Van Til and the Foundation of Christian Ethics (Hatch)

Hatch, Scott J. Van Til and the Foundation of Christian Ethics: A God-Centered Approach to Moral Philosophy. Libertyville, IL: Reformed Forum, 2023.

In the investment world, there is a danger in over investing in stocks that appear good but do not deliver all that is hoped.  The same is true in theology.  There are good (intellectual) investments in Van Til’s theology.  Unfortunately, his students over invested in his epistemology and apologetic method while leaving his ethics largely untouched.  This is a shame, as his ethics promise a number of key insights to the Christian life.

Scott Hatch of Reformed Forum has given probably the best (and maybe the first; I am not sure) systematic treatment of Van Til’s ethics.  I do not think there is anything like it in print. He surveys the failure of modern ethics, the nature of the summum bonum, Van Til’s theonomic and Klinean followers, and the structure of the will in Christian discipleship.  He has several appendices that include the full text of Van Til’s 1930 syllabus.

The Enlightenment Project had to fail because it lacked a foundation for justification. It degenerated into emotivism. Kierkegaard could not give a reason for actions other than “because.” Hume realized morality was just desires.

By contrast, summing up the problem, Hatch notes: “To call something good is to make an evaluative judgment, but an evaluative judgment implies a kind of standard or criterion by which an evaluation can be made” (Hatch 17).

Van Til and Vos

Hatch comes closer than any other recent author in showing the connection that Geerhardus Vos had on Van Til.  We know Van Til said Vos was his favorite teacher, but seeing “Vosian” elements in Van Til’s work is a tougher challenge.  I maintain it is difficult because we look for Vosian elements in the wrong place.  You will not find them, not in any great detail, in his apologetics works.  You will, however, find them in his ethics (28). The biblical-theological method allowed Van Til to see a unity between Old Testament and New Testament ethics.

In Search of An Ethical Absolute

Van Til took a “worldview approach” to Christian ethics, specifically Reformed Christian ethics. By “worldview” neither Hatch nor Van Til mean giving the stock Christian answers to pre-selected questions.  Rather, “worldview” means “Reformed worldview,” a view of life derivative of the revelation of the self-contained God. A specifically Reformed ethic will contain “the absolute self-sufficient personal God; the self-revelation of God in nature and history; the reality of sin; and the revelation of God objectively in Christ and Scripture and subjectively through regeneration and sanctification” (31).

Metaphysics and Biblicism

This might not have been Hatch’s point, but Van Til eschews any type of biblicism that rejects the need for metaphysics.  Hatch notes that Van Til saw “how modernist and liberal thought veers toward moralism but lacks any real metaphysical or epistemological foundation” (33). Indeed, in Defense of the Faith (2008) he says “metaphysics is logically foundational for both epistemology and ethics” (quoted in Hatch 46).

Idealism and Pragmatism

Van Til’s comments on idealism are somewhat dated.  You will find few idealists today. Pragmatism, on the other hand, will always be relevant.  Fortunately, apart from any Christian ethic it is easily dispensed with: “if the absolute is constantly evolving, then there is no fixed reference point for moral values’ ‘ (53).

Personality and the Will

In 2010, Richard Muller critiqued Jonathan Edwards’ view of the will as departing from the historic Reformed teaching, causing a firestorm among some of Edwards’ followers. I tend to think Muller was right, but neither side was altogether convincing.  In other words, pace Edwards I actually believe I make free decisions.  Pace Muller, when I act I seem to act in a unity as a whole person.  Faculty psychology might be true (I think it is), but few people are conscious of it when they act.

It is a shame that neither side in the debate used Van Til’s insights.  Following Augustine, he notes “man is free, but he does not have the freedom of contrary choice, and is nonetheless responsible for his actions” (99). Modern advertising seems to confirm Van Til’s point: “the expanding industry of advertising and communications has highlighted psychologically just how subtly and subconsciously people can be influenced” (102). In other words, a judicious ethics has a whole approach to the whole man.

Toward a Reformed Christian Ethic

As man gets progressively sanctified, he gets progressively “freer” (104).  How is this possible?  Van Til gives an eloquent format from his syllabus: man must become “increasingly spontaneous in willing the will of God,” “increasingly fixed in strengthening the backbone of this will,” and “increasingly [growing] in momentum to meet this increasing responsibility” (CVT, CTE 44-46). This is made possible by its working out in the larger narrative of post-redemptive history. In other words, he must strive for the true summum bonum, the highest good. The summum bonum is the kingdom of God.

Kline, Bahnsen, and Frame

Both Meredith Kline and Greg Bahnsen saw Van Til as formative for their theology, yet Kline and Bahnsen came to radically different conclusions about ethics.  Who, then, was the most faithful student of Van Til?  There is a better way to rephrase this question and answer it: Van Til was a faithful student of Geerhardus Vos when it comes to the nature of the ethical life.

Greg Bahnsen’s theonomy is widely-known, so we will only touch on the highlights for this discussion.  Theonomy proper depends on two points: 1) a unique exegesis of Matthew 5:17ff and 2) the claim that the Old Testament penal codes are binding today unless otherwise rescinded.  It should be obvious by now that Van Til taught no such thing in his ethics.  Neither can it be inferred he taught this in his ethics. I think Bahnsen suspected this (and I think Gary North knew it).  Bahnsen mentions Van Til’s ethics only once in his 500 page work on theonomy, and there it is only Van Til’s claim that there is either theonomy or autonomy, but it is clear that Van Til meant it in a general sense.  Therefore, we can safely conclude, and Hatch does, that Bahnsen’s ethics is not faithful to Van Til’s.

