thought is perhaps the most influential of all modern philosophers. His “transcendental critique” brought about such a radical shift in thinking that the subjective aspects of reason gained almost universal hegemony, culminating in the postmodern subjectivity of the late twentieth century. Not only so, but the centrality of reason, which began in the Enlightenment, as systematized in Kant, began a full-scale assault on the Christian religion in the nineteenth century, an assault that continues in earnest to the present day.

1. For a helpful and thorough introduction to Enlightenment thinking, a good place to begin is Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Rise of Modern Paganism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).

2. “Critical” philosophy, so called because of its foundational questioning, or “critique,” of everything is explicit in Descartes, but finds its culmination in Immanuel Kant.

3. Jonathan Irvine Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 24.

4. Ibid., 25.

5. Clearly, this was not the first time reason’s supreme status was asserted. It was, however, the first time such an assertion gained the credibility that it did and had such an influence across the academic and institutional spectrum.

6. “The distinction between natural knowledge before the fall and the idolatrous use of this knowledge after the fall, the distinction between an original form of natural revelation and a subsequent revelation either in nature with the aid of Scripture or in and through the law, and even the development of a distinct natural theology for apologetic purposes, point finally toward the difference between an unregenerate and a regenerate, a pagan and a Christian understanding of natural revelation.” Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 304.

7. Ibid., 310, our emphases.

CHAPTER 6

Blaise Pascal

(1623–1662)

Although Blaise Pascal died at the young age of thirty-nine, he remains one of the central thinkers of all times for his achievements in science, his influence on the French language, and his remarkable contribution to Christian thought.

We know his story chiefly through the account left to us by his older sister, Gilberte. He was born on June 19, 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand, in the middle of France. His younger sister, Jacqueline, was born two years later, and his mother, Antoinette Begon, died the next year, when Blaise was only three. In 1631 his father, Étienne Pascal, a noble of the gown, a type of French aristocrat usually associated with the judiciary, moved the family to Paris.

The young Blaise, tutored by his father, wanted to study science, but his father guided him into the knowledge of Greek and Latin. Étienne soon recognized the boy’s brilliance and allowed him to study Euclid and the sciences. At age eleven Blaise wrote a short treatise on vibrating bodies. He was then allowed to study under some of the greatest mathematicians of his time, including Roberval, Gassendi, and Père Mersenne. At sixteen, Pascal wrote the Treatise on Conics (1640), a study of the “mystic hexagram,” proving that if a hexagon is inscribed in a circle (a “conic”), then the three points of intersection of opposite sides lie on a line, known as the “Pascal Line.”[1] The most famous French philosopher, René Descartes, disputed such a young man’s ability to achieve such a theory. He would later borrow Pascal’s ideas!

Étienne was then ordered to collect taxes in Normandy, a very poor region of France. In 1645, Blaise witnessed the suffering of the people of Normandy and their difficulty in paying the taxes his father had to calculate. To help his father, he invented a sort of modern calculator, the pascaline, which is considered a precursor to the computer. In 1647, after becoming acquainted with Torricelli’s work, he invented the equivalent of the modern barometer, going against the prevailing Aristotelian view, which held that “nature abhors a vacuum.” In 1654, prompted partly by a friend with gambling problems, he elaborated a theory of probabilities, laying the basis for Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus.

Pascal was quite sickly, suffering from an ailment of the nerves that rendered him in a condition of perpetual pain. He moved to Paris to find better medical treatment, living with his sister Jacqueline. In 1646, his father broke his hip, a very serious accident for the seventeenth century. The two doctors who took care of him in Rouen, Deslandes, and La Bouteillerie, also stayed around to discuss theology with the family. They were followers of Jean Guillebert, a proponent of the minority group who followed the teachings of the abbé de Saint-Cyran (1581–1643). The abbot was a friend of the Dutch theologian, Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585–1638), whose thought would eventually give rise to the movement known as the Jansenists. It generally espoused a return to Augustinian views, including original sin, predestination, and the unconditional grace of God.

Blaise listened to these doctors and began to be influenced by their views. He borrowed their books and then experienced what we know as his “first conversion.” No doubt not a thorough conversion, it was followed by a time in which Pascal became arrogant and irascible. Étienne died in 1651, leaving Blaise a considerable fortune. Jacqueline entered a religious order connected with Port Royale, a center of Jansenism just outside of Paris. She asked her brother to make a large contribution to the center, which request he took rather badly. Little is known about what is called his “worldly” period, the years 1651–1654. He frequented the popular salons of his day where intellectual issues (as well as frivolous ones) were discussed. In one of them he met John Milton, whom he quotes several times in the Pensées. He also encountered the chevalier de Méré, who would become the prototype of the hedonist in his writings. And he corresponded with the mathematician Pierre de Fermat, discussing with him the probabilities of winning or losing after an interrupted game of chance, a discussion that gave him material he would later use in the famous “wager” argument.

Whatever the details of this short but tempestuous period in Pascal’s life, he came out of it because of a conversion, this time, quite authentic. Three incidents form the setting for this turnabout. The first is known as the Neuilly Bridge accident. In 1654, on a holiday, Pascal and some friends rode a carriage across the Neuilly Bridge, and the horses bolted and pulled the carriage to the edge. The reins broke, and the horses went into the river without the carriage. Pascal understood this to be an act of divine intervention. The second incident occurred later that same year. It is known as the “miracle of the holy thorn.” Blaise’s niece, Marguerite, had a severe infection in her sinus system that rendered her blind in one eye. A nun brought in a shrine supposedly containing one of the thorns from Christ’s crown of thorns, and Marguerite was instantly healed. Blaise was overwhelmed by this act of God’s grace.

The third incident is the best known. On November 23 of that same year Pascal experienced something of a mystical illumination. He hastily wrote down what he thought he had gone through and inserted the text, known as his Memorial, into the lining of his shirt. Two memorable expressions are found in this text. The first summarizes the experience: “Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.” The second is simply “Fire,” which comes at the end of a detailed record of the date and time of the illumination. From then on, he tells us, he crucified the god of the philosophers and entered into communion with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Although he had previously written on religious subjects, he would now dedicate his life and work to the service of the Lord. He moved to Port Royal and became free of his former anger, instead, becoming a sage focused entirely upon God’s grace. He wrote the Provincial Letters (1656–1657), a powerful polemic against the Jesuits, particularly their casuistry and Pelagianism (underplaying the sovereignty of God in favor of human autonomy). While his critics accused him of “Calvinism,” he actually denounced Calvinism in the Letters, as well as in the Pensées, likening it to determinism. It is unlikely that Pascal had ever read any of Calvin’s works, having relied instead on secondary literature and hearsay.

Jansenism was a controversial minority position within the Roman Catholic Church. A series of papal bulls was issued condemning Saint-Cyran’s works. The doctors of the Sorbonne formally expelled Antoine Arnaud in 1656, and the next year the Archbishop of Paris barred the members of Port Royal from receiving the sacraments. In 1660 the school of Port Royal itself was closed down. Eventually the movement was reduced to virtual nonexistence, although its ideas would continue to have a remarkable influence in the church.

Pascal began his work on the Apology, which we now call the Pensées, while still writing the Letters. By 1658 he had collected enough material to share it with his colleagues at Port Royal. While ill health continued to plague him, he courageously persevered in his writing. Jacqueline died in 1661, probably of stress from ecclesiastical opposition. Blaise’s afflictions from this loss and from his continued illness intensified until his death on August 19, 1662.

Though unfinished, the Pensées have become one of the most significant works of apologetics, not only for the seventeenth century but for all time. The story of their preservation is intriguing. At his death Pascal left behind a body of papers, mostly in his handwriting, with some by a secretary. His executors decided to make two copies of the work, known as the First Copy and the Second Copy, using great care to decipher his difficult handwriting. (These both followed the same order, the only difference being that the fragments of the First Copy were detachable; those of the Second Copy were not.) Pascal’s uncle, Étienne Périer, published the first edition in 1670 as Apology for the Christian Religion, stating that he copied the fragments “in the same confusion” as he found them. The original papers were also kept, but only in 1711 were they pasted into a bound album known as the Recueil original (original collection).

The order of the Pensées has occupied scholars for many generations. Pascal’s method consisted of writing on large sheets of paper, some of which were cut into individual passages and then collected into bundles, or liasses. The liasses were threaded together, representing about half of the entire work, and have twenty-eight headings, which we are reasonably sure Pascal composed. The remaining fragments are packaged into untitled bundles known as séries. If there is any intended overall order, we cannot find it. Perhaps there was none. But the fragments do hang together as thematic units.

The Pensées have been republished and edited many times from the seventeenth century till today, with several arrangements of the fragments proposed. A breakthrough occurred in 1951 when Louis Lafuma produced a modern edition based on the First Copy. He provided an alternative to the numbering established by Léon Brunschvicg around the turn of the century. Then, in 1976 and 1991, Philippe Sellier produced a good edition of the Second Copy, also with new numbering. The texts below are based on the Brunschvicg edition, translated by W. F. Trotter.

Overall, the Pensées are a plea to know God, to be reconciled to him, and to leave off common errors of thought and a pleasure-centered life. Pascal presents a God who is grand, mysterious, and yet also loving and gracious. Human beings are naturally inclined toward entertainment and the gratification of the flesh. Those pursuits lead only to misery. The only way to be reconciled with God is through Jesus Christ. “[God] has left men in a darkness from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ, without whom all communion with God is cut off” (242).

A structural premise for Pascal’s method is the contrast of three orders. Just as in his mathematics, where he observed that lines, squares, and cubes cannot be added together, being different orders, so in human knowledge, the body (the senses), the mind (reason), and the heart are of different orders. This approach is made evident in one of the most celebrated passages: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” (Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point, 277). It is important to point out that Pascal is not here asking us to leap into the dark. Reason has its proper place. What he opposes are the pretensions of unaided reason to be a source for truth without the gift of faith: “We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them” (282).

Breaking this down further, Pascal argues that God, being infinite, cannot be known by reason alone. Reason—that is, autonomous reason—cannot decide, for decision is a matter of the will. In the famous “wager” passage (233) he asserts that although Christians are unable to give purely rational grounds for their faith, there is no way to avoid making a decision about God’s existence. “You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked.” Using the analogy of a game, with its probabilities and possible outcomes, he puts the following options before his readers: Bet on God. If you win, you win everything—truth, happiness, and the good. Even if you are wrong and there is no afterlife, you still would have lived well in the present. If you do not bet on God, the risks are intolerable.

1. See S. V. Bakhvalov, P. S. Modenov, A. S. Parkhomenko, Collection of Problems on Analytic Geometry (Moscow: Gos. izd-vo tekhniko-teoret lit-ry, 1957). For the complete works, see Pascal, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1963). In English, though no exhaustive publication exists, see Blaise Pascal: Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works, The Harvard Classics 48 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004).

Pensées

(Fragments 195–285)

195. Before entering into the proofs of the Christian religion, I find it necessary to point out the sinfulness of those men who live in indifference to the search for truth in a matter which is so important to them, and which touches them so nearly.

Of all their errors, this doubtless is the one which most convicts them of foolishness and blindness, and in which it is easiest to confound them by the first glimmerings of common sense and by natural feelings.

For it is not to be doubted that the duration of this life is but a moment; that the state of death is eternal, whatever may be its nature; and that thus all our actions and thoughts must take such different directions, according to the state of that eternity, that it is impossible to take one step with sense and judgement, unless we regulate our course by the truth of that point which ought to be our ultimate end.

There is nothing clearer than this; and thus, according to the principles of reason, the conduct of men is wholly unreasonable, if they do not take another course.

On this point, therefore, we condemn those who live without thought of the ultimate end of life, who let themselves be guided by their own inclinations and their own pleasures without reflection and without concern, and, as if they could annihilate eternity by turning away their thought from it, think only of making themselves happy for the moment.

Yet this eternity exists, and death, which must open into it and threatens them every hour, must in a little time infallibly put them under the dreadful necessity of being either annihilated or unhappy for ever, without knowing which of these eternities is for ever prepared for them.

This is a doubt of terrible consequence. They are in peril of eternal woe and thereupon, as if the matter were not worth the trouble, they neglect to inquire whether this is one of those opinions which people receive with too credulous a facility, or one of those which, obscure in themselves, have a very firm, though hidden, foundation. Thus they know not whether there be truth or falsity in the matter, nor whether there be strength or weakness in the proofs. They have them before their eyes; they refuse to look at them; and in that ignorance they choose all that is necessary to fall into this misfortune if it exists, to await death to make trial of it, yet to be very content in this state, to make profession of it, and indeed to boast of it. Can we think seriously of the importance of this subject without being horrified at conduct so extravagant?

This resting in ignorance is a monstrous thing, and they who pass their life in it must be made to feel its extravagance and stupidity, by having it shown to them, so that they may be confounded by the sight of their folly. For this is how men reason, when they choose to live in such ignorance of what they are and without seeking enlightenment. “I know not,” they say . . .

196. Men lack heart; they would not make a friend of it.

197. To be insensible to the extent of despising interesting things, and to become insensible to the point which interests us most.

198. The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion.

199. Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.

200. A man in a dungeon, ignorant whether his sentence be pronounced and having only one hour to learn it, but this hour enough, if he knew that it is pronounced, to obtain its repeal, would act unnaturally in spending that hour, not in ascertaining his sentence, but in playing piquet. So it is against nature that man, etc. It is making heavy the hand of God.

Thus not only the zeal of those who seek Him proves God, but also the blindness of those who seek Him not.

201. All the objections of this one and that one only go against themselves, and not against religion. All that infidels say . . .

202. From those who are in despair at being without faith, we see that God does not enlighten them; but as to the rest, we see there is a God who makes them blind.

203. Fascinatio nugacitatis.[1]—That passion may not harm us, let us act as if we had only eight hours to live.

204. If we ought to devote eight hours of life, we ought to devote a hundred years.

205. When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis.[2]

206. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

207. How many kingdoms know us not!

208. Why is my knowledge limited? Why my stature? Why my life to one hundred years rather than to a thousand? What reason has nature had for giving me such, and for choosing this number rather than another in the infinity of those from which there is no more reason to choose one than another, trying nothing else?

209. Art thou less a slave by being loved and favoured by thy master? Thou art indeed well off, slave. Thy master favours thee; he will soon beat thee.

210. The last act is tragic, however happy all the rest of the play is; at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end for ever.

211. We are fools to depend upon the society of our fellow-men. Wretched as we are, powerless as we are, they will not aid us; we shall die alone. We should therefore act as if we were alone, and in that case should we build fine houses, etc. We should seek the truth without hesitation; and, if we refuse it, we show that we value the esteem of men more than the search for truth.

212. Instability.—It is a horrible thing to feel all that we possess slipping away.

213. Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

214. Injustice.—That presumption should be joined to meanness is extreme injustice.

215. To fear death without danger, and not in danger, for one must be a man.

216. Sudden death alone is feared; hence confessors stay with lords.

217. An heir finds the title-deeds of his house. Will he say, “Perhaps they are forged” and neglect to examine them?

218. Dungeon.—I approve of not examining the opinion of Copernicus; but this . . . ! It concerns all our life to know whether the soul be mortal or immortal.

219. It is certain that the mortality or immortality of the soul must make an entire difference to morality. And yet philosophers have constructed their ethics independently of this: they discuss to pass an hour.

Plato, to incline to Christianity.

220. The fallacy of philosophers who have not discussed the immortality of the soul. The fallacy of their dilemma in Montaigne.

221. Atheists ought to say what is perfectly evident; now it is not perfectly evident that the soul is material.

222. Atheists.—What reason have they for saying that we cannot rise from the dead? What is more difficult, to be born or to rise again; that what has never been should be, or that what has been should be again? Is it more difficult to come into existence than to return to it? Habit makes the one appear easy to us; want of habit makes the other impossible. A popular way of thinking!

Why cannot a virgin bear a child? Does a hen not lay eggs without a cock? What distinguishes these outwardly from others? And who has told us that the hen may not form the germ as well as the cock?

223. What have they to say against the resurrection, and against the child-bearing of the Virgin? Which is the more difficult, to produce a man or an animal, or to reproduce it? And if they had never seen any species of animals, could they have conjectured whether they were produced without connection with each other?

224. How I hate these follies of not believing in the Eucharist, etc.! If the Gospel be true, if Jesus Christ be God, what difficulty is there?

225. Atheism shows strength of mind, but only to a certain degree.

226. Infidels, who profess to follow reason, ought to be exceedingly strong in reason. What say they then? “Do we not see,” say they, “that the brutes live and die like men, and Turks like Christians? They have their ceremonies, their prophets, their doctors, their saints, their monks, like us,” etc. (Is this contrary to Scripture? Does it not say all this?)

If you care but little to know the truth, here is enough of it to leave you in repose. But if you desire with all your heart to know it, it is not enough; look at it in detail. This would be sufficient for a question in philosophy; but not here, where it concerns your all. And yet, after a trifling reflection of this kind, we go to amuse ourselves, etc. Let us inquire of this same religion whether it does not give a reason for this obscurity; perhaps it will teach it to us.

227. Order by dialogues.—What ought I to do? I see only darkness everywhere. Shall I believe I am nothing? Shall I believe I am God?

“All things change and succeed each other.” You are mistaken; there is . . .

228. Objection of atheists: “But we have no light.”

229. This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred times wished that if a God maintains Nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.

I envy those whom I see living in the faith with such carelessness and who make such a bad use of a gift of which it seems to me I would make such a different use.

230. It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created, etc.; that original sin should be, and that it should not be.

231. Do you believe it to be impossible that God is infinite, without parts? Yes. I wish therefore to show you an infinite and indivisible thing. It is a point moving everywhere with an infinite velocity; for it is one in all places and is all totality in every place.

Let this effect of nature, which previously seemed to you impossible, make you know that there may be others of which you are still ignorant. Do not draw this conclusion from your experiment, that there remains nothing for you to know; but rather that there remains an infinity for you to know.

232. Infinite movement, the point which fills everything, the moment of rest; infinite without quantity, indivisible and infinite.

233. Infinite—nothing.—Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

Unity joined to infinity adds nothing to it, no more than one foot to an infinite measure. The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice. There is not so great a disproportion between our justice and that of God as between unity and infinity.

The justice of God must be vast like His compassion. Now justice to the outcast is less vast and ought less to offend our feelings than mercy towards the elect.

We know that there is an infinite, and are ignorant of its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is an infinity in number. But we do not know what it is. It is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd; for the addition of a unit can make no change in its nature. Yet it is a number, and every number is odd or even (this is certainly true of every finite number). So we may well know that there is a God without knowing what He is. Is there not one substantial truth, seeing there are so many things which are not the truth itself?

We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have extension. We know the existence of the infinite and are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because He has neither extension nor limits.

But by faith we know His existence; in glory we shall know His nature. Now, I have already shown that we may well know the existence of a thing, without knowing its nature.

Let us now speak according to natural lights.

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him.

Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their belief, since they profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in expounding it to the world, that it is a foolishness, stultitiam;[3] and then you complain that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not keep their word; it is in lacking proofs that they are not lacking in sense. “Yes, but although this excuses those who offer it as such and takes away from them the blame of putting it forward without reason, it does not excuse those who receive it.” Let us then examine this point, and say, “God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. “No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. “That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.” Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all. And thus, when one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather than risk it for infinite gain, as likely to happen as the loss of nothingness.

For it is no use to say it is uncertain if we will gain, and it is certain that we risk, and that the infinite distance between the certainty of what is staked and the uncertainty of what will be gained, equals the finite good which is certainly staked against the uncertain infinite. It is not so, as every player stakes a certainty to gain an uncertainty, and yet he stakes a finite certainty to gain a finite uncertainty, without transgressing against reason. There is not an infinite distance between the certainty staked and the uncertainty of the gain; that is untrue. In truth, there is an infinity between the certainty of gain and the certainty of loss. But the uncertainty of the gain is proportioned to the certainty of the stake according to the proportion of the chances of gain and loss. Hence it comes that, if there are as many risks on one side as on the other, the course is to play even; and then the certainty of the stake is equal to the uncertainty of the gain, so far is it from fact that there is an infinite distance between them. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain. This is demonstrable; and if men are capable of any truths, this is one.

“I confess it, I admit it. But, still, is there no means of seeing the faces of the cards?” Yes, Scripture and the rest, etc. “Yes, but I have my hands tied and my mouth closed; I am forced to wager, and am not free. I am not released, and am so made that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?”

True. But at least learn your inability to believe, since reason brings you to this, and yet you cannot believe. Endeavour, then, to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. “But this is what I am afraid of.” And why? What have you to lose?

But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks.

The end of this discourse.—Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.

“Ah! This discourse transports me, charms me,” etc.

If this discourse pleases you and seems impressive, know that it is made by a man who has knelt, both before and after it, in prayer to that Being, infinite and without parts, before whom he lays all he has, for you also to lay before Him all you have for your own good and for His glory, that so strength may be given to lowliness.

234. If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles! I say then we must do nothing at all, for nothing is certain, and that there is more certainty in religion than there is as to whether we may see to-morrow; for it is not certain that we may see to-morrow, and it is certainly possible that we may not see it. We cannot say as much about religion. It is not certain that it is; but who will venture to say that it is certainly possible that it is not? Now when we work for to-morrow, and so on an uncertainty, we act reasonably; for we ought to work for an uncertainty according to the doctrine of chance which was demonstrated above.

Saint Augustine has seen that we work for an uncertainty, on sea, in battle, etc. But he has not seen the doctrine of chance which proves that we should do so. Montaigne has seen that we are shocked at a fool, and that habit is all-powerful; but he has not seen the reason of this effect.

All these persons have seen the effects, but they have not seen the causes. They are, in comparison with those who have discovered the causes, as those who have only eyes are in comparison with those who have intellect. For the effects are perceptible by sense, and the causes are visible only to the intellect. And although these effects are seen by the mind, this mind is, in comparison with the mind which sees the causes, as the bodily senses are in comparison with the intellect.

235. Rem viderunt, causam non viderunt.[4]

236. According to the doctrine of chance, you ought to put yourself to the trouble of searching for the truth; for if you die without worshipping the True Cause, you are lost. “But,” say you, “if He had wished me to worship Him, He would have left me signs of His will.” He has done so; but you neglect them. Seek them, therefore; it is well worth it.

237. Chances.—We must live differently in the world, according to these different assumptions: (1) that we could always remain in it; (2) that it is certain that we shall not remain here long, and uncertain if we shall remain here one hour. This last assumption is our condition.

238. What do you then promise me, in addition to certain troubles, but ten years of self-love (for ten years is the chance), to try hard to please without success?

239. Objection.—Those who hope for salvation are so far happy; but they have as a counterpoise the fear of hell.

Reply.—Who has most reason to fear hell: he who is in ignorance whether there is a hell, and who is certain of damnation if there is; or he who certainly believes there is a hell and hopes to be saved if there is?

240. “I would soon have renounced pleasure,” say they, “had I faith.” For my part I tell you, “You would soon have faith, if you renounced pleasure.” Now, it is for you to begin. If I could, I would give you faith. I cannot do so, nor therefore test the truth of what you say. But you can well renounce pleasure and test whether what I say is true.

241. Order.—I would have far more fear of being mistaken, and of finding that the Christian religion was true, than of not being mistaken in believing it true.

242. Preface to the second part.—To speak of those who have treated of this matter.

I admire the boldness with which these persons undertake to speak of God. In addressing their argument to infidels, their first chapter is to prove Divinity from the works of nature. I should not be astonished at their enterprise, if they were addressing their argument to the faithful; for it is certain that those who have the living faith in their hearts see at once that all existence is none other than the work of the God whom they adore. But for those in whom this light is extinguished, and in whom we purpose to rekindle it, persons destitute of faith and grace, who, seeking with all their light whatever they see in nature that can bring them to this knowledge, find only obscurity and darkness; to tell them that they have only to look at the smallest things which surround them, and they will see God openly, to give them, as a complete proof of this great and important matter, the course of the moon and planets, and to claim to have concluded the proof with such an argument, is to give them ground for believing that the proofs of our religion are very weak. And I see by reason and experience that nothing is more calculated to arouse their contempt.

It is not after this manner that Scripture speaks, which has a better knowledge of the things that are of God. It says, on the contrary, that God is a hidden God, and that, since the corruption of nature, He has left men in a darkness from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ, without whom all communion with God is cut off. Nemo novit Patrem, nisi Filius, et cui voluerit Filius revelare.[5]

This is what Scripture points out to us, when it says in so many places that those who seek God find Him. It is not of that light, “like the noonday sun,” that this is said. We do not say that those who seek the noonday sun, or water in the sea, shall find them; and hence the evidence of God must not be of this nature. So it tells us elsewhere: Vere tu es Deus absconditus.[6]

243. It is an astounding fact that no canonical writer has ever made use of nature to prove God. They all strive to make us believe in Him. David, Solomon, etc., have never said, “There is no void, therefore there is a God.” They must have had more knowledge than the most learned people who came after them, and who have all made use of this argument. This is worthy of attention.

244. “Why! Do you not say yourself that the heavens and birds prove God?” No. “And does your religion not say so”? No. For although it is true in a sense for some souls to whom God gives this light, yet it is false with respect to the majority of men.

245. There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration. The Christian religion, which alone has reason, does not acknowledge as her true children those who believe without inspiration. It is not that she excludes reason and custom. On the contrary, the mind must be opened to proofs, must be confirmed by custom and offer itself in humbleness to inspirations, which alone can produce a true and saving effect. Ne evacuetur crux Christi.[7]

246. Order.—After the letter “That we ought to seek God,” to write the letter “On removing obstacles,” which is the discourse on “the machine,” on preparing the machine, on seeking by reason.

247. Order.—A letter of exhortation to a friend to induce him to seek. And he will reply, “But what is the use of seeking? Nothing is seen.” Then to reply to him, “Do not despair.” And he will answer that he would be glad to find some light, but that, according to this very religion, if he believed in it, it will be of no use to him, and that therefore he prefers not to seek. And to answer to that: The machine.

248. A letter which indicates the use of proofs by the machine.—Faith is different from proof; the one is human, the other is a gift of God. Justus ex fide vivit.[8] It is this faith that God Himself puts into the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument, fides ex auditu;[9] but this faith is in the heart, and makes us not say scio, but credo.[10]

249. It is superstition to put one’s hope in formalities; but it is pride to be unwilling to submit to them.

250. The external must be joined to the internal to obtain anything from God, that is to say, we must kneel, pray with the lips, etc., in order that proud man, who would not submit himself to God, may be now subject to the creature. To expect help from these externals is superstition; to refuse to join them to the internal is pride.

251. Other religions, as the pagan, are more popular, for they consist in externals. But they are not for educated people. A purely intellectual religion would be more suited to the learned, but it would be of no use to the common people. The Christian religion alone is adapted to all, being composed of externals and internals. It raises the common people to the internal, and humbles the proud to the external; it is not perfect without the two, for the people must understand the spirit of the letter, and the learned must submit their spirit to the letter.

252. For we must not misunderstand ourselves; we are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without its thinking about the matter. Who has demonstrated that there will be a to-morrow and that we shall die? And what is more believed? It is, then, custom which persuades us of it; it is custom that makes so many men Christians; custom that makes them Turks, heathens, artisans, soldiers, etc. (Faith in baptism is more received among Christians than among Turks.) Finally, we must have recourse to it when once the mind has seen where the truth is, in order to quench our thirst, and steep ourselves in that belief, which escapes us at every hour; for always to have proofs ready is too much trouble. We must get an easier belief, which is that of custom, which, without violence, without art, without argument, makes us believe things and inclines all our powers to this belief, so that our soul falls naturally into it. It is not enough to believe only by force of conviction, when the automaton is inclined to believe the contrary. Both our parts must be made to believe, the mind by reasons which it is sufficient to have seen once in a lifetime, and the automaton by custom, and by not allowing it to incline to the contrary. Inclina cor meum, Deus.[11]

The reason acts slowly, with so many examinations and on so many principles, which must be always present, that at every hour it falls asleep, or wanders, through want of having all its principles present. Feeling does not act thus; it acts in a moment, and is always ready to act. We must then put our faith in feeling; otherwise it will be always vacillating.

253. Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only.

254. It is not a rare thing to have to reprove the world for too much docility. It is a natural vice like credulity, and as pernicious. Superstition.

255. Piety is different from superstition.

To carry piety as far as superstition is to destroy it.

The heretics reproach us for this superstitious submission. This is to do what they reproach us for . . .

Infidelity, not to believe in the Eucharist, because it is not seen.

Superstition to believe propositions. Faith, etc.

256. I say there are few true Christians, even as regards faith. There are many who believe but from superstition. There are many who do not believe solely from wickedness. Few are between the two.

In this I do not include those who are of truly pious character, nor all those who believe from a feeling in their heart.

257. There are only three kinds of persons; those who serve God, having found Him; others who are occupied in seeking Him, not having found Him; while the remainder live without seeking Him and without having found Him. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are foolish and unhappy; those between are unhappy and reasonable.

258. Unus quisque sibi Deum fingit.[12]

Disgust

259. Ordinary people have the power of not thinking of that about which they do not wish to think. “Do not meditate on the passages about the Messiah,” said the Jew to his son. Thus our people often act. Thus are false religions preserved, and even the true one, in regard to many persons.

But there are some who have not the power of thus preventing thought, and who think so much the more as they are forbidden. These undo false religions and even the true one, if they do not find solid arguments.

260. They hide themselves in the press and call numbers to their rescue. Tumult.

Authority.—So far from making it a rule to believe a thing because you have heard it, you ought to believe nothing without putting yourself into the position as if you had never heard it.

It is your own assent to yourself, and the constant voice of your own reason, and not of others, that should make you believe.

Belief is so important! A hundred contradictions might be true. If antiquity were the rule of belief, men of ancient time would then be without rule. If general consent, if men had perished?

False humanity, pride.

Lift the curtain. You try in vain; if you must either believe, or deny, or doubt. Shall we then have no rule? We judge that animals do well what they do. Is there no rule whereby to judge men?

To deny, to believe, and to doubt well, are to a man what the race is to a horse.

Punishment of those who sin, error.

261. Those who do not love the truth take as a pretext that it is disputed, and that a multitude deny it. And so their error arises only from this, that they do not love either truth or charity. Thus they are without excuse.

262. Superstition and lust. Scruples, evil desires. Evil fear; fear, not such as comes from a belief in God, but such as comes from a doubt whether He exists or not. True fear comes from faith; false fear comes from doubt. True fear is joined to hope, because it is born of faith, and because men hope in the God in whom they believe. False fear is joined to despair, because men fear the God in whom they have no belief. The former fear to lose Him; the latter fear to find Him.

263. “A miracle,” says one, “would strengthen my faith.” He says so when he does not see one. Reasons, seen from afar, appear to limit our view; but when they are reached, we begin to see beyond. Nothing stops the nimbleness of our mind. There is no rule, say we, which has not some exceptions, no truth so general which has not some aspect in which it fails. It is sufficient that it be not absolutely universal to give us a pretext for applying the exceptions to the present subject and for saying, “This is not always true; there are therefore cases where it is not so.” It only remains to show that this is one of them; and that is why we are very awkward or unlucky, if we do not find one some day.

264. We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, without the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness, the eighth beautitude.

265. Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

266. How many stars have telescopes revealed to us which did not exist for our philosophers of old! We freely attack Holy Scripture on the great number of stars, saying, “There are only one thousand and twenty-eight, we know it.” There is grass on the earth, we see it—from the moon we would not see it—and on the grass are leaves, and in these leaves are small animals; but after that no more. O presumptuous man! The compounds are composed of elements, and the elements not. O presumptuous man! Here is a fine reflection. We must not say that there is anything which we do not see. We must then talk like others, but not think like them.

267. The last proceeding of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. It is but feeble if it does not see so far as to know this. But if natural things are beyond it, what will be said of supernatural?

268. Submission.—We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so understands not the force of reason. There are some who offend against these three rules, either by affirming everything as demonstrative, from want of knowing what demonstration is; or by doubting everything, from want of knowing where to submit; or by submitting in everything, from want of knowing where they must judge.

269. Submission is the use of reason in which consists true Christianity.

270. Saint Augustine.—Reason would never submit, if it did not judge that there are some occasions on which it ought to submit. It is then right for it to submit, when it judges that it ought to submit.

271. Wisdom sends us to childhood. Nisi efficiamini sicut parvuli.[13]

272. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.

273. If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

274. All our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling.

But fancy is like, though contrary to, feeling, so that we cannot distinguish between these contraries. One person says that my feeling is fancy, another that his fancy is feeling. We should have a rule. Reason offers itself; but it is pliable in every sense; and thus there is no rule.

275. Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.

276. M. de Roannez said: “Reasons come to me afterwards, but at first a thing pleases or shocks me without my knowing the reason, and yet it shocks me for that reason which I only discover afterwards.” But I believe, not that it shocked him for the reasons which were found afterwards, but that these reasons were only found because it shocked him.

277. The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the Universal Being, and also itself naturally, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one and kept the other. Is it by reason that you love yourself?

278. It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.

279. Faith is a gift of God; do not believe that we said it was a gift of reasoning. Other religions do not say this of their faith. They only gave reasoning in order to arrive at it, and yet it does not bring them to it.

280. The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.

281. Heart, instinct, principles.

282. We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. The sceptics, who have only this for their object, labour to no purpose. We know that we do not dream, and, however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. For the knowledge of first principles, as space, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from reasoning. And reason must trust these intuitions of the heart, and must base them on every argument. (We have intuitive knowledge of the tri-dimensional nature of space and of the infinity of number, and reason then shows that there are no two square numbers one of which is double of the other. Principles are intuited, propositions are inferred, all with certainty, though in different ways.) And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of her first principles, before admitting them, as it would be for the heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated propositions before accepting them.

This inability ought, then, to serve only to humble reason, which would judge all, but not to impugn our certainty, as if only reason were capable of instructing us. Would to God, on the contrary, that we had never need of it, and that we knew everything by instinct and intuition! But nature has refused us this boon. On the contrary, she has given us but very little knowledge of this kind; and all the rest can be acquired only by reasoning.

Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation.

283. Order.—Against the objection that Scripture has no order.

The heart has its own order; the intellect has its own, which is by principle and demonstration. The heart has another. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by enumerating in order the causes of love; that would be ridiculous.

Jesus Christ and Saint Paul employ the rule of love, not of intellect; for they would warm, not instruct. It is the same with Saint Augustine. This order consists chiefly in digressions on each point to indicate the end, and keep it always in sight.

284. Do not wonder to see simple people believe without reasoning. God imparts to them love of Him and hatred of self. He inclines their heart to believe. Men will never believe with a saving and real faith, unless God inclines their heart; and they will believe as soon as He inclines it. And this is what David knew well, when he said: Inclina cor meum, Deus, in . . .[14]

285. Religion is suited to all kinds of minds. Some pay attention only to its establishment, and this religion is such that its very establishment suffices to prove its truth. Others trace it even to the apostles. The more learned go back to the beginning of the world. The angels see it better still, and from a more distant time.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. How does Pascal argue against indifference (195)? Do the problem and the answers still hold true today?

2. Compare Pascal’s description of the evils in his day (“The sensibility of man to trifles, and his insensibility to great things, indicates a strange inversion,” 198), with those of our own times.

3. How can greatness come from knowing we are wretched?

4. What are some of the ways Pascal answers the skeptic?

5. Fully describe and explain the wager argument. Is it purely pragmatic? Would it work today?

6. Is Pascal completely opposed to philosophy (226)?

7. Describe Pascal’s view of reason. How is it connected to the heart?

1. Wisd. of Sol. 4:12. “Bewitching of naughtiness.”

2. Wisd. of Sol. 5:15. “The remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day.”

3. 1 Cor. 1:21.

4. “They have seen the thing; they have not seen the cause.” St. Augustine, Contra Pelagium, iv.

5. Matt. 11:27. “Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.”

6. Isa. 45:15. “Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.”

7. 1 Cor. 1:17. “Lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.”

8. Rom. 1:17. “The just shall live by faith.”

9. Rom. 10:17. “Faith cometh by hearing.”

10. “I know.” “I believe.”

11. Ps. 119:36. “Incline my heart, O Lord.”

12. Wisd. of Sol. 15:8, 16. “He moulds a God . . . like unto himself.”

13. Matt. 18:3. “Except ye become as little children.”

14. Ps. 119:36. “Incline my heart, O Lord, unto thy testimonies.”

CHAPTER 7

Joseph Butler

(1692–1752)

Bishop Joseph Butler, sometimes called “the philosopher of Anglicanism,” was born in Wantage, Berkshire, to Presbyterian parents. Butler attended Gloucester and later Tewkesbury, both dissenting colleges. At Gloucester he began to write Samuel Clarke.[1] At Tewkesbury he converted to the Church of England and transferred to Oxford, where he took his BA. Butler had a series of preaching and pastoral appointments throughout his life, preaching in London, taking a pastoral post in Stanhope, and ending his career as bishop of Durham. In 1752, after two years in Durham, Butler died at the age of 60.

One of the things that should be evident by the time we reach the period in which Joseph Butler flourished is that it is a short step, historically, from the Socinianism that Owen sought to refute to the deism of Butler’s England.[2] If we think of John Owen’s Puritan orthodoxy, virtually unblemished, toward the end of the seventeenth century, it is an amazing fact of history that, less than sixty years later, the “apologetic of probability” in Butler’s Analogy against the English deists characterizes the same country in which Owen labored. Clearly, a vast cultural and intellectual shift had occurred.

Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736) was one of the most influential apologetical writings of the eighteenth century. Prior to the publication of the Analogy, the most erudite and systematic apologetic in the empirical tradition was George Berkeley’s Alciphron (1732). C. D. Broad says of Butler’s Analogy that “it is perhaps the ablest and fairest argument for theism that exists.”[3] There are at least three things important to note about Butler’s Analogy.[4]

First of all, the Analogy was written not to prove the existence of God but, at least in part, in opposition to English deism.[5] Theological thought in Butler’s day was primarily deistic. Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) is generally considered to be the founder of deism, but there is no straight line from his philosophy to eighteenth-century English deism. Perhaps most influential during this period was John Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious: Or, a Treatise Seeing, That There Is Nothing in the Gospel Contrary to Reason, nor above It: And That No Christian Doctrine Can Be Properly Call’d a Mystery (1696). The other deists much discussed at this time were Anthony Collins (1676–1729), author of A Discourse on Free Thinking (1713), and Matthew Tindal (1655–1733), who wrote Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (1730). The tendency of deism in England was not that God was absent from his creation, but rather that there was thought to be an identification between natural and revealed religion. All that there was of religion was revealed in nature. According to Toland, for example, we have no more difficulty in conceiving God than in conceiving anything else, and Toland regards the properties of God as idealizations of human properties. God cannot, therefore, be called mysterious unless one is prepared to call everything mysterious, which is unreasonable. This has a determinative effect on the way in which Butler argues.

Second, Butler argues that, for us, “probability is the guide of life.” Butler does not use the notion of probability in a systematic way, so it is difficult at times to understand exactly what he means by it. But there is no question that he means for probability to be set in opposition to any kind of certainty.

Third, Butler uses a double-negative line of argument from the natural religion of the deists to the probability of revealed religion. The basic thrust of Butler’s argument is that this (observed) life and the (unobserved) afterlife, taken together, exhibit features that resemble known features of this life taken alone. For example, we can infer that this life is a training ground for the next life from the way in which the early years of this life are a training ground for the later ones. There is, then, an “analogy of religion”—the analogy of the way in which the deists already think, with the truths that Christianity affirms. And what provides a ground for that analogy is the empirical evidence available to all.

More specifically, Butler sees deism and its affirmation of the “natural” as a basis to argue for acceptance of the supernatural. He argues, therefore, that once some truths are accepted in natural religion, it is not so irrational to move further and accept other truths of revealed religion based on the evidence of natural religion itself.[6]

According to Penelhum,[7] there are at least four different aspects to Butler’s arguments that are calculated to persuade his readers that the claims of revelation are credible.

1. Inclusion—Revelation includes within it the proclamation of doctrines that are already part of natural religion. That is, Butler’s argument for the truths of revealed religion is that certain of its truths are already included in what the deists affirm—truths like the legitimacy of natural law, the reality of the four seasons, and so on. If these doctrines are agreed to be probable, this lends credence to the proclamation of the additional doctrines revelation contains. It is, however, not always easy to decide whether Butler’s judgment about a particular doctrine is that it is more likely to be true than not to be, or that it is as likely to be true as not to be, or merely that it possesses some nonnegligible degree of likelihood.[8]

2. Supplementation—These additional doctrines are not at odds with those of natural religion, but supplement them in plausible ways. For example, the claim that Christ is our Mediator supplements the doctrine of God’s justice by showing that our fumbling attempts at virtue can be acceptable to him.

3. Justification—Here Butler argues that the claims of revelation are supported by special evidences, such as miracles, fulfilled prophecies, and spiritual testimonies.

4. Parity of reasoning—Objections raised against the claims of Christianity are readily comparable to objections that can be raised against the claims of natural religion, and even to some well-accepted claims of common sense and natural science.

Parity of reasoning requires that if we accept these latter claims in the face of the objections to them, we should be willing to do the same for the claims of revelation. Here Butler tries to answer the following kind of deistic objection:

As far as divine wisdom exceeds human, so far the divine laws must excel human laws in clearness and perspicuity; as well as other perfections. Whatever is confused and perplexed, can never come from the clear fountain of all knowledge; nor that which is obscure from the father of inexhaustible light; and as far as you suppose God’s laws are not plain to any part of mankind, so far you derogate from the perfection of those laws, and the wisdom and the goodness of the divine legislator.[9]

Among Butler’s concerns are the criteria that the deists set up for revelation, to which the Christian is supposed to conform. The deists impose their own dogmatic criteria, which revelations have to satisfy, for example, the notion that God’s law or revelation cannot be obscure, or less than plain, to everyone. But Butler wants to argue that if we do not fathom or understand clearly and completely the natural world, why should we expect that we must understand the supernatural world completely?

Of all four of these approaches, it is the last one that seems to be the central burden of Butler’s Analogy. Butler seems to think that the deists have applied a rigor of reasoning to the claims of revealed religion that they do not demand or accept in the claims of their own religion. In one sense, this is simply an ad hominem argument. Instead of answering objections, Butler focuses on the justification for such objections. But as an ad hominem argument, it is not automatically illegitimate.

Butler never met the famous Scottish empiricist David Hume, but Hume had great respect for Butler and his arguments. Some have suggested, though it cannot be proven, that Cleanthes in Hume’s Dialogues is meant to represent Butler.

Perhaps most important from an evaluative perspective, and in line with the new Enlightenment methodology, Anders Jeffner has suggested that one of the key and most self-destructive features in Butler’s argument is the “aspiration to a reasonable theology.” This aspiration emerges in Butler in two ways. The first is an endeavor to accept a religious doctrine, revealed or not, only if it is based on arguments that can be tested by people regardless of their religious status. The second is an attempt only to use such scientific results as are achieved without any theological or metaphysical premises. So, says Jeffner, “If Hume’s arguments against Butler are valid, he has demonstrated in an important field that the aspiration to a reasonable theology leads to the dissolution of theology.”[10] If Jeffner is correct here, this is a devastating critique of Butler’s method, or any other method that attempts to prove revealed religion based on some kind of universal, reasonable tenets.

1. Samuel Clarke (1675–1729) was an English philosopher and Anglican minister. Butler was influenced by and carried on correspondence with Clarke, which he later published in 1716.

2. While it may not be the case that the entire Analogy is devoted to a refutation of deism, there is no doubt that the last part is, and there is no doubt that the first part addresses problems that were endemic to deism generally.

3. C. D. Broad, Five Types of Ethical Theory (London: Routledge, 2008), 5.

4. Two significant studies on Butler have influenced the discussion here: Terence Penelhum, Butler (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985); Anders Jeffner, Butler and Hume on Religion: A Comparative Analysis (Stockholm: Diakonistyrelsens bokforlag, 1966).

5. David White notes that Butler also takes on John Locke’s theory of personal identity, albeit not persuasively. See David E. White, “Joseph Butler (1692–1752),” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/butler.htm. Thomas Reid, on the other hand, thinks that Butler’s notion of personal identity succeeds in refuting Locke’s.

6. If we compare this method with Pascal’s, we can see some substantive similarities. Both men argue, at least generally, that if there are no definitive and certain disproofs of revealed religion, then we would do well to take seriously its claims.

7. Penelhum, Butler, 104ff.

8. Ibid., 92.

9. Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation: Or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature (London: 1730), 105.

10. Jeffner, Butler and Hume on Religion, 20.

Analogy of Religion

Part I

Of Natural Religion

(Chapters I–II)

Chapter I

Of a Future Life

Strange difficulties have been raised by some concerning personal identity, or the sameness of living agents, implied in the notion of our existing now and hereafter, or in any two successive moments; which whoever thinks it worthwhile, may see considered in the first Dissertation at the end of this Treatise. But without regard to any of them here, let us consider what the analogy of nature, and the several changes which we have undergone, and those which we know we may undergo without being destroyed, suggest, as to the effect which death may, or may not, have upon us; and whether it be not from thence probable, that we may survive this change, and exist in a future state of life and perception.

I. From our being born into the present world in the helpless imperfect state of infancy, and having arrived from thence to mature age, we find it to be a general law of nature in our own species, that the same creatures, the same individuals, should exist in degrees of life and perception, with capacities of action, of enjoyment and suffering, in one period of their being, greatly different from those appointed them in another period of it. And in other creatures the same law holds. For the difference of their capacities and states of life at their birth (to go no higher) and in maturity; the change of worms into flies, and the vast enlargement of their locomotive powers by such change: and birds and insects bursting the shell of their habitation, and by this means entering into a new world, furnished with new accommodations for them, and finding a new sphere of action assigned them; these are instances of this general law of nature. Thus all the various and wonderful transformations of animals are to be taken into consideration here. But the states of life in which we ourselves existed formerly in the womb and in our infancy, are almost as different from our present in mature age, as it is possible to conceive any two states or degrees of life can be. Therefore that we are to exist hereafter, in a state as different (suppose) from our present, as this is from our former, is but according to the analogy of nature; according to a natural order or appointment of the very same kind, with what we have already experienced.

II. We know we are endued with capacities of action, of happiness and misery: for we are conscious of acting, of enjoying pleasure and suffering pain. Now that we have these powers and capacities before death, is a presumption that we shall retain them through and after death; indeed a probability of it abundantly sufficient to act upon, unless there be some positive reason to think that death is the destruction of those living powers: because there is in every case a probability, that all things will continue as we experience they are, in all respects, except those in which we have some reason to think they will be altered. This is that kind[1]of presumption or probability from analogy, expressed in the very word continuance, which seems our only natural reason for believing the course of the world will continue to-morrow, as it has done so far as our experience or knowledge of history can carry us back. Nay it seems our only reason for believing, that any one substance now existing will continue to exist a moment longer; the self-existent substance only excepted. Thus if men were assured that the unknown event, death, was not the destruction of our faculties of perception and of action, there would be no apprehension, that any other power or event, unconnected with this of death, would destroy these faculties just at the instant of each creature’s death; and therefore no doubt but that they would remain after it; which shows the high probability that our living powers will continue after death, unless there be some ground to think that death is their destruction.[2] For, if it would be in a manner certain that we should survive death, provided it were certain that death would not be our destruction, it must be highly probable we shall survive it, if there be no ground to think death will be our destruction.

Now, though I think it must be acknowledged, that prior to the natural and moral proofs of a future life commonly insisted upon, there would arise a general confused suspicion, that in the great shock and alteration which we shall undergo by death, we, i.e. our living powers, might be wholly destroyed; yet even prior to those proofs, there is really no particular distinct ground or reason for this apprehension at all, so far as I can find. If there be, it must arise either from the reason of the thing, or from the analogy of nature.

But we cannot argue from the reason of the thing, that death is the destruction of living agents, because we know not at all what death is in itself; but only some of its effects, such as the dissolution of flesh, skin, and bones. And these effects do in no wise appear to imply the destruction of a living agent. And besides, as we are greatly in the dark, upon what the exercise of our living powers depends, so we are wholly ignorant what the powers themselves depend upon; the powers themselves as distinguished, not only from their actual exercise, but also from the present capacity of exercising them; and as opposed to their destruction: for sleep, or however a swoon, shows us, not only that these powers exist when they are not exercised, as the passive power of motion does in inanimate matter; but shows also that they exist, when there is no present capacity of exercising them: or that the capacities of exercising them for the present, as well as the actual exercise of them, may be suspended, and yet the powers themselves remain undestroyed. Since then we know not at all upon what the existence of our living powers depends, this shows further, there can no probability be collected from the reason of the thing, that death will be their destruction: because their existence may depend upon somewhat in no degree affected by death; upon somewhat quite out of the reach of this king of terrors. So that there is nothing more certain, than that the reason of the thing shows us no connexion between death and the destruction of living agents. Nor can we find any thing throughout the whole analogy of nature, to afford us even the slightest presumption, that animals ever lose their living powers; much less if it were possible, that they lose them by death: for we have no faculties wherewith to trace any beyond or through it, so as to see what becomes of them. This event removes them from our view. It destroys the sensible proof, which we had before their death, of their being possessed of living powers, but does not appear to afford the least reason to believe that they are, then, or by that event, deprived, of them.

And our knowing, that they were possessed of these powers, up to the very period to which we have faculties capable of tracing them, is itself a probability of their retaining them beyond it. And this is confirmed, and a sensible credibility is given to it, by observing the very great and astonishing changes which we have experienced; so great, that our existence in another state of life, of perception and of action, will be but according to a method of providential conduct, the like to which has been already exercised even with regard to ourselves; according to a course of nature, the like to which we have already gone through.

However, as one cannot but be greatly sensible, how difficult it is to silence imagination enough to make the voice of reason even distinctly heard in this case; as we are accustomed, from our youth up, to indulge that forward, delusive faculty, ever obtruding beyond its sphere; of some assistance indeed to apprehension, but the author of all error: as we plainly lose ourselves in gross and crude conceptions of things, taking for granted that we are acquainted with what indeed we are wholly ignorant of: it may be proper to consider the imaginary presumptions, that death will be our destruction, arising from these kinds of early and lasting prejudices; and to show how little they can really amount to, even though we cannot wholly divest ourselves of them. And,

I. All presumption of death’s being the destruction of living beings, must go upon supposition that they are compounded; and so, discerptible. But since consciousness is a single and indivisible power, it should seem that the subject in which it resides must be so too. For were the motion of any particle of matter absolutely one and indivisible, so as that it should imply a contradiction to suppose part of this motion to exist, and part not to exist, i.e. part of this matter to move, and part to be at rest; then its power of motion would be indivisible; and so also would the subject in which the power inheres, namely, the particle of matter: for if this could be divided into two, one part might be moved and the other at rest, which is contrary to the supposition. In like manner it has been argued,[3] and, for any thing appearing to the contrary, justly, that since the perception or consciousness, which we have of our own existence, is indivisible, so as that it is a contradiction to suppose one part of it should be here and the other there; the perceptive power, or the power of consciousness, is indivisible too: and consequently the subject in which it resides; i.e. the conscious Being. Now upon supposition that living agent each man calls himself, is thus a single being, which there is at least no more difficulty in conceiving than in conceiving it to be a compound, and of which there is the proof now mentioned; it follows, that our organized bodies are no more ourselves or part of ourselves, than any other matter around us. And, it is as easy to conceive, how matter, which is no part of ourselves, may be appropriated to us in the manner which our present bodies are; as how we can receive impressions from, and have power over, any matter. It is as easy to conceive, that we may exist out of bodies, as in them; that we might have animated bodies of any other organs and senses wholly different from these now given us, and that we may hereafter animate these same or new bodies variously modified and organized; as to conceive how we can animate such bodies as our present. And lastly, the dissolution of all these several organized bodies, supposing ourselves to have successively animated them, would have no more conceivable tendency to destroy the living beings ourselves, or deprive us of living faculties, the faculties of perception and of action, than the dissolution of any foreign matter, which we are capable of receiving impressions from, and making use of, for the common occasions of life.

II. The simplicity and absolute oneness of a living agent cannot indeed, from the nature of the thing, be properly proved by experimental observations. But as these fall in with the supposition of its unity, so they plainly lead us to conclude certainly, that our gross organized bodies, with which we perceive the objects of sense, and with which we act, are no part of ourselves; and therefore show us, that we have no reason to believe their destruction to be ours: even without determining whether our living substances be material or immaterial. For we see by experience, that men may lose their limbs, their organs of sense, and even the greatest part of these bodies, and yet remain the same living agents. And persons can trace up the existence of themselves to a time, when the bulk of their bodies was extremely small, in comparison of what it is in mature age: and we cannot but think, that they might then have lost a considerable part of that small body, and yet have remained the same living agents; as they may now lose great part of their present body, and remain so. And it is certain, that the bodies of all animals are in a constant flux, from that never-ceasing attrition, which there is in every part of them. Now things of this kind unavoidably teach us to distinguish, between these living agents ourselves, and large quantities of matter, in which we are very nearly interested: since these may be alienated, and actually are in a daily course of succession, and changing their owners; whilst we are assured, that each living agent remains one and the same permanent being.[4] And this general observation leads us on to the following ones.

First, That we have no way of determining by experience, what is the certain bulk of the living being each man calls himself: and yet, till it be determined that it is larger in bulk than the solid elementary particles of matter, which there is no ground to think any natural power can dissolve, there is no sort of reason to think death to be the dissolution of it, of the living being, even though it should not be absolutely indiscerptible.

Secondly, From our being so nearly related to and interested in certain systems of matter, suppose our flesh and bones, and afterwards ceasing to be at all related to them, the living agents ourselves remaining all this while undestroyed notwithstanding such alienation; and consequently these systems of matter not being ourselves: it follows further, that we have no ground to conclude any other, suppose internal systems of matter, to be the living agents ourselves; because we can have no ground to conclude this, but from our relation to and interest in such other systems of matter: and therefore we can have no reason to conclude, what befalls those systems of matter at death, to be the destruction of the living agents. We have already several times over lost a great part or perhaps the whole of our body, according to certain common established laws of nature; yet we remain the same living agents: when we shall lose as great a part, or the whole, by another common established law of nature, death; why may we not also remain the same? That the alienation has been gradual in one case, and in the other will be more at once, does not prove any thing to the contrary. We have passed undestroyed through those many and great revolutions of matter, so peculiarly appropriated to us ourselves; why should we imagine death will be so fatal to us? Nor can it be objected, that what is thus alienated or lost, is no part of our original solid body, but only adventitious matter; because we may lose entire limbs, which must have contained many solid parts and vessels of the original body; or if this be not admitted, we have no proof, that any of these solid parts are dissolved or alienated by death. Though, by the way, we are very nearly related to that extraneous or adventitious matter, whilst it continues united to and distending the several parts of our solid body. But after all; the relation a person bears to those parts of his body, to which he is the most nearly related; what does it appear to amount to but this, that the living agent, and those parts of the body, mutually affect each other? And the same thing, the same thing in kind though not in degree, may be said of all foreign matter, which gives us ideas, and which we have any power over. From these observations the whole ground of the imagination is removed, that the dissolution of any matter, is the destruction of a living agent, from the interest he once had in such matter.

Thirdly, If we consider our body somewhat more distinctly, as made up of organs and instruments of perception and of motion, it will bring us to the same conclusion, Thus the common optical experiments show, and even the observation how sight is assisted by glasses shows, that we see with our eyes in the same sense as we see with glasses. Nor is there any reason to believe, that we see with them in any other sense; any other, I mean, which would lead us to think the eye itself a percipient. The like is to be said of hearing and our feeling distant solid matter by means of somewhat in our hand seems an instance of the like kind, as to the subject we are considering. All these are instances of foreign matter, or such as is no part of our body, being instrumental in preparing objects for, and conveying them to, the perceiving power, in a manner similar or like to the manner in which our organs of sense prepare and convey them. Both are in a like way instruments of our receiving such ideas from external objects, as the Author of nature appointed those external objects to be the occasions of exciting in us. However, glasses are evidently instances of this; namely of matter which is no part of our body, preparing objects for and conveying them towards the perceiving power, in like manner as our bodily organs do. And if we see with our eyes only in the same manner as we do with glasses, the like may justly be concluded, from analogy, of all our other senses. It is not intended, by any thing here said, to affirm, that the whole apparatus of vision, or of perception by any other of our senses; can be traced through all its steps, quite up to the living power of seeing, or perceiving: but that so far as it can be traced by experimental observations, so far it appears, that our organs of sense prepare and convey on objects, in order to their being perceived, in like manner as foreign matter does, without affording any shadow of appearance, that they themselves perceive. And that we have no reason to think our organs of sense percipients, is confirmed by instances of persons losing some of them, the living beings themselves, their former occupiers, remaining unimpaired. It is confirmed also by the experience of dreams; by which we find we are at present possessed of a latent, and what would otherwise be, an unimagined unknown power of perceiving sensible objects, in as strong and lively a manner without our external organs of sense as with them.

So also with regard to our power of moving, or directing motion by will and choice; upon the destruction of a limb, this active power remains, as it evidently seems, unlessened; so as that the living being, who has suffered this loss, would be capable of moving as before, if it had another limb to move with. It can walk by the help of an artificial leg; just as it can make use of a pole or a lever, to reach towards itself and to move things, beyond the length and the power of its natural arm; and this last it does in the same manner as it reaches and moves, with its natural arm, things nearer and of less weight. Nor is there so much as any appearance of our limbs being endued with a power of moving or directing themselves; though they are adapted; like the several parts; of a machine, to be the instruments of motion to each other; and some parts of the same limb, to be instruments of motion to other parts of it.

Thus a man determines, that he will look at such an object through a microscope; or being lame suppose, that he will walk to such a place with a staff a week hence. His eyes and his feet no more determine in these cases, than the microscope and the staff. Nor is there any ground to think they any more put the determination in practice; or that his eyes are the seers or his feet the movers, in any other sense than as the microscope and the staff are. Upon the whole then, our organs of sense and our limbs are certainly instruments, which the living persons ourselves make use of to perceive and move with: there is not any probability, that they are any more; nor consequently, that we have any other kind of relation to them, than what we have to any other foreign matter formed into instruments of perception and motion, suppose into a microscope or a staff (I say any other kind of relation, for I am not speaking of the degree of it); nor consequently is there any probability, that the alienation or dissolution of these instruments is the destruction of the perceiving and moving agent.

And thus our finding, that the dissolution of matter, in which living beings were most nearly interested, is not their dissolution; and that the destruction of several of the organs and instruments of perception and of motion belonging to them, is not their destruction; shows demonstratively, that there is no ground to think that the dissolution of any other matter, or destruction of any other organs and instruments, will be the dissolution or destruction of living agents, from the like kind of relation. And we have no reason to think we stand in any other kind of relation to any thing which we find dissolved by death.

But it is said these observations are equally applicable to brutes: and it is thought an insuperable difficulty, that they should be immortal, and by consequence capable of everlasting happiness. Now this manner of expression is both invidious and weak: but the thing intended by it, is really no difficulty at all, either in the way of natural or moral consideration. For 1st, Suppose the invidious thing, designed in such a manner of expression, were really implied, as it is not in the least, in the natural immortality of brutes: namely, that they must arrive at great attainments, and become rational and moral agents; even this would be no difficulty: since we know not what latent powers and capacities they may be endued with. There was once, prior to experience, as great presumption against human creatures as there is against the brute creatures, arriving at that degree of understanding, which we have in mature age. For we can trace up our own existence to the same original with theirs. And we find it to be a general law of nature, that creatures endued with capacities of virtue and religion should be placed in a condition of being, in which they are altogether without the use of them, for a considerable length of their duration; as in infancy and childhood. And great part of the human species go out of the present world, before they come to the exercise of these capacities in any degree at all. But then, 2dly, the natural immortality of brutes does not in the least imply, that they are endued with any latent capacities of a rational or moral nature. And the economy of the universe might require, that there should be living creatures without any capacities of this kind. And all difficulties as to the manner how they are to be disposed of are so apparently and wholly founded in our ignorance, that it is wonderful they should be insisted upon by any, but such as are weak enough to think they are acquainted with the whole system of things. There is then absolutely nothing at all in this objection, which is so rhetorically urged, against the greatest part of the natural proofs or presumptions of the immortality of human minds; I say the greatest part; for it is less applicable to the following observation, which is more peculiar to mankind:

III. That as it is evident our present powers and capacities of reason, memory, and affection, do not depend upon our gross body in the manner in which perception by our organs of sense does; so they do not appear to depend upon it at all in any such manner, as to give ground to think, that the dissolution of this body will be the destruction of these our present powers of reflection, as it will of our powers of sensation; or to give ground to conclude, even that it will be so much as a suspension of the former.

Human creatures exist at present in two states of life and perception, greatly different from each other; each of which has its own peculiar laws and its own peculiar enjoyments and sufferings. When any of our senses are affected or appetites gratified with the objects of them, we may be said to exist or live in a state of sensation. When none of our senses are affected or appetites gratified, and yet we perceive, and reason, and act; we may be said to exist or live in a state of reflection. Now it is by no means certain, that any thing which is dissolved by death, is any way necessary to the living being in this its state of reflection, after ideas are gained. For, though, from our present constitution and condition of being, our external organs of sense are necessary for conveying in ideas to our reflecting powers, as carriages, and levers, and scaffolds are in architecture: yet when these ideas are brought in, we are capable of reflecting in the most intense degree, and of enjoying the greatest pleasure, and feeling the greatest pain, by means of that reflection, without any assistance from our senses; and without any at all, which we know of, from that body which will be dissolved by death. It does not appear then, that the relation of this gross body to the reflecting being is, in any degree, necessary to thinking; to our intellectual enjoyments or sufferings: nor, consequently, that the dissolution or alienation of the former by death, will be the destruction of those present powers, which render us capable of this state of reflection. Further, there are instances of mortal diseases, which do not at all affect our present intellectual powers; and this affords a presumption, that those diseases will not destroy these present powers. Indeed, from the observations made above, it appears, that there is no presumption, from their mutually affecting each other, that the dissolution of the body is the destruction of the living agent. And by the same reasoning, it must appear too, that there is no presumption, from their mutually affecting each other, that the dissolution of the body is the destruction of our present reflecting powers: but instances of their not affecting each other, afford a presumption of the contrary. Instances of mortal diseases not impairing our present reflecting powers, evidently turn our thoughts even from imagining such diseases to be the destruction of them. Several things indeed greatly affect all our living powers, and at length suspend the exercise of them; as for instance drowsiness, increasing till it ends in sound sleep: and from hence we might have imagined it would destroy them, till we found by experience the weakness of this way of judging. But in the diseases now mentioned, there is not so much as this shadow of probability, to lead us to any such conclusion, as to the reflecting powers which we have at present. For in those diseases, persons the moment before death appear to be in the highest vigour of life. They discover apprehension, memory, reason, all entire; with the utmost force of affection; sense of a character, of shame and honour; and the highest mental enjoyments and sufferings, even to the last gasp: and these surely prove even greater vigour of life than bodily strength does. Now what pretence is there for thinking, that a progressive disease when arrived to such a degree, I mean that degree which is mortal, will destroy those powers, which were not impaired, which were not affected by it, during its whole progress quite up to that degree? And if death by diseases of this kind is not the destruction of our present reflecting powers, it will scarce be thought that death by any other means is.

It is obvious that this general observation may be carried on further: and there appears so little connexion between our bodily powers of sensation, and our present powers of reflection, that there is no reason to conclude, that death, which destroys the former, does so much as suspend, the exercise of the latter, or interrupt our continuing to exist in the like state of reflection which we do now. For suspension of reason, memory, and the affections which they excite, is no part of the idea of death, nor is implied in our notion of it. And our daily experiencing these powers to be exercised, without any assistance, that we know of, from those bodies, which will be dissolved by death; and our finding often, that the exercise of them is so lively to the last; these things afford a sensible apprehension, that death may not perhaps be so much as a discontinuance of the exercise of these powers, nor of the enjoyments and sufferings which it implies.[5] So that our posthumous life, whatever there may be in it additional to our present, yet may not be entirely beginning anew; but going on. Death may, in some sort and in some respects, answer to our birth; which is not a suspension of the faculties which we had before it, or a total change of the state of life in which we existed when in the womb; but a continuation of both, with such and such great alterations.

Nay, for ought we know of ourselves, of our present life and of death; death may immediately, in the natural course of things, put us into a higher and more enlarged state of life, as our birth does;[6] a state in which our capacities, and sphere of perception and of action, may be much greater than at present. For as our relation to our external organs of sense, renders us capable of existing in our present state of sensation; so it may be the only natural hinderance to our existing, immediately, and of course, in a higher state of reflection. The truth is, reason does not at all show us, in what state death naturally leaves us. But were we sure, that it would suspend all our perceptive and active powers; yet the suspension of a power and the destruction of it, are effects so totally different in kind, as we experience from sleep and a swoon, that we cannot in any wise argue from one to the other; or conclude even to the lowest degree of probability, that the same kind of force which is sufficient to suspend our faculties, though it be increased ever so much, will be sufficient to destroy them.

These observations together may be sufficient to show, how little presumption there is, that death is the destruction of human creatures. However, there is the shadow of an analogy, which may lead us to imagine it is the supposed likeness which is observed between the decay of vegetables, and of living creatures. And this likeness is indeed sufficient to afford the poets very apt allusions to the flowers of the field, in their pictures of the frailty of our present life. But in reason, the analogy is so far from holding, that there appears no ground even for the comparison, as to the present question; because one of the two subjects compared is wholly void of that, which is the principal and chief thing in the other, the power of perception and of action; and which is the only thing we are inquiring about the continuance of. So that the destruction of a vegetable, is an event not similar or analogous to the destruction of a living agent.

But if, as was above intimated, leaving off the delusive custom of substituting imagination in the room of experience, we would confine ourselves to what we do know and understand; if we would argue only from that, and from that form our expectations; it would appear at first sight, that as no probability of living beings ever ceasing to be so, can be concluded from the reason of the thing; so none can be collected from the analogy of Nature; because we cannot trace any living beings beyond death. But as we are conscious that we are endued with capacities of perception and of action, and are living persons; what we are to go upon is, that we shall continue so, till we foresee some accident or event, which will endanger those capacities, or be likely to destroy us: which death does in no wise appear to be.

And thus, when we go out of this world, we may pass into new scenes, and a new state of life and action, just as naturally as we came into the present. And this new state may naturally be a social one. And the advantages of it, advantages of every kind, may naturally be bestowed, according to some fixed general laws of wisdom, upon every one in proportion to the degrees of his virtue. And though the advantages of that future natural state should not be bestowed, as these of the present in some measure are, by the will of the society; but entirely by his more immediate action, upon whom the whole frame of nature depends: yet this distribution may be just as natural, as their being distributed here by the instrumentality of men. And indeed, though one were to allow any confused undetermined sense, which people please to put upon the word natural, it would be a shortness of thought scarce credible, to imagine, that no system or course of things can be so, but only what we see at present:[7] especially whilst the probability of a future life, or the natural immortality of the soul, is admitted upon the evidence of reason; because this is really both admitting and denying at once, a state of being different from the present to be natural. But the only distinct meaning of that word is, stated, fixed, or settled: since what is natural as much requires and presupposes an intelligent agent to render it so, i.e. to effect it continually, or at stated times; as what is supernatural or miraculous does to effect it for once. And from hence it must follow, that persons’ notion of what is natural, will be enlarged in proportion to their greater knowledge of the works of God, and the dispensations of his Providence. Nor is there any absurdity in supposing, that there may be beings in the universe, whose capacities, and knowledge, and views, may be so extensive, as that the whole Christian dispensation may to them appear natural, i.e. analogous or conformable to God’s dealings with other parts of his creation; as natural as the visible known course of things appears to us. For there seems scarce any other possible sense to be put upon the word, but that only in which it is here used; similar, stated, or uniform.

This credibility of a future life, which has been here insisted upon, how little soever it may satisfy our curiosity, seems to answer all the purposes of religion, in like manner as a demonstrative proof would. Indeed a proof, even a demonstrative one, of a future life, would not be a proof of religion. For, that we are to live hereafter, is just as reconcilable with the scheme of atheism, and as well to be accounted for by it, as that we are now alive is: and therefore nothing can be more absurd than to argue from that scheme, that there can be no future state. But as religion implies a future state, any presumption against such a state, is a presumption against religion. And the foregoing observations remove all presumptions of that sort, and prove, to a very considerable degree of probability, one fundamental doctrine of religion; which, if believed, would greatly open and dispose the mind seriously to attend to the general evidence of the whole.

Chapter II

Of the Government of God by Rewards and Punishments;

and Particularly of the Latter

That which makes the question concerning a future life to be of so great importance to us, is our capacity of happiness and misery. And that which makes the consideration of it to be of so great importance to us, is the supposition of our happiness and misery hereafter depending upon our actions here. Without this indeed, curiosity could not but sometimes bring a subject, in which we may be so highly interested, to our thoughts; especially upon the mortality of others, or the near prospect of our own. But reasonable men would not take any further thought about hereafter, than what should happen thus occasionally to rise in their minds, if it were certain that our future interest no way depended upon our present behaviour; whereas, on the contrary, if there be ground, either from analogy or any thing else, to think it does; then there is reason also for the most active thought and solicitude, to secure that interest; to behave so as that we may escape that misery, and obtain that happiness, in another life, which we not only suppose ourselves capable of, but which we apprehend also is put in our own power. And whether there be ground for this last apprehension, certainly would deserve to be most seriously considered, were there no other proof of a future life and interest, than that presumptive one, which the foregoing observations amount to.

Now in the present state, all which we enjoy, and a great part of what we suffer, is put in our own power. For pleasure and pain are the consequences of our actions; and we are endued by the Author of our nature with capacities of foreseeing these consequences. We find by experience he does not so much as preserve our lives, exclusively of our own care and attention, to provide ourselves with, and to make use of, that sustenance, by which he has appointed our lives shall be preserved; and without which, he has appointed, they shall not be preserved at all. And in general we foresee, that the external things, which are the objects of our various passions, can neither be obtained nor enjoyed, without exerting ourselves in such and such manners: but by thus exerting ourselves, we obtain and enjoy these objects, in which our natural good consists; or by this means God gives us the possession and enjoyment of them. I know not, that we have any one kind or degree of enjoyment, but by the means of our own actions. And by prudence and care, we may, for the most part, pass our days in tolerable ease and quiet: or, on the contrary, we may, by rashness, ungoverned passion, wilfulness, or even by negligence, make ourselves as miserable as ever we please. And many do please to make themselves extremely miserable, i.e. to do what they know beforehand will render them so. They follow those ways, the fruit of which they know, by instruction, example, experience, will be disgrace, and poverty, and sickness, and untimely death. This every one observes to be the general course of things; though it is to be allowed, we cannot find by experience, that all our sufferings are owing to our own follies.

Why the Author of Nature does not give his creatures promiscuously such and such perceptions, without regard to their behaviour; why he does not make them happy without the instrumentality of their own actions, and prevent their bringing any sufferings upon themselves; is another matter. Perhaps there may be some impossibilities in the nature of things, which we are unacquainted with.[1] Or less happiness, it may be, would upon the whole be produced by such a method of conduct, than is by the present. Or perhaps divine goodness, with which, if I mistake not, we make very free in our speculations, may not be a bare single disposition to produce happiness; but a disposition to make the good, the faithful, the honest man happy. Perhaps an infinitely perfect Mind may be pleased with seeing his creatures behave suitably to the nature which he has given them; to the relations which he has placed them in to each other; and to that which they stand in to himself: that relation to himself, which, during their existence, is even necessary, and which is the most important one of all: perhaps, I say, an infinitely perfect Mind may be pleased with this moral piety of moral agents, in and for itself; as well as upon account of its being essentially conducive to the happiness of his creation. Or the whole end, for which God made, and thus governs the world, may be utterly beyond the reach of our faculties: there may be somewhat in it as impossible for us to have any conception of, as for a blind man to have a conception of colours. But however this be, it is certain matter of universal experience, that the general method of divine administration is, forewarning us, or giving us capacities to foresee, with more or less clearness, that if we act so and so, we shall have such enjoyments; if so and so, such sufferings; and giving us those enjoyments, and making us feel those sufferings, in consequence of our actions.

“But all this is to be ascribed to the general course of nature.” True. This is the very thing which I am observing. It is to be ascribed to the general course of nature: i.e. not surely to the words or ideas, course of nature; but to him who appointed it, and put things into it: or to a course of operation, from its uniformity or constancy, called natural; and which necessarily implies an operating agent. For when men find themselves necessitated to confess an Author of Nature, or that God is the natural governor of the world; they must not deny this again, because his government is uniform; they must not deny that he does things at all, because he does them constantly; because the effects of his acting are permanent, whether his acting be so or not; though there is no reason to think it is not. In short, every man, in every thing he does, naturally acts upon the forethought and apprehension of avoiding evil or obtaining good: and if the natural course of things be the appointment of God, and our natural faculties of knowledge and experience are given us by him; then the good and bad consequences which follow our actions, are his appointment, and our foresight of those consequences, is a warning given us by him, how we are to act.

“Is the pleasure then, naturally accompanying every particular gratification of passion, intended to put us upon gratifying ourselves in every such particular instance, and as a reward to us for so doing?” No certainly. Nor is it to be said, that our eyes were naturally intended to give us the sight of each particular object, to which they do or can extend; objects which are destructive of them, or which, for any other reason, it may become us to turn our eyes from. Yet there is no doubt, but that our eyes were intended for us to see with. So neither is there any doubt, but that the foreseen pleasures and pains belonging to the passions, were intended, in general, to induce mankind to act in such and such manners.

Now from this general observation, obvious to every one, that God has given us to understand, he has appointed satisfaction and delight to be the consequence of our acting in one manner, and pain and uneasiness of our acting in another, and of our not acting at all; and that we find the consequences, which we were beforehand informed of, uniformly to follow; we may learn, that we are at present actually under his government in the strictest and most proper sense; in such a sense, as that he rewards and punishes us for our actions. An Author of nature being supposed, it is not so much a deduction of reason, as a matter of experience, that we are thus under his government; under his government in the same sense, as we are under the government of civil magistrates. Because the annexing pleasure to some actions, and pain to others, in our power to do or forbear, and giving notice of this appointment beforehand to those whom it concerns; is the proper formal notion of government. Whether the pleasure or pain which thus follows upon our behaviour, be owing to the Author of Nature’s acting upon us every moment which we feel it; or to his having at once contrived and executed his own part in the plan of the world; makes no alteration as to the matter before us. For if civil magistrates could make the sanctions of their laws take place, without interposing at all, after they had passed them; without a trial, and the formalities of an execution: if they were able to make their laws execute themselves, or every offender to execute them upon himself; we should be just in the same sense under their government then, as we are now; but in a much higher degree, and more perfect manner. Vain is the ridicule, with which one foresees some persons will divert themselves, upon finding lesser pains considered as instances of divine punishment. There is no possibility of answering or evading the general thing here intended, without denying all final causes. For final causes being admitted, the pleasures and pains now mentioned must be admitted too as instances of them. And if they are; if God annexes delight to some actions, and uneasiness to others, with an apparent design to induce us to act so and so: then he not only dispenses happiness and misery, but also rewards and punishes actions. If, for example, the pain which we feel, upon doing what tends to the destruction of our bodies, suppose upon too near approaches to fire, or upon wounding ourselves, be appointed by the Author of Nature to prevent our doing what thus tends to our destruction; this is altogether as much an instance of his punishing our actions, and consequently of our being under his government, as declaring by a voice from heaven, that if we acted so, he would inflict such pain upon us, and inflicting it, whether it be greater or less.

Thus we find, that the true notion or conception of the Author of Nature, is that of a master or governor, prior to the consideration of his moral attributes. The fact of our case, which we find by experience, is, that he actually exercises dominion or government over us at present, by rewarding and punishing us for our actions, in as strict and proper a sense of these words, and even in the same sense, as children, servants, subjects, are rewarded and punished by those who govern them.

And thus the whole analogy of Nature, the whole present course of things, most fully shows, that there is nothing incredible in the general doctrine of religion, that God will reward and punish men for their actions hereafter: nothing incredible, I mean, arising out of the notion of rewarding and punishing. For the whole course of nature is a present instance of his exercising that government over us, which implies in it rewarding and punishing.

But as divine punishment is what men chiefly object against, and are most unwilling to allow; it may be proper to mention some circumstances in the natural course of punishments at present, which are analogous to what religion teaches us concerning a future state of punishment; indeed so analogous, that as they add a further credibility to it, so they cannot but raise a most serious apprehension of it in those who will attend to them.

It has been now observed, that such and such miseries naturally follow such and such actions of imprudence and wilfulness, as well as actions more commonly and more distinctly considered as vicious; and that these consequences, when they may be foreseen, are properly natural punishments annexed to such actions. For the general thing here insisted upon, is, not that we see a great deal of misery in the world, but a great deal which men bring upon themselves by their own behaviour, which they might have foreseen and avoided. Now the circumstances of these natural punishments, particularly deserving our attention, are such as these; That oftentimes they follow, or are inflicted in consequence of, actions which procure many present advantages, and are accompanied with much present pleasure; for instance, sickness and untimely death are the consequence of intemperance, though accompanied with the highest mirth and jollity: that these punishments are often much greater, than the advantages or pleasures obtained by the actions, of which they are the punishments or consequences: that though we may imagine a constitution of nature, in which these natural punishments, which are in fact to follow, would follow, immediately upon such actions being done, or very soon after; we find on the contrary in our world, that they are often delayed a great while, sometimes even till long after the actions occasioning them are forgot; so that the constitution of nature is such, that delay of punishment is no sort nor degree of presumption of final impunity: that after such delay, these natural punishments or miseries often come, not by degrees, but suddenly, with violence, and at once; however, the chief misery often does: that as certainty of such distant misery following such actions, is never afforded persons; so perhaps during the actions, they have seldom a distinct, full expectation of its following:[2] and many times the case is only thus, that they see in general, or may see, the credibility, that intemperance, suppose, will bring after it diseases; civil crimes, civil punishments; when yet the real probability often is, that they shall escape; but things notwithstanding take their destined course, and the misery inevitably follows at its appointed time, in very many of these cases. Thus also though youth may be alleged as an excuse for rashness and folly, as being naturally thoughtless, and not clearly foreseeing all the consequences of being untractable and profligate; this does not hinder, but that these consequences follow; and are grievously felt, throughout the whole course of mature life. Habits contracted even in that age, are often utter ruin: and men’s success in the world, not only in the common sense of worldly success, but their real happiness and misery, depends, in a great degree, and in various ways, upon the manner in which they pass their youth which consequences they for the most part neglect to consider, and perhaps seldom can properly be said to believe, beforehand. It requires also to be mentioned, that, in numberless cases, the natural course of things affords us opportunities for procuring advantages to ourselves at certain times, which we cannot procure when we will; nor ever recall the opportunities, if we have neglected them. Indeed the general course of nature is an example of this. If, during the opportunity of youth, persons are indocile and self-willed; they inevitably suffer in their future life, for want of those acquirements, which they neglected the natural season of attaining. If the husbandman lets his seedtime pass without sowing, the whole year is lost to him beyond recovery. In like manner, though after men have been guilty of folly and extravagance up to a certain degree, it is often in their power, for instance, to retrieve their affairs, to recover their health and character; at least in good measure, yet real reformation is in many cases, of no avail at all towards preventing the miseries, poverty, sickness, infamy, naturally annexed to folly and extravagance exceeding that degree. There is a certain bound to imprudence and misbehaviour, which being transgressed, there remains no place for repentance in the natural course of things. It is further very much to be remarked, that neglects from inconsiderateness, want of attention,[3] not looking about us to see what we have to do, are often attended with consequences altogether as dreadful, as any active misbehaviour, from the most extravagant passion. And lastly, civil government being natural, the punishments of it are so too: and some of these punishments are capital; as the effects of a dissolute course of pleasure are often mortal. So that many natural punishments are final[4] to him who incurs them, if considered only in his temporal capacity: and seem inflicted by natural appointment, either to remove the offender out of the way of being further mischievous; or as an example, though frequently a disregarded one, to those who are left behind.

These things are not what we call accidental, or to be met with only now and then; but they are things of every day’s experience: they proceed from general laws, very general ones, by which God governs the world, in the natural course of his providence. And they are so analogous, to what Religion teaches us concerning the future punishment of the wicked, so much of a piece with it, that both would naturally be expressed in the very same words, and manner of description. In the book of Proverbs,[5] for instance, Wisdom is introduced, as frequenting the most public places of resort, and as rejected when she offers herself as the natural appointed guide of human life. “How long,” speaking to those who are passing through it, “how long, ye simple ones, will ye love folly, and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge? Turn ye at my reproof. Behold, I will pour out my spirit upon you, I will make known my words unto you. But upon being neglected, Because I have called, and ye refused, I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity, I will mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me.” This passage, every one sees, is poetical, and some parts of it are highly figurative; but their meaning is obvious. And the thing intended is expressed more literally in the following words; “For that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord—therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices. For the security of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them.” And the whole passage is so equally applicable to what we experience in the present world, concerning the consequences of men’s actions, and to what Religion teaches us is to be expected in another, that it may be questioned which of the two was principally intended.

Indeed when one has been recollecting the proper proofs of a future state of rewards and punishments, nothing methinks can give one so sensible an apprehension of the latter, or representation of it to the mind; as observing, that after the many disregarded checks, admonitions, and warnings, which people meet with in the ways of vice and folly and extravagance: warnings from their very nature; from the examples of others; from the lesser inconveniences which they bring upon themselves; from the instructions of wise and virtuous men: after these have been long despised, scorned, ridiculed: after the chief bad consequences, temporal consequences, of their follies, have been delayed for a great while; at length they break in irresistibly, like an armed force: repentance is too late to relieve, and can serve only to aggravate their distress, the case is become desperate: and poverty and sickness, remorse and anguish, infamy and death, the effects of their own doings, overwhelm them beyond possibility of remedy or escape. This is an account of what is in fact the general constitution of nature.

It is not in any sort meant, that, according to what appears at present of the natural course of things, men are always uniformly punished in proportion to their misbehaviour: but that there are very many instances of misbehaviour punished in the several ways now mentioned, and very dreadful instances too; sufficient to show what the laws of the universe may admit; and, if thoroughly considered, sufficient fully to answer all objections against the credibility of a future state of punishments, from any imaginations, that the frailty of our nature and external temptations, almost annihilate the guilt of human vices: as well as objections of another sort; from necessity; from suppositions, that the will of an infinite Being cannot be contradicted; or that he must be incapable of offence and provocation.[6]

Reflections of this kind are not without their terrors to serious persons, the most free from enthusiasm, and of the greatest strength of mind; but it is fit things be stated and considered as they really are. And there is, in the present age, a certain fearlessness, with regard to what may be hereafter under the government of God, which nothing but an universally acknowledged demonstration on the side of atheism can justify; and which makes it quite necessary, that men be reminded, and if possible made to feel, that there is no sort of ground for being thus presumptuous, even upon the most sceptical principles. For, may it not be said of any person upon his being born into the world, he may behave so, as to be of no service to it, but by being made an example of the woeful effects of vice and folly? That he may, as any one may, if he will, incur an infamous execution, from the hands of civil justice; or in some other course of extravagance shorten his days; or bring upon himself infamy and diseases worse than death? So that it had been better for him, even with regard to the present world, that he had never been born. And is there any pretence of reason, for people to think themselves secure, and talk as if they had certain proof, that, let them act as licentiously as they will, there can be nothing analogous to this, with regard to a future and more general interest, under the providence and government of the same God?

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Discuss Butler’s notion of probability. Should this notion be included in an apologetic argument?

2. Is Butler’s approach properly characterized as an “aspiration to a reasonable theology”? Why or why not?

3. How might a deist respond to Butler’s argument from probability?

4. How does Butler address the problem of evil?

5. How might an unbeliever respond to Butler’s argument from reward and punishment?

1. I say kind of presumption or probability; for I do not mean to affirm that there is the same degree of conviction, that our living powers will continue after death, as there is, that our substances will.

2. Destruction of living powers, is a manner of expression unavoidably ambiguous; and may signify either the destruction of a living being, so as that the same living being shall be uncapable of ever perceiving or acting again at all; or the destruction of those means and instruments by which it is capable of its present life, of its present state of perception and of action. It is here used in the former sense. When it is used in the latter, the epithet present is added. The loss of a man’s eye is a destruction of living powers in the latter sense. But we have no reason to think the destruction of living powers, in the former sense, to be possible. We have no more reason to think a being endued with living powers, ever loses them during its whole existence, than to believe that a stone ever acquires them.

3. See Dr. Clarke’s Letter to Mr. Dodwell, and the defences of it.

4. See Dissertation I.

5. There are three distinct questions, relating to a future life, here considered: Whether death be the destruction of living agents; if not, Whether it be the destruction of their present powers of reflection, as it certainly is the destruction of their present powers of sensation; and if not, Whether it be the suspension, or discontinuance of the exercise of these present reflecting powers. Now, if there be no reason to believe the last, there will be, if that were possible, less for the next, and less still for the first.

7. See Part II. Chap. ii. and Part II. Chap. iv.

1. Part I. Chap. vii.

2. See Part II. Chap. vi.

3. Part II. Chap. vi.

4. The general consideration of a future state of punishment, most evidently belongs to the subject of natural Religion. But if any of these reflections should be thought to relate more peculiarly to this doctrine, as taught in Scripture; the reader is desired to observe, that Gentile writers, both moralists, and poets, speak of the future punishment of the wicked, both as to the duration and degree of it, in a like manner of expression and of description, as the Scripture does. So that all which can positively be asserted to be matter of mere Revelation, with regard to this doctrine, seems to be, that the great distinction between the righteous and the wicked, shall be made at the end of this world; that each shall then receive according to his deserts. Reason did, as it well might, conclude that it should, finally and upon the whole, be well with the righteous, and ill with the wicked: but it could not be determined upon any principles of reason, whether human creatures might not have been appointed to pass through other states of life and being, before that distributive justice should finally and effectually take place. Revelation teaches us, that the next state of things after the present is appointed for the execution of this justice; that it shall be no longer delayed; but the mystery of God, the great mystery of his suffering vice and confusion to prevail, shall then be finished; and he will take to him his great power and will reign, by rendering to every one according to his works.

5. Chap. i.

6. See Chap. iv. and vi.

CHAPTER 8

Jonathan Edwards

(1703–1758)

Jonathan Edwards was born in East Windsor, Connecticut, and died in Princeton, New Jersey. Throughout the vast majority of his adult life (1722–1758), Edwards was a pastor, first in New York, then Connecticut, and most famously in the church his grandfather Solomon Stoddard had previously pastored in Northampton (1726–1750). Dismissed from the pastorate at Northampton due to controversy, Edwards became a missionary and pastor to the Native Americans in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, from 1751 to 1758. He was installed as president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) in 1758, but died of a smallpox vaccination only two months into his presidency. He was fifty-four.[1]

When Edwards was nineteen, he determined to write and keep together a series of thoughts and ideas on theology, philosophy, science, and the like. These “Miscellanies” and “Notebooks” track the thought of Edwards over the span of his adult life, and much of what is written there forms the background and substance of some of his published works. The miscellany included here represents some of Edwards’s most mature thought, given that it was written toward the end of his life.

The specific apologetic interests of Edwards have been less than central in studies of his thought and life. As Douglas Sweeney notes, McDermott’s Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods,[2] McClymond’s Encounters with God,[3] and Brown’s Jonathan Edwards and the Bible[4] “represent a greater scholarly interest in JE’s apologetic strategy than has existed since the early nineteenth century.”[5] With respect to apologetics, perhaps no other thinker of this period pictures for us the difficulty of maintaining a historic, orthodox theology in the midst of significant Enlightenment influences. Staunchly opposed to Enlightenment thinking, Edwards was a voracious reader of those works that attempted to undermine biblical thought and doctrine.[6] Those readings convinced him more and more throughout his life and ministry that the key to a unified understanding of knowledge could be found only by way of God’s own revelation. As Marsden notes:

Edwards believed that he could develop a unified account of all knowledge, but it could not be discovered by experience and reason alone. God might speak in all of nature and in all of life, but the only place where one could find the key to unlock the whole system was in Scripture. All knowledge must begin there. Scripture was not just a source of information but the necessary guide to a radical life-changing perspective. As every New England child was taught: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7). The starting point for unravelling the mysteries of the universe must be the shattering revelation of one’s total inadequacy and a recognition of God’s love in Jesus Christ. One who was so changed could then experience how all creation was one harmonious hymn of praise to the glories of the Creator and the mercies of Christ. Without the grace that gave sinful and rebellious people ears to hear, they would never hear the sublime Christ-like choruses or see how the particular notes of reality all fit together.[7]

What Marsden calls a “unified account of all knowledge” could not be, for Edwards, purely intellectual. As he sought to make clear in his Religious Affections, knowledge necessarily includes an affective component.

One of the more important Edwardsian distinctions in this regard is a distinction with respect to how we understand or define knowledge. Edwards speaks of a kind of knowledge, for example, of a square or a triangle, as mere “notional knowledge,” while sensible knowledge, on the other hand, “not only beholds, but has inclination.”[8] This distinction is important with respect to Edwards’s understanding of the use and function of reason. It seems that Edwards simply wants to distinguish between what might be called superficial knowledge (what he calls speculation) and what might be called sensible knowledge. Sensible knowledge would include superficial knowing but is “more than” mere speculation. One can “know” in the sense that one perceives, for example, though with that perception come simply “signs,” as Edwards calls them.[9] Knowledge that goes beyond mere perception is knowledge that is affected, knowledge with strong inclination.

Although it is difficult adequately to categorize notional or speculative knowledge, it might be useful to think of it as a kind of “formal” knowledge; it is the kind of knowledge that discerns the mere “form” of the thing and not its “matter” or substance. Edwards himself refers to Romans 2:20 in his explanation of speculative (or notional) knowledge wherein the apostle asserts that there is a “form of knowledge, and of the truth in the law.”[10] Such speculative (or notional or formal) knowledge is merely one way of thinking and understanding—apprehending, to use Edwards’s term.[11] The other type of apprehension is that which includes within it a more significant “sensible” element, that is, a sense of the heart.

Given that one of Edwards’s most important tasks in Religious Affections was to transcend the assumed opposition, or strict separation, of the head and the heart (the kind of separation seen, for example, in Charles Chauncey[12]), knowledge itself, according to Edwards, would be contextualized differently as well. If one were to assume the head and heart to be separate, one could contend, as did the Enthusiasts, that there could indeed be true religious affections without the understanding. If that were the case, then the affections alone, without any rational or reasonable content whatsoever, would be sufficient proof of spiritual conversion or spiritual change. In order to promote what Edwards conceived to be a more biblical approach to an analysis of revival, he opposed this kind of separation. He argued that holy affections, in order to be in fact holy, must always be accompanied by true understanding. There could be no true heat (affections) without true light (understanding).[13]

But the converse is true as well. True understanding, if it is true, must always be accompanied by holy affections. To put it provocatively, knowledge is not true spiritual knowledge until and unless it is accompanied by holy affections. So, says Edwards with respect to true religion,

As on the one hand, there must be light in the understanding, as well as an affected fervent heart, where there is heat without light, there can be nothing divine or heavenly in that heart; so on the other hand, where there is a kind of light without heat, a head stored with notions and speculations, with a cold and unaffected heart, there can be nothing divine in that light, that knowledge is no true spiritual knowledge of divine things.[14]

The important thing to note at this point, therefore, is that true knowledge can obtain only when and where there is the combination of understanding and holy affections. True knowledge does not obtain where there is only notional knowledge. Neither does it obtain where there is knowledge, for example, of God that is strongly disinclined from such knowledge. There must be sensual knowledge combined with holy affections for there to be true spiritual knowledge of any kind. Without one or the other, there can be no knowledge or affections that amount to anything other than condemnation.

With this in mind, it is easier to see how Edwards sought to maintain a full-orbed notion of the necessity of biblical revelation, both in its external form and in its internal testimony, in order for there to be true, spiritual knowledge of anything. Revelation was, therefore, central to everything Edwards wanted to maintain.

Is there no room, therefore, given this understanding of reason and revelation, for the so-called theistic proofs? Though Edwards does refer to and even incorporates proofs for God’s existence in some of his writings, the question with regard to such proofs is not, in the first place, their use, but rather the context in which they are thought to be useful. That context does not seem to be one of an independent reasoning process. Notice what Edwards says about the attempt of human reason to move independently from this world to a god:

I cannot tell whether any man would have considered the works of creation as effects, if he had never been told they had a cause. We know very well, that, even after the being of such a cause was much talked of in the world, and believed by the generality of mankind; yet many and great philosophers held the world to be eternal; and others ascribed, what we call the works of creation to an eternal series of causes. If the most sagacious of the philosophers were capable of doing this, after hearing so much of a first cause and a creation, what would they have done, and what would the gross of mankind, who are inattentive and ignorant, have thought of the matter, if nothing had been taught concerning God and the origin of things; but every single man left solely to such intimation as his own senses and reason could have given him? We find, the earlier sages of the world did not trouble themselves about the question, whether the being of God could be proved by reason, but either never inquired into the matter, or took their opinions, upon that head, merely from tradition. But, allowing that every man is able to demonstrate to himself, that the world, and all things contained therein, are effects, and had a beginning, which I take to be a most absurd supposition, and look upon it to be almost impossible for unassisted reason to go so far; yet, if effects are to be ascribed to similar causes, and a good and wise effect must suppose a good and wise cause, by the same way of reasoning, all the evil and irregularity in the world must be attributed to an evil and unwise cause. So that either the first cause must be both good and evil, wise and foolish, or else there must be two first causes, an evil and irrational, as well as a good and wise principle. Thus man, left to himself, would be apt to reason, “If the cause and effects are similar and conformable, matter must have a material cause; there being nothing more impossible for us to conceive, than how matter should be produced by spirit or any thing else but matter.” The best reasoner in the world, endeavouring to find out the causes of things, by the things themselves, might be led into the grossest errors and contradictions, and find himself, at the end, in extreme want of an instructor.[15]

In other words, the reasoning process, due to its own fallenness, and combined with the condition of the fallen world, renders even the best reasoning both erroneous and contradictory. Given the fall into sin, Edwards argues here, even if reason were able, which he holds to be “a most absurd supposition,” it could only properly conclude for the existence of a cause that was “both good and evil, wise and foolish, or else there must be two first causes, an evil and irrational, as well as a good and wise principle.”

How, then, do we understand Edwards’s zeal, at least initially,[16] for writing a “Rational Account” of the Christian faith? Chamberlain explains it this way:

Unlike the latitudinarian opponents of the deists, however, Edwards’ rational defense did not weaken his adherence to the fundamental doctrines of Reformed orthodoxy. He remains convinced of the rationality of these doctrines at least in part because he uses a standard of rationality not shared by his opponents. He accepted the position first articulated by Locke that religious belief must conform to the principles of reason, but tempered it with the belief that divine, not human, reason was the ultimate standard of judgment. Consequently, he frequently presupposes not only the existence of God but the truth of the very doctrine that is the object of demonstration.[17]

It would seem, then, that, for Edwards, that which is rational is that which, first and foremost, conforms to the mind of God as revealed in Holy Scripture. It should not go without notice that Chamberlain notes that Edwards frequently presupposes the truth of God’s existence in order to demonstrate its truth. Edwards is elsewhere insistent that reason alone will never grasp the truth. In “Man’s Natural Blindness in the Things of Religion,” Edwards says that the minds of men are so dark that they are as contrary as possible to reason.[18] This suggests not only that men cannot reason independently to God, but also, and this is significant, that what is reasonable is biblical and vice versa. Reason itself is identified not as being independent of revelation, but as consistent with revelation. By that fact, reason itself must always presuppose revelation as its criterion and its content.

All of this, however, is difficult to square with other emphases of Edwards’s, even those that represent his maturest thought. Sweeney sees a certain evidentialism in Edwards.[19] Not only so, but Marsden sees in the miscellany provided here an appeal to common sense, as well as a methodological consistency with Joseph Butler.

“Thus,” said Edwards, “there are many things that I am told concerning the effects of electricity, magnetism etc. and many things that are recorded in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which I have never seen, and are very mysterious.” If such things were well attested, their mysteriousness “is no manner of objection against my belief of the accounts, because from what I have observed and do know, such a mysteriousness is no other than is to be expected in a particular and exact observation of nature.” . . . Here Edwards was following the line of argument best known in Bishop Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which maintained that the difficulties and mysteries attending acceptance of Scripture are no greater than those attending acceptance of well-accredited laws of nature.[20]

Can Edwards maintain a consistent, Calvinistic orthodoxy and epistemology while, at the same time, following the method of Butler? This miscellany may help the reader enter the discussion of that question. Whether Edwards was able completely to extricate himself from the Enlightenment thinking that he knew so well will continue to be a fruitful matter of debate.

1. For the definitive account of Edwards’s life and thought, see George Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003).

2. Gerald R. McDermott, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths, Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

3. Michael J. McClymond, Encounters with God: An Approach to the Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

4. Robert E. Brown, Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002).

5. Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. 1153–1360), ed. Douglas A. Sweeney, The Works of Jonathan Edwards 23 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 23. Sweeney also observes, in footnote 7 of the same page, “the more narrowly Old School Presbyterian studies of JE’s apologetics by John Gerstner, ‘An Outline of the Apologetics of Jonathan Edwards,’ Bibliotheca Sacra 133 (1976): 3–10, 99–107, 195–201, 291–98; and Scott Oliphint, ‘Jonathan Edwards: Reformed Apologist,’ Westminster Theological Journal 57 (Spring 1995): 165–86.”

6. “Edwards’ later ‘Miscellanies’ attest most powerfully to his cosmopolitan frame of mind and his eagerness for intelligence on European intellectual trends”; “These entries . . . reveal that the later Edwards devoted his most arduous scholarly labors to rearticulating his faith within the idioms of the Enlightenment.” Ibid., 12, 13.

7. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 81.

8. Edward Hickman, ed., The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1948), 2:96.

9. Perry Miller, “Jonathan Edwards and the Sense of the Heart,” Harvard Theological Review 41 (1948): 135–36.

10. Hickman, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:273.

11. Miller, “Sense of the Heart,” 135.

12. Hickman, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:33.

13. Ibid., 2:265.

14. Ibid., 2:120.

15. Ibid., 2:476.

16. “Initially,” because, as Chamberlain notes, “A purely rational defense of Christian doctrine would have required Edwards to use, as did the latitudinarians in their anti-deist polemic, the standard of rationality advocated by his opponents. To avoid this ‘tactical mistake’ Edwards may have abandoned the ‘Rational Account’ and adopted a more historical approach to the defense of Christian doctrine.” Jonathan Edwards, The “Miscellanies” (Entry Nos. 501–832), ed. Ava Chamberlain, The Works of Jonathan Edwards 18 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 29.

17. Ibid., our emphasis.

18. Hickman, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2:249.

19. Edwards, The “Miscellanies” 1153–1360, 23n7.

20. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards, 477.

The “Miscellanies”

Number 1340

The Insufficiency of Reason as a Substitute for Revelation

By reason, I mean that power or faculty an intelligent being has to judge of the truth of propositions: either immediately, by only looking on the propositions, which is judging by intuition and self-evidence, or by putting together several propositions, which are already evident by intuition, or at least whose evidence is originally derived from intuition.

Great part of Tindal’s arguing, in his Christianity as Old as the Creation, proceeds on this ground that since reason is the judge whether there be any revelation, or whether any pretended revelation be really such, therefore reason without revelation, or undirected by revelation, must be the judge concerning each doctrine and proposition contained in that pretended revelation. This is an unreasonable way of arguing. It is as much as to say that seeing reason is to judge of the truth of any general proposition, therefore, in all cases, reason alone, without regard to that proposition, is to judge separately and independently of each particular proposition implied in, or depending and consequent upon, that general proposition. For whether any supposed or pretended divine revelation be indeed such, is a general proposition. And the particular truths delivered in and by it, are particular propositions implied in, and consequent on, that general one. Tindal supposes that each of these truths must be judged of by themselves, independently of our judging of that general truth, that the revelation that declares them is the Word of God, evidently supposing that if each of these propositions, thus judged of particularly, cannot be found to be agreeable to reason, or if reason alone will not show the truth of them, then that general proposition on which they depend (viz. that the word which declares them is a divine revelation), is to be rejected. [This] is most unreasonable and contrary to all the rules of common sense and of the proceeding of all mankind in their reasoning and judging of things in all affairs whatsoever.

For this is certain that a proposition may be evidently true, or we may have good reason to receive it as true, though the particular propositions that depend upon it, and follow from it may be such, that our reason, independent of it, cannot see the truth, or can see it to be true by no other means, than by first establishing that other truth on which it depends. For otherwise, there is an end of all use of our reasoning powers, an end of all arguing one proposition from another. And nothing is to be judged true, but what appears true by looking on it directly and immediately, without the help of another proposition first established, on which the evidence of it depends.

For therein consists all reasoning or argumentation whatsoever, viz. in discovering the truth of a proposition, whose truth does not appear to our reason immediately, or when we consider it alone, but by the help of some other proposition, on which it depends.

If this be not allowed, we must believe nothing at all, but self-evident propositions, and then we must have done with all such things as arguments. And all argumentation whatsoever, and all Tindal’s argumentations in particular, are absurd. He himself, throughout his whole book, proceeds in that very method which this principle explodes. He argues and attempts to make evident, one proposition by another first established.

There are some general propositions, the truth of which can be known only by reason, from whence an infinite multitude of other propositions are inferred, and reasonably and justly determined to be true, and rested in as such, on the ground of the truth of that general proposition from which they are inferred by the common consent of all mankind, being led thereto by the common and universal sense of the human mind. And yet not one of those propositions can be known to be true by reason, if reason considers them by themselves independently of that general proposition.

Thus, for instance, what numberless truths are known only by consequence from the general proposition that the testimony of our senses may be depended on? The truth of numberless particular propositions cannot be known by reason, considered independently of the testimony of our senses, and without an implicit faith in that testimony. That general truth, that the testimony of our memories is worthy of credit, can be proved only by reason. And yet, what numberless truths are there, which we know no other way, and cannot be known to be true by reason, considering the truths in themselves, or any otherwise than by testimony of our memory, and an implicit faith in this testimony? That the agreed testimony of all we see, and converse with continually, is to be credited, is a general proposition, the truth of which can be known only by reason. And yet how infinitely numerous propositions do men receive as truth, that cannot be known to be true by reason, viewing them separately from such testimony: even all occurrences, and matters of fact, persons, things, actions, works, events, and circumstances, that we are told of in our neighborhood, in our own country, or in any other part of the world that we have not seen ourselves.

That the testimony of history and tradition is to be depended on, when attended with such and such credible circumstances, is a general proposition, whose truth can be known only by reason. And yet, how numberless are the particular truths concerning what has been before the present age, that cannot be known by reason considered in themselves, and separately from this testimony, which yet are truths on which all mankind does, ever did, and ever will rely?

That the experience of mankind is to be depended on, or that those things which the world finds to be true by experience, are worthy to be judged true, is a general proposition, of which none doubt. By what the world finds true by experience, can be meant nothing else, than what is known to be true by one or other of those forementioned kinds of testimony, viz. the testimony of history and tradition; the testimony of those we see and converse with; the testimony of our memories, and the testimony of our senses. I say, all that is known by the experience of mankind, is known only by one or more of these testimonies, excepting only the existence of that idea, or those few ideas, which are at this moment present in our minds, or are the immediate objects of present consciousness. And yet, how unreasonable would it be to say, that we must first know those things to be true by reason, before we give credit to our experience of the truth of them! Not only are there innumerable truths, that are reasonably received as following from such general propositions as have been mentioned, which cannot be known by reason, if they are considered by themselves or otherwise than as inferred from these general propositions, but also many truths are reasonably received, and are received by the common consent of the reason of all rational persons, as undoubted truths, whose truth not only would not otherwise be discoverable by reason, but when they are discovered by their consequence from that general proposition, appear in themselves not easy and reconcilable to reason, but difficult, incomprehensible, and their agreement with reason not understood. So that men, at least most men, are not able to explain, or conceive of the manner in which they are agreeable to reason.

Thus, for instance, it is truth, which depends on that general proposition that credit is to be given to the testimony of our senses, that our souls and bodies are so united, and that they act on each other. But it is a truth which reason otherwise cannot discover, and now that it is revealed by the testimony of our senses, reason cannot comprehend that what is immaterial, and not solid nor extended, can act upon matter, which it cannot touch. Or, if any choose to say that the soul is material, then other difficulties arise as great. For reason cannot imagine any way, that a solid mass of matter, whether at rest or in motion, should have perception, should understand, and should exert thought and volition, love, hatred, etc.

And if it be said that spirit acts on matter, and matter on spirit, by an established law of the Creator, which is no other than a fixed method of his producing effects, still the manner how it is possible to be, will be inconceivable. We can have no conception of any way or manner, in which God, who is a pure Spirit, can act upon matter, and impel it.

There are several things in mechanics and hydrostatics, that by the testimony of our senses are true in fact, not only that reason never first discovered before the testimony of sense declared them, but, now they are declared, are very great paradoxes, and if proposed, would seem contrary to reason, at least to the reason of this generality of mankind, and such as are not either mathematicians, or of more than common penetration, and what they cannot reconcile to their reason. But God has given reason to the common people, to be as much their guide and rule, as he has to mathematicians and philosophers.

Even the very existence of a sensible world, which we receive for certain from the testimony of our senses, is attended with difficulties and seeming inconsistencies with reason, which are insuperable to the reason at least of most men. For if there be a sensible world, that world exists either in the mind only, or out of the mind, independent of its imagination or perception. If the latter, then that sensible world is some material substance, altogether diverse from the ideas we have by any of our senses—as color or visible extension and figure, which is nothing but the quantity of color and its various limitations, which are sensible qualities that we have by sight; and solidity, which is an idea we have by feeling; and extension and figure, which is only the quantity and limitation of these; and so of all other qualities.

But that there should be any substance entirely distinct from any, or all of these, is utterly inconceivable. For if we exclude all color, solidity, or conceivable extension, dimension and figure, what is there left that we can conceive of? Is there not a removal on our minds of all existence, and a perfect emptiness of everything? But if it be said that the sensible world has no existence, but only in the mind, then the sensories themselves, or the organs of sense, by which sensible ideas are let into the mind, have no existence but only in the mind. And those organs of sense have no existence but what is conveyed into the mind by themselves, for they are a part of the sensible world. And then it will follow that the organs of sense owe their existence to the organs of sense, and so are prior to themselves, being the causes or occasions of their own existence, which is a seeming inconsistency with reason, that, I imagine, the reason of all men cannot explain and remove.

There are innumerable propositions that we reasonably receive from the testimony of experience, all depending on the truth of that general proposition, “that experience is to be relied on,” (what is meant by experience has been already explained), that yet are altogether above reason. They are paradoxes attended with such seeming inconsistencies, that reason cannot clearly remove, nor fully explain the mystery.

By experience we know that there is such a thing as thought, love, hatred, etc. But yet this is attended with inexplicable difficulties. If there be such a thing as thought and affection, where are they? If they exist, they exist in some place, or no place. That they should exist, and exist in no place, is above our comprehension. It seems a contradiction, to say they exist, and yet exist nowhere. And if they exist in some place, then they are not in other places, or in all places. Therefore [they] must be confined at one time, to one place, and that place must have certain limits, from whence it will follow that thought, love, etc. have some figure, either round, or square, or triangular, which seems quite disagreeable to reason, and utterly inconsonant to the nature of such things as thought and the affections of the mind.

It is evident, by experience, that something now is. But this proposition is attended with things that reason cannot comprehend, paradoxes that seem contrary to reason. For if something now is, then either something was from all eternity, or something began to be, without any cause or reason of its existence. The last seems wholly inconsistent with natural sense. And the other, viz. that something has been from all eternity, implies that there has been a duration past, which is without any beginning, which is an infinite duration. Which is perfectly inconceivable, and is attended with difficulties that seem contrary to reason. For we cannot conceive how an infinite duration can be made greater, any more than how a line of infinite length can be made longer. But yet we see that past duration is continually added to. If there were a duration passed without beginning, a thousand years ago, then that past infinite duration has now a thousand years added to it. And if so, it is greater than it was before by a thousand years, because the whole is greater than a part. Now the past duration consists of two parts, viz. that which was before the last thousand years, and that which is since. Thus here are seeming contradictions, involved in this supposition of an infinite duration past.

And, moreover, if something has been from eternity, it is either an endless succession of causes and effects, as for instance an endless succession of fathers and sons, or something equivalent. But the supposition is attended with manifold apparent contradictions, or there must have been some eternal self-existent being, having the reasons of his existence within himself, or he must have existed from eternity, without any reason of his existence: both of which are inconceivable. That a thing should exist from eternity, without any reason why it should be so, rather than otherwise, is altogether inconceivable, and seems quite repugnant to reason. And why a being should be self-existent, and have the reason of his existence within himself, seems also inconceivable, and never, as I apprehend, has yet been explained. If there has been anything from eternity, then that past eternity is either an endless duration of successive parts as successive hours, minutes, etc. or it is an eternal duration without succession.—The latter seems repugnant to reason, and incompatible with any faculty of understanding that we enjoy. And the other an infinite number of successive parts involves the very same contradictions with the supposition of an eternal succession of fathers and sons.

That the world has existed from eternity without a cause, seems wholly inconsistent with reason. In the first place, it is inconsistent with reason that it should exist without a cause. For it is evident, that it is not a thing, the nature and manner of which is necessary in itself, and therefore it requires a cause or reason out of itself [for] why it is so, and not otherwise. And in the next place, if it exists from eternity, then succession has been from eternity, which involves the forementioned contradictions. But if it be without a cause, and does not exist from eternity, then it has been created out of nothing, which is altogether inconceivable, and what reason cannot show to be possible, and many of the greatest philosophers have supposed it plainly inconsistent with reason.—Many other difficulties might be mentioned as following from that proposition, “that something now is,” that are insuperable to reason.

It is evident, by experience, that great evil, both moral and natural, abounds in the world. It is manifest that great injustice, violence, treachery, perfidiousness, and extreme cruelty to the innocent, abound in the world, as well as innumerable extreme sufferings, issuing finally in destruction and death, are general all over the world, in all ages.—But this could not otherwise have been known by reason, and even now is attended with difficulties, which the reason of many, yea most of the learned men and greatest philosophers that have been in the world, have not been able to surmount. That it should be so ordered or permitted in a world, absolutely and perfectly under the care and government of an infinitely holy and good God, discovers a seeming repugnancy to reason, that few, if any, have been able fully to remove.

That men are to be blamed or commended for their good or evil voluntary actions, is a general proposition received, with good reason, by the dictates of the natural, common, and universal moral sense of mankind in all nations and ages, which moral sense is included in what Tindal means by reason and the law of nature. And yet many things attend this truth, that appear as difficulties and seeming repugnancies to reason, which have proved altogether insuperable to the reason of many of the greatest and most learned men in the world.

I observe further that when any general proposition is recommended to us as true, by any testimony or evidence that considered by itself, seems sufficient, without contrary testimony or evidence to countervail it, and difficulties attend that proposition; if these difficulties are no greater, and of no other sort, than what might reasonably be expected to attend true propositions of that kind, then these difficulties are not only not valid or sufficient objection against that proposition, but they are no objection at all.

Thus, there are many things that I am told concerning the effects of electricity, magnetism, etc. and many things that are recorded in the philosophical transactions of the Royal Society, which I have never seen, and are very mysterious. But being well attested, their mysteriousness is no manner of objection against my belief of the accounts, because, from what I have observed, and do know, such a mysteriousness is no other than is to be expected in particular, exact observation of nature, and a critical tracing of its operations. It is to be expected that the further it is traced, the more mysteries will appear. To apply this to the case in hand: If the difficulties which attend that which is recommended by good proof or testimony to our reception, as a divine revelation, are no greater, nor of any other nature, than such as, all things considered, might reasonably be expected to attend a revelation of such a sort, of things of such a nature, and given for such ends and purposes, and under such circumstances—these difficulties not only are not of weight sufficient to balance the testimony or proof that recommends it, but they are of no weight at all as objections against the revelation. They are not reasonably to be looked upon as of the nature of arguments against it, but on the contrary, may, with good reason, be looked upon as confirmations, and of the nature of arguments in its favor.

This is very evident, and the reason of it very plain. For certainly, whatever is reasonably expected to be found in a truth, when we are seeking it, cannot be an objection against that truth, when we have found it. If it be reasonably expected in truth beforehand, then reason unites it with truth, as one property of that sort of truth. And if so, then reason unites it with the truth, after it is found. Whatever reason determines to be a property of any kind of truth, that is properly looked upon in some degree as a mark of truths of that sort, or as belonging to the marks and evidences of it. For things are known by their properties. Reason determines truth by things which reason determines to be the properties of truth. And if we do not find such things belonging to supposed truth, that were before reasonably expected in truth of that kind, this is an objection against it, rather than the finding of them. The disappointment of reason is rather an objection with reason, than something to induce its acceptance and acquiescence. If the expectation be reasonable, then the not answering of it must so far appear unreasonable, or against reason, and so an objection in the way of reason.

Thus, if anyone that is in search for things of a certain kind, reasonably expects beforehand, that if he be successful in finding the thing, of the kind and quality that he is in search of, he shall find it possessed of certain properties; when he has actually found something, with all those properties and circumstances that he expected, he receives it, and rests in it so much the more entirely, as the very thing that he was in quest of. And surely, it would be no argument with him, that his invention is right, that some things, that he reasonably expected, are wanting. But on the contrary, this would rather be an objection with his reason.

In order to judge what sort of difficulties are to be expected in a revelation made to mankind by God, such as Christians suppose the Scriptures to be, we must remember that it is a revelation of what God knows to be the very truth concerning his own nature; of the acts and operations of his mind with respect to his creatures; of the grand scheme of infinite wisdom in his works, especially with respect to the intelligent and moral world; a revelation of the spiritual and invisible world; a revelation of that invisible world which men shall belong to after this life; a revelation of the greatest works of God, the manner of his creating the world, and of his governing of it, especially with regard to the higher and more important parts of it; and a revelation delivered in ancient languages.

Difficulties and incomprehensible mysteries are reasonably to be expected in a declaration from God, of the precise truth as he knows it, in matters of a spiritual nature; as we see things that are invisible, and not the objects of any of the external senses, are very mysterious, involved much more in darkness, attended with more mystery and difficulty to the understanding, than others; as many things concerning even the nature of our own souls themselves, that are the nearest to us, and the most intimately present with us, and so most in our view, of any spiritual things whatsoever.

The farther things are from the nature of what language is chiefly formed to express, viz. things appertaining to the common business and vulgar affairs of life—things obvious to sense and men’s direct view and most vulgar observation, without speculation, reflection and abstractions—the more difficult it is clearly to express them in words. Our expressions concerning them will be attended with greater abstruseness, difficulty, and seeming inconsistency, i.e. language not being well fitted to express these things, and words and phrases not being prepared for that end. Such a reference to sensible and vulgar things is unavoidably introduced, that naturally confounds the mind, and involves it in darkness.

If God gives a revelation of religious things, it must be mainly concerning the affairs of the moral and intelligent universe, which is the grand system of spirits: it must be chiefly about himself and intelligent creatures. It may well be supposed that a revelation concerning another and an invisible world, a future state that we are to be in when separated from the body, should be attended with much mystery.

It may well be supposed that the things of such a world, are of an exceeding different nature from the things of this world, the things of sense, and all the objects and affairs which earthly language was made to express; and that they are not agreeable to such notions, imaginations, and ways of thinking that grow up with us, and are unnatural to us, as we are from our infancy formed to an agreeableness to the things which we are conversant with in this world. We could not conceive of the things of sense, if we had never had these external senses. And if we had only some of these senses, and not others, as, for instance, if we had only a sense of feeling, without the senses of seeing and hearing, how mysterious would a declaration of things of these last senses be! Or if we had feeling and hearing, but had been born without eyes or optic nerves, the things of light, even when declared to us, would many of them be involved in mystery, and would appear exceedingly strange to us.

Thus persons without the sense of seeing, but who had the other senses, might be informed by all about them, that they can perceive things at a distance, and perceive as plainly, and in some respects more plainly, than by touching them. Yea, that they could perceive things at so great a distance, that it would take up many ages to travel to them. They might be informed of many things concerning colors, that would be all perfectly incomprehensible, and yet might be believed. And it could not be said that nothing at all is proposed to their belief, because they have no idea of color.

They might be told that they perceive an extension, a length and breadth of color, and terminations and limits, and so a figure of this kind of extension; and yet, that it is nothing that can be felt. This would be perfectly mysterious to them, and would seem an inconsistency, as they have no ideas of any such things as length, breadth, and limits, and figure of extension, but only certain ideas they have by touch. They might be informed that they could perceive at once the extent and shape of a thing so great and multiform as a tree, without touch. This would seem very strange and impossible.

They might be told that to those who see, some things appear a thousand times as great as some others, which yet are made up of more visible parts, than those others: which would be very mysterious, and seem quite inconsistent with reason.

These, and many other things, would be attended with unsearchable mystery to them, concerning objects of sight, and, concerning which, they could never fully see how they can be reconciled to reason, at least not without very long, particular, gradual, and elaborate instruction, and which, after all, they would not fully comprehend, so as clearly to see how the ideas connected in these propositions do agree.

And yet I suppose, in such a case, the most rational persons would give full credit to things that they know not by reason, but only by the revelation of the word of those that see. I suppose, a person born blind in the manner described, would nevertheless give full credit to the united testimony of the seeing world, in things which they said about light and colors, and would entirely rest on their testimony.

If God gives us a revelation of the truth, not only about spiritual beings in an unseen state, but also concerning a spiritual being or beings of a superior kind (and so of an inexperienced nature), entirely diverse from anything we now experience in our present state,—and from anything that we can be conscious of in any state whatsoever—then, especially, may mysteries be expected in such a revelation.

The truth concerning any kind of percipient being, of a different nature from our own, though of a kind inferior, might well be supposed to be attended with difficulty, by reason of its diversity from what we are conscious of in ourselves: but much more so, when the nature and kind is superior. For a superior perceptive nature may well be supposed, in some respects, to include and comprehend what belongs to an inferior, as the greater comprehends the less, and the whole includes a part. And therefore, what the superior experiences may give him advantage to conceive of concerning the nature of the inferior. But, on the contrary, an inferior nature does not include what belongs to a superior. When one of an inferior nature considers what concerns beings of a nature entirely above his own, there is something belonging to it that is over and above all that the inferior nature is conscious of.

A very great superiority, even in beings of the same nature with ourselves, sets them so much above our reach, that many of their affairs become incomprehensible, and attended with inexplicable intricacies. Thus many of the affairs of adult persons are incomprehensible, and appear inexplicably strange to the understandings of little children. And many of the affairs of learned men, and great philosophers and mathematicians, things with which they are conversant and well acquainted, are far above the reach of the vulgar, and appear to them not only unintelligible, but absurd and impossible and full of inconsistencies. But much more may this be expected when the superiority is not only in the degree of improvement of faculties and properties of the same kind of beings, but also in the nature itself.

So that if there be a kind of created perceptive beings in their nature vastly superior to the human, which none will deny to be possible, and a revelation should be given us concerning the nature, acts, and operations of this kind of creatures, [then] it would be no wonder if such a revelation should contain some things very much out of our reach, attended with great difficulty to our reason, being things of such a kind that no improvement of our minds, that we are capable of, will bring us to an experience of anything like them.

But, above all, if a revelation be made to us concerning that being who is uncreated and self-existent, who is infinitely diverse from and above all others, in his nature, and so infinitely above all that any advancement of our nature can give us any consciousness of—in such a revelation, it would be very strange indeed, if there should not be some great mysteries, quite beyond our comprehension, and attended with difficulties which it is impossible for us fully to solve and explain.

It may well be expected that a revelation of truth, concerning an infinite being, should be attended with mystery. We find that the reasonings and conclusions of the best metaphysicians and mathematicians, concerning infinites, are attended with paradoxes and seeming inconsistencies. Thus it is concerning infinite lines, surfaces and solids, which are things external. But much more may this be expected in infinite spiritual things: such as infinite thought, infinite apprehension, infinite reason, infinite will, love and joy, infinite spiritual power, agency, etc.

Nothing is more certain than that there must be an unmade and unlimited being, and yet the very notion of such a being is all mystery, involving nothing but incomprehensible paradoxes, and seeming inconsistencies. It involves the notion of a being, self-existent and without any cause, which is utterly inconceivable, and seems repugnant to all our ways of conception. An infinite spiritual being, or infinite understanding and will and spiritual power, must be omnipresent, without extension, which is nothing but mystery and seeming inconsistency.

The notion of an infinite eternal, implies absolute immutability. That which is in all respects infinite, and absolutely perfect to the utmost degree, and at all times, cannot be in any respect variable. And this immutability being constant from eternity implies duration without succession, and is wholly a mystery and seeming inconsistency. It seems as much as to say, an infinitely great or long duration all at once, or all in a moment, which seems to be saying, an infinitely great in an infinitely little, or an infinitely long line in a point without any length.

Infinite understanding, which implies an understanding of all things past, present and future, and of all truth and all reason and argument, implies infinite thought and reason. But how this can be absolutely without mutation, or succession of acts, seems mysterious and absurd. We can conceive of no such thing as thinking, without successive acting of the mind about ideas.

Perfect knowledge of all things, even of all the things of external sense, without any sensation, or any reception of ideas from without, is an inconceivable mystery.

Infinite knowledge, implies a perfect comprehensive view of a whole future eternity, which seems utterly impossible. For how can there be any reaching of the whole of this to comprehend it without reaching to the utmost limits of it? But this cannot be, where there is no such thing as utmost limits. And again, if God perfectly views an eternal succession or chain of events, then he perfectly sees every individual part of that chain, and there is no one link of it hid from his sight. And yet there is no one link that has not innumerable links beyond it, from which it would seem to follow, that there is a link beyond all the links that he sees, and consequently, that there is one link, yea, innumerable links, that he sees not, inasmuch as there are innumerable links beyond everyone that he sees. And many other such seeming contradictions might be mentioned, which attend the supposition of God’s omniscience.

If there be an absolute immutability in God, then there never arises any new act in God, or new exertion of himself, and yet there arise new effects, which seems an utter inconsistency. And so innumerable other such like mysteries and paradoxes are involved in the notion of an infinite and eternal intelligent being.

Insomuch, that if there had never been any revelation, by which God had made known himself by his Word to mankind; the most speculative persons would, without doubt, have forever been exceedingly at a loss concerning the nature of the Supreme Being and first cause of the universe. And that some of the ancient philosophers and wiser heathens had so good notions of God as they had, seems to be much more owing to tradition, which originated from divine revelation, than from their own invention: Though human nature served to keep those traditions alive in the world, and led the more considerate to embrace and retain the imperfect traditions which were to be found in any parts remaining as they appeared, when once suggested and delivered agreeable to reason.

If a revelation be made of the principal scheme of the supreme and infinitely wise Ruler, respecting his moral kingdom, wherein his all-sufficient wisdom is displayed, in the case of its greatest trial; ordering and regulating the said moral kingdom to its great ends, when in the most difficult circumstances; and extricating it out of the most extreme calamities, in which it had been involved by the malice and subtlety of the chief and most crafty of all God’s enemies—[then] should we expect no mysteries? If it be the principal of all the effects of the wisdom of him, the depth of whose wisdom is unsearchable and absolutely infinite; his deepest scheme, by which mainly the grand design of the universal, incomprehensibly complicated system of all his operations, and the infinite series of his administrations, is most happily, completely and gloriously attained; and the scheme in which God’s wisdom is mainly exercised and displayed—[then] it may reasonably be expected that such a revelation will contain many mysteries.

We see that to be the case, even as to many works of human wisdom and art. They appear strange, paradoxical, and incomprehensible, by those that are vastly inferior in sagacity, or are entirely destitute of that skill or art. How are many of the effects of human art attended with many things that appear strange and altogether incomprehensible by children, and many others seeming to be beyond and against nature. And in many cases, the effect produced not only seems to be beyond the power of any visible means, but inconsistent with it, being an effect contrary to what would be expected. The means seems inconsistent with the end.

If God reveal the exact truth in those things which, in the language of the heathen sages, are matters of philosophy, especially things concerning the nature of the Deity, and the nature of man as related to the Deity, etc. it may most reasonably be expected that such a revelation should contain many mysteries and paradoxes; considering how many mysteries the doctrines of the greatest and best philosophers, in all ages, concerning these things, have contained; or at least, how very mysterious, and seemingly repugnant they are to the reason of the vulgar, and persons of less understanding; and considering how mysterious the principles of philosophers, even concerning matters far inferior to these, would have appeared in any former age, if they had been revealed to be true, which however are now received as the most undoubted truths.

If God gives mankind his Word in a large book, consisting of a vast variety of parts, many books, histories, prophecies, prayers, songs, parables, proverbs, doctrines, promises, sermons, epistles, and discourses of very many kinds, all connected together, all united in one grand draft and design; and one part having a various and manifold respect to others, so as to become one great work of God; and one grand system, as is the system of the universe, with its vast variety of parts connected in one grand work of God—[then] it may well be expected that there should be mysteries, things incomprehensible and exceeding difficult to our understanding; analogous to the mysteries that are found in all the other works of God, as the works of creation and providence, and particularly such as are analogous to the mysteries that are observable in the system of the natural world, and the frame of man’s own nature.

For such a system or bible of the Word of God, is as much the work of God as any other of his works: the effect of the power, wisdom, and contrivance of a God, whose wisdom is unsearchable, whose nature and ways are past finding out. And as the system of nature, and the system of revelation, are both divine works, so both are in different senses a divine word. Both are the voice of God to intelligent creatures, a manifestation and declaration of himself to mankind. Man’s reason was given to him that he might know God, and might be capable of discerning the manifestations he makes of himself in the effects and external expressions and emanations of the divine perfections.

If it be still objected that it is peculiarly unreasonable that mysteries should be supposed in a revelation given to mankind, because if there be such a revelation, the direct and principal design of it must be, to teach mankind and to inform their understandings, which is inconsistent with its delivering things to man which he cannot understand, and which do not inform but only puzzle and confound his understanding: I answer,

1st. Men are capable of understanding as much as is pretended to be revealed, though they cannot understand all that belongs to the things revealed. For instance, God may reveal that there are three who have the same nature of the Deity, whom it is most proper for us to look upon as three persons, though the particular manner of their distinction, or how they differ, may not be revealed. He may reveal that the Godhead was united to man, so as to be properly looked upon as the same person, and yet not reveal how it was effected.

2d. No allowance is made in the objection, for what may be understood of the Word of God in future ages, which is not now understood. And it is to be considered, that divine revelation is not given only for the present or past ages.

3d. The seeming force of this objection, lies wholly in this: that we must suppose whatever God does, tends to answer the end for which he does it, but that those parts of a revelation which we cannot understand, do not answer the end, inasmuch as informing our understandings is the very end of a revelation, if there be any such thing.

But this objection is no other than just equivalent to an objection which may be made against many parts of the creation, particularly of this lower world. It is apparent that the most direct and principal end of this lower world was to be for the habitation, use, and benefit of mankind, the head of this lower world. But there are some parts of it that seem to be of no use to man, but are rather inconvenient and prejudicial to him: as the innumerable stones and rocks that overspread so great a part of the earth, which as to anything known, are altogether useless, and oftentimes are rather an inconvenience than benefit.

Thus, it is reasonable to expect, that, in such a revelation, there should be many things plain and easy to be understood and that the revelation should be most intelligible, wherein it is most necessary for us to understand it, in order to our guidance and direction in the way to our happiness, but that there should also be many incomprehensible mysteries in it, many things understood in part, but yet that room should be left for vast improvement in the knowledge of them, to the end of the world. It is reasonable to expect that the case should actually be the same as concerning the works of nature; that many things which were formerly great and insuperable difficulties, unintelligible, mysteries, should now, by further study and improvement, be well cleared up, and cease longer to remain difficulties; and that other difficulties should be considerably diminished, though not yet fully cleared up.

It may be expected that as in the system of nature, so in the system of revelation, there should be many parts whose use is but little understood, and many that should seem wholly useless, yea, and some that should seem rather to do hurt than good. I might further observe that if we have a revelation given in ancient languages, used among a people whose customs and phraseology are but very imperfectly understood, many difficulties will arise from hence. And in a very concise history, in which only some particular facts and circumstances that concern the special purpose of that revelation, are mentioned—and innumerable others are omitted that would be proper to be mentioned, if the main design were to give a full, clear, connected, continued history of such a people, or such affairs as the history mentions—it is no wonder that many doubts and difficulties arise. . . .

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Is Edwards’s definition of reason a definition of foundationalism?

2. What is the relationship of reason and experience in Edwards’s argument?

3. What is Edwards’s argument for the reality of mystery in Christianity?

4. What similarities are there between Edwards’s method and that of Butler’s Analogy?

CHAPTER 9

William Paley

(1743–1805)

William Paley offers us, in the selection below, a sample of what has been called the teleological argument, or argument from design. The substance of the argument goes back to Greek antiquity, but is solidified into an apologetic argument by Thomas Aquinas. In the fifth of his “five ways,” Thomas says:

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.[1]

This argument did not reach its full potential until the dawning of philosophical empiricism. There are a multitude of reasons for this, one of which would surely be that the renewed and determined focus on evidences—either for or against God, depending on the author—called for a renewed emphasis on the nature of those evidences (as effects of a cause, or, in this case, as designed by a designer). Enter William Paley. For various reasons, some of which we will broach below, Paley’s argument from design was perhaps the central example of a teleological argument in his day and had significant influence into the twentieth century.

Paley was born in Peterborough, England. He trained for the Anglican ministry, graduating from Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1763. Three years later he became a fellow and tutor at Cambridge. He left that post in 1775 to continue in the Anglican ministry. He died in 1805.

Paley’s influence in apologetics seems to be tied to the influence of his published works at Cambridge. His 1794 book, A View of the Evidence of Christianity, was required reading at Cambridge University until the twentieth century. As a matter of fact, Charles Darwin notes the influence that Paley had on his own thinking.

In order to pass the B.A. examination, it was, also, necessary to get up Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, and his Moral Philosophy. . . . The logic of this book and as I may add of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced of the long line of argumentation.[2]

One of Paley’s most influential works, part of which is included here, is Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). Following in the evidential tradition of the Enlightenment, Paley argues for an evidential natural theology, the belief that God can be understood by anyone who will properly reference the natural world. Included in the natural world is the element of design, which, Paley argues, implies a designer. Paley is perhaps best known for the famous watchmaker illustration, included herein.

Even before Paley published his arguments in Natural Theology, the Scotsman David Hume had already attacked arguments of this kind, based on his radical empiricism, in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779). Stephen Davis summarizes Hume’s disagreement with the so-called teleological argument under five points:[3]

1. Why is it illegitimate to ask as to the origin of the watchmaker? What criteria do we use to stop at the designer? Why not go on ad infinitum? There is nothing intrinsic to the design argument that negates such a critique. Hume suggests that order is more a product of perception than something objective. The mind imposes order on the world, then wants to posit a divine orderer to account for it.

2. Hume further argues that any universe that is a universe will look like it is designed. His point here is that creatures like us would almost intuitively see design in the universe, since we’re intelligent enough to see something of the universe itself. Hume says, “I would fain know how an animal could subsist unless its parts were so adjusted.”

3. Hume also notes that, even if the design argument were successful, the designer bears no obvious relation to the God of theism. There is no reason to hold that the designer is unique, or infinite, or perfect.

4. The existence of evil in the world precludes any kind of conclusion that the designer is only morally good. Thus, as in point 3, even if the argument is successful, it can at best prove a designer who is both good and evil. (This is one of the objections that we saw in Edwards as well).

5. The analogy is weak. We observe only a speck of the universe, which itself is unique. How can we propose a designer from such weak and partial evidence? This relates to Hume’s notion of the empirical. The analogy of “watch is to watchmaker as universe is to Creator,” Hume thinks, cannot be sustained. The former analogy is an empirical one, one that can be verified and is repeatable. The latter analogy is neither verifiable nor, as far as we know, repeatable or testable.

Because Paley does not reckon, at least directly, with Hume in Natural Theology, and because Paley’s work was so influential, it may be worth noting a few relevant points, including his response to Hume, in his Evidences book.

In a “new” edition of Paley’s Evidences, published in 1857, the editor notes that

Paley’s claims to be an independent thinker have been disputed. Sir J. Mackintosh describes the Evidences as “formed out of an admirable translation of Butler’s Analogy, and a most skilful abridgment of Lardner’s Credibility of the Gospel History.” . . . The main substance of Paley’s work may no doubt be found in Lardner and Butler, but, independently of the skilful manner in which he has transferred those authors to his own pages, he has interspersed so many sagacious remarks on man, on society, and the practical relations of Christianity with both, as to impart a high degree of originality to the abridgment.[4]

There was some question concerning the originality of Paley’s work. This, it seems, might be obvious, given the fact that, during this era, so much of the discussions surrounding God’s existence were culled from the general evidential milieu in which the challenges were coming. So, it seems natural that Paley would sound much like Butler and others.

More significantly, and again in the evidential tradition that characterized so much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Paley was convinced that the evidences given were available universally and thus could be read aright by anyone. One commentator explained, “A virtuous Deist is, or ought to be, as good a judge of these points as a Christian, and the Deistical tendencies of the last century it was that Paley, like Butler before him, had mainly in view in the composition of his treatise.”[5]

Responding to Hume, Paley, in his Evidences book, first takes Hume’s definition of miracle and then attempts to show how such a definition is inconsistent with other things we take to be true.

Mr. Hume states the case of miracles to be a contest of opposite improbabilities; that is to say, a question whether it be more improbable that the miracle should be true, or the testimony false; and this I think a fair account of the controversy. But herein I remark a want of argumentative justice, that in describing the improbability of miracles, he suppresses all those circumstances of extenuation which result from our knowledge of the existence, power, and disposition of the Deity; His concern in the creation, the end answered by the miracle, the importance of that end, and its subserviency to the plan pursued in the work of nature. As Mr. Hume has represented the question, miracles are alike incredible to him who is previously assured of the constant agency of a Divine Being, and to him who believes that no such Being exists in the universe. They are equally incredible, whether related to have been wrought upon occasions the most deserving, and for purposes the most beneficial, or for no assignable end whatever, or for an end confessedly trifling or pernicious. This surely cannot be a correct statement. In adjusting also the other side of the balance, the strength and weight of testimony, this author has provided an answer to every possible accumulation of historical proof, by telling us, that we are not obliged to explain how the story of the evidence arose. Now I think that we are obliged, not, perhaps, to show by positive accounts how it did, but by a probable hypothesis how it might so happen. The existence of the testimony is a phenomenon: the truth of the fact solves the phenomenon. If we reject this solution, we ought to have some other to rest in; and none, even by our adversaries, can be admitted which is not inconsistent with the principles that regulate human affairs and human conduct at present, or which makes men then to have been a different kind of beings from what they are now.[6]

In other words, Paley does think Hume’s notion of a miracle, as including “opposite improbabilities,” is a fair assessment. But he is concerned that the extenuating circumstances inevitably attached to such “improbabilities” are arbitrarily excised by Hume in order to reach his own conclusion. Miracles, according to Hume’s assessment, cannot be believed by one who believes in God or by one who doesn’t. They cannot be believed if there is a rationale or reason that they might occur, or if they occur purely randomly and without purpose. In other words, Paley seems to understand that what one believes prior to one’s assessment of the notion of miracle, or one’s witnessing a miracle, must necessarily play a role, and a crucial role, in whether or not one can believe in the occurrence of the miracle itself.

He concludes:

But the short consideration which, independently of every other, convinces me that there is no solid foundation in Mr. Hume’s conclusion, is the following:—When a theorem is proposed to a mathematician, the first thing he does with it is to try it upon a simple case, and if it produce a false result, he is sure that there must be some mistake in the demonstration. Now, to proceed in this way with what may be called Mr. Hume’s theorem. If twelve men, whose probity and good sense I had long known, should seriously and circumstantially relate to me an account of a miracle wrought before their eyes, and in which it was impossible that they should be deceived; if the governor of the country, hearing a rumour of this account, should call these men into his presence, and offer them a short proposal, either to confess the imposture, or submit to be tied up to a gibbet; if they should refuse with one voice to acknowledge that there existed any falsehood or imposture in the case; if this threat were communicated to them separately, yet with no different effect; if it was at last executed; if I myself saw them, one after another, consenting to be racked, burnt, or strangled, rather than give up the truth of their account;—still, if Mr. Hume’s rule be my guide, I am not to believe them. Now I undertake to say, that there exists not a sceptic in the world who would not believe them, or who would defend such incredulity.[7]

In other words, asks Paley of Hume and his followers, which is more probable—that the twelve friends of yours are mistaken or deluded, or that the miracle actually happened? In this case, Paley is referring to the notion of testimony as a basic mode of belief acquisition, a mode that, universally,[8] would take precedence even over such improbabilities as miracles, given the proper circumstances.

It would seem, therefore, that one of the reasons that Paley is not concerned with Hume’s objections as he writes his Natural Theology is that he was sufficiently satisfied that the force of those objections had been addressed and answered in his Evidences.

That refutation of Hume gives Paley confidence as he later proceeds to lay out in some detail the weight of evidence for design in the universe, which itself, as Paley later notes, must lead to the conclusion of God’s existence: “Upon the whole; after all the schemes and struggles of a reluctant philosophy, the necessary resort is to a Deity. The marks of design are too strong to be gotten over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD.”[9]

1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica 1.2.3, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province.

2. Frances Darwin, ed., Autobiography of Charles Darwin: From the Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (np, nd), 24.

3. Below is a summary of Stephen T. Davis, God, Reason and Theistic Proofs (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 101–6.

4. William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity; a New Edition, With Notes, Appendix, and Preface, By the Rev. E. A. Litton, M.A., ed. E. A. Litton (Oxford: New Clarendon Press, 1871), x–xi.

5. Ibid., xiii.

6. Ibid., 10–11.

7. Ibid., 11–12.

8. “. . . that there exists not a sceptic in the world who would not believe them, or who would defend such incredulity.”

9. William Paley, Natural Theology; Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected From Nature (New York: Sheldon, Blakeman, 1857), 246.

Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature

Chapters I–III

Chapter I

State of the Argument

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz. that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. To reckon up a few of the plainest of these parts, and of their offices, all tending to one result:—We see a cylindrical box containing a coiled elastic spring, which, by its endeavour to relax itself, turns round the box. We next observe a flexible chain (artificially wrought for the sake of flexure), communicating the action of the spring from the box to the fusee. We then find a series of wheels, the teeth of which catch in, and apply to, each other, conducting the motion from the fusee to the balance, and from the balance to the pointer; and at the same time, by the size and shape of those wheels, so regulating that motion, as to terminate in causing an index, by an equable and measured progression, to pass over a given space in a given time. We take notice that the wheels are made of brass in order to keep them from rust; the springs of steel, no other metal being so elastic; that over the face of the watch there is placed a glass, a material employed in no other part of the work, but in the room of which, if there had been any other than a transparent substance, the hour could not be seen without opening the case. This mechanism being observed (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood), the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

I. Nor would it, I apprehend, weaken the conclusion, that we had never seen a watch made; that we had never known an artist capable of making one; that we were altogether incapable of executing such a piece of workmanship ourselves, or of understanding in what manner it was performed; all this being no more than what is true of some exquisite remains of ancient art, of some lost arts, and, to the generality of mankind, of the more curious productions of modern manufacture. Does one man in a million know how oval frames are turned? Ignorance of this kind exalts our opinion of the unseen and unknown artist’s skill, if he be unseen and unknown, but raises no doubt in our minds of the existence and agency of such an artist, at some former time, and in some place or other. Nor can I perceive that it varies at all the inference, whether the question arise concerning a human agent, or concerning an agent of a different species, or an agent possessing, in some respects, a different nature.

II. Neither, secondly, would it invalidate our conclusion, that the watch sometimes went wrong, or that it seldom went exactly right. The purpose of the machinery, the design, and the designer, might be evident, and in the case supposed would be evident, in whatever way we accounted for the irregularity of the movement, or whether we could account for it or not. It is not necessary that a machine be perfect, in order to show with what design it was made: still less necessary, where the only question is, whether it were made with any design at all.

III. Nor, thirdly, would it bring any uncertainty into the argument, if there were a few parts of the watch, concerning which we could not discover, or had not yet discovered, in what manner they conduced to the general effect; or even some parts, concerning which we could not ascertain, whether they conduced to that effect in any manner whatever. For, as to the first branch of the case; if by the loss, or disorder, or decay of the parts in question, the movement of the watch were found in fact to be stopped, or disturbed, or retarded, no doubt would remain in our minds as to the utility or intention of these parts, although we should be unable to investigate the manner according to which, or the connexion by which, the ultimate effect depended upon their action or assistance; and the more complex is the machine, the more likely is this obscurity to arise. Then, as to the second thing supposed, namely, that there were parts which might be spared, without prejudice to the movement of the watch, and that we had proved this by experiment,—these superfluous parts, even if we were completely assured that they were such, would not vacate the reasoning which we had instituted concerning other parts. The indication of contrivance remained, with respect to them, nearly as it was before.

