The Reformed Doctrine of Scripture Part I
Selection From “The Protestant Doctrine Of Scripture” by Cornelius Van Til 1967
Recently, a large number of “statements” and discussions on the doctrine of Scripture written both from the “conservative” and from the “liberal” view have appeared. It is not the purpose of this pamphlet to deal with these. Its purpose is rather to deal with some quite striking differences between representative “evangelical” and Reformed Christians on their view of the necessity, the authority, the clarity, and the sufficiency of God’s revelation in Scripture as they, from the Scriptures, seek to present the message of saving grace to men.
It is the Christ who speaks to us in Scripture. In it he tells us who he is and what we are. He tells us that he has come to save us from our sins. For that purpose the Father sent him into the world. In order to bring that work to completion in individual men the Holy Spirit takes the things of Christ and gives them unto us (Cf. Jn 16:14–15).
In saving us from sin, Christ saves us unto his service. Through the salvation that is ours in Christ by the Spirit, we take up anew the cultural mandate that was given man at the outset of history. Whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, we want now to do all to the glory of God. Moreover, we want our fellow men with us to do all things to the glory of God. We are bound, as we are eager, to inform them of that which we have been told, namely, that we shall continue to abide under the wrath of God and eventually be cast out into utter darkness unless, by God’s grace, we seek to do all things to the glory of God. Calling upon all men everywhere to join with us in fulfilling the original cultural mandate given to mankind—which we may now undertake because of the redeeming work of Christ—is our joy each day.
The cultural mandate is to be fulfilled in our handling of the facts or events of our environment. Men must subdue, to the service of Christ, the earth and all that is therein. As the Christian constantly does so, he is constantly conscious of the fact that he is working on God’s estate. He is not himself the owner of anything, least of all of himself. He is the bondservant of God through Christ. Therein lies his freedom. Those who still think of themselves as owners of themselves and think of the world as a grab-bag cannot properly evaluate the situation as it really is. Unbeknown to them, they too are working on God’s estate. As they construct their temples to themselves God looks down from heaven and watches them; he yet cares for them. He has infinite patience with them. Will they not finally understand that neither they nor the world belongs to them? Will they not repent? Can they not observe the fact that the wisdom of this world is but foolishness in the sight of God? Has not the whole of the history of human philosophy shown that if the “facts” of the world were not created and controlled by the redemptive providence of God, they would be utterly discrete and therefore undiscoverable? Has not the whole history of philosophy also shown that when man regards his logical powers as positively legislative for Reality, he winds himself into a knot of contradiction? Has not the history of thought displayed the fact that if man takes the laws of logic as negatively legislative with respect to the facts with which they deal, then his logic and his reality stand over against one another in an absolute contrast, or else, when they do come into contact, they immediately destroy one another?
In other words, it is the Christian’s task to point out to the scientist that science needs to stand on Christ and his redeeming work if it is not to fall to pieces. Without Christ he has no foundation on which to stand while he makes his contradictions. A scientific method not based on the presupposition of the truth of the Christian story is like an effort to string an infinite number of beads, no two of which have holes in them, by means of a string of infinite length, neither end of which can be found.
How awesome then the responsibility of the Christian. He must proclaim the Christ as the only name given under heaven by which man, the whole man, by which mankind, with its cultural task, must be saved from sin unto God. What a joy to tell the scientist and the philosopher that they may labor for eternity if only they will labor for the Christ. But when the Christian does thus witness to the promise of great joy that is in the Christ who saves the whole man with the whole of his culture, then inevitably what is a “promise” to some becomes a “curse” to others. Paul says:
“Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place. For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish: to the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life” (2 Cor 2:14–16).
Even as some accept, so also others reject the word of God’s grace. To them the Word becomes a savour of death. Then they, with their culture, are lost. The work of their hands, their science, their art, their philosophy, their theology, in short their culture, will ultimately profit, not themselves, but those who have obeyed the word of grace in Christ. To be sure none of the cultural efforts of any man will be lost, for all things are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. But there are men who will lose their cultural efforts. They will lose the fruit of their labors because they have refused to labor unto Christ. They will reap the reward of Baal who sought to curse Israel and, most of all, Israel’s God. They will seek in vain, to die the death of the righteous.
It is therefore the same God who reveals himself both in nature and in Scripture. It is this God and only he who is “infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection, all-sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, every where present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” It is, to be sure, from Scripture rather than from nature that this description of God is drawn. Yet it is this same God, to the extent that he is revealed at all, that is revealed in nature.
