by Cornelius Van Til
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 flattered. 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 respect 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 supposedly 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 religious. 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 equivalent 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 preaching 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 garments when men would weave our message into the systems 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 exhibits 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.
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