IV. Nor, fourthly, would any man in his senses think the existence of the watch, with its various machinery, accounted for, by being told that it was one out of possible combinations of material forms; that whatever he had found in the place where he found the watch, must have contained some internal configuration or other; and that this configuration might be the structure now exhibited, viz. of the works of a watch, as well as a different structure.

V. Nor, fifthly, would it yield his inquiry more satisfaction to be answered, that there existed in things a principle of order, which had disposed the parts of the watch into their present form and situation. He never knew a watch made by the principle of order; nor can he even form to himself an idea of what is meant by a principle of order, distinct from the intelligence of the watch-maker.

VI. Sixthly, he would be surprised to hear that the mechanism of the watch was no proof of contrivance, only a motive to induce the mind to think so:

VII. And not less surprised to be informed, that the watch in his hand was nothing more than the result of the laws of metallic nature. It is a perversion of language to assign any law, as the efficient, operative cause of any thing. A law presupposes an agent; for it is only the mode, according to which an agent proceeds: it implies a power; for it is the order, according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the law does nothing; is nothing. The expression, “the law of metallic nature,” may sound strange and harsh to a philosophic ear; but it seems quite as justifiable as some others which are more familiar to him, such as “the law of vegetable nature,” “the law of animal nature,” or indeed as “the law of nature” in general, when assigned as the cause of phenomena, in exclusion of agency and power; or when it is substituted into the place of these.

VIII. Neither, lastly, would our observer be driven out of his conclusion, or from his confidence in its truth, by being told that he knew nothing at all about the matter. He knows enough for his argument: he knows the utility of the end: he knows the subserviency and adaptation of the means to the end. These points being known, his ignorance of other points, his doubts concerning other points, affect not the certainty of his reasoning. The consciousness of knowing little, need not beget a distrust of that which he does know.

Chapter II

State of the Argument Continued

Suppose, in the next place, that the person who found the watch, should, after some time, discover that, in addition to all the properties which he had hitherto observed in it, it possessed the unexpected property of producing, in the course of its movement, another watch like itself (the thing is conceivable); that it contained within it a mechanism, a system of parts, a mould for instance, or a complex adjustment of lathes, files, and other tools, evidently and separately calculated for this purpose; let us inquire, what effect ought such a discovery to have upon his former conclusion.

I. The first effect would be to increase his admiration of the contrivance, and his conviction of the consummate skill of the contriver. Whether he regarded the object of the contrivance, the distinct apparatus, the intricate, yet in many parts intelligible mechanism, by which it was carried on, he would perceive, in this new observation, nothing but an additional reason for doing what he had already done,—for referring the construction of the watch to design, and to supreme art. If that construction without this property, or which is the same thing, before this property had been noticed, proved intention and art to have been employed about it; still more strong would the proof appear, when he came to the knowledge of this further property, the crown and perfection of all the rest.

II. He would reflect, that though the watch before him were, in some sense, the maker of the watch, which was fabricated in the course of its movements, yet it was in a very different sense from that, in which a carpenter, for instance, is the maker of a chair; the author of its contrivance, the cause of the relation of its parts to their use. With respect to these, the first watch was no cause at all to the second: in no such sense as this was it the author of the constitution and order, either of the parts which the new watch contained, or of the parts by the aid and instrumentality of which it was produced. We might possibly say, but with great latitude of expression, that a stream of water ground corn: but no latitude of expression would allow us to say, no stretch of conjecture could lead us to think, that the stream of water built the mill, though it were too ancient for us to know who the builder was. What the stream of water does in the affair, is neither more nor less than this; by the application of an unintelligent impulse to a mechanism previously arranged, arranged independently of it, and arranged by intelligence, an effect is produced, viz. the corn is ground. But the effect results from the arrangement. The force of the stream cannot be said to be the cause or author of the effect, still less of the arrangement. Understanding and plan in the formation of the mill were not the less necessary, for any share which the water has in grinding the corn: yet is this share the same, as that which the watch would have contributed to the production of the new watch, upon the supposition assumed in the last section. Therefore,

III. Though it be now no longer probable, that the individual watch, which our observer had found, was made immediately by the hand of an artificer, yet doth not this alteration in anywise affect the inference, that an artificer had been originally employed and concerned in the production. The argument from design remains as it was. Marks of design and contrivance are no more accounted for now, than they were before. In the same thing, we may ask for the cause of different properties. We may ask for the cause of the colour of a body, of its hardness, of its heat; and these causes may be all different. We are now asking for the cause of that subserviency to a use, that relation to an end, which we have remarked in the watch before us. No answer is given to this question, by telling us that a preceding watch produced it. There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver; order without choice; arrangement, without any thing capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose, without that which could intend a purpose; means suitable to an end, and executing their office, in accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it. Arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end, relation of instruments to a use, imply the presence of intelligence and mind. No one, therefore, can rationally believe, that the insensible, inanimate watch, from which the watch before us issued, was the proper cause of the mechanism we so much admire in it;—could be truly said to have constructed the instrument, disposed its parts, assigned their office, determined their order, action, and mutual dependency, combined their several motions into one result, and that also a result connected with the utilities of other beings. All these properties, therefore, are as much unaccounted for, as they were before.

IV. Nor is any thing gained by running the difficulty farther back, i.e. by supposing the watch before us to have been produced from another watch, that from a former, and so on indefinitely. Our going back ever so far, brings us no nearer to the least degree of satisfaction upon the subject. Contrivance is still unaccounted for. We still want a contriver. A designing mind is neither supplied by this supposition, nor dispensed with. If the difficulty were diminished the further we went back, by going back indefinitely we might exhaust it. And this is the only case to which this sort of reasoning applies. Where there is a tendency, or, as we increase the number of terms, a continual approach towards a limit, there, by supposing the number of terms to be what is called infinite, we may conceive the limit to be attained: but where there is no such tendency, or approach, nothing is effected by lengthening the series. There is no difference as to the point in question (whatever there may be as to many points), between one series and another; between a series which is finite, and a series which is infinite. A chain, composed of an infinite number of links, can no more support itself, than a chain composed of a finite number of links. And of this we are assured (though we never can have tried the experiment), because, by increasing the number of links, from ten for instance to a hundred, from a hundred to a thousand, &c. we make not the smallest approach, we observe not the smallest tendency, towards self-support. There is no difference in this respect (yet there may be a great difference in several respects) between a chain of a greater or less length, between one chain and another, between one that is finite and one that is infinite. This very much resembles the case before us. The machine which we are inspecting, demonstrates, by its construction, contrivance and design. Contrivance must have had a contriver; design, a designer; whether the machine immediately proceeded from another machine or not. That circumstance alters not the case. That other machine may, in like manner, have proceeded from a former machine: nor does that alter the case; contrivance must have had a contriver. That former one from one preceding it: no alteration still; a contriver is still necessary. No tendency is perceived, no approach towards a diminution of this necessity. It is the same with any and every succession of these machines; a succession of ten, of a hundred, of a thousand; with one series, as with another; a series which is finite, as with a series which is infinite. In whatever other respects they may differ, in this they do not. In all equally, contrivance and design are unaccounted for.

The question is not simply, How came the first watch into existence? which question, it may be pretended, is done away by supposing the series of watches thus produced from one another to have been infinite, and consequently to have had no such first, for which it was necessary to provide a cause. This, perhaps, would have been nearly the state of the question, if no thing had been before us but an unorganized, unmechanized substance, without mark or indication of contrivance. It might be difficult to show that such substance could not have existed from eternity, either in succession (if it were possible, which I think it is not, for unorganized bodies to spring from one another), or by individual perpetuity. But that is not the question now. To suppose it to be so, is to suppose that it made no difference whether we had found a watch or a stone. As it is, the metaphysics of that question have no place; for, in the watch which we are examining, are seen contrivance, design; an end, a purpose; means for the end, adaptation to the purpose. And the question which irresistibly presses upon our thoughts, is, whence this contrivance and design? The thing required is the intending mind, the adapting hand, the intelligence by which that hand was directed. This question, this demand, is not shaken off, by increasing a number or succession of substances, destitute of these properties; nor the more, by increasing that number to infinity. If it be said, that, upon the supposition of one watch being produced from another in the course of that other’s movements, and by means of the mechanism within it, we have a cause for the watch in my hand, viz. the watch from which it proceeded: I deny, that for the design, the contrivance, the suitableness of means to an end, the adaptation of instruments to a use (all which we discover in the watch), we have any cause whatever. It is in vain, therefore, to assign a series of such causes, or to allege that a series may be carried back to infinity; for I do not admit that we have yet any cause at all of the phenomena, still less any series of causes either finite or infinite. Here is contrivance, but no contriver; proofs of design, but no designer.

V. Our observer would further also reflect, that the maker of the watch before him, was, in truth and reality, the maker of every watch produced from it; there being no difference (except that the latter manifests a more exquisite skill) between the making of another watch with his own hands, by the mediation of files, lathes, chisels, &c. and the disposing, fixing, and inserting of these instruments, or of others equivalent to them, in the body of the watch already made in such a manner, as to form a new watch in the course of the movements which he had given to the old one. It is only working by one set of tools, instead of another.

The conclusion of which the first examination of the watch, of its works, construction, and movement, suggested, was, that it must have had, for the cause and author of that construction, an artificer, who understood its mechanism, and designed its use. This conclusion is invincible. A second examination presents us with a new discovery. The watch is found, in the course of its movement, to produce another watch, similar to itself; and not only so, but we perceive in it a system or organization, separately calculated for that purpose. What effect would this discovery have, or ought it to have, upon our former inference? What, as hath already been said, but to increase, beyond measure, our admiration of the skill, which had been employed in the formation of such a machine? Or shall it, instead of this, all at once turn us round to an opposite conclusion, viz. that no art or skill whatever has been concerned in the business, although all other evidences of art and skill remain as they were, and this last and supreme piece of art be now added to the rest? Can this be maintained without absurdity? Yet this is atheism.

Chapter III

Application of the Argument

This is atheism: for every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. I mean that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtility, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet, in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity.

I know no better method of introducing so large a subject, than that of comparing a single thing with a single thing; an eye, for example, with a telescope. As far as the examination of the instrument goes, there is precisely the same proof that the eye was made for vision, as there is that the telescope was made for assisting it. They are made upon the same principles; both being adjusted to the laws by which the transmission and refraction of rays of light are regulated. I speak not of the origin of the laws themselves; but such laws being fixed, the construction, in both cases, is adapted to them. For instance; these laws require, in order to produce the same effect, that the rays of light, in passing from water into the eye, should be refracted by a more convex surface, than when it passes out of air into the eye. Accordingly we find that the eye of a fish, in that part of it called the crystalline lens, is much rounder than the eye of terrestrial animals. What plainer manifestation of design can there be than this difference? What could a mathematical instrument-maker have done more, to show his knowledge of his principle, his application of that knowledge, his suiting of his means to his end; I will not say to display the compass or excellence of his skill and art, for in these all comparison is indecorous, but to testify counsel, choice, consideration, purpose?

To some it may appear a difference sufficient to destroy all similitude between the eye and the telescope, that the one is a perceiving organ, the other an unperceiving instrument. The fact is, that they are both instruments. And, as to the mechanism, at least as to mechanism being employed, and even as to the kind of it, this circumstance varies not the analogy at all. For observe, what the constitution of the eye is. It is necessary, in order to produce distinct vision, that an image or picture of the object be formed at the bottom of the eye. Whence this necessity arises, or how the picture is connected with the sensation, or contributes to it, it may be difficult, nay we will confess, if you please, impossible for us to search out. But the present question is not concerned in the inquiry. It may be true, that, in this, and in other instances, we trace mechanical contrivance a certain way; and that then we come to something which is not mechanical, or which is inscrutable. But this affects not the certainty of our investigation, as far as we have gone. The difference between an animal and an automatic statue, consists in this,—that, in the animal, we trace the mechanism to a certain point, and then we are stopped; either the mechanism becoming too subtile for our discernment, or something else beside the known laws of mechanism taking place; whereas, in the automaton, for the comparatively few motions of which it is capable, we trace the mechanism throughout. But, up to the limit, the reasoning is as clear and certain in the one case, as in the other. In the example before us, it is a matter of certainty, because it is a matter which experience and observation demonstrate, that the formation of an image at the bottom of the eye is necessary to perfect vision. The image itself can be shown. Whatever affects the distinctness of the image, affects the distinctness of the vision. The formation then of such an image being necessary (no matter how) to the sense of sight, and to the exercise of that sense, the apparatus by which it is formed is constructed and put together, not only with infinitely more art, but upon the self-same principles of art, as in the telescope or the camera obscura. The perception arising from the image may be laid out of the question; for the production of the image, these are instruments of the same kind. The end is the same; the means are the same. The purpose in both is alike; the contrivance for accomplishing that purpose is in both alike. The lenses of the telescope, and the humours of the eye, bear a complete resemblance to one another, in their figure, their position, and in their power over the rays of light, viz. in bringing each pencil to a point at the right distance from the lens; namely, in the eye, at the exact place where the membrane is spread to receive it. How is it possible, under circumstances of such close affinity, and under the operation of equal evidence, to exclude contrivance from the one; yet to acknowledge the proof of contrivance having been employed, as the plainest and clearest of all propositions, in the other?

The resemblance between the two cases is still more accurate, and obtains in more points than we have yet represented, or than we are, on the first view of the subject, aware of. In dioptric telescopes, there is an imperfection of this nature. Pencils of light, in passing through glass lenses, are separated into different colours, thereby tinging the object, especially the edges of it, as if it were viewed through a prism. To correct this inconvenience, had been long a desideratum in the art. At last it came into the mind of a sagacious optician, to inquire how this matter was managed in the eye; in which, there was exactly the same difficulty to contend with, as in the telescope. His observation taught him, that, in the eye, the evil was cured by combining lenses composed of different substances, i.e. of substances which possessed different refracting powers. Our artist borrowed thence his hint; and produced a correction of the defect by imitating, in glasses made from different materials, the effects of the different humours through which the rays of light pass before they reach the bottom of the eye. Could this be in the eye without purpose, which suggested to the optician the only effectual means of attaining that purpose?

But further; there are other points, not so much perhaps of strict resemblance between the two, as of superiority of the eye over the telescope; yet of a superiority which, being founded in the laws that regulate both, may furnish topics of fair and just comparison. Two things were wanted to the eye, which were not wanted (at least in the same degree), to the telescope; and these were, the adaptation of the organ, first, to different degrees of light; and, secondly, to the vast diversity of distance at which objects are viewed by the naked eye, viz. from a few inches to as many miles. These difficulties present not themselves to the maker of the telescope. He wants all the light he can get; and he never directs his instrument to objects near at hand. In the eye, both these cases were to be provided for; and for the purpose of providing for them, a subtile and appropriate mechanism is introduced:

I. In order to exclude excess of light, when it is excessive, and to render objects visible under obscurer degrees of it, when no more can be had, the hole or aperture in the eye, through which the light enters, is so formed, as to contract or dilate itself for the purpose of admitting a greater or less number of rays at the same time. The chamber of the eye is a camera obscura, which when the light is too small, can enlarge its opening; when too strong, can again contract it; and that without any other assistance than that of its own exquisite machinery. It is further also, in the human subject, to be observed, that this hole in the eye, which we call the pupil, under all its different dimensions, retains its exact circular shape. This is a structure extremely artificial. Let an artist only try to execute the same; he will find that his threads and strings must be disposed with great consideration and contrivance, to make a circle, which shall continually change its diameter, yet preserve its form. This is done in the eye by an application of fibres, i.e. of strings, similar, in their position and action, to what an artist would and must employ, if he had the same piece of workmanship to perform.

II. The second difficulty which has been stated, was the suiting of the same organ to the perception of objects that lie near at hand, within a few inches, we will suppose, of the eye, and of objects which are placed at a considerable distance from it, that, for example of as many furlongs (I speak in both cases of the distance at which distinct vision can be exercised). Now this, according to the principles of optics, that is, according to the laws by which the transmission of light is regulated (and these laws are fixed), could not be done without the organ itself undergoing an alteration, and receiving an adjustment, that might correspond with the exigency of the case, that is to say, with the different inclination to one another under which the rays of light reached it. Rays issuing from points placed at a small distance from the eye, and which consequently must enter the eye in a spreading or diverging order, cannot, by the same optical instrument in the same state, be brought to a point, i.e. be made to form an image, in the same place with rays proceeding from objects situated at a much greater distance, and which rays arrive at the eye in directions nearly (and physically speaking) parallel. It requires a rounder lens to do it. The point of concourse behind the lens must fall critically upon the retina, or the vision is confused; yet, other things remaining the same, this point, by the immutable properties of light, is carried further back when the rays proceed from a near object, than when they are sent from one that is remote. A person who was using an optical instrument, would manage this matter by changing, as the occasion required, his lens or his telescope; or by adjusting the distance of his glasses with his hand or his screw: but how is it to be managed in the eye? What the alteration was, or in what part of the eye it took place, or by what means it was effected (for if the known laws which govern the refraction of light be maintained, some alteration in the state of the organ there must be), had long formed a subject of inquiry and conjecture. The change, though sufficient for the purpose, is so minute as to elude ordinary observation. Some very late discoveries, deduced from a laborious and most accurate inspection of the structure and operation of the organ, seem at length to have ascertained the mechanical alteration which the parts of the eye undergo. It is found, that by the action of certain muscles, called the straight muscles, and which action is the most advantageous that could be imagined for the purpose,—it is found, I say, that, whenever the eye is directed to a near object, three changes are produced in it at the same time, all severally contributing to the adjustment required. The cornea, or outermost coat of the eye, is rendered more round and prominent; the crystalline lens underneath is pushed forward; and the axis of vision, as the depth of the eye is called, is elongated. These changes in the eye vary its power over the rays of light in such a manner and degree as to produce exactly the effect which is wanted, viz. the formation of an image upon the retina, whether the rays come to the eye in a state of divergency, which is the case when the object is near to the eye, or come parallel to one another, which is the case when the object is placed at a distance. Can anything be more decisive of contrivance than this is? The most secret laws of optics must have been known to the author of a structure endowed with such a capacity of change. It is as though an optician, when he had a nearer object to view, should rectify his instrument by putting in another glass, at the same time drawing out also his tube to a different length.

Observe a new-born child first lifting up its eyelids. What does the opening of the curtain discover? The anterior part of two pellucid globes, which, when they come to be examined, are found to be constructed upon strict optical principles; the self-same principles upon which we ourselves construct optical instruments. We find them perfect for the purpose of forming an image by refraction; composed of parts executing different offices: one part having fulfilled its office upon the pencil of light, delivering it over to the action of another part; that to a third, and so onward: the progressive action depending for its success upon the nicest and minutest adjustment of the parts concerned; yet, these parts so in fact adjusted, as to produce, not by a simple action or effect, but by a combination of actions and effects, the result which is ultimately wanted. And forasmuch as this organ would have to operate under different circumstances, with strong degrees of light, and with weak degrees, upon near objects, and upon remote ones, and these differences demanded, according to the laws by which the transmission of light is regulated, a corresponding diversity of structure; that the aperture, for example, through which the light passes, should be larger or less; the lenses rounder or flatter, or that their distance from the tablet, upon which the picture is delineated, should be shortened or lengthened: this, I say, being the case and the difficulty, to which the eye was to be adapted, we find its several parts capable of being occasionally changed, and a most artificial apparatus provided to produce that change. This is far beyond the common regulator of a watch, which requires the touch of a foreign hand to set it: but it is not altogether unlike Harrison’s contrivance for making a watch regulate itself, by inserting within it a machinery, which, by the artful use of the different expansion of metals, preserves the equability of the motion under all the various temperatures of heat and cold in which the instrument may happen to be placed. The ingenuity of this last contrivance has been justly praised. Shall, therefore, a structure which differs from it, chiefly by surpassing it, be accounted no contrivance at all? or, if it be a contrivance, that it is without a contriver?

But this, though much, is not the whole; by different species of animals the faculty we are describing is possessed, in degrees suited to the different range of vision which their mode of life, and of procuring their food, requires. Birds, for instance, in general, procure their food by means of their beak; and, the distance between the eye and the point of the beak being small, it becomes necessary that they should have the power of seeing very near objects distinctly. On the other hand, from being often elevated much above the ground, living in air, and moving through it with great velocity, they require, for their safety, as well as for assisting them in descrying their prey, a power of seeing at a great distance; a power of which, in birds of rapine, surprising examples are given. The fact accordingly is, that two peculiarities are found in the eyes of birds, both tending to facilitate the change upon which the adjustment of the eye to different distances depends. The one is a bony, yet, in most species, a flexible rim or hoop, surrounding the broadest part of the eye; which, confining the action of the muscles to that part, increases the effect of their lateral pressure upon the orb, by which pressure its axis is elongated for the purpose of looking at very near objects. The other is an additional muscle, called the marsupium, to draw, on occasion, the crystalline lens back, and to fit the same eye for the viewing of very distant objects. By these means, the eyes of birds can pass from one extreme to another of their scale of adjustment, with more ease and readiness than the eyes of other animals.

The eyes of fishes also, compared with those of terrestrial animals, exhibit certain distinctions of structure, adapted to their state and element. We have already observed upon the figure of the crystalline compensating by its roundness the density of the medium through which their light passes. To which we have to add, that the eyes of fish, in their natural and indolent state, appear to be adjusted to near objects, in this respect differing from the human eye, as well as those of quadrupeds and birds. The ordinary shape of the fish’s eye being in a much higher degree convex than that of land animals, a corresponding difference attends its muscular conformation, viz. that it is throughout calculated for flattening the eye.

The iris also in the eyes of fish does not admit of contraction. This is a great difference, of which the probable reason is, that the diminished light in water is never too strong for the retina.

In the eel, which has to work its head through sand and gravel, the roughest and harshest substances, there is placed before the eye, and at some distance from it, a transparent, horny, convex case or covering, which, without obstructing the sight, defends the organ. To such an animal, could any thing be more wanted, or more useful?

Thus, in comparing the eyes of different kinds of animals, we see, in their resemblances and distinctions, one general plan laid down, and that plan varied with the varying exigencies to which it is to be applied.

There is one property however common, I believe, to all eyes, at least to all which have been examined,[1] namely, that the optic nerve enters the bottom of the eye, not in the centre or middle, but a little on one side: not in the point where the axis of the eye meets the retina, but between that point and the nose. The difference which this makes is, that no part of an object is unperceived by both eyes at the same time.

In considering vision as achieved by the means of an image formed at the bottom of the eye, we can never reflect without wonder upon the smallness, yet correctness, of the picture, the subtility of the touch, the fineness of the lines. A landscape of five or six square leagues is brought into a space of half an inch diameter; yet the multitude of objects which it contains, are all preserved; are all discriminated in their magnitudes, positions, figures, colours. The prospect from Hampstead-Hill is compressed into the compass of a six-pence, yet circumstantially represented. A stage coach, travelling at its ordinary speed for half an hour, passes, in the eye, only over one-twelfth of an inch, yet is this change of place in the image distinctly perceived throughout its whole progress; for it is only by means of that perception that the motion of the coach itself is made sensible to the eye. If any thing can abate our admiration of the smallness of the visual tablet compared with the extent of vision, it is a reflection, which the view of nature leads us, every hour, to make, viz. that, in the hands of the Creator, great and little are nothing.

Sturmius held, that the examination of the eye was a cure for atheism. Beside that conformity to optical principles which its internal constitution displays, and which alone amounts to a manifestation of intelligence having been exerted in the structure; besides this, which forms, no doubt, the leading character of the organ, there is to be seen, in every thing belonging to it and about it, an extraordinary degree of care, an anxiety for its preservation, due, if we may so speak, to its value and its tenderness. It is lodged in a strong, deep, bony socket, composed by the junction of seven different bones,[2] hollowed out at their edges. In some few species, as that of the coatimondi,[3] the orbit is not bony throughout; but whenever this is the case, the upper, which is the deficient part, is supplied by a cartilaginous ligament; a substitution which shows the same care. Within this socket it is imbedded in fat, of all animal substances the best adapted both to its repose and motion. It is sheltered by the eyebrows; an arch of hair, which, like a thatched penthouse, prevents the sweat and moisture of the forehead from running down into it.

But it is still better protected by its lid. Of the superficial parts of the animal frame, I know none which, in its office and structure, is more deserving of attention than the eyelid. It defends the eye; it wipes it; it closes it in sleep. Are there, in any work of art whatever, purposes more evident than those which this organ fulfils? or an apparatus for executing those purposes more intelligible, more appropriate, or more mechanical? If it be overlooked by the observer of nature, it can only be because it is obvious and familiar. This is a tendency to be guarded against. We pass by the plainest instances, whilst we are exploring those which are rare and curious; by which conduct of the understanding, we sometimes neglect the strongest observations, being taken up with others, which, though more recondite and scientific, are, as solid arguments, entitled to much less consideration.

In order to keep the eye moist and clean (which qualities are necessary to its brightness and its use), a wash is constantly supplied by a secretion for the purpose; and the superfluous brine is conveyed to the nose through a perforation in the bone as large as a goose-quill. When once the fluid has entered the nose, it spreads itself upon the inside of the nostril, and is evaporated by the current of warm air, which, in the course of respiration, is continually passing over it. Can any pipe or outlet, for carrying off the waste liquor from a dye-house or a distillery, be more mechanical than this is? It is easily perceived, that the eye must want moisture: but could the want of the eye generate the gland which produces the tear, or bore the hole by which it is discharged,—a hole through a bone?

It is observable, that this provision is not found in fish,—the element in which they live supplying a constant lotion to the eye.

It were, however, injustice to dismiss the eye as a piece of mechanism, without noticing that most exquisite of all contrivances, the nictitating membrane, which is found in the eyes of birds and of many quadrupeds. Its use is to sweep the eye, which it does in an instant, to spread over it the lachrymal humour; to defend it also from sudden injuries: yet not totally, when drawn upon the pupil, to shut out the light. The commodiousness with which it lies folded up in the upper corner of the eye, ready for use and action, and the quickness with which it executes its purpose, are properties known and obvious to every observer: but what is equally admirable, though not quite so obvious, is the combination of two kinds of substance, muscular and elastic, and of two different kinds of action, by which the motion of this membrane is performed. It is not, as in ordinary cases, by the action of two antagonist muscles, one pulling forward and the other backward, that a reciprocal change is effected; but it is thus: The membrane itself is an elastic substance, capable of being drawn out by force like a piece of elastic gum, and by its own elasticity returning, when the force is removed, to its former position. Such being its nature, in order to fit it up for its office, it is connected by a tendon or thread with a muscle in the back part of the eye: this tendon or thread, though strong, is so fine, as not to obstruct the sight, even when it passes across it; and the muscle itself, being placed in the back part of the eye, derives from its situation the advantage, not only of being secure, but of being out of the way; which it would hardly have been in any position that could be assigned to it in the anterior part of the orb, where its function lies. When the muscle behind the eye contracts, the membrane, by means of the communicating thread, is instantly drawn over the fore-part of it. When the muscular contraction (which is a positive, and, most probably, a voluntary effort) ceases to be exerted, the elasticity alone of the membrane brings it back again to its position.[4] Does not this, if any thing can do it, bespeak an artist, master of his work, acquainted with his materials? “Of a thousand other things,” say the French Academicians, “we perceive not the contrivance, because we understand them only by the effects, of which we know not the causes: but we here treat of a machine, all the parts whereof are visible; and which need only be looked upon, to discover the reasons of its motion and action.”[5]

In the configuration of the muscle which, though placed behind the eye, draws the nictitating membrane over the eye, there is, what the authors, just now quoted, deservedly call a marvellous mechanism. I suppose this structure to be found in other animals; but, in the memoirs from which this account is taken, it is anatomically demonstrated only in the cassowary. The muscle is passed through a loop formed by another muscle: and is there inflected, as if it were round a pulley. This is a peculiarity; and observe the advantage of it. A single muscle with a straight tendon, which is the common muscular form, would have been sufficient, if it had had power to draw far enough. But the contraction, necessary to draw the membrane over the whole eye, required a longer muscle than could lie straight at the bottom of the eye. Therefore, in order to have a greater length in a less compass, the cord of the main muscle makes an angle. This, so far, answers the end; but, still further, it makes an angle, not round a fixed pivot, but round a loop formed by another muscle; which second muscle, whenever it contracts, of course twitches the first muscle at the point of inflection, and thereby assists the action designed by both.

One question may possibly have dwelt in the reader’s mind during the perusal of these observations, namely, Why should not the Deity have given to the animal the faculty of vision at once? Why this circuitous perception; the ministry of so many means; an element provided for the purpose; reflected from opaque substances, refracted through transparent ones; and both according to precise laws; then, a complex organ, an intricate and artificial apparatus, in order, by the operation of this element, and in conformity with the restrictions of these laws, to produce an image upon a membrane communicating with the brain? Wherefore all this? Why make the difficulty in order to surmount it? If to perceive objects by some other mode than that of touch, or objects which lay out of the reach of that sense, were the thing proposed; could not a simple volition of the Creator have communicated the capacity? Why resort to contrivance, where power is omnipotent? Contrivance, by its very definition and nature, is the refuge of imperfection. To have recourse to expedients, implies difficulty, impediment, restraint, defect of power. This question belongs to the other senses, as well as to sight; to the general functions of animal life, as nutrition, secretion, respiration; to the economy of vegetables; and indeed to almost all the operations of nature. The question, therefore, is of very wide extent; and amongst other answers which may be given to it; beside reasons of which probably we are ignorant, one answer is this: It is only by the display of contrivance, that the existence, the agency, the wisdom of the Deity, could be testified to his rational creatures. This is the scale by which we ascend to all the knowledge of our Creator which we possess, so far as it depends upon the phenomena, or the works of nature. Take away this, and you take away from us every subject of observation, and ground of reasoning; I mean as our rational faculties are formed at present. Whatever is done, God could have done without the intervention of instruments or means: but it is in the construction of instruments, in the choice and adaptation of means, that a creative intelligence is seen. It is this which constitutes the order and beauty of the universe. God, therefore, has been pleased to prescribe limits to his own power, and to work his end within those limits. The general laws of matter have perhaps the nature of these limits; its inertia, its re-action; the laws which govern the communication of motion, the refraction and reflection of light, the constitution of fluids non-elastic and elastic, the transmission of sound through the latter; the laws of magnetism, of electricity; and probably others, yet undiscovered. These are general laws; and when a particular purpose is to be effected, it is not by making a new law, nor by the suspension of the old ones, nor by making them wind, and bend, and yield to the occasion (for nature with great steadiness adheres to and supports them); but it is, as we have seen in the eye, by the interposition of an apparatus, corresponding with these laws, and suited to the exigency which results from them, that the purpose is at length attained. As we have said, therefore, God prescribes limits to his power, that he may let in the exercise, and thereby exhibit demonstrations of his wisdom. For then, i.e. such laws and limitations being laid down, it is as though one Being should have fixed certain rules; and, if we may so speak, provided certain materials; and, afterwards, have committed to another Being, out of these materials, and in subordination to these rules, the task of drawing forth a creation: a supposition which evidently leaves room, and induces indeed a necessity for contrivance. Nay, there may be many such agents, and many ranks of these. We do not advance this as a doctrine either of philosophy or of religion; but we say that the subject may safely be represented under this view, because the Deity, acting himself by general laws, will have the same consequences upon our reasoning, as if he had prescribed these laws to another. It has been said, that the problem of creation was, “attraction and matter being given, to make a world out of them”: and, as above explained, this statement perhaps does not convey a false idea.

We have made choice of the eye as an instance upon which to rest the argument of this chapter. Some single example was to be proposed: and the eye offered itself under the advantage of admitting of a strict comparison with optical instruments. The ear, it is probable, is no less artificially and mechanically adapted to its office, than the eye. But we know less about it: we do not so well understand the action, the use, or the mutual dependency of its internal parts. Its general form, however, both external and internal, is sufficient to show that it is an instrument adapted to the reception of sound; that is to say, already knowing that sound consists in pulses of the air, we perceive, in the structure of the ear, a suitableness to receive impressions from this species of action, and to propagate these impressions to the brain. For of what does this structure consist? An external ear (the concha), calculated, like an ear-trumpet, to catch and collect the pulses of which we have spoken; in large quadrupeds, turning to the sound, and possessing a configuration, as well as motion, evidently fitted for the office: of a tube which leads into the head, lying at the root of this outward ear, the folds and sinuses thereof tending and conducting the air towards it: of a thin membrane, like the pelt of a drum, stretched across this passage upon a bony rim: of a chain of moveable, and infinitely curious, bones, forming a communication, and the only communication that can be observed, between the membrane last mentioned and the interior channels and recesses of the skull: of cavities, similar in shape and form to wind instruments of music, being spiral or portions of circles: of the eustachian tube, like the hole in a drum, to let the air pass freely into and out of the barrel of the ear, as the covering membrane vibrates, or as the temperature may be altered: the whole labyrinth hewn out of a rock: that is, wrought into the substance of the hardest bone of the body. This assemblage of connected parts constitutes together an apparatus, plainly enough relative to the transmission of sound, or of the impulses received from sound, and only to be lamented in not being better understood.

The communication within, formed by the small bones of the ear, is, to look upon, more like what we are accustomed to call machinery, than any thing I am acquainted with in animal bodies. It seems evidently designed to continue towards the sensorium the tremulous motions which are excited in the membrane of the tympanum, or what is better known by the name of the “drum of the ear.” The compages of bones consists of four, which are so disposed, and so hinge upon one another, as that if the membrane, the drum of the ear, vibrate, all the four are put in motion together; and, by the result of their action, work the base of that which is the last in the series, upon an aperture which it closes, and upon which it plays, and which aperture opens into the tortuous canals that lead to the brain. This last bone of the four is called the stapes. The office of the drum of the ear is to spread out an extended surface, capable of receiving the impressions of sound, and of being put by them into a state of vibration. The office of the stapes is to repeat these vibrations. It is a repeating frigate, stationed more within the line. From which account of its action may be understood, how the sensation of sound will be excited, by any thing which communicates a vibratory motion to the stapes, though not, as in all ordinary cases, through the intervention of the membrana tympani. This is done by solid bodies applied to the bones of the skull, as by a metal bar holden at one end between the teeth, and touching at the other end a tremulous body. It likewise appears to be done, in a considerable degree, by the air itself, even when this membrane, the drum of the ear, is greatly damaged. Either in the natural or preternatural state of the organ, the use of the chain of bones is to propagate the impulse in a direction towards the brain, and to propagate it with the advantage of a lever; which advantage consists in increasing the force and strength of the vibration, and at the same time diminishing the space through which it oscillates: both of which changes may augment or facilitate the still deeper action of the auditory nerves.

The benefit of the eustachian tube to the organ, may be made out upon known pneumatic principles. Behind the drum of the ear is a second cavity, or barrel, called the tympanum. The eustachian tube is a slender pipe, but sufficient for the passage of air, leading from this cavity into the back part of the mouth. Now, it would not have done to have had a vacuum in this cavity; for, in that case, the pressure of the atmosphere from without would have burst the membrane which covered it. Nor would it have done to have filled the cavity with lymph or any other secretion; which would necessarily have obstructed, both the vibration of the membrane, and the play of the small bones. Nor, lastly, would it have done to have occupied the space with confined air, because the expansion of that air by heat, or its contraction by cold, would have distended or relaxed the covering membrane, in a degree inconsistent with the purpose which it was assigned to execute. The only remaining expedient, and that for which the eustachian tube serves, is to open to this cavity a communication with the external air. In one word; it exactly answers the purpose of the hole in a drum.

The membrana tympani itself likewise, deserves all the examination which can be made of it. It is not found in the ears of fish; which furnishes an additional proof of what indeed is indicated by every thing about it, that it is appropriated to the action of air, or of an elastic medium. It bears an obvious resemblance to the pelt or head of a drum, from which it takes its name. It resembles also a drum-head in this principal property, that its use depends upon its tension. Tension is the state essential to it. Now we know that, in a drum, the pelt is carried over a hoop, and braced as occasion requires, by the means of strings attached to its circumference. In the membrane of the ear, the same purpose is provided for, more simply, but not less mechanically, nor less successfully, by a different expedient, viz. by the end of a bone (the handle of the malleus) pressing upon its centre. It is only in very large animals that the texture of this membrane can be discerned. In the Philosophical Transactions for the year 1800 (vol. i.), Mr. Everard Home has given some curious observations upon the ear, and the drum of the ear of an elephant. He discovered in it, what he calls a radiated muscle, that is, straight muscular fibres, passing along the membrane from the circumference to the centre; from the bony rim which surrounds it towards the handle of the malleus to which the central part is attached. This muscle he supposes to be designed to bring the membrane into unison with different sounds: but then he also discovered, that this muscle itself cannot act, unless the membrane be drawn to a stretch, and kept in a due state of tightness, by what may be called a foreign force, viz. the action of the muscles of the malleus. Supposing his explanation of the use of the parts to be just, our author is well founded in the reflection which he makes upon it: “that this mode of adapting the ear to different sounds, is one of the most beautiful applications of muscles in the body; the mechanism is so simple, and the variety of effects so great.”

In another volume of the Transactions above referred to, and of the same year, two most curious cases are related, of persons who retained the sense of hearing, not in a perfect, but in a very considerable degree, notwithstanding the almost total loss of the membrane we have been describing. In one of these cases, the use here assigned to that membrane, of modifying the impressions of sound by change of tension, was attempted to be supplied by straining the muscles of the outward ear. “The external ear,” we are told, “had acquired a distinct motion upward and backward, which was observable whenever the patient listened to any thing which he did not distinctly hear: when he was addressed in a whisper, the ear was seen immediately to move; when the tone of voice” was louder, it then remained altogether motionless.

It appears probable, from both these cases, that a collateral, if not principal, use of the membrane, is to cover and protect the barrel of the ear which lies behind it. Both the patients suffered from cold: one, “a great increase of deafness from catching cold”; the other, “very considerable pain from exposure to a stream of cold air.” Bad effects therefore followed from this cavity being left open to the external air; yet, had the Author of nature shut it up by any other cover, than what was capable, by its texture, of receiving vibrations from sound, and, by its connexion with the interior parts, of transmitting those vibrations to the brain, the use of the organ, so far as we can judge, must have been entirely obstructed.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Discuss Paley’s statement: “A law presupposes an agent.”

2. What characteristics of the “watchmaker” are entailed in Paley’s argument?

3. In what way(s) is Paley’s analogy different from Butler’s?

4. What does Paley mean when he says, “God, therefore, has been pleased to prescribe limits to his own power, and to work his end within those limits”?

1. The eye of the seal or sea-calf, I understand, is an exception. Mem. Acad. Paris. 1701, p. 123.

2. Heister, sect. 89.

3. Mem. R. Ac. Paris, p. 117.

4. Phil. Trans. 1796.

5. Memoirs for a Natural History of Animals, by the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, done into English by Order of the Royal Society, 1701, p. 249.

CHAPTER 10

Friedrich Schleiermacher

(1768–1834)

Known as the father of liberal Protestantism, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher put his stamp on much of Christian thought in the nineteenth century. Only when Karl Barth (1886–1968) mounted a massive critique of him did Schleiermacher’s star begin to fade. He was heir to the romantic movement and significantly modified Protestant theology in order to accommodate the rising reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and the current ideals of neoclassicism.

Romanticism was a complex, multinational cultural movement that celebrated passion and drama. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–1796) is a representative romantic novel that had immeasurable impact on Germany. It describes the life of a young man who sought to break away from the world of money and find fulfillment in the theater. Full of Sturm und Drang, Meister moves from the stage to the real world in a kind of Masonic progression through trials and temptations.

The romantics sought to answer Immanuel Kant’s major conundrum: how can we find the Ding an sich, the thing in itself? How may we resolve the antinomies of life, such as time and eternity, free will and determinism? We do so by storming the heavens to find the unity behind all things. Like Napoleon, we combine science and law to advance this unity, using force if necessary. We use not so much reason as feeling to get there. As the French poet Charles Baudelaire once put it, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.” A centerpiece of Schleiermacher’s theology is the Gefühl, the feeling, or affect for God.

Born in Breslau, Schleiermacher was the son of a Reformed military chaplain. Educated in Moravian schools, he was early on imbued with Lutheran pietism. He seems to have had a conversion in his school years, but also found the teaching inadequate for his intellectual needs. In 1787 he entered the University of Halle, where he studied Kant, Plato, and Spinoza, each of whom would have a significant impact on his thinking. From Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791) he learned the technique of biblical higher criticism.

During these university years he came to doubt the Christian faith altogether. When he timidly wrote his father about his disbelief, his father told him that faith is “the regalia of the Godhead . . . God’s royal due.” The young Friedrich replied that if this was so, then he had lost the faith. “I cannot believe that he who called himself the Son of Man was the true, eternal God; I cannot believe that his death was a vicarious atonement.”[1]

After completing his studies, Schleiermacher became the private tutor of Count Dohna-Schlobitten and his family. This was a cultured and aristocratic household where the young man developed a love for family and social life. In 1796 he became the Reformed chaplain to the Charité hospital in Berlin. There he interacted with a number of adherents to romanticism, particularly W. Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), a central figure in the movement, with whom he translated much of Plato’s work into German. He also developed a relationship with Eleonore Grunow, the wife of a Berlin clergyman whom he hoped she might divorce and live with him. It is here, in 1799, that Schleiermacher wrote the text we shall examine, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers), which would have a major influence throughout the following century.

From 1802 to 1804 he was sent from Berlin to become the Reformed pastor in the Pomeranian town of Stolp. Schleiermacher was essentially in exile, sent there for his liberal views and lifestyle. Eleonore decided to stay with her husband, and Schleiermacher fell into deep depression. He wrote the rather dreary work, Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803), a critique of existing ethical systems, which justified the need for a religious grounding for ethics.

In 1804 he was appointed university preacher and professor of theology at the University of Halle, where he stayed until 1807, teaching every discipline except Old Testament. And while popular, he was also controversial. He was attacked for at least three contradictory reasons: atheism, Spinozism, and pietism. While at Halle he wrote the Christmas Eve Dialogue on the Incarnation (1806), which shows him progressing toward a deeper appreciation of the Christian faith. In 1807, after the Battle of Jena, he returned to Berlin and became the pastor of the Trinity Church. He married Henrietta von Willich, the widow of a close friend. They had one son, who died in childhood.

The University of Berlin was founded in 1810. Schleiermacher played an important role in the founding and took its chair of theology. He was named secretary of the Prussian Academy of the Sciences. He also led in the reorganization of the Prussian church and attempted a merger between the Reformed and the Lutheran Churches of Germany. These would eventually unite in 1817. Schleiermacher taught at Berlin and preached each Sunday for twenty-four years.

Among his writings, we must note his chief theological work, Der christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith), begun 1821–1822, then expanded in 1830–1831. It is a massive study of Christian doctrine centered on the premise that all elements must be examined in the light of self-consciousness. God, sin, grace, the sacraments, the church, and so on are all defined in relation to the “feeling” (or “affect”) of dependence. Interestingly, out of some 750 pages only thirteen of them, tagged on at the very end, are about the Trinity.

Of interest also is that Schleiermacher reorganized the traditional theological curriculum. He developed a section on prolegomena, which he called “philosophical theology.” This he divided into two parts, apologetics and polemics. Apologetics is meant to compare Christianity to other faiths in order to show its uniqueness. It does not belong to evangelism, the gathering of people into the church; that is the province of practical theology. Apologetics is meant to undergird the “truth of the mode of faith,” which Christians need to cultivate. Polemics is the study of divergences, errors, and heresies. This would later be called elenctics. One of Schleiermacher’s disciples, Karl Heinrich Sack (1789–1875), would perfect this system and write several volumes on apologetics himself. This way of organizing the encyclopedia became the basis for the positioning of apologetics in the modern theological schools.

Schleiermacher died in 1834, leaving behind a considerable legacy, but also many open questions. During his life he had battled, as he thought of it, against both the right and the left. The right was represented by E. W. Hengstenberg (1802–1869), the linguist and theologian, a staunch defender of evangelical orthodoxy. And the left was represented by the rationalist D. G. C. von Cölln (1788–1833), whose work showed affinities with the scientific evolutionism of the day and rejected anything resembling dogmatics.

The immediate occasion for On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers was the prodding of friends in Halle. One salon he frequented was held by the Jewish woman Henrietta Herz, with whom he found many sympathies. Among the subjects there discussed were the inadequacies of the Enlightenment, the deficits of neoclassicism, and the quest for the (romantic) notion of diversity within unity. As a pastor, he felt isolated in the midst of these rather liberated people. Indeed, he saw them as “cultured despisers” of the church.

His mentor, W. F. Schlegel, devised a plan to hold a surprise twenty-ninth birthday party for Schleiermacher at which all in attendance would urge him to write a book in defense of the Christian faith. The occasion, November 21, 1797, was a happy one, since most of his closest friends were in attendance. Lots of food and gifts were laid out. Then Schlegel interrupted and signaled the group to say, in unison, “you must write a book.” It took a while, but seventeen months later the book was written, whereupon he wrote Henrietta that he had given the “final stroke to Religion.”

What he meant by this statement is no doubt, first, that he had finally finished the book. But, second, he was touting the radical character of the book, which in many ways was quite unprecedented. Though not written in a complete vacuum, nevertheless it was a departure from many of the currently held views on religion: orthodoxy, natural religion, Pietism, or other. What he set forth appeared to be much freer from authority than any of these, although, of course, it brought with it a sort of scientific authority, intentional or not. Indeed, much of the book is descriptive and analytical. Religion for Schleiermacher was human, anthropological, and thus of limited importance. Yet when you understand its essence, you will see how it points to the things that really matter.

The First Speech tells us that no one can apprehend ultimate reality, or what is beyond the present world. Nor can anyone quite exhaust the individual data in this world. We are thus in a sort of dialectical tension between unity and diversity, which reminds us of our essential finitude. The Second Speech proclaims that religion is not primarily knowledge or action, but is rather a feeling. Schleiermacher’s Gefühl is not a surface emotion, but an affect, a deep-seated longing for the transcendent, or, as he puts it, “a sense and taste for the Infinite in the finite.”

In the rest of the book he makes a case for Christianity by showing that it is rooted in the experience of human beings, but is a superior version of the universal phenomenon of religion. Jesus is the “Founder” of the Christian faith, who knows the depths of religious feeling undisturbed by foreign elements. While his nobleness, his gentleness, his simplicity are all traits of a marvelous human character, the divine element in him is “the glorious clearness to which the great idea He came to exhibit attained in His soul.”[2] Although Schleiermacher is vague and romantic about many things, he uses certain concepts from traditional Christianity but changes them considerably. For example, he sees Christ as one mediator, certainly the best, but says the church should also be full of mediators.

The Speeches are an early work, and Schleiermacher would develop his thought considerably along the way to his The Christian Faith. But they contain in seed form much of what would emerge as mature fruit later on. In his time, they had a mixed reception. A number of philosophers, including Schlegel, to an extent, and the idealists, to a greater extent, faulted the book for not stressing the problem of alienation and reconciliation enough. The church charged the author with pantheism and a denial of traditional doctrines. Yet Schleiermacher was given an influential teaching position in the University of Berlin, and his lecture room was always packed. And he was enormously influential on various subsequent theologians and thinkers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Horace Bushnell, and, later, Wilhelm Hermann and Rudolph Otto. Karl Barth himself, though often arguing against Schleiermacher, did not altogether differ from his construction.

1. Brian A. Gerrish: A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 25.

2. From the Fifth Speech, 246.

On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers

Fifth Speech

The Religions*

Man in closest fellowship with the highest must be for you all an object of esteem, nay, of reverence. No one capable of understanding such a state can, when he sees it, withhold this feeling. That is past all doubt. You may despise all whose minds are easily and entirely filled with trivial things, but in vain you attempt to depreciate one who drinks in the greatest for his nourishment. You may love him or hate him, according as he goes with you or against you in the narrow path of activity and culture, but even the most beautiful feeling of equality you cannot entertain towards a person so far exalted above you. The seeker for the Highest Existence in the world stands above all who have not a like purpose. Your wisest men say that, even against your will, you must honour the virtuous who, in accordance with the laws of the moral nature, endeavour to determine finite concerns by infinite requirements. And were it even possible for you to find something ridiculous in virtue itself, because of the contrast between the limited powers and the infinite undertaking, you still could not deny esteem to one whose organs are open to the Universe, who is far from strife and opposition, exalted above all imperfect endeavour, responsive to the Universe and one with it. You cannot despise when you see man in this supreme moment of human existence and the clear beam is reflected in its purity upon you.

But whether the picture of the nature and of the life of religion I have drawn has claimed your esteem I do not inquire. Because of false conceptions and devotion to nonessentials esteem is too often refused, but I am sure of the power of the subject, as soon as it is freed from its distorting drapery. Nor do I ask whether my thoughts on the coherence of this indwelling capacity with all that is sublime and godlike in our nature, have stimulated you to an intenser study of our nature and possibilities. I also pass the question, whether you have taken the higher standpoint I showed you, and have recognized from thence, in that nobler fellowship of spirits, so much misjudged, wherein everyone freely surrenders himself, not regarding the glory of his self-will, nor the exclusive possession of his deepest, most secret individuality, that he may regard himself as a work of the eternal, the all-fashioning World-Spirit, even the holy of holies of fellowship, higher far than any earthly fellowship, holier than the tenderest tie of friendship. In short, I do not ask whether all religion, in its infinity, its divine power, has compelled you to adoration, for I leave the matter itself to work upon you.

At present I have something else to deal with, a new opposition to vanquish. I would, as it were, conduct you to the God that has become flesh; I would show you religion when it has resigned its infinity and appeared, often in sorry form, among men; I would have you discover religion in the religions. Though they are always earthly and impure, the same form of heavenly beauty that I have tried to depict is to be sought in them.

The divisions of the church and the difference of religion are almost always found together. The connection seems inseparable. There are as many creeds and confessions as churches and religious communions. Glancing at this state of things, you might easily believe that my judgment on the plurality of the church must also be my judgment on the plurality of religion. You would, however, entirely mistake my opinion. I condemned the plurality of the church, but my argument presupposed the plurality of religion. I showed from the nature of the case that in the church all rigid outline should be lost, that all distinct partition should disappear. Not only did I hold that all should be one indivisible whole in spirit and sympathy, but that the actual connection should have larger development and ever approach the highest, the universal unity. Now if there is not everywhere plurality of religion, if the most marked difference is not necessary and unavoidable, why should the true church need to be one? Is it not that everyone in the religion of others may see and share what he cannot find in his own? And why should the visible church be only one, if it is not that everyone may seek in it religion in the form best fitted to awake the germ that lies asleep in him? And if this germ can only be fertilized and made to grow by one definite kind of influence, it must itself be of a definite kind.

Nor can these different manifestations of religion be mere component parts, differing only in number and size, and forming, when combined, a uniform whole. In that case every one would by natural progress come to be like his neighbour. Such religion as he acquired would change into his own, and become identical with it. The church, this fellowship with all believers which I consider indispensable for every religious man, would be merely provisional. The more successful its work, the quicker would it end—a view of the institution I have never contemplated. I therefore find that multiplicity of the religions is based in the nature of religion.

That no man can perfectly possess all religion is easy to see. Men are determined in one special way, religion is endlessly determinable. But it must be equally evident that religion is not dismembered and scattered in parts by random among men, but that it must organize itself in manifestations of varying degrees of resemblance. Recall the several stages of religion to which I drew your attention. I said that the religion of a person, to whom the world reveals itself as a living whole, is not a mere continuation of the view of the person who only sees the world in its apparently hostile elements. By no amount of regarding the Universe as chaotic and discrete can the higher view be attained. These differences you may call kinds or degrees of religion, but in either case you will have to admit that, as in every similar case, the forms in which an infinite force divides itself is usually characteristic and different.

Wherefore, plurality of religions is another thing than plurality of the church. The essence of the church is fellowship. Its limit, therefore, cannot be the uniformity of religious persons. It is just difference that should be brought into fellowship. You are manifestly right when you believe that the church can never in actuality be completely and uniformly one. The only reason, however, is that every society existing in space and time is thereby limited and losing in depth what it gains in breadth, falls to pieces. But religion, exactly by its multiplicity, assumes the utmost unity of the church. This multiplicity is necessary for the complete manifestation of religion. It must seek for a definite character, not only in the individual but also in the society. Did the society not contain a principle to individualize itself, it could have no existence. Hence we must assume and we must search for an endless mass of distinct forms. Each separate religion claims to be such a distinct form revealing religion, and we must see whether it is agreeable to this principle. We must make clear to ourselves wherein it is peculiar. Though the difference be hidden under strange disguises, though it be distorted, not only by the unavoidable influence of the transitory to which the enduring has condescended, but also by the unholy hand of sacrilegious men, we must find it.

To be satisfied with a mere general idea of religion would not be worthy of you. Would you then understand it as it really exists and displays itself, would you comprehend it as an endlessly progressive work of the Spirit that reveals Himself in all human history, you must abandon the vain and foolish wish that there should only be one religion; you must lay aside all repugnance to its multiplicity; as candidly as possible you must approach everything that has ever, in the changing shapes of humanity, been developed in its advancing career, from the ever fruitful bosom of the spiritual life.

The different existing manifestations of religion you call positive religions. Under this name they have long been the object of a quite pre-eminent hate. Despite your repugnance to religion generally, you have always borne more easily with what for distinction is called natural religion. You have almost spoken of it with esteem.

I do not hesitate to say at once that from the heart I entirely deny this superiority. For all who have religion at all and profess to love it, it would be the vilest in consequence to admit it. They would thereby fall into the openest self-contradiction. For my own part, if I only succeeded in recommending to you this natural religion, I would consider that I had lost my pains.

For you, indeed, to whom religion generally is offensive, I have always considered this preference natural. The so-called natural religion is usually so much refined away, and has such metaphysical and moral graces, that little of the peculiar character of religion appears. It understands so well to live in reserve, to restrain and to accommodate itself that it can be put up with anywhere. Every positive religion, on the contrary, has certain strong traits and a very marked physiognomy, so that its every movement, even to the careless glance, proclaims what it really is.

If this is the true ground of your dislike, you must now rid yourself of it. If you have now, as I hope, a better estimate of religion, it should be no longer necessary for me to contend against it. If you see that a peculiar and noble capacity of man underlies religion, a capacity which, of course, must be educated, it cannot be offensive to you to regard it in the most definite forms in which it has yet appeared. Rather you must the more willingly grant a form your attention the more there is developed in it the characteristic and distinctive elements of religion.

But you may not admit this argument. You may transfer all the reproaches you have formerly been accustomed to bestow on religion in general to the single religions. You may maintain that there are always, just in this element that you call positive, the occasion and the justification of those reproaches, and that in consequence the positive religions cannot be as I have sought to represent, the natural manifestations of the true religion. You would show me how, without exception, they are full of what, according to my own statement, is not religion. Consequently, must not a principle of corruption lie deep in their constitution? You will remind me that each one proclaims that it alone is true, and that what is peculiar to it is absolutely the highest. Are they not distinguished from one another by elements they should as much as possible eliminate? In disproving and contending, be it with art and understanding, or with weapons stranger and more unworthy, do they not show themselves quite contrary to the nature of true religion? You would add that, exactly in proportion as you esteem religion and acknowledge its importance, you must take a lively interest in seeing that it everywhere enjoys the greatest freedom to cultivate itself on all sides. You must, therefore, hate keenly those definite religious forms, that hold all their adherents to the same type and the same word, withdraw the freedom to follow their own nature and compress them in unnatural limits. In contrast, you would praise mightily the superiority in all these points of the natural to the positive religions.

Once more I say, I do not deny that misunderstandings and perversions exist in all religions, and I raise no objections to the dislike with which they inspire you. Nay, I acknowledge there is in them all this much bewailed degeneration, this divergence into alien territory. The diviner religion itself is, the less would I embellish its corruptions, or admiringly cherish its excrescences. But forget for once this one-sided view and follow me to another. Consider how much of this corruption is due to those who have dragged forth religion from the depths of the heart into the civil world. Acknowledge that much of it is unavoidable as soon as the Infinite, by descending into the sphere of time and submitting to the general influence of finite things, takes to itself a narrow shell. And however deep-rooted this corruption may be, and however much the religions may have suffered thereby, consider this also: if the proper religious view of all things is to seek even in things apparently common and base every trace of the divine, the true and the eternal, and to reverence even the faintest, you cannot omit what has the justest claims to be judged religiously.

And you would find more than remote traces of the Deity. I invite you to study every faith professed by man, every religion that has a name and a character. Though it may long ago have degenerated into a long series of empty customs, into a system of abstract ideas and theories, will you not, when you examine the original elements at the source, find that this dead dross was once the molten outpourings of the inner fire? Is there not in all religions more or less of the true nature of religion, as I have presented it to you? Must not, therefore, each religion be one of the special forms which mankind, in some region of the earth and at some stage of development, has to accept?

I must take care not to attempt anything systematic or complete, for that would be the study of a life, and not the business of a discourse. Yet you must not be allowed to wander at hazard in this endless chaos. That you may not be misled by the false ideas that prevail; that you may estimate by a right standard the true content and essence of any religion; that you may have some definite and sure procedure for separating the inner from the outer, the native from the borrowed and extraneous, and the sacred from the profane, forget the characteristic attributes of single religions and seek, from the centre outwards, a general view of how the essence of a positive religion is to be comprehended and determined.

You will then find that the positive religions are just the definite forms in which religion must exhibit itself—a thing to which your so-called natural religions have no claim. They are only a vague, sorry, poor thought that corresponds to no reality, and you will find that in the positive religions alone a true individual cultivation of the religious capacity is possible. Nor do they, by their nature, injure the freedom of their adherents.

Why have I assumed that religion can only be given fully in a great multitude of forms of the utmost definiteness? Only on grounds that naturally follow from what has been said of the nature of religion. The whole of religion is nothing but the sum of all relations of man to God, apprehended in all the possible ways in which any man can be immediately conscious in his life. In this sense there is but one religion, for it would be but a poverty-stricken and halting life, if all these relations did not exist wherever religion ought to be. Yet all men will not by any means apprehend them in the same way, but quite differently. Now this difference alone is felt and alone can be exhibited while the reduction of all differences is only thought.

You are wrong, therefore, with your universal religion that is natural to all, for no one will have his own true and right religion, if it is the same for all. As long as we occupy a place there must be in these relations of man to the whole a nearer and a farther, which will necessarily determine each feeling differently in each life. Again, as long as we are individuals, every man has greater receptiveness for some religious experiences and feelings than for others. In this way everything is different. Manifestly then, no single relation can accord to every feeling its due. It requires the sum of them. Hence, the whole of religion can be present only, when all those different views of every relation are actually given. This is not possible, except in an endless number of different forms. They must be determined adequately by a different principle of reference to the others, and in each the same religious element must be characteristically modified. In short, they must, be true individuals.

What determines and distinguishes these individuals, and what, on the other hand, is common to all their component parts, holds them together, and is their principle of adhesion, whereby any given detail is to be adjudged to its own type of religion, are implied in what has been already said. But this view can only be verified by the existing historical religions, and of them it is maintained that all this is different, and that such is not their relation to one another. This we must now examine.

First, a definite quantity of religious matter is not necessarily, in the same degree, a definite form of religion.

This is an entire misunderstanding of the nature of the different religions. Even among their adherents it is general, and causes manifold opposite and false judgments. They suppose that because so many men acknowledge the same religion, they must have the same body of religious views and feelings. Their fellow-believers must have the same opinions and the same faith as they have, and this common possession must be the essence of their religion. The peculiarly characteristic and individual element in a religion is not easy to find with certainty from instances, but, however general the idea may be, if you believe that it consists in including a definite sum of religious intuitions and feelings, and that as a consequence the positive religions are prejudicial to the freedom of the individual in the development of his own religion, you are in error. Single perceptions and feelings are, as you know, the elements of religion, and it can never lead to the character of any one religion to regard them as a mere heap, tossed together without regard to number, kind or purpose.

If now, as I have sought to show, religion needs to be of many types because, of every relation different views are possible, according as it stands related to the rest, how would we be helped by such a compendium of some of them that could define none? If the positive religions were only distinguished by what they exclude, they could certainly not be the individual manifestations we seek. That this is not their character, however, appears from the impossibility of arriving from this point of view at a distinct idea of them.

As they continue to exist apart, such an idea must be possible, for only what commingles in fact is inseparable in idea. It is evident that the different religious perceptions and feelings are not, in a determinate way, awakened by one another or interdependent. Now, as each exists for itself, each can lead, by the most various combinations, to every other. Hence, different religions could not continue long beside one another, if they were not otherwise distinguished. Very soon each would supplement itself into uniformity with all others.

Even in the religion of any one man, as it is fashioned in the course of life, nothing is more accidental than the quantity of religious matter that may arrive at consciousness. Some views may set and others may rise and come to clearness, and his religion in this respect is ever in flux. Much less can the boundary, which in the individual is so changeable, be permanent and essential in the religion of several associated individuals. In the highest degree it must be an unusual and accidental occurrence that even for a little time, several men remain in the same circle of perceptions and advance along the same path of feeling.

Hence, among those who determine their religion in this way, there is a standing quarrel about essentials and nonessentials. They do not know what is to be laid down as characteristic and necessary, and what to separate as free and accidental; they do not find the point from which the whole can be surveyed; they do not understand the religion in which they live and for which they presume to fight and they contribute to its degeneration, for, while they are influenced by the whole, they consciously grasp only the detail. Fortunately the instinct they do not understand, guides them better than their understandings, and nature sustains what their false reflections and the doing and striving that flow from them would destroy.

If the character of any special religion is found in a definite quantity of perceptions and feelings, some subjective and objective connection, binding exactly these elements together and excluding all others, must be assumed. This false notion agrees well enough with the way of comparing religious conceptions that is common but is not agreeable to the spirit of religion. A whole of this type would not be what we seek to give religion in its whole compass a determinate shape. It would not be a whole, but an arbitrary section of the whole; it would not be a religion, it would be a sect. Except by taking the religious experiences of one single person, and necessarily of only one short period of his life, as the norm for a society, it could hardly arise. But the forms which history has produced and which are now actually existing are not wholes of this sort. All sectarianism, be it speculative, for bringing single intuitions into a philosophical coherence, or ascetic, for reaching a system and determinate series of feelings, labours for the utmost uniformity among all who would share the same fragment of religion. Those who are infected with this mania certainly do not lack activity, and if they have never succeeded in reducing any one positive religion to a sect, you will have to acknowledge that the positive religions must be formed on another principle and must have another character.

You will see this even more clearly by thinking of the times that gave them birth. You will recall how every positive religion, in its growth and bloom, when its peculiar vigour was most youthful, fresh and evident, did not concentrate and exclude, but expanded and pushed fresh shoots and acquired more religious matter to be wrought up in accordance with its own peculiar nature.

Therefore religions are not fashioned on this false principle. It is not one with their nature, it is a corruption that has crept in from the outside, as hostile to them as to the spirit of religion generally. Their relation to it which is a standing warfare, is another proof that they actually are constituted as individual manifestations of religion should be.

Just as little could the general differences of religion suffice to produce a thoroughly definite individual form. The three ways of being conscious of existence and of its totality, as chaos, system and elemental diversity, so often mentioned, are very far from being so many single and distinct religions. Divide an idea to infinity if you will, you cannot thereby reach an individual. You only get less general ideas which may, as genus and species, embrace a mass of very different individuals. To find the character of individual beings, there must be more than the idea and its attributes. But those three differences in religion are only the usual division according to the current scheme of unity, diversity and totality. They are types of religion but not religious individualities, and the need to seek for this individuality is by no means satisfied by the existence of religion in this threefold way. It is clear as day that there are many distinct manifestations of religion belonging to each type.

Just as little are the personal and the opposing pantheistic modes of conception two such individual forms. They go through all three types of religion and, for that reason alone, cannot be individualities. They are simply another principle of division. Only recently we agreed that this antithesis rests simply on a way of regarding the religious feeling, and of ascribing to its phenomena a common object. Hence the fact that any particular religion inclines more to one form of representation and expression than to the other, no more determines its individuality than it would its worth and the stage of its development. The individual elements of religion are as indefinite, and none of the various ways of regarding them are realized, because either the one or the other thought accompanies them. This may be seen in all purely deistic manifestations of religion. Though they desire to be considered quite definite, you will find everywhere that all religious feelings, and especially what is most dwelt on—all views of the movements of humanity in the individual, of the highest unity of mankind, of everything in the mutual relations of men that lies beyond each man’s good pleasure, are utterly indefinite and ambiguous. The personal and the pantheistic conceptions, therefore, are only very general forms that may be further determined and individualized in various ways.

Perhaps you may seek this further determination by uniting the two modes of conception with the three modes of intuition. You would reach narrower sub-divisions, but not a thoroughly definite and individual whole. Neither naturalism—meaning perception of the world limited to elemental diversity, without the conception of a personal consciousness and will in the various elements—nor pantheism, nor polytheism, nor deism are single and definite religions, such as we seek. They are simply types within which there have been, and there will still be, very many genuine individualities developed.

Let me say then at once, that the only remaining way for a truly individual religion to arise is to select some one of the great relations of mankind in the world to the Highest Being, and, in a definite way, make it the centre and refer to it all the others. In respect of the idea of religion, this may appear a merely arbitrary proceeding, but, in respect of the peculiarity of the adherents, being the natural expression of their character, it is the purest necessity. Hereby a distinctive spirit and a common character enter the whole at the same time, and the ambiguous and vague reach firm ground. By every formation of this kind one of the endless number of different views and different arrangements of the single elements, which are all possible and all require to be exhibited, is fully realized. Single elements are all seen on the one side that is turned towards this central point, which makes all the feelings have a common tone and a livelier closer interaction.

The whole of religion can only be actually given in the sum of all the forms possible in this sense. It can, therefore, be exhibited only in an endless series of shapes that are gradually developed in different points of time and space, and nothing adds to its complete manifestation that is not found in one of those forms. Where religion is so moulded that everything is seen and felt in connection with one relation to the Deity that mediates it or embraces it, it matters not in what place or in what man it is formed or what relation is selected, it is a strictly positive religion. In respect of the sum of the religious elements—to use a word that should again be brought to honour—it is a heresy, for from many equals one is chosen to be head of the rest. In respect, however, of the fellowship of all participants and their relation to the founder of their religion who first raised this central point to clear consciousness, it is a school and a discipleship.

But if, as is to be hoped, we are agreed that religion can only be exhibited in and by such definite forms, only those who with their own religion pitch their camp in some such positive form, have any fixed abode, and, if I might so say, any well-earned right of citizenship in the religious world. They alone can boast of contributing to the existence and the progress of the whole, and they alone are in the full sense religious persons, on one side belonging by community of type to a kindred, on the other being distinguished by persistent and definite traits from everyone else.

But many perhaps who take an interest in the affairs of religion may ask with consternation, or some evil-disposed person may ask with guile, whether every pious person must connect himself with one of the existing forms of religion. Provisionally, I would say, by no means. It is only necessary that his religion be developed in himself characteristically and definitely. That it should resemble any great, largely accepted, existing form is not equally necessary. I would remind him that I have never spoken of two or three definite forms, and said that they are to be the only ones. Rather, they may evermore develope in countless numbers from all points. Whosoever does not find himself at home in an existing religion, I might almost say whosoever is not in a position to make it if he had not found it, must belong to none but should be held bound to produce a new one for himself. Is he alone in it and without disciples, it does not matter. Everywhere there are germs that cannot arrive at any more extended existence, and the religion of one person may have a definite form and organization, and be quite as genuinely a positive religion as if he had founded the greatest school.

In my opinion, then, you will see that the existing forms should not in themselves hinder any man from developing a religion suitable to his own nature and his own religious sense. The question of abiding in one of them or of constructing a religion of one’s own, depends entirely on what relation developes in a man as fundamental feeling and middle-point of all religions.

This is my provisional answer, but if he will hear more I would add that, except by misunderstanding, it would be very difficult to find oneself in such a position. A new revelation is never trivial, and merely personal, but always rests on something great and common. Hence adherents and fellow-believers have never failed the man really called to institute a new religion. Most men, following their nature, will belong to an existing form, and there will be only few whom none suffices.

Yet—and this is my chief point—the authority being the same for all, the many are no less free than the few, and do no less fashion something of their own. If we follow any man’s religious history, we find first dim presentiments which never quite stir the depths of the heart, and, being unrecognized, again disappear. Around every man, especially in earlier days, they doubtless hover. Some hint may awaken them, and they may again vanish without reaching any definite form and betraying aught characteristic. Afterwards it first comes to pass that the sense for the Universe rises once for all into clear consciousness. One man discovers it in one relation, another in another. Hereafter all things are referred to this relation, and so group themselves around it. Such a moment, therefore, in the strictest sense, determines every man’s religion. Now I hope you will not consider a man’s religion less characteristic, less his own, because it lies in a region where already several are collected. In this similarity you are not to find a mechanical influence of custom or birth, but, as you do in other cases, you are to recognize a common determination by higher causes. This agreement is a guarantee of naturalness and truth, and cannot, whether one is first or last, be hurtful to individuality. Though thousands before him and after him referred their religious life to one relation, would it, therefore, be the same in all?

Remember that every definite form of religion is exhaustless for any one man. In its own way it should embrace the whole, a thing too great for any man. And not only so, but in itself there exist endless varieties of cultivation which are, as it were, subordinate types of religion. Is there not here work and scope enough for all? I, at least, am not aware that any religion had succeeded in so taking possession of its territory, and had so determined and exhibited everything therein, according to its own spirit, that, in any one professor of distinguished gifts and individuality of mind, nothing is wanting to perfection. Only to few of our historical religion has it been granted, even in the time of their freedom and higher life, to develope rightly and perfectly the neighbourhood of the middle-point, and, in even a few forms, to give individual impress to the common character. The harvest is great but the labourers are few. An infinite field is opened in each of those religions, wherein thousands may scatter themselves. Uncultivated regions enough present themselves to every one who is capable of making and producing something of his own.

The charge that everyone who allows himself to be embraced in a positive religion, can only be an imitator of those who have given it currency and cannot develope himself individually, is baseless. This judgment no more applies here, than it would to the state or to society. It seems to us morbid or quixotic for anyone to maintain that he has no room in any existing institution, and that he must exclude himself from society. We are convinced that every healthy person will, in common with many, have a great national character. Just because he is rooted in it and influenced by it, he can develope his individuality with the greatest precision and beauty. Similarly, in religion only morbid aberration so cuts off a man from a life in fellowship with those among whom nature has placed him, that he belongs to no great whole. Somewhere, on a great scale, everyone will find exhibited or will himself exhibit what for him is the middle-point of religion. To every such common sphere we ascribe a boundless activity that goes into detail, in virtue of which all individual characteristics issue from its bosom. Thus understood, the church is with right called the common mother of us all.

To take the nearest example, think of Christianity as a definite individual form of the highest order. First there is in our time the well known outward division, so definite and pronounced. Under each section there is then a mass of different views and schools. Each exhibits a characteristic development, and has a founder and adherents, yet the last and most personal development of religiousness remains for each individual, and so much is it one with his nature that no one can fully acquire it but himself. And the more a man, by his whole nature, has a claim to belong to you, ye cultured, the more religion must reach this stage in him, for his higher feeling, gradually developing and uniting with other educated capacities, must be a characteristic product.

Or if, after unknown conception and rapid birth-pangs of the spirit, the higher feelings develope, to all appearance suddenly, is not then a characteristic personality born with the religious life? There is a definite connection with a past, a present and a future. The whole subsequent religious life is linked in this way to that moment and that state in which this feeling surprised the soul. It thus maintains its connection with the earlier, poorer life, and has a natural uniform development. Nay more, in this initial consciousness there must already be a distinctive character. Only in a shape and only under circumstances thoroughly definite, could it so suddenly enter a life already developed. This distinctive character, then, every subsequent moment displays and is thus the purest expression of the whole nature. The living spirit of the earth, rending itself from itself as it were, links himself as a finite thing to one definite moment in the series of organic evolutions and a new man arises, a peculiar nature. His separate existence is independent of the mass and objective quality either of his circumstances or his actions. It consists in the peculiar unity of the abiding consciousness that is linked to that first moment, and in the peculiar relation to it which every later moment preserves. Wherefore, in that moment in which in any man a definite consciousness of his relation to the highest Being has, as it were, original birth, an individual religious life originates.

It is individual, not by an irreversible limitation to a particular number and selection of feelings and intuitions, not by the quality of the religious matter. This matter all who have the spiritual birth at the same time and in the same religious surroundings have in common. But it is individual by what he can have in common with no man, by the abiding influence of the peculiar circumstances in which his spirit was first greeted and embraced by the Universe, and by the peculiar way in which he conducts his observation and reflection on the same. This character and tone of the first childhood of his religion are borne by the whole subsequent course of his views and feelings, and are never lost, however far he may advance in fellowship with the Eternal Fountainhead.

Every intelligent finite being announces its spiritual nature and individuality by taking you back to what I may call a previous marriage in him of the Infinite with the finite, and your imagination refuses to explain it from any single prior factor, whether caprice or nature. In the same way you must regard as an individual everyone who can point to the birthday of his spiritual life and relate a wondrous tale of the rise of his religion as an immediate operation of the Deity, an influence of His spirit. He must be characteristic and special, for such an event does not happen to produce in the kingdom of religion vain repetition. Everything that originates organically and is self-contained can only be explained from itself. If its origin and individuality are not regarded as mutually explanatory and identical, it can never be quite understood. Thus you can only understand the religious person in so far as you know how to discover the whole in the notable moment that began his higher life, or from the developed manifestation can trace back this uniform character to the first, dimmest times of life.

All this being well considered, it will not be possible for you, I believe, to be in earnest with this complaint against the positive religions. If you still persist in it, it can only be from prejudice, for you are far too careless about the matter to be justified by your own observation. You have never felt the call to attach yourselves to the few religious men you might be able to discover. Though they are ever attractive and worthy enough of love, you have never tried by the microscope of friendship, or even of closer sympathy, to examine more accurately how they are organized both by and for the Universe.

For myself I have diligently considered them, I have sought out as patiently and studied them with the same reverent care that you devote to the curiosities of nature, and it has often occurred to me whether you would not be led to religion simply by giving heed to the almighty way in which the Deity builds up, from all that has otherwise been developed in man, that part of the soul in which He specially dwells, manifests His immediate operation, and mirrors Himself, and thus makes His sanctuary quite peculiar and distinct, and if you only noticed how He glorifies Himself in it by the exhaustless variety and opulence of forms. I, at least, am ever anew astonished at the many notable developments in a region so sparsely peopled as religion. Men are distinguished by all degrees of receptivity for the charm of the same object and by the greatest difference of effect, by the variety of tone produced by the preponderance of one or other type of feeling, by all sorts of idiosyncrasies of sensitiveness and peculiarity of temperament, and the religious view of things nevertheless is perpetually prominent. Again I see how the religious character of a man is often something quite peculiar in him, strongly marked off to the common eye from everything else shown in his other endowments. The most quiet and sober mind may be capable of the strongest, most passionate emotions; a sense most dull to common and earthly things feels deeply even to sadness, and sees clearly even to rapture and prophecy; a heart most timid in all worldly matters testifies even by martyrdom to the world and to the age. And how wonderfully is this religion’s character itself fashioned and composed. Culture and crudeness, capacity and limitation, tenderness and hardness are in each, in a peculiar way, mixed and interwoven.

Where have I seen all this? In the peculiar sphere of religion, in its individual forms, in the positive religions which you decry as utterly wanting in variety. I have seen it among the heroes and martyrs of a definite faith in a way for which the friends of natural religion are too cold, among enthusiasts for living feeling, in a way they hold as too dangerous, among the worshippers of some new sprung light and individual revelation. There I will show you them, there at all times and among all peoples. Nowhere else are they to be met. No man as a mere single being can come to actual existence. By the very fact of existence he is set in a world, in a definite order of things, and becomes an object among other objects, and a religious man, by attaining his individual life, enters by this very fact into a common life, which is to say into some definite form of religion. The two things are simply one and the same divine act, and cannot be separated. If the original capacity of a man is too weak to reach this highest stage of consciousness, by fashioning itself in a definite way, the stimulus must also be too weak to initiate the process of a characteristic and robust religious life.

And now I have rendered you my account. It is for you now to tell me how, in respect of development and individuality, it stands with your boasted natural religions. Show me among its professors an equally great variety of strongly marked characters. For myself I must confess that I have never found among them anything of the sort. Your boast of the freedom that this kind of religion gives its adherents to develope themselves religiously according to their own sense, seems merely of freedom to remain undeveloped, freedom neither to be, nor to see, nor to feel anything at all that is definite. Religion plays in their mind far too wretched a role. It is as if religion had no pulse, no vasculary system, no circulation, and so had no heat, no assimilative power. It has no character of its own, no peculiar presentation. Everywhere it shows itself dependent upon the cast of a man’s morals and sensibility. In union with them, or rather meekly following them, it moves idly and sparingly, and is only perceptible when it is patiently, and, as it were by drops, separated from them.

Many estimable and strong religious characters, indeed, I have met, whom the adherents of the positive religions, not without wondering at the phenomenon, regard as adherents of natural religion. But on closer view they recognized them as their confrères. Such persons have always swerved somewhat from the original purity of the religion of reason, and have accepted something arbitrary, as it is called, something positive.

But why do those who respect natural religion at once distrust everyone who introduces any characteristic feature into his religion? They also would have uniformity, though at the opposite extreme from sectarianism, the uniformity of indefiniteness. So little is any special personal cultivation through the positive religions to be thought of, that its most genuine adherents do not even wish the religion of man to have any history of its own at all or to commence with any notable event. Too much there has been already for their taste, moderation being for them the chief matter in religion, and all who can boast of religious emotions issuing suddenly from the depths of the heart, come at once into the evil repute of being infected by baleful enthusiasm. By little and little men are to become religious, just as they become wise and prudent and everything else they should be. All must come to them by instruction and education. There must be nothing that could be regarded as supernatural or even as singular.

I would not say that in making instruction and education everything, natural religion has pre-eminently fallen into the evil of being mixed with metaphysics and morals, nay, of being changed into them: but this at least is clear, that its adherents have not started from any living self-contemplation and allowing nothing to mark their cast of thought, whereby in any characteristic way men might be affected, they have no sure middle-point. The belief in a personal God, more or less anthropomorphic, and in a personal immortality, more or less dematerialized and sublimated—the two dogmas to which they reduce everything—depends, as they know themselves, on no special way of viewing or comprehending. Hence, anyone who joins them is not asked how he came to his faith, but how he can demonstrate it. Thus they assume that he must have reached everything by demonstration. Any other and more definite middle-point you would have difficulty in indicating. The little that their meagre and attenuated religion does contain is of great ambiguity. They have a providence in general, a righteousness in general, a divine education in general. Now it is in this perspective and fore-shortening, now in that, so that the value of everything is perpetually changing. Or if there is any common reference to one point, it is to something alien to religion, such as how to remove obstacles from morality, or sustain the desire for happiness, or something else about which, in ordering the elements of their religion, truly religious men have never asked. Their scanty religious possessions are thereby still more scattered and dispersed.

This natural religion, then, does not unite its religious elements by one definite view and is no definite religious form, no proper individual representation of religion. Those who profess it have in its territory no definite dwelling, but are strangers whose home, if indeed they have any, must be elsewhere. They remind one of the thin and dispersed mass said to float between the worlds, which is here attracted by one and there by another, but not enough by any to be swept into its rotation. Why it exists the gods may know. It must be to show that the indefinite also can have a certain existence. Yet it is properly only a waiting for existence, to which they can only attain by the power of some force stronger and of a different kind from any they have been subjected to heretofore. More I cannot ascribe to them than the dim presentiments that precede that living consciousness in which religious life comes to visibility for man. There are certain dim impulses and conceptions that have no coherence with a man’s individuality and only, as it were, fill up the vacant spaces. They originate only in the collective life, and are uniformly the same in all. The religion of men of this kind is thus the inarticulate echo of the piety around them.

At the highest it is natural religion in the sense in which men used to speak of natural philosophy and natural poetry. The name was applied to such productions as lacked originality, and which, without being clumsy, conscious imitations, were but crude utterances of superficial endowments. The epithet was meant to distinguish them from the works of living, plastic science and art.

The better part found only in the productions of the religious societies, they do not wait for with longing, they do not esteem it more highly because they cannot reach it, but they oppose it with all their might. The essence of natural religion consists almost entirely in denying everything positive and characteristic in religion and in violent polemics. It is the worthy product of an age, the hobby of which was that wretched generality and vain soberness which in everything was most hostile to true culture. Two things are hated supremely, a commencement in anything extraordinary and incomprehensible, and subsequently any suggestion of a school. This same corruption you will find in all arts and sciences. Into religion also it has forced its way, and its product is this empty formless thing. Men would be self-produced and self-taught in religion, and they are rude and uncultured, as is common with such persons. For characteristic production they have neither power nor will. Every definite religion they resist because it is a school, and if they should light on anything whereby a religion of their own might be fashioned, they would be as violent against it, seeing that from it also a school might arise.

Hence their resistance to the positive and arbitrary is resistance to the definite and real. If a definite religion may not begin with an original fact, it cannot begin at all. There must be a common ground for selecting some one religious element and placing it at the centre, and this ground can only be a fact. And if a religion is not to be definite it is not a religion at all, for religion is not a name to be applied to loose, unconnected impulses. Recall what the poet says of a state of souls before birth. Suppose someone were to object to come into the world because he would not be this man or that, but a man in general! The polemic of natural religion against the positive is this polemic against life and it is the permanent state of its adherents.

Go back then, if you are in earnest about beholding religion in its definiteness, from this enlightened natural religion to those despised positive religions. There everything appears active, strong and secure, every single intuition has its definite content and its own relation to the rest, and every feeling has its proper sphere and its peculiar reference. You find somewhere every modification of religiousness and every mental state in which religion can place men, with each of its effects somewhere complete. Common institutions and single utterances alike testify that religion is valued almost to forgetfulness of all else. The holy zeal with which it is contemplated, communicated and enjoyed, and the child-like longing with which new revelations of heavenly power are expected, guarantee that no element visible from this standpoint shall be overlooked, and that nothing has disappeared without leaving a monument. Consider the variety of forms in which every single kind of fellowship with the Universe has already appeared. Do not be scared either by mysterious darkness or by wonderful dazzling grotesque traits. Do not admit the delusion that it may all be imagination and romance. Dig ever deeper where your magic rod has once pointed, and without fail you will bring forth the heavenly stream to the light of day.

But regard also the human which is to receive the divine. Do not forget that religion bears traces of the culture of every age and of the history of every race of men. Often it must go about in the form of a servant, displaying in its surroundings and in its adorning the poverty of its home and its disciples. You must not overlook how it has often been stunted in its growth from want of room to exercise its powers, and how from childhood it has pined miserably from bad treatment and ill-chosen nourishment.

And if you would comprehend the whole, do not abide by the various forms of religion that for centuries have shone and have dominated great peoples, and have been glorified in many ways by poets and sages. Recollect that what is historically and religiously most noteworthy is often distributed among but few, and remains hidden to the common eye.

But when, in this way, you have wholly and completely within your vision the right object, it will ever remain a difficult business to discover the spirit of the religions and from it to interpret them. Once more I warn you not to try to deduce it as an abstraction from the elements common to all the adherents. You will wander into a thousand vain researches, and come in the end not to the spirit of the religion but to a definite quantity of matter. You will remember that no religion has quite reached actuality, and that you cannot know it until, far removed from seeking it in a narrow space, you are able to complete and define it in the way it would develope if its scope had been large enough. And as this applies to every positive religion, it applies to every period of it and to every subordinate form of it. You cannot enough impress it upon yourselves that it all resolves itself into finding the fundamental relation. Without that, knowledge of details is unavailing, and you have not found it till all details are fast bound in one.

Even with this principle of research as a touchstone, you will be exposed to a thousand errors, for much will meet you to withdraw your eyes from the true path. Above all, I beseech you, never forget the difference between the essence of a religion, in so far as it is a definite form and representation of religion in general and its unity as a school.

Religious men are throughout historical. That is not their smallest praise, but it is also the source of great misunderstandings. The moment when they were first filled with that consciousness which they have made the centre of their religion is always sacred for them. Without reference to it, they never speak of what for them is characteristic in religion and of the form to which in themselves it has attained. You can easily imagine, then, how much more sacred still the moment must be in which this infinite intuition was first of all set up in the world as the foundation and centre of one peculiar religion. To it the whole development of this religion in all generations and individuals is historically linked. Now this sum of the religion, and the religious culture of a great body of mankind, is something infinitely greater than a man’s own religious life, and the little mirror of this religion which he personally exhibits. This fact then is glorified in all ways; every ornament of religious art is heaped upon it. It is worshipped as the greatest and most blessed miracle of the Highest. Men never speak of their religion, nor ever exhibit any of its elements except in connection with this fact.

As a consequence nothing is more natural than that this fact should be confused with the fundamental intuition of the religion. This has misled almost everyone and distorted the view of almost all religions. Never forget that the fundamental intuition of a religion must be some intuition of the Infinite in the finite, some one universal religious relation, found in every other religion that would be complete, but in this one only placed in the centre.

I beg you also not to regard everything found in the heroes of religion or in the sacred sources as religion. Do not seek in everything the decisive spirit of that religion. Nor do I exclude trifles merely, or things that on any estimate are foreign to religion, but things often mistaken for it. Recollect how undesignedly those sources were prepared, so that it was impossible to provide for the exclusion of everything not religion. And recall how the authors lived in all sorts of circumstances in the world, and could not say at every word they wrote, this does not belong to the faith. When they speak worldly wisdom and morality, or metaphysics and poetry, therefore, do not at once conclude that it must be forced into religion, or that in it the character of religion is to be sought. Morality, at least, should be everywhere only one, and religion which should not be anywhere one, cannot be distinguished by the differences of morality, which are always something to be got rid of.

Above all I beg you not to be misled by the two hostile principles that everywhere, and almost from the earliest times, have sought to distort and obscure the spirit of religion. Some would circumscribe it to a single dogma, and exclude everything not fashioned in agreement with it, others, from hatred to polemics, or to make religion more agreeable to the irreligious, or from misunderstanding and ignorance of the matter, or from lack of religious sense, decry everything characteristic as dead letter. Guard yourselves from both. With rigid systematizers or shallow indifferentists you will not find the spirit of a religion. It is found only among those who live in it as their element, and ever advance in it without cherishing the folly that they embrace it all.

Whether with these precautions you will succeed in discovering the spirit of the religions I do not know. I fear religion is only comprehensible through itself, and that its special architecture and characteristic difference will not become clear till you yourselves belong to some one religion.

How you may succeed in deciphering the rude and undeveloped religions of remote peoples, or in unravelling the manifold, varied religious phenomena lying wrapped up in the beautiful mythologies of Greece and Rome, I care very little. May your gods guide you! But when you approach the holiest in which the Universe in its highest unity and comprehensiveness is to be perceived, when you would contemplate the different forms of the highest stage of religion which is not foreign or strange, but more or less existent among ourselves, I cannot be indifferent as to whether or not you find the right point of view.

Of one form only I should speak, for Judaism is long since dead. Those who yet wear its livery are only sitting lamenting beside the imperishable mummy, bewailing its departure and its sad legacy. Yet I could still wish to say a word on this type of religion. My reason is not that it was the forerunner of Christianity. I hate that kind of historical reference. Each religion has in itself its own eternal necessity, and its beginning is original. But the beautiful childlike character of Judaism charms me. This is so entirely overlaid, and we have here such a notable example of the corruption and utter extinction of religion in a great body in which it formerly existed, that it will well repay a few words. Remove everything political and moral as well, so God will, whereby this phenomenon is supposed to be characterized. Forget the experiment of joining the state to religion, if I should not say to the church; forget that Judaism was, in a certain sense, an order founded on an ancient family history and sustained by priests. Regard only its strictly religious elements, and then say what is the human consciousness of man’s position in the Universe and his relation to the Eternal that everywhere shines through. Is it anything but a relation of universal immediate retribution, of a peculiar reaction of the Infinite against every finite thing that can be regarded as proceeding from caprice? In this way everything is regarded, growth and decay, fortune and misfortune. Even in the human soul freedom and caprice interchange with immediate operation of the Deity. All other recognized attributes of God express themselves in accordance with this principle, and are always regarded in their bearing upon it. The Deity is throughout represented as rewarding, punishing, disciplining single things in single persons. When the disciples asked Christ, “Who has sinned, this man or his parents?” the religious spirit of Judaism appeared in its most pronounced form, and his answer: “Think ye that these have sinned more than others?” was his polemic against it.

The universal interweaving of parallelism, therefore, is not an accident, nor the value set on dialogue. All history, being an abiding interchange between this attraction and this repulsion, is presented as a colloquy in word and deed between God and man, and what unity there is, is only from the uniformity of this dealing, and hence the sacredness of the tradition in which the connection of this great dialogue was contained, the impossibility of attaining religion, except through initiation into this connection, and hence also, in later times, the strife among the sects about the possession of this intercourse.

Just because of this view, it came to pass that the gift of prophecy was developed in Judaism as in no other religion. Even Christians are, in comparison, mere learners. The whole idea of the religion is in the highest degree childlike. It could only work on a narrow scene, without complications, where the whole being simple, the natural consequences of actions would not be disturbed or hindered. The more the adherents of this religion advanced on the scene of the world and had relations with other peoples, the more difficult did the exhibition of this idea become. Imagination had to anticipate the word which the Almighty would speak, and, abolishing intervening time and space, bring the second part of the same transaction immediately before the eyes. That is the essence of prophecy, and the effort after it was necessarily a prominent feature of Judaism, so long as it was possible to hold fast the fundamental idea and original form of the Jewish religion.

The belief in the Messiah was its highest product, its noblest fruit, but also its last effort. A new sovereign must come to restore Zion, wherein the voice of the Lord was dumb, to its original splendour. By the subjection of the peoples to the old law, the simple course of patriarchal times, broken by the unpeaceful association of peoples, the opposition of their forces, and the difference of their customs, should again become general. This faith has long persisted, and, like a solitary fruit, after all life has vanished, hangs and dries on the withered stem till the rudest season of the year.

The limited point of view allowed this religion, as a religion, but a short duration. It died, and as its sacred books were closed, the intercourse of Jehovah with His people was looked upon as ended. The political association linked with it dragged on still longer a feeble existence. Till very much later its external part endured, and was that unpleasant phenomenon, a mechanical motion from which life and spirit have long vanished.

The original intuition of Christianity is more glorious, more sublime, more worthy of adult humanity, penetrates deeper into the spirit of systematic religion and extends itself further over the whole Universe. It is just the intuition of the Universal resistance of finite things to the unity of the Whole, and of the way the Deity treats this resistence. Christianity sees how He reconciles the hostility to Himself, and sets bounds to the ever-increasing alienation by scattering points here and there over the whole that are at once finite and infinite, human and divine. Corruption and redemption, hostility and mediation, are the two indivisibly united, fundamental elements of this type of feeling, and by them the whole form of Christianity and the cast of all the religious matter contained in it are determined. With ever-increasing speed the spiritual world has departed from its perfection and imperishable beauty. All evil, even this that the finite must decay before it has completed the circuit of its existence, is a consequence of the will, of the self-seeking endeavour of the isolated nature that, everywhere rending itself from its connection with the Whole, seeks to be something by itself. Death itself has come on account of sin. The spiritual world, going from bad to worse, is incapable of any production in which the Divine Spirit actually lives. The understanding being darkened has swerved from the truth; the heart is corrupt and has no praise before God; the image of the Infinite in every part of finite nature has gone extinct.

In accordance with this state of the spiritual world, all dealings of Divine Providence are calculated. They are never directed to the immediate results for feeling; they do not consider the happiness or suffering which they produce; they are not even for hindering or forwarding certain actions. They are simply calculated to check corruption in the great masses, to destroy, without mercy, what can no more be restored, and with new powers to give birth to new creations. Wherefore He does signs and wonders that interrupt and shake the course of things, and sends ambassadors, with more or less of divine spirit indwelling, to pour out divine powers upon men.

And when man does seek through self-consciousness to enter into fellowship with the unity of the Whole, the finite resists him, and he seeks and does not find and loses what he has found. He is defective, variable and attached to details and non-essentials. He wills rather than gives heed, and his aim vanishes from his eyes. In vain is every revelation. Everything is swallowed up by the earthly sense, everything is swept away by the innate irreligious principle. The Deity finds ever new devices. By His power alone, ever more glorious revelations issue from the bosom of the old. He sets up ever more exalted mediators between Himself and men. In every later ambassador the Deity unites with humanity ever more closely, that men may learn to know the Eternal Being. Yet the ancient complaint that man cannot comprehend what is from the Spirit of God is never taken away.

This is how Christianity most and best is conscious of God, and of the divine order in religion and history. It manipulates religion itself as matter for religion. It is thus a higher power of religion, and this most distinguishes its character and determines its whole form. Because it presupposes a widely-extended godlessness it is through and through polemical. It is polemical in its outward communication, for, to make its deepest nature evident, every corruption must be laid bare, be it in morals or in thinking. Above all it must expose the hostility to the consciousness of the Highest Being, which is the irreligious principle itself. Relentlessly it unmasks every false morality, every bad religion, every unhappy union of both for mutual covering of nakedness. Into the inmost secrets of the corrupt heart it presses and illumines, with the sacred torch of personal experience, every evil that creeps in darkness. Almost its first work on appearing was to destroy the last expectation of its pious contemporaries, saying it was irreligious and godless to expect any other restoration than restoration to purer faiths, to the higher view of things and to eternal life in God. Boldly it led the heathen beyond the separation they had made between the world of the gods and the world of men. Not to live and move and have the being in God is to be entirely ignorant of Him. If this natural feeling, this inner consciousness is lost amid a mass of sense impressions and desires, no religion has yet entered the narrow sense. Everywhere, then, its heralds tore open the whited sepulchres and brought the dead bones to light. Had these first heroes of Christianity been philosophers, they would have spoken as strongly against the corruption of philosophy. They never failed to recognize the outlines of the divine image. Behind all distortions and degradations they saw hidden the heavenly germ of religion. But as Christians they were chiefly concerned with the individual who was far from God and needed a mediator.

Christianity, moreover, is as sharply and strongly polemical within its own borders, and in the inmost fellowship of the saints. Just because religion is nowhere so fully idealized as in Christianity, through its original postulate, perpetual warfare against all that is actual in religion is presented as a duty that can never be sufficiently fulfilled. And just because the ungodly is everywhere operative, because all actuality together appears unholy, an infinite holiness is the aim of Christianity. Never content with its attainments, it seeks, even in its purest productions, even in its holiest feelings, traces of irreligion and of the tendency of all finite things to turn away from the unity of the Whole. In the tone of the highest inspiration an ancient writer criticizes the religious state of the community; in simple openness the great apostles speak of themselves. And this is how every man is to walk in the sacred circle. He is not only to be an inspired man and a teacher, but in humility he is to present himself also to the universal testing. Nor shall anything be spared, not even what is most loved and dear; nor shall anything be indolently put aside, not even what is most generally acknowledged. Though without it be praised as holy and be set up before the world as the essence of religion, within it must be subjected to a severe and repeated test. Thus impurities are to be removed, and the splendour of the heavenly colours to shine more clearly in every pious impulse of the spirit.

In nature you often see a compound mass, as soon as its chemical powers have overcome outside resistance or reduced it to equilibrium, take to fermenting, and eject one and another element. So it is with Christianity, it turns at last its polemical power against itself. Ever anxious, lest in its struggle with external irreligion it has admitted something alien, or may yet have in itself some principle of corruption, it does not avoid even the fiercest inward commotions to eject the evil.

This is the history of Christianity that is rooted in its very nature. “I am not come to bring peace, but a sword,” the Founder Himself said. His gentle soul could not possibly have meant that He was come to occasion those bloody commotions, so utterly contrary to the spirit of religion, or that wretched strife of words that deals with dead matter which living religion does not admit. But what He did foresee, and in foreseeing command, were those holy wars that spring necessarily from the essence of His teaching, and which, as bitterly as He describes, rend hearts asunder and dissolve the most intimate relations of life.

But not only are the elements of Christianity themselves subjected to this perpetual sifting; in their unbroken existence and life in the spirit there is an insatiable longing for ever stricter purification, ever richer fulness. Irreligion is thought to dominate every moment in which the religious principle is not evident in the mind. Religion has no other opposite than just the absence of religious purpose: every interruption of religion is irreligion. If the mind is for a moment without intuition and feeling of the Infinite, it at once becomes conscious of hostility and remoteness. Christianity then demands as first and essential that piety be a constant state. It scorns to be satisfied, even with the strongest displays of it, as soon as it only rules certain portions of the life. Piety should never rest, and there should never be anything so absolutely opposed as to be inconsistent with it. From all finite things we should see the Infinite. We should be in a position to associate religious feelings and views with all sentiments, however they may have arisen, and with all actions, whatever be their object. That is the true highest aim of mastery in Christianity.

How the fundamental view in Christianity, the view to which all others are referred, determines the character of its feelings is easy to discover. What do you call that feeling of an unsatisfied longing which is directed towards a great object, and which you are conscious is infinite? What impresses you on finding the sacred and the profane, the noble with the common and the mean intimately united? And what is the mood that urges you at times to assume the universality of this combination, and to search for it everywhere? With Christians this holy sadness is not occasional, but is the dominant tone of all their religious feelings. That is the only name which the language affords me. It accompanies every joy and every pain, every love and every fear. Nay, in its pride and in its humility it is the ground tone. If you can reconstruct the depths of a spirit from single features, undisturbed by foreign elements that have come from who knows where, you will find this feeling throughout dominant in the Founder of Christianity. If a writer, who has left but a few leaves in a simple speech is not too unimportant for your attention, you will discover this tone in every word remaining to us from his bosom friend. And if ever a Christian has allowed you to listen in the sanctuary of his soul, you have certainly caught just the same tone.

Such is Christianity. Its distortions and manifold corruptions I will not spare, for the corruptibility of every holy thing, as soon as it becomes human, is part of its fundamental view of the world. And I will not go farther into the details of it. Its doings are before you, and I believe I have given you the thread that, guiding you through all anomalies, will make the closest scrutiny possible. From first to last look only at the clearness, the variety, and the richness with which that first idea has been developed.

When, in the mutilated delineations of His life I contemplate the sacred image of Him who has been the author of the noblest that there has yet been in religion, it is not the purity of His moral teaching, which but expressed what all men who have come to consciousness of their spiritual nature, have with Him in common, and which, neither from its expression nor its beginning, can have greater value, that I admire; and it is not the individuality of His character, the close union of high power with touching gentleness, for every noble, simple spirit must in a special situation display some traces of a great character. All those things are merely human. But the truly divine element is the glorious clearness to which the great idea He came to exhibit attained in His soul. This idea was, that all that is finite requires a higher mediation to be in accord with the Deity, and that for man under the power of the finite and particular, and too ready to imagine the divine itself in this form, salvation is only to be found in redemption. Vain folly it is to wish to remove the veil that hides the rise of this idea in Him, for every beginning in religion, as elsewhere, is mysterious. The prying sacrilege that has attempted it can only distort the divine. He is supposed to have taken His departure from the ancient idea of His people, and He only wished to utter its abolition which, by declaring Himself to be the Person they expected, He did most gloriously accomplish. Let us consider the living sympathy for the spiritual world that filled His soul, simply as we find it complete in Him.

If all finite things require the mediation of a higher being, if it is not to be ever further removed from the Eternal and be dispersed into the void and transitory, if its union with the Whole is to be sustained and come to consciousness, what mediates must not again require mediation, and cannot be purely finite. It must belong to both sides, participating in the Divine Essence in the same way and in the same sense in which it participates in human nature. But what did He see around Him that was not finite and in need of mediation, and where was aught that could mediate but Himself? “No man knoweth the Father but the Son, and He to whom the Son shall reveal Him.” This consciousness of the singularity of His knowledge of God and of His existence in God, of the original way in which this knowledge was in Him, and of the power thereof to communicate itself and awake religion, was at once the consciousness of His office as mediator and of His divinity.

I would not speak of Him as standing opposed to the rude power of His foes without hope of longer life, for that is unspeakably unimportant. But when, forsaken in the thought of being silenced for ever, without seeing any outward institution for fellowship among His own actually set up, when in the face of the solemn splendour of the old corrupt system that had so mightily resisted Him, when surrounded by all that could inspire awe and demand subjection, by all that, from childhood, He had been taught to honour, sustained by nothing but that feeling, He uttered without delay that Yea, the greatest word mortal ever spake, it was the most glorious apotheosis, and no divinity can be more certain than that which He Himself thus proclaimed.

With this faith in Himself, who can wonder at His assurance that He was not only a mediator for many, but would leave behind a great school that would derive their religion from His? So certain was He that before it yet existed He appointed symbols for it. This He did in the conviction that they would suffice to bring the band of His disciples to a secure existence. Nay, so sure was He that already He had spoken among His own, with prophetic enthusiasm, of the immortalization of His memory.

Yet He never maintained He was the only mediator, the only one in whom His idea actualized itself. All who attach themselves to Him and form His Church should also be mediators with Him and through Him. And He never made His school equivalent to His religion, as if His idea were to be accepted on account of His person, and not His person on account of His idea. Nay, He would even suffer His mediatorship to be undecided, if only the spirit, the principle from which His religion developed in Himself and others were not blasphemed.

His disciples also were far from confusing this school with His religion. Pupils of the Baptist, still only very imperfectly initiated into the nature of Christianity, were, without anything further, regarded and treated by the apostles as Christians and reckoned genuine members of the community. And it should be so still. Everyone who, in his religion, sets out from the same cardinal point, whether his religion originates from himself or from another, is, without respect of school, a Christian. It will naturally follow that when Christ with His whole efficacy is shown him he must acknowledge Him, who has become historically the centre of all mediation, the true Founder of redemption and reconciliation.

Nor did Christ say that the religious views and feelings He Himself could communicate, were the whole extent of the religion that should proceed from this ground-feeling. He always pointed to the living truth which, though only “taking of His,” would come after Him. Similarly with His disciples. They never set limits to the Holy Spirit. His unbounded freedom and the absolute unity of His revelations are everywhere acknowledged by them.

And when, the first bloom of Christianity being past and it was appearing to rest from its works, those works, so far as they were contained in the sacred scriptures, were regarded as a finished codex of religion, it was only brought about by those who took the slumber of the Spirit for death—religion, as far as they were concerned, being dead. All who still feel the life of religion in themselves or perceive it in others, have ever protested against this unchristian proceeding. The sacred scriptures have, by their native power, become a bible, and forbid no other book to be or to become a bible. Anything written with like power they would willingly allow to be associated with themselves. Nay, should not every later utterance of the whole church, and therefore of the Divine Spirit, append itself confidently, even though there be ineffaceably in the first fruits of the Spirit a special holiness and worth?

In accordance with this unlimited freedom, this essential infinity, then, this leading idea of Christianity of divine mediating powers has in many ways been developed, and all intuitions and feelings of the indwelling of the Divine Being in finite nature have within Christianity been brought to perfection. Thus very soon Holy Scripture in which, in its own way, divine essence and heavenly power dwelt, was held as a logical mediator to open for the knowledge of God the finite and corrupt nature of the understanding, while the Holy Spirit, in a later acceptation of the word, was an ethical mediator, whereby to draw near to the Deity in action. Nay, a numerous party of Christians declare themselves ready to acknowledge everyone as a mediating and divine being who can prove, by a divine life or any impress of divineness, that he has been, for even a small circle, the first quickening of the higher sense. To others Christ has remained one and all, while others have declared that their mediators have been their own selves or some particular thing. Whatever failure there may have been in form and matter, the principle is genuinely Christian, so long as it is free. Other human situations have, in their relation to the central point of Christianity, been expressed by feelings and represented by images, of which there is no hint in the speeches of Christ or elsewhere in the sacred books. Hereafter there will be more, for the whole being of man is not yet by any means embodied in the peculiar form of Christianity, but, despite of what is said of its speedy, its already accomplished overthrow, Christianity will yet have a long history.

For why should it be overthrown? The living spirit of it, indeed, slumbers oft and long. It withdraws itself into a torpid state, into the dead shell of the letter, but it ever awakes again as soon as the season in the spiritual world is favourable for its revival and sets its sap in motion. Thus in oft repeated cycle it renews itself in various ways. The fundamental idea of every positive religion, being a component part of the infinite Whole in which all things must be eternal, is in itself eternal and universal, but its whole development, its temporal existence may not, in the same sense, be either universal or eternal. For to put the centre of religion just in that idea, it requires not only a certain mental attitude, but a certain state of mankind. Is this state, in the free play of the universal life, gone, never to return, that relation which, by its worth, made all others dependent on it, can no longer maintain itself in the feeling, and this type of religion can no more endure. This is the case with all childlike religions, as soon as men lose the consciousness of their essential power. They should be collected as monuments of the past and deposited in the magazine of history, for their life is gone, never to return. Christianity, exalted above them all, more historical and more humble in its glory, has expressly acknowledged this transitoriness of its temporal existence. A time will come, it says, when there shall no more be any mediator, but the Father shall be all in all. But when shall this time come? I, at least, can only believe that it lies beyond all time.

One half of the original intuition of Christianity is the corruptibleness of all that is great and divine in human things. If a time should come when this—I will not say can no more be discovered, but no more obtrudes, when humanity advances so uniformly and peacefully, that only the navigator who calculates its course by the stars knows when it is somewhat driven back on the great ocean it traverses by a passing contrary wind, and the unarmed eye, looking only at what is taking place, can no more directly observe the retrogression of human affairs, I would gladly stand on the ruins of the religion I honour.

The other half of the original Christian faith is that certain brilliant and divine points are the source of every improvement in this corruption and of every new and closer union of the finite with the Deity. Should a time ever come, when the power that draws us to the Highest was so equally distributed among the great body of mankind, that persons more strongly moved should cease to mediate for others, I would fain see it, I would willingly help to level all that exalteth itself. But this equality of all equalities is least possible. Times of corruption await all human things, even though of divine origin. New ambassadors from God will be required with exalted power to draw the recreant to itself and purify the corrupt with heavenly fire, and every such epoch of humanity is a palingenesis of Christianity, and awakes its spirit in a new and more beautiful form.

And if there are always to be Christians, is Christianity, therefore, to be universal and, as the sole type of religion, to rule alone in humanity? It scorns this autocracy. Every one of its elements it honours enough to be willing to see it the centre of a whole of its own. Not only would it produce in itself variety to infinity, but would willingly see even outside all that it cannot produce from itself. Never forgetting that it has the best proof of its immortality in its own corruptibleness, in its own often sad history, and ever expecting a redemption from the imperfection that now oppresses it, it willingly sees other and younger, and, if possible, stronger and more beautiful types of religion arise outside of this corruption. It could see them arise close beside it, and issue from all points even from such as appear to it the utmost and most doubtful limits of religion. The religion of religions cannot collect material enough for its pure interest in all things human. As nothing is more irreligious than to demand general uniformity in mankind, so nothing is more unchristian than to seek uniformity in religion.

In all ways the Deity is to be contemplated and worshipped. Varied types of religion are possible, both in proximity and in combination, and if it is necessary that every type be actualized at one time or another, it is to be desired that, at all times, there should be a dim sense of many religions. The great moments must be few in which all things agree to ensure to one among them a wide-extended and enduring life, in which the same view is developed unanimously and irresistibly in a great body, and many persons are deeply affected by the same impression of the divine. Yet what may not be looked for from a time that is so manifestly the border land between two different orders of things? If only the intense crisis were past, such a moment might arrive. Even now a prophetic soul, such as the fiery spirits of our time have, turning its thoughts to creative genius, might perhaps indicate the point that is to be for the future generations the centre for their fellowship with the Deity. But however it be, and however long such a moment may still linger, new developments of religion, whether under Christianity or alongside of it, must come and that soon, even though for a long time they are only discernible in isolated and fleeting manifestations. Out of nothing a new creation always comes forth, and in all living men in whom the intellectual life has power and fulness, religion is almost nothing. From some one of the countless occasions it will be developed in many and take new shape in new ground. Were but the time of caution and timidity past! Religion hates loneliness, and in youth especially, which for all things is the time of love, it wastes away in a consuming longing. When it is developed in you, when you are conscious of the first traces of its life, enter at once into the one indivisible fellowship of the saints, which embraces all religions and in which alone any can prosper. Do you think that because the saints are scattered and far apart, you must speak to unsanctified ears? You ask what language is secret enough—is it speech, writing, deed, or quiet copying of the Spirit? All ways, I answer, and you see that I have not shunned the loudest. In them all sacred things remain secret and hidden from the profane. They may gnaw at the shell as they are able, but to worship the God that is in you, do you not refuse us.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Explain Schleiermacher’s anthropology. Do you agree with his descriptions of human aspirations?

2. Why does Schleiermacher focus so much on Germany?

3. Does Schleiermacher’s discussion of religion in relation to morality and justice surprise you?

4. How are religion and art related?

5. Describe and analyze Schleiermacher’s view of religion as a feeling.

6. 6. What does Schleiermacher mean by the following statement? “Yet He [Christ] never maintained He was the only mediator, the only one in whom His idea actualized itself.”

7. Or this one? “The original intuition of Christianity is more glorious, more sublime, more worthy of adult humanity, penetrates deeper into the spirit of systematic religion and extends itself further over the whole Universe.”

8. Evaluate Schleiermacher’s apologetic approach as a whole. Has he “sacrificed basic Christian beliefs on the altar of apologetics,” as many of his critics maintain?

*Trans. John Oman (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1893).

CHAPTER 11

Follow-Up

Among the important apologists in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries whose texts we are not able to feature are the following:

Hugo Grotius (or Huig de Groot, 1583–1645), in addition to being a Christian apologist, was a jurist and one of the founders of the modern legal theory based on natural law. He developed a view of religious tolerance rooted in the Erastian notion that the state should have a strong voice in matters of church discipline. When his views did not prevail, he was imprisoned but escaped to France, where he was able to develop as a philosopher and theologian.

His most significant contribution to apologetics is The Truth of the Christian Religion (1621), a work in six volumes covering a wide variety of issues relevant to the defense of the faith. The work is considered the first formal Protestant apologetics textbook, and indeed Grotius was no doubt the first practitioner of juridical apologetics. Book 1 deals with general truths such as natural religion, God’s existence, the need for faith, and so forth. Book 2 argues for the superiority of the Christian religion based on evidences. Grotius presents the “moral government” theory of the atonement, according to which Christ’s sacrifice allowed the Father to forgive sinners while yet governing the world justly. Book 3 deals with source criticism, defending the authenticity of the New Testament documents and their authors. Books 4–6 respond to paganism, Judaism, and Islam. While most of his arguments are informal, they are eloquent. Grotius’s work seems prescient of the rise of deism in the eighteenth century.

A good deal was happening in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Great Britain. One could say that a major factor contributing to the rise of English deism was a type of apologetics that sought to harmonize natural law with human reason. A typical figure who held this view is Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648). As ambassador to France he confronted French skepticism, and in 1624 he responded with De veritate (On Truth). This was later expanded in De religione gentilium (On the religion of the gentiles, or Pagan Religion), published posthumously in 1663. Cherbury argued that humankind universally testifies to five infallible components of truth: (1) there exists a supreme power, called God; (2) this power must be worshiped; (3) virtue and piety combine to make up the best parts of worship; (4) all vices and crimes are abhorred and must be abandoned; (5) there is an afterlife with rewards and punishments.

Another important opponent of deism was Robert Boyle (1627–1691). One of the chief founders of modern chemistry, he is remembered for “Boyle’s law,” according to which volume and pressure are inversely proportional when a gas is kept in a closed space at a constant temperature. Boyle was committed to the idea that science, when properly practiced, could only lead to the discovery of God’s hand in nature. One of his contributions to the cause of apologetics was the endowment of a lecture series in his will. The stated purpose of the Boyle Lectures was to prove the truth of the Christian faith over against various forms of unbelief. Featuring an impressive series of speakers, the lectures began in 1692 and continued until the beginning of the twentieth century, resuming again in 2004. In addition to a number of shorter tracts, Boyle wrote The Christian Virtuoso (1690) in which he defended the Christian religion by three arguments: (1) Christian doctrines are sublime; (2) miracles occurred in history; and (3) the Christian religion has been of proven benefit in human history.

The most influential English philosopher of this period was John Locke (1632–1704). In addition to his work on philosophy he was one of the major figures to shape Enlightenment thought, particularly in the area of political science. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) refutes the theory of innate ideas, arguing instead that we are born a tabula rasa, an empty slate that needs filling up during our lives. At the same time, he believed that God is “naturally deducible from all parts of our knowledge.” The certainty of this is nearly that of “the most evident geometrical theorems.” Locke accepts the doctrine of revelation, but emphasizes that “reason is natural revelation,” the means God uses to communicate a portion of truth that is within reach of our natural faculties. Anyone who dismisses reason in order, supposedly, to make way for revelation, is actually doing the reverse, and “puts out the light of both.”[1]

In his Discourse on Miracles (1703), Locke discusses the criteria for revelation’s authority. God is to be presupposed, as is the historicity of the biblical narrative. Three conditions need to be met before one can be certain that a miracle is of divine origin: (1) It must suggest nothing that challenges the honor of God, natural religion, or the rules of morality. (2) It must communicate information of highest importance for life. (3) There must be a confirmation by supernatural signs. Thus, miracles should be reasonably taken as coming from God unless disproved by a superior vindication. While some consider Locke’s version of the Christian faith to be diminished, he thought of himself as a defender of the faith and its central figure, Jesus Christ.

Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is best known as the founder of modern physics and the author of the Principia mathematica. But he was also a defender of the Christian faith, at least in his own enigmatic version of it. The jury is still out on whether Newton was an anti-Trinitarian Arian or simply wary of too much doctrinal precision. He was a staunch defender of biblical prophecy and wrote The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) and Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733), published posthumously. He also suggested that the hand of God is a necessary explanation for such natural forces as gravity and the motion of the planets.

Apologetics during this time was characterized by attacks against deism. Broadly speaking, deism as a movement arose during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and spread, in different versions, around various countries, particularly England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and, in a somewhat different fashion, Germany. Deists rejected particular tenets claimed by Christians: miracles, prophecy, the inspired Scriptures, and the Trinity, along with the incarnation of the second person. Instead, they argued that God is a “Supreme Architect,” who set the world in motion, including its moral norms, but then governs the world only at a distance. True religion can only be universal, eternal, perfect, and simple.

There were even “Christian” deists who believed that biblical religion essentially speaks in terms of the deist tenets. Notable among them was Matthew Tindal (ca. 1655–1733). His volume Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) bore the telling alternate title The Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature. Tindal radicalized Locke’s position and asserted that only human reason is necessary to gain access to truth. He said, famously, “God designed all Mankind should at all times know, what he wills them to know, believe, profess, and practice; and has given them no other Means for this, but the Use of Reason.” The main job of Christians is to educate humanity and steer it clear of superstition.

A veritable cottage industry of apologetics was spawned, taking issue with deism, particularly Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation, which was called “the Bible of deism,” since it contained most of the essential points affirmed by the deists. Historically, this period witnessed the rise of what we now call the evidentialist school of apologetics. Generally speaking, this approach invests a great deal in the veracity of the biblical accounts of the history of Jesus and his resurrection. The most important proponent was Joseph Butler, whose text we studied above. Finally, William Paley, also examined above, brought many of the best arguments, including replies to skeptic David Hume (1711–1776), together in a clear and systematic manner.

A number of the minor figures have vanished into obscurity, yet at the time they were read with great interest. Among the most prominent was Thomas Sherlock (1678–1761), who wrote The Trial and Witness of the Resurrection of Jesus (1729). A Puritan minister from Dublin, John Leland (1691–1766) gained a reputation as “the indefatigable opponent of a whole generation of Deists,” particularly through The Advantages and Necessity of the Christian Religion (1733). Interestingly, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) wrote a dialogue, Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732), in which the Christian faith is compared with skepticism, emerging triumphant because of its superiority to other religions, its good fit with human aspirations, and its presentation of miracles and prophecy. William Warburton (1698–1779) was a lawyer before becoming an Anglican minister. In 1737–1741 he published six books on The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist, accusing deists of spreading more heat than light.

On the Continent, parallel debates were going on. The most prominent German defender of the faith was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). A uniquely endowed thinker, he was a mathematician (codiscoverer with Newton of infinitesimal calculus), a physicist, a historian, a jurist, and a Christian philosopher. He attempted, in vain, to reestablish unity in the Christian church in order to evangelize the world. For our purposes his most important work is Theodicy (1710), a series of essays devoted to solving the problem of evil. Responding to major skeptics of his day, particularly Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), the French Protestant skeptic and author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), Leibniz argued that we are living in the “best of all possible worlds.” Since God is the Creator, although there must be such a thing as evil, yet the world is as good as it ought to be.

Finally, in response to the rising atheists or monists, then to the philosophes and other supporters of the French Revolution, a host of apologists arose in defense of the Christian position. Adversaries of the traditional view, particularly of Roman Catholicism, not all atheists, included Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Voltaire (1694–1778), the encyclopédiste Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and the Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789). François Lamy (1636–1711) published The New Atheism Overthrown (1696). More positively, he wrote Evident Truth of the Christian Religion (1694). As in Great Britain, apologetics shifted from philosophical to more historical (evidential) defenses. C. F. Houtteville (1686–1742) published the thorough study The Christian Religion Proved by the Facts (1722). A widely published opponent of the philosophes was Nicolas-Sylvain Bergier (1718–1790), who aimed his guns particularly at Rousseau and his exaggerated views of natural religion, and at d’Holbach’s atheism. Bergier’s most significant work is Historical and Dogmatic Treatise on the True Religion (1780), in which he proves in scores of different ways that the Christian faith could not have been of human origin.

1. See John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1.3.17; 1.4.8.

PART THREE

The Global Era

Christian Faith and a Changing World

Part 3 Introduction

It has become a truism to speak of our era as the age of globalization. While we must guard against oversimplifications, globalization is certainly one of the central features of our times. Globalization refers to the increasing connectivity of various spheres. Borders are down, and goods, ideas, and cultural capital can flow more easily from one place to another. It is more and more difficult to conduct affairs in isolation. Marshall MacLuhan popularized the term global village. Today it would be more accurate to refer to a global city, because urbanization is one of the leading results, if not the cause, of this interconnectivity.

Many factors led into globalization as we know it today. One of them is surely the expansion of Europe into the rest of the world, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries and beyond. Commerce, exploration, and colonial expansion were among the chief reasons for going around the world and investigating in life and culture on other continents. Early on, missionaries took part in these journeys. Eventually missions shifted from occasional support for various ventures to an end in itself. Though during the Reformation missions was almost entirely connected with the renewal of the established church and the founding of new ones within Christendom, by the eighteenth century it had moved beyond that sphere. Roman Catholics, particularly the Jesuits, were among the first "modern" missionaries. They were particularly present in Asia, then in Latin America. Protestants also spread the gospel to North America, as well as Africa. There were, of course, mixed motives and mixed results in these drives. Conversions occurred and Christian faith spread. Despite the caricature, missionaries were not usually bringing to the fore a religious support for imperialism. While, to be sure, some missions did not sufficiently distinguish the gospel from European civilization, the reverse was often true: missionaries had to defend the gospel over against the greed of European colonists who had only economic interests at heart.

By the nineteenth century and, ironically, at the same time as this missionary expansion was occurring, the torch of Christian faith began to blow dim on European soil. A number of factors contributed to this. We looked at some in part 2. The devastating Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) began as a conflict between Lutheran Protestants and Hapsburg Roman Catholics, but it eventually escalated into a war involving seventeen different states within Europe. Long and cruel, it ended with the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which established an unstable return to the principle of the cuius regio, eius religio (whose region, his religion), by which the sovereign state could determine which religion was to characterize that country, at least within limits. Religious liberty was still not fully practiced, with the result that the exhausted Europeans looked at alternate, more "enlightened" views that seemed less aggressive.

In the realm of ideas, we see during this time the lasting effects of the Enlightenment, but also reactions against its excesses. The French philosophes—Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and others—attempted to break the dominance of the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church, replacing it with the new "light," not of Jesus Christ, but of "natural religion." In Great Britain, although things were not so radical, deism arose as a kind of "enlightened religion," as we saw in part 2. Apologetics, if we may call it that, was showing Christian faith to be reasonable and self-evidently true. Religion was reduced to its minimum. In Germany the situation was different again. The Aufklärung (Enlightenment) was not as hostile to religion as was its counterpart in France or even Great Britain.

The secularist outlook engendered by these events and these leaders did not go unopposed. A number of significant religious awakenings occurred around Europe and also in North America. The romantic movement in the arts also had a role in opposing Enlightenment rationalism. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) contributed to the German Enlightenment, but with a significantly emotional twist. His novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) is the story of a young man who falls in love with an unattainable girl and eventually kills himself out of despair. Goethe was a prominent figure in the Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement, which fed into romanticism. As we saw in the previous part, Friedrich Schleiermacher similarly combined rationalism and emotionalism in defense of the Christian faith.

In France, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church, apologetics was a combination of romanticism and the elevation of proper reason, but always under the authority of the church. Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) and Louis de Bonald (1754–1840), strong critics of the French Revolution, attempted to defend the faith by returning people to the mother church. A whole tradition of French romantic apologetics developed, which elevated beauty as one of the most powerful attractions of the faith. Although there are a host of relatively minor figures here, the outstanding example of romantic apologetics is François René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848). As a young man he was strongly influenced by Rousseau. He turned Rousseau's sentimentalism into a defense of Catholic anthropology. After the deaths of his mother and a sister, he wrote, "I wept, and I believed." His best-selling Genius of the Christian Religion has the alternate title Beauties of the Christian Religion (1802). While apologetics taught in the typical seminaries resembled the approach taken by Grotius, this newer wave of romantic defense swept over the reading public.

A parallel development in the Netherlands was inspired in no small measure by the awakening (Het Reveil) that occurred there. An outstanding figure is the statesman and historian Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–1876). His best-known book is Revolution and Unbelief (1847, rev. 1868), a fascinating analysis of the French Revolution, with its conclusion that whatever the surface causes might have been, it was the philosophy of rationalism and atheism that, together, were the most fundamental driving force behind the revolution. Groen's most celebrated follower was Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), the father of worldview thinking in apologetics. Much harder to classify, but not without roots in romanticism is the critic of Christendom Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), with whom we begin part 3.

A principal threat to the Christian faith during the nineteenth century came from the realm of the natural sciences. Charles Darwin wrote his monumental work, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. Its original title is telling: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. While numerous apologists attempted (and still do attempt) to reconcile aspects of the evolutionary process with the book of Genesis, a long history of conflict ensued. Although Darwinism declined by the 1930s, other mechanisms for gradual evolution were posited, so that today various forms exist and still raise questions for Christians.

A good deal of the optimism found in the nineteenth century, be it romantic, scientific, or political, evaporated in the early twentieth century, largely in the wake of World War I. Of course, there were omens of a more sober view all along. Commenting on the passing of the nineteenth century, G. K. Chesterton dubbed it "the age of Oscar Wilde," meaning that a subconscious agnosticism had crept in to replace the two great lost ideals of Christianity and republicanism. Wilde had quipped, "Life is too important to be taken seriously." But after the "war to end all wars," the question became whether life made any sense whatsoever. The novels of Dostoyevsky pondered the question of evil that beset the human condition. Friedrich Nietzsche had announced the death of God in the Gay Science (1882), signifying that perspectivism at best, or nihilism at worst, would supplant traditional morality if Europeans insisted on God's departure.

No wonder, then, when theologian Karl Barth introduced his commentary on the book of Romans (1918), with its critique of the optimistic theology of the previous generation, it was greeted with astonishing enthusiasm. Arguing that God is "wholly other," and only "wholly revealed" in the "Christ event," Barth inaugurated what we now call dialectical theology, or the theology of crisis. He vehemently opposed any form of natural theology. And in the bargain he dismissed apologetics as a dangerous concession to paganism. Barth's views had an enormous impact. Among other things, they held back the development of apologetics in continental Europe for several decades. Ironically, Barth's work is not without apologetic import. He crafted the Barmen Declaration (1934), which warned German believers that "what they hold in common in the Confession is grievously imperiled" because of the German Christian Party in the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church, a clear reference to the growing menace of the Nazis and their sympathizers. And parts of Barth's theology were clearly polemical against unbelief. Dialectical theologians after him were not shy to engage with unbelief, public policy, and the surrounding culture. We can think of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), who believed that the gospel is the best interpreter of life, because it can place all of its contradictions in a system of meaning and show the way to renewed life.

Liberalism was not entirely dead, even if it had become more sober. Liberal theology had strong roots in the nineteenth century, but would be revived in different ways in the twentieth. The term liberalism refers to an attempt to assure people of their freedom (liberation) from tradition and of the ability of Christian faith to adapt to the contours of the modern world (hence, modernism, a synonym). Challenges to faith were manifested all around. These included Darwinism, the higher criticism of the Bible, historicism (a sort of reduction of the human being to a historical process), and Freudian psychology, which thought of religion as an illusion. To simplify, here, we can say that liberalism reconfigured most of the elements of Christian faith in an effort to make them able to stand up to these challenges. For example, instead of revelation appearing primarily in an inspired Word of God, it was seen to embed itself into the historical process. History revealed how God could change human relationships, and the Bible became merely a record of the religious experience of an ancient people. Today, progress can be achieved by recognizing this process and calling upon science, technology, diplomacy, and the like to move us ahead. Ethics became far more central than redemption. Religious feelings became more important than truth.

Liberal theology developed along several lines. Paul Tillich (1886–1965) is certainly one of the most prominent neoliberals. Tillich taught in several German universities until his views came under scrutiny by the Nazi government. Dismissed from the University of Frankfort, he moved to the United States in 1933. Tillich developed what is called the "method of correlation," showing that the symbols used in the Christian message correlate to the existential aspirations of humanity, particularly in its post–World War I alienation. Apologetics for him was "an omnipresent element" of systematic theology. Later liberal theologians moved in many directions. Some virtually denied anything unique about Christian faith. John Hick (b. 1922), for example, taught that Jesus did not think he was the Son of God and that Christian faith is not the only way to God. John Shelby Spong (b. 1931) denies the virgin birth and believes only that Jesus Christ "fully expresses" a God of compassion and love. Roman Catholic apologists can be similarly liberal, though in a somewhat different context. Hans Küng, for example, defends the existence of God, but denies the authority of the magistracy (for which he was dismissed from teaching theology in 1979).

Some of the most aggressive liberalism was expressed in North America in strong resistance to more conservative versions of the Christian faith. Among the most noted proponents of liberalism in the early twentieth century were Henry Ward Beecher, Phillips Brooks, and Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick, though a Baptist minister, preached a famous sermon at First Presbyterian Church, Twenty-First Street, New York, entitled, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" He told the crowd that the Bible is only a certain record of events and could not be believed literally. Although the sermon cost him his job, it became widely influential and helped draw a line in the sand between the two camps, liberal and fundamentalist.

Conservative Christianity in North America took a number of different forms. Some of it stemmed simply from immigrant groups that were by definition not inclined toward liberal versions of the faith. For example, large numbers of Roman Catholics came to North America, beginning in the nineteenth century and then cascading in the twentieth. Ethnic Protestant groups came over as well, including Scandinavians, Dutch, and Germans. Most of the time these groups were conservative in their views. More indigenous, the African American churches grew strong, particularly after the Civil War, enabling black people to survive some of the racism in the surrounding culture. Their theology was very close to the Bible, sensitive to the strange ways of divine providence, and conscious of responsibility to the poor. Holiness and Pentecostal churches were also conservative in theology, even if strongly open to religious experience.

The most conscious opponents of liberalism (or modernism) were the fundamentalists. Although the term fundamentalism had been around at least since the publication of a multivolume work titled The Fundamentals (1910–1915), the most likely origin of the movement was the founding of the World Christian Fundamentals Association in 1919. Soon the term became the rallying point for various kinds of antimodernist Christians. One of the driving forces in the movement was a rather new theology known as dispensationalism. Originating in the writings of John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren, the dispensationalist approach to the Bible finds seven different "dispensations," or administrations of God's dealings with his people, culminating in the millennium, a thousand-year period of Christ's direct rule over the earth, just before the new heaven and new earth. Dispensationalists separate Israel from the church, holding that the Jews are still God's chosen people, and that political Israel is a first step toward their restoration.

While only one particular branch of the fundamentalist coalition, dispensationalism contributed to the resistance against modernism an insistence upon a historical-grammatical interpretation of the Bible. Although going to an extreme, whereby a passage ought to be interpreted "literally where possible," the dispensationalists represented the basic concern of all fundamentalists: defending an inerrant Bible against the liberal critical view. Battle lines were drawn and alliances made. J. Gresham Machen (1881–1937) was a leading spokesman for the conservative coalition, though he was not particularly fond of the term fundamentalism. He wrote Christianity and Liberalism (1923), which became the most articulate of the critiques of liberal theology. He would later lead in the founding of two conservative Reformed institutions, Westminster Theological Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (as it became called). The star apologist at Westminster was Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987), pioneer in what is known as presuppositional apologetics. He was enormously influential on Francis A. Schaeffer (1912–1984) and the L'Abri movement, although Schaeffer would become critical of the perceived rigidity of the Reformed type of conservatism. But all were on the antimodernist side.

Things did not entirely fare well for the fundamentalists. While not directly responsible for the prohibition of alcohol, which became the law from 1920 to 1933, they certainly favored prohibition. When it became clear that this measure was going beyond Scripture, and that not only were many people drinking clandestinely, but also the Mafia had a role in promoting illegal sales of alcohol, the fundamentalists were easily caricatured as cultural killjoys. One of the worst blows to the fundamentalist cause was the Scopes trial in 1926. The so-called "monkey trial" had in fact little to do with what the reports and later accounts of it rendered. John Scopes had taught a chapter in a science book affirming some of Darwin's views, prohibited in schools by Tennessee law. Two of the greatest legal minds of the day, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, were brought in for the defense and the prosecution. Darrow was an atheist who defended the rights of free speech. Bryan was a populist, not so much concerned about evolution as he was about government regulating the content of a curriculum. Ironically, just the year before, Darrow had defended Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty, claiming their heinous murder of a young child was the result of hearing Nietzsche taught in school. In the end, although Bryan actually won the Scopes trial, he might as well have lost, as the defense of understanding the Bible literally had been made to look like Philistine ignorance.

Evangelicalism, related to but distinct from fundamentalism, arose as a more general gospel-centered coalition. Originating in the awakenings, evangelicalism counts luminaries such as Jonathan Edwards among its numbers. Its distinctives are, as historian David Bebbington puts it, four principles held simultaneously: conversionism, activism, biblicism, and cross-centeredness.[1] After World War II the term neo-evangelicalism was coined by Harold John Ockenga, the founder of Fuller Theological Seminary, and embraced by Carl F. H. Henry, Billy Graham, and others to signify more openness toward scholarship and culture and less of a separatist attitude toward the organized church. An implication for apologetics was a type of scholar, such as E. J. Carnell (1919–1967), who was dissatisfied with the cultural isolation and legalism of fundamentalism and attempted a more accommodating approach between Christian faith and disciplines such as modern science.

Finally it might be appropriate to speak of postconservative evangelicalism, which exists in many guises. Broadly speaking, it is a trend hoping to get away from perceived problems in evangelicalism, such as its strict doctrine of biblical inerrancy. The so-called emerging church, or "church-next," is one important example of this approach. While strict categories are elusive, it appears that the emerging church espouses a kind of refusal of the Enlightenment and more of a rapprochement with postmodernity. Marcus Borg describes its mentality as "a way of seeing the Bible (and the Christian tradition as a whole): historical, metaphorical, and sacramental; and a way of seeing the Christian life: relational and transformational." One of the implications in apologetics is a greater sense of connection to a postmodern world. Among the leading thinkers in this camp are the late Stanley Grenz and John Franke. But the most widely read advocate is surely Brian McLaren. His approach is missions driven, but not doctrinally centered. He attempts, by "generous orthodoxy," to relate to the surrounding culture with love and compassion, but not with propositional statements of truth.

Leaving North America, apologetics took on a very special shape in the British Isles in the early twentieth century. A loose-knit group of Christians, some Catholic, many Anglican, emerged concerned to speak well of the Christian worldview through direct apologetics, but more often through imaginative literature. J. R. R. Tolkien is the most famous, because of his monumental works of fantasy, creating as they do a parallel universe where Christian values and courageous heroes appear. Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, Dorothy Sayers, and Charles Williams are among the brightest lights in this network. G. K. Chesterton, turned Roman Catholic, was nothing if not an apologist, arguing through the use of paradox for the truth of Christian faith in such works as Orthodoxy (1908), Manalive (1912), and The Everlasting Man (1925). Certainly chief among them was C. S. Lewis, whose writings in apologetics include formal defenses of the faith, such as The Problem of Pain (1940), Mere Christianity (from radio talks 1941–1944), and Miracles (1947), but also imaginative works such as The Abolition of Man (1943) and The Screwtape Letters (1942).

The long hibernation of apologetics in some quarters under the influence of Karl Barth is coming to an end. In part 4 we will look at the many types of apologetics being practiced in the contemporary world. Here, in part 3, we look at a very select few whose thought has characterized the discipline more than most.

1. David W. Bebbington, Evangelicals in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin, 2008), 1.

CHAPTER 12

Søren Kierkegaard

(1813–1855)

Søren Kierkegaard was one of the most enigmatic theologians of the nineteenth century. He was vehemently opposed to apologetics as he understood it. Yet ironically he was a powerful, if often unpredictable, apologist in his own way. Søren was born in Copenhagen to a middle-class family. His mother, Ane Lund, was not educated and had served as a housemaid in the Kierkegaard home before marrying Søren’s father, Michael. Michael was a conflicted man and is reputed to have cursed God in his youth and earned his wrath. It is possible that Søren’s deep sense of guilt as well as his flights of imagination stemmed from this incident. As Michael neared death in 1838, he asked his son to complete studies in theology, which he did at the University of Copenhagen, although he was more drawn to philosophy and literature.

Kierkegaard was a romantic figure. He thought that Mozart’s Don Giovanni was the greatest work of music ever written. In 1837 he met and fell in love with Regine Olsen. He proposed to her and then broke the engagement. Psychologists have long pondered this relationship, but little is certain. As in the case of his relations with his father, it appears that Kierkegaard often reflected on the dynamics involved. His writings are full of allusions to the mysteries of love, the disappointments in persons, trust, and other matters no doubt relating to the psychology behind several of his relationships. In Fear and Trembling (1843), writing under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, he explored the agony of Abraham and Sarah when God told them to sacrifice their only son, Isaac.

Many questions still surround Kierkegaard’s theology. His overall burden was to show how one could be a Christian within the context of Christendom. Negatively, he argued constantly against Hegel’s rationalism, which he felt put everything into the one box of intellectual certainty. A constant theme in Kierkegaard’s writings is the attack upon institutions such as the state church. He believed that the church in Denmark had caved in to modernity. Other institutions, such as schools and businesses, added to the problem. He wrote in his journal, “The trend today is in the direction of mathematical equality.” He favored individual reaction rather than mass conformity and uniformity.

Here we will not be preoccupied with the major problems in interpreting Kierkegaard, such as the nature of faith, the stages along life’s way, the concept of the absurd, and so forth. Instead, we will focus on his direct attacks against Christendom. As a critic of Christendom, Kierkegaard used the term Christian in a guarded fashion. The true Christian for him is a “knight of faith” who fully trusts in God even in the midst of trials where God’s will may not immediately be clear.

The Instant is a series of essays published in The Fatherland, a daily paper in Copenhagen. The title could be translated The Moment (Øjeblikket), as the word signified for Kierkegaard the point at which time and eternity intersect. Found throughout his work, the term can refer to the anxious moment of choosing for eternity, or to the freedom experienced when taking steps toward trusting God despite appearances.

The Instant is unlike much of his earlier work in that he does not bother with pseudonyms or allusions to music. In his journal he had diagnosed the national church with The Sickness unto Death. By the end of his life he was concerned with the way things were going in the Danish People’s Church, particularly after the death of Bishop Primate J. P. Mynster, a family friend, which allowed him to attack the church full blast. Kierkegaard thought Mynster’s successor, H. L. Martensen, was a Hegelian. And the most popular theologian of the time was N. F. S. Gruntvig, an educator and poet whose worldview was rosy and sentimental, according to Kierkegaard. These essays are close in style and in date to Kierkegaard’s Book on Adler, a critique of the deposed pastor Peter Adler (1812–1869), who, though a Hegelian, claimed to have received revelations endorsing his work as “genius.”

The Instant

Number 5*

We Are All Christians—without Having So Much as a Suspicion What Christianity Is

Let me illustrate this from merely one point of view.

When Christianity requires us to love our enemies, one might say in a certain sense that it had good reason to require this, for God would be loved, and (speaking merely in a human way) God is man’s most redoubtable enemy, thy mortal enemy; He would that thou shouldst die, die unto the world, He hates precisely that wherein thou naturally hast thy life, to which thou dost cling with all thy joy in living.

The men who have entered into no relation with God enjoy now—frightful irony!—the privilege that God does not torment them in this life. No, it is only the men whom He loves, who have entered into relation with God, whose mortal enemy (speaking merely in a human way) God may be said to be—but for all that out of love.

But He is thy mortal enemy. He Who is love would be loved by thee. This signifies that thou must die, die unto the world, for otherwise thou canst not love Him.

So there He sits, omnipresent and omniscient as He is, and watches thee, knowing the least thing that transpires in thee, that indeed He does, thy mortal enemy! Beware then of wishing anything, beware of fearing anything; for what thou wishest will not be fulfilled, but rather the contrary, and what thou fearest, and the more thou fearest only the sooner, shall fall upon thee. For He loves thee and would be loved by thee, both out of love. But as soon as there is something thou dost wish think not of Him, and so also if there is something thou dost fear; or if thou dost associate Him with thy wishing and fearing, thou art not thinking of Him in and for Himself, that is, thou dost not love Him—and He would be loved, out of love He wills it.

Take an example. Take a prophet. Think then first what it means to be a prophet, how severely tried and sacrificed is the life of such a man, by the renunciation of pretty much everything we men count valuable. Think of the prophet Jonah! Such a severely tried and tormented man has the modest wish to rest awhile under the shade of a tree. He finds this tree, this shade; it was so grateful a relief to him that presumably he wished he might hold on to this refreshment, feared that it might be taken from him. He scores a hit! God the almighty at once fixes His attention upon this tree, a worm is commanded to sap its root.

How dreadful (speaking merely in a human way) is God in His love, so dreadful it is (speaking merely in a human way) to be loved of God and to love God. In the declaration that God is love, the subordinate clause is, He is thy mortal enemy.

——— and here we are playing the game that we are all Christians, that all love God, whereas by God being love and by loving God we nowadays understand nothing else but the nauseating syrupy sweets in which falsehood’s witnesses to the truth are wont to deal.

Assuming that no God exists, no eternity, no accounting, then the official Christianity is a perfectly charming and elegant invention for very sensibly making this life as enjoyable as possible, more enjoyable than the pagan could have it. For it is well known that what constantly troubled the pleasure-loving pagan was this thing of eternity; but the official Christianity put such a slant upon this thing of eternity that eternity exists precisely for the sake of giving us a thorough relish and zest for enjoying this life.

Just as if one of the composers who compose variations upon one or more movements of a funeral march were to take occasion to compose with free poetic license a dashing gallop—so has the official Christianity taken occasion from some sentences in the New Testament (this doctrine of a cross and anguish and horror and shuddering before eternity) to compose with free poetic license a lovely idyl, with procreating of children and waltzes, where everything is “so joyful, so joyful, so joyful,” where the priest (a kind of leader of the town band) is willing, for money, to let Christianity (the doctrine of dying unto the world) furnish the music for weddings and christenings, where everything is joy and mirth in this (according to the teaching of Christianity, a vale of tears and a penitentiary), this glorious world (yea, according to the New Testament it is a time of probation related to an accounting and judgment), a foretaste of the still more joyful eternity which the priest guarantees to those families which by their devotion to him have evinced a sense for the eternal.

A Genius/a Christian

That a genius is not something every man is, surely is something every man will concede. But that a Christian is something still more rare than a genius—this has been clean forgotten, or rather knavishly consigned to oblivion.

The difference between a genius and a Christian is that a genius is nature’s extraordinary, no man being able to make himself a genius, whereas a Christian is freedom’s extraordinary, or, more properly, freedom’s ordinary, for though it is found extraordinarily seldom, it is what everyone ought to be. Therefore God wills that Christianity should be preached to all men absolutely, therefore the Apostles are very simple men, and the Pattern is in the lowly form of a servant, all this in order to indicate that this extraordinary is the ordinary, is accessible to all—but for all that a Christian is a thing even more rare than a genius.

