Dr Greg Bahnsen - Higher Thoughts: Theological Rationalism (Part 2)

And we'll turn in our Bibles as we begin Tonight to Isaiah 55. Our theme verses for this summer course, as you know, are verses 8 and 9, but I'd like to put them in context again by reading the entire chapter. Isaiah 55, beginning at the first verse. I would remind you that you are hearing now God's own word. Ho. Everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters. And he that hath no money, come ye buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do you spend money? For that which is not bread, and your labour for that which satisfies not. Hearken diligently unto me, and eat that which is good. And let your soul delight itself in fatness. Incline your ear and come unto me. Hear, and your soul shall live. And I will make an everlasting covenant with you. Even the sure mercies of David. Behold, I have given him for a witness to the peoples, a leader, a witness and commander to the peoples. Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and And a nation that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of Jehovah, thy God, and for the Holy One of Israel, for he hath glorified thee. Seek ye Jehovah while he may be found. Call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. And let him return unto Jehovah, and he will have mercy upon him and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith Jehovah. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down and snow from heaven, and returns not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth in bud, and giveth seed to the sower and bread to the eater. So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth. It shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace. The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree, and it shall be to Jehovah for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. And thus Far the reading of God's Word. We have taken Isaiah 55, 8 and 9 as our theme verses for our summer sessions in I would imagine some people have thought, can you really spread out just two verses over? I think it's going to be eight sessions by the time we are done. Seven for those of you who are listening by tape. And the answer is, oh, yes, we could teach an entire course on just about every one of the topics that we have chosen. We began by looking at the prophecy of Isaiah as a whole and what Isaiah's message was and how the book of Isaiah, I argued, was written by one man contrary to the higher critics, and that this one man had a message not only of condemnation from God for the sins of the Israelites as well as their surrounding neighbors, but also a message of great joy, of how the covenant would be renewed, the Messiah would come, redemption would be secured, and the blessings of the Messianic age experienced by God's people. In the 55th chapter, we see another one of the great promises of God about making a covenant with his people and securing for them the sure mercies of David. And then God calls upon them to repent. He says, seek Jehovah while he may be found, and call upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thought, and return unto Jehovah. One must take opportunity to come back to God as God now is present, to bless and to save. And so this call goes out with great urgency. And the basis for the turning, the reason why you must turn and come to Jehovah is he says, your thoughts are not my thoughts and your ways are not my ways. This is to suggest that the unrighteous man, the wicked man, is thinking and is behaving in a way that is contrary to God. So God begins by saying, your thinking, your sinful patterns of reasoning, the way you see things and understand things is wrong. And if you're going to be right with me, you need to forsake your own way of thinking. And so we might, in a very simplistic way, you know, binary logic, perhaps. Okay, well, then the opposite is we've got to think just like God does. And of course, in a sense, we do. We are to forsake our ways of thinking, our rebellion, and come back to God and to think in a way that follows his way of thinking. But in verse 9, Isaiah adds this interesting thought. Not only must we forsake our ways to get back to God, we must recognize that his ways are higher than our ways. And his ways are higher than our ways, even as the heaven is higher than the earth. And so there is this interesting literary device and paradox being used by Isaiah. In one sense, we must renounce our own way of thinking to get back to God. But in getting back to God, we must also recognize that his thoughts are higher than our thoughts. And this then opens up a whole, well, Pandora's box, in a sense, of theological issues that have been debated throughout the history of the church and matters that we need to take account of in apologetics and theology. Last week we looked at the transcendence of God, the sense in which God, in order to be God, must go beyond man, transcend man. He transcends man's created circumstance or situation. In order for someone, something to be God, it must be greater than what we call the created order, greater than nature, must go beyond the temporal world as we know it, and must exceed man's experience. And so we speak of God being transcendent. And then I told you about the idolatrous pattern of reasoning that you see in all unbelieving systems of thought, whether they are more religious or less religious. An atheistic thought, you know, God is so transcendent that he doesn't even exist. He can't be known at all. And then the atheist turns right around and uses his own mind to come up with a functional equivalent to God. You know, nature becomes the source of man's being and nature is the source of man's reasoning. And it's to natural law we go to find our ethic and so forth. That's just one example. But atheists follow this pattern too. Shove God out of man's experience, then define God, although you may not call it such. Define God in your own image. Hindus do the same thing. Ultimate reality is ineffable. It's unknowable, it's transcendent. It's so beyond us that it can't even be rationally comprehended. And then Hindus turn right around and tell us, page after page after page, ritual after ritual, regulation after regulation, what we should do to be right with the ultimate oneness of the universe. So push the divine, push God out of the picture, make him so transcendent that it can't be known, and then turn around and idolatrously make it in your own image. And so the followers of the Koran do as well. They say that Allah is so unlike anything in the created order that no human words are adequate to speak of him. And then you turn to the Quran, made up of human words to speak of Allah, and Allah ends up telling us all sorts of things we should do and how we should live our lives and so forth. So the pattern is there over and.

Over and over again.

