“Thou Knowest Not The Works Of God”: Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) And John Locke On Learned Ignorance

By Paul Schuurman

[Paul Schuurman is Assistant Professor in the History of Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. This article is based on a paper presented at the conference “Early Modern Philosophy in Britain and the Netherlands, 1500—1800: Philosophers and Philosophies, Universities and Learned Societies, Books and Journals, “Rotterdam, 26—2 8 March 2007; Annual Conference of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, organized by Martin Bell, Bart Leeuwenburgh, and Paul Schuurman. The author would like to thank the conference participants and his colleague Aza Goudriaan for their stimulating remarks.]

I. Introduction

On Monday 7 March 1678, during his visit to France, John Locke wrote an extensive French entry in his Journal on the best method of studying the philosophy of Rene Descartes. Locke gives a long list of works by Descartes, his followers, and his detractors. In the last category Locke mentions a work by Gisbertus Voetius that contains everything that can be “said against Descartes.”[1] This is the only mention of Voetius that I have been able to discover in Locke’s writings. Indeed, the father of philosophical empiricism seems to have precious little in common with Voetius, who as a professor of theology at the University of Utrecht worked hard to produce a Reformed version of the very scholasticism that would be attacked so vigorously by Locke, and whose orthodox Calvinism inspired him to wage a war against gambling, dancing, the theatre, and deviating hair styles. Yet the Dutch Aristotelian and the English proponent of the new philosophy shared to a remarkably high degree the same concept of docta ignorantia or learned ignorance.

II. Voetius

In 1655 Voetius produced two scholarly disputations called “De Docta Ignorantia,” but he had expressed the wish to discuss the subject on at least two earlier occasions, in 1639[2] and in 1643.[3] Voetius’s point of departure is his desire to combat vain curiosity. Ignorance as such is not good and we all naturally desire knowledge, but there are many things that should remain shrouded from mortal beings in their present life. Voetius repeats the warning of Thomas Aquinas that our thirst for knowledge should not degenerate into a hopeless quest that goes beyond the capacity of our faculties.[4] Unbounded curiosity easily leads to the presumption that we can know everything ourselves, without the help of other men or even without the help of God and the Scriptures, which provide us with the sole criterion of truth. And after this feverish desire will have met its inevitable frustration, we will sit down in despair and doubt whether anything can be known with any certainty at all. So the pretensions of a curiosity that wants to know everything and admires nothing, ends with the double shipwreck of atheism and skepticism.[5]

The answer to these twin evils is learned ignorance. This ignorance is not really ignorance at all but rather a kind of science. It is a knowledge of our own ignorance and of unknown things per se.[6] This science teaches us that some things cannot be known and hence should not be investigated. This perception will allow us to put our mind at rest, and this quietness will prevent us from slipping into atheism or skepticism.

Voetius’s definition of learned ignorance has both a subjective and an objective side; it pertains to our own cognitive condition and to the things outside us.[7] The subjective side of learned ignorance amounts to a form of self-knowledge. Knowing ourselves means knowing our cognitive limitations, and this knowledge will encourage us to a humility that is in accordance with Holy Scripture and will keep us from “making our own understanding the rule and measure of truth.”[8] The objective side of learned ignorance applies to things particulariter. communiter, or universaliter. The first case applies to things that some of us do not know presently, but will know as soon as we give them our undivided attention. This ignorance is learned when it is accompanied by the realization that we cannot know all things at once. The second case applies to things that will never be understood by most people, although they may be grasped by a limited group of professional scientists and metaphysicians. The third and last case applies to things that are absolutely unknown to any mortal being in this present life.[9] The imperfection and narrowness of the human mind and the vastness and the perfections of its possible objects are complementary causes of our ignorance, and it is precisely our realization of this state of affairs that makes our ignorance learned.

The objects of learned ignorance include both God and his creation, and Voetius illustrates this point with a quotation from Eccl 11:5: “As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.”[10] Where knowledge of God and of his creation ends, there learned ignorance should start. In theology, learned ignorance is fitting concerning the attributes of God, the Trinity, miracles, and in general about all things that are called a mystery in the Scriptures. In physics, learned ignorance is the highest we can hope for about many aspects of the heavens, the seas, the generation of animals, and the origin, essence, and faculties of the human soul.[11] Often we do not know why things are as they are, but only that they exist.[12] For instance, revelation has taught us that God bestows grace and glory on some though not on all human beings, but we have to acquiesce in learned ignorance when it comes to explaining the causes behind this process.[13] It is especially in such cases that learned ignorance applies to things completely or universaliter.

Voetius’s use of the concept of learned ignorance has been firmly connected with his longstanding polemic against the philosophy of Rene Descartes and his followers.[14] Indeed, when Voetius announced his intention in 1639 to treat the subject more thoroughly in the future, he may already have had Descartes in mind. This was certainly the case when he repeated his plan in 1643, and the eventual publication of the two disputations in 1655 coincided with the start of a new crisis about Gartesianism in Utrecht in that same year. In “De Docta Ignorantia” Voetius complains about soli-ipsi who want to know everything by themselves and who run the risk of ending with atheism and skepticism when they fail to limit themselves to learned ignorance.[15] There are other places where Voetius seems to use learned ignorance specifically against Descartes. Already in the disputation “De creatione” of 1638, he attacks mechanicist philosophers who have “recently” pretended to know that primary qualities such as quantity place, figure, and motion are the universal principles of nature, instead of confessing their learned ignorance.[16] Finally, in an essay on philosophical doubt appended to a disputation of 1656, Voetius goes to great lengths to distinguish learned ignorance from Descartes’ method of doubt, which according to him is a principium fanatico-scepticum.[17] There is nothing wrong with limited doubt in a didactic context, for instance, in the form of the questions of the catechism; but philosophical doubt in general, and Descartes’ experiment of radical doubt in particular, is to be rejected, because it tends to subvert the scriptural truths that Voetius tries to protect with his concept of learned ignorance.[18]

Given these anti-Cartesian credentials, however, it is remarkable that in neither of Voetius’s two disputations on learned ignorance is Descartes’ name mentioned a single time. Actually, apart from the implicit reference to soli-ipsi there is little in these disputations that points directly to Descartes at all. And Utrecht University had not prohibited any discussion about Descartes, as the curators of Leiden University had done earlier in the previous decade. Moreover, Voetius had no qualms about open attacks against Descartes in other writings if this suited his purposes.

A better understanding of Voetius’s position can be gained by a closer scrutiny of the origin of his concept of learned ignorance. As he explains in “De docta ignorantia,” he has no use for the well-known treatise by Nicolaus of Cusa on the theme. Gusanus tried to strip away the properties that an object does not have in order to obtain an approximate knowledge about the properties that it does have. According to Voetius, this is an improper use of learned ignorance. Gusanus uses the concept for a theologia negativa that aims to obtain probable knowledge about God, the world, and Christ, whereas according to Voetius learned ignorance should be an unambiguous expression of our ignorance about all these objects.[19] Voetius’s deepest inspiration is not Gusanus but Calvin.[20] In his Institutes Calvin had stressed that we are all covered by a darkness of ignorance.[21] We should realize that since we are not able to measure to the sun, even though we can see it daily with our eyes, we are certainly not able to grasp the infinite being of God, whom we cannot see at all.[22] We do well to refrain from inquiring into subjects such as predestination. Calvin gives the following admonition in relation to the latter topic: “And let us not be ashamed to be ignorant of something in this matter wherein there is a certain learned ignorance.”[23] At another place he stresses that “of those things which it is neither given nor lawful to know, ignorance is learned; the craving to know, a kind of madness.”[24] So, Voetius’s concept of learned ignorance very well fits Calvinist teachings that were already firmly in place for the better part of a century before the appearance of Descartes. Hence, it is not surprising that in De docta ignorantia Voetius is able to mention almost every possible adversary except Descartes. Voetian learned ignorance served a wide purpose in defending an increasingly beleaguered orthodox position against a multitude of perceived or real skeptic and atheist inroads on the authority of Holy Scripture.

III. Locke

I have not found a single instance of the Latin words “docta ignorantia” in Locke’s work and only four cases where he uses the English words “learned ignorance,” and in none of these cases does he use the term very positively. In one case it is contrasted with “profitable Knowledge,”[25] and from the other instances it transpires that Locke associates the term with a senseless scholastic terminology. “Learned ignorance” is mentioned in a context of “artificial Ignorance” and “learned Gibberish”[26] that “enables to talk much, and know but little.”[27] In spite of Locke’s apparent association of the term “learned ignorance” with empty scholastic phraseology, I will nevertheless argue that the concepts of vital importance for the entire project of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, and also that this concept shares many of the characteristics that we have already found in Voetius.

Locke’s concept of learned ignorance clearly has a subjective and an objective side. The subjective side concerns our understanding Locke hopes that by his enquiry into the faculties of the understanding, he “can discover the Powers thereof” and “how far they reach” so that we may learn “to sit down in a quiet Ignorance of those things, which, upon Examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our Capacities.”[28] The objects of learned ignorance are substances. All substances fall under the speculative science of natural philosophy, which includes “God himself, Angels, Spirits, Bodies, or any of their Affections.”[29] Locke repeats again and again that we are completely incapable of obtaining knowledge of the essence of substances. Hence we should guard ourselves against the presumption of letting our thoughts “wander into those depths, where they can find no sure Footing,” and the skepticism that follows in the wake of the failure of such endeavors. Rather we should learn to “acquiesce in the avow’d Ignorance” of such matters, so that we can employ our “Thoughts and Discours, with more Advantage and Satisfaction” to matters that are commensurate with our faculties.[30] So, Locke could fully subscribe to Voetius’s quotation from Ecclesiastes. Actually, this quotation is the first of the two mottos on the title page of the Essay. (The scriptural quotation was added in the fourth edition, while the quotation from Cicero can already be found on the title page of the first edition.) This first motto stresses our ignorance, whereas the second motto, taken from Cicero, emphasizes the need to admit this ignorance. And according to Voetius, realizing and admitting our own ignorance is exactly what makes it learned.

We have seen that for Voetius learned ignorance is a concept that can be used against the pretensions of almost any adversary who fails to meet his orthodox standards. Locke’s concept of learned ignorance is related to that of Voetius, and its polemic potential is just as wide. A closer look, however, at a relatively little-studied polemic in which Locke was involved at the start of the 1690s teaches us that he used learned ignorance specifically against the epistemological pretensions of rationalist philosophers. The controversy was with John Norris (1657— 1711), the best-known British follower of the French Cartesian philosopher Nicolas Malebranche. Locke was especially troubled by Malebranche’s hypothesis that we see the ideas of all things in God, which Malebranche had defended in Recherche de la Verite (1674— 1675).[31] I shall try to give a more detailed explanation of Locke’s use of learned ignorance using this particular case.

According to Malebranche, God has the ideas of all the creatures that he created in himself, since otherwise he could not have created them. Moreover, we know “that through His presence God is in close union with our minds, such that he might be said to be the place of minds as space is, in a sense, the place of bodies.”[32] Since the ideas of things are in God, and since God himself is in contact with our minds, it follows that our minds “can see what in God represents created beings.”[33] Although these are necessary conditions for seeing objects in God, they are not sufficient. The additional criterion is that it should indeed be God’s desire that we actually see the ideas in this way. According to Malebranche, there are three reasons for assuming that this is indeed God’s wish. The most important reason is that when we want to think about something in particular we first cast a glance over all beings in general and only then “apply ourselves to the consideration of the object we wish to think about.”[34] This confirms Malebranche’s thesis that all our particular ideas of created beings “are but limitations of the general idea of the Creator.”[35] Moreover, there is an economy in nature. God does great things by small and simple means. He could have chosen to produce “as many infinities of infinite numbers of ideas as there are created minds,”[36] but he has chosen the more simple option of having the idea of each material object only once, in himself, and allowing each of us to see the object in question through its idea in himself. Finally, the “vision in God” admirably expresses the fact that we can know nothing without God,[37] or, as is attested in 2 Cor 3:5: “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.”

Locke’s polemic against Norris, and through Norris against Malebranche, occasioned four texts of very unequal length.[38] The main text is known as “An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things In God.” In this text Locke balks at the additional criterion of God needing to give active and constant authorization to our vision of ideas in himself. According to Locke this reduces Malebranche’s account to complete vacuity.[39] He systematically attacks all three reasons given by Malebranche for the assumption that God wishes us to perceive bodies through his ideas, and in each of these three cases he makes skillful use of an agnostic line of argument that flows from his concept of learned ignorance.

Firstly, Malebranche’s contention that the “vision in God” conforms with the order in which our mind grasps things (beings in general first, particular things later), typically and unsurprisingly meets with the full brunt of Locke’s empiricist epistemology. According to him, we receive particular ideas first and general ideas only at a later stage. This well-known point also influences a slightly more complicated matter, and that is Locke’s views about Malebranche’s defense of God’s simplicity. According to Malebranche, “particular ideas are in fact but participations in the general idea of the infinite”[40] in God, and “In order for us to conceive of a finite being, something must necessarily be eliminated from this general notion of being.”[41] In this way, Malebranche tries to bring about the difficult feat of maintaining both the priority of general notions over particular notions and the possibility of perception of particular objects through the vision in a God who by his own nature is simple. Locke is hardly impressed by this argument. He remarks that once Malebranche grants the existence of distinct ideas of objects, he must, according to his own thesis of the “vision in God,” admit that these distinct ideas are in God; and their very distinctness means that they cannot be conflated into one general notion of being. So, Malebranche’s apparent fusion of his ontological claim about God (his simplicity) and epistemological claims about us (our ability to partake in a multitude of particular and distinct ideas that are in God) leads him to contradictions about which Locke remarks: “This seemes to me to expresse a Simplicity made up of variety, a thing I cannot understand.”[42] Locke’s own answer is a rigorous separation of Malebranche’s claims. Locke feels that as long as our ability to have a multitude of distinct ideas is joined with a learned ignorance about the nature of God and the way he produces these ideas, it can safely be argued that we have particular ideas before general ideas, without touching the problem of God’s simplicity.[43]

Secondly Malebranche had argued that God does great things by small means. Using this principle of divine economy, God has chosen the simple option of having the idea of each material object only once, in himself, allowing each of us to see the object through this single idea in himself. Locke replies that God indeed never does anything in vain, but he uses the argument from economy in a completely different way, not for the “vision in God,” but for ideas caused by sensory perception. God has given us wonderfully contrived senses and we may assume that these contribute in some way to producing ideas in our minds by the presence of objects. If not, then God’s creation of senses would have been “lost labour.”[44] Moreover, if we would not need our senses to form the ideas of material objects, then a blind man could have these ideas as well as a man endowed with sight, and this is obviously not the case. Here again, Locke admits his ignorance about how ideas are produced in our minds, but human ignorance should not be used as a criterion for putting strictures on God’s omnipotence, “As if it were impossible for the Almighty to produce any thing but by ways we must conceive, and are able to comprehend.”[45]

Thirdly, there was Malebranche’s argument that the “vision in God” is in accordance with God’s will, because it makes us completely dependent on this will. According to Locke, this means that Malebranche gives a very laborious explanation for something that he had been prepared to accept all along: “that the Ideas we have are in our mindes by the will and power of God, though in a way that we conceive not, nor are able to comprehend.”[46] Locke admits that vision by sensory impressions leaves us as ignorant about God’s will as Malebranche’s “vision in God”: “Here is the will of God giveing union and perception in both cases, but how that perception is made in both ways seemes to me equally incomprehensible.”[47] The difference is that the “vision of God” is a pretentious “learned circuit,” which, according to Locke, “in good earnest seemes to me to be nothing but goeing a great way about to come to the same place.”[48] Vision by sensory impressions, on the other hand, is more plausible because it is more simple, and it is more simple because it does not try to make explanative use of God, whose ways we cannot know.