Does that mean Kline is the true Van Tillian on ethics?  It is not so clear there, either. Kline maintained, or at least he pointed out, a “seeming inconsistency between the Decalogue and certain divine commands,” which he called “intrusion” (137). On one level, this seems like common sense.  The conquest of Canaan is an intrusion of the End Times Judgment into history, yet this intrusion is not normative.  What is not clear, though, is what counts as intrusion and what counts as application. The more we see typological anticipations in the Old Testament, the less useful is the Old Testament for ethics. I think Kline is probably closer to Van Til in terms of biblical narrative than Bahnsen is, but I do not believe he would have accepted Kline’s intrusion ethics.

Criticisms

As with many books about or by Van Til, “reason” is always “autonomous reason” if used by the other guy (21-22). Moreover, Hatch refers to Oliphint’s book on Thomas Aquinas, noting, however, that Oliphint’s analysis has met with severe criticism (22 n24).  He does not think the criticisms damage the main point.  I suspect they do.

Speaking of Thomas Aquinas, Hatch only mentions Aquinas’s actual writings once, and in a footnote, and even then it is a reference to James Dolezal’s God Without Parts, quoting Summa Contra Gentiles. This is a recurring theme with Van Tillian literature.  We need to see more interaction with actual passages from Thomas Aquinas. We are often told “Thomas’s view reduces to x” or “His Aristotelianism is clear here,” but we never see how that is the case.

I suppose some thinkers, notably Kant and Hume, were guilty of “autonomous reason,” but I have read enough works by presuppositionalists to suspect that the adjective “autonomous” is doing the heavy lifting normally required by sustained analysis of primary sources.  That analysis we do not always see.

Conclusion

These criticisms should be noted, but they do not take away the value of the book.  The book is literally in a class by itself.  Van Tillians, and even presuppositionalists from other schools, should pay more attention to Van Til’s writings on ethics. They generally do not have the difficulties found in some of his other works, save on one possible point: Van Til’s syllabus, in a way not dissimilar to Oliver O’Donovan’s works, does not always deal with practical problems in ethics.  That is not a problem.  Van Til, as the title of this work suggests, deals with “the foundation of Christian ethics.”

‘This review copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.’

Paradox and Truth: Rethinking Van Til on the Trinity

Smith, Ralph. Paradox and Truth: Rethinking Van Til on the Trinity. Moscow, ID: Canon Press.

Smith’s goal is to compare and contrast the recent arguments of “social Trinitarian” Cornelius Plantinga with the unique approach of Cornelius Van Til. Supposedly, traditional Trinitarianism is stagnant and the insights of these two can revive it.

The introduction is somewhat humorous because Smith (rightly) bemoans the fact that Evangelicals have ignored the Trinity for essentially of their history, and if you take away the doctrine of the Trinity for Evangelicals, nothing will change in their day-to-day lives. At this point Smith begins reviewing Plantinga’s now-famous essay “The Threeness/Oneness Problem of the Trinity” along with a very brief survey of recent Evangelical developments of Trinitarianism. Smith wonders why none of these writers (Plantinga, Stanley Grenz, James Sire) discuss the work of Cornelius Van Til or even John Calvin. What Smith does not realize is nobody outside a microscopic subset of the Reformed world (which itself is already microscopic) has even heard of Van Til or let alone even cares.

(NOTE: I am simply–no pun intended–following Smith’s reading of Plantinga and not inserting my own understanding of the issue). Smith’s first chapter deals with Plantinga’s essay on the Trinity. Plantinga, following many recent moves in theology, suggests the West is fundamentally “modalist,” or something similar. Smith then reviews Plantinga’s charge by examining Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Karl Barth. In short: Augustine, due to his strong neo-Platonism and view of divine simplicity, said each person is synonymous with the divine essence. The conclusion is not hard to draw: if each person is identical with the divine essence, and the divine essence is absolutely simple and admitting of no distinctions, then each person is identical with the other. Ergo, modalism (24-26).

Thomas Aquinas supposedly hardens Augustine’s position. Each person is identical with the whole divine essence, yet we distinguish them by “relations of opposition,” with each person identical with his “relation.” Plantinga remarks, “If the Father, Son, and Spirit are taken as mere names for the divine essence…then this is modalism. If the statement means the Father, Son, and Spirit are taken as names of Persons, then the statement reduces persons to essences, which are abstract. Each person would be a set of properties and the three sets of properties are identical. The persons themselves would disappear” (27).

In some ways chapter two is the heart of the book: what did Van Til really mean about the trinity? Many of his critics, and not a few of his followers, have charged him with being innovative about the Trinity. As is always the case in intra-Reformed polemics, there is more heat than light and nobody knows what anyone is talking about.

I will go ahead and say that Van Til was not as innovative on the Trinity, but rather restated the exact same thing Augustine said in close to the same language. Remember, Augustine said that each of the persons was identical to the essence: the essence is identical to the attribute, and the attribute is identical to the person; ergo, the person is identical to the essence (Plantinga, quoted by Smith, 25). Van Til draws the Augustinian conclusion: the Trinity is one Person. Of course, Van Til realizes that the Trinity is also three persons, so he says that, too. Did Van Til contradict himself?

The Covenant as the Missing Link

Smith suggests that covenant theology provides the missing link in Reformed Trinitarianism (73). He rightly suspects that Augustinian Triadology is at an impasse, and while he appreciates Van Til’s reworking of the Trinity, he notes it is still inadequate. He takes his definition of covenant from Jim Jordan as a “personal structural bond which joins the three persons of God in a life-giving community” (73). In one sense, Reformed theology has always followed this principle in its doctrine of the Pactum Salutis, but Smith, following Abraham Kuyper, takes it even further.

Smith notes that traditional Reformed theology “proposes something Van Til objects to” (84), the idea that the essence of God is an impersonal substratum. Without fully acknowledging the problem his definition of divine simplicity entails, Smith, in order to speak meaningfully about the attributes of God in a way that does not simply reduce each to the other (and thereby make any talk of the attributes irrelevant, which is apparently the case), suggests that the “covenant” allows these words to really come into their expressive nature (85).

