He argues revelation should not be treated in an abstractly
supernatural fashion but that grace perfects nature.
He then goes on to pair the Barthian and Anabaptist views as
being similar and in opposition to the Reformed view. He believes their view(s)
to contain implicit dualist tendencies and represent a kind of anti-nature and
anti-matter mindset. He doesn't specifically mention the Gnostics but most make
the charge at this point. He then argues that the Reformed and in particular
the Amillennial wing within the Reformed need to be sure not to fall into this
trap.
It was an interesting little read and I appreciated it even
if I cannot agree with him. I understand the emphasis though. This seemingly
obscure point is actually pretty important. Without this, the entirety of their
theological project falls into peril. And certainly you cannot speak in terms
of Christianity and culture apart from this understanding. It's no accident
that the theologian he cites is the Dutch giant Hermann Bavinck.
While I am not a follower of Kant, I do agree with him that epistemological categories are limited by our experience. Our
understandings of quantity, quality, relation and modality are all limited by
our ability to contextualize within our minds. In fact I would go further and
state all of our understanding is ultimately relational. Things, object and
ideas only have meaning (to us) in how we can relate them to other similar and dissimilar
entities.
God of course relates at a different level and at a different
scale than we do. His knowledge is not just quantitatively more than ours,
because his understanding of relations (and thus all knowledge) is different
than ours, his knowledge is qualitatively different. He can relate things in
ways and in comprehensive contexts that we cannot.
Revelation reveals to us truths from the eternal and
spiritual realm, a realm we have no way to contextualize. Theologians of the
scholastic tradition seem to believe that once we are given foundational
revelatory data we can proceed (as it were) into the spiritual/metaphysical
realm and begin to predicate, deduce and form models of coherence. This quest
for system allows the theologian to not only 'round-out' the corpus of
knowledge but also to probe into other areas and seek to apply theological
principles in wider fields of ethics and sociology. We will revisit this point.
If the metaphysical realm apart from strict adherence to
revelation is closed to us, then this project is effectively terminated. This
is why sometimes you will hear people say that Barth was anti-metaphysics. I
won't presume to interpret Barth and yet it very well may be the case and I
came to a similar conclusion long ago. This is not to say there isn't a
metaphysical reality. By no means. But what it is saying is that
philosophically and theologically we cannot say anything about it apart from
what we are given by God.
But unlike Barth I believe in revelation given to us in the
form of inspired Words (Scripture) and preserved as such. I believe apart from
this inscripturated Word we are indeed blind. We can tell the
spiritual/metaphysical realm is there but we cannot predicate concerning it and
any attempt to do so actually leads to false conclusions and idolatry. Lacking proper epistemological
tools we end up attempting to relate metaphysical categories and meaning to or
not, we limit them to the epistemological categories of the space/time realm...
our own experience. We create reductionisms and ultimately false constructs.
I do not believe the spiritual realm is the equivalent of
Kant's noumena and that it's up to us to actualize it in different contexts.
Barth might believe the Scripture contains numerous instances or examples of
God's Word but he also seemed to believe you could encounter the Word through
other types of experiences, great emotion, a trauma... perhaps even the
sublime. This of course is reminiscent of Schopenhauer and other figures that
came after Kant and worked with and modified his categories.
The Word functions within space/time and thus Creation but it
is spiritual in its nature. People could hear Jesus preach and witness miracles
and yet apart from the Spirit's work on the heart they did not have the ability
(via the defective nature of This Age) to rightly interpret these phenomena. Only those
who have been gifted with transcendent vision (re-birth, eyes to see) can rightly
begin to apprehend let alone comprehend the revelation they are encountering.
The 'law', the commands of God are spiritual and the natural
man cannot understand them nor in any way begin to follow them. Jesus said that
he could not tell the disciples 'heavenly' things and Paul experienced things
which cannot be uttered. The mysteries of the Incarnation and Trinity transcend
the categories that we can function with and God Himself reminds us that His
ways are not ours, His thoughts are not ours and He draws a distinction between
the ways of heaven and the ways of earth and man (Is 55)
Revelation being part of nature is critical to the Protestant
project because transcendent truths have to be legislated and culturally
enforced. There has to be a way to bridge the truths of the Spirit-Kingdom and
the kingdoms of this world. Without this connection there would indeed be a
distinction between secular and sacred and this oft-attacked Biblical concept
is something they have sought to eradicate. Apart from this connection between
revelation and nature, the ability to apply the Kingdom to the cultural and
sociological model (to Sacralize it) would collapse. Again, if the categories
cannot parse revelation there's no way to develop comprehensive theological,
philosophical and thus sociological systems. The worldview or unified theory project collapses.
At this point we would argue that revelation itself is a
miracle and thus by definition transcends the categories of nature and
space/time. It is in the world (space/time/history) but it is not of the world.