IV. Evaluation: Differences Between Learned Ignorance In Voetius And Locke

Now that the many similarities between Voetius and Locke on learned ignorance have been outlined, it may be useful to conclude with an attempt to discuss their differences. Both men are convinced that learned ignorance is the right response to something that is described as “our present state,” or as Locke puts it: “Our knowledge being so narrow ... it will, perhaps, give us some Light into the present State of our minds, if we look a little into the dark side, and take a view of our own Ignorance.”[49] But Voetius and Locke give a different interpretation of this “present state.” This difference can best be appreciated in the context of their different theological convictions.

For Voetius, the cognitive limitations of our present state are in large part, though not exclusively, a consequence of the Fall.[50] Since Adam’s original sin, and because of this sin, the entire human race has been in a state of universal blindness and corruption that has diminished its natural cognitive faculties.[51] The ignorance caused by the original sin is in itself culpable,[52] but attempts to nullify this ignorance would amount to arrogance and are therefore equally blameworthy. Paradoxically enough, the only sensible way out of this predicament is its acceptance, and learned ignorance is a way of expressing this acceptance.

In Locke’s Essay, on the other hand, hardly anything can be found about the cognitive consequences of the original sin.[53] His discussion of our present state is not so much in terms of human sin as in terms of God’s own designs. Locke’s God is first of all concerned with proportion and economy. Locke remarks, “Our Business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our Conduct,”[54] and he also notes that God has given us faculties that are admirably suitable to the “State of Mediocrity and Probationership, he has been pleased to place us inhere.”[55] We should actually be grateful to God that he has not, for instance, endowed us with microscopic eyes, but merely with eyes that sustain us in our practical everyday pursuits: “And if by the help of . . . Microscopical Eyes ... a Man could penetrate farther than ordinary into the secret Composition, and radical Texture of Bodies, he would not make any great advantage by the change, if such an acute Sight would not serve to conduct him to the Market and Exchange.”[56]

There is another difference between Voetius and Locke. Locke’s learned ignorance is rigidly and exclusively bound to substances, and applies in equal measure to all substances. Trying to know the essence of substances in spite of our limitations is not so much morally reprehensible as futile and wasteful. This futility holds true as much for material as for spiritual substances. For Voetius on the other hand, the connection between learned ignorance and substances is less stringent. We have seen that learned ignorance about objects particulanter and communiter is relative and flexible. Within these categories there are no fixed barriers between ignorance and knowledge. Only Voetius’s third category learned ignorance about things universaliter, is very strict. Attempts to understand the mysteries of the Christian faith are not only futile but even sinful.

So, Voetius and Locke shared a concept of learned ignorance that was motivated theologically, and for both men these theological reasons were summarized by the verse in Ecclesiastes that Locke would eventually use as the first motto of the Essay. But Voetius knew that we cannot know some things because of Adam’s unfortunate lapse, while Locke knew that we cannot know any substance whatsoever because of God’s own designs.

Notes

1. John Locke, “tout ce qu’on peut dire contre Descartes,” in An Early Draft of Locke’s Essay Together with Excerpts from his Journal (ed. R. I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 110. Locke mentions the “Meletemata Philosophica,” but I have not found any work by Voetius with this title. Locke is probably referring to Voetius, Selectae disputationes theologicae (= SDT) (5 vols.; Utrecht/Amsterdam: J. van Waesberge, 1648—1669). A book with the title Meletemata philosophica was written by Adrianus Heereboord (Leiden: F. Moyard, 1654).
2. Voetius, “De Atheismo,” in SDT, 1:114.
3. Voetius, “Des natures et des formes substantielles des choses,” attached to the Naratio historica, in Rene Descartes and Martin Schoock, La Querelle d’Utrecht (ed. T Verbeek; Paris: Les impressions nouvelles, 1988), 111.
4. Voetius, “De ignorantia” (= DI) II, in SDT, 3:683: “. . . inordinatus appetitus circa cognitionem . . .”
5. Ibid.
6. Voetius, “De docta ignorantia” (= DDI) I, in SDT, 3:670: “. . . cognitio ignorantiae nostrae, & rerum ignoratarum aut ignorabilium, qua talium . . .”
7. Voetius, DDI I, in SDT, 3:669: “Accipitur autem docta ignorantia vel proprie, vel improprie. Proprie rursum dupliciter: vel ut directe, immediate, formaliter & primo dicit quarundam rerum ignorantiam; secundo & consequenter reflexivam cognitionem istius ignorantiae nostrae cum ea conjunctam: vel ut directe, primo immediate & formaliter dicit cognitionem ignorantiae alicujus in nobis: & mediate cognitionem rei ignotae seu ignoratae. Impropriety, catachrestice, accipitur pro scientia rerum divinarum & naturalium, quae & quatenus in hac vita a nobis habetur aut haberi potest.”
8. Voetius, DI II, in SDT, 3:681: “Ne quis mensuret seipsum seipso, 2 . 12- aut ingenium suum canonem & mensuram veritatis faciat.”
9. Voetius, DDI I, in SDT, 3:671.
10. Voetius, DDI I, in SDT, 3:679: “De occultis naturae miraculis, deque qualitatibus occultis, antipathiis & sympathiis ne hie disquiram, ex testimoniis Scripturae evinco ignotam generationem nominis Eccl. ii. vers. 5. collat. cum Psal. 139. vers. 14. 15. 16 viam & motum venti, Ioh. 3. vers. 8.”
11. Voetius, DDI II, in SDT, 3:690: “Quam multa de coelo, mari & aquis, igni, meteoris, de generatione inanimatorum & animatorum praecipue hominis, & animae humanae origine, essentia, facul-tatibus, &c.”
12. Voetius, DDI I, in SDT, 3:676: “... in cognitione τί ὅτι acquiescere, & caetera quae ad τί διότι pertinent, docte ignorare . . .”
13. Voetius, DDI I, in SDT, 3:671: “Haec sunt, quae aut absolute, aut ex hypothesi imperfectionis nostrae in hac vita, non sunt scibilia.” See also DDI II, in SDT, 3:683; DDI I, in SDT, 3:671; and “De athismo,” in SDT, 1:126-27.
14. T. Verbeek, “From ‘Learned Ignorance’ to Scepticism: Descartes and Galvinist Orthodoxy,” in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (ed. Richard H. Popkin; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), 31-45.
15. Voetius, DDIII, in SDT, 3:683: “Contra si qui inter dictos literatos, parvi aut saltern mediocris ingenii, aut exiguae eruditionis & nullius fere, aut admodum modicae lectionis velint esse utres & soli-ipsi; necessario aut in desperationem quidquam in scientiis praestandi, aut in morosophias, vertigines, Phaetonticos conatus prolabuntur.” See also ibid., 687: “Soli-ipsis accense etiam Lullistas, Paracelsistas, qui se dicunt Hermeticos, & alios novos, sed obscuros atque in herba emortuos philosophantes, quales e. gr. Fratres roseae crucis,” and Voetius, “Paralipomena” to “Methodus” in SD7; 1:1161.
16. Voetius, “De creatione VI,” in SDT, 1:673: “Hie ergo sistitur cursus eorum: qui quantitate, quiete, situ, figura, motu locali tanquam principiis naturae universalibus omnia effecta se facillime & ad oculum demonstraturos nuper jactabant; quique hinc depulsi ad alia atque alia nova asyla confugiunt; ne soil, doctam ignorantiam alicubi cogantur fateri.”
17. Voetius, “Appendix de dubitatione philosophica” to “De fide, conscientia, theologia dubitante,” in SDT, 3:868: “Ut argumento a necessaria scrutatione & questione veritatis non evincitur necessitas dubitationis de eadem per se tanquam medii aut principii: sic multo minus evincitur necessitas negandae a studiosis certissimae veritatis, provisionaliter sc. in ingressu Academiae & studii Philosophici, aut in perpetuum amplectendi principium illud fanatico-scepticum, Quod nihil scitur: ex lumine scil. & ratione naturali. . .”
18. Ibid., 867-68; see also the “Paralipomena quaedam” to the “Methodus respondendi,” in SDT, 1:1159.
19. Voetius, DDI I, in SDT, 3:670 and 671; see also Richard H. Popkin, “Theories of knowledge,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (ed. Charles B. Schmitt; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 674; and Charles H. Lohr, “Metaphysics,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 585.
20. Voetius, DDI I, in SDT, 3:679: “Et ostendit hoc ipse Deus per longam inductionem cap. 38. 39. 40. 41. Cahinus I. I. Instil, cap. 13. §. 21- ut doctam ignorantiam rerum divinarum commendet
21. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (2 vols; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 4.1.12.
22. Ibid., 1.13.21.
23. Ibid., 3.21.2.
24. Ibid., 3.23.8.
25. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. Peter H. Nidditch; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), IVxii.12 (647).
26. Ibid., III.x.9-10(495).
27. John Locke, Mr. Locke’s Reply to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to his Second Letter, in The Works of John Locke (10 vols.; Aalen: Scientia, 1963), 4:371.
28. Locke, Essay, I.i.4 (44-45).
29. Ibid., IV.xxi.2 (720).
30. Ibid., I.i.7 (47).
31. Nicolas Malebranche, Recherche de la verite oil Von traite de la nature de Vesprit de Vhomme et de Vusage qu’ilen doitfairepour eviter Verreur dans les sciences (ed. Genevieve Rodis-Lewis; 3 vols.; Paris: Vrin, 1962-1964).
32. Recherche, 3.2-6 (1:437): “que Dieu est tres-etroitement uni a nos ames par sa presence, de sorte qu’on peut dire qu’il est le lieu des esprits, de meme que les espaces sont en un sens le lieu des corps”; ET: The Search after Truth (ed. and trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp; Gam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 230 (hereafter LO).
33. Recherche, 3.2-6 (1:437): “Ces deux choses etant supposees, il est certain que l’esprit peut voir ce qu’il y a dans Dieu qui represente les etres creez, puisque cela est tres-spirituel, tres-intelligible, & tres-present a l’esprit” (LO, 231).
34. Recherche, 3.2-6 (1:440): “que lors que nous voulons penser a quelque chose en particulier, nous jettons d’abord la vue sur tous les etres, & nous nous appliquons ensuit a la consideration de l’objet auquel nous souhaitons de penser” (LO, 232).
35. Recherche, 3.2-6 (1:443): “Ainsi comme nous n’aimons aucune chose que par l’amour neces-saire que nous avons pour Dieu, nous ne voyons aucune chose que par la connoissance naturelle que nous avons de Dieu: & toutes les idees particulieres que nous avons des creatures, ne sont que des limitations de l’idee du Greateur” (LO, 233).
36. Recherche, 3.2-6 (1:438): “autant d’infinitez de nombres infmis d’idees, qu’ily a d’esprits creez” (LO, 231).
37. Recherche, 3.2.6 (1:439) (LO, 231).
38. (1) MS Locke c. 28,fols. 107-112, “JL to M’Norris’V’JL Answer to Mr Norris Reflections 92,” published by Richard Acworth in The Locke Newsletter2 (197’1): 8-11; (2) MS Locke d. 3, 1-86, “JL Of seeing all thing[s] in God 1693,” manuscript in the hand of an amanuensis, published by Peter King as “An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things In God,” in the Posthumous Works, 137-213 (= “Examination”); (3) MS Locke d. 3, 89-109, “Some other loose thoughts which I set down as they came in my way in a hasty perusal of some of Mr Norris’s writeings,” probably written in 1693 and published in 1720 by Pierre Desmaizeaux as “Remarks upon Some of Mr. Norris’s Books” (= “Remarks”); (4) finally, there is an unpublished fourth text, “Recherche”; MS Locke c. 28, fol. 159r-159, probably written in 1693 or somewhat earlier, devoted not to Norris but exclusively to the “vision in God” and to related problems discussed in Malebranche’s Recherche de la verite (I.iii.l, 2, and 5).
39. Locke, “Examination”: “But when, after this, I am told that their presence [of ideas to our minds] is not enough to make them be seen, but God must do some thing farther to discover them to me I am as much in the darke as I was at first.”
40. Malebranche, Recherche, 3.2-6 (1:441): “toutes ces idees particulieres ne sont que des participations de l’idee generale de l’infini” (LO, 232).
41. Ibid.: “Mais enfm que nous concevions un etre fmi, il faut necessairement retrancher quelque chose de cette notion generale de l’etre” (LO, 232); see also Recherche, 2:446 note *.
42. Locke, “Examination,” par. 36; see also “Remarks,” par. 11.
43. Locke, “Examination,” par. 36: “God I believe to be a simple being that by his wisdome knows all thing[s], and by his power can do all things, but how he does it I thinke my self lesse able to comprehend than to contain the Ocean in my hand or grasp the Universe with my span.” See also ibid.: “though it cannot be denyd that God sees and knows all things yet when we say we see all things in him it is but a metaphorical expression to cover our ignorance in a way that pretends to explain our knowledge, seeing things in God signifieing no more than that we perceive them we know not how.”
44. Locke, “Remarks,” par. 3.
45. Ibid.
46. Locke, “Examination,” par. 35.
47. Ibid., par. 47
48. Ibid., par. 45.
49. Locke, Essay, IViii.22 (553); cf. Voetius, DDI I, in SDT, 3:679.
50. Voetius, “DI I,” in SDT, 3:636-41; see also “Appendix de dubitatione philosophica” in “De fide” in SDT, 3:847; “De propagatione peccati originalis” in SDT, 1:1105.
51. Voetius, “De fide,” in SDT, 3:847: “. . . homines de facto in Philosophic theoretica & practice, & consequenter in Theologia naturali, multo magis in supernaturali, idque per interventum lapsus & inde ortae universalis coecitas ac corruptionis, ignorantia laborare . . .”
52. Voetius, “DI III,” in SDT, 3:653: “An ignorantia seu excoecatio invincibilis, quae provenit ex peccato originis, etiam ipsa ignorantia originalis, quae pars est peccati originalis, excuset a peccatis ex ea commissis. Resp. Meg. Quia est vincibilis & voluntaria, & consequenter culpabilis, non quidem in se, & ex hypothesi praesentis status; sed in causa, in peccato scil. primo Adami; propter quod nobis imputatum in mentis coecitatem originalem & impotentiam voluntatis nostrae ad bonum incidimus.”
53. Cf. Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature (ed. W. von Leyden; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 139 n. 2; see also “Analytical Summary” by von Leyden in ibid., 97-98.
54. Locke, Essay, I.i.6 (46).
55. Ibid., IVxiv.2 (652); see also ibid., II.xv.ll (203).
56. Ibid., II.xxiii. 12 (303). See also Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 238: “Locke’s theory of the acquisition of knowledge was formulated in the climate created by Comenius and other educationalists, with their emphasis on direct experience and the collection and ordering of ideas from childhood onward. While this climate at first encouraged and supplied a justificatory rhetoric to protoscience, microscopy had outstripped it.”

