by Cornelius Van Til
When Paul and Barnabas came to Lystra and performed the miracle of the
healing of the man unable to walk from birth, the inhabitants wanted to
worship them as gods. They called Barnabas Jupiter and Paul Hermes because
he was the chief speaker. Then Paul and Barnabas "rent their clothes
and ran in among the people saying, Sirs why do ye these things? We also
are men of like passion with you and preach unto you that ye should turn
from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven and earth and
the sea and all the things that are therein: Who in times past suffered all
nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless he left not himself without
witness in that he did
good and gave us rain from
heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.
And with these sayings scarce restrained
they the
people, that they had not done sacrifice unto them. And there came thither
certain Jews from Antioch and
Iconium who per
suaded the people, and having stoned Paul, drew him out
of the city, supposing he had been dead" (Acts 14:14-19).
Quite a contrast this, between being sacrificed to as a god, and then being
stoned as it were to death. Which would you rather be? Paul chose rather to
be stoned to death if need be. He was willing at least to take whatever
might follow rather than be sacrificed to as a god.
Paul knows only two classes of people, those who worship and serve the
Creator and those who worship and serve the creature more than the Creator.
He had once upon a time worshiped and served the creature; then on the way
to Damascus he had learned to
worship and serve the Creator. Therein lay his conversion. To get men to
worship and serve the Creator rather than the creature, therein lay his
mission after his conversion. He knew the hatred of those who worshiped and
served the creature against those who worshiped and served the Creator. It
was that hatred that had impelled him to go to Damascus
to find and bind those that were of "that Way," that served the
Creator. He was prepared now to be the victim, if need be, rather than the
persecutor. Men must at all costs be shown the folly of worshiping the
creature; the issue between the two types of worshipers must never be
blurred.
In a sense, this story of Paul's preaching at Lystra may be taken as
typical of his entire method and-attitude when preaching the gospel to
those who worshiped the creature. Creature worshipers he found everywhere
he went, in the synagogues, in the market place, in the temples; among the
religious and among the irreligious; among the educated and among the
non-educated; among the Epicureans and Stoics as well as among the men of
the street; among the naturalists and the
supernaturalists
alike.
Paul appealed to the heart of the natural man, whatever mask he might
wear, and required of him that he repent from the vanity of creature
worship to the fruitfulness of the worship of the "living God."
That living God had appeared to him on the way to Damascus.
He had appeared as the second person of the Trinity through whom the world
had been created and was still sustained. He had appeared to Paul, this
living God, as the one who had come down into this world to die for the
sins of men, for their worship of the creature rather than the Creator. No
one could now, he had learned, worship and serve the Creator except he
worship and serve this Jesus Christ as Lord. This Jesus was God. He was the
Creator and the great benefactor in giving men forgiveness of their sin of
worshiping the
creature.
So Paul was determined to know nothing among men save Jesus Christ and
Him crucified. And this Jesus Christ as crucified had
been raised from the dead by the power of God the Creator. Being God He had
power to lay down His life and also had power to take it to
Himself again. In His resurrection through the power of
the Creator there stood before men the clearest evidence that could be
given that they who would still continue to serve and worship the creature
would at last be condemned by the Creator then become their Judge (Acts
17:31). Will men deny and defy the work of the Son of God in His death and
in His
resurrection?
If they do, they will meet Him as their Judge. Will they refuse to repent
from their sin of creature worship when called to repentance? Then let them
know that the judgment and their condemnation
is
coming as surely as their own consciences condemn them when they serve the
creature. No one can be confronted with the fact of the Christ and of His
resurrection and fail to have his own conscience tell him that he is face
to face with his Judge.
Having meditated on all this in the long period of his preparation for
his apostolic work, the Apostle Paul was fully determined never to have his
message subtly inter- woven with that of those who worshiped and served the
creature. He would rather be stoned to death than flat
tered.