We see it in neo orthodox theology, Christian theology, professedly Christian theology. These theologians will tell us God is wholly other from us. He's so misdemeanor that the human mind, being finite, cannot speak of God. Nothing in man's experience can clearly tell us about God. So God is utterly transcendent. He's exalted and he can say all these wonderful things. Then you turn right around and say all sorts of things based on the theologians own imagination as to what must be true about God, or where the Bible can be right, where it can be wrong, and so forth. And so here's the pattern. Unbelieving thought, says God is so transcendent that you have to depend upon something in the created order or my mind to tell you what he is like. A real tension there. When you put it side by side, it looks absurd, but that's what you find in all these systems of thought. By contrast, the Christian approach to this matter says just because God is transcendent, he can come right into our experience, he can come right into our world and clearly show Himself and clearly make Himself known. The transcendence of God does not detract from His Eminence, but rather is the foundation of it. Because the transcendence of God means He controls everything. He's the Creator. The transcendence of God means He is sovereign. He controls all things. He made us. And that's why he's different from us and exalted over us. He's the Creator. He's the Governor of all things. But just because he's the Creator and Governor of all things, he has no problem revealing in human words who he is and clearly what he requires of us and how we would be saved. He has no problem coming right into this world in the Incarnation in the person of his own Son, Jesus Christ. He has no problem coming on the day of Pentecost, right into the hearts of his people in the powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The transcendence of God becomes the framework for His Eminence then, rather than something that's in tension with His Eminence, as it is in all other idolatrous and unbelieving systems of thought. That's the summary. Now tonight we want to turn to a third topic, and that is the question of thinking. Theological rationalism. Isaiah 55, verse 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. I hope by the time we end this evening in a few minutes that you will have this really, you know, hammered home to your hearts that God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts. And what that means, what that metaphor, what that figure of speech means for us when it comes to doing theology. Theological rationalism. What do we mean by rationalism? In order to understand the term rationalism, I might point out, and I'm afraid many people who study philosophy don't even distinguish these things. But especially those who aren't students of philosophy get real confused as to whether being rational is good or bad. And so I want to talk about that for a moment. We use the term rational in at least, well, three different ways. Sometimes we speak of something being rational when it pertains to man's reason or to his reasoning, his intellectual or mental capacity. And so to be rational means to use your mind. But then to be rational can mean something, something other than that as well. To be rational, we can speak of something being rational because it doesn't pertain to observation or experience. That is to say, we come to know this in a rational fashion because we didn't learn it through our sense of sight or hearing or smell or touch, what have you. And this in philosophy, then, is set over against an empirical way of knowing things. To know things empirically is to know them through your senses and through observation. To know them rationally is to know them in terms of cogitation or reflection on concepts and logic and so forth. Okay, so on the one hand, to be rational means to use your intellect. On the other hand, to be rational means to use your intellect instead of your senses, senses to know something. And then thirdly, we use the word rational for whatever is based on the authority of man's mind. That is to say, something is rational when it has passed all the tests that the autonomous man wants to lay down, the man who is a law to himself. And it's this third sense which I am employing when I use the word rationalism tonight. Rational in the sense that man's mind is the standard. Man's mind is the final board of appeal. Man's mind is the final authority in what we believe and think. So let me give you a definition, the definition of rationalism. It's the general attitude that men. Man's autonomous reason is his final authority in determining what to believe. Rationalism is the general attitude that man's autonomous reason is his final authority in determining what to believe. And in case we're not familiar with the word autonomous, you might want to add by way of amplification, self sufficient or independent Man's self sufficient reasoning. Man's independent reasoning is his final authority in determining what to believe. Here reason is not just the tool, the intellectual capacity, but reason has become the board of Arbitration. It's the final authority in determining what to believe. Before we get into the more technical and kind of ugly expressions of rationalism that I want to discourage you from this evening, I might point out that rationalism is evident when people treat their own beliefs and treat their own understanding as the limit of what can be the case. That is to say, the limit of reality. And this is pervasive. You don't have to go to college to be infected with this idea. You may have to go to college to get the vocabulary to refer to it and understand what's going on. But I mean, today it's almost the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist, all about us, to think that my thinking, my believing and my understanding is the limit of reality. So you run into, people say, I don't believe in moral absolutely. So I'm not immoral when I do the following. That's not to think about that. Because I don't believe in moral absolutes, therefore there are no moral absolutes. And so I can't be condemned for doing this. It's kind of like, well, if I believe the way you Christians did, then I'd be condemned. But since I don't believe with you, then of course I'm not condemned. That's a strange way of thinking, but I'll bet, I mean, I see the heads nodding.

You've run into the.

That's just really a silly faux pas in reasoning to think since I don't believe in it, it doesn't exist. That'd be like somebody saying, well, I don't believe I have tuberculosis, so I don't. Well, the limit of reality is not set by my thinking and my believing is it. And you find that in terms of understanding too. You'll have people say things like, well, I can't understand how there could be life after death. And if there's no body, there's no eyeballs, there's no brain, how can there be life after death? I don't see how there can be. So there's nothing to fear in dying, since I can't understand it, then it isn't the case. Kind of like saying, I don't understand how Atomic radiation can penetrate the walls of my house, so I'm in no danger. Well, the limit of reality is not set by the limit of your understanding. Those are two different matters altogether. But I as an aside, I wanted you to see how the rationalist spirit has its own, in a sense, secular manifestation, not just its religious manifestation. That silliness afflicts unbelievers thinking about all sorts of things, not. Well, I've used, of course, religion and morality as my examples, but people do.

That all the time.

It's kind of like, well, I don't understand it, so it can't be true, or I don't believe it, so I don't have to worry about it. I mean, that's just irrelevant. Well, rationalism tells us that man's mind is the ultimate authority in what to believe. What is theology? Last week I told you that theology, in the very nature of the case, affirms the transcendence of God. All theology assumes that God goes beyond the cosmos. All theology assumes that man's temporal experience in some fashion is not the same as God. God exceeds man. What is transcendent doesn't originate with the world or with man's experience. So God is somehow exalted above the world and exalted above man.

In his experience.