Following this framework, Smith goes on suggest that attributes like “love,” even the idea of “love,” make sense only in the context of “covenant,” a suggestion, which if flawed in the sense of placing an analogical limit on the Trinity, is fundamentally correct: love’s definition must come from the Bible, not from cheap, American culture.

Criticism and Conclusion

This book is both useful and frustrating. Smith has done an able job surveying and simply explaining many difficulties in modern Trinitarianism. His discussion of Augustine’s revision of divine simplicity is remarkably helpful and succinct. The book’s section on covenant has many helpful insights that detach “justification” from its forensic setting within Reformed theology (or better, to show that the forensic category is itself relational and covenantal).

Unfortunately, Smith demonstrates no real knowledge of Thomas Aquinas what the latter means by relations of opposition. And while it is true that Van Til utilized the covenant in his theology, Smith does no provide any real sense of how that works itself out. Although this is a useful survey on modern American Trinitarianism, his historical angle is woefully underdeveloped.

Until Christ is Formed in You (Essays on Dallas Willard)

Eds. Steven L Porter, Gary M. Moon, and J. P. Moreland. Until Christ is Formed in You: Dallas Willard and Spiritual Formation. Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2018.

That Dallas Willard had a huge impact, largely positive, on evangelicalism is undeniable. That his students have faithfully carried forth his work, applying it in new situations, is also true. A number of such books could probably be written from that angle. This book is unique because it suggests tensions and underdeveloped points, usually in Willard’s psychological works, that should be addressed.

In this review I will state Dallas’s view of the human soul, the tensions it raised, and some thoughts on Kevin Vanhoozer’s speech-act theory as it relates to spiritual formation. I have disagreements with Willard on various issues. For one, I am Reformed. He is not. My take on Christian formation is more heavily oriented to the means of grace and the Lord’s Supper. I do not see that emphasis in his work. Unless otherwise relevant to the various essays, I will not mention every disagreement I have with him, if only for space reasons.

Willard’s Positive Case

Willard’s true gains were not so much in the basics of spiritual formation but in the structure of the human [[Soul]]. As will be noted later, for those of us who come from a classically Protestant background, there was not much noteworthy to us in books like The Divine Conspiracy. That is because the Reformed prize the means of grace which communicate to us the benefits of redemption. That mindset is absent to the larger American community, although it was to that community, not the Reformed one, Willard wrote.

As noted primarily in Renovation of the Heart, the body and soul exist in a symbiotic relationship that is particularly attuned to the hierarchy within the soul. For starters, for Dallas,
-“the will refers to the core dimension’s ‘power to initiate;”
-“the spirit refers to the core dimension’s fundamental nature as distinct from the physical reality;’
-“the heart refers to the core dimension’s center…to which every other component of the self owes its proper functioning” (Black).

The soul, then, is the unifying cohesion to the above dimensions.

A Gentle Critique

Willard’s treatment of the soul was groundbreaking among broadly evangelical teachers. I think it is true in its basic outline. There are some tensions, though, which is student, J. P. Moreland, draws to our attention. First, some basic categories:

• a substance can be used in two ways: it could be an individual thing with properties and dispositions, or it can refer to a thing’s [[Essence]], the range of actual and potential properties.
• A property is a universal; it is non-spatial and extra-temporal. On some readings, “properties (and relations) are universals that, when exemplified…become constituents of the ordinary particulars that have them.”
• a relation is a ‘being X than Y’ state of affairs. It can be either internal or external. For our purposes, “the body stands in an internal relation to the soul such that the soul could exist without the body but not vice versa” (Moreland).
• A part as used here is a separable part, able to exist if removed from the whole.
• The faculties of the soul group its capacities.

So far, so good. Dallas’s project runs into difficulty when pressed on whether “I am my body” or “I am my soul.” He seemed to say both at times. Moreover, should we refer to ourselves as humans, persons, or human persons, or does it even matter? It seems that being human is somehow connected with having a body, in which case I can be a person in the afterlife without being human.

What happens when I die? My soul continues but not my body. This means my identity cannot be fundamentally connected with having a body. As Moreland notes, “If I am neither the soul or the body, it is hard to see how it could literally be that I survive death”. Restating Dallas’s view:

1. the soul is a mode of the body
2. My body is essential to my identity
3. Human relations cannot be separated from my bodily identity.

There is an obvious problem: this cannot account for the intermediate state, something on which Dallas so eloquently wrote.

Both Moreland Dallas (rightly) want to avoid Cartesian dualism. Moreland is going to opt for something like a modified Thomism. He suggests that some of Dallas’s statements on personal identity should not be taken literally. I think that is a good start. Although I generally agree with Moreland’s modified Thomism, I do think there is some promise in a phenomenological approach.

Moreland distinguishes between “thin” and “thick” particulars of substance. A thin particular is the essence or form. A thick particular is the concrete substance. In this view, the soul, a thin particular, is identical to the person.

Putting on Christ as Speaking

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, true to his representation, gives a speech-act account of spiritual formation. Although he does not explicitly mention it, his take on doctrine as cognitive therapy parallels Dallas’s emphasis on the primacy of knowledge. Even more, it flows naturally from it, something the spiritual formation movement, not necessarily Dallas himself, has not always been able to do. “Doctrine resembles,” says Vanhoozer, “cognitive therapy to the extent that it encourages certain ways of thinking about God, the world, and ourselves.” It specifically allows us to “acquire theodramatic habits of thought.” In short, it is character formation.

This helps bridge the gap for a problem that has somewhat haunted Christian ethics. The church, following St Paul’s list of the fruit of the spirit, has always embraced a form of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, and rightly so. But if one forms character out of repeated practice and habit, then it is not always clear why the gospel is needed. By rooting virtue formation in the specifically theological speech of the Bible, Vanhoozer is able to face this problem from a fresh perspective.