When revelation is flattened to the point where the distinction between general
and special revelation are lost, then faith ends up being something more akin
to 'right reason' then the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen. Please note the evidence is of the type that transcends the
categories of nature. It's not verifiable, but it's not something that's
unreasonable or incoherent. It rests on the claims of a Person and His Work. It
is rooted in a bare and simple and yet incomplete coherence, a recognition that
reality is more than what we experience but it cannot be 'proved' in terms of
logic or pass some kind of falsification test.
It is a blessed hope, not something we approach with
epistemological certainty in the way we approach material phenomena or
mathematical proofs. Our faith rests not in proofs and deductions but in a
Person and His claims and deeds.
General Revelation points to a spiritual or noumenal reality.
We're left like Kant (and Ockham before him) saying we cannot (via nature) go
any further. But since we accept Christ we can believe the Scripture He
sanctioned - that takes us into the Spirit-realm. We can have knowledge...
the knowledge of analogy and replication, not the ability to predicate and
speculate. As mentioned previously, doing this necessarily leads to reductionist coherences
and thus ultimately to misleading conclusions.
This is the difference between what we would call Biblicism
vs. the Scholastic Model which has plagued the Church from at least the days of
Peter Lombard and in the form of Confessionalism after the Reformation. We
prefer a different intellectual pedigree, one that follows (to a limited
extent) the path of Ockham, Hume and Kant, one that leads to Scepticism vis-à-vis
this world and inconclusiveness regarding the necessary Spiritual reality and
points us instead to a choice.... Nihilism or Revelation.
We are thankful that Common Grace leads to restraint and that
we can speak of an Innate or Natural Law that is flawed and partial but functions
within the hearts of men. But they cannot account for it and when they attempt
to probe it or establish it, it will always lead to idolatry and error. Is this
due to a simple lack of right reason, or is it a result of a chasm, a gulf
fixed by the curse of Eden and that right reason in fact cannot lead man to
God? Reason limited by space-time-experiential categories cannot penetrate the
veil. The instrument of access is faith in Christ. Apart from that, man's only
viable choice (if honest) is Nihilism. All coherences end up being subjective
and ultimately unverifiable. Attempts at meaning are reductionist speculations.
Scholasticism inadvertently leads to man-made systems, an
idolatrous pseudo-Coherence, an attempt by man to grasp and formulate a
comprehensive system. Ultimately it begins to self-destruct, as the systems
created cannot stand up to their criteria and wither under their own scrutiny. Scholasticism ironically lays the groundwork for its own destruction.
Barth offers a somewhat similar critique but in reality
embraces a very different understanding. We might indeed call him a Word-ist.
He would also seemingly decry the scholastic project but for him the Word is
not the equivalent of Scripture. That may have been true to some degree prior
to the Apostolic Age. But as Biblicists we must insist after the Apostles
disappeared from the earth, the only prophetic oracular Word we have is
Scripture. For Barth this is problem because like a good Kantian he seems to
insist that we must individually and thus subjectively experience the
Noumenal-Word. At this point he is little different than the theological
liberals he opposed. He could not accept the idea of an inspired and preserved
infallible and thus canonical text that was fully authoritative. His
Enlightenment commitments wouldn't allow him to do that. So he sought a way to
retain Supernaturalism but divorce it from an Infallible revelation in the form of The Bible.
We are not sceptics on the order of Hume but like Cassidy we
can appreciate Hume for his utter destruction of any kind of positive
Rationalist or Empiricist system. Hume's thought, in many ways like Ockham of old leads
to Scepticism and Kant for all his efforts remained mired in dogmatic slumber
and had to resort to creating a system (albeit brilliant) that cannot be
verified. Scepticism can be destructive or it can drive man to be forced to say
I (of myself) can know nothing. Possessing nothing and with no hope, the spiritually impoverished Sceptic can possibly be softened to hear the answer... the gospel of Jesus
Christ.
Rejecting the philosophical project, the Christian embraces The Faith based on basic principles of coherence. Innately we know there is a
God, there is a metaphysical realm, there is truth and it can give us a
foundation to stand on to embrace the gospel and revelation.
But once we are there we leave aside the quest for Coherence
and instead embrace truth in the form of Correspondence. Our thinking which is
at best analogical must match and pattern itself after the revelation provided
to us from God. We understand (as per Heb. 11) that true reality is trans-physical or
supernatural and yet we also understand that our fallen categories won't
function in that realm. We cling tenaciously to revelation because it's all we
have. It's our guide as it were to the metaphysical/spiritual realm. It's not a
philosophical foundation stone to transform and redeem this world - let alone a Philosopher's Stone!
We are not anti-matter. We are anti-'This Age' because Christ
has already condemned this world and its 'god' (2 Cor 4.4 and Ephesians 6). The
Dominionist impulse wants to insist that our only slightly-fallen but still very good creation is being redeemed. This is a
desperate attempt to retain their cultural project and make the works of This
Age a part of the Kingdom. They believe we will carry our works with us to
heaven and thus we'll have Bach and Rembrandt and other such cultural
'attainments' in The Age to Come. The Secular becomes the Sacred.
