Attack On Human Autonomy
A Christian Theory of Knowledge, by Cornelius Van Til (Presbyterian and Reformed, 1969, 390 pp., $6.50), is reviewed by Ronald H. Nash, director of the Graduate Program in Humanities, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green.
No student of Christian theology and philosophy should regard his education as complete until he has carefully worked his way through at least one of Professor Van Til’s books. In this extension of his earlier Defense of the Faith, Van Til continues his attack on all systems of thought that exalt the automony of man at the expense of the sovereign God of the Scriptures. If God is sovereign, nothing can be above him (such as the laws of logic) or can exist independently of him (such as “facts”). Human knowledge is impossible unless man’s knowledge is analogical of the divine knowledge, that is, unless man thinks God’s thoughts after him. Van Til’s purpose in this book is to show modern man the relevance of Christianity by demonstrating that only Christianity has the answers to the questions that modern thought seeks in vain.
The thesis of modern theology, philosophy, and science is that “nothing can be said conceptually about a God who is above what Kant calls the world of phenomena, the world of experience.” But, Van Til counters, if the God of Christian theism does not exist (or cannot be known), then Chance is ultimate. And if Chance is ultimate, then nothing (neither words, nor thoughts, nor events) can have any meaning. But if nothing has meaning, it is impossible to deny (or affirm) the existence of God or anything else. The effort to eliminate God turns out to be self-defeating. “If Christian theism is not true, then nothing is true.… So far as modern thought is not based upon the presupposition of the truth of Christianity it is lost in utter darkness. Christianity is the only alternative to chaos.” The “death of God” is simply the inevitable result of the elevation of autonomous man over God. It is what we should have expected all along.
The foundation of all non-Christian thought is the presupposition of human autonomy. Van Til is especially hard on non-Reformed Christians who try to support their faith by appeals to logic, to “facts,” or to probability. If God is sovereign, neither he nor his Word can be compromised by such appeals. Van Til also attacks (correctly, I think) the modern dialectical approach to the Scriptures, which prides itself on its “dialogue” with modern man. The dialogue is spurious, Van Til contends, because the Christ presented by dialectical theology is a Christ that no one can know.
While Van Til devotes space to several of his critics (Floyd Hamilton and J. Oliver Buswell, Jr.), his book does not contain one reference to the man who over the years has offered the most serious objections to his position. I am referring to Van Til’s “fellow Calvinist,” Gordon Clark of Butler University. Clark continues to be concerned over the qualitative difference that exists in Van Til’s system between the divine and human knowledge. According to Van Til, God’s knowledge and man’s do not (and cannot) coincide at a single point, from which it follows that no proposition can mean the same thing to God and man. Clark’s contention is then that Van Til’s view leads to skepticism, because if God knows all truth and man’s “knowledge” does not coincide with what God knows at a single point, then man does not possess knowledge. Until Van Til answers this objection, I must agree with Clark.
I have several objections of my own, also. All Van Til’s conclusions are supposed to follow from the principles set forth in his first three chapters, but it is exactly at this point that his argument is weakest. Take, for example, his defense of the Scriptures. Like Van Til, I believe in the authority and the inspiration of the Bible. But so far as the ultimate validity of his system is concerned, everything depends on Van Til’s ability to defend the authority of the Scriptures without making any appeal to logic or to “facts.” He argues then that the authority of the Scriptures is self-attesting.
As I see it, a self-attesting truth is one that cannot be questioned. A good example of a self-attesting truth would be an analytic statement like “All bachelors are unmarried men.” No evidence can be offered that could throw the truth of this statement into question; no evidence is even needed to support its truth. But in the case of the Scriptures, even Van Til admits that there are problems. He does not think the problems are sufficient to undermine the authority of the Bible, but the important thing here is his recognition that problems do exist. I fail to understand how a system of truth that faces problems which even Van Til admits may never be fully resolved (see page 35) can be self-attesting.
A second problem concerns Van Til’s peculiar understanding of the term fact. It is impossible, he argues, to separate a fact from its ultimate interpretation, which means God’s interpretation. I am willing to grant this, but how is a sincere disciple of Van Til supposed to know when his facts are God-interpreted? When they are consistent with the Scriptures? Hardly, for the Bible says nothing about most of the facts in question. When our interpretation coincides with God’s? Hardly, for we must never forget that there is no point of identity between the divine and human knowledge. I contend then that Van Til’s use of “fact” is vacuous, since there is no way for man to know when his facts are God-interpreted.
