Warfield and the Dutch

Abraham Kuyper

One of the matters stressed in the writings of Paul Helseth and David P. Smith on Princeton theology, and especially (in Smith’s case) on Warfield is the Princetonians conviction that sin affects not only the affections and the will, but the understanding as well. (Paul Kjoss Helseth, “Right Reason” and the Princeton Mind (P & R 2010); David P Smith, B.B. Warfield’s Scientifically Constructive Theological Scholarship, (Pickwick, 2011)) These days this is referred to as the noetic effects of sin, but used to be called total depravity, a deformation affecting all aspects of the mind. Appreciating this (in the case of Warfield) moves him decisively out of the world of rationalism, and closer to the outlook of the Dutch Calvinists who were his contemporaries, Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, with whom he had cordial relations and whom he highly regarded. He refers to Kuyper as a ‘thinker of quality’ who has exercised a ‘remarkable influence’ in Holland. And about Bavinck he says that he ‘brilliantly represents’ the neo-Calvinist outlook.

Yet despite their accord over the noetic effects of sin on the mind, (hereafter NS) Warfield and the Dutch were somewhat at odds in the area of apologetics, and perhaps our renewed appreciation of their agreement on NS makes this harder to understand than if Warfield had believed that reason was unaffected by sin, or less affected, as Van Til thought that he did, and how dozens of our contemporaries do, who believe that the entire tribe of the Princetonians were significantly influenced by what they call ‘Enlightenment rationalism’.

In this short piece I shall touch on factors that in Warfield’s case seem to account for the continued differences between them, but without referring to his encyclopaedia article on Apologetics. This is, perhaps, a mistake, but to be frank I find this production of Warfield’s nearly incomprehensible, and something of an opportunity missed, and I gladly leave to others the task of taking up Ariadne’s thread and telling us what the great man is saying there. So we shall look principally at Warfield’s Introduction to Francis Beattie’s book on apologetics, and his review of Bavinck’s book on certainty, conveniently reprinted next to each other in the second book of his shorter writings.

Warfield readily recognises the fundamental point that reasoning with an unbeliever about the existence of God, or the state of his soul, will not ensure success, but that this is not a very telling thing to say, as the same can be said of any mode of communication between the parties. Whether it’s sowing or watering, only the Lord can give the increase. Why then does he continue to advocate reasoning with the unconverted?

One factor is that in reasoning we (naturally enough) recognize the importance of reason. And in recognizing the reason we recognize the importance of truth. (ref.) But other factors than this may hold the key to the differences, which seem not to have been noticed, and so I shall dwell on these a little.

Imagine the Kuyperian and Warfieldian approaches to Apologetics (as widely understood) as two limits of a continuum. Then I suggest that renewed awareness of Warfield’s commitment to NS narrows the the continuum, but in a way that moves Kuyperianism in the Warfieldian direction. Both hold to the noetic effects of sin, but Warfield agrees that any argument or strategy of communicating the gospel to sinners depends for its effectiveness on God giving the increase, and God alone can give it, something that Kuyper must surely recognise.

More, each holds to the differential effect of sin on the mind. In some areas its impact is greater than in others. Its impact is less in the case of formal disciplines, logic and mathematics and greater in those disciplines which involve estimates of value, such as history and literature and most of all, religion and those disciplines adjunct to it, theology in its different departments. And each recognizes that those who enjoy the effects of the palingenesis nonetheless live with the effects of unregeneracy until their dying day. Though enjoying God’s special grace, indwelling sin continues to affect reason, emotions and will. The children of light are still, in that sense, totally depraved.