Only be not deceived by the fact that it is accessible to all, possible to all, as if from this it followed that it must be an easy sort of thing and that there were many Christians. No, it must be possible for all, otherwise it would not be freedom’s extraordinary, but, for all that, a Christian is a thing even more rare than a genius.

Assuming that it is all as it should be with these battalions of millions × millions of Christians, there emerges here an objection which is really significant, namely, that the case of Christianity is entirely without analogy in the rest of existence. Everywhere else we see the monstrous disproportions of existence: the possibility of millions of plants is carried away by the wind as the pollen of flowers, millions of possibilities of living beings are wasted, etc., etc., thousands × thousands of men go to make one genius, etc., always this enormous prodigality. Only in the case of Christianity is it different: in the case of what is even more rare than a genius it holds good that everyone that is born is a Christian.

Still another objection acquires great significance, if this thing about millions of Christians is to be taken as truth. The earth is only a little point in the universe—and Christianity would be reserved solely for it, and at such an absurdly low price that any and everybody that is born is a Christian.

The matter presents itself in a different light when we perceive that to be a Christian is so high an ideality that, instead of the twaddle about Christendom and the eighteen centuries of Christian history and the claim that Christianity is perfectible, the thesis must be proposed that Christianity never came into the world, that it stopped with the Pattern, or at the most with the Apostles—but after all they preached it so strongly in the direction of extension that the trouble began there. For it is one thing to work for extension in such a way that incessantly, early and late, one preaches the doctrine to all men; and it is another thing to be too hasty in permitting people by hundreds and thousands to assume the name of Christians, to give themselves out to be Christians. The Pattern’s way of preaching was rather different. Absolutely as He preached the doctrine to all men, living only for this, just so absolutely did He hold back when it was a question of being a disciple or of being allowed to call oneself such. Though an assembly of the nation had suffered itself to be carried away by Christ’s discourse, He certainly would not at once have allowed these thousands to call themselves disciples of Christ. No, He would have held back more stoutly. Therefore in three and a half years He won only eleven—whereas one Apostle in one day, maybe in one hour, wins three thousand disciples of Christ. Either the disciple is in this instance greater than the master, or the truth is that the Apostle is a little too hasty in striking a bargain, a little too hasty in the direction of extension, so that the trouble already begins here.

Only divine authority could impress the human race in such a way that the thing of absolutely willing the eternal became absolute seriousness. Only the God-Man can unite these two things: to work absolutely for extension, and absolutely to hold back on the question what is to be understood by being a disciple. Only the God-Man would be able to hold out (if you can imagine it) for a thousand years, and then another thousand years, working for the spread of the doctrine by preaching it, though He did not get a single disciple, if He could get them only by altering the terms. After all, the Apostle feels some selfish need of the relief of getting adherents, of becoming many, which the God-Man does not feel, Who has no need of adherents and therefore has only the price of eternity, no market price.

So the matter stood when Christ preached Christianity. The human race was absolutely impressed.

But naturam furca expellas, yet it comes back. Man has a tendency to invert the situation. Just as a dog which is compelled to walk on two feet has every instant a tendency to go again on all four, and does so as soon as it sees its chance, waiting only to see its chance, so is Christendom an effort of the human race to go back to walking on all fours, to get rid of Christianity, to do it knavishly under the pretext that this is Christianity, claiming that it is Christianity perfected.

First they turned out the other side of the Pattern, the Pattern becomes no longer the Pattern but the Mediator, they dwelt upon His kind deeds and wished they were in their stead to whom they were shown, which is just as preposterous as if when a man is represented as a pattern of kindness, one were not willing to look upon him with the idea of imitating his kindness but with a view to wishing to be in their stead to whom the kindness was shown.

So then the Pattern passed out. Then they did away also with the Apostles as patterns, and thereupon also with the first Christian age as a pattern. And so at last they succeeded in getting to the point of going again on all fours, and making out that this, precisely this, was true Christianity. By the help of dogmas they secured themselves against everything which with any semblance of truth could be called a Christian pattern, and then they went with full sail in the direction of . . . perfectibility.

The Christianity of the Spiritual Man/the Christianity of Us Men

When I thus confront one Christianity with another, it surely could not occur to anyone to misunderstand this, as though now I were in agreement with the veterinary surgeon Pastor Fog that there are two sorts of Christianity. No, I confront them with the unaltered conviction that the Christianity of the New Testament is Christianity, the other being a knavish trick, and that they no more resemble one another than a square resembles a circle. But my purpose in confronting them is to illustrate in a few words the question I raised in an article in the Fatherland, whether we, i.e. the human race, are not so degenerate that men no longer are born who are able to endure this divine thing which is the Christianity of the New Testament. If this is so, it erects in the simplest possible way an obstacle to the proof offered by the perjured priests that the official Christianity is the Christianity of the New Testament and that Christianity exists.

There are two points of difference between the spiritual man and us men, to which I would especially draw attention, and thereby in turn illustrate the difference between the Christianity of the New Testament and the Christianity of “Christendom.”

(1) The spiritual man differs from us men in the fact that (if I may so express it) he is so heavily built that he is able to endure a duplication in himself. In comparison with him we men are like frame walls in comparison with the foundation wall, so loosely and frailly built that we cannot endure a duplication. But the Christianity of the New Testament has to do precisely with a duplication.

The spiritual man is able to endure a duplication in himself; by his understanding he is able to hold fast to the fact that something is contrary to the understanding, and then will it nevertheless; he is able to hold fast with the understanding to the fact that something is an offense, and yet to will it nevertheless; that, humanly speaking, something makes him unhappy, and yet to will it, etc. But the New Testament is composed precisely in view of this. We men on the other hand are not able to support or endure a duplication within ourselves; our will alters our understanding. Our Christianity therefore, the Christianity of “Christendom,” takes this into account; it takes away from Christianity the offense, the paradox, etc., and instead of that introduces, probability, the plainly comprehensible. That is, it transforms Christianity into something entirely different from what it is in the New Testament, yea, into exactly the opposite; and this is the Christianity of “Christendom,” of us men.

(2) The spiritual man differs from us men in being able to endure isolation, his rank as a spiritual man is proportionate to his strength for enduring isolation, whereas we men are constantly in need of “the others,” the herd; we die, or despair, if we are not reassured by being in the herd, of the same opinion as the herd, etc.

But the Christianity of the New Testament is precisely reckoned upon and related to this isolation of the spiritual man. Christianity in the New Testament consists in loving God, in hatred to man, in hatred of oneself, and thereby of other men, hating father, mother, one’s own child, wife, etc., the strongest expression for the most agonizing isolation.—And it is in view of this I say that such men, men of this quality and caliber, are not born any more.

The Christianity of us men is, to love God in agreement with other men, to love and be loved by other men, constantly the others, the herd included.

Let us take an example. In “Christendom” this is what Christianity is: a man with a woman on his arm steps up to the altar, where a smart silken priest, half educated in the poets, half in the New Testament, delivers an address half erotic, half Christian—a wedding ceremony. This is what Christianity is in “Christendom.” The Christianity of the New Testament would be: in case that man were really able to love in such a way that the girl was the only one he loved and one whom he loved with the whole passion of a soul (yet such men as this are no longer to be found), then, hating himself and the loved one, to let her go in order to love God.—And it is in view of this I say that such men, men of such quality and caliber, are not born any more.

The Christianity of the New Testament/the Christianity of “Christendom”

The thought of Christianity was to want to change everything.

The result of the Christianity of “Christendom” is that everything, absolutely everything, has remained as it was, only everything has assumed the name of “Christian”—and so (musicians, strike up the tune!) we live a life of paganism: Merrily, merrily, merrily, here we go round and round; or rather we live a pagan life which is refined by eternity, or by the help of the thought that the whole thing is Christian.

Try it, take what you will, and you shall find that it corresponds to what I say.

What Christianity wanted was chastity—to do away with the whorehouse. The change is this, that the whorehouse remains exactly what it was in paganism, lewdness in the same proportion, but it has become a “Christian” whorehouse. A whoremonger is a “Christian” whoremonger, he is a Christian exactly like all the rest of us; to exclude him from the means of grace—“Good God,” the priest will say, “what would be the end of it if once we were to begin by excluding one contributing member!” He dies, and exactly in proportion as he pays he gets his eulogy at the grave. And after having earned his money in so mean and despicable a way (for Christianly considered the priest might better have stolen it) the priest hies him home, he is in a hurry, he has to go into the church to declaim, or, as Bishop Martensen says, to bear witness.

What Christianity wanted was honesty and fair dealing, to do away with swindling—the change effected was this: swindling remained exactly as in paganism, the adage is, “In business every man’s a thief”—every Christian! But swindling assumed the predicate “Christian,” it became “Christian swindling”—and the “priest” pronounced a blessing upon this Christian society, this Christian state, where they swindle just as in paganism, and do it also by paying the “priest,” who by this mark is the biggest swindler, they swindle themselves into the notion that this is Christianity.

What Christianity wanted was earnestness in living, and to do away with vain honors and glories—everything remained as it was, the change being that it assumed the predicate Christian: the gewgaws of knightly orders, titles, rank, etc., became Christian—and the priest (of all equivocal characters the most indecent, of all comical things the most comical hodgepodge), he is tickled to death when he himself is decorated with . . . the Cross. The Cross! Yes, in the Christianity of “Christendom” the Cross has become something like the child’s hobbyhorse and trumpet.

And so in everything. If in the natural man there is any instinct so strong as the instinct of self-preservation, it is the instinct for the propagation of the race, which therefore Christianity tried to cool off, teaching that it is better not to marry, yet, if worse comes to worst, it is better to marry than to burn. But in “Christendom” the propagation of the race has become the serious business of life, together with Christianity; and the priest (this epitome of nonsense enveloped in long robes), the priest, the teacher of Christianity, of the Christianity of the New Testament, has even got his income fixed in proportion to his activity in promoting the propagation of the race, getting a definite amount for each child.

As I have said, just try it, and in everything you will find that it is as I have affirmed: the change from paganism is this: that everything has remained unchanged, but has assumed the predicate “Christian.”

When All Are Christians, Christianity eo Ipso Does Not Exist

When once it is pointed out, this is very easily seen, and once seen it can never be forgotten.

Any determinant which applies to all cannot enter into existence but must either underlie existence or lie outside as meaningless.

Take the determinant man. We are all men. This determinant therefore does not enter into human existence, for the human race as a whole is subsumed under the generic term “man.” This determinant lies before the beginning, in the sense of underlying. We are all men—and then it begins.

This is an example of a determinant which applies to all and is underlying. The other alternative was that a determinant which applies to all, or by the fact that it applies to all, is meaningless.

Assume (and let us not haggle over the fact that it is a strange assumption, we shall have the explanation), assume that we are all thieves, what the police call suspicious characters—if that’s what we all are, this determinant will eo ipso have no effect upon the situation as a whole, we shall be living just as we are living, each will then count for what he now counts, some (suspicious characters) will be branded as thieves and robbers, i.e. within the definition that we are all suspicious characters; others (suspicious characters) will be highly esteemed, etc.; in short, everything even to the least detail will be as it is, for we are all suspicious characters, and so the concept is annulled (Hegel’s aufgehoben); when all are that, then to be that = 0; this is not to say that it does not mean anything much; no, it means nothing at all.

It is exactly the same with the definition that we are all Christians. If we are all Christians, the concept is annulled, being a Christian is something which lies before the beginning, outside—and then it begins, we live then the merely human life, exactly as in paganism; the determinant Christian cannot in any way manage to enter in, for by the fact that we all are this it is precisely put outside.

God’s thought in introducing Christianity was, if I may venture to say so, to pound the table hard in front of us men. To that end He set “individual” and “race,” the single person and the many, at odds, set them against one another, applied the determinant of dissension; for to be a Christian was, according to His thought, precisely the definition of dissension, that of the “individual” with the “race,” with the millions, with family, with father and mother, etc.

God did it that way, partly out of love; for He, the God of love, wanted to be loved but is too great a connoisseur of what love is to want to have to order men to love Him by battalions or whole nations, as the command, “One, two, three,” is given at the church parade. No, the formula constantly is: the individual in opposition to the others. And partly He did it as the ruler, in order to keep men in check and educate them. This was His thought, even though we men might say, if we dared, that it was the most annoying caprice on the part of God to put us together in this way, or cut us off in this way from what we animals regard as the true well-being, from coalescing with the herd, everyone just like the others.

God succeeded in this, he really overawed men.

But gradually the human race came to itself, and, shrewd as it is, it saw that to do away with Christianity by force was not practicable—“So let us do it by cunning,” they said. “We are all Christians, and so Christianity is eo ipso abolished.”

And that is what we now are. The whole thing is a knavish trick; these 2000 churches, or however many there are, are, Christianly considered, a knavish trick; these 1000 priests in velvet silk, broadcloth, or bombazine, are a knavish trick—for the whole thing rests upon the assumption that we are all Christians, which is precisely the knavish way of doing away with Christianity. Therefore it is a very peculiar sort of euphemism too when we reassure ourselves with the thought that we all will attain blessedness, or say, “I shall become blessed, just like all the others”; for when forwarded to heaven with this address, one is not received there, does no more go to heaven than one reaches New Holland by land.

A Revolt in Defiance/a Revolt in Hypocrisy, or About Apostasy from Christianity

That man is a defiant and refractory creature we know well enough, but that in a very high degree he is a shrewd creature—when it comes to a question of flesh and blood and earthly well-being—we do not always perceive. It is so nevertheless, though at the same time it is true that we have reason to deplore man’s stupidity.

When there is something which is distasteful to man, he looks to see if the power which commands him is not too great for him to pit his power against it. If he is convinced that it is not too great, he revolts in defiance.

But if the power which commands what is distasteful to man is so superior to him that he absolutely despairs of making a revolt in defiance, he resorts to hypocrisy.

This applies to Christianity. The fact that the apostasy from Christianity occurred long ago has not been noticed because the apostasy came about, the revolt was made, in hypocrisy. Precisely Christendom is the apostasy from Christianity.

In the New Testament, according to Christ’s own teaching, to be a Christian is, humanly speaking, sheer anguish, an anguish in comparison with which all other human sufferings are hardly more than child’s-play. What Christ speaks of (for he makes no disguise of it) is about crucifying the flesh, hating oneself, about suffering for the doctrine, weeping and wailing while the world rejoices, about the most heart-rending sufferings due to hating father, mother, wife, one’s own child, about being what the Scripture says of the Pattern (and surely to be a Christian must mean corresponding to the Pattern), that He is a worm and no man. Hence the reiterated warnings not to be offended, not to be offended at the fact that what in the highest, the divine understanding of it is salvation and help is, humanly speaking, so frightful.

This is what it is to be a Christian. That, however, is hardly a thing for us men, such things we might rather pray to be dispensed from. Indeed if such exactions had occurred to any human power, man would at once have revolted in defiance. But unluckily God is a power against which man cannot rebel in defiance.

So man resorted to hypocrisy. People had not so much as the courage and honesty and truth to say to God bluntly, “That I cannot agree to,” they resorted to hypocrisy and thought they were perfectly secure.

They resorted to hypocrisy, they falsified the definition of being a Christian. To be a Christian, they said, is sheer blessedness. “What would I be, O what would I be, if I were not a Christian! Yea, to be a Christian is the only thing which gives real significance to life, gives a relish to joys, and to sufferings assuagement.”

In that way we all became Christians. And then everything went gaily, with fine words and grandiloquent phrases and heavenly glances and torrents of tears, all by the artists engaged for this purpose, who could not find words to thank God enough for the great privilege that we are all Christians, etc.—and the secret was that we have falsified the concept of what it is to be a Christian, but hope by knavish and hypocritical flattery and sweet words, giving thanks again and again that we are . . . the opposite of what God understands by being a Christian—by this hoping, deluding ourselves, to put a wax nose on God’s face; by so heartily thanking Him that we are that, we hope to get out of being that.

Behold, for this reason the church is the most equivocal place. For doubtless there are other places which are called “equivocal places” but are not really that, the fact that they are called “equivocal” prevents them from being really equivocal. A church, on the other hand, that is indeed an equivocal place, a royally authorized Christian church in “Christendom” is the most equivocal thing that has ever existed.

For to make a fool of God is not equivocal, but to do that under the name of worshiping Him is equivocal; to want to do away with Christianity is not equivocal, but it is equivocal to do away with Christianity under the name of spreading it; to give money to work against Christianity is not equivocal, but it is equivocal to take money for working against Christianity under the name of working for it.

The Taking of an Oath, or The Official/the Personal

Let me relate a little anecdote from the criminal world which is not without some psychological interest.

It was a case where a man could, as the phrase is, “free himself” by an oath, that is, free himself temporally by binding himself eternally with a perjury. The person in question was sufficiently well known to the magistrate and had often been punished. The magistrate did not have it in his power to prevent a resort to an oath, but morally was fully convinced that it was a false oath. So the man took the oath.

When the case was concluded his Honor visited the man who had been tried, entered into personal conversation with him and said, “Wouldst thou dare to give me thy hand on it that what thou hast sworn is true?” “No,” he replied, “no, your Honor, that I will not do.”

Here is an example of the difference between the official and the personal. For one who belongs essentially to the criminal world to clear himself by an oath is something official, something he cannot for an instant hesitate to do, or harbor the least doubt that it is justifiable, for it is something he knows all about by long continued practice; for him it is a matter of course, people do such things officially, impersonally, the trick consists in being deft at giving the case such a turn that one can clear oneself by an oath, the taking of an oath is no more than saying “Prosit” to one who sneezes, or adding Esq. to a letter. In vain the solemnity of an oath seeks to make an impression upon him as a personal matter; in vain, for this is a business affair, he himself is official, is officially armed against every impression he knows in advance they will try to make upon him, and so he officially takes the oath. The whole thing, as he understands it, is ex officio.

But personally, no; personally he cannot make up his mind to confirm solemnly a lie. “Wouldst thou dare to give me thy hand on it?” “No, your Honor, that I will not do.”

Everyone who has the least practice will surely concede the truth of the assertion that (passing over to an entirely different world) this case occurs not too rarely, that one will be able to get a priest to acknowledge in private conversation (especially if he is personally touched) that he has a different conviction from that which he officially pronounces, or perhaps that he is personally dubious about what he publicly pronounces with “full conviction.” And yet the priest is in fact bound by an oath, he has taken an oath which is supposed to give assurance that what he publicly pronounces is his sincere conviction. Ah, yes, but in the priest-world this thing about taking an oath belongs definitely to the official—the thing must be done if one is to get into the living. One takes the oath officially, and preaches officially what one is bound to by the oath. “But answer me honestly, Pastor B., wilt thou give me thy hand on it that this is thy conviction, or wilt thou confirm it upon the memory of thy deceased wife—for to me, for my own sake, in order that I may put an end to my doubt, it is so important for me to learn to know thy true opinion?” “No, my friend; no, that I cannot do, thou must not require it of me.”

The taking of an oath—that surely should give complete assurance that the thing is personal! However, the oath (the oath which is the condition of getting into a living etc., O God, lead us not into temptation), the oath is perhaps taken officially. “But is it really thy conviction thou dost teach? I adjure thee by the memory of thy deceased wife that to help me thou wilt tell me thy honest opinion.” “No, my friend, that I cannot do.”

Newfangled Religious Assurances (Guarantees)

Once upon a time, long, long ago, this was the way people understood it: they required of a man who would be a teacher of Christianity that his life too should furnish guarantees for what he taught.

Now they have got far away from that, the world has become shrewder, more serious, has learned to disdain all this petty, morbid concern about the personal, has learned to desire only the objective—now it is required that the teacher’s life shall furnish guarantees that what he says is a pleasantry, a dramatic flourish, a divertissement, altogether objective.

A few examples. If what you would talk about is that Christianity, the Christianity of the New Testament, has a preference for the single state, and you yourself are a single man—my dear fellow, that is no subject for you to talk about, the congregation might in fact believe that it was seriousness, become uneasy, or might feel offended that in this way, so unbecomingly, you brought your own personality into it. No, it will be a long time before you will be in a position to talk seriously about that, in such a way as to content the congregation. Wait till you already have your first wife under the sod and are a good piece along with the second; that is the time for you, then you will step before the congregation to teach and “witness” that Christianity has a preference for the single state—and you will content the people perfectly; for your life furnishes guarantees that this is foolery, a jollification, or that what you say is interesting. Yes, how interesting! For just as in a marriage, if it is to be assured against boredom, if it is to be interesting, the husband must be unfaithful to the wife, and the wife to the husband, so too the truth only becomes interesting, immensely interesting, when a person in an exalted mood lets himself be gripped by it, carried away, enchanted—but of course does exactly the opposite and is cunningly secured by letting it stop at that.

If you would talk about the Christian contempt for titles, decorations and the tomfoolery of glory . . . and you yourself are neither a person of rank nor anything resembling it—my dear fellow, that is no subject for you to talk about, the congregation might in fact believe that it was seriousness, or feel offended at your lack of breeding in obtruding your own personality. No, wait till you yourself have laid up a store of decorations, wait till you are dragging with you such a rigmarole of titles that for the multitude of them you hardly know what your name is—then is the time, then you will step forward to preach and “witness”; for your life furnishes guarantees that this is dramatic entertainment, an interesting morning’s recreation.

If you would talk about preaching Christianity in poverty, affirming that this is the genuine Christian preaching . . . and you literally are a poor devil—my dear fellow, this is no subject for you to talk about, the congregation might in fact believe that it was seriousness, become fearful, feel quite put out and in the highest degree uncomfortable at having poverty come to such close quarters with them. No, first procure a fat living, and then when you have had that so long that you soon will be promoted to a still fatter one, that is the appropriate time, then you will appear before the congregation to preach and “witness,” and you will completely content them; for your life furnishes guarantees that the whole thing turns out to be a jest, such as serious men might desire once in a while at the theater or in church, in order to gather new strength . . . to make money.

And this is the way they worship God in the churches! And there silken and velvet orators weep, they sob, their voice is stifled by tears! Oh, in case it is true (and so it is, for God himself says it) that God counts the tears of the suffering and puts them in a bottle—then woe to these orators, if God has also counted their Sunday tears and kept them in a bottle! Yea, woe to us all, in case God really notices these Sunday tears, especially those of the orators, but of the audience, too! For a Sunday orator would be right in saying (and oratorically it would certainly make a brilliant effect, especially when supported by tears and that stifled sob), he would be right in saying to the audience, “I will collect all the useless tears you have shed in church, and with them I will appear accusingly before God at the Day of Judgment”—he is right, only do not forget that the orator’s own dramatic tears were far more pernicious than the light-minded tears of the audience.

“Beware of Them That Like to Walk in Long Robes” (Mark 12:38; Luke 20:46)

June 15, 1855

Since “witnesses to the truth,” as “genuine witnesses,” instead of uttering a warning against me openly, prefer to be, as they think, all the more effective by secrecy, then I shall undertake their business and witness aloud, aloud before the whole nation: Beware of the priests!

Above all beware of the priests! It is a mark of being a Christian (if one is to be a Christian in such a sense that it will hold good in the Judgment) that one has suffered for the doctrine. But believe me, as sure as my name is Søren Kierkegaard, you can get no official priest to say that. Of course not, for that would be suicide. The very instant it is said that to suffer for the doctrine is required for being even an ordinary Christian, that same instant the whole machinery with the 1000 livings and functionaries is thrown into confusion, all these wassailers [Levebrødre—whereas a “living” is Levebrød] are left destitute. Hence you get no official priest to say it. On the other hand, you may be fully assured that with all his might he will preach the opposite, prevent you from entertaining that thought, so that you may be kept in the state which he understands as that of a Christian, a sheep good for shearing, an inoffensive mediocrity, to whom eternity is closed.

Pray believe me. I tender you with my life the security you can demand; for I am not dealing with you in a finite interest, I am not seeking to draw you to me in order to found a party, etc. No, I am merely doing religiously my duty, and in a certain sense, if only I do it, it is indifferent to me, entirely indifferent, whether you comply with what I say or not.

“Beware of them that walk in long robes.” It is not necessary to say that with these words Christ has no intention of criticizing their dress; no, it certainly is not an observation about clothes. Christ had no objection to their clothes being long. If the professional attire for priests had been short, Christ would have said, “Beware of them that walk in short clothes.” And if you insist that I go to the extreme to show that this is not a criticism of clothes—if the professional attire for priests had been to walk without clothes, Christ would have said: “Beware of them that walk without clothes.” It is the professional dress He would swat, indicating it as a distinctive costume—for he understands something altogether different by being a teacher.

Beware of them that like to walk in long robes. A Bible interpretation over the teacups will at once seize upon the word “like” and explain that Christ had in view only individuals in the professional class, those who take vain pride in long robes, etc. No, my good long-robed man, that perhaps by great solemnity in the pulpit you can make women and children believe, it also corresponds perfectly with the picture of Christ which is presented in the Sunday services. But you cannot make me believe it; and the Christ of the New Testament does speak in this way. He always speaks about the whole order and does not resort to the meaningless gabble that there are some members of the order who are depraved, which is true at all times of all classes, so that obviously nothing whatever is said. No, He conceives the order as a whole and says that the order as a whole is depraved, so that the order as a whole has a depraved liking for walking in long robes, because to be a priest in the official sense is exactly the opposite of what Christ understood by being a teacher, the latter meaning to suffer for the teaching, the former meaning to enjoy the earthly as it is refined by the glory of being God’s representative. So it is no wonder they like to walk in long robes; for all other official positions in life are rewarded only by the earthly, but the official clergy take along with them a little of the heavenly as a refinement.

So then in itself it is entirely indifferent whether the professional dress is long or short. The decisive point is that when the teacher acquires “canonicals,” a peculiar dress, professional attire, you have official worship—and that is what Christ will not have. Long robes, splendid churches, etc., all this hangs together, and it is the human falsification of the Christianity of the New Testament, a falsification which shamelessly takes advantage of the fact that unfortunately the human mass only too easily lets itself be deluded by sense-impressions, and therefore (exactly in opposition to the New Testament) is prone to judge true Christianity by sense-impressions. It is the human falsification of the Christianity of the New Testament, and it is not true of the clerical order as it is of other orders, that there is nothing evil about the order; no, the clerical order is, Christianly considered, in and for itself of the Evil, is a demoralization, a human egoism, which inverts Christianity to exactly the opposite of that which Christ had made it.

But now that long robes have in fact become the official dress for priests, one can be sure that there is something in it, and I believe that by observing what it implies one can form a very significant conception of the nature of official Christianity.

By long robes one’s thought is involuntarily led to the suspicion that there is something to be concealed; when one has something to conceal, long robes are very convenient—and official Christianity has a prodigious lot to conceal, for from first to last it is an untruth, which therefore had best be hidden . . . in long robes.

And long robes—in fact that is feminine attire. Thereby thought is led on to something which also is characteristic of official Christianity, the unmanliness of using cunning, untruth and lies as its power. That again is very characteristic of official Christianity, which, being itself an untruth, uses a prodigious amount of untruth, both to hide what truth is, and to hide the fact that it is untruth.

And this womanish quality is also in another way characteristic of official Christianity. The feminine trait of willing and yet resisting, this coquetry which in woman is unconscious, has its unpardonable parallel in official Christianity, which so keenly wills the earthly and the temporal, but because of a sense of shame must make out that it does not will it, is on the alert to get it, yet secretly, for one must make out—God save us!—one must faint, fall into a swoon, when one has to accept a high and fat post, which one is so reluctant to assume that only from a sense of duty, solely and simply from a sense of duty, one has been able to resolve to assume such a post, and that only when one has—alas, in vain—sighed upon one’s knees before God and begged Him to take this cross, this bitter cup, from one—and one would find oneself perhaps in desperate embarrassment if the government were ironical enough to excuse one.

Finally, there is something equivocal about men in women’s clothes. One might be tempted to say that it conflicts with the police ordinance which forbids men to appear in women’s clothes and vice versa. But in any case, there is something equivocal—and equivocal is the more descriptive term for what official Christianity is, descriptive of the change Christianity has undergone in the course of time, that from being what it was in the New Testament, namely, simplicity, it has (presumably by the aid of its perfectibility) become something more, namely, duplicity, an equivocation.

Beware therefore of them that like to walk in long robes! According to Christ (who surely must know best about the way, since He is the Way) the gate is strait, the way is narrow—and few there be that find it. And what perhaps most of all has brought it about that the number of these few is so small, smaller proportionately with every century, is the monstrous illusion which official Christianity has conjured up. Persecution, maltreatment, bloodshedding, has by no means done such injury, no, it has been inestimably beneficial in comparison with the radical damage done by official Christianity, which is designed to serve human indolence, mediocrity, by making men believe that indolence, mediocrity and enjoyment of life is Christianity. Do away with official Christianity, let persecution come—that very instant Christianity again exists.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. What does Kierkegaard mean by official Christianity being “perfectly charming and elegant,” even though there need be no God?

2. What is the difference between a “genius” and a Christian?

3. What is meant by the “Pattern”?

4. Should we, like Kierkegaard, worry about the concept of Christendom, and protect the word Christian from its cultural underpinnings?

5. Are there parallels between the Christendom that Kierkegaard opposes and Christendom today, even if we seem post-Christian?

*"The Instant, No. 5" (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1855), trans. Walter Lowrie, in Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon Christendom. © 1944 Princeton University Press, 1972 renewed. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 13

Abraham Kuyper

(1837–1920)

Abraham Kuyper was, perhaps, the last of the great Christian renaissance men. It would be unfair to put him in one professional box, since he was prolific and thought deeply in so many areas. He was the founder of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880 and was prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905. Not only was he an exceptional educator and politician, but he was a theologian and journalist as well.

Like James Orr (1844–1913), his contemporary, Kuyper espoused some ideas that would have to be rejected. Because he was so proficient in so many areas, there were bound to be aspects of his thought that would prove less helpful. But as an active, thoughtful Christian who sought to make a difference in a secularizing world, Kuyper has few peers.

Kuyper was invited to present the Stone Lectures at Princeton in 1898.[1] It seems it was this invitation that moved Kuyper to begin, in earnest, to think about the relationship of Christianity as a worldview with other, prevalent, worldviews of his day. Kuyper’s Stone Lectures were later published as Lectures on Calvinism, the first lecture of which is selected below.

For those familiar with Kuyper and his work, it might seem strange to include him in a volume that highlights the discipline of apologetics. Kuyper made it quite clear that such a discipline was relatively useless for the church. In the selection included here, for example, Kuyper notes: “In this struggle Apologetics have advanced us not one single step. Apologists have invariably begun by abandoning the assailed breastwork, in order to entrench themselves cowardly in a ravelin behind it.”

So, thought Kuyper, the discipline of apologetics had failed historically and thus was unable to engage the struggle of modernism. As Warfield indicated,[2] Kuyper’s theological taxonomy relegated apologetics to “a subdivision of a subdivision.”[3]

In his massive three-volume Encyclopaedie der heilige godgeleerdheid (Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology) Kuyper’s discussion of apologetics occupies roughly a scant ten pages of volume 3. Note, for example, the place of apologetics, according to Kuyper.

That which [apologetics] must defend is Dogma, either in its specific details, or in the grounds wherein the Dogma rests, or in the conclusions (gevolgtrekkingen), which follow from the Dogma. It is not diathetical, since it does not describe Dogma, it is not thetical, since it does not postulate Dogma, nor prove it, but it is antithetical, since it directs its plea in behalf of Dogma over against that which pseudo-philosophy raises against Dogma, its grounds or effects. Its place is thus not before but after Dogmatics and Ethics.

Then, further on, Kuyper says:

From this it follows that Apologetics is confined to two tasks. In the first place to disqualify pseudo-theology from its vitium originis, which men come to adopt from the side of philosophy, and in the second place to maintain the principles which are inseparable from Dogma, as actually the only trustworthy ones to maintain, over against false principles of wayward Philosophy.[4]

This “misprision of apologetics” (as Warfield calls it) in Kuyper is due, in part, to Kuyper’s understanding of the antithesis. At one point, Kuyper explains the antithesis this way:

It is like this with a group of wild fruit trees, some of which you graft, and the others you do not. From the moment of that grafting, if successful and the wild trees are properly pruned, the growth of the two kinds of trees is completely different, and this difference is not merely relative and a matter of degree, but specific. It is not a better and tenderer growth in one tree producing a richer fruit, while the other tree thrives less prosperously, and consequently bears poorer fruit, but it is a difference in kind. However luxuriantly and abundantly the non-grafted tree may leaf and blossom, it will never bear the fruit which grows on the grafted tree. But however backward the grafted tree may be at first in its growth, the blossom which unfolds on its branches is fruit blossom. No tree grafts itself. The wild tree cannot change from its own kind into the kind of the grafted tree, unless a power which resides outside of the sphere of botany enters in and effects the renewal of the wild tree. This is no relative transition. A tree is not one-tenth cultivated and nine-tenths wild, so that by degrees it may become entirely cultivated; it is simply grafted or not grafted, and the entire result of its future growth depends on this fundamental difference.[5]

Because the antithesis, as Kuyper develops it, does not adequately take into account the notion of the sensus divinitatis, which notion came to its fruition in Calvin (following Paul, in Rom. 1:18ff.), it takes on the connotation of a kind of metaphysical antithesis, in which the “two kinds of men” to which Kuyper alludes in this illustration really and truly have nothing in common.

In fairness to Kuyper, we should not miss the historical point that, in Kuyper’s own time, there was not much available to him in terms of a consistent Reformed approach to the discipline of apologetics. Due to the influence of the Enlightenment, in which reason was pitting itself against all calls of submission to God’s revelation, apologetic approaches that had their foundation in some notion of neutral reasoning had shown themselves to be thoroughly bankrupt, unable to address the prevailing onslaught of unbelief.[7] For Kuyper, then, it was the principium of revelation, not of reason, that alone was able to rescue men from the foolishness of would-be autonomy. Since revelation was the acknowledged principium of the church, there seemed to be no common ground between the regenerate and the unregenerate, according to Kuyper.

How, then, can one whose view of apologetics is so minimal be included in a volume such as this? The answer to that question could become complex, but the simplest explanation is that, although Kuyper viewed the discipline of apologetics, with respect to its place in the theological encyclopedia, as a “subdivision of a subdivision,” he nevertheless saw the engagement of worldviews, where principle is arrayed against principle, as a necessary battle in which the church must be engaged. To put it another way, since Kuyper defined apologetics as a discipline whose primary task was to engage pseudo-philosophy, the worldview battle that he himself engaged was a much broader, more sweeping debate than would fit within the context of apologetics so narrowly defined.

Like Orr, Kuyper became convinced that any approach that would seek to defend Christianity must do so on the basis of a holistic worldview system. His worldview approach is perhaps best seen in the conclusion to his inaugural address at the dedication of the Free University of Amsterdam. In that address he was discussing the notion of sphere sovereignty. In concluding that lecture he said, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”[7]

With this conviction, Kuyper began to develop what has been called a Calvinistic world-and-life view. As the reader will see in the included work (footnote 1), Orr’s influence on Kuyper is explicit from the beginning.[8] Though Kuyper was familiar with the concept of a worldview early on, it seems that he did not develop it in any detail until he was asked to deliver the Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary in 1898, which became Lectures on Calvinism. That book now includes chapters on “Calvinism as a Life-System,” “Calvinism and Religion,” “. . . and Politics,” “. . . and Science,” “. . . and Art,” and “. . . and the Future.” Kuyper’s goal in these lectures was to extend the theological tenets of Calvinism beyond the church to apply to every sphere of life. His notion of “sphere sovereignty” was developed in order to argue that every institution in society has its existence under God, is therefore dependent on God, and should organize itself and accomplish its tasks coram Deo, before the face of God. It was also intended to argue that each sphere is independent of the others, so that the church is not to encroach upon the state, the state is not to encroach upon the family, the family is not to encroach upon the school, and so on. Each institution, each sphere, is “sovereign” relative to other spheres, but also completely dependent on God and his Word.

In Kuyper’s first lecture, “Calvinism as a Life-System,” he attempts to set out just what a Calvinistic Weltanschauung would entail. Kuyper gives credit to Orr in this lecture, and the similarities are obvious at points. Orr and Kuyper following him both argued that a proper defense of Christianity should include “principle against principle,” as Kuyper puts it. Since secular views comprised complete world-and-life views, Calvinism must self-consciously set forth its own Weltanschauung.

It is in Abraham Kuyper that the notion of antithesis begins to develop, a notion that Kuyper thought essential to any Christian worldview. It is necessary to think carefully and with some depth about just what the antithesis is, and about how this essential notion should be applied. At least these points should be highlighted:

1. The antithesis is real, is radical, and is eschatological in nature. By that we mean that there really is an antithesis in this world. There really are only two “kinds” of people in this world inasmuch as one is either a Christian or not.

It is radical in that it goes to the very “root” or heart of our condition as human beings. The antithesis is not a superficial or nominal judgment, as if it were only a theoretical possibility. It speaks to the central focus of our identities.

But it is eschatological in that the full working out of the antithetic principle is yet to come. So, like the rest of Christian doctrine, there is an already/not-yet aspect to it.

2. The antithesis is covenantal, not metaphysical. This was the point of debate with Warfield and Kuyper, which we will discuss briefly elsewhere. Warfield understood Kuyper to be arguing for a metaphysical antithesis in which there really are two different kinds of human beings, or two different kinds of science. While Kuyper does speak this way, it is evident from his illustrations and elaborations that what he means by kinds is not metaphysical, but covenantal. That is, all people are made in God’s image. It is not as though we have people who are in God’s image and others who are not. That would be a metaphysical antithesis. Rather, as made in God’s image, all people are either covenant keepers in Jesus Christ or covenant breakers in Adam. So, when we speak of an absolute antithesis, we are speaking covenantally, not metaphysically.

One concluding note: the only way to fight against principle is not by offering a series of details or by proving the existence of some generic God. It is rather by seeing Christianity as a worldview, the only worldview that is really and truly coherent.

1. For an analysis of Kuyper’s Stone Lectures see, Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998).

2. Because we are focusing attention here on Kuyper’s worldview approach, we will reserve discussion of the differences between him and Warfield for our introduction to Warfield, wherein we will be dealing more with meta-apologetic issues.

3. Warfield contends that if Kuyper’s classification and delineation of the task of apologetics is correct, then Christianity remains “the great assumption.” B. B. Warfield, “Introduction to Beattie’s Apologetics,” in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, ed. John E. Meeter (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1973), 2:95.

4. Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopaedie der heilige godgeleerdheid, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: J. A. Wormser, 1894), 3:459, 461.

5. This quote is found in Abraham Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), 152–53, translated from Kuyper, Encyclopaedie der heilige godgeleerdheid, 2:100.

6. For an insightful critique of the failure of apologetics in nineteenth-century academia, see George Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983).

7. James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.

8. For further explanation of the relationship of Orr and Kuyper, see Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview, 93ff.

Lectures on Calvinism

First Lecture

Calvinism as a Life-System

A traveller from the old European Continent, disembarking on the shore of this New World, feels as the Psalmist says, that “His thoughts crowd upon him like a multitude.” Compared with the eddying waters of your new stream of life, the old stream in which he was moving seems almost frostbound and dull; and here, on American ground, for the first time, he realizes how so many divine potencies, which were hidden away in the bosom of mankind from our very creation, but which our old world was incapable of developing, are now beginning to disclose their inward splendor, thus promising a still richer store of surprises for the future.

You would not, however, ask me to forget the superiority which, in many respects, the Old World may still claim, in your eyes, as well as in mine. Old Europe remains even now the bearer of a longer historical past, and therefore stands before us as a tree rooted more deeply, hiding between its leaves some more matured fruits of life. You are yet in your Springtide,—we are passing through our Fall;—and has not the harvest of Autumn an enchantment of its own?

But, though, on the other hand, I fully acknowledge the advantage you possess in the fact that (to use another simile) the train of life travels with you so immeasurably faster than with us,—leaving us miles and miles behind,—still we both feel that the life in Old Europe is not something separate from life here; it is one and the same current of human existence that flows through both Continents.

By virtue of our common origin, you may call us bone of your bone,—we feel that you are flesh of our flesh, and although you are outstripping us in the most discouraging way, you will never forget that the historic cradle of your wondrous youth stood in our old Europe, and was most gently rocked in my once mighty Fatherland.

Moreover, besides this common parentage, there is another factor which, in the face of even a wider difference, would continue to unite your interests and ours. Far more precious to us than even the development of human life, is the crown which ennobles it, and this noble crown of life for you and for me rests in the Christian name. That crown is our common heritage. It was not from Greece or Rome that the regeneration of human life came forth;—that mighty metamorphosis dates from Bethlehem and Golgotha; and if the Reformation, in a still more special sense, claims the love of our hearts, it is because it has dispelled the clouds of sacerdotalism, and has unveiled again to fullest view the glories of the Cross. But, in deadly opposition to this Christian element, against the very Christian name, and against its salutiferous influence in every sphere of life, the storm of Modernism has now arisen with violent intensity.

In 1789 the turning point was reached.

Voltaire’s mad cry, “Down with the scoundrel,” was aimed at Christ himself, but this cry was merely the expression of the most hidden thought from which the French Revolution sprang. The fanatic outcry of another philosopher, “We no more need a God,” and the odious shibboleth, “No God, no Master,” of the Convention;—these were the sacrilegious watchwords which at that time heralded the liberation of man as an emancipation from all Divine Authority. And if, in His impenetrable wisdom, God employed the Revolution as a means by which to overthrow the tyranny of the Bourbons, and to bring a judgment on the princes who abused His nations as their footstool, nevertheless the principle of that Revolution remains thoroughly anti-Christian, and has since spread like a cancer, dissolving and undermining all that stood firm and consistent before our Christian faith.

There is no doubt then that Christianity is imperiled by great and serious dangers. Two life systems[1] are wrestling with one another, in mortal combat. Modernism is bound to build a world of its own from the data of the natural man, and to construct man himself from the data of nature; while, on the other hand, all those who reverently bend the knee to Christ and worship Him as the Son of the living God, and God himself, are bent upon saving the “Christian Heritage.” This is the struggle in Europe, this is the struggle in America, and this also is the struggle for principles in which my own country is engaged, and in which I myself have been spending all my energy for nearly forty years.

In this struggle Apologetics have advanced us not one single step. Apologists have invariably begun by abandoning the assailed breastwork, in order to entrench themselves cowardly in a ravelin behind it.

From the first, therefore, I have always said to myself,—If the battle is to be fought with honor and with a hope of victory, then principle must be arrayed against principle; then it must be felt that in Modernism the vast energy of an all-embracing life-system assails us, then also it must be understood that we have to take our stand in a life-system of equally comprehensive and far-reaching power. And this powerful life-system is not to be invented nor formulated by ourselves, but is to be taken and applied as it presents itself in history. When thus taken, I found and confessed, and I still hold, that this manifestation of the Christian principle is given us in Calvinism. In Calvinism my heart has found rest. From Calvinism have I drawn the inspiration firmly and resolutely to take my stand in the thick of this great conflict of principles. And therefore, when I was invited most honorably by your Faculty to give the Stone-Lectures here this year, I could not hesitate a moment as to my choice of subject. Calvinism, as the only decisive, lawful, and consistent defence for Protestant nations against encroaching and overwhelming Modernism,—this of itself was bound to be my theme.

Allow me, therefore, in six lectures, to speak to you on Calvinism.

1. On Calvinism as a Life-system;

2. On Calvinism and Religion;

3. On Calvinism and Politics;

4. On Calvinism and Science;

5. On Calvinism and Art; and

6. On Calvinism and the Future.

Clearness of presentation demands that in this first lecture I begin by fixing the conception of Calvinism historically. To prevent misunderstanding we must first know what we should not, and what we should, understand by it. Starting therefore from the current use of the term, I find that this is by no means the same in different countries and in different spheres of life. The name Calvinist is used in our times first as a sectarian name. This is not the case in Protestant, but in Roman Catholic countries, especially in Hungary and France. In Hungary the Reformed Churches have a membership of some two and a half millions, and in both the Romish and Jewish press of that country her members are constantly stigmatized by the non-official name of “Calvinists,” a derisive name applied even to those who have divested themselves of all traces of sympathy with the faith of their fathers. The same phenomenon presents itself in France, especially in the Southern parts, where “Calviniste” is equally, and even more emphatically, a sectarian stigma, which does not refer to the faith or confession of the stigmatized person, but is simply put upon every member of the Reformed Churches, even though he be an atheist. George Thiébaud, known for his anti-Semitic propaganda, has at the same time revived the anti-Calvinistic spirit in France, and even in the Dreyfus-case, “Jews and Calvinists” were arraigned by him as the two anti-national forces, prejudicial to the “esprit gaulois.” Directly opposed to this is the second use of the word Calvinism, and this I call the confessional one. In this sense, a Calvinist is represented exclusively as the out-spoken subscriber to the dogma of fore-ordination. They who disapprove of this strong attachment to the doctrine of predestination cooperate with the Romish polemists, in that by calling you “Calvinist,” they represent you as a victim of dogmatic narrowness; and what is worse still, as being dangerous to the real seriousness of moral life. This is a stigma so conspicuously offensive that theologians like Hodge, who from fulness of conviction were open defenders of Predestination, and counted it an honor to be Calvinists, were nevertheless so deeply impressed with the disfavor attached to the “Calvinistic name,” that for the sake of commending their conviction, they preferred to speak rather of Augustinianism than of Calvinism. The denominational title of some Baptists and Methodists indicates a third use of the name Calvinist. No less a man than Spurgeon belonged to a class of Baptists who in England call themselves “Calvinistic Baptists,” and the Whitefield Methodists in Wales to this day bear the name of “Calvinistic Methodists.” Thus here also it indicates in some way a confessional difference, but is applied as the name for special church denominations. Without doubt this practice would have been most severely criticized by Calvin himself. During his life-time, no Reformed Church ever dreamed of naming the Church of Christ after any man. The Lutherans have done this, the Reformed Churches never. But beyond this sectarian, confessional, and denominational use of the name “Calvinist,” it serves moreover, in the fourth place, as a scientific name, either in a historical, philosophical or political sense. Historically, the name of Calvinism indicates the channel in which the Reformation moved, so far as it was neither Lutheran, nor Anabaptist nor Socinian. In the philosophical sense, we understand by it that system of conceptions which, under the influence of the master-mind of Calvin, raised itself to dominance in the several spheres of life. And as a political name, Calvinism indicates that political movement which has guaranteed the liberty of nations in constitutional statesmanship; first in Holland, then in England, and since the close of the last century in the United States. In this scientific sense, the name of Calvinism is especially current among German scholars. And the fact that this not only is the opinion of those who are themselves of Calvinistic sympathies, but that also scholars who have abandoned every confessional standard of Christianity, nevertheless assign this profound significance to Calvinism. This appears from the testimony borne by three of our best men of science, the first of whom, Dr. Robert Fruin, declares that: “Calvinism came into the Netherlands consisting of a logical system of divinity, of a democratic Church-order of its own, impelled by a severely moral sense, and as enthusiastic for the moral as for the religious reformation of mankind.”[2] Another historian, who was even more outspoken in his rationalistic sympathies, writes: “Calvinism is the highest form of development reached by the religious and political principle in the 16th century.”[3] And a third authority acknowledges that Calvinism has liberated Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England, and in the Pilgrim Fathers has provided the impulse to the prosperity of the United States.[4] Similarly Bancroft, among you, acknowledged that Calvinism “has a theory of ontology, of ethics, of social happiness, and of human liberty, all derived from God.”[5] Only in this last-named, strictly scientific sense do I desire to speak to you on Calvinism as an independent general tendency, which from a mother-principle of its own, has developed an independent form both for our life and for our thought among the nations of Western Europe and North America, and at present even in South Africa.

The domain of Calvinism is indeed far broader than the narrow confessional interpretation would lead us to suppose. The aversion to naming the Church after a man gave rise to the fact that though in France the Protestants were called “Huguenots,” in the Netherlands “Beggars,” in Great Britain “Puritans” and “Presbyterians,” and in North America “Pilgrim Fathers,” yet all these products of the Reformation which on your Continent and ours bore the special Reformed type, were of Calvinistic origin. But the extent of the Calvinistic domain should not be limited to these purer revelations. Nobody applies such an exclusive rule to Christianity. Within its boundaries we embrace not only Western Europe, but also Russia, the Balkan States, the Armenians, and even Menelik’s empire in Abyssinia. Therefore it is but just that in the same way we should include in the Calvinistic fold those Churches also which have diverged more or less from its purer forms. In her XXXIX Articles, the Church of England is strictly Calvinistic, even though in her Hierarchy and Liturgy she has abandoned the straight paths, and has met with the serious results of this departure in Puseyism and Ritualism. The Confession of the Independents was equally Calvinistic, even though in their conception of the Church the organic structure was broken by individualism. And if under the leadership of Wesley most Methodists became opposed to the theological interpretation of Calvinism, it is nevertheless the Calvinistic spirit itself that created this spiritual reaction against the petrifying church-life of the times. In a given sense, therefore, it may be said that the entire field which in the end was covered by the Reformation, so far as it was not Lutheran and not Socinian, was dominated in principle by Calvinism. Even the Baptists applied for shelter at the tents of the Calvinists. It is the free character of Calvinism that accounts for the rise of these several shades and differences, and of the reactions against their excesses. By its hierarchy, Romanism is and remains uniform. Lutheranism owes its similar unity and uniformity to the ascendancy of the prince, whose relation to the Church is that of “summus episcopus” and to its “ecclesia docens.” Calvinism on the other hand, which sanctions no ecclesiastical hierarchy, and no magisterial interference, could not develop itself except in many and varied forms and deviations, thereby of course incurring the danger of degeneration, provoking in its turn all kinds of one-sided reactions. With the free development of life, such as was intended by Calvinism, the distinction could not fail to appear between a centre, with its fulness and purity of vitality and strength, and the broad circumference with its threatening declensions. But in that very conflict between a purer centre and a less pure circumference the steady working of its spirit was guaranteed to Calvinism.

Thus understood, Calvinism is rooted in a form of religion which was peculiarly its own, and from this specific religious consciousness there was developed first a peculiar theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for political and social life, for the interpretation of the moral world-order, for the relation between nature and grace, between Christianity and the world, between church and state, and finally for art and science; and amid all these life-utterances it remained always the self-same Calvinism, in so far as simultaneously and spontaneously all these developments sprang from its deepest life-principle. Hence to this extent it stands in line with those other great complexes of human life, known as Paganism, Islamism and Romanism, by which we distinguish four entirely different worlds in the one collective world of human life. And if, speaking precisely, you should co-ordinate Christianity and not Calvinism with Paganism and Islamism, it is nevertheless better to place Calvinism in line with them, because Calvinism claims to embody the Christian idea more purely and accurately than could Romanism and Lutheranism. In the Greek world of Russia and the Balkan States, the national element is still dominant, and therefore the Christian faith in these countries has not yet been able to produce a form of life of its own from the root of its mystical orthodoxy. In Lutheran countries, the interference of the magistrate has prevented the free working of the spiritual principle. Hence of Romanism only can it be said that it has embodied its life-thought in a world of conceptions and utterances entirely its own. But by the side of Romanism, and in opposition to it, Calvinism made its appearance, not merely to create a different Church-form, but an entirely different form for human life, to furnish human society with a different method of existence, and to populate the world of the human heart with different ideals and conceptions.

That this had not been realized until our time, and is now acknowledged by friend and enemy in consequence of a better study of history, should not surprise us. This would not have been the case, if Calvinism had entered life as a well constructed system, and had presented itself as an outcome of study. But its origin came about in an entirely different way. In the order of existence, life is first. And to Calvinism life itself was ever the first object of its endeavors. There was too much to do and to suffer to devote much time to study. What was dominant was Calvinistic practice at the stake and in the field of battle. Moreover the nations among whom Calvinism gained the day—such as the Swiss, the Dutch, the English and the Scotch—were by nature not very philosophically predisposed. Especially at that time, life among those nations was spontaneous and void of calculation; and only later on has Calvinism in its parts become a subject of that special study by which historians and theologians have traced the relation between Calvinistic phenomena and the all-embracing unity of its principle. It can even be said that the need of a theoretical and systematical study of so incisive and comprehensive a phenomenon of life only arises when its first vitality has been exhausted, and when for the sake of maintaining itself in the future, it is compelled to greater accuracy in the drawing of its boundary lines. And if to this you add the fact that the stress of reflecting our existence as a unity in the mirror of our consciousness is far stronger in our philosophical age than it ever was before, it is readily seen that both the needs of the present, and the care for the future, compel us to a deeper study of Calvinism. In the Roman Catholic Church everybody knows what he lives for, because with clear consciousness he enjoys the fruits of Rome’s unity of life-system. Even in Islam you find the same power of a conviction of life dominated by one principle. Protestantism alone wanders about in the wilderness without aim or direction, moving hither and thither, without making any progress. This accounts for the fact that among Protestant nations Pantheism, born from the new German Philosophy and owing its concrete evolution-form to Darwin, claims for itself more and more the supremacy in every sphere of human life, even in that of theology, and under all sorts of names tries to overthrow our Christian traditions, and is bent even upon exchanging the heritage of our fathers for a hopeless modern Buddhism. The leading thoughts that had their rise in the French Revolution at the close of the last, and in German philosophy in the course of the present century, form together a life-system which is diametrically opposed to that of our fathers. Their struggles were for the sake of the glory of God and a purified Christianity; the present movement wages war for the sake of the glory of man, being inspired not by the humble mind of Golgotha but by the pride of Hero-worship. And why did we, Christians, stand so weak, in the face of this Modernism? Why did we constantly lose ground? Simply because we were devoid of an equal unity of life-conception, such as alone could enable us with irresistible energy to repel the enemy at the frontier. This unity of life-conception, however, is never to be found in a vague conception of Protestantism winding itself as it does in all kind of tortuosities, but you do find it in that mighty historic process, which as Calvinism dug a channel of its own for the powerful stream of its life. By this unity of conception alone as given in Calvinism, you in America and we in Europe might be enabled once more to take our stand, by the side of Romanism, in opposition to modern Pantheism. Without this unity of starting point and life-system we must lose the power to maintain our independent position, and our strength for resistance must ebb away.

The supreme interest here at stake, however, forbids our accepting without more positive proof the fact that Calvinism really provides us with such an unity of life-system and we demand proofs of the assertion that Calvinism is not a partial, nor was a merely temporary phenomenon, but is such an all-embracing system of principles, as, rooted in the past, is able to strengthen us in the present and to fill us with confidence for the future. Hence we must first ask what are the required conditions for such general systems of life, as Paganism, Islamism, Romanism and Modernism, and then show that Calvinism really fulfills these conditions.

These conditions demand in the first place, that from a special principle a peculiar insight be obtained into the three fundamental relations of all human life: viz., (1) our relation to God, (2) our relation to man, and (3) our relation to the world.

Hence the first claim demands that such a life system shall find its starting-point in a special interpretation of our relation to God. This is not accidental, but imperative. If such an action is to put its stamp upon our entire life, it must start from that point in our consciousness in which our life is still undivided and lies comprehended in its unity,—not in the spreading vines but in the root from which the vines spring. This point, of course, lies in the antithesis between all that is finite in our human life and the infinite that lies beyond it. Here alone we find the common source from which the different streams of our human life spring and separate themselves. Personally it is our repeated experience that in the depths of our hearts, at the point where we disclose ourselves to the Eternal One, all the rays of our life converge as in one focus, and there alone regain that harmony which we so often and so painfully lose in the stress of daily duty. In prayer lies not only our unity with God, but also the unity of our personal life. Movements in history, therefore, which do not spring from this deepest source are always partial and transient, and only those historical acts which arose from these lowest depths of man’s personal existence embrace the whole of life and possess the required permanence.

This was the case with Paganism, which in its most general form is known by the fact that it surmises, assumes and worships God in the creature. This applies to the lowest Animism, as well as to the highest Buddhism. Paganism does not rise to the conception of the independent existence of a God beyond and above the creature. But even in this imperfect form it has for its starting-point a definite interpretation of the relation of the infinite to the finite, and to this it owed its power to produce a finished form for human society. Simply because it possessed this significant starting-point was it able to produce a form of its own for the whole of human life. It is the same with Islamism, which is characterized by its purely anti-pagan ideal, cutting off all contact between the creature and God. Mohammed and the Koran are the historic names, but in its nature the Crescent is the only absolute antithesis to Paganism. Islam isolates God from the creature, in order to avoid all commingling with the creature. As antipode, Islam was possessed of an equally far-reaching tendency, and was also able to originate an entirely peculiar world of human life. The same is the case with Romanism. Here also the papal tiara, the hierarchy, the mass, etc., are but the outcome of one fundamental thought: viz., that God enters into fellowship with the creature by means of a mystic middle-link, which is the Church;—not taken as a mystic organism, but as a visible, palpable and tangible institution. Here the Church stands between God and the world, and so far as it was able to adopt the world and to inspire it, Romanism also created a form of its own for human society. And now, by the side of and opposite to these three, Calvinism takes its stand with a fundamental thought which is equally profound. It does not seek God in the creature, as Paganism; it does not isolate God from the creature, as Islamism; it posits no mediate communion between God and the creature, as does Romanism; but proclaims the exalted thought that, although standing in high majesty above the creature, God enters into immediate fellowship with the creature, as God the Holy Spirit. This is even the heart and kernel of the Calvinistic confession of predestination. There is communion with God, but only in entire accord with his counsel of peace from all eternity. Thus there is no grace but such as comes to us immediately from God. At every moment of our existence, our entire spiritual life rests in God Himself. The “Deo Soli Gloria” was not the starting-point but the result, and predestination was inexorably maintained, not for the sake of separating man from man, nor in the interest of personal pride, but in order to guarantee from eternity to eternity, to our inner self, a direct and immediate communion with the Living God. The opposition against Rome aimed therefore with the Calvinist first of all at the dismissal of a Church which placed itself between the soul and God. The Church consisted not in an office, nor in an independent institute, the believers themselves were the Church, inasmuch as by faith they stood in touch with the Almighty. Thus, as in Paganism, Islamism and Romanism, so also in Calvinism is found that proper, definite interpretation of the fundamental relation of man to God, which is required as the first condition of a real life-system.

Meanwhile I anticipate two objections. In the first place, it may be asked whether I do not claim honors for Calvinism which belong to Protestantism in general. To this I reply in the negative. When I claim for Calvinism the honor of having re-established the direct fellowship with God, I do not undervalue the general significance of Protestantism. In the Protestant domain, taken in the historic sense, Lutheranism alone stands by the side of Calvinism. Now I wish to be second to none in my praises of Luther’s heroic initiative. In his heart, rather than in the heart of Calvin, was the bitter conflict fought which led to the world-historic breach. Luther can be interpreted without Calvin, but not Calvin without Luther. To a great extent Calvin entered upon the harvest of what the hero of Wittenberg had sown in and outside Germany. But when the question is put, Who had the clearest insight into the reformatory principle, worked it out most fully, and applied it most broadly, history points to the Thinker of Geneva and not to the Hero of Wittenberg. Luther as well as Calvin contended for a direct fellowship with God, but Luther took it up from its subjective, anthropological side, and not from its objective, cosmological side as Calvin did. Luther’s starting-point was the special-soteriological principle of a justifying faith; while Calvin’s extending far wider, lay in the general cosmological principle of the sovereignty of God. As a natural result of this, Luther also continued to consider the Church as the representative and authoritative “teacher,” standing between God and the believer, while Calvin was the first to seek the Church in the believers themselves. As far as he was able, Luther still leaned upon the Romish view of the sacraments, and upon the Romish cultus, while Calvin was the first in both to draw the line which extended immediately from God to man and from man to God. Moreover, in all Lutheran countries the Reformation originated from the princes rather than from the people, and thereby passed under the power of the magistrate, who took his stand in the Church officially as her highest Bishop, and therefore was unable to change either the social or the political life in accordance with its principle. Lutheranism restricted itself to an exclusively ecclesiastical and theological character, while Calvinism put its impress in and outside the Church upon every department of human life. Hence Lutheranism is nowhere spoken of as the creator of a peculiar life-form; even the name of “Lutheranism” is hardly ever mentioned; while the students of history with increasing unanimity recognize Calvinism as the creator of a world of human life entirely its own.

The second objection we have to meet is this: If it is true that every general development form of life must find its starting point in a peculiar interpretation of our relation to God,—how then do you explain the fact that Modernism also has led to such a general conception, notwithstanding it sprang from the French Revolution, which on principle broke with all religion. The question answers itself. If you exclude from your conceptions all reckoning with the Living God just as is implied in the cry, “no God no master,” you certainly bring to the front a sharply defined interpretation of your own for our relation to God. A government, as you yourselves experienced of late in the case of Spain, that recalls its ambassador and breaks every regular intercourse with another power, declares thereby that its relation to the government of that country is a strained relation which generally ends in war. This is the case here. The leaders of the French Revolution, not being acquainted with any relation to God except that which existed through the mediation of the Romish Church, annihilated all relation to God, because they wished to annihilate the power of the Church; and as a result of this they declared war against every religious confession. But this of course very really implied a fundamental and special interpretation of our relation to God. It was the declaration that henceforth God was to be considered as a hostile power, yea even as dead, if not yet to the heart, at least to the state, to society and to science. To be sure, in passing from French into German hands, Modernism could not rest content with such a bare negation; but the result shows how from that moment it clothed itself in either pantheism or agnosticism, and under each disguise it maintained the expulsion of God from practical and theoretical life, and the enmity against the Triune God had its full course.

Thus I maintain that it is the interpretation of our relation to God which dominates every general life system, and that for us this conception is given in Calvinism, thanks to its fundamental interpretation of an immediate fellowship of God with man and of man with God. To this I add that Calvinism has neither invented nor conceived this fundamental interpretation, but that God Himself implanted it in the hearts of its heroes and its heralds. We face here no product of a clever intellectualism, but the fruit of a work of God in the heart, or, if you like, an inspiration of history. This point should be emphasized! Calvinism has never burned its incense upon the altar of genius, it has erected no monument for its heroes, it scarcely calls them by name. One stone only in a wall at Geneva remains to remind one of Calvin. His very grave has been forgotten. Was this ingratitude? By no means. But if Calvin was appreciated, even in the 16th and 17th centuries the impression was vivid that it was One greater than Calvin, even God Himself, who had wrought here His work. Hence, no general movement in life is so devoid of deliberate compact, none so unconventional in which it spread as this. Simultaneously, Calvinism had its rise in all the countries of Western Europe, and it did not appear, among those nations, because the University was in its van, or because scholars led the people, or because a magistrate placed himself at their head; but it sprang from the hearts of the people themselves, with weavers and farmers, with tradesmen and servants, with women and young maidens; and in every instance it exhibited the same characteristic: viz., strong Assurance of eternal Salvation, not only without the intervention of the Church, but even in opposition to the Church. The human heart had attained unto eternal peace with its God; strengthened by this Divine fellowship, it discovered its high and holy calling to consecrate every department of life and every energy at its disposal to the glory of God: and therefore, when those men or women, who had become partakers of this Divine life, were forced to abandon their faith, it proved impossible, that they could deny their Lord; and thousands and tens of thousands burned at the stake, not complaining but exulting, with thanksgiving in their hearts and psalms upon their lips. Calvin was not the author of this, but God who through His Holy Spirit had wrought in Calvin that which He had wrought in them. Calvin stood not above them, but as a brother by their side, a sharer with them of God’s blessing. In this way, Calvinism came to its fundamental interpretation of an immediate fellowship with God, not because Calvin invented it, but because in this immediate fellowship God Himself had granted to our fathers a privilege of which Calvin was only the first to become clearly conscious. This is the great work of the Holy Spirit in history, by which Calvinism has been consecrated, and which interprets to us its wondrous energy.

There are times in history when the pulse of religious life beats faintly; but there are times when its beat is pounding, and the latter was the case in the 16th century among the nations of Western Europe. The question of faith at that time dominated every activity in public life. New history starts out from this faith, even as the history of our times starts from the unbelief of the French Revolution. What law this pulse-like movement of religious life obeys, we cannot tell, but it is evident that there is such a law, and that in times of high religious tension the inworking of the Holy Spirit upon the heart is irresistible; and this mighty inworking of God was the experience of our Calvinists, Puritans and Pilgrim Fathers. It was not in all individuals to the same degree, for this never happens in any great movement; but they who formed the centre of life in those times, who were the promoters of that mighty change, they experienced this higher power to the fullest: and they were the men and women of every class of society and nationality who by God Himself were admitted into communion with the majesty of His eternal Being. Thanks to this work of God in the heart, the persuasion that the whole of a man’s life is to be lived as in the Divine Presence has become the fundamental thought of Calvinism. By this decisive idea, or rather by this mighty fact, it has allowed itself to be controlled in every department of its entire domain. It is from this mother-thought that the all embracing life system of Calvinism sprang.

This brings us of itself to the second condition, with which, for the sake of creating a life system every profound movement has to comply: viz., a fundamental interpretation of its own touching the relation of man to man. How we stand toward God is the first, and how we stand toward man is the second principal question which decides the tendency and the construction of our life. There is no uniformity among men, but endless multiformity. In creation itself the difference has been established between woman and man. Physical and spiritual gifts and talents cause one person to differ from the other. Past generations and our own personal life create distinctions. The social position of the rich and poor differs widely. Now, these differences are in a special way weakened or accentuated by every consistent life system, and Paganism and Islamism, Romanism as well as Modernism, and so also Calvinism have all taken their stand in this question in accordance with their primordial principle. If, as Paganism contends, God dwells in the creature, a divine superiority is exhibited in whatever is high among men. In this way it obtained its demigods, hero-worship, and finally its sacrifices upon the altar of Divus Augustus. On the other hand, whatever is lower is considered as godless, and therefore gives rise to the systems of caste in India and in Egypt, and to slavery everywhere else, thereby placing one man under a base subjection to his fellowman. Under Islamism, which dreams of its paradise of houries, sensuality usurps public authority, and the woman is the slave of man, even as the kafir is the slave of the Moslim. Romanism, taking root in Christian soil, overcomes the absolute character of distinction, and renders it relative, in order to interpret every relation of man to man hierarchically. There is a hierarchy among the angels of God, a hierarchy in God’s Church, and so also a hierarchy among men, leading to an entirely aristocratic interpretation of life as the embodiment of the ideal. Finally Modernism, which denies and abolishes every difference, cannot rest until it has made woman man and man woman, and, putting every distinction on a common level, kills life by placing it under the ban of uniformity. One type must answer for all, one uniform, one position and one and the same development of life; and whatever goes beyond and above it, is looked upon as an insult to the common consciousness. In the same way Calvinism has derived from its fundamental relation to God a peculiar interpretation of man’s relation to man, and it is this only true relation which since the 16th century has ennobled social life. If Calvinism places our entire human life immediately before God, then it follows that all men or women, rich or poor, weak or strong, dull or talented, as creatures of God, and as lost sinners, have no claim whatsoever to lord over one another, and that we stand as equals before God, and consequently equal as man to man. Hence we cannot recognize any distinction among men, save such as has been imposed by God Himself, in that He gave one authority over the other, or enriched one with more talents than the other, in order that the man of more talents should serve the man with less, and in him serve his God. Hence Calvinism condemns not merely all open slavery and systems of caste, but also all covert slavery of woman and of the poor; it is opposed to all hierarchy among men; it tolerates no aristocracy save such as is able, either in person or in family, by the grace of God, to exhibit superiority of character or talent, and to show that it does not claim this superiority for self-aggrandizement or ambitious pride, but for the sake of spending it in the service of God. So Calvinism was bound to find its utterance in the democratic interpretation of life; to proclaim the liberty of nations; and not to rest until both politically and socially every man, simply because he is man, should be recognized, respected and dealt with as a creature created after the Divine likeness.

This was no outcome of envy. It was not the man of lower estate who reduced his superior to his level in order to usurp the higher place, but it was all men kneeling in concert at the feet of the Holy One of Israel. This accounts for the fact that Calvinism made no sudden break with the past. Even as in its early stage Christianity did not abolish slavery, but undermined it by a moral judgment, so Calvinism allowed the provisional continuance of the conditions of hierarchy and aristocracy as traditions belonging to the Middle Ages. It was not charged against William of Orange that he was a prince of royal lineage; he was the more honored for it. But inwardly Calvinism has modified the structure of society, not by the envying of classes, nor by an undue esteem for the possessions of the rich, but by a more serious interpretation of life. By better labor and a higher development of character the middle and working classes have provoked the nobility and the wealthier citizens to jealousy. First looking to God, and then to one’s neighbor was the impulse, the mind and the spiritual custom to which Calvinism gave entrance. And from this holy fear of God and this united stand before the face of God a holier democratic idea has developed itself, and has continually gained ground. This result has been brought about by nothing so much as by fellowship in suffering. When, though loyal to the Romish faith, the dukes of Egmont and Hoorn ascended the same scaffold on which, for the sake of a nobler faith, the working-man and the weaver had been executed, the reconciliation between the classes received its sanction in that bitter death. By his bloody persecutions, Alva the Aristocrat advanced the prosperous development of the spirit of Democracy. To have placed man on a footing of equality with man, so far as the purely human interests are concerned, is the immortal glory which incontestably belongs to Calvinism. The difference between it and the wild dream of equality of the French Revolution is that while in Paris it was one action in concert against God, here all, rich and poor, were on their knees before God, consumed with a common zeal for the glory of His Name.

The third fundamental relation which decides the interpretation of life is the relation which you bear to the world. As previously stated, there are three principal elements with which you come into touch: viz., God, man and the world. The relation to God and to man into which Calvinism places you being thus reviewed, the third and last fundamental relation is in order: viz., your attitude toward the world. Of Paganism it can be said in general, that it places too high an estimate upon the world, and therefore to some extent it both stands in fear of, and loses itself in it. On the other hand Islamism places too low an estimate upon the world, makes sport of it and triumphs over it in reaching after the visionary world of a sensual paradise. For the purpose in view however we need say no more of either, since both for Christian Europe and America the antithesis between man and the world has assumed the narrower form of the antithesis between the world and the Christian circles. The traditions of the Middle Ages gave rise to this. Under the hierarchy of Rome the Church and the World were placed over against each other, the one as being sanctified and the other as being still under the curse. Everything outside the Church was under the influence of demons, and exorcism banished this demoniacal power from everything that came under the protection, influence and inspiration of the Church. Hence in a Christian country the entire social life was to be covered by the wings of the Church. The magistrate had to be anointed and confessionally bound; art and science had to be placed under ecclesiastical encouragement and censure; trade and commerce had to be bound to the Church by the tie of guilds; and from the cradle to the grave, family life was to be placed under ecclesiastical guardianship. This was a gigantic effort to claim the entire world for Christ, but one which of necessity brought with it the severest judgment upon every life-tendency which either as heretical or as demoniacal withdrew itself from the blessing of the Church. Hence the stake was fit alike for witch and heretic, for in principle both lay under the same ban. And this deadening theory was carried out with iron logic, not from cruelty, nor from any low ambition, but from the lofty purpose of saving the christianized world, i.e., the world as overshadowed by the Church. Escape from the world was the counterpoise in monastic and partly even in clerical orders, which emphasized holiness in the centre of the Church in order to wink the more lightly at worldly excesses without. As a natural result the world corrupted the Church, and by its dominion over the world the Church proved an obstacle to every free development of its life.

Thus making its appearance in a dualistic social state, Calvinism has wrought an entire change in the world of thoughts and conceptions. In this also, placing itself before the face of God, it has not only honored man for the sake of his likeness to the Divine image, but also the world as a Divine creation, and has at once placed to the front the great principle that there is a particular grace which works Salvation, and also a common grace by which God, maintaining the life of the world, relaxes the curse which rests upon it, arrests its process of corruption, and thus allows the untrammelled development of our life in which to glorify Himself as Creator. Thus the Church receded in order to be neither more nor less than the congregation of believers, and in every department the life of the world was not emancipated from God, but from the dominion of the Church. Thus domestic life regained its independence, trade and commerce realized their strength in liberty, art and science were set free from every ecclesiastical bond and restored to their own inspirations, and man began to understand the subjection of all nature with its hidden forces and treasures to himself as a holy duty, imposed upon him by the original ordinances of Paradise: “Have dominion over them.” Henceforth the curse should no longer rest upon the world itself, but upon that which is sinful in it, and instead of monastic flight from the world the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every position in life. To praise God in the Church and serve Him in the world became the inspiring impulse, and, in the Church, strength was to be gathered by which to resist temptation and sin in the world. Thus puritanic sobriety went hand in hand with the reconquest of the entire life of the world, and Calvinism gave the impulse to that new development which dared to face the world with the Roman thought: nil humanum a me alienum puto, although never allowing itself to be intoxicated by its poisonous cup.

Especially in its antithesis to Anabaptism Calvinism exhibits itself in bold relief. For Anabaptism adopted the opposite method, and in its effort to evade the world it confirmed the monastic starting-point, generalizing and making it a rule for all believers. It was not from Calvinism, but from this anabaptistic principle, that Akosmism had its rise among so many Protestants in Western Europe. In fact, Anabaptism adopted the Romish theory, with this difference: that it placed the kingdom of God in the room of the Church, and abandoned the distinction between the two moral standards, one for the clergy and the other for the laity. For the rest the Anabaptist’s standpoint was: (1) that the unbaptized world was under the curse, for which reason he withdrew from all civil institutions; and (2) that the circle of baptized believers—with Rome the Church, but with him the kingdom of God—was in duty bound to take all civil life under its guardianship and to remodel it; and so John of Leyden violently established his shameless power at Munster as King of the New Zion, and his devotees ran naked through the streets of Amsterdam. Hence, on the same grounds on which Calvinism rejected Rome’s theory concerning the world, it rejected the theory of the Anabaptist, and proclaimed that the Church must withdraw again within its spiritual domain, and that in the world we should realize the potencies of God’s common grace.

Thus it is shown that Calvinism has a sharply-defined starting-point of its own for the three fundamental relations of all human existence: viz., our relation to God, to man and to the world. For our relation to God: an immediate fellowship of man with the Eternal, independently of priest or church. For the relation of man to man: the recognition in each person of human worth, which is his by virtue of his creation after the Divine likeness, and therefore of the equality of all men before God and his magistrate. And for our relation to the world: the recognition that in the whole world the curse is restrained by grace, that the life of the world is to be honored in its independence, and that we must, in every domain, discover the treasures and develop the potencies hidden by God in nature and in human life. This justifies us fully in our statement that Calvinism duly answers the three above-named conditions, and thus is incontestably entitled to take its stand by the side of Paganism, Islamism, Romanism and Modernism, and to claim for itself the glory of possessing a well-defined principle and an all-embracing life-system.

But even this is not all. The fact that in a given circle Calvinism has formed an interpretation of life quite its own, from which both in the spiritual and secular domain a special system arose for domestic and social life, justifies its claim to assert itself as an independent formation. But it does not yet credit it with the honor of having led humanity, as such, up to a higher stage in its development, and therefore this life-system has not, so far as we have yet considered it, attained that position which alone could give it the right to claim for itself the energy and devotion of our hearts. In China it can be asserted with equal right that Confucianism has produced a form of its own for life in a given circle, and with the Mongolian race that form of life rests upon a theory of its own. But what has China done for humanity in general, and for the steady development of our race? Even so far as the waters of its life were clear, they formed nothing but an isolated lake. Almost the same remark applies to the high development which was once the boast of India and to the state of things in Mexico and Peru in the days of Montezuma and the Incas. In all these regions the people attained a high degree of development, but stopped there, and, remaining isolated, in no way proved a benefit to humanity at large. This applies more strongly still to the life of the colored races on the coast and in the interior of Africa—a far lower form of existence, reminding us not even of a lake but rather of pools and marshes. There is but one world-stream, broad and fresh, which from the beginning bore the promise of the future. This stream had its rise in Middle Asia and the Levant, and has steadily continued its course from East to West. From Western Europe it has passed on to your Eastern States, and from thence to California. The sources of this stream of development are found in Babylon and in the valley of the Nile. From thence it flowed on to Greece. From Greece it passed on to the Roman Empire. From the Romanic nations it continued its way to the Northwestern parts of Europe, and from Holland and England it reached at length your continent. At present that stream is at a standstill. Its Western course through China and Japan is impeded; meanwhile no one can tell what forces for the future may yet lie slumbering in the Slavic races which have thus far failed of progress. But while this secret of the future is still veiled in mystery, the course of this world-stream from East to West can be denied by none. And therefore I am justified in saying that Paganism, Islamism and Romanism are the three successive formations which this development had reached, when its further direction passed over into the hands of Calvinism; and that Calvinism in turn is now denied this leading influence by Modernism, the daughter of the French Revolution.

The succession of these four phases of development did not take place mechanically, with sharply outlined divisions and parts. This development of life is organic, and therefore each new period roots in the past. In its deepest logic Calvinism had already been apprehended by Augustine; had, long before Augustine, been proclaimed to the City of the seven hills by the Apostle in his Epistle to the Romans; and from Paul goes back to Israel and its prophets, yea to the tents of the patriarchs. Romanism likewise does not make its appearance suddenly, but is the joint product of the three potencies of Israel’s priesthood, the cross of Calvary, and the world organization of the Roman Empire. Islam in the same way joins itself to Israel’s Monism, to the Prophet of Nazareth, and to the tradition of the Koraishites. And even the Paganism of Babylon and Egypt on the one hand, and of Greece and Rome upon the other, stand organically related to what lay behind these nations, preceding the prosperity of their lives. But even so, it is as clear as day that the supreme force in the central development of the human race moved along successively from Babylon and Egypt to Greece and Rome, then to the chief regions of the Papal dominion, and finally to the Calvinistic nations of Western Europe. If Israel flourished in the days of Babylon and Egypt, however high its standard, the direction and the development of our human race was not in the hands of the sons of Abraham but in those of the Belshassars and the Pharaohs. Again, this leadership does not pass from Babylon and Egypt on to Israel but to Greece and Rome. However high the stream of Christianity had risen when Islam made its appearance, in the 8th and 9th centuries the followers of Mahomet were our teachers and with them rested the issue of the world. And though the hegemony of Romanism still maintained itself for a short time after the peace of Munster, no one questions the fact that the higher development, which we are now enjoying, we owe neither to Spain nor to Austria, nor even to the Germany of that time, but to the Calvinistic countries of the Netherlands and to England of the 16th century. Under Louis XIV, Romanism arrested this higher development in France, but only that in the French Revolution it might exhibit a ghastly caricature of Calvinism, which in its sad consequences broke the inner strength of France as a nation, and weakened its international significance. The fundamental idea of Calvin has been transplanted from Holland and England to America, thus driving our higher development ever more Westward, until on the shores of the Pacific it now reverently awaits whatsoever God has ordained. But no matter what mysteries the future may yet have to disclose, the fact remains that the broad stream of the development of our race runs from Babylon to San Francisco, through the five stadia of Babylonian-Egyptian, Greek-Roman, Islamitic, Romanistic and Calvinistic civilization, and the present conflict in Europe as well as in America finds its main cause in the fundamental antithesis between the energy of Calvinism which proceeded from the throne of God, found the source of its power in the Word of God, and in every sphere of human life exalted the glory of God,—and its caricature in the French Revolution, which proclaimed its unbelief in the cry of, “No God no master”; and which presently in the form of German Pantheism is reducing itself more and more to a modern Paganism.

Thus notice I was not too bold when I claimed for Calvinism the honor of being neither an ecclesiastical, nor a theological, nor a sectarian conception, but one of the principal phases in the general development of our human race; and among these the youngest, whose high calling still is to influence the further course of human life. Just now, however, allow me to indicate another circumstance, which strengthens my principal statement, viz., the commingling of blood as, thus far, the physical basis of all higher human development. From the high-lands of Asia our human race came down in groups, and these in turn have been divided into races and nations; and in entire conformity to the prophetic blessing of Noah the children of Shem and of Japheth have been the sole bearers of the development of the race. No impulse for any higher life has ever gone forth from the third group. With the two other groups a twofold phenomenon presents itself. There are tribal nations which have isolated themselves and others which have intermingled. Thus on the one hand there are groups which have dominated exclusively their own inherent forces, and on the other hand groups which by commingling have crossed their traits with those of other tribes, and thus have attained a higher perfection. It is noteworthy that the process of human development steadily proceeds with those groups whose historic characteristic is not isolation but the commingling of blood. On the whole the Mongolian race has held itself apart, and in its isolation has bestowed no benefits upon our race at large. Behind the Himalayas a similar life secluded itself, and hence failed to impart any permanent impulse to the outside world. Even in Europe we find that with the Scandinavians and Slavs there was hardly any intermingling of blood, and, consequently having failed to develop a richer type, they have taken little part in the general development of human life. On the other hand, the tablets from Babylon in our great Museums by the two languages of their inscriptions still show that in Mesopotamia the Aryan element of the Accadians mingled itself at an early period with the Semitic-Babylonian; and Egyptology leads us to conclude that in the land of the Pharaohs we deal from the beginning with a population produced by the mingling of two very different tribes. No one believes any longer the pretended race-unity of the Greeks. In Greece as well as in Italy we deal with races of a later date who have intermingled with the earlier Pelasgians, Etruscians and others. Islam seems to be exclusively Arabic, but a study of the spread of Islamism among the Moors, Persians, Turks and other series of subjected tribes, with whom intermarriage was common, at once reveals the fact that especially with Mahometans the commingling of blood was even greater than with their predecessors. When the leadership of the world passed into the hands of the Romanic nations, the same phenomenon presented itself in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France. In these cases the Aborigines were generally Basques or Celts, the Celts in turn being overcome by the Germanic tribes, and even as in Italy the East Goths and Lombards, so in Spain the West Goths, in Portugal the Swabians, and in France the Franks instilled new blood into debilitated veins, and to this wonderful rejuvenescence the Roman nations owed their vigor until far into the 16th century. Thus in the life of nations the same phenomenon repeats itself which so often strikes the historian as a result of international marriages among princely families, as we see how the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons, the Oranges and the Hohenzollern, for instance, have been, century after century, productive of a host of most remarkable statesmen and heroes. The raiser of stock has aimed at the same effect in the crossing of different breeds, and botanists harvest large profits by obeying the same law of life with plants; and by itself it is not difficult to perceive that the union of natural powers, divided among different tribes, must be productive of a higher development. To this it should be added that the history of our race does not aim at the improvement of any single tribe, but at the development of mankind taken as a whole, and therefore needs this commingling of blood in order to attain its end. Now in fact history shows that the nations among whom Calvinism flourished most widely exhibit in every way this same mingling of races. In Switzerland, the Germans, united with Italians and French; in France, the Gauls, with Franks and Burgundians; in the Lowlands, Celts and Welsh with Germans; also in England the old Celts and Anglo Saxons were afterwards raised to a still higher standard of national life by the invasion of the Normans. Indeed it may be said that the three principal tribes of Western Europe, the Celtic, Romanic and Germanic elements under the leadership of the Germanic, give us the genealogy of the Calvinistic nations. In America, where Calvinism has come to unfold itself in a still higher liberty, this commingling of blood is assuming a larger proportion than has ever yet been known. Here the blood flows together from all the tribes of the ancient world, and again we have the Celts from Ireland, the Germans from Germany and Scandinavia, united to the Slavs from Russia and Poland, who promote still further this already vigorous intermingling of the races. This latter process takes place under the higher exponent that it is not merely the union of tribe with tribe, but that the old historic nations are dissolving themselves in order to allow the re-union of their members in one higher unity, hitherto constantly assimilated by the American type. In this respect also Calvinism fully meets the conditions imposed on every new phase of development in the life of humanity. It spread itself in a domain where it found the commingling of blood stronger than under Romanism, and in America raised this to its highest conceivable realization.

Thus it is shown that Calvinism meets not only the necessary condition of the mingling of blood, but that in the process of human development it also represents, with respect to this, a further stadium. In Babylon this commingling of blood was of small significance; it gains in importance with the Greeks and Romans; it goes further under Islamism; is dominant under Romanism; but only among Calvinistic nations does it reach its highest perfection. Here in America it is achieving the intermingling of all the nations of the old world. A similar climax of this process of human development is also exhibited by Calvinism in the fact that only under the influence of Calvinism does the impulse of public activity proceed from the people themselves. In the life of the nations also there is development from the underage period to that of maturity. As in the family-life, during the years of childhood, the direction of affairs is in the hands of the parents, so also in the life of the nations it is but natural that during their under-age period first the Asiatic despot, then some eminent ruler, afterwards the priesthood, and finally both priest and magistrate together should stand at the head of every movement. The history of the nations in Babylon and under the Pharaohs, in Greece and Rome, under Islamism and under the papal system, fully confirms this course of development. But it is self-evident that this could not be a permanent state of things. Just because in their progressive development the nations finally came of age, they must at length reach that stadium in which the people itself awoke, stood up for their rights, and originated the movement that was to direct the course of future events; and in the rise of Calvinism this stadium appears to have been reached. Thus far every forward movement had gone forth from the authorities in State, Church or Science, and from thence had descended to the people. In Calvinism, on the other hand, the peoples themselves stand out in their broad ranks and form a spontaneity of their own, press forward to a higher form of social life and conditions. Calvinism had its rise with the people. In Lutheran countries the magistrate was still the leader in public advances, but in Switzerland, among the Huguenots, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Scotland and also in America the peoples themselves created the impetus. They seemed to have matured; to have reached the period in which they were of age. Even when in some cases, as in the Netherlands, the nobility for a moment took a heroic stand for the oppressed, their activity ended in nothing, and the people alone, by undaunted energy, broke the barrier, and among these it was the “common folk” to whose heroic initiative William the Silent, as he himself acknowledges, owed the success of his undertaking.

Hence, as a central phenomenon in the development of humanity, Calvinism is not only entitled to an honorable position by the side of Paganistic, Islamistic and Romanistic forms, since like these it represents a peculiar principle dominating the whole of life, but it also meets every required condition for the advancement of human development to a higher stage. And yet this would remain a bare possibility without any corresponding reality, if history did not testify that Calvinism has actually caused the stream of human life to flow in another channel, and has ennobled the social life of the nations. And therefore in closing I assert that Calvinism not only held out these possibilities but has also understood how to realize them. To prove this, just ask yourselves what would have become of Europe and America, if in the 16th century the star of Calvinism had not suddenly arisen on the horizon of Western Europe. In that case Spain would have crushed the Netherlands. In England and Scotland the Stuarts would have carried out their fatal plans. In Switzerland the spirit of halfheartedness would have gained the day. The beginnings of life in this new world would have been of an entirely different character. And as an unavoidable sequence, the balance of power in Europe would have returned to its former position. Protestantism would not have been able to maintain itself in politics. No further resistance could have been offered to the Romish-conservative power of the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons and the Stuarts; and the free development of the nations, as seen in Europe and America, would simply have been prevented. The whole American continent would have remained subject to Spain. The history of both continents would have become a most mournful one, and it ever remains a question whether the spirit of the Leipzig Interim would not have succeeded, by way of a Romanized Protestantism, in reducing Northern Europe again to the sway of the old Hierarchy. The enthusiastic devotion of the best historians of the second half of this century to the struggle of the Netherlands against Spain, as one of the finest subjects of investigation, only explains itself by the conviction that if the power of Spain at that time had not been broken by the heroism of the Calvinistic spirit, the history of the Netherlands, of Europe and of the world would have been as painfully sad and dark as now, thanks to Calvinism, it is bright and inspiriting. Professor Fruin justly remarks that: “In Switzerland, in France, in the Netherlands, in Scotland and in England, and wherever Protestantism has had to establish itself at the point of the sword, it was Calvinism that gained the day.”

Call to mind that this turn in the history of the world could not have been brought about except by the implanting of another principle in the human heart, and by the disclosing of another world of thought to the human mind; that only by Calvinism the psalm of liberty found its way from the troubled conscience to the lips; that Calvinism has captured and guaranteed to us our constitutional civil rights; and that simultaneously with this there went out from Western Europe that mighty movement which promoted the revival of science and art, opened new avenues to commerce and trade, beautified domestic and social life, exalted the middle classes to positions of honor, caused philanthropy to abound, and more than all this, elevated, purified, and ennobled moral life by puritanic seriousness; and then judge for yourselves whether it will do to banish any longer this God-given Calvinism to the archives of history, and whether it is so much of a dream to conceive that Calvinism has yet a blessing to bring and a bright hope to unveil for the future.

The struggle of the Boers in the Transvaal against one of the mightiest powers must often have reminded you of your own past. In what has been achieved at Majuba, and recently at the occasion of Jameson’s raid, the heroism of old Calvinism was again brilliantly evident. If Calvinism had not been passed on from our fathers to their African descendants, no free republic would have arisen in the South of the Dark Continent. This proves that Calvinism is not dead—that it still carries in its germ the vital energy of the days of its former glory. Yea, even as a grain of wheat from the sarcophagi of the Pharaohs, when again committed to the soil, bears fruit a hundredfold, so Calvinism still carries in itself a wondrous power for the future of the nations. And if we, Christians of both Continents, in our still holier struggle, are still expected to achieve heroic deeds, marching under the banner of the Cross against the spirit of the times, Calvinism alone arms us with an inflexible principle, by the strength of that principle guaranteeing us a sure, though far from easy victory.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Why does Kuyper contend that “two life systems” are contending against each other? Why not three or more?

2. Why does Kuyper contend that apologetics has not advanced one single step in the struggle of ideas?

3. Is Kuyper’s application of Christ’s lordship a proper approach? Are there some pitfalls to be avoided in his approach?

4. Does Kuyper’s example of Islam offer any help for current discussions?

5. Why does Kupyer think that modernism stems from the French Revolution?

1. As Dr. James Orr (in his valuable lectures on the Christian View of God and the World, Edinb. 1897, 3) observes, the German technical term Weltanschauung has no precise equivalent in English. He therefore used the literal translation view of the world notwithstanding this phrase in English is limited by associations, which connect it predominatingly with physical nature. For this reason the more explicit phrase; life and world view seems to be more preferable. My American friends, however, told me that the shorter phrase, life system, on the other side of the ocean, is often used in the same sense. So lecturing before an American pubic, I took the shorter phrase, at least in the title of my first lecture, the shortest expression always having some preference for what is to be the general indication of your subject matter. In my lectures, on the contrary, I interchanged alternately both phrases of life-system and life and world view in accordance with the special meaning predominating in my argumentation. See also Dr. Orr’s note on page 365.

2. R. Fruin, Tien Jaren uit den Tachtig-jarigen Oorlog, 151.

3. R. C. Bakhuizen Van den Brink, Het Huwelijk can Willem van Orange met Anna van Saxen; 1853, 123: “Zoo al de laatste in tijdsorde, zoo was het Calvinisme de hoogste ontwikkelingsvorm van het Godsdienstig-staatkundig beginsel der zestiende eeuw. Zelfs de rechtzinnige staatkundigen dier eeuw, zagen met niet minder verachting en afschuw neder op den Geneefschen regeeringsvorm—als men het in onze dagen zou kunnen doen, wanneer een Staat het socialisme tot beginsel mocht aannemen. Een hervormingskamp, die zoo laat na het ontstaan der Hervorming kwam als dat bij ons, in Frankrijk en in Schotland plaats had, kon niet anders dan Calvinistisch en ten voordeele van het Calvinisme zijn.”

4. Cf. Busken Huet, Het Land van Rembrandt; 2de druk, II, 223.

P. 159: “Was uit den aard der zaak de religie eene der hoofdzenuwen van den Kalvinistischen Staat,” enz. (om andere redenen de negotie):

en. p. 10, Noot 3: “De geschiedenis van onze vrijwording is voor een groot gedeelte geschiedenis van onze hervorming, en de geschiedenis van onze hervorming is grootendeels geschiedenis van de uitbreiding van het Kalvinisme.” Bakhuizen Van den Brink, Studien en Schetsen, IV, 68, v.g.

5. History of the United States of America, Ed. New York, II, 405. Cf. Von Polenz, Geschichte des Franzoischen Protestantismus, 1857, I, viii: “Eine Geschichte . . . in welcher der Geist, den Luther in Frankreich geweckt, dieses mit Eigenem und Fremden genahrt und gefordert, Calvin aber gereinigt, geregelt, gehutet, gestarkt, fixirt und als en bewegendes Ferment uber die Schranken des Raums und der Verhaltnisse weiter getrieben hat, der in seinen mannigfachen Strahlen alle geschichtlichen Moment mehr oder weniger beruhrenden Brenn- und Lichtpunkt bildet. Nennen wir diesen Geist, uneigentlich und anachronistisch zwar, aber, da er ohne Calvin sich verfluchtigt haben wurde, nicht unwahr, Calvinismus; so ist meine Geschichte, ausser der des franzosischen Calvinismus im engeren und eigentlichen Sinne, die seiner einwirkung auf Religion, Kirche, Sitte, Gesellschaft und sonstige Verhaltnissen Frankreichs.”

C. G. McCrie, The Public Worship of Presbyterian Scotland; 1892, 95: “It may lead some to attach value to these sentiments of Calvin if they know in what light the system which bears his stamp and his name is regarded by an Anglican Churchman of learning and insight, which give him a right to be heard in such a matter. ‘The Protestant movement,’ wrote Mark Pattison, ‘was saved from being sunk in the quicksands of doctrinal dispute chiefly by the new moral direction given to it in Geneva. Calvinism saved Europe.’”

P. Hume Brown, John Knox; 1895, 252: “Of all the developments of Christianity, Calvinism and the Church of Rome alone bear the stamp of an absolute religion.”

P. 257: “The difference between Calvin and Castalio, and between Knox and the Anabaptist, was not merely one of doctrine and dogma: their essential difference lay in the spirit with which they respectively regarded human society itself.”

R. Willis, Servetus and Calvin; 1877, 514, 5: “There can be little question, in fact, that Calvinism, or some modification of its essential principles, is the form of religious faith that has been professed in the modern world by the most intelligent, moral, industrious, and freest of mankind.”

Chambers, Encyclopaedia; Philadelphia; 1888, in voce Calvinism: “With the revival of the evangelical party in the end of the century Calvinism revived, and it still maintains, if not an absolute sway, yet a powerful influence over many minds in the Anglican establishment. It is one of the most living and powerful among the creeds of the Reformation.”

Dr. C. Sylvester Horne, Evangelical Magazine, August, 1898. New Calvinism, p. 375ff., and Dr. W. Hastie, Theology as Science; Glasgow, 1899, 100–106: “My apology and plea for the Reformed Theology, in presence of the other tendencies of the time, have been founded upon the two most general and fundamental points of creed that can be taken: the universality of its basis in human nature, as the condition of its method, and the universality of God, as the ground of its absolute truth.”

CHAPTER 14

James Orr

(1844–1913)

As we come to James Orr, we have moved almost a hundred years from the publication of Paley’s Natural Theology. Given what we have seen thus far in the movement of thought and culture in the modern era, we might expect that in the span of ninety plus years there have been significant changes, and there have been.

In the British Isles, as we have seen, John Owen represents perhaps the most biblically and theologically consistent approach in the modern era. Since his time, if Butler and Paley are sufficient representatives, the approach and method shifted. Because of the “new” emphasis on the empirical, brought about by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume (and others), the “evidential challenge” to theism was addressed by attempts to highlight the empirical, evidential aspects of theism and Christianity. Embedded in such an approach, at least in part, was an assumption or supposition, as we have seen, that there are “common sense” categories available to all that can be used effectively for a defense of theism.

But the common sense approach did not fare well in the long run. As George Marsden rightly argued, “Common sense could not settle a dispute over what was a matter of common sense.”[1]

Not only so, but in the nineteenth century a method of criticism, and even attack, of historic orthodoxy began to develop in earnest such that by the end of the century theological liberalism had gained a significant foothold.[2]

Thus, it is likely that at least one of the main reasons that the concept of worldview gained such prominence in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is that during this time there was a sea change in the way Christianity was viewed. With the insurgence of liberalism into the churches, and from there into the culture, there was perceived to be a need to reinsert the basic picture of orthodoxy—the way in which orthodox Christianity had viewed the world in the past and should view it presently.

Enter James Orr, born in Glasgow, Scotland, on April 11, 1844. His parents died when he was young, and he was brought up primarily by relatives. He attended the University of Glasgow, where he graduated with first-class honors in philosophy under Edward Caird (1835–1908). In 1868, he began study for the ministry at the United Presbyterian Divinity Hall in Edinburgh. In 1885 he became only one of two men to earn a DD by examination at the University of Glasgow.

Orr accepted a call to East Bank United Presbyterian Church in 1874 and remained there as pastor for seventeen years. In 1891, he became the first holder of the Kerr Lectureship, addresses from which, two years later, were revised and published as A Christian View of God and the World, part of which is included here.

In 1891 he was appointed to the chair of church history at the Divinity Hall in Edinburgh, until the United Presbyterian Church merged with the Free Church, becoming the United Free Church in 1900, at which time Orr was transferred to the chair of apologetics and systematic theology at the Glasgow College, succeeding A. B. Bruce.

By 1891 Orr was widely known. He was an examiner in philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and he lectured on German theology in various places, including Chicago in 1895. He published The Progress of Dogma in 1901, which was the fruit of his Elliot Lectures. His book Neglected Factors in the Study of the Early Progress of Christianity, published in 1899, was the result of his Morgan Lectures given at Auburn, New York, in 1897. In 1903, Orr delivered the Stone Lectures at Princeton, which were later published in 1905 as God’s Image in Man. Other lecture series that he gave eventually became books as well, including The Problem of the Old Testament, in which he opposes Wellhausen’s documentary hypothesis (1906), and The Virgin Birth of Christ (1907). Orr died, preceding his wife, on September 6, 1913.

It was in The Christian View of God and the World that Orr began to think in terms of a holistic worldview. While it might be difficult to see how radical this was, it should be remembered that hardly anyone was thinking in these terms during this time, especially in the area of apologetics and theology. To begin to work through a notion of Christianity as a worldview and to apply such an idea apologetically put Orr almost alone in his defense of Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century.

Orr’s expertise and interest in worldview was a result, in part, of his expertise in German theology and philosophy. The more he read of the German literature, the more he encountered the word Weltanschauung (German for “worldview”). What struck him, as a pastor and apologist, was just how neatly Christianity fit into the concerns of those who were attempting to develop a worldview. Because Christianity is a coherent system of truth, it (and, Orr will argue, it alone) can address the concerns that are a part of worldview thinking. Orr was convinced that nothing less than the comprehensive truth of Christianity could answer the attacks and critiques that were prevalent in his day.

Orr’s comments are as relevant today as they were when he wrote them.

The opposition which Christianity has to encounter is no longer confined to special doctrines or to points of supposed conflict with the natural sciences, . . . but extends to the whole manner of conceiving of the world, and of man’s place in it, the manner of conceiving of the entire system of things, natural and moral, of which we form a part. It is no longer an opposition of detail, but of principle. This circumstance necessitates an equal extension of the line of the defense. It is the Christian view of things in general which is attacked, and it is by an exposition and vindication of the Christian view of things as a whole that the attack can most successfully be met.

Orr argues that there is no effective defense of Christianity if it is done piecemeal. It is ineffective to mount up evidences against an evidential critique without addressing the very context and foundation of the notion of evidence itself. Christianity has to be defended, according to Orr, as an entire system of thought and life.

Another significant point in Orr’s study is the central place that he gives to the incarnation in his development of a worldview. One of the reasons this is so significant is that, as we have seen, the tendency in arguments of this kind was to tone down distinctives and to elevate what is common. In Orr’s time, there was much discussion of universalism as a modified Christianity. Liberalism was on the rise, so distinctives were thought to be intellectually anathema.

Orr, however, responds to the Zeitgeist of his age by affirming loudly the centrality of the incarnation for a Christian worldview. The complete title of the work herein was The Christian View of God and the World as Centering in the Incarnation, Being the First Series of Kerr Lectures. This point needs emphasizing. As Orr began to think in terms of an entire Christian worldview, he rightly understood that the subject under consideration in Christian apologetics is the Christian faith, not bare theism. So, for him, Christ is at the center of the discussion. Orr was radical in his insistence on the centrality of the incarnation.

In his inaugural address as professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary, Robert Knudsen argued that James Orr’s methodology was, in the main, transcendental in its direction. That is, instead of arguing directly, from evidential challenges to more evidence, Orr inquired as to the nature of evidence itself; he wanted a full-orbed approach to a Christian defense. In describing Orr’s approach, Knudsen notes:

Lose your grip on the true point of transcendence, [Orr] said, which is found in the God-man Jesus Christ, and you will be bound over inextricably to a set of circumstances, which will lead you into despair. The pattern of Orr’s apologetic appeared clearly in his argument from history. As there was a departure from the God-man Jesus Christ, there was an inevitable descent, as we may observe, from a choice between Christianity and humanism, between Christianity and scepticism, and finally, as this process hit bottom, between Christianity and despair. It is as we observe the necessary outcome of the abandonment of the true starting point, Jesus Christ, that we obtain a proof, be it indirect, of its validity and necessity.[3]

It was James Orr, as he developed a Christian-worldview defense of the faith, who began to help the church in its understanding of the importance of presuppositions in life and thought.

1. George Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1983), 244. Marsden’s critique here is focused on American evangelical thought, but the same conclusion would apply to any method that seeks to ground its approach in some kind of common sense realism.

2. For a helpful survey of this trend in America, see Gary J. Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology, vol. 1, Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001).

3. Robert D. Knudsen, “The Transcendental Perspective of Westminster’s Apologetic,” Westminster Theological Journal 48 (1986): 233.

The Christian View of God and the World

Lecture I

The Christian View of the World in General

I might briefly define the object of the present Lectures by saying that they aim at the exhibition, and, as far as possible within the limits assigned me, at the rational vindication, of what I have called in the title, “The Christian View of the World.” This expression, however, is itself one which calls for definition and explanation, and I proceed, in the first place, to give the explanation that is needed.

A reader of the higher class of works in German theology—especially those that deal with the philosophy of religion—cannot fail to be struck with the constant recurrence of a word for which he finds it difficult to get a precise equivalent in English. It is the word “Weltanschauung,” sometimes interchanged with another compound of the same signification, “Weltansicht.” Both words mean literally “view of the world,” but whereas the phrase in English is limited by associations which connect it predominatingly with physical nature, in German the word is not thus limited, but has almost the force of a technical term, denoting the widest view which the mind can take of things in the effort to grasp them together as a whole from the standpoint of some particular philosophy or theology. To speak, therefore, of a “Christian view of the world” implies that Christianity also has its highest point of view, and its view of life connected therewith, and that this, when developed, constitutes an ordered whole.[1]

To some the subject which I have thus chosen may seem unduly wide and vague. I can only reply that I have deliberately chosen it for this very reason, that it enables me to deal with Christianity in its entirety or as a system, instead of dealing with particular aspects or doctrines of it. Both methods have their advantages; but no one I think, whose eyes are open to the signs of the times, can fail to perceive that if Christianity is to be effectually defended from the attacks made upon it, it is the comprehensive method which is rapidly becoming the more urgent. The opposition which Christianity has to encounter is no longer confined to special doctrines or to points of supposed conflict with the natural sciences,—for example, the relations of Genesis and geology,—but extends to the whole manner of conceiving of the world, and of man’s place in it, the manner of conceiving of the entire system of things, natural and moral, of which we form a part. It is no longer an opposition of detail, but of principle. This circumstance necessitates an equal extension of the line of the defence. It is the Christian view of things in general which is attacked, and it is by an exposition and vindication of the Christian view of things as a whole that the attack can most successfully be met.

Everything here, of course, depends on the view we take of Christianity itself. The view indicated in the title is that which has its centre in the Divine and human Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. It implies the true Divinity as well as the true humanity of the Christian Redeemer. This is a view of Christianity, I know, which I am not at liberty to take for granted, but must be prepared in due course to vindicate. I shall not shrink from the task which this imposes on me, but would only at present point out that, for him who does accept it, a very definite view of things emerges. He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity. This forms a “Weltanschauung,” or “Christian view of the world,” which stands in marked contrast within theories wrought out from a purely philosophical or scientific standpoint.

The idea of the “Weltanschauung” may be said to have entered prominently into modern thought through the influence of Kant, who derives what he calls the “Weltbegriff” from the second of his Ideas of Pure Reason, to which is assigned the function of the systematic connection of all our experiences into a unity of a world-whole (Weltganz).[2] But the thing itself is as old as the dawn of reflection, and is found in a cruder or more advanced form in every religion and philosophy with any pretensions to a historical character. The simplest form in which we meet with it is in the rude, tentative efforts at a general explanation of things in the cosmogonies and theogonies of most ancient religions, the mythological character of which need not blind us to the rational motive which operates in them.[3] With the growth of philosophy, a new type of world-view is developed—that which attempts to explain the universe as a system by the help of some general principle or principles (water, air, number, etc.), accompanied by the use of terms which imply the conception of an All or Whole of things (—attributed to the Pythagoreans—mundus, universum, etc.).[4] An example from ancient thought may be given from Lucretius, who, in his famous poem, “De Rerum Natura,” proposes “to discourse of the most high system of heaven and the gods, and to open up the first-beginnings of things, out of which nature gives birth to all things and increase and nourishment, and into which nature likewise resolves them back after their destruction.”[5] The outlines of his system are well known. By the aid of certain first principles—atoms and the void—and of certain assumed laws of motion and development, he seeks to account for the existing universe, and constructs for himself a theory on the lines of Epicurus, which he thinks satisfies his intellectual necessities. This is his Weltanschauung—the progeny of which is seen in the materialistic systems of the present day. A modern example may be taken from the philosophy of Comte, which, theoretically one of pure phenomenalism, only the more strikingly illustrates the necessity which thought is under to attempt in some form a synthesis of its experience. Comte’s standpoint is that of despair of absolute knowledge. Yet he recognises the tendency in the mind which prompts it to organise its knowledge, and thinks it possible to construct a scheme of existence which shall give practical unity to life—imagination eking out the deficiencies of the intellect. In the words of a recent interpreter, “Beneath and beyond all the details in our ideas of things, there is a certain esprit d’ensemble, a general conception of the world without and the world within, in which these details gather to a head.”[6] It would not be easy to get a better description of what is meant by a “Weltanschauung” than in these words. The centre of unity in this new conception of the universe is Man. Knowledge is to be organised solely with reference to its bearings on the well-being and progress of Humanity. A religion even is provided for the satisfaction of the emotional and imaginative wants of man in the worship of the same abstraction—Humanity, which is to be viewed with affection and gratitude as a beneficent providence interposed between man and the hard pressure of his outward conditions. In a moral respect the individual is to find his all-comprehensive end in the “service of Humanity.” Thus, again, we have a “Weltanschauung” in which knowledge and action are knit up together, and organised into a single view of life.

The causes which lead to the formation of “Weltanschauungen,” that is, of general theories of the universe, explanatory of what it is, how it has come to be what it is, and whither it tends, lie deep in the constitution of human nature. They are twofold—speculative and practical, corresponding to the twofold aspect of human nature as thinking and active. On the theoretical side, the mind seeks unity in its representations. It is not content with fragmentary knowledge, but tends constantly to rise from facts to laws, from laws to higher laws, from these to the highest generalisations possible.[7] Ultimately it abuts on questions of origin, purpose, and destiny, which, as questions set by reason to itself, it cannot, from its very nature, refuse at least to attempt to answer.[8] Even to prove that an answer to them is impossible, it is found necessary to discuss them, and it will be strange if, in the course of the discussion, the discovery is not made, that underneath the profession of nescience a positive theory of some kind after all lurks.[9] But there is likewise a practical motive urging to the consideration of these well-worn questions of the why, whence, and whither? Looking out on the universe, men cannot but desire to know their place in the system of things of which they form a part, if only that they may know how rightly to determine themselves thereto.[10] Is the constitution of things good or evil? By what ultimate principles ought man to be guided in the framing and ordering of his life? What is the true end of existence? What rational justification does the nature of things afford for the higher sentiments of duty and religion? If it be the case, as the Agnostic affirms, that light absolutely fails us on questions of origin, cause, and end, what conception of life remains? Or, assuming that no higher origin for life and mind can be postulated than matter and force, what revision is necessary of current conceptions of private morality and social duty?

It is a singular circumstance that, with all the distaste of the age for metaphysics, the tendency to the formation of world-systems, or general theories of the universe, was never more powerful than at the present day. One cause of this, no doubt, is the feeling which modern science itself has done so much to engender, of the unity which pervades all orders of existence. The naïve Polytheism of pagan times, when every hill and fountain was supposed to have its special divinity, is no longer possible with modern notions of the coherence of the universe. Everywhere the minds of men are opening to the conception that, whatever else the universe is, it is one—one set of laws holds the whole together—one order reigns through all. Everywhere, accordingly, we see a straining after a universal point of view—a grouping and grasping of things together in their unity.[11] The philosophy of Mr. Spencer, for example, is as truly an attempt at the unification of all knowledge as the philosophy of a Hegel; the evolutionist is as confident of being able to embrace all that is, or ever has been, or will be—all existing phenomena of nature, history, or mind—in the range of a few ultimate formulas, as if he had already seen how the task was to be accomplished; the Comtist urges to an imaginative in default of a real and objective synthesis, and rears on this basis at once a social theory and religion. The mind grows bolder with the advance of knowledge, and hopes, if not to reach a final solution of the ultimate mystery of existence, at least to bring thoroughly under its dominion the sphere of the knowable.[12]

What now, it may be asked, has Christianity to do with theories, and questions, and speculations of this sort? As a doctrine of salvation, perhaps, not much, but in its logical presuppositions and consequences a great deal indeed. Christianity, it is granted, is not a scientific system, though, if its views of the world be true, it must be reconcilable with all that is certain and established in the results of science. It is not a philosophy, though, if it be valid, its fundamental assumptions will be found to be in harmony with the conclusions at which sound reason, attacking its own problems, independently arrives. It is a religion, historical in its origin, and claiming to rest on Divine Revelation. But though Christianity is neither a scientific system, nor a philosophy, it has yet a world-view of its own, to which it stands committed, alike by its fundamental postulate of a personal, holy, self-revealing God, and by its content as a religion of Redemption—which, therefore, necessarily brings it into comparison with the world-views already referred to.[13] It has as every religions should and must have, its own peculiar interpretation to give of the facts of existence; its own way of looking at, and accounting for, the existing natural and moral order; its own idea of a world-aim, and of that “one far-off Divine event,” to which, through slow and painful travail, “the whole creation moves.”[14] As thus binding together the natural and moral worlds in their highest unity, through reference to their ultimate principle, God, it involves a “Weltanschauung.”

It need not further be denied that between this view of the world involved in Christianity, and what is sometimes termed “the modern view of the world,” there exists a deep and radical antagonism.[15] This so-called “modern view of the world,” indeed,—and it is important to observe it,—is, strictly speaking, not one view, but many views,—a group of views,—most of them as exclusive of one another as they together are of Christianity.[16] The phrase, nevertheless, does point to a homogeneity of these various systems—to a bond of unity which runs through them all, and holds them together in spite of their many differences. This common feature is their thoroughgoing opposition to the supernatural,—at least of the specifically miraculous,—their refusal to recognise anything in nature, life, or history, outside the lines of natural development. Between such a view of the world and Christianity, it is perfectly correct to say that there can be no kindredship. Those who think otherwise—speculative Theists, e.g., like Pfleiderer—can only make good their contention by fundamentally altering the idea of Christianity itself—robbing it also of its miraculous essence and accompaniments. Whether this is tenable we shall consider afterwards. Meanwhile it is to be noted that this at least is not the Christianity of the New Testament. It may be an improved and purified form of Christianity, but it is not the Christianity of Christ and His apostles. Even if, with the newer criticism, we distinguish between the theology of Christ and that of His apostles—between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John—between the earlier form of the synoptic tradition and supposed later embellishments—it is still not to be disputed that, in the simplest view we can take of it, Jesus held and acted on a view of things totally different from the rationalistic conception; while for him who accepts the view of Christianity indicated in the title of these Lectures, it has already been pointed out that a view of things emerges with which the denial of the supernatural is wholly incompatible.

The position here taken, that the question at issue between the opponents and defenders of the Christian view of the world is at bottom the question of the supernatural, needs to be guarded against a not uncommon misconception. A good deal of controversy has recently taken place in regard to certain statements of Professor Max Müller, as to whether “miracles” are essential to Christianity.[17] But the issue we have to face is totally misconceived when it is turned into a question of belief in this or that particular miracle—or of miracles in general—regarded as mere external appendages to Christianity. The question is not about isolated “miracles,” but about the whole conception of Christianity—what it is, and whether the supernatural does not enter into the very essence of it? It is the general question of a supernatural or non-supernatural conception of the universe. Is there a supernatural Being—God? Is there a supernatural government of the world? Is there a supernatural relation of God and man, so that God and man may have communion with one another? Is there a supernatural Revelation? Has that Revelation culminated in a supernatural Person—Christ? Is there a supernatural work in the souls of men? Is there a supernatural Redemption? Is there a supernatural hereafter? It is these larger questions that have to be settled first, and then the question of particular miracles will fall into its proper place. Neander has given admirable expression to the conception of Christianity which is really at stake, in the following words in the commencement of his History of the Church—“Now we look upon Christianity not as a power that has sprung up out of the hidden depths of man’s nature, but as one that descended from above, when heaven opened itself anew to man’s long alienated race; a power which, as both in its origin and its essence it is exalted above all that human nature can create out of its own resources, was designed to impart to that nature a new life, and to change it in its inmost principles. The prime source of this power is He whose power exhibits to us the manifestation of it—Jesus of Nazareth—the Redeemer of mankind when estranged from God by sin. In the devotion of faith in Him, and the appropriation of the truth which He revealed, consists the essence of Christianity and of that fellowship of the Divine life resulting from it, which we designate by the name of the Church.”[18] It is this conception of Christianity we have to come to an understanding with, before the question of particular miracles can profitably be discussed.

While, from the nature of the case, this side of opposition of the Christian view of the world to certain “modern” conceptions must necessarily receive prominence, I ought, on the other hand, to remark that it is far from my intention to represent the relation of Christianity to these opposing systems as one of mere negation. This would be to overlook the fact, which cannot be too carefully borne in mind, that no theory which has obtained wide currency, and held powerful sway over the minds of men, is ever wholly false; that, on the contrary, it derives what strength it has from some side or aspect of truth which it embodies, and for which it is in Providence a witness against the suppression or denial of it in some counter-theory, or in the general doctrine of the age. No duty is more imperative on the Christian teacher than that of showing that instead of Christianity being simply one theory among the rest, it is really the higher truth which is the synthesis and completion of all the others,—that view which, rejecting the error, takes up the vitalising elements in all other systems and religions, and unites them into a living organism, with Christ as head.[19] We are reminded of Milton’s famous figure in the “Areopagitica,” of the dismemberment of truth,—how truth was torn limb from limb, and her members were scattered to the four winds; and how the lovers of truth, imitating the careful search of Isis for the body of Osiris, have been engaged ever since in gathering together the severed parts, in order to unite them again into a perfect whole.[20] If apologetic is to be spoken of, this surely is the truest and best form of Christian apology—to show that in Christianity, as nowhere else, the severed portions of truth found in all other systems are organically united, while it completes the body of truth by discoveries peculiar to itself. The Christian doctrine of God, for example, may fairly claim to be the synthesis of all the separate elements of truth found in Agnosticism, Pantheism, and Deism, which by their very antagonisms reveal themselves as one-sidednesses, requiring to be brought into some higher harmony. If Agnosticism affirms that there is that in God—in His infinite and absolute existence—which transcends finite comprehension, Christian theology does the same. If Pantheism affirms the absolute immanence of God in the world, and Deism His absolute transcendence over it, Christianity unites the two sides of the truth in a higher concept, maintaining at the same time the Divine immanence and the Divine transcendence.[21] Even Polytheism in its nobler forms is in its own dark way a witness for a truth which a hard, abstract Monotheism, such as we have in the later (not the Biblical) Judaism, and in Mohammedanism, ignores—the truth, namely, that God is plurality as well as unity—that in Him there is a manifoldness of life, a fulness and diversity of powers and manifestations, such as is expressed by the word Elohim. This element of truth in Polytheism Christianity also takes up, and sets in its proper relation to the unity of God in its doctrine of Tri-unity—the concept of God which is distinctively the Christian one, and which furnishes the surest safeguard of a living Theism against the extremes of both Pantheism and Deism.[22] Optimism and Pessimism are an other pair of contrasts—each in abstraction an error, yet each a witness for a truth which the other overlooks, and Christianity is the reconciliation of both. To take a last example, Positivism a very direct negation of Christianity; yet in its strange “worship of Humanity” is there not that which stretches across the gulf and touches hands with a religion which meets the cravings of the heart for the human in God by the doctrine of the Incarnation?[23] It is the province of a true and wise Christian theology to take account of all this, and to seek, with ever increasing enlargement of vision, the comprehensive view in which all factors of the truth are combined. The practical inference I would draw—the very opposite of that drawn by others from the same premises—is, that it is the unwisest way possible of dealing with Christianity to pare it down, or seek to sublimate it away, as if it had no positive content of its own; or, by lavish compromise and concession, to part with that which belongs to its essence. It is not in a blunted and toned down Christianity, but in the exhibition of the Christian view in the greatest fulness and completeness possible, that the ultimate synthesis of the conflicting elements in the clash of systems around us is to be found.

This is perhaps the place to point out that, whatever the character of the world-view involved in Christianity, it is not one in all respects absolutely new. It rests upon, and carries forward to its completion, the richly concrete view of the world already found in the Old Testament. As an able expounder of Old Testament theology, Hermann Schultz, has justly said—“There is absolutely no New Testament view which does not approve itself as a sound and definitive formation from an Old Testament germ—no truly Old Testament view which did not inwardly press forward to its New Testament fulfilment.”[24] This is a phenomenon which, I think, has not always received the attention it deserves. What are the main characteristics of this Old Testament conception? At its root is the idea of a holy, spiritual, self-revealing God, the free Creator of the world, and its continual Preserver. As correlative to this, and springing out of it, is the idea of man as a being made in God’s image, and capable of moral relations and spiritual fellowship with his Maker; but who, through sin, has turned aside from the end of his creation, and stands in need of Redemption. In the heart of the history, we have the idea of a Divine purpose, working itself out through the calling of a special nation, for the ultimate benefit and blessing of mankind. God’s providential rule extends over all creatures and events, and embraces all peoples of the earth, near and remote. In view of the sin and corruption that have overspread the world, His government is one of combined mercy and judgment; and His dealings with Israel in particular are preparative to the introduction of a better economy, in which the grace already partially exhibited will be fully revealed. The end is the establishment of a kingdom of God under the rule of the Messiah, in which all national limitations will be removed, the Spirit be poured forth, and Jehovah will become the God of the whole earth. God will make a new covenant with His people, and will write His laws by His Spirit in their hearts. Under this happy reign the final triumph of righteousness over sin will be accomplished, and death and all other evils will be abolished. Here is a very remarkable “Weltanschauung,” the presence of which at all in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures is a fact of no ordinary significance. In the comparative history of religions, it stands quite unique.[25] Speculations on the world and its origin are seen growing up in the schools of philosophy; but on the ground of religion there is nothing to compare with this. The lower religions, Fetishism and the like, have of course nothing of the nature of a developed world-view. The rudiments of such a view in the older nature-religions are crude, confused, polytheistic—mixed up abundantly with mythological elements. Brahmanism and Buddhism rest on a metaphysical foundation; they are as truly philosophical systems as the atomistic or pantheistic theories of the Greek schools, or the systems of Schopenhauer and Hartmann in our own day. And the philosophy they inculcate is a philosophy of despair; they contain no spring of hope or progress. Zoroastrianism, with its profound realisation of the conflict of good and evil in the universe, perhaps comes nearest to the religion of the Old Testament, yet is severed from it by an immense gulf. I refer only to its pervading dualism, its reverence for physical elements, its confusion of natural and moral evil—above all, to its total lack of the idea of historical Revelation.[26] The Biblical conception is separated from every other by its monotheistic basis, its unique clearness, its organic unity, its moral character, and its teleological aim.[27] It does not matter for the purposes of this argument what dates we assign to the books of the Old Testament in which these views are found—whether we attribute them, with the critics, to the age of the prophets, or to any other. These views are at least there many centuries before the Christian age began, and they are found nowhere else than on the soil of Israel. This is the singular fact the critic has to face, and we cannot profess to wonder that, impartially studying it, voices should be heard from the midst of the advanced school itself unhesitatingly declaring, Date your books when you will, this religion is not explicable save on the hypothesis of Revelation![28]

The general drift and object of these Lectures should now, I think, be apparent. From the conditions of this Lectureship I am precluded from directly entering the apologetic field. I feel, however, that it would be useless to discuss any important theological subject at the present day without reference to the thought and speculation of the time. No other mode of thought would enable me to do justice to the Christian position, and none, I think, would be so interesting to those for whom the Lectures are primarily intended. This, however, will be subsidiary to the main design of showing that there is a definite Christian view of things, which has a character, coherence, and unity of its own, and stands in sharp contrast with counter theories and speculations, and that this world-view has the stamp of reason and reality upon itself, and can amply justify itself at the bar both of history and of experience. I shall endeavour to show that the Christian view of things forms a logical whole which cannot be infringed on, or accepted or rejected piecemeal, but stands or falls in its integrity, and can only suffer from attempts at amalgamation or compromise with theories which rest on totally distinct bases. I hope thus to make clear at least the true nature of the issues involved in a comparison of the Christian and “modern” views, and I shall be glad if I can in any way contribute to the elucidation of the former.

Two objections may be taken in limine to the course I propose to follow, and it is proper at this stage that I should give them some attention.

I. The first objection is taken from the standpoint of the theology of feeling, and amounts to a denial of our right to speak of a Christian “Weltanschauung” at all; indeed, to assume that Christianity has a definite doctrinal content of any kind.[29] This class of objectors would rule the cognitive element out of religion altogether. Religion, it is frequently alleged, has nothing to do with notions of the intellect, but only with states and dispositions of the heart. Theories and doctrines are no essential part of it, but, on the contrary, a bane and injury and hindrance to its free development and progress. Those who speak thus sometimes do so in the interests of a theory which would seek the essence of religion in certain instincts, or sentiments, or emotions, which are supposed to be universal and indestructible in the human race, and to constitute the imperishable and undecaying substance of all religions—the emotions, e.g., of awe or wonder, or reverence or dependence, awakened by the impression of the immensity or mystery of the universe; while the ideas and beliefs connected with these emotions are regarded as but the accidents of a particular stage of culture, and as possessing no independent value. They are at best the variegated moulds into which this emotional life of the spirit has for the time being poured itself—the envelopes and vehicles through which it seeks for itself preservation and expression. All religions, from this impartial standpoint, Christianity included, are equally Divine and equally human. But even those who recognise a higher origin for the Christian religion sometimes speak of it as if in its original form it was devoid of all definite doctrinal content; or at least as if the doctrinal ideas found in connection with it were only external wrappage and covering, and could be stripped off—altered, manipulated, modified, or dispensed with at the pleasure of the critic—without detriment to the moral and spiritual kernel beneath. Christianity is not given up, but there is the attempt to refine and sublimate it till it is reduced to a simple state of sentiment and feeling; to purge it of the theoretic element till nothing is left but the vaguest residuum of doctrinal opinion. Agreeing with this party in their aversion to doctrine, yet occupying a distinct standpoint, are the ultra-spirituals, whose naturally mystical bent of mind, and fondness for the hazy and indefinite in theological as in other thinking, predispose them to dwell in the region of cloudy and undefined conceptions.[30]

It scarcely falls within my province to inquire how far this theory holds good in its general application to religion, though even on this broad field it might easily be shown that it involves a number of untenable assumptions, and really contradicts the idea of religion. For what is meant by the assertion that religion consists only in sentiment or feeling, and has nothing to do with doctrinal conceptions? Not, surely, that religion can subsist wholly without ideas, or cognitive apprehension, of some kind. Religion, in the lowest as well as in the highest of its forms, is an expression of the relation of the soul to something beyond itself; it involves, therefore, not one term, but two; it points to the existence of an object, and implies belief in the reality of that object. The element of idea, therefore,—or, as the Germans would say, “Vorstellung,”—is inseparable from it. No religion has ever been found which did not involve some rudiments of an objective view. We may learn here even from the pessimist Hartmann, who, in an acute analysis of the elements of religion, says, “How true soever it may be that religious feeling forms the innermost kernel of religious life, nevertheless that only is a true religious feeling which is excited through religious representations having a character of objective (if only relative) truth. Religion cannot exist without a religious ‘Weltanschauung,’ and this not without the conviction of its transcendental truth.”[31]

Nor, again, can it be contended that, while a cognitive element of some kind must be conceded, religion is indifferent to the character of its ideas—that these have no influence upon the state of sentiment or feelings. The religion of a Thug, e.g., is a very different thing from the religion of a Christian; and will any one say that the ideas with which the two religions are associated—the ideas they respectively entertain of their deities—have nothing to do with this difference? In what do religions differ as higher and lower, if not in the greater or less purity and elevation of the ideas they entertain of the Godhead, and the greater or less purity of the sentiment to which these ideas give birth?

Nor, finally, can it be held that it is a matter of unimportance whether these ideas which are connected with a religion are regarded as true—i.e. whether they are believed to have any objective counterpart. For religion can as little subsist without belief in the reality of its object, as it can dispense with the idea of an object altogether. This is the weakness of subjective religious theories like Feuerbach’s, in which religion is regarded as the projection of man’s own egoistic consciousness into the infinite; or of those poetic and aesthetic theories of religion which regard the ends of religion as served if only it furnishes man with elevating and inspiring ideals, without regard to the question of how far these ideals relate to an actual object. Ideas on this hypothesis are necessary to religion, and may be ranked as higher and lower, but have only a fictitious or poetic value. They are products of historical evolution,—guesses, speculations, dreams, imaginings, of the human mind in regard to that which from the nature of the case is beyond the reach of direct knowledge, probably is unknowable. They are therefore not material out of which anything can be built of a scientific character; not anything that can be brought to an objective test; not anything verifiable. Their sole value, as said earlier, is to serve as vehicles and support of religious feeling.[32] But it is obvious that, on this view, the utility of religious ideas can only last so long as the illusion in connection with them is not dispelled. For religion is more than a mere aesthetic gratification. It implies belief in the existence of a real object other than self, and includes a desire to get into some relation with this object. The mind in religion is in too earnest a mood to be put off with mere fancies. The moment it dawns on the thoughts of the worshipper that the object he worships has no reality, but is only an illusion or fancy of his own,—the moment he is convinced that in his holiest exercises, he is but toying with the creations of his own spirit,—that moment the religious relation is at an end. Neither philosopher nor common man will long continue bowing down to an object in whose actual existence he has ceased to believe.[33] Nor is the conclusion which seems to follow from this—that the illusion of religion is one which the progress of knowledge is destined to destroy—evaded by the concession that there is some dim Unknowable, the consciousness of which lies at the basis of the religious sentiment, and which the mind can still please itself by clothing with the attributes of God. For what is there in this indefinite relation to an Unknowable, of which we can only affirm that it is not what we think it to be, to serve the purpose of a religion? And what avails it to personalise this conception of the Absolute, when we know, as before, that this clothing with personal attributes is only objective illusion?

No objection, therefore, can fairly be taken from the side of the general “Science of Religions,” to the supposition that a religion may exist which can give us a better knowledge of God than is to be found in the vague and uncertain conjectures and fancies of minds left to their own groping after the Divine. If such a religion exists, furnishing clear and satisfying knowledge of God, His character, will, and ways, His relations to men, and the purposes of His grace, there is plainly great room and need in the world for it; and the consideration of its claims cannot be barred by the assumption that the only valuable elements in any religion must be those which it has in common with all religions—which is the very point in dispute. The only question that can be properly raised is, Whether Christianity is a religion of this nature? And this can only be ascertained by actual inspection.

Turning next to those within the Christian pale who would rule the doctrinal element out of their religion, I confess I find it difficult to understand on what grounds they can justify their procedure. If there is a religion in the world which exalts the office of teaching, it is safe to say that it is the religion of Jesus Christ. It has been frequently remarked that in pagan religions the doctrinal element is at a minimum—the chief thing there is the performance of a ritual.[34] But this is precisely where Christianity distinguishes itself from other religions—it does contain doctrine. It comes to men with definite, positive teaching; it claims to be the truth; it bases religion on knowledge, though a knowledge which is only attainable under moral conditions. I do not see how any one can deal fairly with the facts as they lie before us in the Gospels and Epistles, without coming to the conclusion that the New Testament is full of doctrine. The recently founded science of “New Testament Theology,” which has already attained to a position of such commanding importance among the theological disciplines, is an unexceptionable witness to the same fact. And this is as it should be. A religion based on mere feeling is the vaguest, most unreliable, most unstable of all things. A strong, stable, religious life can be built up on no other ground than that of intelligent conviction. Christianity, therefore, addresses itself to the intelligence as well as to the heart. It sounds plausible indeed to say, Let us avoid all doctrinal subtleties; let us keep to a few plain, easy, simple propositions, in regard to which there will be general agreement. But, unfortunately, men will think on those deep problems which lie at the root of religious belief—on the nature of God, His character, His relations to the world and men, sin, the means of deliverance from it, the end to which things are moving,—and if Christianity does not give them an answer, suited to their deeper and more reflective moods, they will simply put it aside as inadequate for their needs. Everything depends here on what the Revelation of the Bible is supposed to be. If it is a few general elementary truths of religion we are in search of, it may freely be conceded that these might have been given in very simple form. But if we are to have a Revelation such as the Bible professes to convey,—a Revelation high as the nature of God, deep as the nature of man, universal as the wants of the race, which is to accompany man through all the ascending stages of his development, and still be felt to be a power and inspiration to him for further progress,—it is absurd to expect that such a Revelation will not have many profound and difficult things in it, and that it will not afford food for thought in its grandest and highest reaches. “Thy judgments are a great deep.”[35] A religion divorced from earnest and lofty thought has always, down the whole history of the Church, tended to become weak, jejune, and unwholesome; while the intellect, deprived of its rights within religion, has sought its satisfaction without, and developed into godless nationalism.

Christianity, it is sometimes said by those who represent this view, is a life, not a creed; it is a spiritual system, and has nothing to do with dogmatic affirmations. But this is to confuse two things essentially different—Christianity as an inward principle of conduct, a subjective religious experience, on the one hand, and Christianity as an objective fact, or an historic magnitude, on the other. But can even the life be produced, or can it be sustained and nourished, without knowledge? Here I cannot forbear the remark that it is a strange idea of many who urge this objection in the interests of what they conceive to be a more spiritual form of Christianity, that “spirituality” in a religion is somehow synonymous with vagueness and indefiniteness; that the more perfectly they can vaporise or volatilise Christianity into a nebulous haze, in which nothing can be perceived distinctly, the nearer they bring it to the ideal of a spiritual religion.[36] This, it is safe to say, was not Paul’s idea of spirituality—he by whom the distinction of “letter” and “spirit” was most strongly emphasised. The region of the spiritual was rather with him, as it is throughout Scripture, the region of the clearest insight and most accurate perception—of full and perfect knowledge (ejpivgnwsi~). His unceasing prayer for his converts was, not that their minds might remain in a state of hazy indistinctness, but that God would give them “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, having the eyes of (their) heart enlightened,” that they might grow up in this knowledge, till they should “all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”[37]

An objection to the recognition of doctrine in Christianity may be raised, however, from the side of Christian positivism, as well as from that of Christian mysticism. Christianity, it will be here said, is a fact-revelation—it has its centre in a living in Christ, and not a dogmatic creed. And this in a sense is true. The title of my Lectures is the acknowledgment of it. The facts of Revelation are before the doctrines built on them. The gospel is no mere proclamation of “eternal truths,” but the discovery of a saving purpose of God for mankind, executed in time. But the doctrines are the interpretation of the facts. The facts do not stand blank and dumb before us, but have a voice given to them, and a meaning put into them. They are accompanied by living speech, which makes their meaning clear. When John declares that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, and is the Son of God,[38] he is stating a fact, but he is none the less enunciating a doctrine. When Paul affirms, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,”[39] he is proclaiming a fact, but he is at the same time giving an interpretation of it. No writer has laid more stress on the fact, and less on the doctrine, in primitive Christianity than Professor Harnack, yet he cannot help saying, “So far as the God and Father of Jesus Christ is believed in as the Almighty Lord of heaven and earth, the Christian religion includes a definite knowledge of God, of the world, and of the world-aim.”[40] This concedes in principle all that I maintain. It affirms that the facts of Christianity, rightly understood and interpreted, not only yield special doctrines, but compel us to develop out of them a determinate “Weltanschauung.” This is precisely the assertion of the present Lectures.

If I refer for a moment in this connection to Schleiermacher, who may be named as the most distinguished representative of the theology of feeling, it is because I think that the position of this remarkable man on the question before us is frequently misunderstood. Schleiermacher’s earlier views are not unlike some of those we have already been considering, and are entangled in many difficulties and inconsistencies in consequence. I deal here only with his later and more matured thought, as represented in his work, Der christliche Glaube. In it also piety is still defined as feeling. It is, he says, neither a mode of knowing, nor a mode of action, but a mode of feeling, or of immediate self-consciousness. It is the consciousness of ourselves as absolutely dependent, or, what comes to the same thing, as standing in relation with God.[41] In his earlier writings he had defined it more generally as the immediate feeling of the infinite and eternal, the immediate consciousness of the being of all that is finite in the infinite, of all that is temporal in the eternal, awakened by the contemplation of the universe.[42] But along with this must be taken into account Schleiermacher’s view of the nature of feeling. According to him, feeling is the opposite of knowledge than that pure, original state of consciousness—prior to both knowledge and action—out of which knowledge and action may subsequently be developed.[43] In Christianity this raw material of the religious consciousness receives, as it were, a definite shaping and content. The peculiarity in the Christian consciousness is that everything in it is referred back upon Jesus Christ, and the Redemption accomplished through Him.[44] This moving back from the religious consciousness to the Person of the sinless Redeemer as the historical cause of it is already a transcending of the bounds of a theology of mere feeling. Theology is no longer merely a description of states of consciousness, when it leads us out for an explanation of these states into the region of historic fact. But an equally important circumstance is that, while describing the Christian consciousness mainly in terms of feeling, Schleiermacher does not deny that a dogmatic is implicitly contained in this consciousness, and is capable of development out of it. His Der christliche Glaube is, on the contrary, the unfolding of such a dogmatic. His position, therefore, is not offhand to be identified with that of the advocates of a perfectly undogmatic Christianity. These would rule the doctrinal element out of Christianity altogether. But Schleiermacher, while he lays the main stress in the production of this consciousness of Redemption in the believer on the Person of the Redeemer, and only subordinately on his teaching, yet recognises in Christian piety a positive, given content, and out of this he evolves a clearly defined and scientifically arranged system of doctrines.[45] It is to be regretted that in the foundation of his theology—the doctrine of God—Schleiermacher never broke with his initial assumption that God cannot be known as He really is, but only as reflected in states of human consciousness, and therefore failed to lift his theology as a whole out of the region of subjectivity.

A chief reason probably why many entertain a prejudice against the admission of a definite doctrinal content in Christianity, is that they think it militates against the idea of “progress” in theology. How does the matter stand in this respect? Growth and advance of some kind, of course, there is and must be in theology. It cannot be that the other departments of knowledge unceasingly progress, and theology stands still. No one familiar with the history of theology will deny that great changes have taken place in the shape which doctrines have assumed in the course of their development, or will question that these changes have been determined largely by the ruling ideas, the habits of thought, the state of knowledge and culture, of each particular time. The dogmatic moulds which were found adequate for one age have often proved insufficient for the next, to which a larger horizon of vision has been granted; and have had to be broken up that new ones might be created, more adapted to the content of a Revelation which in some sense transcends them all. I recognise therefore to the full the need of growth and progress in theology.[46] Bit by bit, as the ages go on, we see more clearly the essential lineaments of the truth as it is in Jesus; we learn to disengage the genuine truths of Christ’s gospel from human additions and corruptions; we apprehend their bearings and relations with one another, and with new truths, more distinctly; we see them in new points of view, develop and apply them in new ways. All this is true, and it is needful to remember it, lest to temporary points of view, and human theories and formulations, we attribute an authority and completeness which in no way belong to them. But it does not by any means follow from this that, therefore, everything in Christianity is fluent,—that it has no fixed starting-points, no definite basal lines, no sure and moveless foundations, no grand determinative positions which control and govern all thought within distinctly Christian limits,—still less that, in the course of its long history, theology has achieved nothing, or has reached no results which can fairly be regarded as settled. This is the exaggeration on the other side, and so far from being helpful to progress in theology, it is in reality the denial of its possibility. Progress in theology implies that there is something to develop—that some truths at all events, relating to God and to Divine things, are ascertainable, and are capable of scientific treatment. It is easy to speak of the attempt to “limit infinite truth within definite formulae”; but, on the other hand, unless some portion at least of this infinite truth can be brought within range of the human faculties, theology has nothing to work on. It is a pseudo-science, and to speak of progress in it is idle.

II. The recent tendency in Continental theology, however, is not so much to deny the existence of a definite “Weltanschauung” in the Bible, as rather to lay stress on the distinction between a “religious” and a “theoretic” view of the world—ascribing to Christianity the former, but not the latter. This is the position of the school of Ritschl, and truth and error are so intimately blended in it that it is necessary to give it our careful consideration.[47] That a sound distinction underlies the terms “religious” and “theoretic” is not to be disputed, and it is important that its nature should be rightly understood. But, under the plea of expelling metaphysics from theology, the tendency is at present to revive this distinction in a form which practically amounts to the resuscitation of the old doctrine of a “double truth”—the one religious, the other philosophical; and it is not held necessary that even where the two overlap they should always be found in agreement. It is not simply that the two kinds of knowledge have different spheres, move in different orbits, and have to do with a different class of objects; for this Ritschl at least denies.[48] But they set out from different starting-points, judge by different standards, and as a consequence frequently lead to different results. Religious knowledge, Ritschl holds, moves only in the sphere of what he calls worth- or value-judgments. That is to say, it judges of things, not according to their objective nature and relations, but according to their value for us—according to their fitness to meet and satisfy religious necessities.[49] This, logically, would lead to pure subjectivism, and in the hands of some of Ritschl’s followers actually does so.[50] This tendency is strengthened by the theory of knowledge to which this school generally has committed itself—a theory Kantian in its origin—which, denying to the mind any power of knowing things as they are, limits it within the sphere of phenomenal representations. Ritschl himself tries hard to ward off this reproach of subjectivity from his system, and makes more than one attempt to find a bridge from the practical to the theoretic, but with no real success. He never quits the ground that it is not the objective truth of things—which would carry us into the region of theoretic knowledge—which forms the subject-matter of our inquiry in theology, but solely their subjective aspect as related to our own states of pleasure and pain, or as helping or hindering the ends sought in religion. In his doctrines of God and Christ, of Providence and miracle, of sin and Redemption, as we shall afterwards see, it is constantly this subjective aspect of things, which may be very different from our actual or scientific judgment upon them, which is brought into prominence. Religion requires, for example, that we view the universe from a teleological and not from a causal standpoint, and therefore that we postulate God and Providence. But these are only practical, not theoretic notions, and the mechanical and causal view of the universe may stand alongside of them intact. “Miracle” is the religious name for an event which awakens in us a powerful impression of the help of God, but is not to be held as interfering with the scientific doctrine of the unbroken connection of nature.[51] Not only are the two spheres of knowledge to be thus kept apart in our minds, but we are not to be allowed to trace any lines of relation between them. We are not to be allowed, e.g., to seek any theoretic proof of the existence of God; or to ask how special Providence, or the efficacy of prayer, or supernatural Revelation, or miracle, or even our own freedom, is to be reconciled with the reign of unbroken natural causation. All such inquiries are tabooed as a mixing up of distinct spheres of knowledge, with the result, however, that they are not really kept apart, but that all in the ideas of Providence, miracle, prayer, etc. which conflicts with the theoretic view, is explained away.

