Van Til's Fideism and Historical Criticism

In Classical Apologetics, Gerstner, Lindsley, and Sproul do a hatchet job on Cornelius Van Til. One of their criticisms, if I recall correctly is that Van Til was a Fideist whereas the Classical Apologeticists produced effective ontological arguments that are still serviceable today. The implication was that Van Til took a problem-avoiding Fideistic approach to all apologetic problems, but this wasn’t true and those students of Van Til should have known it. One of Van Til’s volumes is The New Hermeneutic in which Van Til critics a number of theologians whom he classifies as “New Hermeneuticists”, i.e, Fuchs, Bultmann, Ebeling, Dillenberger, Buri, Polman, Kuitert, Zuidema, Wiersing, Hartvelt, Koole, Baarda, and Augustijn. In the process he voices opinions on several philosophers including Kant, Ritschl, Collingwood, Gadamer, and Bonhoeffer. This book alone should make it clear that Van Til never refused to address the difficult issues. Van Til addressed them.

I was raised in a true Fundamentalist Fideism, one that didn’t deal with the difficult issues. Thus, when I was in college and encountered those issues I didn’t know how to handle them. If God created the earth in 6,000 years and Moses was writing “the very words of God,” then how does one explain The Epic of Gilgamesh which archeologists argue was written long before Genesis? My Fundamentalist mother believed that Satan planted false information in the earth in order to mislead future generations.

I wonder how many children fall away from Christianity each year because Fundamentalist teaching doesn’t prepare them for the real world. If they are taught that it was created in 6,000 years. When they later learn that isn’t true, what does that new knowledge do to their faith? Facing the evidence of science or the history of the Old Testament texts shouldn’t destroy a Christian’s faith. The facts of science and history pertain to how God operated, not whether he did. Fundamentalists who make it an article of faith that the world was created in something like 6,000 years (or even 60,000 – I don’t recall how far they fudge that number today) do young believers a tragic disservice.

Van Til’s Apologetics were “presuppositional,” meaning that he assumed God rather than needing to prove Him. He had studied all the material and arguments, but assuming God, he argued, was far more rational than assuming “Chance.” In fact it was the only stance that was rational. When one applies the laws of chance to the universe there is not enough time for it to have happened. The atheist can argue that while current laws of chance based on current scientific knowledge may not provide enough time for the creation of the universe, new evidence is sure to be found that will one day validate “chance.” The atheist is thereby expressing his “faith” that science will in the future validate his belief. The Presuppositionalist believes that he can safely “assume” God and that no “evidence” produced by current or future atheists will endanger that assumption.

The Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, also known as “Source Criticism” began what is called the Historico-Critical Method. Does believing in this method require that one become an atheist? Wellhausen himself seemed to think so in later life, but later theologians interested in “Old Testament Introduction” have not found their faith in God or in the creeds of Christendom threatened. What they are finding are the ways in which God created the Old Testament not whether he created it. But just as with the Young Earth thesis, if one is raised with a simplistic view of the creation of the Biblical Text and later encounters some of the difficulties non-Fundamentalist theologians regularly wrestle with, one’s faith is going to be tested.

In philosophy one hears the question “is it better to be a happy fool or an unhappy Socrates?” The young philosophy student will be expected to select the latter, but the Christian ought not to be forced to choose the former. Abraham Kuyper famously wrote that there is nothing in the entire world where Christ cannot lay his hand and pronounce “mine.” Perhaps the lazy or limited can’t wrestle with the difficult problems in science, philosophy and theology, but there are those in the Church world who can and have. It is not necessary to pull a fundamentalist blanket over one’s head to retain one’s faith. I am currently reading Brevard Childs’ Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Would that he were available to read when I was in college reading such books as James Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament.

Thomas Hart’s “Reading”

http://web.mac.com/tehart/Jurassic_Rants/Books_and_Rants/Entries/2011/10/16_Reading.html

I attempted to respond to Thomas Hart’s blog note on “Reading” but his blog wouldn’t let me; so I’ll respond on mine. The first difference I noticed is that Hart’s reading program is much more organized than mine. Also, he seems to have mapped out the reading he expects to do in the next ten to twenty years he expects to live (barring accidents). I haven’t any such schedule but my doctor leads me to believe I can expect to accompany Hart through most of the next twenty years – barring accidents and illnesses such as cancer which doctors can’t always anticipate.