Warfield reckons that the root difference between himself and the Dutch lies in a different understanding of the intensity of NS, and particularly of the effects of regeneration upon the mind. Kuyper held that there are two kinds of people, those who enjoy the regenerating enlightenment of God the Holy Spirit, and those who do not. And correspondingly there are two kinds of science, that conducted by the regenerate, and that conducted by those whose minds remain darkened. Warfield comments

There certainly do exist these “two kinds of men” in the world, - men under the unbroken sway of sin, and men who have been brought under the power of the palingenesis. And the product of the intellection of these ‘two kinds of men’ will certainly give us “two kinds of science”. But the difference between the two is, after all, not accurately described as a difference in kind – gradus non mutant speciem. Sin has not destroyed or altered in its essential nature any one of man’s faculties, although – since it corrupts homo totus – it has affected the operation of them all. The depraved man neither thinks, nor feels, nor wills as he ought; and the products of his action as a scientific thinker cannot possibly escape the influence of this everywhere operative destructive power, although, as Dr Kuyper lucidly points out, they are affected in different degrees in the several “sciences”, in accordance with the nature of their objects and the rank of the human faculties engaged in their structure. Nevertheless, there is question here of perfection of performance, rather than of kind. It is “science” that is produced by the subject held under sin, even though imperfect science – falling away from the ideal here, there, and elsewhere, on account of all sorts of deflecting influences entering in at all points of the process. The science of sinful man is thus a substantive part of the abstract science produced by the ideal subject, the general human consciousness, though a less valuable part than it would be without sin. (SSW II 100-1)

There may be a different way of putting this. Two people may each admire a ring but one of them does not know that the peculiar shade of the gold is due to the fact that the gold is Welsh gold. Each recognizes the ring for what it is, and they are capable of distinguishing it from a brooch and a sovereign. Or two may recognize it for what it is but neither know that the peculiar glow of the gold is due to its Welshness, even though one of them knows that the gold is Welsh. The novice and the expert are nevertheless capable of referring to the same object. The point can be put philosophically. Some Reformed critics of Warfield espouse a strong version of the doctrine of internal relations, according to which no one can truly be said know that this is a ring unless they understand all else that it is related to, and especially that it is created by God. In which case an atheist does not, appearances to the contrary, recognize that this is a ring, except where God’s common grace intervenes. Common grace ensures referential success, but not fullness of understanding which (in any case) no one possesses.

But even if the effects of regeneration were complete, and the children of light had every taint of sin removed in this life, Warfield doubts whether ‘the science produced by the two classes of men could be treated as absolute. Sinful and sinless men are, after all, both men; and being both men, are fundamentally alike’. Warfield might say that the differences between the two is a matter of perfection of performance, and not of kind. And this outlook seems to entail a denial of the strong doctrine of internal relations. There are different degrees of understanding the ring. Warfield’s understanding of our knowledge of things is more granular than some of the his critics; we can know that this is a ring but be in ignorance of much about it. Not every fact is an interpreted fact, and those that are may have different layers of interpretation, some of which may be separable from the others and may convey to the intelligent enquirer truth but not the whole truth. So I suggest that the differences in outlook on these questions may boil down to a philosophical difference. (Whether or not he gained this outlook from Scottish Common Realism I leave others to try to answer.)

However, despite these differences, the outlook of Warfield may be closer to that of neo-Calvinism than we have seen so far. He writes appreciatively of Kuyper’s and Bavinck’s work on common grace, and of Kuyper’s writings on social and political questions. We shall try to estimate the significance of these similarities next time.

B.B.Warfield

B.B. Warfield's Scientifically Constructive Theological Scholarship

David Smith’s book is a sustained refutation of the widespread view that Old Princeton in general and such as Charles Hodge and (especially) B. B. Warfield in particular were Calvinists who were overly influenced by the rationalism of the Enlightenment, mediated to them by means of the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy of Thomas Reid and others. This view entered the scholarly community (or was invented there) by Sydney Ahlstrom, and taken up by others such as Mark Noll and George Marsden. So pervasive has this view become so widespread that just as ‘Bill Shankly’ immediately suggests ‘Liverpool’ and ‘Sir Alec Ferguson‘ suggests ‘Manchester United’, so ‘B.B.Warfield’ immediately suggests ‘Rationalist Calvinist’. But this close association is unwarranted, argues Dr Smith. His view nicely complements the work of Paul Helseth, who has plausibly argued that Princeton worked with an epistemology with a moral dimension to it, Augustinian ‘right reason’.(“Right Reason” and the Princeton Mind: An Unorthodox Proposal (P &R, 2010))

Smith pursues his project by developing several distinct strands of Warfield’s work as an author, strands which converge in the conclusion that there is at best (or at worst) only an incidental and partial reliance on Reidian realism, so that nothing that Warfield claims regarding Christian theology may be said to depend on it. The scene is set in the first instance, in a number of interesting chapters which appropriately set the scene, chapters on historiography and philosophical and theological changes in the nineteenth century, and a resume of the course of Warfield’s life. He rather takes for granted that the reader will know already what Scottish Common Sense Realism is.

