Jesus taught us to conclude the Lord’s Prayer proclaiming God’s eternal kingdom, power, and glory. This reminds us that God is sovereign and hears our prayers. Resolve in 2023 to pray with confidence, a confidence that isn’t rooted in your ability or worth but in God’s great power and love. So, if resolutions help you, make them. If New Year’s resolutions aren’t a helpful practice for you, don’t make them. But Jesus commanded us to pray specific themes to remind ourselves of who our God is and what he’s up to. 

December isn’t just the time of year that annual planning is done. It is also the time of year that resolutions are made. And whereas I’m grateful we possess the resolutions of Jonathan Edwards, let me suggest that they aren’t the best guide for making our own resolutions. First, he was rather odd, in part due to his astronomical intellect.1 But second, duplicating other people’s practices can be as harmful as they can be helpful. After all, you are not Jonathan Edwards. For this very reason, Robert Murray M’Cheyene was known to be reluctant to share his own practices of personal piety. Even if they were helpful to him didn’t mean they would be helpful to someone else, or so he argued.
So, does this leave us avoiding resolutions for the new year? Maybe. Studies have shown that very few people continue with resolutions throughout the year. We might better call them hopes or aspirations rather than resolutions. But then there is the whole thing about timing. If God is calling you to change something about your life, why wait until January 1? Why not make the resolution today?
I want to suggest that there is a simple way forward. When we discussed annual planning in my last post, we looked at the Decalogue as a picture of all reality. Planning should be made aligned with reality. As we look forward and long to see changes in our personal lives and families, there is another guide that the Lord gave us: the Lord’s Prayer.2
The Pattern Jesus Gave
When his disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he provided a model prayer (Luke 11:1–4; Matt. 6:9–13). Should that prayer be prayed verbatim? Absolutely. Should that prayer serve as a pattern for the main things for which we should pray? Absolutely. And by mentioning “daily bread,” there is good reason to believe that Jesus intended us to pray this prayer or about these themes daily. When we pray the Lord’s Prayers (as a prayer or a pattern), we are aligning ourselves with the will of God. We don’t have to wonder what resolve God wants from us; he’s told us and told us how to pray for it.
Where does this get us with resolutions? Instead of making resolutions, what if we resolved to pray the Lord’s Prayer daily and work our way through each of the six petitions it contains? Many of these things we could or would resolve actually fall under one of those six heads. And when we change our resolving to daily prayer, we practice bringing our desires before the face of God and seeking the will of Christ.
How Might this Look?
Traditionally and catechetically, the Lord’s Prayer is broken down into eight parts: a preface, six petitions, and a conclusion. So if we used that suggested breakdown of the Lord’s Prayer and resolved to pray it daily or multiple times a week, how could that replace the usual practice of resolutions making?
The Preface: Our Father in Heaven
Resolve to remind yourself often that through the finished work of Christ, God is both your Father and in heaven.
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If I alone can determine what is right and wrong, true and false, just and unjust, I will always be bumping heads with all the others who also think and act this way. With no higher objective absolutes that transcend my and your judgments and assessments, we will always clash. Real human dignity and community can only come from recognising who God is and how we share in the image of God.

