The most recent episode of Christ the Center has been published over at Castle Church. The episode is a brief introduction to the theology of Karl Barth. Previous episodes have covered several interesting topics.
As presuppositionalists, we should constantly seek to expose autonomous reasoning and argumentation. I recently listened to an interesting unveiling of autonomous thought on a Mars Hill audio journal. The speaker was talking about the various pro-life arguments and demonstrated how pro-life apologists typically appeal to autonomy. Often, the pro-life argument is presented as such:
We need to stand up for the unborn child because they don’t have a voice of their own. We must protect them because no one asked them about taking their life.
This reasoning fails within a proper Christian epistemology. Consider the context of euthanasia, in which the “patient” desires to be killed (assisted suicide). The patient has a voice and is saying they want to die. The common pro-life apologetic must permit it. The sanctity of life has therefore not been maintained.
As Christians, we must always seek to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. This includes not only what we think, but how we think. If we employ autonomous reasoning as opposed to a proper analogical epistemology founded on the knowledge of God that has been revealed to us, we have already failed. It behooves us to seek to sanctify our reasoning in order to provide a God-honoring apologetic.
The latest episode of Christ the Center is available. The panel members give a brief introduction to the major issues and point listeners to a number of helpful publications on the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament.
The precise meaning of words is and has been extremely important in the life of the church. Throughout church history, orthodoxy has hinged on small changes in meaning from one term to the next. Perhaps one of the most significant examples of this phenomena was the development and usage of the terms used of the Trinity in the 4th century.
The immediate context for the development of Trinitarian language began with Arius. Arius was a priest in Alexandria who taught that Jesus was not eternal and that there was a time in which he did not exist. According to Arius, Jesus created all things and is preeminent, but is not eternal, and therefore, not God. The Council of Nicaea met in 325 and condemned and exiled Arius. It also produced an extremely important creed. This is not the Nicene Creed we know today. That creed was a product of the Council of Constantinople in 381 and is perhaps more accurately titled the “Niceno-Constantinopalitan” creed. The creed of Nicaea reads:
We believe in one God Father Almighty maker of all things, seen and unseen:
And in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten as only-begotten of the Father, that is of the substance (ousia) of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, consubstantial (homoousias) with the Father, through whom all things came into existence, both things in heaven and things on earth; who for us men and for our salvation came down and was incarnate and became man, suffered and rose again the third day, ascended into the heavens, is coming to judge the living and the dead:
And in the Holy Spirit.
But those who say, “There was a time when he did not exist,” and “Before being begotten he did not exist,” and that he came into being from non-existence, or who allege that the Son of God is of another hypostasis or ousia, or who is alterable or changeable, these the Catholic and Apostolic Church condemns.
The church had definitively dealt with the threat of Arianism, but the resolution was one that did not exclude Monarchianism. Nearly sixty years later, the church was faced with condemning the Monarchian teaching that emphasized God’s oneness at the expense of his threeness. This includes various forms of modalism (Sabellianism being the most notable) that fall under Monarchianism’s larger heading. The Nicaean Creed of 325 stated that the Father and the Son were of one substance (homoousias) and that anyone who alleged different hypostases or ousiai stood condemned.
Many in the East (led by Basil of Ancyra) rejected the identification of the Father and the Son’s ousiai because it sounded too much like the Sabellian teaching. As a result, they began using the term homoiousias as a substitute. The addition of the iota in Greek changed the meaning of “one substance” (homoousias) to “like substance” (homoiousias).
The church lacked the language needed to express the distinctions within the Trinity while maintaining the one essence (homoousias) of God understood in a non-Sabellian fashion. At Nicaea (325), hypostasis and ousia were synonyms. Holding to a distinction of either within the Godhead was heresy. Between Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), however, the church, through the efforts of Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil, and Gregory of Nazianzus (the latter three are collectively known as the Cappadocian fathers) settled on a new meaning for the term hypostasis. Hypostasis came to be used for “persons” whereas ousia remained in use as “essence.” The church now recognized the Father and Son as distinct hypostases (persons) in one ousia (essence) related by perichoresis, or “full mutual indwelling of the three persons in the one being of God.”1
Men were condemned at Nicaea (325) for proclaiming a distinction of hypostases in relation to the Godhead, but a distinction using the same word, albeit a completely different meaning, was solidified as orthodox in 381 at Constantinople.
In his unpublished Reformed Textual Criticism,1 Moises Silva brings up an interesting point regarding the Van Tilian aversion to probabilistic methods and the discipline of textual criticism. One need not spend much time in order to uncover Van Til’s negativity toward probabilistic methods. He found no room for probability within the Christian epistemology. This leads the textual critic who has Van Tilian sympathies to question whether he needs to jettison one of his interests. The whole enterprise of textual criticism is based on mechanical methods designed to point out which textual variant is most likely original.