Contemplation of this fact seems at once to plunge us into great difficulty. Are we not told that nature reveals nothing of the grace of God? Does not the Westminster Confession insist that men cannot be saved except through the knowledge of God, “be they ever so diligent to frame their lives according to the light of nature; and the law of that religion they do profess”? Saving grace is not manifest in nature; yet it is the God of saving grace who manifests himself by means of nature. How can these two be harmonized?
The answer to this problem must be found in the fact that God is “eternal, incomprehensible, most free, most absolute.” Any revelation that God gives of himself is therefore absolutely voluntary. Precisely here lies the union of the various forms of God’s revelation with one another. God’s revelation in nature, together with God’s revelation in Scripture, form God’s one grand scheme of covenant-revelation of himself to man.
1. The Necessity Of Natural Revelation
To bring out the interrelatedness of God’s revelation in Scripture with his revelation in nature, we speak first of the necessity of natural revelation. It is customary to speak of the necessity of supernatural revelation because of the fact that there is no revelation of grace in nature. However, it is equally true that the revelation of grace would operate in a vacuum if it did not operate in nature as revealing God. The supernatural can never be recognized for what it is unless the natural is recognized for what it is: both must be recognized in the light of God’s supernatural revelation. Everything that man does with respect to nature, he does either as keeping or as breaking the covenant of grace that God has made with man. Thus the scientist in the laboratory and the philosopher in his study are both dealing with their materials either as a covenant-keeper or as a covenant-breaker. All of man’s acts, all of man’s questionings, all of man’s affirmations, indeed all of his denials in any dimension of his interests, are covenantally conditioned.
2. The Authority Of Natural Revelation
Naturally, if all of man’s acts with respect to nature, as well as with respect to Scripture, are covenantally conditioned, this is because everywhere Christ speaks to him, and speaks always with absolute authority. The scientist, may or may not recognize this fact. If he is not a Christian, he will argue that any such thing as Christ having authority an absolute authority—with respect to his scientific procedure, is utterly destructive of the very idea of science. The idea of science, he will argue, presupposes freedom on the part of the scientist to make any hypothesis that he thinks may fit the facts. Any such absolute authority also excludes, he will continue, the idea that the words of Christ may and must be tested by facts and the order of facts, i.e., by natural laws already known to man from his earlier experience and experimentation. Suppose, he may say, that I had to work under the absolute restriction of the idea of an all-controlling redemptive providence of God such as the Bible teaches. That would be against the idea of an absolutely open universe. My hypothesis would then have to be of such a nature as to be in accordance with, and even subordinate to, the idea of this all-controlling Providence. This would exclude all newness in science. All would be already fixed. On the other hand, the idea of an all over-arching and redemptive providence would require me to allow that God could arbitrarily come into the “unity” of nature which science has discovered through many toiling efforts, and destroy this “unity” with miraculous insertions. We would then have to allow for the arbitrary createdness of every fact with which we deal. We would have to interpret the idea of scientific “law” as being subservient to that of the biblical account of sin and of redemption controlled by the fiat of the sovereign God. This cannot be, and we will not have it!
Put in other words, the methodology of science which is not definitely based upon the redemptive story of the Bible is based upon the assumption that on the one hand the universe must be wholly open and on the other hand that it must be wholly closed. In expressing this idea, Morris Cohen says that science needs both the idea of the open and the idea of the closed universe, but it needs these not as constitutive but as limiting concepts of one another
If man does not own the authority of Christ in the field of science, he assumes his own ultimate authority as back of his effort. The argument between the covenant-keeper and the covenant-breaker is never exclusively about any particular fact or about any number of facts. It is always, at the same time, about the nature of facts. And back of the argument about the nature of facts, there is the argument about the nature of man. However restricted the debate between the believer and the non-believer may be at any one time, there are always two world views ultimately at odds with one another. On the one side is a man who regards himself as being unable to find an intelligible interpretation of experience without reference to God as his Creator and to Christ as his Redeemer. On the other side is the man who is certain that he cannot find any such an interpretation. He assumes that there resides with him the power to make a universal negative statement about the nature of all reality.
The scientist who is a Christian therefore has the task of pointing out to his friend and colleague, who is not a Christian, that unless he is willing to stand upon the Christian story with respect to the world which has been redeemed through Christ, there is nothing but failure for him. Scientific effort is utterly unintelligible unless it is frankly based upon the order placed in the universe of created facts by Christ the Redeemer.