God is distinct from the world and different from the world and distant from the world. He is other than the world, hidden from the world, mysterious to man. Theology, in one way or another has got to affirm the transcendence of God. And so it would appear that theology is, in the very nature of the case, the opposite of rational or right. Rationalism says, my mind is the limit of what can be real, or my mind will be the judge as to what is to be believed. Theology says, in the nature of the case, God goes beyond your mind, goes beyond your temporal experience, goes beyond your reasoning. And so when you look at the title of tonight's lecture, Theological Rationalism, you might jump back and say, ah, no, oxymoron. There can't be theological rationalism. Theology and rationalism are on different sides of the spectrum. There are different ends here. You can't really put them together like that. Dr. Oh, I wish that were true and it should be. It should be the case that theologians don't act like rationalists. But not all who practice theology do so as self consciously and as consistently as they should. Many who do theology continue to struggle with the function and the authority of reason within religion, and that comes to expression with what we might call the bad guys. We see these Heterodox theologians, the liberals, the neo orthodox, whatever it may be. But we see it with good guys as well. We see it with evangelical theologians. We'll see in a few moments, for instance, those who are Arminian in their outlook. And we see it even with some Reformed theologians, as I'm going to push eventually toward the end of my lecture to point out to you, this is a real bugaboo in theology to get rid of the rationalism that tends to infect all of us as fallen people when it comes to thinking about God. It should be the case that theology and rationalism don't work together. But sadly, we find evidence of it all around us. So the first thing I'm going to talk to you about tonight is the use of reason in theology. The use of reason in theology. Reason. This is the thesis for this part of the lecture. So if you want to get it down now and then you can fall asleep for a few minutes, I'll tell you when we get to the next point. Reason should be used as the tool of the theologian, but not as a standard or law unto itself. In theology, reason should be used as the tool of the theologian, but not as a standard or law unto itself. Christians are often befuddled by that word reason. That's why I took a little bit of time to define for you rational, which is related to the word reason, just to show you that there's at least three different ways you can understand that word. But the word reason has the same kind of problem associated with it. Christians don't know whether reason is something they should embrace or something they should askew. I mean, should we say reason? Oh, boy, I wouldn't want to have any of that. Or reason? Yeah, that's me. I mean, I want to follow reason. In fact, now that I've got you all kind of intimidated by that, it'd be interesting. I'm not going to do this to take a little survey. How many of you think we who are Calvinists and presuppositionalists, we are foolish, firm reason. Go for reason and then take a survey and say, how many of you realize or would say no, no, reason is not what we're going to follow.

Which is it?

We have a real tough time coming to terms with that. And so if I can draw some distinctions, maybe it'll be helpful for you tonight? I think the reason we struggle with how reason fits into our thinking, our theological thinking, is we haven't pinpointed the precise way in which the word is being used. In fact, the Word reason, not just among us. It's not just our problem. But the word reason is perhaps the most ambiguous word in all the field of philosophy. Which is strange, isn't it? Because philosophy is supposed to specialize in talking about reason. It's perhaps the most ambiguous and obscure word in the entire field. You'll have some fun. I know that you browse through works of philosophy all the time and reference works. Sometimes when you see a dictionary of philosophy or an encyclopedia of philosophy, just pull it off the shelf and look up the word reason. You know, sense one, sense two, sense three. It's just, you know, it goes everywhere. And of course, everyone wants to say that their conception of how to think and how to do philosophy is what reason is all about, too. That isn't health. On the one hand, reason can be thought of as a tool. As a tool. And in this sense, it is man's mental capacity or his intellectual ability. And in that sense, we as Christians should say, it's a gift of God. God has given us our minds to use. And indeed, man's reasoning ability is part of what it is to be in the image of God, to be like God. Unlike bricks and stones and trees and dogs and chimpanzees, man reasons. He reflects the nature of his Creator and his ability to be creative, to draw inferences, to use language, and any number of other evidences of reasoning ability. Reason is a gift of God to man, and it is part of the very image of God in man. And so in Isaiah 1:18, you notice how God bids his people, come, let us reason together. God doesn't say, turn off your mind. That's horrible. That's irreligious. Don't try to think. Don't be rational. He says, no, come reason with me about this. He wants us to use our reasoning like God, we are capable of rational thought like God, we are capable of rational communication. God has given us our mental abilities, and he has given them to us to serve him and to glorify Him. So it shouldn't surprise you that when Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment of the law, he answered, you are to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, strength, and that will do it. And mind and mind. We are to use our minds to love God, to serve him, to submit to him. Come, let us reason together. Love me with all your mind. Clearly, we affirm then, reason as an intellectual tool, a good gift from God that enables us to reflect him, to serve Him. But then, on the other hand, when you look at the way the word reason is used. You'll see that it can be thought of as an ultimate authority for man's thinking or an independent authority for man's saints. Something which stands apart from God and not under the authority of God, and can be used to judge all the claims to truth which come to us, including God's. Here you have reason being the, as I put it previously, the Board of Appeal, the final authority. And even God, you see, must appeal to my reason if he wants my following, if he wants me to give him a chance. As Arminians often say, God is going to have to prove himself to me, because reason is the final test. In that sense, reason becomes a law unto itself, as though man's mind somehow were self sufficient, as though man's mind somehow didn't need divine revelation. And that's the attitude that commonly, pervasively leads people to think that they are in a position to think independently and to govern their own lives, that they are in a position to judge the credibility of God's word and to judge the credibility of God's word based on their own insight, their own authority in the most dramatic sense. This sense of the word reason is seen in the French Revolution where the goddess Reason was deified. You may remember they used to have.

A lot of fun in the French.