It should scarcely require much argument to convince us that this proposal to divide the house of the mind into two compartments, each of which is to be kept sacredly apart from the other, is a perfectly illusory and untenable one. It might have some meaning in an aesthetic theory of religion, in which the religious conceptions are avowedly treated as pure ideals, but it can have none where the speech is of religious “knowledge.” There are, indeed, different modes of cognising the same object, as well as different stages and degrees of real knowledge. If by “theoretic knowledge” is meant only knowledge gained by the methods of exact science, or by philosophical reflection, then, apart from religion altogether, there are vast fields of our knowledge which will not come under this category. The knowledge, for example, which we have of one another in the common intercourse of life, or the knowledge which the ordinary man gathers from his experience of the outward world, is very different in purity of theoretical character from the kind of knowledge aimed at by the psychologist or metaphysician, or by the student of science in his investigations of nature. It is as far removed as possible from the disinterested character which Ritschl ascribes to the knowledge he calls “theoretical.” Yet there is no part of this knowledge in which theoretic activities are not present. The same processes of thought which are employed in philosophy and science are implied in the simplest act of the understanding. In like manner, we may grant that there is a distinction of character and form—not to speak of origin—between religious and what may be called theoretic knowledge; and that thus far the distinction insisted on by Ritschl and his school has a certain relative justification. Religion, assuredly, is not a theoretical product. It did not originate in reasoning, but in an immediate perception or experience of the Divine in some of the spheres of its natural or supernatural manifestation; for the reception of which again a native capacity or endowment must be presupposed in the human spirit. Even Revelation implies the possession of this capacity in man to cognise the manifestations of the Divine when they are set before him. Originating in this way, religious knowledge—at least in its first or immediate form—is distinguished by certain peculiarities. For one thing, it is distinguished from strictly theoretic knowledge by the practical motive which obtains in it. Theoretic knowledge aims at a representation of objects in their purely objective character and relations. Religion, on the other hand, seeks to set its objects before it in those lights, and under those aspects, which directly subserve religious ends. With this difference of aim is connected a difference of form. Theoretic knowledge is cool, clear, and scientifically exact. Religious knowledge is touched with emotion, and moves largely in the region of figurative conception, or what the Germans would call “Vorstellung.” In the first place, religion, as having to do with the personal relation of the soul to God, moves in a sphere in which the affections and emotions are necessarily allowed large play. Its modes of apprehension are therefore warm, lively, impassioned, intuitive. It groups its material under the influence of the dominant feeling; lays hold of those sides and relations of the object which affect itself, and lets the others drop out of view; leaps over intermediate links of causation, and seeks to grasp the object at once in its essential reality and inner significance—in its relation to its ultimate cause and final end. A second cause which leads to the same result is that the objects with which religion has to deal are largely transcendental—that is, they lie beyond the range and conditions of our present experience. A certain amount of figurative representation necessarily enters into the purest conceptions we are able to form of such objects.[52]

To the extent now indicated we may agree with Ritschl that religion moves—if he chooses to phrase it so—in the sphere of value-judgments, and not in that of scientific apprehension. But this is not to be interpreted as if religion did not affirm the objective truth of the ideas it entertains—as if its judgments of value were not at the same time judgments of truth. Still less is it to be conceded that there is any necessary divorce between the mind in its practical and the mind in its theoretical activities, so that propositions may be affirmed in the one sphere which have no relation to, can receive no corroboration from, may even be contradicted by, propositions affirmed in the other. Thus to tear asunder faith and reason is to render no service to religion, but is to pave the way for theoretical scepticism. It is in truth the same reason which works in both spheres; the results, therefore, must be such as admit of comparison. If Ritschl would raise a bar against any such comparison of the results of religious thinking with the conclusions reached by philosophy and science—leaving each to work in its own domain—a more just view of the subject will recognise that this is impossible. We cannot have two spheres of truth lying side by side in the same mind without some effort to arrive at an adjustment between them. Still less is it possible for the mind to find itself in conflict with itself,—on the one side for instance, affirming the personality of God, on the other denying it; on the one side affirming freedom, Revelation, miracle, on the other unbroken natural causation,—and not do what it can to annul the discrepancy. Nor will reason in practice be content to remain in this state of division with itself. It will insist on its knowledge being brought to some sort of unity, or, if this cannot be done, in regarding one or other of the conflicting propositions as illusive.

Finally, it is not sufficiently recognised by Ritschl and his school that religion itself, while in the first instance practical, carries in it also the impulse to raise its knowledge to theoretic form. Faith cannot but seek to advance to knowledge—that is, to the reflective and scientific comprehension of its own contents. Just because its propositions are held to be not only “judgments of value,” but to contain objective truth, they must be capable of being submitted to theoretic treatment. Ritschl himself recognises the necessity of constructing a theology which shall be adequate to the contents of the Christian Revelation. Only he would have it move solely within the region of faith-propositions, or, as he calls them, “judgments of value.” Its task is ended when it has faithfully collected, purely expressed, and internally co-ordinated these religious affirmations.[53] It is not observed how much theoretic and critical activity is already implied in this very process of collating, sifting, and co-ordinating; or how largely, in Ritschl’s own case, the results are dependent on the theoretic presuppositions with which he sets out in his (metaphysical) doctrine of knowledge, and his general theory of religion. But, waiving this, it is surely vain to ask theology to go so far, and then say it is to go no further. Christian science has many tasks beyond those which the Ritschlian limitation would prescribe for it. How, for example, can it refuse the task of investigating its own grounds of certainty? How can it help raising the question of how far these religious conceptions, now brought to expression and co-ordinated, answer to objective truth? How can it avoid asking if this content of the Christian Revelation receives no verification from the laws of man’s spiritual life, or in what this verification consists? Can it help going back on its own presuppositions, and asking what these are, and what kind of view of God and man they imply? How can it help connecting this truth given in Revelation with truth in other departments? And this investigation is not a mere matter of choice in theology; it is forced on it as a necessity. For in the very process of collation and criticism questions arise which can only be solved by going further down. Antinomies arise within theology itself: the different sides of Biblical truth have to be harmonised in a wider conception; unity of view has to be sought in a field where only parts are given, and much is left to be inferred. All this involves a large amount of theoretic treatment in theology, and may—I should rather say must—result in showing that the truths of Revelation have also a theoretic side, and are capable of theoretic verification and corroboration.[54]

I conclude, therefore, that it is legitimate to speak of a Christian “Weltanschauung,” and that we are not debarred from investigating its relations to theoretic knowledge.

Appendix to Lecture I: Sketch of the Christian View

It may conduce to clearness if, having indicated the general scope and purport of these Lectures, I now give in this Appendix a brief statement, in propositional form, of what I consider the Christian view of the world to be, and sketch on the basis of this the course to be pursued in the succeeding Lectures.

I. First, then, the Christian view affirms the existence of a Personal, Ethical, Self-Revealing God. It is thus at the outset a system of Theism, and as such is opposed to all systems of Atheism, Agnosticism, Pantheism, or mere Deism.

II. The Christian view affirms the creation of the world by God, His immanent presence in it, His transcendence over it, and His holy and wise government of it for moral ends.

III. The Christian view affirms the spiritual nature and dignity of man—his creation in the Divine image, and destination to bear the likeness of God in a perfected relation of sonship.

IV. The Christian view affirms the fact of the sin and disorder of the world, not as something belonging to the Divine idea of it, and inhering in it by necessity, but as something which has entered it by the voluntary turning aside of man from his allegiance to his Creator, and from the path of his normal development. The Christian view of the world, in other words, involves a Fall as the presupposition of its doctrine of Redemption; whereas the “modern” view of the world affirms that the so-called Fall was in reality a rise, and denies by consequence the need of Redemption in the scriptural sense.

V. The Christian view affirms the historical Self-Revelation of God to the patriarchs and in the line of Israel, and, as brought to light by this, a gracious purpose of God for the salvation of the world, centring in Jesus Christ, His Son, and the new Head of humanity.

VI. The Christian view affirms that Jesus Christ was not mere man, but the eternal Son of God—a truly Divine Person—who in the fulness of time took upon Him our humanity, and who, on the ground that in Him as man there dwells the fulness of the Godhead bodily, is to be honoured, worshipped, and trusted, even as God is. This is the transcendent “mystery of godliness”[55]—the central and amazing assertion of the Christian view—by reference to which our relation is determined to every thing else which it contains.

Pausing for a moment on this truth of the Incarnation, we have to notice its central place in the Christian system, and through its light every other doctrine is illuminated and transformed.

1. The Incarnation sheds new light on the nature of God, and, in conjunction with the work of the Spirit, reveals Him as triune—Father, Son, and Spirit—one God.

2. The Incarnation sheds new light on the doctrine of creation—all things being now seen to be created by Christ as well as for Him.

3. The Incarnation sheds new light on the nature of man, alike as respects its capacity for union with the Divine, its possibilities of perfection, and the high destinies awaiting it in the future.

4. The Incarnation sheds new light on the purpose of God in the creation and Redemption of men—that end being, in the words of Paul, “in the dispensation of the fulness of times to gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth, even in Him.”[56]

5. The Incarnation sheds new light on the permission of sin by showing the possibility of Redemption from it, and how, through the Revelation of the Divine purposes of mercy, a far grander discovery is made of the Divine character, and far higher prospects are opened up for humanity.

VII. The Christian view affirms the Redemption of the world through a great act of Atonement—this Atonement to be appropriated by faith, and availing for all who do not wilfully withstand and reject its grace.

VIII. The Christian view affirms that the historical aim of Christ’s work was the founding of a Kingdom of God on earth, which includes not only the spiritual salvation of individuals, but a new order of society, the result of the action of the spiritual forces set in motion through Christ.

IX. Finally, the Christian view affirms that history has a goal, and that the present order of things will be terminated by the appearance of the Son of Man for judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and the final separation of righteous and wicked,—final, so far as the Scriptures afford any light, or entitle us to hold out any hope.

Beyond this are the eternal ages, on whose depths only stray lights fall, as in that remarkable passage—“Then cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father: . . . then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all”[57]—and on the mysterious blessedness or sorrow of which, as the case may be, it is needless to speculate.

I have for clearness’ sake exhibited this outline of the Christian view in a series of propositions, but I need hardly say that it is not my intention to attempt to exhaust this outline, or anything like it, in this brief course of Lectures. In the actual treatment of my subject I shall be guided very much by the way in which the main positions of the Christian view are related to current theories and negations.

1. It is plain that the Christian view of the world is Theistic, and as such is opposed, as already said, to all the views which deny a living personal God, and also to Deism, which denies Revelation.

2. The Christian views of nature and man come into conflict with many current theories. They involve, for example, the ideas of creation, and of the spirituality, freedom, and immortal destiny of man—all of which the thoroughgoing “modern” view of the world opposes.

3. The Christian view of sin is irreconcilable with modern theories, which represent sin as a necessity of development, and nullify its true conception by starting man off at a stage but little removed from that of the brutes. At least I take this to be the case, and shall endeavour to give reasons for my opinion.

The above denials, if logically carried out, involve the rejection of the Christian view as a whole. We reject the Christian view in toto if we deny the existence of God, the spiritual nature and immortality of man, or destroy the idea of sin. In what follows we are rather in the region of Christian heresy; at least the total rejection of the Christian view is not necessarily implied, though in its mutilation it is found that neither can that which is preserved be permanently maintained.

4. The assertion of the Incarnation may be met by a lower estimate of Christ’s Person than the full Christian doctrine implies; or by the complete denial of the supernatural dignity of His Person.

5. The Christian view may be met by the denial of the need or the reality of Atonement, or by inadequate or unscriptural representations of that great doctrine.

6. There may be unscriptural denials, as well as unwarrantable dogmatisms, in the matter of eschatology.

My course, then, in view of the various antitheses, will shape itself as follows:—

First, keeping in mind that it is the Incarnation which is the central point in the Christian view, I shall look in the second Lecture at the alternatives which are historically presented to us if this doctrine is rejected.

Next, in the third, fourth, and fifth Lectures, I shall consider in order the three postulates of the Christian view—God, Nature and Man, and Sin.

The sixth Lecture will be devoted to the Incarnation itself, and the seventh to the consideration of some related topics—the higher Christian concept of God, and the relation of the Incarnation to the plan of the world.

The eighth Lecture will treat of the Incarnation and Redemption from sin; and the concluding Lecture will treat of the Incarnation and human destiny.[58]

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Which aspects of Christianity does Orr highlight as central to a Christian worldview? Are these sufficient?

2. Why does Orr contend that Christianity “is not a scientific system”?

3. What question does Orr think is the central point at issue between opponents and defenders of the Christian view? Is he correct? Why or why not?

4. Discuss the following: “No duty is more imperative on the Christian teacher than that of showing that instead of Christianity being simply one theory among the rest, it is really the higher truth which is the synthesis and completion of all the others.”

5. Why does Orr defend the notion that Christianity contains doctrine? Are any of his arguments relevant today?

1. See Note A.—The Idea of the “Weltanschauung.”

2. See Appendix II.—The Idea of the “Weltanschauung.” Kant says: “I name all transcendental ideas, so far as they relate to the absolute totality in the synthesis of phenomena, world-notions (Weltbegriffe), partly because of this very unconditioned totality, on which also the notion of the world-whole (Weltganz) rests—which itself is only an idea,—partly because they relate only to the synthesis of phenomena, consequently to the empirical; while, on the other hand, the absolute totality in the synthesis of the conditions of all possible things will give rise to an ideal of pure reason, which is to be entirely distinguished from the world-notion (Weltbegriff), although at the same time it stands in relation to it.” “The cosmological idea (kosmologische Idee) of an absolute whole.”—Kritik d. r. Vernunft, pp. 302ff. (Bohn’s trans., pp. 256ff.). The references to Kant throughout are to Erdmann’s edition (1884).

3. Cf. Zeller on Hesiod’s Theogony, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, 88, 89 (Eng. trans.).

4. See Note B.—Classification of “Weltanschauungen.”

5. Bk. I. Ll. 54–57 (Munro’s trans.). Cf. Lucretius and the Atomic Theory, by Professor John Veitch, 13.

6. Caird’s Social Philosophy of Comte, 21.

7. Cf. Strauss—“We proceed from the isolated circles of phenomena around us, from the stable basis and the elementary forces, to vegetable and animal life, to the universal life of the earth, from this to that of our solar system, and so ever further, till at last we have grasped the entire range of existence in a single representation; and this is the representation of the universe.”—Der alte und dur neue Glaube, 150.

8. “As science becomes more conscious of its problems and its goal, it straggles the more strenuously towards the region where physics melt into metaphysics.”—Fairbairn, Studies in the Philosophy and History of Religion, 88.

9. See Note C.—Unconscious Metaphysic.

10. “The question of questions for mankind, the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other, is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature, and of his relation to the universe of things. Whence our race has come, what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature’s power over us? to what goal we are tending! are the problems which present themselves anew, and with undiminished interest, to every man born into the world.”—Huxley, Man’s Place in Nature, 57.

11. Cf. Principal Fairbairn—“The search for causes, both efficient and ultimate, is being conducted with the most daring and unwearied enthusiasm. Science has become as speculative, as prolific of physico-metaphysical theories—as the most bewitched metaphysician could desire. . . . The consequent crop of cosmic speculation has been of the most varied and extensive kind, ranging from theories of the origin of species to theories as to the origin of the universe.”—Studies, 64.

12. See Note D.—Scope of the Modern Scientific Claim.

13. Cf. Dorner, Syst. of Doct. i. 155 (Eng. trans.).

14. Tennyson, In Memoriam.

15. See Note E.—Antagonism of Christian and “Modern” Views of the World.

16. See Note F.—Internal Conflicts of the “Modern” View.

17. Cf. Max Müller’s Preface to his Lectures on Anthropological Religion (Gifford Lectures), 1892.

18. History of the Church, i. 2 (Eng. trans.).

19. Cf. Baring-Gould—“In every religion of the world is to be found, distorted or exaggerated, some great truth, otherwise it would never have obtained foothold; every religious revolution has been the struggle of thought to gain another step in the ladder that reaches to heaven. That which we ask of Revelation is that it shall take up all these varieties into itself, not that it shall supplant them; and show how that at which each of them aimed, however dimly and indistinctly, has its interpretation and realisation in the objective truth brought to light by Revelation. Hence we shall be able to recognise that religion to be the true one, which is the complement and corrective of all the wanderings of the religious instinct in its efforts to provide objects for its own satisfaction.”—Origin and Development of Religious Belief, ii. Pref. 10.

20. Cf. Areopagitica, “English Reprints,” 56. Clement of Alexandria has a similar figure, Strom. i. 13.

21. Cf. Eph. iv. 6. Flint, Anti-Theistic Theories, 339.

22. Cf. Dorner, Syst. of Doct. i. 366, 367 (Eng. trans.). Even Ed. v. Hartmann recognises the “deep metaphysical sense” of the doctrine of the Trinity, and the service done by it in reconciling the Divine immanence and transcendence.—Selbstzersetzung des Christenthums, 108.

23. “Altruism” is another point of contact between Comtism and Christianity, though, indeed, it was first borrowed from the latter.

24. Alttestamentliche Theologie, 48.

25. See Note G.—Uniqueness of the Old Testament View.

26. Cf. the sketch of Zoroastrianism in Introduction to the Zendavesta in Sacred Books of the East. See also Ebrard’s Christian Apologetics, ii. 186–232. Some interesting remarks will be found in Lotze’s Microcosmus, ii. 459.

27. Dr. Dorner says—“Israel has the idea of teleology as a kind of soul.”—Syst. of Doct. i. 274 (Eng. trans.).

28. See Note H.—Origin of the Old Testament View—Relation to Critical Theories.

29. See Note I.—Nature and Definition of Religion.

30. See Note J.—Undogmatic Religion.

31. Religionsphilosophie, ii. 32.

32. See Note K.—Aesthetic Theories of Religion.

33. Cf. Dorner—“Faith does not wish to be a mere relation to itself, or to its representations and thoughts. That would simply be a monologue; faith desires a dialogue.”—Syst. of Doct. i. 123 (Eng. trans.).

Martineau—“No; if religious communion is reduced to a monologue, its essence is extinct, and its soul is gone. It is a living relation, or it is nothing—a response to the Supreme Reality.”—Ideal Substitutes for God, 19.

Strauss—“None but a book student could ever imagine that a creation of the brain, woven of poetry and philosophy, can take the place of real religion.”—In Kaiser Julian, 12 (quoted by Martineau).

Cf. also Hartmann, Religionsphilosophie, ii. 6–9.

34. Cf. Professor R. Smith’s Religion of the Semites—“The antique religions had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions and practices. . . . In all the antique religions mythology takes the place of dogma, that is, the sacred lore of priests and people, so far as it does not consist of mere rules for the performance of religious acts, assumes the form of stories about the gods; and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual.”—P. 18.

35. Ps. xxxvi. 6.

36. Cf. Bartlett’s The Letter and the Spirit (Bampton Lectures, 1888).

37. Eph. i. 17, 18 ; iv. 13.

38. 1 John iv. 2, 15.

39. 1 Cor. xv. 3.

40. Grundriss der Dogmengeschichte, i. 1. I have used the word “doctrine” in these discussions, and kept clear of “dogma,” which is often used with a prejudice. “Dogma” I take to be a formulation of doctrine stamped with some ecclesiastical authority. If there are doctrines, no objection can reasonably be taken to the formulation of them. It is beyond my purpose to discuss the wider question of the utility and necessity of creeds for church purposes. Cf. Lect. VI. in Dr. Rainy’s Delivery and Development of Christian Doctrine (Cunningham Lectures).

41. Der christ. Glaube, Sects. 3 and 4.

42. Cf. Pfleiderer’s Religionsphilosophie, i. 308 (Eng. trans.).

43. Der christ. Glaube, Sect. 3. 2.

44. Der christ. Glaube, Sect. 11.

45. See Note L.—Schleiermacher on Dogmatics.

46. Cf. Dr. Rainy’s Delivery and Development of Doctrine (Cunningham Lectures). On the position criticised see, e.g., Bartlett’s The Letter and the Spirit (Bampton Lectures, 1888).

47. See Note M.—Religious and Theoretic Knowledge.

48. See passages quoted in Note N.—Ritschl on Religion and Philosophy.

49. See Ritschl’s discussion in Recht. und Versöhnung, iii. 3rd ud. pp. 192–202; and in his Theologie und Metaphysik.

50. E.g. Bender, of Bonn.

51. Cf., e.g., Ritschl’s remarks on “Miracle” in his Unterricht in der christ. Religion, 14, 15—“We entirely change the religious representation of the miracle if we measure it by the scientific acceptation of a connection through law of all natural occurrences. Since this idea lies outside the horizon of the men of the Old and the New Testaments, the miracle never means for them an event contrary to nature, or a breaking through natural law by Divine caprice. For this reason, faith in miracles, in the sense above indicated of a gracious Providence of God, is throughout reconcilable with the probability of the connection through natural law of the whole world. If certain narratives of miracles in the books of the Bible appear to collide with this order, it is neither a task of science to explain this appearance, or hold fast the event as fact; nor is it a religious task to recognise these related occurrences as Divine effects contrary to natural laws. . . . But out of his religious faith will each man experience a miracle in himself, and in comparison with this nothing is less necessary than that he should grub over the miracles which others have experienced.”

52. I may refer for further discussion of this subject to an article of my own on “The Ritschlian Theology” in The Thinker for August 1892.

53. Cf. Ritschl, Recht. and Ver. iii. 14–16.

54. See Note O.—The Hegelian Theory of Religion.

55. 1 Tim. iii. 16.

56. Eph. i.10.

57. 1 Cor. xv. 24–28.

58. The original plan embraced a Lecture between Lecture VIII. and what is now IX.—on “The Incarnation and New Life of Humanity: the Kingdom of God.” The subject is touched on in Lecture IX., and dealt with more fully in an Appendix.

CHAPTER 15

Benjamin B. Warfield

(1851–1921)

B. B. Warfield was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and was educated in his early days through private tutoring. Of significance to the work included here is that Warfield was initially enamored with science and the scientific enterprise. He graduated from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) at the age of nineteen in 1871. After a few short stints in pastoral ministry, Warfield became an instructor in New Testament at Western Seminary in Pittsburgh. In 1887, he moved to Princeton Seminary to succeed A. A. Hodge as Charles Hodge Professor of Polemic and Didactic Theology.

Just after Warfield married Annie Kinkead in 1876, she was struck with a debilitating illness that plagued her for the rest of her life (Annie died in 1915). Because she was homebound until her death, Warfield was committed to remaining at home, faithfully devoting himself to her care. He and Annie lived out their lives at their campus home (where Charles and A. A. Hodge had previously lived) at Princeton.

Warfield was, in all likelihood, the best of the Old Princeton intellects, with expertise in areas of Old Testament, New Testament, church history, systematic theology, and apologetics. He died in 1921.[1]

Warfield wrote a vast number of apologetic pieces, any number of which could have been included here. He was an able defender of the orthodox Reformed view of the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, just to use one example. His defense of Scripture—its inspiration and authority—set the tone and agenda for Reformed and evangelical theology to the present day. He was a defender of confessional theology, working in depth, through various articles, on the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. He wrote against counterfeit miracles, and against the notion of “perfectionism” that was gaining ascendancy in his day. The list of his theological interests, expertise, and writings is too numerous to detail here.

Given such a list, why include below a review by Warfield of Francis R. Beattie’s book on apologetics? Warfield’s “Introduction” to that work provides an opportunity to enter, albeit briefly, into a discussion of “meta-apologetics.” While virtually all other selections included in these two volumes are texts that seek, in various ways, to defend the faith, the text introduced here has to do with the place of Christian apologetics and with its proper method. There are a number of reasons why such a discussion is important. Without detailing those reasons, we should at least mention that the discussion of Warfield in the current selection is, in the main, a critique of Abraham Kuyper’s view of the place of apologetics as a theological discipline. Given the stature both of Warfield and of Kuyper—without question two titans of Reformed thinking in the first part of the twentieth century—any disagreement between these two men can teach us much about the discipline of apologetics per se. At minimum, we should highlight the fact that, as Warfield’s essay will show, much of the discussion and disagreement has its focus in the way(s) in which one’s theology informs one’s apologetic method.

The first thing we will notice about Warfield’s “Introduction” to Beattie’s Apologetics is that virtually nothing is learned about Beattie’s work at all. Instead, Warfield was constrained to use the occasion to offer a critique of Kuyper’s theological encyclopedia, especially as it relates to the place and discipline of apologetics. It is worth noting here that Warfield’s critique is not of Kuyper’s worldview approach, in which Kuyper sought to confront unbelief by way of the Christian worldview. Rather, as we hinted in our introduction to Kuyper, Warfield saw Kuyper’s notion of apologetics tied to (what Warfield saw as) an extreme view of the antithesis. According to Warfield, it was illegitimate to think of the antithesis as a “difference in kind,” if what is meant by that is an entirely different species.[2] That difference, as Kuyper sought to make clear, was one that was initiated by palingenesis, i.e., by regeneration.

So, says Warfield in response to Kuyper’s view:

There certainly do exist these “two kinds of men” in the world—men under the unbroken sway of sin, and men who have been brought under the power of the palingenesis. And the product of the intellection of these “two kinds of men” will certainly give us “two kinds of science.” But the difference between the two is, after all, not accurately described as a difference in kind—gradus non mutant speciem [that is, change in degrees does not change a species]. Sin has not destroyed or altered in its essential nature any one of man’s faculties, although—since it corrupts homo totus—it has affected the operation of them all. The depraved man neither thinks, nor feels, nor wills as he ought; and the products of his action as a scientific thinker cannot possibly escape the influence of this everywhere operative destructive power. . . . Nevertheless, there is question here of perfection of performance, rather than of kind. It is “science” that is produced by the subject held under sin, even though imperfect science—falling away from the ideal here, there and elsewhere, on account of all sorts of deflecting influences entering in at all points of the process. . . . The science of palingenesis is only a part of the science of sinful humanity.

Warfield is concerned, rightly it seems, that Kuyper’s notion of the antithesis is the culprit behind his “misprision of apologetics.”[3] If there is such a great chasm fixed between those who are regenerate and those who are not, then it would follow that the discipline of apologetics would be relatively useless, since there would be no common ground, or at least very little, between the two “kinds” of people. Warfield goes on to say, for example, that, “It would seem, then, a grave mistake to separate the men of the palingenesis from the race, a part of which they are, and which is itself the object of the palingenesis” (our emphasis). So, on Warfield’s understanding of Kuyper, there are “the men of the palingenesis,” who are separate from the race of all other men. If this is Kuyper’s view, it would indeed be extreme and would lead to significant untenable theological conclusions.

The strength of Warfield’s critique of Kuyper is that he correctly sees the direct link between Kuyper’s view of the antithesis and the place that he assigns to the discipline of apologetics. The weakness of the critique (and, we should note, it is perhaps easier to detect this with historical distance) is that, while Warfield tends to view Kuyper’s notion of the antithesis as metaphysical, that is, as obtaining with respect to the actual race and species of man, Kuyper’s own illustration of the antithesis (given previously in the introduction to Kuyper) indicates the contrary. The illustration, as Kuyper gives it, focuses on the difference between fruit trees, all of the same kind or species, with differences being introduced by way of an external grafting of some and not others. The difference, therefore, between the same kind of trees is that something has been done to some of them (i.e., regeneration) that has not been done to the others. It would seem, therefore, that the differences might best be delineated as covenantal, rather than metaphysical. That is, because of regeneration, all people stand before God as either in Christ (because regenerate) or in Adam (because unregenerate).[4]

Having said that, however, we must recognize that there are indeed differences between Warfield and Kuyper that reflect (at least some of) the differences in emphases present among the stalwarts of Old Princeton in the United States, on the one hand, and the Dutch Reformed, on the other. While it is likely the case that Warfield, unlike some of his Princeton forebears, was not as enamored with Scottish common sense realism, there can be little doubt that the theology of Old Princeton, especially after (and perhaps especially because of elements in) the publication of Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology, was not always as critical as it could have been with regard to the place and function of reason in theology.[5]

Yet it may also be the case that Kuyper, perhaps due to the explicit abuses of reason on the Continent that had contributed to, among other things, the French Revolution,[6] was so suspicious of the function of reason that he was tempted completely to undermine its usefulness, leading Warfield to assert, against Kuyper, that “faith is the gift of God; but it does not in the least follow that the faith that God gives is an irrational faith, that is, a faith without grounds in right reason.”

Whatever the case, the current essay, taken in the context of the previous essay by Kuyper, is a good place to begin to see some of the debates that are ongoing in the area of apologetics, especially in evangelical and Reformed circles.

1. We should note here that Warfield died some three months after Abraham Kuyper and five months before the other great Dutch Reformed systematician, Herman Bavinck (1854–1921).

2. It might be useful here to review Kuyper’s illustration of the antithesis, given in the introduction to his piece.

3. Another aspect of this “misprision” is seen, according to Warfield, in Ritschl as well. The relationship of Kuyper’s view to Ritschl’s is beyond the scope of this introduction, but would be a fruitful avenue to pursue, given the vast differences in their respective theologies.

4. We should note here that the category of covenantal difference is our own, not Kuyper’s or Warfield’s, though it seems clear enough that this is what both Kuyper and Warfield were attempting to elaborate, each in his own way.

5. For a helpful assessment of Warfield in this regard, see Paul Kjoss Helseth, “A ‘Rather Bald’ Rationalist? The Appeal to ‘Right Reason,’” in B. B. Warfield: Essays on His Life and Thought, ed. Gary L. W. Johnson (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2007).

6. In 1879, Kuyper founded the Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands in order, in part, to oppose and defeat the secular ideas that formed the basis of the French Revolution.

Introduction to Francis R. Beattie’s Apologetics*

It gives me great pleasure to respond to Dr. Beattie’s request that I shall say a few words by way of introduction to his comprehensive work on Apologetics. I am purposely laying stress on the comprehensiveness of the work. It is always a satisfaction to have placed in our hands a treatise on one of the theological disciplines, which develops with serenity and sanity its entire content. In the case of Apologetics, however, such an achievement is particularly to be welcomed. We have had many apologies; perhaps no branch of scientific theology has been more fruitful during the past two centuries. But we have had comparatively few surveys of the whole field of Apologetics. Perhaps Dr. Beattie’s is the first to be produced by an American Presbyterian.

The fact is, despite the richness of our apologetical literature, Apologetics has been treated very much like a stepchild in the theological household. The encyclopaedists have seemed scarcely to know what to do with it. They have with difficulty been persuaded to allow it a place among the theological disciplines at all. And, when forced to recognize it, they have been very prone to thrust it away into some odd corner, where it could hide its diminished head behind the skirts of some of its more esteemed sisters.

This widespread misprision of Apologetics has been greatly fostered by the influence of two opposite (if they be indeed opposite) tendencies of thought, which have very deeply affected the thinking even of theologians who are in principle antagonistic to them. I mean Rationalism and Mysticism. To Rationalism, of course, Apologetics is an inanity; to Mysticism, an impertinence. Wherever, therefore, rationalistic presuppositions have intruded, there proportionately the validity of Apologetics has been questioned. Wherever mystical sentiment has seeped in, there the utility of Apologetics has been more or less distrusted. At the present moment, the rationalistic tendency is perhaps most active in the churches in the form given it by Albrecht Ritschl. In this form it strikes at the very roots of Apologetics by the distinction it erects between religious and theoretical knowledge. Where religion is supposed to seek and find expression only in value-judgments—the subjective product of the human soul in its struggle after personal freedom—and thus to stand out of all relation with theoretical knowledge, there, obviously there is no place for a vindication of Christian faith to reason and no possibility of Apologetics. In a somewhat odd parallelism to this (though, perhaps, it is not so odd after all) the mystical tendency is showing itself in our day most markedly in a widespread inclination to decline Apologetics in favor of the so-called testimonium Spiritus Sancti. The convictions of the Christian man, we are told, are not the product of reasons addressed to his intellect, but are the immediate creation of the Holy Spirit in his heart. Therefore, it is intimated, we can not only do very well without these reasons, but it is something very like sacrilege to attend to them. Apologetics, accordingly, is not merely useless, but may even become noxious, because tending to substitute a barren intellectualism for a vital faith.

We need not much disturb ourselves over such utterances when they are the expression, as they often are in our modern Church, of the intellectual distress of those whose own apologetic has proved too weak to withstand the rationalistic assault, and who are fain, therefore, to take refuge from the oppressive rationalism of their understandings in an empty irrationalism of the heart. In these cases the extremes have met, and the would-be mystic preserves nothing but his dialect to distinguish him from the Ritschlite rationalist. What he needs for his cure is clearly not less Apologetics, but more Apologetics—lacking which he must ever remain of a “double mind,” clinging with the desperation of a drowning man to a faith on which his own intellect has passed the sentence of irrationality. The case is very different, however, when we encounter very much the same forms of speech on the lips of heroes of the faith, who deprecate Apologetics because they feel no need of “reasons” to ground a faith which they are sure they have received immediately from God. Apologetics, they say, will never make a Christian. Christians are made by the creative Spirit alone. And when God Almighty has implanted faith in the heart, we shall not require to seek for “reasons” to ground our conviction of the truth of the Christian religion. We have tasted and seen, and we know of ourselves that it is from God. Thus, the sturdiest belief joins hands with unbelief to disparage the defenses of the Christian religion.

Dr. Abraham Kuyper, one of the really great theologians of our time, is a very striking instance of thinkers of this tendency. It is not to be supposed that Dr. Kuyper would abolish Apologetics altogether. He has written an Encyclopaedia of Sacred Theology, and in it he gives a place to Apologetics among the other disciplines. But how subordinate a place! And in what a curtailed form! Hidden away as a subdivision of a subdivision of what Dr. Kuyper calls the “Dogmatological Group” of disciplines (which corresponds roughly to what most encyclopaedists call “Systematic Theology”), one has to search for it before he finds it, and when he finds it, he discovers that its function is confined closely, we might almost say jealously, to the narrow task of defending developed Christianity against philosophy, falsely so called. After the contents of Christianity have been set forth thetically in Dogmatics and Ethics, it finds itself, it seems, in a threefold conflict. This is waged with a pseudo-Christianity, a pseudo-religion, and a pseudo-philosophy. Three antithetic dogmatological disciplines are therefore requisite—Polemics, Elenctics, and Apologetics, corresponding, respectively, to heterodoxy, paganism, philosophy. The least of these is Apologetics, which concerns itself only with the distinctively philosophical assault on Christianity. Meanwhile, as for Christianity itself, it has remained up to this point—let us say it frankly—the great assumption. The work of the exegete, the historian, the systematist, has all hung, so to speak, in the air; not until all their labor is accomplished do they pause to wipe their streaming brows and ask whether they have been dealing with realities, or perchance with fancies only.

Naturally it is not thus that Dr. Kuyper represents it to himself. He supposes that all these workers have throughout wrought in faith. But he seems not quite able to conceal from himself that they have not justified that faith, and that some may think their procedure itself, therefore, unjustified, if not unjustifiable. He distributes the departments of theological science into four groups, corresponding roughly with the Exegetical, Historical, Systematic, and Practical disciplines which the majority of encyclopaedists erect, although for reasons of his own, very interestingly set forth, he prefers to call them, respectively, the Bibliological, Ecclesiological, Dogmatological, and Diaconological groups of disciplines. Now, when he comes to discuss the contents of these groups in detail, he betrays a feeling that something is lacking at the beginning. “Before dealing separately with the four groups of departments of study into which theology is divided,” he says, “we must give a brief resume from the second part of this Encyclopaedia, of how the subject arrives at the first group. Logical order demands that the first group bring you to the point where the second begins, that the second open the way for the third, and that the third introduce you to the fourth. But no other precedes the first group, and it is accordingly in place here to indicate how we arrive at the first group.”[1] Just so, surely!

Dr. Kuyper proceeds to point out that the subject of theology is the human consciousness; that in this consciousness there is implanted a sensus divinitatis, a semen religionis, which impels it to seek after the knowledge of God; that in the sinner this action is renewed and quickened by the palingenesis, through which the subject is opened for the reception of the special revelation of God made first by deed, culminating in the Incarnation, and then by word, centering in the Scriptures. Thus, by the testimonium Spiritus Sancti, the subject is put in possession of the revelation of God embodied in the Scriptures, and is able to proceed to explicate its contents through the several disciplines of theological science. Now, what is it that Dr. Kuyper has done here except outline a very considerable—though certainly not a complete—Apologetics, which must precede and prepare the way for the “Bibliological Group” of theological departments? We must, it seems, vindicate the existence of a sensus divinitatis in man capable of producing a natural theology independently of special revelation; and then the reality of a special revelation in deed and word; and as well, the reality of a supernatural preparation of the heart of man to receive it; before we can proceed to the study of theology at all, as Dr. Kuyper has outlined it. With these things at least we must, then, confessedly, reckon at the outset; and to reckon with these things is to enter deeply into Apologetics.

As the case really stands, we must say even more. Despite the attractiveness of Dr. Kuyper’s distribution of the departments of theological science, we cannot think it an improvement upon the ordinary schema. It appears to us a mistake to derive, as he does, the principium divisionis from the Holy Scriptures. The Scriptures, after all, are not the object of theology, but only its source; and the principium divisionis in this science, too, must be taken, as Dr. Kuyper himself argues,[2] from the object. Now, the object of theology, as Dr. Kuyper has often justly insisted, is the ectypal knowledge of God. This knowledge of God is deposited for us in the Scriptures, and must needs be drawn out of them—hence “Exegetical Theology.” It has been derived from the Scriptures by divers portions and in divers manners, for the life of the Church through the ages, and its gradual assimilation must needs be traced in its effects on the life of the Christian world—hence “Historical Theology.” It is capable of statement in a systematized thetical form—hence “Systematic Theology.” And, so drawn out from Scripture, so assimilated in the Church’s growth, so organized into a system, it is to be made available for life—hence “Practical Theology.” But certainly, before we draw it from the Scriptures, we must assure ourselves that there is a knowledge of God in the Scriptures. And, before we do that, we must assure ourselves that there is a knowledge of God in the world. And, before we do that, we must assure ourselves that a knowledge of God is possible for man. And, before we do that, we must assure ourselves that there is a God to know. Thus, we inevitably work back to first principles. And in working thus back to first principles, we exhibit the indispensability of an “Apologetical Theology,” which of necessity holds the place of the first among the five essential theological disciplines.

It is easy, of course, to say that a Christian man must take his standpoint not above the Scriptures, but in the Scriptures. He very certainly must. But surely he must first have Scriptures, authenticated to him as such, before he can take his standpoint in them. It is equally easy to say that Christianity is attained, not by demonstrations, but by a new birth. Nothing could be more true. But neither could anything be more unjustified than the inferences that are drawn from this truth for the discrediting of Apologetics. It certainly is not in the power of all the demonstrations in the world to make a Christian. Paul may plant and Apollos water; it is God alone who gives the increase. But it does not seem to follow that Paul would as well, therefore, not plant, and Apollos as well not water. Faith is the gift of God; but it does not in the least follow that the faith that God gives is an irrational faith, that is, a faith without grounds in right reason. It is beyond all question only the prepared heart that can fitly respond to the “reasons”; but how can even a prepared heart respond, when there are no “reasons” to draw out its action? One might as well say that photography is independent of light, because no light can make an impression unless the plate is prepared to receive it. The Holy Spirit does not work a blind, an ungrounded faith in the heart. What is supplied by his creative energy in working faith is not a ready-made faith, rooted in nothing and clinging without reason to its object; nor yet new grounds of belief in the object presented; but just a new ability of the heart to respond to the grounds of faith, sufficient in themselves, already present to the understanding. We believe in Christ because it is rational to believe in him, not though it be irrational. Accordingly, our Reformed fathers always posited in the production of faith the presence of the “argumentum propter quod credo,” as well as the “principium seu causa efficiens a quo ad credendum adducor.” That is to say, for the birth of faith in the soul, it is just as essential that grounds of faith should be present to the mind as that the Giver of faith should act creatively upon the heart.

We are not absurdly arguing that Apologetics has in itself the power to make a man a Christian or to conquer the world to Christ. Only the Spirit of Life can communicate life to a dead soul, or can convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment. But we are arguing that faith is, in all its exercises alike, a form of conviction, and is, therefore, necessarily grounded in evidence. And we are arguing that evidence accordingly has its part to play in the conversion of the soul; and that the systematically organized evidence which we call Apologetics similarly has its part to play in the Christianizing of the world. And we are arguing that this part is not a small part; nor is it a merely subsidiary part; nor yet a merely defensive part—as if the one end of Apologetics were to protect an isolated body of Christians from annoyance from the surrounding world, or to aid the distracted Christian to bring his head into harmony with his heart. The part that Apologetics has to play in the Christianizing of the world is rather a primary part, and it is a conquering part. It is the distinction of Christianity that it has come into the world clothed with the mission to reason its way to its dominion. Other religions may appeal to the sword, or seek some other way to propagate themselves. Christianity makes its appeal to right reason, and stands out among all religions, therefore, as distinctively “the Apologetic religion.” It is solely by reasoning that it has come thus far on its way to its kingship. And it is solely by reasoning that it will put all its enemies under its feet. Face to face with the tremendous energy of thought and the incredible fertility in assault which characterizes the world in its anti-Christian manifestation, Christianity finds its task in thinking itself thoroughly through, and in organizing, not its defense only, but also its attack. It stands calmly over against the world with its credentials in its hands, and fears no contention of men.

It is a standing matter of surprise to us that the brilliant school of Christian thinkers, on whose attitude toward Apologetics we have been animadverting, should be tempted to make little of Apologetics. When we read, for instance, the beautiful exposition of sin and regeneration to science which Dr. Kuyper has given us in his Encyclopaedie, we cannot understand why he does not magnify, instead of minifying, the value of Apologetics. Perhaps the explanation is to be found in a tendency to make too absolute the contrast between the “two kinds of science”—that which is the product of the thought of sinful man in his state of nature, and that which is the product of man under the influence of the regenerating grace of God. There certainly do exist these “two kinds of men” in the world—men under the unbroken sway of sin, and men who have been brought under the power of the palingenesis. And the product of the intellection of these “two kinds of men” will certainly give us “two kinds of science.” But the difference between the two is, after all, not accurately described as a difference in kind—gradus non mutant speciem. Sin has not destroyed or altered in its essential nature anyone of man’s faculties, although—since it corrupts homo totus—it has affected the operation of them all. The depraved man neither thinks, nor feels, nor wills as he ought; and the products of his action as a scientific thinker cannot possibly escape the influence of this everywhere operative destructive power; although, as Dr. Kuyper lucidly points out, they are affected in different degrees in the several “sciences,” in accordance with the nature of their objects and the rank of the human faculties engaged in their structure. Nevertheless, there is question here of perfection of performance, rather than of kind. It is “science” that is produced by the subject held under sin, even though imperfect science—falling away from the ideal here, there, and elsewhere, on account of all sorts of deflecting influences entering in at all points of the process. The science of sinful man is thus a substantive part of the abstract science produced by the ideal subject, the general human consciousness, though a less valuable part than it would be without sin.

It is well that it is so; for otherwise there would be no “science” attainable by man at all. For regeneration is not, in the first instance, the removal of sin: the regenerated man remains a sinner. Only after his sanctification has become complete can the contrast between him and the unregenerate sinner become absolute; not until then, in any case, could there be thought to exist an absolute contrast between his intellection and that of the sinner. In the meantime, the regenerated man remains a sinner; no new faculties have been inserted into him by regeneration; and the old faculties, common to man in all his states, have been only in some measure restored to their proper functioning. He is in no condition, therefore, to produce a “science” differing in kind from that produced by sinful man; the science of palingenesis is only a part of the science of sinful humanity, though no doubt its best part; and only along with it can it enter as a constituent part into that ideal science which the composite human subject is producing in its endless effort to embrace in mental grasp the ideal object, that is to say, all that is. Even if the palingenesis had completed its work, indeed, and those under its sway had become “perfect,” it may be doubted whether the contrast between the science produced by the two classes of men could be treated as absolute. Sinful and sinless men are, after all, both men; and being both men, are fundamentally alike and know fundamentally alike. Ideally there is but one “science,” the subject of which is the human spirit, and the object all that is. Meanwhile, as things are, the human spirit attains to this science only in part and by slow accretions, won through many partial and erroneous constructions. Men of all sorts and of all grades work side by side at the common task, and the common edifice grows under their hands into ever fuller and truer outlines. As Dr. Kuyper finely says himself,[3] in the conflict of perceptions and opinions, those of the strongest energy and clearest thought finally prevail. Why is not the palingenesis to be conceived simply as preparing the stronger and clearer spirits whose thought always finally prevails? It is not a different kind of science that they are producing. It is not even the same kind of science, but as part of a different edifice of truth. Through them merely the better scientific outlook, the better scientific product, are striving in conflict with the outlook and product of fellow workers, to get built into the one great edifice of truth ascertained, which is rising slowly because of sin, but surely because of palingenesis.

Only in the divine mind, of course, does science lie perfect—the perfect comprehension of all that is in its organic completeness. In the mind of perfected humanity, the perfected ectypal science shall at length lie. In the mind of sinful humanity, struggling here below, there can lie only a partial and broken reflection of the object, a reflection which is rather a deflection. The task of science is, therefore, not merely quantitative, but qualitative; the edifice must be built up to its completion, and the deflection induced by sin must be corrected. This cannot be accomplished by sinful man. But he makes the effort continuously, and is continuously attaining his measure of success—a success that varies inversely with the rank of the sciences. The entrance of regeneration prepares men to build better and ever more truly as the effects of regeneration increase intensively and extensively. The end will come only when the regenerated universe becomes the well-comprehended object of the science of the regenerated race. It would seem, then, a grave mistake to separate the men of the palingenesis from the race, a part of which they are, and which is itself the object of the palingenesis. And no mistake could be greater than to lead them to decline to bring their principles into conflict with those of the unregenerate in the prosecution of the common task of man. It is the better science that ever in the end wins the victory; and palingenetic science is the better science, and to it belongs the victory. How shall it win its victory, however, if it declines the conflict? In the ordinance of God, it is only in and through this conflict that the edifice of truth is to rise steadily onwards to its perfecting.

In the fact thus brought out, the ultimate vindication of the supreme importance of Apologetics lies, and as well the vindication of its supreme utility. In the prosecution of the tasks of Apologetics, we see the palingenesis at work on the science of man at its highest point. And here, too, the “man of stronger and purer thought”—even though that he has it is of God alone—“will prevail in the end.” The task of the Christian is surely to urge “his stronger and purer thought” continuously, and in all its details, upon the attention of men. It is not true that he cannot soundly prove his position. It is not true that the Christian view of the world is subjective merely, and is incapable of validation in the forum of pure reason. It is not true that the arguments adduced for the support of the foundations of the Christian religion lack objective validity. It is not even true that the minds of sinful men are inaccessible to the “evidences,” though, in the sense of the proverb, “convinced against their will,” they may “remain of the same opinion still.” All minds are of the same essential structure; and the less illuminated will not be able permanently to resist or gainsay the determinations of the more illuminated. The Christian, by virtue of the palingenesis working in him, stands undoubtedly on an indefinitely higher plane of thought than that occupied by sinful man as such. And he must not decline, but use and press the advantage which God has thus given him. He must insist, and insist again, that his determinations, and not those of the unilluminated, must be built into the slowly rising fabric of human science. Thus will he serve, if not obviously his own generation, yet truly all the generations of men. We may assure ourselves from the outset that the palingenesis shall ultimately conquer to itself the whole race and all its products; and we may equally assure ourselves that its gradually increasing power will show itself only as the result of conflict in the free intercourse of men.

Thinking thus of Apologetics and of its task, it is natural that we should feel little sympathy with the representation sometimes heard, to the effect that Apologetics concerns itself only with “the minimum of Christianity.” What is “the minimum of Christianity”? And what business has Apologetics with “the minimum of Christianity”? What Apologetics has to do with is certainly not any “minimum,” but just Christianity itself, whatever that may prove to be. Its function is not to vindicate for us the least that we can get along with, and yet manage to call ourselves Christians; but to validate the Christian “view of the world,” with all that is contained in the Christian “view of the world,” for the science of men. It must not be permitted to sink into an “apology” for the Christian religion, in the vulgar sense of that word, which makes it much the synonym of an “excuse”; and much less into an “apology” for what is at best an “apology for the Christian religion”—possibly nothing more than “a couple of starved and hunger-bitten dogmas,” which for the purposes of the moment we may choose to identify with “the essence of Christianity.” The function of Apologetics is not performed until it has placed in our hands God, religion, Christianity, and the Bible, and said to us, Now go on and explicate these fundamental facts in all their contents. When men speak of “the Apologetical minimum,” we cannot help suspecting that they have for the moment lost sight of Apologetics itself altogether, and are thinking rather of some specific “Apology” which they judge might usefully be launched in behalf of Christianity, in the conditions of thought for the moment obtaining. If such an “Apology” were identifiable with “Apologetics,” we might well sympathize with those who consider Apologetics a department of “Practical Theology,” and it is doubtless because they do not rise above such a conception of it that many encyclopaedists have so classified it. But the Apologetics with which we are concerned is a much more fundamental, a much more comprehensive, and a much more objective thing. It does not concern itself with how this man or that may best be approached to induce him to make a beginning of Christian living, or how this age or that may most easily be brought to give a hearing to the Christian conception of the world. It concerns itself with the solid objective establishment, after a fashion valid for all normally working minds and for all ages of the world in its developing thought, of those great basal facts which constitute the Christian religion; or, better, which embody in the concrete the entire knowledge of God accessible to men, and which, therefore, need only explication by means of the further theological disciplines in order to lay openly before the eyes of men the entirety of the knowledge of God within their reach.

It is because Dr. Beattie’s treatise conceives Apologetics after this fundamental, comprehensive, and objective fashion, and develops its contents from that point of view, that we accord it our heartiest welcome.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. According to Warfield, what two forces have contributed to the “misprision of apologetics”? Are those forces still relevant today?

2. Discuss Warfield’s critique of Kuyper? How does that critique comport with the arguments Kuyper gives in the Stone Lectures?

3. Is Warfield correct that apologetics must hold the first place among theological disciplines? Why or why not?

4. Discuss Warfield’s notion that the Scriptures must be authenticated to us before we can trust them.

*"Introduction to Francis R. Beattie's Apologetics," in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, ed. John Meeter. Copyright © 1970–1973. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing. Used with permission.

1. Encyclopaedie der Heilige Godgeleerdheid, Deel III, pp. 4ff.

2. Encyclopaedia, E. T., p. 629.

3. Encyclopaedia, E. T., p. 151.

CHAPTER 16

G. K. Chesterton

(1874–1936)

Gilbert Keith Chesterton is hard to categorize. A prolific writer, he published over eighty books, hundreds of poems, two hundred short stories, a number of plays, and over four thousand articles and essays. He wrote detective stories, using the character Father Brown, a detective-priest, to sleuth out the mysteries. He wrote a first-rate biography of Thomas Aquinas, as well as the entry on Charles Dickens for the Encyclopedia Britannica (1929). His works on Christian apologetics are recognized as being among the most persuasive and imaginative in the English language.

Chesterton was born into a middle-class family in London. He studied at University College and the Slade School of Art (1893–1896), where he began to find faith. Upset with a local group of artists that dubbed themselves “the pessimist club,” he thought their chief sin not to be nihilism but ingratitude. He found himself in the curious position of being thankful and needing someone to thank. He returned to the Anglican Church of his youth. No doubt the discussion of optimism and pessimism in our text emerged from this experience.

Chesterton never finished his degree, but went to work for the publishers Redway and Unwin (1896–1902). In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, a strong believer. Together they moved to Beaconsville, west of London. There he wrote for the Daily Herald and lectured around the country. After World War I he became a leader in the distributist movement, which believed that private property should be consolidated and then distributed to individuals and family units. Originally inspired by the 1891 papal social legislation De rerum novarum, the movement was meant to be a third way between socialism and capitalism. In 1922 Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism, in part through the influence of his close friend Hilaire Belloc. Throughout his life Chesterton enjoyed sparring with George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and many other twentieth-century skeptics. He had an abiding influence on C. S. Lewis and other British Christians. He died at his home in Beaconsfield after a remarkable career as a defender of the Christian faith.

Chesterton’s method is hard to classify. He has been called the “master of paradox.” Mathematicians, not poets, tend to go mad. Believing in oneself is ultimately destructive of confidence. Complaining that you may have only one spouse is like complaining you have only been born once. Orthodoxy is a romance liberalism knows nothing about. In the text we present below, Chesterton argues that Christianity is true precisely because it is unlikely. Orthodoxy (1908) is both autobiographical and theologically informed. Having written Heretics (1905) with critiques of some of the major skeptics of the day, Chesterton felt he needed to write something more affirmative of the Christian faith.

Orthodoxy*

Chapters V–VI

Chapter V

The Flag of the World

When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea of what they meant. The only thing which might be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist thought it as bad as it could be. Both these statements being obviously raving nonsense, one had to cast about for other explanations. An optimist could not mean a man who thought everything right and nothing wrong. For that is meaningless; it is like calling everything right and nothing left. Upon the whole, I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself. It would be unfair to omit altogether from the list the mysterious but suggestive definition said to have been given by a little girl, “An optimist is a man who looks after your eyes, and a pessimist is a man who looks after your feet.” I am not sure that this is not the best definition of all. There is even a sort of allegorical truth in it. For there might, perhaps, be a profitable distinction drawn between that more dreary thinker who thinks merely of our contact with the earth from moment to moment, and that happier thinker who considers rather our primary power of vision and of choice of road.

But this is a deep mistake in this alternative of the optimist and the pessimist. The assumption of it is that a man criticises this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown over a new suite of apartments. If a man came to this world from some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view. But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

In the last chapter it has been said that the primary feeling that this world is strange and yet attractive is best expressed in fairy tales. The reader may, if he likes, put down the next stage to that bellicose and even jingo literature which commonly comes next in the history of a boy. We all owe much sound morality to the penny dreadfuls. Whatever the reason, it seemed and still seems to me that our attitude towards life can be better expressed in terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism and approval. My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for the cosmic patriot.

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing—say Pimlico.[1] If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right. But they really were wrong in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests. Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, “I will not hit you if you do not hit me”; there is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, “We must not hit each other in the holy place.” They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean. The history of the Jews is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. The Ten Commandments which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity. And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men.

If it be granted that this primary devotion to a place or thing is a source of creative energy, we can pass on to a very peculiar fact. Let us reiterate for an instant that the only right optimism is a sort of universal patriotism. What is the matter with the pessimist? I think it can be stated by saying that he is the cosmic anti-patriot. And what is the matter with the anti-patriot? I think it can be stated, without undue bitterness, by saying that he is the candid friend. And what is the matter with the candid friend? There we strike the rock of real life and immutable human nature.

I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back—his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, “I am sorry to say we are ruined,” and is not sorry at all. And he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which was allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it. Because he is allowed to be pessimistic as a military adviser he is being pessimistic as a recruiting sergeant. Just in the same way the pessimist (who is the cosmic anti-patriot) uses the freedom that life allows to her counsellors to lure away the people from her flag. Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men.

The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises—he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things. What is the evil of the man commonly called an optimist? Obviously, it is felt that the optimist, wishing to defend the honour of this world, will defend the indefensible. He is the jingo of the universe; he will say, “My cosmos, right or wrong.” He will be less inclined to the reform of things; more inclined to a sort of front-bench official answer to all attacks, soothing every one with assurances. He will not wash the world, but whitewash the world. All this (which is true of a type of optimist) leads us to the one really interesting point of psychology, which could not be explained without it.

We say there must be a primal loyalty to life: the only question is, shall it be a natural or a supernatural loyalty? If you like to put it so, shall it be a reasonable or an unreasonable loyalty? Now, the extraordinary thing is that the bad optimism (the whitewashing, the weak defence of everything) comes in with the reasonable optimism. Rational optimism leads to stagnation: it is irrational optimism that leads to reform. Let me explain by using once more the parallel of patriotism. The man who is most likely to ruin the place he loves is exactly the man who loves it with a reason. The man who will improve the place is the man who loves it without a reason. If a man loves some feature of Pimlico (which seems unlikely), he may find himself defending that feature against Pimlico itself. But if he simply loves Pimlico itself, he may lay it waste and turn it into the New Jerusalem. I do not deny that reform may be excessive; I only say that it is the mystic patriot who reforms. Mere jingo self-contentment is commonest among those who have some pedantic reason for their patriotism. The worst jingoes do not love England, but a theory of England. If we love England for being an empire, we may overrate the success with which we rule the Hindoos. But if we love it only for being a nation, we can face all events: for it would be a nation even if the Hindoos ruled us. Thus also only those will permit their patriotism to falsify history whose patriotism depends on history. A man who loves England for being English will not mind how she arose. But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end in utter unreason—because he has a reason. A man who loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870. But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly what the French have done, and France is a good instance of the working paradox. Nowhere else is patriotism more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere else is reform more drastic and sweeping. The more transcendental is your patriotism, the more practical are your politics.

Perhaps the most everyday instance of this point is in the case of women; and their strange and strong loyalty. Some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man’s friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else. Women who are utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics in their criticism. Thackeray expressed this well when he made Pendennis’ mother, who worshipped her son as a god, yet assumed that he would go wrong as a man. She underrated his virtue, though she overrated his value. The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

This at least had come to be my position about all that was called optimism, pessimism, and improvement. Before any cosmic act of reform we must have a cosmic oath of allegiance. A man must be interested in life, then he could be disinterested in his views of it. “My son give me thy heart”; the heart must be fixed on the right thing: the moment we have a fixed heart we have a free hand. I must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism. It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance. But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective. It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put in those quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopenhauer—

Enough we live:—and if a life,

With large results so little rife,

Though bearable, seem hardly worth

This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth.

I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch. For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it? In this combination, I maintain, it is the rational optimist who fails, the irrational optimist who succeeds. He is ready to smash the whole universe for the sake of itself.

I put these things not in their mature logical sequence, but as they came: and this view was cleared and sharpened by an accident of the time. Under the lengthening shadow of Ibsen,[2] an argument arose whether it was not a very nice thing to murder one’s self. Grave moderns told us that we must not even say “poor fellow,” of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer[3] even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny. In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer’s suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man’s crime is different from other crimes—for it makes even crimes impossible.

About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything. One wants something to begin: the other wants everything to end. In other words, the martyr is noble, exactly because (however he renounces the world or execrates all humanity) he confesses this ultimate link with life; he sets his heart outside himself: he dies that something may live. The suicide is ignoble because he has not this link with being: he is a mere destroyer; spiritually, he destroys the universe. And then I remembered the stake and the cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist.

This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree. It was not that a line must be drawn somewhere, and that the self-slayer in exaltation fell within the line, the self-slayer in sadness just beyond it. The Christian feeling evidently was not merely that the suicide was carrying martyrdom too far. The Christian feeling was furiously for one and furiously against the other: these two things that looked so much alike were at opposite ends of heaven and hell. One man flung away his life; he was so good that his dry bones could heal cities in pestilence. Another man flung away life; he was so bad that his bones would pollute his brethren’s. I am not saying this fierceness was right; but why was it so fierce?

Here it was that I first found that my wandering feet were in some beaten track. Christianity had also felt this opposition of the martyr to the suicide: had it perhaps felt it for the same reason? Had Christianity felt what I felt, but could not (and cannot) express—this need for a first loyalty to things, and then for a ruinous reform of things? Then I remembered that it was actually the charge against Christianity that it combined these two things which I was wildly trying to combine. Christianity was accused, at one and the same time, of being too optimistic about the universe and of being too pessimistic about the world. The coincidence made me suddenly stand still.

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age. Suppose, for the sake of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing. A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth century. It is simply a matter of a man’s theory of things. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question. And the more I thought about when and how Christianity had come into the world, the more I felt that it had actually come to answer this question.

It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as if there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them. They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and sincerity. They will think me very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity was that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind. Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk. Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light. Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius[4] is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

All the same, it will be as well if Jones does not worship the sun and moon. If he does, there is a tendency for him to imitate them; to say, that because the sun burns insects alive, he may burn insects alive. He thinks that because the sun gives people sun-stroke, he may give his neighbour measles. He thinks that because the moon is said to drive men mad, he may drive his wife mad. This ugly side of mere external optimism had also shown itself in the ancient world. About the time when the Stoic idealism had begun to show the weaknesses of pessimism, the old nature worship of the ancients had begun to show the enormous weaknesses of optimism. Nature worship is natural enough while the society is young, or, in other words, Pantheism is all right as long as it is the worship of Pan. But Nature has another side which experience and sin are not slow in finding out, and it is no flippancy to say of the god Pan that he soon showed the cloven hoof. The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate. The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped. Stars and mountains must not be taken seriously. If they are, we end where the pagan nature worship ended. Because the earth is kind, we can imitate all her cruelties. Because sexuality is sane, we can all go mad about sexuality. Mere optimism had reached its insane and appropriate termination. The theory that everything was good had become an orgy of everything that was bad.

On the other side our idealist pessimists were represented by the old remnant of the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius and his friends had really given up the idea of any god in the universe and looked only to the god within. They had no hope of any virtue in nature, and hardly any hope of any virtue in society. They had not enough interest in the outer world really to wreck or revolutionise it. They did not love the city enough to set fire to it. Thus the ancient world was exactly in our own desolate dilemma. The only people who really enjoyed this world were busy breaking it up; and the virtuous people did not care enough about them to knock them down. In this dilemma (the same as ours) Christianity suddenly stepped in and offered a singular answer, which the world eventually accepted as the answer. It was the answer then, and I think it is the answer now.

This answer was like the slash of a sword; it sundered; it did not in any sense sentimentally unite. Briefly, it divided God from the cosmos. That transcendence and distinctness of the deity which some Christians now want to remove from Christianity, was really the only reason why any one wanted to be a Christian. It was the whole point of the Christian answer to the unhappy pessimist and the still more unhappy optimist. As I am here only concerned with their particular problem, I shall indicate only briefly this great metaphysical suggestion. All descriptions of the creating or sustaining principle in things must be metaphorical, because they must be verbal. Thus the pantheist is forced to speak of God in all things as if he were in a box. Thus the evolutionist has, in his very name, the idea of being unrolled like a carpet. All terms, religious and irreligious, are open to this charge. The only question is whether all terms are useless, or whether one can, with such a phrase, cover a distinct idea about the origin of things. I think one can, and so evidently does the evolutionist, or he would not talk about evolution. And the root phrase for all Christian theism was this, that God was a creator, as an artist is a creator. A poet is so separate from his poem that he himself speaks of it as a little thing he has “thrown off.” Even in giving it forth he has flung it away. This principle that all creation and procreation is a breaking off is at least as consistent through the cosmos as the evolutionary principle that all growth is a branching out. A woman loses a child even in having a child. All creation is separation. Birth is as solemn a parting as death.

It was the prime philosophic principle of Christianity that this divorce in the divine act of making (such as severs the poet from the poem or the mother from the new-born child) was the true description of the act whereby the absolute energy made the world. According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it. I will discuss the truth of this theorem later. Here I have only to point out with what a startling smoothness it passed the dilemma we have discussed in this chapter. In this way at least one could be both happy and indignant without degrading one’s self to be either a pessimist or an optimist. On this system one could fight all the forces of existence without deserting the flag of existence. One could be at peace with the universe and yet be at war with the world. St. George could still fight the dragon, however big the monster bulked in the cosmos, though he were bigger than the mighty cities or bigger than the everlasting hills. If he were as big as the world he could yet be killed in the name of the world. St. George had not to consider any obvious odds or proportions in the scale of things, but only the original secret of their design. He can shake his sword at the dragon, even if it is everything; even if the empty heavens over his head are only the huge arch of its open jaws.

And then followed an experience impossible to describe. It was as if I had been blundering about since my birth with two huge and unmanageable machines, of different shapes and without apparent connection—the world and the Christian tradition. I had found this hole in the world: the fact that one must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly. I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world—it had evidently been meant to go there—and then the strange thing began to happen. When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine. Or, to vary the metaphor, I was like one who had advanced into a hostile country to take one high fortress. And when that fort had fallen the whole country surrendered and turned solid behind me. The whole land was lit up, as it were, back to the first fields of my childhood. All those blind fancies of boyhood which in the fourth chapter I have tried in vain to trace on the darkness, became suddenly transparent and sane. I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice: it was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong colour than say it must by necessity have been that colour: it might verily have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the whole doctrine of the Fall. Even those dim and shapeless monsters of notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend, stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides of the creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cosy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist; to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds. And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe’s ship—even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.

But the important matter was this, that it entirely reversed the reason for optimism. And the instant the reversal was made it felt like the abrupt ease when a bone is put back in the socket. I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism. But all the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist’s pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.

Chapter VI

The Paradoxes of Christianity

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse instance of what I mean. Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.

It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is the uncanny element in everything. It seems a sort of secret treason in the universe. An apple or an orange is round enough to get itself called round, and yet is not round after all. The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to lure some simple astronomer into calling it a globe. A blade of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it comes to a point; but it doesn’t. Everywhere in things there is this element of the quiet and incalculable. It escapes the rationalists, but it never escapes till the last moment. From the grand curve of our earth it could easily be inferred that every inch of it was thus curved. It would seem rational that as a man has a brain on both sides, he should have a heart on both sides. Yet scientific men are still organizing expeditions to find the North Pole, because they are so fond of flat country. Scientific men are also still organizing expeditions to find a man’s heart; and when they try to find it, they generally get on the wrong side of him.

Now, actual insight or inspiration is best tested by whether it guesses these hidden malformations or surprises. If our mathematician from the moon saw the two arms and the two ears, he might deduce the two shoulder-blades and the two halves of the brain. But if he guessed that the man’s heart was in the right place, then I should call him something more than a mathematician. Now, this is exactly the claim which I have since come to propound for Christianity. Not merely that it deduces logical truths, but that when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found, so to speak, an illogical truth. It not only goes right about things, but it goes wrong (if one may say so) exactly where the things go wrong. Its plan suits the secret irregularities, and expects the unexpected. It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth. It will admit that a man has two hands, it will not admit (though all the Modernists wail to it) the obvious deduction that he has two hearts. It is my only purpose in this chapter to point this out; to show that whenever we feel there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.

I have alluded to an unmeaning phrase to the effect that such and such a creed cannot be believed in our age. Of course, anything can be believed in any age. But, oddly enough, there really is a sense in which a creed, if it is believed at all, can be believed more fixedly in a complex society than in a simple one. If a man finds Christianity true in Birmingham, he has actually clearer reasons for faith than if he had found it true in Mercia. For the more complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can be a coincidence. If snowflakes fell in the shape, say, of the heart of Midlothian, it might be an accident. But if snowflakes fell in the exact shape of the maze at Hampton Court, I think one might call it a miracle. It is exactly as of such a miracle that I have since come to feel of the philosophy of Christianity. The complication of our modern world proves the truth of the creed more perfectly than any of the plain problems of the ages of faith. It was in Notting Hill[1] and Battersea[2] that I began to see that Christianity was true. This is why the faith has that elaboration of doctrines and details which so much distresses those who admire Christianity without believing in it. When once one believes in a creed, one is proud of its complexity, as scientists are proud of the complexity of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it’s elaborately right. A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key.

But this involved accuracy of the thing makes it very difficult to do what I now have to do, to describe this accumulation of truth. It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, “Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?” he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, “Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen.” The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness. The belief is so big that it takes a long time to get it into action. And this hesitation chiefly arises, oddly enough, from an indifference about where one should begin. All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never get there. In the case of this defence of the Christian conviction I confess that I would as soon begin the argument with one thing as another; I would begin it with a turnip or a taximeter cab. But if I am to be at all careful about making my meaning clear, it will, I think, be wiser to continue the current arguments of the last chapter, which was concerned to urge the first of these mystical coincidences, or rather ratifications. All I had hitherto heard of Christian theology had alienated me from it. I was a pagan at the age of twelve, and a complete agnostic by the age of sixteen; and I cannot understand any one passing the age of seventeen without having asked himself so simple a question. I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity. But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that, even in that point, He had an advantage over some of His modern critics. I read the scientific and sceptical literature of my time—all of it, at least, that I could find written in English and lying about; and I read nothing else; I mean I read nothing else on any other note of philosophy. The penny dreadfuls which I also read were indeed in a healthy and heroic tradition of Christianity; but I did not know this at the time. I never read a line of Christian apologetics. I read as little as I can of them now. It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to orthodox theology. They sowed in my mind my first wild doubts of doubt. Our grandmothers were quite right when they said that Tom Paine and the free-thinkers unsettled the mind. They do. They unsettled mine horribly. The rationalist made me question whether reason was of any use whatever; and when I had finished Herbert Spencer I had got as far as doubting (for the first time) whether evolution had occurred at all. As I laid down the last of Colonel Ingersoll’s atheistic lectures the dreadful thought broke across my mind, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.” I was in a desperate way.

This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways. I take only one. As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley[3] to Bradlaugh,[4] a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind—the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them; there are fifty more.

Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought (and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow up St. Paul’s Cathedral. But the extraordinary thing is this. They did prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete satisfaction) that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in Chapter II., they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic. One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men, by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of Nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery. One great agnostic asked why Nature was not beautiful enough, and why it was hard to be free. Another great agnostic objected that Christian optimism, “the garment of make-believe woven by pious hands,” hid from us the fact that Nature was ugly, and that it was impossible to be free. One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise. This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it. If it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another; it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles. I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, the taunts which Swinburne[5] hurled at the dreariness of the creed—“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilaean, the world has grown gray with Thy breath.” But when I read the same poet’s accounts of paganism (as in “Atalanta”), I gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards. The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself was pitch dark. And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it. The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself a pessimist. I thought there must be something wrong. And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called “Christian,” especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting. The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile. Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way, were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem tenable that there was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels. The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different. I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never was angry. And now I was told to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun. The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did. The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape every instant.

I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one real objection to the faith. The one real objection to the Christian religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is a big place, full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies—I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of all humanity rounded on the omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense. It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing “Thou shalt not steal.” It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be “Little boys should tell the truth.” I believed this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still—with other things. And I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men’s universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had. We could trust the ethics of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two hundred years, but not in two thousand.

This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves? I saw the same thing on every side. I can give no further space to this discussion of it in detail; but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others. Thus, certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes and their children. But, then, other sceptics (slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their homes and children, and forbade them loneliness and contemplation. The charge was actually reversed. Or, again, certain phrases in the Epistles or the marriage service, were said by the anti-Christians to show contempt for woman’s intellect. But I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman’s intellect; for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent that “only women” went to it. Or again, Christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured. Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. It is often accused in the same breath of prim respectability and of religious extravagance. Between the covers of the same atheistic pamphlet I have found the faith rebuked for its disunion, “One thinks one thing, and one another,” and rebuked also for its union, “It is difference of opinion that prevents the world from going to the dogs.” In the same conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity for despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad—in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought Becket’s robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrees. The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrees, not in the bread and wine.

I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far. The fact that Swinburne was irritated at the unhappiness of Christians and yet more irritated at their happiness was easily explained. It was no longer a complication of diseases in Christianity, but a complication of diseases in Swinburne. The restraints of Christians saddened him simply because he was more hedonist than a healthy man should be. The faith of Christians angered him because he was more pessimist than a healthy man should be. In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked Christianity; not because there is anything especially anti-Malthusian about Christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human about Malthusianism.

Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle. There was really an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial criticism. It might be wise, I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable. Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other; still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek, meek beyond all decency. Now, it was just at this point of the speculation that I remembered my thoughts about the martyr and the suicide. In that matter there had been this combination between two almost insane positions which yet somehow amounted to sanity. This was just such another contradiction; and this I had already found to be true. This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which sceptics found the creed wrong; and in this I had found it right. Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long before I dreamed of Christianity. Then the most difficult and interesting part of the mental process opened, and I began to trace this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of our theology. The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics. But I need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God. Now let me trace this notion as I found it.

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little. Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which seeks to destroy the meson or balance of Aristotle. They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever. But the great truism of the meson remains for all thinking men, and these people have not upset any balance except their own. But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve: that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.

And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take, for instance, the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. The average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air. This is a manly and rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted against the compromise between optimism and pessimism—the “resignation” of Matthew Arnold. Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour. This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass. It does not make him look up and see marvels; for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them.

It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny—all that was to go. We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now Man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the gray ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think of one’s self, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go—as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, qua man, can be valueless. Here, again in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. The Church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.

Take another case: the complicated question of charity, which some highly uncharitable idealists seem to think quite easy. Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things—pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves (as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn’t: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look. Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social and political liberty. The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the “Odyssey.” He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside “Henry V.” Such a literary man is simply outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out. What we want is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments. It is all the difference between being free from them, as a man is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of a city. I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly detained there), but I am by no means free of that building. How can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing them in a clear space without breakage or wrong? This was the achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions. Granted the primary dogma of the war between divine and diabolic, the revolt and ruin of the world, their optimism and pessimism, as pure poetry, could be loosened like cataracts.

St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenhauer. Both passions were free because both were kept in their place. The optimist could pour out all the praise he liked on the gay music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banners going into battle. But he must not call the fight needless. The pessimist might draw as darkly as he chose the sickening marches or the sanguine wounds. But he must not call the fight hopeless. So it was with all the other moral problems, with pride, with protest, and with compassion. By defining its main doctrine, the Church not only kept seemingly inconsistent things side by side, but, what was more, allowed them to break out in a sort of artistic violence otherwise possible only to anarchists. Meekness grew more dramatic than madness. Historic Christianity rose into a high and strange coup de theatre of morality—things that are to virtue what the crimes of Nero are to vice. The spirits of indignation and of charity took terrible and attractive forms, ranging from that monkish fierceness that scourged like a dog the first and greatest of the Plantagenets, to the sublime pity of St. Catherine, who, in the official shambles, kissed the bloody head of the criminal. Poetry could be acted as well as composed. This heroic and monumental manner in ethics has entirely vanished with supernatural religion. They, being humble, could parade themselves: but we are too proud to be prominent. Our ethical teachers write reasonably for prison reform; but we are not likely to see Mr. Cadbury, or any eminent philanthropist, go into Reading Gaol and embrace the strangled corpse before it is cast into the quicklime. Our ethical teachers write mildly against the power of millionaires; but we are not likely to see Mr. Rockefeller, or any modern tyrant, publicly whipped in Westminster Abbey.

Thus, the double charges of the secularists, though throwing nothing but darkness and confusion on themselves, throw a real light on the faith. It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasised celibacy and emphasised the family; has at once (if one may put it so) been fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children. It has kept them side by side like two strong colours, red and white, like the red and white upon the shield of St. George. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink. It hates that combination of two colours which is the feeble expedient of the philosophers. It hates that evolution of black into white which is tantamount to a dirty gray. In fact, the whole theory of the Church on virginity might be symbolized in the statement that white is a colour: not merely the absence of a colour. All that I am urging here can be expressed by saying that Christianity sought in most of these cases to keep two colours coexistent but pure. It is not a mixture like russet or purple; it is rather like a shot silk, for a shot silk is always at right angles, and is in the pattern of the cross.

So it is also, of course, with the contradictory charges of the anti-Christians about submission and slaughter. It is true that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight; and it is true that those who fought were like thunderbolts and those who did not fight were like statues. All this simply means that the Church preferred to use its Supermen and to use its Tolstoyans. There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers. There must be some good in the idea of non-resistance, for so many good men seem to enjoy being Quakers. All that the Church did (so far as that goes) was to prevent either of these good things from ousting the other. They existed side by side. The Tolstoyans, having all the scruples of monks, simply became monks. The Quakers became a club instead of becoming a sect. Monks said all that Tolstoy[6] says; they poured out lucid lamentations about the cruelty of battles and the vanity of revenge. But the Tolstoyans are not quite right enough to run the whole world; and in the ages of faith they were not allowed to run it. The world did not lose the last charge of Sir James Douglas or the banner of Joan the Maid. And sometimes this pure gentleness and this pure fierceness met and justified their juncture; the paradox of all the prophets was fulfilled, and, in the soul of St. Louis, the lion lay down with the lamb. But remember that this text is too lightly interpreted. It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is—Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.

This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities of life. This is knowing that a man’s heart is to the left and not in the middle. This is knowing not only that the earth is round, but knowing exactly where it is flat. Christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact every one did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe—that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature. For no one wants to be forgiven for a big sin as if it were a little one. Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one may be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy—that was a discovery in psychology. Any one might say, “Neither swagger nor grovel”; and it would have been a limit. But to say, “Here you can swagger and there you can grovel”—that was an emancipation.

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket[7] got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not always in one man’s body as in Becket’s; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon. If anyone wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the Pagan empire would have said, “You shall all be Roman citizens, and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and swift.” But the instinct of Christian Europe says, “Let the German remain slow and reverent, that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental. We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity called Germany shall correct the insanity called France.”

Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which, anyone can see, need but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst his chain in the forgotten forests of the north. Of these theological equalisations I have to speak afterwards. Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. How does Chesterton use the polarity optimist-pessimist for his purposes?

2. What is meant by the following? “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” Or, “They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous.”

3. How does Christian faith separate between martyrdom and suicide?

4. Comment: “Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.”

5. Is Chesterton’s argument about God letting the world go free helpful?

6. What does he mean that the world is nearly reasonable, but not quite? How does that characterize his apologetic?

7. Why does he rather disdain apologetics?

8. How did reading skeptics reinforce his suspicion that Christianity was true?

9. What does he mean by saying, “If Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed”?

10. How is orthodoxy a “thrilling romance”?

*New York: Dodd, Mead, 1908.

1. Pimlico in Chesterton’s time was a poor section of London, and Chelsea a wealthier one.

2. Henrik Johan Ibsen (1828–1906) was a well-known Norwegian playwright, theatrical director, and poet.

3. William Archer (1856–1924) was a Scottish theater critic.

4. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (AD 121–180) was a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher.

1. Notting Hill is located in West London, England, in close proximity to the Kensington Gardens and included within the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

2. Battersea is located in the London borough of Wandsworth.

3. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) was an English biologist known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” because of his defense of Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution.

4. Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891) was a political activist and was an atheist and founder of the National Secular Society.

5. Charles Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909) was a nineteenth-century controversial English poet.

6. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian novelist.

7. Thomas Becket (1118–1170) was archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his assassination.

CHAPTER 17

J. Gresham Machen

(1881–1937)

John Gresham (pronounced “Gressam”) Machen was born to a prominent family in Baltimore, Maryland. He distinguished himself early as a scholar, studying classics at Johns Hopkins and earning the Phi Beta Kappa membership upon graduation (1901). Thereupon he undertook theological studies at Princeton Theological Seminary (1902–1904). He spent a year in Germany, one that was a considerable challenge to him. Studying under professor Wilhelm Hermann, a noted liberal theologian, Machen was at first confused by the warm piety and thorough scholarship of this man. In the end he became more convinced than ever of biblical orthodoxy.

Machen accepted a position on the faculty of Princeton Seminary as instructor in New Testament. He was greatly influenced by Francis Patton and Benjamin Warfield, who helped fully restore his confidence in a conservative Reformed theology. He taught at the seminary from 1906 to 1916, when he went to France to serve in the YMCA during World War I. He was opposed to American involvement in the war and sharply critical of Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to “make the world safe for democracy,” fearing that the types of global alliances Wilson promoted could not address fundamental problems and would lead inevitably to more wars.

Upon his return from Europe in 1918, Machen continued to teach the New Testament. He also became a leader in the so-called modernist-fundamentalist controversies alluded to above. Machen was not comfortable with the label fundamentalist and indeed differed with fundamentalism on several accounts. For example, Machen did not want to have strict laws forbidding divorce, believing—as stated in the Westminster Standards—that there are some grounds that allow it. Intriguingly, he was against regulations against child labor, not because he was insensitive to the abuse but because he did not want the government to have the right to investigate people’s homes. Machen also opposed prohibition, for which he was accused of having ties to distilleries. His stance earned him the admiration of H. L. Mencken, the famous skeptic who nevertheless respected Machen’s integrity as a Christian.

In 1924 a document known as the Auburn Affirmation was passed. It stated that the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. did not have the right to impose the so-called five fundamentals as a test of the orthodoxy of its ministers. They were (1) the inerrancy of Scripture, (2) the virgin birth and full deity of Jesus Christ, (3) the substitutionary atonement, (4) the physical resurrection of Christ, and (5) the veracity of Christ’s miracles. The argument of Robert Nichols, the professor from Auburn Theological Seminary, New York, who proposed the affirmation, was that this added another standard to the Bible and the Westminster Standards and was a contradiction to Presbyterian polity. The reality of the affirmation, though, was that it allowed liberal Christianity a strong voice in the church. Not only were the five fundamentals no longer required, but freedom of conscience and church unity were extolled.

In 1929 the general assembly reorganized Princeton Theological Seminary by placing two Auburn Affirmation signers on the board. Machen left Princeton, along with Robert Dick Wilson, Oswald T. Allis, and Cornelius Van Til. In the summer they formed a new seminary, Westminster Theological Seminary, intending to continue the “Old Princeton” tradition, which represented strong Reformed theology and a high view of Scripture. The four were joined by Ned Stonehouse, Allan MacRae, Paul Woolley, and R. B. Kuiper. E. J. Young joined the faculty several years later. While Geerhardus Vos had strong sympathies for the cause and an excellent friendship with Machen, he felt he needed to stay at Princeton, which he did until 1933, when he retired.

Space prohibits going into sufficient details to describe the history of Westminster. From the beginning it aimed at the highest academic standards, along with its orthodoxy. Although limited in their ability to interact with the larger world of research, Westminster professors were no doubt the leaders of conservative scholarship in defense of the Christian position.

Machen would form two other institutions that aimed at the purity of the visible church. The first was the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, in 1933. Machen had become distressed at the official mission board’s toleration of liberals on the mission field, including Pearl Buck, and responded by the creation of an independent agency that would make sure only orthodox people were sent abroad. In 1934 the general assembly declared the independent board to be unconstitutional. A month later the Presbytery of New Brunswick (to which he still belonged, despite the move to Philadelphia) asked Machen to resign. Upon his refusal, after a long fight he was suspended from the ministry. Despite pleas from friends like Clarence Macartney, Machen refused to acquiesce and found himself, along with seven others, deposed in 1936. Whereupon he and a number of colleagues formed a new denomination, originally called the Presbyterian Church of America, but soon named the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Machen died suddenly of pneumonia, while on a speaking tour in North Dakota, at fifty-five years of age.

Machen wrote a number of books, many of them in defense of biblical religion. His New Testament Greek for Beginners is still widely used. The Origins of Paul’s Religion (1925) was a learned polemic against the current notion that Jesus taught the pure religion of love whereas Paul turned it into something of a legalistic faith. The title Christianity and Liberalism (1923) is telling. Machen did not think liberalism was a version of the Christian faith, but another religion. The two sprung from two different roots, he argued; the one is Christianity, the other “a naturalistic or agnostic modernism . . . fundamentally hostile to the Christian faith.”[1]

The chapter headings of Christianity and Liberalism show Machen’s strategy of covering every critical doctrine in theology and comparing the two approaches: (“Introduction”), “Doctrine,” “God and Man,” “The Bible,” “Christ,” “Salvation,” “The Church.” We have chosen to reproduce chapters 3 and 4, since they articulate the apologetic approach of Machen in a particularly clear manner. They also demonstrate that Machen was not simply a classical “evidentialist,” since he constantly refers to basic assumptions or presuppositions.

1. From The British Weekly, September 11, 1924, quoted in Carl R. Trueman, “Foreword,” in J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), ix n1.

Christianity and Liberalism

Chapters 3–4*

Chapter 3

God and Man

It has been observed in the last chapter that Christianity is based on an account of something that happened in the first century of our era. But before that account can be received, certain presuppositions must be accepted. The Christian gospel consists in an account of how God saved man, and before that gospel can be understood something must be known (1) about God and (2) about man. The doctrine of God and the doctrine of man are the two great presuppositions of the gospel. With regard to these presuppositions, as with regard to the gospel itself, modern liberalism is diametrically opposed to Christianity.

It is opposed to Christianity, in the first place, in its conception of God. But at this point we are met with a particularly insistent form of that objection to doctrinal matters which has already been considered. It is unnecessary, we are told, to have a “conception” of God; theology, or the knowledge of God, it is said, is the death of religion; we should not seek to know God, but should merely feel His presence.

With regard to this objection, it ought to be observed that if religion consists merely in feeling the presence of God, it is devoid of any moral quality whatever. Pure feeling, if there be such a thing, is non-moral. What makes affection for a human friend, for example, such an ennobling thing is the knowledge which we possess of the character of our friend. Human affection, apparently so simple, is really just bristling with dogma. It depends upon a host of observations treasured up in the mind with regard to the character of our friends. But if human affection is thus really dependent upon knowledge, why should it be otherwise with that supreme personal relationship which is at the basis of religion? Why should we be indignant about slanders directed against a human friend, while at the same time we are patient about the basest slanders directed against our God? Certainly it does make the greatest possible difference what we think about God; the knowledge of God is the very basis of religion.

How, then, shall God be known; how shall we become so acquainted with Him that personal fellowship may become possible? Some liberal preachers would say that we become acquainted with God only through Jesus. That assertion has an appearance of loyalty to our Lord, but in reality it is highly derogatory to Him. For Jesus Himself plainly recognized the validity of other ways of knowing God, and to reject those other ways is to reject the things that lay at the very center of Jesus’ life. Jesus plainly found God’s hand in nature; the lilies of the field revealed to Him the weaving of God. He found God also in the moral law; the law written in the hearts of men was God’s law, which revealed His righteousness. Finally Jesus plainly found God revealed in the Scriptures. How profound was our Lord’s use of the words of prophets and psalmists! To say that such revelation of God was invalid, or is useless to us today, is to do despite to things that lay closest to Jesus’ mind and heart.

But, as a matter of fact, when men say that we know God only as He is revealed in Jesus, they are denying all real knowledge of God whatever. For unless there be some idea of God independent of Jesus, the ascription of deity to Jesus has no meaning. To say, “Jesus is God,” is meaningless unless the word “God” has an antecedent meaning attached to it. And the attaching of a meaning to the word “God” is accomplished by the means which have just been mentioned. We are not forgetting the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” But these words do not mean that if a man had never known what the word “God” means, he could come to attach an idea to that word merely by his knowledge of Jesus’ character. On the contrary, the disciples to whom Jesus was speaking had already a very definite conception of God; a knowledge of the one supreme Person was presupposed in all that Jesus said. But the disciples desired not only a knowledge of God but also intimate, personal contact. And that came through their intercourse with Jesus. Jesus revealed, in a wonderfully intimate way, the character of God, but such revelation obtained its true significance only on the basis both of the Old Testament heritage and of Jesus’ own teaching. Rational theism, the knowledge of one Supreme Person, Maker and active Ruler of the world, is at the very root of Christianity.

But, the modern preacher will say, it is incongruous to attribute to Jesus an acceptance of “rational theism”; Jesus had a practical, not a theoretical, knowledge of God. There is a sense in which these words are true. Certainly no part of Jesus’ knowledge of God was merely theoretical; everything that Jesus knew about God touched His heart and determined His actions. In that sense, Jesus’ knowledge of God was “practical.” But unfortunately that is not the sense in which the assertion of modern liberalism is meant. What is frequently meant by a “practical” knowledge of God in modern parlance is not a theoretical knowledge of God that is also practical, but a practical knowledge which is not theoretical—in other words, a knowledge which gives no information about objective reality, a knowledge which is no knowledge at all. And nothing could possibly be more unlike the religion of Jesus than that. The relation of Jesus to His heavenly Father was not a relation to a vague and impersonal goodness, it was not a relation which merely clothed itself in symbolic, personal form. On the contrary, it was a relation to a real Person, whose existence was just as definite and just as much a subject of theoretic knowledge as the existence of the lilies of the field that God had clothed. The very basis of the religion of Jesus was a triumphant belief in the real existence of a personal God.

And without that belief no type of religion can rightly appeal to Jesus today. Jesus was a theist, and rational theism is at the basis of Christianity. Jesus did not, indeed, support His theism by argument; He did not provide in advance answers to the Kantian attack upon the theistic proofs. But that means not that He was indifferent to the belief which is the logical result of those proofs, but that the belief stood so firm, both to Him and to His hearers, that in His teaching it is always presupposed. So today it is not necessary for all Christians to analyze the logical basis of their belief in God; the human mind has a wonderful faculty for the condensation of perfectly valid arguments, and what seems like an instinctive belief may turn out to be the result of many logical steps. Or, rather, it may be that the belief in a personal God is the result of a primitive revelation, and that the theistic proofs are only the logical confirmation of what was originally arrived at by a different means. At any rate, the logical confirmation of the belief in God is a vital concern to the Christian; at this point as at many others religion and philosophy are connected in the most intimate possible way. True religion can make no peace with a false philosophy, any more than with a science that is falsely so-called; a thing cannot possibly be true in religion and false in philosophy or in science. All methods of arriving at truth, if they be valid methods, will arrive at a harmonious result. Certainly the atheistic or agnostic Christianity which sometimes goes under the name of a “practical” religion is no Christianity at all. At the very root of Christianity is the belief in the real existence of a personal God.

Strangely enough, at the very time when modern liberalism is decrying the theistic proofs, and taking refuge in a “practical” knowledge which shall somehow be independent of scientifically or philosophically ascertained facts, the liberal preacher loves to use one designation of God which is nothing if not theistic; he loves to speak of God as “Father.” The term certainly has the merit of ascribing personality to God. By some of those who use it, indeed, it is not seriously meant; by some it is employed because it is useful, not because it is true. But not all liberals are able to make the subtle distinction between theoretic judgments and judgments of value; some liberals, though perhaps a decreasing number, are true believers in a personal God. And such men are able to think of God truly as a Father.

The term presents a very lofty conception of God. It is not indeed exclusively Christian; the term “Father” has been applied to God outside of Christianity. It appears, for example, in the widespread belief in an “All-Father,” which prevails among many races even in company with polytheism; it appears here and there in the Old Testament, and in pre-Christian Jewish writings subsequent to the Old Testament period. Such occurrences of the term are by no means devoid of significance. The Old Testament usage, in particular, is a worthy precursor of our Lord’s teaching; for although in the Old Testament the word “Father” ordinarily designates God in relation not to the individual, but to the nation or to the king, yet the individual Israelite, because of his part in the chosen people, felt himself to be in a peculiarly intimate relation to the covenant God. But despite this anticipation of the teaching of our Lord, Jesus brought such an incomparable enrichment of the usage of the term, that it is a correct instinct which regards the thought of God as Father as something characteristically Christian.

Modern men have been so much impressed with this element in Jesus’ teaching that they have sometimes been inclined to regard it as the very sum and substance of our religion. We are not interested, they say, in many things for which men formerly gave their lives; we are not interested in the theology of the creeds; we are not interested in the doctrines of sin and salvation; we are not interested in atonement through the blood of Christ: enough for us is the simple truth of the fatherhood of God and its corollary, the brotherhood of man. We may not be very orthodox in the theological sense, they continue, but of course you will recognize us as Christians because we accept Jesus’ teaching as to the Father God.

It is very strange how intelligent persons can speak in this way. It is very strange how those who accept only the universal fatherhood of God as the sum and substance of religion can regard themselves as Christians or can appeal to Jesus of Nazareth. For the plain fact is that this modern doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God formed no part whatever of Jesus’ teaching. Where is it that Jesus may be supposed to have taught the universal fatherhood of God? Certainly it is not in the parable of the Prodigal Son. For in the first place, the publicans and sinners whose acceptance by Jesus formed the occasion both of the Pharisees’ objection and of Jesus’ answer to them by means of the parable, were not any men anywhere, but were members of the chosen people and as such might be designated as sons of God. In the second place, a parable is certainly not to be pressed in its details. So here because the joy of the father in the parable is like the joy of God when a sinner receives salvation at Jesus’ hand, it does not follow that the relation which God sustains to still unrepentant sinners is that of a Father to his children. Where else, then, can the universal fatherhood of God be found? Surely not in the Sermon on the Mount; for throughout the Sermon on the Mount those who can call God Father are distinguished in the most emphatic way from the great world of the Gentiles outside. One passage in the discourse has indeed been urged in support of the modern doctrine: “But I say unto you, love your enemies and pray for them that persecute you; that ye may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He maketh His sun to rise on evil and good and sendeth rain on just and unjust” (Matt. v. 44, 45). But the passage certainly will not bear the weight which is hung upon it. God is indeed represented here as caring for all men whether evil or good, but He is certainly not called the Father of all. Indeed it might almost be said that the point of the passage depends on the fact that He is not the Father of all. He cares even for those who are not His children but His enemies; so His children, Jesus’ disciples, ought to imitate Him by loving even those who are not their brethren but their persecutors. The modern doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God is not to be found in the teaching of Jesus.

And it is not to be found in the New Testament. The whole New Testament and Jesus Himself do indeed represent God as standing in a relation to all men, whether Christians or not, which is analogous to that in which a father stands to his children. He is the Author of the being of all, and as such might well be called the Father of all. He cares for all, and for that reason also might be called the Father of all. Here and there the figure of fatherhood seems to be used to designate this broader relationship which God sustains to all men or even to all created beings. So in an isolated passage in Hebrews, God is spoken of as the “Father of spirits” (Heb. xii. 9). Here perhaps it is the relation of God, as creator, to the personal beings whom He has created which is in view. One of the clearest instances of the broader use of the figure of fatherhood is found in the speech of Paul at Athens, Acts xvii. 28: “For we are also His offspring.” Here it is plainly the relation in which God stands to all men, whether Christians or not, which is in mind. But the words form part of an hexameter line and are taken from a pagan poet; they are not represented as part of the gospel, but merely as belonging to the common meeting-ground which Paul discovered in speaking to his pagan hearers. This passage is only typical of what appears, with respect to a universal fatherhood of God, in the New Testament as a whole. Something analogous to a universal fatherhood of God is taught in the New Testament. Here and there the terminology of fatherhood and sonship is even used to describe this general relationship. But such instances are extremely rare. Ordinarily the lofty term “Father” is used to describe a relationship of a far more intimate kind, the relationship in which God stands to the company of the redeemed.

The modern doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God, then, which is being celebrated as “the essence of Christianity,” really belongs at best only to that vague natural religion which forms the presupposition which the Christian preacher can use when the gospel is to be proclaimed; and when it is regarded as a reassuring, all-sufficient thing, it comes into direct opposition to the New Testament. The gospel itself refers to something entirely different; the really distinctive New Testament teaching about the fatherhood of God concerns only those who have been brought into the household of faith.

There is nothing narrow about such teaching; for the door of the household of faith is open wide to all. That door is the “new and living way” which Jesus opened by His blood. And if we really love our fellow men, we shall not go about the world, with the liberal preacher, trying to make men satisfied with the coldness of a vague natural religion. But by the preaching of the gospel we shall invite them into the warmth and joy of the house of God. Christianity offers men all that is offered by the modern liberal teaching about the universal fatherhood of God; but it is Christianity only because it offers also infinitely more.

But the liberal conception of God differs even more fundamentally from the Christian view than in the different circle of ideas connected with the terminology of fatherhood. The truth is that liberalism has lost sight of the very center and core of the Christian teaching. In the Christian view of God as set forth in the Bible, there are many elements. But one attribute of God is absolutely fundamental in the Bible; one attribute is absolutely necessary in order to render intelligible all the rest. That attribute is the awful transcendence of God. From beginning to end the Bible is concerned to set forth the awful gulf that separates the creature from the Creator. It is true, indeed, that according to the Bible God is immanent in the world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But he is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and Upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed.

In modern liberalism, on the other hand, this sharp distinction between God and the world is broken down, and the name “God” is applied to the mighty world process itself. We find ourselves in the midst of a mighty process, which manifests itself in the indefinitely small and in the indefinitely great—in the infinitesimal life which is revealed through the microscope and in the vast movements of the heavenly spheres. To this world-process, of which we ourselves form a part, we apply the dread name of “God.” God, therefore, it is said in effect, is not a person distinct from ourselves; on the contrary our life is a part of His. Thus the Gospel story of the Incarnation, according to modern liberalism, is sometimes thought of as a symbol of the general truth that man at his best is one with God.

It is strange how such a representation can be regarded as anything new, for as a matter of fact, pantheism is a very ancient phenomenon. It has always been with us, to blight the religious life of man. And modern liberalism, even when it is not consistently pantheistic, is at any rate pantheizing. It tends everywhere to break down the separateness between God and the world, and the sharp personal distinction between God and man. Even the sin of man on this view ought logically to be regarded as part of the life of God. Very different is the living and holy God of the Bible and of Christian faith.

Christianity differs from liberalism, then, in the first place, in its conception of God. But it also differs in its conception of man.

Modern liberalism has lost all sense of the gulf that separates the creature from the Creator; its doctrine of man follows naturally from its doctrine of God. But it is not only the creature limitations of mankind which are denied. Even more important is another difference. According to the Bible, man is a sinner under the just condemnation of God; according to modern liberalism, there is really no such thing as sin. At the very root of the modern liberal movement is the loss of the consciousness of sin.[1]

The consciousness of sin was formerly the starting-point of all preaching; but today it is gone. Characteristic of the modern age, above all else, is a supreme confidence in human goodness; the religious literature of the day is redolent of that confidence. Get beneath the rough exterior of men, we are told, and we shall discover enough self-sacrifice to found upon it the hope of society; the world’s evil, it is said, can be overcome with the world’s good; no help is needed from outside the world.

What has produced this satisfaction with human goodness? What has become of the consciousness of sin? The consciousness of sin has certainly been lost. But what has removed it from the hearts of men?

In the first place, the war has perhaps had something to do with the change. In time of war, our attention is called so exclusively to the sins of other people that we are sometimes inclined to forget our own sins. Attention to the sins of other people is, indeed, sometimes necessary. It is quite right to be indignant against any oppression of the weak which is being carried on by the strong. But such a habit of mind, if made permanent, if carried over into the days of peace, has with the collectivism of the modern state to obscure the individual, personal character of guilt. If John Smith beats his wife nowadays, no one is so old-fashioned as to blame John Smith for it. On the contrary, it is said, John Smith is evidently the victim of some more of that Bolshevistic propaganda; Congress ought to be called in extra session in order to take up the case of John Smith in an alien and sedition law.

But the loss of the consciousness of sin is far deeper than the war; it has its roots in a mighty spiritual process which has been active during the past seventy-five years. Like other great movements, that process has come silently—so silently that its results have been achieved before the plain man was even aware of what was taking place. Nevertheless, despite all superficial continuity, a remarkable change has come about within the last seventy-five years. The change is nothing less than the substitution of paganism for Christianity as the dominant view of life. Seventy-five years ago, Western civilization, despite inconsistencies, was still predominantly Christian; today it is predominantly pagan.

In speaking of “paganism,” we are not using a term of reproach. Ancient Greece was pagan, but it was glorious, and the modern world has not even begun to equal its achievements. What, then, is paganism? The answer is not really difficult. Paganism is that view of life which finds the highest goal of human existence in the healthy and harmonious and joyous development of existing human faculties. Very different is the Christian ideal. Paganism is optimistic with regard to unaided human nature, whereas Christianity is the religion of the broken heart.

In saying that Christianity is the religion of the broken heart, we do not mean that Christianity ends with the broken heart; we do not mean that the characteristic Christian attitude is a continual beating on the breast or a continual crying of “Woe is me.” Nothing could be further from the fact. On the contrary, Christianity means that sin is faced once for all, and then is cast, by the grace of God, forever into the depths of the sea. The trouble with the paganism of ancient Greece, as with the paganism of modern times, was not in the superstructure, which was glorious, but in the foundation, which was rotten. There was always something to be covered up; the enthusiasm of the architect was maintained only by ignoring the disturbing fact of sin. In Christianity, on the other hand, nothing needs to be covered up. The fact of sin is faced squarely once for all, and is dealt with by the grace of God. But then, after sin has been removed by the grace of God, the Christian can proceed to develop joyously every faculty that God has given him. Such is the higher Christian humanism—a humanism founded not upon human pride but upon divine grace.

But although Christianity does not end with the broken heart, it does begin with the broken heart; it begins with the consciousness of sin. Without the consciousness of sin, the whole of the gospel will seem to be an idle tale. But how can the consciousness of sin be revived? Something no doubt can be accomplished by the proclamation of the law of God, for the law reveals transgressions. The whole of the law, moreover, should be proclaimed. It will hardly be wise to adopt the suggestion (recently offered among many suggestions as to the ways in which we shall have to modify our message in order to retain the allegiance of the returning soldiers) that we must stop treating the little sins as though they were big sins. That suggestion means apparently that we must not worry too much about the little sins, but must let them remain unmolested.

With regard to such an expedient, it may perhaps be suggested that in the moral battle we are fighting against a very resourceful enemy, who does not reveal the position of his guns by desultory artillery action when he plans a great attack. In the moral battle, as in the Great European War, the quiet sectors are usually the most dangerous. It is through the “little sins” that Satan gains an entrance into our lives. Probably, therefore, it will be prudent to watch all sectors of the front and lose no time about introducing the unity of command.

But if the consciousness of sin is to be produced, the law of God must be proclaimed in the lives of Christian people as well as in word. It is quite useless for the preacher to breathe out fire and brimstone from the pulpit, if at the same time the occupants of the pews go on taking sin very lightly and being content with the moral standards of the world. The rank and file of the Church must do their part in so proclaiming the law of God by their lives that the secrets of men’s hearts shall be revealed.

All these things, however, are in themselves quite insufficient to produce the consciousness of sin. The more one observes the condition of the Church, the more one feels obliged to confess that the conviction of sin is a great mystery, which can be produced only by the Spirit of God. Proclamation of the law, in word and in deed, can prepare for the experience, but the experience itself comes from God. When a man has that experience, when a man comes under the conviction of sin, his whole attitude toward life is transformed; he wonders at his former blindness, and the message of the gospel, which formerly seemed to be an idle tale, becomes now instinct with light. But it is God alone who can produce the change.

Only, let us not try to do without the Spirit of God. The fundamental fault of the modern Church is that she is busily engaged in an absolutely impossible task—she is busily engaged in calling the righteous to repentance. Modern preachers are trying to bring men into the Church without requiring them to relinquish their pride; they are trying to help men avoid the conviction of sin. The preacher gets up into the pulpit, opens the Bible, and addresses the congregation somewhat as follows: “You people are very good,” he says; “you respond to every appeal that looks toward the welfare of the community. Now we have in the Bible—especially in the life of Jesus—something so good that we believe it is good enough even for you good people.” Such is modern preaching. It is heard every Sunday in thousands of pulpits. But it is entirely futile. Even our Lord did not call the righteous to repentance, and probably we shall be no more successful than He.

Chapter 4

The Bible

Modern liberalism, it has been observed so far, has lost sight of the two great presuppositions of the Christian message—the living God, and the fact of sin. The liberal doctrine of God and the liberal doctrine of man are both diametrically opposite to the Christian view. But the divergence concerns not only the presuppositions of the message, but also the message itself.

The Christian message has come to us through the Bible. What shall we think about this Book in which the message is contained?

According to the Christian view, the Bible contains an account of a revelation from God to man, which is found nowhere else. It is true, the Bible also contains a confirmation and a wonderful enrichment of the revelations which are given also by the things that God has made and by the conscience of man. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handywork”—these words are a confirmation of the revelation of God in nature; “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”—these words are a confirmation of what is attested by the conscience. But in addition to such reaffirmations of what might conceivably be learned elsewhere—as a matter of fact, because of men’s blindness, even so much is learned elsewhere only in comparatively obscure fashion—the Bible also contains an account of a revelation which is absolutely new. That new revelation concerns the way by which sinful man can come into communion with the living God.

The way was opened, according to the Bible, by an act of God, when, almost nineteen hundred years ago, outside the walls of Jerusalem, the eternal Son was offered as a sacrifice for the sins of men. To that one great event the whole Old Testament looks forward, and in that one event the whole of the New Testament finds its center and core. Salvation then, according to the Bible, is not something that was discovered, but something that happened. Hence appears the uniqueness of the Bible. All the ideas of Christianity might be discovered in some other religion, yet there would be in that other religion no Christianity. For Christianity depends, not upon a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event. Without that event, the world, in the Christian view, is altogether dark, and humanity is lost under the guilt of sin. There can be no salvation by the discovery of eternal truth, for eternal truth brings naught but despair, because of sin. But a new face has been put upon life by the blessed thing that God did when He offered up His only begotten Son.

An objection is sometimes offered against this view of the contents of the Bible.[1] Must we, it is said, depend upon what happened so long ago? Does salvation wait upon the examination of musty records? Is the trained student of Palestinian history the modern priest without whose gracious intervention no one can see God? Can we not find, instead, a salvation that is independent of history, a salvation that depends only on what is with us here and now?

The objection is not devoid of weight. But it ignores one of the primary evidences for the truth of the gospel record. That evidence is found in Christian experience. Salvation does depend upon what happened long ago, but the event of long ago has effects that continue until today. We are told in the New Testament that Jesus offered Himself as a sacrifice for the sins of those who should believe on Him. That is a record of a past event. But we can make trial of it today, and making trial of it we find it to be true. We are told in the New Testament that on a certain morning long ago Jesus rose from the dead. That again is a record of a past event. But again we can make trial of it, and making trial of it we discover that Jesus is truly a living Savior today.

But at this point a fatal error lies in wait. It is one of the root errors of modern liberalism. Christian experience, we have just said, is useful as confirming the gospel message. But because it is necessary, many men have jumped to the conclusion that it is all that is necessary. Having a present experience of Christ in the heart, may we not, it is said, hold that experience no matter what history may tell us as to the events of the first Easter morning? May we not make ourselves altogether independent of the results of Biblical criticism? No matter what sort of man history may tell us Jesus of Nazareth actually was, no matter what history may say about the real meaning of His death or about the story of His alleged resurrection, may we not continue to experience the presence of Christ in our souls?

The trouble is that the experience thus maintained is not Christian experience. Religious experience it may be, but Christian experience it certainly is not. For Christian experience depends absolutely upon an event. The Christian says to himself: “I have meditated upon the problem of becoming right with God, I have tried to produce a righteousness that will stand in His sight; but when I heard the gospel message I learned that what I had weakly striven to accomplish had been accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ when He died for me on the Cross and completed His redeeming work by the glorious resurrection. If the thing has not yet been done, if I merely have an idea of its accomplishment, then I am of all men most miserable, for I am still in my sins. My Christian life, then, depends altogether upon the truth of the New Testament record.”

Christian experience is rightly used when it confirms the documentary evidence. But it can never possibly provide a substitute for the documentary evidence. We know that the gospel story is true partly because of the early date of the documents in which it appears, the evidence as to their authorship, the internal evidence of their truth, the impossibility of explaining them as being based upon deception or upon myth. This evidence is gloriously confirmed by present experience, which adds to the documentary evidence that wonderful directness and immediacy of conviction which delivers us from fear. Christian experience is rightly used when it helps to convince us that the events narrated in the New Testament actually did occur; but it can never enable us to be Christians whether the events occurred or not. It is a fair flower, and should be prized as a gift of God. But cut it from its root in the blessed Book, and it soon withers away and dies.

Thus the revelation of which an account is contained in the Bible embraces not only a reaffirmation of eternal truths—itself necessary because the truths have been obscured by the blinding effect of sin—but also a revelation which sets forth the meaning of an act of God.

The contents of the Bible, then, are unique. But another fact about the Bible is also important. The Bible might contain an account of a true revelation from God, and yet the account be full of error. Before the full authority of the Bible can be established, therefore, it is necessary to add to the Christian doctrine of revelation the Christian doctrine of inspiration. The latter doctrine means that the Bible not only is an account of important things, but that the account itself is true, the writers having been so preserved from error, despite a full maintenance of their habits of thought and expression, that the resulting Book is the “infallible rule of faith and practice.”

This doctrine of “plenary inspiration” has been made the subject of persistent misrepresentation. Its opponents speak of it as though it involved a mechanical theory of the activity of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit, it is said, is represented in this doctrine as dictating the Bible to writers who were really little more than stenographers. But of course all such caricatures are without basis in fact, and it is rather surprising that intelligent men should be so blinded by prejudice about this matter as not even to examine for themselves the perfectly accessible treatises in which the doctrine of plenary inspiration is set forth. It is usually considered good practice to examine a thing for one’s self before echoing the vulgar ridicule of it. But in connection with the Bible, such scholarly restraints are somehow regarded as out of place. It is so much easier to content one’s self with a few opprobrious adjectives such as “mechanical,” or the like. Why engage in serious criticism when the people prefer ridicule? Why attack a real opponent when it is easier to knock down a man of straw?[2]

As a matter of fact, the doctrine of plenary inspiration does not deny the individuality of the Biblical writers; it does not ignore their use of ordinary means for acquiring information; it does not involve any lack of interest in the historical situations which gave rise to the Biblical books. What it does deny is the presence of error in the Bible. It supposes that the Holy Spirit so informed the minds of the Biblical writers that they were kept from falling into the errors that mar all other books. The Bible might contain an account of a genuine revelation of God, and yet not contain a true account. But according to the doctrine of inspiration, the account is as a matter of fact a true account; the Bible is an “infallible rule of faith and practice.”

Certainly that is a stupendous claim, and it is no wonder that it has been attacked. But the trouble is that the attack is not always fair. If the liberal preacher objected to the doctrine of plenary inspiration on the ground that as a matter of fact there are errors in the Bible, he might be right and he might be wrong, but at any rate the discussion would be conducted on the proper ground. But too often the preacher desires to avoid the delicate question of errors in the Bible—a question which might give offence to the rank and file—and prefers to speak merely against “mechanical” theories of inspiration, the theory of “dictation,” the “superstitious use of the Bible as a talisman,” or the like. It all sounds to the plain man as though it were very harmless. Does not the liberal preacher say that the Bible is “divine”—indeed that it is the more divine because it is the more human? What could be more edifying than that? But of course such appearances are deceptive. A Bible that is full of error is certainly divine in the modern pantheizing sense of “divine,” according to which God is just another name for the course of the world with all its imperfections and all its sin. But the God whom the Christian worships is a God of truth.

It must be admitted that there are many Christians who do not accept the doctrine of plenary inspiration. That doctrine is denied not only by liberal opponents of Christianity, but also by many true Christian men. There are many Christian men in the modern Church who find in the origin of Christianity no mere product of evolution but a real entrance of the creative power of God, who depend for their salvation, not at all upon their own efforts to lead the Christ life, but upon the atoning blood of Christ—there are many men in the modern Church who thus accept the central message of the Bible and yet believe that the message has come to us merely on the authority of trustworthy witnesses unaided in their literary work by any supernatural guidance of the Spirit of God. There are many who believe that the Bible is right at the central point, in its account of the redeeming work of Christ, and yet believe that it contains many errors. Such men are not really liberals, but Christians; because they have accepted as true the message upon which Christianity depends. A great gulf separates them from those who reject the supernatural act of God with which Christianity stands or falls.

It is another question, however, whether the mediating view of the Bible which is thus maintained is logically tenable, the trouble being that our Lord Himself seems to have held the high view of the Bible which is here being rejected. Certainly it is another question—and a question which the present writer would answer with an emphatic negative—whether the panic about the Bible, which gives rise to such concessions, is at all justified by the facts. If the Christian make full use of his Christian privileges, he finds the seat of authority in the whole Bible, which he regards as no mere word of man but as the very Word of God.

Very different is the view of modern liberalism. The modern liberal rejects not only the doctrine of plenary inspiration, but even such respect for the Bible as would be proper over against any ordinarily trustworthy book. But what is substituted for the Christian view of the Bible? What is the liberal view as to the seat of authority in religion?[3]

The impression is sometimes produced that the modern liberal substitutes for the authority of the Bible the authority of Christ. He cannot accept, he says, what he regards as the perverse moral teaching of the Old Testament or the sophistical arguments of Paul. But he regards himself as being the true Christian because, rejecting the rest of the Bible, he depends upon Jesus alone.

This impression, however, is utterly false. The modern liberal does not really hold to the authority of Jesus. Even if he did so, indeed, he would still be impoverishing greatly his knowledge of God and of the way of salvation. The words of Jesus, spoken during His earthly ministry, could hardly contain all that we need to know about God and about the way of salvation; for the meaning of Jesus’ redeeming work could hardly be fully set forth before that work was done. It could be set forth indeed by way of prophecy, and as a matter of fact it was so set forth by Jesus even in the days of His flesh. But the full explanation could naturally be given only after the work was done. And such was actually the divine method. It is doing despite, not only to the Spirit of God, but also to Jesus Himself, to regard the teaching of the Holy Spirit, given through the apostles, as at all inferior in authority to the teaching of Jesus.

As a matter of fact, however, the modern liberal does not hold fast even to the authority of Jesus. Certainly he does not accept the words of Jesus as they are recorded in the Gospels. For among the recorded words of Jesus are to be found just those things which are most abhorrent to the modern liberal Church, and in His recorded words Jesus also points forward to the fuller revelation which was afterwards to be given through His apostles. Evidently, therefore, those words of Jesus which are to be regarded as authoritative by modern liberalism must first be selected from the mass of the recorded words by a critical process. The critical process is certainly very difficult, and the suspicion often arises that the critic is retaining as genuine words of the historical Jesus only those words which conform to his own preconceived ideas. But even after the sifting process has been completed, the liberal scholar is still unable to accept as authoritative all the sayings of Jesus; he must finally admit that even the “historical” Jesus as reconstructed by modern historians said some things that are untrue.

So much is usually admitted. But, it is maintained, although not everything that Jesus said is true, His central “life-purpose” is still to be regarded as regulative for the Church. But what then was the life-purpose of Jesus? According to the shortest, and if modern criticism be accepted, the earliest of the Gospels, the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark x. 45). Here the vicarious death is put as the “life-purpose” of Jesus. Such an utterance must of course be pushed aside by the modern liberal Church. The truth is that the life-purpose of Jesus discovered by modern liberalism is not the life-purpose of the real Jesus, but merely represents those elements in the teaching of Jesus—isolated and misinterpreted—which happen to agree with the modern program. It is not Jesus, then, who is the real authority, but the modern principle by which the selection within Jesus’ recorded teaching has been made. Certain isolated ethical principles of the Sermon on the Mount are accepted, not at all because they are teachings of Jesus, but because they agree with modern ideas.

It is not true at all, then, that modern liberalism is based upon the authority of Jesus. It is obliged to reject a vast deal that is absolutely essential in Jesus’ example and teaching—notably His consciousness of being the heavenly Messiah. The real authority, for liberalism, can only be “the Christian consciousness” or “Christian experience.” But how shall the findings of the Christian consciousness be established? Surely not by a majority vote of the organized Church. Such a method would obviously do away with all liberty of conscience. The only authority, then, can be individual experience; truth can only be that which “helps” the individual man. Such an authority is obviously no authority at all; for individual experience is endlessly diverse, and when once truth is regarded only as that which works at any particular time, it ceases to be truth. The result is an abysmal skepticism.

The Christian man, on the other hand, finds in the Bible the very Word of God. Let it not be said that dependence upon a book is a dead or an artificial thing. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was founded upon the authority of the Bible, yet it set the world aflame. Dependence upon a word of man would be slavish, but dependence upon God’s word is life. Dark and gloomy would be the world, if we were left to our own devices and had no blessed Word of God. The Bible, to the Christian is not a burdensome law, but the very Magna Charta of Christian liberty.

It is no wonder, then, that liberalism is totally different from Christianity, for the foundation is different. Christianity is founded upon the Bible. It bases upon the Bible both its thinking and its life. Liberalism on the other hand is founded upon the shifting emotions of sinful men.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Why does Machen insist on describing what Jesus thought about God?

2. Why does liberalism enjoy speaking of God as Father?

3. What is meant by “the awful transcendence of God”?

4. Why does Christianity begin with a broken heart?

5. How do the Bible and the work of Christ complement each other?

6. What is the right place for Christian experience?

7. Does it all come down to where the seat of authority might be, as Machen argues?

*Excerpted from J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism. Copyrighted © 1923. Eerdmans Publishing. Used with permission.

1. For what follows, see “The Church in the War,” in The Presbyterian for May 29, 1919, 10f.

1. For what follows compare History and Faith, 1915, 13–15.

2. It is not denied that there are some persons in the modern Church who do neglect the context of Bible quotations and who do ignore the human characteristics of the Biblical writers. But in an entirely unwarrantable manner this defective way of using the Bible is attributed, by insinuation at least, to the great body of those who have held to the inspiration of Scripture.

3. For what follows, compare “For Christ or Against Him,” in The Presbyterian, for January 20, 1921, 9.

CHAPTER 18

Cornelius Van Til

(1895–1987)

Cornelius Van Til was born in the village of Grootegast, the province of Groningen, in the Netherlands. Van Til’s parents, Ite and Klazina, moved the family to the United States in 1905, when Van Til was only ten years old. Though the sixth of eight children, Cornelius was the first in his family, farmers by trade, to receive a higher education.

In 1914, Van Til entered the Calvin Preparatory School. He graduated from Calvin College in 1921, attended Calvin Theological Seminary for a year, and then completed further studies at Princeton Theological Seminary and Princeton University. He received his PhD from the university in 1927. His dissertation was entitled, “God and the Absolute.” In 1925, Van Til married Rena Klooster.

After completing his PhD, Van Til was called as a pastor. Having served in the pastorate for one year, he returned to Princeton Seminary to teach apologetics in 1928. In 1929, Van Til left Princeton, along with others, in response to the seminary’s reorganization, which moved it from its historic Reformed heritage toward theological liberalism.

Van Til was among the first faculty of the newly founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Following the lead of one of his professors at Princeton Seminary, J. Gresham Machen, Van Til sought to maintain the historic Reformed faith that had been the hallmark of Princeton Seminary until its reorganization. Van Til taught at Westminster for over four decades, until his retirement in 1975. He died on April 17, 1987.

It was Van Til’s academic training that prepared him for the task he would take up at Westminster. Absorbing the writings of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck gave him an appreciation for the depth and breadth of Reformed theology in the Dutch tradition. Studying under men such as Geerhardus Vos, Caspar Wistar Hodge, and J. Gresham Machen at Princeton Seminary exposed him to the best of Reformed thought in America. His studies in idealism at Princeton University under A. A. Bowman paved the way for his deep and penetrating critique of unbelieving philosophical thinking.

It was while he was at Westminster that Van Til began to take the best of Reformed theology and tease out its implications for the discipline of apologetics. Prior to Van Til, apologetics in the Reformed tradition had generally been relegated to a marginal discipline (e.g., in Abraham Kuyper) or taken on tenets that were inconsistent with the theology of that tradition. Van Til sought to take the best of the Kuyper/Bavinck tradition, together with the best of Old Princeton (as exemplified in B. B. Warfield) and to reestablish the discipline of apologetics for Reformed theology. Later on in his career, Van Til’s apologetic approach was dubbed “presuppositionalism,” a label that has since been used to define his (as well as others’) approach to apologetics.

The publication here of chapter 6 of The Defense of the Faith (4th ed.) brings to the forefront of Van Til’s thought issues that are of central concern with respect to Reformed apologetics in a way that no other publication of his is able to do. Speaking of the entire work, Van Til states in the preface, “While this book is, in a sense, an answer to critics, that is not its primary purpose.[1] Its primary purpose is to set forth, in broad outline, a method of defending Christianity which is consistent with the nature of Christianity.” Although he contends that the primary purpose of the book is not to answer his critics, it was just those critics, and the answers forthcoming from Van Til, that allowed him to sharpen and further focus the methodological aspects of his apologetic in a way that he had not done before.

If the reader will allow us to speculate a bit, it appears that there were certain forces at work in the first half of the 1950s that brought to light some tensions between Van Til and some of his kinsmen according to the flesh. In 1951, Van Til was offered a life appointment to teach theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. Not yet sure of his answer to that offer, he was granted a year to make his decision. In the spring of the academic year 1951–1952, Van Til taught at Calvin Seminary, after which time he declined the appointment. It was just after this, in 1953 and 1954, that a number of critical articles appeared in the Calvin Forum, a periodical jointly sponsored by Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary. Given the substance of these articles, it seems apparent that there was something at work below the surface of the criticisms. In the main, they are wide of the mark of what scholarly critique should be. Virtually all of them either caricature Van Til’s position or, by taking one side of what he says to the exclusion of other qualifiers, erect straw men in order quickly and easily to knock them down. Just what was below the surface is impossible to tell. Could it be that some were wanting to insure that Van Til would never teach at Calvin? Did Van Til’s earlier move from the Christian Reformed Church to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church produce such animosity? Was it the fact that Van Til was critical, in places, of both Kuyper and Bavinck that raised the ire of his critics? The answers to these questions may never be forthcoming.

The criticisms were taken hard by Van Til. Note a couple of his reactions: “I read the last of the Forum material. I hope I shall be kept by the Spirit of God from expressing bitterness. The misrepresentation seems to be inexcusable, but I must aim to express myself more clearly”; “I think it is best to avoid a direct answer lest I say something that is less than Christian charity demands. So I am beginning to prepare a pamphlet dealing with Reformed Apologetics in outline.” Could it be that his “aim” to express himself more clearly and his resolve to “prepare a pamphlet” were the impetus behind the current book?[2] It would seem likely.

Whatever the case, it is clear that the motivation, if perhaps not the “primary purpose,” behind the initial writing of The Defense of the Faith was to put to rest any attempted caricaturing of his approach or any falsification of it that had, at its root, a basic misunderstanding of what he was trying to say.

In setting out to write The Defense of the Faith, Van Til labored for clarity, a labor that, by most accounts, produced less fruit than one might have hoped. He expressed his own frustration on occasion that he was not able to be as clear as he wanted to be. Writing did not come easily to him, but teaching did. It is likely for that reason that Van Til thought one of the best ways to clarify his position was to gather together materials from his various syllabuses in such a way that there might be a more obvious, and seamless, unity to it all. In the chapter provided here, therefore, one will notice that it is a republication of one of his earlier syllabuses. This was not simply an easy way to compile a book for Van Til. Rather, since his ideas seemed to catch on in the classroom in a way that they had not in published writings, it seemed a promising way to provide for more clarity.

In the Lord’s good providence, however, these criticisms and Van Til’s subsequent responses are of immense help in guiding the reader through the sometimes opaque labyrinth of Van Til’s thought. Given this context of controversy, this chapter could be seen as a summary of concerns that were at the center of Van Til’s more than forty-year-long teaching and writing career. All that he had written and taught previously led up to The Defense of the Faith, and all that came after reflects back to it. In that sense, this chapter is a good place to begin if one wants to understand Van Til’s approach to apologetics. If The Defense of the Faith is the book to provide the best summary of Van Til’s apologetical/theological position, then the included piece serves as a fit summary of that position.

One more point is worth noting. It was during this time that Van Til dropped the term transcendental as a description of his approach, and he didn’t use it again until his response to Herman Dooyeweerd (and then only because it was at the heart of the debate between the two). This is, in some ways, most unfortunate as the term itself is the single best description of his approach. Exactly why he dropped the terminology is not apparent. It is perhaps because in the midst of the debates that prompted this work was the criticism that Van Til had succumbed to the concepts of philosophical idealism in his theology. Given the term’s origins in Kant, he may have thought it best to drop it. Or, it may be that since J. O. Buswell Jr. had coined the term presuppositionalism in 1948, Van Til simply went with the current description. Whatever the reason, the reader should be aware that “presupposition” for Van Til is just another way of saying what Kuyper, Bavinck, and behind them the Reformed scholastics had always said with regard to the principia of theology.

Once Van Til’s thought is grasped, the implications for the work of the church are most profound. The relationship of Van Til’s apologetic approach to preaching carries rich implications for the life of the church.[3] Not only so, but as Grady Spires says, “For [Van Til] the journey from philosophical apologetics to evangelism was a mere adjustment in style, not in basic content.”[4] Clarity and theological consistency were important to Van Til, not simply so that he might have a viable apologetic, but because, for him, the life and work of the church needed such clarity and consistency in order that the Lord himself might be glorified in it.[5]

1. The material that follows is a modified form of the editor’s introduction to Cornelius Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., ed. K. Scott Oliphint (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008).

2. Thanks to John Muether for supplying these quotations from the Van Til archives.

3. See Edmund Clowney, “Preaching the Word of the Lord: Cornelius Van Til, V.D.M,” Westminster Theological Journal 46, no. 2 (1984): 233–53.

4. David E. Kucharsky, “At the Beginning, God,” Christianity Today 22, no. 6 (December 30, 1977): 20. See also Van Til’s response to Fredric R. Howe in E. R. Geehan, ed., Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions on the Philosophy and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971), 452.

5. For an extended biography of Van Til, see John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008).

The Defense of the Faith

Chapter 6

Christian Apologetics: The Problem of Method*

A discussion of the problem of methodology naturally follows upon that of the problem of the point of contact. If we have discovered what we shall think of the person to whom we are to make our address in the interest of winning him to an acceptance of Christianity, we must next inquire as to the way by which we shall lead him to a knowledge of the truth.

The Christian view of man and the Christian view of method are alike aspects of the Christian position as a whole. So also the non-Christian view of man and the non-Christian view of method are alike aspects of the non-Christian position as a whole. That such is indeed the case will appear as we proceed. For the moment the point is dogmatically asserted in order to indicate the plan of procedure for this chapter.

Our concern throughout is to indicate the nature of a truly Protestant, that is a Reformed, apologetic. A Reformed method of apologetics must seek to vindicate the Reformed life-and-world view as Christianity come to its own. It has already become plain that this implies a refusal to grant that any area or aspect of reality, any fact or any law of nature or of history, can be correctly interpreted except it be seen in the light of the main doctrines of Christianity. But if this be true, it becomes quite impossible for the apologist to do what Roman Catholics and Arminians must do on the basis of their view of Christianity, namely, agree with the non-Christian in his principles of methodology to see whether or not Christian theism be true. From the Roman Catholic and the Arminian point of view the question of methodology, like that of starting point, is a neutral matter. According to these positions the Christian apologist can legitimately join the non-Christian scientist or philosopher as he, by his recognized methods, investigates certain dimensions of reality. Neither the follower of Thomas Aquinas nor the follower of the “judicious Butler” would need, on his principles, to object when, for instance, A. E. Taylor says:

Natural science, let me say again, is exclusively concerned with the detection of “laws of nature,” uniformities of sequence in the course of events. The typical form of such a law is the statement that whenever certain definitely measurable events occur some other measurable event will also be found to occur. Any enquiry thus delimited obviously can throw no light on the question . . . whether God exists or not, the question whether the whole course of events among which the man of science discovers these uniformities of sequence is or is not guided by a supreme intelligence to the production of an intrinsically good result.[1]

The Reformed apologist, on the other hand, would compromise what he holds to be of the essence of Christianity if he agreed with Taylor. For him the whole of created reality, including therefore the fields of research with which the various sciences deal, reveals the same God of which Scripture speaks. The very essence of created reality is its revelational character. Scientists deal with that which has the imprint of God’s face upon it. Created reality may be compared to a great estate. The owner has his name plainly and indelibly written at unavoidable places. How then would it be possible for some stranger to enter this estate, make researches in it, and then fairly say that in these researches he need not and cannot be confronted with the question of ownership? To change the figure, compare the facts of nature and history, the facts with which the sciences are concerned, to a linoleum that has its figure indelibly imprinted in it. The pattern of such a linoleum cannot be effaced till the linoleum itself is worn away. Thus inescapably does the scientist meet the pattern of Christian theism in each fact with which he deals. The apostle Paul lays great stress upon the fact that man is without excuse if he does not discover God in nature. Following Paul’s example Calvin argues that men ought to see God, not a god, not some supernatural power, but the only God, in nature. They have not done justice by the facts they see displayed before and within them if they say that a god exists or that God probably exists. The Calvinist holds to the essential perspicuity of natural as well as biblical revelation. This does not imply that a non-Christian and nontheistic interpretation of reality cannot be made to appear plausible. But it does mean that no non-Christian position can be made to appear more than merely plausible.

Roman Catholic apologists can, therefore, to the extent that their own theology does not teach the perspicuity of natural revelation, with consistency use the method of the natural man. Just as Rome, having a semi-pagan conception of the nature of man, can agree with the natural man’s conception of the starting point in knowledge, so also, having a semi-pagan concept of the nature of the objects man must know, Rome can, to a large extent, agree with the natural man’s conception of the method of knowledge.

Arminian apologists also, to the extent that their theology is faulty, can consistently agree with the nonbeliever on the question of methodology. Believing to some extent in the autonomy and ultimacy of human personality, Arminianism can, in a measure, agree on the question of starting point with those who make men the final reference point in all human predication. So also, believing to some extent in the existence of facts that are not wholly under the control and direction of the counsel of God, Arminianism can agree on the question of method with those for whom the object of knowledge has nothing at all to do with the plan of God.

In contradistinction from both Roman Catholics and Arminians, however, the Reformed apologist cannot agree at all with the methodology of the natural man. Disagreeing with the natural man’s interpretation of himself as the ultimate reference point, the Reformed apologist must seek his point of contact with the natural man in that which is beneath the threshold of his working consciousness, in the sense of deity which he seeks to suppress. And to do this the Reformed apologist must also seek a point of contact with the systems constructed by the natural man. But this point of contact must be in the nature of a head-on collision. If there is no head-on collision with the systems of the natural man, there will be no point of contact with the sense of deity in the natural man. So also, disagreeing with the natural man on the nature of the object of knowledge, the Reformed apologist must disagree with him on the method to be employed in acquiring knowledge. According to the doctrine of the Reformed Faith all the facts of nature and of history are what they are, do what they do, and undergo what they undergo in accord with the one comprehensive counsel of God. All that may be known by man is already known by God. And it is already known by God because it is controlled by God.

The significance of this for the question of method will be pointed out soon. For the moment this simple fact must be signalized as the reason which precludes the possibility of agreement on methodology between the Reformed theologian and the non-Christian philosopher or scientist. We may mention one point that brings out the difference in methodology between the two positions. It is the point with reference to the relevancy of hypotheses. For the non-Christian any sort of hypothesis may, at the outset of an investigation, be as relevant as any other. This is so because on a non-Christian basis facts are not what they are because of the systematic relation they sustain to God. On a non-Christian basis facts are “rationalized” for the first time when interpreted by man. But for one who holds that the facts are already part of an ultimately rational system by virtue of the plan of God, it is clear that such hypotheses as presuppose the nonexistence of such a plan must, even from the outset of his investigation, be considered irrelevant.

1. Reasoning by Presupposition

These things being as they are it will be our first task in this chapter to show that a consistently Christian method of apologetic argument, in agreement with its own basic conception of the starting point, must be by presupposition. To argue by presupposition is to indicate what are the epistemological and metaphysical principles that underlie and control one’s method. The Reformed apologist will frankly admit that his own methodology presupposes the truth of Christian theism. Basic to all the doctrines of Christian theism is that of the self-contained God, or, if we wish, that of the ontological Trinity. It is this notion of the ontological Trinity that ultimately controls a truly Christian methodology. Based upon this notion of the ontological Trinity and consistent with it, is the concept of the counsel of God according to which all things in the created world are regulated.

Christian methodology is therefore based upon presuppositions that are quite the opposite of those of the non-Christian. It is claimed to be of the very essence of any non-Christian form of methodology that it cannot be determined in advance to what conclusions it must lead. To assert, as the Christian apologist is bound to do if he is not to deny the very thing he is seeking to establish, that the conclusion of a true method is the truth of Christian theism is, from the point of view of the non-Christian, the clearest evidence of authoritarianism. In spite of this claim to neutrality on the part of the non-Christian the Reformed apologist must point out that every method, the supposedly neutral one no less than any other, presupposes either the truth or the falsity of Christian theism.

The method of reasoning by presupposition may be said to be indirect rather than direct. The issue between believers and nonbelievers in Christian theism cannot be settled by a direct appeal to “facts” or “laws” whose nature and significance is already agreed upon by both parties to the debate. The question is rather as to what is the final reference point required to make the “facts” and “laws” intelligible. The question is as to what the “facts” and “laws” really are. Are they what the non-Christian methodology assumes that they are? Are they what the Christian-theistic methodology presupposes they are?

The answer to this question cannot be finally settled by any direct discussion of “facts.” It must, in the last analysis, be settled indirectly. The Christian apologist must place himself upon the position of his opponent, assuming the correctness of his method merely for argument’s sake, in order to show him that on such a position the “facts” are not facts and the “laws” are not laws. He must also ask the non-Christian to place himself upon the Christian position for argument’s sake in order that he may be shown that only upon such a basis do “facts” and “laws” appear intelligible.

To admit one’s own presuppositions and to point out the presuppositions of others is therefore to maintain that all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning. The starting point, the method, and the conclusion are always involved in one another.

Let us say that the Christian apologist has placed the position of Christian theism before his opponent. Let us say further that he has pointed out that his own method of investigation of reality presupposes the truth of his position. This will appear to his friend whom he is seeking to win to an acceptance of the Christian position as highly authoritarian and out of accord with the proper use of human reason. What will the apologist do next? If he is a Roman Catholic or an Arminian, he will tone down the nature of Christianity to some extent in order to make it appear that the consistent application of his friend’s neutral method will lead to an acceptance of Christian theism after all. But if he is a Calvinist, this way is not open to him. He will point out that the more consistently his friend applies his supposedly neutral method the more certainly he will come to the conclusion that Christian theism is not true. Roman Catholics and Arminians, appealing to the “reason” of the natural man as the natural man himself interprets his reason, namely as autonomous, are bound to use the direct method of approach to the natural man, the method that assumes the essential correctness of a non-Christian and nontheistic conception of reality. The Reformed apologist, on the other hand, appealing to that knowledge of the true God in the natural man which the natural man suppresses by means of his assumption of ultimacy, will also appeal to the knowledge of the true method which the natural man knows but suppresses. The natural man at bottom knows that he is the creature of God. He knows also that he is responsible to God. He knows that he should live to the glory of God. He knows that in all that he does he should stress that the field of reality which he investigates has the stamp of God’s ownership upon it. But he suppresses his knowledge of himself as he truly is. He is the man with the iron mask. A true method of apologetics must seek to tear off that iron mask. The Roman Catholic and the Arminian make no attempt to do so. They even flatter its wearer about his fine appearance. In the introductions of their books on apologetics, Arminian as well as Roman Catholic apologists frequently seek to set their “opponents” at ease by assuring them that their method, in its field, is all that any Christian could desire. In contradistinction from this, the Reformed apologist will point out again and again that the only method that will lead to the truth in any field is that method which recognizes the fact that man is a creature of God, that he must therefore seek to think God’s thoughts after him.

It is not as though the Reformed apologist should not interest himself in the nature of the non-Christian’s method. On the contrary, he should make a critical analysis of it. He should, as it were, join his “friend” in the use of it. But he should do so self-consciously with the purpose of showing that its most consistent application not merely leads away from Christian theism, but in leading away from Christian theism leads to destruction of reason and science as well.

An illustration may indicate more clearly what is meant. Suppose we think of a man made of water in an infinitely extended and bottomless ocean of water. Desiring to get out of water, he makes a ladder of water. He sets this ladder upon the water and against the water and then attempts to climb out of the water. So hopeless and senseless a picture must be drawn of the natural man’s methodology based as it is upon the assumption that time or chance is ultimate. On his assumption his own rationality is a product of chance. On his assumption even the laws of logic which he employs are products of chance. The rationality and purpose that he may be searching for are still bound to be products of chance. So then the Christian apologist, whose position requires him to hold that Christian theism is really true and as such must be taken as the presupposition which alone makes the acquisition of knowledge in any field intelligible, must join his “friend” in his hopeless gyrations so as to point out to him that his efforts are always in vain.

It will then appear that Christian theism, which was first rejected because of its supposed authoritarian character, is the only position which gives human reason a field for successful operation and a method of true progress in knowledge.

Two remarks may here be made by way of meeting the most obvious objections that will be raised to this method of the Reformed apologist. The first objection that suggests itself may be expressed in the rhetorical question, Do you mean to assert that non-Christians do not discover truth by the methods they employ? The reply is that we mean nothing so absurd as that. The implication of the method here advocated is simply that non-Christians are never able to, and therefore never do, employ their own methods consistently. Says A. E. Taylor in discussing the question of the uniformity of nature:

The fundamental thought of modern science, at any rate until yesterday, was that there is a “universal reign of law” throughout nature. Nature is rational in the sense that it has everywhere a coherent pattern which we can progressively detect by the steady application of our own intelligence to the scrutiny of natural processes. Science has been built up all along on the basis of this principle of the “uniformity of nature,” and the principle is one which science itself has no means of demonstrating. No one could possibly prove its truth to an opponent who seriously disputed it. For all attempts to produce “evidence” for the “uniformity of nature” themselves presuppose the very principle they are intended to prove.[2]

Our argument as over against this would be that the existence of the God of Christian theism and the conception of his counsel as controlling all things in the universe is the only presupposition which can account for the uniformity of nature which the scientist needs. But the best and only possible proof for the existence of such a God is that his existence is required for the uniformity of nature and for the coherence of all things in the world. We cannot prove the existence of beams underneath a floor if by proof we mean that they must be ascertainable in the way that we can see the chairs and tables of the room. But the very idea of a floor as the support of tables and chairs requires the idea of beams that are underneath. But there would be no floor if no beams were underneath. Thus there is absolutely certain proof for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism. Even non-Christians presuppose its truth while they verbally reject it. They need to presuppose the truth of Christian theism in order to account for their own accomplishments.

The second objection may be voiced in the following words: “While a Christian can prove that his Christian position is fully as reasonable as the opponent’s view, there is no such thing as an absolutely compelling proof that God exists, or that the Bible is the Word of God, just as little as anyone can prove its opposite.” In this way of putting the matter there is a confusion between what is objectively valid and what is subjectively acceptable to the natural man. It is true that no method of argument for Christianity will be acceptable to the natural man. Moreover, it is true that the more consistently Christian our methodology, the less acceptable it will be to the natural man. We find something similar in the field of theology. It is precisely the Reformed Faith which, among other things, teaches the total depravity of the natural man, which is most loathsome to that natural man. But this does not prove that the Reformed Faith is not true. A patient may like a doctor who tells him that his disease can be cured by means of external applications and dislike the doctor who tells him that he needs a major internal operation. Yet the latter doctor may be right in his diagnosis. It is the weakness of the Roman Catholic and the Arminian methods that they virtually identify objective validity with subjective acceptability to the natural man. Distinguishing carefully between these two, the Reformed apologist maintains that there is an absolutely valid argument for the existence of God and for the truth of Christian theism. He cannot do less without virtually admitting that God’s revelation to man is not clear. It is fatal for the Reformed apologist to admit that man has done justice to the objective evidence if he comes to any other conclusion than that of the truth of Christian theism.

As for the question whether the natural man will accept the truth of such an argument, we answer that he will if God pleases by his Spirit to take the scales from his eyes and the mask from his face. It is upon the power of the Holy Spirit that the Reformed preacher relies when he tells men that they are lost in sin and in need of a Savior. The Reformed preacher does not tone down his message in order that it may find acceptance with the natural man. He does not say that his message is less certainly true because of its nonacceptance by the natural man. The natural man is, by virtue of his creation in the image of God, always accessible to the truth; accessible to the penetration of the truth by the Spirit of God. Apologetics, like systematics, is valuable to the precise extent that it presses the truth upon the attention of the natural man. The natural man must be blasted out of his hideouts, his caves, his last lurking places. Neither a Roman Catholic nor an Arminian methodology has the flame-throwers with which to reach him. In the all-out war between the Christian and the natural man as he appears in modern garb, it is only the atomic energy of a truly Reformed methodology that will explode the last Festung to which the Roman Catholic and the Arminian always permit him to retreat and to dwell in safety.[3]

2. Scripture

It has been pointed out that the difference between a Roman Catholic–Arminian and a Reformed type of argument lies in the fact that the former is direct and the latter is indirect. The former grants the essential truthfulness of the non-Christian theory of man and of method, while the latter challenges both. This difference will appear again, and appear in its fundamental importance still more strikingly, if the question of the place of Scripture in apologetics is brought up for consideration. A few remarks on this subject must suffice.

For better or for worse the Protestant apologist is committed to the doctrine of Scripture as the infallibly inspired final revelation of God to man. This being the case, he is committed to the defense of Christian theism as a unit. For him theism is not really theism unless it is Christian theism. The Protestant apologist cannot be concerned to prove the existence of any other God than the one who has spoken to man authoritatively and finally through Scripture.

The entire debate about theism will be purely formal unless theism be taken as the foundation of Christianity. But if it is so taken, it is no longer theism as such but Christian theism that is in debate. Pantheist, deists, and theists—that is, bare theists—may formally agree that God exists. Socrates, in arguing about the nature of piety within Euthyphro, says that men “join issue about particulars.” So if the whole debate in apologetics is to be more than a meaningless discussion about the that of God’s existence and is to consider what kind of God exists, then the question of God’s revelation to man must be brought into the picture. Even before the entrance of sin, as already noted, man required supernatural positive revelation as a supplement to revelation in the created universe around and within him. To understand God’s general revelation in the universe aright it was imperative for man that he see this revelation in relationship to a higher revelation with respect to the final destiny of man and the universe. If then even man in paradise could read nature aright only in connection with and in the light of supernatural positive revelation, how much the more is this true of man after the fall. In paradise the supernatural revelation of God to man told him that if he would eat of the forbidden tree, he would surely die. Having eaten of this fruit he could therefore expect nothing but eternal separation from God as his final destiny. Of God’s intention to save a people for his own precious possession he could learn nothing from nature. Nor was this involved in the preredemptive supernatural revelation that had been vouchsafed to him in paradise. It had to come by way of post-lapsarian supernatural revelation. Covenant breakers could expect nothing but covenant wrath. That God meant to bring covenant breakers back into covenant communion with himself through the covenant of grace could in no wise be discovered other than by supernatural redemptive revelation. B. B. Warfield brings out this point when he says that in addition to believing the supernatural fact—that is, God as a transcendent, self-existent being—and in the supernatural act—exemplified in creation and providence—the Christian must also believe in supernatural redemption. “As certainly as the recognition of the great fact of sin is an element in the Christian’s world-conception, the need and therefore the actuality of the direct corrective act of God—of miracle, in a word—enters ineradicably into his belief.”[4]

But supernatural redemption in itself would not be of any avail.

