B. B. Warfield and the “Common-Sense” Conception of Theology

Introduction

Non-biblical philosophies have a way of creeping into even the best Christian writing.  Given the reality of the Fall this is perhaps unavoidable.  Still, Christians should regard it as their duty to their Lord not to be reliant upon any unscriptural underpinnings in their theology.  The Apostle Paul, who knew the philosophers (Acts 17), sees it as one of his obligations to remind believers how they ought to think (e.g. Rom. 12:1-2; Col. 2:8).  Ones ultimate criterion of thought, the most basic appeals to facticity, affect the outworking of ones worldview.  This is to be seen more clearly in some scholars than in others.  Those I have in mind in this piece are men who take a view of the Bible which runs counter to what the Bible itself permits, and whose scriptural vision is duly impaired.

Scripture always and everywhere presents itself as the Word of God.  This is either assumed, as in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis, or it is stated explicitly (e.g. 2 Tim. 3:16).  The Lord Jesus Himself is quite matter-of-fact in the way He assumes the Holy Scriptures to require no other human response but that of belief (e.g. Jn. 5:39-47).  The Bible is self-attesting (Isa. 66:2b).

When once a person has become a Christian he has entered upon a true relationship with the Author of the Word which, by supernatural working, he has believed and by which he has been given light with which to search it and think about it.  He has not acquired saving knowledge by anything within himself.  He has not come to know the Author of life and the Creator of time and space unless he has come to know Him through His Word, and the true significance of the Word.  Saving knowledge opens our eyes to all other knowledge – or at least it should.  Thus, Scripture is seen as the touchstone of all veridical truth.  We begin our knowing anew in light of God’s Word (Psa. 36:9).

Of course, to operate this way one must be like Jesus and the Apostles and accept the outside-Word from God without placing it through the wringer of empiricism.  Faith, for sure, is what brings the testimony of the Spirit with it to give certainty.  But whether faith is present or not does not alter the provenance of the Bible, and thus its ultimate authority or its right to provide the first principles of knowledge.  If “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Psa. 24:1), then a biblical perspective, not just on sin and salvation, but on every other subject under the sun is demanded.  If this is not done the rights of theology will be circumscribed by the creature to the detriment of a proper Christian worldview.

The Bible as Revelation (1)

N.B. Some of this material has appeared in a previous post.

Introduction

Many moons ago evangelicals could be relied upon to hold a generally agreed-upon opinion on the revelatory character of Scripture. There were some who tried to formulate the “Scripture Principle” using evidentialist apologetics (Warfield, Sproul, Pinnock), and others who laid stress upon the Divine initiative in revelation by employing ‘presuppositionalist’ approaches (Turretin, Kuyper, Van Til), but, for all that, the Bible was thought to contain God’s verbal disclosure in propositional form.

Sadly, this is no longer true. Since Karl Barth there has been an incessant attempt to treat propositionalism as naïve and rationalistic. The alternatives put forth as replacements have all advertised themselves as more dynamic then the older view. And they have joined chorus in their efforts to disabuse the church of its “static” view of the Bible.

Certainly, it is true (as I have pointed out) that 19^th century theologians sometimes portrayed the Bible as a repository of retrievable proof-texts to fit any question. But even then it has been demonstrated that such men as Charles Hodge can be construed more charitably than has often been the case in the books and articles of their opponents. I believe the issue of whether the Bible comes to us as propositional revelation is crucial for Christians and ought to be settled in the affirmative. Here, then, are some of my thoughts on the matter:

Five Examples of Placing Man at the Center (3)

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Another thinker whose world and life view has influenced millions of people is Soren Kierkegaard, “the father of Existentialism.”

In contrast to Kant, whose life was marked by pedestrian regularities, Kierkegaard led a rather tortured existence.[1] He was greatly disturbed that the Enlightenment, instead of liberating man, ended up stealing his soul, and, as Kierkegaard thought, obliterating man’s individuality.[2]

His response to this was to teach the complete freedom of the individual’s will as it progresses through the stages of life to eventually realize its need of God.[3] But his God was really only a figment of his biblically informed imagination. For Kierkegaard, truth, like living, was more subjective than objective. He did not repudiate objectivity, but he inveighed against the sort of detached assent to reality which he saw in men like Hegel. This led him to assert that what one must do “is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.” This is no more than is repeated today by the majority of college students.

Five Examples of Placing Man at the Center (2)

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

A paradigm shift began with Immanuel Kant[1], who influenced most of the Western world to believe that our minds are the organizers and rationalizers of a reality which is unknowable “as it is.” The mind of man becomes the final adjudicator in the interpretation of the Universe. In Kant’s system, it cannot be any other way. Further, the empiricist in him put everything not open to the senses behind a cognitive wall in a realm he called the Noumenal. This noumenal realm is the place that “things as they are” (the external world) inhabit prior to being categorized and interpreted by our minds. And the only way our minds can obtain the data of the external world is through sense-experience. As Kant himself said, “All conceptions, therefore, and with them all principles, however high the degree of their a priori possibility, relate to empirical intuitions, that is, to data towards a possible experience.”[2] So sense-data are necessary for any “fact” to be presented to the mind, but once perceived that data is given form or structure by the mind.[3]

Five Examples of Placing Man at the Center (1)

The last post on “The Frame of Knowledge” asserted that the revelatory viewpoint of Christian-theism provides the only acceptable “frame” in which reason and experience can be understood for what they are – i.e. gifts of the true God. I further tried to show that Christians, therefore, ought to begin and end their thinking from within this frame. I closed out with the observation that unless Christians rethink their approach to epistemology in more biblical, which is to say revelatory terms, they will aid and abet the non-Christian world in their never-ending attempts to “shove God in to the margins” of life.

The only way to fight back against this is for the Church to once again let the voice of the LORD be heard as it should. Christians must begin all predication by sanctifying “the Lord God in [their] hearts” (2 Pet. 3:15), and they must further insist that nothing that can be called knowledge can really be known outside of the supernaturalistic “frame of knowledge” provided in the Bible. They must forever abandon the two-storey truth model and instead interpret every fact biblically and theologically. Their epistemological foundations must comport with their theological conclusions. This must be done while mounting a resolute and sustained offensive on all non-Christian alternatives. Theology should always be on the front foot![i]