hughbiquitous

With all the attention J.P. Moreland’s ETS paper is directing at issues of natural theology and the proper sort of commitment to the Bible, I’m looking for some boundaries on these questions.

Ten years ago, Michael Horton wrote on Calvin’s take on the limits of natural theology and concludes that unbelievers are not bereft of reason or truth; God’s common grace should not be discounted in these matters. But it is only when the Holy Spirit "notarizes" revealed truth in the heart of unbelievers that there is power to save:

Calvin also insists that [knowledge of God implanted in the conscience] is legal rather than evangelical in character. This is crucial especially for Reformed believers today, when this distinction seems to be fading. Everyone knows God, but as Creator, Law-Giver, and Judge. "There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity [sensus Divinitatis]." Calvin argues that there is a great deal of common ground in creation for agreement on general principles of morality, justice, beauty, and even truth. One does not require special revelation in order to create a reasonably just society, a beautiful work of art, or even a common sense of morality based on the law written on the conscience (2.2.15). Surely, Christians and non-Christians could agree on many issues related to the common good. And, we can infer (given his positive evaluation of many of the advances of philosophy in secular matters) that Calvin would approve of appealing to philosophical arguments in apologetics…

Calvin finds the inscripturated Word to be the only rock in a whirlpool of subjective opinion. "Hence the Scriptures obtain full authority among believers only when men regard them as having sprung from heaven, as if there the living words of God were heard" (1.7.1). The Word and the Spirit belong together, and thus Calvin moves to the role of the Spirit’s witness, "stronger than all proof." Credibility in doctrine depends on our full confidence in God’s Word. The prophets invoke God’s name for their writings with great care and purpose. Again, the central concern for Calvin is pastoral; he seeks to care for those whose consciences would vacillate and find no comfort. We must rise above human reasoning, judgments and conjectures and this can only be done when the Holy Spirit joins the Word as its "notary public." This is no capitulation to fideism in the face of poor arguments, an evasion of the critical questions…

We have some common ground with unbelievers. In nature, there is some revelation about God. But nature can only tell us that he is a Judge; it does not tell us of his fatherly kindness in the provision of Christ. Nature provides legal knowledge of God, but only Scripture reveals the Gospel, the evangelical knowledge of Christ.

Over a decade ago, Greg Koukl wrote the paper I wish J.P. Moreland had given last week.

Back in 1993, Greg wrote Is Biblical Counseling Biblical? Insight from Scripture and Classical Readings to the Current Anathematizing of Psychology. While its primary thrust is addressing some excesses of the Biblical Counseling movement (which may no longer be characteristic of what’s going on there; I confess ignorance), Greg makes a solid, biblical argument that defeats the narrow "Bible-only" view of sola scriptura that Dr. Moreland was addressing. He goes on to offer some absolutely brilliant things about the right use of natural theology in a solidly Reformed tradition.

While I encourage you to read the whole thing, I’ll highlight three key ingredients.

1. Reformers all the way back to Calvin recognized the value of man’s wisdom, depraved though it is. Quoting Calvin:

Therefore, in reading profane authors, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us, that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator… How then can we deny that truth must have beamed on those ancient lawgivers who arranged civil order and discipline with so much equity? Shall we say that the philosophers, in their exquisite researches and skillful description of nature, were blind?… Nay, we cannot read the ancients on these subjects without the highest admiration; an admiration which their excellence will not allow us to withhold… Therefore, since it is manifest that men whom the Scriptures term natural, are so acute and clear-sighted in the investigation of inferior things, their example should teach us how many gifts the Lord has left in possession of human nature, not withstanding of its having been despoiled of the true good.

2. Writing off all human virtue as sin is unbiblical. "Something is wrong with any assessment of human behavior that forces us to label all human virtue — love, kindness, mercy, patience, gentleness — as sin simply because none are expressed perfectly. This conclusion is not a biblical one," Koukl says.

3. The Formula of Concord, which dealt with certain errors among Lutherans following Luther’s death, addressed the nature of depravity with care and precision. Koukl puts it this way:

Concord makes a distinction that is lost on much of modern evangelicalism: man does not have a sinful nature, strictly speaking, but a nature that is corrupted by sin. This comports with Augustine’s view that evil is a privation of good and not a thing in itself. As such, the fall doesn’t create in man an ontologically new nature… but merely robs his human nature of its original righteousness.

These are weighty topics that need to be assessed carefully. Greg Koukl did a superlative job surveying the biblical data and the wisdom of the ages to make the very important point that sola scriptura does not entail an abandonment of truth found outside the Bible.