For how should we be advantaged by a supernatural redemption of which we know nothing? Who is competent to uncover to us the meaning of this great series of redemptive acts but God himself? . . . Two thousand years ago a child was born in Bethlehem, who throve and grew up nobly, lived a life of poverty and beneficence, was cruelly slain and rose from the dead. What is that to us? After a little, as his followers sat waiting in Jerusalem, there was a rush as of a mighty wind, and an appearance of tongues of fire descending upon their heads. Strange: but what concern have we in it all? We require the revealing Word to tell us who and what this goodly child was, why he lived and what he wrought by his death, what it meant that he could not be holden of the grave and what those cloven tongues of fire signified—before they can avail as redemptive facts to us.[5]

Going a bit beyond this it may be asserted that sinful man would naturally want to destroy a supernatural revelation that portrays his sin and shame and tells him that he is helpless and undone. This is out of accord with the pride that is a prime mark of the sinner. Hence the necessity for the inscripturization of the God-given, post-lapsarian supernatural revelation of God to man.

Thus the Bible, as the infallibly inspired revelation of God to sinful man, stands before us as that light in terms of which all the facts of the created universe must be interpreted. All of finite existence, natural and redemptive, functions in relation to one all-inclusive plan that is in the mind of God. Whatever insight man is to have into this pattern of the activity of God he must attain by looking at all his objects of research in the light of Scripture. “If true religion is to beam upon us, our principle must be, that it is necessary to begin with heavenly teaching, and that it is impossible for any man to obtain even the minutest portion of right and sound doctrine without being a disciple of Scripture.”[111]

What has been said so far on the subject of Scripture has dealt primarily with its place in Protestant doctrine. What bearing does this fact have upon the place of Scripture in Christian apologetics? And what bearing does it have upon the method of apologetics in general?

In the first place it must be affirmed that a Protestant accepts Scripture to be that which Scripture itself says it is on its own authority. Scripture presents itself as being the only light in terms of which the truth about facts and their relations can be discovered. Perhaps the relationship of the sun to our earth and the objects that constitute it may make this clear. We do not use candles or electric lights in order to discover whether the light and the energy of the sun exist. The reverse is the case. We have light in candles and electric light bulbs because of the light and energy of the sun. So we cannot subject the authoritative pronouncements of Scripture about reality to the scrutiny of reason because it is reason itself that learns of its proper function from Scripture.

There are, no doubt, objections that occur to one at once when he hears the matter presented so baldly. We cannot deal with these fully here. For the moment it is of the greatest importance that this simple but basic point be considered apart from all subsidiary matters. All the objections that are brought against such a position spring, in the last analysis, from the assumption that the human person is ultimate and as such should properly act as judge of all claims to authority that are made by anyone. But if man is not autonomous, if he is rather what Scripture says he is, namely, a creature of God and a sinner before his face, then man should subordinate his reason to the Scriptures and seek in the light of it to interpret his experience.

The proper attitude of reason to the authority of Scripture, then, is but typical of the proper attitude of reason to the whole of the revelation of God. The objects man must seek to know are always of such a nature as God asserts they are. God’s revelation is always authoritarian. This is true of his revelation in nature no less than of his revelation in Scripture. The truly scientific method, the method which alone can expect to make true progress in learning, is therefore such a method as seeks simply to think God’s thoughts after him.

When these matters are kept in mind, it will be seen clearly that the true method for any Protestant with respect to the Scripture (Christianity) and with respect to the existence of God (theism) must be the indirect method of reasoning by presupposition. In fact it then appears that the argument for the Scripture as the infallible revelation of God is, to all intents and purposes, the same as the argument for the existence of God. Protestants are required by the most basic principles of their system to vindicate the existence of no other God than the one who has spoken in Scripture. But this God cannot be proved to exist by any other method than the indirect one of presupposition. No proof for this God and for the truth of his revelation in Scripture can be offered by an appeal to anything in human experience that has not itself received its light from the God whose existence and whose revelation it is supposed to prove. One cannot prove the usefulness of the light of the sun for the purposes of seeing by turning to the darkness of a cave. The darkness of the cave must itself be lit up by the shining of the sun. When the cave is thus lit up, each of the objects that are in it “proves” the existence and character of the sun by receiving their light and intelligibility from it.

Now the Roman Catholic is not committed to any such doctrine of Scripture as has been expressed above. He can therefore build up his apologetics by the direct method. He can, as has already been shown, to a large extent agree with the natural man in his conception of both the starting point and the method of human knowledge. He can therefore join the non-Christian in his search for the existence or nonexistence of God by the use of reason without any reference to Scripture. That is, he and the natural man can seek to build up theism quite independently of Christianity. Then when the Romanist has, together with his friend the natural man, built the first story of the house to the satisfaction of both, he will ask his friend to help in building the second story, the story of Christianity. He will assure his friend that he will use the same principles of construction for the second story that they have together employed in their common construction of the first story. The second story is, according to Rome, to be sure, the realm of faith and of authority. But then this authority is but that of the expert. Rome knows of no absolute authority such as Protestantism has in its doctrine of Scripture. Rome’s authority is the authority of those who are experts in what they say are reported to be the oracles of God. These oracles receive their authoritative illumination from the expert interpreters of them, from the pope first of all. But such a concept of authority resembles that which Socrates referred to in The Symposium when he spoke of Diotima the inspired. When the effort at rational interpretation failed him, Socrates took refuge in mythology as a second best. The “hunch” of the wise is the best that is available to man with respect to that which he cannot reach by the methods of autonomous reason. No “wise man” ought to object to such a conception of the “supernatural.” It merely involves the recognition that he has not yet discovered the truth about all of reality by means of reason. So then the natural man need not really object, even from his own point of view, to the presentation of supernatural revelation as it is offered to him by the Roman Catholic apologist.

If the Roman Catholic method of apologetic for Christianity is followed, then Christianity itself must be so reduced as to make it acceptable to the natural man. Since Rome is more than willing to grant the essential correctness of the starting point and method of the natural man in the “realm of nature,” he cannot logically object to the conclusion of the natural man with respect to supernatural reality. The natural man need only to reason consistently along the lines of his starting point and method in order to reduce each of the Christian doctrines that are presented to him to naturalistic proportions.

As for the Arminian way of reasoning, it is, as already noted, essentially the same as that of Rome. The method followed by Bishop Butler follows closely that of Thomas Aquinas. According to Butler some of those who have no belief in or knowledge of Christianity at all have, nonetheless, quite rightly interpreted the “course and constitution of nature.” The cave has already been lit up by means of light that was not derived from the sun. By the use of the empirical method those who make no pretense of listening to Scripture are said or assumed to have interpreted nature for what it really is. It is no wonder then that the contents of Scripture too must be adjusted to the likes of the natural man. He will not accept them otherwise. And Butler is anxious to win him. So he says to him:

Reason can, and it ought to judge, not only of the meaning, but also of the morality and the evidence, of revelation. First, it is the province of reason to judge of the morality of Scripture; i.e., not whether it contains things different from what we should have expected from a wise, just, and good Being; for objections from hence have now been obviated; but whether it contains things plainly contradictory to wisdom, justice, or goodness—to what the light of nature teaches us of God.[7]

Since even in the interpretation of “nature” the natural man must and does himself admit that he cannot know everything, he can certainly, without compromising himself in the least, allow that what Scripture claims about “supernatural” things may probably be true. Already accustomed to allowing for a measure of discontinuity even in his interpretation of the “course and constitution of nature,” why should he not allow for a little more of this same sort of discontinuity in realms about which he admits that he still may learn? Such a concession will not break the principle of continuity that he has employed in all his interpretations of things that he knows; his principle of continuity needs merely to be stretched. The natural man does not object to stretching his principle of continuity if he is compelled to do so by virtue of the irrationality of reality; the only thing to which he strenuously objects is the submission of his own principles of continuity and of discontinuity to the counsel of God.

It appears then that as Arminianism, together with Roman Catholicism, is willing to join the natural man in his supposedly neutral starting point and method, so also Arminianism is forced to pay for these concessions by having the natural man to some extent dictate to him what sort of Christianity he may or may not believe. If the natural man is given permission to draw the floor plan for a house and is allowed to build the first story of the house in accordance with his own blueprint, the Christian cannot escape being controlled in a large measure by the same blueprint when he wants to take over the building of the second story of the house. Arminianism begins by offering to the natural man a Christian theology that has foreign elements in it. As over against the Reformed Faith, the Arminian has fought for the idea of man’s ultimate ability to accept or reject salvation. His argument on this score amounts to saying that God’s presentation of his claims upon mankind cannot reach down to the individual man; it can only reach to the infima species. God has to await the election returns to see whether he is chosen as God or is set aside. God’s knowledge therefore stands over against and depends to some extent upon a temporal reality which he does not wholly control. When the Arminian has thus, as he thinks, established and defended human responsibility against the Calvinist, he turns about to defend the Christian position against the natural man. But then he soon finds himself at the mercy of the natural man. The natural man is mercilessly consistent. He simply tells the Arminian that a little autonomy involves absolute autonomy, and a little reality set free from the plan of God involves all reality set free from the plan of God. After that the reduction process is simply a matter of time. Each time the Arminian presents to the natural man one of the doctrines of Christianity, the natural man gladly accepts it and then “naturalizes” it.

It is no valid objection against this contention to say that certainly many Arminians do not hold to any naturalistic conception of Christianity. For the question is not so much now what individual Arminians believe. Their belief at best involves a compromise with naturalism. But the point we are making now is about the method of apologetics that fits in with Arminian theology. And on that score we must, in simple honesty, assert that this method is essentially the same as the method of Roman Catholicism and is essentially reductionistic and therefore self-frustrative. It appears then that the first enemy of Arminianism, namely Calvinism, is its best friend. Only in the Reformed Faith is there an uncompromising statement of the main tenets of Christianity. All other statements are deformations. It is but to be expected that only in the Reformed Faith will we find an uncompromising method of apologetics. Calvinism makes no compromise with the natural man either on his views of the autonomy of the human mind or on his views of the nature of existence as not controlled by the plan of God. Therefore Calvinism cannot find a direct point of contact in any of the accepted concepts of the natural man. He disagrees with every individual doctrine of the natural man because he disagrees with the outlook of the natural man as a whole. He disagrees with the basic immanentistic assumption of the natural man. For it is this basic assumption that colors all his statements about individual teachings. It is therefore this basic assumption of the natural man that meets its first major challenge when it is confronted by the statement of a full-fledged Christianity.

The Reformed apologist throws down the gauntlet and challenges his opponent to a duel of life and death from the start. He does not first travel in the same direction and in the same automobile with the natural man for some distance in order then mildly to suggest to the driver that they ought perhaps to change their course somewhat and follow a road that goes at a different slant from the one they are on. The Reformed apologist knows that there is but one way to the truth and that the natural man is traveling it, but in the wrong direction. The service stations along the highway will service cars going in either direction. And as there are seemingly more cars going in the wrong direction than there are going in the right direction, the upkeep of the road will be supplied largely by those going in the wrong direction. Speaking together at one of these service stations, two travelers going in opposite directions may be in perfect agreement when they eulogize the turnpike on which they are traveling and the premium quality of gasoline which they are getting. But like Bunyan’s Christian the Reformed apologist will tell his friend that the way he is going leads to the precipice. He points to the signs made by the builder of the road which all point the opposite way from that which his friend, the natural man, is going. And when the reply is made by the natural man that he has been very successful in his trip so far, and that he too has been following signs, signs which point in the direction in which he is moving, the Reformed apologist will wipe out such of these signs as are near at hand and will challenge his friend to wipe out any of the signs he has ignored.

The Roman Catholic and the Arminian apologist would not be in a position to wipe out any of the signs that point in the wrong direction. An Arminian apologist meeting the natural man as both stop at one of the service stations is in a strange predicament. Since he is a Christian, he should really speak to the natural man about the fact that he is following the wrong signs. His belief in creation demands of him that he warn his new acquaintance against following the wrong signs. But since he himself holds to a measure of autonomy for man, and since this undermines his own belief in creation, he can at best say to his friend that it is doubtful which signs are right. Then as far as his “neutral” apologetic method is concerned, the Arminian, in the interest of getting his friend to go in the right direction, admits that the signs that point in the wrong direction are right. He himself goes in the wrong direction for some distance too with the natural man. He fully agrees with the natural man when together they start on their wrong course, and he still fully agrees on the way to the city of destruction. Then suddenly he puts on the brakes and turns around, expecting that his friend will do the same. Thus in the whole business he has dishonored his God (a) by practically admitting that his revelation is not plain and (b) by himself running away from God in his interpretation of natural revelation and in his subjection of supernatural revelation to the illegitimate requirements of the natural man. Meanwhile he has failed in his purpose of persuading the natural man to go in the right direction. The Roman Catholic and Arminian views of theology are compromising; in consequence the Roman Catholic and the Arminian method of apologetics is both compromising and self-frustrative.

3. Block-House Methodology

A final point must be made before concluding this chapter. We have seen that the proper method for Protestant apologetics is that of presupposition instead of the direct approach. But the theology of Rome and the theology of Arminianism do not permit of such an argument. Roman Catholics and Arminians must of necessity argue by way of direct approach. As deformations of Christian theism they contain no clear challenge to the position of the natural man till it is too late.

We have also seen that the method of presupposition requires the presentation of Christian theism as a unit. But the theology of Roman Catholics compels them to deal with theism first and with Christianity afterward. Assigning to reason the task of interpreting nature without dependence upon Scripture, this theology is bound to prove the truth of theism first. The theism that is proved in this way cannot be the only theism that any Christian should want to prove, namely, Christian theism. Yet having proved some sort of theism by “reason,” the Roman Catholic is bound by virtue of his theology to prove a type of Christianity that will fit onto the deformation of theism it has “established.” And what holds true of Roman Catholicism holds true fundamentally also of Arminianism.

It remains now to indicate more fully than has been done that the Roman Catholic and Arminian method of reasoning is bound, not merely to cut the unity of Christian theism in two, but even to prove its theism piece by piece. Romanism and Arminianism lead not merely to dualism but to atomism in methodology.

A truly Protestant method of reasoning involves a stress upon the fact that the meaning of every aspect or part of Christian theism depends upon Christian theism as a unit. When Protestants speak of the resurrection of Christ, they speak of the resurrection of him who is the Son of God, the eternal Word through whom the world was made. The truth of theism is involved in this claim that Christians make with respect to the domain of history. And what is true of the resurrection of Christ is true with respect to all the propositions about historical fact that are made in Scripture. No proposition about historical fact is presented for what it really is till it is presented as a part of the system of Christian theism that is contained in Scripture. To say this is involved in the consideration that all facts of the created universe are what they are by virtue of the plan of God with respect to them. Any fact in any realm confronted by man is what it is as revelational through and through of the God and of the Christ of Christian theism.

But if this is true—and it would seem to be of the very essence of the biblical point of view to say that it is true—then it follows that the whole claim of Christian theism is in question in any debate about any fact. Christian theism must be presented as that light in terms of which any proposition about any fact receives meaning. Without the presupposition of the truth of Christian theism no fact can be distinguished from any other fact. To say this is but to apply the method of idealist logicians in a way that these idealist logicians, because of their own anti–Christian-theistic assumptions, cannot apply it. The point made by these logicians is that even the mere counting of particular things presupposes a system of truth of which these particulars form a part. Without such a system of truth there would be no distinguishable difference between one particular and another. They would be as impossible to distinguish from one another as the millions of drops of water in the ocean would be indistinguishable from one another by the naked eye. “The main point is this, that all counting presupposes and depends upon a qualitative Whole, and that the Collective Judgment asserts a generic connection within its group. Hence no mere particulars can be counted.”[8]

It may be objected that one fact differs from other facts precisely because none of them are rationally controlled. Is it not the insertion of individual facts into a logically concatenated system that makes these facts lose their individuality? Has not Kant taught us that, if we are to have logical concatenation between the individual facts of our experience at all, we can have it just to the extent that we give up the impossible ideal of knowing individual things in themselves?

In reply we need only to observe that this way of escape is not open to the Reformed apologist. The Reformed apologist must, if he is at the same time a Reformed theologian, hold to what the average scientist and philosopher today will look upon as the most hopeless form of rationalism he has ever met. The historical forms of rationalism have done either of two things. If they were reasonably consistent, then they were ready to deny the existence and meaning of individuality in history altogether. Parmenides claimed that the “great question, Is it or is it not?” was to be determined by what man can consistently say about it.[9] This was consistent rationalism. Parmenides was therefore ready to assert the nonexistence and meaninglessness of individual historical factuality. On the other hand, if rationalists were consistent, they held to the same ideal of individuation by means of complete logical description on the part of man, but they realized that such a description cannot be accomplished. Leibniz was not less a rationalist in his hopes and ambitions than was Parmenides. He does not hesitate to make the “possibility of knowledge depend upon a knowledge of possibility.” Yet, Leibniz questions whether man can ever attain to the perfect analysis, which would carry him back, without finding any contradiction, to the absolute attributes of God.[10] Thus, in spite of himself, Leibniz has to allow for the actual existence of individual, ultimately changing things. But then to do so he has to sacrifice his system of logic. He recognizes temporal individuality but can do so only at the expense of logical system. Thus the rationalist agrees with the irrationalist that individuality in fact can exist only at the expense of logical system. And the idealist logicians, such as F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet, are no exceptions to this rule. But in contradistinction from the rationalist and the irrationalist, and in contradistinction from the forms of thought that seek some sort of combination between these two, the Reformed apologist must hold both to the idea of absolute system and to that of genuine historic fact and individuality. He does not hold to “truths of fact” at the expense of “truths of reason.” He holds to truths of fact only because to him they are truths of reason. But then it is obvious that he is not himself, as a human being, able to show the exhaustive logical relationships between the facts of history and nature which are in debate as between believers and disbelievers in Christian theism. In consequence he must maintain that the truths of fact presented in Scripture must be what Scripture says they are, or else they are irrational and meaningless altogether. The true Christian apologist has his principle of discontinuity; it is expressed in his appeal to the mind of God as all-comprehensive in knowledge because all-controlling in power. He holds his principle of discontinuity then, not at the expense of all logical relationship between facts, but because of the recognition of his creaturehood. His principle of discontinuity is therefore the opposite of that of irrationalism without being that of rationalism. The Christian also has his principle of continuity. It is that of the self-contained God and his plan for history. His principle of continuity is therefore the opposite of that of rationalism without being that of irrationalism.

Conjoining the Christian principle of continuity and the Christian principle of discontinuity we obtain the Christian principle of reasoning by presupposition. It is the actual existence of the God of Christian theism and the infallible authority of the Scripture which speaks to sinners of this God that must be taken as the presupposition of the intelligibility of any fact in the world.

This does not imply that it will be possible to bring the whole debate about Christian theism to full expression in every discussion of individual historical fact. Nor does it imply that the debate about historical detail is unimportant. It means that no Christian apologist can afford to forget the claim of his system with respect to any particular fact. He must always maintain that the “fact” under discussion with his opponent must be what Scripture says it is, if it is to be intelligible as a fact at all. He must maintain that there can be no facts in any realm but such as actually do exhibit the truth of the system of which they are a part. If facts are what they are as parts of the Christian-theistic system of truth, then what else can facts do but reveal that system to the limit of their ability as parts of that system? It is only as manifestations of that system that they are what they are. If the apologist does not present them as such, he does not present them for what they are.

Over against this Christian theistic position, any non-Christian philosophy virtually denies the unity of truth. It may speak much of it and even seem to contend for it, as idealistic philosophers do, but in the last analysis non-Christian philosophy is atomistic. This follows from the absolute separation between truth and reality that was introduced when Adam and Eve fell away from God. When Satan tempted Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, he tried to persuade her that God’s announcement of the consequences of such an act would not come true. That was tantamount to saying that no assertion in terms of a rational scheme could predict the course of movement of time-controlled reality. Reality, Satan practically urged upon man, was to be conceived of as something that is not under rational control. Every non-Christian philosophy makes the assumption made by Adam and Eve and is therefore irrationalistic. This irrationalism comes to most consistent expression in various forms of empiricism and pragmatism. In them predication is frankly conceived of in atomistic fashion.

On the other hand when Satan tempted Eve, he virtually asked her to become a rationalist. He asked her to take the position that she needed not to obtain any information about the course of factual eventuation from any source but her own mind. Prior to any tendency that had developed in the course of historical events, she, following Satan’s advice, made what was tantamount to a universal negative judgment about temporal reality. She took for granted that punishment could not come as a consequence of her eating of the forbidden fruit. This rationalism appears most consistently in such men as Parmenides. But even the inconsistent rationalists are really a priorists; they make concessions only because they cannot realize their ideal.

In modern times Kant has combined the principles of rationalism and empiricism. “He described the contribution of reason to knowledge as exactly so and so and the contribution of sense as exactly such and such.”[11] This position of Kant is the dominating position that confronts us today. It is usually spoken of as phenomenalistic. It is characterized by an attempt to bridge the gulf between fact and mind that was brought into the world as the consequence of the sin of Adam. But it cannot be a remedy for this dualism. Phenomenalism is still basically atomistic inasmuch as it still maintains that factuality in itself is non-rational in character. At the same time phenomenalism is still rationalistic in that whatever of unity it thinks it finds in this atomistically conceived reality virtually proceeds from the human mind. At least this rationality is not taken as proceeding from the mind of God. The rationalizing effort that is inherent in phenomenalism would, if successful, destroy all individuality. Its rationalizing effort is admittedly a step-by-step affair. That this is so is evident from the fact that its rationalizations are rationalizations of admittedly nonrational material. Phenomenalism builds up its island of rationality by taking dirt from its center and patching it onto its side, much as the Chicago lake front was built up gradually with dirt hauled into the water from the land. The difference is that the phenomenalists have no right to think of a bottom underneath the water into which they throw their dirt.

The dilemma that confronts the non-Christian methodology in general, and that of modern phenomenalism in particular, is therefore that one must know everything or one cannot know anything. One assumption is that unless one knows the terms or objects of propositions in the fullness of their relationships, one does not know them at all. A second assumption is that the terms of propositions are not merely unknown but ultimately unknowable in all their relationships. And what is called scientific knowledge is a cross between knowing everything about nothing and knowing nothing about everything. “A completed rational system having nothing outside of it nor any possible alternative to it, is both presupposed and beyond the actual attainment of any one moment.”[12]

The point we are now concerned to stress is the atomistic character of the non-Christian methodology. The idea of system is for it merely a limiting notion. It is merely an ideal. What is more, it must forever remain but an ideal. To become a reality this ideal would have to destroy science itself. It would have to demolish the individuality of each fact as it became known. Thus there would no longer be knowledge of a fact that is different from any other fact. The method of non-Christian science then requires that, to be known, facts must be known as part of a system. And since the Christian idea of system as due to the counsel of God is by definition excluded, it is man himself that must know this system. But to know the system he must know it intuitively. He cannot know it discursively because discursive thought, if it is to be in contact with reality at all, must partake of the piecemeal character of nonrational being. Each individual concept that pretends to be a concept with respect to things that have their existence in the world of time must partake of the de facto character of these facts themselves. In consequence each judgment or each proposition that is made by discursive thought about temporal existence is also characterized by the de facto character of temporal existence itself. Each proposition then, as far as all practical purposes are concerned, would have to be thought of as standing essentially by itself and as intelligible by itself. There could be no logically necessary connection between the various judgments of discursive thought; there could only be an intuition that, as F. H. Bradley puts it, somehow reality contains the harmony that is not found in appearance.

If at this point the idea of God is introduced and it is said that man of necessity cannot know otherwise than discursively and therefore cannot know all things, but that God knows intuitively and therefore does know all things, the reply would be that such a God must then stand in a nonrational relation to the universe and to the knowledge which man possesses. Always bound to think atomistically, man could know nothing of a God who knows intuitively and yet knows individuality and concrete historical factuality. Aristotle’s god is just such a god. To the extent that he knows intuitively he knows nothing of individual existence. He knows himself and men only to the extent that they are exhaustively classified, and when they are so classified and he therefore knows them, he does not know them. And Aristotle’s man knows nothing of Aristotle’s god, as Aristotle’s god knows nothing of Aristotle’s man.

It is not difficult to see that the Christian position requires the apologist to challenge this whole approach in the interest of the knowledge of the truth. If man’s necessarily discursive thought is not to fall into the ultimate irrationalism and skepticism that is involved in modern methodology, we must presuppose the conception of the God that is found in Scripture. Scripture alone presents the sort of God whose intuition of system is not bought at the price of his knowledge of individuality, and whose knowledge of individuality is not bought at the expense of intuitional knowledge of system. But such a God must really be presupposed. He must be taken as the prerequisite of the possibility and actuality of relationship between man’s various concepts and propositions of knowledge. Man’s system of knowledge must therefore be an analogical replica of the system of knowledge which belongs to God.

We need not now pursue this matter further. It must rather be pointed out in this connection that since Roman Catholicism and Arminianism are committed to a neutral starting point and methodology, they are bound also to fall into the atomism of non-Christian thought. Since they will not look at all the facts as facts of the Christian-theistic system, and flatly refuse to maintain that anything but a Christian-theistic fact can exist at all, and with this claim challenge the non-Christian methodology from the outset of the argument, they are bound to be carried away to a non-Christian conclusion. It is of the essence of both the Romanist and the Arminian methods of argumentation to agree with the non-Christian that individual propositions about many dimensions of reality are true whether Christianity is true or not. Neither Roman Catholics nor Arminian apologists are in a position to challenge the natural man’s atomistic procedure. Their own theologies are atomistic. They are not built along consistently Christian lines. Their individual doctrines are therefore not presented as being what they are exclusively by virtue of their relation to the main principles of the Christian position. Their contention that the Reformed Faith is wrong in thinking of all things in the world as being what they are ultimately in virtue of God’s plan with respect to them compels the Roman Catholic and the Arminian apologists to admit the essential correctness of non-Christian atomism. And herewith they have at the same time lost all power to challenge the non-Christian methodology at the outset of its career. Instead they themselves become the victims of this method. Since the principles of their theology will not permit them to argue by way of presupposition, their own piece-meal presentation of Christian theism constantly comes to a sorry end. It is as though an army were sending out a few individual soldiers in order to wrest some atoll from a powerful concentration of an enemy’s forces. There can be no joining of issues at the central point of difference—the interpretation by exclusively immanentistic categories or the interpretation in terms of the self-sufficient God—unless it be done by way of presupposition. And the Reformed apologist has a theology that both permits and requires him to do this.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Is Van Til correct that a Christian view of man and a Christian view of method are alike aspects of the Christian view as a whole? Why?

2. What, according to Van Til, does Roman Catholic apologetics have in common with Arminian apologetics? What would account for this commonality?

3. What does Van Til mean by “reasoning by presupposition”? How does this differ from other apologetic methods?

4. What is a “direct” argument, and what is an “indirect” argument, according to Van Til?

5. Describe what is meant by a “block-house methodology.” Is this a biblical way to argue?

*From Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., ed. K. Scott Oliphint (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2008). Used by permission. Chapter 6 of The Defense of the Faith is from chapter 4 of the syllabus Christian Apologetics.

1. A. E. Taylor, Does God Exist? (London: Macmillan, 1947), 13, 14.

2. Ibid., 2.

3. The use of such martial terminology is not inconsistent with the Christian principle of love. He who loves men most will tell them the truth about themselves in their own interest.

4. B. B. Warfield, Studies in Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 38.

5. Ibid., 42.

6. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.6.2.

7. Joseph Butler, The Works of Bishop Butler, ed. W. E. Gladstone (New York, 1896), 1:238.

8. F. H. Bradley, The Principles of Logic, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1922; corrected impression, 1928), 1:368–69.

9. John Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part I: Thales to Plato (London: Macmillan, 1920), 67.

10. Seymour G. Martin et al., A History of Philosophy (New York: F. S. Crofts and Company, 1941), 396.

11. Gordon H. Clark in Christian Opinion, January, 1945.

12. Morris R. Cohen, Reason and Nature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1931), 158.

CHAPTER 19

C. S. Lewis

(1898–1963)

C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast. In his early years he was educated (primarily) privately. He later gained a triple first at Oxford and was a fellow and tutor at Magdalen College from 1925 to 1954. In 1954 he became professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge. Coincidentally, Lewis died on the same day that John F. Kennedy, president of the United States, was assassinated, November 22, 1963.

Throughout his years as an adolescent and young adult, Lewis had rejected theism and Christianity. As a “man of letters” and deeply involved in the reading and analysis of literature, Lewis quite naturally and providentially was moved toward (what he had been calling) the “Christian mythology,” at least in part by way of literature.

Now that I was reading more English, the paradox began to be aggravated. I was deeply moved by the Dream of the Road; more deeply still by Langland: intoxicated for a time by Donne; deeply and lastingly satisfied by Thomas Browne. But the most alarming of all was George Herbert. Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment, but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it all directly, insisted on mediating it through what I would still have called “the Christian mythology.” On the other hand most of the authors who might be claimed as precursors of modern enlightenment seemed to me very small beer and bored me cruelly. I thought Bacon (to speak frankly) a solemn, pretentious ass, yawned my way through Restoration Comedy, and, having manfully struggled on to the last line of Don Juan, wrote on the end leaf “Never again.”[1]

In other words, Lewis began to see that it was the Christian writers who were able to grab his imagination and pique his literary interests. This did not make sense to him; it was a paradox that he could not reconcile.

Lewis, in the process, had committed himself to a kind of Hegelian idealism. Though admittedly not a philosopher, he saw Hegel’s search for “the Absolute,” or “Spirit” as a respectable solution to the problem of the mundane. But, as he himself says, he began to see that such a search was akin to “the mouse’s search for the cat.”[2]

Of course I could do nothing—I could not last out one hour—without continual conscious recourse to what I called Spirit. But the fine, philosophical distinction between this and what ordinary people call “prayer to God” breaks down as soon as you start doing it in earnest. Idealism can be talked and even felt; it cannot be lived.[3]

The Lord continued to pursue Lewis. In a chapter of Surprised by Joy entitled “Checkmate,” Lewis remembers the “horror” of it all.

Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would He also be “reasonable” in that other, more comfortable, sense? Not the slightest assurance on that score was offered me. Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me. The demand was not even “All or nothing.” I think that stage had been passed, on the bus top when I unbuckled my armor and the snowman started to melt. Now, the demand was simply “All.”[4]

Lewis first became a theist through the influence of J. R. R. Tolkien, among others. He recounts the night he surrendered.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. . . . The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.[5]

Lewis is not sure of just how he moved from theism to Christianity, though certain that he did. He was on his way to the zoo with a friend: “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”[6]

Though virtually all of the authors we present in these volumes were called as pastors or teachers of the church, C. S. Lewis was not. He was a “layman of the Church of England,”[7] in that sense. His influence, however, is significant. A 1993 Christianity Today poll of its readers noted Mere Christianity to be second only to the Bible in influence.[8] As the quotations above illustrate, Lewis had a remarkable knack for explaining facts in an engaging and imaginative way, a way that is more conducive to persuasion. His seven book Chronicles of Narnia, as well as The Screwtape Letters and other works, show the depth of insight that Lewis could relate in metaphorical and imaginative ways. Because of that, he is virtually without peer in terms of the ways in which he offers the truths of Christianity in published form.[9]

Mere Christianity was first a series of radio broadcasts given during World War II (1942–1944). In the preface to this work, Lewis is clear about what he intends and what he does not intend. He is not interested in laying out for the reader denominational differences or the doctrines that produce them. Neither is he interested in defending Anglicanism (the communion that he joined after his conversion). Rather, he hopes to “explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.”[10] Lewis is aware of the fact that, even so, it is he who determines just what those beliefs are and in what ways they are common. Mere Christianity should not be seen, however, as a plea for a “lowest common denominator” Christianity. It is meant, as Lewis notes in his preface, for those who do not believe. As a matter of fact, Lewis spends the bulk of his preface explaining the “tentative” character of the truths he sets forth.

I hope no reader will suppose that “mere” Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: “Do I like that kind of service?” but “Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular doorkeeper?”[11]

Whatever deficiencies are attributed to Lewis, and whatever flaws attend his own doctrine and methodology, the reader who reads Lewis here as an evangelist to the lost will surely understand why he says what he says. As a defense of “mere Christianity,” this work has a natural place among apologetic writings.

1. C. S. Lewis, “Surprised By Joy,” in The Inspirational Writings of C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 118.

2. Ibid., 124–25.

3. Ibid., 124.

4. Ibid., 125.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., 130.

7. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), viii.

8. Art Lindsley, C. S. Lewis’s Case for Christ: Insights from Reason, Imagination and Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005), 15.

9. G. K. Chesterton, whose writings also influenced Lewis, is one of a very few who, like Lewis, could persuasively and effectively communicate deep truths in imaginative ways.

10. Lewis, Mere Christianity, viii.

11. Ibid., xv–xvi.

Mere Christianity

Book I

Right and Wrong as a Clue

to the Meaning of the Universe

(Chapters 1–2)*

Chapter 1

The Law of Human Nature

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?”— “That’s my seat, I was there first”— “Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”—“Why should you shove in first?”— “Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine”— “Come on, you promised.” People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups. Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: “To hell with your standard.” Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the “laws of nature” we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong “the Law of Nature,” they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law—with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.

We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.

But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining “It’s not fair” before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter, but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong—in other words, if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money—the one you have almost forgotten—came when you were very hard up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done—well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it—and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.

Chapter 2

Some Objections

If they are the foundation, I had better stop to make that foundation firm before I go on. Some of the letters I have had show that a good many people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behaviour is.

For example, some people wrote to me saying, “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like all our other instincts?” Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct—by mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is nothing in a creature’s mind except those two instincts, obviously the stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same. And surely it often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is? I mean, we often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting from instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is. The thing that says to you, “Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,” cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note.

Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us which was always what we call “good,” always in agreement with the rule of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses—say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother’s love for her own children or a man’s love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people’s children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the “right” notes and the “wrong” ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.

By the way, this point is of great practical consequence. The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials “for the sake of humanity,” and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

Other people wrote to me saying, “Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?” I think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked? I fully agree that we learn the Rule of Decent Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different—we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right—and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs.

There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great—not nearly so great as most people imagine—and you can recognise the same law running through them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers—people who understood morality better than their neighbours did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about. The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said “New York” each meant merely “The town I am imagining in my own head,” how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all. In the same way, if the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply “whatever each nation happens to approve,” there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow morally better or morally worse.

I conclude then, that though the differences between people’s ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just the opposite. But one word before I end. I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, “Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?” But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Is Lewis’s argument for belief in right and wrong compelling? Could it be strengthened?

2. What is the distinction Lewis makes between the moral law and instincts? Is it a legitimate distinction?

3. “The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.” Explain.

*Excerpted from C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, copyright © C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. 1942, 1943, 1944, 1952. Extract reprinted by permission.

CHAPTER 20

Hans Urs von Balthasar

(1905–1988)

A strong Roman Catholic from his youth, Hans Urs von Balthasar is nevertheless difficult to label. Neither a strict Thomist nor a liberal Catholic, he may best be described as an eclectic, with special affinities for the Scriptures and the church fathers. He was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, and attended the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria. He studied theology in the Jesuit Scholasticate in Lyon-Fourvière, where he came under the influence of Henri de Lubac. Balthasar pursued doctoral work in Vienna, Berlin, and Zurich, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation, “The History of the Eschatological Problem in German Literature,” in 1928. The following year he entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). In 1940 he was offered a teaching position in Rome, but turned it down in order to work as a chaplain to students in Basel.

In 1950, with his colleague and friend Adrienne von Speyr, he founded a “secular institute,” the Community of St. John. This was an order where people could belong and still keep their calling in society. The Jesuits were not comfortable with this initiative, and in 1950 he left the Jesuits, beginning what some have called his ecclesiastical wilderness experience.

In 1972, together with Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), Lubac, and Jean Daniélou, Balthasar formed Communio, an international Catholic review, which features a wide variety of articles and commentary on theology, biblical themes, and contemporary culture. After long bouts with illness, he died on June 26, 1988, two days before he was to become cardinal, named by John Paul II.

Besides Lubac and Daniélou, as well as the Polish theologian Erich Przywara, a principal influence on Balthasar was von Speyr. Balthasar avowed his writing would not be what it is without her influence. Von Speyr, a physician and theologian, had grown up in the Reformed Church but became a Roman Catholic under Balthasar’s influence. She had numerous mystical experiences with the Trinity. Another affinity was between Balthasar and Karl Barth. The two admired one another despite an age gap of twenty years. Balthasar even wrote a book about Barth’s theology that the latter praised as the best summary of his work. Finally, not unlike Barth, whom he may have influenced in this regard, Balthasar loved the music of Mozart. He apparently gave away all his records, saying that he had memorized all of Mozart anyway!

Balthasar was wary of the discipline of apologetics. Nevertheless his work may almost be summarized as that of an apologist, one driven to make the message of the gospel understandable to contemporary people. Thus, he took issue with Karl Rahner for his notion of the “anonymous Christian,” a concept Balthasar found inimical to the unique claims of the gospel. In turn, Rahner criticized Balthasar for his allusions to the suffering of the Trinity, which was inspired by his friend von Speyr. Balthasar’s life task was to make the Christian message known and appealing, not by airbrushing its more troubling doctrines, but by arguing for their necessity.

Balthasar was a prolific writer. He wrote scores of books and thousands of articles. Several books are in multiple volumes. His crowing achievement is Herrlichkeit, translated, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, a seven-volume exploration of every theme related to theology and culture. It centers on the idea, stemming he believed from the incarnation, that faith must be felt and imagined, not just believed intellectually. Other multivolume works include Theo-Drama, in five volumes, and Theo-Logic, in three.

Elucidations (originally 1971) is meant to present some of the most controverted teachings of the Christian faith for the present times. It consists of twenty-six short chapters on such subjects as, “The Unknown God,” “The Incarnation of God,” “Tradition,” “The Pope Today,” “An Apology for Contemplatives,” “Am I a Sinner?,” and so forth. We have chosen three chapters which set the tone for his apologetics. Test Everything: Hold Fast to What Is Good (originally 1986) contains an extended interview of Balthasar by Angelo Scola, a close friend. We have selected two sections, “On Liberation Theology,” and “Is There a Christian Culture?” They reveal the approach of Balthasar to very important themes—freedom and cultural impact—that inform his apologetics.

Elucidations

(Three Chapters)*

The Unknown God

Is not the desire to curb an inflated use of the divine name an indication of a healthy instinct in modern man? Nor is one likely to be mistaken if one places responsibility for this inflation on the shoulders of Christians. For them God has become all at once a continually speaking and acting subject in the midst of the world and among men.

The Jews scarcely dared to utter the word “God” at all. The more deeply they learned to know him, the more unutterable became his name, the more inconceivable he himself became. A more intimate communion with God lay far back in the early period of Judaism, when Moses was allowed to see God face to face and when God tented with his people in the desert. Perhaps the concept of God at that time was still too limited, too much a part of folk religion. Or was it perhaps that the Jews of a later period projected their longing for such a naïve communion with the unutterable on to their portrayal of that primal period? There were, too, times in Christian history, above all at the end of the patristic period, which were epochs marked by an elemental trembling in the face of the total otherness of God, who in his very being transcends every concept and, even more, every statement. Let us leave aside the question of how far such epochs were influenced by Greek philosophy (which we can summarily describe as “natural theology”). We are concerned not with questions of historical influences but with questions of substance and truth.

The question may be put as follows. Does God cease, when he reveals himself in his Son, to be the wholly other, the incomprehensible? If he allows himself to be touched, captured, bound, condemned, and crucified in Jesus of Nazareth, does he then come within the reach of men? Does he then become an element among their rational concepts and calculations? “Si comprehendis non est Deus,” says Augustine, echoing those Greek Fathers: “If you think you have understood something, then it was certainly not God.” In the Eastern Church this sense of awe before the incomprehensibility of the mystery soon led to the liturgy’s being performed in concealment behind the iconostasis. About the year 500 an unknown figure, probably a Syrian monk, who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite, set the course of Christian theology for a thousand years by placing at its center the total otherness of God and a sense of deep liturgical awe. His influence on the Middle Ages in the West was scarcely less persistent than that of Augustine. The great scholastics wrote commentaries on his writings; he it was who again and again prevented theological speculation from presumptuously forcing its way into the darkness of the divine mystery.

In our times two German thinkers have again taken up this cause. First, Erich Przywara gave positive expression to it, taking as his starting point the formula of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and from there formulating his principle of Analogia Entis as follows: “That, however great the similarity between creator and creature may be, the dissimilarity always nevertheless remains greater.” The “however great” refers not only to the character of the created spirit as “image and likeness of God,” but just as much to the supernatural self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ and to the gracious participation in the Divine Being which is offered to man in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. What Przywara saw clearly was that, even in so intimate a communion between God and man as is portrayed in the Christian doctrines of grace, of the Church, of the “infused virtues,” faith, hope, and love (which have their origins in the divine life), of the love of God and one’s neighbor, in all this God is still nevertheless always other, the dissimilarity remains always greater. It seems clear that this insight into the best theological tradition had become increasingly strange to modern Christians—with a few exceptions, as, for example, Newman. It was then in our times only by a violent struggle, both in a spirit of reaction and revolution, that the traditional sense of the divinity of God could again be recovered. The second thinker is Gustav Siewerth, who in his book The Fate of Metaphysics from Thomas to Heidegger (1959) portrayed negatively the tragic history of the loss of the sense of the divine mystery with a relentless, at times biting, logic. For him the tragedy begins within Christianity and within theology itself. God, so it appeared to Christians and theologians, has destroyed his hiddenness in his self-revelation in Jesus Christ; from now on we know him even in the very depths of his heart. The Holy Spirit which “searches even the depths of God” has also “been bestowed on us” so that we may “understand the gifts bestowed on us by God” (1 Cor 2:10–12). So that, once God in the folly of his love had revealed to us his own deepest secrets, men now armed with the weapons of the spirit which they had received began to advance into the divine arcana and to take possession of his mysteries, with the consequence that for Hegel the divine spirit is no longer distinguishable from the human (for there can only be one single absolute spirit) and that then logically for Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, the spirit once divine is now replaced by the human spirit, which searches its own psychological and sociological depths.

It is more than instructive to read Siewerth’s account of the individual stages of this spiritual development, which led from a theological rationalism that laid claim to precise knowledge about all the mysteries of God, to the final declaration that “God is dead”—a progression which had its own terrible logic. But we may also ask whether it is truly the case that this tragic history goes back only as far as the onset of nominalism after Thomas. For it may be that the dogmatic formulations of the great councils of the first centuries, in which the Trinity and Christology were conceptualized, were at least very dangerous pointers in this direction. The answer is as follows. Even such formulations as these, like any other theological “knowledge” of God, must become dangerous from the very moment when man ceases to know and to be conscious of whom it is he is dealing with. The Catholic tag “Grace presupposes nature, elevates and perfects it” is nowhere more important than here; for the natural man, if he has not already been artificially corrupted, does have a sense of awe in face of the hidden mystery of being, in face of the ultimate origin and destiny of the world, of matter, of life, of evolution, of the fate of the individual and of humanity. Every religion, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, lives essentially on this awe. Goethe and Albert Schweitzer have given us great examples of such religion, and even the humanitarian world views which today describe themselves as religionless draw their strength, at least in the cases where they do not publicly proclaim their cynicism and demonism, from a primal pathos. They have been gripped by a sense of the urgency of the task of reconciling man with the universal being of the world; hungering and thirsting after ultimate righteousness are not possible without a sense of awe in face of the mystery of being. Religious Judaism which, as we saw, is deeply rooted in this sense of awe, has again and again produced utopian speculations reaching out into the unconditional. That this is so has its grounds in the incomprehensible fact that the eternal incomprehensible God has at a particular time and place in history revealed himself to this people.

But at the moment when the mystery of God bears in upon us so overwhelmingly as it does in the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, a highly dangerous situation arises. On the one hand, those who are confronted with this mystery are enjoined to preach it and consequently to put it into intelligible words and concepts and even, in certain circumstances, to translate it into broadly descriptive formulae in order to protect his overwhelming greatness, to frustrate men’s attempts to master it with their reason and to fit it into their own forms of thought or to frustrate men’s attempts to bring it down to the level of their philosophies of life (as, for example, “being a Christian is nothing other than the brotherhood of man taken seriously”). On the other hand, the wire which is set up round the mystery to protect it can only too easily and almost fatally become a snare to trap men. This, either in the sense that it makes the approaches to the mystery difficult or almost impassable for the man who draws near in a sense of awe (by either a literal or a figurative iconostasis), or in the sense that for educated and uneducated alike, the impression may be created that it is in the wire itself that the mystery has been captured and tamed, that the unknown God has been made known. The “even greater degree of dissimilarity” is then forgotten; for where can one find a work of dogmatics, ancient or modern, which gives it significant expression? Certainly the theological textbooks seem to have lost every trace of such a sense; but do we find it unequivocally in the monumental work of Karl Barth? Or are the texts of the last council formulated primarily on the basis of such a sense? Indeed, may one not have to go to the “liberals” like Paul Tillich in order to find anything approaching such a sense?

It is no easy task to find one’s way back from the “all too familiar” God to the truly unknown God. One makes no headway simply by throwing overboard all formulations, by rejecting all the work of theology, of the magisterial office, of the councils as dangerous aberrations. One simply saws through the branch of tradition on which everything historical sits and falls into the void. This can be seen most clearly where attempts have been made to make a clean sweep of things: for instance, where one discards even the earliest expressions of the mystery of Jesus of Nazareth in the formulae of faith of the Early Church (which for the most part make use of Old Testament concepts) and fumbles one’s way back into a great darkness. For here one finds nothing on which one can lay firm hold, because all the witnesses to the historical Jesus are formed in part by the Easter faith and confession. If one discards the truth of the way in which in faith the Early Church was overwhelmed by God as of no importance for such an investigation and as not binding on us, then the whole overpowering deed of God was in vain. Nothing remains of it except the fact that Jesus was an “outstanding example,”[1] alongside Buddha, Marx, and others. The modern “theology” of secularization and of the “death of God” does in its way open up the way for the old negative theology. Indeed it scarcely needs to open it up but simply points to the fact of its existence as it brushes aside, like so many dead leaves, the withered formulae of a Christianity which would know too much. Even the dogmas of the first ecumenical councils fall victim to this purge; the “unknown God” cannot at the same time also be a known God. But, on the other hand, we must also be quite clear that precisely those Fathers who helped decisively to formulate the trinitarian and christological dogmas—Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Hilary—are full of passages in which they expound the transcendence and unintelligibility of the divine nature in the course of their relentless struggle against the Arian and Eunomian rationalism. It is this which makes it clear that the conciliar definitions of the patristic age are to be taken as attempts to protect the mystery against one-sided “rationalization,” attempts repeatedly made always in the consciousness of their inadequacy.

It is true that in Jesus Christ the mystery of the ground of the world burns out more brightly than anywhere. But, on the other hand, it is precisely in this light that for the first time and definitively we grasp the true incomprehensibility of God. It is here that God breaks for ever all the “wisdom” of the world by the “folly” of his love, which chooses men without reason, by his entering into the chaos of the history of humanity, by his bearing the guilt of his lost and fallen creatures. This incomprehensible love of the God who acts in the event of Christ raises him far above all the incomprehensibilities of philosophical notions of God which consist simply in the fact of negating all statements about God, which may be ventured on the grounds of our knowledge of the world, out of regard for his total otherness. But this more powerful incomprehensibility of the biblical God only remains in effect so long as the dogmatic formulae protect it against renewed attempts at rationalization. Like the cherubim with their fiery swords, they surround the folly of the love of God, scandalous for both Jews and Greeks, and forestall any cabbalistic or Hegelian attempts to overthrow agape with gnosis.

John makes the claim that God is love on the basis of the experience which in Jesus Christ we may have of him. However, according to the teaching of the disciple, God is not love because he has found in us an object worthy of his love which before he lacked, in the sense, that is, that we were necessary to him in order that he might be love. Rather, he is love in himself. But one cannot define love even when one meets it in this world. Where it is genuine, it transcends in its sovereign freedom every why and wherefore. It has its necessity only in itself. It can be encompassed by no concept. Even more, the ground of the absolute divine love outstrips immeasurably all human thought. And so, too, the statement that God needs no creature in order to be love, the statement that God is love in himself, begetting and begotten, communing with himself in such a way that from this communion there proceeds again and again the eternal fruit and witness of love: the statement therefore that God is “triune,” all this is and remains the expression of an incomprehensible mystery. It is only analogously (where the similarity is overruled by a greater dissimilarity!) that we can speak of persons in God, only analogously (where the similarity is overruled by a greater dissimilarity!) that we can speak of “begetting” and “inspiration,” only analogously (where the similarity is overruled by a greater dissimilarity!) that we can speak of “three,” for what “three” means in relation to the absolute is in any case something quite other than the inner-worldly “three” of a sequence of numbers.

It might then seem that it would be better to abandon any attempt to speak and think of God if he always remains, even when he reveals himself, wholly and then most truly unknown. But we no longer have authority to do this, for he came to us in an event—which had its climax in Jesus Christ—of such self-giving, defenseless, inviting power (or powerlessness) that we understand at least so much: he wants to be for us, he wants to gather us into the abyss of his own inner trinitarian love. We do know that this love can in no sense be equated either with individual human beings or with the common humanity of the many; we experience, further, that it addresses us individually and corporately as thou; it is indisputable that Jesus teaches us to reply to this address of love also with thou; throughout the whole Bible there is an increasing demand that we may and must entrust ourselves to it unconditionally, and this demand is based on the “proof” which God has given of his love to the world (Jn 3:16; 1 Jn 4:9).

The Christian centuries and millennia have repeatedly erected towering theological buildings around these mysteries. From time to time it becomes necessary to stress the insufficiency of much that has been thus heaped up in order to make room for new attempts. In the end it is all no more than a start, an attempt, an approximation, just as the life shared between two lovers remains to the end a start, an attempt, an attempt to find a way to each other, but only as each allows the other his own freedom. Woe to the lover who, by whatever means, seeks to tear from his loved one his final secret! Not only is such an attempt impossible, but also by it he destroys the life of love. Only that which is given by the unsearchable freedom of love has power to reveal. And so analogously (the similarity is overruled by the greater dissimilarity!) the free self-disclosure of the divine heart sheds over all our existence, thought, loving, and action an incomparable light; and yet it comes from the God “who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim 6:16). And yet we are to draw near to the inaccessible one “in boldness and confidence through our faith in Jesus Christ” (Eph 3:12), who has “expounded” to us the inaccessible God “whom no man has seen” (Jn 1:18).

Christians today must be capable of withstanding the tension which is contained within these statements. On the one hand, they must abandon every attempt to penetrate into the hidden and free being of God with unbaptized reason, and on the other, they may reject no path which God himself offers men into the mystery of his eternal love. They may neither, on the one hand, push God away into a realm of inaccessible transcendence which then ultimately becomes a matter of indifference for men nor, on the other hand, so draw him into the historicity of the world that he forfeits his freedom over the world and falls victim to human gnosis.

The Personal God

I. Can we dare to apply the concept of person, personality, to the unutterable hidden ground of being from which has proceeded and continuously proceeds the mysterious multiplicity of the world in all its evolving and declining forms? These forms, of which we are one, stand out unprotected in the cold wind of existence. Perhaps from time to time we lean against each other in order to find a measure of support, perhaps from time to time another man’s house seems to offer us something like home and security. But how precarious such dwellings are, hurriedly erected huts in the icy wind of fate which whistles around us on all sides and which from time to time tears away our or another’s roof under which we had thought we might for a while find shelter. And if indeed we are so exposed to fate and if all our insurances against accidents, against old age, against illness are simply powerless attempts to protect ourselves against an overwhelming power, against the ultimately destructive blizzard of death, if our abandonment is indeed as extreme as this, no human fellowship can protect us against our loneliness, no hope for the future can alleviate the frightening situation of the world now. If, finally, no historical past provides us with the consolation which we fail to find in the present—because men have always lived in the same exposure—if that is all true, where shall we find the confidence to feel ourselves truly sheltered and protected in that deeply concealed womb and ground of being from which we have been cast out without our asking and into which we will at the end fall back at the will of fate? If it is true that (according to Nietzsche) everything which is mature wants to die, then that is not to say that it wants to return to the primal ground into which, dying, it falls.

Paul in his speech at the Areopagus offered the Greeks an unusual definition of our existence. God, he said, has scattered men over the surface of the earth and has given them particular and limited dwelling places; that is to say, he has set them in the midst of the finitude of space and time with all its questionableness, with all its painful edges and corners. They were, he says, to “seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him.” Searching is the basic characteristic of man. It is a continual leaving behind of past results which have proved unsatisfactory. Now, of course, one would not keep on feeling one’s way forward—after all the disappointments—if one did not know that there was a gap which must be filled at all costs. But what follows—“that they might feel their way toward him”—betrays a strange sense of helplessness. To feel their way toward him: that is the manner in which blind men behave. “In the hope that perhaps” makes it appear questionable whether such feeling will meet with success. It will apparently be a matter of pure luck, a mere chance hit, if those who are feeling after the truth should happen on anything of decisive importance. And what do they then find?

What is it that the Greeks to whom Paul turns have found? What is the concept of God to which they have fought their way through? At the beginning of the Greek culture stands Homer. For him there are many gods who wear a personal face. Above them stands the father of all, Zeus, who governs the fortunes both of Hellas and of Troy. But behind Zeus and the personal gods stands as a final authority the impersonal, unsearchable, inscrutable abyss of being: fate. It is the question mark of fate which concludes the beautiful, sunny poetry of the Greeks. It is in this fate that the great heroes of Greek tragedy stand, and to this fate and not to the friendly or inimical personal gods that they address their questions. And then follows philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics; and what does it do? It takes over from the personal gods of mythology their anthropomorphic, good, and comforting characteristics: goodness, their readiness to care and provide for others, faithfulness, the love which is without envy. It lifts these characteristics like a cape from the shoulders of the personal gods and drapes them around the impersonal absolute. This was an enormously bold step. It required an unheard of courage to be, the courage to affirm existence. Now the ultimate principle which bears all things is the “idea” of the good or “providence.” The question is, however, whether such a view of things can in the long run be upheld. As soon as philosophy arises, two ideas come into prominence. The first is the thought of Heraclitus: “The world is no more than a heap of sweepings scattered at random,” and it is precisely these sweepings, precisely this terrible chaos and lack of order, this juxtaposition of extremes, precisely this which, according to him, is providence. The other idea comes from Parmenides: the sweepings, the contradictions and opposites in reality do not exist. In truth there is only one thing and that is being, that is God. The first says: The world as it in fact exists is God, or at least God takes responsibility for it; he is the sense which mediates between all this lack of sense. The second says: The world, conceived of as distinct from God, does not in reality exist and is consequently meaningless. Meaning can only be found beyond all distinctions in the very ground of things. Either God is absorbed in the world, or the world is absorbed or resolved in God. The sphere of being is round, and what could fall outside its compass? Only nothingness. And so consequently for philosophy which, as such, always wishes to reduce its subject matter to an explanation in terms of some one ultimate concept, God and the world are finally united and one in the sphere of being. And this philosophical tradition stretches via Plotinus and the Arab philosophers of the Middle Ages right down to Hegel, who was the last philosopher to make the attempt once again to embrace everything within absolute knowledge. The man Hegel, who thinks this all-embracing knowledge is a person, a professor in Berlin. The all-embracing knowledge which he thinks is not a person. All finite beings are sacrificed to the one whom he names the world spirit. Personal immortality, even the resurrection of the flesh, are for Hegel a laughable presumption on the part of the tiny individual in all his questionable mortality. What remains? Karl Marx replies: that which was there at the beginning before philosophy began: the questioning man standing out in the icy wind of fate. He must attempt on the basis of his own strength alone to build himself a house which is protection against the storms of fate. To tame and domesticate the terrifying strangeness of the world. To humanize inhumanity. Where theory could provide no answer, practice takes over. Practice at least does what it can: it attempts to provide for the man of tomorrow a house in which he may live. To the questions which the man of yesterday and today put to it, shouting them out in terror, practice can and will give no answer. Is there nowhere a unity of these fragments of theory and practice? Is there not anywhere beside all the false trails a road which will take us through the forest of being? If so, then there is only one. Something would have to happen which the blind man in his fumbling cannot take into account in his search: namely, that suddenly another hand would seize his and take over the lead. This other hand would not be the hand of his fellow man, promising us for a moment such shelter and refreshment in his hut as he can give; for tomorrow we will both be again confronted by the same fate and death. The hand of one’s fellow man could offer us great promise and hope, but only if it was empowered to seize the hand of the searching man with the power of unconditional love.

What conditions must be satisfied if a hand—the hand of God, of the living, free, personal God—is suddenly to reach out and seize the fumbling hand of man? Above all, that the terrible suffering of man, his exposure to the night and wind, should lose nothing of its weight. Fine words do not bring comfort, even if they are divine. Existence is not only maya, a bad dream, from which one can awake, a veil or a net which one can tear asunder: it is reality. A true living God will have to recognize this terrible reality; indeed, if he is to help and to provide strength, he will have to take it more seriously than a man can. The one who embraces humanity will have to stand up to the force of reality, not by virtue of an omnipotence which from the outset unmans the power of reality, but from a position in which he could experience the terribleness of the power of the world. For only then would he be credible. The Cross of Christ on which God takes upon himself the burden of the whole suffering of the world is the authentication of the living God. It does not matter whether or not it resembles the myths of dying gods; for why should not the myths be a feeling after, as it were, an empty form of that which must occur in true history and yet which cannot be imagined in historical terms? Sayings, teaching, wisdom of all kinds would not have sufficed. There is much penetrating thought which one cannot piece together. It was necessary that there should be a word of a kind quite different from all the sayings of human wisdom, a word which is no word but a silent deed, a non-word, which Paul calls the folly of God. Such a word was necessary if the first condition was to be fulfilled.

II. Now if this condition were fulfilled—and for the Christian it is indeed fulfilled in the event of the incarnate word and Son of God—may it not be that in that event he who wishes to be sought may stretch out his hand in order to let himself be found. The Bible bears witness to such a God; he gives proof of his life and personality most clearly in the fact that he again and again leads the people of Israel along paths which they do not want to follow, which they resist with all their instincts, obstinately, stubbornly, with their hackles raised. For “my thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways. As the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Is 55:8f.). Will clashes with will, plan with plan. Whoever the God of Israel may be who redeems them from the house of bondage, who drags the unwilling people through the desert, imposes on them a law, gives them his promises; whoever this mysterious one may be who never yields up his name—“I am who I am, who I will be for you,” whom you will always know from my dealings with you, even if you do not know my proper name, my hidden nature—whoever this free and living one, hidden and forcing himself on them, may be, one thing is certain for Israel: he is. He is the other, even if he is “all things” (Sir 43:27). He acts and speaks, he guides, promises, and fulfils. “He leads men down into the underworld and leads them up again.”

Philosophers attempt to find out and express something of the nature of God. Israel does not philosophize. It does not seek to grasp God, for God has already grasped it, already has seized it by the scruff of its neck. With its mother’s milk it learns the reality of the divine thou. An “I,” a people, can only exist in relation to this thou. Pascal’s alternative is vindicated: not the God of philosophers and of the learned, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ. The God of the philosophers is a mild, timeless, diffuse light, Plato’s sun of justice, the light of the Enlightenment. But the God of Israel is, to use Pascal’s words, “fire!” Or in Jeremiah’s words: “Does my word not burn like fire? Is it not like a hammer which smashes the rocks?” (23:29).

Other people too have had their gods and have addressed them as thou in prayer. But none of them has had anything remotely like the bitter experiences of its God that Israel underwent. No god has so relentlessly pressed its people on toward its goal, through thick and thin, through defeats, exiles, abandonment, till it reached the goal to which he wished to bring it through this history, till he had brought it to the place where in the deepest hiddenness he could unveil to them his face on which no man had ever set eyes—or rather not unveil it but make it discernible as absolute love. “No one has ever seen God,” but “we have seen and bear witness that the Father has sent his son as savior of the world . . . beloved, if God has shown us such great love . . .” (1 Jn 4:12, 14, 11) and “God who has said: Out of darkness shall light shine! he it is who has made it to shine in our hearts, so that we were enlightened by the knowledge of the glory on the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 4:6). These are paradoxical sayings which speak of not seeing and yet seeing, without cancelling each other out; sayings which transcend the laws of human language, because they are the self-interpretation of a deed which has been achieved; incarnate words in which the flesh more and more receives the primacy over the word; practice before theory. They break the sound barrier of that which for man is unutterable, they outstrip every hermeneutical problem, for they confront man with something done, so self-evident that it “stops the mouths” of many who would question it. And that which is done—“the fact”—is not simply cast before mankind, before the people of Israel at the end of God’s ways, as a unilateral action on the part of God, but in the word becoming man the personal God creates for himself as it were in advance a personal answer. Out of the catastrophes of the disobedience of the Old Testament he has elicited for himself so much obedience that, as the fruit of the history of the people since Abraham, he can produce one woman who can say: “I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be unto me according to thy word.” And even her word is more deed than word: permitting the active word of God to occur. And the fruit of this fruit is Jesus, who is obedient to death on the Cross, but who at the same time knows that in this obedience to the other, to the Father, he has finally brought to light that God’s hidden, always concealed name is love. Out of his love God the Father gives that which is most precious to him, his Son, for us. Out of his love the Son goes into the darkest places of the world, of death and hell, in order to bear the guilt of all his human brothers. And this love is given to us as the fruit poured into our hearts: God’s Holy Spirit of love.

III. Man in his search for truth can never arrive by philosophizing—in however simple or academic a way—at the statement “God is love.” For against this statement the world, as it appears, raises a categorical objection. At best man can push his way forward to the statement that God is the reconciliation of the contradictions internal to the world. A place of peace, where one no longer suffers, where one can forget life, where the painful boundaries between individuals finally fall away, where we are taken up into the realm of that which is without distinction. Unless, that is, man should prefer to dispense with such a peace beyond this earthly realm and to attempt to rise by his own heroic efforts to an affirmation of the world as it is in the midst of existence with all its divisiveness, as did Nietzsche; to say yes and amen in all eternity to this ruminating monster, this will to power. But such an affirmation may not exclude a single one of the concentration camps. Let him attempt it and see whether he can retain his sanity.

There was only one way by which men might approach the statement “God is love.” God first had to reveal himself as the one who is all things in himself, who in his freedom disposes over all things, who predestines and promises, in brief, to show himself as the absolute person; as the one who takes our fumbling hand firmly, only too firmly, in his. The result is Jesus Christ. For him there is only the personal God, whom he addresses as Abba, tenderly loved Father. One can perhaps argue that Jesus was not objectively the unique Son of God. But one cannot dispute historically that he was conscious of his unique status as the one who in his origins stood in an incomparable relationship to a thoroughly personal God, and that all his efforts were directed toward bringing us into relationship with this his Father as his children. When you pray then say, “Thou, our Father . . .” If one reflects for a while on this, keeping in mind the whole fate of Jesus up to his Cross, then perhaps the realization might begin to dawn that here occurred God’s final, never to be exceeded self-revelation. That in this existence and in this dying abandonment by God, God has proclaimed his final “word,” which from that point rings out undiminished down the centuries. What more then could be said than this? And yet has anyone ever penetrated so far into this final revelation that it does not always stand before him as his future?

But what is Christian does not oscillate uncertainly between past and future; by virtue of its unique form and figure, it lends support to the present at every stage. For what distinguishes and sets Christian faith above all other religious beliefs of mankind is this: the hand of the loving Father, who grasps the fumbling child, is the hand of a human thou. The hand of our neighbor. “Who is neighbor to him who fell among robbers? He answered, He who showed mercy on him. And Jesus said to him, go and do likewise” (Lk 10:36ff. RSV). The fact that God’s hand is the hand of one particular fellow human being makes of the hand of every fellow human being something quite new. We may sense through its uncertainty the firmness, the trustworthiness of the divine hand. We can within a Christian marriage join hand in hand in the faith that weak human love will be strengthened by the love of God with an eternal power. Reliability and faithfulness from person to person bear fruit in the fact that we are together borne up by a personal God who shows us his faithfulness in human form. Only where God is person is man taken seriously as a person. Every man is addressed personally as thou by God and experiences here his irreplaceable value. It is with this insight that biblical religion, and in particular Christianity, has entered history. But this insight is in danger of being submerged and lost wherever God is no longer understood personally as freely loving. Moreover, he is only credible as a person where he does not stand over against the suffering of the world, teaching and pouring comfort on it with words, but where he acts by going to the Cross. The personhood of God, the Cross of Christ, the dignity of man, and human love are indissolubly interrelated. One may imagine that one could advocate the dignity of man without believing in God’s person, indeed precisely by denying it. But the logic of history will again level out, either existentially or collectivistically, the persons who have thus been absolutized. It will turn them into cannon fodder and the objects of experiments, into manure for evolution. Only the personal God himself whose love is truth and whose truth is love can give to the I and thou between men a truly personal value, so that in the exchange in trust between the two something unique, something irreducible occurs, not an erotic illusion, not a trick of nature, not something which psychoanalysis can reveal as egoism, but pure truth.

The Incarnation of God

The statement “God became man” is without question central to the Christian witness. For any other religion—quite apart from other “world views”—it is an intolerable, basically self-contradictory statement. It isolates Christianity from all other philosophies and confessions. For the point is not simply that God who has all names and yet is without name, who is wholly other and (beyond this indeed) not other, because without opposites, that such a God at particular points and in particular people in the world and its history becomes “transparent.” That is indeed an all too fashionable word today, and, with its help, it may appear possible to reduce to a common denominator with the basic Christian message Indian avatars and prophetic or mystical personalities—for example, in Judaism or Islam, or even in other religions. Rather, what sets Christianity apart from other religions is the offensive claim that the one who bears all names and yet is without name, who as the Scripture says “is everything” (Sir 43:27), has once and for all declared himself identical with a tiny something or someone in the vast cosmos and among the countless millions of swarming humanity—identical with someone who then can make such monstrously exclusive statements about himself as “I am the door . . . all who have come before me are thieves and robbers” (Jn 10:7f.) and “No one knows the Father but the Son and him to whom the Son will reveal it” (Mt 11:27). Of course, once one has admitted that the “all” can become identical with the tiny “someone,” then one has little choice but to accept such intolerably intolerant claims on the part of this “someone.” But does not the very absurdity of claiming that all the broad rivers which link men of all cultures and religions with the unutterable ground of all things flow through this—his!—narrow gorge show that the very presuppositions of such a claim must be absurd and consequently undermine those claims? Moreover, quite apart from the logical nonsense of attempting to identify the whole with a part of itself (being with individual existents), is it not apparent that such an act would run directly contrary to those broadening, liberating effects which a religion ought indeed to have, namely, of gathering up into an all-embracing peace that which within the world is rent asunder in opposing camps, in a perpetual struggle, and so might it not seem that it is in effect designed “not to bring peace but the sword” and “to divide” men even in their households and families (Mt 10:34f.)? May not Christianity, with its intolerant history of men burned at the stake and religious wars, be a terrible step backward from a religious and political universalism which was beginning to show itself in the Hellenistic-Roman world, and which Christianity at its outset cripples? And may not Christianity, in its post-Christian, secularized form, have to be made responsible for the spirit of impatience and division which today—against the general direction of technical progress—delays and indeed demonically questions the unification of the world?

This indeed is how it appears if we approach the basic Christian claims from outside, in the abstract, unmediated, independently of the forms by which they are mediated to Christians, without making the effort to view them in their whole context, which context is indispensable for their understanding. The tender shoots at the top of a pine tree presuppose the whole powerful tree down to its deepest roots. But precisely this effort to think through the whole anew and more deeply in the light of the highest claims is what is demanded by Christianity; or rather, it is the fact that from its highest point it sheds over the whole a light which makes possible such a new and deeper appreciation. This light does not simply show up the weakness and frailty of all religious and nonreligious philosophies of mankind, of all attempts to find one’s way through to an understanding of the mystery of the existence of the world: on the contrary, it brings such attempts and efforts to a fulfilment which far outreaches anything which might be expected, by setting the truths contained in such philosophies in their proper place and integrating them with the whole. What we shall attempt in the three following sections is to move from an abstract pair of opposites ( “all”—“something,” “God”—“man”) into the realm of the concrete.

I. The mysterious ground of being from which finite things arose—things which require an explanation not only for the way they are but for their very existence—was addressed by Plato with the name of “the good.” For even assuming that our experience of worldly existence would lead us to hesitate before declaring as “good” the existence of a world which is not identical with the ground of being, in particular the existence of a world full of incomprehensible suffering, and would further lead us to experience our distance from the ground of being, our falling away from it into a “region of dissimilarity” (regio dissimilitudinis), as a disaster; even assuming, that is, that what we regard as our worldly being, in its strangeness, inexplicableness, estrangement, was to be experienced rather as something to be overcome than as something for which we should be grateful (as for example in Buddhism); even so, the ground of being which one would then have to speak of (by contrast with worldly existents) as the “not-existing” would, in spite of all, be the good and that which was to be striven for by stripping oneself of the estranging illusion of finitude. It is impossible to conceive of the ground of being itself as evil, demonic, as that which is to be cursed. The “guilt” for the estrangement which attaches to finite existence (not, that is, simply for its mere otherness from the ground of being) is attributed therefore by the religions always to a secondary factor; for example, to the freedom of the pre-existent souls (Plato, Buddhism), or to a “demi-god” (gnosticism), or in radical modern utopianism to a principle of the past which stands in opposition to the absolute which is to come. Setting aside this utopianism, which cannot be thought through without contradiction, primal goodness still remains a justification of everything which in this mixed world can be called truly existent and positive; in this sense it is a diffusion of itself beyond the bounds of its fundamental being, communicating itself to its effects (bonum diffusivum sui). This principle which unites the religions is taken up in the biblical revelation of the Old and New Covenants and integrated into the supreme notion that the causing of a finite world by the good did not occur because the (infinite) good needed this (finite) world in order to be the good. In other words, God does not produce the world naturally because he is God, which would then mean that the world would be in the same measure divine and necessary as God himself; rather it is an absolute freedom which is the ground of the self-effusion of the ultimate good. This in turn has two consequences: that God in himself and independently of his relationship to the world is the good, or in Christian terms is love, and that the ultimate cause of the creation of a world can only be the free, loving communication of divine goodness to created beings. If one thinks this through, then one will have to say, over and above this, that precisely in the freedom of the love of the divine ground of being lies the possibility of there being such a thing as a world (which is not God, not the infinite and the all) at all. Indeed the final point may emerge dimly as a kind of limiting concept which will find its confirmation in the central assertions of the Christian faith: The ground of being can be called the good as free love only if it possesses in itself a spiritual life of love; that is to say, if there is within it a self-giving, a communing, a communality that does not impugn the identity of the absolute but indeed is the necessary condition of its truly being the absolute good.

II. If we consider creatures, which find their highest form in man, from this point of view, then it appears that man also, precisely as an individual, is not only a tiny something (as opposed to the all-embracing “all”) but is something whose being and nature are fashioned and determined by the good which communicates itself to him. Man is “in the image” of God. As spirit—that is to say, in so far as he knows and thinks spiritually and wills freely—he is open to everything and to every existent, which is possible only if he is open to the perspective of being itself (he is quodammodo omnia). As he knows that he is not God, so too he knows that his being is from God, a knowledge grounded in a basic experience which may perhaps use other concepts, ideas, and words but which envisages the same matter as we have attempted to express here. His concern is with the question of the meaning of the world and existence as a whole. It is a secondary matter whether he seeks this meaning in a mysterious peace within the riddle of the world (a peace which, however, must lie beyond the pain which he experiences and can be found in an ascetic, mystical, perhaps technical overcoming of the painful states), or whether he denies the being of the world in the form in which he finds it, in order to find peace beyond it (for example, in the “idea” of the world as it is in God), or whether finally he despairs of his ability to find a solution and, while trying to make the best of his mortal life, sets the riddle aside. But if he encounters the idea that he, as this particular man (as indeed every man is a “particular” man), is the image of the freely loving God who consequently also wills him of his freedom, then a strange and remarkable light will be shed on his existence. On the one hand, it will become clear to him that the free divine good has intended him to be this particular person, this unmistakable person, and has consequently freely given to him his freedom and insight and responsibility; but that this, on the other hand, cannot be simply a matter of dismissing him, of sending him off without further interest into an estrangement from God. Rather he must realize his being as a man with free, rational responsibility precisely by relating the image to the original, not by turning away, but by turning to God. Here a realm of intimate inwardness is opened up which may take many forms and names: contact with the primal image, cherishing and contemplating memories and recollections, prayer, the attempt to make human insight and freedom in every situation transparent to absolute insight and freedom. It is an openness, ready to be formed and fulfilled; it is a making room for the one who may come to dwell, a readiness to be the womb which shall bear fruit each in one’s own particular human worldly activity and efforts.

III. What we have been trying to do in these first two sections is to show how that which is ambiguous, dark, and impure in the many religious attempts of mankind to understand his world and its reality can be clarified and simplified in the light of the Christian answer, clarified moreover in such a way that the path from the universal, human understanding of the world to the Christian understanding could be shown here as a possible, internally consistent one. Does this mean to say that such an exercise as such has already led us to the Christian faith, perhaps indeed has postulated it a priori, constructed it, shown it to be necessary? No. Two elements must be added if we are to get it clearly in view. First, the extent and scale of the negative decisions of human freedom when measured by the standard of the absolute goodness of God—a standard which remains decisive where man’s behavior toward God and toward the world in which he lives is to be measured. These negative decisions are both individual (“sin”) and social (“common guilt,” previously known as “original sin”) in character; the historical world is consequently in a state of such deep confusion that it is totally beyond the power of any individual to outweigh the consequences of personal as well as of social guilt by his own decisions and enterprises. The concrete, unnatural figure of death sets on existence the seal of futility and makes the history of the world internally imperfectible—because the bloody way which may lead to a relatively final happy state can never be justified by this state itself—and remains for ever a warning and a reminder of this insuperable guilt. It thus constantly points up the perilous and indeed imperilling character of every program that would seek to lead men toward a greater freedom. For this always remains a freedom of choice, for better or for worse, so that every form of inner-worldly optimism vis-à-vis the future is not only naive but pernicious. If, however, these are the consequences of the risk which God has taken in entrusting his creatures with genuine freedom (freedom ultimately to deny and to destroy themselves), then ultimately God could only take such a risk if he himself threw himself into the balance, assumed the risk himself, and of himself opened up a way where there were no ways. It is here that the biblical message interposes and proclaims, “God with us,” God on our side! It proclaims not only “covenant,” which assures us of God’s faithfulness, even in spite of our breaches of that covenant and in spite of his just judgments (“if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself,” 2 Tim 2:13 RSV), but a coming over to our side in order to open up a way for us from within our helplessness and hopelessness—yet without in any way overplaying that situation with his omnipotence; without, that is, impugning our freedom in any manner. A way which leads through death into life. Dying freely and obediently, he turns death, the sign of our guilt, into a monument of love.

Here, of course, our thoughts begin to stumble; the mystery begins. And how could it be otherwise if it is God who comes over to our side? In order that this one life and death might become significant for all, the divine gracious freedom had to coincide with human obedient freedom; only the self-exposition of Jesus’ existence allows us to sense how this occurs: God’s word of promise, his wisdom, his law, his faithfulness, are “sent” bodily to our side (so that consequently the mission of all other earlier mediators, wise men, and prophets is taken up and superseded by this mission). At first one sees the man, Jesus of Nazareth, who, like the prophets and yet more radically than they, obeys the spirit which has been given him from above and commits himself to the task given him by God to the point where he identifies his life (and death) with that task, until it becomes clear that he in his whole being has become the statement of God. But he could only become this if, regardless of the process of becoming, he had been so from the start. God’s “word” carries out God’s purposes for the world in the form of a man: the salvation of man by his own total self-commitment to him. We cannot here unfold the meaning of this statement, we can only point to it. For the “incarnation of God” to be possible in a Christian sense, God must be able to come over to our side without leaving his own “side”; but this opposition presupposes essentially that eternal opposition of which we spoke when considering the life of love within the Godhead. The world with its freedom finds a resting place in the final plan of God between God the Father and God the Son and is allowed to participate in that highest freedom which, Christianly speaking, is the Divine Spirit, the shared spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son which gives expression to their unity of love. Because the opposition within the Godhead is overcome in him and (in faith) becomes visible as a presupposition of eternal love, the opposition between God and man, which is an offense to reason, can (in faith) be understood as a presupposition of the one, free, self-giving of God to his world in his Holy Spirit.

And so the isolated position of Christianity, which at the beginning appeared only as a sign of its intolerance, finds its explanation. Such a position rests simply on the fact that Christianity makes the claim, which should now be intelligible, to be the ultimate expression of God and consequently his final self-giving and self-revelation. This cannot be transcended because God, who is “all things,” here out of his free love goes not only into that which is “other” than himself, into the creature, which is a “something” and “nearly nothing,” but also into that which is contrary to himself as he gathers up into himself the sin and the lostness and so the abandonment by God of his creature, gathers it up and transforms it. He does not thereby cease to be himself; indeed he shows precisely through this what he is in himself, what he is and what he can do. God can be dead without ceasing to be eternal life and he can, acting in this manner, prove finally that he is life and love and the goodness and grace which pours itself out in selfless self-giving. That is definitive, “eschatological,” and it would be a self-contradiction if it, relativizing itself, should set other views alongside itself (which perhaps contain pointers toward this ultimate truth) as of equal importance. The heart is pierced, its spring uncovered, water and blood pour forth, there is nothing more than this.

What is the consequence of this death for the world? If it is what Christians believe, then the answer is that it gives meaning to the futility both of our individual existences and of the history of the world, that it gives hope to those who live under the rule of death, hope in a life with God which overcomes death. The way forward is for the individual and for humanity as a whole a way toward a final meaning. A way to a “peace” as the world cannot give (Jn 14:27), even if it made progress in pacifism, because it is first and foremost peace between heaven and earth, between God and men (Lk 2:14; Eph 2:14; Col 1:20). It is from this peace that we are sent out to work with all our power for the pacification of the world. There are Christian existences which radiate such peace, which are blessed for it and who are called “children of God” (Mt 5:9).

*Excerpted from Hans Urs von Balthasar, New Elucidations, translated by Mary Theresilde Skerry. Copyright © 1986, Ignatius Press. Used with permission.

1. Piet Schoonenberg, in Die Antworten der Theologen (Patmos, 1968), p. 54.

Test Everything

(Two Chapters)*

On Liberation Theology

Angelo Scola: Yes, in the second instance we are dealing with the “tendency toward a secular world.” Are we not now approaching the problem of liberation theology?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: I think we are. Liberation theology is primarily a political re-reading of Old and New Testament texts. It leans heavily on the prophetic messages of the Old Testament, which deal with the wrath of Yahweh over the oppression of the poor in Israel. And since Israel is in the before-mentioned sense an “ethnic” people, this theology may indeed be called biblical, not however, truly and properly Christian. It is biblical because, as we have already said, Israel represents a unique blend of ethnic and theological components. Nevertheless, as early as the Old Covenant, the concept of “the poor” begins to shift from a more sociological to a theological one. Since Jeremiah, the “poor of Yahweh” are those who can put their trust in no temporal power but in God alone. That the predominantly theological factor of Yahweh’s poor does not exclude but rather includes the political one, has been lucidly demonstrated by the late Pierre Ganne, a dear friend of mine, whose small book Le Pauvre et le Prophete (the prophetic role of the poor) I translated. He shows in it that the poor are not only theologically but also politically the true prophets, for they stake their all, beyond earthly millennialisms, on the absolute future of God.

But what happens when we pass from the Old Testament to the New? Have we not already made this transition when we distinguish between a temporal “future” and an eternal “avenir” (which already has begun presently in Jesus Christ and his Holy Spirit)? We have now arrived at an essential factor, which Käsemann called eschatological anticipation, a central characteristic of the New Testament. And now I have to ask the question I am always impelled to ask when I read the texts of liberation theology: is not everything already contained in the dual commandment of Jesus, in his truly eschatological maxim, “What you have done to the least of my brethren . . .”? Is the much-invoked solidarity with the poor not clearly manifest in this commandment? Is it necessary to invent an additional theology for desperate sociological situations, a theology which runs the risk of constructing something alongside what has always been understood by serious Christians and which could result in being less comprehensive, less Christian than the Gospels? It is, of course, true that entire epochs have averted their eyes from its ethical and political demands, soothing their consciences with a morality of alms-giving. In this respect it is all for the good that we are now inexorably confronted by the old biblical radicalism, as preached by Saint John Chrysostom and lived by Saint Francis and Saint Peter Claver. But does this really require a new Christology as presented by Leonardo Boff, just to mention one of its outstanding proponents?

Angelo Scola: What is new in this Christology?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: One can recognize it clearly in his book Paixāo de Christo, paixāo do mundo (Petropolis, 1978). In it, Boff seems to develop a Christology strongly influenced by Bultmann, with whom he suggests that we know very little about the historical Jesus. However, he believes that we can interpret the primary intention of Jesus as that of someone who understood himself in his role as liberator of the poor and oppressed. Everything else in the story of Jesus he leaves aside as irrelevant, even confusing and harmful over-painting, notwithstanding the fact that the Gospel versions and their interpretation by Saint Paul, as well as that of the entire Tradition, have been determined by it. The liberation—the “Kingdom of God,” which Jesus expected to result from it—had failed to come about, as expressed by the authentic cry on the Cross: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” The doctrine of substitution is rejected by Boff as well as by Rahner. It is up to us present-day Christians to adopt and execute what Jesus had wished and begun.

And since we are speaking of Boff’s christological design, a word might be added about his Mariology, which contains much that is beautiful and in agreement with Tradition, though its main theme throws a curious light on his Christology. The fundamental thesis (delivered as hypothesis, but finished in detail), which apparently intends to capture the feminist movement by investing it with theological depth, is emphasized in italic print: Mary, who is the eschatologically highest realization of the feminine, was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit in such a way that she can and must be described as hypostatically united with the Spirit. This thesis rests on two bases: one, the theory of C. G. Jung which posits that in every person, man or woman, a masculine (animus) and a feminine (anima) element are present. Thus the two sexes are created to complement each other, and in their union each finds the other as well as its own self. Starting from here, Boff proceeds to say of the hypostatic union of Jesus Christ, that in him not only the masculine but also the feminine are essentially united to the Divine Logos. Nevertheless, it is precisely because of this union that a complementary one is to be expected: a corresponding union, predominantly feminine, must be accomplished, if only because the suprasexual God is the originator of both equal sexes. Only then can the theological “balance,” as Boff likes to say, be established, a balance which could not have been clearly expressed within the patriarchal context of the New Testament. We are content to pose a single question: what does Boff mean by “hypostatic union”? He cannot mean what the definition of Chalcedon meant, when it asserted that in Christ there is a oneness of Person, namely the divine, from which (if we choose to employ modern formulations) the human nature is “personated.” (The old enhypostaton basically had this in mind, and Saint Thomas explicitly acknowledged it.) It was precisely for this reason that Nestorianism had been condemned as a form of Adoptionism: there are not two Persons united in Christ. Mary, on the other hand, is without doubt a human person, even if one allows for the operation of the Holy Spirit to commence with her “immaculate conception.” Could, therefore, Boff’s Marian model explain his christological one? In that case we would better understand how he can represent a Christology which is close to Bultmann as well as to Albert Schweitzer; also, why he depicts both Christ and Mary as eschatological models, whose unitedness to God we are destined to attain.

In his Mariology, Boff quotes an enormous amount of literature. Nevertheless, one cannot help wondering why he avoids mentioning two authors who are both close to his basic intention, but develop it in an orthodox form: Teilhard de Chardin, with his vision of the Eternel Féminin (commented by Cardinal de Lubac), and Louis Bouyer’s bold thesis, influenced by Russian Sophiology, in which he holds that the entire world process rests upon the union of the (descending) Logos with Sophia (ascending to Mary). With both authors, the virginal motherhood of Mary presents the last and highest flowering of Sophia striving upward within the world process, just as Christ presents the definitive Incarnation of the Logos, increasingly made concrete by the same process. Both, accordingly, do not form two hypostatic unions, which as such would have to depict the suprasexual masculine-femininity of God, but precisely that nuptial “toward each other,” which Saint Paul (Eph 5) and the entire tradition describe in countless Christian commentaries on the Canticle of Canticles. Then, of course, keeping in mind the whole of tradition, the equal dignity of man and woman must be corroborated by their division of roles as delineated by Saint Paul (1 Cor 11), and finally converge again in equal dignity, when he concludes: “In the Lord woman is neither dependent on man, nor is man dependent on woman, for just as woman stems from man, so man is from woman. All, however, stem from God.” I do not believe that this can be fundamentally surpassed. But enough of liberation theology, although it possesses many other variants than the one we have described here.

Angelo Scola: Is not liberation an integral part of the missionary mandate of Christ, and is it not necessary for any genuine inculturation?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: Indeed, it is. However, to recapitulate, it does not presuppose any new theology, but rather an effective Christian witness to the main commandment. Consider the work of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Not her theology, but her Christian actions have astounded the Indian sages and brought her to the attention of the entire world. And, strangely enough, she did not even have to touch upon the complex problems of inculturation. It is well known that these problems increase in difficulty when Christianity is brought face to face with more elaborate and sophisticated cultures, as is the case in India, where philosophical wisdom and perspicacity surpass Christian philosophizing. Not that missionary work is any easier in the case of certain African tribes, whose spiritual traditions need also to be respected, or in the case of Latin American Indians, Eskimos or Papuas. Perhaps the example of Mother Teresa teaches us that the living model presents the best access to the Gospel message. On the other hand, the unique phenomenon of Christ is not wedded to any “culture,” even to the hellenistic one of the Mediterranean. Saint Paul knew this. So did the German and Slavic missionaries, as well as Augustine of Canterbury, when he was sent to England by Pope Gregory. Of course, Jesus remains the fulfiller of the Old Covenant for every culture. If one wishes to have Jesus without the Old Testament, or replace his antecedents by one’s own culture (African or Asiatic), the result will resemble Hitler’s “German Christians.”

Is There a Christian Culture?

Angelo Scola: Why do Western Christians appear to perceive the alliance of faith and culture as problematical? Is there indeed a sense in which we can speak of Christian culture?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: There certainly should be. Unfortunately we are now immersed in a culture which should rather be called a technical civilization in its final stage, in which we run the risk of being overwhelmed and dehumanized by a man-made machine, from which we promised ourselves freedom, only to be robbed of it. By machine is meant not only the “frame,” as Heidegger named it, but the entire pseudo-human bureaucratic machinery, as denounced earlier by Marx. How should one go about freeing man from a prison he has built for himself and create an authentic Christian culture? How can we free him from a contrivance of worldwide dimensions, which is almost automatically self-perfecting? Politics and economics are so inextricably entangled that no one apparently is able to bring this wheel-work to a standstill. One cannot help wondering whether the liberation theologians sufficiently accounted for the global proportions of this phenomenon. In the foreground one can certainly divide people into the “oppressors” and the “oppressed.” But is it taken into consideration that the oppressors in the foreground are or may be themselves the oppressed in the background and that it will be difficult indeed from here on to find the Ultimate Oppressor? Perhaps they all belong to the oppressing oppressed—which in no way should imply that everyone is an innocent lamb.

Angelo Scola: And if you were asked to give a brief definition of Christian culture?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: I do not know if it is possible to deal with it in a brief fashion. Culture is a loosely-knit word. Originally it meant the cultivation of the soil, as mentioned in Genesis: to make nature’s wilderness humanly habitable, to put the imprint of man upon it. During certain cultural epochs this enterprise may have succeeded to a degree; let us remember the Georgics by Virgil. But what can be done amid this want of culture wrought by the machine? I suppose one can try to build islands of humanity, and in this project Christians could and should be leading; such actions may have a contagious effect on others and stimulate an asceticism which renounces the excessive goods of consumerism, simply to become more human. In the Eastern bloc countries, where life is almost exclusively dictated by bureaucracy, such islands of freedom are immediately recognized and sought. “When everything is blocked off,” I was told by a dear friend who lives in Erfurt, “one must try to live in the interstices.” Apparently the Christians of the Apocalypse, though they did not bear the sign of the beast, had discovered or created such spaces. From islands like this, true culture, Christian culture, may spread across the earth. Many people are athirst for it.

Angelo Scola: When addressing Catholics, John Paul II has repeatedly called for a transition from faith to culture, emphasizing that faith must create culture, from which specific ways of living can evolve.

Hans Urs von Balthasar: That should indeed be possible, remembering God’s original commandment, for God cannot have commanded the impossible. If man was appointed ruler of the animal kingdom and nature, he must possess this ability within himself, even when, as a result of its misuse, his products have reduced him to a state of servitude. All this sounds very abstract, but the Gospel does not give concrete instructions concerning Christian culture. Nevertheless, such instructions are implicit in Christ’s mandate to give testimony, if necessary, by blood (Apocalypse). Such testimony is given by the epistles of Saint Paul, by the marvelous letter to Philemon, every word of which presents Christian humanism. Testimony, too, consists in doing “whatever things are true, honorable, just, holy, lovable, worthy of praise” (Phil 4:8). To be consistently Christian means to be consistently human, if only because no other religion demands and shows such reverence for one’s neighbor as well as the body as does the religion of the incarnate, of Christ and his dual commandment.

Angelo Scola: Within the dramatic scope of our society, which you have sketched, to what should a Christian commit himself?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Christian should commit himself to the whole of secular culture. Today this is chiefly realized by the secular institutes, one of which I have started to develop with Adrienne von Speyr. The idea is to commit oneself on all levels on which a Christian commitment can humanize whatever is threatening to slide into the inhuman.

Angelo Scola: What should a Christian do, what stance should he take in the arena of politics? Some believe that one ought to “exhibit an ethical-professional profile.” Is that sufficient?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: We cannot simply entrust politics to non-Christians. The Church is confronted with political systems in the world—and by no means merely peripherally. They are to be taken seriously, even though they may present a heavy burden for the Christian. This presupposes, of course, professional competence, just as a physician or lawyer must exhibit competence in his field. This idea is basic to all secular institutes. What applies to secular professions applies equally to politics: although we cannot force specifically Christian ethics on non-Christians, we nevertheless have to demonstrate that life according to such terms is humanly believable. It is faith as exemplified in one’s life that makes the specialist credible, even when there is no need to preach it. Take, for example, Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld.

A sufficient treatment of the thorny theme “Mission and conduct of a Christian politician,” however, exceeds the scope of this interview and, above all, my competence. How can consideration for the common good of the secular state, only to a small degree consciously Christian, and consideration for the individual conscience and knowledge of the politician be harmonized? Are there any objectively verifiable norms, or must the Christian conscience of the politician freely decide each case for itself? In the end he alone can decide whether his missionary obligation as a Christian may have to be reserved in a particular instance, due to a more urgent or seemingly opportune consideration, which may permit him to serve more effectively in the long run.

Angelo Scola: Finally, then, the central issue is the missionary task of every Christian, which cannot be evaded. But how is the essence of Christianity to be communicated to contemporary men and women?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: Primarily, by confronting them uncompromisingly with the whole Gospel. With the whole Christ, rather than with a charism chosen at random. There is but one answer to the fundamental questions of humanity, and that is the Christian one. We are constantly returning to the same starting point: people need to recognize the incomparable, the unique character of the Gospel, not comparable to anything else in the rest of the world. In the universal history of humanity there does not exist—and never will exist—anything analogous to Christ, a man who, without presumption, speaks and acts with the authority of God. “You have heard it said . . . I, however, am telling you.” This “I” has the weight of the voice of Yahweh. And it is not only a matter of speaking. The entire existence of Jesus, his working life, his preaching, his death and Resurrection; everything in him is an exegesis of God. If one attempts to carve out a “historical Jesus” apart from his totality, one loses all understanding, just as the disciples understood nothing when confronted with his Passion and Transfiguration.

Angelo Scola: You equate, then, Christ the man with the Word of God?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: There exists no Christ figure in the New Testament which could be isolated from the sacraments, from the magisterial or pastoral Office or from Tradition. There is a great danger nowadays: to dissect Christ into several small parts, single logoi as it were, and then to meditate on this or that singular aspect, only to lose the vision of the whole. There are certain theologians who close their eyes to the overwhelming apostolic authority of Saint Paul, claiming that he possessed no such authority in the Christian communities; and such folly commands a wide audience. They also claim that in his day there was no hierarchy, no episcopacy, as if that had been necessary, as long as Saint Paul himself was bishop of his communities, together with Titus, Timothy and others, whom one would call auxiliary bishops today. When he sends one of them to Corinth, he impresses on the congregation: “Receive him the way you receive me, with the same reverence.” Saint Paul was highly aware of his authority. And for his part, he acknowledges the authority of Saint Peter.

Angelo Scola: In speaking of Christ, you have used two words which struck me: “unique phenomenon.” How can we deal with this uniqueness nowadays? After all, this is no private event, for which it would be sufficient to read the Bible by oneself or even with the aid of an experienced exegete.

Hans Urs von Balthasar: You are right. Holy Scripture is not preeminently “a” book, but a witness to the word of God, which was sent forth to us in Christ. This word has been written down, so that we may have something solid to support us. It is, however, not Christ’s will that we read him like a book; he himself has written nothing: “My words are spirit and life.” During the lifetime of the apostles and immediately afterward, there existed no “New Testament.” The apostles proclaimed the life of Christ, and they did this with their own lives. Saint Paul is not presumptuous when he says: “Observe me, Christ lives in me; imitate Christ the way I imitate him.” And further: “You have accepted the word for what it really is: not my word, but the word of Christ.” The word of God cannot be simply recited, but requires the testimony of a living Christian, because the Word had become flesh; and hence one has to demonstrate with one’s flesh what the word is.

Angelo Scola: But this living model should really be the Church?

Hans Urs von Balthasar: Of course. To the degree in which she realizes the fundamental intention of Jesus: to be a missionary Church.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. How does the “Unknown God” become known?

2. Describe certain aspects of Balthasar’s Christology. What does he mean by, “God must be able to come over to our side without leaving his own ‘side.’”?

3. How is love transcendent?

4. Compare Balthasar’s view to Francis Schaeffer’s (chap. 22) on human beings as searching for something good.

5. Is it true that Israel never philosophizes?

6. How does Balthasar defend the Christian faith against the charge of violence?

7. What is Balthasar’s critique of liberation theology?

8. Is there a Christian culture?

*Excerpted from Hans Urs von Balthasar, Test Everything: Hold Fast to What Is Good: An Interview with Hans Urs Von Balthsar by Angelo Scola and translated by Maria Shrady. Copyright © 1989, Ignatius Press. Used with permission.

CHAPTER 21

Lesslie Newbigin

(1909–1998)

Lesslie Newbigin was born in Newcastle, Northumbria, in England. He attended a Quaker public (private to North Americans) boarding school in Reading. He then attended Queens’ College, Cambridge University. He was an agnostic when he entered, but an older, believing student challenged him. In the summer he worked at a Quaker service center in South Wales that provided services for unemployed miners. One night, filled with concern for those men, he sensed Christ was reaching down, and his whole outlook on life changed.

As a strong believer he finished Cambridge and then went to Glasgow to work with the Student Christian Movement (SCM). He returned to Cambridge in 1933 to attend Westminster College as a theological student. In July of 1936 he was ordained in the Presbytery of Edinburgh and, together with his new wife, Helen Henderson, was sent to Madras (today known as Chennai) as a missionary for the Church of Scotland. He learned Tamil and studied Hinduism. He became a missionary-statesman, helping to solidify the Church of South India, a coalition of Protestant churches. In 1947 he was appointed a bishop in the diocese of Madurai Ramnad, something of a surprise for a Presbyterian minister. In 1959 he became the general secretary of the International Missionary Council, which would integrate into the World Council of Churches, in Geneva. In 1965 he returned to India to become the bishop of Madras, where he stayed until his retirement in 1974. He and his wife, Helen, made their way back to England by land, using local buses and carrying only two suitcases!

They came to Birmingham, where Newbigin became a lecturer at the Selly Oak Colleges for five years. Then he took a pastorate in the United Reformed Church of Winston Green, just opposite the prison there. He preached in Balmoral and wrote prolifically.

Newbigin counts as one of the most significant theologians of mission and culture in the twentieth century. His chief concerns were to help Christians understand that the gospel is able to challenge the post-Christian world not by making it more Western but by helping it to identify its idols, particularly the idol of relativism, and to speak the truth instead. Well read in history, philosophy, and theology, he also was a churchman through and through. He believed missions was service to Christ and must be motivated by thanksgiving to him.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society emerged from the Alexander Robertson lectures, given at Glasgow University in 1988. Although he claims to be writing not as a scholar but as a pastor and preacher, his broad knowledge of many disciplines will have escaped no one. In the preface Newbigin gives tribute to Michael Polanyi, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Hendrikus Berkhof for some of his analysis. For chapter 16 he thanks Walter Wink for his book Naming the Powers (1984). But mostly these pages are fresh and fluid, bearing the unmistakable stamp of a veteran missionary and a clear communicator.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society

Chapters 15–16*

Chapter 15

The Gospel and the Cultures

In the two previous chapters I have been exploring the issue of religious pluralism. I have given reasons for rejecting a total relativism among religious options and have tried to suggest what is implied for our understanding of the religions by our confession that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. I want to turn now to another aspect of pluralism, the plurality of human cultures. These two different issues are easily confused because, from the point of view of a sociologist, religion is part of culture, and no religious belief is without implications for culture. On the other hand, religions may be multicultural, and that is certainly true of Christianity. There are enormous cultural variations between the ways in which Christians in Nigeria, India, Samoa, and the USA express their faith. The question of the relation between the gospel and the different human cultures is a very live one in contemporary missiology. At one extreme Dr. McGavran and the “Church Growth” school of missiologists affirm—in McGavran’s words—that “God accepts culture” (Lausanne Congress for World Evangelisation, 1974); they therefore tend to absolutize culture and to minimize the cultural changes which conversion ought to imply. People who accept the gospel, they affirm, ought to retain their traditional culture. Surely, however, the Church Growth missiologists are thinking here of such aspects of culture as music, art, dress, habits of eating and drinking, and—of course—language. They would not, certainly, agree that the gospel leaves unchallenged such elements of culture as cannibalism, the death penalty for petty offenses, or the ancient Indian custom of sati—the burning of a man’s widow with his body on the funeral pyre. So if we do not accept a total relativism in respect of the varieties of human culture, what degree of relativism can there be?

The most fundamental element in culture is language. When people are forbidden to use their traditional language, as for instance the highlanders of Scotland in the eighteenth century, or the Taiwanese in our own time, then they feel that the very foundations of their common life have been destroyed. Do the nations of the world, with their many thousands of different languages, have to lose their language in order to become part of the universal Christian church? Perhaps the early church was spared the sharpness of that question by the fact that Greek was available as a common language throughout such a large part of the known world. A similar situation today, when English is so widely used throughout the world, helps us to evade the sharpness of the problem. For many centuries the Roman Catholic Church insisted that the only language in which the gospel could be properly expressed was Latin. And everyone who has wrestled with the task of communicating the gospel in a language which has been formed in total isolation from Christendom knows that every translation involves a fresh interpretation. Islam insists to this day that God’s word as given to the Prophet can only be heard in Arabic. According to strict Islamic teaching the Qur’an cannot be translated, only interpreted. Yet at the birth of the Christian Church we have the story of what happened on the day of Pentecost, when people of a score of different nations heard the mighty works of God communicated to them in their own languages. In the Eastern tradition this is spoken of as the baptism of the languages, and it is on the basis of this understanding that the pioneers of Greek missionary outreach, such as Cyril and Methodius in their work for the conversion of the Slavic peoples, began by translating the Bible and the liturgy into the Slavic languages. Russians did not have to learn Greek in order to be Christians. Pentecost is our biblical warrant for saying that God accepts languages.

But does that mean that God accepts all the elements of human culture? Human culture is simply the way in which human societies order their corporate life, and as such it is corrupted by sin. I have mentioned such very ancient elements of certain human cultures as cannibalism and sati, which are now almost universally condemned. It is worth remembering that even these have had their defenders. Missionaries in Papua New Guinea have told us how shocked tribal peoples were at the idea of burying the bodies of their loved ones in the ground to be eaten by worms, and how much more appropriate it seemed to them that they should be eaten by members of the family; and sati had, and still has, defenders who see it as the ultimate symbol of wifely devotion. Slavery is another extremely ancient element in many human cultures, and in the culture in which the Church first developed. While St. Paul affirms that there is a new creation in Christ which makes slaves and their masters brothers in one family, and which therefore radically subverts the whole institution of slavery, yet he seems to imply that it remains a permanent part of the social order within which Christians must live their lives. It took seventeen centuries for the Church to become persuaded that the institution of slavery was incompatible with the gospel.

It seems clear that no one is willing, in the last resort, to accept a total relativism about culture. All of us judge some elements of culture to be good and some bad. The question is whether these judgments arise from the gospel itself or from the cultural presuppositions of the person who makes the judgment. And, if one replies that they ought to be made only on the basis of the gospel itself, the reply must be that there is no such thing as a gospel which is not already culturally shaped. Missionary history is replete with examples of judgments made on another culture by missionaries who were unaware of the extent to which their judgments were shaped by their own cultures rather than by the gospel. The difficulty of these issues is well illustrated in the long-running and still continuing debate about the relation of the gospel to one of the most fundamental elements in Indian culture—caste. Missionaries from Europe in the eighteenth century, both Catholic and Protestant, regarded caste as a social arrangement with which missionaries had no business to interfere. It was seen as analogous to the hierarchical social structure which was then normal in Europe. Indian Christians were not asked to drop their caste identity, any more than English Christians abandoned their place in the social order, or European Christians abandoned their national identities. There was no embarrassment about adding the caste name to the personal name. But the new generation of missionaries who came to India in the nineteenth century, filled with the egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution, regarded this situation with horror. They saw it as a betrayal of the gospel. They accused their missionary predecessors, and the Indian Christians of their time, of having fatally compromised the gospel. Modern secular opinion in India, very largely shaped by 150 years in which all higher education has been in the English language and in which generations of national leadership have been deeply influenced by modern European culture, endorses the condemnation of caste—whether or not one judges the condemnation to have been effective. Looking back on this controversy from our perspective at the end of the twentieth century, one is bound to ask whether the outright condemnation of caste by the nineteenth-century missionaries was primarily the fruit of their biblical study or primarily the fruit of the new movement of Enlightenment in Europe. Perhaps one might judge that this was an occasion when the Enlightenment brought to light neglected elements of biblical teaching. One is bound to ask, however, whether these “enlightened” missionaries did not, perhaps, communicate an atomic individualism which was farther from the biblical picture than the strongly cohesive, albeit narrowly exclusive texture of the traditional society. Surely every Christian today must condemn the inhuman treatment of the so-called “untouchables” under the traditional caste system, and must applaud the courage with which the nineteenth-century missionaries attacked it and upheld the cause of those excluded from Hindu society; but it is arguable, too, that missionary impact was flawed by a kind of individualism which failed to do justice to elements of value in the tradition, namely the sense of mutual responsibility in the extended family.

A similar issue is raised by missionary experience in Africa. Polygamy is part of the traditional culture in many parts of Africa. Protestant missionaries took it for granted that anyone wishing to be a Christian must acknowledge that monogamy is God’s will and must therefore put away all but the first wife. Very large numbers of men, desirous of giving their lives to Christ, have nevertheless refused to do what the missionaries told them and therefore remain noncommunicant adherents of the Church. Many of us would conclude that these refusals were justified, since it would surely be a very great wrong to send away a woman married in good faith, with the knowledge that she can have no future except perhaps as a prostitute (as would be the case in India) or in another polygamous marriage. To contemporary African Christians, looking at Western society with its serial polygamy, it seems obvious that the traditional African pattern is more true to the gospel, since it at least acknowledges binding covenant obligations while the Western model dissolves them. When one looks back at the whole argument, it seems obvious that the difference between the two estimates of polygamy was not based only on biblical teaching (in regard to which Africans could and did appeal to Old Testament models of polygamy among revered patriarchs) but also, and perhaps much more, on different estimates of the role of the individual in society. For African society the human person is seen as a partner in a whole network of relationships binding him or her horizontally across a widely extended family and vertically to the ancestors who have died and to the children yet to be born. To be human is to be part of this closely woven fabric of relationships. By contrast, the Western post-Enlightenment understanding of the human person centers on the autonomy of the individual who is free to make or to break relationships at will. It can indeed, and I think must be said that the biblical teaching as a whole leads to the conclusion that the proper, God-ordained pattern is truly embodied only in a lifelong partnership of one man with one woman. When measured by this standard, both European and African cultures must be judged wanting. But it is by no means clear that the former is nearer to the biblical model than the latter.

The discussion of this particular African case leads to a more basic question. The question of the relation of gospel to culture is one of the most vigorously debated subjects in contemporary missiology. But one has to ask whether the way in which the question is posed does not imply already an unacknowledged and disastrous dualism. Culture is simply the social aspect of human living. It is defined in my dictionary as “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.” Culture is human behavior in its corporate aspect. The gospel comes to any human community in words of a particular language which is the primary vehicle of a culture, and in a community (the Church) which itself embodies and illustrates a culture. The question of gospel and culture is sometimes discussed as though it were a matter of the meeting of two quite separate things: a disembodied message and a historically conditioned pattern of social life. And the reason why this dualism is present is, one must suggest, that in fact the gospel has been reduced to a matter of individual belief and conduct as though this could be separated from the shared life of society. The point is very vividly illustrated in a contrast between two missionary experiences in Africa. Ronald Wynne was sent as a missionary to a remote and isolated African community which had had no contact whatever with Christianity, the Hambukushu of Etsha in Botswana. Wynne lived with them for eight years, learning their language, entering deeply into their culture, sharing with them stories from the Old Testament which resonated deeply with their own experience of exile and persecution, and becoming part of their life, before he took the momentous step of naming the name of Jesus and inviting them—as a community—to accept him as Lord (The Pool That Never Dries Up, London). In other words, the gospel was seen from the very beginning as something which would affect the entire life of the community and all their customs and traditions. A decision for Christ would be a decision that put the whole of their shared life, their culture, into a new setting. The result was a profound change in the whole corporate life of the community. Wynne contrasts this with what happened in many parts of Africa where a religion of individual salvation had been taught, along with a wholesale rejection and condemnation of traditional culture. The result has been, as he says, a superficial Christianity with no deep roots, and then—later—a reaction to an uncritical and sentimental attachment to everything in the discarded culture.

This raises, it seems to me, sharp questions for us in the old Western Christendom. The very way in which we raise the question, with its dichotomizing of gospel and culture, reveals the dualism in our thinking: a purely individualistic Christianity which reflects the individualism of our culture with its enthronement of the autonomous human reason as the judge of all things has to face—as though it were a separate question from conversion—the matter of relating gospel to culture. I was recently in a meeting where a missionary home from Africa remarked that it had struck him that when his African Christian friends were faced with a difficult decision, he often found that, although they were devout and committed Christians, it was often the traditional African way of thinking which determined the decision. He seemed to be quite unconscious of the fact that the same was obviously true of an English or American Christian. The individual has accepted the gospel, but the culture has not been converted. Or, to put it more accurately, one part of the person has been converted, but not the whole person.

We must recognize the falsity of this dualism and acknowledge the fact that there is not and cannot be a gospel which is not culturally embodied. This is simply another way of affirming, as I have tried to do in the earlier chapters, the historical nature of the gospel. The gospel is about events which happened at a particular time and place in history. The events were in Palestine and not in Japan or Africa. The language in which they were told was Hebrew and Greek, not Sanskrit or Chinese. Wherever the gospel is preached it is preached in a human language, which means the language of one particular culture; wherever a community tries to live out the gospel, it is also part of one particular human culture. Wherever and whenever missionaries have gone preaching the gospel, they have brought not an ethereal something disinfected of all human cultural ingredients; they have brought a gospel expressed in the language and the life-style of a particular culture. It seems to be almost inevitable that, when the gospel is first received, it is accepted in the form in which it was brought, with all the cultural particularities of the missionaries. The first converts reproduce faithfully the forms of Christian life and worship which the missionaries brought. This is not always or only because of pressure by the missionaries; the new thing is often welcomed just because it is new, for there are always in any society both conservatives who cherish the old traditions and radicals who question them. Later, when there has been time for deep study of the Bible in their own language, the new Christians—or more probably their children and grandchildren—will begin to look critically at the forms of Christianity which they have received and begin to make distinctions which the missionaries could not make between what is proper to the gospel according to the Scriptures and what is simply part of the traditional culture of the missionaries. And if, as Wynne says, the conversion has been superficial, there will then be a sentimental reaction which applauds the ancient culture as indiscriminately as it had previously rejected it.

The history of cross-cultural missions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is extremely complex, full of unexpected twists and also full of ironies. Chinese intellectuals rejected the invasion of missionaries in the nineteenth century partly at least on the ground that they brought with them a foreign culture. Today missionaries like Timothy Richard are honored by the leadership precisely because they brought China into touch with Western society and so prepared the way for what is now called modernization. The work of missionaries in India is praised by non-Christians because they brought Western science, medicine, and technology. European Christians criticize the Indian Church for being too Western and express their enthusiasm for Indian cultural styles—not recognizing that the reason why they appreciate things Indian is the same as the reason why many Indians appreciate things Western—namely that they are a welcome change from the tradition. Modern critics of nineteenth-century missions have often criticized the early missionaries in the South Pacific for making the women put on more clothes, although there seems to be evidence that the women regarded this as a way of asserting their new-found dignity in the Christian society. Today Christians in the South Pacific are scandalized by the clothing—or absence of clothing—of the tourists from Europe.

Reference to these twists and turns in the story of cross-cultural missions reminds us of the fact that our judgments are very much governed by the emotions generated by the profound cultural changes in the Western world in the past seventy-five years. The world missionary conference of Edinburgh 1910, with its vision of the evangelization of the world in that generation, is criticized for its alleged confusion of confidence in the gospel with confidence in the expansive power of Western civilization. The charge is not entirely true, for there were strong voices bringing a Christian critique to bear on elements of the so-called Christian civilization. But it is certainly true that there was then still a great confidence in the onward spread of civilization—the kind of civilization which Europe and North America had produced, and that this confidence was also—inevitably—a factor in the confidence of missions. For many at that time, Christianity and modern civilization went together. After the experiences of the past seventy-five years that is no longer so. There is a profound collapse of belief in the future of our civilization. The missionary movement is widely perceived as simply one element of what the Indian historian Panikkar calls the Vasco de Gama era—an era now definitely over. Many sensitive people, including Christians, sensing that our culture is bankrupt, look elsewhere for salvation. Salvation, if it is to be found anywhere, will surely not (in this view) be found in Europe or America: we must now learn to listen humbly to the voice of other cultures. In this climate all judgments about culture and about the relation of the gospel to culture are colored by this profound pessimism about our own. If our own culture has proved bankrupt, and if all expressions of the gospel are culturally embodied, it is understandable that a collapse of confidence in our culture goes along with a faltering of confidence in the gospel. And that is certainly what has happened in the old heartlands of the great missionary movements of the past two centuries.

If this is the true diagnosis of our situation, what is the next move? If the gospel is always and everywhere culturally embodied—in a particular language and a particular life-style, how can it be possible for the gospel to have a critical relation to culture? To be specific, can we who are both Christian believers and also products of this collapsing Western post-Enlightenment culture, can we find a stance from which we can criticize our own culture? A recent writer in Theology, reviewing my book Foolishness to the Greeks, says bluntly that it is impossible. Trying to criticize one’s own culture is, he says, like pretending to move a bus when you are sitting in it. We are what our culture has made us and we have to accept that fact. To appeal to the Bible is futile. After two centuries of scientific historical-critical analysis of the contents of the Bible, we know that it also is simply part of human culture. We can examine its texts more and more minutely and place them more and more precisely within the continuum of human culture, but there is no sense in which the Bible can speak a critical word to our culture. In fact we have no way of understanding the Bible except through the reason and imagination, the concepts and categories which our culture supplies. What answer can be given to this?

It is obviously true that we have no way of understanding the Bible except through the concepts and categories of thought with which our culture has equipped us through our whole intellectual formation from earliest childhood. But the Bible speaks of things which are not simply products of human culture but are words and deeds of God, creator and sustainer of all that is. How can we know that these biblical stories are more than an objectified representation of the religious experiences of a particular people, the peoples of Israel and of the Eastern Mediterranean, with their own particular cultural conditioning? It is also true that we have no way of understanding the natural world around us except through the experience of our five senses. How do we know that these experiences convey valid information about what is really “out there”? How can we know that we are not misled by our sense experiences? Only by making our perceptions public, sharing them with others, comparing our different perceptions and checking their reliability against those of others. On the one hand we have to take responsibility for what we claim to know by seeing and hearing and touching; on the other hand these claims, because they are claims to be in contact with a reality beyond ourselves, must be made “with universal intent.” We must seek to show others that they are valid.

The way in which any Christian perceives God’s revelation in Christ and in the whole biblical story will be shaped by the culture through which that individual was formed. It is simply a fact of history that Jesus has been and is portrayed in an amazing variety of portraits from the Byzantine Pantocrator through the medieval crucifix and the Jesus of the sacred heart, to the blue-eyed blond of American protestantism and the Che Guevara freedom fighter of liberation theology. For some writers it seems obvious that Jesus can be portrayed in any guise that is (as they would say) “meaningful” for them and their contemporaries. But “Jesus” is not a name to which we can attach any character we like to imagine. Jesus is the name of a man of whom we have information in the books of New Testament interpreted (as they must be) in the light of the books which were Jesus’ own scriptures. The Jesus of whom the New Testament writers bear witness is not an inaccessible figure. Our varying perceptions of him—and of course they will vary because we are culturally different people—have to be checked in the same way that all our claims to perceive reality have to be checked. We have to share them with others who perceive Jesus with the different lenses furnished by their different cultures. And this is a matter on which we can speak with solid experience. It is a matter of fact, for example, that in an Assembly of the World Council of Churches, where Christians from an enormously wide variety of cultures, with correspondingly varied perceptions of Jesus, long periods of Bible study shared by people with these clashing perceptions lead to a fresh assurance of the reality of Jesus’ authority and a more fully shared perception of his nature and purpose. Not that all differences are removed, but that there is a fresh assurance that—from different perspectives—they are speaking of the same person.

And in this experience we are being faithful to the nature of the biblical witness. It is, for example, a matter of scandal to Muslims that Christians have four Gospels and not one. Muslims speak of the Gospel (“Injil”) but it is axiomatic for them that there is one gospel, and if Christians have four then that is proof that the four are not authentic. This is of course in line with the Muslim conviction that the Qur’an cannot be translated. God has only one speech, and that is Arabic. The same kind of logic underlay the attempts from early times to eliminate the discrepancies in the Gospels by producing a harmonized version. But the church’s canon includes four Gospels, each of which gives a somewhat different portrait of Jesus. Modern scholars have devoted great energy and skill to drawing out the differences, and that is of value. But for millions of Christians in past centuries and today, the devout study of these four Gospels has led to a growing assurance that there is indeed one Lord Jesus whom they are learning to know and to follow.

It will of course be pointed out that my reasoning is defective, since the sharing of our experiences of sight and sound and touch is potentially a sharing with the whole human race, whereas the sharing of experience of Jesus is limited to the community of believers. This is of course true. And it is to be understood, as I have been pointing out earlier, in terms of the biblical doctrine of election. It is our faith that God has called this community to be the bearer of his gospel for all communities. Once again, of course, this faith cannot be shown to be valid by reference to some more ultimate belief. Like every other human belief, it is part of the tradition of belief developed and handed down in one particular human community. But this community is one which is more and more fully represented in all the vast variety of human cultures. Those who belong to it are people formed both by the human cultures in which they have been nourished and also by the traditions which they share with all Christian believers. They belong to two cultures. In Pauline language, while living as the people of Philippi or Corinth or Rome, they have a citizenship in heaven (Phil. 3:20). What, then, is the relation between these two citizenships, these two affiliations?

There have been and are situations in which Christians feel a deep attachment only to their heavenly citizenship, in which they reject and are rejected by the earthly city. Such was—in large measure—the situation for many in the earliest decades of the Church. It is a situation reflected on many pages of the New Testament. It is a situation which has its paradigmatic form in the crucifixion of Jesus. The cross, where Jesus was rejected and cast out by the representatives of human cultures in religion, politics, law, and morals, would (if it were the last word) imply that the normal situation for Christians is that they reject and are rejected by the world. That is the implication of the words of Jesus, “Whoever would be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me.” Nothing could suggest more forcibly a total rejection of the believer by the world and of the world by the believer.

But the cross is not God’s last word. In raising his beloved Son from the dead, God has given the pledge and the foretaste of his unconquerable grace in kindness and patience toward the world which rejects him. In the resurrection of Jesus, the original covenant with creation and with all human life, the covenant with Noah and his descendants, is reaffirmed. The world of human culture rejects God and is under God’s judgments. But God in his patient and long-suffering love sustains the created world, and the world of human culture in being, in order that there may still be time and space for repentance and for the coming into being of the new creation within the womb of the old. God stills cherishes and sustains the world of creation and of culture, in spite of its subjection to illusion and vanity. The covenant with Noah and its rainbow sign refer explicitly to one of the most basic elements in human culture, namely the work of the farmer who cultivates the wilderness in order that it may bring forth food for human beings (Gen. 8:22). Here the interdependence of human beings and nature, and the dependence of both on the grace of God, are at their most manifest. God’s promise that while earth remains seedtime and harvest shall not cease stands over the entire story of human culture. It is an assurance and an invitation to cherish and care for the earth and all that is in it, because God their creator cherishes and cares for them. And one of the counterthemes of the Old Testament is the perpetual tendency of Israel to forget the awesome and holy God who was the true author of prosperity, and to turn to the gods whose only function was to provide plenty of grain and oil and wine. Israel had to be reminded again and again by devastating disasters that the work of the farmer is only rightly undertaken when it is done as graceful acknowledgment of a gracious God. This double theme is also illustrated from another area of culture, that of politics. The same double theme runs through the Old Testament account of the political life of Israel: the king as one anointed by God to bring peace, justice, and good order, the true son of David; and—on the other hand—the king who uses his God-given power to serve his own ends and so brings disaster on the people (cf. 1 Samuel 8 and 9).

If this biblical interpretation of the human story, with its center in the double event of Jesus’ death and resurrection, is our clue, then it will follow that we are called neither to a simple affirmation of human culture nor to a simple rejection of it. We are to cherish human culture as an area in which we live under God’s grace and are given daily new tokens of that grace. But we are called also to remember that we are part of that whole seamless texture of human culture which was shown on the day we call Good Friday to be in murderous rebellion against the grace of God. We have to say both “God accepts human culture” and also “God judges human culture.” There will have to be room in the Christian life for the two attitudes which Von Hügel used to call the homely and the heroic. Christian discipleship can never be all homeliness nor all heroism. It has to have elements of both and it has to learn from day to day when to accept the homely duties of life as it is, and when to take the heroic road of questioning and challenging the accepted ways. It was necessary for the early church, at crucial moments, to take the heroic path and to accept martyrdom rather than submit to what the vast majority of people took for granted. But it was also right that, when the time came with the conversion of Constantine, the Church should accept the role of sustainer and cherisher of the political order. It is right for churches to be dissenting communities challenging accepted norms and structures. It is right also in other circumstances for the Church to be the church for the nation or the parish, the cherisher and sustainer of the ordinary work of the farmer, the judge, and the soldier. What is wrong is the absolutizing of one position against the other and the corresponding ex-communication of those who take the other role. What is needed is the discernment to know, from day to day and from issue to issue, when the one stance is appropriate and when the other.

But how shall we find that discernment? Once again we face the problem posed by the critic who said that we cannot pretend to move a bus while sitting in it. We are what our culture has made us: our Christianity is part of our culture. We read the Bible in our own language and it is full of resonances which arise from past cultural experience. Where do I find the stance from which I can look at myself from the point of view of the Bible when my reading of the Bible is itself so much shaped by the person that I am, formed by my culture? I think that we can be helped toward an answer by looking at the experience of the churches in the present century. During the 1914–1918 war the churches on both sides made an almost total identification of the cause of Christ with the cause of their own nation. Christianity had become almost absorbed into national identity. It was the scandal of that situation which shocked many—including notably a young pastor in Safenwil called Karl Barth—and caused them to realize that European Christianity was guilty of a fatal syncretism, and to send them back to a fresh and more humble listening to the Bible. Out of that grew the ecumenical developments of the 1930s and ’40s. In the Second World War the blasphemies of the First were not repeated, at least not on anything like the same scale. Spiritual bonds remained through the years of conflict, and almost as soon as the war was over the church leaders on the two sides were meeting together to work and pray for a new form of Christian presence in Europe. They knew that it was no longer tolerable that the churches should be content to be domestic chaplains to their nations: there had to be a supranational entity which could in some measure embody and express the supranational and supracultural character of the gospel. That recognition was given concrete form when, at Amsterdam in 1948, churches whose nations had been so recently at war pledged themselves to be faithful to one another in a mutual commitment to receive correction from one another. That reference to mutual correction is the crucial one. All our reading of the Bible and all our Christian discipleship are necessarily shaped by the cultures which have formed us. In Europe over the past four hundred years these cultures have been embodied in nations which have taken the place of God as the supreme reality, calling for absolute and total devotion. The fruit of that idolatry was reaped in two terrible wars. In that situation, the only way in which the gospel can challenge our culturally conditioned interpretations of it is through the witness of those who read the Bible with minds shaped by other cultures. We have to listen to others. This mutual correction is sometimes unwelcome, but it is necessary and it is fruitful.

As so often, the answer to the complex questions about the relation of the gospel to human culture has to be a practical one and not merely a theoretical one. It is only by being faithful participants in a supranational, multicultural family of churches that we can find the resources to be at the same time faithful sustainers and cherishers of our respective cultures and also faithful critics of them. The gospel endorses an immensely wide diversity among human cultures, but it does not endorse a total relativism. There is good and bad in every culture and there are developments continually going on in every culture which may be either creative or destructive, either in line with the purpose of God as revealed in Christ for all human beings, or else out of that line. The criteria for making judgments between the one and the other cannot arise from one culture. That is the familiar error of cultural imperialism. There can only be criteria if God has in fact shown us what his will is. He has done so in Christ. If that is denied in the name of religious pluralism, then there is no valid criterion by which the positive and negative developments in human culture can be assessed. On the other hand, the content of the revelation in Christ, defined crucially by the twin events of cross and resurrection, provides a basis on which the great diversity of cultures can be welcomed and cherished and the claim of any one culture to dominance can be resisted.

Chapter 16

Principalities, Powers, and People

My previous chapter was about the gospel and culture. This is a very familiar theme in contemporary theological and especially missiological discussion. The World Council of Churches has recently taken it as a major theme. But why should this become a theme for discussion? Why is there not an equally widespread discussion about the gospel and personal behavior? After all, “culture” is simply the word we use for the way in which a whole community of men and women behaves. The very formulation of the theme “Gospel and Culture” indicates (as I suggested in the last chapter) that a dualism has appeared in our thinking. It is a dualism which arises from our tendency to regard individual behavior as something which can be understood, explained, and perhaps changed, apart from the behavior of the society to which the individual belongs. In other words, the dualism arises from the individualism in our culture, and from the resultant privatization of our ethical thinking. It would not occur to people in a traditional African society to develop a theory of personal behavior apart from the way in which this is related to the life of the whole community. And, in accordance with this way of seeing things, the gospel would be seen as something which affects the way in which the whole society behaves and not just the way in which individuals behave. By contrast, one often hears in our Western society such statements as “The gospel is about changing people; it is addressed to the individual conscience, not to societies and institutions. Societies and institutions will only be changed when people are changed. It is therefore the business of the Church to address the individual conscience and to seek conversion there. The reformation of society will follow.”

That way of thinking would seem strange to many human societies today. And surely even in our own highly individualistic society we know that the relation between individual behavior and the behavior of societies is not one-way; it is reciprocal. Professor Donnison has given a vivid illustration of this from personal experience in the Navy. He speaks of days spent in a transit camp where men were coming and going all the time and no enduring bonds were formed between them. In that camp, he says, one had to nail everything down or it would be stolen. Then he speaks of life on board ship on active service. The same men are his companions. But now he knows that any of his fellow crew members would without hesitation risk his own life for one of his mates. The same men were involved in both situations: in one they were bound together by a common purpose; in the other they were not. In the two different social contexts, their personal behavior was totally different (Just Sharing, Ed Duncan Forrester and Danus Skene, 1988, pp. 3–4). The society shapes the person as much as the person shapes the society. What exactly we are talking about when we speak of “the society” as distinct from the people who form the society is a matter we must come back to. It is the fundamental matter of this chapter.

Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book After Virtue contrasts the contemporary way of discussing ethical issues as though they were simply a matter of how each individual decides, in sovereign autonomy, how to act, with the Greek way of seeing behavior as sharing in the life of a polis, an ordered community. So the question “How shall I behave?” is only to be answered by asking the more basic question, “What kind of a community do I want to share in?” As a vivid illustration of the difference MacIntyre quotes the often repeated saying of E. M. Forster that if he had to choose between betraying his country and betraying his friends, he hoped he would betray his country. On this MacIntyre comments that a man who can write those words has never had a country. In the Greek sense, he has never been citizen of a city. The only human community he has known is that of his personally, individually chosen friends.

The idea that the gospel is addressed only to the individual and that it is only indirectly addressed to societies, nations, and cultures is simply an illusion of our individualistic post-Enlightenment Western culture. Very plainly when we turn to the Old Testament we find no such separation of the individual from the society which nurtures and forms him and of which he is a part. The Torah, God’s gracious instruction of his people, is addressed as much to the life of the nation as to that of the individual. It is as much about law and order, hygiene, economics, social welfare, and politics as it is about personal morals. It is Israel as a whole which is addressed in the Torah. That is obvious; but many would say that this is one of the matters on which the teaching of the New Testament is radically different from that of the Old. In the New Testament, they would say, God’s word is addressed to the individual, not to a nation, and the new Israel is not a nation but a community of individuals living in many cities and states but bound together by their individual commitment to Jesus Christ. The New Testament, it is said, does not envisage a social or political reformation of Greek and Roman society; it simply accepts that society as the milieu within which individuals have to work out their own salvation. Is this true? I do not believe that it is, and in order to correct what I believe to be a flawed reading of the New Testament, I want to direct attention to an element in its teaching which has been neglected in the modern period of the historical-critical approach to the Scriptures but is—once you open your eyes to it—extremely prominent.

I refer to the whole mass of teaching in St. Paul’s letters about what are variously called principalities, powers, dominions, thrones, authorities, rulers, angels, and other names. With these we must also look at what the Gospels have to say about hostile spiritual powers, about Satan, and about what the Fourth Gospel calls “the ruler of this world.” If I am not mistaken, most scholarly readers of the New Testament in the past 150 years have regarded all this language as something which we can for practical purposes ignore because it belongs to a thought-world which we have grown out of. We imagine a host of angelic or demonic beings flying around in the air somewhere above our heads, suppose that Paul and his contemporaries believed in these, just as people once believed in fairies and elves, and conclude that we can ignore this part of his writing. The domination of a reductionist materialism, which supposed that when we had discovered the atomic and molecular and biological facts about any phenomenon we had explained it, has prevented us from discerning the realities that Paul and other New Testament writers are talking about, and they are realities.

When we read right through the whole New Testament looking for words which speak of power, authority, rule, dominion, or lordship, we find such words on almost every page. The central phrase of the gospel, the kingdom of God, is obviously about power, authority, rule. In a vast number of cases, of course, the words refer to what we would recognize as human rulers and authorities—magistrates, priests, elders, a governor like Pilate, or a petty rajah like Herod. When Paul writes about “the powers that be” in Romans 13, it is clear that they are human beings, for they wear swords and collect taxes. But what are we to make of the principalities and peers in the heavenly places against which we are to wrestle (Eph. 6:12)? And how on earth is the church to set about making known the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places (Eph. 3:10)? Are these powers the same as or quite different from the powers that collect taxes on earth? When Paul says that none of the rulers of this world understood the wisdom of God, for if they had they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Cor. 2:8), is he just talking about Herod and Pilate, or about something else? A couple of verses earlier Paul has said that these rulers are doomed to pass away. But Herod and Pilate had disappeared from the scene before Paul wrote these words. Does he mean that these two men are doomed to pass away? If so, it seems hardly worth saying: they are already dead. So does he mean that their roles, their offices, their authority is doomed to pass away? Are we talking about an individual called Herod or Pilate or Smith or Jones, or are we talking about something which is temporarily embodied in these officeholders, about the role rather than the individual who plays it? And when (according to the Fourth Gospel) Jesus speaks of his coming death and says, “Now is the judgment of this world; now shall the ruler of this world be cast out” (John 12:31), he cannot be speaking just of Herod or Pilate; neither of them could be called “ruler of this world.” Clearly this language does not simply refer to certain human beings who hold these offices of power and authority for a few years and are then dead and gone. They refer to something behind these individuals, to the offices, the powers, the authority which is represented from time to time by this or that individual. It is these powers, authorities, rulers, dominions which have been confronted in Christ’s death with the supreme power and authority of God. That is why it is the business of the Church to make manifest to them the wisdom of God. That is why we are told in the brief, hymn-like words of 1 Timothy 3:16 that God was “manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world.” What was done in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus confronts the powers before it is preached among the nations. That is why we are told that the risen Christ has been seated at God’s right hand with all the principalities and powers under his feet (Eph. 1:21). That is why we are also told that Christ in his cross disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in his cross (Col. 2:14). But what exactly are these principalities and powers?

It seems clear from the examples already quoted that these powers do not exist apart from the human agencies in which they are embodied—Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas. Yet they are not identical with these particular individuals. They refer, I suggested, to that which is behind them, to the power which they represent and exercise but which is not identical with them. We are talking about power and authority which is real, which is embodied in and exercised by individual human beings, but is not identical with them. The king dies, but the kingship goes on. Another king steps into the place. But what is this thing that we call “kingship”? I used a spatial metaphor when I spoke of the authority which is “behind” the particular person who holds office and exercises authority for the moment. A spatial metaphor is obviously very inadequate. You do not find a thing called kingship by looking behind the king’s back. We say that kingship is a reality which is more than, which transcends the particular exercise of kingship by this man or this woman. But we do not escape the spatial metaphor, for “transcendence” means being above something else. When in contemporary English we speak of the relation of a spiritual reality to its visible embodiment, we tend to think of inwardness—another spatial metaphor. We cannot avoid spatial metaphors but we can be saved from being misled by acknowledging that a variety of metaphors is possible. Shall we speak of the spiritual power within, behind, or above its visible embodiment? We all know very well that long-enduring institutions have something, an inwardness which can be recognized in those who form the institution at any one time, but outlasts and transcends them. This “something” may be benevolent or malevolent. A good school has a spirit, an ethos, which molds the characters of the pupils. It was there before they came, and it will be there after all the present pupils have left. A nation similarly has something which is not just the sum of the attitudes of its individual citizens. And a mob can become an embodiment of evil, an evil which its individual members would never have wished for on their own. Clearly this “something” has reality. But we cannot locate it spatially within, behind, or above its visible embodiment. It is not something which hovers in the air above the heads of living human beings. We have tended to read the New Testament as though this was how its writers conceived of this spiritual reality. We have assumed that “the heavenly places,” where the principalities and powers dwell, are above our heads. But Paul is not a victim of his own inevitably spatial language. According to Paul, those who are in Christ are already seated in the heavenly places where Christ is (Eph. 1:20). This “something” which is invisible, and which cannot be located spatially either within or behind or above its earthly manifestations, is nevertheless real—terribly real. When Christians have to fight their battles, they are not just fighting with this or that person, this magistrate or that temple priest, or that angry mob in the theater; they are not fighting against flesh and blood. Their conflict is not against human beings. It is against the spiritual power that is—how shall we say it?—behind, within, and above human beings. It is this that we have to address. So when John the Seer addresses the churches in Asia, he does not address their members as individuals whom he could name; he addresses the angels of the churches, the spiritual reality, the power—good, bad, or mixed—which is embodied in the congregation, which is more than the personal conduct of each individual. And so throughout the Book of Revelation, there is always a correspondence between the war in heaven and the wars and disasters on earth. The happenings on earth are only understood in terms of the spiritual battle between the victorious Christ who is seated on the throne in the heavenly places, and the spiritual powers that challenge his rule.

Paul’s use of words in relation to these unseen realities is extremely flexible. Such words as principalities, powers, dominions, thrones, angels, authorities, and others are used without any apparent attempt to distinguish between their meanings if indeed there is any difference. Just as no one spatial metaphor can describe the relation between these invisible entities and their visible embodiments, so no one word is adequate to denote them. There is, however, one other word which Paul uses in this connection and which helps us to get to the heart of his meaning. It occurs in the passage of Colossians where we are told that Christ in his cross has disarmed the powers (Col. 2:15). This is the word stoicheion, used always in the plural, stoicheia. It is variously translated in our versions: “rudiments,” “elements,” “elementary spirits,” “ruling spirits of the universe.” Its basic meaning is simply expressed in the word “elements.” It is very frequently used in contemporary Greek writing for the four elements—air, earth, fire, and water. It is used for the letters of the alphabet. It is used in the Letter to the Hebrews (5:12) for the first principles, the elementary matters of the gospel. It may seem strange that Paul brings this word into close relation with his language about principalities and powers, as he does in two places. In Galatians Paul seems to identify it with the law. He tells his readers that before Christ came they were like children under the law which was their custodian, but that now in Christ we have been set free from this control so as to live in the freedom of the Spirit. And to those who want to creep back again under the protection of the law, by receiving circumcision, he says, “Formerly you were in bondage to beings that by nature are no gods; but now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly stoicheia, whose slaves you want to be once more?” (Gal. 4:8–9). In the Letter to the Colossians his readers are warned against becoming a prey to “philosophy and empty deceit, according to human traditions, according to the stoicheia of the universe and not according to Christ,” and later on they are told that having died to the stoicheia, they should not live as if they belonged to this world, submitting to all sorts of rules and regulations (Col. 2:8, 20). In both passages it is the work of Christ which has delivered Christians from the power of the stoicheia and in the Colossians passage it is stated that this is because Christ has disarmed the principalities and powers.

What is clear in these as in other passages is that the powers have been disarmed but not destroyed. They are put under the supreme dominion of Christ by what he has done on the cross, but they still exist. We have to wrestle with them. And the Church has to make manifest to them the wisdom of God as revealed in Jesus (Eph. 3:10). Moreover, in the letter to the Colossians it is explicitly stated that the powers were created through Christ and for Christ and in him alone they have their coherence (Col. 1:15–17). So these things, whatever they are, have a good purpose. They are intended to serve the purpose of God as manifest in Christ. And yet it is these things, these principalities and powers, which crucified the Lord of glory. There has been a rebellion of these powers against their proper sovereign Lord. The rebellion has been put down. The rebellious powers are not destroyed; they are disarmed. They still have a function to perform in God’s ordering of the universe, but they must now subserve their Lord. They are under his feet, and in the end they will disappear when (according to 1 Cor. 15:24) Christ destroys them and hands over the kingdom to his Father.

How do we interpret this language? Simply to ignore it as some sort of outdated mythology would be a disastrous mistake. It is obviously an extremely important element in Paul’s teaching. Nor are we without clues to its meaning.

Let us begin with the matter which is at issue in Galatians, namely the law. Paul has repeatedly affirmed that the law is a good gift of God. Yet it has become a power that enslaves, from which Christ had to deliver us by his death. It was the representatives of the law who put Jesus on the cross. But Caiaphas and his colleagues were not just a few wicked men. They were acting as the temporary agents and embodiments of something more fundamental and more enduring than their own individual opinions. The Colossians passage speaks of “human traditions” about eating and drinking and the observance of seasons and festivals. The passage in Romans 13 refers to the state authorities. The passages in 1 Corinthians 2 refer simply to “the rulers of this age,” which no doubt includes all those elements which had a hand in the decision to destroy Jesus—legal, political, ecclesiastical, and other. If one can summarize all these as referring to the structural elements in human life, one brings them into relation with the language about the stoicheia. All human life is lived and has to be lived within limits which are set by certain structural features, both of the natural world and of the world of human society. In the former category belong the fundamental elements of the physical universe (the original meaning of stoicheia), the invariances which are the subject of natural science and which make it possible for us to behave rationally in the world. If we could not rely on these invariances, on the fundamental stability of the natural world, we could not live a human life. So also our life in society is structured by law, custom, and tradition. Without these we could not develop into responsible beings. No one lives and no one could live a rational life if there were no given norms (which may be different in different places and times) which govern behavior. Most of the time even the most eccentric human being does from moment to moment what the normal customs and traditions of his or her society indicate. Nor can we function without the help of accepted roles. A person appointed to a public office, or ordained to the Christian ministry, may in course of time develop very fresh and original ways of interpreting his role. But she has to begin by accepting the guidance of the tradition. One cannot begin by a sort of creatio ex nihilo, developing a totally original model of behavior unrelated to the expectations of the society which has appointed her to this role. A person who tried to do this simply could not function in her role. So also with our life in larger political units. There has to be some kind of ordered structure of power. Without it, human life would dissolve into anarchy. These structural elements are necessary to guide and protect human life. They serve God’s purpose. But, as we well know, they can also become demonic. The God-given authority of the state can be used for tyranny. Roles can become dehumanizing so that even our best efforts at goodness can become—as Jesus said—play-acting, hypocrisy.

I have been speaking of entities which are not just individual human beings, flesh and blood in Pauline language, but which yet exist and have power. I have been speaking of norms, roles, and structures. We have to acknowledge the reality and the power of these things, and we have to ask what the gospel has to do with them. And we have seen that a great deal of New Testament writing is addressed exactly to that question. These things, says Paul, are good creations of God. They have a part to play in his purpose. But they can come to usurp the place to which they have no right, the place which belongs to Christ and to him alone. They can be, as we say, absolutized, and then they become demonic. The power ordained by God of Romans 13 becomes the Beast of Revelation. The Torah, that loving instruction which God gives his people and the beauty of which is celebrated in Psalm 119, becomes a tyrant from which Christ has to deliver us. Tradition, the handing on of good practice from parent to child as it is so beautifully described in Deuteronomy, becomes an evil power which comes between human beings and the living God.

These are examples from the New Testament itself of the ways in which the powers, created in Christ and for Christ, become agents of tyranny. One could give many more examples from outside the New Testament. Number is one of the stoicheia which has fascinated thinkers of various schools. Numbering enables us to measure and quantify. It is an element of order in the universe. But it can become a tyrant when, as in modern reductionist thinking, it is absolutized and nothing is valued except what can be measured and quantified.

Chance seems to be a fundamental element in this contingent universe which God has created. In past times it was made into a goddess and named Fortuna. And, though not given a personal name, the same power rules wide swathes of contemporary thought. Chance mutations in the transmission of genes become the sovereign power governing the emergence of life. The chance workings of the free market become the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith which mysteriously converts private selfishness into public good. This particular example of an invisible power ruling over human affairs is particularly relevant at present, since it is one of the key arguments of the religious Right against the religious Left that one cannot speak of justice or injustice when describing the huge differences between rich and poor in our society. These, on this view, cannot be called unjust because they are not the work of conscious human agency but the result of chance. Thus in our economic life we are no longer responsible to Christ; we are not responsible at all, for economic life has been handed over to the goddess Fortuna. It is not difficult to recognize that as one of the principalities and powers of which Paul speaks.

Race is another element in the structuring of human life. Family, kinship, tribal community—these are all parts of the structure of human life which play a vital part in the nurturing, the developing of authentic humanity. It was therefore with good intention that missionaries in South Africa insisted that African Christians should be able to organize their churches and conduct their worship in their own traditional ways and using their own languages. But when this good provision was given an absolute status as part of the order of creation, not subject to Christ, it became the demonic power of apartheid. No one who lives in South Africa can doubt its reality and power, and the task of Christians in that country is not to wrestle against flesh and blood, not to attack the Godfearing Afrikaners, but to wrestle against the demonic power which is as real as it is invisible.

Money is perhaps another example of the principalities and powers of our time. As is well known, Marx used the word “fetishism” to speak of the attitude to money which he found in capitalist society. Money, which is a useful means for facilitating exchange, has become a power in itself, so that we do not measure human wealth in terms of real goodness and happiness but in terms of cash. Money has truly become a fetish, a power which demands and receives absolute devotion. In the vision of Marx the proletariat was to be a sort of corporate Messiah which would overthrow the power of this false god and create a society of free and responsible human relationships. Alas, the proletariat is not Christ. The Marxist ideology has itself become a power in the Pauline sense, which controls human behavior and forces those under its power to crush the free expression of the human spirit. The wrestling of men and women like Solzhenitsyn is not against flesh and blood, not against particular human beings, but against the invisible but terribly powerful spiritual force that controls their actions.