Silva assuages the apparent clash:
It would be misleading, I think, to suggest that Van Til disapproved of using the methods of probability in every respect. We may be quite sure that even he, upon hearing a weather forecast predicting a 90% probability of showers, would have canceled a Saturday picnic. […] What provoked Van Til, of course, was Bishop Butler’s transference of such day-by-day decisions to matters about which the Bible speaks unequivocally, including especially the existence of God (also such affirmations as the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the divine authority of the Scriptures). Many other things, however, do no belong in the same category. Even some matters having to do with our Christian life lack firm certainty.2
He then adds in a footnote:
Even more fundamentally, Van Til objected to the use of possibility and probability arguments when presenting the gospel to unbelievers, on account of conflicting epistemologies: “For the natural man the idea of possibility is on the one hand identical with chance and on the other hand with that which the natural man himself can rationalize. For him only that is practically possible which man can himself order by his logical faculties. But the word possibility means for the Christan that which may happen in accord with the plan of God” (The Defense of the Faith [3d ed.; Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1967] 144).3
Silva studied under Van Til in the late 1960s and to his knowledge, Van Til never brought up textual criticism “even during his most vigorous denunciations of ‘probabilistic apologetics.’”4
Boethius was an interesting and important character of the ancient church, but surprisingly does not receive as much attention as other figures. Boethius, a Roman noble in the 6th century, wrote an extremely influential treatise on an Augustinian formulation1 of the Trinity which became the academic standard for the church of his day. Apparently, for anyone to be approved to a teaching post, they had to submit a commentary on Boethius’ treatise. Carl Trueman suggests2 Boethius “falls between two stools” since he lived between the traditional division of the ancient and medieval churches. If he had been active earlier or later, perhaps he would receive more attention from scholars.
Boethius’ life-long work was the preservation of ancient classical knowledge. His goal was to translate the works of Aristotle and Plato into Latin. If he were successful, the achievement could have significantly altered the course of history. Arabic-speaking cultures received the works of Aristotle and Plato in their native tongue which catapulted them ahead of the West. If Boethius had accomplished his goal, Europe may have had a similar advancement earlier in their history.
Boethius however, was not able to give them Aristotle and Plato in Latin. Theodoric the Great suspected Boethius of conspiring with the Byzantine emperor Justin I and had him imprisoned. While awaiting his eventual execution, Boethius wrote his most well-known work, the Consolation of Philosophy, a dialogue between Boethius himself and the Lady Philosophy. The work is understandably centered around the perennial question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” In the work are several interesting philosophical contributions including linguistics and God’s relation to time.
Boethius’ contributions are many. Those interested in the ancient church and the development of Christian theology should study him. Perhaps in the future he will receive more attention.
The audio for the 2007 Westminster Theological Seminary Preaching Conference has just been posted.
Further, the notion of the law as specially imposed by God with a view to reward also points to the absurdity of seeing Christ as under law for his own sake: again, the hypostatic union itself was quite sufficient to make Christ’s human nature worthy of eternal life for itself. Here we see the obvious doctrinal intersection of the covenant of works and that of redemption in the context of Christology and mediation […] [A]s a representative human being, Christ must both fulfill the law positively on behalf of humanity because of Adam’s abject failure so to do, and he must undergo punishment of death because of Adam’s breaking of the original covenant. It is not Christ’s ontology as the Divine-human person which requires this, but his covenantal status as representative which demands it.
Carl Trueman, “John Owen on Justification”. Justified in Christ (New York: Mentor, 2007), 89.
From Goodbye Blog by Alan Jacobs:
[T]he blogosphere inevitably accelerates the pace of debate to the timetable of daily journalism. In terms of how they treat substantive ideas, blogs are not very different from newspapers: they present an idea and then move on, as quickly as possible, to the next idea. Perhaps there can be, later on, some brief acknowledgment that that idea wasn’t treated fully and adequately—but, as the newsreel in Citizen Kane reminds us, Time is On The March, and bloggers are under enormous pressure to march along with it. […] Blogs remain great for news: political, technological, artistic, whatever. And they provide a very rich environment in which news (or rather “news”) can be tested and evaluated and revised, as we have seen repeatedly, from cnn’s firing of Eason Jordan to the discrediting of Dan Rather’s story on President Bush’s National Guard service. But as vehicles for the development of ideas they are woefully deficient and will necessarily remain so unless they develop an architecture that is less bound by the demands of urgency—or unless more smart people refuse the dominant architecture. […] On a smaller scale, the same problems afflict the intellectual and moral environments of the blogs. There is no privacy: all conversations are utterly public. The arrogant, the ignorant, and the bullheaded constantly threaten to drown out the saintly, and for that matter the merely knowledgeable, or at least overwhelm them with sheer numbers. And the architecture of the blog (and its associated technologies like rss), with its constant emphasis on novelty, militates against leisurely conversations. It is no insult to the recent, but already cherished, institution of the blogosphere to say that blogs cannot do everything well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.
Charles Bridges in The Christian Ministry writes:
Nor let it be thought, that studious habits must necessarily infringe upon our more active employments. What shall we say to the nine pondrous folios of Augustine, and the thirteen of Chrysostom - volumes not written, like Jerome’s, in monastic retirement, but in the midst of almost daily preaching engagements, and conflicting, anxious, and most responsible duties - volumes - not of light reading, the rapid flow of shallow declamation - but the results of deep and well-digested thinking? The folios also of Calvin - the most diligent preacher, and of Baxter, the most laborious pastor of his day - full of though and matter, bear the same testimony to the entire consistency of industrious study with devoted Ministerial diligence. The secret of this efficiency seem to have much consisted in a deep sense of the value of that most precious of all talents - time; and of an economical distribution of its minutest particles for specific purposes. Mr. Alleine would often say, “Give me a Christian, that counts his time more precious than gold.” […] But here we should be, like the miser with his money - saving it with care, and spending it with caution. […] And since goldsmiths and refiners’ [Boyle] remarks - “are wont all the year long to save the very sweepings of their shops, because they may contain in them some filings or dust of those richer metals, gold and silver; I see not, why a Christian may not be as careful, not to lose the fragments and lesser intervals of a thing incomparably more precious than any metal - time; especially when the improvement of them by our meletetics may not only redeem so many portions of our life, but turn them to pious uses, and particularly to the great advantage of devotion.”