J.P. Moreland sure knows how to stir the pot.

Dr. Moreland—author of The Rationality of Belief in Inerrancy—delivered a paper at last week’s ETS meetings titled How Evangelicals Became Over-Committed to the Bible and What can be Done about It.

Now, Dr. Moreland is no dummy, so when he opens with words like these you know he’s picking a fight:

…in the actual practices of the Evangelical community in North America, there is an over-commitment to Scripture in a way that is false, irrational, and harmful to the cause of Christ. And it has produced a mean-spiritedness among the over-committed that is a grotesque and often ignorant distortion of discipleship unto the Lord Jesus.

So when Ted Olsen live-blogged the ETS event, a fight is what J.P. got. Scan the comments if you dare; it’s quite the mêlée. Dr. Moreland even weighed in himself to clarify his intentions and defend the salient points of his paper.

The Good

Mark Noll, in his similarly provocatively titled book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, has a chapter titled “The Intellectual Disaster of Fundamentalism” that resonates with much of what Dr. Moreland has to say. I think Dr. Moreland is at his best in this paper when he says,

By and large, Evangelicals responded during [the secularization of the universities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries] by withdrawing from the broader world of ideas, developing a view of faith that was detached from knowledge and reason, and limiting truth and belief about God, theology and morality to the inerrant Word of God, the Bible. If I am right about this, then Evangelical over-commitment to the Bible is the result of the influence of secularization on the church and not of biblical or theological reflection.

In other words, intellectuals blew off the church, and the church returned the favor, creating a separatist, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist ghetto. Evangelicals, says Dr. Moreland, need to abandon that ghetto, and I say “amen.” (But see Roger Overton for why this may be a flawed argument, or at least, an over-generalization.)

Another point of Dr. Moreland’s that I welcome is one that I think he could have made better in his paper, if I may be so bold as to say so. He did a better job explaining it on the Scriptorium blog; see Christianity as a Knowledge Tradition.

It has to do with scripture and the nature of truth, and a clue can be found in our use of the word “inerrant.” To err is to be false; if a proposition is false, it is because it fails to correspond to reality. So when we say that the Bible is inerrant, we are saying that everything in it is backed up by reality. For example, if Jesus did not really rise from the dead, then the resurrection accounts would be in error—the fact that the resurrection accounts are in the Bible does nothing to repair that damage. Put simply, the thing that makes it true is the reality it stands on. The Bible itself is a “truth-bearer” and not a “truth-maker,” to use the philosopher’s language. God’s character, his thoughts, and his actions in history are the truth-makers when it comes to the Bible’s inerrancy. The Bible merely preserves and delivers these truths in an authoritative, God-breathed record.

So when Dr. Moreland goes after “bibliolatry,” one of his targets is the idea that the Bible itself is a truth-maker. That does not diminish the Bible; it simply recognizes it as a vehicle for communicating truth instead of the truth itself.

The Bad

Where to start… for one thing, this is an inflammatory piece. It has a sort of maverick sensibility to it that really isn’t helpful. He calls people out (some by name) for painting these issues with too broad a brush, and yet he does so with a very broad brush himself. He praises Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI for their robust thinking, and less than a page later, takes John MacArthur to task for his “failure to tease out the implications of the ontological reality of the soul.” Even if he is entirely correct and completely justified in the points he makes, he’s making it harder, not easier, for his message to find its home with people.

I’m a guy who cares deeply about Reformed theology and thought, as well as the promotion of the life of the Christian mind in general. Dr. Moreland’s direct and indirect attacks on Reformed sensibilities will draw fire for guys like me who have to answer to presuppositionalist critics who accuse us of “worshiping human reason” or “putting logic above the Bible”. Those are matters for discussion that require an irenic, patient, and careful analysis of some very fine distinctions. Dr. Moreland’s paper did little to help clarify those distinctions. It will also make it more difficult to refer people to Dr. Moreland’s work.

Dr. Moreland dwells a bit on “hearing from God” and signs and wonders. The whole “hearing from God” bit really doesn’t have any traction with me; if God wants to speak to me, he certainly can, but I don’t have any reason to expect that he will and I don’t see anything from Scripture instructing me to operate that way (though I suspect I’m begging Dr. Moreland’s question when I say that). With regard to signs and wonders, I don’t deny that those things can and do happen. I have missionary friends abroad who tell stories that are very similar to those Dr. Moreland has recounted elsewhere about people having dreams and visions of Christ. In the end, I’m not sure that either of these issues is central to a discussion of bibliolatry within Evangelicalism—I think it just muddies the already-disturbed waters.

