Written by Craig A. Carter |
Monday, October 18, 2021
The biggest obstacle to a recovery of confessional Protestant faith today is that, as moderns, we are cut off from our heritage by the philosophical naturalist metaphysics that we have unconsciously and uncritically absorbed from our environment. We desperately need to step outside of modernity long enough to perceive its weaknesses and limitations. But we only absorb contemporary media and read recently-published books and we rarely encounter premodern thought. Even more rarely do we encounter premodern thought that is profound and deep. Perhaps stepping into a Gothic cathedral or listening to Handel’s Messiah evokes that same longing for beauty and truth that we sense in Scripture on the rare occasion that we meditate on it without distraction.

Protestantism has been in crisis mode since the early nineteenth century. The effects of the Enlightenment began to affect Protestant theology in the eighteenth century, but after Kant, knowledge of God became increasingly problematic and Christianity, in general, began to pall as a result of the philosophical naturalism that settled over Western culture like a blanket snuffing out faith. This trend accelerated after the Darwinian revolution in the mid-century and Protestantism was most affected. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the result.
Another Religion Altogether
Protestant liberal theology was a desperate attempt to save as much Christian content as possible from what Walter Lippmann would later term “the acids of modernity.” The liberal project involved restating Christianity within the constraints of modern metaphysics and modern metaphysics was essentially the rejection of the broadly Platonist metaphysics that had formed the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition for well over 2000 years.
As the philosopher Lloyd Gerson has demonstrated with great scholarship in a series of books, the main alternative to Platonism historically has been philosophical naturalism and, in the nineteenth century, philosophical naturalism triumphed decisively over Platonism. This was the context in which liberal theology attempted to preserve at least some elements of the Bible and theology. Even though many Christian words such as “sin” and “redemption” were retained, their meaning was dramatically changed. The definitive judgment of the failure of the liberal project was pronounced by J. Gresham Machen in 1923 when he said that liberalism is not Christianity, but another religion altogether.
From Fundamentalism on through the period of Neo-orthodoxy to the rise of Evangelicalism, the search for a Biblical and orthodox expression of Christianity has been intense. If liberal theology is no answer, what is to be done? If modernity excludes Christian orthodoxy how can we live in the modern world as Christians?
What it Means to be Protestant
Our problem today is that we do not understand the Protestant confessions and so we do not really understand what it means to be Protestants. We believe that the Reformation recovered biblical teaching after centuries of decline in the late Medieval Roman church but we cannot give an account of how the content of the confessions expresses biblical truth. Contemporary Evangelicals are not really Protestants; for most of them, Protestantism is a movement in history.
That in turn means that the great Evangelical movement in the Anglo-Saxon, trans-Atlantic world is cut off from its own heritage. Some of us may read John Calvin and John Owen occasionally, but we do not comprehend them on certain points and much of their depth escapes us. We do not grasp what some have termed “reformed catholicity.” In what sense are we in communion with Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas? We cannot say.
Soft Theistic Mutualism
If you doubt me, consider the sad decline in the doctrine of God that we have seen over the past 50 years as documented in James Dolezal’s little book, All That is in God (Reformation Heritage Books, 2017). There Dolezal shows that “soft theistic mutualism,” a view of God in which God is in time and affects and changes the world and the world, in turn, affects and changes God. This is essentially a pagan, mythological understanding of God and yet it has wormed its way into otherwise orthodox and evangelical writers. This is astonishing!
It indicates that something very deep and fundamental is malfunctioning in contemporary theology and the danger is that this view of God will – if not corrected – metastasize into a spiritual life-threatening cancer in a generation or two. Every confession of the Reformation and post-preformation period, including the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augsburg Confession, the Westminster Confession and the Second London Confession, teaches that God is immutable and impassible. And none see any contradiction between affirming those attributes of God and simultaneously affirming that God speaks and acts in history to judge and save. Moderns cannot, for the life of them, comprehend how they can be so inconsistent.
Moving Forward
My contention is that conservative Protestant theology today needs to undertake an alternative to the liberal project that is comparable in scope. We need to channel a great deal of time, energy and resources into a project of ressourcement. This French term brought over into English means a return to the classic sources of Christianity including the church fathers, Thomas Aquinas and other forms of premodern faith. Recently, in an encouraging development in the work of a number of theologians, many inspired by John Webster, the project of ressourcement has taken the form of looking back to the post-Reformation, Reformed scholastic tradition.