Finally, I am most uncomfortable in the presence of Van Til’s treatment of logic, which he derides as a test of truth. Yet at the same time, he warns that we must not take the biblical teaching about both divine sovereignty and human responsibility as a contradiction. In fact, he admits on the bottom of page 38 that the presence of a logical contradiction in the Bible would be evidence against the Bible’s claim to be the Word of God. For the life of me, I cannot understand this vacillating use of logic. It looks very much as if Van Til introduces logic when it is convenient and ushers it out the back door when it is no longer needed.
I believe these problems are serious. But I do not think they detract from the importance of this book or from Van Til’s stature as one of the most important and original Christian apologists of this century.
New Testament Potpourri
Neotestamentica et Semitica, edited by E. Earle Ellis and Max Wilcox (T. and T. Clark, 1969, 297 pp., 55s.) is reviewed by Robert H. Gundry, chairman of the division of biblical studies and philosophy, Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California.
Not expecting to agree with everything in a critical Festschrift, one nevertheless hopes for learning and stimulus. This book does not disappoint. Its twenty-two technical articles, all by well-known biblical scholars, cover Principal Black’s three areas of special interest: New Testament interpretation, textual criticism, and Semitic backgrounds. One article is in French, four in German, and the rest in English. Only a sampling is here possible.
N. A. Dahl finds Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac behind Romans 3:24, 25; 8:32; and Galatians 3:13, 14; he claims that Paul was drawing from prior Jewish-Christian theology of atonement, and interprets that theology in terms of the Jewish haggadic idea that God grants redemption as an adequate reward to Abraham for his sacrifice of Isaac.
W. D. Davies discusses the moral teaching of the early Church. But does he really answer his own question whether according to the New Testament the Church should try to transform the outside world? He excuses the early Church for not doing so by noting its lack of status and its expectation of a near Parousia, and he emphasizes its ethical example. But are we to go beyond that, or stick to the primitive paradigm?
In an impressive study of Matthew 18:3, J. Dupont rejects the alleged Semitism, “Unless you become little children again,” and treats the statement as a floating logion differently inserted by Matthew and Mark.
E. E. Ellis suggests that Christian midrash on Old Testament passages stands behind some New Testament quotations of the Old. Application of the term midrash is a gain, but the basic idea seems to echo what Dodd said about Christian use of Old Testament text-plots. Indeed, Dodd’s discovery of text-plots would have been the best substantiation for the suggestion of Ellis, had he but mentioned them.
C. F. D. Moule defends the unity and authenticity of Mark 4:1–20 (including the interpretation of the parable of the sower) and argues that parables were pedagogical challenges and thus only in a subdued sense damnatory to spiritual dullards.
E. Stauffer demonstrates that in some Christian literature the designation of Jesus as the son of Mary was recognized as a charge of illegitimacy and therefore suppressed (where not thus recognized, it was retained as indicative of miraculous birth). Stauffer then revives Zahn’s interpretation of Matthew’s nativity account as sober apologetic in the face of that charge—and thus not fanciful haggadah.
K. Aland dates the short ending of Mark in the second century before the long ending and as a counter to the statement that the women “spoke nothing to no one” (16:8).
F. F. Bruce discusses the use and interpretation of Daniel at Qumran. One misses an explanation how Daniel attained canonical status so quickly under a Maccabean date of writing.
And there is more—including useful indexes, a curriculum vitae of Principal Black, and a bibliography of his writings. Altogether a fitting tribute to a master among scholars.
Joins Scholarship And Reverence
The Old Testament of the Jerusalem Bible, edited by Alexander Jones (Doubleday, 1969, 1,587 pp., $11.95), is reviewed by Ludwig R. M. Dewitz, associate professor of Old Testament Language, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia.
While in some areas of current Christian debate the heritage of the Reformation seems to be forgotten, it is certainly very much brought to the fore by the continuing and wide interest in making the Bible to be heard again as God’s Word.
The Old Testament translation of the Jerusalem Bible is another attempt to render the Hebrew and Aramaic text in an English version that avoids archaic, fossilized phrasing and preserves the vivid directness of biblical narrative and prophetic oracle.