He considers Warfield’s own response to these charges in Chapter Four ‘Princeton and Warfield: Responses to Contextual Issues’. Here he considers the early years of Princeton, and the fact its theological outlook predates the Scottish Enlightenment. There may be ‘correlation’ at places between Scottish Realism and the Princetonian theological outlook, there, is no dependence. (Smith is fond of ‘correlation’ as an expository term, by it I think he means ‘partial correspondence’. The railway may run alongside the canal for part of its length, but the canal does not depend on the railway, it ‘correlates’ with it. In fact it was there long before the railway.) Of course if Jonathan Edwards had not had fatal effects from his small pox vaccine things might have been different. He would certainly have brought original ideas to the seminary. Smith’s point is that common sense realism ‘simply has nothing to say about many of the doctrinal matters that are organically united to the Confession’. (95) Further, Warfield is alert to the fact that arguments have premises, and that these premises often have a philosophical character. They are ‘presuppositions’ in one sense of this polymorphic term.

The remaining four chapters all have a connection with apologetics. Apologetics provides the context for Warfield’s conception of systematic theology discussed in Chapter 5. Warfield thinks of the truths of systematic theology to be organically connected and connected to all other truths, for ‘truth is organic and unified’. (121, 123) But this makes Warfield sound rather like Leibniz, and Leibnizianism would certainly have been an original idea at Princeton. The truths of Christian systematic theology are no doubt consistent with ‘my lawnmower is broken’ but truths about my lawnmower are hardly organically connected with the truths of the creed, simply consistent with them. So I think there may be some exaggeration here, or perhaps a failure to see that Warfield was not committed to a doctrine of internal relations. I think this may be relevant to estimating Warfield’s relation to Van Til and ‘presuppositional’.

But it hard to exaggerate the importance of apologetics for Warfield or the exalted terms in which he writes of it. Apologetics is not subordinate to systematic theology, much less to practical theology. It is the ‘culminating department of systematic theology’. (195) That is, it establishes: the possibility of systematic theology by establishing the being of God as personal, the creator of all things, and their preserver and governor; the religious nature of man; of the supernatural factor in history; the divine origin of Christianity, and the trustworthiness of the Scriptures as God’s revelation of God for the redemption of sinners. (200-1) Of these five areas, as we know, Warfield himself devoted much of his time and talents to elaborating a defence of the authority and inspiration of Scripture. In his eyes such a defence involves the use of the reason, not as a mere mechanical fact-acquirer, but as right reason, involved in the proper weighing of all the relevant data according to their true measure and worth. So apologetes cannot reason a person into right views of Scripture, or into the kingdom. The regenerating and illuminating work of the Spirit are necessary for a proper appreciation of the evidence. Nevertheless there are views of Scripture which are according to reason. So there is an important interplay between the subjective, the state of the enquirer, his stock of beliefs, his values etc., and the objective, the knowledge that there is to be had of the world of time and space, of nature and grace.

Both Ahlstrom from one point of view and Cornelius Van Til (205) from another are mistaken in characterizing Warfield’s procedure here as ‘rationalistic’ in the senses that he is operating with a purely person-neutral view of reason. We shall return to this theme. At this point Smith introduces the difference of view of apologetics between Warfield and the Dutch Calvinists, Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck, with whom he had cordial relations. Warfield thinks that they held that because ‘the evidences’ are not sufficient to bring a person to faith in Christ, then deployment of them – Apologetics – is unnecessary, and even perhaps harmful. But Warfield held that the objective argument is required while recognizing that saving understanding and saving faith are the work of the Holy Spirit who opens the eyes of the blind to some at least of the relevant data. Warfield puts the point like this:

But this faith that the prepared heart yields – is it yielded blindly and without reason, or is it yielded rationally, and on the ground of sufficient reason? Does God the Holy Spirit work a blind and ungrounded faith in the heart? What is supplied by the Holy Spirit in working faith in the heart surely is not ready-made faith, rooted in nothing and clinging without reason to its object; nor yet new grounds of belief in the object presented; but just a new power to the heart to respond to the grounds of faith, sufficient in themselves, already present to the mind.