He would rend his clothes and call upon men not to confuse his message with
that of the priests of Jupiter, with the highest being of Plato, or the
"thought
thinking Itself" of Aristotle.
But where did Paul say anything about the god of Plato or the god of
Aristotle? Was he not from all we know more favorable to the
"monotheism" of the Greeks than he was to the polytheism of the
popular religions? At any rate was he not favorably disposed to the "monotheism"
of the Stoics whom he met in Athens?
Is there not a mildness of speech on the part of Paul that does not look as
though he is even inwardly rending his clothes and calling on men not to do
such things? Was his message in the
Areopagus
milder than that which he had given to the common people in the market
place? Or was he somewhat afraid of the authorities who might forbid his
preaching or possibly even cast him into prison? The answer must be that
the attitude of Paul with re
spect to creature
worshipers was the same in Athens
as that which it had been in Lystra. Moreover, for him
the
.'monotheism" of the Greek philosophers, even that of the
Stoics, was still for him the worship of the creature more than the
Creator.
Paul saw the many vanities in Athens,
the city of the philosophers. He was stirred in his spirit because the city
was wholly given to idolatry. And when asked to speak before the
intelligentsia of the city, he did not say that he saw how the common
people of the city, the people who had never heard of the Porch, or the
Academy, who knew nothing of "the rational principle" which
according to the Stoics pervaded
all of the world,
were very religious or very superstitious. He knew that all men are by
virtue of creation by God very religious, and that all men are by virtue of
sin very superstitious. He knew that this is true of the learned and of the
unlearned alike. He knew that even the Epicureans who professed to believe
in no gods and who likely spurned the idea of building any altar to any
god, whether to a supposedly known or to an admittedly unknown god, could
nevertheless fitly be represented by that altar to the unknown god.
Whatever his reason may have been for singling out the altar to the
unknown God rather than the altars to sup
posedly
known gods as evidence that they were religious, it surely was not that he
attached himself to the system of thought that any of them professed to
hold.
In particular it would be no more possible, from Paul's point of view,
to attach himself to their doctrine of the unknown god than to their
doctrine of their known gods. And this for the reason that their doctrine
of the unknown god was involved in their doctrines of their known gods.
ALL
IS ONE
Basic to all the thinking of the Greeks was the assumption that all
being is at bottom one, that all change comes by way of some form of
emanation from that one being and is therefore ultimate as the One, and
that somehow all the ultimate multiplicity that exists as due to ultimate
change again ultimately returns to the One. They were therefore all of them
monists; they spoke of the reality as a whole without making the
distinction between the Creator and the creature. All is water, all is air,
all is change or nothing changes. Whatever is true of the world was for them
also true of the god or gods above the world. But they were at the same
time also ultimate pluralists. To the extent that they allowed for change
at all, this change was ultimate. If there was freedom anywhere, this
freedom was the same sort of freedom for gods and for men; if there was
accident, gods and men were alike subject to it.
There was therefore in their way of thinking no place for the
supernatural in Paul's sense of the term at all. Theirs was an exclusively
immanentistic way of thinking; following Adam and Eve
they sought to do without God; they had no place for God, the Creator, in
their system of thought. They were sure that such a God as Paul preached
did not and could not exist. They were therefore sure that Paul could not
"declare" this God to them. No one could know such a God as Paul
believed in.
But Paul knew that on the contrary, all men at bottom know God, the
Creator. All men know that they are
creatures of God, that they are law breakers. At bottom
they know that their own systems, according to which God can- not exist,
are rationalizations by means of which they seek to suppress the fact of
their responsibility as creatures of God. Their own systems therefore could
not satisfy them. Yet they would not, and as sinners could not, do without
these systems. These systems were like masks which they had put on their
faces not merely for "stunt night," but which they had put on so
as never to be able to remove them. So they tried over and again to polish
up and restyle these masks; there were face-liftings of various sorts. And
the particular style of masks in vogue at the time of Paul when he came to
Athens,
as best we can make it out from secular historians of philosophy, was a
nice blend of all previous schools of philosophy. In this blend there was a
generous allowance made for what was thought to be "the divine"
and "the supernatural." Men were very re
ligious.