This movement is growing and spreading among many who find the shallow biblicism and ahistorical forms of evangelical faith that are so common today to be unsatisfying. Scholars like Richard Muller and Carl Trueman have led the way in recovering the riches of seventeenth-century continental and English pastors and theologians who utilized the metaphysics of the Great Tradition to do theology and write and expound the great confessions of Protestantism. We may not understand their philosophical assumptions, but we can see that they took the Bible seriously and wrote doctrinal treatises that need to be taken seriously by believers. CLICK TO TWEET
The biggest obstacle to a recovery of confessional Protestant faith today is that, as moderns, we are cut off from our heritage by the philosophical naturalist metaphysics that we have unconsciously and uncritically absorbed from our environment. We desperately need to step outside of modernity long enough to perceive its weaknesses and limitations. But we only absorb contemporary media and read recently-published books and we rarely encounter premodern thought. Even more rarely do we encounter premodern thought that is profound and deep. Perhaps stepping into a Gothic cathedral or listening to Handel’s Messiah evokes that same longing for beauty and truth that we sense in Scripture on the rare occasion that we meditate on it without distraction. But how do we get from here to there?
One practice John Webster urged on his students was that of reading sympathetically the great texts of the tradition. Even better, he suggested, was the practice of apprenticing ourselves to one of the great masters for a time by seeking to immerse ourselves in their thought. C. S. Lewis pointed out that reading old books is important, not because ancient writers never made mistakes, but because they tended to make different mistakes than our contemporaries do. We can spot those mistakes because they stand out to us, whereas the mistakes we and all our contemporaries commonly make seem like common sense to us.
So what to do? I believe that we need to do whatever it takes to break out of the cave of modernity and breath the free air of the premodern period where philosophical naturalism is not stifling the truth. But how? One way to do it is to engage in the study of ancient philosophical texts so as to be initiated into the great conversation that has gone on between the greatest minds in the Western tradition for 2000 years.
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Written by Cory C. Brock, James Eglinton, and N. Gray Sutanto |
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
Bavinck’s claim is that every person must honestly deal with the assumed faith necessary even in the sensory and knowledge processes themselves. Facing this reality leads directly to the necessary relationship between metaphysics and science. One needs faith as a habitus, Bavinck supposed, because it is the means of disciplining reason, lest it fall by way of the pride of life.

Faith in Pursuit of Knowledge
Because faith aims toward knowledge—or, we might state differently, because faith seeks understanding—the emergence of Christian science is not merely a novel response to modernist positivism. Rather, it is a historic Christian practice, and a necessity of life in a fallen world. Without sin, Christian science would be wholly unnecessary. There would be no breach in the consciousness between religion and knowledge apart from the rupture-induced act of denying the word of God in the egocentricity of becoming like God in knowing good and evil. Sin damaged the self to the extent that knowledge of a fact no longer coincides with knowledge of God. For this reason, Herman Bavinck offers both an argument for the necessity of faith in doing science and a narrative of the emergence of Christian science in Christian history.
With regard to the emergence of Christian science in Christian history, Bavinck makes the magisterial claim that the apostles of Christ “planted the banner of truth in that world of unbelief and superstition.” He suggests that in the first century, skepticism and mysticism displaced the former highly ordered orientation toward systematic investigation (here he likely has Aristotle in view). Against that backdrop, in its unparalleled sweep of the Roman Empire, Christianity offered the world a religion of truth. While Christianity proved distinctively attractive because of the grace it offered (alongside its claim of a resurrected Messiah), Bavinck’s account also makes the striking point that Christianity is a religion of grace precisely because it is first a commitment to truth. If the one God is truth, and his revelation in Jesus Christ is the unveiling of the truth, then all God does and says is truth. Christianity seeks not only to unveil truth but to make the first-order claim that God defines all truths, because God is truth and the author of essences. Thus, by the Spirit, “whoever believingly takes hold of this gospel is of the truth, is reborn through the truth, and is sanctified and freed [by it]. They are in the truth and the truth is in them.”
Bavinck’s historical narrative then turns to focus on how this approach to truth broke through a culture of superstition in the “world of the Gentiles.” The patristic fathers proved, as quoted above, that “Christianity was the true philosophy, and Christians were the real philosophers. They knew [wisten] reality in truth, they knew who God was, and now, equipped with this knowledge, they also had a different and better insight into the essence of the world, of nature and history.” Eventually, a positive approach had to be found with respect to the knowledge produced by the schools of the time, one that eschewed both the extreme of Tertullian’s denial of the good of pagan philosophy and the Alexandrian exaltation of pagan philosophy. The temptation of Christians throughout history, Bavinck notes, has always been to one or the other: to separate faith from reason or to synthesize them in a syncretistic manner. It is the age-old tension between “world worship and world flight, culture idolatry and culture contempt, Enlightenment [Aufklärung] and pietism.” Despite this perennial struggle, Bavinck argues, a clear wisdom emerged, which he promotes in Christianity and Science and throughout his wider corpus: neither wholesale rejection nor acceptance of pagan insight.