Hart is a Carmelite secular, we read in his note “About Me” at http://web.mac.com/tehart/Jurassic_Rants/About_Me.html . He maps out the books he expects to enjoy through his remaining years which savors of monastic order, and a resting in secure belief. I on the other hand am Presbyterian, of a denomination consistent with the early American Presbyterians whom George III accused of starting the American Revolutionary War. The early Presbyterians were Calvinists and it was Calvinism, according to Max Weber, that gave rise to the “Protestant Work Ethic.” I didn’t become a Presbyterian until I was in my early 40s, but I always had something like the Protestant Work Ethic. I wouldn’t have been out of place in Pre-Revolutionary America.

I have a library like the one Thomas Hart has in his basement. Perhaps we have some of the same books. I have a substantial number of Catholic Theologians on my shelves, but perhaps not the same ones that Hart has. I had a very brief interest in Aquinas after having been called a Thomist by a Process Theologist (Process Theology was derived from the Process Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead). At the time I knew little about Aquinas and nothing about Process Theology. In the course of debating this fellow I rectified my lack of knowledge about the latter. My counter arguments caused this fellow to resort to insult in lieu of anything better. I set out on a mild quest to read Aquinas, but in the absence of a strong incentive my interest waned. I respect Aquinas and have nothing against him. I would probably have studied him at greater length were I Catholic. I recall that Martin Heidegger was offered a permanent position if he would agree to being a Thomistic philosopher. He rejected the offer believing it would confine him too much. I had no such worry in my own study of theology. I was doing it on my own without oversight.

While I haven’t too terribly much about theology on my blog, I studied it for about eight years back in the 80s. When I retired to San Jacinto in 1998 I may have had one of the largest theological libraries in town. Mine was larger than the pastors of the Presbyterian churches we were members of. I came to Presbyterianism because it was closest to what I believed not because I was brought up in it. I was never interested in restricting myself to Presbyterian writers. On Church history I was very impressed by Jaroslav Pelikan, especially his five-volume series on The Christian Tradition. In an on-line discussion at the time a Professor at Westminster Theological Seminary (the seminary which educates most of the conservative Presbyterian pastors) asked me why I spent so much time with Lutherans so I asked him for the names of some alternatives. He mentioned Heiko Augustinus Oberman. I appreciated Oberman but I appreciate Pelikan as well. As to Catholics, I have appreciated among others Aloys Grillmeier’s series Christ in Christian Tradition, although I have not read Grillmeier in a systematic way.

My theological presuppositions, a la Cornelius Van Till, were centered on the canon. I accumulated a wide variety of points of view on each book of the Bible and would pit them against each other as I studied. After several years and numerous debates, the aforementioned professor asked me why I kept on. I wasn’t going to be a pastor or teach in a seminary, so why did I keep studying? I didn’t have a good answer.

Later I thought the best answer was that I was a sort-of lower-case polymath who believed in the ethic presented in Proverbs which isn’t inconsistent with the Protestant Work Ethic, “whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might.” I haven’t just studied theology. I mastered engineering well enough while working in aerospace. At one time I was interested in geology and went on rock and mineral expeditions in Southern California. At another time I was interested in astronomy and cosmology. I had an even greater interest in archaeology and anthropology. Later I became interested in genetics. I am very interested in European, Medieval, and Military history. All the while I have been interested in writing. I have written a good deal of poetry and seven novels, although I haven’t tried in any more than a perfunctory way to get any of them published.

Unlike Hart, after 9/11 I studied Islam, Islamism, and the histories of the most of the Muslim nations. I tend to do everything with “all my might”; which sometimes translates into a great deal of thoroughness.