Lest we substitute a new and better, albeit mechanical, series of habits for the old ones, Vanhoozer reminds us this is not simply rote speech. Rather, “It involves our doing too, but a doing of a very particular kind: a participation in the doing (and the done) of Jesus Christ.” Following some New Testament scholars, Paul’s new theory of virtue formation locates us in the story of Jesus Christ.”

quote: Scripture may be the soul of theology, but doxology is the soul’s embodiment.

Conclusion

Even though I love and cherish Dallas Willard’s writings, not all of it resonated with me. For all of its perceived problems, the Reformed faith, particularly as it understood the means of grace, never really suffered from the easy-believism which Dallas had to confront. As a result, I could only read some emphases with bewilderment. Moreover, I do not remember Dallas–or these authors–dealing with the means of grace, particularly the Lord’s Supper. As a result, while Dallas gave much-needed critiques of broad evangelicalism, I wonder if he ever truly escaped it. To be sure, Dallas believed in the Lord’s Supper and the importance of the local church. I simply wonder how much it actually structured his view of sanctification.

The Reformers praised Aquinas?

David Sytsma’s twitter account, although not active at the moment, is a goldmine of valuable bibliographical information on the men the Reformers read. I copied and pasted from him, but I only did about 1%. The information is overwhelming. You have no excuse for saying the Reformers did not like Aquinas and Aristotle.

Tweets by SytsmaDavid

“…our faith is not against nature but only above it. Thus Thomas Aquinas wrote in Summa contra gentiles; thus Ramon Llull… [and] Philippe de Mornay…”– Johann Heinrich Alsted (Methodus SS. Theologiae [1634], I.ii, canon 3)

“Of the Scholastics, one should especially study those who have declared war on the Jesuits, such as the Dominicans, whom, since they choose a safe way in many cases, we often praise and follow.”— Paulus Voet, (1657), p. 2

“On numerous occasions, Battles cites Aquinas as the target of Calvin’s criticism when in fact the theology attacked by Calvin is at odds with Aquinas’s theology as well.” – Charles Raith II (p. 13).

“[In the study of philosophy] the erudition of the Greeks, which comprises the universal knowledge of nature, is necessary, so that you can discuss behavior fitly and fully. The most valuable are Aristotle’s Ethics, Plato’s Laws, the Poets…”— Philip Melanchthon (1518)

“Augustine & later, Aquinas, concluded that at first an eternal law dwelt in God who is the most perfect embodiment of reason, & by this reason, God rules the world & thus is the reason for all things that happen. Then,they argue,this reason was imparted to human beings” (Zanchi, On the Law in General).
“[God] is pure act without admixture of any potentiality, most simple, and most perfect.”Franciscus Junius (Theses Theologicae).

“He who follows mainly Aristotle as a guide, and aspires to one, simple and the least sophistic teaching, can now and then take on something from other authors, too.”— Philip Melanchthon, “On Philosophy” (1536)

“[Jean Baptiste] Gonet, perhaps the leading Dominican Thomist at the end of the 17th century, believed that major Reformed theologians had “embraced” Thomist views of grace and free choice.”— Matthew Gaetano, 312

“The existence of God is his very essence or whatness. For God is pure act.”– Rudolph Goclenius (Isagoge in Peripateticorum et Scholasticorum Primam Philosophiam, 1598, p. 10).

“I fully accord with Aquinas” – Westminster divine Anthony Tuckney, citing Thomas on faith and reason, Summa theologiae I, q.1, a.8 (Eight Letters, ed. Samuel Salter, 1753, p. 94).

“The natural law is that which is innate to creatures endowed with reason and informs them with common notions of nature, that is, with principles and conclusions adumbrating the eternal law by a certain participation.”– Franciscus Junius (1545-1602)

That is almost word for word Thomas Aquinas. See below:
Natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law (ST 1-2.91.2).

The Shorter Summa (Peter Kreeft)

Kreeft, Peter. The Shorter Summa. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993.

Introduction

On one hand, there is no substitute for reading Thomas Aquinas himself.  If one must have an abridgment and/or guide, then Peter Kreeft’s longer Summa of the Summa is the best bet.  But if that option is already available, is there any point to a Shorter Summa?  Yes, but maybe not for all readers. Although the Summa of the Summa gives the reader everything he needs to know, it is nonetheless daunting.  A Shorter Summa, by contrast, introduces the reader to medieval thought, gives the reader Thomas’s exact words, and avoids the more complicated discussions.

Epistemology

With respect to our dispensationalist friends, the best way to look at Thomas’s epistemology is by using charts.

Three Acts of the Mind

Understanding

Judging

Reasoning

Metaphysics

Existence of God

Kreeft makes the distinction between necessary existence, which applies to God, and our knowledge of that necessary existence. The predicate is included in the essence of the subject (1,2,1). God’s existence is not self-evident to us because we do not know the essence of God.

These articles are preambles to faith, not articles of faith (1, 2, 2).

Proof from motion:  “Motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality.” Whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, but this cannot go on to infinity.  In other words, change occurs.  But what changes must be actualized by another, and this other will either be purely act or an admixture of act and potency. It is important to note what Thomas is not saying at this point.  He is not saying that this goes backward in a linear fashion to a First Cause, with creation having its first moment.  Rather, this series of causes is hierarchical in structure.  The later terms depend on the (continued) existence of the first term.  For example, if car A hits car B which hits car C, car A is the first cause in this linear series.  If, after the accident, car A were to disappear, the damage would still be done.  This is not what we mean when we apply hierarchical causality to God.

Simplicity of God

God cannot be made of parts if he is the first being, for who, then, would have put him together? Moreover, as he does not have potentiality, he cannot be actuated by anything else.

The existence of God in things.