Finally, his concluding call to “teach people how to avail themselves appropriately of the extra-biblical knowledge available in these areas” is a bit glib. What does he mean by “appropriately?” What sort of boundaries would he suggest? I’m all for making good use of extra-biblical sources, but how do you help people make distinctions between the right and wrong uses of those sources?

See also Roger Overton’s critique at the A-Team blog; he is (or was) a student at Talbot in Dr. Moreland’s program and is therefore in a much better position than I am to speak to these issues. He goes a bit further than I do, especially on a very important point: the big problem today is not over-commitment to the Bible; it’s under-commitment.

Conclusion

Dr. Moreland’s customary passions for careful thinking and a thoroughly integrated Christian life are evident, and his commitment to the correspondence view of objective truth shines through here. I would like for Dr. Moreland to suggest some boundaries and guidance for the use of extra-biblical sources, and I would really like to hear him engage the questions that are important to Reformed thinkers with greater care. Who knows, perhaps he’s tried and failed and this is where he felt he had to go with it. Reformed thinkers are not immune to charges of being hard to talk to.

Dr. Moreland has done tremendous work to advance the kingdom of God by providing much-needed on-ramps to the life of the Christian mind. It would be an awful shame if this paper adds toll gates that aren’t needed.

Epilogue

Two of my favorite bloggers have weighed in:

• Justin Taylor says it’s not what he said; it’s the way he said it that’s causing problems.
• Douglas Groothuis calls Moreland’s paper “superb and much-needed.”

I’m starting to think that the web rots the mind.

That’s not an absolute statement, mind you. But I think that there’s some truth in the idea that “the medium is the message” and that our interaction with the web has an effect that is independent of the content we encounter there.

For example, television accustoms us to 22-minute conflict resolution and commercials popping up every so many minutes. There are similar issues with the web: as a blogger, I find myself trying to write everything in paragraphs of no more than four or five printed lines because, as a reader of online content, I know how the medium works.

(Indeed, see web design tip #10, “Shorter paragraphs perform better than long ones. Information on your page should be designed for the short attention span of most Internet users. Keep paragraphs and sentences short unless context mandates otherwise…”)

The Need for Examination

Back in August I bookmarked a number of blog entries and articles expressing concerns about our technological saturation and its effects. The points were well taken—we need to examine our habits:

Keith Plummer: “Christians are prone to assess our use of information technologies solely on the basis of what kind of information is being conveyed with little thought given to how uncritical and excessive use of information technologies may have undesirable effects even when we are using them to communicate good things.”

Douglas Groothuis (quoted by Justin Taylor): “Any area of culture that decreases godliness and enhances worldliness must come under the loving discipline of Jesus Christ–for his glory, for our good, and for the good of those we serve. Christians need to withdraw from aspects of our technological culture … in order to gain perspective on ourselves, God, and our culture.”

John Mark Reynolds: “[The New Media] could also develop a nasty laziness in me. If I can write quickly, why refine my ideas? Why not hop from one idea to another without ever revisiting them? Doesn’t the public demand something new? This underestimates the public and threatens to leave me and any other new media writer severely weaker than we need be.”

Jerram Barrs: (sorry, it’s more than five lines…)

A good test of whether television is servant or master is, when your children have watched something, do they then go out and do something related to what they have seen? Is their imagination stimulated? Television is a servant when your children can watch a program then say, “Well that was fascinating. Let’s go and play Robin Hood,” or “Let’s go and do this thing.”

Is television stimulating your children’s interest and imagination, or is it actually having the opposite effect? When you turn it off, do they just lie around on the floor and say, “What am I going to do now?”

So, What Are You Going to Do Now?

When my church’s blog launched in 2004, the ideas I interacted with there stimulated my interest and imagination, and sure enough, I found myself saying, “what am I going to do now?” The answer came when I launched this blog in January 2005. It’s been fun and it’s definitely provoked me to greater and deeper thoughts (and clearer expressions of those thoughts, too). You might even say that blogging has become a discipline.

But there are times when I wonder if blogging has “jumped the shark.” (It should be noted that some say that the phrase, “jumped the shark,” has, itself, jumped the shark. But I digress.)

I think—I hope—the answer is “no,” but that blogs (and bloggers) are maturing. Hopefully the ideas are growing and the thoughts are stewing. Hopefully readers will get more comfortable reading longer paragraphs and writers will reward them with longer paragraphs worth reading.