There were the Epicureans, to be sure, but they were considered to be
rather extreme. Even among the cultured it was in good style to recognize
the fact that there was more in heaven and on earth than they had yet
dreamed of in their philosophy. They believed in "the mysterious
universe"; they were perfectly willing therefore to leave open a place
for "the unknown." But this "unknown" must be thought
of as the utterly unknowable and indeterminate.
THE SUPERNATURAL
There were according to these Greeks two ideas of "the
supernatural," one of which they would gladly recognize, which it was
custom and style at the time to recognize, and another which they would not
and could not recognize. They were glad to recognize the fact that the
universe is mysterious, that "science" does not cover the whole
of reality. They were even willing to recognize that it is so mysterious
that no one knows what it is. They had come to the conclusion that man as
finite cannot know the
uni- verse (including man)
which is infinite. The infinite, they had concluded, was "wholly
other" than anything they had so far known. The infinite was without
quality. If it was not without quality it was no longer infinite. The idea
of the infinite as
apeiron, as wholly
without quality, was the necessary concomitant of their idea of the
universe as known by man in terms of man.
AUTHORITY
There were therefore also two kinds of authority, one of which they
would gladly recognize and one of which they could not and would not, on
their basis, have anything to do with at all. They would gladly recognize
the authority of experts, in whatever field, the authority of those who had
had special experiences and had made special researches in one region or
another; they would be glad to hear Paul too on the subject of religion as
they might have been glad to hear Einstein on relativity. If he wanted to
speak to them about some experience that he had had with the "
noumenal realm," or if he wanted to tell them of
some
Einfuhlung that he enjoyed for
Das Heilige,
they were perfectly willing to hear of it; they were tired anyway and had
no hopes of anything really new coming forth. But they would not listen to
Paul if he came to them with
ab- solute authority
and if he claimed to tell them about that which they knew was inherently
unknowable. Who did he think he was? Was he not a human being like themselves? Was he not subject to the same limitation as they?
THE RESURRECTION
They
were a bit suspicious, shall we say, because
of what they had heard Paul say about Jesus and the
resurrection in the market place. But he is no common
revivalist; so let us hear
him out. Let us take him away from the rabble and ask him to make clear to
us what he means by Jesus and the resurrection. Maybe there are such things
as resurrections. Aristotle has told us about
monstrosities has he not? Reality seems to have a
measure of the accidental in it. And if anywhere, history is the realm
where the accidental appears. So maybe he has something strange to tell US.
We have an auditorium in which there is some vacant space. But Paul speaks
to them about Jesus and the
resurrection in a way not expected by them. He was
determined to know nothing among them save Jesus Christ and
Him crucified. He wanted to speak to them of the living
God, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe and of mankind. He wanted them
to be converted from the service of man to the service of God; he wanted
them to become covenant- keepers instead of covenant-breakers. So he did
the equiv
alent of what he did in the presence
of the men of Lystra. Again he tore his garments, this time figuratively.
Again he said in effect, "Sirs why do ye these things? Why are you
seeking to weave the resurrection of Jesus Christ into the pattern of your
immanentistic way of thinking? I am come to preach unto
you that ye should turn from these vanities to the living God. You yourself
admit that reality is mysterious. You have many altars to gods you think
you know and then you have an altar to a god you say you do not know. Will
you show me how you make this sort of view intelligible to yourself? What
is the relation between the gods you say you know and the god or gods you
say you do not know? Is it not the same reality, the same universe of which
in one breath you say that it is wholly unknown and also that it is wholly
known? If there is that in the universe which, on your system, is wholly
unknown, and if this which is wholly unknown has an influence for good or
for evil on that which you say you know, do you then really know anything
at all? Why not destroy all the altars to the gods you say cannot be known?