God is in all things, not as essence or accident, but “as an agent is present in that upon which it works” (1, 8, 1).  He is in all things as the cause of their being.

The Will of God 

Does God’s will have a cause?  No. As God by one act understands everything in his essence, so by one act he wills all things in his goodness (I, 19, 5).

The Providence of God

Providence does not impose a necessity on things because not all things have an inherent necessity.  Some have necessary causes, others contingent causes (I, 22, 4).

Epistemology and Psychology

“Free will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free will man moves himself to act.  But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself” (1, 8, 31).

Conclusion and Summary

Nothing substitutes for reading Thomas, preferably in large–very large–amounts.  If one were to have to choose for an abridgment of Thomas, then Kreeft’s larger work is the one to read.  Nonetheless, there is something useful about this shorter Summa. And Kreeft is always fun to read.

Contemplating God with the Great Tradition (Carter)

Carter, Craig. Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021.

Even though I fully endorse Craig Carter’s Great Tradition project, there have been some areas I was hesitant about. One such area was the use of premodern exegesis.  Not having yet read his book on that subject, I thought he meant something like allegorical interpretation and a disregard for the Bible’s Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) context.  I was pleased to discover that he is quite attuned to the ANE context.  Indeed, he is able to do something similar to what the Greek Fathers did at Nicea: he takes the pictures and language of the ANE and shows how prophecy corrects them.

In other words, in terms of his argument about Isaiah 40-48, we view the Bible’s relationship to the ANE, not as one of dependence, but as a polemical corrective, challenging both the pantheistic metaphysics of then and the naturalistic metaphysics of today.

I would normally in the course of a review analyze topics as they emerged from the book. I cannot do that with this book, as Carter is insistent on the phrase “Christian Platonism.” Since his phrase is prone to misinterpretation, we should define it.  Carter explains: “Christian Platonism is a label that can be applied to the theological metaphysics that grows out of fourth-century pro-Nicene theology and becomes integral to classical Christian orthodoxy” (Carter 7). Because of late modernity’s captivity to philosophical naturalism and its erasure of a transcendent God, Carter feels the need to shock readers with something like Platonism.

What Went Wrong?

The Enlightenment did not give us knowledge; it gave us a new mythology.  To be specific, it dressed ancient Babylonian cosmology in more scientific and mechanistic terms.  That is bad enough.  It is even worse when you take that mythology and rewrite the doctrine of God.  Liberals are guilty of this, to be sure, but as Craig Carter makes clear, conservatives are not much better.

Mythological thought sees a continuity between god (or gods), man, and nature.  There is an immanent “force” in nature that explains change. The Enlightenment never rejected this idea.  In the 18th century, it understood the universe as a machine with the power of self-motion.  In the nineteenth century, it exchanged the model of machine for that of organism. What it never rejected with the idea of a “power” in nature that does not need a transcendent God.

Pagan metaphysics, whether ancient or modern, viewed all of reality as part of one cosmic order.  The attributes of God are then applied to the cosmos. This worldview is, in fact, quite consistent. Only the present is real in mythological thinking.  Also emphasized is fertility and potency, forms of sympathetic magic.  And if all reality is one and connected, then it is wrong to introduce boundaries within reality (e.g., male/female; creator/creation).

Even if modern-day conservatives rejected the more pantheistic aspects of mythological thinking, they never rejected the Enlightenment’s view of God, particularly in the pitting of God’s actions vs. God’s being.  In other words, we can only know God by his actions, not by speculating into his being.  Worse yet, this god can be found only in the historical process.

Trinitarian Classical Theism

Against this mythological view of God, Carter champions the historic doctrine of Trinitarian classical theism (hereafter TCT). Carter’s argument demands that we affirm both Trinitarianism and classical theism in one model.  Classical theism without the Trinity will give you Deism.  Trinitarianism without classical theism will give you only a god (or three gods) among other gods.

TCT is necessary for Christian orthodoxy as it generated key metaphysical doctrines: simplicity, aseity, and creation ex nihilo (Carter 49). TCT is also relevant for pastoral ministry: by focusing on God’s being, one can confidently claim that God is x (e.g., love) in his being.  His being is trustworthy.  Yes, this God acts in history, but if we have no assurance that he is steadfast and unchanging in his being, then we can never be quite sure he will always be for us.

TCT begins with God as the First Cause. Correlative with this claim is the one that God is Pure Act.  Existence is part of his essence, otherwise God would need to receive his existence from something other than his essence.  Everything in the universe is a mixture of act and potency.  God has no potency; if he did he would have to be fully actualized from someone (something?) else.  Even worse, if God was not pure act, then the hierarchical chain of motion could never begin, for anything with potency needs an unactualized Actualizer. Furthermore, since there is no change in God’s being, he must be eternal (as all things in time are subject to change). And since there is no potency, he must be immutable. Similar deductions would follow from these reflections.

Hermeneutics and Exegesis

The immediate rejoinder to any such project of “Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition” is the charge that said Christian Platonists will start reading allegories out of the text, which is fatal to any good hermeneutics.  That is a real problem, but it is not a problem with Carter’s proposal. He says the Bible has its own metaphysical assumptions, and when we read naturalistic metaphysics into the text (e.g., any liberal commentary), we are just as guilty of mishandling the text. Does the Bible prove the metaphysics of the Great Tradition?  It is not obvious that it does, but that should raise another question: which is closer to the metaphysics of the Bible: a view that holds that universals are real or a view that believes the cosmos is an organism that evolves?

It is true that one might reject both options, but if the reader is relatively conservative and holds to some form of the ecumenical creeds, then the Great Tradition metaphysics is inevitable. It is easy to “reject all things Platonic;” it is much more difficult to invent a brand new metaphysics on the spot.