Catholicity Global And Historical: Constantinople, Westminster, And The Church In The Twenty-First Century

By Robert Letham

[Robert Letham, a minister in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in England and Wales, is Senior Tutor in Systematic and Historical Theology at Wales Evangelical School of Theology in Bridgend, Wales. This article is a revised version of his presentation given as the second annual Richard B. Gaffin Lecture Series in Theology, Culture, and Missions at Westminster Theological Seminary on April 15, 2009.]

“We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church”: so runs the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed, the one thread that holds together the tattered fragments of the Christian church. In this creed Constantinople I asserts four things: the unity of the church—it is one; its holiness—it belongs to God; its catholicity—the church is international, found throughout the world, and “teaches completely, without any omissions, all the doctrines which ought to be known to humanity”;[1] and its apostolicity—the church is founded on the apostles and the apostolic teaching.

This Niceno-Constantinopolitan quadrilateral is based firmly on the teaching of the Bible. It is expressed clearly in one concise passage, Eph 2:11-22. Here Paul focuses on the unity of the church, for the Jew-Gentile division has been broken down by Christ so that “he made both one”; “he created the two in him into one new man.” Peace with God in and through Christ simultaneously reconciles and unites the strongest enemies in one body to God through the cross. Later, Paul affirms that there is one baptism. In his other letters the same theme is prominent. Romans was probably written against the backcloth of tensions at Rome between Jewish and Gentile Christians. Yet the gospel is for both, and both are branches of the same olive tree. Philippians addresses the need for the church to stand shoulder to shoulder in the face of persecution, for each to look not on their own interests but those of the other, for Euodia and Syntyche to reach a common agreement. In First Corinthians, in the face of rampant factionalism, Paul insists that there is only one body. In the course of time, differing interpretations arose on the unity of the church. Rome held that the church’s unity—and catholicity—was founded on Christ’s appointment of Peter as the rock on which it would be built, so Peter as the bishop of Rome and all his successors were and are the basis of the church. There having been no western representatives at Constantinople I, it took over one hundred years for it to be fully recognized as ecumenical—despite having resolved the trinitarian crisis. We will not be discussing the way Rome has interpreted this quadrilateral, as it was originally an eastern statement. The East followed more closely the Cyprianic model, in which the apostolate—and from that the episcopate—was collegial.

In Ephesians, Paul describes the church as holy—”the whole building grows into a holy temple (noon hagiori) in the Lord.” It belongs to God, and its holiness is expressed in dynamic growth. As the temple was the dwelling place of Yahweh, so now the church is the place where the Holy Spirit is. It is “a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” In this Paul echoes the Gospel of John, where Jesus promises that he and the Father would come, in the Holy Spirit by implication, to make their permanent dwelling with those who love Jesus and keep his commandments (John 14:23).

As for catholicity, while the word katholike does not occur in the NT, the concept is present. In Eph 2, not only has the gulf between Jew and Gentile been broken down with the cessation of the law of ceremonies, but “in Christ we both have access by one Spirit to the Father.” In keeping with the parting instructions of the ascending Christ the gospel had been preached to those who were far off as well as those who were near. The first steps had been taken to its spread to all nations in accord with the sweep of God’s redemptive purposes and the risen Jesus’ specific command prior to his ascension (Matt 28:18-20).

The church’s apostolicity is evident in its being “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets.” The apostles were invested with the authority of Christ for their task of founding and establishing the church. Apostolic doctrine was to be the lifeblood of succeeding generations, as Paul instructs Timothy in his final letter (2 Tim 2:2).

In the Niceno-Constantinopolitan declaration, these four adjectives are mutually defining and interpenetrating. No one of the attributes of the church can be isolated from the others and retain its proper integrity. They are equally ultimate. It is here that digressions frequently occur. The tendency of liberalism was to focus on the unity and catholicity of the church at the expense of its apostolicity and holiness. On the other hand, a stress on apostolicity and holiness at the expense of the church’s unity opens the door to sectarianism. Continuous splintering is the almost inevitable consequence, best exemplified in American evangelicalism, with thousands of denominations. This is even more so in independent church government. Where every single congregation is autonomous and where legislative authority is confined to the local congregation, any confession of the Christian faith beyond the local is purely consultative and advisory; the relentless search for purity usually ends not only in an abdication of unity and catholicity but in an incapacity to be apostolic.

I. The Westminster Assembly And The Catholicity Of The Church

The Westminster Assembly took the Niceno-Constantinopolitan quadrilateral seriously. It affirmed the catholicity of the church in accordance with its unity, holiness, and apostolicity. Its commitment to the apostolicity and holiness of the church is so well known that I am deliberately avoiding discussing it in this lecture. What is less common knowledge is its commitment to catholicity The Assembly expressed catholicity in two ways: firstly, in geographical and global terms, with respect to the Reformed churches, and to all who call on the name of the Lord Jesus (WGF 26.2), and, secondly historically, in relation to those who had gone before, the Fathers and medievals. Here, there was good precedent in Vincent of Lerins, for whom what is truly catholic is what “has been believed everywhere, always, and by all people” (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est)[2] and in Thomas Aquinas, who wrote that the church is catholic with respect to place (per Mum mundum), the condition of the people, and time, since it lasts until the end of the world.[3] The truly catholic church, according to Melanchthon, is supported by the witness of all times.[4]

1. Geographical Catholicity

Obviously, the seventeenth-century world was smaller than ours. The Westminster Assembly was set up in the first instance to defend the doctrine of the Church of England. Its responsibilities were entirely determined by Parliament. At the time, England was locked in civil war. The future, at best, was highly uncertain. The Continent was reaching the end of the utterly devastating Thirty Years’ War. Moreover, what Americans may easily overlook is that Britain as a political entity did not yet exist; only with the Act of Union of 1707 could one speak of a United Kingdom of Great Britain. While England had a handful of small colonies—Barbados was one, there were a few elsewhere—and plied increasing trade by sea, its great imperial involvements lay in the unforeseen future. There were limits to the extent its church leaders could realize the catholicity of the church, through no fault of their own. Yet despite the narrower horizons of the day, it was still a vital factor in the Assembly’s thinking. I will mention six ways in which this was so.

(1) It is seen in the relative diversity of its membership. The differences on ecclesiology are well known. What has become clearer are the different theological alliances. This is evident throughout its deliberations but especially in the disputes over the extent of saving grace, involving English hypothetical universalists such as Edmund Calamy.

In S522 W 22.10.45 he insisted “I am farre from universall Redemption in the Arminian sence, but that that [sic] I hould is in the sence of our devines in the sinod of Dort: that Christ did pay a price for all, absolute for the elect, conditionall for the reprobate, in case they doe beleive; that all men should be salvabiles, non obstante lapsu Adami; that Jesus Christ did not only dy sufficiently for all, but God did intend in giving of Christ & Christ in giving himselfe did intend to put all men in a state of salvation in case they doe beleive.”[5]

In August 1645 the debate raged for several days. The Assembly refused to weaken its position, but on the other hand the controversy did not lead to exclusion, for Calamy continued to play an active part in its business.

(2) It is seen in the attempts to accommodate the independents in the debate over church government. The majority took great pains to maintain the unity of the Assembly, allowing inordinate time for the independents to make their case.

(3) It is evident in its constant correspondence with other Reformed churches on the continent. The complete correspondence of the Assembly and its members, together with the full critical text of the Assembly minutes is to be published by Oxford University Press in five large volumes under the editorship of Chad Van Dixhoorn. The Assembly was inhibited from replying to all who wrote to it due to the binding requirement that it undertake nothing without the authorization and approval of both Houses of Parliament. As Van Dixhoorn calls it, this was “Parliament’s Assembly.” This was evident when a letter was received from Hamburg, referring to a case of conscience, to which the Assembly did not reply since it did not come through Parliament.[6] S. W. Carruthers refers to a request for help for a Greek minister suffering in Greece, in response to which nothing appears to have been done, and to a letter from churches in Zealand, to which it is again unclear as to whether the Assembly replied.[7]

Bearing in mind these restrictions on the Assembly’s freedom, a sample of official correspondence, by no means exhaustive, from June-September 1644 includes a letter from the classis of Amsterdam, which was referred to the Committee for Letters from Churches Abroad.[8] Others were received from the churches of Hanau and The Hague, from the synod of Holland, from Switzerland, and Germany, from the churches of North Holland, Guelderland, Utrecht, Switzerland, and Geneva. Bremen was added to a circular letter from the Assembly, on news that it had been offended by being left off[9] Letters were sent to the classes of the Netherlands.[10]

(4) It is demonstrated by the expressed concern of the divines to be in harmony with those churches. A few sample comments will suffice.

After the Solemn League and Covenant was signed on 19 September 1643, Dr. Cornelius Burgess insisted that the Assembly must be governed by “what is most agreable to the best reformed churches.” In a rough way, he urged, their method of procedure should be the same as “we doe find most of the churches of Christ to proceed in.”[11] A few weeks later, on 15 November, Alexander Henderson, one of the Scots commissioners, exhorted the Assembly: “You are at this time as a citty set upon a mountaine; the eyes of E[ngland], S[cotland], I[reland] & of all reformed churches are upon you . . . and the eyes of papists, Arminians, &c. are all upon you, & howsoever they may seeme to dispise the day of small things, yet they behould this Assembly with great feare and astonishment.”[12] Debates on baptism and the Lord’s Supper included expressions of concern that sacramental practice be conformed as far as possible to continental forms. On 3 July 1644, Herbert Palmer referred to the practice of the French church on receiving communion standing rather than sitting[13] On 8 August, Charles Herle warned that “if you conclude against it [dipping], you condemne the reformed churches that practise it. Those that incline most to popery are all for sprinkling”[14] Twelve days later, Samuel Rutherford reminded members that “the eyes of all Reformed churches is upon this Assembly”[15] On 6 November 1646, the House of Lords stressed to the Assembly the necessity of Protestant churches abroad knowing that Parliament never intended to innovate on matters of faith.[16]

There were of course limits; the divines had minds of their own. Stephen Marshall sounded a cautionary note to the effect that “for the rest of the Reformed churches, our uniformity is not intended to reach so farre as that those things which they had nothing to plead for, but only seeing rules and prudence, that we should be tyed to that.” Charles Herle much prized conformity with Reformed churches, but reminded the Assembly of the need for adaptation to national circumstances.[17]

(5) It is further seen in the large number of citations of continental Reformed theologians. In the space of only a few weeks in the autumn of 1643, the following were cited in the minutes: John Cameron of Saumur, Chamier, Calvin in Book One of the Institutes,[18] Caspar Olevian, Johannes Piscator, Sculbertus, the French and Belgic Confessions, Luther,[19] Cameron again and Daniel Tilenus,[20] Gomarus, Junius and the French synod,[21] Piscator, Gomarus, “the judicious Calvin,” Molinaeus and Tilenus,[22] Peter Martyr,[23] Calvin again, Junius and Gomarus, “the councils and synods,” the Church of England homily, the Churches of Scotland and Ireland, the Synod of France, the Palatinate, as well as “beglise, Bohemia,” Arminius and Socinus (hardly Reformed),[24] Piscator again,[25] Melanchthon, Ghamier, and Calvin,[26] Calvin yet again,[27] Cameron, Beza,[28] Beza and Calvin once more,[29] Beza again,[30] Luther and Calvin, Piscator,[31] Beza and Piscator,[32] and Chamier.[33]

Well might Van Dixhoorn remark on the constant reference to continental divines in debate and the continued traffic of correspondence between the Assembly and the churches in Europe.[34] Morris comments on the affinity between the English Reformed and the continentals when he remarks that “in them as in a mirror we may almost see the entire doctrinal process of Protestantism making itself confessionally manifest.” He observes: “It was this fact that led the Assembly, or at least some proportion of its members, to entertain the hope . . . that the Confession they were framing might win its way to general favor and possibly to formal acceptance in the continental churches.”[35]

(6) Last, but by no means least, is Chapter 26 of the Confession of Faith, On the communion of the saints. This is one of the most neglected chapters both in theory and especially in practice. The chapter is an expansion and description of the phrase in the Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in . . . the communion of saints.”

Union and communion with Christ is the heart of salvation, according to the Larger Catechism, 65-90. It is expressed in the various elements of the ordo salutis, and is evident both in grace and—most fully—in glory. In WCF 26.1, it is the foundation of the communion that the saints have with one another. This is explicit in WCF 26.1 and is unfolded in LC, 66-90—it entails union with one another in love.

The connection between union with Christ and love for all who are united to him is evident in WCF 26.2, where it is said to extend to practical matters, including the relief of material needs, as well as ministry and communion in the worship of God and “other spiritual services.” The communion the saints enjoy with each other does not erode or destroy the integrity of the individual and in particular his or her property. This is an outflow of the doctrine of the Trinity—there is unity (and union) but in diversity

This chapter of the Confession is a serious challenge to the church in all ages. The Assembly recognizes that the communion the church enjoys in Christ extends to “all who call on the name of the Lord Jesus,” whether they are in full agreement on every point of doctrine or not. Indeed, love and union on the human level reflects the union the saints have in Christ. Union and communion with one another is co-extensive with those who are united to Christ. An entailment of this chapter is that a breach in the church questions the reality of the relationship with Christ. This is a forgotten chapter and its neglect bespeaks a guilty collective conscience.

2. Historical Catholicity

(1) This is seen in the Assembly’s defense of the doctrine of the Church of England. Its first task was to defend the doctrine of the Church of England from all false calumnies and aspersions. The work of Anthony Milton, Bryan Spinks, and others has highlighted the fact that the Church of England had a solidly Calvinist post-Reformation past; the Laudian reaction was an aberration. The debates on the Thirty-Nine Articles, held in the first months of the Assembly were not sideshows as Warfield wrote. They were only interrupted by the political necessity of accommodation with the Scots in order to secure their support in the face of initial military setbacks in the war against the king. Later, when aspersions were cast upon the Book of Common Prayer by George Gillespie, a Scots commissioner, members of the Assembly leaped to its defense.