Most recently I have taken up an interest in photography. One can see a number of these photographs at www.lawrencehelm.smugmug.com A few people asked if I intended to become a “professional photographer.” I understand that to be asking whether I intended to sell any of my photographs. I told them I did not. I am pursuing photography with the same intensity I have pursued everything else. Perhaps because of this I have become a better photographer than most people are willing to become, but so what? Christians are taught not to compare themselves with others but to compare themselves with themselves; which I take to mean an evaluation of one’s gifts and then a determining through self-examination whether one is exercising them to the fullest extent. I haven’t the comfort of a Carmelite framework. When I expire during the next twenty years, I hope to be “about my father’s business.”

Trilling on Eliot, VI, the notion of human progress

Trilling writes that the “. . . notion of progress [is] a belief shared by the bourgeois and the Marxist, that the direction of the world is that of never-ceasing improvement.  So far as Marxism goes, this idea seems to have a discrepancy with the Marxist dialectic, for it depends on a standard of judgment . . . the judgment of direction, the certainty of what ‘higher’ signifies and what ‘better’ signifies.  One has only to hear a Marxist defend (as many a Marxist will) the belief that through the ages even art shows a definable progress and improvement to understand how untenable the notion is in any of its usual statements.  And the progress which is held to be observable in art is held to be no less observable in human relations. 

“And from the notion of progress has grown that contempt for the past and that worship of the future which so characteristically marks the radical thought of our time.  The past is seen as a series of necessary failures which perhaps have their value as, in the dialectical way, they contribute to what comes after.  The past has been a failure: the present – what can it matter in the light of the perfecting future?  And from – or with – a sense of the past as failure, and of the present as nothing better than a willing tributary to the future, comes the sense of the wrongness of the human quality at any given moment.  For while they have always violently reprobated any such notion as Original Sin and by and large have held the belief that, by nature, man is good, most radical philosophies have contradicted themselves by implying that man, in his quality, in his kind, will be wholly changed by socialism in fine ways that we cannot predict:  man will be good not as some men have been, but good in new and unspecified fashions.  At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.”

COMMENT:  What is being described here is a Marxist eschatology.  The Christian eschatology this most closely approximates is Postmillennialism.  They both hypothesize a future time when humans will be much closer to perfection than they are today.  Close enough so that human failings the world is used to become almost nonexistent.  This is another case, perhaps, where Marx addresses a Christian ideal and proposes to accomplish the same thing by material means.  

Postmillennialism envisions this improvement in human nature to be accomplished by the work of the Holy Spirit.  Marxism envisions this improvement to be accomplished by Socialism.  Atheists will argue that there is no Holy Spirit to improve man by changing him in such a way that he more closely approximates the image of Jesus Christ.  Very well, I would ask the Socialistic atheist, what in a material system is to effect this change?  Marx wasn’t specific, but Socialists have had a long time since his death to think about it  We have seen Socialism at work in many forms and stages.  Has anyone at any time in any place seen the sort of human improvement here alluded to?   

Postmillennialism is described as an “optimistic eschatology.”  There will be a time when the “Word of God will cover the world as water covers the floor of the sea.”  It is “optimistic” because this will occur on earth prior to heaven.  The other two major eschatologies, Amillennialism and Premillennialism are “pessimistic.”.  There will be no improvement in human nature and only small numbers will be saved.   The Marxists from Trilling’s time sound “optimistic” about a Materialistic future.  I wonder if that optimism exists in the Marxist remnant that survives today.

Trilling picks up Eliot’s arguments after this to say that while they are no more tenable than Marxism, at least Eliot is not deceiving himself. 

Trilling on Eliot, V (Marx, Wordsworth, Hardy, Henley)

Trilling writes, “. . . it is incidentally significant that . . .  in every nation touched by the Revolution, the novel should have taken on its intense life.  For what so animated the novel of the nineteenth century was the passionate – the ‘revolutionary’ – interest in what man should be.  It was, that is, a moral interest, and the world had the sense of a future moral revolution.  Nowadays the novel, and especially in the hands of the radical intellectuals, has become enfeebled and mechanical: its decline coincides with the increasing indifference to the question, What should man become?