The heart of this book is a sustained reflection on Isaiah 40-48. Isaiah is arguing for a certain view of God. Carter makes two specific claims: Yahweh is not a being among other beings, and the invisible realm is filled with countless beings (129). Some might bristle at Carter’s view that there are elohim besides Yahweh.  If that makes one uncomfortable, we can just use Paul’s language in Ephesians 6: ἀρχάς, τὰς ἐξουσίας, πρὸς τοὺς κοσμοκράτορας τοῦ σκότους τούτου, πρὸς τὰ πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις. As any good ANE writer knows, this implies some sort of hierarchy in the spiritual world. Yahweh, however, is not part of this hierarchy.  

If classical theism should never be divorced from Trinitarianism, neither should it be divorced from Isaiah 40-48.  Carter notes: “God is both the metaphysically absolute First Cause of all things and also the One who speaks and acts in history in order to judge the world and save his people” (139).

This underscores how radical a doctrine of creation ex nihilo is. Unlike ANE myths, in the bible creation is not rebellious.  God does destroy Rahab (more on that later, perhaps), but not in the process of creation. Rahab in Psalm 74 refers back to the Exodus and the opening of the Red Sea (143).

Platonism Revisited

Carter notes that the fathers “accepted the Platonic concept of universals as the basis for the logical order discernible in creation, but through  scholastic realism, they relocated them from a hard-to-define Platonic ‘third realm’ into the mind of God” (206). In a similar manner, the Fathers, following the Gospel, championed the Logos, not as a demiurge, but as a Creator; not as a mere structuring principle, but as someone who acted in history.

Carter summarizes his Christian Platonism with a discussion of Lloyd Gerson’s “Ur-Platonism.” For Gerson, all Platonic models incorporate five propositions: 1) antimaterialism, 2) antinominalism, 3) antimechanism, 4) antiskepticism, and 5) antirelativism (Gerson, 9-19, quoted in Carter, 290). Gerson’s criteria seem overly broad and ignore some of the more objectionable points of Plato’s worldview. Nonetheless, it does communicate what the Great Tradition is trying to say and can be appreciated for that.

Evaluation and Analysis

Carter’s most contentious point is his deliberate use of the term “Christian Platonism.”  It is unlikely biblicists would reject his larger project, at least at the basic level.  One might reject Thomism, but few can reject the idea that God is a First Cause without embracing some form of finite godism. It is Platonism, and specifically Carter’s emphasis on Platonism as such, that draws the most ire.  I will admit I do not particularly like the term, but I understand his point.  He wants to “shock” the reader, a reader perhaps long stuck in the mud of philosophical naturalism and materialism.  I get it. I would have said it another way, but I will not quibble over terminology.

In any case, there is very little of Plato in the book.  In fact, for those who have read all of Plato, there is not as much discussion on the realm of Forms as one might expect.  Far more important for Carter’s project, on the other hand, is the prophet Isaiah.  Carter devotes four chapters with a sustained analysis and exegesis of Isaiah 40-48.  By contrast, Plato is mentioned on fourteen or so pages. By Christian Platonism, Carter clearly means a transcendent God who acts on his world without being reduced to the world.  Could he have chosen a better term?  Probably.  Does his reasoning make sense?  Yes.

More important than quibbles of terminology is Carter’s heroic defense of the historic doctrine of God.  As he notes, the Christian world “recovered” the doctrine of the Trinity in the 20th century.  That might not have been a good thing.  Without simultaneously recovering classical theism, it gave us figures like Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, John Zizioulas, Jurgen Moltmann, and others. Without a robust classical theism, God gets moved to history and the historical process. We are not saying one must champion a view of God as First Cause to avoid this problem, but it is hard to imagine what one would do, otherwise.

Works Cited

Carter, Craig A. Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021.

Gerson, Lloyd P. From Plato to Platonism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Aquinas and Gerhard (Scharlemann)

Scharlemann, Robert P. Aquinas and Gerhard. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964.

This is a “book overview,” not a formal review. I do plan to give an analytical review later, but it is not high on the priority list.

As to the actual substance, Scharlemann gives a lucid comparison between Aquinas’s system (faith formed by caritas, caritas being a moral structure aimed at a supernatural end) and Gerhard (faith as a response to the preaching of the gospel and the terrors of the law).

The actual difference, and difference it must remain, between the two, however, is not quite so crystal clear. Gerhard still accepts much of the moral structure of Aquinas, and Aquinas concedes that caritas must be formed from outside the closed system of nature (i.e., by an infusion from the Holy Spirit), otherwise he risks Pelagianism.

The book was written at the height of the Neo-Orthodox age and reflects some of the nonsense (maybe literally) in terminology. We see words like “dialetical” and “confronting the Yes and No and the Yes in the No), none of which actually advances the discussion.

The author’s goal is commendable, though, in getting Protestants to see that still claim much from Aquinas.

On What the Great Tradition Isn’t

I have tried to show that the Great Tradition is more of a conversation than a database of pre-interpreted doctrines. As such, there is more weight on the doctrine of God and Christ than on Baptism. The Great Tradition aims more at the question: “Given what they believe about reality, why did they see the text or doctrine this way?”

1.Christian Platonism is a terrible moniker. I’ve read all of Plato’s writings and though it is fun to watch Socrates troll people, Plato qua Plato has problems.
2. What Carter and others mean, though, is simply metaphysical Augustinianism. If you are a historically-minded Western Christian, this is you. You might not like it, but this is probably what you default to.
3. That means things like Truth and Goodness really exist and aren’t simply names.
4. I don’t like allegory, but I have not yet seen them say they affirm the fourfold method. I could be wrong, though. Typology, by contrast, is the answer. Typology is rooted in historical realities.
5. It is possible to give too much credence to tradition. That’s not really what modern Americans are guilty of. The opposite error is also likely.
6. Even though I believe metaphysical realism is true, not all realisms are the same. Plato’s view of the soul is not the same as Aquinas’s.
7. The Great Tradition is probably more amenable to Augustine’s view of “Signs/Things” as discussed in On Christian Doctrine.

