Proto-Protestantism: Sola Scriptura and Divine Simplicity (II)

30 June 2022

Sola Scriptura and Divine Simplicity (II)

To my mind, it makes perfect sense that this dispute over the doctrine of God has arisen in the context of Reformed Baptist circles as I have long argued Baptist doctrine and understandings regarding concepts such as the covenant and sacraments tend toward reductionism and result from a kind of rationalism at work that will not tolerate ambiguity, tension, and paradox – even though a true Biblicist hermeneutic demands the embrace of such mysteries.

This is why (I argue) that Reformed or Calvinistic Baptists have (historically) always been the most susceptible to Hyper-Calvinism – which is Calvinism placed within or subjugated to a rationalist framework. Further I would argue that many Hyper-Calvinists ultimately find their home within the Baptistic framework. As all external means are rendered effectively useless and the Spirit alone gives life, the ambiguities that arise from a means-based theology become not just problematic but superfluous. This affects everything from ecclesiology and the sacraments to the presentation of the gospel and personal piety.

Forcing and absolutising questions concerning election and God's Sovereignty, even at the expense of what God Himself reveals in the Scriptures, and questions of the Free Offer, and ever fruitless debates over lapsarianism and the like are all too typical of their circles. That said, many Presbyterians though officially paedobaptistic function under the same baptistic framework and functional mindset. Many are Baptists who apply water to infants in what is nothing more than a dedication rite.

Waldron has always been (to my mind) on the better side of the Reformed Baptist world and though he didn't say a lot in this regard, I was nevertheless pleased with what he said and how he said it. But I can imagine there were more than a few listeners who are less than pleased with what he said.

And so the fact that the doctrine of God has been pushed to the cognitive and deductive limits in Reformed Baptist circles does not surprise me and yes, given the direction of certain segments of the Reformed world over the past century or so, I would expect there to be a conflict. In fact, I'm surprised it took this long for the nascent conflict to become manifest. And on a basic or fundamental level these same issues are at the heart of some of the other debates we've seen over the past few decades – from Lordship Salvation, to Federal Vision, to the recent charges of Subordinationism. There are other extant issues and factors at work but the core debates are over prolegomena – what is the Bible and how is it to be read and understood? What is the nature of theology, how is it formulated, and what are its limits? These debates are further complicated by the fact that those making the arguments are rarely consistent – sometimes holding to a hard logic position on certain points of doctrine but when it comes to other issues they see the internal logic of Scripture which in terms of space-time experience generates dynamics and ambiguities.

And as a corollary to this, I wonder if there's been a response to the larger debate within the circles most often associated with Hyper-Calvinism (again rationalism being the underlying problem, though few seem to grasp this). I am of course referring to the disciples of Protestant Reformed Church (PRC) founder Herman Hoeksema and the Presbyterian Gordon Clark who labeled his views as 'Scripturalism' which they most definitely are not. This only adds to the confusion as many encounter this school and believe they've found a Biblically faithful school of thought (which operates as a loose faction within Reformed circles) but instead have fallen in with a group of Rationalists that subordinate revelation to fallen human reason and its limitations. As such their theology falls prey to reductionism and oversimplification resulting in a distorted and unfaithful reading, method, and application.

I am unaware of the Clarkian-PRC response to or interaction with this debate but I would be interested to see how they deal with it as both camps are highly rationalistic and indeed some of Clark's followers have abandoned Presbyterianism and become Baptists. But at the same time both camps would be generally hostile to Thomism and contrary to the strong Empiricist strain that dominates the Anglo-American intellectual (and theological) sphere, both exhibit Continental influences in terms of the Protestant tradition. And yet both tend heavily toward the rationalistic side of things (which historically has been associated with Platonic as opposed to Aristotelian (and therefore Thomistic) epistemology).

As a brief aside, Arnzen's point that Thomas Aquinas should not be considered a brother in Christ is a belief once commonly held among Bible-believing Protestants and yet many of today's Evangelicals and Confessionalists with a mind toward equating the West with the Holy Kingdom would not agree and I've heard Reformed men refer to Thomas as a Biblical Christian – some qualify this by saying 'in his time' or something to that effect. Were someone to put forth his ideas in our century they would certainly be harshly condemned as heretical. This too presents a problem in that it suggests that orthodoxy is something fluid and situational – an accepted and functional reality which prima facie destroys the arguments for Confessionalism.

On a related point (and perhaps a missing component to this discussion), is the context of the cultural crisis and the way this bears on the strong sacral and Dominionist impulses of some thinkers – especially those who insist on a coherentist framework along with those who are (under other influences) be seeking what could be called a unified theory in terms of systematic theology and a similar view of culture in terms of theology, philosophy, and ethics.

For many of this mindset there is an air of desperation as they feel that the Kingdom is taking some kind of massive blow in the downgrade of Western Civilisation. They have in some capacity equated the two or overlapped their identities. The West is certainly in an epistemological crisis and for these thinkers (which span the Evangelical, Confessional, and Catholic worlds) the problem is so severe that there's an overwhelming desire to re-ground all thinking which for many means returning to pre-Enlightenment categories of thought – a highly problematic notion for proponents of Right-wing American ideology. Few of them seem to realise that they're sawing off the branch upon which they sit.