Revolution, killing people, lopping off their heads and taking prostitutes off the street and dressing them up as the goddess Reason. You know, they thought this sacrilege and this irreligion was, you know, the real sign of their independence from God. Paul put it this way in Romans 1:22, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, you know, professing themselves to just to have it all wired, you know, to know what's going on, to use their reason as the ultimate judge. They turned into real fools instead. Of course, that understanding of reason as the ultimate judge doesn't recognize that God's the source of man's intellectual abilities, doesn't understand that God is the very precondition, the necessary requirement for man thinking in a rational way. It doesn't recognize that reason, apart from God's revelation, apart from the perspective of the Christian worldview, doesn't even make sense. Those of you who have heard some of my debates or radio discussions with atheists and unbelievers, now, how often I.

Keep coming back to that. You have a person who says he doesn't believe in anything spiritual, he doesn't believe in God or anything like that, and then turns right around and wants to talk about Spirit, spiritual things or non physical things, depending, you know, you can put it any way you want, and particularly wants to talk about laws of logic or morality or of science, whatever it may be. And yet in an atheist world where all you have are the things you can touch and taste and hear and see and hear, I mentioned that. What? Smell. If you can't do one of those five things, then it doesn't exist. How many of you have smelled a natural law? Well, smells fishy to me, the whole idea of it, but no one has been able to swallow. I mean, have you ever accidentally swallowed an abstract concept? I think I lost my laws of logic. I swallowed them last night. I mean, the whole thing's silly, but this is what atheists end up with. You know, they deny that there can be anything like that, and then they turn right around and appeal to things like that to show that Christians are wrong. So when reason is taken as the ultimate judge, the final board of appeal, people are not recognizing the sovereign and the transcendent character of God's thought. Isaiah 55:9. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts. And if God's thoughts are higher than our thoughts, who are we to stand back and think that we can judge his thoughts? I mean, you really have. I'll be honest with you, the analogy of a little child trying to dispute, you know, is father's opinion on something is really flattering in comparison to the true distance between God's thoughts and our thoughts. When a human being says, well God.

I'm not so sure of that.