On your basis it is impossible to know anything unless you know everything,
and since by admission you do not know everything you should admit that the
whole of your religious activity is an irrational procedure. And what is
true of your religion is true of your science. You do not know what water,
earth, air and fire are. You appeal to some common principle above them all
from which as a common source they spring. But then this common source has,
as
Anaximander said, no positive quality at all.
It must be without quality to be truly beyond and thus truly common, and
when truly beyond and therefore without quality, it cannot serve as the
explanation of anything that has quality in the world that you claim to
know.
Your worship is therefore one of ignorance, of ignorance far deeper than
you are willing and able on your assumptions to own. On your basis there is
no knowledge at all; there is nothing but ignorance.
CULPABLE IGNORANCE
But worse than that, your ignorance is not only much
deeper than you own; it is of a wholly different character than you think
it is. It is ethical, not metaphysical in character. You are making excuse
for your ignorance on the ground that you are finite and that the world is
infinite. And you make an altar to a god whom you speak of as unknown.
Well, God the true
God, is not unknown to man at
all. He is not unknown to you. It is but sham modesty when you speak of
reverently bowing before the mysterious universe. To be sure, finite man
cannot know all the wondrous works of God. But man can and does know that
God, his Creator, exists. Man can and does know that God is the living God
who is not only the original Creator but also the controller and bountiful
benefactor of mankind. He is not far from any of us, His creatures. Has He
not made us aware of ourselves only as we are aware of Him as our God and
as our Judge? Your own conscience
answers "Yes" to what I say. You must admit
that it is only because you are seeking to hide the true state of affairs
about yourself that you have erected this altar to the unknown god. You are
trying to make yourself believe that you have done justice to the demands
of God if only you faintly recognize that there is something that is higher
than yourself, that God is bigger and better than yourself. But when you
thus recognize God as bigger and better you are still bringing Him down to
the level of the creature. You are still worshiping and serving the
creature more than the Creator. The God you are worshiping is Himself
involved in the cosmos and therefore dependent upon its laws. He is in need
of your worship; He is not sovereign over all but dependent upon all. What
ignorance, what guilty ignorance,
what
unbelievable ignorance for those who call themselves philosophers and
pretend to know what the people do not know.
REPENTANCE AND HOPE
But there is hope; there is hope through repentance. I am here to tell you
of the way of escape; I am not a philosopher. I am not telling about
monstrosities and wondrous things when I speak of the resurrection. I speak
of the Creator God who in Jesus of Nazareth came down to earth to die for
the sins of men, and was raised for their justification. Through Him there
is pardon for your sins, for men of all classes, for common men, for
philosophers and wise men, too. But to receive this pardon you must accept
this message on the authority of God Himself. I am come to tell you that of
which by your system you could never know. I am come to tell you that your
systems are not merely inadequate in the sense that they do not cover all
the questions that men must ask, but that they are sinful because they
leave out God. The wrath of God is upon you philosophers, upon you
scientists, you men who are monotheists as well as upon you who are
pluralists, upon you who recognize the supernatural as well as upon you who
do not recognize the supernatural, upon you who make the altar to the
unknown gods and upon you who make the altars to the known gods. You heard
me preach Jesus and the resurrection in the marketplace. I am now, at your
request, giving you the setting for such preaching. And the setting is
all-important. It is that which gives meaning to the fact of the
resurrection. Without this setting the resurrection would be a monstrosity
that you could weave into the pattern of your
immanentistic
views. Please do not so interpret the resurrection. I am teaching you of a
philosophy of history in which there are no
monstrosities. The Jesus who died and rose again from the
dead died to remove the sins of men that believe and trust in Him.
Naturally those who do not so believe and trust in Him will finally be
punished. For He is God, He is the Creator and Controller of the laws of
the universe. He is the ever living God. He will appear again in a special
way to judge as He has once come in the past to redeem. He came into the
world that they that should believe in Him should be saved and that they
who should not believe in Him should be damned; He will therefore come
again as He promised His apostles when He left for heaven; He will come
again, the second time as the Judge of men, to judge men by the truth which
He himself is.