(2) It is also evidenced by the Assembly’s self-conscious awareness of its continuity with the historic church. That the Westminster divines saw themselves in continuity with the historic church needs little argument for those who have read their writings or considered the records of debate. William Twisse, prolocutor of the Assembly, had himself edited the works of Thomas Bradwardine. The divines’ writings are full of citations of Augustine.[36] Their debates are replete with references to the patristics and medievals, far too many to mention in total here. In the brief space of a few weeks in September 1643, the divines cited Cajetan, Cathoricus, “Gregory the Great, many excellent pasadges upon this place,” Duns Scotus and Savanorola,[37] Justin Martyr, Jerome, Augustine and Bernard,[38] Athanasius and Cyril,[39] Tertullian,[40] Bernard,[41] Athanasius again, “St. Gregory” (no more specific description being provided in the minutes), Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians, and Bernard again,[42] Bellarmine,[43] Augustine,[44] classical authors, Tacitus, Solon, Plato, and others,[45] and Augustine again.[46]

(3) Finally, it is also demonstrable by the Assembly’s acceptance of the ecumenical creeds. An influential Reformed spokesman questioned this recently. Robert L. Reymond argued that Calvin rejected “Nicene trinitarianism” and suggested that the Westminster divines may have followed him in this. In particular Reymond talks of “Calvin’s rejection of the ancient doctrine of the Father’s eternal generation of the Son” and asserts, inter alia, that the doctrine of the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit goes beyond Scripture. Westminster trinitarianism is Reformed, following Calvin, not Nicene, he claims.[47] Reymond fails to refer to primary sources from the fourth century, and his grasp of the patristic debates betrays a lack of first-hand familiarity. Moreover, his reading of Calvin is limited—largely confined to the 1559 Institutes—and, for our purposes, he does not refer to the Westminster Larger Catechism, which teaches the very things he opposes. In fact, the LC more clearly follows the Niceno-Constantinopolitan teaching than the Thirty-Nine Articles do, although no one (including Reymond, I’m sure) would make a case that they were not faithful to the tradition.[48] The earliest mss evidence for the LC, 10—11, as well as the draft of those questions presented to the Assembly, undermines Reymond’s case that the Assembly rejected the eternal generation of the Son. I have reviewed Reymond’s work elsewhere.[49]

In the first edition of his New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, Robert L. Reymond suggested the possibility that the Assembly may have rejected the doctrines of the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Holy Spirit as espoused in the ecumenical councils. Instead, he proposed the idea that it chose to follow Calvin who, Reymond argues, considered the language of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan settlement at this point as speculative.[50] While Reymond withdrew these claims in the second and revised edition, they are sufficiently far-reaching to require investigation. Elsewhere, I have demonstrated that Calvin was in agreement with the Council of Constantinople (381 a.d.).[51] This is seen in Calvin’s own teaching on both these doctrines that Reymond claims he rejected. In this sense there is no dichotomy between Nicene trinitarianism and Reformed trinitarianism.

That Westminster did not depart from pro-Nicene trinitarianism is clear in the Larger Catechism. Question 10 asks.

What are the personal properties of the three persons in the Godhead? A: It is proper to the Father to beget the Son, and to the Son to be begotten of the Father, and to the Holy Spirit to proceed from the Father and the Son from all eternity.

The answer explicitly states that the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son. In theory it might be argued that while the Son is said to be begotten of the Father, this did not occur “from all eternity.” Such a reading cannot be sustained for a number of reasons. First, it would be incongruous for the Spirit to proceed from eternity but the Son’s generation not to be from eternity This is even more improbable since the key historically to the resolution of the trinitarian crisis was the settlement of the deity and personal relations of the Son, after which the deity and personal relations of the Holy Spirit followed more readily. It would have been absurd for the Assembly to have supported the eternal generation of the Holy Spirit but not the eternal generation of the Son. Secondly, Reymond’s suggestion would require no comma before “from all eternity,” thus restricting the reference of the phrase to the immediately preceding statement concerning the Holy Spirit. It might also require a semi-colon or colon after the second mention of “Father,” separating the relations of the Son from the relations of the Spirit. There is no semi-colon or colon at that point. Moreover, Van Dixhoorn has discovered that the majority of early manuscripts include a comma before “from all eternity,” thereby supporting the final phrase as covering the relations of the Son as well as the Holy Spirit.[52]

However, even if a comma were not present at that point, the draft questions for the Larger Catechism prove the generation of the Son was understood as from eternity. Presented in S708 15.9.46pm, they read as follows:

Ordered: ‘9 O: Is the sonne equall with the Father in the Godhead? A: The sonne of God who is the only begotten of the Father from all eternity, is true God equall with the Father.’ 

Ordered:’ 10 O: Is the Holy Ghost also God, equall with the Father and the sonne? A: The Holy Ghoste who from all eternity proceeds from the Father and the sonne is also true God, equall with the father and the sonne.’[53]

These questions show that the Assembly’s committee—no evidence suggests that the body as a whole differed—understood the Son to be begotten of the Father from eternity, and that this in no way diminishes his equality with the Father or his true deity.

Reymond also argues that the absence of the phrase of the Greed of Nicaea referring to the Son as “God of God” supports his thesis. This phrase, he argues, implies an element of subordination for the Son; moreover, it was speculative and went beyond the bounds of Scripture. He misses the point that the phrase is also absent from the Thirty-Nine Articles, both from Article 1, “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity,” and Article 2, “Of the Word or Son of God, which was made very Man.” I have yet to hear anyone advance the notion that the Articles diverged from Nicene trinitarianism, still less since they conspicuously support the Niceno-Gonstantinopolitan Greed in Article 8 as provable “by most certain warrants of holy Scripture.” Even more striking, the phrase is absent also from the Creed of the Council of Constantinople (381 a.d.), popularly known as “the Nicene Creed.” If Reymond’s thesis were correct, the Nicene Creed would reject its own trinitarianism! Moreover, the phrase was from the Creed of Nicaea (325 a.d.), propounded at the very start of the trinitarian crisis but jettisoned along the way. I have demonstrated elsewhere that Calvin defends this Creed against the Italian anti-trinitarians.[54]

That the eternal relations of the three trinitarian persons was not a matter of controversy at the Assembly, and that the classic trinitarian settlement was fully accepted by the divines is evident from the absence of any record of discord on the matter. For instance, in the debate on Article 2 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, in S7 TU 18.7.43, in which the Son is said to be “begotten from everlasting of the Father,” while there was, according to Lightfoot, “a great debating,” this surrounded the later reference to the sufferings of Christ and whether it should be stated that he suffered in his soul. There is no record of controversy—or even debate—over the reference to the eternal generation of the Son.[55] In Morris’s words, the Assembly adopted “the Nicene or Chalcedonian description, reproduced almost literally in the Confession ... as the only one which in any adequate sense embodies or unifies these various forms and aspects of the revelation.”[56]

This simply confirms Muller’s argument that the Reformers—including Calvin—and the later Reformed orthodox operated in the context of their inheritance from the late Middle Ages. To understand them it is necessary to have a grasp of the scholastic method, and of the history of medieval exegesis.[57] The Assembly’s Reformed context establishes its Catholic credentials, for the Reformers were at odds not with the Catholic tradition but with its immediate representatives. Evidence abounds from Luther, Calvin, and their contemporaries.[58] In Westminster’s case, this is abundantly demonstrated from the minutes, where the records have shown beyond the slightest doubt that every theological question was debated from a foundation of the exegesis of biblical texts, in dialogue with the history of exegesis reaching back to the early days of the church. So pervasive is the focus on the exegesis of the Bible that it would be futile here to list the texts on which debate turned—the evidence is literally overwhelming.[59] However, it was not carried on in isolation; it took place self-consciously as part of the great tradition of the church.

Furthermore, the Westminster Confession of Faith follows a similar structure to the classic creeds, the Apostles’ Greed and the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Both these focus on God the Trinity, the life and work of Christ the Son, church and sacraments, and the last things. While the Confession is not shaped by any one central dogma—the idea of controlling principles is a nineteenth-century concoction—it does loosely follow this arrangement. God, his decree, the plan of salvation in Christ the Mediator and its outworking, the church and sacraments, and the last things are all extremely prominent elements. That there are additional sections on law, gospel, and liberty, including church-state relations, is due to the historical context in which the Confession was made. The order of the Apostles’ Creed is followed closely in WCF 25 on the church (I believe in the holy, catholic church), WCF 26 on the communion of the saints (the communion of saints), WCF 27-29 on the sacraments (the forgiveness of sins, or one baptism for the remission of sins in Christ), WCF 32 on the resurrection and the final judgment (the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting). As for the Larger Catechism, it follows the classic catechetical structure of creed, ten commandments, and Lord’s prayer. Together, these things demonstrate that the divines did not seek to innovate but saw themselves as standing in the tradition of the Church of England.[60]

3. The Boundaries Of Catholicity

This focus on catholicity has to be seen in context. Not all doctrine was acceptable. Catholicity was neither blind nor accepted in isolation; it was qualified by apostolicity. There were boundaries to acceptable doctrine. At the top of the list of what was unacceptable was antinomianism. A standing committee regularly examined prominent antinomian leaders and their books and referred its recommendations to Parliament for civil action. Antinomianism posed a theological threat but was also perceived to jeopardize the stability and safety of the body politic. Second came the distinctive dogmas of Rome; not the Trinity or Christology but especially transubstantiation and the Papacy. Anabaptism was firmly rebuffed on the sacraments, the civil magistrate, lawful oaths, and private property; there is evidence that it was lumped together with antinomianism as the chief enemy. Arminianism was also rejected. The Assembly was far gentler towards Lutheranism and hypothetical universalism. With the former, it opposed its teaching on consubstantiation, and with the latter, its position on the divine decrees, but in both cases it did so with a lack of venom, regarding the respective exponents as friends rather than foes.

The evident point here is that the catholicity of the church operates within the boundaries of holiness and apostolicity. In this the Assembly followed Constantinople I and all seven ecumenical councils. In these, those who stepped outside the boundaries, who adopted heretical doctrine, were deposed from episcopal office, anathematized, and sent into exile. It was the same with Paul. In the self-same letter in which he insists that there is neither Jew nor Greek, for we are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28), he forcefully condemns those who preached another gospel (Gal 1:8-9). The catholicity of the church requires the capacity to anathematize those who seek to tear down the boundaries. Without those boundaries there is nothing about which to be catholic.

II. The Church In The Twenty-First Century

1. Geographical Catholicity

The church is found throughout the world, it is global. The reality of the global church is overwhelmingly evident today. Demographics alone demonstrate it to be so. The Anglican communion is a topical case in point. The balance of power has swung from Europe and North America to Nigeria, Rwanda, the Far East, and South America. With the rapidly growing churches in India, China, and elsewhere, this sea change is dramatic and irreversible. This poses interesting and potentially exciting possibilities but also some serious dangers.

2. Historical Catholicity

The church is found throughout history. We do not live in a vacuum but have an inheritance from the past. This is based on the created nature of man. Humans were not made to be isolated individuals but relational (cf Gen 1:26-28). Second Chronicles 20:14 reads, “And the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jahaziel the son of Zechariah, son of Benaiah, son of Jeiel, son of Mattaniah, a Levite of the sons of Asaph, in the midst of the assembly.” Jahaziel, as any other person in the OT, was seen as related to his ancestors. You were A the son of B the son of C; your historical antecedents identified you. Moreover, you were also related to your tribe; in Jahaziel’s case, the tribe of Levi—there was a contemporary, geographical relatedness. In this, humans reflect in a creaturely manner the relationality of God, who is not a monad but a trinity. Hence, the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jahaziel in the midst of the assembly—in the corporate, relational context, not in private isolation.

3. How Much Historical Catholicity Is There In Evangelical And Reformed Circles?

1. Historical theology has been neglected or rejected. For many in Reformed circles church history began in 1517 after a hiatus of over a thousand years, during which not much happened of significance. To some the past teaching of the church is irrelevant; one leading British conservative evangelical writes, “I am not convinced that many ‘Evangelicals’ are truly Evangelical. . . . Where are the people who are truly willing to think through this question with nothing in front of them except an open Bible?”[61] Alan Jacobs’s comment is apposite: “From Luther’s time to our own, every generation of Protestants produces people who rise up to proclaim that the Church lost its way within decades of Jesus’ death, leaving the true gospel forgotten and unproclaimed until . . . well, us.”[62]

Might it not have spared a lot of turmoil if Pinnock, Sanders, and Boyd had been aware that what they paraded as an exciting new development was merely a rehash of Socinianism? Would it not have helped if they had been aware that their claim that the church was held captive by Greek philosophy sprang from ignorance that this theory had been refuted many times over?

An accurate knowledge of exactly what the church determined on the incarnation is acutely needed in the western church. This is an elementary point but one that is overlooked in the curricula of many western theological seminaries, which act as though Chalcedon was the terminus of christological conflict, not considering the developments signaled by the fifth and sixth ecumenical councils. It is important to understand this not only for a proper grasp of the incarnation but of the gospel of which it is not merely a part but central. It is also necessary if we wish to relate the incarnation to other areas of the theological spectrum.

There are those who claim that we are entering an entirely new era requiring a massive paradigm shift in the church’s thought and action. In this case, historical theology is merely a curiosity. It may have a part in an ongoing conversation but the debate has moved on. The past is effectively sidelined since a conversation, as it progresses in subtle and dynamic ways, renders obsolete and irrelevant the comments made five minutes ago. Many voices praise the idea that the church will be freed from its captivity to Western Europe and North America. This misses the point that the foundations of the church were laid by Egyptians (Athanasius and Cyril), Turks (the Cappadocians, Maximus the Confessor), Tunisians (Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine), and a Syrian (John of Damascus), to say nothing of the apostles (Middle-Eastern Jews)—these hardly look like Western Europeans, let alone North Americans. This mantra is a coded message, indicating that its utterer wants to move away from the confining dogmas of the Reformation.

Moreover, precisely because the Christian faith is global, the contributions of Western Europe and North America have their place alongside those of Egypt, Turkey, and Syria. If globalism prevails, these regions can hardly be excluded. However, to place the speculation of Anne Nasimiyu Wasike that in the African context Christ is to be regarded as a mother—since mothers are what Africa needs—alongside the historic declarations of the church of East and West that have stood for a millennium and a half as acknowledging the truth, and to see them both as equal partners in a dynamic and ongoing conversation, is to deal a fatal blow to the apostolicity of the church. The ecumenical creeds cannot be reduced to conversation partners at a global roundtable. Insights there may and will be from various parts of the world. But the nature of the ecumenical councils was quite different—they simply confessed the truth and the church recognized what they confessed. They were acknowledging the apostolic faith, not bringing insights from their culture. The same principle applies to the teachings of the Reformation. As Richard John Neuhaus insisted, where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.[63]

Behind the claims of some globalists it is not difficult to see a strain of anti-Semitism. Jesus was a Jew and Christology has to be seen in the context and against the background of Yahweh’s struggles with Israel in the history of his covenant. This is a particular theme of the recently published lectures of T. F. Torrance on the incarnation. Jesus was not a European or an American, but neither was he an African or an Asian. The historical backgrounds of peoples in these countries cannot be regarded as parallel to that of Israel and used either to argue that other religions prepare for Christ in an analogous way to the OT as is common in missiological circles, or to suggest that their paradigms are of comparable value to the Jewish one.