“The heightened tempo of events will go far toward explaining the change – the speed with which calamity approached, or sense of the ship sinking and our no doubt natural giving to survival the precedence over the quality of the life that was to be preserved.  Much of the change can be laid to the account of Marx, for it was Marx, with his claim to a science of society, with his concept of materialistic and dialectical causation, who, for his adherents, made the new emphasis seem unavoidable.  Considerations of morality Marx largely scorned; he begins in morality, in the great historical and descriptive chapters of Capital, but he does not continue in it, perhaps because he is led to believe that the order of the world is going to establish morality.  He speaks often of human dignity, but just what human dignity is he does not tell us, nor has any adequate Marxist philosopher or poet told us: it is not a subject which comes within the scope of their science.

“Yet not merely upon the tempo of events nor upon Marx himself can we lay the indifference to the morality and to aims.  It must fall . . . on the total imagination of our time.  It is the characteristic of this imagination so to conceive the human quality that it diminishes with ever-increasing speed before the exigencies of means.

“Lenin gave us the cue when, at the end of The State and Revolution, he told us that we might as well postpone the problem of what man is to become until such time as he might become anything he chose.   One understands how such a thing gets said; but one understands, too, that saying it does not make possible a suspension of choice already made and the making of it was what gave certain people the right to wonder whether the ethics and culture of Communism were anything else than the extension of the ethics and culture of the bourgeois business world.  For many years the hero of our moral myth was the Worker-and-Peasant who smiled from the covers of Soviet Russia Today, simple, industrious, literate – and grateful.  Whether or not people like him actually existed is hard to say; one suspects not and hopes not; but he was what his leaders and the radical intellectuals were glad to propagate as a moral ideal; that probably factitious Worker was the moral maximum which the preoccupation with immediate ends could accommodate.

“[This] diminished ideal . . . represented by that Worker is what Mr. Eliot would perhaps call, in his way, a heresy.  But from another point of view it is also a practical, a political, error.  It is the error which lies hidden in materialist and rationalist psychology.  Against it a certain part of the nineteenth century was always protesting.  Wordsworth was one of the first to make the protest when he discarded the Godwinian view of mind . . . it was in protest of the view of man shared alike by Liberal manufacturing Whig and radical philosopher, the view that man was very simple and individually of small worth in the cosmic or political scheme.  It was because of this view that Wordsworth deserted the Revolution; and it was to supply what the Revolution lacked or, in some part, denied, that he wrote his best poetry.”

COMMENT:  It is pertinent to think again of Ferry & Renaut’s French Philosophy of the Sixties, subtitled “an Essay on Antihumanism.” Ferry & Renaut’s essay was written in 1985, 45 years after Trilling’s essay on Eliot.  Not all of these Antihumanists could have been known by Trilling, but the idea of them would have been.  That is, Foucault is mentioned, but he is mentioned as deriving from Nietzsche, and Derrida from Heidegger, Bourdieu from Marx and Lacan from Freud.  Trilling didn’t assert that any of the (latter) philosophers had set out to dehumanize man, nor do Ferry and Renaut make this allegation, but an effect of their philosophies has been to diminish man.  What can the “good life” be in the face of such destructive arguments?  What can the intelligent novelist, i.e., the novelist who accepts some form of anti-humanism, write about that is not colored by despair?  Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Return of the Native, and The Mayor of Casterbridge come to mind as examples. 

Is there some way to rise above or repudiate the rampant anti-humanism that pervades our thinking?  Religion has that potential.  The Anti-Humanists have all declared God Dead, but backing away from that un-provable hypothesis is a start.  In the West we are used to Christianity.  We Christians are not left in doubt as to what we should become.  The Holy Spirit, Scriptures tell is, is transforming us into the image of Jesus Christ.  Transforming us kicking and screaming seems to be the case for most of us, but the ideal, the goal is out there for us to see and we don’t repudiate it. 

Many Christian thinkers today oppose what they perceive as an exalting of man over God, calling it “humanistic.”  But the modern philosophers they have in mind aren’t interesting in elevating man.  There is very little of that in their philosophies.  I was most recently reading Heidegger and a major concern of his was a despairing harking back to tradition as a probably-vain hope that something better could be made of Germany.   The Russian followers of Marx exalted the Worker as Trilling describes, but that Worker and his paradise were shams. 