The principalities and powers are real. They are invisible and we cannot locate them in space. They do not exist as disembodied entities floating above this world, or lurking within it. They meet us as embodied in visible and tangible realities—people, nations, and institutions. And they are powerful. What is Christ’s relation to them? To recapitulate briefly: they are created in Christ and for Christ; their true end is to serve him; some do—for the New Testament speaks of good angels who perform his service; but they become powers for evil when they attempt to usurp the place which belongs to Christ alone. In his death Christ has disarmed them; he has put them under his feet; they must now serve him; and the Church is the agency through which his victory over them is made manifest and is effected as the Church puts on the whole armor of God to meet and master them. The language is pictorial, mythological if you like, because we have no other language. But the things described are real and are contemporary. They are at the heart of our business as Christians. Let me try to spell this out in terms of contemporary Christian duty.

In the cross Christ has disarmed the powers. He has unmasked them. He has not destroyed them, but—in Johannine language—has cast the ruler of this world out of his usurped throne. What I have called the structural elements in the world as we know it, from the basic structure of the physical world to the social and political structures of the nations, to the customs and traditions by which human beings are normally guided, to what the sociologists call the “plausibility structures” by which all human thinking is guided: all of these are part of God’s good ordering of his creation. Yet it was these things which at the decisive denouement, the moment when they were confronted by the living God in person, by him in whom the fullness of Godhead was present bodily, were found ranged in unanimous and murderous hostility against him. The death of Christ was the unmasking of the powers. Caiaphas and Herod and Pilate were not uniquely wicked men; they were acting out their roles as guardians of the political and moral and religious order. They acted as representatives of what the New Testament calls the world, this present age. When God raised the crucified Jesus, this present age and its structures was exposed, illuminated, unmasked—but not destroyed. Cross and resurrection seen together mean both judgment and grace, both wrath and endless patience. God still upholds the structures; without them the world would collapse and human life would be unthinkable. But the structures lose their pretended absoluteness. Nothing now is absolute except God as he is known in Jesus Christ; everything else is relativized. That is the bottom line for Christian thinking and the starting point for Christian action in the affairs of the world. What does it imply in practice?

Let me begin with some negatives. It does not mean anarchy. It does not mean an attack on structures as such. Many people are tempted this way. There are those for whom Christian freedom means a rejection of institutions, traditions, laws, and structures. And they can always show good reasons, for all human traditions, institutions, and structures are prone to evil—including religion and including Christianity and the Church. They are all part of this present age. They are all prone to make absolutist claims. They are all ambiguous. There are always good reasons for attacking them. But human life is impossible without them, and God in his mercy preserves them in order to give time for the Church to fulfill its calling to make manifest to them the wisdom of God. Our relation to the structures has to contain both the judgment that is inevitable in the searing light of the cross, and also the patience which is required of us as witnesses to the resurrection. We are not conservatives who regard the structures as part of the unalterable order of creation, as part of the world of what we call “hard facts” beyond the range of the gospel, and who therefore suppose that the gospel is only relevant to the issues of personal and private life. Nor are we anarchists who seek to destroy the structures. We are rather patient revolutionaries who know that the whole creation, with all its given structures, is groaning in the travail of a new birth, and that we share this groaning and travail, this struggling and wrestling, but do so in hope because we have already received, in the Spirit, the firstfruit of the new world (Rom. 8:19–25).

But, second, as Paul tells us, our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against the principalities and powers in the invisible world (Eph. 6:12). What are we talking about when we speak of confronting the institutions of state and market economy and culture with the gospel? We are not fighting against the individuals who perform their roles within these institutions. We know well that when we get a chance to talk intimately with them, they feel themselves powerless. To the outsider they appear to wield great power, but they know that they are under the control of forces greater than their own and that their freedom to change things is very narrowly limited. Those who call for a Christian assault on the worlds of politics and economics often make it clear that the attack belongs to the same order of being as the enemy to be attacked. The aim of the attack is to seize the levers of power and take control. We have seen many such successful revolutions, and we know that in most cases what has happened is simply that the oppressor and the oppressed have exchanged roles. The structure is unchanged. The throne is unshaken, only there is a different person occupying it. How is the throne itself to be shaken? How is the power to be disarmed and placed at the service of Christ? Only by the power of the gospel itself, announced in word and embodied in deed. As Walter Wink reminds us, the victory of the Church over the demonic power which was embodied in the Roman imperial system was not won by seizing the levers of power: it was won when the victims knelt down in the Colosseum and prayed in the name of Jesus for the Emperor. The soldiers in Christ’s victorious army were not armed with the weapons of this age; they were the martyrs whose robes were washed in blood. It was not that a particular Emperor was discredited and displaced; it was that the entire mystique of the Empire, its spiritual power, was unmasked, disarmed, and rendered powerless. A conversion of individuals which failed to identify, unmask, and reject that spiritual, ideological power would have been as futile as an attempt by Christians to wrest that power from its holders. Evangelism which is politically and ideologically naive, and social action which does not recognize the need for conversion from false gods to the living God, both fall short of what is required.

The principalities and powers are realities. We may not be able to visualize them, to locate them, or to say exactly what they are. But we are foolish if we pretend that they do not exist. Certainly one cannot read the Gospels without recognizing that the ministry of Jesus from beginning to end was a mighty spiritual battle with powers which are not simply human frailties, errors, diseases, or sins. And one cannot read St. Paul, or the other books of the New Testament, without recognizing that this drama of Christ’s disarming of the powers is central to their meaning. If we dismiss this as merely outworn mythology, we shall be incapable of grasping the central message of the New Testament. If we try to systematize the diffuse and flexible language of the writers and develop a sort of systematic demonology, we shall also go astray. But if we live in the real world and take the Bible as our clue for understanding and coping with it, we shall certainly know what it means that our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against the invisible principalities and powers, and we shall learn what it means to put on the whole armor of God for the conflict.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Why is language the most fundamental element of culture?

2. How does the gospel both critique and endorse culture? Do you agree with Newbigin on the issue of handling polygamy by missionaries?

3. What is wrong with the dualism “gospel and culture”?

4. Is Newbigin too hard on European Christendom? Do you see any parallels with Kierkegaard?

5. What do you make of Newbigin’s critique of starting with the individual and then trickling down to the society?

6. How does he handle the issue of power in chapter 16? Do you find his analysis of social structures helpful? How about his apologetics?

*Excerpted from Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Copyright © 1989, Eerdmans Publishers. Used with permission.

CHAPTER 22

Francis A. Schaeffer

(1912–1984)

If Cornelius Van Til was Protestant orthodoxy’s most original apologist of the twentieth century, then surely his student, but not always disciple, Francis A. Schaeffer was its most original apologetics practitioner. Schaeffer was born and raised in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in a working-class family. Though he attended the Presbyterian church, largely because it hosted his Boy Scouts troop, he was at best an agnostic. As a young man he had, seemingly by accident, discovered the joys of art and music, and particularly philosophy. The ancient Greeks provided wonderfully articulated questions, but not many answers. Out of curiosity he read the Bible, more to give it a last chance before throwing Christian faith overboard. The very opposite occurred. After regularly reading the Bible, he attended an evangelistic meeting in 1930 and became a Christian believer.

Schaeffer graduated magna cum laude from Hampden-Sydney College in 1935 and enrolled at Westminster Theological Seminary the same year. That year also saw him marry Edith Seville, born and raised in mainland China as her family served with the China Inland Mission. While at Westminster he came under the influence of the charismatic J. Gresham Machen, and of Cornelius Van Til and his “presuppositional” apologetics. At the same time, he was influenced by the more fundamentalist group there, and in 1937, led by Carl McIntire, who had insisted that the “Christian liberties” (smoking, gambling, drinking, etc.) were not part of the “separated” Christian life, and that a millenarian reading of the Bible was requisite, the group formed Faith Theological Seminary and the Bible Presbyterian Church. Schaeffer was Faith’s first graduate and the BPC’s first minister.

Schaeffer became a pastor in Western Pennsylvania and then in St. Louis. The Schaeffers developed a concern for children, creating Children for Christ, an important factor that led them to go to Europe as missionaries to children. They were sent there in 1948 also for the purpose of helping with Christian education and the need for solid theology that resisted the temptations of Barthian views. During this time, Schaeffer awakened to the extraordinary importance of the arts and culture. He was able to meet Hans Rookmaaker, the Reformed art historian, who would become his collaborator and close friend in the work of L’Abri. The Schaeffers moved to Switzerland permanently.

Schaeffer had a spiritual crisis in the spring of 1951. Possibly provoked by Karl Barth’s strong criticism of him as unwilling to debate, and possibly triggered by a growing sense of the lack of love in the McIntire movement, he went back over every doctrine and all of the ground he had gained. And then everything changed. He came to the conclusion that Christianity is true and that many believers have overlooked the present value of the blood of Christ. Schaeffer began to regret the “cold orthodoxy” of the McIntire movement and eventually left the Bible Presbyterians to align himself with the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (which merged into the Presbyterian Church in America in 1982). In 1955 the Schaeffers began the work of L’Abri, a remarkable spiritual community based on both truth and love, one that welcomed people from every possible background to discuss the virtues of Christian faith. Over the decades thousands of guests came to faith. Other branches of L’Abri were begun, notably in England and in Holland.

From then on, speaking engagements multiplied. Schaeffer began to write books. Escape from Reason and The God Who Is There inaugurated what would become a list of over twenty volumes. Edith also wrote a number of books. Schaeffer also engaged in a couple of large film projects, particularly How Shall We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (in collaboration with C. Everett Koop, the surgeon general under Ronald Reagan). Schaeffer developed a kinship with America’s “Evangelical Right,” though it is difficult to sort out what exact role he played in this loose coalition, which included Cal Thomas and Jerry Falwell. In any case, Schaeffer had always espoused conservative views on economics and the sanctity of life. He died in 1984 after a five-year struggle with cancer.

The text we have selected here was first a series of lectures given at Wheaton College in the fall of 1968. While he had already written Escape from Reason and The God Who Is There, Schaeffer wanted to show a more forthrightly scriptural foundation for his apologetic. The principal books he interacts with are Romans, Lamentations, and Jeremiah. The central thesis of the lectures is, “The church in our generation needs reformation, revival and constructive revolution,” which means restoration of pure doctrine, as well as restoration of the Christian life. Schaeffer demonstrates the strong parallels between Jeremiah’s day, Paul’s day, and our own.

Death in the City

Chapters 1, 6–8*

Chapter 1

Death in the City

We live in a post-Christian world. What should be our perspective as individuals, as institutions, as orthodox Christians, as those who claim to be Bible-believing? How should we look at this post-Christian world and function as Christians in it?

This book will try to answer these questions. I will begin by asserting a proposition concerning the basic need of the orthodox church in our post-Christian world, and then I will consider that proposition in the biblical context of the books of Romans, Lamentations, and Jeremiah. Throughout we shall look at the situation we face in the modern world and the perspective we must have as Christians in that world.

First of all, I would like to set forth a proposition about reformation and revival. It will serve to focus our attention throughout the book. It is the basic need of the orthodox, evangelical church in our moment of history.

The church in our generation needs reformation, revival, and constructive revolution.

At times men think of the two words reformation and revival as standing in contrast one to the other, but this is a mistake. Both words are related to the word restore.

Reformation refers to a restoration to pure doctrine; revival refers to a restoration in the Christian's life. Reformation speaks of a return to the teachings of Scripture; revival speaks of a life brought into its proper relationship to the Holy Spirit.

The great moments of church history have come when these two restorations have simultaneously come into action so that the church has returned to pure doctrine and the lives of the Christians in the church have known the power of the Holy Spirit. There cannot be true revival unless there has been reformation; and reformation is not complete without revival.

Such a combination of reformation and revival would be revolutionary in our day—revolutionary in our individual lives as Christians, revolutionary not only in reference to the liberal church but constructively revolutionary in the evangelical, orthodox church as well.

May we be those who know the reality of both reformation and revival, so that this poor dark world may have an exhibition of a portion of the church returned to both pure doctrine and Spirit-filled life.

The latter portion of the first chapter of Romans speaks of man as he is, and two verses tell how he came to be in that position. Romans 1:21, 22 states, "Because, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their reasoning." It is important that we follow the Greek here with the word reasoning and not "imaginations" (as the King James Version renders it), because the emphasis is not on what our generation uses the word imagination to express, but on what it calls reasoning. What is involved here is men's thinking, that which is cognitive, thought processes, comprehension. Thus, they "became vain in their reasoning, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." When the Scripture speaks of man being thus foolish, it does not mean he is foolish only religiously. Rather, it means that he has accepted a position that is intellectually foolish not only with regard to what the Bible says, but also to what exists—the universe and its form, and the mannishness of man. In turning away from God and the truth which He has given, man has thus become foolishly foolish in regard to what man is and what the universe is. He is left with a position with which he cannot live, and he is caught in a multitude of intellectual and personal tensions.

Such is the biblical position regarding man. And if we are going to begin to think of reformation and revival, we must have the same mentality God has concerning the position of man.

The Scripture tells us how man came into that situation: "Because, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful"; therefore, they became foolish in their reasoning, in their comprehension, in their lives. This passage relates to the original fall, but it does not speak only about the original fall. It speaks of any period when men knew the truth and deliberately turned away from it.

Many periods of history could be described in this way. From the biblical viewpoint there was a time when the ancestors of the people of India knew the truth and turned away, a time when the ancestors of the people of Africa knew the truth and turned away. This is true of people anywhere who now do not know the truth. But if we are looking across the history of the world to see those times when men knew the truth and turned away, let us say emphatically that there is no exhibition of this anywhere in history so clearly—in such a short time—as in our own generation. We who live in the northern European culture, including America and Canada, have seen this verse carried out in our generation with desperate force. Men of our time knew the truth and yet turned away—turned away not only from the biblical truth, the religious truth of the Reformation, but turned away from the total culture built upon that truth, which included the balance of freedom and form which the Reformation brought forth in northern Europe in the state and in society, a balance which has never been known anywhere in the world before.

Having turned away from the knowledge given by God, man has now lost the whole Christian culture. In Europe, including England, it took many years—in the United States only a few decades. In the United States, in the short span from the twenties to the sixties, we saw a complete shift. Of course, in the United States in the twenties not everyone was a Christian, but in general there was a Christian consensus. Now that consensus is gone. Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity, not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result, is now in the minority. To ask young people to maintain the status quo is folly. The status quo is no longer ours.

In four decades (from the twenties to the sixties) the change came in every portion and in every part of life. If in the twenties you had distributed a questionnaire in a place like Columbus Circle in New York, you would have found that most of the people might not personally have been Christians, but they would at least have had an idea of what Christianity was. Trafalgar Square in London, about 1890, would have been the same. But if today you distributed a questionnaire in these places, you would find that most of the people you asked would have little or no concept of true Christianity. They would know the word Christianity, but for most, in one way or another, the concepts they have about it would be erroneous. When we begin to think of them and preach the gospel to them, we must begin with the thought that they have no clear knowledge of biblical Christianity. But it is more than this; the whole culture has shifted from Christian to post-Christian.

Do not take this lightly! It is a horrible thing for a man like myself to look back and see my country and my culture go down the drain in my own lifetime. It is a horrible thing that sixty years ago you could move across this country and almost everyone, even non-Christians, would have known what the gospel was. A horrible thing that forty to fifty years ago our culture was built on the Christian consensus, and now we are in an absolute minority.

As Christians in this period of history we are faced with some crucial questions, the first one being this: what should our perspective be as we acknowledge the post-Christian character of our culture?

Let us refer to Romans 1:21, 22 again: "Because, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their reasoning, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." Romans 1:18 tells us the result of men turning away from and rebelling against the truth they know: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness." Man is justly under the wrath of the God who really exists and who deals with men on the basis of His character; and if the justice of that wrath is obvious concerning any generation, it is our own.

There is only one perspective we can have of the post-Christian world of our generation: an understanding that our culture and our country is under the wrath of God. Our country is under the wrath of God! Northern European culture is under the wrath of God. It will not do to say how great we are. It will not do to say the United States is God's country in some special way. It will not do to cover up the difference between the consensus today and the consensus of a Christian world. The last few generations have trampled upon the truth of the Reformation and all that those truths have brought forth. And we are under the wrath of God. This is the perspective we must have if we are going to understand what reformation, revival, and a true constructive revolution will mean.

What, then, should be our message in such a world—to the world, to the church, and to ourselves?

We do not have to guess what God would say about this because there was a period of history, biblical history, which greatly parallels our day. That is the day of Jeremiah. The book of Jeremiah and the book of Lamentations show how God looks at a culture which knew Him and deliberately turned away. But this is not just the character of Jeremiah's day of apostasy. It's my day. It's your day. And if we are going to help our own generation, our perspective must be that of Jeremiah, that weeping prophet whom Rembrandt so magnificently pictured weeping over Jerusalem, who in the midst of his tears spoke without mitigating his message of judgment to a people who had had so much and yet turned away.

In Jeremiah 1:2, 3, we are given the historic setting in which Jeremiah spoke.

To whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah, the son of Amon, king of Judah, in the thirteenth year of his reign. It came also in the days of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, unto the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, unto the carrying away of Jerusalem captive in the fifth month.

Here is Jeremiah rooted in history, during the reign of the last kings before the nation was carried into the Babylonian captivity.

The Bible puts its religious teaching in a historic setting. It is quite the opposite of the new theology and existential thought, quite the opposite of the twentieth century's reduction of religion to the "spiritual" and the subjective. Scripture relates true religion to space-time history which may be expressed in normal literary form. And that is important, because our generation takes the word religion and everything religious and turns it into something psychological or sociological.

The Bible also has another emphasis. Not all that occurs in space-time history is explainable on the basis of natural cause and effect—for example, economic, military, and psychological forces. Most modern men explain all of history this way, but the Bible does not. The Bible says that there is a true significant space-time history which God has made. Of course, history must be understood to be partially a product of the economic forces, of the flow of cultural thought, of military power, and so forth. If we had sufficient time to look at Jeremiah in detail, we would see various forces present: the great countries (Egypt on one side, Babylon on the other), tremendous external and internal forces. Still, history is not to be explained only on this basis. A holy and a loving God really exists, and He works into the significant history which exists. He works in history on the basis of His character; and when His people and their culture turn away from Him, He works in history in judgment.

We must understand that the "Christian culture" of Jeremiah's day was disintegrating into a "post-Christian culture." The holy God was dealing with that culture according to His character. Historic results were not just a product of chance, nor merely of mechanical, economic, and psychological forces. It was God working into that history as His people turned away from Him.

In Lamentations 1:1 Jeremiah speaks of the city of Jerusalem: "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!" Jerusalem, a city which used to be close to God, has been changed by the choice of significant men. They have turned away from Him when they knew Him, and now their city is under siege. There is death in the city.

Furthermore, in Lamentations 1:9 Jeremiah says with brilliant realism: "Her filthiness is in her skirts." God's betrothed—this people and their total culture—has become filthy in her skirts. She is filled with spiritual adultery, and God says, "Her filthiness is in her skirts; she remembereth not her last end." This last phrase is tremendous: "She remembereth not her last [that is, her final] end."

Two factors are involved. She has forgotten what her end will be if she turns from God; but, even more fundamental, she has forgotten her purpose as a nation—she has forgotten her relationship to God. She has forgotten what was recorded in the Pentateuch, that the chief end is to love God. She has forgotten her purpose as the people of God. She has even forgotten the purpose of man. For man is not just a chance configuration of atoms in the slipstream of meaningless chance history. No. Man, made in the image of God, has a purpose—to be in relationship to the God who is there. And whether it is in Jeremiah's day, or in our own recent generations, the effect is the same. Man forgets his purpose, and thus he forgets who he is and what life means.

It was my generation and the generation that preceded me that forgot. The younger generation is not primarily to be blamed. Those who are struggling today, those who are far away and doing what is completely contrary to the Christian conscience, are not to be blamed first. It is my generation and the generation that preceded me who turned away. Today we are left largely not only with a religion and a church without meaning, but we are left with a culture without meaning. Man himself is dead.

Jeremiah says this of God's people who turned away in his day: "Her filthiness is in her skirts; she remembereth not her last end; therefore, she came down wonderfully, she had no comforter." Because the Jewish nation did not remember the purpose of its existence, it came down wonderfully. The people could not find a comforter.

What marks our own generation? It is the fact that modern man thinks there is nobody home in the universe. Nobody to love man, nobody to comfort him, even while he seeks desperately to find comfort in the limited, finite, horizontal relationships of life. But it doesn't go—in his art, in his music, or any other place. In his literature, in his drama, it doesn't go. In the sexual act, in human relationships, he finds only the devastatingly sterile and the ugly.

The Jews had tried Egypt, they had tried Babylon; but there was no comfort, for the true Comforter was gone. In hedonism, in pornography, and in much else our generation has tried a thousand Egypts and a thousand Babylons. But men have come down wonderfully because they have forgotten who man is and what his final purpose is. The true Comforter is gone.

But in Lamentations 1:11, Jeremiah continues: "All her people sigh, they seek bread; they have given their pleasant things for meat to relieve the soul." "To relieve the soul" may be translated, "to make the soul come again." In a city under siege, these Jews were physically starving; they were giving everything for bread.

Today most men in America are not physically starving. In fact, most Americans are suffocating in the stench of a completely affluent society. But no matter what their philosophic and intellectual system is, men, being made in the image of God, have human hungers that need to be satisfied. To some, the major need is intellectual; they must have answers. So they look into existential philosophy, linguistic analysis, and other non-Christian philosophies. But there is no final answer there. Other people have a deep longing for beauty. So they try to produce beauty out of their own fallenness and self-expression of fallenness. But the final answer and true comfort are not there.

Some hunger for beauty. Some hunger for answers. Still others are hungry for moral realities. Many modern sociologists, for example, are troubled by the lack of a firm basis for moral and social form. How is man to find firm categories to distinguish social good from social evil? They try relativism, the concept of social contract, and various types of totalitarianism, and comfort slips through their fingers.

And many men are hungry for love, for God has made man to love. So our generation has turned to sex as a fulfillment of the need for love in the human heart. But it doesn't work; sex, separated from humanness, is not love. So man cries out, "I am starving."

The hand of God is down into our culture in judgment, and men are hungry. Unlike Zeus, whom men imagined hurling down great thunderbolts, God has turned away in judgment as our generation turned away from Him, and He is allowing cause and effect to take its course in history.

God can bring His judgment in one of two ways: either by direct intervention in history or by the turning of the wheels of history. Often it is the peripheral blessings flowing from the gospel which when freed from the Christian base then become the things of judgment in the next generation. Consider freedom, for example. It is the results of the Reformation in the northern European world which have given us a balance of form and freedom in the area of the state and society, freedom for women, freedom for children, freedom in the area of the state under law. And yet, when once we are away from the Christian base, it is this very freedom, now as freedom without form, that brings a judgment upon us in the turning wheels of history.

As the wheels of history turn, our generation feels, as Proust said, the "dust of death" upon everything. And as man feels the transitoriness of the present life, he tries either to elongate it or, through all kinds of strange and devious devices, to give hope for life after death. Thus, for example, we find a strange thing: men who are naturalists and yet seek seances with those who have died. In men like Ingmar Bergman we find a denial of the existence of God but an interest in demonology.

As the Jews of Jeremiah's day were hungry for bread and had no comforter, our post-Christian world is hungry in state and society and in the individual longings of the heart, for it too has turned in our own day from the only sufficient Comforter.

Therefore, if we are going to understand anything about reformation, revival, and real constructive revolution in our own hearts and in the evangelical church, if we are going to start thinking about it and praying for it, we must be realistic. The place to begin is to understand that you and I live in a post-Christian world. Because man has turned from God, there are hungers on every side; there is death in the polis, there is death in the city!

Chapter 6

The Significance of Man

This book began with an analysis of Romans 1:21, 22, verses which tell us why man is in the dilemma he is in. Man knew the truth and yet deliberately turned away. I spoke especially of how our generation has turned away in the last decades, and then I compared our age with Jeremiah's in order to show what sort of message we as Christians must speak into our modern post-Christian world.

In this chapter and in the two to follow I wish to return to the analysis of Romans. I will begin by looking again at the verses, Romans 1:21, 22, to see how the Bible considers man himself—his nature and his significance.

Increasingly, modern men tend to emphasize some sort of determinism. Usually it is one of three kinds: chemical determinism (such as the Marquis de Sade put forward and as Francis Crick maintains today), psychological determinism (as emphasized by Freud and those who follow him), or environmental determinism (as taught by B. F. Skinner and his followers). In the former, man is a pawn of chemical forces. In the second, every decision that a man makes is already determined on the basis of what has occurred to him psychologically in the past (especially when he was very young). In the third, we are only a product of our environment. In all three, man is no longer responsible for what he is or does. Man is no more than a part of a cosmic machine.

The Bible's view of man could not be more different. Romans 1:21, 22 says, "When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their reasoning, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools." The whole emphasis of these verses is that man has known the truth and deliberately turned away from it. But if that is so, then man is wonderful: he can really influence significant history. Since God has made man in His own image, man is not caught in the wheels of determinism. Rather, man is so great that he can influence history for himself and for others, for this life and the life to come.

I am convinced that one of the great weaknesses in evangelical preaching in the last years is that we have lost sight of the biblical fact that man is wonderful. We have seen the unbiblical humanism which surrounds us, and to resist this in our emphasis on man's lostness we have tended to reduce man to a zero. Man is indeed lost, but that does not mean he is nothing. We must resist humanism, but to make man a zero is not the right way to resist it. You can emphasize that man is totally lost and still have the biblical answer that man is really great. In fact, only the biblical position produces a real and proper "humanism." Naturalistic humanism leads to a diminishing of man and eventually to a zeroing of man. But the Christian position is that man is made in the image of God, and even though he is now a sinner, he can do those things that are tremendous—he can influence history for this life and the life to come, for himself and for others.

Consequently, man's actions are not a piece of theater, not just a play. If you see a play one night and then you see it the next night, you know the ending is going to be the same because it is the same play. You see it the third night, and it is the same again. The actions of the characters are a piece of theater; they are not open to change. But the Bible's emphasis is that man is responsible; his choices influence history. Even sin is not nothingness. Romans 1:21, 22 implies the greatness of man.

Perhaps a figure of speech will help. Imagine history, space-time history, as feminine, and us (all men and women) as masculine. As masculine figures, we can impregnate history. We can plant into it seeds that come to fruition in the external world. Just as a man can so impregnate that what is brought forth are legitimate children or illegitimate children, so the Bible stresses that all people are able to impregnate history with what is either good or bad.

In short, therefore, man is not a cog in a machine; he is not a piece of theater; he really can influence history. From the biblical viewpoint, man is lost, but great.

We could spend a long time on this point because, I'm convinced, it is crucial to our discussion with modern people to make plain that Christianity does not destroy the meaningfulness of a man. In fact, it is the only system which gives a final and sufficient meaning to man. Man can influence history even if often, unhappily, that influence in history is not good.

Let us notice that Romans 1:21 says something else. It tells us how men begin to slide when they know the true God. Those of us who are Christians, true Bible-believing Christians, may take it as a warning to ourselves: "When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful." And I am convinced that the first step in God's people turning away from Him—even while they tenaciously and aggressively defend the orthodox position—is ceasing to be in relationship with Him with a thankful heart. Therefore, as we read this as Christians, though the central thrust is why lost man is in the position he is, it must also speak to us. Let us be careful—we who stand for the orthodox, historic Christian faith in this century—that we have a thankful heart. Otherwise it will not be many years until the orthodoxy is gone and we are faced with heterodoxy.

God through Paul puts Romans 1:21 into a very carefully reasoned setting. As a matter of fact, the first eight chapters of the book of Romans are the most systematic presentation of the Christian position in the New Testament. It is my theory that the reason the first eight chapters of Romans make a unity within the unity of the whole book of Romans is that they present Paul's basic message into the Greek and Roman world. Romans is the only book written by Paul to a church he had not visited. When he wrote to Ephesus or Corinth, Paul could assume they already had the basic message because he had preached it to them. But when he wrote to Rome, where he had not preached, he first carefully presented the total structure of the Christian position. Then, of course, he added to it the later chapters. The Greek and Roman world is not very distant from our own world in its intellectual setting. It was a world of thinkers, a highly developed world, such as our own. And we can see here both what Paul preached and what he thought men must know if they were to understand true Christianity.

The first eight chapters are divided into a very orderly sequence. Romans 1:1–15 is the introduction, and 1:16, 17 is the theme of all the rest: "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God [the dunamis of God, the root of our word dynamite] unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For in it is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, The just shall live by faith." Here Paul sets forth the theme of the Christian message. And Romans 1:18 through 8:39 is a running, full exegesis of these two verses.

This exegesis is divided into several sections. First is the need of salvation (1:18—3:20). And, as we have seen in the chapter prior to this, there is a necessary negative before men are ready to listen to a positive. Second is justification (3:21—4:25). So far Paul is talking about how to become a Christian. In the third section he assumes his readers are believers and talks about sanctification in the Christian life, and this is, of course, related to our theme of reformation and specifically to revival (5:1—8:17). Fourth is glorification, touching on the things in the future (8:18–25). Lastly, 8:26–39 tells us that eternal life is forever. Here, then, is a very closely argued structure.

Very often those who must travel and speak a great deal have a basic message which they adapt as they move. I think this was true of Jesus. I believe Jesus gave His teaching many times over. That is one possible explanation for the slight differences in the various gospel accounts. He simply gave the same message in a slightly different way for each slightly different situation. If you had followed Paul, I think you would have heard him giving the same basic message over and over again in order that the gospel would have sufficient content. In fact, wherever there has been great preaching and great evangelizing, it has always stressed a sufficient content. People cannot be saved without it. Christianity must be communicated with sufficient content. Consequently, we find that Paul was careful to give sufficient information to those to whom he was preaching.

Now let us notice further the phrase from 1:16: "For I am not ashamed of the gospel." In Romans 1:16 and 5:5, I think Paul is playing upon the word ashamed. In chapter 5, Paul, talking to Christians, writes, "And hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us." Paul says that in experience after you are a Christian, you will not be ashamed. But in 1:16 he is addressing those who are not yet Christians and is saying that he—Paul the preacher, Paul the educated man—was not ashamed of the system of the gospel, the system of Truth, the content of the gospel, as he presented it to the minds of men in the educated Greek and Roman world. He was not ashamed, because it gives the answers, the answers that nothing else gives.

I'm convinced that we today will not be able to speak out with confidence unless we understand that we need not be ashamed of the gospel and the answers it gives to men. If we do not have this confidence, men will feel our defensiveness, and it will not commend the gospel to them. It is just such intellectual defensiveness in preaching the gospel in the educated world that diminishes its effect. But Paul says, "I'm not ashamed when I stand on Mars Hill, because I have answers that the Greek philosopher does not have. I am not ashamed in the rough and tumble of the marketplace, because I know that the Bible is going to give me the true answers that men need and that nothing else gives."

Sadly enough, there is a kind of an anti-intellectualism among many Christians; spirituality is falsely pitted against intellectual comprehension as though they stood in a dichotomy. Such anti-intellectualism cuts away at the very heart of the Christian message. Of course, there is a false intellectualism which does destroy the work of the Holy Spirit. But it does not arise when men wrestle honestly with honest questions and then see that the Bible has the answers. This does not oppose true spirituality. So Paul writes, "I'm not ashamed. I'm not ashamed of the gospel because it will answer the questions of men; it is the dunamis of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek."

When Paul speaks here of salvation, he is not limiting the term to becoming a Christian. The concept of salvation in Scripture is much broader than the concept of justification. Salvation is the whole process that results from the finished work of Jesus Christ as He died in space and time upon the cross. In justification, our guilt is removed by God's forensic declaration that since a man has cast himself upon Jesus Christ and is relying on His finished work, his guilt is gone. But salvation is also sanctification (the Christian life) and glorification (that great day when the Lord Jesus Christ returns and the Christian's body is raised). And so what Paul is saying is, "I am not ashamed of the gospel which is the power of God for the salvation of the whole man, the whole of what was affected by the Fall, and the whole of our future into eternity."

Let us understand that true Christianity is not Platonic. Much, however, of what passes for Christianity does have the ring of Platonic thinking in it. Platonism says that the body is bad or is to be despised. The only thing that matters is the soul. But the Bible says God made the whole man, the whole man is to know salvation, and the whole man is to know the Lordship of Jesus Christ in the whole of life. The great teaching of the resurrection of the body is not just abstract doctrine; it stands as a pledge and reminder of a very important and a very hopeful fact. It says God made the whole man. God made man spirit and body, and He is interested in both. He made man with an intellect, and He is interested in the intellect. He made man with an artistic and creative sense of beauty, and He is interested in that. Body, mind, artistic sense: these things are not low; they are high. Of course, they can become wrong if they are put in the wrong perspective, but they are not wrong, nor unimportant, in themselves. Therefore, since God made the whole man and is interested in the whole man, the salvation which Paul preaches is a salvation which touches the whole man.

Salvation has something to say not only to the individual man, but also to the culture. Christianity is individual in the sense that each man must be converted, born again, one at a time. But it is not individualistic. The distinction is important. As God made man, He also made an Eve so that there could be finite, horizontal relationships between two people. And these human relationships are important to God, for "the power of God unto salvation" is also meant to give an answer to the sociological needs of man, the interplay between two people and all people. God is interested in the whole man and also in the culture which flows from people's relationship with each other.

So when Paul is saying here that he is not ashamed of the gospel which is the power of God unto salvation, do not think it covers just a small area. It has something to say about every division that has come because of the Fall. From the Christian viewpoint, all the alienations that we find in man have come because of man's historic, space-time fall. First of all, man is separated from God; second, he is separated from himself (thus the psychological problems of life); third, he is separated from other men (thus the sociological problems of life); fourth, he is separated from nature (thus the problems of living in the world—for example, the ecological problems). All these need healing.

No wonder Paul says, "I'm not ashamed of the gospel intellectually because it is going to have the answers that men need. I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God unto salvation in every single area; it has answers and meaning for both eternity and now." The gospel is great. If you are an evangelical Christian, you should be convinced that biblical Christianity is not tawdry; it is not a small thing dealing with a small area of life. If you are unsaved, you should realize that Christianity is titanic. It speaks to every need of man, not by a leap in the dark, but by good and sufficient reasons. In presenting the content of Christianity Paul says there is salvation—justification, sanctification, and glorification—for the whole man.

Notice too that Paul says, "to the Jew first and also to the Greek." One of the marks of the theology from Karl Barth onward is universalism, the notion that eventually all men are saved. In Barth this universalism was implicit; in those who follow him it was explicit. In Scripture there is no universalism of this type, but there is a universalism of another kind—the teaching that one message fulfills the need of all men. This is true biblical universalism: whether a man is a Jew or a Gentile, whether he lives in the West or the East, whether he lived in ages gone by or lives in the present, there is one message that will fulfill, or would have fulfilled, his needs: the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul speaks to both kinds of men—the Jew (the man with the Bible) and the Greek (the man without the Bible). That is, there is a universal message that is fitting for all men and for their total need.

In 1:17 we read, "For in it is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, The just shall live by faith." He is quoting from Habakkuk 2:4. Paul is saying something more than that one becomes a Christian by faith. As a matter of fact, one must be careful to understand that phrase, for often it is presented so that it is no longer biblical. The basis of our salvation is not our faith. Faith is rather the instrument, the empty hands with which we accept the gift. We are not saved by faith in faith. The basis of our salvation is the finished work of Jesus Christ in space and time. Paul emphasizes this in the third chapter where he says we are saved upon the basis of the work of Jesus Christ. Faith is raising empty hands in accepting the gift.

But if this is true for justification, it is also true for sanctification. And so we not only become Christians by faith, but we live existentially by faith. The word existential may be confusing, but the concept is important enough to warrant some explanation. There are two basic ways to use the term existential. It may refer to existentialism, a philosophy that says there is no real, or reasonable, meaning to man. This definition is perhaps too simple, but it will do. On the other hand existential refers to moment-by-moment reality. A Christian must reject the philosophy of existentialism, but he must emphasize what is truly existential, for the Bible does not teach a static situation in which one becomes a Christian and that's it. Rather, it teaches that time is moving, and a relationship to God is important at every given existential moment. Consequently, you do not begin the Christian life by faith and then remain static. You continue to live it by faith. Much of Paul's teaching from Romans 5 on deals with this. The Christian, then, should be the true existentialist, moving upon the knife-edge of time, in every given moment being in relationship with God. Moment-by-moment living by faith is what is taught here.

I have tried to set the stage for the carefully reasoned presentation which Paul makes in Romans 1:18 through 2:16 as he talks to the man without the Bible. All men—lost or saved—are great in their significance. Having been made in the image of God, man is magnificent even in ruin. God made man to be responsible for his thoughts and his actions, and man fashions a significant history. This is true of both Christians and non-Christians, both men with the Bible and men without the Bible.

Chapter 7

The Man without the Bible

In three different places Paul speaks solely to men without the Bible. The first is in Lystra (Acts 14:15–17), where the message is fragmentary because it was interrupted. The second is on Mars Hill (Acts 17:16–32), where he has a longer speech, but that also was broken off. Third is the Book of Romans, 1:18–2:16, where he can develop his argument at ease. We can see here what he was really saying in all these places, for the other two conform to this early section in Romans.

Here, I believe, is where God gives us the method of preaching to our generation, for our generation is largely made up of men without the Bible. How are you going to start talking to them? Are you only going to quote from the Bible if they don't know anything about it, or if they despise or ignore it or do not know its authority? Paul didn't. In this passage from Romans 1:18 to 2:16 he does not once quote from the Old Testament. When he begins to talk to the Jew, however, after 2:17, he does quote from the Scripture, because the Jews knew what the Bible was. But in the first part, where he talks to the Greek, the man without the Bible, he talks to him in a different way. And I repeat: I believe that we can learn from this the method of preaching to our generation.

How, then, does Paul begin to speak to the man without the Bible? He says this in 1:18: "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness." Many of the new translations read "hinder the truth," but I think "hold," from the King James Version, is the better translation. The first thing Paul says to the man without the Bible is this: "You're under the wrath of God because you hold the truth in unrighteousness." Notice that he immediately begins to preach the wrath of God. Think now of this man without the Bible (he is no different then than now). If you merely say what Paul said in 1:16 and 17, "Here's salvation," he will shrug his shoulders and say, "Why do I need salvation?" Or if modern man thinks he needs salvation, it will be some modern psychological salvation. But Paul says, "No. What you need is moral salvation. You are guilty. You have true guilt in the presence of God."

Terry Southern (who wrote Candy and The Magic Christian) had something important to say in the preface to Writers in Revolt. He made a distinction between the communist countries, in which the state has built arbitrary absolutes on the basis of arbitrary law, and the modern West, which has oriented everything psychologically. He had a clever sentence which said that we are the first generation in history to do away with crime. He did not mean there is no crime, but that we no longer call it crime; we explain everything as only psychological. When modern man (whether he is educated or not) thinks he needs salvation, usually he is not thinking of salvation from moral guilt, but rather relief from psychological guilt-feelings.

I am convinced that many men who preach the gospel and love the Lord are really misunderstood. People make a "profession of faith," but because they haven't understood the message, they are not really saved. They feel a psychological need and they want psychological relief, but they don't understand that the Christian message is not talking only about psychological relief (though it includes that), but is talking about true moral guilt in the presence of a holy God who exists. The real need is salvation from true moral guilt, not just relief from guilt-feelings. And I am certain many people who make a profession go away still unsaved, having not heard one word of the real gospel because they have filtered the message through their own thought-forms and their own intellectual framework in which the word guilt equals guilt-feelings.

But Paul will not allow this. He speaks immediately of the wrath of God, and anyone who is unwilling to speak of the wrath of God does not understand the Christian faith. We have a great verse telling us how to be saved: "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life" (John 3:36). But you must remember that the end of that verse is this: "and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him." There is no real preaching of the Christian gospel except in light of the fact that man is under the wrath of God—the moral wrath of God. So Paul has a reply to the man who shrugs his shoulders and says, "Why do I need salvation?" His response is this: "You need salvation because you are under the wrath of God. You have broken God's law."

We must be careful here, for there is, of course, a very false Christian legalism. Paul preaches against it in Galatians. Nevertheless, there is no Christian message without a proper legalism. It is this that demarcates Christian from non-Christian thinking at this point. The non-Christian, in this century especially, has no legal and moral base. Everything floats in space: a 51 percent vote of some type of right-wing or left-wing authoritarianism must decide what is acceptable, or some form of hedonism must be adopted, because, as Plato understood so well, an absolute is necessary for real morality. Plato never found such an absolute, but he understood the problem, and so did the Neoplatonic men of the Renaissance.

But the Bible is clear: there is a moral law of the universe. And that basic law is the character of God Himself. There is no law behind God that binds God. Rather, God Himself is the law because He is not a contentless God, but a God with a character. His character is the law of the universe. When He reveals this character to us in verbalized, propositional form, we have the commands of God for men. Thus there are absolutes and categories; the law which the God who exists has revealed and which is based upon His character is final. This is the biblical position.

Therefore, when men break these commands, they are guilty, guilty in the same way a man is guilty when he breaks the law of the state. When a man sins, he sins against the character of God, and he has moral guilt in the presence of the Great Judge. I know very well that people don't talk in these terms often any more. But it's to our loss. In contrast to left-wing or right-wing totalitarianism with its changing arbitrary absolutes and in contrast to modern man's relativistic, moral and legal chaos, the Bible's teaching alone gives moral answers to men.

We are told in Romans 1:18 that the man without the Bible holds the truth in unrighteousness. Or if you choose, you can say he hinders or suppresses the truth. I will deal later with the difference between hold and hinder. For the moment I will use the word suppress, which is used in many modern translations.

What truth then does the man without the Bible suppress? Formerly we talked about apostasy in a generation which knew the gospel and turned away from it. The Jews of Jeremiah's day suppressed the truth of the Bible which they had. But what truth does man suppress if he does not have the Bible? We read in 1:19 and 20, "Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shown it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made."

Paul divides the truth which they suppress into two parts. It's interesting that they are the same two things that Carl Gustav Jung said cut across man's will: first of all, the external world; and secondly, those things that well up from inside the person. Jung, though he has no real solution, exactly identifies the two basic things that confront man—man himself, and the external universe. And Paul said long ago these are the two truths which man, even the man without the Bible, suppresses. As we have seen, Paul preached in other places to the Gentiles without Jews present, in Lystra and on Mars Hill. There too he used the same approach to the man without the Bible.

We should look in more detail at the truth about man which those without the Bible suppress. The list is rather long, for man is distinguished from both animals and machines on the basis of his creativity, his moral motions, his need for love, his fear of nonbeing, and his longings for beauty and for meaning. Only the biblical system has a way of explaining these factors which make man unique.

In Romans 2:15 Paul put special emphasis upon the moral motions of man: "Who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another."

God through Paul is saying here exactly what I feel we should say to modern man. And it is this: despite what a man may say in theory, he cannot escape having moral motions. The man who says morals do not exist is not amoral in the sense that he has no moral motions. Men may have different mores, but one never finds people without moral motions.

Talk to any men or women, and they may seem absolutely amoral. But if you can really talk to them, you find that they do have their own moral standards. They may be different; they may be very poor. But they are not just a machine. Modern people, as I have said, see themselves as in a deterministic situation where morals have no meaning; but they cannot, and do not, live this way.

We have a startling illustration of this in the Marquis de Sade, who was not only a pornographer, but a real philosopher. Those who are materialists have something to wrestle with in the Marquis de Sade's formulation, something that no determinist has ever been able to answer. The Marquis de Sade said that since everything is chemically determined, then whatever is, is right. Think about that for six months. The simple fact is that there is no way around that conclusion. De Sade is right. And sadism is the perfectly logical result. Obviously nature made man stronger than the woman; therefore, a man has the right to do anything he wants to a woman. That was de Sade's particular form of sadism. Nobody who holds any concept of determinism, either chemical or psychological, can explain why the Marquis de Sade is wrong. Determinism leads in the direction of cruelty and inhumanity, whether it takes the specific form of de Sade's sadism or not.

But even the Marquis de Sade, who indeed would have claimed that all men were merely determined, couldn't live this way. If you read carefully in what he wrote and examine his history, you find that at the end of his life, he was in an insane asylum in Charenton. What he was doing hardly seems possible. He was spending his time grumbling about the way he was being treated by the sailors, and he was reading the letters of his wife with meticulous care, having worked out some sort of system whereby he thought he could figure out from the number of letters in the lines the day he was going to get out. The simple fact is that men, even a Marquis de Sade, may say there is no such thing as morality and that all is a fixed situation, but in their own actions they demonstrate what they deny in their writings.

I have always enjoyed the thought of Khrushchev sitting at the United Nations, pounding on the table with his shoe and shouting, "It's wrong. It's wrong." Isn't that an interesting thing for a materialist to say? He didn't mean that something was merely counter to the best interests of the Soviet Union. He was saying something was wrong.

Moral motions distinguish man from non-man, but so does the need for love. Man feels the necessity of a love that means more than a sexual relationship. Many of the same people who say that love is only sexual go through marriage after marriage, hoping to find something more than physical satisfaction. Even when they say love is only sexual, they are looking for something to make love mean what the heart of man longs to have it mean. They simply cannot live consistently with their own view.

For a few men, the need for beauty is the point at which the mannishness of man most clearly shows through, even though on the basis of their own concept of man as a chance configuration of atoms in an impersonal universe, the very meaning of the word beauty is open to question.

All men, however, have a deep longing for significance, a longing for meaning. I was struck by the opening to Will and Ariel Durant's The Lessons of History. In the first paragraph they meditate on the cosmic dimensions of the universe, on the fact that the planets will remain not only when individual men are gone, but even after the whole race of man is gone. They were impressed with man's transience much as Proust was when he said that the dust of death is on everything human. But as to man's significance, all the Durants can point to is a kind of dignity that man has because he can observe the planets and they cannot observe him. It's quite clear: no man—no matter what his philosophy is, no matter what his era or his age—is able to escape the longing to be more than merely a stream of consciousness or a chance configuration of atoms now observing itself by chance.

In an extreme form, the longing for significance expresses itself most clearly in the fear of nonbeing. It has been obvious for centuries that men fear death, but depth-psychologists tell us that such a fear, while not found in animals, is for man a basic psychosis: no man, regardless of his theoretical system, is content to look at himself as a finally meaningless machine which can and will be discarded totally and forever. Even those who seek death and cry for the fulfillment of the death-wish still have a fear of nonbeing somewhere inside them. I am struck that when you talk to men contemplating suicide, somewhere inside they see themselves as a continuing spectator.

If you go back in art as far as you can go, you find that wherever man is, his essential mannishness is there too. Archaeologists unearthed a man that they say lived something like 40,000 years ago. They found him buried in a grave of flower petals. Now that's intriguing. You don't find animals burying their dead in flower petals. Or examine the Spanish and French cave paintings—the largest early work of art which gives us extended content. (I would accept the date of about 20,000 b.c. concerning these.) The paintings reveal that those cave-dwellers had the same human longings we have. Right there in the midst of the painting are indications that a man is crying out, "I know within myself that I am more than the dust that surrounds me." As a matter of fact, there is a theory that explains the cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain as a symbol system expressing the longings of man. Although it is open to discussion, I think it's probably right; and even if that theory proves not to be correct, still they do show man considering himself as uniquely distinguished from that which is non-man.

We may also mention the testimony of the scholar Levi-Strauss. Though his theories are highly controversial, Levi-Strauss has been a most important anthropologist. This French scientist put forth a concept that shook the world of anthropology. It is this: no matter where you go, into the past, into the present, to primitive peoples or cultured societies, you find that all men think in the same fashion. Man's thinking has not basically changed along the way. Thus, although primitive tribes may not make high-level, analyzed antitheses, still there is in tribal thinking a clear antithesis between tribe and nontribe, hot and cold, and so forth. The mannishness of man is evident as far back as anybody has been able to penetrate.

Michael Polanyi's arguments concerning the DNA template show much the same thing. Without going into details, let me say simply that Michael Polanyi specifically rejected the chemical determinism of Francis Crick. The chemical and physical properties of the DNA template do not give an explanation of what man is merely on the basis of those chemical and physical properties.

So Levi-Strauss said to look at the thinking of man; wherever you go into the past, into the present, man is man. Polanyi said the DNA template does not explain those peculiar things which man is. Mortimer Adler also testified to the problem of man's uniqueness in The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes. He did not have an answer, but he said there is something different in man, and we had better identify it or we will start to treat people as nonhuman and even more tragedy will result. No matter what his theoretical system is, man knows within himself that he cannot be equated with non-man.

What Paul says in Romans is as up-to-date as the present ticking of the clock—men, even men without the Bible, suppress the truth of what they themselves are. Primitive man, cultured man, ancient man, modern man, Eastern man, Western man: all have a testimony that says man is more than their own theories explain.

Paul then turns to the second area in which men suppress the truth. In Romans 1:20 he says, "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." So the second testimony man suppresses is the truth of the external world. Jean-Paul Sartre has said that the basic philosophic question of all questions is this: why is it that something is there rather than nothing? He is correct. The great mystery to the materialist is that there is anything there at all.

However, it is not that something chaotic is there, but that something orderly is there. Einstein understood this very well at the end of his life. According to his friend Oppenheimer and what we know from his own writing, Einstein at the end of his life became a modern mystic. He didn't have the answer, he didn't turn to the Judeo-Christian position or the Bible, but he understood that there had to be a bigger answer because he saw in the universe an order that is indisputable. Einstein worded it beautifully when he said the world is like a well-constructed crossword puzzle; you can suggest any number of words, but only one will fit all the facts. And so Sartre says, "There's something there," and Einstein adds, "Yes. Look at the marvel of its form." Let's put it another way: there is a distinction between science and science fiction. In science fiction you may imagine any kind of universe, but in science you must deal with the universe that exists.

For several years Murray Eden at MIT used high-speed computers to calculate the possibility of whether on the basis of chance there could be so much complexity in the universe within any acceptable amount of time. His conclusion was that the possibility is zero.

We find the same thing in Charles Darwin himself in his autobiography and his letters. It's amazing that this old man toward the very end of his life said, "I cannot believe with my mind that all this was produced by chance." Not his emotions, but his mind. And he has to excuse the testimony of his intelligence by saying that his mind has just come by evolution from a monkey mind, and who can trust that. But, of course, there's a trick in this. If he could not trust his mind on such a crucial point, how could he trust it to formulate the evolutionary hypothesis itself?

In short, the testimony of the existence and form of the external universe and of man himself, whether in the ancient world or the modern, constantly speaks to man and asks, "Do your presuppositions—your gods, your philosophy, or your naturalistic science—really explain what is?" Paul is saying that the truth that the man without the Bible suppresses is the truth of what is, a truth that surrounds him on every side. The Bible says, "They are without excuse." The man without the Bible is without excuse because he suppresses the truth of the nature of man and the nature of the external universe.

I would like to return now to a comment I made earlier in this chapter. You will recall that in the King James Version Romans 1:18 contains the phrase "hold the truth in unrighteousness," and that most modern translations render this verse as "hinder the truth in unrighteousness" or "suppress the truth." Some experts in Greek have told me that "hold" is better. Here, I believe, is the explanation. Paul is saying that men—because they refuse to bow to the God who is there and because they hold their presuppositions as an implicit faith—hold some of the truth about themselves and about the universe, but do not carry these things to their logical conclusions because they contradict their presuppositions. Therefore, they hold a portion of the truth, but they hold it in unrighteousness. They must hold some of the truth about themselves and the universe, for they must live in the universe as God made it; but they refuse to carry these truths to their reasonable conclusions. Whether they live in the ancient world or in the modern world, they adhere to their false presuppositions. Paul is saying, "Don't you understand? You really deserve the wrath of God because you, even you without the Bible, hold this testimony in unrighteousness."

So Paul continues in 1:21 and 22, on which we have already spent so much time. Men have become vain in their reasoning, their hearts have been darkened, and they have become foolishly foolish—holding positions in the very face of what exists. Men then are under God's judgment, not because God has scattered them like a handful of gravel, but because He has treated them as He created them—as significant. Man's own choices have led men where they are. In their own way all men are like the 1960 hippie who said, "Well, I don't care what happens to the next generation. I will take LSD even if it does split the chromosomes. I care only for the moment." In age after age men who had the truth have deliberately thrown it away. The world is what it is, not as a result of the cruelty of God to man, but of the cruelty of man to man.

In Romans 1:24 we read, "Wherefore, God gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their bodies between themselves." Men in our own sociologically and psychologically oriented age have all kinds of explanations for the moral problems of man. But according to the Bible, it is not moral declension that causes doctrinal declension; it is just the opposite. Turning away from the truth—that which is cognitive, that which may be known about God—produces moral declension. The modern artists, the dramatists, and the novelists show how far modern man has turned away into moral byroads. The Bible tells us the cause: men who knew the truth turned away; they are followed by men who do not know the truth, and this results in all sorts of moral turning aside.

Paul repeats this concept three times, in 1:23–24, 25–27, and from 28 on. It seems to me he is saying, "Notice it, and notice it well. You haven't misread. Don't just read it lightly, because I'm going to say it three times so that you'll understand that you read it correctly in the first place. It's because men turn away from God that moral problems arise."

We must not accept minor secondary causes as to why man sins. Some psychological and sociological conditioning occurs in every man's life, and this affects the decisions he makes. But we must resist the modern concept that all sin can be explained merely on the basis of conditioning. In our generation there is a constant tendency to explain sin lightly and think that such an explanation is more humanitarian. But it isn't. It decreases the importance and the significance of man. Consequently, we can be glad for the sake of man that the Bible's explanation is so emphatic.

Paul repeats it in 1:25: "Who changed [the word changed is really exchanged in the Greek] the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature [creature means that which has been created] rather than the Creator." This is the second of the three repetitions.

Paul was thinking of the gods of silver and stone and also the worship of the universe or any part of it. He says men have made such gods rather than worshiping the living God. Even on the basis of what they know themselves to be, they should have known better. Isaiah said 700 years before, "Aren't you silly to make gods that are less than yourself. You must carry them; they don't carry you. Now isn't it silly to make an integration point that is less than you yourself are." Paul used precisely the same argument on Mars Hill. Men who refuse to bow before God take the facts concerning the universe and man, push these facts through their own presuppositional grid, fail to carry their thinking to a reasonable conclusion, and so are faced with an overwhelming lie. Idols of stone are obvious lies because they are less than man, but so are non-Christian presuppositions such as the idea of the total uniformity of natural cause and effect in a closed system—the final explanation of the impersonal plus time plus chance—which ultimately makes man only a machine.

So Paul continues, "For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections; for their women did change the natural use for that which is against nature; and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet."

Usually the first of these sins is taken to refer to lesbianism. But I am not sure that lesbianism is what is involved here. I think that this may be parallel to Isaiah 3:16: "Moreover, the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet." If this is so, Paul is first speaking of heterosexuality which has become twisted. Women turn away from the truth and misuse their natural femininity and all the strong sexuality connected with it. Sexuality here is a neutral word, for the rightness of sex depends on what you do with it. Paul would be saying, the women have used their bodies and their proper sexuality as a man-trap, twisting a good gift of God (which surely Eve had) into that which is wrong: "You have taken one of the most beautiful things that has ever existed, and ever will exist in the created world, and you have turned it into evil."

Romans 1:27 does, of course, refer to homosexuality and includes lesbianism. As people have turned from the truth, they have gotten their sexuality mixed up. A number of homosexuals and lesbians have come to L'Abri where they hoped they could get help. We must show compassion and not act as though this sin is greater than other sins, or as though we are superior since we are not caught in this. But at the same time we must point out that the practice (in contrast to the temptation) of homosexuality is wrong. It is not wrong in a way that makes them worse than other sins would do, but under the absolutes of God its practice is wrong.

The third of the three repetitions comes in 1:28: "And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over [or God gave them up] to a mind void of judgment." The King James translation ("a reprobate mind") misses the point. It's a mind void of judgment, a phrase referring back to 1:21 and 22, "they became vain in their reasoning," religiously but also intellectually foolish. These people do not understand what the universe is, and they do not understand who they themselves are. That sounds very modern indeed.

Gauguin, the French painter, brilliant as he was, provides an excellent example. Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea that man is (or ought to be) autonomous, completely free, he said that what troubled him was that 2 and 2 always equaled 4. He wanted to be so free that on a Tuesday morning at eight o'clock he could say 2 + 2 = 4½.

What Paul is stressing here is that when you turn away from God and follow other presuppositions, the more consistent you are to your presuppositions, the further you get from reality itself. So you see Gauguin trying to paint an autonomous freedom, a primitive simplicity, and, as it were, stamping his feet and saying, "If my system is right, somehow or other 2 + 2 should not always equal 4."

Let us summarize briefly the course of the argument in this chapter. We began by noticing that Paul speaks in a special way to the man without the Bible. The man without the Bible has not suppressed special revelation (that is, the revelation in the Bible), but the general revelation given by the mannishness of man and by the external world. It is then plain that the man without the Bible holds the truth in unrighteousness; he holds some of the truth about himself and the universe, but he does not follow it to its reasonable conclusions. Thereafter, a breakdown in morality occurs. God says to man in this position: You are under My judgment. And so these questions arise: "How are men without the Bible going to be judged?" and "Is this just?"

Those are the questions with which I close the present chapter.

Chapter 8

The Justice of God

How is the man without the Bible to be judged by God? Is God just in this judgment? These are the questions with which we ended the last chapter.

If any of you have ever thought with honesty and not just sat under the evangelical umbrella, or if you have tried to talk to people on the outside, you immediately know that these questions deserve consideration. Is God really just in judging the man without the Bible?

We read in Romans 1:32–2:3, ". . . who, knowing the judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worthy of death [in other words, having moral motions regardless of their philosophic system], not only do the same, but consent with them that do them. Therefore, thou art inexcusable, O man [the man without the Bible], whosoever thou art that judgest; for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things. But we are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth against them who commit such things. And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them who do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?" Think about what is being said here.

Here are the people without the Bible scattered all over the world. Their ancestors (including the last two generations in our own culture), knowing the truth, have turned away from it, and this generation is unaware of it. Yet they have had the powerful testimony of the fact that their own system does not sufficiently explain what is—the mannishness of man and the existence and form of the universe. Further, all men have moral motions, even the modern man who by theory does not believe in morality. Although the standard of moral judgments may be much lower than those set forth in the Bible, moral judgments are still constantly being made.

Let us suppose for a moment that as each baby is born, a tape recorder is placed about its neck. Let us further suppose that this tape recorder works only when moral judgments are being made. Aesthetic judgments, etc., are not recorded, but every moral judgment is. Throughout one's whole life, every real moral motion is recorded upon the tape recorder. Finally, when each person dies and stands before God in judgment, God pushes a button and each person hears with his own ears his own moral judgments as they rolled out over the years: "You were wrong in doing this. You are wrong in doing that." Thousands of moral judgments pour forth, and God simply turns and says, "On the basis of your own words, have you kept these moral standards?" And each man is silent. No person in all the world has kept the moral standards with which he has tried to bind others. Consequently, God says, "I will judge you upon your own moral statements (those judgments upon which you have bound and condemned others), even if they are lower than moral statements should be. Are you guilty or not guilty?" No one will be able to raise his voice. The whole world will stand totally condemned before God in utter justice, because they will be judged not upon what they have not known, but upon what they have judged others and have not kept themselves. So all men must say, "Indeed I am justly condemned."

It is most significant that in Romans 2:15, 16, Paul concludes with this concept in the final two verses where he is addressing the man without the Bible, before he begins to speak to the man with the Bible: "who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to my gospel."

The Bible emphasizes this in various places. Luke 12:2, 3 reads, "For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hidden, that shall not be known. Therefore, whatever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops." I think that people may actually hear their own moral judgments, their own harsh words, being poured out against other men. And they will have to say, "You are just and I am condemned."

Revelation 20:12 speaks of the last great judgment: "And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God, and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works." I have known evangelicals who have been somewhat embarrassed by this and say that this passage really means that people will be judged on whether they have accepted Christ as Savior or not. That is not what God says. He says, "I'm going to judge you by your works, and your works will fail." They will fail on the basis of their moral judgments against others. There is no injustice in God's dealings with lost men, because they are judged on the standard by which they have bound others.

You will recall that up through Romans 4 Paul talks about how to become a Christian. From the fifth chapter on he talks to Christians. In Romans 5 there is a titanic statement about the historicity of the space-time fall of Adam. Paul is giving to Christians the explanation of the origin of evil. But I think it's highly significant that Paul did not mention this to the man without the Bible. When he talks to the man without the Bible he says to him, "I want to ask you a question: do you keep your own moral standards?" I have yet to find the man who, in an atmosphere of empathy, will not say, "No, sometimes I break them by mistake, but at times I deliberately break them." And this is what God's Word says will be the basis of the judgment of those who do not have the Bible. The judgment rests upon the individual's true moral choice.

I am convinced from my experience that without the biblical position concerning God's judgment of all men you cannot have really good answers for modern man when he asks his questions. Some of those questions, as I've been emphasizing, are: Who is man? What is man? Who am I? Does history have any significance? Do I have any significance? And if a Christian is to give answers that are tough-fibered enough to break into the thinking of honest people in this century, he must have an answer concerning significance that will bear full weight. Moral judgment is made on the basis of the standards a man holds and yet deliberately breaks. Such moral judgment has an effect, not only in this life, but in the life to come. The limitedness of this life never can give significance enough. But here when moral judgment is based on a man's choice which affects his present and future life far down into the reaches of foreverness, suddenly significance breaks like a great bursting bomb. This is the significance of finite man on the highest possible level. Here is the very opposite of Proust's concept of the dust of death on life now.

The only way that one can get rid of the lostness of men is to give up either one of two things. First is the emphasis upon God's true holiness. This, of course, removes this lostness of men. But the results are disastrous. What is lost is not just God, but man. If Nietzsche says God is dead, Sartre must say man is dead. For if you give up the true holiness of God, you give up any moral absolute in the universe, and you are back in a big circle where everything is adrift.

Second, one can give up the significance of history and the significance of man in that history. If neither has significance, then the concept of God's judgment of man can be ignored. But if you do that, man has no meaning. So if you give up the holiness of God, there are no absolutes and morality becomes a zero; if you give up the significance of man, man becomes a zero. If you want a significant man, with absolutes, morality, and meaning, then you must have what the Bible insists upon—that God will judge men justly, and they will not be able to raise their voices because of the base upon which He judges them.

This brings me to two conclusions. First of all, in Romans 2:1, Paul moves from abstract statements to personal application: "Therefore, thou art inexcusable, O man." Romans 2:3 repeats the personal emphasis: "And thinkest thou this, O man?" Paul is not just teaching abstract doctrine. It is my opinion, in fact, that every doctrine is meant to be practiced. Even the doctrine concerning the Trinity is meant to be practiced by the way our lives exhibit an understanding of the centrality of personality. And surely Paul's present message is to be practiced. All men are going to be judged, and all men are going to be found with a totally failing grade: "Therefore, O man"—you, individually.

Beginning at 2:17 Paul deals with the Jew, the man with the Bible. God says through Paul, "Just as I have explained that the man without the Bible is to be judged on the basis of the moral standards with which he binds others, I will explain to you, the man with the Bible, that I will judge you upon the higher standards of the Scripture." And as Paul continues on to 3:9, he concludes: the man with the Bible is no better than the man without the Bible, for both Jews and Gentiles have sinned.

You must understand that God's passing grade is 100 percent. If He is less than perfect or accepts less than perfection, the absolutes are gone! That's what an absolute means; it's a 100 percent affair. And so God says to the man without the Bible, "Have you kept 100 percent of the moral judgments with which you bound others?" And to the man with the Bible, "Have you kept 100 percent of the standards of Scripture?" The answer is no. In Galatians 3:21 Paul writes, "Is the law, then, against the promises of God? God forbid; for if there had been a law given which could have given life [or could make alive], verily righteousness should have been by the law." That is, if God could have given a law so that Jesus did not have to go to the cross, surely He would have done it! He didn't send Jesus to the cross as a piece of theater, as one arbitrary possibility in the midst of other arbitrary possibilities. Rather, since there is no law that man in his rebellion does not break, God had to provide a nonhumanist solution for the problem of man if there was to be a solution.

But in the book of Romans, as early as Romans 1:16, 17, we are confronted with God's unexpected solution: "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." Paul says there is a solution for me personally and for you personally—a solution for the universal need of all men. God has provided a solution which fills the practical need and can be discussed on Mars Hill without shame. In that solution two great needs are fulfilled: the need for an absolute and the need for the significance of man.

What specifically is this solution? "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (3:23). The Greek is stronger: "For all have sinned [aorist tense] in the past, and all are coming short of the glory of God." In the past, we have sinned; in the present, we are sinning. But he continues, "being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Many of you have been raised with these words from the Scripture until they have just become words. Some of you may say, "Oh, I've heard it ten million times, and it grinds through my mind like a phonograph."

Smash the record and listen to the words! "Whom God hath set forth [that is, Christ] to be propitiatory through faith in his blood [that is, Christ's finished work in space, time, and history, on the basis of the infinite value of His work because of His person as the eternal Son of God], to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God." God has provided a solution whereby His holiness and man's significance can stand, and yet not all men will be lost.

Then look at the great 3:26. People pass by it much too easily, not understanding the wonder of what Paul is saying: "For the showing at this time his righteousness, that he himself might be just [that is, that He might keep His holiness—and thus there is an absolute], and yet [the word yet is not in the Greek, but the force of it is] the justifier of him who believeth in Jesus."

What is being said here? God has provided a way that no philosophy would have thought of. It is a way that would take us by surprise if we were not just thinking by evangelical habit. There should be everlasting surprise in it. I stand here. I am significant. God must be holy. Is all lost now that I have sinned? The answer is no! God has provided a propitiation, a substitute. The whole of God's answer rests upon the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ. Because of who He is, His death has infinite value; it can cover every spot; it can remove true moral guilt (and not just the guilt-feelings that exist) in the presence of God as the perfect Judge of the universe.

Thus three great things fall into place: God's holiness, man's significance, and the possibility of man's redemption. I don't know about you, but I believe it is time to stand up and sing the doxology. Here is an intellectual answer that nothing else has ever presented!

In 2:1–3, Paul brings the message down to the individual: "Therefore, thou art inexcusable, O man!" Paul's message is not just something for somebody else. It's for every one of us. God is holy. There is a moral absolute. I am significant. I have deliberately sinned. I am under that wrath of God. Note it well: unless by God's grace I have taken advantage of this unexpected and totally surprising answer to the dilemma, I am under the wrath of God.

Our second conclusion involves our attitude as Christians now that we know that the man without the Bible (not only the bushman but the educated modern man) is under the judgment of God. It's perfectly true that God in His mercy often brings men into contact with the gospel in very unexpected ways. L'Abri is a proof of this every day of the year. The amazing people that God brings in amazing ways from the ends of the earth to hear the content of the gospel in L'Abri! But we are not to wait like a piece of stone for God to bring men to us. Paul tells us very clearly what our attitude is to be. In 1:14, 15, he says, "I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians; both to the wise and to the unwise." I am a debtor, says Paul, to all classes of men. "So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also." And although that meant prison and finally death, he was willing to go. He went on in the same way as Jeremiah went on.

Later in 10:13–15, Paul writes, "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How, then, shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? As it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!" Paul's response is firm and strong. I am a debtor to be a teller of the content of the good news. The Christian is called to be the carrier of the content of the good news.

Milton understood properly: Satan was a horrible rebel, but what he did had a large meaning in history. And when men turn and revolt, it has meaning in history. When men who knew the truth turned and revolted against God, it meant that those who followed them in history did not have the content of the gospel. But there is a gospel. And God turns to those of mankind who know the content and He says: Take the gospel. And he continues to honor the way He made man as significant, for He now says, I have put the good news into your hands that you might have compassion upon your own kind!

Who are these, regardless of the color of their skin and the language they speak, scattered over the face of the world? Who are these that do not have the content of the gospel? Who are they? They are my kind; they are my people; they are not something else; they are that which I am. I can really understand them because I am who they are. It is the Christian who knows the real unity of the human race, for we have a common origin; we are of one flesh and blood.

I stand here now, a Christian who has the content of the gospel, and I say: Isn't it wonderful that we have an answer to modern man, who says man is a zero. I can say, You are not a zero. I can say: Proust is wrong; the dust of death is not on everything. There is real meaning that stretches out forever and ever into the future. Isn't that wonderful! And then if I'm listening and thinking at all, not only to the Word of God, but to the dictates of compassion in my heart, I realize that significance means something more. Significance should make me as the seraphim who cover their faces with their wings. I should put my hands over my face, because now I am significant. It's up to me in compassion to take the good news to my kind. This is who I now am.

It is Paul again who sounds the warning in 1 Corinthians 9:16: "For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of; for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!" Upon what basis should I preach and teach? Just some sociological group pressure from my church? The fact that the missionary candidate is a big wheel on some Christian college campuses and in some churches? Never! Ten thousand times no! The pressure upon me is this: I am significant, and my kind needs the message that I know.

Woe to us, woe to our evangelicalism with our lack of compassion. There is a decline in missionary interest across evangelical circles. What is lost? One of two things or both: a real sense of the lostness of the lost or compassion in our hearts. Many of us are intellectually embarrassed to speak of the lostness of the lost. We have been infiltrated by the naturalistic concepts of our own relativistic day. Across evangelicalism there is a great veil; regardless of what men affirm in their statements of faith, they no longer are facing the reality of the lostness of their own kind.

And as we have lost the sense of the lostness of the lost, we have also lost compassion. We are hard. What do you think when you see the newspaper pictures of those starving and displaced people? Do you have any compassion? What I find in much evangelicalism is not only weakness in sensing the lostness of the lost, but a tremendous weakness of compassion for the needs of my kind in the present life. What do you think of the overwhelming misery that almost every edition of the newspaper, almost every TV and radio news program brings us? Do you have any interest in helping them (or others in our own country) who need help in this life? And then as a Christian, does your world-view stand strong and consistent so that as you look at those starving people, you say: "Yes, they need help in this life. These are my kind; and there's an eternity out there, and these people also need the content of the gospel." Compassion for the needs of men, that's our need. In the midst of our affluence, we ought to have compassion for people in this life and in eternity as we understand the lostness of the lost. To separate these two things as though they can be divided is not to understand the gospel.

All the church is to be made up of tellers. Not everyone is to be a missionary, not everyone is a minister, but there is no Christian who doesn't have laid upon him the admonition of Paul to be a debtor. Everyone is bound to be a teller in his own place, in his own calling, according to the individual vocation which God has given him.

What about missionary giving? Often we are proud to say we give more to missions than any other country in the world. But it seems to me that most Christians give their money out of sociological pressure in their group, and that group pressure is often generated by habit. It does not seem to me that most evangelicals give their money out of compassion and a sense of the lostness of the lost of their own kind.

People say to me at times, "But can you preach the gospel you have described in the midst of your intellectual presentation? Will modern man listen? Won't he say it's ugly?" I have never found a man who has thought orthodox Christianity as such is ugly once he understands the titanic answers it gives. I have never known a man who found that that was ugly! What men find ugly is what they see in Christians who hold to the orthodox doctrine that men are lost, but show no signs of compassion. This is what is ugly. This is what causes men in our generation to be turned off by evangelicalism.

At the conclusion of our study of Jeremiah and his message we said that if there is to be a constructive revolution in the orthodox, evangelical church, then like Jeremiah we must speak of judgment concerning individual men great and small and judgment of the church, the state, and the culture which have known the truth of God and have turned away from Him and His propositional revelation. God exists, He is a holy God, and we must know that there will be judgment. And like Jeremiah we must keep on—keep on so speaking regardless of the cost to ourselves. Now having completed our study in Romans we must add this: if there is to be a constructive revolution in the orthodox, evangelical church, we must comprehend and speak of the lostness of the lost, including the man without the Bible. And like Paul we must not be cold in our orthodoxy, but deeply compassionate for our own kind even when it is costly.

If we are Christians and do not have upon us the calling to respond to the lostness of the lost and a compassion for those of our kind for this life and eternity, our orthodoxy is ugly. And it is ugly in the presence of anybody who's an honest person. And more than that, orthodoxy without compassion is ugly to God.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Are contemporary people in fact hungry for love, beauty, and meaning? Give examples.

2. Why is Christianity not Platonic?

3. Explain: "It's quite clear: no man—no matter what his philosophy is, no matter what his era or his age—is able to escape the longing to be more than merely a stream of consciousness or a chance configuration of atoms now observing itself by chance."

4. Do you agree that "The fact that there is much religion means nothing to God and does nothing to remove his judgment"?

5. What are some of the parallels between Jeremiah's day and our own?

6. Commenting upon Romans 1, does Schaeffer get the balance right, between the depravity and the glory of the human being?

7. What are the two kinds of universalism?

*From Death in the City by Francis A. Schaeffer, © 1969. Used by permission of Crossway Books, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.

CHAPTER 23

Follow-Up

As in previous sections, there are other relevant and fascinating selections that could have been included here. Akin to Lewis in his mode of presentation (literature) and his insight into some of the vexing problems that accompany a Christian defense, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) in his The Brothers Karamazov argues for a Christian response to suffering (see, e.g., pt. 1, bk. 5, chap. 4).

Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948), though not orthodox in his theology, wrestled with the notions of divine justice and love of God. He was expelled from Russia and exiled in France. While there, he was a prolific writer and himself wrote a work on Dostoevsky (1923).

It would be somewhat unusual to mention Karl Barth (1886–1968) in a work on apologetics, given his explicit aversion to the entire discipline. We should note, however, that Barth’s antipathy toward apologetics has had significant influence in neoorthodox circles, and the radical subjectivity of Barth’s theology is finding a new place in postconservative theologies.

Paul Tillich, among liberal theologians, is an excellent example of what can happen when an attempt is made to merge Christian truth with non-Christian philosophy. His “method of correlation,” prominent in his three-volume Systematic Theology, attempts to fuse together aspects of Christian revelation with existential philosophy.

Finally, among neo-evangelicals in the mid-twentieth century, E. J. Carnell is easily the most prominent. His Introduction to Christian Apologetics (1948), A Philosophy of the Christian Religion (1952), and Christian Commitment: An Apologetic (1957) form an apologetic triad in which he attempts to show Christianity to be logically and systematically coherent. Influenced by Boston personalism, Carnell sought to move evangelical theology out of a context of fundamentalism, with its rigid structures and legalistic piety.

PART FOUR

Issues Today and Tomorrow

Part 4 Introduction

We have moved over two thousand years since we began this survey. As the following selections will show, there are both continuities and discontinuities from then until now. As for continuities, many of the concerns that we have seen thus far are still present. For example, Francis Collins, like Butler and Paley, argues for the consistency of natural and revealed religion. Alvin Plantinga's argument has something in common with the argument we saw (in vol. 1) of Justin Martyr. Though, unlike Justin, Plantinga is not appealing to the emperor, his appeal, like Justin's, is that those who accept certain ideas and philosophies as rational and acceptable simply reject Christian beliefs based on nothing more than sheer prejudice. William Lane Craig, somewhat like Aquinas, wants to move from a foundation of natural theology to a reasonable conclusion of God's existence.

There are also, however, as we will see, some things that are unique in the argumentation of recent apologists. Collins's argumentation presupposes significant advances in technology that were not available in the past. Plantinga's proposal would be incoherent if not for the substantial discussions, begun in earnest in the twentieth century, of the nature of justification in epistemology.[1] Marion, in his struggle to distance the Christian understanding of God from a univocal notion of being, in the end is arguing for a sacramental notion of being. These and other concerns in this section display unmistakable contemporary characteristics and thus could not have been argued in the same way in times past.

Given these current concerns, where does apologetics go from here? What issues and challenges face the Christian church in coming decades? Obviously, it is impossible to say in any great detail. What is also obvious, however, is that the concerns that Athenagoras was facing, the issues that Aquinas addressed, the need for a new look at old ideas that invigorated Marion—these will be with us until the Lord returns. The problem of evil, for example, will continue to arise in the church and against Christianity until the last enemy is destroyed (1 Cor. 15:26). As this volume is being written, there is a "new atheism" afoot in which challenges to religion generally, and Christianity in particular, are all the rage.

One of the more specific questions that is beginning to be addressed is the question of postmodernism's successor. This question has implications for apologetics, given the close connections, as we have seen, between epistemology, metaphysics, and Christianity. One suggestion, given postmodernism's failure to account for knowledge, is that "critical realism" be adopted.[2] This suggestion makes sense in that postmodernism's radical subjectivity, and thus relativism, serves to move the discussion back toward some kind of "realism," that is, the notion that there really is an objective world that we can know.

But what should Christians think about a critical realistic epistemology? Since it staves off the relativism of a postmodern subjectivity, is it our best option for defending Christianity? Some Christians seem to think so. The Anglican bishop N. T. Wright argues for it, given its insistence on the "reality of the thing known."[3] Not only so, but some conservative Christians have opted for a similar, if not identical, way of articulating a Christian defense.[4] One of the key questions to ask, in light of this current discussion, is, where and how does God's revelation fit? If epistemological theories are "revelation-neutral" in that they are formulated without reference to what God has said, how does revelation find its way into an apologetic discussion, and what is its status? But, as we have seen, this is one of the primary questions that has been discussed all along.

Another possible notion proffered is that we are moving into a "transmodern" context, one that seeks a third way between modernism and postmodernism, eschewing the weaknesses and embracing the strengths of each.[5] But what would a transmodern epistemology and metaphysics look like? How would a transmodern apologetic proceed?

Whatever the future holds for apologetics, it seems to us that at least these truths must remain if our defense is a defense of the Christian faith: (1) God, and God alone, is self-sufficient. (2) God can properly be known only by way of his self-attesting revelation. (3) Holy Scripture, which is the Word of God, together with his Spirit, is the only means by which the barriers and attacks given against Christianity can be broken down. Apologetics—past, present, and future—will be what it is meant to be only when these three elements are incorporated, without compromise, into its method.

May the Lord grant the church the wisdom of the past, the conviction of the present, and the confidence of the future, that all glory would be his as we seek to defend the precious faith entrusted to the saints.

1. Specifically centering on the seminal essay by Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge,” in Analysis 23 (1963): 121–23.

2. See Jose Lopez and Garry Potter, After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism (New York: Athlone, 2001).

3. See N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1992), 35f.

4. Tim Keller changes the term somewhat, from “critical realism” to “critical rationality,” but the substance is the same. See Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Dutton, 2008), 120ff.

5. See Jim Parker’s essay, “A Requiem for Postmodernism—Whither Now?,” in Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and Justin Taylor, eds., Reclaiming the Center: Confronting Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004).

CHAPTER 24

Alvin Plantinga

(1932–)

Alvin Plantinga was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Raised in the Christian Reformed Church, he has theological roots in the Dutch Reformed tradition. As the son of a philosophy and psychology professor, Plantinga evidenced a knack for and interest in philosophy early on.[1]

Plantinga studied philosophy at Harvard, Calvin College, the University of Michigan, and Yale, earning his PhD from Yale in 1957. Throughout his prolific career, Plantinga spent the majority of his years teaching, first, at Calvin College for nineteen years, then, until his recent retirement, at Notre Dame University. It would not be an overstatement to say that virtually all matters metaphysical and epistemological must address much of Plantinga’s own work. His Nature of Necessity did much to further discussions of modality in metaphysics, and his most recent work in epistemology, the roots of which began early in his career, have stimulated a multitude of developments and critiques in philosophical and theological circles.

In 1980, Time magazine called Alvin Plantinga “the leading Protestant philosopher of God.”[2] Philosophy in the previous generation was dominated almost exclusively by atheists or agnostics. This was, at least in large part, due to the influence of positivism on the philosophical terrain. Plantinga himself notes, “When I left graduate school in 1957 there were few Christian philosophers in the United States, and even fewer Christian philosophers willing to identify themselves as such.”[3] Why was that the case? Primarily because positivism with its “verifiability criterion of meaning” had hegemonic influence, and, as most who look back on that period note, Christians were by and large either jumping on the positivistic bandwagon or running scared of positivism’s conclusions. Plantinga was undaunted by such criticisms.

At Michigan, as earlier on, I was very much interested in the sorts of philosophical attacks mounted against traditional theism—the ancient claim that it was incompatible with the existence of evil, the Freudian claim that it arose out of wish fulfillment, the positivistic claim that talk about God was literally meaningless, the Bultmannian claim that traditional belief in God was an outmoded relic of a prescientific age and the like. These objections (except for evil) seemed to me not only specious but deceptive, deceitful in a way: they paraded themselves as something like discoveries, something we moderns (or at any rate the more perceptive among us) had finally seen, after all those centuries of darkness. All but the first, I thought, were totally question begging if taken as arguments against theism.[4]

Almost from the beginning of his philosophical career, Plantinga had an interest in philosophical theology and apologetics.[5]

The selection included here is a part of the argument that Plantinga has been developing at least since his initial work God and Other Minds (1967). In that book, Plantinga argues that since there are no successful arguments for the existence of other minds, yet we all believe such things, and rationally so, there need not be successful arguments for God’s existence (who himself is, at least, another Mind) for us rationally to believe in him.

The development of this argument took a number of significant turns. One central element of it, and one that is highly relevant for discussions included in this volume, is that the so-called “evidential objection to belief in God,” in which it is argued that belief in God is irrational or somehow rationally substandard unless accompanied by acceptable evidence, is itself unable to support its own claims. Thus, instead of meeting the evidential objection with more—and hopefully more convincing—evidence, Plantinga argues that belief in God, like other beliefs we hold, is not necessarily in need of such evidence to be rationally held.

His initial foray into this discussion assumed and included central notions of (what is sometimes called) classical foundationalism. Generally speaking, foundationalism includes two kinds of beliefs—beliefs we rationally hold apart from evidential criteria, which are called “basic” or “properly basic” beliefs, and beliefs we hold on the basis of the first kind of beliefs. Plantinga critiques this epistemological structure, but his critique is not in order to dismantle it; rather it is in order further to refine and expand it. In the end, Plantinga holds to (what he calls) a Reidian foundationalism, inspired as it is by Thomas Reid’s notion of common sense realism.

In Plantinga’s development of this critique, he labelled his view a “Reformed epistemology,” a label he later regretted due to its exclusive connotations.[6] Not only did he drop the exclusive moniker, but Plantinga eventually came to see that his notion of the justification of knowledge, present in his initial work, was not adequate to do the work he required in his epistemological project. He moved, therefore, from a discussion of the justification of knowledge to a notion of warrant.

If we take rationality as warrant, an entirely different galaxy of considerations becomes relevant to the question whether belief in God is rational. Indeed, so taken, this epistemological question is not ontologically or theologically neutral; pursued far enough, it transforms itself into an ontological or theological question.[7]

The development of Plantinga’s epistemological project can be seen in full in his trilogy on warrant: Warrant: The Current Debate, Warrant and Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief, a selection from the last of which we have included here. Plantinga’s project is meant to show that in virtually all accounts of knowledge and its warrant, what is sadly lacking is a notion of proper function. Thus, all have come to epistemic ruin. So, his first approximation of warrant includes the following:

According to the central and paradigmatic core of our notion of warrant (so I say) a belief B has warrant for you if and only if (1) the cognitive faculties involved in the production of B are functioning properly . . . ; (2) your cognitive environment is sufficiently similar to the one for which your cognitive faculties are designed; (3) the triple of the design plan governing the production of the belief in question involves, as purpose or function, the production of true beliefs (and the same goes for elements of the design plan governing the production of input beliefs to the system in question); and (4) the design plan is a good one: that is, there is a high statistical or objective probability that a belief produced in accordance with the relevant segment of the design plan in that sort of environment is true. Under these conditions, furthermore, the degree of warrant is given by some monotonically increasing function of the strength of S’s belief that B. This account of warrant, therefore, depends essentially upon the notion of proper function.[8]

Proper function, then, first of all, simply means that for one to have knowledge or “warranted true belief,” one’s cognitive faculties must be working properly in an epistemically appropriate environment. Not only so, but even if these two conditions (cognitive faculties working properly and an epistemically appropriate environment) obtain, there is more that must be maintained, including the fact that warranted true belief will come in degrees.

We shall not enter the labyrinth of details attached to Plantinga’s project, fascinating as they are. What we offer here is, in significant ways, the culmination of Plantinga’s full and distinguished career as a Christian philosopher. In Warranted Christian Belief, Plantinga first wants to show theism to be a rationally held belief and then from there to argue that Christian theism is also itself rationally held, even if one has no evidence for such.

In this volume, Plantinga sets out to answer the question, “Is Christian belief intellectually acceptable?” In attempting to answer that question, he provides a crucial distinction with regard to objections to Christian belief, a distinction between de facto and de jure objections. De facto objections are objections to the truth of Christian belief. Even more prevalent, however, have been de jure objections.

These are arguments or claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or contrary to sound morality, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view.[9]

While de facto objections deal with the truth or falsity of Christian belief and thus can be fairly straightforward, de jure objections are less clear, diffuse, and often opaque, claiming that there is something other than falsity that is wrong with Christian belief. Christian belief is in some way defective such that one’s holding such belief entails that one inherits its defect. So, the topic of the book, by and large, is to respond to the de jure objection.

Plantinga then goes on to propose that there aren’t any de jure objections to Christian belief that are independent of de facto objections. More specifically, he wants to argue that “the attitude expressed in ‘Well, I don’t know whether Christian belief is true (after all, who could know a thing like that?), but I do know that it is irrational (or intellectually unjustified or unreasonable or intellectually questionable)’ that attitude, if I am right, is indefensible.”[10] Plantinga goes on to show how that attitude is indefensible by construing theism and Christian belief as within the confines of his epistemological project on warrant. If warrant is acquired in the way that Plantinga argues, and if theistic belief generally and Christian belief more specifically are consistent with (at least the essential core of) that project, then theism and Christianity, too, may be warranted.

At one point in this volume, Plantinga makes the claim that the de jure question is not independent of the de facto question.

And this dependence of the question of warrant or rationality on the truth or falsehood of theism leads to a very interesting conclusion. If the warrant enjoyed by belief in God is related in this way to the truth of that belief, then the question whether theistic belief has warrant is not, after all, independent of the question whether theistic belief is true. So the de jure question we have finally found is not, after all, really independent of the de facto question; to answer the former we must answer the latter. This is important: what it shows is that a successful atheological objection will have to be to the truth of theism, not to its rationality, justification, intellectual respectability, rational justification, or whatever. . . . This fact invalidates an enormous amount of recent and contemporary atheology; for much of that atheology is devoted to de jure complaints that are allegedly independent of the de facto question. If my argument is so far right, though, there aren’t any complaints of that sort.[11]

In the selection offered here, the reader will catch a glimpse of a philosophical defense, epistemologically located, in which it is argued that, given what we all believe, it is not irrational to add belief in God to our coterie of basic beliefs. Is this argument sufficiently similar to Butler’s approach in that the conclusion is a double negative (i.e., given what we all already believe, it is not so irrational to believe in God)? Does the de jure question carry any threat apart from an equally rigorous assessment of the de facto question? Questions abound and will continue to do so regarding Plantinga’s approach, as he himself will admit. It is, however, of such influence currently that its place in the apologetic discussion is secure.

1. For a full and interesting autobiography of Plantinga’s life, see Alvin Plantinga, “A Christian Life Partly Lived,” in Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers, ed. Kelly James Clark (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993), 45–82.

2. Ibid., 8.

3. Ibid., 81.

4. Ibid., 62.

5. Ibid., 69ff.

6. See ibid., 67.

7. Ibid., 75.

8. Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 194.

9. Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), ix.

10. Ibid., ii.

11. Ibid., 191.

Warranted Christian Belief

Chapter 6

Warranted Belief in God*

To know in a general and confused way that God exists is implanted in us by nature. . . .

—Thomas Aquinas

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. . . .

—St. Paul

The de jure challenge to Christian (or theistic) belief, as we have seen, is the claim that such belief is irrational or unreasonable or unjustified or in some other way properly subject to invidious epistemic criticism; it contrasts with the de facto challenge, according to which the belief in question is false. Put just like that, the de jure rebuke is pretty vague and general; we can't do much by way of evaluating the proposed complaint without achieving a clearer and more specific formulation of it. As we have seen, clear and sensible formulation of the de jure criticism—at any rate of one that isn't just obviously mistaken—has proven elusive. In the last chapter, however, we were able to make progress by considering the F&M (Freud and Marx) complaint. What we saw is that this complaint is really the claim that Christian and other theistic belief is irrational in the sense that it originates in cognitive malfunction (Marx) or in cognitive proper function that is aimed at something other than the truth (Freud)—comfort, perhaps, or the ability to soldier on in this appalling world in which we find ourselves. To put it another way, the claim is that such belief doesn't originate in the proper function of cognitive faculties successfully aimed at producing true beliefs. To put it in still another way, the charge is that theistic and Christian belief lacks warrant.

By way of response, in this chapter I shall first offer a model—a model based on a claim made jointly by Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin—for a way in which theistic belief could have warrant. Once we see how theistic belief might have warrant, we can also see the futility of the F&M complaint and its contemporary successors. In the remaining chapters of part III, I shall extend the model to cover specifically Christian belief. Chapter 7 will deal with sin and its noetic results. The extended model crucially involves the notion of faith. Following Aquinas and Calvin, I shall argue that faith has both an intellectual and an affective component: chapter 8 will therefore examine the way in which, as Calvin says, the great truths of the gospel are "revealed to our minds," and chapter 9 will examine the way in which, as he also says, they are "sealed upon our hearts." Then in chapter 10, I'll consider and reply to objections to the original and extended models.

I. The Aquinas/Calvin Model

A. Models

I say I propose in this chapter to give a model of theistic belief's having warrant; but what sort of animal is a model, and what would it be good for? There are models of many different kinds: model airplanes, artists' models, models in the sense of exemplars, models of a modern major general. There is also the logician's sense of model in which, for example, any consistent first-order theory has a model in the natural numbers. My use of the term here is more abstract than the first and more concrete than the second. The rough idea is this: to give a model of a proposition or state of affairs S is to show how it could be that S is true or actual. The model itself will be another proposition (or state of affairs), one such that it is clear (1) that it is possible and (2) that if it is true, then so is the target proposition. From these two, of course, it follows that the target proposition is possible. In this chapter, I shall give a model of theistic belief's having warrant: the Aquinas/Calvin (A/C) model. Then in chapters 7, 8, and 9, I will extend the A/C model to a model in which specific and full-blooded Christian belief has warrant.

I claim four things for these two models. First, they are possible, and thus show it is possible that theistic and Christian belief have warrant. The sense of possibility here, however, isn't just broadly logical possibility—after all, such obvious falsehoods as the population of China is less than a thousand are possible in that sense—but something much stronger. I claim that these models are epistemically possible: they are consistent with what we know, where "what we know" is what all (or most) of the participants in the discussion agree on.[1]

Second, and related to the first assertion, I claim that there aren't any cogent objections to the model—that is, to the proposition that the model is in fact true or actual. More exactly, there are no cogent objections of a philosophic or scientific kind (or indeed any other kind) to the model that are not also cogent objections to theism or Christian belief. Another way to put it: any cogent objection to the model's truth will also have to be a cogent objection to the truth of theistic or Christian belief. I shall go on to argue that if Christian belief is indeed true, then the model in question or one very like it is also true. If I am successful, therefore, the upshot will be that there is no viable de jure (as opposed to de facto) challenge either to theistic or to Christian belief. There is no sensible challenge to the rationality or rational justification or warrant of Christian belief that is not also a challenge to its truth. That is, there is no de jure challenge that is independent of a de facto challenge. That means that a particularly popular way of criticizing Christian belief—to be found in the evidentialist objection, in the F&M complaint, in many versions of the argument from evil, and in still other objections—is not viable. This is the sort of challenge that goes as follows: "I don't know whether Christian (or theistic) belief is true—how could anyone know a thing like that? But I do know that it is irrational, or rationally unacceptable or unjustified or without warrant (or in some other way epistemically challenged)." If my argument is right, no objection of this sort has any force.

Third, I believe that the models I shall present are not only possible and beyond philosophical challenge but also true, or at least verisimilitudinous, close to the truth. Still, I don't claim to show that they are true. That is because the A/C model entails the truth of theism and the extended A/C model the truth of classical Christianity. To show that these models are true, therefore, would also be to show that theism and Christianity are true; and I don't know how to do something one could sensibly call 'showing' that either of these is true. I believe there are a large number (at least a couple dozen) good arguments for the existence of God; none, however, can really be thought of as a showing or demonstration. As for classical Christianity, there is even less prospect of demonstrating its truth.[2] Of course this is nothing against either their truth or their warrant; very little of what we believe can be 'demonstrated' or 'shown'.

Fourth, there is a whole range of models for the warrant of Christian belief, all different but similar to the A/C and extended A/C models. (In claiming that models I present are close to the truth, what I am claiming is that they belong to that range.) And the fourth thing to say here is that if classical Christian belief is indeed true, then one of these models is very likely also true. Alternatively, for one who thinks Christian belief true, one or more of these models (or their disjunction) is a good way in which to conceive the warrant of Christian belief.

B. Presentation of the Model

Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin concur on the claim that there is a kind of natural knowledge of God (and anything on which Calvin and Aquinas are in accord is something to which we had better pay careful attention). Here I want to propose a model based on Calvin's version of the suggestion, not because I think Calvin should be the cynosure of all eyes theological, but because he presents an interesting development of the particular thought in question. And here, as in several other areas, we can usefully see Calvin's suggestion as a kind of meditation on and development of a theme suggested by Aquinas. According to the latter, "To know in a general and confused way that God exists is implanted in us by nature."[3] In the opening chapters of the Institutes of the Christian Religion,[4] Calvin concurs: there is a sort of natural knowledge of God. Calvin expands this theme into a suggestion as to the way in which beliefs about God can have warrant; he has a suggestion as to the nature of the faculty or mechanism whereby we acquire true beliefs about God. His idea here can also be seen as a development of what the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. . . . (Romans 1:18–20)[5]

For our purposes, Calvin's basic claim is that there is a sort of instinct, a natural human tendency, a disposition, a nisus to form beliefs about God under a variety of conditions and in a variety of situations. Thus in his commentary on the above passage:

By saying, that God has made it manifest, he means, that man was created to be a spectator of this formed world, and that eyes were given him, that he might, by looking on so beautiful a picture, be led up to the Author himself.[6]

In the Institutes, he develops this thought:

There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty. . . . Since, therefore, men one and all perceive that there is a God and that he is their maker, they are condemned by their own testimony because they have failed to honor him and to consecrate their lives to his will . . . there is, as the eminent pagan says, no nation so barbarous, no people so savage, that they have not a deep seated conviction that there is a God. . . . Therefore, since from the beginning of the world there has been no region, no city, in short, no household, that could do without religion, there lies in this a tacit confession of a sense of deity inscribed in the hearts of all. (Institutes I, iii, 1, p. 44)[7]

Calvin goes on to claim that many rejections of God, or attempts to do without him, are really further testimonies to this natural inclination:

Men of sound judgment will always be sure that a sense of divinity which can never be effaced is engraved upon men's minds. Indeed, the perversity of the impious, who though they struggle furiously are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God, is abundant testimony that this conviction, namely that there is some God, is naturally inborn in all, and is fixed deep within, as it were in the very marrow. . . . From this we conclude that it is not a doctrine that must first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master from his mother's womb and which nature itself permits no one to forget, although many strive with every nerve to this end. (I, iii, 3, p. 46)

Separated from the extravagance of expression that sometimes characterizes Calvin, the basic idea, I think, is that there is a kind of faculty or a cognitive mechanism, what Calvin calls a sensus divinitatis or sense of divinity, which in a wide variety of circumstances produces in us beliefs about God. These circumstances, we might say, trigger the disposition to form the beliefs in question; they form the occasion on which those beliefs arise. Under these circumstances, we develop or form theistic beliefs—or, rather, these beliefs are formed in us; in the typical case we don't consciously choose to have those beliefs. Instead, we find ourselves with them, just as we find ourselves with perceptual and memory beliefs. (You don't and can't simply decide to have this belief, thereby acquiring it.)[8] These passages suggest that awareness of God is natural, widespread, and not easy to forget, ignore, or destroy. Seventy years of determined but unsuccessful Marxist efforts to uproot Christianity in the former Soviet Union tend to confirm this claim.[9]

Second, it also sounds as if Calvin thinks knowledge of God is innate, such that one has it from birth, "from his mother's womb." Still, perhaps Calvin doesn't really mean to endorse either of these suggestions. The capacity for such knowledge is indeed innate, like the capacity for arithmetical knowledge. Still, it doesn't follow that we know elementary arithmetic from our mother's womb; it takes a little maturity. My guess is Calvin thinks the same with respect to this knowledge of God; what one has from one's mother's womb is not this knowledge of God, but a capacity for it. Whatever Calvin thinks, however, it's our model; and according to the model the development of the sensus divinitatis requires a certain maturity (although it is often manifested by very young children).

The sensus divinitatis is a disposition or set of dispositions to form theistic beliefs in various circumstances, in response to the sorts of conditions or stimuli that trigger the working of this sense of divinity. Calvin thinks in particular of some of nature's grand spectacles. Like Kant, he was especially impressed, in this connection, by the marvelous compages of the starry heavens above:

Even the common folk and the most untutored, who have been taught only by the aid of the eyes, cannot be unaware of the excellence of divine art, for it reveals itself in this innumerable and yet distinct and well-ordered variety of the heavenly host. It is, accordingly, clear that there is no one to whom the Lord does not abundantly show his wisdom. (I, v, 2, p. 53)

You see the blazing glory of the heavens from a mountainside at 13,000 feet; you think about those unimaginable distances; you find yourself filled with awe and wonder, and you form the belief that God must be great to have created this magnificent heavenly host. But it isn't only the variety of the heavenly host that catches his eye here:

Lest anyone, then, be excluded from access to happiness, he not only sowed in men's minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken, but revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him. . . . But upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory . . . wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. (I, v, 1, p. 52)[10]

Calvin's idea is that the workings of the sensus divinitatis is triggered or occasioned by a wide variety of circumstances, including in particular some of the glories of nature: the marvelous, impressive beauty of the night sky; the timeless crash and roar of the surf that resonates deep within us; the majestic grandeur of the mountains (the North Cascades, say, as viewed from Whatcom Pass); the ancient, brooding presence of the Australian outback; the thunder of a great waterfall. But it isn't only grandeur and majesty that counts; he would say the same for the subtle play of sunlight on a field in spring, or the dainty, articulate beauty of a tiny flower, or aspen leaves shimmering and dancing in the breeze. "There is no spot in the universe," he says, "wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory." Calvin could have added other sorts of circumstances: there is something like an awareness of divine disapproval upon having done what is wrong, or cheap, and something like a perception of divine forgiveness upon confession and repentance. People in grave danger instinctively turn to the Lord to ask for succor and support, having formed the belief that he can hear and help if he sees fit. (They say there are no atheists in foxholes.) On a beautiful spring morning (the birds singing, heaven and earth alight and alive with glory, the air fresh and cool, the treetops gleaming in the sun), a spontaneous hymn of thanks to the Lord—thanks for your circumstances and your very existence—may arise in your soul. According to the model, therefore, there are many circumstances, and circumstances of many kinds, that call forth or occasion theistic belief. Here the sensus divinitatis resembles other belief-producing faculties or mechanisms. If we wish to think in terms of the overworked functional analogy, we can think of the sensus divinitatis, too, as an input-output device: it takes the circumstances mentioned above as input and issues as output theistic beliefs, beliefs about God. We must note six further features of the model.

1. Basicality

According to the A/C model, this natural knowledge of God is not arrived at by inference or argument (for example, the famous theistic proofs of natural theology) but in a much more immediate way. The deliverances of the sensus divinitatis are not quick and sotto voce inferences from the circumstances that trigger its operation. It isn't that one beholds the night sky, notes that it is grand, and concludes that there must be such a person as God: an argument like that would be ridiculously weak. It isn't that one notes some feature of the Australian outback—that it is ancient and brooding, for example—and draws the conclusion that God exists. It is rather that, upon the perception of the night sky or the mountain vista or the tiny flower, these beliefs just arise within us. They are occasioned by the circumstances; they are not conclusions from them. The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of his hands: but not by way of serving as premises for an argument. Awareness of guilt may lead me to God; but it is not that in this awareness I have the material for a quick theistic argument: I am guilty, so there must be a God. This argument isn't nearly as silly as it looks; but when the operation of the sensus divinitatis is triggered by perception of my guilt, it doesn't work by way of an argument. I don't take my guilt as evidence for the existence of God, or for the proposition that he is displeased with me. It is rather that in that circumstance—the circumstance of my clearly seeing my guilt—I simply find myself with the belief that God is disapproving or disappointed.

In this regard, the sensus divinitatis resembles perception, memory, and a priori belief. Consider the first. I look out into the backyard; I see that the coral tiger lilies are in bloom. I don't note that I am being appeared to a certain complicated way (that my experience is of a certain complicated character) and then make an argument from my being appeared to in that way to the conclusion that in fact there are coral tiger lilies in bloom there. (The whole history of modern philosophy up to Hume and Reid shows that such an argument would be thoroughly inconclusive.) It is rather that upon being appeared to in that way (and given my previous training), the belief that the coral tiger lilies are in bloom spontaneously arises in me. This belief will ordinarily be basic, in the sense that it is not accepted on the evidential basis of other propositions. The same goes for memory. You ask me what I had for breakfast; I think for a moment and then remember: pancakes with blueberries. I don't argue from the fact that it seems to me that I remember having pancakes for breakfast to the conclusion that I did; rather, you ask me what I had for breakfast, and the answer simply comes to mind. Or consider a priori belief. I don't infer from other things that, for example, modus ponens is a valid form of argument: I just see that it is so and, in fact, must be so. All of these, we might say, are starting points for thought. But (on the model) the same goes for the sense of divinity. It isn't a matter of making a quick and dirty inference from the grandeur of the mountains or the beauty of the flower or the sun on the treetops to the existence of God; instead, a belief about God spontaneously arises in those circumstances, the circumstances that trigger the operation of the sensus divinitatis. This belief is another of those starting points for thought; it too is basic in the sense that the beliefs in question are not accepted on the evidential basis of other beliefs.[11]

Of course there are options here. The model could be developed in such a way that the role of the sensus divinitatis is to enable one to see the truth of the crucial premise for a quick theistic argument—such as the heavens can be gloriously beautiful only if God has created them. This proposition is a consequence of theism in any event; what the present suggestion would add is that it plays a crucial role in the genesis of theistic belief.[12] In the Summa Theologiae passage quoted above in footnote 3, Aquinas goes on to make a suggestion like this: he suggests that this natural knowledge of God is "immediate," but also by way of inference:

this is due either to the fact that it is self-evident that God exists, just as other principles of demonstration are—a view held by some people, as we said in Book One—or, what seems indeed to be true, that man can immediately reach some sort of knowledge of God by natural reason. For, when men see that things in nature run according to a definite order, and that ordering does not occur without an orderer, they perceive in most cases that there is some orderer of the things that we see.

Here two things are noteworthy. First, what Aquinas says here suggests that this knowledge (the second variety) is by way of inference, so that, strictly speaking, this knowledge of God would not be basic. The inference, however, would be very quick, elementary, and obvious, so that perhaps believing by way of this kind of inference isn't easily distinguished from believing in the basic way.

Second, note that this knowledge of God can indeed be very confused:

But this knowledge admits of a mixture of many errors. Some people have believed that there is no other orderer of worldly things than the celestial bodies, and so they said that the celestial bodies are gods. Other people pushed it farther, to the very elements and the things generated from them, thinking that motion and the natural function which these elements have are not present in them as the effect of some other orderer, but that other things are ordered by them.

Contemporary naturalists such as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins[13] would presumably concur with those who think that "motion and the natural function which these elements have are not present in them as the effect of some other orderer." Aquinas would apparently include them among those who have a natural knowledge of God—at least if they also believe that there is something (if only, e.g., natural laws) that orders the things we see. Apparently this kind of knowledge of God, oddly enough, does not preclude being an atheist or a naturalist.

Perhaps we can understand Aquinas as follows. Consider the description that which orders what we see. This description in fact applies to God. One who believes that it does indeed apply to something or other can therefore have de re knowledge of God; for example, she can believe of that which orders what we see that it has one or another properties—that it exists, is powerful, and indeed orders what we see. This would be to believe de re of God that he exists, is powerful, and orders what we see. But this knowledge also "admits of many errors": for example, the naturalist thinks that what orders what we see is, in fact, the ensemble of natural laws; she therefore believes de re of God that he is the ensemble of natural laws.

Calvin's view of natural knowledge of God would be a bit different. Following Paul in Romans 1, he holds that the natural knowledge in question is sufficient to render human beings guilty—guilty of failing to worship, obey, and commit ourselves to God. Hence this knowledge includes that God is to be worshiped and obeyed, so that God couldn't be, for example, the ensemble of natural laws. (Of course there is a sense in which one does obey natural laws—if there are any[14]—but in this sense you can't fail to obey them, and wouldn't necessarily be guilty if you could and did.)

2. Proper Basicality with Respect to Justification

On the A/C model, then, theistic belief as produced by the sensus divinitatis is basic. It is also properly basic, and that in at least two senses. On the one hand, a belief can be properly basic for a person in the sense that it is indeed basic for him (he doesn't accept it on the evidential basis of other propositions) and, furthermore, he is justified in holding it in the basic way: he is within his epistemic rights, is not irresponsible, is violating no epistemic or other duties in holding that belief in that way. This is the sense of proper basicality that was foremost in "Reason and Belief in God." That sense was foremost there because there I was contesting the views of the evidentialist objectors to theistic belief. They didn't ordinarily say precisely what they think the problem is with believing in God in the basic way (without propositional evidence), but as far as I can see, they were claiming that belief in God taken that way is unjustified. Further, they apparently understood justification and lack of justification in deontological terms: to be unjustified is to be epistemically irresponsible, to flout an epistemic duty or requirement of some sort. As I argued above in chapter 3, however, it is really pretty obvious that a believer in God is or can be deontologically justified. You think about the matter carefully and at length, considering the F&M complaint and all the rest, but it still seems clear or obvious (perhaps even overwhelmingly so) that there is such a person as God: how could someone sensibly claim that you were being irresponsible or derelict with respect to some epistemic duty? That would be a hard saying indeed.

3. Proper Basicality with Respect to Warrant

There is another sense in which a belief can be properly or improperly basic: p is properly basic for S in this sense if and only if S accepts p in the basic way, and furthermore p has warrant for S, accepted in that way. Perceptual beliefs are properly basic in this sense: such beliefs are typically accepted in the basic way, and they often have warrant. (They are often produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth.) The same goes for memory beliefs, some a priori beliefs, and many other beliefs. I suppose the fact is most of our beliefs that have warrant, have it in this basic way; it is only in a smallish area of our cognitive life that the warrant a belief has for us derives from the fact that it is accepted on the evidential basis of other beliefs. Of course, sometimes beliefs are accepted in the basic way but do not have warrant. As we saw in chapter 4, this can be due to cognitive malfunction, or to a cognitive faculty's being impeded by such conditions as rage, lust, ambition, grief, and the like; it can also be because the bit of the design plan governing the production of the belief is aimed not at truth but at something else (survival, e.g.), or because something in the testimonial chain has gone wrong (one of your friends has lied to you), or for still other reasons.

According to the A/C model I am presenting here, theistic belief produced by the sensus divinitatis can also be properly basic with respect to warrant.[15] It isn't just that the believer in God is within her epistemic rights in accepting theistic belief in the basic way. That is indeed so; more than that, however, this belief can have warrant for the person in question, warrant that is often sufficient for knowledge. The sensus divinitatis is a belief-producing faculty (or power, or mechanism) that under the right conditions produces belief that isn't evidentially based on other beliefs. On this model, our cognitive faculties have been designed and created by God; the design plan, therefore, is a design plan in the literal and paradigmatic sense. It is a blueprint or plan for our ways of functioning, and it has been developed and instituted by a conscious, intelligent agent. The purpose of the sensus divinitatis is to enable us to have true beliefs about God; when it functions properly, it ordinarily does produce true beliefs about God. These beliefs therefore meet the conditions for warrant; if the beliefs produced are strong enough, then they constitute knowledge.[16]

There will be a complicated and many-sided interplay between the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis and the deliverances of other sources of belief, just as there is a complicated interplay between the deliverances of perception, which are accepted in the basic way, and other sources of belief. It is not the case, of course, that a person who acquires belief by way of the sensus divinitatis need have any well-formed ideas about the source or origin of the belief, or any idea that there is such a faculty as the sensus divinitatis. (Just as most of us don't have well-developed ideas as to the source and origin of our a priori beliefs.) Nor would such a person accept the belief in question on the basis of the following sort of argument: this belief seems to be a deliverance of the sensus divinitatis; the sensus divinitatis is a reliable belief-producing mechanism; therefore, probably this belief is true. Of course not; here, as in the case of other original sources of belief (memory, perception, a priori belief, etc.), the belief in question isn't typically accepted on the basis of any argument at all, and the belief can have warrant even if the believer has no second-level beliefs at all about the belief in question.

4. Natural Knowledge of God

This capacity for knowledge of God is part of our original cognitive equipment, part of the fundamental epistemic establishment with which we have been created by God. In this, it contrasts with one of the subjects of chapter 8, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit. As we shall see there, the latter is an element in the divine response to human sin and the human predicament, a predicament in which we human beings require healing, restoration, and salvation. According to fundamental Christian teaching, the central divine response to our predicament is the incarnation and atonement: the life, sacrificial death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the divine son of God. By virtue of this divine response, we human beings can be put right with God and live triumphantly with him in this life and the next. Another part of God's response to our condition, however, is Scripture and the testimony of the Holy Spirit. God speaks to us in Scripture, teaching us his response to our fallen condition and the way in which this response is to be appropriated by us. By virtue of the inward instigation of the Holy Spirit, we see that the teachings of Scripture are true. This work of the Holy Spirit, therefore, is a very special kind of cognitive instrument or agency; it is a belief-producing process, all right, but one that is very much out of the ordinary. It is not part of our original noetic equipment (not part of our constitution as we came from the hand of the Maker), but instead part of a special divine response to our (unnatural) sinful condition. Later, we will look at these notions in more detail; here, the thing to see is the contrast between the activity of the Holy Spirit in our cognitive lives, on the one hand, and the sensus divinitatis on the other. The former is part of a special response to the fallen condition into which humankind has precipitated itself; the latter is part of our original epistemic endowment. The former is a special divine response to sin; presumably it would not have taken place had there been no sin. The latter would no doubt have been part of our epistemic establishment even if humanity had not fallen into sin.

5. Perceptual or Experiential Knowledge?

Suppose something like the A/C model is in fact correct: knowledge of God ordinarily comes not through inference from other things one believes, but from a sensus divinitatis, as characterized above. Would it follow that our knowledge of God comes by way of perception? That is, would it follow that the warrant enjoyed by theistic belief is perceptual warrant? Not necessarily. This is not because there is any real question about the possibility or, indeed, the actuality of perception of God. I believe William Alston has shown that if there is such a person as God, there could certainly be perception of him, and indeed is perception of him. Alston's powerful discussion shows that the usual objections to perception of God (no independent way of checking, disagreement as to what God is like, differences from sense perception, apparent relativity to the theological beliefs of the alleged perceiver, and so on) have very little to be said for them.[17]

Of course it isn't wholly clear just what perception is (there is as much dispute about that as about any other philosophical topic); conceivably, the way to think of perception strictly so-called is such that it essentially involves specifically sensuous imagery. This imagery need not be of the sort that goes with our sense perception; other kinds are certainly possible. (Perhaps sensuous imagery goes with the bat's echolocation, a kind of imagery wholly foreign to us.) But sensuous imagery of some kind may be necessary for perception, and perhaps it is also required that this imagery plays a certain specific (and hard to specify) causal role in the genesis of the candidates for perceptual belief in question.

What Alston thinks of as putative perception of God, however, often appears not to involve sensuous imagery.[18] If so, then, strictly speaking, there wouldn't be perception of God; what Alston's discussion would then show is that (given the existence of God) there could certainly be and probably is something very like perception of God (something that is epistemically on all fours with perception in that it, like the latter, can be a source of warrant). This something, therefore, can properly be called 'perception' in an analogically extended sense of that term. To the believer, the presence of God is often palpable. A surprising number of people report that at one time or another, they feel the presence of God, or at any rate it seems to them that they feel the presence of God—where the 'feeling' also doesn't seem to go by way of sensuous imagery. Many others (by no means for the most part spiritual heroes or even serious believers) report hearing God speak to them. And among these cases, cases where it seems right or nearly right to speak of perceiving God (feeling his presence, perhaps hearing his voice), there is great variation. There are the shattering, overwhelming sorts of experiences had by Paul (then 'Saul') on the road to Damascus and reported by mystics and other masters of the interior life. In these cases there may be vivid sensuous imagery of more than one kind. Still, there is also a sort of awareness of God where it seems right to say one feels his presence, but where there is little or none of the sort of sensuous imagery that typically goes with perception; it is more like a nonsensuous impression of a brooding presence. And (apparently) there are all sorts of examples between these two extremes.

So I have no doubt that perception of God or something very much like it does occur, and occur rather widely. But would beliefs gained by way of the sensus divinitatis of the A/C model be perceptual belief—that is, would the knowledge of God afforded (in the A/C model) by the sensus divinitatis be by way of perception? I'm inclined to think not. There are different accounts of what is essential to perception; Alston's, I think, is as good as any. As he puts it,

what I take to be definitive of perceptual consciousness is that something (or so it seems to the subject) presents itself to the subject's awareness as so-and-so—as red, round, loving, or whatever. When I stand before my desk with my eyes closed and then open them, the most striking difference in my consciousness is that items that I was previously merely thinking about or remembering, if conscious of them in any way, are now present to me. (PG, 36)

Of course it isn't easy to say, in every sort of case, when the object seems to present itself to the subject; let's suppose we have something of a grasp of this notion and can tell within reasonable limits when it applies. Then I think it is clear that in some of the experiences that are, on the model, operations of the sensus divinitatis, there is a sense of God's actually being presented to, present to, one's awareness, but in others not. In the sorts of cases Calvin speaks of (the night sky, the mountains, the ocean), it is sometimes as if one feels, perceives the very presence of God. This would be what Alston calls (p. 21) indirect perception of God—the perception of God mediated by the perception of something else (the night sky, the mountains). In other cases of this sort, however, God doesn't seem exactly present, or presented, even though various beliefs about him—that he is powerful, glorious, to be worshiped, obeyed, thanked—arise. And in some of the other sorts of manifestations of the sensus divinitatis—situations of guilt, danger, gratitude—the sense that God is actually present to one, as Alston is thinking of it, seems rarer. So according to the model, the operation of the sensus divinitatis doesn't necessarily involve perception of God.

Well, even if this sort of knowledge of God isn't perceptual, can we at any rate say that it is by way of religious experience? Can we say that the warrant it gets comes from experience? The first thing to see is that this term 'religious experience' is construed in a thousand different ways to cover a vast and confusing variety of cases; the question as it stands is multiply ambiguous and, in fact, we are probably better off boycotting the term.[19] Still, perhaps we can say at least the following: the operation of the sensus divinitatis will always involve the presence of experience of some kind or other, even if sensuous imagery isn't always present. Sometimes there is sensuous imagery; sometimes there is something like feeling the presence of God, where there seems to be no sensuous imagery present, but perhaps something (necessarily hard to describe) like it; often there is also the sort of experience that goes with being frightened, feeling grateful, delighted, foolish, angry, pleased, and the like. A common component is a sort of awe, a sense of the numinous;[20] a sense of being in the presence of a being of overwhelming majesty and greatness. None of these is inevitably connected with the operation of the sensus divinitatis, although perhaps no occasion of its operation fails to display one or another of these varieties of experience. But there is another sort of experience that is always present in the operation of the sensus divinitatis. Recall the distinction made a couple of chapters back between sensuous imagery and what I called above doxastic experience, the sort of experience one has when entertaining any proposition one believes. Entertaining, for instance, the proposition that 3 + 2 = 5 or that Mount Everest is higher than Mount Blanc feels different from entertaining one you think is clearly false—3 + 2 = 6, for example, or Mount Blanc is higher than Mount Everest. The first two feel natural, right, acceptable; the second two feel objectionable, wrong, eminently rejectable.[21] As I say, this experience is always connected with operations of the sensus divinitatis, because always connected with the formation or sustenance of any belief.

So all of these varieties of experience can be found in the operation of the sensus divinitatis; doxastic experience accompanies any beliefs formed by its operation, as it does the formation of any other belief. So back to our question: shall we therefore say that knowledge by way of the sensus divinitatis comes by way of religious experience, that it is experiential knowledge? Shall we say that (on the model) the warrant it has comes from experience? I don't propose to answer the question. An answer would involve a long and essentially irrelevant effort to answer another question: "What does it mean to say that the warrant of a belief comes from (or comes by way of) experience, religious or otherwise?" This is an interesting question, and a tough question (doxastic experience always accompanies the formation of a priori belief, and scraps of sensuous imagery typically accompany it; does the warrant of a priori belief therefore come from experience?). But we don't need an answer to that question for our purposes. We can be satisfied with an account of how (on the model) the sensus divinitatis does in fact work; given that account, the answer to the question whether this is by way of experience is unimportant and optional.

6. Sin and Natural Knowledge of God

Finally, according to the A/C model this natural knowledge of God has been compromised, weakened, reduced, smothered, overlaid, or impeded by sin and its consequences. In the next chapter, we shall explore the noetic effects of sin in more detail, and in chapter 8 we shall see that (on the model) the sensus divinitatis is restored to proper function by regeneration and the operation of the Holy Spirit. For now, we note only that the knowledge of God provided by the sensus divinitatis, prior to faith and regeneration, is both narrowed in scope and partially suppressed. Due to one cause or another, the faculty itself may be diseased and thus partly or wholly disabled. There is such a thing as cognitive disease; there is blindness, deafness, inability to tell right from wrong, insanity; and there are analogues of these conditions with respect to the operation of the sensus divinitatis. According to Marx and Marxists, of course, it is belief in God that is a result of cognitive disease, of dysfunction. In an etymological sense, Marx thinks, the believer is insane. A milder, more conciliatory way to put it is that the believer, from those perspectives, is irrational; rational faculties fail to work as they should. But here the A/C model stands Freud and Marx on their heads (more accurately, what we see here is part of F&M's extensive borrowing from Christian and Jewish ways of thinking); according to the model, it is really the unbeliever who displays epistemic malfunction; failing to believe in God is a result of some kind of dysfunction of the sensus divinitatis.

And here we should note that the notion of warrant can be usefully generalized. So far, we have thought of warrant as a property or characteristic of beliefs; the basic idea is that a belief enjoys warrant when it is formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth—which includes, we should note, the avoidance of error. But withholdings, failures to believe, can also be dictated by a design plan successfully aimed at truth and the avoidance of error. You have conflicting evidence for the proposition that there is intelligent life in other parts of the universe: some of those you trust say yes, some say no, and some say there is little evidence either way. You therefore withhold that belief, believing neither that there is nor that there isn't life elsewhere in the universe. Your friends with the rocky marriage tell you conflicting stories about the latest quarrel: by virtue of past experience in similar situations you have learned to believe neither story without further corroboration. Your young son asks you how high the highest mountain in Antarctica is; you have a dim impression of having heard that it is in the neighborhood of 16,000 feet, but don't really know; you form no belief on the subject. In all of these cases, withholding is what the design plan dictates. Thus withholding displays a sort of analogue of warrant: it too can in certain circumstances be dictated by the proper function of cognitive faculties operating in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth and the avoidance of error.

By contrast, if you call and ask what I am doing at the moment and I don't form the belief that I am sitting at my computer trying to work on my book, there is something wrong somewhere in my noetic establishment. I am introduced to someone at a party; although I have no reason to do so, I withhold the belief that what I see before me is a person, motivated by nothing more than the broadly logical possibility that what I see is really an extraordinarily clever hologram with sound effects attached. I read Bertrand Russell and see that it is possible (in the broadly logical sense) and compatible with appearances that the world popped into existence just five minutes ago, complete with all those apparent memories, crumbling mountains, and dusty books; as a result, I withhold the belief that I am more than five minutes old. In these cases, my failure to believe is a sign, not of exemplary epistemic caution, but of cognitive malfunction; these withholdings lack the analogue of warrant. Of course I might, in a frenzy due to philosophical error, come to the conclusion that in some way I ought not to believe in other people; I might come to the conclusion that such belief is unjustified, somehow; and I might try not to believe in other people. I might even succeed for brief periods in my study. But it is exceedingly hard to maintain this attitude, as is demonstrated by the famous lady who dropped Bertrand Russell a postcard on which she wrote something like "I agree entirely with you that solipsism is the correct and most reasonable position: so why aren't there more of us solipsists?" As Hume notoriously noted, it is exceedingly hard to maintain this attitude for long, or outside your study. The fact is that someone who consistently believes that she is the only person in the universe is suffering from a serious mental disorder, and the same is true for the person who is merely agnostic about the existence of other persons.

We could put the same point by saying that some withholdings are rational and some irrational. An important sense of the term 'rational'[22] is one in which a belief is rational if it is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly. But the same can be said for withholdings: they can be produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly, as in the first three examples above, but also by cognitive faculties functioning improperly, as in the next three examples. According to the model, the same thing can happen with respect to belief in God. Failure to believe can be due to a sort of blindness or deafness, to improper function of the sensus divinitatis. On the present model, such failure to believe is irrational, and such withholdings lack the analogue of warrant. It doesn't follow that failure to believe is unjustified—if it is due solely to cognitive malfunction, then there is no dereliction of epistemic duty—but it is nonetheless irrational. Contrary to a sort of ethos induced by classical foundationalism, it is not the case that the way to demonstrate rationality is to believe as little as possible; withholding, failure to believe, agnosticism, is not always, from the point of view of rationality, the safest and best path. In some contexts it is instead a sign of serious irrationality.

According to the present model, then, the sensus divinitatis has been damaged and corrupted by sin. Further, according to the extended model I mean to propose in chapter 8, the sensus divinitatis is partly healed and restored to proper function by faith and the concomitant work of the Holy Spirit in one's heart. So the model as so far outlined is incomplete; the rest will come in chapters 8 and 9. Even if incomplete, however, the model as so far outlined will suffice for present purposes. For it shows us a sufficiently detailed way in which a properly functioning sensus divinitatis can produce theistic belief which is (1) taken in the basic way and (2), so taken, can indeed have warrant, and warrant sufficient for knowledge.

II. Is Belief in God Warrant-Basic?

A. If False, Probably Not

As we saw above, Freud doesn't really argue that theistic belief has no warrant if taken in the basic way: he seems to assume that such belief is false, and then infers in rather quick and casual fashion that it is produced by wish-fulfillment and hence doesn't have warrant. Here (despite the appearance of carelessness) perhaps Freud's instincts are right: I shall argue that if theistic belief is false, but taken in the basic way,[23] then it probably has no warrant. First, as we saw above, no false belief has warrant sufficient for knowledge; therefore, if theistic belief is false, it doesn't have that degree of warrant. Still, couldn't it nonetheless have some warrant? There are at least two reasons for thinking not. First, when does a false belief have warrant? Typically, in a case where the faculty that produces the belief is working at the limit of its capability. You see a mountain goat on a distant crag and mistakenly think you see that it has horns; as a matter of fact, it is just too far away for you to see clearly that it doesn't have horns. You are a particle physicist and mistakenly believe that a certain subatomic model is close to the truth: working as you are at the outer limits of the cognitive domain for which our faculties are designed, your belief is false but not without warrant. If there is no such person as God, of course, then there is no such thing as a sensus divinitatis; and what truth-aimed faculty would be such that it is working at the limit of its ability in producing the belief that there is such a person as God, if that latter belief is false? It is exceedingly hard to think of decent candidates. Further, if your faculties are functioning properly and are unimpeded by desire for fame, ambition, lust, and the like, then if they are working at the limit of their capability, you will not ordinarily believe the proposition in question with great firmness—you will not believe it with anything like the degree of firmness often displayed by theistic belief. Thus you won't be sure that you see horns on that goat: you will instead think to yourself, "Well, it looks as if it has horns, but it's too far away to be sure." You won't insist that your physical model is correct; if you believe it is, it will be with a certain tentativeness. These considerations suggest that if theistic belief is false, it is not produced by cognitive processes successfully aimed at the truth, and hence does not have warrant.

There is another and more important consideration, which we can approach indirectly as follows. A belief has warrant only if the cognitive process that produces it is successfully aimed at the truth—that is, only if there is a high objective probability that a belief produced by this process is true (given that the process is functioning properly in the sort of epistemic environment for which it is designed). Now from the fact that a belief is false, it doesn't follow that it is not produced by a process or faculty successfully aimed at truth. It could be that on a given occasion a process issues a false belief, even though there is a substantial objective probability that any belief it produces will be true (given the satisfaction of the other conditions of warrant). For example, a reliable barometer may give a false reading because of an unusual and improbable confluence of circumstances. Physicists tell us that it is possible (though extremely unlikely) that, for just a moment, all the air molecules in the room should congregate in the upper northwest corner of the room. Suppose this happens; at that moment, the air pressure in the vicinity of the barometer in the lower southeast corner of the room is zero; the barometer, however, still registers 29.72, because there hasn't been a long enough time for it to react to the change. The fact that it issues a false reading under these circumstances doesn't mean it is not a reliable instrument. Similarly for a cognitive process: there might in fact be a high probability that a belief it produces is true, despite the fact that on a given occasion (even though the other conditions of warrant are satisfied) it issues a false belief. Couldn't something similar hold for the processes that produce belief in God? Might it not be that belief in God is produced by cognitive processes successfully aimed at the truth, even if that belief is, as a matter of fact, false?

I think not. A proposition is objectively probable, with respect to some condition C, only if that proposition is true in most of the nearby possible worlds that display C.[24] But now consider the process that produces theistic belief: if it is successfully aimed at truth, then in most of the nearby possible worlds it produces a true belief. Assuming that in those nearby possible worlds it produces the same belief as it does in fact (i.e., belief in God) it follows that in most of the nearby possible worlds that belief is in fact true: in most of the nearby possible worlds there is such a person as God. However, that can't be, if the fact is there is no such person as God. For if in fact (in the actual world) there is no such person as God, then a world in which there is such a person—an omniscient, omnipotent, wholly good person who has created the world—would be enormously, unimaginably different from the actual world, and enormously dissimilar from it. So if there is no such person as God, it is probably not the case that the process that produces theistic belief produces a true belief in most of the nearby possible worlds. Therefore, it is unlikely that belief in God is produced by a process that is functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief. So if theistic belief is false, it probably has no warrant. Freud is right: if theistic belief is false, then it is at the least very likely that it has little or no warrant.

B. If True, Probably So

On the other hand, if theistic belief is true, then it seems likely that it does have warrant. If it is true, then there is, indeed, such a person as God, a person who has created us in his image (so that we resemble him, among other things, in having the capacity for knowledge), who loves us, who desires that we know and love him, and who is such that it is our end and good to know and love him. But if these things are so, then he would of course intend that we be able to be aware of his presence and to know something about him. And if that is so, the natural thing to think is that he created us in such a way that we would come to hold such true beliefs as that there is such a person as God, that he is our creator, that we owe him obedience and worship, that he is worthy of worship, that he loves us, and so on. And if that is so, then the natural thing to think is that the cognitive processes that do produce belief in God are aimed by their designer at producing that belief. But then the belief in question will be produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly according to a design plan successfully aimed at truth: it will therefore have warrant. Again, this isn't certain; the argument is not deductively valid. It is abstractly possible, I suppose, that God has created us with a certain faculty f for knowing him; for one reason or another, f always malfunctions, and some other faculty f' created to produce some other beliefs, often malfunctions in such a way that it produces belief in God. Then our belief in God wouldn't have warrant, despite the fact that it is true. (This would be something like a sort of complex and peculiar theological Gettier problem.) And the abstract character of this possibility is perhaps strengthened when we think of the fact that human beings, according to Christian belief, have fallen into sin, which has noetic effects as well as effects of other sorts. Nevertheless, the more probable thing, at least so far as I can see, is that if in fact theism is true, then theistic belief has warrant.

Suppose we try to take a deeper look. How could we make sense of the idea that theism is true but belief in God doesn't have warrant?

We'd have to suppose (1) that there is such a person as God, who has created us in his image and has created us in such a way that our chief end and good is knowledge of him, and (2) that belief in God (i.e., our belief in God, human belief in God) has no warrant: is not produced by cognitive processes successfully aimed at giving us true beliefs about God, functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment. That is, we'd have to think that belief in God is produced by cognitive processes that either (1) are not functioning properly (because of disease or impedance), (2) are not aimed at producing true beliefs about God, or (3) are so aimed but not successfully aimed, or (4) the cognitive environment is uncongenial, not one for which our faculties are designed. With respect to (4), however, we are supposing God has created us; there seems no reason at all to think our epistemic environment is not the one for which he created us. (We have no reason, for example, to think that our ancestors originated on some other planet and made a long, hazardous journey to Earth.) With respect to (3), because, by hypothesis, theistic belief is true, it seems that if the cognitive process that produces it is aimed at the truth, it is successfully aimed at the truth. That leaves us with (1) and (2). Given that God would certainly want us to be able to know him, the chances are excellent that he would create us with faculties enabling us to do just that. So the natural thing to think is that those faculties that produce theistic belief were indeed designed to produce that sort of belief and are functioning properly in so doing. Of course it is possible, in the broadly logical sense, that the faculties designed to produce theistic belief don't work for one reason or another, and some other faculties not aimed at producing theistic belief malfunction, thus producing it. The same, I suppose, is abstractly possible with respect to perception: the original faculties whereby we knew our environment began to malfunction, and by some serendipitous happenstance, other faculties began to malfunction in just such a way as to produce our perceptual beliefs. Possible, but not likely. This is an abstract possibility, but not much more. And suppose, improbably, that something like this did happen with the original sensus divinitatis: it stopped working (perhaps as a result of sin), and some other faculty began to malfunction and leapt into the breach, by serendipitous happenstance producing the very sorts of beliefs the original sensus divinitatis did: then it would seem likely that God has adopted this other way of working as our design plan, so that theistic belief does indeed have warrant, but via a sort of circuitous route. The conclusion to draw, I think, is that the epistemic probability of theistic belief's being warranted, given that theism is true, is very high.[25]

III. The de Jure Question Is Not Independent of the de Facto Question

And here we see the ontological or metaphysical or ultimately religious roots of the question as to the rationality or warrant or lack thereof for belief in God. What you properly take to be rational, at least in the sense of warranted, depends on what sort of metaphysical and religious stance you adopt. It depends on what kind of beings you think human beings are, what sorts of beliefs you think their noetic faculties will produce when they are functioning properly, and which of their faculties or cognitive mechanisms are aimed at the truth. Your view as to what sort of creature a human being is will determine or at any rate heavily influence your views as to whether theistic belief is warranted or not warranted, rational or irrational for human beings. And so the dispute as to whether theistic belief is rational (warranted) can't be settled just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is at bottom not merely an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute.

You may think humankind is created by God in the image of God—and created both with a natural tendency to see God's hand in the world about us and with a natural tendency to recognize that we have indeed been created and are beholden to our creator, owing him worship and allegiance. Then, of course, you will not think of belief in God as in the typical case a manifestation of any kind of intellectual defect. Nor will you think it is a manifestation of a belief-producing power or mechanism that is not aimed at the truth. It is instead a cognitive mechanism whereby we are put in touch with part of reality—indeed, by far the most important part of reality. It is in this regard like a deliverance of sense perception, or memory, or reason, the faculty responsible for a priori knowledge. On the other hand, you may think we human beings are the product of blind evolutionary forces; you may think there is no God and that we are part of a godless universe. Then you will be inclined to accept the sort of view according to which belief in God is an illusion of some sort, properly traced to wishful thinking or some other cognitive mechanism not aimed at the truth (Freud) or to a sort of disease or dysfunction on the part of the individual or society (Marx).

And this dependence of the question of warrant or rationality on the truth or falsehood of theism leads to a very interesting conclusion. If the warrant enjoyed by belief in God is related in this way to the truth of that belief, then the question whether theistic belief has warrant is not, after all, independent of the question whether theistic belief is true. So the de jure question we have finally found is not, after all, really independent of the de facto question; to answer the former we must answer the latter. This is important: what it shows is that a successful atheological objection will have to be to the truth of theism, not to its rationality, justification, intellectual respectability, rational justification, or whatever. Atheologians who wish to attack theistic belief will have to restrict themselves to objections like the argument from evil, the claim that theism is incoherent, or the idea that in some other way there is strong evidence against theistic belief. They can't any longer adopt the following stance: "Well, I certainly don't know whether theistic belief is true—who could know a thing like that?—but I do know this: it is irrational, or unjustified, or not rationally justified, or contrary to reason or intellectually irresponsible or . . ." There isn't a sensible de jure question or criticism that is independent of the de facto question. There aren't any de jure criticisms that are sensible when conjoined with the truth of theistic belief; all of them either fail right from the start (as with the claim that it is unjustified to accept theistic belief) or else really presuppose that theism is false. This fact by itself invalidates an enormous amount of recent and contemporary atheology; for much of that atheology is devoted to de jure complaints that are allegedly independent of the de facto question. If my argument so far is right, though, there aren't any sensible complaints of that sort. (More modestly, none have been so far proposed; it is always possible, I suppose, that someone will come up with one.)

IV. The F&M Complaint Revisited

Now that we have the A/C model before us, we can deal with the F&M complaint in summary fashion. As we saw in the last chapter, Marx's complaint about religion is that it is produced by cognitive faculties that are malfunctioning; this cognitive dysfunction is due to social dysfunction and dislocation. Besides that famous "Religion is the opium of the people" passage, however, Marx doesn't have a lot to say about religious belief—except, of course, for a number of semi-journalistic gibes and japes and other expressions of hostility.[26] I shall therefore concentrate on Freud, who holds (as we saw in the last chapter) not that theistic belief originates in cognitive malfunction, but that it is an illusion, in his technical sense. It finds its origin in wish-fulfillment, which, although it is a cognitive process with an important role to play in the total economy of our intellectual life, is nevertheless not aimed at the production of true beliefs. On Freud's view, then, theistic belief, given that it is produced by wish-fulfillment, does not have warrant; it fails to satisfy the condition of being produced by cognitive faculties whose purpose it is to produce true belief. He goes on to characterize religious belief as "neurosis," "illusion," "poison," "intoxicant," and "childishness to be overcome," all on one page of The Future of an Illusion.[27]

Not to be outdone, a substantial number of subsequent psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have followed his lead. Thus Albert Ellis:

Religiosity is in many respects equivalent to irrational thinking and emotional disturbance. . . . The elegant therapeutic solution to emotional problems is to be quite unreligious . . . the less religious they are, the more emotionally healthy they will be.[28]

Sometimes these suggestions take rather bizarre forms, worthy, almost to be compared with Freud's own highly imaginative stories about the origin of religion and the taming of fire.[29] According to Michael P. Carroll, for example, praying the rosary is "a disguised gratification of repressed anal-erotic desires"—a substitute for "playing with one's feces."[30] Perhaps this isn't up to Freud's standard when it comes to evoking that mist-enshrouded world of our distant ancestors, but it does match Freud for implausibility. A rather common view has been that religious belief is not so much a matter of illusion or cognitive malfunction as of simple stupidity. This view has sometimes been expressed rather colorfully; thus Warren Wilson blamed the growth of evangelical Protestant groups in rural America on the fact that "among country people there are many inferior minds." He went on to explain that revivalism was bound to persist in these regions "until we can lift the administration of popular institutions that are governed by public opinion out of the hand of the weak brother and the silly sister."[31] This kind of opinion is still widely popular among those who propose to study religion scientifically,[32] although (given current sensibilities) ordinarily not expressed with quite the same reckless enthusiasm.

Following Voltaire, Rousseau, and others, furthermore, people in these fields regularly declare that (in this modern, scientific age) the death of religion is at hand[33]—about as often, perhaps, as others predict that the return of Jesus Christ is at hand. Of course previous predictions of the former kind (like previous predictions of the latter) have failed; as a result, these forecasts of the demise of religion (if not of the world) now tend to be more circumspect. For example:

the evolutionary future of religion is extinction. Belief in supernatural beings and in supernatural forces that affect nature without obeying nature's laws will erode and become only an interesting historical memory. To be sure, this event is not likely to occur in the next generation; the process will very likely take several hundred years, and there will probably always remain individuals, or even occasional small cult groups who respond to hallucination, trance, and obsession with supernaturalist interpretation. But as a cultural trait, belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge . . . the process is inevitable.[34]

Is there any reason to believe these things? Is there any evidence for the F&M complaint? Why should anyone believe it? First, however, it is only fair to defend this complaint against a fairly common objection. The F&M style of criticizing religious (or other) belief is often improperly dismissed as an instance of the 'genetic fallacy'. The question, so the claim goes, is whether the theistic beliefs in question are true; the question is not how it is that someone comes to hold them or what the origin of the belief might be. Furthermore (so the claim continues), questions of origin are ordinarily irrelevant to questions of truth. ("Ordinarily"—of course we can think of silly exceptions. For example, we might know that Sam came to believe a proposition by accepting the testimony of someone who, on the subject of the belief in question, asserts nothing but falsehoods; in that case the origin of the belief is obviously relevant to its truth.)

This criticism of the F&M complaint is mistaken. True, questions of origin are ordinarily not relevant to the question of the truth of a belief; but they can be crucially relevant to the question of the warrant a belief enjoys. The objector fails to note that there are de jure questions and criticisms as well as de facto; his objection is relevant only if it is the latter sort that is at issue. But the F&M complaint is that theistic belief is not rational and lacks warrant. Unlike memory beliefs, a priori beliefs, or perceptual belief, theistic belief does not originate in the proper function of cognitive processes successfully aimed at the production of true belief. And if the problem, according to F&M, is that such beliefs have no warrant, then questions of origin may be intensely relevant; on many accounts of warrant, including the one I defend in WPF, the genesis of a belief is intimately connected with the degree of warrant, if any, it enjoys.

Furthermore, there is an indirect connection with truth. Return to the random generator of p. 161, above: I use the machine, proposing the selected proposition to you for belief. You demur, citing the origin of the proposed belief, whereupon I accuse you of committing the genetic fallacy. Surely I am wrong; the fact is you haven't committed a fallacy at all, and your real complaint is that you haven't the faintest reason to think the proposition in question true. It is the same with beliefs that have no warrant for anyone. We ordinarily assume that propositions with warrant have something going for them: it is likely, or at least more likely than not, that they will be true. If I have reason to think your belief that your name is 'Sam' has warrant (you're pretty likely to know what your name is), then I have a reason to accept this belief. If I know that a belief has no warrant for anyone, however, then I have no reason at all to think that belief true, no reason at all to rely on that proposition. Once I see this, I see that the proposition in question has no claim whatever on my belief.

But is Freud right: does theistic belief arise from wish-fulfillment, thereby failing to have warrant? Is there any reason to believe this? Does he offer argument or evidence for this claim, or (in Mill's phrase) other considerations to determine the intellect? Or is it mere assertion? Note that if the F&M complaint is to be a successful criticism, if it is to show that theistic belief lacks warrant, it must meet two conditions. First, it must show that theistic belief really does arise from the mechanism of wish-fulfillment; second (as I'll explain below), it must show that this particular operation of that mechanism is not aimed at the production of true beliefs. Consider the first. Freud offers no more than the most perfunctory argument here, and one can see why: it isn't easy to see how to argue the point. How would one argue that it is that mechanism, wish-fulfillment, rather than some other, that produces religious belief? Much of religious belief, after all, is not something that, on the face of it, fulfills your wildest dreams. Thus Christianity (as well as other theistic religions) includes the belief that human beings have sinned, that they merit divine wrath and even damnation, and that they are broken, wretched, in need of salvation; according to the Heidelberg Catechism, the first thing I have to know is my sins and miseries. This isn't precisely a fulfillment of one's wildest dreams. A follower of Freud might say: "Well, at any rate theistic belief, the belief that there is such a person as God, arises from wish-fulfillment." But this also is far from clear: many people thoroughly dislike the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient being monitoring their every activity, privy to their every thought, and passing judgment on all they do or think. Others dislike the lack of human autonomy consequent upon there being a Someone by comparison with whom we are as dust and ashes, and to whom we owe worship and obedience.