Furthermore, innovation to be valid and effective must be rooted in the appropriation of tradition. Innovators must first master the field before they can develop it; mastery [a, conservative task) is necessary for effective innovation (a constructive task). As a striking example, let me refer to the greatest composition Beethoven ever wrote—at least, that seems to be what Beethoven himself thought—his String Quartet in G sharp minor, Op. 131. Franz-Joseph Haydn (1742-1809) developed the string quartet out of the divertimento, giving it a structure to which he, Mozart, and the early Beethoven all sedulously adhered. It had four movements, the first in sonata form (exposition of main themes, development, recapitulation, and coda), followed by a slower movement (adagio or andante), a minuet and trio or scherzo, and a final movement, frequently in rondo form (successive and recurrent contrasted sections). The work would start in the tonic (or home) key and eventually, after a range of modulations, return to it.

Beethoven’s wuvres show his complete mastery of the form. However, as he progressed, he began to stretch it to its limits. His Op. 132 had five movements, his Op. 130 had six, finishing with the astonishing Grosse Fuge, parts of which sound as if they could have been composed over a century later. The Op. 131 took the process further, to seven movements. Moreover, instead of starting with an allegro in sonata form, Beethoven—unprecedentedly—begins with a slow fugue, all peace and tranquillity in contrast to the Grosse Fuge. He changes key from G sharp minor to E flat minor (in bar 46) to B major (bar 55) to A major (bar 68), eventually ending in the tonic major, G sharp major. Bach, the supreme master of the fugue, never changed key.[64] Moreover, towards the end of the second scherzo, which moves at a frenetic pace, Beethoven causes the ensemble to break down. That is not all—as movement succeeds movement there is nothing in sonata form, until right at the end the seventh and final movement, a brilliantly taut, highly compressed sonata-allegro form, ties together the strands from the previous six movements.[65]

Even in his earlier, more strictly classical works, Beethoven has astonishing innovations. The third movement of the Op. 18 No. 6, with the viola and cello giving a consistent and conventional stress on the first beat of each bar, the first and second violins play an insistently syncopated rhythm. Effectively Beethoven has brought about civil war between the members of the quartet, a recipe for disaster. But this is Beethoven, and the result is both breathtaking and brilliant.[66]

We could bring further examples from Mahler’s development of the symphony, or Schoenberg and the twelve-tone scale. They all built upon the preceding history, and mastered the tradition. Development cannot occur in a vacuum.

Global Christianity in the twenty-first century, to be truly catholic, must be apostolic—grounded in Scripture and built upon the teaching of the church. It is worryingly evident that many who have leaped onto the bandwagon of globalism—mainly in this country—are ready to move beyond the foundations. On the other hand, it is my impression that for too many in the evangelical and Reformed churches, an appreciation of the historical catholicity of the church is lacking. Only when these distortions are corrected will it be possible meaningfully to reaffirm with Constantinople I, “We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”

Notes

1. Alister E. McGrath, ed., The Christian Theology Reader (3d ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 20070, 494 (citing Cyril of Jerusalem).
2. Ibid., 90.
3. Ibid., 499.
4. Ibid., 507.
5. Chad Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly, 1642-1652” (7 vols.; Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2004), 6:202-3.
6. Ibid., 6:65.
7. S. W. Carruthers, The Everyday Work of the Westminster Assembly (ed. J. Ligon Duncan III; Greenville, S.G.: Reformed Academic Press, 1994), 65-69.
8. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming,” Vol. 5: “Minutes of the Westminster Assembly,” p. 167; and Vol. 2: Fols. lr-293v, 12 April 1644-15 November 1644.
9. Carruthers, Everyday Work, 70.
10. Ibid., 63.
11. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming” Vol. 3: “Minutes of the Westminster Assembly,” p. 175; and Vol. 1: Fols. lr-198v, 4 September 1643-17 November 1643.
12. Ibid., 3:311.
13. Ibid., 5:174.
14. Ibid., 5:219.
15. Ibid., 5:238.
16. Ibid., 5:71-72.
17. Ibid., 5:391-92.
18. Ibid., 3:5-7.
19. Ibid., 3:16-18.
20. Ibid., 3:29.
21. According to Lightfoot’s Journal; see ibid., Vol. 2: Introduction to Appendixes: Note on the Membership of the Westminster Assembly: Table of Contents for John Lightfoot’s Journal and the Minutes of the Westminster Assembly; and Appendix A: ‘“A Briefe Journal of Passages in the Assembly of Divines’ by John Lightfoot,” p. 50.
22. Ibid., 3:36.
23. Ibid., 3:46.
24. Ibid.,3:58-65.
25. Ibid., 3:72.
26. Ibid., 3:90.
27. Ibid., 3:94.
28. Ibid., 3:103, 107.
29. Ibid., 3:134.
30. Ibid., 3:155.
31. Ibid., 3:163-65.
32. Ibid., 3:202-4.
33. Ibid., 3:210.
34. Ibid., 1:371.
35. E. D. Morris, Theology of the Westminster Symbols: A Commentary Historical:, Doctrinal:, Practical on the Confession of Faith and Catechisms, and the Related Formularies of Presbyterian Churches (Columbus, Ohio: n.p, 1900), 821.
36. John H. Leith, Assembly at Westminster: Reformed Theology in the Making (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1973), 38-39.
37. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming,” 3:4, 10.
38. Ibid., 2:47-48. See also 3:21 for another report of the same speech.
39. Ibid., 2:50.
40. Ibid., 3:31.
41. Ibid., 3:42.
42. Ibid., 3:58, 64-65.
43. Ibid., 2:75; see also 3:90.
44. Ibid., 3:85.
45. Ibid., 3:94-95.
46. Ibid., 3:107.
47. R. L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (New York: Nehon, 1998), 317-41.
48. WLG, 10-11.
49. Robert Letham, review of Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith. WTJ 62 (2000): 314-19. See also Paul Owen, “Calvin and Catholic Trinitarianism: An Examination of Robert Reymond’s Understanding of the Trinity and His Appeal to John Calvin,” CTJ 35 (2000): 262-81.
50. R. L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology, 324-41.
51. Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity (Phillipsburg, NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2004), 252-68.
52. Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming,” 1:259 n. 186. The punctuation of Bod Nalson 22, fol. 133v.has a comma, supporting the generation of the Son from eternity, but Bod Nalson 22, fol. 159v does not. The earlier printed version of c. 22 October 1647 and the c. 14 April 1648 Parliamentary printing with proof texts support fol. 133v
53. Ibid., 6:357.
54. Letham, The Holy Trinity, 264-67.
55. Lightfoot’s Journal, in Van Dixhoorn, “Reforming,” 2:9-10.
56. Morris, Theology of the Westminster Symbols, 166.
57. Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Muller, “Scholasticism in Calvin: A Question of Relation and Disjunction,” in Cabinus Sincerioris Religionis Vindex (ed. W. H. Neuser; Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1997), 247-65.
58. On Calvin and the Fathers, see A. N. Lane, John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999); and concerning Calvin and the Trinity, see chapter 12 of my book The Holy Trinity. On worship, see Hughes Oliphant Old, The Patristic Roots of Reformed Worship (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag 1975).
59. I refer the reader to the forthcoming multi-volume critical edition of the Minutes of the Westminster Assembly, edited by Chad Van Dixhoorn, to be published by Oxford University Press, which will run to over 850,000 words.
60. See Robert Letham, “Is Evangelicalism Christian?” EQQ7 (1995): 3-33; and Letham, The Westminster Assembly: Reading Its Theology in Historical Context (Phillipsburg, NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2009).
61. Stuart Olyott, “Some Personal Thoughts on Ministerial Training,” The Evangelical Magazine January 2009): 16.
62. Alan Jacobs, “Do-It-Yourself Tradition,” First Things 189 (January 2009): 28.
63. Cited in R. R. Reno, “Religion, Culture, and Public Life,” First Things 192 (April 2009): 57.
64. Robert Winter, The Beethoven Quartet Companion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 248.
65. Ludwig van Beethoven: Complete String Quartets and Grosse Fuge (from the Breitkopf & Hartel Complete Works Edition; New York: Dover Publications, Inc., n.d.), 2:119-58.
66. Ibid., 1:103-20.

B. B. Warfield’s Path To Inerrancy: An Attempt To Correct Some Serious Misunderstandings

By Paul Helm

[Paul Helm is a Teaching Fellow at Regent College, Vancouver. He was Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion, King’s College, London, from 1993 to 2000.]

Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. (George Berkeley, 1688-1753, A Treatise Concerning Human Knowledge, Introduction *3)

B. B. Warfield’s name will forever be linked to the exposition and defense of biblical inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy. Inspiration, he says,

is that extraordinary, supernatural influence (or, passively, the result of it’,) exerted by the Holy Ghost on the writers of our Sacred Books, by which their words were rendered also the words of God, and therefore, perfectly infallible.[1]

He believed this to be the classic Christian view of Scripture. But around the man, and particularly around his defense of the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture (he seems to have used these terms interchangeably), there has grown up a number of serious misconceptions. These have to do with what inerrancy is, with the theological method that allegedly spawned it, with the doctrine of God that lies behind it, and with the place of inspired and inerrant Scripture in Warfield’s theological system. Unfortunately, despite various valiant efforts to set the record straight, these misconceptions are repeated and embellished until the real Warfield is lost from view and the “Warfield position” becomes a whipping boy.[2] This article is a further attempt to make clear Warfield’s position, and particularly his method of arriving at it. In doing this, the immediate objects of attention are certain claims about Warfield made by Professor A. T B. McGowan in his book The Divine Spiration of Scripture[3] though it is part of the burden of this article that Dr. McGowan is one of many such critics of Warfield and of the entire Princeton tradition.[4]

The Divine Spiration of Scripture is a book of considerable scope and ambition. Dr. McGowan proposes changes to the theological locus of Scripture, offers suggestions about the terminology used to characterize Scripture theologically, reconsiders the doctrine of Scripture, and also proposes changes in the use of Scripture in the church’s confession, and in preaching. In McGowan’s view, a “high” view of Scripture is consistent with an errant autographic text.[5] The book is written in an energetic style that offers little sign of careful argumentation or attention to appropriate evidence. A range of comments is called for. Here, however, I shall confine my attention to McGowan’s attitude to B. B. Warfield. I shall focus on two of his misunderstandings about Warfield’s theological method, and then attempt to set out what I believe was Warfield’s actual procedure. I stress that my concern throughout this article is with establishing the factual accuracy of Warfield’s position on biblical inerrancy from his writings, focusing particularly upon his theological method, not with the cogency or truth of his account of biblical inerrancy per se.

The path that we aim to retrace is not that of a historical sequence, but rather the logical path—the nature of biblical inerrancy, the arguments for inerrancy and the place of biblical inspiration in Warfield’s system of thought, and especially within his overall theological outlook. In order to clear a way for the path to be made visible, we shall first consider McGowan’s misunderstandings about Warfield’s method, the first having to do with the Princetonian way of doing systematic theology, the second with the doctrine of God and its connection with scriptural inerrancy.

I. Doing Systematic Theology

According to Dr. McGowan the use of the term “inerrancy” is fairly recent, by comparison with the centuries of usage of the term “infallibility.” Its use represents a hardening of the age-old doctrine. “Inerrancy” focuses our attention exclusively on questions of truth and falsehood, whereas the older term, “infallibility” when applied to Scripture, lays emphasis upon the fact that the Bible is an unfailing guide to whoever may read it, and especially to the Christian and the church, for the purpose for which it was given. Instead of having to do with informing, guiding, and motivating the will (infallibility), through the influence of Warfield and others the Bible has come to be defended in terms that deal primarily, if not exclusively, with the intellect (inerrancy).[6]

In using the term “inerrancy” and its cognates and so signaling a shift of the relation of Scripture away from the will to the intellect, to truth, it is claimed that Warfield (and other Princetonians, such as A. A. Hodge) were simply being children of their time. The late nineteenth century was an era of unparalleled scientific discovery and technological advance. Warfield and his colleagues were infected by these successes. The focusing on inerrancy was the result of their adoption in their theology of a quasi-scientific theological method which was “rationalist” in character. (They were also, it is implied, panicked by liberal critical methods into an overreaction and so to a hardening of the age-old assertion of the Bible’s infallibility.[7] McGowan claims that inerrantism is a doctrine created in the heat of battle.[8])

Dr. McGowan refers to the oft-repeated claim that for Warfield, following Charles Hodge, systematic theology is a matter of gathering facts by a process of scientific induction in the way that (according to the Enlightenment view of science) the natural scientist gains information about the character and behavior of the natural order. For the natural scientist, the data are those ascertainable by the five senses in conjunction with the generalizing powers of the human mind. For the Princeton theologian, the data were the “facts” of Scripture, which the scientific theologian gathers and collates and from which he draws inductive inferences. The results of such inferences, repeatedly checked against the data, are the doctrines of the Bible. Among these doctrines is the doctrine that the Bible itself is inerrant.[9]

Like most of their contemporaries, the Princetonians had a very high view of the achievements of modern science, to the point where Charles Hodge adopted a highly questionable theological method and Warfield’s view of science as ‘true truth’ led him to become a theistic evolutionist.[10]

It is not my intention here to review what I believe are the gross misunderstandings of Charles Hodge’s (and with it, of B. B. Warfield’s) theological method, which I have discussed elsewhere.[11] McGowan shares in and explicitly endorses these misunderstandings of Hodge. Nevertheless, we shall need to look at his claim that there is a close connection between that method and what was (in fact if not in intention) a “novel” doctrine of biblical inerrancy.

McGowan tells his readers that he is going to demonstrate that inerrancy is “rationalist.”[12] There maybe a confusion here between the use of reason and being rationalist, for McGowan does not tell us what he means by rationalism. But he means, presumably, that the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture is a conclusion of a rationalist theological procedure. Warfield is certainly an advocate of the use of the reason in drawing out the “good and necessary” consequences of the statements of Scripture. This is hardly a novel procedure. But rationalism? This suggests the adoption of some a priori, normative epistemology which either imposes itself on the data of Scripture, making them fit into its alien mold, or filters out the wheat of Scripture from the chaff in the familiar post-Kantian liberal manner. It becomes clear, however, as McGowan proceeds, that the alleged rationalism refers to two aspects of Warfield’s thought: an a priori view of what God can and cannot do (to which we shall come later) and the adoption of what, as we have already noted, McGowan and many others regard as an alien theological method drawn from the Enlightenment, a scientific method which Charles Hodge and Warfield so greatly admired. This is what Dr. McGowan says:

In the inerrantist argument, truth is largely viewed in propositional terms and theological method is conceived of in scientific terms. Thus the impression is often given that the whole Bible can be reduced to a set of propositions that can then be demonstrated to be ‘true’. This then leads to a theological methodology based on a scientific method, such as that of Charles Hodge.[13]

But a glance at A. A. Hodge’s and Warfield’s “Inspiration” would show how misguided this suggestion is.