Behind these differences with the Dutch is an intricate network of issues to do with the nature of faith and assurance, to which we might turn on a later occasion.

The last chapter concerns the application of Apologetics. The chief development of the critique of the Ahlstrom (and Van Til) argument is to reassert Warfield’s emphasis on the noetic effects of sin. Dr Smith does not go into what this means, but I take it that it includes chiefly the willful distortion or neglect of data and their grounds (unconscious or otherwise). (250) What Warfield refers to as the subjective side of believing and knowing distorts the apprehension of data (the objective side) on account of the working of what the Apostle Paul refers to as ‘the lusts of the mind’. There is a great deal of evidence produced that this is Warfield’s view. In addition he gives recognition to what the author calls ‘the historical character of truth’. (242) What one misses in Warfield is at length discussion of how the noetic effects of sin variously affect the study of science and other intellectual disciplines.

The account presented in these overlapping chapters, is engaging and in general persuasive. It seems to me that Dr Smith establishes the distinctively Christian character of Warfield’s thought in apologetics, especially the noetic effects of sin. This fact alone is enough to refute Ahlstrom’s and Van Til’s outlooks. Smith shows that this note sounds throughout Warfield’s writings, not only in his elaborate articles, and more popular journalism, but also his addresses to students and faculty of Princeton Seminary reprinted in Faith and Life. One question that this raises is how this fact should affect our estimate of the differences and similarities of Warfield to Kuyper and Bavinck. It may be that the Dutch also miss Warfield’s emphasis on the effects of sin on the mind, as Van Til evidently did. All being well, we shall reflect on Warfield and Dutch Calvinism in a later post.

In this post I have tried to identify the main claims of Dr Smith regarding Warfield. For what it is worth I think that the material establishing the noetic effects of sin is stronger than his argument that the influence of Scottish Common Sense philosophy is only partly correlated with Warfield’s theological views. Such a partial correlation is what is to be expected. After all such philosophy offers a general account of concept and belief formation and the ‘basicness’ of certain beliefs. Besides his establishing his important thesis, in doing so Dr Smith has incidentally drawn attention to other features of Warfield’s outlook which I hope in time to take a look at.

Asking Jesus into my heart

Derek Thomas

So I began to read Stott's book over the Christmas break. And a few days later, I found myself on my knees late in the evening in prayer. In the terminology I might have used then, "I asked Jesus into my heart." And he came.

These words of Derek Thomas’s, recently posted on the e-magazine Reformation 21, pinpoint an interesting and important question about the language we use in describing our faith, and its relation to our understanding of that faith. The language that we use in turn affects our formation as Christians and churches. For it is not just that (as Jesus explicitly teaches) as a man thinks in his heart so is he, but how a man thinks in his heart so is he. But the general question of the relation between spoken language and doctrinal understanding is scarcely ever discussed.

Given the importance of spoken language in the life of the church it is surprising that little seems to have been thought of its connection with or disconnection from sound doctrine. So I thought we might give it an airing. But because of the closeness of language to thought, and of thought to a person’s self, this can be a delicate matter. Pontificating is certainly to be avoided. So I am going to try to bear in mind another teaching of Jesus to help me. When he warned against causing the little ones who believe in him to stumble, I am assuming that he had in mind what these little ones say, as well as what they do in other ways. In what I say, I shall then try to avid causing users of such language to stumble.