Indeed, the Enlightenment has proven the catalyst for much of the change that has taken place in the world and in civilisation. As mentioned in other recent essays, some (mostly Traditionalist Catholics) go further beyond Luther and place the blame on Ockham and the Nominalists. To their way of thinking if it wasn't for this anti-Scholastic movement there would have been no Reformation or Enlightenment. They have a point but as with many such arguments, there are significant leaps in logic and deduction and questionable metanarratives which overlay their interpretation. As is often the case they're guilty of oversimplification.

The problem is that for many thinkers, including some within the Reformed world (and particularly within the Continental theological and philosophical traditions), the Enlightenment is viewed as a problem but the answer is not found in returning to pre-Enlightenment (let alone Medieval) thought. Rather it's more productive, realistic, and in fact even helpful to utilise and interact with what some call the Counter-Enlightenment – rightly or wrongly associated with Kant and the various permutations and reactions to his so-called Copernican Shift in philosophy. Some (including this author) are appreciative of the critique of Medieval Scholasticism and Thomism and yet also have serious misgivings about the Enlightenment and what it produced. This is not to say that the answers are to be found in the nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers and their epistemological methods – and certainly not in the alternative of the Anglo-American analytic sphere. Not at all, but rather the overall breakdown in philosophy leads to a crisis – one that I find to be helpful. Modern philosophy has demonstrated that the entire endeavour leads to collapse and thus modern man is faced with a stark choice (perhaps one even more poignant than what earlier generations faced) of inescapable cynicism and nihilism or the embrace of faith and revelation.

Classical thinkers view this as a kind of fideist option which is unacceptable to them as indeed one cannot (on that narrow basis) easily create or construct the unified theory (or sometimes 'worldview') they would seek as a means of forging or binding a social order together. The salient question is – does the Bible demand this or even suggest it? The answer I would say is a resounding 'no' and as such I believe their concerns can be dismissed out of hand. The inductive methods of empiricist Thomism as well as the deductive Anselmian-Augustinian approach that often (in modern times) views faith as tantamount to 'right reason' are both flawed and ground theology in a philosophical foundation. The Biblicism I continue to argue for means the Scriptures are sufficient for the Church in a fallen world and for the individual Christian, but do not provide a starting point for the forging of a grand unified theory for the redemption or Christianisation of culture, nor the cultivation of some kind of coherentist theological grid.

This is the context for this debate and yet the real question for us is what does the Bible say about itself in terms of theology, the nature of revelation, epistemology, and so forth. Can we differentiate between revealed doctrines and the quest for a comprehensive systematic theology? Dare we ask (as I and others have) if the latter is even a valid endeavour? If it is, the utilisation of philosophy is inevitable and thus the old Athens-Jerusalem debate rages on and yet ironically for the progeny of the Magisterial Reformation, there's a problem in that the origins of their movement are rooted in not just confusion but contradiction on these points as men like Luther seemingly changed over time. An aficionado of Ockham and one who denounced 'reason' as a whore would not be accepted in the later environment of Protestant Scholasticism and the age of Confessions. The movement changed over time, which opens the door to another rather impassioned historical debate – that of Luther vs. the Lutherans, and Calvin vs. the Calvinists. The advocates of Confessionalism necessarily must embrace the scholastic orthodoxy that arose in the seventeenth century and this explains why this (for them) is a fight to the death. The acknowledgement that the Reformers operated on a humanistic basis which stands opposed (at least to some degree) to scholasticism would engender an existential crisis for their movements and their narratives.

But even the arguments of Dolezal fail the historical-theological test. As he and others have effectively argued for a Thomistic view, the reality is that Thomism was viewed (in the thirteenth century) as novel and of dubious orthodoxy. It took some time for it to and its categories and methodology to be accepted. In other words, things changed and it was viewed as something of a break from the previous orthodoxy and methodology. Dolezal's assumptions (at least in terms of historical theology and orthodoxy) are a house built on sand.

And the fact that the Scholasticism which emerged from the universities of the High Middle Ages was a revival of Aristotelianism – that in itself was a break with the theology and methodology of previous centuries, one that many term (loosely) as Platonic or Platonically influenced. Indeed in the minds of many historians, the Renaissance was (in part) a Platonic reaction or pendulum swing to the Aristotelianism of the late Middle Ages – just as the Enlightenment (particularly the Empiricist branches of it) represented a shift once more to the Aristotelian side of things – at least in the broad strokes. Then with the Counter-Enlightenment and the rise of Idealism the pendulum swings once more. Obviously Raphael's School of Athens comes to mind as does Alfred North Whitehead's quote about the history of Western Philosophy being little more than a series of footnotes to Plato. No matter how you view it or arrange it, the monolithic view of Dolezal is resting on arguments no more valid than Rome's contrived consensus patrum.

But there's another angle or problem for the Thomistic argument regarding Divine Simplicity and it is this – the creeds and terms of the ecumenical councils were not formulated in the context of Aristotelian-influenced Scholasticism but in a period that antedated it. To insist on a Thomistic framework is to be guilty of historical-theological anachronism at the very least, and in fact is guilty of a lot more.

Usually Iron Sharpens Iron tends to drag on and is often quite tedious. A lot of this is due to Arnzen. This programme was a rare instance of the opposite. It was too short and barely scratched the surface of these issues and the multi-faceted debates which surround them. I enjoyed it and benefitted from the reflection it generated. I cannot endorse Arnzen, his views, and certainly not his sponsors and favourite guests – men like James White and Joe Morecraft. But this particular episode represented a rare breath of fresh air and has generated a great deal of productive reflection.