The Necessity of Faith in Science
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:
-
Poured Out for Others
We are all called to offer ourselves wholly to God. “All of me to all of you, O God, because of Jesus.” Total surrender. Each of us is an ascension offering, daily giving ourselves to God, renewing our minds by his truth, and presenting our bodies as a living sacrifice. This is our spiritual worship. Following the apostle’s example, though, each of us is also called to be a drink offering for others. We’re called to be poured out as a glorifying accompaniment to their lives of sacrificial service.
Leviticus is the book where many Bible-reading plans go to die. Those who begin well in Genesis and Exodus find themselves, like the people of Israel, stumbling through the wilderness in Leviticus and Numbers, desperate to find their way to the story of David or the letters of Paul. For many, they stumble because they haven’t been taught the ABCs of the sacrificial system. The instructions about arranging animal parts, sprinkling blood, and bodily emissions are incomprehensible until they learn the basic grammar of the Levitical world.
Once we’ve grasped some of the basics, however, we find that we’re not only able to read Leviticus with more understanding; we’re also able to see depths in the rest of Scripture, including Paul’s letters, that were hidden before. Consider the following sentences, tucked away in his exhortation to the Philippians to do all that they do without grumbling or complaining:
Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me. (Philippians 2:17–18)
The language here is Levitical and layered. We are invited to consider the Christian life, and ministry to others, through the lens of Leviticus. Paul assumes that his readers would be familiar with the various sacrifices and offerings, and therefore able to comprehend the aim of his ministry and the aim of their lives.
All of Me to All of You
Paul references two offerings — the drink offering and the sacrificial offering (literally, “the sacrifice and service of your faith”). The latter is most likely a reference to the ascension offering, sometimes called “the whole burnt offering.”
The whole burnt offering is the baseline offering in the Old Testament, in which the worshiper lays hands on the unblemished animal so that the spotless animal now represents the sinful worshiper. The animal is killed, its blood drained and then sprinkled on the altar by the priest. After this, the priest arranges the dismembered body parts on the altar, with a particular focus on the head and the fat portions. Finally, the priest burns up the whole animal so that the animal, as the representative of the worshiper, ascends to God in the smoke as a pleasing aroma.
This offering is a fitting image of total surrender, of our heartfelt desire to draw near to the living and holy God despite our sinfulness. In it, the worshiper confesses, in essence, “All of me to all of you, O God.” Paul draws out this element of the sacrificial system in Romans 12:1–2:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
In the new covenant, rather than offering an animal through fire and smoke, we offer ourselves — our bodies and our minds — as our spiritual service and worship to God. We present the members of our bodies to God as his instruments, and we submit our minds and hearts to the truth of his word. And as Paul makes clear in Philippians, we do all of this by faith. Every Christian is now a living ascension offering, daily presenting ourselves to God through faith in Christ.
Read More
Related Posts: -
There Are Five Important Ways to Prepare for the Preached Word
Since the gospel is the Word of God rather than the word of man, come to church looking for God. Teach your children that ministers are God’s ambassadors who bring you the Word of God (2 Cor. 5:20; Heb. 13:7). Manton wrote, “So much preparation there must be as will make the heart reverent. God will be served with a joy mixed with trembling.” [Manton, James, 146 (James 1:21).]
First, before coming to God’s house to hear His Word, prepare yourself and your family with prayer.
As the Puritans were fond of saying, we should dress our bodies for worship and adorn our souls with prayer. Pray for the conversion of sinners, the edification of saints, and the glorification of God’s triune name. Pray for children, teenagers, and the elderly. Pray for ears to hear and hearts to understand. Pray for yourself and your family, saying: “Lord, how real the danger is that we will not hear Thy Word as we should! Of the four kinds of hearers in the parable of the sower, only one kind heard properly. Focus our minds, Lord, to concentrate fully on Thy Word as it comes to us so that we may not hear the Word and yet perish. Give us faith to hear and profit from it. Let Thy Word have free course in our hearts. Let it be accompanied with light, power, and grace.
Pray that your minister will be empowered by the Holy Spirit to open his mouth boldly to make known the mysteries of the gospel (Eph. 6:19). Pray for an outpouring of the Spirit’s life-giving, illuminating, and convicting power to work through God’s ordinances in the fulfillment of His promises so your entire family is motivated for good (Prov. 1:23).
Second, stress the need for every family member to come with a hearty appetite for the Word.
A good appetite promotes good digestion and growth. Peter says, “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Pet. 2:2). A good appetite for the Word means having a tender, teachable heart (2 Chron. 13:7) that asks, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” (Acts 9:6). It is foolish to expect a blessing if we come to worship with unprepared, unbelieving, hardened hearts. [Watson, Body of Divinity, 377.]
Third, discipline yourself and encourage your children to meditate on the importance of the preached Word as you enter God’s house.
The high and holy triune God of heaven and earth is meeting with you and your family to speak directly to you. Thomas Boston wrote, “The voice is on earth, [but] the speaker is in heaven” (Acts 10:33). [Boston, Works, 2:28.] What an awe-inspiring thought!
Read More
Related Posts: -
Let’s Study the Beatitudes! Part 3, The Mourners
The mourning that Jesus is referring to is a sorrow over our own unrighteousness. The Christian doesn’t bring one’s own worthiness before God but rather comes with the honest and humble recognition that we have no righteousness of our own. We are filthy sinners at enmity with God. We transgress the perfect law of God. We constantly sin and are unfaithful to God and to one another. A true and honest self-evaluation will inevitably reveal much within us to be sorrowful over.
The Christian life is no stranger to apparent paradoxes; apparent because they are not true contradictions. Yet there are many times where we seem pulled between two opposites. Walking the path between grace and truth can be a challenge in our interactions with others. We wrestle with the sovereignty of God and our own responsibility in our lives. In the beatitudes Jesus presents us with another one: blessed are those who mourn. How is this a Christian paradox, you may ask? Perhaps you have wondered how Jesus’ commendation of mourners squares with Paul’s command to “rejoice in the Lord always?” On the surface, a command to continually rejoice seems directly at odds with Jesus’ commendation of mourners. The answer lies in both the circumstances of our mourning and the promise that Jesus gives.
To solve the apparent paradox, we must first consider what Jesus means by mourning. Is Jesus saying that those individuals who walk around in sadness all the time are the truly blessed ones? Why would mourning be a virtue at all for God’s people? It is helpful to notice the two virtues that Jesus lists on both sides of this one: poor in spirit and meekness. Both of these are particular dispositions of humility and honesty toward one’s own character and abilities. So rather than seeing mourning as a life of continual sadness, we should see mourning as an attitude that there is something in us or about us about which we should mourn. If poorness in spirit is the realization that we have nothing in us of true worthiness, and meekness is the recognition that we have no inherent personal strength, then mourning should be seen as the recognition that there is something within us that should bring us true sorrow. It’s not that we walk around joyless and sad all the time, but rather that we recognize and mourn over something within ourselves. But what is that thing?
Set at the beginning of the sermon that encompasses the next few chapters of Matthew’s gospel, these beatitudes set the tone for what follows.
Read More