And in any event where is the evidence (empirical or otherwise) for the Freudian claim? A survey wouldn't be of much use. Hardly anyone reports believing in God out of wish-fulfillment; the usual reports are, instead, of being seized, compelled, or overwhelmed, or its just seeming right after considerable thought and agony, or its having always seemed clearly true, or its suddenly becoming obvious that it is really so. It certainly doesn't seem to those of us who believe in God that we do so out of wish-fulfillment. Of course that won't be taken as relevant; the beauty of Freudian explanations is that the postulated mechanisms all operate unconsciously, unavailable to inspection. The claim is that you subconsciously recognize the miserable and frightening condition we human beings face, subconsciously see that the alternatives are paralyzing despair or belief in God, and subconsciously opt for the latter. Even after careful introspection and reflection, you can't see that the proffered explanation is true: that fact won't be taken as even the slightest reason for doubting the explanation. (Just as with your indignant denial that you hate your father because you see him as a rival for your mother's sexual favors. In fact your indignation may be taken as confirmation; you are resisting what at some level you know or suspect is the proper diagnosis.) So suppose you subject yourself to a decade or so of psychoanalysis, but still can't see that this is the origin of your belief; well (so you'll be told), psychoanalysis isn't always successful. (In fact its cure rate, as far as scientific study can demonstrate, is about the same as no treatment at all.) Now things could be like this; and in the nature of the case maybe this sort of thing can't be demonstrated. Still, why should we believe it?

As far as I can see, the only evidence Freud actually offers is the claim that we see a lot of young people, nowadays, who give up religion when their father's authority breaks down:

Psycho-analysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the father-complex and belief in God: it has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father, and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their religious beliefs as soon as their father's authority breaks down. Thus we recognize that the roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex: the almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear to us as grand sublimations of father and mother. . . .[35]

No doubt Freud saw a good bit of that in his day (and perhaps even in his own case: his relationship with his father, according to E. M. Jones,[36] seems to have left much to be desired). But how is this alleged evidence supposed to confirm the thesis that theistic belief results from wish-fulfillment? The claim is that when the father's authority (Freud doesn't say whether he means specifically with respect to religious belief or more generally) breaks down, young people often lose their religious beliefs. How is that fact, supposing that it is a fact, supposed to be evidence for the thesis that theistic belief results from wish-fulfillment? That's not at all obvious. Suppose theistic belief did result from wish-fulfillment: then wouldn't we expect some kind of correlation between serious belief and a recognition of the pitiless, indifferent character of nature? On Freud's thesis, we would expect that a young person would start evincing belief in God perhaps fairly soon after he comes to see that this is in fact the way the world is. But (given the thesis) why would we expect someone whose father's authority had suffered a breakdown to give up belief in God? The fact is someone who had a warm, loving, respectful relation with his father would be less likely to see the cold and indifferent face of nature than someone whose father had lost authority. As far as I can see, therefore, this alleged evidence doesn't fit well with the main Freudian thesis about the origin of theistic belief and certainly doesn't serve as evidence for it. Perhaps it shows instead that some young people like to display their maturity and independence by rejecting the religious stance of their parents, whatever that stance might be. (Thus at present we find many cases of children rejecting the unbelief of their parents.) But it certainly doesn't tend to show that religious or theistic belief arises out of wish-fulfillment.

Of course the thesis isn't stated exactly, or with enough detail to enable us to see just what would be evidence for it. One naturally thinks that there must be a deeper, more precise statement of the theory somewhere; sadly enough, one can't find any such thing. The evidence for the theory would perhaps have to be something like the way it fits or explains all the data, all the phenomena of religious or theistic belief. But before we could seriously assess its fit with the evidence, the theory would have to be stated much more precisely; we should have to be able to see what it does and doesn't predict much more clearly than, in fact, we can. Freudian explanations have never been strong along these lines.[37]

Even if it were established that wish-fulfillment is the source of theistic belief, however, that wouldn't be enough to establish that the latter has no warrant. It must also be established that wish-fulfillment in this particular manifestation is not aimed at true belief. The cognitive design plan of human beings is subtle and complicated; a source of belief might be such that in general it isn't aimed at the formation of true belief, but in some special cases it is. So perhaps this is true of wish-fulfillment; in general, its purpose is not that of producing true belief, but in this special case precisely that is its purpose. Perhaps human beings have been created by God with a deep need to believe in his presence and goodness and love. Perhaps God designed us that way in order that we come to believe in him and be aware of his presence. Perhaps this is how God has arranged for us to come to know him. If so, then the particular bit of the cognitive design plan governing the formation of theistic belief is indeed aimed at true belief, even if the belief in question arises from wish-fulfillment. Perhaps God has designed us to know that he is present and loves us by way of creating us with a strong desire for him, a desire that leads to the belief that in fact he is there. Nor is this a mere speculative possibility; something like it is embraced both by St. Augustine ("Our hearts are restless til they rest in thee, O God") and Jonathan Edwards (below, p. 305ff.).

And how would Freud or a follower establish that the mechanism whereby human beings come to believe in God (come to believe that there is such a person as God) is not aimed at the truth? This is really the crux of the matter. Freud offers no arguments or reasons here at all. As far as I can see, he simply takes it for granted that there is no God and that theistic belief is false; he then casts about for some kind of explanation of this widespread phenomenon of mistaken belief. He hits on wish-fulfillment and apparently assumes it is obvious that this mechanism is not "reality oriented"—that is, is not aimed at the production of true belief—so that such belief lacks warrant. As we have seen, this is a safe assumption if in fact theism is false. But then Freud's version of the de jure criticism really depends on his atheism: it isn't an independent criticism at all, and it won't (or shouldn't) have any force for anyone who doesn't share that atheism. Given the results of parts II and III of this chapter, this is of course just what we should expect.

Now a believer in God, a Christian or Jew or Muslim, is unlikely to acquiesce in the F&M claim that belief in God has no warrant. (It is only a certain variety of 'liberal' theologian, crazed by the thirst for novelty and the desire to accommodate current secularity, who might agree with F&M here.) Indeed, a believer will see the shoe as on the other foot. According to St. Paul, it is unbelief that is a result of dysfunction, brokenness, failure to function properly, or impedance of rational faculties. Unbelief, he says, is a result of sin; it originates in an effort, as Romans 1 puts it, to "suppress the truth in unrighteousness."[38] In the next chapter, we shall begin to explore the extended A/C model, considering some of the ways in which this suppression and impedance can go.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. What is the difference between the de jure question of warrant and the de facto question?

2. What is the Aquinas/Calvin model?

3. What, for Plantinga, does "basicality" mean?

4. Does Paul, in Romans 1:18f., present the sense of divinity as a capacity or as having content?

5. How does Plantinga account for sin in his model? Is he correct?

*Excerpted from Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief. Copyright © 2000, Oxford University Press. Used with permission.

1. Epistemic possibility is stronger than broadly logical possibility, but also weaker. There are propositions that are epistemically possible, but not possible in the broadly logical sense—true for all we know, but nonetheless impossible. Of course I can hardly be required to produce one; but I can produce a pair one or the other of which enjoys this distinction. Thus consider existentialism: the proposition that singular states of affairs and propositions are not necessarily existent but are ontologically dependent upon the objects with respect to which they are singular. For example, according to existentialism, no proposition singular with respect to Socrates—Socrates was wise, for example—could have existed if Socrates had not. I believe existentialism is false (see my “On Existentialism,” Philosophical Studies [July 1983]), but I could scarcely claim to know that it is false, and, I believe, the same goes for everyone else. Existentialism is therefore epistemically possible. The same goes, naturally enough, for its denial. Each of these propositions, however, is necessarily true if true at all; hence one or the other is necessarily false, in the broadly logical sense, even if epistemically possible.

2. As I shall argue below, 271.

3. Summa Theologiae I, q.2, a. 1, ad 1. In Summa contra Gentiles Aquinas adds, “There is a certain general and confused knowledge of God, which is in almost all men . . .” (Bk. III, ch. 38).

4. Tr. Ford Lewis Battles and ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960 [originally published in 1555]). Page references to the Institutes are to this edition.

5. As Etienne Gilson says, very many medieval and later thinkers have found in this passage a charter for natural theology, construed as the effort to present proofs or arguments for the existence of God. But is Paul really talking here about proofs or arguments? Natural theology, as Aquinas says, is pretty difficult for most of us; most of us have neither the leisure, ability, inclination, nor education to follow those theistic proofs. But here Paul seems to be speaking of all of us human beings; what can be known about God is plain, he says. It is true that this knowledge comes by way of what God has made, but it doesn’t follow that it comes by way of argument, the arguments of natural theology, for example. See below, 175.

6. Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, volume XIX of Calvin’s Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979; originally printed for the Calvin Translation Society of Edinburgh, Scotland), 70.

7. The “eminent pagan” is Cicero. John Beversluis suggests that these passages from the Institutes are really directed to human knowledge before the fall, and that, according to Calvin, “fallen human beings lack both the direct and immediate knowledge of God with which they were originally created and the capacity to achieve it. In Plantinga’s language, the ‘innate tendency, or nisus, or disposition’ to believe in God with which human beings were originally created is no longer operative in fallen humanity” (“Reforming the Reformed Objection to Natural Theology,” Faith and Philosophy 12, no. 2 [April 1995]: 193; see also 197). Of course Calvin interpretation is not my project here; still, Calvin is pretty clearly teaching that all people, fallen as well as unfallen, have this knowledge (“naturally inborn in all”; “each of us is master from his mother’s womb”). Furthermore, as Beversluis points out, according to Calvin (following Romans 1) this knowledge renders those who have “failed to honor him” condemned by their own words (guilty); but of course that isn’t possible unless the sensus divinitatis is working in them, even if it is not in its pristine state.

There is an additional subtlety here: Beversluis speaks of a tendency “to believe in God.” There is obviously an important difference between believing in God and believing that God exists (that there is such a person as God); chapter 9 is devoted in part to that difference. Perhaps in unfallen humanity, according to Calvin, the sensus divinitatis is a disposition to believe in God (to love him, trust him, see his beauty and glory and loveliness), but in fallen humanity only a tendency to believe that there is such a person, just as (according to the book of James) the devils do. See chapter 7 on the noetic effects of sin.

8. See my “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 34ff.

9. It is no part of the model, however, to hold that the sensus divinitatis is never subject to malfunction; perhaps it is sometimes diseased or even inoperative. It can also be impeded in the usual ways, and its deliverances can perhaps sometimes be extinguished by the wrong kind of nurture.

10. Compare Charles Sanders Peirce: “A man looks upon nature, sees its sublimity and beauty, and his spirit gradually rises to the idea of God. He does not see the Divinity, nor does nature prove to him the existence of that Being, but it does excite his mind and imagination until the idea becomes rooted in his heart.” Quoted by Edward T. Oakes, “Discovering the American Aristotle,” First Things (December 1993): 27.

11. It is worth noting that even if I believe something in the basic way, it doesn’t follow that I wouldn’t cite various other propositions in response to your question, “Why do you believe p? What is your reason for believing p?” See “Reason and Belief in God,” 51.

12. For suggestions as to how the model could be developed in this direction, see Michael Sudduth, “Prospects for Mediate Natural Theology in John Calvin,” Religious Studies 31, no. 1 (March 1995): 53.

13. See the former’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995) and the latter’s The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

14. For arguments casting doubt on the existence of natural laws, see Bas van Fraassen’s Laws and Symmetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 17ff.

15. And since a belief has warrant only if it is produced by properly functioning processes or faculties, a belief properly basic with respect to warrant is also properly basic with respect to rationality (that is, rationality as proper function; see above, 110).

16. Of course it doesn’t follow that theistic belief can’t get warrant by way of argument from other beliefs; nor does it follow that natural theology and more informal theistic argument is of no worth in the believer’s intellectual and spiritual life. Note further that, according to the model, sin damages the sensus divinitatis and compromises its operation; see below, 184 and chapter 7.

17. Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), chapters 1, 2, 5, and 6 (hereafter PG).

18. “Although mystical perception may or may not involve sensory content, I will be focusing on the non-sensory variety, since, in my judgment, it has a better claim to be a genuine direct perception of God” (PG, 36).

19. As Alston (PG, 34) suggests.

20. See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).

21. For more on doxastic evidence, see Warrant and Proper Function (hereafter WPF), 190ff.

22. As we saw above, 110.

23. And, let’s add, not taken on testimony. That is because testimony, like inference, is not an ultimate source of warrant; a belief taken on testimony has warrant for someone only if that belief has warrant for the testifier. See WPF, 83.

24. For an account of the connection between possible worlds and objective probability, see WPF, 162.

25. Here we must also suppose, in accord with the conclusion of part IV of this book, that it is not the case that those who believe in God for the most part have defeaters for that belief.

26. See On Religion by Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, ed. Reinhold Niebuhr (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1964). This is a collection of bits of various writings on religion by Marx and Engels.

27. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961 (originally published 1927), 49.

28. “Psychotherapy and Atheistic Values,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 48, no. 5 (October 1980): 635–39.

29. See above, 137–38.

30. “Praying the Rosary: The Anal-Erotic Origins of a Popular Catholic Devotion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26, no. 4 (December 1987): 491.

31. The Farmer’s Church (New York: Century, 1925), 58.

32. See, for example, Herbert Simon’s recent article, “A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism,” Science 250 (December 1990): 1665ff., in which he argues that the behavior of people like Mother Teresa, who are prepared to sacrifice their own interests for those of other people, is to be explained in terms of “docility” and “bounded rationality.”

33. Freud himself was often more careful on this point; see footnote 161, above, 140.

34. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View (New York: Random House, 1966), 264–65. Like the last three quoted passages, this one is quoted in Rodney Stark, Laurence Iannaccone, and Roger Finke, “Rationality and the ‘Religious’ Mind,” Economic Inquiry 36, no. 3 (July 1998). This very interesting paper takes an innovative approach to serious religious belief, swimming against the stream of sociological analyses that see such belief as a manifestation of one or another kind of irrationality.

35. “Memoir of Leonardo da Vinci,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. 11, 123.

36. Degenerate Moderns (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 191. According to Jones, Freud thought of his father as weak and “a pervert.” Jeffrey Masson, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 222. See also Paul Vitz’s Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious (New York: Guilford, 1988).

37. Adolf Gruenbaum’s The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) is a meticulous (and thoroughly unflattering) chronicle of the scientific failings of Freud and Freudianism. Some others are Malcolm Macmillan’s Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1991) and Allen Esterson’s Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud (Chicago: Open Court, 1993).

38. Of course it isn’t Paul’s idea that those who don’t believe are, by that very fact, seen to be more sinful than those who do. On the contrary: just a couple of chapters later he says we are all involved in sin, including, of course, himself (“Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”). Furthermore, the malfunction that lies at the root of unbelief is not necessarily that of the unbeliever herself. Some kinds of unbelief (see below, 215) are like blindness; upon seeing a blind man, the disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2)—to which Jesus replied that this blindness was due neither to the man’s own sin nor to that of his parents.

CHAPTER 25

Merold Westphal

(1940–)

Merold Westphal is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, the Bronx, New York. He holds a BA from Wheaton College (1962) and an MA (1965) and a PhD (1966) from Yale University. He has held numerous teaching posts and has earned many awards. Westphal is active in a number of learned societies, particularly the Hegel Society and the Kierkegaard Society, where he has been an officer. He has authored or edited dozens of books and has written hundreds of articles. His books include God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (1987) and Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason (1992).

Westphal has been fascinated by the helpful insights of the “masters of suspicion,” Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and others. While fully recognizing their ultimate opposition to Christian faith, he believes some of their insights into the weaknesses of the Enlightenment are compatible with Scripture. For this he has been sharply criticized by philosophers, including Christian ones, whose views of truth square more with Enlightenment foundationalism than does his. He replies that while he is not postmodern, there is a third way between the modern and the postmodern, which is biblical epistemology. The following excerpt is from Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (1999). The selection illustrates Westphal’s apologetic approach.

Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism

Chapters 32–33*

Chapter 32

Who Is the God of the Bible? Ask Pharaoh!

This question about the nature of the gospel brings us to the heart of the matter. The deepest reason why liberation theology is offensively political is the conviction that God is revealed throughout the Bible to be on the side of the poor and the oppressed. Gutierrez writes, “Within a society where social classes conflict, we are true to God when we side with the poor, the working classes, the despised races, the marginal cultures.”[1]

Liberation theologians are fond of quoting Karl Barth on this point:

The human righteousness required by God and established in obedience—the righteousness which according to Amos 5:24 should pour down as a mighty stream—has necessarily the character of a vindication of right in favor of the threatened innocent, the oppressed poor, widows, orphans and aliens. For this reason, in the relations and events in the life of His People, God always takes His stand unconditionally and passionately on this side and on this side alone: against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly; against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied it and deprived of it.[2]

John Calvin expresses the bond between the God of the Bible and the victims of human injustice even more strongly in his commentary on Habakkuk 2:6:

Tyrants and their cruelty cannot be endured without great weariness and sorrow. . . . Hence almost the whole world sounds forth these words, How long, how long? When anyone disturbs the whole world by his ambition and avarice, or everywhere commits plunders, or oppresses miserable nations, when he distresses the innocent, all cry out, How long? And this cry, proceeding as it does from the feeling of nature and the dictate of justice, is at length heard by the Lord. . . . And this feeling, is it not implanted in us by the Lord? It is then the same as though God heard himself, when he hears the cries and groanings of those who cannot bear injustice.[3]

As Calvin says it, God does not merely side with the poor and oppressed but identifies so fully with them that their cries express divine pain. No doubt this is why Scripture teaches us to equate our treatment of them with our treatment of God (Prov. 14:31; 19:17; Matt. 25:31–46).

But how can the God of the Bible be a God who takes sides? Is this compatible with universal love? This aspect of who God is can probably best be understood through the experience of parents. The parent who insists that an older, stronger child stop bullying a younger, weaker one clearly takes the side of the one child against the other. But only the bully, while still in a pout over this, will interpret this parental intervention as meaning that the parent does not love them equally. This simple analogy helps us to see that God’s “partiality,” on which liberation theologians place such stress, is fully compatible with the claim that all persons are equally objects of divine love. We must not allow the message of God’s love for the whole world as expressed in John 3:16 to blind us to the sustained biblical witness that God has a special concern for the widows and orphans, the little people, the victims, the excluded, the powerless.

Ultimately, indeed, it is to the Bible and not to Barth and Calvin that the liberation theologians make their appeal; and the story of the Exodus plays the role of paradigm for their understanding of who the God of the Bible is. When this God chooses a people through whom to fulfill covenantal promises to all humanity, he chooses a rabble of slaves and delivers them from their political and economic oppression. In giving the law of the covenant to the people of the covenant, God identifies himself very specifically: “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exod. 20:2). The formula “I am Yahweh” occurs first in Exodus 6, and “the decisive phase of history as the action of God begins here in the fact that God reveals himself to Moses with his name Yahweh, while he had appeared to the Fathers only as El-Shaddai. . . . And God will immediately reveal his most proper and characteristic essence in the fact of ‘bringing out,’ ‘freeing,’ ‘releasing,’ ‘saving’ ‘with arm outstretched and great judgments’ the oppressed people.”[4] The author of the priestly document emphasizes in the strongest way, by God changing his own name (Exod. 6:3), the importance of this one historical intervention of the deliverance of the oppressed people of Israel from Egypt.[5] And immediately afterward, God is portrayed as saying: “Say this to the sons of Israel, ‘I am Yahweh and therefore I will free you of the burdens which the Egyptians lay on you. I will release you from slavery to them, and with raised arm and my great justices I will deliver you. I will adopt you as my own people, and I will be your God. Then you shall know that I am Yahweh your God, he who has freed you from the Egyptians’ burdens’” (Exod. 6:6–7).[6]

The centrality of the Exodus motif in a theology arising among and addressed primarily to the least of Christ’s sisters and brothers is due in part to its obvious relevance to their suffering. But it is not simply a matter of finding an attractive part of the Bible. Once we see the importance of this event for revealing the nature and character of God, it is easy to see its themes throughout the whole of Scripture, in the Law, the Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Epistles, and even the Apocalypse.[7]

Liberation theologians are convinced that this understanding of God comes to its climax in the Gospels, and they challenge us to learn to read the Gospels as the story of the son of the God who liberated the slaves in Egypt. In this light Jesus’ identification of his mission as “good news to the poor,” both in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4) and in his response to the delegation from John the Baptist (Luke 7), his teachings about wealth and power, his relation to women, lepers, tax collectors, Samaritans, and so forth, and the political character of his confrontation with the Jewish authorities, including the charge that the temple trade was thievery (Mark 11)—all these parts of the story of his life and death take on new significance.[8]

What the liberation theologians challenge us to see is that the God of the Bible does not evaluate social orders by the criteria of military power or economic productivity. Nor, for that matter, is the criterion piety as the Gallup Poll measures piety, in terms of belief in God, church attendance, Bible reading, and conversion experience. The biblical criterion of social decency is the simple question, How does this society treat its widows and orphans, that is, its weakest and poorest members?

We Americans are proud of our military prowess and our economic power. We American Christians are proud that we are a more religious people than, say, the peoples of Western Europe (at least by Gallup Poll standards). But in the eyes of biblical faith none of this is worth much; and when we ask the central question of the Bible’s critical sociology, the question about the widows and orphans, it is hard to be proud of being an American without lowering expectations to a shameful level relative to our resources. Economically speaking, we are preoccupied with productivity, but the prime measure thereof, the Gross National Product, is designed to ignore the very question so central in the Bible: How is the wealth distributed? We speak of productivity where the Bible speaks about justice.

Our wounded pride is likely to respond to thoughts like this by changing the subject to human rights. Here, surely, we can be justly proud. But this change of subject is of little help. Just as we can find countries less religious than we, so we can easily find countries with poorer records on human rights than ours. But if instead of comparing ourselves with others we compare ourselves with the expectations of the God of the Bible, we discover that the biblical concept of human rights is much more like Marx’s than like our own. For it has an economic dimension at its heart, so much so that no wealthy country with massive poverty could be said to have a good record on human rights. And this is before the topic of racism is even mentioned.

If the biblical message is not neutralized by the techniques we have examined above, but is rather allowed to express its utopian social vision as the criterion by which societies here and now are to be judged, the biblical critique of contemporary Western societies, including American society, sounds very much like the Marxist critique. That is why it is possible for the Czech Marxist, Milan Machovec, to suggest that Marxists are the heirs of Jesus and the prophets.[9] I would like to put it the other way around and accuse Marx of plagiarism. His critique of capitalism is, in essence, the biblical concern for the widows and orphans, stripped of its theological foundation and applied to the conditions of modernity. What the liberation theologians have tried to show is that the application to modern conditions does not require the abandonment of biblical thinking.

It might seem that this attempt to rehabilitate Marx and to shake biblical Christians free from their uncritical confidence in contemporary capitalist society is badly timed. Is it not the case that the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe has discredited Marxism once and for all and established the superiority of capitalist society?

In a word, No. It is true that European Communism has not been able to come up with a viable alternative to the democratic capitalism of the West and that the Leninist model of the state, long discredited in the eyes of all but its own “truest” believers, has collapsed. But this has little bearing on the Marxian analysis of what happens to the widows and orphans in capitalist societies, and the homeless on our streets have been understandably muted in their celebration of the demise of the Warsaw pact.

Capitalism has shown itself to be more productive than the Leninist state. But if justice and compassion are the biblical criteria, rather than productivity, the question about the worth (and even the viability) of our own society remains an open one. We would do well to remember Israel and Judah. They could rightly point to many bad things about the cruel and idolatrous societies of Assyria and Babylon; but none of this made their own social order acceptable in the eyes of Yahweh, their God, who brought them out of slavery.

Those who benefit most from the contemporary capitalism hope that the collapse of the Soviet empire will enhance uncritical acceptance of present arrangements. They even try to build such acceptance into the definition of patriotism. My hope is just the opposite. Now that Marxist tanks, bombers, and missiles are not the threat they used to be, my hope is that we will find the courage to look more carefully at Marxist critiques of modern society and thereby discover anew the meaning of our biblical faith.

Chapter 33

Third Commandment Idolatry

The previous chapter has suggested that biblical Christians have biblical reasons to give a critique of contemporary Western society that sounds very Marxian. But we have seen that the Marxian critique is addressed both to the political and economic institutions that make up society’s basis (according to historical materialism) and to the ideologies, including religious ideologies, that make up the superstructure of society. What we need to see now is that biblical religion provides the framework for a critique of religion that once again sounds very Marxian. If the last chapter’s subtitle might have been “The Biblical Critique of Capitalism,” this chapter’s subtitle could be “The Biblical Critique of Christianity.”

One of the striking things about the Bible is its hostility to religion; and one of the striking things about this hostility is that it is not at all directed just against worship of other gods. It is not so much about “their” religion as about “ours.” That is why Karl Barth, instead of saying that it was the Jews and not the Romans who crucified Christ, says it was the church and not the world (see pp. 3–4 above). In the New Testament we see Jesus’ polemic both against the worldly discipleship of his followers, especially Peter, James, and John, and against Jewish legalism, focusing on the Sabbath; Paul’s battle against Jewish legalism, focusing on circumcision; and, lest we abuse the Pauline message, James’s critique of cheap grace. As we noted in chapter 2, these biblical diatribes against false religion are addressed to the covenant people of God in their worship (as they think) of the God of the covenant. In the case of James and Paul they are addressed to the Christian church (see especially p. 11 n. 1).

The recurrence of this theme in all these variations shows how thoroughly Jewish is the New Testament. For it occurs against the background of the Old Testament’s polemic against the worship of Yahweh by the people of Yahweh, a polemic unparalleled, I believe, in the history of religion. Although it focuses on the sacrificial cult, it eventually covers virtually every aspect of Hebrew worship. This is what makes it possible for Buber to say that religion can hide the face of God from us as nothing else can (see p. 25 above).

The prophetic critique of sacrifice begins with the story of Samuel and Saul. Having kept the flocks and herds of the Amalekites, despite the explicit command from God to destroy them entirely, Saul seeks to justify this by telling Samuel that the animals are for sacrifice to Yahweh. This piety of disobedience is rejected in Samuel’s familiar words:

Has Yahweh[1] as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,

as in obeying the voice of Yahweh?

Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,

and to hearken than the fat of rams. (1 Sam. 15:22)[2]

Even if the intent to sacrifice had been present before Samuel discovered the forbidden flocks and was more than just a last-minute excuse, it is unlikely that it was the sole motive for keeping the flocks or that he intended to sacrifice all of them. Although the text is not fully explicit about it, it seems that the disobedience here was a case of the people of God trying to render their economic life independent of God’s revealed will; and the text makes it clear that, just as the Godfather is not rendered saintly by his conspicuous philanthropy, so the believing soul manifests no true piety through the conspicuous stewardship of ill-gotten gain. God is not reluctant to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Samuel’s harsh words to Saul echo throughout the Old Testament. Again and again Israel finds “the lavish cultus by which she had hoped to satisfy Yahweh’s demands to be unacceptable and offensive to him.”[3] Although the Torah has lengthy and detailed prescriptions for sacrifice, God is presented as uncommonly hostile to sacrifice when it is unaccompanied by obedience. Often this obedience is left generic and essentially undefined.[4] On other occasions, it is more specific, as when Hosea represents God as saying

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,

the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings. (6:6)

On these occasions a “Marxian” theme often plays a central role. Sacrifice and other forms of worship are unacceptable to God when they are considered “compatible with” economic injustice, when they make it possible for the pious to “endure” the suffering of the poor and the needy.[5] In the next chapter we will turn our attention to such a text. But before we do, it might be helpful to add a new concept to our vocabulary for describing the kind of piety that justifiably evokes the suspicion of secular prophets like Marx and biblical prophets like Samuel.

From Freud we have learned to speak of rationalization and of wish-fulfilling illusion, including projection. From Marx we have learned to speak of mystification, opium, and ideology. And we have developed our own vocabulary. We have spoken of “instrumental religion” to signify the piety that makes God into a means toward our ends.[6] We have spoken of “possessive monotheism” to signify the attempt to make God our private property, in effect our slave (see p. 109 above). And we have spoken of the “One-Way Covenant,” in which we unilaterally dictate the terms of our relation to God’s power and authority. By now the overlappings and equivalences among these terms are familiar.

All these terms suggest a reduction of religion to magic, the project of learning to manipulate the sacred power for one’s own purposes, personal or collective. If they grate on our ears, that does not mean that we are immune to such practices but that we will require a generous dose of self-deception to reduce cognitive dissonance whenever we fall into them.

The time has come to add to this family of concepts that of “third commandment idolatry.” The kinds of religion to which the other terms appropriately apply need not violate the first two of the Ten Commandments, for they can be practiced in the name of Yahweh (or the triune God) and without the aid of graven images. But they violate the third commandment, “You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain” (Exod. 20:7), for when this kind of worship is offered to the God whose will we thereby violate, we take God’s name in vain.

In historical context the third commandment was a prohibition not so much of what we think of as swearing as it was of magical practices and conjuring. Commenting on this meaning of the third commandment, von Rad gives in effect a helpful definition of instrumental religion: “Israel has been assailed at all periods by the temptation to use the divine power with the help of the divine name in an anti-social manner and to place it at the service of private and even sinister interests.”[7]

But the biblical God makes it abundantly clear that he is not available for such service.[8] So another way to talk about instrumental religion would be to say that what is verbally the worship of the one true God has become idolatry.[9] For when we take God’s name in vain by using religion to legitimize impious practices, we worship in fact another god. In his Narnia Chronicles, C. S. Lewis has put the point succinctly. Tash is the false god of the pagan Calormenes, of whom Aslan, the true God, says, “We are opposites.” But Aslan also says, “And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.”[10]

The logic of the situation is rather simple. The God of the Bible is conspicuously on the side of the poor and oppressed. When we are not on their side and when we make it clear by the juxtaposition of our lives and our worship that we attribute the same indifference (or worse) to God, we also make it clear that our worship is directed to some other god. For the god who is so heavenly minded, perhaps with help from Vague Generality or Dualistic Hermeneutics, that he is not moved to compassion and anger by what the wicked do to the weak is not the God of the Bible. And the god who is so earthly minded, perhaps with help from Overt Espousal, that he is an active collaborator in injustice is not the God of the Bible either.

What Marxian language calls “ideology,” the Bible calls “idolatry.” The fact that we use the biblical names for God, such as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, does not change the idolatrous nature of our worship, for we thereby take God’s name in vain.[11] The only real difference between first and third commandment idolatry is that first commandment idolaters know they worship another god, while third commandment idolaters deceive themselves about this fact. It can truly be said of them, “They know not what they do” (see chapter 16 above). Like the ideological use of religion described by Marx, third commandment idolatry is a form of false consciousness. Unless suspicion brings it to the light of day, it can be quite effective in hiding itself from itself.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. How do you evaluate Westphal’s use of liberation theology?

2. Is there a biblical basis for siding with the poor?

3. Evaluate Westphal’s use of Karl Marx in these chapters.

4. What is meant by “third commandment idolatry”?

5. How can the church as the church contribute to apologetics?

*Excerpted from Merold Westphal, "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion," in Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), © 1998, Fordham University Press. Used with permission.

1. Gustavo Gutiérrez, “The Poor in the Church,” in The Poor and the Church, ed. Norbert Greinacher and Alois Moller (New York: Seabury Press, 1977), 15.

2. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/I, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 386.

3. Quoted twice in Allan Boesak, Black and Reformed: Apartheid, Liberation, and the Calvinist Tradition, ed. Leonard Sweetman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), 23–24 and 63–64, Boesak’s emphasis. Boesak also quotes Abraham Kuyper, whose theology some have sought to use in support of apartheid: “When the rich and poor stand opposed to each other, Jesus never takes his place with the wealthier, but always stands with the poorer. He is born in a stable; and while foxes have holes and birds have nests, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. . . . Both the Christ, and also just as much his disciples after him as the prophets before him, invariably took sides against those who were powerful and living in luxury, and for the suffering and oppressed” (p. 91). For further discussion of Calvin and Kuyper, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), chapter 4. For similar quotations from Basil the Great, Ambrose of Milan, Chrysostom, and Thomas Aquinas, see Wolterstorff’s “The Moral Significance of Poverty,” Perspectives 6, no. 2 (February 1991): 8–11.

4. Karl Elliger, “Sinn und Ursprung der priesterlichen Geschichtserzählung,” in Kleine Schriften zum Alten Testament (Munich: Kaiser, 1966), 178, as translated in José Miranda, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, trans. John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1974), 78.

5. As pointed out by Miranda, 79.

6. As translated in ibid.

7. For a study that does precisely this, see “Biblical Faith and Our Economic Life,” a report of the Christian Action Commission of the Reformed Church in America, in The Acts and Proceedings of the 178th Regular Session of the General Synod, Vol. LXIV (Reformed Church in America, 1984), 51–67. For a more detailed study of the Exodus motif throughout Scripture, see Severino Croatto, Exodus: A Hermeneutics of Freedom (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981). For background to the political character of Jesus’ encounter with the leaders of his people, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, trans. Sr. Caridad Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973), 228–32, against the background of Richard J. Cassidy, Jesus, Politics, and Society: A Study of Luke’s Gospel (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1978) and Political Issues in Luke–Acts, ed. Richard J. Cassidy and Philip J. Scharper (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1983).

8. For an attempt by a Marxist to read Jesus as a utopian rather than an ideological figure, see Milan Machovec, A Marxist Looks at Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976).

9. Ibid., 193. He suggests that the crucial question is which tradition best serves the utopian vision of the Bible in the modern world.

1. Here as elsewhere I use “Yahweh” in place of the Revised Standard Version’s “the Lord.”

2. In chapter 18 I mentioned this text in connection with Freud and noted that obedience is as ambiguous as sacrifice, or, to be more precise, that all forms of (apparent) obedience, not just sacrifice, are liable to self-serving distortion.

3. John Bright, A History of Israel, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), 290.

4. See Ps. 40:6–8; Prov. 15:8; Eccles. 5:1; Isa. 66:1–4; Jer. 6:16–21; 7:21–23; 14:10–12; Hos. 8:11–13.

5. In addition to Prov. 21:3 and Mic. 6:6–8, see Isaiah 1, the temple sermon in Jeremiah 7, and the whole book of Amos. In Isaiah 58 it is fasting rather than sacrifice whose acceptability depends on aid for the poor and oppressed.

6. The term “instrumental religion” is derived from the term “instrumental reason” as used by members of the Frankfurt school. Since its (near) synonyms in philosophical discourse include calculative thinking, strategic action, and technology, we could extend our derivation and speak about calculative worship, strategic piety, and faith as technique.

7. Gerhard von Rad, Deuteronomy, trans. Dorothea Barton (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 57.

8. On the sanctity of the divine name and God’s unwillingness to be conjured, see my God, Guilt, and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 237–38, with notes.

9. The concept of idolatry has already put in its appearance in chapters 1, 4, 9, 18, 24, and 26 above.

10. C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 165. I am indebted to Steve Evans for calling this passage to my attention.

11. Kierkegaard offers a helpful analysis of what it means to profess Christian faith “in vain.” To all triumphalist Christians who forget that the path to victory is the way of the cross and that the consolations of faith are offered to those called upon to die away from their natural life he says, “thou hast taken God in vain” (For Self Examination and Judge for Yourself, trans. Walter Lowrie [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944], 85, 95–96, 117–18). Although he does not give a socio-political interpretation to this dying in these texts, Kierkegaard does precisely that in a companion volume, Training in Christianity (trans. Walter Lowrie [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944]). For a look at this “Marxist” dimension in Kierkegaard, see “Inwardness and Ideology Critique in Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript,” in my Kierkegaard’s Critique of Religion and Society (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987). Garry Wills writes in reference to American history: “In most of our wars, as in dubious other matters like slavery, we have indeed ‘taken God’s name in vain’” (Under God: Religion and American Politics [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990], 382).

CHAPTER 26

Os Guinness

(1941–)

Os Guinness was born in China, where his parents were medical missionaries. He survived the devastating Henan famine of 1942, though his two brothers did not. He witnessed the Communist Revolution of 1949 and was forced out of the country with many others in 1951. He continued his schooling in England and attended the University of London.

Though he was already a follower of Christ, a defining experience for Guinness was his visit, and then his prolonged stay, at L’Abri, the Christian community led by Francis and Edith Schaeffer (described on p. 546). Guinness discovered there that the Christian position is not piecemeal, but a coherent worldview with implications for every area of life. He became one of the leading advocates of the L’Abri outlook. It was at L’Abri that he also met and married his wife, Jenny.

The Guinnesses moved to Oxford, where Os earned the PhD from Oriel College in 1981. This was another major turning point for him, because there he discovered the importance of the social dimension of faith. Studying under David Martin, he wrote his dissertation on the implications of the work of Peter L. Berger for apologetics. The research producing the dissertation became the basis for several of his books, particularly the Gravedigger File (1983), an imagined exchange between a senior and a junior spy on how to subvert the church. Throughout his career Guinness has sought to achieve a balance between the importance of ideas and their consequences, including the social structures in which ideas are nurtured, sometimes known as “structures of plausibility.”

The Guinnesses moved to the United States in 1984, whereupon Os worked in several think tanks, including the Wilson Center and the Brookings Institution. From 1986 to 1989 he became the director of the Williamsburg Charter Foundation, a group aiming at celebrating the First Amendment of the US Constitution, particularly the freedom of religion. One fruit of the charter was a curriculum for schools helping young people to learn to live with their deepest differences. In 1991 he founded the Trinity Forum, a Christ-centered “academy without walls” that reaches out to gatekeepers and captains with a view to effecting change and promoting freedom. Os stepped down from the forum in 2004 and is now a freelance speaker and writer with the Augustine Group.

Guinness has authored over twenty-five books on subjects such as American history, the art of civility, the problem of evil, calling, and many others. He is among the most influential Christian apologists of the present generation. The excerpt here is from Time for Truth, written in response to the rise of a postmodern mentality. The book includes a critique of much that is wrong with contemporary culture, but also strategies for redeeming it.

Time for Truth

Chapters 4–5*

Chapter 4

Differences Make a Difference

Prisoner 174517 was thirsty. Seeing a fat icicle hanging just outside his hut in the Auschwitz extermination camp, he reached out of the window and broke it off to quench his thirst. But before he could get the icicle to his mouth, a guard snatched it out of his hands and dashed it to pieces on the filthy ground.

“Warum?” the prisoner burst out instinctively—“Why?”

“Hier ist kein warum,” the guard answered with brutal finality—“Here there is no why.”

That for Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish scientist and writer, was the essence of the death camps—places not only of unchallengable, arbitrary authority but of absolute evil that defied all explanation. In the face of such wickedness, explanations born of psychology, sociology, and economics were pathetic in their inadequacy. One could only shoulder the weight of such an experience and bear witness to the world. “Never again” was too confident an assertion. “You never know” was the needed refrain.

Yet despite the horror, Levi gave the impression that he had survived the poison of Auschwitz and had come to terms with his nightmarish experience. One of only three returning survivors of the six hundred fifty Italian Jews transported to Poland in 1944, he eventually married, had children, wrote books, won literary prizes, and lived a full life. His core mission, however, was always to serve as a witness to the truth, a guardian of the memory.

Writing about his deportation to Poland, he stated: “Auschwitz left its mark on me, but it did not remove my desire to live. On the contrary, that experience increased my desire, it gave my life a purpose, to bear witness, so that such a thing should never occur again.” While other direct or indirect victims of the Nazis committed suicide, including Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig, and Bruno Bettelheim, Levi many times argued against that act.

Thus many people were shocked and saddened when on April 11, 1987, more than forty years after his release from Auschwitz, Primo Levi plunged to his death down the stairwell of his home in Torino, Italy. Feeling the burden of witnessing, the guilt of surviving, the horror of revisionist denials of the camps, the weariness of repeating the same things, and even the anxiety of seeing his own memories fade, he joined the long sad list of the victims of the Nazi hell who took their own lives.

Levi’s mounting depression in the last weeks of his life was known to his family and friends. Significantly, in his last interview he begged the questioning journalist not to consider him a prophet: “Prophets are the plague of today, and perhaps of all time, because it is impossible to tell a true prophet from a false one.” In the same vein he had said earlier, “All prophets are false. I don’t believe in prophets, even though I come from a heritage of prophets.”

Prophets the “plague of all time”? Levi’s dismissal is understandable, for he was an atheist who had been to hell on earth and back. But it is sad, for the strong line of Hebrew prophets is not only a defining feature of his people’s heritage but one of the richest Jewish gifts to the history of the world. Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, and many others—each was a hero of the moral word whose “Thus says the Lord” shattered the status quo of his day. They each opened up perspectives on God’s truth, justice, and peace that restored the world, moved it forward through a transcendent point of leverage, or simply drew a line in the sand to mark off evil.

The prophetic calling, however, was closed to Levi because in his universe he acknowledged no caller. Unlike Søren Kierkegaard with his questing “knight of faith,” Levi recognized no higher majesty to dub him knight.

The Weight of Witness

It is often said that to have a fulfilling life, three essentials are required: a clear sense of personal identity, a deep sense of faith and meaning, and a strong sense of purpose and mission. Levi, it turned out, had a critical deficiency of the second and third, and in ways that poignantly illustrate our contemporary crisis of truth.

To all appearances, Primo Levi had a clear sense of identity and a passionate sense of purpose. “It is very likely,” he said, “that without Auschwitz I would never have written, and would have given only little weight to my Jewish identity.” But following Auschwitz, “My only thought was to survive and tell.” Because of his desperate desire to tell his story to everyone he met, he would compare himself to Coleridge’s ancient mariner who pestered the wedding guests.

Levi’s most telling testimony can be read at Auschwitz itself. In 1980 the Polish government restructured the design of the camp and asked Levi to introduce the Italian section. Of the eight paragraphs he submitted, only the last one stands there today:

VISITOR, OBSERVE THE REMAINS OF THIS CAMP AND CONSIDER: WHATEVER COUNTRY YOU COME FROM, YOU ARE NOT A STRANGER. ACT SO THAT YOUR JOURNEY IS NOT USELESS, AND OUR DEATHS NOT USELESS. FOR YOU AND YOUR SONS, THE ASHES OF AUSCHWITZ HOLD A MESSAGE. ACT SO THAT THE FRUIT OF HATRED, WHOSE TRACES YOU HAVE SEEN HERE, BEARS NO MORE SEED, EITHER TOMORROW OR FOR EVER AFTER.

What was it that undid Levi’s mission to witness? The first and more obvious reason was philosophical. Levi lacked any sense of faith and meaning with which to interpret and handle his harrowing experience. An atheist when he went to Auschwitz, he could never get around the extermination camp as the black hole of godlessness, the extreme situation of absolute evil to which no response could ever be adequate.

For a time in 1944 he was struck by words from Dante’s Inferno, “Consider what you came from. . . . You were not born to live like mindless brutes,” which hit him “like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God.” Two years later, in freedom and on meeting his wife, he felt he had at last found a place in the universe where it no longer appeared “that the world was God’s error.”

But in the end, the dark combination of Auschwitz and atheism always closed back in on him. For instance, in 1946 Levi described his raging in silence at an old Jew who thanked God for having escaped selection to the gas chambers—“If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.” Or as he stated more bluntly in his first book, If This Is a Man, “If there is an Auschwitz, then there cannot be a God.” Forty years later, only months before his suicide, he wrote after those words in pencil: “I find no solution to the riddle. I seek, but I do not find it.”

The second and less obvious reason for Levi’s crisis was practical. He gradually realized that his mission—however noble and necessary—was impossible. As Liliane Atlan wrote in An Opera for Theresientstadt, Auschwitz is “an experience both impossible to pass on, and impossible to forget.”

Most of the reasons for this difficulty are straightforward. Memories are tricky and eventually fade. Revisionists who deny history are shocking but are neither driven nor answered by facts. Besides, most people would rather not be reminded of evil of such magnitude. Then, too, generations pass and the new world of entertainment treats evil as fantasy.

Levi, for example, was amused but stunned when a ten-year-old schoolboy solemnly told him he should have cut a guard’s throat and switched off the power to the electric fence, and then urged him not to forget this advice should he find himself in the same situation again.

But the weight of the witness was always heavier on Levi than the sum of the problems. “We felt the weight of centuries on our shoulders,” he wrote. And the heaviest burden of all was the guilt of surviving—“the best had been murdered”—along with the awful knowledge that confession was impossible, and yet without genuine confession there could be no real confrontation with evil. In the words of Itzhak Schipper, one of the “murdered best” killed in Majdanek in 1943: “No one will want to believe us, because our disaster is the disaster of the entire civilized world.”

Finally, there was the agony of realizing that the ranks of the witnesses were thinning. “We are many (but every year our numbers diminish) . . . Levi wrote. If we die in silence as our enemies desire . . . the world will not learn what man could do and what he can still do.”

In a sense, Levi wrote at the end of his life, the hopelessness he was experiencing was worse than Auschwitz. For he was no longer young. The task of repeating the story was getting harder and harder. The burden of the witness was impossible. The way forward was hopeless. There was no other way out.

In the Steps of Sisyphus

Obviously no suicide ever returns to speak of his or her death, and Levi left no note, so we must pause in respect. But it is almost impossible to read Levi’s last interviews and writings without thinking of Albert Camus and the myth of Sisyphus. In classical legend, Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus to push a huge stone up the hill only to have it roll down again each time—a story that Camus used to picture human fate in a world without God and without meaning.

For those who find themselves without faith in God and who conclude that the world they desire does not fit with the world they discover, life is fundamentally deaf to their aspirations. And in fact, it is literally absurd. All meaning—including for Levi, the establishment of truth—is up to them. They must live so as to be able to say, in Nietzsche’s words, “Thus I have willed it.” Or as Frank Sinatra put it simply, “I did it my way.”

So Levi must roll his “truth” up the hill again and again. When the vast indifference of the public makes the gradient steeper, he must push harder. When he rests for a moment and the revisionists shove his stone back down, he must start again. When his companions drop out and his energy flags, he must summon his strength one more time. Numb, exhausted, aching, despairing, he must roll it and roll it until he can roll it no more. In an absurd world no success will ever crown his labors with significance. He can have only one satisfaction: the rebel’s reward of rolling, rolling, rolling, without end.

But there is an alternative to the fate of Sisyphus—and Nietzsche, Camus, Sinatra, and Levi. It is that truth, like meaning as a whole, is not for us to create but for us to discover. Each of us may be small, our lives short, and our influence puny. But if truth is there—objective, absolute, independent of minds that know it—then we may count on it and find it a source of strength.

Another victim of totalitarian evil stood on this solid ground beyond himself as he declared, “One word of truth outweighs the entire world.” Solzhenitsyn with his statement had not suddenly outpowered the Soviets with some self-generated “truth.” Rather, outpowered, outnumbered, and outgunned, he as one single person seized and wielded truth as a sword that could not be resisted, crying out, “Grant, O Lord, that I may not break as I strike.”

Primo Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were both witnesses to the horrors they experienced. They were both spurred on by their passion not to betray the dying wish of millions to be remembered. But whereas Levi’s view of truth left him a weary Sisyphus with a hopeless task, Solzhenitsyn’s made him a sword in God’s hand and allowed him to raise a voice to rally the world. “It is infinitely difficult to begin,” he wrote in The Oak and the Calf, “when mere words must remove a great block of inert matter. But there is no other way if none of the material strength is on your side. And a shout in the mountains has been known to start an avalanche.”

What am I arguing? Let me underscore it again. I am not countering the postmodern view of truth on behalf of the modern. One is as bad as the other; the postmodern is the direct descendant of the modern and the mirror image of its deficiencies. It is the more dangerous today only because it is more current. Nor am I raising purely theoretical arguments against the postmodern view of truth, for few people outside universities follow the complexities of the higher academic debates.

Rather, I am deliberately underscoring the practical difficulties that grow out of the theoretical deficiencies of the new radical relativism. We can easily be cowed into submission by the force or fashionability of new ideas without realizing their disastrous practical consequences for ordinary life. When that happens, the full answer to the problem in question must always include the theoretical answer. But practical arguments are an important first step in confronting the crisis.

With the present crisis of truth, practical arguments are vital in addressing two particular groups of people. One is those who hold to traditional Jewish and Christian assumptions about truth but have grown careless or hesitant in defending it. The other is those who do not hold to those beliefs but who care deeply about the society in which they live and the quality of their own lives in it. For each group, there are two powerful arguments for the practical importance of objective, nonrelativist truth. As the contrast between Primo Levi and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shows, differences between views of truth—far from being purely theoretical and irrelevant—make an enormous difference.

Red-blooded Truth

For those who hold to traditional biblical assumptions of truth but are uncertain whether they are worth defending, two arguments for the importance of a high view of truth stand out, one lesser and one greater.

The lesser argument is that without truth we cannot answer the fundamental objection that faith in God is simply a form of “bad faith” or “poor faith.” The wilder accusation of “bad faith” comes from outside the Jewish and Christian communities and is one of the deepest and most damaging charges against these faiths in the last two centuries. Jews and Christians believe, critics say, not because of good reasons but because they are afraid not to believe. Without faith, they would be naked to the alternatives, such as the terror of meaninglessness or the nameless dread of unspecified guilt. Faith is therefore a handy shield to ward off the fear, a comforting tune to whistle in the darkness; it is, however, fundamentally untrue, irrational, and illegitimate—and therefore “inauthentic” and “bad faith.”

In modern times the charge of “bad faith” was raised by the French existentialists but is more widely associated with Marxist and Freudian attacks on religion—religion for Marx was the “opium of the people” and for Freud a “projection.” Needless to say, the germ of the charge is far older and wider. “Fear made the gods,” wrote Lucretius as a first-century B.C. Roman. Or as Henrik Ibsen remarked as a nineteenth-century Norwegian, “Take away the life-lie from the average man and you take away his happiness.”

Whatever the historical period, the dynamic of the accusation is the same. As Aldous Huxley set it out more patiently,

Man inhabits, for his own convenience, a homemade universe within the greater alien world of external matter and his own irrationality. Out of the illimitable blackness of the world the light of his customary thinking scoops, as it were, a little illuminated cave—a tunnel of brightness, in which, from the brink of consciousness to its death, he lives, moves, and has his being. . . . We ignore the outer darkness; or if we cannot ignore it, if it presses too insistently upon us, we disapprove of being afraid.

There are several possible responses to this charge, such as those who wield it are rarely courageous enough to turn it on their own beliefs, the very charge is itself the biblical critique of idols, and so on. But at the end of the day, there is no answer without one: Those who put their faith in God do so for all sorts of good reasons, but the very best reason is that they are finally, utterly, and incontrovertibly convinced that the faith in which they put their confidence is true.

“What is truth?” someone will immediately ask. Let me answer straightforwardly. In the biblical view, truth is that which is ultimately, finally, and absolutely real, or the “way it is,” and therefore is utterly trustworthy and dependable, being grounded and anchored in God’s own reality and truthfulness. But this stress on the personal foundation of truth is not—as in postmodernism—at the expense of the propositional. Both accuracy and authenticity are important to truth.

If in our ordinary speech, telling the truth is “telling it like it is,” we can say that a statement, an idea, or a belief is true if what it is about is as it is presented in the statement. Belief in something doesn’t make it true; only truth makes a belief true. But without truth, a belief may be only speculation plus sincerity. Or perhaps, worse still, bad faith. A sardonic nineteenth-century wit once suggested that three words be carved in stone over all church doors: “Important if true.” To which the Christian would reply, “Important because true.”

The milder accusation, the parallel dismissal of faith as “poor faith,” comes from inside the church and is less serious but more common. Whereas both the Bible and the best thinkers of Christian history invite seekers to put their faith in God because the message conveying that invitation is true, countless Christians today believe for various other reasons. For instance, they believe faith is true “because it works” (pragmatism), because they “feel it is true in their experience” (subjectivism), because they sincerely believe it is “true for them” (relativism), and so on.

For some of these Christians the deficiency comes from bad teaching. For others the motive is escape. Retreating into the fortress of personal experience, they can pull up the drawbridge of faith and feel impregnable to reason. But for all of them the outcome is a sickly faith deprived of the rude vigor of truth.

Tendencies toward this schizophrenic split between faith and reason have been evident since the Enlightenment, aided by such philosophers as Spinoza who argued that “Revelation and Philosophy stand on totally different footings,” each with its own separate province. Earlier still in the thirteenth century, the idea led to the disastrous medieval notion of “double truth,” according to which there are two truths—one for the supernatural world and one for the natural. Each was separate and contradictory, but the doubleness meant that the church could be right in theology while wrong in philosophy or science. Faith, in other words, was true even if it was nonsense. Believers could believe with their theological minds while disbelieving with their scientific minds.

Biblical faith, by contrast with both medieval and modern deficiencies, has a robust view of truth. All truth is God’s truth and is true everywhere, for everyone, under all conditions. Truth is true in the sense that it is objective and independent of the mind of any human knower. Being true, it cannot contradict itself.

Human beliefs and truth-claims, in contrast, may be relative because we humans are finite. Therefore all beliefs are partial and provisional. But truth—guaranteed by God—is quite different. Created by God, not us, it is partly discovered and partly disclosed. It is singular (“truth”), not plural (“truths”); certain, not doubtful; absolute and unconditional, not relative; and grounded in God’s infinite knowing, not in our tiny capacity to know anything. As Jean Paul Sartre acknowledged, in words that faith is happy to reverse, “There can be no eternal truth if there is no eternal and perfect consciousness to think it.”

With such a rock-like view of truth, the Christian faith is not true because it works; it works because it is true. It is not true because we experience it; we experience it—deeply and gloriously—because it is true. It is not simply “true for us”; it is true for any who seek in order to find, because truth is true even if nobody believes it and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity—it is simply true and that is the end of it. It is one of the Permanent Things. All that and a great deal more hangs on the issue of truth, even though this is only the lesser argument for truth.

The Final Reality

The greater argument for the importance of a high view of truth is that for both Jews and Christians, truth matters infinitely and ultimately because it is a question of the trustworthiness of God himself. In contrast, for Western secularists final reality is only matter—a product of time plus chance—and truth to them has a corresponding status on that level.

As Darwinism has underscored more and more openly, natural selection does not favor a predisposition toward truth. On the contrary, “truth-directedness” is a handicap, and a lack of it—as mentioned earlier with the fireflies—is an evolutionary advantage. This bias against truth quickly becomes practical: How does one support, let alone explain, the importance of truth from the perspective of secularist thinking? If Darwinism is right, perhaps human truth-directedness is part of our alienation and therefore the entire project of the university and human truth-seeking is futile.

Secularists who choose to continue giving truth its higher status—as, for example, traditional journalists in opposition to the “personal reportage” of New Journalism—have bestowed that status, not discovered it. A similar problem holds for the Eastern family of faiths, including Hinduism and Buddhism. For both of these religions, the final reality is the undifferentiated impersonal. So “truth,” accordingly, is part and parcel of the world of human ignorance, bondage, and illusion (“maya”) separated from that final reality, which we must transcend.

Nothing could be a greater contrast to the high status of truth in the biblical view. Final reality for Jews and Christians is neither matter nor the undifferentiated impersonal but an infinite, personal God. Infinite and yet personal, personal and yet infinite, God may be trusted because he is the True One. He is true, he acts truly, and he speaks truly—for Christians, most clearly and fully in Jesus, his effective, spoken “Word.” God’s truthfulness is therefore foundational for his trustworthiness. His covenant rests on his character; his truth can be counted on.

Jews and Christians are therefore immune to Darwin’s “horrid doubt.” In the biblical view, we humans can think freely and passionately pursue the full range of human inquiry—from coffee-bar discussions to the strivings of the noblest art to the tireless search for the scientific secrets of the universe and knowledge in all fields. And all the while we know that our intellectual powers and our very disposition as truth-seekers are underwritten by the truthfulness of the Creator of the universe. As John Paul II writes in his encyclical on truth, this is all possible thanks to “the splendor of truth which shines forth deep within the human spirit.” Truth transcends us as humans; as we follow it, it leads us on, back, and up to One who is true.

“In the beginning was the Word,” John’s gospel begins—which means that in the end meaning itself has meaning, guaranteed by God himself and now spoken forth as an effective, liberating Word.

In other words, for both Jews and Christians, truth is not finally a matter of philosophy but of theology. Philosophical issues are critical and—at least for philosophers—fascinating, but the theological issue is primary. For all the fragile precariousness of our human existence on our tiny earth in the vastness of space, we may throw the whole weight of our existence on God, including our truth-seeking desires, because he is wholly true.

If Might Makes Right

What of those people who do not hold to traditional or biblical assumptions of truth but who care about society and their place in it? The response here might appear harder, and even in the view of some, impossible. But in fact there are two powerful arguments for the importance of a high view of truth, even for those who do not believe in it. The first of the two is negative in nature: Without truth we are all vulnerable to manipulation.

The promise of postmodernism at first sight is a brave new world of freedom. “Truth is dead; knowledge is power,” the exuberant cheerleaders tell us. We must all therefore debunk the knowledge-claims confronting us and reach for the prize—freedom from the dominations constraining us. What could be simpler and more appealing?

There is only one snag. What happens when we succeed in cutting away truth-claims to expose the web of power games only to find we have less power than the players we face? If truth is dead, right and wrong are neither, and all that remains is the will to power, then the conclusion is simple: Might makes right. Logic is only a power conspiracy. Victory goes to the strong and the weak go to the wall.

We can take the result in an individualistic direction, as Herbert Spencer did; a collective direction, as Karl Marx did; or a broad evolutionary direction, as proponents of the “selfish gene” propose. But the result is the same. When everything is reduced to the will-to-power, manipulation is the name of the game and victory goes to the strong and the ruthless. “Law!” Cornelius Vanderbilt once snorted. “What do I care about the law? H’aint I got the power?”

The power can be subtle, too. One biographer wrote of John F. Kennedy’s manipulation as a master of “using candor in lieu of truth.” People would walk away “thinking they’ve been told the truth. But, in fact, they’ve really been told nothing of true importance. The small and candid moments set up the big lie.”

In Lenin’s famous formulation, there is always power and always manipulation. The question is forever, “Who? Whom?” Duke University professor Stanley Fish makes no bones about the outcome from the postmodern perspective. In an article entitled “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing Too,” he answers several common objections: “Some form of speech is always being restricted. . . . We have always and already slid down the slippery slope; someone is always going to be restricted next, and it is your job to make sure that that someone is not you.”

Those who embrace postmodern power-playing are as suicidal as Aesop’s eagle that, at the moment of its death, recognizes its own feathers on the offending arrow’s shaft. To warn us of such folly, Solzhenitsyn and Havel stand as lone sentinels. Face to face with the force of a totalitarian propaganda and repression far worse than anything in the West, they took their stand on truth and could not be moved.

Fortunately for us, the test is not likely to come on such a cosmic stage. But the same principle holds true at humbler levels—the difficulty may be a controlling boss, a highly manipulative professor, or an emotional tyrant of a family member. Without truth we are all vulnerable to manipulation.

Pablo Picasso is a cautionary example. A genius as an artist, he was often a monster in his relationships—especially with women—because of his controlling, devouring personality. “When I die,” Picasso predicted years before the filming of Titanic, “It will be a shipwreck, and as when a big ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.”

When Picasso died in 1973, at the age of ninety-one, his prediction came true. Three of those closest to him committed suicide (his second wife, an early mistress, and a grandson) and several others had psychiatric breakdowns. “He amazes me,” said his friend, sculptor Alberto Giacometti. “He amazes me as a monster would, and I think he knows as well as we do that he’s a monster.” Indeed, Picasso referred to himself as “the Minotaur,” the mythic Cretan monster that devoured maidens.

One mistress, Marie Thérèse, described how Picasso set about painting: “He first raped the woman and then he worked.” Another told him, “You’ve never loved anyone in your life. You don’t even know how to love.” Picasso himself was brutally blunt, “Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. Then maybe I’d be rid of them. They wouldn’t be around now to complicate my existence.”

Picasso’s destructiveness was rooted in his childhood but was reinforced by his early acquaintance with Nietzsche through friends in Barcelona. “Truth cannot exist . . . truth does not exist,” he used to mutter. “I am God, I am God.”

Significantly, only one of Picasso’s wives and mistresses—Françoise Gilot—survived him with integrity intact. She was forty years younger but not naive. “Picasso,” she later wrote in My Life with Picasso, “was like a conqueror, marching through life, accumulating power, women, wealth, glory, but none of that was very satisfying anymore.” He was like Nietzsche’s loveless superman who must suppress all caring: “Love is the danger of the loneliest one.”

How did Gilot survive, well aware that it was foolish to be sucked into his orbit and fatal to come under his domination? The only safeguard, she said, was truth. Every day she had to be ‘‘Joan of Arc, wearing one’s armor from day till night.”

Freedom For

The second, and positive, argument for the importance of truth pales at first in comparison with the negative, but it is no less important. It is that without truth there is no genuine freedom and fulfillment. Isaiah Berlin, the great Oxford philosopher, used to remind students repeatedly that although freedom has two parts, many young people never experience the highest freedom because they appreciate only the lower.

Freedom, Berlin stressed, is both negative and positive. Negative freedom, or “freedom from,” has an obvious appeal in the modern world. Teenagers, for example, are famous for acting as if all freedom is freedom from parents, from teachers, and from supervision. Many adults make the same mistake.

Modern America has all the appearance of a nation-sized demonstration of the adolescent error writ large. Decisively parting company with the wisdom of their founders, Americans have exchanged the “moral republic” of the framers for the “procedural republic” of today. While the American framers wisely avoided the foolish opposition between authority and freedom of the European Enlightenment through their emphasis on “tempered freedom” and “ordered liberty,” the present generation has overthrown their vision altogether. Whereas the framers believed that liberty requires virtue, virtue requires faith, and faith requires liberty (which in turn requires virtue, and so on), modern Americans believe only in “due process” and the clash of competing self-interests in the neutral public square.

Many Americans equate freedom with privacy; as St. Jean de Crevecoeur observed, “Nobody disturbs them,” or as Justice Brandeis said, “the right to be let alone.” They confuse unfettered freedom of choice with freedom of conscience; as Cardinal Newman put it, “Conscience has rights because it has duties.” They lower freedom of speech to freedom to offend. They stress rights without responsibilities. And they mistake the lower and easier freedom, “freedom under the rule of law,” with the higher and harder freedom, freedom born of virtue that inspires “obedience to the unenforceable.”

Yet negative freedom is always limited and incomplete without positive freedom. “Freedom from” requires the complement of “freedom for.” That is why, long ago the Roman poet Tacitus wrote, “The more corrupt the state, the more laws.” That is what Benjamin Franklin meant when he wrote, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” Or what historian Lord Acton taught in his magisterial writings on liberty: Freedom is “not the power of doing what we like but the right of being able to do what we ought.” Yet having thrown over authority for the sake of reason, and now reason for the sake of desire, Americans find that the limitation of negative freedom becomes obvious: Those who set out to do what they like usually end up not liking what they’ve done.

D. H. Lawrence came to the conclusion that stopping at negative freedom was a central problem of Americans—freedom was always left in declarations, the rage for rights, and the undying restlessness to “move on.” He wrote in his essay, “The Spirit of Place”: “Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within, . . . not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west and shout of freedom. . . . The shout is a rattling of chains. Liberty in America has meant so far breaking away from all dominion. The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover the deepest whole self of man.”

No one expressed this point more often and more clearly than G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy:

The moment you step into a world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel.

In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like. Yet, if this is the case, freedom has a requirement: The true, the good, and the free have to be lined up together. To be ourselves, we need to know who we are. To be fully human, we need to know what humanness is. To aspire after virtue, justice, excellence, and beauty, we not only need to know the content of these ideals but we need to practice them. After all, as the Greeks pointed out, if abstract virtue were enough, we could be virtuous while asleep.

In short, today the crisis of truth, tomorrow the corruption of freedom. Truth without freedom is a manacle, but freedom without truth is a mirage. If freedom is not to be vacuous and stunted, it requires truth—lived truth. As Pope John Paul II declared flatly when he was still a Polish cardinal under the Soviet tyranny: “There is no freedom without truth.”

Will such arguments prevail? Not just in private life but in the public square? To be sure, we need to make them boldly, with imagination and compassion as well as force. But their strength lies in their pragmatism. If truth is truth, it reaches out a strong hand to men and women caught by abusiveness of a thousand kinds. If truth is truth, it strikes a chord in hearts everywhere that are yearning for deeper freedom. Truth, in sum, is far more powerful than mere talk about truth. Human beings are truthseekers by nature, and truth persuades by the force of its own reality.

Chapter 5

Turning the Tables

“Oh, hang the world!” The large, somewhat sullen undergraduate could take no more. He slammed his fist on the table and rudely broke into the professor’s speech.

“Let’s give it a bad name first and then hang it,” the professor went on unruffled, not realizing the mood had changed. “A puppy with hydrophobia would probably struggle for life while we killed it, but if we were kind we should kill it. So an omniscient god would put us out of our pain. He would strike us dead.”

“Why doesn’t he strike us dead?” the student asked.

“He is dead himself,” said the philosopher; “that is where he is really enviable.”

The eminent warden of the college continued, “To anyone who thinks, the pleasures of life, trivial and soon tasteless, are bribes to bring us into a torture chamber.” He was in full flood now, a disciple of Schopenhauer, as pessimistic as the old German and cynical too, with all the jaded brilliance of an academic on a well-worn theme.

Holding his glass of port, he went on, “We all see that for any thinking man mere extinction is the . . . What are you doing? . . . Are you mad? . . . Put that thing down!”

Dr. Emerson Eames, distinguished professor of philosophy and warden of Brakespeare College, Cambridge, found himself looking down the cold, small, black barrel of a cocked revolver in the hands of one of his brightest students, Innocent Smith.

“I’ll help you out of your hole, old man,” said Smith with rough tenderness. “I’ll put the puppy out of his pain.”

“Do you mean to kill me?” the professor cried, retreating to the window.

“It’s not a thing I’d do for everyone,” Smith said with emotion. “But you and I seemed to have got so intimate tonight, somehow. I know all your troubles now, and the only cure, old chap.”

“It’ll soon be over, you know,” Smith continued. And as the warden made a run for the window and leapt out awkwardly onto the flying buttress below, he followed him like a benefactor with a deeply compassionate look, the revolver in his hand like a gift.

Both men were surprised to see the first streaks of dawn. Their time together had begun nearly twenty-four hours earlier at Dr. Eames’s morning lecture. After a day packed with undergraduate affairs, it had resumed late at night in the warden’s rooms. Dr. Eames, it was known, was always in for his friends and favorite students at any hour of the night.

“I came to see you at this unearthly hour,” Smith had said as they started their ruminations, “because I am coming to the conclusion that existence is really too rotten. I know all the arguments of the thinkers who think otherwise, bishops and agnostics and those sort of people. And knowing you were the greatest living authority on the pessimistic thinkers—”

‘‘All thinkers,” Eames had said, “are pessimistic thinkers.” And with a weary cynicism he had kept up this depressing conversation for several hours until something in Innocent Smith had snapped.

Now, with the dawn breaking and Eames’s legs hanging over the buttress and the buttress hanging over the void below, the mood changed again.

“The puppy struggles,” Smith said with pity; “the poor little puppy struggles. How fortunate it is that I am wiser and kinder than he.”

“Smith,” said the philosopher, “I shall go mad!”

“And so look at things from the right angle,” Smith sighed. “Ah, but madness is only a palliative at best, a drug. The only cure is an operation—an operation that is always successful. Death.”

As he spoke, the sun rose, turning the sky from pigeon gray to pink. Bells rang, birds sang, the roofs of the ancient town were lit with fire, and the sun rose farther with a glory too deep for the skies to hold. Suddenly the unhappy man on the last morning of his life could bear it no longer.

“Let me come off this place. I can’t bear it.”

“I rather doubt it will bear you,” Smith said, referring to the delicate stonework; “but before you break your neck, or I blowout your brains . . . I want the metaphysical point cleared up. Do I understand that you want to get back to life?”

“I’d give anything to get back,” replied the unhappy professor.

“Give anything!” cried Smith; “then blast your impudence, give us a song!” Which the startled professor was prodded to do, a hymn of gratitude for existence. Satisfied, Smith fired two barrels over his head and let him climb to the ground.

“I must ask your indulgence,” Smith said brokenly when they were together again. “I must ask you to realize that I have just had an escape from death.”

“You have had an escape from death?” the professor said with irritation.

“Oh, don’t you understand, don’t you understand?” Smith cried. “I had to do it, Eames. I had to prove you wrong or die. When a man’s young he nearly always has someone whom he thinks the top watermark of the mind of man. . . . Well, you were that to me. . . . Don’t you see that I had to prove you didn’t really mean it. Or else drown myself in the canal.”

Smith continued, “The thing I saw shining in your eyes when you dangled from that buttress was enjoyment at life and not ‘the Will to Live.’ What you knew when you sat on that damned gargoyle was that the world, when all is said and done, is a wonderful and beautiful place; I know it, because I knew it at the same minute.”

Ready to hand himself in and face being sent down from Cambridge, Innocent Smith finished with one last meditation.

“I mean to keep the remaining shots for people in the shameful state you and I were in last night—I wish we could even plead drunkenness. I mean to keep those bullets for pessimists—pills for pale people. And in this way I want to make this world like a wonderful surprise—to float as idly as the thistledown and come as silently as the sunrise; not to be expected any more than the thunderbolt, not to be recalled any more than the dying breeze. . . . I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him. Only to bring him to life.”

Shortened and slightly retold, this inimitable passage is from G. K. Chesterton’s Manalive. Fabulous and fantastic, Chesterton’s writing itself floats “as idly as the thistledown.” And like his jesting Innocent Smith, he too holds his pistol to the head of Modern Man—and also to the head of end-of-the-century Postmodern Man and Woman—not to kill them but to bring them to life. And the story, of course, is not simply a flight of Chesterton’s imagination but the fruit of his own life.

In 1892 Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an eighteen-year-old student at the Slade School of Art in London. Far from the stiff-upper-lip primness of the caricature of Victorianism, the end-of-the-century world of art was swirling with decadence, cynicism, and pessimism. Chesterton himself was also drawn to the macabre and the occult. In other words, his world was remarkably similar to our postmodern one.

But however much such pessimism and cynicism was the rage and however drawn to it he felt, one thing held Chesterton back: What he described later as a “thin thread of thanks,” a sort of “mystical minimum of gratitude.” Bursting with gratitude for the gift of life, he was waking up to wonder as he set out to search for a philosophy that would allow him to be realistic and yet “enjoy enjoyment” too.

In the course of his search Chesterton not only came to faith; he came to faith by becoming an archskeptic about skepticism, a radical disbeliever in the fashionable disbelief. He found the skeptics and cynics not skeptical and cynical enough. Far from stopping short of tough questioning, the faith Chesterton came to was the other side of such questioning—and all the stronger for having gone through it.

Relativizing the Relativizers

Chesterton’s journey in life and his story in Manalive highlight an effective response to skeptics and those who insist on a radical relativism that is impervious to traditional claims to truth. Curiously, his approach is exactly the opposite of what most people try to do.

Advocates of traditional views of truth often respond to relativists in the same way as English or American tourists traveling in France who speak their English more slowly and loudly. Similarly, proponents of traditional views commonly underscore the objectivity of truth in ever more earnest and labored ways. And then, when they fail to carry their point, they mask their frustration by issuing dire warnings of the consequences of disagreeing with them. The result is mutual incomprehension and a stalemate.

Chesterton shows us another way—in fact, two other ways—from an honored tradition in Christian witness that is too often neglected today. For when it comes to belief and unbelief, no argument in the world is unarguable. Every argument either has been or will be put forth by someone. But while all beliefs appear consistent to those who believe them, they always have one of two problems: They are either constricting or contradictory.

In the first case the beliefs are more consistent but are incomplete in the sense that they are too small for the fullness of life. Chesterton calls this the problem of the madman: “The strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.” And in the second case the beliefs are more comprehensive but are inconsistent—which in the worst cases makes them self-refuting, a problem Chesterton calls “the suicide of thought.”

Then comes the strategy used so well by Chesterton and the best protagonists of faith. The wilder and more dogmatic an argument is, the more important it is to argue against it on its own grounds. As Chesterton says, the principle stands that “either we must not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his ground, not ours.”

In this chapter we will explore two ways to do this, as put forward by Peter Berger as the two best ways to counter radical relativism. The first effective strategy for countering relativism on its own grounds is negative: “Relativizing the relativizers.” By this is meant applying to skeptics the skepticism they apply to others, thus pushing them out toward the negative consequences of their own beliefs. With a good cigar and a glass of port, Chesterton’s professor has one attitude toward life and death in his comfortable college rooms but quite another when hanging grimly to the buttress while staring down the barrel of a gun. When turned on him, his philosophy of life is cold comfort.

As Berger points out, the strategy rests on two assumptions. The first is that relativism and skepticism entail a hidden double standard—the relativism is inconsistent and incomplete. All too often, relativists relativize others but not themselves. They relativize the past but not the present. They pour the acid of their relativism over all sorts of issues but jealously guard their own favorite ones. A recent study of classical education in the universities points to this attribute when it defines the present-day American academic as “a well-fed, elite, institutionalized thinker of the late twentieth century, who crafts ideas for his peers, with the assurance that the consequences of those solutions should not and will not necessarily apply to himself.”

The strategy’s second assumption is that consistency and clarity are linked. The task of encountering relativism, Berger writes, is to “see the relativity business to its very end.” Press relativism to its consistent conclusion and the result is surprising. Far from paralyzing thought, relativism is itself relativized, the debunker debunked, and what emerges is an almost pristine realization of the importance of truth.

Wasn’t this the assumption behind the prophet Elijah’s challenge to Israel in the ninth century B.C.? If Baal, and not YHWH, was God, then follow Baal, he cried as he offered the prophets of Baal the first opportunity to verify their god. With the bulk of the people sitting uneasily on the fence between God and Baal, Elijah knew that pious calls to return to God would have fallen on divided hearts and deaf ears. He had to mount the challenge on their grounds.

For if YHWH is God, then Baal is not, and the fastest way for the people to see it was to push them toward the false faith that was bound to be falsified by reality. The disproof came first and cleared the ground for the proof, for with the false falsified the true could be verified. “The Lord—he is God! The Lord—he is God!” was the people’s conclusion with heartfelt conviction.

The same logic runs down through the centuries. Jesus said, “By their fruit you will know them”—not by their seed. If you had spoken to the prodigal son the day he left home, would he have listened? If you spoke to him the day he hit the pigsty, would he have needed to? “See where it leads to,” St. Augustine advised in dealing with falsehood. Follow it out to “the absolute ruddy end,” C. S. Lewis remarked with characteristic Englishness. Push them to “the logic of their presuppositions,” Francis Schaeffer used to say.

In doing this, we need to beware of tripping over trivial contradictions or inconsistencies that don’t matter much to the inconsistent—for example, Richard Dawkins’s “Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I will show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work.”

Similar examples of inconsistencies abound. Marxist sociologists may be adept at spotting “exploitation” in a kindergarten but have Mexican nannies and pay their teaching assistants poorly. Smart-aleck high school students may insist that “everything is relative” yet will be the first to object if teachers grade their papers without any standards, such as “I didn’t like your paper—it’s Tuesday.” Radical relativists may deny there are “objective facts” but are strangely insistent on circulating highly detailed resumes. Postmodernist professors may claim that authors are without privilege in determining how their texts are interpreted, but woe betide the reviewer who misinterprets their latest contribution to scholarship and human knowledge. And so on.

All these examples betray relatively trivial contradictions that are more suitable for humor than persuasive debate. But what counts is when the relativism matters to the relativist, when it becomes a question of life and not simply logic. In such cases the strategy and the logic are the same. The relativists’ problem is not their clash with us but their contradiction with reality and therefore the cost to themselves.

When I studied philosophy as an undergraduate in the 1960s, an Arctic chill was still hanging in the air that froze any serious appreciation of religion. The source had been the philosophy of logical positivism and the celebrated “verification principle” of A. J. Ayer. Only that which could be tested by the five senses could be verified as true, he said. Theology was therefore “non-sense,” or as it was famously said, “The word g-o-d is less meaningful than the word d-o-g.”

The trouble for A. J. Ayer was that his verification principle couldn’t verify itself—it was self-refuting. For to accept as truth only what can be tested by the senses is a principle that itself cannot be tested by the senses. It too is non-sense. Ayer’s approach, he later admitted, was “a blind alley.” Years later I enjoyed a conversation with him on the train between London and Oxford. Although retired and knighted as Professor Sir Alfred J. Ayer, he was candid about the failure of his principle. “I wish I had been more consistent,” he said. “Any iconoclast who brandishes a debunker’s sword should be required to demonstrate it publicly on his own cherished beliefs.” Indeed.

Again and again the lesson is simple: While no argument is unarguable, some thoughts can be thought but not lived. So we should never stop halfway in dealing with skepticism but follow ideas uncompromisingly to their conclusion. When heads collide with the wall they will have reached the limits of their position and will be open to reconsider. In this sense, reality is what we run into when we are wrong, for when we are right, we don’t run into it. “There are times,” Václav Havel wrote, “when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.”

The Crisis Is the Opportunity

The strategy of “relativizing the relativizers” has both a sobering and encouraging side. The sobering side arises from the fact that ideas have consequences. The tactic can easily be reduced to a game—and a heartless one—but this obscures its real mercy: Because the skeptics’ view is finally untrue, it is in their interest to discover it in good time. But even if we care so little that we say and do nothing, life itself will most likely push the skeptics out to face reality anyway, and the final outcome may be far less pleasant.

Put differently, all people at some point behave true to their beliefs. Sooner or later they will act on the assumptions they truly hold and reap the consequences. We often say that people don’t “live up to their beliefs,” but it would be more accurate to say that, in a crunch such as temptation, they switch to other beliefs and live up to those instead. We do live by our beliefs. The question is, which ones?

Now although someone’s beliefs and assumptions may not be true and do not describe reality, they will still drive their behavior. So if someone doesn’t believe in truth, count on him to lie. If someone says there are no objective facts, expect her to be careless with facts to further her own interests. If someone explains everything by referring to evolution and the “selfish gene,” be sure that at some point he will be extremely selfish on behalf of the fitness of his own survival. If someone describes newborn babies as “replaceable” and of no more value than snails, you can bet that she will become an advocate of “involuntary euthanasia” (in other words, murder), and so on.

The principle also holds true for nations, for ideas have consequences. Differences make a difference. Behavior follows beliefs as surely as thunder follows lightning. What starts in the studies will end in the streets. When it comes to postmodernism, the stunning fact is that we do not have to predict its consequences—we have already seen the influence of its core ideas on history. Do we really imagine there can be no consequences a second time around?

Not far from his death in 1951, French writer André Gide reflected on the influence of intellectuals on the moral and cultural weakness of France in the first half of the century. He dismissed the scapegoating of writers and the smearing of whole eras and schools. He emphatically rejected the fascists’ charge that the intellectuals had “discouraged and devitalized” French youth. But still, he acknowledged that his generation of artists had come “under Nietzsche’s spell” and introduced a power-worshiping vitality and barbarism to France.

Yes, Zarathustra bewitched too many of us with his dangerous catchwords. Let us be hard! Let us defy the code of Christian ethics! Reevaluate all values! . . . How thrillingly adventurous life seemed, up there, in glacial height, immeasurably beyond all good and evil. How enthralling it was, to disregard all conventions, to transgress all taboos. The call of instinct and intuition; the worship of energy; the panegyrics of élan vital—it was stirring and intoxicating. But from Nietzsche’s Power philosophy it is only one stop to Sorel’s Defence of Violence and to Spengler’s Decline of the Western World.

“The decline of the Western world. . . . C’est la faute à Nietzsche (It’s Nietzsche’s fault),” he concluded. But also, “Why not admit it? I too have sinned and have contributed my bit to the general disarray.”

Will we live to see a similar mea culpa from the wide array of postmodern thinkers similarly bewitched by Zarathustra? From writers who have trashed the reality of words and lawyers who have ridden roughshod over the sanctity of law? Will we hear a genuine, unconditional apology from President Clinton acknowledging that, far from defending the Constitution, he drove a bulldozer through the rule of law and the delicate fabric of trust underlying the republic? We shouldn’t hold our breath. But unless a significant number of America’s thinkers and leaders see what has happened and rise to repair the breach, the consequences are only a matter of time. As Nietzsche said of his prediction, this tremendous event is still on its way.

Yet the strategy has an encouraging side too. The crisis, at its very worst, is the opportunity. The darkest night is just before dawn. In terms of distance, the prodigal’s pigsty is the farthest point from home; in terms of time, the pigsty is the shortest distance to the father’s house. That is one reason people of faith are not overcome by crises. As Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, “If any frightened curate still says that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc, ‘Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night: It is already morning.’”

Pointing Out the Signals of Transcendence

Berger’s first strategy for countering relativism—relativizing the relativizers—is unashamedly negative. This in itself leaves some people uncomfortable, and an added problem occurs when people use the approach in a purely logical way. In searching for any and all “contradictions,” they end up being tiresomely fussy and unconvincing.

In contrast, the real task is to be prophetic, not pedantic; to search for contradictions that matter—and matter not to us but to the people we are engaging. In other words, the goal is to look for the contradictions between logic and life, to search for the tension between the relativism or skepticism of their philosophy and the “treasure of their heart.” Only the latter will become a smart-bomb to detonate fresh thinking.

Because of the negative nature of the first strategy, many people are more drawn to the second tactic for countering relativism on its own grounds, which is entirely positive: “Pointing out the signals of transcendence.” By this is meant the strategy of drawing attention to the contradiction and yearnings within people’s beliefs that point beyond those beliefs toward entirely different possibilities.

Whereas “relativizing the relativizers” is negative because it highlights the negative consequences of false assumptions, “pointing out the signals of transcendence” is positive because it points toward the positive conclusions of true aspirations, unnoticed before. In the comfort of his room Dr. Emerson Eames is mired in his Schopenhauerian gloom, but when confronting the starkness of death in the beauty of dawn, an enjoyment of life begins to shine in his eyes. This first contradicts his put-the-puppy-out-of-its-misery pessimism. Then instinctively, intuitively, irrepressibly, and undeniably, his gratitude to be alive punctures his pessimism and points beyond it to the possibility of higher meaning in life. Gratitude quite literally became Eames’s pointer toward salvation, just as it did for his creator in real life.

Peter Berger defines signals of transcendence as “phenomena that are to be found within the domain of our ‘natural’ reality but that appear to point beyond that reality.” His discussion of them in A Rumor of Angels includes some signals that are positive—for example, order, humor, and hope—and some that are negative—for example, his “argument from damnation.”

The best-known example of a positive “signal” in real life is C. S. Lewis’s “surprised by joy”—experiences that prodded him toward being a “lapsed atheist” and set him off on a search for meaning. But Berger’s argument from damnation is particularly powerful and common, as in the poet W. H. Auden’s experience that stopped him in his tracks and turned him around to start his journey toward faith.

In 1939, Auden emigrated to the United States. In November, two months after the outbreak of the World War II, he went to a cinema in the Yorkville district of Manhattan. The area was largely German-speaking and the film he saw was a Nazi account of their conquest of Poland. When Poles appeared on the screen, he was startled to hear people in the audience shout, “Kill them! Kill them!”

Auden was stunned. Amid all the changes of heart and mind he had passed through in his life, one thing had remained consistent: he believed in the essential goodness of humanity. Now suddenly, in a flash, he realized two things with the force of an epiphany. On the one hand, he knew beyond any argument that “human nature was not and never could be good”—the reaction of the audience was “a denial of every humanistic value.” On the other hand, he realized that if he was to say such things were absolutely evil, he had to have some absolute standard by which he could judge them.

Here, Auden realized, was the fatal flaw of his liberalism: “The whole trend of liberal thought has been to undermine faith in the absolute.” Or as he remarked to a friend, “The English intellectuals who now cry to Heaven against the evil incarnated in Hitler have no Heaven to cry to.” Spurred by this contradiction-cum-yearning, Auden left the cinema on a quest to renew his “faith in the absolute” and began the journey that led him to faith in Christ.

Auden’s realization throws light on one of the deepest problems of postmodernism—its inability to look evil squarely in the eye. In its leveling of moral standards and glorifying of power, postmodernism has close ties to the forces that gave rise to Nazism. But it would be unfair to lay the responsibility for the “blond beast” at Nietzsche’s door. For instance, it was his sister Elizabeth, rather than Nietzsche, who was virulently anti-Semitic. But an even deeper criticism of Nietzsche is undeniable. By insisting that nothing is good or evil in itself, or the “same for all,” Nietzsche shows that he had not faced the reality of evil squarely.

In 1947 Thomas Mann wrote Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events, especially the revelations of Auschwitz and Treblinka. “How bound in time, how theoretical too, how inexperienced does Nietzsche’s romanticizing about wickedness appear . . . today! We have learnt to know it in all its miserableness.” More than half a century on, one can only pray that America does not become the second former-Protestant country to undergo that dark lesson.

Put differently, have you ever heard an atheist exclaim “Goddammit!” and mean it? We can all be taught not to judge; we can all be told that there are no moral absolutes. But when we come face to face with raw, naked evil, then relativism, nonjudgmentalism, and atheism count for nothing. Absolute evil calls for absolute judgment. Instinctively and intuitively, we cry out for the unconditional to condemn evil unconditionally. The atheist who lets fly “Goddammit!” in the face of evil is right, not wrong. It is a signal of transcendence, a pointer toward a better possibility—and unwittingly a prayer.

A full discussion of these strategies would take us beyond our immediate purpose. But the central point is plain: neither strategy is purely theoretical; both are practical, powerful, and proven. Postmodern forms of relativism, skepticism, cynicism, and the like may appear to shatter traditional convictions to smithereens. But fears that such views are beyond argument are groundless.

For no human being lives outside the reality common to us all. Whatever people may say the world is or who they are, it is what it is and they are who they are. Again, no argument is unarguable, but there are thoughts that can be thought but not lived. When all is said and done, reality always has the last word. The truth will always out. Standing up to falsehood, lies, and crazy ideas is never an easy task, but—as we explore next—it is far easier than the hardest task of all, becoming people of truth ourselves.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. What makes the Chesterton story about professor Eames more than simply a clever self-refutation?

2. Explain the two kinds of unbelief and how they came to be.

3. What is meant by the statement that the fastest way for (unbelieving) people to see the true is “to push them toward the false faith that was bound to be falsified by reality”?

4. Guinness cites André Gide as admitting he contributed to his culture’s nihilism. Can you think of other examples of this kind of honesty?

5. What are signals of transcendence?

6. How can a difficult childhood produce honesty?

7. How has our generation, like André Gide’s, come under Nietzsche’s spell?

8. Why for Guinness do strategies have to be both theoretical and practical?

*Excerpted from Os Guinness, Time for Truth: Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype, and Spin. Copyright © 2000, Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group. Used with permission.

CHAPTER 27

Jean-Luc Marion

(1946–)

Jean-Luc Marion was born near Paris, France. Marion studied at the University of Nanterre (now Paris West University Nanterre La Défense) and the Sorbonne and then did graduate work in philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied with Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser. Marion received his PhD in 1980. After teaching at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, he moved to the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he is currently the John Nuveen Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology.

The reason we have included a chapter from God without Being is that it serves to give the reader a splendid example of current, postmodern apologetics (in the Roman Catholic tradition). According to Marion:

If we understand by modernity the completed and therefore terminal figure of metaphysics, such as it develops from Descartes to Nietzsche, then “postmodernity” begins when, among other things, the metaphysical determination of God is called into question. Following the thematic elaborated by Heidegger, I admit that metaphysics imposes on what it still designates under the disputable title of “God” a function in the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics: as supreme being, “God” assures the ground . . . of all other derived beings.[1]

There is much in Marion’s thought that cannot be adequately pursued here. Even the discussion of “being,” which occupies a central aspect of Marion’s work, cannot be developed in detail here. The following, however, should help us see something of Marion’s concern.

In his discussion of Anselm’s ontological argument, Marion calls into question the entire supposition that the ontological argument has much to do with being, or ontology.[2] According to Marion, the argument from Anselm relies not on a concept, but on a nonconcept. Marion rightly notes that Anselm himself never referred to his argument as ontological; that designation was the invention of Immanuel Kant. It is entirely possible, then, according to Marion, that Anselm’s argument has little to do with the notion of being. Without doing justice to Marion’s brilliant article “Is the Ontological Argument Ontological,” we may note that at least part of his point centers on a linguistic shift within Anselm’s Proslogion, a shift from majus (greater) to melius (better) when referring to this being. That is, as Marion puts it, “Does the ‘id quo majus cogitari nequit’ [that than which no greater can be conceived] admit to being interpreted . . . in terms of the question of being or ousia?”[3] Marion’s answer is no, and he supports his answer with Anselm’s further designation of the argument, taken from Proslogion XIV, wherein Anselm uses the formula (id) quo nihil melius cogitari potest (that than which no better can be conceived).

This, according to Marion, specifies further what Anselm meant more generally in the earlier (majus/greater) formula. That is, it is not the case simply that Anselm was concerned to argue from the standpoint of the greatest being, but rather his chief concern was that this being be defined as the best, or (referring back to Plato), the summum bonum. Or, as Marion puts it, “To be greater means to be better.”[4]

Marion’s argument carries at least some exegetical weight. It is surely the case that Anselm’s terminology changes in the context of his argument. Not only so, but Marion refers us both to Augustine and to Boethius as support for his position from the church fathers.[5] This is significant since both were heavily influenced by Plato and thus would have been more comfortable with God as summum bonum than as (in Aquinas) ipsum esse subsistens. So the argument that the ontological argument is not, after all, ontological carries some support, whether or not it is true.

In the article cited above and the selection included here, Marion is concerned to rethink the notion of being as it has historically been used. It is in the context of discussions of being as a transcendental notion that modern and contemporary philosophers have begun to wonder if it is proper and accurate to speak of God in terms of “being.” But the problem has not just surfaced in contemporary discussions. As a matter of fact, Thomas had barely left the quodlibetic quadrants of his monastery before his successor at the University of Paris, Meister Eckhart (1260?–1328?), began to question the coherence of Thomas’s existential metaphysic.

In Eckhart’s sermon on Matthew 5:3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” we can see something of the heart of the problem that Aquinas left to philosophical and ecclesiastical posterity. Whether or not Eckhart was a good metaphysician, there can be no doubt that he was a homiletician (though, by modern standards, as will be seen, not a very good one). His sermon on Matthew 5:3 has three points focusing on a poverty of the soul, which he calls a “stilling.” His first point is that there must be a stilling of the will if we are to be poor in spirit. His second point is that there must be a stilling of the intellect, so that our goal would be to have no conceptual knowledge of God at all. And in attempting to make that point, he says:

Why I pray God to rid me of God is because conditionless being is above God and above distinction: it was therein I was myself, therein I willed myself and knew myself to make this man and in this sense I am my own cause, both of my nature which is eternal and of my nature which is temporal. For this am I born, and as to my birth which is eternal I can never die. In my eternal mode of birth I have always been, am now, and shall eternally remain. That which I am in time shall die and come to naught, for it is of the day and passes with the day. In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of mine own self and all things, and had I willed it I had never been, nor any thing, and if I had not been then God had not been either. To understand this is not necessary.[6]

What could Eckhart be saying here? Leaving aside the question of whether Eckhart’s congregation understood anything of what he said, we can see something of what he was attempting to do. He was attempting to show that any notion of God must somehow transcend the notion of mere being. Whatever God is like, he cannot be in any way identical to standard notions of existence. Thus, his existence is best understood when it is not understood.[7]

There is no need to trace this development through history, but it might be instructive to see how what Eckhart was attempting to do has had some influence even into the (post)modern period. No less a philosopher than Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) has expressed similar Eckhartian concerns, though perhaps for different reasons. Heidegger was once asked if it was proper to posit being and God as identical, to which he responded:

Being and God are not identical and I would never attempt to think the essence of God by means of Being. Some among you perhaps know that I come from theology, that I still guard an old love for it and that I am not without a certain understanding of it. If I were yet to write a theology—to which sometimes I feel inclined—then the word Being would not occur in it. . . . This is what Luther understood. Even within his own church this seems to be forgotten. One could not be more reserved than I before every attempt to employ Being to think theologically in what way God is God.[8]

Eckhart and Heidegger[9] have something in common with respect to the relationship of metaphysical discussions to discussions about God. They have surveyed the metaphysical “received tradition,” especially theistic metaphysical theories, and have found them wanting with respect to an adequate characterization of God. They are both wary of the notion of being when discussing a theistic answer to the question of the nature of ultimate reality. There is something demeaning or otherwise insufficient in (at least one of the main) common metaphysical theistic formulations. Being doesn’t seem adequate as a concept to designate God and then further to attempt to show his relationship to the world. Something else must be added to, or perhaps substituted for, the notion of being if a theistic metaphysic is adduced. And Heidegger is not alone in this concern.

Marion is part of a recent curious development afoot, one that is more recent even than Heidegger, which attempts to distance the metaphysical notion of being from God altogether. He has attempted to show that the (at least, ecclesiastical) historical notion of being either has been unduly imposed on the thinking of significant church leaders, as in the case of Anselm, or has been utilized in such a way as to do an injustice to what we think about God. The interesting point here is that Marion seems concerned, by and large, to place the understanding of God more in an Eckhartian framework than in a Thomistic (and Aristotelian) one. His exegetical point is that Anselm’s argument leans more on Plato than on Aristotle. This point could easily be conceded, particularly given the fact that Anselm saw himself as Augustinian, the latter of whom was decidedly dependent on Plato for much of what he thought. Marion’s interpretation of Anselm’s argument is “that God’s transcendence has to be termed a transcendence of the good and not a mere maximum of entities.”[10] This is Marion’s Platonic rendition of what has characteristically been an Aristotelian interpretation of Anselm’s ontological argument.

But Marion’s further concern, the Eckhartian twist we might call it, is that Anselm’s argument commits us to a nonunderstanding of God. As he puts it, “God exists in re in a very special way—not because he is in understanding, but despite the fact that he is not. Further: he is in reality because he is not in understanding. And this is the last and highest degree of being.”[11] We can hear echoes here of Eckhart’s last line: When it comes to God, “to understand this is not necessary.”

It was Marion’s book God without Being,[12] however, that more clearly set forth his agenda for a kind of Christian philosophical theology, a theology against what Heidegger liked to call “onto-theo-logic.” In that book, Marion suggests that our understanding of God, to be proper, should move outside of the tradition of Thomistic metaphysics. The metaphysical notion of being, as we have it handed down to us from Aquinas, cannot adequately express the Christian notion of God as we have it from biblical revelation. Thus, it is time, says Marion, to move beyond being, beyond Aquinas, to something that transcends the being of medieval metaphysics.

In the book, a chapter of which is included here, Marion is attempting an answer to the question he poses at the beginning: “Can the conceptual thought of God . . . be developed outside of the doctrine of Being (in the metaphysical sense, or even in the non-metaphysical sense)? Does God give himself to be known according to the horizon of Being or according to a more radical horizon?”[13]

Marion’s answer is the latter: God gives himself to be known, he says, according to the gift, which is itself agapē. Any other notion ascribed to God is an idol, including the Thomistic metaphysical notion of being.[14]

1. Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), xx–xxi.

2. Jean-Luc Marion, “Is the Ontological Argument Ontological: The Argument According to Anselm and Its Metaphysical Interpretation According to Kant,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, no. 2 (1992 April): 201–18.

3. Ibid., 213.

4. Ibid., 214.

5. Ibid., 216.

6. Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, trans. C. de B. Evans, 2 vols. (London: John M. Watkins, 1924), 1:220.

7. It should be noted that Eckhart was a mystic in the Roman church.

8. Included herein, and quoted in Marion, God without Being, 61–62.

9. And others. Emmanuel Lévinas, to add just one other, could be included here as well. See Emmanuel Lévinas and Seán Hand, The Levinas Reader (New York, NY: B. Blackwell, 1989).

10. Marion, “Ontological Argument,” 217.

11. Ibid., 212. Note that being still plays a role in the discussion, but it is being which transcends being.

12. See also Jean-Luc Marion, “Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Theological Reader,” in The Postmodern God, ed. Graham Ward (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).

13. Marion, God without Being, xxiv.

14. Marion has a somewhat technical idea of an idol, distinguishing it from an icon. Without going into the technicalities of it, however, it seems to include the negative connotation of that which takes the place of the true God.

God without Being: Hors-Texte

Chapter 3

The Crossing of Being*

Thus, “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence—darüber muss man schweigen.” In other words, in passing from Wittgenstein to Heidegger, in speaking from the starting point of philosophy (or almost) and not from that of logic (or almost): “Someone who has experienced theology in his own roots, both the theology of the Christian faith and that of philosophy, would today rather remain silent about God [von Gott zu schweigen] when he is speaking in the realm of thinking.”[1] Within such an improvised consensus, in spite or because of a judicious approximation, the two thinkers who dominate our epoch cross and meet. In it they radically determine, on the one hand, calculative thought and, on the other hand, meditating thought, and each their relations; such a consensus, however, does not restate, despite the evident similarity of terms, the caution that Ignatius of Antioch addressed to the overly prolix Christians: “It is better to keep silence and to be, than to speak without being.”[2] If we are summoned to silence—if, as Aristotle says, we are “forced by the truth itself”[3] to keep silent with regard to something like God—this state of affairs nevertheless does not settle the fundamental question. For silence itself is expressed in several ways. We know silences of contempt and of joy, of pain and of pleasure, of consent and of solitude. Afforded by the concrete daily attitude and what it most rightly imposes is what one might call the theological attitude, which only bears on what Origen names the “dogmas to be kept in silence, ta siōpōmena dogmata.”[4] But what does this silence mean? To what silence are we summoned today? Death, preeminently, imposes silence; the emptiness of infinite spaces opposes its suffocating vacuity like an eternal silence; aphasia, desertlike, grows with its silence. Does this silence, which threatens modernity more than any other, have the least relation, as to something like God, with what Pseudo-Dionysius has in mind when he incites us to “honor the ineffable [things] with a wise silence”?[5]

In other words, the highest difficulty does not consist in managing to reach, with Wittgenstein or Heidegger, a guarded silence with regard to God. The greatest difficulty doubtless consists more essentially in deciding what silence says: contempt, renunciation, the avowal of impotence, or else the highest honor rendered, the only one neither unworthy nor “dangerous.”[6] But already we pay so much attention to securing the place where only silence is suitable that we do not yet try to determine the stakes and the nature of this silence. The silence concerning silence thus conceals from us that, finally, nothing demands more of interpretation than the nothingness of speech—or even that, to have done with silence, keeping silence does not suffice. Silence, precisely because it does not explain itself, exposes itself to an infinite equivocation of meaning. In order to keep silent with regard to God, one must, if not hold a discourse on God, at least hold a discourse worthy of God on our silence itself.

1—The Silence of the Idol

Let us take a moment to ascertain the seriousness of this new question, for a response is never worth more (and is often worth less) than the question that fostered it with a genuine questioning. A first indication clearly attests that, far from closing off a difficulty, silence opens one—the extreme difficulty that we experience in keeping silent before that about which, nevertheless, we simply cannot speak. There is nothing surprising in the fact that we may not be able to speak of God; for, if speaking is equivalent to stating a well-constructed proposition, then by definition that which is defined as ineffable, inconceivable, and unnameable escapes all speech. The surprising thing, therefore, is not our difficulty in speaking of God but indeed our difficulty in keeping silent. For in fact, with regard to God, overwhelmingly, we speak. In a sense we speak only about that, and much too much, with neither modesty nor precaution. Moreover, not keeping silent concerning God can be taken in several ways. (a) First, obviously, it can be taken in the sense of pious chattering, or supposedly such, since it often joins rampant heresy with invalidity; we simply mention this for the record. (b) Next, just as obviously, it can be taken in the sense of the discourse, rather enfeebled today, that disqualifies or deconstructs the very notion of God; this discourse consists in speaking of God in order to silence him, in not keeping silent in order to silence him. This discourse manifests two weaknesses: it does not see the difference between silencing and keeping silent, because it does not see that a refutation remains within the field of predication, whereas the very adage of Wittgenstein requires that one bypass predication to reach silence. It does not suffice to refute—even as far as “to reduce” a possible interlocutor “to silence”—in order to arrive at keeping silent. The discourse of refutation especially presupposes a conceptual definition of the very thing that it refutes and must, to display even the appearance of rigor, lend two contradictory characteristics to that thing: on the one hand, the definition must exhaust the individual, for want of which its destruction would not eliminate God, by which it is given as a real definition of an individual which is itself at least possible. On the other hand, the definition must in some way undo itself entirely before its refutation; the possible definition (exigentia existentiae) must also deconstruct itself as impossible. This double and contradictory demand is comprehensible only if one distinguishes, within the definition of God thus employed, an idol: namely a representation of God at once inadequate (objectively) and impassable (subjectively).[7] We can conclude that the conceptual idol leads the discourse of refutation to keep silent about God even less in that it seeks more to silence him. (c) There remains one final way of not keeping silent about God—the noisiest but, we must admit, the most seductive. It is used on occasions of what it is sometimes possible to call “returns to God.” One might consider a recent example, the acknowledged role of God in the historico-theoretical deconstruction of certain figures of Leninism. Let us take an example from the French situation, which can be distinguished quite clearly from the testimony of certain Soviets, whose authentic spiritual experience cannot be disputed. All that matters here is the conceptual treatment to which these testimonies are subject in France. In the face of the annihilation of the individual and his share of liberty, what is very approximately named “transcendence” or Spirit appears as the unique means of returning humanity to man or, more prosaically, of portraying as “beautiful souls”—angels—the militants taken in by revolutions. In these cases the name of God hardly intervenes any longer except to back up another concept with infinity, which alone functions in the real operation of the discourse: whether it be a question of freedom, of the spirit, of the soul, of desire, or even of the Other, God always figures as a figurehead, without ones ever thinking him as such. This is all the more true in that returns to God unravel into extremely interested recourses to God, which unbelief, fundamental or superficial, accomplishes as well as—even better than—sincere and confessed faith. Moreover, only the pompous literary Christians are deceived.[8] In these two last cases (the best illustrated in France recently, by the way) the same nonsense occurs, which alone allows one to keep silent so little and so poorly with regard to God: the idolatry of substitution. On the one hand, one presupposes a concept as exhausting the name of God, in order to reject the one by the other; on the other hand, one presupposes that a God guarantees that which another concept signifies more directly, in order to characterize the one through the other. There is here a double impotence to keep silent about God, which silences him all the more. But whence comes the impotence to silence, or rather, our impotence to guard our silence instead of silencing that which our chattering assails?

Keeping our silence, in order precisely by this reserve to honor that which we would designate by silence—in other words, in this case, God—this would become thinkable only if God exposed himself to thought. The retreat of our eventual silence implies an absolute pole of reference around which a respectful desert might grow. The common idolatrous treatment of God prohibits straightaway the solitude of such an absolute pole of reference, since between our gaze or our speech and him, the idol interposes the invisible mirror where the first visible sends the thrust of this gaze back to itself. For what is characteristic of modernity, understood as the perfect completion of metaphysics, does not at all consist in a negation of God.

Such theoretical negation can be located easily in preceding centuries. Modernity is characterized first by the nullification of God as a question. Why does God no longer inhabit any process of questioning? Because the response to the question of his essence or existence (according to the strict metaphysical acceptation of these terms) becomes irrelevant. Not, undoubtedly, for ideological debate and according to the yardstick of the movement of ideas, but surely given a phenomenological reduction. What, then, is put at stake in a negation or an affirmation of God? Not God as such, but the compatibility or incompatibility of an idol called “God” with the whole of the conceptual system where beings in their Being make epoch. The gap between compatibility and incompatibility no doubt matters, but it matters infinitely less than the constant substitution, in one case and the other, of an absolute pole by an idol. Theism and atheism bear equally upon an idol. They remain enemies, but fraternal enemies, in a common and impassable idolatry. Of such idolatry Nietzsche gives the best and final illustration, by demonstrating in exemplary fashion the two functions held by the idol.—To begin with, negation. In what way must one refute something that is named “God”? Not vaguely, but very exactly, for as much as “‘The father’ in God is thoroughly refuted; likewise ‘the judge,’ ‘the rewarder’”; this is to say that refutation implies an identification between the so-called “God” and the moral uses/names that, de facto, constitute his operative definition: “Question: does morality make impossible this pantheistic affirmation of all things too? At bottom it is only the moral god that has been overcome. Does it make sense to conceive a god ‘beyond good and evil’? Would a pantheism in this sense be possible?”[9] Refutation acts in the gap between an overly precise but operative concept of “God” (the “moral God” in the sense of Kant or Fichte) and the undetermined instance of a “God beyond good and evil.” This very gap renders problematic the identification of the absolutely autonomous pole with a name/concept, whatever it may be. In fact, the “moral God” functions as an idol, indisputably reflecting the gaze that the man of ressentiment directs toward the divine, precisely because he in no way reaches the absolute pole. Where then is the idol that supports atheism fixed? The response to this question fully manifests the modern lack of difference between theism and atheism. In fact, atheism works on an idol of the will to power, as also does the affirmation of “new gods.” Atheism denies the “moral God” in having understood the “birth of Christianity out of the spirit of ressentiment,” hence for having reconstituted its genealogy on the basis of a reactive state of the will to power; for “ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.”[10] What is peculiar to Nietzsche consists not so much in proclaiming the “death of God” as in thinking it on the basis of the will to power. One certainly must continue to admit what is taken for “God,” but as an effect of a (reactive) state of the will to power.

Hence, in perfect continuity with (idolatrous) negation, (idolatrous) affirmation: when, according to another inclination in his thought concerning the divine, Nietzsche opens the horizon of manifestation of the “new gods,” he deduces them just as much from the will to power: “And how many new gods are still possible! As for myself, in whom the religious, that is to say god-forming [gottbildende] instinct occasionally becomes active at impossible times—how differently, how variously the divine has revealed itself to me each time!” Under what forms? Response: “The sole way of maintaining a meaning for the concept ‘God’ would be: God not as a driving force, but God as a maximal state, as epoch [making]—a point in the evolution of the will to power”; or again: “‘God’ as the moment of culmination: [Dasein] as an eternal deifying and un-deifying. But in that not a high point of value, but a high point of power.”[11] The “new gods” receive their justification, their existence, and their meaning from the sole will to power, of which they offer a thousand indefinitely rejected and renascent faces, a thousand idols without twilight because without eternity, if not with repeated births. Henceforth one must ask what still separates them from the “moral God,” since, like him, they ensue from the will to power. Or even, why are certain idols extinguished crepuscularly, whereas others open at dawn? Because, simply, some originate in a more active and affirmative figure of the will to power, and others in a less affirmative, more reactive figure. Between the dead and future “gods” the distinction remains one of degree. From the point of view of the multiform will to power, the “gods,” whatever they may be, remain idols whose validity faithfully reflects the state of the gaze that aims at them and sees in them its own affirmation or infirmity. Both on the face of the “moral God” and on that of the “new gods,” only the will to power shows itself. It alone speaks, in the dithyramb of the “gods” that live as in the silence of the “gods” that are dead.

And so we understand why we manage so poorly to keep silent before that which we cannot express in a statement. What Wittgenstein indicates by the term of das Mystische[12]we never have in view for itself, precisely because we always aim at it within our own aim. Nobody demonstrates this better than Nietzsche, who, as by a phenomenological reduction avant la lettre, genealogically leads the “gods”—all, without exception—back to the will to power. Now this will to power speaks and produces, even if das Mystische appears “dead” since the will to power indeed suffices as well to speak and to produce it. That is, the “gods” can always be expressed, as genealogically recognized idols of the will to power. We never will have to keep silent before that which we cannot say—because we never will have anything to express other than idols of the will to power. Nothing is to be said but the will to power, outside of which nothing is, not even the nothing, since becoming itself passes, like being, to the will to power: “Recapitulation: to impose upon becoming the character of Being—that is the supreme will to power.”[13] Hence we never will keep silent, occupied with producing and expressing the thousand and one idols at which the will to power, within and outside of us, will aim as so many goals. Hence, not keeping silent, we will not point out, even by a respectful silence, an absolute pole—absolved from the will to power. Hence, by not keeping silent, by covering it with our busy chattering, we silence that which silence alone, possibly, could have honored—by attempting precisely not to say it, or even to aim at it. Either to silence silence, by dint of words busied in declaring all the idols and the thousand and one goals, or else to silence oneself in order to let that very thing which silence honors be told.

But if our very silence does not succeed at keeping silent, the fault does not return to some empirical behavior of “a public scoundrel” that the simple measures of an intellectual police would be able to straighten out. Our silence either gives way to an indefinite chattering or no longer manages to honor, but simply passes under silence, because, fundamentally, it belongs, as do all of us, to the domain of nihilism, hence, of the play, finally laid bare, of the will to power. Metaphysics comes to completion in the will to power that does not cease to will itself, as well when it wills “gods” as when it does not will them, and hence which wills only idols of itself, and cannot but will such idols. And in this metaphysical completion, the western destiny of the Being of beings is consummated in its ultimate perfection, since “the innermost essence of Being is the will to power.”[14]

We therefore must risk a question, already often approached, that has continued to appeal to us: in order to withdraw “God” from the idol, must we not undertake to think him—should we still say think?—starting from another instance than the one that reduces him to silence, or covers him over with idolatrous chattering? We identify this instance as the will to power, hence metaphysics in its completion, hence finally as Being itself envisaged as the Being of beings. To free “God” from his quotation marks would require nothing less than to free him from metaphysics, hence from the Being of beings. To free silence from its idolatrous dishonor would require nothing less than to free the word “God” from the Being of beings. But can one think outside of Being? And, in order to escape idolatry and to take away its quotation marks, does it suffice precisely no longer to mark them?

2—The Ontological Impediment[15]

In a sense, no one more than Heidegger has aroused the suspicion that it may be necessary to liberate “God” from the question on/of Being, but that this liberation is also contrary to the conditions of thought. The enormity of our proposition—to liberate “God” from Being—can become tolerable, hence simply envisageable, only if it is first formulated rigorously enough to admit precise reservations and to offer a measurable paradox. Thus must one follow the Heideggerian establishment of the chiasmus between “God” and Being, if only to learn to displace it. For if “God” crosses Being, this crossing itself can be understood in several ways.

The first decision made by Heidegger, and maintained down to the last texts, cuts absolutely between theology and the question of—and even more—the word Being; the first is constituted as such, hence in conformity with its essence, only by excluding the second. Thus, in 1951 in Zurich, where someone asked him, once again, “Is it proper to posit Being and God as identical?” Heidegger responded,

Being and God are not identical and I would never attempt to think the essence of God by means of Being. Some among you perhaps know that I come from theology, that I still guard an old love for it and that I am not without a certain understanding of it. If I were yet to write a theology—to which I sometimes feel inclined—then the word Being would not occur in it. Faith does not need the thought of Being. When faith has recourse to this thought, it is no longer faith. This is what Luther understood. Even within his own church this seems to be forgotten. One could not be more reserved than I before every attempt to employ Being to think theologically in what way God is God. Of Being, there is nothing here to expect. I believe that Being can never be thought as the ground and essence of God, but that nevertheless the experience of God and of his manifestedness, to the extent that the latter can indeed meet man, flashes in the dimension of Being, which in no way signifies that Being might be regarded as a possible predicate for God. On this point one would have to establish completely new distinctions and delimitations.[16]

This complex text joins several theses which it is important not to confuse: (a) the nonidentity of God with Being; (b) the nonpertinence of the word Being in theology; (c) the pertinence of the dimension of Being for experiencing “God.” At this point on our path, we will engage only the second of these theses, which conveys the incompatibility of Being with the theological lexicon. In 1953, at Hofgeismar, Heidegger very clearly confirmed it: “The thinker speaks of the ‘manifestness [Offenbarkeit] of Being’; but ‘Being’ is an untheological word. Because revelation itself determines the manner of manifestness and because theology does not have to prove or interpret ‘Being,’ theology does not have to defend itself before philosophy. . . . The Christian experience is so completely different that it has no need to enter into competition with philosophy. When theology holds fast to the view that philosophy is foolishness, the mystery character of revelation will be much better preserved. Therefore, in the face of a final decision, the ways part.”[17] The caesura clearly appears: thought, here philosophy, concentrates on the open manifestation (Offenbarkeit) of Being, theology is attached to the revelation (Offenbarung) of “God”; the piety of the one is due to the rigor of its questioning, the piety of the other, to the vigor of faith. Not only do they remain “separated by an abyss,”[18] but faith, which alone qualifies theology, confronts philosophy as a “mortal enemy, a Todfeind.”[19] For theology is not limited to distinguishing itself from philosophy; in conformity with the word of Saint Paul, “Has not God distracted [emōranen] the wisdom of the world?” and, with Luther’s authority, Heidegger gives full weight to faith’s apprehension of philosophy as foolishness: “For the original Christian faith, philosophy is foolishness,” and asks modern believers, “Will Christian theology make up its mind to take seriously the word of the apostle and thus also the conception of philosophy as foolishness?”[20] As long as faith is not conscious of its own nature, it misses its own basis, namely, faith alone, and in its turn is distracted; distracted, it attempts to fix itself a new ground in calling for Being—despite the abyss that separates the two—going so far as to claim to elaborate a “Christian philosophy” where, in the best of cases, thought can recognize only a “square circle” or some “wooden iron.”[21] This caesura admits no reconciliation: if theology refuses to look on philosophy as foolishness, then theology, in return, becomes foolishness in the eyes, this time, of philosophy. “Foolishness” here indicates much more than an error, a divergence, a conflict; foolishness indicates the irreducibility of two logics that neither can nor must, in any case, comprehend one another: faith cannot comprehend thought, or thought faith; no third position will ever present itself to reconcile them, to the extent that “in the face of a final decision, the ways part.”[22] Foolishness indicates that the two logics act irreducibly, in solitudes that no mediation can open; or rather, since it depends notably on Being, logic does not cover the field of revelation that the Johannine Logos opens to faith. Nothing less than foolishness separates theology from Being.

This disposition of the disciplines is not sufficient, however, for our initial plan—to liberate “God” from the question of Being. It is not sufficient, first, because Heidegger, in full accord with his intention, does not elaborate the modalities of an authentically theological discourse, since it remains to him, by hypothesis, foreign. A single indication comes to us: the word Being must not intervene in a theological discourse. This indicates a rule that theologians should, if not respect literally, at least consider with care. Next, this disposition does not suffice because the distinction between the disciplines immediately frees up the possibility of a nontheological discourse on “God.” For, if theology does not speak according to Being, and if “God” has been thought nonetheless according to Being, one must immediately deduce that some thoughts of “God” are not the concern of theology. Hence the field of theology does not coincide with that of “God”: “God” can also be the concern of theiology, of knowledge concerning the being par excellence: “First philosophy, qua ontology, is also the theology of what truly is. It should more accurately be called theiology. The science of beings as such is in itself onto-theological.”[23] The addition of an i, which transforms theology into theiology, is not insignificant: the logos henceforth bears, more essentially than on “God”/ho theos, on the instance that alone characterizes it as exemplary, the divine itself/to theion. Beings are now expressed in their Being according to the double dimension of beings in general and of the being par excellence; the latter defines the possibility of a strictly philosophical science of the divine, theiology. It is only a question here of beings in their Being, and not of that which faith offers to authentically Christian theology; an indisputable proof comes to us in that (the) theiology (of onto-theo-logy), in stating “the existence of God” positively, can nevertheless perfectly well blaspheme: “For example, a proof for the existence of God can be constructed by means of the most rigorous formal logic and yet prove nothing, since a god who must permit his existence to be proved in the first place [erst] is ultimately a very ungodly god. The best such proofs of existence can yield is blasphemy.”[24]

To “degrade” the notion of “God,” for example, to that of “highest value” constitutes a “blow” against “God,” inasmuch as it is first “the greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being.”[25] The theiological discourse on “God,” or on any other being par excellence, is the concern of philosophy and more precisely of onto-theo-logy, which characterizes philosophy’s metaphysical turn. Metaphysics, in fact, has no need for the theology of faith in order to state divine names: “God” as ultimate foundation with Leibniz;[26] “God” as “God of morality” with Kant, Fichte, and Nietzsche;[27] “God” finally and above all as causa sui with Descartes, Spinoza, and in the end all of metaphysics.[28] These concepts of “God” arise strictly from metaphysics, according to the sole demand of onto-theo-logy. And in addition, if the thought that wants to “destruct” the ontology of metaphysics attempts to reach “a more divine god,”[29] this quest belongs still and always to the meditation of Being, whose theiology touches beings—without relation to the theology touched by faith. In other words, “God” does not enter into philosophy because, from Christian revelation, he would pass into Greek thought; for this passage itself became possible only inasmuch as, first and foremost, the (Greek) thought of Being is constituted as the thought of the Being of beings according to onto-theo-logy.[30]

Thus, the “abyssal” distinction between philosophy and theology appears otherwise more complex than a simple contraposition: theology does not have at its disposal an exclusive domain to which the undivided domain of philosophy would correspond: in fact philosophy, like theology, also reaches something like “God.” Over the domain of “God,” theiology has as much right, or at least other but indisputable rights, as theology. More than of contraposition, we would have to speak of subordination—unless, with “God,” it should be a question, in both cases, of the same stakes.

Such a question can be taken up in another way. We will ask then, if theology does not have “God” for its exclusive formal object, how, vis-à-vis theiology, can theology be defined? Heidegger gives theology as such a precise and—to our knowledge—never retracted definition: “Theology as the interpretation of the divine word of revelation,” or, which here amounts to the same thing, “interpretation of man’s Being toward God.”[31] Theology therefore does not have to do with “God,” in whatever sense one understands him. It has to do with the fact (Faktum/Positivität) of faith in the Crucified, a fact that only faith receives and conceives: it secures its scientificity only by fixing itself on the positive fact of faith, namely, the relation of the believer to the Crucified. Theology does not elaborate the science of “God,” but “the science of faith,” and only then the science of the object of faith (das Geglaubte), in the strict sense that this object is only elaborated in faith as “believing comportment.”[32] If from the very first, as early as section three, Sein und Zeit privileges the authority of Luther, this nonetheless is not a question of a choice between several possible theologies (against Catholicism, e.g.); it is a question of a philosophical decision. Luther intervenes to demonstrate the gap between theiological knowledge (according to the later nomenclature) of “God” and theological science, which concerns only the relation of faith to the event of faith. Nevertheless, this distinction between sciences would remain strictly epistemological (taking the expression with all its requisite insignificance), if Christian theology had not in fact historically misunderstood its own definition; for it did not cease, in Heidegger’s eyes, to pretend to be a science not of faith and thus only of the believing man and then of the “God” of faith, but indeed a science, by faith, of man and even of “God.” Indeed, one must remark that, more than ten years before Heidegger denounces the confusion between theology and theiology, Sein und Zeit denounces before and above all else the confusion between the (phenomenological) analytic of Dasein and “the anthropology of Christianity and the ancient world,” which, substituting itself for the former, masks its urgency and closes off access to it. “The anthropology of Christian theology, taking with it the ancient definition [namely, of man as animal rationale], arrives at an interpretation of beings, which we call Dasein.”[33] Instead of understanding itself as a “conceptual self-interpretation of believing existence,” as an “interpretation of man’s Being toward God,”[34] theology claims to be an interpretation of being itself, whose ontological dignity prescribes that one name it Dasein. Theology misses its own authentically theological status by usurping, under the apparently inoffensive title of anthropology, the strictly phenomenological (hence philosophical) task of an analytic of Dasein. Theology first loses its way by claiming to treat Dasein as such (schlechthin/überhaupt), and not, as a science of faith, Dasein as believing. In short, one must relativize theology, hence put it back in its place, precisely because it does not keep its place and does not recognize the gap between Dasein as such and Dasein as believing. Theology, through one and the same wrong move, does not recognize the scientific character that faith assures it and prevents, by its displaced anthropology, the analytic of Dasein. Heidegger relativizes the dignity of theology only in the name of the exigencies of what is involved in Dasein, the Being of beings, hence in the name of what he even names, at that time, ontology.[35]

On the basis of Sein und Zeit, and only thus, the lecture Phänomenologie und Theologie, given first in the same year, 1927, at Tübingen, becomes intelligible. In it, a very clearly defined topic opposes philosophy and theology. Philosophy is distinguished from every other science in that, concentrated on the analytic of Dasein, of the being with whose being Being itself is an issue,[36] it constitutes “the science of Being, the ontological science.” On the contrary, theology remains an “ontic science” with the same standing as chemistry or mathematics.[37] There is no paradox in that: theology is elaborated as a positive science precisely because a positum is reserved for it; this positum, this being that becomes a formal object for it, must not lead to confusion: it is not a question of “God” (who is first the concern of theiology) or of man (who as Dasein is the concern of philosophy), but purely and simply of the Christlichkeit, namely, of the faith of man in the event of Christ’s being put to death. But such a “Christianity,” if it affects man, does not allow any anthropology and does not interfere with the analytic of Dasein, and for a fundamental reason: as opposed to other existentials and other Grundbestimmungen, Christianity, if it indeed marks Dasein in a situation of believing existence, nevertheless does not belong to it. Christianity affects Dasein but neither issues from it nor characterizes it: “The essence of faith can formally be sketched as a mode of human existence which, according to its own testimony—itself belonging to this mode of existence—does not arise from Dasein and is not freely temporalized by it, but rather from that which is revealed in and with this mode of existence, from what is believed.” To believe, most certainly, concerns Dasein as a possibility of existence, but, in the capacity of faith, this possibility can come to it only from an instance other than itself as Dasein: “the Dasein which is touched by it does not itself have mastery of it (von sich aus nicht mächtig).”[38] Theology studies that which only occurs to Dasein in a manner not fitted to Dasein, since by definition the fact of faith is measured by what the believer believes. In other words, nothing daseinsmässig intervenes in the field of theology. Hence it follows that each concept, in order to appear authentically theological, must measure its essential disparity with the “pre-Christian Dasein,”[39] which assures the strictly ontological “correction” of the ontic addition that faith carries out in it.[40] Faith introduces a “way”[41] of Dasein that can appear only with the measure of the disparity that its believing variant imposes on Dasein; hence by reference to the ontological analytic of Dasein. Theology, thus justified as the ontic science of “Christianity” and of believing existence, falls outside of the analytic of Dasein. The phenomenological reduction of man to Dasein undertaken by Sein und Zeit excludes theology as much as all the other ontic sciences—it excludes theology even more, for none has attempted as powerfully as theology to dispense with such an analytic through the efforts of anthropology. Theology must renounce determining Dasein and, on the contrary, let itself be “corrected” by its neutrality. Neutrality means the analytic of Dasein has nothing to do with something like faith or, especially, “God.” In a word, Dasein exists—precisely because it ex-sists—without “God”: “Philosophical research is and remains an atheism,” “The existentiell involvement of fundamental ontology brings with it the semblance of an extremely individualistic, radical atheism.”[42] The invariant of Dasein appears more essential to man than the ontic variant introduced by faith. Man can eventually become a believer only inasmuch as he exists first as Dasein.

To liberate theology from the word Being now assumes a precise meaning: it is not in any way a question of unbinding theology from Dasein but, on the contrary, of according theology a proper domain—faith—only on condition of submitting it to an ontological “correction.” Theology distances itself from Being neither more nor less than it distinguishes itself, like the other ontic sciences, from Dasein. To be sure, it must not employ the word Being but by default, not by excess: theology refers to something greater than itself, to the existential analytic of Dasein, and later, to the thought of Seyn. The theology of faith must avoid saying the word Being because Being expresses itself more essentially than theology can ever glimpse; and for this very reason every theology remains subject to the question of Being, as every ontic variant of Dasein refers back to bare Dasein itself.[43]

In assigning ourselves the task of liberating “God” from the question of/on Being, we at first believed that we found, following the tracks left by Heidegger, our journey’s path. We now glimpse that this is not the case; the situation is defined on the contrary by two relativizations: (a) In metaphysics, “God,” in the capacity of being par excellence, is the concern of a theiology inscribed in the onto-theo-logy of metaphysics; to the extent that metaphysics in a certain way puts the Being of beings into operation, “God” in metaphysics is the concern of Being; and this without exception. The intervention of the Christian “God” in the concepts of metaphysics constitutes but one particular case, on the whole not very determining, of onto-theo-logy. Before such an inclusion of “God” in Being, can one turn, by a reflex characterized, to simplify, as Lutheran (but also illustrated by Pascal or Barth), toward a “God of faith,” exempt from metaphysical determination? (b) In this second hypothesis, theology appears as an ontic science of faith, whose perfect independence remains exactly ontic, and which, in that very measure, must be subject to the ontological “correction” of Dasein, of which it offers, in its own way, only a variant. We see here the independence most certainly of faith and of its theology, but ontic independence, which implies an irreducible ontological dependence. Hence the theology of faith falls within the domain of Dasein and, directly through it, of Being, as the “God” of metaphysics falls within the domain of onto-theo-logy and hence indirectly through it of Being. It seems that the question of “God” never suffered as radical a reduction to the first question of Being as in the phenomenological enterprise of Heidegger.

Does it remain possible to envisage a third route, where the question concerning “God” would be freed from the question of Being? One could indeed argue in this way: the faith of believing man certainly refers, phenomenologically, back to Dasein, but its intention aims at a term foreign to Dasein; even more, the undetermined term of that aim cannot be reduced to what metaphysics apprehends of it, a causa sui; hence, in the capacity of a pure possibility for the believing aim, it is necessary to envisage another name of “God.” Heidegger actually does not dismiss this third route—or, at least, he does not dismiss it totally. But he envisages it according to an appreciably different apparatus: a “God” other than the causa sui can and even must be envisaged; but to envisage, if the term must have a phenomenological meaning, implies an aim, and hence an aim of Dasein. This aim cannot be defined by faith, which remains a factical and ontic determination of Dasein; it therefore must be understood on the basis of Dasein as such, as the being in which its being, or rather Being itself, is an issue. Consequently, the “more divine god” can be envisaged only within the limit of an aim that determines it in advance as a being, elaborated according to the “Being of the gods, Seyn der Götter. “[44] That which, whatever it may be, will (would) respond to the aim of “God” will (would) be “God” only on the condition of being: “for the god/‘God’ himself also is—if he is—a being and stands as a being in Being, in the latter’s essence, which brings itself disclosingly to pass out of the worlding of the world, auch der Gott ist, wenn er ist, ein Seiender.”[45] Every nonmetaphysical possibility of “God” finds itself governed from the start by the thesis (hypothesis, impediment [hypothèque]?) of Being that will accommodate it only as a being. If there must be a “God” outside of metaphysics, this could be only if he is—in the capacity of a being elaborated in its being, hence according to Being. Being offers in advance the screen on which any “God” that would be constituted would be projected and would appear—since, by definition, to be constituted signifies to be constituted as a being. To be constituted as being of/in Being, as one surrenders to—literally becomes “the divine prisoner” of—Being? Of course, it seems possible to attenuate this overly violent conclusion by all the concessions and kindness of the world; but this is only the kindness precisely of the world, of the Fourfold where the world worlds, between Earth and Sky, the mortals and the divinities. One must still decide whether the worldliness of the world has the right and dignity to take in from among the divinities, gods, or however one would like to name them, something like “God,” or more exactly that which must lose the quotation marks of “God” in order to reveal itself, without condition, antecedent, or genealogy, as that which iconistically crosses the rights of the absolute, Gd? Whence comes the decision that Gd should have to be, like a being that Being manifests, that is manifested according to Being? How is it that the gap between manifestation (Offenbarkeit) and revelation (Offenbarung), explicitly repeated and traversed, is found to be forgotten and erased, so as to conclude that what determines the one—manifestedness of beings according to the Openness of Being—must necessarily determine revelation as well? In the end, is it self-evident that biblical revelation transgresses neither beings in what they reveal nor Being in the manner [guise] of its revelation? Who then decides that the mode of revelation, about which the Bible emphasizes that it speaks polumerōs kai polutropōs, “in many refrains, in many different ways” (Heb. 1:1), should have to sacrifice, as a retainer fee, to Being? According to Heidegger’s very discourse, the Fourfold defines the world and its worlding. What then of the event that is called Gd, since it claims not to belong to this world (John 18:36), and asks those who believe to “deal with this world as though they had no dealings with it [khrōmenoi ton kosmon hōs mē katakhrōmenoi]. For the figure of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31)? In other words, if, by an anhypothetical hypothesis that we admit absolutely, the question of Being is determined only in relation to itself, namely, according to the claim that Being exerts over Dasein and that defines at the start every world that would be constituted as such, must one not infer also, according to the same rigor, that that which, by hypothesis, does not belong to the world and gives itself as such, is not the concern of Being? Can one not uphold the radical irreducibility to the Anspruch des Seins of what Heidegger himself does not hesitate strangely—to name, in parallel, the Anspruch des Vaters in Christus,[46] the claim that the Father, in Christ, exerts on man, whose designation as Dasein henceforth becomes worthy of question? Or again, can one have done with the specificity of faith, acknowledged, moreover, by imposing on it a purely ontic status, as if it were self-evident that the phenomenological enterprise of an analytic of Dasein did not admit, by its very reduction, any exterior and definitively other instance? These questions here remain, for us, questions, and do not mask disguised affirmations. However, a question remains a question, even if it does not come to us from Being. For faith, far from annihilating questions through the idiotic prolepsis of a blunt certitude (as many people, and not the least among them, imagine), can open certain abysses that all the meditation of the world would not be able even to glimpse. These interrogations could be gathered into a topical question, modest in appearance: does the name of the Gd, who is crossed because he is crucified, belong to the domain of Being? We are not at all speaking of “God” in general, or thought on the basis of the divine, hence also of the Fourfold. We are speaking of the Gd who is crossed by a cross because he reveals himself by his placement on a cross, the Gd revealed by, in, and as the Christ; in other words, the Gd of a rigorously Christian theology. But—and we must allow ourselves to be amazed by this—for Heidegger, even this Gd remains enough a “God” to take his name from Being: “in Christian theology, we define God, the summum ens qua summum bonum, as the highest value.”[47] This statement is at the very least doubly amazing. First, it is amazing in that the nomination of “God” as ens supremum is attributed expressly to Christian theology and not to the theiology of onto-theo-logy, as would have seemed more suitable; to invoke a lapsus here would amount to underestimating in an unworthy manner the steadiness of Heidegger’s writing. And if by chance it were necessary nevertheless to concede a lapsus, the secret slipping of thought thus betrayed would merit as much attention as the explicitness of a written letter; in fact, Christian theology passes under the yoke of the question of Being. But this statement is also amazing in a second way. The two terms here evoked, summum ens and summum bonum, refer, no doubt intentionally, to the problem of divine names, and even more precisely, to the debate over the primacy, among them, of the ens or of the bonum. In other words, Heidegger takes a position, in a debate that can be historically situated, in favor of the ens as the first divine name: the good intervenes now only as a manner of beingness, which alone sets forth the first name of “God.” In a sense, everything happens as if the primacy of the question of Being (Heidegger) met, without confusion and with the full disparity that separates a thought that recedes from metaphysics from a thought that remains in it, the primacy of the ens over every other divine name (Saint Thomas). Once again, it is not a question of establishing a spurious agreement—a game, we know, too often attempted, and always in vain—but of noting the analogy between two relations of anteriority: to subject the question of “God” first to the question of Being, to subject the naming of “God” to the primacy of the ens. In summarily retracing the Thomistic decision, we would have not only to determine how the ens acts among the divine names, or how its primacy sets aside other means of access to “God,” but perhaps also to anticipate how, by analogy, the Heideggerian decision may not be self-evident and, even, how to open up another side, if not a beyond: that Gd does not express himself first according to and starting from Being.

3—Being or Else (The Good)

The principal denomination of Gd as and by Being cannot—let us point out the evidence straightaway—be justified by pure and simple recourse to the verse from Exodus 3:14. Indeed, only one’s conceptual weakness permits the attribution to the “metaphysic of Exodus” of the dignity and the merit of a radical innovation. Otherwise, Saint Thomas would have stated only the common, directly biblical thesis—which, as much from the point of view of Gilson as from any other, could not be defended. May a few remarks therefore suffice here to mark the disparity between the biblical text and the “metaphysic of Exodus.” (a) The formula from the Hebrew, ehyeh asher ehyeh, can be understood as a positive statement, of the type, “I am the one who is,” but doubtless first as a refusal to specify further of what “Being” it is a question, in the way of a statement of the type, “I am who I am”;[48] thus did Gilson himself recognize that, understood literally, Exodus 3:14 offers “the only formula that says absolutely nothing and that says absolutely everything.”[49] (b) Supposing that this formula offers a positive statement and does not deny the possibility and legitimacy of any statement concerning Gd, one would still have to determine under what formulation one can understand it. It can be admitted that, as such, the Hebrew verb hayah does not suffice to introduce a concept of “Being”; historically, the transition from the biblical register to conceptual debate between philosophers and theologians depends on the translation of the Septuagint: egō eimi ho ōn. This translation substitutes a participle, ho ōn, for a conjugated form, a present persistence for something unaccomplished; in short, an action can become an attribute, even a name. This modification remains in the background of the Latin formula Sum qui sum, as soon as it is interpreted in view of the ipsum esse or of the idipsum esse (from Saint Augustine on).[50] (c) Even when the Greek Fathers rely on Exodus 3:14 to determine categorically the divinity of the Word, for example, and even though they invoke it to define a name for Gd, they never infer thereby that this name, ho ōn, might define the very essence of God as such. Precisely because ho ōn returns to the Son, it could not in any way determine the triune divinity, which therefore exceeds Being.[51] (d) Finally, supposing that the preliminary difficulties have found a group of satisfying and coherent solutions, one would still have to define whether the name indirectly implied by Exodus 3:14 inevitably precedes other names, like the one that 1 John 4:8 insinuates, ho theos agapē estin, “God is love,” or we would have to gloss: what allows that “God” should be Gd consists, more radically than in being, in loving. In short, in supposing that Exodus 3:14 delivers one of the divine names, we still would have to determine whether it is a question of the first. No exegesis, no philological fact, no objective inquiry could accomplish or justify this step; only a theological decision could do so and retrospectively rely on literary arguments. It was Saint Thomas who made this decision in full knowledge of the facts, since he did it in a debate with the Treatise on Divine Names by Denys. Undoubtedly, in face of the claim of the ens/esse to the title of first divine name, agape as such is not encountered, but only the good, bonum/agathon; but precisely, specifies Denys, Gd himself “charms” all beings at once by “goodness, charity and desire, agathotēti kai agapēsei kai erōti,” since he loves “with a beautiful and good eros of all things, by the hyperbole of desiring goodness, erōtikē”[52]: the good inspires and fosters agape (as also erōs). We therefore are justified in reading, in the debate between the ens and the good, in a sense, the debate between the ens and agape, which crops up therein.

When Saint Thomas postulates that “the good does not add anything to being [the ens] either really or conceptually, nec re nec ratione,” he does not limit himself to underscoring the largely admitted reversibility of transcendentals, which he later will state by emphasizing that “the goodness of God is not something added to his substance, but his very substance is his goodness.”[53] He states a thesis that is directly opposed to the anteriority, more traditionally accepted in Christian theology, of the good over the ens. For Saint Bonaventure still, the last instance that permits a contemplation of Gd is contained in goodness, whereas the ens/esse offers only the next-to-last step of speakable elevation. “After considering the essential attributes of God, the eye of our intelligence should be raised to look upon the most blessed Trinity, so that the second Cherub may be placed alongside the first [namely, in order to frame the Ark of the Covenant]. Just as being [ipsum esse] is the root principle of viewing the essential attributes, and the name through which all the others become known, so the good itself [ipsum bonum] is the principal foundation for contemplating the emanations.” The first of these two names relies on the word of Moses and was privileged by John of Damascus, whereas the second relies on the Trinitarian word (Matt. 28:19) of Christ; and “Dionysius, following Christ, says that the Good is God’s primary name.”[54] In going back from id quo nihil majus cogitari potest to id quo nihil melius cogitari potest, Saint Bonaventure indeed inevitably came upon Denys and the thesis that Saint Thomas confronts. Denys posits that Gd, namely, that which can be aimed at only by the function (and not the category) of the “Requisite (aitia) of all things,” is deployed as the “principle of beings whence issues, as well as all beings whatsoever, Being itself, arkhē aph’ēs kai auto to einai.” Gd gives Being to beings only because he precedes not only these beings, but also the gift that he delivers to them—to be. In this way the precedence of Being over beings itself refers to the precedence of the gift over Being, hence finally of the one who delivers the gift over Being. That one, the Requisite, “Being returns to him, but he does not return to Being; Being is found in him, but he is not found in Being; he maintains Being, but Being does not maintain him.”[55] Being, auto to einai, is only uncovered in being dispensed by a gift; the gift, which Being itself thus requires, is accomplished only in allowing the disclosure in it of the gesture of a giving as much imprescriptible as indescribable, which receives the name, in praise, of goodness. More than for the good, Denys praises Gd for the (de-) nomination of goodness: the good that gives and gives itself in fact. The ultimate nomination recedes from Being to goodness, whose denomination opens a properly unconditioned field to the Requisite, over all and even over nothing: “for the divine denomination of the good manifests all the processions of the Requisite of all things, and extends as much to beings as to non-beings, eis ta onta kai eis ta ouk onta.”[56] It is this text that Saint Thomas had to confront and bypass when he attempted to establish that the name taken from Exodus 3:14, “who is, the one who is,” stands as “the most proper name of God”; his reasoning is stated thus: this name “does not signify form, but simply being itself [ipsum esse]. Hence since the being of God is His essence itself [esse Dei sit ipsa ejus essentia], which can be said of no other . . . , it is clear that among other names this one specially nominates God [hoc maxime proprie nominat Deum ].”[57] The whole question consists precisely in determining whether a name can be suitable “maxime proprie” to Gd, if Gd can have an essence, and (only) finally if this “essence” can be fixed in the ipsum esse/actus essendi. For Denys deploys the primacy of goodness over auto to einai, over the ipsum esse with particular rigor. To begin with, he does not pretend that goodness constitutes the proper name of the Requisite, but that in the apprehension of goodness the dimension is cleared where the very possibility of a categorical statement concerning Gd ceases to be valid, and where the reversal of denomination into praise becomes inevitable. To praise the Requisite as such, hence as goodness, amounts to opening distance. Distance neither asks nor tolerates that one fill it but that one traverse it, in an infinite praise that feeds on the impossibility or, better, the impropriety of the category. The first praise, the name of goodness, therefore does not offer any “most proper name” and decidedly abolishes every conceptual idol of “God” in favor of the luminous darkness where Gd manifests (and not masks) himself, in short, where he gives himself to be envisaged by us.

Next, since the Requisite recedes from Being to goodness, it also must advance beyond beings to nonbeings. Goodness advances to meet nonbeings. Denys insists without reservation on this decisive point, in clearly judging the audacity of his thesis: “And if the good surpasses all beings . . . one must say also, if one might dare, that non-being itself also, kai auto to mē on, tends towards the good beyond all beings”; and further on: “The discourse must dare even to say that non-being also, kai to mē on, participates in the beautiful and the good [namely, kalon kai agathon],” “or, to be brief, all beings come from the beautiful and the good, and all non-beings reside beyond every essence in the beautiful and the good.”[58] In order to praise Gd as being Being itself, it is necessary that whoever thus refers to the Requisite should petition [requière] him starting from Being, hence that he be; only beings can aim at Gd according to and as auto to einai. That which is not cannot, by definition, enter into this form of praise. But in order to praise Gd as beautiful and good, as goodness, the petitioner [le requérant] has no need, if only to be, since the absence of all perfection, even ontic, already designates the place and the instance of a radical desire. The less the nothing has of perfection, the more it will desire perfection. At the extreme, in order to desire, literally less than nothing is required: the less than nothing itself [59] can already petition the Requisite under the denomination of goodness, can praise him as goodness. Ontology concerns being, and if it touches upon nonbeing, this is in view of comprehending it in and as possible being. The discourse of praise is rightfully implemented with nonbeing as such, since its radical imperfection itself offers the motivating forces of desire with a view toward goodness. The less than nothing aims at the Requisite through its absolute desire itself; the specificity of that aim is attested by the specificity of the denomination by which the less than nothing praises the Requisite: as the beautiful and good, and not as Being itself—denomination characterized by another praise and another situation, that of beings (and, for ontology, possible and assimilated ones). Nonbeings as such praise the Requisite by an absolutely singular praise, irreducible to that employed, to give one example among others, by beings.

The modern commentaries (and Saint Thomas) here advance the same reductionist interpretation: by mē on, nonbeing, and ouk onta, nonbeings, Denys would mean only matter without form, the privation of form, and in no way absolute non-Being.[60] Supposing that such should be the implicit doctrine of the Dionysian corpus, one still would have to wonder why Denys chose the “Platonic” terminology, and not another that would have permitted him to avoid having to envisage the hypothesis—delicate, to say the least—of mē on/ouk onta, instead of limiting himself to the marked off-field of onta. And conversely, one would have to wonder why Saint Thomas holds so firmly to limiting the theological question to the field of esse/entia. Be that as it may, the conceptual seriousness of this lexicon is attested by its consequence: the Dionysian nonbeings are no more (and, let us concede, no less) reducible to matter without form than the praise that they proffer—Gd as goodness—can be confused with the praise that beings proffer—Gd as Being itself. If with the Dionysian nonbeings and non-Being it were only a question of a lexical imprecision, Saint Thomas doubtless would have experienced neither such an interest nor such a difficulty in refuting the Dionysian primacy of the good over Being. Therefore, it is to an examination of this refutation that we now must commit the rigor of the debate.