Will you not then repent and bow to him now? Kiss the Son lest He be
angry with you in the judgment day.
By this time the men that heard him knew that Paul did not mean the same
thing that their poets had meant when they too said that men live and move
and have their being in God and that they are the off spring of God. The
Stoics meant by such expressions to assert that men were essentially of a
piece with God: men are by virtue of their intellects participant in deity,
they said. The intellect of man as participant in deity cannot sin. Man's
intellect may make mistakes because it is finite, but it cannot be wrong in
its purposes.
THE FRAME OF REFERENCE
So Paul tells them that if their poets have said what is right as far as
the words are concerned
they should have placed a
different meaning in these words than they did. If they said what was true
and right, they said what is right because their systems are not right.
They could say what is right not in accord with, but only in spite of their
systems. It is because the framework of the universe is what Paul spoke of
when he proclaimed to them the God whom in their consciences they knew, but
whom according to their professed systems they did not know, the Creator
and Controller of the universe, that they could say what is true about
parts of that world or about the whole world. They could say this
adventitiously only. That is, it would be in accord with what they deep
down in their hearts knew to be true in spite of their systems. It was that
truth which they sought to cover up by means of their professed systems,
which enabled them to discover truth as
philosophers and scientists. Would Paul for a moment attach
himself to what Stoics meant when they spoke of man as the offspring of
God? No more than he would attach himself to what they meant who had
built the altar to the unknown God. If he attached himself to the one he
could also attach himself to the other. But he could not and did not attach
himself to either. Both were involved in one another, and if Paul had
attached himself to either he could no longer have preached Jesus and the
resurrection.
Jesus and the resurrection presupposed the doctrine of creation. Jesus
and the resurrection implied the doctrine of judgment to come. It was the
Son of God who had made the world and who was to come as judge of men at
the end of the history of the world, who died and rose again from the dead
in His human nature. It would not be this Jesus nor this resurrection that
Paul would be preaching if he preached Him as consistent with the system of
origin or destiny as held to by any of the forms of
Hellenistic philosophy of the day. How could the
resurrection be preached as evidence of the coming of the judgment and
therefore as evidence of the coming condemnation of those that did not
believe and trust in Him, if the universe is all of one piece and gods and
men are both subject to its laws? How could Paul communicate to the Greeks
about the resurrection of Christ if he did not place this resurrection
before them in the theistic frame of reference given in the Bible in order
thus to distinguish it from
the ,'monstrosities"
of Greek philosophy?
So then we conclude that even at Athens Paul did virtually the same
thing that he had done in Lystra; he challenged the wisdom of the world. He
did what later he did in his letter to the
Corinthinians
when he said: "Where is the wise?
where is
the scribe?
where is the
disputer of this world?
hath
not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that the world by
wisdom knew not God, it pleased God through the foolishness of preach
ing to save them that believe" (I
Cor. 1:20
,21).
Is the church of
Christ
doing this thing
today. and
are we doing this today? Are we really desirous of knowing nothing save
Jesus Christ and Him crucified? Are we really anxious to preach Jesus and
the resurrection and the living God to men? Do we want to ask all men
everywhere to repent and to see in the resurrection the evidence of their
own eternal condemnation unless they do repent?
Then we must surely do what Paul did, tear our gar
ments
when men would weave our message into the sys
tems
of thought which men have themselves devised. We must set the message of
the cross into the framework into which Paul set it. If we do not do so,
then we are not really and fully preaching Jesus and the resurrection. The
facts of Jesus and the resurrection are what they are only in the framework
of the doctrines of creation, providence and the consummation of history in
the final judgment. No man has found this framework unless he has been
converted from the other framework through the very fact of the death and
resurrection of Jesus as applied to him by the Holy Spirit and His
regenerating power. It takes the fact of the resurrection to see its proper
framework and it takes the framework to see the fact of the resurrection;
the two are accepted on the authority of Scripture alone and by the
regenerating work of the Spirit. Half-way measures therefore will not
suffice; the only
method that will suffee is that of challenge of the wisdom of the world
by the wisdom of God.