Wordsworth was no Christian, but he saw the emptiness of a belief in Godwin’s philosophy.  He didn’t advance any alternatives that impressed Trilling.  Eliot turned to Christianity for several reasons.  Anyone who has become a Christian later in life can trace the path through several reasons (or arguments) that led to his becoming a believer.  At least one of those reasons was pragmatic.  Eliot couldn’t survive the conclusions of The Waste Land.  He couldn’t survive the conclusions he drew of the First World War and its aftermath.  

Could Eliot have been faking it, using Christianity as a means and not an end?  That doesn’t seem possible.  What benefit could he have found in a Christ he didn’t really believe in?  Paul wrote in First Corinthians 15 words to the effect that if Christ was not raised from the dead then we are the most miserable of men.  In order to be a Christian one must so believe, and if this belief is entered in to optimism becomes a possibility.  Jesus said, “In this world ye shall have tribulation, but be not afraid for I have overcome the world.” 

Or one can take the approach of Hardy who envied those who can experience optimism:

. . . At once a voice arose among

    The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

    Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

    In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

    Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

    Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

    Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

    His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

    And I was unaware.

Or one might try for the self-encouragement of William Earnest Henley partially recovering from a disease writing,

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

I tend to take a pragmatic view of these matters.  Henley was a sickly fellow who spent years in hospitals.  His unconquerable soul lasted him only 53 years. 

Trilling on T. S. Eliot, II (philosophical & theological quietism)

Trilling wrote, “Perhaps Mr. Eliot’s long if recalcitrant discipleship to Matthew Arnold gives me some justification for quoting Arnold once again:  of criticism he said that ‘it must be apt to study and praise elements that for the fullness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be maleficent.’  It is with this sentence in mind that I urge the importance of Mr. Eliot’s book.

“In the imagination of the Left Mr. Eliot has always figured with excessive simplicity.  His story was supposed to be nothing more than this: that from the horrible realities of the Waste Land he escaped into the arms of Anglo-Catholic theology.  This account may or may not be adequate; but as we review the ten years in which Marxism flourished among the intellectuals and then decayed, we can scarcely believe that this story, if true, is the worst that could be told of a man in our time.  Whatever is censurable in it depends on the blind power of that word ‘escape’ and on our attitude to theology.  For theology I certainly do not make a stand, but when Mr. Eliot is accused of ‘faith,’ of the ‘surrender’ of his intellect to ‘authority,’ it is hard to see, when the accusers are Marxist intellectuals, how their own action was always so very different.  If we have the right to measure the personal and moral value of convictions by the disinterested intellectual effort through which they are arrived at, we might find that Mr. Eliot’s conversion was notably more honorable than that of many who impugned his decision.”

COMMENT:  I was a bit surprised to read that a belief in Marxism “decayed” after a ten year period, i.e. from 1930 to 1940.  He was writing before a Cold War in which Marxism was embraced with great enthusiasm by many Western intellectuals.  I was once interested in American Marxists who advanced the cause of labor during this period.  Perhaps he had those people in mind when he used the word “decayed.”  

Trilling’s point here is that if Eliot gave up his intellectual independence by embracing Anglo-Catholic theology, those who embraced Marxism were in no position to criticize him.  Embracing a fideist or quietist approach to religion or philosophy to the extent that counter theories are rejected a priori is an extreme not many intellectuals could manage.  Perhaps people who don’t fit Trilling’s definition of “intellectual” might manage because they wouldn’t be fully aware of counter arguments, but Eliot was aware.  He worked through the problems that concerned him (perhaps described in The Waste Land) and embraced Anglo-Catholic theology as a logical solution to them.  But did that mean he quit thinking, and embraced his theology as a fideist? 

I am much more familiar with Reformed than Anglo-Catholic theology, and there is a famous controversy that developed between two Reformed theologians that bears upon this subject.  Cornelius Van Til took the position that we could not know everything God knew.  He revealed what He wanted us to know in the Scriptures, but He didn’t tell us all that He knew.  He didn’t even tell us all that he knew about what he told is in these Scriptures.  We could never know all that God knew about anything.  Gordon Clark believed that while we couldn’t know everything that God knew, we could know everything there was to know about what God revealed in Scripture.  We could know the Scriptures as thoroughly as God knew them. 