I mean, I have to think about that. Utterly absurd. Worse than a child telling his father, I don't think you know what you're talking about. Death. And so should Christians endorse the use of reason? I think we can make two mistakes here. They are equal in their mistakenness and their error. And so let's watch out for both of them. On the one hand, believers can recognize the appropriateness of using reason, taken as our intellectual faculty, and then slide from the appropriateness of that into using reason in the sense of intellectual autonomy. I've got to use my mind and therefore I've got to use it independently as a self sufficient authority. On the other hand, believers can recognize how inappropriate intellectual autonomy is and then mistakenly think that that entails rejecting reason as an intellectual faculty. We see this in pietism and many fundamentalist circles. You know, despise education, despise philosophy, reason, you know, that whore reason. We don't want to use reason meaning hopefully we don't want to use sinful rebellious reason, but unfortunately it turns into something that means let's turn off our minds and just feel good, you know, and kind of have an emotional experience of God. On the one hand, we can honor God's gift to man of reasoning ability and then dishonor him through rationalism. On the other hand, we can honor God's ultimate authority and the need to obey him in all aspects of our lives, but then dishonor him through an anti intellectualism or a pietism that says, well, we don't have to think hard, we don't have to use our minds as Christians. I think in the second chapter of Colossians you will see that Paul counterbalances these errors. Colossians 2 and at the third verse, those of you who have taken my apologetics course will know how this is favorite with me. Colossians 2:3 Paul says, All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are deposited in him, that is to say, in Christ. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are deposited in Christ. And that's why in verse 8 he goes on to say, beware lest anyone rob you through philosophy, even vain deceit, which is after the tradition of men, after the elementary principles of the world, and not after Christ. Now notice here in Paul's exhortation found in verse 8, he is not giving a diatribe against the use of reason. He is not saying Christians shouldn't study philosophy, for instance, which you know would make me real sensitive since I got a PhD in Philosophy saying oh boy, you were sure disobeying the Bible out there doing that, weren't you? The exhortation is not against the study of philosophy. Paul makes it clear that believers have the advantage of the best reasoning and the best philosophy available. Because in verse three said Christ is the source of all knowledge. All knowledge, not just things about religion and sentiment and emotion and life after death, but everything. He is the depository of all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Moreover, if According to verse 8 there are many philosophies which are not after Christ, then what Paul is saying is that there is a philosophy that is after Christ. Beware of that philosophy which is after the traditions of men and the elementary principles of the world, that philosophy which is vain deceit and not after Christ, why do I want to beware of those philosophies just so that I will affirm that philosophy that is after Christ. And that's why anti intellectualism throws the baby out with the bath. It destroys true wisdom in the name of Resisting foolishness. We don't want to follow foolish philosophy, so let's just be anti intellectual nerds. It should be plain to us from Colossians 2 that Paul, Paul doesn't endorse reasoning and philosophy that refuses to honor the ultimate authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. He's already said it's in Christ that all wisdom is found. And so any alleged wisdom which follows the traditions of men are, follows the word. Elementary principles, by the way, can be taken as the building blocks of knowledge, in one sense, presuppositions, basic assumptions. Any philosophy that follows the traditions of men and the basic assumptions of the world rather than Christ is to be rejected not only because it's deceitful, but because it's dangerous to you. You'll be robbed, he says, of the treasures of knowledge. Follow worldly philosophy. You won't know anything Paul was saying. And so the Bible teaches us that reason is not to be taken as a neutral authority, a self sufficient, independent authority in man's thinking. And yet reason is to be affirmed as man's gift from God, that intellectual capacity by which we know him and serve him and love him, a tool to be used in glorifying the ultimate authority of God himself. So do we affirm reason in theology as a tool? Yes. As an ultimate standard and authority? No. Let me give you three examples of how theologians have missed this. Three examples of how we see rationalism rear its ugly head in the ranks of the theologians. Well, it's not just the theologians as a class of scholars, but. But we see this rationalism in the way people think theologically all around us, whether they're educated or uneducated, whether they teach in a seminary or not. First of all, the example that I would use is the troubled question of divine foreordination and man's responsibility. Does God predestined everything in advance? Does he foreordain every event that takes place. Well, we read our Bibles, we run across verse after verse after verse that says, yes, he does. Ephesians 1:11 will settle it for us. He works all things after the counsel of his own will. All things. Our God is in the heavens. He has done whatsoever he pleases. The psalmist says every little detail, you know, even the calling of someone from the East. Isaiah says God does that. Jesus says he knows the very number of hairs on our heads. Everything takes place according to his plan. So yes, there's abundant biblical evidence that God plans out everything in advance, even the choices of men. Jesus tells us that we, we can't come unto him unless his Father draws us to the Father. Jesus teaches and Paul teaches that there are a people that have been chosen before the foundation of the world to belong to God and they will only come to be his people by repenting of their sins and trusting in the Savior. The Bible teaches over and over and over again this doctrine of predestination. And yet there are plenty of people. You know them, you run into them, they're your friends, they're your brothers and sisters in Christ. Plenty of people say, oh no, that can't be true. That's not fair. God couldn't do. No, God doesn't do that. Now what do you think is wrong with this person? And I don't mean it as a, you know, a put down or to say that they aren't going to heaven or that you're somehow spiritually superior. But what is wrong with this person when he or she says, no, God can't predestine everything. And then you open the Bible and you give him a clear verse. He foreordains or he works all things after the counsel of his own will. The person will look at that and say, no, he doesn't. Okay, and you read it again, no, he doesn't. Now is the problem that they don't want to accept what the Bible says? Well, that would be a harsh conclusion. I suppose it's true in some cases that people hate the Bible even though they claim to be following it. But you have to know that that's the unusual case. What you usually find is somebody will say, no. The Bible holds us accountable for our choices. We are responsible. That's why God sends people to hell for not believing in Jesus. And if God predestines everything in advance and we're just puppets and you can't hold puppets accountable for what they do, people will tell you, if God predestines everything, man doesn't have a free will and so man can't be held accountable. And now what you do is you go and you open the Bible and you say, but now look, the Bible says man does make his choices here and he is responsible for them. The person says, exactly, that's why I don't believe in predestination. You say, but wait a minute. The Bible also says right here that God predestines everything. No, that isn't what it means then. And you come up with the most really bizarre interpretations of these verses to get around it. Now what's the problem? The problem? You know where I'm going, don't you? The problem is what we call theological rationalism. The problem here is that since my understanding is exceeded by this mystery, it can't be true. Now, what the Arminian usually says is, no, that's a contradiction, and it can't be. And so I'm going to take just a moment to explain to you that predestination and free will are not contradictory. There is no premise, there is no affirmation that is both positively affirmed and then denied by those who believe in predestination and free will. Because I believe. Now get hold of this. I believe God predestines the free choices of men. He predestines their free choices. And therefore what he's predestining is that they choose freely to do this. They can't be predestined and free. Because if God has predestined something, it's got to happen. And if it's got to happen, then man can't do it freely. See, that logic isn't true at all, is it? If God predestined something, then it is certain to happen. To say that it will happen certainly is not to say it will happen by compulsion. Those are two different matters. It is true that if I wanted to predestine that you would do something, let's say I want to predestined that Tim's going to rob a bank. I'm going to make it absolutely certain that he's going to do it. Now, because he and I are on the same level of reality, as it were. We're both human beings. He doesn't have any superhuman abilities. I don't have any superhuman abilities. All I can do is compel him. By doing what? Maybe drug him, hypnotize him. Maybe I put a gun in his hand. I tie it in there so he can't throw it away. And then I put a gun to his back. And I say, now you're going to go into this bank and you're going to rob them. And I'm going to be right behind you, forcing you to do it. Now, I could compel him to follow my will. And that's probably about the only way that I could make it certain, you know, by drugs or threats or something like that. But now the question is, is God limited by what I'm able to do? Is God able to do things that I can't do? The fact that God makes it certain that I will do this, that or the other doesn't by any means prove that God compels me against my will. You say, well, I don't know how he can do that. And my answer when the Arminian says, I don't know how God can do that is neither do I. I also don't know how Jesus walked on water and how a virgin had a baby. But I think God can do things that I can't do. So it doesn't bother me that I don't know how he did it. What I am concerned to make clear here is that there is no logical contradiction. There is just a great mystery there. When