Let us look at some of those who claim to believe or bring the Christian
message to men today but who still want to attach this message of Jesus and
the resurrection to the framework of philosophical speculation that does
not fit with it.
CHRISTIANITY AND REASON (1)
The recent little book entitled Christianity and Reason is similar to that
other little book of a few years ago called The Christian Answer. The aim
of both books is to make Christianity acceptable to its cultured despisers.
One of those cultured despisers, thinks Dr. Theodore M. Greene, was
Professor Walter
Stace who wrote an article in
the Atlantic Monthly of September 1948 under the title Man Against
Darkness. According to
Stace the universe has
been shown to have no meaning. Science has shown that man need no longer
build any altars to the unknown god. He knows that there are no gods, at
least no gods that are good and will reward the good. Against this thesis
Greene would prove that "science, in its strict sense, can neither
prove nor disprove God or goodness or beauty. It simply has nothing to say
on these subjects" (p. 9). If
Stace's
assumption, that all experience is of a sensory nature, were true, then his
conclusion would be right. "But what is to prevent us from being
really empirical and believing that man's moral and religious experiences,
which are no less coercive, vivid,
sharable. and
rationally interpretable than
(1) Ed. D. Myers, Oxford University
Press, 1951 are his sensory experiences, provide further contacts with
reality and further clues to its nature?" (p. 11). Greene is
contending that it is quite possible to reach a "moral and religious
dimension of reality" by a truly scientific method. He thinks it is
possible to hold intelligently that "man can in some measure know
God" (p. 12). He would also justify the idea of authority in religion
as wholly proper for the subject. But in all this he is very careful to
keep his feet on the ground as he thinks. He agrees wholly with
Stace that science says nothing about God. He insists
very care- fully that whatever any minister of religion might ever want to
say about God and religion must be in accord with what has already been
said about the universe by science even if this science has said nothing
about God. "Not only, therefore, is the position I would defend not
anti- scientific, it is committed to reliance upon scientific
evidence and to the full
incorporation of accepted scientifically supported interpretations of
nature" (p. 9). It is thus that the would-be defender of religion
makes sure that there shall never be any preaching of Jesus and the
resurrection after the manner of Paul as far as he can help it. Even if the
fact of the resurrection should be preached, it would have to be reduced,
according to Greene, to a repeatable instance of a law that the scientist
can deal with on his exclusively
immanentistic
principles. Here a lay preacher of religion, though he says that "Man
in the twilight need not falter" yet leaves him without any call to
repentance, without any confrontation with Jesus and the resurrection. The
worshiper of the creature is left without a challenge.
John Wild speaks in the same book on The Present Relevance o Catholic
Theology as maintained by theologians of the Anglican communion. He speaks
of a "keen sense of transcendent reality" (p. 34). He would speak
of the Deus
absconditus, but again this Deus
absconditus must be sure that be does not affirm
anything that is out of accord with the realism that has been developed by
the natural man in accord with the method of Aristotle. Jesus and the
resurrection, surely we ought by all means to have it, but by all means
only as a monstrosity, not as something that requires conversion on the
part of those who are confronted with it. George F. Thomas, Professor of
Religious Thought at Princeton
University,
wants to defend the idea of religion and the knowledge of God. But he wants
to do it by means of an empiricism that is somewhat milder and more modest
in its claims than was the theism of Thomas Aquinas. He wants to build
an attar to the unknown God but insists, as does Greene
and as does Wild, that this God must never presume to speak with absolute
authority to men. At most he must use the authority of the expert.