There are many ways to describe and discuss sin. Perhaps one definition of major significance is to speak in terms of autonomy. In its simplest form this means self-law or self-government. However, if there is a God who created us and seeks to govern us for our own best good, then autonomy is the height of folly – as well as sin. It is idolatry on steroids.
We perhaps see this especially played out in the radical trans movement. Here we have folks who have so deified autonomy that they believe they can – at will – redefine morality, redefine biology, redefine truth, and redefine reality. Talk about playing God! Talk about kicking God off his throne and elevating mere man in his place.
Last week I penned a piece featuring the important new book by Christopher Watkin: Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Zondervan, 2022). As I said there, this is such a wide-ranging and significant volume that a short review will hardly do it justice.
So instead I will feature aspects or chapters of the book in a number of articles. The first one focused on Ch. 23 and is found here.
What I want to highlight today is found in Ch. 5: “Sin and Autonomy.” The Australian Christian philosophy professor also stresses autonomy as the heart of sin, and shows why it is so very destructive. And let me preface this by citing a paragraph from the previous chapter, “Sin and Society”:
The absence of a sustained emphasis on sin and judgment in Christian cultural engagement is, at least, a little odd and, at most, a heinous omission that leaves Christian cultural theory limping and unbalanced. After all, sin is such a crucial figure in the biblical rhythm of creation, fall, and redemption, the rhythm that taps out the distinctively Christian approach to all things from identity and ethics and the environment to culture, the economy, and politics. 108
Exactly right. So it is vital that we speak about sin and identify it properly and accurately. Autonomy is key to all this. And it is the perfect descriptor of what happened in the garden with our first parents:
Adam and Eve choose to live by their own law, their own code of what is permitted and not permitted, rather than by God’s law, and they choose to do so in a world that God has created and sustains, as the creatures God has created and sustains. In the context of Genesis 3, autonomy manifests itself as deciding for oneself what is to be counted as good and evil. It is not, of course, deciding for oneself what is good and evil, because God has already settled that question, and any new legislation that Adam and Eve pass down from their DIY parliament does not annul God’s royal decrees. 133
All this should be sensible enough to understand, but sin of course twists everything, including our understanding. So it is like a toddler telling his parents that he knows what is best, that he can fend for himself, and that he is able to determine what is right and wrong. Or as Watkin expresses it:
It is hard to underestimate the extent to which many in our society today fail to consider what the Bible has to say about God on its own terms because that would require admitting that our own autonomous reason may not be the most reliable truth-discerning tool in the universe. One of the crucial pennies to drop in the minds of those who find their way to faith in their adult years is often the realization that, if there really is a God such as the Bible reveals him to be, then he is smarter than I am and his judgement is more reliable than mine: if he and I differ on a matter, and if he is really God and I am really a creature, then it is more than reasonable to assume that he is correct and I am mistaken. To reach any other conclusion would require a bizarre routine of epistemological gymnastics. Either God is God and I am not, in which case his judgement is to be trusted over mine, or else God is not God, in which case there is no reliable way of satisfactorily arbitrating at all between what is reasonable and what is not.
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It can be fairly concluded that the entire tradition of Old Princeton stretching back to Geneva understood natural theology as a species of true theology. The theologians we examined all believed natural theology to be an important, separate, and complementary discipline to supernatural theology.

Franciscus Junius (1545–1602) was one of the most influential theologians in the post-Reformation period. His Treatise on True Theology (1594) established many of the categories, and set in place the basic outline, that later systematicians would use in defining and delineating the nature of theology. Junius did not just shape later Reformed prolegomena, in many ways he established Reformed prolegomena in the first place. Not surprisingly, Junius is considered by some to be the quintessential Reformed theologian in the period of early Orthodoxy.[1]

Given Junius’s influence and stature, Nathan Shannon’s recent article “Junius and Van Til on Natural Knowledge of God” (WTJ 82 [2020]: 279-300) makes an important and provocative claim.[2] According to Shannon, assistant professor of systematic theology at Torch Trinity Graduate University in Seoul, “Junius and Van Til . . . agree that post-fall natural theology, unaided by special revelation, is not theology in any meaningful sense” (279). The singular thesis—and the most important claim of the article—is that for Junius, as well as for Van Til, “relational reconciliation is a necessary condition of true theology” (279). Or to put it even more bluntly: “Since true theology is determined by redemptive relation, natural theology, lacking this redemptive relation is not true theology, not in fact theology at all. Natural theology is in the end anti-theology” (279-80).

This is a bold thesis, as Shannon recognizes. The entire tradition of scholasticism affirmed the existence and importance of natural theology. And yet, according to Shannon, “Junius’s view of natural (as in unregenerate) theology marks a conspicuous point of departure from pre-Reformation scholasticism” (281). More than that, if Shannon’s argument is correct, Junius sounds a different note than virtually every orthodox Reformed theologian to follow in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the tradition of Old Princeton theology that developed in the nineteenth century. Considering the debate in Reformed circles about the legitimacy (or not) of natural theology, to have Junius on the side of nein would be significant—not only for one’s view of the post-Reformation period but for the pedigree of more recent Reformed theology. “This thesis,” Shannon writes, “so far as it is true, enhances the historical credentials of Van Til’s characteristically neo-Calvinist view of natural theology and natural reason.” In other words, if Junius believed that genuine theology is impossible “apart from monergistic establishment of relational restoration” (281), that “the theology of the unregenerate is prolific idolatry” (287), and that “even falsa theologia is charitable nomenclature” for post-fall natural theology (298), then Van Til’s thought has found a significant historical precursor.

My argument, however, is that Shannon’s innovative thesis does not fit the facts. If “the unregenerate must, it would seem, either know God or know nothing at all,” Shannon commends Van Til for betting on the latter (294). But is this the choice early Reformed theologians would have made? For whatever useful elements there may be in Van Til’s apologetic method, his approach to natural theology was a departure from the larger tradition. Mainstream Reformed thought has consistently affirmed that post-fall natural theology can be true theology. The theology of the unregenerate—though marred by imperfections and never saving—cannot be reduced to “prolific idolatry.” Natural theology is, in the end, not anti-theology.