Arminians tell us that they cannot accept predestination because that is logically contrary to free will. Apart from ignorance or lack of clarity in thinking, what you have usually is the case where someone says, if my mind can't comprehend it, then it can't be true. And I would encourage you. I'm going to move on to a second illustration here. I would encourage you to use the second illustration to help your evangelical Arminian brothers out of their theological rationalism. Because the second illustration of rationalism is how people struggle with the question of God's own personal nature, the Trinity. When an Arminian tells me, I can't believe that because I can't understand, I mean, that's logically contradictory. I usually say something like, and there are people who tell us that the Trinity is logically contradictory too. And yet you believe in the Trinity, don't you? Not because you're willing to affirm logical contradictions, but because you know that something can be mysterious without being logically contradictory. The Bible tells us there is but one God. The Bible also tells us very clearly that three different or distinct persons are God, fully God, not a third of God, not a part of God, not quasi God, God fully God. Three persons are God, and yet there's only one God. Now, in our experience, we individuate persons and beings in the same way we say one person per being. Thank you. You can't have it any other way. Because when we encounter people or persons, it's always one person per unit, as it were, per being. But now what I want to know is why does God have to be like that? Why does the individuation of being when it comes to God have to be what it is for us in our experience of other persons? There's no reason at all to say that God is tri personal, yet there's but one God. There's really no reason in advance why that can't be the case. And there's no logical contradiction in that. But there is a tremendously deep mystery. And I don't pretend tonight that I can unravel it for you. I probably wouldn't even try. Know better by this point. Over and over again, people have tried to find some analogy in human experience to account for the Trinity. Oh, yeah, well, the Trinity is easy to understand. Just think about Dr. Bonson for a minute. Dr. Bonson is a son of his father. And Dr. Bonson is a brother to his brother. And Dr. Bonson is A father to his own children. So there you have it. Three in one. Son, brother, father, all in one person. And what's the problem? If someone were to do that in a presbytery exam, I'd fail them immediately. Okay, because you see, we don't believe that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three different relationships or functions. We think they are three different distinct persons. Okay? The error, the theological error of thinking, well, you see, you got brother, Son and Father, so that's no problem. It's what we call modalism in theology. The three persons are really just modes of God. There's the Father mode, the Son mode, and the Holy Spirit mode. But it's just one God. There is nothing in human experience that's like God. Now, at first, that's troublesome because that makes it hard to understand the nature of God. But when you stop and think about it, probably nothing surprising about that at all. There's nothing in creation that is exactly like the Creator. Well, of course God says, my thoughts are above your thoughts. I'm not like you. There will be a lecture down the line here. I forget which night I'm doing it. But I'm going to be talking about the sense of mystery. And it's awesome and frightening in some senses to us as Christians. But we need to know that it's also a great and grand thing to be affirmed. It's a great mystery in God. John Calvin tells us that God lisps to us. That is to say, he talks, baby talk to us. That isn't to say what he tells us isn't true because he knows how to talk. He made our minds. He knows our language. He knows the right things to say. But so when God's talking to us, do you think that we have some kind of grand insight into the deep realities of the universe, of the Creator? Of course we don't. We think of God as a father. We think of him as a shepherd. We think of him according to all these figures of speech from our own experience. But when all is said and done, nothing in our experience is exactly like God. And so the Trinity is a Great mystery, but it is not a contradiction. No one is saying the same. No one is affirming and denying the very same thing about God. Now, at this point, some of you who have done some reading might say, well, now, wait a minute. Doesn't Dr. Van Till say God is one person and God is three persons? There's a sense in which Van Till wants to affirm the unity of personality in God. Yes, he does. But even that's not a contradiction because Van Till's not saying God is all one person, but God is also three persons. What he's saying is the three persons of God in another very mysterious sense is one person. The personality of God is not just like, you know, three people on a board directing some, you know, activity. So the Trinity is a very difficult thing to understand. But you know that throughout history, people have rejected the Trinity. You have the Arian controversy in the early days of the church. People say Jesus can't be a separate person. The Son can't be a separate person and equal with the Father. And so you subordinate. He's a quasi God, an almost God, a wannabe God maybe, but not fully God. You see, in all of the christological controversies of the early church, at the center of them is the problem of theological rationalism. If I've got to declare the doctrine of God in such a way that it's understandable to me. No, all you need to do is declare it in such a way that it's faithful to the biblical text and not contradictory. And then finally, you see the degeneration to Unitarianism among the New England Puritans, probably the finest social and theological movement in the history of the church. But it lost its way when, in the New England theological experience, Unitarianism reared its ugly head again. Theological rationalism, we've got to make this amenable to the natural man or to the mind, the natural thinking of man's mind. Well, we've talked about the Arminians and we've talked about the Unitarians showing us examples of theological rationalism. But before I get off of this and toward my conclusion, I should point out, you know, even the ones that we consider the good guys can fall into the problem of theological rationalism. I think here of Dr. Van Till's treatment in his introduction to Systematic Theology in Chapter four of Charles Hodge, who is usually thought of as a Princeton theologian, was one of the better guys we can follow. And when it comes to his actual interpretation of Scripture and putting together the system of doctrine found in the Bible, Charles Hodge was masterful but when he reflected upon what he does as a theologian, he was not really very good. And Van Till has taken his lumps for being honest enough to say it. But Van Till says, when you read what he says about the use of reason, there are real problems there. And time will fail me to go through this in the detail that I wanted to. But just to illustrate how even Calvinists can have problems with theological rationalism, Van Hoof points out that according to Hodge's systematic theology, there are three uses for reason. The first use of reason is what's called the instrumental use of reason. In many ways, that might sound like what I have affirmed tonight, reason as an instrument or as a tool of thinking. However, Hodge presents reason as an instrument or tool of thinking in the context of what is usually called the primacy of the intellectual. Reason must govern the emotions and the will. Reason has a kind of superiority then over them. And what Dantu points out is, though that is a very appealing doctrine to many Christians, the primacy of the intellect, even as a tool, fails to see that the fall of man affected man's reasoning as much as it affected man's volition and man's emotions. We don't hold to the primacy of the intellect because we think somehow it's just a little bit better than the others. When it comes to the degrading effects of sin. Man's thinking is as much in rebellion against God as man's emotions and man's will. Hodge also speaks of reason as the prerogative of the deciding whether a thing is possible or not. That is to say, man's reason, using logic, tells us what can or cannot possibly be true. Anyone see any problem with that? Is man's reason the limit of possibility? No. God is the source of all possibility, isn't he? Reason depends on God. And therefore, even if reason had some kind of adjudication in this matter, in the end it wouldn't be the source of possibility, and it couldn't declare the limits of possibility. God alone can do that. And yet here you have a Reformed theologian falling into that way of thinking. Like if someone tells us something that doesn't go along with our reason, we can say, no, that's not possible because reason says it is unclear. Now, in the end, we have to say that's not possible because God's word says it not possible. And then finally and worst of all, reason is taken by Hodge as a judge of the evidences of revelation. Hodge defines faith as the intelligent reception of the truth on adequate grounds. And he goes on to say Scripture never demands faith except on the never demands faith except on the ground of adequate evidence. And as Van Till points out here, this manner of statement again seems to assume that all men, regenerate and unregenerate, agree on the nature of reason and evidence which is contrary to fact. He goes on to point out, and in the end, even if they don't agree on the nature of evidence in logic and man's reasoning, there's the question of whether reason has the prerogative to judge the evidences God gives. God gives evidences which we are to use our reason to understand and appreciate. But that is not to say that God gives evidence for our reason to be the judge of. Remember how Jesus says, you are not to put the Lord your God to the test. And so here we see three examples then of theological rationalism. The Arminian who says, no, I don't see how predestination and free will can both be true. So it's not the Unitarian who says, I don't see how, you know, God can be one God in three persons, so I've got to reject that. And we even see it in someone like Charles Hodge who sees reason as having a function and a prerogative which the Bible never assigns to it. Now, before we conclude this lecture tonight, let me add very quickly that the rejection of rationalism and theology does not mean that we affirm irrationalism. The rejection of rationalism does not mean that we affirm irrationalism. It doesn't mean we endorse arbitrariness as though you can believe just anything you wish. Well, you people don't want to use rationalism, so I guess you can just believe anything. No, we can't.