Nor is this “Thomism.” There are similarities between Thomas and the Great Tradition. However, Thomas would not accept Plato’s view of the soul, for one.

Platonic realism sees universals floating in some abstract realm. A universal is what you predicate of something else. The problem is that many Platonists also want to see the universal as some kind of substance itself, and it is hard to have both. Aristotle and Aquinas, by contrast, said the universal is in the thing iteself. A substance is form + something else (usually matter).

For example, Plato (and probably Augustine) believed the soul was a substance in the body. A ghost in the machine. Aquinas, on the other hand, believed the soul was the form of the body. It in-formed the body. That’s closer to the biblical position of a more holistic person.

As to my being a Thomist, I accept the same Thomist distinctions that Owen did in volume 10. I accept the same Thomist outline that Zanchi did. I hold to a more Scotist view, however, ala Franciscus Junius, when it comes to the ectypal distinction.

Here is another example of why the Great Tradition never meant to determine what a doctrine could or could not mean. What does “participation” (methexis) mean? For example, a sacramentum participates in the res. Paul alludes to the idea when he talks about our participation/sharing in the body of Christ. So on one level, participation means sharing. When Irenaeus, Ambrose, and Augustine use participation, how does it practically function?

If someone wants to criticize Platonism “from within,” read Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. It’s the only dialogue where Socrates actually loses the match. Platonism gets punched in the face pretty hard. Part of it is difficult, but it’s no more challenging than reading Van Til.

One could probably make the argument that even if Plato didn’t reject the doctrine of the Forms, his later writings are aware of the criticisms of them. That’s why we see a movement from the Philosopher King to a more humble approach to rule by law.

How to Think About God (Adler)

Adler, Mortimer J. How to Think About God: A Guide for the 20th Century Pagan. New York: MacMillan Publishing, 1980.

Have you ever read the arguments for the existence of God, and upon seeing said existence established, thought to yourself, “That seemed too convenient?”  If the person were not a Christian, would he or she have come to the same conclusion? Although Mortimer Adler, himself a Thomist, even if an unconverted one, is sympathetic to Thomas Aquinas’s arguments, he does not find them persuasive as they currently stand.  

The question before the house is this: since the cosmos is not part of a larger whole, and since the scientific evidence can be read either way regarding its eternity, does it need the presence of an efficient cause for its continuing existence (Adler 134)?

Adler begins his work by granting several “pagan” premises, namely that the universe could be eternal. To do otherwise, he says, is to beg the question.  As a result, he is not aiming to prove a creative cause in the universe, but a continuing cause.

Though I do not share his skepticism regarding some of the traditional arguments, I do appreciate his clarity.  One danger in seeing God as the First Cause is that it sometimes becomes God as the first temporal cause.  That places God within the created order.  To be sure, seeing First Cause in hierarchical language avoids that problem.

Is God an object among objects?  He is not.  That is the difficulty in giving a definition of God.   When we define objects, we refer them to a general class of objects.  God is in no such class.  What do we do?  Adler says we use the phrase “object of thought” instead of definition.  That is fine, although at this point most people would not have that kind of problem.

Criticisms

Even though Adler pointed out difficulties relating the Big Bang to the cosmological argument, it is not clear how such difficulties would harm the argument from hierarchical cause. His argument from what I can tell is that hierarchical causes do not need secondary instrumental causes (43). It is not clear to me why they do not.

Adler faults the traditional cosmological argument for relying on the principle of sufficient reason, to which he correctly rebuts with Occam’s razor. The problem, though, is that Thomas Aquinas did not need the principle of sufficient reason.  I refer the reader to Norman Geisler’s work on Aquinas.

Adler rightly points out that Aristotle’s view of causation is a faulty view of inertia. Aristotle believed that a body set in motion on a straight line continues indefinitely until counteracted.  This is obviously false.  Is this fatal to Thomas’s argument?  It is not.  Motion, for Thomas on this point, is a change from potency to actuality and does not require Aristotle’s view at this point.

Adler provides a brief autobiographical introduction in this book, to which readers of Adler such as myself will find most interesting.  He also gives an impressive, if somewhat dated bibliography. As the book stands, however, I cannot recommend it. It is not Adler’s best work.  Some concepts, such as his distinction between radical contingency and superficial contingency, were insufficiently argued.  Skeptics will not like his weakened affirmation of God’s existence at the end of the book.  Likewise, theists will not like his weakened affirmation of God’s existence at the end of the book.

The Trinitarian Theology of Cornelius Van Til (Tipton)

Tipton, Lane G. The Trinitarian Theology of Cornelius Van Til. Libertyville, IL: Reformed Forum, 2022.

Greg Bahnsen explained Van Til’s apologetic method.  John Frame touched on broader theological issues.  Lane Tipton gives us something quite new: a whole book on Van Til’s Trinitarian theology.  He clears up misunderstandings and explains some of Van Til’s rather unique phrases. Tipton’s thesis is that every error concerning God comes from either having God participate in man or man in God (Tipton 16).

Self-Contained Trinity

When Van Til uses words like “self-contained God,” he means that “God does not exist in correlation to the universe, with each side of the relation characterized by mutual change” (17).  This is excellently put.  In other words, he means that God is a se.  One minor theme in the book is that creation does not participate in the substance of the Godhead.  I agree.  I would like to point out, however, that there is an ambiguity here that neither Tipton nor some Thomists seem to be aware of.  What does “participation” actually mean?  No one really defines it. Even when I finished reading through all of Plato, I had only a vague idea of what the word meant.  This means there are two errors to avoid.  One is to define participation in such a thick way that one becomes part of the substance of the Godhead.  The other is to weaken it where 2 Peter 1:4 is all but meaningless.