Bavinck’s own effort to avoid either error is thoroughly Augustinian, reflecting Augustine’s general insight that truth is made known by the coherence of authority and reason within a framework of faith. For “science [wetenschap] can thus teach only a little, and that little only to a few. It does not know the way to the truth, for it does not know Christ, and thus it often leads to dead ends.” Although Bavinck certainly does regard Augustine’s pairing of authority and reason to be at times dualistic, this Augustinian insight—that faith is a “gift of God” necessary for all knowledge, for all science—is valuable to him. Indeed, it leads to a further point regarding the necessity of the emergence of Christian science; namely, the logic of the necessity of faith as it relates to the possibility of knowledge. He explains this in the following remark:
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Setting an appointment with our pastor, Bob, she limped into his office on her mangled right foot (while her damaged left leg bore the brunt.) As she sat quietly in his study, he stated, “Gracie, this room is off-limits to every other voice telling you what to do. My job is to help quieten the noise so you can hear your own thoughts – and God’s leading.”

“We’ve done everything possible to save this leg, all that’s left is amputation. When you’re ready, we’ll have that conversation.”
Those words came from my wife’s surgeon, following numerous operations to save her right leg – crushed and disfigured in her 1983 car accident. Everyone in Gracie’s life, including me, had an opinion about this – and Gracie understandably struggled mightily during this time.
The clamor of opinions combined with our self-doubts and fears created a “wall of noise” that felt like a stack of Marshall amps at a Van Halen concert – and, sadly, Gracie found herself amid a storm of speculation by family and friends. At twenty-five, with a toddler, her young heart felt the awful dread of having to look her surgeon in the eye and instruct him to amputate her right leg.
Setting an appointment with our pastor, Bob, she limped into his office on her mangled right foot (while her damaged left leg bore the brunt.) As she sat quietly in his study, he stated, “Gracie, this room is off-limits to every other voice telling you what to do. My job is to help quieten the noise so you can hear your own thoughts – and God’s leading.”
Gracie pondered for over an hour while Pastor Bob sat at his desk – no words passed between them. Finally, Gracie looked up with tear-filled eyes and said, “I’m terrified of doing this,” she whispered. Gaining strength, she continued, “But I can’t live this way any longer – it’s got to come off.”
Nodding somberly, he assured Gracie he’d be with her through the ordeal and kept his word.
Sometimes, the greatest gift we can give to others struggling with heartbreaking decisions is to clear the room, quieten the noise, and sit with them. Scripture reveals God’s explanations are rare, but His presence is constant. Pastor Bob allowed Gracie the stillness and time to be alone with her thoughts, but God assures us that even in our lonely hearts, He is always with us.
More than one hundred years ago, Pastor Cleland McAfee felt rocked when both his nieces died in the same week from diphtheria. Pastor McAfee labored over how to address this terrible grief that washed over the entire community. Working on his sermon, he wrote what would become one of the most beloved hymns in the world. On Saturday evening, the choir assembled and gathered outside his brother’s home and quietly sang the hymn to the distressed family.
There is a place of quiet restNear to the heart of GodA place where sin cannot molestNear to the heart of God. 
Pastor Bob modeled what that hymn affirms.
Gracie later stated, “I didn’t know what was on the other side of that operating room door – but I knew who waited for me there.”
That confidence came from her sitting quietly – near to the heart of God.
Gracie repeated the scenario four years later when she relinquished her remaining leg. I watched nurses push her from recovery to the ICU when she awoke. Lying on the gurney, she lifted her hands and sang the Doxology.
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;Praise Him, all creatures here below;Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host;Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!
The responsibility – and privilege – of pastors is to help quieten the room for others with terrible challenges and heartache. It’s in those quiet places, near the heart of God, that we gain the strength and resolve to trust Him with the anguish – while praising Him in the unimaginable.
Peter Rosenberger hosts the nationally syndicated radio program, Hope for the Caregiver. He’s served as his wife’s caregiver for nearly forty years. His newest book is A Minute For Caregivers.

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