If we couldn’t know everything there was to know about Scripture, Van Til’s critics asked, how could we believe something we couldn’t fully understand?  We understood as much as God intended us to understand, but the insoluble matters we accepted on faith, Van Til responded.  Were Van Til and T. S. Eliot fideists for accepting difficult theological matters on faith?  Or was Gordon Clark arrogant for thinking he could know everything God knew about Scripture? 

Van Til & Eliot weren’t fideists any more than modern scientists are.  Modern scientists don’t believe that they know everything about nature, but they do believe that scientists will one day know almost everything.  They believe that on faith.  While some theologies are frozen in time, most subscribe to “the progress of doctrine.”  Intellectual theologians have been wrestling with doctrine for hundreds of years.  No Christian denomination holds to the theology that the earliest Church fathers advanced.  Various interpretations were advanced and debated.  Creeds and Confessions resulted.  Doctrine progressed and is still progressing.  Van Til, if not Clark, was engaged in that “progress” himself.

Heidegger’s history bears on this subject as well.  His brilliance came to the attention of the Catholic Church, and he was offered a well-paid teaching position if he would devote himself to Thomistic philosophy.  He turned the offer down.  Not because he had a better offer.  He had no other job prospects at the time, and not because he didn’t believe in Catholic theology.  He turned it down because he didn’t want to adhere to Church oversight and restriction.  His philosophy has been seen as promoting the authoritarianism of Fascism, but can we not see in, for example his invocation of ‘tradition’ hints of Roman Catholic authoritarianism?  He didn’t advocate Roman Catholicism, but might it not be there as a kind of Freudian influence? He never claimed to be an atheist and was reconciled to the Catholic Church right before he died (according to an attending priest). 

Wittgenstein adhered more closely to Christianity.  He was converted while reading Tolstoy’s paraphrase of the Bible while fighting on the side of Germany in the First World War.  His philosophy is seen by some as a kind of Quietism.  We should use the words of philosophy for comfort, and not to erect philosophical edifices.  Quietism is often associated with Fideism.  If you hunker down with the comforting words of theology or philosophy, you won’t be angrily debating contrary positions.  You will be embracing what you find comforting and not worrying very much about anything else.  There have been Quietists and Fideists present throughout Christian history.  Should the Quietism of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and Rorty be intellectually acceptable, but a Quietistic embrace of Anglo-Catholicism not be?

Lawrence

Christian Apologetics and Popper's Non-Justification

Popper on page 29 of Unended quest: An Intellectual autobiography, wrote “It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some who misunderstands you.”

On this point I agree with Popper, but Popper applied this approach to all knowledge. No knowledge could be justified as being absolutely true. We can approach truth but we can never quite get there. His opponents on the other hand believed that knowledge can be “justified,” i.e, proved true in a scientific laboratory.

Popper wasn’t a Christian as far as I can tell; so he was dealing with any spoken or written text when he wrote “it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood,” and also when he argued that scientific knowledge cannot be justified as being absolutely true. He wasn’t being a nihilist when he said that. He would say (I imagine) that science should move ahead with its work based on a 99.9999 percent confidence in the lab results.

It is true that evaluations in a laboratory can substantiate some physical facts and discount others, but as Wittgenstein implied at the end of his Tractatus, the most important knowledge can’t be demonstrated in a lab. Wittgenstein was converted to Christianity by reading Tolstoy’s paraphrase of the New Testament while fighting on the German front during World War I. He demonstrates that it is possible to understand and believe in the Scientific Method without believing that method to be the only source of knowledge. Whereas Scientists typically view their epistemology supporting an open-ended enlightened quest; Christians view the scientists’ parameters as forming a box from which they cannot hear the Holy Spirit that Wittgenstein heard.

The writer of Hebrews in Chapter 3 verse 15 wrote, “As has been said, ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.” And again in 4:7, “Therefore God again set a certain day, calling it Today, when a long time later he spoke through David as was said before: ‘Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.’” But as a result of the scientific box that excludes any voices that cannot speak through its laboratory walls, these philosophers and scientists cannot hear ‘his voice.’” The scientific method and hardened hearts seem to go hand in hand, but it needn’t be so, and using Popper’s “falsification method” we falsify that belief by means of the Holy Spirit working in our lives.