On at least two occasions Saint Thomas encounters the Dionysian thesis of the primacy, among the divine names, of the good over the ens, first in the Commentary on the Sentences (I, d.8, q.1), and then in the Summa Theologica (I, q.5). The basic argumentation does not vary. Denys prefers the good because it carries beyond beings even to nonbeings. But this primacy over the ens comes only from the fact that the good “adds” the consideration of the cause, or rather takes “God” into view not only as efficient cause (which makes him a creator of beings) but as final cause, hence as indeed desirable also by what is not at all. The good therefore is limited to “adding”[61] the consideration of the final cause to that of the efficient cause, hence of the ens. This reasoning, obviously, proves nothing. First, it justifies neither the redistribution of the dilemma between the ens and the good according to the four Aristotelian “causes” nor the strange assimilation of the ens to efficiency, nor finally the untenable reduction of the Aitia, of the requisite of goodness, of the Dionysian beautiful and good, to the narrow final cause. But these insufficiencies matter little before an entirely different incoherence: if the consideration of finality is limited to a second, if not secondary, addition made to the ens, whose primacy would appear only in setting aside that addition, how is it to be understood that an addition might thus be added to a primacy? Either the good adds, and one must concede primacy to it; or it adds nothing, and one must establish positively the primacy of the ens. In short, if the ens arises first, this primacy cannot then be obtained by a subtraction.

Thus, Saint Thomas, constrained by the necessity of the thing itself, doubles the first—and feeble—argumentation by a positive and unconditioned justification of the primacy of the ens over the good. Why, indeed, does the ens retain its primacy—of which, in fact, it is robbed by consideration of the good finality? Under what relation does the ens overturn the unconditioned anteriority of goodness that even nonbeings praise? Because a new point of view enters into play. It is a point of view whose newness consists precisely in the fact that it designates a particular point starting from which one’s view is engaged. The primacy of goodness depended on the praise of the Requisite by all the petitioners, even those who are not; whereby goodness transgressed Being by default—the default of the less than nothing—as also by excess—the hyperbole of the Requisite—according to a wonderful commerce of extremes, in defiance of ordinary Being as of all representation. For here, communion exceeds in charity what Being delimits as the common denominator, since no representation, finite by definition, could reach the steps of the Requisite or the abysses of its last condescensions. Thus, in order to establish—by restriction—a situation for the ens and for the community that it delineates, one is obliged to assure it a site, hence a point of view. In fact, Saint Thomas does not hesitate to establish the primacy of the ens by the primacy of a point of view that limits one’s view to the measurements of the ens; the point of view: only a certain taking-into-view permits plotting the position of the ens, making the ens a solid point. One therefore will proceed in this way: “In the simple and absolute sense, the ens is anterior to the others [namely, transcendentals: good, one, true]. The reason for this is that the ens finds itself comprehended in their comprehension, and not reciprocally. For the first term that falls within the imagination of understanding is the ens, without which the understanding can apprehend nothing [primum enim quod cadit in imaginatione intellectus est ens, sine quo nihil potest apprehendi ab intellectu].” Or again: “Now the first thing conceived by the intellect is being [the ens]; because everything is knowable only inasmuch as it is in actuality. Hence being [the ens] is the proper object of the intellect, and is primarily intelligible [primo in conceptione intellectus cadit, proprium objectum intellectus et sic . . . primum intelligibile].”[62] Here the point of departure, for Saint Thomas (and not for Duns Scotus alone) remains Avicenna: “being [the ens] is what is first conceived by the intellect, as Avicenna says.”[63] The ens appears first, at least on condition that one takes the point of view of human understanding; the primacy of the ens depends on the primacy of a conception of the understanding and of the mind of man. The primacy of the ens has nothing absolute or unconditional about it; it relies on another primacy, which remains discreetly in the background. But it is this second primacy that one must question, since it alone gives its domination to the ens, to the detriment of the good (and of the Dionysian tradition).

In fact, to define the ens as an objectum of human understanding seems necessarily to imply interpreting it also starting from representation; indeed, Saint Thomas explicitly introduces the conception, the apprehension, and the imagination of understanding. Hence of man: the ens is presented as the first counterpart that man might apprehend as his object. As we intend to remain strictly theological in our remarks, we will not insist here on the difficulty and the importance of this submission of the ens to the essence and to the marvels of representation. But, theologically, a question immediately presents itself. If the ens is defined as the object first apprehended by the human mind, before every other specification, independent of every measure other than that of human understanding, how can the ens support the effort and the deviation of an analogy? From this position, must one not, on the contrary, draw the Scotist conclusion that the ens, result of a concept because first of a human (in via) apprehension, remains univocal for “God” as well as for all other beings; would the nomination of God as such consequently be the concern of an enterprise other than the discourse of the ens? The legendary opposition of the Thomistic school(s) and the Scotist school prohibits, of course, proceeding with such a question. But we would like to bring up an unavoidable strangeness: the Thomistic apprehension of Gd as ipsum esse, hence his denomination starting from the ens, intervenes, in the order of reasons, before the doctrine of divine names, hence of analogy, is composed. Indeed, the endless difficulties raised by the formulation after the fact of a “Thomistic doctrine of analogy” interferes more than a little with this imbalance. At the risk of solidifying it, we will resume it thus: as, by definition and intention, every doctrine of divine names strives to “destruct” (in the Heideggerian sense) the idolatrous primacy of a human point of view supposed to be unavoidable in the principle of the nomination of Gd, as in addition the primacy of the ens over the other possible divine names rests on the primacy of human conception, Saint Thomas attempted—consciously or not, it matters little—to abstract the ens from the doctrine of divine names. In concrete terms, he inverted the primacy of goodness over Being that Denys acknowledged in his treatise on the Divine Names. From the point of view of the understanding apprehending an object, the ens becomes first. From the point of view of the Requisite that gives itself without limit, goodness remains first. One must choose: if theology proceeds by the apprehension of concepts, as a “science,” then, for it also, the ens will be first, and man’s point of view normative (at least according to the method; but method, in science, decides everything). If theology wills itself to be theological, it will submit all of its concepts, without excepting the ens, to a “destruction” by the doctrine of divine names, at the risk of having to renounce any status as a conceptual “science,” in order, decidedly nonobjectivating, to praise by infinite petitions. Such a choice—by a formidable but exemplary ambiguity—Saint Thomas did not make, the Saint Thomas who pretended to maintain at once a doctrine of divine names and the primacy of the ens as first conception of the human understanding. For our purposes, the historically localizable heritage of this indecision matters little; all that counts is what provokes it: the claim that the ens, although defined starting from a human conception, should be valid as the first name of Gd. This claim does not easily escape the suspicion of idolatry, as soon as the ens, thus referred to Gd, is engendered not only in conceptione intellectus but also in imaginatione intellectus—in the imagination of the understanding, hence in the faculty of forming images, hence idols. For “the imagination forms for itself an [idol] of an absent thing, or even of something never seen [vis imaginativa format sibi aliquod idolum rei absentis, vel etiam numquam visae].”[64] If the imagination can produce the idol that takes the place of the absent, and if the ens falls largely in the conception of imagination, can one not hazard that, according to what Saint Thomas himself freely insinuates, the ens, related to “God” as his first name, indeed could determine him as the ultimate—idol?

The provocation of such a question has nothing gratuitous about it. For it is only after the great confrontation surrounding the ens and goodness and opposing Denys to Saint Thomas that the question (despite Duns Scotus) concerning Being is tied definitively to the question concerning the Gd of Jesus Christ. Henceforth theology will have to place the inclusion of “God” in esse at the center of its work, to the point of “comprehending” “God” in the object of metaphysics (Saurez).[65] The divine certainly did not await Saint Thomas to enter into metaphysics; but it is only with Saint Thomas that the Gd revealed in Jesus Christ under the name of charity finds himself summoned to enter the role of the divine of metaphysics, in assuming esse/ens as his proper name. Henceforth the necessary and sufficient conditions come together so that, with the destiny of the “God of the philosophers and the learned,” the reception of the “God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob” is also at stake. Descartes, deciding all of subsequent metaphysics, will determine that the one who remains for him the Gd of the Christians will be not only the idea of the infinite but also the causa sui. Thus the aporia of the causa sui will be able, through the intermediate stage of the “moral God,” to engender a “death of God,” where the metaphysical idol of “God” is positively accomplished, but where the idolatrous character of this idol is radically dissimulated. This dissimulation in fact is due to the inability of theological understanding, since the ens/esse prevails as divine name, to envisage a properly Christian name of the Gd who is revealed in Jesus Christ—a name anterior to the Being of beings (according to metaphysics), hence also to every thought of Being as such. For a single path can yet open: if “God is charity, agapē” (1 John 4:8), can agapē transgress Being? In other words, can it no longer appear as one of the “ways” of being (even if this being has the name Dasein)? Can it manifest itself without passing through Being, and, if it cannot determine Being as one of its—own—“ways,” can it at least mark its distance from Being? For in order to free God from Being it does not suffice to invoke, by means of a highly suspect and insufficient return to . . . , another divine name, for example, goodness. One still must show concretely how the God who gives himself as agapē thus marks his divergence from Being, hence first from the interplay of beings as such.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. How does Marion work out the notion of “silence”?

2. What does Marion mean by “idol”?

3. How would you describe Marion’s method of defense?

4. What is Marion’s complaint with the Thomistic notion of Being?

5. How does the concept of Dasein inform Marion’s critique?

6. What is the relationship of God and “the good” in Marion’s theology?

7. Why is “the gift” a central aspect of Marion’s argument?

*Excerpted from Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte (Religion and Postmodernism Series), translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Copyright © 1991, University of Chicago Press. Used with permission.

1. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, no. 7, Schriften, 1 (Frankfurt, 1980), 83 [trans. Pears and McGuinness]. And M. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 45 [trans. Stambaugh, 54–55].

2. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians, XV, 1; also see XIX, 1, and To the Magnesians, VIII, 2, as well as, in Die Apostolischen Väter, griechisch und deutsch, ed. Joseph A. Fischer (Darmstadt, 1956), 157, n. 86.

3. Aristotle, Metaphysics A, 3, 984b10 [trans. Barnes, 1557].

4. Origen, On the Song of Songs, P.G. 17, 272a.

5. Denys, Divine Names, I, 3, P.G. 3, 589b. See IV, 22, 724b; Mystical Theology I, 1, 997a; Celestia Heirarchy, XV, 9: “to honor by our silence that which, hidden, surpasses us,” 340b. Likewise Maximus Confessor: “only faith receives these things [the incarnation and its modalities], honoring the Word by one’s silence,” Ambigua, P.G. 91, 1057a.

6. Gregory of Nazianzus, “honoring by a tribute without danger, that of silence,” Letter XCI, P.G. 37, 165a. See Discourse XXVII, 5, and XXXII, 14, P.G. 36, respectively 17b and 189b. On the theme and its difficulty, consult H.-U. von Balthasar, “Wort und Schweigen,” Verbum Caro (Einsiedeln, 1960).

7. See above, chap. 1, secs. 1, 2, and 3.

8. One might consider, for instance, this curious paradox: “I certainly am not unaware of the fact that God is dead since Nietzsche: but I believe in the virtues of an atheistic spiritualism in face of contemporary listlessness and resignation, something like an austere libertinage for a time of catastrophe” (B.-H. Lévy, La barbarie à visage humain [Paris: Grasset, 1977], 225). And to advance “the radical inexistence of the one that he [Jeremiah] calls his Lord” (Le testament de Dieu, [Paris, 1979], 274), without becoming incoherent, one would have otherwise to think further the status of both the existence and the nature of the “Lord” invoked here in so unreligious a manner.

9. Respectively, Beyond Good and Evil, II. sec. 53 [trans. Hollingdale, 62]; Wille zur Macht, sec. 55 = Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Colli-Montinari, 5 [71] 7, VIII, 217 (see secs. 151 and 1035, etc.) [trans. Kaufmann].

10. Respectively, Ecce Homo, “Genealogy of Morals,” then Genealogy of Morals, I, 10 [trans. Kaufmann, 312, 36].

11. Wille zur Macht, sec. 1038 = Nietzsche, Werke, 17 [4] 5, VIII/3, 323; then sec. 639 = [10] 138, VIII/2, 201 and sec. 712 [trans. Kaufmann (modified)].

12. Tractatus logico-philosophicus, 6.44: “Nicht wie die Welt ist, ist das Mystische, sondern dass sie ist” [It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists]: 6.522: “Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies ziegt sich, es ist das Mystische” [“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is called mystical.” Trans. Pears and McGuiness].

13. Wille zur Macht, sec. 617 = Nietzsche, Werke, 7 [154], VIII/1, 32 [trans. Kaufmann (modified)].

14. Wille zur Macht, sec. 693 = Nietzsche, Werke, 14 [8], VIII/3, 52 [trans. Kaufmann].

15. L’Hypothèque Ontologique.—Trans.

16. Séminaire de Zurich, Fr. trans. by D. Saatdjian and F. Fédier, in Po&Sie, 13 (Paris, 1980), 60–61. To be compared with the translation of J. Greisch, in Heidegger et la question de Dieu, 334. Let us cite, for once, the little-known original: “Wenn ich noch eine Theologie schreiben würde, vozu es mich manchmal reizt, dann dürfte in ihr das Wort, ‘Sein’ nicht vorkommen. Der Glaube hat das Denken des Seins nicht nötig. Wenn er das braucht, ist er schon nicht mehr Glaube. Das hat Luther verstanden, sogar in seiner eigenen Kirche scheint man das zu vergessen. Ich denke über das Sein, im Hinblick auf seine Eignung, das Wesen Gottes theologisch zu denken, sehr bescheiden. Mit dem Sein, ist hier nichts anzusichten. Ich glaube, dass das Sein niemals als Grund und Wesen von Gott gedacht werden kann, dass aber gleichwohl die Erfahrung Gottes und seiner Offenbarkeit (sofern sie dem Menschen begegnet) in der Dimension des Seins sich ereignet, was niemals besagt, das Sein könne als mögliche Prädikat für Gott gelten. Hier braucht es ganz neue Unterscheidungen und Abgrenzungen.” Aussprache mit Martin Heidegger an 06/XI/1951, privately issued edition by the Vortragsauschuss der Studentenschaft der Universität Zürich (Zurich, 1952). We thank Mr. Jean Beaufret for having permitted us access to this text [now published in Seminare, G.A., 15 (Frankfurt, 1986), 436–37].

17. Berichte aus der Arbeit der Evangelischen Akademie Hofgeismar, I, 1954 [trans. Hart and Maraldo, 64–65].

18. Nietzsche, II, 132 [trans. Krell, IV, 88].

19. Phänomenologie und Theologie, in Wegmarken, G.A., 9, 66 [trans. Hart and Maraldo, 20].

20. On philosophy as “foolishness” before God, Einführung in die Metaphysik, G.A., 40, 9 [trans. Manheim, 7], and Wegmarken, G.A., 9, 379 [trans. Kaufmann in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 276].

21. See Nietzsche, II, 132 [trans. Krell, IV, 88]; Einführung, loc. cit. One might consult in this regard J. Beaufret, “La philosophie chrétienne,” in Dialogue avec Heidegger, 2 (Paris, 1973), “Sur la philosophie chrétienne,” in Etienne Gilson et nous: la philosophie et son histoire (Paris, 1980), as well as “Heidegger et la théologie,” in Heidegger et la question de Dieu. See finally J.-F. Courtine, “Gilson et Heidegger,” also in Etienne Gilson et Nous.

22. Berichte aus der Arbeit der Evangelischen Akademie Hofgeismer, 1, [trans. Hart and Maraldo, 65].

23. Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung. In Holzwege, G.A., 5. 19 S, see 186–87. [trans. Dove, 135; see also 145–48].

24. Nietzsche, 366 [trans. Krell, II, 106].

25. Respectively, Holzwege, G.A., 5, 260 [trans. Lovitt in The Question Concerning Technology, 105], then Über den “Humanismus,” in Wegmarken, G.A., 9 349 [trans. Krell, 228].

26. Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 53, 55, etc.

27. Nietzsche, 251, 321, 333, etc. [trans. Krell, I, 217; II, 66, 77].

28. Identität und Differenz, 51, 64, 65 [trans. Stambaugh, 60, 72]; see, to a lesser degree, Die Frage nach der Technik, Vorträge und Aufsätze, I, 26 [trans. Lovitt, 26].

29. Nietzsche, 324: “ob der Gott göttlicher ist in der Frage nach ihm oder dann, wenn er gewiss ist . . .” [“whether the god possesses more divinity in the question concerning him or in the situation where we are sure of him”; trans. Krell, II, 68].

30. See Identität und Differenz, 46–47 [trans. Stambaugh, 56].

31. Respectively, Holzwege, G.A., 5, 81, Eng. [trans. Lovitt in The Question Concerning Technology, 122]; then Sein und Zeit, sec. 3, 10 [trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, 30]. See: “Glaubens, dessen Auslegung die Theologie sein sollte,” Holzwege, 203 = G.A., 5, 220 [“faith, whose interpretation theology is said to be”; trans. Lovitt, 64], and the basic definition given in 1927 by Phänomenologie und Theologie, “Theologie ist die Wissenschaft des Glaubens,” Wegmarken, G.A. 9, 55f. [“Theology is the science of faith”: trans. Hart and Maraldo in Piety of Thinking, 11].

32. Phänomenologie und Theologie, Wegmarken, G.A., 9, 55 [trans. Hart and Maraldo, 11–12].

33. Sein und Zeit, sec. 10, respectively 48 [trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, 74] and 48–49 [trans., 74 (modified)]. See again sec. 40, An. 1, 190 [trans., 234–35], where the theological description of anxiety, because it remains ontic, does not anticipate the ontological analytic of Dasein but retards it by pretending to substitute itself for it.

34. Respectively, Phänomenologie und Theologie, G.A., 9, 56 [trans. Hart and Maraldo, 12; this version has “faith’s conceptual interpretation of itself”] and Sein und Zeit, sec. 3, 10 [trans., 30].

35. Sein und Zeit, sec. 7, 37 [trans., 61].

36. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik [1928], G.A., 26, 20 [trans. Heim, 16], which happily radicalizes the formulas of Sein und Zeit, sec. 4.

37. Phänomenologie und Theologie, loc. cit., 48 and 49 [trans. 6]. On the theological situation of this text, see Y. de Andia, “Réflexions sur les rapports de la philosophie et de la théologie à partir de deux textes de Martin Heidegger,” in Mélanges de Sciences Religieuses, 1975, 32/3, and 1976, 33/3.

38. Phänomenologie und Theologie, loc. cit., 52 [trans., 9 (modified)] and 53 [trans. 10 (modified)]. Heidegger’s emphasis. It is indeed a question of separating the “possibilities of existence,” of which Dasein admits the mastery (aus sich . . . mächtig), from those of which it remains the slave (Knecht) by faith. Would the domain of the ontological be defined, here, at least, by mastery? Of what mastery would it be a question? By what dignity would faith find itself implicitly invested in order to oppose itself thereto?

39. Ibid., 63 [trans., 18 (modified)].

40. Ibid., 64–65 [trans. 19]. Correction must be understood neither as a “punishment” nor as a redress but as a putting into relation with fixed coordinates, which permit a localization, a pinpointing, in short the measure of a drift.

41. Faith as “way, mode, Weise” of Dasein; ibid., 55, 61, 68, as its believing variant [trans. 12, 17, 22].

42. Respectively, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs [1925], G.A., 20, 109–10 [trans. Kisiel, 79–80] and Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik [1928], G.A., 26, 177 [trans. Heim, 140]. No doubt, it is only a question, according to certain texts, of an appearance of atheism; but in phenomenology, appearance always manifests that which appears, even if it does not always correspond strictly with it. That atheism here should be “methodical” only renders it more rigorous: it refers in fact to the “disconnection” of God in the phenomenological reduction (Husserl, Ideen I, sec. 58) and is the concern of radical neutrality of Dasein (commentary by E. Levinas, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger [Paris, 1949, 1974], 167, 171, etc.). See above, chap. 2, nn. 27 and 28; and below, chap. 4, n. 1.

43. This ambiguity could explain how Christian theology had been able, biographically, to serve as a path toward that which remains the most foreign to it. See Unterwegs zur Sprache, 96 [trans. Hertz, 13–14], and the text from 1951, Fr. trans. in Po&sie 13, cited n. 16 above.

44. “Seyn der Götter,” Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” WS 1934/35, G.A. 39, pp. 271, 278. One indeed must read “Seyn” as the sign of a non-metaphysical thought of Being, otherwise written as Sein; this graphic change testifies to a decisive change in direction carried out in the first courses on Hölderlin.

45. Die Technik und die Kehre, 45 [trans. Lovitt in The Question Concerning Technology, 47 (modified)]; see chap. 2, n. 31 above.

46. Über den “Humanismus,” in Wegmarken, G.A., 9, pp. 319–20 [trans. Krell 200].

47. Holzwege, 209 = G.A., 5, 227 [trans. Lovitt in The Question Concerning Technology, 70–71]. The reduction of every bonum to agathon, hence to the on is even more developed in Nietzsche, II, 225 [trans. Krell, IV, pp. 168–69].

48. See A. Caquot, “Les énigmes d’un hémistiche biblique,” in Dieu et l’être. Exégèse d’Exode 3:14, et de Coran 20, 11–24 (Paris, 1978), 20, 21; and H. Cazelles, “Pour une exégèse de Ex. 3:14,” ibid., 31–32. It is known that the translation of the LXX deviates from literalness enough to make possible that of Aquila: “esomai ho esomai.”

49. L’athéisme difficile (Paris, 1979), 59. To be compared with the commentary of Boutang: “this ‘Being’ . . . finds itself withdrawn, separated, by the divine declaration. Revelation is the institution of a secret”; Ontologie du Secret (Paris, 1973), 458. Concerning the work by Saint Thomas on Exodus 3:14, the study of E. Zum Brunn, “La métaphysique de l’Exode’ selon saint Thomas d’Aquin” in Dieu et l’être, 245–69, indeed marks the innovative break in relation to the Fathers.

50. E. Zum Brunn, “L’exégèse augustinienne de ‘Ego sum qui sum’ et la ‘métaphysique de l’Exode,’” in Dieu et l’être, 141–64. The recent study of D. Dubarle, “Essai sur l’ontologie théologale de saint Augustin,” Recherches augustiniennes, XVI (Paris, 1981), as strong and convincing as it remains, relies no doubt on a solution that is a little too easy by dint of elegance—the distinction between the esse commune (of “Parmenidean” origin) and the esse divinum (authentically theological, Augustinian and soon Thomistic); but this very distinction remains to be established. We more willingly subscribe to the argument of J. S. O’Leary, “Dieu-Esprit et Dieu-substance chez Augustin,” Recherches de Sciences Religieuses (July 1981), 69/3, if Augustinian thought there finds itself more explicitly taken up according to the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics.

51. There is an excellent clarification by M. Harl, “Citations et commentaires d’Exode 3:14 chez les Pères grecs des quatres premiers siècles,” in Dieu et l’être, 87–108, which shows in particular how ho ōn intervenes, in the polemics against Eunomium, to challenge every pretension to giving the name of God, far from ever stating it (102, 108). In the end, one would have to grant J. Derrida’s so incisive remark: “We can even go further: as a linguistic statement ‘I am he who am’ is the admission of a mortal”; La voix et le phénomène (Paris, 1967), 61 [trans. by Allison, 54].

52. On the link between the agathon/agathotēs and agapē/erōs, see Denys, Divine Names, IV, 7: “This very Good is praised by the holy theologians also as beautiful (kalon), as beauty (kallos), as the love that loves (agapē), as the beloved love (agapēton) and all the other divine nominations which are suitable to this splendor filled with grace, which renders everything beautiful” (P.G. 3, 701c); IV, 13, 712b-c; IV, 14, 712c., etc. See R. Roques, L’univers dionysien. Structure hiérarchique du monde selon le pseudo-Denys (Paris, 1954), 114.

53. Respectively, De Veritate, q.21, a.1 [trans. Schmidt, 5], then Contra Gentes, I, 38.

54. Respectively, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, VI, 1, then V, 2 [trans. Cousins, 102, 95]. Obviously one must not neglect that the good itself does not offer, for Bonaventure, the proper name of Gd. The ultimate moment, the excessus that actually makes one pass in Deum demands that one share the crucifixion of Christ: “transeamus cum Christo crucifixo ex hoc mundo ad Patrem” (VII, 6) [“With Christ crucified let us pass out of this world to the Father”; trans., 116]. The only proper name thus would occur in the fiat by which, if the Christian speaks it in truth, he allows himself to be reappropriated by Gd himself. See the strange commentary against this text by E. Gilson, “L’Etre et Dieu,” Revue Thomiste (1962), 197.

55. Denys, Mystical Theology, 2, P.G. 3, 1000b. On the correspondence between Aitia and Requisite, see our study in L’idole et la distance, sec. 14. Aitia defies categorical expression since “everything is at once predicated of it and yet it is nothing of all these things,” Divine Names, V, 9, 82b.

56. Respectively, Divine Names V, 7, 821b, then V, 8, 824a, finally V, 1, 816b. Concerning the discourse of praise, see L’idole et la distance, sec. 16.

57. Summa Theologica, Ia, q.13, a.11, resp. [trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province 70 (modified)].

58. Respectively, Divine Names, IV, 3, 697a, then IV, 7, 704b, and finally IV, 10, 705d-708a. See also V, 1, 816b (cited above in n. 56) and IV, 18, 716a.

59. “[L]e moins que rien,” a complete loss a wash out.—Trans.

60. The reduction of the Dionysian mē on and ouk onta to simple matter without form arises as a major argument to avoid a larger confrontation; among the very frequent occurrences, we can bring up In librum De divinis nominibus exposito, ed. P. Caramello (Rome, 1950), nn. 226–29, 295–98, 355, etc. (and the commentary, 98–99); Summa Theologica, Ia, q.5, a.2 ad 1; Contra Gentes, III, 20, etc.

61. Addere, says the Commentary on the Sentences, I, d.8, q.1, a.3, resp.; superaddere, says the De Veritate, q.21, a.1, ad. 1; importare says the Summa Theologica, Ia, q.5, a.2, ad.1. The good implies the ens, to which it is “added” as if by importation.

62. Respectively, Commentary on the Sentences, I, d.8, q.1, a.3, solutio, then Summa Theologica, Ia, q.5, a.2, resp. [trans., I, 24]; which one might compare with this fragment: “all that participates in other participations, participates first in being itself: for something is first comprehended as a being, prius intelligitur aliquod ens, before being comprehended as one, living, or wise”; In Librum De Divinis nominibus expositio, loc. cit. 236, n. 635.

63. De Veritate, q.21, a.1 resp. [trans. III, 6].

64. Summa Theologica, Ia, q.85, a.2, ad 3 [trans., I, 434, modified—the English version has “image” for “idolum”]. This disagreement between Denys and Saint Thomas, when it is not simply reduced to an “implicit” agreement (P. Faucon, Aspects néo-platoniciens de la doctrine de saint Thomas d’Aquin [Lille/Paris, 1975], 236), becomes the pretext to celebrate a major progress of Christian thought. Denys, according to E. Gilson, “never rose above the primacy of the Good, never grasped the primacy of Being”; in this view, it is self-evident that, between the “primacy of the Good” and the “primacy of Being,” the “Platonic” is the first and the “Christian” the second. For it never becomes worthy of question that it should be possible and suitable to “conceive God as identical to being” (E. Gilson, L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, [Paris, 1932], 94–95 [trans. by A. H. C. Downes, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 93], commenting on the Thomistic debate with the Divine Names, V, 1). As much as the illustrious historian enlightens us in pointing out perfectly the disparity between Denys and Thomas, his assurance in seeing in it only a progress stifles the properly theological question that is involved here. This insufficiency indeed is found as well in A. Feder, “Des Aquinaten Kommentar zu ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’ De divinis nominibus. Ein Beitrag zur Arbeitsmethode des h1. Thomas,” Scholastik, I, 1926 (which no more than mentions the Thomistic inversion), as well as in K. Kremer, Die neuplatonische Seinsphilosophie und ihre Wirkung auf Thomas von Aquin (Leyde, 1966) (where there is a mention without commentary of the reversal, 466).

65. Saurez, Disputationes Metaphysicae, I, s.1. n. 19, 13, 26, etc. See our study Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981), 128–39.

CHAPTER 28

William Lane Craig

(1949–)

William Lane Craig is a graduate of Wheaton College (BA), Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (MA), the University of Birmingham, England (PhD), and the Universität München, Germany (DTheol). He currently serves as research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology. Craig has distinguished himself through his writings and lectures as one of the leading philosophical apologists and theologians of the contemporary period.

The book from which our selection comes, Reasonable Faith, is Craig’s signature work.[1] Now in its third edition, it organizes some of the central questions of apologetics around systematic theological categories. So, Craig discusses the relationship of faith and reason under the heading De Fide (faith), the absurdity of life without God under De Homine (man), the problem of miracles under De Creatione (creation), and the personal claims of Christ under De Christo (Christ).[2] The text we include here is the first of two chapters under De Deo (God) that discuss arguments for the existence of God. In the section we include, Craig concludes for the success of the Leibnizian cosmological argument, as well as the kalām cosmological argument.

Craig’s approach is sometimes called a “classical” approach to apologetics. In a book offering five different apologetic approaches, Craig explains it this way:

The methodological approach which I shall defend in this essay is that reason in the form of rational arguments and evidence plays an essential role in our showing Christianity to be true, whereas reason in this form plays a contingent and secondary role in our personally knowing Christianity to be true. The proper ground of our knowing Christianity to be true is the inner work of the Holy Spirit in our individual selves; and in our showing Christianity to be true, it is his role to open the hearts of unbelievers to assent and respond to the reasons we present.

Such a method, as it plays itself out in showing Christianity to be true, has been called “classical apologetics.” This approach is comprised of natural theology and Christian evidences. Among its practitioners are such great figures as Thomas Aquinas with his famous Five Ways of demonstrating God’s existence and his appeal to the signs of credibility (miracles and prophecy) to validate Christian doctrines not demonstrable by reason alone; Hugo Grotius, the father of modern apologetics, whose De Veritate Religionis Christiannae drew upon the traditional arguments of natural theology and inaugurated the historical approach to the truth of the Gospels; and one of my heroes, William Paley, whose Natural Theology is one of the most brilliant defenses of the teleological argument ever written and whose A View of the Evidences of Christianity was so impressive that it remained compulsory reading for every applicant to Cambridge University right up to the twentieth century.[3]

As an apologist in the tradition of Arminian theology, Craig is a typical example not only of the apologetic methodology that such a theology entails, but also of a lucid style of argumentation in such a tradition.

1. Complete with its own website, including “Reasonable Faith” clothing.

2. See the preface to William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 12ff.

3. William Lane Craig, “Classical Apologetics,” in Five Views on Apologetics, ed. Stephen B. Cowan (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 28.

Reasonable Faith

Chapter 3

The Existence of God (1)

Kalām Cosmological Argument*

The kalām cosmological argument may be formulated as follows:

1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2) The universe began to exist.

3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of the universe then aims to establish some of the theologically significant properties of this being.

Whatever Begins to Exist Has a Cause

Premise (1) seems obviously true—at the least, more so than its negation. First and foremost, it’s rooted in the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come into being from nothing. To suggest that things could just pop into being uncaused out of nothing is to quit doing serious metaphysics and to resort to magic. Second, if things really could come into being uncaused out of nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything and everything do not come into existence uncaused from nothing. Finally, the first premise is constantly confirmed in our experience. Atheists who are scientific naturalists thus have the strongest of motivations to accept it.

When I first wrote The Kalām Cosmological Argument, I figured that few atheists would deny the first premise and assert that the universe sprang into existence uncaused out of nothing, since I believed they would thereby expose themselves as persons interested only in an academic refutation of the argument and not in really discovering the truth about the universe. To my surprise, however, many atheists have taken this route. For example, Quentin Smith, commenting that philosophers are too often adversely affected by Heidegger’s dread of “the nothing,” concludes that “the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing”[1]—a nice ending to a sort of Gettysburg address of atheism, perhaps.

Similarly, the late J. L. Mackie, in refuting the kalām cosmological argument, turns his main guns on this first step: “There is a priori no good reason why a sheer origination of things, not determined by anything, should be unacceptable, whereas the existence of a god [sic] with the power to create something out of nothing is acceptable.”[2] Indeed, he believes creatio ex nihilo raises problems: (i) If God began to exist at a point in time, then this is as great a puzzle as the beginning of the universe. (ii) Or if God existed for infinite time, then the same arguments would apply to his existence as would apply to the infinite duration of the universe. (iii) If it be said that God is timeless, then this, says Mackie, is a complete mystery.

Now notice that Mackie never refutes the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Rather, he simply demands what good reason there is a priori to accept it. He writes, “As Hume pointed out, we can certainly conceive an uncaused beginning-to-be of an object; if what we can thus conceive is nevertheless in some way impossible, this still requires to be shown.”[3] But, as many philosophers have pointed out, Hume’s argument in no way makes it plausible to think that something could really come into being without a cause. Just because I can imagine an object, say a horse, coming into existence from nothing, that in no way proves that a horse really could come into existence that way. The defender of the kalām argument is claiming that it is really impossible for something to come uncaused from nothing. Does Mackie sincerely believe that things can pop into existence uncaused, out of nothing? Does anyone in his right mind really believe that, say, a raging tiger could suddenly come into existence uncaused, out of nothing, in this room right now? The same applies to the universe: if prior to the existence of the universe, there was absolutely nothing—no God, no space, no time—how could the universe possibly have come to exist?[4]

In fact, Mackie’s appeal to Hume at this point is counterproductive. For Hume himself clearly believed in the causal principle. In 1754 he wrote to John Stewart, “But allow me to tell you that I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that anything might arise without a cause: I only maintain’d, that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration, but from another source.”[5] Even Mackie confesses, “Still this [causal] principle has some plausibility, in that it is constantly confirmed in our experience (and also used, reasonably, in interpreting our experience).”[6] So why not accept the truth of the causal principle as plausible and reasonable—at the very least more so than its denial?

Because, Mackie thinks, in this particular case the theism implied by affirming the principle is even more unintelligible than the denial of the principle. It makes more sense to believe that the universe came into being uncaused out of nothing than to believe that God created the universe out of nothing.

But is this really the case? Consider the three problems Mackie raises with creatio ex nihilo. Certainly, the proponent of the kalām argument would not hold (i) that God began to exist or (ii) that God has existed for an infinite number of, say, hours, or any other unit of time. But what is wrong with (iii), that God is, without creation, timeless? I would argue that God exists timelessly without creation and in time subsequent to creation.[7] This may be “mysterious” in the sense of “wonderful” or “awe-inspiring,” but it is not, so far as I can see, unintelligible; and Mackie gives us no reason to think that it is. Moreover, there is also an alternative which Mackie failed to consider: (iv) prior to creation God existed in an undifferentiated time in which hours, seconds, days, and so forth simply do not exist. Because this time is undifferentiated, it is not incompatible with the kalām argument that an infinite regress of events cannot exist. It seems to me, therefore, that Mackie is entirely unjustified in rejecting the first step of the argument as not being intuitively obvious, plausible, and reasonable.

Other critics have said that premise (1) is true only for things in the universe, but it is not true of the universe itself. But why think that the universe is an exception to the rule? As Arthur Schopenhauer once remarked, the causal principle is not something you can dismiss like a cab once you’ve arrived at your desired destination. Moreover, the objection misconstrues the nature of the causal principle. Premise (1) does not state a merely physical law like the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics, which are valid for things within the universe. Premise (1) is not a physical principle. Rather it is a metaphysical principle: being cannot come from non-being; something cannot come into existence uncaused from nothing. The principle therefore applies to all of reality, and it is thus metaphysically absurd that the universe should pop into being uncaused out of nothing.

Daniel Dennett, misstating the first premise as “Everything that exists must have a cause,” accordingly asks, “What caused God?”[8] This retort merely caricatures the argument. In fact, apart from certain Enlightenment rationalists, who by “cause” meant merely “sufficient reason,” no orthodox theist of any prominence has ever asserted that everything has a cause or that God is self-caused, a notion rightly rejected by Aquinas as metaphysically impossible. Things that begin to exist must have causes. In fact, Dennett himself recognizes that a being “outside of time . . .  is nothing with an initiation or origin in need of explanation. What does need its origin explained is the concrete Universe itself.”[9] Dennett rightly sees that a being which exists eternally, since it never comes into being, has no need of a cause, as do things which have an origin. So Dennett actually affirms the first premise, which will lead him, as we’ll see, to the remarkable position that the universe must have caused itself to come into being.

Sometimes it is said that quantum physics furnishes an exception to premise (1), since on the sub-atomic level events are said to be uncaused. In the same way, certain theories of cosmic origins are interpreted as showing that the whole universe could have sprung into being out of the sub-atomic vacuum or even out of nothingness. Thus the universe is said to be the proverbial “free lunch.”

This objection, however, is based on misunderstandings. In the first place, not all scientists agree that sub-atomic events are uncaused. A great many physicists today are quite dissatisfied with this view (the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation) of quantum physics and are exploring deterministic theories like that of David Bohm. Thus, quantum physics is not a proven exception to premise (1).[10] Second, even on the traditional, indeterministic interpretation, particles do not come into being out of nothing. They arise as spontaneous fluctuations of the energy contained in the sub-atomic vacuum, which constitutes an indeterministic cause of their origination. Third, the same point can be made about theories of the origin of the universe out of a primordial vacuum. Popular magazine articles touting such theories as getting “something from nothing” simply do not understand that the vacuum is not nothing but is a sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws. Such models do not therefore involve a true origination ex nihilo.[11]

Neither do theories such as Alexander Vilenkin’s quantum creation model. Vilenkin invites us to envision a small, closed, spherical universe filled with a so-called false vacuum and containing some ordinary matter. If the radius of such a universe is small, classical physics predicts that it will collapse to a point; but quantum physics permits it to “tunnel” into a state of inflationary expansion. If we allow the radius to shrink all the way to zero, there still remains some positive probability of the universe’s tunneling to inflation. Now Vilenkin equates the initial state of the universe explanatorily prior to tunneling with nothingness. But this equivalence is patently mistaken. As Vilenkin’s own diagram in his recent book illustrates,[12] the quantum tunneling is at every point a function from something to something (Fig. 3.1).

For quantum tunneling to be truly from nothing, the function would have to have only one term, the posterior term. Another way of seeing the point is to reflect on the fact that to have no radius (as is the case with nothingness) is not to have a radius, whose measure is zero. Thus, there is no basis for the claim that quantum physics proves that things can begin to exist without a cause, much less that the universe could have sprung into being uncaused from literally nothing.

That Vilenkin has not truly grasped how radical is being’s coming from non-being is evident from his incredulity at the claim of the Hartle-Hawking model that an infinite universe should similarly arise from nothing. He exclaims, “The most probable thing to pop out of nothing is then an infinite, empty, flat space. I find this very hard to believe!”[13] Vilenkin finds it easier to believe that an itsy-bitsy universe should pop into being out of nothing. He thereby evinces a lack of understanding of the metaphysical chasm that separates being from non-being. If something can come from nothing, then the size and shape of the object is just irrelevant.

The Universe Began to Exist

If we agree that whatever begins to exist has a cause, what evidence is there to support the crucial second step in the argument, that the universe began to exist? We’ll examine both deductive, philosophical arguments and inductive, scientific arguments in support of (2).

Philosophical Arguments: (1) The Impossibility of an Actually Infinite Number of Things

This argument can also be formulated in three steps:

1) An actually infinite number of things cannot exist.

2) A beginningless series of events in time entails an actually infinite number of things.

3) Therefore, a beginningless series of events in time cannot exist.

Let’s examine each premise in turn.

1) An actually infinite number of things cannot exist. In order to understand this first premise, we need to understand what an actual infinite is. There is a difference between a potential infinite and an actual infinite. An actual infinite is a collection of definite and discrete members whose number is greater than any natural number 0, 1, 2, 3 . . .  This sort of infinity is used in set theory to designate sets that have an infinite number of members, such as {0, l, 2, 3 . . .}. The symbol for this kind of infinity is the Hebrew letter aleph: a. The number of members in the set of natural numbers is a0. By contrast, a potential infinite is a collection that is increasing toward infinity as a limit but never gets there. The symbol for this kind of infinity is the lemniscate: ∞. Such a collection is really indefinite, not infinite. For example, any finite distance can be subdivided into potentially infinitely many parts. You can just keep on dividing parts in half forever, but you will never arrive at an actual “infinitieth” division or come up with an actually infinite number of parts. Now premise (1) asserts, not that a potentially infinite number of things cannot exist, but that an actually infinite number of things cannot exist.

It is frequently alleged that this sort of argument has been cut off at the knees by the work of the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor on the actual infinite and by subsequent developments in set theory, which have legitimized the notion of the actual infinite. But this allegation is far too hasty. It not only begs the question against denials of the mathematical legitimacy of the actual infinite on the part of certain mathematicians (so-called Intuitionists), but, more seriously, it begs the question against anti-realist views of mathematical objects. These are distinct questions, run together by such recent critics of the argument as Howard Sobel and Graham Oppy.[14] Most anti-realists would not go to the Intuitionistic extreme of denying mathematical legitimacy to the actual infinite—hence, the defiant declaration of the great German mathematician David Hilbert: “No one shall be able to drive us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.”[15] They would simply insist that acceptance of the mathematical legitimacy of certain notions does not imply a commitment to the metaphysical reality of various objects. In Hilbert’s view, “The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought. . . . The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea.”[16] Cantor’s system and set theory may be taken to be simply a universe of discourse, a mathematical system based on certain adopted axioms and conventions. On anti-realist views of mathematical objects such as Balaguer’s Fictionalism or Yablo’s Figuralism or Chihara’s Constructibilism, mathematical discourse is not in any way abridged, but there are, notwithstanding, no mathematical objects, let alone an infinite number of them.[17] One may consistently hold that while the actual infinite is a fruitful and consistent concept within the postulated universe of discourse, it cannot be transposed into the real world, for this would involve counter-intuitive absurdities.

Ludwig Wittgenstein enunciated perhaps the best strategy for showing the metaphysical impossibility of the actual infinite when he quipped, “I wouldn’t dream of trying to drive anyone from this paradise. I would do something quite different: I would try to show you that it is not a paradise—so that you’ll leave of your own accord. I would say, ‘You’re welcome to this; just look about you.’”[18] If an actually infinite number of things could exist, this would spawn all sorts of absurdities. We can construct thought experiments illustrating what it would be like if an actually infinite number of things were to exist, in order to evoke a sense of how absurd such a world would be. Let me share one my favorites, Hilbert’s Hotel, the brainchild of David Hilbert.[19]

As a warm-up, let’s first imagine a hotel with a finite number of rooms. Suppose, furthermore, that all the rooms are occupied. When a new guest arrives asking for a room, the proprietor apologizes, “Sorry, all the rooms are full,” and that’s the end of the story. But now let us imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and suppose once more that all the rooms are occupied. There is not a single vacant room throughout the entire infinite hotel. Now suppose a new guest shows up, asking for a room. “But of course!” says the proprietor, and he immediately shifts the person in room #1 into room #2, the person in room #2 into room #3, the person in room #3 into room #4, and so on, out to infinity. As a result of these room changes, room #1 now becomes vacant and the new guest gratefully checks in. But remember, before he arrived, all the rooms were already occupied!

But the situation becomes even stranger. For suppose an infinity of new guests shows up at the desk, each asking for a room. “Of course, of course!” says the proprietor, and he proceeds to shift the person in room #l into room #2, the person in room #2 into room #4, the person in room #3 into room #6, and so on out to infinity, always putting each former occupant into the room with a number twice his own. Because any natural number multiplied by two always equals an even number, all the guests wind up in even-numbered rooms. As a result, all the odd-numbered rooms become vacant, and the infinity of new guests is easily accommodated. And yet, before they came, all the rooms were already occupied! In fact, the proprietor could repeat this process infinitely many times and so always accommodate new guests, despite the fact that the hotel is completely full! As one student remarked to me, if Hilbert’s Hotel could exist, it would have to have a sign posted outside: NO VACANCY—GUESTS WELCOME.

But Hilbert’s Hotel is even stranger than the great German mathematician made it out to be. Just ask yourself the question: what happens if some of the guests start to check out? Suppose the guests in rooms # l, #3, #5 . . .  check out. In this case an infinite number of people has left the hotel, and half the rooms are now empty. Now suppose the proprietor doesn’t like having a half-empty hotel (it looks bad for business). No matter! By shifting occupants as before, but in reverse order, he transforms his half-vacant hotel into one that is jammed to the gills! You might think that by such maneuvers the proprietor could always keep this strange hotel fully occupied. But you would be wrong. For suppose that the persons in rooms #4, #5, #6 . . .  checked out. At a single stroke the hotel would be virtually emptied, the guest register reduced to but three names, and the infinite converted to finitude. And yet it would remain true that the same number of guests checked out this time as when the guests in rooms # l, #3, #5 . . .  checked out! In both cases we subtracted the identical number of guests from the identical number of guests and yet did not arrive at an identical result. In fact one can subtract equal quantities from equal quantities and get any quantity between zero and infinity as the remainder. Can anyone believe that such a hotel could exist in reality?

Hilbert’s Hotel is absurd. Since nothing hangs on the illustration’s involving a hotel, the argument, if successful, would show in general that it is impossible for an actually infinite number of things to exist. Students sometimes react to such illustrations as Hilbert’s Hotel by saying that we don’t understand the nature of infinity and, hence, these absurdities result. But this attitude is simply mistaken. Infinite set theory is a highly developed and well-understood branch of mathematics, and these absurdities can be seen to result precisely because we do understand the notion of a collection with an actually infinite number of members. Hilbert’s illustration merely serves to bring out in a practical and vivid way what the mathematics necessarily implies; for if an actually infinite number of things were possible, then such a hotel must be possible. Hence, it logically follows that if such a hotel is impossible, then so is the real existence of an actual infinite.[20]

What can the argument’s critic say at this point? Mackie, Sobel, and Oppy try, in Oppy’s words, to “outsmart” the proponent of the argument by embracing the conclusion of his reductio ad absurdum argument: Hilbert’s Hotel is possible after all.[21] The problem with this strategy is that it could be used to legitimize any conclusion, no matter how absurd, so long as one has the chutzpah to embrace it. What we want is some sort of reason to think that such a hotel is really possible. Here Oppy has no more to say than “these allegedly absurd situations are just what one ought to expect if there were . . . physical infinities.” This response only reiterates, in effect, that if an actual infinite were to exist, then the relevant situations would result, which is not in dispute. The situations would, after all, not be effective illustrations if they would not result! Rather the question is whether these situations really are absurd. It is indisputable that if an actually infinite number of things were to exist, then we should find ourselves landed in an Alice-in-Wonderland world populated with oddities like Hilbert’s Hotel. Merely reiterating that “If there were physical infinities, these situations are just what we ought to expect” does nothing to allay one’s suspicions that such a world is metaphysically absurd. Moreover, Oppy says nothing about what would happen in cases of inverse operations like subtraction with infinite quantities, as when an infinite number of guests check out of the hotel. In transfinite arithmetic, inverse operations of subtraction and division are prohibited because they lead to contradictions; but in reality, one cannot stop people from checking out of the hotel if they so desire!

Again, it’s worth reiterating that nothing in the argument need be construed as an attempt to undermine the theoretical system bequeathed by Cantor to modern mathematics. Indeed, some of the most eager enthusiasts of the system of transfinite mathematics are only too ready to agree that these theories have no relation to the real world. The case against the real existence of the actual infinite says nothing about the use of the idea of the infinite in conceptual mathematical systems.

2) A beginningless series of events in time entails an actually infinite number of things. This second premise is pretty obvious. If the universe never began to exist, then prior to the present event there have existed an actually infinite number of previous events. Thus, a beginningless series of events in time entails an actually infinite number of things, namely, events.

3) Therefore, a beginningless series of events in time cannot exist. If the above two premises are true, then the conclusion follows logically. The series of past events must be finite and have a beginning. Since the universe is not distinct from the series of events, the universe therefore began to exist.

Philosophical Arguments: (2) The Impossibility of Forming an Actually Infinite Collection of Things by Adding One Member after Another

It’s important to note that this second argument is distinct from the foregoing argument, for it does not deny that an actually infinite number of things can exist. It denies that a collection containing an actually infinite number of things can be formed by adding one member after another. So even if the first philosophical argument were deemed to be unsound, the critic of the kalām cosmological argument must still contend with this independent argument for the second premise. This argument, too, can be formulated in three steps:

1) The series of events in time is a collection formed by adding one member after another.

2) A collection formed by adding one member after another cannot be actually infinite.

3) Therefore, the series of events in time cannot be actually infinite.

Let’s take a look at each premise.

1) The series of events in time is a collection formed by adding one member after another. This may seem rather obvious. The past did not spring into being whole and entire but was formed sequentially, one event occurring after another. Notice, too, that the direction of this formation is “forward,” in the sense that the collection grows with time. Although we sometimes speak of an “infinite regress” of events, in reality an infinite past would be an “infinite progress” of events with no beginning and its end in the present.

As obvious as this first premise may seem at first blush, it is, in fact, a matter of great controversy. It presupposes a certain view of time which is variously called the tensed or dynamic or, following the convenient nomenclature of J. M. E. McTaggart, who first distinguished these views of time, the A-Theory of time. According to the A-Theory, things/events in time are not all equally real: the future does not yet exist and the past no longer exists; only things which are present are real. Temporal becoming is an objective feature of reality: things come into being and go out of being. By contrast, on what McTaggart called the B-Theory of time or the tenseless or static theory of time all events in time are equally real, and temporal becoming is an illusion of human consciousness. Pastness, presentness, and futurity are at most relative notions: for example, relative to the persons living in the year 2050 the people and events of 2000 are past, but relative to the persons living in 1950 the people and events of 2000 are future. Things and events in time are objectively ordered by the relations earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than, which are tenseless relations that are unchanging and hold regardless of whether the related events are past, present, or future relative to some observer. B-Theorists typically unify time with space into a four-dimensional, geometrical entity called spacetime, all of whose points are equally real and none of which is objectively present. On a B-Theory of time, premise (1) is false, for the past, like the future, exists tenselessly and there is no question of the series of events’ being formed sequentially.

The question, then, is which of these two competing theories of time is true? Unfortunately, an adjudication of this issue here would take us too far afield. Everyone agrees that the commonsense view is that the difference between past, present, and future is real and objective, and as a result of over a decade of intensive research on this question my studied opinion is that there is no reason to abandon the commonsense view of this matter.[22] Therefore, I am convinced that the A-Theory of time is correct and, accordingly, that premise (1) is true. Given that the vast majority of people share this conviction, I think that an argument based upon this premise will provoke little objection on this score.

2) A collection formed by adding one member after another cannot be actually infinite. This is the crucial step. It’s important to realize that this impossibility has nothing to do with the amount of time available: no matter how much time one has available, an actual infinite cannot be formed. This may seem obvious in the case of someone’s trying to count to infinity: no matter how many numbers he counts, he can always add one more before arriving at infinity. Now someone might say that while an infinite collection cannot be formed by beginning at a point and adding members, nevertheless, an infinite collection could be formed by never beginning but ending at a point, that is to say, ending at a point after having added one member after another from eternity. But this method seems even more unbelievable than the first method. If one cannot count to infinity, how can one count down from infinity?

Sometimes this problem is described as the impossibility of traversing the infinite. In order for us to have “arrived” at today, temporal existence has, so to speak, traversed an infinite number of prior events. Richard Gale protests, “This argument depends on an anthropomorphic sense of ‘going through’ a set. The universe does not go through a set of events in the sense of planning which to go through first, in order to get through the second, and so on.”[23] Of course not; but on an A-Theory of time the universe does endure through successive intervals of time. It arrives at its present event-state only by enduring through a series of prior event-states. So before the present event could occur, the event immediately prior to it would have to occur; and before that event could occur, the event immediately prior to it would have to occur; and so on ad infinitum. So one gets driven back and back into the infinite past, making it impossible for any event to occur. Thus, if the series of past events were beginningless, the present event could not have occurred, which is absurd.

Sometimes critics indict this argument as a slight-of-hand trick like Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. Zeno argued that before Achilles could cross the stadium, he would have to cross halfway; but before he could cross halfway, he would have to cross a quarter of the way; but before he could cross a quarter of the way, he would have to cross an eighth of the way, and so on to infinity. It is evident that Achilles could not arrive at any point! Therefore, Zeno concluded, motion is impossible. Now even though Zeno’s argument is very difficult to refute, nobody really believes that motion is impossible. Even if Achilles must pass through an infinite number of halfway points in order to cross the stadium, somehow he manages to do so. The argument against the impossibility of traversing an infinite past, some critics allege, must commit the same fallacy as Zeno’s paradox.

But such an objection fails to reckon with two crucial disanalogies of an infinite past to Zeno’s paradoxes: whereas in Zeno’s thought experiments the intervals traversed are potential and unequal, in the case of an infinite past the intervals are actual and equal. The claim that Achilles must pass through an infinite number of halfway points in order to cross the stadium is question-begging, for it already assumes that the whole interval is a composition of an infinite number of points, whereas Zeno’s opponents, like Aristotle, take the line as a whole to be conceptually prior to any divisions which we might make in it. Moreover, Zeno’s intervals, being unequal, sum to a merely finite distance, whereas the intervals in an infinite past sum to an infinite distance. Thus, his thought experiments are crucially disanalogous to the task of traversing an infinite number of equal, actual intervals to arrive at our present location.

Mackie and Sobel object that this sort of argument illicitly presupposes an infinitely distant starting point in the past and then pronounces it impossible to travel from that point to today. But if the past is infinite, they say, then there would be no starting point whatever, not even an infinitely distant one. Nevertheless, from any given point in the past, there is only a finite distance to the present, which is easily “traversed.”[24] But in fact no proponent of the kalām argument of whom I am aware has assumed that there was an infinitely distant starting point in the past. The fact that there is no beginning at all, not even an infinitely distant one, seems only to make the problem worse, not better. To say that the infinite past could have been formed by successive addition is like saying that someone has just succeeded in writing down all the negative numbers, ending at 0. And, we may ask, how is the claim that from any given moment in the past there is only a finite distance to the present even relevant to the issue? The defender of the kalām argument could agree to this happily. For the issue is how the whole series can be formed, not a finite portion of it. Do Mackie and Sobel think that because every finite segment of the series can be formed by successive addition the whole infinite series can be so formed? That is as logically fallacious as saying because every part of an elephant is light in weight, the whole elephant is light in weight. The claim is therefore irrelevant.

We can heighten the absurdity of the sequential formation of an actual infinite by imagining, with al-Ghāzalī, two beginningless series of coordinated events. He envisions our solar system’s existing from eternity past, the orbital periods of the planets being so coordinated that for every one orbit which Saturn completes Jupiter completes 2.5 times as many. If they have been orbiting from eternity, which planet has completed the most orbits? The correct mathematical answer is that they have completed precisely the same number of orbits. But this seems absurd, for the longer they revolve the greater becomes the disparity between them, so that they progressively approach a limit at which Jupiter has fallen infinitely far behind Saturn. Yet, being now actually infinite, their respective completed orbits are somehow magically identical. Indeed, they will have “attained” infinity from eternity past: the number of completed orbits is always the same. Moreover, Ghāzalī asks, will the number of completed orbits be even or odd? Either answer seems absurd. We might be tempted to deny that the number of completed orbits is either even or odd. But post-Cantorian transfinite arithmetic gives a quite different answer: the number of orbits completed is both even and odd![25] For a cardinal number n is even if there is a unique cardinal number m such that n = 2m, and n is odd if there is a unique cardinal number m such that n = 2m + 1. In the envisioned scenario the number of completed orbits is (in both cases!) 0, and 0 = 2_0 = 2_0 +1. So Jupiter and Saturn have each completed both an even and an odd number of orbits, and that number has remained equal and unchanged from all eternity, despite their ongoing revolutions and the growing disparity between them over any finite interval of time. This strikes me as absurd.

It gets even worse. Suppose we meet a man who claims to have been counting down from infinity and who is now finishing: . . . , –3, –2, –1, 0. We could ask, why didn’t he finish counting yesterday or the day before or the year before? By then an infinite time had already elapsed, so that he should already have finished. Thus, at no point in the infinite past could we ever find the man finishing his countdown, for by that point he should already be done! In fact, no matter how far back into the past we go, we can never find the man counting at all, for at any point we reach he will already have finished. But if at no point in the past do we find him counting, this contradicts the hypothesis that he has been counting from eternity. This shows again that the formation of an actual infinite by never beginning but reaching an end is as impossible as beginning at a point and trying to reach infinity.

Hence, set theory has been purged of all temporal concepts; as Russell says, “Classes which are infinite are given all at once by the defining properties of their members, so that there is no question of ‘completion’ or of ‘successive synthesis.’”[26] The only way an actual infinite could come to exist in the real world would be by being created all at once, simply in an instant. It would be a hopeless undertaking to try to form it by adding one member after another.

3) Therefore, the series of events in time cannot be actually infinite. Given the truth of the premises, the conclusion logically follows. If the universe did not begin to exist a finite time ago, then the present moment would never arrive. But obviously it has arrived. Therefore, we know that the universe is finite in the past and began to exist.

We thus have two separate philosophical arguments to prove that the universe began to exist, one based on the impossibility of an actually infinite number of things and one on the impossibility of forming an actually infinite collection by successive addition. If one wishes to deny the beginning of the universe, he must refute, not one, but both of these arguments.

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. What are the differences between Craig’s cosmological argument(s) and Aquinas’s?

2. How does Craig’s theology relate to his apologetic method?

3. Does Craig’s argument conclude for the Christian God?

4. According to Craig, what is the principle of sufficient reason? Is it useful for apologetics?

5. What is Craig’s view of an “actual infinite”? Is it coherent? How does this notion of infinity relate to God’s infinity?

*Taken from Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig, © 1984, 1994, 2008, pp. 111–24. Used by permission of Crossway Books, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.

1. Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 135. Smith’s most recent criticism of the kalām cosmological argument is also a denial of the first premise, despite Smith’s avowal that he now accepts the conclusion that the universe has a cause for its existence. Quentin Smith, “Kalām Cosmological Arguments for Atheism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 182–98. Smith’s current position is that the initial singular point of the universe is not real and that therefore the sequence of instantaneous states of the universe is a beginningless series converging toward zero as a limit. Each state is caused by its predecessor and there is no first state. Any non-zero interval or state, such as the first second of the universe’s existence, “is not caused by any or all of its instantaneous states and is not caused by any external cause” (ibid., 189). Smith takes “the beginning of the universe” to refer to the Planck era, that state which lasts until 10–43 second after the singularity. As a state of non-zero duration, the beginning of the universe therefore has no cause of any sort. The universe therefore comes into being uncaused out of nothing.

2. J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 94.

3. Ibid., 89.

4. Elsewhere Mackie reveals his true sentiments: “I myself find it hard to accept the notion of self-creation from nothing, even given unrestricted chance. And how can this be given, if there really is nothing?” (J. L. Mackie, Times Literary Supplement, 5 February 1982, 126).

5. David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), 1:187.

6. Mackie, Theism, 89.

7. See my Time and Eternity (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2001).

8. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), 242.

9. Ibid., 244.

10. There are at least ten different interpretations of quantum mechanics, many of which are fully deterministic, and no one knows which, if any of these, is correct. Even so determined a naturalist as the physicist Victor Stenger admits, “Other viable interpretations of quantum mechanics remain with no consensus on which, if any, is the correct one”; hence, we have to remain “open to the possibility that causes may someday be found for such phenomena.” Victor Stenger, Has Silence Found God? (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2003), 188–89, 173.

11. As Kanitscheider explains, “The violent microstructure of the vacuum has been used in attempts to explain the origin of the universe as a long-lived vacuum fluctuation. But some authors have connected with this legitimate speculations [sic] far-reaching metaphysical claims, or at most they couched their mathematics in a highly misleading language, when they maintained ‘the creation of the universe out of nothing.’ . . . From the philosophical point of view it is essential to note that the foregoing is far from being a spontaneous generation of everything from naught, but the origin of that embryonic bubble is really a causal process leading from a primordial substratum with a rich physical structure to a materialized substratum of the vacuum. Admittedly this process is not deterministic, it includes that weak kind of causal dependence peculiar to every quantum mechanical process.” Bernulf Kanitscheider, “Does Physical Cosmology Transcend the Limits of Naturalistic Reasoning?” in Studies on Mario Bunge’s “Treatise,” ed. Weingartner and G. J. W. Doen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 346–74.

12. Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 180.

13. Ibid., 191.

14. Jordan Howard Sobel, Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Belief in God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 181–89, 198–99; Graham Oppy, Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 291–93.

15. David Hilbert, “On the Infinite,” in Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. with an introduction by Paul Benacerraf and Hillary Putnam (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 141.

16. Ibid., 151.

17. Mark Balaguer, Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), part 2; idem, “A Theory of Mathematical Correctness and Mathematical Truth,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 82 (2001): 87–114; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Platonism in Metaphysics,” by Mark Balaguer (Summer 2004), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2004/entries/platonism/; Stephen Yablo, “A Paradox of Existence,” in Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, ed. Anthony Everett and Thomas Hofweber (Stanford: Center for Study of Language and Information, 2000), 275–312; idem, “Go Figure: A Path through Fictionalism,” in Figurative Language, ed. Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 25 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 72–102; Charles S. Chihara, Constructibility and Mathematical Existence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); idem, A Structural Account of Mathematics (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004).

18. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. Cora Diamond (Sussex, England: Harvester, 1976), 103.

19. The story of Hilbert’s Hotel is related in George Gamow, One, Two, Three, Infinity (London: Macmillan, 1946), 17.

20. Students frequently ask if God, therefore, cannot be infinite. The question is based on a misunderstanding. When we speak of the infinity of God, we are not using the word in a mathematical sense to refer to an aggregate of an infinite number of finite parts. God’s infinity is, if you will, qualitative, not quantitative. It means that God is metaphysically necessary, morally perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, etc.

21. Graham Oppy, Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity, 48; cf. Mackie, Theism, 93; Sobel, Logic and Theism, 186–87.

22. See my Time and Eternity for a consideration of the arguments for and against these theories of time and my defense of the A-Theory.

23. Richard Gale, “The Failure of Classic Theistic Arguments,” in The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 92–93. Gale’s framing the argument in terms of a “set of events” is maladroit, since we are not talking about a set but about a series of events which elapse one after another. Cf. Russell’s statement cited below (n. 52).

24. Mackie, Theism, 93; Sobel, Logic and Theism, 182.

25. See Wacław Sierpiński, Cardinal and Ordinal Numbers, Polska Akademia Nauk Monografie Matematyczne 34 (Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1958), 146.

26. Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1929), 170.

CHAPTER 29

Francis Collins

(1950–)

Francis S. Collins grew up on a small farm in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. He was homeschooled until he went off to high school and then the University of Virginia. He entered the PhD program at Yale University in physical chemistry, but along the way took a class in biochemistry and became fascinated with DNA and RNA. He enrolled at the University of North Carolina Medical School, Chapel Hill.

Collins began to cross large strands of DNA in what is called “positional cloning,” a procedure permitting the isolation of genes carrying various diseases. In 1989, with Lap-Chee Tsui and Jack Riordan of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, he identified the gene carrying cystic fibrosis. The team went on to discover the gene for neurofibromatosis in 1990, and then the gene causing Huntington’s disease in 1993. Collins then became director of the National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health, succeeding James Watson. In 2000 the NCHGR, by then renamed the National Human Genome Research Institute, drew a rough map of every gene in the human DNA, which earned Collins the cover story in Time magazine (July 3, 2000). The project, completed in 2003, is regarded by some to be the most significant scientific achievement in generations.

Collins has received numerous awards and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award. He has been appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A committed Christian, Collins founded BioLogos, a movement dedicated to showing the harmony between the spiritual and the natural realms. While not every Christian endorses his acceptance of an ancient earth with a microevolutionary dynamic, his defense of Einstein’s dictum that “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” is learned and elegant. The text below is a personal account of how Collins deciphered the human genome.

The Language of God

Excerpt from Chapter 5

Deciphering God’s Instruction Book:

The Lessons of the Human Genome*

When I was a research fellow in genetics at Yale in the early 1980s, the determination of the actual sequence of several hundred letters of the DNA code was an arduous undertaking. The methods were finicky, requiring many preparative steps, the use of expensive and dangerous reagents such as radioactive chemicals, and the manual pouring of ultrathin gels that were nearly always plagued with bubbles and other imperfections. The details are unimportant; the point is, it took forever, with lots of trial and error, just to sort out a few hundred letters of the human DNA code.

Despite those challenges, my first published paper on human genetics was based on DNA sequencing. I was studying the production of just one protein, found in the red blood cells of the human fetus in utero, that is supposed to gradually disappear after birth, when babies begin to breathe with their own lungs. The protein is called fetal hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the protein that allows red blood cells to deliver oxygen from our lungs to all of the rest of the body. Humans and some apes use a special version of hemoglobin before birth that helps extract oxygen from the mother’s blood to nourish the growing fetus. During the first year of life, this fetal hemoglobin gradually turns off, and the adult form is produced instead. However, in a Jamaican family I was studying, substantial quantities of fetal hemoglobin continued to appear in adulthood. The cause of this “hereditary persistence of fetal hemoglobin” was of intense interest, because if we could learn how to trigger it on purpose in anyone, it could greatly reduce the ravages of sickle-cell anemia. Even 20 percent of fetal hemoglobin in the red blood cells of someone with sickle cell disease would essentially eliminate the painful crises and progressive organ damage.

I will never forget the day when my sequencing effort revealed a G instead of a C in a specific position just “upstream” of one of the genes that triggered fetal hemoglobin production. This single letter alteration turned out to be responsible for leaving the fetal program switched on in adults. I was thrilled but exhausted—it had taken eighteen months to discover this single altered letter of the human DNA code.

It was with some astonishment, then, that I learned three years later that a few visionary scientists had begun to discuss the possibility of determining the DNA sequence of the entire human genome, estimated to be about 3 billion base pairs in length. Surely this was not a goal that would be achieved during my lifetime.

We knew relatively little then about what the genome might contain. No one had actually seen the chemical bases of an individual human gene under the microscope (they were too tiny). Only a few hundred genes had been characterized, and estimates of how many genes the genome might contain varied wildly. Even the definition of a gene was (and is) in a bit of disarray—simple definitions that a gene constitutes a stretch of DNA that codes for a particular protein had been shaken by the discovery that the protein-coding regions of genes are interrupted by intervening DNA segments called introns. Depending on how the coding regions are subsequently spliced together in the RNA copy, one gene could sometimes code for several different (but related) proteins. Furthermore, there were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn’t seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as “junk DNA,” though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome “junk,” given our level of ignorance.

Despite all these uncertainties, there was no question how valuable a complete genome sequence would be. Hiding in this vast instruction book would be the parts list for human biology, as well as clues to a long list of diseases that we understand poorly and treat ineffectively. For me as a physician, the possibility of laying open the pages of this most powerful textbook of medicine was extremely compelling. And so, still junior in the ranks of academia, and uncertain of the practical realities of such an audacious plan, I joined the debate on the side of undertaking an organized program to sequence the human genome—which soon became known as the Human Genome Project.

My desire to see the human genome fully unveiled intensified considerably over the next few years. Leading a fledgling research laboratory of earnest and hardworking graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, I had decided to pursue the genetic basis of certain diseases that had so far resisted all attempts at discovery. Foremost among these was cystic fibrosis (CF), the most common potentially fatal genetic disorder of northern Europeans. The disease is usually diagnosed in an infant or young child who fails to gain weight and suffers from repeated respiratory infections. Picking up on information from observant mothers who had noted that these children taste salty when kissed, physicians had identified a high concentration of chloride in a child’s sweat as the diagnostic hallmark. We also knew that CF patients had thick, sticky secretions in their lungs and pancreas—but we had no real clue as to the likely function of the gene that must have gone awry.

I first encountered CF when serving as a medical intern in the late 1970s. In the 1950s kids with this disease had rarely survived to age ten. Steady improvements in managing the symptoms—replacing enzymes in the pancreas, treating lung infections with better antibiotics, and improving nutrition and physical therapy—had gradually extended the life span of CF patients so that many of them in the 1970s were surviving to attend college, marry, and enter the workforce. But the long-term prospects for cure were still bleak. Without a fundamental understanding of the genetic defect, medical researchers were just feeling their way in the dark. All we knew was that somewhere in the 3 billion letters of the DNA code, at least one letter had gone wrong in a vulnerable location.

To find such a subtle misspelling seemed an almost insurmountable problem of scale. But the other thing we knew about CF is that it is inherited in a recessive pattern. To understand the meaning of this, it is important to consider that we all have two copies of each gene, one inherited from Mom and one from Dad. (The exceptions are genes on the X and the Y chromosomes, which are present in only a single copy in males.) In a recessive disease like CF, a child is affected only if both copies of the gene are faulty. For that to happen, both parents must carry a flawed copy—but since individuals with one normal and one faulty copy are entirely well, these carriers are generally unaware of their status (about one in thirty individuals of northern European ancestry is a CF carrier, and most of them have no family history of the disease).

The genetic basis of CF thus allowed an interesting exercise in DNA sleuthing: even without knowing anything about the responsible gene, researchers could track the inheritance of hundreds of random bits of DNA from all over the genome in CF families with multiple siblings, looking for DNA fragments that were predictive of which siblings had CF and which did not. Such fragments would by necessity have to be located close to the CF gene. We couldn’t read all 3 billion pairs of letters, but we could randomly shine a flashlight on a few million here, a few million there, and look for any correlation with the disease. We had to do this hundreds and hundreds of times, but the genome is a bounded set of information—so if we kept at it, we were confident of locating the right neighborhood.

That was accomplished, to the astonishment and delight of scientists and families alike, in 1985—and demonstrated that the CF gene must reside somewhere within a 2 million basepair segment of DNA on chromosome 7. But the hard part had really just begun. To employ an analogy I often used at that time to explain why this was such a hard problem, the search was like looking for a single burned-out lightbulb in the basement of a house somewhere in the United States. The family studies were a powerful beginning, in the sense that they allowed us to identify the right state and ultimately the right county. But this was the view from twenty thousand feet, and this strategy could take us no further. A house-to-house search, lightbulb by lightbulb, was required.

We didn’t even have a map of the territory. This part of chromosome 7, like most of the genome, had never been explored in 1985. To pursue the metaphor, there were no street maps of towns and villages, no blueprints of buildings, certainly no inventory of lightbulbs. The work was brutal.

My team and I had invented a method called “chromosome jumping,” which allowed us to move across our 2 million base-pair target in pogo-stick leaps, rather than crawling along in the traditional way. That helped by enabling the house-to-house searches to be initiated in multiple locations at once. But the challenge was still almost overwhelming, and many in the scientific community thought that this approach was so impractical that it would just never work for a human disease. In 1987, faced with limited resources and mounting frustration, my lab joined forces with that of Lap-Chee Tsui, a talented Ph.D. researcher at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Our merged labs pressed on with renewed energy. The search was like a detective story—we knew the mystery would eventually be solved on the last page, but we didn’t know how long it would take to get there. There were clues and blind alleys aplenty. After getting excited for the third or fourth time about a possible answer, only to have it collapse the next day because of new data, we stopped allowing ourselves to be very optimistic about anything. We found it hard to keep explaining to colleagues why we hadn’t found the gene yet, or alternatively why we hadn’t just given up. At one point, seeking another metaphor to explain the difficulty of the problem, I even went to a local Michigan farm to have my picture taken holding a sewing needle while sitting atop a large haystack.

But one rainy night in May 1989, the answer finally came. There, spilling out of the fax machine Lap-Chee and I had set up in the Yale dormitory where we were both attending a meeting, was the data from that day’s work in the lab—showing unequivocally that a deletion of just three letters of the DNA code (CTT, to be exact) in the protein-coding part of a previously unknown gene was the cause of cystic fibrosis in the majority of patients. Soon after, we and others were able to show that this mutation and other less common misspellings in this same gene, now called CFTR, account for virtually all cases of the disease.

There it was—the proof that we could actually find that burned-out lightbulb, that we could identify a disease gene by progressively narrowing its chromosomal position. It was a grand moment of celebration. The road had been long and hard, but now hopes were high that research on finding a cure could get under way in earnest.

At a subsequent gathering of thousands of CF researchers, families, and clinicians, I wrote a song to commemorate the gene discovery. Music has always helped me to express and experience things in ways that simple words cannot. Though my guitar skills are only modest, I find great joy in those moments where people raise their voices together. That experience is made up more of spirit than of science. I found myself unable to hold back the tears as these legions of good people rose from their seats and sang along with the chorus:

Dare to dream, dare to dream,

All our brothers and sisters breathing free.

Unafraid, our hearts unswayed,

Till the story of CF is history.

The next steps proved harder than expected, and the story of CF is regrettably still not history. But the gene finding was indeed gratifying, and started CF research on a course toward what we all expect will be ultimate victory. Adding up all of the work that had been done by the more than two dozen teams worldwide to find the CF gene, it had taken ten years and more than $50 million to identify this one gene for this one disease. And CF was supposed to be one of the easiest—since it was a relatively common disease that followed Mendel’s rules of inheritance precisely. How could we ever imagine extending this work to the hundreds of rarer genetic diseases that urgently needed unraveling? Even more challenging, how could we imagine applying this same strategy to diseases like diabetes, schizophrenia, heart disease, or the common cancers, where we know hereditary factors are critically important but the best evidence indicates that many different genes are involved, and no single gene contributes a very strong effect? In those instances, there might be a dozen or more lightbulbs to discover, and they weren’t even expected to be burned out—just subtly dimmer than they should be. If there was to be any hope of succeeding in these more difficult circumstances, we simply had to have detailed and accurate information about every nook and cranny in the human genome. We needed a house-by-house map of the entire country.

Arguments about the wisdom of the project raged furiously during the late 1980s.[1] While most scientists had to agree that the information would eventually be useful, the sheer magnitude of the project made it seem almost unattainable. Furthermore, it was already clear that only a small fraction of the genome was dedicated to coding for protein, and the wisdom of sequencing the rest (the “junk DNA”) was debatable. One well-known scientist wrote: “Sequencing the genome would be about as useful as translating the complete works of Shakespeare into cuneiform, but not quite as feasible or as easy to interpret.”

Another wrote: “It makes no sense . . . geneticists would be wading through a sea of drivel to emerge dry shod on a few tiny islands of information.” Much of the concern was really based, however, on the potential cost of such an enterprise, and the possibility that it might siphon funds away from the rest of the biomedical research enterprise. The best antidote for that concern was to expand the pie, and find new funds for the project. That was neatly engineered in the United States by the new director of the genome project, none other than Jim Watson himself, the codiscoverer of the DNA double helix. Watson, at that time the unrivaled rock star of biology, convinced Congress to take a risk on this new endeavor.

Jim Watson ably oversaw the first two years of the U.S. Human Genome Project, establishing genome centers and recruiting some of the best and brightest scientists of the current generation to work on the project. Much skepticism remained, however, about whether the project would be able to deliver on its fifteen-year timetable, given that many of the technologies needed for accomplishing the goals had not even been invented yet. In 1992, a crisis occurred when Watson suddenly left the project after a public argument with the director of the National Institutes of Health about the wisdom of patenting bits and pieces of DNA (to which Watson was strongly opposed).

An intense national search ensued to find a new director. No one was more surprised than I to find the selection process converging on me. Being quite happy at the time leading a genome center at the University of Michigan, and never having imagined myself as a federal employee, I initially indicated no interest. But the decision haunted me. There was only one Human Genome project. This was going to be done only once in human history. If it succeeded, the consequences for medicine would be unprecedented. As a believer in God, was this one of those moments where I was somehow being called to take on a larger role in a project that would have profound consequences for our understanding of ourselves? Here was a chance to read the language of God, to determine the intimate details of how humans had come to be. Could I walk away? I have always been suspicious of those who claim to perceive God’s will in moments such as this, but the awesome significance of this adventure, and the potential consequences for humankind’s relationship with the Creator, could hardly be ignored.

Visiting my daughter in North Carolina in November 1992, I spent a long afternoon praying in a little chapel, seeking guidance about this decision. I did not “hear” God speak—in fact, I have never had that experience. But during those hours, ending in an evensong service that I had not expected, a peace settled over me. A few days later, I accepted the offer.

The next ten years were a wild roller coaster of experiences. The original goals of the Human Genome Project were incredibly ambitious, but we set aggressive milestones and held ourselves accountable for achieving them. There were moments of great frustration, when methods that seemed very promising in initial tests turned out to fail spectacularly on a larger scale. Friction sometimes broke out among members of our scientific team, and it was my job to serve as mediator. Some centers failed to keep up the pace and had to be phased out, much to the dismay of their leaders. But there were also moments of triumph, as challenging goals were met and new medical insights began to pile up. By 1996, we were ready to start piloting the actual large-scale sequencing of the human genome, using a process that was vastly more technically advanced and cost effective than it had been in 1985 during my hunt for the CF gene. In a defining moment, those of us leading the international public project made immediate access to the data a requirement for participation, and agreed that no patents of any sort would be filed on the DNA sequence. We could not justify even a single day passing where researchers around the world, aiming to understand important medical problems, would not have free and open access to the data being produced.

The next three years proved fruitful, and by 1999 we were ready to accelerate dramatically. But a new challenge appeared on the horizon. Sequencing the entire human genome had previously been considered unattractive as a commercial enterprise, but as the value of the information became more and more apparent, and the costs of sequencing came down, a major challenge to the public Human Genome Project was mounted by a private company. Craig Venter, the leader of the company soon to be named Celera, announced that he would carry out large-scale sequencing on the human genome, but would file patents on many of the genes, and would keep the data in a subscription database that would require significant payment for access.

The idea that the human-genome sequence might become private property was deeply distressing. Even more of concern, questions began to be raised in the Congress about whether it made sense to continue to spend taxpayers’ money on a project that might better be carried out in the private sector—though no actual data from the Celera team was available, and the scientific strategy that Venter aimed to pursue was unlikely to yield a truly finished and highly accurate sequence. Yet a constant stream of claims of higher efficiency poured out of the well-oiled Celera public relations machine, which also sought to label the public project as slow and bureaucratic. Given that the work of the Human Genome Project was being done in some of the world’s finest universities by some of the most creative and dedicated scientists on the planet, that was a little hard to take. Yet the press loved the controversy. Many articles were written about “the race” to sequence the genome, and about Venter’s yacht and my motorcycle. What drivel! What most observers seemed to miss was that this was not, at its core, a debate about who would do the work faster or cheaper (both Celera and the public project were now well situated to deliver on this). It was instead a battle of ideals—would the human genome sequence, our shared inheritance, become a commercial commodity, or a universal public good?

No effort could now be spared by our team. Our twenty public genome centers in six countries ran around the clock. In the space of just eighteen months, after generating a thousand base pairs a second, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, a draft covering 90 percent of the human genome sequence was in hand. All of the data continued to be released every twenty-four hours. For their part, Celera also generated large amounts of data, but it remained out of view in their private database. Recognizing that they could also take advantage of public data, Celera ultimately stopped at only half the production they had planned. Ultimately more than half of the Celera genome assembly turned out to consist of public data.

The attention to “the race” was becoming unseemly, and threatened to diminish the importance of the goal. In late April 2000, with both Celera and the public project poised to announce that a draft had been achieved, I approached a mutual friend of Venter and myself (Ari Patrinos of the Department of Energy’s genome program), and asked him to set up a secret meeting. Over beer and pizza in Ari’s basement, Venter and I worked out a plan for a simultaneous announcement.

Thus, as described in the opening pages of this book, I found myself standing next to the president of the United States in the East Room of the White House on June 26, 2000, announcing that a first draft of the human instruction book had been determined. The language of God was revealed.

Over the next three years, I had the privilege of continuing to lead the public project to refine this draft sequence, closing the remaining gaps, pushing the accuracy of the information to a very high level, and continuing to deposit all of the data into public databases on a daily basis. In April 2003, in the month that marked the fiftieth anniversary of Watson and Crick’s publication on the double helix, we announced the completion of all of the goals of the Human Genome Project. As the project manager of the enterprise, I was intensely proud of the more than two thousand scientists who had accomplished this remarkable feat, one that I believe will be seen a thousand years from now as one of the major achievements of humankind.

At a subsequent celebration of the success of the Human Genome Project, sponsored by the Genetic Alliance, a heartwarming organization that exists to encourage and empower families who face rare genetic diseases, I rewrote the familiar folk song “All the Good People” to fit the occasion. All joined in the chorus:

This is a song for all the good people,

All the good people who are part of this family.

This is a song for all the good people,

We’re joined together by this common thread.

I wrote another verse, about what many of those families were going through as they struggled to cope with rare diseases in themselves or their children:

This is a song for those who are suffering,

Your strength and your spirit have touched one and all.

It’s your dedication that’s our inspiration,

Because of your courage, you help us stand tall.

And finally, I added a verse about the genome:

It’s a book of instructions, a record of history,

A medical textbook, it’s all these entwined

It’s of the people, by the people,

It’s for the people, it’s yours and it’s mine.

For me, as a believer, the uncovering of the human genome sequence held additional significance. This book was written in the DNA language by which God spoke life into being. I felt an overwhelming sense of awe in surveying this most significant of all biological texts. Yes, it is written in a language we understand very poorly, and it will take decades, if not centuries, to understand its instructions, but we had crossed a one-way bridge into profoundly new territory. . . .

DIAGNOSTIC QUESTIONS

1. Can you identify with Collins’s sense of excitement at the unexpected breakthroughs he experienced?

2. Why would God make research into his own “instruction book” so very difficult?

3. Try to play devil’s advocate and argue why projects such as this should not be funded nor attempted.

4. Describe Collins’s sense of God’s calling in his research decisions.

5. Without getting stuck in the evolution debates, what is your impression of Collins’s calling DNA the “language of God”? Is it a case in point of Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork”?

*Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins. Copyright © 2006 by Francis S. Collins. All rights reserved.

1. For additional details of these arguments, see W. A. Dembski and M. Ruse, eds., Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

CHAPTER 30

Follow-Up

In this final section we give ourselves the daunting task of introducing just a few of the many significant figures in contemporary Christian apologetics. Needless to say, these cursory references will need a good deal of follow-up by our gentle readers.

Occasionally apologists are noticed by a wide public because the quality of their writing is matched by the high profile of their ministry. We cite three in this category. Timothy Keller (b. 1950) is a pastor of a remarkable church in New York City, Redeemer Presbyterian Church. The stated mission of Redeemer is “Seeking to renew the city, socially, spiritually, culturally.” Not only is Redeemer a network of churches in and around the city, but its Church Planting Center helps others with their approach to starting new churches around the world. Keller has written on a number of subjects. The Reason for God (2008) became something of a publishing phenomenon because of its carefully laid-out responses to skepticism and its winsome appeal to Christian faith.

Ravi Zacharias (b. 1946) came to faith from his background in India. He is a passionate apologist-evangelist and speaks regularly in major venues and universities around the world. He has established Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, with centers in six different countries. The goal of RZIM is “to seek to reach and challenge those who shape the ideas of a culture with the credibility and the beauty of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” The ministry takes a number of forms, including forums, research, media, and community outreach. Zacharias has written over twenty widely selling books, including Can Man Live Without God? (1996), Deliver Us from Evil (1998), and The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us through the Events in Our Lives (2007). Most recently RZIM has been concentrating on understanding Islam.

Charles (“Chuck”) Colson (b. 1931) was caught up in the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon. Through those circumstances he became a Christian believer and began Prison Fellowship, one of the most successful outreaches into the world of correction. The mission statement on PF’s website is “To seek the transformation of prisoners and their reconciliation to God, family, and community through the power and truth of Jesus Christ.”

We start with them inside prison, as they learn new values based on the life and teaching of Christ and how to apply them. We continue with them through the critical transition to the outside, helping them through obstacles and daunting temptations. So even if they stumble, it doesn’t mean defeat.

Colson has told his own story in Born Again (1976) and the very personal Life Sentence (1999). Influenced by Francis Schaeffer, he has written several books on apologetics from a basically Reformed viewpoint. They include Loving God (1998), How Now Shall We Live? (2004), and The Good Life (2005). His latest initiative is the Centurions program, run jointly with T. M. Moore, a work that identifies and prepares promising gatekeepers for worldview thinking and persuasive apologetics.

Among the more important philosophically oriented apologists of today, we should include at least three. Nicholas Wolterstorff (b. 1932) grew up in a family of Dutch immigrants on a farm in Minnesota. He studied philosophy at Calvin College with Harry Jellema and Henry Stob, who led him to discover Abraham Kuyper and the neo-Calvinist approach to worldview thinking. He obtained the PhD from Harvard. He spent thirty years teaching philosophy back at Calvin and then finished his career at Yale Divinity School, where he taught philosophical theology. With Alvin Plantinga he edited Faith and Rationality (1984), a volume that put Reformed epistemology in the limelight. Among his numerous books are Reason within the Bounds of Religion (1984), a deliberate reversal of the Kantian dictum, and John Locke and the Ethics of Belief (1996). His most personal book is Lament for a Son (1987), written after his son Eric died in a tragic mountain climbing accident.

J. P. Moreland (b. 1948) is from a nearly opposite school of thought. He obtained the ThM from Dallas Theological Seminary and the PhD from the University of Southern California. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, a part of Biola University. Moreland is in the classical and evidentialist camps, and has strong affinities with William Lane Craig, examined above. He is a fellow in the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, considered the hub of the Intelligent Design movement. His books include Scaling the Secular City (1987), The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer (1994), and Love God with All Your Mind: The Role of Reason in the Life of the Soul (1997).

Finally, very different again, is Richard Swinburne (b. 1934), who is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Oxford. He joined the Eastern Orthodox Church. In his numerous books and articles he argues for the existence of God as metaphysically necessary to the way things are. Strongly committed to the compatibility of science and faith, Swinburne endorses a certain kind of natural theology. He has developed a highly sophisticated view of probability and warrant. His best-known books in defense of theism are The Coherence of Theism (1997, rev. 1993), The Existence of God (1979; 2nd ed., 2004), and Faith and Reason (1981; 2nd ed., 2005). In them he argues for the high probability of God’s existence, based on the contingency of the world.

John M. Frame (b. 1939) is arguably today’s most articulate and prolific apologist in the Reformed, presuppositionalist tradition. He holds the AB from Princeton University, the BD (now MDiv) from Westminster Theological Seminary, the MPhil from Yale University, and the DD from Belhaven College. After teaching at Westminster in Philadelphia, he moved to Escondido, California, to help found what became Westminster Seminary California. He currently holds the J. D. Trimble Chair of Systematic Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. Frame has developed his own version of Reformed epistemology, using a “triperspectival” theory, one that sees unity and diversity among the situational, the normative, and the existential aspects of knowledge. He has written extensively on epistemology, on the doctrine of God, and on ethics. His book Apologetics to the Glory of God (1994) combines biblical theology with apologetic strategies. One of his books, No Other God (2001), is a carefully reasoned polemic against “open theism.” He has also written the lovingly critical work Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought (1995).

Finally, though perhaps not uniquely an apologist, N. T. Wright warrants mention. Nicholas Thomas (“Tom”) Wright (b. 1948) was the bishop of Durham in the Anglican Church, but now is Chair in New Testament and Early Christianity at the School of Divinity, St Andrews University. While associated with the “New Perspective” on Paul, he has regularly been a defender of the historicity of Jesus and the veracity of the Christian hope. He has conducted public debates with liberal theologians such as John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, going to the mat over the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. His most powerful appeal to follow Christ is the book Simply Christian (2006), in which he argues that the Christian faith gives meaning to life in a world desperately lacking in sense.

A host of other marvelous defenders of the Christian position could be mentioned. We simply trust that our readers will take the time to look for them and perhaps bring them to our attention. Many voices are needed to help believers always be prepared to make a defense for the hope that is in them (1 Pet. 3:15). It is our hope that “whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed.” In that, we rejoice (Phil. 1:18)!

General Index

Abelard, Peter, 18

Acton, Lord, 644

actual infinite, 698-707

Adam, disobedience of, 122-24

ad fontes, 13

Adler, Mortimer, 564-65

Adrian, emperor, 159

Aelian, 157-58

affections, 221-22

Africa, 359, 514, 523-24

African American churches, 309

agnosticism, 372, 387, 607

Akosmism, 352

al-Ghāzalī, 706

allegories, 105

Allis, Oswald T., 436

already/not yet, 335

Alston, William, 602-4

Althusser, Louis, 657

Ambrose, 90

America

Kuyper on, 356-57

military and economic power of, 625

Ames, William, 165

Anabaptists, 352

analogy

of nature, 199-201, 209, 213

of religion, 196

Thomistic doctrine of, 686-87

anarchy, 541-42

animism, 344

“anonymous Christian,” 492

Anselm, 18, 657-58, 660

anthropology, 41, 564

anti-intellectualism, 557

antithesis, 332-33, 334-35, 350, 354, 392-93

as covenantal, 335, 393n4

apartheid, 540, 623n3

apologetical minimum, 402-3

apologetical theology, 398

apologetics, 267

Barth on, 308

in the church, 22

Kuyper on, 331-33, 337

apostasy, 323

a priori beliefs, 597, 601, 612

Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas

Archer, William, 412

argument from design, 239-41, 244, 248-50

Arianism, 433, 496

aristocracy, 349-50

Aristotelianism, 165

Aristotle, 18, 38, 49, 70, 74, 88-89, 138, 141, 143, 158, 427, 476, 500, 660, 705

Arminian apologetics, 457-77

Arminianism, 692

Arnold, Matthew, 411, 428

art, 285

asceticism, 413

“aspiration to reasonable theology,” 198

astronomy, 49

Athanasius, 496

atheism, 138, 180-81, 251, 266, 302, 387, 635, 654, 665-66, 693

Athenagoras, 581

atheological apologetic, 132

A-Theory of time, 703-5

Atlan, Liliane, 635

atomism

in apologetic methodology, 471

of non-Christian thought, 474-76

atonement, 133-34, 388, 390, 602

Auburn Affirmation, 436

Auden, W. H., 653

Augustine, 166, 649

Balthasar on, 493-94

Bellarmine on, 111, 113, 122, 127, 128

Calvin on, 53, 54, 62, 64-65, 77, 81, 82, 84, 86, 88-90, 94, 101-2, 103, 104, 105

Kuyper on, 353

Marion on, 658, 680

Pascal on, 185, 191, 192

Augustinianism, 339

Auschwitz, 633-36, 654

authority, 452

autonomy, 461, 467, 533, 568

Averroists, 18

Avicenna, 686

awakenings, 306-7, 310

awe, 494, 495, 605

Ayer, A. J., 650

“bad faith,” 637-38

Balaguer, Mark, 699

Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 491-92

Bancroft, George, 340

Baptists, 339, 341

bare theists, 464

Barfield, Owen, 311

Barmen Declaration, 308

Barth, Karl, 269, 307-8, 312, 492, 496, 531, 546, 558, 577, 622-23, 627, 676

basic beliefs, 586, 589, 598, 600-601

Basil, 111

Baudelaire, Charles, 265

Bavinck, Herman, 453, 455

Bayle, Pierre, 302

Beattie, Francis R., 392, 395

Bebbington, David, 311

Becket, Thomas, 432

Beecher, Henry Ward, 309

being, 581, 657-61, 668-89

beliefs, 651

Bellarmine, Robert, 17, 107-9

Belloc, Hilaire, 405

Benedict XVI, Pope, 491

Benjamin, Walter, 633

Berdyaev, Nicholas, 577

Berger, Peter, 631, 648-49, 653

Bergier, Nicolas-Sylvain, 302

Bergman, Ingmar, 553

Berkeley, George, 195, 302, 361

Berkhof, Hendrikus, 520

Berlin, Isaiah, 643

Bernard, 88

best of all possible worlds, 302

Bettelheim, Bruno, 633

Beversluis, John, 594n7

Bible. See Scripture

Bible Presbyterian Church, 545, 546

BioLogos, 709

birds, 256, 258

Black Death, 14

blessings, 95-96

block-house methodology, 471

body, 24-25

Boers, 359

Boesak, Allan, 623n3

Boethius, 38, 658

Boff, Leonardo, 512-13

Bohm, David, 696

Bolsec, Jérôme-Hermès, 37

Bonald, Louis de, 306

Bonaventure, 109, 681-82

Borg, Marcus, 311, 721

Bosanquet, Bernard, 473

Boston personalism, 577

Bouyer, Louis, 513

Bowman, A. A., 454

Boyle, Robert, 300

Bradlaugh, Charles, 421, 423, 425

Bradley, F. H., 473, 475

Brahmanism, 374

Brandeis, Louis, 643

Brethren of the Common Life, 14

Broad, C. D., 195-96

Brooks, Phillips, 309

Brown, Robert E., 220

Bruno, Giordano, 107

Bryan, William Jennings, 310

B-Theory of time, 703-4

Bucer, Martin, 39

Buddhism, 343, 344, 374, 640

Budé, Guillaume, 40

Bunyan, John, 470

Bushnell, Horace, 269

Buswell, J. Oliver, Jr., 456

Butler, Joseph, 195-98, 224, 241-42, 301, 361, 457,468,581,589

Caiaphas, 535, 538, 541

Cain and Abel, 102

Caird, Edward, 362

Cajetan, Cardinal, 22, 141, 145

Calvin College, 453, 454, 720

Calvin Forum, 454

Calvinism

as life system, 334, 338-59

Pascal on, 175

and politics, 339-41

Calvin, John, 15, 16, 17, 37-41, 108, 346, 347, 458, 590, 593-97, 599, 622

Calvin Theological Seminary, 453, 454

Cameron, John, 147

Camus, Albert, 636

cannibalism, 521, 522

Cantor, Georg, 699, 702

capitalism, 405, 540, 626

Cappadocians, 496

Carnell, E. J., 311, 577

Carroll, Michael P., 614

caste system, 349, 523

castigatory justice, 139

Catholic Reformation, 17-18, 107

cause, 693-96

Celera, 716-17

certainty, 185, 196

Chamberlain, Ava, 223-24

chance, 185-86, 461-62, 539-40, 563, 565

Chardin, Teilhard de, 513

charity, 429

Chateaubriand, François René de, 306

Chauncey, Charles, 221

chemical determinism, 554, 563, 564

Chesterton, G. K., 307, 311, 405-6, 644, 647-48, 652

Chihara, Charles S., 699

China, 631

Christendom, 525

as apostasy, 323

Kierkegaard on, 313-14, 317-20

Christian, as lord of all things, 32

Christian culture, 515, 549-51

Christian experience, 447-48, 452

Christianity, 280, 289-97

of Christendom, 315-16, 321-29

and culture, 531

as a life, 379

minimum of, 402-3

of New Testament, 318-21, 328

Orr on, 366, 369-71

as religion of broken heart, 445

Schleiermacher on, 289-97

Christian liberty, 28, 32-34

Christian life, as true existentialism, 559

Christian mythology, 479

Christian philosophers, 585

Christian Reformed Church, 455

Christian Science, 434

Christian theism, 416, 457-64, 466, 471-73, 477,588

Christology, 16, 512-13

Chrysostom, John, 89, 90, 512

church

as equivocal place, 324

and Scripture, 63-65

unity of, 272

and world, 350-52

“Church Growth” school, 521

Church of England, 341

Church of South India, 519

Cicero, 70, 74, 143, 594n7

circular reasoning, 460

circumcision of heart, 99

cities, rise of, 15

civil rights, 358

Civil War, 309

Clarke, Samuel, 195

classical apologetics, 691-92

classical foundationalism, 586, 607

Claver, Peter, 512

Clement VIII, Pope, 107

Climacus, John, 109

Clinton, Bill, 652

cognitive malfunction, 607, 613

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 269

Collins, Anthony, 196

Collins, Francis, 581, 709

Cölln, D. G. C. von, 267

Colson, Charles (“Chuck”), 719-20

commingling of blood, 355-57

common grace, 41, 351-52

common sense realism, 224, 361, 394, 587

Communism, 626

community, 533-34

Community of St. John, 491

commutative justice, 138, 141, 142, 144

compassion, 575-76

Comte, Auguste, 367, 369

Condorcet, Marquis de, 306

Confucianism, 353

conscience, 643

conservative Christianity, 309

Constantine, 531

Constructibilism, 699

constructive revolution, 547, 553

continuance, of course of world, 200

contrivance, and contriver, 248-50, 256,260-61

Cop, Nicolas, 38

Copenhagen Interpretation, 696

coram deo, 334

corrective justice, 139

cosmological argument, 693, 705

Council of Trent, 17

counterfeit miracles, 392

covenant, 509

and antitheses, 335, 393n4

as “one-way,” 628-29

covenant breakers, 465

covenant of grace, 465

Craig, William Lane, 581, 691-92, 720

creatio ex nihilo, 694-95

creation, 116-18, 260-61, 351-52, 388

cherished and sustained by God, 530

as witness to God, 45-58

Creator-creature distinction, 443

Crellius, 145, 146

Crick, Francis, 554, 564

crime, 560

critical realism, 582

cross, 529, 537-38, 541

Crossan, John Dominic, 721

cross-cultural missions, 526

cultural relativism, 522

culture, 311, 514, 515-16, 521-22, 524, 530-31

and religion, 286

Schaeffer on, 547-53

“cultured despisers” of the church, 267

curiosity, 53

custom, 187, 188

cynicism, 647, 654

Cyril, 522

cystic fibrosis, 711-14

d’Ailly, Pierre, 38

d’Albret, Jeanne, 15

damnation, 653

Daniélou, Jean, 491

Dante, 13, 635

Darby, John Nelson, 309

Darrow, Clarence, 310

Darwin, Charles, 240, 307, 310, 343, 565

Darwinism, 308, 640

Dasein, 673-76

Davis, Stephen, 240

Dawkins, Richard, 599, 649

death, 180, 564

as destruction, 199-208

death camps, 633-36

death of God, 307, 496, 666, 688

de facto objections, 588-89, 590, 611-13

deism, 18, 195, 196-98, 278, 299-300, 301,306,372,387,389,464

deists, 223, 242

de jure objections, 588-89, 590, 611-13, 619

democracy, 37, 349-50

demonology, 553

de Montaigne, Michel, 18

de Mornay, Philippe, 18

Demosthenes, 70

Dennett, Daniel, 599, 696

De rerum novarum, 405

Derrida, Jacques, 657

Descartes, René, 169-70, 173, 672, 688

design, and designer, 244, 248-50. See also

argument from design

desire, 486

determinism, 554, 563, 564

d’Holbach, Baron, 302

dialectical theology, 307-8

Dickens, A. G., 108

dictation (theory of inspiration), 449

Diderot, Denis, 306

Diet of Worms, 17

dignity of man, 504

Dionysius the Areopagite, 493-94

direct method of apologetics, 460, 464

discernment, 531

discipleship, 530-31

dispensationalism, 309-10

distributist movement, 405

distributive justice, 138, 141, 142, 144

DNA, 709-18

doctrine, 375-76, 378-80, 382

dogma, 287

Dominicans, 14

dominion, 351

Dooyeweerd, Herman, 456

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 307, 577

double-negative argument, 196, 589

doubt, 190

dualism, 524-25, 532-33

Du Moulin, Pierre, 165

Duns Scotus, John, 141, 686

Durandus, 141

Durant, Will and Ariel, 563

dust of death, 553, 563, 571, 574

Dyson, Hugo, 311

ear, 261-63

Eastern Orthodox Church, 493, 721

Eck, John, 22

Eckhart, Meister, 658-61

economics, 542

Eden, Murray, 565

Edwards, Jonathan, 219-24, 311, 618

egresses, of justice, 139-40, 144, 148-49

Einstein, Albert, 565, 709

election, 92, 128-30

elements, 537

elenctics, 267

Ellis, Albert, 613

emerging church, 311

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 424

empiricism, 239, 474

Enlightenment, 18, 169-70, 220, 224, 240, 267,

300, 306, 311, 333, 502, 523, 534, 621, 639,643

Enthusiasts, 221

environmental determinism, 554

Epictetus, 424

Epicureans, 56

epistemic possibility, 591-92n1

epistemology, 582

equality, 349-50

equity, 139

Erasmus, 14-15, 19

Erastianism, 299

eschatology, 390

essentials and nonessentials, 276

eternity, 178, 179, 229-30

ethnic Protestants, 309

Euclid, 38

Euripides, 137

Europe, expansion of, 305

evangelicalism, 310-11, 575-76

evangelism, 542

evidences, 239-40, 361, 363, 402

evidentialism, 301, 361, 437, 720

evidential objections, 586

evil, 230, 241, 653-54

problem of, 302, 581

evolution, 307, 310, 343, 416, 651

exegetical theology, 398

existentialism, 559, 591n1

Exodus motif, 623-24

experience, 227-29, 447-48

experiential knowledge, 602-5

expiation, 163

eye, 251-60

fact-revelation, 380

facts, 460, 475

faith, 348, 591, 637-38

as gift from God, 191

and justification, 27-28, 30-31

Marion on, 675-77

and reason, 399, 639

and true fear, 190

and works, 26-29, 31, 34

Faith Theological Seminary, 545

fall, 387, 594n7

false apostles, 79

false belief, 606-7, 608-9

false worship, 44

Falwell, Jerry, 546

Farel, Guillaume, 39

fate, 499-500

fatherhood of God, 440-43

fear, true and false, 190

feeling, 188, 191, 265, 267, 268, 275, 281, 292, 375-76, 380-81, 438

fellowship, 272

Ferorariensis, 141

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 377, 494

Fichte, J. G., 666, 672

Fictionalism, 699

Figuralism, 699

Fish, Stanley, 642

fishes, 256, 258

flesh, 24-25, 98

flesh and blood, 542-43

foolish reasoning, 548

formal knowledge, 221

Forster, E. M., 533

Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 309

foundationalism, 586, 621

Fourth Lateran Council, 494

Frame, John M., 721

Francis, Saint, 430, 512

Franke, John, 311

Franklin, Benjamin, 644

Franzius, W., 146

freedom, 508-9, 553, 644. See also Christian

liberty

freedom from, vs. freedom for, 643-44

Free University of Amsterdam, 331, 334

free will, 41, 84-106

French Enlightenment, 16, 306

French Revolution, 302, 306-7, 337, 343, 346, 348,350,353,354,394

Freud, Sigmund, 494, 590, 606, 608, 610, 613-19, 621, 627n2, 638

Freudian psychology, 308

Fruin, Robert, 339

Fuller Theological Seminary, 311

fundamentalism, 309-11, 435-36

future life, 199-210

futurity, 703-4

Gale, Richard, 704

Galen, 48

Galileo, 107-8

Gallican Confession, 39

Gallicanism, 108

Gauguin, Paul, 566

Gefühl, 268

general revelation, 439, 464, 568

Genetic Alliance, 717

genetic fallacy, 615

genetics, 709-18

Geneva, 37, 39

genius, 316-17

German Christians, 514

German Enlightenment, 306

German philosophy, 343

Giacometti, Alberto, 642

Gide, André, 651

gift, Marion on, 661, 682

Gilot, Françoise, 642-43

Gilson, Etienne, 593n5, 679-80

Gitichius, Michael, 146

globalization, 305

Gnosticism, 434

God

as agapē, 661, 688-89

attributes of, 148

as author of Scripture, 65-66

and Being, 668-79

at center of all of life, 16

as Creator, 50, 59-60, 117-18, 181, 241, 257, 260, 302, 373, 416, 442-43, 610

as “Father,” 440-43

fellowship with, 344-48

freedom of, 507

goodness of, 506-8

as hidden God, 186-87

holiness of, 162, 571, 573

immanent and transcendent, 387

immutability of, 235

infinity of, 182, 234-35, 701n20

judgments of, 126

justice of, 44, 52, 133-34, 136-63, 182, 569-76

limits own power, 260

love of, 497, 503-4

name of, 493

as natural governor of world, 212-17

as necessary and free agent, 149-50

perfections of, 54-55, 139

as personal, 498-504

power of, 148

as self-sufficient, 582

set world free, 416

on side of poor and oppressed, 623, 629

transcendence of, 443, 658-60

truthfulness of, 640

as wholly other and incomprehensible, 493-98

wisdom of, 47-49, 53, 110-28, 148

Goethe, J. W. von, 265, 306, 495

good, goodness, 506-7, 681-83, 688

good works, 31, 34

gospel

confidence in, 556-58

and culture, 517, 524-32

government, of God, 139-40

grace, 100-102

Graham, Billy, 311

Greek culture, 499-500

Gregory, Saint, 114

Gregory XIII, Pope, 107

Grenz, Stanley, 311

Groen van Prinsterer, Guillaume, 307

Grotius, Hugo, 299, 307, 692

ground of being, 506-7

guilt, 560-61

habit, 143-44

Hammarskjöld, Dag, 516

happiness, 210-11

hardening of hearts, 82-83

Hartmann, 374, 376

Havel, Václav, 642, 650

head and heart, 221

heart, 375

depravity of, 98

Edwards on, 221

of flesh, 91

God’s knowledge of, 114-15

Pascal on, 176, 191-92

heavenly citizenship, 529

Hegel, G. W. F., 313, 369, 500

Hegelian idealism, 480

Heidegger, Martin, 514, 657, 659-61, 662-63, 668-79, 693

Heidelberg Catechism, 616

hemoglobin, 710

Hengstenberg, E. W., 267

Henry, Carl F. H., 311

Heraclitus, 500

Herbert of Cherbury, 196, 299-300

Hermann, Wilhelm, 269, 435

Herod, 535, 541

heroism, 530

Hesiod, 157

Hick, John, 309

hierarchical social relations, 349-50

higher criticism, 266, 308

Hilary, 496

Hilbert, David, 699, 700-702

Hinduism, 640

historical Jesus, 496, 517

historical theology, 398

historicism, 308

history, 373, 389, 555

Hodge, A. A., 391

Hodge, Caspar Wistar, 453

Hodge, Charles, 339, 391, 394

holiness, 291

Holiness churches, 309

Holy Spirit, 101-2

and consciousness of sin, 446

illumination of, 92

and inspiration of Scripture, 449

testimony of, 62-67, 77, 79-80, 396, 397, 602

Home, Everard, 263

homeliness, 530

Homer, 138, 162, 499

homosexuality, 566

hope, 510

Horace, 160

Houtteville, C. F., 302

Huguenots, 16, 341

Huizinga, Johan, 13n1

human genome, 7-9, 711

Human Genome Project, 711, 715-18

human goodness, 446

humanism, 13-15, 40, 554

human rights, 625

Hume, David, 198, 240-44, 301, 361, 598, 607, 694

Hus, Jan, 14

Huxley, Aldous, 638

Huxley, Thomas, 421, 423

hypocrisy, 323

hypostatic union, 513

Ibsen, Henrik, 412, 638

idealism, 473, 480

ideas, 376-77

have consequences, 650-51

ideology, as idolatry, 630

idolatry, 57, 532, 626-29, 661, 664-68, 687-88

Ignatius of Antioch, 662

Ignatius of Loyola, 17, 109

ignorance, 55, 179

image of God, 351, 373, 387, 507-8, 551, 554

imagination, 209, 480

imaginations, 56, 548

imaginative literature, 311-12

immortality

of human minds, 206

and morality, 180

of the soul, 49-50, 209

imperialism, 305, 532

improbabilities, 242-43

imputation, 29

imagination, 686-88

incarnation, 505-11, 602

inculturation, 514

Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign

Missions, 436

India, 514, 523

indifference, 18

indirect method of apologetics, 460, 464, 466

individualism, 523-24, 533-34

individuality, of religions, 279-82

infinite being, 232-35, 292

infinite past, 703, 705-7

infinity, 182, 698-707

Ingersoll, Robert G., 421

ingratitude, 48

injustice, 622-23, 628

innate ideas, 300

Inner Light, 414-15

inspiration, and belief, 187

instinct, 486-87

instrumental religion, 628

Intelligent Design movement, 720

International Missionary Council, 519

intuition, 192, 278, 281

Intuitionists, 699

intuition of the Infinite, 287

invisible world, 231-34

irrationalism, 473, 474, 607

Islam, 342, 343, 344-45, 348-49, 350, 353, 354, 355,357,372,522

Israel, Jonathan, 169

James I, King, 107

Jansenists, 174, 175

Jeffner, Anders, 198

Jellema, Harry, 720

Jeremiah, 546, 550-51

Jerome, 89, 103, 430

Jesuits, 17, 107, 108, 175, 305

Jesus Christ

authority of, 451

death of, 529

disarmed powers, 537-38, 541

as example, 496

as Mediator, 293-95

priesthood of, 31-32

resurrection of, 530, 541, 721

as Son of God, 388

as Word of God, 517

Jews, on divine name, 493

John Paul II, Pope, 491, 515, 641, 644

Jones, E. M., 617

journalism, 640

joy, 653

Judaism, 288-89, 372

judgment of God, 144, 569-71, 573, 576

judgments of value, 386

Julian the Apostate, 415

Jung, Carl Gustav, 512, 562

justice, 136-63, 540

justification, 16, 27-28, 30-31, 34

of knowledge, 581, 587, 600

Justin Martyr, 581

kalām cosmological argument, 693, 705

Kanitscheider, Bernulf, 697n11

Kant, Immanuel, 169n2, 265-66, 366, 383, 456,

472, 474, 595, 658, 666, 672

Käsemann, Ernst, 511

Keller, Timothy, 582n4, 719

Kennedy, John F., 641

Khruschchev, Nikita, 563

Kierkegaard, Søren, 307, 313-14, 630, 634

kingdom of God, 373-74, 388, 512, 534

kings, 32-33

knowledge, 384-86

Edwards on, 220-22

as power, 641

knowledge of God, 40-41, 156, 397, 593-99, 602, 605-8

corruption of, 42-45

in creation, 45-58

Knox, John, 16

Knudsen, Robert, 363-64

Koop, C. Everett, 546

Kuiper, R. B., 436

Küng, Hans, 309

Kuyper, Abraham, 307, 331-35, 392-93, 396-402, 453, 454, 455, 623n3, 720

L’Abri, 546, 566, 573, 631

Lactantius, 44

ladder of ascent, 109

ladder of water analogy, 461

Lamentations, 546, 550

Lamy, François, 302

language, 521-22

last judgment, 127

law, 93-95, 99, 572

law of nature, 199, 247, 484-86

Lawrence, D. H., 644

legalism, 561

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 302, 472, 672

Leipzig Disputation, 22

Leland, John, 302

Lenin, Vladimir, 642

Leo X, Pope, 20-22

lesbianism, 566

Levi, Primo, 633-37

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 564

Lewis, C. S., 311-12, 406, 479-82, 577, 629, 649,653

liberal Christianity, 265, 308-9, 362, 363, 436-37, 438-52, 577, 653

liberation theology, 511-13, 514, 528, 624-26

liberty, 349, 358

life systems, 337-38. See also worldview

Lindberg, Carter, 16n6

literature, 479

Locke, John, 196n5, 300-301, 361

logical positivism. See positivism

love, 192

loyalty, 408-11

Lubac, Henri de, 491

Lucretius, 367, 638

Luther, Martin, 15, 16, 17, 19-23, 40, 345-46, 670,673

Lutheranism, 108, 341, 342, 345-46

Lutheran pietism, 265

Macartney, Clarence, 436

MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 16n6

Machen, J. Gresham, 310, 435-37, 453, 545

Machovec, Milan, 625

MacIntyre, Alasdair, 520, 533

Mackie, J. L., 694-95, 702, 705-6

MacLuhan, Marshall, 305

MacRae, Allan, 436

Mahomet. See Muhammad

Maistre, Joseph, de, 306

Malthusians, 425, 426

man, 443-44

dignity of, 387

significance of, 553-69, 571, 573, 574

Manichees, 64-65

Mann, Thomas, 654

Marcellus II, Pope, 107

Marcus Aurelius, 414-16

Mariology, 512-13

Marion, Jean-Luc, 581, 657-61

Marsden, George, 220, 224, 361

Martin, David, 631

martyr, 412-13, 427

Marx, Karl, 494, 500, 514, 540, 590, 606, 613, 621, 625, 628, 630, 638, 641

Marxism, 606, 625-27

Mary, 16

materialism, 534, 563

mathematics, 173, 176, 699-702

McClymond, Michael J., 219

McDermott, Gerald, 219

McGavran, Donald, 521

McIntire, Carl, 545, 546

McLaren, Brian, 311

McTaggart, J. M. E., 703

mechanical view, of inspiration, 449

mediation, 293-95

memories, 635

memory, 597

Mencken, H. L., 436

mercy, 103-4, 150

“mere Christianity,” 481-82

Mersennus, 137

Messiah, 289

meta-apologetics, 332n2, 392

metaphysics, 368, 582, 657-61, 668, 671-72, 676-77

and warrant, 611-13

Methodists, 339, 341

Methodius, 522

method of correlation (Tillich), 308, 577

methodology, 457

Middle Ages, 13-14

Mill, J. S., 616

Milton, John, 174, 371, 574

miracles, 71-72, 242-43, 370, 384

misery, 210-11, 214

“misprison of apologetics,” 332, 393, 395

missionary movement, 526-27

missions, 305, 311

models, 591-92

modernism, 308-9, 337, 343, 344, 346-47, 348,353

modernist-fundamentalist controversies, 435

modernity, 665

monasticism, 351

money, 540

monists, 302

monotheism, 372

Moore, T. M., 720

moral absolutes, 571, 654

moralities, 484

moral judgments, 569-71

moral law, 486-89, 561

Moreland, J. P., 720

mortality, and morality, 180

Moscorovius, 146

Moses, inspiration of, 70-75

Mother Teresa, 514, 614n32

Mozart, Wolfgang, 313, 492

Muhammad, 344, 354

Müller, Max, 370

Munster, 352, 354

Muslims, 528-29

mystery, 232-34

mystery of God, 494-98

mysticism, 380, 395-96

natural corruption, 41

naturalistic humanism, 554

natural law, 299, 599

natural philosophy, 285

natural religion, 196-97, 215n4, 272-74, 283- 85,306,415,581

natural revelation, perspecuity of, 458

natural sciences, 307

natural theology, 137, 165, 240, 398, 581, 593n5, 692, 721

nature, 51, 139, 212-13

grand spectacles of, 596

interpretation of, 467-68

Nazism, 308, 484, 488-89, 633-34, 653-54

necessity, and God’s will, 133-34

negation, 666

negative theology, 496

neo-Calvinism, 720

neo-evangelicalism, 577

Nero, 38

Nestorianism, 513

new atheism, 582

Newbigin, Lesslie, 519-20

new creation, 522

new gods, 666-67

New Journalism, 640

Newman, John Henry, 494, 643

New Perspective on Paul, 721

New Testament, 75-76, 511

Newton, Isaac, 301

Nichols, Robert, 436

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 308

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 307, 310, 503, 571, 621, 636, 642, 651-52, 665-67, 672

Ninety-Five Theses, 19-20, 22

Noahic covenant, 530

nominalism, 495

nonbeing, 683-84

notional knowledge, 220-21

numinous, 605

oath, 324-25

obedience, 627-28

Ockenga, Harold John, 311

offense, of Christianity, 319

official Christianity. See Christianity, of

Christendom, 329

Old Princeton, 394, 436, 454

Old Testament, 70-75, 511, 534

ontological argument, 657-58

onto-theo-logy, 661, 679

open theism, 721

Oppenheimer, Robert, 565

oppression, 515

Oppy, Graham, 699, 702

optimism, 307, 372, 407-18, 422, 430

order, 192

Origen, 103, 662

Orr, James, 331, 334, 337n1, 361-64

Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 310, 437, 455

Ostorodius, 146

Otto, Rudolph, 269

Owen, John, 131-35, 195, 361

paganism, 342, 344-45, 348, 353, 354, 357, 368, 427, 432, 446-47

Paine, Tom, 421

Paley, William, 239-44, 301, 361, 581, 692

palingenesis, 392-93, 397, 400-402

Paludamus, 141

Panikkar, K. M., 527

pantheism, 269, 277-78, 343, 387, 415, 416, 443,464

papacy, 21

paradox, 406, 423, 425, 427, 429-31

parity of reasoning, 197-98

Parmenides, 472, 474, 500

particular justice, 138

Partinos, Ari, 717

Pascal, Blaise, 173-77, 502, 676

pastness, 703-4

patriotism, 408-9, 432

pattern, of Christianity (Kierkegaard), 317-18,323

Patton, Francis, 435

Paul

before Areopagus, 499

confidence in gospel, 556-58

on suppressing the truth, 560-62, 565-69,461

Paul V, Pope, 107

peace, 503, 510

Peace of Westphalia, 306

Peasants’ War, 19

Peirce, Charles Sanders, 596n10

Pelagianism, 89, 175

Pelagius, 88

Penelhum, Terence, 197

Pentecostal churches, 309

perception, 597, 602-5

perfectionism, 392

Permanent Things, 640

pessimism, 372, 407-18, 421-22, 430

Petrarch, 13

phenomenalism, 474-75

philosophes, 302

philosophical theology, 267

philosophy

as foolishness, 670-71

and theology, 671-72

Picasso, Pablo, 642-43

pietism, 265, 266, 268

piety, 41, 44, 292

Pilate, 535, 541

Pilgrims, 341, 348

Pius XI, Pope, 108

Plantinga, Alvin, 581, 585-89, 720

Plato, 40, 55, 70, 74, 180, 266, 424, 500, 502, 506,658,660

Platonism, 557

plausibility structures, 541

plenary inspiration, 449-50

Pliny, 162

Plotinus, 500

pluralism, 521

plurality of religion, 271-72

Plutarch, 138, 158

Plymouth Brethren, 309

poetry, 285

point of contact, 459

Polanyi, Michael, 520, 564

polemics, 267, 287

politics, 530, 542

polygamy, 523-24

polytheism, 46, 278, 368, 372

poor, 511, 628-29

poor faith, 637, 639

positive religions, 272-77, 280, 282, 283-85

positivism, 372-73, 585-86, 650

possessive monotheism, 628

post-Christian world, 520, 547-53

postevangelicalism, 311, 577

postmodern apologetics, 657

postmodernism, 170, 311, 582, 621, 632, 641, 642, 650, 651, 653-54

potential infinite, 698

power, 641-42

powers. See principalities and powers

practical theology, 267, 398, 403

practical wisdom, 116-28

pragmatism, 474, 639, 645

preaching Christ, 34

precepts, 27-28, 92-95, 99

predestination, 126, 128-30, 338-39, 433

preredemptive supernatural revelation, 465

Presbyterian Church in America, 546

Presbyterians, 341

presentness, 703-4

preservation, of creation, 118-22

presuppositionalism, 456, 545, 721

presuppositions, 568

Machen on, 437, 438

reasoning by, 459-62, 466, 473

pride, 48

priests, 32-33, 327-29

Princeton Theological Seminary, 391, 435, 436, 453

principalities and powers, 534-43

printing press, 15

Prison Fellowship, 720

privacy, 643

probability, 195, 196, 200-201, 721

progress, in theology, 382

promises of Scripture, 27-28, 95-96

proofs. See also theistic proofs

of God’s wisdom, 47-48

Pascal on, 186-88

propagation of species, 121-22

proper function, 587

properly basic beliefs, 586, 600-601

prophecy, 70-75, 289

prophets, 315, 634

propitiation, 163

propositions, 225-27

Protagoras, 138

Protestantism, 17-18, 107, 343, 345

Protestants, on Scripture, 466

Proust, Marcel, 553, 563, 571, 574

providence, 46-47, 52, 54-55, 126-28, 143, 216,384

Prusaeensis, Dion, 158

Przywara, Erich, 494

Pseudo-Dionysius, 663, 682-84, 687, 688

psychological determinism, 563

psychological relief, 560

punishment, 52, 54, 97, 148-49, 161, 213-17

Puritans, 341, 348

Quakers, 414, 431

quantum physics, 696-98

Qur’an, 18, 344, 522

race, 540

mingling of, 355-57

racism, 625

Racovian Catechism, 146

Rahner, Karl, 492

rational, Edwards on, 223-24

rationalism, 306, 395-96, 472-73, 474, 496

Ratzinger, Joseph, 491

realism, 582

reason

Charles Hodge on, 394

Edwards on, 221

as natural revelation, 300

Pascal on, 178, 183-84, 187-92

and revelation, 67, 222, 224, 225, 235-38, 333,466

Warfield on, 399

reasoning, in vain, 548

rectitude, 139, 143

redemption, 122-26, 373, 387-88, 390, 573

reflection, 206-8

Reformation, 13, 14-18, 19, 40

reformation (Schaeffer), 547, 553

Reformed apologetics, 457-77

Reformed epistemology, 587, 721

Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, 546

Reformed Theological Seminary, 721

regeneration, 392, 400, 605. See also palingenesis

Reid, Thomas, 196n5, 587, 598

relativism, 520, 532, 582, 637, 639, 648-50, 652,654

“relativizing the relativizers,” 648-49, 652

religion, essence of, 286

religious affections, 221-22

religious experience, 275, 604

religious liberty, 306

religious pluralism, 521, 532

religious vs. theoretic view of world, 383-86

remunerative justice, 139

Renaissance, 13-14, 40

reprobation, 92, 128-30

ressentiment, 666

revealed religion, 196-97, 581

revelation, 215n4, 231-33, 385-87, 582

as principium, 333

and reason, 67, 222, 224, 225, 235-38, 333, 466

“revelation-neutral” epistemology, 582

revival, 547, 553

reward, 213-17

Richard, Timothy, 526

right and wrong, 483-85

right reason, 394, 399

Riordan, Jack, 709

Ritschl, Albrecht, 383-86, 393n3, 395

Roannez, M. de, 191

Roman Catholic Church, 17-18, 39

apologetics of, 457-77, 657

Chesterton’s conversion to, 405

Kuyper on, 342-43, 344, 345, 348-49, 351, 353,354,357

on Latin language, 522

on Scripture, 467

romance, of orthodoxy, 406, 433-34

Roman Empire, 542

romanticism, 265-66, 306-7

Rookmaker, Hans, 546

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 302, 568, 614

Rule of Decent Behaviour (Lewis), 486, 488, 489

Russell, Bertrand, 405, 607, 707

Rutherford, Samuel, 146-47, 161

Sack, Karl Heinrich, 267

sacrifice, and obedience, 627-28

sacrifices, 162-63

Sade, Marquis de, 554, 562-63

Sadoleto, Jacopo, 37, 39

sanctification, 400

Sartre, Jean Paul, 565, 639

Satan, 70, 76, 78-79, 80-82, 84

sati, 521, 522

satisfaction, for sins, 145-47

Savonarola, 18

Sayers, Dorothy, 311

Schaeffer, Edith, 545, 546, 631

Schaeffer, Francis A., 310, 545-46, 631, 649, 720

Schipper, Itzhak, 635

Schlegel, W. Friedrich, 266, 267-68

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 265-69, 306, 380-81

Schlichtingius, Jonas, 146

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 374, 430, 695

Schultz, Hermann, 373

Schweitzer, Albert, 495, 513

science, 300, 391, 400-401, 475

Scola, Angelo, 492, 511-18

Scopes trial, 310

Scripture, 602

as guide and teacher, 58-62

as infallibly inspired final revelation, 464-70

inerrancy of, 310-11

inspiration and authority of, 16, 63, 69-73, 391, 446-52

reading and hearing of, 78

as witness to Word of God, 517-18

as Word of God, 582

Second Adam, 123

secondary causes, 120

sectarianism, 276, 281

secularists, 640

semen religionis, 42, 397

Semler, Johann Salomo, 266

Seneca, 38, 138

sense of deity. See sensus divinitatis

senses, 206-8, 227-28

sensible knowledge, 220-21

sensus divinitatis, 45, 49, 397, 459, 594n7, 595-

98, 600-601, 602-4, 605-7, 611

Shaw, George Bernard, 405

Sherlock, Thomas, 302

Siewerth, Gustav, 494

signals of transcendence, 652-54

significance, longing for, 563-64

silence, about God, 662-63

Simon, Herbert, 614n32

sin, 373, 387, 567

consciousness of, 444-46

and justice, 151, 160

and natural knowledge of God, 605-8

punishment of, 154-56

Sinatra, Frank, 636

Sisyphus, myth of, 636

skepticism, 16, 452, 476, 647, 648, 650-51, 654

Skinner, B. F., 554

slavery, 349-50, 522

sloth, 98, 102

Smalcius, Valentinus, 146

Smith, Adam, 539

Smith, Quentin, 693

Sobel, Howard, 699, 702, 705-6

social convention, 488

socialism, 405

social relations, 348-50

Socinianism, 18, 133, 137, 145, 161, 195, 341

Socinus, Faustus, 146, 155, 161

Socrates, 57

solipsism, 607

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 636-37, 642

Sophiology, 513

soul, 24-25

South Africa, 540

Southern, Terry, 560

Spain, 358

special revelation, 398, 439, 458, 464

speculation, 221

Spencer, Herbert, 369, 421, 641

sphere sovereignty, 334

Spinoza, 266, 639, 672

Spinozism, 266

Spires, Grady, 456

spirituality, 379

Spong, John Shelby, 309

Spurgeon, C. H., 339

state church, 313-14

Stenger, Victor, 696n10

St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Hector, 643

Stob, Henry, 720

stoicheia, 537, 539

Stoics, 55-56, 414-16, 500

Stonehouse, Ned, 436

Stone Lectures (Princeton Seminary), 331, 334, 362

structures, 541-42

Student Christian Movement (SCM), 519

stupidity, 614

Sturmius, 257

Suárez, Francisco, 17, 141-42, 165

subjectivism, 639

submission, 190-91

Suetonius, 137, 160, 163

suffering, 624, 628

suicide, 412-13, 427, 634, 636

summum bonum, 658

superstition, 42-43, 55, 188-90

suppressing the truth, 49, 561, 565-69

Sweeney, Douglas, 219

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 426

Swinburne, Richard, 721

systematic theology, 398

tabula rasa, 300

Tacitus, 644

Talbot School of Theology, 691

Taylor, A. E., 457-58, 462

technology, 581

teleological argument, 239-41

Tertullian, 159

testimony, 243

theism, 387, 389, 439-40, 586

theistic belief, 613-19

and warrant, 608-11, 615

theistic proofs, 222, 440, 466-67

theological apologetic, 22, 132

theology of crisis, 307

Thérèse, Marie, 642

third commandment idolatry, 626-29

Thirty Years’ War, 306

Thomas, Cal, 546

Thomas Aquinas, 18, 165, 239, 581, 692

Craig on, 696

on natural knowledge of God, 598-99

Marion on, 658-61, 679-88

Owen on, 141

Plantinga on, 590, 593, 598-99

Van Til on, 457, 468

Thompson, Andrew, 131-32, 133-34

Tillich, Paul, 308, 496, 577

time, 703-4

Tindal, Matthew, 196, 225-26, 301

Toland, John, 196

Tolkien, J. R. R., 311, 480

Tolstoyans, 431

tradition, 308

transcendence, 268, 652-54

transcendental approach, 363-64, 456

transmodern, 582

trial, 100

Trinity, 497

Trinity Forum, 632

triperspectival theory, 721

truth, 139, 150-51, 225-27, 231, 372, 504, 636, 637-45

and freedom, 644

as God’s truth, 639

unit of, 474

Tsui, Lap-Chee, 709, 713

Turretin, Francis, 165

unbelief, 308, 348, 619

uncertainty, 185

understanding, and affections, 221-22

uniformity, of indefiniteness, 283

universal custom, 423-24

universalism, 363, 558

universal justice, 138, 139, 141-45

untouchables, 523

urbanization, 305

utopianism, 506

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 641

Van Til, Cornelius, 310, 436, 453-56, 545

Venter, Craig, 716-17

verification principle, 650

Vilenkin, Alexander, 697-98

vindicatory justice, 139, 140, 142, 145, 150, 151-61

Virgil, 50, 162

virgin Mary, 124

Vives, Juan Luis, 18, 166

Voetius, 147

Volkelius, 146

Voltaire, 302, 306, 337, 614

Von Hügel, Friedrich, 530

von Speyr, Adrienne, 491, 492, 516

Vorstellung, 376, 385

Vos, Geerhardus, 436, 453

“wager” argument (Pascal), 174, 177, 183-84

Warburton, William, 302

Warfield, Benjamin B., 332, 335, 391-94, 435, 454,465

warrant, 587-89, 591, 600-601, 721

and theistic belief, 608-11

watchmaker analogy, 245-51

Watson, James, 709, 715

Weltanschauung, 337n1, 363, 365-74, 380, 387.

See also worldview

Wesley, John, 341

Western culture, 524-27, 533, 534

Western Europe, 341, 347-48, 352, 354, 358, 625

Westminster Confession of Faith and

Catechisms, 391-92

Westminster Seminary California, 721

Westminster Theological Seminary, 310, 436, 453,545,721

Whitefield, George, 339

Whitman, Walt, 430

wickedness, 97-98

widows and orphans, 625-26

Wilde, Oscar, 307

William of Orange, 350, 357

Williams, Charles, 311

Williamsburg Charter Foundation, 631

will of God, 143, 149-50

Wills, Garry, 630n11

will to power, 666-68

Wilson, Robert Dick, 436

Wilson, Warren, 614

Wink, Walter, 520, 542

wisdom, 110-16

wish-fulfillment, 613, 616-19

witness, burden of, 635-36

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 662-63, 700

Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 720

Woolley, Paul, 436

world, relationship to, 350-52

World Council of Churches, 519, 528, 532

World Missionary Conference (Edinburgh, 1910), 526

worldview, 307, 332n2, 334, 362-64, 373, 392, 720

World War I, 307, 445

worship of God, 56-57

wrath of God, 26, 465, 549-50, 560-61, 573

Wright, N. T., 582, 721

Wycliffe, John, 14

Wynne, Ronald, 525

Xenophon, 57

Yablo, Stephen, 699

Yale Divinity School, 720

Young, E. J., 436

Zacharias, Ravi, 719

Zeno’s paradox, 705

Zoroastrianism, 374

Zweig, Stefan, 633

Zwingli, Ulrich, 16

Scripture Index

Genesis

26:3

95

1:31

117n4

26:36

85

4:7

102

8:22

530

Numbers

17:1

111n10

11:9

71n1

18:25

153

12:1

71

28:10-22

109

14:43

97

43:14

85

16:24

71n1

49:5

71

20:10

71n1

49:6

71

Deuter-

onomy

Exodus

2:30

83

3:14

679,680,

681,682

4:8

139

3:19

83n3

10:16

94n2

4:21

83n3

17:18

74

6

623

17:19

74

6:3

624

28:1

95

6:6-7

624

28:65

85

7:3

83n3

30:6

94n2, 99

9:11

72

30:11

99

10:1

83n3

30:12

67,99

11:3

85

30:14

67,99

16:7

72

32

73

19:16

71n1

20:2

623

Joshua

20:7

629

24:19

152

23:7

152-53

24:18

71n1

1 Samuel

33:19

128n51

2:30

29

34:5-7

152

8

530

34:29

71n1

9

530

40:34

71n1

11:6

85

11:15

73

15:22

627

Leviticus

16:7

115n27

20:27

72

16:13

73

16:14

84

31

81,89

18:10

84

33

81

19:9

84

36:1

43

36:6

126n34, 127-

n43, 379n35

2 Samuel

36:9

114n21

17:14

85

40

54

1 Kings

40:6-8

628n4

10

114n23

45:21

115n30

12:10

85

53:1

43

2 Kings

70

89

22:8

74

78:8

98

92:6

54

2 Chronicles

93

61

6:30

115n28

93:5

62

12:6

144

95:8

98

34:15

74

96

61

Ezra

97

61

9:15

139

99

61

99:1

125n30

Nehemiah

104:2

47

9:8

139

104:24

117n1

Job

106:46

85

10:3

137

105:25

83

12:20

83n3

107

52

12:24

83n3

107:20

26

14:14

144

107:40

83n3

14:16

109, 110n2

113:7

53

22:3

141

119

25,538

22:14

128n47

119:7

139

33:12

144

119:36

188n11,

192n14

34:12-14

143

119:112

98

34:12-15

144

119:137

129n56, 154

35:7

141

139:2

115n29

139:3

112n11

Psalms

144

53

5:4-6

153

145

53

7:9

144

145:9

52

8:2

48

145:19

33

8:4

48

147:5

113n18

9:4

154

147:9

126n38

9:5

154

14:1

43

Proverbs

19:1

47

1:7

220

19:1-9

62

5:21

110n3

19:13

116n39

14:31

623

29

62

15:8

628n4

19:17

623

12:1

144

20:12

85

14:10-12

628n4

21:1

86

23:29

502

21:3

628n5

31:18

94n2

31:32

95

Ecclesiastes

32:23

97

1:15

121n15,

122n16

3:11

117n5

Lamentations

5:1

628n4

1:1

551

7:29

104

1:9

551

1:11

552

Isaiah

3:41

116n36

1

628n5

1:19

95

Ezekiel

1:20

95

7:26

83n3

3:16

568

11:19

91

5:26

84n4

11:20

91

7:18

84n4

12:13

84n4

10:15

84n4

17:20

84n4

10:22

27

36:26

94n2

10:23

27

40:26

109

12:4

125n27

40:31

109

41:23

112n13

Daniel

42:9

73

2:31

112n15

43:10

67

7:10

114n24

45:1

73, 112n14

9

73-74

45:15

187n6

11:5

112n16

51:6

143

53:1

68

Hosea

54:13

67

2:19

30

55:8f.

502

2:20

30

58

628n5

5:15

100

59:21

66

6:6

628

63:17

83n3

8:11-13

628n4

66:1-4

628n4

13:9

27

Jeremiah

Joel

1:2

550

2:12

94n2

1:3

550

Amos

2:23

84n4

5:14

95

4:1

95

5:24

622

6:16-21

628n4

8:11

26

7

628n5

Micah

7:13

97

6:6-8

628n5

7:14

97

7:21-23

628n4

Habakkuk

7:27

97

1:13

152

2:4

558

Luke

2:6

622

1:70

112n12

2:18

57

2:14

123n22, 509

2:20

57

4

624

6:8

115n33

Zephaniah

6:20

121n11

3:5

144

6:24

121n11

Zechariah

7

624

1:3

95

7:6

126n36

9:58

121n13

Malachi

10:32

105

1:2

128n49

10:36ff.

504

1:3

128n49

12:2

570

2:17

128n48

12:3

570

Matthew

15:7

124n25

3:2

14

17:10

141

5:3

659

20:46

327

5:9

510

24:27

79

5:44

441

John

5:45

441

1:12

28

6:28

119n7

1:18

498

6:33

130n61

3:16

498,623

7:14

122n17

3:18

129n53

9:4

115n32

3:36

561

10:22

130n60

4:4

25

10:29

126n37

4:22

57,62

10:30

110n4

5:25

105

10:34f.

505

6:27

27

11:27

186n5, 505

6:29

27

12:36

110n6

6:44

92

13:31

118n6

6:45

92

18:3

191n13

8:36

25

9:2

619n38

19:23

121n10

10:7f.

505

24:13

130n60

11:25

25

25:31-46

623

12:31

535

26:35

116n37

14:27

510

28:19

682

15:5

90

Mark

16:13

78

2:8

115n34

17:4

123n21

10:45

451

17:15

98

11

625

18:36

678

12:38

327

Acts

14:30

116n38

13:43

94

16:16

27

14:15-17

559

14:16

58

2:20

221

14:17

58

3:5

143,153

17:16-32

559

3:5-6

136

17:27

48,53,58

3:6

143,153

17:28

48, 50n3, 442

3:9

572

17:31

153

3:10-12

26

Romans

3:20

93

1

26,593

3:21

139

1:1-15

555

3:21-4:25

556

1:14

573

3:23

26,572

1:15

573

3:25

143

1:16

555,556,

560,572

3:26

143,573

1:17

26, 139, 187-

n8, 555, 558,

4

29,570

560,572

4:11

128n50

1:18

333,549,

556,560,561,

5

559,570

566

5:1-8:17

556

1:18f.

619

5:5

556

1:18-20

593

5:20

93

1:18-2:16

558,559,560

7:7

93

1:18-3:20

556

8:18-25

556

1:19

57,562

8:19-25

542

1:20

47,562,565

8:21

114n26

1:21

548,549,553,

554,555,

8:26-39

556

566,568

8:28

32

1:22

43,548,549,

553,554,

8:30

89

566,568

8:39

556

1:23-24

567

9:5

136

1:24

566

9:13

128n49

1:25

567

9:14

143

1:25-27

567

9:15

103, 128-

n51, 143

1:27

568

9:16

91

1:28

567,568

9:18

143

1:32

154,156

10:4

26,60

1:32-2:3

569

10:8

99

2

160

10:9

26

2:1

571

10:10

26,27

2:1-3

573

10:13

129n54

2:3

571

10:13-15

574

2:5

154

10:17

187n9

2:8

136

11:32

28

2:9

136

11:33

129n55, 137

2:12

136

11:35

141

2:15

262,270

13

535,538,539

2:16

270

13:8

14

2:17

560,572

16:27

110n1

1 Corinthians

4:8-9

537

1:17

187n7

5:17

25

1:21

183n3

1:30

136

Ephesians

2

538

1:10

388n56

2:5

69

1:17

380n37

2:8

57,535

1:18

380n37

2:10-12

494

1:20

535

2:14

125n28

1:21

535

3:3

90

2:2

81

3:7

91, 119n8

2:5

105

3:9

104

2:6

105

3:19

53

2:12

44,56

3:22

32

2:14

510

3:23

32

2:20

63

4:1

33

3:10

535,538

4:5

127n45

3:12

498

4:7

89

4:13

380n37

4:11

121n14

4:30

94

7:31

678

5

513

9:16

574

5:2

126n33

9:19

24

5:14

105

11

513

5:27

125n32

15:3

380n39

6:10

94

15:24

538

6:12

535,542

15:24-28

389n57

15:26

581-82

Philippians

15:28

119n9

1:18

721

15:55-57

34

2:8

123n20

15:56

31

2:9

123n24

15:57

31

2:12

98, 129n57

2:13

98

2 Corinthians

3:18

125n29

2:16

92

4:8

515

3:6

79

3:8

79

Colossians

3:18

114n21

1:15-17

538

4:6

502

1:20

510

4:16

24

2:8

537

5:21

136

2:14

535

7:1

98

2:15

537

8:16

94

2:20

537

8:17

94

1 Thessalonians

Galatians

3:12

93

3:19

93

5:19

80,98

3:21

572

5:20

80

2 Thessalonians

1 Peter

1:5

139

1:22

99

1:6

155

2:9

32

1:7-9

136

3:15

721

1:11

94

3:22

123n23

2:11

84

5

27

2:12

84

5:6

114n25

1 Timothy

1:5

93

2 Peter

1:7

127n40

1:5

98

1:9

28

1:10

129n58

1:17

113n19

1:19

78

3:16

388n55, 535

1 John

4:13

78

3:9

99

6:9

121n12

3:18

130n59

6:16

61, 113n20, 498

4:2

380n38

2 Timothy

4:8

681,688

2:13

43,505

4:9

498

3:16

78

4:11

502

4:8

89,139,144

4:12

502

Titus

4:14

502

3:4

104

4:15

380n38

3:5

104

5:4

99

Hebrews

5:18

98

1:1

678

Jude

1:3

125n31

7

155

2:2

155

5:12

537

Revelation

6:10

139

16:5

143,154

11:3

47,57

16:6

143,154

12:9

442

20:12

570

Table of Contents

Introduction to Volume 2

Part 1. The Reformation, Post-Reformation (Protestant), and Catholic Reformation

Part 1 Introduction

1. Martin Luther

2. John Calvin

3. Robert Bellarmine

4. John Owen

5. Follow-Up

Part 2. Modernity and the Challenge of Reason

Part 2 Introduction

6. Blaise Pascal

7. Joseph Butler

8. Jonathan Edwards

9. William Paley

10. Friedrich Schleiermacher

11. Follow-Up

Part 3. The Global Era: Christian Faith and a Changing World

Part 3 Introduction

12. Søren Kierkegaard

13. Abraham Kuyper

14. James Orr

15. Benjamin B. Warfield

16. G. K. Chesterton

17. J. Gresham Machen

18. Cornelius Van Til

19. C. S. Lewis

20. Hans Urs von Balthasar

21. Lesslie Newbigin

22. Francis A. Schaeffer

23. Follow-Up

Part 4. Issues Today and Tomorrow

Part 4 Introduction

24. Alvin Plantinga

25. Merold Westphal

26. Os Guinness

27. Jean-Luc Marion

28. William Lane Craig

29. Francis Collins

30. Follow-Up

General Index

Scripture Index