We can only believe what God himself reveals. We can't go out and just imagine our own theology, you know, just willy nilly, you know, just like whatever you want. Different strokes for different folks. No, we are still bound by the word of God. Secondly, it doesn't mean we endorse inconsistency in theological dogmas. In 2nd Corinthians 1:19, Paul says word to you was not yes and no. Paul says, I don't preach that way. That is not the nature of my theology. Yes and no. In Hebrews 6:18, we are told that one of the firm things you can count on is that God does not lie, which means, of course, he doesn't contradict himself, right? So we don't affirm inconsistency in theological dogma. What it does mean is when the Bible clearly teaches two things we say they aren't inconsistent, even if to our puny minds they might seem to be. Now, let me take real quickly an example of something which we do reject as irrational in theology, and yet in so doing, we haven't become rationalist. Lutherans teach that because Christ is the God man, the qualities of his deity are communicated to the qualities of his humanity, what's called in theology the communicatio ideimatum, the communication of attributes.

And so what is true of the.

Deity of Jesus becomes true of the humanity of Jesus. And for Lutherans, this means that Jesus is a human body. That's one of the attributes of his humanity. But since he is God and God is omnipresent, therefore the body of Jesus is omnipresent, I don't know how many of you realize that they don't make a big point of that. In fact, I've found very few Lutherans who can even explain their own dogma. But that is one of the crucial things coming out of the era of the Reformation that separates Calvinists from Lutheran, the communicatio idiomatum. Lutherans say the Bible teaches that Jesus is God, therefore since he's also man, the attributes of his humanity must be divinized. The body of Jesus must be omnipresent. Now, Calvinists have rightly rejected that as contradictory, but more importantly, they've rejected that because it's not taught in the Bible. You see, if Lutherans could point to a verse that said the body of Jesus has spread through all space or is present, you know, at a thousand different places at once or something like that, they would say, wow, I mean, that is a great mystery, and we.

Don'T know what to make of it.

And we're going to work on a good formulation of it, like we have on the Trinity and predestination and so forth. So you see, the fact that we reject or rationalism doesn't mean that any theologian that comes along can draw an inference from, well, Jesus is God, Jesus is man, therefore his body is omnipresent, and we're bound to accept it. Not every mystery is acceptable, even though you reject rationalism. In fact, here's an irony if you understand this. It's a $64,000 question of the.

To.

Follow Isaiah 55, 9 is, in a sense to say the only mysteries we will accept are those which God reveals. God is the right to reveal mysteries, but we don't have the right to make them up on our own. So when Lutherans come along and throw this doctrine of the omnipresence of Christ's body at us. It may sound very theological and it may seem like we're being irreligious to say, no, that's not rational. But our point is it's not rational because God's Word doesn't teach that. And we have not, in so doing, preempted our rejection of people giving up predestination or the Trinity because they say, well, it's not rational, I can't understand, doesn't mean we permit just any mystery at all that we might imagine, but only those mysteries which God reveals in the end. What Isaiah 55, 8, 9 requires is intellectual humility. When two things are taught in God's revealed word, we are not to exercise our reason as a judge to say that one of them cannot really be taught because it's logically impossible. We are rather to exercise our reason as a tool to declare, understand and apply those truths which we admit in many ways are things spoken to us as a heavenly Father who knows so much more than us as children. And who are we to talk back to our Heavenly Father? What questions would you like to ask about theological rationalism before we end our session tonight? Frank, could you comment on Flabel statement that where faith made friends, reason can only wait. A little clearer again.

Say it again.

Well, Foible said that where faith makes.

When reason can only wait.