The “lo” and “behold” of the older versions is rendered as “see” (Gen. 1:29; 3:22) or very pointedly as “here” or “here it is” (Isa. 7:14; 42:1). Similarly, the use of the Hebrew word for “and,” which produces a certain monotone in older translations, is rendered in various ways (such as “when,” “now,” and “but,”) or is happily left out (Gen. 3:20; 12:1).
However, the great merit of the translation lies not so much in the rendering of particular words as in the general structure of phrases. Thus the repetitive phrase about the six days in Genesis one is well given as “evening came and morning came.” In Psalms 2:1–3, the staccato rhythm of the Hebrew seems to be reflected in the words: “Why this uproar among the nations? Why this impotent muttering of pagans—kings on earth rising in revolt, princes plotting against Yahweh and his Anointed, ‘Now let us break their fetters! Now let us throw off their yoke!’ ”
A special merit of the translation is the consistent rendering of the tetragrammaton YHWH as Yahweh. This eliminates the danger that the usual rendering—“Lord”—will become merely a synonym for “God,” or that attention will be drawn to his sovereign office as ruler, when in reality the use of YHWH conveys the special personal relationship of the Covenant God to his people and the world.
As in every translation, problems arise, especially where the original text is far from clear. It is difficult to understand why, for instance, Psalm 16:2, 3 is expressed in a way that certainly necessitates the explanatory footnote, when the possibility of the RSV rendering is much clearer. Where the given Hebrew text is corrected in translation, this is stated in the notes, and generally the versions or the Dead Sea Scrolls are cited, if they support the translation. This could also have been done in Isaiah 21:8, where the Isaiah Scroll supports the translation “the look-out” for the erroneous “a lion” in the Massoretic text.
This Old Testament translation offers far more than a translation. The notes throughout are given for clarification as well as for theological perspective. Although it is a Roman Catholic work, based on the 1956 French edition of La Sainte Bible produced by the Dominican Biblical School in Jerusalem under the leadership of Père de Vaux, the notes in general do not betray what Protestants may regard as a particular Roman Catholic bias.
In the English version, the notes are a translation from the French, while the text has been newly translated from the original languages. The short introductions to the various sections of the Old Testament are excellent. What is most refreshing is that the Old Testament is regarded as part of the Christian Bible; thus the notes draw attention to any messianic significance and do not fail to point out relevant passages in the New Testament. Verses like Genesis 3:15; Isaiah 7:14, and Psalms 110:1 arc a few of a host where the notes are very helpful.
Since this is a Roman Catholic version, the Apocrypha are distributed through the Old Testament, joined to the books and episodes where they belong.
All in all, we have here a felicitous product of the best of modern scholarship joined with a deep reverence and devotion for the Bible as the Word of God.
‘Don’T Think, But Look!’
New Essays on Religious Language, edited by Dallas M. High (Oxford, 1969, 235 pp., $5), is reviewed by Alvin Plantinga, professor of philosophy, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The essential feature of this collection of essays is, according to its editor, “that rather than prescribing limits for the meaning of religious language or arguing over preconceived categories for religious talk, something done a decade or so ago, the authors, without saying so, have taken seriously the later Wittgenstein’s lesson to ‘look and see’ or as he puts it in another way, ‘don’t think, but look!’ ” Perhaps the most interesting piece is Robert Coburn’s “A Neglected Use of Theological Language”—a carefully wrought explanation and defense of the idea that an essential feature of theological statements is to answer religious limiting questions (Why am I here? Why is life sometimes so cruel? Why should I keep my promises?) in such a way as to preclude further inquiry.
Another interesting piece is “The Justification of Religious Belief,” in which Basil Mitchell objects to the view that there are no ways of arguing for, or defending, or rationally choosing between, competing world views or total systems. Yet although he refutes Alastair McIntyre’s argument, Mitchell doesn’t really answer the question on the tip of our tongues: how does one go about making rational choices between such competing systems?
Three essays—William Poteat’s “God and the ‘Private I’ ” and “Birth, Suicide and the Doctrine of Creation: an Exploration of Analogies,” and I. T. Ramsey’s “Paradox in Religion”—unite in finding illuminating parallels between the “logics” of the words God and I. Thus, for example, Ramsey: “The logical behavior of ‘I’ then, being grounded in a disclosure and ultimately distinct from all descriptive language while nevertheless associated with it, is a good clue to that of ‘God,’ and we can expect the paradoxes of ‘I’ to help us somewhat in our logical exploration of unavoidable religious paradox, to help us distinguish the bogus from the defensible.”