The term “fideism” means a reliance upon faith rather than reason. This term is normally applied to religion, but Popper admits a kind of fideism in that he has faith in reason. He cannot demonstrate “reason” or “rationality” in a lab. This is an assumption that he holds by faith. Are we Christians fideists in relying upon faith and not on reason? Some Christians are, but Thomas Aquinas believed that the religious truths of Christianity could be proved using reason. He believed (according to Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550, page 35, “that universals were really in things and, as so-called intelligible species, also really in the mind, so he believed that grace was really in sacramental rituals and elements and, as an accidental form, also really in the soul.” This belief didn’t remain unchallenged. William of Ockham and the Nominalists challenged this overweening reliance upon words.

Few Christians today would follow Aquinas or Duns Scotus in the belief that God can be proved by verbal argument. Thomism didn’t disappear but Ockham’s Nominalism weakened it fatally. The Fourteenth Century was a time of great insecurity, for if the proofs of Aquinas and Duns could not be relied upon, then perhaps God didn’t really exist. A fideistic approach to belief was a viable alternative, but it didn’t satisfy everyone.

Luther and Calvin followed Ockham in rejecting Aquinas and Duns. Justification was to be by faith and not by philosophical “proofs.” Assurance of salvation was to occur through reliance upon the testimony of Jesus and his disciples as quickened in the believer by the Holy Spirit. This process is not demonstrable in a scientific lab, but no generation since the Church was formed has lacked believers and evangelists.

Peter (1 Peter 3:15) writes “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” So how would Peter answer Popper’s opponents? He wouldn’t have quite as much trouble with Popper who admits to a fideistic belief in reason, but is this hope that we have truly fideistic? Not according to Cornelius Van Til, the recent Professor of Apologetics from Westminster Theological Seminary. He has been accused of fideism, but his “hope” was never a blind one. He made assumptions equivalent to those of Popper’s opponents and then argued with as much acumen as the most sophisticated philosopher. They assumed the Scientific Method, Van Til assumed the truth proclaimed in Scripture.

But wait, if it is impossible to write in such a way that ambiguity is eliminated (a paraphrase of Popper) how shall we know what Scriptural truth is? Won’t it all be ambiguous? In this regard, Christians rely upon the Holy Spirit to provide enough understanding for salvation. But we should at the same time understand that Scripture is not self-authenticating. In every generation some bright fellow will think it is, read the Bible and rely upon his own understanding and produce or more likely reproduce a heterodox theory of Christianity. Luther and Calvin advocated sola scriptura, scripture only, and by this they intended to object to the Catholic traditions that the RCC claimed equivalent to Scripture, but much confusion has resulted from this expression. If we accept Sola Scriptura then surely Scripture is self-authenticating, many have tended to think, and it is therefore in no need of an exegete. Of course this isn’t a tenable position. Both Luther and Calvin spent much of their lives explaining Scripture. We have always needed teaching. The best way to avoid a heterodox tangent is to familiarize ourselves with the great teachers provided to the church down through the ages. Are any of us as wise as they were? Perhaps, but if so we will surely agree with them. If we discover that we do not then we are on shaky ground. Sola Scriptura yes, but let us consult the teachers who have wrestled (with the help of the Holy Spirit) with the ambiguities of Scripture. Who are these teachers, some will ask? Here we can apply Popper again. We should strive to accept the teachers who stick closest to Scripture but as our studies grow we can compare teacher to teacher and more closely approach a thorough understanding. We should choose wisely. Someplace it is written that we shall be held accountable for the teachers we set over ourselves.

We are not alone in this. He has not left us comfortless, and he has told us he will be with us until the end of the age. As to the ambiguity in that statement, we don’t know quite what “the age” is or when it will “end,” but whatever it is and however long it lasts, Christ has promised to be with us, and with the help of the Holy Spirit we accept that knowledge as justified – not in a lab, but with quite as much confidence as the lab technicians have as they pursue their experiments. 99.9999 percent? Perhaps.