There is a vast difference between exactness of statement, which includes an exhaustive rendering of details, an absolute literalness, which the Scriptures never profess, and accuracy, on the other hand, which secures a correct statement of facts or principles intended to be affirmed. It is this accuracy, and this alone, as distinct from exactness, which the Church doctrine maintains of every affirmation in the original text of Scripture without exception. Every statement accurately corresponds to truth just as far forth as affirmed.[14]

The two authors are clearly making a distinction between the accurate reporting of an event by an onlooker or from memory, say, and the exhaustiveness and literalness sought by natural science. As they say, in their view the Scriptures “were not designed to teach philosophy, science or human history as such.”[15]

Dr. McGowan goes on to assert that such a theological method is “founded on the notion that Scripture can be reduced to a set of ‘facts’ or ‘propositions’, which are then collected and arranged into a systematic theology. This rationalist approach, however well intentioned, actually undermines the authority of the Scriptures.”[16] McGowan appears to be fond of the idea of reducing Scripture to systematic theology, mentioning it five times in two pages. The idea is that in some fashion systematic theology distils the essence of the Bible’s teaching by constructing a series of arranged propositions which can be used to supplant the Bible itself. The Bible then becomes second best, a library of disparate and disorderly books to which the clever systematic theologian has brought form and order. Hence, McGowan says, the authority of Scripture is undermined, because it lies in the shadow of “cold and clinical”[17] systematic theology. So there is a paradox at the heart of old Princeton: while striving with might and main to uphold the infallibility and inerrancy of the Scriptures they in fact undermine their authority by supplanting them with their own rationalistic theology.

There are two issues here. One concerns the actual practice of the Princetonians in their handling of the Bible in the Seminary and the church. Was it, for them, a book that was second best to their systematic theology? Was it a book whose only value lies in the true propositions it contains? Dr. McGowan offers not a sliver of evidence for his claims about the procedure of the Princetonians. However, this is strictly speaking a matter for the historian and so we shall put it to one side.

But what about the repeated charge that in the Princetonians’ theological method the Bible is “flattened and reduced to a set of propositions that are then deemed to be inerrant”?[18] Here we touch upon a serious confusion in the mind of Dr. McGowan and those who think like him. To illustrate the confusion, let us take these three propositions, drawn from a well-known nursery rhyme. In the nursery rhyme

(1) It is true that) Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet. 

(2) (It is true that) Miss Muffet ate curds and whey. 

(3) (It is true that) a Big Spider frightened Miss Muffet away.

Let us suppose that the three statements about Miss Muffet are each true. According to McGowan’s suggestion, in being set out as above, as three distinct propositions, the story of Little Miss Muffet is reduced or flattened into something cold and clinical, and the account given in (1)—(3) disregards the “genre” of nursery rhyme. It has to be conceded that the three propositions do not convey the rhyme or lilt of the original. They are not as easily recited or sung to children as is the nursery rhyme itself. But then nothing but the original, said or sung, will convey that rhyme or lilt. Yet McGowan cannot be defending a pure Biblicism, since he has a high view of preaching and of church confessions of faith.

Where does this idea of “flattening” come from? Frankly, it is not easy to say. But here’s my suggestion. The charge of flattening may arise from the idea that putting a piece of literature into explicit propositional form (as in (1)—(3) above] emasculates or reduces its content to some lowest common denominator. The idea seems to be that a series of propositions, simply in virtue of being a set of propositions, have a content that is all on the same level, a level so low and flat that all (or much) that is distinctive in the original text is removed or diluted. As a botanist, using the language of his science, may classify flowers and so may “miss” their beauty and fragrance, so a systematic theologian of the Princeton school misses those features of Scripture that are intended to move the emotions and energize the will, and so misses features that are crucial to the proper appreciation of these documents.

To see how confused such a suggestion must be, let us adopt the convention of expressing the content of each of (1)—(3) in a phrase in italics. Then the content of (1) is Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, the content of (2) is Miss Muffet ate curds and whey. and that of (3) is Miss Muffet was frightened by a spider. The italicized expressions relate three facts about Miss Muffet, three truths. But where’s the flattening? Why does asserting that it is true that Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet (as opposed to reciting “Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet . . .”) interfere in any way with the distinctiveness of this fact, and so make it more or less equivalent, say, to the fact that she was frightened by a spider? (1)-(3) are, after all, nothing other than expressions used to record or report bodily states (like sitting) or actions (like eating) or reactions (like being frightened). How does being frightened become flattened into eating, or eating flattened into sitting, or each of them flattened into some fourth thing? As soon as we ask such questions, we immediately see how utterly preposterous is the idea that propositions “flatten” facts into something else, into other, flatter facts. Of course the report of someone being frightened is not itself a case of being frightened, and it may not even have a frightening effect on those who hear the report. A report of someone being frightened using language that rhymes is different from a report without rhyme.

But then a recipe for haggis is not itself haggis, nor a photograph of Edinburgh Castle itself Edinburgh Castle.

The examples we have used are of course trivial ones. But we can substitute for them assertions of some of the constitutive facts of our faith, such as

(4) (It is true that) the Word became flesh. (John 1:14) 

(5) (It is true that) Jesus wept. (John 12:35) 

(6) (It is true that) Jesus asserted, “One of you will betray me.” (John 13:21)

It is now, I hope, easy to see that prefixing these first-order biblical expressions with “it is true that” does not flatten each of them, nor make them cold and clinical. What does it do? It is simply a linguistic device for enabling us to assert (4)-(6) as facts. (It is not the only such device, of course. Usually, speaking in a certain tone of voice would also do the trick.) However, if they are all facts, if they are true, they most certainly do not each express the same fact, nor are they truths of equal importance. But who seriously can think that an assertion of Jesus to the effect that one of his disciples will betray him comes to be on the same level as the assertion of a particular reactive state of Jesus, his weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, or as the deeply mysterious assertion that the Word became flesh?

Whether or not two or more propositions are the same or different propositions depends entirely on what the propositions in question mean. In this connection, while McGowan, in common with many others at present, attributes to natural science, and its “flattening” tendency, an inordinate influence upon the Princeton theology, it is worth reminding ourselves of the almost infinite variety of scientific facts. “It is true that copper expands when heated”; “It is true that water is H2O” Are these the same fact? Are they two facts on the same level? What could this possibly mean? Although at first glance this charge against Warfield and old Princeton may seem insightful, it is in fact entirely spurious.

But perhaps this is not quite the problem. Perhaps it is that by extracting the kernel from the husk of Scripture, violence is done to Scripture itself, because the form and content of Scripture are inextricably connected so that to express the content of Scripture in other ways than Scripture itself does is necessarily to mis-state that content, to lose some of it or to distort it.

No doubt there is something in this. Scripture is Scripture, and anything that is not Scripture is something distinct from it, even if it is intended to reproduce some of the content of Scripture. But provided that it is clear that certain statements are meant to reproduce the propositional or cognitive content of Scripture, and to do nothing more than that, then would this not be sufficient to meet Dr. McGowan’s fears? Otherwise, it may be that in all doctrinal construction and all attempts to teach the Bible and to preach from it, the losses must inevitably outweigh the gains.

There is a further, connected matter. McGowan claims that inerrancy only makes sense in relation to what he refers to as “propositional statements.”[19]

Hence, no doubt, his claim that inerrantists reduce the Bible “to a set of propositions,” becoming “mere data to be processed by the theologian.”[20] But this charge, too, I am afraid, rests upon a simple misunderstanding. To illustrate this, let us take two or three biblical sentences at random: “They took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full” (Mark 8:8); “Who do people say that I am?” (Mark 8:27); “Get behind me, Satan!” (Mark 8: 33). Let us add the usual prefix

(7) (It is true that) they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. 

(8) (It is true that) (Jesus asked) “Who do people say that I am?” 

(9) (It is true that) (Jesus said) “Get behind me, Satan!”

These three prefixed sentences, (7), (8), and (9), are, we assume, true. But two of the three sentences that are prefixed are not true, nor are they capable of being true. Only one of them, (7), is true, for only one of them, the first, is a statement, a proposition. Questions and commands are not “propositional statements.” Nevertheless, questions, commands, exclamations, aspirations, vows, and so forth, as well as statements, are all included in the inerrantist’s basket. For questions, commands, and the like can each be inspired, delivered unerringly by their speakers and/or unerringly recorded. They are facts recorded by Scripture. Is it seriously being supposed that Warfield was unaware of such a point? Likewise, distinct scriptural genres hold no fears for an inerrantist. The idea that for an inerrantist such as Warfield the Bible is reduced to a set of statements, and that all questions, commands, vows, and so forth are eliminated, is also preposterous. It is also odd to suppose, as McGowan does, that inerrancy applies exclusively to issues of truth. There are errors in practice—in handwriting and embroidery, chess and soccer, engineering and warfare, surgery and horticulture.

What, in Dr. McGowan’s eyes, does all this have to do with inerrancy? I am afraid that that too is not altogether clear. At one point he seems to be attributing inerrancy to the sets of propositions arranged by the systematic theologian—”everything tends to be flattened and reduced to a set of propositions that are then deemed to be inerrant.”[21] But where does Warfield (or Hodge) make a claim for the inerrancy of the propositions of systematic theology? Not a scintilla of evidence is provided for such a serious charge. At other times, rather confusingly, the Princeton method is said to result in “a belief in the inerrancy of the autographa and a theological method that reduces Scripture to a set of propositions under the theologian’s control.”[22] Are the propositions of systematic theology inerrant, or are the autographs of the Scripture? Both, apparently And what, in the meantime, has happened to the text of Scripture as we have it, that text to which Warfield pays such detailed attention?

Besides being confused, the focus upon the theological method of the Princetonians that we have been examining strangely ignores the central Warfieldian claim that the Scriptures as we have them are infallible or inerrant only because they are divinely inspired. Later on we shall re-consider McGowan’s approach to the autographa.

II. Inerrancy And The Doctrine Of God

Having discussed Dr. McGowan’s treatment of the Princetonian theological method in a general way we turn now to another aspect of McGowan’s charge of “rationalism” against Warfield and the Princetonians in respect of inerrancy, that they make an unwarranted assumption about God.[23] This will require us to consider Warfield’s position in more explicit fashion.

We noted earlier McGowan’s preference for the term “infallibility” over “inerrancy” because it is more “dynamic”; that is, it focuses not so much on belief as upon action, and bespeaks an “organic,” non-mechanical view of inspiration, stressing that the Holy Spirit uses God’s word to achieve all that he intends to achieve.[24] This voluntarist strand in McGowan’s thought is also to be seen in the way in which he relates the doctrine of God to the issue of inerrancy He claims.

The basic error of the inerrantist is to insist that the inerrancy of the autographa is a direct implication of the biblical doctrine of the inspiration (or divine spiration). In order to defend this implication, the inerrantists make an unwarranted assumption about God. The assumption is that, given the nature and character of God, the only kind of Scripture he could ‘breathe out’ was Scripture that is textually inerrant.[25]

A more explicit claim about inerrancy and the doctrine of God is McGowan’s assertion that inerrantists limit God’s power.[26] God is all-powerful and can deliver a perfectly inerrant autographic text. Of course others besides God might have this power. The question is, must God do so? McGowan claims that no, he need not, and the assumption that he must do so is unwarranted. “I agree with the inerrantist that God could have brought into being inerrant autographic texts, had he chosen to do so, but I reject their argument that he must have acted in this way”[27] McGowan also believes that God did not in fact produce such a text. He attributes such an argument to Herman Bavinck, though with no supporting evidence,[28] and cites Bavinck’s emphasis on the dual authorship of Scripture as evidence against inerrantism.[29] But there could not be a stronger and more explicit endorsement of dual authorship than that provided by Warfield the “inerrantist,” as we shall see later. If McGowan were correct, then Warfield drew exactly the opposite conclusion than did Bavinck from the same premises.

In characteristic voluntarist fashion McGowan offers an argument in terms wholly of God’s power, in terms of what God can and cannot do. But this is to neglect other essential features of God’s character, for example, his veracity and faithfulness. Warfield most certainly makes the inference from “God has spoken” to “What God says is infallibly true,” but this is not an inference drawn simply from God’s power but from God’s own infallibility, or more exactly, his necessary infallibility. God not only has not failed in any respect, he could not fail. And being essentially veracious, he could not fail to be veracious. Hence, his word has not and cannot fail. Hence, the Bible is not only true, as some merely human documents are true, but if it is divinely inspired then it is infallibly true. Warfield says that inspiration

is such an influence as makes the words written under his guidance, the words of God: by which is meant to be affirmed an absolute infallibility (as alone fitted to divine words), admitting no degrees whatever—extending to the very word, and to all the words. So that every part of Holy Writ is thus held alike infallibly true in all its statements, of whatever kind.[30]

However, he does not claim that inspiration is the only possible mode of revelation. Contrary to what McGowan affirms, according to Warfield God could have given us a different kind of revelation. Inspiration is not necessary for revelation, since other modes of revelation are possible.[31]

We may say that without a Bible we might have had Christ and all that he stands for to our souls. Let us not say that this might not have been possible. But neither let us forget that, in point of fact, it is to the Bible that we owe it that we know Christ and are found in him.[32] 

Were there no such thing as inspiration, Christianity would be true, and all its essential doctrines would be credibly witnessed to us in the generally trustworthy reports of the teaching of our Lord and of His authoritative agents in founding the Church, preserved in the writings of the apostles and their first followers, and in the historical witness of the living Church.[33]

This would be revelation without inspiration, revelation reported by means of ordinary eyewitness testimony and memory.

The issue of whether God had to bring into being inerrant autographa is an important one for McGowan, who believes that the answer to that question determines whether or not one is an inerrantist.[34] Yet the question “Must God have brought into being inerrant autographic texts?” is somewhat unclear as it stands. Autographic texts of what, exactly? Here are some possible answers to that question.

Could there have been a set of original documents that were partly true and partly false? The answer is, obviously, there could have been. And that is War-field’s answer to the question, or at least, it is strongly suggested by things he says. The quotation just given, with its reference to general trustworthiness, implies that for Warfield there could have been such a document: one that was generally trustworthy, though not absolutely trustworthy, because its medium is not divine inspiration but the reports of those who, as eyewitnesses, say, reliably and yet fallibly testified to what they had seen and heard.