And I think you mean that statement in light of things in the Scripture we might have difficulty understanding. Well, I mean, that unfortunately is a figure of speech that I haven't seen the context. I'm not exactly sure what he's saying. I mean, I have a feeling for where he's going, and I can agree with that. But I hope he doesn't mean by that that faith swims in the sense that it renounces reasoning or intellect and just in some kind of mystical way gets into, you know, kind of rises to a level of awe and wonderment and just swims in that sense. No, God expects us to reason through his Word. But I think it is true that reason is going to have to wait if it wants to be the final judge. You're not going to be able to swim if you treat it that way. And by the way, this lesson that I've given you tonight has theological application, but I hope some of you at least have seen. Well, Dr. Muthman, that's kind of like your apologetic, isn't it? Because what I argue is that faith is the foundation for reasoning rather than faith itself being placed upon the foundation of reasoning. And so there is a nice. I mean, I hope what I'm telling you is true anyway. But there's a nice sense symmetry there between our apologetic and our theology as well. Faith is foundational to all reasoning and so you might want to relate that metaphor to Flavel's remark too. Another question, Mike. The fact that they believe in progress in the intellect. And are you saying that there are among people that don't understand.

And is it true that the Puritans concept.

Did you teach that? Yeah. No, I think it is true that the Puritans did teach, for the most part, the primacy of the intellect. And I understand why. Throughout the history of the church, theologians have tended to do. They don't want to have the idea that people can just run off with their emotions and that they don't have to govern their decisions by what the mind tells them. But on the other hand, a biblical understanding of man tells you that your intellect is no more a sure guide to following God than your emotions or your will would be. They are all equally affected by sin. And Van Til is one of the few people in 20th century Reformed thought that has that balance to.

To it.

If I might recommend, since time is short tonight, you could pick up two tapes that I've done a few years ago. One, the place of logic in Christian thinking and then the Place of emotions in Christian thinking, just to see how those two work together in a balanced way. To declare the word of God, of course, is to use the intellect, to use. Use the verbal skills and so forth. However, that isn't to say that our declaration doesn't have emotional and volitional aspects to it.

And.

It'S not that I want the emotion to lead the intellect, it's just that I don't want to say the intellect leads the emotion either. Both of them have got to be, you know, harnessed to the word of God and sanctified. Tim, we limited reason to logic, pure logic by definition, let's say. Then there are things in which we can say that reason is not tainted by sin in the sense that the syllabus is valid, whether it's done by a sanctified individual or by sinner. Well, I think that you can't. Well, it's not that you can't. People do it all the time. There is a confusion, a verbal confusion in limiting reason to logic that is done very often in the circles that follow. Gordon Clark, for instance. And it's a real muffed up way of thinking. Reason, if you mean by reason the laws of logic, then you need to go on and talk about reasoning and man's use of his reasoning ability and so forth. The standards of thinking have no more changed because of the fall than the standards of morality have changed because of the fall. And in that sense, if you mean by reason, the laws of logic, no, they aren't affected by the fall. However, no man, no one can say that his mind is simply the laws of logic. The laws of logic are thought about by the mind of man. And the way in which we think about logic is affected by man's fall into sin. What I'm wondering, I guess, is whether. I'm wondering whether God might odds inherit my book at the time. Perhaps they were. Could they have been defined from. As the emotional or volitional part of human nature, that part of the thinking activity which you're including under reason, which chooses the stuff of real. The stuff of thought and the goal?

Well.

In a sense, Hodge does do that. He talks about the use of reason for this and the use of reason for that. However, that's different than confusing a function with a standard for that function. And I don't think the Puritans or Hodge made that big a mistake to think that the laws of logic are what we're talking about when we talk about the function of man's reasoning. And the function of man's reasoning must be a tool subordinated in a sanctified way to the word of God, rather than used as a judge of the evidences for God's word and the source of possibility and so forth, as Hodge did, or at least he said he did, his theology was better than what he declared in his foundations for Theology. Well, we'd like to go on and on about these every week, I know, but we need to release this home to its proper owners. And when we come back next week, what I will try. Well, next week will not be a good time to do that.

At some point, I'll try to have.

A longer question and answer period. Maybe we'll need to have an open forum session where we can just keep talking about many of these things. But next week we're going to get into the really tormented question of the incomprehensibility of God and the debate that has been in Reformed circles for now over 50 years on that particular point. Let's close with a word of prayer. As we come to you, our Heavenly Father, we come to you very grateful that though your thoughts are above our thoughts and your ways are above our ways, and though you are truly mysterious, and we have no right to think that our minds can comprehend you, can in any sense limit you. We are grateful that you have nevertheless chosen to exercise your sovereign prerogative and ability to speak to us in a way that is reliable, in a way that we can count upon, indeed a way that can be seen as the very rock of our own lives and thinking. How we thank you for your word that you've been willing to lisp to us as little children and yet in so doing not mislead us, not give us things which would take us apart from the truth, but would rather found our very lives on the truth and enable us to walk in that truth. We thank you for such love and concern for us. And yet we want to glorify you and exalt your holy name. As we end the session tonight, recognize that we have no right to say what can or cannot be true about you. We need to very humbly depend on you and your own self revelation to know you as you truly are. We would ask you to forgive us for the ways in which all of us manifest theological rationalism in our thinking. We know, though we have spoken of others tonight, that we have to admit that we all struggle with that. We do ask that you would give us greater faith in so doing not lead us into irrational, but greater faith and trust in you that we would submit to your word. We do ask that your name would be lifted up and glorified among us as we confess you to be the one whose thoughts are truly higher than ours. In Jesus name we pray.

Amen.