In each case the writers of this volume, as were the writers of The
Christian Answer, are careful to maintain that what they assert about Jesus
and the resurrection must be seen in the non-theistic framework that
destroys its very significance and challenge to conversion. No one, in
hearing what these men say, will feel compelled to ask himself whether he
is ready to meet his judge.
DIALECTICAL THEOLOGY
But what then of the dialectical theologians? Do they not present the fact
of Jesus and the resurrection as a challenge to conversion? Did not
Barth vigorously reject Brunner's idea when he
suggested that the Christian must make his religion understandable to the
consciousness of the time? Did he not write his pamphlet Nein and assert
that it is the first commandment by which we as Christians are to live?
Strange as it may seem, it is precisely
Barth
who ex
hibits best of all how one cannot present
Jesus and the resurrection at all unless one does it in the framework in
which Paul presented it. For what has happened?
Barth
seems to proclaim Jesus and the resurrection as a fact and on the absolute
authority of that Christ Himself. And he tells men that there is no
condemnation for them that are in Christ Jesus who walk not after the flesh
but after the Spirit. But he adds that all men are in Christ Jesus and that
all men do walk after the Spirit. How else could they be men? No man can be
conscious of himself without being conscious of forgiveness of his sins in
Christ. Self- consciousness and Christ-consciousness are involved in one
another.
The No of God, the condemnation by God of the
unrighteous, cannot in any case be the last word of God. His Yes is
the final word. The negation of God, that is the
sin of man against God, is an "impossible possibility." Man sins
against God, of course he sins against God, all men sin against God, but in
sinning against God they are in God; how else could they be present to God?
How else can a child disobey the parent that gives it orders unless it
be in the house of the parent? How else can the little
child slap its father in the face unless it
sit on
the knee of the father?
It is the resurrection of Jesus Christ which, according to
Barth, guarantees this fact that all men, to be men,
must be in Him. Thus for him the resurrection is witness of the fact that
there is no judgment coming in the sense that Paul used the word judgment.
He uses the facts of Jesus and the resurrection as evidence that men need
no conversion in the sense that Paul spoke of conversion; men are already
converted when they are aware of them- selves as men. And all this because
Barth is once more trying to fit the fact of Jesus and
the resurrection into the framework that is accepted by an
immanentist philosophy. Those who worship and serve the
creature are thus not asked to serve and worship the Creator; they are
rather told that what they are worshiping is the proper object of worship.
EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY
How then shall the Reformed minister set off his preaching of Christ and
the resurrection from that of the old and the new modernism of which
mention has just been made? Can he join the "evangelical" in this
matter?
Is not the deity and the resurrection of Christ
one doctrine on which all evangelicals and all Reformed Christians agree?
To answer this question let us first assert that all true Christians
believe in the resurrection in their hearts. But it is not true that all
true Christian preachers preach the resurrection of Christ in the same way.
In particular there is a great difference between the
"evangelical" and the Reformed way of preaching the resurrection.
The "evangelical" will silently grant that the non-Christian
scientist and philosopher have interpreted the "phenomenal realm"
correctly with their exclusively
immanentistic
principles. He does this by saying in effect that those who believe the
resurrection of Christ see more than the scientist and the philosopher can
discover. The resurrection is
iust [just?] said to open
"great vistas of truth" not falling within the field of science.
Secondly the "evangelical" will preach the resurrection not as
an indisputable fact but as something that Christians believe in and bet
their lives on for reasons that are not objective.
In both of these points the "evangelical," as is his wont,
makes concession to natural man's sense of autonomy. In both of these cases
the "evangelical" seeks "common ground" with the
unbeliever in order to win him. In both of these cases the evangelical
compromises the gospel and to an extent frustrates his own efforts. There
can be no full preaching or speaking of the resurrection unless the entire
framework of non-Christian thought
be challenged.
Reformed Christians are bound to be tempted toward cooperation with
evangelicals in the presentation of doctrines that all Protestants are
said to have in common. Yet their own system of theology ought to lead them
to follow Paul at whatever cost.