A second question is, could there have been autographic documents that are partly true, partly false, that functioned as the Christian scriptures? Again, Warfield’s answer is clear, and is implied by his answer to the first question. There could have been such documents.

A third question is, could there have been autographic texts that were equally the word of God and the words of men and yet were partly true and partly false? Here Warfield’s answer, and that of the Princetonians in general, is a resounding no. How could words that are the words of God, who is necessarily omniscient, faithful, and veracious, be partly false? Absolute infallibility, in Warfield’s view, is alone fitted to be the character of words that are divinely inspired. And, Warfield crucially adds, absolute infallibility is what we’ve got, or at least that’s what Jesus says.

Throughout his treatment of these issues Dr. McGowan gives considerable prominence to the autographa.[35] But he has a very different attitude to them than does Warfield. As already noted, he makes the issue of whether or not God must inspire inerrant autographa to be the issue between two schools, the “infallibilists” and the “inerrantists.” The two positions are, he says, in fundamental contradiction, in virtue of their differing attitudes to the autographa.[36] But he fails to provide a shred of evidence for this charge. He claims or implies that the Warfieldian tradition lays great emphasis on the autographa.[37] He seems to think that on Warfield’s view the autographa are texts without apparent discrepancies, such as the presently discrepant accounts we have in the Gospels of, say, the Gadarene swine incident, but that they are nevertheless texts that we do not possess and have not seen.[38] But Warfield does not treat the autographa in this fashion. Rather, both he and A. A. Hodge, in the latter part of their article already cited, are at pains to offer harmonizations of such discrepancies that occur in the texts as we presently have them. They there take alleged errors as serious difficulties. They do not brush them away by saying in each case, “If only we possessed the autographa then this issue would immediately be solved.” Rather, by their response to the difficulties they assume that they are present in the autographa themselves.

It is true that the Princetonians have a strong criterion of what could count as an error. It must present not merely a difficulty but be a “proved mistake,” an “indubitable error.” To the charge that the Scripture exhibits internal disharmony they require that such disharmony must be a “necessary conclusion.” Whether or not these standards of proof or disproof are reasonable is certainly debatable. But the authors’ procedure of attempting to deal with the difficulties openly and honestly, and not simply to appeal to the autographa as a one-word answer to any and every such difficulty, is only too clear.[39]

The Princetonians recognized that there are no extant autographic texts, only sets of non-autographic texts containing discrepant accounts of the same event as well as copyists’ errors. It may be asked, what is the point of giving prominence to the autographa if they are not in our possession? Why do they take such trouble? It is in order to underline their conviction that it is not as if the original autographs are now completely lost and inaccessible, a sort of literary “black hole.” Warfield holds that their content is substantially present in the Bible as we have it, translated from copies into which a series of small errors have crept.

It is the Bible that we declare to be “of infallible truth”—the Bible that God gave us. not the corruptions and slips which scribes and printers have given us, some of which are in every copy. . . . [W] hat is it that distinguishes ‘the Bible as it is’ from the original autographs? Just scribes’ corruptions and printers’ errors; nothing else.[40]

There must be autographa, a set of original texts, since every copied text assumes an autograph of which it is a copy. The Princetonians hold that inerrancy applies to that text, and not to textual variants that have crept in due to the errors of copyists. And Warfield’s assumption is that the present textual variants provide the limits of such discrepancies. Warfield holds that the recognition of the inerrancy of the original and the existence of the present set of textual variants does not warrant speculation as to whether there is some autograph which is substantially different from that covered by the present set of variants. Why should the autographa be inerrant? Because that’s what the doctrine of inerrancy is. What is the idea of an unobtainable inerrant autograph for? To reassure us that the text as we have it, insofar as it is not marred by copyists errors, is inerrant. Note how Warfield distinguishes between copyists’ errors and substantive difficulties in harmonizing texts.

That some of the difficulties and apparent discrepancies in current texts disappear on the restoration of the true text of Scripture is undoubtedly true. That all the difficulties and apparent discrepancies in current texts of Scripture are matters of textual corruption, and, not, rather, often of historical or other ignorance on our part, no sane man ever asserted. . . . The Church . . . does not assert that the genuine text of Scripture is free from those apparent discrepancies and other difficulties, on the ground of which, imperfectly investigated, the errancy of the Bible is usually affirmed.[41]

So Warfield carefully distinguishes between discrepancies in the text of Scripture due to copyists’ errors, and, say, texts which provide discrepant accounts of the same events. So it is possible to identify the copyists’ errors. But this success cannot help us with discrepancies between accounts, for example, in the different accounts in the Gospels of the incident of the Gadarene swine. But McGowan confuses these two issues together as the problem of inerrant autographa, the central dogma of Princetonian inerrancy.

As we have noted, at various places McGowan claims that a commitment to biblical inerrancy involves a “mechanical,” “dictation” view of inspiration, even suggesting at one point that Warfield “devised” such a theory. This suggests a less than sure grasp of another aspect of Warfield’s thought. Warfield is of course emphatic that the mode of inspiration is not, for the most part, that of divine dictation, and he grounds this fact in the doctrine of God. In the process of inspiration God is not to be thought of as suddenly appropriating a human agent, Luke, say, or John.

[O]f course, these books were not produced suddenly, by some miraculous act— handed down complete out of heaven, as the phrase goes; but, like all other products of time, are the ultimate effect of many processes cooperating through long periods. There is to be considered, for instance, the preparation of the material which forms the subject-matter of these books . . . there is the preparation of men to write these books to be considered, a preparation physical, intellectual, spiritual, which must have attended them throughout their whole lives, and indeed, must have had its beginning in their remote ancestors, and the effect of which was to bring the right men to the right places at the right times, with the right endowments, impulses, acquirements, to write just the books which were designed for them. ... If God wished to give His people a series of letters like Paul’s, He prepared a Paul to write them, and the Paul He brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write just such letters.[42]

Theologically speaking, the balance Warfield strikes between human agency and divine preparation and inspiration, is possible only because of his full theism, stressing both divine transcendence and immanence. His doctrine of inspiration is not remotely deistic, nor, viewed overall, mechanistic. Together with this pure theism is a strong doctrine of divine providence such that through it God works all things according to the counsel of his own will. Yet inspiration, though embedded in providence, is not merely a matter of providence, for it is due to the immediate inspiring activity of the Spirit that just these words are the word of God.

Justice is done to neither factor of inspiration and to neither element in the Bible, the human or the divine, by any other conception of the mode of inspiration except that of concursus, or by any other conception of the Bible except that which conceives of it as a divine-human book, in which every word is at once divine and human. 

The philosophical basis of this conception is the Christian idea of God as immanent as well as transcendent in the modes of his activity. Its idea of the mode of the divine activity is in analogy with the divine modes of activity in other spheres—in providence, and in grace, wherein we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, knowing that it is God who is working in us both the willing and the doing according to his own good pleasure.[43]

There is little evidence here of the influence of a “closed Newtonian universe” which McGowan invokes as a feature of the Enlightenment to which the Princetonians were allegedly in thrall.[44] Where McGowan spots a tendency to a mechanical view of inspiration among some inerrantists, if he is accurate, may this not be put down to occasions when that doctrine is in the hands of those with a less robust doctrine of divine providence than Warfield’s? An Arminian with a doctrine of scriptural inerrancy is likely to veer in the direction of a “mechanical” view, if he veers anywhere, for given the Arminian view of human agency he will find it difficult if not impossible to endorse Warfield’s view of divine concursus, favoring a limited concursus at best.

Why was Warfield so confident about the nature and extent of the inspiration of the Bible, and its consequent inerrancy? Answering this question takes us beyond these serious misunderstandings to the heart of his theological method.

III. Warfield’s Path

Warfield’s approach to establishing the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is more that of a historian than a scientist, as we shall now see. He provides us with a brief resume of his method in the following passage.

Inspiration is not the most fundamental of Christian doctrines, nor even the first thing we prove about the Scriptures. It is the last and crowning fact as to the Scriptures. These we first prove authentic, historically credible, generally trustworthy, before we prove them inspired. And the proof of their authenticity, credibility, general trustworthiness would give us a firm basis for Christianity prior to any knowledge on our part of their inspiration, and apart indeed from the existence of inspiration.[45]

Warfield’s approach to inspiration and infallibility is resolutely a posteriori and historical. For it begins from the conviction, also established a posteriori, by an inductive procedure, that the Bible is historically reliable. If the Bible is historically reliable then what it tells us about Jesus is historically reliable, and what it tells us about its own inspiration is equally reliable. Warfield states that our procedure for establishing the doctrine rests at first 

on the confidence which we have in the writers of the New Testament as doctrinal guides, and ultimately on whatever evidence of whatever kind and force exists to justify that confidence. In this sense, we repeat, the cause of distinctive Christianity is bound up with the cause of Biblical doctrine of inspiration. We accept Christianity in all its distinctiveness on no other ground than the credibility and trustworthiness of the Bible as a guide to truth; and on this same ground we must equally accept its doctrine of inspiration.[46]

“Bound up with the cause of Biblical doctrine of inspiration”: that is, there is parity between the distinctive doctrines of Christianity and the doctrine of biblical inspiration. Because we hold that the Bible is trustworthy in its depiction of the deity of Christ, say, then we can similarly be confident about what it teaches regarding its own inspiration. Warfield is not saying that our confidence in Christ’s deity depends upon first accepting the inspiration of Scripture. Nor is he saying that the doctrine of inspiration is as important as the doctrine of the deity of Christ.

We do not adopt the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of Scripture on sentimental grounds, nor even, as we have already had occasion to remark, on a priori or general grounds of whatever kind. We adopt it specifically because it is taught us as truth by Christ and His apostles, in the Scriptural record of their teaching, and the evidence for its truth is, therefore, as we have also already pointed out, precisely that evidence, in weight and amount, which vindicates for us the trustworthiness of Christ and His apostles as teachers of doctrine.[47]

So the path begins as follows. First there is probable evidence, based upon the historical reliability of Scripture, that it teaches certain doctrines about God, Christ, mankind, and so on. Using the same procedure we also recognize that it teaches the doctrine that the Scriptures themselves are divinely inspired. This then enables us to draw the inference that the scriptural account of God, Christ, and man is not only probably true, but inspired, inerrant, because the account of such things is given in a book which is inspired and inerrant. This is “the last and crowning fact” about Scripture, transforming a merely reliable record into an inspired record. Warfield goes on to say that strictly speaking such evidence is, from a logical point of view, probable evidence, incapable of producing demonstrative certainty; nevertheless, it has so great a probability that “the strength of conviction is practically equal to that produced by demonstration itself.”[48]

So the first question is, is the Bible reliable, and the second question is, what does this reliable document teach about its own divine inspiration? Warfield offers an answer to the second question in such articles as “God-Inspired Scripture,” “‘It Says:’ ‘Scripture Says:’ ‘God Says,’“ and “The Oracles of God.”[49]

As we have already noted, there is an additional important feature about what the Bible teaches about its own inspiration. The view of inspiration in question is not “mechanical.”[50] Rather, in inspiring the various authors of Scripture God preserved and employed their distinctive personalities, history, and outlook as fallible human beings with limited knowledge, and nevertheless ensured that what they taught is infallible, inerrant.

The human agency, both in the histories out of which the Scriptures sprang, and in their immediate composition and inscription, is everywhere apparent, and gives substance and form to the entire collection of writings. It is not merely in the matter of verbal expression or literary composition that the personal idiosyncrasies of each author are freely manifested by the untrammeled play of all his faculties, but the very substance of what they write is evidently for the most part the product of their own mental and spiritual activities.

And, quite surprisingly, perhaps.

It must be remembered that it is not claimed that the Scriptures, any more than their authors, are omniscient. The information they convey is in the forms of human thought, and limited on all sides. They were not designed to teach philosophy, science or human history as such. They were not designed to furnish an infallible system of speculative theology. They are written in human languages, whose words, inflections, constructions and idioms bear everywhere indelible traces of human error. The record itself furnishes evidence that the writers were in large measure dependent for their knowledge upon sources and methods in themselves fallible, and that their personal knowledge and judgments were in many matters hesitating and defective, or even wrong. Nevertheless, the historical faith of the Church has always been that all the affirmations of Scripture of all kinds, whether of spiritual doctrine or duty, or of physical or historical fact, or of psychological or physical principle, are without error when the ipsissima verba of the original autographs are ascertained and interpreted in their natural and intended sense.[51]

Nothing could be less mechanical than this.

So, in a manner that is distinct from the general concursus of divine providence, deeper and more mysterious, while nevertheless being a part of providence, God inspires fallible human authors, limited in knowledge and children of their time. While the words are their words, they are also, through the inspiring agency of God the Holy Spirit, God’s words as well. As such, when properly interpreted, the affirmations of Scripture are without error. Questions of genre are relevant to interpretation, and of course the importance of careful exegesis of Scripture is stressed.[52] But this is not at the expense of the distinctive theological principle that a person who is fallible and whose thoughts have been formed by influences that contain elements of human error may nevertheless, in an inscrutable way be capable of speaking infallible truth as a result of being borne upon by the Holy Spirit, while remaining fully himself. This does not mean that, by the wave of a magic wand, an error becomes a truth when it is inspired. Rather, it simply means that patterns of speech and thought that have an origin that is fallible and partly erroneous in character may be used to make infallibly true assertions.

It is true that according to Warfield and the other Princetonians the doctrine of inerrancy has to be nuanced and finessed in various ways. But then why does this, in I. Howard Marshall’s phrase, quoted by McGowan, present the danger of the death of the doctrine “by a thousand qualifications”?[53] If it does, then why may not finely nuanced accounts of, for example, the Incarnation, designed to avoid various heretical alternatives, Nestorianism, Apollinarianism, and so forth, result in the death of the doctrine of the Incarnation? The clarification of a doctrine does not result in its death so long as a substantial doctrinal thesis remains.