In the first half of this article (Parts I and II), I will focus on Junius, arguing that he did not consider natural theology to be falsa theologia, but rather that natural theology, as a means of divine revelation, could communicate truths about God. In the second half (Parts III and IV) I will focus on Reformed theology after Junius, arguing that the tradition of Old Princeton—from Turretin through to Warfield—also affirmed the possibility of meaningful post-fall, unregenerate natural theology.[3]

I. Reading Junius: A Confusion of Categories

The central problem with Shannon’s thesis is that he has misread Junius, confusing his rejection of the theology of the pagans with a rejection of natural theology itself. A careful reading of Junius demonstrates the opposite conclusion from Shannon’s; namely, that natural theology—while imperfect and unable to save—is nevertheless divine revelation and belongs in the category of true theology.

The first sentences of Shannon’s article lay out his main claim, and they also manifest the main area of confusion. “According to Franciscus Junius (d. 1602),” Shannon writes, “since the fall, true theology is possible only where a redemptive divine-human relationship is established ‘through the communication of grace.’ For Junius this relational reconciliation is a necessary condition of true theology” (279). After Shannon’s first sentence there is a footnote which quotes from the eighth thesis from A Treatise on True Theology. The quotation from Junius reads: “Ectypal theology, whether taken in itself, as they say, or relatively in relation to something else, is the wisdom of divine matters, fashioned by God from the archetype of Himself, through the communication of grace for His own glory.” To be sure, ectypal theology (i.e., the theology God fashions for his creatures) is established through the “communication of grace,” but nothing in Junius’s statement indicates that this language implies redemption or relational reconciliation. For Junius, natural theology is a communication of grace, even though the recipient has not been savingly reconciled to God.[4]

The next two sentences from Shannon are also problematic. He writes, “Outside of this relational establishment, theology—dubiously so-called—may be found, but it is necessarily theologia falsa. There is for Junius no activity of the natural man which may properly be called ‘theology.’” The footnote for this sentence points to pages 95–96, 143, and 145 of Junius’s Treatise on True Theology. But these two sections of the Treatise are not talking about the same thing. The earlier reference (95–96) is about the false theology of the pagans, which is not properly called theology. The latter references (143, 145) are about natural theology, which is not to be confused with the pagan philosophy categorized by Varro and Augustine as superstitious (i.e., mythical), natural (i.e., physical), and civil (i.e., political). Introducing the category of natural theology by revelation, Junius writes, “When we say natural, we do not want it in this passage to be understood by the same meaning as we showed in the first chapter above from Varro and Augustine, but rather by its own sense and taken in itself as we will soon (if God wills) define it.”[5] In other words, Junius uses “natural theology” in two different ways—in a narrow way referring to a branch of pagan philosophy (which is not, strictly speaking, theology at all) and in a more formal way referring to a branch of true theology which is communicated through natural grace as opposed to special grace.[6]

Granted, Junius says about natural theology that “this theology” cannot “be called wisdom according to its genus except equivocally.”[7] But notice, Junius does not say natural theology is not theology; in fact, he explicitly labels it as such. What he posits is that natural theology is not “wisdom” in the same way that supernatural theology is wisdom. The equivocation is not whether natural theology is genuine theology (it is). The equivocation is whether natural and supernatural theology are theology in the same way (they are not).

At the heart of my disagreement with Shannon’s article is his tendency to read Junius’s discussion of pagan theology into Junius’s discussion of natural theology. You can see this confusion in the article’s footnotes which bounce back and forth indiscriminately between page numbers in the 90s (the chapter on false theology) and page numbers in the 140s and 150s (the chapters on natural theology). Shannon collapses two categories that are distinct in Junius—pagan theology and natural theology—and interprets them (like Van Til’s theology does?) as the same thing.

II. Junius on Natural Theology

In order to better understand the confusion at the heart of Shannon’s thesis, we  must understand the basic contours of Junius’s prolegomena. A Treatise on True Theology consists of thirty-nine theses expounded in eighteen chapters. These chapters outline a highly technical, but rather straightforward categorization of true theology.

According to Junius, theology—which can be of God (as its author) or about God (as its subject)—is commonly spoken of in two ways. One theology is true, the other is false and subject to opinion (Thesis 3). False theology is called theology only by equivocation (i.e., it is not genuine theology), for it “rests on opinion alone.” False theology consists of “unalloyed dreams and games in place of the truth, and idols . . .in place of the true God.”[8]

Further, there are two kinds of false theology: “common,” which is not disciplined by the cultivation of reason, and “philosophical,” which is aided by the development of reason (Thesis 4). This philosophical theology, which flourished in the centuries before Christ, was labeled by Augustine, Varro, and Seneca as superstitious, natural, and civil. All of this is labeled “false theology, which is nothing other than opinion and the shadow of wisdom grasping at something or another in the place of divine matters.”[9]

True theology, in turn, is either archetypal or ectypal (Thesis 6).Archetypal theology is the divine wisdom of divine matters (Thesis 7). It refers to God’s knowledge of himself.Ectypal theology is the wisdom of divine matters, fashioned by God from the archetype of himself and communicated by grace for His own glory (Thesis 8). The genus of true theology is wisdom, which includes “all principles both natural and supernatural.”[10] Ectypal theology can be known by the creature because of the capacity of the Creator (Thesis 9). In other words, God makes true theology possible.