An Assumption

I assume that when someone makes the bona fide request such as Derek Thomas did to ask Jesus into their heart they are not making a category mistake. They are using words and phrases that bear a positive relation to the language in which the faith has been officially as preached and confessed by the church through the centuries, but a rather loose relation, though perhaps such speakers do not realise that. The language is not reductionistic, intended to bear no direct relationship to the meaning, say, of the creeds.

To illustrate

Materialists typically think that the language of consciousness and especially of intentionality that we use everyday is eliminable, that it’s going nowhere, that we could adopt the language of brain states, neural firings and the like and lose nothing of cognitive importance thereby. T.H. Huxley referred to consciousness as an epiphenomenon, a bye-product of neural activity, like froth on the surface of beer, an effect without being itself a cause of further effects. It is not the froth on the beer that has cheering effects, but the beer itself. In the aftermath of Logical Positivism in the 1950’s and 1960’s there were attempts by R. B. Braithwaite and others, to translate/reduce the language of Christian theology into emotive language.

No one thinks that the language of asking Jesus into one’s heart, or of giving one’s heart to Jesus, is reductionist language, because without question people who talk like this are saying something of theological and spiritual importance about themselves. Nevertheless there is also something odd about it, as Derek also seems to think when he refers to ‘terminology that I might have used then’ implying (I think) that he would not speak that way now.

I don’t suppose for a moment that this is Calvinistic snobbishness in Derek’s case any more than (I hope) it is in mine. It’s not a case of someone demanding that if we are to talk seriously about theological and spiritual matters we must speak the language of the Westminster Standards, and only that language, to do so.

Of course we may understand the language as figurative, and then it could literally mean any of a number of things. But what if we take it more literally than that? Even so, there’s something odd about the language, just as (I would say) there’s something attractive about it. Not just that it’s terse and compressed (nothing wrong with that), or deficient in theological gravitas. Rather, it’s OK but it is going down the wrong track, a track that could lead off the track altogether, into the wilderness. I seem to remember that somewhere C.S. Lewis writes that to think of God as an old man with a long grey beard is a mistake, but that it’s not a very serious mistake. I’m inclined to think that a person who talks of conversion as asking Jesus into his life is making a more serious mistake. So let’s try to see why this might be.

What’s going wrong?

What is someone who asks Jesus to come into her heart saying? Here are things we need to bear in mind. The expression at least has this in its favour, that it is centred on Jesus. But according to the New Testament and the church’s confession of her faith, Jesus is not now in a position to come into anyone’s heart. Having suffered crucifixion, and enjoyed resurrection – how exhilarating that must have been! – he is now ascended to the Father, and though physically located at a place, the New Testament shows little or no interest in this bare fact, nor in the problems that it raises, but it stresses that he is now at his Father’s right hand, a place of exaltation and authority. So the language of taking Jesus into one’s heart invites Jesus to have a role which he is (literally) in no position to fulfil.

It is true that there is some language about Jesus in the New Testament that is related to talk of taking Jesus into one’s heart. We might point to Revelation 3.20, ‘If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me’. Jesus comes and enters into a person’s ‘door’. And there is John 14.20 ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’. But even here care is needed. The words from John’s gospel are concerned with the coming of the Spirit upon Christ’s departure. For the Father and the Son to take up their abode with the believer is to do this through the ministry of the Spirit. Christ Jesus will not abide with today’s believers literally, nor does the New Testament encourage its readers to think that he will, any more than Paul (for instance) is not in the least interested or concerned to show to his readers and hearers what is God’s will for their lives, or to offer advice about how they might discover what God’s will for them is.

Jesus-centric

But what is attractive about the language is that it is Jesus-centric. And bearing this in mind, one way to think of the use of such language is as an affirmation of the great fact of the believer's union with Jesus. He is in Christ, witnessed to by the fact that Christ is in him by his Spirit. I suggest that this is one way of reading such informal expressions, as testifying to the believer’s willing union with Christ. But as well as keeping the emphasis on Christ’s Spirit as the indweller of God’s people, I reckon that such language ought to be tempered by the emphasis of Paul that Christ dwells in the hearts of his people by faith. (Ep. 3.17) The language of Christ coming into the heart is the language of union with Christ, and this (Paul tells us) is the language of believers.