But what are we to do when we encounter difficulties in our path? Warfield’s answer at this point is: the trustworthiness of the apostles as teachers of doctrine, the doctrine of inspiration, established on the historical grounds that we have previously sketched, must mean that the difficulties take second place. They are nevertheless to be addressed. Once again, he draws a parallel between the apostolic doctrine of biblical inspiration and other apostolic doctrines, say of the Incarnation. The Incarnation is clearly taught. We accept the apostolic testimony as we would accept, say, that Aristotle wrote the Nichomachean Ethics. and believe that the Incarnation is true doctrine. Are there difficulties with understanding the Incarnation? Obviously so. Yet,

We do not and we cannot wait until all these difficulties are fully explained before we yield to the testimony of the New Testament the fullest confidence of our minds and hearts. How then can it be true that we are to wait until all difficulties are removed before we can accept with confidence the Biblical doctrine of inspiration?[54]

There is a difference, for Warfield, between a difficulty attending a doctrine and facts that are manifestly inconsistent with it. The impeccability of Christ is a difficult doctrine (this is not Warfield’s example) but must not for that reason be surrendered. But if there are facts in Scripture manifestly inconsistent with it, if there is incontrovertible evidence that the biblical Christ was a transgressor of the law of God, say, then that is obviously inconsistent with the assertion of his impeccability. Allowing for the anachronism, Warfield pleads for Popperian rigor when it comes to testing the claims of Scripture about itself: “By all means let the doctrine of the Bible be tested by the facts and let the test be made all the more, not the less, stringent and penetrating because of the great issues that hang upon it. If the facts are inconsistent with the doctrine, let us all know it, and know it so clearly that the matter is put beyond all doubt.”[55]

But what of such factors as the structure of Scripture, “especially as determined by some special school of modern research by critical methods certainly not infallible and to the best of our own judgment not even reasonable,” the identification of certain prima facie discrepancies, and the like?[56] Warfield refers to such things, along with style and genre, as “the phenomena,” a term that Charles Hodge had used.[57]

In response Warfield asserts that to modify the teaching of Scripture respecting its own character by reference to such phenomena would be a failure “to commit ourselves without reserve to the teaching of the Bible, either because that teaching is distrusted or already disbelieved ... by correcting the doctrine delivered by the Biblical writers, it discredits these writers as teachers of doctrine.”[58]

If the Biblical facts and teaching are taken as co-factors in the induction, the procedure ... is liable to the danger of modifying the teaching by the facts without clear recognition of what is being done; the result of which would be the loss from observation of one main fact of errancy, viz., the inaccuracy of the teaching of the Scriptures as to their own inspiration. This would vitiate the whole result: and this vitiation of the result can be avoided only by ascertaining separately the teaching of the Scripture as to its own inspiration, and by accounting the results of this ascertainment one of the facts of the induction.[59]

The “phenomena,” such as the presence of apparent contradictions in the text, the hypotheses of a “critical” approach to the text, and the like, may be relevant to the exegesis of the texts of Scripture which teach inspiration. Attention to such facts may help us to interpret the assertions of Scripture.

Direct exegesis after all has its rights: we may seek aid from every quarter in our efforts to perform its processes with precision and obtain its results with purity; but we cannot allow its results to be ‘modified’ by extraneous considerations.[60]

At this juncture, the logical order of the procedure, the character of the path, is vital to Warfield’s case. If, proceeding inductively, we were to begin with the phenomena of Scripture and the statements about inspiration together, giving to each of these data equal weight, we would be unable to challenge the phenomena by the statements. So the “real problem” of inspiration, as Warfield understood it, is “whether we can still trust the Bible as a guide to doctrine, as a teacher of truth.”[61] The presence of such trust means giving that teaching priority over every other fact about Scripture which our inductions may lay bare.

So the declarations of Scripture, and the phenomena, are distinct kinds of fact about it. One is logically subordinate to the other. Once again we can see how grossly inaccurate and unfair it is to describe the Hodge-Warfield theological method as “often giving the impression” that the whole Bible can be reduced to a set of propositions that can then be demonstrated as “true.”[62] To whom does it give that impression, one wonders, and how often? The logic is clear. It’s not “There are discrepancies and the presence of phenomena that present difficulties, therefore there cannot be an inerrant text,” but “There is an inerrant text and therefore the discrepancies and difficult phenomena are no more nor less than that—copyists’ errors or unresolved puzzles.”

The second thing that Warfield’s procedure implies is that, as we noted earlier, there is an epistemic parity between the biblical doctrine of Scripture and the biblical doctrine concerning any other Christian teaching. Warfield himself brings out this point:

Let it not be said that we thus found the whole Christian system upon the doctrine of plenary inspiration. We found the whole Christian system on the doctrine of plenary inspiration as little as we found it upon the doctrine of angelic existences.[63]

All the doctrines of our faith, including the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures, are established in the same way from the same Scriptures. These doctrines differ in importance, in the extent to which they reach to the heart of the Christian faith, and the doctrine of divine inspiration (and inerrancy) is not the most important of these. It is certainly not a “foundational” doctrine in the way some critics of Warfield believe, who think that his doctrine of biblical infallibility or inerrancy is evidence that he was in thrall to some version of Enlightenment “foundationalism.”

So much for Warfield’s method, and the pathway he constructs with it.

IV. Mcgowan’s Claims

In this article I have been concerned to clear Warfield’s views on the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture from certain serious misunderstandings. McGowan’s negative remarks on Warfield’s theological method (and that of the Princetonians more generally) are seriously inaccurate. His assertion that War-field’s account of God’s relation to the production of inerrant Scripture is’ ‘rationalistic” is without foundation. His account of the Princetonian idea of inerrant autographa is confused. The idea that Warfield and the Princetonians “devised” an inerrantist account of inspiration that is “mechanical,” or provides any pretext for a mechanical view, has no support.[64] Far from the inspiration and authority of Scripture being Warfield’s central dogma, the motor for formulating a set of propositions “deemed to be inerrant,” the doctrine is for him but one of a set of dogmas that the teaching of a reliable Bible delivers to us.

McGowan offers his book as a contribution to debate and calls for “serious scholarship.”[65] Such scholarship calls for accuracy of statement, the provision of clear evidence, and for cogent argument. Sadly, such features appear to be lacking in his own treatment of Warfield.

There may well be features of Warfield’s path, the logic of his argument for the doctrine of biblical infallibility or inerrancy, that are open to criticism. Perhaps there is an inherent logical weakness in his inductivist approach to the data of Scripture. Perhaps Warfield is too naive in his acceptance of the general reliability of the Bible. Perhaps he does not appreciate as he should that a river cannot rise higher than its source, that a book whose inerrancy is established on inductive grounds is, at best, only very probably inerrant.[66] Perhaps he does not do justice to what Calvin called the self-authenticating character of Scripture. Perhaps he does not sufficiently stress the ineffability of the operation of the divine and human elements in the concursus that is inspiration. Perhaps at certain points he is under the influence of the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy. Perhaps he is not sufficiently under the influence of that philosophy. All such issues are a matter of legitimate debate. But these legitimate points of debate must arise from a fair and accurate and full exposition of Warfield’s views themselves, not from a caricature of them. To follow up these important issues here would take us beyond the scope of this study, which is to consider Warfield’s own path to inerrancy, not whether this is the best possible path.

What has in fact happened since Warfield’s day is a point not appreciated by McGowan. Since then, it is Fundamentalism and later evangelicalism that have brought the Warfieldian defense of inerrancy to center stage, giving it the foundational place that he denied to it, while at the same time allowing the other features of Warfield’s theology, such as his strong doctrine of divine providence, which in his eyes have epistemic parity, to drift into the wings.[67] In all likelihood what McGowan and those who think like him about Warfield and Princeton have done, without realizing it, is to read back into the views of Warfield the conviction of later evangelicals that biblical inerrancy has a central, foundational character, even that it is evangelicalism’s necessary and sufficient criterion. But strange as it may seem, this was not Warfield’s own view. His path had a different starting point, and led elsewhere.[68]

Notes

1. B. B. Warfield, “Inspiration and Criticism,” in Revelation and Inspiration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1927), 396; italics in the original.
2. For example, J. D. Woodbridge, Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982).
3. The Divine Spiration of Scripture: Challenging Evangelical Perspectives (Leicester: Apollos, 2007); published in the U.S. as The Divine Authenticity of Scripture: Retrieving an Evangelical Heritage (Dovm&YS Grove. 111.: InterVarsity, 2007).
4. See, e.g., Nancey Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy Set the Theological Agenda (Rockwell Lecture Series; Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1996), 42-43: Stanley J. Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 71-73; John R. Franke, The Character of Theology: A Postconservative Evangelical Approach (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 88-89; George Marsden, “The Collapse of American Evangelical Academia,” in Faith and Rationality (ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff; Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), 241; David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology (Foundation of Evangelical Theology; Wheaton, 111.: Crossway 2003), 48-49; Stephen Wellum, “Postconservatism, Biblical Authority and Recent Proposals for Re-Doing Evangelical Authority,” in Reclaiming the Center (ed. Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth, and Justin Taylor; Wheaton, 111.: Crossway, 2004), 174; Kevin Vanhoozer, “On the Very Idea of a Theological System: An Essay in Aid of Triangulating Scripture, Church and World,” in Always Reforming: Explorations in Systematic Theology (ed. A. T B. McGowan; Leicester: Apollos, 2006); Kevin Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture and Hermeneutics,” in Whatever Happened to Truth? (ed. Andreas Kostenberger; Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2005), 100.
5. Divine Spiration, 124-25.
6. Ibid., 49, 162- But note the earlier use of cognates of inerrancy, e.g., Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology (1875) (3 vols.; London: Clarke, 1960), 1:169: “If the Scriptures abound in contradictions and errors, then it is vain to contend that they were written under an influence which precludes all error.” This language should not surprise us, given the fact that until Hodge’s Systematic Theology was published in the 1870s Princeton Seminary used Francis Turretin’s Institutio theologiae elencticae as its theological text. (Mark A. Noll, ed., The Princeton Theology, 1812—1921 [Phillipsburg, NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1983], 28-29). In his discussion of Scripture Turretin states, “Rather the question is whether in writing they were so acted upon and inspired by the Holy Spirit (both as to things themselves and as to the words) as to be kept free from all error [ut ab omni errore immunesfueriint] and that their writings are truly authentic and divine. Our adversaries deny this; we affirm it” (Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology [ed. James T Dennison, Jr.; trans. G. M. Musgrave; 3 vols.: Phillipsburg N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992], 1.4.5 (1:62-63). So the use by the Princetonians of phrases such as “free from error,” “without error,” and “errorless” does not call for a special explanation, such as one in terms of the influence of modern science.
7. Divine Spiration, 87.
8. Ibid., 121.
9. Ibid., 116-17.
10. Ibid., 116. Warfield’s “theistic evolutionism” is in fact due to a carefully drawn theological distinction between creation and development. See his discussion of Calvin’s “pre-scientific” view of the creation, which he clearly endorses (“Calvin’s Doctrine of Creation,” in Calvin and Calvinism [New York: Oxford University Press, 1931], 299-300). The relevant sections of the article are reprinted in B. B. Warfield, Evolution, Science and Scripture: Selected Writings (ed. Mark A. Noll and David N. Livingstone; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000).
11. Paul Helm, “Charles Hodge and the Method of Systematic Theology,” in Reformed Theology in America, 1969—2009 (ed. Ronald N. Gleason and Gary L. W Johnson; Wheaton, 111.: Crossway forthcoming).
12. Divine Spiration, 114.
13. Ibid., 116.
14. A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield, “Inspiration,” Presbyterian Review (1881); reprinted with the same pagination in Inspiration (introduction by Roger R. Nicole; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979), 28-29.
15. Ibid., 28.
16. Divine Spiration, 116.
17. Ibid., 117.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 213.
20. Ibid., 117.
21. Ibid
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 49. See also 118, 124. Incidentally, this account of Dr. McGowan’s “high” view of scriptural infallibility is quite unsatisfactory It does not distinguish Scripture from God’s providence. If God works all things after the counsel of his own will then presumably (in a suitably nuanced way) not just Scripture but simply everything is as he intended it. For an attempt to work this out see Paul Helm, “All Things Considered: Providence and Divine Purpose,” in Comparative Theology: Essays for Keith Ward (ed. T. W. Bartel; London: S.P.G.K, 2003), 100-109.
25. Divine Spiration, 113.
26. Ibid., 118.
27. Ibid., 114.
28. Ibid., 162.
29. Ibid., 147-50.
30. “Inspiration and Criticism,” 397. See also 210 and 399.
31. “The Real Problem of Inspiration,” in Revelation and Inspiration, 211.
32. “The Inspiration of the Bible,” in Revelation and Inspiration, 72.
33. “The Real Problem of Inspiration,” 209-10.
34. Divine Spiration, 211.
35. Ibid., 109, 114, 124.
36. Ibid., 212- In other places he makes the issue of “dual authorship” the essential difference between the two schools. But this, too, is baseless.
37. Ibid., 109.
38. Ibid., 162.
39. Hodge and Warfield, “Inspiration,” 45, 46, 61.
40. “The Inerrancy of the Original Autographs,” in Selected Shorter Writings of B. B. Warfield (ed. John E. Meeter; 2 vols.; Nutley, NJ.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1973), 2:582-83.
41. Ibid., 584-85.
42. “Inspiration,” in Revelation and Inspiration, 100-101.
43. “The Divine and Human in the Bible,” in Selected Shorter Writings, 2:546.
44. Divine Spiration, 61, 71, 129.
45. “The Real Problem of Inspiration,” 210.
46. Ibid., 213-14.
47. Ibid., 218.
48. Ibid., 218. (“practically equal”—does Warfield mean “almost equal” or “equal for all practical purposes”? Perhaps it does not matter which.) Incidentally McGowan switches from the idea of demonstrating inerrancy (Divine Spiration, 127) to the view that the Bible is free from demonstrable error (ibid., 155), as if the two were the same. Warfield claims the second, but not the first, except by means of an historical method providing probable conclusions.
49. Reprinted in Revelation and Inspiration.
50. Divine Spiration, 128, 147. See one of Warfield’s many clear anti-mechanical affirmations, “The Real Problem of Inspiration,” 211.
51. Hodge and Warfield, “Inspiration,” 12-13, 27-28.
52. For an account that stresses the centrality of careful exegesis, see Moises Silva, “Old Princeton, Westminster and Inerrancy,” in B. B. Warfield: Essays on His Life and Thought (ed. Gary L. W Johnson; Phillipsburg N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2007).
53. Divine Spiration, 106.
54. “The Real Problem of Inspiration,” 215
55. Ibid., 216.
56. Ibid., 205.
57. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:169.
58. “The Real Problem of Inspiration,” 204-5; italics in the original.
59. Ibid., 223.
60. Ibid., 206.
61. Ibid., 225.
62. Divine Spiration, 116.
63. “The Real Problem of Inspiration,” 209.
64. Divine Spiration, 163: “It is no coincidence that the Princeton school of theology, following Hodge’s theological method, devised an inerrantist (or mechanical) view of the Scriptures.”
65. Ibid., 207, 214.
66. For relevant discussion of this issue, see Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 268-69. As we noted earlier, Warfield does, naturally enough, know the difference between being demonstrative and being probable. “Of course, this is not in the strict logical sense ‘demonstrative’; it is ‘probable’ evidence. It therefore leaves open the metaphysical possibility of its being mistaken. But it may be contended that it is about as great in amount and evidence as ‘probable’ evidence can be made, and that the strength of conviction which it is adapted to produce may be and should be practically equal to that produced by demonstration itself” (“The Real Problem of Inspiration,” 218).
67. I owe this suggestion to Ryan Glomsrud.
68. I am grateful to Andrew McGowan for his comments on an earlier version of this article, and especially to Oliver Crisp for his patient and painstaking reading of more than one draft.