Ectypal theology can be communicated, according to the capacity of the creature, in three ways: by union, by vision, or by revelation (Thesis 10). The first is the theology of Christ as God-man. The second is the theology of spiritual beings in heaven. The third is the theology of human beings on earth.[11] This last category is our theology, the theology of pilgrims (Thesis 13).[12]

Continuing with his careful distinctions, Junius posits that the mode of communicating revealed theology is twofold: by nature and by grace (Thesis 14). God is the author of both natural theology and supernatural theology: “The shared principle of nature equally as of grace is God.”[13] To be sure, supernatural theology possesses an entirely different kind of wisdom than natural theology.[14] Even before the fall, natural theology had to be nurtured by reason and perfected by grace (Thesis 17). After human nature was tainted by the fall, those first principles of natural theology remain in us, but they have been corrupted and quite confused (Thesis 18). As such, the light of natural theology after the fall has been rendered more veiled and more imperfect.[15] Natural theology cannot lead to perfection and cannot, in and of itself, be perfected by grace (Thesis 19). Nevertheless, we should not “ignore” or be “ungrateful” for “this grace, although it is natural.”[16]

Natural theology, for Junius, is that which proceeds from principles that are known by the light of human understanding (Thesis 15). Natural theology deals with things that are common (Thesis 16). The knowledge of natural theology and supernatural theology are imparted by the same mode (revelation), but they impart different kinds of knowledge.[17] Supernatural theology, because of its prominence in communicating divine truth, is sometimes called, narrowly, a theology of revelation, even though more broadly speaking natural theology is also given by revelation.[18] The false theology Junius repudiates at the beginning of his treatise refers to the idle musings of the pagans, not to the imperfect theology of the unregenerate man deducing principles from the light of nature.

Junius’s language can be ambiguous—using words like natural, grace, and revelation in different ways at times—but the overall structure of his argument is wonderfully organized. And within this organization we can see clearly that natural theology—though inferior to supernatural theology—is still true theology. Natural theology cannot save; it cannot (post-fall) be perfected; it does not impart the same kind of knowledge or wisdom as supernatural theology. But it is a species of revelation and of grace. In short, natural theology does not belong to the branch theologia falsa. It belongs to the category of true, ectypal theology communicated through revelation by nature.

Shannon’s interpretation of Junius fails to convince because of a fundamental misunderstanding that equates the false theology of speculative pagans with the natural theology of revelation. Writing in the tradition of Junius, Petrus Van Mastricht (1630–1706) insisted that “natural theology must be carefully distinguished from pagan theology as such, because the latter is false and the former is true.”[19] One could try to argue that Junius would have disagreed with Van Mastricht, but we must remember that Van Mastricht borrowed wholesale from Junius’s outline and from Junius’s categories, both of which had become standard Reformed fare by the first half of the seventeenth century.[20] For Van Mastricht to deviate from Junius on such a crucial point would have necessitated a lengthy discussion defending his more sanguine view of natural theology. The simple explanation is to see Van Mastricht’s careful distinction between false pagan theology and true natural theology as the same distinction Junius made at the end of the previous century. Consequently, in so far as Shannon is right that for Van Til true theology is impossible apart from the “monergistic establishment of relational restoration” (i.e., redemption and regeneration), Shannon is wrong to find an antecedent for this idea in Junius. For Junius, natural theology, always imperfect and never saving, is nevertheless a communication of divine grace and a species of true theology.[21]

III. Tracing the Tradition of Old Princeton

If the first half of this article argued that Van Til’s conception of natural theology does not find a precursor in Junius, the second half argues that Van Til’s entirely pessimistic view of post-fall natural theology is not resonant with the tradition of Old Princeton either. I should make clear that I am working from Shannon’s description of Van Til’s theology. In my estimation, Shannon gets Van Til right, but if someone were to argue that Van Til’s thought allows for a robust natural theology that would not undermine the more important point I am trying to make with respect to Old Princeton. My burden is not to repeat Shannon’s exploration of Van Til, but to argue that in so far as Van Til rejected the possibility of post-fall natural theology (as true theology) he is out of step with his own Reformed tradition.

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