The criteria they employ to determine what is good and
beautiful are not based on Scripture but instead are rooted in ancient
philosophy but that's for another discussion.
Without this cultural redemption then indeed the whole of the
Reformed project regarding culture is rendered worthless and meaningless...
just what it is. Abraham Kuyper and all his descendants at work in America
today are gravely mistaken even if they have virtually conquered the
Evangelical world.
The problem with the old Fundamentalist and Evangelical
notion of heaven being ethereal is not due to dualism or Gnosticism, rather it
is the result of some bad theological impulses and probably rooted more in the
Dispensational divide between Jew and Gentile. Just because some have seemingly
missed the fact that we will have corporeal resurrection bodies does not mean they're
Gnostics. The problem has been compounded by the fact that you have groups like
the Jehovah's Witnesses who actually hold to more or less a Biblical view of
heaven. This has made the Biblical view suspect. But actually I think the
Dominionist view of this life and the afterlife have become the dominant
teaching in today's Evangelicalism. This has been true for about twenty years
now.
And yet returning to the issue of the resurrection body,
Christ's body was unlike ours. It was physical but of a different nature. The normative categories do not apply. We cannot account for a being that can eat fish but
pass through walls and ceilings, appear or disappear at will. The resurrected
Christ is also a form of revelation and a very poignant example of how the
categories (nature) fail to be applicable. In truth we don't even know which of
these attributes are part of resurrection life or applicable only to Christ's
Deity.
Despite Cassidy's concerns, Paul speaks in a way he doesn't
in 2 Cor 4.16- 5.19. Paul speaks of focusing on the eternal, not the temporal,
he speaks of our bodies as tents to be destroyed, and he groans to be 'clothed
upon'. While at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. Living as risen,
Kingdom-people we are part of the new creation, all things for us are new, the
old things (of This Age) have passed away. The Judgment draws the line. And the
reconciliation of the world? That's the work of Holy Spirit in forgiveness of
sins, categories which cannot be applied to the culture of Common Grace... art,
science, politics etc...
1 Cor 7 tells us that even Common Grace ordinances like
marriage are temporary... meaning they cannot be redeemed. Christian marriage
is of a different order than that of the world because the two people are 'in'
Christ. But even that blessed arrangement is temporary as are all things of
this age. And how we approach this age is demonstrated in how we 'possess'
things. We use them as things that are passing away with this age. This must
seem rather dualist to many a Dominionist as Paul doesn't seem to share their
culture-positive constructivist view.
2 Peter 3.10-13 teaches that this world and all the works
that are in it shall be burned up. That's how it's renewed. Cassidy seems to
think that so-called Christian art and cultural endeavours are not part of the
works of the world and thus will survive. Only the work of the Spirit, that
which is Holy is already part of the New Heavens and Earth. God has given us
many beautiful things in the arts and culture, but they are cheap shadows and
the corrupted works of men's hands compared to the glory that shall follow.
Think of the temple. Yes it became obsolete and was done away
with when Christ fulfilled the typology, but nevertheless the works of man,
even redeemed man are still like Solomon's works... failures. The earthly
temple, holy in its context and blessed by God was but a shadow compared to the
Temple made without hands.
If our knowledge is analogical and God's knowledge is
qualitatively different than ours, anything we produce will at best be a
childish reductionism and I see no warrant for believing that our cultural
endeavours, contextualized in a world of sin can possibly do anything to
contribute to God's Kingdom or our experience of heaven. Like Noah we condemn
This Age and all its works.
Cassidy demonstrates the tendency within Reformed
Amillennialism that I realized almost twenty years ago. Most of them, because
they still embrace Dominionism and the language of Cultural Mandate might as
well be Postmillennialists. Kline is right. On this point the Biblical
Amillennial position has more in common on a practical applicable level with
historic Pre-millennialism.
Revelation is not clay that we're allowed to sculpt. Poor
in spirit we understand that we cannot know anything in this world as we ought.
We cannot account for the knowledge we have or how we apply it. We know just
enough to be guilty. Revelation brings us the gospel in the person and work of
Jesus Christ. On the basis of faith in Him we accept the Holy Writings as His Word and
it is our light and truth. Without it we cannot hope to navigate This Age. It
is our only infallible window into the eternal realm and it is our guide through this
dying world under judgment. It teaches us that we are to be light-bearers and
martyr-witnesses, that we are to wage spiritual war on this battlefield and
that we win by being slaughtered and persecuted. This world is not our home and
we do not seek to reform this age. Only God can bring the reformation... the
fires of Judgment and recreation.
Like the post-flood world, heaven will be a fresh slate, the
former things will not be remembered or come to mind and the tears will be
wiped away from our eyes.