Whatever participation means, Van Til posits, not a participation of the divine essence, but a finite replication of it to covenant man (19). This leads to another key point of Tipton’s: Rome’s view of the analogia entis entails theistic mutualism.  Theistic mutualism says that God and creation are in a correlative relationship. We will return to that claim later.

Tipton’s chapter on the Triune Creator is a fine presentation of some of God’s attributes.  He even suggests how these attributes, some of them anyway, safeguard our understanding of God and the universe.  Immutability, for example, precludes any form of pantheism (25). On this point Tipton rightly rebuts John Frame.  Frame, by contrast, “advocates for a species of theistic mutualism when he posits two modes of existence in God” (32 n.21; cf John Frame, Doctrine of God, 572).

The heart of this book, maybe surprisingly, is not Van Til on the Trinity, but Van Til on the image of God.  Van Til simply expounds the standard Protestant view that man was created in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. Adam was already disposed for communion with God.  Rome, by contrast, says something is needed to raise man above his created nature.  This means that man’s position is already defective before the fall.  Scripture, by contrast, says that any conflict in the being of man is a result of sin (44).

The Trinity

This is where problems arise, all of them self-inflicted for Van Til. I note up front that I do not believe Van Til was a heretic on the Trinity.  I know what he was trying to say (see below).  Rather, he simply chose the absolute worst way to express his views on the Trinity.  Tipton says Van Til is misunderstood on this point.  He alludes to Keith Mathison, R. C. Sproul, and John Gerstner. There are two problems with that.  One, those men did not really attack Van Til on the Trinity. They attacked him on apologetics and his reading of Reformed sources.  Two, it is not clear that they actually misunderstood what he was saying.  When someone says the Trinity is both One Person and Three Persons, it is not the critic’s fault that he misunderstands what you are saying.  

So what is Van Til saying?  He begins well.  Tipton notes that the “divine essence has no existence outside of each Trinitarian person” (63). Moreover, the unity in the Trinity is a numeric, not a generic unity.  The persons of the Trinity are not members of a genus called “Godhead.” And in one area where I think Van Til did make a valuable advance in Trinitarian theology, he says that each person “exhausts” the divine essence.  Whatever it means to be God, a divine person is it.  Each person is “interior” to the other persons.

One Person and Three Persons

Following Bavinck, there is “absolute personality” in the Trinity (74; cf Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, 304). This absolute personality entails self-consciousness and self-determination.  This absolute personality “opens itself up organically in a threefold existence.”  God’s being is a “personal unity” (Tipton 76). It works like this:

Absolute personality → threefold, self-differentiated existence (77)

Now we can proceed to Van Til’s infamous claim. When he says “one person” and “three persons,” what he means is “absolute personal being/personality” and “three persons.”  The word person shifts in meaning. At this point he is simply guilty of the fallacy of equivocation, not heresy.  Tipton tries to rescue the phrasing, saying “the terms ‘person’ and ‘personality’ [are used interchangeably] to refer to God in his unity” (83). This does not sit right with me.  If we front load divine unity with personality, then we muddle the distinction between nature and person. To this Van Til would reply that we cannot, ala Gordon Clark, make the divine essence a “mute” essence. I agree.  The older fathers noted that the concept person can already do that.  A person is a mode of subsistence.  As a mode it modifies the divine essence.  It is a mode of existence (tropos hyparxeos). The divine essence is never free-floating in the abstract.

The book ends with a good discussion of perichoresis and autotheos.  We will spend some time on the latter term. Autotheos means the Son’s essence exists of himself and not with reference to the Father (112). The Father communicates the person, not the essence to the Son. In fact, “one subsistent person is not sustained in his essence by another Trinitarian person, since all persons subsist equally as the entire underived essence of God” (117).

Van Til ties all of this together with the idea of “mutual representation.” Tipton explains that “each person represents the whole of the divine essence (in the relations of subsistence) and the other Trinitarian persons (in the relations of coinherence” in the Godhead” (132). In fact, mutual exhaustion correlates with mutual representation (133).

Conclusion

Is Thomas Aquinas a theistic mutualist?  He might be.  Tipton, like Van Til, does not engage in actual analysis with primary sources.  To be sure, he references learned works by Thomists on this topic, but we still do not know what Thomas actually said.  There are problems with Thomas’s account in places, and I agree with Tipton on the donum. I admit that some Thomists do indeed speak of a sharing (or at least, seeing) the essence of God.  If Thomas said something like that, we would need to see where and to see what he means by it.  We see neither. Thomas probably held to the chain of being ontology, but did he mean that there is just one being and God has more of it than we do?  That seems more of a criticism of Scotus. My own reading of Thomas, no doubt largely shaped by men like Norman Geisler and Mortimer Adler, suggests something like the following: God and man have being analogically, not univocally. We can say our concepts of being are univocal, but our judgments of it are analogical.  

Following Norman Geisler, I would say that unless we have something like an analogy of being, we will not be able to escape Parmenides’s challenge. Parmenides said if we think being is univocal, then all being is one.  If we say it is equivocal, then we would differ from other objects and God by not-being, or nothing.  In which case, being is still one.  The solution, then, is that we have our being analogically of God.

That’s not crucial to this review, though. What is crucial is that we are still not sure of what Thomas said.  I can even grant Tipton’s claim for the sake of argument, but we would at least need to see it.

Notwithstanding the above criticism, the book is excellent. Tipton has done what Van Tillians normally do not do: he explains some of Van Til’s unique phrases. I do wish he would tell us what “concrete universal” meant for Van Til.  I do not think anyone should criticize Van Til on the Trinity without at least reading that section in this book.  It may not necessarily convince you, but you will at least have seen what Van Til does and does not mean.

(Disclaimer: I was given a complimentary copy by the publisher. I was under no obligation for a favorable review.  My thoughts are entirely my own.)