Two other pieces compare religion and science: Ramsey’s “Religion and Science: A Philosopher’s Approach” and Frederick Ferré’s “Mapping the Logic of Modals in Science and Theology.” I thought these interesting, but in need of a much more searching and thorough inquiry into contemporary physics and its logic. In addition, there are Erich Heller’s “Ludwig Wittgenstein: Unphilosophical Notes,” Paul Holmer’s “Wittgenstein and Theology,” and C. B. Daly’s “Metaphysics and the Limits of Language.”
Book Briefs
Captives of the Word, by Louis and Bess Cochran (Doubleday, 1969, 274 pp., $5.95). A narrative history of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Christian Churches (independent), and the Churches of Christ.
Speaking from the Pulpit, by Wayne Mannebach and Joseph Mazza (Judson, 1969, 128 pp., $4.95). Relates techniques of effective public speaking to the preparation and delivery of sermons.
The Christian Way, by John W. Miller (Herald, 1969, 136 pp., paperback, $1.50). A study manual based on the Sermon on the Mount.
Pastoral Care in Crucial Human Situations, by Wayne E. Oates and Andrew D. Lester (Judson, 1969, 206 pp., $6.50). Ministers with clinical experience share their insights about how the pastor can minister to people caught in certain difficult situations (e.g., parents of mentally retarded children, parents of children with cancer, emotionally disturbed adolescents, chronically ill persons).
Design for Evangelism, by Joe Hale (Tidings, 1969, 119 pp., paperback, $1.95). Relates the ministry of evangelism to both the deep conflicts within men and the great social issues of the contemporary scene.
Like Father Like Son Like Hell!, by Robert R. Hansel (Seabury, 1969, 126 pp., $3.95). Contends that the roots of adult-youth alienation are not in a chronological age gap but in an “assumption gap”—the new generation rejects the assumption that the young are nobodies waiting around to become somebodies.
Enjoy Your Bible, by Irving L. Jensen (Moody, 1969, 127 pp., paperback. S.50). Suggestions to make personal Bible study more stimulating.
Exploring Christianity, by David F. Siemens Jr. (Moody, 1969, 127 pp., paperback, $.50). This popular apologetic for Christianity surveys the evidence presented by miracles, prophecy, and the character and teachings of Christ.
Breakthrough: Rediscovery of the Holy Spirit, by Alan Walker (Abingdon, 1969, 92 pp., $2.75). Traces the weakness of mankind and impotence of the Church to the loss of the power of the Holy Spirit in our churches and personal lives.
Revolution Now!, by Bill Bright (Campus Crusade for Christ, 1969, 207 pp., paperback, $.60). The president of Campus Crusade for Christ believes that the Great Commission can be fulfilled in our generation; in this volume he tells how it can be done.
Last Things, compiled by H. Leo Eddleman (Zondervan, 1969, 160 pp., $3.95). A symposium of prophetic messages by evangelicals representing a broad spectrum of viewpoints.
Helping the Retarded to Know God, by Hans Hahn and Werner Raasch (Concordia, 1969, 112 pp., paperback, $1.95). A manual covering all phases of Christian education for the mentally retarded. A leaders’ guide for use in class study.
The Promise of Bonhoeffer, by Benjamin A. Reist (Lippincott, 1969, 128 pp., $3.50). Latest addition to the “Promise of Theology” series, which deals with the life and work of major figures in contemporary theology.
In Castro’s Clutches, by Clifton Edgar Fite (Moody, 1969, 158 pp., $3.95). The story of James David Fite, a missionary to Cuba who was imprisoned there by the Communists for over three years.
Fifty Key Words: The Church, by William Stewart (John Knox, 1969, 84 pp., paperback, $1.65). Brief explanation of the meaning and use of fifty bywords relating to the Church.
Mo Bradley and Thailand, by Donald C. Lord (Eerdmans, 1969, 227 pp., paperback, $3.95). Biographical study of a pioneer missionary’s ministry in Thailand from 1836 to 1873.
